Starlight Over Detrot: A Noir Tale

by Chessie

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Original Character, Mystery, Adventure
Length: 1437427

In the decaying metropolis of Detrot, 60 years and one war after Luna's return, Detective Hard Boiled and friends must solve the mystery behind a unicorn's death in a film noir-inspired tale of ponies, hard cider, conspiracy, and murder.

Monster attacks. Crime. Illegal hallucinogens made from electric fruit.

They say things didn't use to be like this. They say things were different, before Luna came back 60 years ago, but Detective Hard "Hardy" Boiled of the Detrot Police Department has never known any world other than that demarcated by the seedy streets of his beloved decaying metropolis; a world in which the coroners sing and dance, surveillance bugs have personality disorders, and the Chief of Police is a scarier entity than most of the eldritch things the city attracts.

The grey unicorn who turned up dead outside the posh High Step Hotel seemed like just another case, but her missing horn is the pointy tip of a very large and nasty iceberg. It's up to Hardy and his friends - a rejected monster hunter, a psychic cab driver, and an underground antiques heir - to find out what’s going on in an investigation that promises to stick more than a cupcake into the very eye of Detrot.

Especially if Hardy has anything to say about it.

By Popular Demand, there is now a Patreon

Additional editing by coandco Sig_Awesome, Hinds, Clint, and Raccoon!
Featured on EQD - 5 Stars!
Cover art by MisterMech (http://mistermech.deviantart.com/)
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Published 2012-06-26 18:34:02 UTC
Last updated 2021-03-29 08:54:59 UTC

Chapter 1: Welcome To Detrot

Starlight Over Detrot:

A Noir Tale

By Chessie the Cat and CEO Kasen

Foreword

More than a millennium ago, it is said, one of the alicorn Princesses of Equestria dealt with her sibling jealousy issues in a fairly novel manner: She transformed into an evil mare of darkness and attempted to plunge the world into permanent night.

When this failed, she spent a thousand years locked in the moon for literal crimes against nature. Inexplicably, the very first thing she did when released was attempt precisely the same plan. It ended predictably badly for Nightmare Moon, but for Luna - apparently cured of her destructive anti-luminary obsession and restored to a position of power - it could be called nothing short of a miraculous turn of good fortune.

Most ponies know this tale, or at least what could be categorized as the official version of it. And while yes, it is possible that Luna was just horrendously neurotic and that a neurotic alicorn is simply that dangerous, doubts have stayed the collective hoof of academia from so casually wielding Hockham’s Razor.

There has never been a solidly accepted explanation for why Luna remained in power. Celestia is certainly no fool. Her millennial reign was a time of relative peace and wise rulership. Returning influence over the moon to her sister after the events of a thousand years ago and the prodigal’s eventual return seemed like giving keys to a liquor store to a recovering alcoholic.

But the largest and most troubling doubt is one that has increasingly weighed on pony historians; It is becoming clear that something changed the course of Equestria that day, something that alicorn neurosis alone fails to adequately account. Sixty years have passed since Luna’s return, and those sixty years have seen more change, chaos, development, and turmoil than the thousand years Luna spent in exile.

In the years following the Return of Luna (or as some historians date it, R.L.), monster attacks rose to a degree that baffled cryptozoological statisticians. Even the areas near Canterlot saw more, far more, than their share of ravenous dragons and Ursas of various grades, to say nothing of the powerful entities and changeling Royal Swarms that nearly destroyed Equestria as we know it.

These continued attacks created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty amongst ponykind, one that Equestria’s vivid colors barely paint over. In this tense and monster-benighted age, equine voices began to seek new meaning and new reasons for being, as though their Cutie Marks were no longer sufficient to define them. Some who failed to find this fresh expression sometimes turned to escapes such as debauchery, violence, and the newly minted trade in illicit magical chemicals. Others turned towards the Princesses as deific figures, spiritually placing their anxieties in royal hooves.

Not everypony gave in to fear, however. Some ponies fought to adapt, and adapt they did. Recent years have been an unprecedented period of innovation and cross-disciplinary engineering. Unicorn magic, earth pony mechanical ingenuity, pegasus weather control and zebra alchemy have increasingly woven together and remade the face of Equestria; they even gave it teeth. Developments like the Skybreaker and the Cloudhammer placed fire and lightning, forces of Nature itself, in the hooves of ponies.

No analysis of change and turmoil, however, would be complete without an analysis of recent events in the city of Detrot.

Detrot was originally conceived as a retreat for the royal family, a trading hub, and an outpost against the monsters who still, now and again, sought to challenge Equestrian defenses. With the discovery of several rich veins of jewels nearby, the town grew over decades from those simple beginnings into an economic mecca to rival Canterlot itself in scope, if not necessarily in class.

Eventually, however, the jewel rush that had bloated Detrot into a vast urban sprawl dried up, leaving it to decay from within. As poverty, dashed hopes, and social pressures degraded orderly society, the city found itself better prepared to deal with the monsters of the wilderness than those in the hearts of its citizens.

- The Scholar

Chapter 1:Welcome To Detrot

The city.

My city.

The soft grass beneath my hooves felt good. A pleasant chorus of birdsong drifted over the rolling hills. The sweet sun beamed down on my face like the smile of the Princess herself. The full moon hung in the sky opposite the cheerfully shining star. It was an odd sight.

Luna must have overslept. Somehow that seemed perfectly plausible.

Facing the comparatively tiny strip of civilization between the vast sandy desert to the west and the wild untamed forest wilderness to the east, I watched the thin clouds lazily dotting the immense blue sky, casting translucent shadows on the towering skyscrapers that loomed over the avenues like peaceful guardians.

The gleaming streets were full of life and ponies rushing to and fro on important business. Smiling faces peeked through shop windows and traded hoof-shakes and hugs with old friends. I felt a strange urge to throw myself on my back and roll around in the meadow like a silly foal, but instead simply lay down and closed my eyes, letting the heat of the day wash away every care.

It was slow at first; A cold chill creeping up my back. I shook myself, trying to ignore the unpleasant sensation, but the prickle in my tail wouldn’t leave. I sat up and looked around, trying to find the source of the nervous tension behind my eyes.

Nothing.

Wait! A voice, softer than a whisper seemed to direct my attention.

Far away, almost at the edge of vision, a glowing light came to life on the horizon. It seemed to waver, then solidify, like a reflection in a disturbed pond. It wasn’t a kindly light, but harsh and angry. It glared down on my city with devilish intent. After a few seconds a second gleaming nova appeared at the other end of the sky, then another, and another, until four flashing stars hung in the heavens.

Irrational fear welled up in me and I started towards the city, thinking to warn somepony. Of what, I wasn’t certain. The lights began to edge across the curve of the world. At that moment, I noticed that for some strange reason the Sun and Moon seemed closer to one another; I hadn’t marked their motion but each time my gaze left then returned they were definitely closing the gap.

Each hoof-fall seemed to cover less ground than the last. Soon, I was running, then galloping towards the streets in a desperate bid to reach them before those lights could meet.

At last, they met one another, and a furious burst lit everything, so bright I was blinded and stumbled to my knees, lying there in the dirt. I tried to rise again, but found myself only able to watch.

The sky darkened. I raised my face, trying to find Celestia’s radiance but the moon seemed trapped, being swallowed by the sun. I struggled, but fear paralyzed my limbs. My heart fluttered like a trapped bird, feeling the predator circling for the kill. The moon’s edges turned a hellish red and starless night descended so quickly that I thought for a moment I’d been blinded again.

The demonic glow seemed to fall upon the city like a gargantuan hammer, and the whole urban landscape shattered like a dropped mirror, huge fissures splitting open the roads and rending loose the buildings from their foundations. Out of the plagued light of the stricken moon, a colossal monster with hooves of fire and eyes shooting lightning stepped down, its tread crushing mountains as it opened its mouth, slobbering gums full of the hacked off buildings that had become its teeth. It flew towards me, vile lips pulled back in a cruel grin as it shrieked:

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

I buried my face harder into the throw pillow on the end of the couch, trying to will the ringing to stop. My head felt around three sizes too small and a little puddle of cold drool had formed around my cheek. Somber, overcast light spilled in through the shaded window. Celestia, please just let me sleep again. This time without the awful dreams.

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng!

Cracking one crusty eye allowed me to glare at the black phone box sitting on the end table. The call button flashed on and off like a malevolent blinking eye, demanding I get up. I slammed my hoof against it, making a spirited attempt to kill the wretched thing. That was my first mistake that day, as this had the unintended side effect of picking up the line.

“Detective Hard Boiled?” The voice from the speaker was high, feminine, and far too shrill for this time of the morning. After a second, she tried again, albeit more softly: “Hardy?”

“Ugh... lemme check... No, Telly. Nopony here by that name. Please call someone else.”

There was a gruff sigh, then a burst of brain-cleaving feedback so loud that I pitched off the sofa into the piles of newspaper littering the floor.

“You awake now?” resumed the voice, with only a hint of smugness.

I scraped myself off the floor and sat back on my rump, rubbing my eyes. “Yes, and thanks for that, you vile harridan.”

Telly ignored my complaining and gave her microphone a gentle flick. I covered my ears, doing my best not to whimper as my growing headache reminded me of how many hard ciders had preceded sleep.

“You're an hour late. You’ve got about forty-five minutes before the chief said she’s going to call Broadside over at PACT to send a team to retrieve your Cutie Mark. She made no mention of the rest of you.”

I pushed myself up to all fours with some effort, then replied in a sickly sweet voice. “Good morning Hardy! How are you? Isn’t it lovely to be woken up by the telephone and a snarky operator pony who thinks she’s a comedian?”

“Careful, or I’ll start singing. Either way, get your ass down here. The chief is reaching for her pills for the fourth time this morning.”

A warning tingle shot from my hungover brain down to the tip of my tail.

“The blue round ones or the purple star ones?”

“Purple stars.”

“Crap... Arright, arright...”

Telly snickered to herself and closed the line.

The bathroom seemed about a million miles away, but my bladder was insisting I make the journey. Staggering towards to the door, I put one hoof on the frame to stop the swimming ground from reaching up and swatting me in the forehead.

The mirror over the sink presented a terrifying image of a wild mane; black mixed with too much grey for somepony my age, and a dusty grey pelt that should have been sold to a taxidermist ages ago. I momentarily entertained the notion that an intruder had broken in. If so, he should be beaten soundly for going to a robbery in such a state.

My flanks looked like they hadn't been brushed in days, and they hadn’t. But although the rest of my body was a genuine wreck, my Cutie Mark still shone brightly: a pair of golden scales balanced in the middle.

Can anypony look at their own Mark without drawing a bit of cheer from it? If so, I was coming close, but I wasn’t quite there yet. I felt a hint of a smile at the corners of my lips.

Ponies are defined by those little magical pictures. It’s one of the first things you learn in school. ‘You will find out who you are and that will be a fantastic day! Everypony has one special talent, one thing about them that is uniquely theirs, which can’t ever be taken from them. Just imagine all the things you can be!’

If only happiness came with that self-knowledge. Zebras have their glyphs, and the buffalo might pierce and tattoo and staple every inch of their bodies with their achievements. But ponies have the truth of who they are, right there on their hind-ends.

Read my ass. I’m a cop.

Clopping over to the toilet, I grabbed a fur brush in my teeth, fitting it into the extending arm over the sink. Pulling it down to where I could brush my ebony mane out of my eyes, I cocked a leg over the toilet and relieved the painful pressure on my bladder.

If I were a unicorn, I’d just wave my horn and a little magic later I’d look like a magazine cover. If I were a pegasus, I could snag a cloud, give it a kick, and bathe in the rain.

I’m an earth pony. No levitation. No wings. Just hooves.

Not that I’ve ever been particularly ungrateful for the head-crushing, rib-breaking strength that goes with being an earth pony, but the daily grooming rituals take a lot longer when you’re stuck doing them manually.

I ran some water in the rust stained sink and dunked my entire face and mane into it, slinging droplets into the shower stall. A bath would have to wait. I snagged the rope and pulled the flush on the toilet then stumbled back to the living room feeling irrationally better about the state of the world.

Snatching the shoulder holster for my gun off the battered old dresser was the first step in the complicated acrobatic routine of wrestling it onto my back legs, then around my torso. I took an extra minute with the barding straps on the trigger bit, taking it in my mouth and making sure it worked.

Dear Celestia's sweet tail, you'd think we could have come up with a better way of putting on a holster by now, but for those of us without horns, thumbs, or prehensile tails, the method still involves a lot of rolling around on the floor.

I pulled a tie from the dresser and cinched it around my throat, giving it a good tug. Yes, you could ask why the nod to professionalism, given that the chief might suspend me today. Assuming, of course, that she doesn’t string me up from a lamp-post as a warning to other would be truants. Regardless, there are certain bare minimums I like to think I maintain. You’d never catch me in the office without a tie, for example, even if that’s only because I find it useful to know whose eyes happen to stray to it as they fantasize about choking the life out of me. Jamming aside the stacks and stacks of goofy ties, I reverently pulled out my most precious possession.

There she lay, nestled in her red velvet case- my father’s revolver. She would have been an ugly, boxy lump of metal were it not for the the polished ivory of the auto-loader and the chased silver which seemed to grasp at what little light dared creep into the mire and muck of my apartment.

She was engraved along the barrel, “To Hard Boiled, with love.” That's Hard Boiled Senior, by the way; He’d tried to give me wisdom, patience, and a sense of responsibility along with his name. In the end, I think I was most grateful to him for that gun.

There is no beauty in this world to trump a perfect firearm. Her breach was worn smooth by years of use, but as I cracked it and flicked the crystalline hammer, she sparked obligingly - like an old clock which still knows just what time it is. The auto-loader whispered as I fit a spare cartridge into it. I then hooked the leather cuff around my front knee and tilted the weapon to the top of my leg, lifting it up to look down the sights.

I'd never needed to adjust them, but some habits aren't worth breaking. Finally, I sat down and attached the reloading strap to my back thigh, giving it a perfunctory kick. With a soft clatter of turning gears, the breach split and tossed the cartridge to one side. I fit the fresh one in, plucked up the trigger bit and tugged on it, shutting the breach again with a satisfying click of readiness.

At some point, my father had her converted to fire standard .45 bullets rather than... whatever she was built for. Magic ammunition was notorious for its lack of standardization. Switching it to brass and lead must have cost him two left legs, but it was worth it.

The department policy these days frowned on the use of weapons that incorporate even a modicum of magic. I’d heard all the arguments for replacing it with a newer gun: ‘Oh, they’re so dangerous,’ ‘Boohoo, the bullets go through buildings,’ ‘Waaah, it misfired and turned me inside out!’

I’d rather have replaced an eye.

Alright, Hardy... last essentials. I grasped the collar of my my battered trench-coat off of its traditional place on the chair beside the front door, and swung it over my shoulders. The old duster settled over my hips and suddenly, like magic, I was an officer of the law again. Protector. Savior of the weak. Damned idiot with a badge.

I snatched my hat and keys, flipping the ancient and misshapen fedora onto my head and tucking the keys in a pocket. I wiggled my ears until they popped through the holes, and then, at last, felt alive enough to risk going out without a fellow cop dragging me in for vagrancy.

****

I've lived in the great city of Detrot all my life. Ambitions of traveling the world gave way to the cold-shower realization there weren't a lot of places out there more suited to a cop than a city full of crime.

Some poet waxed lyrical once about the city devouring the weak and uplifting the strong. Certainly I'd seen my share of undeserving souls lose themselves in the dark alleys of this equine metropolis.

I often found myself fighting the urge to run from my city; to run away into the hills and howl at the moon like the timberwolves you can still hear in the distance on some cold, clear nights, when the weather factories have powered down for maintenance. One of the things that prevented such a feral exodus was the fact that my particular neighborhood wasn’t too bad. At least, I liked to think so; it was one of those little fantasies that helped keep me sane.

Also Ran Road was giving way to gentrification when the jewel boom hit the city. Working class families flooded the street, and the demand for low-income housing went through the roof. After the boom ended and the market for rubies fell out - followed quickly by sapphires and just about every other magical jewel you could name - the banks sold the properties to whoever still had money. Ten story buildings going for bits on the penny to whoever would buy them meant that neighborhoods had to band together to keep the criminals out. Some were more successful than others.

Foals could still play on my street. You could still eat at the corner restaurants without having to pick lead out of your hay. The old buildings didn't precisely sag so much as they slumped against one another, like old friends out for a night on the town who've had one too many.

Closing the front door I shrugged my shoulders up, trying to pull my collar against the pervasive drizzle. My mane, instantly wet, clung to my neck. I pulled my tail down between my legs, trying to keep it from getting drenched. The thick clouds rumbled ominously.

Ahhh, home sweet home.

****

There was already a cab waiting at the curb, her driver sitting on the hood in what looked like an incredibly uncomfortable position: both legs drawn up under her and crossed, one over the other. I don’t think I could have gotten into that position if my legs had been made of rubber and jammed into a taffy machine.

She’d have been pretty if she weren’t so aggressively plain. Her pelt was very close to the off-yellow of a lemon left in the sun too long. She wore no makeup and no clothes, save for a pair of beaten, checkered saddlebags high on her haunches that covered her cutie marks. Her black and white striped mane was braided in a single, whip-like tail that spilled down over one shoulder, hanging almost to her knees. Soaking wet from head to horseshoes, she smiled up at the clouds as they did their best to drown her peaceful expression in their depressing downpour.

A few bumper stickers with slogans like ‘Keep Equestria Green’ and ‘Love Thy Neighbor, Even If You Want to Set Fire To Him’ festooned the rear bumper of the old but well-maintained taxi, which was painted roughly the same color at its driver.

I clumped down the stairs of my apartment complex, making enough noise to jar her from her meditations. Her pink eyes opened and she stretched languidly, sliding off the hood. She radiated relaxation and comfort in such a smug contrast to her dreary surroundings that I found myself wanting to bite her.

“Morning, Taxi. I take it the chief’s been ringing?”

“She was screaming at me to come wake you up or shoot you or something. I turned off the radio right around the time the death threats started. I know you don’t sleep very well these days.” Even her voice was calm and pleasant.

Pulling open the back seat I crawled in, drawing my legs up under me as I settled into the heavily worn velour. “Thanks, Sweets.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” She grumbled softly. Shoving herself behind the wheel, she positioned her not-at-all unattractive rear up against the back brace, back hooves on the brake and gas, front legs wrapped around the edges of the wheel. It always struck me as an awkward position, but Taxi was an earth pony like me. We’re good at coming up with ways of doing things the other races do with a little magic and a lot of noise.

“Sorry. No matter how many nicknames you go through, you’re still going to be Sweet Shine to me.”

Sweet Shine and I had been friends since both of us were still blank flanks. When we both joined the force it seemed we’d found our place in the world, though I sometimes wondered if she’d just followed me because nowhere else seemed to fit. Nopony ever really nailed down her Special Talent, but whatever it was, it made her a brilliant investigator. It was a sad day when she left the force, but after what happened to her cutie marks, even I wasn’t thick enough to ask her to stay.

I still don’t know what ever inspired her to volunteer for undercover work in narcotics. Those ponies always struck me as a bit off in the head, while Sweets... Taxi... was basically a kind heart wrapped in an iron shell.

She slid the key into the ignition and lightning arced under the hood as the thrumming, arcaneletric engine roared to life.

“Death is shadowing you tonight, Hardy.”

“Hmmm?”

“You’ve got a case.”

It wasn’t a question.

****

Rain beat a solid tattoo on the cab’s windows as we drove towards the old city center. I lay there on my side in the back seat, cheek against the glass, watching the passing ponies ducking under the eaves of buildings or piling together into bus stops to escape the sheets of falling water. The silence was comfortable, familiar, and doing wonders for my headache.

The cab’s interior resembled some kind of temple to schizophrenic religious exploration. Beaded curtains hung in the back window and there was the deeply ingrained fumes of a thousand kinds of incense smoke covering up the usual taxi scents. Five different symbols of the sun and three or four of the moon hung from various fixtures.

As I pulled my hat down a little I caught Taxi’s pink eyes watching me in the rear view mirror.

“You look... spiritually misaligned,” she said, enigmatically, then jerked her gaze back to the road as our front bumper nearly took out a passing pony-drawn carriage.

“That’s new? I thought that’d been the case for a few years now. Or is this the part where you ask me why I’m later than usual draggin’ my tail out of the apartment?”

She sniffed petulantly, sweeping her beaded mane from one side to the other. “You don’t want to talk about it, then it’s no skin off my nose.”

The silence descended again for just a moment then, just as I was ready to wrap that silence around myself like a blanket, her ears perked and she rent the quiet asunder with a voice full of far too much early morning cheer. “Okay, I lied. What’s in your head? Come on, Hardy... Tellmetellmetellme!”

Taxi had the sort of curiosity they generally describe as being lethal to cats. It made her a great cop and interrogator, but sometimes an annoying chauffeur. This time, there was nothing for it; I could tell she’d gleefully keep after me all the way to the police station.

“...I had that dream again.”

Taxi rubbed her chin with one unshod hoof. She’s one of the few ponies I’d ever met who refused to wear shoes on any account. “Is that the one where the stripper comes out of the cupcake and it’s your mother?”

I sat upright sharply. “What? No!”

Her eyes glittered with mischief. “Oh! Was it the one where you’re wearing a pretty pink dress to meet Celestia at court?”

I covered my face with my hooves and pulled my coat up to my cheeks, slumping back in the seat. “Yes, yes of course... that was the one. Thanks for the talk.”

She wasn’t to be put off. “Dammit, Hardy, you’re a mopey prick in the morning. Now tell me! What did you dream about?”

My mind flashed back to the demonic beast almost crushing my head in its jaws. I shivered involuntarily. “Sparks of light. Red evil eclipse. Big monster pony with buildings for teeth. Pissing awful.”

I looked back out the window for a few seconds, gathering my thoughts. Her eyes widened just a little, then she waved a hoof knowingly. “Ahhh, yes, I see, I see...”

We were just passing one of the massive black obelisks comprising The Shield. Similar structures sat throughout the city, squatting between buildings or shoved into any convenient nook. This one looked like a huge pyramid, a little taller than it was wide, and each of its four sides was covered in glowing arcane glyphs. While it was dwarfed by the skyscrapers, it still presented an imposing figure jutting toward the permanent overcast of Detrot’s clouded skies.

The Shield was the most important part of our city’s three sided defense against the impinging wildernesses stretched out to the east. Most ponies, myself included, hadn’t the slightest idea how it worked.

I thought back to my first school field trip. It’d been to see one of those massive buildings inside. Anticipation had quickly given way to boredom as they dragged us from one exhibit on the history of the city to another, telling us about how the mighty Shield Organization keeps us safe day in and day out from the monsters out there.

The Shield Protects. The Shield Defends. The Shield Is Your Friend.

Somewhere up there a unicorn sat - probably bored and underpaid - focusing his horn into some sort of spell matrix. I admit, I envied him the predictability of his job.

“What do you see, Taxi?” I asked, feeling the weight of the hours ahead dragging me down into a particularly dark depression. Not really an uncommon reaction when facing what would most likely be a dressing down by the Chief of Detrot PD.

She peeked over her shoulder. “Sorry, I’m moonlighting as a dream interpreter this week. Part of the job is saying ‘I see, I see’ a lot. Just ignore it. So tell me about this nightmare... or was it a stallion?”

“I wasn’t exactly looking between its rear legs.” I replied. My nose wrinkled as we passed an open sewer. The smells and sights of the city were slowly bringing a semblance of awakeness to my abused brain.

Taxi canted one ear in my direction, using her ‘mother-hen’ voice. “I keep telling you and I’m going to keep saying it until you listen. You need a vacation. Preferably before the chief forces a medical leave by throwing another chair at your head.”

“We took that vacation in Prance two years ago, remember? You want a repeat?”

“Oh come on... The vacation wasn’t that bad...”

I tapped the back of her seat firmly. “I spent the weekend in a holding cell! Some checker headed pony who shall go unnamed slipped me a mickey in the hotel bar and I ended up with my rental car parked in the town fountain, pissing off the top of it onto a statue of Princess Celestia.”

Taxi swung the cab into a flow of wagons, carts, and other slower moving vehicles. For all of her earth-child garbage, she still drove like a cop.

“Hardy, do you honestly think you’re going to improve your spiritual state by staying in the city? Any city? The city is half the problem! Take a trip! I can introduce you to the current Chief Thunderhooves. Spend a weekend with the buffalo. It’ll do you wonders.”

I shook my head, neighing irritably. “Running through the plains wearing nothing but paint and a determined expression doesn't strike me as a spiritual experience.”

Taxi very nearly clipped the back wheel of a particularly slow-moving carriage; The top-hatted passenger inside waved an angry hoof at us as the two burly stallions pulling it gave a sharp yank to pull the wheel out of danger. “I was referring to... trying a sweat lodge, or eating some cactus. You could stand to be more in touch with the celestial energies.”

I looked out the window, trying to find a glimmer of sun through the roiling storm outside. No such luck.

I drew a deep breath. “Look... it’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m going to see the chief and she may as well be using her medications for donut sprinkles. No amount of being ‘in touch with the cosmic flow’ is going to keep her from ripping my throat out. So can the moon-calf crap for a half hour, alright?”

Taxi glared in the rear view mirror then reached down and turned up the radio. I lowered my head to the seat, slowly sinking into a doze while the announcer’s voice filled the car.

“Good Morning, Detrot, from WPNN. This is Sunflower Press bringing you everything you need to know! Welcome back to our show at the top of the hour as we give you noteworthy events, and the fairest, most balanced broadcast on the air!

“Today CEO and Chairman of Starlight Industries, Mr. Diamante Voluntas, was at the unveiling of the new uptown corporate park Starlight Towers. The crystalline skyscraper, which has been under construction for nearly forty years, was finished last week. Our correspondent was on site at the grand dedication ceremony this morning. This is Mr. Diamante.”

A crowd milled somewhere near the mic, murmuring and shifting, before a powerful male voice brought instant silence. “Fillies and gentlecolts. Thank you for coming. Two hundred and fifty years ago when this town was little more than a trading post on the way between Equestria and the great Zebra and Buffalo nations, my family saw this city for what it could be. We petitioned the Princess to help us finance and construct the first Shield. It's grown somewhat since then.” Polite laughter.

“We worked with strong backs and hard hooves in the first jewel mines. We have never stopped believing in what Detrot is capable of being, and even in our darkest hour we have thrown ourselves into making this city great. Today, I want to show you the next step in that vision of a fantastic future for ourselves and our foals. Starlight Towers is to be a center of commerce for everypony and will lead us to our great reward, for the glory of Detrot and the whole of our nation. Come with me while I show you my dream for our future... A world full of diamonds.”

There was riotous stomping and cheering followed by the sound of a pair of gigantic scissors slicing through a ribbon, then Sunflower Press's slightly grating voice again.

“The Starlight Towers will be open to the public this coming month. In other news, Griffins representing the Tokan and Hitlan tribes of the Endless Desert have both accepted Mayor Snifter’s gracious offer of sanctuary for their young in the city. Both tribes are experiencing difficulties with the local ecology on their home mesas, though their own version of the PACT is apparently handling the situation and hasn’t asked for help.

“Griffins from both tribes are shacked up at the Moonwalk Hotel in uptown while the issues at home are resolved. If you see one out and about, be sure to give them a hearty Detrot welcome and hope they fix things soon so they can get back to... uh... whatever it is they do out there. Rain dancing.

“Meanwhile, the Church of the Lunar Passage has again protested the coming display of significant Pre-classical Artifacts at the Celestial Museum of History on the 60th Anniversary of the return of Princess Luna to our world.

“The traveling display has passed through Hoofington, Trottingham, and Canterlot, and now makes its way to our fair city. Amongst these artifacts are several pieces of important literature and art, and even the reconstituted armor of Nightmare Moon herself, which will be showing for two weeks. Celestia herself penned the placard which will be shown alongside the piece. The Princess had this to say.”

A familiar, motherly voice spoke. I felt the tension in my shoulders release a little with each word.

“When I lost Princess Luna I lost a part of myself and our country... nay, our world... was poorer for her absence. Sixty years ago, she was returned to us. I want everypony to know the cost of jealousy and anger, and never forget what it cost me. Her lesson is learned as is my own. I am a humbler pony for it. Please, when you see this object, look at it not as a banner of victory, but as the physical embodiment of a thousand years spent apart because we could not make peace.”

Sunflower began again, shuffling papers a little too close to the microphone.

“That was the Princess speaking to our Canterlot correspondent. Sounds awfully full of remorse for having been the one who sent Luna there in the first place, doesn’t she? I just wouldn’t want to be that pony who destroyed the Grand Galloping Gala a few years back with that stampede from the castle gardens. Betcha she dumped them someplace dark and far away too.

“The Church of the Lunar Passage wants the display pulled because of the negative connotations associated with the public exhibition. Miss Astral Skylark from the Church was attending the protest outside the museum today and had this to say.”

The new voice was soft, almost tender, but with a hard edge that made me instantly leery; It was the sort of voice you hear from a Concerned Mother perpetually one step away from being a gigantic pain in the flank. “The return of Luna was nothing short of a miracle. That she came back at all should be celebrated, and the magics which brought her back should be explored.

“We've heard nothing from Canterlot about the events surrounding her return or the ponies responsible for it, even after all these years. That Princess Luna came back to us should be a sign that redemption is open to anypony - even those who've fallen far - if they look to the stars for guidance.

“Celestia would have us believe the vessel of Princess Luna’s return is nothing but a shell. A symbol of her fall into darkness. I say this is obfuscation and lies! The beings or powers that returned our dear Night Princess to us must be addressed. There are obviously greater things in the depths of the beyond than we've been lead to believe. To label it nothing but a display of the fruits of jealousy is to debase the majesty of this event and defraud us of this miraculous return-”

I’d never considered myself a religious sort, but it only took about six sentences from that beastly mare before my headache was back in full force.

“Could you shut that awful crap off? I don’t need to hear from the Loonies this morning.” I growled under my breath.

Taxi reached down and turned the volume on the radio down a few notches - which didn’t help immensely, but took the dull throb to a less intolerable level. Looking over her shoulder for a second she shook her head. “Do you have some kind of problem with the Lunar Passage?” She asked, slipping the car into neutral just long enough to make the engine snarl menacingly at a rickshaw which was drifting into our lane.

Dammit, Hardy! Why does your sense of self preservation never kick in before your mouth opens? That was exactly the kind of thing Taxi wouldn’t let pass.

I inhaled sharply and tried to clear my thoughts of the infernal haze which had hung over them since I oozed off the couch. Mornings should be spent in quiet repose with a newspaper and a nice clean toilet to throw up into.

“I...ugh. No. They’re fine. No problems with the Loonies at all.”

She malevolently reached for the volume dial, and I jerked forward. “Okay, okay! Taxi... do you really need me to answer this? Why in Equestria do you never ask me these questions when I’m drunk?”

Tapping her chin, she grinned hugely. “Because for some reason, when you’re drunk, you’re smart enough not to answer them. So lay it out for me. What’s your issue with the Lunar Passage? I can’t wait to hear this.”

I sighed; My head hurt too much to come up with a creative dodge, so I went for the unvarnished truth. “They creep me out, that's what. They creep me out 'cause I remember what they used to be like. They spent all their time shrieking in basements to each other about Celestia banishing Luna and making up Nightmare Moon as some sort of... cosmic power play. Now, a few years and one economic crisis later, I can't step out my door without stumbling over somepony in a starry robe spouting this trash. It’s ridiculous.”

“So, what, are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to get over their pasts? They've toned down the anti-Celestia rhetoric, and do a lot of really decent work now. They own half the homeless hostels in the city. They’re not hurting anypony.”

“It's not just me. Look, do you remember that Nightmare Night back when we were kids, and what Luna was like when she was here in Detrot? I heard Astral at the Nightmare Night celebration this year in Baltimare; she gave some... speech, kinda like that one, and while she was raving, Luna herself was right there looking as though she half wished she was back on the moon.”

“She’s never said anything about it in public,” Taxi said, “but If you’re right, and the Lunar Passage does make her uncomfortable, then maybe she says nothing because she knows just how important their faith in her is to them. Everypony needs something to get through the day, and if Luna’s rebirth story is that something, what’s wrong with that?”

“...Fine, but did they have to be reborn into ponies that dress like they were sexually assaulted by the night sky?”

Taxi’s expression subtly darkened, but not as much as her words did. “It’s got to be healthier than being reborn at the bottom of a bottle of hard cider every night.”

I winced slightly, but decided to drop the subject before she could go on to dissect my grooming habits. “You asked, Sweets.”

“Yes, I did ask, and you didn’t have to answer me by being a jerk.”

“See, this is why I do not discuss religion with you. I’ve got an equal chance of being saddled with Healing Crystal Earrings or a kick in the teeth.”

“You’re an incredible dick sometimes.”

“...Just drive the cab, Sweets.”

She huffed but left the radio off. I slumped against the window and shut my eyes, praying that calm would re-assert itself as I slid into a quiet funk. The day was only beginning and already I’d pissed off my employer and my best friend. Joy of joys. Maybe, with any luck, I could bring down the wrath of Celestia by day’s end.

Chapter 3: Griffin the Third Degree

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 3: Griffin The Third Degree

While some magical analytic tools are used in modern crime scene investigation, magic does not, by itself, solve crimes. You cannot wave a horn and separate the innocent from the guilty, and certainly not for lack of trying on the part of arcane researchers. Various avenues have been attempted, but none have proven sufficiently ironclad.

You can tell if somepony is lying by casting a spell. However, for all but the most simplistic of inquiries, the lie can take almost any form. It becomes very difficult to tell the truth under the influence of a lie detecting spell, because nopony remembers anything with absolute perfection. False positives are far too endemic for lie detection to be reliable.

Detecting guilt is possible within known magic, but what you ultimately get is personal guilt, not legal culpability. Therefore, you will get stronger ‘guilt’ readings from a bereaved widow who feels remorseful because she wasn’t there for her significant other than you will from the depraved multiple serial killer actually responsible for said pony’s demise.

You can extract memories from ponies, but ponies are vast repositories of memories. You might get the memory you want from a pony you’re interrogating. You might also get a dream they had after too many hay fries. Or what they thought of when you described the crime. Or the full lyrics to the pop music hit “Evil Dances.”

Magically divining the cause of the crime is also possible-but-useless, in this case because nopony has been able to beat the legal concept of "proximate cause" into magic. Without that, any given crime contains a functionally infinite number of events and entities without which the crime would not have happened. Such magic proved as likely to point the hoof at Princess Celestia as it might an actual killer, because certainly that murder wouldn’t have happened the way it had if Equestria had spent thousands of years as an absurdist unreality under Discord’s thrall.

For these reasons, the Detrot Police Department does not rely on magic. They instead tend to rely on evidence, deduction, intuition, logic, and the occasional fragment of blind, unadulterated luck.

--The Scholar

I will freely admit that I’m not a fashionable stallion. I’m sure some of the ties in my drawers would have been quite chic during Celestia’s college years. Realizing that about myself was very helpful, because when it came to judging trends, I could more or less lump them into two categories: ugly or ridiculous.

The High Step Hotel called on the worst of both. It looked like somepony had tried to jam a log cabin into the underside of a Canterlot pleasure temple, then stuck a garden on top with no regard for continuity or theme. The front facade was a mass of faux cracked marble with faded white steps leading up to a wide porch in the style of a country plantation. A few lightly molded, whitewashed rocking chairs tilted back and forth in the mid-morning gusts.

Behind the aging edifice's ridiculous porch it seemed to have grown a short skyscraper like a malignant tumor. It stretched up for a full ten stories, then abruptly terminated in a spilling mass of vines that hung down over the eaves of the roof. The styles the rich enjoy will forever mystify me.

Around the hotel was the sort of badly uplifted, socially acceptable poverty which sometimes happens when a city suddenly booms and busts within a single generation. Across the road and on either side, older, smaller hotels still managed to eke out an existence in the shadow of their imposing rival. The High Step sat amongst them like an elderly king gone to fat, holding court with upstarts all seeking to usurp its place as high-lord of kitsch.

Affluent equines still screwed on the hotel’s silken sheets while reminiscing about all the other ponies who’d done the same. They might even have offered a sad lament for the decline of such a fine establishment, all the while not doing a damn thing to stop it.

****

The ring road around the hotel was clogged with press vehicles and police cars all vying for the last few parking spaces. Taxi took one look at the metal melange, then swung us down a side road. We ended up finding an alley into which to wedge the cab, at a fair distance from the crime-scene. I did some advanced gymnastics getting out of the barely cracked door; Swift dragged herself through the sunroof rather than step out into what smelled like a heap of offal from a nearby butcher shop that’d been carelessly dumped in the hoofpath.

Putting my hooves up on the top of the cab, I looked down through the roof at our driver still sitting there, her eyes tightly shut as she murmured incomprehensibly to herself.

“You sure you don’t want to join us, Sweets? It might be something genuinely horrific. There could be intestines hanging from a lamp again. You remember that one?” I grinned with mock nostalgia.

Swift slapped a hoof over her lips, which didn’t prevent the escape of an alarming gurgle. I gave her a glance; she was a little bit green around the gills, which was a bad color on her safety-sticker-colored face.

Shaking my head, I turned back to Taxi, who was also fighting a massive internal conflict, albeit one in her head instead of her gut. She was slumped over the steering wheel, looking like a yellow party balloon somepony had deflated.

“Hardy, I can’t...”

“Sure you can! Come on, it’ll be fun. You can say some prayers or something. Do a little Buffalo dance for the cameras and we might even make it on the six’o’clock news.”

With an irritated scowl she reached over and turned the radio on full blast, twisting the dial like a knife in my skull. I jerked back as the soulful shrieking of a heavy metal band filled the car. At least, I think it was heavy metal, because it sounded like guitars being put through an industrial grinder. Kicking up my rear hooves, I galloped out of the tiny makeshift parking space before my headache could sneak back, stopping only once I’d reached the sidewalk.

Swift was quick on my heels. She dropped onto the pavement, folding her wings against her side as she looked back towards the car with a puzzled expression. “Sir? Didn’t you say Taxi was hired as a consultant?”

“Yep. Sweets might be all ‘goodness and light’ but she’s also one of the most gifted crime scene investigators under Celestia’s sun. Don’t ask me why she went into narcotics and not Equicide.”

“So... Shouldn’t she be coming with us to... um... consult?”

“She’ll be along in a moment. I’ve done this dance with her about once a month since she came back from her ‘vacation.’ Let her stew in her own curiosity for about five minutes.”

I winked at the rookie, then aimed myself at the High Step and its attendant crowd of vulturous news mongers.

They say ponies evolved as herd animals, and I believe it. I’ve seen PACT defensive formations that were less intimidating than the dense aggregation of random bodies between me and the crime scene. Once the press had been pulled off the corpse and pushed behind the police line, they were stuck for anything to do but snap pictures of the cops and the occasional cleaning pony coming in for their shift at the High Step, but they still felt like there was too much of a story here to disperse. Not even the imminent threat of a torrential downpour from the snarling thunderheads gathering in the heavens could get them out of the street; instead, every being in the massive crowd of rubbernecking civilians and hawkishly watching news creatures simply kept their umbrellas close in anticipation.

Come on Hardy! Let’s go! It’s only ten thousand voracious idiots with microphones looking to analyze your every word and declare it policing gospel. What can they possibly do to you?

I’ve never been good with pep talks; I’m even worse with self-administered ones.

Setting off at only slightly less than a full gallop, I simply charged at the crowd, hoping they’d only notice me once I’d managed to get close enough to the police line to duck into the waiting safety of my fellow officers. Swift gamely followed me into the melee of jockeying cameras on hoof rather than leaping over them. I’m sure she thought she was showing support for her poor earthbound superior, but I still resented her a little bit just for having the option.

Using sharp knees, I managed to shove my way through the outer edge of the mass of shifting bodies; but then, like sharks tasting blood in the water, they caught sight of Swift in her crisp uniform. It took the herd ten seconds to put us at the center of a forest of microphones. The flash bulbs sounded like firecrackers going off next to my face, and the ponies themselves were mere shadows behind the bombardment of lights. Swift was all but blinded, standing there helplessly rubbing her dazzled eyes. I grabbed the kid around the shoulders with one leg and began dragging her towards our goal: the yellow police tape on the other side of the herd.

That yellow line was the one boundary they seemed to respect, because they certainly didn’t respect personal space. A particularly pushy almond-coated unicorn, whose auburn mane spilled down her shoulders in thick curls that must have taken an army of beauticians to achieve, shoved her floating mic almost directly into my mouth. “Detective! Detective Boiled! Sugar Lace here from PNN! Can you confirm the identity of the deceased?”

I made to snap at the black rod in front of my muzzle but she jerked it back as I barreled past her. “I haven’t even seen the body yet. Get out of the way. I haven’t had breakfast and I swear I’ll eat that mic!”

The reporter pony twirled breathlessly to a brown colt standing behind her, one with a huge TV camera mounted on his saddle and a focus lens over one eye. “Sugar Lace here with this report from the scene of a violent death just outside of Detrot’s famous High Step Hotel! No word yet from the police on a suspect but we do have a comment from one of our favorite sources, Detective Hard Boiled! We’ll be showing that later on!”

I quailed inwardly as we edged away from the reporter. Despite the fact that most of what I said into microphones was invective, the Chief and I would no doubt have had words later if I’d become a ‘favorite source’ to that overdone news nag. I say ‘words’; what I mean is that she would likely have screamed a lot and flung me around her office until I threw up.

Grasping the edge of one of Swift’s large wings in my teeth, I tugged it until she unfolded the broad appendage. I ducked underneath and put one hoof across her back. She saw what I was doing and swept her other wing forward, shielding her face. The cameras still flashed, but the blasts of light slowly died off as the ponies operating them realized there was no way in Equestria to take a picture of Swift’s ridiculous coloration without some sort of sun-filter, although that didn’t get the ponies out of the way.

Just when I thought I might have to fire warning shots to get through the crowd, a bowel-loosening, primal shriek split the air. Suddenly, the field of shoving bodies scattered to safe distance. Pulling my partner’s wing away from my face, I saw Sugar Lace huddled almost underneath her camera crew, her eyes skyward.

“Sir? What was that?” said Swift.

The black shadow that fell over us was almost as long across as ten ponies standing nose to tail. A thick, rolling brogue seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously: “Aye! Ye vomitous gobshites! Give me mate some feckin’ room!”

As it occurred to me to look up, a heavy, powerful body dropped from on high, crashing onto the road in front of us and yanking me from underneath Swift’s wing with both taloned forelegs. I found myself crushed against a downy breast in an affectionate hug that came inches from actually breaking most of my bones. I managed to choke out something that the huge devil must have taken as a plea for air, because a moment later I was unceremoniously dropped. “Heh, soirry ‘bout that, Hardy me colt! Oi ain’t seen ye in such a long toime oi roightly lost me head!”

The being looming over me might have been the mad breeding of a golden eagle and a great cat. He was wearing a huge yellow tarpaulin around his shoulders like a rain poncho. He looked down at me with an amber-eyed predator’s gaze, his flesh-rending beak clicking softly. It was an audio version of what passes for an affectionate grin in a species without lips.

Once I could breathe, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. “Celestia save me... Sykes?”

“Aye me, tis!” The griffin thumped his broad chest and his cheeks rose a little as he attempted a smile. His oaken brown coat had a few extra grey hairs and his shaggy leg fur had seen better days, but all in all it was the same old Sykes; a skid-row savage with a badge and not one hint of decorum. Never was there a more reliable cop under Celestia’s sun.

“I heard you flew off and went monster hunting or something. What brought you back? And why didn’t you call? I’d have bought you a drink.” I thumped him on the shoulder and he dragged his claws over the asphalt, looking bashful.

“Well, me laddy, truth is oi were on an undercover wid Magical Items in Canterlot. Buncha them noble types smugglin’ zebra artifacts to the dragons. Busted it up right proper oi did! M’soirry oi didn’t ring ye when oi got back.”

I waved off the apology with a slap of my tail against my thigh. “It happens. What brought you back to Equicide? You miss the local flavor?”

Sykes waved one talon in what I assumed was a rude gesture. “Ye eat out of the evidence freezer one time and yer branded fer feckin’ life...”

I chuckled. Whatever else he might be, Sykes was always a laugh. He had the sort of rough carnivore’s humor that I tended to like and a no-nonsense attitude towards police work. It made him an asset on even the most gruesome cases, where morale starts to flag if things don’t get wrapped up in a nice, neat little bow.

He mimed tossing back a pint of beer as he continued. “There was me just coolin’ me heels at the pub when Telly, that sweet siren temptress, rings me up and says ‘Ye want some work that don’t involve watchin’ a buncha poncin’ nobles?’ Methinks the newspaper be breathin’ down Chief Jade’s neck about ‘species doiversity’ in the ranks again.”

Something caught his attention. He peered around my side, tilting his head in that disturbing way only avians can. “Now oo’s this then? Laddy! Did ye bring me lunch? ‘Ow koind!”

I felt that something bump into my rear legs, so I scooted to one side. It was Swift, crouched behind me, her bit-trigger in her teeth and her terrified features fixed on Sykes. Thankfully, the safety on her little pop-gun was still on.

Hooking one rear leg around the rookie, I dragged her forward. The griffin’s honey colored eyes bored into the tiny pegasus; her ancient prey instincts took over and she did her best to make herself very small. It might have been millenia or longer since griffins chased pegasi through the skies over Equestria, but I doubted she’d ever met one of his size or demeanor. If you didn’t know him, he was intimidating even when he was being friendly.

“Officer Swift, I want you to meet Detective Sykes. Don’t mind him. He’s just a big kitty wearing a chicken costume.” I grinned at them, putting one hoof on my partner’s back; I could feel her heart racing even through her police barding. Swift turned her head warily to catch my eye, and I nodded encouragingly. After a deep breath, she shook herself, muttered ‘Beohoof,’ and thrust out one leg. And then, she uttered quite possibly the most intimidating official introduction in the history of the DPD:

“I’m Officer Swift and I’m nobody's lunch!”

I covered myself with a short coughing spell; Sykes didn’t bother. He pitched over onto his back, rolling around on the muddy cement, letting out loud peals of mirth. “Bwaaahahaha! Oh boyo, Oi likes this ‘un!” He howled, clutching his sides.

Trotting over I gave him a prod in the ribs, though I may as well have poked a rock with a piece of limp spaghetti. “Oh, give it a rest. You remember what it’s like your first day.”

Wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his dark furred forelegs, the griffin rolled over and shook the dirt off his poncho. Reaching up from a sitting position he grasped Swift’s foreleg and give her a shake firm enough to lift her off the ground. “Whooo... Oi needed that! Welcome to Detrot Police Department, Missy. Long may ye live and quick may ye die.”

Swift’s ears flattened against the sides of her head as she regained her balance from the vigorous greeting. “Um... thank you?”

“It’s a griffin’s version of a blessing, kid.” I explained. “When you consider they used to fight dragons bare-clawed and you can live about two days with half your skin burned off, it makes more sense.”

“...Oh.” It was all Swift could apparently think of to say.

The news ponies had moved in again, though they were giving Sykes a wide berth. I flicked my eyes at Sugar Lace, who was practically hanging over the police tape to hear us. “Can we move this over someplace less public?”

Sykes got up, casually flipping his tail in the air and flashing his prodigious rear at the cameras. “Aye, lets. Speakin’ of less public, did oi hear rightly that ye have yerself a driver now? Oi’m afraid Oi been outta the loop.”

“Iris Jade yanked my license. Everypony’s had their laughs already, so I’m afraid you’re a bit late to the party. It was either this or make coffee for the office until the sun goes out.”

Swift followed behind us, staying cautiously close to my side and shooting Sykes guarded looks. She seemed to have relaxed somewhat when she learned Sykes was a fellow officer, but that didn’t completely trump thousands of years of evolution telling her a beasty might just swoop down and have her for dinner.

We were approaching the shifting group of ponies in uniform around the center of the crime scene. Most of them seemed to be standing around trying and failing to look purposeful, but a few of the older ones were clustered around an open box of cupcakes, sipping cheap coffee from the hotel restaurant. The old guard knows when they need to shape up because the boss is coming. They gave me one look and made the determination almost instantly: not the boss.

The crowd parted to let us through, or rather, it parted around Sykes. It was like watching a school of fish shifting around a particularly hungry looking seal. Nopony on the force had ever confirmed the griffin had a genuine taste for pony meat, but he’d never done anything to discourage the idea.

“So what exactly have we got? The Chief was terribly vague.” I asked, shifting my coat and sticking my nose in the pocket to pull out Telly’s initial report. “This damn thing doesn’t even give a gender.”

“Aye, we were still shooin’ off the feckin’ reporters when Oi called that in. Corpse is a mare. No I.D. and nothin’ when we ran her colors and her Cutie Mark. Oi been keepin’ the lab coats off her till ye arrived. Hacks weren’t stupid enough to move the body before we got ’em away, thank the Egg. They tramped all over though.” He waved to a fairly obvious muddy hoofprint where somepony had tried to scrape the muck of the streetcorner off.

The alley was more of a very small backstreet running up one side of the High Step. It was full of overflowing garbage cans and stray bits of trash. A fire-escape spilled down one side of the building, rusty run-off staining the ground and brickwork with a splash of dribbling maroon.

A half dozen ponies in thin, protective clothing lined up against one wall, staring longingly at something behind an industrial dumpster as they passed a steaming flask back and forth between them. The forensics herd was almost dying to get to the body and start poking around. Most of them thought they were the next Fetlock Holmes; I took a smug pleasure in letting them wait.

Just as I rounded the dumpster, I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, and the world gradually seemed to pause.

A lot of what Taxi picked up and discarded looked to me like meaningless cosmic babble, but there was something in the basic idea of meditation. Taking a moment to relax, clear and focus your mind was more beneficial than I’d thought early in my career, and I’d probably have been sold on it sooner without all the spiritual frippery. These days I always chose to do it just before laying eyes on a body, while the possibilities of the case were still infinite.

The curious voices of all those reporters and the other officers, muffled only slightly by the confines of the alley, slowly faded to a low hum. Soon, there was nothing to prevent that familiar feeling from welling up in my chest and tingling on my flanks; my Special Talent, making itself tangible. A wrong had been done here. Some primeval part of me that lived in my cutie mark could feel the injustice in front of me, and burned to do something about it.

In that instant, just before I allowed the mystery to reveal itself, I thought myself alive in a way nopony in that crowd out there could possibly imagine.

I opened my eyes.

She was grey as the cloudy skies, her mane and tail both monochrome, though a shade or two lighter than mine. The body lay splayed out on her stomach, like she’d been trying to make a snow-angel in the pavement. Her front legs were bent at unnatural angles and thick, clotted blood had spilled down her face from a head-wound. Her wide, staring eyes were as colorless as the rest of her.

A tattered red dress was draped around her shoulders and down off her rear end. It was the sort one wears on a hot date, simple and slinky. The shiny, silken fabric was ripped, revealing plump and pretty flanks. The girl was a real looker, or at least, she had been. A few years older than Swift, at most.

They say death is always the same. The means and modus operandi of death are virtually limitless but in the end you’re left with a corpse and a hoof-full of questions that will never be answered. A whole life has been snuffed out in an instant and everything they ever thought, felt, or knew is gone. I hated to think I wasn’t fazed by that prospect any longer. It would have meant the job had finally started to take parts of me I wasn’t happy to lose.

Somepony was fazed, though.

“Excuse me, sir...” A blur of orange feathers blasted towards the other end of the alley. Swift jammed her head into a metal pail, loudly emptying her stomach of everything she must have had for breakfast.

Sykes was leering at Swift with one eyebrow raised. “Moi sweet mother, ye’ve got a big stomach there, eh scrubby?” He chided her. The young pegasus was still propped with both hooves over the bucket, panting like she’d flown a hundred miles.

I nosed through my coat until I found an old kerchief, then eased up behind her and dropped it over her muzzle. She made a noise that I took for thanks and wiped her lips of a few bits of half digested hay.

“You saw dead bodies in training, right?” I asked. “I refuse to believe our budget’s been cut so thoroughly they excluded seeing at least a couple of cadavers from the curriculum.”

Swift’s cheeks colored and she held out the soiled kerchief. I shook my head and she quickly folded it and stuffed it in one of the ammo pockets of her black combat vest. “That was different...” A full body shudder shot up her back, making her quake like a technicolor leaf. “Their legs weren’t doing that.” I can’t say I much blamed her. Nothing truly prepares you for the reality of seeing somepony who died violently.

I swept my coat under my rump and sat down, then straightened Swift’s uniform with both hooves. “Alright, Officer Swift.” I began formally. She drew herself to attention. I pointed up towards the gap between the High Step and the adjoining hotel. “Go take a look up there. See what you can see.”

The rookie’s face split into a grateful smile and she rocketed off the ground with two beats of her wings that sent her up past the fire escape, dodging around a hanging clothes line.

Sykes stepped up beside me, watching her go. “Ye sure that’un is gonna hack it?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose with the back of one knee. “If she doesn’t, I may as well start taking your order for latte because that’s the closest I’ll get to a crime scene. I’ll make a cop out of her if I don’t end up shooting her first.”

“Black with extra sugar, laddy.”

I swatted in his direction with my tail. “Thank you for the vote of confidence.”

I was about to kneel down beside the body for a closer look at her cutie mark when a commotion at the other end of the alley pulled my attention. A familiar voice was arguing with somepony. “Ahhh, there’s our consultant.”

I felt a wave of smug satisfaction as I was proven right yet again, but that wave wasn’t long for the world. A young, fresh-faced pink earth pony in a uniform only slightly less starched than Swift’s darted around the garbage can, shouting. “Sir! Sir, come quick! There’s a crazy mare out here and she just poked Sergeant Street Wise and I don’t think he’s breathing!”

Dear Sun and Moon, please let it be some other crazy mare.

****

I left Sykes and raced out of the alley to find Taxi laying face down across the top of a police cruiser in two sets of hoofcuffs, one for her front legs and one for her back. My driver’s eyelids were shut, and she was muttering a mantra of some kind very softly. She seemed a lot more peaceful than the heavy-set pegasus apparently named Street Wise, who was on the ground on his back, being tended to by two other officers. A bit of foam was dripping from one side of his mouth as he stared at the sky, pupils smaller than the holes made by a .22.

I snatched the lapel of the officer who’d called me from the crime scene and drew him up short. “Alright, what did Street Wise say to her before she poked him?”

He looked left, the right, trying to find some support from the other uniforms on scene, but finding none, he lowered his head. “He said she looked like a sneaky reporter trying to get a late scoop.”

I stuck my face less than an inch from his, my voice full of menace. “That’s it?”

He backed up as I advanced on him, bumping his rear against the side of a somber blue paddy wagon. “Uh...he...um...” His eyes darted back and forth as he squirmed like a fly pinned to a wall. “When... when she took her saddlebags off to get her temp badge, he said ‘We don’t need no ponies without talents telling us how to do our jobs.’ Then she hit him and he fell over.” I noticed Taxi’s black and white luggage laying beside her.

His gazed twitched towards Sweet Shine’s prone body, then towards her hips as he added. “Street Wise is new. He just transferred from Los Pegasus. He didn’t know!”

I snatched the hoofcuff keys off his belt and marched over to Taxi before the pink officer could protest. She opened her eyes as she heard me coming and smiled peacefully, like she’d just come from a three day meditation retreat rather than almost crippling somepony. It was the sort of smile that masks a mountain of old pain.

The foothills of that mountain were clearly visible: The scars on her flanks were a vicious sight. They started a few inches from her tail and went right around to her hips in one long, jagged cut. Many smaller slices radiated from the central wound, leaving a blank, irregular patch of healed-over flesh where the fur had never properly grown back.

Picking up her bags I tossed them over her backside, adjusting the strap so they were tight around her belly, then went about the process of unlocking her forelegs. As soon as the metal bracelets came off her knees she rubbed them for a second then shoved herself down off the car. “Thanks, Hardy...”

I couldn’t keep annoyance out of my tone. “Don’t give me ‘Thanks Hardy’. What’s wrong with you today? First that PACT trooper this morning and now this?”

“His fault.” She said, pursing her lips. Her features held all the carefully constructed calm of cut stone.

“Yes, his fault, but are you seriously going to let him get you so riled up you end up charged with assaulting an officer? I’m half inclined to let you spend a night in a cell.”

That might as well have been water off a duck’s back for all the effect it had on her. “If you feel that’s necessary.”

She met my disappointed gaze with her impassive, emotionless expression. Finally, I gave in, and helped her straighten her bags. “Come on, we’ve got a body. Fix the bonehead first.”

Shaking herself as though to cleanse her mind of the last of her embarrassment she walked over beside the fat, supine form of Street Wise. One of the officers beside him moved to stop her, but I waved him off.

Lowering herself to the ground beside the officer she put her lips next to one of his ears and whispered something then gave him a sudden, sharp kick in the ribs. He gasped for breath, spasmed, then fell onto his side as his body started operating again. Fear filled his face and he rolled over, scooting away from Taxi until he fell over the surprised officer in a heap of flailing legs.

“What did you say to him?” I asked as we moved away from the quaking officer and the sea of stunned faces.

“Oh, nothing much. Something about how I’d come back and pull his soul out through his penis if he ever disrespected a mare again.”

“I’m pretty sure you just killed that stallion’s marriage. He’ll be lucky if he can get an erection for the next six months.”

“Hmmmph... His fault.”

****

Sykes froze when he saw us coming. His vast dark wings shot straight out from his sides, brushing the walls on both sides and almost braining one of the forensics ponies. “Laddy, ye never said your droiver was Sweet Shine!”

Taxi, for her part, skidded to a halt faster than her cab could and turned on her heels. She was halfway out of the alley when I caught up to her.

“What? Taxi, talk to me. Don’t tell me you and Sykes are going to have it out this morning, too!”

She turned to face me so fast I almost ran into her, and she hissed through clenched teeth, “You didn’t even tell me Mr. Beam Boom himself would be here. If you had, I’d have let you walk.”

The griffin had silently taken off and now landed behind her, blocking the exit of the alley. “Now, Miss Sweets...”

“Taxi! Don’t you dare call me by that name, Sykes. Not after what you pulled!”

“Oi toldja a thousand times, it weren’t my fault them drugs exploded! Nopony told me that ware-house was full of anythin’ but artifacts. Iffen’ Narcotics had shared that we woulda taken a light touch...” He held his claws out, placating.

The various branches of Detrot P.D. had as diverse a set of operating procedures as there are crimes under Celestia’s sun. Narcotics prefered interception and disposal under controlled conditions. Magical Items found they had the greatest success with high explosives.

There are many contraband enchanted objects which would gleefully enslave, ensnare, desiccate, or rearrange anypony who got close to or mishandled them, and which are contraband for precisely those reasons. The prevailing opinion in Magical Items was that if it was not guaranteed possible to control the artifacts in question, then it was often better to simply destroy them on site. While some magic items had ludicrous and highly specific destruction requirements, like needing to be taken to the fires of an enchanted volcano or crushed under the hoof of an honest pony, the vast majority responded quite well to P4. Slipping a wad of plastic explosives into a crate of illegal artifacts was pretty standard procedure.

That didn’t matter to Taxi right now, though. The cabbie’s facade of calm indifference was gone. Here, then, was Taxi under full steam and with a head full of anger that’d been building since early morning. She jammed her soft, lemon colored nose against his sharp beak. Despite the size difference, Sykes was the one who seemed to shrink under her driving stare.

“I spent six months undercover living above a club for mares-in-socks freaks, wearing earplugs every single night just so I could sleep, to make that bust. Magical Items wanted a jurisdictional pissing contest and you ended it with a hoof-full of explosives!” She snarled at him and his wings clamped tight against his sides.

The griffin’s rear-legs collapsed and he sat heavily, looking for all the world like a very large kitten being scolded for getting into the treats. The scene would have been patently absurd if I hadn’t just watched Taxi incapacitate a pony twice her size with one hoof.

Sykes tried to recover some of his bluster but as he lifted his head he found himself on the level with Taxi’s genuinely terrifying expression. “H-hey! O-oi was l-laid up in hospital for two weeks! Oi had a head full of Beam and thought pigeons was peckin’ me feathers out! Give us a break, lass!”

“Oh, I’ll give you a break --”

I put a hoof on her shoulder, pulling her around. She tried to turn that dangerous, hypnotic gaze on me, but thankfully I’d long since developed an immunity.

“Hardy, you take your leg off --” she started, but I shoved her back against the wall, rearing up to put my legs on either side of her head. Her eyes widened slightly in alarm as she fell on her tail.

“Sweets, that’s enough.” I growled into her ear, too low for eavesdropping lab coats to hear. I felt a ring of curious gazes crawl across the back of my neck. Jerking my chin at them, I whickered irritably. The idle crime scene investigators all discovered an intense interest in examining their legs, coffee mugs, and trash further down the alley.

I turned back to Taxi. I was close enough to detect the strong incense in her fur and, under that, the unique sweetness I’d always associated with her ever since we were foals. Her breathing was husky and shallow.

“Hardy, you can’t --” she began again.

“Quiet.”

“I will not be --”

“Sweet Shine! You’re going to listen.”

She could have broken my nose. I might even have deserved it. Instead, at the sound of her full name, a bit of fear and uncertainty crept into her expression as she slowly nodded. Taking that as a sign I wasn’t due for another trip to the hospital, I kept my voice low and went on.

“Your personal history with Sykes doesn’t mean a damn thing to that dead filly over there. Whatever parasprite has gotten into your bonnet, it’s going to go on hold until we’re done finding out what happened to her so we can give that girl some peace in the Everafter. If that’s an inconvenience, you can get off my crime scene. Is that clear?”

She looked at the contritely crouching griffin and then back at me. Her ears drooped against her checkerboard mane as the anger flowed out of her, leaving an unsettling hollowness.

I stepped back and waited for her reply. It wouldn’t have been the first time her rebuttal had left me in a body-cast, but I like to think I’ve gotten a little more durable since we were foals wrestling on the trampoline in my backyard. Fortunately, I did not have to find out; she lowered her head and pulled away, refusing to meet my eyes. She muttered half-heartedly, “I’m sorry. I should be handling this better.”

“Handling what better? If whatever is going on is going to make you tear off somepony’s head, take a leave of absence. You’re not the only cab in the city.”

Her gaze snapped up and she gave me a push with her forehooves but I managed to keep my balance. “Is that all I am? Your ride?” She sounded hurt, but there wasn’t any real force behind the rebuke.

“You’re the only one I’d choose, Sweets. Come on, I need you today.” I said with a consoling whinny, brushing her braid back from her face.

Drawing in a breath, she called up some strength from her truly staggering inner reserves and got to her hooves, her cool, serene expression settling back into place. It wasn’t so much for my benefit as that of the forensics ponies who were nervously camping around a stinking heap of full garbage bags just inside earshot.

“I’ll... I’ll see the body now. I don’t want to talk about what’s going on right now, but please, ask me later, alright?”

I nodded firmly. “Yes, ma’am. Our karma is on the clock after all. I’ll buy the first round of drinks when you’re ready, even if it’s that Manehattan trash with the fruit in it you like so much.” That brought a tentative smile to her sunflower pigmented lips.

Reaching into the outermost pocket of her saddlebag, I plucked out a pair of jeweler’s goggles and a pair of latex hoof-covers. I tugged the glasses over her head, then lifted her forehooves and pulled the gloves over them with a satisfying snap. She stood there like a foal being dressed for school until I was done.

As I shifted the magnifying lenses on the jeweler’s goggles down over her eyes and she came alive like a puppet whose strings had been pulled taut. Stalking over to the body of the poor dead mare she stopped, dropping onto her haunches beside her and making a few complex motions with her forelegs over the girl’s bloodied form. Taxi blew a kiss at the bottoms of the Jane Pony’s hooves, then touched her cheek then looked up at me expectantly.

“What was the time of death?” Taxi inquired, running an idle hoof over the lovely dress.

Sykes answered before I could. “Best guess, early this mornin’. Cleanin’ crew found ‘er and called the press. Reporters was all over the lass when we arrived.”

“Couldn’t you have told us that before we got unpacked?” groused somepony behind me. I glanced back at the huddle of eggheads swilling the last of their flask down; a unicorn mare only a few inches taller than Swift, who seemed to be the leader, nickered irritably at us. She had an enormous silver nose ring and a swirl of rose petals tattooed along the fur on her neck, just above the neckline of her lab coat. “This scene is totally contaminated. We may as well just take pictures!”

Our griffin compatriot shifted his weight from one set of legs to the other, incidentally flexing his claws and digging deep gouges in the composite cement. “Must of slipped me moind. Yer paid per job, roight? Ye can stand a little waitin’ around.”

She didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response; instead, she waved her subordinates back. They began dejectedly tucking away their plastic baggies and pulling out the heavy photography lenses.

I snatched a rubber glove from the front pocket of the pony with the nose ring, snapped it on and eased down beside Taxi. “You have a cause of death?”

She glanced up at the skyline then shrugged. “She fell. I’d say somepony or something chased her off the roof. It was a blind jump and she didn’t quite make it. I doubt it was suicide.”

I craned my neck to see the roof nearest the High Step. It was at least a story shorter, but still too far away for a jump.

Sykes butted in. “What makes ye think it’s not suicoide, eh?”

Taxi plucked at the girl’s upper lip lightly, pulling it back to reveal several broken teeth. “She hit the wall face first. If she was trying to kill herself, she’d have stepped off. She was at a full gallop.”

Something sparkled beneath her tangle of hair, so I lifted her matted grey mane off of her ear. The cabbie and I found ourselves both momentarily captivated by a vision of real beauty. Three cherry red rubies hung from a delicately formed golden stem with a single, large green stone which was cut into the shape of a leaf. The earring was a work of art. It managed to be simultaneously flamboyant, subtle, and sexy.

Sykes let out a long, low whistle. “Me oh moi. Our girly had herself some properly noice fashion sense, thinks oi.”

“What would you know about fashion, Sykes? During your first year in the job, you tried to arrest somepony for ‘criminal negligee.’” Taxi smirked, cocking an eye at him.

The griffin puffed his chest feathers up. “Ye didn’t see what they was wearin’!”

I was about to add my own comment to the effect that Sykes was clearly an eclectic bird with an impeccable sense of high fashion, hence his sunflower colored plastic poncho, but at that moment, a hot, sticky mass splashed down my back legs. Time seemed to stop as I looked down at a morass of semi-liquid hay and carrot chunks pooling around my rear hooves.

Swift dropped out of the sky, both forelegs over her mouth as she hung there in front of me. “Oh, sir, I’m so sorry... I found blood on the wall and a tooth on a ledge about seven stories up.... Oh Celestia, I got it all down your tail...”

‘There’s already been a death today, Hardy. Two will not help the amount of paperwork you have to do,’ I thought, clenching my teeth.

Sykes was standing there with an expression like a stunned goose. Taxi’s lower jaw was bobbing up and down like she was trying to find something to say but she only make a soft squeak.

“Officer Swift Cuddles. Get down here, please.”

The pegasus dropped in front of me and lowered her head, clearly expecting me to set fire to her or banish her or something along those lines. I was tempted. I’m pretty sure if I’d ordered her out of the country just then, she’d have asked if she could pack first or if she should just go straight away.

Instead, I shrugged out of the vomit-drenched coat and laid it carefully across her back. “Find the hotel laundry room. Have this cleaned. Cold water only. No magic. Go now.”

The bolt of orange fur that zipped out of the end of the alley could have beaten the goggles off a Wonderbolt in a sprint to the laundromat. As she left, I slapped my tail against a dumpster, shaking off bile and whatever remnants of my new partner’s first meal had still been in her stomach after the first round of nausea. Both Sykes and Taxi were watching me like a rabid mongoose who’d suddenly decided to do a tap-dance.

“What?! If either of you have something to say, say it!” I shouted. They looked at each other, then held up their forelegs.

“I’m nothing but kind thoughts.”

“Moi beak is sealed, lad.”

Settling back beside the cabbie and straightening my tie I took a deep breath. It wasn’t a pleasant breath but then, the mare’s body had been laying out for a while and the rich stink of blood still permeated everything. Thankfully, she hadn’t voided her bowels when she hit the ground, but nothing would dissuade the flies which had started to congregate in a persistently buzzing horde around us.

“Alright, lets see her cutie mark.”

Taxi very gently pushed the slinky red skirt up around the filly’s croup. The image sitting just above her thigh was very similar to her ear-rings; Three grayscale jewels, the stem, and the leaf. Alongside that was a long, curving crescent of deep maroon that started at the top of the mark and swung around, almost like a waning moon.

I scratched my chin and asked nopony in particular, “Huh, gem-working and... something to do with fruit?”

Tracing the shape with her toe, Taxi compared the mark to her jewelry. “I’d be willing to call jewelry her special talent. These are exquisite. They’re measured specifically for her.” She carefully manipulated the mare’s ear in several directions; the accessory didn’t so much as tap against the skull.

“So our victim was a jeweler. In Detrot. That’s terribly unhelpful. Even with the price of uncut stones around here these days, I’ll bet you half the out of towners who come here are artists of different flavors trying to make it rich.” I opined grimly, snatching my hat as a quick blast of wind between the buildings almost swept it off. The storm was coming on at an alarming pace and the forensics ponies were looking antsy.

Taxi squinted at the girl’s forehead, then hummed a little tune as she pushed the hair back from the Jane Pony’s pale, pretty face. “You know, head-wounds bleed a lot but this doesn’t look consistent with blunt force trauma. Swift said she found blood up there. That says to me she was already bleeding when she hit...”

Leaning in close she let out a faint neigh of surprise, pointing at the source of the wound. It seemed to be almost perfectly circular, and around the edges a bony ridge rose slightly above the flesh.

I twisted around to look at the white coats. They’d just finished pulling out their equipment and were in the process of setting up several light sources. I grabbed ‘Nose-Ring’ as she strolled by. “Did any of you see her horn?”

She blinked at me then down at the deceased. “Horn... wait, the dead bint was a unicorn?”

“Yes, and show some respect. Go, look around. See if you can find her horn.”

Sykes dipped his head down below the level of the dumpster, quickly scanning underneath everything nearby. “Oi don’t see it. If it broke in the fall it moight have gone anywhere. One’a them reporters moight have picked it up.”

Taxi brushed a little dried blood away from the hole on one side then adjusted a knob on the side of her glasses. Lenses shifted with an audible click and she peered closely at what was left of the protruding horn. “Huh. This doesn’t look broken at all. It looks like it was cut with something.”

I flicked my tail, driving away another cloud of flies from my back. “Cut? Oog. I hope we’re not dealing with some sort of trophy taker. Can you see any evidence of sexual activity? Assault or something like that?”

She lifted the mare’s rear leg, sticking her head uncomfortably close to her genitals. I looked away from the frank examination. Years on and I’d never gotten used to Taxi’s particularly hooves-on style of investigation. She’d rant and rail about the sacredness of life all day, but until a case was solved, a body was a body.

“I don’t see anything. No fluids, no staining, no blood, or bruising. If you want a more scientific breakdown you’ll have to send her to Slip Stitch. This is exactly the sort of thing that weird little prick would love.”

“Alright, I want to know who had access to that roof last night.”

Sykes signaled to the eggheads who started snapping pictures of seemingly random bits of detritus, starting from a few feet back and slowly working towards the corpse.

Taxi said one last prayer and tenderly closed the girl’s staring eyes, then dusted herself off. Tugging off the stained protective socks she tossed them into one of the forensics unit’s brightly labeled bio-waste containers. I did the same then stopped, hovering there with one hoof towards the light coming down off a street-lamp. It wasn’t yet more than an hour after noon, but the darkness of the quickly oncoming thunderstorm made it seem much later.

Something felt wrong. I couldn’t have put a toe on it for all the bits in Canterlot, but my cutie mark was tingling. I’d missed something. The scene was incomplete. An actor missed his cue and now nopony could leave the stage until the line was said. I swung back to the body.

She seemed so peaceful despite the blood spatter and the terrible angle her front limbs were twisted at when she landed. Her trials were at an end. I almost envied her becalmed state.

Squatting down, I tugged the hemline of her dress straight, covering her cutie-mark again. I’ve no idea why that felt important. Maybe some sentimental part of me wished, however little it might have mattered, to give the broken child some dignity.

But as I did so, something shiny skittered from the edge of her dress, shooting between my rear legs. I dropped a toe in front of it an instant before it could drop into an open drain. It was tiny, and covered in a bit of mud. Nudging it lightly with a hooftip, I glanced around for something to pick it up with so I could get a better look. Nothing in the alley looked particularly tasty. Reluctantly, I tugged off my sanitary glove, turned it inside out, and stuck it over my lips. It tasted foul, but picking up evidence bare-mouthed is discouraged pretty strongly.

“What’ve you got there, Detective? Oooh, is that from the body? Goodie!” Nose-ring was standing behind me, holding a baggy in her glittering levitation field. I spat the object into the waiting bag then wiped my lips, trying to get rid of the awful flavor of talcum powder from the inside of the glove.

She brought it close to her face, using a flicker of magic to reach through and very gently pluck away the dirt. “It looks like some kind of... poop. It’s a lapel pin. I was hoping for something like a spy gem or listening device. That would’ve been juicy!”

I never did get that pony’s name, but Nose Ring seemed to suit her. Her interest wasted, she wandered back to harassing her crew for better angle shots on some of the gravel.

The pin was a stylized dragon or serpent, forming a circle by swallowing its own tail. It looked like the sort of thing you’d pick up in a cheap and cheerful accessory shop for tasteless teens. I couldn’t picture the filly who’d made those fine earrings wearing it decoratively unless somepony held a gun to her head.

I set it on top of one of the garbage cans, watching the crew of investigators crawling over the crime scene. Taxi had found a corner, knelt down, and looked to be cleaning her karma with some humming. Sykes was watching the reporters, radiating a mixture of ‘hungry’ and ‘dangerous.’ I could imagine him any moment trying to sweep one of them up and have fly off somewhere to have a snack. I walked in little circles, looking over each individual element of the crime scene. I don’t know what I was searching for but it was a better use of my time than waiting on Taxi to be done with her meditations.

A rush of flapping wings filled the air. I scanned for the source then almost fell on my rump as Swift landed inches from my nose, breathing heavily, with sweat dotting her forehead. Stupid inconsiderate flying turkey... No, Hardy. Be nice.

“Sir! Cold water, no magic. I couldn’t get anything out of the pockets so I had to do it by hoof. Are they magical or something?”

I nodded. “One day, if you’re smart, you’ll spend a paycheck on a coat that’ll keep you warm in the cold and dry in the rain. It’s essential police gear. Telly laid some of that good ol’ File Cloud magic on the pockets. I’m the only one who can get into them. They’ll carry about a saddlebag worth of stuff in each and weigh about a tenth as much.”

She pulled my carefully folded trench-coat off of her back and laid it reverently in front of me. She couldn’t have been gone more than fifteen minutes but it looked like it’d been professionally cleaned. An old catsup stain on one of the sleeves was gone. I could even detect a hint of lemon.

“Some of those stains were practically historical monuments! How did you get...how did you get this clean and dry?!” I demanded, checking in each pocket to make sure at least the surface layer of items was still in the right place.

Her chest swelled with pride. “Dad was a stickler for cleanliness so he taught me how. It’s just a rain-cloud for washing, a little hail for deep scrubbing, and a quick full speed burst from these babies!” Flaring her wings she gave them a few quick pumps, swirling bits of trash around our knees. “I flew home to get something to help my stomach and dried your coat at the same time!”

Slipping into my coat, I jammed my nose into the under-leg and took a deep whiff, inhaling the scent of a brisk morning wind over a dew dappled field at dawn. I’d thought it’d require fire to get rid of the reek of mold, stale sweat and cheap deodorant.

“I think you got the wrong cutie-mark, kid.” I smiled, sweeping my tail back and forth so the coat fell on either side. It even felt softer.

Swift grinned fit to burst for a while, before her eye caught the shine coming off the sealed evidence bag sitting on the garbage can beside me. “What’s that, sir?”

“Came with the body. Might have fallen off the perp when he cut off her horn-”

The rookie’s eyes got big and round. “Cut off her horn?!” She gasped.

I pressed on despite the interruption. “I’m going to show it to Taxi whenever she’s done with... that.” The cabbie was swaying her hips to a non-existent beat, doing a dance that involved rearing up then dropping to her stomach again and again. Thankfully, she’d picked a corner out of view of the press.

Swift lifted herself up on her forelegs to get enough height, but when she got a close look at the pin, her eyes almost popped out of her head. “Oh no.” She whispered, then fell back on her tail, putting her legs over her face.

“What? What is it? Kid, talk to me.”

Taxi was suddenly there at her side, one leg around her. Swift turned against her shoulder and buried her face in my driver’s checked hair. I started to say something else, but the cabbie gave me a look that could have stripped paint.

It was a tense few minutes as the rookie composed herself. I paced back and forth irritably, my horse-shoes clattering on the pavement. At last, after what felt to my curiosity like an hour, Swift straightened, extracting herself from Taxi’s legs. She dragged the pin off the can and held it between her toes, looking at it sadly.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m fine now.” I wasn’t sure I believed her, but her voice was steady. Her hooves shook as she turned the evidence bag over and over. “I know where this came from.”

Sweets was in full mothering mode, gently rubbing the pegasus’ wing muscles. “Take your time. We’re not in a hurry.”

The kid stroked the pin like it was something precious. “This is from the Vivarium. The proprietor gives them to very special ponies.”

The Vivarium. I dug around in the back of my head, trying to figure where I’d heard the name before. I’ll be the first to admit there are and probably always will be great gaping holes in my knowledge of my city. Detrot is truly immense; only Canterlot itself can claim a greater population. Even then, for sheer width and breadth, we had the capital beaten. Why so many ponies would have chosen to live out here on the edge of Equestria had always been a mystery to me. Adventure or the spirit of entrepreneurial-ism might explain some, but not all.

Then I had it.

“Isn’t that the old whore house near the bay?”

An odd look crossed Swift’s face; a tightening of the lips and a narrowing of the eyes. Its closest relative was probably embarrassed indignation. “It’s not a whore house, sir. It’s a night club and escort service.” The distinction was wasted on me.

“How do you know something like that? You’ll excuse me if I didn’t think you were the type to moonlight as an escort.”

Blood rushed to her cheeks, turning her whole face phosphorescent pink. “I’m not, sir! I h-have a f-friend who works t-there!” She stuttered, almost tripping over her own rear legs.

“Ahhh, that’s convenient then. I want to talk to the hotel manager first, but we’ll pay the Vivarium’s owner a visit once we’re done here and maybe get an I.D. on our victim. Your friend can introduce us to the proprietor.”

Swift made a face like she’d swallowed a sour apple full of bad cheese and opened her mouth to say something, but Taxi beat her to it. “Hardy, do you know anything about the proprietor of the Vivarium?”

“I don’t make a habit of associating with brothel owners or their employees unless I run into them professionally, and in general, escorts don’t get killed by their madames. If we find a dead street walker, we look for their pimp, their pusher, or their loan shark. Why do you ask?”

Taxi’s smirk was more than a little off-putting, and I felt my hackles rise. “Oh, no reason. I just think you’ll be very surprised-” She stopped mid-sentence and her ears perked up, flitting this way and that.

“What is it?” I asked, but she shushed me with a hoof to her lips.

She pointed towards where Sykes stood like a silent sentry guarding the alley entrance. “Can’t you hear that?”

Turning one ear towards the street, I listened until I finally caught the discordant strains of a cheerful, electronic piano tune trickling down between the buildings over the babble of the crowd of onlookers.

The hack driver’s left eye did a little twitchy dance and she quickly tore off her jeweler’s glasses, stuffed them into her bags and sprinted for the sidewalk, while calling over one shoulder, “That’s Slip Stitch! Unless you’re up for some singing, we need to get inside now!”

I grabbed Swift by the tail and tossed her onto my back. “Damnit! I thought the rule was he wasn’t supposed to show up until after the press are gone!”

“What do you want to bet Telly is playing pranks again?”

The rookie squeaked as we blew past Sykes. The griffin cursed and dashed after us as he realized what the swelling musical ensemble meant.

“Siiiir-” attempted Swift, bobbing along my spine, “Whoo--oo iii-s Sllliii---p Sstiiic---ch?”

“Coroner! Trust me, we don’t want to be on the crime scene with him and those reporters or tomorrow morning we’re going to be all over the front page wearing party hats at a murder!”

The thought of being caught out on a crime scene with the city’s eccentric pathologist in front of the newspapers was enough to loosen the bowels of even the hardiest political personality, much less me. The forensics crew was moving double speed, simply backing their truck up to the alley and tossing lenses and lights into the back. We squeezed around them and made a beeline for the hotel’s front door.

Chapter 4: Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 4: Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do

There are reasons that DPD investigative procedure seems haphazard at times. The first is that modern policing only got its start in the last few decades, with the stamping of the Royal Order Preservation Act into law. The Royal Guards and loose association of local sheriffs that used to keep the peace were only deemed inadequate to this task when a Los Pegasus crime wave crested so high that it generated a physical embodiment of larceny, one that actually managed to make off with the city itself for about a week.

This brings us to the second reason: The varied and often bizarre nature of Equestrian crime. Just when the DPD got used to Cutie Mark Fraud and Grand Theft Pastry, they learned that there were ponies making empathy drugs using semi-toxic runoff from the rainbow manufacturing plants, and acts of terrorism involving draconic birthday parties in populated areas.

Most important, however, is that ponies who become police investigators and detectives often do so based on their Special Talents. Some ponies rely on calculation, others more on intuition. Some ponies use spells and artifacts to gather clues, and others are known to have solved crimes with the aid of trained wildlife. The methodology involved in the application of these talents varies far too widely for tightly written procedure to be effective. Case closure rates tend to be higher when investigators are afforded greater leeway for their personal idiosyncrasies, and at this point, Equestrian civilized society needs every closed case it can get its hooves on.

-The Scholar

Sykes muscled the hotel’s revolving door faster than it wanted to turn, letting out an unpleasant squeal from the gears as we all stuffed ourselves into a single cell, which was an extremely cramped and feathery experience. The four of us spilled out into the lobby in a heap of fur, limbs, and tails.

Shoving Swift’s flank off of my face, I dragged myself upright and then began helping her and Taxi up. Celestia was smiling on us in at least one respect: The lobby of the High Step was empty.

It continued the awful thematic failings of the outside in a more reserved fashion. Instead of the ridiculous statuary I’d been expecting, the interior borrowed more from the country ski lodge. The rows of pillars were simply great trunks of oak trees and the sole decorations consisted of a fake Hydra’s head flanked by two dead and mounted cockatrices over a roaring fireplace. Mass produced wooden chairs made to look hoofcrafted ringed the hearth. In every corner of the room and entirely out of place, huge planter pots bursting with all manner of colorful flower added a touch of light and life to the otherwise reputable but unpleasant atmosphere of the place. I spared a thought to how on earth somepony had managed to get them to grow inside a building, particularly in a city that saw sunlight as rarely as Detrot.

Strangely, there were no porters waiting to take our luggage, and the service desk was empty. A divine scent wafted from somewhere, and I realized just how hungry I really was.

Sykes whooped as he spotted a small buffet of breakfast food set in an alcove to one side, which included a few plates of cooked meat. Most of the omnivorous species in the city had their own private restaurants; The hotel must have played regular host to griffin dignitaries. The flesh on display likely hadn’t come from any sentient species, but in Detrot, you can buy almost anything if you know the right creatures.

The griffin tore off his poncho and threw it over an umbrella stand, then shot over and began heaping a plastic dish with heavily spiced morsels from some animal. Taxi went for a dainty dish of strawberries.

At the sight of the food Swift’s stomach growled so loudly I almost thought somepony had left a window open to the thunder outside. She looked longingly at the trays of cooling comestibles, but seemed determined to wait until I pointed her in a direction. I gave her a little shove. “Go on, kid. Let that be ‘cop lesson’ number one. Eat free when you can.”

Stacking a plate with slices of fresh red delicious apples, I flopped down on one of the lounging couches in front of the fire-place. Taxi slid onto the thick shag carpet right in front of the fire and Sykes hunkered down beside her. She gave him a sharp look, but he was either oblivious or ignoring her as he tore into a hunk of something, coating his beak in grease. Eventually, she just huffed and began stuffing her face with strawberries as hunger trumped principle, which I understood. In a cop’s life you’re lucky to eat two solid meals a day during an investigation.

Swift returned from the buffet a minute later than the rest of us, her plate covered in a small monument to excess. I saw no less than six peeled oranges, the cracks between which she’d stuffed with cream and the entire thing was covered in a coating of syrup and cheese. She buried her nose in the mess and I was put in mind of a manticore I’d once seen, feasting on a particularly gruesome kill.

“Hah! Lassy! Oi knew ye was a soul after me own kin!” The griffin officer beamed at the little pegasus who, despite the vicious and voracious way she tore into her food, somehow managed to keep the cream off of her ears.

“What? Ish good!” She said between mouthfuls. Tilting her head she sniffed at the plate in front of Sykes. “Whash zat?” Swallowing half an orange she repeated herself. “What’s that?”

“Ooh, this, lass, is proper food! Ye ponies an yer damn squeamish ways are never willin’ ta give foine cooking it’s due.”

Cocking her head at what she took as a challenge, Swift reached out and picked a piece of meat off the carnivore’s plate, dangling it above her lips.

“Well, I’ll try anything once.”

At that moment both Taxi and I were mid-way through a bite. Panicked horror crossed our driver’s face and she began chewing faster, trying to clear her mouth as quickly as possible. I calmly dipped part of my apple in a bit of ranch dressing and bit off another piece, watching with interest.

Swift dropped the bit of prepared flesh into her muzzle, sucking on it for a moment to get the juices out then shifting it around to the side so she could properly rip it apart. Pony teeth aren’t properly designed for that so it took her a moment, but soon she had it soft enough to talk around. “Mmm... it’s really salty. I kind of like it though.” She swallowed and grinned as though she’d passed some test.

Taxi just sat there with her eyes wide, her mouth open, and her half masticated lunch on her tongue. She started to speak, then fell into a bout of furious coughing as a bit of her meal went down the wrong tube.

I finished my bite, setting my plate aside and carefully out of vomiting range. “It’s meat, kid. Griffin ‘foine cooking’ is meat.”

I wish I’d had a camera just then. Swift’s face cycled through interest to comprehension to disgust then back around several times in a fraction of a second.

“That’s what I taste like?!” She squeaked.

The griffin slurped down another bite and nodded. "Aye. More?" He held out his platter with a cheerful grin on his face. To my surprise, Swift started to reach out; Only Taxi's sharply disapproving frown halted her hoof and stopped her from taking another slice.

"No, that's... okay. Thank you."

I couldn't help but laugh. "Hah! Kid, you're going to have to explain your stomach one of these days. You threw up over a little blood on a wall but eating another mammal doesn't toss your cookies?"

Her nose wrinkled and she scowled at the floor as she went back to her oranges. Taxi set her last few strawberries aside as her appetite left for the moon.

I crunched an apple seed and Sykes continued eating, totally preoccupied, with warm fat dripping off his face feathers. Celestia save us from the insanity of predators.

A loud bell rang somewhere nearby, and an aging, patchy black cow in a tiny red fez and big horn-rimmed glasses toddled through a pair of swinging doors behind the check-in desk. Her mooning brown eyes watched us for several moments before she said: “Can I help you, gentlebeings and fillies?” She spoke with a barely audible Fancee accent; It was just enough to give the impression we were invaders into her realm of suede, fake wood, and high class dinners. “If you’re just coming in to use the bathrooms then I’m afraid those aren’t for anypony but the paying public.”

Sucking apple juice off my toe I tugged my coat open, flashing my badge at her. “Detective Hard Boiled. We’re here to see the manager who was here early this morning. You mind pointing us at him or giving us his card?”

Sykes contemplatively cracked one of the bones on his plate, teasing the marrow out and licking it off of his sharp talons. The snooty cow watched him do so without so much as a flicker of emotion, then turned towards a sign that said ‘Hotel Restaraunt’ in big, looping silver letters. “He’s in the bar, last I saw. Not that it matters. We’ll be lucky to last a week after this. We’ve had four months worth of pre-arrangements canceled in the last hour. Do mind the carpets.”

With that she turned and wandered back into whatever hole she’d crawled out of, slamming the door with her tail.

“What did she mean by that, sir?” asked Swift, polishing off the last of her oranges.

I hopped down from the sofa and stood in front of the fire, straightening my tie. “You think a hotel where somepony got killed is going to get a lot of business from the nobility or the elite? This is a roach motel for big spenders as it is. If it were in Baltimare or Trottingham, it might weather something like this, but here? No way.”

****

The bartender was a youthful and very slender female griffin who was listlessly cleaning already spotless glasses with a perfectly white rag behind a polished wood bar. Canteens and containers of immensely expensive liquor sat behind her, most of them unopened. Sykes eyed her with a certain broad interest, then, at some avian signal I didn’t pick up, his attention was gone. I dragged myself up onto a bar chair.

“Morning, miss.”

She didn’t look up from her pointless little project; she merely dipped her chin to show she’d heard. I dug around in my coat then reached across the bar and put a hoof on the back of her foreleg with a ten bit piece balanced on the back of my knee. Her eyes snapped to the glimmer of metal, then in an instant, it was gone.

“We’re looking for the manager. You know where he is?”

With a loud snort she pointed at the rows of pristine pool tables in the back room alongside yet another fireplace. It must have cost a fortune in wood to keep this place going, unless those fires were magical.

Taxi sat down at the bar and tossed her saddlebags across it, fished out two shot-glasses from Luna knows where, and pushed one across the bar to the young griffin. The bird looked at the glass then up into our driver’s expression. If there had been any pity in Sweet Shine’s face for her impending unemployment, I’m sure the bartender would have tossed it in her face, but there wasn’t.

A tear slowly rolled down her cheek and she grabbed a quart of rum from behind the bar that could have neatly paid my salary for two weeks, upending a shot into both glasses and pushing the farther one back towards Taxi. As Swift, Sykes, and I headed for the games room they shared a last toast to the bloody end of the High Step Hotel.

We found the hotelier in a heap on one of the pool tables, clutching a two-thirds empty bottle of Sweet Apple Acres Whiskey and snoring so loudly he drowned out the crack and rumble of the weather. At first I thought he was an older pony; he wore a heavily tailored, blindingly white tuxedo top and pink cumberbund that might have stepped fresh off the train from Canterlot, if it weren’t such a mess. His sapphire coat had a tinge of silver around the ears, but with roots showing through; a bad dye job. His bushy mustache would have been impressive if it had been real; As it was, it hung half off of his face. A tiny swimming pool of drool ran from his muzzle into the right side corner pocket of his impromptu bed.

I tried to pry the bottle away from him but he clutched it tighter to his chest. “Mrrrergle... towels ‘re in the fuggin’ hall... pish off...”

I waved Sykes over. “Can I get a ‘Griffin Good Morning’?”

“Oi think so... ahem.” Inhaling deeply, he climbed onto the pool table and stood over the manager. I put my hooves over my ears, gesturing for Swift to do the same.

Sykes let out an eardrum-shattering, heart-stopping shriek that echoed through the restaurant. It was a sound used to terrify prey and ward off competitors in the dangerous mesas of the griffin homeland, but in a pinch, it’s also a great adrenaline shot.

The drunk stallion came awake with a yelp, wiggling sideways off the table and tumbling onto the floor. “Whaddafug?!”

Reaching down I casually yanked him up and began brushing off his suit, probably more roughly than was necessary. He made to bat me away, but couldn’t seem to figure out the complicated mechanisms involved in standing on only three hooves and almost pitched onto his face again. I read his nametag quickly.

“Wakey, wakey, Mr... Budding!” Giving him a shake, I pointed my tail at the bar. “Kid, could you go ask the bartender for a Detrot Hangover Cure Number Three and a big cup of black coffee?”

Popping off a quick salute before she could stop herself, Swift zipped back towards the breakfast buffet. Our patient waved his hooves feebly at his whiskey, trying to get it back until I sighed and had Sykes hold him upside down by one leg. This did nothing for his disposition, but in the state of mind I’d started the day, it did wonders for mine.

My pegasus protege returned with a bright green, bubbling concoction balanced on her head and a mug of coffee in her teeth, weaving back to us and carefully setting both down with the practiced ease of a professional waitress. I couldn’t see Swift in one of those little aprons, but then, she was turning out to be one continuous surprise.

“Sir, what’s in this stuff? It looks like squished alligators and smells like gasoline.”

“If she made it right, that’s not a bad guess.”

Grabbing the glass of near-toxic liquid I pulled the manager’s lips open and tilted his head back, pouring the lukewarm go-juice down his throat. He swallowed reflexively, then gagged as his entire body went stiff. His dark blue tail shot out straight, almost smacking my partner in the nose.

We all took two steps back as Mr. Budding suddenly let out a noise like a strangled cat and galloped to the nearest flower pot. For the second time in a day, I waited while somepony finished puking their guts up; a situation substantially improved by them not doing so onto my coat.

Ten minutes later I sat by Mr. Budding on the floor by the vomit soaked planter, feeding him sips of coffee every few seconds as he came around. He held his head between his hooves, moaning unhappily as the after-effects of the whiskey wore off, with a little help from the semi-magical hangover cure. It’s not a cheap way to recover from overindulgence, but the Detrot Number Three is a miracle worker. If you can afford it, I highly recommend it as an alternative to feeling like shit all day.

At last he took the mug from me and downed the scalding liquid all in one go. I’d only found out he was a pegasus when he saw Sykes and his wings shot straight out from his back, further disarranging his wrinkled tux.

“Alright, Mr. Budding, I’m Detective Hard Boiled.”

“Not so loud.” He whimpered, pressing his toes to his temples. I noticed he wore slip-on rubber horseshoes, which were becoming the norm. Probably to keep from scuffing the marble floors. Permanent nail-on shoes were long out of style except among cops and work-horses.

I pulled my badge out and set it in front of him. “We need to ask you some questions. We can either do it here or we can take a quick ride down to the station and ask them there. Our radio pony loves these jazzy tunes with a beat that’ll take the chrome off a police cruiser’s bumper. If you like, I can get her to pump some into one of our interrogation rooms just for your listening pleasure.”

His ears pulled back and a terrible melancholy seemed to settle onto his thin shoulders like a millstone dragging him down. “What’s it matter anymore? A month. I spent a month teaching the staff to speak with a Fancee accent, getting flower arrangements that’ll grow in this awful light, and setting up agreements with local monster hunters. Then what happens? A guest dies on my watch.”

As I got up he remained on the carpet until I gave him a gentle nudge. “How do you know the victim was a guest?”

The answer not forthcoming, I nodded at Sykes who grabbed a pool cue and quietly lined up a shot on one of the tables. The fierce crack of balls colliding with one another jerked Budding back to reality. “Ahh... She... she checked in late last night. She booked the penthouse for one day and one night.”

“Was she alone? How did she pay?”

Smoothing his rumpled tux, he picked up the whiskey under one wing and took an impressive swig. “That’s all in the ledger. I’m not a memory machine.”

He was about to suck down a second hit, but I snatched the alcohol. I thought he might actually cry.

“Let’s go get that ledger. Then, I want to see the penthouse and the roof.”

****

We led the morose Mr. Budding back to his office, half guiding him and half propping him up. He stopped in the restroom just long enough to wash the taste of the hangover cure and stale drink out of his mouth; when he came out, his suit was in a slightly more presentable condition. Considering how I’d woken up that morning, I could certainly sympathize.

The office was tiny and packed with mementos. Both walls were covered with pictures of Budding standing beside various important looking griffins and zebras, holding up various dead animals. There were also more rarified collections of flowers, each healthy and either blooming or about to.

As he turned to open a tiny wall-safe, I got a look at his cutie-mark; a brilliant light blue rose sitting in fresh soil. Another floral mark; Those could mean just about anything.

“You mind if I ask what your talent is?” I inquired, nosing in the direction of his flank.

He reached back and touched his cutie-mark as though making sure it was still there, before answering disconsolately, “I ‘realize potential.’ Some potential, huh? Last place I was at I was working in an ambassadorial hotel for griffin tribe-lords.” He listlessly set a stack of wood-bound notebooks on the table and flipped to the last page with writing on it. “I wish I was still there, even if it meant some stupid bird trying to lick me once a week.” Sykes let out a guttural rumble and Budding quickly added, “No offense to present company, of course.”

Our beaked compatriot went back to boredly playing with the water-cooler in the corner, flicking the tap up and down while Swift and I leaned forward, scanning the ledger. At the bottom of the indicated page it said, ‘Cash paid, Princess Luna, Penthouse, 1 Day.’

I sighed and shoved the book back across his desk. It was too much to hope she’d used her actual name; if anything, such an obvious fake saved me time. “Did your staff already clean the room?”

He nodded, picking up the notebooks and tucking them back in the safe. “It’s one of the little guarantees we give at the High Step. Privacy and discretion.”

“Was there any blood?”

Grabbing a watering can from behind a small bush he began making a slow round of the room, dabbing the soil in his flowers then giving them quick splashes. “Who knows? I’ve seen every bodily fluid that comes out of a creature in those rooms... and a few I’m pretty sure were made up on the spot just to make my life difficult.The cleaning staff don’t keep records of the messes they clean up and we buy carpeting and mattresses in bulk. If there was anything, you can bet it’s been bleached to death by now.”

Before I could stop her, Swift, the voice of innocence, asked, “Why do you need new carpet and mattresses so much?”

The blue hotelier seemed to be someplace else as he stroked an unusual flower that looked like a smiling face. “Oh, we go through them like you wouldn’t believe. Virginities, estrus, messy eaters, weak bladders...” He said it like he wasn’t actually hearing his own words. My full stomach did a little flip as I considered the range of things that get spilled anywhere lots of ponies happen to live one after the other. I had an irrational urge to pick my hooves up off the carpet.

“You know, I moved here because I saw big things in this city? I thought I might save this hotel. The red ink was so thick on the books you’d think the pages were printed that color. I thought I might set up hunting tours with the PACT. See the real frontier, come back with a timberwolf or a quarry eel to mount on your wall! Except the frontier has been the same frontier for over a hundred years and you ponies... you damn ponies!” He all but shouted that last part as he twirled to face us, holding out one hoof protectively over the flora behind him. “You don’t hunt unless you have to! You don’t eat meat! All you want to do is drink and screw and devour my babies!”

Swinging back to his plants, he began gently touching stems. “It’s alright darlings... I won’t let anypony hurt you. You know me... fruits only... I’d never eat one of your precious flowers or roots. It’ll be over soon... they’ll never wipe their dirty juices on you again...”

My well-honed danger sense was ringing like a bell in the back of my head. The thought crossed my mind that the distraught fool in front of me might have killed our filly, but somehow, that didn’t feel right. He’d had all the opportunity in the world to move the corpse and wipe the ledger. Nopony would have been the wiser. Regardless, I decided to get us out of there quickly. “You mind showing us the penthouse?”

Budding finally seemed to realize he had an audience for his crazed botanical ranting. Straightening, he began pulling what remained of his badly frayed sanity back together. Tugging out his cumberbund he tossed it on the desk then pulled a huge ring of dozens of keys off his file cabinet, wincing at the loud jangling as he tucked them under one wing.

“Mmm... Apologies. It’s been a stressful day. Yes. Certainly. I really ought to go back to work in school guidance. I never had to clean sperm off my daisies...”

Swift was huddled up behind me again, peering around my shoulder like she was trying to decide if she wanted to flee or put a bullet in Budding’s kneecaps just to be safe. Again, I couldn’t much blame her. I was tempted to apply a coup-de-grace to the poor fellow’s broken ego myself. It might have been kinder than letting him wander off and try to ‘realize potential’ somewhere else in my sun-forsaken city.

****

Taxi was still back in the restaurant, now with laying on the floor with the bartender’s feathery cheek in her lap. The hen’s beak was streaked with tears but her eyes were closed and she seemed to have passed out a little more peacefully than the hotel manager. The rum was half gone, sitting on the bar.

Budding stopped over them, a chastisement forming and dying on his tongue all in the same instant. Instead, he snatched up the bottle and took a quick swallow. Swift watched the scene with an emotion I couldn’t place; pity, maybe. Sykes just looked uncomfortable.

“Sweets, you know what booze does to you.” I groused, wrestling the expensive drink away from the depressed pegasus before he could down the whole thing.

Taxi lifted the griffin’s head and slid out from under her, easing the hybrid’s cheek onto the carpet. “I just had both hooves up a dead mare’s dress. You, of all ponies, do not get to give me a line of shit about excess alcohol intake.” She got up steadily, putting one knee on the bar for balance and working the others to get her blood flowing. “Besides, I’m good to drive. She had most of it. Are we leaving already?"

“Not yet. I need your eyes. We’re headed up to the roof. Might be the one place our vic’s been that hasn’t been scrubbed with ammonia or had press ponies all over it since early this morning.”

Sykes scratched at his chest feathers. “Ye need me still, laddy?”

I shook my head. “Go organize a few of those lazy asses out front to canvas the neighborhood and see if anypony actually saw our Jane Pony fall, or if anypony knows her. I’m going to stop off at the Vivarium once we’re done here, see if I can get anything resembling an ID.”

Swift’s breath caught. I turned to see her doing her best to maintain a neutral expression.

“Something you’d like to say, kid?”

“N-no, sir... nothing.”

Sykes raised one eyebrow. “The Vivarium... yer goin’ to see Miss Stella then?”

“Who is Miss Stella?”

Sykes opened his beak to educate me when Taxi eased over beside the towering griffin and gently rested a toetip on a spot just below his left foreleg. He winced and his beak snapped shut like a bear trap, almost clipping off the end of his tongue. Before he could recover the cab pony answered for him with a quirky grin, “Oh, Stella’s the madame. I think you’ll find the meeting very interesting, and I don’t want it spoiled for you. I’m sure you understand.”

For emphasis she drove her hooftip a little harder into Sykes’ side. He let out a distinctly kitten-like mewl.

I rubbed my temple with one hoof. “Am I the only pony in this entire city who’s not intimately familiar with this damn whore house?!”

Tapping her chin, Sweets considered the question, then her grin grew a little wider. “Seems like. Anyway, I would like to get out of here sooner rather than later if you don’t mind. This place is clogging my heart chakra.”

****

Sykes left shortly thereafter, stopping just long enough to grab another few savory treats from the lobby as he went out to hunt up the locals and see if there was anything to be gleaned from a thorough questioning. Taxi might have intuition in spades, but knowing when somepony is lying isn’t the same as being able to convince them the truth is the best thing for their health.

I frog-marched Mr. Budding to the elevators, using the rum like a carrot on a stick, before finally passing it to him once we were in the empty hallway leading up to the penthouse. He fumbled with his key-ring outside the door, which simply had a silver knocker rather than a number like the other rooms.

He managed, eventually, to wedge the correct key into the lock, but he turned it so hard that as the door opened it snapped off in his teeth. He hung there, staring at the broken metal jutting out of the keyhole for several seconds, then his brain seemed to shut down and he slid onto his stomach.

Swift started to reach down to pick him up, but I caught her bright red tail in my teeth, “No, kid. We’re here for the filly in the alley-way. We don’t fix the living. Not while we’re on the clock. If you want to do that, go be a therapist.”

“But, shouldn’t we do something?” She murmured discreetly, though I doubt the sloshed pegasus would have heard her if she’d shrieked in his ear. He was in that special alcoholic fugue state that can only be achieved when despair and defeat have had time to fester, burning away everything and leaving a peaceful void. A smile crooked the edges of his muzzle.

There are a few ugly truths in my fair city. I’d watched plenty of idealistic young stallions, carbon copies of Mr. Budding, ground underhoof by the implacable tides of fate and the perverse version of the free market that lives on the borderlands. For many of them the happiest ending they’d ever have was dying too drunk to care. A survey of any halfway house or shelter in the city would net you a dozen stories of ‘might have been’ that the pitiful pony pitched over in the doorway would fit neatly beside.

I didn’t have an immediate response for Swift, though, so I stepped around Buddings prostrate form and into the suite. Taxi gingerly hopped over him, shuffling her bare hooves on the luxurious carpeting. I muttered out of the side of my mouth: “Anything you can do for the poor guy, Sweets? I’d like to go up to the roof and not worry about him taking a dive.”

Taxi’s deep, soulful eyes were full of restrained compassion as they rested on the bottle he was clutching like a life-preserver. “Honestly, I think he’ll be fine. That nestling in the bar had nopony and she needed a kind hoof just then. Budding has his little jungle in his office. His plants need him if nothing else and sometimes that’s all it takes.” I nodded, and turned to examine the sumptuous room before us.

To describe the penthouse suite as ‘big’ would be a crime against opulence; The living space was vigorously and unnecessarily huge. It could have neatly fit my apartment in just the in-room kitchen. The mini-bar was the size of my entire fridge and the bed could have comfortably slept ten or eleven ponies my size.

The carpets were almost bedding by themselves. The floor felt freshly scrubbed, and everything had the sense of having been recently laundered by a professional cleaning crew with a centuries-old vendetta against dust. My heart found a new place in my throat as I realized we were unlikely to get so much as a useable hair from the entire room.

Princess Celestia herself would have found it reasonably comfortable if she could have gotten over the stifling scent coming off the innumerable jasmine and lavender flowers crowding every non-essential surface. The penthouse was easily the worst victim of Mr. Budding’s gardening fetish.

Swift noticed this when she stepped in and almost immediately sneezed a miniature tornado. She blew herself back into the hallway, stumbling backwards over Mr. Budding and tumbling onto her behind. The tornado picked up and scattered a few leaves about the room, but soon dissipated.

“Kid, you really need to take an anti-allergen if you’re going to work a crime scene.”

“Sorry, sir...” She apologized, picking herself up and trying to smooth down her feathers. Mr. Budding did not seem to notice nor care.

I pushed open the door to the bathroom, and let out a groan. Just like the bedroom, every inch was stuffed with blooming greenery. Whatever mad alchemy Budding used to convince rose blooms to open so completely out of season also kept even a single petal from falling. The bar of soap might have been arranged with a ruler. The bathtub was damn near the size of my bedroom. It was dry and didn’t look to have been used.

I stepped back out of the bathroom, letting the door swing shut. “Taxi, you got anything?”

The cabbie moved around the mattress then stuck her nose under the edge of the blanket, sweeping it up on one side so she could take a look underneath. “Mmm... well, whoever cleans these rooms deserves a pay raise. My mother would find this place too clean, and you remember what she was like.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “I remember she almost bucked me in the face when I got my muddy hooves on that precious Neighponese carpet when we were eight. Then she grounded you for three weeks.”

A haunted expression crossed my friend’s face, but she quickly buried it under her facade of indifferent professionalism. “This floor has been vacuumed. The lab might find something if they’re willing to shred the carpet and bedding then go over every one of the shrubs with a fine tooth comb. If her horn was removed in here we might find fragments, but considering the environment we could end up pointing the hoof at every rich or noble pony in the city. Every piece of evidence in this room wouldn’t last one round in the ring with reasonable doubt. Not that I condone such violent action."

“Sure, you don’t. Who won last week’s match?” I grinned, bumping her hip with mine.

“Strike Bison, knock out in the fourth. Sunny Piston never had a chance.” She deadpanned, turning back the covers and pinching the pillow between her hooves, lifting it with practiced care then settling it back in place.

Swift was examining what looked like a hall closet, poking her nose around the door. “Sir, there are... um... stairs over here. They go up and down; I thought this was the top floor?”

I glanced down at the hotel manager who’d found a position from which he could lay and nurse at the rum without expending the effort to lift it. “Where do those stairs lead?” I asked, putting my heel on the mouth of the bottle, pushing it away from his lips.

Budding lifted his head shakily, his eyes taking a bit to focus on me then on the door Swift was inspecting. “Heh... night... shpot. Garden onna roof. Only doors are inna penthoushe and through maintenance in my offishe.”

****

Leaving the manager to his quiet self-destruction, we started up the narrow stairwell. It was just wide enough for one pony comfortably and the floor was uncarpeted. Clearly a place ‘behind the scenes.’ A white light-gem dangled from a string, providing sharp illumination.

As we ascended, I felt a sense of deja vu. The filly laid out on the concrete ran up these stairs early that morning. She was exhausted from her ordeal and running on a terror-stricken adrenaline surge. Every step must have been agony. The bone torn off of her forehead sent shooting pains through every inch of her body as she dragged herself along, away from her tormenter. Why she’d chosen the roof rather than the hall is anypony’s guess.

Five steps up, I paused, then put my back leg on Swift’s chest to hold her back. She tilted her head. “Sir?”

“I’ve got dried blood here.” I informed them, swirling my hoof in a circle over the spot.

Taxi pulled her magnifying glasses out and eased them on then squeezed around us. It was a tight fit; Swift had to inhale just to let her by. I ended up with more of Taxi pressed against me than I wanted to think about. Stopping above the blood, our part-time CSI leaned down and sniffed it lightly. “Doesn’t smell much anymore. Seven hours maybe? It’s totally coagulated.”

It was only a few droplets, but further up I spotted half a bloody hoofprint, first on the step then another on the wall. She’d stopped to catch her breath. A pool of brown, mostly-dried liquid was on the landing. Turning, I pushed Swift back and warned her, “There’s more up here. Do you want to wait downstairs?”

Her eyes flitted towards the puddle then back to my face, “I’ll be fine, sir. I took my medicine.”

“Alright, but if you lose your lunch up here...”

Swift set her jaw and, thrusting her chest out, she marched past me to stand over the spilled body fluids. Slowly she dropped her gaze, looking at it intently. Her cheeks colored and for an instant I thought she was going to bolt, but then the moment was gone. Taxi and I waited, watching intently, ready to snatch her back from the evidence if she showed the slightest hint of inclement nausea.

I grumbled, but part of my scarred, wrung out psyche understood she wasn’t being sick to spite me. She was reminding me uncomfortably of myself before I’d put all of my defenses in place, when the horror and shock was still instantaneous and immediate; I’d fought enough battles with a sour belly as a rookie to know what she was going through. Even years on, though, I’d still seen a few things on crime scenes that simply took my breath away; Dead children, pregnant mares beaten with hoofball trophies, and the rare monster in the shape of a pony who felt nothing as they carved up living beings for fun and profit. Carnage and gore are ugly, sure, but nothing is ever quite so sickening as the stories beneath the blood.

Despite knowing exactly where she was coming from, though, a loud and nervous voice in my head wanted to hurry her along.

At last, Swift stepped away from the cooled blood and put her cheek against the wall, resting there with her face on the cool stone. She was breathing evenly, but the smell of nervous sweat and fear came off of her in roiling waves that collected in the tight space, filling my nose.

Taxi gave me a knowing smile. A private, silent conversation ensued between us which could only take place between two ponies who’ve known each other for many years. If one were to listen in with full comprehension it might have sounded something like this:

Taxi: Admit it, Hardy.

Me: Admit what? She was dumped on me, not the other way around. If she wants my respect she has to earn it.

Taxi: Give her a break. You were a bigger fuss-bucket when you started.

Me: Not how I remember it.

Taxi: Keep telling yourself that.

Me: I never threw up on a superior officer.

Taxi: Whatever you say, Mr. Grumpykins. You know she just impressed you.

Me: Stay out of my brain, Sweets.

Not moving from her place against the wall, Swift pulled a notebook out of the front pocket of her vest, set it down and produced a pencil. She talked as she wrote, very clinical and precise. “Hairs in blood. They’re the same color as the decedent's mane. They appear to have been cut to the same length, so it probably happened when the perpetrator removed the victim’s unus arcanas.”

I tapped the floor by her paper. “It’s her horn, kid. I’m not one of your teachers at the Academy, but it would be nice if I could read your notes without a dictionary.”

She chewed the pencil for a second, then crossed out the scientific name and scribbled ‘horn’ beside it.

The door to the roof had a single print, and the lever was wet. Using an old receipt from a local fish and chips shop out of my pocket, I turned the catch whilst touching as little actual surface as I could with my lips and teeth, and stepped out into a private, rooftop paradise.

Mr. Budding’s taste in interior design aside, I couldn’t fault his skills as a gardener, except in terms of his lack of restraint. The mass foliage spread all through the hotel might as well have been a window display for the bursting, barely tamed leafage practically consuming the entire top of the building.

A footpath of smooth stones lead away from the hutch the maintenance door was in, each rock choked on all sides with thick, healthy grass. It looked absolutely delectable. I had to stop myself from leaning down and having a bite right there even after the considerable meal downstairs. Taxi was intently watching a particularly gorgeous blooming chrysanthemum; a bit of saliva almost spilled over her lip. I gave her a swat on the nose with my tail just as she was moving over to nip the stem.

“Nooo, Sweets. The crime scene is not for eating.”

Her cream coat turned an uncharacteristic shade of cherry. “I was just going to taste it!”

“I know you were. Let’s not make Mr. Budding any more insane than he already is. No snacking.”

Taxi humphed and got out fresh rubber socks for the three of us. We all slipped them on just as a drop of water landed on the brim of my hat, splashing onto my ears. I shivered and swept a foreknee left and right along two diverging side paths in the massive abundance that blocked sight of the skyline.

“Spread out and watch your hooves. Try to stay on the rocks if you can, and let’s find where our victim jumped off. Look for blood spatter, torn fabric, and fur.”

Taxi took one direction and Swift the other. The vines and hanging pottings formed an impenetrable wall of green so thick a rabbit would have trouble squirming between the roots and creepers. Every inch was an overwhelming profusion of colors that tantalized the eyes and the palate. Half the plants I couldn’t have named without a guide-book to zebra-lands and the smell was absolutely divine.

The garden was a maze. Overhead, it was enclosed by a grill of wooden slats just wide enough to let sunlight in and for plants to twine around, but not sufficient to let even Swift through for some aerial reconnaissance.

I started trying to navigate my way towards the edges, but quickly found myself turned around. One path would start to look promising then take a slow turn, crossing over itself or leading over a tiny footbridge and then I was in a dead end. I back tracked, wandering in a direction I thought was probably towards the crime scene but that simply brought me around back of the maintanence stairs.

Eventually, coming up against a dead-end with plastic fountain and a wooden bench amidst a small clearing full of daylilies, I had to sit down and catch my breath. Raising my head, I shouted, “You two find any way through this mess?”

Taxi seemed terribly far away when she replied, “Nope! I found one edge but I had to go back around and I lost it.”

Somewhere nearby and off to my left, I heard Swift holler back, “Sir! I found the alley and the edge over here!”

“That’s great, kid! Can you get up in the sky?”

Flapping seemed to come from everywhere, giving no point of reference. There was a loud rattling noise followed by a hard thump and shaking leaves, then silence. I called out, “Swift, are you okay?”

Swift’s very meek reply came back a little muffled. “Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t look up before you took off, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you stuck in a thorn bush?”

More leaves rustled and then I heard a soft whimper, “Yes, sir.”

I began shuffling through my pockets and finally came up with an ancient baggy half full of candy that’d become a near solid mass. Banging it on the edge of the fountain I broke it apart and managed to shake a piece out. I dropped it on the nearest flat stone. Moving to the next junction I looked left, then right, then dropped another piece and moved on.

“Kid, you’re going to owe me a fresh bag of jelly beans!”

“Yes... sir?”

****

I met Taxi five minutes later coming the other direction with a pouch of shiny meditation pebbles in her teeth, dropping them behind her as she went. We’d circled around and somehow missed the trapped pegasus entirely. After a further two minutes and a short game of ‘Mareco Polo’ we found the bramble laden culvert into which she’d managed to get herself wedged, down a side-passage with gorgeous and very pointy rose-bushes on both sides. Swift and the victim might have fit through easily, but I had to wrap my coat around myself tightly and Taxi got a few fresh scratches on her dock.

Once we passed through, the space opened up and there, at the far end, was the end of the roof. Also, my new partner’s bright orange backside sticking half out of a bramble bush, covered in tiny pink blooms that looked like little bells.

I trotted over and Swift squirmed, kicking her back legs as she tried to get leverage to pull herself out.

“Oh my. Taxi, you don’t think we could get one of those news ponies up here right now, could we?” I teased, grinning sideways at the other earth pony.

“Sir, you wouldn’t!” Swift struggled harder, only succeeding in tangling herself more firmly.

“Trust me, I’m thinking about it.”

Taxi suppressed a smile, then put a comforting hoof on the filly’s haunch. “Relax. Lemme see how you’re stuck.”

Swift had somehow, during her landing, managed to wrap a vine tightly around one of her wing joints and pin the other one to her side. She also had a rather nasty bump growing on the back of her head, where she’d hit the wooden canopy.

“You’re lucky pegasi are durable.” said Taxi. “Hold still. I’ve got some scissors here and unless you want your pinions plucked, best not to move too much.” Unstrapping her saddlebags, Taxi set them down and went on a short dig right to the bottom until she found a pair of mouth-scissors. Fitting them into her muzzle so the blades faced out, she climbed into the bush beside Swift and began working away at the thick vines.

I began a slow inspection of the space between the labyrinthine passages. I tried to see back along the path we’d come, looking both directions. “You know, something occurs to me. How did our victim get here? It took us... what, a half hour to find our way through? She must have been scared out of her mind.”

Swift wriggled a little as she replied, “Well, what if she’s been here before?”

I considered that, then nodded. “Possibly. That does lend credence to at least one thing I’ve been thinking.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“That our victim was a prostitute... sorry, an ‘escort.’ You said this Miss Stella gives out those pins to special ponies, right? Employees?”

There was a loud snap as the tendril holding Swift’s wing against her stomach came free and she let out an alarmed yelp. “Eeek! Hey, careful with those things! I almost lost a wingtip there!”.

Taxi shifted the scissors out of her mouth for a second. “Stop squirming then!” She turned to me, and answered, “I think those snake pins are meant to be protection of some sort. Some of the crime families have rings. Stella has those pins. They’re supposed to say ‘Mess with the pony carrying this and the Stilettos will come after you’.”

I scratched my head. “The Stilettos? Where have I heard that name? Are they enforcers of some sort?”

“I don’t know much about them, but then, nopony does. They’re Miss Stella’s personal guard. They’re mostly former escorts, or so the story goes.” My driver went on, holding the mouth scissors in her hooves to try to get a better angle on the vine around Swift’s wing joint. “The Organized Crime unit tried to nail something to them a few years ago, but the worst anypony could prove they’d done was truss up a rapist and dump him in front of the Castle with a list of his crimes superglued to his... his... um...”

Memory flickered. “Oh, wait, I remember that. Didn’t Telly get to him first and read that list-”

“Yeah, and then she got so pissed at whatever she read she magically yanked it right off along with a bunch of skin and fur.”

“Wasn’t that the scream you could hear from the basement firing range?”

“Yes. Sometimes I’m really glad I’m not male.”

At we descended into contemplative silence, I became acutely aware of every twangy snip of Taxi’s scissors.

Thankfully, she had almost finished; some complicated gymnastics allowed her to cut the last of the plant off of Swift, then she pulled herself free and then grabbed the rookie’s vest in her teeth. With a few sharp tugs, they both fell out onto the gravel, scattering pebbles against my hooves.

“Whew! Thanks.” Swift said gratefully, plucking a stray needle from between her feathers and spitting it out. Taxi gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder.

As I continued searching, I found a swatch of bright red dress. It was stuck to a branch about flank height, which seemed unusual; The path was wide enough that anypony, even one suffering from moderate blood loss, could have avoided stumbling into it.

“I wonder if she ran up here and somepony tried to stop her. She dodged around them, caught her dress, and ran off the rooftop?” I mused, examining yet another spot of blood on one of the prickly roses with a few threads stuck to it.

Taxi swung her magnifying goggles back down over her eyes and followed the same track I had, stepping from stone to stone. “Hmmm... no, there was something parked here that’s gone now. Look. She moved around it as she was running and that’s when she ran into the roses.” She traced a long, thin groove dug into the gravel, and another one a body-length away running parallel; she then pointed to two sets of sharp hoofprints side-by-side that dug deep into the surface. “That looks like a sky chariot to me. Two pegasi pulling. Definitely carrying something. Most likely another pony or a zebra.”

I moved around to one side, avoiding the prints. Another group of steps began where the sky chariot’s carriage would have landed; they looked odd for some reason. There were five marks; Four hooves, and one much deeper point out to the side that seemed to be some sort of peg or cane. The unknown equine had leaned heavily on it.

I stuck my head over the side of the roof. Big mistake. I gulped and turned away, getting control of a minor case of vertigo; the ground was a lot further away than it had any right to be. Pegasi might love the heights and unicorns adore their big towers and skyscrapers, but I’m an earth pony, and my hooves need to be on stone, dirt, or at least some real solid concrete.

Right up to the edge, the adjoining roof looked like it might be reachable with a good strong leap, but some trick of the light made it seem closer than it actually was. Down below, the corpse was already gone. The yellow police tape still blocked off the area, but the crowd of officers guarding it was noticeably smaller. Most of the reporters had left, too, and the few holdouts were looking bored.

I wondered at that, then smiled. The coroner had to have sent his assistant to pick up the body. Telly might have been trying to get me back for putting itching powder in her radio headphones a month ago, but nopony was cruel enough to actually send Stitch to a crime scene with so much of the press out front. Prank wars were generally discouraged in the office, but that’d never stopped anypony from engaging in them. Although there was one story involving Iris Jade and a whoopie cushion - Precisely one story.

I spotted something in the marks where the chariot touched down and scraped aside a little bit of the gravel, revealing tarmac underneath. Looking over to the passage Taxi and I had squeezed through, I noted that the pebbles stopped and were replaced by broad, flat stepping stones. They would make finding an actual path taken by the girl or the assailants difficult.

Swift’s face lit up. “Sir, I know what this is! It’s an old PACT runway!” She exclaimed, pointing out towards the sky-line.

I turned in a circle then rubbed my jawline. “A PACT runway? Are you telling me this hotel saw so many monster attacks that PACT needed their own rooftop parking space?”

“Oh, I don’t think this is used anymore. One of the early city building codes said every city had to have a pegasus runway for armored Turtle Class weapons platforms. They had to be able to land anywhere in the city to rest and reload if there was a big attack.” She informed us, putting her rear hooves together as she slid into that comfortable recitation pose.

With a glance towards the drop, I came to a decision. “Alright, let’s get back downstairs and call Telly, then we’ll find the lab coats and get them to at least give this area a once over. I doubt we’ll get much of use, but no sense in not trying.”

****

I left Swift on the roof to guide the forensics ponies to the site. We followed our trail of jelly beans and meditation stones back to the stairs and down, skirting the bloody hoofprints.

We found Budding in the bathroom of the penthouse, laying in the Iron Pony Competition-sized bathtub, surrounded by his ‘babies’ with a look of mad bliss on his face. Could have been worse, to my mind; I had bet pennies to bits we’d come back to find him trying to stuff himself into the incinerator.

I waited just long enough for Taxi to clamber in and pull his head up a safe level above the water, then open the drain. It was a small kindness in an ocean of bad days ahead for the pathetic soul, but I felt slightly better about myself for it. With any luck he’d come out of it in twenty four hours full of fresh ideas. Maybe murder tourism. There were certainly enough morbidly excitable ponies that would pay a pretty bit to stay in the room the murdered filly occupied.

Back downstairs, I found Sykes standing on the porch of the High Step, in his rain- slicker. We were just about to step outside when I was a momentarily blinded by a streak of lightning that rent the sky from the clouds to the horizon. Three seconds later, a blast of thunder shook the foundations of the building; it was as though the weather factories all turned on their rainmakers at once.

“Oi, boyo!” The griffin greeted us as Taxi pushed through the revolving door. I followed a few seconds later, taking deep breaths as I tried to clear my nose of the pervasive perfume of pollinating plants.

Taxi shoved Sykes’ fuzzy rump to one side so she could plop down on one of the ancient rocking chairs, watching the absolutely wild storm breaking over the town.

“Sykes, the eggheads didn’t leave, did they?” I asked with some trepidation. Calling them back would have involved a lot of irritated screaming over pay rates for ‘two jobs.’

Fortunately, he shook his head and pointed down the street to where their big white van was partially concealed behind a squat mini-mart. “Oi caught ’em at that deli up the street when they was havin’ some lunch and made ’em stick around for ye. Ye want Oi should go get’em?”

I moved closer so as to be heard over the ferocious beating of water on the covered porch. “Yes. Send them upstairs through the penthouse. Tell them not to eat any flowers and to ignore the crazy pony in the bathroom. I doubt he’s going to move for at least a few hours unless they start chewing the azaleas. Oh, and if they can’t find Swift, have them follow the jelly beans and shiny rocks through the garden.”

His big yellow eyes blinked as he absorbed the list of silly instructions, then he shrugged and started out into the raging maelstrom. I set myself down beside Taxi and waited for the downpour to abate enough for us to make it out to the cab.

As we sat in comfortable silence, my Cutie Mark began to tingle again.

I’ve only once tried to explain to anypony the feeling I get when I know that something is unjust, and that once I’d made a real hash of it. It had become, in recent years, easier to live my life if I ignored the squirming sensation on both flanks when somepony had suffered needlessly for the greed or cowardice of another.

But not this time. That deceased filly, now off somewhere laid out on a slab, was a tiny piece of something important. I could feel it, right there in that golden scale on my rear end. Something truly sickening had happened in the penthouse of that hotel; an act so black, so full of merciless will, that I found myself enraged.

I watched quietly as the fury built inside me, then consciously unclenched my jaw and let my shoulders slump. Anger wouldn’t help her. Nothing but justice could help her. So, once more, I would be justice because there was nothing else for me to be.

On came the rain.

Chapter 5: The Best Little Whorehouse in Equestria

Chapter 5 : The Best Little Whorehouse in Equestria

Some species and cultures look at Equestria’s semi-legalized prostitution industry and ask why it was allowed to exist. That particular query is often preceded by another, usually along the lines of “By Tartarus’ gaping maw, what is that mare doing with that papaya?!”

Curiously, one of the major sources of the cross-species disparity in attitudes towards sex is medical; A comparison with the known biological histories of the buffalo and cows shows that ponykind never had as many genuinely dangerous sexually transmitted diseases interrupting their evolutionary development as some other species, and so never came to associate sexual conduct with being struck down by unseen, malevolent entities. Equestria has not had terribly many groups willing to decry sexual liberation as a horrifying scourge, and so have never outlawed the practice of exchanging bits for certain favors.

Despite this, sex is not a topic of polite conversation, because it is a fundamentally ‘icky’ process. Many ponies are uncomfortable around sex, and it is kept well out of the eyes of foals. It is considered rude, over dinner with the family, to bring up that a favorite uncle likes a good romp with a toaster oven and a roll of cellophane, and for similar reasons, the Equestrian prostitution industry did not enjoy a sterling reputation. It did not help said reputation that a notion once existed amongst the constabulary that ponies who entered into sex work did so only to support a habit, vice, or dependency.

Although upper-class ponykind tended to turn up noses at the practice, prostitution saw a sizeable resurgence among high society after changeling-related incidents and scandals; the logic being that when dealing with a prostitute, there’s little need to worry about whether or not your partner is a changeling. In an exchange with a prostitute there is rarely love, and so few changelings turn to it as a means of sustenance.

It’s one of the many reasons that wealthier ponies simultaneously cast a disdainful eye on the practice and engage therein behind closed doors with what other species would think of as shocking regularity.

--The Scholar

The ride to the Bay on the far side of the city wasn’t the most pleasant journey on record. Thankfully, the weather let off mid-way through our journey, its fury expended as it settled back into its usual sullen overcast; what wasn’t so placid was Swift, who lay beside me on the back seat of the cab, her forelegs drawn up and her rear legs held tight against her stomach, shaking like a leaf in a high wind. Every inch of fur on her body was drenched.

“Kid, I know this is becoming a habit, but I’ve got to ask. What were you thinking?”

She looked up at me with her big blue eyes, then drooped as she replied, “I didn’t want the evidence washed away before the forensics ponies could get to it. I couldn’t find an umbrella so I used my wings.”

Her feathers were in complete disarray and her uniform stuck to her like a second skin, dripping on the carpet. It was a genuinely pathetic sight; pathetic enough that I slid out of my coat, picked up the collar in my teeth and threw it over the sodden pegasus. It was almost a blanket for a pony her size. She sank into it, holding it tightly around her neck as she tried to control the shivers. The taxi’s heater was on full blast, but she’d been out there for almost fifteen minutes.

“I’m going to say this once and I want you to take it to heart. Dedication to the job does not mean standing in the rain. You’re no good to anypony if you’re half dead of hypothermia.”

Swift nodded a little weakly then slid out of sight under my coat, burying her face against the thick padded lining. I heard a very soft, “Yes, sir.” Then she slipped back into what I imagined as a self-punitive silence.

I sighed quietly, and let my mind slide back to the scene of the crime we’d just left, setting about organizing the details. “So, our Jane Pony. We’re thinking she’s a prostitute? Yes?” I asked nopony in particular. “She went to the hotel. She’d been there before, probably turning a trick. The roof was familiar. She met somepony there and they spent time in the suite. Her horn was probably removed then. Somehow she escapes, runs up the stairs, and is chased through the garden until she misjudges the jump and throws herself off the building.”

Putting a hoof behind my head, I lay on my back, looking at the cab’s fabric ceiling. Taxi teased a piece of incense from one of the innumerable packages in the glovebox. Pressing it against a red jewel on the dash, she waited until it began to smolder, then stuck it into a holder on the dashboard and asked, “You think it might have been some sex play gone bad? The perp pays her beforehoof to buy the room then meets her there, they get into it, and something goes wrong then she runs from him?”

I considered this. “It could have been. Did you see any ligature marks or marring on her fur that said anything besides ‘Fell off a building?’ Sex acts involving heavy restraint tend to leave something like that.”

“No, I didn’t. Stitch can probably tell us more, but she looked like she was going out for a formal dinner, not a bondage session. The dress was sexy, but a bit understated.” She answered, frowning.

“The lack of identification bothers me.” I mused, retracing the various acts of the players in my head. “She showed up with cash, bought the room, gave a fake name, and there was no purse. The perp might have taken it, but he had to know we’ll eventually I.D. the body.”

“Somepony who can restrain a unicorn and saw off her horn is one salty diamond dog. I can only think of two good ways to do that: Magic and drugs. Leaving her body beside a dumpster just screams ‘contempt’ to me. They had time to move the body, and if they had, nopony would probably have been the wiser.” Taxi said with certainty, swirling a hoof in the smoke to disperse it through the car.

“Alright. I’ll see Stitch tomorrow. Let’s hope we can get something from the Vivarium; I’d like to get this over with quickly if possible. Going to a sex club on duty is not my idea of a good time.”

My driver nickered her amusement. “Only you would see spending time with pretty mares as a downside, Hardy. Or are you switch hitting for both teams? I've never gotten a straight answer out of you.”

I gave the back of her seat a good firm kick, which got a hearty chuckle out of her.

From the confines of my coat, Swift spoke, “Sir... d-do...” Her voice was quaking. She took a moment and forced herself calm. “Do you mind if I stay in the car?”

“Why?” I asked, reaching over to retrieve the depleted bag of congealed jelly beans from one of my pockets and popping one into my muzzle. “I need you on this, Swift. Introduce us to your friend. Might give us an in with this ‘Stella’ pony.”

My partner started to say something, but thought better of it and let her head drop. Something was definitely bothering her about this little side-trip. On top of the rest of her morning, I was half inclined to let her have this one, but the job had to come first.

She’d had one of the most uniformly awful first days on the job that I think it’s possible for a pony to have without getting shot. I was actually feeling sympathy for her, but I couldn’t think of any words that would make her day easier, so I fell back on that oldest of strategies that every cop and soldier learns when confronted with a situation where they don’t know what to say: I said nothing.

****

The buildings were getting shorter and farther apart as we drove towards the more suburbanized parts of the city. The towers that sprang out of the ground uptown, like trees in an old-growth forest, slipped away as we headed into the residential housing sectors; lane upon lane of colorfully dull architecture.

It was a more utilitarian strip than the self-amusing hotel district. It was where the ponies who lived and worked during the late part of the boom years moved when they could afford a little knee and elbow room. A few of the buildings were that sillier, old-city style with too much gold paint, but mostly, it felt like a swatch of tiny, rural houses from many different villages had been crammed up against one another with no regard for whether they fit alongside their neighbors. The town-homes were frequently painted in a weird approximation of what a color-blind exterior decorator might call ‘Farm-chic.’ Carriage, car, and wagon garages were made up to look like barns, and somepony had figured a way to make proper shingles look like they were made of thatch.

The families that bought those homes when the money was good held as tightly to them as a nobleman does to his great grandfather’s coats, because they were part of that rarest of commodities in Detrot; their communities.

They shielded their own and kept out the sicknesses of the inner city, but sometimes within those homes, another kind of illness grew. I’d seen it firsthoof in a way only a cop can. Alongside the boredom of semi-affluence and directionless living came all the usual sinister cruelties in fresh forms. I couldn’t count the number of times some fool had snapped and blown away half his immediate blood relatives out of nothing more than boredom and emptiness. Domestic disturbances accounted for a third of police activity in this part of the city.

That said, some communities were gentler than others, and a few could even be called nice. We were headed for the largest of these, which was a group of maybe twenty moderately upscale neighborhoods collectively known as ‘The Heights.’ The Heights sat just outside the Bay like an oasis of gentility in the otherwise tumultuous moods of the cityscape.

Many would have attributed it’s calmer presence to a quirk of nature making the ponies living there of a less criminal mindset, but the mafiosos were always looking for a way into the most peaceful of these suburbs. They suspected untapped markets to peddle their wares.

There were reasons those markets had never been tapped.

I might not have been with the Organized Crime Unit, but I’d heard the stories. The mob tried again and again to make a foothold in The Heights, and always failed. Their foot-soldiers turned themselves over to the cops. They found religion. They were discovered in humiliating positions in public places. Some simply left town. Above all, they refused to set hoof in those neighborhoods again.

None could say for certain why. Lacking a better explanation, the DPD brushed it off as a statistical anomaly, but nopony believed for a second that it was just a stubborn bunch of community leaders or hardened criminals turning weak-spined.

****

Our destination was tucked into one of the islands of commercialism that seem to spring out of the ground in suburbs to suit those who can’t be bothered to drive to the big markets and venues in the city proper. This particular strip mall was dominated almost entirely by iniquitous business.

A series of sex emporiums, liquor stores, and head shops surrounded the understated little warehouse which constituted the front door of the Vivarium. They were of a better class than most of what one would consider ‘red light district’ fare, but still had that slightly greasy feel of being places ponies go when they’re horny.

The rest of Detrot might have been in a crushing recession, but in this one tiny corner I was slightly cheered to see business taking place, regardless of my own little hangups about things like the ‘Inflatable Love-Sheep - With Real Baa-ing Action!’ being advertised in one of the storefronts. Briefly, I found myself wondering how Detrot’s ovine citizens would feel about its existence.

Behind the line of establishments, I could see the Bay of Unity itself across a short, sandy beach on which a few foals played and frolicked in the wet sand. The dark stretch of water swelled and breached far into the distance.

In its center, on a small island, stood Unity’s Promise; A proudly looming statue of Princess Luna and Princess Celestia rendered in black and white marble, respectively. It’d been a gift from the zebras many years ago to seal a trading deal they’d needed particularly badly.

The two figures were rearing up in opposite directions with their flanks together as though warding off unseen dangers from the shores of the homeland. Their wings swept out protectively, forming a canopy under which the ships coming and going in the bay would have to pass on their way out into the open ocean. Every time I saw it I felt a little hint of long buried pride in my country. Today was no exception.

****

The Vivarium itself looked like a storage building that’d been altered to fit the local scenery. A huge neon sign with the name of the club and a surrealist’s interpretation of a mare with her tail in the air hung above a velvet roped door with cherubic paintings in the Pegasopolis style, depicting different species and genders in somewhat ambigious embrace. Only a few ponies were out front in line.

Taxi found us a spot reasonably close to the nightclub’s front door in a small two story parking garage and, after batting her eyelashes shamelessly at the valet, managed to get him to give her a discount. As we parked, Swift wiggled out from under my coat and hoofed it back to me. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t mention it. You warm enough to have a quick buzz around the sky to dry yourself off while Taxi and I walk?”

She gave her wings an experimental flap then beat them fiercely, lifting herself into the air and slinging water all over me. “I think so. Back in a flash!” Performing a very impressive high-G roll, she seemed to pause in mid-air before zipping off at breakneck speed.

Taxi got out and we headed down the street towards the Vivarium. It wasn’t a bad place to be in the grand scheme of things. Posters for concerts that’d happened months ago were plastered all over the walls; what graffitti there was looked more like art than gang symbols. A few dreadlocked ponies in rainbow caps sat on a streetcorner banging on bongos. Taxi stopped just long enough to drop a few bits into their upturned and open drum-cases.

We passed a pair of foals, a pegasus and a unicorn, splashing in a puddle left by the recent rain shower. As the little unicorn magicked up a ball of water and tossed it at her friend, he hopped into the air to dodge it, then they fell into a giggling heap against each other, just enjoying their day together. Just watching them my heart felt a little lighter.

We moved on.

****

What I’d first taken for a really life-like statue of a bull standing on its rear legs beside the club’s velvet rope turned out to be the door-beast. The minotaur stood at least three times my height and looked like he spent his spare time wrestling grizzly bears; a slab of surly, hulking beef with a mug about as welcoming as a hug from a porcupine. Dark blue fur crawled up his face in thick swatches, curling around his ears and a pair of extremely impressive horns.

Whoever decided to fit him into a sharp black tuxedo would have needed to create a smaller tuxedo for his face to improve his appearance any. It was about three miles of carefully cut material and still managed to bulge in places over his expansive muscles.

I started past him into the club, following the last group of neatly dressed ponies, and he put out one shovel-sized hand in front of my face. He shook his head and said curtly, “Ve haf a dress code. Joo look like somezing I shat.” His voice sounded like he gargled rocks every morning before breakfast.

Taxi stepped around me and gave him one of her coy ‘come hither’ smiles. I swear his entire body turned a shade pinker as he stared at my driver, his eyes darting up and down her body. She lifted up onto her rear toes, which did interesting things with the muscles in her thighs and flanks. “Now then, sir... what was it?” She said sweetly.

He replied without thinking, “Minox.”

“Mr. Minox... could you see your way to letting us in? We need to speak to the proprietor.”

That got his attention. His neck tightened and he stepped back into his position beside the door. “Vy joo need to see Miss Stella?”

I shifted my coat so it fell open, exposing my badge dangling from its chain around my neck. Behind it, my gun strapped to my thigh. “Detrot Police Department. There’s been an incident uptown.”

His bovine mouth curled in distaste. “Joo haf a varrant?”

I stopped trying to meet his eyes because it was hurting my neck, and instead looked past him at the tinted glass door. “Look, Mr. Minox. We only want to ask Stella some questions. I can go get a warrant, but I’ll be coming back with a couple of squad cars if you make me.”

Minox raised one eyebrow, then held out his iron girder-like forearm and pointed away from the club. “Joo go do dat. I vait.” He didn’t sound impressed.

I had no desire to tussle with a monster his size, and short of pulling my gun on him, I doubted he’d be moving. There’s a certain mindset to good bodyguards that means they don’t crumble just because you flash a little metal and authority.

A faint breeze on my backside announced Swift’s return. She dropped onto the pavement with a click of hooves meeting asphalt, then, with great reluctance in her step, slid around my side and into view - which caused Minox’s whole face to light up, and not just because of diffuse reflection off her day-glow hide.

“Svift?! Svift Cuddles! Joo been gone so long!” He bellowed then charged forward and swept the tiny pegasus up off the ground, holding her at arm's length. I almost kicked my trigger up into my lips, but as she dangled there, kicking her hooves and beating her wings, she was... laughing.

“Yes, Mr. Minox! Yes, it’s me! Put me down!”

He gave her a back-breaking hug, then set her down in front of him. She was still grinning as she caught her breath, but I detected a bit of worry too.

Minox seemed oblivious to it as he examined her. “Oh Svift! Ve haf not zeen you in too long! Vy you stay avay?” He peeked at the badge on a string around her throat. “Vat you doing dressed up like law?”

I nudged Swift and asked, “Is this beefcake idiot the ‘friend’ you mentioned?”

Minox’s blew a breath out of his nostrils at me, filling my own nose with the stench of cheap cigarettes. “At leazt I don’t look like I stuck my head in tumble drier.”

Before things could escalate further, Swift took a quick step forward. “This is my new partner, Detective Hard Boiled. I’m an officer now.” I tipped my hat cordially and he afforded me an only slightly less offensive appraisal before Swift continued with only a slight quiver in her tone. “We found one of Miss Stella’s pins on a pony who was killed. I promise we’re not here to make trouble. Can we come in?”

The big bull hesitated then pulled a face. “Any ozer pony I zay no.” He reached into the front pocket of his tux and produced a fine toothed comb. “Brush his mane, zen you can go in. If he make any trouble in ze club, I squish him.”

Taxi grabbed the comb and threw herself onto my back, forcing me to the ground. I flailed for a bit, but when I started to actually get free, Minox helpfully put one of his rear hooves on my side to keep me still. I tried to keep the howls of discomfort to a minimum as she attacked the tangles in my black ratsnest with a vengeance. Swift had just watched, mouth open, as my yellow friend and the creature assaulted my mane.

A moment or two after it was probably necessary, Taxi got off me and Minox let me up. The beast gave me one more glance then grasped my tie, quickly doing it up tight against my throat. “There ve go. Much better. Now joo only look like ragamuffin rather zen my shit. Joo go in, talk to Miss Stella.” He undid the velvet rope then turned and scruffled Swift’s mane. “And joo little one! Joo come back and see old Minox sooner!”

As we moved through, Taxi casually flipped her tail and let it drag across the front of Minox’s tuxedo pants. She murmured just loud enough for him to hear, “Oh, I’ll make sure she visits soon!” I wasn’t willing to look closely, but I’m pretty sure his suit got a lot tighter on him.

I had to stop and breathe deeply as we passed into the Vivarium’s upper hall. I’d developed a sort of all pervading dampness from traveling from place to place all day in the semi-drizzle and the harsh, driving rains, and the rush of warm, slightly humid air blowing from a pair of industrial fans felt amazing.

They’d left the feel of a plain warehouse, with bare fixtures and pipes jutting out of the ground on all sides. I suspected a few of them had been added for ‘effect.’ A freight elevator stood in the middle of the large, empty room, jutting out of the floor with a smiling white unicorn attending it. She wore a sheet wrapped around her that I think was meant to look like a toga. She might have been cute, but everything about her stance radiated ‘Just part of the scenery. Move along.’

As we got into the lift, I turned to Swift and asked, “You wanna tell me what that was all about?”

“Sir?”

I scowled. I wasn’t really in the mood to put up with more evasion. “You’ve been twitching every time this place is mentioned. Why? What exactly is it that has you so freaked out? How did you know about that pin? How did that lummox know you? What is it you’re hiding?” I backed her up against the rear wall of the elevator and her wings flew out from her sides. She looked everywhere but at me.

“Si-sir... I-I...”

Taxi grabbed me by the tail and yanked me backwards, then turned me to face her, putting her hooves on my chest. “Hardy, she’s not a suspect. Take a breath.”

Swift scooted away from me, not even trying to hide the relief that washed over her face. I felt a pang of irritating guilt. She had things I needed to know, damnit, but Taxi was right. Rather than grilling the rookie right there on her strange associations, I inhaled long and slow then let it out. Peaceful thoughts.

The elevator operator was, by this point, repeatedly smacking the bright gold button beside the sliding doors that was the only spot of color in the little box, clearly wanting to get us out of her domain. Her fake smile never budged, but I saw the telltale shine of magic surrounding her horn and a gleam reflecting off something sharp inside her sash. These were not conducive to peaceful thoughts.

The descent was slow at first, then picked up speed. I thought we were dropping into a sub-basement by that point, but it just went on and on. I could have sworn we were further from the surface than the top floor of the High Step Hotel when it finally rattled to a stop, and lovely harp music and a low throbbing beat filled the lift. Wherever we were, the air had gone from cold and wet to very warm and sweaty. The smell of many dozens of furry, feathered, or striped bodies in close proximity started to suffuse everything along with another more intense scent: sex. I covered my nose with the sleeve of my coat.

The door opened onto a dimly lit scene of moving bodies. Before I could get a better estimation of what all was going on, a maroon demon seemed to fly out of the darkness and take Swift off of her hooves with a foreleg hoofball tackle, knocking her onto her back and placing her in a second dangerously enthusiastic hug for the day.

“Oh Swift, Swift, Swift! It’s so good to see you! What’s been going on? How are you? What’ve you been up to? Nice uniform! A little passe, but who am I to judge? Can I see your badge? Minox said you were coming and you’re a cop now! Ooh, can we play with your hoofcuffs?”

Again briefly fearing an assault on an officer, I paused halfway to bucking the hyperactive source of the word-torrent into the wall. I’d thought the ‘attacker’ was a large mare; He had far too many well-shaped curves and his hooves were painted silver. But, no, the newcomer was an earth pony stallion the deep red of autumn leaves, with a mane like golden flax. Taxi’s eyes almost popped right out as she stared at him like somepony lost in the desert who’d come across a big glass of chardonnay. Even I could appreciate that this one had left ‘handsome’ behind somewhere weeping with envy; He looked like somepony with a delicate chisel had carved his face from red marble.

Swift gave him a none-too-gentle push off of her chest and rolled over. “Ugh... Scarlet, I was hoping we could skip this. We’re not foals anymore!”

The pony named Scarlet tapped a hoof against his chin, rolling his eyes in theatric contemplation, before abruptly shouting “Nope!” This drew a few eyes from the crowd of ponies, then a few cheers as he leapt on her and gave her a passionate, tongue-loaded kiss.

As Scarlet finally broke the liplock, mostly because I think they were both out of breath, I gestured at Swift’s acquaintance. “I take it this is your friend? Is ‘friend’ what they call that these days?”

Swift let out a very Minox-like snort. “Sir, this is Scarlet Petals... and yes, he’s just my friend. Scarlet, this is my partner. Detective Hard Boiled.” She said that last with a little hint of the pride she’d started the day with.

I lifted my hoof and he practically leapt on it, giving me a hearty legshake that jiggled my dental fillings. “Oh, Swift makes it sound like such a foalish thing. I’ll leave that little piece of history for her to tell. It’s a pleasure to meet one of our fine city protectors! Minox said you’re here to meet Miss Stella. Can I show you around? We’re happy to have new guests! My, you are a strapping fellow, aren’t you?”

I took a bit to work through that, trying to keep up with Scarlet’s verbal barrage. “You mind if I ask how you know Officer Swift?”

Swift’s shoulders fell and she looked forlorn. Scarlet picked up on it, and his look of amusement grew. “You haven’t told your partner? Oh, you bad girl! I take it this isn’t a social call if you wanted to avoid that coming out, huh? Not ashamed of your family now, are you?”

The pegasus shot into the air and yelled, “Never!”

Our elevator operator was starting to look antsy. Before she decided to just toss the lot of us out with magic, I grabbed Swift by the tail, holding her like a kite as I pulled everypony out of the freight lift.

It turned out we were in some kind of foyer with a short hallway to the club proper, in which a few dozen ponies were having quiet conversations and sipping drinks. Reclining couches lined the walls. The music afforded a modicum of privacy, so long as you were prepared to keep your voice down.

The red carpet led to a pair of swinging doors, and was lined by a row of statues in slightly luminescent plastic or stone. Each one depicted between one and three small ponies in some genuinely creative entanglements. Some were familiar, some were hilarious, and one or two looked downright sinister.

Scarlet slid past me, dragging a more shapely hip than I was comfortable with against my side. “Now then, welcome to the Vivarium! I take it everypony besides Swift is on their first visit?”

Taxi nodded eagerly, still watching the stallion’s butt as he trotted on ahead.

“Excellent! Well, well, well! We’re always glad to get a little new blood around here. If you get the urge to put in a job application I’m sure we can find several interesting positions for a mare as lovely as you, miss...?”

“Taxi.” She replied. She had the good grace to blush, then caught herself when she realized what exactly she’d just been offered. Recovering quickly, she inquired: “What’s your position here, Mr. Petals?”

“Oh, honey, you can call me Scarlet. I’m Miss Stella’s secretary. When somepony needs something, I get it, or I know somepony who can. I’m also available on the Red Light Menu for private encounters. I’m expensive, but I promise I’m worth it. Come along then; It’ll be a little while before the Mistress is ready to see you, but I can at least show you around a bit! If you have any questions, feel free to ask.”

Scarlet pushed open the swinging doors to the club itself, and my first impression was of a wall of solid noise hitting me in the chest. If the bass had been impressive outside, in the central chamber it was deafening. My eardrums immediately started to ache, and my bones felt like they were being shaken by the world itself. I realized then why the club was underground; Their sound-system must have violated the same laws as private ownership of lightning cannons.

The operator of this quasilegal sound system was on an upraised music station behind a sheet of clear perspex; a neon pink unicorn draped in about a thousand glowsticks spinning and dancing between a set of six turntables. He had a pair of bright red goggles strapped around his head; a sort of badge of office that DJ’s had taken on in the last thirty years, for some reason.

The rest of the club was even darker in here than out in the foyer. Flashing lights and twisting lasers made the room seem alien and unusual. Most of the details were lost in the constant motion of the special effects, but I could make out the broad outlines.

The Vivarium’s heart was a grand amphitheater. Ponies, zebras, griffins, and even a few of the less common species lay between tables on cushions or sprawled in curtained booths. The same shocking statuary was everywhere, forced into a dramatic glow by ultraviolet lighting. At the center of the amphitheatre, instead of a stage, was a pool into which you could have fit my entire apartment block. A few ponies splashed and played, engaged in mostly harmless-seeming fun.

In the flourescent darkness, I couldn’t actually see any of the various creatures in the enormous chamber in active copulation. It wouldn’t have surprised me, but I then, I didn’t frequent these kinds of places on principle.

****

Scarlet led us towards one of the booths and invited us all to sit. I had no idea how we were going to have a conversation in the deafening din, until he reached up and brushed a blue gem on a panel just inside the little alcove. The noise level dropped to a pleasant murmur.

“What sort of magic is that?” My driver asked breathlessly, reaching over and lightly stroking the talisman; by some unseen mechanism, the bass returned to full, wince-inducing blast. She hastily teased it in the other direction, and we were again in the cell of peaceful silence.

“It’s a feature of the security system, deary. Ask the Mistress about it if you really want to know more, but don’t hold your breath for too many answers. We take our security and privacy very seriously. Here, let me get some refreshments. On the house, of course, and only the best for our fine officers!” He made a kissy face at Swift and she ducked her head, adjusting her badge and heavily wrinkled uniform self consciously.

“I’d rather just see Stella so we can get out of your mane.”

Scarlet tapped a diamond on the table and the word ‘Waiter’ lit up on the wall in big white letters.

Swift moved closer and leaned up to speak into my ear. “Sir, we’re being watched.” She gestured with her short-cut tail to the upper corner of the ceiling. A tiny security camera’s glittering lens followed us intently.

“Is there a reason you feel the need to spy on us?” I asked Scarlet. pointing at the eye watching over my shoulder.

Scarlet bounced delightedly on his hooftips. “Oh, yes! Mistress Stella has been taking an interest since you came down the elevator. I was sent to greet you. You shouldn’t be surprised. This is a sanctuary. Crimes ponies commit outside don’t matter to us, but if you’re making the customers nervous we’re going to take certain precautions. We’d ask if you’re here to arrest anypony, that you do it outside. We are also aware of some members of the police force who have less than honorable connections with some of the organized crime factions in the city who would love to see the Vivarium closed or brought to heel.”

I felt a swirl of anger; I don’t like head games, and something about this situation felt distinctly like a setup to something. Forcibly calming myself, I tugged up the corners of my mouth in what I hoped was a genuine enough smile to fool the camera. “Alright. No problem then. We’re not here to arrest anypony.”

“I’m afraid Miss Stella and the Vivarium haven’t survived on words and promises. Do you know of the plant called ‘Truth Bloom?’” He asked, running his tongue over his full lips.

“Oh Scarlet, no... that’s not necessary!” Swift protested, her tail lashing back and forth.

Scarlet closed his eyes. “You know Mistress Stella won’t see them without it. Once the mistress’ mind is made up, it’s made up.”

Taxi spent a moment mentally consulting her extensive knowledge of pharmacology, and when it clicked her eyes went wide. “Doesn’t that come from the Seeds of Truth? Those are poisonous!”

Scarlet inclined his head. “The seeds are, yes. The plant’s flower isn’t, though if you tell a lie it will instantly rot in your belly and make you sick. The Mistress insists, as a show of trust between us, that certain precautions are taken.”

I didn’t care to hide my displeasure. “I thought there wasn’t a solid magical method for getting truth from somepony?”

Stella’s secretary chewed at his lower lip. “There isn’t. The plant works largely on whether or not you think you’re telling the truth. A pony who has had extensive preparation might control themselves, but they’d be very uncomfortable and Miss Stella is very perceptive.”

Taxi growled, “Your ‘mistress’ wants to dope us? You can go straight to the moon!”

Scarlet frowned and trotted around the table to her side, gently resting his head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m enjoying your company, though, and if you want to spend the evening once my duties are finished, my time is my own.”

Taxi turned such a fiery shade of pink I thought her face would explode.

Swift tugged on my coat insistently until I lowered my head to her mouth level again. “Sir, if Miss Stella trusts you then everypony here will give you all the help you could ever want. If you don’t do this, we won’t get anything at all, even with me here.”

There’s a certain paranoia that pervades the grey-areas of underground markets, both those that operate within the law and those which skirt it. Participation in tests of this sort, while not uncommon, was frowned upon by the police establishment. We’re meant to use our badges and warrants to get information, and one never knows what one will give up while under the influence. But I felt no particular malice or threat from these ponies, and it wasn’t like we had much to give up.

“Alright, kid. I’m trusting you. I’m going to want some answers later on.”

She bobbed her head affirmatively. “Yes, sir. I promise, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

I was about to respond when a real stunner of a unicorn swept into our booth like a diva taking the stage. She was so white she glowed under the ultraviolet lighting. A set of menus hung in the air beside her head, floating in a pearly levitation field. She wore several horn rings on that glowing spire; Not a common piece of jewelry, but they were coming back into style. She looked a little out of breath, like she’d just come from a brisk run.

“Svelte! I didn’t know you were working tonight.” Scarlet exclaimed.

The waitress scuffed a tastefully painted hoof bashfully on the carpet. “Well, I need the hours. You don’t think Miss Stella will mind?”

“I doubt it. Could you get us two of Miss Stella’s Truth Bloom Specials for my friends here, a banana cream for me, and a-” He paused, then made a kissy face at Swift who ducked her head self-consciously. “- A cherry chocolate shake for this fine officer.”

Svelte didn’t write down the order, but her lips were moving the entire time as though performing mental calculations. Something about her was vaguely unsettling, in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. It might have been that her eyes were a little sharp for a waitress, but what did that prove? Swift was a little small to be a cop. I dismissed the funny feeling as a case of too much intrigue in one day.

“Coming right up!” She answered cheerfully, and then she was gone. The menus followed her out.

I dropped my rump onto the big, soft sitting pillow and put one hoof on the table. “My driver is conspiring against me with regard to anything pertinent about this ‘Stella’ person, and if I ruin her fun she’ll ruin my spine. It’s a sick revenge for me being an ass this morning.” Taxi quirked her lip, clearly pleased with her little game. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions about some other things?”

Scarlet sat forward. “Oh, please do! That’s what I’m here for after all.”

Poking my mouth into my coat, I extracted a small notepad and a pencil, pushing them over to Swift. She picked up the pencil dutifully and flipped to a fresh page.

“Have any of your ponies gone missing lately?”

He tucked his tail around his side, tilting his head as though listening to something. I noticed a tiny black rock stuck in his ear, which was most likely some type of short wave radio or speaker. After several seconds he replied, “I’m afraid that’s one question the mistress wants to answer. Anything else is fine though.”

I shrugged and moved on. “Alright, no problem. The Stilettos. What can you tell me about them?”

Scarlet considered this, and his speaker-laden ear twitched. “That I can answer. What do you know about the founding of our fine city?”

I shook my head. “What I learned in school, same as everypony. Detrot started off as a bump-on-the-map trading post and a retreat for the Princesses. A hundred and some odd years ago, they found gems. After that, there was a boom and the city grew until about thirty back when it all dried up. What does that have to do with the Stilettos? I thought they were just inhouse guards.”

Sliding into that same pose Swift used for recitation, Scarlet beamed at the chance to show his knowledge. “Half right. Back in the early days when mares had a foal out of wedlock or when a stallion got injured and couldn’t work the mines, they were just an extra mouth to feed in a place where everything was scarce. They’d get thrown out of town, or a lot of them were forced into prostitution. It was a pretty rough time, but they found an old mine-shaft to the cave where the club is now; they moved in and made it a brothel. The Vivarium grew with Detrot, servicing all the beings that came through.”

“What does that have to do with the Stilettos?” I asked impatiently.

He let his withers settle on the floor as he continued. “I’m getting there! The Stilettos began as the foals of the first generation protecting their mothers and fathers from marauding animals, bandits, and unruly townsfolk. After a few years some zebras and griffins joined us, bringing their own martial arts.”

“So how does Stella play into that?”

Scarlet put his hoof over his lips. “Sorry, not my place to say. The Mistress likes to make introductions personally.”

He then peered at Swift, who’d just finished writing down every word of that considerable monologue. “Swift, love, why are you taking this down? You know all that.” He inquired.

Her ears colored and she spoke around her pencil. “Ish not for me!”

Just then, our waitress returned with the drinks carefully balanced on a floating tray. In front of Swift, she set down an enormous glass full of chocolate ice-cream and bits of diced cherry, which the pegasus immediately dug into. Scarlet took a few bites off the whole banana sticking out of his, then waited whilst Svelte set two fluted wine-glasses in front of Taxi and me.

As she was leaving, I locked eyes with the tall unicorn for an instant; My cutie-mark trembled. Then she was off again.

I looked to the glasses. The liquid therein was the shade of brown I usually associate with an open septic tank. It smelled like a mixture of cheese doodles, sour cream, and garlic.

“So, if I drink this, how long does it take effect for? I don’t need to be puking for a week straight if I’m trying to interview suspects and need to tell little white lies.”

Scarlet pushed the truth serum a little closer to me. “A half-hour at most. Don’t worry, you only need a sip-”

Before he could finish that sentence, I’d already picked up the drink, tilted my head back, and tossed the entire thing down. To my surprise it was kind of sweet; a bit reminiscent of cucumbers covered in whipped cream.

Swift let out a ragged wheeze and her muzzle fell open. The lump of cherry she’d been chewing her way through fell onto the table. Scarlet’s whole face went slack and he simply stared like I’d just grown a second head.

When she finally found words, my partner stuttered, “S-sir! Y-you’re... only supposed to have a sip!”

I lowered the empty glass, turning it over and setting it lightly on the table in front of me. “So I’d really best not tell any lies then. This is me trusting you, kid. If you’ve just killed me you’d best remember that for your next partner.” Swift looked stricken.

Taxi took a quick pull from hers, made a face, swallowed it, then pushed her glass away.

Scarlet looked badly flustered. The sense of control he’d been carefully building throughout this little meeting was gone. His magnificently shaped nose was out of joint and a little tremor shot up his legs. I admit it was a little satisfying to know something could shake him.

Before he could recover completely, I lifted my face and addressed the person watching through the camera. “You want to know if I’m clean, I’m clean. I’m a cop and I’m here to ask some questions. I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re having with the mob, but I suspect it might have something to do with why I’m here, so let’s get down to brass tacks.”

A soft hum filled the booth, then Scarlet inhaled sharply. “Alright. The Mistress wants me to ask you just one question then.”

I stomped a hoof. “Get on with it.”

Scarlet steadied himself, pulling all of his considerable charm into a devil-may-care smirk. “I... I’ve just... never seen anypony drink the whole thing before. Anyway, the mistress wants to know: are you now, or have you ever been, in possession of a Crusader-class weapon?”

I swung my coat back off of the dark steel of my father’s revolver. Its pleasant weight had always given me a sense of safety in even the most dire times, and sitting there in the Vivarium with a magical truth drug working its way through me had a way of making things feel pretty dire. Still, I wanted this stupid test over with.

“I’ve got no idea what a Crusader-class weapon is. We’re just here to talk.”

I opened the breach and bent my knee so the cartridge popped out, then removed its twin from the autoloader. Setting them both on the booth, I shoved the ammunition across the seat towards Scarlet. He gathered it up and dropped it into the bottom of his half-finished milk-shake.

Taxi held her hooves up placatingly, also speaking to the camera. “I don’t like weapons.”

Scarlet touched his earpiece and his smile became a little more genuine. “The Mistress will see you now.”

****

Moving between tables and swerving to avoid rushing waiters, I felt the back of my neck itching; somepony was still observing me with more than casual interest. I did look a bit out of place, but no moreso than my partner or Taxi, neither of whom seemed to be drawing undue attention. Actually, my driver was picking up more than a few gawking eyes from the gathered crowd, strutting along with that high tailed swagger one tends to see in alleycats on the prowl.

Swift was trotting alongside Scarlet. I sped up and pushed between them, putting my mouth close to the other stallions ear. He casually pressed himself against my side and wiggled his tail end. I did my best to ignore it.

“Are you one of the Stilettos?” I asked as quietly as was feasible. The DJ was off into his evening routine and the noise was only building.

Scarlet giggled like a filly. “Me? Heavens no. Do I look like some kind of knife-play expert?” He jerked his chin at a stout pegasus leaning on one of the support pillars. She was dressed in the same white toga as the unicorn in the elevator. Like most skilled bodyguards, she didn’t stare at me directly, but I was pretty sure she was at least aware of my every move.

“The visible guards wear the white toga, which means they’re not available for engagements. The ones who are working on the other side of things wear whatever they want to.”

As we passed the pegasus, I caught sight of several tiny blades tucked between her folded wing-feathers.

A sudden, unsettling thought occurred to me. “You mind if I ask what would have happened if I had actually tried to get in here with a warrant?”

He gave me a seductive wink. “You’d have gotten to take a longer tour and talk to me for a few more hours, then you’d have walked away with nothing. I wouldn’t have minded the company though.” Much to my chagrin, he leaned over and affectionately rubbed his head up against my neck.

I stumbled away from him, almost stepping on a couple of unicorns who were engaged in a make-out session on the carpet; Swift gave him a quick smack on the back of the head with one wing and hissed, “Scarlet! Stop hitting on everypony! You’re embarrassing me!” The escort stuck out his lower lip and pouted.

I don’t know what I expected from a part time personal assistant and sex worker, but I had to strenuously fight the urge to kick him, if only because doing so would have put another damper on Swift’s terrible first day. Somepony making a pass at me on the job to throw me off my game wasn’t unusual, but it was a new thing to have a frighteningly pretty colt doing it. I quickly dropped back beside Taxi, who was off in her own thoughts, her eyes firmly planted on Scarlet’s rear.

Scarlet directed us to a small passage discretely hidden behind a red felt curtain on a wall near the bar. There were two toga-wrapped Stilettos, a powerfully built zebra mare and a baby-faced earth pony stallion who might have been Swift’s age, standing on either side at what they seemed to think was a sexy variation of military attention. They dipped their heads respectfully at the secretary as we passed.

Once out of the central chamber, the passage’s walls became more like what they were originally; a dynamite-blasted mine. The raw stone glittered with an internal light that was just enough to see by. We descended further, and the music dropped until the only sound coming back to us was the echoing of our own hooves on rock.

Just as I was about to ask Scarlet where in Celestia’s name we were going, the cave widened and spread out, disappearing into the distance. The air was, if anything, hotter than in the club itself and sweat instantly formed and trickled down my neck. An aroma of expensive perfume rolled over us, but there was still nothing to see in the thick darkness.

Our guide touched a ruby the size of my head on the floor and light burst from every side. I staggered, covering my poor abused eyes with my fedora.

Once I could see again, it became apparent that we were in a cavern that rivaled the central chamber of the Vivarium in size, but which was much better lit. Every inch of the domed ceiling was awash in gemstones of every shape and color, providing a warm ambient glow that felt almost like sunlight. The jewels seemed to form a mosaic of abstract pictures of cavorting animals of every species I knew, and a few that weren’t familiar. A reflecting pool so still it might have been a perfect mirror owned the far end of the room. It was altogether breathtaking.

Scarlet trotted over to the pool and turned, sliding onto his foreknees and putting his head on the floor in a deeply submissive bow.

“May I present, Mistress Stella.” He announced.

Nothing happened for several seconds. All I could hear was my own breathing.

For a moment, I thought it was almost my imagination, but then there was a sound very like a flushing urinal; a very, very large urinal coming closer at a terrifying speed.

It built and built, and just as I was getting the notion that maybe I should step back, the pool seemed to explode, throwing up a wave of water that flew straight to the ceiling. For two seconds, it was raining inside. I tumbled onto my bottom, scrambling backwards from the blast and covering my head with my legs.

Silence fell again, and I dared to peer out. I found myself looking into a slitted yellow eyeball as large my head.

Stella is a dragon.

My legs gave out and I collapsed onto my belly. The thought kept playing in my head like a broken record.

Stella is a dragon.

There’s nothing in the world that really prepares you for meeting a fully-grown dragon. Most ponies outside the P.A.C.T. might see them at a distance once or twice in their lives, and even then nothing conveys just how bloody terrifying they are up close. The mind is not prepared to discuss a creature of that size in any rational way.

Stella’s head easily filled my vision. It was purple. A rich, royal purple. The scales on the great serpent’s face looked soft and well polished. With a sort of detachment, I noticed its lips were painted a vivid red the same shade as Scarlet’s pelt, and it wore a big feather duster-sized pair of fake eyelashes. The body was a sweeping series of economy-sized muscular tubes, all wrapped one over top of the other like a snake. Its face seemed vaguely like a dog’s, with a long and rounded snout, though with much larger teeth that jutted above its upper and lower lip, and sweeping flukes back on it’s forehead and neck.

There was a very irritating screaming noise coming from somewhere, and I realized with some embarrassment that it was me. I quickly shut my mouth and tried to recompose myself, dignity gone.

For what felt like a long time, we simply watched one another. Slowly, Stella slid closer, the room filling with the soft hiss of shifting scales. I shored up my resolve and held still, although I couldn’t stop the quaking in my thighs. The very animal parts of my brain all wanted to flee.

An extremely slick forked tongue eased out and gave me a solid lick from groin to forehead that sent me rolling over onto my back, scrabbling for my bit trigger. I realized my gun wasn’t loaded just as I yanked on it and the hammer came down on an empty chamber, clicking in a way that sounded almost apologetic.

The dragon laughed, deep and loud, unperturbed by my attempt to put a bullet into his hide. It was a very male laugh, despite the eyelashes.

After it’d gone on for several seconds I registered Taxi behind me, also giggling like a maniac, and started to feel a bit self-conscious.

“What?! I passed your little test! Was that really necessary?!” I snapped, which only made them both laugh louder.

Finally, when they’d both wrung themselves out, the dragon wound down to a polite cough and replied in a rich baritone that put me in mind of an opera singer, though with an extremely feminine cadence. “Oh, my dear darling little stallion! I couldn’t resist. You looked so serious!”

My blood boiled; I was about to say something nasty which would probably have risked getting me eaten when Swift took a little hopping jump with her wings and landed beside me. “Hello Auntie Stella!”

Stella let out a dramatic gasp, putting one thin forearm on his lips. “Oh deary me, is that our sweet little bird come back to the nest?” His smile of pleasure was frightening to behold, largely because I could have used his teeth for the doorposts of my apartment.

My partner lifted off and flew over, giving Stella a tiny kiss on a cheek the size of a barn door, then setting down on one of his coils and tucking her legs under her. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. This is my new partner. I finally... I finished my training. I joined the Detrot Police Department.” She couldn’t keep a quaver out of her voice.

Stella picked up on her disappointment almost instantly. “You don’t sound very happy about it, darling. If I remember correctly, weren’t you meant to be joining that ghastly group of monster hunters in the PACT? I thought you might bring a touch of class to that ridiculous operation.”

Swift’s blue eyes slid down and she stared at a spot on the serpent’s violet underbelly. “I... didn’t make it into the PACT. Oh, auntie, I failed! Celestia, I failed so bad... I can’t fire any of the large weapons. I’m too small!” I thought she might weep just then, but Stella swept her up gently, cradling her against his powerful breast.

“There, there, little bird. You’ve made your way and will still defend ponies. That was always your dream, yes? If those fools in the PACT shan’t have you, then those that will had best appreciate you.” There was something distinctly motherly in the way the beast held her, lightly stroking her stubbly red mane back.

My partner drew herself in and stood, walking up onto Stella’s shoulder and turning to face me. My brain was finally starting to get into gear again after having had most of the higher gears torn out and lightly stomped by the grand presence of the sea serpent.

Taxi was still laying on her back, letting out occasional weak giggles. I tromped over and pulled her up. “I bet you think that was funny, don’t you?” I said crossley.

“It was so worth it!”

“I’m going to put pepper spray in your socks one of these days.”

“Still worth it.” She replied, her smile unmoved.

Stella watched us with amusement, idly grooming Swift’s tail with one claw-tip. “Now then, Detective, I’d love to meet the very pretty mare you’ve brought into my boudoir. ”

Formalities aside, I decided to take the polite tack. It wasn’t just that there was a dragon in the room, though that can quickly improve anypony’s manners.

I pulled my badge from around my neck and set it on the ground in front of me. “Detective Hard Boiled. This is my driver, Taxi. We’re here on official business.”

Lifting Swift off of his shoulder, he set her down beside me and then sprawled on his side, reclining in the pool with his chin on one palm. “I know who you are, Detective.” I gave him a skeptical look and he amended, “I’ve seen some of your previous work and quite admired your ‘tactful’ way of dealing with the press. Oh, and lovely to meet you, Missus Taxi. I say, you have the most curious coloration, even for you ponies! Is that dye of some kind? It’s very pretty.”

Taxi twirled her checkered braid around one hoof, enjoying the flattery. “It’s ‘miss’. I’m not married... and thank you! It’s hereditary. My family suspects there might have been a bit of zebra somewhere in our history, though I’m the first with black and white.”

The dragon shifted his enormous weight. My driver stood her ground as he came close, gently lifting one of her hooves and touching the tip of it with his tongue. It was a very silly, cordial, and courtly gesture, but Taxi flushed with pleasure anyway. “Wonderful to make your acquaintance.”

“Oooh, a gentlebeing... unlike some ponies I could name.” Taxi gave me a momentary, pointed glare.

“What? You could have told me we’d be interviewing a sea serpent, but no, you had to have your little game. I almost pissed myself!” I snarled, poking her in the side.

“I know! It was great!” She replied, swatting away my leg.

Letting Taxi see she’d riled me would only make the teasing worse later. I raised my chin, trying not to squint against the glow coming from the ceiling, and let the tension in my neck relax. Stella didn’t seem a hostile sort, and so I went into that comforting place in the mind, inside the cloak of professionalism. It’s a place without fear; if I were to die, I’d have died doing the job.

“Niceties aside, I’m wondering if you might be of assistance. We’re here about a mare.” I said, pulling my hat off and setting it to one side.

Stella studied his beautifully manicured claws. “There are many mares here if one has caught your interest...”

“Specifically, a corpse.”

“Well, if you have a shovel, I’m sure we might direct you to a nearby cemetery. Who am I to stop you beating off on a dead horse?”

My brain stalled completely. Twice in as many minutes the wily dragon had managed to throw me for a loop. I closed my eyes and tried one of Taxi’s little breathing exercises. When I opened them again, Stella was covering his mouth with one claw and his muscular shoulders were shaking. I realized he was, again, laughing at me.

Swift had lowered herself to the ground and looked content to let the grownups talk, although I was feeling less and less like an adult the longer this conversation went on.

“Look, damnit, this is an official police interview! I need information!” I grouched, but it was like complaining to a mountain.

“I’m so sorry, darling, but you remind me so much of him...”

“Who do you mean?” I asked, trying to even out my breathing. Anger isn’t useful in a police investigation and I was desperately clinging to the idea that that’s what this was. Too many oddities in too short a period does tend to unhinge a pony.

“Why, your father, of course. You’re almost as sexy as he was.”

I gaped at him, my tail flopping between my rear legs as I tried not to think about that sentence. “My... father...”

“Yes, the Hard Boiled Senior? You are his son?”

Stella took my stunned-fish expression as a signal to continue. “He used to frequent my establishment in pursuit of his professional entrapments. You’ve got his eyes. I never did manage to get him to partake of any of the pleasures I have on offer. Who would have thought the old war-horse would have gone and got himself a wife and child?”

“...He never mentioned you.” I muttered. After a brief consideration, it occurred to me: why would he have? How would it have gone?

‘Hi, son, I’m back from work, and I just met a draconic transvestite in charge of a whorehouse!’

'That’s just swell, dad.’

“I’m not surprised.” Stella boomed. “Never to speak ill of the dead, but he was a terrible stick in the mud. I do remember him very fondly though. I’m glad to see his son took up the call, though I’m staggered you haven’t been down for a little tete-a-tete before now. My Stilettos must be doing their jobs quite well.” He hooked my badge on a claw and picked it up, studying it closely

In any interrogation situation it’s best to keep your questions short and to the point. It leaves less room for obfuscation. Unfortunately, looking back at the entirety of my knowledge of police procedure, I couldn’t find a single manual I’d ever read that dealt with interviewing a dragon. I decided to improvise.

“I work equicide. The Heights aren’t exactly a hotbed of violence. Do you mind if I ask how you are associated with the Vivarium?”

Swift piped up. “Auntie Stella gave his hoard to the construction. The original cavern was his home; he found the outcasts of old Detrot trying to build shelters on the shore of the bay.”

“That seems terribly generous for a dragon.” I commented.

Stella turned in a circle, sweeping his arms at the gem studded ceiling art and the complex surrounding us. “Do I look like a case for the poor house? I have always believed in ‘investing’ and you ponies have never been a bad one. Endlessly innovative, forever growing, forever building... I simply saw the writing on the wall. Your P.A.C.T. continues to make life interesting for my brethren, but I am at peace.”

Shucking my coat, I pawed through it until I found the plastic baggie with the snake ring in it. Passing it to Swift I waited as she took off and dropped it on Stella’s outstretched palm. “Less peaceful than you think. I need information. This was found on a dead filly, a unicorn, in an alleyway at the High Step Hotel this morning. She’d been chased off the roof-top and took a diving leap. Grey body, grey mane, strange cutie-mark that looked like a red moon with cherry stems. She had some expensive custom jewelry on.”

Stella turned the ring over and brought one eye close, which narrowed. “Mmm, yes... this is one of mine. I’m afraid I haven’t had a mare in my employ who was grey on grey for nearly fifty years, though, and that cutie-mark doesn’t sound familiar. I do know some of my girls have lately taken to dying themselves interesting shades at customer request. Is there anything else you might reveal?”

I thought back then nodded. “She took the penthouse and signed her name ‘Princess Luna’ in the guest book. Paid cash.”

The dragon contemplated this, smoothing down his belly scales before he said bluntly, “There’s something you’re not telling me, deary. If you want my help, it’s best to trust. Do I seem the type who’d dash off to the newspaper foals with a hot tidbit of gossip for the presses?”

It’s not operational policy to reveal everything in any given case, but then, I was way off operational standards. The Chief employs me because I get results, not because I follow the book.

“They removed her horn. It looks like she was alive when they did it.”

Stella’s eyes seemed to light with inner fire and a curl of smoke rose from his nose. “They did what?! Are you certain? It wasn’t damaged in the fall?” He boomed, shaking my teeth in my head.

Even Swift cowered from the dragon’s furor. Suddenly, Stella was inches from me. I could smell his last meal, which was something spicy and charred to a crisp. I managed to overpower the desire to run for the passageway; I was deep within the professional cloak, where death is not an option without answers.

I pushed at his chin ineffectually with my forelegs and he backed off, anger still sending little gouts of super-heated air out of his nostrils. “They cut her horn off. I need any information you might have on employees who’ve gone missing lately. Anything at all will help. Scarlet said you’d had some issues at some point with one of the crime families in the area?”

Stella forced his rage down with a visible effort, and brought his tail around, teasing out the fins and stroking them. “Thank you for bringing this to me. My Stilettos will handle it from here. Good day, darling stallion. I do hope we meet again.” He began to sink back into his pool and Scarlet, who’d been kneeling the entire time with his cheek on the ground, lifted himself back to his hooves.

I rushed forward until my legs hit the water, splashing in several steps until it came up around my knees, “Wait! We’re not done here!”

The dragon stopped his slow descent and flipped his tail, sending a wave across the pool that soaked my stomach fur. “Yes, we are. Give me a day and I’ll see what I can come up with, then I will get in touch with you. Until then, good day.” He turned his golden snake’s eyes on Swift who sat a little straighter. “Go see your grandmare, little bird. She misses you.” Then he was gone, disappearing into the depths.

I’d been dismissed. He dismissed me... and short of getting a PACT team and the world’s biggest pair of hoofcuffs I couldn’t think of a thing I could do about it. Damn.

For a few moments, I stood there half in the water, fuming pointlessly... and then something Stella had said finally and unpleasantly sunk in.

“Wait, what did he say? Your grandmare works in a whorehouse?!”

Swift covered her entire body with her wings, hiding. So much for not making her day any worse.

Chapter 6: Happiness is a Warm Gun

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 6 : Happiness Is A Warm Gun

Friendship works for criminals almost as well as it does for other ponies. While there are numerous and occasionally fatal issues of trust between such outlaws, it remains just as true that the things that can be achieved in groups greatly outstrips what any one criminal can do alone. This can be empirically observed in the coalescence and rise of Detrot’s two largest criminal organizations - the Jewelers and the Cyclone Crew.

The Jewelers got their start when the leadership of a Detrot gem miners’ union began smuggling gems to dragons for profit, but gradually, as the gems began to run dry, they realized that their smuggling routes, techniques, and contacts could be used to smuggle other things. Drugs. Weaponry. Illegal zebra artifacts. Additionally, their pinstripe-suited muscle could be used not only to protect their routes, but could generate a revenue stream when applied sarcastically against the owners of small businesses, pointedly indicating the depth of the shame that would result if anything were to happen thereto.

The Cyclone Crew were a more modern phenomenon; a street gang initially comprised of disaffected, poverty-stricken youth who felt that their futures and livelihoods had been torn asunder by the shortsightedness of the previous generation, and banded together for protection, status, and criminal profit. The Cyclone Crew was unique among such gangs not only in its size, but in that it professed an anarchistic philosophy they call “Ever Free,” containing a strong pony supremacist theme. Their recruits ate rainbows during the initiation ceremonies, symbolizing their belief that only ponies come in enough colors to properly seize the future.

Their leadership remained well-shrouded, but a number of their members have passed into urban legend. The Jewelers had Gazpacho the Tanner, a psychopath who earned his nickname during the reign of terror he once held over the bovine community. Spark Flare the Arsonist’s love of wanton destruction seemed to epitomize the Cyclones, who seemed undeterred when she met her end crashing headlong into a public fountain whilst trying to put herself out. They tended to respond by mouthing some old adage about ‘the flame that burns brightest.’

The turf wars between the two, at their height, were legendary - resulting in the release of Class 2 and 3 Hostile Arcane Entities, spontaneous pony combustion, and at one point, the replacement of city hall with a creme brulee five stories high. The resulting police crackdown forced the two groups to resort to more traditional, quieter acts of sabotage and murder, which eventually settled into something of an uneasy truce - at least, for a time.

--The Scholar

The meeting with Stella did not go to plan. That’s not to say I’d gone into the audience with a particular machination in mind, but that sun-blasted serpent had me by the vas deferens from the instant I set hoof in the lift.

I’d spent a few moments making a foal of myself, cursing and screaming at the empty puddle. I was certain the lipsticked lizard could still somehow see me through whatever surveillance system he used to keep tabs on the establishment.

When I finally wore down enough to realize I was wet right up to my croup, Scarlet led us back down the passageway. Swift was trailing behind me, her head hung low; Taxi was bringing up the rear, still sniggering like a psychopathic hyena. I’d have to think of a proper revenge. A resentful little voice shrieked that she might have jeopardized the case with her messing about, but if I’m honest, I didn’t do my research and couldn’t have been more off balance if I’d tried.

A cross dressing sea serpent with a private army of ninja-ponies. One might think that would be the sort of thing everypony would have known about. Maybe in places like Trottingham or Hoofington, that would be the case, but this is Detrot. The city played host to some of the strangest events of the Cutie Mark Crusades. My grandstallion, the original Hard Boiled, fought alongside the royal guard and the first proto-PACT teams. I’d never met him, but some of the stories my father told me of melees with apple pies and warzones reduced to declarations of temporary cease fire so everypony could satisfy a magically induced craving for spinach were part of what inspired me to eventually take up public service. ‘Strange’ is just part of the job.

Scarlet stopped and gave a quick kiss on the cheek to the zebra Stiletto guarding the curtain. She stiffened, but couldn’t keep a tiny smile off her stripy face. The small buck guarding the other side of the door beside her didn’t so much as blink until we’d moved on, but I glanced back to see him ribbing his companion mercilessly.

The strange atmosphere of the Vivarium was a mixture of bizarre affection, commerce, and security. The Stilettos were a scary bunch, to be sure, but the implication was simple: Follow the rules and we’ll protect you. It was the ideal police officers had tried and failed for years to cultivate.

The DJ had switched to lighter, softer tunes for the dinner hour and the lighting had come up a few notches, leaving the club feeling more like a Los Pegasus casino lounge than a steamy, high end brothel.

Scarlet greeted a few ponies as we passed the swimming pool, then took us towards another curtained off area tucked away in a corner. The Stiletto on guard was a very pretty pegasus wearing so much metal in her ears, one could make a tidy profit selling her for scrap. She dipped her chin, held open the curtain for us, then went back to staring woodenly at her own nose.

****

The hallway behind the curtain was a long row of doors, each one with a number and a bright red restaurant-style menu nailed to it. The flowery reek of potpourri barely managed to cover up the less savory odors. If the bar was the Vivarium’s beating heart, then this was its throbbing erection.

I’d only been in a few brothels in my life, and never as a customer, but in my limited experience, this one was less seedy than most representatives of the breed. The chandeliers hanging overhead and the gold-thread-woven carpet were clean and pristine, but I still felt just a little dirty for simply being there. All in all, it felt like the High Step if it was being slightly more honest with itself.

A door halfway down the hall opened, and a radiantly pink unicorn pony wearing enough black buckles and straps to secure steel girders to her torso stuck her nose out and greeted our guide. “Hey! Scarlet baby, could ya go grab us some fresh rubber sheets?”

“What do I look like, your servant?” He groused.

A thin plastic rod levitated out of the room and snapped against his cutie-mark, leaving a dark stripe. “Damn right, pretty boy! Now mush!”

He squealed and bolted down the hallway, calling back, “Yes ma’am! Back in a jiffy!” The crop followed him, taking the occasional swing in his general direction before dropping to the ground as he rounded the corner.

I cautiously approached the... whatever she was... who trotted out of the room to retrieve her toy. The black strips of slick cloth covered every inch of her body, including her tail. If not for her voice it would have been difficult to tell she was a mare, an ambiguity that seemed to be a theme around this place.

She smiled graciously at me, “Heh, gotta show these club ponies who’s boss now and then. Ya comin’ to me? I only do one at a time. Ya want groups, room six is Tossed Salad. He’s the best multi-tasker I’ve ever met if ya don’t mind males.”

Professional detachment is a ward against more than just fear of death. I pulled out my badge, holding it between me and the brain-scouring mental images with which I was being assailed. “Sorry, we’re here to see...” I swiveled my head and addressed my partner. “Hey, what’s your grandmare’s name?”

The fetish pony seemed uninterested in my shield. “Grandmare? Ooh, that’s kinky!”

While professional detachment was faltering, Swift eased around me, and what I could see of the other pony’s face seemed to expand into a massive grin that threatened to pull her head in half. “Oh Swifty, babydoll! It’s good to see ya! I’m sorry ya caught me working, honey. Can’t foalsit ya right now.”

My partner gave her a quick, familial hug. “I’m a little old for foalsitting, Daisy. Is gran around?”

Daisy tugged at the zipper on her neck nervously. “She’s... yeah, honey... she’s in her office working the books.” The dominatrix gulped and flicked her eyes towards the end of the hall, lowering her voice as though predators lurked nearby. “Ya know what she gets like around tax time. Last time I tried to help, she almost took my head off!” The unicorn lowered an ear, showing off a notch where the flesh had been neatly clipped out and healed over.

“Thanks, Daisy.” Swift gave her another snug and motioned for us to follow. As Daisy was closing her door, I craned my neck to get an eyeful of what was going on inside as investigative instinct conquered my better judgement.

“Isn’t that councilpony Pro Bono?” I asked.

Taxi’s cheeks puffed out and she put a hoof over her lips, forcing her gorge back down after the sight of the grotesque visage before her. “Oog... I did not need to see a public official having intercourse with a blender full of custard.”

****

I’d lost total track of the twists and turns we’d gone through, but Swift seemed to know her way by heart. The noises of the club were long gone. We passed only a few customers in the near-empty back corridors, most memorably a well built bull with a mare on a leash attached to a nasty looking bridle.

The sheer size of this underworld village was staggering. Most of the corridors followed the same layout with the menus and numbered doors, but a few were more specialized. We passed a sign which said ‘No customers beyond this point,’ which my partner informed us was the creche with full foalsitting services and a living space for the employees who hadn’t got a place of their own.

I was elated when they replaced the toilets in the Castle with ones that didn’t scream when you flushed them. Benefits indeed.

Swift brought us to a stop outside a tiny maintenance closet tucked away in the farthest corner of the complex. It didn’t have a number or service listing, but a tiny stenciled sign which said ‘Security Office’ hung cockeyed from a knife stuck in the wood.

“Sir... um... I... I feel like I should... warn you...” She started apprehensively, checking her armored vest like she might be making use of it soon.

I touched her shoulder and she jumped. “About what, kid? Come on, I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole with you here, so it might be time to just spill it. Your ancestors are brothel folk. I get it. But you’re a cop to me; everything else is moot.”

Taxi joined me with a comforting smile and said, “If you ever get me drunk and maudlin, I’ll tell you some real family horror stories.”

“It’s not that. Um... did you... er...” The pegasus seemed to be having trouble finding the right words, but eventually settled on: “Did you ever have a grandmother who was a sweet old lady who made you cookies and taught you to play games and things like that?”

I nodded with a nostalgic grin. Grammy Boiled had been a real bundle of joy in her day.

“My grandmare isn’t like that.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Please, don’t make any sudden moves until she knows who it is. She’s a little forgetful these days.”

With that, Swift pushed open the door to the security room and immediately ducked. A throwing hatchet the size of my foreleg whistled out and almost knocked my hat clean off my head before burying itself in the opposite door, wobbling back and forth. In an instant, I’d plastered myself against the wall outside the doorframe, with Taxi attached to the other side, anticipating further projectiles.

“There ya are ye consarned varmit! Where’dja hide mah damn cigars?!” A scratchy, low pitched voice screeched from inside the small office.

“Hello, Granny Glow... It’s me, Swift. Where are your glasses?” My partner trotted in, murmuring like one would to a small, frightened animal.

“Little bird!” The voice said with a gleeful laugh. “Where’d ya come from? Ye should have called ahead. And Ah can see ye just fine! Just need may spectacles for snipin’. Thought you was that red brigand what stole my box of Croupan cigars.”

“Scarlet didn’t steal your cigars, gran. They’re in here somewhere, probably along with your glasses.”

”Oh, Don’t talk to me like a foal. girl! Ah ain’t lost all’a mah marbles. Now come here and lemme see ya. Sakes alive girl, what’re ya wearin’? Looks mighty sharp on ya!”

“It’s my uniform, gran. I graduated and I’m on the job. What’d I tell you about throwing sharp things at ponies?” Swift scolded.

“Horseshit! If Ah was throwin’ em at ponies Ah’da hit ’em. Now tell yer cute friend in the coat and that heap’a yellow fur with the funny mane to stop skulkin’ around or ah really will staple ’em to something!” The voice moved around the office; the door glowed green, then banged open the rest of the way.

Taxi lowered her nose, indicating that I should go first. I didn’t mind; I was so punch drunk on the sheer absurdity of my surroundings, I figured the worst Swift’s grandmare could do was end my day in a hospital bed with a big bowl of jello and no more unpleasantly sexual images of sweet confections and kitchen appliances dancing behind my eyelids.

Strolling in with as much nonchalance as I could muster, I dutifully removed my fedora and coat, tossing them over one foreleg. “Evening ma’am. Detective Hard Boiled, at your service. This is my driver.” I stood aside and Taxi squeezed in beside me, performing her version of a curtsy, which was mostly bending her front knees.

The room was as small from the inside as it looked on the outside. Every inch of the ceiling, floor, and walls was coated in a thick a mixture of receipts, paper garbage, semi-pornographic pictures, and untold hundreds of lines of carefully corroborated notation, all being held in place with a soft shine of magic. It was quite an impressive display.

The unicorn whose horn was holding the mass of papers stood behind the only furniture in the room, a low desk with an adding machine and a tower of ledgers. If Stella was a frightening sight up close, then Granny Glow was Nightmare Moon in heat. She had a face like a piece of dried fruit the color of split pea soup. Maybe once she’d been a beauty, but those days were long gone. Her cheeks were a mass of valleys, laugh lines, crow’s feet, and an additional menagerie of wrinkles that would put any dermatologist in an early grave. She might have been sixty, or she might have been a hundred. It was tough to tell.

In spite of her age, her eyes were as sharp as the butterfly knife hanging in mid-air behind her, click-clacking open and shut like a metronome. She was chewing on the butt of a cigar that stank of rotting skunk; a thin haze of blue smoke rolled around the ceiling.

Shoving the desk and its attendant piles of figures aside with another powerful blast of levitation that made my fur stand on end, she strode forward, grabbed my hoof, and shook it so hard I was afraid it would come off at the shoulder.

“Aye there, proper strong boy yah found yourself, eh, little bird? Or is yers the filly what done painted her head?”

Taxi toyed with her layered braid, deciding the better part of valor was keeping quiet and hoping the old lady didn’t decide she needed a mane cut.

Swift picked a stack of paper and plunked herself down on it, seeming more at ease in the company of the elderly unicorn than I’d seen her anywhere all day long. “Sir, this is... Granny After Glow. She’s head of security here at the Vivarium. Granny, this is my partner in the police department.”

“Ye can call me Glow. Call me ‘Granny’ and I’ll skin ye. That’s fer family only.”

“It’s a real pleasure, ma’am.”

I returned the hoof-shake firmly, then hung my coat on the rack just inside the door. Granny Glow creaked her way back over then yanked her desk back into place.

With a tiny swing of her shining horn, every piece of paper in the room swirled down into neat stacks. The almost casual way she used magic to wrench her environment around was a bit unsettling in somepony her age. I got a glance at some of the papers; A thousand-bit expense account for lubricant.

Don’t want to know, don’t want to know, don’t want to know...

Formalities done, she turned to her granddaughter. The slight stoop to her shoulders only emphasized the fact that Granny Glow must have been a real amazon in her youth, and she was still half a head taller than Swift.

“So tell me, little bird... yer daddy don’t want ye comin’ down to see me. What was it he said last Hearth’s Warming Eve when he thought ah couldn’t hear? Ah’m a baaad influence?” Her lips quirked.

Swift squared her legs and put on a big defiant smile. “I’m... I’m an adult, gran. I can see who I want to! Daddy will just have to put up with it.”

Taxi bit her lip and stifled a giggle for safety’s sake.

“Miss Glow, you’re head of security here?” I asked, trying not to lay on the ‘cop’ too thick. Something told me that wouldn’t get me anywhere with the old mare any more than it had with the dragon, and the two had some real similarities. “Stella didn’t seem much inclined to talk to me. Maybe you can answer a few questions?”

She absent mindedly grabbed a rolled cigar from a wooden box which had been buried under paper, lit it with a flash of magic, then jammed it into her muzzle. “Heh, stumped ya did he? Sticky bugger sure likes his games. Probably was a right bitch about it too. He sent ye down to see me then?”

My jaw tightened involuntarily. After Glow caught the look and blew a smoke-ring at me. “Knew it. Well, t’aint without a good reason. Even lettin’ ye in to see his scaly rump is an uncommon thing, but if my little bird says yer alright, yer alright. She got her momma’s brains, thank goodness.”

My cutie mark twinged and I took a step closer. “What ‘good reason’? We’re here about an investigation. We think it’s possible one of Stella’s employees was killed this morning.”

Glow squinted until her eyes almost disappeared inside her wrinkled green face. “Killed... yah mean died in an accident or somepony did’em in purposeful-like? Ye get a name? Speak up sonny, or badge or not, I’ll have your male-bits for tea cozies!” The knife swinging in the air behind her clicked a bit faster; my dusky tail involuntarily swept down between my legs. The part of me that was aware that using male-bits for tea cozies made no sense was not certain whether she knew that, and did not wish to aggravate her further by pointing that out.

Swift snatched the weapon out of the air with one wing, folded it shut with her mouth, then set it carefully on her grandmare’s desk. “Gran, we’re here to help.”

Just as I thought the ancient unicorn was about to snap her knife up again and make a go for my masculinity, Taxi finally broke her silence. “Hardy, you noticed when you mentioned there was a death, Stella didn’t seem all that upset, but when you said the Jane Pony’s horn was removed, he got angry.”

I nodded. I had noticed that. Anything that gets a dragon’s fuming nostrils two inches from your face tends to stick in your awareness. But as Taxi forced me to relive the experience, the old unicorn’s yellowed teeth clenched and sank right through the end of her cigar, which fell onto her desk and quickly went out. Her eyes were on me, boring into my face with an intensity that had been refined over decades of emptying the bladders of uncouth johns.

“Deary, ah think ye better lay it all out for me right quick here. Iffen her horn was ‘removed’ then there’s a good chance we got more problems than ah thought.”

This being the third time I’d described the situation, I was starting to hit my stride. I briefly ran down the circumstances of the body, then produced Stella’s lapel pin. In spite of department policies on information sharing, laying a situation out loud to somepony often helps me organize my thoughts. True, there’s always a chance when you’re telling ponies about the case that you might end up revealing yourself to a killer, but I’d never had that happen and doubted sincerely it was Swift’s grandmare I was hunting.

When I was finished, Glow just stood there mutely contemplating the plastic bag as it hung in a shimmering light in front of her face. Collecting her thoughts she said with resignation, “That ain’t a way ah’d hoped this day would go, but if Miss Stella thinks ye can help, ah don’t figure to defy the beasty. In a century and pocket change, he ain’t steered us wrong.”

“Fine by me. Swift, take notes.”

The pegasus retrieved the notepad from my coat and sat, pencil in mouth, poised for action.

After Glow’s horn flashed and slammed the door shut, almost clipping my tail. “We can talk freely here. Mine’s the only room in the whole building what don’t got the security system tapped into it.”

“Why should that matter, gran? Stella is the only one who can listen to us. I thought the magical frequency was locked?” Swift asked, shifting the pencil to one side of her muzzle and looking concerned.

“And that’s what we thought too... til a few weeks ago we was doing maintenance and tapped into somepony’s transmission. They was piggy backin’ our own damn equipment!” Glow slapped a hoof down on her desk and the whole thing jumped.

“This security system... what exactly is it meant to do? I can’t picture anypony breaking into a brothel or a night club.” I asked, quizzically.

The unicorn hesitated, bunching up her face as she considered whether or not to answer my question. “Well... if I’mma tell ye, I got to swear ye.” Glow stood up and pointed at me and Taxi with her horn. “Put yer hoof in the air.”

Taxi tentatively lifted her leg. I remained where I was. “Haven’t we passed enough tests today? I drank the truth bloom. Isn’t that enough?”

The security office door swung open again. “Ye can swear or ye can get out, boy! Ah ain’t that lizard and ah don’t trust in potions. Yer word is all ye got that’s worth somethin’ to me.”

I smiled broadly and raised my hoof. If there’s something in this mad world I can appreciate, it’s the solidity of giving your word. In a land of magic, there are still some things more powerful than incantations and flashy horn work.

Glow floated her cigar out and stabbed it in the air at me. “Now this here is a special vow... if either of ye break it ah ain’t responsible for the consequences. Say it with me. Cross yer heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in yer eye.” She did a little fluttering wave with her hoof then covered her eye with it.

“Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.” I mimed the motion. It didn’t feel as silly as it should have; some ponies take such things very seriously.

But as I finished, a shiver shot up my spine. It felt like somepony, somewhere, knew I’d taken that vow. The oath I’d made when joining the police force felt insubstantial by comparison.

Taxi’s face scrunched up like she’d swallowed something sour. “Yech, was that some kind of spell?” She asked.

“Nope. A solid, old-fashioned kinda promise. Now then... this ain’t a thing we just tell the public so yer keepin’ it under that there hat, yahear?” Glow replied, crossing her hooves one over the other.

I nodded and she went on. “Our security system is supposed to keep ponies from hurtin’ each other or takin’ pictures. We got clientele in every walk of life. One of the only rules in Detrot ye could always rely on is ‘Yer safe if yer in the Vivarium.’ Safe!” She punctuated the word by snapping up her balisong, opening it, and driving it into the desk.

She then turned to look at a few of the pictures which were stuck to the walls with various sharp implements. I wasn’t in any hurry to check out her cutie-mark, but thankfully her flanks weren’t in near the poor condition her face was. It was a thin, lady’s knife buried in a target. No surprise there.

When I said nothing, she continued her explanation. “Nopony wants what they do behind our doors out in public, no way, no how. We do our damnedest to make sure that’s how it is. These ponies what broke into our system are clever. We keep our monitoring frequency on a rotation, but iffen they found it once, it’s only a matter of time ‘afore they find it again, and who knows what they already got. They’ve turned the protection spells into cameras in damn near every room!”

Swift was carefully noting everything she said. The kid was studious, I’d give her that.

I collated this fresh information with what I already knew, then pounded my hoof against my forehead as realization sunk in. I’ve never liked being manipulated, and since coming into the Vivarium I’d been stacked against a much more canny opponent in a dizzyingly unfamiliar environment. I began to understand why those dragons smart enough to enter political circles wind up so feared in them.

“That Luna-damned water snake.” I cursed. “That’s why Stella wouldn’t talk to me. His little audience hall is bugged too. He cut everything short when I brought up the mob and left me curious. He read me like a royal banner!”

Glow bobbed her head, puffing her cigar furiously. “You ain’t kidding. Trust me, work for Stella long enough and ye get used to it. Still piss ya off though. He’s why them pin-striped sons’o’bitches been tryin’ to get in here for years and ain’t done it yet.”

Taxi sat forward and I could almost watch as her interest in the case spiked. She’d always loved working mob cases back in Narcotics, because there’s little ambiguity when you’re dealing with the mafia. They’re as close to a genuine evil as one can get without adding a heaping helping of mysticism.

“Was it the Jewelers?” She asked. “Why would they be interested in a nightclub? This strikes me as an awfully hard place to extort.”

“It ain’t just a nightclub." Tugging the knife out of the table, Glow set it spinning again, taking slow pulls from the foul cigar. My lungs were starting to ache just being in the room. "Ye ever wonder why the Heights don’t have so many murderers and thieves when it seems like damn near everyplace else in the city done turned ugly the last thirty years?”

"If I’m honest, I haven't thought about it." I admitted. "It's a statistical anomaly. The department only worries about those when they're negative. We don't have enough officers to chase down the reasons hoods don't go somewhere."

“Well, Ah’m gonna let ye in on a secret, and it’s one them mob fellers might just kill for. It’s us. The Stilettos. We keep the Heights safe.” She said it with a finality that bordered on religious fervor, then her face fell. “Leastways, that’s how it used to be...”

Swift was still scribbling away but paused long enough to ask what was on everypony’s mind: “Wait... it’s the Stilettos? I thought they were just guarding the Vivarium. How do you do that for the whole of the Heights?”

Glow snorted derisively. “If ye’d ever joined Ah’d have told ya, little bird! Ain’t you supposed to be hunting monsters or somesuch, by the way?”

The pegasus dropped the pencil from her mouth and covered her head with her wings. She said in a very small voice, “...I couldn’t make it into PACT. I’m too small.”

Her grandmare flipped her cigar into an ashtray then eased over and put her thin forelegs around Swift. It was kind of an awkward motion, but it had heart. “Awww, little bird... Ah’m sorry. Ah know yer heart was set on PACT. Still, them stupid cowponies can go get themselves set on fire by dragons. Ye’ll be a great copper. After all, yer Grandma Glow taught ya how ta shoot right, and ain’t nopony else can blow the eyelashes off a fly at fifty paces.”

Taxi and I politely turned our backs while the little exchange took place. Her first day on the job had been impressively unpleasant; neither of us could spite her out of a moment of self-pity. It brought back a few memories of my own first day, and Juniper Shore’s patient laugh when I’d almost drawn my gun on a herd of cows out for a late night.

Celestia damn it, I miss him.

I quickly shut the door on those thoughts. It was a different time, and if Jane Pony was going to have any peace, I needed to focus on the now.

Glow’s horn hummed softly. Swift blew her nose on something, then slowly extricated herself from the embrace. “I’m fine, Gran. Thanks. It’s just been a... it’s been a tough day. Tomorrow will be better. You were telling us about how you keep the Heights safe?”

After Glow crossed her rear legs, her creaky knees popping and snapping like fresh-lit kindling. With a tiny flip of her mane she tucked the tenderness away and was, again, the chief enforcer of the Stilettos. “We got a couple of ways and ain’t none of them the kind of thing ah’m gonna say in front of a law pony, sworn or not, till ah know his real colors.” I opened my muzzle to say something about ‘testing’ which was getting old, but she kept going before I could. ”Ah will say this. We ain’t responsible for any of yer dead. Stella’s rule. No bodies.”

“The Jewelers don’t usually go outside of their drug rackets and extortion. The Cyclones usually do theft and vandalism.” I pointed out. “What makes you think it’s the mob?”

“Heh, if it ain’t the mob, it’s somepony with some big’ol guts and a tiny little brain. We had a couple’a these big, burly bastards in here a few months back. It was two buffalo and an earth pony what looked like he was in charge. They come down here and start shovin’ customers, demanding money and we did ‘the usual’; froo-frooed them up in a couple’a plus sized frocks, garters, and makeup then left ‘em hangin’ outside the college covered in blue paint.” A fond smile crooked her jagged lips. I must say I’d been tempted to do similar things myself with one or two of the scumbags I’ve picked up in the course of my work.

“Scouts then. Alright, what happened after that?” I asked.

Glow picked up the stub end of her smoke and relit it. “Nothin’. We was expectin’ something. We’ve had the mob in here before, but not for plenty of years. They learned ye don’t mess about with our employees. Hoods can handle gittin’ their tails kicked. Don’t handle gittin’ their tails trimmed and dyed so good... among other things.”

“Hmmm... then nothing until you picked up this transmission? Is it an inside job? Somepony working here or a customer?” I inquired.

“Inside fer sure. We ain’t figured out who and it seems like they got our movements wrapped up tight. Miss Stella’s been monitorin’ ’em but they’re so damn careful. Every time it seems like we’ve got ’em they ain’t there. I’mma bet that’s why the dragon wants outsiders takin’ a look.” Glow spat contemptuously into a tin can on the end of her desk.

“So what exactly does this have to do with our murdered filly? It doesn’t sound like anything but a blackmail scheme.”

“Ye said her horn were gone, right? Well, we just might know somepony whose got it in for us and don’t much care for unicorns neither. See, we think there’s two of ’em. One spy on the inside, one on the out who is running all around. Onea them transmissions mentioned they was lookin’ for somepony in particular. Coulda been yer Jane Pony.”

I leaned forward, staring avidly. “You think there’s somepony pulling their strings?”

Granny Glow fiddled with her knife, dragging the edge down one side of her desk and carving a deep groove. If she were ‘getting on in years’ and slowing down she must have been a real hellion in her youth. Her magical control was flawless.

She raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Ye ever heard of a ‘King Cosmo’?”

Taxi let out a noise somewhere between a cough and a yelp. “You can’t be serious...”

I gave my driver an appraising glance. “You know this pony?”

She nodded, chewing on her lip. “He’s head of a local criminal family attached to the Jewelers. Lo Zoccolo Rosso. The Red Hoof. He’s a brutal son of the Nightmare. Organized Crime and Narcotics have been trying to hit him for years on drugs charges but he always wiggles free. Last time the only witness got cold hooves right before trial.”

“He intimidated a witness?” I growled.

Taxi’s chin sank to her chest and she exhaled. “They found the witness with all four legs frozen in a block of ice. He probably found that intimidating.”

“Right... charming fellow. He doesn’t like magic users?” I asked, moving to a position behind Swift’s left shoulder where I could read her notes. She’d just finished dotting that last question mark. Her mouth-script was as good as a unicorn’s hornwriting.

“Ye ain’t kidding. He don’t hire ‘spikes’ ‘less he has to.” replied Glow. The derogatory term for unicorns made Swift wince, but her grandmother said it casually, like it was something she was used to. “He done some ugly things to unicorns what won’t give him what he wants.” Glow drew a hoof menacingly across the base of the spiraling jut of magical bone on her forehead.

Taxi’s breath caught in her throat. “He...cuts off horns?!”

“Eeyup. Yer a bright ’un, ain’tcha?”

“Gran, be nice...” Swift chastised gently.

Glow grimaced at her. “Ah am bein’ nice! Ye ain’t seein’ me with nopony’s head jammed in nothin’.”

“So your money is on Cosmo?” I mused. “The horn thing does recommend him as a suspect.”

The elderly pony took a deep breath, choked, and quickly spat again in her spittoon. “It’s funny though. The Stilettos know he ain’t safe. The employees have standing orders not to take any jobs from him or his bunch. Don’t know why yer girl woulda gone out of house or taken work from the pikey sleaze. It ain’t strictly forbidden or nothin’, but it ain’t safe as havin’ a john come here. Yer filly had to know that.”

A knock at the office door brought us all back from our thoughts. Scarlet nosed it open, limping in on three hooves with a scroll clutched in the crook of his knee. Both of his cutie-marks had a nice blue bruise right across the wine-bottle on his luminous apple-red flanks and he was smiling like a fox that’d just caught a rabbit. “Swift? Mistress Daisy said you’d be here.”

“Whadya want, Scarlet?” After Glow growled at him.

Scarlet set the scroll down in front of my partner. Pulling the wax seal off the rolled paper he gave it a kick. It unrolled and flapped against the pegasi’s forehooves. “Mistress Stella sent this down. I’m supposed to act disappointed when I leave, then spread around the club that you refused a bribe and left.”

Swift scanned the yellowed parchment, then read it again. Her rear end hit the ground and she squeaked, “Sir, I think you’d best take a look at this...”

I turned it around and read the note,

My Dear Swift, little bird,

I’m sorry to put you in this position, darling, but your family needs you. Your mother might not have stayed, but I know you’d never abandon us in our time of desperation. By now I’m sure that feisty stallion (such lovely flanks!) has asked Miss Glow a few pertinent questions and your grandmare has told you both about our recent problems. If she hasn’t, ask her about ‘Cosmo.’

I don’t know for certain that Cosmo is the one who killed that filly, but I think I know where our spy’s little friend on the outside is going to be tomorrow. They aren’t the only ones who can tap into a communication system. Too bad we can’t transmit on their line or this would be wrapped up quickly, but they’re filtering us somehow. We can only listen.

Whoever this pony is, they’ve spotted you, the lovely Taxi, and the detective. Having police interest here is making them nervous, and they’re pulling out. It sounds like they found the pony they were looking for. They passed an address and a time through the transmission. You can get it from your grandmother and the time was just after noon tomorrow.

Based on my records, the address is the home of one of our new fillies, an ‘Azure Rose.’ Miss Rose has only been here a few months. I don’t have her cutie-mark in our records and the pictures I have don’t match the description Detective Boiled mentioned, but she might have dyed her coat.

There’s something else and herein I need your help. This spy has apparently got a lot of material from the tap into the protection network. I’m afraid they’re using some sort of voice masking so we weren’t able to get so much as a gender, but if explicit photos from the Vivarium make it into the public eye we will, at the very least, lose our customer base. It’s my hope that if we can catch them we can prevent that eventuality. If not, we’ll swim that canal when we come to it.

You best lean on the detective. I trust him. His father was a solid pony and if he’s anything like his stud, he’s going to be infuriating but also the most loyal friend you could ask for.

Love,

Mistress Stella

P.S. Scarlet is going to pinch your rear end when you’re done reading this, Mister Detective. He has my permission, so don’t kick him or I’ll eat you.

I moved a second too late just as the devious colt nipped me right on the ass. Instead of bucking him stupid, I dropped my rump, pinning his muzzle to the floor. He struggled, but his angle was all wrong and even pushing with all four hooves, he quickly wore himself out. Having his nose and mouth trapped didn’t help. When he finally collapsed, I spoke as calmly as I could with a stinging buttock: “Just because the serpent gives you permission to do something doesn’t make it smart.”

I stood, finally; he took a deep breath, then fell back on his heels. His cheeks were a very vivid burgundy and he was practically panting for breath. He backed slowly out of the room with his rear legs clamped tightly together.

“Sweet Celestia, strike me down before anything else makes this day interesting.” I said, bucking the door shut in his face.

Taxi’s expression promised much mockery and Swift looked like she’d just walked into the wrong locker-room.

“Heeheehee... don’t know as Ah’ve ever seen Scarlet so smitten.” Glow drawled, blowing blue smoke out of her nose.

“I don’t need a male escort with a crush on me.” I seethed.

“Don’t know as ya got a choice on that, cutie. Anyway, ain’t none of mah business what colts ye cuddle. Mah business is the Vivarium’s safety and the safety of the Heights. What’s that note got for ye?”

I passed the scroll to her and she floated a pair of fine silver spectacles out of her desk, settling them on the bridge of her nose. She gave it a quick once-over, then sniffed irritably and tossed it into the garbage can beside her desk.

“That scaly old queen is gonna outsmart hisself onea these days, and Ah hope Ah ain’t around to see it.” She groused.

Swift squared up and put on a serious face. “Sir, permission to pursue this line of inquiry?” Her voice cracked slightly. “Please?”

I settled my hat back on my head. “Let’s keep it simple but... yes. This sounds promising enough, although I don’t know how I feel about this scheme with the mole. Sounds like one for Organized Crime, or at least some back-up.”

After Glow’s eyes hardened. “Are ye daft, drunk, or just stupid? Ye think they ain’t got cops in their pocket who’ll let ’em in our every move? How’dya think yer department is gonna react when they find out little bird’s got family workin’ here? She’ll be out on her ear!”

Swift drew her wings around herself protectively as I worked my lower jaw, trying to think of a response. Even if there weren’t crooked cops in the department, which I wasn’t sure about, she was 100% right about Swift. Eventually I settled on “...horse-apples.”

I fumed, studying my own hooves. The old lady was right. Oh, well, it wouldn’t be my first time going under the radar, though Chief Jade had an unfortunate sixth sense for when an officer had done something that would get their name in the news along with words like ‘sham’ and ‘debacle.’

And then I realized just how grandly this could turn out to be one.

“I’ve just thought of something.” I said, “You’re not going to like it.”

“What?” asked Taxi.

“Remember how we saw that councilpony-”

“Ugh. Yes, and I don’t need reminding. I didn’t know you could get fat there.” she said, sticking out her tongue.

“Glow, without naming names,” I asked, “how many elected officials and royal bigwigs frequent this place?”

“Likely more’n a few. We ain’t exactly small potatoes, or any other kinda root vegetable.” said Glow.

"Then if they’ve got pictures of important enough ponies... If what I saw was an example, then this is the sort of shit that topples local governments.”

Taxi bit her lip - and then put her ‘thinking face’ on, which was never a good thing. She looked like she was about to drop a bombshell into the crater full of self-pity in which I was laying. When she finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “Hardy, I’ve... had a thought. You’re not going to like it.”

“Lay it on me. It can’t make this any worse.”

I knew it was stupid as soon as I’d said it, because her eyes said I was wrong.

“You know how the Cyclones and the Jewelers have a semi-stable divvying up of Detrot’s inner city territory, right?”

I nodded. “Yes, so?”

She turned to After Glow. “Do you mind if I ask how you go about keeping the Heights from getting pulled under? I mean, economically?”

“Ya mean keepin’ all the local businesses in our hooves?” The unicorn asked, teething her cigar thoughfully. “Well... awww shoot. It ain’t like ye won’t figure it yerself. Miss Stella owns most of the homeowners associations. He’s got talons in a lot of pies. If a business looks like it’s gonna fail, he lends them money at low interest. Everypony owes him something and he makes fer damn sure they remember, both that they got a debt and that he ain’t cruel enough to call them in all at once. We keep a stable economy and try to stay self sufficient.”

Taxi bit her braid, turning her thoughts over. “You have some ‘method’ for handling the mobsters that doesn’t involve killing or torturing them. It keeps them scared.”

Glow sucked her stogie for a moment before she replied. “Ah ain’t gonna give no specifics... but yeah, we might just have somethin’ like that.”

“So what happens to all those businesses if say, Miss Stella were to die? From a legal standpoint I mean?” I wasn’t certain where Taxi was going with this but decided to let her play it out.

“Err...Ah suppose the ownership would revert to the Vivarium...” Glow answered nervously.

“And if the Vivarium were to shut down?”

My ears lay flat against my head as realization set in.

Swift’s eyes flicked back and forth between all of us and she asked, “What? What is it? What happens?”

After Glow took her cigar and put it in the ash-tray. “The control of the properties goes back to the city. We ain’t never had to think of a situation where Miss Stella could die though. What makes ye think that’d be a possibility?”

“If they’ve got blackmail material on half the cities elite then it becomes real easy to have a PACT team come clear out a dragon’s lair.” I replied, my breath catching in the back of my throat. “The newspapers will back them up on it. A dragon that maybe ‘went suddenly rabid’ or ‘reverted to baser instincts’.”

Taxi was gnawing her mane-tips so fiercely a bit came free and she spit it out. “It’s... I think it’s worse. If the Stilettos aren’t keeping the Jewelers or the Cyclone crew out anymore, they’ll both be drawing lines in the dirt. Probably in different places. King Cosmo is a Jeweler. With pornography of the movers and shakers in his pocket he’ll just... own... the Heights, but the Cyclones won’t take that lying down.”

My partner’s mouth dropped open and she stammered, “Y-you... mean...”

“Block war in the Heights.” I added, facehoofing.

Our driver nodded. “Goddess, Hardy, what have you dropped us into?!”

My heart did a few calisthenics against my ribcage. My stomach was doing it’s best to crawl out of my throat and escape. Neither of those feelings adequately conveyed the fear which had clamped down on my brain like a thousand ton vise.

If that blackmail shit got out, it’d be disastrous. While having Mayor Snifter’s fat flank taking a spanking all over the evening newspapers did have a certain appeal, he or somepony like him would no doubt send the PACT straight to the Vivarium and they’d have Stella’s head, fake eyelashes and all, on a pike outside City Hall by sundown.

Then, after dark, the mobs would descend on the unsuspecting residents of one of the last decent places in Detrot. And they weren’t going to share nicely.

A simple murder case had just turned into a potential gang-war.

Blood would run in the streets.

Death would stalk the shadows.

I’d have to do a lot of paperwork.

****

We sat for several minutes, absorbing the problem facing us. After Glow stepped out and returned with a cup of tea, sipping it whilst waiting for me to get a grip on myself long enough to make a decision; I knew it would be my decision, in the end. It might have been Swift that Stella asked for help, but the snake was as much a creature of subtlety as was possible for a ten-ton transvestite.

I started taking deep breaths, hoping to develop a spontaneous and fatal edema in my lung from Glow’s cigar smoke, thus making all of this a non-issue. To spite me, my breathing continued unimpeded, though a floating feeling of imminent collapse was making my eyelids feel like they had lead weights attached to them. A new partner and a murder investigation was quite enough excitement for one day and my haunches were dragging, whether from fatigue or a sense of helpless indignation at what I’d been suddenly drawn into.

Part of being a cop in Detrot is thinking on your hooves. There’s no particularly good way of blending together disparate pony policing styles other than to treat most officers as free-agents and pray they don’t get killed. That can occasionally mean giving one of your officers enough rope to hang himself with. Iris Jade understood that, and hence had lasted longer than the five previous Police Chiefs combined. It didn’t make for a sense of absolute safety in the field, though.

Taxi had slipped into that meditative, unreadable place she always went to when waiting for me to do something crazy, stupid, or brilliant. It’s her way of being supportive without committing to whatever insane course of action I might send us barreling after. Swift seemed to be wavering between outright panic and keeping up a determined front, mouthing the names of obscure hero-figures right back into ancient times at a mile a minute. Keeping an eye on her would be a full time affair if she decided to lose it. Granted, a full psychotic break the first day of work was hardly unheard-of, but it would be another inconvenience in a day full of them.

It was Granny Glow who brought us all back from these thoughts to the crashing shores of cruel reality.

“Little bird, sweetie... what is that thing on your leg?” She asked, her horn flickering as she tugged Swift closer. Pulling off her spectacles, she cleaned them on a stray piece of paper then set them back in place.

Swift followed her grandmare’s eyes down to the miniature police issue firearm strapped above her knee. It was a depressing looking thing. The barrel might have made a good toothpick if somepony were so inclined and would probably have been about as dangerous.

“It’s... my gun, gran.” She tried to say it matter-of-factly but couldn’t hide her disappointment.

“That ain’t a gun! That’s a party popper!” After Glow tore the straps off of my partner’s leg with a flash of pea-green energy and wrenched the tiny weapon into the air. Swift didn’t try to stop her. It hung there in front of us like an accusation. The ammunition cartridge popped out and Glow peered at the bullets, adjusting her spectacles on her heavily lined face; They were an unimpressive sight and might have deterred a small rabbit if one were to shoot him in the scrotum.

“What joker gave mah granddaughter this toy?” She demanded, rounding on me and Taxi as she ratcheted the last slug from the chamber. “Ah’ll have his guts for garters!”

“Gran, it’s standard issue...” Swift consoled, reaching up to retrieve the weapon.

Glow swung it out of reach. I felt a fierce tug on my own gun. The hoary mare dragged me up onto my toes by one leg, my entire joint caught in a levitation field. “This here hoof-cannon ain’t ‘standard issue!’” She growled, giving me a shake for emphasis, then let my knee drop as she tossed the object of her contempt into the trash basket along with all of its cartridges. “No grandchild of mine is gonna walk these streets with a piddlin’ piece of filly fluff for protection. Particularly not with them mob fellers out there beatin’ on the door.”

Pulling open the bottom drawer of her desk, she floated out an incredibly ornate box made of shiny black gunmetal. She ushered Swift closer as she set it on the table.

“This here Ah took of a stallion a few years ago what had great taste in hardware but poor life choices. He mighta been compensatin’ for somethin’. Dunno where he got it but... well, you know I ain’t got much use fer guns, and it deserves somepony to love it.” She pushed the top off the case then stepped away.

Taxi wheezed as she saw the box’s contents and my tail snapped out straight like a point-dog who’d caught a scent.

My gun is no great beauty, but it fires every time the trigger is pulled and has a sweet, reliable soul to it that I would never exchange for any other weapon. Even so, for an instant, I felt a twinge of envy. There was only one word for the equalizer laying in its nest of silk in that box: art. I’d seen museum pieces less lovely.

It was a long barrel target pistol in the .45 caliber range. The straps looked like extremely rare and expensive hydra leather, supple and guaranteed never to break. Its sights were diamond shards implanted along the barrel, aligned for perfect accuracy. Carved into the side of it with infinite precision was a Neighponese horn sword with four characters in their funny script on the blade. The entire thing gleamed like polished silver.

Swift realized she hadn’t taken a breath in some time and gasped. “Oh gran... I couldn’t...”

After Glow swatted in her direction with her tail. “Ye can and ye will, or so help me Ah’ll turn an officer of the law over mah lap and tan her hide fer bein’ stupid.” Raising the magnificent weapon out of it’s case, she slid it around Swift’s upper leg and began the laborious process of attaching it to the complex gun-harness. The pegasus just stood there with a big, stupid grin on her face as her grandmare dressed her, adjusting her uniform where necessary.

When Glow was done there was no disguising the presence of the pistol. It stuck out three inches from the end of Swift’s knee. It looked like it should have been heavy and awkward, but didn’t seem to impede her in the slightest as she took a few experimental flaps of her wings, lifting off and hanging there, pointing the gun at various objects in the room, before swooping down and hugging After Glow tight as she could. “Oh, it’s amazing!”

Her grandmother held her a moment longer then stood back. “Now, ye take good care of it. Needs yer love and it’ll keep ye safe.” She then magicked open one of her desk drawers, out of which floated a spare magazine and a box of hollow-points. She slipped these into Swift’s vest pockets with the same sort of matronly doting with which any other grandmare might have given out butterscotch candies.

Swift peered at the characters on the etched blade. “Mmm... I took a year of Neighponese in school, but I only really remember the phonetic characters...”

Taxi twisted her head to where she could read it right side up. “It says ‘Masamane.’”

My partner’s grinned so hard her cheeks almost climbed onto her forehead. “Masamane?! As in The Blade that Cuts the Heavens?!”

“Yep. Whoever customized that gun knew their Neighponese history.” said Taxi, while Swift all but cuddled the weapon, visions of herself as a fearless samareai warrior doubtless swirling about in her head.

Glow shrugged and began flipping through her desk drawer again until she found a manilla folder with the name ‘Azure Rose’ on the tab. “Like ah said. Former owner had good sense in shooters but overcompensated for other deficiencies.”

I knew it was a bad idea to ask, but again, curiosity is the great vice of anypony who goes into police work. “You mind if I ask what kind of ‘overcompensation’ you mean?”

Glow cackled and her knife spun so fast it let off a buzzing sound. “He took a swing at me when ah cut ’im off at the bar. T’wern’t the smartest thing a colt ever done.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

The balisong swung down and buried itself in the carpet between my forelegs. “After he woke up ah gave ’em a choice. He could gimme his rod or... heh... his rod.”

I clamped my tail over my butt, stepped over the quivering blade, and flipped Azure Rose’s personnel file open. All that was in it was a sheet with an address, a few physical statistics that seemed reasonably close to our Jane Pony, and a list with two columns headed ‘Does’ and ‘Does Not.’ For a hooker, the ‘Does Not’ list seemed inordinately long.

“Is our girl popular?” I asked, running a toe down the fetishes, a third of which I'd never even heard of.

“She’s a right lovely little thing but she mostly tends bar. Don’t pay as good as the back rooms, but then Ah never got the feelin’ she was stayin’ long. Ah know she’d take a john home now and then, but Ah think she were mostly just lonely. Always talkin’ about leavin’ town when she had enough money.”

I pondered that, then filed it away along with the growing stack of other little mysteries. A lonely isolationist without much interest in work as a prostitute and a need to acquire a large sum of money. She was young, not closely connected to her peers, and intent on getting out of the city. It wasn’t a lot, but it was more than I’d started the morning with. At the very least, we had a name and a suspect. I could only wrap my brain around so many problems simultaneously.

I grabbed my coat and slid it on over my forelegs. “I’ll check the files and see what we’ve got on your filly. If you find her alive somewhere, be sure to get in touch with Detective Swift.”

Granny Glow swung the door open but as I got up to leave she gave me a tiny tug on the tail. “Little bird and miss Taxi... ye mind waitin’ outside fer a moment?”

Taxi winked at me then stepped into the hall. Swift’s wing-feathers stood on end. “Gran, please don’t...”

I gave the pegasus a little push with my hip. “It’s fine. Go wait in the bar. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” For an instant I thought she might stand her ground and make a fuss, but she relented and let herself be herded out into the hall.

The door slid closed and I was suddenly alone with Granny Glow. She shifted from one hoof to the other, her knees letting out a crackle that sounded like gunshots in the tiny space. Swinging her cigar to the other side of her mouth, she studied me with an ageless self-certainty.

I let the silence linger but she wasn’t interested in playing games of intimidation. She spoke firmly. “Ah ain’t gonna bother with a threat, Detective. Ye don’t strike me as the type that’s too scared of dyin’ yerself.”

I acknowledged that with a flick of one ear.

Glow waved her stogie at the office door and the ponies outside. “Ye mighta seen mah granddaughter is a smart’un but she don’t have too good a grasp on reality. Whatever she might say, she still thinks of the whole damn world like one’a them Daring Do rags Ah was always sneaking to her.”

I raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I noticed.”

She set her cigar and spectacles aside. “Iffen ah mark ye rightly yer not a stupid pony. That dunder-headed accountant mah daughter fell for might be a fine enough father, but he don’t know up from down on the mean streets. Ah did what Ah could. Ah taught her to shoot and think on her hooves. Yer gonna have to teach her the things what matter.”

“Ma’am, I’m not-” I began but she clamped my jaw shut with a spark from the end of her horn. I snorted angrily but she was having none of it.

“Ah ain’t finished.” She snapped then shut her eyes and said in a more measured tone, “Yer her partner. She’ll do somethin’ stupid at some point. Iffen’ ye don’t help her with this hood what threatens her family she’ll go off and try to handle it herself. Ye don’t let her get herself killed.” The hold on my nose became a little tighter and I couldn’t hold back a pained groan; having my teeth ground together by invisible hooves was a new and altogether disagreeable sensation.

She let it relax as she went on. “Ah won’t kill ye. Ah ain’t that kind. Yer gonna live iffen she don’t and you know what? Ye’ll be the one what buries her. She dies, ah’ll stand there and hold a shovel and ye’ll be there beside me. Don’t ye ever forget it, Mr.Detective. If ah read ye right, ye’ve buried somepony else.”

My chest clenched tight as a few nasty memories crowded into the front of my brain, but she was still holding my mouth shut so I couldn’t say a word. She saw the reaction though. “Ahhh... Ah was right. Good.”

After Glow released her painful grip on my face and I stumbled over my own hooves backing away, grunting as my tail hit the carpet. She stood over me, staring down with a really alarming glower, then lifted me onto all fours and began smoothing out my coat and hat. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would convince her I could be trusted with her granddaughter's life. Damn, I couldn’t think of anything to say to convince me of that, but considering Glow could probably have crushed my head like an egg, I decided expressing this would be unhealthy.

Twisting the doorhandle, she pointed me outside. “Ah don’t care one lick iffen ye wanna die, but I know she cares, so yer gonna find this spy and keep yer city safe. Find out who murdered that poor filly and took her horn.” She growled menacingly. “Iffen it was one’a these scum-suckers what thinks they can own Detrot, ye bring ’em to old Granny Glow...” Her knife tore itself out of the carpeting and set to spinning again beside her head. “Ah’ll teach ’em to fear a filly’s cut. Now git!” I barely kept my legs under me as she scooped me up and practically flung me out of the room.

The door banged shut and I realized, unhappily, that my partner and Taxi were gone and I had no idea how to get back to the bar.

Chapter 7: Guesses, Gripes and Grease

Chapter 7: Guesses, Gripes, and Grease

Equestria is home to a wide variety of sentient species, and there are very few of those species who don't collectively wish at least one other sentient species was dead.

Dragons used to step on a lot of toes, especially prior to the Cutie Mark Crusades. The belligerent, predatory griffins have had their scrapes with most of the other species at one time or another, such as the Griffin/Bovine War of 23 L.R.; Older cows, as of the time of this writing, still refer with dark bitterness to the battle at what is now called Hamburger Hill. Buffalo still look upon the encroaching borders of civilized Equestria with anger and mistrust, and there’ve been more than a few flare-ups at the outskirts. Zebras tend to unnerve ponies with either their bizarre alchemical mixtures, strange ceremonies, or eclectic tastes in interior decorating. Changelings are nearly universally reviled, due to their emotionally parasitic nature and statistically significant ick factor, and because all of Equestria is in significant trouble if they ever decide to make truly clever use of their powers.

One would think, then, that the wide variety of races that share space in Detrot would form the perfect ingredients for a fine powderkeg. One would not be wrong.

--The Scholar

After several awkward and sometimes regrettable knocks on various doors, I finally found a stallion who was unoccupied enough to direct me back towards the Vivarium’s main room. I still managed to get myself lost twice, and only by luck stumbled back over a part of the complex I remembered. My sense of direction isn’t great - one more reason the Chief keeps Taxi around me - and it's not helped when I'm breathing a pheromonal haze.

The bar was back in rave mode, which I determined when my nose started spontaneously bleeding from the bass line. The lovely soundproofing keeping the din from the recreational areas completely concealed the fact that the DJ was on full attack.

The room was full of dancing and grinding rumps bopping to the swollen beat; I swept a hoof under my muzzle, then tried to spot my companions. Swift was easy enough to pick out; she was brighter than some of the glowsticks hanging from various patrons. She was in a booth beside the bar, up to her ears in a milk-shake that could easily have passed for four or five meals for me, and was already scraping the bottom with her tongue.

I only recognized Minox when he moved. He blended into the background, slouched over several pillows beside my partner, with a canary yellow lap-ornament who had him halfway out of his shirt. His cuffs and tie were also undone, and my absolutely shameless driver was lazily stroking his chest hair.

Attempting to directly cross the densely populated dance floor was a bad move; I wound up dodging somepony with her mane done up to look like some sort of exotic bird, and in doing so almost caught a very comely unicorn’s backside in the face. I wound up winding my way around the edges instead. Taxi caught sight of me and poked Swift, who dropped her shake and began wiping stray bits of cream out of her mane and cheek-fur.

“Come on, you two. We’re going. We’ve got a few things left before this day is done.” I said, flipping my tail towards the elevator.

The cab pony put on a very sad face and pinched her lips together. If she hadn’t been at least one sheet to the wind, I think she might even have summoned up a tear or two.

“Awww... do we haaave to?” She whined.

“Yes, now kiss the beef and let’s get out of this place before my mane starts to stick to itself. I swear, I’m breathing sex fluids at this point.”

She shot Minox a lusty grin, then threw her forelegs around his neck and hit him with a kiss that would have killed a lesser being dead on the spot. Nopony’s tongue should have been able to do that. It just wasn’t natural.

Swift fluttered over to my side then covered her face with a wing, averting her eyes from the spectacle. She was nervously adjusting the straps on Masamane as she asked quietly, “Sir, is that... I mean, I’ve heard there were ponies who liked... but I never knew anypony who... you know... with a biped...”

“Kid, a thing to understand about Taxi is she doesn’t care what you look like, or how many legs you have.” I answered her, idly swiping a bit of her shake that she’d missed off of her ear and sucking it off my hooftip. “My friend has had Canterlot royals, griffin tribe-lords, and buffalo chieftains nosing around her flanks. I’m pretty sure she does it just for the reactions.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

I nodded in Minox’s direction. His pants were having a staggeringly obvious ‘reaction,’ and when Swift saw it, she ducked back under her feathers.

Long after decorum had been satisfied thoroughly, Taxi disentangled herself from Minox and tossed back the shot of whiskey on the bar. As we three trotted into the elevator, she turned and blew the dumb beast a kiss. He was still sitting there in the same position, dazed and smiling, his suit disheveled, and his tail coiled around his ankle. He did manage a tiny wave before the unicorn in the lift shut the door.

I breathed a sigh of relief as we made our escape from the Vivarium.

****

Once back in the car, Taxi lit another stick of incense and put some calming blues on the tape machine. The night was cool and pleasant. Isolated street-lamps spread pools of light and safety down the alleys and byways of The Heights as mothers called their foals in from their play and the twilight hours lent the buildings a melancholy glow. I stuck my head out the window, letting the wind ruffle my mane, and I listened to the city, as a lonely rickshaw driver sat in the back of his hack and played Taps on a much tarnished harmonica.

Swift, still lightly caressing her pretty new pistola, interrupted my reverie. “Sir, do you mind if I ask where we’re going?”

Taxi threw her head back. “Yeah, you got a destination, boss?”

“Don’t call me ‘boss.’” I groused. “Let’s go by Flying Iron’s place. You remember where it is?”

She gave the wheel a seemingly leisurely twist that had me grabbing the passenger handle to keep from tumbling over. “My arteries remember, yes.”

****

We pitched up on the curb beside the beaten, half rusted cart which sat out front of one of the city’s innumerable box-like ‘neighborhood recreation centers’ that were meant to be the salvation of our youth about ten years back. They’d become places for foals to smoke in the bathrooms and dealers to shell out their wares in relative safety.

A few young earth ponies ran around out front playing an improvised game of hoofball. These were a different breed from the couple we’d seen in The Heights; They had ribs showing and wore hand-me-downs when they wore anything at all. Ponies aren’t a particularly modest bunch, but a little makeup and a ribbon or two is considered making an effort. This lot had a mix of cheap earrings and uncut manes and fetlocks.

For all the ills the world had visited on this particular neighborhood, however, a saving grace had pulled up one day and stayed. The food cart outside was owned and operated by the meanest grease-slinger this world has ever seen. An obese, permanently jovial unicorn with a skill behind the griddle to match his temper when roused: Flying Iron. He’d become the center of local community that the much larger building behind him failed to be. On any given day you could see dozens of ponies lining up, getting a generous helping of hearty soul food and a bit of the latest gossip from their friends in one of the few agreed upon neutral grounds in the city.

The cart didn’t have a name, but a permanent stain of vegetable lard on the cement and the hoof-traffic worn pavement in front demarcated the zone between Flying Iron’s territory and the gangs. They respected him because he fed them - and because if you fought, screwed, or dealt near his stand or the nearby picnic tables, you quickly learned about an extension of his special talent; specifically that he could hit a pony upside the head at fifty paces with a pot of boiling grease. Never a pretty sight.

I introduced him to Swift; he gave her a hoofshake that left her fur matted, then turned to me.

“I ain’t seen you down on this end in too long, Hardy.” He commented, waving his cooking iron at me threateningly. “I’m gonna take offense one’a these days if you lose touch for too long and I’mma have to come looking for you!”

“I promise, I’ll come visit more. Got a new partner to feed! You know what pegasi eat like.” I said; he chortled as Swift turned a little pink.

“I do indeedy. Here, best have a proper meal then before you’re on your way. An extra sprig of parsley for you, Miss Taxi! I remember you’re a fancy sort.”

Taxi nickered in mock offense. “I’m as common as they come, Mr. Iron!... but thank you.”

He spooned out three massive portions of steaming fried hay onto paper plates, dropped the parsley on Taxi’s, and set them on the picnic tables. I passed him the bits with a generous tip.

He was the only pony I’d ever met who knew the secret of frying hay so it crisped but didn’t burn. It was a finer magic than anypony can do with a horn.

Swift stared at the meal in front of her like she’d never seen anything more sickening. It was dripping and the plate was almost transparent from the seepage. “Sir, is this actually food?”

“You ate a dead animal this morning, kid. You don’t get to have a fit over some nice, healthy hay. Besides, if you complain to the chef, he’ll hit you with one of those frying pans. Try it before you knock it.” I said then jammed my muzzle into the mound of sweetly spiced glory, watching as my partner took a cautious nibble. Ten seconds later she had fried hay in her feathers and her mouth was so full she looked like a mutant red squirrel storing nuts in it’s cheeks.

Taxi tried for a modicum of restraint, but whatever alchemy Flying Iron puts into his delicious speciality was too much; she too succumbed to the desire to gorge.

A few minutes later I was picking my teeth with a toothpick while Taxi made a vain effort to clean her hooves with a napkin. Swift lay on her back, a small, beached, carrot colored whale. The incredible powers of the pegasus’ digestive tract had been defeated at last.

I was in my contemplative mood, playing back a few of the things that’d gone on during the morning. “Alright, before I call it for this evening... kid, could I see your notes?”

There was none of the usual snap or ten-hut in her movements as she patted her vest pockets, then set the notepad on the table and went back to the position on her back with her rear legs in the air. “Oog... sir, please warn me next time...”

“Heh, somepony’s eyes are bigger than their mouth. You’re going to have a fun time on the shitter tomorrow.”

Our driver flicked a seed into my mane. “Don’t be crude.”

I adopted an expression of facetious shock. “Moi? Crude? Coming from miss ‘I’m-gonna-have-mouth-sex-in-public?’”

Taxi didn’t even bother with a reply but patted her full belly. “Totally, totally worth it.” I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the meal or not, but I knew if I asked, I’d get nothing more than an amused smile.

Flipping open the notebook I found page after page of carefully annotations. “Jeez, kid... You’ve got a good eye.”

Swift sluggishly put her hooves behind her head. “I write when I have a spare minute. Do you think it’ll be enough for my report to the Chief tonight?”

“Report to the Chief?” I asked, warily.

“I...” She swallowed sharply then decided the cat was out of the bag. “Sir, Chief Jade asked me to report on our activities.”

“No surprise there.” I dragged myself upright, putting my chin on the table. “I think wisdom dictates you leave out a few essential facts about your heritage, Miss Stella, and how we got our lead. Make something up but please, keep it believable and make it boring if you can. If you tell her the complete truth you’re setting yourself up for a Section 8.”

Swift’s jaw worked soundlessly. “Sir, you want me to lie to the Chief?”

I reached over the table and prodded her cutie-mark. “Do you want to be a cop? You can explain to internal affairs why our first stop was a whorehouse-”

“Night club and escort service!” She insisted.

“Fine, ‘night club and escort service.’ You can explain why we’re helping your family of professional sex workers and part-time ninjas with this spy business without getting in touch with Organized Crime. You can tell them all about your relationship with the deceased’s employer. While you’re at it, tell them about the blackmail and the spy. I’m sure that won’t go up the line and cause someone with clout to call down that dragon-hunt faster than you can say ‘Bad Eyeliner.’ Kid, trust me, what the Chief doesn’t know can’t hurt us. You’re the writer here. Come up with something that won’t get us put on administrative leave pending psychiatric evaluation, or worse, cause the thing we’re trying to prevent.”

Still looking very uncomfortable, Swift glanced at the pen and sword on her hip before slipping into sulky resignation. “I think I can do that, sir.”

I flipped to the page regarding the club security system. “Hmmm... you know, most clubs I’ve been into have maybe a couple of protection spells, but nothing this extensive. Can you explain to me how it works?”

Swift shook her head. “I don’t really know, sir. Most ponies don’t even know there are protection spells in the back rooms, much less that they can be monitored. I only know because Gran... well, she’s chief of security and was always chasing me down if Scarlet and I tried to get into things we shouldn’t have while mom was working.”

I swept my coat free of bits of my dinner. “I know unicorns get a sensation in their horns when moving through magical fields, so we’re likely dealing with at least one. Probably a specialist of some kind.”

Taxi pulled at her lower lip a few times then added, “Well, the spies aside, King Cosmo is what we should be worried about. If he did hire them and they were looking for somepony in particular, then whoever it was either had something he wanted or could provide him with something. He might come off as a thug, but that’s just the surface. He didn’t get where he is by being incautious.”

“And yet he lures Azure Rose, or whatever her name is, out to a major hotel and leaves her dead in an alleyway where anypony can find the body?”

“Does Cosmo sound like the kind of pony to pull a hit himself? He’s at least powerful enough to have ponies for that. Maybe one of them got sloppy?”

“Maybe. Regardless, Rose sounds like she was running from something.” I said, thinking out loud. “Isolationism mixed with loneliness is something usually seen in ponies who’re used to socialization and suddenly find it dangerous. Could easily have been him she was running from.”

Taxi murmured, “The only reason the Jewelers haven’t managed a citywide takeover is the Cyclones. If he were to manage something like eliminating the Stilettos, he might really move up in the family to major kingpin. That or he might just be looking for blackmail material to extort Miss Stella or the customers and not know that the Stilettos are the force behind the survival of the Heights. Either way, King Cosmo is playing with fire.”

There was a worry. While it seemed nopony outside of the Vivarium really knew of the Stilettos’ role in the city power structure, the thought of the Jewelers suddenly owning one of the largest suburbs in the city was pretty nerving by itself. The Cyclone Crew survived largely on raw numbers and youthful bravado; the Jewelers were significantly fewer, but rich and well equipped. Having the Heights under their hoof would give the Jewelers a gigantic recruiting ground, tipping the balance of the underworld entirely. They might even have resources to move out of Detrot and begin to infect other cities.

“Alright, so if we’re handling this ourselves, I want to know everything I can about King Cosmo. Call Telly and have her tap the File Cloud to send down everything you can related to him and ‘Azure Rose.’ Try to keep it quiet if you can. If you tell her to keep it off the books, she’ll keep it off the books.”

Taxi pulled the notebook over, turned back a few pages, and pointed to the notes from the crime scene. “The forensics units report is probably not going to tell us anything we don’t already know, but Slip Stitch will have it.” She said, tapping on the lines detailing the blood stains.

Tugging my tie off I stuffed it into a pocket. “I want to see Slip Stitch first thing, before we go and handle this little errand for the lizard.” My driver groaned loudly; Swift was quickly slipping into a food coma and didn’t notice. I continued, “He’ll have the coroner’s work-up on Jane Pony done by then. I’m hoping and praying we get positive ID from the apartment or the records search. If not, we’re back at square one with a whole pile of fresh problems.”

It was a full half hour before Swift could fly; the night had well and truly set in by the time we found a skyscraper willing to let her use the roof for a take-off. I entertained a momentary worry I was about to see a pegasus misjudge her own maximum flight weight, but she managed a solid take-off with only a bit of wobble before catching a low thermal and sailing out of sight.

****

Once more in the car, Taxi tapped the radio dial and a sweetly sultry mare’s voice spilled out of the speakers.

“-listeners! This is your lady of the waves, your queen, your empress of the evening: Gypsy! Welcome to Ever Free Radio! All the news the newspapers think you’re not fit to know!

“Alright ladies and gentlecolts. It’s that time again! Now, I know ya’ll think I’m some kind of crazed, horny succubus riding the airwaves to satisfy my own ego... well, I’m here to say ‘Yes! Yes, I am!’ Your love and adoration is what keeps me going, my beautiful listeners. I’d get on my knees and kiss every one of your hooves, claws, and toes right here, right now if I could. “

I bumped the seat-back. “Hey, what is this?”

“It’s Gypsy.” Taxi replied. “You haven’t heard of her? She’s a pirate radio station that all the cabbies listen to. She does mostly unfiltered news reports. Mayor Snifter wants her head on a plate after she broke that story last year about his wife getting high as a kite on Beam and running through Celestial Park demanding the trees make dirty love to her. He tried to cover it up and Gypsy was the only one with the whole story.”

“No kidding... that was this pony? She sounds crazy.”

“You’re not wrong.” As she turned up the volume, my ears perked and I sat forward to listen.

“Tonight before we start the evening musical line-up I’ve got yet another Manifesto from those whacky, wicked Cyclones. This’ll be, what? The sixth one we’ve received this month? Those nutters are single-hoofedly keeping the local mail-mare employed.

“Now listeners, normally I wouldn’t deign to put this trash on my show because frankly, these ponies repulse me and should be sterilized with a rusty spoon, but I feel you need... nay, deserve... the truth of what’s out there.

Paper shuffled and the voice coughed then put a hoof over the mic and yelled, “Hey! Where on earth is that stupid thing we got from the Cyclones?”

A male voice came back: “It’s in the bottom of the bird-cage!”

“Ahhh, thanks. Okay, I’ve got it here. Lemme just hit the highlights. There’s a bit of poo on it so I’ll make this short or Copernicus is going to get very testy since I’ve stolen his bathroom.” A canary shrilled in the background.

“Yes, Copernicus, I’ll get you your toilet back in a minute. Here we go! Blah, blah, blah, we’re mighty morons... here, this is the bit I want to read to you.

“We are the Cyclone. We are the oncoming storm which will sweep away the injustices perpetrated against ponykind by the lesser species, the buffalo, the zebras, and the griffins, and bring a new order to Equestria with freedom for all ponykind. We have the weapons, if only we have the will to use them. With lightning and fire, we’ll go on the offensive and there will be no fiend or false friend who will dare oppose us.

"The zebras and their foul, unnatural magics, the griffins and their rigid militarism, and the buffalo and their backwards mysticism will all find new places in this order, but above all they will serve ponykind and no longer their foolish, selfish interests.

“The worst transgressors, the Detrot Police Department, will be dissolved and their criminal syndicate of tax-funded thugs will be hung from the lamp-posts and the tops of buildings to be left to rot for their crimes. They suppress the people! They are the very instrument of oppression.

“We are your future and ladeedaadeedah... it goes on like that for three more pages. Heeere Copernicus! Something for you to urinate on besides my bloody slippers.” There was a sound like a stream of liquid hitting a hot frying pan.

"There’s a good boy. Before you mistake my intention here, I just want to say the only reason I’m giving any air-time to these maniacal cretins is to make a salient point; I’m from Detrot. I was born here and this is my city. I might not have been around during the founding but I damn well appreciate the presence of the other species.

“Griffin mercenaries gave their lives fighting dragons. They threw themselves into the jaws of beasts a hundred times their size to keep us alive so our town could flourish. They helped us lay the groundwork for the PACT.

“The buffalo came hundreds of miles off their normal stomping grounds at Princess Celestia’s behest to stampede the Wilderness flat so we could plant our crops. Their teachings on agriculture let us build a home in some of the harshest land Equestria has to offer. Some even stayed and made our home theirs.

“The zebras, our friends from across the sea, helped us with the first workings of the Shield. They were the seed on which all our research into alchemy was built. If you enjoy your car or your magical lights, you have the zebras to thank.

“We paid them, yes, but when I hear of a poor striped pony mare with a zebra for a mother and a pegasus for a father having half her face kicked in because she dared go out at night in the wrong neighborhood, I feel ashamed! You hear me?! I feel ashamed to call this city mine.

“You ‘Cyclones’ might claim to be champions of the downtrodden, but you’re nothing but a lot of gutless pissants who can’t get it up without stomping some poor mare’s head. I’ve known champions. My mother fought in the Cutie Mark Crusades, and when the dragons sued for peace she got off her war-scooter and she shook claws with them!

“My listeners, you can do better. I wouldn’t want to live in a Detrot without buffalo, zebra, or the griffins. If ever you’re tempted to follow these gormless father-screwing bastards or you level a resentful thought at our friends in their enclaves, remember this; they gave those advantages willingly and died so you would have a chance at life.

“Whatever you might achieve with technology, that’s a debt you’ll never repay. Now, from Luna’s fifteenth return party, this is the song that rung in the night. My mother was friends with the singer and can report first hand there was not a dry eye in the audience.”

The music was an old and beautiful tune about some dumb stallion who fell in love with the moon. Pretty, and just the thing after the kind of day we’d both had. I decided it was as good a time as any to broach a subject that was probably littered with emotional landmines.

“Sweets?”

Taxi swiveled one ear back in my direction and asked sharply: “Do you really want to talk to me about this right now? I’m shagged out, and if you try to interrogate me just to satisfy yourself, we’ll just end up peeved at each other again.”

“Dammit, you don’t even know what I’m going to ask!”

Her contradiction started as a fierce tug on the handbrake. She pulled us at full speed into a hundred and eighty degree turn in a ‘No U-Turn’ zone, and most of my organs tried to slide right into my ankles. “You’re going to ask me why I was such a tall drink of steamy hot piss this morning.” She said, completely certain.

I opened my mouth to rebut then my jaw snapped shut. She was right of course. Even thirty years on, I knew only a tiny percentage of went on in my best friend’s brain, but she could read me like a hundred hoof high billboard.

Chastened, I said replied more gently. “Fine, then we’ll skip the interrogation and the hoofscrews. Sweets, please tell me what’s bothering you.”

For a minute, I was certain she was just going to leave me sitting there chewing my cud or worse, dump me on the side of the road. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d earned a long walk back to my apartment.

When she did speak, she sounded terribly subdued. “You take a look at the calendar when you got off the couch this morning?” She asked.

“I can’t say I did. I’ll say it’s a little disturbing you know where I slept last night.”

“What can I say? You come out looking like somepony tossed you down the stairs and I put two and two together.” She shook out her braid and tapped a bobblehead doll of a lavender unicorn on the dashboard. I’d never bothered to ask about it’s significance, but in times of stress she’d give it a poke for inspiration. “You remember back when your dad died?”

My tongue felt several sizes too large all of a sudden. That was an unexpected turn. I’d been new to the force when my father died. He gave me his gun and six months later, he was gone. It’d been one of the few times in the intervening years I’d seriously considered quitting. It never occurred to me that the event would have affected my yellow friend near as deeply.

“I... yes. You vanished for about three weeks after the funeral. What does this have to do with today?” I murmured, confused. “The date he died was six months ago.”

She lowered her ears. “When bad things happen, my first instinct is to run. Whenever my parents would fight, I’d come over to your place.”

I bobbed my chin affirmatively, warming inside at the memory of many late nights where I’d awoken to Sweet Shine tossing rocks at my window. I usually pulled her in by her forelegs and we’d sit with hot chocolate or a bag of cookies until she was calmed down. After the initial tears, she’d give me one of her big smiles and a hug. Those genuine smiles had become rarer down through the years. I found I missed them.

“Go on.” I said encouragingly.

“The day I lost my cutie marks is coming up. I know I shouldn’t go through life accumulating these terrible anniversaries, but damnit...”

I rested my knees over the drivers seat. “Are you going to finally tell somepony what actually happened? I know the board accepted that load of horse-apples you fed them because you’d lost your handler and you were so covered in bandages you looked like a mummy. I know you better. You were too careful to get ‘made’ when you’re undercover.”

We were nearing my apartment. The evening streets were a comforting embrace into which I could sink and let go of my worries. Death could wait until the morning.

Taxi threw a pensive look at me. I could have sworn she was about to say something but then the accursed peace swept down on her features like a hammer and the brief window was closed again.

“Nevermind. I’ll be fine, Hardy. I just need a few days. I won’t let it affect the work.”

Damn...

****

The remainder of the drive had given me time to reflect.

By the standards of Equestrian policing, things were going well enough. We had a name on the decedent, all of the body parts were in one place, and cause of death was pretty surely nailed down. Those might all seem rather basic to creatures that live in areas of lower ambient magic, but in the areas around the Wilderness I’d seen bodies which were only dead on the basis that they weren’t breathing. Thankfully, zombie-ponies aren’t common, or I’d surely have lost my mind a long time ago; determining the time of the murder is a pain in the flank when witnesses swear they saw the victim walking around three days after they were shot.

Taxi left me outside of my building. I got out and turned to say goodnight, but she’d already blasted off around a bend at near top speed, the cab’s alchemically enhanced engine throwing arcs of arcane energy into the pavement underneath it.

I’d spent too much of the day with Juniper on my mind. Glow’s reminder was about as welcome as the Chief’s. I could practically feel my brain revving up to deliver a one-two punch of bad dreams and shitty sleep.

I turned the key to my apartment, all but bucked open the door, then yanked off my coat and threw it across the chair. The couch was calling, but there were necessities.

I pulled a beer out of the kitchen, hooked it under my front teeth, popped the cap off, then took a deep refreshing swig. It washed the flavor of the office, the Luna-damned sex club, and the gory crime scene out of my muzzle. It wasn’t a great taste, but it was a taste that could be relied upon. Too many uncertainties. Beer is certain.

I decided I needed some more certainty and had a second one, then a third to make sure the second was as sure as it could possibly be. It mixed with the fantastic dinner to produce a pleasing heaviness in the gut. Tomorrow would be another day and probably just as mad as this one had been. Such is life in Equestria.

I slept, and though I woke panting in the middle of the night, I was too drunk by then to remember what terrors my imagination had conjured up.

It was a good night.

Chapter 8: Morgue Party

Chapter 8 : Morgue Party

Ponies are, historically, herbivores. While there have been some disturbing and situational cases where this was not adhered to with zealous vigilance, it's considered an aberration of their evolutionary biology for them to slice into meat.

Over the last six decades with the rising murder rates, drug overdoses, and spontaneous combustions, it's become necessary for some individuals to overcome the reflexive distaste most ponies have for opening layers of dead flesh. The Office of the Coroner had, therefore, become a sort of necessary evil. This is in stark contrast to the greatest griffin coroners, who've occasionally been known to invoke a ritual upon the completion of an autopsy that roughly translates to 'Left Overs.'

Nothing stated here should indicate that good ponies are squeamish about dispensing justice as appropriate. Indeed, many with the appropriate special talents were perhaps too territorial. Even within the various arms of the law, specific departments like Equicide and Organized Crime operated separately from one another. Specialized external bureaus such as the Sentient Construct Liaison (Sometimes bastardized as S.C. or Essy Office) were often charged with more specific tasks; in their case, making sure magically constructed intelligent beings stay in line.

All of these offices were more than happy to jump into a six-way jurisdictional clusterbuck at the drop of a hoof, except with regards to the actual handling of corpses. It's just not a thing most ponies want to do.

The Office of the Coroner, therefore, retained a unique position amongst Detrot's civic bureaucracy, and was afforded quite a bit of leeway for being willing to do what nopony else would. This leeway was a very fortunate thing, because it takes a very special kind of pony to slice into his or her own kind for evidence - and the word 'Special' is a fine gloss that does not even begin to do justice to that particular breed.

--The Scholar

Tap tap tap.

I was dead and in the Ever After. It was a nice place with a wonderful fluffy couch. There were no mobsters trying to destroy suburbs, no sea-serpents, and no unpleasant sensation of my tummy trying to furiously eject all of its contents in a putrid slushy waterfall.

Then came the tapping. The infernal tapping.

Tap tap tap.

My mouth tasted of things best not described. I tried to remember how many beers I’d had. The count on my coffee table was six, but who knew where others might be hiding. They were crafty things, those beers.

With a monumental effort, I eased one eye open and took stock of my body. It wasn’t the best inventory ever taken, nor by the most competent individual, but most of the pieces seemed to be there; four hooves, four legs, head... aw, clouds and sky, head. I’d slept on my side with my cheek on my gun.

Sliding off the couch I made straight for the toilet but stopped halfway there, feeling certain there was something I’d forgotten. My hat. I didn’t take off my hat before laying down. I must have been more tired than I thought.

Tap tap tap.

A large chicken that’d been doused in kerosene and set on fire was flapping around outside my window, rapping against the glass. Or at least, something that looked like one. My blurry vision was inadequate to the task of identifying it, so I decided taking a piss would have to come first and I’d worry later about the mad visions of my new partner knocking on my-

Luna strike me with the moon. Right here, right now.

Swift hung there outside the window, covering her eyes with one leg as she tried to see into the dusty apartment and catch a glimpse of my ruined person. I considered leaving her out there. It was tempting. I thought about shooting at her. Very tempting. In the end, though, I moved over and forcefully shoved the window open.

“Good morning, Sir! I brought bagels!”

Oh, blessed little fuzzy orange angel of kindness!

My partner was back in a freshly pressed uniform, over which she’d laid a combat jacket; She still looked more like she was expecting to quell a riot rather than investigate a murder. Masamane looked like Swift had spent the night spit-shining it to a mirror finish. She pulled a slightly rumpled paper bag from under one leg and thrust it through the window at me. Onion and garlic scented steam still curled from the top. This caused a dilemma; my bowels were shrieking for immediate attention but... bagels!

Eventually, the need to use the crapper won out. Sweeping a few old case-files off the ottoman I pointed at a spot for her to sit.

“Give me ten minutes and keep the bag closed so they don’t get cold!” I ordered.

Once in the bathroom I shut the door and had sweet release. I think I dented the toilet. Hops and barley doth not the kindest morning make.

One look at myself in the mirror convinced me a shower couldn’t wait another day. I’d been merely wretched the day before, but I was now a genuine threat to public hygiene. Stepping into the shower stall, I remembered too late I was still wearing my hat.

****

It was more like twenty minutes when I stepped out, rubbing my mane with a towel that could approximate clean if one were to look at it from a distance. Tooth brushing, a bit of personal care, and some quick drags of a brush through my mane and l felt immeasurably better. No hangover for once, or at least, not that pulse pounding variety with the overwhelming nausea.

Back in the living room, Swift had cream cheese on her nose and was absorbed in a trashy novel. She raised her head as I came in. “Wow, you look better... um... sir. Taxi said I should fly by and get some bagels from the place down on Ninth street.” I was so hungry by then, I barely noticed her otherwise irritating insistence on ‘sir.’ She'd just have to get over that in her own time.

“Food. Now.”

She passed me the bag and I tore into it with the viciousness of a tiger. It was a gruesome sight. They were the chewy, slightly sweet variety with bits of diced onion. My favorite.

“Mmm... thanks, kid. Where is Taxi? Why isn’t she up here?” I asked, flicking crumbs off my chest as I finished off a second helping of tasty bread.

“Well, she went by the records office, and now she’s downstairs sitting on the car. She said something about ‘toxic environmental hazards.’” Swift replied, reaching into her vest and pulling out something brown from a tiny bag. She bit off a piece of it and chewed, letting out a noise like a purring cat.

“Is... uh... that-” I tried to formulate the words; they were simple words made difficult only by the fact that they were components of a question I didn’t really want to ask. “-meat?”

Realizing what she’d just done, she hastily pushed the baggie back into her flak jacket’s pocket. “Um... yes... Sir, I found this really neat griffin store near my house and it was so good I wanted to try some different kinds and they promised me it wasn’t anything thinking because I didn’t want to upset Taxi and I was really nervous so the shopkeeper gave me a sample-”

Dammit Sykes.

I stemmed the flood of words by putting a hoof on her chest. “Alright, alright, kid. I don’t want to know.”

“But sir-”

“I really don’t want to know. What you eat is your business. I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t do it in front of Taxi, or we’re both going to end up enduring a long lecture series on predators and karmic retribution.”

“Yes, sir...”

We ate in an easy quiet, me mechanically devouring and Swift with her nose buried in her novel.

I felt suddenly and quite unaccountably guilty for having her in my apartment in that condition. She didn’t seem much bothered by the clutter, though, so I did my best to let it go.

Juniper was a neat freak. Back in the day I’d kept the place in a semi-livable state for him. Many nights when we were in the depths of a case we’d found ourselves too tired to go on and had fallen where we stood, ending up piled together on my bed or the couch. Waking up together was always a joy and we’d spend our mornings... doing much the same thing as the tiny pegasus and I were then.

A pinch of guilty betrayal quivered in my intestines. A bag of bagels? Was the price of my partner’s memory so low? I wished he were there to help me sort out this pile of manure. Taxi might make a great part-time therapist, but there are some places neither of us had ever been willing to let the other touch.

Ugh, chaos potentially reigning in the streets, and I’m getting self-piteous over bagels, I thought, kicking myself in the mental hind end.

Swift caught my frown. “Sir? Is something wrong?”

I covered it with a grin. “Nope. You did good, kid. Best thing for the cop mind is a cop breakfast.”

****

A half hour later, with breakfast concluded and the day officially begun, we climbed into the car and took off in the direction of the city morgue. The weather was fair for once, and I found myself humming something my mother used to sing me - and sometimes Sweet Shine when she was over - before sleep. Dad would stand in the doorway as she knelt beside the bed with a funny, almost sad expression, but to me, it was a song of comfort.

My driver was not comforted. She seemed unusually flustered; She kept checking the clock on the dashboard then putting her hoof on a stack of documents on the passenger seat like she was making sure they were still there.

“Sweets, quit looking like you stole something. You’re making me jumpy.” I said.

“Technically, I think I might get a plea deal for ‘felony borrowing.’ Telly snuck these to me on the sole condition I get them back to her before midday, so do your reading now because if they aren’t back then, Organized Crime is going to have a jurisdictional aneurysm,” she answered, steering with her teeth as she grabbed the files and tossed them into the backseat with me.

“Midday? You aren’t coming with us to visit your Favorite Colt in the Whole World?” I said, smirking at the back of her head as I gathered the papers up in my hooves and began leafing through them.

“I don’t need that ridiculous stallion giving me a headache this morning.” Taxi replied curtly.

Swift nosed in her direction and mouthed the words ‘Favorite colt?’ at me.

I conspiratorially leaned over and said in a voice just loud enough for Taxi to hear, “Oh, my dear Miss Taxi here has a love affair with Mister Slip Stitch, the city coroner.”

The cabbie savagely tore the car around a corner so fast my head slammed against the window. Spots danced in front of my eyes. Somehow Swift had kept her spot, leaning into the rocking of the vehicle almost unconsciously now that she’d gotten used to the constant motion. She was even still noshing on a piece of that unidentifiable jerkied flesh and listening intently.

“Mister Hardy had better watch himself unless he wants a quick trip to Unconscious Land where the Headache Fairies roam.” Taxi warned, pulling us back into our lane. “That pony is out of mind and needs his bloody brain examined. I’d suggest it to him but he’d probably just ask me to hold a lamp and a mirror so he could do it himself. He has no respect for the dead.”

I rubbed the fresh bump on my noggin. “Slip Stitch has immense respect for the dead! Enthusiasm, even. He just has... an... odd way of looking at death that can be a little... off-putting.”

“Off-putting? Off-putting?! The last time I was there he gave me ice cream that’d been cooling in somepony’s chest cavity!” Taxi yowled, bouncing us up on the curb and nearly ending a newspaper vendor.

I snickered at Taxi and replied, “Yeah, but it was the best ice cream you’d ever had and you know it!” I turned back to Swift. “Anyway, Slip Stitch handles Detrot and most all of the surrounding countryside. Best coroner around. You’ll see when you meet him.”

I’d neglected to mention that Slip Stitch was the only coroner in the entire region. That might seem a bit odd considering the high death toll inherent in living on one of the Equestrian borderlands, but then, nopony I knew had actually seen him sleep.

Pawing through the short stack of case files I noticed something. Or rather, a distinct lack of something. “There’s nothing on Azure Rose in here. Didn’t you call records?” I asked.

“I did.” She answered, sounding irritated. “I called records, the tax office, and even the Department of Magical Vehicles. They’ve got nothing on that name, her cutie-mark, or her colors. Did you know you’re part of the second smallest minority in Equestria? Ponies with grey pelts are almost as rare as alicorns.”

“I did not, in fact, know that. Lets see this ‘King Cosmo’ fella...”

The file was old and weathered with a coffee stain on it. A single ancient, yellowed mug-shot showed a hulking earth stallion with a serious expression. The colors were so washed out, his original shade was indistinguishable. A separate photo of his cutie-mark was included; It looked like a wooden hammer or maul of some kind.

“I thought he’d never been busted for anything?” I asked. “Why do we have a mug shot?”

“Oh, he’s been arrested. We never got a conviction.” Taxi affirmed. “That’s the only photo we’ve got and it’s about fifteen years old.”

King Cosmo’s criminal history was extensive, but not one iota of it was confirmed by anything but speculation and circumstantial evidence. Investigations had been run on Cosmo since he was in his teens for everything from racketeering to drug trafficking to conspiracy to commit murder and nothing, not one single thing, had stuck.

Cosmo’s rise to power in the Lo Zoccolo Rosso crime family was barely documented, but seemed to indicate he’d possibly had something to do with the mysterious death of the former leader. He operated largely as a legitimate businesspony, owning several cafes and restaurants including, I was surprised to discover, one of my favorite bars.

His father was serving a many year sentence in Tartarus Correctional Facility for apparently murdering Cosmo’s mother during a domestic dispute. I noticed a scribble in Telly’s horn-writing that said ‘Possible sibling?’ then a psychological profile. Stubborn, pragmatic, issues related to family. Sounded familiar.

“What is this about a sibling?” I asked, holding up the sheet so Taxi could see it in the rear-view mirror.

“His brother apparently died of ‘shock’ or something when their mother was killed. Cosmo spent some time in an orphanage before joining the Red Hoof as a runner and worked his way up from there. Now he runs them. Not directly of course and not provably. Kinda impressive how thorough this guy is.”

Rolling down the window to get some fresh air I plucked out a thick sheaf of information labeled ‘Red Hoof’ which seemed to mostly consist of busts on their members. Careful group. Few convictions.

Taxi saw the paper I was studying and said, “He’s the one who made Lo Zoccolo Rosso a drug family. Fired all the unicorns and added drug distribution. They think he’s making his own but nopony can prove it. He’s got some very expensive magical protection on his place. What little monitoring they’ve been able to pull off gives no indication the Red Hoof is into smuggling, so Organized Crime is assuming there’s a factory somewhere.”

I turned a page and came to the ‘conjectures.’ This is a sheet of information that goes into every case that is mostly just a list of thoughts cops have about the individual or event. It’s often the most useful thing in any file, and for police work is utterly essential. The first few lines were simple connections and inferences. His brother’s death apparently related in some way to why he didn’t like unicorns. Below that was a raft of disparate bits of consideration and a dozen numbers listed as references.

“What are these?” I asked, raising them so she could see.

“As far as I can tell from the few I could find, those are hospital cases in which the victim was a unicorn who lost their horn.”

Swift made an ‘ick’ face as she opened one of the hospital files. There was a picture there of a very young stallion with soft eyes and a stunned expression. A bandage was wrapped around his head, jutting out from the jagged remains of his broken horn.

“Ugh, how could anypony do that?” She asked.

I pointed at the cover of her book, which had a picture of a mare covered from head to hoof in blood wielding an axe in her teeth.

“You read those garbage novels about villains doing unspeakable things and this surprises you?” I asked, incredulous.

When she replied, I had to lean closer to hear her. “That’s fiction. This just feels so wrong...”

“Well, yeah. We’re dealing with assault and murder here. What the hay were you expecting?”

The pegasus raised her right wing and gave it a flap, stirring a gust that knocked me half onto one ear in the unstable twisting of the speeding cab. “I... don’t know, sir. I read case histories in training. They never felt like this. I knew it would be like this when I started, but it still felt like I was reading a bunch of... stories.”

A worry burgeoned in the back of my mind as I realized an unpleasant subtext to what Swift was saying; she’d drawn a line in the dirt between what she read and what she saw. Things she read weren’t real. All of them. That was a scary thought.

It was scary because cautious investigation is learned most safely from the mistakes of other ponies, and you have to take those mistakes seriously if you want to learn anything from them. Case files are, if anything, a history of the mistakes cops make in getting to the truth.

The job of turning her into a useful enforcer of the law was getting more interesting day by day.

****

Most ponies think of the city morgue as a place to tuck away the dead out of sight and out of mind. There are few gleeful thoughts associated with a place whose sole purpose is to process bodies. Our city's idiosyncratic chief pathologist was loudly and proudly not ‘most ponies.’

In the early days of Detrot up to the end of the Crusades, the morgue had once been a confection and pâtisserie factory. It was a relic of that era of hypervigilant construction, and thus was built according to the codes of the time which dictated function over form.

Whatever mad bastard designed it had gone one step farther. While there were attempts in the past to demolish it as the need for fresh room to build became more pressing, nopony had succeeded; short of calling in the Princesses themselves, it was doubtful any being alive ever would. The enchanted concrete had resisted all comers. For ten years City Hall maintained a bounty on the building’s annihilation, but at last, it was declared a historical site, and the freezers and fridges turned into the city morgue.

Only the original designer could say for certain, in the recesses of his or her possessed and heavily sugared mind, why the building had needed to be so durable. Why would a bakery ever need to survive a dragon attack?

****

The drive was through one of the oldest parts of the city, dating back to around Luna’s return. Structures became more squat and boxy with fewer bits of unnecessary flash. We passed over more ‘historic’ cobblestone streets and through very narrow alleys where the the shops crowded in on either side. Arrow slits, pegasi landing strips, and archaic unicorn defense platforms still decorated the walls and roofs.

All at once, the buildings seemed to stop dead at some architect’s secret line in the dirt, as though ashamed to be seen too close to the monstrosity which lorded over a parking lot that might as well be registered with its own postal code.

The morgue looked like nothing so much as an upturned lump of ice-cream laying on the tarmac, having been spilt by a titanic foal who’d presumably gone and wept to his mother until she bought him a second scoop. The dome was ferociously, viciously, ecstatically pink. Protuberances presumably made to look like chocolate chips jutted out randomly from its surface. The only structure that might have rivaled it as a stronghold was The Castle itself.

A sign over the entrance declared the building to be the ‘Detrot City Legendary Confectionery Celebratory Cemetery Preparatory!’ in twenty hoof-tall letters painted in all the colors of the rainbow.

A smaller, magically lit sign hung underneath, flashing on and off: ‘Ice Cream Factory Tours Every Other Day!’ and under that: ‘Magical Mystery Morgue Tours! Weekends Only! Bring The Whole Family!’

****

Taxi’s shoulders hunched higher and higher the closer we go to the dome. Her mouth was twisted into an expression so sour, it was as though she’d been sucking on raw sewage.

Pulling into a parking spot across from the door, which was done up to look like the mouth of a smiling pink pony, she yanked the parking brake so hard I thought it might come off. All mocking aside, I was reasonably sure she’d find a way to beat me to death with my own spine if I gave her any more shit about coming with us.

Swift hopped out of the window and nibbled on her pinions until they were in order then sat expectantly while I heaved myself out the other side. Taxi hit a button on the dash and the window rolled itself down.

“Hardy, I... would you... would you bring me his report? Please?” She asked, her eyes pleading.

“Sure, Sweets.” I replied, tousling her motley mane. Her eyes filled with relief. “But you owe me some backup the next time I’m conducting an interview. I’ll want your full perceptions. Got me?”

Her eyes narrowed in frustration as she warred with her own curiosity, but she soon gave me a quick nod. As I was pulling my leg back, she poked me below the knee which sent tingling agony right through my toe. I danced back from the car, kicking my hoof as I tried to get feeling back. It was a worthwhile reminder of who could cripple who if I pushed too far.

As if to drive home the point, she gunned the engine, blasting hot sparks all over my fetlocks; then she was gone. I smiled to myself and headed towards the morgue’s front doors, entering the Lair of Slip Stitch.

****

Swift pushed open the door in front of me, then stopped so fast I almost ran into her rear end. I peered around her, then let out a noise halfway between a laugh and a groan.

We’d come in on the remains of one of Stitch’s famed ‘Morgue mixers.’ They were rather sparsely attended by the government officials and celebrities he had a tendency to send invitations to, but that never seemed to much bother him.

The lobby looked like that of a doctor’s office, albeit one after a party hosted there by drunk twelve-year-olds. Limp streamers and glitter spilled over every inch, swirling in the breeze coming in with us. My nose wrinkled at the cloying smell of slightly stale cake frosting. There are so many worse things this room could have smelled like, however, so I considered myself grateful.

A mess of rumpled viridian colt wearing a frat-house t-shirt snored on one of the plastic couches, an empty bottle clutched in each foreleg. Swift started to shake him, but I tapped her side and shook my head. “You think we’re going to get anything out of him? Come on.”

Swift moved along the wall, examining the dozens of black and white pictures of famous ponies, standing right there in the very place my partner was, in poses they’d each made famous. They all had one distinguishing feature in common, aside their fame: They were all dead.

I stepped over a stack of party hats and banged on the metal grate over the reception desk. There was no answer. The button which normally said ‘Call’ had the words ‘Press Me For A Party’ scrawled over it in crayon.

Before I could stop her, my partner had pressed it. I hopped back as a blast of balloons and confetti fell from the ceiling followed by a short tune from a kazoo band that rang through the entire building. She was plastered from nose to tailtip in bits of paper shrapnel, standing there quivering with wide eyes.

“Kid, we’re going to have at talk at some point about buttons. Generally if they say ‘Press me’ you shouldn’t press them. The same thing applies to big, red, and shiny. In fact, why don’t you just ask me before you push any buttons at all?”

Swift’s ears turned red and she began trying to comb her feathers clean again.

The speaker on the wall buzzed and popped, then a shy, feminine voice said, “Hello?”

I pressed the talk button. Thankfully, there wasn’t a second load in the miniature party blaster. “Hey, Thalassemia, we’re here to see Stitch. You wanna let us in?”

“D-d-detective H-hardy? Oh, um... sure! C-come right down!” The voice’s stutter made her a little hard to understand, but she’d perked right up when she realized who it was. A buzzer sounded and the elevator, which had been disguised by an elaborate painting of a green alligator in a party hat, opened.

I yanked Swift back a second before she stepped into the lift. Strolling over to the unconscious pony on the sofa I tugged one of his bottles away from him and tossed it into the tiny box. A second explosion sprayed the interior with more multi-colored bits of paper.

“You’ve really got to be careful going into unknown territory.” I said. “Even the best officer with a gun can easily get herself turned into a fine goo by a stupid trap a foal could set.”

Swift kicked at a heap of confetti and said huffily, “I didn’t expect to have to use storming tactics going to a public office, sir!”

“This is Detrot, kid. We’re the police. We handle all the insanity that doesn’t come with body-length sharp teeth. Other ponies can afford to be a little complacent, but that doesn’t mean you can be. Take for granted, no matter where you are, that you’re in some brand of danger.”

I went in ahead of her and the doors of the elevator shut. The descent was slow, and the box shook, rattled, and creaked on its ropes.

Swift fished around in her vest, pulled out something small and green, and popped it into her lips. A spicy, sweet scent filled the space.

“What’s that?” I asked.

She stuck her tongue out, briefly displaying the lozenge. “It’s ginger candy, sir. My mom used to give them to me when I got airsick.”

“Airsick? I didn’t even know pegasi got airsick.”

Pulling out another piece she flipped it to me. “Well... I got over that years ago, but I figured they’d work for my other problem...” Corpses. Right.

All the bagels on top of the beer had produced a slightly upset gurgle in my belly, so I popped the candy into my mouth. It was surprisingly tart, and it only took a few seconds of sucking on it before I felt my stomach begin to settle.

“Huh, that’s amazing. Thanks.”

We’d been descending for a long time but then, no surprise, it was a very long way down. The sub-basements of most old structures contained a bunker of some description. As per the rest of the building, the creator had decided to take that idea one step farther.

Something niggled at the back of my mind. A piece of essential information was missing from this picture. I patted my jacket, making sure all of the things were in place. I checked my gun. I looked at Swift. Ahhh...

“Minor warning about something you might see-...” I started.

“I think I’ll be okay today. Yesterday was just a bad day.” She interrupted, giving me a confident grin.

“No, this is something else you really need to know-”

“I’ll be fine, sir.”

As I was about to insist, the door dinged and Swift stepped out - straight into the paws of a pony-sized hamster in a lab-coat. Everything seemed to freeze for a moment as she found herself nose to whiskers with the massive rodent.

They both let out a collective squeal of alarm as pegasus fell one direction and the hamster, who was only slightly larger than she was, sprawled in the other. There was a scrabble of claws and hooves on the polished floors as they tried to right themselves.

The hamster managed to get up first, running behind a water-cooler and peeking out fearfully. My partner was kicking her rear leg again and again, trying to get her gun to load, not realizing the strap had slipped off when she fell. I grabbed her tail in my teeth and dragged her back into the elevator, putting a hoof on her trigger’s strap so it was forced out of her muzzle.

“Kid! Come on, stop! What’s wrong with you?!”

Her bright blue-green eyes were a little wild as she shrieked: “They’ve drugged me! They’ve drugged me! I’m seeing things!” She struggled, flailing her legs against my chest until I gave her a good shake. She seemed to have forgotten her wings were probably strong enough to take my head off. Thank the Princess for small favors.

“Kid, relax. Nopony drugged you. That’s Stitch’s assistant. The one I was just trying to warn you about?” I said, releasing her a bit so she could get up.

Swift lay there, her breathing erratic. “Sir... I thought I saw a big mouse...”

“You’re fine-”

“No, sir, you don’t understand... I saw a mouse! A big one!”

“She’s not a mouse.” I said flatly. “Thalassemia, come out here.”

The hamster was still hiding, one paw clutching her lab-coat to her throat while the other shook uncontrollably with the urge to bolt. Tentatively, she took a few hopping steps away from the safety of her watercooler. Swift took one look at her, then began immediately trying to grab her gun bit again.

“It’s an Essy! Sir, let me up! I’ve got to shoot it before it hurts anypony!” Her frantic shouting was not doing much for the hamster’s shyness. Nor were the pegasus’ eyes, which held nothing but frighteningly animal aggression.

I put a restraining hoof on one of her wing-joints; she froze in place as I said very slowly, “Swift, Thalassemia is a pony just like you or me. She’s not a magical construct, and this isn’t PACT. Besides, not all the Essies you run into out there are going to try to eat your face. It’s fine. Calm down.”

At this, sanity slipped back into my partner’s eyes. “Why... why does she look... like that?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” I asked pointedly, releasing her wing and letting her up. Whatever psychosis had momentarily gripped her seemed to dissipate almost as quickly as it had come. I brushed it aside as stress. Essy’s weren’t really popular with PACT troopers, and I’d seen some pretty strong reactions to Thalassemia over the years. Swift’s might have taken the cake, but it was a reasonably well chewed cake by then.

Getting her hooves under her, my partner stood, breathed in, then examined the hamster. The coroner’s assistant wasn’t a terribly threatening sight once one got past the fluff, paws, and her uncanny proportions. She was light brown, with a kind face and a series of full-body tics and twitches that made her seem like she was going to dash off at any moment; habits she’d normally expressed even in the presence of someone who hadn’t frantically tried to shoot her on sight. Her labcoat was obviously cut for a stallion of a much wider frame, but while she seemed pudgy, most of that was excess hair.

“H-h-hello...” She stammered, holding out one leg.

Swift stared at it a long, awkward time then politely bumped her hoof against the hamsters claws with a little click. “Um...hi?”

They both stood there fidgeting; neither of them seemed to know what to say. Pulling a gun on someone can make things awkward.

“Thalassemia... why don’t you tell my partner here why you’re a hamster?” I prompted.

“Oh...I...I a-ate p-p-p...” She stopped, took a breath, and rushed the words out. “I ate poison joke!” Her cone shaped ears flopped down against her skull.

The childhood scourge of anypony dumb enough to walk through it, poison joke had long since spread from the Everfree Forest along with ponies. It was usually harmless, but very annoying. Whatever foul sorcerer back in history had decided to give a plant a sense of humor really needed a good kick in the brain box.

My partner’s expression turned to one of sympathy as she asked, “I thought that was easy to cure?”

Thalassemia shook her head, her whiskers bouncing. “M-most of the time. It’s worse if you e-e-eat it. When I was an intern I-I g-got lost when I was conducting research for the doctor o-o-outside the c-city and g-got hungry. I h-had some b-blue flowers. W-w-when I g-got back they c-couldn’t get it o-out of my system.”

“So you turned into a hamster?” Swift asked, her eyebrows up on her forehead.

Thalassemia nodded, turning towards the hallway, which was plastered with posters from old parties dating back almost to the Luna’s return. “It’s not so bad. I s-s-pend a fortune on sh-shampoo though.” She allowed herself a small quirk of the lips at her own joke. “The doctor...t-took me in. H-he’s waiting for you.” She swept a paw towards a pair of swinging double doors at the end of the corridor.

Swift touched the hem of Thalassemia’s lab-coat as though making sure she was real. “What exactly were you studying then this happened?”

The hamster stuck her paws in her pockets and sighed. “Rodent life-cycles.”

****

Thalassemia ducked under a nearly invisible wire crossing the hall at chest height. I pointed it out to Swift and we followed suit. No telling what enthusiastic greeting that could have been hooked up to.

Pushing open the swinging doors we passed into the morgue.

My brain failed completely to properly process what was going on beyond that portal. I made out a disgustingly stained night coat, strange music, and a pair of taut, bouncing blue buttocks. Said buttocks were attached to a wildly gyrating pony standing on his rear legs whilst spinning across the room on an empty gurney. A half dozen corpses covered in sheets dotted the room.

He was singing into a femur. Very, very badly.

“Thiiiiiis horse is a corpse, of course, of course

And no one can talk to a horsey corpse

So then, of course, your one recourse

Is to look inside the dead!

“Cut open the horse and there’s your source

for evidence you will need, in force!

Even though it may sound coarse,

Let’s open up her head!”

I put one knee over my eyes and slowly allowed my brain to compensate for the surrealism. Interacting with Stitch was a trial and those who’ve been required to do it for years make special allowances in their psyche for the things they’re likely to see on a given day.

Swift had developed no such defense mechanism. I heard a soft whimper, then turned to see her toppled onto her side, her eyes tightly shut and her legs drawn up under her in the fetal position. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about how poorly I’d handled the sights, sounds, and smells at the Vivarium.

Doctor Slip Stitch noticed us as his gurney/stage swung back around and a crazed grin spread across his face; of course, any grin on those features, surrounded as they were by a shock of white mane that stuck out in all directions like he’d been recently electrocuted, looked pretty psychotic.

Leaping nimbly off the rolling bed, he tossed his ‘microphone’ into a bin of old bones underneath the rows of meat-lockers and clapped his hooves together, still standing on his hind legs. The music stopped and he pointed at our rodent guide with one hoof.

“Thalassemia! Mark! We show a four percent increase in the rate of decay across all subjects with the application of music with vocals as opposed to music without. This. Is. Stupendous!” He announced, smacking his cutie-mark to punctuate each of the last three words. It was a strange amalgam of a pony skull with two ice-cream cones crossed under it. I’d never asked him how he’d gotten it; I like what little mental stability I have left.

His assistant dutifully pulled a tiny scratch card from her coat and annotated the figure. “Yes, d-doctor. I must ch-check the progress of ex-experiment twenty eight. D-d-do you n-need me r-right now?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s fine, my girl! I shall call if I have need!” Thalassemia retreated to the door, gave me one last demure smile, then she was gone.

It was impossible to put an age on Slip Stitch just from looking at him; He might have been in his twenties or his fifties. He was in the sort of supreme physical condition one expects in a Wonderbolt, despite living in a sweets factory. Effervescent energy just radiated off him.

“Good morning, Detective Boiled!” He greet me, dropping onto all fours and grasping my hoof in both of his. “It is morning, yes? Sometimes I lose track. I wondered when you might toodle down to my demesne again. I take it you’re here related to that mystery filly that ‘dropped in’ yesterday?”

Tugging off my hat I set it on an empty gurney. “Yup. We’re just stopping in for your report. We...” I stopped as I realized the second part of ‘we’ was still curled up on the tiles with her wings over her head as though waiting for somepony to kick her.

“Kid... Oh, come on!” I groaned unhappily, moving over to her side.

Her eyes came up and she tried to focus on me. “Sir?... What’s going on? I thought I saw a... giant hamster...”

There are worse responses to a first meeting with Stitch and Thalassemia than flat-out denial, but it wasn’t going to help our chances of catching responsible parties.

“You did. I need you here and thinking.” I said firmly as I took her by the mane, pulling her up onto all fours and forcing her to look at me. “You have to keep it together today. This is important. Swift, do you hear me? I need you. Azure Rose or whatever her name really is... she needs you.”

These words took a bit to register in my weirdness addled pegasus, but when they did, she scrunched her face together and gave herself a rough shake. “Sorry, sir. I just needed a moment. I’m... I’m ready now.” She sounded steadier. Not much, but it was a fine piece of recovery. She pulled her notepad and a fresh pencil out of her combat jacket, taking a second to stroke one of the armor plates as though to make certain it were still as impenetrable as ever.

I patted her leg then stood back.

“Good. I want you to meet Doctor Slip Stitch.”

Stitch had waited with ineffable patience while my partner got herself into shape. He strode forward in an almost gentlecoltly fashion, his energy not diminished, but momentarily contained as he gave her a gracious hoof-shake. “It’s lovely to make your acquaintance, Detective Swift. I read your report. You have quite the flair for the dramatic.

“You... you read my report?” She asked, sitting straighter.

“Yes, I did! I enjoyed it thoroughly.” He swung a hoof sideways and picked up a clipboard which had been laying on the nearest body’s stomach. It held a few pages of Swift’s neat, tight script, the first of which he flipped back as he went on, “I am always quite pleased to discover a pony with an aptitude for story telling. I was able to sift out what I needed from the obfuscations and dramatizations. Now then, let us see what we have, shall we?”

Trotting to the cold-storage unit, he pulled it open and slid a sheet covered body out, then tugged back the cover and revealed our miss Jane Pony. Swift was already writing, her eyes locked on the paper.

“Shall I just give you a run down then?” Stitch asked, waving his hoof over the body. “This was one of the most impressively dead ponies I’ve ever come across.”

“Impressively dead? How do you mean?” I asked, tilting my head so I could see Jane Pony’s face right way up. She was still beautiful, even laid out like that. Such a shame...

Stitch’s excitement began to ramp back up as he listed what sounded like a Neigh’s Anatomy worth of damage. “Broken jaw, shattering of her sixth through eighteenth rib on the left side and fifth through sixteen on the right, fractures in... well, it would be shorter to list what doesn’t have a fracture! Punctures in both lungs from the ribs -” He pointed at each spot. “- and all of that is just from the fall, which I am labeling ‘cause of death,’ although it only won the race by a nose! There was the blood loss from her horn, which was probably making her woozy by the time she fell. Lovely thing, this! Quite the sticky puzzle!”

Swift made a faint sound of distress, holding her hoof over her lips as she forced herself to examine the filly’s corpse and take note of each injury.

“You’re saying there was more? What was competing with all that?” I asked.

“Let me see... where’d I put that toxicology report?” He mused, head swivelling about for a few seconds before he shouted towards the door. “Assistant! Where is that blood work-up on this dear child?”

The hamster poked her nose in and indicated one of the row of ice-cream freezers lining the wall. “It’s un-under Miss Ambient’s l-leg. Th-the one y-you were keeping.”

“Ahhh, thank you, dear Assistant!” Opening the freezer, Stitch shifted something heavy that didn’t bear thinking about, and retrieved a second clipboard. While Thalassemia ducked back out, he passed the clipboard to me and waited while I pretended to look through the miles of completely meaningless jargon.

“Give me the idiot’s version.” I said, finally.

Stitch took the report, pushed back several pages, then returned it. Printed across the top of the displayed page was, helpfully, ‘Idiot’s version.’

“Thanks.” I ran a hoof down the list of substances. “Love poison? Ace?”

The coroner pulled his night gown off and tossed it over a dead body. “Eeyupa-doodle! I’ve been seeing that mixer more and more in unlicensed sex workers. They use a low dose of love poison as an aphrodisiac, and the Ace numbs sensation, slows heart rate, and keeps swelling down.”

“What is Ace?” Swift asked, re-adjusting her pencil with her tongue. “I mean, I know they said in school it was ‘bad,’ but in training we were mostly grilled on drug symptoms and not so much on their effects.”

“It’s a painkiller of last resort.” I replied, shaking my head at the creative iniquities of the world. “Real strong, real addictive. Legal when a doctor gives it to you, but otherwise it’s too abusable and dangerous for the public. It’ll kill you if you overdose or on general principle if you use it long enough. Nasty shit.”

Stitch stroked Jane Pony’s cheek lightly. “Our filly had never used either one before. Her circulatory system was having one heck of a party for a first timer.”

“How do you mean?” I inquired,

“I mean this was her first dose.” He explained. “She took a real doozy too! I show absolutely no signs of long term addiction. She was clean as an trombone right up until yesterday.”

Swift stopped writing for a second. “Doctor, don’t you mean ‘clean as a whistle’?”

Slip Stitch contemplated that, his deranged mane seeming to swirl in a non-existent wind. “Nope, pretty sure she was trombone spotless!”

I waved a hoof at my partner for her to let it go. She shrugged and went back to taking notes. My eye caught on something at the bottom of the simplified toxicology report, because it had a gold star sticker beside it. “What is this stuff?”

The doctor didn’t even have to look. “Ahhh, yes, our mystery swill! Such a tasty treat, that! That collective of chemicals has exactly one use I know of; zebra religious rituals. They’re a form of magical sedative. I couldn’t tell you exactly what they do but I’d have put fine bits on her being right out of her mind. There’s enough in her system to give a manticore a bad trip!”

“I take it you haven’t made I.D. on the body either?” I asked after a brief hesitation.

“Nopers, and I called around quite a lot. Even this darling little filly who’s enamored of me in Canterlot District records office. She has the cutest-”

Before he could describe anything that would leave me unable to sleep for several weeks, I swept a hoof in the air, trying to wipe away any thoughts before they could form. “Facts please. Stick to facts.”

“No ID - Not a whit! Our sweet filly is a real sneaky creature. Lemme just say... that’s not the best part!” He grasped the sheet and yanked it off of her torso, revealing blood stains and her disturbingly misshapen rib-cage. A long autopsy cut ran up her side - but the red lividity that should have surrounded the cut was absent.

Swift began taking quick, short breaths as she tried to keep herself under control.

“Kid, you don’t need to watch this bit...” I murmured.

“I’m... I’m okay, sir. Really.” She assured me unconvincingly, while doing only a slightly better job of assuring herself.

“Now, this will stun and amaze! I assume you know the proper color of a ponies internal organs?” Stitch said, with the air of a ringmaster at a circus.

I raised one eyebrow at him. “Various shades of red and purple, yeah. Why?”

Picking up a long metal tool in his teeth, Stitch prodded the autopsy sewing, prying it open a few inches so we could see into her chest.

“Since yesterday, her organs, her hemoglobin... even the hemoglobin in blood which had already left her body have all... well, you can see!”

Swift gagged and swooped off towards a garbage can in the corner, standing there with her mouth half open, her chest spasming. Whatever magic was in those ginger candies kept her from losing her bagels, but there was no power in Equestria that would hold in those dry heaves. I merely stared in appropriately morbid fascination.

Ponies are inherently colorful creatures, present company excepted, and even I wouldn’t want to lose the golden perfection of my the scales on my flank. I’ve always taken a certain comfort that even in death, nothing can take those from me. I never understood how Taxi coped with losing hers.

It was like somepony had taken a picture of Jane Pony’s entrails with a very old camera. Nothing inside a body should look like that. Her lungs, heart, and stomach were all the same drab shade of ashen grey as her pelt.

“Sweet Celestia. What could do that?” I asked, my pulse racing. The murder itself had just gotten off its hooves to rival the underworld politics for 'most interesting aspect' of the case.

Stitch set aside his tool, tugged the incision closed, then dragged the sheet over it.

“It’s a juicy little conundrum, don’t you think?” He replied, tucking the cloth underneath her. “I am assuming it’s something in that hoof-licking good cocktail in her bloodstream, but couldn’t tell you what. I’m amazed she could walk, much less run. She must have been out of her mind. Oh, there’s one more thing that may be of interest.”

Folding back the shroud from Jane Pony’s rear end he swirled his hoof over the only spot of color on her body; the maroon crescent section of her cutie mark. His unnatural grin said he was waiting for me to ask him the obvious question.

“Fine, tell me why her cutie mark didn’t lose color along with the rest of her.” I said, sardonically.

He bounced up onto his toes and his rear legs did an excited little dance. “It did! This moon isn’t part of her cutie-mark! It’s some type of mystical tattoo. Right down to the fur follicles. Her talent is only the three gems and this stem.” Tracing the curve of the stem and tapping each gem, he hummed a jaunty tune.

“Come again? I thought even the Academy Arcanum hadn’t come up with a way to make cutie-marks appear before their time.”

“They haven’t! It doesn’t represent her talent, and I suppose that her cutie-mark had already appeared may have allowed for some alteration. It might be a dye of some kind I haven’t seen before, but whatever it may be, it’s quite impressive, don’t you think?” He made no attempt to disguise just how cheerful the enigma made him. Even Stitch must get tired of seeing the same old shootings and disembowelments.

“How can you treat this so... so lightly?She’s dead...” Swift muttered just loud enough to be heard, hugging her trash can for dear life.

Slip Stitch’s ever present grin grew and he tilted one ear towards her as he reared up and put both hooves on the tray. “Oh my heartful little wing-flapper! One day you will be dead too. Haven’t you heard? Life is amazing! Why then, should death not be? I am a student of the incredibleness of dying and therewith the beauty of being alive!” His mirth seemed unquenchable as he looked back at the corpse of the pretty filly. “I must say though, this one is a real humdinger. She didn’t die well.”

Swift, having momentarily conquered her stomach, went reluctantly back to her notes and began jotting down what she’d missed.

“What did we get from the rooftop?” I put forward, trying to find some light in the darkness. “Maybe something in the forensics report?”

The coroner blew a tuft of mane off of his forehead with a petulant whiff. “Oh, those pitiful coffee-slurping foals in the forensics unit don’t know their rubber socks from condoms.” He waved his hooves in disgust over a series of boxes laid out on one of his spare tables. “They bring me scraps! The hotel room was completely worthless. There was some fabric off the roof; expensive, tailored bits of a suit, but nothing identifying. Aside that? Unless you can bring me a suspect and probably what he was wearing? I’m afraid I haven’t much from that mess...”

“Right, that’s... not unexpected considering where she was and what happened to her. Any thoughts on how her horn was removed?”

“There are a few horn injuries every year but this one was rather special. It wasn’t snapped. Whoever did that used something like... well, like this...” Stitch picked up a long, thin implement off of his tool tray. It had a rather sinister looking jagged edge on one side; the other was some type of very masterfully cut crystal.

“What is that for, specifically?” I asked, eyeing the vicious looking blade.

“It’s based on a very old hunting weapon used by griffins.” He explained, deftly flipping it in the air and catching the other end then parrying with it like a sword. Dropping the knife back on the tool tray he went on, “It’s for cutting pegasus wings and dragon bone. I find it also makes a satisfying snap when used on rib-cages. Would you like to hear? I have a recording here somewhere...”

Swift chewed her lower lip, forcing herself not to retch.

“Maybe later. Thoughts on why the horn was removed?” I asked, biting back the urge to snap at him. No one could accuse Dr. Stitch of not giving enough information, but constantly dragging him from his self-fascinating tangents back to something that might actually help my investigation was always a little wearing. Patience is a virtue; my father laid that line on me every day of my life, and I still get pissy with the toaster on bad mornings.

“Not one. You pull a horn off of a unicorn and it’s mostly just a very efficient magical battery.” He nudged Jane Pony’s mane off her forehead, displaying the smooth stump where her horn had been. “You can nip down to your local Radio Barn and find yourself a couple AA rubies which will do the same thing. There are some more obscure alchemical uses that call for horns specifically but... most of those were replaced in the last fifty years with gems. You’d have to ask a unicorn what, I’m afraid. My speciality is less ‘boom, zap, zing’ and more ‘squish, splash, splorch.’”

I was starting to get frustrated. All of this was constructing an extremely interesting and completely worthless picture of our victim with regards to our single useable lead. None of it sounded much like ‘mob killing.’ Those tend to be brutal and quick, or long, drawn out torture affairs meant to ‘send a message.’

The death of Jane Pony was... almost surgical. Sensual even. A murder of planned intent. Mobsters are nothing if not practical, and while much about the dead girl in front of us screamed ‘self-assured and planned out,’ none of it seemed aimed at garnering information or delivering messages. Even her death by pitching off the rooftop was starting to feel somehow very scripted, like a ballet for my benefit.

Unfortunately, criminals are not caught by my feelings alone. On top of all these new mysteries, nothing Stitch had presented us with was dissolving the issue with Cosmo and the Vivarium.

Part of me was hoping we’d just be able to head straight over, arrest the bulky bastard. and deliver him to Tartarus Correctional in time for dinner. That hope is always there. As a cop, you love it when a criminal has left something useful on the deceased that lets you sweep in, all guns blazing, and deliver justice with certainty. It wasn’t looking like one of those days.

Jane Pony. Azure Rose. Princess Luna. Our little filly had quite the collection of names. I gazed into her closed, cloudy eyes. What were you running from, little filly?

While I was having these considerations, Slip Stitch had pulled another body from the freezer, easing the sheet off of it’s head. It was a stallion, his mane fading around his ears and his jowly cheeks wrinkled with age.

“Now, regarding your Mr. Cosmo.” Stitch was off again, clearly enjoying the opportunity to show off his collection of carcasses. “I do have some experience with him. Oh, none of it provable, or he wouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve started quite the curio worth of souls with snapped horns! This fellow died of a heart attack in hospital, mind, but he had quite the story of mayhem and woe. Apparently, he refused a payment to one of Mr. Cosmo’s associates... and this happened.”

“Yuck.” I muttered, prodding the busted wedge of horn. “Still, nothing to attach him to Jane Pony?”

His bush of semi-feral mane seemed to flatten slightly. “I fear not, Mr, Detective. Many brain teasers and not a single answer.” His mane puffed right back up again, however, along with his grin, as he slammed the two drawers with Jane Pony and the stallion back into the wall and flipped the doors shut. “Of course, that’s what you’re here for, Detective! You simply must make sure any fresh bodies are properly cared for next time. I sincerely hope we don’t see more ponies like this. You’ve no idea how difficult doing an autopsy without color coordination really is! Why, I haven’t had such a time since that Beam incident last year!”

“You mean the one where somepony thought he had worms and tried to tear himself open with a chainsaw?” I asked.

“You remember!” he said, grinning maniacally, flushed with the joy of proper recognition. “I got an award for that one, you know.”

Swift let out a noise like a cat being bashed against a tin door, coughing violently as she almost swallowed her pencil.

Stitch pounded her on the back until she spit it out. “Weak stomach?” He asked, sympathetically.

“First week jitters.” I answered as the pegasus wiped spittle off her lower lip.

“I quite understand. I have a weak stomach too, you know.”

“Really?” Swift asked, disbelief written all over her face.

“Oh yes! Would you like to see it? I think it’s in a bag in the freezer-”

She groaned and unsnapped her front pocket, sifting through it and spilling empty candy wrappers all over her hooves. “I have something for... oh pony-feathers... that was my last ginger...”

“Ginger!” Stitch exclaimed. “Excellent for the stomach. I have something better though! Would you like a popsicle? I find even the foulest cases of murder eased by a sweet treat.”

“Um... o-okay.” Swift replied, closing her notes and pulling a pocket watch out of another zipped pouch. She consulted it briefly then turned and held it up, “Sir, we’ve got an hour till noon still. Miss Stella wanted us at Azure Rose’s apartment then, right?”

“I think we’ve got time.” I set my hat back in place and straightened my coat.

Slip Stitch was over by the row of freezers, standing on tip-toes as he sorted something out of the very bottom.

My partner trotted closer. “I like grape. Do you have grape?”

“Oh, lovely! Here, let me see...” The coroner pony gave a few sharp tugs at the bottom of the cooler, then braced one hoof and yanked his prize free. Turning, he held it out. “Just the thing for all that ails you.”

Swift stared at the thing in his hooves and whispered “...grape...” before her blue eyes rolled back in her head and she pitched over sideways in a dead faint, splashing in a puddle of unidentifiable condensed liquid which had gathered in a low spot on the floor. It soaked right through her uniform shirt, leaving the white cloth an off green.

Stitch turned to me. “What’d I say?”

I pointed at the popsicle. An eyeball coated in a thin rime of frost dangled by it’s optic nerve from the end of the frozen purple treat.

“Oooh... too much?” He asked, plucking the eye off and tossing it back in the freezer, then sticking the popsicle in the side of his mouth.

I nodded. “Too much.”

Wedging my nose underneath Swift and wrestling her limp body onto my back, I waited while Stitch attached the clipboards to one another then opened my coat on one side so he could add them to my load.

“Do you think this sweet child shall last?” He asked, moving close so he could stuff the reports into my jacket. His fur smelled like a mixture of formaldehyde and cotton candy. “She’s a rather innocent little thing, isn’t she.”

“Neither of us has much choice. Snifter is on the warpath and Taxi is on the chopping block this time. If I lose the kid, I’m going to lose Taxi. I might as well pack it in and retire if they want me walking or taking an actual cabbie everywhere.”

Stitch slurped at his snack. “Well, if you need to harden that stomach of hers, I’m certain Thalassemia could use an assistant for a few weeks. Send her down to me! I can guarantee she’ll have the time of her life and get over that pesky blood aversion.”

“Tempting, but we’ve got someplace to be. Thanks again, Stitch.”

“Of course, Mr. Detective. Consider it my pleasure. Visit again soon!” He bowed, then shoved open the double doors for me. As I moved toward the elevator, the big band music started up again.

I hurried on a little quicker before he could get to a mind-altering vocal section.

Chapter 9: Not That Kind of Shipping

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 9: Not That Kind of Shipping

Detrot is a trade city. Therefore, it is home to a wide variety of cultures. Cultures, like ponies, breed. And for cultures, there is no petri dish in Equestria better than the poor areas of Detrot.

Immigrants from dozens of lands took residency in Detrot during the jewel boom years, and in the poor areas those immigrants were sometimes forced to occupy, they banded together and formed enclaves. They spoke their languages, built restaurants for their cuisine, and otherwise maintained their cultures in Equestrian lands.

But they did so right next to one another. Just one block over from your griffin barbecue would be a zebra Zedoun shrine; Next door to your Appleloosan tavern complete with swinging door would be a Neighponese-style dojo.

Poorer ponies have a marked tendency to adopt the things that they like from other cultures, or make things in their own more extreme, which wards against outside influences and binds a given community closer together. It generates a solidarity sometimes needed in crime-ridden areas where the police can’t have a continuous presence. However, over time and between generations, these intermingling influences often spawn entirely new cultural results.

--The Scholar

I shoved the morgue’s front door open with my head and squeezed out sideways, trying not to tip the limp rookie onto the pavement. With impeccable timing, Taxi was just returning from her little trip downtown to deliver Cosmo’s file back to Telly. She pulled to a stop at the curb, waiting while I hefted my unconscious burden higher on my shoulders and shambled over to the car.

I dumped Swift on her back across the hood, then wiped a bead of sweat off my forehead, feeling a slight burn in my neck muscles. The kid wasn’t light, flier or not.

“What’d that gross bastard do this time?” Taxi asked with a scowl that could make a basilisk cry at fifty paces.

“Eyeball on a stick.”

Taxi blanched. “Why hasn’t he been put on notice or fired or something?” She asked, getting out of the car, a stick of incense already smoking in her teeth.

“Look at it this way: About the only reason I can ever see for hoping that pony gets married or breeds is so there’s somepony else just as enthusiastic as he is to keep the morgue staffed. Do you want the job? Does anypony besides Slip Stitch?”

Taxi left my rhetorical question hanging there as she waved the smoldering incense under the pegasus’ nose. Swift coughed, spasmed, sat up abruptly, then grabbed me around the neck with desperate energy, pulling my head down until I was nose to nose with her.

“Sir! Sir, help! They’ve got a mad pony running the morgue!” She cried, shaking my head. “You’ve got to believe me! He was singing and then I wanted grape and my popsicle stared at me!”

I put one hoof on her chest and gently pushed her away. Now did not feel like the time to be the reality-filled syringe in her veins. “Kid, listen to yourself. You got some fumes in the morgue and passed out. All those chemicals probably got to you. You’re okay.”

Her gaze fixed on the doors over the coroner’s office over my shoulder, then she slowly shook her head. “I... uh... yeah... Sorry, sir.” She released her hold on my throat and stumbled off the car, her wings sagging under their own weight. “Heehee... Oh... sir, you wouldn’t believe what I thought I saw...”

“I just might. We’ve still got a little time before we’re supposed to head to Azure Rose’s place, so get yourself straight first.”

“Ugh, what is this stuff all over me?” She sniffed at the disgusting dampness on her uniform shirt then stuck her tongue out. “Blech, it’s foul...”

“I think it’s embalming fluid.” At least, I hope it is. “You’ll be fine. You can change as soon as we hit the Vivarium. Are you ready to go?”

Extending her plumage to full, impressive length, she did a quick push-up, then reared back and snapped off a smart salute with one wing. “I think so, sir!”

Not being the finest example of mental health Equestria has ever seen, I couldn’t say precisely how wise it was to let her believe the entire thing had been in her head, but for now I decided to let it go. We had work, and the work comes before the sanity.

“I’ve got the report from Slip Stitch right here and-” I started.

“Oooh, gimme!” Taxi eagerly pounced on me, shoving her hooves into my pockets and digging through the top layer of the assorted items; for someone who found Slip Stitch so repulsive, she sure found his reports fascinating. I shoved her off of me, and hopped backwards several steps as she prepared to make another advance.

“Hey, no! Errand first, then Sweet Shine’s curiosity. Nothing in that report will be worth a damn thing if the Heights is on fire.” I said, tugging out the clipboard and holding it to my chest. Taxi looked about ready to tear my leg off to get to it. “In the car. You can read it in the car while you wait for us to handle this situation.”

Instantly, she was behind the wheel with the engine thundering. “Let’s go then!”

As I opened the door and hopped in, Swift leapt into the back seat through the opposite rear window. She turned three times, then settled down and fished out a piece of jerky to chew on from whichever place she’d secreted it. Teaching her to use doors was going on my ‘to-do’ list, but the carnivorous snacking didn’t seem correctable. I mean, what exactly was I supposed to do? Rub her nose in some roadkill?

I tossed the forensics and the blood workup on the seat beside Taxi, then pulled the folded envelope on which I’d written down Azure Rose’s address out of my pocket. It wasn’t a familiar part of town.

“Hey, do you know where Capriole street is?” I asked.

She did; and I could tell because her ears quickly splayed backwards on her head. “Oh, that is some piss in this day’s wine...”

“Why? Where is it?”

“The Skids.” She answered, digging through the glovebox for one of the thousand maps she kept there. This particular one was of the entire city and covered in highlighter of various colors. When she finally found Capriole street she put a hoof on a spot in an ocean of red marker. “It’s right in the middle of Cyclone territory, last I checked.”

“Ehhh...” I glanced out the window for a quick second, contemplating whether or not another visit with Slip Stitch would be preferable. It was a close thing. “Alright, the Cyclones don’t usually screw with cops directly unless we go in there with our manes on fire. We’re doing one thing then leaving. Keep the blues and twos off.”

****

The Tranquil Cadence Residential Housing Project; known to everypony in the city as ‘The Skids,’ occupied a section of the old city, centered around the largest reservoir outside the bay. Intended to provide affordable, mass produced, and cheap to maintain housing to give even the poorest pony in Detrot a place to rest their head, it was yet another attempt to save a town whose soul was rotting from the inside.

I can’t attest to its power as a mode of salvation, but it did end up succeeding in one respect; The destitute flocked to the identical square blockhouses en masse. Thousands of ponies crammed themselves into tiny flats, but over the last twenty years the densely populated area became a haven for gang warfare. Street groups fought one another for dominance, eventually finding themselves fighting together against both the police and their greater foe, the Jewelers.

Over time, like any group of persecuted misanthropes, they developed an ideology and became a collective; The Cyclones.

That the largest portion of The Cyclones were pegasi was a matter of changing demographics. When the weather factories opened, the pegasi workers coming in from the countryside needed their own community. The Skids offered cloud homes at dirt cheap prices and ground homes even cheaper.

Yet nothing about The Skids said ‘Welcome Home.’

There was practically a line in the pavement between the relative safety of Detrot’s mostly police owned streets and the more volatile Cyclone stomping grounds. We hit that line along with a pothole that made the rear suspension shriek and actually managed to send the otherwise impeccably balanced Swift tumbling onto the floor.

The buildings themselves seemed to leer and lean towards us, shattered windows and boarded doors lending them all the appearance of patiently angling monsters watching for their next prey to wander too close. Colorful monsters, mind. Most of the city graffiti stopped at street level, but in the Skids, the Cyclones took a certain delight in covering the high up walls with obscenities and their ubiquitous motto ‘Ever Free’.

We drove in mutually agreed upon silence.

An occasional sunken-eyed equine face would appear in a window, surprised by the wheeled invader to their impoverished Tartarean underworld. Their hollow gazes would follow us until we passed, then they would duck back out of sight, heading back to activities no decent pony wants to imagine.

Many-colored feathers blew through the gutters, swept up in tiny eddies of wind and never decently cleaned up. The sense of pervading menace in the Skids had even Swift huddling below window level instead of peering out. Taxi drove us deeper and I could hear her forcing her breathing calm.

It was the graffiti that first alerted me to something being off about the area we were passing through. Normal Cyclone scrawling was slowly being replaced with a mixture of arcane symbols and iconography I wasn’t much familiar with.

“Taxi, what’s up with the decorations?” I asked, pointing at a stuffed, straw doll of a pony dangling from a telephone wire. It had a rictus skeletal grin in black paint across its stitched face.

“We just passed into the territory of another group of Cyclones.” Taxi answered, very nearly in a whisper. “I don’t know this end of town very well. There are lots of different ones out here.”

“I thought they were all one gang?” asked Swift.

“Not a chance. They’ll roll together against the Jewelers and the police... but there are a lot of different sects of Cyclones. Let’s just hope this isn’t one of the really sick ones.”

We drove on, passing through more empty avenues.

****

“S-sir? We’re being followed.” Swift whispered, tapping me on the shoulder.

“I know.” I replied. I’d seen the darting shadows rushing back and forth between the buildings several minutes ago. They were getting closer, and still we drove on, bumping over holes in the road and dodging empty shopping carts that’d been left in the streets. The sidewalks were deserted but for a few stray bits of garbage.

I was about to call this little trip off and get us out of there when Taxi slammed on the brakes, bringing us to a sharp halt.

“Hardy, don’t move. Swift, take off your hardware and stow it under the seat. There’s a compartment down there you can stick it in.” Taxi said out of one corner of her mouth.

“What’s going on?” I asked, raising my head slightly so I could see out of the windshield. Our driver pointed towards a figure standing in the road.

A lone pegasus stood in the middle of the lonely lane underneath the sole functioning street light, one wing raised towards us. Her pelt was a dull lavender, and she was nude except for a tiny bag hanging from her neck. A series of absolutely brutal looking scars or burns criss-crossed her chest in intricate, almost ritualistic patterns.

“Cyclones. Just shut up and do as I tell you, or we’ll be lucky if they just take the car.” Taxi replied, her jaw set firmly. “Dammit, Hardy... I know this is important, but you’re an ass.”

“The hay did I do?”

“You got us into this! Now can it!” She snarled, turning the key. The engine died with a soft hiss.

Moving with great deliberation, Taxi pushed open the car door and stepped out, keeping her hooves apart and her tail down. The pegasus didn’t move except to lower her wing.

“Sir, what... did Taxi mean about ‘just taking the car?’” Swift kept her voice low, unstrapping Masamane from her shoulder harness and fiddling under the driver’s chair until she found the little box then slipping it inside.

“I don’t work Organized Crime, remember? We don’t get calls for bodies in the Skids. If somepony dies here they usually drive the corpse elsewhere. They’re not shooting, though, so I’m calling this a diplomatic cross examination. They’re curious.”

Outside, Taxi was turning in a slow circle. I couldn’t peg an age on the mare examining her, but she moved with a certain self-assurance, like a soldier. She eventually seemed satisfied, and turned to the vehicle.

“Duo in de backseat.” The Cyclone pony called out. “Git out da car. If ye be armed, keep dem in plain sight.”

Her voice was calm and controlled; no malice. If she was from the same group of ponies that wrote that silly manifesto Gypsy had read on the radio last night, she was definitely not what I imagined.

I pushed open the door and made a show of easing out. For once, Swift decided not to use the window. As the Cyclone saw my partner’s crisp uniform she stiffened and her attention flipped towards the air above us. I tilted my head back and saw four more pegasi drifting lazily in a synchronized circle overhead, each one clutching a blackened thunderhead in their forehooves.

I’d seen a pony struck by lightning during a middling-vicious pegasus attack before. Most of her fur was singed off and she hadn’t been able to talk without drooling for about six months afterwards. I didn’t fancy the idea of finding out just how accurate those thunderheads could be.

“Yer on de wrong side of de tracks, copper.” The mare said, her voice tight as she stared a whole cutlery shop at Swift, who shrank back, clearly wishing her shooter was on her leg.

Taxi murmured, “Be polite, Hardy. She’s their leader and it’s disrespectful if you acknowledge the lesser ponies while she’s talking to you. They can turn us into grease stains and nopony within a five block radius will claim to have seen a thing.”

I took a few steps towards her. A warning crackle of lightning snapped down and hit the ground in front of my right foreleg, leaving a scorched hole. I stopped; an idea percolated from the murky brown depths of my psyche.

“The rookie is with me. You talk to me.” I shouted, punctuating each of the last three words with a hoofstomp.

The mare seemed, for a moment, taken aback. Her eyes danced towards her guards then she nodded and bowed her head in acknowledgement. “We recognize ye, Detective Hard Boiled. Hero cop. Yer badge be not a shield here, but ye found de killer of Scallop. Fer that, we give ye time to explain yer presence.” She replied, turning one eye then the other to look at me.

Scallop. I went back in my memory a few years and found an image of a dead colt in his late teens with a shell for a cutie-mark. He’d been raped, killed, and tossed in a sewer grate. Juniper and I had chased down the fat buck that did it through a mound of witness statements over the course of four months. When we caught him, Juniper’s gun officially ‘misfired’ and the bullet ‘just happened’ to ‘ricochet’ and rip the slimy manure-sucker’s scrotum off; my cutie mark didn’t so much as twitch.

“I remember Scallop.” I affirmed, lips curling at the memory. I could feel many unseen eyes in the buildings on either side of us tracking over my back. “We’re here on police business.”

“Yer ‘police business’ be no concern of ours, copper. Ye leaves. Now.” The mare replied, her neck tensing, which made the spider-web of scars on her breast dance in the weak morning sunlight.

“We’re here because a filly was murdered. She lived here. Capriole street.”

Gritting her teeth the pegasus pointed back the way we’d come. “Ye leaves!”

“We believe it may have been King Cosmo.”

At this, the mare hesitated, her expression forming an intrigued rictus. “De King of Ace?”

I wasn’t familiar with that moniker, but nodded anyway. “The same. We’re here to get evidence that could let us arrest him. We might even break his organization. I hear the Cyclones have been having a rough time of it lately with the Jewelers.” That was a bluff. I hadn’t actually kept track of the state of the local criminal syndicates, but it was a safe bet; the Jewelers and Cyclones were always at each others’ throats. The pegasus didn’t fight me on it.

Her shoulders slumped slightly and she lowered her head. “Dey moves in on us worse den ever.” She replied, subdued. “We wants to be left alone. De Aroyo Cyclones is just lookin’ after we own. Dem mad stompers what want de rest of de city, dey be not welcome here.”

“I’m not here for you or any of the Aroyo Cyclones, whoever they are, but... if you let us through, I will hunt Cosmo.” I promised, holding my coat closed against a burst of wind that swept trash around my ankles. “All you have to do is step aside and let us find this dead filly’s apartment.” Taking several measured steps closer, I brought my forelegs close together and stuck my chest out, daring her escort to strike me down.

She leveled her green eyes on me, and kept staring into mine as she put one hoof on the small bag hanging on a string around her neck, her lips moving as though she was talking to it. After some consideration and what sounded like a lot of muttered recriminations, she dropped her leg and spoke with a bit of reluctance.

“De ancestors say ye have one day to go walkabout in de Aroyo territory. Capriole is one block over. De car will be safe. Hunt, Detective Hard boiled. Hunt the King of Ace and don’t come back unless he be dead or on his knees. If ye lay him low, Aroyo will owe ye.”

She took off with a twirl, beating her wings with slow, purposeful sweeps as she called out, “Cyclones! Fly!”

Lightning flashed, thunder crashed, and the sky was empty.

I had to give it to those ‘Aroyo’ Cyclones. They were damn flashy.

****

“I have no idea how you got us out of that, Hardy, but that was... pretty amazing.” My driver said, holding her car keys to her bosom like they might run away. “I’ve dealt with the Cyclones before. Most of them are crazy poor kids dealing Zap off a street corner. That bunch was just scary.” She was breathing heavily, her braided tail flicking back and forth to slap against her sides as she tried to let out the tension.

Swift was still sitting there on the pavement, her wings popped up, staring where the nameless pony no longer was. “Sir, w-what just happened?”

“We got ourselves a day.” I said, holding the car door open for her as we retreated to the cab. “If Azure Rose is holed up here then she must have had a good reason. This is not a bunch of ponies that are easy to get taken into, but it fits our profile of somepony running from something. The Jewelers would have a heckuva time getting in here.”

My partner slid into the back seat and made room for me. Taxi turned the ignition; the roar of magical arcanolectrics coming to life sounded just a little too loud for comfort.

I murmured a quick prayer of thanks to Celestia, and we were off.

****

The blockhouse Azure Rose had chosen to make her home was one of the five story survivors whose exterior was much worse than its interior. Most of the windows below the third floor were boarded, but those on the higher levels were in decent shape and somepony had made an attempt at some point in the last century to scrub the worst obscenities off the front door. Some of them were pretty creative; I’d never heard anypony suggest that particular use for peanut butter and razorblades.

Taxi, despite the Cyclone’s assurances that the car would be alright, decided to circle the block while we were inside rather than find a place to park. I couldn’t say I much blamed her. Eyes glittered in some of the alleyways, giving us lascivious stares that made me wonder if they’d stop with just rolling us and leaving us in a gutter.

Taxi caught my tail with her hoof as I stepped out; I turned to see those bright pink eyes giving me a meaningful look. “Hardy, be careful in there.”

“You know me, Sweets. I’m always careful.” I replied, straightening my gun harness.

She sighed irritably, her forehead conferencing with her steering wheel. “Alright, be alive when you get back.”

****

Swift petted Masamane like a long lost pet, wiggling her leg to make sure its easy weight was still there as we marched up the steps of the apartment block. “Sir, why did Taxi tell me to take off my gun?” She asked.

“Have you looked at that weapon?” I answered, jabbing a hoof against its silvered and polished barrel. “It’s probably worth more than the car. Never trust gangsters if they have the upper hand. They’ll take what they can from you unless it benefits them not to.”

I opened the front door and stood aside so Swift could go in first. I figured, this being a pegasi friendly part of town, that it might not hurt terribly to have one lead the way.

The lobby reminded me of what would happen if somepony were to let Granny Glow get into interior design. A thin haze of soft green smoke gathered near the ceiling. A thick necked vermillion stallion with a mane the color of lumped lard sat behind the bullet proofed reception window, the root and leaves of a Zap apple tree sticking out of the end of his pipe as he thumbed through a magazine called ‘Stud Party.’

The doorbell dinged softly as we came in and he looked up. When he saw my badge hanging around my neck and sorted out the ecstatic coloration of my partner from her uniform, he began choking violently, spitting out the Zap and then furiously patting at his lap to put out the colorfully smoldering, sparkling embers.

“As you were... we aren’t here with narcotics. Can you direct us to the apartment of a miss ‘Azure Rose?’” I asked, trying to work a friendly smile, which was a tough thing to generate when the stink coming off that foul plant is trying to claw your sinuses out.

He hesitated then popped his pipe back into the corner of his mouth. “Aye, Azure Rose? Dunno anypony by that name...”

Picking the envelope out of my front pocket I looked at it briefly. “Apartment one-oh-eight?”

“Bein’ renovated. Nopony livin’ there.” He blasted twin rings of smoke out of his nostrils.

Swift tilted her head to one side, stepping closer to his booth. “Renovated? Here?” There wasn’t any menace in her tone, but the manager nonetheless drew back, looking very much like he wished he weren’t sitting in a tiny box with no exits except past two armed cops.

The lack of cooperation wasn’t unexpected considering the part of town he lived in. Managers who turn in their tenants don’t last long in the poorer parts of the city. I decided to try a little gambit. “We’re here on the blessing of the Aroyos.”

His mouth dropped open and the cornpipe tumbled to the floor. “I’m paid up through next week!”

I rolled my eyes and assured him; “We don’t work for them. We’re just here to check the apartment. You want to let us through?”

Putting a hoof on his desk he lifted himself with some effort and pressed a button on the wall. The metal door beside him buzzed loudly and he waved us through. “Go on up... and tell Wisteria I let you in without a fuss! I pay enough protection!”

****

A thin, pink colt in his mid-teens sat in the stairwell, too spaced out to notice as Swift and I edged past him. My partner stopped for a second, looking into his wide, staring eyes. He didn’t respond but he was, at least, breathing. A thin streamer of drool ran untended down to his chin.

“Sir, shouldn’t we call... I don’t know, an ambulance or something?” She asked, shaking his shoulder lightly.

I tugged out the Ace syringe poking out of the boy’s rear hoof and set it to one side. “He’s stoned. He’ll live. Leave him be. We’ve got better things to do.”

We moved on. Swift seemed inordinately quiet, but it was to be expected.

The walls weren’t exactly ‘clean,’ but they weren’t the kind of scummy I usually associate with flophouses like this. If Azure Rose had to pick a dump, she’d picked one of the better ones, particularly if the owner could afford a regular protection payment on top of his Zap habit.

It was at the landing on the first floor that I sensed something was amiss. I couldn’t discern what, but I wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t listen to the occasional instinct. I stopped, grabbed Swift, swung back onto the stairs, then reached into my coat and pulled out a tiny mirror. My partner took the hint and kept her muzzle shut, picking up her trigger bit and nosing the safety on her gun into the ‘off’ position.

I eased the reflector up into the hallway and turned it in a half circle, taking in everything. At the far end, a bunch of boards had been torn off the window, leaving a hole out onto a rickety fire-escape. One of the apartment’s doors was slightly cracked. I counted off from the end of the corridor nearest us; It was the eighth down. The nameplate said ‘Charity Soul.’

A trail of broken glass lead right up to it. Stealth was going right out the window the second one of us set hoof on the carpet.

“Stay here. Keep look out. I think our spy is already in there.” I whispered. Swift nodded and slid further down the stairs.

Stepping gingerly over the remains of the shattered window, I managed to make it right up to the door before dropping my heel squarely on a bit of sharp glass. I tried to keep the noise to a gasp of discomfort but inside the room something shifted, then there was silence. I lay one ear against the door, holding my breath.

A hole the size of a bowling ball exploded inches from my face, sending wooden shrapnel all over my neck. One inch lower and it would have broken my neck like a twig, earth pony or not. It snapped the door’s top half from the bottom cleanly.

I stopped bothering with subtle. Swinging my rear hooves around I blasted the remaining wood with a two legged buck, slamming it right off its hinges. A grunt of pain told me I’d struck a solid blow. I threw myself into the room just as my assailant was picking himself up off the floor.

It was a mess in there. The bed lay in one corner, slashed open. A curio in the corner was snapped and the trinkets spilled across the floor. He’d even knocked a couple of holes in each wall. It was a classic search-and-toss, professionally accomplished.

I absorbed all that in an instant, but it was the perp who got my immediate attention. He was a blushing cherry color and... dear Celestia, the size of five brick shithouses stacked together. His shoulders were as big across as my whole body was long. He was just recovering as I brought my gun around, snatching the trigger in my teeth.

“Halt!” I shouted. Police everywhere are thankful that it’s a word that’s relatively easy to say with something in your mouth.

He dragged himself from under the busted doorway then, faster than I could track, kicked a vase off the floor at my face. I tried to dodge but it hammered across my forehead, splitting into a hundred fragments and knocking me backwards. Then he was on me, throwing himself forward in a well practiced front-line hoofball charge.

The attack was lightning fast, hitting me at chest height. If I’d been anything but an earth pony, my spine would have been turned into an accordion. Even as it was, it felt like I’d been hit by a piano fired out of a cannon. Agony bloomed in my chest as all the air in my lungs decided it had better places to be.

I flew against the wall, leaving a sizeable dent in the drywall, my ribs creaking as he pressed the attack. We stood, chest to chest, his bloodshot eyes inches from mine.

‘How do you get muscles in your cheeks?’ It was a wholly appropriate thought, considering my sternum felt like it was inches from caving under the incredible power he was bringing to bear.

Everything seemed to slow down as he pushed forward. My vision greyed around the edges and pain exploded around my eye-sockets.

I snapped at his nose with my teeth, catching his upper lip and drawing blood. It may not have been the most honorable of combat tactics, but show me an unwaveringly honorable pony in Detrot, and I’ll show you a dead one. He let out a growl, going slack for just a second. I was too slow to take advantage. That or he was simply too fast. He let it be known that was a mistake by barreling his forehead into mine.

Stubbornness aside, my lights were pretty close to out as he stepped back. I slid straight to the floor. He gave me a firm kick in the stomach for good measure, then galloped out into the hall.

I was inclined to just lay there. Screw the Vivarium. My organs felt like I’d gone through a spin cycle in an industrial washing machine full of ball bearings.

Still... paperwork. I’d probably have to do a lot of that explaining this if I had nothing to show for it.

Spurred on less by desire for justice than fear of red tape, I dragged myself towards the door, hoping I could at least get a shot off on one of his knees. Pushing my bit into my mouth I discovered he’d somehow managed to snap the strap. Despite the amount of force he’d put into crushing my ribcage, I couldn’t feel any actual damage beyond some nice deep bruising. My breathing was starting to even out a little. I had no good way of measuring time except those breaths. I could have laid there five seconds or five minutes.

I pulled myself to my hooves and stumbled into the doorway, intent on at least seeing which way he’d gone. Maybe, with luck, Taxi would be on the street and be able to take him out with the cab. I doubted she’d risk a stallion through her windshield, particularly one the size of the taxi itself, but at that moment respiration felt like an optimistic endeavor, and if I was managing that, then perhaps luck was on my side.

A little voice in the back of my head admonished my optimism. Luck doesn’t feel like fractured ribs, dumbass.

The towering heap of studly red brawn was standing in the hallway, facing apartment 108. Just standing. His hooves planted, his eyes forward, he stood and watched me. He seemed like a sculpture, barely moving even to breathe. I lifted my gun, prepared to fan the hammer with my tongue if I had to, but he didn’t so much as twitch except to glance at the weapon and allow a contemptuous sneer to spread over his lips.

Swift’s bright orange head popped up over his left shoulder, her trigger-bit clenched in her teeth. She was mounted on the big bastard’s back, balancing on all four hooves with Masamane’s intimidating barrel pressed firmly against the base of his neck.

“Shir? Do joo have hoofcuffsh? Ah can’t work dem an hode mah gun.”

I began to laugh... and that hurt too. I didn’t care.

****

After some significant wrestling back and forth and trading off who was covering the stallion with which gun, we managed to get a pair of hoofcuffs on him. He refused to say a word but sat there stolidly, staring at us. Examining his flank, I noticed his cutie-mark was a pair of golden hoofboxing gloves. No wonder he’d put me through the wringer.

“Sir, shouldn’t we be going now?” Swift asked, glancing towards the door.

“We came here with a purpose. He got here before us, so I figure the worst we can do is finish what he started.”

****

I began sifting through the mess. The room had been relatively simple but appointed with a certain ostentatious character. The pony living there obviously treated the space as her ‘retreat.’ The bed was an expensive model covered in a dirt cheap sheet to hide the quality. Several of the knick-knacks in the curio were the sort of thing one wouldn’t find in a second-hoof store. Most of the little objects were a friendly blue, tasteful and pleasing to the eye.

A gigantic travel trunk sat in one corner. It looked staggeringly out of place in a squalid flophouse; it’s surface was studded with gems arranged in complex patterns. I struggled with the top, trying to wrench it off without much luck. It was when I started poking around the thing for an opening mechanism that I finally noticed the maker’s mark on one hinge: ‘Falter’s Mystical Intercontinental Impedimenta.’ A few scuff marks around the hinges showed where somepony else had tried to get in, with similar lack of success.

Magic luggage. Brilliant. I’d forgotten, momentarily, that we were dealing with a dead unicorn.

Swift, at the same time, was hopping around the room with her notepad out, scribbling away like mad. She seemed intent on documenting the position of everything, her wings flapping and flaring excitedly each time she came across something new. If nothing else, the Chief would have a thorough documentation of all the reasons she was going to fire and/or hang us.

Leaving the damned arcane box where it was, I kicked through some of the detritus, hunting for some evidence of its owner.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to help?” I asked with a look toward the stallion in the corner. He snorted and tugged at his cuffs, making them jingle. “Right, thought not.”

I poked through the curio. It was a glass fronted faux-antique job with several shelves inside; during our little fight I’d stumbled over it in my flight backwards. I was going to be picking grains of glass out of my hooves all night, which was always a fun game. Flipping it over, I noticed the wood comprising the top of it had dropped a few inches, revealing a golden glimmer. Reaching in, I carefully wrenched it out.

It was a jewelry box, elaborately detailed and studded on three sides with enough gems to buy a nice summer home. Gold inlays detailed scenes of animals with tiny diamonds for eyes dancing in sylvan vales. It was locked, but the lock hadn’t got a keyhole. Still, it’d been hidden and for that reason alone was interesting.

“I think I found what our lumpen lummox here was looking for.” I announced.

“What is it, sir?” My partner asked, leaping over a pile of broken wood.

The stallion in the corner shot up, took one step forward, and his nose hit the carpet.

“Oh, yep, we did. Jackpot.” I said with a smile, setting the box in front of Swift.

“That’s not yours!” The enormous oaf snarled, righting himself as best he could with his foreknees bound tightly together.

“Ahhh, it speaks!” I answered, cheerfully poking him in his barreled chest. He made to nip me but only ended up with his muzzle in the rug again. “Now then, I somehow doubt this is yours either. So we’re going to take this along with us and you’re coming too. I have a sweet old grandmare who’d just love to spend the night asking you questions.”

He cocked an eye at me skeptically then pushed me back with his forehead on my chest. “You can go straight to Tartarus! Let me out of these cuffs and I’ll send you there myself.” His voice was deep, like a ringing bell, but a bit dull. He spoke slowly, with a poorly learned accent. I took all of this in and slowly a minor profile began to form: Bodyguard. Low intelligence. Required for social functions to appear to be able to hold a conversation without embarrassing whoever was holding his leash. Purchased for his brawn rather than social skills.

Oddly, though, he didn’t look like an actual mob enforcer. He was too clean cut. His mane of streaked blonde was cut back to shoulder length, but he wore no identifying marks. Mobsters like ponies to know they’re mob. That’s part of what makes mob fear tactics effective; a mafia grunt might be one stallion, but you know that if you screw with or shoot him, there’s... well... a mob of others willing to take his place and pick apart your life in excruciating detail.

It was very tempting to give him a bloody nose considering the lump growing on my forehead, but in the interests of diplomacy I decided against bucking him in the face.

“I don’t think you were ordered to kill anypony, and somehow doubt you would even if you had been.” I said, shoving my muzzle into his face.

His neck musculature swelled and I leapt back as he tried to headbutt me again. He was obviously not a fast learner.

Settling on the cut open remains of the bed, I stroked the top of the jewelry box. It was a stunning thing. The craftspony who made it clearly loved her art. I couldn’t imagine a male having put his hoof to it. Everything about the design was feminine and elegant.

As I was having these contemplations a piece of paper that fit neatly into the underside slid out, dropping onto the sheet. I picked it up, flipping it over. It was blank but inside it there was a much folded photograph of two very pretty mares standing side by side. One of them looked like slightly younger than the other, but they both shared the same cool, sky colored pelt and flowing, ruddy cardinal mane. They held each other in a sisterly embrace, one leg around each other’s necks, smiling at the camera. Behind them there was an idyllic lake scene with towering pines and a small cabin in the distance.

“Kid, check me on this... the taller one? That’s our Jane Pony, right?”

I passed her the picture and she examined it closely. “It is. Sir! We did it!”

Despite the lack of monochrome, the older pony was definitely our victim. In life she’d been a real creature of beauty and seeing her there, grinning cheerfully, it made my heart sink to think she was sitting in a freezer.

Still, a piece of this vile puzzle was finally taking shape! I didn’t want to burst Swift’s bubble, but the day wasn’t over.

“Unless the ox over there killed her, which I somehow doubt-” I waved towards our prisoner.. “-we’ve got nothing but a picture and... huh... mmm...” I picked up the blank sheet of paper, holding it up to the light.

The paper glowed, then flashed, almost searing my eyes with a burst of sparks that spilled all over the bed, leaving smoking holes in the sheets. I dropped it quickly, blowing on my burnt hooftips.

“Foul-flanked, sewer-swilling magic slingers!” I cursed.

“Sir, are you alright?” Swift asked, waving a wing over my hooves.

“Yes, I’m fine... dammit.”

As we watched, thin, looping hornwriting spilled down the page like ink pouring out of a bottle, arranging itself into sentences as the spell unwound. Picking up the paper I held it carefully in case it decided to do a repeat performance. It was a letter, disguised with magic. What I’d done to set it off was a mystery, but I decided to give it a read anyway:

I don’t know if you’ll get this letter or if I’ll have time to send it. I might not. If I don’t then you’ll probably find it. I’m hiding it in the old curio in the place we used to trade things back and forth when we were living at home. I know you’ll check that.

If my jewelry box is still there, it has my diary in it. Just leave it. You can’t open it. It wasn’t for you anyway and I don’t really want everypony back home to know about my life here.

Tell Mom and Dad I miss them. I’m sorry if I don’t make it home. I’ll try to send the money whether or not I do. I miss you so much, sis. This whole thing just turned out so wrong. Please, take care of yourself.

Love,

Your sister,

Ruby Blue

“Huh... that’s our identification.” I murmured. It was, like every other part of this case, rife with enough vague innuendo to make a pony insane.

As I finished reading, something clicked behind me. I turned, noticing the top of the enormous box had popped open a few millimeters. “Magical... luggage. Right.” I mused.

Reaching over, I carefully re-closed the lock, then ran through the letter one more time. As I reached the girl’s name, the clasp popped open again. I closed it and thought the name in the direction of the box. Nothing happened. I read the letter once more and there was that same, satisfying click of the bolt sliding back. “Huh... Not the most secure system I’ve ever heard of, but I guess it works for somepony who has more identities than most professional criminals.”

Swift took the letter and read it, lips moving over each word. “So her name is-”

I hastily shoved my hoof into her mouth and pointed at the thug in the corner, who was trying desperately to angle his head so he could see the the letter.

“I think until we’ve got him someplace secure we’d best keep mum on that.” I said, removing my horseshoe from her lips. She coughed, her cheeks coloring.

“Sorry, sir.”

“It’s fine. We’re on a schedule, so I’d like to get us back to the Vivarium as soon as possible. I’m a bit vague on how we’re going to carry him though.” I jabbed my leg at the mound of muscle in the corner. “I don’t think he’s coming willingly and I don’t want a rematch.”

“You’re damn right! Lemme out of these cuffs, you stinking pig!” He yowled, trying to take a step towards me. He managed to hobble a few inches before he was on his face.

I sniffed my under-legs then pointed at Swift. “I’m not the one who stinks. By the way, we’re getting you a wash as soon as we hit the Vivarium, kid.”

Swift blushed ferociously, then sought a distraction from that topic by looking thoughtfully over at the trunk. She shoved the top open and poked her head in. “Um... there’s nothing in here, sir. It even looks arcanely reinforced.”

My mind spent a moment seeking any reason that we couldn’t do that. It was probably against regulations as some form of cruelty to... something or other, but damned if I could figure out what. “I... we... hmmm...”

Real fear blossomed in the thug’s face as he looked back and forth between Swift, the box, and I. “Y-you... you wouldn’t!”

****

It was the work of a further ten minutes to figure out the luggage could only be opened by reading the name off of that letter, followed by a few minutes colt-handling the struggling heavyweight into the trunk.

I finally resorted to the gentle encouragement of ‘accidentally’ kicking him in the testicles after he tried to hit me with his hard-ass forehead again. It settled him considerably so we could fit the top back in place while he cringed and clutched at his genitals. I made sure the box wasn’t airtight; If it were, the trip would have been complicated. I snapped the lock shut and gave the luggage a good kick. “Hey, you okay in there Mr. Gloves?”

“Screw you, copper!”

“That’s a yes. Kid, whichever side of your family gave you your imagination was a bunch of bad, bad ponies. They’re getting a Hearth’s Warming Eve Card from me this year, though.”

A flicker of proud smugness crept across her face but she masked it well. “Just using operational resources creatively, sir.”

“Hah. Grab the jewelry box and let’s go. I think we’re done here. I want to see if I can get into that diary later on and maybe get some insight into what our filly’s last few days were like. If nothing else we can get a sense of what she’s been doing lately and maybe find some additional suspects.”

I gave the box a rough shove towards the door. To my surprise it slid quite easily, eliciting a fresh round of very creative swearing from the trapped bodyguard. Why a pony on the run who’d descended to working in a whorehouse wouldn’t have long since pawned the magic box was a good question, but one I’d have to leave for another time.

Pressing my forehead against the end, I guided it through the doorway. It rocked a little as its angry prisoner tried to buck his way out, but whatever enchantments had been laid on it to make it lighter made it inordinately structurally sound.

In the hallway, a few curious eyes peeked out from cracked doorways, then quickly slammed as we passed, our cussing, surly burden rocking the box violently.

We got to the top of the second landing stairs without incident, but then a problem presented itself. The first landing was a short distance down, but the second one was quite a bit longer and lined up with the lobby door. I doubted Swift was strong enough to hold the heavy side, weight enchantment or no. At the same time, I didn’t really want to try to back down the stairs.

“Say, kid, could you get down there and hold that open?” I asked, pointing at the metal stairway door.

The pegasus eagerly hopped down and swung it back before the question even occurred to her. “Erm... sir, what are you going to do?”

“Bowling. Hey, Mr. Gloves! You might wanna brace yourself.”

“What?!” The trapped pony shouted back.

I whirled around and gave the trunk a kick with both rear hooves, doing my best to keep it tracking true as it slid down the steps. I’d expected it to at least catch on the doorway, but my aim was better than I’d expected; it passed right through, and as it did a set of four wheels popped out of the bottom, lifting it a few inches off the carpet and allowing its considerable momentum to carry it on a merry glide through the lobby, nearly pasting an old brown earth pony.

I galloped across the lobby after it while the apoplectic stallion inside abandoned the effort of finding new ways to denigrate my lineage in favor of just trying to kick his way out; anything besides magic would have been slag under that assault. His merry ride only came to an abrupt end when the trunk collided with the closed front door of the building.

Swift and I passed the manager, who was still sitting in his reception booth, his mouth agape. A curl of smoke rose from his crotch, but he didn’t seem to take any immediate notice of this.

I tipped my hat. “The City of Detrot thanks you for your cooperation.”

****

Getting the trunk full of pissed-off pugilist onto the curb was comparatively trivial, thanks to the wheels; Taxi swung around the corner just as we got him into position. She braked hard, threw open the passenger side door and yelled, “What the hay is that?! Hardy, tell me you didn’t...”

I smacked the trunk and ‘Glovey’ screeched something semi-incoherent about my mother and Cerberus. “One packaged spy’s accomplice ready for transport. You think we can fit him and the luggage in the boot? I don’t really want to get him out until we get where we’re going and I can have Minox sit on him.”

We ended up tipping the trunk up on one end slightly, then grappling it into the back seat, putting Swift in beside it and myself in the front with Taxi. Our passenger howled and shrieked the entire time, only quieting when Taxi threatened to drag him behind us on a tow-chain. Considering the abuse the box had survived thus far, it would probably have made it, but he didn’t seem inclined to test this as much as we were.

Taxi’s curiosity was brimming. “Did we get an identification on our victim?”

I reached into the backseat, grabbed the jewelry box from Swift, and set it in my lap along with the picture and letter. “We most definitely did.” I passed her the letter and she braced it on the steering wheel, reading it and looking out the windshield at the same time.

The trunk's lid clicked but Swift was already on it, holding the lock shut even as Gloves tried to shove the top off again.

Tossing the letter back into my forelegs she asked, “Are we sure that’s her real name?”

“I’m pretty sure. Our dirtbag here doesn’t know it yet and something is telling me that’s a good thing. Let’s keep it that way.”

Nodding, she gave us an extra squirt of speed. Somehow.

As we were leaving the Aroyos’ turf I caught a glimpse of a lavender pegasus standing on a rooftop, following us with her eyes. I could have been wrong from that distance, but her expression seemed almost sad as we drove out of her dominion, into the comforting embrace of familiar streets.

****

The drive back to the Vivarium involved an unfortunate detour around roadworks, so it was closer to half past one in the afternoon by the time the Unity statue came into sight. Taxi was driving a little faster than was probably wise, but the NightTrotter didn’t seem terribly offended. It just rumbled like an aroused bear as ponies coming off their lunch hours rushed off crosswalks to get out of our way.

We hit the parking lot outside the club, drawing more than a few eyes, possibly because we hadn’t slowed down, and because Taxi was aggressively blind to concepts like ‘pedestrian right of way,’ even on the sidewalk. Three top-hatted fops in matching wing-tipped horseshoes were nearly victims of Taxi’s predatory front grill; they leapt out of the way, backing up against the wall of the nightclub as we mounted the curb, all four tires protesting as we skidded to a gut-wrenching halt.

Minox, back in his cleanly pressed tux, was back on duty outside before a somewhat lengthened line of customers. Taxi’s attention must have done him good, because he looked a bit more relaxed. At least, he did until he saw us almost flatten the trio of noble-ponies and leave tire marks on his nice clean sidewalk.

He charged away from the door, leaping over the rope. “Joo find ze place to park or I toss zat heap in ze bay!” He bellowed.

My driver stuck her head out the window and winked at him. “Delivery for After Glow and Miss Stella!”

The minotaur hesitated then pressed his hand against his breast-pocket and spoke in a low voice. I couldn’t hear the reply but he tapped the pocket again then pointed around the side of the building. “Go around ze back.”

Taxi revved the engine before calling out, “That’s what I kept asking you to do but nooo, you had to work!”

Minox’s face blazed as he made his way back to his position by the door, crossing his arms and trying to look gruff, an attempt that just barely failed to hide an embarrassed grin as we rounded the the building.

****

After Glow was waiting for us beside a maintenance door disguised as part of the brickwork. She was lighting a second cigar off of the nub of the first one, her wrinkled green face bunched in concentration as she blew on the ember. Swift leapt out of the window before it pulled to a stop, landing beside her grandmare.

“Gran, you know the doctor said chain smoking is bad for you!” She said, batting the second cigar away with a wingtip. Glow caught it again with her horn before it could land in a puddle.

“It’s damn near the only thing with chains ah got left these days!” Her grandmare replied, disappointed. She tucked away the extra smoke and trotted around the end of the car, putting one hoof up on the window and peering in. “Yah bring us a damn trunk?!”

Pulling open the back door, I gave the box a solid kick. “Hey, Gloves! You alive in there? We’re gonna dump you in the bay, if that’s alright with you.”

This commenced a thumping and coarse language such as few ponies have ever had the pleasure of hearing. I turned to Granny Glow, tapping the trunk. “You have a cart we can put this guy on? The box is enchanted so it’s lighter than it looks, but I still don’t feel like carrying it.”

“Awww, come on, yah whinin’ puss. Give’er here.” Her horn lighting, Glow tore the trunk out of the back seat, juggling it in one levitation field whilst discretely pulling out her cigar and lighting it with another. Gloves was not pleased.

“Sir, do you think I could go use one of the showers and clean my uniform?” Swift asked, straightening her combat vest and sniffing at it a little.

“Yes, please.” Taxi added. “Being cooped up in the car with that smell is giving me a stomach ache.”

“Alright. You waiting here?” I asked.

“Not a chance! Things are just getting good. You pulled me into this, so I want to at least watch.” My driver replied, closing the car door, whipping her braid around one hoof and hiking up her saddlebags. “Besides, it’s not like my karma can get any worse today. You saw to that. Don’t think I won’t take it out of your hide later.”

Grabbing my hat off the front seat, I set it back in place and turned to After Glow. “I take it you’ve got a place we can take care of our little ‘issue’ here?”

Glow spun the trunk in mid-air and shoved it through the maintenance door ahead of her as she answered, “Ye’ve proved yer colors enough fer me, bucko. The lizard can fire me iffen’ he wants, but Ah’m layin’ mah trust on ye. We’ve got a place.”

****

The back entrance lead to a janitor’s hallway with a smaller, more cramped mining elevator dating back probably fifty years, whose solidity left a lot to be desired. The bottom of it looked like it’d been built of ancient railroad ties and there was no roof. It was a hoof-operated job or, in this case, horn operated. Glow set the trunk on it then grabbed the huge crank wheel set in the center of the floor with her magic. Swift stepped onto the platform, looking down to see between the slats.

“Gran, where does this go? I didn’t even know there was a second elevator in the Vivarium.”

“Ye’ll see, little bird.” After Glow answered, floating a beer-can out of the purse slung around her neck and spitting into it. “Yer about to see some of the best kept secrets we got. Ah wanted to show ’em to ye earlier but... well, yer dad’s a giant prig.”

Swift snickered and flipped one ear back against her head. “Daddy is just looking out for me.”

Grabbing the wheel in a flash of telekinesis, the old unicorn tapped a hoof impatiently. “You two goin’ down or not?”

That statement made me realize I hadn’t yet actually gotten onto the elevator. My sense of self-preservation was waiting to see what happened with the weight of three ponies on it. If she trusted her granddaughter’s health to it, though, I eventually decided I could trust mine. Taxi and I stepped onto the platform; it creaked, but held firm.

Glow released the brake, and we descended on the archaic mining platform. There was no light except that given off by Glow’s horn, which cast everything in a disturbing lime. Darkness quickly consumed both the sounds of the street and what little illumination came from above. The walls would glisten once in awhile when we passed a layer of shale in the roughly blasted bedrock.

I couldn’t estimate how far down we were going, but from the wind whistling up between the slats and the creeping chill, it felt like a pretty deep trip; deeper even than the central chambers of the club.

Gloves was getting antsy and started kicking the wall of the box again, this time in a more measured and intent sort of way; less ‘frantic bucking,’ more ‘battering ram.’

“Trust me, mate.” I stage whispered to him. “You really don’t want to get out of there right now. There’s a unicorn out here who would love it if you did, if only so she could find out whether or not it’s possible to interrogate somepony once they’ve been turned inside out.”

Glow seemed to appreciate that, allowing herself a small smirk, but for some reason this assessment didn’t to appear make Gloves any happier. He whimpered, but decided further kicking was probably unwise.

****

After what felt like a thousand years, the elevator ground to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. Echoes of dripping water seemed to come from everywhere at once. Scarlet rounded the corner with a torch attached to his forehead by a little strap, fanning the cone of light over us and our package. His gaze lingered on me for about five seconds longer than it needed to.

“Scarlet, get the damn light outta our faces, wouldja? These here ponies don’t need ya blindin’ em.” Glow growled.

“I told the mistress you’d be down soon. Minox said he’d send Master Snow Coy in a few minutes if you need him.” He replied, still sneaking little glances at me out of the corner of one eye.

The extra illumination let me see where we’d come to rest. Stone hallways branched off in all directions from the elevator. Most were only large enough for a pony and perhaps a mine-cart, though the one Scarlet stood in seemed much wider. A double set of badly rusted railroad tracks went deep into the darkness.

“Who is ‘Snow Coy?’” Taxi asked, raising her eartips. Normally I’m leery of my compatriots asking too much about the methods employed by those existing in any legal grey area, but we’d left ‘reasonable deniability’ sitting on a street corner in the Skids around the time I decided parcel post was the best way to transport a suspect.

Glow shoved Scarlet to one side of the hall with her magic and set off. “Ye wanted to know how we git them mob boys to stay out? Snow Coy and his family be how. They’ve got a gift what goes back generations.” The trunk rose off the elevator and followed her. “Ye’ll see iffen’ we need him to break this idjit.”

She let one corner of it bang against the wall, making Gloves snarl, “Hey, watch it!”

“Heh, few bruises is the least of yer worries bucko.” Turning to me, Glow lowered her voice. “Speakin’ of worries... didja... is... is Azure Rose yer girl?” I plucked the picture from my jacket and held it out. She took it and scanned the image then passed it back. “Aye, that’s our miss Rose...”

“She’s the one.” I replied, affirmatively. ”Also, now that we’re here and I don’t think the male mountain is going anywhere, I feel safe in telling you her real name wasn’t Azure Rose.”

“Not-... now wait a damn minute!” Glow brought us up short, swinging around and taking a threatening step towards me. “Yer not sayin’ ye were holdin’ out on us are ye?”

I started to rebut with something about crotchety crones and busted ribs, but Swift stepped between us. “No, gran. Nopony knew. Her name is Ruby Blue.” She hesitated, then sadly amended, “Was.”

“She’s got more names than a phonebook. Our filly knew somebody was chasing her.” I added, wincing as I caught a drip from a stone spike hanging from the ceiling right down my neck. Glow squinted at me for a moment then swung back to the tunnel.

The intense humidity had us all sweating despite the cold. In the close, subterranean air the only smell that made it through the sweat and cigar smoke was the embalming fluid drenching Swift’s uniform.

“Ugh, kid, do you mind going back up and handling your hygiene? I’ll fill you in when we’re done.” I promised, nudging the pegasus back up the passage.

Scarlet nickered softly, sniffling at my partner. His lip curled and plucked at her shirt lightly. “Ugh... Swift, that’s you? Were you rolling around in ammonia and garbage? I thought the pony in the carry-on was just a particularly smelly sort!”

“Hey! I’ve got standards, ya pricks! Professionals don’t smell like that!” Mr. Gloves shouted back.

My partner’s face flushed angrily and she gave the box a boot, making it swing in circles until Glow righted it. “I-it’s not my fault! I fell in some stuff at the morgue...”

“The morgue?!” Scarlet exclaimed. “We’re going back up stairs this instant and I am going to scrub you with a wire brush and a sand blaster!” Grabbing her short tail in his teeth, he began dragging her off down a side passage.

“Sir! Help!” She pleaded, beating her wings at him. He dodged and wove, giving her a shake like a dog with a toy.

“No help here, stinky.” I smiled, shooing her with a hoof. “Get cleaned up and we’ll meet you afterwards.”

Taxi covered her nose with her leg. “Really, sweety, you reek like a dead cat left in the sun.”

Swift let herself be carted off by the escort which, unfortunately, left us without a light. Glow popped a tiny ball of glowing sparks from her horn that spat and crackled, hanging over her head. It was uneven illumination and the going was a little perilous. The unhewn rocks made for a stumbling journey.

After the fourth or fifth time I tripped and almost landed on my chin, I was about to ask Glow how much farther we had to go when the hallway abruptly stopped as a smooth, stone wall. It looked like fitted rocks had been piled together.

“Did we take a wrong turn?” I asked.

Our unicorn guide let out a guffaw. “Boyo, mah sense of direction ain’t gone yet.” Grabbing a stalagmite in one hoof she wrenched it sideways like a lever. It rattled on a well disguised gear and hidden equipment groaned to life, sprinkling dust and gravel on my ears as the entire wall dropped outward on a well-oiled hinge, revealing Stella’s private home.

I don’t know what I expected. Stella’s audience chamber upstairs was very ‘dragon’ in its appointment. The gems and the ridiculously tasteless mosaic were just enough of an exhibition to convince everypony who might see it they were dealing with a barely tamed beast, civilized only by the threat of a PACT team dropping in on his heavily groomed head.

Here then, was the truth. Stella was civilization. Public mendacity aside, in his private lair I think I’d have felt comfortable entertaining the Princesses themselves.

The cavern stretched over a hoofball field’s length into the distance, and would have been lost to sight but for a ring of gemstones set in the ceiling, all of which shined brightly. Moving water created a comforting background noise. A throne in the style of a Pegasopolian fainting couch occupied an entire stretch of wall, sitting in a pool with water splashing against its legs. The underground lake would have worn me out on one good lap from one side to the other.

Most of the room’s furnishings, including a vanity with a gargantuan mirror, were scaled to serpent size, except a low platform with short steps leading up to the throne. The platform spanned the cave from one end to the other, just above the water, and seemed climbable by ponies. On it, a series of magnificent marble counters displayed an incredible array of curiosities from every corner of history and the world.

I recognized a first model telephone from fifty years back and a refrigerator my great grandfather would have owned. A zebra mask leered at us with the word ‘Welcome’ underneath in big black letters. At the foot of the throne lay a small tea table and chairs made of blood red timberwolf heartwood; a wood so hard to come by that the biggest thing I’d ever seen made out of it was a spoon.

After Glow turned to us and hacked up something black, spitting it over the side into the pool. “Lizard likes his fancy shit, don’t he? Don’t let it bother yah none. He scratches his scaly ass in the mornin’ same as the rest of us.”

Taxi was already on the catwalk, rushing from one little exhibit to the next, oohing and ahhing over the highlights of the impressive little collection. “Oh, Hardy, I wish I’d known we were going to a museum!”

A great voice reverberated off the ceiling: “Way to make me feel old, dahling.”

Stella rose almost soundlessly out of the waters at the side of the platform, his ample violet body slithering up with much less show than the day before, but the sight was no less arresting. His make-up had been redone and his flukes freshly polished; they glistened as water dripped off of them.

The purple serpent’s golden eyes gleamed with pleasure as he followed the Taxi’s progress down the row of displays.

“Most of those are things I’ve seen ponies create.” He said, fondly. “I’ve seen the Princesses raise the sun and lower the moon over a hundred thousand times, and yet these little genius magics of science and culture, mundane and beautiful, are what amaze me.”

My driver rushed over and put her forehooves up on his elbow excitedly. “You have an entire collection of Daring Do books! Even the reprints!”

Reaching out with two clawtips he lifted one of the tomes off its place on the shelf, flipping it open and pointing to the publisher’s mark as he laid it back in her eager hooves.

Taxi almost fainted on the spot, holding the book in both legs like it was made of gold. “First editions! Oh my...wherever did you get these?”

Stella slid his split tongue out and tapped it obscenely against his chin. “Miss Do came through Detrot once and needed some... relief. Every few months from then until she died, she’d spend an evening with us. When she passed on...” His expression saddened. “...she left me this in her Last Will and Testament. She’d signed it for me on her deathbed.”

I looked over my driver’s shoulder, examining the well loved novel. A hoof-written note on the front page said, ‘To Stella, My Biggest Fan, from D.D. Keep my spot warm. Who knows? I might be back!’

Taxi carefully shut the page, pressed her forehead against it, then set it back on the shelf.

“I never took you for a Daring Do fan, Sweets.” I murmured.

“There are still a few things you don’t know about me, Hardy.” She retorted, stepping back and sitting down on a chaise lounge up against the railing.

After Glow stepped to one side, floating the trunk forward and dropping it unceremoniously with a loud thump in front of Stella. Its occupant slammed the top with all four legs, but it held tight.

“Hey, jerks! Some of us have bones!” Gloves called out.

I climbed on top of the box. “We got our spy’s little friend. You should know, your employee... she’s dead.”

Stella’s expression darkened. “Was it this creature that killed her?” He said, ominously clicking two fangs together.

I shook my head. “Doubt it. He’s a trained monkey. Big, stupid, and I think relatively harmless.” Wincing, I felt one of my ribs shift back into place. “Mostly. We found him searching her apartment for something. Pretty sure we found it or at least, part of it. There’s also a letter to her sister. I’ll make sure that gets delivered if I can. Intercity record keeping is still a mess so finding her might be a trick.”

“I see... and Azure Rose?” The dragon murmured, his frown deepening. There’s something existentially unnerving about seeing a displeased dragon; nothing in that expression said ‘happy days and sunshine are coming your way.’ In fact, had I been the object of that displeasure, I’m pretty sure I’d be improvising methods of killing myself with a first edition Daring Do, because that would be less painful than whatever he was concocting.

“An alias. She used several.” I replied, leaping off the box. “Her real name was Ruby. Ruby Blue.”

“Miss Ruby Blue.” Stella considered this, the large fin on the side of his throat bobbing lazily. “If you can discover her family’s identity, I will see she gets full benefits and burial paid for. Anonymously, of course. I take care of my ponies.”

Something that’d been bothering me finally came to the fore. I knew it was a bad time but couldn’t continue without saying it.

I trotted over and hooked my legs over the railing beside him, looking down into the deep, black waters. “Speaking of ‘taking care’... This game to get the identity of your spy. You played me, Stella.”

“My, my, first names now? Isn’t that a little familiar?” He chuckled.

My tail lashed against my cutie-mark and I growled, “I don’t like being played.”

“Pawns usually don’t.”

The air had become thick with tension. Even Gloves had quieted while the exchange took place.

“Are you saying I’m a pawn?” I asked, seething internally.

“You’re either a pawn or a player, and right now you don’t even know the shape of the board you’re on. You dance to my tune and you hate it, but you’ll still do it because you’re not ready to take the lives of others in your hooves. Another player is moving against me; King Cosmo is canny and I believe he has dangerous friends lurking behind the curtain. Regardless, I need him eliminated. Now, you get a choice, which is a thing rarely afforded to the pieces on the field...”

He raised both claws, holding them out to me. Bobbing his left taloned hand, he said, “In the one, the life of everypony in the Heights and the Vivarium. The continued peace, for however it may last.” He raised the right. “In the other, your pride. Choose, Hardy. I’m leaving it to you. If you say so, I will release this fool in the box and let him walk out of here. You may condemn us, but I know I won’t get your cooperation if I don’t give you this choice.”

There it was, once again. I could practically feel the dragon pulling my strings.

A voice somewhere in that closed off, sickened part of my psyche said: Screw it... let it all burn.

The taste of guilt followed immediately. Its flavor wasn’t to my liking. It wasn’t a worthy thought, and Swift would never forgive me. For some reason, that mattered a lot just then. I’d known her for two days but didn’t want her to think badly of me. Damn. Getting old. Must be.

“Stella... whatever happens from here on, you will owe me. Period. Your word.”

The dragon nodded. “My word. Now, let’s see this thing you’ve brought me.”

Turning to the container full of bodyguard I pulled the letter from Ruby Blue to her sister from my coat and read it to myself. The lock popped open.

“Finally! You rat bastards are gonna pa-” The stallion I’d been calling Gloves stopped in mid-sentence as he took in the dragon’s bulk leering down at him from overhead, licking his painted lips.

I fell back from the box, covering my nose. “Agh... damnit, Stella! I’m not cleaning that up!”

Chapter 10: The Spy Who Wubbed Me

Starlight Over Detrot: Chapter 10: The Spy Who Wubbed Me

The concept of an arcanelectric device is not new, but the mass production and increased scaling of such things came into being only recently. What few devices there were around the time of Luna’s return were mostly small consumer appliances, such as fans, movie projectors, refrigeration units, and rainbow vacuums. This was largely because pony materials science wasn’t up to the task of handling more dramatic arcanelectrics; traditional woods and metals used to house such designs would warp, shatter, or occasionally animate and begin demanding revenge for being plucked from the earth (see The Grand Galloping Gala Waffle Maker Incident, LR11)

It wasn’t until zebra alchemy became better integrated into Equestrian industry that things took off for arcanelectrics; with the introduction of materials that could contain magic, more powerful devices became possible. Magic-powered automotive vehicles came to supplant trains and manual pulling for personal transportation. Telephone networks and radio transmitters meant ponies were no longer even occasionally killed by attempting to use dragonfire for in-city personal correspondence. This doesn’t even touch on some of the more explosive arcanelectric devices, such as the Cloudhammer Lightning Rifle.

While the mixing of magic, technology, alchemy, and weather control has produced vast improvements in the quality of life for most ponies, it has not done so with complete reliability. Even with the stabilizing innovations of zebra alchemy, arcanotech is best described as 'moody.’ Magic is unpredictable by its very nature, and such devices operate on the basis of rules that are bizarre, arbitrary, or applicable in every circumstance except when it would suddenly be most inconvenient for them not to. The lowliest hot water heater, given the right confluence of ambient magic/local conditions, will still occasionally soak a pony right up to their ears in cherry flavored gelatin.

--The Scholar

Watching the bodyguard soil himself gave me a certain guilty satisfaction, especially after he’d nearly taken my head off just an hour ago, but I still felt a little bad for the guy. Stella was a bladder-emptying presence on his good days; specifically, days nopony had tried to blackmail him or murder his employees.

As the dragon dragged more of his coiled body above the platform, the thug’s stricken gaze remained locked on Stella’s slitted golden eyes. He backed into the edge of his box, almost tipping it over, but there was nowhere for him to go. That didn’t keep what was left of his base-mammal awareness from screaming at him that ‘anywhere else’ was a healthier place to be.

This suited me just fine; he was likely in a pliable enough mental condition to get the basics out of the way. I stepped between the bodyguard and the imposing figure of the Vivarium’s madame, trying to put on a disarming smile. I didn’t need to try too hard, because it was being compared to Stella’s smile, which could have put the Royal Guard on full alert.

“Good afternoon,” I said; his gaze shifted to my face and a bit of intelligence crept back into his eyes. “You mind if I ask your name? I think it’s likely to make him less inclined to eat you if we have that.” I jerked my rear hoof in Stella’s direction.

“H-h-hay Maker.” He managed, pee sloshing around his ankles.

“Wonderful. Progress. I’m Detective Hard Boiled, this is Miss After Glow—” Glow’s knife let out an unsettling clicking noise. “—Miss Taxi—” My driver lifted herself on her rear legs, stretched her forelegs over her head on each side and twisted back and forth until her spine produced an alarming crack. “—and I’m certain you’ve guessed that this is Stella. I have some things I want to know but you’ll have to excuse me.”

“F-for what?” Hay Maker asked warily.

I waved in our host’s direction. “I believe our guest here needs a quick shower?”

The bodyguard yelped, “What?!”

Before he could protest any more eloquently, he was in mid-air, dangling by his back legs as Stella swooped him up in one claw, snapped the chain links on the cuffs binding his knees together, and dropped him squarely in the vanity’s pool-sized sink. He scrambled up right just in time to be flattened against the bottom by a stream of steaming hot water from the tap.

“There now, isn’t that better?” Stella asked, clicking his teeth together as Hay Maker, coughing and sputtering, dragged himself up the side of the sink. His blond mane stuck to his neck, and as he stood there, he soon began shivering in the cool subterranean air. “Hay Maker. Such an aggressive title! I rather like it. Now then, as Mr. Hard Boiled said, we have questions and I believe you have answers.”

“B-bite me...” He spat, his forelegs giving out as he slid onto his belly. “I-I know you freaks don’t k-kill ponies. I can t-take whatever you can dish out.”

“Such language.” Stella tsked, smacking his ruby lips together. “I suppose common courtesy is too much to expect.”

He picked up Hay Maker once more, and deposited him in front of me. I gave him a little prod in the chest. “We aren’t going to torture you—”

After Glow flicked her cigar in a circle. “Speak fer yerself. Ah say we feed ’em to the lizard one inch at a time!” A knife she might as well have magicked into existence whipped into the metal grate at his feet, neatly clipping a few of the hairs from the tip of Hay Maker’s overgrown fetlock. The bodyguard’s neck tensed and if his bowels hadn’t already been empty, I think he’d have lost control again.

Stella merely swished his tail through the lake water, splashing my ankles. “I doubt he’d have much flavor, Miss Glow. Besides, I believe the goal was informative?”

“Ah’d find it very informative. Ah ain’t never seen a dragon eat nopony before.”

I glanced at the old unicorn and let out an irritated grunt. “Not helping.” Turning back to Hay Maker, I put both forehooves on his shoulders. I forced him to look into my face rather than up at Stella, who was inspecting talons that could eviscerate a pony with a limp-wristed gesture. “I don’t think you’re behind this little scheme with the club security system. You can still get out of this. Give us the pony who you’re working with and I’ll make sure you walk out of here.”

His lips twitched into a sneer and he swatted my legs away, giving me a hard push that sent me onto my ass. “Screw yourself, copper!” He spat in my face.

After Glow caught him in a full body field of arcane energy before he could advance, yanking him backwards against the railing. “Eh, stay there big boy, or yer goin’ in the drink.”

As I picked myself up, Stella had a bemused expression I wasn’t sure I liked. “Mr. Detective, I believe the kind approach isn’t likely to work on this one. It’s rare to see such loyalty in a ‘bought’ pony. I wonder if perhaps our little spy is more to him than just an employer?”

Hay Maker clenched his teeth at Stella’s words, narrowing his eyes and pressing against After Glow’s implacable magical hold. The muscles in his neck bulged, but she just went back to casually shaping the ash on her cigar with the edge of a hoof. “It don’t matter. Ah’m gonna skin ’em when Ah find ’em.”

“No, you won’t,” I replied, one ear back against my head. “They’ll be your prisoners, sure, but I want them both alive and healthy. I think we’re going to need them to handle your ‘other’ little problem. Send that Snow Coy fella in. I assume he’s got some spells we can use to get at what we need from this mule?”

Stella smirked at that, then tapped a gemstone on his vanity and spoke into a small microphone hidden somewhere in the expansive mirror. “Scarlet, darling? Send Master Snow Coy in. It seems we will be needing him after all.”

The speaker spit a bit of static then Scarlet’s voice came from some overhead speakers. “Yes, Mistress! Right away! Ugh, Swift, hold still!” There was a splash of water and scuffling hooves.

My partner’s slightly panicky voice took over. “No! You’re not putting perfume in my mane!”

“It’s not perfume! It’s conditioner, now hold still while I do your tail.”

“I don’t need conditioning!”

“This would go so much faster if you’d stop fighting...”

“Stop pulling on my wings!”

Stella smiled fondly as the speaker went dead.

Hay Maker was recovering his bluster as he dried out. “You are going to burn, you hear me? I get out of here and I’ll toss a feckin’ bomb in this place.”

“Then I shall count my lucky stars it’s unlikely you will ‘get out’ of the Vivarium in a timely fashion. You’re useful, sweetness. Pray you remain that way.” Stella replied, his neck flukes standing up as he turned to me. “Detective, I assume you have a plan?”

“Something like that. I figure they’ve got a way to communicate. Am I right?” I asked, eyeing Hay Maker. He merely scowled and gnashed his teeth, futilely trying to tug himself free of the encompassing mystical restraints. I continued, “I didn’t find it when I frisked him, and if the pony we’re hunting is as clever as I think they are, then he’s going to have to show us how they’ve been talking to one another. I’d imagine he managed to inform them we caught him so might I recommend we put the staff on lockdown?”

“Hardy, what if it’s a guest?” Taxi put in.

“Doubt it,” I replied, waving a hoof. “For the kind of infiltration they’ve been working, I’m betting they took a job. We’re looking for ponies with a history in security. Probably even a special talent for security or intelligence gathering. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult once the guests clear out to go through the... staff...”

I trailed off as I noticed both Stella and Glow sharing a look; when they saw my bemused expression, they collectively burst into laughter.

“What’s funny?” I asked, irritated.

The unicorn rolled her eyes, her jowls jiggling with mirth. “Riiight... yer lookin’ for a pony in this place who is good with restraints, information extraction, and keepin’ secrets. Nope, why would we eeever employ one o’ them? Try again, smart-wad.” Her voice was thick with sarcasm.

“Fine, then we need an alternative.” I said curtly, indignation covering the fact that I was a little embarrassed by the oversight. “Let’s hope Snow Coy provides us with one. Either way, make sure the staff don’t leave.”

“Already done, deary.” Stella assured me, straightening his auburn mane. “I came to much the same conclusion before you arrived. The staff will find themselves required to stick around for an extra hour or two. I hope, sincerely, that is enough. My employees aren’t used to these types of inconveniences.”

The racket of the descending elevator from down the tunnel interrupted these conversations; all eyes turned towards the cavern entrance. The first hoofsteps that followed were so faint at first that I thought I’d imagined them. The pony coming sounded reluctant, shuffling along and kicking pebbles out of his way rather than prancing proudly like every other dom I’d seen in the building. He paused in the shadows just outside of Stella’s lair.

I could see only the outline of a thin, rather short pony with somewhat handsome features marred by a weak chin. He seemed to be taking deep, fortifying breaths as though preparing for an unpleasant ordeal.

“Master Snow Coy, come in, please,” Stella said encouragingly. “We need your expertise.”

“Yes, Mistress Stella,” Snow Coy murmured, as barely audible as he was barely visible.

He was a head shorter than myself and—unlike the effeminate Scarlet—masculine, but his shoulders were hunched forward, making him look like he was trying to be as small as possible. Worse, he was a pegasus: no magic. His wings were tiny; they might have been Swift’s if she’d been at all in proportion. His mane was a soft ashen shade of yellow, and his short cut pelt seemed to shift under the light, occasionally settling on off-navy blue.

All in all, it wasn’t an image I’d ever associated with the words ‘Grand Inquisitor.' Or even ‘Dominant.’ He trotted forward and bowed low, pressing his cheek against the cold metal catwalk as he waited to be addressed.

Hay Maker was eyeing him, but as he bowed, the big boxer heaved a sigh of relief as the ordeals he was envisioning faded. Snow Coy ignored him; the pegasus’ attention was on Stella, who waved one claw for him to get up. “Master Snow Coy, you know I don’t stand by those silly old ceremonies. Get up.”

Blushing lightly, the stallion pushed himself upright. “Yes, Mistress Stella.”

I trotted around him in a small circle, studying his unusual coloration. Taxi had a frown on her face, as nonplussed by this extremely humble pegasus as I was. He wasn’t even wearing any of the straps or metal spikey bits I’d seen on almost every other pony at the Vivarium. Still, if there’s one rule by which all of Equestria lives, it’s that nothing is ever exactly what it seems.

“You’re Master Snow Coy?”

He sat on his haunches, following me with his kind, gentle eyes. He reminded me of a kindergarten teacher I’d met once, many years ago. “Yes. Are you the one I’ve been told is threatening the Vivarium?” he inquired calmly, pursing his lips. I shook my head and waved towards Hay Maker, who’d managed to get one of his hooves loose and was clutching at the railing at his back as he fought to free the others. That, or After Glow was just screwing with him; she didn’t seem terribly worried and wasn’t even breaking a sweat holding him in place.

Snow Coy got up and moved over in front of the much larger pony, settling on his bottom again. “Miss Glow, you can let him go now.” He said very quietly.

I jumped forward before the shine around Glow’s horn could go out. “Wait a second! Stella, I get that you’ve got big trust in your people but before we go any farther, you’re not planning on... I don’t know, frying his brain with lightning or something are you? A vegetable isn’t going to do us a mountain of good, you know.”

Hay Maker registered his agreement with a displeased grunt.

“Detective, I realize you have a certain interest of your own in this one, but I would ask you to please trust that our methods are sound.” Stella picked up a cosmetics compact I could have used for a bed from the collection on his vanity and began disinterestedly applying a thin layer of powder to his cheek scales. “We haven’t survived this long on luck. You wanted to know how we’ve kept the Heights safe and maintained our relative anonymity? You earned the right to know, my sweet stud. Now, let Master Snow Coy work.”

Glow’s horn sputtered, and the hum of magic died. Immediately, and as I’d thought he would, Hay Maker lunged for Snow Coy, who sat impassively as the much larger pony grabbed him by the shoulders and threw his leg around his throat, then yanked the small pegasus upright while backing towards the door.

“Get of my way or I’ll break his neck like a friggin’ twig!” the boxer shouted.

I ratcheted my gun’s autoloader, kicked up my bit, and leveled the barrel at his head, already figuring which angle I could put a bullet in him from. It wasn’t a terribly difficult shot at this range, but you generally give the hostage taker one chance to surrender, because even easy shots sometimes miss.

I was about to lay the standard, slightly bit-muffled ‘There’ff nowhere to go’ spiel on him, when Snow Coy twisted his head to one side uncomfortably. Hay Maker looked down at the sudden motion and their eyes met.

And something... happened.

I could never have told you what. It was so quick I barely had time to draw breath. One second, I was considering how I was going to blow Hay Maker’s head all over the wall; the next, Snow Coy’s gaze locked with the boxer’s, and the bigger pony seemed to go slack. Slowly, the tower of muscle and crushing strength relaxed his grip.

Snow Coy lightly rubbed his throat and coughed, keeping his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Hay Maker’s face. Reaching up he very tenderly touched the bigger pony’s cheek, and murmured a genuinely regretful, “I’m sorry.”

We don’t use magic in most police work unless the crime was magical, but I’d witnessed my fair share of incantations. This was unlike any spell I’d ever seen. My brain scrambled for any coherent explanation. Enchantment. He’s enchanting him. He’s secretly an alicorn... or a transformed unicorn... or...

“What’s your name?” Snow Coy asked, uninterrupted by my awestruck musings.

“Hay Maker.” The boxer replied, then looked surprised, as though he hadn’t intended to answer.

“What is the name of your accomplice?”

“I... I don’t know her real name or what name she uses here. I just call her boss.” Hay Maker’s jaw clenched tightly as he fought to close off the flow of words.

“Do you love her?” The dom asked, brushing back his subject’s mane with all the gentility of a father holding his foal for the first time.

Tears began to leak from the corners of Hay Maker’s eyes. He struggled to back away but whatever Snow Coy had done to him, it was a damn sight more ‘whammy’ than even After Glow’s telekinesis.

“Y-y-yeees...” he choked out, then almost bit the tip of his own tongue off as he tried to force his voice down.

“And... does she love you?”

“N-no! Stop! Please... stop...” Hay Maker begged, his lips quivering.

Snow Coy touched his chin, holding him up while those kind and caring eyes imprisoned him in some deeper, darker place than any After Glow or I might have come up with. Seasoned interrogators take hours to get information out of a genuinely reluctant being, much less one who had somepony to protect, and yet here was this unassuming creature, tearing out a pony’s soul with a gently-asked question.

“How do you communicate with each other?”

Hay Maker shook his head, still unable to break the fearsome gaze. Mechanically, like a pony possessed, he reached up to his lips and lightly twisted his front tooth using his tongue and hooftip. It snapped out of a secret socket that seemed to be built into his jaw. Coy held out his hoof and he spat the fake tooth onto it.

“Just one more question. I promise. How is it activated?” Coy murmured.

“Y-you have t-to p-press t-the button...w-with your t-tongue...” Hay Maker was almost gagging on every word now.

Snow Coy nodded to himself then lowered his head and closed his eyes. The boxer immediately collapsed, great wracking sobs pouring out of him as he curled up on his side and drew his legs up. The dom gathered Hay Maker to his breast and, wonder of wonders, the other stallion clutched at him like a rock in a rushing river.

I didn’t dare break the profane silence as Snow Coy comforted the weeping pony. They lay there, holding one another. We were on a pretty fiercely enforced deadline and nothing I could think of to say seemed appropriate.

At last, after some minutes, the dom extricated himself from the larger pony, trotted over, and set the tooth down between my forehooves.

“I hope this was worth it to you,” He muttered. His slender face was streaked with moisture. Before I could reply his wings buzzed and he dashed out of the cave full tilt, crying like a foal.

My jaw was right down between my knees. It took my trigger bit dropping from my lips and smacking painfully against my fetlock to bring me back to reality.

“What in the holy sun of Celestia was that?!” I blurted, pushing my hat back on my head.

After Glow’s cigar had gone out; she relit it with a burst from her quivering horn, laughing nervously. Even she seemed slightly shaken. “Ah... heh... Ah known that colt and his family back three generations. They say his granny could make a dragon cry. Weirdest bunch of ponies Ah ever met. They sure do care though...”

“B-but what did... what did he do?” I stammered, staring down at the false tooth. It had a small jewel embedded in the top of it that looked like it could be pressed.

“Do ye really wanna know?” After Glow asked, chomping on her smoke and puffing a ring out of her nose. I found, surprisingly, that I didn’t. There are some things in this world that a pony is just not meant to question. In the best case, I’d waste time beating my head against an unsolvable mystery; in the worst case, we would learn how to tear out a pony’s secrets with a gaze, and not all the ponies who’d learn to do so would be as gentle or restrained with such magic as Snow Coy. No, much better to let that question die.

Taxi straightened her saddlebags. “So... it’s him,” she said, “him and his family. They’re the ones who take care of the mobsters. Why... why do they stay? He looked like he hated it.”

Stella turned in a small circle. “Miss Taxi, my dear... I see those scars on your flanks. I’m uncertain what your talent is and wouldn’t be so rude as to ask, but I can only guess that other ponies have looked down on you for their loss, yes?” The dragon’s voice was deeply sympathetic. “I see the shame etched there, etched deep. Their loss blackened your spirit in some way. You catch ponies looking at you, accusing you with their eyes, don’t you? They think: ‘I wonder if she deserved it.’ ‘I wonder what evil path she was foolish enough to tread.’”

Taxi said nothing, her tail sweeping protectively underneath her body. Stella was treading on dangerous ground; if he’d been a pony, he’d probably already have been laying on his back clutching a bloody nose. As it was, there was nothing my driver could do but listen.

“If those ponies dare treat someone who lost something so dear to them in that manner, can you imagine what they would do to a pony once they knew what Snow Coy is capable of? Do you know of any group of ponies who wouldn’t be afraid of him one day laying all of their secrets bare?”

My driver started to respond but hesitated then sat down, staring hard at the platform underhoof. Her expression was, outwardly, entirely emotionless. To anypony who didn’t know her she’d have just looked lost in thought, and she was—but I knew it was the look she got when her own colored history was nibbling at her.

Stella went on. “Here he has a home. He’s even quite popular. Where else would a pony with such skills find safety?”

Taxi shut her eyes tightly and muttered, “Nowhere.”

Before the mood could get too melancholy, I decided to distract everypony with business. I waved After Glow over, pointing my hoof at Hay Maker’s false tooth. “You ever see anything like this before?”

She lifted the dental device and spun it in a circle, pulling out her spectacles and arranging them on her nose. “Mmm... Ah know it. Saw some’a this here back in the Crusades. Used to send in ponies tah get enslaved and work the dragon gem mines with somethin’ like this fer intel. Looks juryrigged, though. Smart pony made this.”

Taxi poked the tooth, sending it spinning. “How come I never got one of those?” she griped. “I could have used something like that when I was working undercover!”

After Glow grinned with a certain nostalgia. “That there is war materiel. Dragons wised up towards the end of the Crusades. Started usin’ this nasty warding spell. Walk into the spell with one’a these in yer head and it goes ‘boom!’” She clapped her forehooves together; both Taxi and I jumped. “Pretty nice piece of kit unless ye happen to stumble through somewhere what has the bad juju on it. Celestia had most of the real ones rounded up and destroyed at the end of the war. Ye never know where the spell is, after all. Looks like somepony figured out how to make something similar.”

Hay Maker swallowed sharply as he listened to Glow’s explanation. I was with him on that; the thought of having had a homemade version of a military communications device known for volatile explosiveness sitting behind me the entire drive over wasn’t a pleasing retrospective.

Stella dragged himself out of the water, the catwalk shaking. I had to dance to keep my balance as he crawled across his massive lounge. His bottom half still lay in the water. “Hmmm... Miss Glow, would you take our prisoner upstairs and find him someplace quiet to sit?”

The old unicorn’s lips curled up in a scary grin. “Eeyup...”

Stella shook her head and raised a clawtip. “Treat him gently... for now.”

Glow’s grin vanished beneath a sharp eyeroll. “Aw, awright. Dipshit, yer comin’ with me.” Her horn flashed and she snatched up Hay Maker, rolling him onto his back in mid-air. He flailed his hooves helplessly, tearful bawling replaced by fearful wailing.

She left me sitting there, contemplating the tooth, which I picked up in both hooves, turning it over and over. “Taxi, what do you know about devices like this? I mean the logistics of how they work.”

She shrugged and thought back. “What, magic communications devices? We used a smaller version of the ones in the police cruisers when I was undercover. Really expensive, too big, and not all that reliable. That thing looks too small to have an internal power supply, so I bet it works off something local like those walkie-talkie gems we saw on some of the staff. Probably whatever they were using to tap into the security also powers it remotely. If that’s the case its range is likely limited to this building and the surrounding neighborhood.”

“So it’s entirely possible his friend hasn’t had more than a few minutes advanced warning?” I asked, feeling the beginnings of hope. “And if Stella’s got the place on lockdown, his friend’s still here?”

“Well... maybe? Ugh, Hardy, you’re asking the wrong pony!” She tossed her mane in agitation.

“How durable is the receiver do you think? It’s likely to be magical, right?” I asked, insistently.

Taxi smacked me on the side of the head. “You never paid attention during magitechnical class, did you?”

“Hey!” I objected, rubbing my temple. “Do you see a horn on my head or a bunch of wires and gems on my ass?”

She let out a long, exasperated groan. “Arcanelectrics have to use magical receivers. That’s the ‘arcane’ part, doofus. If it’s wired into the security system then it has to be arcanelectric. I don’t know how durable it is, but the answer is probably ‘very.’ Magic speakers don’t have an upper range unless you build one in. They’ll still break from excess volume like those new lightning based ones but it takes a lot more to do it. That’s why there are laws on personal sound systems.”

“So if we were to put a lot of sound through this, the one on the other end might survive?” I mused.

“Uh...yeah, at a guess, it might. Why? What do you have in mind?”

Stella, who’d been content to listen to us while preening himself, turned onto his side and propped himself on one palm. “Ahhh, does my little Detective have an idea?”

I straightened my coat, tucking the tooth into the front pocket. “I’m thinking so. I’m going to need to borrow your disc jockey.”

The dragon’s lip curled in amusement. “Gyro Technic? I’m sure he’ll be happy to help. I’ll call him while you’re on your way up.” Something in the way he said the word ‘happy’ made me distinctly nervous. After a moment’s consideration, he added, “Don’t kill him or I’ll eat you.”

****

There’s a certain tactful methodology for dealing with difficult members of the public. They taught it to us sometime in the Academy right after the month-long course I vaguely remember as Not Humiliating The Department with Public Sex Acts 101. I remember listening to the prim and proper charm-school professor with a tight hair bun and a nice flank just long enough to pass the test, then promptly forgetting every word she ever said.

In Equicide, on most days, I was there to ask questions. Period. ‘Tact’ was just another word for ‘bullshit’ in my book. You use it when necessary, but in general it’s just another tool in pursuit of the truth. If it got in the way of the truth, you abandoned it for something more effective.

Gyro Technic made me wish I’d paid more attention to that teacher’s mouth and less to her rear end.

Taxi and I were directed up to the DJ’s booth via a circuitous route through the back rooms. I had braced myself for slowly explaining what we needed to a zap-headed psychedelic druggie waste of fur whose cutie-mark had something to do with ruptured eardrums.

If only.

I pushed open the door to the tiny music booth and stepped into a surprising pool of quiet. Gyro Technic was still twirling and dancing to something, but the noise coming from his headphones sounded nothing like the buzzing, wild animal music the club was swinging to last time I was on the dance floor. It sounded like classical; the kind of sweet, soulfully melodious stuff Taxi put on when we’d had a rough day and the vodka came out.

He hadn’t seen us and his eyes were closed as his collection of glow-sticks and flashing strobes swung around his neck. His horn worked both turntables at once while deft hooves quickly switched records, sending the crowd just inches away through the soundproofed glass into another frenzy of bumping and grinding.

We stood there for a full minute, waiting for him to see us then Taxi coughed politely.

Gyro let out a surprised yelp, then scrambled to grab his microphone, “Hey, cats! Your sweet beat master gotta take a call! Be back in two shakes of my hot ass!”

He didn’t look all that old. His pink fur was still lustrous and he hadn’t a single wrinkle around his eyes. The tips of his spotted turquoise mane weren’t grey, but what came out of his muzzle were the gravelly tones of a life-long smoker, low and with the kind of seductive growl that could set mares swooning.

The crowd surged in a mass of waving hooves and tails as he set another record on his tables and put the needle in place, but there was nothing to hear. It was strange to watch that many ponies shrieking without hearing it, like a movie that’s lost the sound track.

He pulled his headphones down around his throat. It was definitely classical coming out of one side while that beat heavy garbage, turned down low, came out of the other.

“You two ruffians don’t intend on using my equipment, do you?” Gyro sniffed, giving us both an appraising look.

My brain chugged. I turned to Taxi who was having a similar cognitive failure; in the span of two seconds Gyro had gone from that passionate, masculine voice that most ponies could listen to all night to a reedy Manehattanite twang so upper-crust it gave the impression we were being charged to breathe his air and the debt was running up quick. I was also suddenly aware of Stella’s threat. Murder the disk-jockey, become dinner.

Be polite, Hardy. I thought. You can be polite, right? Just tell him what you want,then leave.

“We’re not here to touch anything.” I assured him, trying to be genial. “We just need your services for the good of the Vivarium. I assume Stella told you what’s going on? Do you think you could improvise a way to route speaker power through—” I pulled the tooth out and set it on his turntables. “—this?”

Gyro flung his headset off with a shot of magic and began shuffling through his vinyl, pointedly not so much as looking at the communication device.

“Good of the Vivarium... hah!” He snorted, tossing his mane as he selected a record and slipped it into the auto-changer. As he turned away, I gave his cutie-mark a quick look: a treble-clef overlaid with a conductor’s wand. He continued, no less arrogant and certainly not sounding terribly cooperative. “Stella did not deem it necessary to tell me anything. He never does! He just makes demands like I’m one of those whipped little perverts who enjoy the rod. Well, you can march right back down to that dragon and tell him that I may rent, but I am paid up. So long as the job is done and the masses are happy I don’t take requests and I control the sound! That is in my contract.”

Irritation began to eat at my resolve not to pummel this pony. “Look, Stella authorized us to use this system. You can either help us or leave but—”

“But what?” He interrupted, his horn letting off a menacing glow. “You think because you’re some stiff cop you can come into my booth and tell me what to do? I’ve played the Gala, Mister Officer! I have ponies in high places who call on my services for their musical needs! I am not at your behest.”

I grit my teeth, feeling my pulse start to pound in my temples; speaking slowly and deliberately like he barely understood Equestrian was as cordial as I could manage anymore. “We. Just. Need. A bit. Of your sound.”

“Yes, and I need a boat made of gold to fly me to the moon where I’ll take tea with the princesses! I see we have two things between us that are not going to happen tonight.”

Taxi, in typical Taxi fashion, wasn’t paying much attention outwardly to the little dick waving competition but had already begun to do precisely what I’d said we wouldn’t: touch everything she possibly could with great interest.

“Look, this isn’t complicated,” I started.

Technic very casually bit off a piece of paper from a discarded record slip, chewed for a second, then spit it onto my hat. “You can’t run my equipment without me. Now screw off until you have some manners and a little breeding.”

Two seconds. If Taxi hadn’t been physically between us inside of two seconds, he’d have had a crushed trachea and I’d have been dissolving in a dragon’s stomach an hour later. I fought the red haze descending over my vision until my driver took my face in both hooves and touched her nose to mine.

“Hardy, lemme have this one,” she whispered. “He’s not kidding about the equipment. This setup is ridiculously complex. I promise, I’ll get one back for the spitball on your hat, but we need him.”

I breathed out and nodded quickly.

She turned and put her hooves together. “We’ll be off then, Mister Technic. Before we go, I must say, that Beethoofan Number Nine in D you have on the wall over there looks to be in absolutely spectacular condition,” she said, gesturing at a record inside a sealed case on the wall whilst shooting him a smile I’d seen melt butter from across the room. “Do you mind if I ask where you got it?”

Technic hesitated, eye twitching towards the prize of his collection while his headphones hung just above his head. “That’s... I... acquired that in a second hoof store... ” He jerked upright then covered his mouth with one leg. “I mean—I bought it at auction!”

Taxi held a toe to her lips. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t tell anypony. I’ve often found some rather spectacular pieces for my personal collection among the lower class establishments. Most recently, I discovered a copy of Lady Octavia playing Allegrezza for the double bass at the thirteenth Lunar Return party. It’s a pity what ponies will throw out when they haven’t any idea what they’ve got.”

Gyro’s breathing caught and he gave Taxi a manic expression. Taxi had seamlessly metamorphosed into exactly what every true, fanatical collector desires: somepony to show off for who will appreciate their passion. “You... discovered an original recording of that session?”

“Oh, yes. Verified by the Canterlot Musical Society. There were only eight made, but it seems one of those to whom it was originally gifted fell on hard times at some point and was forced to sell it.” Taxi smoothed back her checkered mane and practically purred. “I discovered it in a thrift shop covered in dust, but still in perfect playing condition. I could let you have a listen at some point if you would deign to give us a few minutes of your time and maybe the use of your considerable talents?”

She put extra emphasis on the word ‘considerable’ and I could see Gyro’s audiophiliac mind turning over the possibilities. As usual, when brute force and authority failed, flattery and bribery got us everywhere.

“I... hmmm... I believe I could arrange something. Let me see what you have there.” Setting his headphones aside, the DJ magically lifted the fake tooth, turning it end over end then carefully prodding the socket in the bottom. “This contains a wireless power stone and a fairly specialized listening spell bound to that gem in the the tip. Maybe a microphone of some kind? What did you have in mind to do with it?”

“How long do you think it would take you to rig a way to channel the club’s sound system through this?” I asked, ignoring the questions.

“Perhaps five minutes?” He replied, immediately tugging a stack of cabling out from under the turntable and splitting down several wires. “The power stone is very simple. Do you want to talk to somepony on the other end?”

“Nope.” I paused for dramatic effect. “I want you to turn it all the way up.”

Gyro’s facial expression at that instant was worth every bit in the royal treasury. It started somewhere near incomprehension, proceeded through disbelief, wandered the edges of eagerness, and finally settled on confused anger. “You’re... attempting to be funny, right? If I’d known you were going to waste my time—”

“No joke. As much power as you can put through that.” I waved a hooftip at the tooth.

His face a mask of intense surprise, he unconsciously plucked a disk from his collection, slipped it into the player, and adjusted several dials, sending the crowd into their next number. “That’ll... almost surely shake apart the receiver after a few seconds!”

“We’ll only need a few seconds. Can you do it?” I asked, firmly.

A lick of quiet, forbidden joy began to ease into his stuffy, chiseled features, but underneath a war was taking place. “I... there are laws...”

I eased my badge out and held it up for him. I couldn’t see his eyes through the rose tinted goggles, but he took my badge in his magical grasp and held it there, studying it. After several long moments, he spoke, “I should... tell you something.” He sounded very subdued all of a sudden. “I just want you to know what you’re asking of me.”

His shoulders sagged and he pulled himself back up onto his stool. Turning back to his sound board he pointed to a large knob in the center of his console. It had eleven notches on it spread evenly around the outside edge. “You don’t know it, but the music is the smallest part of what we do. Picking a good track is easy. This... right here... is at the very center of what makes a good DJ. This is what is difficult to control. It is our responsibility, our power, and our burden. Anypony can get behind a pair of turntables and spin a tune. We are the ones who know the limit and this... is the great temptress. She begs you to push her just that little bit farther every night and those who go too far end up brain damaged, deaf, and broken.”

He drew in a breath and tapped the dial. “This is the volume.”

Taxi looked a little confused by his dramatic treatment of a volume dial as Pandora’s Saddlebag, but in that instant, I understood. I recognized something in the disk jockey buried underneath his facade of civilized behavior. It reached right back into history when our ancestors chased the horizon on the open plains and outran the wind. It was something Gyro Technic and I shared.

All cops, in our heart of hearts, want to go out on the edge between justice and vengeance and dance there. One day we want to see just how far we can go, then take another step. It’s the rush of a skydiver waiting until the last possible second to open his parachute. It is an addiction, and Gyro, whatever jet-setting silver spoon he’d been born with tucked into his mouth, had it bad.

I smiled at him for the first time, and laid my hoof lightly on top of his, where it rested on the volume control.

“All the way.”

****

Taxi and I stepped back onto the dance floor and two Stilettos fell in behind us; the zebra and the colt who guarded the entrance to Stella’s audience chamber. We pushed our way through the herd of hustling bodies.

I leaned over to my driver and said quietly, “I didn’t know you collected ‘vintage’ recordings.”

She quirked her lips. “I don’t.”

“But you said—”

“I said I’d get one back for him spitting on your hat.”

****

If anticipation had a flavor, it would be like chilled sweat, condensing in the humid room full of bouncing ponies all unaware of what was about to happen. The easy weight of a walkie-talkie gem sat in my front jacket pocket. It had a clear line straight up to Gyro, who sat in his DJ booth surrounded by ropes of cable all attached by tiny metal clamps to the fake tooth, with one trembling hoof on the volume.

What we were about to do could easily have caused a riot. An evil little part of me kinda hoped it would. Our spy must have known she was made by this point, and had either secreted herself somewhere or was trying to escape. Either way, the moment was upon us; time to drop the bass.

I dipped my muzzle and spoke into the com-gem. “Do it.”

For several seconds nothing happened. I had enough time to think ‘Aw, ponyfeathers...’ as a noise like a thousand wolverines having simultaneous bowel distress seemed to rip through the air. Even Taxi and I, who’d known it was coming, instinctively ducked. There were a few screams from the assembled masses as everypony dropped to their knees at once.

The music cut out and Gyro’s modified voice crackled through the speaker system, sounding slightly distorted and very apologetic, “People! Sorry for the fart, I had the nachos tonight! Heh, just kidding, cats. Your lord of the dance just popped a fuse back here. Gimme ten minutes to get it all cleaned up! Meanwhile, drinks at the bar at seventy five percent off! Make sure to tip your waiters and waitresses.”

As one the crowd rose, gave a collective shrug, brushed themselves off, and headed for the bar. All in all, not the worst response to a noise like that from a pack of ponies. The fact that most of them were already heavily liquored probably helped. Gyro had handled it masterfully.

My communication gem let out a beep for attention; Stella’s dulcet tones spilled therefrom. “Hey there, sweetums! You might be interested to know that my console shows we just had a breach of the safety spells in room thirty seven. It’s currently undergoing reupholstering and shouldn’t be in use. Trot that tasty rump down there! My Stilettos are en-route to support, but I figure you’ll want first crack at our little mole.”

I smacked the gem. “Ten four.”

Aiming myself at the entertainment rooms, I set off at a full gallop, throwing myself around patrons and over spilled drinks. I drew a few lazy eyes, but since the Stilettos were paying me no particular mind, the guests wrote me off as just one more rushing employee trying to pin down the ‘sound problem’ and get them back to their leisure in top form.

The bordello complex had fared less well than the dance floor. Angry ponies wanting to know what the hay was going on stuck their heads out of every room in various states of dress, undress, and too-weird-to-mention dress.

Taxi, as usual, was thinking more quickly than I was. She dove into a janitor’s closet, grabbing an extension cord and a bucket. She slung the cord around her neck and shoved the bucket into my mouth then began waving ponies back into their rooms.

“Sorry, sorry, we’re going to fix the issue right now,” she said just a little bit louder than necessary and to nopony in particular, which most everypony took to mean she was talking to them. “No, no problem at all! Just a fuse. Discount drinks up front! Ask and your entertainers will be glad to give you a voucher for the next time you come in!”

****

The corridor to Room 37 was an altogether different beast.

Taxi stopped on one side of the hall and I on the other, pressing up against the wall on either side of the junction. Our two Stilettos took up positions at either end of the adjoining halls, readying their various sharp implements.

A semi-transparent sheet of plastic hung from ceiling to floor, keeping in the worst of the detritus inside, but the air was a dirty brown behind it. I twirled my hoof three times in a circle then pointed at my driver. Taxi nodded, edging over to my back in preparation for disabling anypony who tried to get past me.

On three taps of one hoof, I Iifted the veil of plastic sheeting and immediately caught a face full of swirling sawdust. I tried to peer through it, but there was nothing to see. It looked like a tornado had hit a construction site in there.

I blinked to clear my eyes and caught a glimpse of a shadow moving at the far end of the hall, stumbling drunkenly from one wall to the next. A faint pearly glow radiated from somewhere near the figure’s head.

Taxi grabbed me by the coat and tossed both of us sideways just as a wooden sawhorse wheeled out of the cloudy air, smashing headlong into the far wall. We landed in a pile of woodchips, which was softer than I might otherwise have hoped for. Twisting upright, I barreled towards the figure in a three legged gallop using the fourth to cover my face. As I got close enough I could see the shape a little more clearly. It was a tall, thin mare.

At the last moment I dropped my shoulder into a charge but the unicorn’s horn shined again and a sharp, invisible blow to the side of the neck sent me sprawling, rolling nose over hoof into the pony’s knees. She let out a feminine whinny of alarm and fell on top of me. Before she could recover I leaned up and grabbed her ear in my teeth, shoving her chin, forcing her head to one side.

Her aim spoiled, the next blast just slapped the floor beside my face rather than turning my muzzle into tapioca. Tearing herself away with strength born of fear, the spy readied another attack, and I brought my gun up, preparing to tug back the hammer manually and put one in her gut.

Then Taxi was there, appearing like a vicious wind out of the discombobulating cloudy haze, walking on her back legs. She lashed out with her hard toe-tips, landing double blows on either side of the spy’s neck. The mare let out a strangled gagging noise and fell across my belly, a sack of wet, comatose concrete.

“Oof! Ugh, Sweets...did you have to drop her on me?” I complained, shifting out from underneath the unconscious body.

“Would you have rather I let her finish that last spell? I’d miss your stupid face if it were a different shape,” Taxi answered, grinning. “So would Scarlet and Stella.”

Despite her thin limbs, our spy was heavy. Her flanks were the sort of sporty muscular that ballerinas and dressage masters pick up after years in a dance studio. She wore an apron draped around her middle, hiding her cutie-marks. A thin trickle of blood ran out of both of her ears, dripping onto the carpet. With the dust finally beginning to settle I could see her face.

“Isn’t that our waitress? From yesterday?”

“Svelte. Miss Svelte.” Taxi said, thinking back.

“That’s her, yeah,” I said, yanking the apron off her flank. Her cutie-mark was a lock sprouting a twist of thorns in the shape of a key. “And there’s our ‘security background’ too. Hay Maker was probably watching the place yesterday when we came in. She probably... ugh, she probably ran straight from wherever she was holed up. You think she was listening in on the conversation with Scarlet?”

Taxi lifted the girl’s face then let it drop. Her tongue lolled obscenely from the side of her muzzle. “I would have. That fake tooth is a work of art. I wouldn’t put it past her to have something similar she could throw around for emergencies. Maybe she bugged the drinks. Look at this.” She tugged one of Svelte’s horn rings until it came free, pulling out a small rag from her bags and cleaning it off a bit. The gem inset was blackened and cracked and the back of the ring was a mass of extremely fine wires. “I thought those looked awfully tacky. The receiver was right out in plain sight.”

“Smart, when you think about it.” I said, admiringly. “If she was carrying a purse or something bulkier the Stilettos might have found it.”

“So I guess that’s how she communicated with Hay Maker... but I don’t think that’s what did all this.” I said, pointing towards small piles of scattered tools left by the work-ponies which looked like they’d been thrown into every corner. None were embedded in the drywall, but a few had left sizeable dents. “If those exploded with that kind of force it would have taken her horn off, if not her head. Besides, how was that tapped into the security grid? And how would she get enough power out of something that small to communicate?”

Taxi was examining the girl closely, peeling back her eyelids. “Well, she’s lost her eardrums and she’s going to have one rocking headache when she comes to... probably a concussion to boot. I’m surprised she was still able to think long enough to throw a sawhorse, much less give you that shiner.” She pointed at my chest.

It wasn’t until she said it that I became aware of the absolutely mind-numbing agony in my chest and collar bone, the adrenaline no longer there to help me ignore it. That telekinetic attack had some real oomph. I tried to twist my head so I could see the damage and pins and needles started from my shoulder and worked their way right down to my heel.

“Luna stick me with her horn...” I cursed, trying to will the suffering away. I’ve never been good at assessing how injured I am on any given day, but there’s a certain metallic flavor in the back of the throat associated with your body telling you that you’ve been an boneheaded cretin.

Our Stiletto guards approached cautiously, ready not doubt to turn somepony into a pincushion if the moment called for it. When they saw me sitting over Svelte’s snoozing form they relaxed and came to that peculiar attention of theirs, waiting for orders.

Taxi was all too happy to give some. “You two yahoos just gonna stand there? We could use some help.”

The zebra looked at her companion who was jiggling and shaking one of the walkie-talkie gems. They conferred with their eyes, then the zebra said, “Internal communications in this section seem to be down. What do you need?”

“We’ve got a couple of injuries here—”

“I’m fine—” I started to object, but standing to show just how ‘fine’ I was felt only a little bit like having my leg torn off. I quickly sat again.

“As I was saying, we’ve got a couple of injuries here and if this injury doesn’t shut his muzzle, I will personally add a few more to his tally,” My driver threatened before adding, “We also need a unicorn who knows anesthetic magics of some kind.”

“There is a clinic at the other end of the complex. Several of the dominants are skilled in pain extraction as well,” The zebra Stiletto replied.

“Do you want to go get them or do I have to pay for that service too?” Taxi snarled. She’s been known to get a bit protective now and then, even if the implication appeared to be that she’s the only one who should get to decide how much I suffer. Still, even the ache in my shoulder couldn’t dull the tiny smile I allowed myself at seeing her in full on mama-bear mode again.

The zebra said something to her companion which I didn’t catch, then they were both off in opposite directions.

I did my best not to whine as Taxi began prodding and fussing over my busted leg. “You’re an idiot, you know that? Charging a unicorn...” she scolded, pinching a nerve in my side, which quieted the tingling fury of my tortured nerves.

“Can’t I just be hurt for a few minutes?” I shuddered, feeling her manipulating something under my pelt that should have most definitely not been in that position.

“You’re lucky this is just a dislocation and that we don’t have to explain why you look like you got in a high speed slap fight with the Night Trotter’s front bumper.”

“A dislocation? Are you screwing with me? I’ll be lucky if I’m not on my back for a week—”

Taxi didn’t wait for me to finish. She grabbed my leg, slid her ankle behind mine, shoved with all of her weight on my chest, forcing me off balance and onto my side. I inhaled a tasty muzzle full of bits of wood, kicking out with my back hoof which she deftly avoided. Planting her back leg on my neck she wrapped both forelegs around my damaged limb and pushed at my shoulder with her rump, wrenching it down and backwards.

I was prepared to scream like a filly; I had the noise building in my throat... but it never got to leave. Something in my shoulder joint let out a pop, then felt surprisingly better.

“Aaaaaagh... Oh. Hey...”

Lifting herself off my side she stepped back. “There. You were saying how it was a smart thing for you to try to tackle a unicorn?”

“I... heh... I didn’t really want to shoot the girl.”

“Oh?” Taxi said, skeptically. “Really? When did you get all chivalrous?”

“Chivalrous?” I snorted, testing the leg and finding it a bit tender. “Delivering a mare to the hospital with a police issue round in her stomach does not strike me as the best way to be ‘discreet.’ Besides, it worked, right?”

Didn’t somepony use that line on you recently? A niggling voice in the back of my head reminded me. I tried to think where; a memory of a raging File Cloud came roaring back. Right...Swift. Gonna have to buy the kid a drink at some point and apologize for that one.

My driver, rather than answer that or berate me further, began poking around through the mess of tools and garbage strewn around the hallway. I hobbled after her on three legs.

She pushed the door to Room 37 inward, and stepped to one side as another cloud of dust spilled out. I fought a sneeze, because doing so would have meant inhaling the horrid air. Instead, I buried my nose in my coat, took deep breaths through the lining, and surveyed the damage.

Everything inside Room 37 which wasn’t nailed down lay in little heaps in every corner. It all seemed to have been blasted back from the exact center of the small space. The walls were bare right down the stone and looked unfinished. A metal panel in the floor was slightly ajar, its hinges twisted and bent.

“I think we found where she got into the security grid.” Taxi muttered, kicking back the panel. It slammed against the floor with a dull clang.

I cast a worried eye back towards the filly in the hall. Taxi caught the look and shook her head. “She’ll be out for an hour, bare minimum.” She assured me. “A rampaging elephant couldn’t wake her after that strike. You should have seen my teacher back in the zebra ze-do do it. Somepony tried to mug him once; I think they’re still in a coma.”

“Yeah, but let’s keep it down until After Glow gets here.” I said, feeling my shoulder start to throb. “I’d rather not try to explain how our mark crawled away, and I’m not carrying any magicuffs for her horn if she decides to try anything besides running. I already got the crap beaten out of me twice today. That’s plenty.”

“Fair enough,” Taxi replied, fishing in her bag for her jeweler’s goggles. She settled them over her eyes and adjusted the magnification lever on one side. We both leaned over the edge of the open maintenance hatch and peered in.

About six inches down the hole was absolutely stuffed with lines of glowing cabling and wire wrapped in intricate ropes around each other that seemed to run back and forth through the floor in both directions. They were all wound around a central trunk as thick around as my foreleg with a line of pulsating lights crawling down it. Some of the wires looked like platinum and gold carved. Somepony had carved tiny symbols into those almost too small to make out.

“That’s the security grid?” I gawked at the lines of rich metal.

“Yeesh... this must have cost a fortune.” Taxi said, quietly impressed. She bent closer. “What’s that?”

Whatever ‘that’ had been seemed to have half melted, half exploded. It was an ugly, tumorous thing attached to the side of one of the larger lines of cable. A baseball-sized sapphire wrapped in tangling fingers of threaded black wire sat at its core, and a dribble of diseased-looking green fluid dribbled from a split up its center of the stone, similar to Svelte’s horn ring. Bits of the fragmented mechanism littered the inside of the hole, though the damage to the cables themselves seemed to be minimal.

“Until we know better, I’m going to call that our listening device,” I said, wiggling down onto my stomach and pointing with my good hoof at the machine’s casing. “Check me on this...Does that look like part of an old toaster to you?”

Taxi scratched her head. “You mean like that hunk of junk you’ve got in your apartment that still runs off gem-power? I guess it does a bit. Speaking of that, when are you going to throw that thing out? It’s older than you are.”

“That was grandad’s toaster!” I replied defensively. “It’s an antique. I’m not just going to toss it out. Besides, it still makes perfect toast.”

“Hardy, it turns the toast blue.”

“Well... yeah, but it’s always perfectly crisp on both sides.” I raised my nose haughtily in a fair imitation of Gyro Technic, then turned my attention back to the mechanism. “Our girl must be a damn genius on a shoestring budget if she’s raiding old appliances for spare parts.”

Fiddling with her goggles a little more, Taxi reached in, digging her rear hooves into the carpet. She picked up a screwdriver that had been laying in a valley between two bits of cable, turning it around in her teeth and tossing it on the carpet.

“Huh...She was trying to remove it when it blew.” My driver said, rolling the screwdriver between her knees. “The magical feedback down her private com frequency straight from the club’s sound system probably burnt her horn-rings first, then bottlenecked here. She must have had a second to step back or it would have done more than burst her eardrums.”

I pulled away, trying futilely to get some of the sawdust out of my mane. “Alright. After Glow can take a look at it later, but frankly, I’m not inclined to futz with a piece of home-brew arcanotech that just did all this.”

“Certainly not. We’re getting you to the clinic to make sure the damage isn’t any deeper in that shoulder. I’m not having your dumb ass crippled for life on my watch.”

“Sweets, I’m fine—” I tried to argue, but my dearest, oldest friend smacked me just above the elbow on my bad knee. I screeched like an owl being fed through a woodchipper and tumbled onto my side. She stood over me, one hoof raised warningly above my throat in the same spot she’d hit Miss Svelte.

“You are getting looked at! If you complain, I’ll yank the others out of their sockets and use you for a door-stop!”

What little dignity I had left was already creeping right out the door, hoping it wasn’t spotted on the way. I supposed the day might have gone worse. The filly could have been dead. Or I could have been.

I shut my eyes in resignation as she helped me up again, most of my weight resting on her back as she let me use her for a crutch. I still resolved to be annoyed, though, and nothing she could have done would take that from me...

...except care enough to keep me from having to drag myself on three legs to the medic’s station. Damn.

I get no respect.

Okay, for this chapter I have to do an author’s note.

I promised myself I wouldn’t do these regularly but CEOkasen and I were in a massive bind and needed to get this out the door. I had to rewrite it from the ground up and we put out a call to our fellow bronies. Several responded and their work made this miles better.

Ebon Mane. The Equestria Daily Pre-reader and author of Merely A Mare. He’s been one of our biggest supporters and is an all around amazing writer. I hope, one day, I get his skill with words. He’s consistently excellent and holds a well deserved place in the Pony Fiction Vault.

Invictus_rising. He’s author of several stories and, in his infinite kindness, took some time out of his day to fix some of my botched sentence structure. I can’t say how grateful I am.

To my readers: Go read their stuff. They deserve the attention!

-Chessie

Chapter 11: Ponies Will Pay You to be InhuMane

Starlight Over Detrot: Chapter 11: Ponies Will Pay You to be InhuMane

Ponies get injured. In a world with Equestria’s dangers, it happens with unsurprising regularity. Hospitals are filled with flying accident victims, monster attack survivors, and those whose torsos have uncomfortably intersected farm equipment, in addition to the diseased and the involuntarily enchanted. Fortunately, ponies have adapted and Equestrian medicine is capable of feats which would have been thought impossible just a few decades ago.

Conventional medicine has been augmented drastically by improved documentation, cross-cultural knowledge and the active ingredients present in recently-analyzed herbs; it remains the best path for dealing with diseases and afflictions. Indeed, the pony pox vaccine has saved thousands of lives; dreaded scourges such as feather flu and neighcrotizing fasciitis have been all but eradicated.

Arcane healing is available in more accessible and convenient forms than ever before. Recent advancements have included numerous ways of magically healing visceral trauma, including a sort of telekinetic surgery that allows for noninvasive repair of internal injuries. It takes quite a bit of training for the required control, but in the hooves of a skilled unicorn, it is capable of results previously thought completely outside the realm of pony healers.

Of course, today’s medicine, scientifically developed and methodically applied, cannot cure every ailment.

Still, even when a patient is beyond the help of modern techniques, there may still be hope... if one is willing to pay a price.

--The Scholar

Whatever system they used to navigate was still a mystery to us; the trip to the Vivarium’s medical facility ended up being the long way around. By the time we reached the room marked with a big red cross, Taxi was half-carrying, half dragging me along. She slung my busted flank into one of the waiting room lounge chairs just inside the door. I was in too much pain to do more than grunt with a very masculine facade.

Calling the room a ‘clinic’ might have been too kind a description. Sure, it was about as well stocked as my nearest urgent care, but the extra accoutrements made me want to wash my hooves off rather than touch the tiled floor.

The walls were that sloppy shade of robin’s egg blue that they sell in bulk to doctor’s offices; cheap enough that you can sling on a fresh coat of it to cover really foul stains. There was a complicated examination table that might not have been out of place in an actual hospital. Too complicated, perhaps. Actual tables don’t have quite so many chains, or all those straps dangling from their sides.

My shoulder and side had moved beyond the ‘aching’ stage and a pleasing fuzziness stole over my sensibilities. Never having been a completely sensible pony to begin with, I was knackered. Taxi peeled my coat off my side and nosed around my bruised upper thigh, blowing sawdust off my mane and neck.

“She did a number on you,” she murmured. “You best hope their healers know what they’re doing or you’re going to end up explaining this to the emergency room.”

I tried to shrug; my protesting muscles turned the gesture into a full-body wince. “It feels like I stepped in front of an invisible train.”

"You look a bit like you did.”

“Thanks. So, if this is a clinic, where’s the doctor?”

Leaping onto the chair beside me, my driver crossed her rear legs and picked up a semi-pornographic magazine titled Plot Twist from the small end table, and we performed the ancient ritual that every creature since the beginning of time who has gone to a doctor’s office has been forced to perform: We waited.

After several minutes, an irritable voice came down the corridor. “—so I said, ‘I don’t bloody care what Winter Snip wants! She can damn well wait her...” The voice hesitated, then barked, “Why is my door open?! My shift doesn’t start for another twenty minutes!”

A huffy, middle-aged unicorn tromped in, wearing a pristine lab-coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He was muscular, but still non-threatening, possibly because of a toupee that might as well have been freshly killed. It must have been attached to his head with sticky tack, and the absurd mustache dangling off his upper lip made some very unwise part of me want to reach out and pluck a few hairs, just to see what would happen.

“Hellfire and damnation!” He cursed, tearing his stethoscope off and tossing it onto the table. “I do not do couples and if you two want somepony to watch you play doctor, you can go hunt up one of the nurses!”

The pale pony with the medical satchel we’d met in the hallway earlier trotted in after him and dumped her bag in the corner. “They’re not clients, Pickle. They’re patients.”

Our doctor, presumably ‘Pickle,’ sucked his teeth. “You’re supposed to call me first if there’s been a damn injury! What if I’d been with somepony?”

Grabbing his comm gem, the nurse whacked one faceted side. It rang, like a flicked crystal glass, and turned pink. Pickle’s eyes followed it, then his ears splayed out in both directions.

“If you’d use your talky-stone for something besides bitching to Barrel about the unfairness of your ridiculously well paying job, you’d might have seen you had a message.” She scolded, patting him on the cheek affectionately. “We’ve got another one coming up soon.”

Pickle tried to maintain his gruff exterior but a little smile peeked through. Then he was all professional again. “Let’s see... What’d you get yourselves into-” He stopped as his eyes found the growing bruise on my side and shoulder. “Good heavens! Did you get really over-eager with a cricket bat?!”

“Angry mare with a nasty horn blast.” I replied, turning slightly to one side.

“Ahhh, fillyfriend caught you coming in here with your favorite employee of the Vivarium?” The doctor cocked his head towards Taxi.

She and I looked at each other, then she poked me in the bruise for his indiscretion. I shied away, clenching my teeth against the pain. “No, I don’t work here. This moron decided to try to tackle a magically-skilled unicorn barehoofed. He’s lucky she didn’t tear his head off.”

“Tackle?! My, my, you are a lucky one. May I ask why?” He lifted me easily off the couch with a shimmer from his horn, giving me the dignity of keeping my rear legs on the ground as I stumbled over to the exam table and crawled up onto it.

“We’re working for Stella. That’s all you need to know.” I replied hotly, biting my tongue to keep from swearing as he prodded my leg. His gaze stopped on my badge and gun, then moved on. I felt a soft warmth begin to grow in my neck and the shine from his forehead grew brighter.

"Fair enough.” He said dismissively. “If you’d broken some rule of the club, you wouldn’t be sitting in my office. More likely, you’d be digging yourselves out of a dumpster.”

The heat was building and my foreleg felt like putty, squishing and flattening in an unseemly manner. Two minutes of this treatment made me restless. “Mind if I ask what you’re actually doing, doc?”

“Don’t call me ‘doc.’” His horn shot a reprimanding spark that stung my cheek. I tried to jerk back, but none of the muscles usually involved in that action seemed willing to respond. “I didn’t go to medical school because I like fixing ponies, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t give you a blow by blow.”

“Why... did you go to medical school?” Taxi inquired, picking up a tongue depressor and nibbling on the end of it.

Pickle flapped his tail around and knocked the wooden stick out of her lips, deflecting it with his horn into the biohazard box under the sink. He gave her a sweet, friendly grin that made my spine tingle, although my cutie mark wasn’t doing its warning dance. “Same reason I work here; I like watching ponies in pain.”

“What?!” I tried to yank myself back, but he pinned me to the bed with magic so all I managed was a bit of unsettled tail flicking.

“Oh don’t worry, my dear boy.” He waved his horn back and forth in a figure eight over the bruise. “I will make this brief unless you happen to be paying. I have my desires well under control. The alternatives were criminal interrogation or dentistry, and neither a life of crime nor one perpetually immersed in other pony’s bad breath was quite so attractive.”

The nurse was applying a viscous red liquid to a bandage of some sort and it flitted over to my side. A few seconds after it had been applied, I beat my other leg on the table as electric agony pulsed down to my knee. “Celestia buck me to the moon, what is that?!”

“Healing balm.” She answered, wrapping a white strap around my neck so it was held in place.

“That feels like you just stuck me with a thousand needles!” I whined.

“Unless you wish to find you have an extra knee, I suggest you keep still while I work here. This is simply a scan, but it is best if my information is accurate.” Pickle murmured, his horn flickering and flashing. I did my best, but the sensation of things moving around under my skin was so creepy I couldn’t help kicking my rear legs. “You have a few minor hairline cracks in the bone and the joint is damaged.”

“Can you fix it?” Taxi asked, watching the motions the doctor made very intently.

“Oh yes. Common injuries, but without magic you’ll be limping around for a few weeks. I’ll have to handle the swelling though.” The nurse stated matter of factly, adjusting the bandage so it fit more completely over the angry purple splotch on my side. As an afterthought, she added, “Pickle is good with bones but bruises... well, he’s good at putting them there. Just wear this for a few hours and you’ll be fine.”

“Is it still too late to go to an actual doctor?” I yelped as the sadistic unicorn jabbed me good and hard in the side. ‘

“I am an actual doctor. Now then... get ready. I’m going to enjoy this a lot more than you are.” Pickle bit his lip, shut his eyes, and his horn became too bright to look at.

“Can I have an anaesthetic?!” I shouted. The rapidly building burn gave me just enough time to realize that I should have asked this much sooner.

I am thankful that there’s an upper limit for how much pain a body can feel before it turns itself off. I’m pretty sure I had time to scream, and I couldn’t have blacked out for more than about thirty seconds. The sensation was akin to having my whole body covered in adhesive bandages and duct tape, then having it all torn off in one go.

Time seemed to have moved without my participation. When I returned to sensibility, Taxi was next to me, her hooves pinning my neck down as Pickle blew a bit of smoke off his horn. My shoulder felt blissfully neutral, though the muscles further down were still screaming bloody murder. Overall, despite my brain still trying to convince itself otherwise, it actually felt better.

“Now then, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” The doctor snickered to himself. “Actually I lie. It was probably awful.”

I made a lunge for his throat. My driver barely held me back from throttling the deranged pervert within an inch of his life, pulling me back as I struggled to climb over her restraining forelegs.

“Lemme at him!” I yowled, gnashing my teeth. “I’m gonna tear his horn off and shove it where Celestia can’t reach!”

Taxi stepped between the doctor and myself to prevent that, whilst readjusting the strap on my healing compress so it sat more comfortably. “Look at it this way. He’s probably going to be the one fixing our spy’s eardrums. Unless you want to deprive her of this lovely experience then I suggest you back off.”

Pickle just watched impassively while his nurse tugged a fresh sheet of plastic over the exam table.

I dipped my chin, still heavily considering going for my gun. Putting one in each of his rear knees and using him for a wheelbarrow might have been really satisfying. My leg did feel stronger, though, and he wasn’t the one who’d injured me. I grumpily batted at my trigger bit, letting myself be led back to the waiting chair beside the door, just in time for said door to swing open and smack me squarely in the freshly healed thigh.

“Gah! Bucking bastard whore-”

“Who ye’ callin’ ‘whore,' boy?! Git out the damn way!”

I went completely weightless as a swirl of magic caught me me, the chair, and Taxi, and shoved all three of us to one side. My organs all sloshed unpleasantly against my ribcage.

Granny Glow’s rear end backed into the clinic as she carried a bundled shape underneath a piece of rough canvas sheeting over her head.

“We got an injury here.” She growled, spilling the unconscious body onto the examination table. Tearing the sheet away, she tossed it in one corner, revealing Svelte’s disheveled form. Her apron was smeared with bits of wood and drywall dust. “Pickle! Prime yer spike and stick yer dick in some ice. We need this ’un up and at’em soon as ye can.”

“Oh, not another!” The medical dom swept his stethoscope onto his head and immediately pressed it to Svelte’s chest before prying back one of her eyelids with one hooftip and inspecting her pupils. “Is this that unicorn you mentioned?”

“Yeah. Did ye not hear the noise earlier?” Glow asked, putting her hooves up on the bedside.

“I was in storage number seven getting fresh speculum sheaths. I thought it was the plumbing having an issue.” He said defensively, then turned to the nurse who was pushing some kind of magnifier into Svelte’s ears, inspecting them. “Pansy?”

“Her eardrums are... gone.” Pansy pulled the tool out of the sleeping mare’s ear canal and wiped it on the sheeting. She gave me a look that was pure accusation. “This... looks like she was next to an explosion, but no shrapnel wounds or anything. I thought you said you tackled her?”

“I might have blown her up with the club sound system first. Then my partner here did some zebra trick that put her out.” I noticed my hat sitting on the floor beside the table and got up to retrieve it, setting it back on my head. I wasn’t aware of it having fallen off, but then, whatever healing spell Pickle hit me with left it hard to be aware of anything. “How long are you going to take to get her awake? She’s got some questions to answer.”

“Awake?! This pony should be in a hospital!” Pansy shouted, stomping on the tiles. “I can fix her eardrums and probably the concussion, but what if her personal ley lines were damaged? She might lose the ability to use magic for years!”

“She was using magic just fine the last time I saw her.” Taxi put in, gruffly. “She was flinging around sawhorses.”

The nurse paused mid-tirade, her muzzle still open. “Even if her magic is fine, I’m still insisting we get her to a hospital—”

After Glow grabbed the younger mare in a levitation field and tore her off her hooves, suspending the helpless escort upside down in front of her heavily lined face. “Yer doin’ no such insistin’, missy! Ah ain’t lettin’ this twat outta mah sight. She’s a threat to the Vivarium and iffen ye wanna have a job come tomorrow, yer gonna get her up and chatty.”

The grand ol’ grizzly would have no argument where her charge’s life was concerned. Better ponies than Pansy had confronted Granny Glow in situations far less dire than ours, and found their wills wanting.

“Y-yes ma’am!” Pansy wailed. “P-p-please put me down!”

“That’s better!” Glow dropped her in a heap then swung her horn towards the doctor, who was doing his best to look very small. “Pickle, ye go get any other ponies what know medicine magic. Oh, and git one who knows some numbin’ spells. Ah find out ye cast that screamy magic-pain healin’ shit on this filly and her heart exploded, ah’ll cast it on you... after ah peel ye!”

“Wait. ‘Heart exploded?!’” I threw myself to my hooves, feeling momentarily light headed.. “Tell me you did not use, on my personal body, a spell that can make hearts explode!”

“I’ll just go get the rest of the medical-play staff then!” Pickle said hastily as he bolted for the door, his coattails flapping in the breeze. By the time I got my bit into my teeth to put a slug into his flank, said flank was out the door and around the corner.

****

There wasn’t much to be done until Pickle and his crew managed to fix Svelte’s injuries, so I gingerly hoisted myself up, got a map on a napkin from Granny Glow, pulled another tongue depressor out of Taxi’s mouth, and went looking for Swift.

The early afternoon was about as busy as any other time in the Vivarium, with ponies coming and going at their leisure. We wandered semi-aimlessly, following Glow’s directions and occasionally passing patrons on their way to places unknown and activities best not considered.

Even at its worst, the Vivarium had a strangely peaceful feeling about its odd halls and twisting passageways. It was unusual in Detrot; in a city that, too often, felt like it just needed one good push to send it spiraling into the grave, the brothel was a place of intense, soulful activity. Taxi, being of a more progressive mindset than I, might even have labeled it ‘healthy.’

****

Our destination was something called the ‘hypocaust,’ which defied my vague dread by turning out to mean ‘bathhouse.’ I took the time to work out the remaining kinks in my muscles and let myself calm down.

I felt the baths before I saw them. If the dance floor was sweaty, the atmosphere in the club’s bathhouse was like somepony tossing a bucket of hot water in your face. Despite attempts to seal the space away with a few layers of self-closing doors, nothing in the world could have stopped the heavy humidity from making my tail frizz so bad, I was tempted to resort to stealing one of Taxi’s hair-ties and wrapping it up in a bun.

We continued on, until I caught the rich smell of perfume and steam through a pair of swinging doors at the end of a short hall. The air had a palpable weight to it and I shucked my coat and gun, folding it over and stuffing as much of it as I could into one of Taxi’s saddle-bags. I left my harness and hat on, reasoning the moisture couldn’t hurt them much.

Feeling more naked than I had any reason to considering ponykind’s general lack of issues with nudity, I did my best to look like a casual customer in for a swim. How my driver manages never to seem out of place is one of those little miracles — and one of those things that made her such a good undercover cop — but I still stuck out like a spoon in a fork factory.

The bathhouse was arranged in a low-ceilinged, open cave with a few partitions for privacy. At the entrances to those partitions were some coded arrangement of black and green flags, which I took to indicate occupancy. Pools of variously colored water steamed between low walkways. Only a few souls were socializing, bathing, or fornicating at that time of the afternoon.

There was a brilliantly hued red blot in the fog off to our left, which seemed to be having an argument with a dressing room door. I approached cautiously, on the off chance there was somepony in the world into door domination of some kind, but the blot turned out to be the familiar, feminine shape of Scarlet with a half dozen fluffy towels on his back.

“You can’t stay in there forever! Come on, Swift, it’s not that bad...” Scarlet cajoled, tipping the towels off his back onto the floor. Underneath them, Swift’s uniform and tactical jacket were freshly laundered and pressed.

“Yes it is!” My partner called back from inside the dressing room. “Why did you have to wash my mane? It’s not like I even got anything on it! Ugh...I look ridiculous...”

The stallion saw us coming, held a hooftip to his lips then spoke through the door again, "You're being a little diva, you know."

That did it. The dressing room's door blew open and a tiny package of raging, feathery embarrassment pushed her nose up against the escort’s pretty face. "Diva?! I'm gonna coat you in Daisy’s liquid latex an-yeep!"

Swift noticed her audience and scuffled her hooves on the slick tile as she tried to back into the little closet. They went immediately out from under her and she took a tumble onto her chin. And when I got a good look at her, I sympathized with her desire not to be seen.

On any other pony the look would have been just absurd; on Swift it was so saccharine and over the top that I began taking quick breaths so as not to laugh myself stupid. Whether as a byproduct of the wash or the humidity, her damp mane had popped into poofy little curls and her tail was no longer braided. It was like a tuft of especially fluffy cotton balls which some mad fool had painted maroon. Something in her fur gave it a glossy finish, emphasizing the overall impression of a foal dunked in canola oil and styled to look like a porcelain doll.

Behind me, I could hear Taxi wheezing as she fought with the impulse to say whatever was on her mind; the look in Swift’s eyes was one of abject humiliation.

There are times for cops to exchange guff with one another; it helps relieve the stress of the job, and can foster comradeship during tense moments. This was clearly not one of those times.

“Sir? C-could you please just...go ahead and shoot me?” She muttered, hiding her face under one wide wing.

“Lemme guess... You use about a gallon of mane gel every morning to make your hair do that spiky thing, right?” I asked, feeling around in my pocket until I found a comb.

She nodded, taking the comb from me and trying futilely to get her mane back in place. “Can we please not tell anypony about this, sir?”

“Cross my heart, hope to fly... such and such, whatever. Either way, you can’t go out in public with me like this. I’ve got a reputation, and anypony we tried to interrogate would giggle themselves insensate.” I turned to my driver. “Hmmm, Sweets? You got any of that stuff you used to use when you were going through your ‘mohawk’ phase?”

“The stylist’s cement?” Taxi asked, then grinned and popped the clasp off her saddlebag. “You know, I just might. Let me take a look.”

Five minutes and half a tube of asparagus-scented cream later, we’d managed to tame Swift’s unruly locks into a spiked mane so hard that it was practically a weapon. I had Taxi give her tail a quick run through with the comb and a lighter dose of the product. Once done, I had her turn in a slow circle, then grabbed her tactical vest off Scarlet’s neck and threw it around her shoulders. She hesitated, reaching for her uniform.

“Wait... skip the blouse.” I instructed. “Just the vest for now.”

Beneath an uncertain gaze, she shrugged her legs through the holes and pulled the zip shut. I took three steps back and eyed her carefully; from a distance, one might almost have convinced themselves she was some type of private security. Short, tangerine private security using too much mane fixer, but It was still a distinct improvement.

“Yeah, that’s much better. What do you think?” I stepped sideways so Taxi and Scarlet could see.

“Something’s missing,” Taxi murmured. Stepping forward she pulled Swift’s badge off of the uniform’s top, hooking it to the front of the vest. “There. Much better.”

The stallion’s lips fell into a disappointed frown. “Oh birdy, you look like some kind of awful commando dressed like that. At least with the blouse on I could pretend. What would your mom think?”

“Mom would probably hide under a pillow if somepony besides dad glared at her too hard!” Swift patted her chest, wiggling to get comfortable with the new setup. “Sir, are you sure this is okay? I mean, my professor in the Academy always said that the uniform is one of our tools and we should respect its integrity.”

Memory raised a quizzical eyebrow. “That wouldn’t happen to have been Carnival, would it?” I asked, strolling over to the nearest pool and dipping a hoof in it.

“Oh... yes!” Swift looked surprised. “I had Professor Carnival for ‘Duty And Ethics.’”

“Duty and Ethics.” Taxi squeezed condensed water out of her braid. “I wondered where they stuck him. Best place for him, really.”

“Best place for him would have been retirement.” I bit back, my breath fogging in front of my face. “Kid, did you ever wonder why a cop who takes his job so damn seriously is teaching rather than working a beat? Or about his limp?”

I shook my head and pulled the uniform from Scarlet’s back, holding it up. Despite the laundering, it still smelled a bit weird.

“H-he didn’t seem really happy there...” Her eyebrows rose. “What about his limp? I mean, I noticed but nopony ever said anything about it. I thought it was just how he walked.”

“They’re being polite...” My driver murmured. “He’s... well, he really is a good teacher—”

“He’s an idiot.” I spat.

Taxi’s expression sank. “Hardy, don’t—”

“No, she deserves to hear this.” Folding the uniform, I spread it out under me so I could keep my stomach off the wet stone, then sat down before addressing Swift. “There’s a bit of a story there. Professor Carnival used to be Detective Carnival, a few years ago when I was still just ‘Officer Hard Boiled.’ He was the darling of the old police chief, and he had a certain something which, in theory, makes criminals shake in their boots. He had faith in the law.”

“Faith, sir?”

“Yeah, faith. He believed.” I lifted my hooves towards the ceiling like I’d seen some of the Loonies do during their little prayer services. “He thought it was the uniform that made the cop, and that if he just believed enough then there was nothing that couldn’t be achieved.”

“To be fair, he did get some really high profile criminals in front of a judge.” Taxi added, as though I needed the reminder.

“Solving cases doesn’t make you invincible, Sweets. I should know.” I replied.

Both Swift and Scarlet were sitting in rapt interest. Rivulets of water dripped from both of their manes, but neither seemed to mind.

I continued. “His last case involved the shutdown of a drug den which served some of the richest Beam the city had ever seen. Real nasty sorts. With his back-up still five minutes away, he walked right in amongst a bunch of dealers and their patrons and demanded ‘In the name of the law’ that they surrender.”

Swift’s lower jaw sagged. “He did what?!”

“That’s right.” I smacked the tile, feeling a light burn in my chest, unable to hold back a twitch of anger as I recounted the events. “His partner at the time was this sweet kid named Rotunda. He was all starry-eyed for Carnival. Everypony thought there were big things in his future, and the two of them together had put the fear of Celestia in the hearts of some baaad sorts. Rotunda believed. He had faith. Faith in Carnival. Faith in the uniform.”

I stared off into space, remembering Rotunda marching around the office, animatedly telling everypony about a particularly funny collar involving a vat of taffy and a cactus.

“What happened then?” Scarlet prompted then covered his mouth. “Sorry...”

“It’s fine. What happened is what always happens when ponies with faith run up against ponies with guns and heads full of drugs.” I slouched dejectedly, rubbing one fetlock with the other. “Carnival managed to get to cover after taking only five bullets in his rear left leg. Rotunda tried to provide covering fire.”

“They got out of there then, right?” Swift wanted to know.

“If only.” Shoving myself to my hooves I paced up and down the side of the bathing pool. “I don’t know if you know anything about Beam but... it’s combustible in its raw form. Oh, and one of the dealers hit a propane tank, which burst and filled the whole area with gas. Nopony knows who fired the next bullet. Doesn’t matter now, I guess.”

“Y-you mean...” said Swift, trepidatiously.

“Yep. All that Beam and gas went up at once. They found Carnival high out of his mind, bleeding from a few holes, and laying in a pile of trash. He spent three months in Sacred Sun Rehab getting back on his hooves.”

“W-what about Rotunda?” Swift asked, nervously.

My tail began slashing at the air. “He was... well, alive.”

Taxi’s closed her eyes and muttered, “Healing magic wasn’t near so good back then as it is these days. There was a lot of nerve damage because of the Beam. The doctors managed to regrow his face and give him some alright prosthetics for his front legs but his sight...” She left the sentence to hang there like the last note of a particularly sad song.

“Kid, you have to realize that what makes you a cop isn’t something you’re given, like your pistol or your flak jacket. It’s something that stays with you.” I pulled my badge out and unlooped the chain from my throat, kicking the metal shield across the tile to her. “Even without this, I’m still a cop. Drop me on an island in the middle of nowhere, take away my gun... and I am still a cop.”

I patted her uniform blouse. “This isn’t magical. It’s fabric and thread. At best, it will give you the weight of the Detrot Police Department behind you. At worst... it will make you a target. And doing the kind of work we’re doing right now, you don’t need to be more of a target.” Pressing the badge to her chest with my toe, I held it there meaningfully. “You are still a cop, as long as you’re defending ponies.”

It was a pretty line that Juniper recited to me on nights when we were out walking down some cold, stinking street during my rookie years. It was technically true, but it was the sort of line nopony who has had time to grow cynical and mean under the sometimes oppressive weight of the job would get comfort from. Still, it had the desired effect on my green-as-grass right hoof; Swift held her head a bit higher and began folding the remainder of her uniform into a neat square she could shove it down into one of her spare pockets.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll remember.”

“Good. We caught the pony who was spying. She’s down in the clinic getting patched up. You ready to go?”

She pulled a golden locket out of one of the pouches on her flak jacket and tugged it on, tucking the locket inside her vest. After making sure it was secreted away properly, she returned to parade rest. “I’m ready, sir.”

“I need you with me down there when we interrogate her. You’ve got an eye for detail and a head for taking notes."

Swift tilted her head quizzically. "Why don't you use one of the club's interrogation tops?"

"I'd rather try the old carrot and stick. It would be more useful to have her on our side. I'm going to need you to take a close record of everything she says, alright?"

Taxi gave me one of her special, brand name ‘I’m going to make you regret buttering up the scrub’ looks; it was a smug half-smile mixed with a healthy helping of knowing amusement. I wished I’d known some of those zebra moves of hers, so I could wipe it off her face.

Swift snapped a fountain pen from her tactical vest’s inner pocket and held it in her teeth. “Yeth, thir!”

Scarlet’s communications gem pinged and he pulled it off the tether around his neck, holding it up to his ear. “Pickle says they’re going to be done with Miss Svelte in about five minutes. He’ll have Pansy keep her sedated if you’d like to freshen up first.” His eyes filled with devilry. “I could wash your back...”

“Aaand that’s us going!” I snatched my coat from Taxi’s bag and pulled it over my shoulders.

****

The clinic was packed. All I could see was two eye-pleasing flanks wedged side-by-side in the doorway. A hum that I could feel in my bones had the whole hallway vibrating and the air pulsated, deforming the light so everything in the seemed to be under the glow of a flickering television screen just inside the doctor’s little playroom.

Taxi, Swift, and I approached cautiously, as one does when confronted with anything magical. Enough years living in Equestria, and thus absolute saturation of mystical energies, teaches a survival instinct where the arcane is concerned. It wasn’t quite fear of death; most magical injuries are survivable, but there are some you wouldn’t want to.

Scarlet just ignored it, marching forward like the office wasn’t packed with a bunch of heavily concentrating mage-ponies who could turn him into soup with a thought.

The hum dropped off a bit along with strange lighting effects, then the two buttocks wiggled until they could back out of the room. A clown-car procession of unicorns, in various costumes and states of undress, followed them out and began to disperse in different directions, talking to one another in low voices.

After a minute the room was empty, save for Pickle, After Glow, and Pansy, who were sitting together on either side of the bed, sharing something from three steaming mugs. Svelte was laying under the sheet on the hospital table, her front and rear hooves strapped down, still unconscious. Somepony had the decency to clean the blood off her face and ears and fold up her apron on the counter.

A black mass rested on top of it which took me a bit to identify as our spying device, disconnected from the club security system. It really was a foul looking thing.

“Ehhh, Detective! Yer lookin’ like ye had a swim.” After Glow set her cup on the bed beside the sleeping unicorn.

“I may as well have. How is our mole? Still in dreamland?” I asked, hopping up onto an empty chair beside Svelte and turning my head to one side so I could see her face properly. I had a sudden image of myself in a similar position, not twenty four hours ago, standing over the corpse of another filly.

“Aye, she’s nappin’.” Glow answered, bumping Svelte’s silvery horn with her hooftip. “Will be until we bring her out of it. Even then, she ain’t castin’ any spells for awhile.”

Taxi sniffed at the cup then made a face. “Yuck... what is this stuff?”

Pansy slurped another muzzle-full and grinned. “Think of it as ‘unicorn juice’. It’s a mixture of caffeine, taurine, and some magical herbs. Miss Glow insisted we do a very quick, very precise healing job. We used your spy’s reserves first, then our own. She’s going to be feeding herself by hoof for days.”

Swift licked a drip off the side of her grandmare’s glass. The effect was as though she’d licked very angry paint thinner; She tumbled over as if pushed by an unseen hoof, hacking and coughing. “Ugh, gross! Gran, you don’t know any healing magic! Why are you drinking that stuff?!”

“Heh, ah like it. Anyway, ye wanna git this here show on the road?” The elderly pony pointed towards Scarlet who was leaning on the door-frame, listening to chatter on his com-gem intently.

“Mistress Stella is watching and says we can proceed at any time.” The escort nodded at a particular point on the ceiling.

“Alright, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right.” I drew myself up and pulled off my coat and hat, setting them on the chair, leaving just my badge hanging around my neck. “Pansy, get out. Thank you for your services. I hope we won’t need them again today.”

Pansy got to her hooves and went to the door, stopping there to peer back at Svelte before vanishing into the afternoon crowd. I shifted my attention towards Pickle. “You start doing whatever you need to to wake her up.” The doctor obediently began focusing a thin stream of glittery light at Svelte’s forehead. Lastly, turning towards the rose-colored stallion waiting expectantly at the door, I put my hooftip on his chest; he let out a perverse moan at the contact. “You go get Hay Maker. I want him here.”

Scarlet started to back out, then faltered. “Wait, what? Are you sure-”

“Now wait a gol’ dang second! That’s mah prisoner! Ye don’t let yer prisoners in the same room together during no interrogation! Where do ye get-”

“Sir, police manual on interrogation of suspects-”

Rather than respond to the cacophony, I snatched up Pansy’s abandoned mug and slammed it against the floor. The high-pitched tinkle of ceramic shards scattering underhoof preceded the intended silence. All eyes were on me and all mouths blissfully shut. I pulled out the chair nearest the wall and sat, sighing as the weight came off my aching knees.

“Now then,” I said as I reclined, “we seem to have an issue of jurisdiction. Which one of you wants to take total responsibility for the survival of the Vivarium?”

“Now see here, ye git-”

“No, you see here! You sent me out there to hunt down this girl because you didn’t know which of your own people betrayed you. You knew the place was watched. You could have sent Stilettos, but you’d have to hope none of them were your spy and she didn’t notice any changes in your duty rosters or movements.”

“That is beside the damn point...” The old unicorn glowered at me.

“It is the center of the ‘damn point!’” I bit back, kicking the chair I was sitting on so it toppled against the wall. “You had nothing!”

“...we intercepted the transmission...” Scarlet whispered and I stared him down until he bit his own tongue.

“You had nothing. She’s clever and she made one mistake as she was trying to leave, if you could call it that. I don’t think anypony could have planned for what I did.” Sweeping back the sheet over her side, I tapped her key and leaf cutie mark. “This mare is obsessed with her own security. If she didn’t even tell her henchmen her real name, she’s not going to tell us, but it sounds like he’s worked with her for awhile. Ponies like her don’t make friends. They have tools and they abandon them when they’re not useful anymore. And yet, for some reason, she’s kept him around.”

“Thas’ more reason we oughta keep ’em from seein’ each other!” Glow barked, sloshing her mug of magical coffee as she gestured with it.

“She could have hidden for a few hours or snuck out during the search, but she didn’t want us to find that.” I indicated the hunk of wires and metal on the counter. “We’d have scanned Hay Maker magically eventually and gotten the tooth. Then we’d have found the listening device. She knew that. We just took a quick and dirty path. That says to me she doesn’t want ponies to know how she works.”

“Sir... um... why do we need Mister Hay Maker though?” Swift asked, folding back a fresh page of her notebook.

“We need a lever, and the one pony who might provide us with a whole mountain of information on where this girl has been and what she’s done over the last six months is sitting in one of your spare rooms. If you want to stop listening to me, I will find another avenue of inquiry and you lot can handle this yourselves. Otherwise-” I shoved Scarlet backwards through the door. “-get the Celestia-bucking bodyguard!” Closing it perhaps a bit more forcefully than was necessary, I righted my chair and set it beside the bed then sat down, waiting for Pickle’s magic to take effect.

The others were sitting in speechless shock. I left them to it and began sorting through my pockets for something to eat; I came up with one of the last of the bag of congealed sweeties and sucked at it until it was soft enough to chew. Glow came out of her befuddlement first, trying to recover some composed dignity by pulling out a smoke and puffing at it a bit; it was some seconds before she realized the cheroot wasn’t lit. Swift picked up her pen and switched back in her book some, scribbling at a page which I noticed said ‘The Detective’ across the top.

Taxi scooted close and whispered from the corner of her mouth, “Nice show. Was that for Stella’s benefit?”

I replied just as softly, using the hum from Pickle’s horn to cover my words, “Yes. For some reason he wants to trust me. I want to know how far that goes.”

The doctor clapped at the floor for attention and said, without looking at up, “She’s coming out of it. We laid about six kinds of sleeping enchantment on her. The first three sedation magics we tried practically melted off whatever she’s using for counterspells. We had to get creative, so this is taking a bit.”

I stepped up to the bed. Swift's pen-scratching stepped up slightly. After Glow's lifted her cup over the girl's head, ready to brain her with it if it came to another bout of hoofticuffs. Taxi crossed her rear legs into a lotus position on her chair and began taking deep, slow breaths.

A long moment passed where nothing happened. Pickle's horn sputtered and the shine vanished. He stepped back and flicked his eyes at Svelte, who still hadn't moved.

"We know you're awake." I said to her, rubbing my jawline. "The unicorn beside you is old, impatient, and extremely violent. I know of at least one pony whose genitals she has super-glued, so I would heartily recommend you talk to us before she starts feeling artsy-craftsy."

At that, the spy’s sharp, green eyes snapped open and she surveyed the room, taking in all of the ponies around her at a go. Her gaze moved towards the door then the ceiling before settling on my face.

It was there again. The burning in my cutie-mark. The sense of wrongness. Her features were well formed and attractive. but something in them was like a winter’s morning. I could almost hear the clicketyclick of an adding machine running behind those eyes. She was calculating.

Panic flashed in her face and she struggled for an instant to rise, then relaxed into the blankets. It was such a perfect act that even I doubted for an instant whether or not I’d grabbed the right pony.

“What happened?” She gasped, her high voice fearful, as she rubbed her brow with one hooficured toe. “I was just checking one of the storage rooms-”

After Glow slapped her across the face with a light flash of horn energy. The pretty mare’s entire body jerked. “Eeehhh shaddup. Ain’t foolin’ nopony here, cuteness.”

The moment Svelte touched her stinging cheek, the chill returned to her expression. I felt like I was looking at an industrial machine, beautifully tuned, as it churned through tasks one after the other.

“I am caught then.” She said, almost to herself. Her voice lost all feeling, taking on a tone I’d only heard in the truly sick cases; sociopaths, axe murderers, stock brokers and the like. “This is a first. My work, to date, has been impeccable. I must adjust my algorithms.”

I held out my leg in a friendly manner. ““Do you mind if I express some real admiration?” I flicked my hoof at the doctor. “Pickle, get the girl something to drink. Non-magical.”

The girl touched her toetip to mine, a picture of absolute composure. By all rights, had she been a suspect I’d brought into the station, she should have been shrieking for her lawyer. Instead, she squirmed up in bed as Pickle held a cup of water to her mouth and allowed her to take a few sips..

“Thank you, Detective.” She murmured, licking her lips.

“You can call me, Hardy. Do you mind if I just use ‘Svelte?’ It seems to fit you, and we don’t particularly need your real name for this.”

“That will be fine. I am not inclined to give out my actual title and even under duress, you’d never know if I was telling you the truth.” The mare replied, with a thin smile. “Besides, I have used that name for some time and become partial to it.”

“Svelte it is, then.” I said, cocking an ear toward Swift who was still burning through words in her tiny, clipped mouth-script.

Turning towards the cup Pickle still held she stared at it intently; a look of mild surprise crossed her face. Rolling her eyes up towards her horn, she tapped at the tip lightly with her hoof. “I... oh... I suppose you tapped out my arcane reserves.”

“That’s right.” I confirmed. “I’m afraid I don’t know precisely how that works, but I’m told it’s only a temporary inconvenience. Now then, since you know who I am then I assume you’ve done some research since yesterday?”

“I would not be a very good at my job if I let something like you passing through my zone of observance go unmarked. I was leaving today and I determined that your presence would not alter my equations nor my exit vector. I—” Her soft, white cheeks pinkened. “I have miscalculated.”

“We all done made some mistakes, honey bunch.” After Glow yanked the bed a bit closer to her jowly face with a burst of telekinesis. Pickle leapt back, lest he be crushed. “What we wanna know is who yer sweet flank is workin’ for, afore I start decidin’ which bits ah wanna carve off it and—”

I cut in before the security pony could give me more nightmares. “That’s enough!” The unicorn stopped, then opened her muzzle to say or do something that would probably have ended with me in a mountain of pain. Her eyes drifted over my back to where Swift sat, still taking notes and she forced her temper down.

“Ye best get somethin’ outta this or ah swear...”

I couldn’t resist needling her just a little more. “Yes, yes, swear all you like. For now, we’re doing this my way.”

Moving my chair closer to the bed’s new location, I leaned back in it. “Now, Miss Svelte. We healed you. We’ve got your accomplice here in the building and that device you used to break into the security system. These ponies think you’re part of a blackmail scheme of some kind operated by King Cosmo, the Ace distributor. I think there’s more to it, but I would appreciate if you would fill in the blanks.”

Svelte lay back, snuggling down into the soft pillow behind her head. Her mouth smiled, although her eyes didn’t. “We are both professionals, Hardy. I do not think I will do that. My equation balances on you having things you need to know from me and what I can bargain out of it beforehoof. Until I have guaranteed my own egress along with adequate recompense for my troubles, I see no advantage. Unless you are intent on torture or attempting to use that quiet hypnotist, who I don’t see amongst your number, then I have had a long day and would like to plan my escape while I nap.”

Sliding off my seat I trotted to the door and tugged it open. A small pack of Stilettos waiting in the hallway raised a mixture of extremely sharp weaponry, preparing to turn any unauthorized pony who might be trying to leave into an equine smoothie. They relaxed when they saw my face. Scarlet was out there beside them, his com-gem glued to his ear. He looked up and raised a questioning eyebrow.

I turned back to the bed. “Don’t let me keep you. You can go at your leisure. The guards won’t stop you.”

Glow’s magic gathered around the door and it crashed against the frame so hard the hinges splintered. Pickle leapt into a corner beside the counter and hunkered down, covering his head with his hooves and shaking fearfully.

“The hay they won’t!” Granny Glow shouted, her voice cracking with tension. “Ah’ve had it about up to mah eyes with yer ass, boy, and—”

Pulling my hat off the counter I set it on my head, ignoring the raging unicorn. “Swift, we’re leaving. Get your things. Taxi, go warm up the damn car.”

My driver stood and moved in the direction of the exit; she knew this game. The pegasus, predictably, didn’t move.

“Sir? We can’t just go...” Swift said, swapping her pen around to the other side of her mouth with her tongue.

“Yes, yes we can.” I replied, evenly. “It’s obvious Miss Glow doesn’t need my help here.” I gave her a quick wink.

Swift’s eyes widened a little, then she let out a long, dramatic sigh and shut her notepad. Not the finest piece of acting I’d ever seen, but a worthy effort.

Granny Glow watched the none-too-subtle interplay for a bit longer then dragged her tail around her rear ankles and covered her face with her foreleg. “Alright, alright, don’t go gettin’ all passive aggressive about it... This ain’t onea them movin’ pictures.” She pulled the door open again with her horn, leaving it hanging loosely from one hinge. “Girly wants to go, she can go.”

Svelte didn’t move for a few seconds. Her eyes were full of suspicion but she pulled the sheet off her legs and slid down, catching herself on the side-table before she could fall. I waved her on out of the room, encouragingly.

She took three steps towards the busted door then exhaled an angry breath and dropped her beautifully shaped rear end onto the floor. “Fine, so I was bluffing. How did you know?”

I kicked the door and it swung slowly shut, then sidled up beside her, leading her back to the bed. She climbed back onto it and tugged the covers up to her chin. The calculating overtones were still there but overlayed now then a heap of uncertainty. She’d gone from grief, to anger, to acceptance all in a matter of seconds. Her mind was rational in a way I could only envy.

“Well, knowing the mob, I doubt they’d do more than simply shoot a failed spy who’d gotten herself caught and not managed to escape with the last of her surveillance information... but it was that transmission we picked up that gave it away.” I replied, bumping my hoof against Pickle’s rear where it stuck out of the cowering ball of stallion wedged into the corner. He raised his head then hopped up and frantically dashed out the door. That handled, I returned to the bedside.

“You’ve had months to figure out the security procedures here and you just happened to let them catch your transmission yesterday?” I shook my head. “No. The first time I could believe it was an accident, but twice? Not a chance. You wanted us to catch your partner, or at least reveal him if we didn’t manage to capture him. I’m still figuring out why. Speaking of that, Miss Glow? Could you see if Hay Maker is here yet?”

Pulling her communicator out of her purse, Granny Glow thwacked it on the floor then gave it a good shake until it lit up. “Yep... jus’ outside.”

“Send him in.”

It was a very timid boxer who nosed open the clinic’s door and edged inside; he had obviously suffered... at the hooves of somepony with a twelve year old’s fashion sense.

Taxi made a gagging noise, stuffing her hoof in her mouth and my throat did a quick jog as I swallowed a chuckle sideways, leaving me coughing against one of the counters. Swift’s brain utterly failed to compute and she just rolled onto her side, front and rear legs churning the air in paroxysmal seizure.

The pigtails in poor Hay Maker’s mane had the tips dyed pink and his tail was a mass of ribbons so dense he was probably better off just cutting it free rather than trying to untie the mess. A purple tutu hung around his middle, dragging the floor with each step.

Granny Glow gave him an appraising look, then wrapped him in magic and dragged him into the room entirely as he struggled to back away from the bed and its occupant.

“Come’ere boy! Let yer fillyfriend ‘ave a good look atcha!” She cackled, holding the made-up stallion up like a rag-doll for Svelte. The spy sighed unhappily and shifted down to the end of the bed, reaching up to tug the ribbons holding his pigtails up loose.

“Miss... I’m sorry. I dun messed up.” He whimpered as she freed his mane.

“You did exactly as you were meant to, Mister Hay Maker.” I said, grabbing him by the tail and dragging him down. After Glow took that as her cue to release him, and he drooped like a maroon party balloon that’s had all the air let out of it. “Miss Svelte was just filling us in on precisely what that was, mind you.”

Holding his face in her hooves, Svelte patted him on the cheek. “I...wish to apologize for your current condition, Hay Maker,” she murmured. “You were a necessary sacrifice and my equation balanced on being able to claim catastrophic losses and an adequately high risk of my own revelation. I knew these prostitutes would not harm much more than your dignity.”

“W-what do you mean, Miss?” Hay Maker looked up at her with the kind of adoration that you usually see in a particularly well loved pet. It was downright disturbing to see in a pony.

“Ahhh...I get it.” Taxi unfolded from her funny sitting position. “This isn’t your usual kind of work, is it? An escort service? No, you’re industrial espionage, aren’t you?”

“I am.” Svelte confirmed, ruffling her bodyguard’s blonde mane. “This was... not my choice of career mind you. I would much prefer to be securing the wealth of the great and the good. Instead...I find myself serving cocktails and hiding in broom closets. Do you mind if I ask how it was that you managed my capture?”

“The club sound system.” I answered, jostling the destroyed listening device with my toe. It let out a weak crackle of energy then died again. “The DJ routed it’s full power through your private frequency with Mister Hay Maker’s little tooth.”

Svelte’s only show of surprise was a slight widening around the eyes. “Then I shall count myself lucky I am only recovering with a slight headache.”

“I think it’s time you told us who you’re working for.” Taxi said, scootching her chair closer to the bed.

“Yes, I suppose it is.” She held her hoof to her chest, clearing her throat. “You surmised correctly. King Cosmo is my employer, though... I am uncertain if he is the one ‘pulling the strings’ as it were. I was assigned to acquire serviceable surveillance information with an emphasis on embarrassing both patrons and staff.”

“So why stick around so long?” I asked. “Surely you had enough decent information before now.”

Svelte pulled at her mane, trying to get it straightened out. “You’re right, of course. I would have exfiltrated some time ago if Mr. Cosmo had not altered my orders. I sent him some... samples... of my work, and two days later he wanted everything he could get on one particular pony that happened to be in those images. He demanded I gather all the information about her I could. I was only able to access the personnel files the day before yesterday. They are... somewhat more secure than your average bank.”

After Glow polished her hooftip on her chest smugly, then blew on it. “Can’t have little wenches like you gettin’ in all willy nilly and pawin’ through ponies private documents.” Her expression darkened like a stormcloud. “A’fore you go though ah wanna see ezactly how ye got into mah safe!”

The spy nodded her assent, quietly petting Hay Maker who was trying to unwind some of the flashier bits of flair from his rear end. “If it will help guarantee my safety, I see no disadvantage. I have no love of Mr. Cosmo. My service to him has not been... pleasant.”

“What’s he got on you?” I inquired, picking up a stray ribbon and twiddling it between my forehooves.. “You don’t sound like the kind of pony who has trouble vanishing. He’s got to have something.”

“Unwittingly, you’ve reached the crux of the matter. He can find me.” She replied with sad resignation. “I do not know how he has managed it. Each time I have attempted decampment his cronies have discovered my location within a matter of days. Each design towards my own escape he unravels with unerring capacity. I have warded against every kind of scrying magic I could find information on and still he discovers my location and intentions. It is most... frustrating.”

Swift set her pen aside, working her jaw which must have been getting sore. She flapped her wings a couple times, stretching them out wide until they almost touched the opposite walls then drawing them back in tight against her sides. “Um... can I ask something?”

I waved her forward. “It’s an interrogation, kid. That’s how this works.”

“Oh, right. Well, I just wanted to know how you got involved with Mister Cosmo if you don’t like working for him.”

Svelte blew out a breath through pursed lips. “I was sincerely hoping nopony would ask me that. I guess it is not a significant secret. I designed the security system for his personal complex. Thereafter, I found myself in some rather dire financial straits and indebted to one of his lieutenants.”

“Dire financial straits?” Swift asked. Something in the innocent way she posed her questions made ponies want to answer, whether they meant to or not. It was a new technique to me but with our spy, it seemed to be working.

Svelte held up her right front leg, pulling back the fur on her fetlock to show off a lovely collection of old needle scars. “We all have our little vices that help us get through the day. Mine just got the better of me, for a time.”

My partner’s teethed her lip then picked up her pen, going back to her careful documentation to mask some inner discomfort.

“So lay it out for me.” I said, fiddling with my hat brim. “What did you hope to gain from having your bodyguard caught?”

“C-caught?! Miss?!” Hay Maker pulled away slightly from the white unicorn, giving her a look of deep hurt more suited to a kicked puppy than a stallion of his girth.

“That was... necessary.” Svelte lay back, looking at her bodyguard with... regret? Certainly the closest thing to a genuine emotion I’d seen her display.

“Go on then.” I prompted. “Tell us about ‘necessary.’”

Rising from the bed, Svelte padded over to the countertop where her shattered equipment lay. She sifted through the remains, twanging a broken spring. “I became...aware... of the reasons for King Cosmo’s interest in the mare known as Ruby Blue, alias Charity Soul and Azure Rose. I am glad to finally have her name, by the way, Mister Hay Maker. Thank you for sending me that before they found your tooth. You have been most useful, yet again.”

Against all reason, Hay Maker’s lips rose in a tiny smile at the faint praise.

Svelte continued, “Miss Blue acquired an item which Cosmo, or somepony he answers to, desires. I am unaware of what precisely this item is, but I believed I might leverage it against the remainder of my debt if I could obtain it. Alternatively, were my compatriot to be apprehended, I could declare I had lost an important asset in the pursuit of Mr.Cosmo’s goals and demand my debt be cleared on those principles. Based on my calculations, I decided this was the best method of achieving my objectives on short notice. I sent the transmission and let nature take its course.”

There it was then. I have to say, there are few things in this world that make me quite so nervy as a perfectly logical assessment of a totally illogical situation. Miss Svelte’s thinking was built on a series of assumptions fed into some internal mathematical understanding of the universe which spat out this altogether cruel answer to her problem. It made my cutie-mark positively buzz to think what she might be capable of, given the right situation and an easy way out.

Again, I felt pity for Hay Maker; he’d grown a genuine love of the... creature on the bed with the mind of steel and the heart of granite. Whether or not she could still be called a pony might be subject to open debate, so refined was her paranoia and her soulless arithmetic.

After Glow summed up my thoughts rather succinctly when she grumbled, “Honey...yer one ice cold piece of work.” She waved her horntip at the boxer who knelt beside the bed, worshipfully gazing at his employer.

“It is not for you to judge me, After Glow!” Svelte snapped, her full lips curling into a grimace. “I do what I must to survive. My talent is to understand just how insecure the world is. I recognize the futility of permanent connections with my fellow ponies. It is a lesson you might do well to learn, lest there be no interloping officer to save you next time!” She crawled back onto the gurney, drawing her rear legs to her stomach, rolling to face the wall.

I contemplated my next move. I could have left her there. She’d betrayed her bodyguard. I knew I wasn’t like to find much greater regard if she were handed an opportunity to turn on me. Still, I’ve always believed in giving ponies a chance or at least, making sure they had enough rope to hang themselves with.

“Fine. You want to survive and ditch your debt?” Reaching up I took her hoof and pulled her back over to look at me. “Help us take down Cosmo. We’ve got... well, I think we’ve got at least part of what he was looking for.” I fished through my coat until I found the diary, pulling it out along with its attendant picture, and setting it on the bedside table. Svelte picked it up in both hooves, trying the lock for a second then letting it drop.

“You designed the security system for Cosmo. You see how the world is unsafe.” I said, patting the book. “So, where lies the crack in the armor of the King of Ace?”

Chapter 12: Gentlecolts, You Can't Fight in Here! This is the War Room!

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 12:

Gentlecolts, You Can't Fight in Here! This is the War Room!

How do you secure a location against every possible route of entry? Can earth ponies break down the walls? Can you keep pegasi from breaking in on higher floors? What if they use disguises and pretend to be building maintenance, do you have countermeasures against that? What if they pay off the guards?

And that doesn’t even begin to cover magic. Do you have spells to prevent unicorns from teleporting in, turning invisible, shrinking for portability, or any of the other innumerable, devious ways magic could be used to grant access? What if they have the counterspells to those spells?

And how do you balance all this against the need for the building to function for its intended purpose?

It’s a set of questions that has baffled security experts for as long as there have been things that needed securing. Not because the answers don’t exist, but because they keep changing. Security is a continual arms race between infiltrator and protector, with countermeasure begetting countermeasure begetting countermeasure.

In fact, there is exactly one building in Equestria that can be considered perfectly, timelessly secure: A bookstore.

The proprietor had been driven into a security-obsessive paranoid state by a few periodically stolen (or possibly merely misplaced) copies of the then-popular Daring Do and the Neighcronomicon. Since said proprietor was a rather powerful unicorn, this store eventually became the recipient of a completely staggering number of protective enchantments; ultimately, it became physically impossible for any being to enter the building.

It stands today as an ironclad monument to those who would trade sanity for security, and deserve neither.

--The Scholar

A police operation planning session is generally characterized by a bunch of officers sitting around tables with their ties loose and note-pads on the tables in front of them. The doughnuts are gone by the time you arrive and everypony’s hooves are lightly dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Sometimes, if it’s a truly massive op, they might drag you into a little classroom full of desks made for grade-schoolers. The doughnuts will still be gone when you get there.

It’s a very purposeful sort of environment, even if the op is targeting some two-bit drug dealer working a particular street corner just a little harder than his local precinct wants to let slide. For homicide, there’s almost always big pictures of the victims in eight by ten glossy tacked to a board at the front of the room.

It should also be said that apart from the few minutes in which you personally are relevant, an operation planning session is roundly and soundly one of the dullest things you will ever sit through in your entire life. Some of the cruder elements of the Detrot Police Department have commented that those meetings would have been vastly improved by the presence of hookers.

I can now say: They weren’t wrong.

The room we’d chosen for our briefing wasn’t in use and mostly picked because, for some unfathomably perverse reason, one of the green-painted walls was enchanted to be adhesive. Scarlet cleared the various ‘toys’ attached to it into a cardboard box, dumped them in the hall, then went about the process of carting in a half dozen bean-bag chairs and two huge boxes of various pastries from the Vivarium’s kitchens.

After Glow soon followed, levitating a dozen cups of coffee and sharpening a knife on a whetstone at the same time just so nopony thought she was doing secretarial work.

Haymaker and Svelte came in last. Our spy was using her associate’s flanks to hold herself up. The boxer had refused to leave her side, supporting her in the short trek down the hall. He lead her immediately to one of the squishy seats, then sat on the floor beside it. She took the nurse-maiding with good grace, as though it was expected.

Taxi and Swift collapsed into their own cushions, my driver putting her hooves behind her head and wiggling down until she was comfortable, while the rookie went about ever more note-taking.

Scarlet returned after a short delay, wheeling in something that resembled a cinema projector from my dad’s era. The mechanism looked mildly like the ones the newsponies used, but with a lot of extra, obviously magical bits tacked on and no reel for the film to be fed through. Scarlet began fiddling with one of the panels on the side, but nothing happened; he grew gradually more frustrated with the device until After Glow trotted over and gave it a firm smack, which sent it whirring to life.

“Scarlet, ah swear, if the com-gems were any more complicated ye’d have found some way to turn yerself into goo with one,” the elder unicorn commented. “Yer lucky yer cutie-mark is somethin’ besides fixin’ stuff.”

“I fix stuff! I fix lots of stuff. You know arcanotech just doesn’t like me!” he pouted, adjusting something on the machine until it gave a low whine. He leaned up and spoke into a piece of wire mesh attached thereto: “There... Mistress Stella? Can you see us clearly?”

The dragon’s voice came down from speakers in the ceiling. “I see you, dear colt.”

I saw the glint in Scarlet’s eye just before he turned around, lifted his tail and backed up to the projector’s forward facing camera lens. “How ‘bout now?”

“Oh, yes, I see quite clearly!” Stella purred.

With a rustle of heavy fabric, Swift grabbed one of the beanbag chairs in her teeth and lobbed it at Scarlet, who caught it right in the face and toppled over on his side. Crawling out from under it, he impishly stuck his tongue out at the pegasus then curled up on the pillow.

“Why do we need that thing? Can’t Stella see everything that happens in here?” Taxi asked, touching the camera’s rear leg.

“Those are just security spells.” Scarlet explained, pointing at the ceiling. “Low resolution. This machine is as good as being in the room!”

“Ahhh, alright.”

I went straight for the box of pastries, stuffing my cheeks with lightly crisped bagel and exquisite cream cheese. “Oooh, that’s good.” I hadn’t realized precisely how hungry I was until food was available.

I spent a few moments indulging my vacant digestive tract with perfectly warm coffee before I walked in front of the camera, pulling the diary out of my pocket along with the picture of the sisters, then hesitantly laid them on the wall. As I touched the surface, it felt like gravity changed directions for just the tip of my toe, creating a slight pull on my hoof. I frowned appreciatively; it was certainly more useful and a lot less flashy than most enchanted conveniences.

Granny Glow levitated Svelte’s listening device and put it just below the diary and the picture. My partner then added her notes from the murder scene, before both of them took seats on the floor behind the camera.

“We are short of time so I’ll get straight to it.” I began, setting my hat on the wall in one corner. “Miss Svelte, where is King Cosmo’s personal complex?”

The spy wiggled onto her stomach, letting all four legs hang over the sides of her chair in a sultry pose that had Hay Maker blushing. “Oh? I suppose you would not be aware of that. King Cosmo operates the Monte Cheval.”

“What?!” Taxi leapt up, her black and white mane flying. “You’re joking! None of my records say anything about that!”

I felt my butt hit the floor as the issues facing us went from ‘difficult’ to ‘nearly insurmountable.’

‘They’ say if you want to find your horse in organized crime, you follow the money. 'They' also say you can’t fight City Hall. ‘They’ are only right about half the time on either count. Most often when you follow the money you find it leads off a bridge, and only discover this while you're on the way towards the water wearing concrete horseshoes. Equally, when you fight City Hall, you'll often discover just what a bunch of cowardly prigs high society ponies are when confronted with a pair of hoof-cuffs. And, just as often, you'll discover just how vengeful they can be when they're the ones signing your paychecks.

The Monte Cheval was a very recent development within Detrot. It was a mix of pleasure complex, casino, and nightclub on par with the Vivarium. Possibly even larger. It’d been built, seemingly overnight, in place of an old strip of condemned government housing just outside the Heights a little less than a year prior. The vast construct was a gleaming bastion of finance; a daring plan to rebuild the shattered economy of my washed out burg on the backs of addicted gamblers and tourists seeking a respite from more heavily regulated parts of Equestria.

In spite of the whisperings from within DPD’s mob unit that the shadowy proprietors must have purchased the land with interference from Canterlot royals or some illicit source, the Monte Cheval had the blessing of City Hall to do whatever it damn well pleased so long as it could bring the bits. That Taxi hadn't heard anything about its actual ownership, even from our notoriously gossip-happy mob unit, was a sign that somepony high in the government hierarchy had their hooves up to the elbow in money I would have preferred not to follow.

“How’d he manage that trick?”I muttered, scratching my chest.

“Mister Cosmo is under the hoof of somepony who knows how to ensure he is not investigated,” Svelte asserted, her tail wagging languidly back and forth. “I do not know who, but perhaps you will discover that yourselves. The least of it is that he has made certain you are all running about like roosters with your heads cut off trying to stomp out small time dealers or his rivals. Somepony in the government who sets investigative priorities simply let him slip between the cracks.”

My brain was feeling like a fried egg left in the sun too long. I needed a refocus. “Then let’s start at the beginning. Miss Svelte, what precisely was your purpose here?”

“My purpose?” The white mare leaned her head to one side. “Is that not obvious? I was sent to gather embarrassing or damaging information from the customer base.” She directed her horn at her busted hacking device. “I am not paid to ask questions of my employers. In this instance, I was not paid at all.”

“So ye just did it then?!” After Glow snarled, pausing in her knife sharpening. “That bastard has got a complete account of us for the last however long?”

Svelte nodded, shrugging her slim shoulders. “A bit over five months, and yes, he does. I doubt it will do him much good anytime soon, but it is in his possession at least.”

Miss Stella spoke from wherever she was listening; the room vibrated slightly. “Please explain further. Why would this not do him any good?”

“Well, I record only the direct, unfiltered feed onto crystal drives. You have everything encrypted and the only way to get anything from it is to watch the output live. It must be decrypted first, as well. It is five months worth of information on everypony here, sleeping, eating, and working.” She explained, miming the act of putting food in her muzzle and resting. “The vast majority of it is completely worthless.”

“Alright, so it’s not an emergency yet, but it could be pretty quickly. What if he were to find out you’d turned coat?” I inquired.

Considering this, Svelte went to the table and got herself some coffee and one of the bagels. She sat herself back down beside Hay Maker and used his broad back for a table, resting her mug between his shoulders.

“Then he would immediately begin decrypting and viewing, gather as much blackmail-worthy information as possible, and I believe make an attempt to destroy or control this business.” She said, matter-of-factly.

I heard Swift take a quick breath, her note-taking skipping a beat. After Glow dabbed the edge of her cigarette on the table, shaping the ash into a cone then shaking it off. "That ain't gonna happen while Ah'm suckin' air.”

"Vows aside, you are unlikely to be able to stop him at present." Our spy lazily shifted about on her pillow until she could face the ancient guard. "You would need to destroy the structure funding the Monte Cheval, as well as convince his legitimate investors that they are helping fund illegal activities. That would require the elimination or exposure of his secondary funding mechanism and the reacquisition of the crystal drives I have already delivered, as those drives contain material that could be used to indefinitely fund his business ventures."

Taxi raised her hoof for attention. "Wait, his secondary funding? You mean his drug business?"

Svelte bobbed her head. "That is correct."

"I... I think I get where you're going here!" My driver exclaimed, leaping to her hooves and rushing up to the wall. "I need some paper or something."

Scarlet produced a stack of blank paper from someplace and a pencil, dropping it at her hooves before going back to his place. Snatching it up, Taxi began tearing one piece into small bits, writing words on each one. She began tossing them up on the wall, arranging them in a pattern.

"My teacher in the Ze-Do said every problem should be looked at as spider's web in which we are caught. We can struggle blindly like animals and further entrap ourselves, or use our will in the process of freeing ourselves one piece at a time." She spread out the bits. One with Cosmo's name was at the center. "What sort of margin of profit does the Vivarium operate at?"

Scarlet opened his mouth to answer, but closed it hard at a dirty look from After Glow.

It was Stella who finally answered, "Considerable, though during our early days it was... less so. Our escort service makes up a smaller percentage of our bottom line each year."

"Any new business, but especially casinos, operate at a loss their first few years." Taxi put a piece of paper beside Cosmo with the word 'Monte Cheval' printed on it then 'investors' beside that. "They've got a huge chunk of seed money but that's all. Stella, your hoard was the seed money for the Vivarium, right?"

"That is... correct. It was far smaller in those days." The dragon replied, his voice holding a bit of nostalgia. "I wasn't ever one for amassing more than a comfortable bed's worth of gemstones. These days, it is largely wrapped up in deeds and bank notes which are not plentiful nor so pleasant to sleep upon."

“Well, if Cosmo is operating the Monte Cheval off of his drug business, then he’s keeping that information somewhere. No matter how big that drug business is, he had to take out a loan from somepony.” Taxi stated, placing a piece of paper with the word ‘ledger’ on it on the other side of Cosmo’s name. “He’ll have some kind of ledger to track his finances. He’s an earth pony who doesn’t like unicorns, so he’s probably not using memory spells. It won’t be at the Monte Cheval, in case he’s raided by the police. He’ll have it somewhere else. If we can get that and expose his mob ties, he won’t find enough investors to stay above water. His creditors will eat him alive!”

“How then, do you intend to do that?” Svelte asked, getting off of her chair and meandering up to the board. She stared at it fiercely then remembered her horn wasn’t in operating order and grabbed a piece of paper. Obviously unused to writing with her teeth, it took her a bit to remember how. At last she attached the paper to the wall, which said ‘Monte Cheval Security’ in badly unpracticed script.

“I designed their security procedures to be impenetrable-” Her ears slide down on either side of her head. “-even to myself. No magical scrying, far-seeing, or divination spell that exists in the public archives will work within the confines of the Monte Cheval.”

“Now why’dja go and do a dumb thing like that, girly? Even Stella and Ah got a damn back door!” After Glow sniffed, derisively...

“I was paid a considerable sum of money at the time and hoped never to associate with Mister Cosmo again.” Svelte replied sharply.

“So we flip one of his managers. No problem.” Taxi waved her hoof as though the issue had been resolved.

Spilling onto her back across her beanbag, Svelte kicked her rear legs a bit then said, “His top level staff are all trained in counter-interrogation and have been warded against every sort of aggressive enchantment I could find counterspells for, then counter-warded to set off an alarm if somepony tries and fails to cast on them. You won’t be ‘flipping’ them even with your little ‘secret weapon.’”

“Speaking of that, Miss Svelte, I must ask how you know about our dear sweet Master Snow?” Stella’s voice was curious, but with an edge; that it was disembodied and its source somewhere in the undercarriage of the club couldn’t take away the slight menace.

“Oh? I know your draconic memory cannot have failed so quickly, despite your age. I’m certain you remember the group of rapscallions who made a scene some months ago?” The spy asked, her words thick with sarcasm.

Stella let out a rumble that made my legs turn to jelly as she answered, “I remember... and comments about my age will cost you, little filly.”

“Cost me what? You don’t hurt ponies, you ridiculous old-”

Before Svelte could finish, After Glow’s knife had flashed out and shaved a healthy swatch of fur off of the younger mare’s fetlock before slicing into the beanbag, sending a puff of white fluffy beads into the air that landed in her mane. Hay Maker didn’t even have time to react. Svelte put a hoof on his back and pushed him back down before he could make some entirely futile protective gesture.

“Sorry, mah magic ain’t so good anymore. Ah ain’t so young as Ah used to be.” After Glow grinned dangerously, yanking her blade out of the chair.

Touching her freshly shorn foreleg, Svelte brushed the fur off, trying to look nonchalant. I almost believed she hadn’t been unsettled in the least; the mare was a consummate actress. I almost missed the subtle shaking of her hoof..

“I... take your meaning.” She murmured, more subdued. “Well, those ruffians were sent at my request. I needed to see how your guard has managed so perfectly to disable all those who have attempted invasion. I planted bugs on them. I must say I was amazed, though I think painting obscenities on them and hanging them from the Academy flagpole was excessive. They were as docile as kittens after that treatment by... Master Snow Cow, was it?”

“Snow Coy... and Ah’m half tempted to git yer ass in front of his eyes just to cure yer smart lip, honey.” Glow threatened, gathering up the white beads from the chair in her magic and sweeping them into a garbage can. “This ain’t helping with how we’re gonna git the damn recordin’s back.”

“If sneaking isn’t going to work, we could always try the direct approach.” I sat forward, shifting my badge out of my collar. “Dress your Stilettos up as cops and storm the place. Make it look like a police raid. We’d be in and out before Cosmo knew what hit him.”

Taxi leaned over and lightly tapped my wounded shoulder. A pain like having my leg lightly roasted over an open fire with a nice brace of stoked kippers had me stumbling and trying to shake the tingles out. My driver only gave me a disapproving look. “Hardy, King Cosmo is prepared for a real police raid... do you honestly think we’d find what we’re looking for that way? This requires subtlety. I realize you’re as subtle as a fart in an elevator-”

“I can be subtle!” I nipped at her, rubbing my shoulder. “Fine, we can’t do direct and a caper is out of the question. What’ve you got?”

“I...” Taxi considered this then shook her head, braid lashing her forelegs. “Okay, I just want to say this: if I were given this operation profile back when I was working for the DPD, I’d tell the Chief to find somepony stupider to pull it off.” Putting her hoof on the sticky wall, she brushed a scrap that said ‘blackmail’ over beside another with ‘drug operations’ scrawled thereon. “Even if we were to re-acquire the recordings before they can be usefully examined, we still have to eliminate Cosmo’s businesses or he’ll just be back later from another angle.”

“I may have a useful piece of information for you.” Svelte cut in, a mercenary gleam in her eye. “It will... have a price attached, however.”

“Yer right, lass!” After Glow brandished her knife, marching towards the spy who tumbled off her chair and scrambled backwards. The bodyguard started to rise again only to find himself squashed against the floor by a field of glimmering magic. “Let’s see what it’ll cost ye to tell me jes’ what yer thinkin’. An ear mebbe?”

“I just want to leave!” Svelte cried, raising her chin to avoid the weapon twisting against her throat. “I just want to get out of this awful city! I want an air chariot ticket!”

“Miss Glow-” Stella’s speaking her name from on high brought the security pony up short before she could practice any creative amateur surgery and undo all of Doctor Pickle’s hard work. “-lets hear what this filly has to say. If it is of use, I will guarantee she will leave the city safely and with a small but adequate fund that she can start over elsewhere.”

“Yes, yes! Please!” The spy begged.

Using nothing but a knifetip and a healthy dose of fear, Glow forcibly lifted the girl’s lovely head.

“You know, I would speak right now if I were you, Miss Svelte.” I said, moving up beside the older pony, but making no move to stop her. “That is the best deal you’re likely to get. Cosmo doesn’t need a failed spy who can point to him in a blackmail attempt on some of the most powerful ponies in the city, if not the region.”

Her eyes still held some of that feral cunning which made my cutie-mark positively wriggle, but it was mixed with the kind of self-preservative fear that shortens irritating cases down to plea-bargained confessions.

“Mister Cosmo has someplace he stores important things.” Svelte started. “I noticed a... call it a ‘deviation’ from my security procedures. The Monte Cheval contains a private office for Mister Cosmo accessible only from the street. He takes guests there sometimes. There is a phone line there which I did not authorize. Whenever anything he needs stored comes in, he calls this phone then puts the object in the safe under his desk. It... ‘goes away’ from there. I don’t know how or where..”

“How exactly did you find out about this ‘deviation,’ then?” I asked, squinting one eye at her.

Svelte gulped, then forced a weak smile. “Cosmo tends to treat mares as furniture. I was in the room.”

“Alright then. I want to look him in the face and tell him about the investigation of the death of Ruby Blue. I believe we could... combine direct and subtle. You say magical spells won’t work?” Picking up a second bagel off the snack table I jammed it in my mouth. “Whash aboush... libbing shurveillanshe?”

“Come again?”

I swallowed quickly. “What about living surveillance? Did you cover living beings actively sitting, watching and listening?”

“Errr... no?” Svelte’s uncertainty heartened me somewhat. “Why would I? What could possibly watch from inside a safe?”

“I know that sort of magical lockbox.” Taxi put in, making a square shape with her hooves. “They’re used by banks and casinos to move money around, though I’ve never heard of somepony having a private one except... well, criminals. There’s no law against it, but they’re brilliant for moving things you don’t want somepony to intercept. If Cosmo is working on his ledgers himself, there's no more excellent way of moving them around.”

“So what if we give him something that he’s likely to put through that system?“ I held up Ruby’s book.

Svelte sucked her lower lip. “That book... I suppose it seems to be a diary... is clearly magical. I take it then, Mr. Hay Maker, it was hidden?”

“Yes, ma’am. I dun missed it.” The boxer replied, shamefacedly. “I’m sorry...”

“It is no issue. You have done as well as might be expected with the information available.” She patted his big, maroon head. “I doubt a book is what Cosmo seeks, though it may lead him to whatever that object may be. Alternatively, it may contain evidence which could point to him as the culprit behind the filly's death. I... imagine if it were to find it's way into his hooves, it might be considered valuable enough for him to transport it to his secure location.”

“If we could keep eyes on that book when it went into the safe-” I began.

“I have just told you that no artifact or scrying magic will work!” The spy huffed, impatiently. “Those shoddy little bits of scrap and gems you police ponies call bugs will die the instant they cross my wards.”

“Heard you the first time. I think I know who can help us.” I said with an enigmatic quirk of the muzzle before turning to Taxi. “You still have that contact with the Liaison office?”

My driver’s eyebrows tried to climb up onto her hairline, then she hopped up as comprehension set in.

“You’re not thinking of who I think you’re thinking of-”

I shrugged. “Hey, if you have any better suggestions, now’s the time.”

Taxi leaned close and whispered in my ear, “I know we need surveillance, but... Hardy, you know what they’re like!”

“Alright, so ye got somethin’ the nasty git wants.” After Glow said, shifting her weight from one set of knees to the other. “Ye gonna trade it to’em fer the recordings and a promise to leave be? Seems awfully weak to me.”

“Oh, no... I wouldn’t take a promise from a mob kingpin.” I gave a self satisfied flip to the brim of my hat, turning to look at our little matrix on the wall. “No, we’re going to do business with him. More specifically, I am. I have... well, I think we can get the location of his drug production facility and wherever he is keeping his valuables. Two birds, one stone. I’ve might have an idea how we can do that.”

Stella spoke from overhead. “We have trusted you thus far, Hard Boiled Junior. You do your father proud. You’ve got his lovely mind... and his lovely hind end.”

Maybe it was exhaustion, but as I realized where my buttocks were aimed, something inside me finally snapped. I threw my rear legs out and kicked the innocent camera in an arc over everypony’s head. It hit the rear wall, spilling cogs and bits of metal; letting off one last crackle of energy it went dead.

“That's the last crack about my flanks I'm taking! The next pony to make one will be taking a bullet in the knee!”

****

There wasn’t much to be said after that. We’d determined to set everything in motion on the coming day, and set off back towards the front of the club. The evening had crept up quickly and I was finding myself more exhausted than I’d thought equinely possible. My eyelids were starting to feel like they were sagging around my knees.

Swift was, if anything, in worse condition. After a day punctuated by intense terror, violence, and a mountain of note taking, she’d given up on trying to keep her wings from dragging the carpets. She simply trudged behind us, trying to unkink her jaw from it’s writing position.

Taxi, who'd managed to avoid nearly all of the excitement, still hummed cheerfully to herself as she trotted at my side.

After Glow did offer to let us sleep in one of the spare rooms but for some reason, my partner vetoed that, saying something about ‘Scarlet waking up everypony up with kisses’. Instead, the aforementioned effeminate nuisance took Svelte and Haymaker off to one of the private rooms, presumably for a shower and something to eat. The two of them were getting a bit ripe.

I wasn’t much better. I could still taste embalming fluid from the coroner’s office, blood and bile from Hay Maker’s chest crushing charge at Ruby’s apartment, and sawdust from the attack in the bowels of the club - but there was no pain. Against all odds and in spite of the various ponies intent on doing me harm, my body was merely exhausted; whatever other choice words I might have had for that sadistic rat-bastard Pickle, he’d reassembled me.

We stumbled and staggered through the undercarriage of the Vivarium, meeting nopony besides some quietly respectful Stilettos who were keeping our path clear of the evening crowds. After Glow shoved a door with the words ‘Fire Exit’ printed in big red letters on it and I caught a hard face-full of Detrot’s Special Rain Number 6: the driving downpour with a hint of car exhaust and cloying depression.

There was a loud poof as After Glow opened a huge umbrella and levitated it over our heads. The cab was parked outside with a zebra Stiletto standing watch over it, another umbrella clutched in her teeth. Those velour, incense scented car seats had never looked more inviting.

I felt like a slug crawling under a rock as I lifted myself into the back, then made room for the rookie. Taxi shifted her yellow tail end behind the wheel and pressed the ignition. The engine thundered comfortingly as I slammed the door and shut out the storm. We turned out of the parking lot of the Vivarium and onto the calm streets of the Heights. After a day that'd felt like it refused to end, all I wanted was to fall onto my bed with a beer and a half eaten carton of fried rice.

****

"So, what's the plan?" Taxi asked, breaking me out of my half snooze. The cab was halfway out of The Height's shopping districts. You could feel the difference in the quality of the roadworks as we drove out of the upscale neighborhood and back into Detrot's gritty inner city streets.

"Plan? You call your friend and ask if our 'surveillance' is interested in this case. Plan is I talk to Cosmo, get the recordings back, and we shut down his drug operation. I've got to make a couple phone calls tomorrow morning." I said, hoping to shut her down before she could get into 'planning mode.’

"That's not a plan. That's a goal." She replied, expertly pulling us in behind a couple of carts passing down an alley. "I'm talking specifics. If you want to do business with a drug baron you need a fresh identity! You know he's going to do checks on you."

Swift's ears lifted, slightly. "Identities? Are we going to do undercover work, sir?"

I shook my head and put a light hoof on my driver's seat. "I'm not going undercover. It's handled. Just make the call. Have them meet us in the morning if they want to help. Otherwise, we'll come up with something else tomorrow. This is just an intellgience gathering mission, for now."

"Hardy... ugh, never mind. I'll work out the logistics." Taxi pinched the bridge of her nose then peeled off down a side road to escape a slow moving carriage.

The weather was only worsening with each passing minute as we got closer to my apartment. The weather factories should have been down for the night, but periodically they had been known to handle emergency orders from other cities and regions by drowning Detrot in truly wild rainstorms.

"Kid, are you going to be able to fly in this?" I inquired whilst nudging Swift, who seemed like she was verging on unconsciousness. She pulled herself together long enough to raise her soft orange head over the edge of the window.

"Oh... I..." Her lower lip quivered then she lifted her wings and gave them a slight shake to work the impending sleep out. "I'll be fine, sir."

It was a good little show of toughness, but I could still see the quaking in her pinion feathers.

"You got a friend nearby you can stay with?"

"She could always spend the night at my studio-" Taxi started to offer.

"Sweets, your place is a closet and it smells like a zebra temple after an attack by potpourri demons."

My driver lifted her nose indignantly, but didn't deny it.

Swift thought for a few seconds. It looked like a real effort. "If there's a cloud hostel in the area you could drop me off, sir. I bet I can make the rooftops, at least."

I smacked the seat. "Screw that, kid. You're coming home with me. We're close to my place. You can use the couch. Might not be as soft as clouds but it'll do for a night."

She started to object, but a convenient, heart-stopping crash of thunder left our ears ringing. Images of a smoking pegasus tumbling out of the sky shot through my brain; I could see she was also thinking along those lines.

"Yes, sir."

Chapter 13: Mental Mind Buck Can Be Nice

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 13: Mental Mind Buck Can Be Nice

To err is equine, but if you want a guarantee that things will go wrong, hire an Essy to do it.

“Essy” – a colloquialism derived from the abbreviation for Sentient Construct, “S.C.” – is a term used to describe any object or creature given the ability to think independently by magical means. Essies are, objectively, one of the worst ideas ponykind has had since the swiss-cheese life preserver.

The thought process seemed reasonable enough: Giving magical items the ability to think and activate themselves would allow them to handle complex tasks independently of pony operators. The unfortunate “However” is that creating a sentient being is a complex process. It takes years and years of development and life experience to create an adult pony, and creating an Essy is, functionally, an attempt to bypass that process with magic. It will therefore not surprise the astute reader to learn that not once in the history of thaumatology has anypony ever managed to create an Essy without crippling personality defects. The results have included paranoid-schizophrenic home security gargoyles who constantly talk about 'the voices from the moon' to OCD-riddled cleaning devices that can't stop cleaning themselves.

Due to the amount of energy and materials required as compared to the average resultant utility, Essy creation is rarely considered cost effective; their manufacture tended to be limited to mishaps involving emotional magic and the occasional academic endeavor.

Still, once created, they do carry some advantages: First, their lack of normal economic needs means that they tend to be motivated by nonstandard currencies, such as entertaining assignments or a decent polishing. Second, the relative rarity of their employment and their complex nature means that countermeasures are rarely taken against their use.

For these reasons, the DPD, among other agencies, discreetly maintains a small Essy Liaison Office to handle negotiation with and safe employment of these unusual agents.

--The Scholar

There are many kinds of sleep. I once made a list of them one evening when I was on stakeout and bored out of my skull.

There’s the kind of sleep you have when you’ve had a cold for three days and suddenly your sinuses are clear. There’s the variety where you just finished making love. My personal favorite is the kind where you know you’ve got a mountain of work to be done, but none of it for the next twelve hours. This was a joy my rookie was to know tonight.

Swift and I barely made it in the door. I was going to get her a beer, but I came back from the kitchen to find an unconscious pegasus, draped over the couch and coffee table, drooling out of one corner of her muzzle and snoring like a kitten.

I cracked open my brew on the edge of the cheap wooden doorframe, then sat with it between my forehooves, sucking at the straw to cleanse all the foul flavors of the day from my palette. I’d thought food might be an option, but my brain already felt like a mushroom-and-exhaustion omelette. I needed sleep.

Before getting up to go to bed, I glanced back at the sleeping rookie.

She’s going to be a good cop one day. If you keep her alive, said a quiet voice in the back of my head. It sounded an awful lot like Juniper.

She’s a hot mess with daddy issues and not enough sense to keep her head down when the bullets start flying. I replied, feeling more than a little bitter that my deceased partner would intrude on my tiredness just to deliver his personal opinions.

So she's you? I could almost hear the dead prig giggling.

Swift had the foresight to set aside her gun and clips before she passed out, but she hadn’t stripped off her tactical vest or assault harness. Beneath it, however, I noticed a glint of gold hanging around her neck.

Careful not to wake her, I studied the glitter. It was a chain. A golden chain. Pulling it free with the tip of one hoof, I lifted out a beautiful locket of the same metal. It must have been whatever she'd gone back to get when she was putting on her uniform in the Vivarium’s bath-house.

It should be understood, I’m paid to snoop for a living, but being paid to do something you love doesn’t mean you don’t do it for fun now and then.

Pushing the button on the top unfolded the locket on a clockwork hinge. Inside was a tiny black-and-white photograph of a cheerful young unicorn mare with a dreadlocked mane holding a bundle of squirming fur and feathers to her chest. Beside her, a dour seeming pegasus stallion with expansive wings looked at the wriggling little foal in the mare’s forelegs with a tiny, put upon-smirk on his face.

There was an inscription etched on the other side of the case which read, ‘Our love goes with you on all your adventures! –Mom and Dad’

So that was the couple that spawned my little burden.

Except she wasn’t entirely a burden, was she? Saved my tail in that fight with Hay Maker and fixed that issue with the File Cloud before it could become a real mess. She wasn’t stupid. A bit naive and reckless, sure, but a pony could do worse. Taxi was good backup, but required an awful lot of bribery or begging to get her out from behind the wheel during all but the most interesting cases.

I gingerly sllpped the locket back into the front pocket of her vest, turned around, and pushed open the door to my bedroom. At some point in recent history, I’d apparently made the bed. Whatever madness possessed me to do that, I was grateful for it. I set the dregs of my beer on the nightstand, tossed my coat across the chair, set my gun back in its case, and tore off my tie.

My head hit the pillow. I was asleep before my eyes were closed.

****

“Good Morning, Detective Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled! Do you awaken?”

A trilling noise brought me out of some altogether unpleasant dream, which seemed to involve being cuddled by an especially friendly mare with six legs. I became quickly aware of a gentle weight resting on my chest and went to swat it. Something buzzed and moved away.

Still a dream then. Nothing buzzing could possibly be real or in my room. Certainly nothing that big.

Prying one eye open gave me a glance into the black, quivering mandibles of an insect which could have easily devoured my head in one solid bite.

“Ahhh, you rise! Good!” The creature shrilled. It didn’t seem to have lips but a quad of scintillating wings opened from beneath a bright pink carapace and it rose into the air. That had been the buzzing sound. Another set just below vibrated extremely quickly and seemed to be producing the words.

No coffee in the world is as good for bringing a pony instantly out of sleep as a sight like that.

Fully conscious, I did what any rational pony would in such a situation: I leapt for the dresser, fumbled my gun out of its case, and rolled onto my back, trying to stuff bullets into the chambers. I only stopped when I realized the strange insect hadn’t moved from its place on the end of my bed, and looked vaguely familiar. It wasn’t making any especially threatening motions, despite its appearance. But if you ignored that freakish face and the multi-faceted eyes, it might almost have been a...

“Ladybug?” I let two bullets drop from the side of my mouth.

“We are most pleased to see you again, Detective Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled!” The creature chittered, cleaning its black spider-like legs with its distressingly unusual mouth. “We were most distressed to hear of the demise of your swarm-friend, Detective Juniper Shores.”

I set my gun to one side, shaking out the one round I’d managed to load in my clumsy attempt to blow a hole in the giant bug’s face.

“Taxi managed to have the Essy Office get in touch with you, then. What happened to you? The last time I saw one of your number, it was yay big—” I held my hooves about two inches apart from one another “—and spoke like a cat screaming down a pipe.”

Raising its back armor, the Ladybug released about two dozen similarly colored creatures scaled down to the size of a golf ball. They settled in a row across the end of my bed, their constantly vibrating wings making the whole room feel like I was sitting in a beehive. “Our collective has learned many things about diplomacy since we became aware! We have learned you species with fewer eyes and fewer bodies find it unsettling to interact with many beings simultaneously. We have contracted the fine horn wavers at your Academy and they have, most diplomatically, made a far less squishable diplomat.”

“Wait, back up... you convinced one of the Academy to make you this size?! Just like that? How did you pay for that?”

“You ponies and your bits of money metal.” The ladybug rubbed its rear legs together, making a noise that closely approximated a terrier being strangled. I realized, after a moment, that it was laughing. “We learned much from our daytime televisions! So many things we’ve learned! Most especially, we learned you place value on sexual propriety. Such a silly thing, but we found it most useful to know the mating habits of such ponies as wave their horns about. We simply asserted that were they not to abjure, temporarily, their demands for finance, that we would inform their mates of all such activities.”

“You blackmailed the Academy?!”

The ladybug tilted its head as if considering this, then cheerfully nodded.

“Most definitely yes! You may call this representative ‘Queenie.'”

****

I’m afraid there’s no good way to explain Ladybugs. Unlike most sentient creations, they weren’t a fluke of magic gone wrong or a useless one-off accidentally brought into existence by the right mix of bad arcane weather. They were made for a purpose.

Some incredibly daft magic user, whose name is stricken from the record books lest he or she be cursed forever by every police pony alive, decided that the standard surveillance techniques of the time were outdated. Now, said magic user was not wrong about that particular detail; this was back when our most effective police listening technology involved a cup pressed against a door, but they were a believer in the notion that it would be very convenient, in a criminal investigation, to be able to monitor everything.

This anonymous fool did what most fools do when they’ve got something huge to accomplish and no internal mechanism for telling them they’re being stupid; they made a list. This list contained all the things he or she thought a bugging device needed to be: mobile, easily disguised, controllable remotely, able to listen from many angles, and very difficult to destroy.

Our intrepid arcanist went through what must have been a veritable bestiary of life-forms, coming at the end to a small group with the necessary traits. Gathering them in one place and using magics which have, no doubt, been locked away in the vaults of the Academy, they created the Ladybugs.

It could have gone worse. That’s not to say it went well, but it could have gone worse. After all, this thaumaturgist had started with parasprites as the base for their new magical creation. Whatever else went in has been lost entirely to history, and is probably only contained in the mind of that silly, silly pony, wherever he or she might be.

What came out this ill advised venture was a brand new species. Highly intelligent, able to change color and shrink to the size of a pea, and magically connected to one another, the Ladybugs should have been the bane of Detrot’s criminal elite.

At the time, It sounded fantastic.

Unfortunately, all that versatility came with a raft of downsides; the damn things had the attention spans of toddlers when left to their own devices, they got bored easily, and they had an excess of personality which could test the patience of the sanest, most even-minded detectives.

Eventually, the Ladybugs were de-commissioned and handed over to the Essy Office for integration into society. Since then, they’ve gone somewhat ‘freelance.’ If a pony on the right side of their mutant moral code has need enough and can promise to keep them interested, he can commission their services. Just be ready to put up with them.

****

“We have been mightily intrigued by your upcoming criminal enterprise!” Queenie buzzed, winging onto the dresser as I dug out a fresh tie and began dressing.

“Criminal enterprise? Taxi told you what we’re doing?” I asked, struggling into my gun harness. Several of the smaller ladybugs helpfully buzzed down from the end of the bed and grabbed the straps, holding them whilst I shoved my rear hooves through the loops and cinched them up tight.

“Assuredly. No details, but we are assured this will be interesting, or your money back!” Pulling its legs up underneath, the mega-sized bug flipped onto its belly and crawled down onto the floor.

“This isn’t going to violate your Essy autonomy contract, is it?” I asked, pulling my tie down around my throat. Two insects helpfully tugged it tight, adjusting the knot.

“No, no, no! We are ever so good at keeping secrets! Our contract is safe.” Queenie set the spare tie aside. It was only lightly chewed. Lifting its head slightly, it seemed to be listening to something going on in the next room. “Miss Sweet ‘Taxi’ Shine is also here, waiting for you I believe.”

“Look, I know you strive for precision, but just call us Hardy and Taxi.”

“We... we will try. Hardy.” The massive bug lifted its clacking jaws in a frightening parody of a smile.

“Ugh, and don’t grin like that. It’s going to give somepony a heart attack. Is my partner still asleep?” I asked, making sure my auto-loader’s action was still smooth and clean.

“If you refer to the pegasus with the expressive pigment, we believe she is still unconscious, yes. You are a rogue, Hardy! Wherever did you find such a lovely creature?” Queenie did a little pirouette that was a vague, mechanical imitation of 'suggestive.' “Detective Juniper Shores would approve.”

“I’m not sleeping with her! She’s just my partner!” I hissed. “What Juniper would ‘approve’ of is irrelevant, and I’ll kindly ask you not to bring him up, unless you want to have to get yourself another diplomat because this one got a hole in it.”

The Essy held up its forelegs placatingly and burbled. “We would prefer not to have expensive fissures in our carapace, Hardy.” All of the ladybugs let out a simultaneous hum, and their antennae turned towards the door. “You may be interested to hear that Miss Taxi has been cleaning. Your abode is far more presentable."

Because I was adjusting my trigger bit to hang suitably close to my mouth when they said that, I almost nipped the tip of my tongue off.

“She’s what?! Why didn’t you say that first?!” I shouted, hurling myself out of the bedroom.

****

I arrived on a scene of total devastation.

A few carpet stains were all that remained of my carefully arranged and arrayed messes. She’d... stacked my case files. That evil, feminine menace had actually organized them into piles beside the sofa.

Swift was still on the couch, two throw pillows jammed on either side of her head. Her ears were covered by the cushions and she was still sleeping like a rock.

The rest of the living room buzzed with activity. Fastidious little insects swarmed through, plucking dust off of every surface, wielding cleaning brushes I hadn’t seen in years. Standing at the sink in that weird two-legged zebra combat stance, with a dish-rag draped over one hoof, the ring-leader herself was casually wiping dishes.

“Taxi... Taxi, y-you-” Words failed. My mess. My glorious hovel was destroyed! She’d managed to even clean up that beer stain in the corner I’d been cultivating for the last five months. The carpet, whose natural color I’d long since forgotten, was only slightly spotty and once more a rich green. It should have been impossible, but with the help of the ladybugs, my home had been transformed... into a magazine showcase! There were flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Flowers!

I fell onto my stomach, shutting my eyes and praying when I opened them the horrible dream would be over and my familiar piles and heaps would be back. No such luck.

“Ahhh, good morning, Hardy! May the light of the Princess shine on you! Did you sleep alright? Your energies seem-”

“Kill yooou!”

****

On closer examination, attempting to throttle a pony trained in every form of martial physical combat I can name was probably a stupid idea.

It felt right at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.

****

Taxi applied the ice-pack to the right side of my head. I sucked in a breath against the pain. “You know, most ponies would be grateful. This place was a sty.”

“Was I grateful the last time you did this?!” I replied, furiously. I felt my chest for any cracked ribs from the fall. She’d put me down quickly, but thankfully only with the light tap on the head rather than one of those awful nerve pinches.

“Well, I just thought you were grumpy that day! Anyway, I didn’t mess with your case files this time. I made sure to put them in the same order they were in before. These ladybugs can be most helpful if you have the right lever.”

“What lever did you use to get them cleaning my apartment?” I pulled away from her, still holding the cold pack to the small bruise.

A tiny smirk played across her yellow muzzle. “Oh, I told them you’d do something interesting when you saw it. I admit, I didn’t expect you to attack me, but...” She indicated the sofa where every single ladybug in the room had come to rest in a blanket of pink surrounding Swift. All of their multi-faceted eyes were on us, every wing still. "...well, Mission Accomplished.”

“Lovely.” I sneered at the gathered Essys. “Are they going to actually help us, or are they just here for the amusement factor of watching you smack me?”

Queenie scuttled out of my bedroom and up onto the back of the couch. My partner was still out cold, her rear legs twitching as though she was running from something in her sleep. That she couldn’t feel the mass of moving beings around her was something of a miracle, but we’d had a genuinely tiring day and the kid was new to the gig.

"We are going to assist you, Hardy.” Queenie chirped, drawing a small bag from under its wings and pulling out a powdered bear-claw. It started a very dainty nibble, then tossed the whole thing into its jaws, spraying sugar everywhere. “We find this Cosmo character a most odious villain and you are a suitable hero! We cannot wait for the plot to twist!”

“Apparently, they’ve been watching a lot of daytime television. Just ignore it.” My driver murmured, dipping her head into her saddlebag.

I immediately recognized the two thick manilla envelopes she set on the coffee table and facehoofed, which didn’t seem to deter her.

“Speaking of things, I’ve got some fresh identities for you and Swift!” she chirped. “Now, you’re Ruby’s building manager’s cousin who is looking to start a fresh drug trade in the Skids. You walk with a limp and have a scar on your left flank you got from an altercation during an illegal underground Ultimate Rodeo. Can you manage a lower-class Trottingham accent? If not—”

“Sweets,” I said, waving away the overproduced character file, “hold off on the secret identities.”

“I spent all night arranging these!”

“I’m still saying we won’t need them.” I insisted, putting my hoof on the envelopes and pushing them back to her. “I know what I’m doing. Come on, let’s get the kid up, get some breakfast. I’ll call Slip Stitch and get what I need from him. Then we can go see Cosmo.”

“Why are you calling that nutbar? Didn’t you get enough of him yesterday?” Taxi asked, standing up.

“He’s got drugs. We need drugs.” I let the spinning in my head subside, then moved over to the couch and waved my hooves over it until the ladybugs took the hint and the swarm flew blew past my head, finding a fresh spot on my newly cleaned counters. I gently shook Swift’s shoulder.

“...spergle... wha?”

One soft blue eye slid open and my young partner’s face cracked into a smile I hadn’t seen from anypony in years: One genuinely glad to see me first thing in the morning.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Morning kid. You ready for some actual cop work?”

“Yes, sir! What are we–” Her lower jaw seemed to stop working of it's own accord, leaving her chewing air.

It was all very sudden, but it felt like the world wanted me to see what happened, and so conveniently let time itself bugger off down the bar for a pint.

Swift’s gaze lighted on something over my shoulder, and then the pony on the couch was, within the blink an eye, no longer my green-as-clover protege. Her face had changed in some tiny, imperceptible way, and there was a pony I no longer recognized laying there on my couch. I’d seen something like it the day when she was confronted with Thalassemia, but that was a pale shadow of what was happening in front of me. She had the same shape; the same wild fur and spiky red mane; it just wasn’t Swift anymore.

I took an involuntary step back as a rank smell I can only call unrestrained bloodlust spilled off the pegasus. Glancing back over my shoulder, I found the subject of her attention licking powdered sugar off the coffee table: Queenie.

The huge ladybug’s antennae lifted as it realized something was wrong, and its armored back tightened for a leap into the air.

Queenie was fast.

Swift was greased orange lightning.

Bounding off the couch, the rookie extended her wings and gave them one solid flap, launching herself into the air. The downdraft almost flattened me. She was over my shoulder before I could so much as twitch, using my back as a springboard to throw herself across the room at the Essy, who’d just managed to take off.

My partner extended all four hooves and hit Queenie with a kick that would have turned any normal creature into a smear on the bottoms of her horse-shoes. Luckily, the insect’s natural armor was exceptionally thick, even on its underbelly. The two of them crashed to the carpeted floor, rolling end over end until they hit the door.

Taxi looked ready for violent action, if only she could figure out what that action should be. I was feeling much the same way. Similarly, Queenie seemed uncertain what, precisely, was going on, and merely flailed at my partner with all eight of it’s legs, trying to push her off.

Gone was the clever, skilled flier who’d navigated her way straight up a narrow alley between two buildings; the pony viciously attacking our surveillance being seemed little more than a crazed brute. Swift was banging her head against the extremely thick armor on the creature’s underbelly as though trying to burrow her way to it’s heart. I was grateful Taxi had moved Swift's gun off the coffee table, or the scene might have been significantly more unfortunate.

“Detective! Your pegasus is malfunctioning!”

Queenie’s plea came from all of the smaller ladybugs chittering in unison from the kitchen counter and brought me back from my confused indecision. Taking firm hold of Swift’s stubby tail when it swung near enough, I tore her off the ladybug’s chest and threw her towards the couch. She tried to get her balance, beating at the carpets and knocking over the table; I was on her before she could, pinning her wings down with my weight on the joints. She snapped at me like a rabid dog, biting at my chest, though there was little she could do from that position.

“Get Queenie out of here!” I shouted.

My driver shoved open the kitchen window, which was just wide enough for the giant Essy to clamber through. Taking the hint, Queenie flew over and crawled out. Taxi and followed it out onto the fire escape, then shut the window behind her.

Swift’s rage didn’t stop. She kicked her rear legs, tried to nip at my fetlocks, and flexed and flailed her wings until I was forced to apply some pressure to them. The pain was what brought her out of it enough to use her voice and when she did, my ears immediately hurt.

“Shir!” She shrieked, slurring each word like she’d had too much to drink. “I gots to kills it! Kill it! Shir!”

“Kid, stop it!” I yelled back.

“Lemme kill it!”

I slapped her across the muzzle with the bottom of my hoof.

She gasped, and started to arch her back for a buck which would have torn the end off my couch. I hit her again and her head jerked to the side. A trickle of blood ran down her nose, onto her upper lip. That finally did it.

“S-sir? W-why are you h-hitting me?” She whimpered pitifully, putting her hooves over her mouth.

“You just tried to kill something.” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and even.

“I-It’s not a pony!” She cried. “S-sir, my w-wings hurt!”

I stepped back off of her wing-joints and she sat up, folding them against her side. Tears and blood ran down her face, making her look like a real mess, particularly with the sand still in her eyes from her recent sleep She seemed halfway towards shock, breathing in quick gasps as sobs wracked her tiny frame.

“You want to tell me what that was about?” I said, putting my hoof on her shoulder. She shuddered from head to hoof, but didn’t back away. “I get not liking bugs, but... I’ve never seen somepony go that crazy before. At least, not without a heavy dose of Beam.”

“I...” Her pupils dilated until the blue almost vanished from her eyes then shrank quickly back to their normal size. The fury was replaced with complete befuddlement on her foal-like features. “I don’t... know...sir...”

“Don’t know?! You just tried to use your head for a battering ram!”

“Sir, I just said, I! Don’t! Know!” She bit off the words like each one tasted vile.

“Is this the real reason they tossed you out of PACT?!”

I regretted the words almost as soon as they were out of my muzzle. They were unkind and unfair. I’d seen hundreds or thousands of damaged ponies down through the years. It comes with living in this world and, in particular, Detrot. Magic does bad things to ponies, but nothing compared to what we do to one another.

Swift’s eyes welled over and she snatched up a pillow, biting it hard as she fought not to cry. It was the business of several minutes to get herself back on even footing.

When the tears were no longer impending, I closed my eyes and said quietly, “Sorry, kid. I didn’t mean that.”

“No, you’re right, sir... I mean, I am too small for fire-team weaponry, but if they knew about this...” Her ears were plastered to the sides of her head. “I... don’t know.” Her voice broke. “Sir, I’m scared!”

I didn’t really know what to do. What would you have done?

Me, I’m a cold bastard. It’s how I get through the day. You can’t spend your mornings waking up to go root around in the lives of the dead to discover why they’ve died violently and maintain a sunny, cheerful disposition. The ponies who try either end up like Slip Stitch, which is to say mad as a badger on fire, or like the Chief, which is to say stoned out of their minds and with a fair chance of one day ending up on the sour end of an equicide investigation by her own employees.

And yet, confronted by my partner, this youthful vessel waiting to be filled with the ‘wisdom of the master,’ crying like a foal, I just didn’t have it in me to keep up the high power defenses that keep me going through each day. Coldness only takes a pony so far. I made a note to kick myself thoroughly later for my weakness.

Sliding my forelegs under hers I lifted her off the couch and hugged her to my chest for a few seconds. She didn’t resist. Rather, she curled her head under my chin and shut her eyes. I hadn’t hugged anypony in too damn long, so I was a bit out of practice, but she didn’t have any critique for my technique. It was a great departure from the snarling beast that’d almost taken off my face just two minutes ago.

After her shaking had stilled and her tears dried a bit, I set her on her hooves and stepped back.
“Swift, can I try something?” I asked, pushing her back against the couch.

“S-sir?”

“I’m curious.” I put a hoof on her forehead. “Just stand there and try not to move.”

She nodded, wiping her drippy nose on the back of her fetlock. “Alright.”

I moved close, put my muzzle next to her ear, and whispered into it.

“Essy!”

The change was instantaneous. I got that smell again, like burning copper, and only had time to jerk my head back as she chomped the air where my ear had been. I shoved myself away, preparing to fight for my skin, but Swift just hung there with a surprised look in her eyes.

“What was that?!” She squeaked. “I’ve never felt anything like that before!”

“I’m not sure.” I answered, truthfully. “What I do know is that we’ve got a problem.”

“Am... I sick?” She coughed into her hoof, then felt her forehead for fever. As she was, her eyes drifted towards the ceiling and her back went rigid. “S-sir... why is your ceiling f-fan covered in parasprites?”

“They’re not-” I looked up at the ceiling fan. Sitting on every blade was a line of ladybugs, all silently watching the two of us. “Wait, you almost destroyed the apartment trying to disassemble Queenie. Why aren’t they setting you off?”

“I don’t know! If I knew, don’t you think I’d tell you?” She let out an exasperated noise. “They’re kind of cute. Pink, but cute. What are they?”

“Ladybugs.” I gestured for one of them to come down. A smaller specimen, about the size of a grape, leapt off the fan and buzzed down to my leg, alighting on my upraised knee. “They’re... well, I’m not going to use the ‘E’ word, but they’re going to help us take down Cosmo. Think of them as living cameras. Each one can see what all the others can see or, if they’re touching a pony, they can record physical sensations and play them back later for somepony else.”

“We have to hide them in the diary, right? Aren’t they too... um... too big?” Swift asked.

The ladybug made a noise which, on a much larger creature, might have been considered very rude, then shrunk to the size of a pea and flattened itself on my leg as thin as a bit piece. Its armor turned the same soft grey as my fur, blending in almost perfectly.

“They’re pretty good at what they do. I...”

There was a knock on the door and Taxi padded in as quiet as a mouse. “All clear?”

“Clear enough.” I murmured. “Where’s Queenie?”

“It’s going back to its roost to watch soap operas.” She shifted her interest to my partner, holding out a package of tissues.

“Could you tell it I’m sorry?” Swift asked, taking a tissue to blot her bloody nose with. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just saw it and I... I hated it so much. Even thinking about magic-made creatures as big as I am... those vile abominations-” Her breath caught in her throat, turning into a half-feral snarl. She blinked, then wretched, coughed, and stuffed her hoof into her mouth.

“I will tell Queenie you’re sorry.” I touched her foreleg. “You have no idea why... whatever that is... is happening? Somepony ever jigger with your brain? You get in a staring contest with Snow Coy?”

“Sir... ugh, if so, I don’t remember it.” Her mouth quivered as she fought back another wave of tears. “I should go home until I find out what’s wrong with me. I’ll go to Doctor Pickle or one of the nurses at the Vivarium tomorrow and if they can’t find anything I’ll go to Sacred Sun and check myself—”

“Kid, we don’t have time for that.” I cut in. “Yeah, I admit we can’t afford to have you losing it every time there’s a sentient construct in the room, but they’re rare enough.”

“But what if I just go crazy and attack somepony?”

“Then I’ll hold you down by the wings until it goes away.” I touched her shoulder where her wing connected and she fluffed the tips. “Either way, we’re on a time budget here. The second Svelte doesn’t clock in, we’re going to have a much worse situation. Unless you want to pray Cosmo is feeling lazy, I want to head that off at the pass. Plus, I have some calls to make. I’ll give you a complete breakdown of what I’ve got in mind in the car.”

“But sir, shouldn’t we report this-”

“Oh, Sweet Celestia, no.” I shook my head violently. “We are not reporting this to the Chief unless you want a Section 8 discharge today. We’ll be unemployed and what I have in mind for Cosmo won’t work if you and I are sitting in line at the food pantry.”

Swift’s eyes widened a little then she set her jaw. “I’ll... If I start feeling... Sir, please watch me.”

“I won’t be the only one.” I jabbed my knee at Taxi. “Sweets has this zebra neck trick that can put an earth pony out for an hour, and you’re half my size. I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine.”

Taxi nodded, holding her hoof out to help Swift up and I took her other leg.

“Sorry I hit you, kid.”

“It’s okay, sir. I took worse hits in PACT training.”

****

The phone rang and rang. Just as I was about to hang up, the timid voice of Thalassemia came down the line.

"H-h-hello? T-t-this i-is th-the C-city Co-coroner—"

"Thal, it's Hard Boiled. Put Stitch on the line."

"Oh, Detective! Y-yes. I w-will get the-the pants off h-his head."

"...What?”

"It's an exp... an experi..."

"Experiment. Right. Go get him."

The phone set down and I heard claws scampering on tile into the distance. Some moments later, I heard hooves that clopped like they were dancing, before a humming musical voice waltzed up and snatched up the receiver. "Doctor Slip Stitch here! I am most ecstatic to make your acquaintance!"

"Doc, it's Hardy."

"Hardy? Hardy who?"

"Hard... Boiled. Have you been into the embalming fluid again?"

"Oh! Yes, I have. Goes down smooth, gives a heady rush. What can I do for you, Detective?"

"You still have your friend at the Academy pharmacy? I need some–" I set a sheet of paper on the table with the phone and smoothed it down. "R-three-three-seven-nine-nine."

"Carfentanil? That's lovely strong stuff! Does that mean you’re joining Officer Boomerang’s weekly poker night?"

"What? No, no. I need some for a case I'm working."

"Oh, Detective, you do give me the most interesting requests! I'm sure I have some here. I'll have it couriered to your apartment within the hour."

"Oh, and could you keep this under the table for me?"

"Why, whatever do you mean, Detective? I've no idea what you're talking about. Formaldehyde and methanol have such a wonnnderful aftertaste."

"Thanks, Stitch."

****

"Detective! You owe me kisses and candy. The Chief was apoplectic. The scrub’s last report didn’t contain an itinerary, and for some reason I couldn’t possibly piece together, her High Holiness wants to keep tabs on you. I jotted out some garbage about you doing interviews and claimed I’d dropped it behind my comm console.”

“Thanks, Telly. I need a couple favors. Could you arrange for a note in the log that says a clean-up crew went out to—” I gave her Ruby’s address “—and something about me bringing in a red stallion, name of Hay Maker? Don’t bother with the booking information but just have the note. Erase it tomorrow.”

She hesitated, then the line buzzed as she switched channels. “Sure thing. That’ll be a spinach and cauliflower pizza, two boxes of bonbons from that place uptown, and new pads for my second set of headphones. Anything else?”

“These ‘favors’ are going to get expensive quick, don’t they?”

“You’re damn right they are.”

****

Plans make me crazy. The second a pony says ‘I have a plan,’ that’s usually a good time to exit stage anywhere as quickly as possible. I’ve never been good with other pony's plans, and my own don’t ever turn out well enough that I feel comfortable making them a regular part of my life. I prefer to enforce the law by the scruff of my neck, and on the days I wear them, the seat of my pants. A detective can’t make quick decisions if he’s constantly consulting a plan or his superior officer. It’s part of why the Detrot Police Department still manages to operate despite the overwhelming odds against it.

There is a certain benefit to plans; ponies like me can always be relied upon to upset the schema of criminals with acts of well engineered insanity when we discover somepony else has a plan in the works. Insanity often replaces a plan in the Equestrian Police Force, and works better than it has any right to.

The insanity I laid bare to both partner and driver on the trip across town was some of my finest.

****

Monte Cheval. The Mountain Pony.

I’d never actually seen the Monte Cheval up close myself, being neither rich enough nor cursed with a severe enough gambling habit. I remembered reading the front page news article when the place had opened, and I think I used it to wipe up a puddle of vomit after an especially heavy night of drinking.

There were plenty of places in Detrot catering to low-rolling betters hoping for that one big win which would raise them out of the slums. The Monte Cheval wasn’t one of those.

Detrot hadn’t had the luxury of heavily regulating industry for thirty years or so, except in cases where failures to do so verifiably meant ponies dying. In the eyes of City Hall, any business was good business so long as it brought in the bits. Somepony at the Detrot Tourism Board must have wet themselves when the proposition for the construction of the Monte Cheval came across their desks.

****

I only marked the passage from the middle-class part of the city into the area near the far side of the bay by the change in the quality of the tarmac. While the Vivarium sat in a comfortable suburban environment, Monte Cheval was unquestionably an urban venture and the roads had all the welcoming smoothness of silk bedsheets after a long day. I could almost feel the taxi settle onto the softer road surface with a happy whine from the rear suspension.

Pushing my hat back from my eyes, I took a gander over at Swift, who was busy scribbling in her notebook on a new page with the words ‘The Detective’ topping it. I decided then and there, once the mess with Cosmo was over and Ruby Blue’s killer safely behind bars, that I’d ask her what she found so interesting about me that it required more than one page to take notes on.

“Hardy, we’re almost there.” said Taxi, settling the car in behind a double-wide truck with the words ‘Monte Cheval’ across the back. “Can we finish here quickly? This place makes my pelt crawl.”

Now that she mentioned it, there was a general sensation of spiders rushing up and down my back. Gold lamé spiders.

****

Since the Vivarium, I’d been mentally bracing myself for a similar setup at Cosmo’s pleasure dome. The reality was much, much worse than anything I could have imagined in my worst nightmares, and I’m a pony who knows nightmares.

No picture in the paper could possibly do it justice. Hidden amongst middle-sized sky-scrapers and hotels some distance around the edge of The Bay of Unity from the Vivarium and just outside the Heights, some army of ponies had moved a mountain.

Compared to the natural mountains nearer Canterlot, this was a piddling and unambitious pile of rocks, but plunked down in the middle of the city in the lowland valley which was Detrot, it was a massive undertaking and an impressive achievement. Equestria is a place of many wonders; the Monte Cheval, whatever else it might have been, had to be counted amongst them, and would have been simply brilliant if they’d just left it be.

Sadly, whoever set the mountain in place felt the need to ruin the image of an inner city alpine by capping it with a brightly glittering eruption which I’m sure, in their mind, looked like gold lava spilling down the crags. The trick was accomplished with spotlights which roved over a series of carefully placed reflectors, making the whole mess sparkle and seem to flow.

Princesses save us. They’d built a giant piss volcano.

It seemed impossible that the obscenity of it could have been lost on everypony who helped build it, let alone its numerous employees and patrons. And yet, there it was, standing and spewing in frothing defiance of good taste.

The words “Monte Cheval” topped a mildly understated sign over the valet parking lot. They were wrought in fine gemstones, but in letters small enough to somehow say ‘Yes, I’m on a phallic symbol that would seem to have lost control of its bodily functions and is spraying the world with precious metals, but I’m not going to shout about it.'

****

As we came into the parking lot behind a line of expensive carriages and motors from out of town, Taxi made a sound halfway between a retch and a sneeze. Her wrenching yank on the handbrake almost sent me and Swift onto the floor. The car behind us honked furiously while my driver leaned down and buried her face in the glove-box, taking long breaths of the thick incense.

“What the hay was that?!” I shouted, more alarmed than angry.

“Sorry, this place makes me ill.” She replied, completely unapologetic.

“If you’re going to make a scene in the lobby—”

“Hardy, I just had to resist the urge to drive straight into the lobby and start running down porters with my front bumper. This place is—”

“I know what it is.” I broke in before she could get deep into the act of complaining. “You’re coming in and you’re going to look pleased to be here. We’ve got to sell this.”

“This idea is nuts. We’re hoping they don’t immediately kill us. I’ve still got those identity folders, if you want to use them.”

“I don’t. If this goes south, I’m hoping they won’t risk using guns inside a crowded building, and will either take us someplace private or throw us out without question. It’s not the plan that matters. It’s seeing Cosmo himself. Just stand behind me and try to look harmless.” I said, firmly then put my hoof on my partner’s notebook. She set her pen aside and slid to attention.

“Sir?”

“Wait here.” I ordered. “This has to be Taxi and I. I want you to just sit and watch what’s going on in there. If this goes south, it’s your responsibility to tell to the Chief where we are and explain this mess. I don’t want you to move unless you see us in actual physical danger, got it?”

“A-alright, sir. How should I sit and watch, though?”

“As soon as we’re inside, your ladybug is going to turn on.” I patted the spot on the side of her head where the tiny insect hid in her electric red mane. “Don’t be alarmed when it does.” I considered how to explain the sensation. “It feels a bit like flying off a very tall building-”

“But, I like flying—”

“—without wings.” I finished.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Think about taking deep breaths until you’ve adjusted.”

“Think about it?” Swift asked.

“You won’t actually be able to take deep breaths but just think about it real hard.”

“O-okay, s-sir.”

“Good.”

****

Getting Taxi to give her keys to the valet was akin to separating a mother from her foal when she knows there’s a chance they may not see one another again. I almost had to pry them out of her teeth, but in the end she managed to set them on the hood with less than good grace. The valet tipped his little red cap and promised to look after the Night Trotter. I slipped him five bits for his trouble, then a further ten bits to ignore Taxi’s death threat regarding the eventuality of him scratching the car.

Then, pulling my driver towards the enormous tunnel under the mountain which constituted the entrance of Cosmo’s lair, we slipped into the heart of darkness. Well, maybe the infected lower urinary tract of darkness.

“Welcome to Monte Cheval!”

A short distance into the darkened hole, twin teal-green mares, both in bizarrely fashionable miner’s helmets, stood on either side of a set of glass doors. They were almost a flat match for Svelte’s beauty, but it was more engineered, with a thick layer of makeup covering up whatever flaws they might have had The one who’d spoken rushed to hold open the door for me and gave a wan lift to the edges of her mouth as I hauled Taxi past her. Foreleg in foreleg, I tried to make us look less like a couple of ruffians in off the streets and more like legitimate customers.

For a second, I thought they might stop us, but we apparently had that look only ponies who are so rich they no longer have to care about appearances can pull off. I puffed out my chest and marched forward while my driver looked like she was being taken to her execution. I sincerely hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

Inside the Monte Cheval, we were assaulted by the chemical smell of low-grade formica decaying under day-in-day-out neon lights, spilled beer, and the endless clank and clatter of slot machines humping the Equestrian Dream of that one big winner coming from the stale early morning hours of a Detrot Casino.

The interior was dim where we stood, with a coat-checker beside the door. Further in was a series of invitingly lit craps tables surrounded by eager crowds of ponies willing to hoof their bits into the pockets of the stallion upstairs in exchange for ‘hope’ and little else. On every side, rattling and screeching, promising ‘Big Wins’ and ‘Jackpots,’ all manner of gaming machines lined the walls with a pony in almost every seat.

Despite the glitter and perpetual activity, something in the place felt... sickly. It was a desperate hole for ponies begging to be saved from their own boredom and emptiness, either by sinking into the oblivion of debt or cashing out just before that could happen and hoping for something more satisfying in one of the adjoining arcades. I could almost sympathize.

“Sir, I apologize, but we do have a very strict no-weapons rule here in the Monte Cheval for everypony’s safety. Our security wards have made me aware that you are wearing a gun harness.” A young mare barely out of her teens, with multi-colored braces on her teeth, had appeared at my elbow. She had a short black vest on and a nametag, and carried an air of ‘minor authority.’ “If you would care to leave your armaments with the desk clerk, she will see they’re checked into our safe–”

“Thank you, but no.” I said, letting my coat hang open so my badge was immediately visible. “If you could direct us to the manager, that would be excellent.”

An annoyed breath was sucked through her pursed lips, but she didn’t display any surprise, as though this were a common occurrence. It was an ephemeral crack in her facade at best, and she quickly reassembled her pleasant smile. “Of course, sir. If you will still, for the patrons, leave your weapons here, we would–”

“Miss–” I quickly read her nametag. “–Forsythia, I am a police detective. You may or may not be aware, but that does entitle me to carry a firearm into secured establishments in pursuit of my work.”

“Yes, but–”

“Go get your manager. March.”

Forsythia’s nose wrinkled up, then she turned on one rear heel and pranced off into the slight gloom of the mine-styled casino, leaving us at the coat check. My cutie-marks had developed a persistent prickle that I’d been fighting not to acknowledge.

“Hardy, I hate this plan.” Taxi said, very softly. “I really do.”

“Feel free to walk us out of here and come up with another one.”

“I didn’t say it couldn’t work. I just hate it.”

“What’s your Shiny-sense saying?” I asked, shifting close in the hope whatever magical system of listeners they were no doubt employing couldn’t pick up whispered conversation.

“Nothing, other than that we should be careful.”

I put one hoof in my coat-pocket, feeling the diary and the tiny package of medical grade opiates that Stitch had delivered. “Then it’s not saying anything we didn’t already know.”

“This place is foul. The energies are making me sick.”

Putting my leg on her shoulder I gave her a gentle, and hopefully encouraging, shake. “Take some deep breaths and do the meditation with the fruit–”

“Ze-doun causatum contemplation number six? That’s supposed to be for relaxing situations! I don’t need to think about the ‘fruits of my labors’ when my fruits could end up getting me killed.”

“I’d say you need to relax right now. I need you thinking. I’m going to turn on the ladybugs.”

“Alright.” Taxi muttered then closed her eyes and began reciting something to herself in the lyrical zebra language.

I put my head down, pretending to examine the cheap carpeting.

It’s been oft-commented that the pony who designed the ladybugs was some type of mad genius. Their brilliance can’t be disputed; Ladybugs are fantastic surveillance. Equally, the madness of that pony is in every part of the creatures from their whimsical appearance to their extremely trying personalities. It is most obvious in the downright bizarre way one has to activate them.

I tapped my forehooves together twice, wiggled my rear end, and quietly chanted:

“Sunshine, sunshine; Ladybugs... Awake.”

Dignified, it was not, but a light tingle shot through my scalp, which was the only sign that the group of ladybugs hiding in my mane were working. Taxi had her own colony and was going through a similar little production. One ladybug each might have been enough for the events at hoof, but we decided thoroughness was in order.

It’s always best not to think too hard about having bugs in your fur (even if they are hyper-intelligent and reasonably friendly) unless you want to go into a full body scratching fit right out in public. Even as it was, I had to resist the urge to throw myself on my back and roll around in circles.

“Brrr, that still gives me the creeps.” Taxi muttered.

The mare with the braces was just returning, followed by a stiff legged stallion in a tight fitting tuxedo. His pelt was pasty, like yogurt that’d gone about two weeks past its expiration date and the monkey suit didn’t suit him in the least. His mane was the sort of black that only comes from a bottle. Even I have a few grey hairs, here and there.

If Forsythia radiated ‘minor authority,’ that gentlecolt was ‘power-trip incarnate.’ He swept past customers and even his own employee dashed ahead of him, watching carefully for any sign he was directing his fuming displeasure at her.

This is going to be fun, I thought.

“Now, then, what’s all this?” The manager started testily, giving Taxi and I an up and down look like we’d just crawled out of a gutter. “I was under the very distinct impression I told the gaming board that they could speak to our lawyers if they want to complain about the payout ratios again. There is no law against having a higher than average payout and we are not monopolizing the customers just by doing so!”

My driver put on her most beneficent smile and started: “We’re not with the gaming board—”

“Oh? Then I see no good reason for you to be here!” He snapped, taking a step toward her. I noticed two burly shapes moving through the shadows on either side of us. “You’ll disturb the customers.”

I pulled my badge out of my coat and held it up in my teeth. “You see thith?” I said, trying to hold in the lisp.

He let his eyes rest on it then they went back to my face. “I see it. It’s a bit of metal with the name of a very silly police-pony with an addiction to ink in the newspaper, Detective Hard Boiled.”

Disrespect. Good, I liked that. I was going to feel some actual remorse if I treated somepony with an ounce of grey matter behind their eyes like I was about to treat this character.

I let the badge drop and stepped up to the manager. “You know who I am? Then may I ask who you are?”

If his nose had been any higher in the air it would have been scraping the ceiling. “My name, Detective, is Reginald Bari, and unless you are willing to produce a warrant or leave peaceably this instant, I shall call my lawyers and you will find yourself on the end of a very unpleasant lawsuit for criminal trespassing!”

“Bari... that’s a kind of drum, right?” I asked, genially, then continued without waiting for a reply. “Good to meet you, Bari.” I cocked my head at my driver. “Taxi, could you please proceed to scream bloody murder? He just attempted to touch you inappropriately.”

“What?! I did no such thing!” Bari yelped, shying away from us both.

Taxi hadn’t moved but a slow, naughty grin was creeping across her face. She drew in a breath and I rested my hoof across her shoulders, stopping her before she could unleash what would no-doubt be an all-time great performance in the history of Equestrian theatre.

The two shadows in the darkness stopped moving. Sweat broke out on the surly stallion’s forehead.

“I’ve got a mare here who can shriek very convincingly, Bari, my friend.” I gave Taxi a little jiggle, like she was a loaded pistol waiting to fire. “I’m no expert on running a casino, but I think that would be awfully disruptive to the customers, or at least, to a police record free of molestation charges.”

“W-what do you want, Detective?” Bari asked, his eartips shaking with nervousness.

“I’m here to see The King.”

The manager’s eyes edged upwards a few degrees above my forehead then flipped back. It wasn’t much, but it was all I needed. The King was 'In.'

“I don’t know who you–” The manager started to say and Taxi took a slightly deeper breath, readying a shrill burst that would have rattled the windows. "–Okayokay! I... I can’t... it’s... I...” Bari sniveled, desperately.

“Tell you what.” I raised my leg and adjusted his bowtie with one hooftip. “Why don’t you head off behind your little curtain or wherever you keep the phone you have where you take your orders and you tell the King I have something he wants, then we’ll see what happens.”

Reginald might have been a cringing, power-playing imp, but what he lacked in spine he more than made up for in survival instinct. He was quickly realizing I was ‘above his pay grade.’

Just to emphasize my seriousness, I gave him a rough push that sent him onto his back and growled, “Hop, hop, little bunny.”

He hopped. He downright bounced. The characters in the shadows faded with him, going back to whatever hole in which they waited to break kneecaps. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to face off with two enforcers for the Red Hoof. It was reputed that what they lacked in magic, wings, and numbers, they made up for with extreme brutality.

Taxi put her mouth to my ear. “I just noticed we haven’t seen a single unicorn or pegasus working here. Even the couple at the door? Both earth ponies. Doesn’t that violate equal opportunity laws somewhere?”

“I think we’re waaay past nailing Cosmo on something like that, Sweets.” I replied, checking my gun to make sure it was properly loaded.

"Sillier things have happened to organized crime," Taxi pointed out. "They got Al Capony on tax evasion, after all."

I shook my head. “This place is operating with the unfettered blessing of the city fathers and mothers. You want to scream about regulations, you can knock yourself out, but I think the best thing you’re going to get out of that is a sore throat.”

“I know. It just seems... ugh. This work makes my head hurt sometimes.” My driver slapped the carpet in frustration. “Why did I agree to help you with this?”

“The potential for lives in peril, mob boss taking over a large section of the city, my new partner’s weirdo family wiped out?”

Taxi let out a sigh, but there was a dash of amusement underneath. “It’s still not as bad as that weekend I tried to teach you yoga and you got drunk before coming to my class.”

“Really? I felt wonderfully cleansed after that.”

“You made a pass at my teacher!”

“She looked wonderful in those nice, tight pants.”

“She’s sixty five!”

“They were really nice pants.”

Taxi giggled and put her leg around my neck, giving me a quick snug that felt better than it had any right to.

As she let go, I became aware of some activity closing in on us. The two unsavory gentlecolts lurking in the dark had been replaced by five, similarly unsavory sorts who weren’t much bothering with lurking. They all wore that same brand of bad tux that Bari did, and looked to have names with definite articles, like ‘The Razorblade’ and ‘The Disemboweler.’ There, at their center, was Bari, whose altogether nasty expression of glee made me want to forcefully remove it with both rear hooves. He trotted towards us and stopped a short distance away.

“Mister Cosmo will be glad to see you, Detective. Of course, it is going to be on his terms.”

It was then, I realized that during our little conversation the nearest set of craps tables had been mysteriously emptied and the signs overtop of the five closest rows of gaming machines had gone out. The crowds, sheeplike as always, simply moved off a bit farther away to where things were still working.

I turned to the door. It was closed, and nopony had come through after us. There must have been quite the line backing up while they pulled that little trick.

We were, effectively, alone in the open. At that range, even Taxi’s best shrieks would have been nicely muffled by the clanking slots.

I opened my mouth to say something typically impudent only for a hood to sweep down over my face.

Chapter 14: It's a Black Bag Affair

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 14 : It’s A Black Bag Affair

Detrot is a violent place, but usually, being a cop affords some protection in much the same way being part of a large criminal gang affords protection: If you are well regarded by the organization, then your large group of heavily armed friends will stop at nothing to avenge you.

Murders are rarely passionate affairs for the seasoned criminal investigator; they are, after all, considered and analyzed by investigators who each see dozens a year. They must carefully dole out how much energy and effort they apply to each, saving the full treatment for true victims, lest the police burn out attempting to avenge murders between drug dealing rivals or decrepit junkies fatally squabbling over the last needle of Ace in the flophouse.

This careful expenditure of motivation ceases when another cop is the victim of an equicide.

The DPD will scream, quite appropriately, bloody murder. They will set up APBs and throttle reporters until the event makes the front page for weeks. They will send patrol teams to go rough up everypony within ten blocks and/or visual range of the poverty line. They will exhaust months worth of overtime pay in a breakneck pursuit of justice. And breakneck is only a slight exaggeration; legal issues like probable cause, Mareanda rights and justified use of force tend to blur just a bit in the reddened eyes of police dealing with the murder of one of their own. May the Princesses help anypony they actually happen to finger.

And they must respond thusly. Not merely to avenge a fallen comrade, though the emotional ties to the brotherhood of police can provide bonus motivation. Indeed, they must because they could not function if they did not. To let a cop-shooting slide with anything less than a public crusade would shatter the fragile illusion of control and order that the police seek to maintain.

Debate can be had on whether that illusion has been successfully maintained, but on average, the criminal underclasses understand that shooting a cop makes things unpleasant enough that it is not really worth it.

None of this is to say, however, that cop killings don't happen. Somepony panicking at the apex of a Beam high, for example, will not be in an appropriate state of mind to appreciate the consequences, or perhaps even recognize the shadow before them as an officer of the law.

And on very rare occasion, you will find someone powerful, well connected, or clever enough to evade the fallout resulting from murdering a cop - say, one who has gotten into the proverbial 'It' far too deeply for his own good.

-The Scholar

There has been much written on ‘captured officer’ scenarios, even though they don’t happen terribly frequently. I’ve never been a fan of the idea that you capitulate with your captors as much as possible unless you’re using that to find their weaknesses.

Sometimes, life is downright perverse.

I jerked my head back and forth, trying to back away, but a restraining hoof on my tail stopped me and the drawstring on the bag was cinched up tight around my throat.

From the sound of things, Cosmos goon's had bagged Taxi too. She’d ‘accidentally’ smacked one of them in the nose while they were putting it on, but otherwise kept her struggles to a minimum. We actually did want to meet Cosmo without anypony deciding we needed a bullet in the leg to make that happen.

“Is this really essential?” I asked, a little muffled. I could hear Reginald Bari somewhere in front of me. He had a particularly smug way of breathing.

“Completely,” he said, patting my forehead. “Now, come along... little bunny.”

I wanted to break all of his bones so badly.

I took a step and almost put my hoof down on my hat. They’d knocked it off when they shoved the bag over me. Somepony picked it up and wedged it into my coat, squashing the brim.

Two of the Red Hoof enforcers pressed themselves up against my side, and I could only assume they were doing the same to my driver. Guided by their barrels, I took a few halting steps, then got the idea that I was just going to have to trust them not to put my nose through a pylon. It was an especially uncomfortable situation, but one shouldn’t expect any less from gangsters.

They didn’t feel the need to relieve me of my weapon, but having my head in a bag made it virtually impossible for me to use anyway. It was just one more little bit of arrogance on their part which said ‘We’re in control.’

While I couldn’t see where we were going, it wasn’t far. The noise of the far off crowd dropped, then vanished. Somepony opened a door, then led us into an area that smelled of pipes and mildew. Maintenance corridors. I started counting hoofsteps in case I needed to get back this way.

We took a right. Then a left. Then another right. Up a short set of stairs. Down another. Another twist, another turn, and after a few more minutes of that malarkey I was completely lost, which was probably the point.

The silence of our guards was a bit unnerving, though the fact that they felt the need to bag us meant they hadn’t decided whether or not to kill us yet, and there was a chance we could walk out of this situation. Alternatively, it meant they were going to be blowing our brains out and they preferred to keep all of the chunks in one easily disposed of sack.

I was about to ask if they were taking us for an interrogation or just a prolonged stroll when Bari stopped. Something let out a loud ‘ding,’ like a struck bell.

Our guards turned to the side and moved forward, but my forehoof caught on a raised ledge, sending me stumbling forehead first into a cold, metal wall.

“Upsy daisy,” Bari chortled. “Must watch that first step!”

Taxi staggered in beside me, only her amazing agility keeping her from landing squarely against my side. Several sets of hooves followed us into the small closet-like space. I felt around until I touched a hoof-hold of some kind, using it to drag myself up. I realized we were in an elevator just as it began to rise, almost dropping me to my knees again.

After a journey that felt awfully long but whose actual length I had no way of gauging, we came to a sharp halt and the bell rang again. I already was getting quite tired of the disorientation, but then, again, that was obviously the point; knowing that fact helped, a little.

Bari’s entourage hauled us out into a much larger room that smelled of strong cigar smoke, cedar, and old coats. The carpet underhoof was extremely thick. It made me want to lay down and have a nap. No such luck, of course.

We were lead forward and set on a pair of short, uncomfortable couches.

I heard the manager leave the way he’d come in, followed by at least one of our guards.

Nopony spoke, so I decided to take a risk.

“You want to talk like this?” I asked, gesturing to myself.

The hood was grasped at the back of my head and torn off, none-too-gently, the rough fabric grazing my nose. My eyes took a bit to adjust to the sudden brightness.

We were in an office that, at first glance, might have shamed that of Princess Celestia or Chief Jade... but the longer I looked at it, the cheaper it seemed. It wasn’t in spite of the fact that every surface was either expensive wood, gold, or red velvet; it was because every surface was expensive wood, gold, or red velvet. Like the casino, it was an unintentional caricature of real splendor and refinement, creating an overriding cheapness to the whole thing that betrayed the image of seasoned wealth.

Our couches sat in front of a desk that would have been a genuinely long walk around if one were intent on standing on the other side for some reason. It was practically the size of my bedroom. But It was the pony behind the desk that commanded attention.

Cosmo, the King of Ace.

I tried to keep the surprise out of my face, but was only half successful. His teenage mug shots didn’t do his current visage any justice.

The leader of the Red Hoof was absolutely gargantuan. Stallions shouldn’t come in sizes that big. Hay Maker would have fit neatly under his chest like a foal hiding under its mother. His pelt was rich brown, the color of tree bark, and his mane was solid ginger, in a tight crew cut.

A cigar I could have used for a baseball bat was clenched in one corner of his broadly smiling mouth. There was no mirth, no joy, and no friendliness in that smile; it was the smile of a pony who is waiting to kill you only so he can determine why he should.

It requires a certain kind of individual to run a criminal organization of any size. Brutality alone is insufficient; it takes a genuine intellect. Underneath that powerful body, I could see an equally powerful mind which dwarfed Svelte’s pure mathematics. Despite the rough way he’d come up, if Cosmo had been anything but a criminal, he might have been a pillar of the community.

But as it was, my cutie-mark was doing a little samba.

“Mister Cosmo.” I greeted him, straightening my face fur.

His face tightened and he spoke in a bass that sounded like a radio announcer except a lot less enthusiastic, “Detective Hardy. I believe that’s what the papers call you, isn’t it?”

Reaching into the top drawer of his desk, he pulled out the Detrot Observer, opened it to page three, and shoved it across the desk at me. There was a picture of my face trying to duck behind one of Sykes’ wings, and below that, a rather graphic picture of Ruby’s corpse. The headline read ‘Murder in the streets!’

Mayhem, Murder, and Mystery!

Today at the upscale High Step, a beautiful young filly was found dead of unknown causes in the alleyway beside the famous hotel. Her identity has not yet been released. Detective Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled was on site investigating, and is quoted as saying ‘The killers will be caught! Rest assured!’

Cosmo and his goons went to a lot of effort to instill fear, but I wondered if there was any piece of black-bag theatrics they could pull that I would find as demoralizing as I found the ink smeared on that pulp. What does it say when a violent death at a major local hotel doesn’t even make the front page? Particularly when they can’t even be bothered to get an actual quote?

It went on to give details of the case, most of which were rumors and whatever the reporter could buy off of one of the crime scene investigators for a twenty-bit piece or a cup of coffee. Typical news-rag tripe. Right in all the wrong ways.

I shook my head and pushed it back to him.

“You’re here about the dead slag.” Cosmo said, drawing smoke into his mouth and letting it leak out at the edges.

My brain did a little flip flop, then reoriented as I realized he wasn’t actually aware of that and was just conjecturing based on the news article.

I tried to play it off. “That’s part of it, yes. Primarily, I’m here to sell you drugs.”

Cosmo might as well have been a statue for all the emotion his face showed. I was starting to wish that frightening grin would go someplace else for awhile. It was starting to get under my fur.

“That is quite the pronouncement, Detective. You know, I don’t think in my forty years of life I have ever heard one like it before?” the mob kingpin murmured, his cigar smoke curling around his features and lending them a slightly demonic cast. “It has the pleasingly concise finality of an eyeball popping in its socket.”

Taxi let out a soft gagging noise then devolved into a coughing fit.

I slid down off the couch and strolled over to the drinks bar against one wall, putting myself about two centimeters of scotch into a glass. “Do you mind? My friend seems to have something stuck in her throat.”

The gangster held his hooves wide and rocked back in a well appointed chair which might have been the only genuine antique in the room. “By all means. Make yourself comfortable. It’s not often I get the chance to have a frank conversation with a member of our city police. Particularly while I’m at my leisure. You’re a puzzle, Detective.”

I filled another glass with water while our ‘escorts’ followed me with their eyes. They were very much at ease, insofar as they outnumbered us and I had only one gun. Cosmo’s office would be a bad place for me to get into a firefight and they knew it. All of them wore black tuxedos similar to the one on the manager; they could have concealed anything from a sawn off shotgun to a machine pistol on a stealth harness.

I set the glasses in a helpfully placed mouth-basket and carried it back to my seat, offering the extra glass to Taxi, who took it and slurped down the entire thing. The look she gave me said that she was wishing it was something decidedly stronger than water.

It might have been unkind to hit her out of left field with the ‘sell you drugs’ line but I hoped, by going miles off police procedure, I could convince the mobster I was something besides a cop who’d lost his mind. I needed him to think we were desperate.

Cosmo regarded me for a few seconds then leaned forward and asked, “Detective, what is your actual reason for being here?”

“Like I said. I want to go into business with you. I’ve got some talents and connections I think you could use.”

Setting his cigar in the ashtray, Cosmo dropped out of the high backed chair and walked towards one wall which I’d taken for simply blank. He placed his hoof on it, and the surface turned immediately transparent. Outside, a vista of wonders opened before me. It was the city as seen from the top of Monte Cheval, right up near the peak and by the sweet sky. It was beautiful. I could just see a strip of blue out between two skyscrapers that marked the bay. Somewhere down there, After Glow and Stella waited for me to return.

“Detective, do you think a view like this becomes available to stupid ponies? I am not a stupid pony. This is not a courtesy to the Detrot Police Department, nor to the authority of your badge. This is about you, Detective. I want to know what madness possessed you to walk into my place unannounced, without backup, and demand to see me. This is not about your interest in me. It is solely about my interest in you.”

I shrugged. “You know, most days I’d say you’re wrong. Today, Mister Cosmo, you’re absolutely correct. I’m here regarding just two things. The murdered filly and what I can do for you.”

The monumental stallion snorted, waving his hoof in my direction like swatting a fly. “If you had evidence to so much as accuse me of something, Detective, we wouldn’t be sitting here. It doesn’t matter, either way. I didn’t kill her. I do hope you had something else.”

He said those four words without any particular inflection. ‘I didn’t kill her.'

I’d wanted to hear him say them, but now that he had, I felt strangely empty.

Some ponies think there’s a ‘cop sense’ which tells guilt from innocence, but there’s honestly not. I wanted Cosmo to say those words with sweat rolling down his face and fear in his eyes. I wanted it to be simple, so I could jab my hoof in his face and declare ‘Aha! You lie!’... but I couldn’t. If he was lying and this were poker, I’d have called with a pair of twos in my hoof.

I decided to lay the rest of my cards on the table and hope he didn’t realize the game was five card stud rather than high-low.

“I’ve got a stallion in my lock-up we picked up while searching the murdered girl’s apartment,” I said, sipping the scotch. It burned wonderfully going down. “We found him ransacking the place. He said you were the one who ordered him over there. Name of Hay Maker? You know of him?”

Cosmo’s teeth made a noise like the car’s brakes grinding. “He is not my employee, though I am... aware... of him, yes.”

“Now, while I realize an accusation of murder by a... sequestered pony might not carry much weight by itself, the filly’s horn was snapped clean off right at the root.” I covered the inner fury I was feeling at the cruelty of that action with a casual smirk. “There are some — Oh, let’s call them ‘rumors’ — of certain actions performed by your ‘Red Hoof,’ which–”

Cosmo interrupted me. “Detective, you may or may not be aware, but this room is surveillance neutral.” He pressed his toes together and leaned towards me, in a way far too reminiscent of a vaguely psychotic green dictator of my close acquaintance. “I have been assured by members of the Academy that no form of arcanotechnic spying will operate within these four walls. The moment they enter, all such technologies are rendered inert. You understand what that means?”

“I understand,” I replied. “Our mutual acquaintance said something like that might be the case. What does it have to do with us?”

“Well, what it has to do with us is that whatever you see here would be useless in a court of law. Eye-witness accounts are, I’m sure you’re aware, essentially worthless.”

I bit my tongue against a comment on his treatment of witnesses. “I’m aware.”

“Just so you know where we stand, and how little I fear your ‘accusation,’ it is not ‘The Red Hoof’ that removes horns...”

His sentence trailed off as he reached into his desk drawer, extracted a brown wooden box, and set it between us. Flipping it open revealed one of the most grisly sights I’ve seen since my first day on the job.

Unicorn horns, at least a dozen of them in every color of the rainbow, all broken and shattered, lay in the bottom of that box.

“-I do.”

I almost fell backwards out of my chair. His thug had been waiting for this and shoved me forcefully back into my seat. Taxi, through an incredible feat of willpower, hadn’t moved, though her eyes were locked on the container and its sickening contents. Not that it took me long to recover; part of being a cop is seeing foul things and, like soldiers, we learn to bury our emotions to accomplish our goals.

Cosmo was right, though. Ladybugs aren’t admissible in court unless you have a warrant, and defense lawyers love dissecting their little personality quirks. I could have watched him stomp somepony to death right in front of me but without corroborating evidence, I had nothing. Incidentally, that’s how much the word of a cop is in this city.

Cosmo closed the top of his little trophy case. “I just want you to be aware of who you are ‘doing business’ with, Detective. Your ridiculous threats aside, why are you here? Feed me this stupidity about wishing to do business again, and I will consider you to be wasting my time. You need something. I don’t buy for a second that you’re just some badge breaking bad.”

I shut my eyes, tightly. If I could have, I’d have forced a tear. “I... I’ve got no choice.” I thought of Ruby, her broken body laid out on the cold metal table, drained of fluids and color. It gave my voice the appropriate quaver. “I’m being ‘forcibly retired’ in a couple of weeks by that vile unicorn bitch who’s running the force now. I’ve been a cop for a lot of years and I gave everything I have to this city, but they’re denying my pension. It’s not like my cutie-mark is the kind you can open a shop with.”

I turned my hip so he could see my golden scales. At the mention of Chief Jade, Cosmo’s mouth tilted into a gross sneer, but underlying it was another feeling which must have been terribly unusual for the kingpin: sympathy. It was a strange, twisted form whose source I was a little leery to discover, but at that point I was willing to use any edge that might present itself.

“Retired by Chief Spike herself?” He mused. Taxi shifted in her seat, unhappy to hear the racial epithet applied to Jade, but kept her peace. “I will listen to your proposition, Detective. While I may not have been responsible for the girl’s death, I do have... an interest in her. Make your offer good, though, or I will heavily consider adding one retired police pony’s badge to my little collection.”

I pulled Slip Stitch’s package out of my coat. The carfentanil was in a clear vial and full to the top. The liquid itself was perfectly clear. Setting it on the desk, I pushed it over to him. Cosmo picked it up, turning the vial over in his hooves and reading the label.

“Medical grade?” The mobster asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Experimental. A thousand times stronger than the best Ace on the market. Add it to your stock and you can sell half as much for the same price—”

I stopped as Cosmo tapped the surface twice and asked, “Where does she play into this?” He waved his knee at Taxi who gulped her water a little faster than she’d meant to and almost spit on the carpet.

“My driver,” I replied. “I get fired, she gets fired. Chief Jade is culling ponies who aren’t ‘loyal’ enough... which is to say, ponies who don’t kiss her flanks day in, day out. We’re a package deal.”

“Fine. Your mare, your problem. If you ever want me to take her off your hooves I can use a driver—” Cosmo licked his thick, brown lips and leered at Taxi. I was tempted, briefly, to say ‘Sure, go right ahead’ just to see the look on his face when she tore his testicles off, and was deterred only by an even chance that she’d go for mine.

“No thanks. She’s mine,” I answered, quickly. I could feel said cab driver’s eyes trying to burn a hole in the side of my head at the implication of ownership.

He plucked at his close-shorn chin. “Ahhh, then I will bide my time. Perhaps one day, you’ll wish to pass her off. Tell me about this connection of yours?”

Schemes turn on whether or not somepony came up with something believable to fill a hole in a story. Often, the best lies are the ones that make the best stories. You keep them short and sweet, then let the recipient fill in the details in their own mind.

“I’ve got this kid... real genius... who works out of his basement.” I began, straightening my collar and swirling another mouthful of scotch around my tongue. “I’ve got some ‘evidence’ in my private locker that narcotics would love to have about where some of the weirder experimental psychedelics used to come from. We have an... arrangement. He keeps his nose clean and makes me some specialty chemicals whenever I have a party, I keep his evidence nice and cozy.”

“I see. This kid isn’t looking for work, is he?”

“He works for me. Period.” I crossed my forelegs under my chest.

The mobster considered my offer briefly, then rolled the drug back to me. He made no move to have us thrown out, and it took a second to realize he was waiting on me to sweeten the pot.

I tilted my head back the way we’d come and said, “Before I’m gone from the force, I can plant some real solid ‘indicators’ it was our red friend who killed that girl in the alley. Who is he, by the way?”

The muscles in Cosmo’s shoulders popped like cords of tempered steel as he puffed a thin stream of smoke in my direction and replied, “An employee’s bodyguard; an employee who may have just attempted something... unwise. Not your problem, Detective.”

“Well, he was looking for something. The girl had this hidden in a cubby-hole.” I pulled the jeweled diary out of my second pocket and set it on his desk beside the carfentanil. “Call it a freebie. Yours if you want it.”

There was no actual shift in his facial muscles, but I detected an immediate change in attitude. Something behind the eyes. Whatever was in that diary was worth a thousand times whatever a source of wonder-drug additives might be.

Reaching forward, he gingerly lifted the diary to his side of the desk and tried the golden lock. It held fast against his efforts, but he didn’t look much bothered by that. No doubt he had somepony adept at breaking such things. I know I would.

The smile he gave me then was far more authentic and, for that reason, an awful lot more unsettling. “Detective, do you have access to the girl’s other effects?”

I nodded, eagerly. “I will, for a few weeks. You want them, I can get them for you.” Getting to my hooves, I extended my leg over his desk. “You and I have a deal? I can make regular deliveries of the drug. Dead drops, no face-time, cash-bits only.”

“I will... consider your proposal.” He made no move to touch hooves. “If I find it worthwhile, I will have one of my lieutenants call you tomorrow at your home. I assume you’re in the book. Forthwith, consider this our last meeting. Leave this sample with me. Until then...”

I was expecting it, but that didn’t make the black hood anymore pleasant. The bag tightened up at my neck and his guards pulled me up, still not bothering with ‘gentle.’

“Until then.” I said, trying to at least sound cordial. No longer being able to see Cosmo’s huge figure was somehow comforting. It meant we weren’t being dragged off to eat bullets, which would have necessitated some violent action and I’d had enough violent action for one day already.

We were being forcibly moved towards the door when Cosmo called out, “Oh, Detective? One last thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I find a threat is usually necessary. Just part of doing what I do. Take it as granted that if this isn’t carfentanil or I discover this diary is anything but the property of the pony you say it is, I’ll have you disemboweled and feed you your own intestines.”

“Understood.”

“Then I will say ‘good morning,’ Detective.”

****

The stroll back seemed a bit shorter but no less twisting. The shakes were making it difficult to walk but I covered it by pretending to have let the scotch get a little more on top of me than it had. Nopony leaving that situation with their skin intact can be blamed for a case of the quivers. It’s just the body’s natural response to half-expecting to be shot.

We’d done it. I’d done it. I walked into the office of one of the most dangerous criminal entrepreneurs in the city, laid a bluff six inches thick on him, and walked out without so much as a scratch.

How had I done it? Much as I would have liked to attribute it to my own genius and charm, that was too easy. He might not have been expecting us, but something else was going on.

In any situation where things seem too easy, I’ve long since learned to take for granted that I’d made a mistake. Considering I’d gone in expecting to have him crack me around the head a few times just to make sure I knew who the boss was — if not shoot me outright — I should have been grateful; I wasn’t. Despite no longer being in Cosmo’s presence, my cutie-mark was practically doing a jig.

As we traveled our circuitous route and the adrenaline rush of not getting killed began to fade, it became painfully clear what that mistake was.

The diary.

He’d wanted that book many times more than he’d wanted the damn drug. I wondered what might be in it. Unsealing it had seemed like a secondary priority, but after walking away and leaving it sitting in the mobster’s lap, I wished I’d taken some time to crack that lock and give it a read. I was also wondering about that business about Ruby’s other possessions. What use could he have for them?

I needed to get back downstairs and see if the ladybugs were in position; my mane felt noticeably emptier. I hadn’t felt them crawling about, but then again, they were notoriously light-footed.

We made the elevator again and rode it back to the ground floor, our coterie of killers shuffling us along towards the door. They removed the hoods at the front door. The nearest set of craps tables were, again, full of gambling creatures totally oblivious to the activities going on around them. Mister Bari was there, holding Taxi’s car-keys on one hoof with a tiny bowl of after-dinner mints balanced across his back.

“Mister Cosmo sends his regards.” He held out the bowl and I snapped one up, chewing on it. “He is fond of threats, so I will add my own. If I see you or your pig cunt here at the Monte Cheval, I’ll snap your ankles.”

Taxi made to reach for her keys but somehow lost her balance and staggered against him, tipping the mints sideways so they fell off of his back and scattered across the floor. The ponies guarding us, who’d been reduced to just the two, leapt back from the mess lest they get powdered sugar all over their immaculately shined hooves. Regaining her stability, my driver gently picked up her carkeys from where they’d fallen.

Bari was standing stock-still, gazing straight ahead. Something trickled down his lip from his left nostril. It looked an awful lot like blood. I knew that look; it was one almost exclusively worn by ponies who’ve just had an explosion go off right next to them.

“Won’t you thank Mister Cosmo for his hospitality?” Taxi asked, blowing the stallion a kiss. “Oh, and don’t worry... you’ll be able to move again sometime this week.” Her eyes slid to my face and she pointed towards the double doors. “We should go.”

“Did you just do what I think—” I started to ask.

“Yes.”

“We should go.”

Before the Red Hoof maniacs could register that Bari was having issues with his central nervous system, we both were out the door and down the stairs, climbing into the waiting cab. The engine snarled and we were off down the road just as the first of their number dashed out of the front door with his gun-bit between his teeth.

****

Swift was still in the back seat underneath a blanket, just where we’d left her. The valet apparently hadn’t noticed the presence of a small puddle of pegasus spread across the rear cushions. Her eyes were wide open, totally unblinking, and the expression on her face was one of frozen shock. I’d forgotten what it was like using the ladybugs.

“Alright, you can shut down.” I said to the air. Two dozen ladybugs wiggled out of my mane and flew up onto the seat back, shedding their black camouflage as they grew back to normal size. “Thank you. Stick around. I want to see what’s going on in Cosmo’s office here in a minute.”

The little creatures made an affirmative sounding buzz, then sat still, for the moment.

My partner’s upper lip twitched, then she bolted upright, taking a deep, gasping breath. Her pupils were huge, her eyes unfocused. As she released the breath, they shrank back to their normal size and she fell backwards, her wings drawing up tight against her sides.

“S-s-sir... that was the worst thing ever,” she whimpered. “H-how was I supposed to turn them off?”

“You just ask,” I replied. “Also, they turn off on their own when they get bored. I’m surprised they didn’t when we left the office. What’s Cosmo doing? How many are still up there?”

“He was just sitting at his desk, staring at that diary. I think there are a bunch still there. They started off in your mane but then they moved everywhere.” Her tail slapped the seat as she tried to get the residual sensation of being a bug out of her system. “Oh, Sir... It was like watching a lot of television screens all side by side, except with legs.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what it’s like.” I helped her into a sitting position and adjusted her tactical jacket. “There’s a reason the force doesn’t use them anymore. Actually, several, but that’s not important. I need to see what’s going on up there. Something is wrong.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Swift’s eyebrows drew together in a confused and worried expression. “He took the diary and he said he’s going to call you. That’s what you wanted, right?”

“We wanted the ladybugs in his office, but I get the feeling I may have made a mistake.” I put one hoof on the rear window, standing up on the seat to look back towards the Monte Cheval, fading into the distance. “That diary should have earned us some extra goodwill, not a straight buy into his good graces. If it just contained evidence Ruby was holding against him or somepony he works for, that would be one thing, but I think there’s something else going on here.”

“What do you think it is?” my young partner asked.

“I hope I’m about to find out.” I laid back on the seat and slid my hat over my face, then did the dance as subtly as I could.

“Sunshine, sunshine; Ladybugs... awake.”

****

Nopony I know actually enjoys the feeling of using ladybugs. The equine mind just isn’t made to process the feeling of having that many eyeballs all at once. Fortunately, their creator did have the good grace to give the silly things a reasonably easy-to-use interface; you mostly just think about what you want to see and they take you to the closest possible view of whatever they happen to think is likely to fit the bill.

Sadly, user comfort wasn’t considered a priority.

It didn’t hurt in the dictionary sense of the word, but for an almost completely abstract experience it felt awfully specific; I felt like my brain was being fed through a spaghetti strainer.

I was split into hundreds of tiny pieces, then each piece wiggled its way down a massive web until they reassembled themselves in a loose puddle, shifting and coalescing. Dozens of images flashed past me, of trains moving into stations, of bonfires, and muddy alleys. I caught pictures of many different creatures mid-coitus. A surprising number of the visions featured televisions, all watching different stations as the collective simultaneously absorbed epsiodes of ‘Neighs of our Lives’ and ‘Desperate Horsewives.’

It took a bit to get myself oriented and make certain my awareness was really mine. One would think that would be easy, but inhabiting the tiny brains and eyes of hundreds of insects all having their own private view of the world is a strange trip. I imagine it’s a little like being inside Chief Jade’s head. Regardless, there was work to be done.

Cosmo’s office, I thought.

My awareness exploded back into many little chunks, scattering down the intricate network until it came to rest again in another section of the mass insectoid consciousness. It took a bit to orient myself.

The ladybugs are nothing if not thorough. I felt as though I were looking into a very small diorama of Cosmo’s office. There was only one occupant. Cosmo sat at his desk, his cigar guttered in an ashtray. Ruby Blue’s diary sat between his forelegs; beside it there was one of the old style rotary phones like I’ve got on my end table. The vial of carfentanil, broken and dripping, was laying in his otherwise empty garbage can.

The stallion’s wide, cruel face wasn't smiling anymore, but I almost wished it was. If I’d had a spine just then, a shiver would have run down it.

With one hoof, he stroked the diary like one would touch an old, familiar lover, just as somepony knocked on the door.

“Come in!” Cosmo called, pushing the book to one side.

One of his Red Hoof, a thick necked maroon colt with a pair of arrows on his flank, pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Sorry to bother you, sir.”

“What do you want, Nock?,” the mob-boss asked, picking up his cigar again.

“Sir, that cabbie crippled Mister Bari,” the pony named Nock replied. “He said something to her and I don’t know what she did but he can’t move his legs.”

Cosmo slapped his tail against his chair. “So dump him at Sacred Sun. He probably deserved it. Why are you bringing this to my attention?”

“Well, sir... Shouldn’t I send out a few of the guys? Maybe snap her legs and take her for a little ride? Teach the bitch some respect?” Nock inquired.

It would almost have been worth it to see him try. The last pony who’d tried to harass Taxi in that way refused to press charges because he was afraid the court bailiff wouldn’t be enough to stop her if she decided to disassemble him into his component parts.

“No need.” The kingpin ground his yellowed teeth together. “Leave the cop and his twat alone, for now.”

“If you don’t mind, sir, what did he want?”

“Something ridiculous. If he was being truthful he’s a fool, and I don’t do business with fools. If he lied, well, I think he might still be useful.” Cosmo pointed at the floor at Nock’s feet. “Go back downstairs and check the security wards. If one so much as twitches, I want to hear about it. Get out.”

“Sir.”

Nock reversed out of the room and shut the door behind himself, leaving Cosmo, again, sitting by himself in the opulent private office. Picking up the phone receiver, he set it in the crook of his neck and listened for a dial tone then dialed a number.

“Detrot Police Department? Yes, could you put me over to desk sergeant Sing Song?” The pony at the other end spoke something I couldn’t make out. Cosmo replied, “Tell him it’s Booster. Just calling about the game next week.”

In all likelihood, it was Telly doing the asking, but none of the ladybugs seemed to be close enough to pick up what was coming through. I gave several of them a nudge, and they started moving closer. At last, an especially brave and stealthy individual managed to wiggle its way onto the mouthpiece.

Cosmo waited, tapping his hoof on his desktop. After a short time, another voice came down the phone line.

“Ayo! Booster! Ye cheating scum-stain! It’s yer week to bring the sweety hoochie!” Sing Song crowed. I could hear the familiar sounds of the department in the background.

I wasn’t personally familiar with all the officers on desk, but Sing Song was a well known gossip of the worst kind. Give him a few drinks and he’d tell you damn near anything you wanted to know about Detrot Police Department’s internal dramas. It could be great entertainment on a Friday night, but he was the very definition of ‘security leak.’ Hearing that one of the leading lights of the Detrot Mafia had been sitting in on one of his game nights was somehow unsurprising.

Cosmo’s voice rose about three octaves and fell comfortably into what took me a second to identify as the old Princess Street cockney. “Sing A Song fer me, jackboot! Three hot bottles of rum I swear fell off the truck just fer the boys! Can ye sling a little banter?”

Sing Song’s tone changed, “Oh, yup! That’s a ten four.” I heard him cover the phone briefly then return. “Sorry, lieutenant is in the room. What can I do for ye?”

“Weeell... my sister’s dating a copper. Ye know a ‘Hard Boiled’?” Cosmo asked, plucking at his upper lip.

“Ol’Hardy? Yeah, he’s a right hard-case.” I could almost hear the sergeant's smile down the phone line. “One’a the old guard even though he’s about ten years younger’n’ half the officers. Right pissant and too good at his job for a cop who drinks so much. Chief hates him. Or maybe wants to screw him. Tell yer sister to steer clear! She’s gonna fire’em one day.”

“Hmmm...a’right Singy.” The kingpin’s tail slapped the floor. “Ye mind if I ask? Ye got a big red stallion inna lock-up there?”

“Lemme check... yeeeah, name of Hay Maker? One’a yer friends?”

Shaking his head, Cosmo let his shoulders slump theatrically. If Sing Song had been in the room, it would have been a spectacular performance. The mobster was a natural born actor. An awful lot of ex-street ponies are; it comes with the rough living.

“He works cargo on one of my docks an’ he was making crap at the bar last night. Wondered if he got picked up after I left,” Cosmo answered, flipping a leg as though to clear the air.

“Ye want I should let’em out?” The desk officer offered.

“Let’em rot. He didn’t come in fer work an’ I ain’t feeling generous. Hey, couldja check’an see if somepony went out cleanin’ up apartments down in the Skids?” Cosmo continued, his lip twitching.

“Now what in the wide wide world of Equestria would ye need to know that fer?” Sing Song sounded genuinely suspicious, but as seemed to be the pattern, the mob boss was right on top of it.

“T’ain’t no thing. Sis ain’t such a good judge of character. When she broke up with her last guy, he kept a buncha her stuff out there. Curious if this Hard Boiled fella is tryin’ to get it back fer her.”

“Ahhh, family... I know what that’s like keepin’ track of ’em.” Sing Song sighed. “My li’l Fritter wants to get her nose pierced like one’a them miiino-taurs.” Pages flipped over in the log book. “Yeeeah, sent a cleaning team out to the Skids. Capriole street. Right crap-hole. Heck, reminds me of the time I had to call a forensics unit to my ex-wife’s house just so I could sneak the damn dog out. She still thinks he done run away.”

“Thanks, Singy baby! I’ll bring the boys some fresh pie with extra cheese come this Saturday night.”

“Oi! Ye better! It’ll be a start to makin’ up fer all that card-sharkin’!”

Cosmo set the phone back in its cradle and put his hooves behind his head. I really wished I could get a ladybug into that stallion’s impressive brain just to have a look around. He’d made me the second I walked in. The carfentanil in the trash was a worry but, as I said before, plans are made to go wrong.

Even if I were under-cover and had backup, he’d have known me for a cop with one phone call to that mouthy bastard Sing Song or, more likely, one of his deeper connections in the DPD. It wouldn’t surprise me if a significant part of the police retirement system was funded by mob bribes.

Luckily, nopony on the force made use of ladybugs, at least officially, in years. Svelte might have been a securitizing genius, but her knowledge of our spells and methods was probably derived from trade magazine which were all about the ‘latest and greatest’ rather than the ‘old and insufferable.’

These thoughts drifted through the odd space within the ladybug network where I’d laid out my awareness as I studied my mark. He hadn’t moved for several minutes. I was about to hop out and wait for our surveillance creatures to tell us something interesting was happening — or, alternately, get bored and leave — but Cosmo suddenly came alive and lurched forward, snatching up the phone again. This time, he dialed a zero.

“Operator? Put me through to the law firm of Umbra, Animus, and Armature. Extension forty two.”

“Yes, sir. Who should I say is calling?”

“The King.”

“Please hold.”

The line buzzed twice, preceding the query of a sensual, masculine voice. “What do you want?”

Cosmo poked the diary. “You’ll never guess what just dropped into my lap.”

“I am poor at guessing games. Speak plainly.” The voice directed. I couldn’t hear anything in the background which would have given me a hint as to where the pony or whatever he might be was located. Nothing in his cadence or accent indicated any particular city or region of origin. However, if Cosmo made my cutie mark tingle, then this character on the line made it want to leap off, crawl away, take an airship to the middle of nowhere and retire to a quiet life growing kumquats.

“A detective from the cop shop, name of Hard Boiled, just paid me a visit.” The mobster said, rolling his cigar back and forth between his stained lips. “My contact in DPD says he’s on the rocks. Might get tossed on his ear any minute. Dumb bastard wants to sell me some experimental drugs. He’s the one investigating the dead unicorn cunt who tried to fly, too. Offered to bury the case in exchange for doing business.”

“Burying the case would be advantageous.” The voice mused, then fell silent, waiting for Cosmo to continue.

“That’s not the best part. He dumped her diary in my lap. If she hid the—”

The voice cut him short, sharply. “Do not speak it!”

Something I hadn’t expected to see flitted across Cosmo’s powerful features; fear. I had to go over that in my head a few times: the being on the other end of the line struck genuine fear into a unicorn-mutilating mob boss the size of a small barn.

“I-if she hid it somewhere, its location is probably in there.” Cosmo went on, more carefully this time. “Damn book is magic-locked, but I’ve got ponies for that. This cop said he could get me her other possessions. I’ll bet you...‘It’ is in them someplace. She wouldn’t bury it somewhere or something stupid, right?”

“That is our understanding.” The voice paused for some time, and continued only when I just thinking he might have hung up. “You will do business with this police pony. Acquire the girl’s possessions. If the object is among them, you will bring it to us.”

“He had a drink. The scotch. I mixed some of that drink you gave me into it. That enough for your little trick to work?” Cosmo inquired.

The receiver was set down for some time, and the mob-boss made to wait. When the voice returned, it was slightly annoyed. “I do not see him.”

“But you told me the Scry could keep track of anypony once they’re marked!” Cosmo protested. “Is the security slut still at the whore house?!”

The voice twitched towards a bit of genuine anger. “She is. Watch your tone, Mister Cosmo. I find it most likely that this police pony was wise enough to simply pretend to drink.”

A thin bead of perspiration formed at one side of the stallion’s face and ran down his cheek. He was trying to sound casual and calm but a vein in his forehead was standing out quite visibly. “What do you want done?”

“Offer him a sum of money for the girl’s things. Make it considerable. Complete the deal and allow him to walk away. Eliminate him in a discreet fashion once you have them, and we will compensate you. We are in the process of acquiring our own leverage within Detrot’s Police Department should this prove unnecessary; however, we prefer to hedge our bets.”

I felt very cold, or would have if my brain were still attached directly to my body. As it was, I was stuck sitting in existential non-space and had to console myself with some mental squirming. Despite my decade and pocket change of experience on the force, it a very rare thing to hear two ponies discussing upcoming plans to murder someone. That someone being me was a whole basket of new and uncomfortable feelings.

Cosmo was speaking again. “I’ve got you. I want to play with that damn cop’s skin when this is over. His little mare did something to one of my guys. You’ve no idea how hard it is to find a decent casino manager who won’t get too greedy when he’s skimming off the top. If I deliver ‘it’, can I guarantee payment?”

“Of course. Ours is a generous family, after all.”

The phone clicked and the line whistled. Cosmo set the receiver back in place.

Something in the way the unknown pony said ‘of course’ made me want to give myself a full body bleach bath.

Picking up the diary in his teeth, the giant stallion opened the two swinging doors on the side of his desk, revealing a steel safe built into the wall and covered in an array of shining gemstones. That, then, must be his little magic lockbox.

For a pony with a hate-on for unicorns, the mobster seemed surprisingly practical when it came to making use of their various technical innovations. Of course, I don’t like magic either, but my toast is perfectly crisped and faithfully blue every single morning.

Poking and twisting a half dozen points on the door in quick succession, he then stepped back as it let off a squirt of multichromatic steam and the little vault opened. I don’t know that I could have copied his actions even with the ladybugs recording them for me but, thank the sun, our rider on the diary was still in place. That particular bug had managed to worm its way into the edge of the binding. I pushed away all the other sets of eyes except that single pair. My perspective shifted to a wonderfully detailed view right up Cosmo’s nostrils.

The lockbox was empty.

Setting the book inside, he stepped back and let the door shut itself, closing the ladybug in stifling darkness. Refocusing, I drew back into the awareness of the other creatures.

At last, the moment of truth.

Lifting the phone, Cosmo dialed in an extremely long list of digits and the safe whistled a short tune. Closing the cabinet, the King of Ace set his chair back behind his desk and started to pour himself a drink.

I tried to hop into the safe again, only to find my little friend on the inside was gone.

Show’s over, I thought as loudly as possible.

Everything distorted, twisted, then shrank to a single white point.

****

I opened my eyes. Beautiful sunlight filtered down through soft, orange feathers onto my face as we trundled down city streets. The seat was comforting and warm. Taxi had wisely decided we needed to be someplace far away from the Monte Cheval, so we took the first transit highway back in the general direction of the Heights.

Swift had her forehooves up on the back seat, and was bopping and bouncing to a light, airy tune coming through the cab’s speakers. One of her wings extended over my head, keeping the light out of my face. Taxi was burning something stinky.

I really wished I could have just laid there in the peace of the moment between moments, and let my problems, such as psychopathic mob bosses and mysterious voices on telephones laying out plans to kill me, take a backseat for a few more hours.

The dream from the morning in which this insanity began wormed it’s way back from whatever hole in my subconscious it’d crawled into. For an instant I was back there again in the valley with the gnashing teeth of the demon as it bore down to swallow me and my city whole.

I sat up and shook myself. Using ladybugs does have one minor advantage: You feel like you’ve had a half decent nap. Swift was the first to notice I was moving.

“Sir! Miss Taxi, he’s awake.” My partner pulled her wings back to her sides and sat on the edge of her seat while my driver tilted one ear back in my direction.

“Hardy? Light preserve!” Taxi asked, unconsciously pressing the accelerator a little harder. The roads seemed damn near empty, it being after the morning rush but before lunch could be served. “You were in there awhile. What’d you find out?”

“That Sing Song needs his jaws wired shut and Cosmo is planning on killing us, eventually,” I replied. “He was talking to somepony on a telephone. No idea who but they’re through a law-firm. Umbra, Animus, and Armature. You know them?”

“I... I know of them.” My driver sucked on her lower lip, accessing her spectacular memory for odds and ends of police minutiae. “They’re not the kind of lawyers I ever interacted with, though. They mostly work for royalty and corporations. They tend to defend criminals whose crimes require a six figure income to commit.”

“My favorite kind of perp; ones who think they’re untouchable. They’ve got some way of tracking ponies that they call ‘The Scry.’ Don’t know what that means, but I’ve got a friend we can ask later if we’re feeling especially curious.” I put a toetip on my chin, stroking my lower lip fur. “The ladybug is in the diary and went for a ride, but I can’t figure out where it ended up.”

Letting off a little tune with their wings, a number of the ladybugs remaining in the car rose into the air and formed an arrow beside Taxi’s head, swinging in a circle until the tip stabilized pointing off to our left.

Swift’s eyes went round as she watched the floating insects. “Oh! That’s super neat!”

The bugs quickly rearranged themselves into a crude smiley face, hanging in mid-air, then zipped back into position. Taxi glanced at them then shook her head. “That trick would have been useful back when I was learning the road network.”

“No kidding. I might still have my license,” I said.

“Now there’s a scary thought...”

“Thank you, peanut gallery.”

Taxi snickered to herself, then turned down the nearest cross street, taking us in the direction the ladybugs were indicating.

****

The drive proved to be a long-ish one, which gave me time to update my companions more completely on what I’d seen inside the ladybugs.

“Wait, he pitched the carfentanil?!” Taxi blurted, incredulously. “Mix it into a batch of Ace and that stuff is worth like, five thousand bits a vial!”

“Eeeyup.” I replied, smoothing down my hat brim. “Right in the trash. I’m hoping we’re heading for something worthwhile. If we’re not, he can probably liquidate his current stocks of Ace and whatever else he has put away for rainy days to get himself out of the mess these ledgers are going to get him into.”

“That’s assuming we’re going to his private ledgers.” The cab pony reminded me. “You’re putting an awful lot of faith in that idea, you know.”

“I know. I’ve got a good feeling about this.” I patted the seat back like it was her shoulder. “Either way, if this doesn’t work, we come up with something else. We’ve still got the ladybugs in his office and hopefully he’ll be amusing enough to keep them from all wandering off. I think getting the diary back by itself might be worth the trip.”

“What makes you think so, Sir?” Swift asked, one ear standing up while the other flipped down against her cheek.

“Whoever is holding his chain wants this ‘It’ they mentioned bad enough to kill a cop.” I answered, raising my neck so my badge swung back and forth. “That’s not something anypony does lightly. It tends to bring down the wrath of the heavens on your head quite handily. I don’t know if PACT has something similar, but when a cop dies, the whole force comes together.”

Swift almost bounced in her seat. “Oh! Yes, we... they do! The PACT all got together to hunt down a hydra they called ‘The Waster’ last year after it killed a whole team. Colonel Broadside has one of its heads preserved beside his desk. He uses it for a pencil sharpener!”

Taxi met my eyes in the rear view mirror, and we had one of our private conversations:

‘Hardy, that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘You want to go complain to PACT about some hydra’s right to a peaceful death, Sweets?’

‘How would you feel if your earthly remains were used as a coat rack?’

‘Or an umbrella stand.’

‘What a lovely thought. Still, I doubt the Princesses would approve of such trophy taking.’

‘Sweets, if the Princesses were here, I think they’d find a number of things not to approve of in this city, and a little practical taxidermy would be way, way down on the list.’

Chapter 15: Home Is Where The Heart Is

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 15 : Home Is Where The Heart Is

When you get down to it, mental stability is difficult to maintain in Equestria.

Ponies stymied in an apparently straightforward ambition can go from meek, unassuming creatures to frothing lunatics in the course of a few seconds. Imagined slights have induced ponies into attempting to befriend buckets of produce. Some of Princess Celestia’s most trusted advisors have been known to instigate citywide brawls at the apparently unbearable thought of missing deadlines. And this is to say nothing of incidents caused by bizarre ponies who just seem to operate on different mental planes. (See H.P. Hoofcraft’s account of “The Horror in Pink,” L.R. 3)

Equestria’s aggressively hostile ecosystem is a major stress factor, of course, but the greater contributor is the incredible power of emotional magic. Love can and has turned aside armies, but anyone who’s ever been in a relationship gone sour knows just as well that love can make you crazy. Not to mention jealousy, terror, pride, or any other form of intense emotion that might send a pony over the deep end.

Equestria roils with seething tides of emotion, creating a bizarre and shifting psychic atmosphere not entirely incomparable to weather patterns, albeit less predictable. It has been theorized that this is why artifacts such as the Elements of Harmony and the Crystal Heart are so essential; they provide stability to a mental weatherscape that would otherwise regularly be struck by the emotional equivalent of torrential hurricanes. The Princesses themselves assist in providing this anchor; Princess Luna has been known to appear in dreams to solve intense emotional issues, while Celestia is a pillar of well-established calm and perseverance.

But the farther one gets from Canterlot, the more often one encounters zones of inherent instability that are simply stronger than most. In essence, there are places where ‘Crazy’ becomes a matter of geography rather than psychology.

-The Scholar

I never considered it a possibility that I would land in the planned super-suburbs of Detrot. I could never see myself settling down to be entombed within socially acceptable desperations, hidden from neighbors by fences and fertilized lawns.

Granted, I know plenty of ponies dream of owning a home in some beautiful neighborhood with manicured hedges, but I think most of them are out of their minds; those places are vastly different from the organic, pumping hearts of the city like the Heights or the Skids. They are where, I've always believed, the darkest evil breeds.

See, it requires a special breed of pony to drive past the seedy realities of a downtown byway into those little bubbles of fantasy perfection, smiling to themselves each day at having 'escaped' those realities. It takes a pony who can lie to themselves, their partners, their children, and everyone around them. They must be able to maintain one vast illusion within their own minds, lest they find themselves ejected from the fantasy and, most likely, from the neighborhood.

That illusion and that lie can be summed up in three simple words: I am safe.

They tell themselves that one big lie so all the little ones become easier, and that makes those ponies dangerous.

I could never tell myself the lies loudly enough to believe I was genuinely secure in such an environment, not after what I've seen of those ponies while working in Equicide. Give me Beam heads, street gangs and broken bottles on the asphalt over the carefully maintained facades of homeowners associations, soccer practices, and interior design magazines on the coffee table. The most brutal acts of vicious inequinity come out of those purposefully identical, clean, and willfully dull households.
.

****

We followed the general direction of the ladybugs' arrow, skirting traffic as we drove deeper and deeper into one of Detrot’s farthest suburban districts. The insects swung faster and faster the closer we got to our destination, adjusting themselves as necessary to keep us on course.

The housing divisions we passed through were the sort of nice, upscale places that’d been popular with managers and top end workers during the boom years, but whose designers preferred uniformity over following the trends and fashions of the time. It gave the whole area a feeling of being cut from a form and slapped on a flattened landscape by some enormous and terribly uncreative doll-house enthusiast.

In decay, most of those who could no longer afford the expensive mortgages had moved out, leaving the developments in a sort of limbo. Of course, plenty of families remained; they huddled close together for warmth in their three story town-homes and bungalows amidst a ghost town growing around them as their neighbors succumbed or moved on to greener pastures.

We would pass through a beautiful scene with children playing on crisp, green lawns and grandmothers sipping tea on whitewashed porches, then take a turn and see one ‘dream house’ after another with boards over their windows and broken advertisements from once-optimistic realtors hoping to offload the places at a fraction of what they’d once have gotten. The middle-class suburbs have always struck me as a sad place. Unlike the Heights, these had no wise benefactor propping them up through the dark years.

They were like an old dog, coughing and struggling, peering into one alleyway after another in search of a quiet place to die.

We took one last left, and our ladybugs hummed to let us know we were getting close.

****

Something was distinctly different and very wrong about this part of the suburbs, wronger than usual, but it took a moment for my slightly addled brain to lay hoof on what it was.

The front yards. The yards were all dead.

Even the most deserted of the blocks in the area, there had been at least a few dozen holdouts managing to create something resembling community by keeping their grass well fed and tended. On unsold lots, there were often wild, prarielike carpets of grass and weeds. But there wasn't a single blade of green on this solitary road. Every square inch of sod was brown and empty, like a parasprite swarm had swept through in the middle of the night and clear-cut everything.

“Now that’s not spooky at all,” Taxi whispered sardonically, as she spun the wheel and took us down the deathly still avenue.

“No kidding. Feelings?” I asked, automatically checking my gun and giving the various straps little tugs to make sure they were all working. Nothing worse than finding yourself in the middle of a gunfight only to discover your reload strap is giving you a wedgie.

“No helpful ones. It’s just empty. Really empty. Did you notice there’s no realtor signs?” She pointed towards the empty spot beside all the mailboxes, indicating the absence of some representative signpost advertising optimism and a hope for a better future if you just moved in.

“What’s the name of this road?” Swift wanted to know.

I stuck my head out the window, looking back the way we’d come. The white words on the little green sign were smudged with dirt and a bit hard to make out, but not impossble.

“It’s Cosmos Bloom Road,” I replied, my jaw tightening.

“That’s too much coincidence for me for one day.” Taxi let the engine lose revs, slowing us considerably.

“Sir, you think this is King Cosmo’s home?” Swift stuck her wing out the window, testing the air currents in case she needed to take off quickly.

“It’s a safe assumption. He wouldn’t be the first mob lord to get sentimental or to change his name.” I glanced over the driveways and doors, looking for recent movement. There was none. “I think we’re pretty safe here. Cosmo’s security system is damn near perfect. Nopony looks for a Jeweler safehouse in the middle of the suburbs, so I doubt he's bothered to post guards. Drive on.”

****

I didn't need the helpful little burp noise from our insect friends to point out our final destination. It shone like a beacon of green amidst the forlorn, samey pillars to good taste amongst the middle classes. The structures on either side were like all their neighbors; action playsets still in the box; the building between them was the real deal.

It was a house of the same age at the rest, the pre-market collapse styling unmistakable. Unlike its companions, the front yard wasn’t a melange of gravel and untouched sod. This house almost burst with grassy life, cropped to a precise length by the hooves of some extremely fussy or well paid gardener. It was a showcase, if there ever were one, for fine living and fashionable excess.

Every shingle on the roof was perfect, the siding gleamed, and every window-sill looked recently painted and remodeled. There wasn’t a speck of dirt nor even the stain of gasoline on the driveway. It was two stories of condensed shtick made with a salepony’s smile and wrapped in a big red bow made of nothing but hopes and dreams.

The mailbox said, in soft pink letters, ‘The Blooms.’

“You think it might be his real name? Cosmo Bloom?” Taxi asked, letting the engine idle at the far side of the road as we inspected the house. “I wonder if he just never used his family name or if he abandoned it when he left home. Granted, Bloom isn’t an especially ‘mafia’ name...”

“You remember. Back then, the developers used to name things like streets after themselves or their families,” I pointed out. “I’m thinking we’re there. His father built this neighborhood or had some hoof in it.”

“Are we going in now, sir?” Swift was already checking her extra ammo clips and feeling each of the straps on her tactical vest.

“I think our options are limited,” I replied, cocking my gun and checking the chamber then making sure the safety was on. “Cosmo knows Svelte is flipped or, at least, suspects. If he’s keeping the recordings or his ledgers here, he’ll be coming for them at first opportunity. If he’s not, there’s something he values enough to hide.”

“Can we call the Vivarium for backup?” Taxi opened her door, but didn’t get out.

“Let’s not pull that card just yet.” I shook my head, scooting to the edge of the seat and stepping out onto the warm tarmac. We were far enough from the industrial park that the sunshine was downright beautiful. I felt more than a little exposed. “I’d rather our connections to them not be revealed quite yet if we get caught. We need that as an option. Ladybugs, you listening?”

Our private swarm wiggled in the air, zipping into the shape of an ear that turned slightly towards me.

“Good. You have representatives down near the Vivarium?”

The ear did a little affirmative hop.

“Alright, go find a red earth pony with a wine cork and bottle for a cutie-mark and who acts like he shits glitter.” Turning into the shape of a pen and paper, the bugs pantomimed scribbling down notes. “Show him what we’ve been doing and tell him to stand by. We might need Stilettos to swoop in and pull us out, but unless something really ugly goes down in here I want him to wait. Meanwhile, go scout the street. Make sure we’re not being watched and signal me if we are.”

Three ladybugs split off from the group and landed in our manes while the rest buzzed out of the cab’s window, blasting off in all directions to see what they might see. Swift made to swat hers away but I grabbed her hoof before she could. She set it down.

“Sorry, sir. I had fleas once when I was a kid and I hate bugs in my fur.”

“So long as you don’t start feeling the urge to cover yourself in pesticides I think it’s fine. Speaking of that, any of those nasty, crack-someone’s-sternum-with-your-face feelings?” I turned so she could check my rear weapons straps and she peeled back my coat, tugging the one on my left thigh a little tighter.

Her eyes rolled up and to one side and she stuck her tongue out, taking a quick internal inventory. “Erm...No, sir. Nothing.” Swift chewed on her bit. Something was bothering her.

“What is it, kid?” I asked, examining the second story windows and imagining Cosmo watching us from them. It would have lead to one heck of an awkward conversation busting into this place only to discover he’d somehow beaten us there.

“Sir, do you mind if I ask something?”

“Is now the time?”

“Well, it’s about the ladybugs.” She went to scratch her mane, only stopping at the last second as she remembered why that was a bad idea. “I just wanted to know why don’t we just tell them where to go? That sounds so much easier.”

“Ahhh, the million bit question. You know what an autonomy contract is?” I patted the spot on my head where I could feel the ladybug shifting about. It gave a quiet buzz to let me know it was there.

“No... I mean, I’ve heard of them but only in PACT training.”

“Short version? The autonomy contract is a list of rules.” I touched one toe to the bottom off my hoof, mimicking the act of going down a grocery list. “Long version? It’s an individualized user’s manual for each and every sentient non-natural being that exists with the blessing of pony society. Ladybugs have got their own and it says, very specifically, that they’re not allowed to put themselves into surveillance positions, you have to know what you want to watch before you use them, and they can’t breed unless one of their number dies. Keeps anypony from making a city-wide spy network.”

“So why did you tell them to go look around the neighborhood?” She set Masamane’s trigger down and wiped a little saliva off of it then took it back in her mouth.

“They can signal danger. Any threats to life or limb, they’re allowed to give us a heads up.”

“Oh...” Swift stretched her wings, processing this information. “Seems like an awfully complicated way of doing things, if you don’t mind me saying, sir.”

“You’ve no idea. There are some Essies—” Swift’s left iris gave a visible jump and she blew a whistling breath between her teeth. “—Sorry, kid. There are some constructs who’ve got entire novellas worth of required reading just so you don’t end up turned into bubblegum.”

“Speaking of ‘dangerous situations,’ Hardy, if you keep dragging me into things like that little scene at the Monte Cheval, I’m going to have to get something with a little more kick than my rear hooves, if you know what I mean,” Taxi put in, throwing her shoulders back, working the kinks out. “Kicks are wonderful but a gun—”

“No!” I almost shouted then lowered my voice lest there be prying ears on the street.

Her face immediately fell. “A small one! I picked one out of the Requisition catalog last night! I just want—”

“No!” I slapped my hoof against the side of the Night Trotter which didn’t so much as leave a scuff but Taxi still gave me her death stare. I ignored it; it was an order of magnitude less terrifying than the prospect of my driver being armed. “I know this has nothing to do with you being worried about getting shot. Under no circumstances are you going to get a gun.You drive the car. You do not fire the bullets. Any bullets need firing, I fire them.”

“Sir, wouldn’t it be nice to have somepony else—” Swift started, but I didn’t let her finish.

“Kid, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Just trust me. It would not be nice having bullets in my flank. Or your flank. Or innocent bystanders. Or the ceilings. Or anywhere but the bad guys!”

The rookie looked from me to Taxi then back again. “What do you mean, sir?”

“What I mean, is that with anything smaller than a rocket launcher, Taxi is the worst markspony who has ever lived.” I jabbed my hoof between the cab driver’s eyes and she gave me an exaggerated, sulky frown. “So no, we will not be getting her a gun. If she wants a vest, I keep an extra at my apartment.”

“I prefer my mobility.” She replied as a thin and altogether too clever smile started to form on her lips. “It was just a thought. Besides, I think you gave me an idea.”

“No ideas either!" I shouted, trying to stamp out that seed before it blossomed into my well-intentioned doom. "I remember what happened the last time somepony gave you a firearm.”

On cue, Swift rustled her wings and asked: “What did happen?”

“She shot me with it,” I groused, rubbing my left rear leg against my right.

“Are you ever going to let me forget about that?” Taxi lowered her head almost to the cement.

“If it’d been anything bigger than that practice BB-gun, I’d be a eunuch, so... No. Besides, you can already render a pony unconscious by coughing on them in the right spot. Now, enough about this. Let’s see what we’re up against.”

I shut the rear door of the cab and faced the house; Cosmo’s childhood home. It squatted there between its barren adjoiners, a cheerful manifestation of every lie and evil which lives in the heart of the equine middle classes, waiting for us to knock on the front door. My instincts let off little tickles of warning, but nothing more than they usually would going into a new situation with limited intel.

Backing off and waiting for the ladybugs to give us a complete accounting of the neighborhood was tempting, but who knew whether or not Cosmo could call things back from his lockbox? I wanted the diary back in my hooves as quickly as possible. That, perhaps more than the recordings, the ledgers, or whatever valuables might be inside was my real reason for not waiting. Despite not knowing its contents, I was somehow dead certain that leaving it in his possession any longer than absolutely necessary constituted dangerous stupidity.

“We’ll try this friendly-like first,” I told my two companions, then moved up the driveway, trying to make as little sound as possible on the stairs. Swift stacked up on other side of the portal with Taxi behind her.

The welcome mat actually said ‘welcome,’ so I decided to take its advice. The door latch turned easily and I gave it a light shove. It swung open on an oiled hinge that didn’t so much as squeak. I held my breath, waiting.

There were no alarms. No sirens. No bells whistling or tricked shotgun hooked up to the knob ready to blast unsuspecting ponies into tiny chunks of meat.

“You want to do the honors, kid?” I asked, holding my leg out in front of the door

Swift brightened. “Yes, sir!” Sticking her head around the door, she drew breath and shouted, “This is the Detrot Police Department. Anypony inside, make yourselves known!”

We waited, either for a hail of bullets or the familiar sound of scrambling hooves trying to mark a run for it, but there was nothing but a soft creak from somewhere near top of the staircase that could easily have been the wood settling.

My partner’s eartip swung up, down, then towards the end of the hall, straining for any sound. “Sir, I... think it’s safe to enter.” She sounded almost disappointed.

I stepped into the small foyer, gun bit at the ready but not yet in my mouth. “In and fan out. Cover every room and watch your corners. I don’t want somepony to get out behind us. The ladybugs will tell us if somepony goes out the back or tries to fly. Then it’s up to you, kid.”

“Yes, sir!”

Taxi wiped her rear hooves on the welcome mat and followed us in. “I noticed a drainage ditch behind the house. If somepony goes out that way they’re going to have an awful time running through the mud.”

“I’d rather not get find myself suddenly exercising this morning, so lets secure the house as quickly as possible.“

The three of us broke off and moved down the hall, myself in the lead and Swift close behind with Taxi bringing up the rear. The first doorway proved to be a simple, classicist sitting room with a tasteful wood burning stove. All signs pointed to recent occupancy. A rocking chair in the corner had a groove worn into the carpet under both rails.

A picture of a smiling family hung over the stove; two nearly identical brown colts, a thickly built earth pony stallion, and a thin, extremely sweet faced unicorn mare. At first glance, the four of them might have been lifted from the pages of a magazine, but the picture had a story to tell to the pony looking for one.

The stallion in the back might have been big and powerful, but there was a desperation about his eyes as his leg hung around the mare’s neck. Her waifish features held the beginnings of an emotion, just the first breath of feeling which hasn’t had time yet to flower, but I could still see it in the set of her mouth and the cant of her chin: Contempt.

The images of the two colts down front had their own tales to tell. They were almost identical facially; there, the similarities ended. On the left, the boy had grown like an oak, strong and bullish. There was no mistaking him. It was King Cosmo, though a younger pony without the gleam of evil crawling around in his eyes. The leg he laid on his brother’s back was... tentative, careful, like he feared he might break him. Meanwhile, the other colt seemed barely there, a shade fading from the picture. His eyes were sunken and hollow, though he kept up a fiercely brave smile for the camera.

We moved on.

I kept waiting for my cutie-mark to tell me we were wandering into danger. but whatever evils might have sometimes been in residence seemed not to be around at that moment. While ‘safe’ might have been too strong, I wasn’t feeling especially threatened by anything I was seeing. The smell of the place reminded me of my grandparent’s house but there was still something ‘off’ about all of it. Still, shadows gathered in the corners of well lit rooms; hangers on to some great and long past atrocity. The house on Cosmos Bloom Road was not a ‘good’ place.

We passed a well-used little kitchen and an empty guest bedroom before coming to an open door with a set of steep wooden stairs leading up to the second floor.

“You hear that?” Taxi asked softly, her ears jutting straight forward up the stairs.

“Breathing,” I whispered back.

“Actually, it sounds like snoring,” Swift put in.

“She’s right,” my driver murmured.

“Snoring, then.” I put my hoof on the side of the bottom step, trying to apply weight slowly. “Top of the stairs? Two rooms, left or right. Sounds right-side to me.”

“That’s the echo,” Swift corrected, indicating the other opening. “It’s coming from left side, sir.”

I decided to take the kid’s call and crept up, testing each stair before putting my hoof down, wishing for once I owned a pair of those rubber horse-shoes. The log-sawing sound only grew with each step until I stood in front of the closed door with a noise like a lumberjack’s camp on the other side. Taxi swarmed up after me, making about as much racket as a mouse wearing socks while Swift simply leapt, giving her wings two half-beats and touching down beside me with a soft thump.

I covered my lips with my hoof then edged the door open nice and slow.

The room on the other side gave me that wriggle in the hindquarters I’d been waiting for. It positively reeked of close, long term habitation by at least one pony.

A flickering light from an old television set played across a bed littered with irregular shapes: Beer cans. Lots of beer cans. A veritable menagerie of beer cans. A few old clothes were strewn around the floor, adding dirty laundry to the scent of stale hops.

The only time I’d smelled that particular blend of despair and rotten beer was soon after Juniper died, before Taxi pulled me back from the brink.

That was a welcome thought. I shoved it aside and focused my attention on the bed’s occupant.

It took some time to make out details in the dim light but I thought it might be a stallion. It was hard to tell. His face was almost as wrecked by age as After Glow’s, though with none of the spry, feisty energy. Whereas she seemed merely inconvenienced by the years, the pony under the sheet had been ravaged by them. His pelt might have been just a convenient thing to hold his bones together. Its original colors were lost to a long, rough history, leaving him dingy bark color with a thin, sun-bleached mane.

If death had a face, it was the pony in that bed, and yet there was something about him that was familiar.

“I'm going to climb out on a limb here, but that's the pony from the picture downstairs, right?" I slipped nearer to the bed and saw a hearing aid on the nightstand. No wonder he hadn't heard us come in. "The stallion behind the kids?"

"It... could be?" Taxi gnawed on her upper lip, then her lower as she tried to match the heap of barely living flesh in the bed to the vibrant picture of health downstairs. "But if we're going with this being Cosmo's home, and that picture is his family, that means... this is his father. He's supposed to be in Tartarus Correctional, right?"

"That's the idea, yeah. Generally a prison stay implies staying in prison. Can we wake him up?" I gently bumped the bed but the only response was a rude snort and the stallion rolled onto his back, pulling the sheet higher. Something on the bed rattled softly.

"Oh come on, Hardy, lemme do it. You'll give him a heart attack." Taxi shoved me out of the way with her hip and took my place, giving Cosmo's father a light shake. When that didn't get any reaction, she picked up the hearing aid between her hooftips and stuck it into his ear. Leaning over, she whispered, in a voice I'd heard her use with kittens and puppies: "Good morning."

The stallion didn't move, but the snoring stopped, punctuated by the sounds of a weedwacker chewing up eggs. One rheumy eye worked it's way open, full of a small desert worth of sand. He glanced up at my cabbie's face and his withered muzzle opened on empty, pink gums into a weak grin.

"Y'see, Honey... angels come to take me back... angels," he mumbled, running his tongue over his cracked lips. His voice was surprisingly strong for coming out of a throat with so many wrinkles it was hard to tell where his neck started and his chin stopped.

"I'm not an angel, Mister Bloom." Taxi touched his cheek very tenderly. "I'm with the police."

"Ehhh..." His smile reminded me of Cosmo's just a little, but not cruel. Just sad. He didn't seem surprised to see us; if anything, he looked... relieved. "Might as well be angels, then. Means the same thing. I go back where I belong. Right to the pit."

"We're not here to take you anywhere, Mister Bloom," Taxi replied with a reassuring hoof on his foreleg. He glanced at it like it might have been made of gold, and I realized, however he'd escaped Tartarus, he'd traded one prison for another.

"Well then, what do you want? Nothin' in this world you can take that I didn't already take from myself." Bloom said, raising himself off his stained blanket as his arthritic joints let off a chorus of pops and crackles. His breath was something special; the mix of decay and day old beer I'd woken up to many a morning when work was getting the better of me.

"We're here on police business,” I said, stepping into Blooms vision behind my driver.

"Now I know I'm not dead. No angel ever looked like you, boy," he guffawed, throwing his rear legs over the side of the bed.

"Mister Bloom, sir, we're here about your son." Taxi was really laying on the charm for the old bugger.

"Jingle Jangle?" he asked, sweeping the glass with his dentures off the side-table and stuffing them into his mouth. His appearance wasn't much improved by the addition of pearly whites, largely because they were more like off-yellows. "What about him?"

"Cosmo. We're here about Cosmo," I clarified.

"Cosmo? Cosmo's dead, boy! Don't taunt an old pony so! It ain't right." His jaws clattered against one another as he pulled himself unsteadily to a standing position. His left eye was milky probably almost blind though his right was still sharp.

Taxi sucked on her tongue then said just loud enough for the hearing aid to pick up, "He's the one the picture downstairs. The big one standing in front of you."

"Jingle Jangle is his name," he answered then turned to the bed and began arranging something on the far side of it, as though from long habit. The television had some cooking show on, but the volume off; its light was enough for him to perform whatever his task was. "Sweet colt. So sweet. Loved his brother. His brother's name was Cosmo. You sure you're looking for the same pony and ain't got your wires crossed?"

My line of inquiry stalled, I did some quick arithmetic in my head.

Had Cosmo taken his brother's name after he died? Possible. If he had, was he trying to cover for his crimes? No, Cosmo didn't fear being caught. He was too careful. We'd gotten lucky to have come as far as we had. More likely he was paying homage.

"Yes, Jingle Jangle? Can we talk about him?" I prompted him. Out of my peripheral vision I saw Swift peering down the stairs, shifting weight back and forth on her rear hooves. I discreetly pointed at my eye then down the way we'd come. She nodded then turned and flew back downstairs to continue exploring the house.

"What's to talk about?" The old pony pulled open a tiny ice-chest beside the bedroom door, then expertly tore the top off of yet another bottle of beer, adding the top to a collection in one corner. "Has Jingle got himself mixed up with that bad crowd that helped get me out? He's a sweet boy. Helped get me home. Helped get my wife back where she should be."

The list of questions was growing every time the codger opened his mouth. The old pony obviously had no idea of his son's criminal activities. Telling him just how close to the tree the apple had fallen seemed like a recipe for sending the sad son of a bitch to his grave. He might have been a murderer, once, but my cutie-mark felt downright frigid at the thought of sending him back to Tartarus, and the questions weren't going to answer themselves. I decided to take executive action.

"You know, I have a few spare minutes if you don't mind sharing a beer?" I jostled the icebox with my hip, making bottles clank against one another. "I'd love to talk if you don't mind. Maybe you could tell me a little about the boys?"

I figured that it'd been awhile since Mister Bloom had somepony to drink with. I was correct; he happily ripped the top off another beer and found me a clean straw from a package on the desk.

"Hardy, do we have time for this?" Taxi muttered, too low for the hearing aid to pick up.

I spoke back from the corner of my mouth. "We're making time. Ladybugs will let us know if there's an issue outside."

Bloom returned and settled himself on the edge of the bed, passing me the beer. “Now ain’t this friendly? Heh. Couldn’t used to say ‘ain’t’ when I was selling houses. The higher ups said it sounded ‘simple.' Honey didn’t like it neither. Thirty years in the Pit, and I ain’t done anything quite so queer as having beer with a copper.”

“Honey... that’s your wife?” I inquired, raising my beer towards a picture of the mare from the living room portrait on the bedside table, then taking a quick sip, which was a mistake. I had to restrain myself from spitting all over Bloom; the beer was the foulest piss poor barley-snot I’d ever tasted.

“Honey Bee. Most rightly named pony I ever met.” The stallion sniggered, which devolved into a coughing fit that made my chest ache in sympathy. “She was the sweetest thing in the whole wide world when she was happy... but had the nastiest sting you ever met when she was mad. It was that sting that did it, in the end. Especially after... well, after poor Cosmo...”

“Your younger son?”

“Heh, that old picture in the living room makes us look real nice, don't it?” I nodded and he continued, sipping his beer like it might be his last. “Nawww, Cosmo is the older, though he don’t look it. Even before he got sick he was a thin little thing. All of his mom’s grace but none of my constitution.” Bloom thumped himself on the chest proudly, which produced some pretty alarming wheezing. Taxi put her hoof on his shoulder until he had his breathing under control, then waited for him to go on.

"Leastways, I used to have constitution. They say The Pit... Tartarus... takes everything from you unless you give it freely. The ponies there try to 'correct' behaviors and they sure tried with me. Buncha doctors and nurses and headshrinkers... but I weren't interested in being corrected. I deserved to be there after what I did to Honey Bee...” His lower lip quivered as he added, “...and Cosmo..."

A few tears made thick tracks in his cheek fur and he shoved his straw back into his mouth, sucking mouthful after mouthful of the cheap beer to try to wash his grief away.

“Bloom... Sorry, we've been calling you that. It’s the name on the mailbox. Is there another name you go by?” I asked.

“Blooms fine. Suit yourself kiddo.” He let his shoulders slump, drawing his rear legs up under himself. “Don’t matter what you call me really. My name ain’t worth squat anymore.” His one good eye circled around until it centered on me. “So tell me, who are you and your lady friend really? I’d believe you’re law, but if she’s a cop then I’m a chicken in a horse suit. That hair looks like a sex toy one of the boys made in Tartarus for his conjugal visits.”

“I’m a police detective.” I tilted my beer bottle in Taxi’s direction and she patted her braid, trying to look deeply offended by Bloom’s comment, but unable to hide a quirky grin. “And you’re right about her. That she’s not a cop,” I added, quickly. “She’s my driver and, when she feels like it, my bodyguard. Bloom, can I ask what happened to Cosmo and Honey Bee?”

Straightening his back, the ancient pony pushed himself back on the bed, jostling something behind him that clanked and skittered, like a box of pebbles being shaken. He gave us a look of deep suspicion. “Now why would you care about a piece of ancient history like that if you ain’t here to take me back to The Pit?”

It was a worthy question and I didn’t have an immediate response. Bloom was damn near burning up inside with the need to confess himself. I could feel that the moment I set hoof in his little cave. The perfect condition of the rest of the house, mixed with the utter neglect of his personal space, painted a picture of a pony wracked by internal divisions. One thing can always be relied upon, though. A father’s love for his son.

“Jingle Jangle is caught up in something nasty. Some real ugly pieces of work want him dead or run out of town. I’m just trying to understand him a bit better so maybe I can keep things from getting worse.”

This lie had the benefit of being technically true; I just neglected to mention I was working with those ‘ugly pieces of work,’ and my conscience would surely play havoc with my night’s rest for that if it came to killing the stallion’s son. Like so many of the little evils I commit in the name of the job, I knew I would end up just calling it ‘necessary’ and waiting for them to remove that knot of guilt, and thus delay my inevitable brain tumor.

Bloom considered my answer for a long time, lowering his head onto his forehooves. I was about to reach out and check for a pulse when he said, without moving, “Cosmo got sick. That was when it all went bad I guess. Our whole lives went bad at once.”

Taxi raised her voice to ask, “What kind of sick?”

“Nopony knows,” the elderly stallion replied, his stringy tail slapping against his sides. “It were like his little body didn’t want to be alive no more. I had a whole neighborhood worth of houses to sell and I gave every one to the bank, paid for every kind of specialist you can imagine, and the best they could tell me is his heart was bad. Just bad.”

“Jingle was close with his brother?” I toyed with my straw, taking another reluctant sip. The beer was so hoppy I thought I might be better off eating it with a spoon.

“Heh, that don’t begin to describe it, fella. Jingle Jangle... that sweet boy... offered to donate his heart. Couldn’t have that... but you know there’s always ‘options’ if you’ve got money to spare and nothing to lose. After all them specialists, I still had a nice chunk left. I...” Bloom's face contorted and he went to take a swallow of his swill but his bottle was empty. He stared at it, then rolled it off the bed into a pile of other bottles and heaved a sigh. "I went to a zebra."

Taxi's breathing stopped and the room went very quiet except for the constant buzz of the television in the background.

It might have been a relatively innocuous statement, given that there were plenty of zebras working in nearly every part of pony society, but I got the feeling Bloom could only be referring to one especially nasty brand of zebra. The witch doctor.

The stripes might have contributed a fantastic array of alchemical conveniences to the lives of everypony, as trade with them really expanded in the last century, but they also brought along their own brand of criminal activity. The healing powers of witch doctors were the stuff of legend, matched only by tales of the extremely high cost of their services. If money was no object, it was reasonably easy to get their help, but bits were almost never the only price.

"You went to a witch doctor for your son?" Taxi asked, her voice full of scorn.

"What would you have done if it was your child?" Bloom's gnarled face bent into a grimace. "He was gonna die. You get that? I'd have given anything... and I gave everything!"

The fur on my neck didn't really want me to ask my next question, but curiosity is one of those sick emotions which obeys no master. Wisdom gives us time to think twice before we ask those questions which are going to lead us to answers we'd rather not have. But, as I've said before, I am not a wise pony.

"What did the witch doctor do?"

Bloom tapped his chest on the left side. "Heh, he did what we paid him for. He gave my son a new heart so he could live."

Taxi pushed herself to her hooves. "Your son is dead, Mister Bloom."

A deep well of sadness pooled behind the stallion's eyes. It wasn't a self-pitying sadness; Bloom was beyond that. Whatever emotions he felt towards his own predicament had long since turned to entrenched self-hatred.

"Like I said... It were my Honey Bee's sting what did it in the end," He replied, morosely, turning sideways on the bed and patting something on the pillow next to him.

"What... did the witch doctor do?" I asked again, suddenly not minding the taste of the beer. Anything to cover the flavor crawling up the back of my throat.

"It were a great romantic gesture, at the time, don'tcha know." Bloom tossed his head back, his few remaining bits of mane flying back over his shoulder. In his youth, it might have been quite the gallant gesture. "He bound up Cosmo's soul in our love. Mine and Honey Bee's powered it. So long as we loved each other, my son's new heart would beat."

"I take it that didn't go well?" I said.

"It should have been Jingle Jangle's love for his brother. Should have been, damnit!" Bloom barked, his breathing becoming more labored with each word until he was almost panting. He took a few seconds to get it under control, then went on, “Instead it was me... a busted out construction pony who sold a whole street full of empty houses to a dying bank!" Casting about for something to take out his fury on, Bloom grabbed one of his beer bottles in his teeth and chucked it against the wall. It didn't have the decency to shatter in dramatic fashion; it just clanked impotently against the dresser and clattered to the floor. "You know the bank what owned them all went bust when everything fell apart thirty years back? This one was in a trust for Jingle Jangle, but the rest? I don’t think nopony owns them.”

My teeth were grinding against one another as I started to get a fuller picture of what had turned Jingle Jangle into the pony with the box of broken unicorn horns, but there was one piece missing. I forced my jaw to relax.

“How did your wife die, Mister Bloom?”

For the longest time, he just sat there with his head between his foreknees, his scarred ears moving in little circles. When he did speak, it was without emotion, like he was describing an old dream.

“First few months, things were great. Cosmo was up and running around again. We had nothing, but it didn’t matter. We had our son.” His tail swung under the sheets, scattering what might or might not have been rocks on the bed. The unkind truth was all that would do for a pony as far gone as he and he seemed determined to have it out in the air.

“Then... Honey Bee stopped smiling at me. I remember that most. She stopped smiling.” Raising his leg towards the window, he looked into the distance to a beautiful past, long lost. “You know, she dreamed of a neighborhood full of ponies? Her family were rich and kept her isolated. I was her big rebellion: A poor stallion making his way up in the world... but it turns out there’s only so low you can fall before love ain’t enough.”

Bloom turned to the bed, stroking the object on the second pillow. I was starting to get a prickle in my hindquarters but before I could ask what he had there, he continued, whispering half to himself and half to us, “I came home one day and found her here, with one of the gardener’s assistants. He was barely more than a colt. We fought. I threw him out. Honey Bee was so... frustrated. So angry.” He put his hoof on the back of his head, rubbing one particular spot. “She stung me.” His upper lip curled into an vengeful sneer. “I stung her back. Turns out a bowling trophy stings harder than a frying pan.”

What’s a pony going to say to that? Had it been any ordinary day on the job, Bloom’s confession might have left me ebullient as I hauled him off to serve his sentence. Watching him laying on top of those sheets, stinking of sweat and spilt beer, his entire life stolen by the cruelest twist of fate imaginable, I just wanted to leave him alone like a monument to some kind of terrible tragedy. Any small comforts I might have offered turned to ash in my mouth.

Like a building collapsing in slow motion, Bloom just kept speaking. I wanted him to stop, but hadn’t the heart to stop him.

“Cosmo was with Jingle Jangle.” He indicated the other room down the hall. His voice began to soften until I had to edge a closer just to hear him. “He died with his brother holding him. In all’a ten minutes, Jingle lost his home, his brother, mother, and me. I called the police. Called ’em and they put me in the clink... then in The Pit.”

That was it then. Another tale of suburbia gone wrong. One more to add to my ever-growing body of evidence that says sticking ponies in rows of boxes and declaring them to have ‘come home’ is a recipe for horror.

“So how did you get here?” I lifted my hooves, taking in the entire house with the gesture.

Bloom plucked at a strand of his mane and paused, assembling his thoughts before he replied, “I ain’t rightly sure. One day about a year ago, guards come in The Pit and stick me with a needle full of something. I wake up, I’m here in my own bed. Jingle Jangle is here. He says he paid some ponies to get me and I can’t leave, but the whole house is mine again. I asked and he even... he even brought me Honey Bee. Brought her back to me so she’d be where she belongs!”

“Come again?” Taxi was still standing by the door, pacing back and forth the short distance between the wall and the dresser. “Mister Bloom, your wife is dead too...” But then, I saw her eyes widen, gradually, as if she didn’t want to believe what she just thought. She took a few, extremely hesitant, steps closer to the bed...

...And my entire spine turned to ice as the realization set in.

“Honey Bee... Say ‘hello’ to the nice officer!” Bloom cackled, reaching over to the pillow with both hooves and picking up something smooth and white. He set it between his knees on the bed and his lips peeled back from his teeth into an ill tempered smile. I’d seen the same smile not two hours before in his son’s office.

My brain did a series of extremely complicated acrobatics followed by a spit of oil on the gears and total shutdown. My lower jaw slackened and I stumbled back from the bed, kicking my half empty beer away.

It was a skull. A pony skull. There wasn’t a scrap of flesh to give the pony an identity, but part of her horn was still there, snapped halfway down its length, poking out from between her eye sockets.

If it could be called luck, Bloom got his moment of kismet, because I didn’t have time to kick my trigger into my teeth and shuffle him loose this mortal coil with a dose of extremely therapeutic lead. Celestia save me, I wanted to. The rictus grin on his face matched the one on his dead wife’s just a bit too closely, and the DPD has drilled into our heads that gunfire is a better response to horror than catatonic paralysis. Fortunately for him, Taxi was on him like the crack of a whip. Her hooftips smacked points on his neck and chest just under the collar bone then behind the ear. He was unconscious before he had time to realize he’d been attacked.

Honey Bee’s head slid off the bed, tumbling end over end. Without thinking, I brought my hoof down to stop her from rolling out of the room into the hall, but whoever had glued her back together after the assault with the bowling trophy hadn’t done a stellar job. She exploded like a dropped egg, scattering fragments of bone in every direction. I dumbly lifted my heel, dust spilling from my horse shoe.

“H-Hardy... l-look...” Taxi held out a shaking leg towards the filthy bed. I didn’t want to look. I really didn’t. But my eyes just wouldn’t listen.

A pile of polished bones lay in the bed beside the once-more sleeping body of Mister Bloom. They’d been arranged with great precision on top of the sheet to be in something resembling an equine shape.

“Well, that’s my quota of ‘fucked up’ for today. I’m done,” I said, backing out of the dank little bedroom. My all encompassing instincts were shrieking ‘get out now’ and my cutie-mark felt like a hot brand applied to my hind end.

“S-shouldn’t we... I don’t know... shouldn’t we call the office?” Taxi stammered, her usually collected demeanor completely shaken.

My thought process was still being clogged by a queue of the totally surreal. The absolutely foul beer wasn’t helping.

“How would you explain this?” I asked, shoving a chunk of Honey’s jaw away from my toe. “I, sure as manure, never want to try to write this into a report, and I think dragging his father in might alert King Cosmo that we’re onto him. We were never here. As far as I’m concerned, Bloom died in Tartarus.”

“S-sir?” A voice behind me asked. I almost leapt out of my skin, jerking around to face Swift with my gun bit clamped in my mouth. The rookie was standing in the doorway, her ears splayed in both directions and a slightly shocked look on her face. “Sir... I think you should come take a look at this.” Her eyes alighted on Bloom. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing.” I let my trigger drop and used my rear hoof to brush the crushed remains of Honey Bee to one side where my partner couldn’t see them. “It was his nap time. What’ve you got?”

Swift pointed with one wing at the stair-well. “I... Sir, I think you better just come.”

****

My brain was on a merry-go-round. Cosmo. Jingle Jangle. Bloom. This ‘family’ the lawyer mentioned on the phone. The cracked pieces of skull still stuck in my horse-shoe that I was going to have to get a hose to clean out. That disgusting beer.

We left King Cosmo’s father where he was, snoring to Taxi’s pressure-point lullabye. I don’t know if I’d really have shot the geriatric nutter, but I was glad I’d never have to find out. I’d gone into the mobster’s office prepared for something vile and I thought I’d covered my bases when I asked the ladybugs to warn us of danger.

The house on the empty street shouldn’t have flown in under my Horrifying Crap radar, but something about the place was so much like home, before my father died, that I let myself forget just whose home it was.

Bloom seemed so reasonable and loved his son, despite the sickness that’d eaten his mind during years of imprisonment. A tiny, mad little part of me screamed for even a taste of that familiar affection... and there it was, the crack in my defenses. I shared a beer with a murdering, psychotic prison escapee. Damn me for a sentimental fool.

As I stomped down the stairs, following Swift’s tail around the corner, I began putting myself back in order. I flicked my tail to one side, hitting my cutie-mark with it then flipped it to the other, striking the other one. It was a simple ritual, but those are what can keep a pony from going mad when everything in the world indicates, by all rights, they should. I followed the action with a few deep breaths and some choice words to myself about keeping my head out of my ass, and I was prepared for anything.

Or so I thought.

We hit the bottom of the steps and went around the corner, continuing our descent on the second landing into the basement. A door waited for us at the end of a short hallway. It was as anonymous and featureless as every other in the house, and for that reason, my freshly reconstructed wariness shrieked ‘Danger, Danger!’ at the top of its metaphysical lungs.

Swift might have already scouted the area, but I decided to take it slow. Giving her tail a tug, I tapped the floor three times in a line, then pointed behind me. She obeyed immediately and without question, leaping over Taxi and taking up the rear guard position; a good little soldier marching to my drum. I was glad she hadn’t stayed for the talk with Bloom. Ugliness of that sort should only come along once in awhile, even doing the job we do, and this case was quickly filling up with sordid little details too grim for a pony who hasn’t had time to build a resistance to them. She didn’t need to see that on her third day of work.

I put my hoof on the door and gave it a gentle shove. It swung open and the stink of sweat and chemicals washed over me in a wave. I buried my face in the collar of my coat as my eyes started to instantly water.

A harsh, red glow from an uncovered bulb in the ceiling made everything seem eery and otherworldly, casting stark shadows into every corner. The room was full on every side of short work-benches, each of which was dedicated to a different project of some kind and tools hung from every inch of the walls except the one directly across from the door. Hammers of every sort that might be imagined dangled from the ceiling just low enough to be grabbed with teeth but not so long you'd have to duck to walk under them.

The one wall which hadn't been claimed by the jungle of tools and papers was covered, top to bottom, in pictures. There were hundreds, some cut carefully and others glued slap-dash together so just one character was visible. Every one featured a different image of King Cosmo's family. Jingle Jangle and his brother wrestling in a pile of pillows. Honey Bee kissing Bloom. A wedding photo. Images of a hospital bed.

"...family..." Taxi murmured it so softly I almost didn’t hear it.

"What was that?" I asked.

"It’s his family," she said, clearing her throat and speaking to be heard. "This house? That scene upstairs? King Cosmo is putting his family back together from scratch."

“That doesn’t mean he’s not insane, Sweets.” I pushed the door the rest of the way open, moving into the sticky air of the sanctuary. “He breaks off unicorn’s horns because he has problems with mommy cheating on daddy. Whatever happened to him in his youth, ponies have a choice in what they become, and he turned into a monster.”

“I know but that... that doesn’t feel like what happened to Ruby. You saw the victims in the file, right?” I nodded and Taxi continued, shouldering her way in behind Swift. “Most of them looked like ponies who’d gotten in his way or refused to pay protection fees. He didn’t kill most of them either. Left them crippled or magicless, sure, but murder them? He’s cruel, but nothing I’ve seen says ‘callous slaughterer’ to me. He could be a killer and he’s certainly a beast, but poison isn’t how ponies like him work. He could have poisoned us. Slicing off somepony’s horn then chasing them off a building? It just doesn’t... doesn’t seem like him."

It was true. Cosmo hadn’t lied to us when he’d said he didn’t kill Ruby. I didn’t think to ask if he’d been responsible for her death, but whatever else he might be, the broken colt trying to rebuild his fractured, half dead tribe didn’t strike me as the cold customer who’d taken a file to that girl’s head.

“I... look, now isn’t the time.” I slipped towards the shrine of pictures, each hoofstep feeling far too loud in the small space. “Let’s see if we can find whatever is on the receiving end of that lockbox and then I want to find someplace to hole up for the night. How long is Bloom going to sleep?”

“I doubt he’ll wake up before dinner time.” Taxi rubbed her toetips together as though she wished she could wash them off. “When he does, with any luck we’ll just be an alcoholic dream.”

“That oily crap he drinks is enough to give you booze dreams while you’re awake.” I pushed aside a stack of papers on one of the workbenches and examined an especially well turned tome with the title ‘Equestria’s Legends, Myths, and Malarkey.’ Flipping open the front few pages, I went to the index, where a number of stories were circled in red ink. ‘The Well of Impossible Desires.’ ‘The Lamp Of Dreams.’ ‘The Alicorn Amulet.'

Taxi moved up behind me and read over my shoulder. “Mmm... Looks like somepony wanted to make a wish.”

“What?”

“All those stories.” She ran her hooftip down the row of circled tales. “They’re stories about somepony making a wish. I used to read them all the time when I was a foal.”

“What did you wish for?” I asked, closing the book and setting it back in place. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I got one anyway.

“To grow up faster.”

Her answer hung in the air like a bad smell in a telephone booth, a sad reminder of darker days.

Swift was on the other side of the room, sorting through another stack of paper. Half extending one wing, she set one heap on top of the strong shoulder joint like a table as she raised her voice to be heard. “Sir, I think that King Cosmo was... looking for something.”

“Well, we knew that,” I said. “He found her. She’s dead.”

“No, I don’t mean like that.” My partner held up a folder of newspaper clippings. “Some of these papers are old articles. They’re about ponies getting suddenly rich or doing amazing things. Most of them are... pretty bad ponies.”

“How do you mean?”

“Um...well, here.” She adopted what I was coming to recognize as her ‘recital’ voice. “Don Pastrami was pronounced dead three days after an apparent poisoning attempt by a rival crime family. At his funeral, this evening, he was seen to sit up in his coffin and has apparently made a full recovery. It’s been declared a medical miracle by the Twilight Academy and Sacred Sun Hospital. Doctors are baffled by his sudden—”

“I get the idea,” I interrupted, pulling the paper away from her and examining it. “I remember this incident with Pastrami. Nasty customer. He was head of the Diamond Cutters crime family. Died of a heart attack two years later, right?” I looked at Taxi for confirmation and she dipped her chin affirmatively.

Swift shuffled out another paper and set it on the table. “Most of them are about good things happening to... really really bad people. Look, here’s another one here about a... Lady Miscellany’s trial a few years before that. See what’s circled?”

“Miscellany was represented at trial for murder by... Umbra... Animus, and Armature. All charges dismissed,” Taxi murmured.

“Wait, those lawyers Cosmo called?” I asked, feeling like the fly sitting on the edge of a spider’s web, considering just having a little stroll across.

“I found this too. It was tacked to that article.” Using her free wing, Swift plucked a fragment of what must have been scrollwork off the middle of the pile. There was only three words on it, written in artful calligraphy. I couldn’t make out what it said so passed it to Taxi..

“It’s... really old Equestrian. Maybe even pre-classical era,” she informed us, trying to wrap her mouth around the words. “Op... tare... Op... hmmm... well, that first word is definitely ‘desire’ or ‘wishing’. I don’t know the rest of it. It’s been awhile since I took a course on ancient languages.”

“Take it along,” I replied, using the hem of my coat to blot sweat out of my eyes. The close air was beginning to make me feel a bit ill. “I’ve got an old friend with a lot of ‘specialty knowledge’ I want to go see once we’ve got that diary back and have handled Cosmo. If anypony will be able to get into it, he will, and I want to know what a mob kingpin thought was worth my life. Until then, we need to find the receiving end of Cosmo’s magic safe. Nothing else matters.”

Taxi tucked the scroll into her saddlebag and we spread out, searching walls, tugging furniture, and tapping surfaces. The job should have been short but there was so much detritus jammed into the little room that we were soon resorting to pushing stacks around just to move about. I was starting to get frustrated when Swift let out a triumphal cheer.

“Sir! Sir! I think I found it!”

She was kneeling in front of a truly gorgeous wooden clothing dresser which looked to have been converted to less glamorous purposes. It was wedged into the corner behind a mop and several pans of photography fluids. The developing fluid must have been the source of the chemical smell which was quickly turning my brain to cheese.

“What is it?” I asked, picking up the mop in my mouth and using it to push the trays under one of the work benches.

“This bottom drawer doesn’t open. It’s locked, but there’s no keyhole or anything.” Demonstratively, she hooked her hoof into the handle and pulled. The entire dresser creaked but nothing happened. “It’s not fake. You can see the seams.”

“Wait a second... I remember these! My mom used to have one.” Taxi rose up on her hooftips, excited. “It’s sort of a jewelry box for storing things you don’t want anypony to find. You have to know how to open them. There’s usually a catch or a button. Let me see...”

Swift moved aside so Taxi could take her place. Getting down on her front knees, my driver fished around on either side of the handle. There was a faint click followed by a spurt of chromatic sparkles, and the drawer slid open.

“I... is that... Oh, Celestia save me, I said I was finished with screwed up things for today!”

Chapter 16: But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 16: But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?

Cadaver #43062- Patient Name: Quartet, String

Developed case of Wandering Torso Syndrome induced by not-quite-passing car. Remaining limbs may make excellent supports for credenza. Family did not seem to appreciate this fact.

Cadaver #43095- Patient Name: Catalogue, Card

Self-inflicted alphabetization. Dewey Decimal system not conducive to continued organ function. Made for easy autopsy, though.

Cadaver #43203- Patient Name: Legs, Crazy

Terminal case of congenital Sleipnir Syndrome.

--Notes made during the writing of Dr. Slip Stitch’s Amazing Almanac of Anatomical Anomalies, published through Staggeringly Random House

Hearts belong in a pony’s chest, beating the steady drum of life. They belong on Hearts and Hooves Day cards, all neat and friendly with messages of love. One might even see a heart on Hearth’s Warming Eve, lighting the way through the dark and cold.

One place a heart definitely doesn’t belong is in a drawer. If a heart is in a drawer, something has gone wrong in the world, and I believe everypony should just sit down, take some breaths, and wait until things make sense again. Sadly, that luxury is afforded to few, and never to those wearing badges.

****

“Kid, breathe. Breathe.”

I held a paper satchel over Swift’s mouth as she hyperventilated; for once, thank the Princesses, she’d managed to hold off on puking her little orange guts up. Taxi sat in the corner opposite the dresser and its grisly contents, humming one of her chants to herself and looking peaceful. It was a great act, but I could see the tick in her left eye every now and then.

When the drawer had popped open, all of the switches in my brain that controlled conscious thought shut off. I may have drooled a little, but at that point, nopony in the room was looking at me anymore.

There, in the middle of the drawer, was an equine heart. It was glistening with what might have been moisture, sitting in a little box full of velvet and silk handkerchiefs to keep it safe and comfortable. Zebra runes dotted its surface around the neck of each large artery, and a thick white diamond nestled amongst a bundle of tightly wound wires at its center. I might be an earth pony, but even I have a sense for when something is just loaded with the wrong kind of magic. The fleshy parts of the heart should have long since rotted away, hardened, or at least shown some signs of aging, and yet they were flawless. Pristine, even.

The front of the box was engraved with the letter ‘C’, hammered into a solid gold plate.

Some might say it shouldn’t have been a great surprise, after we’d seen Jingle Jangle’s mother upstairs, to find a heart sitting in his private collection, but I must label any group of ponies who would say such a thing a collective of idiots. The old cliche about homicide detectives being able to ‘get inside the heads of killers’ is lovely propaganda, but in truth, it’s bullshit. We don’t get inside their heads. We notice patterns. We establish motivations. We put together reasonings from the twisted wreckage and scenes of horror that killers leave behind.

What we don’t do is crawl around inside their brains. I’ve seen cops who thought they could do that, and nothing good comes from empathizing too closely with murderers. The best one should hope for is to sympathize convincingly enough for them to give you something that will let you put them in jail. Hence, opening a drawer and finding a heart that looks like it just came out of somepony’s chest still came as a bit of a shock.

Swift’s breathing was finally starting to slow down, so I gave her the bag. She clutched it to her face, as though the meager paper fibers might somehow shield her from the sickness of that house.

“Sir... what is that?” she asked.

I thought about not telling her, lest it provoke a round of industrial-bakery-level cookie-tossing, but not doing so could have led to all sorts of issues down the road - and besides, what plausible lie could I have told?

“It’s the brother’s heart,” I tried to sound calm, despite the ferocious crashing of my own pulse in my ears. “Cosmo’s father said he went to a zebra witch doctor to keep his son alive when he was dying, and the witch doctor gave him a new heart. No idea why it’s not rotted. Probably magic.”

“Oh... okay...” Swift replied, holding her bag more tightly over her face.

“You did good," I added. Comforting banter was a new thing for me; I'm not certain how well I pulled it off. "I’m going to have to take a few anti-nausea meds myself after this day is over.”

I couldn’t see her mouth, but her breathing calmed a little; I like to think she smiled.

Taxi was still in the opposite corner of the room, sitting in her impossible rear-legged folded up position on a work stool and resting her forehooves on her knees. Her lips were moving but her eyes were closed. I moved over to her side and hefted my butt onto bench beside her, trying to emulate the funny upright sitting style kids these days seemed to enjoy. Her ear flitted in my direction, but she didn’t acknowledge my presence.

“Sweets, talk to me,” I said, very softly.

“No. I’m going to be angry for another five minutes here.”

“It’s not like this is my faul-”

“Five minutes.”

I hopped off the bench and moved away. The ‘five minute time out’ rule is a long-established coping mechanism for my relationship with Taxi. She doesn’t make use of it terribly often, but when she does, it generally means she’s less than four minutes from assaulting the nearest living thing if she doesn’t get those five minutes to take her mind elsewhere.

Instead, I returned to the drawer. I couldn’t help the odd feeling that the thing was watching me, and with magical artifacts like that, it’s best not to take chances, so I reached in and flipped the lid of the plush box closed.

I pushed the box and its disturbing contents aside, and immediately felt the light of hope as a jewel-inlaid book tipped forward, falling neatly onto my right forehoof. With great care, I picked up the diary of Ruby Blue and felt its comforting weight against my chest.

From just inside the binding, a pea-sized brown ladybug wiggled its way out and puffed up to a normal size, returning to its normal red and black color scheme. I gave the creature a light pat on the head and it winged its way up the stairs, presumably to find its mates. Patting my coat, I found a mostly empty pocket just inside the collar and slipped the book inside. The tension in my neck relaxed just a little at having it back safely in my possession, my error undone.

I almost missed the last item in the drawer; it was nearly the same color as the wood.

It seemed to be a tome, though not like any I’d ever seen. The cover was solid brown with an unusual texture, made of something I wasn’t familiar with.

As per standard operating procedure when dealing with what might or might not be a magical item, I snatched a long ruler off the nearest workbench and did what ponies have been doing since time immemorial when confronted with the unknown: I poked it with a stick.

When nothing happened upon initial prodding, I used the edge of the my ruler to lift the cover. Still nothing. No explosions, no screaming, no attempts to fly out and eat my face. Granted, such results are never a perfect indication of future behavior, but I felt reasonably assured it wasn’t going to do anything really nasty.

I levered the cover all the way open and ran my eyes down the page.

“Kid! We got it! We’ve got his ledger!” I called to Swift. She leapt up, tossing her paper bag to one side.

“What, really?!”

“Yes, really.” Picking up the book, I spilled it open on the desk and ran down a row of figures. “I think it’s in some kind of accounting jargon. P-T to White Petal, Sent B.D. and D.T. to handle, acqui two thousand? What?”

Taxi rose from her sitting position, brushing dust off her bottom. “White Petal. It’s a massage parlor about three miles from Monte Cheval. P-T is probably protection. It also means extortion. Taking protection money. I’d bet B.D. and D.T. are whoever he sent to get the protection money. Acqui might be short-hoof for ‘acquired’ and two thousand is how much they got.”

My brain immediately started to glaze over at the thought of digging through that book, translating page after page. “Right, you’re in charge of the ledger.” Picking it up in my teeth, I passed it to my driver... who immediately dropped it and fell back, wiping her mouth violently with both hooves.

“Oh ick! Ick yuck ick! That’s vile!” she sputtered, trying to scrape her tongue.

“What? What is it?” I asked, looking down at the seemingly harmless little tome.

“That book’s cover is made of leather!” she spat, making a sound like a motorboat with her tongue, then kicked the book across the floor to me.

“Wait, real leather?” I reared back from the ledger.

“What other kind of leather do you think I’m talking about?!” she barked, tearing through her saddlebags until she found a package of chewing gum. “I bet Cosmo thought it was some kind of sick joke!”

Swift set her paper bag to one side and edged over, running her hoof over the book lightly. “Sir, it’s... cool. Soft. What's wrong with- what did you call it? Leather?”

“Griffin smugglers sell it. It’s soft because some creature used to be wearing it.” I held out my hoof and Taxi slapped a stick of gum on it. “It’s skin, kid. Leather is some animal’s skin.”

Lifting the book in both hooves, my partner sniffed it lightly. “It smells... mmm. It smells... good.”

Before my partner could get any stranger, I pushed the ledger against her and said, “Then you keep track of it. We can decipher the whole thing as soon as we get a quiet moment. I think we’ve got what we came for. The recordings from the Vivarium aren’t here and I don't feel like digging through any more of Cosmo's dirty laundry.”

“You think Cosmo has already moved them?” Taxi asked, nervously.

“Bet against me and I think I’d win, easy." I replied, spitting the gum in my hoof and holding it out. Taxi shook her head. I went on, "Either way, that ledger might be our saving grace, so sick joke or not, you’re going to have to read it.”

“If I'm going to dig through that, then you’re going to let me have a weapon, right?” My driver’s voice sounded just a little bit too hopeful for her intentions to be noble and pure.

“Weapon? Sure. Lethal? Not a chance in this world," I responded, pulling off my hat and tossing my mane so it settled out of my eyes. "Picking buckshot out of my cutie-mark is not how I want to spend my weekends. Get yourself a big zebra stick you can hit things with or a bazooka full of chili powder. Otherwise, drop it.”

“Ookaaay...” Taxi sounded slightly dejected, but I could hear one of her special notes of duplicitous cleverness buried somewhere under the surface. In the back of my head, I started writing a death threat to slip Requisitions. That group of somewhat vengeful ponies was entirely too capable of giving my trigger happy best friend an assault rifle with rubber bullets and leaving me bruised beyond recognition.

Something tingled in my mane, then made a noise like a fire alarm three inches behind my right ear. I slapped a hoof against the side of my head, staggering to one side as the ladybug in my mane did its damndest to destroy my hearing. Based on Taxi and Swift's reactions, they were having a similar experience.

“Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs awake!” I shouted over the dreadful noise. It immediately cut out, and the insect flew out of my hair. I offered it my forehead, clapped my hooves together and shook my tail.

****

The Ladybug network was abuzz; more of the passing images than usual seemed to be of scenes relevant to myself. I saw the outside of my apartment complex and a dozen little insectoid eyes fixated on the house on Cosmo’s Bloom road. A number of bugs were in the Night Trotter, buzzing around the eight track player. Had I a tail just then, it would have been slashing the air as I tried to find whatever they were trying to warn us of.

Danger, I thought, impatiently.

My perspective split, changed, and shifted until I was peering into the windows of the house. It slid backwards, moving down to the far end of the road. A black limousine was there, trundling along at a leisurely pace. The tinted windows kept the driver’s identity anonymous, but I could see at least six ponies moving behind the darkened glass. I pushed one of my eyes closer to the license plate; it said ‘HAMR-DWN1’.

Hammer down. King Cosmo’s cutie-marks were hammers.

“Leaving! Need out this instant!”

Conveying urgency without lips is difficult, but I managed it somehow; I was out so fast my ears popped.

****

“We’re going now! King Cosmo is up the street and coming home!” I gasped as sharp pain burst behind my eyelids. Leaving the ladybug network isn’t meant to be done so quickly. “Kid, you have the ledger?”

“Right here, sir!” Swift held open her combat jacket, showing one of the ammo pouches stuffed to capacity.

“You're on point! Taxi, middle, I'll bring up the rear. Head out the back and go for the car!"

We started a headlong charge up the stairs, but halfway up, my cutie-mark did something that sent me stumbling against the railing. It felt, for just a second, as though all of the blood in my whole body had rushed into my flanks. My tail jerked like it'd been pulled, and I stumbled back down three steps. The sensation of having left something unfinished was overwhelming.

I shouted to my partner, "Keep going! I'll be right back! Park up the street!"

Taxi threw me a questioning look and Swift started to slow down, but then I met my driver's eyes for a half second. She nodded, pushing the rookie ahead of her as I darted back into the basement lair.

The dim, hellish light coming off the bulb didn't provide much luminance. I stood there amongst the dozens of dangling hammers, the displaced paper stacks, and the half completed projects, waiting for some further sign.

Talent or not, cutie-marks are not the most reliable crime solving mechanism. I, like most decent cops, preferred observation and awareness to magic and spiritualism. While, now and then, the magic and spiritualism comes in handy, most times it seems to be there just to drive you mad - like right then. Time was a factor here and just waiting for a signal from on high (or, as was often the case, from my butt) seemed like a recipe for disaster, but I've yet to have such a flank-signal be completely meaningless.

I waited ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty and I was starting to think I'd simply imagined the tug on the steps. Around thirty-four, I was proved very wrong.

When it happened, there was no warning. My entire body seized. Every muscle cramped at once like I'd stuck my hoof in the cab's engine while it was running. I was left shaking, my limbs burning, with my chest tight. My cutie-mark let off another prickle, centered on one particular corner of the room.

I wanted it to be some awful magic King Cosmo unleashed to disable everypony in the house, and I'd simply gotten lucky. Unfortunately, the feeling was too familiar. It was something I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night. It brayed in the back of my mind, gripping my consciousness with an overwhelming command that left me breathless and frightened. It was a heartbeat, coming from the dresser.

Forcing myself to move, I ran to the stacked drawers and tore open the secret panel. It hadn't locked when it was closed, but considering the mess we'd made finding it, it was unlikely the mobster would be unaware somepony had broken into his house.

The box looked so innocent. Almost peaceful. Its golden lettering was carved with fantastic attention to detail. It might have been just one more of symbol of Jingle Jangle's depravity, but it was beautiful.

No, I told myself, firmly. No, his name is Cosmo. I can’t let myself forget that. He stole his brother’s name and made it his own. Jingle Jangle was the sweet boy who died with his brother. Cosmo is the pony who is going to try to kill you. Cosmo is the King of Ace. He’s the pony you’re going to bring down.

Without quite realizing what I was doing, I flipped open the top of the box.

The heart of Cosmo’s brother sat there, quietly thumping to itself like a chest-less ticker was the most natural thing in the world. My hoof reached towards the crystal at its center of its own accord. As my toe touched its cool surface, it gave a jarring burst of energy that coursed up my leg and, again, every muscle in my body clenched. No blood pumped through and no brain controlled it, but something deep within the organ was still very much alive.

Reality snapped back as my ladybug trilled loudly in my ear. I shook my head, then clapped the box closed and yanked it out of the drawer. Jamming it into one of my enchanted pockets, I sprinted up the stairwell.

As I turned towards the front door, the insect beside my head let off two short, sharp beeps and I skidded to a halt. There was a sound coming from the other side of the door. It wasn’t the Night Trotter’s healthy grind. It was softer, without the crackle of unshielded arcanolectrics or high powered runes; a luxury vehicle.

A car door slammed and four hooves hit the pavement, then a second door opened.

There’s a tiny part of every pony’s mind that wants to wait and see what happens. I’d long since taken that part of my brain out behind a barn and shot it.

Scanning my options, I settled on the back door. It had a straight line of sight from the front but jumping through a window wasn’t appealing and hiding, hoping Swift wouldn’t do something rash, was even less so. Light-hooved as I could, I rushed down the carpeted hallway and made the backdoor just as heavy treaded hoofsteps started up onto the front porch.

I pulled the handle, twisted, and stepped into mid-air.

The front porch was a beautiful piece of house construction. The back porch left a really frightening amount to be desired, largely because it was still a stack of two-by-fours covered in a tarp sitting up against the fence. I pitched off the back step as the door swung shut behind me, collapsing into a many-inch-deep puddle of mud.

Laying there, I waited to hear the door above me open, but once more, the Princesses were smiling on me. Nothing. Squirming out of the clinging dirt with a number of wet squelch noises, I pressed myself against the back of the house and shimmied across to the side.

Peering down the gap between the houses, I could just see the front bumper of Cosmo’s limo.

Where was Taxi?

I didn’t want to try the drainage ditch running between the row of houses I was in and the more inhabited collection a few streets over. There was a dead cat floating in it. As my day included enough foul events without adding splashing around with some foal’s deceased pet, I left a swim as a last resort.

The next house over was a shabby, decaying affair whose rear had been let go almost completely, and I was thankful it was. It made finding a place between two of the fence slats that much easier.

Behind me, I heard the click of a door and froze, plastering myself to the fence I’d just climbed through. Somepony gave a bullish snort and the door crashed shut again. On the empty street without even the benefit of birds' song in the trees, the noise was deafening.

I made an effort to breathe and started hopping fences again, occasionally peering out onto the street. My partner and driver were well and truly off the radar. My frustration growing, didn’t register the soft hum until it was almost on top of me.

Ten ladybugs, flying tightly grouped, zipped out of the sky and landed on the bridge of my muzzle. I crossed my eyes and swatted at them.

“Hey, off! Not a place to rest! Where’s the car?” I whispered urgently to the whirring swarm.

The insects did a quick mid-air pirouette and arranged themselves into an arrow pointing over the next fence. It was a good thing Cosmo’s neighborhood was a remnant of the styling period when treated wood was favored over chain link. Climbing chain link with hooves is not pleasant. Still, the going wasn't easy.

After hopping twelve more fences, my lungs were starting to feel like somepony had doused them in flaming napalm and my bruised shoulder joint was screaming for rest. I slowed to catch my breath and noticed that I seemed to be making my way around the edge of a cul-de-sac. Creeping down the short alley between two houses, my heart fluttered at a truly glorious sight. It may have been fluttering from over-exertion, but I chose to take it as a sign of joy rather than a sign of how badly out of shape I was.

The Night Trotter was sitting there inside a half open garage attached to one of the other empty homes, just across the street. The garage was dark inside, and if I hadn’t been looking for it I might have missed it entirely, but there it was: my salvation in vehicular format.

Working my way across, I circled around, clambering through one back yard after another, until I was convinced that it might simply be better if Celestia banned fences altogether. While a few were easy enough, most involved a jump or some undignified scrambling, but finally - at about the point where running for my life was taking a backseat to wording the banning petition - I made it to the final house. I was sweating in every place it was possible and wishing yesterday’s rains would return just so I might have a bit of relief. Journey over, I plunked my behind on the rear stoop and just let myself pant.

I was so worn out I barely registered the door behind me opening. It may have been blood flow issues from the exercise or my adrenal gland having drained multiple times in a short period but I couldn’t even muster a solid surprised jump.

“Hardy!”

“Sir!”

Perhaps, just maybe, it was time to have a nap. Right there seemed good.

****

In spite of not finding the recordings and almost getting caught by the megalomaniacal creep himself, which would have probably ended me as a pony skin rug in his dining room, I felt inexplicably good. My limbs ached and my lungs hurt with every breath, but we’d escaped. I had another piece of The Truth, capital letters and all.

It did, however, leave one burning question: Why did I take the heart? Why did I risk becoming a trophy for Cosmo to hang over his fireplace? 'Because my Cutie Mark told me to' seemed as incomplete an explanation as that old Celestia-Works-In-Mysterious-Ways cop-out. Why did it tell me to?

It felt right? It wasn’t much a much more complete answer, but it was at least true. It had felt right.

The heart was a wretched hunk of flesh and metal conjured up from the imagination of a crazy zebra with too much mechanical creativity and not enough common sense, but buried under the horror of its creation, some tiny piece of the boy in the painting, putting on a strong face in spite of his fading spirit, was still there. That spirit called to me and I had no ability, no will, to ignore it.

Maybe he wanted me to free him? Maybe it was the magic of cutie-marks leading me to correct a great injustice? Or maybe the zebra’s spellcraft had some residual narcotic effect on my mind and flank?

Any of those options sounded perfectly reasonable in the light of my near-complete exhaustion. I could still feel the heart, thudding back and forth in my pocket in time to my pulse, like a happy kitten that's found a friend. Now and then it would settle, but I was too freaked out and tired to give its continued animation much deep thought. Magical artifacts are categorically not my department.

If my luck held, Cosmo would not immediately realize who’d burglarized his house. If he somehow put together that it was the ‘stupid cop’ and that I was working with the Vivarium, then his unstable mind might just decide an assault of some sort was worth the enormous number of potential lives lost to recover his brother's heart.

I didn’t want to find out if that might be the case, but I was too shagged out to even lift my head, much less come up with a course of immediate action. Taxi needed time with the ledger. I needed rest.

****

After my short dizzy spell, my partner and driver managed to wrestle me into the back seat of the cab without too many questions asked. It might have looked, to the untrained eye, like I passed out, but that was deceptive. Detective ponies don't have fainting spells. We have combat naps.

With my scruffy, muddy tail wrapped around my body, I let myself close down for a bit while Taxi wormed her way down a side street just around the curve of the road, keeping us out of sight of King Cosmo’s limo. The streets smoothed and, for a short time, I let myself enjoy the feeling of having once again defied death.

****

Time was passing unmarked and the motion of the road under the vehicle was delightfully relaxing. Another nap was right on the horizon when Swift asked, “Sir, why did you go back?”

“Hmmm?”

“She asked ‘Why did you go back down there?’ and you better answer her, you stupid ninny!” Taxi cut in, pulling back on the hoofbrake and throwing us to the curbside. She turned to face me. “I’m not paid to drive for crazy and stupid! Just one or the other! Not both at the same time!”

“Oh...” I struggled onto my side, plucking the box out of my pocket and setting it on the seat in front of me. It wasn't making much noise, to speak of, though if one looked closely it was easy to detect a slight rocking motion. “I got a feeling.”

“Hardy... that’s not... why... Why would you take that awful thing?!” Taxi sputtered, reeling back slightly.

“Bargaining chip,” I replied, though maybe that was only partly true. Saying the heart ‘called’ to me was a recipe for disaster even considering our long standing reliance on ‘feelings.’ Whatever else she might be, Taxi wasn’t any more a fan of dark magics than I am. The thought that there might be some bit of a dead pony residing inside that meaty amalgam would likely turn her stomach almost as much as it was churning mine. There was no sense in alarming her. An alarmed Taxi is a dangerous Taxi. Besides, the organ didn't seem malicious... just bizarre.

"You're insane! That's your problem, right?" My driver railed. "I just watched that huge bastard walk in there and I was convinced I was going to see him dragging out a carpet full of... full of you in ten minute's time leaking all your vital fluids!"

“Look, I'm fine. We got away. That's what matters." I held open my coat to show my entirely un-bullet riddled body. "That box might be the best chip we have. Could be the only one that will stop Cosmo from shooting at us long enough for me to offer him a deal.”

“A deal?!” My cabbie’s voice rose with each word. “You don’t deal with ponies like him! You lock them in deep, dark holes and let therapists dig out the evil parts of their brains! You stick them in cages for study! You don't make deals with them!”

“This won’t be a compromise. It’ll be a deal,” I answered, tiredly. The expression on her face said the distinction was lost on her, and she might be more inclined to pull my head off than to relax. I continued hurriedly before violence could ensue. “Compromises are where nopony gets precisely what they want. You can make deals where one party walks away pissed off and the other dances a little jig. What’s important is Cosmo walks away. Forever.”

After a moment’s thought she relented. “I’m going to take it out of your hide if you get yourself killed doing this, Hardy. I swear.”

"Won't that be difficult if I'm dead?"

"I will find a way." Releasing the brake, she steered us back into the flow of traffic. “So? Where are we going?”

I turned to Swift.

“Kid? Thoughts?” I asked, fighting down a yawn.

“S-sir?” Her wings half-extended in surprise, almost swatting me in the face.

“I asked for your thoughts,” I reiterated, pushing her feathers away from my nose. “Where should we head? The Vivarium was the first place I considered, but I don’t know if Cosmo can track either this box or that ledger. I doubt it’ll take him long to put together what happened, even if he’s not sure how. The first thing he’ll check, after he discovers the house has been invaded, is that drawer. If it’s possible, I’d like to keep who we’re working for at least a little bit secret. I’m also too damn tired to come up with anything so... what’s the plan?”

My partner’s face leapt from confusion through comprehension, sidelined briefly at fear, before settling on deep contemplation. After some thought, she got a roguish glint in her eye. “Sir? Can we put wherever we go on the department’s tab?”

“Could be our last case if things go poorly, so why not? If we pull this off, they'll pin medals on our chests or fire us. Or both. Either way, it won't be a problem.”

My dear, sweet, naive little partner heard the word 'medal' and everything else after that was just so much babble on the wind. Rising up into as close to attention as she could in the back seat, she lifted her muzzle high and announced, “I know a place, sir. Nopony would ever look for us there.”

****

I want to note that every horrible dream I’d ever had of transient living centered around theme hotels. I am a pony who requires a certain degree of sneering indifference from staff in an establishment before I start to feel genuinely comfortable. I won’t eat a daisy-burger unless it’s flavored with the cook’s phlegm in that first bite. It lets me know where we stand, and that I am leaving the right tips.

The desire to stay in adult fantasy worlds where the employees are chipper and appear to be cheerfully enjoying their own public humiliation is mystifying to me. I don’t need somepony in a ridiculous hat catering to my every whim. If the room’s mini-bar contains actual booze rather than tiny bottles full of cinnamon mouthwash and residue, it’s just confusing.

****

“You can’t be serious!”

“Well, Hardy, she’s right about one thing. No-one in their right mind would ever look for us here.”

“I’m not staying here!”

“Sir, it fulfills all the criteria in the police manual on safe-house selection.”

“I picked up on that, yes. It’s a boat, dammit! I’m not staying here!”

My objections went unheeded, partly because I’d been outvoted, but mostly because I was too tired to lodge them without all four knees wobbling. Cosmo’s neighborhood ‘obstacle course’ took more out of me than I’d like to admit.

Having never even heard of the High Seas, I thought it fair to assume it wasn’t the sort of place murders take place frequently. Standing outside with the Night Trotter’s engine idling and the quickly drying mud sticking to every inch of me not covered by trenchcoat, I could understand why. If I were intent on stabbing somepony, I’d have to first ask them to step out into the parking lot next door just so I could take myself seriously.

When I said it was a boat, that was not a metaphor, allegory, or simile. It was a boat. A big boat.

From the outside, it looked like somepony, at some point, had dropped a large, pink and purple pleasure ship in the middle of a parking lot in midtown Detrot. Whether that was actually the case or somepony just built it to look like that, I don’t know, but if it was an accident then the enterprising minds behind Detrot’s hotel industry certainly took advantage. It was one of the few I’d seen that didn’t seem short of business. Very nearly every spot in the parking lot had some type of vehicle in it. Even the High Step, with all its pedigree and posh character, wasn’t as busy a place on its best days.

The boat, which must have cost a fortune if it were ever actually seaworthy, stretched lengthwise across the lot for half the length of a hoofball field. The hotel’s name was painted across the bow and a smattering of platforms, catwalks, and stairways covered its sides, leading to the rooms themselves. It was zero-utility and pure facade, like many of the younger buildings in the city.

About a dozen over-painted tug-boats sat behind their larger parent with their own private parking garages and little lawns out front. The image that first formed in my mind, as we followed Swift’s directions was off the highway, was of a great, violet whale that’d beached itself on an asphalt shore and was surrounded by mourning relatives.

The name on the bow was ‘Sweet Heart’s High Seas Hotel’.

****

“Kid, I realize I don’t get out enough, but this is ridiculous. How did you even find this place?” I asked, resigning myself to my fate as we drove through the lot, searching for a place to park.

“The city looks different from the air, sir,” she replied, raising her wings for emphasis as she stared out the window at the landlocked cruise ship. “I used to fly over this place going home from training, back when they were building it. I always wanted to stay here!”

“I... why did you always want to stay here, exactly? You can’t tell me you’re a fan of boats.”

“Erm... no. I get seasick at the movies.” Turning her head, she spoke over her shoulder, eyes still on the hotel. “I just liked the idea of it, you know? I never get to stay in weird places. When we used to go on vacation, Dad would always take us to historical sites or Mom would want to go to all the mystical places like old graveyards and forests. It was sooo boring! I mean, look at it! It’s a huge boat in the middle of the city.”

I sighed and picked grit off my cheek. “What I care about is that they’ve got a shower. This isn’t a vacation. We’re here to rest and make plans. We’ll only be here for a few hours.”

“Sooo... does that mean we’re staying?”

“I don’t have the energy to argue so, yes.”

“Eeee!” Swift did a little four-hoofed dance until she caught my look. “Sorry, sir.”

Turning to the front of the car, I raised my voice so Taxi could hear me. “Sweets, get Telly on the horn. We need a line of credit. Enough to pay for a night here if they don’t rent by the hour. Ask her if she can keep this one out of the log until... day after tomorrow.”

My driver shifted her flank against the seat-rest. “Aaand what should I tell her you’ll be buying her this time?”

“A gold plated nose-hair plucker. Canterlot real estate. A griffin sex dwarf. I don’t care. Line of credit. I’m going to lay here and you two can tell me when the room is ready. This isn’t a vacation. It’s a rest.”

Despite my dour insistence, Swift was still all but jiggling with excitement in her seat.

****

When Taxi and Swift returned from the small front office, they were sharing a look that made me feel awfully like the rabbit stuck in a snare, listening to the hunter coming. Had I been more aware at the time, as opposed to just barely staving off sleep, I might have thought to ask what the joke was that I’d missed. As it was, they decided to share anyway.

“Haaardy! You’ll never guess what happened!” Taxi singsonged.

“Oh, sir! It’s fantastic!” Swift joined in, making my fur crawl.

I put my chin on the window sill. “I don’t do guessing games. What’s the scoop? Do they have a place for us?”

“Not just any place!” Taxi exclaimed, holding her hooves together dramatically and fluttering her eyelashes. “Telly gave us unlimited credit, and even said she’d let you have this one for free so long as we asked for their specialty rooms. They’re giving us the wedding suite!”

Every drop of blood in my body turned to solid ice.

****

Once we’d parked up, we were met by a goofy looking grey-green earth pony colt from the front desk whose smile might have been wired in place. He wore the standard hotel uniform; blue sash, white vest, ridiculous sea-pony hat, and a disposition so cheerful I wanted to kick him. He seemed completely immune to my deplorable state, babbling happily about the amenities of our room with the well-practiced ease of somepony who gives the same speech about once a week.

We were led around the side of the ship to a set of private stairs, with Taxi and Swift oohing and ahhing over his every word and myself trailing along behind like a sad puppy just in out of the rain. The door he took us to was a more heavily decorated version of every other, with the words ‘Captain’s Quarters’ in big, loopy letters across the top.

“Now then, if the sir wouldn’t mind, I can take his coat to be laundered while he gets comfortable in his quarters.”

I barely registered that the porter was talking to me as I lay my head on the door sill, my hat-brim folded down over my eyes. I could have rested right there except my dear, sweet driver elbowed me in the chest.

“Buh? Wha? Oh... right. Yeah, sure...”

Both Swift and Taxi peeled me out of my coat and hat, draping them over the colt’s back. And maybe, I just wanted to see that twitch in his heavily engineered good cheer as the muddy, sweaty coat settled on his shoulders. Regardless, being naked, save for my gun harness and weapon, felt good. I’m not normally a pony who feels alright going around in the buff, but there are times for it.

“Thank you, sir,” said the bellhop, who then turned to Taxi and held out our keys in his teeth. “Ma’am, your keys, both to the mini-bar and the room. Feel free to call us for anything you might need. The phone in the room will ring room-service and we’ll have somepony up right away. Check out time is noon.”

I dimly registered the colt retreating down the stairs and the key going into the lock, then my partner zipping past me in a blast of orange fluff and wind.

“Oh sir!” Swift cried. “This is so cool!”

I knew it was coming. I thought I knew what to expect. The truth was worse than I could have imagined.

Lifting my head, I stared into an abyss of lavender, perfume, and nautical paraphernalia.

The room was made to look like a plus-sized version of standard shipboard quarters. The windows were portholes and the walls were bulkheads. I might have been alright with that. I’d stayed in something similar during my Academy days.

The color scheme and the appointments were where everything fell apart.

Every surface was some lighter or darker shade of red, ranging from maroon down through mauve with an immoderate pass through cerise here and there. Wretched wreaths of fake flower spilled across the only useful table, though I supposed most ponies who would willingly take the Captain’s Quarters wouldn’t have paperwork on their minds.

The bed was the true horror.

I’d seen a heart in a drawer and a box full of broken unicorn horns just that morning. The day before, I’d been stomped and nearly killed by a paranoid spy and her massive meat-shield. Before that, a crazed coroner tried to feed my partner an eyeball freeze-pop.

None of it compared to that bed, where I was expected to lay my head and dream rejuvenating dreams.

I think the proper naval term for it was ‘dinghy’. The tiny craft was suspended from the ceiling by four thick cables, all falling into that same ‘romantic’ decorative schema as the rest of the room. Silk sheets and fluffy, heart shaped pillows sprawled over the control-wheel shaped headboard. Some monster, cruel and insensitive to my bleak condition, had spilled a loose dusting of rose-petals over them.

Champagne was cooling in a bucket of ice. Not beer. Not smooth, beautiful, liquid hops and barley, none of the elixir that might rebuild me in my moment of need and soften the blow of having to lay myself down amongst the stains and juices of untold ponies.

Just carbonated, chimerical crap.

The dearth of worthy beverages did not bother Swift, who was dancing around the freakish little room, poking her nose into cabinets, fiddling with the fake instruments board, and rummaging through the mini-bar.

I took one more look at the bed... then kicked out my rear leg, pulling the strap which set my auto-loader. It made a dull, unsatisfying click. I glanced down at my revolver and realized somepony, most likely a certain somepony with a stupid stripy mane, had nicked my cartridges. Not that it would have been difficult, considering how wrung out I was in the car, but it was still disappointing that I couldn’t shoot something.

“It’s not that bad, Hardy.” Taxi put her hoof on my rear end and gave me a shove into the room. “Like you said, we’ll only be here for a few hours.”

I put my leg over my face and tried a few breaths. They didn’t do much besides make me feel a bit light headed.

“No-one else will ever know about this, Sweets.” I grumbled. “You, me, and Swift. Nobody else. You hear me?”

My driver’s guilty smile said I was not long for this world.

“Errr...Telly may have already told Chief Jade. By the way, she asked me to pick up one of those little boats they sell in the gift shop. She wants it for her desk, just so she can remember this.”

I fell forward onto my forehead and lay with my rear end in the air.

Death. Death would be good. Right here, right now.

****

Somehow, Taxi helped me into the shower for just long enough to get off the worst of the dried mud and stinking horse sweat, then dragged me bodily into the bedroom and tossed me onto the bed with some kind of judo.

Swift produced the ledger. She and Taxi tore the fake flowers off the table, then set to work.

I fought sleep, but it was a losing battle. In spite of the deeply revolting knowledge of what’d most likely been done hundreds of times on the sheets I was under, I couldn’t drag myself out of the bed. I watched with detached interest, drifting in a pleasant fog, as the two mares whose fates I shared started going down rows of figures and jotting out notes. In an ideal world we’d have been out there with a battering ram, dragging Cosmo out by his ankles and clamping him in irons.

It was not, by any means, an ideal world. That didn’t stop me from wishing.

Beer would have been nice, I thought, letting my eyes slide shut.

****

Awareness was slow coming back.

How many hours had passed? I couldn’t be certain. I knew, in general, Taxi could be relied on to wake me if something were to happen that she considered urgent, or even vaguely interesting.

Soft words were spoken off to my left and somepony tittered in response.

Something did seem to be a bit off, but I couldn’t figure what, precisely, it was. My brain was chugging along like poorly oiled machinery, so I started with the basics. My hooves all seemed to be in operating order. I was still in the hilariously awful dangling bed. I was very comfortable and the bedsheets were warm. Very warm.

Too warm.

There was somepony in the bed with me.

I could feel their breath on my face.

On the one hoof, it could have been Queenie. Waking with that thing on my chest was a proper shock. Swift and Taxi were, in all likelihood, the two voices going back and forth but neither of them sounded close enough to be my mystery guest.

Most interesting, whoever it was didn’t quite smell like a filly.

Upon that realization, my eyes jerked open.

It took several seconds to pick out Scarlet Petals laying there amongst the pillows. His red coat provided excellent camouflage in the ridiculous bed. Propping his handsome face on one shoe, he smiled coyly down at me.

I weighed my options. Kicking him would likely have been very satisfying, but the satisfaction might have cost me some body parts next I saw the dragon. Besides, it’s entirely possible he’d have enjoyed it, and I didn’t need that kind of relationship with Stella’s secretary. Screaming might have worked, but I was still too dozy to get up a good head of anger. He hadn’t kissed me awake or anything like that. Still, a line had been crossed and warranted an appropriate response.

Rolling over, I dropped over the edge of the boat then turned around, planted my front hooves, and gave it a buck that made the entire hotel room shake. Being as it was dangling from the ceiling, the whole craft, cheeky male-whore included, swung into the nearest wall. Pillows flew all over the place as he let out a frightened whinny, dropping out onto the carpet in an undignified heap.

Trotting over, I put my hoof on his side, rolled him onto his back, then planted it on his chest. A few petals stuck to his mane as he put his hooves under his chin, looking up at me submissively. It would have to do.

“Scarlet,” I said, tapping him on the chest, “are we going to have another ‘sitting on your head’ issue or are you going to stay out of my bed?”

“You were just so cute, Detective Hardy!” he gushed. “I couldn’t bring myself to wake you.”

“My bed. Stay out. Period.” I gave him a good poke in the gut for emphasis and stepped back. “Now, anypony want to tell me why he’s here?”

Taxi, who hadn’t moved from her place at the table, pushed Cosmo’s ledger away. Most ponies would have missed the subtle signs, but over many years I’d learned to spot them; she was scared. Her eyes were bloodshot from poring over the columns and graphs, but it was the poise of her ears and the tightness of her shoulders that made it truly worrying.

Swift wasn’t even making an effort to disguise her discomfiture with whatever it was they’d learned. The leg with her pencil strapped to it was stiffly curled against her chest and her wingtips spilled right to the floor. She wasn’t frowning, exactly, but it wasn’t a happy expression.

Mouthing around until she caught the straw on a little glass of champagne near her elbow, Taxi slurped up half of it in one go before she replied, “I called Stella and filled him in on the general outlines of our day. He sent us Scarlet.”

Looking down, I stepped off of the stallion’s chest. “Are you here to liaise or are you just handing down the snake’s dictates?”

Tipping himself back onto all fours, the secretary stood and struck a loose approximation of a military pose. I don’t think any drill sergeant in the world would have accepted an attention that included that much flouncing. “Here to help, sir! Mistress Stella says the Stilettos stand at your call!”

I nodded. He relaxed as I set myself down on the edge of the dinghy to stop it swinging back and forth. “I hope we don’t need them,” I replied, then canted my head at Taxi. “We learn anything from the ledger?”

Swift sounded... Almost defeated. “It’s... sir... it’s awful!”

“Care to elaborate?”

Taxi dragged the little notepad Swift was taking down notes in over in front of her and flipped back the first three pages. “Good news? It’s Cosmo’s actual ledger. Bad news? We can’t use it.”

“What? You couldn’t break the code?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.

“No, I didn’t say that, did I?” she responded, sounding just a bit exasperated. “We just... can’t use this. This is well above my karmic pay-gradient, frankly. I can’t decide whether to burn it or just find a really deep hole to hide in.”

I moved over to the table and and picked up the pad, running my eyes down the facts and figures they’d managed to dig out of the book’s contents.

“Payments to a courier... destinations... let me see...” I dragged my hoof under each line, making sure I had them matched to their attendant numbers. “A half dozen payments to the Academy? Payments to the city planning office. Sweet Celestia, is that the mayor’s office?! He’s bought off a quarter of the city government!”

“It gets worse.” My driver chewed at her lip, which she only did when she was genuinely frightened. “We managed to translate part of the next page before we stopped. It’s his... blackmail payments.”

I turned the page.

“Two payments, five hundred, from Officer Spindle. Ace addiction. Fifteen payments, thirteen hundred from Judge Tingle Spark. Zap addiction, embezzling. Thirty payments, five thousand... from... mayor’s adjutant Tumbler... Underage... zebra prostitution.” I trailed off, unable to continue.

I’d known the ledgers might lead us to something sickening, but it’d become a ticking time-bomb sitting in our hooves. Each entry was one part of a complex death trap woven into the fabric of my city. We’d badly underestimated the reach of the King of Ace.

My brain was sliding quickly from drowsy fogginess to something resembling terror. Every sense sharpened to a razor’s edge.

“Sir...” Swift’s voice quivered over each word. “W-what do we do?”

It was an excellent question. Holding the book was likely to be extremely dangerous. Destroying it was unconscionable. Using it...

For a moment, I was tempted.

I'd long suspected that corruption ran deep through the city's veins, but here was solid proof of just how rotten the city was, and it was infuriating having that rot exit the realm of my cynical suspicions and become my solid, choking reality. More than anything else, I felt betrayed by the very ponies who'd charged me with solving murders and keeping order; ponies who'd let themselves slide so deeply into their desperate sins that they were paying sociopathic madmen a royal ransom just to keep their heads above the black, tarry surface of their own iniquity. Parted of me very much wanted to pull the trigger. To let it all go public. Let the city burn in the fires of its own hypocrisy and let the Princesses sort out the rest.

My cutie mark stung for a moment, chiding my brief, vengeful thoughts. It was right. Applied incorrectly, too many innocents would get caught in the backwash created by powerful ponies covering their flanks by any means at their disposal. On top of that, the ledger was essentially stolen evidence; inadmissible by any standard. We'd wind up doing a lot more damage than good.

If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn I could hear Juniper giggling somewhere nearby. He was always the sort who could work his way out of situations that seemed impossible with a laugh and a touch of quick thinking. He’d taught me many valuable lessons, but none more so than ‘Keep it simple.'

“...We eliminate Cosmo. The ledger is secondary to that until the Vivarium is safe. If he killed Ruby Blue, we arrest him. If he didn’t, we drive him out of town.” I picked the notepad off the floor and flipped it back onto the table beside the ledger. “Was there anything in there that is actually useful?”

Taxi hesitated then pulled the pad to her end of the table and began shuffling pages. “It... mmm... I... I don’t actually know if this is ‘useful’ per se, but I did notice a strange transaction.” She held out a particular section of Swift’s notes in her teeth, indicating the line with her toe.

“Fifty Flimsy Mimsy foal’s chemistry sets and twenty arcane viewers sent to... Sunny Days Juvenile Foster Facility?” I read the line twice to make sure I was matching up the purchase with its intended destination.

“That’s an awfully generous donation for a mob boss, don’t you think?” Scarlet added, sidling up beside me with more contact than the action required, but not enough to warrant smacking him, a line he clearly had experience treading.

Setting the evidence notes down, Taxi gave us both a very meaningful look. “Oh, it’s generous. Very generous. Especially considering Sunny Days has been closed for five years due to magical contamination.”

“That’s his drug factory.” I said, with certainty. “It’s the perfect venue. Arcane viewers for crystal drives aren’t cheap, but with what he’ll make off those recordings, he can afford it.”

Taxi nodded at the paper. “The date on that is yesterday. There’s another delivery schedule for next week that looks about the same size. Cosmo must be cleaning out every shop that sells viewers in the entire city. If the ledger's right, he’s got almost thirty already.”

Stepping away from Scarlet, who’d begun lightly grinding his flank against mine, I asked, “Did Svelte tell you how many hours’ worth of recordings she’s got?”

He shook his head. “Miss Svelte was most cooperative, but she could only give us general numbers. Thousands was her best answer. If they have a hundred viewers and groups of ponies watching all of them, then they could get through the whole thing... well, faster than I want to think about.”

“We need to move, then. How many Stilettos do we have?” I asked, picking up Swift’s pencil and finding a clean page on which to make a list of our immediate resources.

In general, it requires a decent sized army to attack any fortified criminal position, whether they’re expecting an attack or not. Fatalities were to be expected, but the situation warranted maximum force and with overwhelming numbers we might just pull it off without them.

Scarlett puffed out his chest with a proudly magnanimous smile and replied, “Four!”

“Four?!” I shouted, spitting the pencil to one side. The escort shrank back against the side of the bed, but his comfort was the last thing on my mind. “Four?! Four to take down a major drug lab?”

“Well, a zebra, a griffin hen, and two ponies... but... um... yes.” The escort squeaked like a mouse that’d been stepped on.

“We don’t even know how many ponies Cosmo has assigned to that place and my entire backup is four ponies? Why is the serpent suddenly getting stingy?! We’re facing our deaths here!” I snarled, smacking the bed beside his head.

“I-it’s all those who volunteered!” He whimpered, cringing. “Mistress Stella insisted they be volunteers! The rest are guarding the Heights!”

Bucking Scarlett was such a tempting proposition, and had I been confronted with that piece of information before my little nap, I probably would have. However, naps have a powerful restorative effect. I recommend them to anypony in a high stress job where you risk finding yourself with a higher than daily recommended dose of lead in your system.

Still, it left me with one unfortunate fact; while the prowess of the Stilettos in keeping the mob out of their neighborhoods was impossible to deny, as a tactical unit, seven persons just weren’t that many. While the element of surprise is an amazing force multiplier, ideal scenarios are few and far between, and I wasn’t pleased with the thought of going in nearly unsupported.

I drew in a breath, forcing myself not to choke on the room’s cloyingly sweet air. My mane was absolutely foul with whatever scent the hotel’s maid staff regularly rubbed into the pillows to cover the stink of sex. I wanted another beer. I would have strangled somepony with my bare hooves for a case of it, even that wretched trash Bloom somehow forced down every day.

Still, It was time to play the hand I’d been dealt. I knew Cosmo was holding aces. I just hoped that four of a kind was enough.

“Alright, where are these characters?” I asked Scarlett, picking him up and holding him upright until he got his legs under him.

“They’re waiting in one of the Vivarium annexes,” he replied, the unsettling flicker of adoration still in his eyes. “We have to pick them up, but I saw your cab. We should have enough room if the Tortellini twins are in the back and Edina sits on Zeta’s lap in the front. I can squeeze in with you and Hardy.”

Swift slid off of her chair and stomped over to Scarlett, shoving between us. She gave him what might have been an intimidating glare coming from just about any other pony. “You’re not coming.”

“The Mistress wants me there!” he responded, waving his hooves to ward her off. “Your grandmother wanted to come, but the Mistress said she had to stay behind and organize things.”

I let my shoulders slide back and asked, “Why does Stella want you there? You’re not a fighter, are you?”

“I... I know how the security system works. Those recordings have to be destroyed. He wants somepony there that he trusts implicitly to do it. I’m supposed to protect his interests...” Scarlet mumbled, lamely.

“Protect his interests?!” I snapped, poking at the other stallion’s shoulder. He recoiled, holding his foreleg to his chest like I’d punched him. “I’m protecting his damn interests! You want those recordings, you’re going to wait in the car for them. Got it?”

We needed Stella’s goodwill, but we didn't need a civilian in the line of fire. Scarlet was, thankfully, amenable. “I think I can live with that... so long as I know you’ll be coming back for me, Hardy,” he simpered, sweetly. My adam’s apple bobbed as I tried to keep down my lunch. Swift bit her tongue between her teeth and suppressed whatever comment was dancing around on its tip.

My driver, conversely, was never the soul of reservation. “Oh, Hardy...you’ll come back for him, won’t you? After all, the two of you make such an adorable-”

“Sweets, if you finish that sentence, I’m going to shoot you.”

“How? I’ve got your bullets in my glove box.”

“I’ve got pillows, damnit!”

Somepony knocked on the door, interrupting the conversation before it could escalate to myself wearing a fine array of ice-pack based accessories and/or Taxi picking feathers out of her teeth. Mostly out of habit, I adjusted the empty gun on my leg before I went to the door, flipping open the one-way porthole and pushing my eye against it.

Our porter in the absurd sailor outfit was there and, for once, he wasn’t wearing that smile that made him look like he’d suffered an attack from an aggressive amateur mortician; if anything, he looked a bit nervous.

I cracked the door and stuck my nose out. “What is it?” I asked, shortly. Not even the shattering of the porter's hollow facade could improve my mood right now.

“Er... sir, your coat is clean.” His lips tried to work their way up into something friendly, but they only managed a pained grimace. Turning sideways, he displayed my carefully folded trenchcoat. “We couldn’t empty the pockets, but we gave it a hoof wash...”

I practically leapt on him, snatching up my coat and swinging it around my shoulders. It felt miles better than it had any right to, even if my tie still had spots of grime on it. I struggled into the leg-holes and let out a languorous moan. The inner lining was still warm!

Our bellhop was staring. I followed his eyes to my chest, then down to my gun sitting in its holster.

“Is something the matter?” I pulled my coat shut, and his gaze went up to my face.

It took him some time to find words. “Errr... the... the lady asked that we have her... taxi... detailed...”

“...Yeah? And?”

He shot a queasy look over his shoulder.

“The v-valets just wanted to know... um... if y-you w-want your box of... heart... polished?”

Chapter 17: Meet the Gang

Starlight Over Detrot: Chapter 17: Meet The Gang

Congratulations on your departmental purchase/happenstance acquisition/black market smuggling of a Minotaurus Mk II 12-Gauge Saddle-mounted Semi-automatic Shotgun. Treat your weapon well, and it will provide you with years of service and maiming on demand; Treat it poorly, and there are a few documented cases where these weapons have sought revenge.

The Mk II can be equipped with a variety of optional features, including ghost-ring sighting, anti-telekinetic trigger guards, and filigree styling. It is best used in close-quarters or against fast-moving aerial targets; it is capable of stopping a berserking griffin even after you have insulted their progenitors.

-Do not store loaded, especially not with any form of magical round. They may get Up to Mischief.
-Given the proximity of the barrel to the pony ear, always wear ear protection when using this weapon.
-Keep out of reach of foals.
-Not to be used for the ballistic distribution of party favors.
-Not to be used for the ballistic distribution of party guests.
-This is a highly inefficient way of making cupcakes.
-Though we appreciate the business, do not stash all over town in case of shotgun emergency.

--Instructions from the manufacturer of the Minotaurus Mk II 12-Gauge Saddle-mounted Semi-automatic Shotgun

Paying our hotel bill at the High Seas quickly embedded itself in my brain as one of those memories you call up in the middle of the night to lambast yourself when sleep just won’t come.

The concierge didn’t even bother to fake a smile as Taxi handed her the room keys. Her facial expression resembled a pinched goldfish as she pushed the freshly shined and polished wooden box across the front desk and into my waiting legs. I picked it up, putting my ear to the top. It was probably my overactive imagination, but the faint beat of the organ inside sounded vaguely apologetic.

Explaining why we had left a still juicy and apparently very excitable pony heart in the car - an explanation that included the badge and the words 'need to know basis' far too many times to earn the trust of the not-unreasonably wary staff - was only half so awkward as when we passed the employee lounge to find the valet sobbing into a veggie hoagie in the corner. Taxi, being Taxi, made to go comfort him, and he very nearly stuffed himself in the refrigerator trying to get away from her.

In the end, our retreat from the villa High Seas was less than graceful, but it didn’t matter. I’d rested and showered, and while I did still smell like cheap shampoo, I was feeling measurably more myself. The heart wedged into my breast pocket squirmed and jumped occasionally and, while I’m ascribing an enchanted organ emotions, seemed enthusiastic about being out for a walk.

One of the other valets (not one that my thoughtlessness had traumatized for life) pulled the car around, dropped the keys into Taxi’s hoof, and held out his hat expectantly. I tossed him a half dozen bits. He frowned. I threw in six more and he rewarded me with a polite sniff, slapping his cap back on his head with the soft jingle of currency.

Luna’s moony tail-end, I hate these places...

****

After briefly consulting a map of the city to find Scarlet’s hidey hole and lay down the best route, we piled Scarlet, Swift, and myself into the back of the Night Trotter. Taxi slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and lit some especially nasty incense.

Long years of acquaintance were giving me vibrations of ‘trouble in paradise’ from my driver. I couldn’t tell if it was an actual disturbance in her emotional state, but she was definitely hiding something. I tried to catch her eye in the mirror, but she quickly glanced away, covering the evasion with a burst of speed and noise from the engine.

My partner was using Scarlet for a cushion, one huge wing draped over him while the other became a makeshift blanket. I was grateful she’d opted to sit between us, if only because I didn’t fancy any more little ‘incidents’ that might involve the need for kinetic demonstrations of my disinterest in him getting under my tail. Or vice versa.

For his part, the red stallion appeared to just be relaxing, but now and then I caught him peeking at me out of one lidded eye.

We turned into the early evening traffic just as the sun dropped low enough under the cloud cover to light up the streets in a vivid amber glow. It seemed like the whole city was holding its breath, as though it could see the violence about to ensue.

While Taxi had neglected to mention what sort of ‘magical contamination’ might be at our final destination, it was a good bet that any building condemned for severe enchantment was likely to make our assault an interesting affair. There were a few possible reasons the city might not have been willing to pick up the tab for a clean-up or demolition; the work might have been very dangerous, very costly, impossible, or some combination of all three. Buildings left to rot in Detrot tended to become havens for criminals, and space was at a premium. Sunny Days Foster Care Facility was therefore a rarity, and smart ponies are wary of going into any potential combat situation without enough information.

These characters the dragon was lending me were another unknown, and the most I could get from Scarlet was that they were ‘skilled.’ The wide range of distressing things that might have meant wasn’t helping my blood pressure any. Worse, Taxi’s slowly expanding enthusiasm for the job was starting to make my mane prickle. Since she’d left the force, getting her onto crime scenes wasn’t hard, but the actual policing of criminals was one line she was rarely willing to cross without considerable bribery. Something about Cosmo was changing that.

I realized then that I’d just assumed she’d be joining us for the assault; when I brought up the number of ponies going along during my conversation with Scarlet, she’d done nothing to dissuade me of that idea. She’d once been an extremely competent cop, aside from her total disregard for procedure and desperately poor marksponyship. I was glad to have her along, but we were going to have to sit down and have one of our little ‘talks’ about why she was so interested in Ruby Blue’s case.

****

Fifteen minutes later, we were pulling up to Scarlet’s ‘Vivarium Annex’ just inside the line of slightly nicer houses on the Heights’ outermost borders. There were a few ponies and various other beings hanging around under the street-lamps, but all were well dressed and none looked to be working.

I couldn’t describe my relief when I saw where we were going.

It wasn’t a public sex dungeon or a seedy porn shop. There weren’t any semen stains on the sidewalk or the overpowering musk of sweaty, heated bodies you could taste from a block away. It was a coffee shop; simple, friendly, and familiar. The sign over the glass door was stenciled letters with a little picture of a steaming cup beside it: Darling’s Morning Brew.

It sat sandwiched on the end of a row of shops just off the main thoroughfare. A whiff of fresh-baked bread tantalized my nose, and I decided that no matter what sort of terrible adventure we might be walking into, I wouldn’t do it on an empty stomach, nor uncaffeinated.

With a yawn and a big stretch, Swift raised her head and sniffed at the air. “Mmm... what smells good?”

Scarlet pulled himself up on the back seat with some full body yoga that involved far more butt wiggling than was probably necessary “We’re here. I hope Edina didn’t make a scene. Darling still won’t sell anything with meat in it.”

“Meat? I'm guessing Edina is our griffin?” I asked, pushing the car door open and stepping out onto the sidewalk. The scent of toasting bread was even stronger outside.

“That’s right. Bit eccentric, but she’s very good at what she does. Don’t let her scare you. She’s only half as crazy as she sounds.” Scarlet thought briefly, then added, “exactly half as crazy, come to think of it. Just don’t mention her height or she will hurt you.”

“I’ll remember that. What about the others?”

Tapping his chin with one rubberized hoof, the secretary considered his reply. “Let me see... The Tortellini twins are a bit on the quiet side. They both used to play hoofball with the Detrot Manticores. I don’t really know them personally. They tend to prefer to work ‘out of house’ when they’re not on guard duty. I do know their specialty is masochism and submission; somepony wants to work out some stress, they make good bucking bags, apparently. Funny thing... I’ve never seen them actually injured.”

“Should they have been?” I asked, shutting the car door as Swift and Scarlet stepped out the other side.

“If somepony is hitting you in the face with a hammer? Typically, yes.”

That brought me up short. I raised one eyebrow, squinted at him, then decided that this was not a line of inquiry I wished to pursue at the moment. “What about this zebra?”

“Mistress Zeta? She’s–” Scarlet bit his lip, trying to find the words, “–very... unusual. You may find a kindred spirit in her, Miss Taxi.”

At that, my driver’s ears perked up. “Really?”

“You and she share a certain joie de vivre.” He twirled his hooftip in a foppish circle, but before he could carry this comparison any further, he was derailed, presumably by the audible gurgle in his stomach. His mind followed. “Mmm, I wonder if Darling made bagels this morning.”

The heart in its box beat just a little faster against my breast and I couldn’t help but agree; Scarlet had said the magic word.

“Bagels?”

****

A little bell announced us as I pushed open the coffee shop’s front door and led my companions into a whole world of wonderful sights and smells. Darling’s couldn’t have been more inviting if the counter was made of solid gold. As it was, I had to just stand there for a few seconds taking in the ambiance.

The cafe was dotted with sagging, lightly coffee-stained sofas and armchairs which looked to have been looted from a thrift shop, reminding me of good friends gathered around the bar to exchange gossip after a hard day’s work. Every wall was covered in shockingly poor local art that might have been surrealist interpretations of sewer crawling or possibly bowls of ground meat. The floor was bare stone and tile of the sort that’s easy to wash with a hose if the owner is feeling ambitious.

A shaggy-maned professor in a threadbare vest crouched over stacks of ungraded tests on one of the private tables, slurping a cup of piping hot tea, while a doe-eyed unicorn with a badly dyed mane and about two dozen piercings tried to peck out the next great Equestrian novel on a typewriter at a booth.

The long counter was plastered with crusty, yellowed news articles about the shop; behind it, a fat, smiling buck with a bizarre mottled coat the color of bleu cheese was taking entire rows of bagels out of a wall-sized brick often and slapping them onto a tray beside the register. My tongue felt like it’d melted in my mouth.

I wanted bagels. I needed bagels.

I pulled my hat off and breathed deep, filling my lungs until I was lightheaded. The barista straightened the row of scaldingly hot bread rings and grinned as he recognized in me the hallmarks of an enthusiastic patron.

“Welcome to Darling’s, Detective!" he called out. "I’m Darling Brew. We’ve been expecting you!”

I had to stop myself from running to the counter like an over-eager foal in a candy store, which I managed to do just long enough to wonder, “Wait, how did you know I was coming?”

Darling showed off his cutie-mark with a turn to one side. Upon seeing a bowl of batter with a bullwhip dangling over one side, I froze my brain right there. Unless directly relevant to a case, I have long since learned not to ponder nor ask how ponies get their cutie-marks in this city. The answer often ruins my appetite, and I wasn't about to wreck the one I had.

“I used to work for Miss Stella. He called ahead.” Darling waved to Stella’s secretary, who’d come in behind me with Swift and Taxi fast on his heels, noses up high. “He said the police pony who was bringing Scarlet was to be given top tier treatment and all the bagels he could eat.”

If that gorgeous lizard had been in the little coffee shop at that moment, I would probably have given him a very public and extremely unwise show of affection.

“We’re waiting on four others. Could you let us know when they arrive?” I requested, pulling my tie a bit looser.

“Oh! Two of them are already here, in the back. The Stilettos use my employee lounge sometimes when they need a planning space outside the club. Can I get the three of you something to eat first?”

"Yes. Yes, you can." My belly felt ready to chew itself to death if I didn’t do something soon. “A basket full of your best onion, chive, and garlic bagels, plus a big pot of coffee. Let’s see this lounge.”

Darling lifted the counter on one side of the bar and held it open for me as I called over my partner and driver, who’d begun inspecting the truly awful art on the walls. We slid through and into the shop’s storage area.

****

The poorly lit halls weren’t deep but, even so, I was sad to leave the coffee shop’s main floor and its raft of delightful smells; It was the closest thing to a ‘homey’ environment I’d encountered since toppling off my bed to discover my apartment had been stripped of its character by a maniacally cleaning-obsessed cabbie.

We followed Darling’s chubby rear end through the halls and I began to hear raised voices coming back from somewhere up ahead. Soon, I was able to discern that it wasn’t really multiple voices; it was just one voice and it seemed to be arguing with itself.

“No! You stupid, stupid bird! You’re not listening! We can’t eat their livers or they’ll toss us in the clink!”

The pace of the speech changed to a marginally more languorous entreatement: “But I want pâté with a bit of honeyed kidney. Can’t we have honeyed kidney?”

The voice shifted back to its previous, sharper cadence. “You fool! You don’t serve kidney with liver! Now be silent! I hear someone coming.”

Stopping in front of my three companions I let out a long, exasperated sigh and flipped my coat off of my rear hip, glaring at my cutie-mark.

Well? I thought.

It was either being extremely stubborn or we were reasonably safe. While my cutie-mark and I’d had ‘disagreements’ in the past, most often when I really wanted to shoot somepony who’d cut me off in traffic, it didn’t often let me walk into a situation with a dangerous lunatic without at least a heads up.

I noticed Scarlet was staring at my flank as intently as I was, so I flipped my coat back over my my butt.

“Hardy?” Taxi murmured, sensing my concern, “I think we’re okay. Stella is looking out for number one.”

“Do you want to bank on his self-interest meaning we’ve got useful ‘volunteers’ for this insane mission?” I asked as Darling waited a bit further down the hall. The door to which he was leading us was at the end, with a hand-lettered sign that said ‘Employee Lounge’ on a bit of cardboard.

“I would.” She shrugged her saddlebags higher on her thighs, lifted her hoof, spit in it, then held it my way. “If he thought we were incompetent or incapable, he’d have someone besides you handling this. As is, I get the impression he likes to use minimum necessary force whenever he can, and he does seem to be a good judge of what ‘minimum necessary’ means.”

I thought about this. “...Fine. You're not wrong. For now, I’m not betting against that serpent. I think I’d end up poor very quickly if I did.” I gently pushed the proffered leg aside. “Though, if my liver ends up in a pâté, it’s your fault, Sweets.”

I strode after Darling, trying to radiate a self-confidence I didn’t really feel. No reason to let our little squad think we were anything less than absolutely assured of victory.

Then the coffeeshop owner pushed the lounge door open and a flying ceramic mug hit me squarely between the eyes.

****

Pain.

Pain is useful.

In my job, I’ve often experienced pain and, therefore, I’ve become familiar with its various flavors. There’s the pain of watching some rich jerk walk out of a court-room, after you had him dead to rights, because his lawyer found a procedural loophole. There’s the pain of being flung through a plate glass window by a prescription drug-abusing unicorn. There’s the pain of losing a partner.

Pain tells you that you’re alive and that your circumstances have become exciting.

My exciting circumstance, just then, was that I’d been pegged me in the face with an especially solid ‘Saving The World One Bit At A Time’ charity coffee cup. I was in pain, sitting on the floor holding my forehead with both hooves, with all airs of confidence gone, and the only thing keeping me from trying to shoot someone that I’d forgotten to reload my gun when I got in the car.

As the dizzying spin of the room slowed, I could finally see my attacker.

Having spent years around Sykes and his ilk, I’d taken for granted that huge size was a genetic side-benefit of being a griffin. This, as it turned out, was untrue. The snow-white beast standing on the coffee table with a cup in her claw and a second one clutched in her tail, ready to throw, was tiny even by pony standards. Her fluffy mane gave her enough height to be technically taller than Swift, but not by much.

Every inch of her body from the neck back was wrapped in enough whips to make her a walking advertisement for sadism. The various handles bobbed like wind chimes with every twitchy movement.

“Edina! Look what you’ve done!” Darling scolded, shoving the little griffin off the table. She squawked like a squeezed chicken and flopped onto the carpet, struggling up as the coffee shop owner tore the mugs away from her and set them back on the sideboard underneath. “If you want to make a mess in the Vivarium, knock yourself out, but in my place, you are not a top, you are not a domme, and you do not get to break the cookware!”

“You can’t do anything to me! I’m invincible!” Edina shrieked, tearing a cat-o-nine tails from around her neck and brandishing it threateningly. Her wings rose and her voice shifted into a screechy rail that felt somehow more avian than feline as she shouted, “Yeah! She’s right! You can’t touch us!”

From somewhere in the darkened back corner of the small room, a ball of light-blue yarn sailed out and bounced across the carpet in front of the griffin.

Now, it should be said that there are a few impulses remaining in the equine hindbrain that I find genuinely embarrassing. I’ve never liked thunder all that much and hated going to the farrier since I was a foal, but after seeing Edina react to a bouncing ball of string, I had to count myself momentarily lucky that I wasn’t even a little bit cat.

The griffin’s pupils dilated until they almost filled her eyes, then she was off, rolling head over tail, yarn in her beak, flopping back and forth on her back. It was a gruesome sight as the mighty hunter tore at her prey until she was so tangled up all she could do was wiggle her rear toes and chirp helplessly at us.

A cold, soft voice spoke beside me. “Edina, you really must control your feline half, or she is going to get you in trouble.”

I jerked back in alarm. My head spun around and I almost tipped off my hooves, catching myself on the door. The source was of the voice was a zebra mare who was very suddenly beside me, standing just over my shoulder. My driver, who is a pony normally known for strict observation of everything around her, let out a very un-Taxi-like squeal and rose into a fighting stance. Swift was teething her gun-bit, apparently not having gotten over the shock of seeing me brought down by a mug. We can only be grateful that her safety was still on, which prevented her from blowing a considerable hole in the creature I presumed to be Mistress Zeta.

She was odd even by zebra standards. Her mane was cut into a standard short, tight mohawk, but instead of the traditional tribal bangles or tattoos, she wore an elaborate dress made of coils of thin, fibrous rope layered one over top of another. Each length of rope was attached with a snapping button, for easy removal, to some sort of vest. Her hooves were wrapped in odd, tightly woven shoes whose bottoms looked like some kind of soft fabric.

I blinked and she was gone. Vanished, like a whisper of smoke in a high wind. Scarlet was just standing back with a pleased and slightly smug smile, watching the proceedings.

Taxi’s ears flattened against her head as she started to relax, then she let out a shrill yelp as Zeta reappeared beside her and said, matter-of-factly, “Your form is excellent, pony, but you must place your rear hoof slightly farther forward or you will lose balance on the return kick.”

Lightning isn’t that fast, and it’s definitely not that quiet.

My driver self-consciously moved her rear leg a few inches, then dropped back onto all fours and tried to tame her breathing. She muttered something in zebra, as she often did when whatever she had dancing around her tongue-tip was likely to cause stress in her friendships.

Zeta’s eyes widened and she said something back in the strange, flowing language.

Taxi raised one eyebrow then tentatively lifted her front leg. The striped mare bent forward and put her forehead against it briefly, then stepped back and raised her own hoof. Lowering her head, my driver rested it against the tip of Zeta’s toe. A wide smile broke out across the zebra’s face.

“Pony! You have been to zebra lands!” Zeta exclaimed, almost bouncing on her front legs.

Taxi looked abashed, an impression aided when she lowered her two-tone tail to the floor, “Actually, I just spent some time in a zebra commune a few years ago. I learned the language from a mare named Zarathustra. Her mother was one of the first zebra immigrants. Still rhymed every other sentence.”

Nodding sagely, Zeta quirked her mouth in a private grin. “Yes, yes. Her mother is quite the piece of work. Zarathustra is one of my cousins. I am glad she abandoned her mother’s habit. It makes conversation in Equestrian very awkward.” Spreading her forelegs wide, she rose up on her rear ones and bowed her head. “I name you ‘friend’. You may call me by my tribe name; Zeta.”

“I’m Taxi. Tribe name is Shine,” she replied, mirroring the gesture, “and I name you ‘friend’ as well.” Turning, Taxi pulled me forward with one leg for introductions while I rubbed my still-aching head. “This rude ass is Detective Hardy. Please pardon him if he’s too thick to perform greeting rituals. The uniform is Officer Swift.” My partner bobbed her head and cracked a small smile. “She’s still learning diplomacy.”

Zeta looked me up and down then studied Swift for a second before turning back. “Most appreciative of meeting you and your partner, Detective. Stella spoke highly. I do wish to apologize on behalf of my co-worker.” She inclined her nose in the direction of the trussed up griffin, who was still writhing on the carpet. “She is very competent, but is often of two minds, neither of which responds well to caffeine.” She gestured at a half-emptied coffee brewer sitting on the side-board.

The little griffin, seeing her private addiction, attempted to claw her way in the direction of the pot, although some weak scrabbling at the carpet was all she could manage still tied up. She tried a screech of furious defiance, but with the yarn wrapped tightly around her beak it came out as a sort of pissed-off honk.

When I looked back to where Zeta was just standing, she’d disappeared again, reappearing on the couch sometime between blinks, with a magazine in her hooves and the coffee pot on the cushion beside her. I peered over at Taxi and my teeth hurt with the effort not to laugh; her muzzle was set in a determined frown as she tried in vain to track whatever moves the zebra had just used. She wasn’t getting anywhere, and who could blame her? Zeta was spooky fast.

I was going to ask where the ‘Tortellini twins’ were when a noise like a small herd of elephants tromping down the hall sent Scarlet and Swift scattering out of the doorway. The two beings who came in after them stopped in the door, and their mere presence made the entire room feel smaller by half.

They were unicorns only by virtue of having four legs, a horn and cutie marks. Any resemblance to the equine form ended there. Edina might have been insane and Zeta unsettling, but those two were just plain scary.

Both of them wore full body hoofball uniforms, including face enclosing helmets with the Detrot Manticore emblazoned on the sides. At first, I thought they were wearing some type of pelt-suit with weird texturing underneath the outfits, but on closer inspection I realized that they were covered in a thick layer of stomach-turning scars.

Every inch of their bodies, from the backs of their eyelids to the tops of their rust colored hooves, was a mass of puffy, pink lines the like of which one could only receive from prolonged and very thorough torture. Some were newer than others and where tufts of fur did grow, they were grassy green. Just looking at the two of them made me ache.

Their horns jutted up through their helmets a good two inches each in total defiance of every hoofball safety rule I’d ever heard of, but since I hadn’t heard of any recent impalements on the field, I assumed they had a method. Peering around their sides against my better judgement, I flicked my eyes at their cutie-marks, which turned out to be a relatively innocuous: a pot of boiling water and an oven.

“Scarlet,” the one on the left rumbled. The giant stallion’s voice sounded like he had an industrial quarry in his throat. “We come when called. Where is the pain you promised us?”

Scarlet gulped audibly and sweat popped out on his forehead. “Errr, pain is coming, boys. Detective, these are the Tortellini Twins-” He nodded at the one on the left, then his brother. “Bake and Boil. Boys, this is Detective Hardy. He’s going to be directing things.”

The two stallion’s lifted scarred eyebrows in close unison, giving me a skeptical once-over.

“He’s so puny,” said Bake, holding his hoof at his chest height, which came just above my head.

“I could break him with my face,” Boil replied, tilting his helmet back to show a slightly flatter spot just below his horn.

“What pain will you give us, little stallion?” Bake wanted to know.

There was a moment’s silence punctuated only by the soft rustle of a griffin on too many stimulants trying to untie her leg from the side of her own head.

Policing, in my experience, is all about finding out what motivates people. I’d long ago discovered that motivations for most are relatively simple. But now and then, one runs across an individual or group of individuals whose needs and wants are completely foreign. In those instances, what makes a good cop is whether or not he can adjust to a given situation fast enough to take advantage of an opportunity.

I am a good cop.

I casually adjusted my tie, smoothly using the motion to allow my gun-bit and badge to swing between my front knees. As I guessed, two sets of piercingly green eyes followed the dangling objects. Stepping between them, I put my forelegs around their necks, drawing their heads together as I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Gentlecolts, the pain I'll give you lies within a drug facility in a magically contaminated hellhole guarded by some of the most dangerous, heavily-armed mobsters this city has ever seen. Your two bodies may be all that is between us and flying lead, crushing hooves, and whatever unspeakable damages the arcane can dream up.” I stepped back, holding my hooves wide as I gave them my fiercest grin. “You two want pain? I’ll throw you right into the dragon's teeth."

The room's reaction to my theatrics was focused silence. The twins themselves simply stared at me in stoic contemplation, while Taxi was pretending to be engrossed in the ceiling tiles. Swift just watched intently, with one of those uncomprehending looks she was going to be famous for if she wasn’t careful. Even Edina, sensing tension in the air, stopped struggling with the snarl of yarn long enough to look up and watch.

At last, the twins appeared to reach a decision. They straightened to their full height, then lowered helmeted heads to the floor, leaving their rear ends in the air. It took me a second to recognize the gesture for what it was: total submission. They replied with perfect synchronization, in voices that could grind stone. “We will have your pain.”

Thus far, since meeting the best the Stilettos had to offer, I’d been startled, assaulted, and insulted. It was indicative of the last few days of my life that I considered two enormous, scarrified hoofballers offering themselves to me for physical abuse only a mild aberration. The nap had mellowed me a bit, however, so using their scrotums for bucking-bags was less appealing than it might have been earlier in the day.

Instead, I gave them my best approving nod and turned to Darling Brew, who’d been standing quietly outside. “How about those bagels?”

****

Per Mistress Zeta’s warnings, we waited to free Edina until the proprietor returned with refreshments. Unlike our briefing at the Vivarium, the more relaxed atmosphere of Darling’s did lend itself to sitting down with coffee or, in Edina’s case, a flask of booze and calming herbs that Zeta nearly had to force down her throat. Whatever magic chemical was in that stuff calmed the griffin enough for us to cut her loose; sadly, it didn’t stop what seemed to be an ongoing argument.

“Detective is meat. We don’t work with meat,” Edina muttered in the voice I’d come to associate with her more predatory half.

“You work with meat all the time, you silly, flapping ninny!” her other half bit back.

“Yes, well, we don’t have to be happy about it!”

Zeta had the griffin propped up on the couch cushions and was gently cutting the last of the yarn out of her white leg feathers while the rest of us were gathered around the coffee table, devouring a mound of bagels and other pastries on a plastic tray.

The Tortellinis had, for reasons I preferred not to contemplate, elected to sit on the floor at my hooves whilst Scarlet curled up beside me, giving them slightly jealous looks now and then. Taxi was nibbling at a piece of fresh toast with one of her amused smiles, watching my discomfort as though etching it into her memory. Swift, meanwhile, had managed to get cream cheese into her feathers.

The zebra mare let out a long-suffering sigh as she plucked another piece of string from between her co-worker’s talons. Edina was still grumbling at herself as she snatched up a croissant and began tearing it to pieces, getting crumbs in her chest feathers. She seemed to have sunk into her own mind and was barely reacting to the presence of other beings in the room.

Swift was just ripping into her second pastry as I finished my third. After setting the last bite back on her plate, she gave voice to a question on all of our minds:

“Miss Zeta, what’s wrong with her?”

Neither the zebra nor the griffin considered this the faux pas it might have been; Zeta'd been anticipating the question, and reacted no more strongly than to run her hoof affectionately down Edina's neck. “Most take for granted that two animals can magically coexist within one body without there being... issues.” She turned Edina’s snowy face up to hers and the griffin simply continued to chew, her eyes unfocused. “In most griffins, those take the form of cravings. In her, it is distinct personalities. You ponies call it ‘moon touched’ when a mind fails to agree with the body upon what is real, yes?”

“So why isn’t she in a hospital?” Taxi asked, sweeping cream off her lower lip with her tongue. “She would probably benefit from therapy.”

“What therapy would you give her?” Zeta inquired, twirling her hoof in a circle over the griffin’s head. “A doctor telling her she’s mad? She knows that. Drugs? She would not be Edina, then. Her clients accept her as she is. They would miss her.”

Edina lifted her head and her eyes centered on me; they were sapphire blue, cool as a winter morning. Against my breast, Cosmo’s heart began to pound against the sides of its box like it was attempting escape.

We watched one another for some time and I slowly got the oddest sensation of being an animal, trapped behind glass, being watched by a child on a parent’s leash. That I understood my course made it no less binding. I was about into walk into the depths of a heavily enchanted bastion of criminality to face down an unknown number of opponents with only a small circle of volunteers at my back. Her psychosis meant she did as she pleased, even when that meant to follow a madpony like me to nearly certain death.

I envied her just a little.

“That’s it, then? You just let her be like that?” Taxi sounded slightly offended by the idea, though I couldn’t say why.

“She fights for the Vivarium,” Zeta answered, lowering her chin onto one of the throw pillows. “Like many there, she is safe only within the confines of Miss Stella’s protection. Otherwise, I’m certain she would be locked away and her skills... nay, her very being... would be wasted in attempts to ‘fix’ her.”

“So why this mission?”

Zeta chewed at her tongue self-consciously before she replied, “Edina volunteers for every mission. Safewords don’t matter in combat situations.”

****

For a while, the seven of us sat with our cups and munched on the heap of excellent pastries. I had the thought that my job might just be a lot more pleasant if I worked with prostitutes all the time; at the very least, I’d eat better.

When we were down to patting full bellies and slurping the dregs from the bottoms of coffee cups, Taxi pulled open her saddlebag and spilled a heap of rolled up papers across the table.

“While Hardy was asleep, I went by the Castle and spoke to the city planning office,” she told us, checking the numbers on each corner of the rolls until she found the one she was looking for. Unfurling it across the table, she used two coffee cups to hold down the top and bottom edges. It was a blueprint of some large, single story building. “This is Sunny Days Foster Home. I’m afraid I couldn’t get plans from anytime in the last ten years before it was closed, so these are a little out of date. Those files were ‘removed’ from the city archives. I’m betting some bits changed hooves to make that happen.”

“If Cosmo is running an industrial level drug operation, I doubt he’s leaving essential information in the hooves of the DPD,” I groused, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “I would have thought a half decent map wouldn’t be too much to ask, though.”

“You want a half decent map, you give me a half decent planning department. I flirted with the receptionist-filly for fifteen minutes just to get these.” The cabbie slapped the paper with the back of her hoof in irritation. “As it is, all she could tell me was there was ‘additional construction’. There’s not even a record of what sort of contamination is in there other than an estimated clean-up bill of something like twice the cost of rebuilding elsewhere.”

“So, scouting then. Zeta, you’re it.” I nodded towards the zebra. “We need entrances, exits, number of guards, and if you can a possible route of entry. Think you can handle that?”

Zeta clapped her hooves together excitedly, which didn’t make any noise with those special shoes but the sentiment was there. “I will be the eyes! I am most proficient!”

Swift raised her knee for attention. “Sir... what about the ladybugs?”

All eyes turned to me.

“What about them?” I asked, one ear tilting towards the rookie. “If my last look at what they’re up to is anything to go by, they’re sitting in my apartment messing with the radio and reading my case-files by now. They get nosey. It’s part of the price of doing business with them. I told you we can’t use them for advance scouting and we know the building is dangerous.”

The pegasus scratched her neck, thinking, which smeared more cream cheese into her throat fur. “Couldn’t we... I don’t know... couldn’t we have Miss Zeta wear one?”

“Yes, what are these ‘ladybugs’ the little one speaks of?” Zeta wanted to know.

Deciding showing was better than telling, I patted my mane until I found one of several tiny lumps still lurking just behind my left ear and wiggled it free. The insect had taken on the color of my pelt, most likely out of instinct rather than necessity, and was whirring quietly to itself; it was fast asleep.

“Oi! Wake up!” I gave the bug a light shake. It lifted its head, opening its jeweled eyes and giving its wings a quick buzz. “We’ve got a drug den in an extremely nasty magically infected environment and what might be a very lethal group of mobsters guarding it. We need to destroy all of it whilst probably outnumbered and outgunned. You in?”

The essy let off a piercing whistle and exploded into the air, doing a series of wild loops before settling back on my hoof.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, then. When we leave here, you make sure one of your little friends is on everyone in this room. Got it?” The creature turned in a circle, taking in all the faces around it before buzzing back to me and tilting backwards and forwards, imitating a nod.. “Excellent. You’re riding the stripes.” Turning to the zebra, I held the bug out. “Thinks of it as a camera that will pee in your mane if you leave it on too long. Keep it on you and we’ll be able to see your every move.”

Shuffling forward, Zeta sniffed at the little creature. “It’s... a parasprite?!” She did a quick walk backwards into the wall and slid to the floor.

“Errr... no. Just smells like one. They’re breeding-restricted by their enchantment and their autonomy contract. Go on.” I encouraged, flipping the essy off my toe.

The ladybug alighted in the zebra’s mane and wiggled down amongst the spiky black and white fur on the back of her neck. She reached back to touch the spot, then thought better of it.

“You police ponies have some most interesting equipment,” Zeta murmured.

“Tell me about it,” I replied, turning back to the blueprints and tracing the spaces one at a time. “I see two options here for our drug lab. The cafeteria or the auditorium.”

“What do you mean? Couldn’t he just use a classroom?” Scarlet asked, pointing at the rows of empty rooms. “If somepony wanted to be inconspicuous, that would be best, right?”

“Best for a small time operation, sure, but for a big one? No, that’s about efficiency,” Taxi pointed out. “Remember, King Cosmo hasn’t been worried about inconspicuous up to this point. That school is his. His version of ‘inconspicuous’ is making sure there’s nopony checking in on it. Spread a few bits around the school system and toss some at D.P.D.’s good-ol'-colt network and he’s got nothing to worry about. Nobody so much as goes to look.”

“Which means he’ll use the largest possible space with the best ventilation system,” I finished. “My money is on the auditorium. There are four easy exits, plus it backs up to the road on the far side.” I pointed at my partner, who popped to attention. “Swift, Zeta will point out guards up high. You need you to take down any she can’t immediately reach. I doubt they’ll have more than a lookout. Do it quietly, if you can. No shooting.”

The pegasus rose up on the tips of her toes, her chest fur standing up. “You can count on me, Sir! I’ve got an idea for an approach already!”

“Fine.” I waved towards the zebra’s mane where the ladybug hid. “Everyone gets a bug so if you can’t handle what’s up there yourself, order them to signal me or Zeta to assist. I have little doubt things are going to get loud, but I want us to have an advantageous position by the time they do.” I looked over at the Tortellini twins and Edina. “You lot, I assume, are for when things do get loud?”

The twins covered their muzzles with one hoof and chuckled heartily, before Boil replied, “Bullets sting.” Their horns began to glow and a mint green shine crept over the unicorn's body until he glittered like cut diamond; the shimmering field then sank into his skin.

“Ooh! Ooh! Let me do it!” Edina screeched, leaping up and unfurling two of her whips from her wings. They were an especially vicious looking pair, covered in bits of metal and tipped with a twist of barbed wire and a lead weight. Before anyone could stop her, she swung them both back, almost clipping my nose off, then brought the lashes down across Boil’s face.

I cringed backwards, expecting a spray of blood and the sound of crunching bone; the lead weight should have shattered a good chunk of the stallion’s cheek. Instead, a noise like a chiming bell rang through the lounge. The whip left a thin cut through the top five layers of skin before it stopped like it’d hit a brick wall and dropped to the rug.

The stallion just wiggled his nose and wiped a bit of blood onto the back of one fetlock. Swift, in fact, reacted far worse to the wound than its recipient.

“...What... Why wouldn’t you just leave the force field... you know... outside your skin?” she said, cringing.

Boil looked at her blankly, as though she’d just asked what music tastes like. “What fun would that be?”

Trying to recover my composure, I dusted my perfectly clean coat with my toe and said, “Right. Bulletproof. Lovely. You’re on point then. Just how good is that spell?”

Bake lifted his heavily padded shoulders and let them drop. “Don’t like being hit in the eyes.”

“Then you’ll like being shot in them even less.” I snatched up a pen from the table, drawing a line through the maze-like school building to the auditorium. Moving back along that route some distance, I found what I was looking for. “Here. This is the entry point for the ground pounders. The gym has an exterior and an interior entrance to the lock-rooms. It’s underground and off the likely patrol routes. There’s a maintenance tunnel that runs back behind the gym teacher’s office, through the boiler room, and comes up in what I’m guessing is a closet off of room one-oh-three.”

I tapped the classroom with my pencil then circled it.

“There’s a couple of windows the external scouts should be able to get in through. We regroup here before we hit the auditorium. If anypony doesn’t show or an alarm has gone up and they know we’re coming, we have the ladybugs call Scarlet.” The secretary sat up straighter at his name, listening attentively, as I continued. “He’ll call The Castle and tell them there’s a hydra’s nest or a swarm of parasprites breeding in there. Maybe a Mood Bomb. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Something to make ’em jump.”

“Sir...” said Swift, “I thought we were trying not to involve the rest of the DPD in this?”

Taxi gave me a concerned expression. “Yeah, I’m with Swift on this one. It’s not like we’d be able to call the cops on them then mysteriously disappear. You know standard operating procedure in an emergency raid situation. They’ll stop flight traffic and block off the road, then set up a series of shield and alert spells over the whole area. We won’t be able to sneak out. Even the fliers won’t be able to leave. So why tip off...”

“Because if things go all parasprite-shaped,” I explained, “our highest priority will be to keep the recordings from leaving to where we can’t trace them. If we tell them about a situation that requires them to bring out the riot squads, then they should be able to prevent anyone or anything from leaving the area - such as, say, certain blackmail recordings taken from the inside of a whorehouse.”

Swift looked at the address on the top left of the school map, then grimaced.

“Wait, is that... Chrysanthemum Lane?... Sir, there’s a PACT and D.P.D. pegasus station-house at three hundred feet above sea level less than a mile from there,” she protested. “I know, I trained there! Response time was less than eight minutes last year. They’ll have the building surrounded before you could get out of the detection perimeter!”

I lifted one of the last bagels on my hooftip and peered at it for a while. “Which is what we want. If it comes to that, we hope Stella or one of her agents can get the recordings from Evidence before Cosmo does. I won’t have any of you die here if it can be avoided. Anypony doesn’t show, we ditch. No sense in walking into a meat grinder.” I bit the side of the bagel, chewing the delicious doughy perfection, and added, as an afterthought, “Explaining why I’m in a drug den in the company of a bunch of ninja prostitutes will probably mean my job, though... so let’s keep it as a last resort.”

****

Fitting seven creatures into the Night Trotter involved a more intimate experience of my companions than I was hoping for. At one point, Zeta volunteered to ride on the roof if necessary. But by moving the front seats forward a few inches, putting Edina on the floor with another ball of yarn to keep her indignant squalling to a minimum, and letting Swift spill half across my back and half across Scarlet’s, we were able to get everyone in. The engine turned, and we were off.

Bake sat beside Taxi, eyeing her horribly scarred flank with intense interest. After some minutes, she noticed his gaze and shuffled her saddles up to cover her rear end. Rather than take offense, he gave her a broad, if extremely ugly, grin.

Rather than risk conversation with him, she raised her voice and asked, “Hey, Hardy? What’s the plan, assuming we pull this insanity off?”

I pushed Swift's wing off of my head, ceasing to use it for a sun visor. “The plan? Cosmo volunteers for Tartarus or leaves the country for the rest of his life. I’m afraid I haven’t thought much past that.”

“Goodie. I want a raise once this is done...”

“You want to back out, you can always go take that job at Luna Cab.”

“Nahhh, I’d have to handle actual passengers then.” A note of irritation entered her words. “I wouldn’t be able to punch any of them in the crotch if they didn’t stop staring at my ass!”

Boil’s cheeks flared bright red and his brother smacked him on the back of the head.

“Am sorry.” The big hoofball player apologized, fixing his helmet, “Most interesting scars ever seen. Very pretty. Never saw cutie-mark not grow back before.”

“Keep your eyes to yourself, kiddo,” my driver snapped. “I might be half your size but I’ll find a way to make you hurt that you won’t like.”

The stallion held out his hoof. “I give you coupon if you want to try one day, pretty lady.”

My driver looked ready to plow us into a fire hydrant; I hurriedly changed the subject. “Could we swing by Requisitions, while we’re on the way? I don’t think my revolver is going to cut it in there.”

Taxi waved her hoof at the rear seats, indicating the trunk. “I went while you were asleep. There’s extra firepower for you and a vest. I managed to find a couple of clips for Masamane,” a little smile touched her lips, “...plus a little something I scrounged together for myself,” she added, in a much lower voice.

“What?!” I barked and tried to leap to my hooves, jostling Swift, who nearly pitched over on top of Edina’s bound-up body down on the floor.

“Hey, I followed your guidelines!” Taxi replied, defensively, “Nothing lethal!”

My back was starting to ache from having my partner’s neck pressed into my vertebrae with the constant motion of the car grinding them together, so I wasn’t much in the mood to argue.

“...Fine. What about the Chief?” I asked, poking my head up to see where exactly we were. There wasn’t much to see. The evening was coming on quick and night would soon fall. The weather factories were still running, but must have been working on a shipment of rain-clouds because it was still dry out. “I assume you couldn’t avoid a report.”

“I avoided a report just fine,” Taxi sniggered. “Swift’s report has us gallivanting off to some hunting cabin outside the city. Jane Pony ‘may have stayed there.' It’s off the PACT patrol routes.”

“Hence, the weaponry.” I pawed at my partner’s shoulder until she lifted her head. “I assume you were using ‘may have stayed’ in the same cosmic sense I ‘may’ have one day breathed the same air as Princess Celestia, right?”

“Errr... yes, sir.”

“Good kid.”

****

During the boom years, Detrot was a center, not only of industry, but of education. The Arcane Academy decided to make its home here, instead of Manehattan or one of the other cities most likely to host a grand university. While they might have regretted that decision in following years, at the time it seemed like a brilliant idea.

We were the heart of innovation for the war effort and the greatest defensive bastion against the dragons. The name ‘Detrot’ meant something, as a point of culture and development.

Ponies back then understood the essential truth that their children were their only hope for a grand future. Those children had opportunities that were envied across the whole of the world.

Those were good years.

The Sunny Days Juvenile Foster Care was a heaped-up cadaverous construct, full of desiccated dreams. They were tasked with making sure even the least amongst them, the orphaned foals of dead miners, city workers, and soldiers lost in the Crusades, would have an education and a home.

They failed.

Had it been abandoned because of the collapse of the economy or because it was no longer needed, then letting it sit fallow might have been reasonably justified as a monument to a great experiment.

Sudden magical contamination had all the poetry of being pasted by a bus while crossing the street. It reminded ponies just a bit too much of their own, extremely potent mortality and that the supposed destinies granted by cutie marks could still all be wiped out in an instant if one failed to look both ways before crossing, and hence it was shoved into one of the city’s innumerable back drawers; too difficult to reclaim, and too depressing to eulogize.

****

“Stop the car,” I ordered, waving one leg in the rear view mirror.

“What?!” Taxi pulled back on the throttle but didn’t brake. “We’re still a mile from the school!”

“We’re walking the rest of the way.” I answered, as she steered us to the curb. “Zeta needs time to get ahead and scout our approach. That and I don’t know if you noticed or not, but a souped up hack isn’t exactly a sneaky vehicle. Quietly, remember?” At that, the cabbie’s expression grew full of apprehension and I knew, then, that something was definitely off the rails. “Quietly... isn’t... a problem... is it?”

“N-no,” she stammered, as she found six sets of eyes on her. “...We should get out now.”

Rather than fuss with opening doors, Swift just rolled down the back window and crawled out onto the pavement. Scarlet had to flop onto his back, then shimmy his hips down until he could roll forward. I dragged myself out after them and found Zeta, having somehow squirreled passed me, already helping Taxi unwedge Boil from the passenger seat; fitting him in the front really was a minor miracle. Bake, meanwhile, backed out and picked up Edina by the scruff of her neck, slinging her over his shoulders like a sack of grain.

In the growing darkness of mid-evening, I looked up over the skyline, trying to see where exactly we’d pulled up. Taxi was always my sense of direction and location and I’d often had to trust that she’d brought me within throwing distance of wherever I needed to be.

We seemed to be in some kind of industrial park. The surrounding buildings were the sort of nondescript, boxy warehouses built by architects uninterested in city beautification. Their sole aesthetic virtue was that they radiated ‘purpose,’ but there was little else.

Smoke stacks, silenced until the morrow, bit into the starry horizon like deformed teeth. I shivered, despite the unseasonable warmth of the evening. The thick storm clouds directly overhead boiled and belched, but held their peace. A street lamp further up the road buzzed, then flicked on as it got dark enough for the bulb to decide we weren’t getting enough of the bleak details of the empty street.

I could still hear the vibrantly active parts of the city, in the distance. Out there, ponies were laughing, fighting, screwing, and living, but in the desolate after-hours of the manufacturing district, with all the workers gone to pub and hearth, the area around Sunny Days felt like it was in a lonely sleep, waiting for the mercy of dawn.

Lost deep in my introspection, it was some time before I noticed the others were watching me, waiting for orders.

“Whew... alright, Sweets.” My own voice sounded very loud in my ears. “Pop the trunk. Let’s see what you got.”

With a very telling hesitancy, Taxi reached under the steering wheel and hit a catch. The car’s boot snapped open smartly and there was sharp intake of breath all round.

I resolved then and there: Screw a death threat. I’m sending Requisitions a cheesecake full of dynamite.

And I resolved this because what my driver had ‘scrounged together’ was a Mark V PEACE Cannon.

****

Usually when PACT and the Detrot Police Department are forced to work together for any reason, there is considerable tension. While regular drilling against the chance of a rogue marauding dragon attack does lend both groups the chance to let off some steam, nothing really manages to completely quell the upset caused by having two policing forces with overlapping jurisdictions.

Despite this, there have been documented times in the history of both agencies where they worked together brilliantly.

One such instance happened during an especially bad run of city-wide unemployment which included a speculative boom and bust in food stocks that left the price of bread sky high. The DPD were ‘encouraged’ to find some means of dealing with civil unrest that didn’t leave lots of dead bodies for the evening news to turn into a morbid collage. As the Castle’s entire arsenal was already largely bought wholesale from the ‘low collateral’ section of the PACT weapons catalogue, it meant new research, and while we didn’t have the labs for that, the eggheads at PACT were more than happy to throw their brains at coming up with non-lethal alternatives.

Their magnum opus was the Polite Enjoinder Against Criminal Enterprise.

****

Taxi hefted the huge blaster out of the trunk and slung its strap around her neck, grunting at the added weight. The PEACE was a modified riot gun, almost a third my driver’s body length in size, with a barrel I could stick my whole hoof into. There was a bottom mounting for saddle fire, and I noted she’d gone for the drum-fed option rather than clip fire. Weirdly, she’d kept the mountings along the weapon to be fired by creatures with fingers, and simply tied a string around the trigger with a bit for her teeth.

It was a gorgeous weapon, all things considered, and in the hooves of any other pony I’d have been pleased to have it along.

“A PEACE Cannon?! Are you out of your little yellow mind?!” I shouted, slamming my forehead against the side of the car.

My driver lifted her nose and sniffed, haughtily, “I’ve taken the training course on this firearm, thank you very much! I passed with flying colors. You’re just jealous.”

“Who in Equestria let you on a gun range long enough to take a training course?!”

She rolled her eyes and patted the gun like an old friend. “You remember that pegasus mare I dated last year? Placid Skies?”

“The PACT twit with the lisp?” I sneered, shoving my hat back on my head.

“Yes, that’s her,” she acknowledged. “She took me to the range. Her special talent is patience! Something some of us, who shall go unnamed, could do with!”

“I... how... how did you even get that thing?!”

“Requisitions likes me, apparently.” My driver gave an impudent little shrug. “At first I told them it was for you and they were... for some reason, very reluctant, but then I said it was for me and they practically dumped it in my lap. I’ve got all different kinds of ammo, too!”

Pushing the cannon’s empty case to one side, she dug out an entire carton of extra drums in all the colors of the rainbow. Thanks to the idiosyncracy of the ammo manufacturer, I didn’t recognize any of them by name, but ‘Tom’s Revenge’ and ‘Party Pooper’ both sounded like unpleasant things to be hit with.

Unfortunately, Taxi was already to the stage where she was caressing the multi-chambered monster like a newborn; wrestling it away from her would have required Zeta’s assistance, or a short emergency room stay. More importantly, it would also have delayed us. I wanted to get moving sooner rather than later.

Damn.

“If you ever shoot me with this gun... accident or not, I’m shooting back. Understood?”

Ratcheting the action bar back, she fitted a drum marked ‘Hush Now’ under the barrel, then stood up on her rear legs, checking the safety. “Understood. I promise, I’m a much better shot than I used to be! Just... you know, let me go first, okay?”

“By all means.” I dragged the cannon’s box out and tossed it onto the curb, then went back to the trunk. In spite of the high probability I was going to be fragged by my driver before the night was out, I couldn’t fight the big grin spilling across my muzzle; Taxi knew me too well.

A police-issue Minotaurus shotgun, a reliable oldie-but-goodie of a weapon, sat there wrapped in cellophane, alongside two boxes of mouth-loadable quick clips for earth ponies. Alongside them was a series of intricate straps, plus a second trigger bit and a full-chest flak jacket.

I doffed my coat, picking up the bulletproof vest and sticking my head through. I wrestled with the buckles until one of the Tortellini twins fastened them in place with a burst of magic. The dark blue armor covered my chest and spine to just above my tail and wrapped around my side in places it wouldn’t otherwise interfere with the firing of my gun. It wasn’t perfect protection and it definitely wasn’t comfortable, but I wouldn’t be walking bullet bait either.

Turning back, I lifted the shotgun in my teeth and laid it on the curbside.

“Oh sir! I want one!” Swift gushed.

“You can have one when you grow up, kid,” I replied, winking at her.

My partner stiffened, then gave her wings a flap that blew air right up my tail. “I’m so going to get you for that, sir.”

I laughed, cradling the weapon to my chest with one foreleg and smiling gratefully at my driver. “If I die tonight, Sweets, I think I’ll die happy.”

The cabbie just rolled her eyes, breathed on her hoof, and smugly polished the side of her cannon’s barrel.

“Your lady take good care of you, little stallion,” Bake commented, levitating the straps out of the trunk.

Mistress Zeta helped me attach the extra belts to my gun harness, expertly wiggling the new holster to make sure it was tight on my side as Boil unwrapped the beauty itself. I turned so he could fit the shotgun’s stock into place, then sucked in a breath as they connected my rear leg to the cartridge eject and adjusted it.

Draping the second trigger around my neck, I picked up the shotgun’s bit and I tugged until I heard the ear-pleasing click of the safety. Finally, I stuffed several additional cartridges in my front pocket and swept my jacket back on.

“Alright! Scarlet, front and center!” I barked and Stella’s secretary almost threw himself at my knees.

“Yes, Detective?”

“You’re waiting in the car. Don’t touch the stereo or Taxi will use pressure points to make all the blood in your body flow backwards.”

He nodded and climbed into the back seat, incidentally curling up in my warm spot.

“Swift.” My partner, who’d been checking her kit and setting her fresh clips in her vest, raised her head. I lifted my chin towards the sky. “Get up high and find the school. Scout from as high as you can and don’t get seen. Wait for my signal and watch for Zeta. Tell your ladybug to have hers chirp at her if she’s about to walk into something she can’t handle. If you feel a tingle, that’s me watching you. One chirp for yes, two chirps for no, three chirps for ‘wait’ and four for ‘attack’. You hear one continuous noise, you get out. That’s pull back. You all got me?”

“Yes, sir!” Swift splayed her wings and blew off the ground in a flash of orange, sailing off towards the rooftops, leaving behind a microburst that sent my mane flapping in my eyes.

I let out a low breath and turned to face the darkened street.

Seven against an unknown force with only surprise to our advantage. Seven to save the lives of hundreds. Maybe even thousands.

The fates had decreed a night of blood and mayhem. The thin air, flavored with smoke from the smoldering forges, felt crisp as good wine and sweet as my mother’s pie. I didn’t need Taxi’s intuition to tell me death was breathing down our necks; I could feel his rattling laughter in my bones as he toasted the seven fools coming to meet him.

It felt good.

I inhaled deeply, savoring the aroma of the Grim Wrangler's scotch... then pushed my chest out and grinned my maddest grin.

“We’re ready. Cosmo won’t know what hit him.”

****

“Hardy?”

“What is it, Sweets?”

“The school’s the other way.”

“Oh... uh... right."

Chapter 18: School Dance

Starlight Over Detrot: Chapter 18: School Dance

Early on in their dealings with hostile megafauna and aggressive sentient species, ponykind latched onto the truth that a sufficiently overwhelming display of force applied over a very short period of time and in the right way could end battles with very few actual volleys being fired. This formed the basis for what Equestrian military strategists would term the "Total Surprise Doctrine," or, as pegasi would come to know it, "Shock and Awesome."

The Total Surprise Doctrine is as follows: Victory occurs when your opponent has lost the will to fight.

That's it. That is the core of the doctrine. The only thing close to revolutionary about this concept in warfare is the realization that this statement is not necessarily followed by corollaries like "Because he has a hole in his torso the size of an infant."

It's an idea that remains very popular among Equestrian forces for the simple reason that ponykind, on average, takes very little joy in killing. They appreciate the idea that, instead of simply murdering your foes until the remainder surrender, you scare the manure out of them. You attack from unseen angles, or with blinding and explosive displays of force. You use magic to turn the very environment against your opponents. You confuse their senses, blind them, deafen them, cut off their communications and leave them terrified and alone.

You wield weapons like the Cloudhammer Lightning Rifle, whose blinding flash and building-quaking reverberations have easily been responsible for more battlefield accomplishment than the inaccurate voltage it delivers, or the ever-versatile Partytime Grenade Launcher, capable of accepting a wide variety of blinding and debilitating payloads. You create panic and immediate leg-wetting fear without having to create a large number of bodies to go with it.

In short, you send the message that fighting is useless, because you have already won. Yet it is only when you have successfully sent that message that you have actually achieved victory.

--The Scholar

I’ve had fifteen years of working with the Detrot Police Department, and after all that time, the oddballs I’m involved with with never cease to amaze me. All things considered, though, I find that complete weirdos provide me with a strange kind of comfort.

Most ponies think of themselves and their neighbors as ‘normal’, even under the weight of enormous evidence to the contrary. I was guilty of this when I was younger, but years of prying into the dirty secrets of dead and killer ponies in a corruption-steeped city lends itself to looking at normality with a very different set of eyes.

Normal is a facade, a social lubricant intended to make meaningless interactions easier. Those who wear it may indeed simply be boring, they might be repressed, but they might also be sociopaths. Sometimes the most visible deviations you get are little ticks that appear through the cracks. I’ve peeked into the lives of enough snapped accountants and killer clerks to know that behind the dullest visage, there could easily exist a stallion picking his next victim.

Conversely, experience has taught me that when a being happily wears their oddity on their sleeves, no matter how freakish they might seem, they’re usually the ones I can trust when things get wild.

By that logic, I could not have wished for a more trustworthy cohort.

****

During our trek to the school, Zeta slipped between two buildings into what I was sure was a dead end. As we passed and I stuck my head into the alley, she had, again, vanished.

By contrast, as we continued, I came to the quick realization that neither of the Tortellini Twins were especially stealthy.

“You two are going to get us all shot. You’re clomping along behind me with all the regard for silence of a passing train.” The two scarred masses of horseflesh managed to look creepily apologetic, while I rubbed my chin, thinking. At last, I shook my head and turned, pointing into the nearest alley. “Taxi, could you peel some of that string off Edina and cover their hooves with a bit of the stuffing from those uniforms?”

The griffin shifted on Bake’s back, possessively pulling more yarn around herself, while the twins opened their mouths to argue. Before they could, my driver grabbed the two stallions around the necks, yanking them back into the darkness of the alley. “With pleasure.”

“I’m going to check in on Swift and Zeta. Sunshine, sunshine...”

****

Flashing images, pinches of sensation from all directions, and a rush that would have given me a nasty ache in the neck if there’d been any actual motion. This meant that the ladybug network was having a heck of a time processing something. I caught a burst of stripes here and there, then pictures of my apartment with a toilet paper roll spilled across the living room, followed by a snatch of ceiling, then lightning seen the wrong way up.

‘What’s the issue?’ I thought at the web of eyes. ‘Show me Zeta, already!’

The entire system hiccuped. Every image ran backwards for a half second, then caught up with itself; a psychic shrug.

‘You can’t be serious. Alright, fine. Show me Queenie!’

My consciousness burst into fragments, oozing backwards some distance until I landed in a mid-town hotel in one of their ‘business’ class rooms, looking at a bed through the eyes of several dozen insects all gathered together atop a lampshade. The clarity was so perfect I could have sworn I saw lint in the carpet even while floating near the ceiling. More ladybugs in one place tend to give a better view of any given location, and that room was absolutely swarming with them.

Queenie’s great red and black bulk was tucked underneath the bedcovers while a griffin soap opera played at something near maximum volume on the television in the corner. Every few seconds somepony would bang on the wall, and was studiously ignored in favor of the show. I would have waved my legs for attention, were there any to wave, but as it was. I was stuck waiting for the commercial. It couldn’t come soon enough; I was damned near getting interested in the story.

Just when I was starting to wonder who really was the father of Rachel’s egg, it cut to an ad for an ointment to treat ear mites, and the ladybugs’ attention shifted. Stretching her carapaced wings and waving them with a hum that shook the bedposts, Queenie slid from under the covers and crawled to the edge. Shuffling through the junk on the bedside, it pulled out a pack of Canterlot Reds, and shook one out. One of the smaller ladybugs approached with a lit match and it sucked in a deep, healthy drag of blue smoke.

“Ahhh, ponies invent the finest things, they do! Too bad my smaller selves cannot enjoy them,” it burbled, rolling the cigarette to one side of its mandibles before shifting its attention to the point near the ceiling from which the most of my psyche was peering down. “Detective! We have found ourselves most entertained and would like to continue our association for many long times! You are having a trouble?”

‘You’re damn right I am. I can’t see Zeta. The zebra.’ I tried to sound exasperated, but knowing ladybugs, the sentiment was likely lost.

“Oh, yes!” The ladybug cocked an eye at the TV, making sure it was still on commercial before it replied, “The stripy one is most interesting. We are, ourselves, having trouble seeing her! The one who rides with her is feeling somewhat ill.”

‘Why can’t I see through that one’s eyes?’

“We did try.” Queenie emitted a faint whine. “She moves very quickly and much in darkness.”

‘Queenie, I need to be able to see her! Can you make it happen or not?’

“Ours cannot keep up, nor can we catch glimpses when she moves in shadow but-.” The giant insect hesitated, then plowed on, “-we might have a thing we can do. We have learned many things of ourselves.”

‘Well, do it then!’

“We warn you, Detective.” There was a note of uncharacteristic seriousness in the way its lower wings buzzed out each word. “Thiis may be extremely unsettling. Mightn’t we show you your malfunctioning pegasus first?”

‘Swift?’

“She is less stomach turning.” Queenie whined, rising off the bed a few inches. “We have not done this in some time and would like to get our eye in first, before we show you the fast stripes. There’s only a small chance your mind may become disassociated from your body.”

‘Go ahead and... wait, what?!’

****

Rather than the usual sensations of being split into many little chunks, I was formed into a single strand of awareness, stretched along a vast distance. All the other imagery usually characterizing the ladybug network dropped away, until there was only empty space with one brilliantly white line down which I traveled. I shot along that line until I stopped so suddenly it felt like I ought to have had some form of spinal damage. My eyes opened.

The panoramic cityscape that greeted me was nothing short of breathtaking.

I love my city, though it isn’t a fairytale romance; I love it like one might love a crazy marefriend prone to starting kitchenware-flinging arguments. I don’t trust it. I can’t reason with it. I keep one eye on it in case it becomes the source vector for an incoming crock pot. Often, all I can do is poke around its nooks and crannies and hope to make it a slightly happier place. But I’d never ditch it for another.

And as I looked down upon the sprawling Equestrian hive through surprisingly crystal-clear vision, I remembered why.

I was somewhere over the city, looking down from a great height. I felt my heart beat faster as I gazed towards the distance, upon the gleaming spires of glass and concrete downtown, pointing towards the sky like a hundred defiant hooves raised against the daunting forces of physics. A few even had the audacity to insert themselves into the overcast clouds, jamming their way into heaven’s foyer with muddy horseshoes and inquiring brusquely what the heavens intended to do about it.

Beneath and between the proud towers were torrents of life and activity. Vehicles coursed along the street grid, brilliant headlamps creating the impression of choreographed fireflies in flowing streams of light.

Amidst politicking and corruption and drugs and murder and hungry megafauna and cosmic threats from ancient beings, pony civilization had managed to put aside all of that crap long enough to build this awesome vision of urban beauty that, more than any other sight, filled me with a sense of unreasonable comfort. For just a moment, I thought: We did this. We built this. We can do anything. Everything is going to be alright.

Then I realized my tummy was on something soft, that there was a heavy presence on my back and sides, and between my rear legs I had the oddest feeling that important parts were missing.

Something wasn’t alright.

I tried to will myself to look down at my hooves but my head wouldn’t move.

‘Kid?’

My ears pricked. except they weren’t my ears; whatever I’d been expecting from the ladybugs, it wasn’t to end up tucked behind my partner’s eyes. Her scalp was tingling like mad, which signaled her ladybug was in use. The sensation was about five times as strong as it usually was.

“Sir? Is that you?” She rubbed her head, bumping against the bug which was vibrating with the internal stresses of keeping the link open.

‘Yes! Yes, it is!’ There was no response. I wondered, ‘Can she hear me?’’

Swift continued looking about in all directions, so I took that to mean she couldn’t. That was entirely in keeping with the philosophy of the pony who’d constructed the ladybugs; do one thing extremely well and screw everything else. Ladybugs listen. That’s pretty much what they’re best at. Still, I suppose I should have doubted that ‘brain invasion’ was anywhere in the official documentation.

‘Alright, chirp once for ‘yes’ then.’

The ladybug let out an eardrum busting shriek and Swift gasped and clutched at her ear, scrambling for purchased with her front hooves. “Too loud! Eesh!” Her insect hummed a much quieter apology. “That’s better. Alright, sir, I’m trying to get closer. Give me a few minutes. This thing doesn’t move very fast.”

The cloud she’d chosen for her perch was a nice, fluffy little number just a few shades lighter than the sky itself. Her rear legs clamped tightly around it while she used her front legs to steer, beating her wings occasionally to drive herself lower. Sitting on a cloud was a strange experience, but considering my bed at home had often been compared to laying on rocks with nails pounded into them, I could understand the appeal.

Being a mare was surprisingly less bizarre than being a pegasus. Her wings kept moving and twitching with the air passing through their feathers.

We began a slow coast over a large area which seemed flatter than the rest of the manufacturing district. Several boxy, single story buildings spilled across what I estimated to be about five acres of overgrown grassland, all linked with closed-over halls and corridors. The school was abutted on either side by what I thought might be factories. Their stacks spewed a thick, chemical smoke that made my... no, her lungs ache.

“Sir, is that the school?”

One chirp.

“Yes, sir. Closing in.”

Viewing Sunny Days through pegasus eyes, I could make out innumerable little details that my own relatively weak earth pony vision just wouldn’t pick up at such distance. The pebbles on the rooftop near the rear of the largest building were littered with cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. Drifting a bit closer, I picked up motion behind one of the rooftop heating units.

As we eased around the air-conditioner, I felt Swift’s cheeks burn as she realized the two ponies behind it were... otherwise engaged, and not likely to be looking for aerial targets. A heavyset mare and a very lanky stallion were humping their brains out, having a grand old time. Nearby, two light hunting rifles lay propped against the side of the rooftop with a couple of coffee mugs beside them.

“Should I take them out, sir?”

It was sorely tempting to have her leap out on two ponies screwing, but I decided it wasn’t necessarily the best tactic while our information was incomplete. We needed to know what Zeta could see, whether or not there were others. If we couldn’t take out the exterior guards, we might just settle for sneaking in, knowing they’ll be coming when the alarm is raised.

Tell her to wait.

The ladybug chirped thrice, then my mind slid back into the interstitial void.

****

Dropping back into my own body, my nose was assailed by the stink of rotting garbage. I tried to lift myself up only to discover my hooves still flailing in mid-air, dangling off either side of a very wide and muscular back. Raising my head, I caught a glimpse of the oven cutie-mark. I was being carried by Bake.

“Where are we?” The smell was starting to make my nose burn. “Ugh...and could you have picked another place to stop?” I complained, before a hoof was slapped across my mouth. Taxi stepped around Bake, motioning toward the other end of the short alley. I followed her leg with my eyes as she took her toe away from my lips.

We’d moved during my little excursion into pegasushood. While the streetlights on this block all seemed to be out, there was enough light filtering down from the factories to give everything an orange gleam. In the far distance, a single star glared down at me from just above the horizon line. For some reason, my chest tightened for a second before the glittering point of light was lost amid the cloud cover.

As my vision adjusted, I made out the twisted shape of a tall, wrought iron fence across the street. Above the arched gates, the words ‘Sunny Days Foster Care’ were spelled out, in what I imagine somepony thought were friendly letters. They looked less so in the sweeping shadows of mid-evening, amidst the smog and filthy decrepitude.

I lowered my voice to just above a whisper, “What is it?”

Taxi raised her knee towards the school’s roof. “Guard passed about five minutes ago.”

“Fat filly or a skinny guy?” I asked, sliding back on Bake’s spine to make myself more comfortable. It might not have been a very dignified position, but I wasn’t done hopping about in pony’s heads just yet.

“Heavy-ish? I didn’t see where she went.”

“She’s humping the other roof guard on the far end. They’ll be awhile. I had no idea pegasus vision was that good. Felt like seeing everything through a telescope,” I mused, shoving my shotgun up a bit so it wasn’t digging into my side. Taxi gave me a curious look so I explained, “Let’s just say we’re going to have to sit down with Queenie when this is over and have a little talk about ‘undocumented features’ on her Essy contract. It doesn’t matter now. Swift has eyes on the guards and will tell us if they move.”

Taxi relaxed visibly, then asked, “What about Zeta?”

I bumped one of the insects clinging to my mane with one ear. It buzzed fitfully. “Not sure. The bugs are having trouble getting any kind of actual picture from her. I spoke to Queenie. It said the one riding her is ‘feeling ill’. Don’t know what that means. I’m going to try that ‘feature’ again here, so just keep us out of sight until I find out if we can move to the gym.”

“Okay. Be safe.”

“Not likely.” I chuckled. “I’ll give it my best shot, though.”

Sunshine, sunshine...

****

The second trip through the ladybugs magical matrix seemed to take much longer than the first, like the lot of them were hesitating. I wound through their number, picking up glimpses of what might have been fire and smoke along with angry, upraised voices. These pictures were interspersed now and then with single frames of running stripes. There was a feeling of being tugged towards something, but I pulled against it, forcing myself closer to a single thread of perfect white which seemed closest to the stripes.

After a time the others fell away and I was left sailing down that lone thread. It shook and twitched in my grasp, but I held on until, with a sickening jolt, I burst back into the real world.

If I’d been able to scream, I’d have given our position away immediately. For the first ten seconds, all I could do was hang there in stunned, tortured agony; every bone and muscle burned with pain of an intensity I’d never considered possible, not even with a career in law enforcement. The sensations coming out of the other end of that psychic tunnel were something akin to being in a tumble-drier full of ball bearings and angry bees. Even those times I’ve been shot simply didn’t compare.

Eventually, it all devolved into a haze of fire shooting down my nerve-endings. There were glimpses of striped legs and hooves moving over ducts and clambering through girders. Sometimes my host would leap across distances I’d have judged completely impossible, landing light as a feather but with each touch of wind or pressure causing waves of throbbing discomfort.

What I could see was the main school buildings off to her left. In the time we’d made it to the front gates, she was already exploring the back side.

When I’d gathered enough wits I managed to beg, ‘Out! Out now! I need out! Out of-!’

My mind was torn out of Zeta’s body so fast I didn’t even have time to think ‘Thank Cel-’

****

Rather than returning to my own body, I was left to hover inside the system of little minds, taking whatever might pass for ‘deep breaths’ in that environment. The path I’d come down seemed to be quivering. Images at one corner of the field seemed to still be of something burning, but knowing the ladybugs, they’d probably just come across an especially entertaining factory fire or something.

I gradually sank through the shifting field until I was slipped, almost gingerly, into the bodies of a few who happened to be in the cheap hotel room with the ladybug representative.

It was still smoking, now with one cigarette in each side of its mandibled mouth. The soap opera’s credits played in the background as it hunched over the edge of the bed.

‘Queenie. What the hay was that!?’

The giant bug blew a puff of smoke towards the floor and buzzed just loud enough to be heard, “We are uncertain, Detective Hard Boiled. The fast stripes are not injured as we understand it. It simply hurts. It hurts always.”

‘Wait, she didn't take a hit? You’re saying she was in that condition on the way here? In the coffee shop?!’

“Affirmative, Detective.”

I thought about this for some time, all the while aware that the others would be waiting on me; time didn’t flow any differently inside ladybugs. Queenie toked its cigarettes, eyes drifting back to the tube and an advertisement for chips.

The conclusion to which I came was that there were probably not many things I could do about the situation from where I was; interrogating the zebra would have to wait. Strange as it was, her ‘condition’ didn’t seem to be inhibiting her any. I still needed to see what was going on, though.

‘You think we could try looking in on her again except...maybe without the ‘feeling’ of what she’s doing? Cut the sensations down or something?’

Queenie lowered its head and the ladybugs in the room stilled. I realized they were conferring internally with one another. It was odd to see the usually hyperactive creatures sitting completely motionless. They looked like rows of black and red sparrows kipping on telephone lines.

All at once motion resumed. Queenie crawled underneath the covers of the twin bed, pulling them up to the general place its chin would have been on any other creature.

‘Well?’

“We can very muchly do such a thing, Detective,” The Essy agreed, settling down amongst the pillows. “We have decided, for the sake of entertainment, that this will be most worth it. We will spread the pain amongst our entire cohort.” The creature drew a quick breath. “We think we should tell you of something else, unrelated to-”

‘Save it for later. We’re short of time and I need to see what Zeta is seeing.’

Queenie shrugged, then swallowed its cigarettes, both still lit, and spat a small heap of ash on the carpet. “Ready, Detective?”

‘In your own time.’

I exploded into shards of awareness and wound my way down the spider’s web.

****

I thought, upon landing back in Zeta’s body, that I’d developed a pounding headache. It was some seconds before I realize it was the zebra’s skull that was full of screaming banshees. Having spent many a morning with similar feelings, the reduced level of sensation was only miserable rather than crippling. Other than that, being a zebra mare was not so different from being a female pony, except insofar as my face felt like it was the wrong shape.

Zeta was halfway through a gut-churning leap between two buildings and weightlessness is not good on top of a headache. She caught the far roof and tumbled with nary a piece of gravel disturbed. Jerking to a stop, her ears twitching back and forth, she lightly touched the side of her head where the ladybug hid.

“Detective? Is that you?” she asked. In spite of the run and her heart crashing against her ribs, her voice was perfectly controlled.

‘Sound yes. Quiet as you can.’

The ladybug beeped and Zeta nodded, sliding to the side of the building facing the school’s rear entrance. Her hooves brushing over the gravel still hurt like the dickens, but it was within toleration.

“I have seen several guards. Two on the rooftop, armed with guns. I do not wish to fight them directly. It could alert those down below.”

There was some motion going on on the ground near where the two guards were enjoying themselves. At least three ponies seemed to be loading boxes into a truck from a covered dock which lead into what, based on my memory of the blueprints, used to be the cafeteria. Swift and I had missed it from above.

“I will try to get a bit closer and see what they are transporting.” Zeta murmured, then snatched a rope off of her back and tied it deftly around one of the smaller smokestacks in a very complicated knot which seemed to leave behind a large extra coil to one side. Testing for strength, she threw the end of the rope around her middle then backed up to the edge of the building. Rather than rappelling, she simply threw herself over, running headlong down the brickwork with an absolutely reckless disregard for gravity.

I was pretty sure I was about to experience being turned into a zebra pancake when the rope jerked, then jerked again, slowing her descent. I was only taking a tiny fraction of what she must have been feeling, but even then, the bite of the nylon line into my stomach was agonizing.

She hit the dirt with a nearly silent bump and dropped to her belly. Creeping through the unmowed grasses almost as fast as a pony could walk, we were soon near the edge of the rear gate. Crouched in the shrubs, Zeta raised her eyes and swiveled her ears towards the truck dock.

Four burly earth ponies were doing the unloading work with a fifth stallion in a high visibility orange jacket standing behind them, supervising, although ‘supervision’ seemed to mostly involve cussing at the labor for being slow and sipping from a hip flask with a straw in it.

Each box seemed to be marked with either a playing card or a prism. The longer she sat, the more I began to pick up the spicy, pungent aroma of chemical run-off. I’d smelled something very similar some years before, in a hospital room with Sykes while the poor bastard screamed at the ceiling about being pecked to death by chickens.

If one hangs a rainbow in the sky, it can be very beautiful and relatively clean. Left unused, they quickly ferment and produce a powerful empathetic hallucinogen. I realized then what the markings meant.

‘Beam and Ace. Those boxes are full of Beam and Ace! We’ve got to-’

I stopped as I remembered Zeta couldn’t hear me. ‘We’ve got to’... what? The truck was nearly full. We could, at best, make sure no more shipments left this facility, but the one sitting there was going out to spread its poison to hundreds, if not thousands. If I were King Cosmo, I’d have bought myself a few pegasi from the police station up the street to tell me if there were to be a raid on the school.

We might have called out the alarm, but without some proper chaos inside, the talent behind those drugs would have still walked away. At best, the police might arrive to find an empty drug lab. I had no choice but to sit and watch as they continued their work, consoling myself that the lot of them would soon be unemployed. We had bigger things to worry about.

A commotion on the far side of the truck drew my attention. Zeta pulled her nose back into the bush, cautiously peering out of one eye.

The four loaders stopped their work to see what was going on as a furious looking mare sporting one of those black tuxedos I was starting to think of as the Red Hoof uniform stormed around the end of the truck with a leash in her teeth. On the other end, dragged along very nearly on his chin, a ragged and extremely thin unicorn colt with a big, idiotic grin on his face, stumbled after her. The leash was connected to a metal ring around the base of his horn that flashed and spat sparks.

“Heeey pretty thiiing... not so faaast.” The boy whined drunkenly, trying to pull at the leash, but only earning himself a yank which sent him tumbling onto his muzzle. I didn’t need pegasus vision to see the young stallion was high as a kite.

Whatever color he’d originally been was disguised under a thick layer of street dirt that left him a blotchy purple. Through his ragged pelt, he had needle tracks on his front legs you could have driven a train down. The ring was a cheap knockoff horn restrictor, but it did its job; keeping him from launching the angry mare into the next county.

The pony leading him was so enraged she was almost vibrating. What I could see of her pelt was spotty pink, and her mane was done up in a severe, business-only style.

Charging up to the workers, she barked, “Does one of you idiots want to tell me how this thing got past the perimeter?” Kicking out with her rear hoof, she caught the boy in the chest, bucking him into the side of the truck. He sagged, giggling like she'd given him a playful tap.

All of the workers looked at one another blankly, then every eye turned on the manager. He swallowed, then wet his lips from his flask and tried to put on a disarming smile as he replied, "Don' know, Miss Snicket. Dun' heard the 'perimeter' up on the roof havin' theyselves a good ol’ time. We didn’ know you was comin’ down for an in-spec-shun."

The mare named Snicket seemed to physically inflate with rage until the valve in her throat gave, her anger coming out in a piercing shriek. "You imbeciles posted two on overlook?! For the whole moon-blasted building?!"

“We figgered only two was needed, Miss Snicket,” the supervisor replied, his ears slowly falling against his head as he added, “...ain’t like nopony ever comes here...”

This didn’t mollify her in the slightest. Advancing, she reached up and before he could move back, slashed at the manager with her hoof. An ugly hook sticking out from the bottom of her horseshoe caught in his vest; she yanked him down from the dock onto the ground with a thump.

“You think this is a joke?! Get those foals down from there! I hope you’ve at least got some ground patrols going!” Snicket growled, pulling his face to hers. He whimpered as the hook dug into his chest.

“N-no ma-ma’am Miss ma’am! I mean uh, yes ma’am!” The manager whined. “Rumble Strip and Tussle! They iz on hoof!”

“Call two more for the ground and another two for the roof. Two thirds of your force guarding the coffee brewer strikes me as excessive, don’t you think?” Snicket’s breathing evened out, but that didn’t in any way take away from the air of danger around her. “And if I come down here again and there’s anything less than eight, I swear, the police will wonder how a stallion managed to pull his own heart out of his rear end without the benefit of magic!”

“Y-yes ma’am!”

She released him, giving him a shove back toward the dock. Turning towards the colt, she rubbed her chin. The teen had managed to drag himself into a sitting position and was unabashedly staring at her rear legs.

“Hey... hey yo lady... pretty lady.” He drawled, dribbling all over himself. “You got the stuff? My horn always tells me where the stuff is...” Pointing at his forehead he frowned and the restrictor ring sparked again. “It... usually does. Hehe...”

Snicket shook her head and shoved the poor wretch onto his back before tying his leash to one of the truck’s door handles. “While you’re at it, handle this mess. I don’t feel like disposing of a corpse tonight; he ain’t worth it. But I never want to see him again, got me?”

With that, the enforcer leapt up onto the dock and disappeared inside the school, leaving four dock workers glad not to have been the target of that vicious temper and one dock manager relieved to still have his heart in the right anatomical position.

He scowled at Snicket’s departure, then shook himself and tossed a dirty gesture towards her back before turning to his crew to recoup a portion of his masculine pride. “That mare could use a good ride, ya know what I mean? Too bad she puts the hay on the table or bitch’d get one!”

The box jockeys snickered back and forth amongst themselves, then one at a time directed their attention the colt who was nosily inspecting their cargo. Whatever sense of self preservation remained in his chemmed-out mind must have finally alerted him that something wasn’t precisely kosher, but it was too late. By the time he looked up, the dock workers had already formed a box around him.

“Y-yo guys...I could totally score elsewhere if like, it’s a bad time and-” The boy babbled, tugging at his leash.

Zeta happened to glance slightly upwards. Swift’s cloud was parked just above the truck dock. The guards on the roof were peering over the side to see what was going on down below. My partner’s radiantly orange face was there for the whole world to see if they were to look up for even half a second. I felt my stomach turn. It might have been my host’s but the sentiment was mutual.

I just knew that Swift was watching the scene with her rear end wiggling like a jungle cat readying for the pounce. She was going to get herself killed.

‘Ladybugs! Tell the pegasus to wait! Now!’

I watched for a tense few seconds, wondering whether or not training would overcome my young partner’s deeply seated hero complex. I couldn’t see her facial expression up amongst the clouds, but my heart, back in my actual body, was probably pounding. If she moved, I doubted even Zeta would be able to stop that lot before somepony caught a bullet.

With an internal sigh to relief I saw a puff of cloud as Swift frustratedly slammed her hooves down on her ride, then pulled back out of sight. Zeta exhaled as well, then re-hid herself with greater care. Enormous self-control aside, I could feel her nervously stroking one of the dozen ropes looped around her body.

“So, kiddy... yer horn is what leads ya to ‘the stuff,’ is it?” The supervisor’s voice was the sort of mocking friendly only gangsters usually manage, the sort that suggests that you’re alive mostly because they haven’t gotten around to killing you yet, and that if you don’t want to move higher on their ‘to do’ list you had best keep your head down. Being the source of the irritation, the colt had earned himself a very high place on that list indeed, and his mouth wasn’t helping.

“Uh... yeah, dude. It’s keen. You want I could score us both some, right? Lemme go get-” He backed into the wall of workers behind him, one of caught the leash in his teeth and pulled it taut, using it to sling him onto his knees.

“Horn, huh?” The supervisor reached out and gently stroked the boy’s horn, almost sensually, from base to tip. I’d seen a stallion do something similar in a bar once to a mare who’d had a few too many, and she responded by tossing him into a table. But with that restrictor ring on, shabby as it was, the kid couldn’t have lifted a pencil. “Yahknow, boss has a thing he likes. Always wanted to give it the ol’college try on a little spike what couldn’t fight back. Like yerself, fer instance.” He clapped his hooves together and pointed to a box. “Hold ’im.”

Zeta’s lips drew back in a hard grimace, but she held her position. Swift was still up there, her eyes on the sights unfolding down below. If I was considering sodding the plan and telling my partner to rush in, I hated to think what was going through her mind. She held, only by virtue of the fact that it was her family on the line.

The four powerful dock workers tore the colt off his hooves, carrying him over to one of the cardboard boxes and tossing him face up across it. He tried to kick them, but it only earned him a boxed ear. The manager wrapped the leash around his knee, then stepped on it, pinning the boy’s head at a painful looking angle.

“Heh, might give this purty thing to the boss. Gift-like.” The manager purred, stroking the boy’s horn in a way which made my skin crawl. “He might take a bunch of others and make a hat rack or somethin’. Ye prolly be better off wid’out it anyway, right boys?”

Blood beat in my ears. It wasn’t my blood, but I could fully understand the impulse driving it; Zeta wanted to rush out there.

I weighed the odds again and again. Swift holding all of them at gunpoint wouldn’t keep them from sending up the alarm. Zeta couldn’t silence all of them before the rest of their coterie came down on their heads. Two against seven was bad odds in a hoof to hoof fight. A couple of those seven had guns. If I’d had more time to come up with a plan, we might have saved the boy. As it was, the best we could do was watch.

“Uh, dudes, I’ll go. I swear! I won’t tell nopony! I got warrants on me! Please, don’t hurt me!” The boy begged, pitifully.

“Oh, can’t go to the pigs, eh? Good to hear! Won’t squeal for anypony else, then.” The manager gave the leash a hard tug, positioning the poor colt’s head with his horn on the edge of the box. “Look’ey me boys! King of Ace’s right hoof pony, eh?”

If I’d been in control of my own body, I’d have shut my eyes. There are some things even I don’t really need to see. Equicide detectives see all sorts of horrors, sure, but only in the aftermath of the deed; we almost never bear witness to the deed itself, and our imaginations only paint a picture so vivid. Unfortunately, Zeta chose to watch everything. Her breathing was rapid, each breath filling her lungs with acid as whatever condition she had seemed to worsen under stress.

They boy started to scream for help, but it was muffled by one of the dock workers stuffing a plastic bag into his mouth. Meanwhile, their supervisor reared back and got himself into a good position, using the box to brace one leg. “Shoulda got yer junk someplace else, boy. Leastways, now yer next hit’ll make ye feel awful lot better, won’t it?”

With that, he brought his full body weight down on one hoof directly onto the colt’s stubby horn.

His scream would ring in my ears for days.

Up above, Swift was laying there with her hooves over her ears, shaking her cloud almost to pieces. Zeta was almost hyperventilating, clutching her chest with one hoof to slow her pumping lungs.

Mercifully, the poor kid was unconscious after about two seconds. Blood dribbled down his face, running off of his nose and staining the sidewalk but only the top half of his horn was broken; not a killing wound. A detached, clinical part of my mind was analyzing just how I’d prosecute them if he’d died.

The four goons, chortling with sadistic glee, yanked the boy upright as their supervisor picked up his snapped horn, tucking it in the front pocket of his vest.

“Ehhh, toss him in one of the dumpsters out back. He ain’t gonna die from no busted horn no time soon. He can sign his name on them hospital forms with his mouth.” The manager patted his vest and grinned, “Can see why the boss likes that so much. Good souvenir.”

If I’d been there, two of us with guns might have taken all of them. Arrested them. Shot them. Something.

Helplessness is antithetical to the cop spirit. We were the help that he was calling for, a mere hundred meters away. But the truth was that succumbing to our better instincts could have gotten everypony killed, and ended our crusade to stop a gang war.

Two of the big guys slung the colt between them, one carrying him by his mane and the other by his tail as they hauled him towards the back of the building.

I decided it was time to retreat and see if we could effect entry. That’s the police standby, when the horror is too great; procedure and plans.

We had the scouting information on the guards on the ground. It was unlikely the thug in charge would be able to get fresh guards in the time it would take us to get into the building.

Ladybugs, signal zebra and pegasus to pull back. Lead them towards my position.

****

My eyes popped open and I had to suppress a moan. The constant symphony of pain inside Zeta’s head was gone and left me weak with relief. Every muscle in my neck and shoulders still ached with phantom agonies. I’d need a good hour long massage and a weekend at Taxi’s spa once this was all over. Pleasant thoughts, for another time.

I was still in the reeking alley, hanging off of Bake's back. The twins stood side by side beside an old refrigerator box while Taxi watched the end of the alley, peering fitfully at the school gate.

My cutie-mark was pulsing with tightly wound, but redundant fury. The image of the nameless colt’s face as he pleaded for somepony to save him kept replaying itself in my head, leading me to one simple conclusion; I wanted to punish these ponies. I wanted to make them squirm.

First, though, we had to get inside. Sliding down off Bake's back, I pulled my coat straight and began checking my weapons. The simple routine covered the violence roiling in my belly.

"Hardy?" Taxi's voice was full of thinly disguised worry.

"What?" I asked, perhaps more curtly than I meant to.

"What's going on out there? Is Swift alright? Where are the guards?"

"The kid is fine," I replied calmly, chambering a shotgun shell. The sound had a note of finality. "We're going in. We have to move within the next few minutes or our window will close. Swift and Zeta will be back in a moment.”

My driver’s lips formed a thin line as she stared hard at me, but I just moved past her and stood at the alley’s mouth, just letting the smoky air crawl into my lungs. I laid my head on the brick wall, concentrating on the shaded foster home’s front entry.

A flashlight swung back and forth over the grounds as the chunky guard made her rounds, passing by the gates still pulling her thin flannel shirt back into place. After she was gone, a flutter of wings announced my partner returning. Her hooves hit the dirt with none of her customary delicacy, scattering tiny stones all over the backs of my legs.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her heated breathing.

“Sir.”

With one word, she managed to convey everything. Anger at what we’d witnessed. Sadness. Intent. We shared that silence, with my driver eyeing both of us trying to piece together what might have occurred out there. I didn’t feel like telling her.

I didn’t turn, but set my jaw and gave the only order I was sure she’d accept just then. “Go. Tell Scarlet to find that dumpster and get the boy an ambulance. Come back, quick as you can. We’ll be going in as soon as you’re back.”

Wings beat the air and she was gone again, leaving me with my very confused driver.

“What was that all about?” Taxi asked, trotting around my side.

“I don’t want to explain right now. Suffice to say, the situation has changed.” I responded, then, before I was cornered into recounting that horrible scene, decided a change of subject would be best. “There are at least eight guards. Two on the roof, two walking the grounds. More inside but they’ll be out soon. I saw one Red Hoof, name of Snicket. Watch out for her.”

“Hardy, that didn’t answer my que-”

“And I said not now!” I snapped, then bit my tongue as I saw the look of hurt surprise on my driver’s face. I added, more gently, “Really, Sweets. I need to keep a level head. Leave it at ‘bad things.’ I’ll tell you when we get out of here.”

Taxi’s gaze took in my expression in an instant and she stepped back, “Sure thing.”

Princess bless her, I thought. Sweets might have a hot head you could cook your dinner on when it came to certain things like her cutie-marks, but she knows that fine line between when I’m just being a grump and when I actually need space.

I felt, more than heard, Zeta fading out of the darkness beside me.

“Detective Pony. I see the flying one is not here.” The Stiletto’s voice was frigid as a bad date. “She is taking care of the unicorn?”

“Yes. It’s being handled.” I rounded on her, kicking bits of broken bottle. “That being said, I want to know, right now: why did you volunteer for this mission?”

Her face remained devoid of emotion as she replied evenly, “I am protecting my home.”

“Bull.”

“I see no bull here, Detective.”

Taxi’s mouth was drawn down into a frown of uncertainty as she cut in, “Hardy, she’s trying to help. Do you really need to get her personal reasoning down?”

“Sweets, ladybugs can tap into a living nervous system. I didn’t know they could do that, but apparently they can.” Taxi’s jaw dropped and she started to say something but I charged on before she could. “That isn’t important right now. Like I said, we’ll be talking to Queenie about it later. What is important is that this mare shouldn’t be anywhere near a police operation.“ I poked Zeta in the breastbone. “I saw through your eyes. I felt through your body. How you’re even standing is nothing short of a miracle. I ask again, why are you with us?”

Zeta’s eyes widened ever so slightly, then her gaze hardened into crystal. She brushed my hoof away and stepped back, putting some distance between us. “You know nothing, pony.”

“Damn straight I know nothing. That’s the problem.” I nodded towards the school. “I’m not going into a dangerous situation with somepony who could keel over any minute. You should be crippled. So explain it to me.”

The zebra smoothed her dress of many ropes. Bake and Boil were still back there somewhere, speaking in low voices to one another and Taxi had on that ‘disapproving school-teacher’ scowl that she reserves for times she thinks I’m being an unnecessary hard-ass.

Zeta let the tension hang until I was ready to throw something at her. When she finally began, it was in a subdued tone.

“I am under a curse.” The zebra murmured, uncoiling and recoiling one section of her clothing for better access and to distract from her obvious discomfort. “The doctors may call it a ‘neurological condition’ but I know what it is. It is a curse.”

“A curse? I thought curses didn’t ex-” I thought better of it and shook my head. “...never mind. Let’s hear it.”

Pushing her mohawk back from her face, she smiled in the way I’d seen Taxi smile when she was covering something too painful to let out in polite company and continued, “I have lived with pain since I was a foal.” She stroked the hair on the back of her right foreleg with her left, shuddering slightly, “Our healers wished me to lay abed and plied me with every potion. None did more than make me sleep.”

Her lips rose into a proud smile. “It is my curse... but it is my honor as well.”

“Your honor? Care to explain that?” I cleared a spot on the dirty ground, using my coat for a seat.

“My father was a warrior. He trained our soldiers that fought with you ponies during the dragon contention, the one you call the Cutie Mark Crusades. He stopped the healers. He dragged me out of the temple and taught me... well, the word does not translate well. In the language of the zebra, the word is ‘sisu’.”

Taxi sucked in a breath and murmured, “Ultimate courage.”

“Courage?” I asked, incredulously. “I’ve seen courage. It doesn’t let a pony in your state run straight down a wall or climb a building.”

“As I said, it translates poorly. It is the will to be the stone that stands when the wall has fallen. It is the tenacity of the willow, bending under the wind, but never breaking. In my case, it is the speed of the kestrel, racing for the mouse before it can reach its burrow. The bird pushes itself, faster and faster, against the burn of its muscles, until its goal is achieved or it is dead.” She shook herself, wiggling her rear hoof to get the kinks out of the muscle. “I hurt, yes... but I continue.”

I spent a few seconds absorbing that. “I can’t argue with the results, but I’m curious. Magic has advanced the last few years. I’m sure you could find a unicorn who understands zebra brains well enough to figure something out. Why keep the pain? Why live like that?” I shuffled a half eaten candy bar out of my inner pocket and stuffed it into my cheek as I listened.

“Why any challenge?” Zeta cocked her head towards Taxi. “That one understands. If I give up the forging fire and cease to live at the edge of what is possible for me, I may as well let the healers have me again. If I flinch from this mission today, what will I flinch from tomorrow? Eventually, I will be nothing but bones, skin, and fur set to sleep my life away in oblivion. I am no longer sad for my curse. I suffer. I persist. I do not flinch.” She bowed her head, her explanation finished. “Will that satisfy, Detective?”

I chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then spat a raisin out of the corner of my muzzle. Eventually, I gave the concept a provisionally approving nod. “I think that’s what I needed to hear. I guess that’s why you get along with the winged whackjob, isn’t it? Somepony trying to fix either of you would take away everything else, wouldn’t it?” She gave an acknowledging nod just as my brain caught up to the fact that I hadn’t heard from the vicious little minx since I’d come out of the ladybug network. “Speaking of that mug-tossing molly, where is Edina?”

Boil leaned down behind a garbage can and lifted a cloth sack that seemed to be snoring. He grinned around the bag as his brother said, “Little griffin falls asleep. Coffee makes her portable when it wears off. Less... screechy.”

I gave the bag a light tap and its contents let out a disgruntled snort. I grinned. “I like your thinkin’. Keep an eye on her. We’re heading for the school. Zeta, you have a route for us to the gym entrance?”

“We cannot enter at the back and the way there is patrolled. I could not get clear routes, but I believe they are focused largely towards the western side of the building.” The zebra replied, using her hoof to mark out three interconnected squares in the gravel. She drew a circle and a crude drawing of a child’s slide, then pointed to the playground I could just see poking up through the grass some distance inside the gate. I could make out the three buildings, each larger than the last. The third, in back, was likely the gym.

Drawing a line down one side which wound to the end of the playground, then back to the starting point about halfway up the second structure, she laid down the patrol route. “We can pass quickly, if we are quiet. Unfortunately, the door to the locker-rooms is padlocked and opening such things is... well, let it simply be said there is a reason I work with rope.”

Taxi pulled a hair-pin out of her saddlebag, rolling it dexterously between her teeth and tongue. “That’s fine by me. I always welcome the chance to practice the talents of a mis-spent youth.”

I looked around at my small squad and nodded my approval. “That leaves us with one tardy pegasus.”

“Right here, sir!” Swift called as she barreled down from the sky, skidding a few times and dancing to a stop. “I did a flyover on the way back. The fresh guards are all talking at the back of the building, but they haven’t started walking yet!”

“Scarlet is looking for the boy?” I asked.

My partner bobbed her chin, affirmatively. “He called Miss Stella from the corner phone. Miss Stella will be sending some ponies who aren’t working to sift the area.”

“What? Actual back-up? Fantastic!” I beamed, sitting up a little straighter.

Swift pursed her lips. “Errr... no, sir... non-combatants.”

“Ahhh...” I couldn’t quite keep my disappointment off my face. “It was a long shot. Either way, most of their guards don’t seem to be armed with anything more than mouth pistols or rifles; nothing fancy or attention getting. They weren’t counting on discovery, much less infiltration. Nopony infiltrates a drug lab.”

Taxi pulled her cannon around her back and secured it for running. “If we’ve got a window, we’d best go now. May the sun be with us and the moon watch our paths.”

“Amen.” Zeta intoned, adding several words in zebra. I took it for a blessing, though I swore I’d heard my driver use something similar when calling me a shit-head.

****

Swift sat atop a nearby building providing lookout as we approached the gate. The chained lock wrapped between the bars took Taxi all of thirty seconds to pop open with her hairpin magic. I was hoping for silence, but my luck is either extremely good or extremely bad with very little in between. Every step of a covert operation is a protracted crap shoot during which you will roll snake-eyes at least once. In our case, that came in the form of hinges that probably hadn’t opened in the last five years making a noise that almost stopped my heart in my chest as they were wrenched open across a thick blanket of rust.

Everypony froze in place, then pressed against the hedges on either side of the entry, waiting to see if somepony was coming to investigate.

I considered having Bake and Boil toss us over, but their most powerful magic seemed largely limited to their one well practiced spell. Besides, I didn’t want to put myself at the mercy of what two pain enthusiasts might consider a ‘gentle’ ride.

After an eternity listening for my ladybug to signal to us we’d been nicked and being pleasantly disappointed, I waved a hoof for Zeta to move ahead on point. She slid through the gate and leapt into the chest-high grass on either side of the cracking sidewalk leading up to the school’s front doors. Barely a blade was disturbed and she made as much impact as a breath passing between them.

Bake and Boil, carrying Edina in her sack, followed Zeta through. The two hoofballers were making a token effort to walk on tippy-toe. In the hazy night, with ground-hugging mist muffling our hoofsteps, they could be mistaken for industrial equipment being used on a late shift. Once they hit the grass, though, the sound dropped to a level I was comfortable moving ahead with.

Taxi darted in after them with me bringing up the caboose.

Sneakiness isn’t in the same pasture as my special talent, but then, the guards weren’t casting the tightest net. I felt the grass brushing under my belly as I pushed through it, trying not to leave too wide a trail. So focused was I on making as little noise as possible that I almost didn’t hear my ladybug let out a squeak of warning. I barely had time to throw myself onto my stomach. A second later everypony else followed suit.

I held my breath as we all did our best ‘stone’ impressions and counted the beats of my heart.

At thirty, the beam from a flashlight plied its way over our heads, sweeping towards the street then back around to the wall. Soft hoofsteps followed, crunching along the pebbled walk between the school’s buildings.

There was no good frame of reference. The mist made everything sound terribly close and far away at the same time. The guard might have been right in front of me or halfway across the playground.

I heard a sound; a faint clicking. It might have been the hammer of a gun being cocked. I picked up my trigger bit, holding it between my teeth lightly. The clicking came again, followed by a long exhalation and a murmur of pleased grunting. My nose wrinkled as I caught a whiff of burnt apples.

Zap. The idiot guard was smoking Zap outside in Detrot's perpetual overcast. He was asking for a lightning strike to burn off his cutie marks.

While it was true that Cosmo’s Red Hooves might have been an intimidating bunch, it seemed we’d gotten lucky once again. Cosmo was operating under the notion that trained professionals guarding a zone of magical contamination were more likely to invite police interest than a bunch of anonymous hooligans squatting in an abandoned building.

I had to give to the King of Ace that he was careful in a whole other league than most criminals. The drug lab wasn’t connected to him in any way that could be proved in a court of law. If I’d been investigating him in the traditional sense of the word, I’d have put myself in a straitjacket trying to draw lines between what cops can use for evidence and what was actually there.

The patrolling guard was just finishing his smoke break and it couldn’t end soon enough; there was a sharp rock digging into the back of my knee which was going to give me a royal ache come morning. As he turned back to his route, he spat his cigarette over one shoulder. It pinwheeled end over end, landing in front of me and scattering potentially lightning-attracting embers all over my fetlocks. I scrambled to stub it out with my toe, earning myself a fresh burn and the pleasing odor of my own smouldering fur. I couldn’t even cuss, lest the rat bastard son of a two-bit whore hear me.

The flashlight came back on and, whistling to himself, the stallion started back the way he’d come. Cosmo’s taste in security guards left much to be desired, but gangsters need incompetents now and then. I’d seen it a hundred times in the Organized Crime breakroom. They bust some small time operation and the perps swear, up and down, that a mob boss was heading everything. Inevitably, they can’t pick him out of a line-up or describe his cutie mark. If your only need in a security guard is somepony to scream in terror loud enough to be heard before his head gets blown off, it makes little sense to pay for the best.

As the ladybug signaled all clear with a two noted burble in my ear, we immediately started forward again, sliding around the outside edge of the building and skirting the playground. It was a longer way than the crow flies but we didn’t have precise locations on the roof guards. All it might have taken was one wandering by at the wrong moment and happening to glance down. Even with Swift feeding us overwatch intel, I didn’t care to be stuck out with naught but thick grass for cover. Intel or not, the creeping about business, especially with two colossal hoofballers in tow, had the flavor of being a big fish in a very small barrel. I couldn’t wait to get inside.

Twice more, we had to drop and press ourselves to the ground as somepony wandered by on the roof. A properly interested lawn care specialist might have ended our plans at the outset, but as it was, getting around to the gymnasium was mostly a matter of timing. The rooftop guards were more interested in exchanging sloppy kisses as they passed one another on their patrols than they were in waving their torches around the grass to find a stupid detective and his merry band of nutters. The one on hoof was so high he had to stop once on each trip to make sure the brickwork hadn’t changed since he saw it last.

We slowed to a crawl as we reached the gym, which might as well have been one of those huge, warehouse type structures. The grass there was thicker, deeper, and easily concealed even our lumpen duo of muscle bound masochists. I could almost smell the years of congealed sweat off hundreds of young ponies dashing, sprinting, playing soccer and kickball, lifting weights, or cringing as they were ordered to climb a rope without benefit of wings or horns.

The gymnasium itself was dead quiet; it’d been some time since we saw a guard, which put all of us on edge. The longer it’s been since you’ve seen a guard, the more likely the second you choose to make your move will be the second one rounds a corner.

It was no surprise they didn’t seem to be using the gym but it did confirm my suspicions that the drug lab itself was towards the far side, in the auditorium. The auditorium was likely soundproofed, with a full ventilation system to keep the stage lights from making the room unbearably hot; desirable where one might be working with explosively fuming chemicals. While the patrols seemed largely focused towards the western end of the school, I wasn’t prepared to call us ‘safe’ until we were inside.

Flapping wings sent all of us down onto our bellies, but I rose quickly as I saw who it was coming to a landing in the grass.

“Swift! What are you doing? Get down!” I hissed at her.

She looked both ways then crouched slightly, which did as much for her invisibility as it did for Bake and Boil’s. “Sir, there aren’t any guards on this end.” Using one wingtip she pointed over my shoulder. I turned, just able to make out a very high chain link fence surrounding the baseball pitch. If we’d tried a sneak in through the back, we’d have been stuck hauling ourselves over that.

I stood and flicked grass off my coat. “Hmmmph... that was easier than I was thinking it was going to be.”

Taxi wiggled up beside us still down low and murmured, “What’s going on?”

“We’re clear, apparently.”

My driver squinted at me, then at Swift and finally, the building. The look on her face sent a shiver dashing from my tail up my back, dragging with it a fat wad of anxiety.

“We’re not clear, are we?” I grumbled, pushing my trigger bit with one toe.

“No, no we’re not.” Taxi’s voice was full of trepidation.

There it was, once more; Hardy walking into a trap he knew was coming. My driver’s stunning intuition mixed with my own leant itself to a certain awareness of where life’s little pranks are likely to be. My choices were limited, my resources almost nil, and even with the great force multiplier that is surprise, I still counted our chances of achieving all of our goals as low. The thing I needed least of all was my dearly beloved driver’s pseudo-clairvoyance popping up to tell me my strike of luck was a hammerblow to the head.

“Let’s get it over with, then. Lead the way, kid.”

Bake shifted Edina off onto Boil’s back to get a break whilst we made for the building. My partner’s electrifyingly red mane could be seen even through the deepening dark so I settled for following it and trusting she wouldn’t lead me into any pot-holes.

As we neared the edge of the building and stepped out of the foliage onto a concrete walkway that wrapped around the entire structure, I saw our destination. The stairs down into the lockers were worn smooth by the passing of thousands of little hooves.

Taxi bounced passed me, her hairpin in her teeth as she raced eagerly down the steps to the locker-room door. “Oooh, lemme see!”

I trailed after her as Zeta, Bake, and Boil waited at the top.

“Can you do it?” I asked, trying to look around her at the lock.

“P’shaw... can I do itsh... shush, lemme worksh.” My driver fiddled the thick lock between both hooves, holding one bit of the pin with the top of her tongue and the other half between her teeth. Thirty seconds may have been a slight exaggeration on her part; the actual break-in took closer to five minutes, and by then every movement or sound from our companions had me ducking slightly into my cover.

“Ahhh, there we goesh!” The door clicked with a certain conclusiveness; a sound sweet to my ears. Taxi spit the bent hairpin into her hoof and stowed it in her bag.

“Alright, play it careful. Sweets, you’re in first. You got something we can use in small spaces?”

She swung her gun down, cocked it with her teeth, then pulled the string around her neck. “Already loaded. Shouldn’t deafen us, but anypony gets hit will definitely want to have a little lay’me’down.”

“Good enough. Everypony ready?”

Nods all around.

I eased the door’s handle open. Taxi stuck her head and the mammoth barrel of her gun around the corner, checking all the corners. Pulling back, she swirled her hoof in the air, then patted her chest: clear.

“Huh...” Pushing open the door, I trotted on through. The musty scent of an old locker room hit my nostrils hard, but as long as no bullets came flying out to greet me, I could deal. It wasn’t quite pitch black inside; some persistent emergency lighting, a holdover from the school’s active days, showed me row after row of lockers with wide benches between them. I glanced sideways, then hit the switch beside the door with my elbow. Overhead, old style neon lights burst into life. One or two popped immediately, leaving patches of darkness.

There was still enough light to tell us the area did, indeed, seem to be clear.

The twins stomped in and began shedding their hoof coverings.

“Locker room reminds me of time with Manticores,” Boil said, patting the bench before plonking his rear on it. “Less pain those days, but more head stomping.”

“Ahhh, is good to make noise again,” Bake pronounced, kicking off the last of the improvised shoe padding.

“You two make enough noise for everypony, toes padded or not.” Zeta humphed and pushed between them. Her eyes roved around the room, seeking danger. “I do not like this.”

“Yeah, sir... this feels wrong.” Swift agreed. “Why leave such an obvious entrance unguarded?”

“Not sure.” I replied. “Taxi, thoughts?”

“You know, as Sunny Zoo once said—”

I didn’t get to hear her insightful musings on the art of war, but I imagine that they were much along the same lines as mine when, as if choreographed by an unseen force, every single locker in the room burst open simultaneously with a resounding, choral clang.

“Oh, horseappl—” I managed as a ballistic pencil launched itself towards my right eye.

Chapter 20: Rolling in the Aisles

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 20: Rolling in the Aisles

Magical Contamination

Areas of "Magical Contamination" are defined as self-sustaining zones of significant and unpredictable magical influence; usually the result of miscast high-power spells or zones of catastrophic emotional turmoil. They are only rarely created artificially. As the results of magical contamination can range from the debiliating to fatal to worse than fatal, the deliberate creation of magical contamination zones is regarded somewhere between ‘felony’ and ‘war crime.’

DPD Policy states the following actions be observed by all officers regarding entering a zone of magical contamination:

1) Don't do it.

2) Seriously, don't do it. The Detrot Police Department is not screwing around. Do you like having one head and a torso not made out of a citrus fruit?

3) If circumstances dictate you really must, determine the source and origin of the contamination prior to entry and prepare accordingly. Magic being what it is, the origin may tell you what to expect. Dealing with a massacre site haunted by the vengeful dead should be approached differently from a site accidentally contaminated by an overzealous baker attempting to go all-out for a royal event. In one case, fondant and wax paper are likely to do you very little good; in the other, they may be your salvation.

4) Magical contamination seems curiously drawn to dramatic irony. Under no circumstances should you utter any phrase along the lines of “How bad can it be?” or “What’s the worst that could happen?” whilst inside a zone of magical contamination, as this can result in you being immediately rendered into glue.

--Excerpt from Appendix H: Subsection B.44 of the Detrot Police Department manual

Twice in one day, I’d found myself under attack by educational paraphernalia. Twice in one day.

Even for me, that’s bad.

****

It was, if I’m being generous, a stalemate. For an enchanted school, I admit, I had been worried about a more lethal brand of magic than vengeful squibs and papier-mache dolls.

The noise was probably the greater danger. While the walls were thick, anypony passing by outside was bound to hear the clicking, slicing, splashing, splurting tornado blowing around the tiny classroom. Whether or not they’d be coming to investigate was a question of how much they wanted to fend off the attacks of vicious washable markers.

I ducked into my coat, holding it over my head as a shield against some safety scissors which were trying to go for my throat in the most ineffectual manner possible. Taxi had learned the value of cover from her bloody nose, yanking a desk onto its side and pulling the top open. This would probably have worked nicely if it hadn’t released a raging swarm of erasers which immediately tried to fly into her ears.

Bake and Boil just stood there, hooves over their eyes, being buffeted by kamikaze glue-sticks. Swift huddled between them, her wings over her head, with a rolled up syllabus repeatedly smacking her across the back of the knees. Zeta, deciding the best part of valor was evasion, was dashing around the room in acrobatic circles; she was making me tired just looking at her.

“Thoughts? Options?” I yelled, smacking a shiv-shaped piece of paper out of the air and pinning it to the floor.

“None coming to mind!” Taxi shouted back, tossing her mane to fling off a folder clip that was trying to eat her one very small bite at a time.

“Sir, I’m going for the teacher’s desk!” Swift called out. I couldn’t see her through an explosion of confetti, but the vague shapes of Bake and Boil were still visible, their skins glowing.

“What? Why?!”

“Nothing’s attacking Zeta!”

I looked over the top of my coat, then sneezed as a pot of glitter burst in my face, stuffing my nose with sparkles. After some moments of choking, I managed to get a look towards the front of the room. Zeta was standing on the teacher’s desk, hooves raised, turning in circles in her combat stance as she waited to deflect another object flying at her face, but indeed, none seemed interested in doing so.

“Zeta! What did you do?”

“I have no idea, Detective Pony!”

As is often the case when dealing with magic, discovery is a matter of experimentation and observation. Sometimes this included tossing somepony out over the lava and seeing if they learn to fly on the way down. Senior officers have frequently commented that the relationship they maintain with their juniors, at least where magic is concerned, is similar to that of scientist and lab rat.

I find this distasteful and inaccurate; I have never, personally, detonated a junior officer. This doesn’t mean I’m above letting them get some on-the-job training in why you shouldn’t leave cover to play hunches.

“Kid, go for it! You’re up!”

“Yes, sir!”

I heard the beat of Swift’s wings over the roar of the storm, using the downdraft to sweep away her worst aggressors as she leapt into the air. Immediately, two rolls of thick construction paper bounced off the floor and wrapped themselves tightly around her rear legs. She slewed sideways, then caught her balance, kicking them off as she landed beside Zeta on the desk.

“I think I’m oka—” My partner let out a howl of pain as the teacher’s ruler snapped off the floor and cracked her soundly across the cutie-mark. She toppled off the desk, landing behind it and sending up a spray of paper.

“Kid? Kid, talk to me!”

A few seconds later, Swift’s head popped up over the side of the teacher’s desk. “Ow... I’m fine, sir. In fact...”

My partner stepped out from behind the desk, trotting towards me. I fully expected her to be instantly turned into an orange art-project by the animated school supplies, but the vicious little bastards seemed to have suddenly lost interest. Still wiping glitter out of my mouth, I watched as a tape dispenser swerved in mid-air to avoid her out-stretched feathers.

“How are you doing that?” I demanded.

She examined herself, then reached under her wing and peeled something off of her side, then held it out. It was a piece of paper with the word ‘Hall Pass’ printed in big, official letters across the top.

“I fink iz diss,” she mumbled around the paper.

Zeta glanced down at her hooves, finding another pass sticking to the bottom of her stealth-shoe. There was a scattering of them underneath the teacher’s desk and spread across the floor where Swift had landed.

I had to pull my head down as an especially loaded eraser plopped a cloud of dust on my shoulder.

“Everypony gets one! Yes, you two, too! No, I don’t care if you’re enjoying yourselves!”

****

Five minutes later, the storm had ended. Five sticky, glittered, marker-stained equines, plus Zeta and the unconscious Edina, who’d managed to avoid the mess altogether, sat around the teacher’s desk with our blueprints spread out before us and hall passes glued or pinned to whatever flesh was immediately available.

Again, luck was with us; the soundproofing between classrooms must have been spectacular and nopony seemed to be coming to investigate. The mess spilled across every inch of the room was gradually cleaning itself up. Erasers dabbed spots of chalk off the walls, sparkles were swept back into vials, and bits of paper rearranged themselves in neat stacks inside student’s desks. It was, altogether, a weird thing to watch.

Taxi lifted her hips to let a piece of foal’s art slip out and fly up onto the wall, taping itself back in place with a fresh strip from the dispenser. “Hardy, I hate to bring this up but since nopony else seems willing; what’s the reasoning behind the hall passes?”

I ducked as a ball of yarn flew over my head, settling amongst a pile in the corner. “You remember what the diary said? His spell would ‘solve all his problems’? Spirits had constant truancy issues with his students, so now the school makes sure they’re where they should be. It fits with High Spirits’ twisted logic; if they’ve got a hall pass, they’ve got permission to be where they are.”

A couple of tiny brushes were dancing along the floor, sweeping up confetti. I watched them for some time, and realized - High Spirits wanted to solve Calliope’s problems, too. Calliope was the janitor. Now, by the same magic, the school helps clean itself. It was kind of imaginative, in a unicorn sort of way.

Zeta flicked her striped tail, looking impressed. “That is... brilliant. Why did you ponies allow such an amazing training ground to fall into disuse?”

I had a brief flash, just then, of what world travelers must feel when passing through a country with vastly different social mores. Knowing what I did of Zeta’s past, her question almost made sense.

I spent a few more moments listening to the swish of animated brushes whilst formulating an answer. “...That boiler... was rebuilt and enchanted by a pony who hadn’t slept in months. I’m pretty sure nopony wants to volunteer to find out what else he decided to ‘improve.'”

The zebra tilted her head forward in contemplation then nodded. “I take your meaning.”

Turning the map sideways, I eyeballed the distance between the classroom and the auditorium. “Sweets, check me on this... that looks like about... two hundred meters, right?”

She put her hoof on the paper, using the scale at the bottom for a general measure. “I’d use one of the measuring sticks in here if I wasn’t worried it would bite me. I could call it that, sure.”

“Alright, Zeta, you up for another little jog?” I asked, gesturing towards the zebra.

Stretching her legs one at a time, Zeta shook herself all over. “Of course. What do you ask of me?”

“Scout ahead.” I cocked the brim of my hat at the classroom’s door. “Keep it silent and avoid confrontation if you can. Get us a general sense of what’s in the auditorium. I’ll drop in with the ladybugs and take a look once you’re out there.”

“I go.”

Between breaths, Zeta had vanished and the only sound was the soft click of the lock sliding closed.

Taxi trotted over and tugged the door open, peering down the hall in both directions. Pulling her head back, she exhaled, “She’s amazing.”

“Yes, and scary. I’m glad I don’t make striped enemies very often.” I replied, then my eye caught something on the back of the door. “Hey, what’s that?”

“What’s...huh.” Taxi opened the door fully and examined the outside face of it. It was papered, from floor to ceiling, with hall passes. “You think that’s how they managed to keep the school from trying to clean up the drug lab or attacking them?”

“Good bet, yeah.’ I noticed a broom making for the exit and motioned for her to close it again. Reaching up, I jiggled the ladybug in my mane until it meeped. “Make sure my hall pass doesn’t come off while I’m gone. I’m going to take a ride on the zebra express.”

Pulling my coat more comfortably around my shoulders, I sat down and shut my eyes.

“Sunshine, sunshine...”

****

An hour, so it turned out, was plenty of time to forget what it feels like being tossed into a barrel rolling down a steep hill with a crazed wolverine attacking the base of your skull. Zeta moved at such speed and with so little regard for simple things like ‘up’ and ‘down’ that I was momentarily thankful I was in her body and not my own; motion sickness is my least favorite brand of nausea.

Zeta was slinking, in near total darkness, down the top of a long row of lockers. Her breath caught as she heard hooves somewhere ahead and she dashed down the wall, up the opposite side. Pausing for a few seconds, she flipped a tiny tool out of one side of her hoof and began unscrewing a vent, removing the screws and setting them on the locker. If it weren’t for her own breathing, I’d have thought she’d gone deaf; the operation was conducted in near perfect silence.

Slipping into the duct, she squirmed along the thin, aluminum tunnel as fast as I might have walked with nary a sound. It was just a freakish sensation to be moving that quickly in such a tiny space. I had the odd sensation of time contracting until, without warning, Zeta froze in place and held her breath. Whatever additional senses she had operating weren’t transmitting down the ladybug’s network; I heard nothing for a gut-clenching ten seconds until a voice filtered through the maze of vents.

“—dimwitted sack of chickenshit! Your mother would have used a condom if she’d known you were on the way down daddy’s pipe!”

The voice was familiar; Snicket. Cosmo’s creature.

There was the sound a body crashing into something and breaking glass, followed by a low moan.

“Remake it, and you will be trying the next batch yourself. A full needle too!” Snicket barked. “Dead clients don’t give us repeat business!”

Zeta was moving again, writhing like a silverfish down the narrow tunnel. Abruptly, we came to a closed grate in what I’d been thinking of as the left wall. Zeta rolled with the tunnel until it became the floor and my inner gyroscope threatened to throw in the towel if she didn’t stop confusing it in such a cruel fashion.

Flickering yellow light spilled up through the grate as the sneaking zebra pressed her cheek to the metal, trying to get a look. Her eyes adjusted slowly until the images resolved out of the mottled mass of bustling, blurry figures down below. What she saw gave me a rough case of vertigo followed by an emotion I’m all too acquainted with; tactical self-pity.

It is the feeling one has when they find themselves facing down any situation where bulletproof vests start to feel inadequate and silly.

I’d played my cards correctly, though there was very little satisfaction in that. The drug lab was, indeed, in the auditorium, but the room was much larger than it was on the out-dated blueprints. Somepony must have decided, not long before the school closed, that just the thing to drive the students away from lives of crime was a theater that could put the Canterlot Royale to shame.

The architect's solution to the ever-present issue of demolition in a tightly packed city was to sink the expansions into the ground and use the old building, making the room about fifteen feet deeper than it had originally been. It was elegant, simple, and made for one ridiculously difficult position to invade. Two sets of stairs on either side of the main door lead up to halls behind the risers that, I presumed, included roof access. I counted at least four exits.

Tables filled the orchestra pit and lined the stage; at a quick count, a half dozen ponies in lab coats hustled between them. Four guards, all giving off that hyper-attentive vibe that security only does when the boss is around, were standing in the high-rise boxes on both walls. Sure enough, there, on center stage, trying to rub a spot of something red off the sleeve of her tuxedo, was Snicket herself.

Having taken in the tactical situation, I noticed a mare laying against one of the curtains, surrounded by a heap of broken glass and what looked like sand. She was nursing a bruised cheek, but the other technicians were very carefully not looking at her as she pulled herself up and started to slink away. “I’m sorry, ma’am...”

“Bunsen, while you’re being sorry, clean that up? I imagine you’re going to be unavailable tomorrow while you come down...” Snicket waved a hoof at the spill near the curtain. “...and I don’t like my operations messy.”

“Y-yes, ma’am,” Bunsen whimpered, rubbing her face as she started for a bucket and mop. As she passed, Snicket’s rear hoof snapped out, catching the hapless mare across the shoulder and landing her face first back in the sandy concoction. She gagged, then shrieked in pain as she tried to scrape the chemical out of her eyes with her hooves.

Before the Red Hoof could find any other ways of punishing the damaged pony, a stout stallion, whose cutie-mark was a saw cutting a log in half, pulled Bunsen behind the stage curtain and forced her face into a bucket of soapy water. The screaming subsided in a bubbly gasp.

Snicket gave the big colt a disapproving glare as he dragged away her toy, then turned back to the lab, catching everypony staring in stricken horror. She dramatically swept her leg over their heads and announced, in a voice that could be heard right to the back row, “You bunch get back to work! Need I remind you that we sell a quality product here, ladies and gentlecolts? And that I am personally responsible for the continuation of our customer base, and that you are responsible, each and every one, to me? You know where you owe your debts, and there are three ways to pay it; Bits, work, or pain. Just be glad you’re useful; most ponies only get two of those options.” She dropped her leg and turned, leaving the stage and Zeta’s limited visual range. The technicians paused for only a second, before hurrying back to their variously steaming, smoking, rumbling apparati in hopes of escaping any attention on themselves.

Behind the curtain, the stallion was dabbing the filly’s eyes with a cloth as she sobbed against his chest.

I never worked in Narcotics, but I'd seen enough bodies in stash houses that I thought I knew what to expect, and I had not expected a room full of slaves. It was just one more crime to add to Cosmo’s docket if ever we could get him into a courtroom, which was looking like an increasingly remote scenario.

It was a rare thing for me to get emotionally involved in my work. Perhaps it was the helplessness with which I’d watched her or the callousness of her brutality; maybe it was the exhaustion of the last three days getting to me - but I really wanted nothing more than to have a little dance on Snicket’s face.

None of that was helping with the strategic situation. If we just burst in, a couple of hoofballers were going to cover us about as well as a pair of sandbags with legs.

‘Ladybugs, signal zebra to pull back and let me out.’

It was time to come up with a plan.

As I may have mentioned, I hate plans.

****

“...so that’s it, then? Hardy, you're making retreat sound lovely."

Taxi’s expression was skeptical as she cast an eye back towards the trap door we’d come up through.

“If retreat were an option, I’d be considering it heavily,” I agreed, tapping the map. “The fresh guards outside are going to make that difficult. At best, we get out without somepony seeing us and leave empty hooved, but I don’t trust my luck that much. More likely somepony gets shot.”

“Sir, we can’t just... leave those ponies in there, can we?” Swift rustled her wings uncomfortably. “Indentured servitude was outlawed in Equestria five hundred years ago!”

“I don’t intend to leave them there,” I assured her. “Surprise and storming tactics aren’t going to be enough, though. We need something else if we’re going to come through this bloodlessly and right now, I’m open to suggestions.”

Taxi and Swift looked at one another, then down at the blueprint.

In a perfect world, these sessions would be done long before any operation occurs so everypony knows what they’ll be going into. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, we’re forced to deal with what’re often called ‘evolving battlefields.’ There’s another, less socially appropriate, term that the ponies actually on those battlefields use: clusterbucks.

I glanced at Bake and Boil who were sitting against one wall of the classroom, conferring in low voices. Now and then I’d catch a word, but their conversation seemed mostly wrapped up in how they might get Stella to give them permission to move High Spirits’ boiler. They had the bag of griffin between them and were using the opportunity, while she was asleep, to braid her tail-tuft. I decided against asking them for tactical advice.

“Sir?” Swift began, haltingly. “Th-the police manual s-says we should come back with backup and n-not risk civilians.”

I gave her a dour look. “Kid, if we follow the police manual, then King Cosmo is going to have Snicket kill everypony in that room tonight.”

“What?!” My partner’s eyes almost popped out of her head.

“You think he’s going to let a bunch of eggheads pay off their debts and just ‘walk away’ from a drug operation?” I let out a soft snort. “He’s going to have them all dumped in the canal when he’s done with them. If we’re detected leaving, it’ll be done right then and there. If you want to save their lives, we’re going in there.”

“But sir-”

Whatever objection Swift was about to raise was cut short by a screeching yawn from across the room, announcing Edina had regained consciousness.

“Ahhh, the drink of heaven has released its hold!” There was a pause, then the softer of her two voices asked, “Why are we in a bag?”

Bake made to open the bag just as a set of four claws ripped a griffin-sized hole in the side of the sack, nearly clipping off his nose. Like a princess entering the grand ball, Edina sauntered out, shaking the kinks out of her wings and neck. Flipping one of her whips off her shoulder and giving it a few practice swings in the air, she studied the classroom briefly, then her predatory eyes found mine.

“Ahhh, the meat! What did we miss?”

I was about to answer with what would have, no doubt, been a succinct and brilliant summation of the ridiculously dangerous situation, wherefrom might have come a perfect scheme for eliminating our enemies in time to be home for breakfast. I’m sure it would have calmed her considerably while settling in everypony’s mind the idea that everything was under control.

How unfortunate, then, that the chemistry textbook on the shelf beside me had other ideas, such as “Fly off the shelf and try to eat Edina’s face.”

****

Dealing with a crazy person is most often a matter of finding the right lever. Even the most psychopathic serial killer usually has one or two little buttons that you can find and push to get them to make a mistake. For some, it’s reading that their mother probably abused them in the newspaper. For others, it’s giving them all the coffee they could possibly want. Once, I got a full confession just by having all the interrogating officers blow bubbles with a piece of gum whenever they were in the perp’s presence.

When the crazy person in question is an ally, the business of finding levers becomes a more sensitive task. I can attest to this, having survived Chief Jade’s tenure mostly because I knew how far I could take things before she started breaking bones.

In this regard, Edina was no different from any other nutcase, except insofar as I had to wrap my head around the idea that there was more than one nutter that needed dealing with.

****

“I will devour you for your crimes, pony meat!” The griffin screamed as a second volley of blackboard erasers bounced off her rear leg, leaving her coated in a thick cloud of dust. Her second voice chimed in, “No, we peel it first! Then we set it on fire!”

Swift was trying, once again, to get close enough to slap a hall pass on Edina, but the griffin had a whip in one claw and almost took her ear off with it. For what felt like the fourteenth time in three days, I was tempted to shoot down something small and winged, but we needed the mad griffin in fighting condition.

“Miss Edina! You have to listen!”

“Listen to this, flappy meat!” Edina shrieked as she swung her whip again, forcing the pegasus back. An especially speedy graphing compass raced ahead of the pack and buried itself a half inch in the griffin’s fuzzy backside, sending her bolting back the other direction.

Taxi and I stood on opposite desks, trying to snatch the crazed hybrid out of the air. Bake and Boil seemed uncharacteristically content to sit back and watch, which I should have taken as a measure of the futility of our “Grab Her” plan.

“Over there! Hardy, she’s coming for you!” My driver yelped, then dived out of the way as a dozen boxes of crayons shot by her head.

I leapt at the griffin but found my forelegs full of nothing but air; I then found the ground rushing up to meet my face. A flash of black and white snatched me out of mid-air, set me on my hooves, then bounced across the desks like her rear end was spring-loaded. Where Zeta had appeared from was a question I was prepared to leave for another day; she definitely hadn’t come in through the door. Still, I was just grateful to have her there.

On her next pass, Swift managed to bring Edina closer to the ground and Zeta hopped up, snagging her in all four legs. The griffin yowled like a trapped alleycat as they fell, rolling end over end into a pile of desks. She came up fighting, but found her thumb-claws tied tightly together; the zebra ended up sitting behind the teacher’s desk with her rear hooves up, cleaning a tiny scratch on one of her fetlocks.

“Edina! Be calm!” Zeta ordered, blotting at her wound.

Against all reason, this seemed to have at least some measure of the desired effect. The griffin’s puffed-up chest-feathers flattened slightly. “You meats have dragged us into a pit of perdition and we have been attacked by demon possessed books!” Edina complained. “Why should we be calm?”

“The books will only attack you if you take that paper off of your buttocks, you silly thing.” replied Zeta. Edina peered over her shoulder to find a hall-pass duct taped to her rear and, soul of wisdom that she was, immediately went about trying to peel it off. Zeta hefted a book in both hooves and chucked it at her. “I said, you will get attacked if you take that paper off. Now leave it!”

“It’s sticky!” The softer of Edina’s voices whined. “We don’t like it!”

“I don’t care,” Zeta snapped with unusual brusqueness. “Unless the two of you wish to be eaten alive by this school’s spirits, I do recommend you settle. There will be foes aplenty for you to take out your rage upon here soon.”

At that, Edina perked up slightly. “There is meat we can hurt?”

****

Watching the school attempt to devour Edina was quite inspiring after her performance with the coffee cup that morning.

As their conversation was unfolding, an inkling of an idea was beginning to form; an idea that made use of the the bastard child of a vindictive vice principal, sitting alone in his basement home, weeping over lost love, and cursing the ankle-biting beasts he’d spent every day trying to save.

If it worked, we might save everypony, and even manage to avoid terminal bloodshed. If it failed, we’d probably all be dumped in the canal along with a half dozen innocents before the night was over.

****

I stepped forward and put my leg around her shoulders. “Yes, yes there is much meat you can hurt - And you can hurt it as much as you want to! So long as you follow some very simple instructions.”

“We do not follow instructions! We give them!” Edina nipped at my face, but I caught her beak on the bottom of my hoof before she could remove my upper lip.

“Oh, I think you’ll like these... because they will hurt a lot of meat.”

The devil’s grin on my face gave her pause. Edina’s left iris grew slightly, while the right centered on my face.

“Tell us more.”

“Gather ‘round.” I raised my hooves to draw my companions in close. “I think I know how we can pull this off.”

****

Fifteen minutes later, the pounding of hooves and slamming of metal locker doors echoed again down the halls.

Once, it would have been hundreds of foals dashing to and fro, class to class. But not that night.

That night, the noise was just two ponies. Two scarred colossi of destruction, crashing like a wrecking ball ballet from wall to wall, bashing lockers and smashing doors. Their horns glowed with burning green light as they held an eagerly squirming black bag between them.

Behind the titanic charge of demolition, four shadows moved, tearing paper off walls and pushing open classrooms.

Far down in the depths, the cheery tune of a calliope took up a quicker beat, piping through heating vents that stretched acre after acre within the abandoned school until a gleeful war-song thumped along with the mighty charge. With each door opened, a subtle drone built until the vibrations grew into the roaring of caged lions being set free upon their captors.

Zeta, Taxi, Swift, and I did our best to keep our heads low as the swarm boiled out of each room. In the darkness, it might have seemed as locusts soaring out over fertile fields, were it not for the occasional much larger object, a mop or broom, which whipped past our ears.

I caught sight of Swift’s maniacally grinning face as she snatched down a strip of hall-passes off in her teeth and threw them into an empty garbage can. Behind her, Taxi was working methodically, moving from locker to locker and yanking each one open. Zeta, bringing up the rear, passed like a cleansing wind. A box of some strongly scented powder bumped into the shoulder of my tactical vest, spilling over my hooves before flying on after the two barreling hoofballers who were moving ahead at a neck-breaking speed.

Deciding we’d done enough, I kicked the trigger bit of my shotgun up into my teeth, dodged an ungainly artist’s easel, and set off at a full gallop after the twins. Sweat dripped into my eyes as I ran. The heart hidden in my coat was chugging with excitement, rocking back and forth with the beat of my hooves on the tiled floors. My lungs were full of fire; my thighs full of acid.

Juniper’s manic laughter chased me amidst a hurricane, a veritable typhoon of enchanted objects all swinging to avoid me by a matter of inches as they chased after the rampaging hoofballers. As I ran by, the others stopped in their efforts, hiked up their own weapons, and followed.

The coin was in the air, and there was nothing left but to see where it would land.

****

We swung around the final bend towards the auditorium just in time to see a curious face with a trigger in its mouth poke around the side of one of the theater’s wide double doors. I didn’t get a good look before Bake’s rear hooves crashed into the woodwork, sending the guard and the door for a short but extremely painful-looking flight.

The sack held between the brothers ruptured, and Edina, her hall-pass left back in the classroom, burst out into the drug lab proper with four whips, holding one in each claw. She was a screeching, spinning cannon ball of sadistic terror, and on her tail-feathers followed the unleashed fury of High Spirits and the Sunny Days Foster Care Facility.

If we’d been hoping for chaos, we couldn’t have designed a more brilliant entrance given six months to plan. It felt odd, giving no warning, but then that would have rather defeated the purpose of this attack. Bake and Boil were already inside when I reached the doors, dashing down amongst the rows of chemistry sets with reams of hall-passes in their teeth, slapping one after another on the stunned scientists. A splash of fire boiled up from a tipped-over table, but was immediately doused by a floating fire extinguisher.

I stopped in the entrance, peering around the side only to be yanked back by my tail as a spray of gunfire spattered the side of the doorway. A guard up in the spotlight catwalk dangling above the stage, quicker on the uptake than his fellows, had blasted a nice-sized hole in the wall with an SMG. Thankfully, Taxi was even quicker, and the school did not take kindly to having holes put in its walls.

Two seconds after he’d opened fire, a terrified scream followed as the pony was booted out of his perch by a flying broom. Before he could fall to what would probably have been a quick and messy death, a lasso snapped out from one of the balconies, wrapping itself around his front right hoof and turning his descent into a swing, squarely into a pillar. I picked out a flicker of stripes, then Zeta was gone, leaving the guard dangling like a concussed pinata.

The other guards had regained a semblance of composure and were lining up shots. From the perch of a stage-right riser box, a grey-green earth pony mare with three eggs for a cutie-mark let off a few rounds from a semi-automatic pistol held in her teeth. The bullets peppered Bake’s side and he stopped in mid-run, clenching his teeth, then letting out a moan that could be heard over the deafening thrum of the swirling tornado in the center of the room. His assailant cheered and thrust one hoof in the air, only to go wide-eyed as the gigantic hoofballer giggled drunkenly and stumbled on his way. While she stared, Zeta appeared behind her, looping a rope around her neck and another around her ankles, plucking her gun from her lips and tossing it away as she hogtied her to one of the uprights.

The three remaining guards had mistaken loudness for danger and decided on that basis that Edina was the biggest threat; they started snapping bullets at her as she winged by them. One who didn’t step back quickly enough caught a face-full of her whips that sent him tumbling up against the wall, clutching his slashed-open cheeks.

The technicians were in a panic, though most had the good sense to throw themselves underneath the stage. The two who remained out of cover were quickly herded by the twins underneath tables and behind bookshelves.

Two guards in sniping positions stood overlooking the audience pit, trying to follow Edina with their guns. One wore a thin denim jacket with a pocket full of what I presumed were extra bullets, while the other had taken the ill-advised route many young gangsters have in recent times and gotten a facial tattoo. It was somewhat unfortunate, then, that he couldn’t be bothered to keep that bit of flesh shaved; it had grown back in such a way that he looked like he had a bad skin disease.

Those were our next priority. Taxi and I pressed against the walls as I gestured towards the right side stairs, where we could move to flank them. On the count of three, we both dashed up the steps, then Taxi reared up, hefted the P.E.A.C.E. and winked at me. I stepped back slightly and the cannon made a dull ‘thunk’, a cloud of purple smoke bursting out of the end.

The round bounced neatly off the nearest support pylon and sailed past my cheek; If I’d been an inch to the right, I’d have lost some of my head. I glared at my driver, who compensated for nearly decapitating me by presenting me with an elusive sight: Taxi Looking Sheepish. Her debt thus paid, she then lined up her second shot and yanked on her makeshift trigger; it exploded all over Denim-Jacket, covering the stallion and the immediate balcony in a thick violet dust. It wasn’t a very large radius - a few yards, at best - but it was enough; He had time to gasp once before his eyes rolled up in his head and he hit the floor like a lead weight, tongue lolling from his mouth.

“What was that?!” I had to shout to be heard over the rumpus occupying the center of the room; By this point, this consisted mostly of Edina, who seemed to be reveling in the ongoing chase as the school tried unsuccessfully to bring her down in a place where she had plenty of room to maneuver.

“Sleeping powder! He’ll be out for ten hours!” she yelled back.

That was about when our second target had realized he was alone, and yanked his rifle towards our position. My brain did one of those automatic calculations and the answer it spat out was not good; if I wanted to shoot him at this range, I’d have to use my revolver and that would have neatly negated our goal of ‘zero corpses.’

Taxi took another shot, which went wide and decorated one of the chandeliers. The stallion raised his leg to fire. I braced my legs, ready to put a round in the guard’s chest, or to tackle Taxi and take the shot on my armored sides; I’m not sure which it was.

Fortunately, as the guard was about to bite on his trigger, some part of my mind registered a sound like a thunderbolt winning an argument; At the same moment, his trigger bit exploded out of his mouth, twisting sideways and slapping him in the opposite ear.

I don’t know who was more surprised, me, Taxi, or the poor sod with the freshly bruised face and bleeding lips. We stood there, staring at each other, until there was a second report, and his gun burst, throwing hot shrapnel all over him. He came out of his shock with a full-throated squeal of pain, tossing himself on his back and rolling wildly in circles as he tried to get the burning metal out of his fur and his face.

I was just going through a series of chants, prayers, and graces to any royal beings of power who might be listening, when Swift dropped onto the balcony over the fallen gunner, her expression panicky. “Oh my! Are you okay? I just meant to hit your gun! I didn’t think it would blow up!"

For a moment, my brain actually froze up in confusion, as it tried to piece together two things: First, that it had been my green rookie partner who’d pulled off that shot, and second, that she wasn't taunting her target; her voice had been quivering with frightened sincerity. It was a real apology. Here was a pegasus who’d just performed a feat of marksmareship that would have impressed Calamity Mane, and all Swift was expressing was genuine concern that she might have hurt the murderous drug-gang soldier who’d been about to drill a messy hole through Taxi.

I groaned and slapped my face with one hoof. We were going to have a long talk. Later. "Dammit, kid!” I hollered. “We're in a fight! Go support Edina!"

"Oh... right! Sorry, sir!" She hopped onto the railing around the balcony and took to the air, coasting like a big, underqualified kite.

Face-Tattoo was just getting to his hooves as Taxi pushed the P.E.A.C.E. under his nose, letting him get a good whiff of the residual Hush Now powder on the barrel. Five seconds later, he was snoozing like a baby. Opening my coat, I pulled out a pad of hall-passes, laying one on him, then another on his partner, leaving them to nap.

Throwing my legs over the balcony, I looked down into a scene of catastrophic damage. Bake and Boil had taken a very systematic route through the chemistry sets, blowing out fires and upending everything they could that didn’t seem immediately explosive. The school was already in the process of cleaning up the mess. A garbage can flew by, laden heavily with steaming beakers. The scientists were still hiding under the stage and each time one would venture out, the hoofballers would push them back.

“Well, that was easier than I... tho...”

I don’t know why anypony would ever say that sentence in its entirety, least of all me.

Math was never my strong suit, as Taxi had been known to shout about after she’d had a few drinks. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe all the booze was finally catching up to me, but I realized then that there were four guards in various states of unconsciousness or incapacitation.

There had been five ponies guarding the laboratory. Snicket wasn’t amongst the fallen.

A crash from backstage was all the warning we got before nine heavily armed ponies poured from behind the stage curtains, lining up on stage with their guns trained on the balconies. Taxi and I were trapped on the right side behind the riser boxes. Unlike the last bunch, this crew had ample warning. Every one of them had a hall-pass attached to their flank.

Three mares had saddle-mounted shotguns in various delicious flavors pointed at Bake and Boil. The twins were standing below the stage looking up at this fresh development with an unsettling lack of emotion towards the idea of being shot in the face. Their armor was cracked in a few places where bullets had bitten into the plastic, but overall none of their injuries seemed more than superficial. The remaining guards were sweeping their sights along the railing, looking for any easy targets.

All the while, a swirling vortex of school materials whipped through the center of the room, cleaning and pecking apart the damaged drug lab. Swift and Edina were nowhere to be seen, nor was Zeta, which wasn’t terribly surprising.

One of the drug makers, a young stallion with a bleached blond mane and more curiosity than could ever be called healthy, started to stick his head out from under the stage, but Boil shoved him back amongst his fellows.

I raised my head a few inches over the balcony and a rifle let off a loud report. A bullet whipped past the brim of my hat, nearly taking it off. I ducked back, relying on a thin crack between two slats in the viewing box to see what was going on down below.

Snicket, like a spotty pink bullseye, strutted out onto center stage. Her weaponized hooves clicked and clacked on the polished floor boards. She seemed a bit chunkier than the last time I’d seen her; she was probably wearing some type of body-armor underneath that tux. Behind her, the teamster’s manager stood with a derringer in his teeth and the poor druggie’s horn still sitting in his front pocket. I narrowed my eyes, wishing I could get a message to Swift to put one in each of that prick’s knees.

Snicket’s voice rose above the clamour of the school trying to clean up the chemicals. “I don’t know who you are, friend, but you picked the wrong place for a nightcap! Throw down your guns or we turn your friends here into blood custard!”

I considered our options. None of them were especially good, but they were worth considering. Shouting for Swift to kill all of them would probably have ended very poorly. Bake and Boil seemed disinclined to cause injury, or they’d probably have already charged the stage and proceeded with some head stomping. Their skills seemed mostly focused on absorbing damage. Zeta’s abilities were primarily in stealth and misdirection and Edina, wherever she’d gotten to, was probably better off there; as much fun as watching her try to disrupt that line of fire might have been, we were looking to maintain as close to a zero bodycount as possible - though at that point I was sorely tempted to recalculate that stance.

That left me, Taxi, and an extremely complex tactical conundrum. The twins weren’t in any special danger, but it’s never wise to show all of your cards at once. We had an advantage in range and position, but not in firepower.

There was only one thing for it, then. I slowly stood, putting a big smile on. I found myself looking down all six of the gun barrels that weren’t otherwise occupied in keeping back Bake and Boil. “Good evening, Miss...Snicket, was it?”

The Red Hoof tilted her head to one side. She asked icily, “You know who I am?” In the acoustically perfect space, I could hear her without her even having to raise her voice.

“One of your people mentioned your name while we were coming in.” I replied, trying to sound unworried by the array of death dealing devices aimed at my cranium.

“Mind if I ask who sent you?” Snicket wanted to know. “I’ve already narrowed it down to ‘nopony smart.’ You’d have come with more guns if you had half a brain in that grey-ass head. I just want to know whose employer I’m going to have to kill, later. If you’re lucky, I may send you back as the messenger, while I kill the rest of these idiots who came with you.”

I trotted down the stairs, the guns following me each step. At that range and unless one of those ponies was some type of sharpshooter, I wasn’t worried about a lucky headshot, but there were plenty of other places they could put holes in. “I’m with the Detrot Police Department.”

Snicket’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait. Aren’t you... You’re the fool that walked into the casino yesterday morning and asked to see the boss!?”

I tipped my hat. “The same.” I then yawned loudly, to the mild consternation of the small army with its guns trained on me. “Oh, do excuse me; I have had a truly exhausting three days, so I’ll get to the point: I’m here to disable this drug lab and your employer is going to be leaving town soon. If you want the protection of Detrot Police Department once that happens, give yourselves up. Otherwise, I’m sure the Cyclones will be overjoyed to know the King is gone and you’re unprotected.”

The enforcer-pony tilted one eye closer to me, then looked down at the Tortellini twins, who’d sat down to wait for something interesting to happen. She seemed warily perplexed as to why we all seemed so nonchalant in the face of certain doom, which was good; that wariness was keeping her from advancing further right away and mercilessly abusing her superior firepower and numbers. Instead, she tried to keep puzzling this out from a distance:

“I’ll believe you’re with the pigs, but I’ll be damned straight to Tartarus if these two are cops. And whatever did that—” She indicated the gently swaying thug dangling from the balcony, “—wasn’t an ‘officer of the law’, either. Besides, if this is a police raid, how come there aren’t a dozen squad cars worth of pigs knocking down the doors? You’re working freelance, aren’t you, buddy boy? Who bought you?”

A hoof lightly tugged at my coat and I half-turned to see Taxi crouched and nosing towards a spot directly above Snicket’s head. Doing my best to look like I was just stretching my neck, I glanced at the spot and it took less than a second to pick out Swift alongside Edina, creeping along the stage-lighting catwalk. How the griffin’s dual psyche was having a quiet enough time of it to manage ‘sneaking’, I couldn’t say, but there they were.

I decided to keep Snicket talking while they got into a better position, praying none of those on the stage decided to look up. “Oh, nopony bought me. I’m just doing my civic duty with a group of friends. You’ve heard of civic duties, right? They’re what you do when you’re not busting some sad addict’s horn off his crown like that piece of garbage hiding behind you.” Pointing at the teamster, I growled, “That’s right, shit-eyes! I see all and hear all, and I’m coming for you once I’ve taken this stupid trash out to the curb.”

The manager took two steps back, lips peeled back in a silent snarl. Snicket gave him a disgusted look, then shook her head and tapped one armored hoof against the other. “I don’t think you will, cop. I’m counting and I only saw six with you and three guns. I’ve got nine and every one of them has a shooter. These two, right here, are dead, if you don’t chuck your piece over.”

I kept a poker face. Taxi was pulling at my coat again. She whispered, lower than could be heard across the auditorium, “Hardy, I think I can hit the stage from here.”

I mumbled back out of the side of my muzzle. “You can’t hit the broad side of a double-wide barn, Sweets.”

Unsnapping the underside of her gun, she removed the drum, pointing at the remaining six shots. “I can throw this. I think I can land it on the stage. Can you shoot it from here?”

I shook my head slightly. “I’m good, but not that good.” But somepony was. My eyes drifted towards Swift and Edina, who appeared to be having a very quiet argument in the rafters. It seemed to involve my partner keeping a tight hold of Edina’s flight feathers with her teeth. “Wait a second... alright, I have an idea. Be ready to throw.”

Draping my hooves over the balcony, I flicked one toetip at Bake and Boil as I addressed Miss Snicket once again, “You can shoot those two, if you like. They’ll probably enjoy it. I was just wondering where you were keeping those lovely recordings? You know the ones.”

At that, Snicket’s eyes widened and she flicked her gaze at the manager who cringed visibly. He started to move sideways off the stage.

“That’s what I needed to know.” I smirked at the Red Hoof and her band of thugs, making sure their guns were still all pointed at me. “You really do need to get some better help. If my partner were here...” Up on the catwalk, Swift lifted one ear then turned to peer down at me, listening attentively. Edina took the opportunity to free herself and begin straightening her feathers. “...we might have a shot. I can see, of course, that we’re outgunned by miles and miles, so... I surrender. Everypony, you ready to surrender?”

I admit it; I couldn’t have been more obvious if I’d held up a flag with a picture of flying bullets. Swift already had her bit between her teeth, ready to fire, as Edina selected a whip with glinting metal near the tips, coiling and uncoiling it in her claws.

Blessedly, the ponies holding the guns weren’t the sort that’re hired to think. Snicket was, and she wasn’t buying our ‘surrender’ for a second, but she hadn’t thought to look up for winged assailants.

Stomping twice on the floor behind me, I ducked as Taxi jumped up from further down the balcony, spun in a circle to gain momentum, and chucked her ammo drum in a near perfect arc towards the stage.

In that second, I’d have laid her against any champion shot-putter in the Equestrian Games for that particular launch. I had plenty of time to ask myself: Why did that super-natural spatial awareness, that let her navigate our rabbit's-warren of a city and make tosses like that beauty, not translate into being able to fire her gun straight? Only the Princesses may know.

The drum rolled rolled end-over-end through the air and bounced off the stage.

“Now! Kid! Hit it!”

Everypony in the room had just enough time to draw a quick breath.

Masamane roared. It howled. The gun had shouted loudly and proudly before, but in the absence of any other noise, the sound was the very heavens themselves opening up and Celestia herself descending on solar wings to undo the enemies of the righteous.

It was a sound to make composers weep with envy.

Swift’s bullet tore into the side of the Hush Now canister, ripping straight through several of the shells and setting off the others. A cloud of sleeping powder burst in the middle of the stage, spinning in a circle and spurting thick smoke.

Snicket, all bluster aside, had spectacular reaction time. She dove off the stage, leaping over Bake and Boil, who just watched her without so much as raising a hoof. Once she’d passed, they turned back to the stage, raised their hooves, slapped them together, then shut their eyes in anticipation. Their horns flashed green.

“Kill them, you thick-headed geldings!” The enforcer screamed at her cohort. I couldn’t see the stage, which was obscured by the thick purple smoke, though there was a distinct reverberation of gunfire. A volley of hot lead spewed at the hoofballers from inside the cloud; they weathered it like two rocks in a tsunami, with ridiculous smiles plastered all over their destroyed faces. A thin mist of blood spewed up around them, splashing across the nearest set of tables along with bits of shattered bullets ricocheting off their sub-dermal shields.

Edina let out a war-cry so loud it made my eye sockets ache, launching herself from the catwalk. The rush of her wings blew the remaining powder off the stage, revealing six ponies still standing, who’d managed to take cover before the canister burst. Twirling like a top, she dropped on them with predatory intent. Her whip snapped out as she dove by and leveled out, moving too fast to for the eyes of the remaining guards to follow. The metallic tip caught one stallion across the lips, splitting them open before almost taking off the end of his ear. The look of surprise on his face was nothing to the wail of agony that rode its coat-tails. Edina shot past him before he could even hit the ground.

“Taxi, go around the other balcony! We’ll set up a crossfire!” I called out. My driver nodded, sprinted back the way we’d come, her duo-chrome tail disappearing down the stairs. As I was waiting for her to get in position, I raised my head, trying to get a look down at the stage.

It seemed Bake and Boil had abandoned their rather passive way of doing things. The hoofballer with the oven cutie-mark was helping his brother onto the stage. He wiggled his flank as a number of shots burst against his tail, then together they turned to face their attackers. Advancing slowly, they singled out a stallion who was almost as tall as they were and marched in lockstep towards him. The other remaining guards spread out, trying to get away from the seemingly invulnerable twins and to get proper angles on Taxi and I. A bullet skipped off the balcony inches from my head, sending splinters down the back of my neck.

Raising my leg, I shoved my shotgun’s barrel between two vertical slats. I kicked my trigger, catching it in my mouth. It tasted of sweat and sawdust, but it was a flavor worth the payoff.

The Minotaurus boomed in my ear.

Briefly, everything else - the crackle of the guards guns, the ongoing cyclone of school related objects dissecting the lab, and the sounds of combat - were muted by the explosion of sound and fire spewing from the end of the shotgun. My shoulder jerked and the recoil flowed down my spine. Nothing sounds like a twelve gauge Minotaurus unloading a high powder, low pellet shell in an enclosed area. The auditorium just amplified the effect and sent all of the guards diving towards the nearest bullet-resistant object, with the odd exception of the one that Bake and Boil seemed to be menacing.

My shot was high and wide; I’d been aiming for one of the light fixtures above the stage. It dropped with a resounding crash directly onto an olive-coated gunmare who’d decided one of the old set-pieces was a good place to hunker down. She cried out, struggling to drag the heavy light off of her rear legs.

Another one down.

I hesitated before moving on to another target. The two giant Stilettos seemed to have what I could only think of as their ‘chosen victim’ backed up against the rear wall of the stage. He was curled up in a ball on the floor.

Now what the hay are those two doing? I want a closer look.

The ladybug hiding in my mane made a beeping sound that resonated inside my head. Terror struck me when I realized what that meant.

No, that’s not what I-

My correction came too late. My awareness exploded into points of light, then sank into darkness.

****

Dropping into Bake’s body must go down as one of the strangest experiences of my entire life. Every part of his body seemed to bulge against its armor, as though barely restrained; though initially, I didn’t have much time to appreciate the newness of his body because I was too busy trying to find new expletives and coming up short.

Ladybugs, I swear...you, me and a big flyswatter are going to have a very brief but poignant discussion!

The network didn’t respond, except with a slight psychic judder so I turned my attention back to what was going on.

Bake’s forehead was itching, almost burning. I realized that was his magic in operation. I expected pain, but that was far off in the background, behind a very high wall of endorphins that would have had me grinning like a drunk monkey. The stallion on the ground was a soft beige, with a leaf green mane, and a set of crossed shovels on his flank. His jaws flexed again and again as he tried to pull his trigger. His eyes were tightly closed and he didn’t seem to realize the machine pistol’s pin was falling on an empty chamber.

Bake moved slowly forward and put his toe lightly, almost tenderly, beneath the cowering thug’s chin. The pony’s bright magenta eyes opened, and he stared up at the hulk of muscle and lacerated skin looming over him. Blood dripped onto the gun-pony’s face from the dozens of grazes where bullets had skimmed the surface of the megalithic hoofballer’s nose and cheeks, bouncing off the protective spell underneath. His trigger fell from his mouth, swinging down and smacking him in the knee. He was too transfixed to even feel it.

Boil came up on his brother’s side and picked up the bit with his magic, gently sliding it back into the guard’s teeth. With great deliberation, he put his muzzle next to the softly whimpering stallion’s ear.

With the care of a lover coming to his lady’s bed, he whispered one word.

“Reload.”

The pitiful goon’s eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped over, in a dead faint.

‘Okay, curiosity satisfied! Now let me out!’

****

Vision faded back in and I came back into my own body just in time to see a hazy pink hellion charging down the carpeted balcony towards me, murder in her eyes. The long, nasty points on the insides of her hooves flashed in the overhead lights. Her bow-tie was loose and hanging to one side as she hammered down on me with terrible purpose.

Seeing her up close, she might have been a sweet faced, girl next door type, but the eyes had seen too many sad stories. Lots of them had doubtless ended on the tips of her hooks.

The smart part of my brain was already getting me upright as she leapt for my throat. If I’d tried to back up, rather than ducking, she’d have neatly torn my head off and my tale would have ended there. As it was, she sailed right over, taking two steps off my armored flanks and landing facing the other direction. I swung around and her forehooves were dropping towards my face.

****

Fighting in close combat as an earth pony is always a tricky proposition.

If you’re fighting a griffin, they’ve got claws that can tear through everything but metal armor and a beak that will neatly snap bone. If it’s a unicorn you’re in combat with, you’re going to go for a flight or, if you’re really unlucky and wind up against an actual magician, end up turned into something nasty. Pegasi won’t attack you unless they’ve got positional advantages, and if they do, it’ll be quick strikes then darting back out of range.

Guns were the great equalizer for earth ponies, and those who chose not to use them were either psychotically confident or so skilled it didn’t matter. Still, fighting another earth pony has a certain pleasing symmetry.

****

Not many options. I jerked my gun up, catching her first strike on the casing rather than my cheek. My revolver, like most weapons from my grandfather’s time, was built a damn sight sturdier than she needed to be; even the smash of an earth pony’s hooves didn’t so much as scratch the finish.

Rearing up again, she drove her other hoof down, slamming it onto my shoulder. The hook caught in my armor, ripping a long tear in the thickened fabric. After all, it was bulletproof, not stabproof; If she got one good poke at my neck or chest with those claws, it might very well go right on through.

Hopping back several steps, I parried another blow aimed at my head, wincing as she slashed the top of my fetlock. The blood welled up as I staggered away. I bent my knee, shaking droplets off on the cushioned carpets, but the cut didn’t seem to have affected my range of motion. It just burned like a bad date.

Her sneer of triumph was short-lived as I put my hoof under my coat, smacking a buckle release before grabbing my shotgun’s barrel in my teeth, tearing it out of its holster straps, and smashing the stock across her cheek. Snicket stumbled away, spitting a muzzle-full of blood onto the carpet. A tooth came with it.

The strap of the Minotaurus with the mouth-bit hung from the trigger-guard and short of suddenly learning Taxi’s trick of standing up, I wasn’t going to be firing it anytime soon, but it made a decent club. In a pinch, everything is a weapon. Earth ponies learned that by dying in droves back when we were on the food chain only slightly above sheep.

“Having fun, cop?” Snicket made my title sound like a pejorative, full of contempt. Somehow, even with the quick swelling in her face, she managed to crack an incompletely toothy smile, graced with a couple of holes. I didn’t try to answer around my make-shift bat, but raised my lips at the edges, mirroring her look. “Heh...doesn’t matter. I’m betting you’ve only got one of those little powder bombs. We still outgun you.”

She liked to talk. Good. Each word she sputtered was a bit of breath and focus she was wasting, and I needed every edge. I charged forward and gave the shotty another swipe, intentionally aiming high. I hoped to get her to duck so I could get a good kick in on her forehead and end this quickly. The longer the fight when on, the greater her chances of a lucky strike.

Dancing neatly into my guard, she met me chest to chest, with my head higher than hers; always a bad position in equine hoof-combat. Her claws raked up my sides, finding a weak spot in the armor just below my armpit. I had to kick out my rear leg and throw myself onto my side, or the spike would have torn neatly into my heart. She wasn’t keen to let me off, though, and delivered a punishing kick to my rib-cage that left me gasping for breath. Before I could move, she landed a second one and I felt a burning, sudden need to go to the bathroom. She’d bruised a kidney nicely. I rolled, coming back up just as Snicket was on the offensive once more.

No matter how good a pony is in any given fighting style, it can always go wrong. I was on the losing end and we both knew it.

I decided to go with something unconventional. Wrenching my neck, I tossed the shotgun into her face. The effect was less than one might wish for, but still significant. Rather than take the hit across the noggin, like I’d hoped she might, she tried to swat it from the air mid-stride. It was enough to interrupt her gait for a half second, giving me time to leap back and bring my revolver into the space between us, trigger in my lips.

Snicket stopped, staring down the barrel cautiously for a moment... before a defiant gleam set in her eyes. “You aren’t here to make bodies, cop. You didn’t kill any of the other guards. You shoot me, this all goes straight to the deep, cold moon, doesn’t it? You need this to look like a punchup between rival gangs; They find a cop bullet in me and all those inconvenient questions start getting asked, right?” She advanced again, her front teeth marbleized with hot crimson. “I’m going to take you apart, piece by piece. Then I’m gonna de-feather that little griffin and wear that orange filly’s wings for a head-dress. Then, I’m going to hunt down that lizard you’re working for! Yeah, figured it out! You’re humping for the big purple drag queen!””

It didn’t matter if she knew or not, but something felt slightly off. While it’s not entirely uncommon for mobsters and other unsavory types to fall into the habit of monologuing to cover surprise or pain, I found my attention just a little too focused on her speech. In your standard punch-up with a psychopathic, hook wielding filly, paying attention isn’t a bad thing, but there should have been other sounds accompanying it: gunfire, some breaking glass, a few terrified screams. There were not. I risked a glance towards the stage behind her.

My eyes widened. The trigger slowly dropped out of my lips, thumping on my knee.

Snicket was still going. “-then, I’m gonna hang you by your... What are you looking at?”

I nodded at the front of the auditorium. She glared at me warily... then her face fell into a moment’s confusion; Now that she wasn’t talking, I think she noticed the same silence I had. She took a couple steps to the side, then turned so she could see what had my attention, yet still keep an eye on me. Equine field of vision being what it is, she didn’t need to move far, but I’d almost have been disappointed in her if she’d actually looked away.

Bake and Boil were sitting together at center stage, a small pile of guns at their hooves, and a pair of very satisfied looks on their ugly faces. The few conscious remains of Snicket’s little army were cowering in the corner underneath a rainbow banner for what must have been the last play ever seen at Sunny Days.

Swift was going from one to the next along with one of the braver technicians, attaching hoofcuffs to the thugs' foreknees one at a time. Where she’d gotten enough cuffs for the job is anyone’s guess, but every time one of the guards looked like they might struggle, Bake or Boil just shot them a leer of interest.

Taxi was covering proceedings with her cannon propped on the balcony from up high on the farside riser-box, though what efficacy it might have at that range was somewhat questionable. I was definitely going to have to make finding an alternative to aiming a priority if she was going to carry that blaster around with her everywhere.

I turned back to Snicket, whose lips were half-parted, her eyes roving over the diorama, seeking some edge that wasn’t there. Beaten is beaten, and she was beaten. She had the particular facial expression I tend to associate with a puppy that’s lost its bone; on any other pony, I might have felt a twinge of sympathy. Her mind was winding its way down a path towards an unpleasant conclusion, followed by a nasty consequence. Something told me there was unlikely to be a hug-and-a-kiss ‘forgiveness scene’ at Cosmo’s place, where she’d cry and he’d pat her head and tell her ‘just do better next time.’

I lazily scratched at the shallow slice across my foreleg. “Looks like your particular jig is up, pumpkin. We can offer you protection. You want it, or do you still want my head?”

I knew what coming before I posed the question; Snicket’s body-language could have been a neon sign. Her shoulders bowed and she bellowed until her voice cracked. There was a touch of creeping madness in her face, of old psychosis coming unchained, as she dug her heels into the carpet and prepared to charge.

My back legs were tight, and my front were loose; I was going to catch her for a full body slam into the nearest pillar. Despite that wiry strength coiled up behind cutting claws, I outweighed her. The slam was likely to leave some broken ribs, possibly a damaged spine, but she would live.

She threw herself towards me, hooked shoes outstretched for the kill. Blood streamed down her chin, staining her teeth red. A pony notices those little things, when facing imminent death. I tensed, inhaling a breath thick with chemical fumes and sweat.

A thin, shiny line of cable fell from the rafters, with no particular hurry, landing neatly over Snicket’s shoulders. She had an instant to realize what it was before the knot pulled taut and the Red Hoof’s eyes bugged out of their sockets. She was bodily yanked backwards into mid-air, all four legs milling uselessly in circles. Raising her knee, she tried to hack at the cable with her claws, but it was too strong.

Zeta, one hoof in a loop of the cable on the end, the other wrapped around it, slid down from somewhere in the shadows up above us, riding the rope to the ground. As she did, Snicket flew up towards the ceiling, hanging there trying desperately to draw breath. The zebra settled on the carpet, holding on until there was a bubbling gasp.

Stepping off the rope, Zeta let the enforcer drop. The body hit the ground with a wet thump, then lay frighteningly still. Trotting over, the zebra leaned down and pressed her head against the Red Hoof's chest, then held it over her muzzle. Nodding to herself, she unfastened the cable and began looping it around her leg.

I was too rocked, for several seconds, to do more than incoherently stutter. When I found a few words, they weren’t exactly gratitude and grace.

“Are you insane?! We need zero dead!” I shouted. My partner looked up from the stage, and Taxi, momentarily took her eyes off the rounded up guards.

“The beast lives.” Zeta shrugged, indifferently. “She will not recover for some time, but she lives. If I did not work for Miss Stella, be assured, I would have made certain that was not the case. This is not a being worthy of life. It is a rabid animal.”

Snicket’s breast rose very slightly, the dropped again. She was breathing. It was weak, but it was breath.

“I’m going to pretend you weren’t doing that exclusively to make me have a heart attack.” I gandered over the railing down at the stage. “Speaking of things that’ve given me a heart-attack... where’s Edina?”

A shriek of mortal fear picked that precise moment to ring through the auditorium.

“Ahhh... right. Let’s go get her before she pulls off something important.”

Chapter 21: Can You Tell Me How to Get...

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 21: Can You Tell Me How to Get...

The one hard-and-fast rule of Equestrian police interrogations is that the interrogating officer is not allowed to cause physical discomfiture to the subject. No beatings or torture or starvations or sleep deprivations or cakeboarding. Celestia's Equestria takes stark issue with cruel treatment of suspects... but it has never taken issue with unusual treatment.

The options in creative methodology employed by interrogators vary as widely as the interrogators themselves; some of them have gotten downright imaginative. Pegasi have been known to create thick indoor fog clouds and ask their questions from different and disorienting angles. A unicorn illusionist pioneered a technique wherein she disguised herself to look like the subject's mother. Notably, one of Equestria’s most feared interrogators has earned dozens of confessions simply through hours of unrelenting whining.

Of course, there are occasionally advantages to working extralegally. Interrogation techniques employed by non-legal entities are not restrained by any such code of conduct. It is difficult to argue against the idea that dangling someone feet first above a roaring volcano is excessive, but it does tend to get ponies talking.

--The Scholar

In basic training they say the key to every cop’s life is easily summarized in one thing: positivity. The popular and well-entrenched wisdom is that if you can keep a positive outlook in the face of what’s wrong with the world, you’ll wake up every morning convinced you’re a superhero who can change that world themselves.

I used to wake up in the morning some days and piss on a police manual before breakfast. Sometimes because of my hangover, but often just to remind myself why I’m alive and so many good ponies aren’t.

****

Zeta pitched Snicket’s unconscious body off of her back, letting her spill onto the stage at the hooves of a sizeable colt with tufts of ruddy orange fur around his neck. “You.” She pointed at the stallion, then at the comatose enforcer. “Carry this or I will forcefully emasculate you.”

The guard, considering this sufficient incentive, scrambled to shift Snicket onto his back, aided by one of the techs who was perhaps a little rougher than necessary with the Red Hoof, though she wasn’t in any condition to feel it. From somewhere off the back of stage-left, another squeal of pain made several of the trussed up guards jump. It was followed by a cackle of avian laughter.

I sighed, scratching at my ear and finding it full of dust.

Taxi was giving me dubious looks. “Hardy, shouldn’t we go stop whatever that is?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting around to it.” Inspecting a nasty rip in my coat, I started for the back door of the auditorium, ducking under a cardboard replica of Canterlot Castle. “Get the guards on their hooves and ready to go. Don’t forget to cuff Snicket, and see if you can break those hooks off her hooves.” I indicated one of the work-tables behind the curtain, which was lined with rows of snips and clamps.

“Alright. Where are you going?” Taxi wondered.

“I guess I’m going to go take care of the—” Another piercing wail split my explanation. “... noise... before it attracts attention. Then we snatch up the recordings and ditch this place forever. After that? Cosmo.”

Swift was just finishing affixing one last pair of cuffs between the front knees of a very slender mare with a razorblade cutie-mark. The taller mare made to spit in her face, but my partner swept one wing up, blowing a little breeze back at her and flicking the spittle all over the other pony’s nose. “Sir, I think we should probably go and-”

“I know, kid. You’re with me. Zeta?” I inquired. The zebra was watching as the school cleared away the last bits of the drug lab into large garbage cans. A number of wide, heavy chairs were starting to fly back into the auditorium from wherever they’d been stashed, settling themselves in rows starting from the back. Flights of screws seemed to materialize and begin bolting the chairs in place. Soon, the only evidence there had ever been a drug lab would be the ponies who ran it. “May I have your company?”

“Of course, Detective Pony.” She bowed, then snapped out with her teeth, catching my shotgun out of mid-air before a pair of kitchen tongs could carry it off to parts unknown for disposal. I gingerly took it from her, flicked the safety on, then with her assistance, settled it back in its holster and reattached the various belts to my trigger.

That may have taken more time than generally required. I wasn’t feeling any special hurry.

****

I pushed through the stage door marked ‘Emergency Exit’ and held it open for the two mares coming behind me.

There was a long, grassy alley behind the school with brick walls on either side which ended at a thin strip of tarmac. It might have been paved cart path some years back, maybe for bringing props to the back of the auditorium. Passing between empty warehouses, it must have wound its way back to a main road some distance away; I could hear the far off squeaks and bumps of late night traffic.

A pool of light provided by a street lamp, which gamely lit the abandoned alley despite having most likely not seen maintenance since the school was closed, illuminated a sight that sent a warm tingle right to my cutie-mark.

Dangling by one rear leg from the lamp by the thin length of a whip, a flailing body twisted and spun as it tried to fend off a ghostly figure which danced and snapped at its face. The figure leapt up and gave a sharp bite to the soft parts of the swinging body, eliciting another howl of agony.

We approached at a leisurely pace.

“—little bitch! Let me down from here!”

“Oooh, meat likes a game, does it? We play many games before we eat you, pony meat!”

The manager, his vest torn and hanging from his neck, was doing his best to shield the most sensitive parts of his body with his rear hooves while Edina cavorted around him in circles. He looked up and saw us coming.

“Help me, idiots, or I’ll make sure you don’t get paid this week!” He shouted at us. “Shoot it or something!” The stallion yowled, batting at the griffin with one foreleg as she came in for another nip.

“Meat! Meat is loud and stupid!” Edina glared at us, hissing softly as she swatted the manager across the face with one wing. “You meats, stay back! This one is ours!”

The three of us stepped into the circle of light and the manager’s jaw went slack. “You’re not-”

“No, we’re not. You’ll be re-joining your friends in a few minutes, so don’t worry. We’ve got to have a little talk first.” I told him, gesturing for Zeta to catch Edina before the griffin could swoop in to peck out one of our prisoner’s eyes. Snapping out with a lasso, she wrapped it tightly around the griffin’s wings, pinning them to her sides along with her front legs. Tripping over herself, Edina pitched into the grass, chirping angrily at us.

“Release us, meat! We caught this one fair and square!” she demanded, trying to bite the zebra as she reached out to stroke the little griffin’s downy neck-feathers. As Zeta’s hoof touched the base of her skull and began moving in tiny circles, it was like a switch had been flicked. Edina’s slitted pupils widened and her beak fell open. Every muscle in her body relaxed.

“Is that some kind of pressure point trick?” I asked.

Zeta shook her head. “Merely a neck scratch. Works on most griffins.”

“Huh. I’ve got a big friend I may try that on the next time I’ve got a few drinks in him.” I blew a breath through my nose. “May be worth a laugh down at the bar.”

I returned my attention to the hanging manager. He was staring back at me with a mixture of shock and fright.

“Y-you should be dead!”

“Probably,” I conceded.

“The Red Hoof cunt—”

“—Is going to be nursing a sore throat for the next month.” I finished for him. Zeta stroked the noose dangling from her side in a subtly threatening way as I asked, “Now, name?”

“Go bone your mother, fuzz! I want a lawyer!”

“Ahhh... you seem to have missed out on how this is going to work. Allow me to explain. I’m doing some freelance good deeds. I may claim it as volunteer hours on my taxes, as a matter of fact. The upshot is that I’m not presently working as a representative of the Detrot Police Department.” Taking a step forward, I put my leg overtop of Zeta’s, stopping her slow scratching motion. Edina immediately came to attention,half-heartedly trying to turn her head to snap at our legs. I guided her beak around to stare at the manager’s helpless form. “Edina, if he doesn’t cooperate, I’m going to hold him while you bite off his ears. How does that sound?”

Long claws scratched at the ground as Edina tried to get up, only to be held gently in a squat by the zebra’s restraining hoof. Finding she couldn’t rise, she settled for a low purr. “We like this. Please, meat... do not cooperate! We are hungry and would much appreciate a simple meal without all the fuss!”

Panic crossed the manager’s face and he glanced at Swift. “You! You can’t let them do this to me! You’re a cop, right? My boss’ll kill me!”

If he was hunting sympathy, he’d picked the wrong pegasus. She snapped out one wing, stopping his spin and bringing him back around to face her; her blue eyes were furious pinpoints that she might as well have trying to drive into his skull. “How could you? How could you have done that to somepony?!”

“Done what?!” He quailed, trying futilely to pull away from her.

Swift grabbed his thready, green vest in her teeth, tore it off of his head and dropped it on the pavement. Without the thin piece of clothing, his paunch sagged slightly. I had to tilt my head to make out his cutie-mark and even from the proper angle, I wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like a sandwich of some kind with a snail crawling out of the end.

Digging around until she found the front pocket, my partner yanked out the drug addict’s snapped horn. The broken piece of magical bone stuck out of one side of her muzzle as she waved it accusingly under the managers nose. His face paled under the layer of patchy scrub-like fur clinging to his pasty cheeks.

Swift stuffed the horn into one of her pockets, turned away and sat facing the wall. “I’m not even going to look at you, or I may do something I regret. I saw you hurt that poor pony. I was watching from a cloud and I saw it, so you don’t get to talk to me!”

The manager hung there for a minute, processing what’d just happened, before kicking frantically at his ankle, trying to dislodge the whip. “Arrest me then! I want to go to jail!” He begged. “You gotta protect me!”

Grabbing his foreleg, I stopped his slow spin, shifting him around to face me again. “We’ll take your situation under advisement and if you cooperate, I’ll consider not feeding you to the feathery psycho.” I patted his cheek, comfortingly. “Now then, about that name?” I asked again.

In the way of all middle-management types too witless to climb out of mediocrity, he was a pony of grand ambitions and little courage.

“Hoagie! My name’s Hoagie. Please, lemme down! I’m going to pass out!” He whined.

“I can disable blood-flow to his legs.” Zeta offered, taking a step forward. Hoagie’s breath caught. “It will keep him conscious longer, though if we take too long they may need to be amputated.”

“Hmm...” I considered this just long enough to make him worry. “No, no, I don’t believe that will be necessary. I just need a question or two answered. You think you can do that for me, Mister Hoagie?”

“Yes! Yes, anything!”

“Excellent. Good to have you on board.” It was a real effort to smile at him, considering I wanted to pull his heart out through his ass. “Now, the recordings. You know which ones I’m talking about, yes?”

“I... “ His lip quivered as his cowardice fought a losing battle, deciding how likely it was that a member of Detrot’s finest would just sit by and let a griffin devour him piecemeal. Once again, my co-workers bought the short end of the trust-stick. “I was supposed to escape if we ever got raided and things were looking bad. Everypony else would have really good lawyers and be out of jail fast, so I was supposed to get out with the crystals. I... I forgot them.”

Zeta sneered at the hanging stallion. “I do not believe you simply forgot. You ran away. You are... yellow. I believe that is how you ponies say it. You are yellow and no better than the dog that runs from the wolf, rather than defend his shepherd.”

“Hey lady! I’m not getting paid enough to die!” Hoagie snapped, a look of offended pride crossing his face.

“If there is a sum sufficient to induce you to acts leading to your death, you are a waste and I see no use for you as anything but offal to feed my winged friend. Speak, yellow pony. The recordings.” The zebra didn’t raise her voice, but somehow, that made her tone all the more unsettling. Edina ran her long, pointed pink tongue over her beak.

“They’re in the office!” Hoagie screeched, holdings his forelegs together pleadingly. “Snicket has the key to the lockbox!”

I let my chin fall to my chest, thinking. Finally, I nudged Edina with my toe. “Alright, get him down and put him with the others. We’ll get the bunch Stella had hunting down the injured kid to pack them into a truck or something and stash them somewhere until we're done with Cosmo.”

“This is our meat to play with!” Edina snarled.

“Yeah, it was your meat. He cooperated. If any of the others decide they want to make trouble, you can chew on them a bit. Clear?”

Her green eyes narrowed to slits. “If there is no more meat to hurt, we will be most unhappy.”

A look of relief passed over Hoagie’s face, right up until Edina flew up and popped the supporting knot free. I didn’t feel much like catching him.

****

I sent the others on ahead and stayed back, looking up at the lonely streetlight. It flickered and buzzed, a tiny cloud of insects zipping around it in a nightly ritual as old as fire. Why did they do it? What drove them to keep trying to get to the light?

I suppose I might have asked Queenie. Who knows? The Essy might even have told me.

A breeze snuck down the long path, ruffling my mane and brushing the brim of my hat. I pulled the old fedora off, examining it. There was a thin hole in the brim just a few centimeters from the headband; a bullet hole. I hadn't even noticed the hit. It was such a damnably close thing and, yet again, I was alive to hold my hat and wonder at the reasoning of moths.

Cosmo needed to be brought down. We had little of the original plan remaining to us, though the pieces that still fit were integral.

My cutie-mark felt very slightly hot. Not the aching burn of proximity to great injustice. Just hot, like I was standing on one side of a door with a raging fire on the other. The drug lab was gone. We'd gotten away with zero dead. Snicket, Cosmo's killer, was off the board.

Why, then, did I feel the game wasn't over?

I knew the answer. It was in the back of my mind, though it was only later that I had time sift through the subconscious musings.

Ruby Blue was dead, and still I didn't know why.

****

I stepped back onto the cool, air-conditioned stage to discover Swift standing on the stairs, basking in the gratitude of a couple of the freed laboratory techs.

“Thank you so much, Miss!” A kindly-faced older mare with an incongruous lip piercing was vigorously shaking my partner’s hoof, while another chemist about my age with a nasty, barely healed chemical burn on his ear patted her on the back.

“I-I’m j-just doing my duties, ma’am.” Swift muttered, blushing the color of a cooked lobster. Taxi had one of her smug looks on, letting my partner take the adulation while she sat back and watched the guards lifting their snoozing compatriots into wheelbarrows and carts purloined from the theater prop closet. Several of the techs had the guards’ guns in their teeth, keeping them moving.

I felt a slight tug on my coattails. Turning revealed that the source was an eggshell-blue filly with an electrical coil emblazoned on her flank, holding my coat in her teeth. She dropped it and lowered her eyes. The whites of her eyes had a sick looking redness to them, and the fur of her cheeks was matted with tears. A series of truly shocking purple splotches dotted her neck and cheek. Her voice was soft, beaten, as though she was afraid to hope for dawn after such a long and awful night. “I... we... mister... what’re we s-supposed to...”

Something in my memory jittered. I recognized her, but it took a few more seconds for my brain to catch up with my eyes; When I figured it out, my chest tightened with sympathy. The last I saw her, she was in a pool of spilt chemicals under the curtains. The mare Snicket kicked. Bunsen.

Dropping onto my haunches, I touched her shoulder. She blanched, falling onto her backside like she was expecting to be struck, then forced herself to look at me.

“Bunsen, right?” I asked. Her expression turned slightly fearful, and I added: “I saw what Snicket did to you. We were sneaking around a bit. Take your time. What’s wrong?”

“I...I’ve got a... a debt. S-Snicket said iffen I didn’t work for it, she’d hurt my kids. I had to make... make all kinds of things for them... b-but my debt...” She stuttered, then stopped and dropped her eyes.

“I know who holds your debt.” Sliding my hooves underneath her forelegs, I lifted her and set her upright. “He’ll be leaving town soon. Sooner than he knows. Got me?”

A miniscule flicker of something I rarely get the chance to see first-hoof burst to life in her injured face. “R-really?”

“Yes. I’ve got a place where you can be safe, too, until he’s gone. Your kids too.” I gave her a light shake, then stepped back. “I still have something to do, though, so wait here. Listen to the pegasus and we’ll get you out of here. She may not look it or sound it, but she does know what she’s doing.”

Bunsen nodded, her lips settling into an uneasy smile that lasted only an instant, then wandered backwards towards where Swift was securing the guards in the aisle between rows of now perfectly laid down theater chairs. The tall stallion carrying Snicket was at the end of the line.

Trotting down the stairs, I walked in a slow circle around Snicket’s impromptu ride, ignoring his curious looks. Now that Snicket wasn’t casting red-hazed berzerker eyes on my jugular vein, I could see she actually was pretty nice to look at. Not the kind of stunning gorgeous that Ruby Blue had pulled off even in death, but not bad.

Pushing aside her bowtie, I tugged open the lapel of her tuxedo’s jacket. As with any decent tailored coat, there was an inner pocket. That close, I could smell bubblegum and the turpentine she used to oil her claws, though somepony had used a pair of snips to remove the tips of the dangerous spikes. Tipping the pocket upside down, I shook it until a pack of Supremo Mega Blammo Bubble slipped out, followed by a thin, old-fashioned key with a gem inset that caught the light and seemed to shine internally.

“Ahhh... that’s a lovely thing.” I murmured.

Taxi was at my side. I hadn’t noticed her come up beside me until she spoke, “What’s that?”

“Not sure.” I answered, picking up the key in one side of my mouth. The cold copper tasted foul. “They gave that little scummy twit who was with Snicket some orders to grab a lockbox out of her office, but didn’t give him the key.”

My driver eyed the gemstone. “It’s an old drug runner trick. They have two keys. Cosmo has one and Snicket has the other. It keeps a courier from running off with whatever they’re holding and selling it elsewhere. It looks magical.”

“No surprise there, I guess.” I sniffed, irritably, and made for the stage. The stallion carting the Red Hoof knickered unhappily, shifting his burden as he turned back to wait. “This is just a modification of that safe in Cosmo’s office. Doesn’t matter. We’ve got the key. Come on.”

****

Finding Snicket’s office took more time than it should have. The door was hidden inside an ancient wooden wardrobe half again my height. Somepony back in the day must have thought it was cute to stash the theater director’s office behind such a thing. Taxi’s sharp eyes noticed that the badly painted furniture was slightly inset into the wall, and she decided to have a look. Inside was a curtain of taped-together hall passes that parted in the middle.

I sidled in beside her, gun ready, and pulled back the curtain with one leg.

What we found was a kind of controlled clutter. Every wall and surface of the room, ceiling included, was covered in dozens of monitors. Even more sat on the floor. The dark screens seemed like sunken eyes, staring at us as we invaded the Red Hoof’s little sanctuary.

A small desk sat in the middle of the mess, with a chair behind it. The screens were mostly blank, though a few showed static and one was an overhead shot of the drug lab itself. Bake and Boil had the guards and lab-techs moving towards the back of the auditorium, a slow train covered by Swift, head high and wings wide, at its front and Zeta’s stripes bringing up the rear.

Taxi stepped over a screen that hadn’t yet been plugged in. “Hardy? I’m feeling that need to ask what the plan is, again.”

I spat out my gun-bit. “Plan is as much the same as we can make it. I was hoping we could just leave that bunch out front and call the DPD, but I don’t think that’s an option now.”

“Are you afraid they’ll identify us?” My driver wondered.

“Nah, not really.” A flicker of amusement crossed my lips. “I mean, what’re they going to say? ‘We were taken out by a bunch of whore ninjas and the Detrot Police Department?’ They’ll think the fumes got to them or it was a rival gang.” I lifted a thick notebook off Snicket’s desk and nosed it open. “Unfortunately, we can’t charge any of them for the drug lab. The school destroyed most of the evidence and anything it didn’t is contaminated. We have no warrant. Until Cosmo is out of the picture, we can’t afford to let them go or book them.”

“What, then? My trunk can’t fit that much pony.”

“I know,” I acknowledged. “Haymaker took up half the space by himself. Might be fun to try, though.”

Taxi buried a smile.

I ran my eyes down the page “Hmmm...looks like Snicket had the jump on trying to get information off the Vivarium recordings. Here...” I read from the notebook, “Nine A-M, griffin tribelord Gorse for three hours, likes anal, recorded on crystal six, information block one-one-four-one. Ten A-M, Bark Skin, Academy Lectern, thirty minutes with... Scarlet Petals... crystal five, info block blah blah blah.” I groaned and shut the book. “She didn’t get much, but enough to screw the Vivarium. No pun intended,” I added as I caught Taxi’s expression. “We might have to find a nice, deep hole to drop her down until this blows over.”

Taxi gnawed on her lips, top, then bottom, before pulling the desk drawer open. It leapt out, as though on a spring. My driver stopped breathing for several seconds, then murmured, “Oh my...”

Inside the drawer was a staggeringly complicated array of knobs, switches, and toggles set into a jet black control panel. Each was labeled with a different number, corresponding to a similar number on each screen. At the top, a big green button had a sticker on it that said ‘Play’ and below it, a red one that marked ‘Stop’.

Taxi sometimes acts according to strange whims and cosmic signals, but I always suspected she was just incapable of ignoring a shiny toggle.

Before I could stop her she smacked ‘Play’ and every single screen in the room burst to life. I tossed my leg over my eyes as the light exploded in a wildly discordant mural of wall to wall imagery that sent my stomach churning. Backing into the door, I tore loose the hall-pass curtain and sat heavily. The passes fluttered down over my head. “Dammit, Sweets!”

“Sorry, sorry!” She darted forward and punched the Stop key, freezing all of the images in place. “It... you know...”

“Yeah, a button. I hope the next one isn’t wired to a bomb or both you and Swift are going to bite it.” I groused, letting my leg drop. The frozen pictures seemed to be mostly empty rooms, though a lot of them weren’t and I really wished they were. I tried to find something to focus on and picked one that seemed tame enough, until I realized the cucumber wasn’t actually a cucumber. I shivered and shut my eyes, pressing the Stop button again. The screens went blank.

Poking at the control panel, Taxi began turning switches and dials, until one made the entire assembly shudder. A smaller drawer snapped from the side of the open one. There lay a crystal drive, an emerald the size of a chicken’s egg. The gem seemed to catch light and twist it inside itself in a way that was mildly hypnotic.

The damn thing could have paid my rent for a year if it were sold on the street, notwithstanding the huge value of the blackmail material inside it. Sometimes I envy the bad guys, just a little.

Picking Snicket’s key out of my front pocket, I set it on the desktop. “If that’s the recording... what does this go to?”

Taxi shook her head, then gave me a questioning look. “Cutesy gangster crap?”

Turning around, I brought my rear hooves up and smashed the side of the desk with all of my strength. It skidded across the floor into the wall and tore free a bundle of cables leading out of the bottom, tipping onto its face with a floor-shaking crash. A second, hidden drawer bounced out of the bottom, dangling by one broken hinge.

“Cutesy gangster crap,” I agreed, prying one shoe-tip into the space and ripping the drawer free. A thickly jeweled lockbox dropped onto the floor. Snatching up the key, I slotted it into a keyhole on the top, twisted it, and felt the entire thing creak. Several internal mechanisms variously shook, rattled, and let out noises of operation before the lid, with little aplomb, opened an inch.

Flipping it open, we found were six more crystal drives, each in their own comfy little hole. Picking up the lockbox, I closed the lid again and pulled out the key. “Get the one from the machine. Everypony else should be out front by now. I think it’s time to go.”

As if to punctuate that statement, a dustpan and feathered brush flew around the fallen hall-pass curtain and began trying to sweep a monitor off the wall.

****

After the amount of noise we’d made coming in, strolling through the silent halls of Sunny Days with only the light of a small mouth torch was eerily peaceful. We’d left the auditorium just as the first of the expensive magical screens was dragged out of Snicket’s little office and tossed into a small, metal dumpster that’d somehow made its way in and was waiting patiently beside a row of garbage cans full of carefully separated chemicals and broken glass. The clean-up was proceeding apace, with tiny squadrons of tweezers zipping back and forth along the corners of the room, removing fragments and dust that more brute force methods had missed.

By wordless agreement, as we moved down the quiet hallway, we tore open every door we could easily reach. The entire building was a disturbed tomb and we were just setting things back the way they should be.

High Spirits, wherever he was, deserved a little peace in knowing his school would always be clean and the students always on time.

****

I strode out the front door to the school yard, where a middling-sized crowd of ponies was milling around in the middle of the street. Scarlet and Swift sat together, talking softly on the sidewalk under a streetlamp while, in the road, the guards were pressed together, side by side with their injured and unconscious brethren piled beside them. Bake and Boil were making sure none of them ran off with the help of a circle of five or six ponies who I didn’t recognize; Stella’s search team. The lab techs were gathered up as far as they could be from the guards, while still being in the light.

Being back in the smoky air of the industrial center made me long for the clean, filtered school again. I could feel myself getting black-lung just standing there, but it wasn’t so much the foulness of the air that made me uneasy as the uncertainty of what was coming.

We’d won, in every sense of the word. Every part of our three day journey was leading up to eliminating one of the worst mobsters in the city. Again, I tried to summon up some celebratory impulse that just wouldn’t come.

Taxi jostled me gently with her foreleg. “Hardy?”

I realized I’d let myself drift for a moment, watching the little herds of ponies. I shuffled my coat, taking the time to run my hooftip over the lacquered box in my inner pocket. The heart made a quick double-thump, which my tired mind was inclined to interpret as ‘I’m here, I’m okay.’ My shoulders relaxed, just a little.

“I’m fine, Sweets. Just piecing together what we’re going to do next. Hey! Scarlet!”

Stella’s secretary was fervently nodding to something Swift was saying, but at my call, his head snapped up and his puppy-dog grin appeared.

“Detective Hardy!” The rose colored stallion rushed over to us. “I was so worried! Are you hurt?”

“No moreso than usual.” I flicked a bit of dust off one shoulder. “What’s your situation? Bring me up to speed.”

Scarlet hesitated, sweeping his tail between his hind legs. “Err... well...we did find the colt. He’s on his way to the hospital. Swift gave me his horn.” He patted his stylish sapphire blue saddle-bag. “I’ll see to it the doctors get it. It was a clean break, so he should, eventually, recover.”

“Good to hear.” I said, waving Taxi forward. She opened her own bag and extracted Snicket’s lockbox, setting it on the road in front of me. Scarlet leaned forward, reaching for it, and I put a restraining hoof on its top. “These are the crystal drives. The recordings. Let’s talk price.”

“I... I’m only... I can’t...” He stammered, then a disappointed look expanded from his mouth to his eyes. “Detective Hardy, you’re not going to try to blackma—”

I held up my leg for silence.

“What I want is protection for Cosmo’s drug makers. The ones making the drugs were debtors he roped in to mix product. I want them and whoever they choose to bring with them safe in the Heights. Got me?” Facing the motley collection of guards, waiting for whatever fate we might have in store with them I added, “We’ll also need somewhere to dump the King’s goons. Some of them are... sharp.” My hoof found the gash in my armor and I tugged it open, leaving the plating underneath exposed.

“Of-of course!” Scarlet said, picking up the box and secreting it away in his pack. His sweet smile returned. “We’ve already got a couple of trucks on the way. We have safe places and we can get their families as well. What about the drug lab?”

“The school ate it.”

The stallion peered at me, confused. “What?”

“It’s taken care of.” I didn’t feel like going into long explanations. Using one knee, I rubbed one eye, then the other. Adrenaline is better than caffeine, but it doesn’t last near as long and the comedown is a bitch. “I need to sit down for a bit. Have some coffee. Where’s our ride?”

Taxi’s lips curled back off of her teeth. “Yeess. If you’re here, who is guarding my car?!”

Stella’s secretary brushed a stray hair out of his eyes. “Miss Edina and Miss Zeta came to get me. I think Miss Edina was driving, so it shouldn’t take long to get—”

****

A tiny, mean part of me regretted keeping my driver from murdering Scarlet.

****

Bake was sitting on Taxi as the Night Trotter’s engine sound wafted down the desolate road. The twins were very apologetic, but firm in their position that she wasn’t allowed to choke the life out of Stella’s secretary. My driver was less than pleased with the arrangement and kept slamming her back knee into Bake’s gentlecolt’s region. It wasn’t having the desired effect.

Meanwhile, Swift recapped the fight for Scarlet, who was watching her zip in excited little circles, making shooting noises with her mouth. She was practically dancing.

I remembered that feeling of total, full body exultation after my first successful operation. Juniper had to almost throw me at my bed after forcing a whole cup of chamomile tea down my throat, because I just knew, just damn well knew, that I was going to make a lasting difference and within a few weeks the criminal elements would find themselves shaking in their little booties at the name ‘Hard Boiled.’

I let myself smile as I followed her tale out of the corner of one eye, inspecting the damage to my shotgun. The blow to Snicket’s cheek had widened a weakness in the stock that I was going to have to slap some epoxy on before I sent it back to Requisitions.

A pair of headlights flashed, bringing me upright. The Night Trotter’s nose crept around the bend in the row, its lights playing over the crowd as it rumbled forward at a snail’s pace. There didn’t seem to be anypony behind the wheel, though Zeta was sitting in the passenger seat with her hooves braced against the ceiling. Her eyes were like saucers.

As the vehicle got closer, I made out a pair of tiny claws clutching the steering wheel and a single, orb-like eye, tilted sideways, peeking over the dashboard. Edina would have needed five or six telephone directories under her for a normal driving position.

Taxi’s struggling increased substantially. “Lemme up, you chunky bastard! What’s she done to my baby?!”

The car pulled very, very gradually, to a stop in front of us. Zeta threw herself through the window and slumped onto her foreknees beside the nearest gutter, retching copiously. Edina pushed the driver’s side door open and stepped out. The Night Trotter’s engine snapped, crackled, and shut down with a burbling of quiet pleasure, like a race-pony who’s run hard and made the finish line by a comfortable margin.

“We find this a most suitable vehicle,” the snowy griffin said approvingly, patting the cab’s hood with one wing. “Pardon and excuse how long it took us. We had to try out the fully engaged speed rune and then got into a race with a very perturbed meat sack who believed his pony police car could keep up with Mistress Edina in the bends. We have set him right, though we do not think he meant to drive into that milk truck.”

My driver writhed on the road, flipping over and using both rear hooves to smash Bake under the chin, finally tipping him onto his side. She tossed herself towards the car, throwing up the hood to reveal the steaming hulk of the engine. “Oh sweet Celestia...”

A few of the runes etched into its surface still glowed with latent energies, but most seemed to be flickering weakly. The large red ruby centered on top was almost black, its magics completely drained.

“Wait, Mistress Edina... did you say you got in a race with a...” Scarlet began, then found a fuming Sweet Shine a centimeter from the end of his nose.

They stood there, muzzle to muzzle, for several seconds. Everypony else, including the guards, was frozen, waiting for the attack that was inevitably coming. There was no way in this world I could have gotten close enough to stop her before she snapped his neck.

Taxi growled in a voice barely above a whisper. “Your boss will be paying for my entire power re-supply and a recharge on my maneuvering rune."

Scarlet made a squeaky noise of resignation as he pulled a sparkly pink wallet from his bags. “Cash or check?”

****

Finding a late night garage took us an extra hour; rousing the mechanic to any sense of urgency required the addition of a zero to his fee, especially after a raging Sweet Shine almost tossed him through his own front window when he made a comment about her ‘lead hooves’ and the nearly empty power system.

The Night Trotter hadn’t suffered much for the hard driving, but then I’d never seen it so much as cough no matter how hard Taxi rode the clutch.

The four of us, Taxi, Swift, Scarlet, and I sat in peaceful contemplation in the small lobby beside the garage, meditating over styrofoam cups of instant coffee that had an aftertaste of motor oil. Arcane sounds of machinery came through the wall.

My driver was in a more forgiving mood since she’d watched Scarlet going down the checklist of options and ticking off every maintenance related alteration the mechanic had available. After a noticeable improvement in his attitude when Stella’s secretary didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at the final cost, the grease-monkey placed some calls and had his entire crew in for the wee hours with a promise that he’d have us on our way in ‘two super quick jiffies,’ whatever those might be.

Thus, we waited.

I think we were midway through the second alleged jiffy. I took another sip of the wretched sludge and felt the kinks in my back coming undone. A cup of joe can do wonders, even if it tastes like sewer water. Peering over the rim of my cup, I noticed Scarlet doing that quick breath thing one does when they know asking a question is unwelcome, but if they don’t they may have a stroke.

“Detective?” Scarlet asked, finally. I set my cup aside and waited until he went on. “Do you mind telling me what you’re going to do now?”

“I’m holding up my end of the bargain.” I replied, setting my cup on the small table and picking up one of the outdated magazines, hoping that would signal I didn’t really want to have an ongoing conversation.

“As... comforting as that sounds, could you elaborate?” Scarlet pressed.

Swift scowled at him and gave him a kick in the ankle. “If The Detective says he’s going to hold up his end of the bargain, then that’s what he’s going to do.”

I grimaced at the title. I could hear the capital letters. ‘Sir’ was bad enough. If she went around calling me ‘The Detective’ we were going to have to have a heart to heart.

“You want the truth?” I asked, and Scarlet nodded. “Fine. I’m going to walk into Monte Cheval and bell the biggest, meanest cat you’ve ever met. The Heights will be safe. The Jewelers will have one less mobster, and I’ll know whether or not Cosmo had Ruby Blue murdered. Is there anything else?”

“That’s all very well to say, but... how are you going to do all that?” Scarlet wanted to know.

“We have his ledger.” I waved towards Swift, who flashed the belly pocket of her tactical vest. “His drug business was massive and must have been supporting damn near every other part of his organization. Extortion is good money, but not good enough to run a casino. I doubt he ever considered that he might need a back-up. Every dirty deal he’s ever run will come back to bite him, and his creditors will chase him into the grave. His only alternative will be to skip town and pray his creditors are less skilled headhunters than the Detrot Police Department.”

Scarlet pursed his thin mouth, wiggling back in the uncomfortable lobby chair. “I... don’t mean to be rude, but if it’s all so easy, why hasn’t somepony done something about him before now?”

I slurped at my cup, forcing myself to swallow as I answered, “If we’d been going through normal police channels I think Cosmo could have sold me a sack of Beam out front of the Castle and I doubt I’d have been able to arrest him for it. He’s careful bordering on paranoid and whoever holds his strings has somehow kept him off of anypony’s radar. Speaking of that, I need to have a quick discussion with someone. Make sure I don’t fall out of my chair.”

Closing my eyes, I pushed a hoof into my mane, searching around until I found the little bump behind my right ear. The ladybug meeped, then raised its wings and gave them a buzz.

I know you can hear me. I need access. I’m not playing games anymore.

Nothing happened.

Dammit, now!

My vision exploded into fragments, then peeled away into blackness.

****

The network was in a strange state. Many of the ladybugs were drifting aimlessly over the city, passing images of smoking ruins. Probably whatever fire they’d been watching earlier had burnt itself out, and now that our fight with Snicket was over, the big shows for the evening had finished. A few ponies were screwing, a few eating supper, but the largest segment of the ladybug population was involved in various televisions.

Still, there was a peculiar anticipatory sensation that sat right near the edge of perception as I floated inside the field of magical insects. I poked around for several seconds, trying to get what I could, though none of the images were coherent enough to tell me anything useful. It was another irritating fact of dealing with ladybugs; unless somepony was telling them what to look at they tended to drift about like children on a city-sized playground, staring at whatever took their fancy.

Take me to Queenie, I thought, exasperated.

After clinging to Zeta’s consciousness, the sensation of speed was less jarring, but no amount of experience will ever make me enjoy the roller-coaster ride feeling of sliding through tiny minds, one after another.

The grimy hotel room crashed down around my ears.

In the corner, the television still blared. The neighbor sounded like they’d given up just banging on the wall and were using a lamp or some heavy instrument to bash their way through. Arrayed over the stained mattress, hordes of ladybugs swelled and moved like a blanket of living, multi colored ping pong balls. Most of them seemed to be asleep.

Queenie, meanwhile, was laying on the floor, forelegs propping up its chin. It was intently watching an advert for car polish, with a bowl of popcorn and the surviving half of a delivered pizza piled on the floor nearby. Internally, I attempted to send the sound of a throat clearing down the connection.

“Detective Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled!” The insect rolled onto its back, peering at the spot near the ceiling where most of my mind was hovering. “You have returned! Joy and rapture abound! We have not been so amused in many weeks.”

I figured you bunch would get a kick out of that. I replied. Now, question time. One, how did you drag me into the network without me doing the song and dance first?

The ladybug raised one wing and began cleaning itself with its proboscis. Something about the procedure was just a bit obscene. “We have not needed the dance to operate for some years now, Detective Hardy.”

What?! Why did you make me do it all those times?!

“It was so entertaining to watch.” Queenie’s lower set of wings buzzed and though I couldn’t read its expressions very well, I got the distinct impression it was a bit wistful.

I...argh! Never again! I tried to envision a giant boot stomping on Queenie’s face and send that down the link before I continued. The essy just fluttered and made its laughter noise. Question two. You got anypony left in Cosmo’s office?

“One of ours remained. The King of Ace has been in his office for some hours. He returned not long after you left his abode and did much damage to his desk, chair, and several of his guards. We found his screaming most interesting, though we did see something else that we feel you would find very intriguing elsewhere-”

Sorry, no time to go on sightseeing tours. He’s still there?

Queenie’s mandibles twitched, but it answered after a short pause, “The King of Ace is there. He made several phone calls and is now having a beverage full of poison.”

Poison?!

“Alcohol. Most foul! Foulest fouly foul!” The ladybug shuffled out a pack of cigarettes from somewhere inside its carapace and lit one from a wooden match struck on its leg.

Right, booze. Envy him a little bit. Did he try to call the school?

“We are unaware of the content of his conversations,” Queenie hummed, apologetically. “Our representative became most interested in the wonderful probability tables in the below rooms. We must explore them further. If you would like to acquire many thousands of your metal pony bits, we are certain we can assist!”

The blackjack tables? I... mmm... tempting, but we’ve got something to do first. Keep watching. If he goes anywhere, let me know.

“We will do our very bestly bestest!”

Let me out, but keep your people nearby. I may be about to do something stupid.

The insect sucked down a lung-full of smoke and blew a series of concentric circles in my direction.

“Most assuredly, Detective Hardy! That is part of why we enjoy you so very much.”

****

I dragged myself up and pushed my hat back on my head. Swift and Scarlet were laughing over a calendar full of kittens on the lobby wall while Taxi sat in her meditation pose, rear legs drawn under herself. She wasn’t actually meditating, but rather had one eye cracked and on me.

I lay back in my barely padded chair, tilting my gaze back to look up at the cool neon lights. So much was riding on the next few hours, the next few moves. I imagined Cosmo as a wily old tiger, cornered and ready to tear the throat out of one last foe. How much did we really know? His history? Certainly we had a chunk of it. There were so many holes and fragments. I felt like I was assembling a puzzle starting from the center, realizing as time went on that it was much larger than I’d first thought.

How would the King of Ace respond to having his brother’s heart stolen? Now that his drug lab was gone, he’d have to be comatose not to wonder about the connecting factor between his recent misfortunes. There was little left for him to lose, and to prevent an atrocity I had to give him something before he could move from shock and depression to vengeful rage.

Time was, again, not in my favor. Cosmo might decide at any time that he could retrieve his brother’s heart with an attack on the Vivarium. If nothing else, he might decide it would draw me out.

I had only one card left to play and it wasn’t the kind that could be played over the phone. That meant walking into the mad, wounded tiger’s den before he could recover. The question remained; Was I another tiger, ready to claim his territory, or a mouse inviting myself in for a snack?

I sat up.

Taxi unfolded herself. “Hardy? You alright?”

“Just checking in with Queenie,” I told her. “It’s going to be keeping an eye on us.”

“An eye on us for... what, sir?” Swift asked as she and Scarlet noticed I was up and made for their seats. “Didn’t we win?”

Innocence like that should be put in museums and kept away from the big, nasty realities of Equestria to give us all something to strive towards. That, or it should be physically painful.

“Kid, we just set the house on fire. We can put it out, but first we’ve got to walk in and convince the crazy son of the moon who owns the place to give up the keys before it burns to the ground around him.” I prodded Scarlet in the side, ignoring Swift’s confused look. “That’s where you come in. I’m going to be trusting you to keep ahold of Cosmo’s ledger and to get us out. I need Vivarium fliers standing by.”

The escort’s lipsticked mouth turned downward slightly. “The Stilettos will be guarding the Vivarium very closely and patrolling the Heights. They’ll be stretched pretty thin.”

“I don’t need fighters,” I assured him. “Pegasi or griffins. If we can’t leave through the front door, we’ll need a quick exit. Cosmo doesn’t have many fliers in his employ. I need to exploit that.”

“Just what do you intend to do?” Taxi asked, looking very leery.

“Like I said. We’re going to bell the cat. Then the cat is going to have a ringing bell around its neck, inviting all the other predators to dinner. If I’m right, he’ll run. If I’m wrong, we’ll need that exit sooner, rather than later.”

Chapter 22: So We Come To It

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 22: So We Come To It

What differences can we make with these single lives we live? I’ve never been sure.

My cutie mark always seemed to mean there was a destiny for me somewhere out there, but I was never the kind of pony to succumb to happy stagnation, having ‘fulfilled my purpose.’ On top of that, Death seemed to always wait around every corner, ready to snap me up if I set one hoof poorly.

Where do ponies go once their purpose is fulfilled? What if they fail to fulfill it?

-Detective Hard “Hardy” Boiled, Detrot Police Department

Blood Alcohol Content: 0.18%

Potholes and rattling axles gave way to a silky ride down richer streets. Scarlet had opted to sit in the front with Taxi at Swift’s insistence; she didn’t want anypony to bother ‘The Detective’ while he was gathering himself for the coming showdown.

My driver sank low in her seat, steering with one hoof while the other traced over the dashboard of her precious cab like she’d never seen it before. The engine was running noticeably smoother. Spurting lightning crawled underneath the hood with a vim and vigor it must have cost Stella a fortune to achieve, but to Sweet Shine, it was just barely worth letting Scarlet and Edina off the hook.

I’m fairly certain if she’d gotten her cutie mark just a few years later, it would have been burning rubber.

It was unfortunate, then, that none of modifications to her car had preempted the argument that came when I laid out my intentions. It wasn’t until I threatened to get an actual cab, if I had to, that she backed off. There was still a sullen air about her, but she knew this had to be done. The rules of the game hadn’t changed since she put aside her badge and some deeper part of her knew that it could work. It had a chance to work.

I’d expected Swift to join in berating me for being a macho headcase, but after the fight in Sunny Days, if I said I was going for a flight, she'd be sure I'd sprout wings. While that’s not unheard of in Equestria, those sorts of things happen rarely enough that the idiom still stands as a reminder not to put anypony on too high a pedestal.

We drove on, passing baker’s shops setting out their wares for the morning hour and gifting the late night pedestrians with tantalizing whiffs. A few diners were still catering to the bar-closing crowd, as they stumbled home slaughtered on pints of the season’s first cider. I let down my window, peeled off my hat and gave the wind free reign to play in my mane. Swift rolled hers down as well.

“Sir, do you mind if I go flying?” my partner asked. “It helps me relax.”

“Go on, kid. Just don’t lose the car.”

“I won’t, sir.”

Tossing her wings out the window first, she let the air catch her and sweep her off the seat. I peered behind, seeing her coast off into darkness above us, beyond the avenues and into a sweet space of thermals and air-pockets, experiencing a purity of form and motion that I might never know.

“Hardy? I know you’re set on this, but can I take my cannon?” Taxi asked, over one shoulder.

“Yeah. We’re not walking in there unarmed,” I said, touching her seat back, reassuringly. “Put something good and loud in it. Stun the whole room if you have to and keep your trigger where you can get ahold of it.”

Scarlet didn’t look back, but spoke from his place in the front with his chin on his crossed fore-knees. “Detective? I... I know you’re going to be alright, but I’m scared.”

“You’re an idiot if you’re not. Wait in the car.”

“I’m not afraid for me. I’m afraid for you.” He shifted in his seat, turning to face me. There were a few tears at the corners of his eyes. “I-I called our people and I’ve got six volunteers who can get you out if you can get to the roof or a window, but none of them are fighters.”

“That’s what I thought.” I stretched out, rolling my shoulders a few times. “What about the Stilettos who came with us to the school?”

“Miss After Glow recalled every able-bodied fighter to the Vivarium after I told her what you planned.” He shrugged and brushed his long mane back from his face. “If what you’re doing works, we won’t need fighters and if it doesn’t, everypony we send inside with you might die. You understand, right?”

“I don’t intend to die and I’m not going in unarmed. If this turns foul, we just have to get to a window, right?” I asked and Scarlet bobbed his chin, uncertainly. “Have your people waiting.”

“They’ll be there.”

“Good. Now, give me the duct tape Taxi keeps in the glove box.” I tugged the heart box out of my inner pocket, setting it on the seat between my knees and giving it a gentle, comforting touch on the lid.

Jingle Jangle’s brother’s heart was beating at the same familiar pulse as my own. I drew it close to myself, brushing the polished wood with my lips as I whispered, “It’ll be fine.” The box’s passenger thumped twice against me, then lay still.

I should have been asking myself what in Luna’s name I was doing. It felt right. Just right.

Monte Cheval was close.

The road was coming to an end.

****

Bells.

A clock-tower struck the hour as we turned down the final avenue between the stubby towers and office blocks surrounding the Monte Cheval. In the uneven darkness of the cityscape, against the backdrop of fractured stars, the buildings bore a disturbing resemblance to something, but I couldn’t remember what; it had me chewing on the strap of my gun bit, though.

I counted the strikes of the bell, breathing in between each one, then out as its counterpart rang.

A hoof-tap on the window across from me signaled my partner’s return. I rolled down the glass and moved back, making room. Swift dropped very neatly into the car, bouncing over the seat cushion a couple of times. Her huge wings fluffed against her sides a few times as she adjusted her bulletproof vest a bit tighter in the chest, absentmindedly touching the pocket that had recently contained the ledger. A look of momentary panic passed over her face before she remembered the leather book was safe in Scarlet’s saddlebag.

Despite the supposed relaxation properties of the flight, her shoulders were tightly wound. I expected her to say something, but she just sat and gathered her wings in close to her stomach. Part of me needed a few more minutes of silence, but a louder voice, always the louder voice, was curious.

“Kid, you mind if I ask what you’re going to tell Chief Jade when she comes calling about what we’ve been up to?” I cracked the breach and checked the cartridge in my revolver, counting the bullets for the sixth time before I set it back in place. “I somehow doubt you’re going to have a nice, clean lie you can tell her.”

Swift tilted her head towards me, then puffed a breath through pursed lips. “Sir, I don’t even know what I think about what we’ve been ‘up to.’ I just saw you do the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen anypony do in my whole life outside of a comic book and I almost wet myself when I shot that pony’s gun.”

“You’re still here, though,” I replied. “Could always head to Jade, throw yourself at her hooves, and spill the beans. Your family is safe and I’m doing this one way or the other. She might even toss you another partner. Maybe some bean counter who’ll keep you out of the line of fire.”

The pegasus lowered her sky-blue eyes, her voice soft and full of shame. “...I thought about it. Just for a second there, when I saw the guard crying and I realized I’d hurt him... I really did think about doing just that.” She grimly ran her hoof down her pistol’s side, grimacing. “But even though I was frightened, you were there, keeping everypony together. My family is safe, because of you. I couldn’t possibly turn you in! ”

“I can’t ask you to walk into this one with me. It’ll make Sunny Days look like a cake-walk if it doesn’t go our way.”

Swift pulled Masamane’s slide back, cocking it with the satisfying impact of perfectly earth-pony-engineered metal falling into place, while the sword etched on its side snatched a glisten from a passing street light. “No. You can do this, sir. I know you can. I’m coming.”

“You know kid? You say that, and I damn near feel like I can.”

I held out my hoof. After a moment, she bumped it with her own.

Taxi downshifted, slowing our approach as she called into the back. “Fillies and colts, get your big pony pants on. We’re there.”

****

Even at that hour, the Monte Cheval hopped and bopped to the sounds of unlucky ponies, too witless to realize the house had them by their addicted little short and curlies. We could hear ringing one-armed bandits and the rattle of chips. Spotlights played back and forth across the glittering top of the artificial mountain, making the low-hanging cloud cover glow an effervescent blue. I tried to spot Cosmo’s office up near the peak, but it was well hidden by the flash and glitz.

Nopony might even know he was up there; the many-eyed monster snatching up the bits and hope of all those sad souls he’d trapped in his decadent hole, and beyond, those pitiable creatures he held in his web of extortion. Certainly some of them deserved such cruelty, but they couldn’t all be sinners. More likely, the majority were innocents caught in the wrong place by an opportunistic predator.

The parking lot was packed from one end to the other and the valets seemed to have gone on break. We found ourselves a spot towards the back.and slotted in between a rickshaw full of what must have been a pony’s entire material possessions, and a carriage fit for a royal. Nothing much surprising there. The Monte Cheval was one of those rare, classless places where leather work duds and hoof infections could readily hobnob with top-hats and expensive cosmetic surgeries.

I suffered through a good-luck hug from Scarlet as we left the car, though I was surprised to discover my confidence was high. Glancing up, I thought I saw a face looking down at us from the rooftop of one of the buildings ringing the Monte Cheval. It might have been my brain playing tricks, but it buoyed me a little.

Thus it was, that Swift, Taxi, and myself marched up the front steps of the undermountain palace of the King of Ace.

The doormare, a carbon copy of the one who’d been there earlier except for her camera cutie-mark, made to block our way. Her coloration was too close to her counterpart’s to have been anything but a dye job.

“I’m sorry, gentleponies, but you will have you surrender your weapons. You can’t go in armed like—” She started to say, before Taxi swung her massive cannon around, and the doormare developed an expression that ballistics professionals have dubbed “PEACEful contemplation,” the almost universal reaction to staring down a barrel half as wide as your head.

“Run along. We’re going to have a talk with the bastard that made you dye yourself up like that. I can tell you’re cute underneath. Go do something better with your life,” Taxi said, with a saucy wink.

I never did find out if the poor girl applied for a career change, but she was at least possessed of some survival instincts, and immediately threw herself down the stairs, galloping off towards the far side of the car park and what I presumed was the employee parking.

Smiling at my driver, I ushered Swift forward. “Last chance, kid.” I said. “Duck out now, and you can say I dragged you into this.”

My partner snickered behind her hoof, then replied by unfurling her wings and sweeping them forward with such force that an explosion of wind crashed the casino’s doors inward, hard enough to rock them on their hinges. She strutted across the threshold, trigger between her teeth and eyes set with heroic determination.

Taxi sucked her teeth as she started after her. “Come on, before she decides she can take on the whole building by herself.”

****

The casino interior veritably buzzed with activity, though of a more subdued nature than the early afternoon hubbub. Taxi and Swift both stopped a few meters inside, spreading out to either side with their guns in a relaxed but available position; no sense in causing a riot right away. I was holding that as a reserve option should we find ourselves needing an alternative get-away.

Reginald Bari, Cosmo’s little stooge with the big mouth and the wonky nervous system, materialized out of the dim light near the coat-check. He’d apparently regained the use of his limbs at some point after Taxi’s little pressure point therapy, though he was walking with a pronounced limp.

I wish I had a framed photo of his expression as instantaneous recognition set in. A good casino manager remembers every face of every customer, and a good stooge can whisper a dignitary’s name to his boss on a moment’s notice. Bari was both of those things.

“You!?” He gasped, then reached into his coat for what I could only imagine was a panic button of some sort.

“Go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you, Bari ol’ boy,” I said, unable to keep a completely impassive expression. My partner flicked her eyes towards me, but with the trust born of well ingrained authority worship, she lowered her weapon rather than putting a hole in the snarky manager’s kneecap.

Immediately, as his hoof fiddled inside his coat, I sensed a dozen shadows around me detach themselves from the walls. Most were the heavily muscled variety, though a couple had the thinner, whip-like movements that made Snicket such a menace.

They closed in, surrounding us.

“You’re one stupid piece of work, cop. Did I seriously just see you bring that flying turkey and that yellow bitch with the fancy moves in here, strutting like you own the place after what you pulled last time? If you’re lucky, the boss’ll just break a few dozen bones. Might get you a nice desk job filling out paperwork with your teeth, if you’ve got any left when we’re done.”

I could already see that trick of clearing the nearest rows of tables taking shape. Ponies were collecting their chips and being ushered to farther tables while more of the Red Hoof, in their ubiquitous tuxedos, faded from alcoves and security areas that probably dotted every inch of the building. I pitied any idiot who decided to cheat in the Monte Cheval.

“You know, Bari, my chum? That sounds wonderful, but I’m afraid I have to refuse,” I drawled, yanking my coat back off of my foreleg. The casino manager and his entire entourage of likely heavily armed psychopaths tensed, readying to turn me into a smear.

Counting my blessings, I waited as they all took in what was strapped to my side.

Bari tilted his head with a look of total incomprehension. “That... looks like a shotgun duct taped to a... a box?”

I nodded, giving my trigger-bit a light tug. “Eeyup. Now, there might be explosives in here, but even with your low estimation of my intelligence, it would be pretty silly for me to stroll into a public place with a bomb and demand to see a mob kingpin. No, what’s in here is something far more interesting... and if anything happens to it, I guarantee your boss will saw you off at the knees, then make you walk a mile.”

The Red Hooves shifted their collected weight from leg to leg, waiting for the order to disembowel the three of us. Taxi shifted the cannon, making it clear that the first three or four who decided to follow that order would truly know P.E.A.C.E.. I imagine they were also considering the consequences of displeasing their boss if they were to damage something of importance to him. That, more than even my driver’s enormous gun, stayed them from butchering us.

Shifting the box a little, I nodded towards the casino manager. “You go tell the King there’s a crazy pony down here with a box. A big, hearty box. You tell him that, just like I said it. A big... hearty... box.”

I sat down on the well-trod red carpet and flicked my hoof at him in a gesture of dismissal. Bari squinted at me, trying to get my measure.

Any good operator knows his odds before he sits down at the table, and I might have a wildcard, for all he knew. He’d thought the deck was stacked, but I could see the uncertainty hanging there in his tiny, probability-loving brain. It was enough.

“Watch them,” he ordered his goons. “If he does anything besides breathe, turn him and his friends into a stain. We’ll tell the guests somepony spilt some punch. A lot of punch.” Maintaining that wary expression, he moved off towards a phone box on the wall and dialed.

I watched his phone conversation with some interest; I read his lips and caught the shape of the words ‘cop’, ‘shotgun’ and ‘hearty box.’ He suddenly jerked his head away from the speaker, tumbling against the side of the booth as he dropped the telephone, then scuffled with it until he could press it back against his ear. His face went through a calisthenic series of expressions, ending at lip-quivering terror. He nodded, murmuring what I thought was ‘yes, sir’ into the receiver several times before hanging it back on the wall.

Sliding the glass partition open, he made some secret signal and the goons practically fell over themselves retreating back into darkness. Dragging his hooves, Bari approached us, his head low and teeth gritted.

“Bari! Good to see you again, my dear friend!” I ruffled his toupee, turning it sideways on his head. “I was wondering when you’d get back.”

I could see him struggling with the intense desire to try and sever one of my arteries, but his self control won out.

“T-the boss says to bring you up-upstairs...you piece of-” He growled.

“Ah-ah-ah...” I chided. “Don’t offend the guests.” I waved towards the back of the room. “You’ll have to lead the way. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to keep close track last we came through. You understand, of course.”

“Of... course,” he managed before turning on his heel. He marched towards the service door behind the coat check with the three of us in tow.

****

With no obfuscating circles or labyrinthine routes, we came to the purposefully nondescript metal elevator in less than a minute. I could hear the continuous grating of Bari’s teeth as he stalked along in front of us.

I couldn’t resist tweaking the tight-ass just a little bit more. “Bari, baby, you really should relaaax! My driver over there gives a real good zebra massage.”

“I hope the boss tears you into tiny pieces,” he replied, his nostrils flaring as he almost bucked the elevator button. The empty car opened.

Swift and Taxi stepped into the little box and I followed, keeping my trigger close until the door was almost completely closed. As it shut, I caught a glimpse of Bari’s face. Something about it wasn’t right. I might have been seeing things, but I thought he smiled for a blink. It would have put me on guard, if I could have been any more on guard in this manticore's den.

****

The elevator rattled and shook as we rode towards the office and prepared. Taxi fitted a different set of rounds - something called ‘Ghostie Giggles’ - into her cannon. Swift preened her flight feathers with her teeth in preparation for a quick getaway if it became necessary. I just sat, taking my time, wishing I had a script I could read from.

I’d bluffed. Simple as that. I couldn’t shoot the heart even if it came down to it. How could somepony destroy something so innocent? Beautiful even.

Cosmo kept it locked away, but he should have kept it on him if he wanted it to be safe.

I wanted a beer really badly.

The car ground to a stop, let out a happy ding, and the doors parted on a scene of spectacular destruction.

Down the short hall from elevator to office door, a heap of broken garbage lay against both walls. Most of it was the kind of expensive trash found on shelves of ponies who have no emotional attachment to it, but for whom facade is important. Only one of the rich, oaken double doors still remained attached to its hinge; the other spilled into the hall with two size sixteen hoofprints in the other side of it. I hopped over an empty, shattered bottle of what had once been extremely good wine, and took a moment to pick up my revolver's bit.

Something moved on the far side of the door, rattling what I thought might be busted cutlery. Swift picked her way over the mess behind me, while Taxi held the elevator door open and made sure there were no ambushers coming from one of the hall's two side doors.

Prying open the good door, I stepped into a space that was, if anything, in worse condition than the hall.

Not a single piece of furniture remained upright. Nearly every dish was crushed and most of the beautiful sidebar had evidence of violent, almost berserk, rampage. A small amount of blood was splashed on Cosmo's globe and another bit on his mirror. The drinks cabinet lay on its side, a growing pool of wasted booze staining the floor underneath.

The King's desk, previously a monument to stable construction and hoof-crafting, was split down the middle, one half kicked into a corner while the other still occupied the center of the office. A telephone, its receiver shattered, sat beside the desk. Behind these, the grand vista window was open to the skyline. The midnight city gave the illusion of a flowing umbra punctuated by winking lights in the windows of third shifters and night owls.

His lamp smashed, the only proper illumination came from a couple of small overheads. I nodded for Swift and Taxi to move out and check the sides, tip-toeing with as much care as possible.

“S’you isn’t it? Tha’ damn cop,” a voice said. The words were stilted, slurred and sad.

I bit my trigger hard, ready to fire at anything that moved. My partner’s ears were tilted towards the fragment of the desk.

The wooden mess shifted, rocking a bit as the King of Ace dragged himself into view. His monumental shoulders slumped, sagging under a weight even those vast muscles couldn’t hold. A bottle of potato schnapps lay beside him, only half full, the rock bottom booze of street runners. Four or five others, plus a heap of empty single shots, littered the carpet around his hooves.

Heaving himself up, he braced one leg on the window. His tuxedo was torn at the shoulders and ripped open down the front. Blood trickled from a dozen minor cuts on his forelegs and chest, probably from the damaged mirror, leaving a crimson hoofprint on the glass. I couldn’t see his face. It was still covered in shadows and he stood just at the edge of one of the spots of light.

I could hear sirens in the distance. Normally, sirens were a comforting sound. Not there. Not then.

I held my position, Taxi and Swift both covering him from either side. If he made any threatening moves, I was confident my comrades could take him down, but as he rose he staggered and sat down hard, shaking the whole room. Picking up the bottle, he took another rough swig, then tossed it in the general direction of his upturned garbage can. It rolled end over end, spilling schnapps everywhere.

“S’pose I shouldn’t be surpr-super...sup-er-ized.” He sounded out each syllable, his accent sliding into a familiar street jive. “It were you, weren’t it? At my house.” Cosmo growled, his throat was raw; each word seemed like a real effort.

Raising his head, he showed me his face in the light of the overhead.

Swift couldn’t suppress a gasp.

Deep, sagging lines ran down his cheeks and underneath his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept since we last met. Wood splinters stuck from his lips and nose, that rocky face brutalized by what must have been an attempt to chew his way through the desk. There was something deeper, behind the damage to his muzzle, that had my insides writhing.

I’d seen that look before in others, in Taxi when she’d lost her cutie-mark and my own mirror after Juniper died. Something important, something fundamental, was busted in that pony’s soul.

I slowly dropped my trigger. “Jingle Jangle?” I murmured.

Cosmo wheezed like a geriatric, sliding to his foreknees.. “I... never figured on anypony calling me that again. My name...heh... my name...” He wiped a drop of sweat from his moist brow, smearing it with blood. Salt in those wounds must have hurt like a beast, but he gave no sign, no indication that he was even in any discomfort. His strength was failing, though; holding his head up was too much, so he let it drop between his knees. “Y-you brought... brought my brother?” he asked, with what must have been his last shred of hope. Tears of fury or maybe genuine grief had dried in the corners of his eyes.

I didn’t know exactly what I expected, but I had some guesses. Maybe a raging monster I was going to have to put a few bullets in before we could sit down and have a rational conversation. Possibly a cool, unruffled mob lord with an unshakeable smile and a back-up plan. Maybe even the old stand-by; an ambush at the door with black bags and sleeping gas.

I didn’t expect a beaten, sloshed stallion who could barely keep himself on his hooves.

Pushing my coat back from my leg, I revealed the box and the shotgun. The duct tape holding the wooden box to the barrel was tightly wound right down to the stock. I hoped I didn’t actually need the shotgun at any point or I would be in a pickle.

Stumbling towards me, he fell heavily onto his face and lay there for several seconds, stretching his legs in the direction of the heart. I backed up a couple of steps, raising my revolver. Rather than charge, he slumped onto his belly, burying his face in his knees. He made a soft sound that, at first, I took for laughter. He was weeping; great broken sobs of ultimate loss.

“W-weren’t supposed to... b-be l-like th-this!” The King of Ace moaned, his shoulders shaking.

“What? What weren’t... Wasn’t?” I asked, then shook my head and decided to try to get control of the situation again. “We’ve got your ledger.”

“I... I know, dammit. It don’t matter now.” The accent was so strange. It was still Cosmo, but it was like I was hearing some younger version of him speaking through a body that didn’t quite fit. Gone was the cool and erudite mobster, self-certain and confident on his throne.

“Why... doesn’t it matter?” Swift wanted to know as she hobbled a bit nearer, still keeping her gun on him, trying to cling to any vestige of triumph. “You lost and we won! We... We want you to leave town forever a-and never come back!”

Cosmo looked up at her, then over towards me with an incredulous expression. “I-is she real?”

“Third day on the job,” I replied. “She’s not kidding, though. We can offer you protection to the edge of the city or the nearest skyport.”

The mobster kicked a piece of his of telephone across the floor. “Still don’t matter. My wish...” His teeth squeaked against one another as he tensed for a half second, then relaxed again. “...just wanted my brother back.”

“Your brother’s dead."

“You think that matters to—” Whatever he was starting to say was lost as his jaw locked up again for some reason. His mouth twisted into a snarl of frustration as he spat a splinter from his tongue along with a smattering of red dots that landed all over his loosened tie. Straightening his tie, he smoothed back his greased mane. “You got the lab, didn’t you? It’s what I would have done.” His tail lashed against his leg as he explained, “I rang my operative as you were coming up. She’d have picked up if she were anything but dead or in a coma. You got the damn drugs and that school... the school...”

I pulled a hall pass out of my pocket and tossed it to him. He caught it, flattening the paper so he could see it before flicking it away. Looking up, he shook his eartips. “Why? Why in the hell did you come for me?” He asked it in the voice of an innocent stallion wronged by a cruel universe. “Was it the fuckin’ snake bought you off and sent you to knock down my door?”

Taxi glanced back the way we’d come. “Seems you did a fine enough job knocking your own door down.”

Cosmo glared at my driver out of one eye, but she met his look very evenly. It’s easy to do that when your gun’s mouth can double as an umbrella stand.

“It was the girl,” I told him.

His brow crinkled as he squinted at me through an alcoholic haze. “What girl?”

“In the alley. Pretty kid with her horn broken off. Remember now?”

“...The... dead streetwalker?” His face filled with incredulity, then his fury swelled again. “You run down my people, stick your flank in the middle of Jeweler business, and break into my home... over a dead whore?!”

Before he could get too riled, Swift raised her gun, dropping her cheek onto the sight and aiming it at his front right knee. His keen eye danced across the tip of her weapon’s barrel and he snorted disdainfully, but settled again. The rage still simmered just under the surface, but alcohol and the generally discouraging idea that he might get his leg blown off kept him from any rash attempts to do to me what he’d done to his desk.

Taking off my hat, I set it carefully to one side. “Her name was Ruby. Ruby Blue. She threw herself off a roof because you or some bastard whose name you’re going to give me drugged her and chased her off the top of the High Step Hotel. But fundamentally? Yes. That, and to keep a gang war from destroying one of the last nice parts of my city.“

His lips shaped themselves into the words ‘gang war’; there was a long, tense pause... and then he began to laugh. It was not an amused laugh; It was the laugh of somepony who’d watched their house and worldly possessions burn, then been presented with a citation from the fire department. The mad laugh of somepony whose circumstances had just gotten too absurd for him to comprehend.

“You... I... I... Bwaaahaaaheehee! I knew the snake was pulling your strings!” He giggled, his leg slipping out from under him as he slid onto his side.

“I do my own good works, thank you very much," I answered, indignantly. “This isn’t for him and this isn’t about him. This is about us. Who killed Ruby Blue?”

His laughter quieted to a soft snigger every now and then. “No... no, I want to ask you a question now. How did you fritz The Scry? I saw you. You drank my scotch. You didn’t fake it. There was a spell on it. Even that paranoid bitch I sent to watch the dragon couldn’t avoid that magic, once we forced it down her throat. And yet... the one bastard in the city I want found more than anything, and nothing!”

Most seasoned interrogators will tell you to go into the room and act as though you know what the perp is going to tell you, before he does. It’s a solid bluff and rarely fails to produce some reaction. “I have ways. I heard the phone call to your lawyers. We had the room bugged. Some enchantments work no matter what and I think everypony should have their little secrets. Now tell me... who was it? Who ordered the hit? What’s her diary got to do with it? What do they want?”

Cosmo glanced around his office, as though searching for my purported surveillance device in the wreckage. Then he faced me and I saw that fear again. “They... they know. They know you got the damn diary again. Look...” His eyes still held a bit of that old calculation. “—you tell me how you hid yourself from tracking magic, then get me out of the city? Give me my brother?”

I paused, thinking, before holding out my hoof to help him up. “I will. Now tell me.”

It was an utter, vacant lie. I had no idea how I’d ‘hid myself,’ but more than that, there was no way in the world he was getting the heart back. He didn’t deserve it.

“The-they...gr—...” He stuttered, then his square jaw seemed to lock itself shut. I eased a bit closer, trying to hear whatever word his throat seemed to be trying to form. “Th-they grrr-aaannt...”

It was a soft spray, a gentle burst from a warm shower-head, followed by a chunky mush spattering across my chest and neck. The steamy liquid hit my face and I blinked, trying to clear my vision. I stepped back, thinking for a moment that Cosmo had spit something at me. Somepony whinnied fearfully. Glass tinkled in a broken window-frame and a powerful wind blew straight into my eyes, blinding me again.

Wiping my face with one hoof, I saw it come away bloody, then saw the surprised gaze of the King of Ace, laying on the carpet. His single, remaining eyeball was upturned to look at me while the other was a black hole.

The second bullet was like a lover’s touch on my breast. It cut through the body armor, bursting through the back. I felt a tickle in my throat and coughed, softly, as though preparing to give a speech. It would have been a lovely speech, I’m sure.

In its box, the heart began to slam against the sides with wild abandon. Maybe it was worried. It didn’t need to worry. Things were okay.

It was time to lay down.

Too late. A scream, far off, made me feel a little better. Somepony was going to be there to figure things out. Maybe they could tell me what happened, one day. I clutched the heart, petting it and wishing we’d had more time to get to know one another.

Time.

Time to lay down. Time to rest.

Rest for a long time.

Juniper?

I’m coming.

In Detrot, a city with a heart blackened by sin and the invisible touch of dark forces, a cop dies. His story ends.

The children of the Heights rest in soft beds, safe for one more night, never knowing the poor souls who go to grave and madhouse to keep them secure. Blood will fill the gutters, to be washed away by rains and time.

Weep for the living. If such good stallions can be cut down in their prime, ask yourselves, what hope is there?

Starlight Over Detrot

End.

Act One.

Act 2, Chapter 1: Wake Up, Detective

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 1: Wake Up, Detective

Death. The Great Pasture Beyond. The Grim Wrangler’s Herd.

A culture cannot survive without some way of psychologically dealing with the fact that, for all but the most royal of us, life eventually terminates; funerary rites, memorial services... and comforting beliefs about what happens to a pony after he or she has passed on.

Throughout recorded civilization, these beliefs most often take the form of unverifiable but nonetheless gripping and hopeful stories that try to not only make sense of death, but of the strange, twisted, and often unfair universe in which death occurs.

The cows believe in tiered reincarnation, based on how productive a member of cow society you were. The griffins believe in a “Great Hunt,” where the souls of the brave eternally hunt the souls of the cowardly. The buffalo have what sociologists have termed the “Eternal Grazing Ground,” a field of plentiful food and wide-open stampeding space. The dragons, being exceptionally long-lived, prone to hundred-year naps, and lacking natural predators, once believed that death was merely a transition no more significant than going to sleep; however, due to her role in the Cutie Mark Crusades, many draconic spiritual scholars now believe that Princess Luna herself is the physical incarnation of Death. The Princess has, notably, neither confirmed nor denied this in any public statement.

Among ponykind itself, however, recent difficulties over the last 60 years have seen a rise in cult-like behavior and a proliferation of beliefs. Again, Princesses Luna and Celestia play central roles in many of these beliefs, whether or not they want to. The Church of the Lunar Passage, for example, publicly espouses the notion that when the world ends and the sun’s flame finally burns out, the faithful will live on in spirit to serve Princess Luna in her Kingdom of the Night, ruling over the Land of Dreams.

--The Scholar

“I hate rain. Why do I stick around this city again, Juni?”

“I don’t know. You certainly bitch about it enough. Here. Coffee, two sugars.”

“I like one sugar.”

“You need the extra calories. A stallion can’t live on bagels alone. A cop even less so.”

“Ugh, fine. I wish you’d just get what I order one of these days.”

“If I got you what you ordered, you’d get soft.”

Rain ran down the windshield, distorting the city lights outside. Inside, the car was warm and smelled of burnt coffee beans and wet horse. Not a pleasing combination, but after enough hours sitting on stakeout, I was used to it. Every night, the same thing, for the last week.

“So, where’s the perp?”

“He was with his girl, Hardy. You were there. Fifteen minutes from now, we see him tossing a garbage bag off the back porch of that house with the gardenias out front. I check it and find the body. Two minutes laters, we catch him in the shower covered in her blood.”

“Then I kick him in the head when he goes for that knife. I remember.”

The darkness closed in a bit at the edges of my vision. Out there, I could still see the house. The pillars. I thought they were a bit ridiculous on a little cottage, but the mare who lived there hadn’t believed us when we told her that her boyfriend was a murderer.

“Hardy, focus.”

“What’s there to focus on?” I asked. “Being on stakeout is the very definition of ‘unfocused’.”

Juniper sighed, pulling off his hat and tossing it in the back seat. His titanian green mane fell into his face, covering one dusky eye. “You always were a dumb bunny before you’d had your coffee. Go on, drink.”

Raising the cup to my lips, I slurped at the liquid inside. In spite of the alleged sugars, it was completely flavorless. Typical.

“Juni, you mind if I ask something?”

“No, go on.” My partner smiled, glancing out at the house to make sure the perp hadn’t come out yet. “You’re in as piss poor a situation as anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not like questions will make it any worse. Besides, we’ve been overdue for a conversation.”

I thought for some time. “Is there somepony in the back seat?”

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, jerking his head towards the rear. “It’s Jingle Jangle’s brother. Don’t worry. He’s dead. He likes you, though.”

“I’m going to get creeped out if I have to call him Cosmo. Isn’t there something else I can use?”

Juniper cocked his head towards the rear of the old police cruiser, then nodded. “He saw what his brother did with his name. He wants you to give him a new one. A clean name.”

I looked out at the wild weather. Water was falling in thick sheets, rattling the hood with a steady drumming sound. Lighting coiled and flashed, followed a second later by peals of thunder that had the entire car vibrating. “Call him... Gale. Good to know we’ll have somepony else to sit stake-out with. I get tired of listening to your old war stories time and again.”

“Hey, pup! You watch that ‘old’ crap or I’ll give you a good boxing ‘round the ears.” One ear flitted in the direction of the back seat again then Juniper shrugged. “The kid says he likes it. He likes storms. They drowned out his parents fighting.”

“Depressing, but alright. So, are we going in there? We might catch the guy off guard this time and get him before he kills the girl.”

“Nahhh.” Juniper raised his coffee and sucked down some of the tasteless garbage. “This already happened. I figured you’d pick a bar somewhere. Was this really a happy memory for you?”

“A bit. Anytime you and I weren’t being shot at I was pretty good. I guess I should go ahead and ask... What’s going on?”

“It’s past time we had a talk, and I figured you weren’t doing anything particularly important just now. If you want a more specific answer I’m afraid existential questions aren’t really my bag.” My partner rolled the window down an inch, letting a gust of wet spray in and some of the dense, hot air out. “You remember anything from the last couple days?”

“I remember getting shot, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“How was it?” he asked.

“Not so bad. There are worse things that can happen to a pony.” I answered. “Remember when I had to try on trousers for that award ceremony at the Castle and Jade showed up and volunteered to ‘help’ make sure I was in proper uniform? That was worse.”

“I thought she was going to actually kill you with a wedgie.” Juniper chuckled. “It would have been a laugh.”

“It was a laugh. For you. You giggled until you almost had to be hospitalized.”

“Oh... heh... yeah.” He rubbed his thick bush of chin-fur, ruffling it softly to hide his grin. “Well, the truth is that there are things moving. Various motions in the aether are upsetting some very large tea-cups. The cosmic flows need a plumber.”

“And that’s supposed to mean...”

“No clue. I said you could ask questions. I didn’t say I’d have answers you’d understand.” My partner breathed on the window, then wrote the words ‘Ever Free’ in the mist before wiping them out. “Could be you’re just hallucinating. Might make you feel better if you told yourself that.”

I touched the car’s console, then my hat. It all felt real enough, but then it’s easy to convince yourself of that even when you’re not dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.

The silence lingered, but it was a pleasant one. The three of us sat there, listening to the storm clattering on the windows, enjoying private thoughts. Juniper Shores tapped out a bit of brandy into his coffee, then held it out to me, but I waved it away. Boozing didn’t improve my ability to shoot like it did his.

A door slammed, just loud enough to be heard over the weather, and the perp backed out onto the porch, dragging the bag along behind him. He was a purple stallion, only a little taller than Juniper. I could make out the blood still on his face and neck.

“There he goes.” I said.

“Eeyup.”

“I... guess we’re going to go take him down?”

“Eenope.” Juniper shrugged, running his tongue up the side of his cup quickly to catch a stray drip. “You did that already.”

“Ah. Alright.” I hesitated then reached over and poked him in the side.

“Ouch! What was that for?”

“Nothing. Just checking. Say, This just occurred to me, but what is Gale? I’m kind of embarrassed that wasn’t my first question.”

“You’d have to ask somepony with a horn and even then, I doubt they’d be able to tell you. He’s okay with you holding the reins though. He wants to help and he thinks you’re a good pony, for whatever reason.”

“Help do what?” I grumbled, pushing at the door handle. “I got shot in the chest and now you’re telling me to sit tight while that guy kills his marefriend.”

“I’m just telling you what he says. If you want some more complicated answers, you’ll have to get yourself a psychologist. Should probably do that anyway.”

“Ugh, shrinks make me itch.” Giving up on getting out, I slid back and tried to get comfortable again. For some reason the seat was cold and felt a little bit like metal.

“Goodness, look at the time.” Juniper held up his battered pocket watch. “You’ve got to go. I’ll be in touch.”

“Juni? What do you mean?”

He was gone. The water began to seep into the cracked windows. Out the windows I could see four lights at the horizon, gathering speed as they careened towards one another. Overhead, the clouds were lit with a fiery, cruel glare. Buildings gnashed like teeth. The frigid seat clanked against my back as I tried to shake off the tentacles of darkness snaking around my hooves in a halfhearted manner one might use to dislodge crumbs from one's lap.

I just wanted to drink my coffee. Coffee is good.

Damn.

****

“-crazy days in our fair Detrot! Thankfully, with the Monte Cheval under new ownership we’re not seeing so many ponies staggering out of alleyways with their rib cages kicked in because they can’t pay their gambling debts. Whoever this new owner is, they’re turning things around in big ways since the sudden death of the former, equally anonymous, owner.

In other news, investigations into the violence at an uptown bar have revealed that it was a fight between visiting griffin clanners and one of the local Cyclone chapters. Now, not all those Cyclones are bad’uns, but this lot decided they were going to throw a hissy having all those ‘meat munchers’ in their favorite dive. Word is they got their flanks kicked so hard they’ll be picking teeth out of the wall down there for a month. No dead, but plenty of injured.

Gypsy, your Lady of the Signal, needs to go get some grub and visit the little filly’s room, so here’s something to sooth you through until the morning comes.”

A soft, bouncy jazz started up. Nice stuff. Good for dancing.

I didn’t hurt. Celestia strike me down, right here; Nothing hurt. If I’d been able to point out some specific thing that was in pain, that might have given me something to cling to. Certainly, I should have been in bloody awful pain.

I decided my body was probably somewhere down there, under the place my mind seemed to be occupying. Something was cold and a few other things were stinky, but there wasn’t a spatial reference for any of it.

I tried to open my eyelids. Nothing happened. The empty darkness persisted. I tried again, two or three times, before realizing there wasn’t really anything to see. I was laying in the dark.

Something clicked against whatever I was laying on as I shifted what I think was my left rear hoof. It was awhile before I could figure out precisely how my back worked. The muscles seemed stiff and sluggish.

I thought my heart should be racing, but its beat was as steady as ever. Strange, that. No more strange than seeing Juniper again, I supposed. It’d been a surreal conversation, but most dreams are like that.

The only element that didn’t fit was Gale -- Cosmo’s little brother -- sneaking into my dream. I’d had those dreams a hundred times before, but never so vividly. Juniper being there was also a fresh development, but one I could explain easily as my own subconscious deciding to screw with me.

'Focus,’ Juniper had said. I intended to, if only I could shoo away this damn muzziness.

I tried to wet my lips, but even my jaw felt tight. Sensation was slowly creeping back in, along with a ferocious tingling in what I assumed were my extremities. They felt pretty extreme.

“Ow, piss, ow!” I croaked, then gathered what willpower was immediately available and tried to throw myself into a sitting position.

I've done smarter things. My head cracked the ceiling and a tangle of spots exploded at the corners of my sight.

It turns out my vocabulary is a lot larger than Taxi gives me credit for. I managed to cuss continuously for a full minute and a half before I started repeating myself. More cautiously on second attempts, I began feeling out the confines of my little prison. It seemed upsettingly coffin shaped, though no coffin I'd ever run across was quite so uncomfortably appointed and there seemed to be something attached to my right foreleg. I felt along its length. It was a tube of some sort, leading to a patch of tape stuck just above my elbow.

The music bubbled along happily somewhere near my rear hooves. I decided that was as good a direction as any. Shifting my weight, I felt around until I brushed against some sort of latch on the right side.

Complex thought was beyond me just then, but I could understand ‘latch’. I could also manage ‘kick’, though my first attempt wouldn’t have stumbled a fly. On the third strike, the catch snapped, popping a little door open. A strangely familiar stench of formaldehyde and ice-cream hit me like a wave and my stomach turned. I choked, but there was nothing to come up. I’d been hungry before, but nothing like the ache developing in my belly just then. I also had to pee worse than I had in my whole life.

Grabbing the edge of the drawer, I used my leverage to shove myself down, sliding a long, flat rack out with me.

The neon lights were harsh and tears started to cloud my vision almost immediately, but not before I could identify my surroundings. I sort of wished I hadn’t. It wasn’t a place a pony ever wants to wake up, and typically doesn’t.

I was in the Detrot City Morgue.

I’d figured on landing there, one day, but I didn’t expect I’d be able to enjoy the experience. I rather hoped I wouldn’t be alive to do that.

Wiping my eyes, I felt around until I found the edge of the table, realizing belatedly that it wasn’t just a table. It was a freezer rack.

I’d been in the meat locker. That was disquieting on a whole other level, but the rational part of my mind was operating. My drawer wasn’t on and I wasn’t frozen stiff. That meant, at least in theory, that somepony didn’t think I required preservation.

“Juni,” I murmured to... myself, “I do hope you are dicking with me again, because if this isn’t still a dream I am going to have nightmares until the sun goes out.” I listened for a reply, but the only sounds were the tune from the radio sitting on Stitch’s surgical table and my own breathing.

Clearing my eyes of a healthy build-up of grit, I peered at the tube in my leg, then followed it to a hanging bag of clear fluids on a t-frame beside the rack. Turning the bag, I read the label; nutrient saline.

This all presented me with a series of extremely uncomfortable and contradictory facts. Firstly, I remembered being shot with the clarity that can only be delivered by the sensation of feeling a bullet pass through your chest trailing what must have been a considerable quantity of your internal fluids.

Secondly, I remembered my heart stopping. That is the sort of thing that sticks with you.

Thirdly, I was alive. I had to pee. I wasn’t in any pain to speak of.

Grabbing the edge of my ‘bed’, I heaved myself over the side. For some inexplicable reason, I thought my legs were working at full capacity. Instead, my chin hit the tile at speed and then I had two bumps to teach me the value of caution and care.

And I had to pee.

I tried a more measured approach. My right knee seemed a bit stronger than my left, so I put more weight on that one, managing a sort of tripod stance before easing up onto all fours. Peeling the tape off my knee, I saw the needle stuck in a vein and gingerly tugged the I.V. out, leaning up to hook it over the t-frame.

Where the needle had been, a drop of blood formed, hardened, and flaked off in a matter of seconds. I watched it, with a detached sort of curiosity.

There wasn’t even a pink spot.

At that, my brain decided: ‘Too weird, equine shutdown, ten second time out.’

Dizziness overcame me. I sank onto my haunches, taking shuddering breaths of the foul basement air. The morgue cooler wasn’t warm, but nor was I shivering. Being naked in a public place felt weird to me, despite how inclined many ponies are to do so, like my driver.

I needed my badge. My gun. Even my coat would have improved things a bit.

First, however, I needed to pee. There was an empty janitor’s bucket beside the swinging double doors out into the rest of the old ice-cream factory. Limping over to it, I put one hoof on the wall, raised myself up, and shut my eyes.

Blessed relief. I don’t think I’ve had a piss that good since the last time I got really good and hammered with Juniper.

Juniper. There was a thought.

Speaking of hammered, hadn’t I been shot in the chest?

Finishing off, I pushed the sloshing bucket to one side and stepped back, finding myself in front of a small mirror set above Slip Stitch's surgical wash-up sink. The pony looking back at me was not the dashing specimen of masculine devastation I've come to expect when I look in a mirror. The pony I saw might have been dragged off a four day bender, partying with a pack of timberwolves. His face was drawn and haggard, eyes hollowed out.

A wide, circular patch of flesh on the left side of my body seemed to have been shaved clean, but was growing back nicely. There seemed to be a bit of reddened flesh that was quickly returning to a normal color. I touched the spot and felt something underneath that definitely wasn’t there before, something far too big to be the bullet that sent me here.

A clipboard was dangling from the back of the medical frame holding my I.V. fluids. Trotting over, I turned the frame so I could read the attached paper. It seemed to be a report, transcribed in Thalassemia’s tight, easy to read script:

Name: Hard Boiled, Jr
Occupation: Police Equicide Detective, DPD
Species: Earth Pony
Cutie Mark: Golden scales, balanced
Mane: Black, unkempt
Hide: Grey
Eyes: Brown

Cause of Death: Cardiac failure caused by gunshot wound to the heart. Penetration of standard-issue DPD bullet-resistant vest suggests unusually high-powered rifle, though no corroborating ballistics were recovered from scene. I’m not even sure what the ‘scene’ was.

Next of Kin/Power of Attorney: That wacky cab driver. She’s such a hoot! I would have done more significant alterations to his physiology if she’d let me, though what purpose the modifications serve, I am uncertain. Where she got her information regarding alchemical magics and surgical procedure is also a question I would dearly love answered. The procedure was more complex than any I’ve ever seen, but simplified such that a colt with a pair of safety scissors could perform it! As an aside, those two gentlecolts with the interesting facial scarring she brought with her were very knowledgeable and seemed to have no qualms about allowing me to perform surgeries upon their person, but I fear I had to put off such joys whilst we attended to the Detective.

Organ Donor Status: Affirmative. Liver is probably shot, but might offer to donate kidneys to local orphanage. [Recommend donation delivery not be done via party cannon this time? Please? I'm not sure they got the message of goodwill when we anonymously donated all that blood at their second-story windows. -Thal]

Post-mortem Appearance: Good. Body mostly intact. Some minor bruising to ribs, sternum, and neck. Signs of repeated repair work, both magical and analogue. Holes pretty easily covered with coat and tie. Why that silly-filly insists I keep him hooked up to I.V. fluid is beyond me, but who knows? Mayhap it is a principle of one of her religions, or simply part of her mourning process. Regardless, I will remember to send her a basket of chocolate and strong alcohol.

Best Probable Use: Animatronic Taxidermy. Spring mechanically animated corpse on Chief Jade when she comes around next. Expression on her face calculated 97.6% likely to be worth subsequent spirited attempt to destroy me.

Notes:

I knew I was going to see this someday.

I think we all did. The cops had a pool going.

The big favorite was, of course, Death by Chief Jade, though alcohol poisoning was a close second. I took a longshot on "Tragic Bagel Buttering Accident,” which was slightly above "Shot by a Sniper in a Mob Kingpin's Office.” Pity. Sgt. Cobalt will be going home with a nice chunk of change if Miss Sweet Shine ever lets me report this.

I'm going to miss the ornery bastard more than I'll miss my 20 bits. At worst, once I’m finally allowed to make final preparations, I can get a decent internal examination of the device and perhaps do more than write up notes. It seems somewhat sad that we’re installing something so magnificent in a corpse.

-Signing Coroner, Slip Maledictus Efribus Consumarcio Obsessi Stitch, PhD, MD, ADHD.

ADDENDUM: Noticed something odd. I came down to the morgue today and found the I.V. bag I’d left attached to the Detective empty. I catheterized him and found he’d quite needed to go. How strange. Have added a fresh I.V. bag with nutrient solution and will continue to observe. May put off sawing off knees for use as table legs.

ADDENDUM ADDENDUM: It has been nine days since the surgery and the Detective is... I’m unsure. He is most certainly still dead. There was no brain activity I could detect; however, the installation would appear to be operating. By all rights, without preservation, he should be primed to possess a pungent post-mortem perfume. I find myself most curious, though I have been, again, forbidden from heavy exploratory surgery. Disappointing. Will have Miss Thalassemia continue daily catheterization and intravenous feeding. This is getting interesting!

Since very few ponies ever have the joy or pleasure of reading their own autopsy, I felt the need to have a sit-down again and some of those refreshing deep breaths. Whether it was the fumes or possibly the precursors of manic psychosis, I started to feel a bit better. After all, what pony can say they’ve been ‘most certainly dead?’

As with any death investigation, including one’s own, it’s best to start with what you know. A bullet killed me. Taxi brought me to Stitch and did something which remedied that situation.

Cosmo. Cosmo was dead.

I started going up and down the length of the freezers until I found the only one ‘John Pony, Male, Gunshot, unclaimed.’ Opening the drawer, I slid the sheet covered body out. It was the right size.

Peeling back the shroud, I stared down into the face of my enemy; my dead opponent, laying there with all the secrets he might have revealed, locked away forever in that destroyed cranium. I touched the brown fur on his cheek and felt the oddest rush of affection that seemed to well up from somewhere under my breastbone, before realizing what I was doing and jerking my hoof back. Odd and unfamiliar emotions seemed to be plucking at the edges of my awareness. None were so strong as to feel invasive, but they were certainly there.

I decided to take the clinical approach to my examinations.

Only minimal effort had been made to clean up Cosmo’s appearance; his bloodied fur might have been dabbed at a bit, but his cause of death was cut and dry, no autopsy required. His skull was a little misshapen from the force of the bullet passing through. Snatching a rubber sock from a pack on the nearby table, I slipped it on and tilted his head towards me.

The bullet hole was enormous and clean around the edges, like only the highest of high powered rifles can produce. His skull hadn’t even had time to shatter until the projectile was slowed by passage through his occipital orb. I let his head drop and peeled off the sock, dropping it in the biohazard box.

“I wonder where they dumped you,” I said to myself.

I needed a minute, one not surrounded by corpses, so I reached for the door, only for the other side to slam wide and for Miss Thalassemia to sweep through like a fuzzy ball of fury. “That silly stallion!” She snarled, scuttling past me without looking up. “...turning the pressure chamber all the way down just to see what would happen to a week-old dead goat... it explodes! What’d he expect? Silly, silly — Oh, hello, Detective — ridiculous and now I’ve got to go clean it up and-”

The hamster stopped short, her broad ears stiffening. One single whisker ticked a couple of times as she slowly turned to face me.

“Hi, Thal. What’s shakin’?”

I guess, confronted by a similar situation, my response might not have been all that different. My voice just doesn’t reach to octaves that high.

“ZOOOMBIIIE PONY!” the hamster shrieked, so shrill every piece of glass-work in the room cracked. She scrabbled at the tiled floor with her clawed toes, backing away so fast she tripped over my piss bucket, slopping it’s contents into the drain. Her nose wrinkled, tamping down her panic slightly. “Yuck, d-did you p-p-pee in that?!”

“I was about to pop,” I explained, striving for nonchalance.

Her whiskers wiggled as a succession of confused emotions ran round and round behind her eyes. Pulling her labcoat a bit tighter around herself, she rose, righting the bucket with one toe, carefully avoiding the puddle. Those prehensile digits must’ve come in spectacularly handy. Getting her wits about her, she faced me, studying my face with a combination of scientist’s interest and the reasonably justified terror of having her brains eaten.

“M-mister... D-Detective H-hardy... w-what h-happened? Y-you were d-dead!” she finally squeaked.

“I’m aware. I woke up about five minutes ago, so I imagine I have fewer answers than you do. Where is Stitch?”

“H-he’s off on a p-pick-up for the c-city. How did this h-happen?” Her gaze dropped to my chest and she stammered, “Y-your lady friend, Miss Taxi, brought you to us and m-m-made...” before trailing off.

“Made what?” I took a step forward and Thalassemia shrank away. “What did she make you do?”

“S-she brought us a box...w-with a-an organ in it!.” The rodent whispered, faintly. “It was a-alive Detective! It was beating and whenever we put it n-near you it w-went crazy!”

I touched the spot on my chest, feeling the lump underneath the skin. The flesh felt oddly loose around that spot. “You... cut me open?”

“Y-your heart h-had a hole in it!” Tears were starting to come, but the hamster girl plowed on, “Th-these two b-big unicorns with your friend. They h-had terrible scars a-all over them! T-the Doctor t-told me to p-prep him for s-surgery, th-then h-he made me leave!”

Dragging a short hoof-stool from under the prep sink, I sat, stroking my chin as I started to prioritize my questions. My heart. They’d taken out my heart and put the brother’s inside me. Little Cosmo’s heart... no... Gale’s heart. A shiver, centered on my tailbone, danced there for a long second then shot to the back of my neck.

While I was thinking, Thalassemia looked to have remembered something and darted over to the short filing cabinet in one corner. Yanking it open, she pulled out a sheaf of paper and scurried back to me, holding it out.

“What’s this?”

“I-I s-saw the Doctor writing it. M-Miss Taxi t-told him to l-leave no documentation a-about what th-they d-did to you, b-but the Doctor g-gets bored...”

“—and he has the most selective memory of anypony alive.” I took the papers from her, laid them on the table and sorted through them for about three seconds before realizing they were all in Stitch’s ridiculously illegible hoof-writing. I pushed them away. “Summary?”

She stacked them and shuffled them, flipping one page after another. I realized after a moment that she really was reading just that quickly. No wonder Stitch kept her on, despite her... condition. As she came to the last page, she shook her head. “It’s... a sort of instruction m-manual. The Doctor doesn’t al-always write in... um... st-straight lines. It me-meanders a-a little.”

“I’m listening.”

“I-If I’m re-reading this r-right, t-the two big ponies... h-had somepony named Zeta t-translate the r-runes using some kind of key th-they got from somewhere. Then they ch-changed them. I-it says th-that your h-h-heart... used to run on l-love. It’s a changeling’s heart!”

My lips peeled back from my teeth in a grimace. “Come again?”

She hurried on, excitedly checking back through some of the pages to make sure she had certain parts right, “The r-runes make it li-live. It’s alive. Miss Taxi ma-made them change the runes, so it runs on regular mag-magic po-power. Th-those big ponies w-wrote new r-runes on it and the Doctor made... oh g-goodness...”

I thought there was little she could have said at that point that would make the tight knot of nerves in my stomach any worse. I was wrong.

“You better follow up that ‘oh goodness’ right quick, darling.”

“Detective...I don’t know how to tell you this but... y-you... y-you h-have b-b-batteries.”

I must have looked very scary just then because Thalassemia cringed, shielding herself with the papers. “I’m just r-reading what it says!”

“Clarify, please?” I hissed.

Pulling the manual open she leafed to one particular page. “The D-doctor was writing this down so he c-could write a paper about the procedure, I think. Your heart r-runs on rechargeable p-power stones. Y-you have to p-plug yourself i-into s-something o-or have a unicorn charge th-them.”

“Great...” I shut my eyes, grinding my cheek against my foreknee. “Where are my weapons and clothes?”

Stitch’s assistant brightened a little at having something else to do, scampering to the drawers beside the freezer. She ran down the labels until she found the right one, pulling it open. I slid off my stool and moved up beside her.

Inside was my hat atop my gun, harness, and bit, and underneath it all my familiar old trenchcoat. Leaning in, I picked up my fedora and flipped it onto my head, then set my revolver and accoutrements aside. Lifting my coat by the collar, I held it up to the light. Someone particularly skilled with a needle and thread had sewn up the hole.

“T-the Doctor t-thought you should h-have something nice to w-wear to your p-party. He’s v-very good, isn’t he? I-I can’t sew to s-save my life, and h-he makes s-sure all my labcoats f-fit.”

“Wait. My ‘party’?”

She hesitated, then replied in a slightly subdued voice, “Y-your funeral.”

“Ah.” I grunted, pulling my coat around my neck and shoving my forelegs through the sleeves. Its weight sinking around my hips was as comforting as a blanket in childhood. Waking in the morgue, naked, cold and alone, is not an ideal way of starting a morning. Come to think of it, I didn’t know what morning it was. Or if it was morning.

“How long have I been... Let’s leave the existential questions aside and call it ‘asleep?’” I asked.

Thalassemia flipped open the calendar on the wall. “Errr... l-let me see. It’s been three weeks, two days, and—” She glanced up at the wall clock, whose hands said ‘midnight’. “—n-nine hours since the D-Doctor operated on you. T-the n-new heart started beating then.”

“I guess somebody has been keeping my batteries changed?”

She nodded. “T-the Doctor trusts me, but he made me l-leave when he d-did it. I think he’s t-trying to protect me. If the medical board f-found out about them doing an experimental alchemical procedure i-in the morgue...”

“He made sure you have plausible deniability,” I murmured, adjusting the brim of my hat so I could see the spot where the bullet in the theater had torn a hole. It, too, was neatly sealed and patched.

I exhaled, trying to keep myself from having too many deep thoughts. .

It wasn’t so much that the time-frame wasn’t disturbing as that my shocked brain was yet to begin the unkind process of regurgitating all those little emotions that build up when a big chunk of your life is ripped away. Stitch was probably lucky that he was out just then. The idea that he’d performed un-tested surgery on my corpse as a laugh struck me as a greater violation than the enormous span of weeks I’d missed.

Though if I were being completely honest with myself, I’d note that I’d missed more of my life during sinking depressions and hangovers.

“T-there should have been s-something e-else in that d-drawer.” Thalassemia held up the last page; on it was a technical diagram on the page of something that might have been a plug of some sort.

I stuck my head over the open cabinet again and saw, down in the bottom, my badge and a long, thin coil of strange black wiring. My badge came first; I slipped the chain over my head, then picked up the wire. One end of it looked like a regular wall plug. The other was distinctly ‘heart’ shaped.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I held up the length of cable, turning it this way and that.

“I... I th-think that goes into your ch-chest...”

How is a pony expected to have a ready response to something like that? Being Slip Stitch’s assistant, and incidentally a hamster, Thal had always been possessed of an incredibly durable psychology. I admired that just then; my own psyche was mostly slogging forward on inertia and denial. Catatonia or going back in the coma were both looking real good.

I sighed and sat, holding the plug out. “Show me.”

Taking a cautious step forward, she took the wire and began gently feeling around the shaved area of my chest. After a short search, I experienced the strangest sensation I’ve ever had the pleasure or horror of having inflicted upon my person, up to and including being shot:

Thalassemia unzipped me.

I winced, then tilted my head to look down at a flap of what I thought was my skin hanging back from a bare spot of flesh. On either side, a zipper of some type seemed to have been melded into the skin, creating a little pouch. Beneath it, a metallic socket shaped like the heart end of the plug stuck out a millimeter or two from my breastbone.

“O-oh The Doctor is so good! H-he or so-somepony smart has written an ench-chantment i-into the skin to keep it from growing over your z-zipper or s-suffering tissue rejection!” Thalassemia enthused, toying with the flap so she could read the runes written on the inside. “I wish I c-could w-write these d-down!”

I pushed her paws back gently. “Hey! No futzing with my internal organs. I’ve had enough of that for a week. How can I tell how charged I am?”

Reaching up she used a clawtip to press on my chest socket. A soft light emanated from the hole for a half second, then faded. “If the l-light comes on... i-it means you’ve g-got m-more than twenty p-percent. I-if it starts fl-flashing, y-you n-need to get to a unicorn or a p-power supply.”

Brushing my foreleg with the other, I considered whether my next question was a good idea or not. Granted, it couldn’t really have made my day any stranger. “I pulled my I.V. out about ten minutes ago. It... bled, then stopped... now there’s nothing.”

She tilted her head, then lifted my knee so she could examine the spot. “I-it was in for weeks! There’s... there should be a spot there!”

“I’m telling you, ten minutes ago, I watched it bleed for a second then close itself.”

Thalassemia turned to the pack of papers, reading one section then another. “C-come to think of it... Y-you essentially r-recovered from heart surgery i-in three weeks, instead of six. That... I... I-I’ve g-got... well...th-the Doctor le-left a note here in the m-margin. It s-says that s-somepony m-might have un-unforeseen c-consequences a-and benefits fr-from the procedure.”

“What sort of ‘benefits’?”

“H-how should I know?” she murmured, pushing the manual into my hooves. I folded it and it into my coat pocket. “D-don’t get shot in the h-heart again and y-you might get the ch-chance to find out.”

“I’ll do my best. I... damn. I don’t guess you’ve seen Taxi or my partner since they dropped me here, have you?”

“Miss Taxi s-seemed s-sure you w-would wake up. She left a n-note for you. Y-your partner w-wasn’t with h-her when they left y-you here.”

“Swift wasn’t here?... never mind. Note. Where is it?”

Thalassemia pulled a corner store postcard from her pocket and held it out. “I k-kept it f-for you. The D-doctor tends to u-use whatever is n-nearby to write on s-so I had to keep it s-safe.”

“Thanks, Thal. You’re a peach.” I waited as she zipped closed my chest, then gave her a quick kiss on the forehead before stuffing away my charging wire and taking the note. It was in my driver’s slightly erratic and rarely used mouth-writing:

Hardy, you stupid bastard.

Please get up. Please. This isn’t how we’re supposed to go out. You’re going to bury me, dammit! I don’t want to go first.

I don’t know what I’m saying.

Look, you kept me from losing it when my partner (She’d crossed out a few words here into illegibility) died. You can’t kick it now and I’m going to make sure you don’t! I couldn’t let you go out like that.

If you ever read this, I know you’ll probably be pretty pissed.

I did something that you’re going to be really mad at me for, but I’m fine with that if you’re alive. I had to make a deal with somepony.

I guess the first thing you should probably know is that now, I owe him a favor.

I told him what I could of what we’ve been doing. I’m sorry. If you live, you owe him too. He gave me the procedure for your heart and said he had a feeling you’d... come calling, whatever that means. You’re dead.

Sweet Merciful Princesses, I must be an idiot. This is just me rambling. I miss you so much. I wish I could say these things to you, but I have to go hide for awhile. Some... thing... is looking for us, I think. Maybe looking for you. I don’t know. The best thing I can do is be moving around, trying to keep ahead of whatever it is.

I haven’t seen Swift since she leapt through the window and chased after whoever shot you. Nopony found her body and she hasn’t been to the Vivarium. I’ve been monitoring the police bands. I don’t know where she’d be. If you’re reading this, Telly knows where I am.

You promised, remember? You promised you’d never leave. I’m holding you to that! Get up and come get me!

Sweets

I finished the note and lowered my head to my hoof. Thalassemia was waiting patiently, examining the manual more closely as she sat on the stool I’d recently occupied.

Sweets, what did you get into?

A favor means a lot of things in Detrot, but nowhere more so than in the underworld. No legitimate institution would have had anything to do with putting the corpse of a cop under the knife. Necromancy was flatly illegal under Celestia’s law, and while my resurrection might have loosely skirted that insofar as there are no laws against heart transplants, I’m pretty sure a zealous prosecutor wouldn’t have seen any difference if he’d known how long my own heart had been stopped before I got the replacement.

That meant my friend had sold the both of us to some concern of extremely questionable legality.

But, I was too fried to dig into that. I needed to get home and sleep, then call Chief Jade and tell her I was back, then probably try to find some way of keeping my job... No. Before I called the Chief I needed to hunt down the kid and find out what happened to her. Then, I needed to solve my own assassination.

My plate was full, for one of the recently deceased.

“Hey, you mind if I ask who else knows I’m here?”

“J-just The Doctor, myself, your driver, and t-those t-two big unicorns. I-I think y-your friend told the D-Doctor to hide y-your...body.”

I nodded, then checked my pockets, making sure everything was still in place. “Can I use your phone, Thal?”

She waved towards the hall.

“O-out and t-to the left. D-dial n-nine for an outside l-line.”

****

“Dispatch. What can I do for you?”

“Telly?”

“Dispatch. I’m on the clock. What’s up?”

“Telly, it’s Hardy.”

“...Screw you. The ‘call from Hardy’ joke was old last week. Look, we know he’s probably dead in some alley, and just because I had a little breakdown in the coffee room doesn’t mean you assholes get to keep calling me. If I get one more, I’m logging all of you as having rung up sex lines on department time.”

“Telly, it’s me. No fooling.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m hanging up now. Go eat dragon shi—”

“Dammit! Behind Chief Jade’s desk, under the floorboards.”

There was a long pause.

“Go on?”

“There’s only one other pony who knows where you buried Sergeant Sack Note’s accordion. One pony who helped you make sure that prick would never ruin another office party. Who was it?”

Another pause, punctuated with an indrawn breath.

“Hardy?”

“Damn right. Now, I need—”

“Hardy!? You! Where have you been?! What’ve you been doing, you idiot!? Why didn’t you call?! What’s been going on?! Why aren’t you dead?!”

“I’m fine. I promise. I’ll be overjoyed to explain what happened at some point over many drinks, but right now I need to know where Taxi is.”

“Oh, Celestia’s ass, the Chief is going to blow a fuse when she finds out you’re alive. The last thing anypony saw was you, your driver, and the rookie tromping into the Monte Cheval without a warrant and your guns drawn! You have any idea what sort of trouble that made for the department?! Then a week later all our contacts are saying the Jewelers have suddenly disappeared from a five block radius of that place like somepony set a fire under their tails and-”

“Telly!”

“What? Jeez, let a girl finish when she’s on a relieved rant. After your driver dropped off the map and your partner didn’t report in, we all seriously thought you died.”

“I need to know where Taxi is. She left me a note that said I should call you.”

“A note? Where’ve you been?”

“Just tell me where she is. I don’t have time to go into what would be a very lengthy explanation.”

“Uh, she changed her call numbers. I don’t have whatever the Night Trotter is currently running on. The last thing she said to me was that that if I heard from you, you could find her on a love boat.”

“A love boat?”

“That’s what she said. Mean anything to you?”

“...As a matter of fact, it does. Thanks, Telly.”

“No problem. You know, Jade put filed the papers to have you fired, right?”

“Not surprising. I guess you managed to ‘lose’ them, then?”

“Of course! What do you take me for? She’ll do it again the second she finds out you’re not six feet under, though. Hey, did you hear about your—”

“Sorry, Telly, I’ve got things to handle right now. Could you keep Jade in the dark for a bit longer? We’ll talk later.”

“I’ll see what I can do. but your—”

“Bye, Telly.”

****

Setting the phone back on the cradle, I thought about where I might go. The most obvious first stop was Sweet Heart’s High Seas Hotel. Pawing through my pocket, I found a twenty-bit coin near the bottom of one. It was laying underneath Ruby’s diary.

Ruby. Damn me, for a feckless idiot. Why did I think I had all the pieces? There could only be one answer and it wasn’t pleasing to my ego; arrogance. I’d let pass too many years believing the answers were simple. Of course, in large part, they had been. Murderers aren’t usually complicated.

Still, who would order the assassination of a cop? That’s insanity, even if said cop happens to be doing something extremely dumb at the time he’s shot. The bullet did more than punch through my chest. It blew a hole right through my entire matrix of reasoning for the death of Ruby Blue.

Either way, I needed my driver. More than that, I needed my friend.

Picking up the phone again, I dialed the local cab company.

****

It’d been too long since I’d gotten in a car that wasn’t the Night Trotter, and particularly a taxi. I’d forgotten how much of her pension Taxi threw at reconstructing the junker she’d bought off a scrap yard into the speed demon whose back seat I’d become accustomed to.

The cab company, after midnight, sent me a jalopy that might have been built sometime around the dawn of Discord. The seats smelled like rotten bubblegum and hobo vomit. It crept along at a snail’s pace which would have given me more time than I wanted to think, if the driver hadn’t been a loud-mouthed unicorn with a bad haircut, who insisted on laying her life story on me. I paid no attention.

I hadn’t had a real meal in three weeks and my empty belly was telling me, in no uncertain terms, it was time to eat. I pulled the cab off to a side-street pizza diner and got myself a slice, only managing about a third of it before my stomach declared itself filled. Three weeks without solid food had left me with a tummy convinced it was never going to eat again. The rest went in a doggie bag, then we were off once more.

Some distant part of me was marveling at just how well I was taking everything that’d happened. The more I thought about it, the odder it seemed, but then a pony’s mind is very resilient. Maybe Gale was taking up some of the slack, keeping me calm when I might otherwise have been inclined to have a little breakdown. Maybe the breakdown was still coming. I wasn’t in any condition to make those sorts of introspective determinations, and asking myself just why I was willing to accept the literal presence of a... a 'ghost in my biological machine' was a path down which madness surely lay.

****

We pulled up to the High Seas and I passed the twenty bit piece to the driver.

“Keep the change.” I muttered, stepping onto the curb. She sniffed, bit the coin, then burned as much rubber as the smelly rust bucket probably could, leaving me standing there facing the shadowed hulk across the enormous parking lot. Most of the lights had been shut off for guest comfort, it being well past the witching hour when we finally arrived.

I pulled my coat tight at the neck and started a slow walk to the hotel’s office.

****

The pony behind the front desk was a supercilious prig who gave one look to my fresh-from-the-grave appearance and threatened to call security. I had to flash my badge at him to get service and, even then, he made me go back outside and clean my hooves on the mat before he’d let me in.

I asked for a yellow mare driving a taxi and got a blank stare. I then inquired if the pony in the marital suite was demanding, kept strange hours, and was possibly out of her mind. He grinned and reached under the desk, passing me a key.

“If you want to get her out of here, I’d appreciate it. She’s a criminal of some kind, right?”

“Something like that,” I replied then took the key and started out of the office.

He called after me. “One of my porters touched her butt and she put him in a coma for an hour! You be careful apprehending her and don’t make too much noise. We have guests sleeping!”

****

I circled the ship towards the captain’s quarters, moving up the metal staircase to the door with the heart shaped knocker. I paused outside, trying to comb my mane back from my face, then rapped sharply on the ultra-pink door.

There was no response for several seconds, then the peephole was covered. An instant later the door was thrown wide and a cerulean blue demon launched itself at my throat. I yelped and tumbled onto my back as a feminine form tried to strangle me. The mare deftly avoided my defensive hoof-strikes, which might have looked to the untrained eye like helpless flailing. She hugged me to her chest, crying piteously into my mane.

I pulled her leg from my throat long enough to croak, “Lady! I’ve got no idea who you are, but could you let go?!”

“It’s me, you silly mule!”

I recognized that voice.

Now I got a better look, the attacking mare was victim of a truly awful dye-job that’d left splotches around the outsides of her ears and the edges of her mane. To anypony looking from a distance, she might have seemed just a terminally unfashionable face in the crowd. Up close, the canary roots showed through.

“Taxi? Holy Sun, what’d you do to yourself?” I asked, gently pulling myself from under her.

Her hoofslap caught me across the cheek and I fell onto my rear. “You’ve been in a drawer in the morgue for three weeks and the first thing you want to know is why I dyed my pelt?!”

Then she was hugging me again, right there on the cold catwalk outside her hotel room. I put my legs around her and groaned. There was no getting out of it. Taxi might not have a cuddly soul, but when she wanted to express affection I’d long ago learned to just accept it with as much grace as possible. With my ribs cracking from the pressure, it wasn’t much grace.

Finally, she let go and cupped my face in her hooves, turning it one way, then the other. “Hardy... Oh wow. Sorry, I’ve just been having nightmares lately where this happened and it turned out you were a ghost. It’s really you!” Tears crept into the corners of her eyes. “It really is!”

“Yeah, yeah it is me.” I stood, facing the open doorway. “Can we go inside and maybe you can tell me what’s been going on? Possibly get me a cup of coffee, too?”

Taxi nodded, raising herself and backing into the hotel room. I followed her in.

It was obvious the maid hadn’t been through in a number of days. Maybe they were trying to hint that my driver should get out. Whatever the reason, the room was a mess. Rich red bedsheets spilled across the floor and one of the chairs, creating a sort of fort underneath the hanging dinghy/bed. The garbage can was full to the top with old food wrappers, containers, and pizza boxes. The mini fridge stood open, empty, and unplugged. It was a level of destruction most often seen only in rooms occupied by rock stars and political figures.

It reminded me of home more than a little.

“Sweets, you’ve been staying in this?” I asked, a bit shocked.

My driver self-consciously picked up one of the chairs, setting it upright and dusting crumbs from some meal off of it. “M-miss Stella picked up my tab. I...oh...Hardy, it’s been awful!”

“I can imagine.” I swirled my chin in a circle, encompassing the state of the room in the gesture. “Why don’t you pick a point in the story I haven’t been around for and tell me what’s been going on?”

Sliding onto the chair, my driver indicated I should grab the other seat. I sniffed at the box of rice on it, and decided it was probably past salvaging. I set it on the carpet, crawled onto the cushion and got comfortable.

My driver opened her mouth, but no words came out. She closed it again, then scratched at her ear and tried again. “I... I’m really glad to see you.”

“I gathered that from the full nelson in the doorway,“ I replied, trying a smile. She returned it, tentatively. “Maybe start with the most obvious thing. Why are you blue?”

“That’s the most obvious? Not ‘Why am I alive?’ or ‘What did you do to me?’.”

I shrugged, holding up both hooves. “What can I say? I like to start simple. I’m a simple pony and I get the feeling the answer to those questions is going to be complicated.”

Her lip quivered, then she sucked in a breath. “I dyed myself blue because I think somepony might be looking for you.”

I squinted at her, then asked, “What makes you think that?”

Taxi seemed to suddenly fill with a nervous energy. She leapt off the chair, pacing back and forth in front of it staring at her own toes as she said, “After you... after you were shot, Swift vanished. She went out the window of Cosmo’s office and that was the last time I saw her. When I couldn’t wake you, I panicked and signaled the Vivarium to pick us up. After that... I... I made a trade with somepony for what we needed to save your life. You got my note, I guess.”

“Who’d you give a favor to?”

“It’s... not important right now, is it?”

Shaking my head, I tapped my toes together. “Pretty damn important, if you ask me.”

“I’ll answer that in a minute, then,” she replied, then continued pacing. “Anyway, I tried to get Queenie to tell me where Swift had gone, but it said that she had taken her ladybug off. Stella offered to let me stay at the Vivarium, but I just... couldn’t. He’s paying for this room, like I said.”

“Very kind of him. Go on?” I prompted.

“Well, I slept here a few days. Just laid around.” Her voice faltered, then stopped. “One morning, I woke up and the ladybugs were gone. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Nothing duller than watching a pony meditate, sleep, and cry for a week straight.”

“Okay, but none of that explains the blue-ness.”

“I’m getting to it!” she snapped, then quieted, lowering her head and sinking to the filthy carpet. “A few days ago, I tried to get in touch with a few of my old contacts for help to see if I could find the rookie. She hadn’t been by the Vivarium and nopony had seen her. Some of my contacts were... I don’t know if ‘reluctant’ is the word, but several weren’t even answering. These are very reliable ponies, you know?”

“I know the kind, yeah,” I affirmed.

“Then... about a week ago, I finally quit moping and thought I’d try to do something useful. I decided to swing by your place to see if I could find anything in your old case-files about murdered prostitutes or gangsters having miracles happen to them. I know it’s a long shot, but I was pretty wrung out.” Her face filled with trepidation. “H-Hardy...y-your apartment’s gone.”

I almost sprained my neck yanking my head up. “What?!”

“They burned it, Hardy! Somepony gutted your building!” She rushed ahead, her eyes frantic with the need to have the story told. “The fire department’s public statement is that it was an accident, but I found one of the neighbors and he said as he was running out he saw the smoke coming from your apartment! Before that, he’d heard somepony crashing around in there like they were having a dance party with a bunch of minotaurs!”

“Tossing my place. Probably looking for the diary. Still need to figure out why that’s so important,” I muttered to myself as my ego hid under the bed.

Queenie and Telly. I’d been so wrapped up in the investigation of Cosmo that I’d brushed both of them off right as they were trying to tell me something. The ladybug network had certainly been ‘intent’ on that smoke and fire I saw the last time I was tapped in. No wonder. Knowing the extremely literal minded character of the Essy collective, they probably took brushing it aside as a signal that it was unimportant. They were still, fundamentally and by nature, tools, and as such often did only what their users asked and nothing more.

I needed to get Telly a fruit basket by way of apology.

“You think it was Cosmo who did it?” I asked, tugging at my upper lip with my teeth.

Taxi scratched at the rug. “It might have been, but your neighbor said the smoke from your place was purple. Now, it could be your old toaster finally decided it was tired of life, but that sounds like magic fire to me.”

“Unicorn trying to cover his or her tracks, then.” I mused. “Whoever shot us did it from up good and high, too. Probably a cloud. I know of some cloud-walking magics, but considering pegasus vision, it’d be simpler to assume a flier was our shooter.”

My driver nibbled at her lips for a long moment, then pushed herself to a sitting position. “Cosmo doesn’t... I mean didn’t... make regular uses of species besides earth ponies except when he absolutely had to. We didn’t fight a single non-earth pony in the theater and I’m pretty sure all of his guards were earth ponies too.”

“Aye. He might have tossed my apartment, but he’s got no reason to burn it.” I shook myself, sliding off the chair and climbing up on the dinghy. It was much more comfortable, despite the slight swaying, and I was feeling sleepy. No time to rest, though. “The only reason to torch the place is to make sure nopony could possibly know who was there. Forensics off a magically torched building are useless and enchanted fire turns into the regular old vanilla variety as soon as somepony stops casting the spell.”

Going over to the mini fridge, Taxi shuffled through the empty bottles until she found a half full one, yanking the cork out with her teeth and taking a short sip before she continued her story, “Anyway...a week ago, I decided to go home for a few hours and get some stuff. I got a tail. I never saw them, but they were there.”

“A ‘feeling’?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I ran and whoever they were, I think they almost cornered me over on Brighton. Me!”

That, by itself, wasn’t an uplifting notion. Taxi, in her car and on her roads, can be a speed fiend or a ghost. That someone was able to keep up with her such that she was required to hide rather than run meant a savvy hunter, at home in the streets of Detrot.

“Anyway, there’s an alley there with one of those big storm drains that I wedged her and threw a tarp from the trunk over. Then I...well, I didn’t know what to do. There was one of those spray on dye shops across the street and I gave them twenty bits to let me stand in the run off sluice for a minute.” She looked down at her chest fur. “It came out blue.”

I held my breath and counted ten, making certain there were no chuckles about to burst out and get me killed. Again. “A-and you just left it like that?”

Taxi rolled her eyes and cracked the first smile I’d seen since my resurrection. “I’ll dye it back. Just give me a few hours and let me sober up.” Her expression fell. “I managed to get my cab here and put her in the underground parking. The valet lent me some tools so I could change my call numbers and disable the radio.“

“That’s sweet of him,” I commented, rolling onto my back and crossing my forelegs behind my head.

My driver seemed to think for a brief time, then moved forward and lightly touched my chest over the socket. “D-does this hurt?”

“The plug?” I shook my head, negative. “No. Funny thing, you’d think it would. Whatever magic you paid for, it did its job.”

“Are you charged?” she inquired.

“I’m good for a few hours, I think. You going to tell me where you got the information to fix me?”

Biting her lip, Taxi glanced to the side, doing her best not to look straight at me. “It was...I had... I went to see... Don Tome.”

“The head of the Archivists?” I asked, tilting my head.

“I remembered that you said he knew about magical artifacts, and he was--“

“--trustworthy, for somepony who’d be locked up in any sort of just world.” I sagged a bit. “Damn. I guess there are worse beings I could owe my life to. Zebras have funny ways of thinking where ‘owing’ someone something is concerned. I don’t guess he hinted at what this favor he wanted is.”

“No... he didn’t. You’re not mad?”

I tugged my hat from my head and dropped it on a clean spot on one of the chairs. “Sweets, if I was going to be mad, I can think of a much longer list of things to be pissed off at you about than selling favors to a criminal antiques enthusiast to save me from the charnel house. Besides...” I pulled Ruby’s locked diary from my coat and set it beside the fedora. “...I was going to go see him myself. We’ve got to find the kid first. Once that’s done... then we’ll see what the Archivists want.”

****

Apartment gone. Job probably gone. Partner vanished. Mystery unsolved. Possessed bug heart running on batteries.

Why did I not feel worse?

Sure, I was a bit unhappy to have my back-up ties destroyed, but they weren’t really all that valuable to me. I still had my gun. My father’s badge was in a bank box along with mom’s wedding ring. All those case files represented years of red tape keeping me leashed to the bureaucracy. My fondness for Chief Jade’s regular sessions of physical abuse aside, my job was paperwork fifty days out of a hundred. Her attempt to desk me was just an effort to bring that number up a bit.

I became aware of the heft of my badge resting on my breast-bone. It was everything I’d been for fifteen years, but underlying it was the sad truth; I’d stopped serving our blind mare Justice, and just as it looked like I might be getting back on the path my cutie-mark has driven me along since it appeared, a bullet ended my chase. Our trail was three weeks cold.

Still, I couldn’t fight a crooked smile breaking out on my muzzle.

They’d killed me. They’d taken my job. They’d taken my home. They’d taken the entire life I’d scrimped and clawed and wept to construct, that I might fulfill my purpose within the corrupted, befouled system of bought influence and criminality running my city. The faceless sons of bitches had burned it to the ground.

There it was. The truth. I’d seen truth so rarely the last few years that it’d taken me hours to recognize it, but when I did, it presented me with one glorious conclusion.

Whoever killed that girl, killed me, and killed Cosmo had better watch out.

I’m free, you bastards. I’m free and I’m coming.

Act 2, Chapter 2: Hush Now, Quiet Now

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 2: Hush Now, Quiet Now

The griffins and the pegasi have had a long, rocky, and bloody history. The reason for it is not complex. Griffins eat meat, and pegasi are made of meat.

It provides a biological backdrop to the cultural reasons pegasi value flying skills and athleticism so highly: Those who did not display strong flying skills tended to wind up on a griffin's plate. It's been further suggested that the pegasus power to manipulate weather and generate electrical storms is in fact a combination of magical and evolutionary adaptation to a hostile Equestrian airspace. Nothing quite puts off a predator like being tazed in the beak whilst several thousand feet in the air.

In something of a great paradox, the pegasi owe a lot of their current identity and capacity to the stresses put upon them by tormentors higher up in the food chain.

The predatory practice did start to die down around the time the pegasi got fed up and started organizing their own militaries: When the ones who survived were the ones who started fighting back in force. Ultimately, though, it was the alliance of the Three Tribes of Ponykind that put a stop to the practice just about entirely. When the price of a meal might include being turned into a newt and bucked into next week on top of being electrocuted, other meals started to appear more affordable.

The two remained cold warriors for a long time afterwards, however; It was only well after Celestia and Luna rose to power that a genuine treaty was worked out between Equestria's two most prominent flying species, who could then walk amongst their prehistoric enemies without fear of being eaten or shock-fried.

Which is not to say that the two species never get into a scrape every now and again.

--The Scholar

I wanted to ask more questions, but I could see my driver starting to nod off as the burst of relieved energy gave way to a combination of drinks and what was probably several sleepless days and nights. It was a potent cocktail, and she was flagging fast.

I helped her into the dinghy, threw a sheet over her and turned the air conditioner on before flopping down underneath, resting my head on an awful red throw pillow with a cherubic foal stitched into it.

From that horrendously unfashionable vantage point, I let my mind wander.

I thought about a day, many years ago, when I’d run through open, grassy fields following my brother, who was shouting encouragement as I fought to keep up with my shorter legs.

Wait. You never had a brother, Hardy.

This wasn’t what I needed if my brain was going to go for a walk-about. I shut my eyes, tight as I could, and forced my brain to quiet. There, in the darkness behind my eyelids, I tried to wrap myself in my own memories. Juniper laughing over a bottle of wine. Mom, baking in the kitchen or carving in her workshop. Dad, in from the station house, washing a bit of mud off his badge or digging it out of his horse-shoes. Eating dinner with Taxi, who was showing her latest little magic trick or talking in the corner to my father about some nuance of a case he was working on. My brother holding me while we slept after I’d had a bad dream—

No, dammit! That’s not mine!

Nothing would quite silence the distinct sensation that I was no longer alone in my own head.

I should have been appalled. Frightened. Disgusted. Instead, I felt as though somepony was trying to comfort me.

I eased downward into a confused, but somehow still pleasant sleep. Dreams are still dreams, even if you’re not sure whose they might be.

****

“Hardy! Hardy! Wake up!”

Hooves shook my shoulders violently and I swatted at them in my semi-asleep state. This earned me a toe in the stomach that brought me fully awake all in one go.

“Egyyah! Sweets! What’d ya do that for?!”

“Wake up!” My driver gave me another good shake to make sure I was fully conscious, then stomped back into the bathroom. I heard water running, then the flush of the toilet, before she called out, “I went out this morning and fixed my radio, then I called Telly and told her we’re back on the grid. She left a message to call Sykes.”

“Sykes? What does he want?”

Taxi almost danced back in, wiping the edges of her muzzle with a towel draped over one leg. “He knows where Swift is!”

“What? Sykes?!”

“Apparently!”

I used the edges of the dinghy to haul myself up before dropping onto all fours and doing a full body stretch. My rest had been interrupted by a succession of strange and sometimes foalish dreamscapes, but I felt excellent. The floor wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I’d slept in many worse places and I hadn’t felt like moving the empty food containers off the couch. While she’s usually very finicky, my driver has been known to turn into a bit of a slob when on the bad side of a downward spiral. Much like myself, actually.

“Erg... was that the news that required you to shake my fillings loose?” I asked, grabbing my hat and the diary from my makeshift night-stand. I stuffed the book down my coat front, then mashed the hat over my ears, wiggling them through.

Taxi gave me a sober look. “Jade knows you’re back.”

“How? I told Telly-” I stopped short as I realized what I was about to say. Jade had eyes everywhere within the Castle and, if nothing else, she had intuition that would give Taxi’s a run for its money. “Forget I said anything. What does she want?”

“I think Telly parsed it down to something fit for equine ears. The gist of it was that you need to come in right now, this very second, or you’ll suffer until the stars fall out of the sky.”

“Huh. Jade must be taking more of the green squares if she’s feeling that kindly. I expected a death squad sent out immediately.” I waved one hoof. “I’ll see how I feel once we’ve picked up the kid. Setting hoof in The Castle after what we pulled is begging for another trip to the hereafter.”

“You can’t avoid her forever, you know,” Taxi murmured.

“I’m fully aware. Now get your stuff and call the front desk to let them know you’re checking out. We’re leaving.”

****

Taxi kept peering at me in the rear view mirror as we drove along, as though making certain I was really, actually there. That I had only experienced a subjective day between strutting like a champion of the world into Cosmo’s office and waking up on a slab was still terribly disorienting.

Gingerly shifting the fur on my chest about, I finally found the zipper and pulled it down a few inches. I tapped the socket, then breathed a relieved sigh as the light came on. Wasn’t looking forward to my first ‘charging’ session.

So many questions. Too many.

Don Tome, librarian to the criminal underworld, was probably the best one to answer the ones about my new organ, but knowing him he was about to exact a price I was uncomfortable paying. The meeting with Jade was bound to be painful or great fun, or both. I’d often fantasized about what I’d do if she finally dropped the hammer and fired me.

There was also the distinct possibility that someone might, at some point, try to kill me again. I’d been gunned down from a cloud the last time, and if our opponents knew my exact location, nothing was stopping them from taking another shot. Taxi’s sense of her city could be relied upon to keep us free from stalkers, but very little could prevent a determined assassin from taking down a target if he knew where they were going to be. That left me with unpredictability and the fact that they probably believed me still dead already as my only actual strategic havens. I needed a safe place to stay, but I couldn’t worry about that until certain things were handled.

All that remained if I survived that insurmountable list of lethal problems was the kid.

“Hey, could we pull over so I can ring back Sykes?” I asked, over the seatback.

By way of answer, Taxi tugged the Night Trotter into the far lane, pulling us to a stop beside a telephone box. “There’s a fur stylist up on the corner, bless the sky. Do you mind if I go get myself fixed up?”

“No, go ahead. I’ll probably be a few minutes.”

“Telly left a number for Sykes, but unless you want to risk Jade listening in you’d probably better use an actual phone rather than routing through the station house.”

“Alright. I’ll see you in a few. I hope they do emergency jobs. Blue is not your color.” I sorted through my pockets until I found a few stray coins, then stepped out onto the street corner as the cab pulled off towards the nearby boutique.

****

“Aye, ye stinkin’ stoat shite! Callin’ me early in tha mornin’ ye best not be askin’ fer a hand-out! Oi gots oi a gun and a belly full of drunk what will come down and rain lead and hellfoire on ye!”

“Sykes, it’s me.”

“...Me feckin’ who?”

“Hardy! Jeez, I’m out of the game for three weeks and everyone forgets the sound of my voice.”

“Hardy! Scramble moi eggs, boyo! Oi heard ye was...well, ye wee pretty has been tellin’ tales of woe. She said ye was dead o’ gunshot. De kind ye ponies don’t walk away from.”

“I’m still amazed at how many things in the world can be both right and wrong simultaneously.”

“Now what’s that supposed ta mean, boyo?”

“Nothing important. Where’s the kid?”

A long silence.

“Yer wee girly is kippin’ at a motel ‘over top of a griffin beat doive what’s called The Plot Hole... but Hardy, me soul, oi gots to warn ye...”

“Warn me of what?”

“Yer kiddo ain’t loike she was, matey. Sometin’ broken inside. She sings and wroites little ditties ta pay her tabs and... boyo... she foights. Ne’er seen nothin’ loike it. Yer girly ain’t roight no more. Oi tries to talk to her, keep her safe, and sometoimes she’s alright and sometoimes she don’t even see me. Talks loike oi ain’t there to somepony name’a Grape or sometin’.”

“You think to get her to somebody who could help?”

“Hardy, ye ain’t seen yer sweet thing scrap. Them is a bunch what loikes a tussle an’ a pint an’ a leg’o foine meat. They ain’t too picky what koind of meat, either, but girly uses them PACT and copper foightin’ styles, an’ holds ‘er own against griffins what should be usin’ her leg bones for toothpicks! She’s fast and madder than a badger on foire.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“She... well... Girly knows what she needs and if she was a griffin, it be a stiff cup and a scuff o’ the knuckles. When Oi found ‘er she were diggin’ in dumpsters, covered in blood, and smelled loike a week’ old kill. Ain’t so much better now.”

“Right. I’ll go pick her up and see what I’m dealing with. Thanks for the tip.”

“Hardy?”

“Yeah?”

“Ye be careful down there. Them is not sorts what is impressed by a shield and gun.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Take care, Sykes.”

“Ye too, laddy.”

****

As much as I wanted to get going immediately, Taxi’s dye job would not be rushed. The stylist just shook his head as I passed him the money for the job, pushing it back as he said something about it being ‘a fine pleasure to fix such a disaster.’ I pocketed the bits just as my driver trotted out of a booth, her fur still damp and a pleased smile on her face. Her mane was unbraided, but it looked distinctly more like hers. The black and white layers were back to their normal shades. It must have required magic to get that dye out so quickly. .

“Ahhh, that’s better,” I said, holding open the shop’s door.

“You’re telling me! You mind if I ask, though... shouldn’t we be keeping our heads down? If nothing else, the dye was a decent disguise.” Taxi wanted to know as she stepped out into the greasy morning air ahead of me.

“Honestly?” I shrugged, stepping up to the cab parked out front and opening the back door to climb in. “Someone tipped off our assassin that we were at Cosmo’s. Reginald Bari, most likely. The little weasel smiled at me as we were on our way up the elevator. He’ll probably be in the zebra lands, drinking mojitos and chasing striped flank by now. I think we’ve got a grace period, here, before he or someone he works for finds out I’m up and around. I may just have been a target of opportunity or not a target at all.”

“They did burn your home...” she reminded me.

“Yes, yes they did,” I replied, feeling a twinge of sadness. I really had liked that apartment. “I’m assuming they’re looking for Ruby’s diary. If they want that, they’ll need me alive. If they don’t... well, I can’t live the rest of my life in a log cabin somewhere. I need to find out who is working all these angles. Once we’ve got the kid, I think I know a place we can bunk while we work this out.”

“Shouldn’t we... I don’t know.” Taxi hauled herself behind the Night Trotter’s wheel and started the engine, letting it idle. “Hardy, I have no idea how to handle something this big. I mean, whoever this is... they just killed the head of one of the most dangerous crime families in the whole of Detrot, which means the whole of Equestria, just to tie up a loose end. This is the sort of thing the police call Canterlot to take care of! We should at least tell the DPD!”

“Yeah, and the Department is going to do precisely what, may I ask?” I heaped my coat beside my head, resting my cheek on it. “You know the job. You think Jade would authorize an investigation? My cutie-mark has been all aflutter since I woke up in that freezer. I’m going to do what I do. Investigate.”

“That’s what I was afraid of...” She prodded the pedals and turned us onto the thoroughfare, then added, “Oh well. If you can’t be talked out of it, then I guess you’ve got wheels. The more ponies you have watching your back, the less likely someone or something is going to put another bullet through it. Besides, I was getting tired of the decor at the High Seas.”

“Glad to hear, because, if I’m honest, I don’t want to do this without you.”

That got a smile out of her.

“Now,” I added, “let’s go find Swift and see what she’s been getting into.”

****

Crossing the city during the morning rush is misery no matter which city you happen to be in. Detrot’s complex web of byways, highways, and under-streets doesn’t make that any simpler. Even with a knowledgeable cabbie who was more than happy to cause near-death experiences to save a few minutes, the trip was longer than it should have been, and I was getting antsy by the time the traffic started clearing.

Peering out the window, I realized we were heading in the direction of Detrot International Air Chariot Port. As we drove, I started to see shadows passing between us and the sun, far higher than all but the most ambitious skyscraper might climb.

Sky Town.

Sky Town had kind of aggregated, perhaps literally out of the blue, when enough of the pegasus and griffin residents had decided that they were tired of sleeping on the ground; It had done so without the benefit of any kind of central planning or taste, so that, instead of the traditional pegasus cloud-city style with massive columns and high-roofed temples, the whole was a confusing mishmash of conflicting novelty architectures. I saw one cloud shaped like a fairy-tale castle, adjacent to another shaped like a rubber duck, incidentally lit from below by a spotlight to make the place glow yellow inside.

The whole thing reminded me of when I was a foal, lying on my back in the grass and gazing up at clouds, interpreting their shapes - Except that when they found a cloud was shaped like a dog with five legs and a gland problem, somepony had not only tried to live there, but parked that cloud next to every other bizarrely-shaped cloud they could find.

On the ground below Sky Town was a loose, slightly seedy confederacy of fuelling stations, greasy spoons, and cheap hotels designed to cater to the budget-minded traveller and provide the clashing clouds above with a modest income, as well as a place for the winged to interact with their landbound friends and family.

I didn't visit much. Investigations in Sky Town were left to the DPD's flight-capable officers, and I didn't envy the poor bastards one bit for that. A pegasus' preferred method of body disposal tends to involve said corpse being shoved onto a cloud and pushed out over the Wilderness, which means the thing is either eaten by Wilderness beasts, or simply drifts endlessly. Depending on the weather and the stability of the cloud, however, this had been known to backfire; Most famously, during Mayor Snifter's inaugural 'Clean up the City' speech, which was interrupted by a cadaver crashing through his podium.

Between the buildings, I could now and then snag a glimpse of the port itself - and it almost made up for the aesthetic atrocity committed by Sky Town.

Emerald towers of suspended cloud sprouted from a huge, golden spire sitting in a vast green field, miles from anything else. Hordes of winged creatures spun in orderly circles around it, some trailing the fat, cigar-like air chariots while others had only themselves and perhaps a cart for their possessions, all waiting to go through customs.

My heart beat a little harder as that old, foal-like wonder crept up from wherever it hides when I’m being cynical and pissy. I’d never wanted to fly myself, nor was I a big fan of heights, but there was something truly glorious about that holding pattern of comers and goers, a beautifully choreographed dance of aerial beings, all passing through the mighty tower on their way to parts unknown.

****

The ground traffic had thinned until we were very nearly the only ponies on the road aside a few pedestrians and other cabs on their way to the Air Chariot Port to deliver and pick up travelers.

Only a few ponies remained on hoof. While that part of the city couldn’t exactly be called ‘safe,’ nor was it rife with crime. The farther we drove, the darker it became as clouds crowded out the already spare sun until it was a reasonable facsimile of twilight in the deep alleys. We passed a roaming group of griffin tribals, decked out in full war regalia, who stared at the car with undisguised suspicion until we turned another corner.

Neither of us were especially familiar with the grimy ground district beneath Sky Town, so we ended up doubling back a couple of times on the narrow streets before finally resorting to standing on the curb and waving down a passing pegasus air traffic patrol-pony. He directed us towards a particular cloud structure hanging somewhere down a series of back roads.

I thought it’d been my imagination, but as we got closer I saw that it did indeed bear a striking resemblance to a wedge of cheese turned on its end. The complete lack of municipal building regulations governing the shapes that clouds could be in Sky Town meant there were more than a few of these hideous eyesores. Space was cheap, though, so many a budding amateur architect started there, designing cloud homes and hotels.

We wound our way closer, navigating largely by Taxi’s internal compass. Even with directions, we damn near missed it.

The Plot Hole was one of those fine places frequented by youthful idiots drinking their way to middle age and old killers hanging around out of cussed stubbornness. I’d been into a hundred like it, or so I thought. The beer was going to be watery, but if you asked for water, the whole building would laugh.

The place itself spilled like a nasty infection through the bottom floors of what might have been a cheese shop in better days. If it were a roach motel, the roaches would be demanding tea-towels and better accommodations.

Someone with shallow pockets had done the facade, which was a set of boarded-up windows covered in griffin tribal symbols spray painted over the plywood, leaving the cheese-cloud up above as the only identifying mark. It was the kind of place you either knew was there or somebody told you was there. They didn’t advertise, because there were no door guard and no tuxedos. If you went into the Plot Hole, it was understood that you were there of your own accord and anything that happened to you was your own damn fault. Not Responsible for Lost or Stolen Limbs.

Outside on the corner, a crowd of laughing, boozing pegasi air-navy wrestled hooves and claws with a bunch of young griffins over an upturned cable spoon.

Taxi swerved to avoid a plastered old fella who’d probably had one too many salt licks, skidding onto the curb-side beside a parking meter. The Night Trotter’s brakes whistled unhappily at being so treated, steaming in the mid-morning air as we got out.

My driver started to feed a rusting parking meter that looked like it hadn’t been maintained since cars had been invented. I gave her a curious look. “You think somepony is going to come around here to boot the car?” I asked.

“I’m just being cautious,” she countered. “Besides, while you were gone I made a little bit of extra money and put in an alarm system.”

“What kind of alarm?” I asked, warily.

Patting the hood, she pulled a tiny black box from her saddlebags and pressed a button on it. Something inside the car shuddered and a soft glow suffused the interior upholstery before fading a moment later. “Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to touch the seats right now, unless, of course, you liked the idea of spending several weeks screaming in the burns unit of Holy Sun Memorial.”

I grinned as she secreted the black box away. “Whatever happened to 'peace and light'?”

“Peace and light don’t apply to anypony who touches my car without asking.”

****

We circled the building twice, looking for the entrance. All of the doors we tried were boarded over or chained shut. We could see a couple of ponies and griffins coming and going from the rooftop, but none of them heard us, were sober enough to listen, or cared to stop when we tried to shout for assistance.

Finally, one of the navy pegasi, his cap flipped backwards on his head, stumbled away from his friends and gave Taxi a wink. Beer stains covered his uniform’s lapels and every other step was in the wrong direction.

“Heya pretty! You feel like ditchin’ the square and comin’ with me fer the night?” he drawled, holding his beer bottle protectively to his chest.

Before I could step between them to prevent a murder, my driver returned his smile with a demure tilt of the chin and swish of the tail. “Oh, I’d love to, but I don’t have a drink of my own. You happen to know how I could get into this place?”

The sailor glanced at me, raising his bottle in my direction, “Whaddabout’ cher colt-friend?”

“Oh, he’s not my colt-friend. He’s got a little lover boy named Scarlet waiting for him, anyway.” I half opened my mouth to protest, but let it snap shut and settled for an irritable snort. Ignoring me, she stepped closer to the sloshed pony, brushing her cheek against what must have been an absolutely foul shoulder. “So how about it? Mind showing us the way?”

Obviously surprised to find his tactic had netted him any interest whatsoever, the stallion gave me an appraising, cockeyed look before turning back to Taxi. “Sure, shweet thing!” He slurred. “T-there’s a rope fer ponies wid-out wings over t-there.” He tipped the mouth of his bottle towards the corner of the Plot Hole. “-hiic. Lemme f-fly yah up!”

“Oh, that’s so sweet!” She gave him a little kiss on his scruffy cheek and even in his drunken state, he pinkened. “I’m afraid of flying, though, so I’ll just climb. Why don’t I meet you inside? You can get another couple of drinks and I’ll be right there.”

“T-that’s a g-good id-dea...hee!” The blushing sailor flared his wings and stumbled sideways. He flapped them weakly, lifting about a meter off the ground before flying face-first into an electrical pole directly behind him and sliding into the gutter. He let out a snort, kicked one rear leg, then started to snore.

Taxi let out a slow breath, then tore a kerchief out of her bag and began wiping everywhere she’d touched the drunk.

“I guess there was no prettier way of doing that, was there?” I murmured, kicking the stallion’s bottle off the curb.

“Unless you wanted to snuggle up with him and pout your lips a little, no.”

“I’m not criticizing,” I replied, trotting off toward the corner of the building the sailor pointed at. We’d passed the rope twice and I’d paid it no mind. It was knotted at intervals for easy climbing and wrapped around a cleat, driven into the brickwork. The thick rope went up through a hole six meters in the air onto one of the lower take-off platforms.

“Ugh, they couldn’t have settled for stairs, could they?” I grumbled, working my jaw and forelegs a bit.

“Come on. You used to be able to do this. Remember when we were kids?” Taxi grinned and leapt onto the wall, grabbing the twine in her teeth, hauling her rear legs up to the first knot and clambering up like a spider-monkey.

My heart should have been hammering at the thought of climbing that building, but it was, again, strangely peaceful. Taxi peered over the side and shouted, “Hey! You gonna be down there all day?”

“I’m working up to it, dammit!” Grabbing ahold of my anger to bolster my courage, I stretched up and grabbed the rope in my teeth, using a garbage can for a step-ladder as I dragged myself to the first knot.

****.

I grabbed the ledge, using my rear hooves to brace against the side of the hole. Levering myself up, I caught Taxi’s hoof, pulling myself onto the platform. Getting up I brushed myself off, flicking a bit of brick dust from my coat.

Taxi was giving me one of ‘those’ looks.

“What’d I do now?” I asked, shaking myself off.

“You just climbed a three story high rope,” she replied, tilting one ear towards the ground very far below. I hastily backed away from the edge, putting one hoof on my stomach.

“And?”

“You’re not even breathing hard.” She pointed out, touching my chest.

“I...” I looked down at myself, then turned in a circle. She was right. Three stories up and I wasn’t even winded. I should have felt some burn in my muscles, but they felt just like they had when I’d woken up that morning. “Huh. Coffee and a heart transplant will do that to you, I guess.”

“You’re not kidding. How are your batteries?”

“Could we find something to call them besides ‘my batteries’?” I groused.

“Fine. How are the magic rocks in your chest?” Taxi gave me a flippant wink.

I gritted my teeth and unzipped my plug pouch. The light was winking on and off. “I’ve got some left. A few hours, at least, before I have to try out that plug Stitch's assistant gave me.”

“Don’t take too many chances with that, please? The Archivist said you’re three days from a heart attack when you’re fully charged, and physical exertion or injuries will drain it more quickly.”

“Good to know. Don’t worry. As soon as we get out of here, I’ll find myself a wall socket.” Turning to the darkened doors at the end of the platform, I straightened my hat and walked into the Plot Hole, ready for anything.

****

Why do I ever think I’m ‘ready for anything’?

****

“Bang up, swing down, make a red robin from the dusty song of a gun-”

In spite of the morning sun on the horizon, inside the Plot Hole, it was dim and what little light did creep through was a sallow yellow sneaking through cracks in the boards covering the windows. A low, thick haze of cheroot smoke obscured the details of the bar’s interior. I let my lungs adjust to the tickle of vaporized tar pervading the dreary atmosphere.

“Drink down, fly away, farther than the sun can find you-”

A double-bass strummed a steady beat to the words of an unseen but very sweet voice on a stage somewhere across the half-empty bar room. Through the smoke and the moving bodies, I couldn’t make out much, though as my eyes grew accustomed I started to find details here and there. What I’d thought was just one floor turned out to be three, the ceiling having been torn out of the bottom two floors to make additional seating accessible only to those who could fly.

Most of the patrons seemed to be griffins of different colors and shapes. Some were tribals, though most were the city dwelling variety who were both less muscular and smaller, with a more refined air about them. I hopped sideways to avoid a beast that might have given Sykes, who was undoubtedly the largest griffin I’d ever met, a match in a claw-wrestle. The hybrid tipped his cap and raised a beer to his beak, slurping messily.

There was another scent, underlying the sweat, brewing beans, and smoke that gave me pause. It took several seconds to identify but when I did, I wheezed and tried not to breathe. Cooking meat. The whole place reeked of meat on a grill.

Taxi stumbled against my side as a tall stallion pushed past us onto the platform we’d just climbed up and leapt off, spreading his wings and sailing into the morning air. I pulled her towards what I presumed to be the bar. It had the greatest concentration of empty space, it being early morning and only a few dedicated alcoholics sipping brews. Most of the crowd was sitting around the stage.

“Hide away, cry softly, in a hollow tree, begging for heaven to take you-”

I climbed onto a stool with my driver beside me and called out to the thick necked griffin behind the bar, “Hey! Bartender. Little service?”

“I’m a barista, dick wit. This is a coffee shop,” he said without turning, seemingly very intent on cleaning a set of mugs.

“Well, barista... Little service or do I have to go ask your mother to stop hiking her tail down in the alley to get up here and make me a cup of coffee?” I shot back, putting both hooves on the bar.

The barista slapped a towel over one shoulder then swung to face me. He had only one eye, the other covered by a black patch, and his jawline was a mass of old battle scars. Stalking forward, he set his terribly sharp talons in front of me and glared down at me from his huge height.

“What did you say, little stallion?” His voice held all manner of promise of death and pain, should my answer be the wrong one.

“I said, your mother’s having a good dicking in the alley, and she’d probably make me a better day-starter, so either go get her or give me some brew, chop chop,” I replied, letting a slow, impudent smile spread across my face.

It should be noted that griffins have very few rules of social discourse. As far as I’ve been able to discover, they believe the world is governed best by two things; a strong hierarchy and huge testicles. If you have one, you don’t need the other. You can get damn near anything in griffin society by either having courage or position.

The barista turned one eagle-eye closer, then burst into a hearty laugh. “You, stallion, are going to die horribly one day. You got a griffin friend?”

I pulled open the flap on my chest, showing the socket with its heart shaped plug. “Already happened, and yeah, he’s a tall drink of piss, name of Sykes. I woke up from a three week coma this morning and I could really use a pick-me-up.”

Shifting his weight, the griffin snatched a cup from under the bar and jammed it in the espresso machine, flipping a switch that set off a series of clicks and buzzes. “Aye, I know Sykes. Bucket of piss, more like. You a cop, too?”

“Sometimes.” I pulled my badge off over my head, setting it on the bar and pushing it a few inches to one side. “Sometimes, I just want some coffee and a bit of quiet.”

“Coming up.”

Before he could move away, I reached out and lightly caught his foreleg. “Hey, one more thing?” A 20 bit piece appeared from my coat pocket, and I slid it across to him. “You seen a bright orange pegasus, about half my height, maybe a bit... odd?”

“You mean Li'l Fireball?” The barista shifted his weight, crossing his talons over the bit and making it vanish into a fold of his tatty apron. He jerked his beak at the stage. I twisted on the stool towards it; The added height allowed me to just barely see over the crowd of tall avian heads.

“Whisper to me, pray to see, hanging from the mistletoe tree, those we lost to devil’s deeds...”

That gorgeous, sad voice kept time, hitting each verse with a metronome’s perfection. It was poetry, sung and spoken, and if I hadn’t been so intent on my task I might have stopped to have a weep. Sentimental it was, but it reminded me of better times.

I peered around, trying to find Taxi in the foggy, darkly-lit room. For a moment, I thought she’d vanished, until I caught sight of her up on the second balcony. How she’d gotten up there without wings was anypony’s guess. She waved to me, then pointed her toe at the stage.

My attention turned back as I tried to pick out what was going on in front of the dark curtain hanging in the corner. There was the bassist, a thin griffin with his instrument leaning against his chest, and a microphone stand with the mic tilted all the way down.

There was a head between us, but as it moved, I knew who was standing there before I saw the salmon-colored plumage spread out to either side of her.

Swift.

Officer Swift Cuddles. The second unluckiest sadsack of cop flesh the world ever did see.

Her first day on the job, she’d puked in a garbage can on a crime scene. The second day, a mad musical medician offered her an eyeball on a stick. The third day, she’d watched her partner die of a sucking wound to the chest in the office of a mobster.

“In time, let yourself be saved, and hope to come back, when home is grave.”

I'd never heard her voice like that.

“She’s somethin’ isn’t she?” The barista had returned, dropping my coffee on the counter beside me. I absent mindedly fiddled the straw around to my lips and slurped it. It was damn fine, bitter and brisk. “Li’l Fireball came in about... two weeks ago with your friend, Sykes. Crazy. Covered in what I’m pretty sure weren’t animal blood. Big Eddie-” He flicked a claw at the other corner of the room. At first, I took the form he was gesturing towards for a novelty mummy of a griffin propped against a table; On second inspection, I saw that it was moving. “-has a thing for pony flank. Made a play, tried to take a nip, and she broke his collarbone.”

“How’d he get like that?” I asked.

“She broke his collarbone.” My server’s beak clacked as he snickered to himself. “The three story fall while he figured out you can’t fly with a broken collarbone did the rest.” Using his bar towel, he wiped at an old stain on the counter. “Her set’s off in a minute if you want to talk to her. She stays upstairs in the cloud. Comes here every day and just sings that depressing shit. Pretty, but makes you wanna toss yourself out a window. Crowd loves it, though. Freakiest little horse I ever did meet.”

As I watched, Swift’s song or poem, or whatever it was, came to an end. She lowered her head. I expected applause; it’d been a lovely piece to my untrained ear. The only sound the congregates made was to snap their claws and tap their hooves, keeping the bassist’s beat. She stepped backwards, vanishing behind the black curtain as an older pony wearing a beret hopped up to the mic.

“That there was Li’l Fireball, ladies and gentlebeings,” he announced with a sweeping bow towards backstage. “Thank you all for coming to the open brunch. Tips for Miss Fireball go in the jar by the stage and we’ll make sure she gets them. Anyone not tipping, please die in fire.”

The flock of griffins dispersed, some stopping to drop a few slips of gold into the jar before moving off with their coffees and glasses, a few to the higher floors and most to the coffee bar.

“She’ll be over here in a minute. Just you watch. She always orders the same thing.” The barista rumbled.

True to his word, Swift reappeared once the crowd had moved off and picked up the tip jar, balancing it between her wings as she walked, eyes on the floor, towards the bar. None of the audience accosted her, though some offered words of approval. She didn’t acknowledge them. Big Eddie’s eyes glittered, watching her with malevolent, altogether ineffectual fury as he sipped a steaming cup.

She stopped in front of my stool, still staring at the floor.

What do you say to somepony who watched you die? How many things can you say? Nothing seemed appropriate and the pegasus was a shadow of herself . She still wore the battered tactical suit, but it was torn and stained in places, like she’d been in several nasty dust-ups of some sort. Her wings, normally preened within an inch of their lives, had feathers sticking out in every direction. Even as I watched, one came loose and dropped to the ashy floorboards.

“Kid?” I inquired, trying to keep the worry carefully contained.

“Could you please move? You’re in my seat,” she murmured in a voice soft enough I had to lean forward to hear it.

“Swift?”

Reluctantly, she lifted her chin from its dejected sag and her eyes found mine. They widened slightly, then she shook her head violently from side to side, almost spilling her tip jar. After a short pause, they dropped again. “Could you move? You’re in my seat.”

I slid onto the stool beside that one and waited as the rookie climbed up. It was high enough that, by all rights, she should have used her wings to help, but they were in such poor condition I doubted she could command more than basic flight.

She sat, hunched over the bar, as the barista set a small salad topped with diced chicken in front of her and a cup that smelled strongly of brandy. Pushing the tip jar across, she waited while he counted out the coins for her meal, then slid it back. I noticed he didn’t take a tip for himself.

“Swift, it’s me,” I tried again, putting my hoof on the edge of her plate before she could take a bite.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know who you are. I just want to eat my lunch. Please, leave me alone,” she muttered, tucking into a piece of lettuce.

What did I think I was going to find? Three weeks she’d been thinking I was dead. I was probably much the same when Taxi pulled me out of the bar after Juniper died.

Grabbing her shoulders, I turned her to face me. “Swift! It’s Hardy. Look at me!”

“Hey, buddy, don’t-” The barista started, but I tore my sleeve back off of my gun and glared him down until he backed away before returning my attention to my partner. Putting my hooftip under her chin, I forced her head up and peered into her wasted young face.

Sykes hadn’t exaggerated. Something defining piece, some necessary part, some essential essence was gone. She might have been ten years older, or fifty. The grime clinging to her matted fur made it hard to tell. Her face was lined with old tears. The scent coming off of her was of unwashed pegasus strong enough to stun a charging bull at fifty paces; musk, coffee spice and mildew.

She didn’t pull away, but nor did her expression show anything but bland neutrality. “I’m sorry, sir. I talked to Shotty today, too. It’s okay. I’m fine here.”

“Shotty? Your friend Grape Shot? He’s talking to you?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“Yes, sir. He comes and goes. You’re not going to be talking to me all the time, too, are you? I dream about you sometimes. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop apologizing, dammit! Kid, I’m here! I’m really here!” I barked, giving her a good shake.

“That’s impossible, sir. The bullet was a seven sixty two by fifty one at three hundred meters. It hit you in the chest. You died. You were dead. I saw.” Her filthy ears splayed out against her head. They had sores around them, where the fur looked quite unhealthy. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated.

“Ugh, Taxi paid off a friend of mine and got me a heart transplant in time; she used that magic heart from Cosmo’s brother. I’ve been in a coma for the last few weeks.”

It was technically true, although I think omitting the various details wherein I had actually been very dead was probably simpler than the whole story. That could wait for another time, hopefully after I’d had a chance to speak to The Don. I still needed some explanation as to how a changeling’s ticker had ended up in in my chest.

“Swift, it’s me. I swear,” I insisted, pulling her off of her seat. “Let’s get you out of here.”

For a pony in such a sad condition, she sure moved quick. I barely ducked her first strike and the second one caught me a glancing blow on my weak shoulder. I stumbled back against the bar, sweeping her salad off the counter into her face. Despite the distraction, she was on me instantly like a crazed animal, her wings buffeting my sides.

Stupid opponents fighting a pegasus tend to try to get range and re-group after this sort of attack. It’s a tactic I’ve seen plenty of griffins use. Griffins are ambush predators and if the prey doesn’t immediately fall, they’re not built to fight a protracted battle, particularly if outmatched by a speedy opponent. The key is to get close before the pegasi press the counter attack and pick you apart one piece at a time. Earth ponies can do close.

Grabbing her by the neck in my forelegs, I rolled fast onto my side across the cigarette-butt strewn floor. She tried to get her knees up to kick me between the legs, but I had height and strength on my side as I forced her head to one side, crossed my fetlocks and cut off the flow of blood to her brain with my knees. She snapped at my throat, but almost immediately, her struggles became weaker and she started to just pound on my ribs with her free wing. It hurt, but less than one of those shots to the groin would have.

A glass hit the floor beside my head and the surprise loosened my grip just enough for her to get purchase and shove herself away. Distracted for just an instant, I saw Taxi’s yellow hooves dance by my cheek and noticed, for the first time, that there seemed to be a melee going on on every side of us. The barista was locked in some very fancy hoof to claw combat with my driver who was keeping him off of us while the rest of the bar fought a pitched battle for... some reason. I’d missed the start, though I could only imagine we were the catalyst. That or it was just Barfight o’Clock.

I jerked sideways as a half empty beer can crashed beside my face, splashing across my chest. Bottles, plates, or flying claws seemed to be the weapons of choice, although a few were wielding bar stools and canes. It was a joint for griffin poetry aficionados and, being a group not naturally keen on criticism, I’m sure nothing quite relieved creative differences like bottling someone who gave you guff for splitting your infinitives. Unfortunately, it wasn’t convenient to the task at hoof.

Using my seat, I levered myself into a standing position as Swift dragged herself upright. She was moving slowly and her powerful wings dragged the dirty floor.

"Kid, snap out of it!" I shouted, trying to be heard over the fighting.

No such luck. Lifting her wings, she prepared to launch herself at me when a movie-monster rose out of the battlefield behind her. Before I could get my trigger to my lips, Big Eddie, his mane blowing in a breeze that'd snuck in from somewhere and his bandages trailing across the floor behind him, cracked my partner across the side of the head with his mug. She immediately slid to the floor, dazedly drooping against the bar.

The giant beast was the same size as Sykes, with a patchwork of gauze criss-crossing his face. In the half-light of the coffee shop, he was a scary golem, looming over my unconscious partner. Taxi was still engaged, using one leg to pound on the barista while another pinned a dangerous looking stallion with a shaved mane to the ground. Any hope of her assistance was out the window. I leveled my gun at Big Eddie's forehead, ready to send him on his Great Hunt. It would have complicated my day to shoot a civilian, but after the month I’d had, it was definitely looking like an option if he laid another talon on Swift. He watched my weapon, twisting his head on his neck in that altogether bizarre way only birds are capable of.

"Oi saved yer feckin' loife, an ye wanna pip me?" he asked, in a familiar tribal cockney.

"Thanks, but my life is handled," I replied out of the corner of my mouth, clutching my trigger tightly.

"Ye take yer crazy girly outta 'ere and don't come back, ya hear?" He gestured at Swift with his fluffy tailtip. "Don' need no whacky-in-the-'ead broad in 'ere makin' me loife 'arder. Oi got my lick in. Now sod off." He nodded in the direction of the door, then leapt into the air, grabbing one of the columns up to the second floor and climbing claw over claw up to the balcony. Swinging himself over, he snatched a cup of coffee off an unoccupied table and propped himself on his claws, watching the fight unfold.

Few times in life is one presented with situations that go better than expected. I decided to count my lucky stars and retreat while they were still shining.

Most of the combatants were just getting warmed up and didn’t seem much interested in towing it with a firearmed opponent, so I shoved Swift's body off the floor onto my back and settled her limp weight across my spine. She'd lost more than a few pounds and couldn't afford to lose many more if the ease with which I mare-handled her were any indication.

"Taxi! I got her! We're going!" I shouted, hoping my driver could hear me. I'd lost track of her, but some seconds later, a canary-colored form appeared with a big, self-satisfied grin.

"This is my kind of place!" she exclaimed.

"What isn't your sort of place?” I snapped. “Get my badge off the bar and then help me get her down the rope." I pushed the door to the platform open and stepped out, hopping out of the way of a barreling griffin running out of the Plot Hole at full tilt.

****

While the fight raged, Taxi climbed to the ground and I hauled up the rope, securing it around Swift’s waist before lowering her into my driver's waiting hooves. I let myself down slow, dropping into the alley beside them and hoisting my partner back onto my shoulders.

Our drunken sailor friend was still laying in the gutter. His cap was missing and his pockets looked to have been turned inside out. Still, it could have been worse. He was alive, and in the nastier corners of the city that’s as much as can be asked for.

After Taxi stopped to lightly pet his head, the two of us moved on. The car was right where it had been and as Taxi disabled the car’s alarm, I tossed Swift into the back seat, folding her limp wings against her sides as neatly as I could. The smell off her quickly filled the tightly enclosed space.

“I know I should have asked this before we started a battle in a coffee bar full of griffin war poets hopped up on heavy doses of caffeine, but what are we going to do now that we’ve got her?” Taxi asked, starting the vehicle and turning us into the flow of mid-morning travelers.

I glanced over at the filly, her face scrunched up in discomfort. Her foreleg wheeled a little, as though she were chased by some horrible dream. The sleep seemed troubled, but considering how long she’d probably been awake, I decided to let her rest. That and a physical altercation in the car didn’t sound like a fun way to spend the ride.

“For now, the Vivarium,” I directed and she pulled down a side-street, turning us in the direction of the Bay of Unity. “Once we get there, we’ll either have to get somepony to hit her with a sleep spell or maybe that zebra neck trick while we handle our other errand.”

“Why? Where are you planning on going?” Taxi asked, quizzically.

“The Castle. I may not like it, but Jade needs to be handled before she does something rash, like put out an APB on me. After that, we’ll see if we can regroup and call in some favors. I want to be there when Swift wakes up.”

“Why do I get the feeling I just cashed my last police paycheck?”

“Drive.”

I pulled my hat down, burying my nose in its lining as I tried to cover the stink rolling off my partner’s body. It was going to be a long day.

****

Some ponies have the bus as their time to process the events in their lives. Some have just after dinner, laying in bed. I’ve got the cab.

I tried. I really did. Each time I thought I’d found a good place to start, it slipped between my hooves and I was left spinning. So many of the events of the last three days... except it hadn’t been three days, had it? It’d been a month.

Twenty eight days since I first saw poor Ruby’s corpse in that alleyway.

Losing that amount of time, one expects their city to have changed significantly. I put my hooves on the windowsill and stared out at the day. It was grey, like many other days in Detrot, and yet I felt a renewed sense of purpose that’d been missing for years. I still didn’t know what that purpose was, but it was gradually growing in my gut.

If destiny ever really touches us, mine was smacking me about the ears.

The task before me was as straightforward as any I’d ever been given; solve the deaths of three ponies, including my own. Why did that have to be so complicated?

Juniper often told me that my best option, given a moment of uncertainty, was just to take the next step. As was most frequently the case, he was right. I didn’t have to like it.

****

Taxi didn’t even bother with the front entrance. She just waved to Minox as we passed the Vivarium’s columned facade. It was a quiet day at the sex club and the minotaur pointed her around the side of the building.

Nopony was there to meet us as we pulled up in front of the disguised doorway and Taxi put on the parking brake.

“Now what?” she asked, more to herself than to me. I didn’t answer, but instead stepped out of the back seat, looking both ways. The back of the Vivarium backed right up to the Bay and the waters lapped against the concrete shore with a calming regularity.

I didn’t even see him coming.

If Taxi’s greeting was enthusiastic, Scarlet’s was downright unsafe. He crashed into my side like an affectionate bowling ball, smashing me against the car. His legs went around my middle and he hugged me so tightly my eyes felt fit to pop out of their sockets.

“Deeeteeeectttiiiiive!” he cried into my mane. Struggling to breathe, I prized one hoof underneath his knee and, as gently as I could, pulled him off.

“Scarlet! Get ahold of yourself, stallion!” I coughed.

“You were dead!” He sobbed, putting his forehooves on my chest and turning my face back and forth to make sure all the pieces were still there.

“Yes, and now I’m not.” I set him back a few inches and fixed my coat. “And if you don’t mind, let’s skip that entire line of conversation. I’ve had that talk with three people today already and it’s old. Let it just be said, I’m fine.”

Taxi had on one of her smug smiles, specifically the kind she usually reserves for when I’m embarassed or in pain caused largely by what few social reservations I have left. I rolled my eyes and patted Scarlet on the cheek, then turned back to the car.

“Scarlet, I want you to go get After Glow and the medical staff. We’re going to need them,” I told him.

“Whatever for? Are you hurt?" His already vaguely feminine voice climbed an octave or two. "You just said you were okay!”

“I’m fine, but we found Swift.”

“Oh my...”

****

After that, things happened quickly. Scarlet called After Glow, who practically tore the secret door off its hinges charging out into the back lot. For a pony that old, she sure could move. She took a few heavy breaths leaning against the back of the Night Trotter, then pushed herself upright.

“W’ere is she? Where’s mah granddaughter?!” she barked, covering her worry with anger.

I nodded at the car and she jerked open the back with her horn. The metal shrieked and Taxi winced, but getting between After Glow and Swift would have been closely akin to getting between a mother bear and its cub, if the mother bear was endowed with the power to fling a pony into the upper atmosphere. It was worth having to straighten the door hinge.

“Awww, little bird... what’ve ye got yerself up to now...” she murmured, doing a quick inspection of my partner. Pulling back, she raised her eyes over the car’s roof. “Where’d ye find ‘er? Ah been lookin’ fer three weeks!”

I shook my head and answered, “She was staying with a friend of ours. She... honestly, I don’t know what happened. Found her in Sky Town. Could you get medical already?”

“Yer damn right, get medical, ya idjit! Why’d ye bring her here?!” the furious unicorn demanded. “Why didn’tcha take’er to a damn hospital afor’ ya called us?!”

“I got between her and her salad and she went for my throat,” I recalled, shoving my coat across my chest protectively. “You want her in a psych ward wearing a straitjacket, go right ahead and take her to the emergency room. I can’t think of anyplace that has guards paid to handle a rampaging pegasus trained in police and P.A.C.T. combat tactics. I’m just lucky she wasn’t strapped when I jostled her lettuce or I think I’d have a fresh hole.”

Glow listened to my explanation, the grimace on her face deepening the already canyon-like lines. With incredible tenderness, she wrapped Swift in a glow of magic, lifting her out of the car and headed for the hidden door. “Give us an hour. We gots to look’er over.”

“I’ve got to check in with the department. Keep her sedated. I want to be here when she wakes up,” I ordered. The matronly unicorn glanced over her shoulder, but nodded.

“Don’t take too long, ya hear?” Glow growled. “Ah ain’t a patient sort and if Ah wasn’t in a hurry, Ah’d wring some proper answers out of ye. Ye’ve got two hours ‘afor Ah send Zeta ta come get ye, an Ah don’t think ye wanna be dragged out yer department roped to an annoyed zebra.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “Could you have an extension cord set up for me when I get back? I need a charge.” I tugged my chest flap open, showing her the blinking light.

She flicked her eyes at the plug. “Anythin’ else? Cookies? Spot of tea?”

“Some bagels would be great. Oh, and tell the dragon when you see him... I’m ready to play.”

Act 2, Chapter 3: Can You Say 'Aaaah?'

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 3: Can You Say 'Aaaah?'

For a society that very often goes around completely naked, Equestria has a thriving fashion and body decoration industry. Expensive dresses. Mane dyes. Decorative horseshoes. Some have even been known to go about installing gemstones in various parts of their anatomies. But there are already plenty of books on fashion; more sociologically interesting is the topic of magical decoration.

On the milder end of magical decorations is illusions; Recently, it had been very much in vogue amongst younger demographics to have long-duration glamors that gave them the appearance of changeling wings, hooves, or horns. And while actual age alteration spells are out of reach of all but the most powerful mages, using illusions to make somepony appear younger is much easier, and quite popular, especially amongst middle-aged and older mares.

At the extreme end, the very fringe, there are those willing to risk having themselves altered permanently with magic. Some have sought draconic eyes or claws, or to emulate the bat wings of Luna's personal guards. Some have attempted to change themselves across pony types, although such magic grants the appearance, but not the function: For example, an earth pony or unicorn with permanent transformed pegasus wings will not be able to fly without an accompanying flight spell, because pegasus flight is more than a matter of simple aerodynamics, a fact too often learned via brief and/or painful experience.

On the practice of cosmetic transformative magics, one Mr. F. Pants, a wise pony and social scholar, once eloquently stated: “What are you? Stupid?”

Taking on transformative magics is allowing magic to work on your very being, form and identity, and even Equestria's very best mages have been known to miscast complicated spells. Magic is unpredictable, often mercurial, and taking on transformations for purposes of appearance seems tantamount to taking on the risks of open-heart surgery for a permanent hooficure.

Additionally, one had best be sure one really wanted those minotaur horns, because deliberate transformation magics, such as these, are very hard to reverse.

--The Scholar

I’d walked down that cobbled lane in front of the Castle more times than I can count.

Most often, I’d been the righteous defender of the law, hauling in a fresh-caught suspect, head hung low, tail between legs. A few times, I’d been the one on the business end of the hoofcuffs, usually either when Jade wanted to make a point or when I’d been drinking. Or both.

The multi-century old stones had been worn smooth, replaced, and worn down again. Rogue dragons had scoured them with flame, and the hooves of many thousands of ponies still trod that path up to fortifications that once stood as the sole bastion against a deadly and dangerous wilderness. Princesses held counsel and warriors fought on those towers.

Years after all those great souls had bravely faced their fates, one Police Detective marched under the portcullis, head held high, ready to face perhaps the scariest monster to ever terrorize that ancient fortress.

And he was grinning.

****

Taxi was, maybe wisely, sitting out my confrontation with Jade in the car. She was halfway into one of her meditative trances and had four sticks of incense sending streamers of smoke from the cracked windows. I paused under the gate to look back at her, watching her controlled breathing. Wisps of smoke curled around her lemon colored ears.

Fighting my own desire to be anywhere but there, I turned away and walked towards the closed wooden doors of the Castle. My heart had finally decided that it was time to pound. Some primal fear built deep into the hearts of children and experienced police ponies alike was causing my adrenaline to surge, but even that wasn’t enough to dampen my smile.

Reaching the doors, I put both hooves on them and pushed them wide. Wind from the change in air-pressure blew my mane back from my face, almost taking my hat off as I strode into the office. The File Cloud was spinning calmly around the ceiling and ponies ran back and forth down the aisles of cubicles as on any other day. Telly sat behind her console, six headsets wrapped around her neck and another around her tail, her aqua face tense with concentration. Dials flew and files dropped from the sky to their various destinations.

As I stopped in the entrance, Telly looked up, and the Cloud let out a noise like a record needle digging into vinyl. Every eye in the building rose and hunted around for the cause before settling on me. Somepony dropped a glass and another spilled coffee on their hooves, squeaking and dancing, but aside that, there was silence.

“Morning!” I shouted, loud enough to be heard from the back aisles. “I’m just here to use the restroom, then I’ll be heading back to the cemetery! By the way, Sergeant Cobalt won the pool!”

The crowd just stared, too agog to do more than shuffle uncomfortably in their spilt paperwork. I let the silence linger as long as it could, then swept off my hat and stepped out of the door, letting it swing shut behind me. Immediate whispers broke out on all sides as everypony found some piece of gossip regarding my absence that desperately needed telling to their closest neighbor. A few called out questions; ‘Where’ve you been?’ ‘Did the Chief kill you?’ ‘Are you here to eat our brains?’

It was nice to be home.

Ignoring the shouted inquiries, I sidled over to Telly’s control console, leaned across, and gently shut the operator’s thin mouth with one toe-tip. Somepony was shouting into her headset from somewhere down the line; she pressed the mute button, leaving them to scream impotently into thin air.

“H-Hardy?” she stammered, pulling the set off her tail and dropping it on the console before stepping around the side to give me a closer inspection. “I... I mean... damn it all.” A tear gathered up in the corner of her eye, but she swiped it away before it could fall. “I know we talked on the phone, but... I’d half convinced myself I somehow mixed up The Chief’s medication with my stash of bonbons.”

“Y’know, for all you lot have been mourning, did anypony look for me?” I asked.

“We got the report of you walking into the Monte Cheval and everypony just... sort of...”

“Assumed I got my flank turned into puree and fed to the fishies?” I quirked one eyebrow at her.

“It was a pretty good assumption, you selfish bastard! Why didn’t you call ahead? What happened to you?” She gave me a light push with one hoof to emphasize the question.

“I’m sorry, ask me that again? Why didn’t I call Iris Jade to tell her I’m going to be in the Castle in a half hour?”

Telly scratched her jawline. “I see your point. You want me to call up now?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. If she has some lethal trap on the doors, I’d prefer she didn’t have time to arm it.”

“Suit yourself.” The radio pony shrugged and waved me towards the staircase up to Jade’s office. “You haven’t been officially declared dead yet. Just ‘missing.’ Once it’s official, I’ll get some real nice flowers to put on your grave. I might even wear a dress.”

“Awww, that’s real sweet, Telly.” I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and she pushed me away, turning red in the face.

“That’s sexual harassment, yahknow.”

“Go ahead and report me.” I threw her a wink, then started towards the upper floors. I caught her lightly touching the spot I’d pecked her and she stomped her hoof, running back to her console and ducking her head under the edge of the control panel.

I could still feel the attentive eye-tracks of many ponies darting up and down the back of my neck, but if Jade knew I was in the building, most of the glass in her office window would already have needed replacing. It didn’t pay to be the bearer of such news, if only because you could easily become collateral damage.

****

I paused again in the carpeted hall outside of her office, flanked on either side by the suits of empty armor; There, I put my head between my foreknees and downed some lovely deep breaths, trying to gather my resolve. Just because you’re about to do something insane doesn’t mean you are insane; therefore, doing it does not magically shut off the parts of your mind that are screaming ‘Don’t do this stupid, stupid thing.’

I checked my battery. It was still blinking. I had at least some power left. With luck, I wouldn’t pitch over dead on the carpet or have to beg for the use of Jade’s lamp socket. That would probably ruin my big moment.

In the name of theatrics, I reared onto my back legs, placed both front hooves on the double doors, and slammed them open with all my strength. As if coordinating with the spectacle, my coat billowed out behind me as the tall portals swung to the walls with a reverberating bang that made my ears ring. Perfect.

Chief Iris Jade, the terror of the Castle, Chief of Police for the most dangerous city in Equestria, sat hunched over her desk with a fountain pen clutched in her pea-green telekinetic field. Her drawn features, creased with the weight of a city’s safety and heavy doses of semi-legal psychoactives, stayed on the paper in front of her despite the clamorous noise. She seemed somehow small, sitting behind that huge wooden edifice, in the largely empty office. I knew it was a carefully constructed lie, built to fool anypony who might think her weak into overstepping their bounds; she took a perverse glee in proving otherwise.

The candy bowl on her desk had been refilled; an empty box labeled ‘Starlight Industries’ sat in her otherwise empty garbage can.

I hopped up onto one of the chairs in front of her immense oaken desk, rolled onto my back, and threw my legs over the sides. It wasn’t comfortable, but then, it wasn’t supposed to be. I waited, picking my teeth with the edge of one horse-shoe, for the Chief to acknowledge me.

Ours was a battle of wills on her home turf. She might not have expected me, but that didn’t mean she had to act like she was surprised. Jade didn’t get to be Chief of Police by being easy to ruffle.

After a long moment, she signed her name to the sheet of paper and set her pen aside. Blowing a strand of her mane out of her face, she raised her dominating gaze, examining me like an enthusiastic bug collector who’s found themselves a prize beetle and can’t decide precisely how they want to skewer it. Her pupils were enormous, though her expression remained entirely emotionless, devoid of even the most basic signals one might use to work out her mood. Whatever she was on, it must have been amazing stuff.

“Detective,” she said, at last.

“Chief,” I answered, in exactly the same tone of voice.

“I take it, from your presence, you have come to tell me precisely where you’ve been for the last month?” she asked in a clipped monotone.

I fiddled my hoof around her candy-bowl, drawing a smiley face in the pills. Adding some dimples, I sat back to examine my artwork.

“Ehhh... not really. Why? Was I supposed to?”

If I live a thousand years, I doubt I’ll ever see a more satisfying look of surprise than the one on Jade’s face at that instant. It might have been my imagination, but the lights seemed to dim and the shadows to stretched out, as The Chief rose from her seat and planted her hooves on her desk.

“Excuse me, Detective?!” she snarled, her horn sparking menacingly.

“I said, ‘Not really,’ Chief.” I answered, casually. “The dead girl is still dead, although I’m not anymore, thank goodness. Did find out her name, before I died. Ruby Blue. Pretty little thing. Mob boss is dead. Oh, but you wouldn’t know about him. Never mind.” Picking up one of the pills from her candy stash, I rolled it around on my hoof.

Jade’s razor thin right eyebrow tried to climb onto her scalp. “Hardy, I think it best you explain yourself very quickly.”

“I died. Mob boss died. Girl in the alley was a hooker. Nice kid, apparently. Don’t know her story yet, but I’ll figure it out, probably around the time I figure out who shot me.” I turned the pill and made to put it in my mouth, then thought better of it. “I probably shouldn’t have one of those. The ghost in my chest might not like it.”

There are probably only a few emotions I’ve ever seen on Chief Jade. Anger is a big one. She has lots of flavors of that, but then, her job is not one that breeds calm contemplation. Amusement and sometimes generalized menacing are two others she’ll display, if they’ll give her an edge in a confrontation.

Raw, brow-twisting confusion is not one she shows all that often.

She narrowed her eyes to slits and asked, “Hardy, are you drunk right now?”

“Haven’t touched a drop since I woke up.” I said, honestly. “By the way, I found Swift after I got out of the cooler. She was eating chicken salads and writing depressing poetry. She threw a griffin off a building.”

Jade dropped her bony flank into her chair, which she scooted under the desk, then crossed her forelegs and gave me a Look.

“What... really happened, Hardy?” she murmured, all the fury and pomp gone from her voice, replaced with curiosity. “You walked into a death trap, then you show up here after a month sounding like you’ve been on a bender the whole time...”

I shrugged and bent my neck to look across at her. “If you want a full debrief, you’ll have to get me a big ream of paper. It’ll all be lies and maybe not as much fun to read as the kid’s, but I promise I’ll maybe think about filling out a report. Until then, as a matter of courtesy, I figured I should tell you what I’m going to be doing.”

“What you’re going to be doing?!” Her anger rose again, only to be quickly tamped down when she saw I’d said that specifically to get her riled. “What you’re going to be doing is going home until I figure out what to do with you! You walked into a public building, without a warrant, orders, or backup, with guns drawn!” She tore her top drawer open and slapped a newspaper on the desk. It had a security camera picture of Taxi, Swift, and I inside the Monte Cheval’s lobby. “You have any clue how much flak you brought us?!”

“Can’t.” I checked my hooftip, then rubbed it on my coat.

“Can’t... what?” she growled.

“Can’t go home. They burned my apartment to the ground. Don’t know who ‘they’ are, but I’ll figure it out.”

“Detective, I’m going to chalk this little interview up to some form of temporary mental illness.” Jade seethed, speaking through gritted teeth. “You’ll be speaking to the department psyc-”

“No.”

Jade stopped mid-sentence, as though nopony had ever interrupted her before. Impudence was one thing. Open defiance was something else.

“Detective-”

“Now you bring it up?” I broke in, before she could get up a good head of steam. ”Swift is a section eight, too. You might want to get on that paper-work. Doubt you’ll want her tactical vest back, though. It’s had vomit and a few different kinds of blood on it.”

Her horn glowed, then her entire desk did, before it was slammed to one side of the room with a sound not unlike a badger being force-fed a bucket of nails. Jade strode forward through the now clear path to thump a hoof on my chest. “Screw the psychologist, you are going in a holding cell!”

I stood, kicking the chair sideways so it landed with a loud thump, out of the way, so I had a clear path of retreat. “If you think you can put me there, good luck. I showed up here as a courtesy, and to let you know what I’m going to be doing. I will be investigating my death and Miss Ruby Blue’s. When, and if, I survive long enough to get answers then I’ll come and write you the longest, most interesting report you’ve read in years. Then you can go all carrot peeler-y on me.”

I thought, briefly, she might actually explode. Her pupils were now two different sizes. I think she was just uncertain enough as to whether I was deranged enough to actually attempt to shoot her that she didn’t immediately try to break all of my bones.

“You’re fired,” she said, carefully and without much conviction, gauging my reaction.

I reached into my pocket, fished out my badge, and tossed the loop of chain around her horn, leaving it to dangle in her face.

“Was there anything else?”

Again, that gorgeous surprise. She was actually speechless, as the metal shield rocked past her face like a clock pendulum, slicing across priceless moments in time. I wish I’d had a camera. Just one snapshot of Jade looking genuinely unsettled would have made my whole year.

Taking that silence as a ‘no,’ I swung around and strode out of her office, whistling a joyful tune. I grabbed the rope beside the door in my teeth and swung the portal closed behind me, leaving the most stunned Police Chief in Detrot’s history with my badge resting on her nose.

I took a few seconds to savor my victory.

Then, like anypony with a survival instinct, I broke into a full gallop towards the stairs, running for the back of the building and the Night Trotter parked beside the maintenance exit.

****

Tearing open the cab's rear door, I threw myself in, yanking it shut. Taxi spun up the rear wheels so hard a cloud of smoke spat against the side of the Castle, peeling out of there and around the closest corner at speeds that were at best illegal, and at worst impossible. I imagined I could already hear sirens in close pursuit, but that was nothing unusual around the department and, in all likelihood, Jade was still sitting in her office processing what'd just happened. At least, I hoped that was what she was doing.

"You wanna give me the short version of what you just did in there?" Taxi asked, gripping the wheel tightly in both hooves. "When you came sprinting out of that door I half expected gunshots."

I laid my head in the window-sill, letting wind rustle my face-fur. "She fired me."

"Well, duh...I didn't think for a second you'd let her pull you from this case, and since you, y’know, died, I doubt she'd let you investigate your own murder. You know what I’m asking! What happened?"

I gave her a brief summary, right up to my glorious escape. Throughout, I noticed us slowly speeding up.

“You... didn’t...” she murmured.

“I did.”

“I... geesh. I get... I mean, I get why you did it. No sense dragging the DPD through the mud with you. I’ve seen that look in your eye since you showed up at the High Seas. The one that says ‘I’m about to throw myself down a manticore’s throat and hope it chokes’.”

“If Cosmo has contacts in Detrot Police Department, you know whoever killed me does.” I explained. “Our best bet is to go off the grid until we have some idea which direction the next attack is coming from.”

My driver shuffled her hooves up and down the sides of the wheel, as though she couldn’t quite get comfortable, looking nervously out both windows. “You’re sure there’s going to be a ‘next attack’?”

“I think it’s best to assume there probably will be.”

She exhaled, re-adjusting her mirror so she could look me in the face. ”It does mean we’re both now as unemployed as it’s equinely possible to get. We have nowhere to stay, no money, and half a tank of fuel. Any thoughts on those issues, since you seem dead set on adding problems to the already huge pile?”

“A few. First, I want to check in on Swift.”

Taxi rested her forehead on the steering wheel for a minute, then revved up the motor and swept us off towards the Vivarium. Her lips were moving in silent prayer the whole way.

****

The Vivarium was as quiet as I’d seen it. Minox was still on the front gate, but he’d found himself a stool to sit on and was just letting through a small group of tourists who were the only bunch in line. As we parked, the minotaur stepped off the curb and ran to meet us, a charging freight-train of beef. He skidded to a stop and cordially opened Taxi’s door, holding out one of his ham-sized fists so she could step out from behind the wheel.

“Good evenink’ miz Taxi. It iz gut to see joo again,” he lowed as my driver stepped into his arms, putting her hooves up on his huge chest.

“Good to see you too, Minox.” She gave him a little kiss on the chin, which was the closest spot she could reach considering his height. His ears flushed with pleasure.

Giving me a subtle bow, Minox waved us towards the smaller employee entrance beside the main door. “Come, Detective. Miz Stella iz vaiting for joo.”

“Take me to Swift, first. Then we’ll see to Stella,” I directed him.

“No need, Detective. Miz Stella and Miz Swift are in ze same place.” He held open the door and we slipped into the club.

****

Via another discretely placed service door, we came around to the secret elevator at the back of the building. Minox hauled on the rope, then lowered us hand-over-hand into the darkness. It was a jerkier and much slower trip than the first time down, but he managed it with a minimum of fuss until, after much huffing and puffing, the wooden elevator rattled and clanked its way into the cavern complex underneath the Vivarium.

“Shouldn’t you be upstairs guarding the door?” I asked him.

“I am on ze, how joo say, ‘break.’ Ze Stilettos take over. I take joo to Miz’ Stella.” he rumbled, then pulled a flashlight from the back pocket of his tuxedo and fanned the light across the cavern tunnels. The humid air cloyed my lungs, and in the distance, water dripped from stalactites onto still pools. We followed the beefcake, me with my eyes ahead, and Taxi with hers on Minox’s rear end.

It was comforting, in some way, to know that my month in the cooler hadn’t changed my driver terribly much, aside the blue highlights that still crept through when the light hit her mane just right.

After a short trot, we came to the blank wall and Minox tapped out a series of knocks on the stone with his knuckles. There was a wait of several seconds, then the heavy stone began to shimmer with pearlescent light. It slid easily out of the way, grinding into the slot in the wall.

Beyond, up on the catwalk set amongst all of Stella’s incredible museum pieces, there was a miniature field triage. Five or six ponies moved around a small hospital bed surrounded by a white plastic sheet, some taking readings and writing in clipboards, others conversing with one another. Machines beeped and booped, taking readings on the patient who reclined in the bed. Swift was still down, thank the heavens. She lay amongst all those machines with electrodes on her forehead and an IV drip in her leg. After Glow lay on a pillow beside the bed, her old face pinched with worry as she watched over her sleeping granddaughter.

I looked past my partner’s sleeping body to Stella, who hovered over the whole operation. He’d hauled his vast purple body entirely out of the water and lay on a macroeconomy-sized chaise lounge with a pair of gigantic reading glasses perched on his nose, clutching a pony-sized book in two claws. For once, he seemed to be only wearing a token dash of lipstick and a bit of mascara; It was strangely heartening to know that there were times even Stella chose not to prioritize appearances.

As the weighty door opened, he glanced up, setting his novel to one side. He was the only one to even acknowledge we’d come in. The doctors and nurses remained where they were.

Minox stood aside, waiting for Taxi and I to move through before stepping back into the tunnel. The door glowed again, slamming back into place.

“Detective! Welcome back!” Stella called out, rolling off of his throne into the deep pool with a splash that sent ripples all the way across the underground lake to lap against the thin shore. That was when everypony else stopped what they were doing and looked up at us.

After Glow rose shakily to her hooves, her knees cracking and popping, as the sea serpent flowed across the water to the edge of the catwalk nearest us, gripping it in both claws.

“Stella,” I acknowledged, stepping up on the catwalk and moving over to the bed. The doctors made room for me to stand beside Swift. She looked pale, which made her seem almost pink, but anypony laying in a hospital bed looks sickly. It’s some trick of the environment. “How is the kid? She was in rough shape when I found her.”

His honey-colored eyes flicked towards the bed and its occupant, then to somepony standing behind the curtain. “Doctor Pickle!”

My ears perked and I grabbed the curtain in my teeth, tearing it back from a crouching dom who was doing his best to look like part of the catwalk.

“You!” I blurted, grabbing the lime colored sadist by the front of his labcoat and yanking him to his hooves, holding him an inch from my face. “Stella, do not tell me you’ve had this scumbag working on my partner!”

“Get off me, you ridiculous pony!” he cried, pushing ineffectually at my hooves. His horn started to glow; I gave it a good smack with my hooftip and he winced, the shine dying. Pulling him around, I shoved the smaller pony up against the railing.

“Use heart-exploding magics on somepony, will you?! You better not have laid that on my partner!” I shouted, shaking him.

“Take this maniac off me!” He struggled, trying to shove me away.

A soft glittering field suffused my hooves, pulling them from around Pickle’s neck. He stumbled back against the catwalk’s railing, rubbing his throat with one hoof. The other doctors hadn’t made any move to stop me and seemed to be exchanging knowing looks. It was After Glow’s horn shining, pulling me away from the stallion.

Stella had an amused smile on his thick lips. “Sweet detective, Doctor Pickle may have... unconventional methods, but he is more knowledgeable about equine anatomy than any other pony in my employ.”

I glowered at the doctor and he swallowed visibly, adjusting his white coat.

“Awww, knock it off,” After Glow grunted. “Pickle’s a shit, but he’s our shit, so ye don’t git ta shoot’em. Besides, he knows ponies’ insides an’ mah little bird needs... well, she needs somethin’.” Grabbing Pickle in her telekinetic field, she upended him by his tail, dragging him around to hang in front of her. “Now, ye wanna tell us what’s wrong with mah granddaughter?”

Pickle crossed his forelegs and stuck out his lower lip, which was funny to see on a pony hanging upside down. “I will not, especially if I’m going to be treated like a sack of grain!”

“Unless ye wanna be treated like a cent-ri-fuge, ye’ll speak and speak quick!” After Glow gave his tail a dangerous twist that sent him spinning in a slow circle.

Pickle’s petulant composure broke down immediately and he began to wave his hooves at the ground, trying to get down. “Sweet Sun, no!” he gasped, trying to grab the nearest object, which happened to be the railing edging the catwalk.

“Miss Glow,” Stella admonished, clucking his forked tongue, “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

Glow gave him a sour look, but set Pickle back on the catwalk. He stood, brushing himself off, quickly recovering his bluster as he straightened his greased mane. “That’s better... harumph!”

“Now then, Mister Pickle. Would you be so kind as to give us your diagnosis of my god-child’s condition for the benefit of the lovely Detective?” Stella asked, politely.

The other medical players made room for Pickle as he strutted around the table like a peacock, snatching a clipboard off the end of the bed. “Where would you like me to begin? She’s dehydrated, malnourished, and concussed to start. If I’m going by the sores and state of her wings, she hasn’t bathed or preened in at least ten days.”

I felt a prickle of guilt.

She’d trusted me.

She walked into Cosmo’s office, trusting me to keep her safe and my arrogance should have, by all rights, put both of us in the ground for good. I’d been given a second chance, but not soon enough to save her from total collapse.

Taxi had dragged me out of my funk when my partner was killed, mostly with lots of coffee and threats of violence if I touched the bottle until my head was on straight. Swift should have had her family. Why she’d chosen to run and hide was something I intended to ask the second she was up.

“You still have that spell for looking inside a pony?” I asked.

“My body-scan spell?” Pickle inquired, stroking his horn lightly with one hoof. “That was what we were planning on doing next. It seems she’s recently either been contaminated with magic or somepony has cast some very elaborate spells on or around her. My colleagues and I were just discussing whether or not it was a good idea when you barged in.”

Ignoring the jab, Taxi bit her lower lip and asked, “Well, we were in a school about a month ago with high levels of magical contamination. Could that have been it?”

Pickle slipped a vinyl flogger out of the inside pocket of his coat and began spinning it with his magic. It looked like a nervous habit, twirling his S&M toy as a unicorn accountant might twirl a pen. “While I would love to pin that on you two being nitwits and failing to watch where you walk, no... these magics are significantly older than a month.”

“How much older?” I asked, tugging off my hat and laying it at the foot of the bed.

“Who can say?” The dom swiped his flogger across one shoulder, leaving it hanging there. “You want to come up with a decent way of measuring magical decay over about six months, the Academy would love to talk to you.”

“Alright, fair enough. Gimme worst case scenario if we cast the body-scan and it goes wrong,” I said.

“Worst case?” Pickle shrugged. “She ends up not needing a mane-cut this year and she’ll have to learn to scratch her ass without the use of her wings because all of her fur and feathers will have fallen out. They’ll grow back, but it’ll be pretty embarrassing.”

I sat and held out my hoof to After Glow. “Miss Glow, she’s your granddaughter. I don’t know what all might be wrong with her or where she’s been this last month. I’ll say this, though. She attacked me in that coffee bar and tried to take a chunk out of my throat with her teeth.”

The elderly mare considered her options, then flapped one wrinkled ear against her head. “Can’t see as it’s gonna make things much worse iffen’ ah end up havin’ to knit her some sweaters. Go on an’ do it.”

Without another word, Pickle closed his eyes and raised his horn. The other doctors backed up a few meters, not wishing to interfere with the delicate spellwork. I shoved my hooves into my pockets, wishing I’d thought to bring a snack.

A thin beam of light projected from the insufferable stallion’s forehead, spreading out into a flat, glowing field that intersected Swift’s body, moving from her head down to her ankles, then back again.

“...That can’t be...right...” Pickle murmured, his magic playing back and forth over her head a few times, then across her abdomen centering just below her navel, then back at her face. With a jerk, the spell faded and the good doctor squeaked loudly, tumbling back from the bed.

“What? What is it?!” Taxi yelped.

Pickle’s eyes were round with fear as he stumbled further away and slumped onto his backside, staring at my prone partner’s face. “H-he-her...”

“Her what, boy? Spit it out!” After Glow barked, dragging him back over. The Chief Stilletto was not a pony one kept waiting, if mostly because she tended to puncture things to pass the time.

“Her teeth! H-her teeth!” he managed, shakily before his eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped onto his back, all four legs in the air.

“Her teeth?” I gave the stallion a light shake, but he was unresponsive. “Come on, dammit, what’s with her teeth?

The animal part of my brain became aware of lots of people watching me. There was a certain expectancy in all of that attention. Again, I’d been volunteered for the unpleasant duty.

I blew a frustrated breath through my nose and picked up a pencil. “You better make for damn sure she’s still unconscious...” I growled at After Glow.

“Boy, if she ain’t out after the spells ah laid, ain’t nothin’ in this world gonna keep her from bein’ lively,” she replied, her horn giving off a gentle flash.

With my pencil, I gently pried open my partner’s lips. One of the nurses pulled a penlight out and shined it into Swift’s mouth.

If she’d had a hat full of rabbits in there, I think I’d have been less surprised. As it was, I had to restrain myself from a good’ol filly-ish shriek at what I saw. The nurse wasn’t quite so gritty. She let out a frightened whinny and dropped the lamp, which rolled underneath the bed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t need it to see what’d sent Pickle into a paroxysm of terror.

Something was very wrong with my partner’s dentistry. Every tooth aside the front few seemed to have grown a half inch and sharpened to a razor sharp point, curving slightly inward and interlocking with one another tightly. Two long, nasty canines, obviously for ripping meat, protruded from her upper gums. I nudged them lightly, but they seemed to be attached, and solidly so.

Those teeth had no business being in a pony’s head. If she’d caught me with that bite in the Plot Hole, she might have torn my throat out.

I wiped my pencil thoroughly on the bed spread, mostly using the action as an excuse to gather my thoughts. In general, I’ve found that if somepony in the room doesn’t look scared when something nasty happens that everyone else will listen to them, no matter what silly thing they may have to say.

“Well, Detective?” Stella inquired.

I shook my head. “I’m going to take a guess and say ensorcellment, unless she’s been seeing a dentist with an ugly sense of humor this last month. She’s got the teeth of... I don’t even know. I don’t know of anything with teeth like that. Some sort of predator.”

“What? Yer... lemme see that!” Glow snatched the pencil from me and pushed it into my partner’s mouth, taking in the bizarre sight. Swinging around she yanked Pickle up into the air. A rush of wind caught him across the cheek, rocking his head on his shoulders. “Wake up!” She shouted, then delivered another magical slap. He came out of his swoon howling.

“Putmedownputmedown!”

After Glow obliged, dumping him on his face. Pickle put his paw on his chest, forcing his breathing to even out. “Ye faint again, next time yer gonna wake up takin’ a swim! Now, ye wanna tell us what in the whole wide world mighta caused mah granddaughter... what mighta caused that?”

The medical-dom settled his hooves under himself, trying to put himself back together. I think I might have been more shaken if my month - come to think of it, my last 24 hours - hadn’t already been the weirdest of my life, but this was just frosting on a very odd cake.

“I-I’ve no idea,” he sputtered. “A spell. Definitely a spell. A very, very complicated spell. It’s still working, too! Her stomach is... it’s not even a pony stomach anymore. More like a bear’s. There’s something... something’s in her brain, too! It’s changing things!”

I tried to remain calm, but my shoulders were feeling like corded steel. Thinking under pressure is something I’m good at, but I couldn’t keep the worry from my words. “You say it’s a spell. Nothing accidental?”

“Yes, idiot!” Pickle snapped, turning to face the lake as he tried to force himself not to hyperventilate. “Somepony cast that! It’s too complex for random magical mutation!”

“No way to find out who, then?”

“I don’t know how.” He chewed at his lip, swinging his flogger around his shoulders.

I turned to After Glow, who was gritting her teeth so tightly her jaw popped. I tried to force myself to sound like I knew what I was doing. “You have ponies who can do anti-magic, right?”

Glow nodded. “Ah got ponies can break enchantments, sure. Ain’t nothin’ will fix what already happened. Different transformation magics don’t play nice together.”

Stella swung his bulk down over the bed, lightly stroking Swift’s mane with one claw. “My dear little bird... I am so sorry. I should have watched you more closely.”

“It wasn’t your responsibility to watch her.” I sighed, feeling my stomach tighten with the cruel admission. “It was mine. I’m her partner.”

The dragon’s flicked his tongue between his teeth, running it down to his chin as though tasting the air. Come to think of it, he might have been doing just that.

“I... see, Detective,” he murmured, after some seconds’ pause. “You weren’t exaggerating when you said you were ready to play. Well then, if I may, what will be your first move?”

It was a valid question. My itinerary was already packed and I hadn't even had breakfast yet.

The path hadn't changed and I knew, in my freshly magicked ticker, that I needed Swift. She might have been greener than grass and crazier than a bucket of monkeys on Beam, but she was a fantastic shot and loyal to a fault. The pony I’d seen in the Plot Hole wasn’t my partner. That was a broken shell.

I hoped whatever magic she was under was responsible for that. If it wasn’t, our situation might be a whole lot worse. Still, there was only one good option.

No rest for the unemployed, homeless, and hunted.

Hooking the edge of a horseshoe in Pickle’s coat, I shoved him over to the bedside. "Fix my partner. While you’re at it, try to figure out what was done to her and the purpose of this spell. If I’m going to hunt down those responsible, I need intel.”

The dragon settled back beneath the waters, sinking up to his neck so he could sit at a level height with the end of the catwalk. “I’ll see it done. Anti-magic is relatively simple and, regardless of complexity, it should not take long to arrest the progress of this enchantment once we have enough horns to apply to it. If it hasn’t damaged her up to this point, we must hope its removal won’t either.”

“Good. I’ve got to make some calls. There’s a certain ‘bug’ who might have some information about what put Swift in this state and I want to pick its brains.”

Stella tapped the railing on the catwalk. “May I ask if you’re referring to the ‘representative’ of the Ladybug collective? If you are, I think you will find it upstairs.”

There was no hiding my surprise. “Queenie is here?!”

“I believe so, yes,” Stella replied, teasing his throat fin with one painted talon. “That delightful creature came in some days ago asking when your corpse was going to be up and about. Strange soul, but I think harmless. I made use of its talents while we were renovating our security measures. If only all my employees would work for access to my collection of soap opera reruns,” the sea serpent said with a wistful smile, losing himself in pleasant thoughts for a second. “Either way, the creature seemed certain that your death was impermanent. I, myself, was less optimistic, but I’m always glad to be proven wrong. It happens so rarely these days.”

“You thought I was a pawn,” I reminded him.

“Yes. You see? Glad to be proven wrong.”

I gestured for Taxi to follow me and she fell in behind as I started for the hidden tunnel.

“Get this bunch to work and have Scarlet or Minox come find me when the situation changes. My batteries are running low.”

“Of course, my kissable colt. I believe you can use the power systems in the DJ booth. I’ll have your bagels sent up,” Stella replied in a sickly-sweet way that reminded me of an especially aggressive and cheek-pinching aunt on my mother’s side. “If it is here today, you’ll find your Ladybug with Gyro Technic. They both have a... fondness... for Neightoven.”

****

Minox let us into the club just as the early afternoon regulars were coming in off first shift, slapping hooves and backsides to some harmonic garbage hot off the presses and about twenty years too young for me to consider it worth listening to. The lights were up bright enough so I wasn’t risking stumbling over or into anypony and bless the stars, they’d cranked the bass down to a tolerable level. It was a healthy herd for a time of day most bars and restaurants are dead quiet. Some were making straight for the back rooms to have their lunch-time bump and grind while others appeared to be just settling in for a cocktail and a plate of nachos.

Neither Gyro nor Queenie seemed to be in the DJ booth as Taxi and I wandered across the half empty dance floor. There did seem to be a few more Stilettos than usual, creeping about in their white sashes or standing guard at doorways. I supposed that even a month on, Stella was still feeling a touch of blameless paranoia. I know I would have, dead enemy or not.

As I’d so recently demonstrated, it’s hard to say for certain who might still be walking around, even when you’ve seen the corpse. A city heavy on the magic is like that.

“Huh...where do you think they are?” I mused, curiously.

“Let’s check the sound station. DJs usually leave a note if they have to go pee or something and Technic only works until late evening,” Taxi replied, discretely snatching a martini glass off a passing waiter’s tray and tipping it back into her muzzle in one gulp. She made a face. “Bleh, too dry.”

We tried the door nearest the booth which was guarded by only one Stiletto who seemed a bit familiar. I grinned and put my foreleg up in greeting. “Zeta?”

The zebra rope mistress bowed her mohawked head. “Detective! It is pleasurable to see you again.”

“I hear you’re one of the group I have to thank for my fresh lease on life.”

“It is an unusual circumstance when a creature may be reincarnated as themselves.” The zebra raised her chin with a touch of pride in her words, “I could not let an opportunity to witness such a unique event pass me by. My next life shall have many experiences to draw on as result of our acquaintance.”

“I wasn’t reincarnated, I died and-” I paused as she gave me a confused look. I shook my head and dropped it. I had neither the time, inclination, nor vocabulary to fight advanced zebra logic. “Thank you anyway. Look, have you seen Technic? We’re looking for a really big insect and Stella said it would be with-”

Zeta's normally very neutral expression soured instantly. "If you seek Queenie, the creature is in the booth. How such a sweet being as the Ladybug can tolerate an arrogant, lecherous wretch like that is beyond me."

"Not a Gyrotechnic fan?" Taxi asked, slapping her side with her tail.

"May he get mange," the Stiletto said, curtly, holding open the curtain beside her. "Down the hall and to the left. You may ignore the sign on the door. He hasn't had a successful sexual encounter since he started working here."

****

‘If the booth is rockin’, don’t come a’knockin’. If it’s empty, fuck off. I’m probably somewhere getting laid.’

The sign was in loopy black marker and hanging by a bit of string from the knob of the DJ booth. We both stopped to stare at it for a second, then Taxi shoved the door of the booth open.

A red and black rocket flew out of the tiny room over her head and buzzed around me in a wildly enthusiastic circle, the breeze off its nearly invisible wings knocking my hat onto my shoulders.

“DetectiveHardyHardBoiledYou’reAliveWhereveyoubeenWeMissedyouso!” it buzzed, bobbing up and down as it inspected every inch of me.

I waited patiently for it come round again before putting one hoof on the bug’s chest and gently pinning it to the nearest wall. Its wings fluttered feebly, then settled under its carapace. “It’s good to see you too, Queenie.”

The huge insect’s mandibles flipped and wobbled in its mouth as it chewed on something and its multi-faceted eyes seemed to be changing colors, first blue, then black, before cycling around to a deep rich red.

“Queenie... are you on something?” Taxi asked, waving her hoof in front of its face. It followed her leg up and down, then wiggled its jaws at me as I released it.

“Only five cups of the finest coffee Equestria has to offer.” A posh voice behind us brought me around. Gyro Technic stood there in the door of the DJ booth, a mug hanging in his magical field and a whole array of glowing necklaces and gemstones wrapped around his neck and ankles. “So, you back to futz about with my equipment, blow my fuses, or bull me out of good music?” He gave my driver a pointed glare and she turned her nose up at him.

“How about ‘none of the above’? Don’t need you, although...” I tapped my chin, releasing Queenie, who zipped up around the ceiling and began firmly beating its head against a light fixture. “-I could use a wall socket and some privacy .”

“Well, you can go find one someplace else. Your damn badge buys you nothing with me, after what you pulled!” Gyro swept his silky, rose colored mane off his shoulders and sipped some of his coffee. Strains of classical music drifted from the small glass-enclosed room behind him and a small picnic, complete with a coffee pot and a stack of watercress and what looked to be mayo sandwiches. My stomach growled at me.

“You know, Sweets?” I said, giving my driver a coy smile. “I seem to have misplaced my badge. Have you seen it?”

She gave me a quizzical look, then her lips formed an ‘o’ and she mirrored my smile. “No, no, Hardy... I haven’t seen it. Did you maybe... leave it in your other jacket?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve seen it at least once since a bunch assassins burned my apartment down to save this miserable, loud-mouth piece of crap’s job,” I answered, still in the same tone of indifferent wonder. “Now, was that before or after I was shot in the chest and killed?”

“Oh, definitely before.” She bit her lip, then a very exaggerated light bulb seemed to go off behind her eyes. “Now that you mention it, I remember where you left it!”

“Where was that, Sweets?” I asked, staring straight at Gyro who was listening, curiously and with a bit of wariness, to our exchange.

“You left it hanging on the horn of the Chief of Police, after you told her to go buck herself.”

“Thaaat’s riiight, isn’t it?” I exclaimed. “And, having done something like that after what has been a truly stressful month, some stinkin’ spin jockey keeping me from my quiet would be setting himself up for one heckuva rough day.”

“What are you two going on a-” Gyro didn’t have time for another snarky comment before Taxi was on him, her hooves tapping out a double strike on his neck and chest. He went stiff from head to tail. His horn sparked weakly, then darkened, dropping his cup of coffee on the thick carpet. The disk jockey’s expression was frozen perfectly in that half-uncertain, irritable state with just an echo of burgeoning surprise. He blinked a few times, then made a very low mewling noise at us.

“Nicely done. You got the face right and everything,” I exclaimed as my driver polished her hoof on her chest.

“Not my best work, but I’m pleased with it. Where do you want him?”

“Meh, prop him in the corner.”

I grabbed one of Queenie’s rear legs in my teeth. It tasted like cigarette ashes and bad Neighponese from the joint up the street. The bug was still determinedly beating its head against the enclosed light as I pulled it to the ground and dragged it through the door of the DJ booth. Taxi finished positioning Gyro in the hallway, re-adjusting his face into something a little more natural and setting his coffee cup on between his front hooves so anypony passing might think he was just lost deep in thought, then followed me in and shut the door.

Shoving a box of records over to sit on and staying carefully below the level of the window out to the dance floor, I checked the turntable to see how many tunes were left in the play list. There seemed to be about a half hour left on the current record, so I let it play, snatching up one of the sandwiches and stuffing it into my mouth.

Queenie zoomed up and pressed its face against the nearest speaker, humming along to the bombastic rhythm of a hundred-year-dead composer’s parade song.

Pouring myself a cup of coffee, I then offered the pot to Taxi, who waved it away, but did take one of the sandwiches. We ate, listening to music, enjoying the little feast. It was nice to have time on my side again, even if it was only for a few hours.

There was also the issue of how to broach a particular subject with my driver. I was hoping she might be a litmus test for how the rest of Swift’s family might react.

“Sweets, we need to go over something. I think you may deck me while I’m telling you this. Could you give me a chance to explain before violence ensues?” I began.

“Of course, Hardy,” she smiled, chewing the crust off another one of the sandwiches. “You know you can tell me anything. I’d look pretty silly if I killed you after all the trouble I went to.”

I put my hoof over my eyes. “That’s less than comforting.”

“If you want comfort, get yourself a teddy bear,” she replied, shoving her sandwich into one cheek so she could talk around it. “I dwive teh car. Now dwop the pretense. Wa’s on your minb?”

Setting the last bite of my sandwich on the table, I watched Queenie slowly float in a circle, dancing in mid-air as the caffeine worked its way through the bug’s system. I’d died once. It wasn’t so bad.

“Swift’s been eating meat.”

Taxi choked on her sandwich, spraying me with crumbs. “What?!”

I brushed my coat off, trying not to look like I was bracing for a flying hoof to the forehead. “Last month, Sykes fed her some at the hotel, the day we met. She was sneaking tidbits after that, but at the Plot Hole she was eating a full on chicken salad.”

“And you didn’t think that was weird?!” she gasped, grabbing the cup of coffee and trying to clear her throat before continuing, “Hardy, meat is not good for ponies!”

“I thought she was probably going home and puking it up or something. My brain was-”

“-on the case. That’s always your stupid excuse, isn’t it?!” she snapped, angrily.

“I had more important things going on! What was I supposed to do? Slap her hoof? Besides, Juniper used to eat jelly. Straight. No bread, just big bottles of jelly. The back of our police cruiser was full of them!”

“That’s a little different, don’t you think?!” Taxi shouted, rising to her hooves and pacing back and forth.

“At the time, no, no I didn’t,” I said, folding the ear closest to her so she wouldn’t deafen me in the enclosed space. “Now that she’s got chompers you could rip the tits off a dragon with, I’m reconsidering that position.”

“Brilliant. What are you going to tell After Glow and Stella?”

“Not a clue. You were the dry run. And since my pre-owned heart is still beating and I don’t have a secondary concussion, I think it went well.”

“Errrg...” Every muscle in Taxi’s body tensed as she fought the urge to pummel me. A month ago, she might have done. Her self restraint was impressive. “Fine! What did you want Queenie for? I already asked what happened after Swift left! It wouldn’t tell me!”

“Youareentitledtoknow, DetectiveHardyHardBoiled!”

“Why me? And could you slow down. You sound like a record player turned up too fast.” I said, turning to the insect.

Queenie bobbed affirmatively, turning end over end until it bumped into a wall. “Weee...seeem to be afffeeected cheeemically. We will t-t-t-ryyy.” The insect drew itself up. “Y-you are the pegusususus p-partner aaand a p-p-police poony.”

I bit my lip, then banged my forehead against the floor a couple of times.

“What... was that about?” said Taxi. “If you were looking for a concussion, you could have just asked me! We’re friends! I’d have been more than happy to!” she said, a little too enthusiastically.

I grimaced. “I... Look. I was afraid of this. Swift must have killed something or done something illegal. Queenie’s Essy contract says only a police officer or the next of kin is entitled to know what, so they can mount a legal defense. You’re not a cop anymore, or her partner. I’m still, for all intents and purposes, both... at least until Jade manages to get that paperwork signed and published. Telly will make that problematic. You’d have had to go find Swift’s parents.”

Taxi’s lips curled. “Princess-damned literal minded...” She trailed off before whatever foul curse she was about to spew could hit the airwaves.

“Queenie!” I raised my voice. “Get down here. I need information.”

The insect, still zipping back and forth around the window, settled to the floor in front of me. Its jaws were still waving crazily as the stimulant worked its way through the creature’s system.

“YesDetectivesweetums?”

“Never call me that again. I need to know what happened between the moment you saw me get shot and when Swift took off her ladybug. Everything.”

Queenie wiggled its forelegs, then raised one wing and one of the swarm zipped out, alighting on the tip of my nose.

“AreyoupreparedDetective?”

“Sunshine, sunshine, lady... bugger it. Just let me see.”

****

Most trips into the Essy collective feel like passing down a long, dark tunnel at high speed and, while not painful, aren’t for the weak of stomach. I’d never asked a ladybug for recall before. If you’ve ever put a tape in the player, then rewound it, that’s what it feels like. My whole conscious awareness running in reverse. Forming coherent thoughts in that condition is impossible. The lights of many ladybugs drifted around me, whizzing by in swirling swarms.

Space, if anything in that strange place could be called space, seemed to twisted like an image seen through flowing water. I fought to keep my thoughts in something resembling a solidified order, but it was a losing battle.

An instant before I felt certain I must give up and be scattered to the winds inside the ladybug network, I spiraled down into a single point, hanging in a starkly empty darkness.

Sensation came first. My face was wet. Wind was blowing at my body. My shoulders ached, though not in an unpleasant way. There was a persistent pressure in my bladder and what felt like lead weights in my stomach.

Is this Swift? I asked. There was no-one to answer.

Sound came next. There was screaming. My own screaming, high pitched and terrified. I broke off the shriek and my lungs aching as the air refused to enter them in anything but short, sharp gasps. I could feel hot stickiness on my face and hooves and the whistle of the high altitude, invisible fingers tugging at my wings.

Poor kid. Followed me into Cosmo’s office and hadn’t even mentioned she needed to hit the can, I thought.

Another voice was there, but distant and muffled by the winds.

Vision burst, stuttered, then solidified into images. A body laying on the floor, its eye socket burst open with the force of a high caliber sniper round. Another, more familiar personage, clutched feebly at a lacquered box as his dumb ass bled out from an enormous chest wound. His coat spread out around him, soaking up the gushing blood. He twitched once, held out his hoof towards the open window as though there was somepony there, then lay very, very still.

Taxi, her braid flapping behind her, was shouting something as she stood over my corpse, but I couldn’t make it out. The air blowing in from the broken window was too loud.

Altogether, it wasn’t an image I’d ever hoped to be able to play back for myself at any point my life, least of all now; my trauma plate was nice and full. I studied the scene as best I could from a mindset of detachment, noting the trajectory of the bullets and the spray of the glass. For a minute, I was just any of the hundreds of bodies I’d seen.

Swift’s vision swiveled towards the broken picture window and in the farthest distance, a black dot sitting on top of a tiny, drifting thunderhead. Taxi tried to move towards her, but she’d already braced her rear hooves and spread her wings. One second, she was inside and the next, blasting out over the Monte Cheval, her all powerful wingbeats propelling her straight at the black dot which quickly resolved itself into the general shape of a pony.

Leaping backwards, the sniper dropped off their cloud perch, spread their wings and blasted into the sky. They were still too far away to make out details, but Swift was closing quicker than the assassin was escaping. Giving a glance back, the sniper must have realized there was no escaping, banked, then shot straight upwards faster than I’d ever seen a pegasus climb.

If that piece of flying was impressive, it was nothing on the maneuver Swift pulled. Her flight feathers tilted downwards and she dropped her rear legs, using the additional drag to bring herself inside the sniper’s curve of ascension. Using her front knee, she kicked her trigger into her mouth and fired a shot.

The sniper juked as the clouds beside their face were split open by the passing bullet. Pulling up quickly, the black figure dipped sideways into an evasive roll. It’d been a miss, but it cut the ascent short before her target could get out of range. Closing now, I could just see the masculine shape of the killer’s shoulders, his tail a rich red-wine colored plume bundled tightly against his rear with the same stunt-flier braid that Swift wore. He appeared to be wearing some kind of dark, full-body armor that covered nearly every inch of pelt. A gigantic rifle strapped across his back should have been slowing him down, but he gave no sign of encumberance.

They flew on for a time, bobbing back and forth in an unpredictable pattern that would spoil all but a close shot. Every wing beat made the distance between them shorter, but the gun-pony seemed to know that. He was heading for a low cloud-bank drifting off of one of the weather factories. Swift put on a little more speed, trying to catch him before he could make the cover.

Swooping underneath, the sniper dove out of sight behind the strip of cloud. I expected her to follow, but my partner had something else in mind. She dove sideways, gathering velocity. The air between her wingtips was starting to shriek as she tilted back around, circling sideways and horizontally to the cloudbank her prey had disappeared into. Letting herself catch a thermal, she rose fast and popped over top of the cloud. Down below, the gunpony had his rifle out and lay prone with it pointed along the line she’d have taken if she followed him. He’d gotten into position faster than I’d have thought possible and it was a nasty ambush. He might have had three, possibly four shots before she could draw a proper bead.

Thankfully, Swift apparently knew this tactic well enough to take advantage of it. Dropping as silently as possible, she slowed and landed on the pliant surface of the cloud, behind the armored gunner. Up close, he was a thin stallion, his back and neck lined with ropes of the sort of speedy muscle pegasi are best known for. His face was covered by some kind of tinted gas-mask.

Swift trotted towards him, lining up Masamane’s iron sights on the back of his head. “P-p-pud y-your gud d-dowb! Y-you’re unber a-arresd!” she stammered, her teeth chattering around her bit.

My heart swelled with a bit of pride. The kid was terrified, but even as I lay dead in a nice big puddle of blood back in King Cosmo’s office, she was still trying to be a decent cop. I’m not sure if I could have managed that if our positions were reversed.

The sniper jumped as he realized he’d been made, swinging his rifle around in one smooth motion, using his wings to balance as he repositioned. He could have dropped through the clouds, if he’d been intent on escape, but nopony expects someone covered by a weapon to change targets that fast. It may not work in the movies, but in real life a properly reactive gunner can put you down, surprised or not. One second he was aiming off the end of the cloud, the next he was bringing his barrel down towards Swift’s forehead.

I prayed. Even though I knew the outcome, I still, in that breath between intention and action, prayed.

And he hesitated.

Maybe the Princesses heard my prayers. Maybe it was a stray gust. Maybe it was shock that he was being covered by a foal-sized cop.

Whatever it was, the huge gun’s mouth wavered in the air, stopping just above my partner’s frightened face.

There could be no missing at that range.

Masamane kicked, the report swept away by the racing winds.

I imagined, briefly, that I could see the passage of the shot as it moved in the time between life and death.

Unlike with the sniper’s rounds, there was no neat hole. Her bullet shattered the faceplate of the sniper’s gas-mask. The huge bullet entered his brain and shredded it on the way through. The back of his head burst wide open, throwing a rain of skull and lympha out over the city. He stood for another second or so while his body realized what his brain already knew, then the rifle fell, dropping through the cloud and rolling end over end until it disappeared into the streets..

Pegasus magic kept him from following the weapon as he crumpled to the cloud surface like a dropped doll with its strings cut. Swift darted toward him, whether to check if he was still alive or maybe make sure that first bullet had done the job, and stopped just short of his armored hooves.

She held there for a long time, her gaze drifting out over empty space. I realized she was as reluctant to examine a dead body as she had been the day I met her. Instead, she started searching for identifying markers, all the while, keeping her eyes off his face. There weren’t any. The armor was totally nondescript and very precisely generic. Similar stuff could be bought off the shelves of any decent military or police surplus. There were no patches. Somepony had even filed the serial numbers off the ends of his extra cartridges tucked into the suit’s belt.

The gas-mask was almost split down one side where the slug snapped the frame on the way through. A bit of purple fur was tangled in the edge of the mask, bunched up around the pony’s neck. Cocking her head, Swift tugged at it with her forehooves, fiddling with the strap around on the back. When it came free, she squeaked and fell onto her backside with the broken mask clutched in her legs.

Slowly, she peered over the top of the mask at the corpse’s face.

He was certainly a handsome looking thing, if one ignored the gaping wound. My partner’s shot hit him squarely in the eye, not unlike the one he’d put through Cosmo; a perfect kill. The sniper’s coat was the same color as expensive grapes, lavender fading to violet around the mouth.

The mouth. His muzzle hung, half open. Those teeth.

Inch long incisors jutted from his top and bottom gums all the way around, creating a frightening muzzle full of ripping daggers.

“S-sh...sh...sho...” Swift whispered, her lips forming a word I couldn’t quite pick up over the strong winds.

Something in the stream of sensory input felt like it’d been shifted slightly out of focus. I realized I’d lost audio completely, followed quickly by a full body numbness as sensation dropped out, too. Swift reached up and touched her mane, finding the ladybug standing at the edges of her fur to try to get a look at what was going on. Pulling it down, she stared at the tiny bug on her toe for a long time.

Then she swept it off.

The images twisted, flipping back on themselves in a very disorienting manner until I was hanging in mid-air in front of the pegasi’s young face. Tiny wings buzzed on my back. Dual jaws clicked against each other in my mouth. My vision seemed to be of a thousand images all being played back simultaneously in a broken mirror.

I was inside the ladybug and if being female was unusual, being an insect was fifty times so.

Turning, Swift let herself fall through the cloud and the last I saw of her was an orange streak charging towards the horizon.

****

I came out of the vision with a start and had to consciously force myself to breathe.

I watched myself die.

Sweet Celestia, there’s not enough beer, vodka, or gasoline in the world to purge that image from your brain once it’s there. I could try, though. I intended to try, but that was going to have to wait for Swift to be up and about.

My hooves were shaking. I stared at them, willing them to stop. I knew why they were shaking, but I didn’t have time to have a breakdown. My partner needed me.

The truth is that I don’t see death very often in my job. I see the dead all the time, sure, but nopony calls an equicide detective for a death that’s about to happen. Years full of corpses filed away in stacks of paperwork and buried under job-required appointments with the force psychologist, and one would think that death might no longer be quite so horrible. I wish that were true.

Sadly, it seemed no amount of determination or will was going to stop my legs from quivering.

Hoisting myself up, using the wall for balance, I lifted my head to find Taxi up on her hind legs behind the DJ station, a couple of glow-sticks woven into her mane, waving her hooves at a huge crowd dancing outside. My muscles felt stiffer than they should have if I’d only been sitting for the length of that memory; a glance at a digital clock on the wall said at least an hour had passed.

Queenie flew in circles beside my driver, bobbing along to something deep and primal played through the club’s speakers.

Reaching out, I touched my Taxi’s shoulder and she jerked, pulling Gyro’s headphones down around her neck. “Oh...you’re awake! I was wondering how long you were going to be down!”

“Yeah, I am wondering why I was.” I flicked my eyes at the gyrating ladybug. “Hey, Queenie? How come that took so long?”

The insect didn’t stop its dance to respond, but its secondary wings buzzed the answer. “Pony minds t-t-take Hiiigher bandwidth for memory replay! Pooony brains pop if, if, if, you dump too much information into them at o-o-once!”

“Well, then I’m glad you were patient about it. Is the coffee wearing off?” I asked.

Taxi nodded. “Yeah, Queenie hasn’t tried to eat any of the electrical cables for at least ten minutes.” Grabbing a fresh record, she set it on the turntable and dropped the needle onto it, then stepped out from behind the window. “Did you get what you were looking for?”

Snatching up one of the remaining sandwiches and using the pause as an excuse to order my thoughts, I took a quick bite before replying, “Swift chased down the sniper. He’s dead.”

“Hmmm...oh come on. Don’t leave me hangin’! What happened?”

I swallowed the chunk of flower and sighed, “He was a pegasus wearing combat armor. No markings. He was special operations of some kind, maybe. She caught him and he drew on her. She blew his head all over a thunder-cloud. I’m betting it rained blood somewhere near mid-town.”

“That’s... disgusting.”

“You’re telling me. You wanna know the real kicker?”

“Worse than the greenhorn killing somepony?!”

“Yeah.” I tapped my cheek with my toe. “His teeth. They were like hers. Whatever spell she’s under, he was the final product.”

Taxi’s upper lip twitched. A shudder started at her left rear ankle and worked its way up to her right ear. “Y-you think he... infected her with something magical? Like a disease?”

After some consideration, I shook my head. “Not likely. She was eating meat three days before that. Whatever is going on happened before we met.”

“Are we going to-”

“Investigate? Eventually, yes. Right now, I’m worried about getting her up and figuring out how to convince her I’m not a hallucination. Then I’ve got to call in my favours and go see The Archivist.”

A knock on the door of the DJ booth cut short any further discussion.

“Who is it?” I called out.

“Your beloved garcon!” came the reply. Scarlet, a basket of piping hot bagels dangling from his mouth, a carton of cream cheese balanced on his nose, and an extension cord around his neck, trotted into the tiny room. Setting his burdens down he plugged the cord into the wall, then offered me the end as he he peered over his shoulder at where Gyro Technic still leaning stiffly against the wall. The disk jockey was blinking ‘SOS’ furiously in Horse Code.

“Did I miss something?” Stella’s secretary asked.

“Oooh, only a violent recounting of unmentionable horror. Let’s have that.” I picked up the cord, unzipping my chest pouch and fishing through my pockets until I found the heart-shaped plug. Scarlet watched the process with interest.

“Sweets, could you?” I asked, feeling suddenly squeamish at the thought of pushing a piece of metal directly into my own breast bone.

“Ugh, fine...ya big baby.” Brushing aside my trench coat, she tilted the plug into the socket. There was a soft click and I cringed, uncertain what to expect, until a feeling of soft warmth spread throughout my chest.

“How does it feel?” Scarlet asked, very softly.

“It... hmmm.” I had to think about how to answer that. It wasn’t a bad sensation. Unusual. Certainly not something a pony is generally meant to feel, but then, I’d had mornings where I woke up with headaches I’d have sworn were sent straight from the pit. This was nothing like that. My eyeballs tingled in their sockets. “A bit like being a Hearth’s Warming Eve light. How long do I have to sit here?”

“The Don said you were probably going to have to charge for about fifteen minutes,” Taxi put in.

“I just spoke to Miss After Glow. She said that they’ve done as much as they can for Swift...” Scarlet added.

“How is she?” Taxi wanted to know.

“Not...um...” His expression was sad as he rubbed his toe tip at the carpet. “Not great. Her mouth...short of knocking all of her teeth out and giving her dentures, the doctors can’t do anything about that. She’ll be ready to wake up soon, though.”

“Alright, thanks Scarlet.” Plucking one of the bagels out of the basket, I popped it into my mouth. “Time enough fer lunsh.”

Act 2, Chapter 4: Tell Me, Exactly How Could Things Be Worse?

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 4: Tell Me, Exactly How Could Things Be Worse?

Meat is not banned outright in Equestria. Celestia is quite aware that certain species require flesh to survive, and Equestria learned the lessons of prohibition back during the brief Manehattan Quiche Stampede, which, although some of the politest and most refined rioting in Equestrian history, still caused enough of a disruption to instill the relevant lesson.

But the concept of flesh as food is still something ponykind finds decidedly unsavory, and it's kind of hard, once substantial processing has been applied, to determine the origin of a given kind of meat. Given the vast array of Equestrian species that exhibit sentience, it is understandable that there is applicable paranoia.

Therefore, Equestria has Rules regarding meat.

Meat must be labelled with its place of origin and species, so that an investigation can lead right back to a potentially offending slaughterhouse before one can finish saying "I have no idea how that cutie mark got in that burger, Officer."

Above all, it has to be from a species considered nonsentient: chickens, rabbits, turkeys, pigs, and most rodents, for example. Any animal capable of forming its own lobbying group to protest such treatment is generally considered to have met minimum grounds for sentience.

There are many less interesting, but no less strict, rules, regulations, and taxes, all of which are the subject of some intense controversy. This controversy is mostly fueled by the Pork Barrel Party, a heavily meat-industry-funded Griffin political party which tends to argue that ponies eating flowers is just as brutal and technically life-destroying as griffins eating anything else; The counterargument tends to note the low occurence of ponies calling flowers 'Grandma' outside of mental wards.

--The Scholar

How did I wind up attached to this kid?

Whatever Iris Jade might have intended when she paired me with the rookie, I doubt she expected me to come to a place where I wanted Swift at my back. When we rolled into Sunny Days and took down Snicket, she reminded me of a pony I’d thought lost; a pony who did the right thing because it was the right thing, not because it was another notch on a professional scorecard.

She’d looked at me with genuine admiration and some part of me had tried, desperately, to be her ‘Detective;’ a storybook character built of shining childhood dreams of blind justice and righteousness.

She made me want to be a better pony, and damn her for it.

Disappointing her would mean that the last sliver of whatever Juniper saw when he took my grassy-green flank under his wing, back in the day, had slipped away. I might as well push pencils, or climb back into that freezer and let the Grim Wrangler have me.

I never expected my death to be a jagged pill for anypony, but Equestria still finds ways of surprising me.

Swift hadn’t deserved to swallow that particular dose.

****

The stone door of Stella’s lair chamber rolled clear of the portal, crashing into its slot in the wall. Scarlet, hips swaying with a more subdued ‘swish’ than on his good days, led Taxi and I into the makeshift underground medical bay.

Most of the small herd of medical players and doms had cleared out, leaving After Glow on her pillow with her cigar, Pickle flipping his flogger while reading a medical text of some kind, and my sleeping partner. Stella rested on the side of the catwalk, his great arms crossed beneath his chin, watching Swift sleep with the ponderous worry only a draconic parent can project. He looked up as our hooves hit the catwalk, then rose off the platform and slithered back towards his lounge-seat.

After Glow’s horn was glimmering as she brushed a comb through Swift’s unruly mane, taking out the worst snarls with a tender touch.

My driver and I moved into the bubble of apprehensive silence, taking up positions on either side of the bed. I studied my partner, whose sleep seemed calmer than it had been an hour ago. Taxi picked up an extending medical probe, using it to lightly tug down the pegasus’ lip, revealing the horrifying magical dentistry.

“I... mmm... I hoped Scarlet was wrong, somehow,” she muttered, dropping the probe.

“Me too,” I said, straightening a stray feather on the nearest wing. Somepony had given her wings a general cleaning and she no longer stank, but it was going to require some heavy preening before they’d get anywhere near a state for protracted flight.

Glow floated her brush back into her purse and rose creakily to her hooves. “Detective. Ye gonna share whatever ye was gone so long for?”

Removing my hat, I laid it on the bed across my partner’s rear hooves. “Swift killed the pony who shot me. Sniper, heavy anti-pony rifle, black armor. She chased him down and got the drop on him when he tried to ambush her.”

The Stiletto matriarch gently pinched her grand-daughter’s cheek with a glimmer of telekinesis. “That’s mah girl.”

“I figure there’s a thing I ought to tell you. About a month ago, a griffin friend of ours fed her some meat. She’s been eating it ever since.”

Instead of the expected explosion, I got three sets of very unsettling stares. Stella picked his teeth with his tongue, making me wonder what his diet consisted of that left him needing such a regular floss. Glow just stood, her ancient eyes unblinking, while Pickle looked just a bit disgusted.

“What? Come on, say something. If I’m going to die again, I’d like to at least have the whole story this time.”

Pickle unhurriedly bookmarked his medical text, laying it back on one of Stella’s display tables. “We are... aware, Mister Detective. My spells have revealed that her stomach contains at least four different griffin prey species. None of them intelligent, thankfully.”

“Then why is this not shocking anyone?” I growled.

“Because, while we were... disassembling... the enchantment which has been afflicting Swift Cuddles, we were able to ascertain some of its, shall we say, facets.” The sadistic prick flicked his flogger at me and I caught it in my teeth. He let it drop, leaving me standing there with the rubber-tasting thing bouncing off my chin. I spat it out as he continued, “The spell was placed on her some time past, but it was triggered roughly a month ago, most likely by her first ingestion of carnivorous fare.”

“Ye let mah granddaughter eat feckin’ flesh, ye stupid idjit!” A burst of magical wind swatted me across the back of the the head, just hard enough to hurt as After Glow poked me in the chest. “Ah told ye to look after’er!”

“My friend is a griffin the size of a bus, and she’s a grown mare,” I replied, pushing the old unicorn back gently but firmly. “Slapping her hoof after this spell was set off wouldn’t have stopped it. Blame me if it makes you feel better, but right now, I just want to figure out: What else was it doing to her? Before the prick passed out-” Pickle’s mouth tightened, irritably, “-he said something had been done to her brain and her stomach?”

The doctor flipped his clipboard off the end of the bed and covered his discomfort by shuffling paper. “Counter-magic was able to break the transmutative enchantment. A few unicorns draining magic from the spell rather than putting it in, like we did with Miss Svelte when we emptied her arcane reserves, did the job very nicely. However, as they say, the damage is done. The details would be... well, out of the purview of an earth pony.” He said this last with a sneer that made me want to break his nose.

Taxi, ever sensitive to racial attitudes and not much liking Pickle’s, snatched away the doctor’s clipboard and began paging through it. “Oh give me that, you twit.” Pickle’s horn glittered as he made to yank his board back and my driver raised one hooftip at him warningly. His face sank into a disgruntled sulk, but he let his magic disperse. Finding the summary, she shook her head. “This says the original spell-casters used an arcane conservancy. That’s heavy alchemical transmutation. Why would they waste such a powerful magic on giving somepony big teeth?”

The doctor’s eyes widened slightly at this display of knowledge; despite his irritation, he gave her a look of mild admiration and respect before he replied. “Ah, well, that...If it were simply cosmetic, it might be a simple task to reverse. A magical conservancy is a package of magic meant to be set off. It spread through every part of her, altering fundamental aspects of what make this young filly a pony.”

“Such as?” I prompted.

Pickle put his hoof on Swift’s stomach gently. “Right now, with the spell broken, she is functionally omnivorous. Her body no longer produces certain vitamins in an efficient way. She will require heavy doses of protein. Animal protein. If that magic had matured for two more weeks? Goodness me, she might have had trouble with a head of lettuce.”

“What about trying to tear my throat out in the coffee bar?” I asked.

Shifting his weight, he grabbed the cat-o’nine tails off the platform and spun it around his head in a circle, practicing a few strikes at the air in front of my face. “It might just have been your charming personality... but likely, it was the alterations in her adrenal gland and amygdala. Those seem to have been almost pure enchantment and are reversing themselves as we speak. The whole of the changes to her brain are, frankly, impressive.”

After Glow tapped her hoof on her chin. “Quit tha damn suspense. Tell’em what they done to her brain.”

Not for the first time, the dom’s face betrayed annoyance at having his spiel interrupted, but defying Glow was mostly done ‘at your own risk’. “The magics employed here have made her highly aggressive, extremely susceptible to suggestion, and capable of eating meat.”

“That is... most strange.” Stella mused, his scales rustling against one another as he coiled his tail up on the nearest ledge. “I’m afraid I can’t think of an especially good reason-”

“The bastards turned her into an assassin,” I said, calm as I could.

Stella, who I’d somehow managed to momentarily forget was actually in the room, slithered down to head level with me and I danced backwards in alarm. Despite his generally calm, pleasant demeanor, he was still big up close. “Detective, if you have knowledge we don’t, I think it best you share. We are her family.”

Deciding my hand was already tipped, I figured a truthful answer couldn’t lead Stella to any more rash action than finding out that somepony had changed his god-daughter into a meat eater. “Like I said, Queenie showed me some things from after I was shot. The pony she killed... the sniper? His teeth were like that.“ I nodded at the bed.

“I... see.” The dragon murmured. “I will have to look into this more closely. Ponies are nothing if not inventive, but magically created murderers that one can simply point in a direction smacks of turning beings into bullets... and that is one thing I can’t abide. The Crusades should have taught us the folly of that.”

I nodded. “I’m thinking this was done with a specific purpose in mind, too. Swift has some sort of strange fetish for Essy’s. She tried to tear Queenie apart when they first met.”

“Mah girly did what?!” After Glow burst out. “She’d cry a week iffen’ she hurt a butterfly... leastways, iffen' the butterfly weren't trying to kill 'er!”

“I know. I didn’t say any of this made sense.”

"Sense or not, that leaves the big, stinking dead elephant carcass in the room." Taxi chimed in. "How did Swift get exposed to this magic?"

Pickle twirled his mane around one hoof, but said nothing. Stella rolled over in the lake, sending waves up to the shore and After Glow chewed on her cigar, thinking. The silence stretched, backdropped by my partner's soft snoring.

"Alright," I said, finally. "-so we have questions. The most obvious way to get answers is to ask the kid when she's up and around, but before we wake Swift, I want to talk favors. You remember, I'm owed one?"

Stella crooked one clawtip at me. "My sweet Detective, are you certain this is the time for that?"

"Never a better one. I died getting this favor, so I'm going to take one and put one on layaway." I replied.

The dragon raised one penciled eyebrow, then nodded. "Go ahead, then."

"Firstly, I have found myself without work and un-housed due to a difference of opinion with my employer."

Taxi swatted me across the rump with her tail. "Dipstick here threw his badge on the horn of the meanest police chief in Equestria and walked out of her office without so much as a 'by your leave.'"

At that, After Glow let out a rattling laugh that devolved into coughing while Stella covered his snout, politely burying draconic giggling which might have deafened the lot of us.

When the mirth subsided, the sea serpent opened his arms expansively. "Then, Detective, you are in need of a place to stay. The Vivarium will be open to you-"

"No, no!" I said, hastily. "I don't need a place. I need money."

Stella leaned back, a stray curl of his orange mane falling over one shoulder. "As I can't imagine you retiring, I assume you don't just mean bits to get yourself back on your hooves. That would seem an awfully small favor for one bought from a dragon. After all, with the proceeds from our recent acquisition of the Monte Cheval-"

"Hey, yeah!" Taxi blurted, her braid flipping down across her side. "How did you do that? We took years driving mobsters out of places they were that heavily entrenched! You did it in a month!"

Pursing his ruby red lips, the dragon slapped the surface of the water a few times in a gesture of indifference. “As much as I would adore the opportunity to credit my dear Stilettos with that, the ledger you so very kindly provided did prove most helpful.”

“You were supposed to bury that!” I growled.

“And it is done. The book is buried at the bottom of the Bay in my private hoard. I swear, I shan't use it twice.” He drew a cross over his chest, then tapped himself on the eyelid with one long claw. “However, it benefits you that I have, just this once. Monte Cheval will be extremely profitable under my guidance, thus, money is a non-issue. Now, what is this other favor?”

“The second half is pretty straight forward. I want you to sit on your claws. No active investigation. No sending out your army to hunt the ones who did... that.” I indicated the bed where my partner still slept.

The air in the cave became very suddenly tense. Stella's slitted eyes bored into me with the precision of a surgeon's knife as he said: "Explain yourself, Detective."

Trotting over to the rails, I threw my forelegs over the side. “Anypony who would do something like this has resources. Huge, resources. They used a magically trained assassin to kill me and a major figure in organized crime, for no other purpose I can see than to eliminate a loose end. I’ve got my own leads, which I will follow, but they’re a month cold. I want the Vivarium out of the firing line this time. Period. You got me? I will find out who killed Ruby, who killed me, and who enchanted Swift.”

“Ye think they is all the same som’bitches?” Glow asked, her stogies burnt almost to the stump.

I flicked one ear towards her. “Count on it. You have my word; before the end, you will know what I know. If I don’t survive, I’ll make sure somepony does who can tell you what’s happened and what I discovered. Until then... sit.”

There was a pause that seemed perfectly happy to stretch until my sanity snapped. Stella’s face seemed expressionless; maybe I’m just not good at reading reptilian emotions. Glow and he exchanged a few meaningful glances, employer to employee, friend to long time friend, then the Stiletto bowed her head and went back to stand beside her grand-daughter’s hospital bed. The decision was made.

Stella held out his talon to me and I gently touched it with my toe. “You have your line of credit, Detective... and I will be discreet in my explorations. If I receive information, passively, that may help you then I will send it your way.”

“Fair enough. I think it’s time to wake up Swift. Pickle, you said it was mostly the changes to her brain that made her attack? Would those make her hallucinate, too?” I asked, then added as an afterthought, “She thought she was talking to one of her friends from the Academy.”

“Very probably. The alterations seemed focused on making her more violent and more inclined to follow orders.” The dom replied, twirling his flogger in a languid figure eight pattern. “The segments of the spell causing her hyper-aggression and obedient tendencies dissolved when we drained the magic from them. She should, in all likelihood, have her faculties intact, though I should say her memories of the last few weeks may be somewhat hazy. There are also likely to be some...minor side effects. Cravings, things of that nature. I’d say nothing too serious.”

“You think it’s safe to wake her here?” I asked.

Pickle raised one hoof and twirled it in a circle to indicate the cavern. “She’s inside a dragon’s lair surrounded by her friends and family, one of whom is an unparallelled telekinetic and the other of whom is a sea serpent. I have trouble imagining a safer location.”

Raising my head, I moved to the bedside and stood with After Glow and Taxi.

“Then do it. I need my partner.”

Stella gave the dom a subtle nod and he lit his horn, leaning over the hospital bed and pressing it against Swift’s cheek. The light swelled into her fur, illuminating it from the inside for a second before fading.

Swift tensed under the sheets, then relaxed again, weakly kicking her rear hooves to drag the fabric down off of her chest. One bright blue eye opened a crack, but didn’t focus on anything. She scratched some sand away with one toe and her giant wing unfurled, smacking against the side of the hospital bed. It rattled alarmingly, and that brought her fully awake.

Her eyes snapped open and she looked around, first at her grandmare, then at Taxi and up to Stella. Finally, her gaze drifted passed Pickle without recognition before settling on me. As our stares met, she slumped a little, laying back with one leg thrown across her eyes.

“This was a really nice dream, too.” She murmured, so softly we all had to lean forward to hear.

“Ye ain’t dreamin’ girl.” After Glow said, leaning down and planting a cigar scented kiss on the pegasi’s slightly dirty forehead. “Ye look like shit on toast.”

Swift smiled sleepily, rolling onto her side and pulling the sheet up to her head as she looked up at me with those baby blues. “I’ll come see you one day, sir...”

“Dammit.” I grumbled. “Come on, kid! Get up! I’m actually here.”

“Mmmhmmm.” She let her eyes slide shut again.

After Glow and I peered at each other. “Ye said she was hallucinatin’. Didn’ think it be this bad.” Returning her attention to the bed, she yelled, “A’right! Up an’ att’em, birdy! We gots ta talk! Yer partner ain’t dead and the prick o’er there says ye ain’t crazy no more, so git up!”

My partner’s response was to pull her pillow over her head.

Taxi wiggled her nose and commented, “That could have gone worse, I suppose.”

I picked up my hat and plopped it down on my head. “Pickle?”

“My duty is done, Detective. If you have more-” The dom started, but I put my hoof on his horn and used it to drag his nose down level with mine over the bed.

“Shut it. Just nod or shake your head. Is she healthy? No life threatening injuries?” I demanded.

He squinted at my hoof, painfully tugging on the point of bone on his forehead, then nodded weakly.

“Good. After Glow. Get her up.” I shoved Pickle backwards onto his rump then stepped back to give the Stiletto room to work.

“Gladly, boyo! Birdy! Wakey-wakey, sprouts and bakey!” The elderly Stiletto’s horn burst to life, wrapping Swift in a pearly shimmer. It tore the sheet away, ripping her off the bed into mid-air before floating her prone form over the railing. My partner’s eyes shot open; she only had time for a surprised gasp before the field faded.

Three meters, as it turns out, isn’t enough time to remember you can fly.

Stella dropped quietly below the waters, coming up a second later with a drenched and very unhappy pegasus hanging by her middle from his talons. He gently set my shivering partner on the catwalk and laid a towel across her shoulders. She slid onto her foreknees.

"I-I-I'm awake, gran." She muttered, then her tongue poked at her cheek and she winced. “I-I think I’ve g-got something stuck in my t-teeth. I-it feels sharp!”

Deciding the reality was going to be tough to hide, I moved around in front of her and raised her chin with my toe. “Sit down, kid. We’ve got a conversation coming and you’d best be calm for it. I’ll get you something to cocoa and-”

“Cocoa? Wait... uigh! No! Just no!” She groaned, shoving me roughly away. I staggered a few steps, catching myself on the bed. “S-stop talking to me, you s-stupid h-hallucination! I’m c-cold and I’m wet and I’m not in the mood for stupid ghosts making my stupid day even worse!”

I took a deep breath. “Sweets, I think my partner needs another reality asserting swim. How about you?”

Taxi put one foreleg around my neck. “I think she might, too. Miss Glow, would you do the honors?”

“W-what? I-I don’t wa-want-”

Swift didn’t have the chance to finish that sentence before she was hoisted off the catwalk.

****

In subjective terms, I’d only known the kid a few days. In that time, she’d killed for me and nearly died on at least a couple of occasions. That meant something in Detrot, a city where ponies routinely murdered one another for the pettiest of reasons. I knew, somewhere underneath what was left of my once massive ego, that I couldn’t have looked myself in the eyes each morning if I gave anything less than my all for the kid.

Thankfully, there weren’t any clauses in that conscience-driven mutualism that required me to be nice about it.

****

It took two more trips into the lake before Swift was ready to consider that maybe, just maybe, there was actually something to this ‘Hardy isn’t dead’ idea. During her second dunking, I had Glow call up to Scarlet to get us some warm blankets, hot chocolate, and Swift’s cleaned and repaired tactical vest. Somepony with a very childish imagination had slapped some colorful, highly non-regulation patches on it. The white bunny on the chest plate was an especially nice touch.

Scarlet arrived just as Stella laid a dripping bundle of orange misery at my hooves, one last time.

Grabbing a towel, I began vigorously scrubbing the water out of her fur while Taxi worked on her other side. Swift whimpered softly but didn’t have the strength to protest at being treated like a foal. Regardless, she’d needed the bath pretty badly. Pickle took the opportunity to stretch out her wings and examine them. They were short quite a few feathers, but none of the flight essential ones. He advised she not try any fancy maneuvers for a little while.

When we finished drying her, Scarlet pressing a steamy mug with a straw into Swift’s hooves. She stared at it for a long time, then took a tentative sip, followed by a stronger one a second later.

I plunked myself down on a cushion and rubbed my hooves together, then grabbed a bagel from the pastry basket and set to, waiting for her to gather her frayed wits. A trip in the drink may be age old, but it is a surprisingly effective cure for a mild case of the crazy.

It was a long five minutes. I had bagels, though, and that makes it easier to be patient. As her shaking stopped and she sucked down more of the cocoa, I watched Swift come gradually back to life. She was still subdued and damp, but Scarlet was running the brush through her tail, getting the poof back in its curls.

Finally, she lifted her head from her cup and studied me closely.

“How?” She asked, very softly.

I ran my tongue around the outside of my lips, gathering off the crumbs before I replied , “I’ve got a friend here in town who runs a gray market establishment for the sale of magical artifacts. Taxi bought a favor from him.” Peeling open my chest pouch, I showed her the black heart shaped socket. Her eyes widened, but she let me continue, “Taxi had Slip Stitch stick that heart we got from Cosmo’s into my chest. It did... well, I don’t really know. I intend to ask my friend when I see him.”

“Mmmhmmm...” she murmured. She then lazily turned herself sideways, extended one wing, and smacked me with it.

Pegasus wings might look like a lot of fluff, but it was like being hit really hard with an especially feathery baseball bat. There was a brief moment where I thought I was flying, then a full round of orchestra bells rang in my head, followed by a comfortingly dark few seconds where I thought I might not have to pay the piper for that particular injury. As I came to, my vision recentered on an angry pegasus face just inches from mine.

“You are the world’s biggest tail-hole, Sir!” she shouted, her voice breaking as she threw her forelegs around me. Then, the waterworks started. What was it with fillies hitting me, then immediately using me for a kerchief?

I just lay there, legs around her neck, holding her to my chest as wave after wave of tears rolled out. Maybe I shed a few of my own, but she’d bludgeoned me, dammit! My masculinity needs these little buck-ups now and then.

A seeming ten minutes later, she was down to sniffles and After Glow came forward to get her own round of hugs, then Taxi and Scarlet; ultimately finished up by Stella himself, who picked up Swift on his palm and tenderly stroked her hair with his claw while she clung to one of his enormous fingers. All in all, I doubt any psychologist this side of zebra country has seen a more successful short term fix job.

Unfortunately, it left a few unpleasant questions.

“S-sir, I h-hate to ask this... but i-is there something wrong with my t-teeth? They feel really really funny.”

Swift was wrapped in warm blankets, her poofy red tail unbraided and spread out behind her. I knelt on a cushion on the edge of the little nest as After Glow curled up beside her grand-daughter, back to her brushing. Taxi had resigned herself to having a bagel as we all basked in the joy of having everypony back together again. I even tolerated Scarlet laying his head on my side.

There was a very loud intake of breath as the question was asked. The best option, obviously, was to just answer her as directly and intelligently as possible. Annoyingly, nopony seemed to know quite how. That, again, left it to yours truly.

“Kid, we... may need to have a little talk before I get you a mirror. First, I’m going to tell you this and I want you to stay right there, in your blankets, with your cocoa, and remember that your friends are around you. We aren’t going anywhere. Alright?”

Swift looked nervous, but nodded anyway. “Y-yes, sir.”

“Good.” I pulled at my lower lip with one hooftip, then held out my toe. “Swift... you got magicked. You got magicked good and hard. Some whacked-out unicorn somewhere put together a spell and stuck it inside you, then left it there, dormant, until that dumb-ass flying cat I call a friend fed you flesh.”

“What?! W-what did it do to me?! Sir!” She squeaked, starting to rise. I put my hoof on her back and shoved her firmly back to the ground.

“Kid... cocoa.” I nudged her back towards her cup. “I’ll let you up after I’ve told you this. I expect you to act like a cop, because that’s what you are, alright? That means if you panic, you’re no good to anyone. Got me?”

She took this in along with a deep breath, then nodded, and I lifted my leg off her shoulders.

“Now... the spell is off.” I continued. “I don’t precisely get the inner workings of counter-magic, but I know it was a pretty simple fix and most of the really bad stuff- namely, what they did to your brain - is gone. There were some side effects.”

“What kind of side effects?” She asked, holding her pillow to her chest like a shield.

Signaling After Glow to get me her pocket mirror, I smiled as disarmingly as I could manage. “You might be the only pony alive who’d consider this ‘good news’, but you get to eat all the meat you want.” She tried to copy my smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. I went on. “The downside of that is you’re probably going to need a very open minded orthodontist and to floss more regularly.”

“W-what does that mean, sir?”

The pocket mirror floated down into my hooves and I tilted it up so Swift could see herself.

There was a note of hesitation as she edged forward and tugged her lips back in a terrifying grimace, showing off a mouth full of industrial grade serrated meat cutters. Her teeth fit neatly against one another, curving slightly inward like a mastiff’s teeth, or maybe a shark’s, meant more for gripping and tearing rather than chewing. If I had to guess, I’d have called her built for arterial bleed-out. The assassin spell’s caster was not a subtle sort and the design was made for dealing death in only the bloodiest way possible.

“...coool...”

I was sure I hadn’t heard that right. “What was that?”

“This is so cool!” Swift grinned, flashing her fangs on one side, then the other, then giving the air a few experimental chomps.

There was a pause as everyone processed this.

It was After Glow who found some words first. “Birdy... ah love ye more’n life itself... but sometimes, yer one creepy little pony...”

Swift stuck her tongue out of the space between her teeth, licking the top of her muzzle. “I cannot wait to try eating with these!”

My ears perked and I leaned forward. “Wait... kid, you’ve had those chompers for at least a couple of weeks. Are you telling me you don’t remember?”

“What?!” Her wings sprung out from her sides, almost whacking me again; I barely caught the wing with one hoof. It was one of the more annoying pegasus habits. I get that it’s an old instinct - if you’re a pegasus and something spooks you, you want to be ready to get into the air as soon as possible - but it was a habit responsible for more than a few concussions around the office.

“I...I mean, I...” She looked briefly confused. “I feel like I’ve just woken up. Like I was asleep, but I have pictures in my head of all of these things. This bar and hiding my gun and stage lights...”

Taxi eyed Swift’s teeth. “You spent the last month performing at a griffin beat dive in Sky Town, sweety.”

“Really?”

“Yeah... performing under the name ‘Li’l Fireball.’” I affirmed, nosing Scarlet’s cheek off my flank and pointing Swift’s empty cup of cocoa. He nodded, then rolled to his hooves and picked up the mug before moving off towards the back of the cave. “What’s the last thing you actually remember?”

Staring up at the ceiling, used her sharp canines to scratch the top of her tongue, then shook her head. “I remember being in King Cosmo’s office. I watched you fall. I watched you... d... die. I saw you stop breathing. T-then I remember f-flying. Chasing somepony. I c-caught them on a cloud. I told him to s-stop and then he tried to shoot m-me.”

“Anything else?” I inquired.

“Just... crazy. It’s crazy. Impossible and crazy.” She bit her lip, then winced as she very nearly drew blood. “The rest is just this... blur of smoke and music and eating and stuff...”

Since she didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, I decided it couldn’t hurt to push a little.

“Queenie showed me what happened. The sniper’s... mmm...I don’t know how to tell you this, but his teeth were like yours.” I touched her jaw, lightly. “The magic they laid on you was, as far as we can tell, intended to turn a pony into some kind of... meat eating assassin. It changed your brain in some nasty ways. Most of them are gone, but I think whatever was done to you was done to him.”

Swift’s eyes widened. “Y-you mean all th-that fighting in the bar... that really happened?!”

“I’m afraid so, kid. If Pickle’s right, and I’m assuming he’s not a dick and an idiot-” Pickle snorted and tossed his pen at me, bouncing it off the brim of my hat, but not breaking my verbal stride “-then it’s like a hypnotic compulsion mixed with a hit of bad Beam. You’d have shot your own teddy bear if it got in your way or somepony ordered you to.”

Her ears slowly flattened against her head. “If somepony ordered me to? Like the... like the pony who shot you?”

“Yeah. If he was half so far gone as you were, I doubt he knew exactly what he was doing. I swear, we’ll find out what happened to you, but-”

Abruptly, Swift shrugged off the blanket and stood. Her expression was completely unreadable. Turning on her heel, she spread her wings, and flapped them experimentally. She frowned at her messy feathers, then trotted out, leaving the five of us staring after her. We sat there, exchanging confused looks for several seconds.

“Was it something you said?” Taxi asked, dumbfounded.

“I... have no idea.” I replied.

Scarlet seemed to be thinking as he scratched at his ear, lips pinched into a filly-ish pout. “Um... I don’t know if this is relevant, but ever since we were kids, she’s been a goodie four-shoes. She’d tell everypony what she’d done eventually... and I do mean everypony. She was the one pony you didn’t want on a cookie raid.”

“What’s that got to do with this?” I asked, waving my hoof after my partner whose hoofsteps had disappeared into the distance.

“She might have been honest, but if she’d done something really bad, she wouldn’t talk to anypony until she had her courage up. It’s some stupid thing her dad taught her about being ‘honesty or nothing.’”

“Brilliant.” I grumbled. “What does she do during these little ‘courage building’ excursions?”

“Errr... well, knowing Swift, she’d go somewhere high. Minox was waiting to take you all back upstairs, so he probably just let her out.”

I rested my forehead on the cool metal of the catwalk. “I don’t guess you’ve got any idea where she’d go, do you?”

Scarlet shook his head and wiggled his chest and hips demonstratively. “Sorry...no wings. High places are sort of a pegasus thing.”

“I know what you mean.” I sighed, using the railing on the edge of the catwalk to drag myself upright.

“She’s at tha ol’ water tower up tha street.” After Glow interjected, stretching one leg, then another as she worked herself to a standing position. “There’s a lookout platform up ’ere. If she’s anywhere, mah li’l birdy is there.”

I cocked my head to one side. “Don’t tell me she intends on climbing that thing.”

“Naw, there’s stairs. Why?”

“Thank the sky.” I waved towards Stella. “I’ve got to go handle our living situation, then check in with The Don of The Archivists. He wants to see me, for some reason. If I’m not back right away, where can I get my line of credit?”

The dragon primped his head-fin, as though talk of money was beneath him. “First Bank of Detrot. It’ll be in an escrow account under the name ‘Sweetums.”

My neck felt suddenly very warm. “You couldn’t pick something less... horrific?”

“I assumed you wanted anonymity. Would you prefer Snuggy Bear?”

I sighed. “Point taken. I’ll call once I figure out what’s wrong with Swift.”

****

Taxi and I had no trouble finding the water tower. It was a dark blot against the afternoon sky outside of the Vivarium. Getting to it was another matter.

After circling back on ourselves a couple of times, trying to find a street that wasn’t one way and actually passed somewhere vaguely near the water tower, we parked the cab beside an empty alley. We armed the cab’s security system before setting off into a maze of very narrow streets surrounding a shopping center like the one the Vivarium existed in. There was hoof-traffic only, and had a few more pretensions to class than the strip mall housing the old whore house.

I was quickly lost, but I followed close on Taxi’s rear, passing window shops and ‘natural health’ stores I’ve no doubt my driver would have loved to stop and wander around for a week or two. There was a good chunk of ponies out and about, but most were window shoppers hunting sales in the run up to the Summer Sun Celebration.

Come to think of it, having lost a month of my life, I wasn’t even sure when the Summer Sun was going to be happening.

Before I could muse too heavily on how badly I needed a calendar, which would have inevitably lead to thoughts of the burnt one lost in the fire at my apartment, we turned one more corner and arrived at the base of the water tower.

It was a rickety beast of a thing that surely dated back to before the surrounding mall was built. The barrel’s side was painted with a fading picture of a smiling sunflower almost five meters high. The piping dropping from the underside was rusted in places, but the spiral staircase up to the top seemed perfectly secure. It even looked recently painted.

I’d have likely written off the fact that nopony had tried to tear it down as a quirk of local architecture, but seeing a wisp of red tail hanging from the encircling platform high above, I suspected After Glow or possibly Stella may have had a hoof in why it managed to stick around; it was probably easier to keep an eye on the kids if you happen to know their favorite hiding spots.

“Why, oh, why, does it always have to be someplace with an altitude? I already did the damn rope climb today...” I griped.

“Think of it is as immersion therapy. You keep this up, you won’t be afraid of heights anymore!” Taxi giggled, giving me a firm shove towards the staircase.

“You know that’s not how it works!” I shot back, trying to give her a kick for good measure. She stepped out of the way and nudged me again.

“Go on, prissy boy. I’ll be waiting down here on the nice, safe ground.”

Still grumbling to myself, I put my knee over the railing and started up the rickety, creaking staircase. It rattled under my weight, and I closed my eyes, focusing on taking the next step one after another. About four meters up, a wind whipped past my tail, almost ripping my hat from my head. If my heart had beaten even a little faster, I might have sprinted straight down to the ground and gone to get a megaphone to have that conversation with Swift, but it’s rhythm remained steadfastly calm. I might have been having a short walk to the shops, rather than climbing a gigantic, rusting water tower.

Cracking one eye, I peeked at the ground and shuddered.

Pushing ahead, I tried to make a game of it. Step, step, step. Ten more. Eyes closed again. Step step step. Don’t look down. Step, step, step. Hey, I can see my apartment from... oh, wait, that burned down. Step, step, step...air!

I lifted my hoof one last time and stepped on nothing, lurching forward onto the viewing platform with my eyes wide open. Inching back from the edge, I crawled towards the second stair up to the look-out position. A continuous wind tugged at my coat-tails, not strong enough to blow me off, but definitely a reminder of where I was.

With an effort of will, I raised my head and forced myself to look up. Swift sat there on her side, her shoulders leaning against the water tower and her face buried in her hooves. Her shoulders shook violently, but if she was making any sounds they were torn away by the wind. Climbing the second staircase, I paused and swallowed the vertigo before it could overwhelm me. My partner needed me. That was more important than thoughts of screaming and plummeting for the last five seconds of my life.

Gently, I touched her shoulder. She jerked, frightened, raising her head and staring up at me. The bags under her bloodshot eyes hadn’t improved much since that morning, but she was much more my partner than the mad creature that Big Eddie smacked with a coffee mug that morning.

“S-sir?” She stammered, trying to wipe her eyes with her hooftips.

“Yup... It’s me. No need to call me ‘sir’ anymore.” I chuckled, holding my coat closer against the wind. A few spots of rain were starting to fall and the clouds didn’t look civil.

“W-what? Why?” Her tail fluffed a little bit and she dragged it around, using it to wipe her eyes.

“Well, the day we met I told you that you didn’t need to. Remember?”

“Yes. You’re my superior officer, though. That matters to-”

Before she could get all heartfelt, I interrupted, “This morning I tossed my badge around the Chief’s horn, told her you were section eight, and showed her my flank.”

Swift was so surprised that her wings burst open and she very nearly knocked the both of us off the tower.

“You’ve got to be joking!”

Regaining my balance, I hunkered down and pulled my coat under my butt. “Nope. Unless you want to be stuck in a police psychologist’s office until Celestia needs a walker and cane, this is pretty much our only good solution. Somepony killed me. I don’t intend to let that pass.”

“I...mmm...” She shook herself, running her tongue over her terrifying pearlies. “The Chief wouldn’t let us investigate the death of a relative, even if that relative happened to be yourself, right?”

“Exactly. Now, when you say ‘us’... does that mean you’re on this with me?” I asked.

“I don’t... I don’t know.” Turning away, she pressed her forehead against the water barrel. The cold up there was starting to chill my bones, but seemed not to bother Swift in the least. “How’d you find me?”

“Your grandmare knew where you’d be,” I answered, digging a lolipop that was probably a month old out of one of my pockets, shelling off the paper, and popping it in the corner of my mouth. “Why’d you leave?”

I think if Swift could have flown just then, she might have tossed herself off that water tower just to escape the question. Her expression was one of total dejection.

“I... t-the...” She stuttered, then beat her head against the metal wall a couple of times, sending a dull rumble through the entire structure. “I r-r-remember. I remember watching and feeling your blood on my face. I wanted to stop and help, but you...you were gone so quickly...”

“I recall, yes.” I did my best not to squirm at the memory.

Swift ruffled her wings and began the laborious process of pulling her feathers straight. The wind didn’t make it easy, but it was something most pegasi learned to do from very young. Between tugs at her pinions, she continued. I could tell she was trying to keep her voice calm, but it was less than convincing. “I watched you d-die... and I flew. I was so... so scared, but so angry. I wanted that pony!”

“It was probably the magic-”

“No!” She yanked her head from under her wing. “No, it was me! I wanted him dead! I chased him, and I caught him. I caught him on a cloud. He tried to outfly me, but I was faster!” Her nose was running and she wiped it with one hoof, then wiped the hoof on the rail. “He... he was going to shoot me. I told him to stop and he was going to shoot me... but then... he... he hesitated. Then... I shot him. I aimed, and he had this mask on and I shot him in the face.”

Her lips quivered as more tears threatened, like a cloudy horizon. “I... searched his body.”

“Kid, I saw... Queenie, remember?”

“No! Sir, you let me finish!” She snapped, clenching her frightening detiture.

I held up my hooves, placatingly, “Go on.”

She sank back, and closed her eyes. “I s-searched his body. I pulled off his mask. I-it was... I thought... Sir, d-do you remember my letter from my friend? The one that got me this job?”

“Grape Shot. Lieutenant Grape Shot. Yeah, you told me a story about him and a trainer of yours. I remember.”

“Sir, it was him.” Her entire body was quaking, but somehow, I didn’t think it was the chilly altitude.

“Say again?”

“It was him! Lieutenant Grape Shot! He was the face under the mask!” She blurted, standing, rearing up and putting her hooves on the rail. She looked out at the afternoon sun, barely visible now for the gathering rain storm. “I...everything got really strange after that. I remember feeling something in my mane and taking off the ladybug. Then I flew. I flew until I saw clouds...”

“Wait, no, go back. The pony who shot me... The pony who killed our only direct lead... was a PACT trooper?!”

“Yes! Sir, it was him! I swear!” Drops of rain hit her cheeks, running down her chin like flowing tears. “I-I thought I’d lost my mind. I ran. I wanted to be far away from ponies...where I couldn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t know what was going on and everything inside my head felt mixed up. A couple days later, I was in this alley...somewhere...and he showed up there. He talked to me...talked like we did in flight camp...” She stepped back from the railing and I caught her as she fell, wrapping my coat around her tiny body and holding her to my chest.

“I know, kid. I know.” I held her, my ridiculous little partner, my friend, comforting her as best I could. While I would have liked to be ‘all there’ in that moment to take care of Swift, my brain was racing ahead at its own pace.

A PACT Trooper was my sniper; a brainwashed PACT trooper, most likely created using the same set of magics which had affected my partner. I didn’t care for where that line of logic ended, but I’ve never been prone to denial when the case is in front of me, whether I like the answers I find or not.

Unfortunately, it was going to have to wait. Tempting as storming up to Colonel Broadside’s office and demanding answers was, it probably ended with me taking another trip to the cooler. I ground my teeth against one another, stroking Swift’s mane. She’d quieted, but was still shivering.

I had a few decent leads. The scroll from Cosmo’s basement. The law firm of Umbra, Animus, and Armature. The diary. I needed to know what they meant and there were only a few friendly beings in the city who might tell me. Thankfully, the one I was going to see later on was one of them.

“Kid... look. If you say it was Grape Shot, I’ll take your word that it was.” I took her face in my hooves, lifting her teary cheeks up so I could see her. She didn’t resist. “I’ll tell you again, any time you want to stop, you can stop and come back to the Vivarium. Heck, After Glow would probably teach you to run the Stilettos. It may not be police work, but if I didn’t have this case, I might be inclined to go ask Stella for a job myself. That’s a safe path and if you chose to do that, I couldn’t blame you.”

Swift listened, then shook her head and used one wing to wipe water off my forehead. She seemed to be trying to find the right words to tell me what was on her mind and coming up a bit short. “I-I... mmm... it was... sir...” Pulling at her mane, she huffed frustratedly. “Sir, I tried to find Grape Shot’s body a few days after we fought, but the cloud was feral. It was gone.”

Rising, she held out her hoof to me to help me up. I took it, and stood beside her, keeping my eyes on the horizon so as not to look down and ruin the moment by screaming like a filly.

Swift continued, “I know the safe path, but Daring Do never took the safe path, and neither should I. Sir, somepony shot you. Grape Shot, my friend, shot you. That wasn’t a random shot. Nopony puts a bullet there without meaning to. I need to know why. Nothing I do from now on, no matter what, will matter if I wake up every morning asking myself why my friend killed my partner... and why I killed him.”

I tossed one leg over her neck and grinned.

“Good to hear. I promise, we’ll find out, together. Now, can we get down off this friggin’ tower, please?”

“Can I still call you ‘sir’? We might get our jobs back. Who knows?”

“I’m not gonna stop calling you ‘kid’ anytime soon.”

Leaning over the side, I waved at the yellow spot far down below. She waved back.

Then I threw up.

****

It turns out that apologizing is never the right thing to do when an angry filly is cleaning vomit off of her hooves. Especially if that filly is as violent as my driver.

To think, she used to be worse.

I should have blamed it on Swift.

****

“I swear, Hardy! You got it in my mane!” Taxi complained, wiping her head with a towel with one hoof and clutching the steering wheel with the other.

“Well, now you know what it’s like to be puked on from way up in the air, dammit!” I snapped back, holding my bright purple eye. The pain wasn’t as bad as it had been five minutes ago, but I was still annoyed. Turning to the window, I rolled it down and let the cool rain land on my bruised cheek.

“Sir, I did mean to ask, “ Swift began, rubbing her mane with a second towel as she tried to keep the spikes from getting too damp, “if we’re not going back to the Vivarium, where are we going? I buried my gun over in Sky Town and I need to go get it, but unless we’re regrouping at your apartment-”

“They burned my apartment.”

“What?!” Again, with the wings.

“Yeah, occupational hazard when dealing with mobsters. Don’t worry. I’ve got everything I need right here.” I patted my gun and the seat of the car. “Either way, no, we’re not going back to the Vivarium. I want them off the map and your family safe.”

Taxi frowned into the rear view. “Stella said he would cover our expenses, but I’ve had enough of hotels.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a place in mind. The local culture is very colorful.”

****

“This isn’t what I had in mind, you arse.”

“It’s safe. That’s all I care about. Don’t hit me again.”

“I want you to know the only reason I’m not is because I’m driving.”

“That’s enough for me.”

“Swift, hit him.”

“Argh!”

“Sorry, sir. You deserved it this time.”

“That’s the last time either of you gets to smack me this week, or I’ll put poison joke in your manes while you sleep!”

****

We swung around another pothole, then Taxi swerved to avoid a trash-can which the stiff winds had blown into the street. Swift was busy repairing weeks of neglect to her wings while I counted the bullets in my gun. I only had five bullets left. I wondered where my poor shotgun had ended up. Slip Stitch was probably using it to prop open a door or something.

The alleyways between the housing blocks were getting narrower as the graffiti climbed higher up the walls, measurable by the determination and boredom of the vandals. We drove past a dead rabbit nailed to a lamp post. Further on, a pair of skulls I sincerely hope were plastic dangled from a telephone wire by a thin cord like two shoes tied together. Finally, turning down one more road, we came to a giant eight letter phrase painted in ruddy red across the front of a building.

‘Ever Free.’

Taxi let the cab roll to a stop just shy of the building.

“Hardy, I know we’ve been friends a long time and I did just save your life... again... but I’m re-evaluating that decision as we speak.” She murmured. “You must know they can’t exactly have missed us coming in this way. We might as well have raised a flag.”

“I know what I’m doing. Wait here.” I said, opening the car’s door and stepping into a puddle.

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Taxi replied.

The rain was light, but made the air taste clean even in the dirtiest of the city’s districts.

The street was empty, a single long avenue with nothing on it but a row of buildings on either side that might generously be called ‘ruins.' Warped, bizarre pictures ran up and down the sides of the buildings; pictures of fields of stars and green fire, images of blood pouring out of the ground, vistas of buildings shaped into a foul and decaying mouth.

Despite the apparent emptiness, I knew we weren’t alone. I could feel eyes everywhere, from all directions, watching me with a mixture of curiosity, malice, and uncertainty. Most likely, the only reason I was still on my hooves was that they didn’t know precisely what to make of this development; a cop wandering into their territory without escort or back up. They could afford to wait. At worst, it’d be a body for them to dispose of.

Raising my voice, I called out, “I’m here to see the Aroyo Cyclones! Tell the one they call ‘Wisteria’ that I’m here.”

I waited for several seconds. Nothing moved in the desolate boulevard except a plastic bag that swirled across the street like an urban tumbleweed.

Reaching over, I put one hoof on the window-sill of the cab. Taxi rolled it down and stuck her head out. “Sweets, you got any of those special bon-bons you buy from that place uptown?”

“Bon-bons? You want to eat now?!” She exclaimed.

“Yeah. Is something unusual about that?”

“Erg... fine. You’re insane.” Irritating attacks on my mental health aside, Taxi reached into the glove box and produced a thin cardboard tube with loopy writing on the side. She tipped it over my hoof. Several chocolate balls toppled onto my shoe and I sat back against the side of the car, shoveling a few into my mouth and chewing contentedly.

A faint rush of air was the only warning before six pegasi dropped in a circle around the car and two unicorns popped into existence in flashes of light, their gleaming horns trained on me. Every one of them had a piercing or tattoo of some kind on their faces or necks, some more elaborate than others, but all well into the range considered to make it tough to get jobs outside of ‘bodyguard’ and ‘professional ass-kicker.’

I ate another bon-bon. They really were excellent. Perfectly soft, with a nice creamy center.

“Be dropin’ yer shooter, dead walker!” The foremost unicorn barked. I sucked the chocolate off my toe and put on one of those smiles i’d learned from Taxi that projects total contentment with whatever situation I happen to have found myself in. They have the added bonus of being terribly irritating to anyone in a ten meter radius.

“Mmm, dead walker? I like the sound of that.” I laughed, stroking my gun from hammer to barrel. The unicorn tensed, her horn glowing brighter. “Now then, where’s Wisteria?”

“There be no pony by that name here, dead-”

“No, no, no,” I interrupted, shaking my head in mock disappointment. “You’re supposed to reiterate that I should drop my weapon. Defensiveness just tells me you’re lying. Bring Wisteria out here.”

The unicorn took a step back, then her face pinched together angrily. She was a comely thing, too many piercings, but she had the soft eyes of a soul untainted by death. The girl had never killed somepony in her life; probably why she was on guard duty.

I decided to change tack, “Look, sweet thing. I don’t know where you heard I’d died, but I want to ask you something. Do you think, knowing I’ve died, and knowing I took the King of Ace with me... that you’re qualified to put me down twice?”

She flicked her eyes up at the circling pegasi, each one clutching a small thunderhead, then sideways at her partner; a colt barely her age with a tiny revolver attached to his knee. I could tell she was weighing her options and finding herself unhappy with them. Sitting down, she rubbed her forehead, then lit her horn. It sparkled, then shot a thin blue stream of sparks into the sky.

I chewed another bonbon.

After a few seconds a voice overhead called out, “Good t’ing, Jambalaya! Ye do good!”

From the top of one of the nearby buildings, a shape dropped over the eves, soaring once overhead then swooping down to stand in front of the unicorn, Jambalaya.

The mare was the color of a purple calla lily in full bloom, her body slashed and cut with an assortment of scars that Bake and Boil might have found very attractive. In the afternoon light, she seemed a little heavier than she had been the last I saw her, nearly a month ago. It took me a minute to figure out what had changed since the first time I came this way and she’d threatened to cook me alive. She was pregnant. There was also a marked similarity about the face between the young unicorn and the older pegasus. They were surely related.

“Mama, why we not fryin’ dis dead walker?” Jambalaia demanded.

“We be not stompas, is why. We be Aroyos, an’ Aroyos fly wise. We not killa’s o’good ponies. De Hard Boiled, hero cop, be a good pony says I!”

Jambalaya poked the mare in the chest and growled, “Ye speak of fly wise and ye know what de ancestor say! Ye not supposed ta fly until de foal be comin’!”

“And I say, I be knowin’ my own weight!” The older pony snapped back, before turning to face me. “Ye must be excusin’ my sweet girl. She be a lovely, but still new on de job.”

“It’s fine. I have my own little hassle.” I replied, gesturing towards the back seat of the car. Swift lifted her head, but the windows were closed so I doubted she’d heard me.

“Jamba, would ya be sendin’ deez ones back to dey sight spots? We be safe enough, t’inks I and I.” Wisteria said to the younger mare.

Jambalaya scowled, turning on her heel and signaling for the pegasi to disperse. They flew off in all four directions, disappearing over the roofs. The colt stayed by her side and she gave him a hard stare, but he didn’t so much as budge, studying his hooves with great intensity. I detected a little color in his cheeks.

“Now den... I be Wisteria. I be a little wonderin’ how ye found I and I’s name. I don’t t’ink we was dat friendly, last we be seein’ one anoder.”

“One of your people has loose lips and likes his Zap. He runs the building of that poor filly who died at the High Step.” I answered, stuffing the wrapping from the bonbon in my pocket.

Wisteria made a noise of disapproval in her throat. “Uck, Water Closet... dat pony get lost tryin’ to find he own tail wid a map an’ all fours legs.” She ran one hoof over her belly and exhaled a motherly sigh. “May I be askin’, what ye doin’ here again? I and I cannot say we expected ye back. Most because de ancestors be sayin’ ye walks on de other side. Dey is not often in de wrong.”

I settled my flank on the hood on the cab. I could feel Taxi’s death-glare through the windshield; she was generally the only one allowed to sit there without meeting a hideous end. I counted it payment for punching me.

“Your ancestors are a smart bunch. I’ve found myself unemployed and unhoused. One is handled, but the other is a problem, since until very recently, I was dead too.” I tossed my head towards Taxi. “My driver broke what I’m sure are a dozen laws, a few of them cosmic, to get me on my hooves again. There’s something or someone looking for me and it doesn’t mind working with Jewelers and cops.”

The colt beside Jambalaya made a gagging noise when I said Jewelers. She nipped at his flank; he quieted and I went on. “Point being, I need somewhere to lay my head while I try to find out what’s going on. A place to retreat to. The King of Ace is dead. I’m assuming you Cyclones don’t like leaving your debts unpaid.”

“Aye, ye be a’right about dat. Ancestors say dey last see ye walkin’ into the jewel mountain, de deathly place. Den de King be dead. How den he die?”

“A bullet in the head from his employers after I chased him into a corner. Dead trying to betray the ponies who owned him.” I replied.

“Den he die like he live; stompa. Aye, Hard Boiled, hero cop. I an’ I t’ink we can make ye a place among de Aroyos to lay ye self. I be wantin’ to hear dis story of how ye becomes dead walker.”

Act 2, Chapter 5: Home, Home on the Mange

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 5: Home, Home On The Mange...

What's in a name?

Well, everything, really. At least for ponykind. Names and Special Talents are delicately intertwined, but not in a very straightforward fashion.

The conundrum is that to give a foal a name is to proclaim to the world who that pony is before you have empirically determined anything about them: Most importantly, before you understand their Special Talent. And ponies, unlike griffins, do not have the luxury of hiding behind meaningless frippery like "Gustav" or "Susan."

It is not known whether a name determines a destiny, or vice versa. In a magical land like Equestria, either is plausible, and no study has been concieved that could analyze the effects. Despite the lack of any possible data, however, hopeful naming strategies have evolved over time.

Some, usually families with a family business or tradition, often know approximately how they desire their offspring to progress, and will name them accordingly. Others hedge their bets, and give their foals a lot of wiggle room with a name that could point to a lot of things: "Starsong," "Rose Quartz" or, in the ultimate example of learned-pony name-hedging, "Waveform." Still others have been known to write to the Princesses for assistance in the matter, but the Princesses have been known to delegate this responsibility to potentially uninterested subordinates, as a certain Mr. Pfft Whatever will attest.

Still, it does happen that names and talents mismatch. Ponies can and have had themselves legally renamed when the irony of being an sky-chariot pilot named Terminal Velocity gets to be too much.

Even that is not enough for some ponies, however. Tribal traditions and other social constructs could wind up applying a host of additional names - and even those can have their own, subtle kind of power.

--The Scholar

Stella might have exhibited some brilliant paranoia, but he was an Equestria Games welcoming committee compared to the Aroyos.

The street was so quiet I was soon hoping somepony would drop something or open fire just for a confirmation there was life there besides the five of us: Me, the pregnant Wisteria beside me, Swift and Taxi behind, and Jambalaya bringing up the rear like a sulky shadow. My shodden hoof-falls made the street echo.

It’s not that there were no signs of life, however. For all there was graffiti on every surface, there were signs of hidden life in every door and on every wall.

Symbols were carved into most of the weather-beaten doors. Not one of them had the original paint, though a few were colored with the art of some talented tagger. A few of them had fetishes like the dead rabbit, but most were less grisly. Here and there, the signs were more familiar. I saw an upturned garbage can with a chess board laid across it, the pieces still in place. A child’s ball, bright red, with a yellow sun emblazoned on one side, wallowed in a puddle.

I just wished some of it would bother to show itself; With nopony actually there, it felt like walking through a museum exhibit on the horrors of urban decay.

I was about to ask where we were going when Wisteria stopped abruptly.

We stood in front of what I, at first, thought was just another door on the row of blockhouses, but unlike its neighbors, this one was a perfect, shiny white like it’d recently had a fresh scrubbing. The knocker was shiny bronze and the number ‘7’ above the peephole looked meticulously polished.

“Stand still.” Wisteria ordered. “Let the ancestors be seein’ ye.”

“Ancestors? What, am I going to meet them?”

“Dis be as far as ye go. De ancestors see nopony not born Aroyo. Dat be de rule.”

“I thought they were-”

“Hush! Ye be in de presence! Ye wi’ stand!” she snapped.

I had a sensation of everything around me holding its breath. I felt my temper flare for a second, but it died just as quickly as I reminded myself that I was a guest and these ponies could end me in an instant if they set their minds to it. Turning to the door, I rubbed my hoof on my grey chest fur and waited, watching the peephole.

It was covered, for a moment, then whatever was peering out pulled away, only to be immediately replaced by another, then another, and another.

There was a soft rattle of the doorknob, then a sweet silvery bell rang somewhere nearby.

Wisteria exhaled loudly, wiping her forehead with the back of one knee. She tilted her head at the bag or fetish hanging around her neck, then nodded. “De ancestors say ye stay.”

“That’s... fantastic. Thank you,” I said, half turned towards the door.

“I and I afraid dat... maybe not all,” Wisteria said with some trepidation, patting her bag.

I sat on the sidewalk in front of the white door, my tail slapping against my coat. “You want me to jump through a few hoops? Do a little dance? What?”

“If ye is to be stayin’, dey say ye must have a name.”

“I... had one last time I checked,” I replied, raising one eyebrow.

“Dat be de name ye given by de outside. If ye stay, ye be Aroyo... and given Aroyo name.”

Deciding it was another little test, I let my head drop. “Fine... lay it on me.”

“Oh, Hardy, would you ease up?” Taxi swatted me on the shoulder. “I spent some time with a zebra clan that had a ritual like this. Granted, I ended up something that I think translates to ‘She Who Hikes Her Tail,’ but it’s just a formality.”

“The last ‘formality’ was a big glass of Truth Bloom. That led me to working for Stella. And dying. Don’t forget the dying,” I grumbled.

“Sir, are you sure this is the best place we could stay?” Swift whispered in my ear. “This all seems really sort of... weird.”

“Says Miss Dragon Teeth herself?” I bit back.

My partner stuck her tongue out between two of her fangs before quickly shutting her mouth. “It’s just... what’s wrong with a hotel?”

“Hotels don’t have their own dedicated gangs of street protectors and insular paranoia. I need both of those just now.”

“Oh...”

“It’ll be fine, kid. This isn’t half so bad as it could have been. Keep in mind, we could have ended up staying with Scarlet.”

Swift’s ears fluttered, then lay back against her head. “No way, sir. I’d rather sleep on feral clouds than stay with him.”

“Why’s that?”

“I tried for a little while a couple of years ago. He uses my things without asking,” she complained. “If I left a pair of hoofcuffs laying around, I’d come home to one of his boyfriends chained to the bed.”

“Why did you have hoofcuffs?” Taxi asked, squinting at Swift, who blushed furiously, hiding her face under her wing. “Weren’t you a PACT trainee until six months ago?”

“I-I... um... I... u-used to play pr-pretend I was an o-officer...”

“So you bought actual... wait, you know what? Never mind. Any answers I get to this will either confuse or disturb me,” I said, shaking my head.

“T-thank you, Sir.”

While this conversation was going on, Wisteria was listening to her bag again. She blinked a little, sucking on her tattooed lip.

“You look perplexed. I’ve had enough perplexing things for one day. Can we skip perplexed and get to ‘Place I can lay down’?” I asked.

Wisteria dropped the bag against her chest. “I... I and I not sure what dis means. Dey be sayin’ ye name, but is not a Cyclone name and is not Aroyo.”

“Yeah, Perplexing? We talked about this. No more of that, thank you.”

“De name dey give ye be...‘Cru-sa-der’.”

She said it just like that, sounding out each syllable: Crusader.

That word flailed about in my memory, trying to find something to connect to. It was having a heckova time in the mess of trauma and violence composing my recent thoughts. Somewhere, I’d heard that before. There were the Cutie Mark Crusades, of course, but I was born years after they’d finished, so that didn’t seem relevant. I just couldn’t place it anywhere else. It’d been a long day.

“Alright, so my Aroyo name is Crusader, then?”

“Dat be. De ancestors be very strange some days. Come, Crusada.” Wisteria bowed, then stomped her rear hoof three times. Up and down the street, more bells rang, tinkling prettily on the corner of every building.

All at once, doors up and down the street began to open and creatures of all shapes and sizes flooded out. Neighbors came back into the street to greet one another and shake hooves, or claws, resuming conversations my presence had probably interrupted as though nothing had happened. I noticed two old griffins, their beaks weathered and bent, stepping from the shade of a thin alley to reclaim their game of chess.

There were plenty of curious looks, but with the lockdown apparently called off, most seemed content to accept that we were meant to be there. I wondered if this was mostly by virtue of the fact that we weren’t lying on our backs with smoking fur.

Taxi tapped me on the shoulder. “Hardy, close your mouth. You look like a fish.”

My jaw snapped shut, but not before Wisteria could catch my expression.

“Is de way, in de Skids, Detective Crusada,” the Aroyo explained, holding her hoof an inch above the ground. “De way is be like mouse hiding. Wait out dem what would take de little we have an’ strike when dey back be turned.”

“Sir, it’s... this is like the Heights, right?” Swift asked.

I contemplated that, then flicked one ear back against my head. “I think this is the opposite. Nopony here is trying to live like they’re ‘normal’. This is...something else.”

“Aye, ye be right. We be Aroyo. We be de true Cyclones! We be Ever Free.” Jambalaya declared proudly. “Ye laws be unwelcome. Only law, is law of de Aroyo.”

“Which is?” Taxi asked, lips pursed.

“Don’t be stompa.” Wisteria chuckled. “De Jewelers, dey kill what dey not control. De coppers, dey not protect us. We protect ourselves. We live free.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied, glancing at the roof where one of the pegasi lookouts stood. “You said you had a place for me?”

Something rattled behind me and I turned to see a small gaggle of various species of children standing there on the sidewalk. There were maybe ten, all told. A few ponies, a buffalo, a zebra, and three young griffins. They wore a mix of feathers, bits of shiny garbage tied in their manes, and face-paint laid on an inch thick in imitation of the scars and tattoos sported by nearly every one of the older Aroyo’s guards.

One of the griffin chicks darted forward, and touched me on the chest with one claw, then dashed back to his companions who all started giggling. Wisteria frowned at him. “Ye, little ones! Be off wi’ ye! Deez be our guests!”

The griffin made a rude noise with his tongue, then made to run off. Before he could, Jambalaya levitated a newspaper out of a nearby garbage can, rolled it up, and smacked him across the flank with it.

“An’ be respectin’ ye elders!” Wisteria yelled after as the kids scattered in all directions, squealing and laughing. Swift had a tiny quirk to one side her mouth that couldn’t quite be called a smile, but was certainly better than the haunted look she’d worn since we climbed off that water tower.

Wisteria continued, “Today? Dey learn to write de words dat matter.” She pointed to the group of kids who were following a tan pegasus down the street. The stallion was carrying what looked like a bag of painting tools towards one of the alleys. As I watched, one of the foals asked him a question and he passed her a spray-paint can with a mouth-nozzle on it.

The girl began laboriously spraying the wall with what eventually became an ‘E’, followed by the letters V, E, R, F, R, E, and E. She followed it by flapping her tiny wings and lifting a little distance into the air, flipping upside down and drawing a tiny picture of a cat’s foot.

“What’s dat...err...that?” Taxi bit her tongue at the slip, but our companion didn’t seem bothered.

“Dat be her name, Miss Shining Eyes.”

Taxi stopped in her tracks. “What did you call me?”

Wisteria paused, giving my driver a gentle smile. “Ahhh, yes. De ancestors say ye sees wid shining eyes.”

“Oh... Sorry.” Taxi continued down the sidewalk as she explained, “My mom used to call me ‘Bright Eyes’ back when I was a kid. She said stars shined in them.”

“Dat dey do, Miss. As to ye question, dat be de girl’s sign. Dey what would come after, know dat ‘Cat’s Paw’ marked dere.” Wisteria answered, waving to the foal who raised her spraypaint can high and did a little salute with it.

“But... why teach them to write at all? Will they leave someday?” I inquired.

“Some, dey leave. Dey want life outside de Aroyo and de Skids. Dey is free to go, so long as dey not join de Jeweler stompas. Most stay. Dey want free, we be free.”

****

I’d certainly dragged enough Cyclones in for questioning, though usually fruitlessly. The gang was fractious at best and while they might work together in specific circumstances, there was no central leadership to speak of. You couldn’t properly infiltrate them because, at best, you might disrupt a single operation or nab one truly awful suspect, but after you did the remainder would simply hack off the group which was busted like a gangrenous limb.

The rule was simple.

Get caught, confess, or get convicted and you lost all status as a Cyclone and had to work your way back up from nothing. It was a damnably efficient system for keeping cops out and the truly knowledgeable Cyclones were hardened street creatures.

The Aroyos seemed a more inclusive group than most, but also more deeply insulated from the outside world.

****

“How much territory do you actually control?” I asked, stepping around a pale pink street vendor who seemed to be selling some kind of dolls made of sewn rag.

Wisteria scratched her neck, thinking how best to reply. “De Aroyo not control de street. Do ye control de earth? De sky? Dey be molded, but dey not be owned. Ye wi’ die one dey, and go back to sky and earth.”

“I think he means where do most of you usually live,” Taxi rephrased.

“I and I understands, but de question be... not right.” Our guide patted a passing foal on the head as he rushed towards a group of his friends. “We be inside de street. Aroyos run underneat’. We go de places nopony else go.”

“The sewers?” I tilted my head.

“Under city, we moves where we be pleased to move.”

“Your territory is wherever the city sewers run?” Swift stepped up to ask, her ears perked up.

“We not seek de control de other Cyclones be. Dey come here, dey meet Aroyos in dey homes. Den, dey meet death wid swift wings.” Wisteria gave us a slightly maniacal smile.

“Alright, where are we going then?”

“We be here!” Wisteria turned down a short pathway between two buildings, shoving open a rusting gate. Behind it, a short walk overgrown with weeds led up to a metal reinforced door with a series of heavy-duty locks. Somepony with a sense of humor and a detail brush had painted on a few extra locks just for good measure.

Putting my hoof on the door, I glanced at our guide. “This? I was expecting an apartment someplace.”

“Dis be better. Dis Aroyo safe place for times of trouble. We have many, but dis be mine. Haven’t needed since de King be dead, so it be yours now.” Wisteria turned to the last of our number who was still glowering like a cat that’s had her toys taken away. “Jamba?”

“Mama, do dey have to stay here? De boys and I-” Jambalaya started but her mother interrupted.

“Girl, ye little crew can go find yeself a better place to drink and screw! Ye wi’ hand over de key to de Nest or I wi’ turn ye over I and I’s knee!” Wisteria growled. Her daughter blew air through one side of her mouth, pulling a keyring out of her mane with her magic and levitating it over to the door. Expertly unlocking every one of the locks, she swung the door open on a black, empty space.

Wisteria smiled and hit a switch on the wall just inside, revealing a short, concrete stairway leading down to another metal door, this one with an inset wheel.

“What is this? It looks like some kind of bunker...” Swift murmured, touching the wall and wiping a bit of dust off her hoof.

“Dat it be.” Wisteria agreed. “De Skids be poor, but for d’ose dat run de street, it be de safest of places. Now, ye run wid us...and de ancestors, dey would not see ye die again, Crusada. Ye saved Aroyo lives when ye unmade de King’o’Ace. Dis place be yours, now.” She stepped out of the way, leaving the stairway open. “I and I must be goin’ back and makin’ sure de patrols be on dey routes. Jamba, ye post guard on de rooftop across de street. Make sure dey be watchin’! If any comes, ye ring the inside bell.”

“Yes, mama.” Jambalaya breathed an unhappy moan, then said to Taxi, Swift, and I. “I be watchin’ de t’ree of ye. Ye watch ye steps. De guards wi’ be watchin’ for ye Night Trotter, but don’t be comin’ and goin’ as ye please. Leave by de way ye came and drive ye quiet. If ye must fly, keep below de level of de buildings until ye reach de outskirts.”

“Alright. We’re not looking to make trouble while we’re here and we’ll be out of your fur as quick as it’s feasible,” I assured her, though she didn’t look convinced. Passing me the keys, she shut the rusting gate behind her as both she and Wisteria retreated up the street.

Swift settled on the top step leading down below, scratching under one wing. “Sir, do you think this is... I mean, I know we had to have other options, right?”

“None that I felt perfectly comfortable taking.” I sat down beside her, resting my rear hooves on the lower step. “These Aroyos don’t seem like a much worse lot than Stella’s Stilettos. Sure, a little crazier, but they’re a gang. Gangs don’t form because they like outsiders. We bought this place in blood and if I read Wisteria right, they’ll protect us.”

“But we’re... I mean... shouldn’t we... ugh! This loud voice keeps shouting at me in the back of my head ‘You’re the police!’. Hiding in some... weird bunker feels like giving up.” She used one wing to pat the spot on her leg where her gun would normally have been strapped, then remembered it wasn’t there. “My badge probably isn’t worth the steel it’s printed on right now, though. I left it in Sky Town, with my gun. Darn it. I feel so...exposed. Like there’s nothing safe anymore.”

“I know what you mean.” I set my tail on the step beside me and smoothed some dirt out of it.

She lifted her head slightly. “Sir?”

“Kid, you remember what I told you a month ago at Stella’s?” I asked.

“About... not having my badge, but still being a cop?”

“Yeah, that.”

Swift rolled her eyes. “Sir, you were trying to make me feel better. I know that’s all it was.”

Taxi dropped onto the step opposite me, sitting with Swift between us. “He was, sure. It doesn’t make him any less right, though. Cops are in what they do, not a badge or gun. You want to still be a cop, then you’ve got what you need to do it. Granted, I’d feel more comfortable if you still had your gun.” Her nose drooped. “Not that I can carry my cannon with me anyway.”

“That thing is still in the trunk?!” I exclaimed.

“Did you think I was going to give it back?” she asked, giving me a sideways look.

Before I could start on chewing out my driver, Swift asked, “But, sir...I know we have leads, but are we really the ponies to handle this?”

“Can you think of anypony better?”

“The Princesses?”

“Sure... Go tell the Princesses that you got your brain magicked to turn you into a murderer. Just roll that one around your tongue for a minute. ‘My mind was enchanted by a city-wide conspiracy to do... something.’” I got up and started down the stairs, leaving her sitting there.

“Sir... I know you’re right... but you’re still a real tailhole sometimes.”

“I know, kid. Now, let’s see what this pit they’ve stashed us in is like.”

****

Police safe houses come in various flavors. The nice ones have doors and running water, but most cops never get to stay in the nice ones. I certainly hadn’t. The last time I’d been in one while on a case, I had to clean feces out of a ceiling fan and sleep on the witness.

There’s a good reason for that. The lower end you buy, the more places there are you can potentially hide. Since most tracking magics are tied to a pony or object, they can be broken fairly easily once you know they’re there. There are exceptions, of course, but usually at the point someone is rich enough to buy top of the line magical tracking, they can afford lawyers good enough to make problems disappear without actually killing the witnesses.

Having the anonymity of staying in a real crap-hole is nice for ponies needing to vanish. In no way does that stop it from being a real crap-hole.

Thankfully, the Aroyos and the police were about as far removed from one another as it’s possible for two groups to be.

****

There was a dirty symbol on the wheel. I brushed some of the grit off with the corner of my coat. It said, in tiny stenciled letters, ‘Detrot Municipal Mega-Fauna Shelter.’ then beneath that ‘Warning, Opening Mega-Fauna Shelter Without Alert Is A Crime Punishable by-” and somepony had scratched out whatever the punishment might have been replacing it with a crude picture of two pony figures engaged in some very creative sexual acts.

“Right, then. As expected then,” I grunted, grabbing the wheel in my teeth and wrenching it around as hard as I could. It was on an oiled bearing, so I almost brained myself as it spun around and smacked me in the lower jaw.

Swift caught the crank, then gingerly twisted it until we heard the loud clank of bolts being drawn back. Taxi stepped up as I massaged my jawline, pulling the heavy door open. It was nearly three inches thick and the bolts holding it in place seemed to have runes or glyphs of some kind carved into the ends.

“Sir, this couldn’t be a... a dragon bunker, could it?” Swift asked.

“Probably dates back to the Crusades,” I commented. The space inside was dark, but feeling around the edge of the door I found a switch. Light gems built into the ceiling tiles flickered, then burst into harsh white light that quickly dimmed to a comforting yellow.

“Oh Hardy, this is great!” Taxi gushed, bounding off the stairs.

Great. Great, she said.

I suppose there have been more unlikely places, but it was nothing like I’d had in mind. The bunker’s foyer was a cozy little nest suitable for maybe ten ponies laying next to one another with a hallway behind it that seemed to have rooms off in each direction, each delineated by ragged curtains strung up in the doorway. It showed former occupancy by nearly every species imaginable, though.

There was a couch the color of old newspaper sitting in one corner with a bright green, glass blown hookah almost as tall as myself beside it and a television with a broken screen. Piles of pillows covered the opposite wall almost up to the ceiling and a buffalo peace pipe hung from a hook beside them th a dream-catcher dangling under it. In the middle, a low coffee table was fashioned out of an old plank and stacks what looked like manuals for various home appliances propping up all four corners.

Taxi was off immediately, poking her head into each of the rooms as she darted off deeper into the bunker. Grabbing the hookah in my teeth, I slung it into the overflowing garbage can positioned conveniently beside the door, then made to go after her.

“Sir?” Swift said, bringing me up short. I glanced back to see her still standing in the doorway, scratching one fetlock with her knee and looking at the thick, hoof-woven rugs that covered whatever passed for flooring.

“Kid, what is it? Really, you can lay off the preface. If you want something, just ask.”

Her eyes remained downcast, but she gave another of those half-smiles.

“Can I go get my gun? I’m feeling... kind of naked without it?”

“You feeling safe with a gun?” I queried.

“I... feel safer with it than without, sir.” She shifted her weight from one rear hoof to the other, leaning her flank on the doorframe. “Do you mind?”

“You don’t need my permission to go anywhere, remember?”

Swift used her tongue to dig something that didn’t bear thinking about from between two of her back teeth. “I know, but my judgement feels like it’s not all that good right now.”

“Still worried your brain might still have some hypno-magic somewhere inside it?”

“Y-yes. I’ve been having funny urges since I woke up. Stuff moving too fast near me makes me feel... strange. Excited.” Her eyes wandered up to the skyline briefly, then she hastily amended, ”But, sir, I... I c-could kill somepony just as dead with my combat training, or by kicking a cloud, or by hitting them with my wings hard enough. Not having my gun doesn’t make anypony safer with me.”

“That’s... an unpleasantly sane way of putting that and doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable... but, fine, go on. If you need somepony else’s judgement, here’s your orders; ‘Don’t shoot anypony who isn’t very probably trying to shoot you first’. Just remember what that Wisteria filly said. Stay below the level of the buildings when you leave and when you come back, land and walk.”

She looked noticeably relieved. “Yes, sir.”

As she turned to go back upstairs, I caught her tail in the corner of my mouth for a second, giving it a gentle tug and forcing her to pause again. She looked back, waiting silently for whatever I might say to her. It was a sad sight. A month ago, she’d been so full of life. Seeing her like that was breaking my heart. Maybe it wasn’t original, but I decided it didn’t matter if those feelings were from some phantom of the original organ or the specter in the replacement.

“Kid, I’m going to say this and you consider this an order, too. Stop thinking about it. Grape Shot was dead the second he pulled the trigger on me. His death wasn’t your responsibility.”

Swift wilted a little and put her cheek against the concrete wall beside the door. “Is it that obvious, sir?”

“Yes, yes, it is,” I said, putting my hooves on either of her slim shoulders. Her breath caught in the back of her throat, but she swallowed it firmly along with what might have easily developed into another emotional stormburst.

“Swift...Whoever cast that spell on Grape Shot killed your friend. He was just a bullet in a clip to them.”

Her back stiffened. “Sir, I pulled the trigger.”

“If you hadn't he would have.” Pulling her around with one leg, I looked into her watery, pink eyes. “You’d be somewhere dead on a cloud, your brains all over some roof-top, and he’d still be killing for whoever enchanted him. They fried his brain, kid. I’m pretty sure whatever was left of your friend stopped him from capping you just long enough to save your life... and maybe his soul.”

Her expression didn’t change, though after a moment, she relaxed a hair. “Yes, sir.”

“Now go get your gun.” I bobbed my head towards the open door at the top of the stairs. “We’ll be waiting for you to get back. Then we’re going to go see somepony who might have some answers. ”

Spreading her wings, Swift leapt off the bottom step and was out the door in a blast of feathers, soaring off down the street on a low thermal. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, and rubbed the soft layer of skin over top of the socket on my chest, watching her go. I felt suddenly, very old.

My partner. My poor, sweet partner. The kid needed time to relax and process the month’s events. I wished I could give it to her. Detrot is not merciful to ponies who lay down to rest when the race is still being run.

A draft on my neck made me shiver, and I thought for a moment I smelled gun-metal and dark coffee. Someplace in my distressed sub-conscious, Juniper was laughing his ass off.

“Hardy, you’ve got to come see this! They’ve got a little kitchen and everything!” Taxi called from down the hall.

****

I’d been born a few years after the end of the war and still remembered the ‘drills’ they were running everypony through back then. We hadn’t been lucky enough to get ourselves a local dragon shelter, but most ponies with enough money to afford a house could at least buy some magical reinforcement on their basements that would probably not have stopped an especially determined draconic attacker, but could keep you alive in the event of a fly-by.

During the drills, a siren would sound all up and down the street and everypony in the house had to climb down into the basement, seal the doors shut, and shut down all arcano-electric or gem based power to the building. I remember once, during one of those drills, I’d brought down a shadow projector with a gem inside it. My father was furious, although ‘furious’ means different things to different ponies. In the case of Hard Boiled Senior, it meant a trip to a veteran’s home. For the next month, every one of my weekends I spent reading stories and sitting with ponies who’d lost limbs to dragon fire.

It wasn’t the punishment, nor his anger, that really hurt, though. It was remembering the frightened look on his face when the siren sounded and he saw me clutching that little glowing gemstone. It was knowing, if a real dragon had felt the magic from that stone , he might have killed my mother and left my dad all alone. I know how unlikely that sort of thing is, but the years after the war were a bit of a hysterical time.

I never hated dragons, but then, dragons weren’t real to me like they were to him.

After all, the only thing I knew about how my grandpa died was that it was ‘in a fire,' but at the time, nopony had ever said it was a building that burned.

****

The bunker was larger than I’d thought it was going to be, but further down the central hallway we came to a second metal vault door hammered into the concrete. After running through the entire keychain, we determined that it was locked with a key Jambalaya hadn’t seen fit to give me.

Aside whatever might have been behind that door, there were several chambers, each with a closet sized bathroom, sprinkler system and grooves on the floor where something had been bolted at one time. I assumed it was probably the original beds. Most had a mix of cast-off furniture, reconstituted junk, and hoof-crafts. Guests or not, I decided to bin most of it.

“This place is perfect!” Taxi squealed as she heated a can of scavenged baked beans over a little stove, adding some shallots and part of an onion that’d been hours from going bad when she found it in the bottom of the the mini-fridge somepony had dragged down there.

“It smells like every drug I think I’ve ever seen and a few I think were invented right here,” I groaned, clutching a broom in one hoof as I swept ashes off one of the rugs into a dustpan that’d had its own layer of dust when I dug it out of a janitor’s closet behind a room which had been used, at one point, for storing cots. Somepony had converted it into an impromptu one-table poker pit.

“Shush! I know we won’t be staying here long. Just let me have my dreams, okay? I’d love to fix this place up. I’d like to see somepony try to rob this!”

Nothing, it seemed, would spoil my driver’s good mood. I guess she deserved it. She’d gotten me back, charming soul of wit and virtue that I am.

****

“Sweets, how did somepony get an entire grilled cheese sandwich down the radiator?”

I shouted this from one of the ‘bedrooms,’ though calling it that was being very very kind. The ‘beds’ seemed to be home-made bean-bag chairs stuffed with pegasus plumage and shed buffalo fur; very comfortable, but it made me shiver to think what creatures had dedicated their collected biological detritus to the project and over how long.

“You would be amazed what you can do on enough Zap,” Taxi called back. “I once drank an entire half-gallon of grape juice and woke up on top of a telephone pole with a squirrel trying to stuff nuts in my ear. Anyway, could you find some plates or bowls for us to eat out of?”

****

It was several hours later, well into the evening, and our little ‘home’ was starting to take shape. Taxi and I had dedicated most of those hours to making the place livable. We didn’t know how long we’d be there and it never hurts to know your place of retreat inside and out. For all of my protestations about needing to get to the Don, I needed the rest as well.

Swift returned an hour after she’d left, panting, armed, and holding a dead pigeon in her teeth as she stood on the top of the stairs. She said something about having an insatiable urge to chase the damn thing which was why she’d been gone so long, but before I could drag any answers out of her regarding that, Taxi shoved her back out onto the street and told her not to come back until she’d found herself a toothbrush and some floss.

Twenty minutes later my driver was still grumbling something about ‘Side effects, indeed,’ while the three of us ate an improvised, but surprisingly tasty meal.

Sitting together, around that low table in the dimly lit bunker, I felt a thing that I hadn’t since well before my death.

Comfortable.

I was comfortable.

How had I managed that? I supposed the impenetrable magical fortification over my head might have helped, but was that really all that I needed?

I’m sure part of it had to do with the job. I remembered Taxi’s hare-brained suggestion back before it all started about going ‘running with the Buffalo’ with her or something like that. At the time, it’d sounded crazy, but something about Cosmo’s ledger, full of the vast sins of my city which I could never touch so long as I remained a member of the Detrot police establishment, had changed all of that.

Maybe I’d changed too, but I suspected it was the job that was different. I might have gone back and begged Jade to let me back onto the force. She might even have done it, but the job would have been, from then on, to turn a series of blind eyes to every sin committed by the powerful in my city.

It was madness, but the prenatal thoughts simmering down in the ancient, neglected part of my brain that still listened to animal intuition were telling me that I had two paths; one of them lead to my death and the other, probably to my death, but with a slim, incidental hope of maybe doing something worthwhile before it came.

PACT, the Detrot Police Department, the Jewelers.

All that power vested into all those institutions hung over my head like a mountain and I was a little diamond dog deep in the earth, digging through the dirt. A sane pony would have followed Taxi out onto the plains and smoked the finest Zap and sat in a tent, content to stay as far from the machinations of monsters as possible.

Still, knowing all of that, there was the voice.

It spoke to me, a constant whisper.

Shake the mountain, the voice said.

I intended to try.

****

“Erg...” Swift patted her belly with one leg. “I think I ate too much.”

“I told you four plates of that was too much...” Taxi scolded, tossing her paper plate into the garbage.

“I don’t see why couldn’t I have the pigeon... I caught it!”

“Because... just... ugh, Hardy, help me here!”

“Hey, she wants to eat the pigeon, I say she can eat the pigeon so long as I don’t have to watch.”

Act 2, Chapter 6: All Quiet in the Library

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 6: All Quiet In The Library

When History judges Celestia's reign amidst the monster attacks and lunar relocation controversies, one of the marks strongly in her favor will be that she understood the positive effects of knowledge and learning. She went to great lengths to keep Equestria's libraries open and free to the public, even going so far as to put them in the care of some of her most highly regarded advisors.

It is unfortunate that many ponies do not choose to avail themselves of such knowledge, except in emergencies; More than one librarian has been flummoxed by time-sensitive requests to cross-reference "Grain Thresher" and "That pink nubbly thing what supposed to be in Granny's torso."

It can be more unfortunate, however, when they do avail themselves of certain kinds of knowledge; One may recall the story of Second Chance, the unicorn foal who, distraught over the passing of his parakeet, got a hold of an occult tome and inadvertently reanimated all the pets who had ever died on his block. Anypony who has ever been distressed by a dog attempting to mate with his or her foreleg has likely not had the experience of being accosted so by a dog missing much of its flesh.

Incidentally, Second Chance maintains a place of prominence in the Celestial Register for having Equestria's most disturbing cutie mark.

Because of how directly and dramatically knowledge can translate into power, such incidents forced Celestia to put barriers in front of certain kind of knowledge; Academic or government credentials are often necessary to access high-security and/or unsavory spellcraft.

Naturally, such barriers led to a black market in forbidden occult data, but never let it be said that the black market completely lacks the awareness that a tentacular apocalypse would be bad for the underground trade. To prevent said trade from being washed away by a sea of fire, sparkles, or extradimensional horrors, they had developed their own forms of self-regulation.

-The Scholar.

“Sir, I am entirely uncomfortable with this.”

“You want comfortable, you go back and give Jade your resume. Be prepared to throw yourself at her hooves and give them a big ol' tongue bath. Otherwise, quit complaining.”

“But... why do I have to leave my gun! I don’t want to leave my gun! I like my gun! I just got it back, along with my sanity, and I don’t want to give up either one again!”

“Kid, the Archivist knows me, but he doesn’t know you and he doesn’t like ponies he doesn’t know, especially when they’re armed. Don’t worry. We introduce you and he’ll warm up to you quick. Besides, I’m leaving my bullets here, but he won’t let you in carrying a piece if he doesn’t know you, loaded or not.”

“You weren’t this nice with Miss Stella...”

“I didn’t know the lizard. I know the Don. When Juniper died, he sent me a bottle of scotch and some roses. Besides, unless you want that cannon to melt on your leg, you don’t want to try to take it into the Archive without his permission. They’ve got magical artifacts on every door that will turn unauthorized mechanical weapons into super-heated goo.”

“What about yours?”

“It’s a magical weapon. They’ve got other ways of dealing with ponies who get frisky with magic. Now, this isn’t a discussion. Put your gun in the glove box.”

“But I just got it back!”

“It’s either this, or I’ll go buy you a coffee and you can sit there and never meet the pony who managed to resurrect me from the dead. You’ll wonder, every day, just what interesting things he might have told you about your little dental issues and the PACT... that you missed. It’ll hang in the back of your mind, an eternal question, squatting in your brain forever-”

“Sir, that’s not fair!”

“Fair? Really? You want to talk to me about what’s fair?”

“...right ...sorry, sir...”

****

The Library Of The Magnificent Mind.

Most ponies thought of it as an aspirational title, but few realized that Magnificent Mind had been the architect’s name. I knew this only because I did an eighth grade project in which I had to pick a building in Detrot and write up its history. At the time, I think I was hoping for suck-up points with the teacher since I knew at least nine of my fellow class-mates were writing histories of the Morgue, in hopes of a class trip and some free ice-cream.

Magnificent Mind, born ‘Cheese Doodle’ before he changed it for professional purposes, was a bonafide genius and The Detrot Tenth Librum Publicum was his masterpiece. Sadly, his grasp of economics - or, for that matter, reality - never quite measured up to his grasp of architecture.

While feasibility, insanity, and arrogance all worked against Magnificent Mind, in the end it was money that left the last library built in Detrot, since the start of the war, in its sad final condition. Most ponies weren’t even aware Detrot had a ‘Tenth Archive Librum Publicum’, as the plaque on the door called it.

I certainly wasn’t when I started that project all those years ago. It did earn me a ‘B.’

****

“Sir, I... heard of these ‘Archivists’ in the police academy. Aren’t they criminals?” Swift asked, shutting the car door as she got out.

“Technically, yes.”

“So why isn’t there anypony trying to arrest them?”

“You mean other than the Academy, Customs officials, the Essy Office now and then, and every major illegal magical contraband task force Detrot PD has ever assembled?” I kicked a pebble off the curb, looking up at the hideous building hanging over us. “The Don is real careful and real smart. He’d give Stella a run for his scaly money if he actually cared about expanding his empire.”

“I knew about him from my days in Organized Crime, but you sound like you’re old buddies. How did that happen?” Taxi asked, standing on her rear hooves and adjusting her saddlebag so it hid her scars more completely.

“Juniper and I got on the case of some smugglers who were moving timber-wolf wood across borders and reassembling it to harass some local farmers. They’d killed a couple and made it look like timber-wolf attacks, but the Don came to us when he heard about the deaths. He’d helped them move the wood,” I explained.

“But... you can’t... I mean, everypony knows they’re here! How can all of those groups want to arrest them and-” Swift sputtered.

“Kid, when I say The Don is smart, I don’t just mean ‘smart’. Those groups might want to arrest the Archivists, but there’s a general consensus that it would be a very very bad idea to actually do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, every time somepony finds something big, magical, and nasty, they take it to the Academy... right?”

“I guess so. I don’t really know. What does that have to do with these smugglers?” Swift looked up at the Archive with a bit of disgust.

“Well, criminals find magical things, too. Sometimes they want to sell them, sometimes they want to steal them, sometimes they want to destroy them... Hell, sometimes they don’t know what the damn things are, and if they’re going to catastrophically explode or make waffles. They can't take it to the Academy without a bunch of inconvenient questions on record, so either they have to let something possibly valuable go un-looked at, or have to start poking it and hope it does something. It’s a problem they used to solve by having underlings or loan shark debtors push the buttons firsthand in an abandoned warehouse or decaying slum, and, let’s face it, the testers weren’t always treated to a delicious breakfast.” Swift grimaced. I continued. “In short, ponies who can’t really go to the major institutions within Detrot need someplace to go that’s safe, discreet, and smarter than they are. That’s where The Don comes in.”

“So he just gives criminals information on artifacts?”

“Not so much. First, he charges. Second, he filters everything. If somepony finds one of Equestria’s truly dangerous magics, he buys it from them and stores it here, in the Archive... or... well, maybe not here, here, but he has places. If they refuse... Well, let’s just say the DPD has gotten its share of anonymous tips about dangerous artifacts.”

Swift pursed her lips, scrunching up her face as she worked through the reasoning. “That’s why they don’t get arrested? Criminals bring magical things here and the ‘Don’ takes them and makes sure they don’t have to mess with them to find out what they do?”

“Exactly. Some lower-rent parts of Detrot would be smoking purple craters several times over if it weren’t for him.”

“Okay, I... guess I understand. I... well, sir... I’m just nervous. Is this building safe?” She wanted to know as she peered up at the structure in front of us.

“Safe is a relative term, kid. The guy who built this place was an idiot. Brilliant, but pants-on-head stupid.”

“How about safe relative to a school haunted by an enchanted boiler? It looks like somepony threw tinker toys into a big glob of peanut butter...”

Swift, for all the description might have lacked lingual flair, wasn’t wrong.

Built between two industrial estates only twenty or so blocks down from Sunny Days Juvenile Foster Care, Detrot’s tenth public library wasn’t a looker. I guess it’s hard to be beautiful with only half your skin.

Many ponies had tried to describe the building when it was first opened to the public and their attempts always came back around to different, synonymous terms for ‘poop with stuff in it.' It sat on the street like a big dog-dropping. The only concessions to style or taste were the expensive glass revolving doors positioned about halfway across the front.

“The exterior isn’t finished. The Don likes it like that, for some reason,” Taxi said, arming the car’s security system. We started up the stairs to the revolving doors at the front of the building.

“I don’t know much about construction, but I’m pretty sure you build the ground floor walls before you start designing the lobby!” Swift protested.

“Like I said, the architect was a genius, but his favorite childhood drink was probably drain cleaner."

****

The revolving doors squealed on unoiled bearings as I pushed through and Swift came in behind, with Taxi loosely trailing.

An itch on my flank had begun to bother me. Yes, my cutie mark was telling me there was Injustice ahoof - but telling me that in what was, whatever else, a den of criminal activity was kind of like having a smoke alarm over a dragon's nest. Not exactly helpful. I discreetly tried to scratch it on one edge of the doorframe. Fortunately, Swift's eyes were elsewhere.

"That's impossible!" Swift squeaked as she glanced around the library's lobby.

The Archive stretched out before us in all directions like a bibliophile’s dream writ large. Row upon row of wooden shelves, lit by enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the domed ceilings. Brilliant frescoes stretched out along the edges of the walls, dipping down all the way to the carpets, outlining some of the greatest moments of Equestrian history. Not a speck of dust hung in the air, nor a hint of humidity. It was a welcome change from Stella’s steamy grotto, but it was also, as Swift said, quite impossible.

“If it helps, think of it as an illusion.” I murmured to my partner.

“But, Sir! It can’t be! This... this isn’t illusion magic! There’s no fragmentation at the edges of vision! No spatial distortions! It’s...it’s really bigger on the inside!” she complained, pounding both front hooves on the carpet as though demanding the world explain itself.

I shrugged, sweeping one leg towards the ceiling to encompass the beautiful images and the vast shelves of endless books. “The story goes that nopony told the architect you can’t build a bigger building inside of a smaller one... so he just sort of... did. Look, it’s really best not think on it too hard. You just got your mind back in some kind of order and trying to get your head around this place would probably send you off the deep end again.”

My partner looked like she was about to say something else but was interrupted by my driver, and a hard thump on the flank.

Swift’s spatial dilemma had left her in a halt half-way out of the pony-sized cell, blocking it with her stunned, hoof-waving frame; While not all that heavy, she provided more than enough unexpected inertia to stop the door and make Taxi hit her nose squarely on the pane, an event punctuated by more of Taxi’s foreign invective.

"That's the second time in a month some flying damn thing has busted my damn nose! First that goddess-damned ball in the locker room at the school and now-” Taxi snarled, forcing the revolving door open with both hooves.

“Sorry, sorry!” Swift yelped, leaping backwards from my irate friend.

“Oh, you will be sorry when I get my hooves on you!” Taxi lunged for her and my partner dodged backwards, bumping heavily into a chest-high stack of encyclopedias.

“Sweets! Knock it off! It was an acciden-” I started. I didn’t have the opportunity to finish.

The change was sudden and altogether distressing.

All sound vanished in an instant. My two companions paused in their melee, Swift half-way through a take-down as Taxi started into one of her combat katas. My driver opened her mouth and said... something, then Swift held her hoof up to her ear. Taxi shook her head and pointed to her muzzle.

I couldn’t even hear my own heart beat. Quiet is one thing, but that was a sort of silence that made me think very uncomfortably of being back in the morgue’s cooler.

Surrounding us on all sides, a bubble of distorted light clung to each of us. Raising my leg, I waved it back and forth in front of my face a few times. I turned one way, then the other, I searched for the source of the strange phenomena. It took me a minute to find it.

Standing some distance away between two long rows of books, a young unicorn stallion, perhaps a few years Swift’s senior, was glowering at the three of us. He wore a tiny pair of silver rimmed glasses with circular lenses sitting so far down his nose I was surprised they didn’t drop onto the book of ‘Ancient Equestrian Poetry’ floating in front of his chin.

His royal blue features were gaunt, almost emaciated, with prominent cheekbones and a mane cut that spilled over his shoulders in a smooth, blonde wave. He could be called handsome, though something about his appearance reminded me of Taxi’s carefully cultivated air of personal negligence. His thin vest and pocket watch chain seemed like they’d be more at home on a noble of some kind, but he wore a zebra bangle around his left forelock.

His face was pinched with irritation as he lifted one leg up at a sign hanging between two bookshelves. It said ‘Shhh...’ in simple block letters.

Taxi, Swift, and I peered at one another, then back at the librarian. I gave him an exaggerated nod.

Sound returned in a rush and my head momentarily ached; even my own breathing felt very loud. Swift clenched her teeth tightly, then shook her head like a bee had buzzed right into her ear.

The librarian backed up, turning to disappear into the stacks again. I hurried over and said, in a low voice, “Excuse me... we’re here to see The Archivist.”

Cocking his head, the stallion seemed to consider this, then pushed his spectacles higher on his nose and beckoned us to follow. I trotted after him as he turned down a row of books. Reaching the end, I caught a glimpse of his cutie-mark, a silver bell with a crack up the middle of it, vanishing around the corner.

He didn’t seem to be galloping, but as my companions and I followed him deeper into the stacks, I started to lose track and have to pick up speed. The carpets muffled hoof-falls and the eerie emptiness of all those rows of books seemed to swallow us. A few times as we moved further, I saw a few ponies, and several zebras, all reading quietly in various nooks and crannies, but by and large, the place seemed almost deserted. We passed a closed museum case full of books and Swift stopped to stare at it, but Taxi gave her a little push to keep her moving. Eventually we were pounding down the carpets at something close to top speed.

It was the tenth time I’d lost sight of the librarian, only see his long mane flashing around the end of a pile of books, when I felt a mouth on my tail, yanking me to a halt. Taxi was breathing hard and even Swift’s sides were heaving just a little.

“Hardy... haah... how are you... not tired?” my driver panted. “We’ve been running for the last... haah... fifteen minutes!”

I looked down at myself, then shook my head. I didn’t feel tired. I wasn’t even sweating. In fact, now she mentioned it, I’d completely lost track of how long we’d been going. “No idea, but I get the distinct impression we’re being screwed with.”

“W-what do you mean, Sir?” Swift asked, putting a hoof on her chest.

I pointed to one of the signs overhead. “We’ve passed Romantic Historical Comedic Fictions already. Three times.”

“Awww, no way. It’s barely as big as the front of the Vivarium outside! T-this place can’t be that big...” Swift whimpered. “It’s-”

“Yeah, yeah, impossible. You said that already.” Raising my voice, I shouted over the towering bookcases, “Don Tome, you righteous bastard! It’s Hard Boiled! You asked to see me, dammit!”

“No need to yell, Detective. I am right here.”

I whirled, almost smacking Swift across the nose with my tail. She fell onto her behind as Taxi reared half into a fighting stance, both front hooves in the air, standing on one rear leg.

Don Tome, The Archivist, Librarian To The Underworld, sat in an enormous, high backed armchair, set before a roaring fire that we’d somehow missed when we’d first come this way. A dusty book was propped across his foreknees and his satin suit draped loosely on his wasted frame. A glass of milk and plate of cookies, one with a bite out of it, sat on a table beside him. The zebra’s ageless eyes twinkled with amusement.

He might have been only a little older than myself, or he might have been three times my age. His joints didn’t creak when he moved, but when he did it was with a deliberation that only comes from long years.

Closing his book, he laid it on the tea table and adjusted one of the heavy golden rings dragging down both of his ear-lobes. Tugging out a pocket watch, he checked it, then snapped it shut smartly and shoved it back into his vest pocket.

"You're just on time," he murmured in a voice that sounded like rustling parchment. Waving his dark hoof, he gestured towards three smaller seats arrayed beside him. “Please, sit. We have many things to discuss and it is my bed time soon.”

“Good to see you, Tome,” I said, stepping forward and offering him my hoof, which he took and gave a little shake. I did my best to tamp down my annoyance at the little game we’d just been unwilling participants in. “What’s with the wild goose chase?”

The Don raised his chin and his smile widened. “How else would you have been on time?” He chuckled, his laughter like old leaves blowing in the wind. “I jest. My son is... very protective of me, and lately there have been some... issues... which have caused me no end of consternation. My security is tight at the moment.”

“I see... so what’s this little meeting going to cost me?” I said, mentally filing away the comment about his son. “I know you, Tome. Nothing comes free.” I patted my chest with one leg. “I owe you one for getting me on my hooves, but you know my policies on ‘favors’. There are limits.”

“We... heh... we’ll get to that, Detective. I believe you’ll find my terms most acceptable, and relatively inexpensive,” he replied, picking up one of his cookies, studying it briefly, then taking a ginger bite. Laying it back on the plate, he pointed at Swift with his hooftip. “Come here, little one. Sit beside me. It is very unusual that a pegasus deigns to come into my library.”

Swift, whom I hadn’t been paying attention to, had been busily examining some of the books on the shelf beside her. She lifted her head, realizing she was being addressed. “I... I’m sorry, what did you say? I was just-”

“It is fine, dear child. I was just asking you to come sit with me,” he repeated, ushering her over.

My partner’s face brightened, then she remembered precisely who and what she was talking to. She drew away slightly. I planted one hoof on her rear and gave her a light push. “Go on, kid. He doesn’t bite. Ponies come in all flavors on both sides of the law. Some better than others. You’re safe enough here.”

She gave me an uncertain look, then tried to smile as she trotted over and pulled herself onto the seat nearest the Don.

“You like my collection?” the old zebra asked with an expression like a proud grandfather bragging about his children.

“It’s... amazing!" Swift exclaimed, her nervousness momentarily forgotten and her excitement raising her right up onto the tips of her hooves. "You have all of Love And Horseshoes! Even some I haven’t read yet! I could spend forever in here!”

“Ahhh, I am always pleased to have a fellow reader here. We get so few who are on anything but... a less savory business. I assume my friend, the Detective, has told you about me, my young officer of the law? May I know your name?”

My partner’s enthusiasm was very quickly dampened. “Yes, sir. I’m, Swift. I... mmm... I’m still learning. I’m... not an officer of the law right now. I don’t even have my badge...”

“You may not be working for the police department, but believe me, if you are with that stallion over there, you are an officer of the law in every way that matters.” The Don chuckled, flipping his hoof in my direction. He sobered quickly. “Now, why don’t you tell me precisely what is wrong with your jaw?”

Swift’s ears flatten against her head and she almost fell off the chair. “What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with-”

The Don, with surprising speed for a pony his age, picked up one of his cookies and flung it at her. I expected her to duck or shy away, a typical equine response to something flying at your face, but Swift snapped the cookie out of mid-air with frightening accuracy, her wolfen teeth turning it into a fountain of crumbs.

“Ahhh... most interesting,” the zebra murmured.

Realizing what she’d done, my partner quickly pulled her lips shut. I rested my face on my hoof. “That particular cat was coming out of the bag eventually anyway. I’d hoped I could get some answers first, though.”

“How’d you know?” Swift asked, munching the remains of the cookie self-consciously.

“I have been spying on you since you came into my library. You are very carefully keeping your mouth closed where anypony can see you,” the Don answered with an indulgent grin.

“You’ve been watching us?!” she squeaked.

“But of course. I know the others; Hard Boiled is a good pony, and Miss Taxi... well, she means well. You, however,... are a fresh enigma. I am aware that, of recent, you had some hoof in the demise of the pony known as ‘King Cosmo.’ Miss Taxi gave me that particular story, though there are some parts I believe only you can fill in. May I see your teeth, child?”

I crawled onto the chair on the Don’s other side and helped myself to one of his cookies. “Go on and show him, kid. Whatever he has to say can only help. We’ve got time.”

Reluctantly, Swift used one toe to pull back her lips on one side, then the other. Adjusting his spectacles, the Don leaned forward. He reminded me of an old pediatrician I’d once had, who was capable of putting both patients and parents at their ease. I guess that’s a skill you develop when you work with high magics that can level entire city blocks if somepony gets panicky with them.

“Most... interesting.” Tome pulled off his glasses and laid them on top of his book as he sat back in his large, comfortable chair, sipping his milk. He bowed his head and seemed to sink into a deep meditative contemplation. He was so still that after a minute, I wasn’t sure if he was still meditating or if he’d simply fallen asleep, so I gently nudged his leg. Without moving, he grumbled, “Patience is going to be one of your virtues, Detective Boiled, even if the cosmos has to hammer it into you with nail and maul.”

“That might be,” I remarked, “but I know it doesn’t take you that long to run through what you know, vast as that might be. You’re just deciding on a price.”

He sighed, brushing his hooftip lovingly over the book he’d been reading. “Ponies are so much more difficult than books. I wish, sincerely, that I didn’t need to ask for remuneration and that the knowledge would be its own reward. However, this isn’t the world we live in. So, to that end, both of you will owe me and I will collect here, today... but first, I will at least give you my thoughts, once I have heard your story. Agreed?”

Swift glanced at me and I shrugged. “Hey, we’re here. I can’t think of anywhere else we might get information on our little issue.”

My partner turned back to the Don and lifted her leg, which he lightly touched with his own. “Agreed,” she whispered.

“Tell me, then, what do you know about how you acquired those beautiful dentata?”

“I... don’t know much of anything,” she began, hesitantly. “There was a spell on me. It made me want meat. I still want meat. It made me want to follow orders. Everything over the last month is sort of... fuzzy, like I was drunk. It’s gone... and I just feel kind of numb.”

“Numb,” the Don nodded to himself, then said, “You’re still in shock, child. That’s good, for now. Please, do go on.”

“Tell him about Grape Shot,” I said. Taxi looked curious. I realized neither of us had thought to inform her of that particular wrinkle.

“Sir, I... I don’t think that’s really-”

Pressing my hoof to her chest, I gave her a hard look. There was terrible fear in those wide, blue eyes. “Kid, you want to know why all of this happened, we need that information. I know you’re scared... but this is the safest place I know of, Stella’s place included. No-one here thinks you’re weak.”

“Y-yes, sir.” She hung her head, pressing her hoof against the cheerful looking rabbit emblazoned on her tactical vest’s chestplate for strength. After several seconds, she raised her eyes and spoke directly to the Don, “Mister Tome... I used to be a trainee with the PACT. Even... even before that I had a friend I went to Flight Camp with. We were both in PACT training together. He was amazing.” Tears started to gather at the sides of her eyes as Swift continued but the ancient zebra just waited as she inhaled a few times, fighting them back, “I... I washed out. I’m... I’m too small. My friend stayed in and... and he became a lieutenant inside a month. His... his name was Grape Shot. He was a strong pony. He was smart and fast and he worked so hard!”

“He sounds like quite the good soul,” Tome commented.

“He was. When a cockatrice got free in training, he leaped in front of it when it came after me and got turned to stone instead! I chased it down and... made it unstone him and everyone else, but he was the real hero... and the stupid newspapers only wanted to talk to me!” My partner’s breathing was getting heavier as she tried to keep control of herself.

“I did read an article about that, not so long ago, I believe. If I remember correctly, you kicked a cockatrice until it cried, child. I don’t believe you should sell that short,” the Don said, his lips sweeping into a pleasant smile.

Swift shook her head, her tears flowing freely now, dripping onto her legs. “It... it was him, though. He gave me the courage, every time, in Flight School and then again... when he leapt in front of that cockatrice.”

Reaching out, the zebra rested his hoof over top of Swift’s. “I can’t believe I am going to say this, because I strive to avoid tropes of cheap novellas, but the courage was yours and the actions were yours. Your friend just gave you a reason to be brave.”

“I... sir... when we were fighting the King of Ace... somepony shot Hardy.” Her shoulders shook with emotion. “I chased him and I caught him. He was wearing a g-gas mask. He...he...started to shoot me. I stopped. I hesitated, darn me...and he hesitated. Then I fired my gun. I killed the one who shot my partner. It was right, wasn’t it?” Her voice had risen to borderline hysteria.

“It is always right to protect yourself or your friends, Officer Swift.” The Don said in a kind voice.

Swift was gasping now, her sides spasming as the pain started to win. “I-I t-took off his... his gas mask. T-t-the p-pony I k-killed was... was... was Grape Shot!”

She buried her face against the seatcover and covered her head with both shaking wings.

Taxi moved over to her side and put one leg around her. I exhaled, moving my chair closer and putting my knee over her neck. I’m a damn marshmallow where crying fillies are concerned, but I was surprised to see the Don reach over and gently rest his hoof on my partner’s shoulder.

“I see...” was all the old zebra said. No judgement. No condemnation. Just quiet acceptance of the facts. Ten years since I’d first met him and every time I came back to his softly snapping fire in the warm little alcove someplace in the endless repository of knowledge, I asked myself why the heavens would see fit to put us on opposing sides. I did tend look for father figures in all the wrong places after I'd lost my real one, and Don Tome was nothing if not fatherly.

For some moments, we all sat in silence as Swift composed herself. A package of tissues appeared from somewhere, lying on the Don’s night stand. I hadn’t seen the deliverer come or go, but Tome just picked up the packet, tore it open, and began lightly blotting my partner’s face. She hiccuped a few times, then held her breath until they went away before gently taking the tissue from him and using it to wipe her eyes.

“Sorry...”

“No need to apologize, child. Old stripes like myself are used to tears. A long life will have many and the young deserve the chance to cry when the world is dark,” he said, comfortingly, then pushed himself back into his chair and folded his hooves, one over the other. “I don’t wish to distress you, but was there... something more?”

She nodded, sniffling a little. “Yeah... yeah, there was. It’s...I don’t know. I was kind of out of it, but I’m pretty sure. G-grape Shot’s teeth were like mine, except it was all of them. The ones in front, too.”

“Mmmhmmm... I thought that might be the case,” he replied, picking up his reading glasses. A second book had appeared on top of the first, again delivered by unseen agency. This one was black-covered, wrinkled at the edges from long years of daily use. Opening the book, he ran down several pages before finding the one he was looking for. “Let me see...ahhh. This may be small comfort, I’m afraid. There have been several magics passing through the city which might have caused elements of your condition if it were simply one of a kind... but none which would turn a pony into an assassin, nor which work collectively without heavy modifications.”

“They used an arcane conservancy.” Taxi put in. “I read the dispeller’s notes. It was very strong magic.”

“Miss Stella’s Stilettos do employ some very competent magicians,” the Don agreed.

“Wait...how do you-” I began, then paused. “Right. I don’t know why I’m surprised. You knew I’d taken down Cosmo and that he was moving on The Vivarium. That was enough, wasn’t it?”

“Information is my stock and trade, Detective. Stella doesn’t interfere with my business, and I have a certain respect for any creature who can promote any kind of order in a city as ripely corrupt as this one.”

“Alright, so what about the spells? I need whatever you can give me, right now.”

The Don shifted his weight against the armrest, draping one foreleg over it. “I am afraid, then, that the news is not good. This particular arcane conservancy is one composed of several magics. A few of them are in my lists,” he admitted, tapping a couple of entries with his toe. “I believe the spell which has affected this sweet child’s teeth is a simple cosmetic alteration, but it was meant to be temporary and has obviously been modified by somepony of considerable knowledge. It was sold to me by a magic dealer who left for the zebra homeland not long after and bought less than three days later by an anonymous purchaser.”

“What, so you don’t have any records of the pony who came to pick it up?” Taxi asked, half rising in her seat.

“Cash paid, courier pick-up from a dead drop, no receipt asked for.” The Don shrugged his slim shoulders, making the act look like a dance move with its well-practiced grace. “I believe you said this other pony was a member of the PACT? Why do you not start there?”

“Because I’m not a cop anymore, and accusing Broadside of turning his troopers into magical assassins without proof is a great way to make sure I’m never a cop again,” I replied, studying the fire. “I’m not even sure it’s him, anyway. If I’m going to investigate him, I need an evidence trail. But you already knew that.”

“Yes... and unfortunately, I am afraid I may be less than helpful.” The Don shook his head, sadly. “Whosoever was arranging the transfer of these spells did so months ago, piecemeal. They used over a dozen courier services for each one, legal and otherwise. I have several pings on my network... but tracking down the destination or origin of even a single element would be the work of many weeks. If you have that kind of time, I can certainly-”

“We don’t.” I exhaled, pulling my knees under my body. “Whoever shot me is bound to send another assassin when they hear I’m rolling the streets again. We needed that information a month ago and if our perps are anything like competent, the couriers themselves probably didn’t know what they were carrying.”

“Very likely,” the Don agreed. “Of course, I mean to set you on a path that may provide you some answers along the way. I have reason to believe my recent troubles could be related.”

“How so? We’re not getting involved with gangsters again, are we?” Taxi asked, pushing herself up on her forelegs. “I mean, I know we owe you and Hardy’s heart wasn’t cheap-”

“Dear girl, ‘cheap’ describes things bought for money.” The Don stopped her, holding up his hoof. “That heart bought the life of a child once and, lately, the life of one of the very small number of beings in this world I would consider truly decent. It was very inexpensive to my mind. However, there must be balance in all things and for a life saved, there is a price.”

“A price?” Swift asked, lowering one ear, with a look of disappointment. “Isn’t doing the right thing enough?”

“You would be stunned at how often I ask myself that.” Don Tome propped his head on his chin, giving her a slightly sad smile as he explained, “Consider that were I to extract no price, pony nature would dictate that I give until I have nothing left, and therefrom I have nothing left to give. However, by extracting a price and investing wisely, over time I grow that which I have to give.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, kid, don’t let this old stripey charmer try to feed you his line about altruism. He’s all sweetness and joy, until you miss a payment.”

"It's all so my generosity may continue to build! If I have to dislocate a shoulder or two in the name of that generosity, so be it!” Tome snickered, tapping his hooftips together. Swift looked briefly horrified, her wings springing out from her back, so he went on, quickly, “Besides, Hardy and I get along because I have a sincere belief that no-one need die or be permanently crippled to repay a debt of bits. Besides, both of these often impact their ability to repay those bits. That doesn’t mean their lives have to be pleasant until it’s done.”

My partner still looked a bit uncomfortable with that, but somewhat mollified.

“Speaking of this... heart. You want to tell me how you just so happened to have the magical knowhow to convert a bug’s heart to run on power gems?” I asked, my stomach growling at me. “Oh, and can I have some more of those cookies?”

“To the second question, of course.” Clapping his hooves, the zebra pointed at me and a plate of cookies fell across my forelegs, steam still rising from them. Nopony had come or gone, but then, The Don has a very classical understanding of luxury and that ‘the help’ should be less seen than felt.

“To the first... Your heart was a simple matter, if I am being truthful,” Tome explained, flipping one of my cookies into his mouth with the tip of his toe. I covered my plate protectively with my hoof, only for Taxi to snatch one from the other side. I shot my driver a nasty look and she just grinned around my snack as the Don continued. “In the zebra homelands, we have our own problems with changelings. We discovered, long ago, that they can siphon off the emotional magics of others to power their own abilities. This power is centered in their ‘heart’ organ. We handled our problems quite elegantly: by reversing the predator/prey dynamic. They make excellent subjects for organ transplants. Very adaptable, after all.”

Taxi made a revolted face. “You hunted them?!”

“Quid pro quo, girl. They have no problem with feeding off of us,” the Don said with a soft snort. “What you brought me was... well... one unfortunate side-effect of these ‘hunts.’ The less savory elements of the zebra underworld will often sell the hearts of dead changelings with necromantic modifications to desperate ponies, then siphon off the love of friends and family themselves, using the heart as a conduit. What you brought me was one such device. Miss Taxi filled me in on where you procured it.”

My hackles rose. “You mean the moon-blighted bastard who sold that heart to Cosmo-”

“Yes, he was stealing the love of The King of Ace’s parents. It led to the mother’s death, the son’s, and in all likelihood the madness that befell the King himself. Either way, replacing the worst of the enchantments was no issue, but you may find yourself subject to certain influences when in the presence of intense emotional magics. Your ‘passenger’, for instance, may become more active.”

“Gale,” I murmured, munching on one of my cookies. I glanced down and noticed another one gone, then heard soft crunching beside me. Swift was looking very smug.

“Is that his name? Appropriate, I suppose, considering the whirlwind that is your life.” The Don covered a soft chuckle at his own joke with a cough, then went on, “He is a shadow of the child who once owned that heart. Treat him kindly. He does control your cardiovascular system.”

“I think we have an arrangement worked out. He’s been working beautifully. Better than the original, actually. I’m pretty sure the healing magics are still pumping, too. A cut on my leg closed up in a few seconds this morning.”

“Yeah, and didn’t I give you a black eye earlier when you puked in my mane?” Taxi said, poking at my cheek with her toe lightly. “I thought I nailed you good, too.”

Reaching up, I touched the flesh around my eye, finding it perfectly unbruised and painless. “Huh... bonus.”

The Don nodded to himself. “I left those magics intact. Be aware, when you’re injured, it will drain your magical reserves much more quickly. Anything more than superficial injury, like, say, serious bullet wounds, will leave you scraping the bottoms of your ‘tank’ unless you happen to be standing next to an electrical outlet. You’re likely to have a heart attack before the ambulance can arrive.”

“Right. Don’t get shot. My recent track record isn’t good,” I said, scratching at my chest over the socket. “Fine. What’s my tab at right now?”

“Meteoric, my friend,” the Don replied, with a quirk of his thin, black lips. “Were you paying me my usual prices to consult for Detrot Police Department, I’d have put Chief Jade out of her office and be picking out wallpaper.”

“I’m scared to ask what you charge by the hour.”

“You ask dangerous questions, Detective Hard Boiled. Dangerous questions have costly answers. Speaking of which, I believe it is time for this question you have been ‘saving’? Do go ahead.” He squared his chest, as though preparing for a trial, but he was smiling faintly. “I can’t take the suspense.”

I shut my eyes and inhaled a calming breath, trying to temper my anticipation. The Don’s mind held secrets that could unravel the very fabric of Detrot. His vaults contained a wealth of magics that could, given the right impetus, scour the city down to bedrock. He’d saved more lives than anypony would ever know and remained content to sit on his secret throne; an old zebra in a library, reading by the fire with a plate of cookies and milk.

And he’d just offered me answers. It wasn’t an opportunity to be wasted.

Reaching into my front pocket, I extracted Ruby Blue’s diary, laying it on the ottoman. I used my chin to indicate Taxi’s saddlebags. “Sweets, you still have that scroll we got from Cosmo’s place?”

“Sure. Just be glad I was too out of it this month to clean my bags.” She pulled her saddlebag up and rifled through it until she found the rolled paper. She set it beside the diary.

“We were tracking Cosmo’s safe-house.” I began, lifting the book with the edge of my shoe, “This diary was owned by a pony who stole... something. They chased her off a building, and I think the key to whatever she took is inside it. It’s locked and I haven’t been able to get into it.”

The Don picked up the diary, turning it over several times, studying the jewels inlaid on the surface. “Magical locks may be a speciality of mine, but if you, as you say, wish it open in a timely fashion and without damaging the contents... then you will likely have to find the key.”

“I... damn. I was afraid you were going to say that. Alright, take a look at this, then.” Picking up the scroll, I unfurled it and ran my toe under the three words printed thereon. “We found the scroll in this sort of safe-house Cosmo had where he was hiding his father. He was looking for something. Maybe what our dead girl took, maybe not. Don’t know.”

“Let’s see...” Returning his reading glasses to his nose, Tome lay the diary back in my lap then moved on to the scroll. He read the words to himself several times under his breath, then swept his hoof back through his thin mane. “This is a very odd pre-classical Equestrian dialect. ‘Lunaric.’ Very unusual. Dead as a doornail. It was one of the ‘royal’ languages, used only by the clergy and nobility.”

“Can you read it?” I asked.

“Hrm....this first word is ‘to choose’ or ‘to desire to choose’. Optare. That translates cleanly into modern Equestrian as ‘wish’. The others... are part of a tonal segment. If we apply Lunaris grammatical structure and work around the pre-classical Equestrian...this would seem to mean something like-” The Don’s clenched his lower jaw and squinted in concentration, “-’Lattice Of Dark Wishes.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I grunted.

“I’m afraid I’ve absolutely no idea.” The Don laughed, holding up both hooves. “Apologies, detective. My knowledge of this world is still incomplete.”

“Gotcha. Alright-” I paused as I glanced at my driver.

Taxi had her tongue between her teeth, making one of her ‘thinking’ faces.

“Sweets? You have something to add?” I asked.

She shook her head, then hesitated for just a second before saying, “Um...This might be unrelated, maybe, but...back when I was in school, I remember a story about the days when Princess Luna and Princess Celestia started fighting. Princess Luna was so angry, the sky started to twist itself to suit her ‘dark wishes’. They say it... looked like spiderwebs.”

Tome peered at the paper again, then nodded. “I suppose ‘lattice’ could also be taken to mean ‘web’.” Pulling his glasses down, he looked over them at Taxi. “That is a bit of a leap, mind you. Where did that come from?”

“I...” My driver’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment at the praise. She’d never been especially good at taking a compliment. “Cosmo was trying to make a wish, I think. Dark wishes. He had all this research about criminals who suddenly had good things happen to them. The ‘web’ of dark wishes-”

“Hah! Yes! That makes a certain sense, then.” Turning back to me, The Don pushed the paper back. “What you have there, I’m afraid, is a piece of ancient history.”

I picked up the scroll and jammed it into my front pocket. “That’s less than I hoped for, but fine. When I brought him the diary, he almost pissed himself with glee. Rang up this law firm here in town. Umbra, Animus, and Armature? You know them?”

The Don sharply sucked in a breath. “Ahhh...deary me, I am aware of them, yes. It is difficult to be in my profession and not ‘aware’ of Umbra, Animus, and Armature.”

“You don’t sound like you’re happy with that,” Swift commented, raising one wing and quietly going about the process of fixing feathers with her teeth. It was a very different process with a mouth full of blades, more related to combing than preening.

“Less than most of those who exist on the grey and bleeding edge of the law.” Tome pulled at the hem of his vest, self-consciously. “There is not one significant criminal presence in this city, myself excluded, who doesn’t keep them on retainer. They have... resources. Massive resources. I can’t remember the last time I heard of one of their clients actually facing a court-room.”

“Not surprising, then. They were pulling Cosmo’s strings. You know anything about the law firm itself? Who runs them?”

The Don shifted in his chair, tapping his hooftips together. A thin folder dropped out of mid-air, landing open across his legs. Turning over one page, then another, he took a swig of his milk. His eyes never left the paper.

“They ‘appeared’ in the city about seventy years ago. When I say ‘appeared’, I do mean appeared. Overnight, in fact.” His lips slanted downward as he studied the page. He checked the opposite side, which was blank. “My city records before the Crusades are less specific than either of us might like, but Umbra, Animus, and Armature are apparently the names of the founding senior partners; a familial trio, two brothers and a sister. Prior address unknown, prior relationships unknown, prior associations unknown. In fact, I have no records of them to speak of, which is unusual by itself. They have not been seen in public in some years, if they are still alive at all.”

“Gotcha... erg. Investigating them directly would probably be a bad idea, no?” I asked.

“If you have a strong desire to find out if it’s actually possible to sue someone into the grave, then yes, by all means... march into their offices.” The Don traced one of the stripes on his foreleg with his opposite toe as he spoke, “Your best course of action is likely to be patience. If they care so much about whatever it is that is in that diary, they will come to you.”

“Comforting thoughts.” I hopped off my seat and stood in front of Tome, giving him a slightly melodramatic salute. “Well, that’s all I had. You need me. I’m here. What’s the grand total, between my heart and this particular Q and A?”

He laughed heartily, which was a noise like gears splitting in an old washing machine. “You could always give me your gun, you know. That would square us. I do love a fine piece of magical equipment and I would love, ever so much, to study it.”

I drew my weapon close to my chest, patting the barrel. “Every time I come by here, you ask that. Afraid my answer’s going to have to be the same."

“You can't blame me for trying, my friend," the Don said, showing two rows of perfectly white teeth, in an expression that narrowly fell short of a ‘smile.’

"You said wherever you’re sending us might have some answers?”

"I... that I can’t guarantee, but it strikes me as a better option than hunkering down and waiting for someone to start shooting at you.” Tome stacked the folder of information on the law-firm beside his book on the table, smoothed his waistcoat, and slid down from his armchair. “Detective, may I introduce my sons?”

****

It’s odd that, even years into working as a police pony, some things still get under my skin a bit. The idea that gangsters, even relatively benign ones like Tome, should have families is just a little strange, especially when I don’t.

Cosmo’s father was less ‘family’ and more ‘evidence of severe mental health problems’, but the principle remained the same. It’s easier to think of criminals as being numbers on a court docket and if you’re going to arrest them day in, day out, a certain distance is necessary. Hence, though I’d known The Don for many years, it never occurred to me that he had children.

****

Since some ponies have a tendency to breed more or less indiscriminately with who-or-whatever gives a wink and a nudge, it’s a bit strange that I so rarely ran into zonies. I knew, in the back of my head, that they existed, and that the cross-breeds possessed their own relatively healthy subculture, but those subcultures tend to stay out of police involvement whenever they can. I could count the number of zony suspects I’d ever hauled in on both hooves.

The particular zony leaning casually against one of the book cases was a sight, too.

He was handsome on a scale most ponies don’t even touch. Nearly a full head taller than myself, he was thickly muscled, but in a way that seemed to accentuate the natural curves and lines of the body. His face had the chiseled jaw that the papers love and he possessed a casual, easy smile most politicians would envy. Black stripes started behind his ears, diving down his sides and the rest of his brown pelt. They weren’t as well defined as The Don’s, but they seemed to fit the picture of slightly unusual amiability that he projected. The only thing marring his face was a very stubby unicorn horn poking out from between two locks of his tightly trimmed mane.

I heard Taxi make a little noise in the back of her throat and shift her rear legs closer to one another, sweeping her tail down between them.

A square medallion or amulet of some kind dangled from his neck, inlaid with an array of simple gems and he clutched a short staff or walking stick in his foreleg, holding it lightly against the side of his neck. Zebra runes wound around the staff from the base up to a notch around half-way up.

The zony nodded his head towards us, then bowed to his father and spoke in a voice smooth as rich velvet, “You called, Father? I have been very busy, affirming our business relationships in the Eastern Wilderness. You said it was urgent?”

“Yes, very.” Tome raised one eyebrow, waving his hoof at the spot beside the zony. “If I may, where is Limerence? Was he not here some minutes ago?”

“I’ve no idea, I’m afraid,” the stallion said, with a shrug. “Creeping around somewhere, no doubt. He hasn’t the proper respect for a call-”

“I’m here, Zefu.”

The voice came from someplace behind one of the tall rows of books. A faint hum of magic cut out and papers shifted against themselves. In total silence, a spindly frame drifted into view, stepping along with great care, as though the carpet might be made of explosives that could be set off by an incautious step.

It was a familiar face; the unicorn who’d led us a chase through the entire library not fifteen minutes ago. His straw-colored mane was drawn back in a tail as he padded in, making less noise than a kitten wearing slippers, and sat before the fire, staring into it.

I hadn’t had much chance to study him before, but now I got to see him up close.

If Zefu was a tower of masculine charisma, this ‘Limerence’ was his direct opposite. His body was nearly as thin as Chief Jade’s. He had some muscle, but it was the wiry sort had by somepony who works out as a necessity rather than the dedicated bulk and ripped abdominals of his brother. He was also, most definitely, a unicorn. Nothing of his face or features genetically reflected the Don in the least, but there was something in the set of his shoulders and the peaceful, cool expression on his face that set me distinctly in mind of the old zebra.

The Don held out his hooves and his sons moved over in front of him, facing me. I noticed Zefu moved with a slight limp, leaning heavily on his staff. “My sons, I wish to introduce you to three ponies of considerable importance. Detective Hard Boiled, Officer Swift, and Miss Taxi.” Tome declared. “These are my boys, Zefu and Limerence.”

Zefu held out his hoof, “Detective Hard Boiled! I have heard of your escapades! I found them very entertaining. Tell me, did you ever make any headway on that poor girl found in the alley?”

“I’m afraid not and my trail is cold. I wasn’t aware the Don had sons.” I gave the Don a fond grin. “Keeping secrets again, Tome?”

“Always,” he replied, shifting his attention to Limerence, who was staring fixedly at his own toes. “Zefu and Limerence, I have missions for the both of you and would like you to sit in on this.”

“Of course, Father,” Limerence replied, immediately. His voice was so soft, I found myself leaning forward to hear it.

Zefu seemed somewhat hesitant. “Sir, I am afraid my plate is currently full. Another mission-”

Tome gave him an uncharacteristic sharp glare. “Zefu, I would not call you for anything but the most important of situations. Clear your plate.”

Chastised, the zony bowed his head again, though I did catch a hint of irritation in his expression.

“Now then,” Tome began, sweeping his hooves out to encompass all of those gathered. “Detective... my sons... Miss Swift, and Miss Taxi. I have gathered you today, with the express intent of revealing some unfortunate circumstances which have befallen the Archivists.”

Did I fail to mention the Don likes a bit of drama? He and Stella would get along beautifully.

“What is it, father?” Zefu asked, working his rear down to the carpet. It took a bit of doing, seeing as his legs seemed not to operate very well. That wasn’t changing the look of undisguised lust in Taxi’s eyes. I gave her a little bump with my hip and she jumped, then frantically started studying the ceiling.

“The long and short of it?” Tome leaned back in his armchair, shaking his mane out so it flipped against his side. “Several of my local contacts have dropped out of sight. I have made attempts to get in touch, some more aggressive than others, but received no replies. Worse... it is my belief that objects of power have been targeted for theft.”

Taxi’s ears shot into the air and she sat forward, “Wait...somepony is stealing from you?!”

“Truth be?” The Don shrugged. “I’ve no idea. Many of these vaults are not designed with security in mind, but obscurity. Some are simply shoe-boxes in someone’s closet.”

Swift’s face went rigid and her left eye twitched. “That’s crazy!” she blurted, pushing herself up on her front hooves. “I... how do you keep anything safe?! I thought the vault was like...a magically reinforced super bunker with big steel doors and-”

Tome laughed, heartily. “Dear child... you do have an imagination, don’t you? Good. Keep that close.” Pursing his mouth, he waved at the roof of the archive. “But, no...There are far too many objects in my care to keep them in one place. I built my network on trust, bribery,and threats of imminent violence, but maintaining a vast network of magical vaults would be both prohibitively expensive and calling more attention to myself than I like. I would be forced to centralize my storage and that would leave many more of these objects vulnerable. Some... do not interact well with others. As it is, I am the only one with a complete knowledge of where these vaults are located and who holds them.”

I scratched my lower lip with my top row of teeth. I was going to need a trim at some point. “Hmmm...what about these two?” I said, nodding towards the zony and the unicorn.

Limerence gave me a look that I had trouble interpreting. Somewhere between distaste and derision, garnished with irritation and a bit of curiosity. “Our knowledge is closely regulated. My father is not stupid.” He turned to The Don and asked, “Father, why do we require this... interloper? A police pony? Really?”

“Hey, just asking questions here,” I said, gruffly. “You want me to handle this-”

“I do not 'want you to handle this.'” Limerence bit back. “Father’s friend or not, you do not understand the complexities of our business, and after what I heard of your activities at the Monte Cheval-”

“That will do, Lim,” Tome interrupted.

“But-”

“That... will do,” he repeated, and the younger stallion quieted, his yellow mane falling across one half of his face as he glowered at the carpet. “I have brought the good Detective in on this for several reasons, not the least of which is that I trust his abilities and his character.”

“Yes... father.” Limerence seemed thereafter content to slip into a barely controlled sulk.

Zefu flicked his mane to the other side. “Father, if you don’t mind me asking... what was stolen?”

“At the moment? I am uncertain.” The Don shook himself, pulling his watch out and checking it again before continuing, “That... is your mission. Discover what is happening to my contacts and secure their vaults. There are two envelopes in your letter boxes. They will detail your instructions.”

“Yes, father,” the two stallions said, almost in unison.

“Now, it is soon time for me to retire... and I wish to have a moment alone with the Detective. Take Miss Swift and Miss Taxi to the kitchen. Get them something to eat more substantial than some cookies.”

Zefu smiled broadly, offering Taxi his foreleg. “Gladly. Dear lady, will you allow me to escort you?”

I swear, my driver went right from canary yellow to tomato red.

“O-o-okay...” she breathed. “...p-please sleep with me...”

Act 2, Chapter 7: Executor of the Estate

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 7: Executor of the Estate

A certain Dr. Hooves is attributed with the saying that a pony is the sum of his or her memories. If this is the case, Equestria is similarly the sum of its history. Therefore, the preservation of that history is of paramount importance to ponykind's identity and progress.

It is theorized that one of the greatest periods of loss in our nation's identity is the period of Discord's reign, when countless words were eaten and libraries converted into armored giraffes for the sake of a cheap laugh; a foul period of destructive whims during which numerous powerful artifacts, magnificent spells, ingenious devices, and the methodology behind their creation faded from knowledge and into legend. Ponykind has been rediscovering them, and themselves, ever since, often approaching from ignorance with unfortunate results.

Consider the following: Recovered texts documenting the Paleopony period demonstrate that even during that primitive time, equinekind's knowledge of mechanical devices had enabled the production of functional unicycles; It's unguessable how far Discord set Equestria back. Given the technological acceleration of the last sixty years, Equestria might well be colonizing space by this point had it not been for the interference of that entropic abomination.

The Princesses, or at least somepony or ponies close to them, are aware of the price potentially paid by the loss of history, and have taken steps to preserve it through academies and museums, but even these well-intentioned institutions have their detractors... and saboteurs.

-The Scholar

Tome and I walked through the library, side by side, enjoying a friendly silence. We’d strolled into a deeper section of the immense building, passing under signs that said ‘Restricted Access’ until, finally, we reached a small wooden door tucked into another quiet alcove between two shelves labeled ‘Amusing Anecdotes That Almost Destroyed Countries’ and ‘Planetary Domination Plans For Kitchen Use.’

The simple, silver nameplate said ‘Curator Of Tomes.'

Tome led me into a comfortable office that put me most closely in mind of an old professor’s study, rather than the leading light of one of the most esteemed criminal institutions in Detrot. His plate of cookies was already waiting on the desk and a sort of controlled chaos held sway over the stacked books and curiosities on every surface. Books packed every wall, most in sealed glass cases. A ladder was propped against the shelves for reaching the higher collections.

Many ponies might have felt uncomfortable amongst that much clutter, but I found myself relaxed. It was like home, back when home was home instead of a pile of ashes I couldn’t even visit lest there be killers watching.

He shut the door, and exhaled, his shoulders unknotting. Something about the space just said ‘safety’ in big, friendly letters.

Trotting around the desk, Tome hauled himself up into his chair, offering me the posh, red velvet stool on the other side, which I took, gratefully.

“Heh... Detective, you may be half my age, but I believe when I say ‘I’m getting too old for this, you have some idea what I really mean,” the Don mused, giving me a half-hearted smile.

“Yeah, yeah, I do,” I replied, doffing my hat and laying it on the cushion. “So... now the others are out of the room, you want to tell me the real reason you brought me in on this? Particularly with your sons involved?”

Tome picked up a cookie and spent a long time studying the chips before he spoke. “Do you know what it’s like to have sons, Detective?”

“Can’t say I do, no. Ponies like me don’t have foals,” I replied.

“At one time, I thought that zebras like myself didn’t bear children either.” He bit into his treat, crunching noisily. “You can’t have failed to notice that Limerence isn’t mine, at least, by blood.”

“I was meaning to ask about that, but didn’t know how without sounding like a bigger prick than usual,” I answered.

“He’s the child of my second wife’s first marriage. Ahhh, what a lovely thing she was...” He gave me a mildly lecherous grin, then covered it with a second bite of cookie. “I’d never had a child of my own. By the time she passed, I had grown attached to the boy. You must excuse his demeanor. While he took to the business side like a fish to water, I can’t say the same for his public face. He tends to prefer the back rooms, surrounded by books of forbidden knowledge.”

“What about... what’s his name? Zefu? What’s wrong with his legs?”

“Yeees... Zefu. Sad. Truly sad.” The Don lowered his eyes, guiltily. “That may be my fault, I’m afraid.”

I half-closed one eye, leaning closer. “How so?”

“Zefu was born of my third wife. She was a unicorn. He grew up strong, though his magic never grew with his body. He still struggles with pencils and light spells.” Raising his chin, he straightened his dark vest. “I pushed those boys hard... and I should have given him some leeway, methinks.” Guilt snuck into his face, deepening his wrinkles such that, for a second, he looked his actual age. “It was a simple thing, really. When he was in his middle teens, he and Limerence were studying a channeling artifact I gave the two of them. He became... frustrated with it, and drew on his anger to power his magic.”

“Oooh...yikes.” I winced. “I investigated a death of a unicorn a few years ago. Charred to death, extra crispy. Turned out he got peeved prepping for a fancy dinner party and tried to make a magical oven heat faster. Didn’t go so well.”

The Don shut his eyes against the old sadness. “Zefu was, I suppose, lucky to have survived, but his muscles no longer obey him quite so well as once they did, hence, the walking stick.”

“Taxi certainly thought he looked pretty good,” I remarked, peering over my shoulder on the off chance she happened to be standing behind me. “Granted, her taste in males has always run towards the... exotic.”

“He enjoys having the muscles, whether they work for him consistently or not. It was part of his rehabilitation.” Pushing his plate aside, Tome scooted his chair underneath his desk and pulled an envelope out of the top drawer, laying it between his forehooves. “Regardless, you are right; I did wish to speak to you alone. We are now coming to the part where you balk.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

Tome pushed the envelope across the table. “This is my last will and testament.”

I hesitated for a long moment, then carefully picked up the envelope and opened it. The parchment inside was crisp and freshly sealed with red wax and the Archivist seal, a book overlaid with a staff of some kind. Closing it, I laid it back on the desk.

“You aren’t planning on this being used sometime soon, are you?” I asked, unable to hide my worry.

“As I said, I am very old, Detective. Very... old.” He slumped over his desk, letting his chin fall onto his crossed legs. In that position, he looked gaunt and exhausted. “I have watched this city grow from a pitiful little outpost into the mightiest trading center outside of Canterlot herself.” Looking down at the envelope, he turned it over. It said, across the front, ‘To Detective Hard Boiled’, in the Don’s twisting mouth script. “I was considering this well before last month. You and Juniper dealt with me honestly, and… this must be done. So, you will hold on to this for me, won’t you?”

“I can, sure... but why me? Why not your sons?”

“That is... a complicated question.” Tome clenched his teeth slightly, sucking air through them. “Are you aware of the zebra laws of succession?”

I shrugged and nodded. “I’ve heard of them, sure. Why?”

“Children succeed their parents... but in my case, that is not a simple matter. Limerence is, by all rights, my son. He is the elder, he should be the head of the Archivists. Zefu is my blood. He has a claim as well.” The Don worked the joint in his right foreleg in a circle for something to do besides look at me. “I am left with a more... Equestrian solution.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, feeling that I wasn’t much going to like the answer to that question.

He rose, coming around the desk and settling his hips against one side. Laying one foreknee atop the other, he gave me a look of quiet wonder. “Equestrians.” He murmured, shaking his head as though trying to explain sunlight to a blind pony. “You know, when I first came to this country, I still rhymed every other sentence? ‘I must wake up or I’ll be late! Then whatever will be my fate?’ Trust me, when your brain is blueprinted in Zebra, it takes forever to get over things like that.”

“I knew you were from the homeland. That’s about it, though. I don’t ask for someone’s history unless they’re under investigation, and, as a matter of course, you’re not,” I replied, still trying to work out what must be coming that the Don was sure I would resist. Nothing was springing to mind.

“I came here as part of the Academy Arcanum. My former colleagues were too wrapped up in their duties to see the growing dangers of allowing Equestrians the secrets of alchemical mechanization with no checks or balances,” Tome continued, his upper lip lifting into a quiet snarl. “I knew...even before the Crusades… that were there no-one protecting ponykind from unwise exploitation of artifact magic. It was facing its own extinction. Now, I am faced with passing on the greatest trove of these destructive powers in the whole of Equestria, to one, or the other of my sons. I cannot split the collection between them, nor dare I let them rule jointly.”

“Makes sense. I’ve seen what happens when two managers try to work together with personalities as different as those two. Nothing good,” I commented, trying to conceal the fact that every additional moment it took him to get to the point made my nerves twitch. Out of habit, I began checking my gun straps to make sure they were all tight.

“True.” Tome clapped his forehooves on the floor in a ‘down to business’ sort of way. “So, to my Equestrian solution! You ponies are very fond of ‘tests’. I’ve found them very useful in childrearing… but now is the time to to put away childish things. I wish, truly, that I could give this to both Juniper and yourself, together. He was a great detective.”

I pressed my hoof against my forehead as an unwelcome surge of emotion made me momentarily light headed. Again, that smell of gun metal and coffee drifted through my nose and I fought to control my breathing. Choking up in front of Tome would have done irreversible damage to what little dignity I liked to think I had left.

“That he was,” I answered, pulling my hat brim low over my eyes. “So what’s the test, then?”

“It comes in two parts. Firstly, you’ll investigate the disappearances of my contacts. Thus far, I am aware of only three who have gone missing.” He opened his desk once more and took out a library slip. In the place one would normally have written the title of a book, followed by its due-date, there were the words ‘Moonfire Weapons’ and ‘Contact After Lunch.' “The latest is the curator of the Celestial Museum of History. He has or had, in his keeping, a series of Crusades-era weapons prototypes. They are designed around magic fire principles. None of them are especially dangerous on a city-wide scale, but they are important precursors to...other things.” He paused, his eyes sliding down towards my knee before he jerked them back up and went on, “They charge in moonlight and fire a beam which can slice through wood, brick, and police issue armor like it was warm butter.”

“So that thing you said about ‘don’t get shot-'”

“Goes doubly for these, yes.”

“Lovely,” I cursed. “Any weaknesses? Anything that could help if I get in a firefight?”

“The reason they remained mere prototypes is that their effective range is about five meters,” he replied, holding his hooves close together. “Very short. Somewhere after that, the beam becomes moonlight again. A glorified flashlight.”

“Alright, I think I can deal with that. I’m not digging my hooves in, yet. What’s the second bit?”

“You’re taking Limerence with you.”

I balked. I balked hard.

“Oh, no no no, I’ve already got a green as snot rookie with scary teeth! At least she knows which end of a gun makes the death noises!” I exclaimed, pushing myself up in my chair, “I don’t need a damn librarian tagging along and getting himself blown full of holes if things get loud!”

“Limerence is combat proficient,” the Don said, quietly.

I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “Him?!”

“I insisted both of my sons be trained in the martial combat systems of the homeland, though Limerence favors a more Equestrian style. It is a dangerous world, and even moreso for those who would send their children into it. I chose not to send them unarmed.”

I fell silent for several seconds, then pointed at this envelope. “Equestrian method. This is it, isn’t it? You’re testing him and Zefu. So what’s Zefu’s test?”

“Zefu works best with others,” Tome said, waving one hoof at the door as though Zefu was behind it. “He leads. He follows. He is a pony, forever climbing the ladders of both my approval and society at large. It’s a byproduct of his heritage. There are still many prejudices where inter-species breedings are concerned and overcoming them is his ultimate goal.”

“He said his plate was full, didn’t he? What’s he been up to?”

“Truth be told, I don’t keep a complete set of tabs on my sons. I could, easily, but they live their own lives. Limerence chooses to live here. His speciality is Equestrian magic theory and ancient history. His brother, on the other hoof, travels more or less constantly. He consults, professionally, with groups who want information on safe use of alchemical constructs and...” The Don’s nostrils flared slightly. “...necromancy.”

“I thought death magic was...” I caught myself before I said something monumentally stupid in this context, like ‘illegal.’ “Right, never mind.”

“I may not approve of his hobbies, but neither would I deny my sons knowledge. It is the only gift I can pass down which I feel is truly safer in their hooves than out. If I had my choice, I would see my collection annihilated rather than shift this burden onto one of them….”

“...But we both know that’s not an option,” I murmured.

The Don traced one of the stripes on his foreleg with his toe, as though making sure it was still there. “Of course not. Anyway, Zefu has always relied on his contacts, his finances, and those he could make use of to fulfill his goals. That is his test. When faced with this adversity, he must solve it alone, without other ponies, nor with any form of financial assistance other than basic living expenses. If he manages it, he will have proven to me that he is capable of leading the Archivists.”

Grabbing my hat, I stuffed it over my ears, “What about Limerence?”

“Limerence... is not so cold as he likes to seem, but he deals poorly with the public.” The Don touched the edge of a picture on his desk, stroking the frame. I edged sideways, until I could see a black and white image of a very pretty young mare and a tiny unicorn foal.

“Y'know, you've seen my press clippings, Tome. You might have noticed I don’t deal well with the public either. I haven’t earned myself many friends doing this job.”

“On the contrary, you deal brilliantly with the public. You achieve your ends through force, intimidation, deduction, and careful exercise of authority. The public might not like you, but ponies do as you say, and that is all that is required.” The old zebra shifted in his seat. “Limerence has yet to learn the fine art of getting what he wants without risking an attack upon his person in almost every circumstance.”

“So his test is to work with me and mine. Have you informed him and his brother that this whole ‘mission’ is a test for the succession?” I asked, dubiously.

“Not at all. For now, they should both think this is just one more in a long line of tests I have given the both of them.” Tome’s lip quirked. “You are up to foalsitting one simple librarian for a few days, no?”

Favors. Moon-damned favors. They’re more valuable than gold and more binding than any contract written up by a lawyer. Worse, I owed Tome my life. All he was asking was that I participate in his goofy little test.

“I think this is where my partner would start spouting something about regulations... but I’m not employed with DPD anymore, so I guess that’s a moot point.” I sighed, holding out my hoof. The Don laid the envelope across it. “Fine. We’re square after this, right?”

“Never, my friend. There cannot be a debtless world. You will always owe me, and I will always owe you... and thus is the world kept in motion.” He went to the door, opened it, and held out his hoof for me. “Now, you should rest. Tomorrow, you’ll be meeting Limerence in the afternoon at three o'clock sharp at Cafe De Farasi, on Gorgon Street. From there, I leave it in your capable hooves.”

****

Taxi and Swift were curled up together in a stack of unshelved books tucked into a far corner of the library. My partner was laying on her back, a book balanced on her chest, using another one as a pillow as she turned the pages of yet another trashy adventure novel. Meanwhile, Taxi sipped a fluted stemmed glass of something that smelled like grapes and flipped through a magazine of occult ‘news.'

They both looked up as I stepped out of the rows of books.

“Sir? We got scones and cheese and they even have a griffin librarian here who let me have some of her turkey!” Swift exclaimed, rolling and carefully marking her place with a bookmark, then tucking the book under one wing.

“Yeees, and a more disgusting sight I’ve never seen,” Taxi murmured, setting her magazine back on a table that said 'Returns' via a tiny sign.

“Did you manage to convince Zefu to give you a romp, Sweets?” I asked, with an impudent grin.

My driver, no longer under the spell of estrogen, gave me a dirty look. “I said I was sorry! Besides, can you blame me?”

I gave my flank a hearty scratch, now that I wasn’t likely to offend anypony. “I think you’d have better taste in stallions, frankly. Something has had my cutie-mark doing a double-step on my ass since we got here. I mean, I know it's a criminal den, but still. Something's not right.”

Taxi narrowed her eyes, looking worried. “You think the Don is playing us?”

“Tome?” I shook my head. “Nahhh. He doesn’t enjoy politics and backstabbing. He’s damn good at it, but if he can, he’ll play it straight. Besides, he gave me his Will.”

“As in... Last and Testament?” My driver’s voice reflected the incredulity I was still feeling.

“That’s right.”

“Why... you? I mean, wouldn’t it be better off with a lawyer or something?” Taxi ask as she pulled herself onto her stomach, getting her hooves under her.

“It’s not the kind of thing you ask a pony, Sweets. The Don’s not senile. He has reasons for everything he does.” I laid my hoof on the front pocket of my jacket. “Besides, I think he’s foisting the decision as to who takes over this place off on me.”

“You?!” Swift gasped.

“Wouldn’t be the first time a father couldn’t decide between his sons. Either way, let’s get back to the Nest. The Don seems to think we might find ourselves a lead as to who was running Cosmo while we’re helping with his investigation. He’s right a frightening amount of the time, so we’re meeting that ‘Limerence’ pony tomorrow morning. He’ll be working with us.”

Taxi looked crestfallen. “Not Zefu?”

“I don’t think we’d be able to do the job if you were juicing your tail every time he looked at you sideways.” I checked my pocket again, making sure I had the Don’s envelope, before pointing us towards the nearest wall. “Let’s go home. I think we have a big day ahead of us and I need some sleep.”

****

Finding one’s way out of the Library of Magnificent Mind is easier than finding your way in. Just walk in a direction until you find a wall, then turn right or left, depending on which way you think might be closer to the door. You’ll inevitably be wrong and have to walk a much further way around than you thought, but you’ll make it eventually.

Swift was still partially agog at the size of the place, but was high stepping cheerfully with a whole stack of books balanced carefully between her shoulderblades, wings outstretched for stability. By the time we found the door, she was panting under the weight, but I didn’t feel like lending a shoulder and Taxi was still grumpy over the pigeon.

****

My little ponies, my fine zebras, my griffin loves, buffalo friends, and those few dragons I’m sure are listening! This is Gypsy, coming to you as live as can possibly be! I am your communicating vessel to the stars!

We’ve got an update here, people!

Oooh, boy! This is a neat one. As it turns out this upcoming Summer Sun Celebration here soon, the Princesses will be performing some pretty spectacular cosmic maintenance. You see, my sweets, the Princesses must realign the sun and moon. I know, crazy, right?

It hasn’t been done since Princess Luna was locked away in the moon, but finally they’re taking the opportunity to straighten out the moon’s orbit properly. That requires two ponies, apparently, although I’m a bit vague on the details.

What it does mean is we’re going to get one of the most incredible and rare celestial events in Equestrian history; a full, day-long solar eclipse!

Now, this is a bit different from your standard eclipse, gentle-beings, so nobody panic. The Princesses will be working their magic, and this should spread darkness across the whole of Equestria for a good twelve hours, but then the sun will rise again! Keep your eyes to the sky on the first day of the Summer Sun Celebration! This is going to be spectacular!

****

The phone in the street-corner box rang five times before somepony picked it up.

“Telly! What’s the news?”

An indrawn breath. “Dear sweet soul of the sun, you wretched scumbag! What did you do?!”

“What do you mean ‘What did I do?' I quit. Did you think I’d do it without at least getting one back for the home team?”

“Chief Jade was one inch from calling all cars to hunt you down and drag you back here without your legs! She burned your pension paperwork with spellfire and mounted your badge on the wall! There’s an empty plaque there beside it that says ‘Hard Boiled’s Head.' I don’t even know where you get a plaque like that!”

"I'm more surprised that it didn't come out sooner. Remember when we switched her medication for fruit snacks?"

“It’s serious this time, dammit! I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Well bless your little heart for picking up then. I need a favor.”

“What, like the fifteen thousand others? You’re not a cop anymore! What makes you think you get favors from me?”

“Because you know I wouldn’t risk that psychotic witch tracing me unless it was important.”

“...Fiiine… what is it this time?”

“I need you to run a record check with the PACT. Keep it quiet, if you can. Check into a pony named ‘Grapeshot.' I want his recent records and training history.”

“Ugh…if this costs me my job, I will personally hunt you down and that ‘psychotic witch’ will get her trophy.”

“Thanks Telly. Radio Taxi. Our call sign is Cupcake Alicorn Rodeo Picklebarrel.”

“I’ll send you what I have tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Telly.”

“I hope you die, Hardy.”

“Been there, done that.”

"Encore."

****

Back in the Nest, we closed up the bunker’s doors, sealed it all tight, and bedded down for the evening. Swift crawled into one of the hammocks strung between two pillars and was shortly sound asleep. I lay beside one of the wall sockets, topping off my batteries out of a paranoid worry that I might find myself suddenly running out in my sleep. It was silly, really, but try having power stones embedded in your chest and see how many risks you want to take.

Taxi curled up on her side next to me, her head in my forelegs, reading one of Swift’s novels.

“Sweets?”

“Hmmm? What is it?”

“I come back this morning, and we’re already on the case again. No down time. No rest. I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d think there was somepony driving us forward here.”

Letting her book drop, she held it open with one toe on the line she’d been reading. “I... keep expecting to wake up and get another of those calls from Slip Stitch asking if he can finally started breaking you down for parts or not. I felt like I’d aged twenty years there, but here you are… and here we are, following this insane case because… well, because it’s the only thing any of us can do.”

“Yeah. I wish we could afford to rest. Say, do you think… well...” I ran a hoof through Taxi’s mane. “Sorry. I can’t stop thinking about the case. You know me. I’m not so good at taking rest periods.”

“No, it’s fine. You want a sounding board, go ahead. I haven’t seen you in almost a whole month.”

Chuckling, I patted her shoulder. “You and I didn’t talk for longer when you were off running around with the zebras. That was almost a year and a half, remember?”

“Yeah, but you weren’t dead then. I knew we could talk and all I’d have to do was go find you. So come on, then. What’s on your mind?”

I gnawed at my lip for a second. “I was just wondering if the Don’s vault keepers vanishing has anything to do with your contacts who weren’t calling back. I guess it’s just one of those connections you draw right before you sleep.”

“Maybe. I don’t want to think about that too hard. Vast criminal conspiracies give me heartburn and that’ll make sleeping miserable. I will say that Limerence pony worries me, though.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not my intuition or anything like that. I got a worse ‘feeling’ from Zefu, but that’s nothing unusual when I’m attracted to somepony. Limerence just strikes me as so... distant. Cold, even.”

“Can’t be any colder than anypony else we’ve worked with.” I replied, feeling the slight tingling in my chest that signified a full charge. “That Svelte bitch at the Vivarium was a right basket of ice-in-her-veins crazy. The egghead just sounds like he’s got a stick wedged up his back passage sideways.”

Taxi couldn’t hold in a girlish giggle, “It’s true. No worse than you, some days. Alright, I’ll play nice. I’m exhausted, though.”

Tugging the plug out of its socket, I began coiling the wire back up and stuffing it away in my coat pocket. My driver very gently zipped up the pocket on my chest for me. “Me too. Ugh, I hope things are quiet tomorrow.”

“G’night, Hardy.”

“Good night, Sweets.”

****

As it turned out, twelve hours rest was about what all three of us needed. I’d intended to get an early start, but that wasn’t happening. I’d come back from the dead and Swift from a severe case of the crazy, all in a very short few days. Sleep was what we needed, and it was a dreamless, world-weary sag into unconsciousness that I hadn’t had in months without heavy drink.

Even so, I found myself waking feeling like somepony had set a lead weight on each of my eyelids. Taxi and I had barely managed to crawl into the bean-bag chairs before sleep chased us to ground. If my dear, beloved little partner hadn’t summarily shoved a gallon mug of coffee under my nose along with a heaping platter of bagels, I think I might have just gone ahead with one of my long considered, early morning suicide attempts. As it was, I buried my face in the first of several rings of tasty dough. Foregoing a knife entirely, I grabbed a stick of butter and used it to smear a second bagel while I finished the first, then tossed down half the coffee in one scalding gulp, holding up my cup for a top-off.

After a good half hour with the three of us eating together, I began to feel less like sucking on my own gun. Breakfast done, I hunted around until I found a twenty-pony shower with lukewarm water behind one of the myriad doors of the Nest. I hadn’t chosen the name, but that was what Wisteria called it and the three of us hadn’t come up with anything better.

Standing under the stream, I washed off a healthy portion of my remaining self-destructive impulses, then dried off and pulled on my gun harness and weapon.

“Hardy, today is the first day of the rest of your life,” I murmured to myself, looking in a small mirror over one of the bathroom sinks.

“Yeah, and it’s going to be a short one if you keep talking to yourself.”

I whirled, looking for the source of this second voice. I was alone.

“Right here, rookie.”

Slowly, I turned back to the mirror.

Juniper was grinning at me impishly from behind the glass, his olive green features a little blurred by the steam from the shower.

“Well, you did say you’d be in touch,” I groaned, rubbing my temples with both hooves. “Is this going to be the kind of touch that makes me want an adult?”

“Could be,” he sniggered, putting one hoof on the mirror. I found myself mirroring the gesture, wishing I could actually feel him there. Sadly, my toe just hit cold glass.

“I guess it would be impertinent to ask if this is a bad case of whacky in the head meats...” I said, softly.

Juniper shook one ear a little. It was that one tell he’d never broken after years at a poker table, and nopony in the office had been willing to tell him he did that whenever he held a hand he wasn’t sure how to play. “Crazy is relative, rookie. Besides, we faced plenty of crazy things and you never came out the other side with bugs in your brain box. Why should you have them this time?”

“I never died any of those other times. Could be my ol’ brain finally wore out, you know?”

“Could be,” he repeated. “Speaking of worn out... you really think this favor for Tome is a good idea?”

I turned on the water in the sink, washing the taste of sleep out of my muzzle, “What choice have I got?”

“Not much of one, but go on. Lets hear what’s ticking over in that rusty, rookie’s brain of yours.”

“What? On the case? Don’t you know?” I asked, a bit confused.

“Sure, I do. I just want to see if you do.” He grinned a little wider.

Snatching a threadbare towel off the rack, I dried my mouth and mane, then slung it across my neck. “Truth? My partner’s eating pigeons, and I’m going to be dropped into a role as babysitter and executor of the estate for a pony who could one day be in control of what amounts to city destroying magics. On the case, I’ve got no good leads. The Don wasn’t nearly as helpful as I hoped he’d be.”

Juniper blew a breath through one corner of his ethereal lips. “Still thick as concrete, I see. I taught you better than this.”

“Well excuse me if having a bullet pass through your chest doesn’t leave your cognitive skills in tip-top shape, but I haven’t exactly had a chance to sit down and think here! I don’t have the convenience of being dead!” I snapped, slamming my hoof angrily against the mirror. It cracked around my shoe.

“Sir? Who are you talking to?”

It was Swift, just outside the door. Juniper was frowning at me, his face fractured into a thousand tiny pieces. Without looking back, I turned and trotted out of the bathroom. I could still feel my dead friend’s eyes following me from the shattered mirror.

My partner was standing in the hallway with a towel over her leg, looking a bit worried.

“Just talking to myself, kid. Us old ponies do that. Go on, get your shower.”

****

The Cafe De Farasi wasn’t my kind of place.

Knowing The Don, he’d picked it for precisely that reason. He likes to believe he’s ‘broadening the world’s horizons,' one pony at a time. In another life, he’d have been a pretty good life coach. As it was, he was a sometimes very irritating mob boss.

Hence, I’d been sent to meet his son at a place where the word ‘cafe’ was a generous misnomer. De Farasi was a rich pony’s greasy spoon with aspirations and politics.

The facade gave the general impression that a giant overgrown bush had sprung up in the middle of a row of businesses. Vines spilled from the roof down to street level, ringing two sliding glass doors into a brightly lit dining room in which a small afternoon crowd of ponies wearing only the latest fashions sat at petite tables, sipping exotic coffees from all corners of the globe.

Swift, Taxi, and I paused on the stoop, looking at a sign beside the door that said ‘Notice’, followed by a staggeringly long list of things they didn’t serve.

Swift began reading the list, her lips moving over the words.

“...meat, cheese, dairy, non-free trade, non-organic, non-plant-cruelty free, genetically modified, magically modified, processed...”

“What exactly do they serve here?” I grumbled, grabbing one of the vines in my teeth and giving it an experimental nibble. I quickly spat it out when it turned out to be bitter. Figures.

“I...guess coffee? Maybe? I usually write in coffee shops that smell like clove cigarettes and sweat. This place feels like a surgeon’s waiting room,” Swift murmured, positioning herself in front of the glass doors. They slid soundlessly open.

Soft piano music played through hidden speakers. Nopony so much as glanced up at us in the pristine, white coffee bar, except the barista behind the counter who was wearing a perfectly clean apron and a smile carved from granite. Even taking in our ragamuffin appearance, his avocado colored face didn’t so much as twitch.

Taxi leaned close to me. “Hardy, please watch me while we’re in here. Last time I was in a place like this, I almost killed a waiter.”

I wiped my hooves on the mat, feeling very conscious of my tattered coat and unbrushed mane. “We’re just here to get Limerence and leave. Don’t get us arrested.”

“Easy for you to say...”

Instead of a reply, I headed over to the coffee bar and grabbed one of the heavily padded stools, sliding it under my rear end as I spoke to the manically smiling garcon, “We’re here to see a pony named Limerence. You know him?”

The mouth moved, but the eyes didn’t show any recognition that there was somepony in front of him. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know anypony by that name. Can I get you something to drink?”

“No. I’m supposed to meet this pony here in-” I glanced up at the clock on the wall above and behind the barista’s head, "-five minutes ago. Stiff looking character, unicorn, blonde mane, light blue body, wears a vest with a pocket watch and some specs?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I haven’t seen anypony by that description. Can I get you something to drink?”

I edged forward slightly and began waving my hoof in front of the barista’s face. His eyes followed my toe, but otherwise, he didn’t react.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he repeated. “Otherwise, I would ask you to leave so other customers in line can place their orders.”

I stole a glance over my shoulder, searching for a line that did not exist.

“You’ve been given money to tell us that Limerence isn’t here, so he can make it look like we never showed up, haven’t you?” I asked, resting one hoof on the bar.

The barista’s stoney smile never wavered. “I am going to have to ask you to leave so other customers in line can place their orders.”

Reaching back, I grabbed Swift’s foreleg with my rear one, dragging her forward and lifting her up onto the barstool beside me. “Kid?”

“Yes, sir?”

“This pony is being difficult. Give him your ‘cooperation face,' would you?”

Swift turned to the barista and spread her lips back in the friendliest, widest grin her sweet little face could manage. I’m sure the bit of red jam from breakfast still stuck between her left canine and the adjoining tooth helped.

That irritatingly stolid smile vanished and the coffee pony backed into the counter behind him, upending a carafe of milk that sloshed across his hooves. Raising one shaking leg, he pointed towards the far corner of the room, to a curtained booth with the curtains drawn shut.

I gave him a tip of the hat and Taxi shot him a wink.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” Swift added, giggling to herself as we left the stunned barista with wet toes and a pressing need to find himself a bathroom.

****

We stopped outside the curtained booth.

“I suppose hints will be inadequate, then," said a soft, but masculine voice from inside.

The curtain slid back, revealing Limerence sitting there with a wooden puzzlebox on the table in front of him and a stack of rolled scrolls beside. He looked freshly showered, his mane still damp. An untouched cup of something brown with a purple tinge wisped steam that curled around the ceiling.

“You mind if we join you?” I asked, politely.

“I’d rather initiate a stabbing,” he replied, shortly, pulling his spectacles off with a flicker of magic and polishing them on the edge of his vest, “but since my only relevant options are stabbing myself or you, one of which would hurt and the other of which would make Father cross and dirty the lovely booths of the cafe where I break my morning fast several times a week, I will simply have to accept that some ponies are too thick to understand when they’re not wanted. By all means, sit.”

I slid into the booth across from the librarian, followed by my companions.

Picking up his puzzle-cube with his horn, Limerence resumed fiddling with it, ignoring the three of us.

After a long, awkward moment of silence, I rested my forehooves on the table. “Your father wants us to work together. You think you can manage that?”

“I think I have few other choices,” he answered, his puzzle twisting in his magical grip. It gave off a soft click, then the lid snapped back. The interior was empty. “Damn...” He muttered, tossing it onto the table beside his scrolls.

Swift, ever set on making friends, scooted forward, “You solved it? Isn’t that good?”

“A solved puzzle is meaningless.” Limerence pulled a face, his thin nose wrinkled with distaste as he glared at the open box. “A puzzle is only a puzzle before it’s solved. Once solved, it has no purpose, no use, no meaning.”

“So why try to solve it at all?” my partner asked.

Limerence gave her a quick glance, then pulled his cup over and sipped it, “Why solve any puzzle? They become meaningless once solved, and yet if you don’t try, they’re equally meaningless. What say you, Officer Swift Cuddles?” He turned to my driver, “Or you, Sweet Shine?” he turned to me, “Or you? You, Detective Hard Boiled Junior. You, I assume, have some opinion on the virtues of puzzles, since you’ve made it your life's work to solve them.”

Taxi pulled her saddlebag around, extracted the last of her bonbons, and munched on a couple of them, glancing at me. “You sure we want this one? He does his research. I’ll give him that. He’s going to make you want to strangle him.”

“So do you, now and then.” I immediately picked up on the trick, giving her a cocky smirk as we both ignored Limerence’s irritated glare at being spoken of as though he wasn’t there.

“If he’s useless, I guess we can always send him back to his father. It’s not like we need a tag-along who doesn’t know the score.” My driver crushed a candy between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, waving one hoof in the librarian’s general direction.

“Could do.” I gave her an exaggerated shrug. “We-”

“Alright, enough!” Limerence smacked a blue hoof on the tabletop. Swift jumped, baring her teeth at him, but quickly shutting her lips before he could notice the sharp back rows. “I do not understand why my father would even think of bringing you into this, nor what possible motivation you could have to accede to it! You might have simply left today and let me work this as I prefer, Father’s wishes or not. What is your purpose here, Detective?!”

I kept my voice as calm and even as I could. “Your father is an old friend of mine. He needed my help. What more do you need to know?”

"I need to know whether that's true. That explanation feels too simplistic for such… colorful characters." Limerence pulled his papers close to him with his horn, lifting the top one and turning it around. It was my police file, with added notes from Iris Jade along the bottom. "If even a fifth of this file is reliable, you are a professional miscreant, Detective. The only reason you aren’t a kingpin on the other side of the law is that, for some reason, destiny saw fit to give you a talent which dictates you seek justice.”

He flipped over the next one, a picture of a younger, slightly heavier and less toothy Swift trying to hide an eager smile in the corner, “Officer Cuddles, if I may draw your attention to the bottom of this paper, you will see the police department psychologist expects to be discharging you for ‘cowardice under fire’ within six months.” Swift narrowed her eyes and angrily swatted the file out of his magical grip with one wing. It settled back on the table.

Limerence didn’t get the chance to open his mouth when he raised Taxi's file. He found his face being held firmly against the table by a fuming mare, her hoof braced against the back of his horn in the one place a unicorn never wants to find themselves.

“Drop it,” she growled. He very carefully laid the paper back on the table.

“I see,” he murmured in a perfect imitation of his father. “Please, do look down, Miss Shine.”

“My name is Taxi,” she snapped.

“Yes, Miss Taxi, of course. Now, if you please?”

My driver held his cheek harder into the table for an instant, then glanced at her stomach. A short, bladed weapon of some kind hung an inch below her navel, suspended in mid-air by a soft glitter of magic. It’s front end was heavier than the back, curved slightly like some kind of farming tool. It pressed very gently against her belly-fur.

“Sweets, get off him,” I ordered, putting my hoof on my driver’s shoulder.

“He pulls that crap again, he won’t get a warning before I kick his head off.” My driver snarled, shoving herself away from Tome’s son. The knife vanished up the back of Limerence’s vest, sliding with a satisfying *snick* into some hidden holster.

“Oh, and just so we understand each other-” I nodded down at my leg. Holding my trigger bit wrapped around the tip of my other hoof, I gave it a light tug, just enough for the trigger to whisper against the safety. “You die if you pull a knife on one of my people again, Tome’s child or not. Clear?”

“Certainly, Detective. My father would have it no other way.” Limerence folded his papers, stuffing them into a long pocket of his vest. His tone was far more respectful, almost formal, as though we’d been speaking to an entirely different pony twenty seconds ago. “I only wish to establish why we’re working together. Father seems convinced you are able-bodied and worthy of respect, but your handling of the King of Ace left much to be desired. There will not likely be another changeling heart which we can install should one of us find ourselves at death’s door during this enterprise.”

“So you want me to justify myself to you?” I cocked my chin at him, but didn't waiting for an answer. “Your father is being stolen from and thinks it may help with discovering the identity of whoever ordered the death of the King of Ace and myself.”

“And what, pray tell, leads him to that conclusion?” the stallion asked, his spectacles sliding to the tip of his nose.

“I’ve absolutely no idea. You know what he’s like.”

Limerence’s eyes took on a shadowy cast. “Yes, I do. Father never says all he knows... and he always knows far more than you think he ever should. His judgement is excellent, but I do not ever like involving myself with law enforcement.”

“Why is that?” Swift asked, holding up one hoof. “Don’t you have something worked out with the city so you keep everypony safe from illegal magical artifacts?”

I slapped my forehead with my foreknee. “Kid, you sound like a comic book character sometimes.”

“Sorry, sir...”

The librarian studied Swift for a moment, apparently finding something therein that he liked. He gave her a tolerant smile and replied, “That is only a portion of what we do, Miss Cuddles. We-” Limerence was cut off when Swift out a low hissing noise that was far too reptilian for my taste. My partner’s wings flew half-out from her back, smacking me in the side. I winced, then shoved her back into the seat.

“You really don’t want to call her that. Swift is fine. Hardy works for me.”

Limerence sipped his coffee or whatever it was, nodding politely to Swift, who settled herself back, refolding her wings, “Swift then. You may, for ease of reference, call me Lim. And as I was saying, Miss Swift, we don’t just monitor illegal artifacts. We trade in them. Law enforcement takes a dim view, whether or not our mission charter is to prevent the most dangerous ones from reaching the hooves of those that might do real damage with them.”

“Speaking of that, what was in those ‘instructions’ Tome mentioned? The ones he said were in your letterbox? Anything I need to know?” I asked.

Pulling a post-card sized envelope from his inner vest pocket, Lim laid it on the table. “Aside that he expects me to work with you... very little of which you are unaware. I would have strongly preferred us to meet as ships passing in the night, investigating upon divergent paths. Had you simply left, I might have claimed you abandoned your charge or a mistake had been made, then gone about my business.”

“Why did you even show up if you were going to pull that trick?” Taxi asked, keeping her fury in careful check.

“When I am on a mission, Father does tend to... look in on me from time to time.” Limerence chewed on his upper lip, not bothering to hide his discontent. “I’m uncertain precisely how, but he has a certain awareness when I am not following the letter of his requests.”

“You think Tome would have bought the idea that we just showed up, didn’t find you, and left?”

Lim set his coffee down and sighed, “Perhaps not.”

“Can I expect you to be trying a runner on me every time my back is turned? Because if that’s the case, you can leave now. I need ponies I can rely on watching my back.” I gave Swift a light bump with my hip and she ducked her head, hiding a smile behind one wing.

Limerence shook himself and worked his shoulders in circles, trying to release some inner tension. “You needn't worry. Much as it pains me, I will abide by my father’s wishes, for now.” From a thin, black wallet floating out of his pocket, he laid a fifty bit piece on the table underneath his empty mug. The barista appeared, spiriting the money and his mug away while shooting Swift some nervy looks. “I am acquainted with the curator of the Museum. I have already called his staff and they haven’t seen him for nearly four days. To that end, we will search his offices.”

Standing, I put one hoof on his chest before he could leave. “I run the show, Lim. Period. You work with us, I give the orders. Are we clear?”

The librarian looked down at my toe, then used his magic to gently push it off of his breast. “Certainly, Detective. I will follow, unless I believe your orders threaten myself or my mission.”

“Our mission.”

“Of course.”

****

Limerence, for some strange reason, opted to ride in the back of the Night Trotter with Swift and I. He sat against the window in total silence, having sunk into a deep meditative trance that even Taxi would envy.

My partner stared at him for some time with one of those incisive looks that only cats and children can really manage, trying to fathom our newest companion. He wasn’t making it easy. After five minutes of this, his horn glowed, wrapped a field of magic around her muzzle and forcibly turned her face towards the front of the cab.

With an indignant sniff, Swift dug her novel out of her tactical vest’s front ammo pocket and buried her face in it. Limerence squinted through one eye, read the title, grunted, then lowered his head between his forehooves and seemed to fall into a light doze.

Out of the corner of my vision, I watched my partner and the librarian. For two ponies so similar in age, they couldn’t be more different. Limerence seemed to project a firmly entrenched, world weary cynicism, whereas Swift, despite the violence of the last month and the sometimes questionable nature of her grandmother’s child-rearing methods, still clung to notions like heroes and happy endings.

What a world we live in, that the young should have to clutch their innocence to themselves, lest it be stolen. I let my head sag against the window-sill and tried to rest easy. At least we were just going to a museum. Nothing exciting there.

****

Traffic.

Sweet mercy of Celestia, save us all from traffic.

More to the point, save us from Taxi and traffic. Nothing good happens when the two get together.

For a pony striving for internal serenity, my driver is an angry mare when she’s not able to wedge the gas pedal to the floor to get where we need to go.

“Oh, fine! Just pull right out then, you stupid piss-drinking sister-lover!” Taxi barked out the window as another cab drew parallel and hopped into our lane, causing her to slam on the brakes for the fifth time in as many minutes.

I could see the sweeping arches of the Classical History Museum up ahead, but there seemed to be an enormous crowd lining the streets between us and it. I couldn’t make out more than a few sparse details, but what I could see made me squirm in my seat. Most of the ponies out there were wearing knee length, dark blue robes covered in starry sequins; the Church of the Lunar Passage was out in force.

A few police cars were parked up on the curbs, keeping the protesters from storming the museum’s front door, but with them there nopony was getting in the front entrance. The traffic was composed largely of rubberneckers hoping for a fight between the cops and the nutters in the robes.

“You still all ‘peace and light’ for the Loonies, Sweets?” I snarked. Taxi glared a whole kitchen drawer full of cutlery at me in the side-view mirror.

“Shut up, Hardy! I swear, I will put you back in that cooler and let Slip Stitch use you for spare parts if you give me crap while I’m trying to park in this!” she shouted, using her body weight to wrench the wheel to one side. Whatever handling packages she’d managed to attach to the vehicle responded by snaking us neatly into a space that wasn’t there half a second ago, slotting us in where a rickety rickshaw carrying an old couple was just pulling out.

Another cab, late and having just watched my driver snatch an impossible parking spot, honked his horn furiously. Taxi pressed her flank against the window as he passed.

“Too slow, Arty!” she yelled to the other cabbie.

“Screw you, Taxi!” the pony I presumed to be Arty called back.

“You wish!”

****

Oh, to have time to spend in the Museum. Many times I wished I might find myself on a case that would lead me there, just so I could spend a few hours cooling my heels, enjoying the quiet and beauty.

If Canterlot had the Royal Archives and Canterlot Gardens, Detrot’s greatest wonder was unquestionably the Celestial Museum Of Classical History. Whereas lots of Detrot’s civil infrastructure was fraying around the edges, the Museum was funded by the one source unlikely to run out anytime soon: the Princesses themselves.

I don’t know when the Princesses decided they could steer Equestria with culture rather than force of arms, but most of the time, I’m glad they did. While Detrot may not be the most successful example of this principle, we have been given one of the most glorious demonstrations of it.

The Museum was, at one time, home to some royal with a thing for picture windows, high ceilings, and vast rooms with enough carpet that the place was once used in the testing of the Cloudhammer Lightning Cannon’s early prototypes. I hear they involved wearing heavy wool sweaters and shuffling hooves.

The collection was, at least initially, composed of transplanted art reclaimed from the dragons as part of the peace agreement at the end of the Crusades. Over time it grew and changed, becoming a more permanent fixture of the city.

Outside, it looked like a reserved mansion, built in the modern style, all sharp angles and white wash with black tinted windows. It might have been an office building if not for the enormous, faux wood doors across the front that were normally thrown open invitingly to the public.

On that day, however, the doors were shut tight.

“Have these pricks seriously been here all friggin’ month?!” I groused as we edged out of the car onto the crowded sidewalk across from the protest.

“Once a week, every Monday. Monday, moon-day, you know?” Taxi replied, carefully buckling her saddlebag against possible pickpockets roving the dense crowds. “They sing songs of praise to Princess Luna for about an hour, then on with the shouting for the next six.”

“What are they protesting?” Swift wanted to know, sidling backwards from a large, silver maned stallion who gave her a nasty look as she bumped into him.

“Far as I can tell? Anything having to do with ponies remembering Nightmare Moon. They’ve got some idea that the whole thing was a power-grab conspiracy by Princess Celestia,” I explained, shouldering my way between two deeply oblivious ponies standing on the curbside, watching the proceedings.

The Loonies were a diverse bunch, old and young, male and female, but I didn’t see a single non-pony species amongst them. This was odd, considering the makeup of Detrot’s social fabric, though it might have been incidental to the group there on that particular day.

They were all draped in the cult’s weird sparkling robes, holding signs in unicorn magic or taped to their bodies. I squinted, trying to read a few of the picket cards. ‘Don’t Shame Our Princess!’ said one, while another was, ‘Down With The Sun Tyrant!’

I felt a hoof on my back and glanced behind me. Limerence was there, pointing towards the alley between the museum and the adjacent tenement. “There is another way, unless you wish to traverse that imbecilic throng of religious simpletons.”

I did not. “Lead the way,” I said, and stepped into line behind the smaller stallion.

It was strange watching him move through the crowd. Swift and even Taxi were having trouble making much headway without the judicious application of knees to a few ribcages, but Limerence seemed completely at ease, moving between bodies like a gust of wind.

Putting one hoof on a colt’s forehead to keep him from dashing under me, I pushed him back under his mother’s skirt and finally reached the brick frontage of the building behind the pack of ponies with nothing better to do than watch the Loonies make fools of themselves. A moment later Swift stumbled out of the crowd, followed by my driver looking mussed and irritable.

“Where’s this other way in?” I asked. Limerence’s response was to simply set off again, the rest of us in tow, moving around the outside edges of the crowd. To that end, a walk that should have taken us thirty seconds ended up taking nearly fifteen minutes. We circled around, crossing the busy street, dodging between cars and carriages, until the four of us finally made it to a narrow side-street running up the side of the museum.

A police cruiser was blocking it, but the two uniforms inside were preoccupied with paperwork. I pulled my hat over my face so as not to be recognized as Swift flashed them the police markings on her tactical vest; they moved the car a bit so we could squeeze by.

Once in the alley, away from all those jostling bodies and shouting ponies, I let myself breathe. I’ve never relished being up to my ears in other beings, ponies or not. Every group that size gets my cutie-mark buzzing with all the secret evils they’ve committed that nopony will ever be able to find or fix.

Limerence was standing in front of a door marked ‘Fire Exit,’ waiting for us. His horn glowed and a flicker of light seeped from the top panel, then he shoved it open. Stepping back, he held out one leg for us to go through ahead of him.

“Shouldn’t that have set off... I don’t know... an alarm of some kind?” Swift asked.

“In an ideal world, yes,” Limerence replied. “However, as we do not to live in an ideal world, we instead have ourselves a perfect point of ingress.”

“Alright, then. Let's see if we can do this without making a fuss,” I murmured.

“Sir, making a fuss seems to be almost all we do these days,” Swift remarked.

“Then let’s keep the fuss from devolving into gunfire.”

I stepped through the fire escape and straight into a fierce-eyed griffin’s claws, his spear upraised to drive straight into my freshly repaired heart.

Act 2, Chapter 8: If Only You Had Been There

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 8: If Only You Had Been There

Recent decades have seen an upswing in interest for archaeology, as well as an upswing in ponies being crushed by heavy things. Yes, these are related trends.

Unlike a lot of the dynamism of the past six decades, the archaeological surge is one movement with at least one easily traceable cause: To wit, the wildly successful Daring Do intellectual property, which started out as novels, but inspired comics, radio programmes, and movies, as well as numerous fan works, ranging from beautiful creations that could make Canterlot high society weep with envy, to bizarre objects whose very existence provides a disturbing glimpse into the recesses of the equine psyche. Regardless, the character's adventures and dauntless pursuit of ancient riches resounded in the dreams of many a foal.

However, becoming an archaeologist requires more than a pick, a whip, and a silly hat; It requires a honed intellect, a good memory... and an instinct for which floor stones will release curiously round boulders directly onto your spinal column. For every talented filly or colt driven to excellence in the field by lifelong dreams of emulating their paperback-wrapped heroine, there were ten buck-toothed hayseeds filled with exponentially more enthusiasm than competence, some of whom soon found significant portions of their anatomy lovingly wrapped around ancient spearpoints. And those who were ended by purely physical traps were some of the luckier ones; The fate of those who bumbled around ancient places of genuine magical power is, for our current purposes, best left to the imagination.

Of course, not all archaeologists meet unsavory ends in ancient ruins; Some make it back with their findings to the gates of civilization, where even worse things can happen.

--The Scholar

I was halfway to my gun-bit before I realized the griffin looming over me was nailed to the floor. I examined it more closely, realizing I’d very nearly unloaded on a very detailed and likely very expensive wax-work of a tribal warrior.

The fire-exit seemed to be in the back of one of the displays, an open tableau of ancient griffins fighting pegasi, all suspended from wires overhead. Shuffling sideways, I stepped out of the display and down onto the cold, stone floor, ducking underneath a red rope strung across the front. My cutie-mark tingled, but I couldn’t get a bearing from it; Sometimes, following it was kind of like playing Marco Pony using my ass.

The room we’d come out in seemed to be an exhibit on Pre-Classical Equestria. A dozen similar dioramas of various creatures were spaced evenly around the edges. Across from me, Princess Luna held a quill in her magic, signing a peace accord between two of the noble houses of Equestrian antiquity. Beside that, a picture of a meteor crashing to the ground and ethereal, ghostly horses swirling around the sky above it, snow drifting from their hooves. The sign on that one said, ‘Theory of Cause of the Pre-Equestria Ice-age and Following Windigo Infestation.'

Nopony seemed to be about, though considering the crowd outside, that wasn’t surprising.

Swift let out a frightened sound as she stepped in behind me; Taxi had to give her a light push to get her moving. She recovered quickly, hopping down beside me, studying the displays.

“What should we do, sir?” she asked.

“This is Lim's turf,” I glanced at the librarian. “You got a direction for us?”

Limerence started towards the shut double doors at the end of the exhibit. “The curator’s office is on the other end. We must check in with security before we proceed, or they will undoubtedly inform your former compatriots in law enforcement. They may also have some information on Fizzle's whereabouts.”

“Lead the way.”

****

The four of us wove our way through one enormous room after another, some more fascinating to our troupe than others; we wound up having to physically drag Swift past an exhibition on mid-Lunar Fall poetry masters. After ten minutes wandering the deserted Museum, we came to a metal door that said ‘Security’ hidden behind a glass case with a stuffed and varnished timberwolf inside. My partner paused at the tree-beast and bared her matching fangs at it, then giggled at her own reflection in the glass.

I chuckled at my partner’s antics. “Kid, you keep making that face it’s going to get stuck like that.”

Swift snorted and gave me a push with one wingtip. “You know this from personal experience, sir?”

I blew air through my nose, ruffling her mane. She hopped out of reach and gave me her new favorite grin while Taxi just shook her head at the both of us.

I rolled my eyes and rapped my hooves on the office door. There was a scramble of hooves, the sound of something toppling off a table and somepony zipping something before Limerence, disinclined to wait, simply pushed the door in.

A chunky, uniformed security pegasus stood there with potato chip dust on his face and his tie loose. His bright green face was a mask of shock as he wiped at his coat with one wing, using the other to hike a pair of dress pants higher on his flank.

Behind him was a closet with a tiny desk jammed tightly against the wall. A bank of monitors stretched from floor to ceiling, each one with images of the museum. I saw several pointing at rooms we’d already been through and he could only have missed us if he hadn’t been looking. The gentlecolt’s magazine flopped open on his desk might have been a clue.

“How’d you get in here?!” He demanded, his double chins jiggling with consternation.

“Detective Hard Boiled, Detrot Police Department. We’re liaising with the Museum as part of an investigation and would like to speak to the curator. Is he available?” I asked.

“No, he’s not and I’m buh… busy!” The security pony stumbled over the last word, his eyes twitching back in the direction of the smut rag on his desk. He moved over slightly to block my view.

“Pardon, but if I may?” Limerence eased in front of me. “Mister Greener Side? You remember me? My father has relations with the curator and has sent me to-”

His swing was clumsy and wouldn’t have broken a mosquito’s nose, but all the same, Limerence ducked out of the way. Taxi grabbed the guard before he could recover enough for a second buck, sliding onto his back easily and pinning him down with one of her painful pegasus-specific wing grips.

“Hrrrg, bastard! Ya didn’t have to tell my boss about my allowance, ya rat!” The guard snarled, trying to shake my driver loose.

I tilted my head at Limerence. “I take it you two know one another?”

Limerence gave Greener Side a coldly appraising look. “I am not at fault if you decided to take money from the donation box, Mister Greener Side. I merely pointed it out. The consequences were yours. Now, my father has relations with the curator and we wish to see him. Will you assi-”

"Go buck yourself!" the pinned security-stallion snapped, then whined as Taxi applied her hoof to his shoulderblade a bit more firmly.

I sighed and shoved Limerence backwards, stepping between him and the guard. I addressed the heavy stallion as he squirmed under my driver. "Mister...Greener Side? We're with the police, working on a case. We will need to see the curator. Can you just point us in his direction and we'll get out of your fur?" Greener Side kicked one rear leg, entirely failing to dislodge my driver. "Taxi, get off him."

My friend eased off of Greener Side, giving him a warning poke in the wing joint. He righted himself, shaking his uniform out as he tried to reclaim some of what little dignity he'd had to begin with. He gave Limerence a look of barely restrained violent intent, but the librarian seemed not to notice. Turning to me, he tightened his tie and patted the pepper-spray canister attached to his belt, just to assure himself that his authority could still be enforced in some world that existed only inside his mind.

"I can't take you to the curator. Sorry," he said, shrugging his broad shoulders.

"You can't, or you won't?" Swift asked.

"Can't, dammit!" Greener Side snapped. "I ain't seen Doctor Fizzle in days. He lef’ me here to handle this whole place by myself… again! Prick enchanted the donation box, too!” He held up his left hoof, showing a burn mark on the side of his toe. “Ain’t had a beer in three days...” He grumbled.

“Fizzle… that’s the curator’s name? He leaves you here often?” I inquired.

“Yer damn right he does. Every few months, running off to the Princesses know where and leavin’ everything locked up tight with magic and those monitors recordin’ everything what happens like we was some kind of bank or something,” the pegasus ranted. “I swear, he just leaves me here because he can’t teleport back without somepony to set up his little summonin’ circle. I’da lost my job cause of that jerk-” He flipped his toe at Limerence. “-iffen Fizzle had wanted to take the time to train somepony else.”

“Understandable. I would not have released you from your employment for something so small as theft. The inconvenient and painful removal of your flight feathers would have proven deterrent enough. Temporary as well.“ Limerence said, contemplatively. Greener Side clenched his wings tighter to his body as the thought of having his feathers plucked rooted around right down in the old equine-avian parts of his mind for a shiver to send shooting up his back.

“Regardless," continued Limerence, "we do need to see the Doctor’s office. If you would?”

“The Doc ain’t here. Won’t do ya no good trying to get into his office without him here to let you in.”

“We’re on police business,” I reminded him. “Tell you what. Just give us the key. If we can’t get in, we’ll just deliver it back. If we can, I’ll make sure you’re compensated and that the guys outside send up a case of beer. That sound good?”

The guard tapped his chin as though he actually really had to think about it. Then he turned to his desk, picking up a ring of keys and using his wingtip to shuffle through them. Picking one, he unsnapped it from the carabiner and dropped it into my outstretched hoof. “Suit yourself. I expect that key back before ya leave… an’ have them boys outside make sure it’s Buckweiser! If ya need anything else, ya know where I am. Just take the shit-head with ya when ya go.” He used one wing-tip to indicate Limerence, whose eyebrow rose, then whose horn lit to give a gentle, cautionary tug to the end of the nearest feather.

“Oh, I will. Don’t you worry. Back in a few.” I gave him what I hoped was an assuring smile, then trotted down the hall.

****

Nightmare Moon. Everypony knows that old story. The Princess of the Night got her tail in a bunch over ponies sleeping through the night, making her feel unappreciated. After many years, she confronted Princess Celestia and demanded more hours of the day be devoted to the night so she might receive an equal measure of worship. Rebuffed, she swore vengeance and turned into a creature of darkness. The Nightmare.

To most, it’s a fairy-tale. How could it not be? The Princesses themselves are ancient and a thousand years is a long time. Nopony, not even the very best of historians, could ever get things precisely right. Mistranslations happen and while the Princesses did their best to keep history tightly recorded, there are always holes.

Hence, every now and again, it was important to have reminders in physical forms of precisely what happened all those centuries ago.

****

Fizzle’s office was at the other end of the Nightmare Moon exhibit. Taxi and I hesitated outside of the floor to ceiling length black curtain with a sign above it in silver letters that said ‘Welcome To The Nightmare’. Swift put one hoof on the curtain, then looked back at us.

“Is something wrong, sir?” she asked.

“Curtains,” Taxi murmured. “I don’t trust curtains.”

I shook my head and set my heels together, marching purposefully forward. “Sorry, kid. Old cop paranoia. We’re fine here.”

Limerence canted his chin, giving me a curious look. “I have not heard of this particular wariness.”

My driver rubbed one ear and grumbled, “Most haven’t. Curtains present an awful tactical situation, particularly in storming, invasion, or even inspection situations. They don’t block bullets or spellfire. They don’t block sound. They shroud vision and it’s easy to get tangled in them. Enough years of walking into drug labs, seeing a curtain, then having to duck a shotgun blast will make you start to hate them.”

“Ahhh… I suppose that makes a certain sense, then.” Limerence remarked. Using his magic, he snatched the curtain from both sides and pulled it back. “No shotguns. What a surprise. Now, shall we?”

The room beyond the curtain was almost pitch black. My cutie-mark, which had been tingling since we entered the building, started to ache.

“Sweets, something’s wrong,” I muttered.

My driver nodded. “Yeah, I feel… hmmm. Come on.”

As I stepped through, gun bit lifting to my mouth, a pair of bright, white horse-shoe shapes appeared on the floor in front of me. They were small, about right for a foal’s hooves. Swift bounced on her toes, giggling softly. “Oooh, sir, I love these!” she squeaked. Stepping forward, she stood on the horse-shoe shapes. A second set appeared directly in front of the last set. “It’s a tour!”

“Oh, goodie,” I drawled, then stepped in behind my partner. She started forward, following the marks. Very suddenly, a light on our left burst to life, illuminating a case with two towering figures inside. I jumped, surprised as I tumbled onto my side.

The Princesses, Celestia and Luna, stood flank to flank, their flowing manes drifting out behind them in glorious shades of the morning sky. I was momentarily frozen by the beauty of the great monarchs. Their eyes seemed to reflect a calm benevolence, though Luna, the smaller of the two, had a bitter twist to her mouth.

From somewhere overhead, a soothing, masculine voice spoke, “Ladies and Gentlecolts. This is your curator, your master of ceremonies, Doctor Fizzle. I would like to welcome you to history… and to tell you a story of the Fall and the Return of our beautiful Princess Luna. This is a story of all of us. Come with me, while I show you our great leader at her lowest point, before she returned to glory.”

I groaned and moved on, keeping to the markings. A short distance ahead, a second case, this one with a map of what must have been Equestria ten centuries past, lit up.

“This is our land, not now, but as it was,” Fizzle continued his oration. “See, Canterlot is little more than a trading village. Look there! Where now there is the Everfree, the old city of the Royal Pony sisters. Their Castle once stood as a beacon of life in the vast wilderness! Of course, there weren’t so many ponies back then.”

“Where is Fizzle’s office?” I asked, angling my head towards Limerence.

“It is off to our left,” he replied, plucking his pocket watch from his vest and using it to wave in that direction. “I’m afraid the spell I use for reading in the dark wouldn’t help the rest of you, so it would be best if we kept to the path for some distance. I will turn us at the correct place.”

We continued, the recorded voice cheerfully describing each of the set-pieces as we passed them.

“Celestia and Luna ruled as equals, loved by their ponies, feared by their enemies. They brought down great evils like the Crystal King, Lord Sombra, and Discord, Chaos itself, during his more rambunctious years. Down through the centuries, they became symbols of faith, of something ponies could hang onto no matter what happened. Sadly, it was not to last.”

“On your left, we see the final confrontation. Luna facing Celestia in the Palace of the Royal Pony Sisters, realized from a precise description given to us by both Princesses. Ahead you will see the centerpiece of our collection.”

Limerence put his hoof out to stop me. “Here. Turn here.” He lit his horn, shining a circle of light on the floor in front of us, then playing it up until it vanished into the black. “Fizzle. Fool must have used an enchantment to make the room properly dark.”

“Seems a little...impractical and unsafe, doesn’t it?” Taxi asked, trying to peer through the darkness at where she thought the walls should be.

“Fizzle lives in a world all his own,” the librarian lamented. “Believe me when I say he worries less about practical matters and more about aesthetic effect. He loves a good show. Considering the unique way the museum is funded, it makes him excellent at his job, but a nuisance to work with.”

“Lately, that seems to describe most of the people I end up working alongside. Alright, take us where we need to be.” I stood back and Limerence took the lead, stepping off the path, his horn providing a weak illumination.

After ten or fifteen body-lengths, we came to the wall. Limerence’s mouth drooped into a stern frown.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The good doctor has the door locked with a simple warding magic. An inconvenience, but nothing I cannot replace once we have finished. It will just take a moment.” The stallion’s horn began to shimmer more animatedly as sparks spurted towards the wall, catching in the grain of the wood and sliding outwards in both directions.

A crackle of lightning sprayed from Limerence’s forehead, forming a rectangle in front of us. Slowly, a vaguely door-like shape began to creep out of the woodwork, resolving like a picture being developed in photographer’s solution.

“Ahhh, here we are.” Limerence made a satisfied noise and his horn snapped back to its cool glow.

My nose began to twitch almost immediately as a tangy, slightly sweet, slightly foul scent hit my nose.

Taxi and I exchanged a look. I could just make out her expression in the dark, but it mirrored mine.

I picked up my trigger in my teeth and Taxi shrank against the other side of the door. Swift sniffed at the air, then hesitantly picked up Masamane’s bit and stacked up behind me. Limerence gave the three of us a puzzled look.

“Is… there something I should know, Detective?” he inquired.

“Get against the wall,” I growled around my bit. I thought he might object again, but something in my face must have stopped him. His horn flickered, then that strangely weighted knife slid out of its hidden sheath. He held it at the ready, floating beside his face.

Shaking the key from my pocket, I slotted it into the door, then pointed at Limerence to twist it. He used the barest flick of telekinesis to turn the key, then backed away. I laid my hoof on the handle and gave it a push.

A soft incandescent light streamed from around the edge of the door. I fell back, covering my face and Swift almost immediately began gagging, staggering away from the black portal as she tried valiantly not to puke on her bit.

Death. The smell of decomposition instantly made my eyes begin to water. Taxi and I held our breaths, partially waiting for gun or spell-fire, and partially because the air wasn’t fit to breathe. When no bullets or lightning was forthcoming, I scooted forward, poking one eye around the side and scanning back and forth.

The office might have been Tome’s, if he were a compulsive hoarder. It had that feel to it, of a collector who loved his work more than he loved the money the work brought in. Stacks of yellowing paper and heaps of scroll-cases, dusty books, and flecked bits of parchment were laid in a haphazard fashion on every available surface to a depth of at least three inches. A wide desk, heaped with even more bits of historical detritus, sat in the middle.

Behind the desk, a still form slumped sideways. The desk lamp was turned away from it, so I couldn’t make out any details other than that it appeared to be male.

On three walls, a book-case with a glass front stretched from the floor right up to the ceiling, packed beyond capacity. I studied the reflection in the glass, checking each corner for potential ambush, before stepping cautiously into the office. I kept my gun at the ready, lifting my hooves high and placing each toe deliberately so as not to set off a cascade of paper from one of the low shelves.

Inside, the smell was even stronger; I did my best to breathe through my trigger.

After several seconds, when nothing had happened, I let my bit fall. “I think we’re clear. Kid, wait out there a minute. Get your stomach straight.”

“Y-yes, sir...” Swift called.

“I take it your partner is not possessed of a strong constitution where mortal matters are concerned?” Limerence asked, slipping his knife away as he came in behind me. His nose wrinkled at the scent, but he seemed unfazed by it.

“You could say that,” I remarked. “She’s got the stuff when it counts, though.”

“I shall, as they say, take your word for it.” Limerence’s eyes went to the shape propped up behind the desk. His horn sparked and the lamp on the desk shined, twisting upwards to point at the face of the still unmoving body.

In the door, Taxi let out a faint choking sound as the light played across the pony’s features.

“...Fizzle...” Limerence murmured.

I groaned, moving around the desk. “Now that is something I had hoped not to see twice in my life.”

The corpse, unquestionably the source of the smell in the room, was laying in its chair, head lolling to one side and tongue dangling from swollen lips. Wide, vacant eyes stared up at nothing. As I watched, a fly buzzed off of the dead stallion’s ear, landing on the bridge of his nose. It skittered down to his chin, then took flight once more.

Fizzle, it seemed, was an older gentlecolt, his frame willowy and his face heavily creased. He wore a very dapper waistcoat and watch, not dissimilar to the Archivist’s standard uniform.

These were all details, taken in at a glance. None of them quite stole my attention like the one that I was certain had made Taxi gasp.

Doctor Fizzle, from nose to tailtip, was entirely grey and had a circular wound on his forehead just below the mane-line. The blood had dribbled down his face and splashed onto his desk, drying to a flaky brown crust.

“...Most… curious,” Limerence muttered. I noticed a slight tremor in his shoulders as he let the lamp swing back into position.

“Curious?” I growled. “Curious is not the word I’d have used.”

I’d seen a lot of ponies handle death for the first time, and Limerence was showing all the signs of a ‘first timer,' whether he was turning his nose up at Swift's weak stomach or not.

"I… yes. Apologies. My father's work is... sometimes violent, but I..." He trailed off, his eyes locked on Fizzle's dead face.

"You don't see many dead," I finished.

"No,” he confirmed. “I am uncertain if that is a statistical anomaly, or merely my father trying to keep me insulated from that side of things… but as a rule, we generate few actual casualties, even on our most aggressive missions.” Limerence breathed in and out several times, then closed his eyes briefly. When he reopened them, the facade of cool professionalism was back in place. “Excuse my brief malaise.”

“Don’t worry about it. Seeing your first corpse tends to do that to anypony,” I replied and he gave me a nod that seemed… almost grateful.

Taxi had moved into the room and was inspecting the body. “Hardy, this is definitely the same M.O.”

Limerence’s ears perked. “Same as what? I may be new to death, but I am fairly certain Doctor Fizzle was light brown with a streaky ginger mane, and I know of nothing that would cause a pony, fur and all, to turn… hmmm… monochrome.”

I considered for a few seconds how to bring the librarian up-to-date. Any complete accounting probably wouldn’t improve his already low opinion of me. Time for the editor’s pen, then.

“A month ago, we were investigating the death of a filly in an alleyway,” I told him. “It led us to King Cosmo.” I circled my hoof in Fizzle’s direction. “Her body… was like his, but we never did find out why. I think I already know the answer to this, but is the good Doctor a unicorn?”

“He is,” the librarian said, softly, then added, “though no more, I suppose. It would be impossible for Cosmo or anypony in his employ to have performed this act. I estimate… at least based on what I know of decay… that he could not have been dead for more than a week, at the most.”

“Hardy... he’s right.” Taxi had her jeweler’s glasses on, examining the body up close. “This is the same weapon. Whoever did this was here recently.” She cocked her head, then ducked below the level of the desk, coming up with a half-empty bottle of something cloudy and brown. Sniffing it, she set it on the desk. “Vodka, maybe? Vodka isn’t usually that color.”

Limerence trotted around the desk, lifting the bottle to his nose. “Mmm… I think that is some form of nightshade. Possibly an extract I believe they call ‘Ace’ on the street. It has been mixed with something to cover the smell. The chemical binding agent seems to have broken down, hence, the color and scent.”

A light went off in my brain. “The girl had a bunch of chemicals in her system, too.” My mind began to move, albeit sluggishly, towards the only logical conclusion. “This was somepony Fizzle knew. He let them through the wards and drank with them. Before he died… they did that to him.” I nodded at the corpse’s bloody crown.

“Would it not be easier to take a trophy after death?” the librarian asked, setting the bottle back on the desk. “Removing a horn whilst the pony is still alive is extremely painful. Even with intoxicants in his system, the good doctor would have fought back.”

Taxi raised one of Fizzle’s forelegs, holding it up. There was a bright purple ring around his fetlock. “They tied him up. Probably drugged him first, then tied him for the procedure.”

“This is either a real sadist, or somepony with a purpose,” I mused.

Limerence tapped on the side of the vodka bottle. “This, mixed with nightshade, would at least partially nullify the pain. I don’t believe this was intended as a form of torture.”

Thinking back, I tried to assemble the grand mass of information still floating in my head into something cohesive. I realized I hadn’t written a report or a single note since the whole mess began. Swift had all of those.

“Hey, kid?” I called out.

Swift poked her head around the door, swallowing hard. “Sir?”

“You remember what Slip Stitch said about the girl, right? What were those drugs in her system?”

My partner cocked her head, then patted her vest until she found a slightly wrinkled notebook still hiding in one of the side pockets. She flipped it open, searching for the right page. “Um… drugs for zebra rituals.”

“That mean anything to you?” I asked.

The librarian paused, as though about to make a painful admission. “I… am afraid that is my brother’s demesne. He maintains a strong interest in the magics of the homeland.”

“Then we’ll call him as soon as we’re out of here, right?” said Taxi.

Limerence pulled the envelope from his father from his front pocket and shook it open. “Per father’s instructions, our normal channels of communication are closed until this mission is completed. Zefu will not even be checking our usual points of interaction, much less responding to calls.”

I buried my face in the crook of my knee. “Dammit, this is a police matter! This stupid test can’t take precedence over-”

“You are not, at present, a member of any law enforcement institution, Detective,” the librarian reminded me in a voice just above a whisper. “Nor are we working with the police. If I may put forth a recommendation, we should vacate this space quickly and re-seal the wards.”

I stomped one hoof, feeling the old frustration returning.

The Don must have had some inkling of what I might find there, but did he see fit to tell me? No, of course not. Unfortunately, the only reason the Don usually ever withheld information was if he believed that having it would be more dangerous than not. Nothing irks me worse than somepony who knows better than I do and won’t let me make my own damn mistakes.

He reminded me a little too much of my dad sometimes.

I tried to organize my thoughts. Standing over a stinking body, that’s a tall order, particularly for a pony whose brain hasn’t had a great recent service history. In the end, I did what I always do when faced with a situation of too many variables.

“We can’t do anything about the body. Leave him. We’ll take a look at the footage from the security monitors for the last several days and see if we can get anything worthwhile. Make sure anything you brought in with you, leaves with you,” I directed, then pointed at the Archivist. “Lim, where are the moon guns?”

Pulling his father’s note from his vest, he flipped over to the back side and read it closely. “This would seem to indicate that the weapons are… ah...” Pivoting on one rear heel, Limerence trotted to the bookcase nearest the desk. He tugged the glass back, then pulled a series of identical, dark blue covered books off the shelves. The titles were ‘The Lunar Rebellion,' Volumes One through Six.

Opening the first book, he laid it on the desk. Rather than pages, the book contained a red, fuzzy case. Two indentations, top and bottom, seemed to indicate that something had, at least until recently, lain there.

“I’m going to take a few steps out on what I’m pretty sure is a fairly safe limb and say that these guns aren’t invisible?” I murmured.

“No… no, they are not. They are most assuredly gone.” Limerence pursed his lips, shifting the first book off of the pile and opening the second. That one, too, was empty. Shuffling through the entire stack, he methodically checked each of them then picked up the pile and slid it back into the bookshelf.

“Okay, let’s keep calm. Just how many of these things are in the wind, right now?” Taxi asked.

Limerence waved his hoof over the fake books. “The good doctor was entrusted with the entire collection. Twelve units, all told.”

“Do you think whoever stole these is planning on making copies?” she went on to ask. “We could be looking at some kind of arms deal-”

“If they're planning to reproduce them, then our opponents are wasting their time.” Limerence picked up the stack of fake books, slotting them back into place on the shelf. “The weapons contain magical enneagrams which I don’t believe can be properly reconstituted without… let's call it ’royal assistance.'”

“I’ll put that in the ‘good news’ column, then,” I replied, moving to the door.

Swift was still standing against the wall just outside, her face a bit green.

“Kid, you still in the game?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” she muttered, dejectedly. “It’s just… the smell…”

Giving her a light pat on the back, I jerked my chin at the curtained door out of the exhibit. “Don’t worry about it. Smell still gets to me, too. If that smell ever stops bothering you, then be worried. Anyway, go talk to the security guard. See if you can get him to pull the monitor images for the last week or so.”

Pushing herself to all fours she trotted back to the path, heading for the exit. “Will do, sir.”

“Oh, and don’t tell him about the body! Tell him we got into the office, but nopony was there!” I called out.

“Understood.”

Limerence was flipping through the paper on the desk as I turned back to the room. From the pile, a thin black book rose. With a flick of his horn, it opened.

“What’ve you got there?” I asked.

“The good Doctor’s appointment book,” he answered. “The last day with any appointments was… mmm… five days ago. The last thing on his books that is not marked as having been done is a mane-wash for late afternoon.”

“Isn’t it a bit strange nopony thought to look for him?” Taxi inquired, plucking out one of the scroll cases and unrolling it to look at the contents.

“No. Doctor Fizzle’s appointments were largely at the whim of his donors. He was frequently called away on a moment’s notice.”

“Well, we’ve got a time-frame then. We’ll get what we can from the security system.” I flicked one ear to indicate the door. “I’m curious… how did the pony who did this manage to seal the room up again once they’d left?”

Limerence touched the side of his spectacles, pushing them higher on his muzzle. “In all likelihood, he allowed them in, then they laid their wards to mirror his own. These were not complicated. Unless I miss my mark, they were only meant to keep out that odious security creature."

“Mmm...so no clue there. Damn.” I headed to the door. “I think, short of dragging the forensics team in here, we’ve got what we can. Seal the room and ward it. Keeping off Jade’s radar just became a whole lot harder.”

Limerence nodded as Taxi and I backed out of the tiny office. Shutting and relocking the door, his horn glittered as he began reweaving the illusory magics. Slowly, the portal faded back into the woodwork.

We followed the librarian back in the direction of the two white horse-shoe prints, still patiently waiting for the return of we three errant tourists. Annoyingly, the kid had closed the curtain on the way out, leaving the room very dark. The tour only seemed to go in one direction.

“Now, ahead you will see the centerpiece of our collection!” Fizzle repeated as we got under way. “Made of an unknown material, this was the armor of Princess Luna during the Lunar Fall. It was reconstituted by order of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna and now rests with us until its next stop on the trans-Equestria tour to commemorate the sixtieth year of Princess Luna’s return.”

Taxi cocked her head. “I wonder how they reforged it if it’s an unknown material.”

“A good question there, little filly!” The Professor said and my driver fell onto her haunches.

“What?! Are you talking to me?!” she exclaimed.

“Yes! You may ask this arcane construct any questions regarding the armor of Nightmare Moon and it will provide any answers it can!”

“Oh... Lovely.”

****

Talking to an invisible, pre-recorded message is never a calming experience, whether you’re attempting to pay your power bill or get yourself a curry. Enchanted messaging systems are notoriously touchy.

The idea is noble enough, but it's yet another magical solution to ‘save time’ that actually ends up costing more. You record a set of answers onto a tape or vinyl, then use a spell framework to copy a carefully edited portion of your personality and the messages into runes. Once done, it operates like any other enchantment, except with a very ‘personal’ touch.

As you would imagine, any alchemical or thaumaturgic system that can hold a conversation is going to arouse the interest of the Essy Office. Nothing worse than a crazed pony, uncertain how they’d somehow become a room, screaming to be demolished at all hours of the morning.

I was brought in some years ago on a case where several hundred ponies had received messages from somepony with intimate personal knowledge, claiming to be their marefriend or coltfriend, which led to two homicides by jealous spouses. The culprit was finally tracked to the Equestria Revenue Service main office, where it turned out a bored prankster had managed to re-program their automated calling system with their own personality, which began calling overdue debtors en-mass.

The lesson should have been clear.

Stop sticking bits of your brain into rooms, dammit!

****

I nudged Taxi. “Go on. You got it talking. Ask about the Moon Guns. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Taxi tilted her head back and addressed the darkened room as we moved along the path. “Doctor Fizzle, do you know anything about ‘Moon’ weapons?”

“I’m sorry, but this construct is made to answer questions about Nightmare Moon’s armor. Any other inquiries will have to be made directly to staff.”

“Ah...alright then. I guess it can’t hurt. How did they rebuild Nightmare Moon’s armor if it was an unknown material?” my driver asked.

“A good question there, little filly!” the construct enthused. “The armor is ensorcelled with any number of spectacular magics, few of which we were able to identify. The armor was simply fitted back together, piece by piece, like a puzzle. As it was, it re-assembled itself, every crack sealing and every break repairing right down to the microscopic level.”

“Why couldn’t the Princess just tell you how it worked?” I put in.

“A good question there, little colt! Princess Luna’s memory of her time as Nightmare Moon is, sadly, stunted in places. It was, after all, a thousand years ago and her neurology was being affected by extremely powerful magics! Now, you have arrived!”

The last set of horse-shoes in front of us sputtered out, leaving us in complete dark.

A powerful overhead light burst to life and, despite myself, I leapt back.

The purple titan of the night, the horror that haunts the dreams of every child, the great evil that stole Princess Luna was standing there just a few short inches from us. Her wings spread wide, she arched her back gracefully as though preparing to take flight. One hoof was upraised towards the sky. An arrogant smirk, complete with long fangs, decorated her unearthly, beautiful face. All that separated us was a very thin piece of glass.

It was a statue, of course, like the wax-work griffin, but the similarities in style ended there. I could see each individual hair of Nightmare Moon’s muzzle and the sweeping curve of her etheric mane swelling to the ceiling seemed to undulate and flow with hidden breezes. At first I thought the effect was magic, but upon second examination I realized that it was some gorgeously ephemeral fabric being blown about by hidden fans.

“That’s...fantastic,” Taxi whispered at my shoulder.

“I’m glad you think so, little filly! We’’re quite proud of her. We have had some difficulty discovering the true events which occurred during her defeat and the return of Princess Luna. The ponies involved have been somewhat cagey regarding that piece of our history, however, one of them has sworn before death to release the complete and unaltered truth!” Fizzle gushed, his fatherly voice rising with excitement. “In the meantime, we have been given access to the armor to display while it moves around Equestria! We will be showing this piece for two more weeks. You got here just in time!”

There was a faint sound from my other side and I looked over to see Limerence squinting at the glass. His lips dipped at the edges.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“I am...uncertain,” he replied, walking in a slow circle around the case before coming to a stop in front of it again. His attention seemed focused on the armor’s breastplate. Tilting his head, he examined it from one side, then the other.

“Ahhh…” The librarian breathed out through half open lips. “Somepony has been bamboozled.”

Taxi blinked at him. “What?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, resting his hoof on the front of the case. “It is possible this is unrelated to the case at hoof, but I believe the breastplate has been stolen.”

“What?!” I leapt to my hooves, slipping on the marble floor and falling flat on my stomach. Metal horse-shoes are not ideal indoor wear on slippery surfaces.

Limerence ignored my pratfall, shifting his eyes up and down the faux-Princess’s body. “Mmmhmmm… as well, I believe it may have been the only piece of Nightmare Moon’s armor that was ever here at all.” He fell silent again, his gaze roving from the horseshoes to the vestments then up to the helmet before falling back on the chest once more and seeming to lose himself in thought.

Pulling myself up, I poked him in the side. “Hey, you want to elaborate on that for those of us in the class who aren’t professional artifact dealers?”

The librarian came out of his deep contemplation with a full body jerk. “Ah… apologies.” He let his rear end drop onto his haunches, assuming a tone like a lecturing teacher as he gestured with a hoof at Nightmare Moon’s horseshoes, then at the helm. “Those are fakes.” He nodded his horn towards to the chestplate. “That is a counterfeit.”

“You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t see the difference.” I grumbled.

“I suppose that is a somewhat arcane distinction,” Limerence admitted, somehow managing to sound patient and condescending at the same time, “A fake is simply meant to proxy something and is relatively innocent in its purpose. I suppose 'replica' might be a better word. A counterfeit is designed to make it seem that something has not, in fact, been stolen or removed.”

I thought on this for a short time, then asked, “Assuming what you’re saying is true, and you’ll have to give me a moment to digest this... why would the Princesses report that they had the entire armor here if it wasn’t true?”

Limerence motioned at the statue as though the answer were obvious. “Detective, surely you’re aware that the armor of Nightmare Moon is an artifact of incomparable power. Pieces like this tend to operate as a set. I doubt it could be made to function piecemeal by anypony save perhaps Princess Luna herself. To have it all in one place would be extremely foolhardy.” He gave the shoes a look of admiration as he went on, “Luna has employed the services of an excellent Canterlot artist to create the copies. I recognize the work. A dear, long time friend of the Archivists by the name of Humbug.” He used his horn to direct our eyes towards one of the whorls on the wax-work’s front left shoe. “If you note, there is a cross-hatched brush stroke carved at the very tip of the shoe which looks somewhat reminiscence of an ‘H.'”

Taxi, who hadn’t removed her jeweler’s glasses, was poking around the case. “So...what? Somepony breaks in, steals a bunch of secretly held weaponry and… possibly the most famous piece of armor in Equestria?” She gave an offended snort. “No way. Where are the guards? The wards?”

“The Moon weapons needed only be kept out of sight. There is little reason to ward something you are hiding.” Limerence narrowed his eyes at Nightmare Moon as he continued, “However, this… hmmm… let us see, shall we?”

The librarian’s horn flickered again, spreading thin tendrils of light in all directions. They crept outwards like vines, a spilling field of wispy smoke that slid through my fur where it intersected my body. I waved my hoof at the light, but it passed right on. As I watched, a few of the lights bisected the case, sputtered, and died immediately with a sound like a chicken full of eggs being squished in a vice.

Limerence nodded with quiet satisfaction. “I can assure you that this statue is warded quite heavily. Guards would be almost entirely unnecessary. In fact, I doubt the entire PACT with a legion of Cloudhammers could open that case.”

“What then?” I grumbled. “They must have opened it if the real armor is gone.”

“Indeed. Only Fizzle, the Princesses, and perhaps whoever they entrusted with the transit of the armor would have the knowledge to open it. Short of stealing the good Doctor’s memories, I can’t see how that would be done, and would be easily precluded by his death.“ His ears drooped. “I suppose... unavoidably... I must say that I ... mmm... I... do recognize the counterfeiter’s work.”

“Finally, some good news!” I exclaimed, throwing my hooves in the air. “Praise be to Celestia for providing us some luck. Who is it?”

Shaking his mane down over one shoulder revealed that the librarian’s face had fallen into a look of dismay. “There we face… a somewhat difficult issue. while I do know his identity, I do not know how we would get in contact with him.”

“Why? What’s the issue?”

“I will just say, he is of a profession that I find… deeply distasteful,” Limerence opined, clenching his teeth as though the mere mention irritated him.

“Counterfeiting isn’t bad enough?” Taxi chimed in.

“I can respect an artisan. What I can’t respect, is a faker,” he replied, his tail slapping against the cracked bell on his rear hip. “While he may have skill at his private profession his… public face is one I’d gladly see impaled on his own flaming swords.”

“Flaming swords?!” I burst out.

Limerence looked uncomfortably around, then swept his hoof toward the curtain. “I…will see if I can speak to my father about where we might find him. Considering your rather irrational methodology, I believe I will keep his name to myself until such time as I am convinced pursuit is worthwhile.”

“Irrational methodology?!” I snarled.

“Yes, exactly that. I don’t wish to get your hopes up if it is impossible. We… have a more pressing matter. Miss Swift has been gone for some time. Shouldn’t we go check on her?”

I squinted at him and he refused to meet my eyes. “Yeees, but you’re going to tell me more about this counterfeiter with the flaming swords once we’re done with that.”

The librarian chewed at his lower lip, still staring at the floor, then gave the barest of nods. “Once I have spoken to my father and determined it is the wisest course of action.”

“Fine.”

As we made to leave, Taxi raised her voice, “Thank you for the tour, Doctor Fizzle!”

“You’re welcome there, little filly!”

****

Limerence Tome had asked me a question the day before that I never answered.

"Why solve any puzzle?... You've made it your life's work to solve them..."

I started to wonder if maybe my dogged persistence wasn’t just a little bit self-destructive in nature.

On second consideration, Juniper had been right. I was being hard-headed. It was part of what made me a good cop and a crappy civilian. Many years of persisting when all sane, rational minds would have given up leads one to the conclusion that if they just crack on, they’ll make out alright in the end.

Sometimes that’s even true.

But sometimes you end up with a bug’s heart and your partner chewing the local wildlife.

***

We came around the corner to witness Swift and Greener Side, locked in a fierce battle of wits.

If this battle had anything to do with getting our damn monitors operating or determining the exact location of either the Moon weapons or the armor of Nightmare Moon, I think I’d have been less put out.

My partner and the security guard were sitting facing one another over a short night stand. Arrayed in front of them was a dizzying mix of colorful cards spread out in ritualistic patterns.

“What in the wide, wide world of Equestria are you doing?” I asked.

Swift jumped, her cards scattering across the table and off onto the floor. I stopped one with my hooftip, peering at it. On it was artwork of a manticore festooned in pictures and icons, not one of which meant a single thing to me. I glanced at Taxi, but she shrugged and passed the card back.

“Sorry, sir! We were waiting for the monitors to run back to the events of this week! Mister Greener Side said he had some cards and I wanted to play while we waited and I had my cards in my pocket and I hadn’t had the chance in almost a month because I was crazy and-” Swift babbled until I cut her off with a hoof over her muzzle.

“It’s alright, kid. Clean it up and let’s see what we’ve got.” I waved the security pegasus back towards his office and said, “We need to see the tapes from five days ago. You think you can do that?”

He heaved his massive weight off the chair, readjusting his uniform so it didn’t slip down the crack of his enormous rear end. “Weeelp, I supposed I could see my way to it… seeing as there’ll be some beer involved. If there were a sammich comin’ too, I might even be getting you some nice close-ups of a few pretty mares, while we’re at it. Your girl there plays a mean game of Enchantment: The Conglomeration, by the way.”

My partner, who was down on her knees picking up her cards, ducked her head under one wing. “T-thanks…” she muttered.

“That's… good to know, but mostly what we need to see is the armor case for Nightmare Moon and Fizzle’s office,” I directed.

Greener Side scratched the tuft of tangled beard on his collection of chins. “Huh… funny thing, now you mention it. Five days back, the Doc had me go on break for about an hour and a half. That was the last time I saw ’im. Came back and he’d already sealed up his office and left.”

“I don’t suppose you know when that was?” Taxi put in.

“Ehhh, just after lunch, mighta been?”

I pushed open the door of the little security room. “You mind showing us the footage from around that time?”

“Suit yaself. When the Doc gets back, I tell ’em you was by, if you like,” Greener Side replied, waddling around me to the bank of security monitors. He lifted himself up into the chair with a bevy of grunts and groans.

Taxi shuffled her hooves and Limerence coughed, awkwardly. I did my best to smile at the security pony. “If you see him, pass along my regards.”

Greener Side bobbed his head, then swung around in his chair to face the monitors and opened the desk’s drawer, revealing a control panel similar to the one in Snicket’s office, though much less complex. Flipping several switches, he rotated a dial back and forth.

“Here ya go.” He raised his head, jerking his chin at the middle monitor which was showing an image of the Nightmare Moon exhibit as it must have looked with the lights up. “It’s set to the hour before we open until after lunch. The controls is pretty simple. Big button goes forward, little one goes backward, dial says how fast.”

Opening my coat, I dropped a five bit piece on the table. “Why don’t you go get something to eat?”

His eyes widened and he snatched up the bits. “I am a bit peckish. Alright, don’t mess with nothin’ under the desk, right?”

I tilted my head towards the underside of the security station. Four stacks of magazines lay down there that I’m pretty sure weren’t security related. The top one looked a bit...sticky. “Wouldn’t dream of.”

“Back in a few,” Greener Side said, trotting out of the booth and down the hall.

Taxi sighed, watching him go. “If that’s the best security Fizzle could afford…”

“He might not be a very good security guard, but he has a really good deck,” Swift put in, using her wings to sweep together the last of her cards and slip them into her pocket. “He managed to get an Ebony Trefoil out on the first turn!”

“I’ve no idea what that means, but unless it means he’s secretly some kind of fat ninja, I don’t think-”

“Security comes in different flavors, Miss Taxi,” Limerence said, softly. “That… creature... is merely one.”

“I don’t see why you’d even have a guard that incompetent,” my driver sniffed. “I wouldn’t set him to guard a daffodil sandwich, much less a museum.”

The librarian shrugged, pushing himself up and going to the control panel for the security system. "My best supposition is that he is there to meet some sort of minimum insurance requirement that a sapient being be on duty. The museum's real security force is that Doctor Fizzle is… or, rather, was… a master ward-smith. He assisted in the development of the wards which surround The Archive itself. While his office may have been a low priority, largely on the principle that thieves would assume the most heavily warded locations contain the most valuable objects, I would have great pity on anypony who tried to access his displays without permission.”

“You mean besides the one who you seem to think stole that armor?” I reminded him.

"Ah…" Limerence tucked his tail under himself and mentally reconnoitered. “...So it would appear.”

Taxi, meanwhile, had raised herself into Greener Side’s chair and was running the footage from the security camera. The image appeared to be from the corner opposite the curtain, but nothing was happening. She tapped the dial and the video shifted slightly, stuttering as it picked up speed.

After a few seconds, a high speed Doctor Fizzle, as he must have looked in life, pushed through the curtain. The dapper stallion’s smiling old face reflected a genuine contentment with life. That’s a rare enough thing to see in Detrot that I felt a twinge of sadness that he would be, just a few short hours later, laying dead in his office.

Taxi slowed the image speed back to normal. We then watched as the dead professor wandered through his displays, his horn glowing with tendrils of light very similar to the ones Limerence had used. Each case he passed got the treatment, and in each case, the lights vanished as soon as they crossed the surface of the glass.

Stopping in front of the armor of Nightmare Moon, he gave the statue a jaunty salute before progressing with his test of the wards. Satisfied they were all still in place, he turned to his office and trotted on in, whistling to himself.

For a long time, nothing happened in the exhibition room, then, of a sudden, the image went dead.

“What happened?” Swift asked, putting one hoof on the video and giving it a little tap.

“I am uncertain what... Ah. He’s cast a darkness spell,” Limerence answered, nosing in the direction of two glowing, white hoof-prints towards the corner of the screen.

“Right...that’s going to make this less useful,” I groaned.

Taxi rolled the dial, moving the images forward more quickly. After a few seconds, somepony opened the curtain across the front of the exhibit and stepped onto the white horse-shoes. I couldn’t make out any details other than that one of them seemed much smaller than the other.

Several moments later, the statues of the two sisters lit up, revealing a stubbly-faced, fresh-out-of-adolescence colt with a tousled mane and a tiny filly with a big orange bow in her hair. They gawped at the princesses, ears twitching with interest as they listened to Fizzle’s dialogue.

It proceeded thus. Ponies came and ran through the tour one after another, in groups and individually. The tour, as it turned out, circled the room in a roundabout fashion to make the space seem larger than it was. Upon coming to the armor, they left again through a second curtain we hadn’t had the chance to make it to.

There was a father and his son, two playful sisters, a group of doddering old mares who spent an age over each statue, and dozens of others.

I glanced at the time-stamp after we’d watched the video in stops and starts for a good ten minutes; We were about two hours into the day. Swift had her notepad out and was annotating each group with a short description and as many cutie-marks as she could make out.

“Two, stallion and mare, baby bottle, sack of potatoes…school group, children...count nineteen...”

On it went. Faces, cutie-marks, ponies coming and going.

As you might imagine, after a little of this, I was starting to get very bored.

I slouched over the desk, playing with a pencil, listening with only half my brain to the litany of cutie-marks and numbers. Time passed. Taxi broke out a packet of biscuits. My eyelids were starting to droop and my head to nod when Swift fell abruptly silent.

“Bwha...what?” I raised my nose, glancing at the video monitor, then at Swift, before slurping up a bit of saliva that Lady Ennui had lovingly placed upon my lip. “Why’d you stop?”

My partner dropped her pencil, working her jaw. “There’s nothing happening. I guess everypony had things to do in the afternoon.”

I studied the various screens, but she was right. Everypony seemed to have left the building. Fizzle hadn’t re-emerged from his office.

“Hmmm...that’s…” Taxi began, one ear fluttering back and forth.

“What is it, Sweets?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Lemme run it back a bit here.” Twisting the dial, she let the video go back several seconds, then play forward. “Watch that screen there.” She nodded at one particular picture in the upper left corner.

The screen she was indicating was displaying the room with the griffin statues, where we’d come in.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Just… watch.” She let the picture play.

A minute passed, then, very slowly, a very small spider crawled from the edge of the lens, tapping its legs as though uncertain where it might be going as it meandered across the glass.

“It’s just a bug. Whatever you thought you saw-” I grumbled.

“Keep watching,” she insisted.

I sat, crossing my forelegs. “Alright, I’m watching...what’s supposed to be...hap...pen...ing…” I trailed off. The spider had completed its trip across the screen, vanishing on whatever arachnid business he might have had that day. A few seconds after the first had finished its path, another, identical spider, appeared.

It made its way across, following very much the same path as the first. In fact, if I’d had to make a guess, I’d have said it was exactly the same. This one finished its walk after a few seconds, only to be followed quickly by another who’d apparently had much the same errands.

“Is...there something wrong with the video?" Swift asked.

Limerence’s horn flickered and he turned the dial to maximum speed. That same spider leapt across the screen fifty more times in the span of a few seconds.

“What it is... is a section of footage which has been magically looped over a span of time,” the librarian stated, matter of factly. “Note the time-code continues to progress.”

He was right. The numbers kept counting forward, even as the spider wandered his quiet path again and again.

Taxi sucked her lower lip a little. “It’s...kind of amateur, I guess. Good enough if nopony is actually looking for it or if you don’t think somepony is going to have a time-frame. Would have been a lot better if not for that wandering bug." Taxi shrugged. "There’s no way I know of to recover what was there, but... I think I’d rule out Greener Side. Maybe Fizzle or the pony who killed him?”

I considered that for a moment, then nodded. “I could see our murderer jiggering the tape, but remember, it was Fizzle who told the guard to go on break. Either of them could have done it.”

“Sir, how did they do it? I mean, whoever it was?” Swift asked. “It seems sort of complicated. Couldn’t they have just turned the whole system off?”

Limerence tapped at the panel, briefly, letting the video continue running from the point we’d left off. “Shutting off the museum security would have, no doubt, triggered several alarms. I believe it was done simply, however. Considering the timestamp, these changes to the security feed were accomplished before the murder, which suggests to me that Fizzle was responsible. If that it is true, then he recorded a few seconds from the security cameras, then set the input as the output and left it to repeat itself for a certain span of time. Anypony looking at the images later on would assume there was just a lull in the museum activity.” The librarian dipped his nose in my driver’s direction. “We, ourselves, would have missed it were it not for Miss Taxi’s keen eye.”

My driver acknowledged the compliment with a flip of her braid.

“That leaves us with...why? We know this was probably his time of death and, in all likelihood, the thefts happened simultaneously. Unless Fizzle sold you out-”

The Archivist held up one hoof. “Impossible,” Limerence said, flatly. “Fizzle’s life was artifacts. His cutie mark was a magnifying glass and a piece of an ancient tablet which he discovered when he was a foal. Betraying us would be betraying his own talent.”

Taxi stiffened, her breath catching in the back of her throat. I put a calming hoof on her shoulder and she forced her back to relax. Limerence lifted one eyebrow.

“Have I missed some essential piece of information?” he asked.

I added a little pressure to the hoof on her spine and Taxi shuddered, then shook her head. “No,” she muttered. “Nothing you need to know whatsoever.”

"Ah." Limerence shrugged, turning back to the video. “I assume your reaction is in some way related to your injuries? Do remember, I have read your file, Miss Taxi. I am entirely aware of your wounds, and their origin is irrelevant to our task, so you will find attempting to conceal them from conversation quite unnecessary. If it helps, I will avoid casual discussion of talents and cutie marks. Will that suffice?”

Taxi’s ears still hovered almost flat to her head, her tail still flicking unhappily as she pulled her attention away from the librarian and back up to the bank of screens. Concealing pain was something my driver was always good at, but some things still snuck in under her radar now and then.

"That...will be fine. Thank you." She replied.

A new pony had entered the Nightmare Moon exhibition and the spider, it seemed, had finally completed its endlessly circular journey. “Hmmm... it seems the loop ends two and a half hours later. It might have been triggered to end then, or maybe the killer did it.”

“I guess there’s no way to know, is there?” I asked, settling my chin back on the edge of the desk, preparing, as per usual, to start the process over and make sure there was nothing we’d missed.

“Probably not, no. Not unless you want to send this to the police information labs.”

Swift picked up her pencil again and flipped to a new page in her notepad to continue her inventory of potential witnesses.

“Hmmm... blue body... red mane… cutie-mark, maybe cherries with a stem-”

“What?” I wrenched my head up from the desk, looking around until I found the angle that Swift was viewing.

A young unicorn mare stood on the middle-right screen, facing half away from us, her eyes locked on the armor of Nightmare Moon. Her pelt was gentle blue, with a sweeping, almost blood-colored mane of rich curls rolling down her sides. Her cutie-mark appeared to be a cherry stem with three berries dangling from it. Shifting her weight from one hoof to the other, she pulled a piece of paper from her bright green saddle-bags and examined it closely. Her lips moved, saying words I couldn’t hear, as she stared at the statue intently for several seconds then folded the paper away.

“That's impossible! This footage is less than week old! It can't be-” I started.

Taxi whispered the name that was hanging on the tip of my tongue.

“...Ruby…”

Act 2, Chapter 9: It's Not Suicide if it Works

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 9: It’s Not Suicide If It Works

One might think that a country ruled by immortal absolute monarchs capable of directing the motion of the sun and moon would be largely immune from political strife. One would only be partly right. While the presence of the Princesses simplifies some aspects of Equestrian political life - the nation has never known a war of succession or torturous nationwide election cycle, for example - Equestria is not without its politics.

While the Princesses can be counted on to toss their irresistable social weight around on the most divisive blanket issues facing Equestria, such as the legalization of pony-griffin marriage, the royalty are few, and their attention per unit time is limited. They cannot be bothered every single time animal rights activists and furniture salesponies clash over the use of timberwolf lumber in credenzas, so when the cry goes up that 'Fir is Murder' and ponies start throwing sap on one another, the resolution is often left to local elected officials, such as the mayors, police chiefs, and judges.

Because the elected officials are ultimately accountable to their little ponies, the ability to manipulate the herd, whether through convincing argument, ad campaign, vague threats, or straight-out charisma, is both plausible and heavily sought-after. After all, the herd is a fickle beast; The distance between a congregation licking your hooves and an angry mob ready to trample you into wafers can be as small as a few catastrophically poor mugs of cider.

Indeed, those who would walk in the corridors of political power are treading a thin line even without agents of chaos actively seeking to undermine one's reign.

--The Scholar

I held a cup of coffee with shaking hooves, still trying to get myself under control. The frantic call to Slip Stitch had helped, somewhat, but I was left facing a strange situation.

****

Click.

“Stitch! Stitch you bastard, I’ve been on hold for twenty minutes! What were you doing?!"

The coroner, as ever, was immune to my or any displeasure.

“Detective? My dear sir! How is the ticker holding up? I do wish you’d let me have another look at it; I'd love to see it operating at full capacity!”

“My heart’s fine! I need to know if you copied that surgery you did on me! Where’s that Jane Pony we brought in a month ago?”

“The poor child with the cherries on her flank?”

“Yes!”

“I have her on ice here until somepony comes to claim her body. A month and a half is my usual wait time. Why? Detective, you sound like you’ve seen a ghost.”

"...I may have. Go pull her drawer.”

Slip Stitch set the phone down, trotting away into the distance over echoing tiles. There was a sound like a horn being stepped on, then the rattle of an opening morgue drawer. After a moment, his hoofsteps returned and he picked up the phone.

“Am I looking for something specific?”

“Is she still there?”

A pause.

“Detective, have you been drinking? If so, I would like the name of your bartender. I will have him cater my next party.”

“Tell me, dammit! Is she still there?!”

“Where else would she be?”

I took a deep breath, recomposing myself. “Alright… whew. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse, but at least there aren’t two corpses walking around…”

“You know, Detective, I realize that chemical supplements may have left a poor taste in your muzzle after your experiences with Miss Jade, but I can get you-”

“No, no, it’s fine Stitch. Thanks. Keep the filly on ice as long as you can. We may need her body.”

“Of course. I am aware you have recently become unemployed. May I take this call to mean you are continuing investigations into the death of this lovely creature?”

“Yes. Keep it off the radar, if you can. Jade’s going to be sniffing up my tail soon enough as it is.”

“I did hear of the rather spectacular way you recused yourself from your post. If I may say, ‘Bravo!' I can’t think of any ponies who have survived her wrath unscathed.”

“Don't jinx it. I have something to do before she comes after me with a drawer full of kitchen implements.”

“Well, should you need a place to go to ground, or indeed, six feet beneath…”

“I’ll keep you in mind. Take care, Stitch.”

“Sun be with you, Detective.”

****

The Museum had a well stocked break-room for the employees, with a little fridge labeled ‘Greener Side Keep Out!’ and a stack of instant coffee packets. The security pony was back at his desk, no doubt back to poking through his debaucherous reading material, completely unaware that his boss’s corpse was moldering in his office just a few yards away.

I thought about having Taxi try to erase us from the tapes, but decided against it when I realized they’d start questioning the guard the moment somepony inevitably went hunting for Fizzle. Greener Side might not report the good doctor missing for a number of days, but somepony surely would at some point. Short of erasing his memory - which, come to think of it, Taxi might have been able to do, but probably not without causing some brain damage -- he was going to tell them we’d been poking around.

Nothing for it, then. Soon enough, Jade would have her reason to hunt me down with the full force of the Detrot PD. We just had to buy ourselves as much time as possible..

****

The coffee was cooling quickly in my hooves, but I sipped it again anyway.

Swift sat across from the table, her notebook open to the last page, but she wasn’t writing anything. She was just staring at the words ‘Red mane, blue body, cutie mark cherries’ with an expression of disbelief.

Taxi had a magazine open and was doing the crossword puzzle on the back page.

Limerence did not deign to drink the instant coffee, but instead sat in the corner, back to the three of us, curled into one of his meditative positions. The explanations had taken a short time, and we edited them heavily for content, but he accepted that there was apparently a dead filly walking around much more readily than the rest of us had. Finding out that Ruby was still definitely dead didn’t make me feel any better.

Swift’s ears fluttered against her head as she tapped the notepad with her pencil.

“Sir… I…” She hesitated, then shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What, kid? I’m open to just about any thought you’ve got right now.”

“Um… I was just going to ask if you still had that picture of Miss Ruby.”

“Yeah, here somewhere…” I patted around my pockets, then started seriously hunting through them. The magical water-proofing had survived the various repairs, and the miniature pocket dimension in both sides was still almost stuffed to capacity. It took some heavy searching before I found the folded photograph. “Here…” I passed it to her and she nosed it open, spreading it on the table.

Taxi craned her neck, interestedly, then her eyes widened a little. “You...think?”

I stared at the image of the two fillies, forelegs around one another, smiling brightly out of the dead past. The one I presumed to be Ruby was a little taller than the other girl, but their manes and coats were a close match.

“Seems to fit, yeah. Some kind of family relation, maybe? This picture looks a couple of years old,” I replied.

“Sisters,” Swift murmured. “I’ve got a picture just like this of me and Scarlet. I always thought of him as my brother. My loud, way-too-flirty brother...”

“Now I’m disturbed by the fact that you felt the need to date him,” I answered, and my partner glowered at me.

“Well, nopony else wanted to go to prom with the filly who looked like she should still be wearing wing-trainers after she had hit puberty!” she snapped, then looked abashed as she remembered who she was talking to.

I held up my hooves. “Hey, not criticizing. Celestia knows, I’ve got enough friends with unusual dating habits.” I flicked my eyes towards Taxi, earning me a kick in the shins under the table. Swift giggled. “Anyway, if you say that’s her sibling, it fits well enough with what we know. I’m curious as to why she’s in Detrot, though.”

“Why else, sir? She’s looking for her sister,” Swift stated, then gave me a curious look. “Do you not have family?”

“Not for a lot of years. I forget what it’s like,” I replied.

An uncharacteristic burst of bitterly sad feelings welled in my chest at that admission. I realized, after a moment, that the emotions were centered very specifically on the left side of my chest. Touching the socket on my breast, I tried to project comforting feelings in the general direction of my aorta, forcing myself to be calm before I continued.

“Regardless, we need to find her. I want out of this museum, first and foremost. Then we’re going to have a discussion with His Truly over there-” I motioned at Limerence, “-about this counterfeiter.”

Limerence spoke without moving, “And I say again, that will happen once I have contacted my father and informed him of our progress. I will also make an attempt to send a message to my brother.”

“You think he’s going to respond?”

“The effort costs us nothing.”

“That’s not very encouraging.” I exhaled.

“Was I supposed to be encouraging you? I missed that part of my instructions.”

****

I pushed open the emergency exit once Limerence declared its wards broken and its electronics disabled. Once we were out, he waved his horn over the lock and there was a soft click as the mechanism shut itself again.

A muffled voice seemed to be echoing down the alley. Somepony was speaking into a megaphone.

“What is that?” I asked, leading the way toward the mouth of the narrow alley.

Limerence’s lip curled with displeasure as he moved along beside me. “That… is Skylark.”

“You mean…”

“Yes. Astral Skylark. Head of the Lunar Passage. She comes down here to encourage her ‘flock’ to do ‘Luna’s good work’ every Monday.” He furtively looked both directions, hunting for another way out of the alley. The police car had moved at some point, leaving the mouth of the passage exposed to the crowd. Pausing at the end of the alley, I peered out.

“That’s… not… good.”

“What is it?” Taxi asked, moving up to my flank.

I turned to answer, but the voice was on that megaphone again. It was loud and shrill. I had to wait until it paused for breath to answer her. “The Loonies are pretty much taking up the entire sidewalk. I don’t think we’ll be able to avoid them.”

“Maybe we could pretend to be part of the bunch that was watching?” she suggested, then bit her tongue as she glanced at Swift. “She could take off her tactical vest and we’ll hide your guns in my saddlebags and-”

“We’re pretty obviously coming out of the museum, Sweets,” I reminded her. “I think the fact that we’ve got a pony in uniform with us might be the only thing that keeps that lot from doing anything genuinely rash. There’s also news ponies down there. I think I see Sugar Lace and that camera pony, too...”

“What, then?”

I hesitated for several seconds, thinking.

Our options were not brilliant, nor likely to avoid undue attention. Announcing to the world I was alive seemed a bit foolhardy, but knowing the Detrot P.D. the gossip train had already left that particular station. Avoiding Jade’s attention was preferable, but if what Stitch had said was right, she was going to be after me anyway sooner rather than later. What I really needed was something to keep her busy.

Well, when all else fails, brazen stupidity.

“You remember that scam you pulled on the buffalo crime boss about eight years back?” I asked Taxi.

She rolled her eyes to one side and stuck her tongue out of one side of her muzzle. “Yeeeah… that was a good one. His entire syndicate went ape,” she recalled.

“We need Chief Jade off our backsides and too distracted to start digging into what we’ve been up to and we need to get through that crowd. I’m seeing an opportunity.”

Taxi looked puzzled, then her eyes shot wide. “No. No way. Hardy, she’ll kill you! She’ll hunt you down and personally mangle your body!”

“Yeah, but she’ll have to do that after the P.R. storm dies down. That gives us time.”

Limerence studied me for several seconds, then his ears splayed out. “Detective, what are the two of you talking about?”

I patted him across the shoulders in a chummy manner; he stepped sideways, out of reach. “We’re going to go have a little talk with Miss Skylark. Then our problems with Chief Jade will be over, at least for a fair while.”

“Is that… wise?” he asked. “Remember what I said about threatening my mission-"

"Our mission."

"Of course. Regardless, I will not-”

“The mission will be fine,” I assured him, but he still looked very dubious.

“I am going to send you the bill for my tailor if this vest is, for any reason, covered in your viscera, Detective.”

****

I took the lead and Taxi, the rear, with the Archivist and the rookie in the middle. Strutting out of the alley, I centered myself on the source of the megaphone.

If anything, my initial estimations had been low. The crowd hadn’t just taken up the sidewalk in front of the museum. With the arrival of their leader, their numbers had doubled or perhaps tripled, with a sea of midnight blue robes filling the road, blocked in by police bollards on both sides, behind and in front, separating them from a second group who were just there to watch the goings on. The police car that had been blocking the alley when we first arrived had moved down to join its fellows, shoring up the blockade in front of the entrance to the converted mansion.

“Hear me, my friends! We have taken their shaming of our Mistress of the Night for too long! We will be here, every Monday, without fail!”

The protesters screamed their agreement as Astral continued.

“The Sun will hear our voices and will cease this madness! We do not accept her lies! We do not accept her misdirections! Hasn’t Princess Luna suffered enough? A thousand years banished to the moon, and for what? What we now willingly give! Our adoration, justly deserved! May she one day see fit to uplift us to be with her, as equals!”

It only took them seconds to spot the four of us coming out of the museum’s alleyway, but when they did, a shout rose from the herd of picketers.

There was no mistaking their shepherd.

Astral Skylark, self-proclaimed Priestess of the Night’s Glory, was near the head of the crowd, on some kind of upraised platform. Like her flock, she wore those silly robes, though hers were significantly more ornamented than the rest, covered as they were in glossy thread and sequins made out of what could only be real silver. Her pale, white mane was cut to a conservative and very straight shoulder length and swept back from her forehead, allowing her horn a wide berth. At the edges, around her ears and eyes, her fur was much darker, a purple so deep it almost appeared black. It gave her the odd appearance of wearing some type of mask, a bit like a raccoon with a sense of style.

She could have been thirty from her looks, but something in her eyes said closer to fifty. While not beautiful, she had a certain sharp charisma about her heavy-set, violet features. Her robes hung down to her ankles, with a huge hood pushed back from her neck that would surely have blocked vision if she’d ever had it up.

She paused at the sight of us, megaphone hovering halfway to her muzzle, and drew breath for what would doubtless be another tirade about how we were emotionally raping Princess Luna from across the country by looking at some dusty artifacts. That breath held when I headed straight for her.

There were a few camera flashes from the rookie news-ponies who’d no doubt had covering the protests dumped on them to get them out of the office. It brought my head up from its customary slump, reminding me this was supposed to be a show. I gave them my best smile, which was a bit ragged, but would pass for what I had in mind. Sugar Lace was out there, leaning on one of the parking meters. She brightened as she saw me, shoving her camera-pony back into position and snatching up her microphone in her magic.

I looked back to make sure the other three were still behind me. They were, though Taxi looked deeply uncertain, and Limerence wasn’t even hiding his distress, taking short little hops forward just to keep between Swift and my driver. My partner just looked a bit nervous, her wings kicking up a little dust as she fought the urge to take off.

At first, the crowd shouted a few slogans at us, but they quieted as soon it seemed I wasn’t intending to try to move around them or make for the police line. It was a short walk, during which every eye followed us. Cameras flashed, and a few voices whispered, ‘Isn’t that Detective Hard Boiled?’ and ‘I saw him in the paper!’ One, which I caught only because it was one of the ponies nearest us, muttered, ‘I thought I heard he died or something’.

Up close, Skylark was still an imposing creature, but much shorter than I’d thought. The platform she was on raised her a good third of a meter in the air, and she was wearing some kind of lifts in her horse-shoes. I paused at the bottom of the platform, then leapt up onto it beside her.

Indignation flared in her face and she lifted the megaphone closer to herself. I grinned at her.

“Detective? I’ve heard of you. You were in the papers, investigating that girl, right?” She said, removing her magic from the trigger of the speaker. At conversational levels, her voice was almost pleasant, though a bit abrasive. Her accent was lower-Canterlot, though far removed and well trained out of the worst of that particular cockney.

I didn’t respond, just maintained my smile.

“What do you want? We are in complete accordance with city ordinances regarding noise and public protest. You have no right-”

Before she could get a good head of blustery steam, I held out my hoof. She jumped back from it slightly, her horn flickering, shooting a thin stream of sparks onto the platform as though she expected me to bite her. Reaching out, I tapped the switch on the back of the megaphone where it hung in her magical grasp, locking it to ‘on.'

Skylark, for all her mule-headed insistence on the evils of Princess Celestia, knew that when there’s a smiling pony and a screaming pony in front of a crowd, the crowd will look at the smiling pony first to see what to do. Celestia herself was rarely seen with anything but a serene smile, and the mare in front of me had obviously taken cues. In a flash, the upset from finding somepony on stage with her was gone and she straightened, stepping forward and throwing her shoulders back, putting on a sneering smile of her own.

“What do you want, Detective?”

“I’m here on behalf of Chief Iris Jade of the Detrot Police Department!”

That perked the newsponies right up. Sugar Lace elbowed her camera-pony, who swung his camera around in my direction.

Astral’s piercing green eyes narrowed as she stared at me fiercely, her smile fixed right where it was by the crazy glue that was the public gaze. “What is your game?” she whispered, too low for the megaphone to pick up.

I lifted her hoof in mine and held on. She tried to tug it away, but relented as I gave her leg a light squeeze with the crook of my knee.

Aiming my muzzle at the megaphone, I spoke to the crowd. “I’ve come straight here at the request of Chief Iris Jade to see what can be done about these shameful displays inside the Museum! I want you all to know that the dignity of our fair Princess of the Night is one of the police department’s highest priorities! We’ve just been inside talking to Director Fizzle, doing our best to bring him around to your way of thinking!”

Skylark’s wariness flipped right over to total disbelief. “What?!” she squeaked.

“That’s right! I also want to just personally, on behalf of Chief Iris Jade, shake your hoof. I may not share all of your beliefs, but I want to just let you know the Chief is behind you one hundred percent.”

“W-wha?” the priestess sputtered.

I continued, getting into the roll of things, “Our officers are here to make sure you’re protected during this difficult time but Chief Jade asked me to say, and I’m quoting here, ‘We thank you, Miss Astral Skylark, for your efforts in helping bring down the Sun Tyrant!’”

I snapped the megaphones switch off and straightened my hat, keeping my expression carefully controlled, though I think it might have tilted heavily towards a smirk by that point.

A hush had fallen over the crowd.

Even the newsponies had stopped their incessant picture snapping. Sugar Lace was staring at me, mouth agape, while her camera-stallion had almost dropped his camera off of its saddle.

After about five seconds, somepony shifted their hooves. It could have been a shuffle of discomfort, but it was followed immediately by another, then another, until finally the cultists burst into gleeful applause, cheering with a manic energy. I made a great show of lifting Astral Skylark’s leg and giving it a firm shake. She was so surprised, she let me. The megaphone spilled out of her magic, dropping onto the pavement at our hooves and letting out a grating squeal. Nopony even noticed.

Releasing her leg, I hopped off the front of the platform as the cultists made room for me, still cheering hugely. I could feel death-glares from the dozens of police ponies lined up against the edges of the crowd, but they weren’t willing to try to press into the shouting herd to get to me.

I looked back again to make sure Taxi, Swift, and Limerence were still behind me, though my driver and the librarian looked like they regretted their lack of alternatives. Limerence in particular was giving me the stinkeye. Swift merely seemed confused.

We made our way over to the Night Trotter, followed by riotous cheers as Taxi tossed herself behind the wheel. She started the engine, lightning from under the bonnet making the incautiously close hop backwards. They parted in front of the vehicle so we could get out, like an ocean of blue sweeping back on either side.

I shut the cab’s back door and waved toward the stage, where Skylark still stood, eyes blank with shock and her broken megaphone laying between her knees. We drove away, past the police line, and back into the city streets.

Some days, I love what I do.

****

“She’s going to kill you, Hardy!” Taxi yelled, slapping the steering wheel with both forelegs, voice full of mixed worry and anger, “No trial, no jury, just you and her and a high powered drill!”

At the first turn off, Taxi had gunned the engine, sending us careening off at something close to top speed.

“Sweets, she has to catch me, first. She’s going to be up to her ears for the next week.” I replied, trying to calm my stricken driver.

“If I may ask: What, precisely, did you hope to accomplish by antagonizing a pony who is, by your own admission, both very powerful and chemically unstable?” Limerence asked, disapprovingly.

“I was buying us some breathing room,” I answered, watching the late afternoon streets passing through the window. “Jade will have to deal with the public relations disaster I just dumped on her before she can come after me properly, and if I’m arrested, she’s going to want to avoid the press while doing it.”

“Why?” he wanted to know. “I would think she would want ponies to see her punishing you for that kind of embarrassment.”

“Then you don’t understand how Chief Jade works. She’s insane. She’s not stupid.” I told him. “Any public arrest will give me more opportunities to embarrass her.”

“Yes, but antagonizing her-”

“Look, that guard will tell them we were there eventually, but if he hasn’t reported his boss missing yet, I give it another week before he does. This will tie up too many of Jade’s resources for her to start asking why we were at the museum.”

Limerence’s lip twitched with another objection, but his lip is where it died. He sat back slightly. “You believe she will assume you sought out Astral's demonstration as part of some plot to make sure she isn’t able to chase you for your actions in her office, rather than a desire to cover up your activities inside the museum itself."

“You got it. Get Jade wound up and watch her go. We’ve got that week… at least, if we manage to keep out of her way from here on. After that, yeah, she’ll come after me.”

He thought about this for a long moment, then exhaled. “Detective, you are a very foolish pony, but I do not think I would like to play chess against you.”

“He’s just an idiot!” Taxi shouted from the front seat, savagely thrashing the wheel and very nearly tossing Swift out of the open window. “So you bought us some time, but dammit, Hardy! Do you have any idea what she’s going to do?!”

“Honestly?” I gave a shrug. “I don’t care.”

My driver was momentarily speechless, as was the librarian. Both of them stared at me like they’d found themselves in a very confined space with a lunatic.

“Sir... I... I know the idea behind it but... what about after she does catch you?” Swift asked. “She… she might not kill you but... she is going to lock you up! What good will you be in a prison cell?”

“Yes, she probably will, and if I’m in her holding cell and someone assassinates me, there will be many, many questions asked after that little display. I just made myself a public figure, at least for a bit,” I replied, laying my head against the window. “I promise, kid. I’m not going to waste my time here.”

“Two days?!” I howled, shaking Limerence by his lapels.

Using his magic, he disentangled my hooves from his vest and pushed me back slightly. “That is the soonest. This counterfeiter is not a pony it is easy to contact without an appointment. My father had to tap several favors for this, as did I. The tickets were not easy to acquire.”

It was an hour later, back in the Nest. We’d had another short audience with the Aroyo Ancestors to allow Limerence into our little home, though they gave a stark warning that if he were to make any moves outside of the Nest without us, he would be immediately struck by lightning; a threat which earned them nothing more than a small bow of the head and a deferential "Of course." I think he actually found it reassuring.

His affiliation came up during that conversation; I decided honesty was wiser than discretion, particularly where our hosts were concerned, but thereafter Wisteria was giving him dangerous sidelong glances the entire time she escorted the four of us back to the bunker. Apparently the Archivists' reputation for being ‘equal opportunity’ artifact handlers meant that, in the Aroyo's eyes, they were hung with the same foul rope as those wretched bastards who used the poor and destitute to test unknown magics.

He’d been somewhat impressed by the bunker itself, spending quite some time going over the enchantments on the door and the ceilings before he went to the task of making contact with his father and brother. I’d expected him to make a phone call, but it turned out to involve some sort of private ritual. When he finally let us back in, the kitchen floor was covered in an intricate pattern of flour and bits of cheese. The news gleaned from his bit of apparent dairymancy was less than pleasing, hence, the argument that followed.

“I don’t have that sort of time, dammit!” I scowled, collapsing onto my haunches.

“You should have thought of that before you humiliated the Chief of Police,” he bit back, sharply. “Two days is when we can see the counterfeiter. You can wait here, or investigate on your own, but I don’t believe you want to make superfluous trips out of the Skids and, if I understood you correctly, you have no other leads. I will not jeopardize our chances by letting you go gallivanting off with your pistol out.”

“I’ve got the PACT trooper! My contact in the D.P.D. is going to be calling me back toda-”

“Certainly, because a direct investigation of the PACT won’t lead you into the mad-mare’s cross-hairs,” Limerence hissed, voice thick with sarcasm. “My father believes you no fool, but again you act without forethought! Yes, you achieved your short-term goals, but at what expense?! I do not understand how in Equestria you managed to defeat the King of Ace, if this was your mode of strategic thought!”

Taxi, whose earlier anger had cooled to fatalistic doldrums, was eating a taco on the bean-bag. She wiped guacamole off her nose and added, “Mostly luck. By all rights, I can think of at least five times he should have died during that mess.”

I gloomily rubbed my temple with one toe. “Thanks for that, Sweets…”

“Happy to help,” she replied, shoving her taco into her mouth and crunching noisily.

****

I don’t take ‘downtime’ well. I never have. Knowing I was in for two days worth was going to make things miles and miles worse.

No amount of shrieking at Limerence could get him to tell me the identity of our counterfeiter, lest I, in his words, ‘Drag them into the street and try to interrogate them at gunpoint, further endangering my objective.' I told him that after two days laying on my ass, that would start to look like a real possibility. He still wouldn’t budge.

That left a sullen, irritable detective warming his backside with a restless rookie and an annoyed cab driver. Fortunately, it did leave us a bit of time to take care of a few errands.

****

“Hello! Good morning! This is the First Bank of Detrot! My name is June Showers!”

“Yes, I want to check my credit account. The name it’s under is ‘Sweetums.' It was set up by my employer.”

“Certainly. Just one moment.”

There was some soft breathing over the phone, along with flipping of papers. Two seconds later, the cheerful mare gasped loudly. When she came back on the phone, her tone was somewhere between fascination and shell shock.

“S-sir? I ha-have the account here for you.”

“Good. I’ll need a transfer to my personal accounts. Name is Hard Boiled Junior.”

“Yes… u-um… how much did you need?”

“Well, how much is in there?”

“I… errr…” She stammered. “T-there’s enough.”

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific than that, honey.”

Miss June Showers quoted me a number.

The sheer weight of the digits knocked the phone out of my hoof, leaving me momentarily struggling to snatch it back up.

“There’s how much?!”

“Like I said, sir. There’s… enough.”

“Fine, give me... five hundred to my personal accounts, plus another thousand in cash couriered to the outskirts of the Skids, near Capriole St on the corner with High Trotter Rd. Tell the courier to tell the pegasi who stop him there that it’s for ‘Crusader.'”

“Alright, sir. Say, I’m going to be off here in a few hours... you sound cute. Would you like to go catch a drink?”

“Just transfer the damn bits.”

“Awww, alright. If you want to, my number is-”

“Bits now. Gold-digging later.”

****

The next day, after a miserable sleep and having left Taxi and Swift playing cards in the Nest, I trotted down to the corner phone to see if I could get in touch with Telly, since I didn’t think she’d be too inclined to call out to me.

****

“Detrot Police Department, Telly speaking, what is the nature of your emergency?”

“Telly, switch me to a secure back line.”

“H-hard-...one second.”

The line clattered, then static spat in my ear, before settling on a low hum.

Telly sounded, for the first time I’d heard her on the line, genuinely frightened. “Alright, this is as secure as I can make it. Hardy, I don’t know what you were thinking with that display in front of the Museum, but the Chief… I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean? The news must have-”

“Yes, the damn news agencies have been eating us alive! She sent out something about how you didn’t work for us and weren’t representing her views at all… but… Hardy, I expected her to be apoplectic. I expected her to physically detonate. I expected to be cleaning bits of Jade off the walls while ducking a vengeful ghost which could only be sated by your spilt blood. We all did. But... she just... closed the door to her office. She hasn’t come out all day. I'm not even sure she went home last night. One of the desk sergeants swore he could hear her crying in there.”

“Impossible. Iris Jade doesn’t have tear ducts. She can’t. Not after all that stuff she puts in her system. They’ll have sealed over,” I murmured. “That’s… you’re right, though. Not what I had in mind.”

“You had in mind?! You were actually thinking when you did that?!”

“Yes, yes, I was. I needed her angry. I’ve got a few recent activities I need the department to not be checking into,” I answered.

“Well, you got your damn wish,” Telly huffed, unhappily. “The last twenty four hours, we haven’t been able to issue a parking ticket without the news ponies asking if we’re doing it as an act of defiance against the ‘Sun Tyrant.' I’ve got one of the rookies assigned to nothing but answering calls that come in about that. At least tell me what this is all about!”

“I… mmm… I can’t tell you everything, but I can say that the King of Ace is dead, that dead girl at the High Step was connected, and the pony behind it has taken at least one more victim. Whoever it was, he tried to have me assassinated using somepony who is either current or former PACT. Speaking of that, that’s why I called.”

There was a very, very long silence. Briefly, I thought the call must have disconnected, then Telly spoke again.

“Ugh… you know what? I don’t want to know. I really don’t. I swear, though, this is your last favor for a long time,” she groused.

“Telly, you’re the sweetest thing in the whole world.”

“I’m a grumpy bitch who will gladly feed you to a raging information cyclone if you call her again this week.” She sighed and I heard her yanking open her filing desk. “So, you wanted info on this ‘Grape Shot’ you called about, right? Well, he was a real tough character to find. I had to call up some of the ‘secret’ protocols in the File Cloud to get his information.”

“Are you sure it’s his information? I remember the time with the carrot cake recipe you got from the Cloud-”

“Hey, I was still a novice back then. I didn’t know 'Bits of Carrot' was a Neighponese idiom for 'Shrapnel.' No, this, I’m fairly sure, is… at least a chunk of his file. Best I can do, I’m afraid, without a lot more information on him.”

“So? What’s it say?”

“Let’s take a look, shall we?” Telly hummed to herself, flicking through pages. “Mmmhmmm… Grape Shot. Okay, this is what I’ve got. He made the rank of Lieutenant faster than anypony besides Broadside himself, decorated for valor… Confirmed elimination of a class three parasprite swarm… He’s credited with the burning of eleven timberwolves, six cockatrice dead in various ways… and one confirmed straying dragon kill. This is one scary customer!”

“That’s just his combat record. What about his training?”

“I’m… not seeing anything especially unusual here. He was a member of the ‘Apex Squad’ of recruits. Elite trainees. They all had top level marksmanship and flight skills.”

“Nothing about… maybe magical enhancements?”

“Nope. Sorry. It looks like just training across the board. Good training, but standard training nonetheless.”

I hit the payphone booth’s wall with one hoof in frustration.

“Great. What about his current whereabouts?”

“Erm… ooh, juicy. He’s been absent without leave for more than a month! Specifically a month and a week. His employment termination paperwork is here from... three days before you dropped off the radar. Nopony in PACT has seen him since then.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Just one more thing. Do you have any recent requests or reports from a filly with a cherry for a cutie mark? Blue body, red mane?”

“You mean that dead girl from last month?”

“No...another pony. Anypony else with that color scheme?”

“Errr...I don’t have anything here.”

“Alright, Telly. Thanks. You won’t hear from me for a bit. You just keep your nose clean. The Chief doesn’t need more targets right now.”

“Likewise, Hardy.”

****

I slept. I dreamed. I didn’t remember my dreams, except that I woke to a cold sweat with an intense sensation of being swallowed and the smell of coffee. The coffee smell turned out to be real, thank the heavens.

Blearily rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I shoved an empty fast food wrapper off my stomach and rolled onto my side, trying to work myself back into unconsciousness. Limerence was sitting across from me in the space we’d designated ‘the living room,' his wicked looking knife out, running it up and down a sharpening stone. It wasn’t making any noise whatsoever. I realized, then, that nothing was making a noise. My own breathing was completely silent.

I frantically waved my hooves at him until he looked up, set his knife down on his forelegs and let his horn’s light fade. Sound returned so quick my ears popped, sound so bone-twistingly grating that I dug at one with a hoof, trying to hold in a very un-stallion-like whimper.

“Do you have to do that?” I moaned.

“Sharpen my weapons?” Limerence tested the edge of his blade on his hoof, and finding it not quite to his satisfaction, applied to whetstone again. “I was attempting not to wake you.”

“There are a dozen other rooms in this place. Did you have to do it in here?”

“Miss Taxi is cooking and suggested some anatomical impossibilities if I were to criticize her stewing style again,” he replied.

“Lim, you called her potato casserole ‘inedible, disgusting sewage scrapings with a hint of dog regurgitate.'”

“I stand by that statement,” he said, his blade rasping over the bit of rock in even turns.

“Look… when you’re dealing with Sweets, you’ve got to understand she didn’t exactly have a ‘supportive’ upbringing and her mom wasn’t the sort to teach a filly ‘household skills,'” I told him, hanging one leg off the couch. “She can clean like a demon, but you’ll have to avoid saying things like that when she’s experimenting in the kitchen. About half the time it’ll be delicious. The other half, it’ll taste like someone pooped on your plate and covered it in catsup.”

Limerence shrugged, pulling his hooves under himself. “If that is my alternative to violence, I suppose I will have to learn a spell to dull my taste buds ‘about half the time’. As to your question, I simply wanted some silence and a room with a sleeping pony struck me as a good place.”

No arguing with the logic there, I suppose. I decided to change tack.

“You mind if I ask… why the strange knife?” I inquired, pulling my hat off the end of the couch and settling it over my ears.

“My kukri?” He said, glancing down at the weapon. “What about it?”

“Don’t most unicorns use straight stabbing weapons? I thought horns were better for throwing things, so you could put all the weight of the thrown object behind a point.”

Limerence twirled his blade in circles around his head, making the tip whistle, watching it spin with a pleased smile. “The kukri is the weapon of a farmer. I consider myself a farmer of information… and sometimes, farming requires sharp tools. While I do have other options...” His horn shone a little brighter, and a half dozen other knives in various shapes and sizes flew down the sleeves of his vest, hanging in the air around him. “...It is true that I do prefer the kukri. It can puncture, but killing should be a last resort. A weapon that emphasizes bashing and slicing makes that far easier and a kukri is ideal for both.”

“You didn’t strike me as the ‘life is precious, at one with the flowers and grass’ type. I expect that from Sweets, sure, but-”

For the first time since I’d met him, Limerence laughed. It was a richer sound than I expected from the soft spoken librarian. “Hah! You mistake me! A hamstrung enemy can cry out his owner’s name. A dead enemy will tell you nothing.”

“Yeah, but considering your response to Fizzle…?”

His lips twitched into a discomfited expression as he slid his weapons back into whatever compartment they were usually strapped to and pulling his blonde tail around himself. “Ah… I see. You’re asking if I’ve taken a life before.”

“I guess I am.”

The momentary mirth was gone and the chilly aloofness took its place once more. “No, Detective. I have not killed before. My father’s philosophy is wise. Death is unnecessary when debt can be extracted, no matter how long it may take to extract it.”

“Mmm… thought not. Be glad-”

He held up both forehooves. “Spare me, Detective. You’re about to tell me about the ‘heavy burden’ of killing. I’m aware. I will kill, when the time comes. I don’t feel any particular eagerness for it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that I will have to one day.”

I shut my muzzle and settled on my side, feeling the weight of life hanging on me again. Something about Limerence made me feel old in a way even Swift’s oft-times insufferable naivete didn’t.

My heart beat a little faster, then quieted as gentle sensation of somepony trying to pat me on the back suffused my psyche.

Conversations with Limerence were like trying to bang my head against a wall. He was 'vehemently disinclined to discuss his personal life,' instead making clear, repeatedly, that this was a ‘mission’ and to his mind that meant only that we were working together. Emphasis on ‘working,' less on ‘together.'

It’d made for a dull couple of days. Most of it I’d spent lounging around the Nest, aside a little light shopping which had to be aborted when some news filly recognized me in the checkout line and tried to assault me with a microphone. After the first twelve hours and my various phone calls, the boredom struck with the fury of a thousand hammer-wielding alicorns.

Speaking of alicorns, I glanced at the wall-clock, which was one of the few items I’d let stay when we purged the place of the stoner paraphernalia. It was in the shape of a zap apple tree leaf and featured Princess Celestia with her lips wrapped around a gigantic joint. Green smoke forming the hands of the clock. At that particular moment, it said three thirty in the afternoon.

“This… pony we’re going to see tonight,” I started again and Limerence shifted his weight from one side to the other, preparing to rebuff me yet again. “What time did you say we had to be at this...’performance’ or whatever it is?”

“Seven. The performance will happen. We will sit through it. Then we will see the counterfeiter. We have had this discussion at least three times in the last forty eight hours.” He irritably thrust himself to his hooves and trotted into the hallway, disappearing to parts unknown.

With him gone, it became apparent that the smell coming from the kitchen was developing a distinctly smoky scent.

“Haaardyyy! Could you get the fire extinguisher?” Taxi shouted from down the hall.

I rolled over and shoved a throw pillow back over my face.

Act 2, Chapter 11: On With the Show

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 11: On With The Show!

The inherent ability of sapient creatures to misrepresent reality provides a frustrating challenge for historians trying to sift through the morass, but it is somewhat ironically important for them to recognize just what kind of role lies play in history and society, and how they have grown and evolved with ponykind.

Actually, evolution is a good word for it; Lies are fascinating and complex animals. And much like animals, they range from giant striped whoppers to lies so small and subtle that the naked eye will never see them. While indeed many lies are pathogenic, the vicious rumours and Neighgerian banking scams being mimetic analogues to the plagues and predators of the world, a number of lies are commensal, or even symbiotic, when the truth would cause genuine harm or discord. While Aristrotle was one of the first to label Honesty as one of the Virtues of a Harmonious Society, this has been disputed by his successors; philosophers from Equinas to Immanuel Canter have argued that this seems strange, because there are so many times in life when Harmony is better maintained by lies.

Canter has, of course, written sufficiently of the little white lies that keep society lubricated, but sometimes we come to genuinely love our lies. Comforting but unsubstantiated fantasies regarding the world, the Princesses, and the afterlife can help ponies cope with life's brutal events. And what are fictional stories and tall tales besides dressed-up lies, entertaining whilst sparking imagination and wonder?

Some ponies even make a living out of dressing themselves in sparkling deceit, exuding greatness and power whilst genuinely possessing neither. If they're good enough, though, nopony will care; the audience will simply bask in the illusion.

--The Scholar

In a country where magic is about as mundane and common as bathroom tissue, you’d think a magician would hold absolutely no wonder. After all, any unicorn with the right arcane instruction manual can produce a rabbit from a hat or, for the demented, a hat from a rabbit.

Despite this, there remains in all of us a wonderment at watching somepony really good at appearing to break the cosmic rules of physics and continuity. Show ponies who know their art well can wrap their simple tricks in glitz and glitter and their more complex ones in layers of narrative that leave viewers breathless with anticipation.

I am not a pony that’s easily impressed, but Ghoulini, for whatever distasteful side-ventures he might have been involved in, was a master.

****

I’d done the sane, rational thing and gone for my gun, half ducking under the table. It wasn’t great cover, but it blocked line of sight and would serve if somepony started slinging low caliber bullets.

When it dawned on me that we were not under draconic or terrorist attack, I sheepishly returned to my seat and re-adjusted my tux. Luckily, most eyes were riveted on the curtain of flames stretching across the room, but Limerence shot me an amused look; I was thankful my new pink coat covered a blush reasonably well because my cheeks were burning brighter than that backdrop.

Chief Jade had retreated from the stage and, for a moment, the curtains simply burned, letting the tension build.

As suddenly as it came, the fire was snuffed, vanished along with the curtain itself, leaving a darkened shadow on my vision. I blinked several times, but the image remained. I noticed, after a few seconds, that it was in the shape of a pony.

Slowly, the spotlight irised open on the form of a stallion standing mid-stage. He was a strapping thing, wrapped in cultivated muscle that suggested strength, but it was the meticulously built body of a model with too many carefully treated curves to have ever brawled in the street. His mane was a shocking turquoise, framing a face the color of ripe blueberries, with a jaw so square it might have been set with a level.

He wore a thin, very white shirt which was puffed at the knees, and his flanks were covered in extraordinarily tight black pants that gleamed under the spotlights. His eyes were closed as he stood, head bowed low, seeming to wait for something.

A voice, which I quickly recognized as Telly’s 'dramatic' tone filtered through a modest depth of alcohol, came from the Castle’s public address system.

“From Canterlot, by way of the Far East, from the lands of Zebra lore to the farthest reaches of the Griffin home-land, the magnificent Ghoulini has traveled in search of the secrets of life and death. Now, he returns from these adventures with fresh knowledge to share.”

Ghoulini raised his head, lowering himself to his haunches and spreading his forelegs wide to encompass an audience already on the edge of its seats.

“Witness! The elements at his command! Water!” Telly’s voice echoed through the old stone fortress. A swelling, orchestral score started up, accompanying her words.

Ghoulini seemed to drink it in, his shoulders straightening as he lifted himself higher. A stream of water shot from between the floorboards, swirling around his body like a liquid cloth around a dancer. He raised one hoof, stepping up onto the water. I expected to catch a splash and spray in the face, but instead he simply hopped up onto it and began to walk slowly out over the crowd supported only by a stream of water. It was an act of supreme and impressive balance.

I looked for a gleam of telekinesis on his legs, but there wasn’t one. He really seemed to be walking on the water.

Something under the table shifted and I, reluctantly, glanced down. Swift stuck her nose up from under the tablecloth, her ears pasted back against the sides of her head.

“S-sir…” she whispered, “My… My jacket got put in the… er, the coat room.”

“So? Go get it!” I hissed.

“Sergeant Kiss Tell is running the coat room! He processed my entrance paperwork! He’ll recognize me!” she whimpered. A mare at one of the nearby tables gave me an inquisitive look and I suppose I did appear a bit touched in the head, talking to my lower half.

“Dammit, kid.” Reaching down, I grabbed Swift and pulled her up, pushing her back onto the chair next to mine. Pulling my own jacket off, I slung it around her shoulders. “I’ll want that back, you hear?”

“Y-yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Shifting myself in my chair, I looked up at to find Ghoulini had danced his way back to the stage, the whip of water sinking back into the boards. Just as it vanished, a squirt of some thick, multi-hued dust exploded at the edges of the stage.

Telly’s voice rang out overhead, “Earth!”

Sweeping his hooves left, then right, Ghoulini swirled the cloud down around himself. It obeyed with spectacular accuracy as he lifted onto his rear hooves, leaping across the stage with the agility of a ballet dancer and coming to rest, balancing on one foreleg. The dust gathered into a tight knot underneath him, then exploded outwards, masking the stage entirely in a dense, impenetrable fog.

“Air.”

Inside the dust cloud, a darkened shape lifted off the ground. It twisted in a slow circle, moving faster with each revolution until the dust cloud began to move with it, drawn steadily upwards and becoming thicker by the minute. At last, it became a miniature tornado, the figure inside spinning so fast I couldn’t make out any details. I’d heard of pegasi pulling that particular trick in mass combats against dragons and flying monsters of various kinds, but never a unicorn.

The air drew inward, a rainbow swelling down into the shape of a ball, revealing Ghoulini still turning slowly as he hovered a meter or two above the stage. His white shirt was immaculate, despite the physical activity, as he came to a gentle stop. He held between his forelegs what seemed to be a swirling mass of stone in every color imaginable. It pulsed and gradually solidified as the magician rolled it between his hooves.

“Fire!” shouted Telly.

Ghoulini’s lips curled into a devilish smile as he swung around, raised his rear legs, and bucked the stone out of mid-air. It shot out like a cannon ball over the crowd and despite knowing it was a magic show, I ducked.

A deafening roar filled the room as the ball detonated over everypony’s head, sending gouts of many-coloured flame spurting down amongst the crowd. Fear gripped me as the rushing light swept around my hooves, but it avoided them by several inches as it spread across the floor. I could feel the heat, but it didn’t touch me nor seem to scorch the marble.

Clapping his hooves together, Ghoulini pointed towards the crowd. With a soft pop, the fire turned into a field of butterflies that took to the air, streaming back to the stage and vanishing up the wide sleeves of his shirt.

All in all, it was pants-wetting, but one of the most impressive displays of magical skill I’d ever seen.

Landing at center stage, Ghoulini took a bow to thunderous applause from his audience. I even found myself clapping along and Swift was on her seat, rearing and flapping her wings in her excitement. Limerence, for his part, remained steadfastly slumped in his seat, unhappily sucking on the straw in his water glass.

“Come on, Lim.” I gave him a little push in the shoulder with one toe. “You can’t tell me that wasn’t amazing!”

“Amazing, yes,” he grumbled, “But it was a trick. A very clever trick, using smoke and mirrors. If magic is to be done, let it be through skill in truth, rather than illusion.”

“You think you could have pulled that one off? Even the illusion?” I asked.

“No,” he conceded, “but then, my talents involve useful activities.”

Leaving the snippy librarian to his sulk, I turned back to the show.

Ghoulini stood at center stage, a microphone having floated up to his muzzle.

“My friends!” the magician declared, his voice low and sensual, putting me in mind of a radio advertiser with a smoking habit. “I want to welcome you to the Detrot Police Gala! Tonight, there will be spills, chills, and more than a few explosions. But first, I wish to introduce my lovely assistant, Miss Patter.”

Raising one toe, he flipped it towards the side of the stage, causing a burst of flower petals to fall from somewhere overhead. A beautiful, heavily made-up mare in a spangled leotard strutted out of it and did a quick dip, first towards the crowd, then towards Ghoulini. I thought she might be an earth pony, thin of limb and curvaceous in all the right places, with a mane the color of wheat and a splotched coat of browns and whites, but she wore a very elaborate head-dress that covered her crown. She might have had a horn, she might not. Pretty as she was, she did nothing to take away from the sheer presence of Ghoulini himself; a prop.

“Now, for your viewing pleasure, a dance... but first, Miss Patter must change clothes. I do hope you won’t mind if she doesn’t leave the stage to do it.” The magician laughed as his assistant looked shocked. After a few appropriate gasps from the more sensitive members of the audience, he added as though it were an afterthought, “I suppose it would take a while to get out of that leotard. Let me see what I can do!”

Clapping his hooves, he made a throwing motion in Patter’s direction. A blast of glitter shot from his toe, covering the girl from head to hoof. It rained down her shoulders, pouring over the stage in a wave. Some even drifted onto my table. I touched a bit of it, rolling the shiny paper between my hoof and forelock. I’d expected an illusion, but it remained, even on close examination, completely real.

Returning my attention to the stage, I noticed the girl’s leotard was gone, replaced instead by a two piece dress of ruffled lace. She gave Ghoulini a properly relieved look, then raised her hoof. He pretended to appraise her closely, then grinned like he’d had an idea, “She is so very lovely, it would be impossible to decide on just one costume. Never mind then! We shall have many! Maestro, may I have a tune, if you please?”

The music started up again, this time a rollicking violin. Ghoulini pulled Patter to him and she let out a little noise of surprise, fluttering her eyelashes as he twirled her around him. Her hooves moved with his as they settled into a wild tango, dancing back and forth across the front of the stage.

As the violin reached a crescendo, the magician tapped his rear hoof twice and a tongue of fire seemed to lick its way around Patter, curling around her ankles then flaring briefly. Her outfit was consumed in an instant, but rather than leaving her naked on the stage, she was instead wearing a flowery skirt that hung over her flanks. She looked down, then up at Ghoulini before leaping back into his forelegs. He swung her sideways, tossing her into the air. Another squirt of fire, and again her outfit disappeared, leaving in its place a flowing ball gown that fluttered in the air as he caught her.

The dance continued for several minutes, each costume dying in a flash to be replaced with another more elaborate one.

I’d seen street magicians; they’re a dime a dozen. Never in my life had I seen such a fantastic display of magical prowess, but always Ghoulini’s horn remained unlit. We might have been there for an interrogation, but for the time, I let myself be lost in the childish wonder of it all.

Finally, breathing heavily, the two came to a stop and bowed deeply, to raucous ovations from the diners.

****

After what felt like too short a time, Ghoulini’s act came to an end, though it must surely have been an hour. He’d finished on a spectacular stunt involving his assistant swallowing a flaming sword right to the hilt before vanishing in a puff of smoke, only to reappear in a pair of angelic wings, descending to the stage from the rafters.

I was exhausted, hoarse from cheering, and with aching hooves from all the clapping. As the lights came up and both performers left the stage, not a single seat was filled as many an ‘Encore!’ was shouted. Well, I say ‘not a seat’. There was one, with a glum, irritable librarian fiddling with his pocket watch.

Swift and I ignored him, whooping and whistling until Chief Jade took the stage again at which point we both returned to our seats and did our very finest to look insignificant.

Uncoiling her microphone, Jade gave the crowd a magnanimous smile. “Alright, alright, calm down ladies and gentlecolts. Now, dinner will be served soon. Our own chef, Detective Griddle, will be arranging meals for the evening and your waiters will be by any minute.”

With that, she leapt down from the stage and began circulating the tables, shaking hooves and generally hobnobbing.

Limerence had his forehead buried in the tablecloth.

“Lim, could you give it a rest?” I grunted, laying my chin on one hoof.

“Excuse me, Detective. Stage magic is… Hm.” He seemed to think better of whatever he’d been about to say. “Never mind. It is unimportant. I will be fine.” He turned to the stack of menus at the center of the table, levitating one over in front of his face.

“Nopony hates something that amazing for no reason. Am I detecting a hint of...envy there?” I asked, slyly.

Limerence stiffened. “No!” he snapped.

“Oho, no way, you’ve been ice cold the last four days. You want me to back off, you tell me exactly why this guy rubs you so far the wrong way.” I crossed my forelegs and glared at him as he shuffled his rear legs, raising the menu higher.

“I would prefer not-” he began, but Swift interrupted.

“Come on, Lim,” she begged. “Whatever it is, I promise not to tell, and if we’re going to be working together, I feel better knowing something about the ponies I’m working with. I work better with others if I know they trust me.” She glanced towards me. “Right, sir?”

“Right.”

Swift's appeal to practicality got him thinking. With an annoyed sigh, Limerence tossed the menu back into the pile and shoved his pocket watch back into his vest. “...Fine. If it is indeed for the efficiency of the mission, I suppose I must. I share my father’s philosophies on debt, however, so I will expect that… should I deem it relevant… the two of you shall tell me something of yourselves, at a time of my choosing. Is this agreeable?”

“Fine by me,” I replied and Swift nodded.

Setting his hooftips against one another, the librarian stared at them for a long moment, putting his words in order. “...when I was… much younger… I had… Let's call it an interest… in the stage. Particularly in acts of rather more physical magic.”

“You wanted to be a magician!?” Swift whispered, as though somepony might overhear.

His jaw clenched as he continued dourly. “I… was very young, as I said. My father took Zefu and I to see a showpony performing at the Detrot Peace Memorial Theater. My brother certainly enjoyed himself; he laughed his way through the entire thing, but I found myself… truly interested, perhaps for the first time in my life. I poured through father’s library for all of the books related to illusion and non-magical disguise.”

“Sounds like a heap of fun, actually. Why the bitterness?” I asked.

“It was… my passion, but my brother and the other colts his age soon took to calling me ‘The Great and Powerful Limmy’, teasing me so endlessly that I could never get any study done, much less actually perform the few tricks I’d learned.” He slipped a bit coin from his pocket, holding it up between his toe before rolling it end over end, then balancing it on the tip of his hoof. He thrust it upward and I tried to follow the coin with my eyes, but it never landed. Limerence let a wisp of a smile cross his face, leaning forward and putting his hoof under Swift’s wing, pulling it out with the coin balanced on the end. She clapped her hooves together and giggled.

“Oh that’s good!” she squeaked.

“Thank you,” he murmured, then continued his tale. “I was not discouraged from my studies. As a matter of fact, I expanded their scope. But while my brother soon tired of his games, the other children did not. It became something of a challenge to them to find me each day as I would run off after classes, hiding myself away to read. I learned a spell to let myself walk on ceilings, and another to see in dark places. I taught myself to walk quietly, and to be seen only when I wanted to be seen. For a time...it worked brilliantly.”

I canted my head to one side. “What changed?”

Limerence lowered his eyes. “We got a new student in my class. A filly named ‘Pathfinder.' Her special talent was to find things. I was still a blank flank, but Pathfinder ingratiated herself to her fellow students by helping, each day, to find me.”

“Ahhh… no more studies,” I added..

He took a quick sip from his water glass, then went on, “I did my best, hiding in ever more elaborate places. Even the library wasn’t safe, and father has long believed in letting us handle our own lessons. I think, as he usually does, he considered this filly a ‘learning experience’.”

“Well, that’s not right,” Swift huffed. “Gran caught a colt bothering Scarlet once and when the colt’s dad told her that Scarlet should stop being so girly, Gran put them in both in panties and sank their hooves in concrete in front of the school.”

The librarian guffawed at the little pegasus. “One day I would like to meet this ‘Gran’ of yours.”

“You and she have a surprising amount in common,” I remarked. “Anyway, go ahead. Pathfinder.”

“Well, one afternoon, after an especially rough class where I’d had spitballs shot at the back of my mane and been forced to take an extra half hour of physical training after school, I was leaving the Archive to go and test a brand new spell. I ran headlong into Pathfinder and her comrades. They gave chase and caught me in an alley. They tore my books, kicked me, and I barely made my escape by running up the wall. Still, they pursued. Down the road, they on the ground, me on the roof.” He made the motion of windmilling his hooves. “I came to the old clock tower on Haven St. The other children would not pursue, but Path Finder, ever cruel and persistent, came after me. I decided I’d had enough and that this filly was an excellent test subject for my new enchantment”

“She came after you on a clock tower?!” Swift burst out.

Limerence shrugged and bobbed his chin. “Her talent was to seek until she found whatever it was she was looking for and she was very, very good at it. Sadly for her, I’d climbed to the very highest point of the tower. Her persistence was...” He hummed to himself as he tried to find the right word. “...unwise. She cornered me - or so she thought - near the bell, but I had timed my presence there very carefully. As she came closer, murder in her eyes...I cast my spell. I believe you’re familiar with it, Detective?”

“The one that makes everything quiet?”

“Silence. The spell is called ‘Silence’. I let her hit me once, twice...then shrank the field to encompass just my own head and ran down the other side of the building.” He gritted his teeth. “The pain was considerable...but it was worth it. Path Finder was never very punctual. She hadn’t kept track of the time, but of course, I had.”

Swift curiously touched the pocket with his watch in it. “Is that why you’re always checking that?”

He nodded. “It is as important to know when you are as much as where. It might have saved Path Finder if she had. As I was saying...we were meters from the bell when I cast Silence. For the first time since before the Crusades, the Bell of Haven St Clock Tower, where hundreds had sheltered from dragon attack, was silent at five o'clock...” His lips curled into a slightly demented grin. “...at least, until its third ring.”

Realization took but a moment to set in. “That… I can hear that bell from my apartment.”

“Yes, yes you can. It was rather loud, I’m certain, though I couldn’t hear it at the time. Pathfinder had to have her eardrums magically regrown and I acquired this.” He lifted himself in his seat, showing me his cutie-mark: the cracked bell. “Sadly, my passion for sleight of hoof was somewhat dulled by the experience. It was not tricks that saved me. It was practical magic, pure and simple. Hence, I consider only the practicalities of magic a worthwhile pursuit.”

“That still doesn’t explain your reaction when you heard we were going to come meet this character,” I murmured.

“I dislike fakes and show-offs,” he stated, evenly, though his gaze wavered as he said it. “Pathfinder used her abilities to demonstrate superiority over me simply to make others like her. Stage magic is nothing more than a display. Corner a show magician on a bell tower with an actual threat of violence and most will be no better than frightened foals. At worst, you may catch a face full of glitter.” He turned his nose up and picked up the menu again. “Sadly, all protestations aside… the fact remains that a part of me would still trade both left legs to be one of them. Cognitive dissonance is very irritating. I suppose I simply transfer that irritation onto the profession as a whole… and no, being aware of it doesn’t help, either.”

Swift and I sat, digesting that for a long moment.

“Alright, that makes sense,” I said and Swift gave an affirmative nod.

“If that is all the personal prying you wish to do, Detective, mayhap we should order our food?” Limerence suggested.

My stomach made a sound like a bear being dragged under a steamroller.

****

Detective Griddle was in the wrong profession, but then, not every pony can follow their cutie-mark to fortune. A truly great cook can easily end up propping up a desk if the jobs just aren’t there, and Detrot is one place it pays to have a pension and regular paycheck. Police work is that, if nothing else.

The vegetable curry I ordered could have easily burnt the ears off a dragon, but it was delicious right to the last bite. Swift settled on some sort of sandwich off the griffin menu which I didn’t look at too closely. It smelled distinctly of flesh, though, and the waitress gave her a look one generally reserves for watching somepony else tongue a urinal. I wasn’t even prepared to identify whatever it was Limerence ordered. It looked like some kind of bean dish, but with a hefty dose of eight or nine different dressings. I was thankful the Don was paying our tab because the wines with our meal came in bottles with vintages pre-dating the Crusades.

We ate, enjoying one another’s company, listening to a semi-talented band which included Telly on multiple vocals. She sat on an old, beaten piano, banging out some jazzy tunes while singing a chorus with herself, a bottle of scotch beside her as the band tried to keep up.

All in all, a better police Gala than any I could remember, especially considering I hadn’t been to one in nearly ten years. I suppose showing up as a guest — and in disguise — might have helped considerably back in those days.

****

The ‘additional privileges’ included with our tickets turned out to be a backstage meet and greet with the Great Ghoulini in his dressing rooms. Jade was still out there drumming up support for the police department, so it was a grass-green officer with buttons shiny enough to damage retinas who led Swift, Limerence, and I behind the stage and down one of the multitudinous hallways towards one of the unused office areas.

Somepony had tossed a bright golden star on one of the doors with the word ‘Ghoulini’ on it. The officer left us just outside with a firm instruction to wait until the magician called us in. As soon as he was around the corner, I dropped myself into one of the chairs beside the door. My stomach felt like it weighed the better part of a ton and I’d drunk more than a few glasses of the good wine, so the ground seemed a touch slippery. Swift was swaying on her hooves, though Limerence seemed entirely unaffected.

“How are you not even a little bit drunk? I saw you have at least four glasses,” I groused.

The librarian’s horn flickered for a second. “A simple spell to dissolve the alcohol in my bloodstream. Quite useful at occasions like this one.”

“Sir… I am really…*hic*... good, but I wanna nap…” Swift burped, softly, then stumbled over and sat beside me, laying her head on my shoulder.

I exhaled and twitched my chin at my partner, giving Limerence a meaningful look. “Do you mind?”

He rolled his eyes, then his horn glowed brightly and a feeling of warmth swelled up in my stomach, spreading down each limb until it felt like I had been wrapped in an electric blanket in front of a roaring fire. Then the sensation was gone and I was left feeling entirely, perfectly normal. Perhaps even a little refreshed. Swift lifted her head and put one hoof to her chest, puzzled.

“What happened?” she asked, sounding a bit disappointed. “I was feeling so nice!”

“Sorry, kid. We can’t be toasted while we’re interrogating somepony, much as I might prefer that,” I said.

“Awww… alright.” Swift plucked at her bowtie, straightened her mane, and smoothed her wings a few times until they lay flat. “I… sir, I've been wondering something. Doesn’t it seem weird that a show pony would be a criminal? I mean, I’ve heard of the Great Ghoulini before. Nopony ever said anything about him counterfeiting things."

"I know… Lim? You want to field this one?" I asked.

Limerence set his back against the wall and slid to the floor. "Father has seen more than a few of Ghoulini's fakes in his time, though only a fool would try to pass off a counterfeit to the Archivists. Granted, many criminals are fools. I know little of Ghoulini other than his works, but the underworld has its own mythologies and I make a point of following those."

"So, what do they say?" I inquired.

"They say he's quite likely the finest counterfeiter who has ever lived, though his work is recognizable if a pony knows what to look for. That armor, for instance, was subject to a thinning technique at the edges, meant to give an aged appearance. A casual observer, or even a non-expert viewing it at close range would not notice.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I was wondering how you picked that out. Anything else?”

He shook his head. “Little, I’m afraid. The police have investigated him at the behest of the criminal community-"

Swift made a noise of shock at that.

The librarian pinched his lips together, "Miss Swift, surely you cannot think the police a wholly independent adjudicator of justice? They maintain balance. Nothing more, nothing less. Ghoulini is a skilled counterfeiter, but the underworld does not like anything it cannot control or understand. He operates entirely outside of jurisdiction or allegiance, aside a very carefully maintained set of standards.”

I blinked at Limerence. “So how is it you think we’re going to get him to help us, then?”

He pulled at his lower lip with one toe and said, “That, I believe, is where we are taking a risk. We might get his assistance with this case if we can appeal to that set of moral qualms.”

“How so?" asked Swift. "I mean, he’s a criminal. Doesn't that sort of mean not having 'moral qualms?'"

Limerence made an offended sniff. “Simply because a pony does not feel the need to follow the law does not mean they are without standards, Officer. As I said, his code of conduct may be useful to us.”

A faint rattle came from the dressing room and it opened on the broadly smiling face of the magician. Up close, he was older than I’d have thought, though no less handsomely proportioned. He’d abandoned the ruffled white shirt in favor of a spangly jumpsuit that came up to his throat.

“Ahhh, my guests! Do, please come in! I was most intrigued when I heard just one group purchased all three of my backstage passes,” he greeted us, cheerfully, before retreating back into the dressing room, letting the door swing shut behind him.

I leaned close to Limerence and muttered softly, “Just how much were these tickets?”

He replied out of one side of his mouth, “You will be more comfortable not knowing, Detective. Let it only be said that if you were working for father on anything besides his grace, you would be very poor indeed, Stella’s credit or not.” With that, he pushed open the dressing room and trotted inside.

“Sir, is he serious?” Swift asked.

“Honestly, I’ve no idea, but I don’t think I ever want to find out. Accountants scare me worse than mob enforcers.”

****

The dressing room was a tiny affair, with vanity, sink, and dresser somepony must have scrounged out of the local thrift store just for this occasion. The old office was dingy, but one of the rookies must have been forced to give it a good scrub and polish to remove the worst of the ‘police grunge.' There was a small dressing blind covered in elegant scrollwork with the words ‘The Great Ghoulini’ painted across it.

A beautiful lounging bed had been brought in and lay across the side wall with Miss Patter, still in one of the frilly costumes, draped bonelessly over it with one hoof thrown across her forehead. She appeared to to be dozing, her chest rising and falling at even intervals.

Ghoulini was seated before the vanity's mirror, a deck of cards flipping back and forth between his hooves. He turned to the three of us and his face split into a gracious smile.

“Now, my guests. It is lovely to meet you! I, as you may have guessed, am the Great Ghoulini. May I know your names?” He rose from his seat, stepping forward and offering his hoof.

I flicked one eye toward Swift who looked slightly nervous. Limerence, meanwhile, was studying Patter with great interest. She still hadn’t moved from her spot on the couch.

“My name is Mister Thick. This is my associate, Mister Twitter… just call him Mister Twit. And this here, is Miss Snuggles.” I gestured at Limerence and Swift, who both shot me a furious glare. I turned back to the magician and lightly tapped hooves with him. “I must say, Mister Ghoulini...that was, without question, the most spectacular show I’ve ever seen. The trick with the vanishing koi…”

Ghoulini’s rich laugh filled the tiny room. “A magician never reveals his methods, but let me just say, that was as tricky as it looked, Mister Thick. We had to practice for quite some time to make that work, didn’t we Miss Patter?”

Patter acknowledged that with a flip of her tail and nothing else.

“You’ll have to excuse my lovely assistant. She’s quite moody after a show,” our host apologized, shifting on his stool. “Now, have you any questions? I can’t tell you how my performance happens, but if you’d like to ask me about myself, I’m happy to talk. My fans are, after all, where the magic comes from. Heh, the real magic is that someone’s willing to pay me to do this!”

Snatching a chair from a couple stacked beside the door, I turned it around and straddled it, resting my front hooves on the chair’s back.

“Yeah, I’d love to ask you a question or two.” I felt my heart beat a little faster. I do love asking questions, particularly when the pony being asked doesn’t see them coming. If I hadn’t been a cop, I would probably have been breathing heavily down microphones for a living like Sugar Lace.

I scrutinized Ghoulini. His face was kind and open, completely devoid of trickery or malice.

It was the kind of face only the most hardened criminals and the finest magicians can manage. It was the face of somepony ready to steal your wallet in a very friendly and likeable way.

I wanted to deck him, just a little.

“Why did you make a counterfeit chestplate for Nightmare Moon’s armor?”

****

In my defense, I didn’t actually know what was about to happen. I suppose caution would have saved me some injuries, but I’d already snuck into the Castle, escaped Chief Jade, and had several glasses of wine. At least, an alternative course of action might have kept Limerence from gloating quite so hard over having, once again, proved his assertions about my recklessness.

****

Patter jerked her hoof down from her face, saw me, then Limerence. She shrieked so loudly my ears ached and her horn flared brightly.

Ghoulini, great magician of the stage vanished, replaced by a glowing mannequin of some type of dark wood with silver rings running through it. The doll was roughly pony shaped, with articulated joints at knees, neck, and tail. It lacked facial features, ears, or muzzle, but it still had a properly solid set of rear hooves and a killing attitude.

If I hadn’t thrown myself backwards off my chair the second the creature appeared, I’d have caught his clumsily thrown buck square in the forehead. Even as an earth pony, even with a good thick skull, I’d have probably been a vegetable for the rest of my life.

Swift moved to leap between me and the doll as I scrambled to regain my hooves, but a second doll appeared from behind the small blind. It was identical to the first, though instead of the ruffled white shirt, this one wore only a set of black pants. It charged, going from zero to full gallop in under a second. It caught her in the mid-section and together, they spun across the floor into a heap of flailing limbs.

Limerence was already on his hooves, but instead of the obvious threats, he was bearing down on Patter. An explosion of multi-colored lights came from the couch where she’d been sitting, followed by a burst of confetti as she disappeared.

I rolled, leaping up facing the wall and kicking out with one rear leg. It connected with a sound like somepony giving a tree a good whack with an axe and the shock traveled all the way from my ankle to my shoulders. The doll flew backwards, smashing into the wall where it collapsed into a pile of kindling.

A feminine voice squealed and Patter reappeared beside me, throwing herself between me and the doll as it slowly reconstituted itself, one piece of wood reconnecting to another, each surrounded by an eerie green glow. The creature began to stand, but its front legs had been snapped clean in half and it stumbled, collapsing on its face. The girl swung to face me; her dark eyes were wild, like a mother who’d just watch somepony cold cock their child.

I kicked the air six inches below my chin; It must have looked awfully silly, particularly to anypony who doesn’t regularly wear a gun bit. Unarmed is just not my natural state.

Before I even had time to curse my compromising nature which had allowed me to enter the situation without a gun, Patter launched herself at me, apparently forgoing her magic in favor of attempting to throttle the life out of a much larger, much more powerful earth pony with her bare hooves.

Adapting to changing combat environments is one of the first things they teach in basic training, but little within that covers a hysterical mare determined to tear your throat out. Most police training assumes the officer is being attacked by a dangerous opponent, so it focuses heavily on damaging the essentials; groin, knees, and skull. Patter might have been dangerous if she’d been able to think long enough to use her horn, but she was well beyond that by the time she hit me, so I fell back on more gallant impulses and didn’t kick her head off.

Instead, I wrapped both hooves around her neck, turned, and swung her weight. She squealed as her rear legs came off the floor and she hit the ground with a dull thud, me on top of her, one hoof braced against her horn. It spat a thin beam of sparkling flames that blasted past my cheek, leaving a thin burn on my jaw. I gave the jut of bone a good, hard smack.

“Hey, none of that!” I snapped, as tears started dripping down her cheeks. “Where’s Ghoulini?”

The girl shook from head to hoof as I pressed my toe against her horn, but she slowly extended one toe. I looked up to where she pointed in the direction of Swift and the pile of sticks and doll parts she was still fighting her way free of. The doll she’d been fighting seemed to have given up the ghost, though she still had to pry its legs off of her mid-section.

“That’s cute,” I growled. “You want to tell me where he is, really?” She gestured frantically at the bits of wood. I narrowed my eyes, then carefully rose, letting Patter gulp down a few breaths. “We aren’t here to hurt him or you. We just want to ask some questions, then we’ll be on our way, alright? Get that thing off Swift, and we’ll talk.”

Patter closed her eyes and held up both hooves in a gesture of acquiescence, then her horn let off a quick spark. The doll holding on to Swift released her. She backed away, stumbling into my side.

“Sir? Are you okay?” she asked, worriedly.

“Aside a fresh set of bruises, I’m fine. How is Lim?”

Limerence was still rubbing at his dazzled eyes, sitting beside the couch. He’d been looking right at the filly when she pulled her disappearing trick.

“Celestia preserve, I do hate magicians,” he complained, rising to his hooves. “I… fear I may be temporarily blind.”

“Lovely. Alright, I need you covering this girl. Come to my voice,” I directed. The Archivist staggered up and moved towards us. I caught him before he could walk into the door, directing his forehead up against Patter’s shoulder.

“Alright, this is how this is going to work,” I explained, picking my chair back up and setting it in front of where Patter sat on the carpet. “We’re going to play twenty questions. You give me an answer I don’t like, like, say… trying to kill us… my friend here blasts you." I had no idea whether or not he could project blasts, but hopefully that wouldn't matter. "First question. Can you talk?”

She shook her head, then waved both hooves at the doll I’d been fighting, then the other in a heap against the floor. Her eyes were leaking a constant stream of tears as she looked at me, pleading.

“Alright, I… think I get it. Like I said, we’re not here to hurt you. If I let you get those things up… is it going to end with my friend here having to singe that pretty face?” I asked, pointedly.

Again, the head shake. I tapped Limerence’s shoulder. “If my hoof leaves your leg for any reason, turn her into a light bulb. Got me?”

“Understood, Detective.” Limerence gave Patter a light prod with his horn for emphasis.

“Sir… what’s… going on?” Swift asked, softly, looking down at her torn tuxedo with dismay.

“Honestly? Just a theory, right now.” I jerked my chin at the doll nearest me, then indicated Patter should do whatever it was she was going to. “Go on.”

The mare’s eyes were still fearful, but as her horn gleamed with arcane energies, she seemed to relax.

Gradually, the pieces of the wooden doll began to reassemble themselves. First, the ankles grew together, followed by the knees, then the torso which was composed of several jointed pieces. Lastly, the bulbous, wooden head rose and attached itself to the neck, interlocking neatly with the other pieces.

Patter breathed a low sigh, her horn shaking from the effort.

A set of eyes appeared on the doll, then a muzzle, and some ears. One piece at a time, like watching an artist sketching on a blank canvas, the Great Ghoulini re-appeared. Patter looked at me for permission and I pulled Limerence away. She immediately rushed to the statuesque figure of the magician, throwing herself at his forelegs. He put his knees around her neck, holding her to his chest for several seconds.

“Silly girl,” the doll murmured, the voice syncing perfectly with the lips though it obviously had no vocal cords, “We couldn’t keep doing this forever. You knew somepony was going to get the better of you eventually.”

The filly looked up at him, adoringly, then settled onto her belly under him like a faithful hound. He rested his hoof on her neck, turning to me. “Well... as… my assistant has not been tortured… I must ask, why the great Detective Hard Boiled would appear in our rooms, disguised, dyed pink, and with… that…” He turned and scowled at Limerence. “... that Archivist… if he were not here to kill us.”

Limerence would have glared back, but his eyesight still hadn’t recovered and he only managed to glare at the wall a half meter to the magician’s right.

“How do you know he’s an Archivist?” I asked.

Ghoulini rolled his eyes. “Oh please, Detective... the pocket watch? It is a gift to every Archivist on the day their training is completed.”

Limerence was taken momentarily aback. He sank onto his rear end, staring incredulously in the general direction of the magician’s face as he touched the chain dangling from his pocket. The watch had come loose sometime during the fight and he scooped it back into his jacket hastily, then asked, “How do you know that?”

With a hint of pride, Ghoulini lifted his chin in the air. “My assistant may be sadly… out of touch, but I do keep abreast of my competitors.”

“We are not competitors. You, sir, are a leech,” Limerence snapped, taking a step forward and stumbling over the leg of my chair, pitching onto his muzzle.

Patter tittered softly, crossing her forelegs. Swift had a tiny grin on her lips as she helped Limerence back up and dusted him off.

I held up my legs, and everypony, minus Limerence, gave me their attention, “No need to get nasty here. This was, in theory, supposed to be a friendly little meeting. I’ve got to ask, before we go on - You’re not...real, are you?”

The magician squared his magnificently proportioned shoulders and replied, “What is real, Detective? You have the look of a pony whose definition of that word is very shaky these days.”

“You know exactly what I mean,” I said, slightly annoyed.

Ghoulini sagged a little, then sat heavily. A brush floated off of the vanity and the strap wrapped itself around his hoof. He began absently combing Patter as he answered, “My body is wood. Timberwolf wood, to be precise.” He tapped his chest with one hooftip and it let out a dull thunk. “I move. I live.”

“That’s… alright, fine, but are you… I don’t know. Are you actually talking to me or is this another sort of trick?”

“I believe what you’re asking, Detective, is something along the lines of ‘Do I think?’ or perhaps ‘Do I feel?’” He chuckled, then leaned down and planted a loving kiss on his assistant’s forehead. She cooed, like a happy kitten, and rubbed her forehead against his thigh in a way I found vaguely disturbing. “They are both questions I’ve asked myself many times, though I don’t suppose it matters. What matters, I believe, is that Miss Patter seems to think I am alive.”

“I don’t follow,” I murmured.

“Oh? Is it not obvious? She wanted to be a magician’s assistant when she was young, and so she became.”

Swift’s ears were swiveled forward as she hung on every word. “You mean… you were her… imaginary friend?!”

He stroked the thin tuft of fuzz on his chin like he was thinking. I wasn’t even sure if that was possible, but there was something about Ghoulini that seemed designed to put a pony at their ease. It was marred, somewhat, by the blankly worshipful Patter still kneeling beside him, her horn glowing dimly as she maintained whatever spell was letting the conversation go on.

“My love was not… subject to a kind, caring youth,” Ghoulini explained. He gripped Patter’s thigh and pulled her sideways, lifting the dress away from her flank. Her cutie-mark seemed to be two faces, meeting nose to nose. When I tilted my head, the negative space between them seemed to form another face with a blank, empty smile.

“What’s that a talent for?” Swift asked.

“Oh? You can't guess? And no guesses from the great Detective?” The fake stallion smirked at me.

I examined the mark for several second, then reached out and pulled the skirt back down over her flank. Something about watching Ghoulini manipulate the girl was genuinely unsettling, although I supposed if it were really Patter doing the manipulating…

This could give a pony a brain cramp, I thought to myself. Then I had it.

“Faking. Her talent is faking."

“Got it in one!” Ghoulini laughed, offering me a pleased smile. “Few ponies have guessed on the first try.”

“So you’re… a counterfeit… counterfeiter?!” Swift’s eyes were open wide as she slid onto her rear end. “I mean… that’s really… really…”

“Brilliant?” Ghoulini offered.

“Weird,” my partner replied.

“Ahhh, I suppose it is that too, and as well, I suppose there is no purpose in hiding our ‘secondary’ profession.” The magician stood, going over to the second doll which was crumpled by the blind. He shuffled through the pieces, then turned to Patter and shook his head. Her lower lip quivered, but she held in another volley of tears as he went on, “Our works do pay the bills, after all. Timberwolf wood is not cheap nor plentiful and its enchantment potential fades after a matter of months. My...brother...here will need replacing.”

“That is how you’ve always managed an alibi! We have investigated you several times. These dolls can move about at will, taking on faces and bodies as needed. That is truly astonishing magic.” Limerence looked genuinely impressed as he said this.

“It is, isn’t it? Credit must go where it is due, though. Miss Patter was the one with the interest in books of adventure and magic, of daring criminals and clever sorcerers. I simply whispered to her from that place where she was safe inside her own mind. The creation? That was all her own.” Ghoulini hefted a piece of the other doll, rolling the broken pieces between his hooves.

I cocked my head to one side. “How did you… or… she… know who I am?”

“We witnessed your truly excellent prank upon the Chief of Police on the television.” He answered. “She sees poorly through my eyes, but her skills do make her quite talented at discovering what is disguised. When she saw you with her own vision, it was obvious who you were.”

Limerence gave the air next to Ghoulini’s face a look of puzzlement. “Would it be correct to say that this girl is… mute?”

The magician flicked his ears backwards against his skull and Patter whined softly, huddling closer to him as he replied, “She does not speak, Archivist. Speaking is how most ponies connect. The cruelties heaped upon her made speech a terror and over the decades, she's rather lost the skill. I suppose she could, but it's been many years since she tried and a pony doesn’t gain a talent for falsehood because they live a peaceful childhood. Regardless of capacity, you have destroyed many of my finest works. Neither of us especially wants to talk to you.”

Limerence lowered his left ear, looking for the first time as though he was genuinely hurt. “We do not make a habit of destroying art, Mister Ghoulini, or… whatever you are. I may disapprove heartily of how you make use of… or…-” He stomped a foreleg a few times, backing up his train of thought before he corrected himself, “-how Miss Patter...makes use of her talents, but I can appreciate them. We use her recreations as training aids in the recognition of fakes.”

Ghoulini sat a little straighter. “You… haven’t been destroying my work?” he asked, hopefully. Patter, unable to continue disguising her interest in the conversation, flicked her ears towards Limerence.

“Your pieces come to our attention fairly regularly,” Limerence continued, testily, “When it was determined that several of our most expensive losses had come at the hooves of one pony, we decided it would be worthwhile to begin a collection. My father, in particular, was impressed by your Leoneighrdos. Make no mistake, I don’t like magicians, I don’t like counterfeiters, and I most assuredly don’t like you and whatever… bizarre psychiatric illness you represent-” his voice softened somewhat, “-but I am not without my admiration for your work, however grudging.”

The magician bowed to the Archivist, then remembered he couldn’t see, and said, “Then I will say thank you. One day, maybe, we will pay your Don a visit and ask him if he might let us walk down memory lane, as it were.” Ghoulini turned to me. “Now, Detective...you have gone to great risk to meet us tonight and if it is not to kill us at the behest of these... Archivists... then I would know why you have put yourself in this dangerous position? I heard of your execution of the King of Ace, but then I’m afraid you dropped off the map.”

“It wasn’t-” I hesitated, thinking better of a complete recounting of those events. If Ghoulini wanted to think I brought down the King of Ace by myself, it might play to my advantage. “Never mind. I did take a considerable risk and I’d appreciate it if you answered some of my questions regarding your business. In particular, regarding the armor of Nightmare Moon.”

“Oh, yes...mmm…” The magician’s lips thinned into a sharp line. “I fear, Detective, there is nothing I can do for you. My assistant and I have strict guidelines and a confidentiality clause implicit. Torture is useless as well, were you so inclined to stoop to that. I am wooden, and Miss Patter is…” He glanced down at the girl who was toying with the brush on his hoof, chewing on it lightly and trying to pull it back towards her head. “...as you see her.”

Limerence almost mechanically plucked his spectacles from his pocket and set them on his nose. After a few seconds, he took them off again, slipped them away, and shut his eyes. “I know something of the contracts your customers sign. You have a clause which relates to ‘death,' yes?”

“As any sane counterfeiter would,” Ghoulini agreed, placing his hooftips against one another. “Our services are to promote the common good. Thievery should not lead to death. It is almost precisely the purpose of a thief that they sneak. To murder in the course of theft is to defeat the purpose of what we do. It is to lower oneself to the level of a thug. Artless, foolish, and the bane of a functional society.”

Swift’s nose twitched as she brought one wing around and used the feathertips to scratch her head. It was a weird thing to watch. “You mean… society needs thieves?”

Ghoulini, enjoying a curious audience, seemed to warm to the role of teacher. “But of course! The world is a cycle. Thieves ensure that the powerful may never be invincible, and that the weak always have recourse. Yes, we profit, but it is in theft that all great truth is found. I have counterfeited diaries of great ponies, works of art that would simply have lain in dusty warehouses rather than being appreciated in their prime, and glorious statuary that might otherwise simply have rotted were there not a pony willing to take the time and energy to resurrect it, polish it, and cast it back into the public eye as an ill-gotten gain.”

“But… that doesn’t make any sense! Why not just restore art? Wouldn’t that be better?” my partner groaned, putting her hooftip on her forehead.

“So much of what we value is only valuable if we believe it might be lost,” the magician explained, his hoof tracing its way down Patter’s spine. She shivered, then wiggled her flank at him, lasciviously. “Why, I counterfeited a painting by a relatively unknown bovine artist just a few years ago named Jackson Bullock. Fantastic, surreal, beautiful works, and yet he was almost entirely invisible to the public eye until somepony saw fit to steal and copy one of his works. Quite poorly, mind you -- couldn’t have gone unnoticed -- but once we had a few in circulation, he was suddenly a sensation.”

My partner’s face twisted up as she tried to make the logic jive with her understanding of the world and when it failed to, she did what smart police ponies do and let it wash with a shrug and a nod; facts are facts, whether we like them or not.

“Then, If death is your personal ‘line’, do you know Professor Fizzle of the Museum where the armor was kept?” I asked, easing down onto my knees so I could look Patter in the eyes directly. She shied away a few inches, but I kept her pinned with my gaze. "He’s dead. And your armor is sitting in the museum, locked up behind all those wards. They tore off his horn, girl. Sawed it right off.”

Patter, for all she might have appeared a simpleton, wasn’t hiding the look of abject horror at that particular revelation.

Ghoulini slid his leg between me and the girl. “I’m who you talk to, Detective.”

“Yeah, and you’re not telling me what I need to hear. So either you get her to talk, tell me what I need to know, or you go back to being kindling and she can wait a few weeks to get her ‘magician’ back until you can pay for another body.”

At this, Ghoulini’s eyes and lower jaw misted away, leaving the doll’s face somewhat lopsided-looking. Patter, her ears still pasted to her head, was making a very soft whine, trying to back away while still not rising from the floor.

The magician tapped the girl on the shoulder, gently, and pointed to his face. She looked up and her horn flashed, remaking his features. After she had finished the touch-ups, Ghoulini was no longer smiling amiably at me. Instead, he was glowering like a dog who’d just had his bone snatched away.

“Detective, threats are not necessary,” he rumbled, soothingly teasing Patter’s mane until she hid her face between her hooves. “We… mmm… if what you say is so, we will concede the greater good is served by relinquishing that information and since you have taken such a risk, I can only allow for the possibility that it is. Fizzle, very kindly, allowed us almost complete access to the armor during our study for its re-creation. Killing him should not have been necessary.”

“Then you know who stole the armor?!” Swift squeaked, hopping eagerly onto the tips of her toes.

The magician ground his jaw back and forth a few times, then shook his head. “No. I’m afraid I don’t. That… particular deal was operated through an intermediary. We were brought the materials and payment, then told to leave the finished product at a dead drop. We were given but four days to complete it. It was very much a rush job. Not… perhaps our best work, but we believed passable.” He peered at Limerence. “I must inquire how you spotted it. I thought I was quite thorough, despite the time crunch.”

Limerence grimaced as he thought back. “Your resin work on the breastplate was done too quickly. The resin cooled unevenly, such that the interleaving did not take properly on the metal work. It wouldn’t have been obvious until about five days after the initial forming was completed. I noticed a similar issue on a pair of griffin gauntlets we acquired not six months ago.”

“Ahhh...yes. The griffin king’s war gauntlets. Sadly, the pony who tried to switch those for mine was a poorer thief than he was a choice of artisan,” the stallion sighed. “That is, as ever, the problem with working on a time budget.”

“Who is this ‘intermediary?' You think he'd talk to us?” I asked.

“Doubtful, though your Archivist might at least convince him to allow you a visit. He is a broker for things unsavory here in Detrot who was, until recently, employed by a pony of your recent acquaintance, one ‘Mister Cosmo’. This stallion stepped into the vacuum left by the King of Ace upon his demise, though I believe a more powerful controlling interest managed to take over the vast majority of those holdings.”

“What’s this pony’s name?”

Ghoulini exhaled, sadly, “I don’t know. Sorry.” Swift slumped and even Limerence looked a touch disappointed, so the fake stallion quickly amended that statement with, “You must understand, that’s just not how this business works. He has a title. As Miss Patter is ‘The Great Ghoulini’, so this character is ‘The Drum Beat.' I believe the name derives from funny ideas about ‘the drum beat of progress,' though from his tactics he is a manipulator. I can give you his theoretical location, though for reasons I’m sure you understand, I can’t directly intervene on your behalf. He is… in a place that has a tendency to disrupt the spells maintaining my form, but I can at least point you to the entrance. From there… you’re on your own.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

Act 2, Chapter 12: Sneaky Sneaky Sneaky

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 12: Sneaky, Sneaky, Sneaky

Once, the diamond dogs were among Ponykind's many harriers; cruel slavers who kidnapped stray ponies and worked them, sometimes to death, in gem mines. The very ground beneath your hooves was both their refuge and ambush point; those terrible claws could grasp at your ankles anytime, anywhere, and drag you off into the darkness, never to be heard from again.

Now, they are not only a common, but a base sight in Equestrian lands. They coalesce in squalid underground warrens beneath major Equestrian cities, kept on leashes made of subsistence paychecks. The days when Equestrians feared them substantially more than they might fear mob muscle or irate-looking security guards are long gone. The dogs are now, if you'll forgive the pun, an underclass.

Interestingly enough, the dogs were not broken by a war of liberation fought on behalf of those they'd kidnapped. No clarion call of the Princesses, no grand stampede crushed their loosely-knit nation, and wisely so; attacking the underground home of an enemy capable of moving through and manipulating the very earth would have been a strategic catastrophe. No, the dogs were crushed without a lance raised, shot fired or spell cast at them, all by the economic fallout of a different war altogether.

The dogs' economy was based on the acquisition and sale of gems and minerals, and the two greatest consumers of gems in the land were the ponies and the dragons. When the dragons were wrecked by the Cutie Mark Crusades, the dogs lost their biggest trading partner, and the only creatures remaining and willing to buy gems in sufficient bulk to keep their economy anything close to afloat were, ironically, the very creatures they once sporadically enslaved.

Naturally, the trade treaty Princess Celestia negotiated with the suddenly contrite dogs was favorable for the Equestrians indeed, and included a provision that put a stop to their uncouth practices. But, without slave labor, the dogs' economy soon faltered.

These have not been a pleasant few decades for the dogs, though with that said, some of the more enterprising ones have recently tapped into a new revenue stream. Politely, this new revenue stream could be described as selling echoes of the past; Impolitely, it is perhaps best not described.

--The Scholar

Limerence was trying to fix his tux as his vision finally began to recover. Swift was attempting to make the torn remains of my jacket fit over her wings again, with no luck whatsoever. This wasn't a real problem; the lost deposit wasn’t worth weeping over unless Stella was intent on making me justify my expenses.

“Mister Ghoulini...before we go, why did you talk to us? Really. You could have pretended to have vanished. Miss Patter could have pretended to be simple. It wouldn’t have been that hard, would it?” I asked as we gathered ourselves together.

The great magician’s lips twitched into a very weak smile. “Well...I do speak to my fans, regularly, but...it is rare to be honest with them. I… suppose that a pony can only fake so many things for so long before they want to talk to somepony besides themselves about those things. I may be Miss Patter’s friend, confidant, and lover, but that does not mean I am… anything more than I am; wood… and enchantment.” He touched the mare laying at his knees on the tip of the nose and she giggled, then made a mock snap at his toe. “Once we confirmed you weren’t intent upon our deaths, I guess we wanted some genuine company. Show business is quite lonely, and after tonight, we must go back to being invisible.”

“That’s why nopony sees you outside of your shows!” Swift snapped her wings to her side and grinned at her own deduction. “Most of the time you don’t look like that, right?”

Ghoulini raised his well formed chin, sticking it out in a slightly petulant manner. “Let it only be said that Patter and I live under... other faces and other names. It’s not the life of permanent stage glamour I would prefer, but it’s a life.”

I looked down at myself, then at my partner. The two of us looked like we’d been in some sort of brawl, which wasn’t far from the truth. My shirt was torn in a couple of places and the sleeves had burst on the jacket when Swift was tackled with the other doll.

“We’ve got to get out of this building without Jade noticing us,” I murmured, trying to wipe the worst of the make-up off my muzzle. It was turning into a drippy, streaky mess. I’d lost my cotton balls at some point during the fight and didn’t much fancy trying to find them.

“Easier said than done,” Limerence commented, lifting Swift up by the scruff of her neck with his horn. She dangled there like an indignant kitten, rear legs drawn up, glaring at him as he patted the dust off of her, then set her back on her hooves. “The spell disguising our colors is wearing quite thin and I can’t cast it upon us again tonight without risking some... permanent changes. I, for one, prefer my natural colors.”

“Well, unless you can find another way out, you can kiss those colors goodbye; Jade's going to paint us blood red. We can’t go out the front. She'll be saying goodbye to everypony as they leave,” I grumbled.

Rising from her spot at Ghoulini’s hooves, Patter approached me. Her horn spat a few sparkles and I felt something shift within my body like somepony had given me an especially weird enema. The fur around my muzzle tingled, feeling chilly.

Limerence’s face dropped into an annoyed scowl. “Breaking the spell early is not what I had in mind, Miss Patter! Every news agency in the city will be ripping this foolish stallion apart and, sad as it may sound, I require him to finish my present task!”

I raised my hoof to look at it and realized I was, once more, a creamy gray.

Ghoulini trotted around my sides. "That spell only had about two minutes remaining,” he said, coolly. “And... as you saw fit to kindly converse with us and Miss Patter is uninjured, in spite of her somewhat foolish attempts at martial combat, I will tell you that there is a rear entrance to the building accessible from this hallway.“

Pulling the wrecked tuxedo’s wrecked white shirt over my head, I poked one toe through the gaping hole in the shoulder and growled, “That doesn't help the fact that if somepony spots me in here, they’ll be serving me for the second course at the main table, now does it?”

“No, it’s true.” Pulling his thick, curly mane down over one shoulder, he dragged his brush through it a few times as he - or maybe Patter - considered our situation. “However… A clever magician always has two exits when the stage is on fire.”

Patter’s horn started to shine and she snatched a dozen costumes off a rack behind the little dressing blind, dragging them over the top of it into a pile and dropping them across my back. I groaned under the sudden weight. Individually small, all those sequins were heavy.

The stallion shuffled through hats in a hat box one after another, talking half to himself and half to us. “You will be carrying my costumes out to the vehicle behind the building. Leave them inside, then make your escape. Now... we’ll need a quick thing for your head here... ahhh, this will do.”

The hat he’d picked was obviously one of Patter’s. It was a big, floppy thing with mounds of feathers sticking out of both sides that looked minutely like a peacock if one stood back a bit. Levitating it over my head, he worked it down until my ears stuck out through the holes. The brim was wide enough to cover my face.

Swift had both hooves stuffed halfway into her mouth as she watched the process.

“Something you’d like to say, rookie?” I asked, with a huff.

“No, sir!” she managed to gasp, sucking ferociously on her toe. “Nothing... nothing at all!”

“Good, because we’ve got to cover those lovely wings of yours somehow.”

Her amused expression turned quickly to horror and she backed away from me, directly into Limerence. His horn surrounded her in a shining field of telekinesis, lifting her off her hooves.

“No! No, it’ll be okay! Nopony will notice me!” she shrieked, flailing her legs and thumping her wings against herself.

I glanced at Ghoulini, who was holding his hooves at varying lengths along her side, trying to figure what the optimal quantity of spare costumes was to disguise her plumage, but her squirming was making it difficult. Finally, he gave up and tossed a polka-dotted cow’s dress - one which surely did not belong to himself or his assistant - across her back, then tied it in place with a bit of rope. He worked an oversized black bowler hat down over her ears, then Limerence plunked her down beside me.

“Perfect!” I clapped my hoof against the carpet and Swift rocked back onto her heels. “Nopony will recognize you and no sane being would be wearing that for any reason besides money.”

“S-sir... I... I feel sick.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not your look, but I put up with being pink all night, so don’t puke on that dress or it’s coming out of your paycheck.”

“I never got to collect my first paycheck, sir…” she replied, unhappily.

Before I could retort, Ghoulini was back at his wardrobe, sifting through it. “Now, one last thing. Archivist?”

“I will be fine, I assure you.” Limerence took two steps back, but I planted my hoof on his butt and gave him a push back towards the magician and his assistant.

“We’re not taking chances,” I said, trying not to sound too smug. I don’t think I succeeded, because Limerence took Patter’s little game of dress-up with all the grace of a cat who’d just found himself dunked in a bathtub, especially when a second feathery hat covered in fake, prismatic doves came out.

“Hard Boiled… you will owe me something for this. I do not know, at this time, what it will be; it may be one of your minor organs for me to shred and feed to my pet snake. I just want you to understand, eventually, you will owe me something,” the librarian growled as the hat was dragged on straight.

“Claim it soon. The psychotic mare just through that door wants full body dibs and intends to decorate her office with pieces of me.”

Once he was dressed, Ghoulini draped us in a few extra costumes for good measure. “Now, then, Detective… if there’s nothing else we two can do for you, we would like to be moving on. My apologies burning you, and for our rash behavior when we first saw you.” I brushed my hoof over the raw spot on my muzzle as Ghoulini went on, “I’m sure you understand. Being caught by a pony who most recently killed one of your former customers, who was incidentally being followed by a member of a group who makes it a point of professional pride to either employ or eliminate counterfeiters...”

“We are not assassins, Mister Ghoulini!” Limerence snapped.

The puppet waved his hoof, dismissing our librarian’s objection. “Be that as it may, you are well known for putting my professional colleagues in the hospital, forcing others into retirement, and causing more than a few to simply ‘disappear’. Caution is never unwise.”

Before the two could get deeper into a discussion of these semantics, I stepped up and said, “Apology accepted. Where can we find this ‘Drum Beat’ character?”

“I will guarantee, you will not like where I send you.”

“Theme of my life, lately. Go on. Where?”

“There is a… call it a… private club... some distance from the Monte Cheval, on Caparo St down a back alley.” Ghoulini’s upper lip twitched with apparent disgust. “It caters to those of a somewhat unusual taste. The pony name for the place is the ‘Mud Pie’.”

“How will I know which back alley?” I asked.

“I believe you shan’t have any trouble. You must tell the bouncer that you ‘always keep the tempo.' That will, at the very least, get you into the building. I don’t know that you will be able to speak directly with Drum Beat himself. His secretary conducts most of his business with clients from an outside office.” Ghoulini moved back to Patter’s side, laying his hoof between her ears. “That, I fear, is all the information I have. Once you are inside, you are on your own.” He nosed the air in Limerence’s direction. “I do recommend you disguise your unicorn friend, however. The locals in that area have… a prurient and disturbing interest in unicorns.”

I squinted at the librarian’s horn. “Any particular reason? I was sort of hoping to have him along.”

“A hat will suffice. He does look fetching in that one, doesn’t he? A mare could just eat him right up!” Ghoulini and Patter both gave Limerence a frightening, slightly lewd leer. It looked creepy even from my end, but seeing that same, identical expression mirrored on those two faces inches away sent him wheeling backwards onto his rear end, tangled in the costumes wrapped around his body.

Giggling maniacally, Patter unwrapped the poor stallion and began rearranging his disguise as he cowered at her hooves, both forelegs pressed firmly over his eyes. It was comforting to know that were upper limits to Limerence’s icy composure.

There was a knock at the door.

We all froze in place, waiting.

“Mister Ghoulini! The crowd would like to see you one last time before you go! Are you up to a brief encore?”

It was Chief Jade’s voice. She sounded like she’d just returned from a week long vacation to Tartarus, but it still sent squirmy little shivers down my neck.

My heart went into instantaneous overdrive, threatening to climb right up my throat and choke me. Swift was wide-eyed and trying to kick her absent gun-bit while Limerence tugged at his tuxedo with magic, probably hunting for knives that weren’t there.

Ghoulini, ever the quick thinker, raised his voice and said, “Now, you lot be careful with those! Put them in the car and there will be a ten bit piece in it for you!”

Before I could stop him, he or, more likely, Patter grasped the door handle with their magic and threw it open.

I ducked my head, staring at the ground in front of my hooves. The wide-brimmed hat covered everything but my ears. I prayed that Limerence and Swift had the good sense to keep their heads down.

There, inches in front of me, standing in the hallway, was a pair of lime green hooves.

Death cometh with carrot peelers, Juniper whispered in the back of my head.

“Now, go on. Out. I must speak to the Chief.”

Ghoulini’s voice got me moving. I forced myself to lift one hoof, then the other, brushing by Iris Jade who took two steps back to make room and said, “Leaving so soon, Mister Ghoulini? What happened to your three guests?”

Two more steps. I heard my companions moving behind me. Swift was a set of clicking iron horse-shoes, will Limerence moved across the floor with barely a whisper of sound.

“They went back to the party, I believe,” Ghoulini answered.

“Oh… I’d hoped to meet them again.” Her tone turned inquisitive, though not yet menacing. “What’s that, if I may ask?”

My veins filled with ice. Was she talking to me? I couldn’t be sure. I kept moving, one step in front of the other.

“That? That’s just a bit of one of our props. Broken, I’m afraid.” Ghoulini answered, kicking something so it rolled across the floor. I realized it was the scraps of the timberwolf wood doll and he’d just shoved them back behind the curtain. “Such is the business of show. I will replace it on my own ticket, of course.”

“Ahhh… I see. Well, what about that encore?”

I breathed a relieved whimper then clamped my teeth shut, lest I be heard. The end of the hallway was only five meters away. I just needed to walk around that corner.

“The police have been more than generous, simply lending me a stage for my talents, but I’m afraid Miss Patter is feeling peaky, so an encore would be quite out of the question. Those fine ponies are my associates and will help me with the carrying.”

There was a pause, then I heard shifting hooves.

“...wait a second…”

Jade’s voice was like a bucket of ice-water down my neck.

I walked a little bit faster. The corner was just a meter away now.

"...is that…"

Three steps.

Two steps.

“...golden ...scales?!”

I looked back to see Jade’s eyes locked on my flank, where the extra costumes weren’t covering.

Our eyes met.

A slow, lethal smile spread across her face.

Before she could start the doubtless extremely painful process of taking me into custody, an explosion of light and confetti showered the hallway. Unfortunately, I’d been looking right at the point where the brilliant flash started. Everything went immediately dark and spotty. I staggered, tripped, and almost tumbled onto my face before a hoof on my backside shoved me ahead. The ridiculous hat came off. Somewhere in front of me another set of hooves grabbed me and pulled me out into a cool breeze.

The voice of a banshee with a hang-over shrieked bloody murder from the open hallway, cut off as the door slammed shut.

“Haaaard Booooooooiii-!”

****

Swift and Limerence kept close to my sides as we ran. I couldn’t see where I was going, so I trusted them to keep me from crashing into telephone poles and fire hydrants. Unfortunately, that didn’t include the side of the Night Trotter. I rubbed my eyes, cursing all unicorns, their progeny, horns, magic, and light itself.

“What happened?” shouted Taxi, yanking open the car’s rear door. I felt around until I got my forelegs up on the seat, then Limerence lifted my ankles and bodily tossed me towards the far door before throwing himself in.

“We need that getaway!” I called back.

Somewhere behind us, a door banged open and there were shouting voices. A police whistle sounded.

A small, soft body landed against my side, then the front end of the car hunkered down as the rear wheels spun madly, trying to find grip. Then we were off. I was still blind, but I could make out a few loose shapes around the edges of vision. Not ideal, but better than sitting in a holding cell.

“What about Ghoulini?” Swift asked from my side.

“Patter will be fine,” I assured her. “It’s not like the Chief can admit I was there. Sneaking into the police ball, right by her? She’s already going to have a hilarious time getting back into office come next election time. They can’t arrest the guests of honor, either. Not at their biggest annual fundraiser.”

“Oh... mmm… okay,” she responded, softly. She didn’t sound happy. I wished I could see her expression.

“Hardy, are you alright? You’re staring at Lim’s butt,” Taxi piped up from the front seat. I jerked my head away from where it’d settled against the seat, staring out what I hoped was the window.

“The magician helped us get out. Used some kind of light spell. We’re out, though, and we got what we came for. It’s... complicated.”

“Magician? What magician? Light spell? Was that Jade chasing you?!”

I stretched both forelegs out in front of me, sinking down into the familiar old seat cushions. “Yes, it was. Like I said, complicated. I’ll be fine in a bit and we’ve got our destination. Let’s head back to the Nest. I’ll tell you about it after I’ve had a beer.”

“Sir, your chest is flashing,” Swift informed me. I felt her hooftip on my muzzle, and she asked, nervously, “Didn’t Miss Patter burn your face?”

“Yeah, she did. Why?”

“I can’t tell which side was burned,” she murmured, pulling the remains of my tuxedo’s jacket and the various costumes off and dropping them on the cab’s floor.

“Make that a beer and a half hour with a wall socket,” I amended.

****

Ahhh, beer. Beer, my old friend. Nothing washes the taste of fancy food, torn tuxedos, bruised ribs, or gut wrenching terror out of one’s mouth like a good beer.

I wanted about twelve, but we only had a few in the fridge. Limerence contented himself with tea, though Swift and Taxi both snatched their own brews. From the sound she made after her first sip, I suspected Swift was new to the fine art of hops and barley, but she drank it anyway as we sat on bean-bags around the upturned industrial spool which had become our coffee table. I was plugged into the wall and starting, for once, to enjoy the subtle warmth of being recharged. Gale or whatever certainly seemed to be enjoying it. Every now and then my heart would give an extra beat I could only interpret as ‘happy.'

Sadly, my vision was taking longer to recover than my face.

“Alright, first thing's first. Ghoulini pointed us at a contact somewhere called ‘The Mud Pie.' I don’t know where it is and I don’t think we can go back and ask him to clarify his directions. Taxi, you have the map? We’ll need to know who we’re likely to be dealing with.”

My driver pulled her ‘special’ map with the local divisions of power amongst all of the city’s rival factions out of one of her saddlebags and laid out on the table. We all leaned over it.

“Caparo… I haven’t updated this for the changes since Cosmo’s death, but I’m assuming the Heights have expanded to encompass Monte Cheval,” Taxi explained. “There are a number of characters remaining who would pose a real threat to Stella and a couple of the ‘big boys’ who’re mostly from out of town. Some of the uptown Jewelers have connections in Canterlot, and there’s the Cyclones, if they think that territory is open. They’ve been reluctant to move on it, but if they organize a proper stomp, Stella might have her claws full. Aside that, I don’t know the shape of things right now.”

Limerence shook his head as he pointed out a dividing line between a blue section and a red section of the map. “Those other events do not interest me. Here. Caparo street.”

I looked over the spot he was indicating. A thin, darkly colored splotch ran up and down that area in both directions, bulging out in places to encompass specific structures. It might have been a coffee stain if it weren’t so regular, but my eyes were still blurry when I tried to focus up close.

“Sweets, what’s the brown one?” I asked.

“Um... I’ve got a legend in here…” she tugged out a tiny diary from her bag and flipped through it until she found a piece of paper with various colors listed next to the names of the major criminal organizations in Detrot. “Errr… It’s… oh poop.”

“What? What’s poop? Taxi, don’t leave us hanging here!” I blurted.

She set the legend on the table in front of me. “Dog territory.”

“Oh… poop.”

“What’s wrong, sir?” Swift asked.

“Diamond dogs. That entire zone is owned by the diamond dogs,” I replied.

Swift raised both eyebrows. “Is… that… bad?” she inquired.

“It ranges from just deeply inconvenient to downright dangerous, depending on which end of the stick you’re holding,” I answered, running my hoof up Caparo Street. The entirety of it was encompassed by the brown stain. “Diamond dogs don’t necessarily hate ponies, but they’re not friendly in general. They’ll do business with us. The really irritating thing is that they have no proper concept of what ‘architecture’ is and most of them are almost entirely nocturnal.”

“We can get in, but getting out will be hard,” Taxi mused, thinking. “Diamond dog enclaves tend to be like rabbit warrens.”

Limerence raised his chin. “I can navigate in absolute darkness.”

I snorted, loudly. “Yeah, but can you navigate with a yoke around your neck and a restrictor ring on your forehead? When Ghoulini said Diamond dogs don’t like unicorns, he wasn’t being clear. Diamond dogs love unicorns; roped, chained, and finding gems for them."

"Nonsense," said Limerence. "The practice of slavery was outlawed amongst the dogs shortly after the Crusades."

"Oh, yeah." I said, rolling my eyes. "Because everything that happens in Detrot is totally legal and above board. That's why we have a chorus line instead of a police department."

"...Point taken," he sighed. "The point can be hidden via hat, however-"

"Besides, that whole area is likely to be rich with gemstones.”

“...What does that have to do with anything?”

Taxi and I glanced at one another before I answered, very slowly, like talking to a child. “Lim… you… have been on missions before where you were faced with magically hostile territory... right?”

The librarian shuffled his forelegs, staring at the spotty carpet between them. I got the distinct impression he was embarrassed and when he finally spoke, he sounded very subdued, “I… have done restrictor ring exercise training. Father has other means of dealing with artifacts in zones of extreme arcane instability. He… has yet to see fit to send me on those missions. Why do you ask?”

“Riiight...“ I sighed, scratching my ear as I tried to figure out how to explain the situation. “Diamond dogs like to settle in places of extreme magical instability. Gems grow faster in places like that. Most rock farms are in areas with lots of wild magic. The upshot is that it’s very difficult to cast or maintain spells in those areas without heavy training. That must have been what Ghoulini meant when he said he would have ‘issues’ there.”

"Wait," said Swift. "If… Diamond Dogs work in areas of lots of wild, unstable magic… why… do they like unicorns? Wouldn't they just explode?"

"Sometimes, yeah, actually. They didn't typically bring unicorns back to their home lairs; they used unicorns to find new veins of gems and new areas of unstable magic. If a unicorn happens to explode... well... that's a positive result from the canary, isn't it?" Turning back to Limerence, I indicated the point on his forehead. "So unless you're hiding some alicorn powers or you’re used to handling fields of wild magic, you’re better off keeping your horn hidden and non-glowy.”

Limerence flicked his tail around his knees, then rose and went over to the pile of costumes Ghoulini had left us with. I hoped, one day, I’d get the chance to return them to him, though in the meantime if they were going to be useful I was glad we had them.

Sifting through the pile of clothes, Limerence pulled out the bowler that Swift had been wearing and tugged it on. It settled right down, leaving his horn sticking out at the brim. Pulling a few strands of his mane forward, he used them to wrap his horn until it looked mostly like an especially poor hair-cut rather than his nexus of power.

“Suitable?” he asked.

“Works for me,” I replied. “We’ll be underground, no doubt. Dogs tend to build their communities sub-terranean. It’s a tactical nightmare. Just don’t forget while we’re down there to keep your horn off. Police unicorns get extensive training for going into places like this and even then, most won’t. No magic. Got me?”

“I fail to see what the worst that could happen-” he started to protest, but Taxi cut him off.

“You could accidentally tear someone’s head off or your horn could spontaneously combust.”

The librarian drew back. “That… must be some kind of exaggeration.”

“Nope,” I confirmed. “Not a bit. We’re going to be magic free. Taxi, Swift and I are carrying. You know how to use any non-magical firearms?”

Limerence chewed his lower lip pensively before answering. “I am… aware of their function.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I… fear that my previous instructor in mechanical powder-actuated ballistic weaponry was required to take a… " the librarian sounded as though he were choosing his words very carefully, "...leave of absence for major surgery to replace his knee after a… sad accident. Unfortunately, nopony could be found to replace him.”

“What does that mean?”

“You do not want me handling a gun, Detective.”

Realization gradually dawned.

“...I do not want you handling a gun.”

****

I was tempted to lie down and try our luck in the morning, but though the hour was late, the bars were still open and therefore most criminals were still awake. Why bar-time and criminal operations are so intimately linked is a mystery for the ages, but it’s convenient for the thirsty officer of the law.

Diamond dogs are a naturally nocturnal species, rarely coming out during the day and most often irritable and bad tempered when they do. At night, they’re a friendlier bunch, though as fiercely territorial as ever. Like many of the sub-culture dominated parts of the city, a call out to the diamond dog territories was rare from Detrot Police Department.

Most ponies would have been shocked at the real attrition rate amongst some of the city minority species, but because they most often chose to handle violent deaths internally, whether with bribes, shivs, or a shrug and a kick into a deep hole, the news rarely got ahold of those events. In times past, there were issues with ponies and diamond dogs butting heads, but when the dogs learned that ponies could help participate in their species-wide addiction to gemstones, a relatively amiable business relationship developed.

This isn’t to say there wasn’t a certain friction. After all, the amiable business relationship usually only lasted so long as the ponies in question were better armed. Since the gemstone market collapsed thirty years back, the relationship had only decayed further.

****

It being just short of the witching hour, there were few on the roads as the Night Trotter tooled along the narrow avenues at low speed, with Taxi in the front glaring at any being who dared get within ten meters of the cab’s front bumper. More street lights in that area were out than not, leaving wide stretches of dark street where anything could have lurked. Limerence sat in the passenger seat, his eyes glued on the road ahead, his irises suffused with a faint green glow. More than once, he directed Taxi around what might have been an innocent card-board box or possibly a disguised pothole.

We were taking no chances.

The P.E.A.C.E. Cannon lay across Limerence’s forelegs along with a full bandoleer of extra ammunition. I wasn’t inclined to ask Taxi where she’d managed to find police issue munitions considering our recent issues. I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked the answer.

Swift was back in her tactical vest, bunny patches and all, with Masamane strapped to her knee, and I wore a cheap combat jacket we’d picked up off a pawn shop owner, along with my trench-coat. It wouldn’t have protected me from anything bigger than standard munitions, but I felt better having it. The weight of my revolver on my thigh was a greater comfort.

The discussion over what to do about Limerence’s lack of non-magical armament came down to a second pawn shop run to pick up a goofy looking bladed mouth weapon he called a ‘katana.' It cost us twice what I thought we should have paid, but as we got out of the store, Limerence confided that whoever had sold it was giving up an heirloom from the Neighponese homeland and he’d have gladly paid several times as much. It wasn’t what I would have chosen, but after watching him do a few pirouettes with it, slicing through imaginary foes with the long, curved blade, I had to admit it had some good intimidation value, if he managed to get in close. He wore it in a cheap plastic scabbard slung across his back with the handle in easy reach of his teeth.

The dingier parts of Detrot come in as many flavors as the richer bits, but the diamond dog zone was almost entirely unique amongst them. Most of it looked like a construction site, absent all the workers. Roads wound between what appeared, in many cases, to be empty lots. Only a ‘Welcome’ mat in front of a large hole, here, or a mailbox stuffed to brimming, there, gave lie to the idea that this part of the city was a ruin. Mounds of dirt piled up high or quarried down low took the place of proper buildings.

Rattling across a small bridge marked ‘Digger Memorial Bridge’ on the map splayed across my legs, we entered the diamond dog territories proper.

No dogs were on the street, though some ponies wandered here and there between what few above-ground structures had managed to spring up like unwelcome weeds amongst the rough gravel heaps. It was an odd thing, seeing the tiny city within a city, home to a species whose lifestyle was so far removed from my own. The sensation was not unlike stepping onto another planet.

In the near distance, the skyscrapers clawed great holes out of the skyline while the vast cloud-tracks of the weather factories blotted out what few stars escaped the buildings. Darkness reigned amid the nearly unlit streets.

I did a few of Taxi’s breathing exercises, trying to relax my shoulders. The tension had been growing since we left the Nest, particularly since my eyes still seemed a bit out of sorts. Blots of strange blurriness drifted across my sight, sometimes leaving me momentarily disoriented.

No sense getting worked up about it. It had to be done. I turned to Swift, who was unloading and reloading Masamane for the sixth time, checking her breach, barrel, and trigger for any signs of wear.

“Kid, give it a rest. That shooter isn’t going to get any cleaner."

Swift pushed the clip back into her gun and wiggled down in the seat. “I know, sir. I’ve just been having… ugh. Before, it was just a gun. A really cool gun, but a gun. Now… after Grap- after what happened… it’s… like it’s part of me.” She rested her hoof on the gun’s slide, pushing it forward to reveal the bullet in the chamber. “That… feels like it’s an extension of me. I fire a bullet, and I’m firing part of myself.”

I rolled onto one shoulder, looking across at her out of the corner of my eye. “You worried about losing yourself to the gun?” I asked.

“...A little. Dad was always going on about how ponies should always do the least harm they can in the world and mom… mom would go through these weird phases where she’d only eat fruit that’d already fallen from the tree because she couldn’t stand to think the trees were suffering,” my partner recounted, stroking Masamane with the lightness of a lover. Lifting her head, she pulled her lip on one side back with her toe, showing the rows of dangerous fangs lining her mouth. “What will they think of me? I have to eat meat or I’ll get sick. I killed-” she stuttered, then lowered her eyes. “I killed.”

I blinked at her several times. “You haven’t called them?”

Swift shook her head. “Gran told them a month ago that I was doing some sort of under-cover work for the police department and had to vanish for awhile on short notice. Detrot P.D. reported me AWOL a couple of days later and they took it like I was on some kind of secret mission. I sent them a letter a couple of days ago to let them know I’m okay, but I still have to go see them soon...”

“Kid, the second we get out of here-”

“No, sir,” she said, firmly.

My brain skipped a track. Swift had never directly defied me before, which made it even more surprising that she’d choose to do it over something like this.

“You… mind telling me why you don’t want to tell your folks you’re back on the grid?” I inquired.

“I… I just can’t see them yet, sir. I can’t. Maybe in a few days, but I need to… I need to make sure I’m still me.”

Slowly, I lifted myself into a sitting position. “Alright, kid. You promise me something, though. You promise you won’t get yourself killed before you get a chance to have that talk with them, alright?”

Swift’s brow furrowed, then she nodded, weakly. “Yes, sir.”

"I hate to interrupt this touching moment," Limerence lied from the front seat, “But Caparo Street is our destination, correct?”

“That’s the place, yeah.”

“I… believe I see what Mister Ghoulini meant about us not having any issue finding the location. We are presently on Caparo Street, if the sign ahead is to be believed.” he said, contemplatively.

I looked up out of the windows to all-encompassing darkness. There was one lonely street light maybe a mile down the road, but I couldn’t make out any details of the area immediately on either side of the car. The headlights lit up the street and the sign Limerence was pointing out, but nothing else. “When did that happen?" I asked.

“It appears this area is designed such that several streets converge here, though I cannot fathom why,“ Limerence answered, then leaned over to my driver and said, “Park us, if you please, Miss Taxi. There are several carriages to your left, but I see a clear spot.”

“Why is it so dark on this street? There were a few ponies walking back there a few miles ago who had flashlights, but I can’t see a damn thing here!” she cursed.

“There is no better way to maintain discretion than to make a place mildly inconvenient.” Limerence murmured. “Make it too inconvenient, and somepony might believe there’s something valuable there. I think we may do well, once we’re out of the vehicle, to keep our light sources to a minimum until we’re inside the structure.”

“That’s easy for you to say… I don’t even see a structure!” my driver complained as she pulled the wheel hesitantly to one side, slowly edging the car over. The ‘spot’ Limerence referred to was between two unlit, empty carriages. Even their running lanterns had been doused and I hadn’t even noticed them until the car’s lamps played across the rear wheels. We worked our way in, though it took several complicated maneuvers to get the Night Trotter’s normally very nimble frame into the tight space.

“Sir, I’m... um…” Swift’s ears laid back on her head. “I can... sort of see here.”

“It’s pitch black out there! How can you see anything?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s like... ever since I came back, everything is brighter, especially at night.”

“You didn’t feel the need to drop that tid-bit of information?” I growled.

“I thought it was just my imagination until now,” she replied, defensively.

Deciding not to pursue the issue, I checked my revolver’s hammer and magazine, then said, “We’re having you checked again when we have a spare minute, but right now, I’m not going to be real put out by that. What do you see?”

Swift swung her head back and forth, peering out the windows. “There’s...a big building to our left. Two of them, actually. That’s all there is, on either side of the street. Everything else is empty lots full of holes. I see an...alleyway of some kind between the buildings and there’s this big...uh...thing. It’s standing beside the alley.”

“Standing… like as in ‘alive’ standing or is that ‘inanimate’ standing?”

“It looks… furry,” she clarified, squinting at a spot to our right that looked entirely black to me. “I think it might be a diamond dog, sir.”

“Alright. Get your guns. Ghoulini said we were going to meet a former employee of Cosmo’s. No idea who that might be, but I’m not going down there without an escape plan. Limerence, how is your horn feeling?” I asked the librarian.

“It...is a most odd sensation,” he replied, forehead wrinkling at the sensation. “I believe I can still cast, but the closest equivalent I can grant you to what I am feeling, even trying to maintain my dark-sight spell, is being very, very inebriated.”

“It’ll get worse. If we’re heading into some place run by the dogs, we’re headed underground. I don’t know why Cosmo would be employing a diamond dog-” I said reaching under the driver’s seat and pulling out a duffle bag. Unzipping it, I began passing around flashlights with forehead straps. Limerence pulled his over his bowler, while Swift attached hers to a clip on the front of her tactical vest. “-but keep these with you. Keep them off, for now, but don’t lose them. I want to try to get in, talk to our guy, and leave with a minimum of fuss. Diamond dogs don’t like bright lights, so if things go south, point the torch at their eyes.”

Taxi grabbed her cannon out of Limerence’s lap, opened her door, and hopped out onto the road. She stood a moment, arranging the giant weapon on her back with the flashlight strap around its barrel. I eased out after her, tugging my coat straight and covering my gun with my sleeve as Swift and Limerence joined us.

After several seconds, the car’s lights dimmed, then faded, and we were left in a dark so thick it felt like a cloying soup. I’d thought my sight would adjust at least a bit, but even after a full minute I still might as well had have a blanket over my head.

“Sweets?”

“Yeah, Hardy?”

“Can you see anything?”

“A little. Not much.”

“I can’t.”

A masculine voice chimed in next to my shoulder. “Detective, you were looking directly at that light spell this morning. It wouldn’t surprise me greatly if it had damaged your vision in some way.”

“I’m going to take some time out of my day here soon to hunt that magician down and drop him off at the zoo’s beaver exhibit so they can build a dam out of him,” I grumbled. “Swift? You here?”

“Right here, sir!” she replied.

“That’s not helpful.”

“Oh! Sorry...” I felt something soft slide across my shoulders and realized it was her wing. She clenched it around my side and I stepped in close. Despite our size differences, she managed to guide me over to the curb. Guiding me onto the curb was mostly accomplished with a face-plant into the sidewalk and a great deal of quiet cussing.

We moved, three abreast, down the side-walk in the direction my companions claimed was the one with the alley. I became aware of a shift in the flow of the air that seemed to signal we were beside the building. I still couldn’t see much and the moon was barely a sliver, but I did my best to look like I could. Shelling out for some of those sun-glasses enchanted with a night-vision spell was starting to seem like a good idea considering where all we’d been lurking lately, especially with Stella paying for them.

Swift tugged me sideways with her wing. I turned to face the pitch black wall.

“Sir, he’s r-right in f-front of you,” she whispered.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“N-nothing. He’s just leaning against the w-wall. Celestia, he’s big...”

Of a sudden, two brightly glowing red coals lit up, hanging in the air in front of us. I took an involuntary step back, but the the pair just regarded us for a long moment. A voice like a train engine coming up to steam spoke from a mouth full of glinting, yellowed teeth.

“Pony,” it rumbled.

I pushed my hat back, feeling myself sinking into those two gleaming pits. The dog must have been simply enormous if the distance between its eyes was anything to go by. “Uh...evening. I’m...um, I’m here..to talk to the Drum Beat.”

“Password, pony,” it growled in a deeper tone, sounding displeased. I definitely didn’t want it displeased. Displeased didn’t seem healthy.

“Err... I always keep the tempo.”

The towering figure seemed to take a long time to send those words down through whatever byzantine system that diamond dogs used for brains, but when it did, it was as though I were watching tectonic plates shifting. The creature moved back and to one side.

Again, the shockingly deep voice, “Pony use only lights inside. Pony either watch show, do business, or play pet. Pony leave after. If pony make trouble, dog tear pony into tiny pieces. Pony understand?”

I gulped and wondered at my decision not to bring additional armaments. It’s always a tricky thing to do the mental sums when you’re incorporating the strengths of ponies into a risk equation. In all likelihood, in hoof to hoof combat, me being an earth pony might have evened things considerably. His greater reach might be an issue, but compared to unicorns and pegasi, we’re pretty hard to kill in close combat. I didn’t care to make trouble, but it was worthwhile to at least have it as an option.

“Understood.”

The creature I began thinking of as 'Dog Mountain’ banged on something metal that swung slowly open, emitting a strange illumination. The sidewalk began to shine as though it were lit internally and I could finally get some idea of the shape of the diamond dog.

He stood taller than a pony by a good half meter, with muscles on top of his muscles, and his eyes glittered with a malevolent intelligence. Nopony could mistake him for a minotaur, despite the upright posture. Nothing so noble ever graced that being’s genetics. He looked like an unholy mating of a grizzly bear and a timberwolf.

Dog Mountain wore only a vest or shirt of some kind whose color I couldn’t distinguish from the surrounding tangle of fur. It might have been luminance, but the odd wavelength of light cast from inside the building was stingy with details and didn’t reveal much of his craggy features.

Taxi gave me a light push and I scooted around the diamond dog, tipping my hat as I stepped into darkened room. Limerence was ushered in last and the door slammed shut behind him, leaving us standing in the odd half-light waiting for our eyes to adjust. It came from a dozen purple, neon tubes on the ceiling. They were not unlike the ones in Stella’s foyeur, though these seemed less decorative and more utilitarian in nature.

“Black lights,” Taxi murmured. “That’s genius…”

“What is?” Swift asked. Hers and Taxi’s already impressively bright pelts were practically shining, while I just looked like an especially grumpy shadow. Limerence seemed to be a dull white, though his horn glittered brilliantly.

“Black lights must not interfere with the dog’s natural night vision and it’s just enough for us to see by,” she answered as she began examining the space. It seemed like it should be much larger, at least based on the outside dimensions of the building. “Ghoulini said this was a club, right? A club for what?”

With a loud clank, the floor began to shift under us. I leaped off to the left, while Taxi and Limerence jumped to the right. Swift, using generations of pegasi logic, immediately spread her wings and tried to take off, but she wasn’t fast enough. The trap door slid back and she vanished into the depths. I heard several thumps, then a soft squeak, followed by, “Oooowww…”

“Kid? Kid, are you alright?” I called, standing at the edge of the hole that’d been opened. It looked like an old mechanic’s pit, with stairs leading into darkness.

“Y-yes... maybe... Owie."

There was a soft crackle, then a buzz as more of the purple lighting came on down below, revealing Swift sprawled at the bottom of the steps. She’d come to a rest with one wing at an awkward angle, but looked otherwise uninjured.

I started down the steps, taking them two at a time. Reaching her, I hooked one leg under her middle and lifted her onto her hooves. “You sure?”

Swift, experimentally flexing each limb, winced when she got to her left wing. “Eep... oh… ouch.”

“Is it broken?” I asked.

“I don’t... think so.” She worked the appendage in a circle a few times, then pulled it to her side. “It’s just bruised. I’m fine, sir. Really,” she insisted.

I gave her a skeptical look, then shook my head in defeat. “If you die of a broken neck at the bottom of some stairs, your grandmother’s going to see to it I have a similar fate.”

Swift giggled softly, then fluffed her good wing a couple of times and began inspecting our environment as Lim and Taxi descended the steps. I gave the floor an experimental kick, leaving a thin divot in it. It seemed to be dirt. Hard packed by many beings' feet, but still, dirt.

The sub-basement had concrete walls, but a second hole, this one rougher, lead away through one of them and down a long, barely lit corridor. More of the purple lights had been half-hazardly hung with cheaply installed electrical wires and a plethora of cable that dangled just above head level. It provided enough light to see by, but a pony would be hard pressed to read their watch.

The place would have been a stunning fire-hazard if it’d been built of anything but sod.

“Hardy, this whole place is giving me a big case of the creepies,” Taxi said with a shiver.

“We’ve been in worse. Remember Sunny Days? Heck, Juniper and I went into this weathervane o-once…” I felt a mental bucket of cold water and my muzzle clenched shut.

“A weathervane, sir?” Swift looked suddenly very interested.

“I’ll tell you about it... sometime, kid. We’ve got work to do.” I sighed and looked off towards the hole. “It worries me that the guy at the door didn’t tell us to leave our guns in the car.”

“It is easily explicable, I b-believe,” Limerence said. There was a note of strain in his voice that raised my hackles. “G-guns have limited efficacy down here. The f-fighting conditions favor d-diamond dogs. They can burrow through the g-ground.”

“Lim?” I asked, worriedly. “You copacetic? You’re shaking.”

“My horn still feels very strange, Detective.”

“Worse than before?”

“It is...buzzing. There is so much power here. So much... raw... magic. I can feel it. It’s coursing through the ground. It’s burning in the dirt. It’s... singing to me, Detective...” he murmured, licking his lips lustily. We all stared at him for several seconds, until he gave a start and blinked several times. “That was... unsettling.”

“You’re telling me,” I said, half expecting him to start cackling like a loon. “I’m starting to think the car might be a better option for you-”

Limerence shook his head, firmly. “No… I have experienced magic sickness before, though nothing this powerful. Mmm… I may have a solution.” Stuffing his hoof into his vest pocket, he fished around until he came up with a thin, black ring. He held it out to me. “If you please, Detective. I can’t do it myself.”

My lower jaw almost hit my chest. “You want me to put that on you?! Why do you even have one of those?”

“After Miss Patter, I thought it wise to acquire some option for dealing with other unicorns besides killing them. I do not wish to be left behind, and in battle, it is conceivable that I may act on instinct and training-”

“-and detonate yourself trying to throw a pebble. Alright, give it here.”

The librarian pulled off his bowler and lowered his head while I worked the restrictor ring down his horn to its base. As I did, he let out a faint noise of relief. “That is much better,” he said, replacing the cap and re-arranging his mane to cover everything once more.

****

The tunnel was longer than I’d expected, with unlit branchings in both directions. It descended at a fairly steep angle, and the further we went, the more sounds we began to pick up. From one branch, there was what I felt sure was the sounds of construction intermingled with shrill screams that devolved into laughter after a few seconds. Down another, music and the beat of many hooves. Down a third, wet slapping. We hurried on from that one pretty quick.

About five minutes into our journey, Swift put her good wing across my chest, bringing us to a halt.

“What is it?”

“I… hear something, sir. Hoof-steps… and yelling,” she said, warily. “They’re coming towards us.”

I cocked one ear down the dirt hallway, holding my breath. At first, I heard nothing, but after some seconds I picked up what seemed to be somepony shouting and the thump of hooves. They did seem to be getting louder, but it was hard to tell just how far away the sounds actually were.

Without warning, a shrilly shrieking stallion wearing some kind of wooden yoke broke around the corner at a full gallop, hitting the far wall and regaining his balance. “Meeerrrccyyy! I swear, I won’t do it again!” he called back down the hall, then turned to run in our direction.

I was about to kick my gun bit into my mouth, but as he turned to look where he was going he noticed the four of us and began to slow. Trotting to a stop, breathing heavily, sweat pouring from his forehead, he leaned on the side of the tunnel to catch his breath. He was perhaps a few years my senior, though still in excellent condition. He stank of sweat and thick layers of cologne, and barely an inch of him was clean. The yoke was covered in layers of caked-on dirt.

The four of us gaped at him for a long minute before he grinned, chest still heaving, and trotted up to me. I noticed a thin, stubby horn sticking up from his mane with yet another restrictor ring locked around it.

“Huh… whoo… Don’t recognize you lot! Must be new. Welcome!” he said, cheerfully.

“Uh… yeah… new. Are you… okay?” I asked, uncertainly.

“Oh, yeah! Hah!” he coughed, then slipped around us. “Won’t be if she catches me, though!” A howl rose up from the earth. It sounded like some sort of wild animal, or maybe a whole pack of them. I could almost feel it vibrating in my legs.

The stallion’s ears flattened to his head. “Oh bugger… Must dash!” He broke into a gallop, heading down the semi-lit hall, and within seconds he was out of sight.

That howl came again, this time much closer, and Taxi pulled her P.E.A.C.E. cannon down from her back as Limerence loosened his sword in its scabbard. Swift’s ears kept moving as she tried to pinpoint the source, but the sound was coming from everywhere simultaneously. It felt like a rock had dropped into the bottom of my stomach as the primal voices screamed for me to follow the stallion with the sense and get out of there. I stood my ground, gun-bit at the ready, but still dangling.

Around the corner, at speeds nothing that size should have been able to achieve, a creature unlike any I’d ever seen came barrelling at us. I got an impression of fur, teeth, and lots and lots of buckles, before my knees turned to jelly.

If the bouncer was a mountain of canine, the beast sweeping toward me, knuckles dragging the dirty floor, was a small moon. It was something out of my darkest, childhood dreams. I knew, in my gut, that there was no weapon in our arsenal that could bring such a monster down. We were all going to die. I shut my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

Ten seconds later, I was still standing there and the noise had died entirely. Slowly, I peeped out of one eye, then opened the other, finding myself looking at a wall of thick, brown fur. I gradually tilted my head back and felt my rear legs go out from under me, flopping onto my haunches.

****

There are just those times in your life where preparedness doesn’t cut it. I was never a scout. I never tied knots. I never made campfires. That’s more Taxi’s thing.

A police pony can fall into a rut where he believes his gun makes him prepared for damn near any situation that comes up. Being proven wrong repeatedly won’t really fix the issue. It takes a complete reordering of mental priorities to come to a fresh conclusion. Sometimes, it takes a really big diamond dog.

****

“Pony! You should watch where you sit. I almost ran over you!”

It took a little bit for me to register that the monster had spoken and even longer to realize that the voice was very distinctly feminine. I looked back at my partner and driver, who were sitting in similar positions to my own, eyes peeled wide. Limerence was several meters back, his sword hanging loosely from his mouth, crouching in a combat stance. His bowler lay on the floor beside him and the fear in his eyes mirrored my own.

I turned back to the diamond dog and swallowed, trying to think how to respond.

“Uh...s-sorry?”

The creature’s lips peeled back from pink gums as it revealed two lines of sharp teeth. I realized it was smiling, though it was hard to tell. “You see my prey come this way, pony?”

“Um...little guy, yoke, covered in dirt?” I asked, lamely.

“Yes! Which way has he gone?”

“That way.” I murmured, waving down the hall. The diamond dog made to squeeze by us and I quickly made room, though she stopped again, looking at Limerence who was still clutching his sword.

She flicked her glittering, beady little eyes down at me. “Pony, are you lost? You bring weapons here, you must be lost or on business.” Returning her attention to Limerence, she raised one tree-trunk sized leg and pointed at his mouth. “You should be careful with butter knife, little stallion, lest you cut yourself.”

“Um… do… I… are…” I closed my lips abruptly. No thoughts were really organizing themselves into sentences in the presence of that enormous creature. It was down to Taxi to finally find some words and put them in an order.

“We’re here on business, but... I... d-don’t think we know where we’re going,” she murmured, weakly. “We’re trying to f-find someone named... uh... The Drum Beat.”

The diamond dog’s demeanor immediately darkened. “The Drum Beat? Are you here to do...business...with him?”

I finally found my voice. “We’re... here to talk to him," I specified, "then we’ll leave. You know where we can find him?”

The female dog’s upper lip twitched with irritation, bordering on antipathy. “From guns, I say you here to kill him. I say, this fine with me.”

“

You’re not a fan of this character?” I asked.

“Dog only fan of dog. That one bring drugs. Bring tainted gems. He do business and dog way say he stay, but I not like it. You sure you not here to kill him? I would like his tail as trophy if you do.”

I blinked a little as the inquisitive parts of my brain took over from the terrified bits. “He’s...not a diamond dog?”

“Dog never treat dog like pony treat dog.” the monster growled. “You want Drum Beat, go all the way to end of the central path. There be little dogs there. Ponies not like big dogs, but like have little dogs guard them. He sec-re-tary there. You want see Drum Beat. He see you, or maybe shoot you. If he shoot at you, you shoot and bring me tail. Okay?”

“I...heh. If it comes to taking his tail to get what we want, I’ll bring it to you in a bow. Thank you,” I replied.

There was the sound of hooves from down the hall from the way we’d come and the stallion, still dirty as could be, trotted around the corner. He halted as he saw who we were talking to, his face spreading into a smile. “I reached the other end! Is this... still coming off of my time?”

The diamond dog bared her teeth, fiercely and snarled, “I not see you reach end, pony! Now, you run!”

Throwing herself over our heads, she performed a complicated mid-air maneuver, digging her claws into the ceiling so she could get by the four of us with a minimum of pushing and shoving. Dirt rained down on my head and she landed with a ground shaking thump behind us. The stallion, for his part, immediately wheeled and started for the other end at best possible speed. As the two vanished behind him, Limerence let his sword drop from his mouth.

“Detective… is this sort of interaction going to be indicative of our entire working relationship?” he asked.

”Them’s the breaks, I’m afraid. At least she wasn’t trying to mate with us. Or eat us. Or sue us. This time."

Limerence didn’t look much comforted by that. “I... usually deal with such things with a cup of tea. It calms my nerves and provides a centering action in trying times. I must say, I do not believe there are enough cups of hot tea in the world to make that-” he pointed in the direction the two strange characters had run off “-alright.”

I laid my hoof on his shoulder and exhaled a long, slow breath. “That, my friend, is what booze is for.”

Act 2, Chapter 13: We're All Ears

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 13: We’re All Ears

Detrot can be and has frequently been likened to a complex ecosystem. While that ecosystem is usually described verbatim as "a large, parasite-infested dog with two legs and irritable bowel syndrome," certain things nonetheless ring true at a deeper level than the sardonic complaints that generate the analogy.

Detrot, as in any ecosystem, is home to competing species. And while a few species remain dominant, lots of the minorities have found their niche within Detrot's metaphorical skin folds and gastric organs.

The sheep and the bovines have found ways to thrive by selling their own bodies, or at least, byproducts thereof; Where would the pony fashion industry be without the former, and where would the pony baking industry be without the latter?

The smarter dragons have stopped rampaging and demanding tribute for treasure, and have instead used their hoards to enter the world of high finance; whereas once ponies quailed at the sight of a dragon's fangs and fiery breath, the sight of them bearing briefcase and tailored suit has become substantially more frightening.

The minotaurs are used as muscle at least as often as they're used as motivational speakers. The diamond dogs, as discussed, have their fingers in a few... shall we say, pies. But there are lesser-known species operating within Detrot, many of which are a barely-felt presence - but no less important for their nigh-invisibility.

-The Scholar

“I’m going to ask this again. What sort of club is this?” Taxi asked as she trotted along beside me in the dank depths of the subterranean tunnel.

I shook my head, pausing to pull off my hat and wipe the sweat from my forehead. The shaft had been getting progressively warmer the deeper we went. “Not a clue.” I jerked up as a scream trickled down one of the corridors, followed by loud, scandalous moaning. “Smells like the Vivarium, but it’s like a mine. A weird... sex... mine… or something.”

Limerence looked contemplative, but he didn't look happy about his conclusions. “As fervently as I believe the words 'sex' and 'mine' should never be adjacent in either order, I may… be able to posit a possible explanation, if you will hear me out.”

"Let's hear this theory,” I murmured.

There was some real hesitation.

"Premise one: During the Crusades, some of the diamond dogs ran slaves for the dragons. Premise two: Detrot is prone to a staggering variety of untoward inclinations and perversions. Based on those, it would not strike me as… entirely impossible to come to the conclusion that some ponies would find themselves... enamored with diamond dogs thereafter. It is… not without precedent.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to the librarian. “Are you saying ponies are paying diamond dogs to treat them like… slaves?!”

He fiddled his pocket watch’s chain. “I am… simply proffering an assessment, based on what I am seeing-" He was interrupted by the crack of a whip, followed by an extremely happy whimper off down the hallway. Limerence swallowed, uncomfortably. “...and hearing. There are odd perversities all throughout Detrot. I’ve no doubt we will encounter more than one flavor before this mission of ours is complete.”

"I think I want out of this place as quickly as possible,” I said, and Taxi nodded in agreement. We picked up the pace a little, going further and further into the pit.

****

We passed by what seemed to be some sort of shower room or bath, then a little deeper, a coat-room, but most of the activities were blessedly hidden away down the branchings. Twice, we had to make room for sweaty, grinning ponies trotting up from the depths reeking of activities best not mentioned. After awhile, the sounds of sex started to die down, or at least became less pervasive.

Another sound, however, was steadily building.

“Is that a drum?” Taxi asked, tilting one ear ahead.

Swift bobbed her head. “Yeah. I heard it a few minutes ago. It sounds like… I don’t even know what.”

I tugged off my hat and held it up to my ear to cup some of the sound. “Some kind of waltz or march, maybe?”

Our progress stopped as we came to a very abrupt corner. The far wall seemed to just stop at some kind of rock face. I took a few steps, and Swift put her wing on my shoulder.

“Sir, I hear some… other noises.”

“What sort of other noises?”

“The kind I think you don’t want to walk in on.”

I couldn’t hear a thing past the drums. I raised one questioning eyebrow at Taxi; she shook her head.

“I’ll take your word for it, kid. That diamond dog we met back there said ‘Go to the end’. This looks like the end.”

“Just... you know…”

“Yeah, yeah…being careful.”

I stepped cautiously around the corner and my hooves clicked loudly as I moved from dirt onto a solid surface. Overhead, bright white neon lights buzzed, then sprang on, leaving me blinking in the sudden illumination.

Limerence poked his head around the corner, took a moment to assess the situation, then said, puzzled, “I don’t know what I expected, but that isn’t it.”

If one happens to be underground, there are any number of mental associations that go with that. Gems, grottos, crazy transvestite dragons. These things all have their explicable places in the world and when it comes down to mentally categorizing them, you can say, with some self-assurance, that they should be somewhere beneath the terra firma and mayhap at the bottom of a mine.

An office door is not usually on that list.

It sat at the end of a short section of unpainted concrete hallway, set into a short depression. The handle was designed for hooves. It looked like it’d been installed no more than a few months ago; the grout around the edges still seemed recently laid and the wooden surface, freshly polished. A soft, yellow light shined through the semi-opaque window. There was no name on the name-plate. Just a simplified symbol which might have been a drum, with two drum-sticks laid across it.

The thumping beat was still going, loud enough to make the dust in the air dance.

“Alright, after Cosmo’s mountain, I think we can call this ‘subtle’,” I said. “I’d still give an eye for us to be going after some criminal with his base in a good old abandoned warehouse, seedy bar or a tenement block, though.”

“Where’s the fun in that, sir?” Swift asked, with an impish smile.

The joke had been weak, but it was what I needed just then. I laughed.

“Oh, fun? Is that what this is?” I asked, giving her a playful little push with one hoof. “If you’re having fun, we could always go down one of these side passages and see if one of the diamond dogs wants a little pegasus to play with. I’m sure they can show you all new definitions of fun. Your grandmother probably knows what I'm talking about!”

Swift sniggered and flapped her good wing at me as Limerence looked back and forth between us, with a growing expression of horror that just made us laugh all the harder.

I opened my muzzle to explain, but he cut me off. “I have no desire to understand the private little joke the two of you are sharing.”

“Fine, fine. Let’s get this over with.” With the tension broken, I, still chuckling, jerked my head at Taxi, who unslung the P.E.A.C.E cannon and snapped off her safety. “What’ve you got loaded in that thing?”

She gave the barrel a little shake. “Slug rounds.”

“Ahhh… mmm. Should do.” I turned the door handle halfway. “On three. One...two…”

The door opened. I pitched forward into the frame, flopping face-first onto the floor.

A young-ish gold mare with a hair-bun and thin glasses that absolutely shrieked ‘secretary' found herself staring down the barrel of one of the biggest weapons in the Detrot Police arsenal. We stared at one another for five seconds, then ten. She was pretty, in a very conventional sort of way, with some cheap mane extensions and a bad dye job that left her attempt at blonde with murky orange bits around the roots. From behind her, the thumping drums continued, slightly louder.

It was telling that her eyes had only widened slightly at the sight of the gun.

“Picking up or dropping off?”

There was an awkward pause during which I didn’t really register that a question had been asked. When I did, I reached up and grabbed the cannon’s barrel, pulling it down and levering myself up on the door.

“Uh…” I peered back at my three companions. Limerence had his head turned as though he might draw his sword. I motioned him to relax, but he kept the sword’s hilt close to his teeth. “We’re here to talk to the Drum Beat. Is he in?”

The secretary squinted at us over the top of her glasses, taking in our armament and appearance with a disconcertingly practiced eye. “He has four diamond dogs guarding him, you know. You want his head, you’ll have to handle them first.”

I dipped my chin and covered my face with one hoof. “I… we’re just here for information! Why is everypony assuming I’m here to kill him?!”

“I dunno. I would.” She shrugged and opened the door. “He just denied me a third request for a raise this month, then asked me to file something in the same sentence, so I’m a little pissed. So, what’s your deal then? He screw your sister? Owe you money?” Wheeling around she gave me another narrow-eyed examination, without waiting for an answer. “Saaay, didn’t I see you on the T.V. the other day with that nutty bitch from the church?”

I stepped into the office and Taxi came in, leaving Limerence and Swift at the door to guard our approach. “I’m… I… ugh. I’m here to see what I can see. You’ll excuse me if I was expecting to have to storm the place to find somepony to talk to.”

The little office had a desk, a filing cabinet, and a ceiling fan. A light haze of cigarette smoke hung near the ceiling and a cigarette, still burning, lay in the ashtray by the secretary’s desk. It might have been the office of any aspiring detective or hoodlum anywhere in Detrot. A second door, similar to the first, led deeper into the building or bunker or whatever it was.

Now I got a look, I saw the secretary’s wings; unusual in a pony working underground. Despite her apparent youth, she had the jaded look of somepony who has been trapped behind a desk for years, pushing pencils for the sort of ‘aggressive go-getter’ who climbs high in either corporate culture or criminal enterprise.

Trotting around the desk, she plunked herself down in her chair and unfolded one wing, using two feathers, in a stunning display of avian dexterity, to pick up the cigarette and bring it to her muzzle. She inhaled, then blew the smoke out through her nose.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m inclined to open the door for just about anypony who wants to hurt the bastard right now. What’s your deal, then?” she asked, using her smoke to indicate the chair in front of her desk. “I’m Cutter, by the way. Not that it matters to you, I imagine. If you were some kinda death squad, you probably wouldn’t want witnesses.”

I tugged off my hat, respectfully, and sank gratefully into the chair. “Oof. Thanks. It’s a heckuva walk from up top,” I said, rubbing my hoof back and forth on the edge of the seat before I continued. “We’re not a death squad. Just looking for information on a transaction this ‘Drum Beat’ guy had a few weeks ago. Really, I am curious. Who is he?”

Cutter shifted in her chair, pulling open the drawer of her desk. I tensed, wondering if she was about to pull a gun, but it was a clear, glass bottle that came out along with two glasses. “Who is he really? Dunno. I answered a job ad a few months ago. It’s not like he tells me anything. I’m mostly here because I think he liked the idea of having a secretary or some pony to treat like manure.”

“What’s the job, then? I mean, you work for him. Don’t you know what he does?” I inquired.

“Do I look stupid?” she grunted, waving her wing at herself. “Smart ponies don’t ask questions when there’s a steady paycheck, even if the work is crap. As far as I can tell, he’s some kind of fixer.”

“A fixer?” Taxi asked, watching as Cutter poured brown liquid into two of the glasses, then downed the entire thing. I snatched up the other glass before my driver could and she gave me a sour look.

“He fixes things for ponies with money,” she said, her voice rising. She tossed her glass over one shoulder where shattered against the wall of the second office. “You want me to put some fine points on it?! It means the prick never pays his secretary what she’s worth… and he’s always listening to those friggin’ drums!” Cutter was almost shouting now, but there didn’t seem to be any response from behind the closed door so she sank back in her seat, crossing her legs sulkily and staring into the bottle of liquor.

I cleared my throat and let my gun bit drop from my teeth; I didn’t remember picking it up, but there are few situations in which a pony is unwise to arm themselves before an angry mare. Taking a sip of my glass, I choked down the cheap bourbon, then passed it to my driver who gave it a sniff and discretely tossed the remainder on the carpet.

“You mind if I ask who his last employer was?” I prompted her.

Cutter glowered at me, though her eyes didn’t seem to be focusing properly. I suspected that hadn’t been her first drink of the day. Rather than answering, she pointed at me with one wingtip, “You know, I...hmmm. You do look awful familiar. I know I saw you on the T.V. but...there was somethin’...somethin’ before that...”

“I’ve got one of those faces,” I said, trying to dismiss the issue before she started asking questions.

“Heh, now I remember! You were in one of those pictures from his last job. You and that… that… uh… Cosmic or whatever his name was!” she said, with a triumphant grin, refilling her glass for another drink.

I shot up in my seat. “Last job? He was spying on Cosmo?”

Cutter wiped her mouth on the back of her foreleg, further smearing her lipstick, then nodded. “Yeah, that was the name. He had me pick up this dead drop full of pictures of ponies. Apparently somepony was looking for this bunch. Some pretty thing with a red mane and cherry cutie-mark, this mean looking stallion built like a double-wide trailer on steroids, and...yeah, you.”

Gale started racing in my chest with the hope that we might dig up something other than unsettling dreams in this perverse mine. “...He ever tell you what the job was?”

“Seemed like he was mostly just supposed to watch those ponies or find’em or something. I doubt even he knew all the details, except I heard him talking about setting everything up for a ‘big move’. The pay for that job must have been beautiful. We went from this crappy little office on Tenth Street to...this place. He bought up the whole block, actually. That freaky club upstairs was part of the package. No raise for me, mind you....” She bit off the last two words, angrily, then her lip quirked into a vindictive little smirk. “I think it must not have been what he had in mind, though. Heard him on the phone a couple weeks ago, screaming about somepony gypping him.”

Taxi grunted as she slung her P.E.A.C.E. back across her shoulder and asked, “You happen to know who was paying him?”

The secretary drew a little circle in the air beside her head with one wingtip. “Oh, so you think I’m crazy and stupid, right? I don’t want to know that sort of thing! Go ask him yourself!”

“I intend to,” I murmured.

A calculating expression crossed Cutter’s face as she looked from me to Taxi, then back again.

“Tell you what...” she began, gesturing at the door with one wing as she took a drag from her cigarette with the other. “I’mma take a break and go get some coffee. He’s got one of his ‘girls’ in there right now and those diamond dogs are in the dirt holes behind the desk. While you’re ‘asking’ him whatever questions you mean to, you mind rifling his pockets? He’s got a safe key and I know where the safe is. Whatever he’s got in there will probably pay my way until I get work. I’d be ever so appreciative.”

I set my hat back on my head, flicked the safety on my gun off, and stepped aside as Cutter came around the desk.

“If a key happened to fall out of one of his pockets when we were searching him for weapons and land in that glass you were drinking out of, I doubt anypony would suspect you,” I said.

The secretary flicked her burgundy tail as she pushed by Limerence and Swift, calling over her shoulder, “Hey, if I remember your name one of these days and we meet somewhere, I’ll be sure to buy you a drink, alright?”

“Until then,” I replied. “You take care of yourself, Miss Cutter.”

“I intend to.”

****

Once the secretary was out of sight, we turned back to the second office door and the nerve-jangling drums. Taxi was checking her safety, flicking it on and off a few times.

“Sweets? You ready for this?” I asked, nodding toward the back room.

“Yeah. Yeah, just...we’ve been at this for a long time. You think this pony is the one who helped set up the kill on you and Cosmo?”

“If I’m lucky, yeah. I don’t know who it could have been. He might be able to finally unwind this damn knot.”

“I… guess we shouldn’t keep him waiting then. Remember, as few deaths as possible.”

"I promise to keep it down to single digits."

"There's only supposed to be six in there."

"It'll be an easy promise to keep, then."

****

Earth pony rear hooves are some of the most feared weapons in all of Equestria. Some police teams take along battering rams to storm buildings, but, much to the chagrin of the rams themselves, they never really saw widespread use; a few solid hits with an earth pony's ol' Lefty and Righty, and anything short of a bank vault door will cave.

The door of the Drum Beat’s office was nowhere near a bank vault and I’d struck it right next to the handle with much more force than strictly necessary. It didn’t so much open as it exploded inwards.

Taxi was in first, her P.E.A.C.E. cannon leveled at the pair of moving bodies sprawled over top of the broad, wooden desk in the middle of the room. Limerence followed her in, his sword out and the tip leveled dangerously, as I covered the corners with my pistol, taking in the layout at a glance; a wooden desk, a chair, a few trashy pictures of fillies in various unseemly poses, and a thumping speaker the size of my chest set into the wall which was pumping out a beat that made my bones ache. The room was lit by a single, metal desk lamp which lay on the floor in front of the desk, turned towards the ceiling where it’d apparently been knocked by the two wiggling bodies stretched across the desktop.

The mare, a glowingly floral magenta-coloured mess who might have been of age if you didn’t look too close at her ID, let out a shriek as she caught sight of us and struggled to rise. Her partner seemed to just take it for a signal that his vigor met with her approval and sped up, but overbalanced as she heaved herself against his weight, sending both of them toppling off the side of the desk into a heap of sticky limbs.

My eyes drifted down to the stallion’s flank… A drum. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning as recognition set in.

“Bari?!” I laughed.

I reached over and tapped the volume control beside the speaker, shutting it off. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until that moment that I noticed the line of what seemed to be four holes filled with tiny heaps of dirt lined across the back wall.

****

I’m not a pony to believe in karma. Karma isn’t a force you can kick in the face or put a bullet in when it isn’t behaving. Karma doesn’t obey the law. Karma is what happens in ponies' minds when the law has failed to provide for solutions and when justice can only be achieved in a metaphorical sense sometime down the line.

In my experience, karma is usually just another word for bastard... but now and then, even bastards give you a pass.

****

As I silenced the music, there was an explosion of dust. The filly let out another ear-splitting scream, though the half-light of the desk lamp was only enough to make out the general shapes of four diamond dogs clawing their ways out of the holes.

Reginald Bari, King Cosmo’s erstwhile casino manager -- who Taxi had put in the hospital on at least one occasion -- dragged himself up and began yanking at the drawer of his desk. His eyes fell on my driver, then almost bugged out of his skull. He stopped short and slowly raised his hoof, pointing at her accusingly, his muzzle hanging open.

With four diamond dogs in the space, it was suddenly much smaller, though these were a more compact breed than that great bitch we’d met upstairs.

There was a long pause, as everyone took stock of the situation.

They were also armed with a variety of instruments for the dealing of death.

Thankfully, they weren’t the only ones.

Limerence was the first to move, his sword scything through the air as he jumped forward and onto the desk in one smooth motion, using his momentum to take him over into the first diamond dog’s chest. The sword sank through the shoulder of the shaggy, bipedal beast’s vest as it raised its billy club to crush his skull. Blood spurted and the monster let out a frightened squeal of pain as the librarian pinned it to the wall. Relic or not, that katana was a vicious weapon. There was a crunch as the tip snapped against the wall, then the remaining bit plunged into the badly painted concrete, pinning the creature like a fly on an entomologist's work table.

The dust obscuring our visibility, I barely saw the second diamond dog launching itself at Lim with a short blade of some kind clutched in his paw, glittering in the light of the desk lamp.

Swift’s eyes were miles better, because she was there as the dog brought the blade around to bury it in the librarian’s side, interposing herself between them. She grunted, taking the blade strike on her vest. It sent her tumbling, but not before she could lash out with her good wing and catch Lim’s assailant on the side of the head. Pegasi wings make lethal weapons, and only the dog's inborn toughness saved it from a broken neck. It still hit the wall with a noise like a bag of used kitty litter being slung off a second floor balcony, and slid to the floor.

Somepony kicked the desk lamp and I lost sight of Bari, but he was the least of my worries.

One of the remaining diamond dogs who’d been moving to help his friend with Limerence stooped over as Swift struggled to regain her footing, sweeping its claw down to pin the pegasus by the neck to the carpet. Its teeth gleamed as he held up a short spiked weapon with a hook on the end ready to tear into her spine, then glared at me. The message was clear.

Unfortunately for that diamond dog, I have been known to take such messages with poor grace.

Kicking the wall behind me for a quick boost of speed, I barreled into the desk, sending it skidding into the wall, then lowered my head and aimed for his knees. It was a big bastard and the blow caught the creature low. There was a wet snap, followed by a roar of pain. Something caught in my coat, then tumbled to the carpet before the monster sprawled, freeing Swift. As he it hit the ground, two very tiny but very solid pegasus hooves landed on his forehead. I don’t know what diamond dog skulls are made of, but it must have been some close relative of stone. That hit should have splashed the brains of anything less than a minotaur.

Limerence was dealing with the fourth dog and they were locked in close combat, exchanging quick blows, or rather I should say, Limerence was kicking the diamond dog and the dog was throwing its claws in the librarian’s general direction. I never did see if it was the shot in the genitals or to the side of the head that brought down it down, but when it fell, it hit the ground with nary a whimper.

The dust began to settle somewhat as Swift rose, limping on three legs with her one good wing dragging the carpet, and Limerence attempted to wipe dust from his vest.

“Alrighth!” a voice behind me shouted. “Everypony freezshe or she diesh!”

That’s not a thing a cop ever wants to hear. It triggers some basic instinct in the cop mind that goes back to the paleo-pony period that knows hostage takers are the lowest of the low. They can’t face an opponent personally, won’t surrender, and aren’t ‘playing fair’ as it were. Therefore they receive no mercy.

I turned my head, very slowly, to the door.

Framed in the dusty opening, my driver held her P.E.A.C.E. cannon loosely by its strap, the string she’d rigged around the trigger pull still clutched in her teeth. Beside her, Reginald Bari, his black mane wild and his eyes wide with fear, held a derringer in his muzzle. It was aimed squarely at her face.

I hadn’t seen him sneak around the edge of the room, but then, I’d been otherwise occupied. My cutie-mark gave a little sizzle.

“Taxi…” I murmured.

“Yes, Hardy?” my driver replied, softly. Her eyes crept sideways to the gun inches from her face.

“You alright?”

“Oh, peachy,” she deadpanned. “How’d he get past you?”

“Not sure. Still working that out.” I turned to the stiff backed stallion and asked, “You want to enlighten us?”

Bari’s eyes flicked towards his back where I noticed a thin cloak of some kind dangling from his shoulders that he definitely hadn’t been wearing when we came in. His lips curled a little as he spoke around the weapon. I hoped, sincerely, that he didn’t accidentally lick the trigger. “I’m leafin’! Nopony follow me or I shooth her!”

For several seconds, there was only the faint mewling of the diamond dog still attached to the wall. Limerence gave him a merciful snap on the side of the head with one hoof and he sagged, unconscious.

The stallion with the gun began to back out of the room. “You’re cominth with me sthweeth hearth!” he growled.

I closed my eyes. “Taxi, would you please take that silly pea shooter from him before he hurts himself?”

“Don’t we need him conscious?” she asked as Bari’s eyes darted between us and his fear grew.

“That’s at your discretion, really. I’m sure he can regain consciousness in a timely manner.”

A feral grin spread across my driver’s face. She let the barrel of the P.E.A.C.E. drop, then used its weighty momentum to duck into a ball and roll forward, coming up with the enormous barrel of the weapon facing Bari, laying on her back. The stallion flinched away, teeth tightening on the trigger of his gun as he tried to follow Taxi.

The cannon’s blast was something akin to a squid being forced through a cheese grater at close to the speed of sound.

****

No one is completely sure why weapon designer Bouncing Betty tried to literalize weaponry with a vigor most ponies reserve for second-degree murder. Rarely do pacifists become weapons designers, but she believed quite strongly that killing was unnecessary except in very specific circumstances. To that end, she did her absolute best when producing devices for the dealing of harm and injury to be very specific as to their function.

After the death of her family at the hands of a dissatisfied client who’d requested a weapon that fired ‘smooth as butter’ and received a rifle with a firing pin made of thickened cream, rather than change professions, she came the conclusion that idiom was the source of her woes. From there on, she was determined to strike down hyperbole, idiom, and metaphor with the fury of the heavens and the complete lack of common sense that goes with being a pacifistic weapons designer.

It should be no surprise, then, that insanity soon followed, with medication on its heels, and a series of progressively stranger attempts to wipe the scourge of poorly chosen language, local color, and slang from the world of firearms.

It was not her insanity that made her unique, however. Detrot is rife with ponies both mad and ambitious.

No, what made her remarkable was that, in a few cases... she actually succeeded in developing weapons of staggering linguistic specificity and effectiveness. This ultimately culminated in her most twisted creation, the Gut Shot. It was a lovely weapon, if only because it rarely necessitated a direct hit to reduce an enemy to copious vomiting.

Later on in her illustrious career, the P.E.A.C.E. project was happy to have her, psychosis or no.

****

“Slug rounds. Funny. How do we get him off the wall?”

“If we’re taking a vote, sir, I think a really big spatula.”

“Ugh, don’t be silly. I’ve got a jar of salt here in my saddle bags. Just toss it on him when you want to get him down. Speaking of that, shouldn’t we maybe get these guys an ambulance...or maybe several? We don’t need a body count here and that fellow with the knife sticking out of him looks pretty bad...”

“I was very careful, Miss Taxi. The blade has missed any major arteries and death or permanent injury is unlikely. They will all have mild concussions and the gentlebeing with the broken knee may need minor surgery. We have time, their discomfort aside.”

“Careful or not, Sweets is right. Alright, kid, go find that big bitch with the little colt friend and see if she’ll help. We need a couple ambulances, but with luck, we’ll be out of here by the time they arrive.”

****

Swift departed, back up the tunnel. Taxi, Limerence, and I studied Reginald Bari’s plastered form as he hung from the wall directly beside the exterior office. The sticky slug rounds had left only a few inches of his muzzle, nose, and eyes exposed. The rest of him, from hocks to withers, was drenched in a thick, viscous fluid. Worse, it smelled like the back end of a dump truck. His pistol was stuck in there with him, but I doubted it would work again in this lifetime. It’d hardened in under a second, but a second was all it needed to seep into every nook and cranny of the little gun, as well as every nook and cranny of the whimpering criminal.

“Well, we could leave him up there. You know, as a piece of art nouveau. I kinda think he goes with the theme of the place upstairs.” Taxi giggled to herself. The stuck stallion’s face scrunched up and I think he tried to shake his head. It was hard to tell.

“I would like to ask him a few questions regarding that cloak he was wearing. Unless I miss my mark, it’s a most interesting piece of enchantment,” Limerence mused.

“Oh lay off it you two. We’re short of time,” I grumbled, poking my head into Taxi’s saddlebag until I found the canister of salt. Unscrewing the cap I turned sideways and did a quick swing of the head, tossing the entire bottle across the stuck earth pony. While I’m no fan of gimmicky weapons, the pony who’d invented the slug non-lethal sticky round really knew their business.

There was the noise of ice on a frozen lake cracking and Bari yelped as he was suddenly dumped off the wall by the contracting stain of chemicals, pitching onto his face. Sweets was beside him, one hoof on the back of his head, making sure he didn’t do anything stupid. Edging over, I gently tugged the pistol out of his mouth. It was, as I’d thought, gummed beyond usability.

“Phew... you’re going to need a bath, Bari, me'son. That stuff sticks in places you won’t even know you had.” I muttered, lowering myself to peer into Bari’s eyes. The fear from earlier had gone, now that it was clear we didn’t intend to kill him, and it’d been replaced with defiance and canny calculation. I intended to have that done with relatively quickly. I glanced around, then shut the door on the four diamond dogs in Bari’s office and pointed at his secretary’s desk. “I don’t believe your secretary will mind if we use her seat for this. What you think, Sweets?”

“No, I don’t think she will, Hardy,” my driver replied, coyly, as she hoisted the black-maned stallion up by the scruff and almost tossed him at the chair.

That seemed to rouse our prisoner’s tongue. “Ugh, screw you, you pissing awful twat!”

“Now, now, Bari.” I bared my teeth in something that was only loosely a smile. “The lady was very courteous the last time you met-”

“Courteous?! Bitch put me in the hospital! I am not talking to you. Might as well put a bullet in me if I did! The ponies out for you-” he snarled, but I cut him off with a light tap on the mouth. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like I smacked him, but an officer never stoops to such measures. Though, technically, I wasn't an officer anymore.

“We’ll get to the ponies out for us in a moment. As I was saying, the lady was very courteous. You’re not eating out of a tube or breathing via as machine. She could easily have cut blood flow to your crotch and then where would your lovely friend have been a few minutes ago? ...Actually… Speaking of loose civilians...where’d she go?” I realized I hadn’t seen his consort since the fighting started.

Turning, I reopened the door of his office and peered around. At first, I only heard the snores of four diamond dogs with lightly bruised brains, but after a second I could single out another sound; soft weeping. Moving into the room, I turned in a circle, then spotted a dark red tail poking out from behind Bari’s desk.

“Miss?” I asked, awkwardly. How do you talk to a mare whose lover you’ve just finished unsticking from a wall? “Miss, we’re not here to hurt you.”

Her tail twitched, curling up underneath her backside. She peered, cautiously, over the top of the desk. Her eyes were red and ringed. She might have been blue, or possibly purple. It was tough to tell in the semi-darkness.

“C-c-can I-I h-have m-my f-fix now?” she stammered, as though her tongue were several sizes too large.

My chest tightened as a cold realization set in. Her quivering shoulders and the look of extreme sleep deprivation said ‘Ace’ addict, but she couldn’t have been on the stuff for more than a little while. She still had some of her baby fat and that’s the first thing to go. Ghoulini had said Bari was trying to replace Cosmo. Replacing the King of Ace meant supplying drugs.

A slow fire started to build in my cutie-mark.

I’m sure he thought of the girl as just a side-benefit.

'No killing, Hardy. You need him alive,’ Juniper’s voice whispered in the back of my mind.

“Honey, I’m going to get you out of here. I know a place where you can get your gear and where you can sleep, but we need to get you upstairs. Can you walk?”

I don’t know what part of that she heard, but the word ‘gear’ perked her right up.

“I-I t-think so…” She grabbed onto the desk, pulling herself halfway to her hooves. I eased over to her side, doing my best not to frighten the poor filly any worse. Briefly, she jerked away from my touch, but I slid under her foreleg and she leaned heavily against my shoulder. Guiding her out of the office, I retrieved a chair, then shut the door, jamming the handle and leaving the diamond dogs to their unplanned naps.

I tilted my hat brim down, covering the half of the girl’s face where Bari sat at his secretary’s desk. I could feel three sets of eyes following me as I lead her out the second door, back into the tunnel. I beckoned in Taxi’s direction as discreetely as I could. I heard her hoofsteps and the door to the office closing. Shifting the girl’s weight against the nearest wall, I let her rest there as I moved back to Taxi’s side and pushed her checkered mane out of her face, leaning in close so we could speak discretely.

“Sweets, that bottom feeder in there has been supplying this kid.”

Taxi’s shoulder tensed. “Ace?”

“Yeah, probably. I don’t have to fill in the blanks where that relationship is concerned. ”

“I’ll break the little bastard. Hardy, give me five minutes-” she hissed, but I cut her off with one hoof on her shoulder.

“I need you to take the girl to Stella’s place. She’s crashing.” I nodded meaningfully at the shaking filly whose eyes were slowly drooping shut. “If the ambulances find her here, she’ll be taken to a hospital and they’ll detox her for a day or two, then put her back on the street. Either way, Bari will have her back here riding his desk in a few days.”

“Oh, I can make sure he never-”

“No, Sweets. No maiming. Take care of the girl. Give her to Stella. At worst, he’ll make sure she gets cleaned up and some medical attention.”

“What about you and the bookworm? Where do you want to meet?”

“We can get to the edge of diamond dog territory and call a cab. We’ll meet you at the Nest once we’re done here.”

Taxi’s breath caught and she whispered, reluctantly, “Alright. If I don’t get to kill him, you don’t either. Got me?”

“I want to get this over with as much as you do. Now go.”

My driver nibbled at her lower lip, as though she might say something more, then stepped back and went to the quivering filly, speaking in low tones like one might to a frightened animal. I straightened my coat and pulled off my hat, inspecting it for fresh damage before plunking it back on my head.

If I’m honest, I was dithering; so much rested on our interrogation of Reginald Bari. I didn’t need another disappointment to add to what’d already been a difficult day.

Gathering myself, I stepped back through the door of the outer office and shut it behind me. The lock clicked shut with terrible finality.

Bari still sat where I’d left him, his seedy brown eyes following me. A keyring and pen lay on the table, which had apparently been the contents of the fixer's pockets. Limerence stood behind him with his usual serene, unflappable expression, though it seemed a bit harder than usual, like it’d been carved into his cheeks with a chisel. Wherever the secretary might have been, she was taking her sweet time. Lim opened his eyes, saw me, and flicked his muzzle open, showing an extra key in the same style as the rest of those on the keyring. He dropped it onto one hoof, discretely, then popped it into the top drawer of the desk.

I nodded my approval to him, then I walked to the desk and put my hooves on it, leaning across to stare into the fixer’s eyes. “Mister Bari, I want some very straightforward information from you. If you give it to me, I leave here today and you get on with your wretched little life. If you don’t, we drag you to the police station and leave you tied to the fire hydrant out front. Is this a suitable arrangement?”

I knew what was coming, but there are certain conventions you have to stick to. He rolled his tongue around his teeth, then inhaled. I ducked to one side, letting the gob of spit fly over my shoulder.

Never one to disobey convention, I snaked forward and grabbed Bari by the back of the head, bringing his forehead down on the desk just hard enough to make the entire table shake. He jerked and let out a pained breath, struggling to rise. I held him there until he stopped, then released his head and he slowly sat up again, glowering at me with a slow burning fury.

“You’ve got nothing on me. My record is clean. You broke into my place of business. You set hoof within a mile of the police station and it’ll be you they’ll be dumping you in the cell first!” Bari snarled.

It wasn’t pleasant to realize that he was correct. My usual routines tended to hinge very heavily on whether or not I had the authority to put somepony in a nice, deep pit for a long, long time if they don’t tell me what I need to know. Interrogation usually depends heavily on having some type of incentive you can wave over somepony’s head and short of breaking many of his bones, I didn’t have anything off the top of my head. I knew he’d worked for Cosmo, but then, many ponies had worked for Cosmo. It did me no good if I couldn’t get him into a court. He might have dealt drugs, but I doubted he had more than a small stash in his office and, even then, I had no warrant.

I set my jaw, pulling my sleeve up over my gun and flicking the hammer back, raising the weapon and pointing it between Bari’s eyes. “I suppose I could just blow your brains all over the wall. That would work for me, honestly.”

He seemed entirely unphased by the idea, leaning back in his chair and putting his hooves behind his head. “Yeeeah, pull the other one, cop. It’s got bells on it. You didn’t come all the way down here to plug me.”

“You set up the hit on me and Cosmo!” I snapped.

“So what if I did? Think you can prove it?” Bari’s teeth flashed as he put one hoof on his secretary’s desk, stroking the wood back and forth. “You need information. It so happens I deal in information. If you’re willing to pay for it...saaay, enough to set me up nicely and a guarantee from that lizard friend of yours to leave my suppliers alone, I could maybe see my way to passing along something you might could use.” His lip curled into a sneer as he added, “I won’t even charge you extra for the trip to the emergency room that bitch of yours gave me."

I was very tempted to blow a hole in him, see how he bargained with a bullet in his lower intestine, but that wasn't likely to work... and police interrogation methods tend to rely on time. Sure, you can leave a suspect in interrogation for a few hours with a pot of coffee and no bathroom breaks, or now and then claim ‘poorly built chairs’ if somepony should get a few bruises writing out a confession. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes we acquire a few talents in between that put us in good stead, but somehow, I got the feeling Bari would hold out. Whoever bought that hit paid better money than I had on hoof and Stella’s line of credit probably didn’t extend to buying up entire streets. Besides, I didn’t feel much like negotiating with the weasely little flank stain.

Before I could start another line of questioning, however, Limerence raised his foreleg for my attention.

“Detective, I have read much about interrogation and have often wanted to try my hoof at it.”

“You’ve… never interrogated-” I began, incredulously, then shut my muzzle on the snarky comment and grabbed Limerence by the foreleg, dragging him off to one side where I could speak in a low voice. “...No. Just… No. And may I recommend, in your future career, that you don’t tell the suspect you’ve never actually performed an interrogation before?”

The librarian, thankfully, had the good sense to whisper, though he retained the urgent tone. “I have questioned subjects before and I believe your approach is likely to have us here when certain inconveniences arrive. He is banking on that. I believe I can get the information we need with some haste. Will you allow me a ‘crack’ at him?”

I closed my eyes and inhaled, slowly, then let the breath out in a rush. I’d hoped to be able to extract Bari and interrogate him at our leisure, but I doubted we’d get by an entire building worth of ponies and diamond dogs, including that fellow by the front door, without somepony raising an alarm. Carrying an unconscious body tends to do that and we needed out sooner rather than later. The fight with the body-guards didn’t help, and tying them up was going to waste more time. I wanted out before they woke up and decided to have another shot at us, or worse, dug out through the floor and found some friends to give us more flavors of Tartarus.

“You’ve got five minutes, then we’re going to have to fight our way out and you get to carry him.” I stood back and to one side. Limerence nodded and began fishing in his side pocket with his muzzle, which took at least twenty seconds. I couldn’t help a twinge of pleasure watching him have to use his teeth like everypony else without a horn. Finally, though, he found his prize and held a tiny book in his teeth that said ‘Pocket Dictionary’ on the spine, then trotted over to Bari and set the book in front of him. I plunked myself down on the concrete floor to watch.

“Mister… Bari, was it? I don’t imagine you use your ‘real’ name in your professional endeavors these days.” The librarian smiled, resting his hooves on the table.

Bari grunted, putting his legs behind his head and pretending boredom. I could see him carefully watching the other stallion through slitted eyes. “You’re gonna do what, bore me to death? I know the damn Archivists. Anypony that deals with anything magical knows the Archivists! You stink of book glue and shit. Go toodle back to your library. The pig and I have business to discuss.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do.” Limerence circled the desk, that unsettling smile still firmly in place. “The Drum Beat. Amusing title. Might I ask where it comes from? I assume something besides your cutie-mark.”

Bari pushed the chair back and lifted himself to his feet, staring hard at the library pony, his nostrils flaring. I tapped the hammer of my gun, the click echoing around the tiny room. Bari gave me a nasty look, before turning back to my companion. “If there’s a beat, I keep it, boy,” he growled, threateningly. “I hear that music that makes the world turn and I listen close. I hear you dying one of these days here reeeal soon.”

Limerence bobbed his head, as though that’d been the answer he expected. “A pony who keeps tempo with the world around them should know that wheresoever there is an upbeat, a downbeat shall soon follow.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then continued. “Drum Beat has a certain logic to it. I, too, share more of an affinity for my nom de gare than I do for my name. You called me an Archivist. I appreciate that, though my name -- and do be clear, I feel no fear in giving you this -- is Limerence. It is a word of interesting origin. Archaic, yes, but still significant even today.”

“Is this going somewhere, boy? I’ve got places to be.” Bari, in spite of his irritation, looked vaguely uncertain of himself. He was starting to genuinely wonder just where all of this talk might be leading. He wasn't alone; I was wondering myself.

The librarian went on as though he hadn’t said a word. “You see, my mother loved me. Mightily, in fact.” A sad look crossed Lim’s face, but he covered it quickly. I was sure he was letting that on exclusively for Bari’s benefit. “You will see here…” Limerence opened the dictionary to a page that was already bookmarked and ran his hoof down it. Bari leaned forward slightly, looking down at the book. “'Limerence' is a word that, roughly speaking, means ‘obsession.' I was hers.” Easing back, he slid around the table behind Bari, who didn’t move, still studying the dictionary. “Today, Mister Bari, it is I who am obsessed. And as I’m sure you’re aware… a pony obsessed is capable of many things.”

I didn’t see the knife until he was already moving, and by then, it was too late. Limerence yanked open the front of his vest, grabbed Bari by the back of the neck with one hoof, slammed his face down on its side, and in one smooth motion snatched a five inch blade from his inner pocket with his teeth and drove it nearly to the hilt through the stallion’s ear. I don’t know how sharp that blade must have been, but my guess was ‘very’, because it went through flesh, book, and into table like a super-heated chainsaw through a bucket of double cream.

Bari jerked a little, but was so shocked he seemed momentarily uncertain as to what to do. I couldn’t blame him. I was still sitting there, open mouthed, as Limerence stood back and casually dusted a fleck of blood off of his hoof on the edge of the table.

The fixer just laid there for several seconds, his eyes wide as saucers.

He gave his free ear a little wiggle.

Then the other.

Then he screamed.

Then he tried to yank his head up from the table.

Then he screamed again.

I suppose there just isn’t much in a gangster’s repertoire of personal experience that prepares them for being… stapled… between the words ‘obsessive’ and ‘attachment’ in the dictionary definition of a disused descriptor.

“Now, then! It is rare I find myself in the position of ‘teacher’, but I find I like it.” Limerence was speaking again. “There are many words in Equestrian which are synonymous with ‘limerence’, and I have many knives remaining about my person. Shall we define a few more? If you make it necessary, I can certainly summon my thesaurus.”

Bari, who’d managed to pass himself off as the manager of a casino in the pursuit of his professional ambitions, wasn’t a stupid pony, whatever lack of wisdom might have lead him to a life of crime. His plans for extracting concessions might have been worthwhile, if I hadn’t been in a hurry or, mayhap, had I not had a very pointy librarian along. The turn of events had caught him on the wrong hoof, though.

“You can’t do this!” he howled, thumping one hoof on the table, which only jostled his head and set off another round of moaning. His eyes slid from Limerence to me. “C-cop! Stop h-him!”

You know, if he hadn’t called me ‘cop’ I might have? I don’t know why that irked me quite so badly.

Limerence slammed his toe down on the table beside Bari’s cheek, making the whole surface jump and eliciting a sound like a chicken being slow roasted alive from the trapped criminal. “For your sake, I think I am the one you speak to, Mister Bari, and I assure you, the Detective over there is not any more likely to save you than you are to save yourself. He is a creature of justice, and that filly… that child… upon whom you decided to express your prurient interests in exchange for indulging her chemical weaknesses has assured you little sympathy from that direction.” Lifting his hoof, he slid around the table and sat, poking at his cufflinks and settling his bowler back in neat order. “As to whether or not I can do this, I wish to make you aware of several significant facts.”

Bari was quaking violently, tears rolling down his nose. “W-what?”

“Firstly, the Detective over there believes in things such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, evil and righteousness. I do not. The world is not so easily categorized. I am at peace with this. Secondly, you may feel it ‘bad’ that I’ve driven a blade through your ear’s cartilage, but I can guarantee, you would consider it a pale vision of ‘badness’ if I were to take this pencil here-” Limerence lifted a leaded pencil off the secretary’s desk, wiggling it front of Bari’s eyes before setting it down again. “-and drive it into your eardrum.”

I’m pretty sure Bari would have peed himself at this point, if his bladder had anything in it. My cutie-mark was strangely quiet. I expected it to be doing something at the sight, but now and then, I run into ponies who deserve whatever they get. I suspected, just then, this was probably the case. That or Lim was bluffing. I wasn’t sure which.

Limerence leaned in very close, whispering in Bari’s ear just loud enough for me to hear. “The third and ultimate fact you must acknowledge about whether or not I ‘can'... is that I have pinned your ear to a table. That is a truth, hard and inarguable. That I can do it twice should not require demonstration; you have another ear. That I would then feel absolutely no compunction in beginning to pin other pieces of you to the table should, therefrom, be easily extrapolated.”

The librarian moved away from the desk and settled himself beside me, crossing one hoof over the other as he went on, half turning in my direction, “So we come to an important question, which will be the first of several today. It is simply a matter of who does the asking, and how. Do you wish to parlay with the pony who may have a willingness to listen to you without inflicting trauma or do you wish to attempt it with the pony who has demonstrated the ability and inclination to impale your fleshy extremities to a lump of wood?”

He fell silent. The only sound remaining was the shuffling of Bari’s rear hooves as he tried to keep the weight off his ear and a faint *plink plink* that I soon identified as blood running down the table and dripping onto the floor.

“I...uh…” Bari stuttered and Limerence gave the table a little tap with one toe. “Alright! Alright! Dammit, you awful bastards!” he howled in agony. “I don’t know who ordered the hit! I don't! Th-they just paid me to infiltrate and tell them if Cosmo was losing it! I- I just had to call this number and tell them somepony was there! They promised me when he was out of the picture I’d have everything!”

“Who is they?” I inquired, rising and walking around the table.

“I d-dunno! I dunno! They just paid me! They were… They were looking for you, too!” he bawled. “I didn’t know they were going to try to kill you!”

“You suspected, though.” Limerence’s lip twitched as he contemplated this. “You received payments, Mister Bari. How?”

“M-my secretary picked them up! This lawfirm held them!”

Lim and I exchanged a glance. “Umbra, Animus, and Armature?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.

“Yes! Yes! That's… That's them!” he sobbed, pressing his face against the desk. His voice was full of bitterness as he said, “Who-whoever they were working for promised half the crims in this city e-everything Cosmo had to whoever found you and the bastards stiffed me!”

“No… no, they didn’t.” I grinned at our prisoner. “I stiffed you, Bari. It might have been a dragon in lipstick who pulled the trigger, but I gave him the gun. Fair comeuppance for having me killed, especially because I intend to let you live today, if possible. How many pieces you’re in will depend on whether my friend here thinks you’re cooperating sufficiently. We’re not done here, though. Is there a hit on me still out?”

The fury in Bari’s face was tempered by the gentle reminder sticking out of his ear that said it would be unwise to act on his irritation. After a short hesitation, he answered, “N-no. There was never a hit on you. They just w-wanted you found, then whoever f-found you was supposed to call this number. I knew it... might be some kind of h-hit job, but they w-wanted to use their own c-contractors. A-after the casino there were still s-signs. Signs they were still looking for you.” he whimpered, digging at the pocket of his vest. I stepped over beside him, grabbing his hoof and moving it away, then sticking my muzzle in the pocket and retrieving his handkerchief, laying it on the table under his cheek to soak up a bit of the small puddle of blood.

“Elaborate on these ‘signs’, please?” Limerence said.

Bari’s gaze fell. “I was r-reading between the lines when they t-told m...e my ‘services were no longer required’. They called me and said th-they’re bringing in somepony from inside to...do something. Whatever it is, it’s big. They still want you. I-I’m pretty sure they want you... you alive this time!”

That was an unsettling thought. Till that moment, for some reason, I’d considered myself only a minor character in this unfortunate series of events. The confirmation that I was, in fact, a major player settled around my neck like a lead weight.

“Where are you getting these little musings, I wonder?” Limerence murmured.

Bari half-turned his head, then winced. “What are you? Stupid? These aren’t the kind of people to just… give up because some moron detective dodged a bullet! They want something f-from him or they w-wouldn’t have sp-spread his name around! Th-that first hit was just... opportunity. Cosmo was a… a wreck! He was going to spill so-something, b-but they... they didn’t want to kill him until he wasn’t useful anymore. T-that’s why I was there!”

I nodded as understanding dawned. “Ah… they may not have wanted to kill him just yet, but the two of us in one place was just too good for you to pass up, wasn’t it Bari? You called them, told them I was there and that the King of Ace was going to crack and tell me everything.” Bari shuddered and shut his eyes, but I ignored him and went on, “I wonder why they called in… whatever Grapeshot was… for that job. If they just wanted me dead, they could just call a public hit. Leaving that hanging over my head long enough would be a sure way to get it done.”

“Public hits operate on unpredictable time frames.” Limerence put in. “If a pony must die immediately, calling in a contractor is best. If they feared you might tell somepony whatever it was the King of Ace said to you, it might have been incentive enough to have you both eliminated immediately. It sounds as though Mister Bari put the fear of that in them.”

I nodded. “That still leaves the question of why hunt me down in the first place? The diary? Killing me there, specifically, makes no sense, unless there was some element we're missing. If they wanted me dead, a hit would have been plenty...unless they wanted me dead there. That or they needed me dead in some predictable way. Damn. I didn't need more puzzles." I returned my attention to our prisoner. "Alright, next question, Bari my sweet! Tell us about the cloak?” I ran my hoof over the tattered remains of the fabric still clinging to his neck. It felt smoother than silk. “That could be downright useful.”

“It was part of m-my payment. T-the ponies who p-paid for m-me to watch C-cosmo said i-if I made a w-wish, they could g-grant it. I left them a note... saying I w-wished for an inv-invisibility cloak.” His nose wrinkled. “Stupid thing only works at night, and only for a few seconds… and you… you tore it!”

“Ahhh...yes. A ‘cloak of shadows.' I remember my father telling me of these.” Limerence mused. “They are based on a piece of ancient clothing favored by Princess Luna. Sadly, the modern prototypes were less successful and the true magics behind their creation have been lost. I believe we have several in the Archive. Little more than curiosities, really.”

“Wait, they offered you a wish?” I asked, feeling a tingle in my flank.

“Yeah…” he replied. “I thought it was strange, but… but I told them what I wanted, and-and next time my payment came, the cloak was in there.”

“Mmm… That’s… I don’t know what to make of that yet, but I’ve got one more question for you. The armor of Nightmare Moon. That was your work. No, don’t bother denying. I’ve got a reliable source. Why and for who?”

The fixer half squinted out of one eye, looking slightly confused. “H-how in the... I... mean... uh…” he stuttered.

Twitching his jacket open on one side, Limerence revealed a second pocket, which had another book sticking just above the lip. “I don’t hear an answer coming in a timely manner, Mister Bari.”

“How did you e-even know about that?! It hasn’t been on the n-news!” Bari gasped, using one hoof to hold his ear against the table so it didn’t move around too much.

“I found the professor’s corpse and tracked it here,” I said, carefully keeping a neutral tone of voice.

“F-Fizzle’s... d-dead?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“He is dead and his horn was cut off. He’d been entrusted with a cache of magical weapons which was also stolen and the armor replaced with a very expensive counterfeit.” Limerence murmured. “Mightn’t you know anything about that?”

There was a short pause, then Bari shook his head, which was another in a long line of easy to make mistakes when you’re attached to a wooden surface by something sensitive. “Oww! D… dammit! I...I didn’t kn-know. Fizzle w-wasn’t r-run through me. J-just the armor. They wanted the b-best and I had a...a pony I know...who is the best. I-it was an-another job, you know? This b-business isn’t exactly about going to your boss’s place for H-Hearth’s Warming Eve!”

“Who paid? How did they approach you? Tell me something or I swear, I’m bucking that table!” I tried to keep my voice down, but the frustration was starting to get to me.

“I-It was one of those puh… ponies in the stupid robes! I don’t know anything! I don't! They set up the escrow account!” he yelped.

My back legs wobbled, then shot out from under me, and I sat down harder than I meant to. I didn’t have the excess mental energy necessary to rise again. Re-ordering brain processes is a tough activity for those of us who’ve lost entire years in the bottoms of beer bottles. I turned to Limerence, who’d sunk back into that emotionless facade, but I detected a slight twitch in his left eye.

When I found my voice, it was to shout, “The Lunar Passage paid for the fake armor?!”

“Yee-heee-heeesss...” Bari sobbed heavily, his chest heaving as he beat one hoof on table.

“It... can’t be,” I muttered, but it didn't sound like Bari was lying. “That’s... I mean, they were still protesting when we were there. Wouldn’t they have stopped?”

Limerence pulled a second blade from his vest and lay it on the table in front of Bari. “Maybe I should slice off that ear and see if you’re feeling a little more honest-"

“Dammit, please! Please! I swear!” the fixer shrieked.

I put my hoof on Lim’s chest, holding him back.

My cutie-mark was still cold as the grave, and I was uniquely qualified to speak on that subject.

“He’s telling us the truth. It was Lunar Passage, or somepony pretending to work for them.”

The librarian’s jaw tightened and he leaned close to whisper, “Detective, that is entirely out of our batting league. He knows that. He’s just trying to put us off!”

I shook my head. “My talent is telling me he’s not.”

“I have to report this to my father now-”

“Hold on… what’s that?”

Limerence followed where I was looking up to a corner of the room behind Bari’s head.

I doubt I’d have seen it if the rational parts of my brain hadn’t been otherwise occupied with a dose of impending panic. It was a tiny red light, discretely winking on and off.

“Mister Bari,” I said, lifting my head to address our prisoner. “What, precisely, does the flashing light mean?”

Bari tried to shift his head slightly, then his eyes widened. “Is... is it flashing or is it strobing?” he asked, nervously.

I scratched the side of my head. “Um… definitely flashing.”

“Oh shit…” the criminal cursed under his breath then lifted himself a little. “Cops! Cops are busting the place!”

I leapt to my hooves. “Wait, what?!”

The glass window on the outside of the office shattered and something rolled end over end through the air, landing at my hooves. I had time for two steps back before there was a flash, a snap, and an all-encompassing darkness descended.

Act 2, Chapter 15: Right to Remain Silent

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 15: Right to Remain Silent

Since the dawn of the species, and especially since the dawn of the Equestrian Revenue Service, ponies have sought not to be found, and other ponies have sought to find them. It's another one of those delightfully evolutionary arms-races that have resulted in the diversity we see today out of the many and varied forms of magical tracking.

As discussed earlier, one popular method is to plant a magical or electrical broadcasting device or substance on - or in - a pony. It's reliable once initiated, but the biggest weaknesses of this method are the fact that utilizing such a device requires you to have found that pony once by some other means, and that they might be able to remove the offending object if discovered.

Sympathetic tracking remains highly reliable for finding individuals; get a mane-hair or hoof scraping from the individual you intend to track, and put it in an alchemic concoction or zoodoo doll, and you should have an easy and reliable way of locating somepony. The key, of course, is to ensure your sample is from the correct individual. Mane transplants have become popular not only amongst aging stallions, but spies as well, to fool exactly this kind of tracking.

Emotional tracking is useful, make no mistake; the power of ambient emotions renders each sentient being a beacon to the right sort of eyes. But those eyes are A) expensive, and B) somewhat nearsighted, better for determining number and position than identity. Emotions being what they are - analog, nebulous variables - they sometimes have trouble distinguishing between specific entities in similar mindframes. This has resulted in problems, such as when authorities attempted to use a prototype to track down an enraged domestic abuse suspect and wound up in the cave of an Ursa Intermedia attempting to pass a kidney pulsar.

These are just some of the most popular methods. Suffice it to say, however, that any circumstance, device, or property that could successfully evade all forms of arcane tracking would be the sort of prize that could spark full-on wars.

--The Scholar

What’s a pony to do when they have no answers? I’d died for my answers and only gotten more questions for my trouble. Juniper’s little visits weren’t improving that situation much.

Faced with such a direct demand for answers, I found myself just standing there with Night Bloom’s slightly venomous breath blowing in my face, unable to come up with anything solid.

Explaining all the vicious things I’d seen during the last month... would it have helped? Trying to make sense of how I’d become a ghost to enchanted hunters of every stripe was pointless without more time to think and even had I had that time, I wasn’t certain I wanted to tell anypony besides maybe Taxi and Swift, lest I end up strapped to a table somewhere. The ability to avoid magical tracking was one that ponies would kill for.

Maybe they already had.

I was forced to fall back on the world’s oldest standby.

“You want to debrief me, then we’ll do a debrief. I’ll tell you what’s gone on this last month as best I can. I won’t promise not to leave some things out, but I need a drink and you need information, so we’ll do this my way. Got any more of that vodka you gave the Red Hoof around here?”

****

“You hung your badge on her horn?!” Cereus said incredulously, turning over his fifth shot-glass and setting it beside the row in front of me. “I’m surprised she didn’t shoot you!”

Night Bloom was still half-way through her third and every now and then would let out a little squeaky giggle. She might have been a super secret agent, but she’d turned out to be a cheap date. “I’dda shot’em! I’dda shot’em in the butt and it... itta be funny!” she slurred, then slid to one side and lay her head on her foreleg.

Survey wasn’t the most comfortable place for a picnic, but we’d dug out a couple of old chairs, a card table, and a bottle of what I presumed to be old moonshine some M6 agent from history had left behind. It tasted like death and smelled worse, but drunk is drunk and I was starting to feel a little warm and fuzzy. I’d begun with the death of Ruby Blue, leaving out as much of Stella and the Don as I could while still telling my tale.

Night Bloom wasn’t especially happy about that, but she accepted it after the first drink. Though, by halfway through the second one, I think she’d have been okay if I’d asked for one of her kidneys.

“Sho...like, you ran away, then stuff, right? We know all that, cause...cause things. I wash...washled...wa-t-ched th-the camerash. S-shaw when you left the Shkids, shaw you at the show, then caught the sh-toopid reporter lady.”

“Yeah, I followed some leads. You found me at Bari’s place. I think the tracker turned back on probably because I left the bugged tux in the car and...got...maybe far enough away from it? I don’t know. The upshot is, we got some pretty good information from the perverted little bastard.”

“This law firm, Umbra and whatever. Have you been able to find anything about them? They sound kinda important,” Cereus asked.

“No, and believe me, they’re rising quickly on my list of priorities, but I don’t know precisely how I’d go about it. Direct investigation is right out. The death of Miss Ruby Blue is wrapped up in all of this, somehow. So is the theft of that armor. I left her diary at the Nest and I still need to get into it. She was running from something that caught her, poisoned her, and ripped her horn off before she died. The same thing or things killed Fizzle.” I sucked on my teeth, contemplating my empty shotglass and the half-full bottle on the table. “I do have...one clue that Bari spilled right before you nailed me with that flashbang, though.”

“Wash-at? Cluesh? I like cluesh!” Night Bloom shoved herself upright, which only resulted in a slow slump onto her other side.

“Well, I don’t know how much this one will help. Bari said the pony who paid for the fake armor and took delivery was wearing robes of the Lunar Passage. That’s...basically what I’ve got, right now. I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with that.” I groaned.

“Oooh...yikes. You don’t do anything the simple way, do you? I tried to find some information on them when I was compiling a list of possible suspects, but I didn’t have all that much luck,” Cereus murmured. “You’d think, for a group that big, that we’d have more information, but they’re mostly a Detrot phenomena and they’re super insular. That and they don’t seem to like non-pony... well, non-unicorn, pegasus, or earth pony species and it’s not easy to hide... um…” He gave me a sharp toothed smile.

“Truly. My leads have pretty much dried up. I need to call Taxi before she has a little freak out. You mind if we go see if Limerence is awake?” I asked.

“I... think I’m going to leave Nighty here for a nap,” Cereus said, glancing fondly at his superior officer whose head was lolling against the cushion she was laying on.

“Good. Can I have my gun back, now?”

****

As Cereus and I left Survey, out through Holding and past an irate Sugar Lace, I tried to set my thoughts in some kind of order. I won’t say I was taking pleasure in seeing that awful mare behind some bars where I've wanted to put her for years, but it was certainly not hurting my mood. The alcohol wasn’t either, nor was having my coat and weapon returned, though sans bullets it was mostly just for personal comfort.

I pushed open the holding area door to discover Limerence sitting just outside on his rump, a massive folder of paper between his knees and a pencil clutched in his teeth.

The dusk pony’s eyes widened as he stared at my companion, who hadn’t yet acknowledged our presence.

“H-how?” Cereus squeaked and Limerence looked up. “We bound you with aurora! That... you... you still have the restrictor ring on! You were asleep! How did you-”

The librarian tilted his head, then dismissed the question with a wave of his hoof and returned to reading through his folder. “Aurora is only as good as the chair it’s affixed to. The six-oh-eight-three FlimFlam Inc interrogation chair has a structural flaw. Twist far enough to the left and the front legs will come off.”

Cereus’s muzzle opened and closed several times as he tried to find words to go with his confusion. “W-why aren’t you-”

“Surprised to see dusk ponies? The magic string was a clue. Am I right in pre-supposing you are Princess Luna’s agents, sent to guard the armor of Nightmare Moon?”

He nodded, weakly.

“The ‘agent’ is drunk off her flank at the moment,” I replied, glancing back the way we’d come. “Can’t blame her, really.”

“I’m just an intern, really,” Cereus added. “I might get to be an agent one day. I hope I do, but with how things have been going...”

“I see. This is a most interesting location, I must say.” Lim’s eyes roved over the various shelves. “I see many unique and interesting artifacts. A shame they are locked away here. I would love to study this collection in depth.”

“Sorry, Lim, but we’re short of time. I need to call Taxi before she storms the Castle by herself. Cereus, could you get that ring off my friend’s head, then point me to a phone?” I asked the dusk pony.

“I’m... afraid there’s no local phone service. We’re in the Wilderness,” he explained, trotting over and plucking the restrictor ring off of Limerence’s head with his teeth, then spitting it on the shelf. The unicorn let out a a barely-noticable relieved breath. “The only connections we have go directly to Canterlot, and Nighty was right. The Royal Guard blocked our contact protocols. If we make any kind of public scene to get noticed, whoever stole the armor is going to vanish. I’d totally bet they’re monitoring the morgue and the police station. You’ll have to take the tram back to make a phone call.”

“Shit. Sweets is going to have a cow - possibly an entire pasture. Alright, no big deal there. I’ll try to keep you apprised of the situation. Before we go, how should I get in touch with you?” I asked.

Cereus rolled his eyes up, sinking into thought. After a moment, he moved down a row of shelves, looking at labels. “I did find a... I guess you’d call it a toy, really. It’s a super long ranged walkie-talkie. It only works with one other walkie-talkie. It’s kinda useless and the designer’s dead, so we’ve just got the two. I could… maybe let you have one. Don’t tell Nighty, though! She wouldn’t like it at all. Oh! Here they are.” Picking up a small metal box, he trotted back and laid it at my hooves. “You press the button on the side to talk to me.”

Limerence levitated it with his horn, turning it over to examine the back. “I don’t feel a power source.”

I pointed at a sticker on the side. “What’s that say?”

The Archivist squinted at the tiny print. “Warning: Powered by Quantum Entanglement. Do not open casing ...or a planet-killing singularity may result?!” His horn winked out and he dropped the box, hopping backwards from it. I braced for death. Several seconds later, my atoms were still mostly in the same places they’d been. I relaxed.

“Yeah, that’s probably why we only have two,” Cereus said. “Don’t worry, though. I’m pretty sure the the case is made of some kind of hyper-alloy. According to the card, it’s water proof, bullet proof, bomb proof, dragon fire proof, lava proof, magic proof, and foal proof.”

I gingerly picked up the box and tucked it into one of my pockets. “Basically indestructible, then. I’ll... take your word and do my best not to test that. Hmmm... heh. Alright, before I leave this fantastic place, I’ve got to try out those cameras you’ve got in the Castle. You think Night Bloom would mind if I had a peek at those?”

“I’m sure she would-” Cereus gave me a conspiratorial grin. “-but the chain of command passes to the next available agent in the event an agent in the field is incapacitated.”

“Did you not say you were an intern?” Limerence asked.

“Yes, but I finished all my courses!” His tufted ears fluttered as he leaned in close to me and said, “Besides, it’s sooo cool!”

****

Night Bloom still slept in the corner. Her dark mane lay half across her pillow and in sleep, with the lines of fury and worry gone, she seemed almost at peace. I felt a touch of real envy for her dreams which weren’t haunted by dead partners or horrible, city eating monsters.

I shook myself and left the filly to her snooze, turning back to Cereus, who was poking around a box covered in switches and toggles underneath the giant map of the warehouse.

“You’ll have to give me a second to remember how this thing works,” he muttered.

“Take your time. My driver’s not likely to go completely postal unless I’m gone for more than a day. Speaking of that, how long was I out?” I asked, watching Limerence, who was bent over the map of Detrot with a notepad held in his magical grasp, scribbling something. He’d been scribbling since we left the warehouse itself.

“Six hours, maybe?” Cereus replied, absently tapping at the control box. “You had a good sleep. Sorry the chair wasn’t very comfortable, but Nighty insisted.”

“Flash-bang sleep is never good sleep, but I’m fine. How is it going?”

“I think... Oh! Sorry, forgot to set my entry parameters for the Castle. Here...goes!”

Flicking one last switch, Cereus stepped back. The entire wall buzzed, popped, then the map of the warehouse faded to blackness, to be replaced by an overhead view of the Castle itself. Dozens upon dozens of tiny lights moved back and forth through the halls, up and down the aisles, all going about their important policing business. Cereus wasn’t done, though. Picking up a stick or rod of some kind, he pointed it at the map. It vanished, turning into an image of the back of an irate radio-pony who was shouting the ears off somepony through her microphone.

Seeing Telly, back in her natural environment, doing what she was born to do, made me feel a sort of crushing nostalgia.

In my heart, I knew I was doing the right thing. My death and the deaths of who knew how many others needed to be investigated. There was no walking away… but some part of me wished I was back there, fighting with Jade, expressing my disdain for paperwork, and walking through that vast hall as the conquering hero once more.

For now, it was not to be.

“You weren’t kidding. That’s nice bit of kit,” I said, examining the picture. “Show me the Police Chief’s office.”

“Coming right up!” Cereus answered, flicking the screen back to the map of the Castle, then pointing his little rod again. He frowned at the map for a second. “Um, it’s empty. Do you still want to see it?”

“Jade’s not in there? Is there any way to figure out where she might actually be?”

“Yeah, I could flip through the screens,” he answered. “If she’s in the building, we’ll find her eventually. It might take a few minutes. Sorry... I’m not very good with this thing, yet. Nighty says training on these systems is still limited because they’re illega-” His ears lay flat and he added, “Er... Could you forget I said that, too?”

“Consider it forgotten. Couldn’t hurt to look around the Castle anyway, “ I sighed. “I might never get to see the inside of it again unless Jade manages to chase my ass down.”

“Right, here we go!” Biting the button on his remote rod, Cereus began sifting through images; behind a desk, underneath a drink machine in the employee breakroom, Jade’s empty office, some space that was completely dark, a hallway, the inside of a set of armor.

The pictures shifted, one after another, until I got quickly bored. Grabbing a chair, I pulled it over and sat, resting my chin on my forelegs. Seeing a place you’d spent years in only holds so much wonder. A few minutes after that, I felt my head starting to nod and tried to force myself awake without much success. Flash-bang sleep is just no replacement for the real thing.

“Eep!” Cereus let out a distressed noise and dropped the rod, which kept scrolling images. It rolled over to my hoof and I lightly kicked it back to him.

“Eep?”

The dusk pony nodded vigorously. “Eep!... I mean, oh... bother. I think you should just… uh… I, er, found Chief Jade...”

I narrowed my eyes at Cereus and he quailed, fumbling to pick the control rod back up. “You found Chief Jade... and what?”

Raising his muzzle, he tongued the button.

A scene appeared.

It seemed to be the Castle’s dungeon holding cells. In all my time with Detrot P.D, I’d only seen them with any prisoners on two occasions; once after a riot and again, after a labor strike turned violent.

Chief Jade was marching up and down in front of a cell half-way down the hall. Her silver mane was loose, falling in lank ringlets around her olive green shoulders. She wore her blouse half-unbutton and her eyes were bloodshot. Her lips were moving, but there was no sound. The angle was wrong to see what or who she was talking to inside the cell.

“Those holding cells are supposed to be unused. The last time we put prisoners down there, half the social justice leagues in the city wet themselves with glee, then sued the city for unpony-like treatment. Can you get me an angle on the cell itself?” I asked.

“Y-yes...I can. But you have to promise not to freak out, okay?” Cereus squeaked.

“I am promising nothing. Picture. Change. Now!” I growled.

The dusk pony bit his lower lip, looking extremely dubious as he aimed the device again, then tapped the button.

The scene shifted.

Freaking out seemed like the only proper response.

Huddling against the far back corner of the cell, her huge wings bound to her sides and both forelegs and rear legs shackled together, my partner lay on her side like an orange ball of misery. They’d unbraided her tail, taken her tactical vest and Masamane, and left her bound in her cell. The shackles were enormous on her, and I doubt she could have moved more than a few body-lengths. They’d gone the full medieval route, including a heavy ball of iron, though somepony had the foresight to bandage her injured wing. She must have put up one heck of a fight.

As I watched, Swift shivered against the cold of the stone dungeon, straining at the binders on her wings for a second or two before giving up. Dried tears streaked her face. She didn’t seem to be acknowledging Jade’s presence.

I snarled, pouncing on Cereus, pushing him onto his back and standing over him with one hoof poised over his chest. “When?!”

“I don’t know!” he yelped fearfully, drawing his rear hooves up. “I don’t know when they caught her! Sh-she was in the area, right?”

Stepping off of the dusk stallion, I closed my eyes and tried to calm down. “She... called from a pay phone. She must have stuck around to make sure the ambulance could find the place. Damn...”

Cereus got to his hooves, giving me wary sideways glances. “W-what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I need some leverage. Even if that leverage is me.” I put one hoof against my forehead and shuddered. “I can go to the Castle, give myself up, and beg her to let Swift go. Stella might be able to bust me out, or the Don.”

“Noble as that may sound," said Limerence, "what I know of Iris Jade would tend to suggest she would suspect such an attempt and be ready for it. I believe, if you fall into her hooves, she will have her way with you before any such mission might be launched.” His lips curled into a half smirk. “Pardon the poor choice of words.”

I almost gagged. “I’m… going to have trouble shifting that image…”

Cereus made a soft sound half-way between contemplation and curiosity. “What sort of...um...what sort of leverage would work, do you think?”

“I’ve no idea, but unless you’ve got some thoughts, I’m running on empty!” I snapped, feeling my frustration start to boil over.

Cereus sucked on his lower lip, pinching it with one fang. “Well, I know...one thing. It might be important. Maybe, since you’re going to be investigating the Church of the Lunar Passage, you could check it out?”

“If you’ve got something that I can use to get the kid out of that cell you have got my attention here.”

Turning back to the giant image of the cell, Cereus twiddled the rod in his teeth, then bit down on one of the buttons. We flashed back to Chief Jade’s office, this time to a spot above and behind her desk. The room hadn’t changed since last I was there, with the exception of a framed picture of a smiling young filly that I didn’t recognize sitting on the desktop. She must have borne some close relation to Jade. The filly looked almost like a smaller version, complete with tiny police cap and minus a few thousand wrinkles and a vengefully psychotic expression.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“That’s Chief Jade’s daughter, Cerise,” Cereus replied.

“I… mmm. I didn’t know Jade had a daughter,” I murmured.

“From what intel we could gather, which wasn’t much, they’re estranged,” the dusk pony said. “However, her daughter is a member of the Church of the Lunar Passage. After she joined, their relationship got really bad. I talked to a ‘Sergeant Sing-Song’-”

“Lemme guess... poker night?” I said, sardonically.

“How’d you know?” he inquired, raising one eyebrow. “Buy-in was only fifty bits and he seems to know everything that goes on in Detrot P.D.-”

I tapped him on the forehead. “Focus. Chief Jade’s daughter. Church of the Lunar Passage.”

“Right, sorry. Chief Jade’s daughter apparently got roped into the Church a few months back. A little less than a month ago, Cerise stopped talking to her mother completely. Nopony has seen her, although she left a note saying she’d joined one of the Church’s convents.”

“A Bride of Luna…” I mumbled. “Crap.”

“This gentlepony may be right, Detective,” Limerence put in. “You mentioned the Chief’s emotional state has been somewhat unstable?"

"Yes. Every day for as long as I've worked for her."

Limerence rolled his eyes. "Allow me to be more specific: You said she was recently in an emotional state unusual for the median course of her personal pharmacokinetics, and that she did not respond to your 'Sun Tyrant' scheme the way you extrapolated she would; by closing the door to her office and possibly having a sobbing breakdown rather than, say, levelling the Castle with apoplectic rage. Am I right?"

"Ah. That. Yeah."

He nodded. "It occurs to me that the two may be related.”

I had a thought. “During that conversation with Cosmo, I heard that the law-firm was going to get some kind of... leverage in the Detrot P.D. Could this be what they meant? If the church has the Chief’s daughter, and they’re responsible for the deaths, we might be facing a worse situation than we thought.”

Limerence shook his head. “I do not… believe this situation is merely a power grab from a group of mad religious zealots. It is too careful. Too well calculated.”

“Calculated or not, I need to call Taxi, now. The kid needs me. I do not intend to let her down. We’ll split up when we hit town. You go see your father. Apprise him of the situation. I’ll meet you later on at the Nest.”

Cereus flicked his gaze at Night Bloom. “Wh-what should I tell her when she wakes up?”

“Tell her I’ll be in touch and to keep watching the monitors in the Castle.” Turning back to the screen which had reverted to the map, I stared for a long moment at the single light in the area signifying the deep dungeons. “I’ll be there soon,” I whispered.

****

The tram ride was a strange experience. It was less a train and more a mine-cart with electric rails. The tunnel was largely unlit, though somepony had the foresight to hang magical lanterns at intervals. Whatever the warehouse had once been, at least that part of it was a gemstone mine of some description. I don’t know how long we were on that train, but it felt like a half hour at a pace good enough for the moving air to blow my ears back against my head.

As we rode along, Cereus blabbered on about his detailed analysis of possible pancake recipes, a desire to meet Swift and play that card game with her, and progressively more outlandish speculation on what exactly might really be going on. When he got to ‘lizard people’, Limerence threatened to tie a piece of rope to him and toss him off the back of the cart. That shut him up for about three more minutes. After that it was Lim’s horn.

The tram stop was in the bottom of an abandoned junk shop. Up a set of stairs, we stepped out onto the cold, early morning streets of Detrot.

Sunlight was just starting to peer over the far horizon, though it was grey and promising another rainy day. I inhaled slowly, letting my eyes drift shut. Detrot. My city. When I opened them, I felt a chilly calm. All those years spent in a trance-like state, stumbling from case to case, bar to bar after Juniper’s death were slowly coming back to me. The ponies who wanted me dead would be coming for my partner, if they knew she was there. If they had real control of Chief Jade, they would soon know. A daughter is good leverage. So is a partner.

Some little voice somewhere in my cowardly subconscious insisted I surrender. It was an animal voice, a fearful voice. Maybe they might leave us be, stop hunting us, stop killing, if I gave them the damn diary. Maybe they’d leave my city alone.

I smiled as I caught a brief scent of coffee and gun oil. That little voice was snuffed. It died screaming.

Limerence sniffed at the air, then shook himself and fit his bowler back down over his ears, flicking the brim with his toe. “May I assume that we are about to be faced with another ridiculous show of extremely dangerous vigilantism that will inevitably explode in our collective faces?”

My left ear flicked at a buzzing fly. “I’m going to detonate this one in as few faces as possible.” I waved my hoof in what I hoped was the direction of the Archive. “I’ve got the number for a pay phone down the street from the Nest. The Aroyos always pick it up and they will let Taxi know where to get me if she’s there.”

“Is there no way I can dissuade you from this destination?” Limerence asked. “Your partner is a secondary player in this mission, and I believe she will be safe-”

“You don’t need to be there,” I interrupted, cutting him off.

Pursing his thin lips, the librarian regarded me with a curious expression on his light blue face. “I didn’t ask if I was going along. I asked if I could dissuade you.”

“No,” I replied.

His eyes narrowed. “Good. I would see little purpose in following a pony who would abandon his family, mission or not.” Straightening, Limerence started off at a stroll down the street, calling over his shoulder. “I will attempt to prepare some form of getaway, should whatever madness you have planned fail to pan out.”

I smiled at his back, then started in the opposite direction.

****

Finding a working payphone in the strange little suburb on the outskirts of the city that Cereus had dropped us off at was more difficult than I’d anticipated.

I found one outside of an all-night diner with a piece of neon-lit pie in the window. The Aroyo on the other end was curt, until I gave him my name. He warmed right up after that and promised he’d fly right over to see Taxi.

The waitress of the cafe was a whole stack of crazy with a side of emotional issues, but I sat while she rambled about her day, her marefriend, and some band she was obsessing over, sipping a cup of coffee that tasted like bile and munching on a piece of pie that was better than it had any right to be. Under other circumstances, I might have actually enjoyed myself, but each time I thought I might be about to relax the image of Swift crying on the floor of a dungeon came back and the pie turned to ashes on my tongue. She should have been there with me. Sending her out on her own was a recipe for disaster and I should have seen that one coming.

Of course she’d call the office. Who else could dispatch an ambulance to diamond dog territory? Jade would be monitoring the main lines. She’d have heard Swift. She might even have one of those voice recognition talismans hooked up to the phone system in case I called. Maybe the kid said something to tip her off, or maybe Jade just knew. None of that was keeping me from kicking myself.

It was whoever was pulling Jade’s strings. It must have been, or they’d just have tossed Swift in amongst the normal prisoners.

They’d caught her.

They’d bound her.

They’d stuck her in a hole, and soon they’d be coming for her, probably in hopes to use her to draw me out.

Who was I to disappoint them?

****

Taxi didn’t so much ‘drive’ up as she burned the Night Trotter down the road at something like the speed of light, throwing arcs of magical electricity onto the pavement that sparkled in the morning sun of the lonely street. Braking so hard she left two streaks of rubber in front of the cafe, she was out of the cab before the engine had died, all but bucking open the door of the little diner.

When she saw me, sitting quietly, alive and well, she drew in several deep breaths then screamed like a howling banshee for a few straight seconds, leaving my ears aching and the waitress cowering under the counter. This was good. For Taxi, it was a fairly cool, level headed response.

I expected some act of minor, affectionate assault, but she just staggered to the table and sank into the seat across from me. The waitress was staring at us, though mostly at the monstrous gun attached to my driver’s back. I waved her off with one hoof and she retreated behind the counter, peering out from behind one of the coffee machines.

Taxi'seyes were red and her mane was unbraided and tousled. In her rush, she’d even left her saddlebags behind. The scars on her hips would have given a diamond dog a sour stomach, but she didn’t seem to care who saw at that particular moment.

“Hardy... where…”

I held up my hoof, then took a sip of my coffee before I said, “I don’t have time for a complete explanation and you’d just think I was losing my mind if I summarized. We’ll leave it at that we have fresh allies and this day has been very stressful and is only likely to get worse.” My heart clenched in my chest and I swallowed.

Taxi caught the look of discomfort. Her face softened and she asked, softly, “What’s wrong?”

I tried to take a deep breath, but my lungs felt like they were full of glue. Opening my mouth to speak, all that came out was a faint choking sound. I downed some more of the coffee. It was awful, but it was liquid.

After draining half the cup, I found my voice. It was a weak, anemic little thing, but it was there.

“Iris Jade has Swift.”

My driver’s right eye twitched and I had time to finish the other half of my swill before she managed to order enough thoughts to form sentences. I wasn’t inclined to help on that front. Nothing she had to say could be any worse than the hideous beating my own guilt was perfectly happy to give my already battered ego.

Lowering her chin onto the table, she turned her cheek sideways, looking up at me out of one eye. “So… that’s it, then. Game over.” Her shoulders slouched as she went on. “We… had a good run, right? I mean, if we ditch this now, we can probably get Swift out if you give yourself to Jade. Might get you a few years in prison. We could get it halved if we split up the charges evenly and get a good plea. They can only prove… slander of a public official, a few… uh… hundred… speeding tickets, illegal use of police materiale, abuse of authority, theft, impersonating a police officer, causing a public disturbance, criminal trespassing, and maybe conspiracy of some kind-”

“Oh can it, Sweets.” I put my hoof on her forehead and pushed her back off the table. “You know me better than that.”

Taxi smacked my leg away. “Yeah? What exactly are you going to do? Call up Stella and storm the Detrot Police Department?! Swift might as well be on the moon!” She buried her face in both hooves. “I know you, too. You won’t let this lie. You should. She might be in there a few months, tops, if she just kept quiet. She could just pin it all on you and walk, probably, but that silly child is going to confess to everything if we leave her there long enough, won’t she?”

I coughed, softly, and murmured, “Probably, yes. There’s that, and the ponies hunting me will probably try to use her to get to me.”

“So, what then?” My driver stomped on the table, rattling the silverware. “Tell me you got something out of Bari that we can use! Tell me your ‘new allies’ gave us something that will magically teleport your partner out of a guarded, teleportation proofed cell in the basement of one of the three most secure buildings in Detrot?”

I lowered my chin to my chest, covering my face with the brim of my hat. “I’ve got something.”

I could feel her eyes on me, boring into me, seeking good and deep. That was Sweet’s speciality, after all. Finally she said, “Whatever it is, it scares the piss out of you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, it does. If this doesn’t kill me, I’ve got no guarantee it will even save Swift… but it’s better than nothing.”

“How much better?”

“Not much. I’m short of plans, time, and options. It’s this, or we put a bow around my neck and trot me down to civic center for whoever wants to lay claim.”

Taxi wiped a tear from the corner of one eye and nodded. “Okay. Okay, fine. Sorry, I haven’t slept. We’re going on that vacation as soon as this is over, right?”

“Absolutely.”

She gave me a wan smile, and reached across the table, grabbing my handkerchief out of my front pocket to loudly blow her nose before she asked, “Where were you? Really?”

“A warehouse full of magical pre-war artifacts owned by a secret agency of bat pony spies under the direct orders of Princess Luna to guard the armor of Nightmare Moon.” I replied.

“...Yeah. That… that summary does kind of make you sound insane.”

“Can we go?” I nodded towards the door, then toward the area behind the counter, which was empty. “I think the waitress is somewhere, probably talking to Telly as we speak.”

“Right.” Taxi squared her shoulders. “Where are we headed?”

****

“I’m coming.”

“No, no you’re not! If this is a bust, I need somepony on the outside to take the diary to Stella and have him bury the damn thing. Don’t take it to the Don. He’s too practical. He’ll crack it and try to use whatever is inside for his own benefit. I don’t want to give it to them until it’s our last resort, because frankly, I’m not sure how much less pragmatic the dragon is.”

“I don’t care about the stupid diary, Hardy! Do you not get it? This is not about you!”

“Nor is it about you. So you’ll wait, hear me? Drop me off, then park the Night Trotter somewhere. If I’m not out in an hour, go report this mess to Stella. He’ll make sure Swift and I have a decent lawyer.”

****

We’d ridden downtown in the frigid quiet Taxi projects when she’s really pissed off. I suppose I couldn’t blame her for being mad. She’d gotten me back after a month in a meat locker and there I was, about to do something that would probably put me back in it. At least once, a traffic enforcement cruiser tried to flag us down, but some light application of Taxi’s rear hoof soon left them with clouds of dust and feelings of penile inadequacy.

When the engine stopped, I was half asleep; if they could bottle the Night Trotter’s ride, they’d have the perfect sleeping potion. Pushing my hat brim back, I leaned forward and put my hoof on Taxi’s shoulder. She covered it with her own for a half second, then jerked her head at my door.

“I’ll be waiting,” Taxi muttered. “You die in there, I am just going to use your corpse for a coat rack next time.”

“I’m sure I’ll make a pretty coat rack. Now go, find a place to hole up. I’ll call you in an hour.”

“You better, you hear me?”

I didn’t answer, but opened my door and slid onto the pavement. Taxi was watching me in her side-view mirror. I gave her a subtle nod, then turned to face a dastardly fate once more.

The Castle seemed to slump in the long shadows of the early hours, but I knew Jade would already be there. She worked a schedule that would have made most farmers beg for time off and considering recent events I felt certain she wouldn’t be sleeping much.

Nopony was in the courtyard, though a few were coming and going between some of the side buildings ringing the central spire. A passing secretary noticed me standing there under the portcullis and her eyes almost popped right out of her head. The clipboard she’d been holding in her magic clattered on the paving stones, but she didn’t stop to pick it up. Rather, she hurried on into the building she’d been aiming at and slammed the wooden door behind her.

That didn’t bode well. Most of the other ponies I could see wandering the Castle grounds also had an air of tension. They goose-stepped about, looking over their shoulders like a voice might call down Celestia’s fire on them at any moment.

The ancient wooden doors of the Castle, which had seen dragon fire and cockatrice gaze, seemed to glare down at me like the disapproving eyes of some ferocious head-mistress.

Behind me, the Night Trotter revved and tires squealed. Taxi might have said goodbye, but I didn’t catch it if she did. My entire attention was riveted on those doors. Somewhere behind them, Swift was locked in a dungeon. I might soon be joining her. Cheerful thought, really. If I joined her, I might be out of this particular game. Then I could rest, right?

For some reason, I doubted that would end up being the case.

Nothing else for it. It was time to put one hoof in front of the other. I started up the cobbled walk, stopping in front of the doors again and putting my toe on their oaken surface. I pushed and a cool wind rushed out, making my coat billow. Part of me wondered if I looked like one of those heros in a western, trotting into the saloon for the final shoot out. More likely I looked like a drowning victim standing too close to a fan.

Pushing the door open, I eased around it into the air conditioning. I had to smile. So little changed in Detrot Police Department. The cubicles were back in place after Jade's dinner as though they'd never left. The File Cloud still rumbled and spat lightning, spinning lazily beneath the dome. Telly was in her usual seat off to one side, behind the console that controlled the central radio system and the File Cloud. One hoof pressed to her temple, she was apparently explaining something to somepony who just wasn't getting it. She sighed and pulled her headset off, laying it on her desk. Two others glittered in her magical grip, with their own conversations ongoing. Telly’s multi-tasking skills would have put a hydra to shame.

I hadn’t noticed it at first, but silence was gradually descending on the office. Telly picked up on it before I did, and looked up at the door, then at me standing there. Her muzzle sagged open and her horn flashed, sending both head-sets sailing end over end out over the cubicles. She stood, slowly, and half raised one hoof, then let it drop. I grinned and bobbed my chin at her.

By then, the entire room was frozen in place, staring. Dozens of equine eyes peered over tops of cloth dividers at me. A pony could get used to creating that sort of quiet wherever they went, but I got the distinct impression that if somepony sneezed, I might have had a stampede on my hooves.

It was now or never.

You do realize you could have just called ahead, right? Juniper whispered in the back of my head.

That would be so much less fun, though! I thought.

I threw my chest out, raised my chin, and shouted, “Chief Iris Jade!”

Since everypony in the room was simultaneously holding their breaths, those three words echoed and reverberated off the columns, bouncing around for several seconds in the ancient chamber.

There was no response.

Silence reigned.

All eyes swiveled to look at the window. I rolled my lower jaw, then called again at the stained glass window stretched across the back of the Chief’s office above the throne dais.

“It’s Hard Boiled! You’ve got something of mine!”

Again, nothing happened for several agonizing seconds. I took a deep breath, preparing to repeat my challenge.

The stained glass window with the likeness of lady Justice, her flaming sword shining and blind eyes watching all those who passed through the halls of the Detrot Police Department, exploded. If the doors hadn’t been ‘pull only’ from that side, I might have tumbled out onto the street and made a run for it. Shards of glass burst out of the window, shooting over the crowd.

Ponies started to scream.

Every single piece of glass stopped in mid-air, hanging over the crowd like a glittering field of beautiful, prismatic death. The shrieking slowly died, replaced with frightened murmuring.

An olive colored shape appeared in the broken remains of the window, her horn glowing and spitting streams of green fire. I couldn’t make out the details of her expression at that distance, but there was no mistaking the vibration that seemed to spread through the room.

Chief Iris Jade stepped into mid-air. A brilliant shine wrapped itself around her body and she drifted down from the rafters. Her face, as she got closer, resolved into a cold, empty-eyed glower.

It’s amazing what a month in a freezer will do for somepony’s confidence. I expected to be frightened. I expected to be fighting the urge to run. I wasn’t. I felt calm. Almost at peace. My heartbeat was steady. Underlying that, there was the ever burning fires of my rage. She had Swift. She would give me my partner, or there would be a reckoning. I knew that like I knew my own fetlocks.

Her rear hooves, shod in black heels, touched down first. If she’d been a wreck when I saw her last, she’d become a veritable disaster area. Her face was drawn and lined. She wore no makeup. Her silvery mane was loose and her eyes bloodshot.

A piece of me wished I had an impudent smile, but it was only a string of self control that kept the anger out of my voice. “Chief Jade.”

The unicorn’s lips peeled back. “Hard Boiled.”

Above us, the glass window was reassembling itself, one shard at a time slipping back into place until I couldn’t tell the stained fresco had been shattered at all. It was an act of supreme telekinetic control, one I hadn’t seen in all the years I’d known her. She was impressive, yes, but this was something else. Even her most fearsome acts of telekinesis didn't display close to this level of precision.

“Jade. We need to talk,” I said, just low enough that the gathered office workers couldn’t hear.

“We’ll talk,” she growled. Her nostrils flared and she took a threatening step forward. “Immediately after I burn every scrap of fur off your body, cuff you, and find a nice comfy cell for you.”

I shifted my weight from one leg, to the other. “Actually, that sounds like a good idea. Minus the fur burning part and the cuffs, mind you. Shall we adjourn to the dungeon?” I dropped my voice on that last word. “I believe you have something for me there…”

Jade’s expression didn’t change, but I detected the subtlest hint of surprise. It was buried in an instant. “The dungeon. Yes. Your partner has been a model of stubbornness. She might have been a good cop, if you’d ever given her the opportunity. I will find out where you get your information.”

“Agreed.”

There was no covering that look.

“What?” she said, dumbly.

I shook my head and held out one foreleg in the direction of the basement stairs. “We’ll talk there. Too many prying ears here. You hear me out, then you can do whatever you want. Got me?”

Jade’s teeth flashed. “I can do whatever I would like to right now. Is there something stopping me?”

It’s funny how, now and then, a pony can realize just how precarious their position is in life at the least opportune moment. Life is short, frequently messy, and tends to end violently for those trying the hardest to make a difference. It also necessitates a gamble now and then which could save or damn, depending on which way the dice fall.

I whispered a word. It might have saved me or might have damned me, but my future rested on that one word. It was a name.

“Cerise.”

****

Jade hadn’t killed me outright, but ten seconds later, I was wishing she had. I dangled upside down in a field of magical energy, my fore legs and rear legs bound tightly to one another. All of the blood had rushed instantly to my forehead and whatever good Gale had accomplished for the flash-bang induced headache was undone in a matter of seconds.

My muzzle was bound shut with a strip of glowing light and my gun hung in the air just out of reach. I squirmed uncomfortably, kicking one rear leg. Jade stomped along in front of me, her gaze straight ahead and her horn spitting occasional flares of light and crackling sparks that bounced off the stone walls.

I suppose things could have gone worse. She might have broken out the kitchen implements right then and there, in the door of The Castle. Telly had looked on helplessly as Chief Jade dragged me, hooves flailing, off the floor, and marched towards the stairs down to the dungeon. My heart was still oddly calm, but that might have been my coronary passenger trying to keep me from doing something undignified.

Down a side-passage off of the main hall, my captor tore open one of the old service entrances and stepped down onto cold stone steps. There, the only illumination was her horn, bobbing and swaying in front of us as I trailed along behind, gripped tightly by immutable telekinesis. Chief Jade might not have been Granny Glow’s match for sheer power, but for finesse, she might have blown the old mare out of the water.

The stairs descended in a tightening spiral into tunnels older than the city itself in which the earliest pony settlers had sheltered from the attacks of great beasts. A biting chill started to creep into my fur, but still, Jade stomped silently along.

Abruptly, the journey ended at an arch with a faint, flickering glow beyond. The stink of mold and long-congealed bodily fluids hit my nose and I swallowed, lest my stomach decide it was going to pick the worst possible moment to rebel. Jade swung around the corner and I winced as my flank bounced off the wall, setting me spinning.

At the other end of the long row of empty cells, each one able to hold twenty ponies and every one fronted by rusted iron bars, a lantern hung from a wall sconce. Moving at a leisurely pace, Jade trotted down the long, echoing hallway towards the lamp. I wanted to call out, to beg or maybe just scream at her to put me down, but I couldn’t even scratch the vicious itch on my nose that’d been getting worse the deeper we went.

Jade stopped, but I continued floating until I was right beside her, looking into the cell across from the light.

The cell was a disaster area. Bits of what I presumed to be a cot lay scattered along the walls, broken into tiny pieces. The bucket, which I supposed was meant to be used for bodily functions, was upturned against the bars and a torn police blanket was draped over a small lump that breathed very slowly as it lay in one corner.

My throat tightened at the sight of several long, orange feathers laying just behind the bars.

Jade’s horn guttered and I dropped the half meter onto my back with a soft ‘oof’ as all the air in my lungs rushed out. The blood pumping back into my extremities left them tingling. I struggled to get my breath back, looking at the shape under the blanket. It hadn’t moved.

“Miss Cuddles,” Jade said. “Get up.”

The blanketed body didn’t move, but a defiant voice said, “Why should I? You want to tell me how The Detective isn’t coming for me again and how I’ve ruined my future? You… y-you go straight to the moon!” She pulled the blanket tighter around herself, clanking as the iron ball attached to her rear legs shifted. “You go straight to the moon!"

I could have cried, I was so proud of her.

Chief Jade considered this, then flicked her eyes at me. “I rarely say this, because I’m not often surprised by this city, but I was wrong about that. If this stallion with me wants to remain a stallion, however, he’s going to provide me with some very quick answers in a more forthcoming fashion than you did.”

Swift shifted onto her other side, rattling her chains, and looked up. When she saw me, I think her wings tried to spring out from her back because she winced, then struggled upright. Her tail dragged the floor as she limped towards the bars.

I stepped up to the front of the cage as she stood there, gaping at me.

“S-sir?” she squeaked.

“Hey, kid,” I whispered, though not for stealth’s sake. “I’m here to get you out. Are you alright?”

Her light blue eyes shined with moisture. “I’m pretty far from alright, sir. This place stinks and the food’s lousy.” She hiccuped, then jerked her head in Chief Jade’s direction. “You’re...not trading yourself for me or something stupid like that, right?”

“I’ll admit, it crossed my mind, but no… not today. Granted, that’s not saying what I’m doing might not be end up being pretty stupid,” I answered and Swift managed a weak giggle.

Magical energies wrapped themselves around my chest and forced me around to face Jade, who stepped up nice and close. “Hard Boiled. The only reason you’re not furless and locked in that box with your protegee is that you… mentioned my daughter.” At the last word, there was a slight catch in the Chief’s voice, though she covered it well. “I go well out of my way to keep my private life out of my public officiation, so I can’t think of any reason you’d mention her unless… unless you knew something about what’s been going on.”

Lowering myself onto my haunches, I leaned my shoulders against the cold bars and shut my eyes before replying, “Chief, if I could actually tell you everything that’s happened during this last month, I’m pretty sure you’d still have fired me or at least put me on a section eight. I wish I hadn’t set you up the situation at the museum, but I needed you looking elsewhere and to buy myself some cover.”

Jade punched me.

I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t be painful. Possibly because the last pony to deck me had been Night Bloom, who hit like a filly fresh off of her cute-ceanera.

Iris Jade had spent years terrorizing the police force, but she got things done most often without the need for violence. She and I had never come to blows, though it’d frequently been a close thing. More often than not she’d toss me about a bit with her horn when I needed reminding just where the bounds of insubordination really were, but she’d never actually hauled off and socked me, no matter what I’d done. I suppose she’d been saving up, because my head snapped back against the iron bars as her hoof made contact with my jaw and if I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have wound up on my back. I tasted blood.

“So you thought you would link me, publicly, to that wretched church?!” Her horn blasted a thin jet of fire that cut into the ceiling, leaving the stones glowing. “Do you have any conception of what they have put me through?!”

Wiping my muzzle on the back of my hoof, I stepped to one side, putting a little distance between us. “I deserved that. Still, there are things going on that are bigger than you and me.”

“Do you not think I am aware of that, you damn fool!” Jade’s horn ripped me off the floor, dragging me close again. “Do you think someone just absconds with the Chief of Police’s daughter as a prank?!”

I blinked as I looked into her reddened eyes, tears hanging at the edges. A thought slowly crept across the front of my brain. It was such an odd notion that I almost dismissed it, but five seconds of awkward silence later, it was still sitting there like a bad smell in a phone booth.

“You're... clean…” I murmured.

Jade’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

“You’re clean,” I said, a little louder.

Her horn released me and I fell onto my rear. “I don’t know-”

I cut her off, unable to restrain my amazement. “You haven’t taken any pills today, have you?! Or yesterday? You’re not even shaking! You’ve been off the junk for a week, at least, right?”

“Hard Boiled, you are not making a convincing case for keeping your fur!” Jade snapped. “You will-”

I slammed my hoof down hard enough to shake the floor of the cell block.

“Dammit, Jade! You want my help, tell me what happened!”

Act 2, Chapter 16: Devil's Deal

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 16: Devil's Deal

The pony mind, by and large, is ill-equipped to deal with its environment as-is.

This cannot really be 'blamed' on the pony mind; It is difficult to envision many minds capable of truly dealing with Equestria, which has been known to take even the Princesses by surprise from time to time; Lesser souls have been driven to madness by the deceptively colorful no-pony's-land that we call a country.

So ponykind has adapted. One such adaptation was to develop substances that allow the consciousness to create a more comfortable reality to deal with; to allow escape, coping, and recuperation. Equestria has no shortage of these for good reason. While attempts are made to keep the most dangerous substances out of pony hooves, numerous mind-altering substances are nonetheless vital to the continued functioning of society as a whole.

Chief among these is, of course, alcohol - oft-celebrated social lubricant and sorrow drowner, said to be invented over a millennium ago by Princess Luna herself, as alluded to by the nickname for its improvised format, "Moonshine." Cider Season has become an annual herd ritual in numerous places around Equestria; a chance for everyone to buffer their confusions and pains through a cheerful haze formed by fermented apples. There had been, once, a brief attempt to introduce an alcoholic prohibition in Manehattan; This prohibition lasted all of 20 minutes, and that included the corny resolution and a song-and-dance number.

Zap, generally used as a relaxation drug among lower- and middle-income individuals, is an interesting case study. While technically illegal, it's usually harmless enough that a Zap user suspected of nothing else and not generating too many complaints from his neighbors will not generally be the subject of an arrest, unless he is caught smoking it outdoors during a thunderstorm. The discreet Zap smoker generally has little to fear from the law, though less-upstanding officers may take the opportunity to flex their authority.

Sadly, some of these substances are too powerful. Some, such as Ace, are so potent and addictive that ponies sufficiently exposed to them may seek little else; others, such as Beam, can cause ponies to inflict significant harm to themselves or others during bad trips. Some lines had to be drawn.

But one line that's been difficult to draw has been the squiggly loop currently attempting to encircle prescription pharmaceutical abuse; it's difficult to establish just how prevalent it really is. Because they are legal substances in the hooves of those to whom they are prescribed, even the highest and most heavily scrutinized echelons of society are not immune.

--The Scholar

Shouting at Chief Jade was always a poor idea, but without all those drugs in her system, only her charming personality and patience were between my squishy bits and her wrath. That, and a few extra cards I had in my hoof.

****

“You want my help, you put me down this instant. Otherwise, stick me in that cell, you get nothing, and the ones who foalnapped your daughter walk away. You’ll also answer me when I ask a damn question. Are we clear?” I growled from my position, held upside down against the bars of Swift’s cage with a pulsating magical field.

Chief Jade’s horn was squirting a steady stream of fiery light that was quickly making the air in the poorly ventilated cells uncomfortably warm as she pinned me to the wall.

“You are an utter bastard, Hard Boiled,” she snarled, then tossed me to the floor. “I should tear the answers out of you along with your intestines! This is my daughter we are talking about!”

Underneath the threats, I heard the real fear, the genuine desperation clawing at her sensibilities.

“Yes, it is.” I pulled myself up and pointed over my shoulder at Swift, who was looking like she wished she could show off some of those fancy P.A.C.T. combat tactics against the Chief just then. “And you’ve got my partner. So get off your damned throne for a minute so we can work something out!”

Swift perked up, putting her hooves up on the bars. “Wait, the Chief has a daughter? What does that have to do with anything?”

“We got some… deeper intel from Bari and a… recent acquaintance.”

“What sort of Intel? I wish I’d been there for that!” My partner wiggled her hips like a kitten in anticipation.

“I don’t think you’d have enjoyed it all that much. Limerence pinned Bari’s ear to the table with a knife. Bari got real communicative.” I couldn’t cover a smile at the memory.

Swift’s eyes popped, then she giggled. “Awww, now I really wish I was there!”

Jade dropped onto her haunches. “You must excuse me for interjecting, but I haven’t been following your various criminal activities quite so closely until… until the last several days. What… have you been getting up to? What does this… Bari fellow have to do with my daughter?”

I waved a hoof in front of my face, as though to clear the air. “It's complicated. We got a lead on this Bari stallion -- he’s an information broker, fixer, all around scumbag -- and he told us that it was the Church of the Lunar Passage or somepony working with them who paid for the theft of the Armor of Nightmare Moon.”

The Chief’s lips fell open. “What?! The armor is-”

“Yes, it’s been stolen. The armor in the museum is a counterfeit and the curator is dead. It’s unimportant, or maybe very important. I don’t know. The ponies guarding it contacted me. They seem to think if Canterlot gets wind of this, that our targets will disappear.” I rubbed my neck, thinking. “It reeks of rampant flank-saving measures, and they’re trying to keep themselves hidden, but I’m inclined to agree with them that it would be bad if the target of my investigations were to find out we’re aware that armor is gone.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, Hard Boiled, if I find this a bit hard to stomach. Are you saying the Princesses sent… secret agents to guard the armor, and that that vile Church took my daughter to make certain of my complicity in the theft of some ridiculous bloody artifact?!” Her voice was rising well into what I’ve long considered the ‘danger zone’ for mares.

I narrowed one eye at her. “I’m… sorry, I think we might be on two different pages here. Are you saying your daughter is being held against her will? I thought she joined the Church willingly.”

Jade frowned, which brought out deep lines on her forehead. “Now, how would you know that?”

“Like I said… you might want to fire Sergeant Sing-Song,” I repeated.

“Ahhh… his ‘poker-nights.'” She sighed and plucked at her thin mane with a spit of magic. “I attend them anonymously with some regularity, if only to gather intelligence on precisely what’s gone on in various departments. He does make the finest nibblets, too. I’ll be sure to nail his wagging tongue to his card table next I see him.”

Swift and I peered at each other and she shrugged, jiggling the chains around her foreknees.

Jade’s brow furrowed with an emotion I couldn’t identify as she went on, “But… yes, my daughter joined the church. After my husband’s… accident… we didn’t talk much. She needed some ponies who could support her. I suppose she found some.”

My partner murmured sympathetically, “I read about Mr. Jade when I was researching Detrot Police Department. That was awful… to die of a heart attack so young...”

The Chief’s horn flashed menacingly. “Yes, a heart attack. I had to pay good money for it to go unmentioned that he died of said heart attack while in the arms of a mare he could have sired.” She gave her head a slight shake. “Being that it was my Cerise who walked in and found them together, I believe his heart attack may have been only symptomatic of my horn cutting off the flow of blood to his brain.”

I sat there for a many seconds, my eyes wide and my tail clenched under my groin like it was trying to escape.

“Oookay, that was yet another thing I don’t think I particularly wanted to know...” I tried to say, light heartedly, but it faltered and I found myself unconsciously edging backward from Jade.

“I am providing context, Detective.” She replied, with a sweet little half smile that sent ice rushing down my spine. “Make no mistake, if I believe that you are between me and my girl, there will be no hole you can hide in deep enough that I will not find you.”

I peered at Swift, who was looking at the back of Jade’s head with fresh horror.

“I guess it leads back to another question. What makes you think she’s been taken hostage?” I asked, trying to recover my train of thought. Jade had a strange way of derailing it. “I suspected that might be the case, but you make it sound like you’re certain.”

Standing a little straighter, Jade flicked her forehead in a little circle. There was a snap, a bright light, and a pop. A small messenger scroll appeared, of the variety used by most of the delivery services in the city. She caught it before it could hit the ground and passed it to me.

I unrolled it, set it on the stone floor, and read it. It was succinct and to the point.

“We have your daughter. We will contact you with instructions. Fail to follow, and we will send you an inch of her horn every three days until you have.”

“Most of their ‘instructions’ were simple enough. Have patrols avoid this area or ignore that warehouse. Their latest instruction came in a matter of days ago, after you re-emerged.” Jade wrapped the scroll in her magic and tore it into tiny shreds. “It was to look for and arrest you, then keep you until such time as they sent somepony to get you. I suppose you’re going to tell me you think that’s a poor idea?”

“If you want your daughter back, then yes, probably.” I grumbled. “You’ve no idea where she is and your resources are police resources. The kidnappers will have accounted for that. What else? That can’t be all they told you.”

Jade’s shoulders rose defensively and he took a couple of steps back, reminding me for all the world like a nervous cat.

“Come on, dammit! Your daughter’s life, my freedom, and maybe this city’s safety are riding on this! What’s the deal?” I demanded.

“They… said… they knew something about… how I got into office.”

Swift cocked her head. “I remember seeing your ads on T.V! You were so passionate!”

I thought back to the election, trying to remember the details, but at that time, I’d been deep in the bottle. Well, deeper.

Jade’s answer was slow coming. “My… competition -- a very strong mare named Mariposa -- dropped out of the race and I was left facing this nitwit named Corpseweed who turned out to have hidden a history of domestic abuse. A history that just happened to be leaked to the press a few weeks before the election.”

My ears twitched. “Wait, you’re saying somepony… put you in office?”

“I know your history, Hard Boiled, so I know you’re not thick! Do you need me to write it down for you?!” The Chief snarled, poking me in the forehead with her toe. “Understand. I believe in this city. I believe it can be something better, but these… finks, these bottom feeders in city hall want ponies they can control.”

I chew my tongue, thinking. “Are you certain it was them who put you in office?”

“Damned if I can think who else, unless the… the beasts who stole my daughter somehow… knew they’d want…” She trailed off.

“-knew they’d want a pony with a viable hostage in case they needed, for some reason, to control the police department.” I finished.

The air in the dungeon became very suddenly quite thick. I wiped a bead of sweat off the tip of my nose.

“Sir… nopony could think that far ahead, right? I mean, it’s impossible, isn’t it?” Swift asked, worriedly.

“Kid, these characters have been one step ahead of us the entire time. The Church was staying very quiet when Jade got into office and they’ve grown exponentially since then. Limerence doesn’t think this is just the Church-”

“Limerence…” Jade’s face slackened. “As in, Limerence Tome?! The Archivist?”

“Yes? Why?”

“You have made some strange friends, Hard Boiled,” she murmured. “I have a file on Limerence Tome that I used for a doorstop. Nothing he couldn’t beat if it ever came to court, of course, but his father is involved in every kind of illegal artifact smuggling imaginable.”

I tugged at my left ear with one toe and flicked a bit of loose fur on the floor. “I know. The Don and I have been friends for years. As I was saying-”

Jade’s wrapped a thin glow of magic around my muzzle for a half second. “One of these days, we are going to have a complete debriefing, Hard Boiled. I’ll do it with knives, if I have to.”

I sniffed, softly, and smacked the side of her horn with one hoof. It twanged like a banjo and she winced, but the magic around my nose vanished. “We might, but right now, I’m focusing on getting your daughter back and my partner out of this cell. Now, you never did mention why you’re not on anything. Clarify that. If my daughter had been snatched, even if it was by some loopy cult, I’d be up to my ears in pills.”

The Chief bristled, half turning to look at the wall across from Swift’s cell. She sank onto her heels, shutting her eyes. “You must have some… idea of how hard this job is, right, Hardy? I mean, it’s been… I don’t even remember how many years. Enough years. More than enough. Watching, each day, as some part of your city dies or gets hollowed out by pony-shaped monsters ready to rip the very fabric of reality itself just to make a few bits.” Her lip quivered, a surprisingly vulnerable gesture from a pony I’d long thought ate a bowl of razors for breakfast and only bled iron. “You know what my first day of work was?”

“I can’t recall. I was… well, I was pretty drunk. I remember that,” I answered.

“My first day on the job, I went into my office and found a box on my desk with the head of a childhood friend in it and a death threat from the local Jewelers.” She shuddered, slightly. “A stallion named Iron Knuckle ran them. He was… an ugly character.”

Swift gasped, “What?! Really? I never read about that!”

“That’s because I… had it handled,” Jade replied, her face impassive as stone.

“Do I want to know?”

“It doesn’t matter if you do, honestly. I sent a P.A.C.T. team to Iron Knuckle’s front business with Cloud Hammers and an open mission to eliminate an infestation of carnivorous parasprites who’d somehow managed to enter just that building through a basement sewer. Sadly, the evacuation order for the building was… misdirected.”

She rested a hoof on her breast, slipping into an insincerely dramatic tone that sounded just a little like Sugar Lace. “A true tragedy, for a young police Chief, to lose twenty of her citizens to such a mistake. Of course, it was the P.A.C.T.’s responsibility to check the building before sending in their lightning throwers. Sadly, they missed that step. Though when it was discovered the building was being used as an illegal gambling and drug den, it was written off as a minor loss.”

Chief Jade’s lips lifted into a hawkish little smile as she finished, “Being Chief of Police is really all about messaging. I sent the bastards my message, and I’m sure they got it; Never touch the green bitch and her people, or Celestia will not save you.”

My lungs were burning. How long had I been holding that breath? I’d never really put too much thought into Jade’s success, but certainly a willingness to get her hooves dirty would explain how a pony whose history was, ostensibly, that of a bureaucrat had managed to bring about one of the first actual decreases in crime the city had seen in decades. I exhaled sharply, coughing into my hoof.

“Are you… sure you want me knowing all of this?” I asked.

“Hard Boiled, if I couldn’t have you in a cell for the rest of your life, I could just as easily turn you over to these creatures who’ve taken my Cerise.” With that, Jade’s horn burned brightly and I felt a sharp tug on two very essential and personal parts of my anatomy. I cringed, but she’d already released me. “But, I doubt there is a being whose testicles I am presently more in control of. So if you want to spill my dirty laundry, feel free. You’ve put away plenty of ponies in Tartarus Correctional. I’m sure they’d love a chance to show you just how grateful they are for the opportunity to reform their behaviors.”

My ears lay flat at the thought, then I ground my teeth and stood up straight.

“Alright, then. Hard ball. Dancing around won’t help us. Your ‘pill’ habit? What’s the story?”

Turning, she sat facing the far wall as she went on, “Like I said. They killed a friend of mine. Twenty of theirs ended up in the morgue. Oh, they couldn’t trace it to me, but they knew. That’s the Detrot way after all.” Her ears drooped a little. “But… you can’t be that pony forever without it… taking… something from you. Eventually, I damn near shot Fluff’N’Stuff, down in Requisitions, for arguing with me when I demanded another ‘Awake And Aware’ shot from the stakeout stash and a bottle of raw caffeine.”

“Trust me. You’re not the only pony who has ever been tempted to put a round in Fluffers,” I muttered.

“I’m well aware. I am, so far as I know, the only pony to ever actually press a gun to her forehead,” she countered, flicking her platinum mane from one shoulder to the other. “It was a bit of a wake-up call. I went to see a shrink. He started prescribing me this stuff that made… well, it made everything easier.”

“I take it that didn’t last?”

“Nothing ever does,” she said with a shake of her head, getting to her hooves and pacing back and forth across the front of the cage. “I moved from one pill to the next. I took more. I took less. I mixed.” Her ears fluttered as she tilted her head toward the ceiling, searching for answers there. “My daughter...” she gulped and forged ahead. “My daughter… stopped... having a mother."

Strange as it may sound, I had the completely irrational urge to comfort the Chief. I imagine that would have been similar to trying to comfort a manticore in heat, but she was still a mare and still working on the side of justice. Call me a ravening sexist, but I’ve always felt a stallion who won’t comfort a mare when she’s having a rough time isn’t worth the testosterone pumping through his veins.

Jade continued, bitterly, “Then… then... that damn shrink...up and vanished. I thought the little wormer left me, high and dry. Four days later, I get a call from this medical wholesaler who said they’d ‘heard’ from my ‘psychiatrist’ that I might be running low on medications and asked if I needed to place an order. Didn’t even ask for a prescription. I should have… dammit, I should have thought deeper into it, but the withdrawal was so bad by then…”

Putting a leg across her breast, she shivered from nose to tailtip. “Anyway, the blasted freaks fed me whatever I asked for. After you vanished and my daughter… sent me that letter… they asked if I wanted to ‘increase’ my orders. I’d finally had enough. I decided to start acting like Chief of Police.” Her nostrils flared. “I tried to hunt the pill pushers down. I called up Starlight Industries. The pills always came in their boxes, but they said they didn’t even have me on record! When you came to my office last week, I was on the last of my final shipment and trying to wean myself.”

Swift’s wings rustled against her sides as she shuffled closer to the bars. “Y-you mean… you think the ponies who t-took your daughter were…”

“Drugging me stupid. Yes, I know it sounds insane. Kidnapping my daughter, my psychiatrist, and getting me to drug myself... You don’t have to tell me how crazy it sounds!” She slid onto her stomach, ignoring the layer of grime that attached itself to her belly fur. “It’s like they...wanted...me in office, but too out of my mind to be effective.”

“That… would fit with some of what we’ve been seeing, actually.” I said, thinking. “Some of the events I’ve witnessed lately make me think this is some kind of… coup, but if it is, it’s too... Unstructured. This is almost chaos for the sake of chaos, but it could just be that I don’t have all of the pieces yet. What about your own investigations? Turn up anything?”

Jade shook her head. “I didn’t make the connection until a couple weeks ago. By then, it was too late. The wholesaler apparently knew I was on to them. The numbers I usually used had all been disconnected. There were no records left. They were thorough. Even the shipping slips were useless.” She shut her eyes, tightly. “That’s when I got the letter from the kidnappers.”

“Everypony has had a wake up call lately. I’d love to tell you about mine, but your opinion of my sanity is probably already low.”

Jade shifted one front hoof closed to the other. “I… it took that to make me realize what was going on. I had… nothing. Nothing, but you, you seething pile of manure… and every spell, every enchantment, every artifact I used to find your impossible ass came up empty. How did you even manage that?!”

“Trust me, I’m in the market for explanations, same as you,” I answered. “I’m… glad you didn’t just phone them the instant I showed up on your doorstep.”

“I’m certain somepony in our office has. I am not so naive as to think this department is without a healthy helping of rotten apples. Couldn’t you have contacted me privately? Did you need to face down the dragon, sword drawn?”

I tilted my head towards Swift. “I was pissed off. Speaking of that, can we get those manacles off the kid?”

The Chief snorted, softly. “She put two officers in hospital with broken noses while we were dragging her in.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s in an iron cage. One which I will be getting her out of sooner, rather than later.” I pointed at the chains binding my partner.

Jade rolled her eyes. “You’ve gotten soft.”

“I know,” I groaned, then gestured again towards the restraints. “Manacles. Now.”

Swift held up her hooves and the Chief’s magic wrapped around the lock, snapping it open. The pegasus whimpered as blood flowed back into her hooves, dancing on all fours.

“Ow! Oh, that smarts!” she whimpered, rubbing one fetlock with the other.

Shrugging my coat off, I laid it on the ground and stretched out. “So, your daughter’s being held, most likely by the Church or somepony directing them who now knows I was here and you captured me. That leaves us in a bit of a position.”

Jade raised one eyebrow. “I’m still curious as to what makes you think I’m releasing you. I tapped every favor and resource I had through the city to find you over the last few days and the best I could do was catch myself up, which ended up involving the sifting of a mountain of rumors. Your attack on the Monte Cheval? Your… associations with that psychotic pervert dragon down in the Heights? Be glad they didn’t reach the papers!”

“You need somepony outside of Detrot Police Department who won’t be missed if they should go missing.”

“So what do you suggest? I have ‘captured’ you, most certainly, in the eyes of far too many. I don’t believe we can get around that easily.” Jade murmured. “These… persons… will want a call back from me very soon to confirm you are in captivity. Unless I send that-”

“I’m going to hit you with this knock-out talisman I swallowed before I came into the building,” I replied. “I vomited it up along with a lock picking kit, then hit you with it and cracked the locks on the dungeon doors.”

“What? I’d have felt… ahhh...” Realization lit in her eyes. “Nopony would believe you simply showed up without some plan to escape. That would be ridiculous,” Jade murmured, then looked at me quizzically. “You… did have an escape plan, right? In case I just dumped you in a cell?”

“Of course.” I coughed, wishing I’d been that prepared. I hoped Limerence wasn’t about to drive a war-scooter through the front door of the Castle. “Granted, our time frame is now… significantly… shorter. I don’t want to push my luck, so I’m going to make my moves on the Church as quickly as I can. It may mean losing the armor, at least temporarily, but I’d rather have the full force of Detrot P.D. behind me-”

“You won’t,” Jade exhaled, unhappily.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Excuse me?” I hopped to my hooves. “I risk my neck chasing a dead broad around the entire city, I get shot in the chest, I face down legions of mobsters, psychos, and freaks...and you are tossing me under the bus when this is over?!”

“What choice have you left me with?!” the Chief snapped. “You retrieve my daughter, I will tell our people to look the other way where you’re concerned and I’ll hunt the cowardly, gutless monsters who snatched my child, but Hard Boiled… if even half of what I’ve heard is true, that’s the best I can do. Right now, you are a wanted criminal, with knowledge of matters affecting national security. It’ll be a miracle if we can’t keep the Royals themselves out of this mess, if that armor is really gone!”

“If they get involved, it really will be gone. Dammit, I’ve done what I had to do! I need your help!”

“I understand, but you’ve had your big boy horseshoes stomping all around the city like a Minotaur in a ceramics shop.” She mimed holding a phone to her ear with one hoof. “Sweet heavens, do you know I called the Essy Office this morning to requisition assistance from the Ladybug Collective in finding you, only to discover, wonder of wonders, that you already had! That creature… Queen… or whatever its name is… fed me a line about not violating your rights to a functional court defense when I demanded to see what in Tartarus you’d been up to the last month!”

Thank you, Queenie. I owe you a bucket of donuts and coffee for that.

“Chief, this is bigger than either of us. This is bigger than the ‘good name’ of the police department. We have to find out what is going on in this city. Somepony was willing to kill a young girl, a cop, a top level mob boss, and kidnap the Chief of Police’s daughter, along with potentially risking the ire of the Royals to steal that armor. That isn’t even mentioning whatever else they’ve been up to.”

“And you still haven’t even given me a solid reason to let you walk up those stairs, Hard Boiled.” Jade blew a bit of her mane out of one eye and prodded me in the chest. “What are you going to do? Will you simply bust into a Church of the Passage and pummel somepony until they give away the location of my child?”

I’d hoped she wouldn’t ask me that. She’d given me at least one lead. Her psychiatrist might be a worthwhile avenue of research, or possibly just Astral herself, but the truth was that I didn’t actually know what I was going to do.

Infiltrating a religious group, particularly one that may or may not have had you killed, is tricky business. Astral was downright shocked to see me coming out of the Museum, but I’d been so focused on my plan of escape that I hadn’t taken time to consider whether or not there was another reason. That or maybe she hadn’t been directly involved.

Umbra, Animus, and Armature might have been a good direction, but I got the feeling that would lead me a bit further down the rabbit hole than I was ready to go without first taking care of the Chief’s ‘situation’. Even having her off my tail was likely to count for a lot.

All of that aside, I needed Swift. She was essential, and all other matters were secondary.

“I’ve got a plan ” I said, simply.

“Yes, a plan! Hard Boiled, the alcoholic who, until recently, managed to keep his job on the power of that mark on his ass alone despite offending every dignitary, breaking every protocol, and charging headlong into the lion’s teeth every time it presents its mouth… That Hard Boiled has a plan. You’ll pardon me if I want to know some details of this plan!” she snarled, tossing her mane.

“If I tell you, you’ll think it’s impossible, dangerous, and likely to get everyone involved killed.” I considered this answer, then nodded. “But, since you have very few options other than getting the Princesses down here or praying that the individuals who show up to pick me up also drop off your daughter in the process -- for which you have no guarantee -- I think you’re going to have to take it on faith that I can get her back.”

Jade’s face slowly sank into an incredulous expression. “I… Hard Boiled, you do realize that is perhaps the least convincing argument for allowing you to maintain your freedom I have ever heard, right?”

“It’s this, or you’ll probably be getting bits of Cerise in the post.”

That statement was like a bucket of extremely cold water in the face. The Chief’s lips thinned to an angry line and her eyes glittered with fury. I could almost feel all the terrible things she intended for the ponies who’d stolen her little girl.

“Death is too good for them… and if I allow Cerise to be the point of leverage that ponies can use to get to me, I may as well lock her away for the rest of her life.” With a sound of pained resignation, the Chief floated a keyring out of the darkness and slotted a long, black key into the door of Swift’s cell. “Therefore, you will retrieve my daughter and when she is safe, in my hooves, I will… apply… myself to seeing to it that you are allowed to finish your investigations and that you will spend as little time in jail as possible. Are we clear?”

I’d been offered worse deals, of late. Not many, but a few.

“Crystalline,” I murmured.

The door of the cage open and Swift threw herself out, crashing into my forelegs like an extremely happy puppy being let out from behind the doggy gate. “I knew you’d get me out of here, sir!” she squealed, putting her front hooves up on my chest.

“Oof! Alright, kid, alright! You’re fine!” I patted her on the back a few times, carefully avoiding her busted wing. “We’ve got to get your gun and vest, first. Chief?”

“They’ll be delivered to the bovine musclehead who works the front door of the Vivarium later today,” she said, shifting her tail to one side as she sat on the gritty stone, her horn glistening darkly. “There is, perhaps, one other… minor… matter which I think you will wish to look into. I don’t know exactly if it will end up helping you, but I figured I needed a...call it a ‘trump’ card in case, for any reason, I was unable to locate you before a ‘deadline’.”

“What sort of… trump card… are we talking about, here?” I asked.

Jade lowered her eyes slightly. “There is a pony who contacted me a couple of days ago asking about you. I have them stashed in one of my personal safe houses for the moment with a promise to help them with a matter. You say this is all wrapped up in the death of the gray filly a month ago? I think this pony may have some information that will, if nothing else, prove illuminative regarding that. I’ve got them at the Burning Love, in those rooms the owner rents out. I assume you’re familiar with him?”

I sucked my teeth. “I doubt there’s a cop in the city that isn’t. He and my father were friends when I was a colt. The Prince and I go back a long way.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Jade sniped. “You and he share an irritatingly similar lack of decorum.”

“From you? I’ll take that as a compliment.” I shot back.

“Is this… pony you have staying there… are they somepony you thought you could trade to these kidnappers?” Swift chimed in, curiously.

The Chief scowled at the young pegasus. “I’m not… proud of this action, but my little girl is the most important thing in my life. If you ever have children, you will understand. I shant expand on the details, lest there still be ears listening, but-” She turned back to me. “-before you do anything rash, speak to this pony. What this individual told me made little sense in the context I had available, but now… it makes more, and I believe you will find some of your answers there.”

“I can work with that. What’s our escape route?” I wanted to know, glancing back in the direction of the stairs. “I don’t… really know this part of the Castle all that well.”

Turning to the wall, the Chief’s horn sparked. “A very wise being once said ‘Never build a dungeon you aren’t prepared to be locked in one day.' I think Princess Celestia took that to heart when she built this place.”

The stones of the wall rolled back on themselves in a way that my rational mind said was probably impossible, but magic does things of that nature on a regular basis. The doorway behind the wall revealed a rickety metal staircase spiraling up and out of sight.

“There’s a hallway at the top that leads to a sewer grate. I’ll be casting a sedative spell on myself the minute you’re out of here, so don’t try to come back this way. The door won’t open for anypony but a unicorn.” She pointed up the stairwell. “If you need to communicate with me for any reason, leave a note by the sewer grate. I’ll check it once a day.” She thought, briefly, then added, “Also, if I get any parts of Cerise...even a hoof shaving...I swear, I will hunt you all the way to the moon if I have to and these rats will get only the parts of you necessary to tell them what they want to know. The rest, I am keeping. Understood?”

“Understood,” I muttered, then raised one ear. “There is one thing you could do which might improve our odds of success. Could you pull all of our files on the Church of the Lunar Passage and have them delivered with Swift’s equipment?”

She nodded, then gestured with her toe at the secret passage.

I picked up my coat, moving to the stairs with Swift fast on my heels, and started up, when a thoughtful voice called to me, “Oh, and Detective? One last thing.”

I held my breath as cold sweat trickled down my sides.

“In pursuit of my daughter, I am authorizing you to continue the use of the Ladybug Collective. They are technically police materiale, after all, and after I discovered you’d been using them, I gave direct orders to the big one not to communicate in an official capacity with anypony operating without the blessing of the department. Since I don’t fancy another call to those morons at the Essy Office, nor communicating with that ridiculous insect again, you’ll need this. Don’t go flashing it around!”

A gleaming piece of steel on a long, silver chain drifted up the shaft, clutched in a field of magic, until it hung in front of my face. I stared at it for several seconds, then leaned forward so the chain slipped around my neck.

My badge sank down onto my chest and I closed my eyes, feeling its heft like a comforting friend back from a long absence.

“Thanks, Chief!” I looked up and yelled back. The secret passage was already closing, but Jade's eyes were locked on me with a frightening intensity. She didn't say anything more; she didn't need to. The message in her gaze was unmistakable.

If you make me regret this, Detective, then you will regret it tenfold.

She stood, unblinking, conveying that message, until the way was sealed completely, leaving me with nothing but a badge, a partner, and a very long, very dark climb.

Act 2, Chapter 17: Hunka Hunka Burning Love

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 39: Hunka Hunka Burning Love

How often ponies wish that we could take things back, unmake decisions, erase events.

Historians do not particularly wish this. While those with considerable magical power are capable of limited time travel, most historians do not wish to have to ever again sift through paradoxes like those created by the Battle of the World Cuckoo, which earns the distinction of being the only engagement in the Crusades to literally have been over before it began.

While actually deleting events is out of reach for all but the most powerful spellcasters, deleting records of those events is much more accessible and, in a lot of cases, nearly as good.

The fact of the matter is that Equestria's recordkeeping system has not advanced much over the centuries. While magic sense-impression recorders exist, and the Academy has recently begun experimenting with arcanelectric methods of information storage, these have yet to bear fruit in any way that might be economical to the consumer, and thus, most records are still kept on paper, on scrolls, and in books. Even Detrot's vaunted File Cloud is still just a convenient method of moving paper documents and physical evidence about.

Therefore, erasing these records is simply a matter of setting fire to the right location and making it look like an accident (which will otherwise generate more records), or finding the right pony and convincing them that the bits you have in your teeth are worth more than the continued existence of the police report describing your illicit encounter with a pool toy.

Though while you can destroy paper, and thus the ability of authorities to independently verify that you embezzled enough funds from the local orphanage to stone a whale to death with the coinage, it is much harder to destroy memories. Even your attempt to destroy the paper may create more memories that you tried to destroy the paper. Try to destroy the pony with those memories, and you'll generate many, many more memories.

Make no mistake: Every dark thing you do, somepony will remember. The question is whether or not they remember you.

--The Scholar

Swift and I had to heave against the sewer grate together to get it to shift, but when it did, weights and counterweights hidden in the walls rattled the heavy metal bars open. We both emerged into the morning light to stand in a wide, damp gully beside the road leading up to the Castle.

Swift took a long-belated breath of freedom. In Detrot, freedom had a slight tinge of automobile fumes and hobo urine, but that didn't matter to my now-smiling partner. “I knew you were coming, Sir.”

“Couldn’t exactly leave you in there, could I?” I replied, glancing back at her. A few tears had gathered at the sides of her eyes, but she was grinning broadly.

“How did you know where I was?” she asked, tugging at the bandages around her injured wing with her teeth until they came free.

“A little bat flew right up and whispered it in my ear.” I snickered to myself.

Swift looked, understandably, confused. “What?”

“Kid, if I have to explain that on an empty stomach I don’t think the answer will make much more sense. Besides, we need to get your gear and find Limerence before he demonstrates, in spectacular fashion, his pessimistic analysis of my ability to get myself out of these situations.”

Swift gave my trenchcoat's hem a light tug, then flicked her wing at a spot across the street. A bit of bright yellow Night Trotter body-work stuck out from behind a set of dumpsters.

“There we are. Safe and sound,” I murmured.

Gingerly, she tested her wing, wiggling her feather tips. “Oof… that’s going to ache, but I think I can fly.”

I nodded, hoisting myself out of the gully and peering down the street. “Try to keep out of the air for a few more hours. We’ll have the doctors at the Vivarium give you a look over and get you back in fighting shape.”

“I really hope I never end up in a cell again. That was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Then don’t call the front line of the Detrot Police Department when they’re looking for you!” I snapped. “Have you never heard of a vocal trace talisman? Worse, you stuck around to see who’d show up, didn’t you?”

Swift’s ears drooped contritely, and she slid onto her behind. “I… I wasn’t thinking. It was all that excitement a-and-”

“You don’t do it again and we’ll call it ‘lesson learned’, alright?”

She bobbed her head and turned in a little circle at the bottom of the trench, holding up her forelegs, expectantly. I couldn’t hold in an amused chuckle when I realized she was stuck. She looked down at herself and huffed, “There’s nothing funny about being short, sir!”

“Trust me, walk around without the benefit of feathers for long enough and this becomes real funny.” I leaned way down and caught her scruff in my teeth, hauling her up beside me.

Dusting ourselves off, we strolled towards the car, side by side. Surprising as it may sound, it was a fantastic feeling to have the kid beside me again… but, as if sensing my comfort, that was when the keening wail of an alarm drifted over the walls of the Castle. We hurried a little faster.

Taxi must have seen us coming half-way across the street, because the car’s engine blasted the road with thick arcs of lightning as she shoved the dumpster out of the way with the front bumper. I heard some shouts from up the street and broke into a gallop.

“Sweets, I thought I told you to go find someplace to hole up!” I shouted, ripping open the car door and throwing myself in.

“And I ignored you! What’s different from how we normally operate?” she shot back, turning a dial under the dash board as Swift rolled onto the seat, using her rear hoof to close the door.

The engine roared, wreathing us in arcanelectric fire, then we were gone at speeds most ill advised. Behind us, police cruisers were just starting to gather themselves for a pursuit that was already a foregone conclusion.

****

“How did you know I was even going to walk out of there?” I asked, both hooves up on the back of the seat. We were driving down mid-town, crossing a busy lane which was packed with other taxis. The perfect cover, despite having left behind our pursuers more than twenty minutes ago. I didn’t want to take chances.

“If you were that easy to kill, I’m pretty sure Jade would have done it years ago. That or I would have,” Taxi answered. “Now, where’s the bookworm?”

“I told him to contact the Don. Can we call the Archive?”

“Loosely speaking, yes. Lim gave me a contact protocol for them, but it’s only one way.”

Taxi passed me a hoof mic, twisted a couple of dials on the radio, then pressed a button. The soft hum of a ringing phone filled the car. After three rings, the line clicked and picked up. Nopony spoke, but the line was definitely open.

I thought for a moment, then pressed the ‘send’ button on the mic and leaned down to speak. “Tell Limerence to meet us at the Nest.”

The line clicked twice, then buzzed. I hoped that meant ‘message received’ and not ‘sending an assassin to eliminate all evidence of your existence.' The two are sometimes easily confused where these sorts of systems are concerned.

Taxi took her mic and hung it on a hook by the steering wheel. “Alright, next stop?”

“We’re going to get some food and give the Chief an hour or two to get back on her hooves and get Swift’s equipment to the Vivarium. Then we’ll go hope there’s not another angry, crazy unicorn waiting for us there.”

****

There’s a certain persistent cliche about cops and donuts. I can’t say it’s not completely, totally true, which is unfortunate because such stereotypes can be hurtful in the wrong hooves. Granted, if you’re a cop, your skin had best be thick enough to enjoy your damn donuts with pride or you won’t last very long.

Taxi, as if more proof was needed that "cop" was still etched somewhere on her soul, was on her third chocolate frosted devil cake and showing no signs of slowing down as we sat in the Night Trotter across from the little donut shop just inside the Heights.

Swift sucked a bit of frosting off her toe and carefully selected a double-glaze with extra sprinkles, stuffing the whole thing into her muzzle. “Mmm… this… herp-” she coughed, spraying me with crumbs, then covered her mouth with her toe and chewed more carefully before she spoke again. “Mmmhmmm... this would only be better if I had some chicken to go with it. I wonder if I can find a bakery that will frost chicken.”

“Don’t tell me if you do, kid. I don’t want to know.” I chewed on the business end of a kruller that would have made a decent pillow in a pinch. I’d already gone through the bagels, not having realized just how hungry a minor encounter with a psychotic being of unfathomable power will make a pony.

“Hardy," said Taxi quietly, "something about what you said about these villains drugging the Chief or… I guess getting her to drug herself… just sounds… off, to me."

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed. “That’s not the first thing lately that’s felt like it was somehow… chaos for the sake of chaos. The tap on the Vivarium might have been a disaster by itself if that information had gotten out, not to mention the gang war that could have followed. Cosmo’s blackmail diary was a bomb, too.”

“I wonder, sir,” Swift mused. “What… what if they’d taken her daughter, then… destroyed the Vivarium so Stella wasn’t keeping the Heights safe, then the Jewelers and the Cyclones started fighting for some reason and the Chief was too out of it to do anything. What would have happened if they somehow got the blackmail diary and all the Vivarium recordings… and… and released that then?”

There was a collective swallow of fear.

“We… don’t even know they knew about Cosmo’s diary, do we?” Taxi asked, voice tense with a sort of terror.

“No, we don’t, but I think it’s an easy thing to put together that somepony with tentacles in as many places as he had his would need something like that,” I answered, tipping my hat back on my head and wiping my muzzle with one fetlock. “His death should have created a power vacuum, where ‘They’ -- whoever ‘They’ are -- could have installed somepony who was directly friendly to their aims. That pony would have had both the Vivarium tap and Cosmo’s blackmail diary, or at least, his extortion files...which I guess is more or less the same thing.”

I sat a bit straighter as pieces began to assemble themselves into a coherent picture. A thought struck me.

“Bari!” I exclaimed. “They’d have put Bari in Cosmo’s place; a puppet they could easily control. He would have gotten access to Cosmo’s extortion information… and maybe the diary, itself, too. Even a short list of all the ponies Cosmo had under his hoof could have turned this city upside down.”

My driver’s lip twitched, as though she were afraid to say what was on her mind. When she finally spoke, it was with considerable trepidation. “He could have blamed the death of Cosmo on the Cyclones. That would have started a war, right? The death of a top level boss would have been a good reason to call a stomp. Except it wouldn’t just have been Cosmo’s Jewelers involved. It would have been all of the Jeweler families!”

“If… we hadn’t given the blackmail book to Stella and he hadn’t taken the Monte Cheval and dispersed the Red Hoof…” Swift shuddered.

I turned to look out the window, feeling a creeping chill that made the donuts I’d just gorged myself on feel like a stomach full of live eels.

“Then if chaos was… the goal… we’d be up to our ears in blood and fire right now.”

****

There was one fact that, even amidst the gravity of our talk, none of us felt like mentioning aloud; but it hung over our heads, quieting our conversations as we drove back to the Nest.

If the ponies or beings or... whatever they were... stayed true to form, they were likely to have multiple plans operating simultaneously. While a gang-war was certainly bad, such things have a tendency to find a balance relatively quickly and if the violence became severe, the Princesses could have intervened.

Unfortunately, much as I wanted to ride off and fight the beasties, I was stuck with one particular quest which, if successful, meant the Chief would no longer be pursuing me directly. The only reason I wasn’t ducking under the city’s carpets again was that I doubted my ability to continue running for more than a short period if the Chief did, in fact, devote all of her un-chemically altered brain power to finding me. That and the line of investigation put before me fit neatly into a direction I was already headed.

The ladybugs were likely to be a help, if it came to another of those unpleasant invasion missions or a need to get some secretive information from an unsuspecting individual. I’d no way of knowing if Queenie had been watching me. I searched my body as best as I could, but if there had been a ladybug about my person, it was long bored and off to see other things. But knowing the Collective, they probably had other eyes on me.

We needed to go see this pony Jade had tucked away, in case her days started raining pieces of her daughter, and the Burning Love was one of the few police safe houses I wasn’t feeling too sad to be going to. First things first, though.

****

“Ah don’t think e’s had enough. Do ye think e’s had enough, Minox?”

“Celestia save me, I got her back, didn’t I?! Put me down!” I howled, kicking my forelegs.

“I zink ze Detective mebbe needs anoder reminder he iz to make sure ze birdy is safe,” the minotaur chuckled.

I dropped into the bucket positioned under my head with a wet splash. Water rushed up my nose. I coughed violently, then was pulled out by one rear leg.

“What’d Ah tell ye ‘bout gettin’ mah little birdy hurt?” A densely wrinkled face swung into view as I was turned to face Granny Glow. The bucket of water under my head only had about half of its contents left, the rest of which was mostly soaked into my mane and ears.

“She fell down some stairs!” I snapped. “I’m not responsible for that!”

“Ye let’er get locked up by that maniacal bitch what runs yer police department. Ye wanna tell me that wasn’t yer fault?”

“I... dammit, it wasn’t!”

splash

Hoofsteps echoed down the corridor, along with the voices of my partner and driver conversing with one another.

“Hey, Gran? I’m done with my shower and the healers fixed my wing...”

They stopped in the doorway of the little room off one of the Vivarium corridors.

There was a pause.

“Gran! You set him down right this instant!”

****

“I’m sorry, sir…”

“That’s the sixth time you’ve said it, kid. Enough. I’m damp, I’m not dead. Your grandmare’s just protective.”

Swift sank back into the sullen silence she’d only broken with apologies since we’d left the Vivarium. Her tactical vest was back on, bunny patches and all, along with Masamane, but that didn’t seem to be bringing her terribly much comfort.

Updating Stella on our progress had taken longer than it should have, especially since Swift took a full ten minutes chewing out her grandmother for dunking me in the bucket, but in a way, I was grateful for the soak. Some masochistic part of my brain that had been felt I hadn't suffered sufficiently for my partner’s predicament a few hours earlier was now well and truly satisfied, and I couldn’t bear After Glow any particular ill will for the dousing, deserved or not.

Taxi hadn’t been pleased, though, and I had to physically restrain her from trying to do something stupid to Glow. Minox caught a knee in the groin for his participation, though after a short audience with Stella during which I gave him as much of recent events as I could, Taxi and Minox were once more cuddling like kittens in a basket.

****

The return trip to the Nest had required us to duck several police cruisers, though even the ones I’m reasonably sure had made us seemed strangely disinterested. After the third one failed to give chase, I relaxed in my seat and closed my eyes. For the first time in a couple of days, I let my shoulders unwind as the streets passed by. A light shower from a nearby weather factory set up a spray off the front tires of the Night Trotter that made the world outside the car’s windows seem gray and diffuse, somehow not entirely real.

I listened to the tires and to Swift’s breath.

The file on the Lunar Passage lay across my lap. I hadn’t opened it. Part of me was dreading cracking that file.

Publicly approaching Astral Skylark was one thing, but for every pony who agreed with her publicly or wore the robes, there were likely a hundred who harbored private griefs and grievances they’d gladly point at Princess Celestia, whether or not she was responsible. The Jewelers, despite all of their vast resources, were relatively few in number compared to a religious group that spanned the city from end to end. Skylark’s program was a popular Monday morning radio spot.

Investigating her, if she was dirty, was tantamount to suicide. Too many ponies sympathized with her brand of insanity.

It was no wonder the Chief was inclined to devote an expendable asset to the effort.

Chaos. It was an odd thought that there would be ponies whose goal was to promote chaos within the city. Certainly, there must have been some underlying investment they were making, some long term plan which would develop out of the madness they seemed bent on creating, but damn me if I could see what it was.

A gang war that would have lead to that quantity of death and violence would have affected every stratum of Detrot society, not even mentioning the release of all those secrets. That might have, single-hoofedly undermined every major institution from the police department right up to city hall.

It was difficult to imagine what kind of a mind could have assembled such a plan.

At the center of this web, that lawfirm continued to rear its head, but I couldn’t even begin to delve into their secrets until after Chief Jade’s daughter was safe.

Deep in these thoughts, I barely registered the crossing into the Skids until the brakes almost jolted me out of my seat as we pulled up in front of the double gates leading down to the Nest.

Wisteria, her pregnant belly almost dragging the pavement, trotted around the corner just as I slid out onto the pavement. It lacked some of the verve of her usual entrance, but her presence was no less imposing.

“Ah, Crusada! De Aroyo be glad to be seein’ ja!” she called, stopping in front of me with a pleased smile on her face. “Dem Archivist ye be bringin’. He be already below.”

“Thank you for letting Limerence in, Wisteria.”

“We was almost not, until he foolish self, he say ye was going into de lair of de green she-beast of de cop-land and had charged he wid’ makin’ sure ye escape! I and I see ye have all of ye pieces. Must have been some escape, if ye be here and he ‘ave not left de Nest!”

“I’m pretty sure the kids will want to hear that one later, if I get the chance to sit down and tell it.” I pushed my hat back and looked out over the streets of the Skids, which were alive with various species coming and going from door to door, neighbor to neighbor. “Speaking of things that somepony will want to hear about, what do the Aroyos know about the Church of the Lunar Passage?”

Wisteria’s ears flattened and she drew in a slow breath. “Dey be… bad news, son. One of ours, she leave, she go join dem. Rose Thyme be her name. Rose, she go… she come back. When she come back, she speak in tongues and have no memory, but wander here. Strange t’ings she say, when she talk these days. She not talk often.”

Swift edged up beside me. “What sort of things?”

Another breath, and the Aroyo shuddered from head to hoof, like somepony had walked over her grave. “Rose… she say dey take her a place, show her t’ings she will not speak of… but she say a demon heads dem. A demon, wid wings and horn.”

“An… alicorn?!” Taxi blanched.

“Aye... if she be believed. De girl were mad. Her mind be walkabout.”

“Where is this ‘Rose’? I'd like to speak to her,” I said.

“She be wid de Ancestors now...” Wisteria’s lavender face sank. “I and I be sorry, Crusada, but dere be no speakin’ wid her.”

“She’s… dead?” Swift whispered.

“Wid de Ancestors,” Wisteria repeated, then turned to look at the sky. “I and I must be back to patrol. Ye be wary, Crusada. Ye be in danger most grave, if ye go against de Lunar Passage.”

****

The Nest was a welcome rest, however little I might have of it. Swift turned the wheel on the vault-like door and stood back as it unsealed itself from the wall, revealing our living space.

Seated at the make-shift table in the center of the pile of bean-bag chairs, Limerence had two screwdrivers grasped with his magic and was bent over a bundle of wires. He glanced up, then sat back with a pleased smile and set his project to one side.

“Detective! I must say, strange as it might sound, that I am glad to see you.” He stood and trotted up to us, turning to Swift. “And with the package in tow, no less!”

“The ‘package’ is fine, thanks for asking,” Swift grumped.

“Do I dare ask why you’re so glad to see me?” I inquired.

Nodding at the table, Limerence exhaled, unhappily. “Well, the bomb I was planning on using to open the dungeon cells came with a faulty detonator. What you get for buying on short notice, you know.” He grunted and used his horn to lift the wires off the table, dropping the entire mess into the garbage. “I thought to repair it, but found the timing device unreliable, so decided to replace it. I fear I may have lost track of time.”

“Wait, did you say bomb?!” Taxi gasped, shying back from him. I took two involuntary steps back myself.

“Oh, yes. Don’t worry, there is no explosive currently attached,” the librarian replied, setting his screwdrivers back in a small tool kit beside his work space. “I was waiting on a call from a friend of mine to see if he might supply some T.N.T. for the purpose. Even in these enlightened days, a pony must purchase his fireworks well ahead of time if he hopes to use them at his leisure. I suppose I will have to tell my friend his services are no longer needed.”

“You...you were going to blow up the Detrot Police Department’s underground cells...to get us out?” I asked, incredulously.

“It was to be a shaped charge. Damage would have been minimal.” Limerence said with a dismissive shake of his mane.

“I think I’m either worried for your sanity or deeply touched. I’m not sure which.”

I thought I saw a hint of a smile, but Limerence quickly cleared his throat and as his face slid back into its usual stoic impassivity. “The two are not mutually exclusive. As you are here and appear relatively unscathed, may I assume that Chief Iris Jade is, at least until we have achieved whatever task she must have set for us, off our immediate tail?”

“Yes, and her daughter is the task,” I answered. “Before we start figuring out how to tackle that particular hydra, we’ve got a discovery process. Your favorite part, I’m certain.”

“Research?” Limerence’s eyes flashed with interest.

I pulled open my coat and tossed the file labeled ‘Church of the Lunar Passage’ onto the table in front of the librarian.

“Research.”

****

Three hours passed. Taxi, Swift and I passed most of that time with idle conversation and a few board games Swift found tucked away in one of the closets. I wasn’t especially good at any of them, although the one called ‘Enigmatic Plot Advancement Device!’ was lovely good fun. I won in the tenth round with ‘Celestia’ in the ‘Throne Room’ with the ‘Rainbow Ray Of Ultimate Blasting.'

Limerence hadn’t left those files except to make a couple of phone calls to the Archive about half-way through. An Aroyo knocked on the vault door about thirty minutes after that with another stack of papers. An hour later, a gleam of predatory glee in his eyes, Limerence rose from his seat and left the room. An hour after that, he returned and bowed to us, declaring himself ‘prepared.' Prepared for what, he didn’t say; he simply led us into a spare room, in which he’d laid out a number of beanbag chairs and a set up a projector of some sort, then he bade us sit as he picked up a remote control. The projector clicked, clanked, then hummed to life.

A picture lit up on the wall, depicting a crescent moon wrapped around a crowning sun; the emblem of the church.

“The Church of the Lunar Passage!” Limerence declared, crossing in front of the project. The image played across his blue body, following his form as he walked across to face the three of us. “Thirty years ago, it was a non-entity. Today, it represents the single largest religious group in all of Detrot, aside the typified casual worship of the alicorn diarchy that the Princesses have been unsuccessful in stamping out, despite their best efforts.”

The remote clicked and the image changed. A sea of ponies in blue, glittering robes stood together inside some type of large office building. At their head, barely recognizable at that distance, a mare’s shape stood with both forelegs upraised.

“Their faith, at least from what we’ve gathered, appears to revolve around the usual acts of charity, forgiveness, and compassion. It has the unfortunate added wrinkle of including what could be termed ‘Lunar Dominionism’; the exaltation and dominance of Princess Luna and the things she represents over Princess Celestia and her demesne. This is a simplification, though the information we in the Archive have acquired from former members is often sketchy and vague. Not surprisingly, few but the innermost circle are likely aware of the true aims of the Church.”

“Lim, we already know all of this,” I said, impatiently, half rising from my seat. “And beyond that, when in the world did you have time to make slides?”

“I don’t have time to give you a placement test, so you’re getting the full monty, Detective,” Limerence retorted, using a little burst from his horn to push me back onto the beanbag chair. “The less time you spend protesting the quicker it will be over.”

“Alright, alright…” I slumped.

“Anyway, where did I leave off? Right!” He clicked the remote. The next picture was a familiar mare, resplendent in her hood and fancy robes. “The leader of the Lunar Passage is a pony of considerable wits and charisma, by the name of Astral Skylark.”

“What’s wrong with her face?” Swift asked, before I could.

Now I managed to get a good look, Skylark’s head did seem just like somepony had painted a dark mask or helmet right onto her violet pelt. The blackened pattern curled back around her eyes, then over her ears. Last I’d seen her, I’d been too wrapped up in my plans for escape to give her more than a cursory examination.

“My files contain nothing on the significance of those markings. They are presumed to be some form of makeup or cosmetic spell with a religious meaning.” Limerence answered, tracing the shape over the mare’s eyes.

“Could they be natural?” I asked.

“'Natural...'" he mused, "is difficult to define, Detective, and the subject of another presentation altogether, which we may view later if you wish. I can state with certainty, however, that she was not born with those markings. " He tapped his remote again; the next picture was a mug-shot of a very young, very pretty Astral Skylark. She held her police number with a calm, cocky smirk. The strange markings were absent.

“She’s a criminal?” I exclaimed. “How come I’ve never heard that tidbit before?”

Limerence patted his mane smugly. “I had to dig quite deep for that answer. Astral Skylark was once known as the Ebon Kitten; Thief and small-to-middling cat-burglar who terrorized the wealthier streets of Canterlot. The Lunar Passage was founded after she had some form of mental breakdown, followed by an epiphany in which she claims Princess Luna spoke to her in a dream. The Princess herself has not publicly commented on the truth or falsehood of this. After those events, Skylark turned herself in, served a brief sentence, and was released, having built the core of her Church from a number of inmates she met inside Tartarus Correctional. Again, details are sketchy, and somepony went to considerable trouble to eliminate the records of that period of her life.”

“Not surprising for somepony trying to start a religion...” Taxi muttered.

“...But a little ironic when you consider that forgiveness and redemption became essential tenets of the Lunar Passage,” the librarian explained. “They believe they can be forgiven for all sin in much the same way Luna was forgiven when she returned from the Moon.”

“And I assume they’ve got a nice, healthy list of sins to choose from, don’t they?” I grumbled.

Limerence’s horn flickered and a sheaf of densely typed papers levitated off the concrete floor. “I’m fairly certain the list alone could break spines, to say nothing of attempting to actually live within these strictures. It should not surprise you, then, that 'forgiveness' is simply a matter of prayer, priestessly confession, and occasional healthy donations.”

Taxi bit her lower lip and closed her eyes, murmuring just loud enough to be heard, “If forgiving oneself was that easy, I might be half-tempted to go get myself some sequins and a blue dressing gown to sew them to.”

“None of this says ‘diabolical plan to cause chaos and mayhem across the city',” I said, contemplatively. “They’ve already got control of a big chunk. Ugly political undertones aside, the Jewelers would give quite a few eyes to be as publicly respected as this lot. Maybe even some of their own.”

“The Church's charitable character has earned them quite a lot of forgiveness for past transgressions and they do, largely, attempt to keep their contempt for Celestia out of public these days,” Limerence added.

“Alright, that’s… basic intel, then. Anything we can use? Negotiation levers? Thoughts on why they’d pay for the theft of the armor and the moon weapons?”

“Aside the significance of the weapons and armor to Princess Luna, I have few conjectures,” the librarian said with a shrug of his slim shoulders. “There is...an interesting and little known fact which I have discovered, however.”

“Go on! Oooh, finally something good!” Swift said, eagerly.

“If what I have dug up is true, the horseshoes of Nightmare Moon were gifted to the griffins as a ceremonial gesture for their assistance during the Crusades. The helmet remains in Canterlot, so far as anypony knows.” Lim’s nose wrinkled. “For what reason the griffins should want such things I cannot imagine, but they are a peculiar species.”

“Gifted to the griffins…” I mused, somberly. “So this Church can't be hoping to re-assemble the armor. I mean, stealing from a museum in a run-down city is one thing, but stealing directly from the Princesses and the griffins? The Church might be big, but even they don't have the kind of army they'd need to pull artifacts from the vaults of two major governments. It'd be… ridiculous. Suicidal.”

“Quite. So we are back to square one, insofar as their motivations are concerned.”

I pulled the diary of Ruby Blue out of my coat. I’d hidden it for days in the Nest, but it felt right that it should be in my hooves. The gem-stoned cover was still as enigmatic as ever, sealed against all but the most persistent of attackers. I doubted we had the time to pass it off to The Don. Not even the Academy was likely to crack it faster than the Archivists.

“I guess that leaves us with this pony Jade is sending us to see. We could pursue the law-firm, but that reeks of ‘front’. They’ll be next on our list, though. Any thoughts on where we might find Cerise?”

Limerence nodded, clicking his remote again. The picture changed to a smiling young girl, who was a carbon copy of Jade except with a shorter mane-cut. “This is the most recent picture of the mare in question. If what Iris Jade says is to be believed, her daughter has joined one of the five convents of the Lunar Passage within the city.”

Click.

A map of Detrot appeared on the screen. Five points were marked with tiny gold stars. “She is most likely at one of these five locations. Unfortunately, invading any one, without prior knowledge of her whereabouts, will alert the church and give them time to move her. It will be extremely difficult to extract her thereafter should we ‘guess wrong.’”

Taxi stuck the tip of her tongue out of one side of her muzzle and commented, “Now there’s a shitty creek…”

I pulled myself out of the beanbag chair with a soft groan. “So, we gather information. We go see Jade’s lead. I haven’t been down to the Burning Love in a long time."

****

Taxi brought the Night Trotter to a gliding stop and said over her shoulder, “You know, I haven’t seen him in a year and a half, and he’s getting on in years. You sure he still runs the place? Most ponies his age have retired and let their kids take over the show.”

“Most ponies aren’t like him,” I replied, pressing my muzzle against the window. “I mean, can you think of anypony you know crazy enough to run a store that sells only two things?”

The street was almost empty, save a few pawn shops and the odd, deserted coffee joint on the corner. They all had that sense that institutions get when the dying neighborhood just doesn’t have anything left to give, but sticking up like an especially gaudy rose in a garbage heap halfway down the street, a giant sign depicting a guitar resting against a toilet bowl rose out of one of the buildings.

It was cornea-scarringly bright, but even the Crusades hadn’t damaged those fantastic glass tubes. In gigantic blue letters, the words ‘Burning Love Toiletries And Musical Majesty’ dripped at odd angles like they’d haphazardly fallen into that arrangement down the building’s facade. The front window was lined with an array of toilets in every size and shape, backed by gorgeous instruments, none of which strayed terribly far from type. Long necked, short-necked, ten string, twelve string; the Musical Majesties part of that title was a sight to behold.

Some things in Detrot are timeless, either because they’re actually impossible to destroy - as in the case of the city morgue - or because they’re too weird to die. The Burning Love fell neatly into that second category.

I smiled to myself as a memory unwound behind my eyes of my father bringing me down there many years ago. I’d sat on the owner’s spangly jumpsuited back, eating peanut butter and banana bagels until I was almost sick while he and my dad strummed instruments, talking about the ‘good old times.'

“Sir, this place is silly,” Swift commented, stretching her wings and leaping out of the back seat through the window.

“Hey, show some respect, filly! This shop has been here since before either of us were born and it’s seen this city through some dark times. I’d rather stakeout at the Burning Love than damn near any other cop-flop in the city. Criminals don’t walk this street because they know there’s a strong chance we’re in residence up there.” I pointed to the row of windows above and behind the sign. “That and the owner…” I turned to Taxi, who was adjusting her saddlebags. “You remember those Jewelers who tried to drive him out about ten years back?”

“The Bronco Brothers. I busted them once for trying to sell Ace-loaded popsicles to school children. They beat that particular rap with four months in jail. Right pair of bastards. Whatever happened them? I never did hear,” Taxi asked.

“Nopony is perfectly sure, but the Prince had himself some nice guitar cases up for sale about three weeks after they rousted his place. Said he got them from a ‘griffin friend’, because they were ‘genuine animal skin’.” I grinned and nodded towards the door. “At the time, nopony really wanted to ask why the Bronco Brothers had donated their cutie-marks for the griffins to make guitar cases out of.”

“He made guitar cases out of-” Swift started with a horrified expression, but I cut her off.

“Like I said, nopony is perfectly sure.” I added some extra emphasis to those last four words and she quickly got the message, letting her teeth click shut around her objections. “The Prince is one of the few ponies in this city the police department trusts implicitly.”

“B-but why? And why do you call him the Prince? I mean, it’s just a plumbing and music store…”

“Toilets and guitars,” Taxi put in. “He does toilets, he does guitars. You won’t find a drum or a sink in the whole building.”

“His name is Precious,” I replied to Swift’s question. “Everypony just calls him the Prince. The Prince of Detrot. No actual royal connections that I know of, but there might as well be.”

“There are some certain rules in Detrot which are incontrovertible on pain of...various, vaguely defined, terrible consequences," Limerence said, stepping out of the other side of the car and checking his pocket watch for the time. "These rules exist outside of the law, and outside of the normal order of things. One of those rules is that the Burning Love is always safe. If you are on the side of order, peace, and wise counsel, then you may shelter here. The Archivists have long been friends of the Prince.”

“They say that, during the war, Precious made some kind of deal with the dragons to design and install central plumbing in the caves of their lords so they’d leave this place alone.” I explained, feeling a swell of nostalgia at seeing the old place still pumping with life. “Dozens of ponies, griffins, and zebras sheltered here when they couldn’t get to the bunkers. He saved a lot of lives. They say even Princess Celestia stays here when she’s in town and doesn’t want it known that she’s come visiting.”

“S-so that’s why nopony knows what happened to the Bronco brothers?” Swift asked, warily, her wings clenching tighter to her sides as she looked up with new respect at the neon sign.

“You got it, kid.”

****

The little bell on the door jingled as I pushed it open and stepped into the Burning Love’s front room. A glass countertop with a register, but nopony attending it, ran along one wall. Behind it, in row after row of black and white pictures, dozens of famous ponies and beings of Detrot held guitars or sat on porcelain thrones, smiling for the camera.

I felt cocooned by the hundreds upon hundreds of instruments and bits of pipe dangling from strings on the ceiling as though they held absolutely equal appeal. Precious didn’t believe in aisles full of shelves, nor rummage bins of parts. His merchandise, much like his personality, was built on a philosophy of presentation and quality first, practicality second.

Stepping up to the counter, I tapped the bell with my toe. The sound rang through the entire building, reverberating off the toilet bowls in a way that was somehow more melodic. I turned and moved to one of the toilets that was actually at ground level, sliding onto the seat.

Swift tilted her head, looking puzzled. “Are we...waiting for something, Sir?”

“Precious likes to make an entrance, but it takes him a bit these days,” I answered, then settled in to wait.

Five minutes later, we were still waiting when a moaning, wistful guitar chord split the air, sending everypony scrambling upright. A wind of indeterminate source whistled through the building, setting the dangling merchandize spinning and sending dancing, prismatic reflections off every surface. Hidden chimes made sweet music as they spun.

I glanced up to find Swift crouched against Taxi’s side, her gun bit in her mouth and her wings flared. I gave her a firm stare until she gulped and dropped her trigger.

Another guitar chord, followed by a beautiful little riff that put me in mind of buzzing bees, and the wall behind the counter slid back on both sides with a burst of light to reveal Precious, the Prince of Detrot, an electric guitar clutched in both hooves and a broad smile on his brilliantly white face.

“Laaadies and gentlecolts! M’dears, ah am so glad to see you here tonight! Why don’t you give yahselves a round of applause!” he declared, strumming the guitar so it let out a gorgeous tone.

I quickly stomped my hooves and Taxi did the same, while Limerence clapped politely with the tips of his toes. Swift just stood there, staring, open mouthed.

Precious looked much as he had the last time I’d seen him. Maybe a few pounds heavier around the middle and a few more gray hairs, but he still burned with life.

His dark mane curled around the top of his head like a halo, spilling down the back of a suit studded in rhinestones from collar to cufflinks. Every inch of him glittered or shined, while a tiny tufted beard and mutton chops crowned a slightly chubby face that somehow managed to remain beautiful despite the added wrinkles. His eyes, as they had been since the day I’d met him when my father set me on his back, were milky white.

He was like the Don, in that he didn’t show his age. It was there, most definitely, but his sheer zest for living seemed to beat back the years.

Strutting out from behind the counter, the blind stallion turned one way and bowed, then the other. “Ah must say, ya’ll are a beautiful audience today! Now then, what can Precious get for ya?”

“It’s me, Precious. Hard Boiled.”

His pale eyes lit up and he put one hoof on the counter, swinging himself over it in one quick motion, punctuated by a very slight stumble on the landing which he covered with a sweep of his impressively hooficured toes down the lapels of his jacket. “Hard Boiled, mah son! Ah do declare, ah did not think to see ya back in these parts anytime soon! ‘Specially not after what they be saying about ya on the boob tube!” He cocked one ear then trotted up, tossing his forelegs around my neck. The old fellow smelled of tobacco and guitar oil. I hugged him warmly, then stepped back and he turned to my three companions. “And who are these folk ya brung me? Two fillies, onea whom smells like...little miss Sweet Shine!” he exclaimed.

Taxi opened her forelegs in time to catch the elderly stallion in a big hug. “It’s good to see you too, Precious.”

The stallion held her at leg’s length. “Ah, lovely as can be and never far from thought, mah girl!”

My driver, against all the odds, turned bright red and ducked her head demurely as the Prince shifted his attention.

“Mah sweet heaven, is that Limmy?”

“Limerence, Precious, and yes. It’s agreeable to see you too.” Limerence took the obligatory hug with good grace, patting Precious on the back. “Father sends his regards.”

“The Don’s a busy pony, but we got a chess match to finish!” Precious declared, brushing one hoof over his crew-cut mane. “Ah got’em on the ropes and he ain’t gonna weasel out of it this time!”

Taxi caught Limerence’s eye and mouthed ‘Limmy?’ at him. He thumbed his nose at her with one hooftip and shook his head.

Precious eased back from Lim and turned to Swift, who was wide-eyed and crouched on the floor. “Now, who, ah ask is this little thing? She don’t smell like no foal, but she ain’t no bigger’n a ukulele!”

“C-can you see me?” Swift asked, wide eyed.

The Prince’s ears twitched in her direction. “Shore’nuff, no, but ah hear ya, filly! Ah smell ya, and ah feel when ya walk.”

My partner looked at her hooves, then sniffed her tactical jacket.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. You don’t stink. His cutie-mark is an echoing toilet bowl with a guitar sitting in it. It’s how he learned to play without seeing. He feels vibration...and you’re standing in a room full of pipes that conduct vibration beautifully. The floors are ridden with pipe, pumping air and sound. This might be the most heavily plumbed building in Detrot… and it suits him well,” I explained to Swift. “Precious, I want you to meet my new partner. Swift, this is Precious, the Prince of Detrot.”

The stallion bowed good and deep, lifting Swift’s hoof and giving it a light kiss with all the gentlemanly aplomb one might afford a visiting princess. “Mah little lady! Shorely, anypony that Detective Hard Boiled will dare call partner is somepony right special! Why, he ain’t called nopony that since ol’Juniper passed, bless his soul.”

“Really?” she squeaked, her rear legs collapsing under her so she fell onto her behind.

“Surely’nuff. It ain’t no common pony can be keepin’ up with our fine fellow, now is it?” Precious winked at me, then his tone turned formal and business-like as he straightened the collar of his high-necked jumpsuit. “Now then, what brung ya to mah door? Ah don’t see ya needin’ either mah instruments or my plumbin’, if the telly is right.”

“It is. We’re working, off the books, for Chief Jade,” I said, tugging my badge out from under my coat and passing it to him. He turned it over in his hooves, then nodded and released the chain so it jangled against my chest.

“Ya don’t go stickin’ ya’lls head up in a known cop-flop unless ya got the blessin’ of Miss Jade, ah suppose, telly or not. Lemme guess. Yer here about that mare she got hid away upstairs?”

“Mare?” I asked. “Chief Jade said there was somepony here we should come see.”

“Yeah, Jade, sweet soul she is, come in about a week ago with this pretty young thing in tow. She says ‘Precious, take good care of her!’ and so ah done. Funny girl. Won’t give me nor anypony her name Smelled like she were scared half out of her wits and just stays in her room, ‘cept to eat. Won’t talk much. Just sits there, listenin’ to them records ah gave her of mah performing days.”

I sighed and rubbed the side of my neck. “Alright, you mind showing us the way up?”

“Ya gonna be here for lunch? Ah gonna do mah special! Double fried bananas with a creamy sauce!” he purred.

My stomach twitched and I looked sideways at Taxi who blew air into cheeks and made a face like she was about to explode.

“Yeah, I think we can be convinced.”

“Faaantastic! Well, come along then and we’ll get ya situated.”

****

Precious led us behind the counter and through the hidden doors, walking with the confidence of a pony who has long since memorized his route and no longer needs to think of the specific number of steps involved. He had the courtesy to flick on the lights in the hall and stairwell as the four of us trailed along behind him, up one set of stairs and beyond his apartments to the third floor where the rentals lay.

For a pony who liked people, Precious prefered to have few long term tenants, instead enjoying a continuous flow of temporary renters to keep his life interesting.

Up another flight, we entered the back rooms. They were clean, but poorly lit, since Precious was usually the only one using them. Several of the light bulbs were out, but I’d gotten used to dark places, of late, and my eyes adjusted quickly.

Down the hall, we stopped in front of one of the doors. It was like every other, except a soft tune and the lovely croon of Precious’s singing played on an old victrola seeped through.

“Now, just so ya know, she ain’t too keen on visitors. Ya be gentle, ya hear?” Precious gave me a meaningful look and I nodded.

“Of course. We’re not here to interrogate her. Just to talk.”

“Well, mind ya manners. Girl is a mite fragile,” the stallion said, then tapped on the door twice.

The music stopped, and a faint feminine voice said something I didn’t catch.

“It’s me, Miss. Are ya decent? Ah gotta couple’o fine callers. Friends of mine. Good folk. Ya mind?”

Again, the voice, too soft to hear. I made out that she was asking another question.

“Yes’m. Ah be right out here. Ah promise, these ponies are here with mah okay. Word of the Prince.”

The lock on the other side of the door clicked.

“Go on in, and please try not to spook the little thing? Ah get the feelin’ she got enough problems as is,” Precious murmured, stepping back from the door and starting back toward the stairs.

“Thanks Precious. We’ll be down for food soon,” I assured him, then put my hoof on the door handle. It slid open and I gave it a light push.

The room had the smell of many years of occupation by many, many different species. The Burning Love might have been clean, but it was a hostel and if you let enough beings roost in any particular place over a long enough period of time, the scents get ground into the wood and layered under the carpets. It reminded me of one of my college dorms, minus the constant smell of Zap in the hallways.

There was a dresser, the victrola sitting in the corner, and a simple soldier’s cot with a lumpen shape on it covered by a heavy blanket.

“Miss?” I asked the seemingly empty room.

The blanket shifted slightly and the pony under it raised her head, still keeping the sheet tight against herself. I picked up a pair of soft, green eyes under there, but nothing else.

She whispered something, and I cocked an ear.

“I’m sorry, I missed that?”

“...what do you want?” she repeated, only slightly louder, still clutching the comforter to her chest.

“I’m here to ask you a few questions. Chief Jade sent me,” I said, adopting the tone one generally reserves for scared puppies and children.

“Did you find her?” she whispered, eyes widening hopefully.

I glanced back at Swift, who shrugged and shook her head. I turned back to the hidden girl. “I’m… afraid I was sent here without much information. Chief Jade told us you might be able to help me with a case I’m working on for her.”

The girl tilted her head. I couldn’t see her expression, but I didn’t need Precious’ super-powered nose to pick up that the room reeked of fear.

“W-what’s your name?” Her voice was so faint I had to edge forward to hear it, but she just drew further away.

“I’m...well, do you mind if I let my friends in first?”

She made a motion that I took for a nod and I slid my hat off with one hoof, tossing it on top of the dresser as I made room for the remainder of my group to file in behind me. Limerence’s horn buzzed softly as he shut the door behind us.

“There, cozy and safe, yes?” I murmured, touching one hoof to my breast. “I’m Detective Hard Boiled. These-”

“D-Detective what?!” the girl let out a shrill yelp and all but launched herself off the bed.

I found myself with a face full of flowing red mane crowning a complexion the sharp blue of a clear sky on a cold summer morning. I fell backwards, landing on my back as the girl stared down at me, her blanket bunched around her fetlocks.

It was her.

I knew, rationally, that it couldn’t be her. She was dead, but the resemblance was just too striking and for several seconds while my brain tried to find a fresh batch of uncooked grey matter to use, she was there.

She’d haunted what few dreams hadn’t been nightmares and a few that had. Her broken body and that picture of her, side by side with a younger mare crept into my thoughts, day in, day out. During those seconds while my mind was sorting itself out, the girl that had started me on the path to eventual death and resurrection was there, in the room, her gentle, open face full of worry and hope.

Ruby Blue.

My lips formed the name, but I shook my head violently from side to side and rolled over, getting back to my hooves. “Miss. I... you’ll have to excuse me. I’m… afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” I said, formally.

“Disadvantage? Sir, isn’t that Miss Blue’s sister?!” Swift put in, excitedly.

I slapped my forehead so hard that if I’d been any other color, I’d have had a glowing hoof-print shaped bruise for a month.

“Thank you, Swift...” I sighed. "Anyhow. Miss, I…"

I trailed off, suddenly realizing I was at a loss for words. Good words, at least. Everything I could think of saying sounded… wrong, somehow.

I… what? I thought. I’ve been trying to find your dead sister’s killer? I’ve fought through hellfire and clawed my way out of the grave to meet you, because you might be sitting on the keys to a conspiracy spanning the entire city that has killed an as-yet-uncounted number of ponies?

As I was shaking those thoughts away, the girl put her hooves up on my chest. “Please! I’ve been here for weeks trying to find anything and everything is crazy here! I just want to find Ruby and take her home! If you know anything that can help me find her, I’ll do anything! I just want out of this awful city!”

I appraised the unicorn filly cooly, trying to gauge just how much was safe to say.

It’s always an issue when dealing with a relative of a decedent. By telling them their loved one is dead you might get just the piece of information you need to give them peace, or you might send them into a crushing catatonic depression that they don’t climb out of for hours.

The girl might have been a year or two younger than Swift; she was barely out of her teens. There was still some baby fat on her cheeks, but nopony could have mistaken her for a foal.

I decided to try a gentle touch, taking her hooves off my chest and stepping back. “Alright, let’s take a seat. Now, you seem to know who I am, at least. Yes, I am Detective Hard Boiled. Did Chief Jade send a message ahead saying I would know something?”

She shook her head, her rusty red mane falling down her neck in thick, curly waves. “No, it was… um… oh Celestia, this sounds so nuts.” Ruby’s twin turned in a frustrated circle, then hopped back onto her cot, dragging her blanket up under her chin and pressing both hooves over her eyes. “Do you know anything about my sister?”

I hesitated, then said in a carefully neutral voice, “I think we should probably have something to eat. This has been a busy month, and for some reason, I think it just got a whole lot busier. What’s your name?”

“I… I’m Lily. Lily Blue.”

****

Precious arrived with a precariously balanced platter covered in a steel plate on his back and a package of paper plates in his muzzle. Limerence rushed to lift the platter with his horn while Taxi gently took the napkins from the aged stallion and opened them.

“Awww, ya kids’er makin’ me feel old here. Granted, means ah don’t have to do any of the work…” the Prince chuckled, settling himself down on the carpet and adjusting his paunchy undercarriage with one hoof to get comfortable.

Gingerly lifting the top off the platter, I set it aside and breathed in the burst of steam. Precious’s talent might have marked him for the happy life of a plumbing musician, but to my mind his real magic had always been behind a stove.

“Sweet mercy, that’s what I need in my mouth parts…” I whimpered, snatching up one of the pieces of rich bread and dumping a spoon full of sliced banana on it, then drizzling the peanut sauce over the top. It tasted even better than it smelled.

Lily waited politely until everypony else had served themselves before coming forward and tearing off a piece of bread from the loaf, dunking it in the sauce and returning to her cot. She seemed reluctant to leave the safety of her blankets for longer than strictly necessary.

“Miss Blue-” I began.

“You... you can just call me Lily, Detective,” she said, after swallowing. “Do you mind if I call you ‘Detective’?”

“Lily. Alright, Lily, and yes, Detective is fine,” I replied. “I’m afraid, like I said before, you have me at something of a disadvantage. I… know some things about your sister and I want to tell you, but you sound like you know me and I’m certain we haven’t met.”

The filly sucked her lower lip between her teeth and nibbled on it, pensively. “I don’t know who to trust right now, but…” Lily reached over to the nightstand and slid it open, pulling out a much folded envelope and letter. I recognized it as the paper she’d had with her when I saw her in the Museum’s security footage. “...I think this means I can trust you, Detective.”

Taking the envelope, I opened it and turned it over in my hooves. The paper inside was ragged around the edges, tear-stained and with a few crusty brown droplets on the bottom half of the page. I pointed at the spot. “Is this yours?”

Lily shook her head. “It came like that. I don’t know what that is.”

I had a sneaking suspicion I did know, and it threatened to ruin the delicious meal. Despite that, I sniffed at the paper. Yep. Dried blood.

Lovely.

Turning the letter over, I unfolded it and spread it out on the carpet. It was written on expensive stationary that said ‘High Step Hotel’ in the upper right corner.

“What’s it say, Sir?” Swift asked, poking her nose over my shoulder.

I took a deep breath and read.

****

Dear Lily,

I don’t know how long I have to write this, so I’ll write as fast as I can. I think she’s asleep or somewhere else or something. She comes and goes. I can hear her in the back of my head. She whispers. She’s keeping my horn from writing her name.

I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry. It’s all gone wrong.

I’ve only got a few minutes before I have to meet them. I left you another letter in the curio, but I think she made me write it. She picked the words just for Him, so He would... investigate. She makes me do all these things and half of them don’t make any sense at all. Maybe she’s making me write this too.

I can’t tell where she stops and I begin anymore.

I know this doesn’t make any sense.

She told me you’d come. She knows things. She looks into the things that are coming and when she does, sometimes I can see too. She wants things, but I don’t know what.

My diary is the key. I know that for sure, but I don’t even know what’s in it anymore. She keeps taking things from my mind! Stealing them, when I’m not looking! I won’t let her have this, though. The bitch won’t have this. Today, I’ll fight. She wants me to just let her hide and let all the horrible things happen! She doesn’t get to hide, this time.

Maybe that’s part of her plan too.

Tears and blood spattered the paper, like somepony had suffered a spontaneous nose-bleed. When they began again, the horn-writing was more composed.

I will be so glad when this is over. I’m so tired.

If she makes me go to the History Museum and stand there while she tries to get into that stupid armor box again, I think I might go crazy. Maybe I already have.

She talks to herself, you know? She says these two words, again and again. ‘Random Factor’. She says if I don’t do what she says, you die, and I believe her. She showed me you dying, again and again, in all these ways...Oh Lily! It was awful! She keeps changing things in my head, again and again!

I think there’s somepony who can change things. I think he’s a pony who can make this all right again. Maybe she’s just making me think this. Maybe it’s all a trick. Maybe I already wrote all this in the other letter and she just took the memory!

I don’t know anymore.

When you reach Detrot, I know you’ll hunt around. I can’t stop you and I think bad things happen if I try. If nothing goes right and you get my things first, just bury my jewelry box somewhere. Toss it in the lake.

If you go to the police, be careful. There are many, many eyes. They’re watching. A lot of those paths end in...bad things. If you’ve exhausted all your other options, you’ll have to try the police.

Find one of the outlying precincts Don’t go to the headquarters. Tell them to call ‘Miss Jade’.

Damnit. Everything that awful witch has left in my head is bits and broken pieces.

Don’t show Miss Jade this letter, but tell her you’re looking for The Detective and you have some information that might help her...you have to say it like this, okay? Tell her ‘You have information for The Detective that can help cut her strings’. Say it just like that, you hear?

You can’t trust Miss Jade, but she’ll help you find him, I think.

I hope he can make things right, because whenever she says ‘random factor’, his name is floating there.

She sees so many things, but I think it’s too much even for her.

The name of the pony you’re looking for is Hard Boiled. My diary is keyed so if you and he hold it and say my name, it’ll open. If you never meet him I don’t know what’ll happen. Nothing good, I think.

The bitch thinks she’s the only one who can manipulate. She thinks she’s playing Hard Boiled. Screw her. I saw the paths, same as she did. If things go like I think they will, he’ll have my diary.

I... hope she doesn’t take this from my mind. Everything is so confused.

I’m sorry to put this on you, but I don’t think there’s any other way. What’s coming is bigger than me. I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’ll see you again, but I swear, I’m doing this to protect you. If She isn’t lying to me, then it has to be this way.

Find Hard Boiled. He’ll help. I think.

I love you, sis.

Your sister,

Ruby Blue.

Act 2, Chapter 18: Next of Kin

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 18: Next of Kin

We are all told that everypony is eventually gifted with one extraordinary talent, one skill or ability that makes them unique and special, and that everypony will find this talent in the course of their lives.

It sits among the comforting schoolroom lies told to our foals, yet remains mostly true; while the expanding pony population may put stretch marks on the word 'unique,' ponies are nonetheless all possessed of their Special Talents, something to which one may cling no matter how vast and terrifying the world may seem. But while you are guaranteed a talent, you are not guaranteed that your talent will always be useful. And in many ways, having a useless or obsolete talent is worse than having a blank flank.

In the technologically stagnant years of Celestia's solo reign, this wasn't as substantial an issue. The economy crept along at a slow enough pace to avoid completely trampling older talents underhoof. When the first weather factories started cropping up, heavily automating the otherwise painstaking process of rainbow manufacture and snow construction, those pegasi who only knew how to make weather by hoof were phased out relatively nontraumatically over generations.

But now, with change occurring at a breakneck pace, some ponies are left out in the cold before their time is up. Pity the Equestrian small farmer; with increasing automation, particularly the development of the ClusterBucker 11000X, most of the family farms were driven out of business, especially if they relied on old-fashioned tree-bucking or other manual forms of labor. Likewise, the miners of Detrot lost their place to a gem shortage and competing Diamond Dog labor.

Some of those outpaced by changing reality are able to redefine their talents or businesses to keep them relevant. Some small farmers or brewers went from providing staple crops to providing specialty products 'crafted with care and integrity' until they had created their own sustaining market. Some of the displaced miners redefined themselves and their talents as things like "Finding Gems Amidst Dirt" and became talent agents.

But not all had the drive, connections, or sheer-bloody minded madness needed to overcome their own talents, and there is little in the world to offer comfort to a pony whose talent has been utterly lost to changing tides.

--The Scholar

I lay on my back, one hoof draped across my belly, while Swift dropped a piece of peanut sauce-smeared bread on my face and tried to get me to respond for the ninth time in twenty minutes.

What else was I supposed to do? The universe was persistently screwing with me.

I turned my head to look at the letter, still laying on the carpet where I’d left it when I staggered over to Lily’s cot, unwilling to deal with the world from an upright position. The paper still stubbornly refused to conveniently cease to exist. I was tempted to get a blow-torch and force the issue.

Limerence was sitting in the corner, a look of deep consideration on his thin face while Taxi was sifting through her saddlebags for the third time. She’d already emptied two of her ‘emergency’ flasks and I was worried that, in a minute, she’d break out the little supply of Zap leaves I knew she kept for really serious situations. Precious must have gone downstairs to talk to a customer, though I didn’t hear him depart. For a showpony, he’s light on his hooves.

Lily, meanwhile, sat on the edge of the cot as far from my hooves as she could get, once more covered from head to hoof in her blankets. Her curly red tail kept tickling my fetlocks as she nervously flicked it back and forth like a frightened cat.

There we lay for long minutes, trying to make sense of a development too demented to fit comfortably into our understanding of the cosmos. I think I’d have been happy to sit there for several hours in that condition, had Limerence not risen to his hooves in a decisive manner.

“Detective,” Limerence began. “I find myself in the disconcerting position of not knowing precisely what to do next. I am coming to understand your decision making process somewhat, particularly in light of recent events. I do not believe any sane pony could live like you do, but I believe it may be the primary reason you are still alive. So I must ask you, much to my discomfort, what our next course of action is?”

“How in the flip should I know?” I grunted, turning onto my side so I could face the wall. I licked some peanut sauce off my nose and shut my eyes. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to deal with crazy future-seeing fillies and ponies with voices in their heads. There were already far too many of those in my little group of friends.

Limerence wouldn’t let it be. “If what you've told me about your exploits so far is accurate, you are dangerously competent when faced with cosmic nonsense. This is nonsense in its purest form. I will not let you turn into a lump when there are things we must do, Detective. Now get up before Miss Taxi and I...” he peered at Taxi, who was laying on her back licking the last few drops from a third flask of something that smelled strongly of petrol. “...before I get you up!”

I grumbled and pushed myself over with one hoof on the wall to lay on my back, my coat spreading out under me. “Lim, I don’t even know where to begin. That letter is just not possible.”

“I agree that it raises concerning questions, but we cannot allow those questions to paralyze us! Our objectives have not changed!” he growled, then pointed at Lily, who shrank away from the librarian, hiding as much of herself as she could under the enormous comforter. “We must get into that diary and we must still acquire Chief Jade’s daughter; to that end, you will provide this girl information in exchange for answers.”

Pushing myself up on my elbows, I looked down at Lily.

She was nosing her way out of the blanket and caught my eye. I held her gaze for several long seconds. She seemed so young. Younger even than Swift. Younger than anypony I’d met from Detrot in many, many years.

That letter was all she had of her sister.

Ruby’s corpse was still at the morgue and Stitch was likely to keep it a few more weeks to wait for a claimant. Sending the poor child down there, by herself, to get her sister’s body seemed a cruel way to go about things, particularly since Stitch had been known to throw one of his death parties to ‘celebrate the deceased’s life’ when one of his clients' families showed up in person.

She deserved to know something, but what could I tell her? So much of what’d gone on was outside of what a sane pony was likely to believe could happen, and now there was that letter sitting on the carpet like an especially irrational bit of dog poop.

Limerence was waiting for an answer, his spectacles almost falling off the end of his nose as he scowled down at me. I looked up at him, then at the rest of my friends.

"Can you give us a few minutes?" I asked.

Lim looked like he was concocting an objection, but Taxi, bless her, knew the score. She rose unsteadily to her hooves and pointed towards the door. "You want your 'objectives', then get out and let him do the job," she grunted. The librarian opened his muzzle for a second, then shut it. Fighting me was one thing. Fighting Taxi, a pony substantially more immune to logic than I even when not drunk and belligerent, was something else entirely. Swift had already wisely gotten to her hooves and made for the door.

****

I shut the door behind them and stood for several seconds, collecting my thoughts.

“Detective Boiled?” Lily whispered. “Is… my sister dead?”

The question caught me quite off guard, but anypony with half a brain should have been able to put it together, I suppose.

My shoulders sagged under a burden hanging on joints that felt older this week than they had the last. I listened to my heart and could have sworn it was trying to make some kind of little tune. Maybe Gale was trying to comfort his despondent caretaker? Who knows?

Moving over beside Lily, I shifted the blankets until I found her hoof, then took it between two of mine.

“Miss, I have been pursuing a group of very bad… beings… during the last month. I don’t know their aims yet, but it was your sister… your brave sister... who put me onto them.” I explained in as soothing a voice as I could manage.

“So my sister’s… okay?” she asked, her full, beautiful mouth quivering with barely controlled emotion.

I inhaled, but still felt out of breath as I replied. “No. No, she’s not.”

Lily’s eyes slid closed and the tears began to fall. She didn’t whimper or moan or sob. She just cried, like somepony who’d known the answer to their terrible question before it’d been asked. How could she not? An insane letter, her sister vanished, a monstrous city, and a Police Chief stuffing her away in the safest hole in the city? Only a fool wouldn’t have suspected. She only needed confirmation and I’d given that to her.

She took her hoof from mine and hid it under the blankets again as she leaned back against the wall. The covers fell across half of her face, hiding her expression.

“Dammit Ruby…” she muttered as more tears ran down her chin. “You and your ‘big plans...'”

It wasn’t the response I expected. Most grieving family go straight for denial. Anger tends to lend itself to those who’ve had some time to come to grips with what’s happened. Of course, she’d been alone with her thoughts for days if what Precious said was true. Alone with that letter. It’d been read no less than a hundred times. The paper was heavily creased.

I rose to my hooves and gently pushed the blanket back from Lily’s face. She stared up at me out of wet eyes.

“How?” she asked, breathily.

I decided there wasn't likely to be any better time to tell her. It was that or risk her refusal to help us until I did. I didn't know precisely how much of a time-frame we were on, but 'not a long one' was probably the best answer.

She deserved to know.

"She fell...from a rooftop. She was killed."

"M-murdered?"

I slowly nodded.

"Do you know wh-who..." her voice faltered and she covered her lips with her hoof.

"I've been hunting them. I will find them," I answered, with as much certainty as I could muster.

Lily lowered her head and breathed a faint sigh. I lifted myself onto the cot and she laid her head on my chest.

We shared the sad silence of the tiny hostel for a few minutes. Rain had begun to beat against the windows. Nothing new there, but no amount of water could wipe away the deeply ingrained grief of my city. A girl dies and her sister is left to the unkind mercies of the city that killed her.

I didn’t know what I could say, and to say nothing seemed unkind, but Lily wasn’t demanding anything as she lay there against me. It felt odd, holding this child I’d just met, the news of her sister’s death fresh on the air and the scent of her mane filling my nose.

I couldn’t have smelled good. When had I showered last? Maybe before the diamond dog mine? I couldn’t remember.

She didn’t seem to mind.

I held her and listened to her ragged breathing. Her tears soaked into my fur and the rain hammered on the glass outside. The room was cool, but it’d been forever ago the last time I held somepony in a calm moment. Somewhere, Juniper was sniggering his dead ass off.

After what I’m fairly sure was a period of time adequate to leave the others wondering just what we were getting up to, Lily gently tugged on my coat with a little telekinesis and I raised my foreleg so she could straighten up. Pulling her blankets away from her head, she reached over to the night table and opened the drawer. Levitating a comb out of it, she began to groom her red mane, pulling days worth of snarl out of the thick curls. It was a robotic sort of action, but one I’d seen many victims of violence perform. It signaled a sort of acceptance of what had happened and a pony needing to get back to who they really were underneath.

It was also temporary, but could be useful if one were willing to take the time it offered. Damn me for a wretch, but I needed that time.

“Lily…” I murmured.

“Yes, Detective?” She didn’t look at me, but was instead staring fixedly at the wall as she replied.

“How do I open your sister’s diary?” I asked.

That brought her head around with a sharp jerk. “You...have it? Seriously?!”

“Didn’t... the letter say I would?”

“That letter sounded like it was written by somepony out of their mind! Which, considering my sister and her crazy ideas about hitting it big in Detrot, might not have been all that far from the truth!” She dropped the comb onto the bedspread and faced me, angrily. “I came here to find my sister, and she’s dead, so I’m taking her body and I’m going home. Got me? I don’t care about this awful city! I just want out of here!”

Her voice was almost at a shriek now and I doubted there was any way Precious hadn’t heard her. Still, he was savvy in the ways of police work. He’d keep his peace, unless he thought I was hurting her.

I reached into the inner pocket of my coat and produced the book.

Her eyes went to the cover and she backed away, almost to the other edge of the bed. I held it out to her.

“Lily...your sister died for whatever is in this book. She died for it, do you understand? Someone murdered Ruby for what she knew. If it’s that big-” I swallowed a pang of conscience at what I was about to say. “-do you think they won’t come after you?”

Another kind of fear replaced the momentary panic. This one was deeper, more refined; a terror bred of inevitability and the sort of sickening realization that comes immediately after the doctor walks into the room looking professionally regretful.

Of course, I had no proof the monsters behind Ruby’s death would go after her family, but who knew who had read that letter? They might have had her family watched on principle; if I’d been the ones who lost the diary for a second time, I know I would.

Lily was shaking, her entire body rocking back and forth on the bed.

“I’m going to find these beings. I will find them and I will make sure they go into the deepest pit in Equestria. One they’ll never climb out of. You hear me?”

Her eyes twitched in the direction of my face, but were still a little blank, staring into some nightmare all her own. I rose to my hooves, deciding to leave her be, for a moment. As I crossed to the door, I felt a firm grip take hold of me. I stumbled, catching myself on the chair and peering back at my backside.

A gleam of dark blue magic was wrapped around the root of my tail. Lily was still watching the far wall. The rest of her didn’t move, but her lips did.

“Detective… do you promise, if you find out who killed my sister, that you’ll make sure they get everything they deserve?” she whispered.

I blinked at her. “I’ll do what’s right. I’ll do what’s just. It’s my talent.”

“Will you kill them?”

The question hung like a cold draft of reality in the warm air of the small room. It was the sort of question most ponies don’t think to ask. It was, assuredly, not the sort I’d ever been asked by a young girl barely out of her teen years and grieving over her dead sister.

A month ago, I’d have just said ‘no.' I wasn’t an assassin or a hitpony. I had been a cop then, and I was still a cop when that question was asked. My badge felt heavy against my breast.

Something had changed, though. Something elemental. I was no longer the red-tape-wearing lackey of the state. A cop must serve. A cop must protect. Even if I thought they would leave me and Swift and all those relying on me be, walking away from my investigations was no longer an option.

This is it, Hardy. You know if you do this, there’s no going back. Juniper murmured in a spot somewhere above my left ear.

“If that’s what it takes to end this and make sure this city is safe.”

It was done.

Lily’s furrowed brow relaxed a little and she pushed her blanket away from her ears.

“I… think, Detective, that… that it’s time you told me what’s happened to my sister.”

****

I might have edited the story for content or lied or possibly omitted some of my more significant wrongdoings. She was just a girl after all. A child, really, and not a child of Detrot. I’d done more than a few somewhat reprehensible things during the last month. Most of the time I wasn’t unconscious was, in fact, spent doing somewhat reprehensible things.

Nopony really needed a story like mine laid on them so soon after hearing confirmation of her sister’s death, but she just sat there and listened as I spilled the tale from the first moment when I set foot in Detrot Police Department and Jade had saddled me with Swift to the death of Cosmo and beyond. She’d stopped me there, long enough to take a look at my heart plug, then returned to her seat.

She asked few questions, and only those for clarification. I even got a tiny smile out of her as I described my odd encounters with Stella and Princess Luna’s spies. It vanished as quickly as it'd come.

Mostly, she just listened. Her lips would move over certain parts and her eyes narrowed when I described what we’d done to Bari, though she didn’t make any particular comment on it.

I wasn’t watching the clock, but at some point about halfway through the story, there was a knock on the door. It was Precious asking us if we’d like some refreshments. I hadn’t realized just how thirsty I was after talking for so long and soon had a nice, chilled glass of orange juice with a dash of something a little stronger in it balanced between my hooves. For the girl, he brought a steaming cup of hot chocolate. Not long after, I heard the first guitar chords of what turned into an impromptu show, no doubt to keep my companions entertained. It felt good, being back at the Burning Love.

“-that was… let me see... that was yesterday. Celestia save me, it feels like a week ago.” I shook my head and wiggled the straw on my drink around to my muzzle, taking a quick draw. “After Jade let us go, we went through the information we have on the Lunar Passage. When I say ‘we,' I guess I mean Limerence. He had slides and everything. The Church is a weird bunch, let me just say.”

Lily’s nose twitched and she nodded. “Then you came to see me, right?”

“Yeah, precisely.”

The girl was on the edge of her cot, and now slid onto her side, drawing her legs up beside her. She looked at the floor as the tune coming up through the pipes reached a crescendo. “You have some interesting friends, Detective.”

I laughed, feeling the weight of days worth of secrets finally shared. Granted, I’d shared them with a pony only two thirds my age, but it felt good to have them out.

“I promise, Swift’s smarter than she sounds and good to have in a scrum; it's just that her decision making lends itself to the noble more often than the intelligent. Lim’s a… I don’t know. I don’t have a proper handle on him yet. He seems like such a prick most of the time, but then he’ll go and do something that totally surprises you. Taxi’s been there since I was a kid. Just always there. She’s the best friend you could ask for, so long as you don’t mind a concussion now and then as part of the deal.”

Lily tilted her head and pointed at my chest. “Then there’s you, Detective. You and that… Gale… creature.”

I shook myself and patted my heart plug. “I honestly don’t know what to say about him. He’s there. That or I’m nuts and he’s an especially friendly and consistent hallucination. It doesn’t matter, I guess. He’s not the only character who has been talking to me lately from beyond the grave. If you can believe it, my dead partner’s been making appearances too.”

There was a pause as Lily processed that, then she shrugged her slim shoulders and brushed a bit of her mane that’d fallen into her face behind one ear. “I... suppose anypony who has been through what you have deserves a few quirks,” she replied, sympathetically.

“What about you? I tell you my story, I think you better tell me yours.” I leaned my head in the direction of the floor. “Sounds like they’re going to be awhile. Precious is quite the musician and his shows aren’t to be missed.”

“He comes up here some nights and sings me to sleep.” Lily ducked her face under the edge of her blanket. “If he were younger, I’d think he was sweet on me...”

“Heh, don’t underestimate the old war-horse,” I replied and the filly’s ears colored. “Still, I’d love to hear your story. I suspect that diary is going to open some doors, but I’d like to hear it from your lips if you don’t mind so much.”

“What do you want to know?” she inquired, her horn glowing softly as she raised her mug to her lips.

It was so odd to be having an actual conversation with somebody that didn’t involve the butt of a gun or my hoof on some essential part of their anatomy that I found myself a little out of practice. “I don’t know. Tell me about yourself. What’s your life like, away from here?”

Lily shrugged her thin shoulders and said, “I’m not very interesting, I’m afraid. My whole family is cherry farmers, out of Dodge Junction. At least, everypony except Ruby.”

Tugging the blankets away from her flank, she showed off a gleaming red cherry fruit on her hip. I did my best not to stare. It was a very nice flank.

Dammit, old boy, you keep your dirty mind to yourself! I growled, as my long dormant libido sputtered angrily at me.

Lily continued with a fond smile, “I… love the farm.” The smile faltered a little. “Ruby was always Miss ‘Big Ideas’. She wanted to make fruit beautiful, instead of just making it tasty.”

“I saw her cutie-mark. Three gems with cherry stems, right?” I asked.

“Yes. She...got her cutie-mark when she discovered a spell that would let her bring out the real shine in just about anything. She could make fruit shine...but her first love was gemstones.” Lily raised both hooves, twisting her toe in a small circle for emphasis, “She had a way of picking...just the right stone for whatever she wanted to do…”

“Were you and she close?”

She looked up and to the left, as though thinking precisely how to answer. “We were… different, you know? She was my big sister. You can’t not be close to your big sister, even when she makes you want to strangle her now and then. She used to get me in so much trouble...” Lily giggled a little, then her expression turned quickly sad. “So much trouble.... We got into everything trying to get our cutie-marks. She once tried to shoot me out of a cannon she’d made out of paper mache. We both just ended up covered in soot and confetti.”

I laughed, heartily. “I’ve got a few stories like that. My friend in the other room, Taxi -- the one with the ridiculous mane -- was always up to one nutty thing or another trying to find some way of getting her cutie-mark. She...mmm…” I closed my eyes for a second as an unpleasant memory flashed through my head.

“What is it?” Lily asked.

“Nothing,” I murmured.

“Ponies thinking of ‘nothing’ don’t make a face like someone just shot their puppy.”

I glanced up at her, surprised at the note of compassion in her voice. In spite of the recent death of her sister, in spite of the load I’d put on her shoulders, her face showed only a very genuine concern. Concern for me, no less. It’d been awhile since somepony I wasn’t very personally acquainted with showed that, and this brand didn’t come with bruises and crushed ribs. I found myself, for some reason, a little unsettled by the idea.

I exhaled. “I take it you saw those saddle-bags she wears everywhere?”

“Yes, I did…” She hesitated, then added, “When she sits down, they ride up a little. I thought I saw something on her thighs…”

“Scars. They’re scars.”

Her eyes widened. “Scars? Then...her cutie-marks..?”

“They’re gone. I don’t know how or why. She’s never told anypony what really happened. She used to be a cop, like me. She lost them...well, her discharge papers said ‘Injured in the line of duty’.”

Lily’s ears flattened to her skull. “You...must know something. To lose something like that. I thought cutie-marks couldn’t just be destroyed like that!”

“Yeah, me too. I don’t know much. The story goes, few years ago, she was on assignment, undercover with one of the drug lords in Detrot. Vicious son of a bitch named ‘Skinner.' You can guess why.”

“Good heavens!” Lily exclaimed. “He didn’t really-”

“He did. Took real pleasure in that particular activity, so I hear” I said, grimly, then added as I saw the look of shock in the girl’s eyes. “Trust me, characters like him are not the foulest thing this city has to offer.” I sucked in a breath, shuddering at the memory.

“Anyway, Taxi… I don’t know. It’s been years and she still won’t talk about it. Back then she was still calling herself ‘Sweet Shine’, or at least, something close enough that I don’t remember the difference. What I do know is she was deep cover in Skinner’s organization. Her partner, who was also her handler, vanished. He was this skeevy little colt named Fox Glove. How he got to be a cop, I’ll never know, but Taxi tried to take care of the poor fool despite his dumb tail stumbling over her hooves at every opportunity. She must have let half a dozen collars go just to keep that numbnuts alive. They’d been partners for...maybe two years, by then. Not long, but long enough.”

“He vanished?”

“Thin air, like a ghost.” I clapped my hooves together for the snap noise. “Taxi will only say she got made by Skinner’s organization. ‘Fox Glove’s dead.’ She told me that one night after a few drinks, then clammed up completely. She didn’t even say that to the review board. ‘Fox Glove’s dead. Skinner’s dead.’ That was it.”

Lily’s ears tilted towards me, curiously. “But... how did she... survive?

“Not a clue.” I shook my head as I continued, “One of my mates in the department found her three weeks later, hugging a bottle of scotch in a bar on the east side. Her hips were all bandaged up. Real messy job. I went down there and hauled her to hospital. She told her doctors not to talk to anypony about it and took discharge and an early pension when it was offered by the department. She vanished for a couple of years there.”

The girl’s nose wrinkled. “That sounds...like she maybe went a little crazy...”

“You’re telling me.” I chuckled. “Sweet Shine was always a bit loopy, but she comes back from going what she called ‘walkabout’ calling herself ‘Taxi’ with her mane all done up in that braid. She brought along some goofy fighting styles you do not want to be on the receiving end of, and the zebra rune core of her cab's engine stuffed in a duffle bag. Her entire pension was still sitting in a bank account, so she used it to outfit this absolutely wild ride and became a hack driver. She drives me nowadays.”

Lily’s eyes glinted with interest. “I really wish I had more time to get to know you and your friends, Detective. Ruby was like you. She always had wild stories to tell. She was good at telling stories. She once tricked half the town into thinking she’d had a cousin move in. Even had ‘him’ introduce himself around town a bit. It was just her in a hoodie with a bit of make-up and a simple voice spell, but she fooled darn near everypony.”

I bobbed my chin. “She… managed to hide herself pretty effectively here in Detrot, when it came to it. That’s not a simple thing to do in a city that has this many eyes.”

“I always said her talent would have been as an actress, if she hadn’t been such a good jeweler. That’s her and me. Sun and moon. So different. I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag,” she mused, biting her lower lip between her teeth in a way I found very fetching for some reason. “Her cutie-mark was this magical discovery and me… I just went out one morning when the cherry trees were blossoming and stood in the branches of my favourite tree, letting the petals fall on my face. I knew then, I never… never wanted to be far from those trees. I knew it in my gut.” She peered towards the rain drenched window and sighed, sadly. “That seems so very far away right now…”

“Maybe less than you think. Once this situation is fixed-” I began, but Lily interrupted me with one hoof on my muzzle.

“Please, don’t.”

I let my reassurances die on my lips as she looked at me with eyes full of grief.

“Ruby is dead.” she said, quietly. “That...can’t be changed. I was hoping I’d come to Detrot and she’d be either happily working herself crazy for some jeweling house or at least...she’d come and apologize to Mom and Dad and they’d apologize to her and maybe she’d...be home for Hearth’s Warming Eve or something…”

“She didn’t leave under good circumstances?”

“No… no, she really didn’t.” Lily used the edge of her blanket to wipe moisture from her eyes, then slid onto her side and crossed her forelegs under her chin. “A few days before harvest season she announced ‘I’m going to Detrot!' She’d run off before on one whacky plan or another, but never… never anything that big or that far. Mom and Dad didn’t take her terribly seriously until she’d booked the tickets and was halfway through packing. Then things got...loud. There was an awful lot of shouting and… some bad stuff was said. Dad didn’t mean any of the stuff about ‘not coming back this time’, but he said it and… I never saw Ruby so mad.”

“Family is still family,” I said. “She loved you. Even at her worst, she was trying to protect you, if that letter is any indication.”

The girl’s nose wrinkled at the glanced down at the letter, which was still laying exactly where I’d dropped it. “That letter.... She wrote that a month ago. More than a month. I recieved it a couple of weeks ago because our mail mare is older than dirt and crazy to boot. How… how did she know it would be you investigating her death?”

Sliding off the bed, I moved just far enough to snatch the paper up in my teeth and return to the comfortable warm spot that’d developed where I was sitting. I scanned the contents of the letter one more time, then passed it back to Lily. “Honestly, there’s so much in that which doesn’t make any sense. I try to interpret that right now, I’m going to go nuts.”

“Do you know who ‘She’ is? Lily kept mentioning somepony who was...controlling her or maybe blackmailing her. And paths? Seeing paths? Maybe like a scrying spell?” Lily pointed to her horn with one toe.

“Magic isn’t my forte, and if I had to go down the list of ponies who fit the list of ‘evil, controlling, and female’, I’d have to include my employer, my driver, and the head of the largest religious organization in the city. That’s just my short list.” I replied, sardonically. “Limerence might know. I’ll be going over it with him, rest assured. What I really need, right now-”

“-is Ruby’s diary opened,” she finished for me. “I was wondering when you’d get to that.”

I lifted the diary off the bed where it’d lain for some minutes. “I should tell you, for the sake of disclosure, that her first letter -- the one I found this book hidden with -- said she didn’t want you to know what her life was like here. You might be better off letting me read this on my own, once it’s open. For the sake of her memory.”

Lily considered that for a bit, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so, Detective. I’d rather remember my sister like she really was. I could lie to myself and say she was a saint, but I’d always know the truth. Ruby was always trying to keep me safe and ‘preserve my innocence.' I’m not a foal anymore.”

Something in the way she said that made me profoundly sad, but I lifted the book, holding it between my hooves. Its heft was comfortably familiar after all those weeks of carrying it, and I’d almost become inured to the perpetual enigma of those pages. If I’m honest, some part of me didn’t believe I’d ever actually see it opened. A niggling voice of self deprecation had spent the better part of my recent days declaring with cruel certainty I’d be dead long before that particular mystery was solved. It felt good to put it to bed.

Ruby’s sister reached out and rested her hoof on the jeweled cover.

“My sister and her silly gem locks…” Lily muttered, tracing the shape of an especially large sapphire with her toe.

“The most security crazy ponies in the city couldn’t get into this book in any sort of reasonable time,” I commented.

“Ruby lost a piece of her early work to one of our aunts. Glory just snatched it right out of her jewelry box. Awful mare, stealing from a filly,” Lily explained, stroking the lovely stones. “She just claimed it was hers and everypony believed her. Ruby...well, Ruby did not take kindly and the next thing I knew, she got a book on gem-locks out of the library.” A smile crept onto her face once more, and I had the funniest sensation that the entire room had become brighter. “She once even locked the cookie-jar with this funny enchantment so if anypony besides her opened it, it looked empty.”

“No kidding…” I shook myself and raised the book again. “Sorry. I’ve been carrying this thing around so long it feels odd actually opening it. Shouldn’t we go get the others?”

Lily’s green eyes shone as she peered into mine. I felt my heart trying to climb up the back of my throat for a second. She thought for a bit, then shook her head. “Do you mind if it’s just you and me, right now?” She nibbled on her lip, pensively. “I… trust you. I don’t know why. Ruby was never an especially good judge of character, but she wouldn’t send me to somepony she thought might hurt me.”

“Alright. Ready?”

She nodded.

I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath, clenching the book a bit tighter.

“Ruby Blue.”

I guess I expected some kind of column of light or something descending from the heavens to point out whoever had killed her. That would have been helpful, really. Even a fully interactive psychic adventure novel would have done me.

What I got was a soft hum, followed by a ‘click.'

I opened my eyes and stared down at the book. The cover was slightly ajar.

Lily pulled her hooves away and swept the blankets back around herself.

I pulled the cover open and stared down at the first page.

This is the diary of Ruby Blue : Keep Out!

Act 2, Chapter 19: The Diary of Ruby Blue

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 19: The Diary of Ruby Blue

With all that has been written in these very pages about why the big city is a terrible degenerating polluted place where you're as likely to be stabbed as vomited upon by passing drug addicts, one might reasonably wonder why ponies go there in the first place; there is, after all, not a large market for stabbing victim and/or vomit sponge tourism.

Some of the upsides of the urban sprawl are worth reiterating.

First, addressing the issue of safety: Yes, it is true that you're unlikely to be decapitated by mafiosos in Appleloosa, but this must be weighed against the idea that you're substantially more likely to be eaten by quarry eels. Big cities have far better monster defenses, such as large militias or public guard services like the PACT, to drive off hostile megafauna; Small towns frequently have to rebuild themselves after hydras choose their town squares to have mating seasons.

And the primary reason organized crime thrives in big cities at all is because small towns don't have anything worth the risks associated with crime. It is often said that cities possess opportunities; what is meant by this, economically, is that the city creates larger, more concentrated markets for services that couldn't be self-sustaining in smaller towns, from higher education to full-pony massage with satisfying conclusion. And because all these businesses are in close proximity to one another, knowledge frequently spills over between these various industries, allowing for, in the above examples, masseurs trained in the finer points of anatomy, or possibly grad students who know exactly how to blow to get something published. Either way, there'll be a lot more smiles.

So, year after year, ponies flock to the big cities to try and make their fortunes. Some make it.

Some don't.

--The Scholar

Day one of my new life.

Whew, I’m finally here! The bus station. Maybe it’s not the most glamorous arrival into a city, but I’m finally free of that awful little farm. Okay, so it’s not awful and it’s not little, but… compared to this? It feels so small now, looking back.

I just bought this diary in the station gift shop. I’ll have to change the lock on it. It’s nowhere near secure enough for my private thoughts! Just imagine if some paparazzi were to one day open this book and see all those juicy secrets and gossip I’ll no doubt have as soon as I make Detrot and get set up.

I know, I know, I’m being silly.

Tell you what. I’m going to write this diary to you, Lily. I can share all my lascivious adventures and pretend it’s you I’m telling them to.

You better never read it! If you’re reading this, you stop right now, you hear me?

I’m sorry we didn’t get to do more than say goodbye. I’d have loved to take you out to dinner, but Dad was still furious with me and you know what he’s like. Stubborn as a mule. Kinda like me, I guess. I know, when he sees all the money and attention I can bring the farm, that he’ll calm down.

Then I can apologize.

I’m so sorry you had to see all that. I knew it was coming, I guess. I’m just not made for living on the farm. I want to go and see the world, sis! My hooves want to move!

Oop. That’s the sound of the ticketeer calling. All aboard for Detrot! The city that shines!

Day two of my new life!

I’ve had better arrivals to a new town, I’m pretty sure. Remember that time, when I was six, that I snuck onto the air chariot to Canterlot and that really nice old pony -- Mister Pants or whatever his name was -- brought me back? That was a way better arrival than this one.

Oh Lily, this city is so beautiful. I can’t even tell you! I arrived, today, at the bus station, after the longest bus journey of my life and I already feel right at home.

Okay, it’s not beautiful in the way you and Dad would have said ‘beautiful’. It’s dirty, it’s smelly, it’s got lots of strange ponies and creatures wandering everywhere...but it screams ‘Opportunity!' Everything is so alive here!

I went into a corner store and they were selling gemstones! Not even selling them in a piece of jewelry. These were charged, magical gemstones you could put into a flashlight!

First things first, I’ve got to find myself a place to stay. There are a dozen little hotels around the bus station, but I think I’m going to steer clear of those for now. I’ve got my savings and I’ve read enough to know not to let those out of my sight and I’ve got them hidden in my trunk’s ‘secret’ mode. Nopony will touch them, and even if somepony does steal my trunk, I’ve got a tracking spell on it.

Alright, first things first. A place to stay!

Day three of my new life!

Found a place to stay!

It’s a bit of a dump, but I am a pony who can adapt to changing situations and thus, I am prepared for life in the big city.

The hotel is...well, it’s called ‘H-E-L’. Some of the lights on the sign are out and the pony at the bus station ticket counter who pointed me to it just called it by those three letters. It’s cheap, if nothing else.

Good thing I learned a cleansing spell before I left. It was worth the month and a half I spent learning to cast it properly. I had to torch a whole nest of bed-bugs and clean something I don’t want to even identify off the sheets. Thank goodness magic doesn’t require me to get my hooves dirty. I think the room might be cleaner now than it has been in the last ten years. The maid who delivered me some towels this evening looked around then offered me a tip!

I ate for free tonight in the hotel bar after the owner let me clean up a few more rooms and get them ‘shining.' He even offered me a job! It doesn’t pay enough for me to pursue my dreams, though, and by the time I was finished, my horn was practically burning.

The food was...well, you and Mom wouldn’t have eaten it, but she’s super picky. I’m pretty sure Dad would have been right at home. I hate that I have so much in common with him sometimes. Grilled cheese with something that I think was probably celery and a bit of butter. Delicious, but greasy.

I will have to watch my figure!

Day five of my new life!

Hunting around, looking for work has been hard. I’ve got at least a month or two worth of money I can spend at my hotel so I’m not worried about being put out on the street. I had to give a pushy little stallion who was making comments about my flank a piece of my mind, then a taste of my horn when he decided to get even more pushy.

He had a couple of friends with him, though, so I had to run. I lost them in a crowd down around Subversa St. No biggie, right? I knew the big city wasn’t perfectly safe when I came down here.

Turns out the reason all the gems are so cheap is the market here collapsed about thirty years ago. I wish I’d known that. I’d have saved myself the time learning that gem finder spell in the Fashionista’s Essential Arcanery. The author’s a genius of little tips and tricks for the pony in a styling crisis. Who’d have imagined somepony from a little hick town like her would be so knowledgeable?

It gives me hope, considering what a pit Dodge Junction is. No offense, sis. I know you’re happy there.

Crafted jewelry is still worth something, thankfully. I saw a few ponies in one of the local parks with towels laid out and a few wares on them, so I went and tried that with a few of my better pieces. I got enough bits to put me up for another month, if I’m careful! I think I’ll buy myself some more materials, though, and maybe some of these local tools I saw when I was passing the hardware shop.

Day eight of my new life!

I went over my budget again and found I’m in really good shape! Even if I was a bit dumb yesterday. I went on a bit of a spending spree, buying up all the jewels and tools I could find. Silly, silly Ruby!

Still, I’m pretty much in a bind where that’s concerned. I needed to continue selling at the park or I’d be up a very poor creek indeed. I’ve had little luck in finding work so far and it turns out I’m not alone.

Granted, many ponies have started coming to buy my work; I was even able to raise my prices slightly, with a bit of haggling. Time to start the newspaper hunt! I’m still staying in H-E-L, although the owner, Mister Patty, is letting me stay for free now so long as I keep using my cleansing spell to ‘shine up’ a few of the rooms.

Today, I even had one of those upper-crust ponies come by and he was very impressed! Asked if I’d stolen it and he didn’t believe me when I told him I’d made them, so I whipped him up a brooch for his neck kerchief in twenty minutes flat, just so he could watch me do it. He was very snooty when I presented it to him, but he paid me a whole hundred bits!

Day twelve of my new life.

What a day. My hooves ache. My flank aches. My ears ache.

I’ve been walking around downtown looking for work, again. I went into every jewelry store I could find and none of them are hiring. I thought it’d be easier to get a job than this.

It’s not like I’m going to starve. I could probably work the park for the next five years if I wanted to, but simply selling my works on a towel feels so cheap. Besides, I’m entirely out of gold and quick running through my silver supplies. Those do not come cheap! Making jewelry entirely out of gems would be tacky. And skies forbid I ended up having to use some lesser metal!

Either way, I must find something soon or I will find myself cleaning rooms at the HEL to pay for metals. That’s a hideous thought. Somepony pooped on the carpet of room sixteen yesterday!

Day sixteen of my new life!

Oh Lily, can life get any better?

You will not believe what happened to me today.

I found a jewelry store!

Not only did I find it… I bought it! That’s right! Yours truly is the new owner of Glitterstone Jewelry! Maybe, finally, I’ll be able to send some money home to Mom and Dad. Then possibly start planning a trip to come say all the things I meant to say that weren’t yelling and screaming.

I know, you think I’ve lost what few marbles I had left. Two weeks in a new city and starting a business. Well, you just listen to this!

I was wandering downtown after I’d sold the last of my silver works today, I was hunting for a metal shop with decent prices so I could buy some fresh gold. No wonder ponies have been coming to me! Precious metals are very expensive here and my jewelry would have sold for twice what it was going for in the park if I’d had a proper shop all this time!

Regardless, I have a real shop now.

I found the Glitterstone Jewelry on a side street off the park with a big ‘For Sale’ sign on the door. It was run by this sweet old couple; Two gentlecolts who’d been together since before the war, selling their Jewelry to the Detrot elite! They’re getting on in years and had been trying to sell the shop to somepony. Well, Miss Ruby Blue went right on in and asked what their price was.

Would you believe it? It was exactly as many bits as I had! I realize it sounds too good to be true, but then, they didn’t want to see the shop close down. They’d poured their hearts and souls into it, so passing their great work onto some young blood made perfect sense.

They even gave me tools! The finest tools I’ve ever owned! All they asked was that I sign the deed transfer and voila!

Their lawyer made a special trip over with all the paperwork and we had it hashed out in five hours, tops. I read the contract, which was two of those hours, and went through their books. The rent is paid for two months and there were no liens against the building or their stock. If I sell just twenty pieces a month normal prices, I can keep this place open as long as I want to!

I will pop down to the HEL and tell them I’ve found a place to stay. I’m sure they’ll be sad to see me go, but I’ve been teaching that lovely maid my cleaning spell and if they play their cards right, I bet they’ll do just fine without me. New ponies were coming to stay when I left the day before and the manager was bragging just last night that his scores in the local tourist magazine had shot through the roof in just the few weeks I’ve been staying with them. He said he might even have made enough to get their sign repaired!

Tonight, Lily, I will sleep in the back room of the Glitterstone and tomorrow, I will begin the work of getting enough pieces together to hold a grand opening. If I have to go clean every hotel room in this city, I’ll do it. If I have to sell my soul to Tartarus, I’ll send it with love and kisses. I swear, by Celestia, it is a new day and I am going to become Equestria’s greatest jeweler!

Day twenty of my new life

This has been the busiest week of my entire life. I had to go apply for a small loan at the bank, who were surprisingly eager to grant fresh business loans. I got some very favorable contract conditions, though I’m going to have to show a return pretty quick if I want to keep things moving.

The shop is slowly taking shape. I may hire some actual help at some point, but for now, it’s just yours truly. Oh Lily, I wish you could see it!

Knowing Dad, though, he’s probably still mad at me. I’m still kind of mad at him, but holding a grudge is just going to make me into an old mare that much quicker and nopony needs an ancient, grumbly Ruby.

My checklist of stuff I need to do before we open stretches around the block, so this will be a short entry.

Grand re-opening of the Glitterstone, next week!

Day twenty five of my new life

I am going to sleep like death.

I worked for seven straight days to make enough pieces, atop getting my business license transferred and sorting out the tax situation, but Lily, let me tell you it was worth the back ache.

The Grand Opening was a hit!

The store was packed! I had ponies from everywhere! Even a few of the local dignitaries stopped in to pick up pieces for themselves or their significant others.

I got to shake hooves with ponies from city hall, and even the mayor’s wife turned up! She bought the very last piece I brought with me from home. I didn’t even ask for a price. She just plunked a bag of bits on the counter that would have broken my horn if I’d tried to lift them with magic.

There’s even going to be a news article on page six of the Detrot Chronicle about it. Maybe that’ll bring some more customers. I’d love for things to stay this busy, though if they do, I will definitely need some help.

I’m going to bed, and tomorrow I’ll open the store at eight’o’clock sharp to greet the first day of my business. I wish you were here, Lily. I could use your strong little hooves lifting the bag of bits I made. Too bad most of it will have to go to materials. I’m gonna be tapped out again.

Day twenty six of my new life.

Well, uneventful is the word.

I made a few pieces today and even sold one or two, but I guess ‘Grand Opening’ does mean the grandeur sort of leaves with the opening. Many of my customers from the park are still popping by and I’ve made sure to give them a healthy discount for helping me get on my hooves. Mister Patty from H-E-L came in and I just gave him a pair of cufflinks he was looking at. Sure, they were expensive to make, but it was worth it to see him smile.

Day thirty of my new life.

Who knew running a shop was this much work?!

It’s nothing enormous, but I’ve started to see ponies wearing my work on the street now. I treated myself to dinner last night and the waiter had a clasp on his tuxedo that had my signature. I’ve met so many ponies lately that I didn’t even remember him coming into the store. It’s success, but whew, it’s tiring.

The salad was delicious, by the way, but there wasn’t a cherry in sight. I’ve been shopping around, but every place that has them, they’re overripe. Oh Lily, I miss home. I wish I could come back and see everybody. I can’t afford to right now.

Give it a few weeks for things to calm down and maybe I’ll get up the courage to write a letter, apologizing to Mom and Dad for all those horrible things I said. I sure hope so.

I miss cherries.

Day thirty three of my new life.

Sold three pieces today! Celebrating with wine and cheese! Nothing else to report.

Lily...ugh.

I guess I have to keep to form here.

Day thirty five of my new life.

I want a bath; a full body bath, with fire. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel clean again.

I’m presently sitting in my room, door closed, breathing into a paper bag while I write this. I called the police and they said they’d be here when they could get here. It might be a half hour or an hour.

I just got a visit from some very, very unpleasant ponies who called themselves the ‘Jewelers' Union’. Except Detrot doesn’t have a Jewelers' Union anymore. I checked. Officially, the Jewelers' Unions all broke up years ago. These didn’t smell like some trade ponies, though. They smelled like thugs.

I was just closing up for the evening after a wonderfully lucrative day, when these two big stallions tromped in led by this mare who looked like a snake with legs. I did my usual ‘Welcome to Glitterstone!’ but she just walked around the room, then stopped in front of me.

Her perfume was strong enough to kill a minotaur. Some kind of awful jasmine garbage you’d find in the bottom of a florist’s dumpster. Disgusting.

She claimed I owed her money. I’d never met this pony in my life, and here she is, claiming I owe her...oh Lily, it’s not even worth recounting. More money than I’d make in a year. She said there was ‘interest accumulating’, too, and if I didn’t pay...well, I told her I’d never seen her before and she said the previous owners had borrowed money from her and her associates and because I was the new owner, I owed the money too. I went over the contract and it said nothing about transferred debts. That was when I realized these ponies were probably not acting within the law.

I told them to get out.

That’s when one of those ridiculous mounds of muscle smashed one of my display cases! Just bucked it!

Well, Mama Cherry and Daddy Blue didn’t raise no cherry stone! I snatched that awful mare by the mane and tail with my magic and tossed her right out my door. She screamed at her baboons to get me.

I’m ashamed to say, I wasn’t thinking especially hard. I cast the first spell that sprang to mind. I was scared, Lily, but those ponies...I don’t think I’ve ever been so mad. You remember our ‘fruit picking’ spell which snatches berries one at a time? The one Mom taught us when we started out, before we could shake trees properly?

I cast that.

Lily, I’ve never heard a stallion scream like that before, but it turns out that spell isn’t too specific about what kind of ‘fruit’ it plucks.

Now, I am just sitting here right now with my head between my foreknees, trying to get my breathing under control. While it was happening, I felt so cool and collected. I expected stuff like this in the city. After all, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Now, I can’t stop shaking. Why can’t I stop shaking? They’re gone.

I think I hear a police siren.

I feel like I might throw up.

Day thirty six of my new life.

I don’t know, Lily. Is this all worth it? Should I just call Mom and Dad right now and beg to come back?

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be a mopey guts. I paid for a fresh display case and a security system, so all is well I think. I’m still exhausted. How could a pony not be?

When the police finally showed up yesterday, I had managed to calm down a bit, but I was still not at my best. It’s still strange to me to see cars on a regular basis, but the police arrived in one. A ‘cruiser,' I think they call it.

These two officers, Mister Hide and Mister Pink, came to the store, looked around a bit, then asked me what’d happened. I told them best as I could and they took down descriptions of the ponies who’d been here, then they said there was probably not much they could do. Honestly, they really said that. Of course, I asked them why, and the younger one said it was because the Jewelers Union was a local criminal syndicate. Since I had only myself as a witness and they had no camera footage or other evidence, they weren’t likely to get anywhere.

Well, I’ve got cameras now! Next time somepony decides to come into my place without permission, I’ll damn well have some evidence!

Day thirty nine of my new life

It’s been quiet around here. Very quiet. I’ve had my usual customers, and a few new ones, but the last three days have been strange. It’s as though the locals aren’t looking me in the eye anymore.

Maybe it’s just paranoia. My sales are steady and that ‘help’ I mentioned hiring might actually be a viable option here in the next couple of weeks. Paranoid Ruby aside, you should see some of the pieces I’m finally able to create with proper gold!

I’m enchanting my diary to lock with magic, along with the front door. It’s not the most secure of enchantments, but it will make me feel better and if it’s broken, at least I’ll know if I’m being broken into.

Day forty five of my new life

What is it with colts and flirting? I don’t smell like sex, do I? When I want a coltfriend, I’ll darn well get one, and not a minute before! I wish they’d stop trying to get under my tail and buy things already.

Day forty six of my new life

I had this sweet girl wander in off the street today.

She looked half starved, poor thing, and her horse-shoes were missing half their nails. This poor girl was wearing actual metal shoes, too. Everypony in the city except those doing heavy construction or the police seem to wear rubber shoes or temporaries. Speaking of that, I must go have my farm shoes removed, now that I think about it, next I get the chance to hit the farrier.

She said she’d just come into town from Appleoosa on the bus. Her name is Crisp Luck, though it’s not a very apt title. She hadn’t a bit to her name.

I gave her a meal and some blankets to sleep under. She’d apparently been staying at one of the local shelters over night. She’s a pegasus, though her wings looked quite the mess. We talked over dinner this evening about her family. Crisp apparently came to Detrot from a farm, not unlike myself, but her luck was not so good. Her talent, apparently, is giving good luck to others. Sad, then, that she keeps none for herself.

I’m letting her sleep in the shop tonight, on a cot I found in one of my storage rooms. Nothing so sad as a pony with nothing. Might it be that she is the ‘good luck’ I need? I’ll check my finances and see if I can afford to keep her on. I’ve been thinking of hiring help, after all.

Day forty nine of my new life.

Crisp Luck is taking to Jewelry making with a zest that makes me feel worn out. She’s burned herself on hot metal a dozen times in three days, but every time she just slaps a bandage on it and goes back to work.

Since I got to Detrot, I think the thing I needed most, after work and money, was a friend. Crisp is a pretty quiet sort of pony, and sometimes I’ll realize she’s been working beside me at the forge for an hour without saying a word. I’ve tried to talk to her about her family over dinner, but she won’t say why she left Appleoosa.

I did poke my nose into her saddle-bags. Oh, I know, I know. I’m a bad, nosey pony.
`

She didn’t have much; a couple of pictures of ponies I presume are family, a fillyfooler romance novel (Who’d have thought? She hasn’t made any gestures in my direction. Maybe I’m not her type?), and a note from a doctor. Specifically, a gynecologist. It said she’d had a miscarriage.

I’m not one to pry too deep, but why would a pony interested in making a new life for herself keep that kind of thing? And if she’s not interested in stallions, how did she get pregnant?

...Honestly, I don’t know if I want to know the answer.

I gave her a few bits today to go buy food and she brought back a really stunning array of stuff. I thought I had some money-sense. That filly knows her stuff! She even found me some good cherries. I’m sitting here with a bowl of them balanced on my stomach, feeding the two of us with my magic. She’s reading her book and I’m writing in my diary.

It’s quiet. Feels almost like the farm, really. You remember the nights when you and I would stay up late, reading those books of dirty poetry to each other that Mom and Dad never knew we had? It’s like that. I miss you, Lily. Oh, how I wish I could just call you. That’s another thing we have here that Dodge Junction doesn’t. Proper telephones!

I know it’s not easy to spread telephone lines across the Badlands, but wouldn’t it be nice if Dodge Junction were big enough to afford a telephone in every house? These city ponies are the smartest I’ve ever met, and one day, they’ll figure out a way so we’ll have a real phone rather than having to go up to the bar and ask Mister Rapido to cast his long-distance speaking spell.

You just wait, Lily. This city might have suffered, but I promise, there are beings who want to make things better. I want to be one of them, and when I see you again, it’ll be as one of those brave ponies who tried to make Detrot great!

Day fifty six of my new life.

It’s a funny thing, when you look back at what you’ve come from. It’s been almost exactly two months since I came to Detrot. I think I should go ahead and at least write an actual letter to Mom and Dad. I know I haven’t updated this journal every day, but then, I don’t think I’m the kind of pony who keeps every thought in a little book. After all, I did come out here to discover who I am. I do like my diary, but life comes at you way too fast to be taking notes constantly.

The hubbub surrounding the ‘new’ jewelry shop has died down a bit, but I’ve made sure to keep my prices low enough so even a dreaming school filly can buy something in my store if she saves her pocket money. There’s always somepony needing something for a ‘special occasion’, too.

Crisp Luck and I have settled into something of a routine. She’s no longer looking for other places to stay and I got her a better bed. I don’t know why we’re still sleeping in the same room, but she seems to take some comfort from having me around, though she hasn’t tried to crawl under the covers with me yet.

I do still wonder what happened to her.

I don’t think it was anything good.

Still, she’s smiling as she works the forge and she only burned herself a couple of times today. That’s a major improvement, let me say.

I’ve got to do a supply run tomorrow out to one of the outlying mines which is still operating. I’m going to see if I can secure myself a decent pipeline for some cheaper gold. I prefer working with unrefined gold anyway. It means I get to establish, first hoof, how pure it is.

Day fifty seven of my new life.

I don’t know why I decided to take my diary on the train. The car rattles and squeaks like you wouldn’t believe and I’ve had to take a ride in the caboose. Everything smells like goat. Not that goat is an especially unpleasant scent, but it’s so odd being in a train full of them. The particular mine we’re heading for is, after all, owned by a family of goats.

I suppose it was a touch underhoofed of me to wear this dress to conduct business in. Red is my color, though, and it’s not as though there’s any worthwhile stallions baying at the door of the busy jeweler. Mostly what I get is huffy little colts with too much of their parent’s money.

I wish I had more time to appreciate the beauty of this place. I realized, just now, I haven’t been out of Detrot in almost two months. The city is wonderful and there’s always something to do, but the country-side really makes a pony feel alive. That’s what it’s like out here. I feel alive. I want to throw myself in the grass and roll around a bit.

Oop! We’re approaching the station. I’ll update with how things have gone once I’m done here!

Day fifty seven, part two!

Lily! I did it! I really did it!

These goats were ecstatic to have a buyer in Detrot who was willing to give them a direct cut. They’re all one small family who has been working through a refinery which wants forty percent, off the top, of every load of ore. I told them I’d give them a flat thirty on every sale, plus expenses, and picking up my shipments myself.

I prefer to do my own melting and refining anyway. Magic helps that sort of thing enormously. It does mean one big, unpleasant train ride each month, but who cares if my ore comes in and I get to determine purity?

I’ll be heading out to get some dinner for Crisp Luck and I soon. She’s been out doing errands today.

Lily.

No.

I can’t write this to her. I can’t write this to anyone. I have to write to someone, though.

Crisp is in the hospital. I’m in the waiting room.

Looking back, it’s been two days since my last entry. I’ve been here, sleeping on a couch that smells like death, for the last two days.

The doctors have managed to keep the news ponies away from us, but this one pushy mare managed to sneak in. Sugar or something. She was awful, but the doctor levitated her out of the window and dropped her into the dumpster behind the hospital.

The shock has worn off some. I couldn’t speak for that first day for almost six hours, and when I finally did, it was to ask where the bathroom was. I had to throw up twice. Every time I go in her room and see her, I have to throw up, but I keep going.

Crisp. Poor, Crisp. Heavens save her, little Crisp.

I’m so sorry. It didn’t even occur to me.

I’ll try to calm my emotions for a minute here so I can at least get this out. If I don’t, I fear I might go crazy. Maybe I already have. Maybe those whole journey was insanity. Maybe I should just go back to the farm. No... I couldn’t face Mom and Dad. I couldn’t tell them why I came back. Not after this. I couldn’t.

Alright Ruby. Just write it, you stupid foal.

I came home and found the door of the shop ajar. I went inside, and somepony had destroyed everything. The whole place was destroyed. It had magical residue on it, so probably a unicorn. They’d torn it all to pieces.

I found Crisp behind the counter. There was a baseball bat there, too. I think she tried to defend herself with it.

Whoever attacked the shop broke everything. Why am I even lying to myself? I know who it was.

She was laying on her side. There was blood all over the floor. The bat. Her clothes. My jewelry.

I found her wings in the garbage. They’d been burned. The stumps were cauterized with magical fire. The doctors said that they could, maybe, have re-attached them if they’d only been torn off, but the burns were too much. The flesh could be regenerated, but she’d never fly again and even if they did put them back on, they’d be useless.

Crisp was unconscious. She was breathing, but just barely.

Whoever hurt her -- the bastard Jewelers Union, whoever they really are -- nailed a plank to her side with one of my jewelry nails. They nailed it to her and wrote ‘Your next customer gets the same treatment. Pay up or we’ll find you.’ on it.

I’ve got to go throw up again. I’ll try to eat something later. I’ll have to find a hotel near the hospital soon.

Crisp is still in a coma. It’s been five days since I found her.

Rent for the shop is due in a few weeks. I don’t think I can afford to open it. If somepony did this to my assistant, what would they do to my customers?

I went to the cops. I told them everything and they sent a few ponies down to check it all out. Whoever hurt Crisp was a ‘professional.' That’s what the police called them. A ‘professional’. Like you can make a life out of hurting other ponies.

They’d broken into the security system before it could even send off a signal and the cameras were erased. Their magical signatures were disguised by massive bursts of power, probably from smashing charged gemstones. It was definitely a unicorn, but unless Crisp wakes up and can talk, there’s nothing they can do for her.

I found her family in Appleoosa.

I finally got the whole story, too. Crisp’s uncle was a raping monster.

She didn’t tell anypony until she found out she was pregnant. When she tried to tell her family, they didn’t believe her. The uncle was a very powerful member of city council and Crisp apparently had a reputation as being a ‘loose’ filly.

Crisp ran. After she left, they caught her uncle bent over one of the other children in the family. His brother, Crisp’s father, bucked him to death.

They’re going to come get her in a few days. I told them how we’d met and that she’d been injured. That was all. I didn’t give them details.

I’m going to lay down again. Maybe when I wake up, my guilt will stop making me feel so sick to myself. I should have known it wasn’t going to be so easy to get rid of those beasts.

I’m so sorry, Crisp.

I’ve come to a decision.

I’m pretty sure I saw one of those Jeweler ponies sniffing around the hospital today. I couldn’t be sure, but he looked big and nasty.

I talked to the manager of H-E-L today and asked him for his advice. Mister Patty has always been kind to me. He sat and listened as I told him what had happened. Then he told me that I was in huge danger. He told me about the Jewelers. They’re mobsters. Killers. He told me that Crisp is only going to be safe if I disappear, and if I was going to do that, I needed to keep away from my family because they’d be targets.

I tried to find those old colts who used to own the store, and they’ve apparently moved to Haywaii. Patty said he wasn’t surprised. Dumping a mob obligation on somepony is about the only way to get rid of it.

I don’t want to lead these...these whatever they are...back to you, Lily. I am going to have to go away for awhile where nopony can find me, until they’ve forgotten who I am. I remember those stories I read as a child. I’ll use fake names for everything.

I was watching television in the waiting room this morning and there was a piece on about this group called ‘The Lunar Passage’. I think I’ve got a solution to my present situation which might give me some time to reflect on what’s been going on. I know making ‘life changing decisions’ on grief and no food for a couple of days is pretty stupid, but I can’t think of anything else.

I’m going to join the Church.

Maybe I’ll find a little redemption, there, too.

I’m liquidating my assets over the next couple of days. I’ll set it up with my lawyers to have it all put into a trust for Crisp’s treatment. It’s not much, but I think I can sell the mining contract with the goats to another of the jewelers in Detrot. The bank loan… I don’t know. The store will be gone. I will be gone. It’s not like my credit is going to matter. I’ll send the bank what I can and the rest will go into the trust.

I’ll put my trunk and other things in storage. I shouldn’t need them. Not if what they’ve said about the Church’s convents is true.

With any luck, maybe Princess Luna can quiet my nightmares.

I stopped reading and stared at the next page.

The words on the page were in the same looping, careful horn-writing, but they wavered and twitched, like they were trying to escape.

Lily, who’d listened with her head resting on the cot, lifted her ears. Her eyes were red. There’d been some more tears there, but she hadn’t stopped me while I read. “Detective?”

“It’s...I...uh…I think I should just read this next bit to myself.”

“What is it?” she persisted, putting one hoof on my foreleg.

“I don’t really…” I scratched at my mane, then shook my head. “Just sit there for a second.”

Lily narrowed one eye, then lowered her head back between her knees. ”If you’re trying to protect me again-”

“No, no it’s not that…” I lifted the book and showed it to her.

She looked confused. “It’s just an empty page. What’s wrong?”

I bit my tongue between my teeth. “I think it’s one of your sister’s tricks.”

“You mean there’s invisible words?” she asked, cocking her head. “Ruby and I used to pass messages like that. Is it something for me?”

I squinted at the page. “It’s for me, I think.”

“For...you?” She asked, incredulously, then pointed her hoof accusingly at the letter on the ground. “I still don’t believe that exists. Are you saying my sister wrote you a letter in her diary before she died?”

I shut my eyes and gradually drew in a breath.

Staring at the darkness behind my eyelids, I tried to re-align my badly shaken sense of reality. Yes, I’d had a few minor conversations with my dead partner and, sure, my present partner had enormous wolf teeth, but there was at least some loose cause and effect that could be applied to those facts. Juniper less-so than Swift, but the fact remained, I was far less bothered by them than I was by the thought that Ruby might somehow have known of me before the day I began investigating her death.

Even in Equestria, a veneer of the explicable is important to preserving the thin skin of sanity which stands between ponies who are willing to do what’s right, regardless of whether they know why it’s right, and those who throw up their hooves and begin indiscriminately firing heavy ordinance at parking meters, street preachers, and anypony who talks in a movie theater.

I turned back to the page and forced my eyes to focus on the words. They seemed to waver and shift under my gaze.

“Lily, I wish I could say I have some kind of grip on this,” I sighed, wearily. “I’ve been a cop for fifteen years and I’ve seen some righteously strange things, but this last month has taken the cake, the bakery, and half the Equestrian frosting reserve worth of weirdness.”

Lily stuck her lower lip and drew her brows together. It was one of those faces that sends a little tingle through a stallion’s heart, whether she knew it or not. Finally, after several long seconds, she pulled her blankets over her head, rolled onto her side, and closed her eyes.

“Detective? Could you...could you go?” she asked, very softly. I thought, for a moment, that I hadn’t heard her properly.

“Hmmm? Go? Now?”

“I don’t think I can handle this right now. I’m not a fighter and I’m not a police pony. I’m a farmer. If you need something kicked, or something lifted, I’m your mare. Otherwise, I need...I need some time, alright?”

My ears drew back and I eased off the bed. “You want me to come back later?”

“Yes, please. I don’t want to know what it says right now. If my sister hid it from me and not you, she had a reason. She was flighty, but she wasn’t dumb.” Lily’s voice sounded very composed, but I could see the blankets quivering. She followed my look of worry down to her covers, then clenched her shoulders until the comforter stopped shaking. “I’m probably going to cry like a foal the second you close the door, but I’m feeling very numb right now. You have my sister’s diary. You have everything you need from me,” she murmured, then tried for a tiny smile. “I’ll be here, waiting. Could you come tell me when all of this starts to make sense?”

I closed the diary and stuffed it back into my pocket, careful to keep the lock from snapping shut. “If there’s anything your sister tells me that you need to know, I’ll send a message to Precious or come see you.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, then turned to stare at the wall. Her horn glittered and the needle rose on the old victrola and settle back on the cylinder. Precious’ bluesy tunes started up a soothing melody.

Retrieving my hat and sliding it on, I put my hoof on the door and gave the girl who’d haunted my dreams one last look. She was a question I might never answer, and for that reason if no other, she was beautiful to me.

I shut the door behind me as I left and stood there for a long time, eyes closed, my forehead resting on the wooden paneling, trying to will the world into some kinder shape. When I opened them again, it was still the same Equestria, the same Detrot.

Downstairs, the performance sounded like it was ending. I decided to go see if I could stuff my self-pity with a few pounds of junk food and three or four beers before I was forced, once more, to dive into the diary to plumb its secrets in the hope they might buy myself, my city, and the girl I’d just left to her tears a little bit of rest. I thought back to the words I’d seen on the page on which I’d closed the diary.

Mister Hard Boiled,

If you and Lily have opened this book together, you should be seeing this message. Anypony else will see only blank pages. I’m sorry, I haven’t got long. She will take my mind again, soon. Just go somewhere away from Lily and the next bit will appear. I don’t want my sister to hear this.

If She isn’t lying, this will help, I think. I wish I could be more specific, but if I try, She will take everything from me. I don’t know if it will stop what’s going to happen.

Please, if you’re real, protect my sister.

If you’re not just a fever-dream, I want you to know how sorry I am. For everything.

Especially for Juniper.

Ruby

“So? What’s the diary say?” Swift hadn’t even given me time to reach the bottom of the stairs before she bounced around the corner and put her hooves up on my chest.

“Too many things. Just...too many things. Suffice it to say, we’ve got what we came for. I’ll give you a run down when we’re out of here.” I patted the pocket with the book, then glanced around the shop. Limerence was behind the counter, an abacus floating in his magical grip as he counted out bits in the till. A warning bell went off in the back of my head. “Kid, where’s Taxi and Precious?”

Swift stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth, between two pointed teeth, then pointed a spot further back in the store. “Mister Precious got a call for a plumbing emergency at the griffin ambassador’s office. He said we could stay here as long as we liked...”

She fell silent and her eyes darted towards the floor, the ceiling, then my chest.

“And...where’s Taxi?” I growled.

Her muzzle twitched as she tried to make up her mind. At last, her well-ingrained deference to authority over-rode her fear of my reaction.

“Well, when we came back down, Mister Precious got up on the counter and started playing us some music. Between songs, he asked if we wanted anything to drink. She asked if she could have a beer. He gave her... a couple of those,” Swift said, softly.

Limerence raised his head from where he’d been sorting bits and added, “Yes, then the rum. Then the whiskey. Then some griffin concoction with a bleeding manticore on the label. Detective, you really must speak with your driver regarding her drinking habits. It cannot be safe to consume that quantity of alcohol in a single sitting and I, for one, do not feel like climbing a telephone pole in that deranged vehicle we have been using as personal transport because your driver was tanked.”

My forehead hit my hoof so hard the edges of my vision fuzzed.

“We’re going to come back to that first question. Taxi is where?” I asked, with a dangerous edge to my voice.

Swift chewed at her lower lip, then looked at Limerence.

“She’s somewhere in the Burning Love’s warehouse.” The librarian gestured towards the back of the shop, then added, as an afterthought: “I feel it only reasonable to inform you; she did mention before she left that, were you to go and find her without first -- in her words -- ‘making the universe a sensible place for sober ponies,’ that she would 'dislocate your entire body.'”

I mouthed the words ‘entire body’ at Swift. She nodded.

“Right, then. I don’t suppose I can convince either of you to go handle that particular situation?”

****

I pushed open the door to the Burning Love’s warehouse. While one might think Precious would settle for a storage room with a few extraneous bits of surplus and maybe his extra set of keys, that pony would be sorely underestimating the Prince of Detrot’s hoarding problem. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never so much as heard of him throwing away a piece of plumbing or a musical instrument if he thought it could be repaired.

To that end, he’d done what any enthusiast dreams of when they make a healthy living; he’d bought himself a huge, unused building and filled it to the brim with his obsessions.

Precious would not settle for row upon row of shelving units, like M6 had for their tat. Rather, he’d spent his bits on enormous glass displays, with spotlights and red-ropes across some of the larger objects, velvet carpets running between rows of shined and polished piping. One entire wall was nothing but elbow joints, while another was devoted to guitars with strange necks. I saw one that looked like it should only be possible to play with eleven hooves and a prehensile tongue, but that was the Prince in a nutshell. Impractical and brilliant at the same time.

Soft music was piped down through hidden speakers, more I imagined for the benefit of the collection itself than of anypony who might be touring it.

“Taxi?” I called out. There was no response. The music played on.

Goodie… I thought to myself. Now I get to walk into the drunk, surly tigress' den and try to get her to drive me home.

I wiped my hooves off on the mat just inside the door and started down the carpeted rows. I paused as I caught a glimpse of somepony. Turning, I glanced at the reflection in the nearest display case.

Juniper was sitting there, one of his big grins plastered across his muzzle. He regarded me for several seconds, then lifted his chin in the direction I’d been going.

I continued on my way. The ghost or spirit or whatever he was kept pace, trotting from one reflection to the next.

****

Precious’ warehouse was a damn sight bigger than a sane pony would suspect a space devoted exclusively to guitars and toilets could be.

“Oh Sweets, I swear, if you jump on me in here…” I grumbled as I trotted along under the warmth of the spotlamps. My drunken driver ambushing me and putting me in hospital to be picked up by our pursuers at their leisure would have been an especially anti-climactic way to end my inquiries.

I was just rounding a corner beside an exhibit that seemed to be devoted to the s-bend when I heard a noise some distance off. It sounded like a loose approximation of singing.

I picked up the pace, cantering down the carpeted lanes between the warehouse stock, until at last I reached the back wall. There, between two pipes twice my height in width, a toilet fit for a dragon sat behind a red velvet rope. It was absolutely enormous, but there was still no sign of my driver.

I listened again. Taxi’s singing wasn’t so much verses as it was snatches of different songs all piled on top of one another. She was definitely near by. I turned in a circle, searching for her. Precious might have found the strange acoustics of that space to be pleasing, but her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, sad and wistful and very, very inebriated.

“Sweets! Sweets, you in here?” I shouted.

The singing stopped. My driver’s head slowly appeared over the edge of the giant toilet bowl. Her pink eyes took a long time to focus on my face.

“H-hey, Hardible. Hardiblu. Haaardddyyy,” she giggled, drunkenly, throwing herself upright. A bottle of something was clutched in one hoof. She took a long pull, then tossed it over her shoulder. It clinked, clanked, then slid down into the porcelain abyss. “D-didn’t I shay I was gonna... shtuff... your dislocate every...your whole body? Does it all make senshe now?”

I pulled the diary out of my jacket and waved it at her. “It all makes sense now, and I will happily explain every last detail when you come down from there, sober up, and drive the four of us back to the Nest.”

“I dun...heeyup...dun wanna!” my driver pouted, letting herself slide back down out of sight in the bath-tub sized bog.

I dropped onto my belly, crossing my forelegs under me. “Sweets, get out of the toilet. We’ll go find out if Limerence knows some magic for hangovers.”

“Ever-hic...Everything makes senshe in the toilet…” she whimpered. I heard her fishing about in the bottom of the bowl for her lost bottle. “There’sh no shtupid dead filliesh writing about my f-friendsh they never met.”

Setting my jaw, I pulled my coat around myself and tried to cool my burgeoning irritation. “I don’t need to tell you precisely how disconcerting I find it, do I? Trust me, it’s nothing compared to what’s in the diary.”

“Don’t care,” she said, sulking. “I don’t wanna play thish game anymore. H-Hardy, can we jusht go shomeplace elshe? I wanna...wanna go. I wanna go be with you shomeplace that’s not Detrot. Oh...Hardy, can we go away from all thish? Please? You’n’me and Sh...Shwi...the little one with the big wingsh?”

There was a heartfelt note of yearning there. I guess I shouldn’t have been terribly surprised that Taxi would take such things so hard. She was not a fan of ‘fate’ nor ‘destiny’. Those two concepts had bitten her badly in the past. The letter in the diary from a dead girl I’d never met was unlikely to sit with her any better. I didn’t really fancy trying to tell a drunk, despondent, heavily trained martial artist that our situation had gotten even stranger when she’d bypassed ‘under the table’ and gone straight to ‘in the toilet’.

That is to say nothing of my own response to Ruby’s letters. I was very tempted to go root through Precious’ liquor cabinet to see if she’d missed anything good and lethal. Booze cures many ills and causality matters less after you’ve had eight or nine shots of engine degreaser on the rocks.

“When all of this is over? Yes, we’ll go on a vacation to Haywaii,” I promised, then added, thoughtfully, “There’s a couple of gentlecolts there whose mailbox I need to crap in. First, we have to take care of the strong possibility that there might not be much of a Detrot to come back to if we were to, say, leave today. Come on. We’re going to get you a cuppa, then go back to the Nest for a solid six hours of rest. I’ve got to read the rest of the diary and no quantity of death threats from Iris Jade are going to make that any faster.”

My driver’s ears twitched against the rim of her throne.

“Sweets, if you don’t come down from there, get a cup of coffee, and take us back to the Nest, I will make a concerted effort to drive us there!”

“Oh shush, ya big… big stallion boy...thing. You don’t have my keysh and you can’t get into my sh-shecurity shystem,” she countered, lifting her nose in the air.

“Yep. That means I'll have to hotwire the vehicle first. That means fiddling with the engine. That means me… doing a thing that requires mechanical and magical competence... to your car. Are we understanding one another?”

****

Limerence, as it turned out, didn’t know any spells for getting rid of a hangover, though he suggested - out of Taxi's reach - that we might research a piece of temporal magic he called "Not Drinking So Damn Much In The First Place." Precious, when he finally returned, suggested a bacon sandwich. That certainly got Swift’s interest, but Taxi immediately ran to the nearest toilet (a heavily embossed number with chromed piping) and vomited with great gusto. After that, she’d only looked like she was on Death’s door, rather than Death itself.

The Prince soon whipped up a pot of his four alarm coffee and set it before my sullen driver. Sobriety was going to be unkind and we all knew it.

It was another hour sitting around waiting for her to be stable enough to get us back to the Nest, and even then, I insisted we that we take side-roads and avoid the highways. Taxi took this with the grace I’ve long expected of her when she’s hungover, which is to say she very nearly mowed down a mare with a double foal-carriage, a group of college students, and several innocent traffic cones all the while moaning obscenities.

Swift hadn’t managed to get either Limerence or myself into a talkative mood, so after the fourth aborted attempt at conversation she settled for staring out the window. The rain was down to an unpleasant drizzle, but still we drove, to home, hearth, and safety. I felt the diary in my chest-pocket and smiled in anticipation.

The game was, finally, ahoof.

Act 2, Chapter 20: Scary Questions, Scary Answers

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 20: Scary Questions, Scary Answers

There have been quite a few times when the diarchs' security was threatened. The events of Luna's Return and the royal wedding of Princess Cadence and Prince Shining Armor both saw Celestia functionally foalnapped, and that was twice in as many years. Neither Nightmare Moon nor Queen Chrysalis saw fit to kill their captives despite being in an apparent position and having a very strong reason to do so. Chrysalis could have eliminated Celestia and taken her place. In Nightmare Moon's case, one might think such an act would have neatly and quite permanently fulfilled her goals of total control of the heavens.

So why didn't they?

While there are numerous plausible theories, scholars posit that there are two most likely practical reasons that no Princess has been assassinated despite the wealth of opportunities to have done so: Either alicorns are made of sterner stuff and, while they can be disabled, require substantially more than a bullet or a magic bolt to actually kill... or their would-be assassins have been consistently afraid to do so, in part because nopony has any idea what would happen when the sun and moon are no longer under control.

It's true that we've seen what happens when one of the diarchs is out of the picture - a thousand years of peace and prosperity, if not so much progress - but Luna was never really dead; Celestia could well have been utilizing Nightmare Moon's magic from within her lunar prison to keep the moon in motion. While there was a time before the diarchs ruled, the two have held sway over the sun and moon for so long that no one is sure what calamity could occur should even one die. The sun could wink out entirely. The moon could come crashing down on Trottingham and roll across Equestria like an unstoppable runaway ferris wheel. A door could open to a world populated entirely by horrific bipedal monkeys.

Equestria could burn.

To make an attempt on the lives of the Princesses would be to want them dead so badly that one would be willing to risk the world itself in exchange. How fortunate for all of us that the willingness is as rare as the ability.

--The Scholar

While my driver frequently -- despite her purportedly ‘clean’ lifestyle -- drank herself under the table, she’d never handled a good, deep drunk all that well when coming out the other side. Since we’d reached the Nest, she’d done nothing but down hot coffee and glare at anypony who came near.

I provided Swift and Limerence with an edited-for-dignity summary of the events that took place after they left Lily’s room, and I showed them the diary. Limerence tried a number of different spells over the book, none of which would reveal the hidden words. To his understated consternation, not one of them made the tome so much as jiggle.

At last, with the day’s intense emotions worn off, I slumped under the covers on one of the spare beds for a nap, hoping things would make more sense upon waking.

****

“So, I could believe she’d somehow heard about me on T.V. after one of my cases and if she’d lost her mind, maybe she drew some… association… and all of this was a big coincidence. It might take a couple of drinks and possibly being hit in the head with a hammer, but I could believe it… if she hadn't mentioned being sorry about Juniper." I said, shifting the cord from my chest to the wall socket under one leg and into a more comfortable position. “We need to know how she knows what she knows.”

The four of us were gathered around our spool/table in the Nest’s ‘living room.' Three hours worth of sleep hadn’t fixed any of our problems, save that Taxi was no longer making death threats when somepony entered the room.

“Short of… time travel, Detective, I know of no method by which this might be done, and even the most effective time-manipulation magics generally lead to self-annihilating closed loops,” Limerence declared. “The last pony who could even cast such a spell was the greatest magician of the last century, and I somehow doubt she is involving herself in this insidious plot. Nonetheless… whether or not this filly is simply mad, clairvoyant, or some combination of the two… we are faced with the same conclusion. The Church are our culprits and the rest of this is entirely speculative distractions.”

I picked up the diary and let it flop open to the last page I’d read, putting my hoof on the letters that remained invisible to everypony except myself. I hadn’t gotten time yet to read on, though with a fortifying nap under my belt, I was feeling about ready to have done.

“You don’t believe that,” I replied, tapping the open page.

“Not fully, but I will not discount the evidence of my… well, of your eyes, I suppose; this… this filly is frustratingly skilfull with her locking magics,” the librarian exhaled. “But, it is secondary. We will do what we can to discover how she has gained such information, but our primary mission remains the recovery of the Moon Weapons.”

Swift frowned at him. “What about the armor of Nightmare Moon?” she asked.

Limerence flicked an ear, irritably. “That armor is of secondary importance to the retrieval or destruction of those weapons. Incomplete, I do not believe it anything more than a curiosity, and its completion would require thefts from both the most secure vaults of Canterlot and the eyries of the most dangerous griffin tribe-lords. Luna’s weaponry, which is almost certainly in their hooves at this very moment, is designed for the killing of dragons. It may have significant weaknesses, but in the hooves of religious zealots... well, do you want to bet on whether or not such weapons would work on Princess Celestia? I would rather not gamble on such a thing.”

That brought me up short. “Wait… you think they could be doing a hit on Celestia?!” I choked.

Limerence shrugged and dismissed the question with a flick of his blond tail. “Initially, I discounted such a possibility, yes, but our foes have proven themselves extremely clever. The Princess would, no doubt, feel the proximity of such powerful lunar magic well before an assassin could get close enough... unless that, too, has been accounted for in some manner. Do you wish to take that chance?”

I shook my head. “Alright. I’ve still got half a diary to finish. We’re short of time, so whatever move we make, it needs to be tomorrow. If it involves foalnapping Astral Skylark and applying some of that persuasive power you used on Reginald Bari, I’m going to go ahead and shoot myself when we’re done… but our options aren’t looking great.”

“You’re not serious, are you, Sir?” Swift asked, worriedly. “Foalnapping? Shouldn’t we just… I don’t know… Tell the Princesses?”

I put my hoof across my eyes and sighed. “Exactly what do you want to tell them? One of Equestria’s major religions stole Crusades-era weapons and is intent on using them to kill one of the diarchs? Limerence is right. All we’ve got is a lot of speculation,” I explained. “Besides, the second we spill all of this to the Royals, our advantages go away. We have surprise and mobility. If somepony intercepts our message or the Princesses act in such a way as to alarm our thieves, the armor vanishes, the weapons vanish, and our prey can simply wait for a more opportune time. They don’t seem to lack for patience.”

Taxi, who’d remained silent behind her however-many-cup of coffee said very quietly, “Hardy...what if what we need isn’t in that diary?”

I inhaled, sharply and lifted the book across my hooves. “Ruby… wasn’t insane. I don’t know how I know, but I know. I feel it in my ass.” I gestured at the scales on my hip.

“You said it, though. What if this is all just speculation?”

“I know what I said! You get an alternative, Sweets, feel free to pop it in the suggestion box. Until then, I have some reading to do.”

****

I don’t know for certain why I chose the most secluded room in the Nest. It wasn’t more than a closet, though there was a bong and lava-lamp we’d missed on our initial cleaning expedition. It just seemed appropriate.

I plugged the lamp in and pushed the bong into the hallway before dragging one of the bean-bags in behind me, doffing coat and hat, and sliding into a lazy heap on my back with Ruby’s diary balanced on my stomach.

My worries remained as oppressive as ever. If the ponies who’d taken Jade’s daughter decided to jump the gun on hurting her child to assure her compliance, it would leave me once more facing two omnipresent monsters. I had no doubt she’d follow through on her threat to turn me over to them. Her methods might have been some miles beyond the town of ‘Questionable’, but the Chief of Detrot Police was in the position she was in because she could get things done. Her many predecessors had lasted months, if they were determined, or years, if they were utterly corrupt. She’d lasted years on guts, grit, and prescriptions.

Opening the diary, I turned back to the page I’d been on and sighed.

“Alright, Ruby. I’m alone. What’ve you got for me?”

The letter flickered on the paper, then vanished. Words began to spill down the page from top to bottom. In seconds, the small, jeweled book had filled out. I licked my hooftip, adjusted the lava-lamp so it was over my shoulder, and began to read.

Day one of my...new life.

It’s not really day one, is it? I’ve already gotten one ‘new life’ and poor Crisp almost died because I was thoughtless. Lily always said I should stop and take everything into account. I should have warned Crisp. I should have warned her.

How could I? I had no idea somepony could do such a thing to anyone, much less another pony.

But… then why does this guilt keep hounding me?

I’ve put the rest of my stuff in storage; everything except this diary, my trunk, and a set of clothes.

I managed to dissolve my bank loan with less hassle than I’d thought I’d end up with. I owe it to Mister Patty of H-E-L, who said I saved his business and negotiated with the bank manager for me when I told him about my troubles. He didn’t try to stop me. He even agreed this might be safest. He’s got regular guests coming in for the first time in years and he’s hired a half dozen unicorns on staff. I showed him the spell I used. It turns out that spell was part of a text which was thought lost before the Crusades. Our little Dodge Junction library had one of the only copies left in Equestria.

Part of me suspects he took my obligation on himself.

If I make it big, one of these days, I will send him back that money.

What am I saying? Make it big? I already tried that. Damn me. I’m still that stupid little girl getting off the bus.

Here I am, then. Another bus station.

I’ve just gotten off the number six across town. I’m sitting on the steps of the First Church of the Lunar Passage Lunar Memorial Shelter. Silly name, right? The shelter should be...shelter enough. I hope I won’t have to be in a place like this for more than a month or two. I can’t afford to be noticed.

I’m using the name ‘Charity Soul.' Despite that little piece in the newspaper, nopony seems to have connected me to the girl who owned the Glitterstone. Not surprising, I guess. I look like a ragamuffin. I didn’t think to wash my fur or mane before I got on the bus.

Right, me, I know. Unwashed and unkempt. Who’d have thought that would ever happen?

The Lunar Passage says they take anyone seeking redemption. Princess Luna doesn’t seem like an awfully bad pony to seek it from. I know I could go and see her in Canterlot, but maybe that’s not what I need. I know the Princess doesn’t care about me personally, but that doesn’t seem to be what the Church is about. It’s more like it’s about the idea of the Princess’s redemption, rather than the reality. Kind of like my trip to Detrot.

Alright, I’m here. I may as well go on in. I smell something cooking and after I sent off the cheque to Crisp’s family, I only have a few bits left. I could eat a whole cherry tree about now.

****

It’s been three days.

Day three of my life in the Church.

Nahhh. I'd rather call it ‘three days later.'

I’m going to write to you, Lily, one more time. I feel like writing to somepony and I love you, so listen up!

I know this may sound strange, but I am feeling better. I know, right? The guilt has been hanging around my shoulders like lead weights, but each day I’m here, working… it feels less. I don’t like to think about what happened.

One of these days, I may look up Crisp and go apologize to her in person.

Anyway, the first day I mostly just stayed in the shelter. They gave me a tiny room, barely bigger than the closet at the Glitterstone. It's the best they said they could do, but I don’t really mind. It’s not like I have a lot to put in it.

The building is laid out like my the dorms at Dodge Junction’s little college. I know, it’s not so little to you, sis, but after you spend a bit in the big city, everything becomes small.

Everypony eats together in a big cafeteria. It’s okay, food wise. They even had a cherry cobbler today! Nothing is quite like mom’s, but the chef-pony who works in the back really does like his work. It’s so strange. There are these ponies in blue robes and they smile all the time. It’s not even like it’s forced. They’re genuinely happy to help us. I stood and talked to one of them today while we were in line for dinner. His name was Carrot. No last name, no surname. Just Carrot. Green mane, orange body. Appropriate, I guess, but not super imaginative.

Though what he lacked in originality, he made up for in… sweetness. He was... just sweet. He told me he’d used to be addicted to something called ‘Ace’ and one night, he’d just robbed a house to pay for his...whatever it is. He’d broken a little filly’s piggie-bank for the bits in it and he was sitting in an alley, when he looked up and saw the moon overhead. He said he thought he’d felt Luna, staring down at him, and looking sad.

The next day, he returned the money to the girl’s house, apologized to her parents, and let the police take him. He served a few weeks in jail for misdemeanor theft, then went straight to the Church.

It’s so strange. Many of the ponies I’ve met here seem to have similar stories. It’s like this city is looking for redemption and will take it wherever they can find it.

For a church about the story of Princess Luna, I don’t see much of her around here. Sure, there are the blue robes. I talked to the pony running this place about them. Her name is Celestial. You can guess how popular she is, considering I don’t think these ponies like Princess Celestia all that much, but she does her absolute best and that seems to earn respect by itself. She told me the robes are only given to ponies who’ve actually joined the church and been ‘redeemed’ in Luna’s light.

I asked her about that and she said it was just a simple ritual and after I’d been there a few more weeks and maybe done some work with the Church, I might be invited to take part!

The next day, I volunteered in the kitchen, feeding ponies. I might not have yours or Mom’s talent, but I can still make a mean pie when I’ve got some decent ingredients. The chef, Mr. Cast Iron, was glad to have extra hooves behind the stove. My cleansing spell helped with clean-up, too, although cleaning a hotel room or two is nothing to cleaning fifteen or sixteen sinks full of dishes.

Still, the pain in my horn feels makes me feel…I don’t know. Cleaner. I feel cleaner, for having done it. I feel like Crisp is less hurt, because I’m hurt.

Yikes. I just read that back to myself. That sounds way too loony for my taste. I’ll do kitchen work, but no more working until my horn aches. That cannot be a healthy way to go about this whole ‘redemption’ thing.

****

Day six, in the Church.

Odd as it may sound, I’ve found this place more comforting than I thought I would. It’s boring. Frequently dull. It’s certainly not the Glitterstone and I can’t deny, a huge part of me wishes it were. I should have known that just buying a store because some old stallions didn’t want to see their life’s work shut down wasn’t a fluke. Not here. Not in Detrot.

I… wish I could come home, but I went by the Glitterstone yesterday. I got the funniest feeling of somepony watching me as I walked by, then I saw this stallion in a trenchcoat, reading a newspaper get up off one of the benches in the little park just up the street and start towards me.

I ran.

I hopped onto the bus just as it was leaving from the corner and when I was looking back, I’m pretty sure I saw him watching me through the buses windows from the sidewalk across the street. I think he might even have been one of those three ponies I saw the first time, when they came in and broke things in my shop, but I couldn’t be sure.

I can’t come home. I can’t. Not until they’ve forgotten about me. The amount of money they say the owners of the Glitterstone owed was crazy. More bits than I’ve seen in my whole lifetime.

I’m here now, though. Your past only matters in the Church during group meetings.

I’ve been working by day in the kitchen, then heading to the garden in the empty lot behind the building in the afternoons, and finally this sort of ‘confessional group’ in the evening where I talk about my life before coming here. I have a lot less to say than most of the ponies who come through.

For some reason, those group meetings leave me exhausted. Nopony else seems much better, except Celestial, who seems to enjoy them. Still, afterwards, I have the best sleep I’ve had since I left Dodge Junction.

Tomorrow is Monday, which is some kind of special day for the Church. There’s a big meeting and we’re supposed to sit through some kind of lecture by a pony named ‘Astral Skylark’. She’s a big-wig in the Church.

I hope it’s not as dull as it sounds.

****

Oh sis! I feel so...alive!

For the first time in days, I feel genuinely alive and awake!

I don’t even know why, but Miss Skylark’s lesson today resonated with me. I wish I could write it all out for you here, but I came away with this really intense feeling of relief.

‘I am responsible for my actions, but my future isn’t defined by the ones already taken unless I am unwilling to change my course.’

That was the gist, at least. I don’t remember much more, although I feel pretty good right now. She talked about Princess Luna and told several stories of the ponies she’d met in the church, then about Detrot and the problems the city has. Afterwards I felt like I’d awoken from a really restful sleep. Not that I was bored. She speaks with such passion.

I’ve heard she doesn’t like Princess Celestia, but she didn’t talk about her at all. I sort of wish she had. I also want to hear what Celestia has to say for herself, particularly with regards to letting places like Detrot get so bad. I know it’s really far away from Canterlot, but is that really an excuse? She’s supposed to rule everypony, not just those an easy sky-chariot flight away.

Miss Skylark had to depart immediately after she delivered her message to handle some Church business at the museum. I wanted to talk to her and ask her some questions, but I didn’t have time. Maybe the next time she comes to the shelter, I’ll ask her some of them.

****

Group confessionals tonight. It’s been two days since Ms. Skylark’s talk and already, I’m wishing I could attend another one. Anything but those damned confessionals, pardon my Fancee.

I talked about home tonight, when my turn came up. Some about you and Mom and Dad. I told that story about when we got chased up a tree when I was six and you were five by that thing we thought was a timberwolf. Remember, it turned out to be the neighbor’s dog who’d gotten out and fell in a bramble bush? The other ponies in group laughed.

Why do these groups tire me out so badly? It wasn’t like we were having a really intense conversation or anything. I come off those meetings with my whole body aching, from horn to hooves. I feel much better in the mornings, but it’s feels like I’ve run a ten mile marathon until then.

I talked to one of the robed ponies, a very pretty mare named ‘Cinder,' and she told me the groups used to make her tired too, but after she took the robes and joined the Church, they became easier.

I’ve decided to volunteer for a couple more shifts in the kitchen. I like the work and it’s time to think. I do feel a little guilty about not using my talent for jewelry, but right now, I hardly want to think about working metal. I can bring out the shine in some of the fruit we grow in the back garden. Maybe that’s what I should be doing with my life. Maybe that’s what I should have been doing, before I left the farm.

I don’t know anymore. The Church makes me feel better and worse at the same time. Mostly better. I’ve got a few more weeks before I can officially join, if I choose to. Once I do, they’ve got businesses who can fix me up with a job. I’ve got to be careful during group not to give any pertinent details. I change the names of places and people.

Nopony will even know who ‘Charity Soul’ was, when she’s gone.

I did go back to the Glitterstone again. Disguised, this time. I had to dye my fur with some temporary paints and wear a hoodie I bought from one of the corner stores.

That stallion with the newspaper was still there, watching the place. He’s got an ugly scar under one eye and a dark orange mane that looks like clumps of it were torn out. He watched me walk up to the door, try it, then walk away. He was definitely watching, though. They’re still looking for me. I don’t even want to think what they’d do if they found me. Probably what they did to Crisp, or worse.

I peeked in and there’s even a piece of garbage I forgot to throw away before I left, still laying on the floor just inside. Nopony has bought the space in the last few weeks.

I left soon after that. I don’t need to think about that. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it in group, but maybe in a few nights I might. It couldn’t hurt to have it out of my system. I’ll edit it enough so nopony will know it was me. I still need to tell that story, though.

****

Wow! It’s been a whole three weeks since I updated my diary! My family must be worrying about me. I’ve never been gone for this long without sending them a letter or something. Sure, I mean, there was that time when I was nineteen, but that was just the next county.

I don’t...really want to think about that right now, honestly. What if Lily comes looking for me? Just the thought gives me a headache. Mom and Dad are getting on in years, and if she leaves right before harvest, the farm will be in bad shape.

Sis, I know you’ll come eventually, but could you wait just a little while longer? I’ll send you a letter soon! I promise!

I’ve got to keep this diary going or I’ll lose track. Life is so routine here, or at least, it was.

Apparently, somepony talked to Miss Skylark today. Talked about me.

I’ve expressed to a number of ponies here that I was interested in actually joining the church directly. Today was another of Miss Skylark’s visits. She’s apparently the busiest pony in the world. She goes from one shelter or retreat to the next, day in, day out, talking to ponies about the glories of the Lunar Passage.

I mostly just work the kitchen, go to group, and listen to the Monday lectures. Not all of them are by Miss Skylark, although she apparently likes to tour the various shelters when she’s available. She might do twelve talks in a day at different places around the city if what Cinder said is right. She also said Miss Skylark also sometimes records her talks and projects herself in other places, using some kind of magic, so it’s hard to know if you’re actually seeing her unless she comes down and talks to ponies there.

Anyway, somepony talked to Miss Skylark today, when she was really here. After her lecture, she came down from the podium and into the crowd. She took me to one side.

I didn’t realize how young she is. She’s older than I am, but I thought she’d be ancient! You don’t see her up close all that often.

She has the strangest markings on her face, too. It looks like she’s wearing some sort of hat, except it’s her fur. I asked her about it and she just smiled this very enigmatic smile. We went on a little walk through the garden, just talking. Not rushed at all. I felt so relaxed talking to her. Even my headache, which had been there since I went to group last night, went away.

She asked me about my life here and I showed her the tomato plants I’ve been cultivating out back.

Then she asked me something I’ll never forget.

She asked me what I want.

Honestly? Since I left the Glitterstone, I wanted nothing more than to be back home. For some reason, when she asked that and I answered, I started crying. I just started bawling, like I did when I was a foal. She’s so… motherly. She reminded me of Mom, just then, in a way that I didn’t even notice until that moment. Her horn was glowing, and she touched me with it and dried my tears, then held me for awhile underneath the apple tree behind the building.

She asked me about my family, and I told them I hadn’t spoken to you in months. At that, she let out this sort of sigh, patted my hair, and said ‘I’ve spoken to Miss Celestial and she seems to think you’re ready to take the robes. If you want to take the robes, it’s not an easy life, but it is a life of peace. The Church will be your family, and if your born family should wish to join you one day, they will be welcomed.'

Oh, Lily! I wish you could have been there to see me.

I’m still smiling, even right now. Really grinning!

I’m going to get to take the robes! She even offered me a place in the church at one of the Convents, if I choose to go. I know it’s ridiculous, but I said yes! Me! A nun! A wife of Luna!

I’m feeling...elated and a little scared. I don’t know why I said yes, but now that I have, I won’t turn back. One day, Lily, you’ll hear my name and it won’t be as some big show-pony. It’ll be because I saved the world. You better believe it, little sister! I can do more good here than I could ever have done in that little jewelry shop.

****

Oh Lily, I’ve never been so excited! I’m packing up my diary and I thought I’d just do one last entry. The card I’ve got says mine is room ‘12b’ in the Convent of The Full Moon

The diary entry stopped there, like Ruby had been interrupted halfway through a sentence. I could see the next word, but it was faded into illegibility and the one after was barely a mark on the paper.

I flipped to the next page, then back to the first, before quickly re-reading that last line.

“What do you think she meant when she said she didn’t want her sister to read this?”

I jumped about two meters in the air, sending the bean-bag flying against the wall. The book clattered off my chest. If there’d been any more room, I’d have probably injured myself, but in the small closet I only had space to bump into the door, nose first. Clutching at my injured muzzle I glanced around, looking for the source of the voice. I expected to see Limerence or maybe Taxi standing behind me, reading over my shoulder, but there was nopony there.

I caught a small motion out of the side of my vision and peered up to at the lava lamp.

Bent across the mirrored surface of the lamp, looking like a carnival mirror attraction, Juniper’s spectral face grinned out at me.

“I wish you’d go be dead. You’re starting to make me question my sanity,” I said, taking several deep breaths to try to control my heart rate.

“Well, it's healthy that you're at least asking the question,” he replied with a lopsided shrug. “If you weren’t, I might be.”

“Are you still not going to tell me what part of my damaged psyche you represent? Or possibly just how Ruby knew your name?” I asked, sardonically.

He snorted, which was a strange sound to hear coming from a lava lamp. “If you didn’t have some mystery to solve, you’d go mad with boredom, Hardy. Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. What, in that book, did the girl not want her sister to see?”

I considered this for awhile, then slid back onto the beanbag. “While I’m talking to myself, I suppose working on the case is a better use of my time than drooling and rocking.” I rested my toe on the last line of the book. “Fine. I’ll bite. If I had to guess, she probably didn’t want her to have the location of the convent. Her sister’s obviously protective of her, even if it took awhile to get her out here. I know those farming families. Leaving at all is tantamount to abandonment, particularly during harvest.”

Juniper shut one eye, whilst the other rolled toward the ceiling. It was a sort of contemplative expression he’d often worn when faced with an especially vexing problem. “Not unlikely, I suppose. Did anything about that strike you as strange?”

“Should any of it have struck me as normal?” I asked, flippantly. “I don’t know about you, but dead fillies sending me letters with my dead partner’s name in them that had to have been written before she could possibly have met me seems a little ‘strange’, don’t you think?”

His nostrils flared. “Don’t be a wise-ass, Hardy. Wise-asses get shot.”

I tapped my chest. “Already did. It was a less life-changing event than most ponies seem to think and didn’t provoke terribly much attitude adjustment anyway. Besides, you’re one to talk.”

“Hey, you got off easy. Bullet, spray of blood, done.” Juniper sniffed, patting his thick mane with one hoof. His death hadn’t been pretty, but incorporeality had been kind. His mane looked freshly cut and cleaned, like it had every day he was on the job. “Either way, I don’t want to get into a ‘who died more violently than who’ contest with you, because I would win and you’d sulk. Answer the question.”

I gave him my best ‘you’re-dead-and-I-miss-you but-I-wish-you-weren’t so-I-could-punch-you’ look. “Fine. If I had to say, then yes, based on what I know about Skylark and Ruby, something in that was a bit odd.”

“Any...thoughts on what it might have been?”

My patience, already somewhat fractured by a day full of irritatingly dense enigmas showing no signs of coming unwound, finally snapped.

I shoved myself up and grabbed the lava lamp between my hooves. It was quite hot. “Alright! What?! Come on, out with it! What did you see there that I’m not?! I’ve been dealing with enough cryptic crap lately!”

Juniper turned on his heel and trotted into the distance of the bent reflection, flicking his tail in my direction. “You never used to have quite this temper, you know. It’s doesn’t suit.”

I forced myself to breathe and set the lava lamp back on the closet’s little table. “Juniper… I watched you die in the worst way I think a pony can. I made peace-”

“Bull!” he snapped, swinging to face me. “Just bull. You didn’t make peace, Hard Boiled. You crawled into a bottle for two years. You’d still be at the bottom of it if Taxi hadn’t dragged your ass out, and you still drink too much.”

That was a load of shame I didn’t need just then, but it hit home. I sank onto my haunches and closed my eyes, tightly.

“Juni, if you’d watched me die like that, what would you have done?”

His voice was softer when he spoke again, but I still didn’t want to look at him.

“Honestly? Probably the same thing,” he said, with a note of sad resignation. “At some point, you’re going to have to tell that sweet Kid in the other room just what happened, you know. She’s curious.”

I clenched my teeth together and opened my eyes to find him watching me. “My business. Not hers.”

“She’s your partner. Your business is her business. One of these days, it’ll come down to you or her. If you don’t trust her, like I didn’t trust you-” the regret in his voice was thick enough to cut with a knife. “-then one of you dies. Maybe both of you.”

I put my muzzle up on the edge of the table, just a few inches from his image in the glass side of the lamp. “I didn’t know you didn’t trust me.”

He let his shoulders sink. “I thought of you as a kid, Hardy. Somepony who needed protecting. Sound familiar?”

That realization struck an unpleasantly truthful chord. In all the years we’d worked together, he’d always been the teacher, and I, the student. The idea tasted sour in my mouth, but I couldn’t deny the parallels. Swift was such a kid.

Juniper continued, without waiting for my answer, “Doesn’t matter right now. Like I said before, this case is moving things. You want to know what those things are, you have to stop looking at the immediate. Swift hit on something important with her little question about what would have happened if everything had gone all pear-shaped simultaneously.”

“Fine. While you’re feeling helpful, what did she hit upon?” I grumbled.

“This is a web, Hardy.”

“A… web.” I muttered. That ticked some ethereal box in the back of my head and I wished, later, I’d been a bit more astute at that moment. It might have saved me considerable troubles.

“You got it.” He sat, pointing at my chest with one hoof. “You, are so wrapped up in the ‘who’ and ‘when’ and ‘where’ that you’re not hunting down the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. You have to ask yourself two significant questions. How did the Church get so big so quickly. and why do so many ponies follow Skylark with such fanatical conviction?”

I blinked, then shook my head as I stared down at the concrete floor between my forelegs.

“I don’t know.”

There was no reply. I looked up, and found myself sitting in darkness. Juniper was gone. The lava lamp’s bulb had burned out.

****

I trotted down the hallway into the living room, diary in my teeth, hat back on my head. Limerence was there, along with Swift and Taxi, as well as an unusual addition to our group; Wisteria was laying on her side beside the spool table, a pillow under her purple neck. They’d moved the latest in a long line of board games onto the floor just so she could play. Her pregnant belly protruded in front of her with a cup of something steaming resting on one side.

The Aroyo’s eyes lit up as I came in and she grinned. “Ah, Crusada! Is good to be seein’ you. I and I was worried ye fell into de bog.”

I snickered and set the diary on the table. “I wasn’t in the bathroom. I’ve been reading… well, reading a thing of importance.” I flipped open the book to the last page with words, then turned to our librarian. “Lim, you remember the names of those five convents?”

“Of course,” he answered, then tugged a notepad from the front of his vest pocket and went down it from the top, “The Waning, the New, the Waxing, the Full-”

“That one. The Full. Where’s that?” I asked.

“What… Detective, if I might ask, why are we going over this again?” He gestured to the closed vault-like door of the dragon bunker. “To my knowledge, you have not left the Nest and the nearest phone is on the corner. Are you saying you have a lead for us?”

I pointed to the diary. “Ruby spent some time at the Convent of the Full Moon. It’s the last entry, here. I think there might be more, but I’ve no idea how to get into those parts, so we’re stuck with this.”

Taxi’s ears pinned back. “Ruby was a nun?”

“Seems like it, yeah,” I said. “Might explain that strange alteration to her cutie-mark. The red crescent moon?”

Limerence shook his head. “My research contained a chunk of information on the nunneries of the Lunar Passage. To my knowledge, there is no cutie-mark alteration as an associated requirement for entry into their orders. Granted, this information is limited, but I believe I can say with some certitude that if it is part of a ritual, it is part of one of which the public at large is unaware.”

“To your knowledge?”

The Archivist’s sneered, indignantly. “Detective, if you are going to ask me to examine information for you, you must trust that I will do so in a thorough and studious manner. If I say such a thing is not the case, then be assured, I have studied every aspect for which there is intelligence available.”

“Alright, alright, no need to get your vest in a twist.” I patted at the air in his direction in a mollifying gesture, and he sank back onto his beanbag chair. “The Full Moon Convent. Where is it?”

“The address is… mmm… number twelve eighteen, Centurion St.,” Limerence replied. “What makes you think that Miss Ruby was kept in the same place as either Cerise or our targets?”

I let my back legs flop out under me, not looking forward to that particular explanation. “I’ve got a good feeling and a ghost who tells me so.”

Three of my friends just looked confused, while Wisteria nodded with quiet understanding. “Crusada, ye be followed by de Loa, den? Daddy Legbaa, mebee?”

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with ‘Loa,'” I said

“Dey be spirits o’ de world. Daddy Legbaa be de Loa dat gathers de herd. Loa of sheep and loa of sleepers. He be that which speaks between de spirit world and dis one. Often he come as brother, or father. He be many faced, a sneaking thing. A sheep be only one of de faces on he altar, one name, o’many. Equestrian call him ‘de sandstallion’, or ‘dreamer’. He speak in quiet times, mostly in sleep, but when de mind is calm as well-”

“Oh! Sheep Loa, counting sheep, right… funny!” Swift giggled.

Wisteria grinned at my partner, then returned her attention to me. “Tell me, Crusada… what be Daddy Legbaa sayin’?”

“Well, I don’t know about ‘Daddy Legbaa’, but I will say this particular spirit says we should be investigating just how the church got so big so fast,” I explained. “Call it a ‘hunch’, if you’d prefer. It’ll certainly make you worry less for my mental health than the truth will.” I reached into one of the pockets of my jacket and pulled out a beaten, battered city atlas, opening it on the table. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the part of the city around Centurion and this map is a few years old. Do you know where this convent is, Taxi?”

Taxi popped her tongue in her cheek. “I haven’t been that far east in awhile. I know where Centurion is, but that’s a long road.”

I nodded towards Wisteria. “What about the Aroyos? You run the sewers, right? You know where this Convent of the Lunar Passage is?”

The Aroyo ran her tongue around the outside of her top teeth and raised one eyebrow. “I and I do not know de city by such names. What be near?”

Pushing the atlas across the table, I flipped to the index and found ‘Centurion St’, then rain my hooftip down the winding length of a single line several miles east of the Bay of Unity. Wisteria’s lipsthinned into a grimace.

“Crusada...dat be...a place de blue-castle be knowin’ well,” she murmured.

“Blue-castle? The police?” I clarified.

Wisteria’s face clouded with distress as she explained,“Aye. D’ere be only one t’ing on dat street that I and I know has become somet’ing else. We...stay away from dere. Ancestors say, if run there, bad things. De Ancestors say, de girl who come back to us claiming to see demons wid horn and wings… dey say she come from ‘Centurion’.”

“What’s there?” Swift asked, looking over the atlas.

Pointing to a spot on the map, the Aroyo’s words were laced with fear as she replied, “De old lockaway for dem what flies in fire.”

I squinted at the spot she was pointing to. It was a green blob, stretched over about half a block. “Crusades Memorial Facility for Behavioral Modification?”

Taxi’s eyes widened with recognition. “No way… Hardy… that’s the name on the sign. Don’t you remember? That used to be Supermax!”

It felt, momentarily, like a softball was trying to work itself up my throat. Words logjammed behind it.

“I thought they tore that place down…” I managed, swallowing.

Limerence shrugged and adjusted the chain of his pocket watch. It was a self-comforting gesture I’d seen The Don make frequently. “To my knowledge, Supermax itself was never destroyed. It is too far outside of the city center to be useful for construction and -- like many things from the time after the Crusades -- it was simply more efficient to spread around it rather than demolish.”

Swift was looking back and forth between the three of us with puzzlement on her face. “Um...what’s Supermax, Sir? It sounds like a big grocery store chain...”

I bit my lip, then exhaled. “It use to be a prison... if you can call it that. It was built during the Crusades to house P.O.Ws. Draconic prisoners, specifically. After the war, it was converted. It became the highest security prison complex in all of Equestria. Not like Tartarus Correctional. Tartarus is a place for reforming beings who’ve strayed.” I gazed at the green blob on the map, wishing the sickening reality away as I went on, “Supermax… was a punishment.”

“What… what happened to it?” she asked.

Taxi sucked at her teeth. “I...didn’t follow the story too closely, but… a couple of years after Hardy and I joined the force, there was this big kerfluffle with city center. Apparently some news pony found out about inequine conditions there and got the Royals involved. Princess Celestia herself intervened to have it shut down.”

I nodded and said, “The Princess paid for the building of Tartarus Correctional on the condition nopony would ever be held in conditions like Supermax. I never did hear what happened to the building once all the prisoners were moved. Ponies who could be sent elsewhere were. It was a place for housing the worst that Equestria could produce; Juniper called it ‘The Hole.'”

My driver’s lips peeled back. “The Hole. Sounds right. It was a place you dropped ponies when you wanted them to disappear. That place made my neck itch.”

“And my cutie-mark,” I added. “Juniper and I were working back then, but the staff were… strange. Cagey. If you needed to meet with a prisoner, you did it in this sort of ‘interview’ booth where you could see them, but they couldn’t see you. They claimed the isolation was part of their ‘treatment.'"

Limerence lifted one ear. “This location is… obliquely familiar. Were there not also some concerns about prisoner riots of some sort?”

“Concerns, yes,” I recalled. “With so many of our worst in one place the Royals thought it must be a powder keg. Funny thing; I never heard of any actual riots there. Granted, the guards were under about twelve kinds of non-disclosure agreement, but that was one of the things that turned heads, when that journalist did his ‘expose.' No prisoner violence at all.”

“Ahhh, yes. I believe I remember reading that particular exposition during my father’s teachings on the dangers of public opinion.” Limerence mused. “That journalist… he produced a great many photographs of listless prisoners, unlit cells, limited food supplies… It unseated half of the city-council, and the construction company behind it ‘ceased to be,' if I am remembering correctly.”

“They’d apparently broken a whole raft of building codes in constructing the place, not to mention something that got the Academy involved. The executives did a runner. Never did hear if they got caught,” I commented, grabbing a chair with one hoof and dragging it over so I could sit.

Taxi glanced over at Wisteria. “When did the Church take over? I mean, considering what we know about Miss Skylark’s past, it makes a kind of sense she’d want to make a prison into something better, but I never heard of somepony building a convent in a prison.”

“I and I do not know,” the Aroyo murmured. “Dey come some year ago. Like many an evil t’ing in dis city. It do not die, but only sleep. We do not run dere. We never run dere. De sewer beneath is full of t’ings best not mentioned. Traps for the unwary, and always de feeling ye fly against strong wind.”

“Hmmm…”

Fear hadn’t made Wisteria’s accent any less incomprehensible, but enough time in the Aroyos' presence let me get the gist. ‘Convent bad.'

I pointed at Limerence with one toe. “Pop Quiz, genius. If I wanted to keep something secure and secret, particularly something that was especially dangerous and likely to get me killed if I were found out, what are the safest places in all of Detrot?”

The Archivist searched the upper left corner of the room for the answer. “Legitimately safest and most secure? In all likelihood, Stella’s hoard, The Castle, The City Morgue, The P.A.C.T. building, The Shield Corporation HQ, Archive Librum Number Ten, and…”

“-Supermax.” I finished for him. “And if I’d say, stolen the psychotic Chief of Police’s daughter, a pack of moon-based death rays and a piece of the most famous armor in Equestrian History?”

“Ah,” was all he said.

Taxi’s ears drooped against the sides of her head. “Hardy… you cannot possibly be thinking what I am absolutely positive you’re thinking.”

“Yeah, yeah, I kinda am.”

“I’m starting to feel like a broken record here...” she muttered.

“You don’t need to say it, Sweets. Believe me, breaking into Supermax does not appeal to me either, but we don’t have time on our side. If the Church is keeping Cerise there, we need to move now. We need information, we need resources, and we need a plan.”

There was a long, agonizing silence. A significant part of me was hoping somepony would be able to come up with something.

Wisteria’s mouth slowly slid into a grin and she stroked her thick belly. “I and I must be growing old, Crusada. I forgot, for a moment, why de Ancestors like ye.”

“Oh? They like ponies with a masochistic streak, then?” I chuckled, weakly.

“Oh, no… dey likes ponies dat make good stories! I and I will look forward to telling dis one.”

****

Once Limerence and Swift acclimatized to the idea, and my driver went through her typical phases of ‘total refusal to participate,' ‘smacking me with pillows,' ‘cussing like a drunken sailor,' and finally ‘demanding to know what I needed her to do,' we got on to the work at hoof.

****

The little black walkie-talkie squawked at me, then buzzed for several seconds.

“Detective Hard Boiled? Is this thing working? Can you hear me?” Cereus asked through the device’s speaker.

“I read you, Cereus,” I replied, holding down what I hoped was the ‘send’ button and not ‘implode the planet’.

“Oh, Detective! Whew, it’s so good to hear from you! I was getting seriously worried. Could you give me a second?” I heard shuffling in the background, some half-heard words, and a low, angry hiss, followed by a shrill female voice.

“Detective Hard Boiled! How did you get the other one of these?!” Agent Night Bloom shrieked up the mic at me. “I demand you return it to the warehouse immediately!”

“Sure. I’ll just pop on over and do that right this instant.”

Several quiet seconds.

“What do you want, Detective?” the dusk pony growled. I heard something rattle over the mic… yep, I knew that sound. That was an ice-pack shifting.

“Still hung over, huh?”

“Yes, dammit! Speak! What do you need?!”

I couldn’t help needling her just a little. “You know, a good friend of mine says a bacon sandwich helps with that.”

I thought, briefly, we must have lost connection.

“You are a sick little pony, Detective…”

“Fully aware.” I chuckled. “Anyway, Agent Bloom, I need your help. Specifically, I need that enchanted map you’ve got on the wall down there again.”

“What?! Again?!” she snapped, then, without waiting for my answer, she shouted away from the microphone, “You damned flying rat! You let him use the surveillance functions in Survey?! I’m going to use your fangs to pick mud out of my hooves when I’m done here!”

I heard somepony squeak and then retreating hooves, before Bloom returned to the walkie-talkie, still cursing, “...stupid fast little bastard… rip his ears off and let’em try to night-fly…” Then, she addressed me. “Detective, you are not permitted access to our systems! I should not even be talking to you right now-”

“Miss Bloom-” I interrupted her. “-if you want a career tomorrow or ever, you’ll go stand in front of the map.”

I said it coolly, calmly, and with all the quiet reserve I could muster.

Again, the shocked silence. Then, in a weaker voice, she said, “Detective, I’ve got protocols...”

“Which you are so far outside of you don’t even appear in the same postal code. I need your assistance if you want that armor back. I have reason to believe there may also, potentially, be a set of lethal weapons in possession of some very dangerous ponies who may mean Princess Celestia harm. You want my information, you will help me. Do we understand one another, Agent Bloom?”

The only way I knew we were still on the line was because I could hear a shuddering breath every few seconds. Gradually, the breathing steadied. When Bloom came back, she sounded shaken.

“I’m… I… uh… Detective? I’m in front of the map. Who… um… who is going to hurt Princess Celestia?” she stammered.

“I didn’t say you got my information right now. I just said you got it. Now, what I need-”

“Wait! Wait, no. What am I doing?! Detective, who is going to hurt the Princess?! I need to know! They won’t ignore my calls if I say there’s a threat to the Princess!” Night Bloom snarled.

“It’s the Church of the Lunar Passage,” I murmured.

“What?!”

“You asked. Now, are you standing in front of the map?”

“Back up, numbnuts! A bunch of misguided, fanatical crazies working on their own to steal a relic of Luna’s is one thing! A regional religion trying to kill Princess Celestia is something else entirely! I can’t take that to my superiors! They’ll laugh me out of Canterlot!”

“Exactly.”

Night Bloom paused.

“Aaand that’s the point, isn’t it?” she grumbled. “I take this to Canterlot and you’re wrong, my career dies. And even if you're right, then the armor is lost when those incompetents at central office try to investigate and end up raising a ruckus, so any would-be assassins vanish… and either way, we find nothing and I get a forcible retirement as the laughing stock who claimed there was a plot by a major religion to kill Princess Celestia.”

“You put that together right quick, didn’t you, Agent Bloom?” I said, unable to keep the smile on my face from leaking into my words.

She groaned into the walkie-talkie. “Damn you, Detective. One day, when I am back behind my nice, safe, comfortable desk, I am going to find a way to ruin your tax return…”

“My apartment burned down and all my tax records for the last ten years were incinerated in magical fire. I look forward to seeing just how deep a forensic audit can go. For now, information. Can that map of yours get us some images of the Convent of the Full Moon?” I asked.

There was a sigh, then the faint click of buttons being pressed.

“Let me check this damn thing.” she grunted, then was quiet for some time. “Convent of the Full Moon… I don’t have that listed here. Is it under a different name?”

“Try ‘Supermax.’”

More typing noises. More waiting.

“Huh… yeah, we’ve got a location of a place by that name. There’s a few exterior images from a telephone pole across the street. Looks like a few ponies coming and going. Gosh, that’s one ugly building…” Bloom talked to herself as she fiddled with the map device. “Okay, okay, I’ve got one sensor in a sort of ‘reception’ office. Pictures of Princess Luna everywhere and what might be some kind of secretary wearing a blue sheet covered in sequins. Then there’s a few in something that look like...dorms or something. Detective, what is this place?”

“It’s a convent, like I said.”

“Oh… right.” Her voice had some wariness in it as she added, “It doesn’t look like a convent. Looks like a prison, to me...”

“Funny you should mention that. Can you see if there are any secret passages or anything of that nature?”

“Oh, goodie, Detective calls up the ‘spy’ to get him a secret passage. Maybe next I’ll pass you a code with my super-secret decoder ring, then fly my ass to the Moon.”

“Dammit Bloom, just look!” I barked. “I don’t need guff, I need help! Now look at the building. Secret passages?”

“Fine, fine, have your fantasies,” Agent Bloom replied, then paused while the map did its thing. “Well… this is odd.”

“Don’t be mysterious,” I growled. “You’re crap at it.”

I could almost hear the dusk pony’s hackles rising. “You-...I’ll have you know, I was first in my class in document obfuscation, redaction, and tactical misfiling! I am very good at being mysterious!” she barked at me.

“Says Miss ‘Doesn’t-lock-the-interrogation-room-door’?”

I could hear breath hissing between her fangs. At least, I tried to pretend that’s what the sound was. It sounded more like venom eating into the case of a device with the potential to destroy a sizeable chunk of our planet. When she spoke, it was in a voice full of barely restrained fury. “You…”

“Yes, me. Now what’ve you got?”

Agent Bloom sat there for a moment, trying to think of something else to say before heaving a defeated sigh. “Piss on you. Fine. Most of the time, if we’ve got sensors in a building, they’re everywhere inside. There’s maybe… I count ten inside this prison. Tops.” Bloom muttered. “If you want more, you’ll have to wait, because my files on this place are incomplete and covered in coffee stains.”

I jerked my head back from the black box’s speaker as the dusk pony shouted at the top of her lungs, “Cereus, you chicken shit! Get down from the rafters and get to doing the ‘clerical’ part of being a damn clerical intern!”

I heard Cereus in the background somewhere sigh, “Yes, Miss Bloom…”

I waited, tapping my toe on the table. I could hear the shower running down the hall and some delicious smell coming from the Nest’s kitchen, with only a hint of ‘burned celery’ to give it spice. Limerence was off somewhere consulting the Archive’s libraries on the topic of Supermax, so I assumed it to be Swift in the shower and Taxi, once again, experimenting in the canteen.

Across the quantum tunnel linking our two walkie-talkies, Cereus and Night Bloom hunted through what sounded like an avalanche of decade or more old files.

Several minutes later, the speaker crackled and Agent Bloom’s voice came back.

“Detective?”

“I’m here.”

“I don’t know what you want there, but if my files here are accurate, that place was a deathtrap when it was a prison.”

“A deathtrap?!” I exclaimed. “But… I was working for Detrot Police Department when it was shut down. I don’t remember anything about that. If I remember, it was really peaceful for a prison. That was what brought attention in the first place.”

“It’s not surprising you wouldn’t have heard. The records were buried. These are incomplete, but… if these records are even remotely accurate, there was a suicide rate amongst the inmates you would not believe.”

“Suicide… rate? Seriously?”

“You heard me right. The entire core of the building is a magical construct. It was designed as some kind of… prisoner punishment and reward system. They were supposed to have shut it down when the dragon’s P.O.W.s were all released, but it turned out they were still using the wretched thing. On ponies. That’s what prompted the shutdown.”

“What… sort of ‘reward and punishment’ system are we talking about here?” I asked.

“The details in my file are sketchy...”

“Sketchy? Sketchy is not what I want to hear, Bloom! I want specific. I want magnificent details. Don’t give me sketchy!”

“Hey, you want better, you go down there and take a look around yourself!" she snapped. "That’s what I have! The Royals found out the prison was still using this thing, the Academy went in to shut down the magical construct, and it’s been empty ever since by order of the city!”

“Alright, alright, don’t get your feathers in a bunch-”

“I don’t have feathers, you insufferable bell-end!”

I chewed on the words ‘insufferable bell-end’ for a second, then shook myself. “Fine. Give me the rundown then. Points of interest?”

Agent Bloom drew in a breath, then continued more calmly, “Hmmm...a few, although these are mostly on the blueprints, which don’t seem to be entirely accurate. Top floors are mostly maximum security cells, then there’s a basement which is labeled ‘Arcane Control Level,' then something below that which is called ‘Secure containment.'”

“Secure containment. Don’t like the sound of that.”

“You shouldn’t. There’s a few sewer lines running parallel to the sub-structure, but if you’re hoping to sneak in via the sewers, can I recommend against it?”

“Why is that?”

Cereus, who was still looking over the files, must have grabbed the walkie-talkie from Night Bloom, because his voice came over the mic, “Sweet Sky! Detective, that whole area is monitored by a network of alarms, and they didn’t disassemble the prison’s defense systems! The nicest stuff down there is heavy neurotoxin launchers made for disabling dragons!”

There was a scuffle, then a squeak of pain, then Agent Bloom’s voice. “That’s what you get for snatching things, dummy!”

Cereus whimpered in the background, “You didn’t have to pinch me…”

“Go clean a shelf or something!” she snarled.

The intern made a noise like a smacked puppy and I heard wingbeats in the background.

Bloom took a moment to compose herself, then picked up the walkie-talkie again. “Right, pardon me there, Detective. Issues in the chain of command. May I recommend against the sewers?”

I cocked one ear closer to the black box. “Have you got any good options for me, then?”

“Nothing… brilliant, I’m afraid. Damn. Based just on the images from what few sensors we’ve got, there might be something below Secure Containment. I couldn’t tell you precisely what, but it’s not a small space.”

“How do you figure?”

“I think I’m reading this correctly. Mind you, my degree is in espionage, not architecture,” she muttered. “These blueprints are the ones originally logged with the city and they don’t seem to be entirely accurate. Some of the rooms are… erm… bigger than the blueprints say they should be. I’ve also got eyes on a stairwell I’m pretty sure isn’t on paper. The whole damn building is like that.”

“Strange. What about the architect? Any information on him or her?”

Bloom hummed briefly. “Let me...oh! Yes, I’ve got...well, I’ve got something here. The pony who designed this place wasn’t just an architect. If this file is right, she was the Chief on-site psychologist, too.”

“A shrink designed the building?”

“Under direct orders from the Royals to find a way to contain the dragons, yes. They apparently gave her considerable leeway and resources.”

“Oof… my day keeps getting better and better,” I grumbled.

Bloom ignored my complaining as she continued reading, “Let’s have a look, shall we? Here we go… Yeah, this is it. She developed ‘treatments’ they used to keep the draconic prisoners pacified… Grisly stuff, from the looks of it. She worked there for several years, then when the P.O.W.s were released and later, when the shutdown came, the Royals apparently got wind of just how far she’d taken her ‘orders’ during the war. When Supermax was closed, she was tried for war crimes.”

“Wait, how come I’ve never heard about any of this? Somepony being tried for war crimes on this scale in my city would have made the news or something!”

Bloom whistled softly, “You’d think but- Oh, by Luna's flank...”

“What? What is it?!”

“Detective… this pony was… former Royal Guard! She got a military tribunal, headed by Luna herself!”

“But… I thought it was Celestia who shut that place down?”

“Celestia’s name was on the shutdown orders, but if what this says is right, it was Luna who made it happen.”

I took a few breaths to try to realign my worldview a little bit. Seeing the Princesses involved in such things was hard, considering they were often held up as paragons of equine virtue.

“So...where is this architect now?” I asked, trying to re-order my thoughts.

“Tartarus Correctional,” Agent Bloom replied, to the sound of scattering parchment. “Life sentence.”

“Right...that...hmmm… That meshes with something else I’ve heard lately about Miss Skylark. Alright, send Cereus with the blueprints to the outside of The Skids. Have him come disguised, or at least, wearing something to cover up his ears and wings. Tell the guards there he’s coming to see ‘Crusader’. They might not let him through, but if he tells them to give me the documents, I’ll get them.”

“I’m not giving sensitive M6 documents to an intern to deliver, much less your hoodlum friends!” she protested.

I rolled my eyes and said, “I’ll be waiting. By the way, what’s that architect’s name?”

Night Bloom snorted, “You insult my skills as a spy and you expect all of this help and offer me nothing. Why should I even tell you?”

“Because you’re a career minded, emotionally unstable mare dragging herself through the depths of a red-tape jungle in the middle of nowhere with no resources besides one puke green rookie and a cop whose life can probably be measured in hours.”

I swear, I heard her fangs grinding together.

“If...I ever...get my hooves around your throat, I’m not sure what I will do, Detective...”

“Kiss me, bite me, kill me?”

“Two out of three, yes. The Architect’s name is ‘Saussurea’.”

“Thank you for your time, Agent.”

I’d already tucked the walkie-talkie away before I thought to ask ‘which two’ she meant

****

“Sweets?”

“Yeah?! Just a minute! I’ve got to get this before it boils over!”

“Alright, no worries. You think you got a road trip in you?”

“Road trip? Are you out of your mind? We’ve got to move on the Church before Jade gets antsy, homicidal, or parental!”

“I think you just described her entire lifelong demeanor, Sweets. Now you mention her, though, I need to stop by the Castle and drop off a message on the way out of town. We may need some ‘expanded permissions’ where we’re going. Anyway, It’s short road trip and we need additional information. You up for a drive to Tartarus?”

Act 2, Chapter 21: The Big House

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 21: The Big House

While the documents presented here have mostly focused on equicides and the justice related thereto, for which harsh penalties are appropriate, the Equestrian justice system overall is actually quite lenient. Most crimes - such as petty book theft from hospitals, love poisoning, barnslaughter, all the way through destroying a small town via omnivorous parasprites - go unprosecuted with a sincere apology and an effort to make amends or return the stolen items. Even when prosecuted, many crimes go right down to community service, usually set to work fixing the damage caused.

Princess Celestia believes that all ponies are basically good, and thus believes in a justice system that puts reconciliation and rehabilitation before immediate public safety, and well before any kind of punitive justice. This is not an indictment of her strategy; In Equestria, harmony has to be maintained by whatever means necessary, because disharmony invites disaster. Punitive justice in particular doesn't undo the damage caused by the crime, and invokes permanent feelings of bitterness and recrimination.

With that said... what do you do with ponies who just won't behave? Who spread disharmony wherever they go, and who repeatedly commit terrible acts that no amount of barn-raising will undo?

Equestria has no official death penalty, of course. But it has plenty of precedents for millenia-long sentences (see the oft-cited, if rather extemporaneously judged and sentenced case of Princess Celestia v. Nightmare Moon, BLR 1000) and some ponies just have to be put in the deepest, darkest holes Equestria has.

-The Scholar

This is your Queen on the scene, ladies and gentlecolts! Gypsy calling to you from the highest mountain and the lowest sea on Detrot Free Radio!

Now, yours truly has had to be careful these last few years. There’s plenty of very low ponies in very high places who’d love to play lots of despicable games with my organs, but I’ve kept ahead of them every step of the way! It’s a tough time in Detrot for those who want to speak truth to power. The Detrot Police Department, fine ponies that they are, seem not to know just who the good guys are anymore.

I’m here, today, to tell you that there’s one cop out there you can always count on. He’s the tip of the iceberg, friends, but he’s a face I can point to.

If you meet him, shake his hoof! He may not be popular with the Detrot Establishment right now, but he’s your friend and he will fight for you!

His name is Detective Hard Boiled!

Recently, the good Detective was seen tromping head-first into the Monte Cheval! Soon thereafter, the Jeweler Kingpin, King Cosmo, who has been spilling Ace from one end of this city to the other, decided he should take an ‘extended vacation’! Next, the Detective was seen at the home of another well known scum-bag, the information broker known as ‘Reginald Bari’, alias ‘The Drum Beat’.

****

Taxi hit the brakes so hard I flew forwards into the footwell as Swift smacked into the back of her seat. Thankfully, there was nopony behind us or we’d have probably have another vehicle wedged up our back bumper.

“Jeez, Sweets! You trying to get us killed?!” I shouted.

“Hardy, did you hear the damn radio?!”

“I heard! What’s the problem? I didn’t think I could stay completely out of the news forever. Not after that last stunt.”

“But… but why!? How’d she find out about what we’ve been doing?” she sputtered.

“I don’t know! Maybe if we could listen, we’d find out!”

****

-Drum Beat is currently in police custody, pending investigation for charges of rape, drug running, fraud, and a laundry list of other crimes. The story goes, he was found with Detective Hard Boiled’s knife pinning his head to a dictionary! The Drum Beat’s lawyers jumped ship earlier today after it was revealed that the Detective himself rescued the girl who, just after midday, came forward to offer her testimony against this miscreant!

Thereafter, we got to see the spectacular havoc he caused for both the Church of the Lunar Passage and Chief Iris Jade! If there’s one pony who needs a fire lit under her backside, it’s that one. Iris Jade is still pursuing the Detective regarding those events, though some of my ‘secret sources’ say he may not be her highest priority at the moment.

Detective, we’re rooting for you here at Detrot Free Radio! Me, the parakeet, and the poor fool who gets me the coffee. If you ever need a friendly ear or information on the goings on in your city, we’re here for you!

****

“What...the...hay…?” Taxi was still sitting on the side of the road, her eyes locked on the radio. We were on a backcountry road, paved but still desolate. Stands of old, tall trees blotted out the remains of the evening sun on either side of the road.

“Well, you said she was a pirate radio station and she’s pegged the police on things before, right?” I murmured.

“Yeah, but the police wouldn’t have released that detail about the knife, would they? They wouldn’t have even wanted to show you were involved!”

“Sir, is...this bad for us?” Swift asked.

“Right now? I don’t know. I wish we hadn’t left Limerence back at the Archive."

"Well, he... wasn't wrong when he said that one of his goals, as an heir to a major 'extralegal' organization, was to stay out of prison? I mean, I could… kinda see where he was coming from on that-"

"Still, I’d kind of like to quiz him on what he knows about this ‘Gypsy’ pony and particularly how she keeps managing to broadcast without the police finding her,” I replied. “I’m… definitely going to be looking into this. There’s a... poker game that happens fairly regularly that might account for her advanced knowledge, but I don’t think that’s the case.”

“What about that thing about the girl from the sex mine?” Taxi asked, turning the volume on the radio down as a commercial for cigarettes came on.

“Stella doesn’t much care for rapists of drug runners. Did you tell him to hide her?”

“No… I’m afraid that slipped my mind,” my driver answered. “I was sort of focused on the fact that the police bands were all screaming about getting hooves on the ground in diamond dog territory and capturing your ass so Chief Jade could mount bits of you over her desk. I dropped her off and made a beeline for The Nest.”

“I kind of like being on the radio,” Swift said, very softly.

“You weren’t on the radio, kid, and be glad. Taxi and I have no immediate family for our targets to threaten, but you’ve got your parents, and your grandmare-”

My partner sniggered and put one hoof on my muzzle, “Sir, my grandmare’s probably the most dangerous... anything you know, maybe excepting our boss. Do you really think she hasn’t had my parents and me under constant observation for like, the last twenty years?”

I sat back from her, dubiously. “Are… we being followed right now?”

“Maybe. I dunno. When Chief Jade made you my partner, did Gran make some kind of really nasty threat?” Swift asked, spreading one wing out the window to catch the breeze in the tips of her feathers.

“Errr… something like that, yes.”

Swift nodded. “I… ugh. I wish she wouldn’t do stuff like that. Scarlet was the only pony I’ve ever been friends with that she didn’t, and that was only because it would have been like kicking a bunny...”

“What’s the threat got to do with whether or not we’re being followed?” I asked.

“It means we’re not being followed, Sir,” she answered, then added by way of explanation, “She only makes those threats if she’s gonna turn responsibility for my safety over to somepony for awhile.”

“Oh. Good to know, I suppose.”

Swift turned in a circle like a puppy looking for a place to lay down and stretched real big, wiggling her hips in the air before sliding back onto her belly. I tilted my head to one side to get another look at her cutie-mark as she tugged a notepad out of her combat jacket’s front pocket along with a pencil and began jotting something on the paper.

“Kid, I’m feeling a touch guilty here because I never did ask this. What’s your special talent? I know you’re a mean shot with that leg cannon, and you’re a pretty spectacular flier, but what does that even out to?”

My partner stretched out her rear leg and peered at the short sword and pen on her flank. “I...yeah, I guess I never asked you either, Sir. Things have just been so crazy. My talent is that I fight like I write.”

“And...what’s that mean, precisely?”

Swift flipped the pencil she had around in her teeth and jabbed it at the air like a knife before spitting it back on her notebook and puffing out her chest, proudly, “I...well, I write my stories about ponies fighting for what’s right. Heroes! I read all these comic books Gran got me when I was a foal - The Power Ponies, Batmare, you know the stuff - and it just sort of… stuck. I wanted to be one of those heroes!”

“Mmm… makes sense I guess,” I said, noncommittally.

Taxi had one ear tilted towards the back seat and said, “Well, we’ve got at least another hour before we hit Tartarus. How’d you get it?”

“Oh! Um… I got it one day when I was at the Vivarium, playing in the creche.”

“That’s your cue to tell us a story, kid. We’re about to be out of range of the radio stations,” I explained.

Swift’s salmon colored ears settled down on either side of her head. “Sorry, sir. I… it’s just a little embarrassing.”

“Believe me, kid, as cutie-mark stories go I don’t think you’re likely to top Sweets or me for ‘awkward.' Lay it on us.”

The little pegasus held one hoof to her chest and sighed, dramatically, “Well, if you insist, sir. I guess I was… maybe eight? The other kids were always making fun of me and Scarlet. Me for my… errr…-” She raised her wings, spreading them out so the tops of her flight joints smacked against the ceiling. “-and Scarlet because… um...” She paused, as though hunting for some words to fully encapsulate the experience that was her red friend. Finally she settled on, “... because Scarlet. He’s been like that since we were small. He’d get into Auntie Stella’s make-up and paint himself from nose to tailtip.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” I chuckled.

“It was one day just after snack period and one of the big colts was bothering Scarlet. His name was ‘Target Practice.' Guess what his talent was? Too bad he always used it to find just how to hurt somepony. He was calling Scarlet prissy and pushing him around. I mean, I know Scarlet’s fussy, but Target said some really mean things, like that nopony would love a colt who was such a filly and stuff like that. I started to get angry, but I’d gotten in trouble the week before for fighting. Dad… said I should write my feelings out, rather than acting on them and he gave me my first notebook.”

“Sensible of him,” Taxi murmured. “I wish my dad had been like that.”

“Speaking of… him… Sweets, you been awful quiet on that topic since I told you where we were going,” I said, in a low voice, “Are we going to discuss that particular situation at any point?”

“No, Hardy. No we’re not,” my driver replied, firmly.

“Alright, just thought I’d ask.”

Swift, who’d been very caught up in her story, kept going, “-I pulled my notebook out and started writing about my favourite hero, trying to ignore what was going on. I’ve written a bunch of stories about her. Her name is Quick Strike! She’s a rogue journalist, afraid of nopony, fast on her hooves and good in a round of hoofticuffs!” Her expression drooped. “But… I was so angry, I only got five words down…”

“Which five words?” I asked, curious.

My partner rolled her pencil back and forth across the paper and replied, “Quick Strike would stop him.”

Rising to her hooves, she trotted back and forth in the tiny space. It was more of a walk for her than it would have been for just about anypony else I know.

“I’ve never been so mad, but after I wrote that, I knew what was right, and I knew I had to fight them whether or not I got hurt, because once those words were on paper, they were real.” Swift grinned, throwing one hoof over her heart. “I went right up to Target and put one hoof on his chest and said ‘You leave my friend alone!’”

“That’s...very brave of you,” I murmured.

“Yeah, well, like you say, Sir... brave and stupid can come in the same package.” She smiled, with a wistful air, as she recounted her tale. “Target smacked me right between the eyes so hard I hit the ground before I could blink.”

“What? Was nopony watching the foals?” Taxi asked, sounding a bit shocked.

“Oh, Target would always find some way of cornering us where nopony else could see. He was really good at stuff like that. He was a bully, you know?” She shivered a little and leaned towards the window. “Anyway, I was laying there, and my head hurt, and my ears were ringing.” Swift put her hooves on either side of her head. “I don’t remember it perfectly, but Scarlet was trying to get me up and Target just shoved him away, then put his hoof between my shoulders and grabbed my flight feathers in his teeth.”

“That’s… a pegasus submission position they teach us in the Academy. You should have been half blind with pain,” I murmured.

Swift grinned. “I know! My wings are so big, though! The joints twist further than most ponies. That’s when Target said -- I’ll never forget this -- that’s when he said, ‘Birdy needs her wings clipped’. I’d written one of my villains saying just that to Quick Strike a few days ago, and I remembered what she did. So I reared back, twisted on my side, and smacked him with my other wing. I smacked him as hard as I could!”

Taxi and I both winced and let out a mutual, “Oooh... ouch!”

She nodded vigorously. “You bet your tail, ouch!... um… Sir! Target flew all the way across the room! I’d never seriously hurt a pony before that, and I felt terrible right away, but I knew if somepony were to hurt my loved ones, I could. I… well, I guess after I saw Target with his rear legs all bandaged up, I might have thrown up a little, but from then on, I wanted to fight for my city! I wanted to write what’s right, and inspires ponies to do what’s right… and then fight for it!”

“Hence, joining the P.A.C.T.?”

“Yes, sir! What’s more right than stopping ponies from being eaten by monsters?”

I made a mock indignant noise in the back of my throat and touched my badge where it rested against my chest. “Hey, I think stopping city-wide conspiracies that have led to multiple deaths is pretty good!”

Swift’s ears pinkened and she ducked her head behind one wing, muttering, “I… didn’t mean it like that, sir.”

I nickered and poked her in the side. “I know, kid… heh.” I watched the trees whipping by the car so fast they might as well have been a picket fence. Despite the roughness of the road, it was reasonably comfortable in the Night Trotter. I eased up to the edge of my seat so I could put my hoof on Taxi’s shoulder. “Hey, Sweets? What’s our ETA to Tartarus?”

“Mmm… maybe an hour, at speed, assuming we beat the rain,” she replied, pointing out the window in the direction we were headed. Feral clouds darkened the sky in the distance. “Why?”

“Nothing. I just hate getting there around feeding time for the big guy,” I sighed.

“The big guy, Sir?” Swift asked.

“You’ll see if he’s someplace nearby. He’s tough to miss, unless he’s trying to be sneaky.”

My partner nodded, then dug into one of her pockets until she came up with a small paper package that smelled strongly of teriyaki. Tearing it open, she picked up a strip of something unmistakably meaty and ripped a chunk off with her razor-like teeth, chewing noisily.

“Swift, do you have to eat that now?” Taxi’s whole muzzle scrunched up as she looked in the rear view mirror.

The pegasus looked down at her snack then made a rude noise. “It’s medicine. I’ve got a unique metabolism. Are you going to tell a pony she can’t have her medically necessary meals?”

“Oh pish posh, I know for a fact you went out and hit that griffin eatery on the edge of the Heights an hour before we left!” my driver countered.

“And you don’t have to run wings all the time! Especially when your stupid brain is all magicked up to make anything flying that’s smaller than you are look like food. I had to chase that stupid sparrow from one end of Capriole Street to the other right before we left, remember?” Swift replied, fluffing her feathers out. “Besides, Rocky’s Bar-B-Que had already served lunch and they only had rabbit left. After you’ve had chicken or some turkey, that’s so boring.”

“I… cannot believe I am having this conversation. Hardy, could you tell your partner-”

“Oh, no, Sweets.” I held up both forelegs. “You want to try to pull her food away from her, it’s your hoof to lose.”

Swift gnashed her teeth appreciatively, then tore off another piece of seasoned meat. By way of reply, a package of napkins flew over the seat and smacked my partner in the muzzle.

****

We didn’t beat the rain, which slowed our progress considerably. Driving in feral rainclouds is always a little risky, and Swift didn’t feel like getting out to go shoo them off, so we were stuck under a downpour. On such poor roads, it made driving like Taxi usually did treacherous.

“We’re almost there,” my driver called back. “Get the bullets out of your guns and get them ready. Are you sure Chief Jade called ahead to let them know we were coming?”

“I’m fairly certain she didn’t, but she’ll have bribed or intimidated someone to do the deed,” I answered, pushing the cartridge out of the side of my gun. “I left the note where she said to, in the grate by the sewer exit. I’m pretty sure we’re good to go.”

Swift worked the clip release on her pistol, then ratcheted the slide to release the last bullet, deftly catching it with one hoof. “Sir, I’ve never been to Tartarus Correctional. I mean, I saw a little movie about it during training, but I’ve never actually gone there. Is it really as bad as everypony says?”

“Honestly?” I considered her question, then answered as I stared out the windshield, trying to see our destination over the high trees, “It’s a prison. You can’t really make a prison ‘nice.' It’s as nice as it could be, given its purpose. Princess Celestia doesn’t want her subjects -- even the wayward ones -- to suffer. But if you’re asking is it as bad as you’ve probably heard? You’d have to ask the few there who remember Supermax. I think ‘therapy’ is probably preferable to having some awful bastards rooting around in your head with spells.”

“I think I’d rather have more dunkings in Miss Stella’s lake if it’s all the same to you, Sir, especially if the alternative is magic messing about in my mind ever again,” Swift mused, then her ears twitched. “Wasn’t there another Tartarus prison, before this one?”

“If you mean the original, I don’t think that was a prison in the traditional sense.” I replied, thinking. “As far as I know, Princess Celestia, or maybe even somepony before her, needed some place to stuff a bunch of the nastier beasties Equestria tends to spew out. They did the smart thing and dug a big hole, found a big guard dog, and stuck all the uglies at the bottom to fight it out. As far as I know, more ‘efficient’ methods than a huge, immortal rottweiler have been found since then.”

“More ‘efficient’, Sir?”

“Back during the Crusades, the dragons made a play for Tartarus,” I explained, tapping back into my school years. “They tried to free some big, ugly, elder lizard. Celestia wanted to negotiate his release in exchange for a cessation of hostilities. I suppose we should all be grateful Princess Luna was from… an older school.”

Swift frowned. “Wouldn’t a truce have been… you know… better?”

“Dragons don’t get weaker as they get older, kid. They get bigger, and stronger. You think those lizards, with one of their most ancient, powerful warriors leading them, would have thought twice about torching some stupid little peace treaty?” I inquired, one eyebrow raised.

“I… I guess not. What did Princess Luna do?”

“Heh… she moved the dog out and had the original Tartarus filled in with concrete.”

My partner’s eyes bugged out. “How come I never heard about that!?”

“There’s a bunch of things that happened during the war I don’t think most ponies are especially aware of. Princess Luna was mostly in charge of the war effort, while Celestia ran everything else. It was… a really ugly time. My grand-dad fought in the Crusades.” I shifted my leg, showing her my revolver where it hung against my knee. “This was his weapon. The first Hard Boiled. He gave it to my dad, then my dad gave it to me just before he died.”

“So… your family has been defending Equestria for like… ever!” Swift squeaked, eyeing my gun.

“Something like that.” I settled on my side and let my mind drift, remembering my father’s face as he tucked me in one night. It blurred, shifting with the memory, to become Mister Bloom’s face, then flashed back again. I patted my chest, resting my toe on the socket pouch.

Rousing me, again, from my nostalgia, Swift ruffled her mane so the spikes in front stood up properly and asked, “Um...Sir? Why are you ‘Hard Boiled Junior,' instead of ‘Hard Boiled The Third?'”

I rolled my eyes and poked her nose. “How come you’re ‘Swift Cuddles?' I don’t know if you noticed or not, but Equestria doesn’t have especially consistent conventions for naming ponies.”

She screwed up her face, looking perplexed, “I guess. It just seems weird is all.”

“You’ve met our radio pony, right?”

“Miss Telly? Yes, I met her… oh, my. It’s really been more than month, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, yes it has. You ever ask her real name?”

“N… no, I didn’t. For some reason I guess I just thought it was ‘Telly,'” Swift murmured, looking a touch embarrassed.

“It’s Radiophonic Telegraphica.”

“Yikes… that’s a muzzlefull!”

Taxi let out a loud guffaw from the front seat as she added, “I doubt her name has ever been spelt correctly on any piece of official documentation. I once found a copy of her original job application and the secretary had her down as ‘Radiowhatzit’!”

“Really?” Swift snickered.

“Oooh, yes. She’s reeeal sensitive about it, though!” My driver was almost purring with mischief. “You tease her about her name and she’ll show you just how nasty that File Cloud can be! Hardy made a smart remark once and she managed to find and dump copies of his yearbook pictures from second grade all over the Castle! He was dressed up as Spitfire from the old Wonderbolts team!”

I yanked my coat over my head, hiding within my fortress of invisibility.

****

The final approach to the prison was marked out by a chain-link fence almost seven meters high, topped with a row of razor wire. A single guard worked the gate, sitting in a tiny shack that was little more than a lean-to. He glanced at our front license plate, then boredly poked the button on his console. The gate began to slide open with a rattle that silenced all the local wildlife.

There was a sign on the gate itself:

No unauthorized personnel.

No flying vehicles.

Magical scanning is in effect from this point forward.

Keep doors and windows closed until authorized to open them.

Anti-air aggressor enchantments in effect.

If asked for identification, present it promptly.

Follow all orders given by a member of the Tartarus House Guard.

No flying.

No teleporting.

Failure to comply can result in magical nullification, electrocution, digestion, and/or death.

Down below, in sloppy permanent marker, somepony had added the words, ‘Beware Of The Dog.'

“Beware of the dog, Sir?” Swift asked.

“You remember I said Princess Luna moved the guard out of the original Tartarus?”

“Y-yes?”

“Beware of the damn dog, kid...”

Beyond the gate, the road became smooth tarmac that might as well have been freshly laid for how little traffic used it. With a fearful finality, the chain gate began to rattle shut behind us.

Taxi, normally a speed freak, seemed to lose her taste for the right-hoof pedal. Behind the gate, the forest was no different than it had been on the other side, but there was a definite change, like a tension had charged the very air.

We crept along with the engine only slightly more than idling. On the other side of the fence, no birds sang. Swift had both hooves up on her window, trying to catch a glimpse of our destination.

Tall pines lined the unlit road, looming over the vehicle as it inched further into what was feeling increasingly like a gaping maw. On we drove, for what felt like an hour. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes, but during that time, a gradual itch began to build up on the surface of my skin. A significant chunk of it was centered around my heart plug.

I fought the urge to squirm. Squirming tended to only make it worse. Swift, sadly, didn’t have the same knowledge or self restraint. Her wings shifted and stretched, the tips brushing my face as she squirmed in the seat beside me.

“Relax, kid. It’s the scanning fields. They’re looking over the car. Probably checking out our weapons. If there’s anything sketchy-”

“Sir, I’ve been scanned before,” she whined, scratching at the bunny patch on her chest lightly. “This doesn’t feel like that!”

“I know,” I said, putting one hoof across her shoulders to press her back into her seat. “You want thorough, Tartarus is thorough. Whatever pony they’ve got monitoring their security system probably now knows you in ways your mother and doctor don’t right now.”

“Oog, that’s a disturbing thought, sir.”

I reached out and lifted her upper lip with one toe, revealing her frightening back teeth. “How do you think he feels?”

Swift’s eyebrows drew up onto her head and she poked me in the chest. “What about you, Sir?”

I glanced down at the plug in my chest. “Trust me, that’s been foremost in my mind.”

“Are you sure coming out to Equestria’s biggest prison is a good idea, sir? Whether or not Chief Jade is behind us in private, there’s probably somepony in a position of authority, somewhere, who wants us. This feels an awful lot like it would make a really good trap.”

I shrugged and put a hoof behind my neck, rolling onto my side to stare at the cab’s ceiling. “Yes and no. The pony who runs this place is tight with the Chief and thus I believe will be discreet, but let’s be honest, we’re not the easiest group to forget these days. There’s only a very short list of ways of contacting Tartarus, too. We’re in a zone of magical exclusion.”

Swift looked perplexed. “What’s… a zone of magical exclusion?”

Taxi leaned back slightly and said, “Think of it as someplace separated from the rest of the world, magically. Spells that work outside reach a zone of magical exclusion and just kinda… stop. Something to do with disrupting ley lines or something like that. Spells cast entirely inside work fine. With the radio jammers they’ve got, it makes communicating into and out of this area without wires impossible. The only ponies with wired phones are the guards.”

“How does that work?” my partner wanted to know.

“You saw the gates, right? There’s about five layers of those. Look, here-” I pointed out the window. We were just passing another chain-link fence on either side of the road which disappeared between the trees. The top bar of the fence seemed to glitter in the darkness for a moment after the headlamps had passed it. “Those fences are covered in runes to suck directed magic. You try to teleport past them and...well...I once saw what came out the other side of a failed teleport through an unstable spell field.”

Swift’s brows drew together. “W-what was t-that, Sir?”

I shuddered, for effect. “A few of the organs were still recognizable, if you squinted…”

My partner put one hoof to her muzzle and her cheeks puffed out. To her credit, she didn’t actually puke on me, again. A month on and I’d forgotten just how much Swift didn’t care for blood, though to be fair it was easy to forget that given her 'medically necessary' diet.

I had time to grin, then my entire body went stiff and my hackles rose. It was a completely instinctive reaction. Something deep in my little lizard brain was having a panic attack.

The cab slid to a stop.

“Sweets? Why are we stopping?” I forced the fear from my voice, but it didn’t matter. Swift and Taxi were having similar, visible reactions.

“I don’t know! The engine just cut out!” Taxi grumbled, poking at the ignition. The car’s mighty core let out a noise like a deflating dachshund.

“It’s a magical engine! It can’t just cut out!” I snapped.

“If somepony is casting a directed disruption spell, it can!” she snarled, checking a read-out on the dashboard. It was complete gibberish to me, but in the universal language of the Big Red Light, it seemed to indicate a malfunction. “They’re draining the magic out of the core. Dammit, I just had those runes replaced...”

“Sir?” Swift sounded very nervous.

“It’s fine, kid. They probably detected something they don’t like up at the prison. We’ll just sit tight. We’ve got Jade’s permission to be here,” I replied, trying to sound like my heart wasn’t trying to climb up my throat.

Adrenaline demanded I be moving, though it was a bit vague on precisely where and to what purpose. If anything, my lizard brain had been reduced to a hyperventilating sack of nerves hiding in a corner. It all came together to scream those words a pony least wants to hear when they’re stuck in the middle of the woods in an immobile car they can’t get out of: Something is coming.

Being trapped with a pegasus who had a long history of hysterical behavior and a grumpy cabbie wasn’t helping.

“Sir, I s-smell something,” Swift whispered.

“It’s your imagination, kid...”

“No, sir, it’s really not my imagination,” she insisted, inhaling deeply. “It smells like...wet fur.”

I was about to issue some further comforting bit of tripe, when the car shook, as though from some great impact nearby.

Everypony froze, holding our breaths, hoping it was just some collective, temporary spurt of rampant imagination.

Taxi, very slowly, reached over to her door and pressed the ‘lock’ button. All four doors made a soft *snick* as the bolts slid shut.

“S-sir…” Swift whimpered. “My imagination hears something… It’s hearing it right after it felt the car shake!”

“Calm down, kid. We’ll be fine. We’re in the car. They’ve probably sent Cerberus to have a looksee. He’ll sniff around a bit and it’ll be okay,” I tried to reassure her.

Taxi glanced back at my partner, seeing her distress, and added, “I’m sure he’d rather be spending tonight in front of the fire with a few dozen pounds of fresh meat than out in the rain deciding whether or not we’ve brought anything dangerous with us.”

Swift nodded, “Him and me both.”

I tried to make my neck muscles relax but they were having none of it. I shoved one hoof into my pocket and felt around, but sadly, I was out of candy.

There was another thump, this one much more pronounced and very close. The entire vehicle shook with the impact of it and Swift’s wings, never paragons of self-control at the best of times, sprung out so violently I had to duck backwards. The stink of wet dog finally began to seep into my nostrils.

“Siiiirr! I don’t like this!” she cried, picking up her ammunition and trying to push it back into her gun with shaking teeth. I leaned over and I snatched it up before she could get the clip to fit, stuffing it into my coat pocket.

She looked at me, stunned, as though I’d just stolen her baby.

“Kid, the last thing you want to do is shoot Cerberus.”

“No, Sir, I’m pretty sure I really, really, really want to do that!”

I was coming up with some riposte and I’m sure it would have been a brilliant explanation of exactly why that was such a poor idea if the car hadn’t immediately rocked on its wheels. Something massive, pink, and slimy dragged itself up Swift’s window.

My partner pitched onto her back in a dead faint.

****

Nothing really prepares a pony for the experience of truly exceptional mega-fauna up close. Cerberus guarded the gates of one of the nastiest holes in existence for longer than anypony alive except maybe the Princesses can remember.

I’d only been in the presence of the Tartarus guard dog a few times and most often, at a distance great enough to render perspective a bit useless. Stella was, far and away, the largest being of my direct acquaintance and he was, at least, relatively friendly. Swift’s response was, thus, pretty common.

****

I suppose there are few ponies who can say they’ve been licked by something that big and lived to tell the tale. Sadly, I can say I’ve had that experience on multiple occasions.

“Ball licking stupid son of a-” Taxi’s tirade against all things canine was cut short as the tongue returned, running up the windshield and shaking the Night Trotter.

A detached part of my mind that wasn’t completely occupied with the fact that a giant, demonic mutt was tonguing the fragile metal box containing my fleshy bits could hear shouting voices coming from somewhere nearby. Several lights flashed outside, followed by a crash of what felt like thunder.

Outside, the air crackled with energies obscured by a slippery layer of saliva coating the windows The car began to rattle from bonnet to bumper, gradually becoming still over a period of several seconds. The pervasive reek of unwashed, muddy fur finally started to fade.

Taxi and I shared a wide-eyed glance.

“H-Hardy? Can we never be that close to that creature again, please?” she asked, fearfully.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the least of our problems right now, Sweets…”

“How do you mean?”

I gestured to the windshield, where the pounding rain had finally started to clear the glass.

Outside, in the light of the headlamps, no less than six unicorns stood there, horns at the ready. They all wore rain-slickers, but my attention was drawn more immediately to the dozen or so cocked guns, ranging from rifles to revolvers, pointed at us.

For a long moment, nopony moved. Then a voice seemed to fill the car’s cabin.

“This is the Tartarus Correctional Night Watchers. You will disarm yourselves and step out of the vehicle!”

The voice was neither male nor female, but had the quality of one constructed out of pure magic. It was a neat trick for speaking in a space where you didn’t have a physical speaker. Arcane ventriloquism, of a sort.

I looked down at Swift, who was still out cold on the seat, her tongue lolling from one corner of her muzzle. “If you can hear me out there, that’s going to be difficult.”

“You will comply! Disarm or we will open fire!”

“I’m fine with this ‘disarm’ part, but my partner’s passed out and I can’t get her gun off. I’d appreciate if you didn’t shoot us until she’s woken up.”

There was a pause as the unicorns looked at one another, then one of them rolled his eyes and lowered his gun, trotting forward. He rapped on the driver’s side window with his toe.

Taxi rolled it down and glared at him. “I really hope you’re going to pay for my car wash. If that stinking, three headed, hydrant humper licked any paint off…” She let the threat hang in the air. The guard, a stallion a few years my junior with fur the color of mottled stone and a cherry mane, cocked one eyebrow, then peered into the back seat.

“Our detectors register a class four arcane transformation in this vehicle and two occupants.” he asked. “May I ask why there seem to be three of you?”

I decided telling him about the woes of ponies attempting magical tracking upon me was probably unwise.

“No idea, but that transformation is probably my friend here,” I said, hauling Swift upright. Her head swung back as I gave her a light shake. She wasn’t coming around, so I gently tugged her jaw open so he could see the thick rows of dangerous looking teeth. “Your damn dog scared her half to death, by the way.”

“Are you Detective Hard Boiled?” The guard narrowed his eyes at me.

“That’s right. We’re expected?”

“My name is Captain Bramble, and yes, you are expected, which makes me curious as to how you managed to sneak this far into our detection field and still remain invisible to us. Again, I ask, why are our sensors not detecting you?” The stallion’s voice was hard; a no-nonsense sort of voice that I often associate with eventually being shot by one’s subordinates.

“I’m afraid that information is ‘need to know’. We’re here under special dispensation and that’s all you need to know. So do you mind shutting off whatever spell you’re using to drain our engine so we can proceed?” I growled.

Bramble’s sharp eyes flicked towards my partner, then back to me. “Certainly.”

I blinked at him. “Well...err...thank you.”

An irritating smile spread across his face. “Riiight after you give up your weapons and submit to a complete magical nullification.”

I put one hoof over my eyes, then tugged open my chest pouch. “I’ve got a magical organ transplant. You try to nullify me, this visit will be very short.”

Captain Bramble’s gaze flicked at the socket on my breast, then back to my face. “Hard Boiled, you have entered the most secure prison in Equestria without tripping a single sensor. You have two options. One is submit yourself to nullification. The other is immediate sequestration in our holding cells until such time as we can verify your identity and discover how you have managed this.”

The line of unicorns raised their guns. I heard the distinctive ratchet of gun hammers being drawn back.

I slowly, carefully, opened the car door and stepped out onto the paved road. Rain immediately ran down my collar, soaking into the fur on my neck. “Fine. You want to arrest me? Let’s go ahead and see the Warden.”

Bramble shifted his weight, his horn shining as he holstered his pistol. One of the other unicorns who had tiny box with a screen on it in one hoof took a few steps forward and whispered something in the Captain’s ear. He jerked his head up. “What? How can we all be off the sensor net?! Ten minutes ago it was picking up the mares in the car just fine!”

The other guard just shook his head and smacked the box against his knee.

Turning back to us, Bramble had a very angry look on his face.

“I don’t know how you’re doing that little trick, Detective, but you will submit to magical nullification before I let you anywhere near Tartarus! First, however, you and I are going to the cells.” He turned to his companions. “Get the driver and the pegasus in the back seat. Our file indicates both have advanced combat training, so horns only.”

The five remaining guards started towards us.

A flash of eye-scarring luminance exploded between the car, myself, and the six unicorns. Bramble was tossed on his tail, rolling end over end into the mud on the side of the road.

My vision took several seconds to return, but as the dancing lights faded, I made out the shape of something that might have been a pony standing in the road in front of me. I wiped at my eyes with one toe and blinked a few times, trying to make out details.

The being seemed to be on fire.

That was definitely a ‘detail’ and as I realized it, I stumbled back, catching my coat on the Night Trotter’s sideview mirror.

Unable to retreat further, I gawked at the creature; Brightly glowing orange flames curled like affectionate snakes around its fetlocks. Rain flash-vaporized as it tried to land on the creature’s body. It had a spike of fire on its forehead that twitched in Bramble’s direction and he found himself hauled out of the mud and dragged across the pavement by his tail, dropped at the beings hooves.

It had a definite feminine curve to its flank, but that was all I could make out before the crackling, fiery magics winked out, leaving a black blur and my night vision ruined.

Turning, I fought with my coat, freeing it from the mirror.

An imperious female voice almost knocked me off my hooves. I can only imagine what it did to Bramble.

“Captain Bramble!”

I forced my eyes to focus on the spot the fire had come from and the edges of the image began to resolve. For a brief moment, I thought it was Chief Iris Jade standing there, though a more rational part of my mind said that was impossible.

Bramble had managed to drag himself to something resembling attention, ears tight to the sides of his skull and one hoof against his forehead. “Ma’am!”

“Captain Bramble, of the Tartarus Watch! Did I hear that you were about to magically nullify an enchanted transplant organ?” Aside from the volume, the voice was a perfect monotone; unemotional and deafening at the same time. An underlying inflection suggested that the pony might have a chest cold or cough of some kind.

The Captain’s voice shook as he spoke, though there wasn’t enough light to make out more than the scantest details of the creature he was talking to. It was a mare, most definitely, but even in profile, in the indirect light of the headlamps, it was clear there was something very, very wrong with her body. The least of it was that she didn’t appear to have ears.

“N-no Ma’am! Just assessing prisoner threat levels!” Bramble explained, hastily, the hoof he was saluting with shaking visibly.

"Really, Bramble? I would think those assessments would have taken fully into account their special permissions, wouldn’t you? I would think that nullifying an organ transplant would qualify as something you would wish to get my approval on, wouldn’t it?”

“N-no Ma’am! I mean...yes, Ma’am!”

The being regarded Bramble as he shook in front of her. Her voice dropped from the tower of power into a calmer, more even tone. “Bramble… Go clean the pup’s house.”

The unfortunate guard captain tilted his head. “Ma’am?”

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, “I realize you are new to Tartarus, Captain Bramble, but there is an order of things here. This is not Fillydelphia Penitentiary. Obedience to protocol must come first. If you are, at any point, uncertain of your course of action, you send word to me. I do not abide my guardians acting independently, both for their own sake and that of my prisoners. Nor do I abide them threatening my guests.”

The guard took three steps back, looking sideways at the other unicorns for support. “M-Ma’am?” he repeated, nervously.

Raising one leg, she pointed down the road.

“The dog house. You will not be directed again.”

“B-but Ma’am, Hard Boiled isn’t on our sensor net! He made us all vanish!” Bramble squeaked, waving his hoof at the pony who was holding the box with the read out. Said pony was trying to look very, very small and unimportant.

I couldn’t see the being’s face, but there was a definite sensation of the air becoming much, much thicker.

A gigantic shadow detached itself from the treeline and moved with the sort of speed you expect from freight trains. It was entirely silent, but the ground vibrated under our hooves with its passage. Bramble never was it coming, as he was torn off his hooves into the air, yelping in terror. Six bright red lights seemed to hang high above, two of them directly above the place where Bramble hung by his tail, whimpering fearfully.

The mare addressed the three sets of gleaming eyes.

“Make sure he cleans the pup’s bowls nice and thoroughly. Disobedience and the entitlements of rank do not exist in Tartarus,” she said, her voice unwavering and still lacking any emotional inflection.

Bramble, for his part, must have nodded or made some gesture of understanding, because a second later the shadow took one step; its leg intersected the headlight for just long enough for me to get the impression of something canine, before it was off down the road, bounding along like a puppy with a new toy.

I tugged at my hat brim and began patting water off of my trenchcoat.

The Warden of Tartarus glanced over her shoulder at me, disdainfully, then at the five unicorns who remained around the car.

“Well?” she snarled at the others; “I believe you have work to be done? Or shall we have the prisoners guard themselves?”

They looked at one another, then, in a series of magical bursts, they vanished, leaving us alone with the pony in charge.

“Warden,” I murmured.

She turned, trotting around to my side of the car and opening the back door. “Pardon that ugliness, Hard Boiled. Our newest captain is one of what is becoming an unfortunate trend. I shall accompany you to my office, where we will have tea. Then you will explain why you have permission from a pony who is, ostensibly, attempting to hunt you down and arrest you to be in my prison, and why I should not lock you away.”

“That’s going to be a long explanation, Warden,” I murmured, pulling myself onto the back seat beside my still unconscious partner.

“Long and ridiculous. By the way, good to see you, Warden,” Taxi put in, turning the engine over.

“Of course, Miss Shine. I look forward to this explanation, then. We get so very little in the way of news from the city out here that it is refreshing to have a chat now and then. First, however, we will have tea.”

The Warden’s horn fired, launching a stream of vicious looking red flame that lit up her face. She grasped my partner in that fiery magic and dragged her sideways, like a sack of potatoes, making room for herself; The flame was harmless and did not produce the smell of charred pegasus, but it was impressive; Even ten years on from our first encounter, I had to force myself not to take a step back from the sight she presented in the full light. It was not a pretty one.

Granted, I doubt she’d have objected if I had. After forty odd years, I think most ponies had given up on making a ‘good’ first impression with her. After all, how easy is it to make a good impression when speaking to a pony who looks like she’s taken a bath in acid?

An especially creative journalist once described her as ‘naked in ways nopony has any business being naked.'

The flesh of her face was gone on one side, exposing blackened teeth and bone underneath. The other side was a melted wreck of scarred flesh. One eye was largely gone and the socket had slipped down onto her cheek. Its remains were a distressing pus-yellow, while the other shone with an alarming crimson glow. Her ears had been vaporized, along with all of the fur on her body. What was left were patchy clumps around her rear fetlocks and groin.

Nopony could be blamed for thinking she should be dead. By all rights, anypony in her condition should have been dead many, many years ago.

It should be no surprise, then, that Swift chose that moment to wake up.
`

She screamed and went for her gun, grabbing her bit in her mouth. She yanked on it so hard she unbalanced, pitching into the back seat hoofwell upside down, her rear hooves flailing at the air.

I suppose I had no excuse, given her past behavior when confronted with anything even a little bit outside the ordinary, for being unaware that that would happen. It was damnably awkward.

The Warden studied the undignified sight, then looked up at me. “You have acquired a new partner.” It wasn’t a question.

I sighed, watching Swift tugging futilely on her gun bit, the hammer clicking on an empty chamber, staring with panicked eyes at the scorched being. “I feel like I’m saying this a lot lately, but she’s not as dumb as she looks.”

****

The road up to the prison’s main buildings was a winding affair and Taxi took it slow.

Swift was bundled on the seat under my coat with just her ears and one eye poking out, refusing to take her gaze off of the Warden who sat on the opposite side of the car. I sat between them, my hat on my forelegs along with the clip of Swift’s pistol underneath it. I’d have liked to have the discussion about ‘mind controlling zombie ponies’ someplace besides in front of the Warden, but I’m certain she was used to similar, albeit probably less creative, responses to her condition.

“S-sir… W-why is t-the z-zombie pony s-staring at me?” Swift whimpered.

“Last time I’ll say it, kid, she’s not a zombie. She’s as alive as you or me.” I turned to face the Warden, who was indeed watching Swift with a certain intensity.

The Warden wiggled the muscles above her left eye, which was a gesture I’d come to understand was her version of a smile. “I am merely enjoying the last refuge of those whose dating careers have ended prematurely, Detective. Your partner is not an unattractive mare.”

“Your ‘dating career’ should have ended forty odd years ago anyway and we both know it. Stop trying to freak the kid out,” I growled.

Warden shrugged her boiled shoulders and let her chin rest on one fried hoof; it made a slightly crunchy sound. Her single eye remaining focused squarely on Swift. The tiny pegasus squeaked and yanked my coat over her head.

****

The final gate was five times the height of a pony, topped with metal crenelations. At intervals up and down the walls, magic sigils had been carved into the metal. Powerful spotlights positioned every few meters projected circles of illumination on the treeline. Several of those swung to focus on the car, bathing us in light. Taxi covered her eyes with one hoof and hit the brakes.

Warden rolled down the window and leaned her head out; the spotlights swept away, back to covering the trees.

The towering gate began to edge their way open and we rolled forward into the vast, empty parking lot of Tartarus Correctional. Inside, there was another fence topped with razorwire, guards in full body armor with automatic weapons lining the walls. They were the last defense in the event of a breakout and knew just how badly -- considering some of their prisoners -- a breakout could go. Not that their restrained violence was needed very often.

Even if a prisoner were to make the wall, he or she still had the miles of forest, the magical containment fields, Cerberus, and the greatest terror -- The Warden herself -- to contend with. In all the years of operation, there’d never been a successful escape. Of course, the same could be said of Supermax, though for different reasons.

The Night Trotter rumbled into the parking area, pulling into one of the six ‘visitor only’ stalls. That persistent itch of magical scans was starting to feel like my skin was being scraped off. Taxi hid it well, but that was years of zebra meditation and honed, if intermittently applied, self control, while the Warden seemed entirely at ease, though that might have been that she didn’t have much skin left to scrape. Swift and I, meanwhile, were left scratching furiously at any bit of flesh we could reach.

“Ugh, could you tell them to knock it off?” I groaned, scrubbing at the fur on my neck.

What was left of the Warden’s lip on one side rose an inch, sending Swift piling back under my coat in an itchy, frightened heap.

“They’ll ‘knock it off’ when they’ve figured out why you disappeared from our sensor nets.” The Warden replied. “Unless you wish to be forthcoming, I see no particularly good reason to give that order. However, my room is shielded from such intrusions, as is the prison proper. I won’t begrudge my guards their curiosity, however.”

“You could just ask me, you know!” I snapped.

“Of course.” She opened the cab’s door and stepped onto the pavement. “If you were aware, however, I have little doubt you would have told me simply to make certain nopony else might ever use it to escape from my prison. After all, despite our methodological differences, you and I remain on the same side.”

I snorted and pushed Swift’s clip back towards her. She snatched it up and began to fit it into her gun, then glanced out at the watchtowers, thought better of it, and slipped it into her vest instead.

“To hear Jade tell it, some days I think she wishes that weren’t the case,” I replied.

The Warden made a wet noise in the back of her throat that sounded like a cough. I realized, after a second, that it was her slightly sickening version of laughter. “Oh, Detective… Jade cannot kill you. She hates you too much.”

“How is that a thing?” I asked.

“For ponies like Iris Jade, enough hate can become like love. Believe me, I know.”

With that, she turned towards one of the smaller structures off to one side of the undecorated hulk that represented the main security gate. I started to follow, then realized I was alone. Swift was still in the car, along with Taxi, who hadn’t moved from behind the driver’s seat.

I tapped on the driver’s side window until she rolled it down.

“Sweets? Come on, I need your intuition in here.”

“Yeah, I know.” She looked resigned, and a bit sad. “I hate coming to this place. I was trying to hide it, but dammit…”

“You know he can’t hurt you anymore, right?”

“We’re not discussing him,” Taxi growled, not meeting my eyes. “Just leave it. Go on. Tell the Warden what she wants to know and get us access to the architect. Saura or Sauce or whatever her name is. I want to leave as soon as we can. I’ll join you on the other end of the checkpoints when you’re done in there.”

I tried to think of something to say to convince her, but finally just shook my head and wandered around to the other side of the car. Tugging open the door, I looked down at Swift, who was still just a lump with a few orange feathers poking out of the ends, hiding under my coat.

“Kid, come on. It’s cold and it’s raining. We’ve got things to do here and the Warden wants to have a talk,” I said, trying to sound soothing. I’m not terribly good at ‘soothing’. Shouting, screaming, threatening? I can do those good. Soothing? Not so much.

“If it’s alright s-sir, I think I’ll stay he-here,” Swift whispered.

I put my mouth down next to her ear, where I hoped the Warden couldn’t hear us. “Look, you want to know the Warden’s story, you ask her. She fought in the Crusades and it cost her more than you can imagine. Until then, get up! You’re embarrassing me.”

So much for soothing, but it got the job done.

Swift shifted on the seat, letting one leg slip off. “S-sir...you’re a jerk…”

“I know, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I need you out there.”

She didn’t reply, instead pushing herself backwards out of the car and dumping my coat across my left hoof. I swung it on, adjusting the tails so they fell over my hips.

I turned to go after the Warden who was still standing at the edge of the car park, watching us with an eerie patience.

I got all of two steps before a scream of terror had me diving for the ground. I watched as a three-headed black shape smashed into the side of the Night Trotter, then leapt on Swift, jaws wide to tear her limb from limb.

Act 2, Chapter 22: Heartburn

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 22: Heartburn

Once, the dragons considered ponies to be insignificant lesser life forms, not even threatening enough to be worth crushing. And why should they have seen ponies any other way? Adult dragons are massive, armor-plated fire-breathing beasts capable of singlehandedly destroying pony settlements and fending off entire squadrons of Wonderbolts by themselves, while ponies are small, squishy, and flammable.

Dragons stood at the very top of the food chain, but it was there that they grew fat and lazy, while Ponykind continued to develop to make up for their comparative bodily shortcomings. Spells became more complex and devastating. Devices, arcane and mechanical, placed more and more power into the hooves of the individual pony.

The dragons watched, and did not care. They were dragons; what could stand before them?

Perhaps this sort of laissez-faire deluded coexistence might have persisted to the modern era, had not adolescent dragons raided Baltimare during a Summer Sun Celebration with the stated goal of ‘putting those prissy ponies in their place.’ This was ultimately unfortunate for all involved: for the ponies, because of a death toll in the low hundreds, and for the dragons, because Ponykind had just developed the heat-seeking rocket launcher.

The retaliatory ordnance that destroyed a volcanic dragonhome came as something of a shock to a complacent dragonkind.

It was the first volley fired in what would escalate into the Cutie Mark Crusades: A bloody, many-year-long war led by Princess Luna and her generals, notable among them an orphaned pegasus mare and mechanized warfare specialist known best to the dragons as ‘The Demolisher,' a fiery earth pony alchemist and weapons developer called ‘The Blooming Death,' and a powerful mage with a voice that could shatter stone: ‘The Sweet Embrace.' Though thousands of dragons descended upon Equestria, they soon found themselves descending rather more abruptly and terminally than they expected. They learned that there were, finally, creatures with bigger fangs, as armor-piercing weapons cleaved dragonscale hides, fired from distances dragon breath could never hope to reach unaided; as spells beyond their comprehension, if they were lucky, merely killed them.

Ponykind did not emerge unscathed, but despite significant losses of life, Ponykind ultimately emerged victorious and has, in the intervening decades, mostly rebuilt. The dragons have not recovered. Given their slow breeding cycles, it's likely they will not for millenia, if they do at all. Their collective pride certainly never will.

Detailed treatises on the war and its events (Such as the Siege of Sunburst Mountain, the Appleloosa Valley Massacre, and the eventual Camp Spike Peace Accords) can be found in other tomes, but for our immediate purposes it is sufficient to note that even now, long after its conclusion, the war still echoes still in the hearts - and sometimes, the bodies - of dragon and pony alike.

--The Scholar

I was moving before my brain was, leaping to defend against the monster attacking my partner. I rolled sideways, using the motion to snatch my trigger into my muzzle and coming up with my sights trained. The light in the enormous parking lot wasn’t fantastic, but I made out several sets of eyes, flashing jaws, and pink tongues crouched over my partner.

I took up the slack, preparing to empty my chamber into the black shape, then made out a sound; Swift giggling.

That last part brought me to a skidding halt.

My heart was thumping, but looking down the sights of my gun at my partner being accosted by a hulking monster, I held my fire.

It was Cerberus; Cerberus writ very, very small. Very small, and very fluffy.

The beast was only big by pony standards. By mega-fauna standards, the creature crouched over Swift was puny. He was also licking her face with two of his huge canid heads, while the third tugged gently on the front pocket of her combat jacket, trying to pull the buckle off. There was something odd about its proportions.

The Warden just stood and watched.

“S-s-siiir! It’s tiiickling meee!” my partner yelped and that sent me into action. I trotted over, dropping my bit and selected the middle head of the great dog. Reaching up, I snatched its bright red collar in my teeth and hauled. Earth pony strength is not to be trifled with, but I tugged at him in complete futility. My hooves slid on the pavement and Swift flailed at the air while the devilish dog dodged every attempt to push him away.

“Little assistance here!” I called out. I could hear distant laughter from several of the watchtowers. No help there, then.

“Detective, it may be best if she simply gives him whatever it is she has in her front pocket,” the Warden yelled, though compared to that overpowering voice of command she’d used earlier, it was practically a whisper.

By this point, Swift’s face was bathed in saliva, leaving her fur sticking up in unnatural angles.

“S-sir! Help!”

“Kid, give it whatever’s in your pocket!”

“I-It’s my snacks, sir! Those are expensive!” she protested, wings beating the ground.

“Do you want to be licked to death?”

Swift made an unhappy grunt of resigned irritation and put both rear hooves on the beast’s middle neck, pushing its brown muzzle away from her stomach so she could reach the pocket, ripping open the snap. The great beast suddenly backed off and sat to attention in front of her, all three tongues wagging from wide, grinning canine mouths. She looked up, surprised, then fished around in her pocket until she came up with the little paper package.

Rolling over, she got to her hooves and shook a piece of jerky out, then tossed it to the creature. Its closest head snatched the tiny piece of meat out of mid-air and chewed it noisily.

A tiny smile appeared on my partner’s muzzle as she pulled out another bit and tossed it to the rightmost head, who also snatched it. When it came to be middle head’s turn, it just let the meat bounced off its nose, then snarfed it off the pavement.

Now I could get a look at the beast, I realized why it’d looked so odd earlier. Its heads and paws were too big for its body. On just about any other species, it would have been cute.

I jumped as the Warden spoke from my side, “Well, I’ll be damned. We’ve never managed to get him to obey us. I assumed it was largely just a matter of time. What sort of snacks are those, if you don’t mind me asking?” The question was directed at Swift.

She looked down at the paper package, then tilted her head. “Oh… um… Teriyaki?”

The Warden frowned. “Why does a pegasus have… meat?”

My partner’s eyes glittered with mischief as she gave her biggest, scariest grin. “I got some special chompers!”

I’d never seen the Warden show even the slightest hint of lost composure, and she wasn't about to start at the apparently humdrum sight of a pony with fangs. She merely nodded. “I see. You would be the ‘class four’ transformation we detected, then?”

“I...guess so. What’s class four?” Swift asked.

I shook my head. “It’s some kind of weird system they use up here. Think the PACT classification system for mega-fauna. Whoever was looking at your teeth apparently thinks you could be dangerous.”

Swift’s eyebrows drew together as she looked around at the guard towers. “Dangerous here?”

“They take no chances in Tartarus,” I murmured, then turned to look at the huge dog. “I wasn’t aware there were two Cerberus’... Cerberi?... Or that one of them was so...dinky.”

Warden sniffed, which sounded like a broken vacuum cleaner sucking up a bit. “Cerberus is our guardian’s name,” she said, the tiny stub of muscle and bone that used to be her tail flicking back and forth. “The guards call this one ‘Goofball'. Apt, considering he has taken three months to learn ‘come’ and is still extremely vague on ‘sit'. He will obey if you have food or are willing to scratch various parts of him.”

“Three months? He’s a puppy?” Swift sounded surprised, tossing the huge animal another of the bits of her snack, this time a little higher. It landed on Goofball’s middle head’s muzzle, then the left head snagged it, prompting a snarling dis-agreement which the right head just rolled his eyes at.

“Yes… bit of a palava there. Cerberus escaped some months ago, and by the time we’d managed to hunt him down, he’d doused an entire dog kennel in his… mmm…” She tapped her chin, looking for a tasteful way to say whatever it was she had in mind. “-his ‘issue.' We thought it surely impossible that he might have any get from this, but...we were wrong. The mother was an enormous mutt herself, though I doubt she’d have survived the pregnancy if we hadn’t managed to build a magical womb inside the father and...well, the details of a mega-fauna canid surrogacy are somewhat dull, I suppose.”

“Okay, I get… that he exists and I don’t mean to sound cold, but why?” I inquired.

The Warden coughed, softly, then nodded in what I thought was a random direction. Far off, I heard a sound like a tornado drill siren; the howl of something much bigger than your average spaniel. “Since leaving Tartarus, I fear...Cerberus, the immortal hound… may be… aging.”

“Aging?” Swift asked, surprised. “I… I heard stories about Cerberus when I was a filly. He’s been around for centuries!”

“Longer than that. We believe it may have something to do with his departure from the original Tartarus. This is not to say he is unlikely to live several more centuries. His species is naturally long lived. They say their ‘larger’ cousins in ancient times once hunted dragons. Now… he is all that remains. It placed a certain imperative upon us to find his replacement. That...” The Warden waved her hoof at Goofball, who rolled onto his back with all four legs in the air, snuffling at Swift’s hooves. She popped a piece of meat into her mouth, then into each of his, “-is aging at something like one one hundredth the rate an ordinary dog would. He will be an infant longer than we-” she hesitated, then corrected herself, “-I should say... longer than you will be alive.”

“But...that’s...centuries from now!” Swift exclaimed. “What makes you think we’ll even need Tartarus by then?”

The Warden shrugged her bony shoulders. “Change happens. The Princesses have not survived this long by leaving things to chance. There will always be a Tartarus, whether or not it houses prisoners.”

Swift shook the bottom of her bag of jerky out over Goofball’s face, then stepped back and tossed him the paper. He began furiously licking it again and again, shredding it into tiny pieces. When he was done, he sat down in front of her once more.

She rubbed the back of her head. “Uh...that’s all. I don’t have any more.”

Goofball’s heads all cocked in different directions, which meant left and middle conked skulls and snapped at one another, while right just glanced at his companions with a sort of annoyed disgust before coming back to Swift. He took a couple of steps forward and pushed his nose against her chest gently.

“I said I don’t have any more,” she insisted, putting one hoof on his muzzle. He sank onto his belly, staring up...well, staring at her with three sets of mournful puppy eyes.

“Come along.” The Warden exhaled, turning back towards the squat, grey building in the distance. “We’ll leave him at the door. At the very least, I’ve managed to train the great wretch not to come inside of buildings without my permission. He might be immune to fire and bullets, like his father, but he’s not immune to a dozen or so newspapers on the noses.”

I set off behind the Warden and, after a few seconds, Swift followed, with Goofball at her heels. His big tongues wagged as he padded along at my partner’s back.

The rain had let up at some point, though I hadn’t noticed it, and a stiff wind whipped across the car park. I glanced back at the Night Trotter, to Taxi, who hadn’t said anything or so much as moved during the little drama with the hound. She was still there, her head resting on the steering wheel and shoulders shaking.

I left her to her grief.

****

The Warden led us into the building through a barred metal door, which shut out the drizzle, the wind, and the insufferable itch of the magical scans. Goofball did stop just outside, though he whined so piteously as Swift stepped over the threshold that she had to go back for a minute to scratch a few of his ears.

When the door closed, I still heard him outside, scratching and sniffing.

We were in a narrow, carpeted hallway lit by white neon lights. It was as cold and uninviting as the chilly night outside.

“Miss Warden, Ma’am?” Swift turned from the door and looked at the burnt mare. I realized, after a short pause, she wasn’t looking directly at her but rather at a spot about three hooflengths above her head.

“Yes, Miss Cuddles?”

Swift paused, then plowed on. There was just something about the Warden that suggested correcting her might be a poor idea. “Ma’am, if it’s not rude, wh-what did you mean when you said Goofball would out live… us? You made it sound like you weren’t… you know… a pony.”

“Is Princess Celestia a pony, Miss Cuddles?” Warden asked, the scaly flesh above one eye twitching as her bare teeth clicked together.

“O-of course she is.”

The flesh that was all that still clung to her upper lip twitched into a sneer that I think - at some point along the collection of carbonized noodles she used for a nervous system - was supposed to be a friendly smile. Swift crouched low to the paved floor, then forced herself back to a standing position as the Warden replied, “Simply because I do not age, does not mean I am not alive. I am a pony.”

Ever the blunt one, Swift asked the obvious question, “B-but what happened to you? You don’t have a face!”

Warden laughed, which wasn’t a pleasant sound on the best of days. “Mmm...tea. We will speak over tea. It is one of my pleasures.”

****

The Warden’s office was at the end of a hallway that required her to stop no less than four times to disable traps and wards, her horn squirting that fiery magical glow each time she did. Swift seemed fascinated by it and I remembered that when I’d first met the Warden, I had been as well. It was unlike the power of any other unicorn.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside, flicking on a lightswitch. The Warden trotted around behind her desk to a small kitchenette and began filling a pot with water from a bottle. She lit the tiny gas stove with a burst of magic.

Where the halls outside had been all utility, the little office was almost pleasant. Not quite pleasant, but very nearly. The smell of burnt flesh, which we’d managed to avoid while outside in the open air, became immediately pervasive. Swift made a soft slurping noise as she sucked back a muzzle full of saliva.

“Mmm, something smells...delicious, Sir,” she whispered to me.

I couldn’t hold in a full body shudder the like of which Celestia herself had never seen. It almost took me off my hooves.

“Kid… That’s the Warden,” I replied, forcing myself to swallow.

“What?!” she squeaked, falling onto her haunches.

“You will find, Miss Cuddles, that despite the condition of my ears, I am not deaf,” the Warden said, aloud, as her tea kettle began to whistle softly. Levitating it off the burner, she began filling three porcelain tea-cups. “I must say, you are the first, outside of my griffin inmates and subordinates, to mention my distinctive scent as a ‘plus’, however.”

Swift’s cheeks colored and she lifted herself into one of the seats in front of the Warden’s desk. “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”

“Be sorry when you have committed an act worthy of guilt, Miss Cuddles,” the burnt mare said, curtly, then floated a cup of tea over to Swift. “You did not know, so guilt is unwarranted.”

“I’m…” my partner paused. I heard another apology coming, but instead she fluffed her wings out and began smoothing the water off them with her hooves. “I’ve seen some really… um… some really ‘new’ things this month and I’m still not used to everything.”

“I am still seeing ‘new’ things after nearly seventy years of life, Miss Cuddles.” The Warden replied, dropping a straw into her tea. She slid her pink tongue between her blackened teeth and caught it, then sucked noisily. Without lips, a straw is especially difficult to use. “Of course, I suppose you are right to be curious. Incurious minds make poor officers. Ask your question, then I will ask mine.”

Swift’s ears flattened and she looked at me for permission. I nodded. “Go on, kid. We’ll have this over faster if you’re not falling all over yourself every time you look at her.”

“R-right…” Bucking herself up, she faced the Warden, looking into that one glowing red eye. “Miss Warden. What… why are you… so badly hurt?”

She considered the question for several seconds, then nodded, “Still tactful. I’m sure Hard Boiled will beat that out of you one day.” Rising, she walked back and forth behind her desk, then stopped and set one hoof on the table top. There was a piece of flesh there just above the fetlock that seemed seconds from falling off that drew my eyes. I squirmed, uncomfortably and looked away. “Miss Cuddles, whilst you were unconscious, I said a thing to Hard Boiled. I assume you are aware of his relationship with Chief Iris Jade?”

“Y-yes.”

“Have you wondered why she does not kill him? She certainly has the capacity. She hates him with a passion. She has demonstrated a willingness, in the past, to go outside of the law.” She asked, staring at me with her one good eye. “Why, then, does he live?”

Swift thought a little, then rubbed her upper lip with her toe. “I don’t...I don’t know.”

“Mmmph. I will tell you.” Warden’s tongue snaked out, running across the fronts of her discolored teeth. She seemed to be relishing this conversation and Swift quickly sipped her tea to cover her discomfort. For my part, I sucked down some of mine, enjoying the tangy, sweet flavor and trying to keep from smiling. Smiling would have ruined the Warden’s mojo.

“It is precisely because she hates him.” The old mare’s eye seemed to glitter a little brighter.

“She does?” Swift asked, glancing at me. I raised my cup to her.

“Oh yes, Miss Cuddles… She loathes him. It is a powerful hatred. Years he defies her, years he fights her and struggles, even when she has him under her hoof… and when it comes to it, when he’s spat in her face like he did on the news some days ago… she gives him permission to come here. Why do you think that is?”

Swift shivered. It was a tiny thing, but the Warden took it as signal to continue.

“Hatred… is not unlike love. It makes us do things we could not otherwise. We become... attached, to that which we hate. It gives us a reason to keep going. Ponies like Jade… ponies like me… need those reasons. During the war, I fought. If you could see what is left of my mark, you’d wonder just what talent I held.” She turned to one side, showing the burnt, fur-less skin on her hip. “My mother believed I was a leech. She told me that I was often enough.”

“That’s awful!” my partner exclaimed. “A mother should never say something like that to her foal!”

“I suppose,” Warden said, thoughtfully, lifting herself into the folding chair behind the desk. “A pony can only hear something so many times before they embrace it. A leech survives. A leech continues, while the animal it feeds off of dies. A leech may kill a dragon, where a bullet may not. That was my talent and my mark. I specialized in stealing magics. My power was to take the power of others.”

“Is that… is that why there’s all the magical disruption stuff here? You made all of that?”

The Warden bobbed her skinless chin. “Back then, I was a soldier in the Royal Guard. Warding the Princess, stealing the magics of any who would attack her and using them to protect the ponies of Canterlot. I was in Cloudsdale during the great attack. They teach that in history still, yes?”

“Of course!’ Swift said, half rising. “I had a whole section on the Cloudsdale campaign! B-but they never mentioned… you.”

“And why should they? What good would come of mentioning something like me, Miss Cuddles? I assume, however, they mentioned the dragon’s generals?”

My partner wet her lips, then whispered the name like she might conjure up that ancient evil, “High General Astraxis...”

“Yeeesss…” The Warden hissed, her gaze sliding up to the ceiling as she sank into reminiscence. “I was there. I remember it, clear as you see me. I remember standing on the palisade overlooking the great courtyard of the cloud city. I wore enchanted shoes back then and walked on clouds. I remember his mighty shadow as he dropped from the sky over Cloudsdale, diving out of the sun.”

“You...saw him?!” Swift gasped.

“Mmmhmmm. Gorgeous, he was. Gorgeous, flaxen, and terrible.” There was a touch of genuine wistfulness in the way she said that. “Our forces had retreated. We’d been ordered to form a perimeter in the great courtyard, with the civilians at its center, and our general -- the finest of his age -- cast his mightiest spell to shield them. I remember it, glittering purple in the mid-morning. But I...I was outside of it. I wanted to see Astraxis with my own eyes.” She pointed to the gory remnants on her face.

Swift gulped, “What h-happened?”

The Warden nickered and her tea floated down to the table. She stared into space, apparently lost in that long ago moment.

“As I said. I saw him, Miss Cuddles. I saw him coming. I was standing on one of the highest points, a shoulder of cloud once used as a lookout tower by the weather teams of Cloudsdale. The wind whipped through my mane.” The two charred holes where her nostrils contracted slightly. “I smelled that dragon before he came.” She snorted and crossed one hoof over herself, resting her cheek on the surface of her desk. “Mmm...they don’t tell you about the smell. He smelled of fire. He smelled of sex.”

The pegasus was enraptured, and I drained my teacup. I’d heard the story before, but it wouldn’t do to interrupt. We needed the Warden receptive.

“He was beautiful,” she murmured. It was an odd thing, for a pony without much of a mouth to speak so clearly. After some time, one realized her horn never really stopped glowing. Its light was muted, but persistent. “Then he turned his great silver eyes on me. He looked down at me; a little girl playing at soldier, not even a snack to him. He looked down and I could almost hear his thoughts as I stood there. I could see him make the decision. He might have strafed the city as his first attack. He might have blasted the general’s shield or chased a few of the civilians who hadn’t made it into the perimeter.” The Warden’s eye flicked towards Swift. “He decided, in that moment, to come after me...”

“How are...how are you still alive? I read about Astraxis. He was the greatest of the dragon’s generals! His fire melted entire forests down to the bedrock!” Swift exclaimed.

“It could. I am in a unique place to say, I do believe, that his fire could have burnt the world,” she assured her, flicking her tongue over her ashy teeth. “When he opened his great jaws, I saw a flame that would put the sun to shame.” The Warden cackled, madly, then slid off her chair and came around the desk, leaning in close to my partner who tried to get as far from her as she could without falling off her seat. “You know what I thought then? It’s the sort of thing you think when you’re about to die.”

“Wh-what?” Swift said, just loud enough to be heard.

The charred face pushed in close as she could and said, very softly, “I thought ‘I wonder what would happen...if I ate his fire!’.”

There wasn’t, I suppose, much a pony could say to that. Swift just sat there, staring up into that glowing eye, and I imagine she saw what I’d first seen all those years ago when Juniper first took me to Tartarus and introduced me to the then-new Warden. She saw a dragon’s fire, swallowed up by a little filly.

“I burned, Miss Cuddles,” the Warden growled, her voice husky. “He blew his mighty flame, intent on snuffing out that little fly on the tower, and I burned and burned and burned...and my horn drank and drank and drank. It drank until I was full, and then drank some more. It drank until I burst, then drank until I was alive again.”

If she could have, I’m sure she would have been grinning. Swift was quivering in her chair. It was a heck of a performance.

“I drank until his fire was dry… and he screamed his fury at the sky, finding his fire stolen. I burned alive, and would not die. I have burned for longer than you have lived, and will probably burn after you’re dead.” She twisted a piece of dried flesh from her leg and tossed it away. Another grew immediately in its place, crackling into a cinder instantly as we watched. “So you understand then, why Jade can’t kill Hard Boiled?”

Swift looked confusedly up from the gruesome display and answered, “No, Miss…”

The Warden threw her shoulders back and turned, marching back behind her desk. “One day, I will find Astraxis. He is what drives me, Miss Cuddles. One day, I will find him and he will live to see my face each morning. In the night, he will scream only my name…and when he dies, it will be with my kiss on his lips.”

A tiny wisp of smoke escaped from her nose and she winked her darkly glittering eye at my partner.

Without taking her eyes off of the Warden, Swift said out of the corner of her muzzle, “S-sir… I think I need to go pee…”

****

Swift was off down the hall to the bathroom, leaving me alone with the Warden in her tiny office. With the kid out of the room, she relaxed, leaned back in her seat, and put her rear hooves up on her desk, one crossed over the other.

“Where did you find this one? I like her,” she chuckled, topping off her cup of tea.

“Jade dropped her in my lap a bit more than a month ago. Been a wild-ass month, but she’s held on alright.” I sighed, turning the tea-cup around as she offered me a refill. It had little pictures of dragons painted around the rim.

“I noticed. Smarter than the last one. Innocent, but smarter than...whatever his name was. Stinky.”

“Stink Bug...and yeah, he was a two week long pity party before I got him drunk and had him piss in Jade’s mail box. Swift’s less innocent than you think. Killed a pony she loved to save my life.” I tipped a cube of sugar into my tea as the charred pony on the other side of the desk drank hers with a hearty sigh of enjoyment. “Did you have to freak her out?”

She quirked her eyebrow, or at least, the general area that her eyebrow might have been. “Hard Boiled, I don’t have enough skin left to screw and I’ve got more time than I know what to do with. I woke up in a hospital three decades ago and I haven’t gotten a minute older. My skin doesn’t grow back. I haven’t needed a mane-cut since I came out of the blasted coma. Ironic as it sounds, I was in heat when I got burned so unless you’re offering your cock to the pyre in my belly, I think you don’t get to tell me who I do and don’t get to freak out. I don’t get many other joys out of this perpetual life besides my work.”

I waved my hooves, placatingly. “Fair enough.”

“So… tell me about that thing on your chest. Looks like you got attacked by a psychotic electrician.” She nodded her horn towards my heart.

“It’s… Honestly, that story would take a month. It’s a transplant. Runs off the mains. I got stupid and I got shot and I like to think I learned some humility.”

“You? Hah! I doubt it!” she guffawed, sounding not unlike a lawnmower running over a pet turtle.

I decided to change topics. “Speaking of that, where on earth did you find a piece of work like Bramble? That guy strikes me as ‘gonna die with one of his own stallion’s bullets in his back’.”

“If he is lucky. You remember what I said about ‘unfortunate trends’?”

“I do.” I replied. “I was too busy being glad that prick didn’t decide to nullify me on the spot just to be safe to ask what you meant.”

“You’re lucky I was nearby. I wouldn’t put it by him. Half the prisons and jails across on this continent are sending me their puffed up little pissants to whip into shape.” A dribble of saliva ran down between her teeth but she quickly wiped it away with the back of one fetlock. “Princess Celestia levies guards from everywhere to come here to Tartarus. They train here and with any luck go home a little kinder and a lot smarter. Rehabilitation only works if the guards aren’t making the situations these ponies and other beings come in from worse.”

“Lemme guess. That means every time some warden somewhere has some jerk off who thinks it’s a good idea to beat on a prisoner, they send them to you, right?” I asked, sliding my tea back across her desk. She shifted the cup back onto its tray.

“Precisely. Bramble smacked a prisoner for asking him directions to the toilets. It was either an assault charge or come train with me. He picked train here.”

“Bet he’s regretting that just now…” I said, waving my hoof in what I thought was the direction the unfortunate guard had been dragged off by Cerebrus.

“That pup can make a right mess,” she agreed. “So...tell me then. What brings you to my prison? The kid ate up that line about Jade not killing you because she hates you so much, but I expect there’s probably some less poetic reason.”

I nodded and pulled my coat open to get some air around my barrel. The tiny room was stiflingly hot with the Warden in it. She radiated a certain permanent warmth that was impossible to escape except outside. “You might say that. You know the Church of the Lunar Passage?”

If she’d had facial features, I’m pretty sure the Warden would have flinched. As it was, she drew back several inches and sucked a breath down her ruined throat. “...Yes. Sad to say, I know those ponies quite well. It took me months after that Skylark witch left to scrape the last of her taint out of my prison.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse than you can imagine,” she said, turning to the wall beside her desk. Her horn flared a little higher and part of the wall slid to one side, revealing a row of filing cabinets. Extracting a file from the third drawer from the top, she plunked it on the desk and opened it. Turning it around, she pushed it across the table to me. Inside, there were pictures of Skylark. Her face was bandaged, but she was sitting with a group of about a dozen of the toughest, nastiest looking ponies I’d ever seen. She looked like a choir girl leading a biker gang.

“We emphasize a therapeutic approach to rehabilitation here, but it’s intermingled with the need to keep some of the most dangerous things you can imagine from either escaping or killing us. That… mare…” she spat the word like it tasted foul, “...emphasized blaming everything on Celestia and said you could redeem yourself utterly just by confessing, serving a sentence of incarceration or penance, and feeling guilty enough. Doesn’t matter the sin. Of course, according to her, these sentences are meant to be short and anything longer than a few months is ‘the cruelty of the sun bitch’. Her favorite personal pleasure was long, nasty descriptions of what it was like to be Luna, trapped on the moon for a thousand years. The inmates ate that right up.”

“She was popular, then?” I asked.

“You better believe it.” The Warden shut her eye and rubbed a spot of loose skin over her temple. “She herself kept a low key, but I had a half dozen guards injured in private altercations with prisoners in her sect. They took to calling us ‘the sun’s lackeys’ and me ‘Celestia’s rug muncher.' Blamed us for their continued imprisonment after they’d ‘repented.' We were ‘keeping them from their rightful place at Luna’s side.' She single-hoofedly set our therapy schedules back five years. We had a few who might have gotten paroled if not for that deluded pony.”

I put my hoof on the picture, pointing to Skylark’s bandaged face. “What’s with the bandages?”

Warden shook her head. “Not a clue. She came in here with those and would not talk about them to anypony, myself included. She took them off after a few weeks and it looked like she had scars under her fur, but the fur grew in quickly.”

“Mmm...well, you asked why Jade’s not presently using my skin to pad her chair?”

“I asked a number of things. Neither you nor Miss Cuddles in there are official officers of the law and there are, I’m certain, plenty of ponies in city hall who would love to personally pick your brains with sharp instruments after your appearance on the news. That you have managed to elude my sensor net is disturbing as well.” An exposed muscle just below her jaw distended slightly, pulling her teeth open an inch or so. “My respect for the work you’ve done as well as the likelihood that you wouldn’t live terribly long if I were to turn you over to an interested party has, so far, stayed my hoof. Give me additional reasons.”

“Somepony has kidnapped Iris Jade’s daughter.”

The Warden didn’t move for a moment and she had no expression to read.

“Cerise…” she said at last, very quietly.

“You know her?” I asked, pushing my chair back from her desk so I could stretch my neck.

“I am aware of Jade’s child, yes. She was a right hellion when she was younger. She takes after her mother, like that. She was caught shoplifting some years ago and her mother brought her to me to ‘scare her straight’.” A thick gout of flame boiled out of the Warden’s nose.

“How did that go?”

“I had Cerebrus swallow her.” The light in her eye socket danced with merriment at the memory.

I choked and if I’d had anything in my mouth, it would have painted the far wall of the little office. “Swallow?!”

“She was a powerful little telekinetic even then, but spend a minute or so in the gullet of a giant dog and suddenly spell-casting becomes the last thing on your mind.”

“Did...did it work?”

Warden raised one toe to her teeth, tapping the front two. The action scraped away a little of the ash, but her next breath replaced it. “She stayed away from the law, if that’s what you mean. Sadly, I doubt being swallowed or vomited did anything for her relationship with her mother.”

“I can say damn sure it didn’t,” I answered, trying to find a more comfortable position on the folding metal chair. “Apparently, Cerise got herself involved with those bottom feeders in the Church some time ago. I’ve been on the trail of some answers. Somepony is making a play for the city. A big one. Having Jade off the board is a part of that.”

“And...you wanted information on Skylark? From me?” she scoffed. “You must be dredging the bottom of the barrel if I am the pony you come to.”

“It’s a pretty shallow barrel, but… thankfully, no. Supermax. Were you aware Skylark had purchased it?”

"I… was… aware, yes." I don’t know what expression the Warden would have made just then, but several muscles in her throat and chest contracted simultaneously. “Just precisely what is this about, Detective? How does the Church of the Lunar Passage relate to the kidnapping of Cerise?”

“No more calling me Hard Boiled, then?” I quipped.

The temperature in the room suddenly climbed several dozen degrees. I began to sweat and reconsider my smart mouth. A dribble of something hot and red began to run down her jaw, dripping onto the floor behind her desk. Smoke rose from where it landed.

“I fought the city council on the sale of that… place. I fought them with every fiber of my being, and they threatened to have me replaced. Replaced! Me!” she snarled and the warmth built even further. I scooted my chair back a few steps. “I… could not stop it. I even wrote to Celestia on the matter. I do not know if she even received my message. Everything has to go through so many layers of flappers and fools these days. The reply was that the land lay fallow and with the construct disabled, its sale would be… harmless!”

I tried to scoot further, but my back hit the wall. I quickly rose, preparing to leave the room, find Swift, and head for the fire exit if the building started melting. Warden’s eye was like a red coal, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was somewhere else. Somewhere that was inspiring an anger I felt certain could cook the world if it ever came unleashed.

At that moment, she seemed to finally notice my discomfort and the heat abated instantly. The room was still hot, but no longer felt like I was standing in front of a blast furnace.

“Excuse my temper,” she apologized, sliding up onto her chair once more. Steam rose under her backside. “Few things get my dander up like stupid, greedy bureaucrats.”

“I’m less worried about your dander and more worried about my fur burning off, thanks very much…”

“Of course.” She waved away my worries with one flip of her hoof. “As you were saying. I was aware Skylark bought The Hole. She turned it into a church or homeless shelter or somesuch, I believe.”

“A convent, actually. I’ve got reason to believe she’s keeping Cerise there,” I explained.

“You think Skylark… Astral Skylark, of the largest religion in Detrot… stole the Chief of Police’s daughter as part of a power play?” The Warden sneered.

“I don’t… I… dammit, I’m on short time. Can we start from a place of trust and just say that I have reasons?”

“You do not sound like you are in a sharing state of mind. What about this makes you believe I will be?” she asked, persistently.

“You’d think I was insane, lock me up, and several ponies would probably die, myself included,” I shot back, fanning myself with the edge of my coat collar.

“I already think you’re insane. Now I am simply determining whether or not you are correct.” The Warden’s teeth clicked together and her horn light faded to barely a flicker. I realized she was examining me with the sort of high powered intuition good cops learn or die violently without. After a long minute, she uncrossed her forelegs and sat up. “Alright. You let me scare the piss out of the rookie and that was kind of you, so if I were to say ‘Yes, I’ll help'… what would that entail?”

“Simple. We need to see the architect of Supermax, Saussurea. We need to know how to get inside."

I wish, just then, I could have seen what look would have been on the Warden’s face. I don’t imagine it was a friendly one.

“You… want to get into… Supermax. Sneakingly, I presume?” she asked, barely above a whisper.

“That’s right.”

“You would, thusly, bother my first inmate with this mad venture?”

“You got it.”

Two twin rings of smoke shot from her nose, dashing off my face. I struggled not to cough.

“I’ve been from one end of that pit to the other, Detective. One does not sneak into Supermax. It is a place ponies will go to die if they are unwelcome. You might die. I knew your father, and your grandfather, and would find that...unfortunate,” she murmured.

“You might be surprised to find out that death is less unpleasant than it’s chalked up to be,” I replied, pushing my hat back on my head.

“Oh… believe me, I know precisely how unpleasant dying is, Hard Boiled. I have been dying for many, many years. I will probably be dying long after you are dead and your flesh has fallen from your bones and your bones have turned to dust.”

“But that’s dying. As for death… well, let me just say I found it almost relaxing,” I replied, tapping the socket on my chest. “Either way, we need to speak to Saussurea. Is it happening or are we sending Cerise to her grave to satisfy your ego?”

The Warden spread her hooves wide. “No need to get pushy, Hard Boiled. I was simply bored and curious. You’ll see Saussurea.”

“That easy?” I asked. “Nothing’s been that easy, lately.”

“If you want reasons, I can give you three. One, you brought me that rookie who is taking quite the long time to urinate and I imagine is more likely bucking herself up in the hallway to come back in here. Two, Jade and I have history and Cerise doesn’t deserve to get involved in Detrot politics, if that has, indeed, happened. I will keep my own council, being as I’m certain Skylark or whosoever pulls her strings is listening to the major information channels. Three...mmm…” She stopped for several seconds, then shook her head. “Your grandfather and father were good ponies. Your father fought to stop the abuses at Supermax and your grandfather fought in the Cloudsdale campaign. That gun on your leg is part of a legacy of ponies who fight for Equestria. You best not break that legacy, or there will be a whole long list of angry beings who’ll happily char-broil you alive.”

I digested that for awhile, then patted my gun and eased off the chair. “I think I can deal with that. Now, Saussurea?”

Warden stepped from behind her desk and waved towards the door. “The Architect is, for some reason, often awake at this hour. She’ll be glad for the company. If you did have in mind to show your gratitude for this little service, you might arrange a date for me with the shrimp. I’d love another crack at her psyche. It seems wonderfully fragile,” she said, mischievously, wagging her tail stump.

I grinned. “Done. If we survive, I’ll buy you two the first bottle of wine.”

“Sir?!”

I jerked, falling off the chair backwards with my rear hooves in the air, facing the door.

Swift stood in the doorway, eyes wide as platters.

I’m not proud of what I did just then.

I could be a bad pony.

“Oh, hey kid! Was just discussing a night of romance with you and the Warden here! You up for it?”

****

Five minutes later, we’d left the Warden’s office, heading for the treatment areas. That involved several more security checks and a gradual downward journey, though mostly on sloping paths rather than stairs. Without the Warden there, I doubt any of them would have let Swift or I through, period, even unarmed as we were. Each one insisted on a thorough inspection of my partner’s muzzle and my chest.

We’d been forced to surrender our weapons at a tiny glassed in office and no amount of complaining or whimpering would budge the pony behind the counter on that front. It was mostly Swift doing the whimpering and complaining. Since she’d gotten Masamane back, she’d been extremely reluctant to part with it.

Swift had been gracious enough not to shoot anypony, but I think she was considering it. She marched along, head between her foreknees, tail tucked between her legs, and enormous orange wings clamped tightly to her sides.

The Warden, for her part, was still letting out little mirthful noises I interpreted to be giggles. They sounded like pennies rolling around in a clothes dryer full of fresh intestines. I shuddered and tried to put that case out of my mind.

“Sir, that was so not funny…” she whispered for the fourth time in as many minutes.

“Who’s joking? Besides, you want some interesting stories, I guarantee, Warden is the one to speak to. She lived through the Crusades, after all.”

Swift brought her head around to look at the mare trotting down the hallway in front of us. “Sir, if the price of us getting what we need is a date with anypony, when we get out of this, we’re going to make it a double. I get to pick your ‘double’. Agreed?”

I shuffled nervously. “Who would my ‘double’ be in that instance?”

“Scarlet Petals,” Swift purred, bopping me in the side with one wingtip.

****

We caught up with Taxi sitting in one of the ‘waiting areas’, playing chess over a tiny table with somepony I thought should probably be familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was a short grey-green stallion with an unruly mane, wearing a thin black collar around his neck. The area they sat in was just behind the last of the checkpoints; a small circular table surrounded by comfortable chairs set to one side of a long hallway. It looked like a perfectly ordinary waiting room until one realized the chairs and table were bolted to the floor.

It was always just a little unsettling to pass that last checkpoint in Tartarus. Once a pony had, the guards just sort of vanished. There were still ponies in pure white uniforms, but the entire place more closely resembled a giant hospital than it did a prison. The uniformed ponies didn’t radiate the kind of easy aggression that the guards upstairs did.

Taxi was sitting across from the stallion, minus her saddle-bags, which was a strange look for her, though I doubted she could have gotten them by the guards as it was. Under the sharp white light of the hospital’s overheads, the scars seemed to move with a life of their own. I forced my eyes away from her flanks. Swift was not so gracious, though she’d seen my driver without her saddlebags on a few different occasions. Seeing her like that in public made her seem somehow indecently naked. Reaching over, I poked Swift in the hip and she jumped, then turned red.

“Sorry, sir,” she muttered, “I...really should ask Miss Taxi what happened one of these days.”

“You do that, kid, and good luck to you. If she won’t tell me, I somehow doubt she’ll tell you.”

The Warden trotted over to one of the orderlies standing at a long reception desk stretching the length of the hallway and off around the corner. The row of nurse ponies rose to their hooves from whatever they’d been doing as she approached and she quickly waved them back to work as she levitated a clipboard over, making her mark on the sign-in sheet then exchanging a few words with one or two of those behind the desk.

I walked over to Taxi and her new friend. My driver looked up and smiled; it was one of her ‘I’m trying not to scream’ smiles rather than the ‘I want to be here and am perfectly content’ variety. Swift stayed where she was, uncomfortably trying to look everywhere at once as though some burly beast with a machete was about to pounce on her.

“Sweets? You ready for this?” I asked. Her eyes were red, still, but she looked like she’d managed to master her emotions.

“We’ve got the Warden’s permission?” she inquired, pushing herself off the chair and pulling her braid down on one shoulder.

“Yeah, we’ve got it.” I grimaced. “I offered her a date with Swift and she was all over the idea. That or we’re walking into another trap.”

“Why do you not sound happy about that? You usually enjoy traps.”

“I’ll tell you later,” I replied, then turned to the stallion she was seated with. “Pardon me, do you mind if I steal my driver? We’ve got some work to be done.”

The stallion laughed and shook his head, reaching out to tip over the Princess Luna figure on his side of the board. “Not a problem, Detective Hard Boiled. We’d just finished anyway.”

“Do I know you?” I asked, tilting my head to one side. “You seem familiar, but then, I just spent a month in a coma so my memory is a bit iffy.”

“No, I doubt you’d remember, coma or not,” he replied, with a dismissive flick of his toe. “If you ever come back this way, Detective, be sure to send me your driver. I need a decent chess partner and the Warden’s usually busy.”

“Sure, will do.” I turned to Taxi. “Shall we?”

She shook herself, shifting her hips like she usually did to hike up her saddle-bags before realizing they weren’t there.

“Can we make this quick? I’m going to need some sleep at some point.”

I paused, for an instant, as I got the strangest feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. Maybe it was the haunted look in her eyes or the way she kept her gaze, very carefully three inches above mine.

“I make no promises,” I replied, finally, chalking it up to a case of nerves. We moved away from the little reception area. Once we were out of earshot and standing with Swift again, I asked, “By the way, do you have any idea who that pony was?”

Taxi tilted her head and scrunched her nose at me. “I thought you were just being polite because you couldn’t remember his name. You seriously don’t know who that was?”

“I’m drawing a blank here.” I shrugged.

“That was the Light Bulb Killer, Hardy. I’m going to get your brain checked again if you don’t remember him now...”

That brought back a flood of memories as my internal librarian finally got off her drunken flank. “That was Spider Shade? Sky and stars, he was barely an adult when we locked him up!”

“Who is ‘Spider Shade’, sir?” Swift inquired.

“A very old case that a very young Hard Boiled solved by the skin of his teeth.” Taxi snarked, then glanced back at Shade who was quietly folding up his chess board and dropping the pieces, one at a time, into a small box.

“Juniper solved that one, mostly by keeping me from becoming a tasteful addition to that nutcase’s end-table,” I said, darkly.

“I was speaking to one of the orderlies when Spider was in the toilets,” Taxi said. “She told me he’s cleared for release, but he’s refused parole the last five times it came up. His mental health is fine, but he likes it here, apparently. There’s plenty of light and every time he gets the urge to make a lamp out of somepony’s bones, he has his therapist just up the hallway.”

“I’ll try to take some comfort in that. When I testified at his trial, he swore he’d have my cutie-mark for his ‘fall line-up’ that year at the Canterlot furniture show,” I said, sliding my coat down over my flanks, protectively.

“Creepy…” Swift said, making a face.

****

We waited for a few minutes, exchanging small talk, until the Warden was done with her conversation with the ponies behind the nurse’s station. She strolled leisurely back to the three of us with a trio of metal rings levitating along beside her. Peering over my shoulder, I noticed they were identical to the one around Spider Shade’s neck.

“Warden, I do hope you’re not intending on putting us in a box somewhere,” I said.

“Unless you want to submit to magical nullification, it’s strip naked and wear this as long as we’re in the containment areas,” she answered, waving the metal ring in front of my muzzle. “We have protocols for a reason. This is to keep everypony safe, prisoners included. The last thing I need is a gung ho cop punching one of my inmates.”

I sagged slightly, then turned to Swift. “Alright, kid. Fur and feathers time.”

Her lips slid to one side as she gave me a pensive examination. “Sir?”

“We’re heading down to the actual prison.” I explained, waving a hoof at the lobby around us, “This is just the treatment areas. The ring is...mmm...think of it as a ‘full body’ restrictor ring like we use on unicorns. You try to fly, try to use weather magics, or do anything besides walk, talk, and breathe and the prison’s security system will shut off your voluntary muscle groups. You’ll be on your back in about five seconds.”

“Wait, why do we need to wear them, then?” Swift asked, studying the rings. They had a tiny locking mechanism around the throat with a keyhole and five gems.

“Because we’re guests and guests don’t shit on the carpet. Warden’s protocols are designed to make sure everypony feels safe, prisoners included. We’ll leave our weapons and clothing here and get it when we’re leaving.”

She nodded, and began unsnapping her combat vest, dumping several spare clips of ammunition on the nursing station. Meanwhile, I removed my revolver, tugged out the empty cartridge, and tossed my coat down along with my hat. We stood back, side by side. Feeling the air blowing up my sides in public has always felt a bit odd and Swift quivered in the air-conditioning.

Warden’s teeth clicked together. “Come on, Hard Boiled. Don’t waste my time. The rest of it.”

Swift and I glanced at one another, then blinked at her.

“Gun harnesses...” she hissed.

“Oh come on! Do you have any idea how difficult these things are to get out of?” I complained, tugging at the strap secured around my upper leg.

“Yes, I’m entirely aware, and if you need a small room to do the work in, I am sure we can arrange that for you.”

Swift peered sideways at me. “She’s...talking about a cell, isn’t she?”

“Yes, yes, she is.” I exhaled and sat, starting the laborious process of uncoupling the snaps under my legs. “Can we at least have a hoof?”

The Warden wiggled the rings with her magic, her eye locked squarely on Swift’s rear end as my partner rolled onto her back, using her wings to brace herself while she squirmed into position to tug the rear leg reload mechanism off. “Can’t. I’m holding things already. Oooh, so heeeavy...” she said, with a hint of mocking.

Taxi could only take so much.

“Sweets! Either stop laughing and help us or go find a friendlier unicorn!” I snarled as my driver collapsed in a fit of uncontrolled laughter.

“I c-caaan’t! I f-forgot what w-watching somepony take onea those off was like!”

****

Dignity.

Be dignified.

I forced myself to breathe. The office ponies were giggling. Swift was hiding under her wings. The Warden was still staring at her butt.

Thankfully, the stallion behind the counter was a stoic sort with the composure of a Royal Guard. He shuffled Swift’s tactical jacket, and ammo into a basket then carefully affixed a tiny label before passing it to one of his fellows to secret away in the back. My trenchcoat, hat, and gun went in a second box.

The Warden levitated over the rings and I lifted my chin, trying to pretend for all the world like I hadn’t just spent ten minutes writhing around in the floor like an idiot while everypony watched. She opened the ring at the lock, sliding it around my throat. The gemstones flashed, then let off a soft click.

Swift and Taxi were similarly dressed for prison.

“Alright, Hard Boiled. I believe you know how these operate. Jade, I’m certain, would like to have one around your throat one of these days.” She inhaled, and when she spoke again it was with the well practiced boredom of an airline hostess. “Now then! Guests of Tartarus Correctional. You will follow me as we proceed from treatment into containment. Do not deviate from the path. Do not attempt to use magic. Do not attempt to eat anything unless given explicit permission. Do not attempt to urinate or defecate without explicit permission-”

“Seriously, sir?” Swift asked, looking to me.

“Seriously, kid. You know how many ponies have tried to smuggle things into prisons like that?”

“Oh…”

“If I may continue?” the Warden grumbled.

“Yeah, yeah…”

“Follow all instructions given by the Warden or orderlies. If you attempt to teleport, death or liquefaction will result.”

“Death… or?” Swift squeaked.

The Warden didn’t respond to the question. She turned towards a bank of crisp, corporate style elevators at one side of the hall. Taxi and I stepped into line behind her and Swift got the hint, hopping in along side.

“We are proceeding into the prison complex proper. Do not attempt to pass anything to anyone. Do not accept anything from anyone besides a prison attendant except with explicit permission. Failure to comply with these strictures will cause the control ring around your neck to disable parts of your central nervous system to insure compliance. Do you wish to continue?”

“I’m not seeing a choice.”

“Then I bid you, welcome to Tartarus.”

Act 2, Chapter 23: Flowers that Bloom in Dark Places

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 23: Flowers That Bloom In Dark Places

Despite the protests of out-of-work miners and ice-haulers to the contrary, there is something worse than having an obsolete special talent: Having a dangerous special talent.

Cases do exist of ponies whose special talents have literally been things like 'madness' or 'alcoholism' - and how do you cure a special talent? A special talent is not something a pony can wish away - it is an integral part of who they are, no matter how self-destructive, and only top tier magic has ever been able to rearrange cutie marks; a process that, in the one documented instance, had disastrous results even when the talents were all relatively benign.

Such cases are fortunately rare; Nearly all special talents are positive or useful... at least, on paper. They don't always work out that way. Far more common than flat-out negative special talents are special talents that turn out double-edged; for example, somepony with a talent for ostentatious displays and working a crowd can easily become a showoff, a braggart, and a liar. Anypony whose talent becomes an obsession can easily leave problems in their wake...

...And somepony with a talent that serves others can wind up serving the wrong pony.

--The Scholar

The elevator was glass-fronted and, like everything else in Tartarus, felt like it belonged in a hospital rather than a prison. We dropped past hallway after hallway stretching out from the carriage, each lined on either side with sliding glass doors set into the wall. On the first few levels, some ponies wandered the halls, but the hour was growing late and most had retired to their rooms. Those that were moving from place to place all wore the same kind of collar Swift, Taxi, and I did.

“Sir, I thought this was a prison? Why is everypony allowed to just...go wherever?” Swift asked.

“They aren’t,” I replied, gesturing to a mare who was talking to another behind one of the closed glass doors. “Those are the ‘low security’ cell blocks. If they’re non-dangerous or have a proven record of good behavior, they might get one of these rings. They can put them on and the door to their cells will open. The ring locks and if somepony wearing one decides to get violent for some reason, they get to have a little nap instead. When they get back to their cell, the door locks and the ring unlocks. Some semblance of freedom apparently keeps violence down. We’re heading to where this place got its reputation, though, so watch your flank.”

Warden was watching the hallways go by, one after another, completely impassive. Well, I say completely impassive. She might have been making funny faces for all I know. I’d often pictured her goofing off when nopony else could tell.

Stepping up beside her, I asked, “How many levels down are we going?”

She cocked her almost skinless face look at me. “To the bottom, Hard Boiled. Saussurea has the floor to herself. She designed the building, after all.”

Taxi raised one ear. “You let a prisoner design the prison?”

“Believe me, I had obvious reservations, but there are few ponies whose talent is imprisoning others.” The Warden sighed, which was a sound like writhing maggots played through an excellent speaker system. “The alternatives were letting her walk out... or snapping her horn and legs off. A little known side-effect of being one of the finest incarceration development specialists in the world; she is very difficult to lock up.”

I leaned on the wall of the elevator, watching as the floors dropped away. “That’s a thing I meant to ask. Why imprison her at all? Sounds like she should have been given a medal after how she handled the dragons.”

“She was. It was her handling of her pony inmates that earned her a permanent place in Tartarus,” Warden replied.

We crossed from one floor to the next and suddenly, the sliding glass doors were gone, replaced instead by simple metal with sliding peek doors set in them.

“Ahhh… here we are,” Warden said. “High Security. I do wish I could spend more time here.”

“Whyever for?” Taxi asked, peering out the glass fronting of the elevator at the rows of dimly lit hallways.

“I have several friends on this floor. One beast to another, the creatures who inhabit this place are a more… interesting… breed. Once you get by their murderous tendencies, or at least, can ignore them, you can find quite the intriguing conversationalists down here.”

One floor flashed by for several seconds and we were dropping through a shaft in front of a gigantic space many dozens of bodylengths long. I caught a glimpse of an enormous something moving out there in the darkness. It had a tail covered in pale red scales.

A rattling voice called out from the depths, “Morning, Warden!”

The Warden smiled and gestured for the three of us to cover our ears. Once we had, she called back in that thundering voice which rattled every bone in my body, “Good Morning, Califax! Keeping your snout clean?”

“Yes Ma’am!” the… whatever it was… called back.

Then we were beyond that level, still descending.

“Prisoner exchange with the dragons,” the Warden explained, though nopony had asked. “They had a real difficult time convincing Califax to stop eating ponies, so he’s being required to spend a couple of centuries getting to know us, lest he spark a war leading to the annihilation of his race.”

Swift raised one wing, like a student in class. “Um...I know wedon’t, but I remember studying about the dragons in school and they have a death penalty, right? Wouldn’t that kind of thing mean they usually kill him?”

“Good question, with a slightly depressing answer, I’m afraid. The Far Reaches dragon species don’t have nearly enough males of breeding age remaining after the Crusades to afford to kill him. They were hit particularly hard.”

“Oh…”

A magma chamber blew by, bathing the inside of the carriage in a red glow, and the elevator began to slow.

We dropped from the ceiling of another enormous room and the elevator rails changed from a smooth glide to a slightly unsettling rattle. All outside was dark, though there were spots of light in the distance which seemed to demarcate a dome of some kind. The elevator slowed further until, with a light thump, it came to rest and the cage slid open.

“After you, ladies and gentlecolt,” the Warden said, holding out one fried leg.

I stepped out of the elevator and onto what felt distinctly like soft soil. I shuffled my hoof and inhaled deeply. The space or cave or whatever it was smelled of growing things; life and greenery. My night vision was adapting quickly to the dim light, but it still took some time to pick out the distant details.

I looked up… and felt my jaw drop.

If the elevator weren’t still sitting there, hanging from a set of taut chains, I might have thought we were outside. Overhead, far and away, the night sky stretched from horizon to horizon. It was, perhaps, a little smaller than the real deal if you really focused, but the illusion was good enough to trick the eye so long as one didn’t look too closely.

We stood on a path or track of some sort, which wound away between a stand of what looked like trees. The dirt was cool, but the air felt warm as a mid-summer’s evening. Somewhere nearby, water lapped against a shore and a faint wind came from someplace to tickle my fetlocks.

“This is... not what I was expecting,” I murmured.

Warden’s eye cast a red glow on the road, providing a little bit of light to see by. “Saussurea may be the most simultaneously damned and rewarded pony in history, with the exception of Princess Luna,” she mused, contemplatively. “She was allowed to build her own prison, to her specifications, on sole condition that she never leave it. Come along, then. She will be having a late snack, I’m sure.”

The Warden trotted along the path, her eye providing a beacon to follow. I looked at Swift, who was shuffling her feathers like she wished she could take off, and then started after our host.

It was a pleasant midnight walk for the bottom of a maximum security prison. Soon, I caught sight of the source of the water noises; a pond, big enough for a decent swim if a pony were so inclined, surrounded on all sides by a stand of trees. As we passed one, I stopped and gently scored the bark on the trunk of the nearest one. My hoof was immediately covered in sap.

“Living trees down here. That’s a nice trick,” I said, softly to myself.

“Not as good as that sky,” Taxi added. “I might commit a few war crimes if this is the punishment...”

“You're in luck. I think some of the things you and Minox get up to might count.” I snickered. She poked me in the hip, sending little tingles of pain right down to the tip of my hoof. Still totally worth it.

We moved on, trotting along the path amidst the indoor forest with our hooves sinking into the dirt in a way that some essentially equine part of me hadn’t known it was missing. At length, I saw a light amongst the trees.

It resolved as we got closer into the shape of a window; four panes of glass, with a candle sitting behind it and the shadow of a rocking chair. As we got closer, I saw a tiny cottage. The path seemed to be taking us there.

Abruptly, the Warden stopped in the road ahead of us and turned to face me. “Detective, may I make... a request?”

I pointed at the ring around my neck. “It’s not as though I’m going to disobey, is it?”

“Mmm… this is a more personal request. Your collars will let you do the interrogation as you see fit, unless you mean to get violent. I just wanted to ask if you wouldn’t mind… being gentle with Saussurea. I can’t guarantee she’ll be gentle with you, sadly.”

My brows pinched together. “That’s not like you, Warden.”

“Miss Saussurea is not like my other inmates.” The Warden paused, considering her words, carefully. “She is… a friend. One of very few I still have, I’m afraid.”

“A friend?”

“Yes. A friend, strange as that may sound. I would appreciate it if you kept your questions succinct. She is quite old and will not live more than a decade or so at most. I would like that decade to be as easy as possible.”

“I… see. I somehow never thought of you as having ‘friends’ in that sense,” I replied.

“Just as I think you never considered basic tact or courtesy. Friend or not, make no mistake when you see Saussurea; she is a monster. Irascible, demented, and with a vicious temper. An old manticore, if you will. If you’re incautious with her, she is still dangerous. My friend or not, she does not suffer fools, even for me.” The Warden’s eye flared brightly, making the trees seem to glisten with red magma flows where the light played off the variations in the grain of the wood. “Oh… and be polite. She likes polite ponies.”

“Well, we’re screwed then.” Taxi giggled. “We should muzzle Hardy if that’s our winning condition.”

“I think I can restrain myself for a few minutes, Sweets,” I grunted, kicking some dirt off of my horseshoes and straightening my shoulders.

“Best be, because if you want the Architect of Supermax to help you, she has to feel she’s doing it for a good reason. The Hole is her greatest achievement and even after decades, she’s remained convinced it will re-open.”

”Mmm... so, she’s a whole truck full of crazy, then.”

“Keep such thoughts to yourself, Hard Boiled, or this visit will end quickly. Now, shall we proceed?”

I nodded and the Warden moved ahead once more.

The cottage was about as quaint as quaint could be. I’m sure if Taxi had an ideal fantasy of rustic living, that would have been it. It was a simple wood cabin with a flat-topped roof and what seemed to be a small garden off to one side. Warden directed her eye over the little planting and I saw what I thought were tomato plants, if substantially underripe ones.

Beside the door, a rake with a jacket draped off the end rested alongside a set of four galoshes and a fishing pole. There was even a ‘Welcome’ mat.

“I realize the answer is going to be ‘lots of magic’, but how was this even possible? I’ve heard of some spectacular underground constructions, but this…” I inquired.

“Saussurea found an empty magma chamber when performing city survey for Supermax,” Warden answered, tapping soil off her toes on the doorstep. “She made note of it and when it came time to construct her own prison, she chose this. The sky is a projected illusion and there’s a big grow-lamp up there which acts as the ‘sun’ for twelve hours a day. The rest was mostly labor and time.”

“I still don’t understand… why she gets all of this,” Swift muttered.

“Miss Cuddles, her sins were impossible to ignore, yes... but during the war, Saussurea was a hero,” the Warden explained. “She managed to contain dragons during a time when we thought the only viable method of dealing with a dragon was to kill them outright. It was thanks to her direct efforts that we were able to have returned to us many thousands of ponies in exchange for their prisoners. She saved more equine lives than you will ever know.”

My partner’s shoulders slumped a little like a scolded kitten and she stepped back behind me.

The Warden reached up and knocked three times on the cabin door, then stood back to wait.

For a long minute, there was no motion inside, then I heard a soft scraping sound. The doorknob on our side turned a lucent color somewhere between a shiny red apple and fresh blood, then gradually swung open.

Light from the fireplace showed a thin frame standing in the doorway, clutching a shawl with one hoof while the other rested on a walker. My night vision readjusted enough for me to see a pleasant, if wrinkled, smile underneath a long, prominent muzzle.

“Warden! How good of you to come!” Saussurea's voice was warm, but with a crackle like dry leaves underfoot in autumn.

“Saucy! It’s good to see you. How have you been?” the Warden said in the most friendly way I’d ever heard from her, her teeth clattering against one another.

“Fine, fine, of course. Underground tomato plants are proving a challenge, but I’ll have it cracked one day soon,” the old mare replied, then poked her head around the Warden’s side. “And who are these three fine ponies you’ve got with you? New recruits for the guard?”

“Ah, no, I am afraid not. Saucy, I realize it is very late, but do you mind if we come in?”

“Oh, of course not, Warden. Please.” Saussurea stepped back, leaning heavily on her walker as she pulled it along with her and retreated into the warm house. “Do mind that you wipe your hooves!”

I shut my eyes and tried to conjure up one of Taxi’s old meditations, but was forced to settle for three calming breaths before I stepped over the threshold.

Inside, the cabin was homely and small, with a roof that suited its occupant well even if I was required to duck slightly to keep my ears from brushing the rafters. Swift, half pint she is, grinned as she reached up and touched the top of the doorframe with one wingtip.

There was a huge fireplace, big enough for a house five times the size, though the fire in it was small and peaceful, merrily sputtering away. In front of the fire, a rocking chair still swayed gently back and forth.

A workbench with attendant table owned one entire wall, covered in tools of every imaginable shape and size. Each wrench and hammer looked neat, well oiled, and sharp. Arrayed across it, shackles of every variety and description spilled in great profusion, in all sizes; from one I’m fairly certain was meant for hydras to some which might have been for foals. If you focused, you could make out some semblance of organization, though what method she was using I couldn’t discern.

The room was lit, aside from the fire, by a couple of old fashioned lightning bug lamps.

Saussurea waddled over to the tiny kitchenette and pulled a plate down from the cabinet, yanking a package of digestives out and spreading them artfully around in a fan with her magic. Swift, Taxi, and I stood in the doorway, admiring the comfortable little space as the Warden trotted over to the fire . warming her hooves over it... No. She put her hooves in the fire.

Polite. Be polite, Hardy.

“Miss Saussurea? My name is Detective Hard Boiled. May I introduce my companions, Officer Swift and my driver, Taxi." I bowed slightly to one side to indicate the mares beside me.

“I know who you are, Detective." Saussurea moved to her seat by the fire and heaving herself up into the rocker.

That put me immediately on the back hoof. “Have we met?”

The old pony shook her thinning, burnished red mane, pulling her shawl tighter across her breast. She ignored my question, but said instead, “Come here, deary. Sit by the fire with me. It is a cold cave and I prefer to see my guests.”

I moved around in front of Saussurea and settled on the soft rug laid out there. She levitated one of the biscuits from her plate over and I raised my hoof so she could lay it there.

“That does apply to the rest of you, you know,” Saussurea said, with a faint laugh.

I realized my partner and driver hadn’t moved. Swift was staring at all of the shackles on the wall, while Taxi was staring at Saussurea, her spine arched like a cat. My cutie-mark was tingling with a certain intensity, though it was barely more than the perpetual buzz I’d always felt in Tartarus.

“You two, come sit,” I ordered. Swift, reluctantly, moved over and dropped onto her stomach beside me. Taxi stayed where she was.

“I think I may stay here, if you don’t mind…” Taxi said, with a touch of distemper.

“Sweets… polite, remember?” I pointed at the rug.

Dragging her hooves, my driver pulled herself over and eased down in front of Saussurea, who just levitated one of her cookies over and laid it on her hoof. Taxi made no move to pick it up.

“Now then, my three visitors…” the mare began, sounding for all the world like my grandmother, insistence on feeding even unexpected guests included, “What brings you young ones to my door at this hour? Somehow I don’t think it’s for my friendly conversation or my cookies. My friend, the Warden, comes to visit me a few times a week, but it’s rare even the other inmates come down this deep.”

Warden was still warming her forelegs in the flames, seeming entranced by the dancing fire.

“Miss Saussurea, I… don’t know where to begin. We are in a bit of a bind.” I tried to smile ingratiatingly. I think, on my best days, I could pull off ‘abandoned puppy’ pretty well.

“Oh yes, you’re bound up tight, aren’t you!” she cackled, one hoof stroking the side of her rocker. I realized a chain of some kind was attached to the rocker itself, holding it to the floor. “Bound up and nowhere to go! Tell me, boy! What sort of bind would bring you down past old Califax, to the bottom of Tartarus, when Iris Jade herself is baying for your blood? Perhaps a lovely little thief, tiptoeing around in blue robes?”

My muzzle dropped open and my thoughts scattered. I looked at Saussurea, as though seeing her for the first time, and realized, at that moment, that my initial impressions of her had been incorrect; somepony’s sweet, doddering grandmare she was definitely not. She looked at me out of her rheumy eyes with the sort of piercing intelligence that I’d seen only a few times in my life… though admittedly, quite a lot over the last month and a half; in Stella, in Cosmo, in Diamante, in Skylark, in the Don, and in Iris Jade.

Saussurea was a player.

Deposed.

Trapped.

Chained.

Banished to a hole at the bottom of the world.

Still playing.

I turned to look over at the Warden. “What exactly is going on here?”

The Warden didn’t move, lowering her hooves until they rested on the hot coals with a faint sizzle.

“Ah, Mister Hard Boiled!” Saussurea said, leaning way back in her rocker and steepling her toes, studying the ceiling. “You are not an unclever soul, then. I was worried you might be stupid. That would have been very dull. After your interaction with Skylark on the television, I deduced you would be coming.”

“You… deduced?” Swift sputtered, half rising off the carpet.

Saussurea’s lips peeled back, revealing two rows of perfectly white teeth. It was only a smile by some very loose definitions. The Warden smiled with more honesty behind the emotion, and she did so without the benefit of a face.

“Yes. He is, of course, seeking for Skylark’s safe-house for some reason I haven’t determined.” the ancient jailer continued, in a conversational tone. “He believes it is in my great work. It is entirely likely he is correct.”

“Saucy, you promised you wouldn’t do this…” the Warden growled.

“I promised no such thing!” Saussurea snorted, sliding off her rocker and trotting over in front of me. She lowered her long snout until it was inches from mine. “I merely said I would consider giving them the information they needed, if you let them see me. I didn’t say I would do it kindly.”

My cutie-mark flared and I must have winced, because her smile grew.

“Alright, I’m going to ask it again. What’s going on here? Warden?”

“Hard Boiled, you want answers, you’re talking to the wrong pony. She said you’d be coming, and I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, but she said if I did, you could bugger off back to Detrot with nothing. She also said whatever she knows is very important to the city. I’m afraid Saucy does as she will, more often than not. Her contract of incarceration is with the Princesses, not with the Warden of Tartarus.”

“And she bloody hates it, don’t you, Warden?” Saussurea nickered, stepping back from me and and giving the burned mare a light push with one hoof so she stumbled sideways out of the fire, shaking hot coals off her hooves. “Excuse me, Hard Boiled. I don’t mean to distress you. I’m pleased you did come to see me, expected or not. Your partner, Juniper, was a wiser pony than most, even if his methods were soft. I have always believed in a more strong-hoofed approach to dealing with criminality, but the Princesses and my friend, the Warden, disagreed. It turns out that, though you can bend dragons, you cannot bend the sun and moon.”

Feeling a touch more sure of myself, I inhaled and rubbed my chest with one toe. The socket was itchy sometimes.

“I guess, after the list of ponies I’ve dealt with lately, I shouldn’t be surprised when one of them manages to get one over on me. You obviously want me to ask, so how’d you know?”

“That you were coming? Oh come on, my boy! Put it together and impress me.” Saussurea dropped her backside into her rocker and munched noisily on her late night snack. A log in the fire snapped, sending a wave of sparks swirling up the chimney.

I watched for some time, thinking.

“You knew Skylark, didn’t you?”

Saussurea nodded. “Oh yes, good friends, we two. Not that a pony like her has ‘friends.'”

“Or like you…” Taxi muttered, eyes firmly on the carpet.

“What was that, Miss Taxi? I’m afraid my hearing isn’t what it used to be,” the mare asked, though she couldn’t have missed what my driver had said.

My driver raised her head and I could tell, from the glint in her eye, that she was about to say something untoward. I did one of those rare, stupid-and-intelligent things; I put my hoof over her muzzle.

Taxi’s eyes lit up with anger. They confirmed my suspicions, as they spelled out: You just logged several minutes gasping for breath and rolling around on the floor trying to restart some of your organs by force of will.

My own ocular reply came: Yes, but that may be the least of my problems.

I turned back to Saussurea, “You must excuse my driver. She forgets herself sometimes. As I was saying? You and Skylark. She served her sentence here. You told her about Supermax, yes?”

The old mare’s eyes didn’t leave Taxi, but she replied, “Yes, yes I did. Very good, Detective! I told her about Supermax, and you learned, by some means, that she or somepony who holds her chains has… a design upon the city. Up to her old tricks again, is she? I assume she has taken something of… significance? She was truly an excellent thief.”

Click.

One more piece, sliding neatly into place.

“She has taken something of extreme significance, yes, and I’m fairly certain it’s in Supermax. Do you think you can get us in?”

Saussurea exhaled through her nose, studying the three of us.

“Detective… do you know anything about my sweet child?” she asked, at last.

“The… prison?”

“Yes." She swept her shawl up against her chest. I peered through the slats of the rocker at her flank and her cutie-mark needed no explanation. It was a closed shackle. She continued, “A mother must protect what she loves, after all. Why should I help you?”

“You told Warden you would?” I shrugged and nodded towards the Warden who crouched beside the fire.

“Warden? You think a promise to her means more to me than my child?” Saussurea laughed, heartily. “I may value her friendship, yes, but not that much. She is, after all, my captor.”

“Captor?” Swift asked, looking around the comfortable cabin. “Miss, I would kill for a place like this!”

Saussurea regarded my partner, as though seeing her for the first time. “Girl… I did kill for a place like this. Would you really?”

“What? I mean… N-no, it was just a figure of-…”

“Then no, be assured, you wouldn’t,” the old jailer sneered, kicking the chain attached to her rocking chair so it clanked against the floor. “There was a time, well before you were born, when I was one of the most powerful ponies in this country. The Princesses themselves hung accolades around my neck for my work.” She made a gesture with her hoof, encompassing her tiny cabin and the cavern. “Now, all I have is a pit with a chair that my own regulations mandate must be attached to the floor and a horn which can barely levitate a package of snacks for guests because every inch of magic above and beyond is siphoned off by my only friend,” she jabbed her toe at the Warden.

Warden turned to Saussurea, and I got the impression that, if she could, she’d look distinctly sad. Saussurea took a deep breath and pulled her shawl from around her shoulders, laying it across her lap as she met the other pony’s eyes. At first, she looked defiant, then her expression softened a little.

“Excuse me, Ward. Resentments aside, I am comfortable here,” she assured her.

The Warden nodded and patted the arm of the rocker. “No offense taken, Saucy. You know, if I could, I’d let you walk out. The war changed ponies.”

Saussurea rolled her eyes. “Oh, do be honest, Ward. I am lusus naturae. The war didn’t change that and we both know it. My talents simply found an outlet in conflict.” She returned her interest to the three of us, Swift in particular and she asked, with a bit of a dirty grin, “You know what it’s like to have a dragon kiss your toe, kiddo?”

Swift’s lips quirked into a very small smile as she stared off into the distance. “Um... well... Yes…”

“What?” Saussurea sat forward, surprised. “Say that again?”

“Oh… I’m sorry. I guess you didn’t mean it like that.” My partner’s cheeks turned a deeper shade of orange. “My god-father’s a dragon. He’s very sweet and he’s really affectionate and before prom I asked him for advice on my dress and when he saw me he said I was the loveliest filly in the world and kissed my hoof and-”

“Sweet mercy, what is this world coming to?” Saussurea interrupted her rambling with an angry sniff. “Those beasts used to bow when I passed their cages, and they knew respect. Now they’re being given stewardship of our foals-”

“Those poor dragons bowed because you… you put things in their brains!” Taxi burst out, suddenly leaping to her hooves. The black ring around her neck beeped, then flashed, and her forelegs collapsed, sending her sprawling face-first onto the rug.

There was a moment of complete silence as everypony registered what’d happened.

Taxi was still awake, her eyes wide, but her body was entirely stiff. Only her ears twitched to show some sign of life.

Saussurea slid off her chair and I took a step forward, but she just moved in a little circle around my prone driver. “Now then, what violent thought were you just having in my direction? And how did you know of my methods? I have told precisely two ponies in the last thirty years of how I achieved my success. One of them is in this room and sworn to secrecy.”

My driver couldn’t answer. Swift was just staring at her, shocked.

I put a hoof to my forehead and groaned. “Warden, do you mind letting her up? She’s... going to have some murderous thoughts. It’s sort of how she relates to the world. You have my word, however, that she won’t act on any violent thoughts today. Isn’t that right, Sweets? Flap one ear for ‘yes.'”

Both ears flapped against the carpet and she glared at me.

“Sweets, I can always have Warden leave that thing on until we get home. And if I have to do that, I’m going to call Scarlet Petals to the Nest and let him play ‘dress up’.”

One ear flapped.

Warden reached down and poked the lock on the front of Taxi’s control ring. It hummed, softly, and all of her muscles went lax. Slowly, she got to her hooves, dusting herself off.

“Now, answer the question. You want my help, I want to know just who has been acting the stool pigeon,” Saussurea demanded.

“I saw you, you… you… you demon! I saw what you did to those dragons!” Taxi replied, sharply. “How could you?”

The elderly jailer’s brow furrowed, causing lines of wrinkles to spring up around her eyes. She regarded my driver with a curious expression, trotting around her like she was some specimen under a microscope. A very aware but possibly suicidal part of my brain was screaming that I should be getting between them, because Taxi was radiating every ‘going-to-kill-somepony’ signal I’d ever seen from her. That I knew she couldn’t physically attack Saussurea was the only thing stopping me.

“Mmm... that’s... interesting. Are you, perhaps, mildly psychic or some other such thing? I have heard of some earth ponies-"

“It’s my talent!” My driver snarled, and the ring around her neck beeped, but she drew in a breath and the glow faded from the black metal.

My rear knees jerked, and Swift sat forward, very attentively, suddenly much more interested in the exchange.

“Your… talent…” the jailer’s lips drew together at the edges and she edged sideways so she could see my driver’s flanks more closely. In the poor light from the fire, the scars on her sides were simply dark blotches. “Very… very… interesting. The finest arcane minds and interrogators our civilization has produced have tried, via every magical means known to ponykind, to yank that information out of my mind. You, here… scarred pony...”

“My name is Taxi!” she snapped.

“No, no it isn’t,” Saussurea said, with a disconcerting smile. “Scarred Pony. We’ll call you that. I smell submission on you. You’ve been jailed before, haven’t you?”

I started to step between them, but the Warden was already there.

“Saucy!” she barked, a thick spurt of green flame gushing out of one side of her neck where the skin didn’t quite meet up on both sides. “We are not doing this with guests! Do you hear me?”

Saussurea dismissed the scowling Warden’s objection with a flick of her hoof, “Oh? Will you turn off my nervous system, Ward? They came to me, remember? Skylark can make her play for the city for all I care. I didn’t ask these three to come into my home and-” she poked the air in Taxi’s direction. “-Miss Scars over there to pry into my mind with whatever means she uses.”

“You’ve had your fun. Now, answer these good ponies’ questions.”

The former warden’s eyes narrowed as she examined Taxi, whose shoulders were high and tight. “Mmm… no. No, I don’t think I have. Warden, you can leave. Take the little one with you.”

There was another silence, this one thick with menace.

“No.” Warden growled, her muzzle starting to smoke. The room was quickly becoming uncomfortably steamy.

“Warden,” Saussurea continued, ignoring us. “I will say it only once, and this is my promise, above and beyond my friendship to you. On my continued tenancy here; I will assist them. But only… if you leave me. I want to be alone with the Scarred Pony and her… friend. Otherwise, I bid all four of you good night.”

She leaned back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes.

The Warden’s sides were heaving and she made a noise like a blast furnace with each breath. The air in front of her face was distorted by the heat. Slowly, she turned to me. Her horn lit a little brighter and I heard a voice very close to my ear at just a whisper. I doubted anypony else in the room could hear it, though Taxi cocked one ear like she was also listening to something.

Hard Boiled, Sweet Shine… I must apologize. I had thought to have your information simply, but Saussurea is her own pony. You can leave, now, or stay and get what you came for. She’ll keep a promise about this cell, if nothing else. I should warn you, however, that two orderlies have attempted suicide after protracted contact with her in unassessed conditions. It is your decision. Better ponies than you and I have tried to force information from Saussurea and failed.

I thought for a few seconds, then shook my head and started for the door. Screw the old bitch. Limerence might have turned something up. Letting her dig into my driver’s brain to get her kicks was one line I would not cross, city-wide conspiracy or not.

It was only with one hoof on the door that I realized Taxi wasn’t with me.

She was looking at Saussurea, her expression unreadable. Generally, ‘unreadable’ on Taxi should be understood to mean ‘homicidal’ on just about anypony else, but she wasn’t moving and the control ring remained dormant.

“Sweets? We’ll talk to Limerence. He might have something for us. I think this was a dead end.”

My driver didn’t move for some seconds, then her haunches slid to the floor.

I walked over and put one hoof on Taxi’s foreleg. “Come on. We don’t need to do this. She’s just going to screw with your mind and she wants me to watch.”

“I know,” Taxi replied, very quietly, then smiled up at me with one of her sad, soft little smiles.

“Aaand that’s not necessary, right?” I murmured.

“No… no, I think it is. I think I want her to,” she said, and winked. Saussurea, still seemingly dozing, let out a disturbing chuckle.

Swift, who’d been quiet so far, pushed her mouth discretely under my ear. “Sir? This is a bad idea. We should just go.”

I replied, in a whisper, “Do you have a good way of making Taxi do something she doesn’t want to?”

My partner bit her lip, then stepped back and sat.

I examined my driver, trying to get some notion of what she might be thinking, but her face gave away absolutely nothing; perfectly neutral, but for a tiny sloping of the lips on one side. In any other circumstances, it might have been a smirk, but her eyes were blankly unemotional.

The information we needed was hanging by a thread and I couldn’t tell if she had something in mind or was experiencing one of her bouts of staggeringly self-destructive behavior. Those had become less common the more years that stood between her leaving home and the present day, but now and then they would crop up at inconvenient times.

It left me in an awkward position.

Limerence was a genius at getting intel, but I suspected his limits had been reached. There also remained that unfortunate time limit dangling over our heads. Who knew how long our opponents and their lackeys would wait to teach Jade a lesson in obedience?

“Up to you, Sweets,” I said and pulled open the door, ushering Swift out into the gloom. “Kid, go on. Ask the Warden to tell you a story.”

“Sir-” she started to object again, but I cut her off.

“No, kid. This is Taxi’s call.”

She gave me a heartbreaking look of confusion, then nodded and stepped off the stoop, spreading her wings out to either side. “If you need me, Sir…”

“I’ll call.”

The Warden, without another visible word, trotted out. I gently shut the door behind her, then heard her voice speaking next to my ear, “A condition of Saussurea’s continued incarceration is that nopony should ever monitor the interior of that cottage, Detective. There are no cameras nor any listening devices. This is ill advised and I am going off protocol in even allowing it. I do this only for the sake of Cerise.”

I rested there, my hoof on the door and my heart feeling like it was charging back and forth in my chest like a hoofball player on a rampage.

“I thought she’d never leave,” Saussurea said, clapping her hooves together, eagerly. “Now, information, yes?”

“That’s the idea,” I replied.

“Good! I do love teaching!”

I wish, to high heaven and beyond, I’d had my gun. I’d have left the world one vicious bitch fewer. The way she said that set off every alarm bell in my brain and I was moving backwards towards the door, intent on putting some wood between myself and those five words, before I really considered what the consequences of running might be.

Regardless, Saussurea didn’t give either of us the chance.

Her horn sparked and I felt something heavy and cold clamp itself around my ankle. I jerked my head down to find a thick iron cuff clamped around my knee. A second one crawled across the floor and I tried to leap back out of range, but the first one seemed to come alive, yanking me sideways like a dog with a toy in its mouth. I stumbled and fell, my vision going fuzzy, as the other chain clamped around my neck, followed by a third that wormed its way around my muzzle.

The chain around my ankle drew tight and I tried to find Taxi, but all I could see was a yellow blur as tears of pain filled my eyes.

Somewhere, in the background, I could hear Saussurea’s mocking laughter.

“Now, then, my friends! In a bind, are we? You’ve no concept of what a bind is. Do not worry. I will happily educate you!” the ancient jailer giggled as more heavy-duty chain swung down, wrapping around my belly and hauling me off my side until I dangled in the air like a marionette as high off my toes as the low ceiling would allow. Blinking my vision clear, I finally saw what’d been done to my driver.

Nothing.

She was still sitting there on the rug, eyes shut, taking slow, deep breaths. She hadn’t moved.

I tried to speak, to tell my driver to run or kick Saussurea or something, but the chain around my mouth tightened until my teeth ground together, painfully.

Saussurea, for her part, was standing beside the fire with one hoof on the mantle, grinning at me like a jungle cat.

“Ahhh, Detective… this is how you should be. You make an attractive chandelier,” she nickered.

My brain felt like it’d been frozen solid. I’ve never done well with helpless situations and I didn’t like the fact that Taxi was doing her best ‘stone’ impression. I knew she wouldn’t let me get hurt, beyond a certain point, but up to that point all bets were off. I squirmed, trying to draw in a full breath and ended up just shifting one of the chain links into a less comfortable position on my nose.

“Now, then… Scarred Pony.” Saussurea was addressing my driver, who dropped onto her belly. “We have things to discuss, yes?”

Taxi finally opened her eyes. “Yes. Yes, we do. Can I ask how you managed to make the chains work?”

A smug smile crossed the jailer’s face. “I will allow you this question, I suppose. After this, you will only answer mine until I am finished with you. Do we have an accord?”

Taxi dipped her chin.

I fought against the chains, rattling them with all my entirely impotent might. I knew where this was going, or thought I did. Both of them looked over at me and my driver gave her head the barest of shakes.

“He is a brave sort, isn’t he? Plenty of those died during the war,” Saussurea commented, crossing to stand in front of me. “Mmm...your question, then, Scarred Pony? My talent is to lock away the world. I have imprisoned dragons, killers, and creatures you would not even wish to imagine. Warden steals the lion’s share of my magic, yes, but she is...kind hearted. She leaves me enough that I can still call myself a unicorn.”

Moving to her work table, she picked up one of the larger shackles, turning it in her hooves for a moment. “I keep myself busy. I sequester a little of my magic in each of my shackles. Imprison it. Just a smidgen. A flavor of enchantment, woven into the metal. Over a long enough time… well, a mouse can move a mountain.”

Raising the iron, she tapped it with her toe and it rang like a bell, then flew off the table, catching my driver around the throat. She overbalanced, toppling onto her back with the collar clamped tightly around her neck. I expected a considerable amount of flailing and shrieking at this point, but she just laid there on her back, like she’d expected it.

‘Sweets, what are you doing?’ I begged, with my eyes.

I felt like I was an alien watching a strange tableau I wasn’t fit to understand. There, my driver, collared and chained, laying on her back in the most vulnerable position a pony can. There, Saussurea, a pleased expression on her face.

Saussurea watched Taxi for a time, then moved over until her leathery face filled my vision. I got to study the canyon sized wrinkles around her thin mouth. “Detective… do you know why I ask the little one to leave?”

More wiggling, more pinching from the chains, more glaring before I finally succumbed to my confusion and shook my head.

“She doesn’t need to see this.” The mare growled. “She’s a child. If you had any sense, or any kindness in you at all, you’d leave her on her mother’s doorstep. You? You deserve what comes now, for dragging her into your world. Now you will see what that selfishness will one day create.”

Lady, you have no idea... I thought.

Swinging back to my driver, Saussurea’s horn glittered and the chain around Taxi’s neck yanked her upright. She gagged, staggered, and put one hoof to her throat.

“Now, Scarred Pony. I want to know a thing. Answer my questions and you will have your answers. Lie to me and I will know. You will leave emptyhoofed and your friend will leave with torn ligaments in all of his limbs,” Saussurea snapped. “First question. What, exactly, is your talent?”

Taxi took several seconds to recover her voice, but when she did, it was a deeply subdued one that I hadn’t heard in many, many years. “I… become… what other ponies need,” she whispered.

It was a strange thing to hear my driver admit. She’d been reticent to even mention her talent before she lost her cutie-marks, but once they were gone, it was a non-topic and few ponies were willing to ask. All it usually took was one look at the mass of flayed flesh on her hips to discourage curiosity.

Saussurea chewed at her lip, examining Taxi closely. She studied the checkered braid, the curve of her neck, and her unshod hooves, taking in every detail like an inspector at a crime scene.

“You have my sympathy, Scarred Pony.” she said, finally. “No compassion, I’m afraid, but… sympathy. Who removed your cutie-marks?”

My ears perked right up at that. I wondered what Taxi would do. She was still wearing her control collar and the chain leash would keep her from going anywhere, but that single question might have doomed our hopes of getting answers.

She didn’t hesitate at all.

“I did.”

My eyes widened and I struggled against my bonds again, for whatever reason feeling like this might improve that revelation in some way.

Taxi removed her marks. I knew she and her talent didn’t have a good relationship, but to think she’d do something like that. I wanted, desperately, to ask what she meant. I wanted to hear her say she’d lied, but I doubted such a thing would trick Saussurea. It was ‘Truth’, with a capital T.

Saussurea nodded, rubbing at a bit of thin, fire-engine red mane hanging beside her ear. “Very interesting. Do you miss the one who broke you, Scarred Pony?”

No emotion. No hint that she was feeling anything. I hadn’t seen Taxi this way since we were kids. She seemed so empty as she replied, “Yes. Very much.”

“Mmmhmmm… I see.” Saussurea’s voice took on a sing-song note. “Your talent might have made you a brilliant teacher. You could have been the greatest doctor in Equestria. Mayhap even a psychologist the like of which this world has never seen. You could have been so many fantastic things and now… you are a broken thing, cast out from the loving embrace of your proper owner. Is that why you spend your days with that fool?” she asked, pointing at me with her horn.

Taxi bit her lip and nodded, very slightly.

“Excellent! The one who broke you still owns you, you know. I can feel his collar around your mind.” Saussurea gave a slight tug on the chain attached to my driver’s throat, forcing her to look up into her eyes. “You still want to submit. To crawl. You knew I needed a slave, same as you knew the fool over there needed to know what I’d done to the lizards all those years ago.”

My driver’s eyes were still blank. “Yes.”

“Most… interesting. Few talents are so double edged. If I hadn’t promised Warden I’d give you the information you need, I might spend several long days exploring your sweet, sweet mind.”

Twisting my muzzle sideways, I managed to push off one of the links of chain with my jaw, then work my mouth free of the rest so I could speak.

“Warden! Get us out of here!” I shouted.

Saussurea looked annoyed as she trotted over and picked up the end of her chain, laying it gently across the top of my muzzle. I tried to shake it off, but it clamped back in place, though not tightly enough this time to keep me from speaking. “Detective, do you think I am stupid? One of the first spells I wove was one to soundproof these walls.”

Through clenched teeth, I growled, “You want to let me down, we’ll talk about just what I think of your spells…”

“Oh dear, was my initial impression of you wrong, Detective? Are you a rude boy?” she purred and the chains around my ankles pulled more firmly until I felt tingling pain in my joints.

I had another word of defiance on my lips, but I saw my driver over Saussurea’s shoulders, violently shaking her head. I snapped my mouth shut.

“There we are. Good boys get what they came for. Bad boys get their legs pulled out of the sockets.”

Saussurea returned to my driver, gathering the chain around her foreleg like a leash, bringing Taxi up on her toes. “Now then, Scarred Pony. You saw what I did to those dragons, yes?”

“Y-yes…”

“Let us see just how specific this little talent of yours is, shall we?”

She grabbed Taxi’s chin, forcing her head up.

Their eyes met.

My driver’s jaw fell open, and the muscles in her rear legs tensed, but she didn’t move.

“What do you see, Scarred Pony?” Saussurea demanded.

Taxi shuddered, her tail slapping against her flank as muscles in her thighs seemed to struggle in different directions, some keeping her still while others spurred her to flee.

“A… a little dragon.”

“Goood, yes. Very good. What else?”

“I can’t,” she whimpered.

“I’ll cripple him, Scarred Pony.” Saussurea jerked her head in my direction. “Oh, he might be alive, he might recover, but I doubt it would be fast enough for whatever you lot have in mind…”

Taxi stared at me for a half second, then dropped her chin to her chest.

It was rare I saw a genuine demonstration of Taxi’s talent. Sure, her skills in interrogation were all but unmatched, but she’d always kept it hidden, even when we were kids. Her ‘Shine’ as she called it. It never worked conveniently, but then, in the place she was, her talent was no comfort. A talent is only a boon if you make it work for you, and Sweet Shine’s never had.

Sadly, that didn’t seem to mean it’d failed to develop.

“I… I saw you… with a little white dragon on a leash. She was crying and you told her to stop and she stopped. Then you told her to smile and she smiled. Then you told her to… to chew off... her...her own...her own wings...”

Taxi, who had one of the strongest stomachs of anypony I’ve ever met, leaned over the fire and vomited.

“Excellent. Excellent, Scarred Pony.” Saussurea’s smile was borderline orgasmic. “Her name was ‘Pet,' if you are curious. One of the dragons we captured just so happened to be pregnant. Oh, she might have let the soldiers know… and she might have been returned to her people. Like all dragons, bloody stubborn. When she laid her egg, I took it. I told the Princesses I returned it to the draconic ambassador, but truly? She was my little toy. Fair payment, for what the dragons almost took from me.”

“Sh-she was innocent…” Taxi said, her eyes glistening with tears as she wiped her muzzle with one hoof.

The old bitch stepped back, trotting over to her rocking chair. My driver was dragged along, stumbling at her heels.

“There are no innocent dragons, Scarred Pony. Dragons are not like ponies. Their souls are rife with greed. It is in their very blood,” Saussurea said, with a little shrug. “Though, for your curiosity when you have not yet earned your question, I will simply say she is most likely alive. I left her on the doorstep of the dragon ambassador the day the Princesses signed that wretched peace accord. I believe he raised her as his own. I doubt he found her replacement wings, however.”

I quietly thanked Celestia I’d passed up a snack earlier, or I might have lost it just then.

“How… could you do all of that? Even-” Taxi started to ask, but Saussurea interrupted her with a sharp yank on the chain.

“Considering what the blasted dragons did to my child?! I could have done much, much more! Her mother could just as easily have eaten one extra filling final meal before she left my care!” the mare snarled, angrily. “Mmm… but then, you don’t really need to know about that, do you? You may find out quite soon, after all. I am sending you into my child’s belly. Skylark and her brood may feed her, but… I suspect a thing is being done of which I do not approve.”

With that cryptic statement, Saussurea held Taxi’s chain to her breast, eyes closed, savoring the moment.

At last, the mare had enough reveling in her sense of control, leaving me squirming in anticipation, and asked, “Tell me. Skylark. She still performs her little song and dance for criminals, yes?”

“She… she still has a prison ministry, I think,” Taxi replied, softly.

“No, no… I mean at Supermax. The conditions under which I gave her my child were very particular. Particularly that she should keep her fed. This city produces a uniquely vile brand of criminality and I wished to see her cells always full.” Saussurea grumbled, picking up her shawl with a spurt of magic and slinging it half-hazardly back around herself. “Damn this cold old body. What I wouldn’t give to stride her halls again and feel the fear of all those evil ponies at my passing!”

I decided it was time to interject.

“Skylark’s not keeping criminals in Supermax,” I said.

Saussurea frowned and nodded, “Confirmation, then. I realized that soon after she ceased appearing on the Warden’s doorstep, asking to speak to the inmates here. She has been using my magics as well, I imagine. I will not allow this continue. I would only see the beastly, the evil… the unrighteous… bow,” she said, putting one hoof on Taxi’s forehead. I thought my driver might bite her or something, but instead she let the old jailer push her to the floor. “My little creature here understands. She’s a hateful little thing. She hates herself most of all, don’t you, Scarred Pony?”

Taxi didn’t answer, but I could see her quivering. I was worried she might have broken. I couldn’t tell.

“So help us!” I snapped, “We’ve got limited time and some innocent ponies are going to die if you don’t!”

“Oh, you will have your help,” Saussurea assured me. “Skylark does not get to feed my child the easy pickings! I gave her the instructions to re-activate my construct such that she might do my will… but she is not. The criminals of this city sit in the councils and institutions! Until such time as I can return to my proper place, I am afraid -- and it saddens me to do this -- I am afraid I must put her back to sleep. To that end...”

Her horn glowed and a roll of blue paper slid from behind one of the desks, dropping across Taxi’s back. “This should be adequate to get you through the traps in the sewers, though once inside, you will have to navigate with what little intelligence you have. I was very thorough in my obfuscations of the building’s true dimensions and I am very old. Even I will have to relearn her halls, when the time comes.”

I shifted in the chains wrapped around my torso. “What about the construct? What’re we meant to do with that?”

Saussurea’s eyes twinkled with mischief. “That… was not part of the deal. I said I would give you the information you needed. Once those inside the cells are dead or removed, my child will rest again, until such time as the necessary spells are cast. Skylark’s hold on the city will break. That is all you need to know.”

I kicked my rear legs a little. “Could you let us out of this-” I caught the words ‘shit hole’ before they left my mouth. “-lovely little cottage? We’ve got places to be.”

She gave me one of those evaluating looks that said she already had an answer in mind, but wanted to give me some hope.

“I think perhaps… I will have one last thing from my Scarred Pony.”

Gently tugging Taxi’s leash, she guided my driver onto her knees in front of her, then raised her hoof. Taxi looked up at it, ears low against the sides of her head. Her silence was unnerving enough. I didn’t know what to make of the fact that she hadn’t already attempted to cripple the mare. Certainly Saussurea deserved it.

“Kiss my toe, Scarred Pony,” the jailer murmured.

I opened my mouth to tell her she didn’t have to, but one of the chains snapped up and lodged itself between my teeth, leaving me gnawing at the metal angrily.

Taxi lowered her muzzle, and very tenderly pressed her lips against the end of Saussurea’s hoof. She rested there for a long time, then pulled back and stood.

The collar unsnapped from her neck and my bindings came undone, sending me plummeting to the floor in a pile of bruised ribs and fury. I felt the control ring around my neck start to buzz and forced my breathing to calm down until it subsided. A self-induced concussion wouldn’t make the situation better and I needed my wits for the conversation I was damn well going to have with Sweets the moment we could get someplace private.

My driver stepped back from Saussurea and adjusted her braid over one shoulder, then turned to me. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Sweets. Are you?”

She didn’t answer. Her gaze found the jailer’s and she leaned close, resting one leg on the ancient monster’s shoulder. Saussurea didn’t move away or draw back. She tilted one ear.

“Amateur…” Taxi whispered.

The elderly pony’s eyes almost popped out of her head.

“H-how…”

“You never made me love you, Saussurea,” my driver, my friend, said with a cool vindictiveness that sent shivers up my back. “You might hold my leash, but you are nothing compared to the stallion who broke me first. You are a rank, stupid child, clutching for control in a world that’s lost to her. Now you’ll die, down here in this pit you’ve built. You’ll die with only your captors for company and your fake sun to warm your grave.”

Saussurea’s face went slack.

The chains spread all around the room began to rise into the air, sliding over every surface like vipers readying themselves to pounce.

Taxi turned to me and tilted her head towards the door. “Shall we?”

I glanced at the animated chains. “If she’ll let us.”

“Oh… she’ll let us. Won’t you, Saucy?” Taxi murmured, all the animation and life returned to her face like a light switch flicked on. “You need to know, don’t you? If you kill us, you won’t ever know.”

The Jailer of Supermax snarled and the metal snakes leapt forward, stopping a bare inch from my driver’s face. She blinked at them, then reached up and pushed the chains away. As one, they collapsed all around the room, falling in tangled piles, leaving the impression the tiny cottage had been gift wrapped by an especially psychotic and security-conscious pony.

My driver pulled the blueprint off of her back, checked it, then folded it back up and tucked it under one leg.

She trotted to the door and gestured for me to come along. I moved over beside her, pushing open the door and stepping out onto the stoop. Inside, the chains slithered over one another, still moving in a malevolent mass lit by the infernal light of the fireplace. Saussurea sat in her rocking chair, her shawl hanging to one side, her biscuits scattered on the rug.

Outside, crickets chirped and sang their little songs amongst the pre-dawn in the artificial forest. I saw a red light bobbing along out there between the trees and a flash of bright orange feathers nearby.

When Saussurea spoke again, it sounded like a different pony. There was something in her voice that was almost pleading. “Tell me his name…”

Taxi grinned and put her hoof on the doorknob. “You sad little pony. Couldn’t you guess?”

“Tell me!”

“His name… was Daddy.”

****

Outside, on the little path leading away from the house, I stopped my driver with one hoof on her shoulder. She put her forelegs around my neck. We held the hug for about ten seconds, then stepped back from one another.

“Sweets…” I began.

“I needed a warm up, Hardy,” she said, cutting short what I’m sure would have turned into a bit of a sympathetic outpouring. “That’s all that was. I’m fine. Seriously, if one nutty quack with a bondage fetish could get under my pelt, I think it’s time to turn in my freak card.”

“Did you have to take it that far?” I asked.

She pulled the sewer blueprints from under her leg and laid them at my hooves. “She gave us what we came for, didn’t she? Besides… like I said, warm up.”

“A warm up for what?”

“Before you and Swift came down, I gave my identification to one of the nurses. She recognized me. My father’s in the prison hospital. He’s dying.”

“So? You haven’t spoken to him in years, right? Don’t tell me-”

“We’re going to see him.” she said, firmly. “If nothing else, to find out what Saussurea won’t tell us about what the Supermax construct does. He was a prisoner there before Tartarus was finished. Besides...” she exhaled a soft sigh. “-she was right. He’s still got a hold on my mind. Supermax makes the school look like a pleasant side trip. I need those shackles off, before I go into something like that.”

Act 2, Chapter 24: Blood and Family

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 24: Blood and Family

The Equestrian cutie mark is a powerful advantage; in fact, one might say it is a key factor in why ponies are the world's dominant species.

This is not simply because of special talents. Every species has talented individuals. No, it is the search itself that provides a large portion of this edge. The hunt for one's cutie mark encourages innovation, experimentation, creativity, and persistence at a very early age; The longer one remains a blank-flank, the more these skills are learned. The result is a hardworking populace open to new ideas - and, as empirically determined, one tenacious and technologically advanced enough to win a war against dragons.

It's not entirely without downsides; not all experiments are successes, and some are rather spectacular failures. The economic damage caused by overzealous fillies and colts attempting to earn flank iconography probably numbers in the low 7 digits of bits annually. Most of this is lost productivity by parents attempting to get, say, sap out of horsehair, but occasionally an overzealous blank-flank will try for a cutie mark in vehicle racing and propel a car directly into somepony's living room, or get in a position to cause a low-intensity national pastry scandal.

But the damage caused in the quest is a small price to pay in aggregate - even if some have to pay more than others.

--The Scholar

The day a pony gets his or her cutie-mark is supposed to be a gloriously happy day. It’s a celebration of self-discovery and of destiny found.

Unfortunately, I remember the days before I got mine with the vividness only trauma will allow.

My only comfort, down through the years, was that I hadn’t been alone.

Junior pounded down the stairs, rebounding off the wall that his mother, Dove Tail, had reinforced specifically because telling him not to was a lost cause; the wall held against his thin frame, even if he’d have liked a few more pounds on it. He skidded into the kitchen, barely pulling up before he hit the table. His bat, slung on a strap around his chest, slid forward and nearly clocked him on the side of the head.

“Mom! Mom! Can I go outside? I’m done with my homework!” he squeaked. For a colt his age, the squeak was forgivable, as was his lack of a cutie mark.

Being a blank-flank would have been a bit less terrible if he could have defended himself. Karate classes had been a lost cause, because ‘discipline’ and ‘Hard Boiled Junior’ seemed to be opposites, though he’d found baseball a decent alternative. Not because he was any good at it, but because having a valid excuse to cart around a bat tended to discourage the bigger colts and fillies from trying to express childhood angst with violence upon his person.

His mother, Dove Tail, stood in the kitchen with her chisel in her teeth and her thick brown mane covered in wood shavings. She was leaning over a beautifully carved race-car clamped in a vice, putting on the finishing touches.

The small house’s kitchen often doubled as her work-space, since Hard Boiled Senior kept his guns in the garage. There’d only been a few incidences of wood chips in macaroni.

She rolled her eyes as she heard him bounce off the wall, then tear down the hallway.

Like father, like son.

Setting her chisel to one side, she stepped back from her project.

“Junior, your father’s going to be home in two hours for dinner. You’ll be home then, right?”

“Yes, Mom!”

She scratched her chin, looking like she was thinking, but mostly using it as an excuse to wipe mahogany out of her mahogany fur. “...You be careful if you’re going over to Sweet Shine’s house, you hear?”

Junior frowned at his mother. “Come on Mom! Shiny’s an okay pony.”

“It’s not Shiny I’m worried about, Junior… and when you get home, I wanna check your math. Thirty times thirteen does not equal ‘butt’,” she snickered, while her son looked a little downcast.

“I thought that was funny…”

“So did Miss Ampersand. Funny enough to call me today just to relay the joke. You should have Shiny tutor you. At least she knows when to be funny, and I’ll give you a tip. It’s when your math grade is higher than a C.”

“Ugh, Shiny’d tutor me with my bat, Mom.”

Dove Tail laughed and ruffled her son’s short black mane. “It might get through that especially thick head you and your father share! Now go on. Have fun.”

****

Junior stood outside of Sweet Shine’s house, tossing rocks in the air and trying to hit them with his bat. Trying to do both the throwing and batting with your teeth is especially difficult, particularly when you don’t have ‘batter’s jaw’ and have to go pick up your bat after almost every swing. Even his muzzle guard didn’t stop him having to do that, although it kept him from losing teeth.

He dropped his bat, spat out his guard and tugged his saddle-bag open, fishing out his old watch with the broken leg strap to check the time.

Five minutes.

Shiny was nothing if not punctual, but that day, she was five minutes late.

He stuffed his guard and his watch into his bag, then slung his bat over his back, pacing up and down in front of Shiny’s mailbox.

Sweet Shine’s house sat directly across from the Boiled residence, but the two could not have been more different. Where Dove Tail liked to do her own maintenance, such that every aspect of the facade and small, white washed porch were in perfect repair, Shiny’s parents were less fastidious.

As a matter of fact, their lawn would have done well as a scrap yard for old mining equipment. A barrel of pickaxes lay against a hunk of machinery whose original function might have been drilling or sorting or maybe even pie-making for all the likelihood it'd ever work again. The house itself wasn’t totally ramshackle, but the roof sagged in a couple of places and gutters were missing on both sides.

Junior thought it looked gloriously spooky, but he’d never been allowed over, so he didn’t know what it was like inside. He’d asked, a couple of times, especially considering all the time she spent at his place, but both his parents and his friend seemed to be against the idea, so he’d let it drop.

What he did know was that, about three nights a week, he heard shouting over there and the night before, it’d been especially bad. He couldn’t make any words out, but usually after her Mom and Dad had a bad fight, she’d come over to his place after the lights had all gone out over there.

Last night, she hadn’t.

He checked his watch again.

Ten minutes.

“Hey! Hardy!” The sound was right beside his ear.

He yelped and spun to see his friend grinning at him from the middle of the sidewalk.

“Shiny! Sweet Celestia, don’t do that! I almost peed on my tail!” he gasped, putting one hoof over his chest to slow his breathing. “Where’ve you been?”

“What do you mean ‘where’ve I been’? I had to make sure everypony was gone or asleep before I left!”

Sweet Shine was a little bit taller than Junior, with a wild black and white mane. She was a blank flank, one of only two in their class. That was enough bond for two kids living through the slings and arrows of elementary school. Adults said her soft, pink eyes seemed ‘old,' but to Hardy, she was an endless font of energy. Every day, she’d have a new adventure in mind, plus she had the added bonus of being able to beat up any colt or filly in their class. That helped enormously, because Junior was a little on the small side.

For a colt with a bat and a best friend, those days were good.

“Okay, okay, no big deal. Sooo...what’re we doing today?”

“I’ve got a couple ideas,” Shiny replied. “Dad won’t be home from the mine for at least two hours and Mom took her medication early. I’d have been here sooner if I’d known she was out cold, but Dad made me sleep downstairs last night so it took me a bit to get out of the window.”

Junior glanced at Shiny’s single story house, then did his best to put the thought of ‘sleeping downstairs’ out of his mind. The boiler was in the basement, and Junior didn’t like his well-maintained, perfectly shined and functional boiler. The boiler in Shiny’s house must have been a real fire-breathing monster.

Hefting his bat, he prepared for whatever quest they might be on. He hoped it wouldn’t involve spending bits. His allowance wasn’t for two more days and he’d already spent last week’s. Shiny never had any, but she somehow always managed to find fun anyway, even if it did mean getting chased out of the movie-theater now and then.

“Alright, lead the way!”

****

Sweet Shine seemed to go everywhere at a dead run. She never held back. It’d taken Junior a few weeks of knowing her before traveling from place to place didn’t leave him flatly out of breath.

First stop was just up the road at the baseball pitch in the little park beside the school to collect some protection money.

They pounded down the empty road, neck and neck, with Shiny pulling a little bit ahead, then Junior. He’d been getting stronger month by month, and soon nopony but his pegasus class-mates and Shiny could catch him. She made a thing of being a good sport, though, and sometimes even let him win.

Rounding the corner at the end of their road, they saw the old groundskeeper, Mr.Sweep, a heavyset and older gentlecolt in a dusty cap and apron with bright blue eyes and an even bluer mane, standing beside the chain link fence surrounding the batting cage, surveying a scene of destruction.

“Mister Sweep! Mister Sweep, sir! We’re here!” Shiny called out. “I saw them coming in this morning when I was on my way to class!”

“Ahhh...kids. Good to see ye! Couldn’ta come earlier, could ye?” he said, with a big, cheerful grin.

“Sorry, sir. I don’t think my last period teacher would like it if I skipped class,” she replied. Junior would have said something similar, but he was still catching his breath.

“It’s no worry. I’m just glad ye here. Ye come out and run this bunch off, I might just have things cleared up for game time night after tomorrow,” he said, waving the end of his broom toward the pitch.

Dozens upon dozens of fat, contentedly slouching geese in browns and whites waddled around the field, quacking and beeping at one another conversationally. And pooping. Lots and lots of pooping.

The geese were an annual menace, coming down from Las Pegasus and further north to kip at the little lake beside the field. Unfortunately, that meant that before every game, somepony had to go out and scrape up their poop; that was, unless a pair of enterprising young ponies could convince them to bugger off instead of roosting. Every few weeks, a new batch had to be taught who the bosses were.

That was, after all, Junior and Shiny’s task, and what Mister Sweep paid them for. Nopony else wanted to go run around in goose poop.

“Alright kids, here’s ye plastics.” Mister Sweep held out two sets of four rubber socks with padded bottoms. They were, in theory, for cleaning up plumbing spills, but they worked just as well with feces of all stripes.

Junior and Shiny sat beside the pitch and struggled into their socks, wiggling their toes down into the latex.

“First to fifty is goose crap!” the filly shouted, then charged a big gander who looked unimpressed until he found himself on the receiving end of full power earth-pony fury.

“I got this one!” Junior called back, ducking low to crash underneath an especially chunky hen, sending her honking into the sky.

****

A half hour later, they were both sweaty but feeling accomplished and Mister Sweep disposed of their stained socks, shelling out a few bits into both of their hooves. The field was clear of geese, with only a few stubborn holdouts quickly waddling off towards the lake.

Back on the sidewalk, they trotted along, side by side, off to parts unknown; two mighty warriors, back from the battlefield, happy to be alive.

“Oof, did you see me get that big one who tried to bite me? Betcha he was surprised,” Shiny giggled.

“Yeah, especially when I jumped on his back when he tried to take off!” Junior nickered.

His friend laughed, giving him a light bump with her shoulder. “You almost face-planted in poop when he whacked you with his wing.”

The colt sniffed and turned around, flipping his tail at her. “I didn’t see you helping.” Grinning, he swung back and leapt at his friend, sending both of them crashing into the grass beside the road.

Under normal circumstances, that would have prompted a wrestling match. Junior didn’t care that he usually lost. It was fun wrestling with Shiny. She was strong and smart and didn’t bite like other fillies did.

Instead, Shiny screamed.

It was one of those throat tearing screams that cracks at the end, emptying lungs and leaving ear-drums ringing. Junior yelped and quickly climbed off of his friend, who curled up on her side, clutching her stomach with both forehooves.

She lay there, apparently in agony, her eyes pinched shut and tears leaking from the corners. He’d only seen Shiny cry on a few occasions, and never where anypony else might have seen her.

“...Shiny?” he asked, cautiously, touching her rear leg with one hoof.

“I’m… I’m okay…” she whispered, trying to uncurl. She got about halfway there, before her muscles seemed to seize. Now that he got up close, there seemed to be an ugly discoloration under the bright yellow fur on her side.

“Did you do all that running... with that?” he asked, gawking at the bruise.

Slowly, his friend pulled herself to her hooves, wiping grass out of her mane. “Yeah...so?”

“Did you… fall down some stairs or something?”

Shiny gave him a teary eyed look, then put her hoof on his face and gently pushed him away. “Yeah. Something. It was my fault. It’s nothing. I think you’re gonna win if we wrestle today, though. Can we just go get some ice-cream?”

Something was off kilter, but Shiny had never been forthcoming and could still probably whip him in an actual fight, injured or not, so he didn’t want to push it. She sounded desperate to put whatever had happened out of her mind and he was relatively happy to comply.

“Uh...yeah. Yeah, sure. Ice cream...” he replied, having not really heard most of her actual words; he was still trying not to look at the nasty purple marks.

****

Contrary to their intentions, there had been a few stops on the way, but finally Shiny and Junior made it to ‘Sweet Eats Ice-Creamery and Delicatessen.'

They sat across from one another at the ice-cream parlor, the only foals in the building at that time of the afternoon, sipping ice cream shakes that Junior’s mother would have called foul on for ruining his appetite. If she knew what he was doing for extra bits she might have something else to be upset about. Shiny’s mother never seemed to worry about such things, or at least, Shiny never brought it up if she did.

“Sooo… alright, ice cream, geese, tag, making Miss Bobble’s poodle bark so hard he peed himself, chasing ducks, climbing that tree to get somepony’s frisbee, and...what else is there to do tonight?” Junior asked, trying to avoid the subject that just wouldn’t leave him alone. Thoughts of Shiny’s injuries sat in the back of his head, refusing to accept the non-explanation she’d given him. His mother always said his curiosity would get him in trouble one day.

“I wish it’d hurry up and be tomorrow,” Shiny opined. “Daddy’s leaving town for another of his ‘trade union’ meetings. Him and those union ponies are going up to see the governor. He’s coming down from Las Pegasus.”

“Well, your mom’s going to be around, right?”

“Yeah, as much as she ever is. She and the mail pony, Ms. Goodie, are spending more and more time together when dad is out.”

Junior sniggered and sucked a bit more of his shake. “You think they’re kissing?”

Shiny didn’t laugh.

She should have laughed, then maybe socked him, but she didn’t. She just looked a bit sad.

“Uh… that was a joke,” Junior clarified.

“I know,” his friend said, scratching her crazily mismatched mane. “Sorry, I’m a drag today. Daddy’s under a lot of stress and I should be making it easier for him, but I keep messing up...”

“Do you want to go see the doctor about your side? Doctor Ham's clinic is just up the-”

“No!” Shiny said, quickly. The ice-cream bar minder raised his head from behind his newspaper, made sure everything was alright, then went back to his reading.

“I mean… no. It’s okay. Really. Doesn’t hardly hurt unless some dumb pony leaps on me.” She gave him a sharp look and he lowered his head.

“Sorry…”

“I’ll just brain you as soon as I’m not hurt. Anyway, come on. I need to get home.”

Junior tugged his watch out and peered at it. “It’s barely five thirty. Your dad won’t be home for a half hour, right?”

Shiny’s eyes went round as dinner plates. “Five thirty... Oh Celestia! I’m not supposed to be out! It’s going to take me more time to get in! Come on! I’ve got to get back!”

She was off her chair and out the door before the colt had a chance to protest. He paused to toss the bits for the ice-cream on the table, then wiped his muzzle with the back of his hoof and chased after his friend.

****

They rounded the street corner just in time to catch the beaten, battered shape of a wagon turning into the house across from the Boiled residence. It was piled high with cardboard scraps, paint cans, wooden dowels, and a few rusting pick-axes. There were five houses and lawns between them and the basement window Shiny must have crawled out of.

An ancient, reptile part of the brain shouted ‘too much open ground’ in the back of their heads and the filly skidded to a half, then grabbed Junior’s leg and dragged him into the bushes at the side of the road. They peered out from between a pair of begonias at Shiny’s father, Stone Shine, as he began unhitching himself from the front of the wagon.

“Why are we hiding from your dad again?” Junior asked, in a low voice.

“I told you, I’m supposed to be home. I’m grounded because… well… because…” she hesitated, then shook her head. “He made me sleep downstairs and if he finds out I can get out, he’ll nail that window up.”

“Oookay, that’s… creepy, Shiny.”

Shiny’s gaze lowered. “It’s not his fault. I keep trying to do better, but since the mine closed down, everything’s been so...hard for him and I know I’m not helping and I sh… should stop sneaking out… because a good daughter doesn’t do stuff like... like that. I know I… I hurt him when I’m not there when he gets home. I… I try to keep the house clean, but mom takes her medication a few times a day now and while she’s on it she doesn’t want to do anything and I don’t think Daddy knows and Ms.Goodie is…”

Junior put his hooves up on his friend’s chest. “Shiny, Shiny… chill out. It’ll be okay. Really, we’ll get you back there and your dad will never know.”

“How? Do you have an invisibility cloak in your dumb saddlebags?” she grumbled.

He looked back at his green saddlebags and patted the Wonderbolts buckle. “My saddlebags are not dumb!”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t make the question any different. What sort of magic plan do you have? Daddy’s going to go right in and call for me in like, two minutes. He’ll know I left! I’ll be grounded forever!”

“Shiny! Stop it! We’ve got to get you back! Now come on!”

With that, he grabbed his friend’s leg and dragged her behind the nearest house. They wiggled between the slats of one fence then hauled themselves over the top of another, dodging a snarling poodle that thought better of trying to assert his dominance when Shiny charged headlong at him and retreated instead underneath the porch.

Three more lawns and both Junior and Shiny were covered in leaves, tiny cuts, and sweat. Shiny in particular seemed to be having trouble and every time she took a breath, she clutched at her side with one hoof. Junior was worried. Usually he was the one getting worn out.

They’d made it, though, and together they crouched under the rose bushes beside Shiny’s house.

Stone Shine was just finishing the job of unhitching himself from his wagon.

Up close, the filly’s father cut a very imposing figure. He was almost a head higher than Junior’s dad, who wasn’t a small pony by any means, and his slate grey fur was patchy around the knees like it’d been worn off. His jaw was so square it would have been laughable on just about any other stallion, but a hard, cold edge in his eyes kept anypony from commenting on it.

Junior squirmed a little, trying to push one of the bush’s thorns away from his hip.

“Okay, where’s the window?” he asked.

Shiny’s eyes were glued to her father, who couldn’t have been more than a few meters away. He was absorbed in unloading the wagon, slinging signs and buckets of paint on ropes over his wide barrel. She pointed in the general direction of the back of the house. Junior could just make out the edge of a window propped half open at ground height.

“Shiny, listen, alright? I’ll go distract your dad. You go sneak in.”

“What?!” the filly gasped.

“Trust me. It’ll be fine.”

“You’re nuts. Why do I hang out with a crazy pony?”

“Because nopony else would chase geese with you. Now wait until you get a safe chance to run.”

Reaching back into his saddle-bags, Junior pulled out the bright red frisbee they’d found in a tree. Giving it a good wind up, he took a deep breath and winged it as hard as he could across the street, over Stone Shine’s head, then he charged headlong at the giant stallion. At the last moment before impact, he shouted, “I got it!” then braced.

He’d have done more actual damage if he’d hit a brick wall.

The frisbee skidded into the street, rolling end over end as Junior smashed into Shiny’s father’s side and sat down hard, black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

Stone Shine looked down at the little colt with an expression that said he was considering heavily whether or not to simply paste him with his enormous hooves. It wouldn’t have taken much.

“Sorry, Mister!” Junior said, in as chipper and endearing a manner as he could. Rising on wobbly legs, he stumbled sideways and leaned against the wagon. Adults usually went for his bumbling foal act, particularly if he threw in a bit of stage injury and a stiff upper lip. Pretending injury after hitting Stone Shine didn’t require much acting. His forehead felt like he was going to have a goose-egg there. Fair trade for bullying all those birds.

“You’re… that cop’s child, aren’t you?” Stone Shine growled, looking over his shoulder at the house across the street. “What are you doing on my lawn?”

“Oh! Um, I was just out tossing my frisbee around and it went over there,” he answered, waving towards the space between the buildings, but Stone didn’t even glance that way.

Reaching down, the stallion grabbed Junior by the scruff with his teeth, a little more roughly than necessary. The colt yelped as he was lifted off his hooves and carried over to the curb, where the bigger pony gave him a slight swing and sent him rolling end over end into the street.

“Are you a stone, colt?” Stone Shine asked.

“W-what, sir?” Junior asked, confused.

“I don’t think your ears are broken. I asked if you...are a stone.”

“N-no. I’m not a s-stone-”

The big stallion’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve seen you with my daughter. She might not have told you this, but my talent is to dig the worthwhile things out of the chaff of the world, boy. I don’t care who your daddy is. You only get one warning. She is mine.”

Stone Shine picked a rock that happened to be laying beside his mailbox, raised his hoof, and brought it down. Junior felt the ground shake with the impact. A blast of dust and shattered pebbles rose up around his leg and when he moved his hoof, the rock was gone.

“You come onto my property again, we’ll break you open and see if there’s anything valuable inside.”

Junior’s eyes darted over Stone’s shoulder and he tried to pick out Shiny down the way, but she was gone. He hoped, desperately, she’d managed to get back inside.

“Uh… yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Stone Shine didn’t reply, instead grabbing three more strings worth of paint cans and trotting up onto the porch, shoving open the front door with his shoulder, and disappearing inside.

Junior just sat there for about ten seconds, taking deep breaths. That’d been way more intense than he’d thought it was going to be. He’d certainly seen Stone Shine in passing, but Shiny was usually very good about being home on time and they’d been friends for months without a situation like that developing. She’d always insisted on meeting him.

Rising, he tried to get a look down the driveway at the window that Sweet Shine must have used to sneak in, but he was at the wrong angle.

Sighing, he hiked his bat up higher, settled his saddlebags and fixed the straps, then trotted off to find the frisbee.

****

Bored, bored, bored.

Worried and bored.

It was sixth period. School was about to be out, and he was worried. Mostly bored, but worried, too. Worried was not a natural state for Hard Boiled Junior. Adult ponies worried. He chased geese, played baseball, climbed trees, and generally enjoyed life.

It was Shiny who had him worried, too, which made it worse. Sweet Shine was a pony about whom he was not used to worrying. She always seemed to shrug off the world, like it didn’t affect her. Sure, she might fall or bang her head, but she got right back up and went back at it.

What she didn’t do was miss class.

He’d once seen her come in sniffling and sneezing, shivering with fever. She just tossed her jacket around herself and kept taking notes. When the teacher had asked if she was alright, she’d said she was absolutely fine.

Shiny was invincible, or so he thought, and yet he was staring at her empty seat.

Finally, the bell rang.

Junior was first out of the room and off down the street before morning announcements had finished.

****

It was only as he rounded the corner onto his home street that it occurred to Junior that he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do about Shiny not showing up for school. Go knock on her front door? That sounded awfully stupid, especially after her dad’s threat. He could always tell his dad, but then what would that do?

He slowed from a full on gallop to a contemplative trot as he moved down the rows of houses, his legs carrying him home while his young mind tried to unknot the tangled problem.

Stopping by his own mailbox, he looked up at the sloppily painted letters that said ‘The Boileds’, and then across the street at his friend’s house and the lawn covered with junk.

What was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t like Stone Shine could actually hurt him, right? Sure, he might tell his dad, but that would just be a scolding and he could explain he was worried about Shiny and then it’d be okay.

So why was he scared?

Truth be told, it was Stone Shine himself. Something just seemed so off about that pony.

Telling himself he was being silly, Junior set his hooves and marched across the street. This self-reassurance had a very short half-life, because by the time he was stepping up onto the curb, he was overcome with a series of extremely nasty ‘What-ifs,' the least of which involved Stone Shine setting tigers loose on him.

“Okay, so… sneaky. Sneaky where? Oh come on! You don’t even know where her room is… and now you’re talking to yourself,” Junior smacked himself on the forehead, trying to clear his thoughts.

Downstairs. She said she’d slept downstairs the last couple of nights.

Checking the driveway, he made sure Stone Shine’s wagon was gone, then bolted for the alley between Shiny’s house and the next. Wiggling himself into the spot they’d hidden the day before, he checked the street in both directions, then listened for any movement from the house.

Nothing.

He moved from under the rose-bush, keeping low to the ground, and snuck around until he could reach the window Shiny had pointed out.

Putting his hoof up on it, he tried to peer in, only to be met by a piece of plywood nailed across the glass.

“Huh…” he murmured. He moved down the back of the house. The backyard was, if anything, messier than the front. There were huge wheels from some vehicle he couldn’t identify stacked beside spools of wire and broken cogs that were bigger than he was.

Like most things in a young colt’s life, Shiny’s back yard was usually out of his sight and therefore largely out of his mind. His friend had only moved in a couple of years ago and he hadn’t thought it at all odd that she kept them well away from that area. Now, however, the thought wouldn’t leave his head.

Why hadn’t she ever invited him over? All that garbage laying out there would have made for fantastic games of hide and seek.

He nosed around the outside edge of the house, listening for any movement inside that might have let on that he’d been nicked, but all was quiet. The windows all seemed to have been shut up entirely.

Finally, frustrated, he slumped against the side of the house and scratched his ear.

“Oookay… so, knock on the front door? Pretend I have a good reason to be here? Borrowing sugar or something?” he asked himself, feeling like his other options might have been exhausted.

“Psst!”

The voice was right near his flank and he let out a yell of surprise, then clapped both hooves over his muzzle.

Turning in circles, he looked for the source. He seemed to be alone.

“Shiny?”

“Down here, doofus!” his friend whispered.

Looking down, he found a tiny grate, barely six inches across, set into the base of the house’s brickwork.

Getting down on his belly, he wiggled up close. “Shiny, is that you?”

“Who else would it be?” she replied. He tried to peer through the grate and caught a glimpse of yellow fur and pink eyes. Something was off about the left one. It seemed darker, somehow, and there was a tinge of red in one side.

“Shiny!...why are all the windows nailed up? I thought we got you in clear and clean.”

“You did…” she exhaled, sadly. “Daddy was really angry last night. Something about the union ponies being ‘spineless’.”

“What’s that have to do with you?”

“I… um… It’s my fault, Hardy. Daddy told me I couldn’t go out and that I’d have to stay in. Then...he caught me when I tried to get out the window. I thought he’d gone to bed and-”

“Is… is that why you weren’t in class today?” Junior asked.

She nodded.

His eyes were adjusting to the darkness through the vent. He could just make out a little cot and a candle sitting on the table beside it. His friend was sitting on the cot, the fur around her eyes smeared with tears. She didn’t look like she’d had a bath since yesterday. There was still a spot of chocolate shake on her chin.

“Shiny… nopony deserves this! I’ll go tell Father and-”

“No! Hardy, don’t! Please don’t!” she begged, her eyes full of panic. “It’s… it’s my fault. Please, don’t. Daddy is just trying to help me...”

“Help you? I’m not gonna leave you down there. That’s stupid!” Junior exclaimed.

“No... Hardy, promise me. Promise you won’t tell anypony. I’ll go away and you’ll never get to see me again. Daddy’s already moved us a couple of times because somepony got too nosy about our lives. Please, I don’t… I don’t want to lose you…” she pleaded.

Junior’s ears flattened to his head.

He didn’t know what to do.

Sweet Shine was practically his only friend. He’d never been especially good at making friends and she was the only one he felt like he could really be himself with. Everypony else was intimidated because his dad was a police officer, or didn’t like him because he was a blank flank. There weren’t any other kids on his street, either, which didn’t help.

“I promise. I won’t tell anypony.” He put his toe against the grate and she touched it through the wire mesh. “I’m going to visit you every night, though.”

“C-could you bring my homework? I’ll be back to class soon, I hope. I don’t know how long I’m grounded for...”

“What did you do? My mom only grounded me like...once ever and that was because I almost burned the house down trying to get my fire-swallower cutie-mark.”

“I… um… it was bad. I fought Daddy about something. I defied him and...he...is teaching me my place. It’s right here. Please, go on. Daddy’s going to be home soon. I’ll see you later tonight, alright?”

“Uh... sure.”

Reluctantly, Junior rose, took one last look at the grate, then darted off back down the alley.

****

That night, well after his parents had gone to sleep, Junior slipped out of his bed. He’d been distracted at dinner and had to spend an extra half hour with his mom working on math. His father noticed his distraction and asked about it. He’d felt bad saying he was just worried about a friend from school, because while it’d technically been the truth, it certainly didn’t encompass the whole truth.

Hauling on his bat and saddlebags, he poked through the messy hole that was his closet until he found his old checkers set and stuffed that in on top of Sweet Shine’s homework.

Tiptoeing downstairs, he eased the back door closed. It was, after all, the door farthest from his parents’ room.

Circling around the house, he waited for his night vision to catch up before darting across the street.

There was some arguing of some sort going on in the Shine household. He saw Stone Shine through the front window, sprawled out on his back across the couch in the flickering glow of the television. Sunshine, Shiny’s mother, was leaning against the doorframe of the living room. Her white fur appeared off-blue in the illumination of whatever show was on. She seemed to be shouting something, but Junior couldn’t make out what. What he could see was a big, round bruise on her eye.

Maybe clumsiness ran in the family?

Moving around the side of the building, he edged along the side, moving on the tips of his toes so has to disturb as little grass and gravel as possible. He almost tripped over a cog that’d been left in the hedge, barely catching himself on the side of the house.

After what felt like an eternity, he made his way to the back of the building and slid down onto his knees. In the dark, it took several minutes to find the vent.

Dropping down, he poked his muzzle against it and whispered, “Shiny. Shiny, you there?”

For a long moment, he was afraid she was back upstairs and he was wasting his time. Equally, he kind of hoped he was. Something about the whole situation seemed very, very wrong, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He’d promised, after all.

There was a flash of yellow, then bright, shining eyes appeared at the grate.

“Hardy... oh, Hardy! It’s... it’s really nice to see you,” Sweet Shine whispered. She still didn’t look like she’d had a bath. That bit of chocolate hadn’t moved.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t get all mushy,” he replied with a little smile, then reached back and pulled her homework out of his saddlebags. Rolling it up, he gently fed it through the grate, one piece at a time. “Here. I’ll come by tomorrow morning and take it to class with me.”

“Eesh... Thanks. Yeah, I’ve been so bored today… I hope this punishment is over soon. Daddy’s acting really funny. He keeps checking and rechecking this list. I asked him if I could help and he told me to go into my room.”

“Well, I did bring this, if you want to play,” he said, laying out his checkers board on the grass beside the grate.

“How’re we supposed to do that?” she asked, poking at the vent.

“You tell me where you want to move, and I’ll move for you. Duh!”

“Oh... right. Okay, I’ll take black!”

****

It was two hours later when Junior, exhausted and thoroughly beaten at checkers, fell into bed. He thought he’d fall asleep immediately, but he couldn’t. His thoughts wouldn’t settle.

Junior had been grounded before, but never in the basement. That just felt odd. Shiny seemed to take it in stride, but she had always taken things in stride. Nothing seemed to ruffle her mane. Well, nothing except her dad. She rarely talked about him and when she did, she always started acting mopey and weird, so he was usually happy not to talk about Stone Shine whenever possible. Her mom was almost a non-entity.

It struck him, then, how little he actually knew about his friend of many months. He knew her likes and dislikes, what board games she liked to play, how she liked to sleep, --usually curled up in a little ball on the end of the bed-- and a few other details that he’d picked up, but did he really know her? He couldn’t say for sure that he did. She was very good at escaping from places, and sneaky as could be. He knew that.

He knew she liked collecting things. She’d once shown him a whole bunch of sparkly rocks and said she had lots of others at home. When they were out, she’d often pick up small stuff, like buttons or strange stones and put them in her saddlebags.

He knew her mom and dad didn’t get along as well as his mom and dad did. Sure, his mom and dad had disagreements, but they almost always sent him out of the room for them.

That was almost the sum total of what he could actually think of just then. There was lots of little stuff, like how hard she tried in school and how she was always talking about traveling. No, not traveling. Running. She talked about escaping a lot, particularly on the nights she’d sneak over to his place after her parents had been at it.

They’d lay together under his blankets, a flashlight between them, and talk for an hour or two before they fell asleep. Shiny was expected to take herself to school most days so her parents never missed her. Her dad was up and gone before she left and her mom almost always slept until noon.

It was funny, now that he considered it.

He’d known her so long and his Mom and Dad were almost his whole life, but hers... well, it was funny.

After her dad was angry, she’d say strange things, like how badly she’d screwed up, but it was always things his parents wouldn’t have even let him do, like cooking or trying to repair stuff in the house. Truth be told, he admired that she even could plunge out a toilet. The one time he’d attempted to get his cutie-mark in plumbing, his mom hadn’t let him have dessert for three whole days.

What was slowly occurring to him was that if he was going to be friends with her, he definitely needed to know more about what her life was like. Some part of it felt very off kilter, but he’d promised he wouldn’t tell anypony, and he kept his promises. Fortunately, she hadn’t made him promise not to start nosing around.

The first inklings of an idea began to form, as Junior drifted off to sleep.

****

Junior stumbled down the stairs, sneezing and coughing, into the kitchen where he slumped down in front of the breakfast table. His eyes were wet and glazed.

His mother took one look at him and trotted over, putting one hoof on his forehead.

“Goodness! You’ve got a fever!” she exclaimed.

“I’m okay, Mom. I feel-” He tried to stand, staggered, and sat on the rug. “-alright, I feel awful...”

Dove Tail frowned, then pointed back toward the stairs. “Bed. Now. I’ll be up with breakfast in a few minutes.”

“Awww, come on, Mom! I’ve got a test today!” he protested.

“And...that’s how I know you’re not faking. If you were faking, you’d have let your teacher tell me that. Now up you go! I’ll make you some soup.”

****

Junior sprawled in the bed, quickly pushing the bottle of hot-sauce he’d sneaked out of the kitchen under his pillow. It wasn’t a pleasant way of faking illness, but a bit of ‘Mama Z’s Everfree Forest Super Spicy Mareuga Pepper Sauce’ definitely did the trick, fever and all. He’d only used a tiny lick worth, but it was enough to have his nose running and his entire body warm to the touch.

He laid back, one hoof behind his head, running down the mental list of things he’d need for that day. With any luck, it’d all be for nothing and he’d be playing with Shiny by next afternoon, but his father had taught him that if you needed to know something, the best way was to watch other ponies and ask only when you knew what the right questions were.

Something was wrong in the world. It was something he couldn’t identify. Something he didn’t understand.

He knew it in his gut. He knew it good and deep, in a place a little colt had no business knowing something. When he looked out his window at Sweet Shine’s house before, he’d only felt a sense of general curiosity. Today, laying in his bed, and since the night before, he’d felt the wrongness in a way he’d never felt it before.

Sure, there’d been times when he was bullied, or he saw ponies get hurt who didn’t deserve to be hurt, but never before in his short life had he ever been so sure that something was... unbalanced. That was the word. Unbalanced. It was like his tiny world was a great set of scales, and all of a sudden, an enormous weight had been dropped on one side.

He didn’t like lying to his mother or faking being sick. The guilt was already gnawing at him and, truth be told, he found staying home more boring than school, but he also knew that whatever was wrong was somehow more important than that. So he laid there, thinking through his idea as best he could. The earliest part was ‘buy some time’. He really did have a test that day and an extra couple of days to study would help.

His mom came up about ten minutes later to check on him with a plate of fruit and muffins and the thermometer. He had to do another hit from the hot-sauce bottle while she was on the stairs, then lay back and wait, his entire tongue feeling like he’d chewed on some hot coals.

Step two involved the hot-water bottle hidden in his bedside drawer. As soon as she was out of the room, he laid the thermometer on it until it was up to temperature, then stuck it back in his muzzle when he heard her coming back.

“I’ve called the school,” she told, checking the little glass tube, then shaking her head and laying it on the night stand. “They’re going to keep your homework for you. I also called Doctor Fine Weather and he said to take bed rest, fluids, and if you’re not okay in a few days, to come see him. I’ve got a couple of errands today and your father will be home at six. Are you going to be okay, if I’m gone for an hour or two?”

He nodded, weakly. “I... think so. Could you read me a story when you get back?”

He didn’t especially need a story read to him, and hadn’t for a couple of years, but it’d helped him get to sleep when he really was sick and his mom enjoyed just about any excuse to be motherly.

“Yes, dear. I’ll see you soon!”

****

Junior’s mother busied herself around the house, making sure he was as comfortable as possible before she’d finally get ready to leave.

As soon as he heard the front door shut, he was moving. Crawling over the end of the bed, he pulled open his old toy-box and began fishing through it until he found the various items he was looking for; two ‘Junior Police Colt’ walkie-talkies with extra power stones, his ‘Sail The Seas’ enchanted range-finding telescope, a half-empty note-pad, and a pencil with hoof-grip.

Setting the magical telescope on the window-sill, he swiveled it around until he could see Sweet Shine’s house, then took a big bite of his muffin.

With that, he waited. Junior was good at waiting, if nothing else. Not a patient pony, but definitely one who could sit in one place if what he was doing held his interest. It helped that he had a good book to read. A.K. Yearling’s most recent was a longer novel than the last couple, but he didn’t let himself get so engrossed that he wasn’t paying attention.

At eight o’clock and three minutes, Stone Shine shoved open the front door of the Shine residence, back weighed down with heavy saddle-bags. He seemed to be wearing some kind of kerchief around his broad, gray neck. His permanent scowl was plastered on his blocky features.

Junior picked up his pencil in his teeth and began noting every detail he possibly could:

Stone Shine leave at 8:03 has big heavy bags, no hat. Bags have paper, maybe or tools. Looks angry. Maybe he just always looks like that?

The powerful stallion hitched himself up to his wagon and was gone, off down the road, in a matter of minutes. Through the house’s front window, Junior had a mediocre angle on the living room and, through an open door, part of the kitchen. It would have to do.

After about twenty minutes, Daring Do had climbed the tower of Ahuizotl and was seconds from finishing off the mad beast, when he caught another movement from inside the house.

He peered down the telescope and tried to get the focus right. At first, he found himself looking at a gigantic monster, its jaws wide to swallow him, his house, and the entire neighborhood all in one bite.

He zoomed out a few inches and found himself staring at an ant on Shiny’s front stairs. Unlimited range didn’t really mean unlimited range, for practical purposes, since his telescope’s aperture was only a couple of inches across and the curvature of the world kept him from seeing other countries, but it was a very handy feature to have. He’d never used it for spying before, but it made gazing at the moon and other planets a cinch. Twisting the adjuster, he raised his view so he could get a good look at the shape moving around inside his friend’s house.

It was Sweet Shine.

She was inching along the hall, one hoofstep at a time, into the living room. Vanishing for a moment, she reappeared hauling open the curtain across the front window. It gave him a much better view of the inside of the house and he silently thanked her. It was then that Junior could see an unconscious shape slumped on the sofa.

Shiny’s mother lay there, a glass of something yellow near her foreleg and an uncapped pill bottle beside it.

Sweet Shine crawled over the couch, light as she could, and gently pressed her hoof to one side of her mother’s throat as though she were feeling for something. After a moment, she nodded to herself, then climbed back and went into the kitchen. Instead of going for the fridge, she disappeared into the pantry, returning a moment later with a pot in her teeth and a bag of something that looked like rice or grits.

Junior noted each of these events, carefully as he could, in his notepad. Trying to get a better look at Shiny was up to, he refocused the telescope’s lens a little and noticed something around her neck.

It looked really weirdly like a collar; a really heavy collar with some kind of black ring on the front of it. Shiny didn’t seem much bothered by it, but as she walked, it bounced against her chest.

‘Collar, approximate weight unknown, purpose unknown.’

Pulling his eye away from the telescope, he squinted as best he could at the kitchen across the way.

“That’s... really... I… Shiny, you never get to give me poop for being weird again...” he said to himself, then shook his head and went back to taking notes.

****

His mother returned home about two hours later and brought him some chicken noodle-soup, along with a package of his favorite crackers. The next time his mother came to check on him, he pretended to be asleep. She patted his hair and he shifted, giving her a sleepy smile, then a few good hacking coughs to really sell it. His acting was so good, he had to pretend to swallow a spoonful of something foul and cherry flavored.

As soon as she was out of the room, he spit it in the garbage, then went back to his telescope, watching as Shiny laid a bowl of something steamy along with a cup of what he thought might be coffee beside Mrs. Shine's head, then vanished back down the hallway.

Soon after, Shiny’s mother was moving. The pale mare heaved herself off the sofa and blearily stumbled down the hall towards what he assumed was the bathroom. Her mane was a tangled mess, but when she returned some minutes later, it was at least brushed. She picked up the coffee and downed it all in one gulp, then twisted the top off the pill bottle and popped a few of those in her muzzle. Certainly more than the recommended dose.

Shiny was back by then, but her mother ignored her as she bustled about the house, a broom in her teeth and a dust-pan attached to one hoof, other than to lift her legs so the filly could sweep under the sofa. Soon Shiny’s mother had planted herself in front of the television with a box of tissues, attacking the meal her daughter had prepared. Hardy couldn’t tell what she was watching from the angle he was at, but every now and then she’d dab her eyes or blow her nose.

****

Two hours later, the mail-pony, Miss Goodie, arrived on their street.

She was a hefty unicorn mare, with a big smile and a big laugh. Her fuchsia mane and tail were just starting to go grey, while her sea-green fur contrasted badly with the royal-blue uniform.

Junior had always liked her, though like most of the ponies in his life to that point, he knew very little about her. She started on his side, trotting along with her cart behind her, and worked all the way down to his house where she stopped and exchanged gossip with Junior’s mother for about five minutes. Then she was on her way. She finished their side, and Junior watched as she seemed to take longer, and longer at each house until she was simply standing at the end of Shiny’s drive. She stood there staring up at his friend’s place for almost ten minutes.

Junior scribbled a note in the margins: Stressy mail mare?

She finally began dragging herself down the walk.

Sweet Shine met her at the door and the mailmare seemed to relax noticeably, giving one of her trademark smiles as she unhooked her mail cart from her back. Shiny wasn’t returning the smile, but simply turned and trotted back into the depths of the house.

Miss Goodie wiped her hooves on the mat, then pushed the front door closed. A minute later, she was in the living room. Shiny’s mother looked up with a sleepy grin, her mane still in disarray. Goodie’s horn gleamed, and the curtains snapped shut.

In spite of his best efforts, Junior couldn’t get an eye on what happened next. He could see some kind of activity that might have been wrestling going on on the couch.

****

It was a half hour or so before there was any more action at the house across the street. Junior was mid-way through a game of solitare, his book propped across his knees, when the curtain was pulled open again. Miss Goodie was buttoning up the front of her uniform and brushing the kinks out of her mane while looking in the hall mirror. Shiny’s mother lay on the couch still, sprawled bonelessly on her back, a stupefied grin on her face.

Trotting to the door, the mail-mare smiled back at Shiny’s mother, then did something that looked very distinctly like blowing her a kiss. Junior blinked through the telescope, then shook his head. Maybe that part had been his imagination.

Soon thereafter, she was re-hitching her mail-wagon and was off down the road to her next delivery.

I’d been talking for long enough that my tongue was dry.

Swift seemed to be lost in thought as she trotted along beside me.

Once we were out of Saussurea’s cabin, my partner had insisted on full disclosure. Taxi shrugged and said she didn’t care one way or the other. Deflecting a curious pegasus was, as always, like pulling tail hairs, but after a few pointed questions poking holes in my story, I decided to start from the beginning.

As we’d approached the elevator, Taxi trotted up beside the Warden and began speaking to her in a low voice. Rather than taking us on to our destination, Warden turned off the path and started towards the little pond. I didn’t care to ask why we were going for a little walk, but eventually figured Taxi was giving me time to tell my tale and maybe putting a few more minutes between herself and what was sure to be an unpleasant reunion.

“Didn’t you know what was going on, sir?” Swift asked, suddenly, lifting her head.

“I was a foal. I didn’t have the benefit of having been raised with a grandmother who worked in a brothel for my sexual education,” I grunted as we plodded along behind the two mares, just out of earshot.

“I… well, okay, I understand that. Mom worked there, too and… Dad didn’t want me exposed to stuff, but Mom said I had better at least learn from safe ponies, so she had Miss Stella give me ‘the talk.' What I meant was...”

“Why didn’t I figure it out? There was nothing to figure. At that point, I hadn’t seen anything, remember? Heck, I’d never even had a mare-friend by that point. Shiny was the only filly who wasn’t ‘icky’.”

Swift’s nose twitched, as though on the scent of some important question.

“Alright. What about your parents? I mean, they must have known what was happening to Shiny, right?”

“The abuse? Yeah, I think they suspected, but... there’s more to it,” I explained, unhappily. “Father was... he was a great stallion, but he couldn’t do anything without proof. You have to understand just how bad things were. Sweet Shine would never have asked for help. She didn’t like getting help with homework, much less with her family. If me or my dad cornered her, she’d have lied. Stone Shine would have taken his family and vanished again before anything could be done.”

”She’d have lied?!” Swift gasped. One of Taxi’s ears flicked in our direction and my partner said, more quietly, “B-but why? And if he hit his wife...why didn’t she leave him?”

“A pony gets hurt bad enough, particularly by somebody they love, and they don’t tend to act especially rational. How would you have reacted if your father hit you?”

Swift’s mouth opened, then shut several times. “I... I don’t know. Dad never hit me…”

“Not even a spanking? Not even once?” I asked, surprised.

“Mom would have turned him over her knee if he ever did. I mostly got time-outs.”

“Well, I can tell you this, because I only GOT one spanking during my foalhood. The emotional pain hurts longer than your butt does. My father spanked me exactly once, and he hated it just as much as I did. I’m pretty sure he decided that wasn’t going to be his ‘go-to’ punishment after that. I know the old cliche about ‘hurting you as much as me’, but I sincerely believe it did hurt him badly.”

Swift stared at the dirt between her forehooves. “So… did it hurt… Stone Shine?”

I shook my head. “No. No, kid, I don’t think it did. Like he said. He dug things out of the dirt and if there was nothing worthwhile there, he ground it into dust. Believe me, I’m sure my father would have loved to arrest him just for what he suspected..but as I said, no proof. That and…” I paused, trying to think how to word what was coming next.

My partner tilted her head. “That and... what, sir?”

“I’ll be honest, I don’t know all of what happened in that house or in the years before Shiny moved in. I don’t know if anypony besides Stone Shine does. Sweets isn’t exactly a reliable source on the topic, but I put together a bit of it. Kid... What do you know about the early days of the Jewelers?”

Act 2, Chapter 25: Unearthed Facets

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 25: Unearthed Facets

There are lots of ugly histories in Equestria. The Crusades. The Reign of Sombra. The Fall of Nightmare Moon.

Thankfully, most of those histories are just that: History, thanks to a combination of fortitude and capital-scale arcanery. But they are the histories of Equestria's overt antagonists, which Equestria has a much easier time dealing with. By contrast, the Invisible Hoof of the Market cannot be lifted from the throat of Equestrian society by simple telekinesis.

The years after the Crusades were a time of rampant growth and reconstruction. With Princess Luna's return and balance restored, ponies changed and adapted at a rate unseen for centuries. The growing demand for recently-developed arcanotech devices created a booming industry for the mining, refining, and enchanting of gemstones. This new market lasted for years, helping reconstruct the economy of Detrot after the war. Barons of industry were built overnight and enormous wealth amassed by hewing magical gems out of the dirt to power new and fantastical inventions for which the public hungered.

This all changed because of an innocuous and sensible question.

History has lost the utterer and his or her exact words, but the sentiment was roughly as follows: "Hey, why are we paying these guys so much to drag gems out of the dirt? We’ve got electrical generators and magical conversion systems. Surely we could start recharging these gems, rather than just replacing them, right?"

Clever or not, this pony couldn’t have seen the monster he or she would create when they figured out how to cheaply reconstruct the magical power lattice inside a gemstone. Simply put, it meant a gemstone could be repeatedly charged for years before needing replacement. This was a wonderful thing for the arcanelectric device manufacturer, the designer, and the consumer. It was not so wonderful for the miners and refiners, who soon found themselves out of work with their families starving.

When your focus is on your next meal, the consequences of your most drastic steps to secure it will be a distant blur until you're fed.

-The Scholar

Junior’s father was angry. His son knew it the second he came in the door. He didn’t know why he was angry or what he was angry about. Hard Boiled Senior wasn’t the kind of pony to stomp around and shout when he was furious, but he definitely projected an aura of tension.

First things first, upon hearing his son was sick, he’d marched right up the stairs with a glass of water and plunked himself down beside Junior’s bed, ruffled his child’s mane, and set to pleasant conversation. This made Junior feel doubly guilty that he wasn’t actually ill, but he needed an excuse to ask his dad some questions and illness would be as good an excuse as any.

Hard Boiled Senior looked much like an upscaled version of his son, with a slightly rounded frame and muscles his boy could only envy. His black mane had chunks of gray, and he hadn’t taken off his uniform yet, so he still looked very much the officer of the beat.

Junior adored him, and it made him all the more worried to see him angry.

“-and then, Mom made me soup again. That was pretty much it, really. The teacher said I can retake the test when I get back.”

“Ahhh, good to hear,” his father said, with a smile that didn’t really find his eyes. He stared off into the distance for a second, then shook himself.

“Dad… are you okay?”

His father looked up at Junior as the colt propped up in the cushions, his hot-sauce bottle still under his pillow and his nose running profusely.

“Mmm… never can hide it from you when I’m not,” his father sighed. “Truth? I can’t tell you the whole, but I will say something fairly awful happened today. The governor was visiting. His daughter… died, here in Detrot.”

Junior rubbed his neck, then he sat up straighter. “That’s… I mean, that’s bad, but… you work with dead ponies a lot, right? Usually, that kind of thing doesn’t make you mad.”

Hard Boiled Senior shut his eyes. He was still seeing the look on the girl’s face. Her eyes bulged with fear, though she’d been dead for hours by the time what was left of her body was found. He hadn’t needed to read the coroner’s report for cause of death.

That was often the problem with having a perceptive child. He’d sworn to himself, before his son was born, that he’d tell him the truth whenever he could. His own father had been unable to tell him lots of important things and he didn’t want to keep that cycle going by keeping secrets from Junior.

“She… died badly, son. Very badly. Some bad ponies wanted to hurt the governor, so they hurt his daughter instead. One day, if you have foals, you’ll understand just what it means to want to protect somepony with all your heart. When you fail to protect them, when you fail to be the best you can be for them, or when they’re stolen from you… it’s difficult not to be angry.”

Junior slowly reached over and put one leg around his father’s neck.

Hard Boiled Senior was caring, but he wasn’t big on hugs. Still, when it mattered, they were always there. He slid his forelegs around his son and held him to his chest for a long moment.

When they parted, the elder stallion seemed noticeably calmer.

“Do… do you have a suspect, Dad?” Junior asked.

Hard Boiled Senior settled back on the little chair and folded his forelegs. “I suppose that’s the problem. We have plenty. There are many groups in Detrot, lately, with a bone to pick with the governor. Unfortunately, the pony or ponies that committed this act were very careful. Strong as a minotaur and clever.”

Junior pursed his lips to one side. “Maybe, when Shiny isn’t grounded anymore, we can ask her to look at things?”

The stallion chuckled, unclipping his badge from his chest and laying it on the bedside table.

It’d been about a year before when Sweet Shine first showed a talent for police work. She’d simply looked at the mayoral candidate of the year on television during a broadcast about the tragic death of his wife and declared, in the middle of dinner, that he’d murdered her. Two weeks later, the truth came out.

Since then, Hard Boiled Senior had, often reluctantly, made use of the little filly’s burgeoning talent. He wondered what cutie-mark she might have that would give her such insight into the minds of murderers and monsters, but she didn’t seem to be one herself, so he fought his guilty conscience and, now and then, brought home a casefile.

“We’ll see. You just concentrate on getting better.”

A heavenly scent chose that moment to waft into the room and further unpleasantness was preempted by watering mouths.

“I think dinner might be ready!”

****

Stone Shine had returned home late, looking like a thundercloud was hanging over his head. Shiny was waiting for him in the front hallway, sitting with her head low and one hoof up. He draped a thick jacket covered in something that looked like coal dust over her head, then trotted into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a beer bottle in his teeth. He still had the strange kerchief around his neck. Glancing down as he collapsed onto the couch, Stone Shine tore it off and stuffed it into the garbage can at the end of the sofa.

Junior adjusted his telescope, watching his friend closely from across the street. She’d put away the coat, then she returned to her father’s side, sitting patiently on the carpet beside his hooves. Stone Shine picked up the television remote and turned it on, then sat back with one hoof behind his neck. He patted the couch beside him and Sweet Shine leapt up onto it, resting her chin on his leg.

Reaching down, he very gently patted the top of her head. Junior couldn’t help but be reminded of a pet owner stroking a beloved animal, though for some reason that image disturbed him.

Junior wondered where Shiny’s mother was. He’d lost track of her since dinner and she wasn’t in the living room. His notepad lay beside his hoof and he rolled his pencil back and forth between his teeth, examining the scene across the way.

He could see tension in his friend’s shoulders, but she was giving her father a tentative smile. Stone Shine was tipping back his beer in great, gulping swallows.

All at once, he spat his beer out and leaned forward, eyes wide. His daughter, surprised, pitched onto the floor and Junior thought he saw her cry out. She clutched at her side, rear legs kicking feebly as she lay there in a heap on the carpet. Her father paid her no mind, his entire attention focused on whatever was going on on screen.

He leapt to his hooves, seemed to shout something and gestured violently towards the hallway. Shiny scrambled upright, limping out of the room as Stone Shine grabbed the curtains in his teeth and slammed them shut.

****

Nothing happened for the next hour that Junior could see, despite sitting in rapt attention the whole time. His father came up again and kissed him goodnight, then his mother brought him a plate of cookies for dessert. Putting her hoof on his forehead, she pronounced his ‘fever’ broken and said he could take one more day off from school just to make sure he was alright.

Thankfully, the next day was the end of the week, and he had the whole weekend ahead of him to do...whatever it was he was doing. He still wasn’t entirely sure.

Wiping the last crumbs of his dessert from his blanket, he reached over and spun his telescope on its stand. He sighed.

“What am I doing?” he asked himself, “Watching the filly across the street like some kind of stalker? Okay, sure, we’ve been friends for a couple of years and her parents are kinda… total weirdos...”

That sense that something was very wrong wouldn’t leave him alone, no matter how he tried to push it out of his brain.

Rolling out of bed, he tossed on an extra pillow and several stuffed animals onto the bed, pushing them underneath his blanket. He began packing his saddle-bags, stuffing the walkie-talkies in with the extra power gems, his chess set, one of the cookies from dessert, and a box of crackers he’d squirreled away for his plan. Then he climbed into bed, shut off the lights, and pretended to sleep.

****

It took three false starts before he was absolutely certain his mother and father were actually asleep. His mother came in to check on him under pretense of getting a glass of water, then his father needed to check his temperature again, and finally, his mom returned to give him a kiss goodnight.

At last, he managed to crawl down the stairs, avoiding the creak in the third from the top and the groan in the bottom one with nimble little bounces. He headed for the back door through the kitchen, gingerly lifting the key out of the pot beside the toaster and fitting it into the lock, then making a mental note to re-lock it on the way back.

He crept across the street, checking Shiny’s house for movement every few steps. There was none. He eased up onto the curb, then snuck into the alley, passed Stone Shine’s wagon and around the side of the house to the vent.

Sliding onto his belly, he whispered, “Shiny! Shiny, you down there?”

His friend’s eyes appeared at the grate. “You don’t have to whisper. Dad sleeps like a rock and Mom’s had her medication.”

“Oh… um, alright,” he said, sheepishly. “Here, I brought you a cookie from dinner.”

“Ooh, nice! I didn’t get anything tonight because Dad had some kind of really big freak-out about something on the news,” she replied as he sifted through his saddle-bags, then brought out the cookie and fed it between the slat. Sweet Shine devoured it immediately. “Mmm, yum.”

“I… ugh… I’m worried about you. You do know how weird it is that your Dad has you staying in the basement, right?”

Shiny shrugged and sat back on her cot. “I... don’t… want to talk about it. Could we just play some checkers or something?”

She was still wearing that funny collar with the weight on it. Now that he could see it closer, it appeared to just be a heavy, iron ball with a ring in the top. The fur around the strap seemed to be puffy and red, like it’d been rubbed raw.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the collar.

“Is tonight just going to be ‘Ask Sweet Shine Questions’ night?” Shiny glanced down, then covered it with one hoof. “It’s mine. Daddy gave it to me, because I’m his girl and he wants me to be strong.”

“That’s freaky, Shiny.”

“Yeah, well, it’s my dad and my life, and I do what I’m told, unlike some ponies I know. Are you gonna insult that, too?”

“Sorry…”

His friend’s ears fluttered and she shook her head. “It’s alright. I’m sorry, too. I’m just...not feeling great. I’m really hungry.”

“Oh! Here!” He retrieved the walkie-talkies and crackers, pushing them through along with a set of power gems. “So we can talk during the day. I’m faking sick tomorrow. I need a couple extra days to study for the science test.”

His friend stared at the device for a second, then pressed the ‘talk’ button. The speaker on Junior’s squawked. He quickly turned the volume down to a more manageable level.

“Thanks. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go out again. After my chores are done, I usually just sit down here and wait for Him to be home so I can come out.”

“Do you know what he freaked out about? I mean-”

Shiny cut him off. “Does it matter?”

“Errr… I guess not. Alright, I brought my chess set. We’re going two out of three this time and I read one of those books my dad keeps about this game. I am so going to beat you this time!”

****

Despite the late night, Junior was up bright and early the next morning, watching Shiny’s house. The early morning events played out pretty much the same way they had the day before, with one exception.

An hour before noon, a car arrived on their street.

Cars weren’t a terribly common occurrence, much less big black ones with ponies in suits. Two gentlecolts, one tall and thin, the other short and thin, both wearing sharp suits. They trotted up to the front and knocked on the door.

Shiny answered. Her mother was still asleep.

The two ponies smiled as they saw her, but those smiles gradually vanished as whatever conversation they were having went on. About ten minutes later, they’d gone again.

It was after lunch before Shiny managed to actually get on the walkie-talkie. Junior had watched through the telescope as she took out the garbage, dusted the steps, washed the dishes, and vacuumed the floor.

“What was that about?” Junior asked, holding down the ‘talk’ button.

“What?” his friend asked.

“Those stallions in the suits that came to your place today. They looked like something out of a comic book!”

“Oh… um… they just wanted to know where my Dad was yesterday. I told them he was here. He says the union ponies are upsetting some ‘powerful interests’ with what they’re doing to change things for the… uh… pro… p-prola… pro-le-terry-at, whatever that is. He said that they might bother us, so I have to always say he was there if somepony comes around asking.”

“Huh. Sure. My dad came in last night and was acting funny, too. He told me about this case with the governor’s daughter. She was murdered…”

Shiny’s voice dropped off for a second, like she was moving around, then it was back. “My dad was watching that report on the news, too. I don’t know. It’d freak me out if somepony I talked to earlier that day had a family member killed.”

Junior laid his head on his pillow, tracing patterns on the ceiling with his eyes.

“I just can’t wait for stuff to get back to normal,” he said, deciding a change of subject was in order since he didn’t really know where to go from there. “I miss chasing geese and stuff. You ever wonder what life would be like if you were a Princess or a Lady, far from here?”

"All the time..." Shiny replied, softly.

“But then I wouldn’t have you to talk to while I’m faking being sick, would I?”

They shared a good laugh and Junior shut his eyes, letting the sunlight play on his face.

****

Stone Shine wasn’t a happy pony when he came in that night. He stomped into the house and Shiny hastily hid Junior’s walkie-talkie, cutting off the conversation they’d been having about which Wonderbolt was more awesome. She hadn’t thought, however, to turn off the lock on the walkie-talkie’s ‘send’ button.

Junior listened to a muffled yell for attention, followed by hoofsteps dashing up the stairs and a door slamming. Not long after, somepony sounded like they were wrestling with a piece of furniture that was definitely a little too much for them. The soft squeaks and whimpers marked it as Sweet Shine doing the lifting.

At last, it thumped into place. There was another shout, and again, retreating hooves.

The colt sighed, scratching at his jaw. He couldn’t talk to Sweet Shine while she had the send button pressed, so he just turned the volume down. He didn’t know how long the batteries would last, but she’d switched in a fresh pair not more than an hour or two ago, so he was pretty sure they’d be okay. If this went on much longer, though, he’d end up having to spend that week’s pocket money on more.

He expected Shiny to return at any moment, but she didn’t. All he could hear was water moving through the pipes and the furnace grumbling. How his friend had managed to sleep with all that he’d never know.

Junior picked up his book and went back to reading, the walkie-talkie tucked under his pillow.

****

A half hour later, there was movement at the Shine house. Three taxi wagons, each drawn by a pony at least as large as Stone Shine himself, pulled up out front. Junior snatched up his telescope and tried to get a bead on them.

Two stallions and a mare clambered out of the cabs, paid the cabbies, and started for the door of the Shine residence. Every one of them was absolutely enormous. Muscles seemed to bulge from every inch of their bodies and each had the stooped shoulders of a hard worker. Junior couldn’t be sure, but he was fairly certain the mare’s cutie-mark was some kind of cart with wheels. She stopped on the stairs, turning to glance up and down the road.

Her eyes stopped on his house. She looked up.

Junior ducked back out of sight.

He waited, his breathing heavy, wondering why he was so nervous about being seen. They were just guests, right? Guests at the Shine residence. He’d probably seen guests over there plenty of times, hadn’t he?

Now he thought of it, not once in two years had he seen anypony besides Stone, Shiny, Miss Goodie, or Sweet Shine’s mother entering or leaving that house. Odd. He was usually more observant than that. It wasn’t really possible that they’d never had a guest, was it? After all, his mom and dad had guests every other week.

Slowly, he edged out, peering down onto the street. The mare was gone, along with the rest of her little convoy.

Something rattled behind him, and hoofsteps sounded like they were coming up the stairs. He dove for the bed, tossing the blankets over himself, waiting for his mother to open the door.

Some seconds later, he was still waiting.

It was then that he realized the sounds were coming from his walkie-talkie. Shoving both hooves under the pillow, he pulled it out and was about to turn the volume down, when he heard a voice. It sounded gravelly, but distinctly feminine.

“Stone… what in Celestia’s name would you call a meeting here for?”

The next voice was definitely Shiny’s father, but he sounded very strange. Articulate. Chilly. His accent was different.

“I am taking my exit vector. You hired me to give your little revolution a kick in the pants, and it’s had its kick. Two years worth of this is long enough. My daughter has been infected by this… city. I will be moving on. I make a point of telling clients when a job is finished in person. It prevents misunderstandings.”

“We hired you to intimidate some ponies! We didn’t hire you to do what you did to that poor-”

“You hired me to achieve a goal. I expect my payment. You can send it to my accounts at-”

One of the males interrupted, “The only goal you’ve achieved is making us all wanted ponies!”

Stone Shine’s reply was soft, but it reminded Junior of the rock he’d watched the large stallion crush into dust the day before. “Your revolution needed backers. It needed the fear and cooperation of powerful interests. Now, you have both. I will need to assume a new identity very soon. I have been… compromised.”

“But the mines are still dying!” another voice protested.

“The mines are dead,” Stone said, firmly. “Your new connections in the underground will help you achieve your other goals. You paid me to rebuild the union’s power base. It is rebuilt. Nopony in this city will dare speak against you and the law firm will keep all of you from facing jail time for the actions associated with your group.”

“This… this isn’t what we wanted…” the mare stammered.

“Then you should have been more specific when we were establishing our contract. You were not my only customers in this enterprise.”

There was silence on the other end of the walkie-talkie.

“Why did you bring us here?” one of the stallions asked, cautiously.

“As I said. I like to tell clients in person that a job is finished,” Stone Shine replied. “This one is finished. I do not like to operate in these haphazard conditions.”

“You’re being paid, aren’t you?” the mare growled.

“I only took this ridiculous job because the payment was within the accepted risk curves. That is no longer the case. Altering city records was not easy and the prostitute provided as my ‘wife’ for this venture has been in a state of collapse since day one. Amongst other things, she is a lesbian. That has proven very inconvenient for my cover. She did not take well to any of the mind alteration spells, and my daughter’s memories required significant reformation.”

“Nopony asked you to bring your child into this!” the mare snapped.

“She is mine and I will do with her as I please. However, she has been… damaged… by this city. Her training is incomplete and this ‘drunken lout’ facade has been expensive to maintain. My patience is at an end and she has fallen behind. I will have to alter her memories again once we’ve left this place and that is expensive. Liquidation and disposal of the mother figure will be extremely expensive, especially if we want to make sure no questions get asked. Thus, you will pay me, or I will kill all of you and your loved ones. Your ‘movement’ will die with you. Is that simple enough?”

Another very protracted silence.

Junior stared at his walkie-talkie, wondering just what it was he’d stumbled into.

“I’ll… make sure the money is where it should be.”

“Very good. Go three blocks in opposite directions to the convenience stores there. Take separate cabs. This building is being watched.”

“What?!” the mare squeaked.

“I will be gone tomorrow, as will this structure and perhaps a large swath of this neighborhood. Along with that will go any evidence of our association. Your lawyers will eliminate any culpability you may have and cover my tracks. I have dealt with them before and their influence is vast.”

“Wha… What are we supposed to do?” one of the stallions stuttered.

Stone Shine’s chair scraped back. “You have a powerful syndicate of willing, desperate laborers who need money to feed their foals and, now, have no choice but to follow you or perish when the law comes looking for a scapegoat for the acts I and my associates have committed. May I recommend extortion? If you find that not to your taste, prostitution is an excellent option. There are also several new recreational chemicals which -- I have on good authority -- will soon be illegal. Early investment in that market will be rewarded.”

The four ponies muttered back and forth between themselves. Stone Shine let it go on for a moment, then added, “Leave now. You won’t see me again."

Junior waited for somepony to issue some kind of objection, but he didn’t know what they could say to that.

All of the sets of hooves soon retreated and the door slammed.

Soon afterwards, he heard it open again and a much smaller set of hoofsteps came trotting down.

Sweet Shine shuffled back, then picked up the walkie-talkie, unlocking the receive button. “Hardy? You there?”

Junior stared at the speaker. Slowly, it dropped from his hooves and landed on the bedspread.

He… had to tell his dad. He knew he had to tell his dad. That was the only option, wasn’t it?

Tell his dad he’d faked being sick and snuck a walkie-talkie to the girl trapped in a basement across the street whose father was apparently some kind of criminal mastermind -- instead of just a drunk, surly miner-- and was going to kill his ‘wife’ and brainwash his daughter with magic.

Riiight… said a voice in his head. What else was there? Tell Shiny her dad had erased her memories of her real mother? That he was...training her to be...something? He wouldn’t blame her if she never talked to him again.

He shoved the covers back and ran for the bathroom.

****

After peeing, vomiting, and otherwise expelling every optional solid or fluid in his body, Junior stood there staring at himself in the mirror.

He felt so small.

He looked so small.

His mom called him a ‘late bloomer’. She wasn’t kidding. He didn’t even have his cutie-mark yet and he still had most of his baby-fat. His muscles were puny. He couldn’t even hold his bat in his teeth without dropping it on every swing.

Downstairs, his mother was doing something that involved a great deal of hammering. It might have been dinner or it might have been building a chair. His dad wasn’t home yet. He could tell his Mom and maybe she’d be able to help. She could call his dad and then they could all go over there and…

Again, he was stuck with the unfortunate question. And then what?

Tomorrow, his only friend in the world would be gone. Tomorrow, he’d have lost her. Tomorrow, he’d be alone again and, if what Stone Shine said was right, their house would be gone. Maybe even the neighborhood.

It was too much for a little pony.

His rear legs gave out and he slumped onto the bathroom floor. Inhaling slowly, he put one hoof over his eyes.

Okay, so, Mom and Dad… might believe me. So, the police search Sweet Shine’s house… for reasons? They don’t just call me a stupid, imaginative little foal and walk away. Best case scenario? They find something terrible, Sweet Shine goes to an orphanage or something, and I never see her again. Worst case? They find nothing and he vanishes next week instead of this one… maybe after killing me and my whole family just to be sure.

Trotting back into his room, he put his hooves up on his window sill.

The mare from before was on her way up the street and her companions were already out of sight.

Shutting his eyes, he inhaled nice and slow, then looked up at the sky. The stars were just starting to come out. Somewhere, Princess Luna would be raising the moon real soon. He wished he could talk to her just then. She’d probably know just what to do.

It felt so wrong. So awful. So mean. How could anypony just tear a little filly away from her friends? How could they do that stuff to her mind? Shiny was always so smart and tried to work really hard and what if that was just the magic spells messing with her memories so she only thought that was what she was really like?

It felt so… so out of balance.

Junior realized he’d been holding his breath. His lungs burned. He gasped in a lungful of air, but the burn didn’t go away. Instead, it spread. His whole body felt like it was vibrating. His eyes shot to Sweet Shine’s house.

Something felt wrong. More wrong. Something felt like the sky was about to fall and the pigs to start flying.

His whole body shook with the sensation of it. He felt fire, boiling up in his guts, and it came to him that it wasn’t fire.

He was afraid… and something else.

He was angry.

He’d never been angry and afraid at the same time. One or the other, but never both together.

Above all else, a notion began to take hold. It felt like it’d come out of nowhere. He couldn’t really source it. He just knew he had to be there for Shiny. He knew, if he wasn’t there now, something in the world would always be out of balance.

Leaping off the bed, he yanked his bat from beside the bedside table and charged down the stairs, the wooden club clenched in his mouth.

His mother was standing in the kitchen, washing radishes for dinner, and she let out a frightened yelp as he hit the wall at the bottom of the stairs, then pounded past her.

“Junior!” was all she had time to shout, before he yanked open the front door, bucking it shut behind himself so hard one of the glass panes shattered. He didn’t stop to look at the damage.

His hooves hit the pavement as he rushed down the front walk, his eyes on Shiny’s house. If there’d been a wagon coming just then, he could have been paste, but it didn’t matter. He knew where he needed to be and the world had better darn well get out of the way.

Act 2, Chapter 26: Daddy

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 26: Daddy

Lots of magic influences emotion. One of Equestria's princesses specializes in magic of the heart. It is possible to check out books with emotionally manipulative alchemical recipes with nothing more than a library card. While malicious use of emotional magic (e.g. Discord prior to 3 L.R.) is appropriately punished, well-intentioned abuse of it is not considered more serious than a foalhood misdemeanor. It is not widely considered strange, unusual, or worrisome that anypony has this kind of power over the free will of other ponies.

And yet, what moral questions fail to arise in the presence of emotional magic seem to leap to everypony's lips when magic alters thought or memory.

The wariness here is hardly unwarranted.

Memory alteration is very much like surgery. It is invasive. It is messy. It leaves scars. It is unpleasant to watch. And done incompetently or haphazardly, the results can be utterly horrific. Memories, like organs, are connected to one another, linked by an intricate web of emotional tissues and associative logical capillaries. To hack them out willy-nilly and replace them with substitutes without a lot of careful sewing will leave a barely functional drooling patchwork mess.

Unlike surgery, however, pony memory alteration is not near so advanced. The only positive use ponies have managed to discover for it has been the excision of memories and events so traumatic as to be utterly crippling to the individual pony, an act akin to the amputation of a gangrenous limb. There has been research into attempting to install additional memories in order to impart skills or information, but this has presented difficulties, again because of the interconnectedness of memories. You try to copy somepony's memory of attending a major arcane conference, you'll also copy thoughts about the trial separation they were fretting about and the cute flank of the pony in the next row, and if you connect things wrong you'll wind up with a pony unable to think about elementary thaumic particles without getting both an aneurysm and an erection.

None of this stops some ponies from trying substantial alterations, however, often for substantially less noble ends.

-The Scholar

Good ponies do bad things. Bad ponies do good things. In the end, we’re all just ponies. Those are the facts.

Every now and then, something has to come along to balance the scales.

****

Junior leapt up the stairs of Shiny’s house and was reaching for the doorknob before he stopped. His brain had finally caught up with whatever high powered intuitive process was driving his hooves and decided it needed to kibitz before he threw himself into a crazy pony’s house at top speed.

What am I doing? he asked himself for the sixth or seventh time that day.

The answer was obvious and sitting right there waiting for him, like it had been every day since the day he was born.

He was going to set things right.

Taking a deep breath, he reached for the handle again, then shook his head..

No sense in doing this like a dummy, though...

Edging sideways, he peered in around the edge of the floral print curtains. He got a good look at the living room. It was surprisingly spartan. Though he’d never been over, he expected some concessions to personal taste, but there weren’t any pictures on the walls. The sofa seemed to be a thrift store purchase and the only picture that was there had a smiling stallion Hardy didn't recognize with his leg wrapped around his equally grinning marefriend against a backdrop of flowers and windmills. A stock photo, then; the one that came with the frame.

Looking down, he froze. Something was laying in front of the sofa… No, it was somepony.

Junior couldn’t see much of her, but some of her yellow fur was matted and sweaty. She wasn’t moving. For a moment, he thought it might be Shiny, but the shape was too big. Her ‘mother,' then. In the gathering evening, the light from the sun cast everything in a dim orange

Pressing his ear to the window, he listened as hard as he could.

Somewhere, far off, he could hear a noise. It sounded like a drum, or maybe clapping hooves, except they were clapping really slowly. There was also a muffled squeak that followed every clap. It was hard to tell just what he was hearing.

Putting his hoof up on the door handle, he breathed in, clutched his baseball bat a little tighter, and worked it open, careful to cushion the click. He didn’t know what he’d have done if it were locked, but then, most ponies in his neighborhood felt no need to lock their houses. It was a safe place to live.

Pushing open the door, he stepped over the threshold, ready to run or do battle or...something. He wasn’t sure. He stood there, looking over his shoulder at his house across the street.

His mother was still inside, jerking at the door handle. He must have broken the latch when he kicked it. She raised her head and frowned at him.

Dove Tail opened her mouth to call to him, but he gave her a little shake of the head and somehow, in that special way only mothers can, she understood something was wrong. She went immediately back to hauling at the door knob with renewed vigor, then wheeled and ran for the back door.

Junior sighed and shook his head. He should wait. He knew he should wait.

The force drawing him in was less patient than his good sense.

He stepped over the threshold and gently nosed the door shut behind himself.

He pressed himself to the wall beside the living room, easing out with as soft a clop as he could make. It wasn’t easy to be stealthy on hard-wood floors. Hooves aren’t meant for sneaking.

The walls were painted a cheerful, if slightly faded green, with not a speck of dust in any corner. His eyes darted over the couch, then the television, which was still showing one of those soap operas his mother liked to watch now and then when she thought nopony was around.

The lump on the floor still hadn’t moved.

Junior cocked an ear. He could still hear that slow clap sound, a little louder, along with the soft squeak, but it was no more identifiable than it had been outside. Moving deeper into the house, he eased around the edge of the living room, trying to get a look at the poor pony who’d been pretending to be Shiny’s mom. Her face was half obscured by a bottle leaning across it. Something about her seemed a little bit... strange. It took him a moment to realize exactly what.

Her sides weren’t moving.

She wasn’t breathing.

His eyes widened and he darted forward on tip-toe, gently pushing the bottle off of her face.

He immediately wished he hadn’t. Under her fur, her face was blue. Her tongue protruded from one side of her muzzle. Now that he was close, he could see the thin wire wrapped around her neck, sawing into her throat. It looked like a tiny snake, biting off the circulation.

Her eyes were wide and blank. She was, unquestionably, dead.

How? How had it happened so fast? She’d been alive that morning!

His stomach roiled and he scrambled over to the sofa, burying his face between the cushions so he could vomit as quietly as possible. It was disgusting, and his throat hurt. Junior had never seen a dead pony before, and he took an instant to hunt around inside his head for his fear. Why wasn’t he running home? Why wasn’t he waiting on his mother?

Sweet Shine needed him.

Again, that thought swam up from the darkness and any fear he’d felt died immediately.

He wiped his muzzle on the couch cushion, glancing back at the dead mare. His stomach lurched, but he shook it off. He could be scared later. He’d no doubt that he was going to sleep real poorly that night and maybe for a few hundred nights after, but his purpose remained; a shining beacon for him to follow.

Thankfully, the hallway was carpeted, so sneaking was considerably easier.

He moved down the hall, feeling like he was on autopilot. A smart part of him didn’t want to know what those sounds were. That bit knew, somehow, he wouldn’t be a happier colt if he found out.

There were six rooms arrayed on either side of the hall, five with their doors open. The one at the far end was shut; the noises were coming from there.

The walls were just as bare as the living room; no pictures of family, no furniture nothing to distinguish the house from any one of the show-models on their street. It felt like he was walking through some kind of doll house, perfectly assembled to look bland and unassuming. His mind couldn’t really process the dead pony in the living room, though every few steps he had to stop and swallow a muzzle full of bile.

Slowly, the sounds resolved into soft weeping, followed every few seconds by another crack and a shriek as something landed against something else.

Junior gently turned the doorknob, hoping, praying that it had all just been some kind of fever dream induced by too much hot sauce and too many bowls of his mother’s soup. He opened the door just an inch, pressing his eye to the crack, and if he’d had anything left in his whole body it would have left via the nearest exit just then. As it was, his sides heaved and he staggered back, collapsing on the rug. The door swung slowly open.

Stone Shine’s back was to him, and Sweet Shine lay face down across a low cot. The enormous stallion towered over her, his fierce eyes blazing with fury. Clenched between his teeth, was a long metal rod or crop.

For her part, Shiny just lay there on her side on the bedsheets, her little frame shaking with agony. Ugly red stripes cut across her sides, back, and even face. The weight on her collar seemed much larger, for some reason, than it had the day before. Junior’s eyes widened as he saw her flanks.

They’d been beaten so vigorously the yellow fur was stained orange and brown by freely flowing blood, but that wasn’t what drew his attention, or at least, was secondary.

Sweet Shine’s cutie-mark had appeared. It was a dark, staring eye with a dove of some kind taking flight, rather than a pupil. A nasty slash ran right across the middle of it.

Stone Shine spat his crop out and snarled at his daughter, “The Girl does not question! The Girl does not demand! The Girl does not beg! The Girl obeys!”

Shiny just shook, her tail and hooves twitching spasmodically. She was past crying, although tears ran down her nose and dripped onto the bed-spread. Her eyes were glazed and was puffy and swollen, the eyelid bleeding.

Leaning forward, the enormous, enraged stallion put one hoof on the side of her head, pressing it into the bedspread and shouted, “Say it!”

The filly’s body jerked as he slowly applied pressure, her neck muscles creeking. “...spa...tha…” she grunted, though it might just have been the air leaving her lungs.

“Say it!” Stone thundered.

Set it right.

The voice was somewhere far off, a whisper in the recesses of his mind.

How? he asked.

Come on, dummy! You’ve got a bat!

Oh...

Sweet Shine’s face was contorted with pain, but it wasn’t until her jaw popped that she started to struggle against the pressure on her head. It wasn’t like a child fighting an adult. It was the panicked flailing of an animal feeling death oncoming. Stone Shine’s weight was inexorable, crushing the little filly’s skull.

Junior hefted his bat, feeling its weight.

‘Now or never!

He could have died. Stone Shine might have seen him just then, grabbed his bat, snapped his neck, and that would have been the end of Hard Boiled Junior. Later on, of a quiet evening, he’d think about that possibility and it would bring a smile to his face.

He could have died.

He didn’t.

Stone Shine must have caught the movement in a reflection on an empty picture frame sitting on the bed-side table. He started to turn, just as Junior’s first swing caught him squarely across the side of the head.

It was a mighty swing, a swing to fell oaks and manticores.

It didn’t fell Stone Shine.

It gave him a good rattle, though.

The stallion dropped the crop, stumbling sideways off the bed into the wall. Shiny gasped as the pressure came off her head, but Junior didn’t have time to check on her. He was amazed to find his bat still in his jaws. He’d never actually swung it quite that hard, and he’d managed to hold onto it!

Wild thoughts were swirling around in the back of his head, but the one that crystallized out of the fog was:

He hurt your friend! Hit him again!

Stone was recovering, his dark eyes not quite focusing as he searched for his attacker, when Junior’s second shot connected with his front knees. The power of the hit finally tore the bat out of the colt’s mouth. It skittered off under the bed. Stone staggered, pitching forward onto his face as the boy scrambled back out of the way.

For a moment, there was total silence in the tiny bedroom. Junior stared at the stallion he’d managed to bring down. By all rights, he should go get the bat and give him a few more whacks for good measure, but he was unconscious and Shiny was injured. That quickly rearranged Junior’s priorities.

Hopping up onto the bed, Junior gently nosed at his friend’s side. Her eyes were shut and he thought she must have passed out. Up close, she was even more of a mess. She’d wet herself at some point, and her canary yellow fur was so bloody it stuck up in all different directions. He shut his eyes and braced himself. He knew it was going to hurt. There was no way it wasn’t going to. He just prayed she was as comatose as she looked.

Junior jammed his nose under her side and tried to will his hearing to shut off.

It didn’t help.

Shiny screamed as Junior forced his head under her little body, hefting her over his shoulders. She was lighter than he thought she should be, but he just tried to focus on the lifting. He wasn’t a big pony, although he was still an earth pony and that helped. The stupid collar was throwing off the weight distribution, so it took an extra second to find a balance. He didn’t have time to figure out how to get it off of her.

Shiny didn’t have another shriek in her. She slumped, panting heavily, as he crawled off the bed. Junior’s mother had hammered into his head how he wasn’t supposed to move an injured animal or pony, but he didn’t have a choice. Stone Shine was coming around.

The big stallion’s left eye opened, slowly spinning in its socket until it centered on the two foals. He started to rise, but his forelegs weren’t entirely cooperating.

Junior bolted, his hooves scrabbling at the hardwood floor. Unfortunately, he had to pass Stone Shine, who reached out to catch the little interloper and smash him into a red goo. Junior dodged the tree-trunk sized leg, barely avoiding the edge of the door. That motion almost ended it for the colt and filly as he felt Shiny begin to slide off to one side, but he hoisted her higher on his back. His muscles ached, but he knew he had to keep going.

Behind him, he heard a bellow of rage as Stone Shine managed to stand. The blow to his knees slowed him, but a raging minotaur probably wouldn’t have stopped him completely. Junior was regretting not taking the time to lay the big meanie out more permanently.

In the hallway, he got some traction on the carpet and could finally do a sort of stumbling gallop. His breath was coming in stricken gasps as he rounded the corner into the living room, sparing only a glance for Shiny’s dead ‘mother,' before realizing he had a problem.

With Sweet Shine on his back, he couldn’t reach the front door’s handle with his teeth. If he tried, he’d tip her off.

That was when, like an angel out of the evening light, his mother’s face appeared. Dove Tail was just outside, peering in through the window in the door and down at Junior. Her eyes widened at the sight of the bloody filly draped over him and she slammed the door open with one mighty kick.

“J-junior! What happened?!” she shouted, but he couldn’t answer. He just loped passed her, desperate to be out in the open air again.

It was then that Stone Shine rounded the corner.

He didn’t resemble a stallion anymore, so much as a living engine of anger. His face was swollen across one side, and several teeth were missing. His front knees had started to swell, making the joints move poorly. He charged towards Dove-Tail, who had only an instant to look at the condition of her foal and his friend, before making a snap decision.

Stone Shine only had eyes for his stolen property as he moved to bash Junior’s mother out of the way, recapture his daughter, and end that impudent little colt. Two seconds later, the only thing he had eyes for was Dove Tail’s mighty rear hooves.

His head snapped back, and all forward momentum ceased.

A deathly silence fell over everything. Even the birds seemed to stop, holding their songs to see what might happen.

The stallion glared at Junior’s mother, spit out five or six more teeth, along with a good sized piece of his tongue, then reached towards his daughter. Then, like a fresh cut tree, he collapsed at Dove Tail’s hooves, blood gushing from his mouth in a hot, sticky torrent.

Junior felt movement on his back. He lifted one ear, turning to look at his friend.

Shiny lifted one hoof, reaching out towards her father.

“D-Daddy?” she whispered, her voice broken from screaming. “Daddy?!”

The colt had no idea what was going on, but he knew he had to get her away from there. She began to struggle, trying to climb off of his back, her rear hooves flailing as she fought to get to her father.

“Daaaaddddyyyy!”

****

Shiny and Junior lay together on a double-wide hospital bed. The bandages around the filly’s middle and the cast on her foreleg made cuddling difficult, but they managed to at least maintain a little contact, toe to toe. The doctors had a momentary discussion of separating them, during which a gun was nearly pulled and Hard Boiled Senior had to be talked down by his wife.

After that, the nurses just wheeled in a bigger bed.

The hours had seemed like a whirlwind of activity, but mostly for Shiny and Junior, it’d been quietly laying together while the hospital staff worked them over with horn, bandage, and wash-cloth. Junior’s parents stayed with the children as long as they could, but, at last, the staff insisted they go out to the waiting room so they weren’t underhoof.

Junior only managed to pick up bits and pieces of what’d happened after they got home and the ambulance was called. The police had arrived first, with Hard Boiled Senior in the lead. They’d searched Stone Shine’s house and hauled him away to another hospital, cuffed and manacled, though they were none-too-gentle with him after one good look at what he’d done to Shiny and the dead prostitute. Then they’d wanted to ask Junior what happened, and his mother put her hoof down, until her husband gently led her away and asked his son if he would mind telling him.

Junior described everything, in as great a detail as he could, to his gently frowning father. Then the tears came. He cried and held his dad, while Shiny hung around his middle, for what seemed like ages.

Sweet Shine refused to speak, except to wail whenever Junior was more than a couple of hoof-lengths away. That’d started to calm down a bit, as time wore on, at least enough so that the colt could make it to the bathroom.

Sometime during that period, a kindly old unicorn had come in to take a complete inventory of their injuries. Junior only had a couple of scrapes, bruises, and a loose tooth from the blow he’d delivered to Stone Shine’s head.

When the doctor reached Shiny, his expression became grave. She was asleep, at last, but clutched Junior to her chest like a stuffed animal, her face buried in his mane.

The doctor’s horn glowed, running over every inch of her from top to bottom. It winked out, and he gave Junior a light pat on the head, before turning to leave the little hospital room. The door was cracked, so Junior could hear the conversation outside, though he couldn’t see who was being spoken to.

“-indications of severe injury and signs of repeated magical healing on every inch of skin. We removed that collar and the flesh underneath was infected. She’d been wearing it for several days, continuously. There was some form of enchantment on it as well. There’s also deep muscle scarring indicative of years of this treatment.”

“The colt mentioned something about memory alterations when we spoke to him?” a mare, who Junior assumed to be a police officer, asked.

“Severe and endemic. Whatever this child endured, it was beyond anything a pony many times her age could have survived while keeping their sanity. It’s best she doesn’t remember.”

“What about the collar? It’s...magical?”

“Mmm... sickening. Truly sickening. It is a simple device based on something the dragons used during the war. The weight grows heavier the more rebellious thoughts the wearer has. When she was at home, I imagine he made her wear it continuously.”

“How could...somepony do these things to a little filly?” the other mare asked, shocked.

“I don’t know. Truly I don’t. It’s the worst case of child abuse I’ve ever seen. If that colt hadn’t been there and stopped Mister Shine when he did… well, the inflammation alone would have probably permanently paralyzed her. I don’t even want to think on the rest of it. He saved that girl’s life.”

“And… he got his cutie-mark, too,” said another pony, who seemed to be part of that conversation but had remained silent until that moment.

He knew that voice. It was his mother, out there, listening to the doctor alongside whoever the other pony was.

He smiled to himself and nestled deeper into the blankets, pressing his cheek against Shiny’s shoulder.

His eyes popped open.

Wait, what did she say?

****

“They found Sweets’ real mother a few months later. She was another dead Jane Pony, just like the girl that Stone Shine strangled. No extended family, nopony to come looking for her, and...sadly, no story we could find other than that she was young and fell in love with the wrong stallion. My mom and dad wanted to adopt Sweets, but the foster care wouldn’t allow it. They said it would be unhealthy for her to live so close to where the trauma took place. Miss Goodie took her in, instead, believe it or not. She lived a couple of blocks over. She was an alright mother, although Sweets spent most of her time at our house anyway.”

Swift and I sat on one side of the underground pond, while Taxi and the Warden sat on the other, studying the reflection of the fake stars on the still water’s surface.

“What...happened to Stone Shine?” my partner asked, curiously.

“Supermax, then Tartarus when it was built. We… thankfully, we didn’t have to attend his trial. Once the investigation began in earnest, they uncovered a lot of… bad things… including the governor’s daughter. They found the murder weapons in Stone’s ‘toolbox,' in the outside shed. He killed her.”

“Sweet Celestia!”

“Yeah, trust me, my dad was all in favor of bringing back the death penalty just to see that guy burn. Either Stone’s ‘contacts’ left him high and dry, or there's some crap that not even friends in high places can pull you out of, but he never said a word about them after he was arrested. He’s been here ever since.”

“Eesh… that makes my cutie-mark story sound so lame…” she murmured, tracing her hoof back and forth through the water.

“Take the lame and be happy with it. Almost dying after watching a friend get tortured is not a good way to remember what should have been one of the happiest day of your life.”

“What about… the Jewelers?”

I groaned and flopped onto my side in the grass. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about that. I couldn’t identify those ponies and the word of a traumatized child wouldn’t carry much weight in court even if I had. You know the rest of what happened, though, I’m sure.”

“The Jewelers became the meanest criminal syndicate in the whole city... because of Taxi’s dad?”

“Probably not just him... but... yeah. That’s the long and short of it. She had to work about six times as hard as anypony else in the academy and when it came to it... when she’d finally made it... her cutie-marks... well...”

I let that sentence hang.

“Did...you ever ask Taxi why she got that talent?” Swift asked, hesitantly.

I scratched at my ear, thinking. “I did-”

“I stood up to Him,” Taxi’s voice right beside us made my partner and I jump. She and the Warden stood a few meters away, side by side. I hadn’t heard them come up. My driver looked none-the-worse for wear, but it’s always difficult to tell with her. “That day, when he came to me and told me to get my clothes, put them in a trunk, and get ready to leave immediately...I stood up to him. I told him I didn’t want to leave Hardy. That damn collar got so heavy it almost broke my neck, but I still told him no.”

Swift’s ears fluttered. “What does that have to do with your talent, though?”

Taxi sucked in a breath, and when she spoke it was in a voice so soft we all had to lean forward. “I’d been what he needed for years and years. A victim. A scapegoat. A good, obedient daughter. I became, in that... very brief moment... what the most broken, screwed up little pony I’d ever met needed. I became my own creature, separate from him. I defied him... and he broke me for it.”

She didn’t look back at the scars on her flanks, but I knew that was where her thoughts were.

I reached up to adjust my hat, which was feeling awfully loose on my ears, and remembered it wasn’t there. I tried to cover the motion by plucking at a couple of loose hairs in my mane. “Sweets… you and I both know this is a bad idea. The bastard nearly killed you.”

“I… I know,” she whispered. “You kept him from killing me even though the odds of you walking out of that house were spectacularly low. Miss Goodie slept with my mother, even knowing she was being abused. She knew it wasn’t safe and that my mom was a screw up. She loved her anyway. Heck, she wasn’t even my real mom. After she died, Miss Goodie gave me a place to live, and paid eight years worth of therapy bills. She was under no obligation to do that.”

“So what you’re saying is that ponies are insane, right?”

Taxi snorted. “I’m saying ponies don’t always make sense and that even the unhealthy things we do are usually for a reason. I know Daddy needs me. My talent’s been humming since we hit the tarmac outside. Besides… he’s going to die, so what can he do to me?”

I jabbed my hoof in the direction of the cabin. “That old slag is dying and she sure seemed to do a few things to you-”

She sidled over and gave me a good bump with her hip. “-and you’re more broken up about that than I am, so leave it be. If you want to wait, I’ll buy you an ice-cream from the cafeteria and you can sit outside.”

I shook my head. “I’m coming. Under protest.” I glanced at the Warden, then gestured to my bare head. “Can I at least have my clothes back?”

****

My hat settled over my ears and I patted the brim, hauling my coat tight around my shoulders. The trip back up through the depths of Tartarus seemed to take much less time than the trip down. There was little time for conversation, but when I asked the Warden about it she admitted she’d slowed the elevator to give the unicorns upstairs more time to scan us.

Noble as that might have been, she was visibly annoyed when the technician handed her a report saying that the magical scanning systems throughout the entirety of Tartarus had decided to all simultaneously go on the fritz. It’d happened before, but usually only doing especially nasty arcane weather. They’d only headed off an alarm and lockdown at the Warden’s command, when nothing else seemed to happen. The non-magical systems were apparently still working fine, giving all clears at every corner.

Taxi, Swift, and I stood together just outside the first security checkpoint, putting our various clothings back on. Taxi’s saddlebags were still locked shut with some kind of tiny padlock and my partner’s vest had been emptied of everything, including the lint. It’d taken a direct order from the Warden for security to release our luggage. They hadn’t quite finished scanning it and I thought the unicorn in charge of that effort might still refuse when she told him to give me my gun back, sans ammunition. He did not look like a happy pony as he helped me strap it back to my leg.

The Warden was signing the paperwork for our equipment and as she finished, she waved us towards the elevator up to ground level.

****

The prison hospital was only slightly lower security than the rest of the place, thus we did get to leave behind the control collars.

A simple fact of the matter was that nopony would get treatment in the hospital unless they were so weakened, so injured, and so provably incapacitated that treatment in their cells was no longer an option. Escape attempts from the less secure areas of Tartarus would probably have required a willingness to run with only two legs and double pneumonia. Not that it hadn’t been tried.

Warden lead the way, out across the courtyard and exercise areas. Nopony but the guards were out at that time of night. Most prisoners were safe in their cells, unless they had permission to be elsewhere.

The rain was long gone and the forest smells were returning. I sneezed, violently, then yanked my kerchief out of one pocket and blew my nose. Allergies are yet another reason I am a city pony, through and through.

We stepped into the central courtyard just as the guard was being changed. An especially slobbery looking Captain Bramble was just passing his sponge, weapon, and keys off to a younger guardsmare who looked like she was seconds from a laughing fit. The captain just scowled at us as we trotted by.

Somewhere, in the distance, a mighty howl shook the trees. A little bit closer, a second, much squeakier one responded.

“Mmm...Cerebrus is hunting tonight,” the Warden commented.

“N-not a pony, right?” Swift asked, worriedly.

“No, no...he hunts ponies when I tell him to hunt ponies. Sounds more like a hydra crossed into his territory. With any luck, we’ll have food for him for a few weeks once we carve up the body,” Warden said, chuckling to herself.

Swift’s nose wrinkled, then her instinctive and lifelong social indoctrination gave way to her predatory curiosity. “What’s hydra taste like?”

Warden’s tail-stub flapped to one side in a gesture of amusement. “You are most assuredly a partner for Hard Boiled.”

The pegasus pouted a little, her wings clutching tighter to her sides. “At least his friends aren’t as creepy as that Saucy pony. Why do you even like her? She sounds awful.”

Warden paused mid-stride.

“I... do not like Saussurea for who she is, Miss Cuddles. She’s a demon. Her actions are nothing short of villainous.” Her shining eye flared, then dimmed until it was just a faint glow somewhere deep in the socket. “I... like her for what she can be. Perhaps, I should say, what she represents.”

“I don’t understand,” my partner murmured.

Warden inhaled and looked up into the starry sky, as though searching for answers there. “Saussurea believes, sincerely, in making the world a better place. Very few ponies are willing to sacrifice to change the world. Most like the idea in a sort of... ephemeral sense, but few actually act upon it. Saucy did. She did it in an especially vile fashion, but she succeeded.”

“That’s... but... I mean, that doesn’t say why you’re friends.” Swift persisted.

“It is, I suppose, because I need the reminder. I am very capable of turning Tartarus into a place like Supermax. The Princesses have endowed me with the power and tools to do something just like that, if temporarily, and, believe me... I have been tempted now and then. I believe some here deserve that sort of treatment, through and through. I’ve read the files of everypony under my care, at length.”

“So... why don’t you?”

Warden shifted her weight from one leg to the other, then reached out and gently laid her burnt hoof on my partner’s cheek. Swift blanched, but didn’t pull away. “I... I have a very long time to live. A very long time, if the doctors are right. I need reasons to continue on the straight and true path. Madness is a very real option. Saussurea may die soon, but she changed this world in the tiny blink of life she lived. I want to change it as well, in a way that leaves it a brighter place for my having been in it... and I have much longer to screw up.”

My partner made a soft noise and her mouth formed into the shape of an ‘O.'

“Now, then.” The Warden turned to my driver, who’d been silent through the entire trip up from the deep cells. “Have you been made aware of your father’s specific health problems?”

“I... um... The nurse told me. Lung cancer, from the time he spent in the mines, right?”

“...Technically, yes. Lung cancer will most likely be what kills him, but his... body... does not want for other contenders.”

I raised one eyebrow and pointed towards the hospital in the distance. It was a white, concrete building with a bright red sun painted across one wall. “I suppose that raises two questions. ‘What contenders?’ and ‘Why keep him there?’ If he’s dying, why not his cell? It’s not like you can’t keep him alive in a hospital bed in High Security.”

“Stone Shine was not in High Security, Hard Boiled,” Warden replied. “He was an ideal prisoner for his entire stay here. His condition precludes keeping him amongst other inmates, however.”

“'Condition?'” Taxi asked.

The burnt mare traced a circle in the mud with a toe. “At some point in his life, primitive, highly illegal magical mutation was used to alter your father’s appearance. Several times, actually. Those enchantments have been... breaking down. We believe the repeated damage to his genome from those transformation spells is causing the cancers to manifest. The presence of other ponies exacerbates the problem, though for a short visit the damage is likely to be minimal.”

My driver chewed her lip. “I... oog. Do I want to know what that means?”

“Honestly? I think you’re better off just getting in your cab and heading back to the city. It’s not my decision. You’re the next of kin. That does grant certain rights.”

I knew Taxi’s ‘brave face.' She was wearing it with an extra helping of ‘stoic.'

After the day I put Stone Shine in the hospital, it’d been years before I’d seen her have an honest to goodness breakdown again. There was one outside the testing office for the Academy during her final year. She’d cried for a bit on my shoulder, then went right in and aced everything. When Miss Goodie died was another. They had been close through the later years of that relationship, though more like good friends and less like family. In their own way, that meant they were closer. Taxi wouldn’t have gotten too tight with somepony who wanted to be her mom. Trust like that, once it’s broken, never really comes back.

“I’ll see him,” my driver murmured.

“Alright. It’s your choice.” Warden shrugged her scoured shoulders and set off towards the hospital ward. “I don’t know that your father will tell you anything, but Supermax’s magical construct was a mystery to damn near everypony besides Saucy, and most of our inmates from back then were either badly damaged or not the talkative sort. I might even be able to convince the city council that foul thing is bad enough to warrant releasing the funds to disassemble it entirely, if you can figure out its actual function while you’re in there.”

****

We stopped just outside the sliding glass doors across the front of the cinder block-and-concrete structure long enough for the unicorn guard inside the security hut to do yet another inspection. It ended up having to be visual, since his horn sputtered angrily when he tried to aim his scanning spell in my direction. The Warden gave him a swift explanation, then quickly scribbled her signature on the guard’s ‘responsibility release’ form when he presented it, and waved the rest of us through.

The prison hospital ward was nearly empty at that hour, though that had always been the case. Most injuries could be treated inside a cell and the more significant facilities were mostly used for prisoners who couldn’t be kept with the general populace for various medical reasons.

A long hall stretched off maybe a hundred yards, lined on either side with glass boxes, giving an impression of enormous openness and space. Each tiny room was its own cell, glassed in and soundproofed. Privacy curtains hung between the rooms and the doors could only be opened with a talisman keyed to the specific cell, all of which were kept with at the security desk. Only six of the little rooms had their curtains drawn; the rest were visibly unoccupied.

Warden looked back and forth, smoke pouring from her nostrils before she turned to the nurse’s station beside the front door. It was little more than a desk and filing cabinet with a bored-looking mare in a labcoat sitting behind it, reading a trashy novel.

“Where’s Custodius?” the Warden asked, curtly. The mare didn’t look up, but jabbed one hoof down the long hall before pointing at the ‘no smoking’ sign on the wall behind her left shoulder. Warden frowned, then inhaled the smoke with a deep breath and turned to the three of us.

“Wait here for Custodius. He’ll take you to Stone Shine.” With that, she turned to the door.

I caught her hoof. “You’re not coming with us?”

Warden shook her head and made a big show of yawning, which was like somepony opening a hot forge inches from my face. I danced backwards as the fur on my muzzle started to sizzle.

“I’ve got to get some sleep at some point and I can’t spend the rest of my night leading the three of you around.”

Taxi rolled her eyes. “We both know you don’t sleep.”

“Yes, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ve got work to do,” Warden replied, moving towards the door. “The guard will let you leave and once you’re done, you can see yourselves out of my prison. I don’t expect to see you again unless you’ve secured Cerise, and if anypony asks about your presence I will tell them you were here to see Miss Shine’s father. Will that be adequate to get you out of my fur?”

“You don’t have any f-” Swift started to say.

“Yes, yes it will!” I said, quickly stuffing my hoof in my partner’s muzzle.

Warden continued out into the prison’s darkened courtyard, trotting back towards Administration.

I pulled my toe out of Swift’s mouth and wiped it on my coat.

“So, where’s this ‘Custodius,' then?” I asked nopony in particular.

“Just down here, Detective,” a voice called from the nearest cubicle. “Is she gone?”

“Who? The Warden?” I called back.

“Yes.”

“Uh... yeah, yeah, she’s gone.”

A small, light brown head popped out from behind a curtain, peering both ways down the line of cube-like rooms. “Ahhh, so she is. Pardon, that pony offends my medicinal sensibilities something fierce.”

Custodius trotted out of the tiny room, adjusting his floor-length doctor’s coat and nametag with an absent minded brush of his hoof.

Custodius was a donkey.

I don’t know why that surprised me. I’ve met plenty of donkeys in my time in Detrot, though they’re a minority species practically everywhere. The Crusades had done unparalleled damage to the donkey homelands, and while they couldn’t be called endangered, there were fewer donkeys left in Equestria than griffins.

His drooping ears and sagging jaw gave the impression of a creature of low intelligence, but his eyes flickered with a clever interest as he evaluated the three of us.

“I see what all of the fuss was about,” he murmured, contemplatively. “May I assume the pegasus is the one with the intriguing dental configuration we detected earlier?”

Swift bobbed her head and grinned, flashing her back rows of teeth.

“And... you’re the one who was giving our scanners fits?” Custodius asked, his wrinkled jowls swinging back and forth.

“If you want an answer on that, I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong pony,” I explained, scratching at the plug on my chest. “I don’t know why magical scanning isn’t working on me. It’s going to be damned inconvenient if I end up in hospital at any point.”

“Not just you, Mister Hard Boiled,” the donkey pursed his lips. “For a few minutes there, our entire network was having issues. It appears to be functional again, though you and your friends are… insistently and perplexingly absent.”

“We’re here to see Taxi’s father, Stone Shine. Can you take us to him?” I asked, gesturing sideways at my driver.

Custodius crossed his foreknees and leaned toward me, sniffing at the air in my direction. “You reek of magic, sir. Absolutely stink of it. Phew.”

I looked over at Taxi, then raised one leg and gave myself a good whiff. Aside realizing just how badly I needed a shower, I couldn’t smell anything particularly out of the ordinary.

“That’s not surprising, I guess. I’ve got an enchanted heart transplant,” I replied.

“Ah. I do swear, I should have moved to a country with less reliance on the arcane. The Warden smells so ferociously that she and I have a quiet agreement to not be in the same room with one another.” Custodius plucked at the fur on his fetlock with his teeth, then turned towards the row of cubes. “Stone Shine is at the end. Follow me. Keep to the middle; especially you, my good, stinky gentlecolt.”

I decided not to comment on that as we followed him down the rows.

Swift was less incurious. “What do you mean he stinks of magic?”

“I don’t know that anything I said was unclear, Miss Teeth,” the donkey replied, shortly. “This entire country smells of it. If the finest medical fields in the world weren’t here, believe me, I’d vacate in a heartbeat.”

“What’s it smell like?” Swift asked, raising her nose and inhaling deeply.

“Truth be, I doubt you could detect it. It’s like... burnt cheese mixed with cinnamon, and you lot don’t have noses sensitive enough to be bothered by it, so you douse everything in spells!” Custodius said, huffily.

Taxi tilted her head to one side, moving up closer to the donkey’s side. “I’ve... never been to the Tartarus hospital, but the last time I was here was for an injured prisoner who witnessed a large drug trade. I wasn’t aware Doctor Caverna had retired.”

Custodius stepped sideways around a nurse pushing a cart of medications, giving me a moment to look into one of the occupied glass cubicles. The pony inside was so swathed in bandages I couldn’t even tell if they were male or female.

“Unsurprising,” he replied. “I am the third doctor they’ve gone through in six years, though I suppose the rather unique mental condition spending any amount of time around the Warden produces in doctors may have something to do with that.”

Swift was trying not to stare -- and failing -- as we passed a bed which seemed to contain several jars, each with a different piece of a pony; wings, torso, ears, eyes. The eyes were focused on a crossword puzzle being propped up by one of the hooves which wasn’t in a jar.

“...that’s freaky…” she muttered, then quickly covered herself and asked, “Uh...I mean...’What mental condition is that’?”

“Nothing too severe, and easily managed by limiting contact,” Custodius replied, stopping long enough to scan a patient report hanging on a cell which was entirely dark inside in a way that suggested a spell. All I could make out was a pair of flashing, golden eyes at about where a pony’s would be if they were laying in bed. “Call it catastrophic cognitive dissonance. Every fiber of all but the most cynical doctor’s being calls out to heal the needs of those who are broken or in pain. I doubt you will disagree there is something very wrong about our dear Warden.”

“No kidding…”

Custodius shrugged and moved on. “I do believe Doctor Caverna’s ejection involved an attempt to bandage the Warden to a depth of eleven inches.”

“Eee…”

“...Yes. Very much ‘eee.' Now then, here we are.”

We’d reached the last cube at the far end of the ICU. The rest of the occupied cells were well kept and appeared relatively recently moved into. The last one seemed much older and more lived in. I could see a vase, with flowers in it silhouetted against the curtain. The curtains weren’t the same drab green of every other; rather they were a soft shade of sunflower with a black and white fringe at the bottom. I glanced at my driver and she’d taken note of the similarity as well. She touched her braid, pinning it to her shoulder momentarily before tossing it back.

“Now, I must issue a warning. Mister Stone Shine is quite old. We don’t know exactly how old, since his condition has altered his genome in a very disturbing fashion and he has never been terribly forthcoming. We are doing our best to make him comfortable until his passing. That, however, is not what I feel the need to warn you about.”

“If you’re going to warn us, just get it over with,” I said, impatiently. “I don’t like mysteries.”

Custodius pretended to read the chart outside Stone’s room for a moment, then slid onto his backside on the linoleum floor. “To be honest, I don’t know that warning you will even do any good. We’ve tried every containment method available to us, including the jars. Nothing works. These spells he’s been under have re-written his entire chromosome.”

I rubbed my nose, thinking back to my high school biology class. “Shouldn’t he be dead already, then?”

“In theory, yes.” The donkey nodded, sagely. “He’s alive now only because of constant monitoring. At best? His organs aren’t failing right this minute. That... may change at any time. They’ve adopted an unpleasant tendency to copy whatever they’re near. That has exacerbated the cancer. We managed to put a stop to that, at least internally, but his... skin... well, it’s just a matter of time now.”

I could see a tremor starting in Taxi’s left hoof, but when she spoke, her voice was cool and steady, “We’ve got some questions for him. My... father... won’t die until he’s seen me. He’s too stubborn. He... wouldn’t give me that kind of peace.”

“Go on in. He’s probably awake... and if previous doctors are to be believed, he’s apparently asked to see you, Miss Shine, every day for the last twenty-odd years.”

With that, Custodius held out a tiny silver box with ‘Number 1’ carved into the top of it; the door talisman. I scooped it off his hoof and he turned back down the row of cubes, leaving the three of us standing outside Stone Shine’s cell.

“Alright, this is-” I started.

“Shut up, Hardy.” Taxi cut me off, putting her hoof on my chest. “Just... just shut up.”

I shut up.

Taxi stepped up and put her forelegs around me, pressing her face against the side of my neck. She was shivering, like an electric current was running from her tail to her ears. She just held me for several seconds and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so I gently patted her back. When she stepped back, she was smiling.

It wasn’t a happy smile, but it held the kind of strength that most ponies assume defines my driver’s personality. She’s very good at being strong at the right moments, so nopony sees what’s underneath. Most of the time, even I don’t see it and I still, after many years, can’t say I fully understand her.

Taking the talisman from me, she pressed it against the glass door. There was a soft hiss and runes flickered softly, then vanished again as it retreated into recesses on either side.

The lights inside the little room were turned down low, and the privacy curtains surrounded the bed.

Taxi was in first, while Swift and I piled into the tiny space behind her. The door slid shut and there was the sound of sucking air as it sealed itself. Machines built discretely into the wall behind the bed beeped and hummed to themselves. I reached up to tug back the curtain, but Taxi caught my hoof, and pulled it back.

She faced the curtained bed.

“Daddy,” she whispered.

Something behind the curtain drew in a wet breath. It was strange, though. It sounded like several things inhaling simultaneously through several mouths.

There was movement. An appendage that might have been a hoof, though it seemed to have too many angles, rose from the bedsheets and touched something above the headboard. The light came up and the curtains drew back.

Swift retched, tumbling back against the glass doors with one hoof swept across her mouth. There was a bucket near the end of the bed, and I wondered momentarily if that was for the convenience of guests or the occupant of the tiny room.

The last time I’d seen Stone Shine, he was a mountain, a terror, a monolithic powerful beast that I, the tiny colt with a baseball bat, had seen fit to strike. He’d been seconds from simply ending me and my best friend. He’d strangled a mare simply for being in his way.

The years had not been kind.

What lay in the bed was not a pony. It might have been a pony at one time, but only if you squinted until most of the details were lost.

The creature’s face made the Warden’s seem a right beauty. I tried to find some piece of it to focus on to make sense of the horrible things that’d happened to it. No… to him. It was Stone Shine. I remembered those eyes. They weren’t the eyes he’d had when I saw him last, but there was a look there that marked the creature I’d seen beating his daughter to death for defying him. One eye seemed to have been bisected, as though it was trying to divide like a cell, while the other was riddled with strangely colored cataracts, leaving it looking like insects swam just beneath the surface.

It was his chest and limbs that set my partner’s stomach roiling, though.

Where any sane, right-minded being should expect fur, there was a misshapen, lumpy mass of bare, pink flesh. It was as though his organs, impatient for him to rot, had chosen to burst through and get a few breaths of fresh air.

A pair of what I could only describe as lips seemed to be growing on his collar bone. They were fixed in a rictus smirk.

His face was no longer the powerful, square jawed pride of a stallion. Teeth stuck through the top of his lip, deforming it at strange angles. In several places, it seemed additional teeth had grown in spots they simply had no business being.

For all of that, the eyes were still Stone Shine. Maybe not the eyes, but the gaze. He regarded the three of us, and I felt sure he should be blind with that visual configuration, but he saw us all the same.

Where before he’d looked hardened and powerful, now he looked like a sack full of mismatched body parts waiting for the incinerator. He’d been a gigantic beast, and the enforcement of a sedentary lifestyle didn’t seem to have stripped away all of that muscle, though it was finding unusual structures to settle into on bones that reminded me of children’s building toys dropped half-hazardly across one another.

I suppose the only reason nausea didn’t catch me out was the amount of time I’d spent around Slip Stitch.

As I watched, a thin fringe of yellow fur pushed its way out of the skin above his upper lip. It was the same shade as my driver’s. Slowly, a smile spread on the old killer’s face.

“Girl…” he growled; a wet sound boiling out of a diseased gullet.

I glanced at Taxi, who was standing with all four hooves planted like she didn’t know whether to run, scream, or attack. I admit, I was having the same quandary.

“...oh...” Taxi shuddered, her eyes locked on the thing in the bed. That yellow fur was slowly spreading across Stone Shine’s face, like a quick growing moss. The effect was distressing.

“Mmm... I... knew... I would see you before the end.”

A single drop of blood ran from a place under his scalp, down across his cheek, landing on the sheets.

Swift, smart filly that she was, chose that moment to pass out.

Act 2, Chapter 27: Sweet Shine, My Only Sweet Shine

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 27: Sweet Shine, My Only Sweet Shine...

Magical injury is, put simply, a very bad thing. It has been mentioned previously that magic is capable of a variety of outcomes significantly worse than merely killing somepony. However, when it comes to why this is so, prior documents have danced around the specifics like a ballerina in a minefield, and for much the same reason: failure to do so would get messy.

Not all magical injury is particularly horrific. Much conventional magic doesn't really do anything a sufficiently powerful projectile weapon or physical force couldn't do: Concussive force bolts, fireballs, having your face savaged by a summoned orthos, and so forth. But then there’s the kind of magic that turns stomachs; now and then, into lemurs.

A thought exercise is illustrative in this instance: Imagine some sort of horrific and fatal occurrence, and leave nothing off the table for being too outlandish. Melting. Organ alphabetization. Torso turned to fruit. Decapitation by an uncalibrated party cannon. Having all your skin go on strike. Heart attack - as in being physically assaulted by your own heart.

Now imagine surviving it, and living continuously in whatever ruined state the magic left you.

If, at this point, you find yourself needing to go find a place to vomit, then you will be sharing a bucket with many of the greatest minds of this century.

-The Scholar

I’d seen all manner of magical injuries in my time with Detrot Police Department. "Death by magic" was the fourth most common pathology in my line of work, after bullets, bucking, and "Misc," and seeing that written across the top of a police dispatch was usually the first sign all the local psychologists with DPD contracts would be buying themselves extra boats in the coming year.

Death by magic was frequently nowhere near as bad as survival. Mercifully, equicide isn't called in when there's a ‘survival by magic,' so it was rare that the truly hideous effects were animated in my presence, much less talking to me.

Nopony gets to tell me that slipping into shock isn’t a decent coping mechanism until after they’ve seen one of the really nasty survival stories in person.

****

I was quick on my hooves, hauling Swift into the corridor and tossing her onto one of the spare cots lining the hall. Truth be, as the door to the little cubicle slid shut, I had to force my own mental state back to something resembling normal, mostly by clamping off every bit of the intense fear that’d suddenly welled up inside me at the sight of Taxi’s father. Lots of the various voices in my head were screaming ‘Icky, icky icky!’ at maximum volume. I just needed a quick breath of fresh air to settle my nerves.

I didn't bother trying to wake her. ‘Pegasus Nap Time’ was an easier solution than trying to wake Swift up for conversations like the one I anticipated having with Stone Shine.

I tried to toss a blanket over her twice, then stilled the shaking in my left hoof. It was a tremor with several sources, most pressingly, the civic impulse to do everypony involved a favor, grab my gun and just go end that abomination in the next room.

Be strong, Hardy. Be strong for her, I thought, breathing deep of the disinfected hospital air. Pepping myself up seemed a bit silly. The worst was over, right? I’d looked upon the beast and he was a broken shell of a thing, unable to move.

Why did that not feel particularly comforting?

I patted my coat and trotted back to the little hospital room, where father and daughter were still standing, staring at one another across a gulf of years, filled with unfinished business.

Tugging off my hat, I set it on the end of the bed. The movement broke the spell between them and Taxi’s shoulders sagged as she stared at the floor between her hooves like that little filly I’d known so many years ago. I could almost see the memory of the weighted collar dangling from her neck.

I had to force myself to look in the general direction of the creature under the covers. Stone Shine’s twisted body was enough to put a manticore off its dinner, and I didn’t feel like looking him in the eyes. The last time I’d seen those eyes, he’d been seconds from killing me. Sure, there’d been plenty of times in the intervening years when somepony was ‘seconds from killing’ Hardy, but that first time is always the one that sticks with you.

Stone Shine’s gaze drifted from his daughter over to me. His mitotic eye narrowed slightly.

“I… know… you, don’t I?” he rumbled.

His accent was unusual. It sounded like upper Canterlot, but slow and deliberate, like speaking took effort. I noticed the mouth on the side of his neck twitched with each syllable, as though it were trying to form the words but lacked for vocal chords. I forced my eyes back to his face, though that wasn’t any better.

Stiff upper lip, Hardy, said a smug voice hovering somewhere behind my eyes.

Go soak your head, Juni, I thought, irritably.

“Yeah. We’ve met. Baseball bat about twenty years and change ago.” I mimed swinging a club with my mouth.

Stone Shine’s upper lip pulled back, revealing a broken row of mismatched teeth. I shivered, involuntarily.

“I… thought so,” he said, with no hint of malice. I felt he should have been enraged, or at least showing some emotion towards the pony who’d put him there. Instead, I got the feeling I barely rated his attention.

His interest drifted back to his daughter. Another tuft of yellow fur sprouted near the general area of one eyebrow. I didn’t know what to think of that.

“My… good girl…" Stone murmured, spittle running down one side of his mouth. He absentmindedly wiped it away with a bit of rag kept beside one hoof. “I haven’t… seen you in too… long.”

Taxi wasn’t moving, her eyes locked on the floor.

She made a noise that might have been a word or an escaping sob, and sank onto her stomach, drawing her rear legs up.

“… Daddy…" she said, faintly.

I reached down and lifted my driver into my forelegs, hauling her upright. That ‘strong’ face had lasted about as long as I expected it to.

“I… suppose I should… not be surprised, Girl,” Stone mused, his speech slurring each word. “You… were… obedient, until the… end. You learned well… everything I taught."

Rising to her full height, she stepped to the edge of the bed and reached out, resting her hoof over top of Stone Shine’s. “Daddy?”

Remarkably, the monster in the bed’s lips spread into something resembling a grin. “It is time… we talked… yes?”

“Yes, it is. I need to know some things.”

“Then, I will know… some things… first. They… tell me nothing… of my daughter… in this place.”

Taxi was staring down at the blood on the sheet, and said nothing for a few long, awkward moments.

“Girl?”

“Yes, Daddy?” she answered, immediately.

“You… grew up… strong?”

She slowly nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”

“Good… good. You… are… a killer?”

I blinked at that; Even coming from a misshapen amalgamation of pony parts, the question seemed bizarre. I expected Taxi to dismiss the question as ridiculous, but her ears sank, and she said: “N-no, Daddy…"

He gave her a look that seemed to pierce through the thin facade she was presenting. In this case, his gaze was like using a buzzsaw to slice a dinner roll; a foal could have figured out that Taxi was hiding something. I cocked my head towards my driver, and saw her shoulders start to tremble.

“You… would not… lie… to me… would you… Girl?”

“No, Daddy,” she whispered. “I’ve… I’ve killed.”

I couldn’t be certain, but I didn’t remember her ever mentioning she’d killed somepony. It was certainly possible in our line of work, but most suspects surrender or flee when a cop threatens deadly force. Even patrol officers rarely actually discharge their guns, and some detectives are lucky enough never have to touch a trigger-bit with their teeth.

In all the time she’d been on the force and in the years thereafter, despite how crazily effective a martial artist she was, I couldn’t remember actually hearing of a death directly attributed to my driver’s hooves. She’d hurt a lot of ponies, who... usually deserved it, but killing wasn’t her thing. Even that whacking great cannon she liked to cart around in the trunk was a non-lethal weapon.

The somewhat traitorous thought occurred to me that her partner, Fox Glove, had died, as well as their suspect in that case, Skinner, but she’d never been forthcoming with the details of those events.

I shook my head. Part of me wanted to grab the nearest blunt object, brain her with it, then pull her out of that room and take my lumps later on. Surely avoiding the psychological damage this little meet and greet must have been doing was worth a few nights nursing some broken bones when she woke up. Right?

Stone Shine settled his misshapen skull back into the pillows, staring at the ceiling. “I… am glad. Girl will need… to kill. There will be… much killing.”

My driver and I shared a confused look. Taxi reached back with one leg and snatched a discretely placed stool sitting beside the bed. Sitting down, she rested one hoof on the bedsheet. “Daddy… I don’t want to kill anypony. I’m not like you.”

Stone’s lips twitched, though emotions were tough to read on that wasted face. “I… do… hope for your sake… that isn’t true.”

I took a couple of steps forward and put my forelegs up on the bed.

“You… know something about what’s been happening in the city?” I asked.

Shine shifted in the bed, bringing one ravaged hoof up to his face to study the back of it, then the front. “I know you are... working against... powers you do not... comprehend. I know... you would not... come here... unless death were... on the line. I know... my Girl... is in danger... and what I know... may keep her... alive.”

“And you’re going to tell me?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism out of my voice.

He blew a breath out through his nose, along with a little bloody phlegm that landed on the sheet. He gave me a look like I was something he’d stepped in.

“I… wish… I’d… killed you,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Take a ticket, get in line. If you know something, though, I need information.”

Rising slightly in the bed, I heard what could only be described as a soft tearing sound and the old stallion winced. I realized the flesh on his back seemed to be somehow attached to the plastic mattress underneath him. My gorge rose, but I swallowed and tried to keep myself from developing a very undignified case of the hiccups.

“I know… what I have always… known. This city… rots.”

"What else is new?"

"Rot is not new, but… the amount is. Corrupted foundations… wither. They threaten to collapse Detrot... altogether."

“...Who are they?”

At that, Stone’s expression darkened. His eyes darted to one side, as though he’d momentarily misplaced something. He shook his head, like he was trying to clear it.

“I… do not… remember.” he said, finally..

I took a step forward and said, “You don’t remember?”

Stone tossed his rag over the side of the bed in my direction and grunted, “Is that not… what… I said… foal?"

I couldn’t hold in a chuckle at the sheer, bloody, awful irony of it. “You’re telling me that somepony dicked with your memories? After what you did to her?”

Stone shrugged, his shoulders peeling away from the bed in a way that made me squirm inside.

“Part… of the… deal.”

“What deal?” Taxi demanded.

“To… keep you… safe.”

Taxi’s jaw fell open, then she fell onto her haunches. “To keep me safe?! You almost beat me to death! You beat me every other week!”

“Only to make you… better. You could… not remember… and I could not… remember. If… you had learned of them back then, they… would have killed… both… of us before I could teach you... to survive.” He touched the edge of the bed closest to her with his mutated toe. “You… had to be hard… and I tempered… you. You are steel...now. Steel to… cut. To… kill.”

“To kill who?” Taxi asked, her gaze narrowing.

“My former...employers.” He waved his hoof over his body. “They… are not the sort to… leave loose ends. They will... come for us... both… now that you are... pursuing them.”

“Well, you want to help us-”

“I do not… help you… boy! I help...blood!” Stone snarled, jabbing his hoof in my direction. He turned back to Taxi, his anger dissipating as fast as it had come. He folded his misshapen legs across his lap, his reedy voice calm again as he asked, “Tell me… Girl. Why… come now?”

My driver’s lip quivered, and she half-turned, resting her hoof on the tiny table beside the bed. There was an empty tin of something that smelled like fruit there. “I… I… ” she hesitated, like she knew the question she wanted to ask, but just couldn’t find the words. “I... never got to tell you what my talent was. Do you remember, when I got my cutie-mark, Daddy?”

Stone’s nose wrinkled. “You defied… me… to get it, Girl. You… succeeded… in your training. You… became strong. Why… does your… talent… matter?” he replied, coldly.

That got Taxi’s dander up. Her hackles rose and a spark of anger finally lit behind her eyes. She straightened, the pitiful little filly gone. “T… Training?! Seriously?! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through the last twenty-something years?” I don’t even know who I am because of you! Is Sweet Shine even my name?!”

The mouth on the stallion’s neck half-opened, then began to frown. I shut my eyes against the sight and tried to breathe. Something in that mouth was disturbing something buried deep within my psyche. I wished I could fish it out.

“Sweet Shine… is your name,” he murmured, at last. “I… gave it… to you after… your mother… died.”

Taxi’s braid slapped against my side as she tossed her head, angrily. “You mean after you killed my mother!” she accused.

“I killed… both… of them, Girl.”

No defensiveness. No remorse. It was as though he was correcting a minor point in her grammar. The simple, direct, and absolutely guiltless way that he said that snapped my driver’s anger like a rubber band. She slid forward off the stool, which tipped to one side and clattered against the floor. Tears were flowing freely now, but her eyes didn’t leave his face as she stared at her father.

She stumbled back, tripping over her rear legs and I had to catch her before she fell into the wall. She turned to put her face against me again, the wracking sobs leaving her shoulders quaking.

For several long moments, the only sound in the room was my driver’s weeping as I held her and stroked her mane. I rested my chin on her shoulder, smelling the incense in her hair and waiting. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know what to do.

Stone Shine watched the two of us, expressionless, with those disturbing eyes seeming to strip the years away. My driver was a strong, smart pony, but before that stallion it felt like she was a naked child, with her cutie-mark still fresh and bleeding.

When he spoke, I felt Taxi’s shaking redouble.

“You… think I… do not… love… the Girl, don’t… you?” Stone growled, softly. “Because I took… your mothers… from you?”

Raising her head, my driver whirled on him. “You… I… how can you even say the word ‘love’ to me?!”

“I… wished you… to be strong, Girl.” The twisted stallion’s eyes flickered towards me. “You… were stolen… from me… before I could teach you… why.”

“So tell me! Tell me now! Tell me why you choked my mother to death and left her on the living room floor!” Taxi shouted, shaking the bed with her forelegs. “Tell me why you brainwashed me!”

"You… witnessed… your biological mother’s… death. She produced you...and she was of no use to Them once she...had. To protect… you… you had to obey… and you had to forget. Obey… and disremember. You could… never know… what I was.”

“What were you, then? Tell me! Make me understand, dammit!”

Stone Shine examined his daughter, looking her over with quiet interest. I got the distinct impression he was seeing that girl he’d tortured all those years ago in a very new light.

“My… daughter...” he began, carefully, pausing to wipe his nose. It’d begun bleeding copiously. “I… was their first… attempt; the very first… for those who hold the reins… of power… in this city. They needed… a killer… who could bring death... to any… who might upset… their plans. They… paid… well.”

Taxi’s eyes widened and she glanced out the glass door towards where Swift lay.

“Somepony made you like this?!”

“For… a boon, yes.”

Taxi blinked at him, then let her hooves drop off the bed and took a step back. “What boon?”

Shine sat upright, or closer to it, and his shadowed eyes brightened. “I… desired… a child. They gave me… the Girl.”

The gears in my brain were grinding. I had a list of questions, and couldn’t conceive of how the answers could possibly make any sense.

The thin patch of yellow fur that’d been growing on his face blossomed into a thick tuft, with a faint strip of white overlaid with black across it. It looked, strangely, like he’d suddenly grown a mustache.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Shine brushed his hoof over the fur, tearing some of it free. It floated down to the bed. “No longer calling me… Daddy… then? I was… rather… enjoying that. If… you must… know… it was… Supermax.”

“I don’t recall anything about Supermax causing rampant… whatever… is happening to you. Everything cancer." I put in.

He gestured to the wreck that was his chest, then to the mouth sprouting from the side of his throat. “I was paid… during my killing days… to allow Them...to give me certain... enhancements. They allowed me...to alter...my appearance. Supermax… eats… arcane energies. It eats those… things… which make a pony… powerful. It has eaten...my magic.”

“Daddy...I’ve got to go to Supermax. We’re going there to… to stop some ponies from doing something awful. Will you help us?” Taxi asked, quietly.

Shine lowered his eyes and sighed. “Girl...you should know that They...are aware...of your pursuit...though not the direction...it takes.”

“How can you know that?” I inquired.

“They...told me,” he answered, calmly.

“You’re saying they snuck somepony into Tartarus?!” my driver gasped.

“Snuck?… yes. They came to… visit me. Days ago. They sent their… representative… to me. He removed his face and… name… from my memories… but he left me… with a promise of… another wish…”

“Wait… a wish? Not a boon?” I asked, suddenly feeling like I was on to something.

Stone gave me a look of burning contempt. “Wish? Boon? What… is the difference? They offered… me… a new body. A new… body… and my freedom... if I gave you… to them.”

The hair on my neck rose. I put my hoof on my gun and slid back the hammer, then remembered they’d taken my bullets. “You… sold out your own daughter?” I hissed.

Reaching out, Stone Shine gently laid his broken hoof on top of Taxi’s on the bed. I expected her to flinch, but she didn’t. Her expression was unreadable, though her tears still dripped onto the sheets.

“Do I look… like I have… my freedom... or a body? Even if I had known… where she was… or that she … had grown… into such a strong, lovely mare… I never could have.” He coughed, blood drooling from his nose in thick rivulets. One of the machines behind him started to beep a little louder. “I turned them… down, boy. They left...me...to die.”

Taxi’s eyes slid shut and she laid her head on the bed. Stone brushed his hoof through her mane, and that memory from the days before I’d smashed his jaw with my bat came back to me; watching Stone and Shiny, curled up on the sofa, watching the news. For just a little while, things had been very close to… normal… there.

Like so many of the creatures I’d met lately, he was inequine. In any sane world, things like him should not exist, and yet this is not a sane world. Monsters like him and Saussurea love and live and fight and die, same as the rest of us.

Sometimes, very much by accident, they bring beautiful things into the world.

“Now… then,” Stone rumbled. “...Supermax?”

“Yes, Daddy…" Taxi replied, not moving from her place on the bed.

“I… remember little,” he sighed. “It...has been many...years.”

“Do you know anything about the magical construct?” I asked.

Stone lifted Taxi’s chin on the tip of his hoof so he could look into her face. She looked back at the patchwork stallion; father and daughter, seeing one another for the first time.

“It was the uniforms… and the cells. Something there… makes their sucking magics work, if the… construct… is active. The Jailer of Supermax placed… things… into the dragons to weaken… them. She could… not… with ponies. Instead… she wove something into… the uniforms… and the… mortar.”

I scratched at my mane, thinking. “You got any clue what that might have been?”

He shook his shaggy head. “They have taken… much… of my memories... and I was only able to… keep bits and pieces. I… remember only… that you must… beware… the red… moon.”

Laying back in the bed, he shut his eyes and exhaled, slowly.

Taxi raised herself and looked to me. “Red moon?”

I touched the diary in my pocket. “Like… Ruby’s cutie-mark?”

The machines surrounding Stone Shine were starting to buzz insistently.

“The doctors… will be here soon… Girl,” Stone murmured, glancing at the read out. I couldn’t be sure what all those red lights meant, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t indicate good health. “I… would appreciate… it… if you would do one… last… thing.”

My driver touched the hoof of the stallion who’d done so many horrible things to her. He’d stolen her mother, her childhood, and any hope for a normal life. He’d left her shattered, hating her own talent, and he was asking favors.

I would have walked away. Even knowing his reasons. Even knowing he’d done it all out of some demented version of familial affection. I’d have walked out of that room. At least, I tell myself I would have.

Of course, I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to my father. There are days I swear I’d give an eye to have had that privilege.

“Anything, Daddy.” Taxi replied, .

“Kiss my… cheek… and...” he leaned up to be nearer her ear and his voice dropped too low for me to hear the last whatever he was requesting. Taxi nodded to whatever it was and brushed a stray bit of fur from his fetlock.

Leaning down, she gently pressed her lips against her father’s ruined face.

He smiled. A contented smile. The smile of a stallion, after many chased years, finally finding peace.

A sick part of me envied him that smile.

My driver laid her hoof on his chest, then very gently ran it up to his neck. Taking a deep breath, she gave the side of his throat a little poke. If I hadn’t been watching closely, I might have missed it.

Stone Shine jolted in the bed, every muscle seeming to seize at once. The mouth on his neck opened and shut, its deformed tongue lashing back and forth.

Blood poured from his nose, his ears, and his tear ducts, gushing down his face, splashing onto the bed. Machines began beeping in alarming patterns.

Taxi rested her hooves on the edge of the bed. The blood washed over them.

She stepped back, just as the door slid open and Custodius, along with two nurses, all wearing face masks, piled into the room.

“He’s crashing!” somepony shouted. I just stared as Stone Shine’s body spasmed, then his back arched with a cracking sound that echoed around the tiny room.

“Out! Everyone out!” the donkey snapped, giving me a shove with his forehead.

That got me moving.

I was too stunned to do more than stumble out into the hallway as the hospital staff tried desperately to save Stone Shine from whatever catastrophic malady had finally taken hold.

Taxi turned towards the hospital’s exit and started walking.

Grabbing Swift off the cot, I tossed her onto my back and moved into line behind my driver. She didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, so I just edged up beside her. Alarms were going off at the front of the building, but they seemed mostly centered around the nurse’s monitoring station.

“Sweets, what did you do?” I asked, just loud enough to be heard by her and, I hoped, nopony else.

“What he asked me to,” she answered, curtly.

“I… don’t know anything about your zebra stuff, but that didn’t look like he said ‘please turn off my pain centers’.”

She shook her head and pulled her braid down across her shoulders. She refused to look at me, but resolutely marched in the direction of the sliding doors.

“He… he asked me…" she paused, her eyes clenched tightly shut. “He asked me to… to show him… what a good killer I am.”

****

We made it back to the car with no additional incidents. The guards ignored us as we pulled out of the parking lot, and the first gate slid open without a fuss. If they saw what Taxi did, I hoped they would decide, upon second examination, that Stone Shine had plenty of reasons to be dead. The very last thing we needed was Warden after us for killing one of her inmates.

Swift shifted in her sleep, though I suspected it was now a more natural unconsciousness and less a faint. The hour was very, very late and I was feeling as shagged out as I could ever remember being. Sleep was becoming mandatory.

Still, the facts of what I’d just seen and heard wouldn’t leave me.

She’d killed him, right there in front of me, with her bare hooves. I admit, I might have done the same, but I am not Taxi. Mercy would dictate that, given the chance, you end suffering whenever you can. Stone Shine’s state was nothing if not suffering. By the same token, my friend had never been a killer in my mind. I’ve lived with that moniker since one of my earliest cases forced me to shoot a drug dealer who was half-way to beating one of his clients to death.

Sure, Taxi was physically capable of killing. The time spent with the zebras, plus her police training, not to mention all those weekly martial arts classes, meant she was nothing if not able to kill. It just struck me that, to my knowledge, she’d always held back.

“Sweets… why’d you do it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice down so as not to wake my sleeping partner.

“Why’d I do what, Hardy?”

“You know what.”

“He asked me to.”

“If he’d asked you to jump off a bridge, would you?” I grumbled.

Taxi didn’t even hesitate.

“Very probably.”

That statement sought for some emotion in my brain to latch onto. It didn’t find one. In fact, I was feeling strangely numb.

“Sweets… that is not how you make me feel better. You just murdered a stallion in front of me. Your own father no less. Am I meant to ignore that?”

She shrugged, turning the wheel to follow a tight bend. “You want to arrest me, Hardy? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I’ll drive us to the Castle, put the cuffs on myself, march into Chief Jade’s office, and sign a full confession.”

I snorted. “Oh, don’t give me that martyr crap. My cutie-mark’s ice cold. I’m a bit confused by that, but it hasn’t been wrong so far and I just need to be clear in my own mind. Why? And none of that ‘because he told me to’ garbage.”

Taxi tapped the brakes, slowing us into a long corner. The blur of trees outside whipped by so quickly it looked like a picket fence. I leaned forward, waiting.

“Chains don’t… come off that easy, Hardy,” she said, after a protracted pause. Her voice was dangerously neutral; like a pony standing on the edge of a rooftop trying to figure out whether or not to take the leap. “I hoped I’d just be able to walk in there, see him dying, and walk out, knowing he couldn’t hurt me anymore. Turns out it’s not that simple.”

“I don’t remember you ever killing somepony before. Sure, you’ve threatened and beaten the sunlight out of enough ponies, but-”

“I’ve killed before, Hardy. I’m not proud of what I had to do, and I’m not going to talk about it. Maybe if you get me in an interrogation room one day, I might, but until then-”

I put my toe on her shoulder, gently. “Sweets, I’m not threatening you and I’m not attacking you. I’m just trying to understand. As your friend. Not a cop.”

“Good luck with that, Hardy. You’re always a cop. Besides… I don’t think I get it, either.” She exhaled and rolled the car’s window down, sticking her hoof out into the air flow. The night was cool, and the wind, refreshing. “If you figure out why I just let that bastard die peacefully instead of giving him a few more months strapped to a bed while his organs try to climb out, would you tell me?”

I slumped and let my eyelids drift closed, still trying to think of something to say when I felt Swift started to stir.

“Mrbledrble…" my partner’s big blue eyes opened slowly and she peered around the inside of the cab. “Did I miss anything?”

“No, kid,” I said, patting her spiky mane.

My little mutant assassin.

I shook my head and tried to smile. “Nothing at all.”

****

“Hardy, I don’t mean to alarm you, but… I think we might be being followed,” Taxi called as we drove back towards the city. We’d just passed the final gate out of Tartarus and were moving at what I’d have called a decent clip and most other ponies would have called a completely insane speed.

I sat up, having dropped off to sleep at some point. I was still knackered. “You sure you’re not just exhausted and maybe a bit paranoid? I know I am…"

“I’ve been getting this worrying tingle that you might need to know something important. I had it before we went to see my Dad and this feels… the same, but different.”

“That’s not terribly descriptive, Sweets…"

“You want descriptive, you try having a talent that mostly works when somepony else needs it to. It could just be that stupid bat-thing from M6, although how he’d be flying over Tartarus I don’t know. Either way, it doesn’t seem especially dangerous. Just strange. I think I lost them awhile back, but I’ve still got that feeling…"

I nestled down into the cushions beside Swift, who was already deep in dreamland. Reaching over, I gently tugged one of her big, fluffy wings away from her side, then pushed my head under it so I didn’t have the cabin’s interior lighting in my eyes. “If that feeling decides to give you any details, lemme know… otherwise, could you wake me up when we hit the Nest? A beanbag chair and a wall socket are sounding fantastic about now.”

“Alright, will do. Thanks for being there for me, tonight. I couldn’t have done all that without you.”

Yawning, I rubbed at a spot on my nose where Saussurea's chains had dug into the flesh. “I’m not sure if that makes me feel any better, but yeah… anytime, Sweets.”

I rolled over and buried my face against my partner’s side. Pegasi make good pillows. Gradually, I let myself relax, sinking down into the comforting darkness as the sound of tires on tarmac lulled me to sleep.

I dreamt of warping flesh, splitting eyes, and drowning in rivers of blood.

Same old, same old.

Act 2, Chapter 28: Dog Day Afternoon

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 50
Dog Day Afternoon

...in summary, I don't think that this 'megafauna' classification is such a good idea. Really, even the most massive ursa major can have a family, and even the scariest creature can be made into a good friend. I think it's wrong to treat them as different from bears and squirrels and ponies just because they have big teeth and spiked tentacles and... ovipositors... and… and...

-Heard at the 4th Canterlot Zoological Symposium

I should have known what Tartarus would have in store for us. You don’t name a place after Equestria’s most famous pit for the storage of nasty, demonic forces without having a little baggage attached, and I should have seen what was coming a mile away when Taxi’s father was brought up. Nothing good happens comes from cracking open a can of beans that old.

Of course, had I somehow known and decided I didn’t want to make that whole side trip then, in all likelihood, I’d have died, puking up my guts from a neurotoxin in the sewers or maybe some variation of whatever happened to Stone Shine.

Rosey thoughts.

Taxi didn’t say a word to me when we arrived back at the Nest. She just collapsed into a bean-bag chair in one of the bunker’s bedrooms and was asleep in seconds. It didn’t seem like a particularly pleasant sleep. Limerence still wasn’t back from whatever errands he was on.

Swift, on the other hoof, couldn’t seem to get back to sleep once she’d woken up. I was exhausted, but my thoughts wouldn’t stop racing.

That left my partner and I, alone and restless, mulling over the night’s events.

We lay, side by side, in separate chairs, listening to my driver whimpering and talking to herself in the next room. I’d plugged myself into the mains and was laying there letting my heart juice up.

“Sir, can I ask what happened in the hospital room? I wasn’t going to say anything before because Miss Taxi seemed really upset, but I do want to know,” Swift said, rolling onto her side and propping herself on one elbow.

“I’m not entirely sure myself. Taxi’s father was on his last legs. It might have all been the ramblings of somepony on lots of pain medications,” I replied, adjusting the wire on my chest.

“Come on, Sir… I wasn’t born yesterday,” Swift said, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, alright, kid. It was bad. Her father was some kind of… experiment… by whoever is running Detrot’s criminal underground. They were making assassins using transformative magicks. Sound familiar?”

I felt slightly guilty, for some reason, neglecting to mention what else I’d seen, but I don’t imagine there was a need to tell the kid that Taxi had killed her father. Rolling that conversation around my tongue, I found it not to my taste, and set it for another date; preferably sometime after Celestia went into a nursing home.

Swift was silent for a minute as she considered the question, then bobbed her head.

“Okay, I understand why you didn’t tell me all of that until we were gone, I guess,” she said, then narrowed her eyes at the carpet. “I... Sir, this might seem totally out of left field, but maybe it was that law-firm?”

“Armature, Umbra, and Animus or whatever it was?”

Swift nodded. “Didn’t you mention hearing Taxi’s dad talking to the Jewelers about a law firm with ‘vast influence’ or something, when you were a kid?”

I scratched at my neck, thinking. “I… yeah… eesh, I must be slow on the uptake, lately. I hadn’t drawn that particular connection until just now. You think? It’s been more than twenty years since then. That’s a long time.”

“I think Princess Celestia would disagree, Sir,” Swift answered, flexing her wings. “We’ve seen an awful lot of crazy stuff lately. I mean, getting a major religion in on corrupting the police department? Trying to collapse the entire city government with a mob boss for a pawn? Doing it all at the same time? Whoever these ponies are -- if they’re even ponies -- they don’t think small.”

I was momentarily taken aback.

“Kid, if you’re that smart, how come you’re a cop?”

Swift’s nose scrunched up, then she giggled and stretched out one wingtip to flick my badge, which I hadn’t bothered to take off when I lay down. “I dunno. Bad luck, I guess.”

“Alright,” I said, with a smile. “So if we run under the assumption it is the law-firm, where does that leave us? We can only investigate them directly after we’ve recovered the Chief’s daughter. If we find out they’re actually behind this mess, how do we go about arresting them? They’re a law firm. Their professional appointment is avoiding arrest. Then there’s the sheer weight of influence they can probably drop on us. They could have Mayor Snifter, or any one of a dozen judges in their pockets. Then there’s their street level connections. That they haven’t picked us up already suggests a very conservative approach, that we’ve been lucky...or that they think can nab us any time they need to. Short of bringing in the Princesses themselves-”

“-Which we can’t do until we have the Chief’s daughter-” Swift added.

“-so our jobs haven’t changed.”

Swift scratched her hip with one wing. “Sir...do you ever feel like we swat down one terrible thing and another one just… pops up?”

“Believe me, kid, I know the feeling. We will see the other end of this. That or we’ll end up dead. Cases end one way or another. We’ll see what Limerence has for us tomorrow.”
‘

“What about… what about Taxi? Do you think she’s...okay?”

“Just watch. She’s probably in the next room crying her eyes out right now, but she’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll never know any of that happened until she gets pissed off. I’m just hoping the next thing she gets angry at is something that we need shot and not...you know...me.”

“Is that why we’re going to Supermax tomorrow?”

“Stress relief for my driver? No, but...two birds, one stone, you know?”

With that, I rolled onto my side and shut my eyes. A few minutes later, I heard Swift flipping onto her back and the sounds of soft snoring. I smiled and let myself drift off to sleep.

There was a frantic banging somewhere nearby. I didn’t need frantic banging. Frantic banging is terrible early in the morning.

I buried my nose in my beanbag chair and felt around until I grabbed something soft, then dragged it over to hide under. Whatever ‘it’ was, squeaked. I jerked my head up, then realized I’d pulled Swift off her beanbag and had my forehead nestled against her stomach. Her rear hooves flailed at the air.

“Siiir!”

I grinned and rolled out of the chair as my partner staggered to her hooves. “Sorry, kid. You don’t want to end up being a pillow, you should maybe try being less fluffy.”

She turned bright red and growled at me, “Sir, if you want a cushion, there’s plenty that don’t breathe!”

“Yeah, but none of those are quite so warm.” I left my partner scowling at my back, snickering to myself as I snatched up my gun harness and tossed it across my back. I didn’t feel like putting it on just to answer the door, but having my gun nearby was comforting.

Grabbing my coat, I slung it over my shoulders. The banging was getting a little more insistent. It was coming from the front door.

“I gave Limerence the key. I...wonder who that is at this hour?” I asked, glancing at the Princess-Celestia-smoking-a-joint clock. We’d only managed about six hours rest. Most ponies wouldn’t even have been to work yet.

I staggered over to the door and drew back the bolts, letting it swing wide.

A panicked Jambalaya, Wisteria Aroyo’s oldest daughter, blew past me into the bunker.

“It be in-de-vincable!” she whimpered, tumbling over Swift, who scrambled to get out of the way. “We must be gettin’ de Aroyo down here and de Nest sealed!”

Outside, now that the door was open, I could hear frightened shouts and pounding hooves, along with a strange yelping sound that sent shivers down my spine. Swift cocked one ear towards the noise.

I turned to Jambalaya who was quivering in the corner, her horn glittering with unspent magic.

“What exactly is out there that a lightning bolt or a few bullets isn’t handling for you?” I asked.

“De beast! It come! It chase us and...and it lick us!” she shuddered. I noticed for the first time that the fur on half of her body was matted and sticky.

Swift was still listening intently to the sounds outside. Her eyes brightened.

“It... can’t be!” she gasped, then zipped by me and up the stairs. I trotted after her, unholstering my pistol and adjusting the tongue grip so I could use the trigger with my muzzle. Jambalaya didn’t seem inclined to get up from where she was, so I left her there and went to see what all the fuss was about.

The shouting was getting closer. I opened the gate, and was almost run down by two shrieking mares running in the opposite direction.

Outside was a scene of panic. Ponies hid behind dumpsters, under upturned cans, and a few even peered out of the sewer grates.

A massive, vaguely familiar ball of black fur crouched over something in the street.

“The horror! The horror! It’s eating her!” somepony shrieked.

Overhead, three Aroyos with thunderclouds in tow were repeatedly blasting the creature, lighting up the entire street and nearly deafening everypony in the process. It didn’t seem to be doing much good. The creature was ignoring them in favor of whatever it’d found to play with. There was definitely laughter coming from that direction, which contrasted strangely with all the terrified whinnying coming from everywhere else.

Moving around so I could get a look at the actual activity, I groaned and clicked my safety back on.

Amidst the frightened hard of Cyclones trying desperately to drive the creature away, my partner lay on her back, giggling like a maniac as Goofball ‘attacked’ her with all three tongues.

I was too tired to even consider how the hound of Tartarus had managed to get into the city, past the Shield, and avoid the PACT patrols. Another crackle of lightning shot across the street and the giant dog’s back fur stood on end for a second, then settled. I’d seen pegasi put down small hydras with that power, but Goofball didn’t seem to have even noticed, aside one of his heads turning to snap at a tail that got too close.

Looking up at the Aroyos still circling, their thunderheads looking awfully empty, I shouted, “Stand down!”

An errant lightning bolt snapped down and burned the sidewalk only a few feet in front of me.

“Dammit! Drop the clouds or I swear, you’ll need a rectal exam from a meteorologist!” I snarled, leaping backwards before I could be turned into an equine light bulb.

I’ll say this for the Aroyos; they were, at the very least, well trained. The three pegasi shoved their clouds together, then gave them a collective buck that dissipated them.

A rush of wings announced Wisteria dropping from the rooftops to land beside me. She stumbled, holding her heavy, pregnant belly so it didn’t smack against the pavement.

“I and I! Who be ye to order de Aroyo?!” she snapped, angrily. “We be defendin’ ours from stompa!”

I shook my head and sat on the sidewalk, then called, “Kid? You got that thing under control?”

My partner had managed to wiggle out from under Goofball and was furiously rubbing a spot behind his right and middle head’s ears. Left head was chewing on his own foreleg.

“I think so, Sir!” she yelled back. “Could somepony get some of my snacks? I might need them!”

I turned to Wisteria, and smiled, placatingly. “Sorry about this. We took a side trip tonight and I think that followed us home.”

“I and I should be smackin’ ye for dis! Aroyo ye be, but we do not be needin’ de attention of de PACT stompas here!” she barked, then unslung the tiny pouch from around her neck and began speaking to it in low whispered tones.

“I know, I know. Could you convey my apologies to the Ancestors? We’ll return him as-” I looked out towards the street where Swift had managed to work her way down to Goofball’s neck. The enormous puppy toppled onto his side, laying there panting, all three tongues dangling. “-as soon as I figure out how.”

“Ye be not callin’ de PACT in here! Not if ye be wantin’ de Nest another night!” Wisteria growled, though her anger seemed to be abating now that the situation was in hoof. Aroyos were starting to emerge back onto the street, forming a ring of curious onlookers at a respectful distance from Goofball and my partner.

“I don’t know how he even got into the city. The Shield usually keeps the bigger megafauna out, doesn’t it?” I thought aloud.

“He not be de ‘bigger’ megafauna.” Wisteria frowned at Goofball, then clapped her hooves together three times. There was movement from the rooftops. I looked up as a dozen ponies appeared up there with various weapons, though they held their fire. “We try de bullets. We try de lightning. I t’ink Miss Catarang even try de spell fire. He not even singed. What be he, and speak quick?”

“Ever hear of Cerberus?”

“Dem what guards Tartarus?” she asked, raising one eyebrow as she watched Swift playing with the huge animal in the middle of the street. “I and I be under de impression he were… bigger.”

“He’s getting on in years. That’s his...erm...replacement.”

Wisteria squinted at Goofball, then shook her head.

“Dat? Ye doggy looks...eh...I and I be tryin’ to find a nice way to be saying ‘stupid’.”

“Believe me, I couldn’t agree more, but I’m pretty sure he’s harmless. We’ll get him home… uh… as soon as... um...”

As soon as... what? I didn’t have time to rent a truck. I’d no idea how he escaped and since he’d obviously followed us, there was probably nothing stopping him doing it again. I didn’t know if drugging him would work, since bullets and lightning obviously didn’t, and I’d no idea where on earth I’d find enough drugs. That also left the possibility of getting it wrong and killing one of the most valuable animals in Equestria. Atop all of that, I didn’t want to even think about the Warden showing up in Cyclone territory to retrieve her pet.

“...crap,” I concluded, eloquently.

One of the foals sitting on the sidelines, a small-ish filly with a frizzy red mane, was edging up to Goofball’s side. She gently touched his tail, then darted back to her group of friends. After a moment, seeing that nothing bad had happened, several others started to sneak forward to touch and stroke the big dog.

Goofball seemed to adore the attention. His tail flipped and wagged back and forth, smacking the pavement.

“Alright, alright! Enough!” I said, loud enough to be heard by everypony. Swift and the foals all looked up. “Kid, can you get that thing downstairs?”

Swift raised her head. “Aren’t we calling the Warden-”

“Not an option, I’m afraid. Don’t make me explain it, but you get to keep the damn thing for now.”

Wisteria’s eyes widened. “Keep? Keep?! Hard Boiled, have ye taken leave of ye senses?!”

“You want the Warden of Tartarus here? Or PACT? Or the Detrot Police Department? Or the Jewelers? You think all of them wouldn’t give an eye to get a bulletproof, magic-proof attack dog?”

The Aroyo’s lips twitched, as she tried to come up with another objection, then she grabbed the pouch around her neck, tore it off, and half turned, cupping it in her hooves. What followed was a furious, whispered conversation between herself and her juju-bag.

Meanwhile, several of the braver Aroyo children had climbed up on Goofball’s side and were using him for a jungle-gym. Swift was nestled comfortably between left head and middle, while the right one who, I noticed for the first time, seemed to have a big brown spot around one eye, was nuzzling at her hooves.

“Kid? I thought I said downstairs!” I snapped.

“I thought I asked somepony to get my snacks, Sir!”

“Right, right…”

Trotting back through the gate, I headed down into the bunker. Jambalaya was still cowering in one corner, her face drenched in dog saliva. I paused to look at her for a second, then went down through the kitchen and grabbed a package of jerky from the fridge. The frightened mare just stared at me as I came back through.

“It’s safe, ya know. The dog’s with me.”

This was, apparently, the wrong thing to say. Jambalaya yelped and sprang to her hooves, galloping down the hallway into the depths of the bunker, her piercings jangling all the way. I heard one of the doors towards the back slamming shut.

****

Getting Goofball into the bunker wasn’t so much a trick as was getting the foals off of him. Aroyo children were about as socialized as feral cats, at least until their teenage years, and the concept of ‘No!’ was relatively foreign unless ‘No’ was backed up by somepony smacking them across the flank.

Once Swift had her snacks, she just held one out on her hoof and Goofball trotted happily along behind her down the stairs, into the bunker. Wisteria, still snarling very quietly at her bag, came as well. Then we had to chase a whole pack of foals, along with a few griffin chicks, out of our home with judicious applications of a broom.

Swift pointed at the floor. At least one of Goofball’s heads seemed to understand ‘sit’. Right and middle were still fighting over the last chunk, but he still sat, then she tossed him another scrap of flavored meat and slumped against his chest. The enormous dog snuggled her up between his right and middle head, gently licking her cheek. “Ugh, Sir, if I’m keeping him here...how are we gonna feed him? That was half my snacks…”

“Find the number of a local pet shop supplier,” I suggested. “Miss Stella’s paying for this venture. I’m pretty sure a few bulk shipments of kibble won’t raise terribly many painted eyebrows, especially considering we've barely done more than buy food and gas with it.” I turned to Wisteria. “Sooo… what do the Ancestors say?”

Wisteria scowled and used one hoof to poke me in the chest. “I and I say ye mad! I say, ye take one too many trip to de ot’er side! I say when ye walk wid Daddy Legbaa, ye mind go to de dream place and not come back!”

"That's not what I asked."

Her ears slipped down against the sides of her head, and she deflated, grumbling. “De… De Ancestors… say de dog… be too valuable to be lettin’ run about wid dey dat would stomp us…”

“Alright, I’m...urk.” The precise weight of the load of fuzzy trouble that’d been dropped into our laps sank around my shoulders. “I hope this isn’t for more than a couple of days, but yeah, we’ll keep him in the bunker until we figure out what to do with him. Can you get some volunteers from the kids out there to walk him, make sure he craps in dumpsters, keep him fed, and make for damn sure the P.A.C.T. doesn’t see him?”

The Aroyo shut her eyes and drew in a breath. “I and I... Aye, yes, de chillun’s be fine wid diss, I sure. I be not fine wid it...but...how we are to discipline de beast when de wee pegasus be not around?”

Swift put her hooves as far around Goofball’s center neck as she could. One head nestled under her broad left-wing. “Teriyaki chicken works.”

As if on a cue arranged by Celestia herself, Taxi chose that moment to stumble into the living room. Her striped mane was a mess and her braid undone. She was rubbing at her crusty eyelids, leaning heavily on the doorframe. “Oof… I was comfortably asleep, and some Aroyo mare who smells like spicy food and raw terror just tried to climb under my bed. Somepony care to explain that?”

She paused, sniffed at the air, then opened her eyes and stared at Goofball, Swift, Wisteria and I.

Her back knees dropped out from under her as she looked at my partner and the dog, snuggled up together on the carpet.

She shut her eyes. When she spoke again, it was in very slow, measured tones. “Hardy...I want you to tell me...right now...that there isn't a miniature Cerberus...sitting in our living room.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I remembered then that she’d been preoccupied when Goofball made his first appearance.

“If I can’t tell you that, does that mean violence?”

“Yes, Hardy. Yes, that means violence.”

****

Taxi managed to hold back the urge to beat something long enough to hear a short-form explanation. Then she destroyed a pillow. Then a garbage can. Then a beanbag chair. Then she stormed out of the bunker to find -- in her words -- ‘more coffee than has ever existed’.

We hauled Jambalaya out and her mother took her by the tail, scolding her furiously for abandoning her post. The young Aroyo almost wet herself when she realized Goofball was in the bunker with her, but we managed to bundle her out before she did anything drastic or messy.

Swift hit the corner phone and made her call out to get a monstrous supply of puppy chow and three of the biggest dog-bowls in all of Equestria. It took about fifteen minutes of rooting through the phone book to find the right number, and even then, they wouldn’t actually come into the Skids to deliver. A small bribe did secure us a cart brought to the edge of the territory, though, and a promise of future deliveries as needed.

****

It was another hour before my driver came back, practically vibrating, with a gallon milk jug full of coffee slung over each shoulder and a replacement bean-bag chair. I, meanwhile, piled into the shower to try to wash all the emotions of the previous night down the drain.

Once that was accomplished, I emptied the trench coat’s pocket dimensions into a decent sized pile in what had become, more or less, my bedroom. It wasn’t strictly necessary to do that, being as the contents would have been just fine going through the wash. My coat still reeked of stress, sweat, and fear, but I felt better having it empty. It felt like starting over.

As I sorted through the pile, I found the old serpent pin that’d begun our little adventure. I turned it over in my hooves, sitting against the side of a cot, listening to my driver excitedly explaining to Swift that the universe was going to explode and her mane felt like it was crawling away. I wondered if she was on anything besides caffeine, but then, knowing Taxi it could just as easily have been sugar as Beam.

The snake eating its own tail glinted in the light as I examined it. Miss Stella’s medallion. Ruby’s medallion. Mine.

Funny thing, that.

The serpent destroying itself.

Like my city.

But then, maybe it wasn’t the city eating itself. Maybe it was us. Ponies. Griffins. Dragons. The rest. The whole lot of us, trying to hold an outpost on the edge of the Wilderness for decades on end, sprawling and screwing and killing one another, too far from the grace of the Princesses.

On the flip side, I’d certainly met plenty of creatures willing to fight for one another and try to coexist peacefully with one another.

I never believed ponies were inherently evil or corrupt. Sure, there are those who’re definitely open to corruption, but is that their fault? The Princess’ fault? The heavens?

In the end, I’ve done my job under the apprehension that evil is only what we do. It’s not who we are.

Shaking myself, I slipped the medallion back into my pocket along with Ruby Blue’s diary, an old picture of Juniper, and a few other little knick knacks. The rest of it went into the garbage. I squirmed into my gun harness, then went about the process of cleaning my gun.

There was something else for my mind to chew over. My father’s death was easy. Simple. Death in the line of duty. An unlucky day, an unlucky hour, and a bullet meant for somepony else. I remembered the funeral; Mom standing in the rain, holding my hoof and me, in uniform, with Hard Boiled Senior’s gun attached to my leg.

I missed Mom, too. Granted, I took a certain amount of comfort in knowing I would probably see them both soon if I failed at any point in the coming days.

Or maybe I wouldn’t.

I’d pulled through a gunshot wound and subsequent heart transplant. Who knew how long Gale could keep me going? Maybe, one day, it’d be Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and myself sitting there at the end of the world and the answers to questions like ‘Who is trying to kill me today?’ would seem pleasantly trivial.

These melancholy thoughts swirled around and around inside my head as I checked my gun’s barrel, cleared the breach, tested the hammer’s motion, and cleaned the chambers. Again, it wasn’t strictly necessary. It’d never been necessary. Magical weaponry is nice like that. It was just the ritual I needed. Clean the weapon. Clean yourself. Try to ignore the horrors that’ve gone before and the ones still coming.

A startled yelp from the other end of the hall brought me to my hooves, trigger in my teeth. It might have helped to have my gun holstered, but that was secondary in my thoughts.

“Mercy of Celestia, get this wretched beast off of me!” the voice shouted a second later and I relaxed, dropping my bit.

Limerence was home and making a new acquaintance.

****

Goofball had our librarian pinned to the carpet. Limerence was trying futilely to push one of his heads away with his horn and another with his hooves while the other tongued him within an inch of his life.

Swift was tugging at the giant canine’s collar, trying to drag him away from the stricken stallion while Taxi sprawled in one of the beanbag chairs, laughing so hard tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes.

“No! Goofball! Bad! Sit!” my partner shouted. I sighed and grabbed a spare newspaper off the table, brandishing it in one hoof.

Goofball’s eyes locked on the rolled paper and he whined, then slowly backed away from Limerence.

The normally very composed Archivist was dishevelled and his face-fur stuck out in funny directions as he got to his hooves, rearranging his vest self-consciously and picking up his spectacles from the carpet. He inspected them for damage before popping them back on his nose.

“Detective. I take it you have a truly excellent explanation for this?” he said, gesturing at the three-headed puppy.

“Passable. ‘Excellent’ might be stretching it. Where’ve you been? I was wondering if you were coming back at all.”

Limerence tugged his watch out and looked at the time. “I am well within the margins laid out for likely action on the part of our opponents. Besides, I believed we might need something in the event we’re caught wandering around the interior of Supermax. These things take time to acquire.”

I hadn’t noticed until just then, but Limerence was wearing saddle-bags. They looked a size too small, extremely worn, and had a tiny book for a clasp.

“Are those the same bags you were using in school?” I asked, grinning.

The librarian sneered, “I, unlike some ponies I know, am of a frugal mindset. These remain perfectly serviceable.”

Opening the silly buckle, he levitated out a shapeless blue sheet of fabric that glittered slightly, turning it this way and that.

“I...is this an actual Lunar Passage robe?” I asked.

“Indeed. I have acquired four. Fakes might have been easier to obtain, but fakery will be more easily discovered.”

“How did you get these? Don’t the Passage only give these things to their fully initiated members?” Taxi asked, leaning off her chair to feel the cloth.

“I got them same place anypony with a need, a will, and no time does. I stole them. It was a complicated procedure involving a blackjack and a few members of the church out for an evening stroll.”

I put one hoof over my eyes. “You mugged them?”

“Robbery, technically. Mugging tends to require a subject to be conscious, but I believe I made it look adequately like a robbery such that few will take more than passing interest.” Limerence sniffed, flicking a weighted club out of his front pocket and depositing it on the mantel, along with several wallets, a gold watch, and a glitzy purse. “The foal-sized one was procured at the nearby school. Difficult to find, but not to acquire.”

“...Tell me you didn’t cold-cock someone’s kid, Lim…”

“You needn't worry.” Limerence dragged the remaining outfits out, spreading them out on the carpet. “Once located, it was a simple trade. Seven pounds of candy was a relatively inexpensive purchasing price.”

Swift sat up and asked, “Why do we need a foal sized-” She paused, then sank to the carpet and put her face in Goofball’s fur. “Oh... right.”

Turning the fabric around, Limerence found the neck hole then tossed it over my head. It settled over my shoulders and the fabric flowed over my flanks. The robe was surprisingly comfortable. I shifted my weight, and it felt like being stroked with a velvet glove, except all over.

“Mmm...huh. Nothing this nice in the police catalogue,” I commented, holding up one leg to study the cloth.

“I imagine not. It is slightly magical, though the nature of that magic has escaped me.”

I tugged the robe’s hood off of my ears, letting it bunch around my neck. “Why would this need to be magical? It was expensive enough to enchant my coat just to make it waterproof.”

Limerence shrugged. “I may need to acquire an additional robe if you want me to find out. Is it important? It seems benign enough. I doubt anypony else would have noticed.”

I felt a tingle in my left foreleg.

“You mind me asking why you noticed?” I asked, trying to ignore the sensation.

The Archivist gave me a look of hurt pride. “I spent my entire foalhood up to my flank in the most dangerous enchanted mechanisms our species could produce. If I cannot recognize an arcane signature against the background radiance of Equestria, I need to turn in my horn.”

The tingle suddenly became a burn, which mounted quickly. It crept out from my knee, spreading up my spine to the back of my neck, then down over my chest, centering around the socket on my breast. I stumbled backwards a couple of steps.

Something was wrong.

Very, very wrong.

My heart started to thump against my ribs. I felt very un-stallion like shriek trying to claw its way up the back of my throat. The ache was intense, agonizing, and constricting. I felt like I was being crushed.

“Sir? Are you okay?” Swift asked, worriedly.

I opened my mouth to say something, but all that came out was a choked gasp. Blood was rushing in my ears.

My heart fluttered.

Oooh, that’s bad... I thought, detachedly.

Something grabbed the hem of the robe, then tore it over my head, leaving me blind. My knees gave out immediately, and I tumbled onto my side in a heap, panting for breaths that wouldn’t fill my lungs.

My vision was starting to go. Black spots flickered around the outside edges.

So maybe it won’t be so long before I get to see all those ponies I was missing. Huh. Strange thing, that. Shouldn’t I be afraid?

Of course, I hadn’t been afraid the last time I died either. I felt sure that probably wasn’t healthy.

Swift’s face came into view and she shouted something about a zipper.

I decided the light hurt my eyes. If I’m honest, my eyelids were just feeling terribly heavy. I let them slide shut.

I floated in darkness.

The pain in my legs was gone. All the pain was gone. There was nothing there but the dark and the cold to usher me home...

Two perceived seconds later, I squealed like a stuck pig as sensation flooded back into my body, starting in the center of my chest. Pins and needles rocketed up my back, spun around my groin, then made my teeth feel like I’d taken a big mouth full of squirming worms.

I jerked my eyes open and sat bolt upright. Limerence stood over me, his horn shining, while my partner fussed with my chest pouch. Taxi had her legs around my neck, holding me in place.

“Get the bloody plug into him!” the librarian snapped, and Swift abandoned the attempt to open the pouch with her hooves, grabbing the toggle in her teeth. She managed to pull it open, but not without almost tearing the flap of skin off in her zeal to get it done. I wanted to stop her, but my limbs seemed momentarily frozen.

Swift slipped the plug into me, then stepped back. Lim’s horn winked out and he sighed with relief.

My heart was pounding and the ache was back, but it was quickly receding.

I found my voice.

“What… in the… whole of Equestria… was that?”

Limerence glared death at me. “You had a heart attack, you idiot!” the librarian snapped. “Did we not tell you to keep that prosthesis charged? How long has it been?”

Taxi gave him a push with one toe. “Hey, back off! I watched him charge it yesterday!”

“Unless he has been severely injured in the intervening period-”

I shook my head. “I charged it before I went to bed. Kid, back me up on this.”

Swift nodded. “I watched. It was totally fine.”

The librarian’s frown deepened. He looked down at the robe, which lay discarded on the rug at his hooves. Lifting it with his horn, he flipped the cloak inside out. With a little jerk of his head, he yanked out the threads holding the inner lining closed, then ripped the interior off.

I’m not sure who made the little gasp noise, but Limerence dropped the torn robe, eyes widening as he took a couple of steps away from it.

Live in a place like Equestria for long enough and eventually a smart pony begins to build up a certain instinctual awareness of when something shouldn’t be poked, prodded, or generally messed with. Magical things are often vindictive, on top of being dangerous. They’ve been often compared to cats, insofar as there’s no telling when one will decide it’s had enough playtime and claw your eyes out.

This particular ‘magical thing’ had the feel of an object a pony shouldn’t get within two miles of.

The entire inside of the robe, from one corner to the other, was a mass of silvery threads woven into stunningly intricate spellwork that defied the eye to make logic out of it. Whorls and swirls wove into and over top of one another in no recognizable pattern, though there did seem to be some points of intersection that were fairly common. It was the very center that drew our attention. There, miniscule and the color of wet blood, a tiny crescent moon was stitched into the fabric.

“The...red moon?” Taxi asked aloud, though nopony had an especially good answer for that.

Limerence cautiously picked up the cloak again, this time with his hooves rather than his horn, twisting it so he could peer at the various shapes. “My, my, my...I say...”

“You want to share with the rest of the class? What exactly are we looking at here?” I asked.

“Detective, I don’t like explaining the obvious.” Limerence spread the cloth out on the rug. “This is some of the most unusual spellwork I’ve ever seen and it’s on a piece of clothing being given to the general public. Do I need to explain to you why that is very probably a bad thing?”

“I picked up on that!” I snapped. “I want to know what it is and what it does!”

The librarian sniffed at the robe, then shook his head as he traced the threads. “This... does several... things. It’s not a simple spell. It’s... layered.” He lowered his horn and waved it over the upper left section. “I recognize a portion of this. A complex masking enchantment to prevent the magics interacting with anything besides the robe and perhaps whatever is in contact with it.” He pointed to a particular set of swirls that loosely resembled a bird in flight. “This part is a...mmm...channel of some sort. Think of it as moving energy from place to place. It appears non-functional. The rest, I can’t say.”

“What about the moon?” I indicated the center of the robe.

Limerence shook his head. “It’s a moon. It's red.”

“Unhelpful!” Taxi said, poking him in the side.

“I do not recall guaranteeing all my information would be helpful,” the Archivist said, swatting in the direction of the offending hoof with his tail. “My horn, without spells to back it up, does not give me any more data than your eyes do. The altered cutie-mark of our victim suggests it has some significance, but as I said before, I am unaware of anything in the church of the Passage which utilizes a red moon in either iconography or semiotics.”

I slumped a little, teething at my lip as I tried to figure the next question. Something in all of this felt awfully important, but my rude awakening and my little cardiac episode had conspired to muddle my brain somewhat.

“Alright, Stone Shine said it was the uniforms that made Supermax work, didn’t he?” I asked and my driver nodded. I touched the plug on my chest, thinking. “If...this cloak somehow...drains...magic, then wouldn’t that have been what almost shut down my heart?”

Limerence traced a section of the cloak, then tapped the red moon. “Your heart is, to my knowledge, a unique artifact. There’s no way of saying what interactions it might have found with this spell, but I will say this magic is diverse.”

“It just looks super complicated to me…” Swift commented. “Isn’t most magic supposed to be...you know...simple?”

“Simple? I suppose that is one way of thinking of it, but wouldn't say simple so much as... focused. For greatest reliability, magic is best tasked with actions of limited complexity,” Limerence explained. “You would be amazed how much can be accomplished by ‘push’ and ‘pull’. Levitation, shields, and teleportation are all, effectively, just variations on those two actions.”

My partner’s eyebrows drew together. “How is teleporting all about pushing and pulling?”

Limerence shifted his weight and a tiny smile appeared on his thin blue lips. He apparently enjoyed the ‘lecturer’ role. “Ahhh… yes. A good question! A mage, of adequate power and finesse, may push an object into a phased state by altering the vibrational paradigm of the matter in question. He can then transport it between two points at very near the speed of light.”

Swift squinted at him, then rubbed Goofball’s neck with one wing. “Oookay. What’s...well, what’s different about that robe?”

He shook his head and flicked one toe at the edge of the cloth. “Whatever spell is here seems to...mmm...seems to act differently dependent upon what stimulus it is exposed to. I would go so far as to say, given the right channeling of energies, this might produce a quite wide range of effects.”

“A wide range…” Taxi murmured to herself, then stood, pacing in a little circle. One of Goofball’s heads followed her while the third went about the business of grooming his crotch and the other nuzzled Swift. She stopped, suddenly, and turned to face us. “Saussurea was a jailer, correct? With a talent for binding magic into objects. She used it to control her inmates, and make them docile?”

I felt a tickle in my cutie-mark, this time much less alarming. “You don’t think she’s been… mind controlling the ponies of the Passage?”

Limerence’s nostrils flared as realization took hold. “Nothing so uncivilized. No, she’s not even needed to. This… cloth… must encourage obedience. A subtle manipulation of thought patterns. A... push in the right direction, if you will. It feels quite comfortable to wear, yes?” I nodded and he continued, “I suspected as much. Spells woven into the cloth to make it feel comfortable and the wearer feel content. Happy even. Too subtle to be detected against the background magics of Equestria, but…”

“-but if you wore this for long enough, you’d get...what? Addicted?” Taxi asked.

“Psychologically dependant, certainly,” Limerence agreed. “I imagine there are supporting magics and there is… some part of this that I can’t exactly fathom.” He traced a particularly thick line of silver thread from one end of the robe to the other, then sideways in a swirl before it returned to the red moon at the center. “It is like this spell is...moving energies, but it goes...nowhere.”

“It managed to dump the entire charge in my heart in about thirty seconds,” I said, covering the plug with one hoof. “Pull off the moon. Let’s see what’s under there.”

Limerence’s horn lit and he gave the fabric a light tug, then tore it free. A tiny sliver of something white slipped out and skittered across the carpet to my hooves. He levitated it up, pushing his spectacles up his nose as he examined the object closely.

“I...mmm...Detective, I believe...this could...be wing bone,” he said, letting the word hang.

“As in...what? From a bird or something?” I asked, worriedly, though I was fairly certain I already knew the answer.

“No… no. I can’t be certain without some testing,-” he replied, “-but...I believe it’s from a pegasus.”

Taxi’s ears stood up straight. “A pegasus?”

Swift’s eyes shot open and she looked over at me. “Sir, tell me that means somepony is robbing graves.” She stopped briefly, then slapped her forehead with one hoof. “Why is that the nicer option?!”

I leaned closer, peering at the fragment. “How can you tell this is from a pegasus?”

Limerence floated his spectacles over to me, holding them an inch or so from the bone so I could peer through. Something inside them hummed softly, then the image seemed to twist, zooming in considerably. I found myself looking at a much larger bone.

“Magnifying...glasses?” I asked, tapping the ear-pieces.

“Quite useful in my line of work,” he answered, then nodded towards the picture. “Notice the hollow structure with the striations in the bone?”

“I...guess so. Why?”

“Hollow bones indicates a flying species. The striations are magical channels. The creature who owned this bone was able to make use of magic, in some capacity.”

“Couldn’t it be dragon bone?” Swift wanted to know.

“I suppose it might, but the hollowing would suggest a smaller species and I set the age, based on texture and wear, at post-adolescence. No, I believe this is... almost certainly taken from a pegasus or a griffin. Being as griffins are more rarefied... The likely conclusion speaks for itself.”

Swift peered at the sliver, then shuddered. “Are... Are we calling this another victim, Sir?”

“Much as I hate it...yeah, probably. We’ve got three victims, now, although I don’t know that identification on this one will be possible. Ruby, the Professor, and whoever this poor pony is. Probably quite a few more, ” I murmured, then gathered my coat under myself and sat. “Alright, Lim. This cloak controls ponies. That much we know is probably true. Theory time. What exactly does this cloak do, besides that?”

Limerence squared his shoulders and pushed his glasses up his nose. “I prefer to avoid speculation, but… there are certain inferences to be made here, I suppose.”

“Make ’em quick. I got dragged out of bed for this and if we’re hitting the prison today, we need to start actually planning,” I said.

The librarian thought for a moment, then pulled a beanbag chair over with his horn and settled it under himself, gathering his hooves up against his chest. “I do wish we’d get some proper chairs here…” he muttered, then took a deep breath. “Well... ahem. The cloak operates, in some way, related to Supermax, yes?”

“Yeees…”

“Supermax’s magical construct was a means of control. If I were a fetishistic jailer with a penchant for psychology with the endless resources of Princess Celestia behind me, I would design a prison of the mind as much as the body. It would encourage positive behavior and discourage negative ones. Above all, it should allow for maximum control over a range of characteristics, across a range of species.”

“So...it could keep unicorns from using magic?” Taxi asked.

“Conceivably -- if this were anything or than speculation -- it might prevent anyone in direct contact with this design-” he pointed to the ripped red moon laying on the carpet. “-from using any form of racially endemic magics. Of course, it would require that individual to be targeted to avoid a blanket shutdown, but... I don’t see why such control should stop with that, either,” Limerence mused, nodding to himself.

“You’re saying it could be worse than stripping somepony of their innate magics?!” my driver gasped.

“Significantly. The wing bones of pegasi channel magic, similarly to the way a unicorn’s horn does.” Limerence pointed to his own forehead. “It is a less conscious activity, in large part, but similar, and it enables flight for pegasi, who are otherwise not inherently aerodynamic bodies. The red moon is... in some fashion sending that magic through this analogue to... somewhere else.”

“What makes you think it’s sending it someplace?” I asked, poking at the red moon with the tip of my hoof.

“You must excuse me. This does touch on some things that I fear might be beyond you...”

I gave Lim a light prod in the hip. “Was that supposed to be that insulting?”

Limerence’s ears drooped a few inches. “Apologies. Father continues to be right about my lack of social graces. I meant this involves some very high level magic theory. No insult intended.”

“Then get on with it. I’ll try to keep up.”

“I suppose an attentive audience is the least I can ask. Very well, then… Hmmm...how to explain...?” Limerence’s glasses floated off his nose and he began polishing the lenses on the edge of his vest. “Think of the moon’s shape and color as a ‘flag’. The magic has been… ahm… trained… by the spell to recognize it.”

“Alright, I’m with you so far.”

“I suppose the simplest way would be to say that if draining magic is what this actually does, then the red moon is being used to send magic someplace once the rest of the spell focuses it into the wing bone. If it were not going elsewhere...well, the wing bone would eventually disintegrate. Too much magic flowing through an object that can’t take the stresses will cause it to melt; after all, finding cheap materials that could handle the stresses was what led to the arcanelectric revolution.”

“So what about giving me heart attacks?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure somepony would have noticed if everypony with an enchanted pacemaker died wearing one of these robes…”

“That... is most likely unique to your condition, I’m afraid. Yours is not a traditional prosthetic. To wit, it operates on your entire body, rather than simply your heart, hence the somewhat outsized power requirements. Most pacemakers go months between recharges. Yours...operates for days or hours, dependent upon the strain you place upon it. This cloak... disrupted...the flow of magic through your body.”

I lay back and tried to work the kinks out of my shoulders. The pain in my left leg was gone, but the anxiety of a brush with death sticks around like a foul aftertaste.

There was also a splash of guilt swirling around the nether-regions of my psyche; Gale, maybe. Feeling bad about letting me down. Not for the first time, I felt sorry for him. He was stuck with a grumpy old curmudgeon too stubborn to die properly and too stupid to stop trying. I wished there were something I could do for him that didn’t involve eating less cholesterol. Heck, I didn’t even know if the cholesterol bothered him or not.

“I assume, because these cloaks are… all over the city, that every member of the church is being affected?” I asked.

“It is a worthwhile assumption,” Limerence answered, picking up the cloak’s lining and stuffing both it and the robe back in his foal-sized saddlebags. “Though the degrees are surely limited by various factors. Distance, exposure, and no doubt a system of some kind designed to avoid arousing suspicion. I would think it would look quite bad if everypony who simply put one of these on suddenly lost their racial abilities or became highly suggestible.”

“Oog...I...that’s a scary thought…” Swift muttered. “I know a couple of ponies from the Vivarium went and joined the Church.”

“An optimistic and fatally stupid part of me is hoping that’s the worst that happens. I don’t want to find myself in a punch up with the entire Lunar Passage,” I said, tugging at one of the straps on my gun harness, self-consciously. “One last thing, though. Lim, what do you think the effect would be of... I dunno... tattooing this-” I tapped the shredded red moon shape laying on the carpet. “-onto somepony?”

Limerence’s nose wrinkled a little as he thought, then he shook his head. “Simply tattooing it onto somepony? Probably nothing.”

I tilted my head, confused. “I thought you said this was the focus?”

“Without the spellwork attached, it is...well, it is simply a red bit of cloth. To make something like that work you would need a space in which to focus the spell.”

“Huh. I...hmmm.” I glanced at the carpet, then looked up and asked, “Assuming you had such a space and could make the spell work, what would happen?”

Limerence contemplated the answer for a long moment, his frown deepening as whatever conclusions he was coming to edged gradually in an unpleasant direction, “If... if the spell were being channeled directly through a pony’s body rather than an analogue? I would imagine whatever effects the spell is capable of might be multiplied exponentially.”

Silence fell over the room, save a soft whine from Goofball, who was gently licking Swift’s face as she absentmindedly petted his heads. It lingered for several minutes as each of us tried to come up with something to say. Ruby’s presence hung heavy in the air. The poor dead filly who’d tried to make her life a little better, murdered for… what? The madness of zealots?

Finally, long past the moment the silence had become awkward, Taxi slid off her beanbag chair. “I’m going to drink the rest of my coffee and see if it’s possible to fall into a caffeine coma.”

****

Three hours later, breakfasted and with another hour of sleep, Limerence and I were poring over the blueprints we’d acquired from Saussurea. After the first ten minutes, I decided drinks were in order and had to pop down to the corner store for beer and gin.

Taxi was somewhere, either sleeping off her java binge or chewing on the furniture. Goofball was just chewing on the furniture, which was fine so long as he kept it to the giant upturned industrial spool we used for a table. I’d given him a good smack on the muzzle with a magazine when he managed to bust a beanbag chair. I was going to have to start putting those on expenses. Swift lay on the giant dog’s back, wings spread to keep her balance, her face in her book.

“Saussurea said there was an approach through the sewers. Am I just not seeing it, here?” I asked, turning the blueprint of the subterranean tunnel network on the east side of Supermax.

Limerence sucked in a breath, then shook himself. “I... can see several places we might get close, but... there aren’t any entrances I would term ‘unguarded.' If the passageways I see here are in any way accurate, these are less safe approaches and more paths of least resistance.”

“Let’s see... there’s the neurotoxin launchers. Those can be handled with... what? Gas masks?”

“Hardly. We’ll need filtration spells. This toxin is an offshoot of chimera venom. It’s been weaponized to a median lethal dose of around ninety nanograms. Unfortunately, that is not the worst of our problems. The area is filled with extracted basilisk eyes and heartseekers.”

I sat back from the blueprints and winced as my shoulders realized just how long they’d been in that position. “I’m... familiar enough with basilisk eyes. I thought their abilities only worked when they were alive, though?”

“They are like any other magical organ, if preserved correctly. I think we should assume that these are preserved correctly. So, we’ll need... mirrors, filtration spells...”

I ran my hoof down the list of weapons systems in the sewer, then checked it against the actual tunnels. “Where are these... ’heartseeker’ things? I don’t see them on the map.”

“Ah... yes, those are... mmm... those are our primary danger down there,” Limerence replied, levitating a gin and tonic to his lips and taking a quick sip. “The toxin launchers and basilisk eyes are relatively old technology which can be trivially counteracted if a pony knows how and expects them. I know of no effective method of avoiding the heartseekers. They are enormously illegal to import and if we encounter them, combat will be... problematic.”

“Sure, I’ll believe that, but what are they?” I asked.

“Oooh! Sir, I know this!” Swift exclaimed, bouncing off of Goofball’s back and landing on all fours at the side of the table.

I glanced at my partner, then held out of my hoof for her to continue.

“Heartseekers are also called ‘daevas.' They’re invisible monsters, except you can see their shadows. They hunt by listening for heartbeats!” Swift exclaimed, rising up onto her toetips. “I had a whole section on them in training for the PACT!”

“What was their method for handling these things?” I asked.

Swift’s shoulders sank a little. “Um... daevas are super territorial, so they don’t like to leave a place once they’re there, but... uh... there’s no really good way to get rid of them. You can shoot them, but they don’t die from it. It might slow them down, but... they don’t die from... well, from anything. The P.A.C.T. just boxes them up when it captures one and puts them in a warehouse somewhere. So long as you don’t open the box, they seem pretty happy...”

I blanched as the real horrible brilliance of that particular security system sank in. “I suppose that’s...entirely in keeping with what I know about Saussurea’s sense of humor. Basilisk eyes that turn anything they see to stone, and invisible monsters that the eyes can’t see. I’ll ask Sweets later on. Maybe one of her zebra friends knows something about how to handle the heartseekers.”

“I will check my resources as well. Regardless, that does leave us in a poor position once we’re inside Supermax. Navigation inside the building itself will be… difficult,” said Limerence.

“Yes, but we’ll all be carrying a few Ladybugs from the Collective with us. Chief Jade gave us permission to use them, so once we’re inside, we’ll spread them out a little and see if we can start mapping the place. If our disguises hold-”

“-assuming we haven’t set off every alarm in the building by then-” Limerence added.

“-then we will find Cerise quick as we can, extract her, and pull a fire alarm. The building should empty and the cells along with it. Once that’s done, the construct will shut down. After that, we can take Cerise to the Chief, get her to tell her story, then have Iris Jade arrest Skylark. Once done, we clean out the Lunar Passage, round up these robes, and set fire to them. With any luck... they’ll have the armor of Nightmare Moon and the moon guns there, too. If that doesn’t put a crimp in the plans of whoever this big smart kahuna who thinks he owns my city, I don’t know what will.”

As I finished, I realized Swift was giving me a look I wasn’t sure I liked.

“What?”

My partner indicated the map of the sewers with one wingtip. “Sir, with all due respect, that is the most optimistic load of road-apples I have ever heard.”

“Ugh… kid, you’re starting to sound like Taxi,” I replied with a laugh, pushing myself back from the table. “This is why I don’t do ‘plans.' Frameworks, action agendas, mission statements… sure. But not 'plans.' I fully realize we’re likely to go in there and everything will blow up around us. It’s entirely possible that Cerise will be dead already and we’re screwed six ways from Sunday.”

Swift shook her head. “I… Sir, I can’t believe that, either.”

“We’re not facing something you can shoot or bite with those big munchers of yours. This is Supermax. The Hole. The bottom of the world. You want out-”

“You already offered me that once, Sir.” She smiled and put her forehooves up on my chest, giving me a gentle shake. “Don’t offer again, okay?”

I paused, then tossed a leg around her neck and mussed her mane all out of shape. She giggled and struggled to pull away as I flattened all the product in her fur. “Heh! Alright, kid. No more trying to get you to back out.” I released her and stepped back to look at my friends. “Sooo... I did it last time. Which of you wants to go wake up Taxi?”

“Not it!”

“Not… Curses! You pegasi and your quick lips… If she kills me, deliver my corpse to my brother, Zefu. He’ll be able to get my last words for my headstone.”

“Are you sure you want ‘Ow, ow, please put my eyes back in their sockets’ on your headstone?”

Act 2, Chapter 29: Shadows With Teeth

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 29: Shadows With Teeth

It used to be that if you needed to repel a giant wilderness beast from a population center, you either needed all the town's magicians to get together and form a barrier, or you needed a unicorn with a talent for guardianship; The latter are scarce enough that they can’t be in all major cities in Equestria simultaneously.

Plans for a device that could create a selectively permeable magical barrier over an urban area based on the spellwork of a deceptively brilliant guard captain had been in development even before L.R. 0, but it was not until the Crusades that the Shield Project was really kicked into overdrive in terms of funding, horsepower, and thus, actual progress. Equestria needed ways to protect population centers from fast-moving dragon raids; a firm stare and harsh language can only repel so many draconic incursions.

The Shield's technology was in use on a small scale for general creature repellant functions for some years before the war, but efficient wide-spread implementation was only allowed via a breakthrough by the independently funded Ancile Research Group. Unfortunately for the research group, who’d publicly banked on being able to refund their debts with war funds, this breakthrough came very shortly before the dragons surrendered. The Ancile Research Group was nothing if not resourceful, however, and Detrot's position at the time -- being a wealthy jewel boom town amidst a monster-infested wilderness -- made it ideal for the Shield's continuous development and operation. The Ancile Research Group became the Shield Corporation, and has maintained the Shield ever since.

The precise operational methodology of the Shield was and remains a matter of national security; The obelisks that maintain the barriers are public knowledge, but little else is. This was not unreasonable, especially since the most development thereof occurred during wartime. If the inner workings of the Shield had been public knowledge, went the reasoning, the barrier could have easily been disabled or subverted by dragon agents, changeling infiltrators, bored insectoid hyper-intelligent collective consciousnesses, et cetera.

It should be understood, however, that The Shield isn't perfect. Determined, unknown, truly massive, or overwhelmingly numerous attackers can still get through, which necessitates the existence of PACT. Furthermore, attempting to get magic to be selective at that scale and power hasn't been without snags. On occasion it has inadvertently repelled griffins, buffalo, pet ferrets, and at one point, Mrs. Trotter of 504 Sandy Lane, who was ejected from the city at over 500 miles an hour. Thankfully, those errors have been scarce in recent years, and pegasi are necessarily quite durable when it comes to full-body impacts at high speed.

The city agreed that a relatively modest annual payment and the occasional hyperaccelerated citizen is a small price to keep out most of the nastiest beasties.

-The Scholar

It was about six hours into the morning and the list of errands had been whittled down to a short few remaining. We’d directed the clean-up of Goofball’s first major defecation, torn apart and re-sewn the Lunar Passage’s robes sans enchantments, and Limerence made a pitstop at the Archive to retrieve something for us to handle the heartseekers. He hadn’t been especially specific about what it was, which had me worried.

Taxi, Limerence, Swift, and I now sat around our living room table with a cloth spread out in front of us. On it was a veritable heap of weapons.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get another police issue shotgun to fit your harness on such short notice," said Taxi, "but I had a contact in the evidence archive who was willing to let this ‘fall out of the back door’ for a couple hundred bits.”

I picked up the sawn off shotgun Taxi was pointing at, fitting it into my side holster. It was approximately the right size, although the wooden butt didn’t quite settle. The weapon was a nasty piece of work, probably made from a hunting weapon, originally, with most of the barrels removed. I hoped if I had to fire it that I’d have the option of being more than a couple meters away. Anypony up close was likely to be turned into a fine red mist.

“If you don’t mind my asking, where’d you get the rest of this mess?” I asked, gesturing to the mass of guns that Swift was eyeing with undisguised lust.

Taxi shrugged and reached back into her saddle-bag, pulling out a stack of bit notes I could have swum in. “Stella’s generosity knows no bounds. I was curious today. Do you know, under his ownership, they’ve increased profits three fold at the Monte Cheval? Having access to a stable of skilled prostitutes and a lunatic security officer operating the tables might have something to do with that.”

“Huh. Stella really gave Svelte a job? I’m mean, I’m not shocked, but…”

Taxi laughed, “She’s apparently happy as a clam, so long as she’s allowed to test security by breaking in now and then, and bust a few heads if anypony fails to catch her. Either way, the black market in Detrot still operates, even if the white collar market doesn’t. This stuff wasn’t cheap.”

I turned the sawn off shotgun over, peering at the underside. The serial numbers had been polished off entirely, right down to the surface; a professional job, then.

Swift lifted a machine gun in both hooves, using one wing to slap the release on the drum. It thudded on the carpet and she grinned, holding the monster of a weapon in the crook of her leg with the barrel propped across her neck. “Sir, can I-”

“No, kid, we don’t have time to get you a combat saddle. Besides, I think the recoil on that thing would give you whiplash. Take your pistol or something else you can hide.”

“Awww...”

Limerence had been quiet up till that point, but he didn’t look happy as he examined the table. “And what, precisely, am I supposed to use? My knives will serve me to a range of approximately five meters.”

I cocked my head and asked, “You can’t throw them?”

“I can, but if I throw my weapons out of range of my telekinesis, then I don’t have them to use again, now do I? There is also the issue of not being terribly easy to use in a non-lethal capacity if I am tossing them. Or was I assuming incorrectly that our goal is a low number of casualties?”

Taxi scratched her head, then pawed through the pile of guns. “I’m afraid I had to buy a ‘lot’ rather than a selection if I wanted these today. I think I saw...Ah! Okay, I know this is a bit on the exotic side...”

My driver lifted a strange looking weapon out of the pile that I couldn’t immediately identify. It was the size of a pistol, but there was no barrel, nor anyway I could see to operate it with one’s mouth. Taxi tugged back on what looked like an oversized hammer and two arms burst out from the side with a loud ‘sproing!’.

“Is that… an arrow… gun?” Swift asked, curiously.

“Buying hot weapons isn’t an exact science, so my seller wasn’t real specific on what was in this bunch, but he did say there was ammunition for everything.” Taxi gestured towards a duffle bag sitting behind the Nest’s front door. “Will this work for you, Lim?”

Limerence levitated the weapon out of my driver’s forelegs, tilting it this way and that as he examined the piece. “Interesting. I take it you didn’t notice the previous owner was a murderous unicorn racial supremacist?”

Taxi raised both eyebrows and he turned the weapon over, showing off the words ‘Sod-Suckers’ and ‘Turkeys’ carved into the underside of the stock. Beside each slur, a couple of hash marks were cut into the metal.

“Knowing my seller, the previous owner is dead or in prison,” she said, dismissively, picking up a blocky object and affixing it to the top of the strange gun. “This is a quick loader. You just pull this-”

“I’m aware of the basic functions of a crossbow, Miss Taxi,” Limerence said, shortly. Yanking back on a lever, he gave the gun a slight shake. A bolt fell into place from the loader, then locked when he let go of the lever. Floating the gun around in front of himself, he aimed down the sight at a discolored spot on the wall, then pulled the trigger. The weapon jerked as the arrow buried itself six inches to the left of his intended target. “Mmm… My aim is poor with conventional firearms, but… this weapon has some functional physics I can adapt to, if you don’t mind me taking a few hours practice before we leave.”

“We won’t be moving until tonight, so take all the time you need,” I said. “That...does leave you, Sweets-”

“Cannon,” she said, firmly.

“No, we need discretion in-”

She shook her head and pointed towards Limerence, “We’ve got a silencer in our group, remember?”

Limerence’s lips twitched into a small smirk. “I can fire my weapon and cast my silence, so long as my attention need only be in two places at once.”

I rolled my eyes at my driver and the librarian. “Suuure. Then explain to me how you two are going to hide that monster under a Lunar Passage robe? Sling it between your rear legs? I mean, Sweets, I always suspected you wanted a-”

“Finish that sentence and I begin picking bones to break that you won’t need today,” Taxi growled, patting her P.E.A.C.E. cannon with one hoof where it lay beside the table. “I’ll figure something out.”

Cracking the breach on my shotgun, I quickly went through the motions of popping shells into it with my mouth, then sealing and firing it. It wasn’t a quick weapon by any means, but I wasn’t going to need to do more than fire in the enemy’s general direction.

“One last thing. What’s our method for handling the heartseekers?”

Limerence scratched at his mane, then spoke with clear reluctance. “I… erm… I was... able to find one legend of a zebra prince sneaking into a nest of daevas.”

“Go on,” I prompted.

Opening the pocket of his vest, he pulled out a gemstone and set it on the table. His horn flashed as he aimed it at the jewel and a rhythmic thumping filled the living room.

“That sounds like… a heartbeat,” Swift said, cocking an ear.

“Very astute. The zebra in question used a device made of a drum, wheel, and rope, but the purpose was similar. Unfortunately, I’ve only been able to make three of these without giving myself a horn ache or risking total depletion. I fear enchanting is not my forte.”

I examined the rock, then shook my head. “What good is drawing them to us?”

“We don’t draw them to us, Detective. Before we enter the daevas’ lair we will place them at various entrances to the sewers around the area, as far as possible from the place we intend to pass through. With luck, it will lure them away from us.”

Swift chewed on her lower lip, then asked, “If you don’t mind… what happened to the zebra prince in the story?”

Limerence’s expression fell and he carefully studied his hooves. “Well... you must understand, this is a zebra morality story and there are social connotations and cultural flavor which is somewhat lost in translation-”

My partner glared at him. “What...happened...to the zebra prince?”

“Ehem… His heart was torn out and he was eaten alive when the drum device ran out of beats.”

At first, none of us could think of anything to say to that. I felt briefly light headed and tapped my chest plug a couple of times until Gale remembered he needed to beat.

Taxi picked up the pulsing gem, then shuddered and quickly laid it back on the table. “Oof, that’s weird. It really feels like a tiny heart.”

“I want to go back a step here. This whole ‘heart being torn out’ thing is entirely understandable, but if we’re going to put our lives in your hooves, I want to know what you meant when you said ‘with luck’. Exactly how long do these operate for?” I asked.

“Truth? I’ve no idea. Minutes, perhaps. I would consider our upper limit to be a half hour of relative safety. Again, I am not an enchanter. I study things that others have enchanted, but the best I could do was a simple spell matrix and a charge. I can silence our own heartbeats and we must pray the daevas are drawn away. Once these magics are exhausted-”

“-we’re screwed. Alright. Is this the best we could do?”

“If we had a few more days, I could take this to one of the other Archivists...”

I shook my head and picked up the stone, dropping it into my pocket. “I don’t want to find out how long Cerise has before something bad happens to her, if it hasn’t already. Taxi, can you go ring the Essy office and get a few of Queenie’s brood to join us?”

A soft tingle in my mane gave me quite a jolt, then a tiny black and red creature crawled out of the fur behind my left ear, skittering out onto the tip of my nose. I stared at it with crossed eyes.

“How long have you been there?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. The ladybug began self-consciously cleaning its forelegs with its mandibles. I reached up and carefully plucked it off my muzzle, setting it on the table.

“I… take it then that this is one of those… police surveillance creatures I’ve heard of?” Limerence asked. “Weren’t they hideously unreliable?”

The ladybug let out an indignant buzz, then turned its back on him, crossing its forelegs grumpily.

“They’re reliable enough, so long as you know how to keep them interested,” I replied, then got down on my knees so I could be face level with the insect. “Hey, could you make sure the collective has a few of yours ready to join us at Supermax? I can promise some ridiculously dangerous escapes and probably somepony getting shot.”

The bug made a big show of pretending to think, then it nodded, which was a full body action for something so small. Taking off, the creature flew up and re-settled behind my ear, burrowing into my mane. I wondered just what percentage of the last couple of days Queenie was storing in that vast, networked mind for later perusal when its soap operas were on commercial break.

“Sir, I just had a really scary thought. Does that thing being here… does that mean Chief Jade can watch… everything that we just did the last couple of days?” Swift asked, uncertainly.

“I… uh… Celestia preserve us, I hope she doesn’t have that kind of spare time. Either way, I suppose it doesn’t matter. We’re going in, one way or the other. If she wants to bust us, she’ll have a bumper crop of evidence once this is over.”

“That does remind me…” Limerence trotted out of the room, returning a moment later with a long, square cardboard box floating behind him. Lifting the lid, he plucked out a sheet of reflective metal that appeared to have a hoof-strap attached to the back of it. “This should work for the basilisk eyes.”

“A mirror shield… huh. I like it. Simple, reasonably foalproof to use,” Taxi murmured.

“The security system at Supermax seems based largely on being a relative unknown to any would-be escapee. I have learned a filtration spell I do believe should protect us from airborne contaminants.”

“So… that’s it then. We’re ready,” I said.

“Detective, I don’t think we could be ‘ready’ for this with six weeks preparation, much less six hours. What we are is desperate, endangered, and probably going to die screaming while an unseeable demon claws our organs out.”

“Come on, Lim! Think happy thoughts! I’m alive, aren’t I?”

The librarian poked me in the chest over my heart socket. “In open defiance of probability. Still, we proceed as needs must.”

Goofball, who’d been napping, raised his two of his heads and wagged his tail, almost toppling Swift as he batted her legs.

The four of us looked at him, then at one another.

“Who gets to go tell Wisteria we’re leaving Goofball with her?”

****

As it turned out, the dog was the least of our issues.

At first, Wisteria insisted on guiding us through the sewers herself, but I vetoed that and the Ancestors concurred. Nopony could fault her for loyalty, but they were not happy with the idea of the pregnant mare going out of the Skids, much less participating in any sort of dangerous mission, so Wisteria saddled us with her daughter.

Jambalaya was still sore about having to be dragged bodily out of the Nest by her mother, but she agreed to take us to the edge of the Aroyo underground territories, which ran considerably farther than their above-ground haunts. From there, we’d have to make our own way using a sewer map and Saussurea’s blueprints.

****

“What’s the plan for once we’re inside?” Taxi asked, accelerating down the vacant motorway. It was just after sundown and we were well out of the Heights, moving at a speed that would leave police cruisers out of puff and miles behind.

I sat, watching the empty and near-empty industrial estates on either side of us. Here and there, a Shield monolith poked out above them, like giant caltrops to stab the feet of giants. The Wilderness loomed up behind them, a vast field of green climbing up one side of the mountain, bookending the valley Detrot sat in. I saw what I thought was the shape of a small dragon veer towards the city from far up, but as it reached the top of the Shield’s coverage area a soft flicker of light surrounded it for a moment before it reversed course, darting back towards the forests.

“I don’t know,” I replied, finally. “We’ve got disguises and I hope those will give us some leeway. We need evidence of what Skylark is doing and, if possible, a way to shut the magical construct down. The best I think we can hope for is probably Cerise extracted with minimal casualties. If things go badly, prioritize escape. We do nopony any good if we’re dead. Swift, did you get your camera? We’ll need pictures, if for no other reason than to turn over to our lawyers when they ask us exactly why we were trespassing in a convent with enough weapons to gut a Tatzelwurm.”

My partner nodded and pulled a small, bright green film-loading camera out of her vest’s front pocket. Turning, she grinned and aimed it at me. It flashed, and a sheet of thin picture paper spat out of the front. “Oooh, Sir, can I get one later with you standing in front of Miss Stella? Or maybe one with Goofball?”

I smiled involuntarily and pointed to the lens-cap, which was still on. “Sure, kid. If we survive, yes, you can take pictures of me and your dog all you like.” I turned to my driver. “Sweets, where’s this sewer entrance we’re meant to be taking?”

“It’s about a mile and a half from the building, but if Saussurea’s blueprints are to be believed, the actual territory of the heartseekers extends two kilometers in every direction. There’s no listing of how many there are now, unfortunately.”

“Damn. I hope these things aren’t that fast…”

“All indications are that they are very fast, Detective." Limerence added. "We will need to move quickly once we’re in the sewers."

Jambalaya, who was sitting in the back seat with Swift and I, said, “I and I have run de underland near de Hole. De… de ‘heart seeker’ ye be callin’ dem… I and I have been near dem. Dey not come away from de edge of dey lands nor above de ground, but.... If ye meet one, dey be tricksy.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I replied to that rather ominous piece of advice.

Looking up, I poked at my mane around my ear. “Ladybugs?” My neck tingled and I took that to mean they were listening. “I need three of you to move the heart beat stones to the places we pointed out on the map, then whoever is coming with us into the building needs to be waiting where I told you we’d stop. Clear?” The fur on the back of my head twitched twice, which I took to mean ‘yes.'

Jambalaya gave me a funny look. I thought about trying to explain who and what I was talking to, then decided it wouldn’t matter to her estimation of my sanity if I did.

****

I hadn’t been to the Hole more than a decade.

I remembered it with a sort of vague horror at what we as a species had let happen, first to the draconic prisoners and then later to our own, but you can’t spend your entire life outraged at mistakes made and corrected. The Princesses managed to bury and redress the worst of the abuses, largely by taking anypony who’d committed them and either sticking them in prison or making sure they’d never work anything more complicated than a hay frier.

A part of me refused to stop chewing over the question of how we were going to deal with Skylark herself. Shut down the magical construct and whatever spells were manipulating the populace should go with it, but that still left a cult of personality that spanned the entire region. Assassination was just not in my bag of tricks.

A month ago, I’d have dealt with this situation by drinking myself into the grave; I'd examined every fresh case for a new opportunity to give the reaper his due.

Funnily enough, in spite of various factors colluding to put me in harm’s way this time, I was surprised to find myself no longer quite so eager for the end.

****

There was no way, if you were anywhere near it, to mistake what was once Supermax for any other building in Detrot. It hacks a perfectly square swath of stars out of the horizon. The structure defies perspective until you’re near enough to realize just what a towering monstrosity it really is.

The buildings around us were thinning as fallow, empty farmland took over. Much of it had been poisoned beyond use during an especially irresponsible period of gemstone mining, before regulations were put in place to protect the local aquifers.

“We’re getting close…” Taxi murmured from the front seat. I began patting my pockets, checking for each essential accessory before peering out the windscreen, trying to pick out our destination in the low light.

Once Supermax was built, there were two good reasons to avoid that particular section of the city.

I glanced over at Jambalaya, who was leaning half out of the car window, holding a torch with her horn and pointing it at the roadway. She was counting off sewer grates as we passed them.

“How do you know where we are?” I asked, speaking a little louder to be heard over the sound of the rushing air.

She pulled the torch to her hooves and called back, “I and I be knowin’ dis place! We be almost de’re! Tell she what moves dis mad t’ing to stop!”

Taxi applied the brakes and I flicked my eyes at Swift. She nodded, then rolled down the opposite window. Sticking both wings out, she let them catch the wind, which swept her out of her seat and sent her soaring up into the night sky.

“De wee pegasus… she be mad flying like dat!” Jambalaya gasped as my partner was sucked out into the open air.

“Not crazy. Just very, very good at what she does. She’ll be back. She’s just going for a little scouting run. I want to make sure we aren’t watched.”

We pulled to a stop some distance further on, got out, and began arming ourselves.

The field we’d stopped beside was empty and the road, pock marked; a ‘low traffic’ area. An old farmhouse squatted in the distance, decaying in the middle of a disused field of gravel. It might have been wheat, or it might once have been rocks, but it was empty and that’s what mattered.

I looked back towards the center of the city. We were quite some ways out from uptown, but the sprawl surrounded Supermax whilst simultaneously keeping a respectful distance. Few ponies were likely to be on the lonely road at that hour. The weather factories were shut down for the evening, leaving the untended clouds crowding the sky. It was a starless night. A perfect night for skulking about.

Jambalaya crawled out of the car and stood unsteadily, trying to get her hooves under her. She wasn’t used to being driven. Chariots were still commonplace; cars were a bit of a luxury in Detrot.

Swinging her torch around, she scanned the road until she found a removeable sewer cover. Stuffing the light away, she reached into a bag around her neck and produced a metal stick with two prongs on the end. Bracing her rear hooves, she stuck the ponyhole key in and heaved the cover off, then shined the light inside.

“Dis one be clear, Crusada.”

Swift came in for an almost silent landing beside me.

“Nopony anywhere near, Sir,” she reported. “There’s a bunch of cars at Supermax, but nopony was outside keeping watch.”

“Why should they? It’s a convent,” I replied with a shrug, trying to wedge my shotgun a little more tightly into its holster. After some fiddling and a half roll of gaffer tape, we’d managed to get it to fit, but it still wobbled when I moved.

“Yeah, but… Sir, why do a bunch of nuns and priests need cars?”

I paused, mulling that over. “I… think we’re going to find out.” Rooting around in my pocket, I pulled out the heart gems and laid them on the pavement. “Alright, ladybugs. Are you here?”

A thin buzzing filled the air as about two dozen tiny insectoid creatures dropped from the skies, alighting on the brim of my hat

Jambalaya drew back, her flashlight swinging up into my face. “What be dis?!”

I held up my hoof as she thoroughly ruined my night vision. “Friends. Jeez, watch it with that thing.”

“Dey be bugs! Little...little demon bugs! Parasprites!”

I laughed and gestured to the field. There was a soft chirping coming from out there. “Trust me, these things are parasprites like those crickets are a swarm of locusts. We’re fine.” I shifted my attention to Limerence. “Lim? Set us up.”

His horn fired and he pointed it at the three gems, one at a time. They began to pulse with a weak light and the faint thump of an equine heart. Six ladybugs detached themselves from the group, swooped down, and snatched up the gemstones before flying off into the night, a pair clutching each jewel.

“I and I… be… be not wishin’ to know what ye be doin’, Crusada. Ye be too strange a pony,” Jambalaya muttered, pointing to the open sewer. “We be go from dere.”

Swift pulled open the trunk of the Night Trotter, dragging out the box with the mirror shields in it and hefting it across her back. “Alright, good to go, Sir!”

I backed down the hole, fitting my hooves into the sloping rungs of the ladder. I paused halfway into the dark pit. “Keep your flashlights on and your eyes peeled. We don’t know what these neurotoxin launchers look like and there’s still the possibility we could run into a heartseeker before we’re out. Limerence, you have your spells ready?”

He nodded, then hesitated and patted the crossbow strap keeping it slung across his back. “I feel I should warn you that I will not be able to use my magic for anything but silencing our hearts and filtering the air once we are in the daevas’ territory. My attention is best split only in two directions at once.”

“If we have to fight before we reach Supermax, I think we have either got plenty enough weapons or so few that a crossbow won’t matter,” I replied

“That is not… comforting, Detective.”

“Wasn’t meant to be,” I answered, then began my descent, letting myself be swallowed up by the darkness.

****

The climb was a long one, but Limerence’s horn provided a little bit of illumination on the inside of the shaft. It’d been awhile since I climbed a ladder and I kept waiting for the burn to start in my thighs. Certainly, Limerence was huffing and puffing as the floor came into sight.

“My...goodness. I swear, I must add more aerobics to my calisthenic regimen…” he murmured between rough breaths.

I stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder and fished in my pocket until I found my light. I’d opted for a couple of electrical lanterns on neck straps, which were bright without being blinding. Flicking it on, I turned in a small circle, getting a good look at our surroundings while the others made their way to the ground.

We’d come down into a disused cistern and the smell was, thankfully, milder than it might otherwise have been; still crap and mold, but not bad enough to knock over a charging minotaur. There were flood water marks high on the walls, which might have accounted for the relatively clean state of the place.

Tunnels stretched away from us in two directions and a thin trickle of sewage water ran down the middle, but otherwise we seemed to have come into a relatively quiet part of the network. I breathed a sigh of relief. Part of me expected demonic shadows or a whole army of cultists just waiting at the door.

Taxi was climbing down in front of Swift and having a real time of it. Dangling from her shoulder, her P.E.A.C.E. cannon scraped the far wall of the narrow shaft with every step she took. I shook my head, but didn’t feel like restarting the argument of whether or not she should have that wretched thing.

Jambalaya was the last one down, her horn focusing a circle of light on the walls. Her nose twitched as she sniffed this way, then that, before pointing off to our left down the nearest tunnel.

“Lead the way,” I said, trying to breathe through my mouth.

****

I was lost.

Lost, lost, lost.

The map we had with us might have been adequate, to a point, but if the little unicorn Arroyo hadn’t been there, I’m fairly certain we’d have wandered until we starved or the daevas ate all four of us. Taxi had a sublime understanding of the surface roads, Swift could navigate the skies with unerring accuracy, and Limerence could read a map upside down and backwards, but in the sewers they were all as hopeless as I was.

The primary issue was that all the tunnels looked almost exactly identical. We trotted from one to the next, down broad cut-throughs and some that were barely cracks in the wall and I soon felt like we were going in circles. I was painfully aware of our timer ticking down on the heartseeker lures, as well. Twice, we passed through cisterns that were, to all appearances, completely identical to the one we’d entered from.

“Are we… almost there yet?” I asked, for the third time in five minutes.

Jambalaya blew a breath out of one side of her muzzle. “We be nearly dere, though iffen ye be askin’ me dat again, I be leavin’ ye here to make ye own way, Crusada.”

I dropped back beside Taxi, pulling the collar of my coat up against the slightly cool air in the tunnel.

“You know we can’t make this any faster, Hardy…”

“I know. Part of me was hoping that we’d at least be able to leave via the sewers, though.”

Taxi sucked on her upper, then lower lip before finally shutting her eyes and “I didn’t want to ask earlier, but what is our exit going to be? The fire alarms don’t strike me as a terrible effective method if shooting does start.”

“The sprinkler system will automatically call the fire department if it’s set off. I doubt anypony would see fit to disable that, weird cultists or not. We start shooting, they’ll be on their way, along with the police. All we have to do is cause some proper chaos until they get here, then leave with the rest of the crowd.”

“Yeah, Swift wasn’t kidding when she filled me in. Optimistic horseapples. Sooo...what’s your plan B? You wouldn’t be taking us in there without one.”

I frowned at the floor, plodding along behind our guide with my tail tucked between my legs to keep it out of the puddles. “There was something in the hoofnotes on the blueprints, yeah...”

“And?”

“I sincerely hope we don’t have to use that one. Trust me, it’s nothing nice.”

“You mean less nice than this?” Taxi asked, waving her hoof at the ceiling of the sewer.

“Significantly. It’s a one way exit. I’m reserving that in case things don’t go anything like to plan. If I’m honest, I’d like to just walk in, get Cerise, then sneak out. Who knows? Maybe they’ll let us out the front door. It wouldn’t be the first time a dumb lackey let a hostage walk out with somepony who looked like they should be there...”

****

Another five minutes passed, and Jambalaya came to an abrupt halt at a side-passage covered by a set of heavily rusted but sturdy looking bars. Reaching out with her magic, she grabbed the middle one and gave it a light twist. Somewhere in the stonework, something groaned, then the bar scraped its way up into the ceiling.

“Dis be it, Crusada. I and I not know de way from here,” Jambalaya said.

“That’s fine. We’ve got a map,” I replied, poking my head through the bars and looking both ways. The space was just big enough to wiggle through, if I breathed out.

“If ye be lost, find dat line,” she added, pointing her horn at a length of faded, off-yellow-colored pipe running along one side of the tunnel until it vanished into the distant dark. “It lead back here.”

“Alright then. I guess this is it.” Hauling my coat back, I freed my shotgun and adjusted the strap on my bit. “Jambalaya, you okay making your way back on your own?”

“Aye, Crusada. Ye come back alive, hear?”

I grinned at her and blew a little kiss off my hoof. “Awww, I didn’t know you cared.”

She gave me a black look, and stepped out of where the kiss might have landed. “I and I be not de one cleanin’ up after de mutt. Ye come back, or I find ye grave and make He wid Three Heads crap on it.“

With that, she turned on her heel and marched off back the way we’d come.

Chuckling, I squirmed between the bars and joined my companions.

“How long do you figure we’ve got left before the lures run out?” I asked.

Limerence tugged his watch out and checked it.

“Perhaps ten minutes, at the outside. We are less than a kilometer from the prison. At decent speed, we should make it in time, assuming the daevas have been drawn away from their lairs.”

“Cheerful thoughts, Lim! Cheerful thoughts. Now, I’m ready when you are.”

The librarian’s horn burst to life, lighting up the whole tunnel then guttering to a soft glow. Silence descended like a hammer blow. I felt like my ears should have popped or something. Swift winced and pawed at the side of her head for a second, then opened her mouth to say something before remembering just how futile that would be.

I pulled the sewer blueprints out of my front pocket, unfolded them, and held them up for Limerence. He studied them briefly, then nodded and peered at the walls before picking a tunnel that appeared, to me, just like every other. We started down it at a pace slightly faster than a walk, but not quite a gallop.

Taxi and Swift took up positions on either side of him, with myself bringing up the rear. My driver’s ridiculous cannon was draped over her back, balanced between her saddlebags, both of which sagged with extra ammunition for all of our weapons. I’d asked if she needed me to carry any of that mess earlier, but she seemed to be trying to prove the stupid blaster was practical in some way, shape, or form.

At the next junction, Limerence swept out one hoof, bringing the rest of us to a sudden halt.

I stepped up beside him, and gave him a curious look. He pointed ahead, then levitated his glasses off his face, holding them in front of mine. Through the lenses, I could see significantly more light than was actually there and a short distance further. I supposed that late night reading was easier if somepony didn’t need to turn on a lamp.

Up ahead, I caught sight of a figure standing in the middle of the tunnel. It was equine, male and seemed to be straining towards us while looking up and to the left. One hoof was upraised, as though warding us away. It took me a second to realize that the pony in question wasn’t moving. His original coloration was probably not granite, either. A stick of some kind was clenched between his teeth with rags wrapped around one end; an old, makeshift torch, long extinguished.

I followed the stone pony’s gaze up to the corner of the room, but couldn’t make out exactly what he was looking at. Limerence’s glasses floated back to his nose. He grabbed Swift’s tail in his teeth, pulling her around sideways. She gave him an offended swat with one wing, then hauled the mirrors off her back and passed them to him.

Separating the four pieces of glass, he showed us how to hold them up. Hobbling along on three hooves wasn’t ideal, but it was better than being turned to stone like the poor sap up ahead.

Lim held his shield high and walked forwards, slowly. The rest of us followed. After ten paces, he let out a low grunt as something seemed to press against the mirror with a tangible weight. Two seconds later, the weight relaxed and he let his shield drop. I reached out to stop him, but he shook me off. Moving to the wall, he lifted himself up on his rear legs and reached into a tiny hole in the brick work, tugging something out.

He returned to us with an eyeball on a stick clutched in his teeth.

From the look on Swift’s face, she’d have been okay not knowing exactly what it was, but I was curious. I took the stick from him and examined it closely. The eye was attached to the end with an elaborate set of wires buried in the area of the former optic nerve. All of it was tied tightly around a power gem in the base. The entire construct was solid stone.

Limerence picked a piece of cardboard out of his pocket and held it up.

It said ‘Filtration spell now active. Can maintain for seven minutes. Shields should clear path to Supermax. Watch sides of hallway. Eyes are positioned in corners for best coverage.’

Limerence raised his shield, then his horn brightened and a thin glow formed around our bodies. My neckfur immediately stood on end and it felt like whole armies of fleas were marching around my ears. I couldn’t help a firm scratch and Swift almost toppled onto her side, giggling so violently that I felt certain we’d call down every daevas in the building on our heads if she weren’t under the comforting blanket of the silence spell.

The librarian held up another card: ‘Apologies. Tolerate or die.’

Swift recovered shortly, but her rear legs did a little jig every time she wasn’t walking. Taxi, as always, seemed completely unbothered.

We edged around the statue, moving into the tunnel he’d been running from. Whether by luck or sheer cleverness he’d been only a few meters from escape. There was no telling how he’d gotten that far, but unless he’d known about the trick bars up ahead, he would probably have been trapped one way or the other.

I studied his slim, handsome face, noting the fear, and underneath, a slight resignation.

We moved on.

In the next tunnel, we formed a tight diamond, shields held out and forward to keep a vanguard with full coverage of a cone in front of us. Every few seconds, I felt a slight pressure on the mirror that reminded me of a stiff breeze as another of the eye emplacements turned itself to stone.

The walls were slick with something green and slightly furry. Without warning, Swift grabbed my tail coat in her teeth, hauling me back. I stumbled and almost dropped my shield, but managed to hold onto it. She jabbed her foreleg at the darkness ahead.

Limerence squinted, then he went round eyed and took two or three steps back, scrambling for his front pocket, spilling more cards on the floor. Snatching up one labeled ‘#33’, he flashed it at me.

‘Something out there.'

I waved my leg at his horn and then my gun, but he shook his head, digging out another card.

‘Living.'

I grabbed Limerence’s glasses off his nose, popping them onto my own face. He blinked, then made to reach for them, but I pressed him back with one hoof on his chest. Raising my shield, I turned to the tunnel and stepped forward, peering just around the edge of the mirror with one eye.

With the glasses on, I could see what’d stopped my partner. I could also smell it; the faintest hint of something rotten. I looked down, worriedly, but my fur still glowed with the filtration spell. Time was counting down.

Towards the opposite end of the tunnel, something seemed to be growing from the walls. It reminded me of a furry carpet, with lumps and protrusions sticking out of it. The creature or plant or whatever it was stretched across the ceiling and back down the other wall. As I got a little closer, a protrusion popped up from the floor and I hastily yanked my head back behind the shield as something hit the front of it. Glancing down, I saw what looked like some kind of stinger or needle, leaking a green mist that curled around my hooves as though hunting for a way in.

I took a step or two back, then cast around on the ground. Finding a chunk of broken masonry, I chucked it down the hall.

The other end of the tunnel came to life in violent fashion. Dozens of those little arms exploded off the ground, peppering the entire hallway. I hopped backwards another meter to avoid the spray, raising my shield.

We’d found our neuro-toxin launchers.

Motion activated, living neuro-toxin launchers. The sick mind of Saussurea was, yet again, going to try to kill me.

Retreating to my companions, I gave Limerence back his glasses, then picked up one of the cards and made the motion of writing with a pencil. Lim floated one over to me and I quickly wrote a sentence, then held it up in front of Taxi.

It said ‘Got Party Poppers?’

Taxi grinned like a fox who’d been told she has the run of chicken coop full of crippled hens. Unslinging her P.E.A.C.E., she set her saddlebags down and rifled through them until she came up with a bandolier slung with a dozen bright colored shells. Opening the gun’s drum, she switched out the rounds as quickly as she could, then sealed it and reared back, grabbing the trigger in her teeth as she aimed it down the hallway. I reached out and gently put my hoof on the barrel, lowering her intended target a few inches.

I felt like I should put my hooftips in my ears, but there was nothing to hear. I’d been on the receiving end of a Party Popper during riot training in basic, but that was many, many years ago. One does forget just how vicious the tools of the policing trade can be when the goal is to keep an opponent alive. It tends to mean inflicting maximum pain and confusion without killing them outright. My abiding memory of being hit with a Party Popper was watching the floor coming at my face and wondering why I needed to sneeze.

The gun jumped and flashing light filled the tunnel, along with a concussive blast that reverberated through the stones underhoof, but made absolutely no sound. We ducked behind our shields as the far end of the tunnel went wild. Confetti burst in all directions along with eye-piercing fireworks that danced along the walls, spinning in circles and dancing through the air.

When the lights faded, we peered over our shields at the far end of the hall which was still weakly lit by a few burning embers.

A few tentacle-like arms were frozen in mid-air and the ground was littered with spent needles. Several were still trying desperately to throw their payloads at the sparkling lights, but there was nothing left to throw. Thick, green smoke billowed around the floor.

Taking a deep breath, I plowed forward. The toxin launchers didn’t even notice me as I carefully stepped over them. Whatever they used for senses would -- if the equine reaction was any indication -- be completely overwhelmed for minutes or hours.

My companions followed me through the tiny forest of twitching tentacles. Limerence paused just long enough to grab one of the stingers and pop it into a tiny glass jar, then we continued down the next tunnel.

****

Our luck lasted for five more tunnels.

With preparation, we’d managed to skirt things that had bested dragons and the most cunning criminal elements in Detrot history. Granted, we’d had to use half the Party Poppers we’d brought along and the tunnel was absolutely filled to brimming with a sickly, green mist; I’d had a moment of genuine worry when we came upon the corpse of a young dragon entirely blocking one part of the hall, but he’d been picked down to the bone.

In the room beyond him, however, we ran into our first heartseeker.

Taxi saw it first, and raised her hoof for everypony to stop.

Swift scooted close and mouthed, ‘What is it?’ at her, trying to pierce the fog filling the hall.

My driver quickly took the pencil from Lim’s pocket and wrote something on one of his flash cards, then held it up.

‘Count the shadows,’ it read.

I looked down at myself, glowing slightly in the darkness, then towards the other end of the corridor. Up ahead, there were four pipes running floor to ceiling, each casting its own shadow on the walls of the tunnel. Another came from a broken lighting emplacement laying smashed on the floor.

‘One, two, three...’ I silently spoke each number, then snatched for my trigger bit.

There were six shadows.

The sixth stood halfway down the hall. I tried to make out general shape of whatever was casting it, but the impression was too strange. It seem somewhere between a pony and a large insect of some kind. There were certainly more legs than a pony should ever have and something like an enormous tail waved in the air behind it, sweeping back and forth across the hallway as though searching for something.

Most importantly, it was right in our path. It wasn’t moving towards us yet, but I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not.

Limerence put his hoof on my shoulder for attention, then pointed at his horn. The light surrounding it was almost out and the toxic fog still choked the ground around us. He jerked his head sideways, and I noticed a thin cut through between two tunnels. We edged over to it very, very slowly, praying the creature was either facing the other direction or asleep. There was no way to know.

The space was barely wider than a pony.

Swift slipped in first, followed by Taxi. Limerence gave me a worried look, then flinched as his horn sputtered. The glow around us began to fade.

The daevas wasn’t moving, so I pushed into the little space with him and jotted a quick note on a flash card.

‘How long?'

He shook his head and shrugged, then pinched his eyes shut for a moment.

I went back to writing.

‘How far are we?’

Taxi pulled the blueprints out and pointed to a spot on them, then mouthed, ‘Not far.’

I nodded, then quickly wrote, ‘Can you keep the filter spell if you shut off the silence?’

Limerence thought for several seconds, biting his lower lip. Taking the pencil he wrote back, ‘A little longer.’

I looked back and forth between Taxi and Swift. ‘Be ready to shift,’ I said, hoping they could read lips well enough to get the gist of what I had in mind. Taxi bobbed her chin and Swift switched off Masamane’s safety.

Limerence took a deep breath, then his horn’s light faded to a dull glitter.

Sound crashed into my ears so violently that I moaned. My own heartbeat was like thunder in my ears. Breath was the rushing of waterfalls. There’s no comparison where real silence is concerned and there’s a reason it’s used as torture in some of the less civilized parts of the world.

I became quickly aware of another sound, back the way we’d come. It was a keening shriek, building in intensity until it began to reverberate in my very bones.

Something skittered on stone. I felt a breeze jostle my tail and a thick, wet breath blowing on my flanks.

“Move, move!” I shouted, giving Taxi a push with my muzzle. My companion’s squeezed through the narrow space and out the other side, looking both directions. I glanced back at the passage. The shadow was just outside, and I had the eerie sensation that it was studying me. It moved off to one side and another of those strange shrieks echoed down the hallways.

“Limerence, which way?!”

“Give me a moment! I need to recalculate!” Limerence yanked his map out and Swift held it for him.

Far off, there was a sound like a whole flock of screeching hawks howling out the chorus of some sort of war song. Fear crept up from the direction of my chest and I did my best to project calm thoughts I wasn’t really feeling.

“Calculate faster!” Taxi yelled, wrenching her cannon up into her hooves and leaning against the wall for support as she pointed it back down the hallway. “We don’t want to be in an enclosed space when I fire a Popper!”

Swift was hyperventilating, her wings spread for flight as she clutched her trigger bit between her teeth. The next shrill hunting cry sounded much, much closer than the last one. She backed towards the far end of the hall, her shield raised and eyes wide with fear.

Limerence smacked the blueprint so hard he put a hole in it with his toe. “Ha! There! Ahead! That way! There’s a passage to the left up ahead! Look for a broken valve!”

That was enough for me. I grabbed Swift, tossing her onto my back by her tail; short legs were not a positive evolutionary mechanic when you’re stuck underground and running for your life. She didn’t even have it in her to argue. I legged it in the direction Limerence indicated, my driver and the librarian close behind.

More of those terrifying cries shook the brickwork, seeming to come from all around us. My partner clenched her eyes shut, pressing her hooves over her ears.

“It’s alright, kid!” I called back. “We’re almost there!”

“Nothing about this is alright, sir!” she cried, her wings clutching my sides to keep her balanced.

I was about to agree when I saw, just down another hallway, the shattered remains of a valve wheel sticking out of the wall. I braked hard enough to almost throw her over my shoulders, then turned and charged down the side-passage. Swift swung off my back just as we reached the valve, raising her gun and grabbing her bit between her teeth. I winced as she fired a round back down the hall just as Taxi and Limerence plowed into her line of fire.

Something behind them screamed and tumbled, scratching at the tunnel floor as it tried to right itself.

Limerence’s horn was flickering as the last of the filtration spell started to fail. His coat was matted with sweat, but he still found the strength to grab the broken half of the valve, wrenching it around. I expected a loud groan of rusting metal, but the half wheel turned easily on a greased cog.

The wall the wheel was attached to crunched inwards and stopped after just a few inches. The space wasn’t anything like wide enough for us to fit through. He threw his shoulder against it, but the slight frame of the librarian wasn’t heavy enough.

Turning, I bucked it with both rear hooves and the door crashed open, tipping over a piece of furniture that’d been shoved in front.

A shadow was in the tunnel. It hissed and I got the barest impression of claws swiping at Taxi’s head. She ducked and leapt through the door, then turned and grabbed Limerence by the mane, hauling him through. Swift drew her wings in tight, hopping over the broken cabinet. My ears were still ringing from Masamane’s shot, but just as I could have sworn I felt the beast’s claws or tentacles or whatever it had closing around my ankle I tossed myself at the doorway, banging my head on the frame. I tumbled through, stumbling forward into a wall then crashing to the floor hard enough to make my ribs ache.

I heard the door slam shut and glanced up to see my driver, one back hoof planted on it, bracing herself against an upturned bookcase. The books were scattered across the floor.

Swift lay beside me, her wings spread open on the soft carpet while on her other side, Limerence held his darkened horn with both hooves. There were tears at the edges of his eyes that were just starting to run down his cheeks.

I stared at the shut door, imagining the creatures on the other side throwing themselves against it, but I couldn’t hear them. Hopefully that meant nopony had heard the gunshots, either.

The room we were in was barely more than a broom closet, with a bookcase full of technical manuals and a mop, but it seemed safe enough.

After holding the door shut for a minute or two just to make certain nothing was coming through, Taxi staggered over and collapsed against me, using my stomach to rest her head.

“Limerence... you okay?” I asked.

“I am... going to be, Detective. Nothing a cup of tea won’t fix, though I fear we may have to do without my silence or filtration spells.”

“S’fine. You couldn’t pay me to go back that way. Swift?”

“I’m...ugh, my fur smells like sewer and I don’t think I’ll feel clean for a month, but I’m alright.”

I glanced down at my driver’s head where she rested on my belly. “Taxi?”

“Heehee... whoo... Luna’s great and glorious plot. I could go for some whiskey right now…”

Edging around a little so I could see her face, I found her grinning.

I realized I was, too.

Then Swift let out a little snort. It developed, over a few seconds, into a giggle. Limerence’s eyes were shining as he wiped tears from his cheeks; even the ever-stoic and unflappable librarian was smiling. It was only moments before all four of us dissolved into rampant, helpless laughter; desperate, weak kneed, heartfelt laughter. In the back of my mind, I knew there was a possibility we might be heard, but even being found by cultists struck me as a nicer option than being torn apart by heartseekers.

Besides, unless you’ve been there, a breath away from death, with the demons baying for your blood, you can’t know what it’s like in the moments afterward. Often, the only thing left to you is to laugh. Laugh and laugh until all the terrible memories are tucked comfortably away in your subconscious for your therapist to dig out later. Laugh because you’re alive and damned be whatever vileness may still be coming.

We’d done the impossible and our night was only just beginning.

Act 2, Chapter 30: A Machine for Ponies

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 30: A Machine for Ponies

In Equestria, a land where the impossible happens on a clockwork basis, the most impossible-seeming thing may be that there are ponies who still deny things as possibilities.

As an example, ponies have long made rhetorical use of "When pigs fly" to describe an impossibility - right up until the Battle of Applewood, during which an experimental porcine regiment volunteered to be strapped to rockets, stuffed with explosives and fired at dragons. Afterwards, the phrase's use as an adynaton was considered both inaccurate and disrespectful.

Unlike all of possibility, however, the pony mind is finite. Ponies have tried to account for all possibilities, to monitor everything in preparation for impending disaster; the attempt usually induces more madness than it ever prevents. So ponies necessarily deny possibilities, to narrow the frame of reference they have to deal with and avoid keeling over from analysis paralysis.

Yet, denying the wrong possibilities has dire consequences. Most people know there's a kind intelligence raising and lowering the moon, but denial lends the ability to ignore the possibility that said life form might get bored, angry, possessed by a demonic intelligence… or just suddenly decide 'Screw it, I'm going back to bed.'

It's an ongoing problem in Equestria. One just has to push forward and hope that the possibilities one accounted for were the right ones.

-The Scholar

We had to sit for a good ten minutes after our bouts of laughter, huddled in the tiny closet, before any of us felt safe enough to get up and move about. When we’d finally recovered from our ordeal, Limerence got up and stuck his head out into the hallway for a quick reconnaissance.

Stepping back, he said, “We appear to be in a storage room just off the cell blocks. The walls are concrete and the door is solid oak. I doubt we will be heard in a truly compromising fashion unless somepony is immediately outside.”

“Good,” I replied, pulling my coat pocket around so I could dig through it with my muzzle. I talked while I hunted through the odds and ends. “Any motion out there?”

“None I could see, though I heard some voices further away. No way to gauge distance. This building is very unusual,” Limerence murmured, contemplatively.

“Unusual?” Swift asked.

“It echoes. It echoes in places I do not think a building should echo. There is more space here than is immediately apparent.”

“Weird. Isn’t your library like that, though?” Swift inquired.

“It is...different. The Archive’s superstructure may or may not be magical in some fashion. We’ve never actually managed to discover if it is. However, that does not seem to be the case here. Somepony wished to disguise some simply enormous spaces and did so using nothing but additional walls.”

“That’s consistent with what we’ve got from our other sources,” I added, tugging the black walkie-talkie I’d gotten from M6 out of my pocket and fiddled with the controls. It spit static for a second, then I heard a sound that reminded me of a buzz saw working its way through a bag of water balloons; somepony was snoring up a storm.

“Agent Cereus? Agent Cereus, come in. This is Detective Hard Boiled,” I said, tapping the voice box. The snoring continued.

I sighed and banged the walkie-talkie on the wall a few times.

“Buza...wha?!” somepony on the other end snorted, then I heard a struggle and a feminine voice, “Detective! Detective, is that you?”

“Who else would it be? Where’s Cereus?”

“I’m the damn ranking officer. What do you need Cereus for?”

“He doesn’t argue when I ask him to do illegal secret agent things.”

Night Bloom was several seconds in replying to that. She yawned, rolling off of her bed. “What do you want, Detective? I need to talk to you about like I need holes in my wings, so make it quick. I want to go back to sleep.”

“Well, we’re inside Supermax. I need-”

“Guh...one second…” Bloom rattled the walkie-talkie a little, then I heard hoofsteps as she stumbled out of whatever place she’d found to collapse in. “...Sorry, I got a little drunk last night and I could have sworn I heard you say that you’re in Supermax, so I’m going to take a minute here and let you correct that miscommunication while I get myself some coffee.”

I waited patiently until I heard a coffee brewer running.

“Now then. Tell me that my only hope to retain a career after this entire stupid venture finally comes to an end is not currently inside the most dangerous prison in Equestria."

“Miss Bloom, if you keep romancing me like this, people might start to get ideas!” I chuckled.

“Celestia’s sunny ass, you are in Supermax…”

“Yes, yes I am. We need your assistance.”

“We?”

I held out the walkie-talkie to Swift and she tilted her head then said softly, “Uh… hello, spy… bat… lady...”

“Your rookie?” Bloom asked, coolly.

“Yep! Now then, as I said, we’re in Supermax. I need any internal information your sensors can give me.”

The dusk pony snorted down the line at me. “You act like the ones we’ve got will even be working with you there.”

“The magical sensors might not, but you’ve got a couple of old spy cameras somepony snuck in here back in the day. The signal from those is still operating. Anything you can give me will help.”

“Supermax is practically blind to us compared to every other major municipal building in Detrot. That building is deranged!”

I looked up at Limerence and formed the word ‘deranged’ with my mouth. The librarian gave me a little shrug. “Apt description,” he murmured.

“Alright, we’re in a closet on-”

“Cell block one-one-A, if the sign outside is to be believed,” Limerence said.

“Is that the lunatic we picked up with all the knives?” Bloom inquired.

“That’s him. He’s a surprisingly helpful lunatic. Now come on, we’re not working with infinite sums of time. Cell block one-one-A. Anything in the area?”

The soft sound of pouring coffee drifted out of the speaker, then Night Bloom’s hoofsteps as she trotted through the M6 warehouse. I heard Cereus singing to himself somewhere and Sugar Lace took a moment to throw some half-flanked expletives as Bloom passed her cell. I tapped my hoof, waiting for her to get herself settled in the Survey room.

“Ahem...alright. I’m now sitting in front of the magical map. I think I am owed an explanation for why you’re inside that shadow-spawned monstrosity, since I did put some serious trust in you and you seem bent on killing yourself. I thought you were going to have the Princesses raid the place or something! I never thought you’d be dumb enough to go in there yourself.”

I tugged at the brim of my hat. “The short explanation is that we’re trying to keep the city from descending into total chaos and everyone we know and love from dying horribly in a maelstrom of hellfire and violence. Again. If the Princesses get involved, we’ll probably fail to do that.”

I could practically hear Bloom’s eyes rolling in their sockets. “Good, good, yes... now, tell me about your childhood.”

“I beat my best friend’s father into a coma with a baseball bat to get my cutie-mark after watching her flogged half to death with a metal rod in her own bedroom. Incidentally, her father is a magically mutated assassin responsible for an unknown number of deaths.”

“Sure, sure, I…" Pause… two… three. "Wait, seriously?!”

“It’s fine. He’s dead. He died puking up his own organs, yesterday.”

“I... w-what?! What?! No, what the damn what?!”

“You asked. Now. Information. Cell block. One-one-A.”

“You… mercy, Detective, you can’t lay something like that on somepony this damned early in the morning…”

“Time frame! Information!”

“Fine, sorry, jeez...” The sound of machinery being manipulated came down the line. “Uh… yeah, I’ve got a camera in the corridor that’s labeled ‘one one A’. It’s hidden in some brick work and the angle is pretty bad, but it’s pointed towards the cells. Two of them are occupied. The… um… the occupants seem to be asleep.”

“Any movement in the rest of the building?” I asked.

“One of our sensors near the surface is registering lots of movement. Maybe two dozen ponies. They seem to be headed in a general ‘downward’ direction via the service elevators in groups of four or five. None of the sensors below the cell system are still operating. I dunno if that’s your fault or what. Damn, these blueprints are wonky; they don’t match any of the locations we’ve got cameras or sensors…”

“That’s fine. We need eyes on a particular pony. Green, silver mane. Looks a bit like Chief Jade but much younger.”

Bloom flicked through the various images she had available to her one after another, then she let out an unhappy sigh. “I’ve...well, I’ve got three potential candidates. Detective, do you promise me you’ll tell me what’s going on before any of this endangers the lives of the Princesses? Please?”

I drew an ‘X’ over my chest then tapped my eyelid. “I know you can’t see it, but I’m crossing my heart and hoping to fly, sticking a cupcake in my eye. If I think this has gone beyond the place we can salvage it without destroying half the city, I’ll call the Princesses. Until then, I don’t want them in the line of fire. There are some dangerous weapons involved and we’ve no idea if the Princesses are susceptible.”

“Weapons that could… hurt… Princess Celestia?!”

“You understand my reticence?”

“I... um... o-okay... I…" Pause. "...Luna take my wings... Detective, this is insane. All of it.”

“I’m well aware. Go on?”

“Well... Candidate number one is just down the hall from you. She’s in cell A16. Candidate two is on the other side of the building, in cell D171, and candidate three is below you on the floor above ‘Arcane Control’. The camera down there is transmitting some strange interference.”

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “Anything more specific?”

“Dammit… I’ve got bad angles on all of them and these cameras are very old. Sorry.”

Taxi took a step forward and spoke to the walkie-talkie before Night Bloom could reply, “Number three. Can you guide us to number three?”

I cocked my head towards my driver. “Any specific reason you want to try sending us deeper into this pit?”

My driver sucked at her lower lip..“I don’t know. Wouldn’t you keep your most valuable prisoners on the deepest level you could?”

I raised one eyebrow, then jerked my chin towards her flanks. She gave the subtlest of nods.

“Alright, candidate three it is then. Bloom, can you direct us that way?”

There was more fiddling with controls, then a faint buzzing sound. I thought we might have dropped the undroppable connection, so I tapped the mic.

“Hold your reins! I’m working!” Night Bloom snapped. Thirty seconds later, she picked up the walkie talkie again. “I’ve...got nothing, Detective. There are signs, sure, but this is going to be miserable no matter how you go about it. This place was designed with internal defense in mind. You know, in case dragons broke out?”

“That’s... damn. Alright, any tips you can give us? Places to stay away from?”

“Why don’t you ask a cultist for directions?” she said, making no attempt to hide her sarcasm.

I was about to make a snarky comment, but it died in my throat. I looked towards Limerence’s saddlebags. “You know… that’s not a half bad idea.”

“Are you stoned, Detective?!” Night Bloom barked.

“I’ll call you back later if I’m alive,” I replied and broke the connection, turning to our librarian. “How is your horn?”

He crossed his eyes to look up at the spiral of bone on his forehead. There was a little charring around the tip. “I’m afraid complex spells will be entirely out of the question. Telekinesis may be limited as well. My silence is part of my talent, but I had hoped to reach the building quickly and endurance casting is-”

“-not your forte. Robes, then. Everypony gets one. Sweets, you’re going to have to-”

“I know, I know…” Taxi grunted and began unloading her cannon.

Pulling the smallest robe out of the bag, I tugged it over Swift’s head. Fortunately, the kid Limerence had bribed with diabetic shock was a pegasus, so there were some convenient wing-holes.

“Oof, this thing is itchy without those enchantments on it…” Swift muttered.

“Yeah, well, suck it up, kid,” I replied, pulling her hood up and finding the ear-slits so it would stay that way. “We’re going to see if we can spread out a little and map the inside. You and me will go together and map this floor. Taxi and Limerence are going to the floor above. Get a feel for the area and map what you can. Nopony goes for Cerise until we’ve got a decent idea of the internal structure on this floor and those above. Since I don’t hear any alarms, I suspect we’ll be able to move around freely, so long as we don’t raise a fuss.”

“And it goes without saying, but I shall emphasize it anyway: avoid groups and at least attempt to look like you know what you are doing,” Limerence added, struggling to push his tail through the hole in the back. Without the use of his magic, he was having a time of it. “My studies on the Church of the Lunar Passage suggest it is a more… casual… group than most religious offshoots but I do not recommend any protracted conversations. If you are confronted, pretend to be new to the building.”

I glanced at my driver, who was wearing her robe as she finished tucking something away in her saddlebags. “We’ll be heading towards candidate number-... wait... Sweets, where’s the cannon?”

“I broke it down. It’s in my bags.” She pointed towards her checkered luggage. “What? You didn’t think I was leaving it here, did you?”

“I… kinda hoped you might, actually. I didn’t know it was that compact.”

“It’ll take me a good five minutes to put it back together, but it fits in my bags. I couldn’t fit the drum-” She nosed the metal wheel still on the carpet. “-but I can load single shells and fire it like that until I get another one.”

“Nothing worse than you having semi-automatic fire with that beast anyway...” I murmured.

“I’ve been practicing! I’m not that bad...”

“You almost shot us tonight when you fired that stupid thing at the neurotoxin launchers, or did you just not notice the arch your shell was about to bounce off of?”

Taxi’s cheeks flushed red and she chewed on the end of her braid, scowling at me.

I stepped back so I could see the rest of my companions, all wearing their robes, all standing at something approximating attention. Swift was a little more ‘attentive’ than Limerence, who was still trying to get his tail situated. “Alright, ponies. We’re in enemy territory. We’ll search the building, try to get a feel for their security, then return here in three quarters of an hour. Agreed? Objections? Thoughts?”

Swift pulled her notebook out of the front of her tactical vest, then let the robe fall back in place. “I’m good to go, sir!”

Limerence nodded. “I am prepared. If you are not here within the hour, Miss Taxi and I will acquire Cerise, if she is here, and make for the alternative escape route.”

“I still don’t know what this ‘alternative escape route’ is…” Taxi grumbled.

“And I believe it best you don’t have time to contemplate it should we be forced to take that option,” Limerence replied before going to the door and cracking it an inch so he could peek out. Seeing no-one, he opened it and stepped into the cell block, gesturing for Taxi to follow. My driver took a quick breath, then adopted a serene smile and went after him. I held my breath as they reached the first corner, then vanished around it.

No alarms went up.

Nopony screamed or waved a gun.

All in all, it was an unsettlingly easy entry, all things considered.

Tapping my hat, I said, “Ladybugs? You still there?”

I felt considerable movement in my mane before a dozen tiny black and red insects buzzed into the air in front of me.

“Bleh! Don’t do that!” I snapped, waving a hoof at them which they deftly avoided. “I am not a bus or a public convenience! Go look around and see what you can see without violating your contract. Alert us if you see anypony who might be important.”

A ladybug still in my mane gave a little wiggle, then the rest zipped out the door.

I drew in a deep breath, held it for the count of five, then let it out.

I wished, often, that I could just sit down and consult with Gale. It’d have been nice to have somepony to talk to who I could just run things by, who I knew was on my side, no matter what. Of course, Swift would probably do damn near anything I asked her to, but somehow it felt wrong to take advantage of that.

This entire night’s insanity might have been avoided if we’d gotten the Princesses involved. Of course, it might also have set off a chain of events leading to both of their deaths. Granted, so might letting them stay where they were. I had no way to know.

Once I had Cerise in hoof, I could deliver her to her mother who would then, presumably, rain down fire and brimstone on the Church and Skylark. With luck, I might find the armor or the Moon weapons, but at the very least we could start the process of disassembling the Church itself. I was determined to leave that to smarter, more capable minds. ‘Rescue the girl’ was a thing I could understand. Fixing a bunch of directionless, brain washed ponies was miles above my pay grade and southwest of my special talent.

“Kid, you ready for this?” I asked.

Swift tapped her gun against her leg and flashed me that excessively sharp and toothy smile. “I think so, Sir. I’ve got six clips for Masamane, two flashbangs, a lock picking kit, some grid paper for the map, a good book in case we get caught, and a whole half a grilled chicken with extra garlic back in the Nest to celebrate if we don’t!”

I shuddered. “If you eat that, you’re sleeping outside until you go through an entire tube of toothpaste.”

My partner smirked, cheekily, and offered me her hoof. I gave it a little bump, then doffed my hat, picked up the last robe and shrugged my way into it before stuffing the fedora into my pocket. I flipped the cloak’s hood over my ears so it hung low over my eyes. Swift hadn’t been kidding; the whole inside of the awful, spangly bastard felt like it was crawling with fleas even outside my trenchcoat.

I tugged open the closet door and stepped out.

I stopped. My eyes widened, just a little, then I covered them with my hoof.

I could almost hear Swift’s jaw hitting her knees as she came out behind me.

“Sir… sir, it’s all... I mean... everything... They even did the signs!” she whispered.

“I’m glad you said that, kid. I thought I was seeing things.”

“Yeah, b-but… sir! Who would paint everything blue?”

I shook my head as I looked around the cell block. “Crazy cultists. Remember?”

Fashion travesties aren’t uncommon in Equestria. It’s almost a defining characteristic. Now and then, however, somepony will find some simple and entirely new method of shocking the eye and when they do, you have to sit back in awe.

Every inch of the Convent of the Full Moon had been painted in varying shades of blue. In a building of ordinary proportions, this might have been merely distracting, but inside Supermax, a former prison with enormous spaces to play with, it was downright upsetting. The ceilings and floors were an off shade of ‘Princess Luna’s butt’ while various hues decorating the walls and fixtures ranged from ‘Luna’s mane’ right down to ‘Luna’s inner thigh, just to the left of her intimates’.

The ceilings were painted with a range of constellations, most of which lived either in the Princess’s mane or in the mind of the demented artist.

Somepony was obsessed.

Blue obsessed.

Luna obsessed.

Knowing the cult, it was probably Astral herself, but there was likely to be a long list of other contenders. The Church of the Lunar Passage, like most religious groups, had a tendency to accept ponies with mental illnesses.

****

I’d sometimes wondered, if the Church were to spring up in Canterlot, what Luna’s official response might have been. Even after sixty years of living in what was, for her, subjectively ‘the future,' she was still a Pre-Classical era diarch. She didn’t take kindly to ponies telling other ponies what to believe, particularly about her. She preferred to let her actions speak for themselves. Often those actions spoke loudly, in the Royal Canterlot voice, and left everypony in the room with ringing ears.

The distance from Canterlot meant the Church could keep a somewhat lower profile, though it was their charity work and -- in spite of their leader’s somewhat eccentric views on Princess Celestia -- well-meaning public face that let them avoid the attention of anypony who might get too curious about their inner workings. Detrot was far enough removed that even the most over-the-top religious leader could find some traction so long as they were doing good works, and Astral was by no means the most over-the-top that I’d seen in my years in the city. The best funded, maybe, but outwardly, definitely not the weirdest.

The most commonly accepted explanation for why Skylark had chosen Luna to be the deity of her particular church and Detrot for the epicenter was Princess Luna’s story; a thousand year stay on the moon for crimes against all of ponykind, followed by a return to glory once she’d served her penance.

It was simple supply and demand. Redemption is popular in a city with lots to redeem.

****

The cell block ran in both directions, off to the left and right of our chosen hiding place. Aside the general ‘blueness’ of it all, it reminded me largely of every other jail environment I’d ever been in with the exception of Tartarus. The cells still had the bars on them and none were more than a few feet wide.

Swift and I paused outside of the closet, side by side, to try to get a feel for the place and maybe listen for anyone raising an alarm. My partner raised her nose and sniffed at the air, then shook her head. “This whole place doesn’t...smell right.”

I took a deep whiff and noticed the odd scent as well. It was faintest of smells, but it seemed to claw at the edge of my awareness. I couldn’t quite identify it. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it reminded me of a pet-shop for some reason.

“Shouldn’t the smell of dragon have... you know... gone away by now?” Swift asked.

“That’s dragon?”

“Oh... you... uh... you don’t spend enough time around dragons to know, I guess. They teach us to recognize the different animals the P.A.C.T. hunts by scent. Especially the big ones. This whole place smells like dragons.”

“How come Miss Stella doesn’t smell like that?” I asked.

“He’s a very clean dragon, Sir, but when he doesn’t have perfume or he’s just finished a big show, he smells like that, too.”

“Huh. Learn new things every day. You’re right, though. We’ll add ‘dragons’ to our list of things to watch out for.”

We moved down the line of cells, side by side, peering into each one. Most were terribly ascetic, empty but for a military-style cot, a shelf, and a hooflocker. The walls were painted in a uniform design to look like a clear night sky. Most were empty, although we did run across a couple that contained sleeping ponies. Considering the hour, that wasn’t surprising. We were half-way down the hallway when we found Cell A-16.

The mare inside was kneeling beside her cot. She had her head down, her hood drawn up, and seemed to be deep in prayer. I paused at her door, considering my options. Her hooves were within the right color spectrum to be Chief Jade’s, but I couldn’t see her mane color. She was a slightly brighter green.

“Erm... Miss?” I asked, softly.

Pausing midway through a mumbled prayer, she turned and smiled, tossing back her hood. “Oh, excuse me brother. I didn’t notice you there.”

She was a little on the heavy side, a blue almost as rich as the walls of her cell. She seemed genuinely pleased to see somepony out and about at that hour. She was also, unfortunately, not Cerise.

“Excuse me… I thought you were someone else,” I began, then stalled as I realized just how poor an idea telling her who I was looking for might be.

“What can I do for you, brother?” she asked, pushing herself to her hooves. Her smile hadn’t moved; looking into her eyes gave me the oddest impression of peering into an empty room.

“We’re looking for…” I thought quickly, chewing on the inside of my cheek. “I’m afraid we’re a bit lost. We’re looking for room... uh... we’re looking for the cafeteria?”

“Nothing new in here. Ponies get lost all the time in the Full Moon. It’s just down the hall. Take a left at the end. There should be something edible still on offer.” She gestured towards the other end of the hallway.

I gave a little bow and my best holy smile. I think it made me look a bit constipated, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Thank you, sister.”

“May Luna be with you,” she said, then turned back to her cot and her prayers.

“Luna be with you, too,” I replied, then hurried past the cell, with Swift trotting along behind me, a questioning look on her face.

As soon as we were out of earshot of that cell, she whispered, “Sir, why are we heading for the cafeteria?”

“I’ve no idea. I just needed an excuse to move us along and now we’ve got a destination in case we get asked again. If we wind up somewhere we’re not supposed to be and somepony confronts us, we can just ask them to take us to the cafeteria. We know where that is in relation to our exit. Say we got turned around. You’d be stunned how often ponies are happy to believe you just got lost if you ask them for assistance. Now we have somepony to corroborate that we’ve been looking for it all along.” I flicked my tail towards the row of rooms behind us.

“Oooh… I see!”

Moving on, we began to scout out the space as best we could.

The floor we were on seemed to contain mostly those same small rooms. Wandering around in the sleeping convent was a genuinely spooky feeling, particularly as it was altogether likely that at any moment somepony might recognize either of us and clap us in irons. Still, vigilance can only last so long, especially when there seems to be nothing going on.

We found the cafeteria with nopony in it and a lovely selection of only very slightly stale muffins sitting beside the breakfast bar. The long tables suggested they might have been original to the prison. Dragging out two stools, we sat down, and Swift pulled out her graph paper. She began tracing our route, as much as we could remember.

“Sir,” she began, holding her pencil in one side of her mouth. “-this feels super creepy. I mean… we’re just… walking around. Shouldn’t they have some security here?”

“Why do they need it?” I said, tucking into a second muffin. “These robes are designed for psychological control of some kind and nopony - besides us - is going to break into a convent. Nopony sane, anyway.“

“I know. It just seems really weird…”

I shrugged and pointed out a hallway she had backwards on the map. “You’ve got to understand, kid...nopony ever escaped Supermax. Not one. To my knowledge...no one even tried.”

“I guess. I just expected this to be... you know... harder.”

“You mean the pit full of neurotoxins, monsters, and eyeballs that turn you to stone wasn’t enough?”

“Mmm... maybe.”

“Don’t wish for trouble, kid. Trouble will find us, if it’s here.”

A tickle of guilt pricked the back of my mind. For morale purposes, I declined to tell her that my cutie-marks had been absolutely singing since we hit the cell block. I’d been forcefully ignoring them, but it’d crossed from irritation into real pain not long after we’d asked directions. I squirmed on my chair, trying to scratch the golden scales on my flanks against the edges of the seat without being too obvious about it.

The walkie-talkie in my pocket let out a short, sharp burst of sound and I scrambled to pull it out and turn the volume down. Putting it into the edge of my robe, just by the collar, I covered it with a layer of fabric so it would look like I was talking to Swift if somepony happened to be passing by.

“Detective. Detective?” Night Bloom whispered.

“I’m here. Seriously, this had better be important. Calling an operative back when they’re in the field-”

“I know, I know! I’m sorry. If you’re still in the area you were in, I see at least sixteen ponies heading downstairs. Big group-”

“Yeah? So? We’re keeping away from groups…”

“That Skylark mare is with them!”

Swift’s head came up so fast her pencil flew out of her mouth and smacked me in the forehead. I very nearly pitched off my seat, scrambling to right myself and clutching the walkie-talkie with one hoof.

“She’s what?!” I hissed.

“Skylark! She’s there, at the convent!” Night Bloom replied.

Cereus said somewhere behind her, “Agent Bloom, ma’am… they’re on the floor above, in the stairwell. I think they’re heading down into some kind of cafeteria. I’ve got an angle on that staircase-”

My partner and I shared a split second look. I barely had a moment to throw my hood over my face before babbling voices filled the room. The door banged open and Astral Skylark, first and foremost amongst the ponies I could confirm wanted me dead, led an entourage of quietly talking ponies behind her.

“-tonight’s events. Is the chamber prepared?” Skylark was addressing a much smaller unicorn filly who trotted along beside her, holding a notepad and quill with her levitation field.

“It is being readied, Sister Skylark. We have a little while yet, if you would care to have some food.”

I held my breath. The last thing we needed was a meal with the witch.

“I will eat when we are finished with this evening’s festivities. Luna preserves us during famine or feast.”

I exhaled, softly, and tucked my tail under myself. The group of blue robed ponies moved across the room, following their leader, seemingly ignoring us. I pulled my hood a little lower over my eyes.

“What about her?” Skylark asked.

“Ah. Yes… She’s… ready, sister. Are you sure this is-”

“Our ascension is nigh. It is necessary, for the work we do. We have information suggesting that...” She trailed off. I could almost feel her eyes tracking across the back of my head. I heard hoofsteps, then a faint breath on neck of my cloak.

“Brother? Sister? What are the two of you doing up at this hour?”

She was standing right behind me. My cutie-mark felt like somepony was stabbing me in the flanks. I shifted on my seat and took a deep breath, setting my lips in a calm, collected smile as I turned to face her. I kept the hood down and it cast a shadow over most of my face. Swift hadn’t moved.

Skylark hadn’t changed one whit since the museum. Fortunately, those piercing eyes weren’t looking at me directly, but rather, at my muffin. I heard her stomach grumble.

I took a quick chomp and swallowed. The lump in my throat made it difficult. “Ahem… a-apologies, sister. I was hungry and my fellow sister of the night saw fit to come along and get something herself. I sleep poorly on an empty stomach. Care for a bite with us?”

I saw Swift tense out of one corner of my eye. She rested her hoof on her trigger bit, ready in an instant to kick it into her mouth.

Skylark cracked a tiny smile. It was almost warm. “I… well…” Peeking over her shoulder at her entourage, all of whom seemed to have fallen silent, she pursed her lips and shook her head. “I will fast. Luna wills our bodies be clear as our minds. Go back to your beds when you are done. Pray, sleep, and dream of our coming glory.”

“I will, Sister,” I managed to choke out, forcing my voice not to shake.

The babble of voices returned as the group of ponies retreated. Skylark bowed her head slightly and then returned to her group, waiting until they were all out the door to resume whatever conversation had been going on.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Swift slumped onto the table, her face buried in her hooves.

“I take back everything I just said about ‘easy.' That… was waaay more intense than I needed just now, Sir…”

“You’re telling me.”

I jumped as my walkie-talkie made a soft staticy noise, then Bloom asked, very softly, “She’s gone, right?”

Pressing the send button, I replied, “Yeah, she’s gone. I almost pissed in my cloak, but she’s gone. Any idea what sort of ‘chamber’ they were talking about?”

“Um… well, if they keep on their present trajectory, the only thing besides ‘Arcane control’ is the sub-basements. No idea what’s down there. That whole zone is blind.”

“We’ll keep it in mind, then. If we get the chance to go down there, we’ll take a look. Keep us appraised if you get anything else on the sensors or cameras.”

“I’m… huh. I’ve got a sensors just above those sub-basements, but no cameras below Arcane Control. The level of magical interference down there is making everything twitch on this end. It’s like there’s some kind of… reactor or something…”

Swift’s ears drooped slightly. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Understatement of the year. Thanks for the warning, Bloom. We’re moving on. We’ve got to meet up with the other half of our team here in a minute, but I want to make a quick stop first.”

I stuffed the walkie talkie back in my pocket.

Our map was barely a sketch, but it did give us a general shape and listed the exits. The convent’s side-passages were shaped like a bird spreading its wings. Long, dead-end hallways led out from a central stalk, with a few branchings further on. It was a defensively excellent scenario for somepony trying to bottleneck an opponent in one of those stalks. Fighting one’s way into Supermax was almost as futile as fighting your way out.

The hallways were all broad, well lit, and much taller than what was strictly necessary for pony occupancy, though they’d been artificially lowered in most areas by somepony popping a bit of plaster and a new ceiling in place.

“Sir, if the clock on that wall over there is right, we’ve only got seven minutes before we’re supposed to meet-up with everypony. Where are we going?” Swift asked.

Looking up at the numbers and letters above each cell, I tried to get a general notion of which direction we might need to go. “Call it a ‘stop’ I want to make on the way through this place. I doubt we’ll get another chance, especially once we’ve found Cerise. We’ll need to get her out of here quickly. I just hope that doesn’t mean braining her with something. It’s entirely possible she doesn’t know that she’s a hostage.”

“A stop, though? Are we sightseeing, Sir?”

I shot her a displeased scowl.

“Smart-flanked fillies get their celebration chickens fed to the dog. And no, we’re not sightseeing. We’re looking for...oh! Yes, alright, I think it’s this way.”

I’d found the correct hall and thanked Celestia it was on our floor. I didn’t really want to follow Skylark into the depths before I had to on what was likely to be a silly hunch. My cutie-mark was still aching and the burn would simply not settle down. Something wretched was going on in Supermax; a truly black stain on the rightness of the world. Now if only it would come out and make itself obvious, so I could shoot it!

We trotted, side by side, down the smaller row of cells which followed that particular passage. For some reason, there were very few ponies in that area. Most of the rooms we’d seen had nopony in them.

At last, after two or three more minutes, we stood in front of our destination.

Reaching into my trenchcoat pocket, I pulled out Ruby’s diary. Running my hoof over the jeweled cover, I shut my eyes. A pulse of warmth swelled in my chest, like a tiny ember from what used to be a roaring fire.

I looked up at the placard over the door and sighed.

It said ‘High Security,' and below that ‘12B’.

The bars were open and the room, vacant. The cell looked to have been recently cleaned. The cot was stripped and the hooflocker stood unlocked and empty. I peered into the surrounding cells; all unoccupied. We were alone and, with a little luck, unobserved.

“Sir... is this... Miss Ruby’s cell?”

I nodded, leafing open the pages of the diary to the last page with any writing.

“Alright, Ruby… please let me be right. If I’m not, and you’re nuts, then we’re many, many flavors of screwed...”

I stepped into the cell, holding the book in my teeth as I moved over to sit on the cot. The cot was a scratchy, awful old military brand that reminded me of the Academy. I spread the diary across my foreknees and felt a grin break out.

Swift tapped her fetlock where most ponies wear their leg-watches, and pointed the way we’d come. “Sir, is anything happening?”

“Kid… Ruby left us another message. She knew we’d be coming." I turned to show Swift what I'm sure was a manic grimace. "She knew we’d come here.”

****

We made it back to the storage closet with less than a minute to spare. Checking the hall to make sure nopony was watching us, we crept into the tiny room to find Limerence and Taxi were already there. My driver and the librarian were sitting, side by side, crouched over a second hoof-drawn map of the facility.

Taxi looked up and leapt to her hooves, rushing over and tossing her legs around my neck. “Celestia save me, I swear, when Skylark came down past us and you weren’t here when we got back…”

I patted my driver’s back and set her back a step. “We’re fine, Sweets. Heh...we ran into her. Had a nice little chat. Offered her a muffin.”

My driver gave me a confused look, then glanced at Swift.

“He’s not kidding," my partner replied to the unasked question.

“I’m… not going to ask. You’re here and that’s what matters. Did you get this floor mapped?”

Swift nodded and pulled out her map, laying it down beside Limerence’s.

“Interesting…” Lim murmured, “These floors line up in a very unusual fashion, but the spaces within them do not suggest efficient use.”

“I was looking at that,” I replied, pulling the maps over and laying them one over top of the other. The shape they revealed looked even more like a bird with spread wings.

“Isn’t the building a cube, sir? Why not build normal hallways?” Swift asked.

I pursed my lips, then shrugged. “Dunno. Lim?”

Limerence’s eyes were slowly tracing the patterns, then he suddenly blanched and stepped backwards from the maps. “She... she wouldn’t… Not even Saussurea…”

“What? What is it?!” I demanded.

Reaching back, he pulled a torn piece of cloth out of his saddlebag and tossed it down on the floor, spreading it open. “Look. Look, here.”

It was the ripped out sections of the robe, with the spells still attached.

“Why did you bring that thing?” Taxi asked.

“I...was curious,” he replied. “I wanted to see if I might map the spell if I could see it in a fully powered condition. Immaterial. Please, take note of this part. Does it look...familiar?”

He pointed at a particular part of the threads; they looked very distinctly like a bird in flight.

“It’s... no way!” Swift exclaimed. “The floor plan?! Seriously? She built the whole building as a giant spell?”

“I believe she did. Additionally, the duct work in some portions is decidedly suboptimal for airflow, so it is best to assume that is also a component. I noticed something as well, when we were hiding. Come.”

Opening the door to the hallway, Limerence checked to make sure the coast was clear, then ushered the three of us out and towards an open cell nearby. The cells on either side didn’t have anypony in them, but we still kept our voices low.

“Now…” Limerence murmured, waving his hoof at the ceiling and walls. “Do you see?”

I turned in a little circle, peering at the shapes on the walls. There were beautifully drawn constellations on every surface, though most seemed to be fictitious.

“I… am seeing a lovely mural of stars,” I replied, quietly.

“Check the next cell.” Limerence pointed towards the wall beside ours.

Trotting out, I poked my head through the bars and looked up at the ceiling, then moved back to the first cell, then the second. “Huh. I’m going to assume that nopony would be dull enough to do every room with exactly the same design without a purpose to it.”

I lifted myself onto the cell’s cot and gathered my hooves under myself.

“Not at all, I think. If you damage a spell matrix without knowing its components by… well, erasing parts of it, you run the risk of an explosion or magical feedback. This was done very precisely. I would imagine, once Supermax was closed and re-acquired… somepony realized they couldn’t have visible spell-work out there for everypony to see on every wall. They covered it up. They hired an artist, and made the control spells look like-”

“-stars and galaxies. That explains why somepony decided ‘blue’ was such a brilliant color scheme for this place,” Taxi said, softly. “So, how is this affecting the whole city, then? Those spells can’t just work...you know...here. It’d be pointless.”

“This spell is focused around the red moon. That shape seems to create the effects at whatever point it appears. Somepony in one of these cells, wearing a simple red-moon, gets the effects. Somepony out in the world, wearing the spell in their robe, would get them as well. There is surely a limit as to distance, but... It could be quite large, depending. The spell is powered by something within Supermax that we have yet to encounter."

That was one of those sentences just guaranteed to send shivers racing down my back. I don’t care for ‘have yet to encounter’ when it’s applied to lunch, much less spell frameworks with the potential to control minds.

“We know Ruby was here. She either let them or they forcibly tattooed the moon onto her flank. Could they have made her kill herself with that?” I asked.

Limerence pursed his lips, then nodded. “I... I imagine they might have taken some action here that could have lead to her death, yes. Though that does beg the question, ‘If they could do that, then why not simply order her to return with whatever it was she stole?’”

I patted my jacket pocket. “I... have Ruby’s diary. We stopped by her old cell. She’d... I... mmm…”

How to explain what I’d read in those first few words? No summary would be adequate. I tugged the book out of my pocket and set it on the floor between the four of us.

Cracking it open, I turned to the page I’d left off and began to read Ruby’s final message.

****

She’s gone right now. At least, I think She is. I’m lucid again, or at least, as lucid as I ever am these days.

Detective, I need you to know. Maybe She needs you to know. The Convent is so wrong. Everything. Everything is so wrong. I just wanted to get away from this stupid, awful city.

Nothing escapes. It’s like a giant whirlpool, sucking everypony down. She just wants to be left alone, I think. Maybe not.

I need you to get out of there. If you can read this, you went to my cell there. I keyed this part to appear if somepony was thinking they were inside cell twelve B.

She… maybe She is making me think you’ll do that. Maybe She is setting it up so you will. I don’t even know any more. It’s layers and layers with Her.

I know this. You have to stop them, and get out of there. Stop… Miss Skylark. I can’t. I got away. I have to hide now. I have to hide. Celestia, I am so tired of being scared. I only just got my mind back from Skylark, and now it’s all being taken away, piece by piece.

Last night She let me see something. She still won’t let me say her name. She doesn’t know if it will happen or not. She never knows where you’re concerned. This could all be a trick. It probably is.

It doesn’t matter. You have to decide for yourself. You have to go Down. Down and Down and Down.

Down and back in time. You have to find where it all starts. Where the bad ones came from. The darkness. The puppeteers. The hatred.

Go down Down, to when it was all cold.

My diary will tell you the rest of what happened at the Convent, but first, you have to go Down.

She made me hide Her. She made me hide Her inside my old trunk. You have to get my trunk, and put my diary inside.

Detective, please be safe. Please, be real.

Saying my prayers to Luna felt strange last night, knowing what I know. For all I know, this is the third or fourth message I’ve left in this stupid diary with your name on it. Maybe it’s all Her trying to lead you somewhere. Maybe I’m not really lucid at all.

I don’t know.

Maybe I’ll pray to you. I know that She will steal your name from me again, but right now, I have you.

My Detective.

Yours most sincerely and with all my love,

Ruby Blue

****

“The damn... trunk?!” Taxi snarled, slumping onto her side in a dejected heap. “That piece of magical junk that we tossed Svelte’s bodyguard into?!”

“I’m guessing, yes,” I replied.

“We had whatever they’ve been searching for the whole time?!” Swift moaned, tossing a wing over her face.

“They knew she had it, too,” I affirmed. “When the girl ran from here with… whatever she stole… they hunted her. She hid at the Vivarium, with an apartment in the Skids. What better locations? Both are guarded, not inclined to participate directly in city politics, and with extremely intelligent and benevolent leadership figures. Then, they found her. Svelte was at the Vivarium on her blackmail mission, and Cosmo was being bankrolled by the ponies hunting her. These people, whoever they are, must have sent down the line to look out for Ruby Blue. Maybe it was Skylark, or maybe it was whoever is pulling her chains. They found Ruby on the security tapes Cosmo sent them.”

Swift’s eyes slowly widened. “Why didn’t she leave the city, then?”

I felt the pieces begin to click into place. “She was afraid they’d go after her family. She was probably right, too. If these ruthless bastards had somehow caught wind that her personal effects left the city, or that she did, the first thing they’d hunt down was everyone she knew and loved. Maybe this...whatever it was...she seemed to think was controlling her wouldn’t let her leave, or wouldn’t take the risk. It doesn’t matter. She found something here...”

“But… that trunk was empty, wasn’t it?” Taxi said. “Was there some kind of… secret compartment?”

I chuckled, sadly, putting my hooves over my eyes.

“Ruby mentioned in her diary she knew some kind of spell to make things appear empty.” My voice caught in my throat. “She...dammit. I didn’t even think of it until just now. She used it on a cookie jar, as a filly. It was all right there, right in front of us. She fixed her trunk so she could hide things in it, then left the diary for me or her sister to find. Somehow...somehow she knew. She knew everything. She knew who would investigate her death.”

“You must excuse me for a moment, Detective," interjected Limerence. "I am aware of your capacious ego, and should no longer be surprised by such things, but… are you suggesting this mare killed herself just to get you involved in an investigation of her recent life?” he asked, incredulous.

I sagged, pushing the cover of the diary shut. “I don’t know. Ruby’s story is in this book. All of it. I haven’t had time to read it, but the rest appeared when we went to her cell.”

Limerence’s lips formed a line for a moment, then he shook his head. “Without additional information, our immediate mission is still unchanged. I don’t believe any of us want to sit here whilst you plod through that book. We know what we have to do.”

I got to my hooves, tucking the book back into my coat pocket. “...I hate it, but you’re right. Speaking of that, did you find our filly upstairs?”

Limerence dipped his chin. “No. Unfortunately, while the mare above may have shared the color scheme, she did not resemble your Chief Jade in any other way, shape, or form.”

“Not… unexpected, I guess,” I said, pulling the two maps over and setting them beside one another. “Sweets, does your ‘feeling’ have any helpful tips on how we get down to the next floor?”

Taxi shook her head and shrugged. “We mapped out the stairs on the floor above, but this floor is different. Saussurea-”

“Sir?” Swift interrupted, raising one wing for attention.

The rest of us turned to look at her and she shrank down a little, pointing at the map with one toe.

“Sorry…” she stumbled under the scrutiny, her wings fluttering slightly. “I… um… it’s probably nothing, but… did any of you notice the spaces where the maps don’t match up are… uh… square?”

Taxi didn’t reply, but instead dragged the maps over and laid them over each other again. Flattening the corners with her hooves, she aligned the maps so the central stalk overlayed the one above.

“Hmmm…she’s right. There are large spaces at the ends of each hallway. Each one is a couple of stories. There’s smaller ones in between, but all leading from the middle. It’s like-”

“Really big jail cells,” I murmured.

Limerence shrugged his slim shoulders and sat, checking his pocket watch. It was fairly late in the evening. “We knew there were dragons kept here. Is this surprising?”

I rested my toe on the map. “No, but I... I mean, you remember what you said about that spell? The one inside the robe?”

“Which particular saying are you referring to?”

“You said they were channeling magic and it was going nowhere. They were sending it someplace, though, right?” I asked.

“I… hrm… the structure of the spell does suggest something like that, yes. Dissipating it into the air would be simpler, though how exactly this particular enchantment even operates is beyond me, I’m afraid. Your point being...?”

I poked the map, then pulled out my M6-issued walkie-talkie. “Remember what Night Bloom said? Severe... interference in her sensor network on the floors above Arcane Control?”

“Like a… reactor, yes.” Limerence’s upper lip twitched as he began to gather together the idea that’d been working it’s way up from my subconscious, assembled one piece at a time. “This… structure… is some form of battery. A system for channeling the power of dragons and the ponies locked in its cells… and the ponies out there, wearing these robes. It allows them to be controlled. It siphons off power… little doses and sips… and it sends the power-”

“-here. To Supermax,” Taxi finished for him, with a certain finality. “Downward.”

We all simultaneously looked at our hooves. That eerie feeling of being inside the belly of a giant beast was multiplying, second by second. My cutie-mark was starting to ache profoundly.

Silence reigned for a full half minute while we tried to figure out our next course of action.

“Then Cerise is what we do now. We will… we’ll take her to Stella, get the trunk, then when we’re away, we’ll contact Chief Jade and let her know we succeeded.”

Everypony got to their hooves. Snatching up our maps, I traced us a route which would hit one of the staircases leading further into the prison.

Taxi and I left first, leaving the instruction that Swift and Limerence should follow some minutes later. We’d no idea what we’d find on the floors below, so everyone was weapons free, with the exception of Taxi, who settled for one of Limerence’s knives tucked under her robe.

So it was that we found the staircase.

So it was that we descended; down into the dark.

On the way, we’d encountered nopony awake. Plans going well tend to make me nervous, and there was no hope for getting that lucky.

It was almost a relief, half-way down the stairs, when the hum started.

Act 2, Chapter 31: Foal's Play

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 31: Foal's Play

Who wants to live forever?

Well, lots of ponies, really. And immortality is easier to achieve than is widely believed; there are more ways to go about it than simultaneous wing/horn development. Reliable immortality without strings attached, on the other hoof, proves to be something of a greater difficulty.

Alicornhood is not only monstrously rare, but tends to come with burdensome royal and cosmic responsibilities, plus the risk of going mad and trying to benight Equestria, metaphorically or literally. Plus, you might as well get your cutie mark replaced by an image of a set of crosshairs over a rubber duck, because you will be a target for every recently-awakened magical entity with fears of inadequacy and delusions of grandeur, and they will know where you live.

Age alteration spells can reset the clock; sadly, Equestria's very best wizards have trouble casting them. Even if you find one of the maybe three horns in Equestria capable of managing such a feat, mishaps can and will occur. One pony who paid dearly for such a reset seemed to have disappeared completely after the ritual was finished, and only in the post-analytical phase was it discovered that the pony in question had actually been reverted to a zygote.

Necromancy is another route, but it is a largely illegal one in Equestria. It tends to have too many side-effects: too many displaced souls, too many wandering bodies seeking vengeance for crimes against equinity/nature/fashion/etc.... Too much disharmony. And it smells positively awful. That said, there is one known Detrot example of immortality through necromancy, and he is known as the Lich King of 34th and Staccato Street: A unicorn nearing the end of his life who tapped into the power of death basically to keep colts off his lawn. His yard care strategy works 364 days out of the year; on Nightmare Night, his home is awash in costumed bodies. Fortunately for him, the authorities seem to tolerate him and his total lack of ambition... and his lawn does look nice, tended as it is by friendly zombie ponies occasionally demanding "Graaaaains."

Finally, bio-arcanelectrics show promise as an emergent field of life-extending experimental magic. Astute minds should have, by now, an instinctual flight reaction when the words "magic" and "experimental" are uttered side-by-side.

--The Scholar

“Sir, I think I’m feeling it in my teeth…”

Swift was just ahead of me, her ears flat against her head as she tried to block out the all-encompassing hum. It never varied, and never seemed to change tone, but it gave me the weirdest sensation of things wiggling about inside me. It seemed to come from the walls, all around us, and right up through the floor.

“Me too, kid. Just try to ignore it,” I replied, lamely. “With luck, we won’t be down here long.”

Limerence was just behind me on the stairs. He wasn’t quite as quiet as Zeta, but his hoofsteps still made about as much noise as a sneaky kitten. “Detective, I do believe we are heading in the correct direction. My horn is beginning to resonate in a manner that is most uncomfortable.”

“It’s...not going to split or crack or something, is it? If it is, we can do this without you.”

“I think if that were at all likely, Miss Skylark would have been less inclined to come this way. Still, I will monitor it.”

“Hardy, do you think we’re likely to run into Skylark again?” Taxi asked, catching up to me on the stairs.

“I couldn’t say. Agent Night Bloom said they’re blind below this floor.”

“Do we at least have a plan for the possibility that we do? There was a big crowd with her,” she persisted.

I flicked my hoof at her saddle-bags. “What’d we bring a P.E.A.C.E. cannon for if not that?”

She paused, and I saw her fighting a tiny smirk.

I held up my hoof. “I want to find another option if we can.”

My driver looked crestfallen.

I nickered a little, bumping her with my hip, “However, if it comes to gunfire, I promise you get to pick your own ammunition.”

Her expression blossomed into a smile and she started practically skipping down the steps.

“Sir, haven’t we been going down a long time?” Swift asked.

I nodded. “This building’s floors aren’t exactly one right on top of the other. I imagine that has something to do with the original prisoners.”

“The... dragons. Sir, did you notice the smell is getting stronger, too?”

Now she mentioned it, I hadn’t until I sniffed at the air. “They removed all the dragons from this building at the same time. Shouldn’t the smell have degraded at the same rate everywhere?”

Limerence nodded without looking back. “It should, yes. I admit to a certain amount of internal disturbance in discovering that this is not the case.”

A pair of double doors were up ahead at the bottom of the steps, wider than necessary for ponies, with heavy dead-locked bars pulled back on either side. The way was open, but my heart was fluttering. Walking into the sewer had been bad. It’d been foul, death in the darkness.

It hadn’t made my cutie-mark sting. It hadn’t made my guts writhe. I’d been afraid, in the sewers, but it was the fear of death. Death is something I’m used to fearing. It’s tangible. It’s real. You can touch the knife that kills you, or the bullet, or feel the spell fire before it scours your flesh away.

Something in Supermax was making me afraid, and it wasn’t something I could touch. It was just a sound; a perpetual ringing in the ears.

“Lim, what’s your thoughts on this sound we’re hearing?” I asked.

“It is not a sound,” he answered.

“Come again? I’m hearing it pretty good.”

“Nothing I can really declare it to be besides that. It does not vibrate the surfaces underhoof, nor our bodies. The stimulus is some reaction in our brains to passing energies, but they aren’t simple kinetics.”

“So...the spell, then?”

“Possible. It is an order of magnitude more extreme than anything I have personally been in the presence of, up to and including any artifact I have handled whilst working at my father’s hoof." Limerence’s mouth twisted, bitterly. “I am aware he has...protected me...from certain aspects of our business...but this is still-”

“I get it. Big mojo. Nothing good.”

We gathered behind the double doors and Taxi began the labor intensive process of reassembling her cannon while Swift stood lookout at the top of the stairs, ready to faint or ask where the bathroom was should somepony be on the way down. I loaded my sawn-off shotgun, fiddling with the duct tape to try to get it to sit comfortably.

“Are we...expecting a fight, Detective?” Limerence asked, his horn glowing softly. I don’t consider myself any sort of expert, but the way the light flickered didn’t look terribly healthy as he levitated his crossbow out from beneath his robe and settled a bolt in place.

“We’re expecting to be prepared for the unexpected, yes.”

As Taxi finished assembling her weapon, she wrapped the strap around her middle and threw her robe over her cannon, leaving it dangling along her side. It bulged in a ridiculous manner.

“Sweets, I don’t...think that’s likely to convince anypony you’re not carrying a personal howitzer,” I commented.

She grunted, nipping the air in the direction of my tail. “You worry about your stupid little toy you have on your leg. I’ll worry about my real gun.”

I mock growled, and then leaned forward, grabbing her strap in my teeth and twisting it so the P.E.A.C.E. swung off her spine and down between her back legs. Before she could snap my neck, I hopped back a few steps and she lurched forward in an uncomfortable waddle, her forelegs outstretched in half of a zebra attack pose.

“Not funny, Hardy.” Taxi humphed, fighting to pull the gigantic weapon back into position.

“Yeah, but when you tell this story to your grandkids, it’ll be hilarious.”

“If I get to have grandkids, considering the way things have been going lately…”

****

I called up the stairs for Swift to join us, then stacked up Limerence and Taxi against one wall, myself and Swift behind the other, in standard storming formation. Pushing the door half open, I peered both directions, looking for any immediate threats.

It was just another cell block. The cells seemed to all have heavy duty-metal doors, rather than ordinary bars, but it was still just another row of cells.

I scratched at my mane, puzzled, then stepped through and turned in a little circle. Same blue walls. Same blue floors. Same starry patterns on the ceiling and walls.

“We’re clear,” I murmured, shaking my head. The hum was still there and, if it’d actually been a sound, it would have been shaking my molars. Despite this, I didn’t have to speak much louder. Limerence was right. It wasn’t actually a noise.

That wriggle in my belly suddenly redoubled, and I sagged heavily against the wall, feeling my head swim for a moment. My eyes fuzzed around the edges and my cutie-marks felt like somepony was trying to cut them off with a rusted spoon. I felt a foreleg on my shoulder, and looked up, expecting to see Taxi there. Instead, Limerence was standing beside me, supporting my weight very gently.

“You are under some severe discomfort, Detective.” It wasn’t a question.

“My talent hates this place…” I replied.

Lifting his hooftip, he put it against my neck and pulled his watch out, counting off for about thirty seconds.

“Your heartbeat is irregular. Not weak or suggestive of failure, but not normal.”

“You think the amount of magic in here is messing with Gale?” I asked, worriedly.

“If you mean this consciousness you claim inhabits your transplant, then yes, entirely likely. If the prosthesis is failing, you will experience symptoms not unlike the heart attack you had back in the Nest. Are you feeling something of that nature?”

“Not...really. Bit light headed.”

Limerence tucked his watch back into its pocket. “Blood pressure fluctuations and some negative response to the local environment.”

“Any advice you can give me, doc?”

“Try not to die from a heart attack in a situation where bullets, knives, or rays of cosmic light slicing through your essential organs will exacerbate the problem.”

“Tell me that was a joke, Lim.”

“No.”

****

The cell block we’d found ourselves in was empty in a way that made the relative vacancy upstairs seem downright unsettling. We passed cell after cell, not one of which had anypony in them. They were all open and the exterior locks had been disabled, but it did nothing for the somehow much more oppressive feeling of being in an empty, ultra-high security prison block. On the other hoof, it also meant we weren’t passing anypony who might want to know why four strange individuals were wandering around by themselves in an otherwise secure area.

Whereas the cells upstairs had all been neatly labeled, there were no labels, nor any signs that might guide a pony from place to place. It was almost intentionally obtuse. Swift was trying to construct a map and making some progress with Limerence’s help, but after a good ten minutes of fruitlessly wandering empty, labyrinthine hallways which didn’t seem to have any relationship to the rooms above, I dragged us into an open cell and called M6.

“Night Bloom, you there?”

Cereus picked up. I heard all four of his hooves doing a panicked dance. “Detective? Detective! Please talk to me! What in Equestria possessed you?”

“Ahhh, Cereus. Good to hear from you, mate. I take it you mean ‘Why am I in Supermax?’.”

“What else would I mean?!”

“I dunno. The list is long. Where’s Night Bloom?”

“She’s on her ‘drinking chair’. She said if I disturb her, she’ll send me to the moon.”

I rubbed my neck, thinking. “You...you guys actually have something in the warehouse there that could do that?”

“I don’t want to take the chance!”

“Alright, makes sense. I need your help down here. Night Bloom said there was somepony on this floor and we’ve been checking around, but so far we’re hitting dead ends.”

“Some... pony?”

I slumped against the wall of the cell. “Is there a problem?”

“Well, you’re somepony and your partner is somepony. You’ve got like, four someponies right there,” Cereus replied.

I had to pause for a moment and fathom whether he was being sarcastic or whether he might actually just be that stupid.

“I need… to know if there is somepony besides Taxi, Swift, Limerence, and myself...on this floor. Can you do that for me?” I asked, very slowly as though speaking to a foal.

“Righty-oh! One sneaky, sneaky surveillance coming right up!” He sounded like he was practically bouncing along as he trotted back into Survey and fired up the map. The sounds of machinery in the background rattling and beeping had me hastily covering the speaker.

“Um...well, I...huh. We don’t have any sensors down there. There’s a few spy cameras. One of them’s painted over and one’s in a bathroom. The other one is...oh! Yeah, there’s a mare! She’s... errr... she looks like she’s on her knees or something, talking to the ceiling.”

“Praying? Alright. Any details you can give us? We can’t check every cell in this place.”

“I...don’t see anything specific. It looks like it’s at the end of a hallway, but there’s no signs or anything. Not even a smoke detector. I’m pretty sure that’s not up to building code...” He hummed to himself, then exclaimed, “Wait! I don’t know if this will help, but... there’s a set of stairs leading up nearby!”

Limerence’s ears twitched and he pulled the map Swift and I had constructed out of his pocket, spreading it on the bare concrete floor. Laying it over top of the map of the ultra-high security block he and Swift had been working on he traced his hoof across the various hallways, then off the edge.

“Here. It must be here.” He pointed at a blank part of the map we hadn’t filled in yet.

“How do you figure?” I asked.

“It is the only staircase on your map that isn’t on the one of this floor.”

I pressed the walkie-talkie’s send button. “Thanks, Cereus. I’ll buy you a beer as soon as we’re out of here.”

“Oh! I...uh...I helped?”

“Yes, yes, it helps. Good work, agent. Could you let us know if she moves?” I would swear I heard him puff his chest out at the word ‘agent’.

“Will do! Happy to be of service, Detective!”

I broke the connection, stuffing the walkie-talkie back in my pocket.

“Lim, you think you can lead us there?” I asked.

“Gladly.”

Refolding the map, Limerence took off in the lead.

****

There’s only so long a pony can have his guard up, and I was quickly reaching the limits of my attention span. Five more, entirely uneventful minutes walking brought us into the unmapped section of the floor and I was starting to pray for some flying bullets. The school had been interesting. The danger was mostly irritating; not lethally dangerous… and at least it wasn’t dull.

Moving through the endless blue walls and lines of empty cells was giving me the surreal feeling of walking through the shell of some giant shelled beast. A breeze of ventilated air was like slow, mighty breaths, ruffling manes and the edges of cloaks. I didn’t especially care for the metaphor, but nor could I escape the sensation of having willingly strolled into the stomach of a horror scaled for a different time and a different place. Supermax, the Hole, would always be a prison; the sins of Saussurea and the ponies who built it or were interred there could never be truly cleansed.

I was so wrapped in these thoughts that I ran nose-first into Limerence’s flank when he stopped suddenly in front of me.

“Oof...Detective!” he grunted, using one rear leg to push me away. “I might expect that behavior from some of our other companions, but not from you!”

Before she could start, I put my hoof over Taxi’s muzzle. “Hold on making me blush until after we’ve escaped with our lives.”

“B-but I might never get another chance like that one!” Taxi whined.

“...We get out of this, Swift and I are going on a double date. Payment for the ease with which we accessed Saussurea. She’s going with the Warden. I’m…” I shut my eyes and groaned. “I’m going with Scarlet Petals.”

My driver’s eyes lit up like Hearth’s Warming Eve lights. “Best… night… ever! Eee! Oh, I am so picking you out a tux.”

“-And you won’t find out what restaurant we’re going to unless you hold the mocking until after the imminent death is no longer quite so imminent. Got me?”

“I… er… dammit…” Taxi grumbled, but fell silent.

“Good. Lim, why are we stopping?” I asked, turning to our the librarian.

“We’re here, I believe,” he answered, pointing at the far end of the hall. A set of broad, double doors was set to one side of the cells. “That appears to be stairs.”

I tilted my ears towards the hall, trying to pick out any sound which might indicate which our target was in. All was quiet.

“Spread out and check each one.”

Swift and Limerence took one side, while Taxi and I took the other, moving from cell to cell. At each one, we stacked up, weapons at the ready on the off chance there might be guards of some kind. Like everything else in Supermax, however, it seemed that there was a policy of ‘lowest profile is most secure profile’. That or they were relying on the internal magical sensors somewhere upstairs to alert them of trouble. Either way, I felt reasonably safe.

We were halfway down the hall. I stuck my head around the corner of a cell, gun at the ready, trigger in my teeth. Another empty cell. Yay.

I was about to move on, when a small part of the wall moved. I hesitated, then blinked a few times. My eyes were working just fine and I wasn’t hallucinating. I’d had enough experience hallucinations of late to say that probably wasn’t the case.

What’d I just see?

There it was. It moved again.

Slowly, a shape resolved out of the wall as my vision adjusted to the notion that there should be something there. Bowed shoulders. A hood. It was the form of somepony wearing a robe of the Lunar passage, though this one was nothing like the cloak my companions wore. Against the midnight blue walls, it was nearly invisible. The sequins looked to be actual gemstones. It was a gorgeous piece of clothing, covering hooves, tail, and head so thoroughly I couldn’t even tell if the individual under it was mare or stallion.

I waved towards Taxi and Limerence, who nodded and took up guard positions on either side of the hallway, then stepped into the tiny cell.

Swift whispered in my ear, making me jump, “Is...is it her, sir?”

I shook my head and gently pushed Swift away.

“Miss Cerise?” I asked, quietly.

The kneeling pony didn’t look up. Didn’t even acknowledge that I’d said anything.

Cautiously, I stepped into the cell, keeping my trigger tight. The cot’s blankets didn’t look to have been used and the footlocker was still open, and empty. It was almost as though the tiny room had been picked at random by an occupant who didn’t intend to spend long.

I took a couple of steps forward and reached my hoof out, gently putting it on the hood and tugging the fabric back. It tumbled onto the pony’s shoulders along with a shock of beautiful, flowing mane.

Silver mane.

Silver mane, olive green pelt.

Just like Chief Iris Jade.

The girl’s face was pinched, like she was deep in concentration. Cerise looked very much like her mother, though her eyes had fewer of the stress lines and her cheeks suggested gradually disappearing baby-fat rather than the skeletal slings and arrows of long-time drug addiction.

Her lips were moving, but she wasn’t saying anything. She turned to one side, shifting on her rear knees, balancing awkwardly with one hoof. Her horn was glowing a faint white, but the light from it sputtered and crackled, as though nearly spent.

There was no way she was still unaware of us, but still she remained where she was.

I reached out to pull her up, but before I could, I felt a tug at the hem of my cloak.

“What is it?” I asked, peering at Swift.

She nodded, silently, upwards. I followed her eyes up towards the ceiling and, at first, I wasn’t entirely certain what she was telling me to look at. The walls looked pretty much the same as in every other room; dark blue, with starry patterns on every surface.

Twinkling starry patterns.

Moving starry patterns.

The pattern of sparkling points spread out across the room appeared to be very gradually shifting, sliding across the surface of the wall. Some appeared to be carried on invisible eddies of wind, while others simply circled one another, like fish in a pond.

“Oh... that... may not be good. Is that good?” I backed up a couple of steps, then called into the hall. “Lim, could you come tell me if this is good or if we’re about to die?”

Limerence poked his muzzle into the cell and glanced at the walls. “As you would say, Detective, ‘Not a clue’. This spell is of a considerable size and complexity, though there were always rumors during the war of magicks that could level cities. Without my library, your guess is as good as mine. Is that the filly in question?”

I nodded at the kneeling figure, whose only response was a slight shuffling of knees as she changed position again, this time facing the doorway. “Yeah, but… something’s wrong here. I don’t know.” I raised my voice slightly, and tried again. “Miss Cerise? Can you hear me?”

Still, no response. Some part of me was shrieking that moving her forcibly might be a terrible idea; probably the part that says ‘don’t poke the magic thing with a stick’. I became aware that the ever-present tone which had followed us throughout the floor was somehow even louder inside the cell.

Taxi appeared at Limerence’s side, her cannon propped across one shoulder. “What’s wrong? Is it Cerise?”

“Yeah, but...I don’t know. Something feels very wrong about this.” I gestured at the penitent filly, then at the bizarre, moving ceiling.

Limerence sucked his cheek between his teeth, then pointed at her flank. “Detective, I realize this may seem an odd request, but...could you move the girl’s robe away from her hip?”

“This room feels like somepony hit it with a really big, really magical tuning fork. Are we sure even touching her is a good idea?” I asked.

The librarian thought about this briefly, then shook his head. “No, but I think we have few options.”

Giving my trigger an idle kick, I sighed and moved forward. As gently as possible, I took the edge of her robe between my teeth and pulled it away from her flank, then stepped back to get a look.

“Ah… yes. I believe your earlier question has… perhaps now been answered,” Limerence murmured.

I stared at Cerise’s leg, where it met her barrel, enraptured by that sensation of all of time and space coming together to finally present me with the Truth.

Her cutie-mark was a hammer poised over an egg; I hadn’t a clue what that might be, but the surrounding iconography was certainly familiar. The flesh of her hip was puckered, like an infection had set in, stretching around her cutie-mark into the shape of a brilliant red moon.

Limerence peered over his shoulder at the double doors. “If the alarm system is disabled, it’s possible we might move her without setting something off.”

“We came through the sewers without anypony noticing. Should we take that as a good sign?” Taxi asked.

“I’ve no idea. This is, frankly, beyond me,” Lim replied, gesturing at Cerise. “What I do know is there is a direct route between this room and the front door two floors up. If we cannot make it out there, we can go down past Arcane Control and take… erm… Plan B.”

I pulled a face. “We’re not taking Plan B unless we have to. She’s not… all there right now. Can we… I dunno… deface the spell or something? Maybe get it to stop doing whatever it’s doing?”

Limerence rose and moved over to one of the walls, resting his hoof on the ever-changing pattern. “Brute force is, as ever, not the solution, Detective. Be glad you aren’t in possession of a horn right now. If you were, you would realize how apt your ‘tuning fork’ statement actually was.”

“So, is that a ‘no’, then?”

Reaching up, Limerence touched his horn with one toe, barely hiding a wince at the gentle contact. His horn seemed to be letting off a very faint glow, though he didn’t appear to be casting any spell. “Based on the weight of ambient energies I can feel simply being in this room, if we damage this enchantment incautiously, it’s entirely possible the feedback could simply fry her. Or us. Or everypony in the building.”

“Are we saying that moving her isn’t likely to do the same thing?” I queried, easing around to look into the girl’s face. Cerise’s lips were in constant motion, but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. The look on her face was one of absolute calm. Taxi, at her most serene, had never come within a mile of that expression.

Limerence shrugged. “In all likelihood? No. I don’t believe they intend the girl to remain here. She’s being moved at some point, probably tonight.”

I glanced around came to the same quick deduction. “Unused bed, nothing in the hooflocker, unscuffed floor, and ‘special’ robe which looks more like Skylark’s than anypony else’s in the building. Alright, yes, these were temporary accommodations. We heard Skylark talking about somepony being ‘prepared’ earlier.”

“Shall we assume whatever she meant has some relation to this?”

Swift looked at her hooves, then shuffled her wings a tiny bit. “Sir, I... don’t want to go all ‘Daring Do and the Temple Of Flaying Alive’, but…-”

“Officer Cuddles-” Limerence said, scoldingly, “Imagination has it's place, but I don’t think it’s likely that the head of a regional religion would sacrifice the Chief of Police’s daughter for such foul purposes.”

My partner’s ears drooped a tiny bit and she looked, if anything, a bit disappointed. “Why not?”

"…Because… because such things are simply not done!" Limerence sputtered.

I gave him an appraising look. "We're talking about people we suspect of possibly setting up a conspiracy to assassinate Celestia. You're saying there's things they wouldn't do because it's 'not done?'"

"Even criminals have standards, detective! My brother Zefu, walks a fine line as it is. To cross it is to call down the Royal Guard! And, the murder aside, necromantic magics one might extract from such a thing, when discovered, would invite the immediate, fiery wrath of Celestia herself!"

"If we're right about the assassination thing, that may be what they're hoping," Taxi pointed out. It might have been my imagination, but I swear Limerence turned a slightly paler shade of blue.

I raised my hoof. “Wait... Back up. Magics? Killing somepony could be done for...magical purposes?”

Swift giggled and nodded. “Oh, yeah! That was what I meant! It’s one of my favourites in the whole series. Daring totally saved her love interest from losing all his skin! An evil priest pony was going to draw a spell on it which would be super, duper powerful! It was so awesome! She swung-”

“Hold the phone, kid.”

She trailed off, staring at me, quizzically. “I...I was just making a joke, Sir. I don’t actually think-”

I put my toe over her mouth, cutting her off.

The resulting silence was deafening.

I tossed my robe back over one shoulder like a serape, flicked off my safety, and picked up my trigger with my toe, holding it at the ready. “Has anyone else just noticed the hum stopped?”

Limerence glanced at his horn, then took several quick steps back, peering into the hallway. Pulling his robe up, he levitated out his crossbow. “If... there is a time to move this filly, it is likely to be now.”

I knew exactly who was going to move the filly, too. Taxi had to hold her cannon, Swift was too small, and Limerence’s horn was burned out.

Joy of joys.

“Alright, everypony out of the cell. If something explodes-”

I didn’t even get to finish my sentence before I was, very abruptly, alone in the cell with Cerise. Limerence, Taxi, and Swift all peeked around the edge of the door.

“Alright, Miss Cerise… I dunno if you can hear me, but please don’t snap my neck.”

Shutting my eyes, I reached down and took a muzzle-full of Cerise’s robe in my teeth. I gave it a light tug. No movement. I opened one eye, frowning around the fabric in my teeth. Cerise’s lips were still moving.

I risked a look back towards the door.

Taxi made a little ‘go on’ motion with her hoof.

Taking a deep breath and bracing my rear hooves, I put all of my weight behind my muzzle and pulled sharply on the robe, trying to drag Cerise away from the wall. Earth pony strength being what it is, I generally expected to topple over in a pile of flailing legs with an angry unicorn demanding to know exactly what I thought I was doing. Painful, but probably not lethal. At worst, I expected to end up with a mouth full of torn robe.

I really didn’t expect to almost yank my own teeth out of my head.

“Ow! Oh, Celestia, why?!” I moaned, stumbling backwards, clutching at my jaw with both forehooves. Tears sprang to my eyes and I screwed them shut. “What’s that damn robe made of?!”

“Uh... um... s-sir?” Swift stammered.

I turned to look at my partner, wiping my eyes with both fetlocks. “What? You want to try moving her? Give it a shot!”

“N-no, sir…”

Something in her voice brought me up short. Her brilliant blue eyes were wide as the moon and full of fear.

I slowly let my head swivel back around, then swallowed heavily.

Cerise was staring at me. Her horn continued to glow. What set my stomach twisting was her expression, or perhaps, her complete lack of one. She wasn’t worried, curious, or even slightly disturbed.

She was just staring.

Eloquence, Hardy. Think eloquence! What would an enchanted, deranged, emotionally unstable cultist girl who doesn’t know she’s a hostage and intended for death or worse want to hear from a police officer?

“Uh...h-hello?”

Putz.

Cerise’s face didn’t change, but her mouth dropped open. I found my gaze drawn involuntarily down to her thin lips. At once, a shrill, thundering voice issued from her muzzle.

“Intruders detected! Report to Arcane Control for immediate processing!”

I leapt back from her, bringing my revolver up and leveling it between her eyes. I don’t know what I intended to do with it, but I was so surprised that ‘shoot the hostage’ sounded better than ‘death by possessed unicorn’.

I paused. A funny feeling had crawled into my brain and it took me several seconds to realize exactly what had caused it. When I did, I gnawed on my lower lip.

Well, what can it hurt? It’s not like fighting our way out was ever really an option, I said to myself.

“Pardon...could...you repeat that?” I asked, quietly.

“Intruders detected! Report to Arcane Control for immediate processing!” the voice barked.

Hesitantly, I let my weapon fall.

“Intruders detected!” the not-Cerise voice snapped again. “Report for processing!”

“What if I say ‘no’?”

“You… You will report for processing! Come to Arcane Control immediately!”

“Shouldn’t you be sending guards?” I asked, feeling one of those cocky smirks spring up on my face.

There was a protracted pause.

“Guards are on their way, but it will save them time if you come to Arcane Control. Immediately!”

I dropped my flank onto the thin carpet in the tiny cell, taking a moment to scratch at a spot under the robe that’d been bothering me for some minutes.

Taxi hissed from the doorway. “Hardy, what...are you doing?! We have to move!”

“I’m asking where the guards are,” I said, with a shrug and a smile. “Our friend here has apparently detected some intruders. Why send us to Arcane Control? The only thing down there is Astral Skylark, and Skylark isn’t incautious. I somehow doubt our illustrious host wants us to voluntarily trot our heavily armed selves down into the center of whatever ritual she’s got going on, either.If this is anything like any other prison, then the security stations will be upstairs. Nor, I think, would she order any of her lackeys to tell the ponies with guns to head in the same direction as their leader. Something stinks.”

“Report to Arcane Control for processing!” the voice insisted.

“Yes, yes, certainly. I just want to know what’ll happen if I say that I damn well won’t.” I replied, reasonably. Rising to my hooves, I took couple of steps forward and poked Cerise in the nose with the tip of my hoof.

There was a protracted pause. It lasted a full minute, during which the girl just sat there, her mouth still open and eyes dull.

When the voice returned, it was somewhat quieter and far less commanding.

“Um… Please… could you… come to Arcane Control?”

Swift poked her head out. “Please? What kinda mean disembodied authoritarian voice are you?”

I narrowed my eyes at the girl being used as a puppet.

“Let Miss Cerise go.”

The voice was quiet for a long time and when it spoke again, it quavered a little, “If I do that, then the guard ponies really will come. Please? If you go down the hall, and turn left, the stairs are there. Don’t go to the others! Those go down to Secure Containment. I promise, if you come, I can… I can tell you stuff!”

Stuff? Not how a security pony typically refers to essential information.

Something in that voice still sounded very strange, too. It was high, and tinny, but I couldn’t quite put my hoof on exactly what was so odd.

“Sir?” Swift’s voice brought me out of my thoughts.

“What is it, kid?”

“I know this is probably a stupid question, but what do we do now?”

I flicked the hammer on my gun, then tongued the safety back on and stepped out into the hallway to join my friends. As I did, Cerise’s mouth snapped shut and she turned back to the wall, her lips resuming their non-stop litany of what I assumed to be prayers. I had the most unsettling image in my head of a television showing static.

“I think we go to Arcane Control and hear about ‘stuff’,” I replied.

“This is way weird, sir.”

“I must concur with Miss Cuddles, Detective,” Limerence added. “Yes, this intelligence seems disinterested in passing us along to Astral Skylark, else it is likely we would be up to our hocks in cultists just now, but I find myself uncertain what ulterior motivations it could have.”

Taxi pulled at her braid with her teeth, nervously. “Hardy, I think we should leave. Call Chief Jade. Let her know Cerise is here, and let her take it from there. Send her one of those magic robes and-”

“Leave the girl here to Skylark’s sweet mercies?” I growled.

“It’s not like they can just kill her, right?” Taxi murmured, eartips hanging low. “I mean, they need her for a hostage for now...”

“Sweets, I don’t see as they have any other options. Jade let me go. Flat out. They might not be able to prove it, but her daughter is no longer reliable leverage and she can identify them. Even if they managed, somehow, to strip her memories then they’ve lost all credibility if they let her go.”

“But just… murdering a helpless girl!” my driver protested. “I realize Skylark might not be on the up and up, but the church is about forgiveness and generosity!”

“Yeah, like the spell-worked robes? Look, you said it yourself! Knowing that the Supermax construct is operating will bring Celestia and Luna in here, if we’re not careful, and that might be the point!” I replied. “We lose the armor immediately, and our perps will vanish. Celestia and/or Luna become prime targets. We can’t afford to let this get out of hoof. We’re leaving with Cerise, and if we’re lucky, the Moon Weapons.”

Limerence’s nose wrinkled. “But… walking into this intelligence’s den does not strike me as terribly wise, Detective!”

“Did walking into this building?"

Limerence's riposte died on his parted lips.

"That's what I thought. Now come on. I’d rather not keep our disembodied friend waiting, lest it decide to actually send some guards to check on us.”

****

It didn’t take us long to find the particular staircase, but getting into it was another question. Arcane runes ran the length and breadth of the door-frame, which was just a little taller than your average pony, and it was covered with a thick, metal security door.

“What now, sir?” Swift asked, putting her hooves up on the thick metal door and giving it a light push. It didn’t budge.

“Maybe we should just knock?” Taxi suggested.

Limerence snorted, waving his horn at the door. “This is a type Twenty Six Elevated Security Portal. It would take a team of ten hydras to yank it loose. I somehow doubt that ‘knocking’ is-”

I rapped my hoof on the door and a dozen heavy bolts rattled back. A hiss of releasing air blasted our cloaks up around our knees.

The librarian stared at the door, then glared at me. “Detective, I hate that you manage that.”

“What? What did I do?” I asked, plaintively, taking the door handle in my teeth and hauling it open, revealing a dark passage behind.

“You frequently manage to make ponies smarter than you are look very stupid by being more lucky than any single creature has any right to be.”

“You say that, but the luck extends only until bullets start flying or the universe needs somepony to take a beating,” I answered, poking my head into the unlit hole in the wall. In the depths, I heard the sound of another door unsealing, followed by a rush of air. An overpowering smell rolled out of the tunnel and I staggered back, holding my nose with one hoof.

“Pheeew! That’s foul!”

Swift covered her muzzle with both hooves, her cheeks inflating as she tried to hold her stomach. “Ugh, yuck! What is that?! It smells like...like dragon, but it’s...gross!”

Limerence’s horn flashed, pinching his nostrils shut. “Id is decaying dragon,” he said, quietly.

I tried to draw in a breath, but I could almost taste the awful stink. My eyes were watering ferociously. The four of us quickly retreated down the hallway and into some cleaner air.

Taxi fished around in her saddlebag, then pulled out a tiny vial labeled ‘Menth.' Holding her breath, she uncorked it and smeared the substance on one toe, then under her nose before holding it out to me. I quickly snatched it and applied a liberal dose, before passing it to Swift. When I inhaled again, all I could smell was high powered mint.

“Ahhh... okay, that’s better,” I let out a sigh of relief. It hadn’t improved the flavor of the air much, but I could breathe.

Limerence was last, practically emptying the vial over his face, then returned it to Taxi.

“What, exactly, could be causing this scent? I don’t remember any of the stories about this place mentioning a… a dumping ground for draconic corpses,” the librarian muttered.

“Saussurea never mentioned anything about sending us down into her prison’s control center,” I answered. “She wanted us to clear the cells. I got the distinct impression she wouldn’t be terribly happy to have us down in Arcane Control, if her refusal to tell us anything about the construct is any indication.”

“Then I suppose, this being you, that is where we must go, yes?”

“I’m glad you’re finally beginning to get how this works. Now come on. Safeties off, but triggers down. I don’t want to walk into an ambush, but nor do I want us to end up shooting somepony who might help. Clear?”

Without waiting for an answer, I marched back towards the stairs. A few overhead lights flickered on, invitingly.

****

The fire in my cutie-marks was a constant thing by then. I hoped the distraction wouldn’t catch me off guard at some crucial moment. It’s the problem with having a talent that, now and then, tells you something you already know; there’s no good way to shut it off. Still, I hoped once I knew exactly what grave injustice it was working off of, it might let up a little.

Death is one thing. I’m used to death. Most deaths are pretty quiet. A dose of pills. A slip in the tub. The front bumper of a bus.

I’m even used to death that’s had a few months to simmer in its own juices. It’s never something a pony looks forward to, but it is never boring and, most frequently, it gives you a point to begin piecing together a picture of what led up to the moment of death.

Some very smart pony once said that ‘Death is the great story teller’. He or she wasn’t wrong. All the most interesting stories begin somewhere and, in between, somepony dies. The more violently, the more interesting the tale; at least, to this of us of a macabre disposition.

The thing I will never get used to is just how poorly the world treats those who survive. Sure, death will get there eventually, but the survivors tend to be the ones who end up having to piece things back together.

On the upside, they’re also the only ones with any hope of learning the truth, and death is happy to have a captive audience.

****

“Sir, about what Lim said. Do you think there’s some kind of... dragon burial pit down here?” Swift asked as we descended the long, spiraling staircase.

“Could be, but I doubt it,” I replied, cocking an ear back towards her. “Celestia and Luna returned the corpses of any dead dragons they could for proper funeral rites after the war ended, remember?”

“I...read about that once, yeah,” she answered, then paused and added, “But...but, why would there be a dragon down here? Unless there’s another way in or something, the hallways upstairs are wide enough you could lead a mid-sized dragon down them, but this would barely fit a hatching-”

I waved a hoof for quiet. Around the next curve, the second security door came into view.

Taxi wiggled in beside me in the narrow hallway and whispered, “Does this smell like ‘trap’ to you?”

I raised my head, looking back in the other direction. “If they wanted to trap us all they had to do was wait until we were down here, then shut that upstairs door and the one ahead. They’re airtight and remotely controlled. This hallway was made to seal in the event of a prison break. Anypony in here would be dead in real short time.”

Swift’s wings puffed out for take-off, but she forced them back down. “That...is still super unnerving, sir.”

“If it’ll make you feel better, I think we may be about to meet the reason why none of the alarms in the sewers went off,” I said, “With all that running around we were doing, we must have set off a couple of them. The path Limerence and I set was pretty clean, but it wasn’t perfect.”

“You mean the other ways through the sewer were more dangerous?!” Swift asked, disbelief all over her orange face.

“Errr... yeah. Much. If things go bad, we’ve still got our ladybug and M6 on the outside. It might mean a trip to jail, but if it all goes wrong, we have options.” I don’t know whether or not I was saying that for my comfort or the kid’s.

Deciding that, trap or not, I needed to know what was down there, I forged ahead through the open security door.

More lights came to life and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the harsh neons. Blinking away the glare, I surveyed the small room I’d found myself in.

On second appraisal, I realized small might have been inaccurate. If I’d been able to actually see the walls, it might have been pretty good size. As it was, every spare inch of space that wasn’t a pathway was crammed full of equipment. Screens, monitors, work stations, and machines of all kinds hummed to life. A few let out operations noises and fans started blowing fresh air through the room from overhead vents, helping considerably with the stink of draconic death.

Moving between the rows of machines, some of which were running videos of the sewers and others which seemed to be beeping a tune, I quickly determined the room was unoccupied.

“It’s safe!” I called back towards the steps. “You can come on down!”

Swift stepped in, cautiously sweeping her gun around and checking the corners. Glancing at the vents, she inhaled the fresh air coming through the vents, then pulled her robe over her head and stretched her wings.

“Kid, we’re wearing disguises for a reason,” I chastised.

“Sir, you try having feathers and then wearing a big, itchy blanket on top of an itchy tactical vest. I’m going to have to preen for an hour just to feel like I don’t have wing-mites when we’re done here.” I frowned and she sank down a little. “I’ll put it back on when we leave, okay?”

I smirked, then tore my own robe off, throwing it across my back. “Honestly, I’m glad you said that. These things are miserable without those spells on them.”

Taxi followed Swift in and her lips twitched in disgust as she surveyed the rows of technology. “All this machinery just to make sure ponies’ wills stay broken so we can tuck them away someplace quiet where they won’t bother the civilized people...”

“Miss Taxi, before you make sharp judgements, you must remember the time and circumstances under which this building was commissioned,” Limerence murmured as he moved into the room and began casually inspecting the various monitors.

My driver raised one eyebrow at him. “You can’t seriously be defending this place…”

“No, I am not defending Saussurea’s methods,” he explained, poking at a keyboard attached to one of the machines. “I simply wish to make sure we remember that before she became the villain of this particular tale, she was a hero. Before Saussurea, ponies did not capture dragons. We killed them. We slaughtered them en-masse. We’d become very good at it. Had we proceeded just a few more years in that direction... a few centuries from now, we would live in a world without dragons.”

“But what about this magic being used on ponies?”

“Would you have prefered your father be kept in a less secure facility? At the time, you must understand… there were no other options. Equestria did not contain a more secure prison. Princess Luna had sealed the original Tartarus, permanently, to prevent the dragons from freeing any of the horrors therein. Anything left inside is dead or encased in stone.”

My driver glared at him, but there wasn’t much force behind it. He met her gaze, levelly, and after a moment she let her eyes slide away. Nopony really had anything to add to that, so we began exploring the room in greater detail.

I poked around a few of the monitors which showed the sewers and the interior of Supermax. Something about them was very strange, but I couldn’t pinpoint precisely what it was.

“Lim, I need a second pair of eyes here,” I called to our librarian, who was scowling at a bundle of wire spilling from the back of one of the terminals. He heaved himself up and trotted over to my side, peering down at the image on the screen. It was in black and white, and a touch grainy, but I could still tell something was off. “Does this look...funny to you?”

His expression turned even darker as he examined the picture. “If by funny, you mean humorous, then no. If by funny, you mean it is entirely bizarre… then I concur. These are not images of Supermax. Not as it is today.”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“The walls, Detective. Despite the monochrome, you must see that those walls are not blue. They are white. Unpainted. That is the hallway we just came from. As well, if you look here-” He indicated another image which seemed to be the sewers. “-If you remember, this was where we ran into somepony carrying a torch who had been unlucky in his attempts to avoid the basilisk eyes?”

I squinted at the particular screen and it did look familiar, but there was nopony in it.

“Where is he?” I asked, dumbly.

“A very, very good question,” Limerence said, turning in a circle. “Also, not the only one I must raise. This room, presents an enigma all its own.”

“You mean, besides that there’s nopony here?” I asked. “Wasn’t our friend supposed to be ‘processing’ us or something?”

“Quite the trick it would be, too, considering none of these machines are connected to anything of significance. This is not a control room in any way, shape, or form.”

“What do you mean not a control room?” I waved my hooves at all the machinery. “What exactly is all this crap for then?”

Limerence shifted his weight and swung his horn towards the back of one of the nearest pieces of equipment. Shutting his eyes, he let out a guttural noise and the glow around his forehead intensified slightly. The screws affixing the back panel in place slowly worked themselves free, then he tore the sheet of metal away, propping it to one side. Reaching in, he wrapped his hoof in a bundle of cable and pulled it out, letting it flop across the floor like some giant, artificial snake.

Working his way to the end, he held up an unconnected plug.

Stuffing the wire back into the machine, he fitted the panel back in place, but didn’t bother with the screws. “A functional fake, and probably good enough to fool anypony not looking too closely or who’d been paid to be less than thorough. I imagine one might input commands into this system for ‘effect’, but whosoever is actually executing them is not doing it from here.”

“So...who is actually making this whole place work?” I asked.

“Um… that… that’s me.”

Everypony jumped and I snatched my trigger into my mouth so fast I almost bruised my lips.

Twisting around, I searched for our benefactor, but there was nopony there. We were still alone.

“Could you give me… uh… gosh, this stupid thing sticks,” the voice trailed off, as though talking to itself, then popped back, “I saw you come down the hall, I think. We’re talking, so I guess you made it. My sensors are acting dumb and there’s no cameras in there, but if you’re actually in the control room...could you go kick the wall? I mean, kick the bit that doesn’t have any machines on it.”

“Who is this?” I asked the air above my head. “Why have you been watching us?”

The voice seemed to be coming from a hidden speaker somewhere. It didn’t reply for a long moment, and when it did, it sounded somewhat subdued. “My… my name’s Tourniquet.”

“Okay, Tourniquet. You care to explain the spying?”

“There’s nothing else to do, and I waited a really long time for somepony who...you know...who wasn’t with those weird church ponies. Please, just go kick the wall. I promise, I can tell you lots of things.”

“You’ve said that twice, but...we’re working on scant trust here,” I grumbled, trotting around the room in a slow circle. I discovered the single, very-much-out-of-place blank section of wall tucked behind two banks of whirring mechanicals. “You gonna promise me I’m not about to die horribly if I do this?”

“I promise!” Tourniquet replied.

Limerence, Swift, and Taxi piled up at my sides.

“Mayhap it would be best we keep our weapons ready,” Limerence murmured.

I picked up my trigger bit, then turned and planted a solid buck on the section of wall. Something inside went ‘crunch’, then there was a soft humming followed by the sound of working hydraulics. The wall sank in, then swung upwards out of sight on two enormous hinges.

Even wearing the menthol spread, the scent of dead dragon washing out of the room behind still very nearly knocked me off my hooves.

“Phew... I am going to bury my face in a rose-bush when we get out of this place,” I muttered. Swift had her teeth clenched around her trigger bit so tight they creaked.

Behind the wall, there was a sea of black, and then, farther on, a single light hung in the distance, illuminating a perfectly circular space in the darkness.

“Lim? Can I borrow your glasses?”

The spectacles dropped over my face and the lenses whistled softly as they adjusted themselves. Suddenly, I was right up there in that circle of light. I took an involuntary step back, trying to make sense of exactly what I was seeing.

A nursery?

That’s certainly what it looked like. There was a soft looking blue crib, complete with mobile and teddy-bear. A rocking chair sat beside it, surrounded by stuffed animals, along with a bookshelf that overflowed with books. A few toys lay on the floor, where they'd been dropped. They were mostly familiar pieces that I’d had during my own youth; a set of building blocks, a heap of comic books, and a whole pile of puzzles.

There was a child’s bedroom, floating out there in the blackness.

The voice drifted from far off, only slightly raised. I realized, at last, what had given me pause back in that cell.

It was a filly’s voice; not a mare’s, but a girl’s.

“You...you can come over! Just walk straight towards the light!” Tourniquet called to us, though I still couldn’t see her.

“Why don’t you walk towards the light? Where are you, anyway?” I shouted.

“You came into my home! Be nice!”

That gave me pause.

The way she said it, I got the feeling she wasn’t just referring to the room we were in. I set my trigger back against my leg and moved forward a couple of steps onto soft carpet. My hoofsteps seemed muffled, but I got the impression of a simply gigantic space around me. Something in the way the air moved around my ears. Whatever the room around us might have looked like, it was huge. I wished I could see more of the details. That scent was stronger than ever, though the ventilation system seemed to be working overtime to fix that.

Deciding that my situation could only improve, I turned to my companions and gestured for them to wait, then started out into the dark. The carpet smelled a bit musty, but it was clean enough that I wasn’t stirring up dust-devils with every step.

For some reason, Limerence’s glasses weren’t adjusting for the low light levels. That was a touch worrying, though the way the circle of light didn’t reflect on anything else in the room seemed to indicate magic.

As I approached the crib, the burn in my cutie-mark intensified. I let out an involuntary yelp and stumbled down onto one knee.

“Are you okay?” Tourniquet and Swift asked, almost simultaneously.

I rubbed at my back leg with one hoof. “I’m fine. Cramp. Walking down lots of stairs, you know?”

“Oh…”

I couldn’t tell which of them said that, so I rose and kept walking. Reaching the little nursery that seemed to hang in empty space, I paused at the edge of the circle of light, then, with some trepidation, I stepped into it. My heart was thumping in my ears, and the very air seemed to shudder with some great power.

“Alright, that’s my part of the bargain here. Now, will you show yourself?” I asked.

“I...I can, but you have to promise me something, alright?”

Tourniquet’s voice came from the other side of the little bedroom, somewhere just beyond the other end of the lit region. I stepped around a loose roller-skate and gave it a light kick, sending it scooting across the carpet under the crib.

“Another promise?”

“Promise you won’t...you know, you won’t hurt me? Please?”

“You don’t hurt me, I can promise I won’t hurt you. Is that fair?”

Tourniquet seemed to think for a second, then answered, “I guess. I...gosh, are you really a detective? I heard somepony call you that.”

“Yes, yes, I am. You can call me Hardy.”

“Hardy? Um...okay. Could you... you know, could you just sit? Please? I don’t want you to freak out.”

I let my rear legs slide under me, sitting down as the girl gathered her courage.

One slight, pink hoof appeared on the far edge of the circle. Then the other. I thought, for a second, she was wearing some kind of strange horse-shoe, but as more of the filly shuffled forward, I couldn’t keep my eyes from pulling wider and wider.

Tourniquet’s left leg was perfectly ordinary, but as the light shone on her right, it reflected and refracted off metal and crystal. The illumination traveled up to her chest, where the chrome spilled out over her side, stretching up to her neck. She poked her face into sight and I had to repress a shudder; her face was still there, mostly, but her eyes were gone. Not even a milky white remained. In their place, two glittering jewels split the light into sparkling rainbows.

It might have been pretty, if it didn’t suggest an especially cruel mind. The girl’s eyes had been extracted.

There was nothing to indicate what had done the damage, but as she moved, something behind her rattled in the air above us. As her back came into view, I found myself scooting backward, almost tumbling over as my flight response took momentary control of my brain.

Wires.

Endless shining wires.

Dozens of them spilled out of her back, disappearing up toward the ceiling like a pair of grotesque wings. They moved with her as she took a few steps into the light like a shadowy mechanized horror pulled from a twisted mind.

The parts of my mind that could be afraid were so overloaded they simply switched off, leaving the analytical bits to take notice of the tiny details. She was an earth pony. No real wings, no horn, and all the lean muscle of a young athlete. Her face had lost its baby-fat, but she couldn’t have been much into puberty.

Half-turning, she looked away, letting me study her.

A patch of flesh on her side was gone, exposing a criss-crossing spaghetti work of cable. It flexed as she breathed, simulating muscle in a way that made my hackles try to climb up the back of my head. Much of her skin seemed original, but some parts weren’t exactly pieced together correctly, as though the surgeon had been rushing.

Even her tail was artificial. It sprung out of her backside in very natural looking curls, falling down her ankles with wild abandon, but even the best kept hair is not that shiny. The individual strands must have been some kind of thin, durable material. Subjectively, I suppose it was very pretty, but nothing covered the cruelty of what’d been wrought by a depraved, vicious, and very creative mind. I suspected I knew exactly whose mind that might have been.

An unkind, deeply irrational part of my mind was screaming ‘Shoot it!’, but my trigger bit remained where it was.

After a more than appropriate period letting me get used to her existence, the girl tested a smile.

“Hi-EEP!”

Tourniquet squealed and leaped backwards, eyes wide and frightened. I was momentarily confused, until I realized she wasn’t looking at me. She was watching something over my shoulder.

I turned just in time to catch a face-full of raging, razor sharp teeth.

Act 2, Chapter 33: "We never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 33: "We never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."

While the true origin of magic is a source of permanent debate and speculation, the most respected overall theory regarding the source of magic is summed up in the adage "True magic comes from within"; specifically, that magic comes from living beings, a byproduct of organic processes. By this - the Vivogenic theory of arcane origin - magic energy may simply be a waste product generated by life itself, stored within the body and radiated continuously or at regular intervals; arcane fertilizer.

Vivogenic theory has several advantages. It explains the source of the background emotional magic that pervades Equestria. It helps explain the emotional resonance and amplification that can be created between two or more ponies in states of kinship. And it explains why Ponykind, though particularly attuned to magic, is not alone in its ability to manifest voluntary or involuntary magical effects, a pedestal they share with griffins, zebras and dragons, to name just a few. In rare cases other species have been known to display arcane talent; One may recall the tale of Mr. Fluffypants, the household cat who, chased one too many times by the neighbor's dog, somehow cast a spell to 'blend' the offending canine. Mr. Fluffypants has remained reticent on his feat of arcanery.

Critics of vivogenesis note that unliving artifacts are wellsprings of power, and that this theory fails to explain their origins. And yes, nonliving objects of arcane power do exist, but so far every object of power with a known origin is either A) the product of a known arcanosensitive intelligence or intelligences, or B) is potentially the crystallized product of Equestria's magical background radiation, which, by vivogenic theory, has its origins in living beings.

The final major point in support of vivogenic theory is the unfortunate fact that living sacrifices generate an astonishing amount of raw power. While this could obviously not be the subject of controlled official experiment, the evidence consists of more than a few significant case studies. A number of foals sacrificing crickets in another cutie-mark hunt have actually caused an extraplanar incursion. (See LR 23 - The Go'Soth'Arok, Slayer Of Worlds incident. For further reference, you might also see the Mayor’s desk. Go’Soth has become something of an heirloom between generations of city-leadership. Look for the jar beside the Celestia bobble-head.)

Unfortunately, less scrupulous individuals do not limit themselves to sacrificing insects.

-The Scholar

I was thankful they were dead.

Small mercies, and all that.

Decomposition had hit them a little harder than the dragon, and the bodies were no longer in what I’d have called ‘good’ condition. Bits of sinew and flesh still clung to them, binding their joints and bones together, but they hadn't fallen apart entirely.

Swift was shaking, her eyes riveted on the hanging bodies.

I quickly got her attention with one hoof, waving her closer. She took several seconds to get moving, but when she gathered her faculties, she tottered over and collapsed beside me. I lifted Tourniquet, who squeaked softly like a piece of industrial machinery, and laid her in my partner’s forelegs. I grabbed one of her wings dragged it around the girl. Swift got the message and pulled the other one around, forming a protective shield with her feathers around the two of them.

I pulled my trigger into my mouth and trotted towards the hanging bodies, stepping over toys and skirting bits of furniture.

I hadn’t expected another investigation, but those pegasus bones they’d been using as loci in the robes had to come from somewhere.

Once I was underneath the seven bodies, I forced my revulsion to one side and I did my best to examine the bodies. It was tough to get a good look from below, particularly through the dangling coils of what my brain wanted desperately to label 'intestines'. I fought it hoof and tail, swallowing until my stomach was under control.

Taxi was still pulling on her jeweler’s glasses as she joined me. Limerence came along a minute later. For all the young buck was trying to put up a strong front, he couldn’t hide the quaking in his knees. I lifted my toe up to my nose and peered at it, willing it to be still, for his sake. No such luck. I wasn’t doing much better. I let my leg drop and looked up at the corpses hanging above us.

“Alright, what do we think?” I asked. “Just a general appraisal.”

“I... hmmm... I can’t tell." Taxi murmured. "Death could have been blood loss from the wings, horn, and broken bones, dehydration, or any one of a list I can see from down here. Massive trauma, almost certainly, but unless we can get the bodies down from there, I can’t give you anything more specific.”

Lim coughed, then found his voice. It was weak, but steady. “I believe it is neurotoxic shock, Detective. These ponies died of neurotoxic shock.”

I looked at him out of one eye. “How do you go about that diagnosis?”

“The professor at the Museum and Miss Ruby both displayed a similar condition. I had some time to get access to the reports on Ruby Blue’s death while you were resting. I thought my own analysis might prove worthwhile.”

“And?” I prompted.

“The chemicals in her system are consistent with a poison used in zebra rituals whose primary purpose is... is accessing the soul, for various reasons.”

"And you only thought to bring this up now?"

"Forgive me for failing to find a suitable window between our various brushes with Death, Detective, but only now did it achieve immediate relevance."

“So, are we still outright denying there might be necromancy involved?” I asked, forcing a cocky smirk. I needed that smirk. That smirk was all that was keeping me from having my own little break down. Standard weirdness aside, analyzing corpses strapped to a dragon’s insides was far down my list of ‘How I want to spend my nights’.

“I can not dispute what I see with my own eyes, Detective,” he replied, sadly. “I am disturbed and distressed by it, but I can’t deny it.”

For how long the body had been down there, I was surprised there wasn’t more smell. Even with the menthol spread, a rotting corpse left in an enclosed space produces a scent that will floor you.

“Why aren’t they more rotted?” I inquired.

Taxi shifted her hips a little, poking around the edge of the wound with her toe. “Probably a mix of the dry air and... huh... that’s funny…”

“Sweets, you know how much I hate those two words,” I growled.

“I know. It’s... just funny. There’s something wrapped around them.”

“I don’t have your eyes, Sweets. The light’s bad.”

Just as I said it, the light overhead shifted to a new angle, casting direct illumination on the bodies.

“Thanks, Tourniquet!” I shouted over my shoulder.

“Can... can you get them down from there?” Tourniquet asked, meekly, still hiding under Swift’s wings.

I glanced at Limerence and he shook his head. “Sorry, honey. Our unicorn’s still pretty burnt out.”

There was a paused, then she called out, “It’s okay…I... I don’t think Mister Girthranx minds anymore.”

Limerence gazed to the side, studying the dead dragon’s head. “Ahhh... this... is Mister Girthranx, then? I do wonder why Saussurea would cage one of her inmates with her daughter, unless there is some element we are missing.”

“I don’t know. We’ll ask the girl in a minute, but I want to see what we can see before we go traumatizing her with questions about this,” I said, then nosed my driver’s ribs. “You want to tell me ‘what’s funny’, Sweets?”

Taxi gnawed her lip. “It’s just something odd. Whoever put these ponies up there didn’t... tie them... in place. They’re wired up there. It’s like they somehow had... wires... sunk into their bodies. Look? See the unicorn’s neck?”

I focused on where she was pointing, and, in the improved light, I could see something silver glittering up there near the base of the unicorn’s skull. I thought she might be a slightly older mare, but age is hard to tell from a body that’d been decomposing for so long. I traced the wire with my eyes until it disappeared around the side of what was left of her neck.

“That... is very... yech. Funny is not the word,” I replied. “Thoughts on why somepony would perform amateur electrical work on a corpse?”

“Not a one. I somehow doubt that Skylark is trying to be the next Doctor Flankenstein.”

Limerence drew in a solidifying breath, pulling his kerchief from his front pocket and pressing it to his mouth. Taking cautious steps, he moved underneath the bodies and into the cavernous wound in the dragon’s belly. My stomach lurched at the sight of him simply hopping over the side, into the great beast’s gut. Whatever organs had been in there were largely reduced to ash when it’s fire-bladder ruptured, but that didn't improve the sight of my companion standing inside Mister Girthranx.

“Detective, I am... not unsympathetic to how vile a thing this may be to ask you to do, but I believe the two of you should... pop in and take a look at this.”

I dropped my head and spent a few seconds just looking at the carpet down there between my hooves. There was a loose, plastic building block that whoever had moved the toys away from the walls had apparently missed. I gave it a little kick back towards the center of the room, trying my best to calmly contemplate the capricious vicissitudes of fate that’d led me to a night where I’d have to walk into a carcass.

Taxi pulled her jeweler’s goggles up onto her forehead, then stepped into the hole. She didn’t even hesitate, but that was Sweets, through and through. Her ‘professional’ mode was a scary beast.

I clenched my jaw, shut my eyes, and followed her into the massive stomach. For some reason, I expected to step directly onto something wet, but the ‘floor’ was simply concrete covered in a thick layer of undisturbed ash. The exploding fire-bladder had vaporized the creature’s interior right down to the floor. I glanced quickly around the interior of the little cave. My insides crawled, but in truth, there wasn’t much to see. Everything had been charred black inside the creature, though there was plenty of room for me to stand upright without ducking. I supposed we were closer to his upper intestinal tract than his lungs.

“Detective, if you please?” Limerence’s horn glowed, lighting up the back ‘wall’ for us, along with Girthranx’ spine.

Taxi squinted at the sight, and I fought down my urge to puke for the second time that night.

“Sweets, that vacation you mentioned earlier? Can we go tomorrow?”

“I... am thinking so. Look.” She pointed her toe at the dragon’s vertebrae that were just above head height. I edged forward, sending swirls of ash around my knees.

“What the…” I trailed off, the thought unfinished, my brain refusing to make sense of what I was seeing.

Thin, spidery wire snaked around and around the dragon’s spine, winding up and down the wall behind him, into and out of the concrete. They seemed to pierce his bones at very regular intervals, creeping like vines through his entire lower body.

“What is that?” I exclaimed.

“That, Detective... is…” Limerence frowned, then shook his head. “I... hmmm. I fear I don’t even have a supposition. How a body might be impregnated with these wires is a hideous enough question without getting into 'why'. This beast must have been alive throughout this process and for some time thereafter. Look. The wires have calcified around the places where they intersect the bones.”

“Tourniquet said ‘Girthranx’ was nice to her,” I mused. “She said he burned a village and he was nice to her. Down here in the dark, his spinal column wired to a wall, still alive. What kind of... of awful creature is Saussurea?”

Lim shrugged and tipped his horn in the direction of Swift and the girl, who were still sitting in that same position we’d left them. “The most dangerous kind, I suspect, and one not unique to our species. She was a parent who’d lost her child. The war created many such monsters. I do wish I could say Saussurea was the foulest, but statistically, she barely rates. Those who died at her hooves, this dragon included, come to... a comparatively small number.”

“I don’t think any of those whackos ever wired someone to a wall, though,” I said. “This goes way beyond cruel. This is-”

Taxi’s voice was so soft I didn’t catch what she said.

“What was that, Sweets?”

She cleared her throat. “An ignition.”

I gave her a blank look. “A... what?”

“It’s an ignition. Look around us. This is how Saussurea started the machine. Remember what Limerence said?”

I thought back, then nodded. “You mean about how it takes more power to start this place than to keep it running?”

She waved her hooves at the dead dragon’s body. “You think a living dragon wouldn’t have enough magic pouring through his body to get everything up and functioning?”

Limerence grimaced. “That... does explain how Saussurea managed to hide Tourniquet’s presence here. Expecting an inspection? Have her turn herself off and go to essential functions only. No magical possessions, no extraneous arcane fields; nothing to tell the inspectors this was anything but an ordinary prison complex. When they’re gone, use this... unfortunate brute to turn it all back on.”

“But when the prison was closed, he died." I finished, just to indicate my comprehension. "With nopony to keep the power on, she went to sleep.” I looked over my shoulder at Tourniquet, who was quietly playing with Swift’s pinion feathers, her thin, pink face hidden against my partner’s tactical vest. For her part, Swift didn’t seem to mind, but she kept casting curious little glances in our direction. I mouthed ‘I’ll tell you later’ and she nodded.

A chill cut through that discovery, and the pain in my flank that’d been there since we entered the building subsided somewhat. I let the thoughts coalesce just a little bit longer, then took a few steps back, out of Girthranx’s stomach.

I peered up at the corpses hanging from his ribs.

“Limerence? Giving a general estimate, if you were to burn the souls of ponies while they were wired into the ignition system, how many would it take to restart Supermax and awaken the construct?” I asked.

Lim, whatever his social faults, was not a stupid pony. He looked up at the bodies and his lip twitched with disgust. “I would venture, based on the immediate evidence, that it would take approximately seven, Detective.”

“Why the injuries, then?” I wanted to know.

“My knowledge of necromancy is very limited, but... spell taps? They are probably places where one might channel and focus the magic within the body. Earth ponies focus their innate talents through their hooves. Pegasi through their wings. Unicorns through their horns. You must have a place to gather the energy of a burning soul and..."

I slapped my hoof against my face. “Alright!... alright. Understood. I wish I hadn’t asked. That’d be why they’re grey then?”

“Very probably. The soul, either removed or burnt, might produce any number of strange effects. As I said, I know almost nothing about necromancy.”

My stomach sank to someplace around my knees as the implications of that ground their way in.

Ruby. The Professor.

Skylark or somepony close to her fueled a spell with their very souls. They set fire to the things that make them living, thinking beings. They stole the magic from them so completely that it left nothing of worth or consequence; a shell of meat, to be tossed away.

I felt my anger start to grow, but shoved it away and marched back towards Tourniquet and Swift. My heart thumped against my breast as I slowed and finally stopped over them. The two fillies raised their heads in unison to look up at me.

“Tourniquet... your mother is in another prison for the things she did here at Supermax. She is safe, happy, has a good friend, and is in no pain, but she will not be coming back,” I said, in a firm voice. “She committed unspeakable crimes against Equestria and equine dignity. You... are the greatest of those crimes.”

Swift gasped and she half rose, but I glared her back into a sitting position. Tourniquet let out a faint, mechanical whine and the wires on her back drew taut. Before she could lift into the darkness, I took her in my hooves and pulled her to me. She tried, feebly, to push away but I held her fast until she slumped, brokenly, against my breast.

I patted her fiber-optic mane as her shoulders began to heave. She couldn’t weep. Weeping is for things with eyes. I wished she could. I would have given damn near anything for that little girl to be able to weep as I told her cruel truths. There was nothing for it. I couldn’t lie to her after seeing what these monsters had done.

In what I hoped was a soothing tone, I lowered my muzzle to her ear. “I’m going to take care of you.”

Tourniquet edged back a little so she could see my face. Her cheeks were dry, but I had the feeling if she could have, they’d have been drenched with tears.

“Why?” she whispered.

“Because I think you’ve suffered enough. I think you’ve been lied to enough. It’s time you know the truth,” I replied, pulling my coat around to form a bit of a pillow. “There are certainly a number of ponies in the city - good ponies - who will want to meet you. This isn’t the end for you, Tourniquet. You’re going to get to have a life, if it’s the last thing I do. Maybe, one day, somepony can arrange for your mother to see you. We might be able to repair you, too.”

Tourniquet’s lip quivered, then she shook her head and got up, trotting in nervous little circles. “I can’t help or they’ll hurt my Mom…”

“If we’re successful here, they’ll have no reason to hurt your mother. Your mother will be the least of their worries.” I grinned, hoping my eyes reflected sincerity. “We’re going to bring Celestia’s fire down on them.”

“How? Miss Gypsy says the whole city is corrupt and nopony can do anything about-”

“Wait... Gypsy? The radio pony?” I interrupted.

Tourniquet gave me a curious squint. “You know her?”

“Yes... I mean, I know about her. She hosts an underground talk show. What I want to know is how you know about her.”

The girl pulled on her mane some, self-consciously. “Miss Gypsy talks to me sometimes. After I woke up, sometimes I could hear her. She’ll say stuff now and then.”

Taxi came up and pushed aside a couple of building blocks to make herself a place to sit. “You’re saying... you can hear her broadcast here?”

Tourniquet wiped at her eyes with both hooves, then seemed to remember there was no need. She appeared to be quite happy for the subject change. “No... I mean, not right now. I hear her sometimes. She’s out there, talking to ponies. I haven’t heard her in forever, though.”

Limerence, Taxi and I shared a silent, visual conversation while Swift scooted up beside Tourniquet and draped a comforting wing across her.

“We’re... in a magical disruption zone because of all the mining,” I murmured, “No long distance broadcasts could reach this place.”

Tourniquet put the tip of her hoof in her mouth and chewed on it slightly. “I know. I don’t know how, but I hear her. My broadcaster is broken, or I’d talk to her. I wish I could talk to her. I don’t know anything about what’s going on outside, anymore.”

“Detective, I think this may be a mystery for another time. We need information on what is going on upstairs and downstairs,” Limerence said, matter-of-factly.

“Right, sorry.” I turned back to the robotic filly, holding out my hoof. Without thinking, she took it and stepped closer, settling on her haunches. “Okay, honey, we’re going to handle Skylark. After tonight, I’ll put her in a hole so deep the sun won’t ever find her. Your mom will be safe. You have my promise. On my life. Got me?”

Princess help me, if I was lying to her. I didn’t know if I could promise such a thing. I hoped I could. At the very least, I knew I was committing to seeing Skylark arrested.

I let my eyes drift towards the seven nameless, grey ponies the head of the Lunar Passage had strung up from the ribs of a dead dragon.

Shutting my eyes, I thought in the direction of my artificial heart, ‘If I fail this child... you better stop beating and just let me go. I’m not worth a damn if I can’t keep this promise.’ I don’t know if Gale heard me. I didn’t know if he’d listen, either way.

“I’ve... I’ve got you, Mister Detective,” Tourniquet replied, at last. A tiny, genuine smile flowered on her lips and she threw her legs around my neck, hugging me with all the ferocity the little girl could muster.

“I’m working for some of the smartest ponies in the whole country here, so I want you to keep your chin up while we do this. Whatever happens, nopony is going to forget you down here again. Clear? I won’t let that happen.”

“How, though?” Swift asked, giving me a little poke with her hooftip. “It’s not like we can tell anypony she’s down here until we’re done with all of this craziness..."

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, kid. The Don or somepony else-”

There was a little rustle in my mane. The ladybug, who I’d almost forgotten was there, buzzed out of my fur and landed on Tourniquet’s nose. She blinked at it, then giggled and shook her muzzle back and forth until it took wing.

“What is that?!” Tourniquet asked, watching the little creature with a certain amount of curiosity.

“That... is a nosey little insect who doesn’t know what constitutes important information,” I grumbled, then lifted my hoof for the bug to land on, “Couldn’t you bunch have warned me about running into Skylark upstairs?”

The ladybug had the grace to look abashed, scratching the back of what constituted it’s head with one claw and glancing to one side.

“What do you want?” I sighed. “We’re still going to need scouting information if we’re going to leave the upstairs in any sort of reasonable timeframe.”

Waving its tiny legs at the filly, then at me, the ladybug lifted off and settled atop Tourniquet’s head.

“You... want to stay here?”

The creature wiggled its proboscis in a way I took to mean ‘affirmative’, then zipped right up onto my nose.

A burst of static flashed behind my eyes, and the world went dark.

****

I didn’t recognize Queenie’s new hotel room. It was a bit nicer than the old one, with a bigger bed and a decent sized TV. I thought I’d slept, or at least passed out, in every hotel in Detrot, but then, I hadn’t done stake-out work in months, so a few new ones had probably opened, shut, exploded, or been sucked into eldritch dominions. That’s how life is in the hotel industry, or so I’m told.

Queenie itself was sprawled on the flowery bedspread, its wings open, and a dozen or so ladybugs were giving it what I thought was probably some kind of massage.

“Huh... it’s good to be the queen,” I thought.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes it is, Detective Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled!” The giant Essy lifted its head to look at the spot where my awareness floated, which was somewhere near the ceiling. “It is most wonderful. Now then, you have discovered something terribly interesting!”

“You’re talking about Tourniquet? Incidentally, where were you? Why didn’t you let us know about Skylark coming down?”

Queenie let out a noise I took for an embarrassed sigh. “The upper floors are sealed with air-tight doors! Stupid awful ones that we couldn’t sneak through. We had to wait for ponies to go through them. This building is super-de-maximally obtuse!”

“Aaand the first ponies through were Skylark and her cronies… Right. Got it.”

Queenie’s mandibles twitched as it rolled over onto its stomach. “Now... to busy-business! That sweet little puppet child! Do you know how especially fantastical she is? Her body is that entire building!”

“Yeah, I'm aware of that. Why are you interested? It's not like she's a jealous lover or a continuous running gunfight.”

“Oh, Detective, Detective! You do not understand! She is magnificently brilliant! A sentient construct like no other! She is a diamond, shining in darkness!” Queenie’s compound eyes swirled with a rainbow of colors as it flitted off the bed to perch on the nearest chair, picking up a cup and saucer from a silver tray somepony had laid out. It took a quick slurp of something I suspected was a good deal stronger than tea, then set the cup aside. “We wish to assure ourselves of her well-being.”

“Wait...are you saying you feel for this sweet thing?”

Queenie seemed to hunch forward a little, its wings clamping down on its carapace protectively.

I don’t usually pick up on whatever the ladybug collective has for emotions, but I was getting a definite sensation that there was something they weren’t telling me. For a species that thrives on spreading secrets around, it was a strange feeling.

“Queenie, you want my help with her, you’re going to have to be straight with me.”

The over-sized insect crawled off the fancy chair, back onto the bed. Reaching for the remote, it flicked on the television, straight to the middle of a soap opera. The volume stayed low, however, so I waited for an answer.

“We don’t want to see her be alone,” Queenie replied, finally, “Alone is awfully lonely.”

“You make it sound like you’re the one who’s lonely there.”

Flopping over onto its stomach, the Essy poked at the side of the bed until it found the vibrate function on the side of the mattress.

“We are,” it answered.

I glanced -- although ‘glance’ is the wrong word, since I didn’t have anything resembling eyes while tapped into the collective -- around the posh room at the swarms of ladybugs zipping to and fro, toying with the kitchenette taps and huddled in front of the television.

“Maybe you and I have different definitions of ‘lonely’.”

Queenie shook itself and eased up against the headboard, gathering its legs against its stomach. The buzzing tones of its speech were very subdued. Almost sad.

“There are none like us, Detective. None at all. You see many, but we are all... one. There are none... but her. She can live in her hole, down in the darkly dark. She can sleep, alone, and dead until everything she knows or understands is dust...or we can show her that whole big world out there! We would give her freedom. Free, like we are free. Free and away and seeing all the things there are to see!”

I wanted some hooves so I could smack myself in the face.

“So... stay with the girl, then. What necessitated a trip into the collective?” I asked.

“Our payment has changed,” the insect answered.

“Your…payment? We’re paying you, outside of letting you watch us get shot at?” I commented.

The creature ignored that and continued, “You intend to be emptying the cells of the Super-de-duper-Maximum!”

“That’s... right?” I replied.

“We do not wish the puppet girl to turn off. You will not empty them entirely.”

“Excuse me?!”

There’s no way to shout inside the collective, but the shrill buzzing of the insects darting around the room intensified as though I had. Even Queenie seemed to wince, its jaws drawing in under it’s head.

“Detective, you need us. We need the puppet girl, most lovely. This is not an equitable discussion of terms. Do this, and you have us until the madness is seen through. Do not, and you do not have us.”

It was a simple statement of intent, but it left me with a deeply inconvenient conundrum. Queenie was right. Painfully, abjectly, irritatingly right. I’d no good way of escaping Supermax without some functional knowledge of the interior, and the movements of our enemies. Beyond that, I’d no idea what our future might bring and having the collective on my side was damnably useful. Sure, I could ask Tourniquet for help, but who knew if she would?

I also didn’t know if I had it in me to put the girl back to sleep, knowing I might not be able to keep my promise to her for a long, long time. A whole dragon just to get the place operating? Right, because I have plenty of those on hoof.

Then, if I let this all go public, there would be the inevitable fight with the Essy office over letting her keep her various abilities, many of which were no doubt extremely dangerous in the wrong hooves. Then there was likely to be the monstrous fallout when the Princesses found out what Saussurea had actually done.

If I shut her down, it was far more likely, even if I could bring her back online, that somepony would think it a much better idea that she stayed a broken, comatose memory of the Crusades, hidden safely away in the bottom of an abandoned building.

Oh, for a drink. A beer. A puddle of vodka piss on the side of the road. Anything.

“You sure you don’t want me to see if I can get Princess Luna to make a cameo appearance on that silly show you watch as the father of Rachel’s egg?” I growled.

“Alas, alas, as much fun as that would be, Rachel’s egg turned out to be Gerrard’s. He scrambled it and served it to her for breakfast before the changelings got him. Although it could all be a dream memory concocted by Timothy to get the truth about Antelia’s marriage to the Archduke Friendmont. They’re going to-”

“Lemme out! Now!”

The hotel room faded to black.

****

“-Celestia’s fiery backside crapping heavenly merciful crap…”

I came out of the collective mid-tirade. My companions were looking at me worriedly, with Swift and Tourniquet standing side-by-side over me while Limerence checked over his crossbow. Taxi was still poking around the dragon. As I awoke, they all turned their attention in my direction.

Pulling myself to my hooves, I swatted the ladybug that was still on my nose into mid-air. It righted itself, then zipped over to Tourniquet and curled up on her shoulder.

“Alright. How long was I out?”

“About five minutes, Sir,” Swift answered. “Are you okay?”

“Right! Well then, we have a fresh... wrinkle. Nothing too serious, but we can’t call Jade in on this. Or Celestia and Luna. We have to handle Skylark ourselves. Nothing new there,” I explained, waving a hoof at Tourniquet. “You’ve made a new friend, honey.”

Swift shot to her hooves. “Wait! What?! Seriously?! Sir, what’s going on?”

“The long and short of it? Our... equipment... is rebelling. Queenie wants Tourniquet left on. No clearing the cells entirely or we’re out one extremely useful collective of surveillance insects.”

“A... a new friend?” Tourniquet asked, uncertainly, plucking the insect from her shoulder and holding it at leg’s length. It twirled on her hoof, then flitted up between her eyes and gave her a light bump with its forehead.

“Believe me, you may regret their interest at some point, but yes. I think it’s time for you to explain to my very intelligent and technologically literate friend here-” I held my hoof out towards Limerence. “-how your power system works and exactly how Skylark and her creatures have ‘broken’ you.”

Tourniquet perked up. “Oooh! I never got to tell anypony about my powers! I mean... ever! I mean, except Miss Skylark and Miss Geranium, but they’re always busy and don’t want to talk too much. Can we have a tea-party?”

Limerence stowed his crossbow across his back and checked his watch. “I wish we knew just how much time is available to us before Miss Skylark deems Cerise ‘ready’ for whatever this... ritual…is.”

A far-off look entered the little girl’s eyes and a burst of energy flowed up her sides. “I... I’ve been stalling the flow of magic so we’d have a little longer. The..uh... the humming upstairs is the cables in the walls creating a super-magical resonance from the diversion of power. When it stops, the…” Her lips twisted into a frown as she tried to find a word for something that obviously didn’t taste good, ”-the somepony up there is... I don’t really understand all of whatever they’re doing, but they’re ready. I’m supposed to send them a message when I get feedback. When I do, they’ll... um... that’s when they’ll come for her.”

“I take it you’re referring to arcane feedback? Is that not painful?” he asked.

“It would be, but my power sub-system is a composite matrix of thirty eight thirty a-volt-”

I tuned out the discussion before it could get too technical. I’ve long since discovered that technical conversations are most likely to lead to somepony getting electrocuted if you pay too much attention. Well, more accurately, if I pay too much attention.

Taxi was still over by Mr. Girthranx and seemed to be messing about under his chin. Swift was watching her, and followed me as I started over in that direction.

“Sweets?” I asked.

My driver pulled her head back from the under the dragon and wiped a bit of something I didn’t want to identify off of her forehead. Beside me, Swift choked.

“What? Oh, hey, sorry. I didn’t see you’d woken up. What does Queenie want?”

“The usual; complicating something that should be simple. It wants Tourniquet kept online.”

Taxi frowned. “That’s... going to make our lives harder, yes. No Jade, then?”

“No Jade. No Celestia. No dumping Skylark and our evidence out front of the Castle, and making for the border - or we forgo the Ladybugs' help, and I know we're not at the bottom of this hole yet. I don’t even have an escape plan, and we need an alternative to clearing the cells.”

“Well... that’s your department,” she replied, ducking back beneath the dragon. She seemed to be fishing about inside a sizeable hole that’d been torn as the creature’s flesh dried and contracted. “Ah... aha! Here we go!”

“Ugh... what are you doing down there?”

She spat something at my hooves, then grabbed a paper towel from her bag and began wiping her braid out. She positively reeked of dead lizard, but most of what was actually on her body seemed like dried flakes and bits of skin.

“I wondered if what I picked up in my vision of Saussurea might have actually been accurate. Thankfully, the brain was pretty far gone and this had fallen down through part of the neck that connected directly to the brain pan.” Sliding back in, she pulled her flashlight out and flicked it off, then dumped it in her bags. “Incidentally, if you ever need to kill a dragon, there’s about a twelve inch hole around the base of the skull that’s pretty soft and doesn’t have any bone between you and vital things. Of course, you have to get under his chin, but-”

When my driver is in her ‘professional’ mode, she’s capable of things that make me cringe.

“No, no, thank you... I shan't be fighting any dragons so you can just stop there. That... might be the most morbid thing you’ve ever said, Sweets,” I said.

“Believe me, I’m not thrilled to be digging around in a dragon’s brain, but I think this is important,” she said, nudging the lump of... something that she’d left on the carpet.

I carefully picked it up off the carpet, turning it over in my hooves. No amount of washing was ever going to make them feel clean again after the sewer, so why not? Not for the first time, I was glad I wore shoes.

The object I held seemed to be a piece of rock or stone that’d been cut very finely. It didn’t shine or reflect much of the light, and the cutting seemed purely functional. The entire surface was scrawled with tiny runes, much too small for me to read.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think it’s how Saussurea controlled the dragons,” she answered. “She’d install one of these in their bodies, usually somewhere they couldn’t get it out. I believe it works like the prison uniforms or the robes of the Lunar Passage, although I’d be willing to bet it’s a much nastier piece of work.”

Turning to stone over, I found the little red moon on the underside. “Hmmm... alright, I can buy that theory. What’s it got to do with us?”

Taxi tapped the stone. “We’re inside Supermax and that-” she pointed at Tourniquet, “-is the control system. Maybe we can use this, somehow?”

I tugged at the fur on my chin, then pocketed the talisman. “If nothing else, it might help us get some information out of Skylark if she thinks we’ll force-feed her that stone. Alright, I think we have to-”

A loud siren sounded, sending Taxi and I scrambling for our weapons, then was abruptly cut off.

Tourniquet called out, “Detective! You hafta go now! They came for Miss Cerise and Miss Skylark wants to know why I didn’t call them when she was ready! I’m making excuses, but you need to get out of here! I left the door to the lower sub-basement open, but they’ll seal it once Miss Cerise is taken through!”

“Great flaming sun-butt…” I snarled, then charged over piles of toys and bits of Tourniquet’s long, lonely life, doing my best not to stumble over them. Swift took off and landed in front of the door, shoving it open just in time for me to dash through and careen off a piece of equipment. Taxi and Limerence were out a second later just as the secret panel began to slide shut.

I spared one last look back at Tourniquet. The light was already shrinking back to just the area immediately around her bed. She waved at us quickly, then the wires on her back tightened, pulling her off the floor into mid-air. She rose until she vanished into the dark and, with a great hiss, the hydraulics sealed the wall shut behind us.

“Pissing damn awful stupid... ugh!” I slammed my hoof on the back of one of the fake machines.

Swift tried to slow her breathing, putting her hoof to her breast. “Whew... Sir, we need to keep moving.”

“We’ve got no plan, kid. We can move all we like, but-”

“Detective... You need to go upstairs! Quick!” Tourniquet’s voice over the hidden speakers made me jump. “Take the hall on your left at the top of the steps. My sensors still aren’t working for some reason, but my cameras tell me there’s five ponies in Miss Cerise’s room, so if you move fast, you can get by them and into the sub-basement to High Security and the Mechanical Room. That’s at the other end. I’m afraid I can’t guide you after that. They’ve done something to my controls down below.”

I put my face against my knee, then shoved myself back from the machine. “Alright! We’re moving. Can you tell that insect you’ve got with you to send us a fresh ladybug so we can get some recon?”

“Will do! Please be safe!”

Taxi and Swift were already struggling back into their itchy robes, while Limerence just stared at his, forlornly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Such a waste of magic’s potential,” he sighed.

“I know. These could have done incredible things for pony society, but-”

“Oh, no. I simply meant the pitiful tail clearance. I felt, throughout our entire trip down here, as though I was getting a... mmm... what’s the colloquial term? A ‘wedgie’?”

I snorted and grabbed the robe, found the neck hole, and stuffed it down over his head. “We’ve got to move! Now, help me with mine.”

****

At the top of the stairs, I almost wet myself when the door out of Tourniquet’s chamber slid open of its own accord. Swift took point, her ears swiveling back and forth.

“Sir…” she whispered. “I hear somepony over there, I think.” She pointed down the hall in what I felt sure was a random direction.

“That’s Cerise’s cell,” said Taxi.

“Limerence, you think we can maybe extract Cerise from there, before she’s moved?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Based on the construc... er... Miss Tourniquet’s description, they’ve placed Cerise under a magical compulsion. Short of unweaving it or acquiring the magical frequencies it is keyed to, I doubt she can be moved without considerable difficulty so long as the spell is receiving power from Supermax. If nothing else, it will very probably alert our foes.”

“And she can’t just... shut off the power?” Swift asked.

“She is... aware of her own capacities in a strangely childlike fashion, but from what I gathered from her explanation, many of the construct’s abilities are being hobbled or routed through other systems which will set off alarms, though she seems unaware of how exactly that is being done. My best bet - and all this is merely untested hypothesis, bear in mind - is somepony has gained access to elements of her control system and re-wired them."

“So... we need to figure out what they’ve done. That means capturing Skylark or somepony near her,” I said, “I’m taking point, then. Don’t pull your gun unless somepony is looking like they’re going to pull theirs first.”

I looked right, then left, before following Tourniquet’s instructions and heading towards the sub-basement, doing my level best to look lost; it wasn’t far from the truth.

I still hoped we could avoid a gunfight. Extracting an enchanted girl from a room with five ponies wasn’t a thing I wanted to try, particularly if one of them was likely to be Skylark, and especially not without knowing exactly how many unicorns there might be. Sure, we might hit them with a stun grenade, but I wanted to be damned sure we wouldn’t be alerting the upstairs guards.

I felt the faint brush of air and the slight weight of a ladybug dropping onto my mane.

“Queenie,” I whispered to the tiny creature, “One buzz for yes, two buzzes for no. Can you help us talk to Tourniquet?”

I wondered for a moment just how the girl and the collective would interact, but the answer, when it came, was one buzz.

“Alright, excellent. Can she seal all the doors upstairs to keep anypony from getting down here?”

Another short wait, then two buzzes.

“Crap... okay…uh... what about the alarms? Can she keep the alarm from going up or cut off their communication system somehow?”

A longer pause.

One buzz.

“Excellent! Tell her to do that as best she can. We need as much time as she can buy us.”

Another buzz.

****

I wish I’d been paying attention to where I was going. I was largely just following Limerence’s occasional instructions, so it must be understood that, when I turned down what I thought was just another hallway, I didn’t expect to run head-first into somepony else.

Our foreheads cracked against one another, and we both went down in a tangle of robes and waving legs. I shoved the other pony away, and pulled myself upright, spitting out a wad of my own cloak.

The pony on the ground was still rubbing her forehead. Her hood flopped down over her face as she got to her hooves.

“Ugh... ow. I swear, Skylark, you are going to pay my hospital bills if I’ve got a concussion because of your dumb acolytes..." the other pony muttered. “Did you bunch at least get the girl, or did you get lost?”

That was a mare’s voice. In fact, it was a voice I’d heard very recently; the little blue mare following Skylark about when we ran into her in the cafeteria.

She pulled her hood out of her face and stared at me.

I stared back, gradually realizing my own hood was sitting on my back.

Her mouth fell open.

“D-D-Detective... H-hard B-boiled?!” she gasped, stumbling backward. Her horn started to glow.

In that close, she didn’t stand a chance.

I was on her faster than she could blink. Crashing onto the ground knocked the wind out of her and the light of whatever spell she’d been about to cast died instantly. Pinning her to the floor with my weight, I rested my hoof against the base of her horn, forcing her face to one side and making it clear what I’d be doing to her if she started flinging magic.

“Miss... Geranium?” I growled, softly.

Her eyes were as round as the moon.

“H-how do you know my name?” she squeaked.

“Good. I just wanted to be sure. I don’t think I need to threaten you, but just in case, I feel your horn warm up even a little, you’ll make a flimsy Earth pony. Do we understand one another?”

She gulped down a breath and tried to nod.

I looked around, searching for a nearby cell. There was an open one slightly down the hall, just passed the security door down into the sub-basement.

Limerence had his crossbow out and a bolt cocked. I indicated where exactly he should aim it, then pulled my hoof from Geranium’s horn. “Now, then. Here is how this is going to work. My friend here with the crossbow is going to point it at your spine. If he feels, for any reason, you’re not being cooperative enough, he’s going to take away your back legs. It probably won’t kill you, but you will have to forget any career aspirations that involve walking. Say, ‘Yes, Detective’.”

“Yes... D-detective,” she whimpered. Fear was rolling off of her in waves.

“Get up.”

I stepped back, letting her rise. It took her a minute to figure out how her hooves operated. That was good. I needed her scared.

She was half my height; only a little taller than Swift, and plain in that way that professional mares sometimes cultivate that’s meant to show they’ve no interest in the interest of stallions; it still, somehow, manages to be very interesting. Despite the name, her fur was baby-blue, topped with a tightly wound bun in pink so faint it was almost white.

I gestured to the nearby cell and her gaze followed my hoof. “We’re going in there and we’re going to have a quick conversation. How quickly you talk will determine how useful I think you are. How useful you are determines how long you live. Now move.”

Taxi stepped in beside Geranium, and Limerence moved up on her other side, boxing her in, on the off chance she thought pulling a runner was a good idea with the crossbow wedged firmly against her lower back.

“O-okay…”

I trotted over to the open cell and stepped inside as my driver and the librarian guided Skylark’s assistant into the room with us.

“Queenie? You still listening?” My mane buzzed. “Good. Could you see if we can shut cell... where are we?”

“Secure wing, bee-bee-thirty-six,” Limerence answered.

A few tense seconds later, the thick door began to slide closed.

“How... how are you doing that?” Geranium asked, dumbly, her eyes on the door as the bars slid into place.

I let out a derisive snort. “I hope you’re not stupid enough to think I’m going to tell you that, or this conversation is going to be very short.” I gave Taxi a quick head-jerk towards the door and she rose up on tip-toes, peering down the hall to make sure nopony was coming. Limerence, meanwhile, kept his crossbow aimed squarely at her forehead.

The girl backed up a couple of steps until her back legs bumped into the cot against the wall.

“I swear, I don’t know anything that’s going on!” she cried.

I smiled, mirthlessly at the cowering filly, “For your sake, that best not be true. I haven’t fed my partner here lately and she’s getting hungry.”

Swift flashed a puzzled look that morphed into understanding. She gave Geranium one of her big, happy-to-eat-you grins. It had the desired effect.

“Oh Celestia save me!” she shrieked, leaping backwards onto the cot. “I’m her lawyer! I’m Miss Skylark’s lawyer! I just handle the paperwork!”

“You knew I was bad news the second you laid eyes on me,” I reminded her. “You know my name. I’m betting you work for some very particular law-firm of my late acquaintance, too. I’m also betting you can tell me about seven dead ponies..."

Geranium raised her head a little, and underneath all that heaped up fear, I saw a hint of calculation. “I... I don’t know who you’re talking about. I just work for-”

“Umbra, Animus, and Armature,” I said, evenly.

Her ears fell against her head. “No... No, I mean... I... I... I just work for Miss-”

“Swift?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“Do you think a pony can still answer questions if you’ve eaten one of their legs?” I asked, casually.

Getting into the role, she picked her sharp canines with one toe. “You know, they probably can, Sir? If I take real small bites, I bet they could answer lots of questions."

Geranium threw herself off the bed at my hooves, blubbering incoherently, “Please, please, don’t let her eat me! I swear, I swear! I’ll tell you everything!”

I pulled my hoof away from her and stepped back, adjusting the robe more comfortably around my shoulders. “Good. You know, you’re the third pony in the last month I’ve threatened to feed to someone or something?” I chuckled, darkly. “If I ever managed to rejoin the Detrot Police force, I’ll have to write a manual on what an effective interrogation technique it is.”

The girl sagged on the floor, hiding her face in her forelegs. “Just... just please... get this over with…”

“You know Skylark murdered seven ponies?”

She mumbled something that I didn’t quite catch.

“I’m sorry, say again?”

“... yes…” she whimpered.

“Are you just fine with that?” I growled.

“I was... f-f-following orders.” She sniffed and wiped her muzzle on the back of one hoof.

“I’m sorry, I’ve heard that refrain from better ponies than you and it didn’t let them off the hook, either. You let that girl, Tourniquet, think her mother could come back to her one day. You let her keep thinking her chronometer was busted and kept her just happy enough so she wouldn’t try anything rash.”

“The... the construct?” Geranium’s eyes darted towards the door. “Why... why do you care about that thing?”

That was the wrong thing to say to me just then.

“You threatened that child with her mother’s life!” I snarled, shoving her backwards against the wall and pressing my hoof against her throat. “Now, you will tell me what Skylark is doing and how this moon-blasted lawfirm keeps sticking their noses into my life!”

“I... I’m just a messenger,” she answered, quivering from nose to tailtip. “I... I wasn’t lying. I barely... I barely know anything! The lawfirm will remove my memories as soon as I’m done here. They... they might already have. I don’t remember when I started working for Miss Skylark..."

“Yeah, but you know about the corpses. You know the magical construct is operating. I want to know what’s going on downstairs.”

“I... I don’t know. Oh Celestia, you’re going to kill me…” Geranium collapsed onto her side, moaning pathetically. I would have felt sorry for her, if I hadn’t spent the last half hour standing in a room with seven corpses that probably had her name on them. “I helped her and I don’t even know how! She made them take all that from me! All I know is... she does this... this ritual and these ponies turn grey except their hooves or their horns or whatever... and then she... she takes the bodies away. All those other ponies... they’re just here to watch…”

“What about her little crew down there? All the ponies going to the ritual?” I asked.

Geranium’s nose wrinkled. “I... I can’t tell you. You don’t understand. The lawfirm... they’re not just lawyers. I don’t know what they really are, but-”

“You’re singing a tune I’ve heard already, kiddo. I want actual information or I’ll just feel free to feed you to my friend here.”

It’s a real beautiful thing when a pony starts really thinking. Especially when they start thinking of ways to please you. Sometimes it’s romantic, sometimes it’s social, and sometimes it’s spurred on by fear of being devoured. No matter how it happens, it’s always nice.

“I... uh... oh mercy of the sky... I... the law-firm is all about keeping secrets. I didn’t even work for them until about six months ago. Then they bought my old firm and we had this company party, and they offered everypony big raises to stay on, but said if we did, we’d have to accept the memory alterations and something called the ‘Scry’. I had law-school bills to pay…”

“Wait, the Scry?” I asked. “Back up and go over that with me.”

““I... ugh... this was just supposed to be a six month job.” Geranium rubbed her eyes with both hooves. “Look, I don’t know what it is, exactly. It’s like, magic of some kind. It can find anypony, anywhere. You drink it or mix it into somepony’s drink and they can track you. It was in everypony’s punch at the company party.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The partners who refused memory alteration... I never saw them again.”

“Madame, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but you let Astral Skylark burn souls,” Limerence put in. “For all you know, you gave her the spell that let her do it. Celestia will look very poorly on ponies who do such things. Necromancy, if you’ll remember, still carries extremely long prison terms. You are also a liability to your employers, simply for having talked to us. If Skylark doesn’t use you for fuel for whatever mad pursuit she is on, your employers very likely will.”

The girl hid her face against the cot, drawing her robe around herself. “I... I don’t know. Running into you four is a death sentence. I know that much. Everypony who works for the law-firm was told to watch out for you! Unless I show up with him on a leash-” She jabbed her hoof at me. “-then they’re probably going to liquidate me. If I’m lucky, that just means I get to spend the rest of my life drooling in a mental hospital somewhere..."

“And what if you did? That... hmmm…” I tapped my chin, thinking. “We might bait them out-”

Geranium threw her hooves up. “You’ve no idea how these people operate, do you?!”

“You were just enlightening us.”

“They won’t do that stupid thing of showing up to interrogate the prisoner, personally! This isn’t a movie!” she shouted. I hoped the door was good and thick. “They’ll dump you in some industrial garage somewhere, pull your hooves off, and when whatever anonymous killer they’ve hired to skin you alive has everything they want to know, you’ll be burned with spellfire until there’s nothing left. They’ll never get their hooves or wings or whatever it is they have - they’ll never get themselves dirty! You’ll never see them!”

She flopped back on the cot, tossing her foreleg over her eyes.

Limerence hummed softly to himself, then tilted his head towards me. “Detective, we can’t kill this pony. Not that I think it likely that was your plan, but nor can we trust her. Nor can we keep her locked up in this room. If she is not at the ritual, Skylark will know.”

I felt a flicker of movement in my mane, then three insistent buzzes.

“Hold that thought!” I said, quickly, then dropped onto my stomach just as my vision fuzzed into darkness.

****

I came out of the Ladybug network hanging in the hallway with Cerise’s cell.

Five robed ponies were moving down the hall, with a sixth tethered behind them on a rope lead. Cerise was following, but her gait was badly uncoordinated, like she’d had a few too many to drink. Her horn was spitting sparks atop the thin, continuous glow that occasionally flashed in a way that somehow suggested an engine heading for over-heat.

Despite the slow pace, none of the ponies with her seemed inclined to rush her along. The one in the lead kept checking a watch, but made no move to press the girl for greater speed.

After just a moment, the view slid away.

****

My eyes popped open and I leapt up.

“We need to move. We’ve got maybe five minutes before the ponies with Cerise are here.”

Taxi cocked her chin in Geranium’s direction. “You said it. What are we doing with this one? It’s not like we can leave her here, and her best bet for walking out of this is to stab us in the back.”

Geranium cowered on the bed, her wide-eyes fixed on me as I considered our options. More likely, she thought I was deciding her fate.

She wasn’t a victim.

Not like those corpses in Tourniquet’s pit. Not like the poor girl that Reginald Bari had used for sex in exchange for drugs. Not like Ruby. She’d benefited from her servitude, and while it may not have been kind work, it was well paying.

What Geranium was was a potentially lethal millstone around our necks, and shooting her might have been a mercy, considering the grace her employers were likely to extend.

Still, I wasn’t there yet.

I couldn’t just kill somepony because they were in my way.

That didn’t mean I had to be nice.

Reaching into my pocket, I felt around for the rock that’d been in Girthranx’s head. Pulling it out of my pocket, I turned it over in my hooves until the side with the red moon was facing Geranium

“You know, I really wish I didn’t have to do this. It might surprise you to find out that I’m not a bad pony. In fact, it surprises me, now and then. Unfortunately, for you, I’m afraid that won’t mean you get to walk away unscathed.”

“W-what are you going to do?” she asked, swallowing.

“It’s not what I’m going to do. It’s what you’re going to do.” I held up the glyph covered stone. “You know what this is?”

She shook her head.

“It’s... well, it’s like the robes. I assume you’re aware of the secret spells woven into the robes of the Lunar Passage?”

A gradual nod, this time.

“This was how the Jailer of Supermax controlled dragons, back in the day. She’d stick these things in their brains and her girl... that sad, sweet little creature you brought back to life so you could power these beastly spells... she could make them dance. We’re working with the ‘construct’ as you call her.”

There was no mistaking the look of shame that crossed Geranium’s face, but nor was there any disguising her disgust at the mention of Tourniquet.

“You’re going to swallow this,” I stated, evenly. “I don’t know what it’ll do to your digestive tract, but I doubt it’ll be good. Still, it’s this and a trip to the hospital for a stomach pump or you die here, tonight, and those student loans you worked so hard to pay off will follow you into the afterlife.”

Geranium gulped, uncomfortably, still staring at the runed stone.

“Look, I can’t trust you, I can’t leave you here, and, believe it or not, I don't really want to kill you,” I added. “This is my solution. I don’t know precisely what Tourniquet can do to your body if you were to try something stupid with this rock in your gut, but I think it would be a whole lot less pleasant than that stomach pump. Now, do you want something to wash this down with?”

The mare licked her lips, nervously, then shut her eyes and took a couple of steps closer, opening her mouth. I gently placed the stone on her tongue and she took the canteen of water that Taxi proffered.

It took three attempts for her to get it down and she almost vomited on the third try, but with more than a little retching, she managed to swallow it.

I admit it.

I felt a bit guilty.

Unfortunately, showing guilt is a great way to get shot, arrested, or used by a pretty face.

Geranium was panting heavily by the time she managed to force the rock down. I helped her off the bed, then went to the door, which opened without being asked.

“If things get loud, you go find a place to hole up,” I murmured, stepping out into the hallway.

“Wait! What? Where are we going?” she asked, frantically.

“We’ve got a party to attend, sweetheart,” I replied, just as a group of six ponies rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway. “We’re your ‘plus four guests.'"

Act 2, Chapter 34: Temple of Lost Souls

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 34: Temple Of Lost Souls

The empathogenic substance known on the street as Beam, believe it or not, has its roots in environmental research.

The colorful runoff from the rainbow factories is one of Equestrian industry's toxic byproducts; while only mildly hazardous to actual health, long term exposure or direct contact tends to garishly and permanently recolor objects and ponies. Research in how to dispose of, process, or use the substance had been fruitless for a time; the breakthrough took the form of a lab director walking into the lab one day to discover that A) an explosion had taken place, covering the lab in a strange, crystallized powder, and B) sitting calmly amidst the dusted wreckage of the lab were a dozen scientists in a blissful pile with lab coats nowhere to be found, lazily licking one another.

Research into the resultant substance - officially 'beryllium methylrefractate', or BeM - began, and it was discovered that not only did it cause a pony to become temporarily empathic, but multiple users in close proximity tended to cause emotions to resonate between ponies; the end result in most trials being a happy drunken cuddle fog.

For a while, the properties were considered amazing and revolutionary, science riding the high of its new discovery. BeM was being considered for therapy to cure depression or antisocial behavior. Making ponies empathic would bring Equestria closer together!

It was a nice dream, but the problem is that BeM leads to partial or total loss of emotional control. The emotions of all nearby ponies can be overwhelming, especially resonant BeM users. Those affected act on impulse, lose inhibitions, and lose themselves in the feelings of nearby ponies. This is fine when the mood is calm and everypony is at least a little happy to begin with, but it was quickly and messily discovered that giving BeM to, or even near, poorly adjusted or severely upset ponies had negative, even dangerous effects. Whatever disharmony was present was often amplified, resulting in reactions from catatonic depression to psychotic breaks. One pony in trials telekinetically snatched a scalpel off a doctor and took it to her own guts, screaming that she had to "get it out;" it was later discovered that a patient in an adjacent room had just been shown pictures of his massive intestinal parasite.

By the time the substance was becoming considered worrisome, BeM and its manufacturing process had found its way out of the lab while science wasn't looking, and splashed into the rave scene as "Beam," the ultimate party drug. The final motion to actually ban it came after a scandal caused when a DJ decided to treat the five-hundred some guests at her dance party by putting hydrated Beam into the sprinkler system and setting it off - a party that just happened to be attended by the Princess of the Crystal Empire. The Princess was missing for three days; she was found in a dumpster, wearing naught but unidentified fluids and a gigantic smile, with neither a single piece of her regalia nor - she claimed - any memory of the last 72 hours. Members of the Canterlot Chargers hoofball team provided a somewhat more fleshed-out account: That the Princess of Love spent the first two days rutting everything she could get her hooves on, including twelve griffins, at least a third of a pet shop, a gathering of sports aficionados in town for a book signing, and an unknown number of mailboxes. She then proceeded to consume an entire doughnut shop and crawled into the dumpster to vomit.

Legislation reclassifying Beam as a controlled substance galloped swiftly afterwards, but it still circulates underground. While not a major cash cow for cartels like the Jewelers due to BeM's lack of addictive qualities, it nevertheless finds manufacture in either A) the prism-filled labs of middle-class ponies - mainly pegasi - looking to either cure their boredom or make a quick bit, or B) The Crystal Empire.

It is worth noting at this juncture that not everyone took poorly to the scandal; most notably, the Crystal Prince and Princess themselves seemed to look on it with good humor, even perhaps glee. The Princess would later privately describe the party and subsequent binge as 'a great time,' and the Prince was even apparently amused enough by the whole affair to invite the aforementioned rainmaking DJ - who had also played their wedding - to host the next Crystal Ball.

Indeed, in the Crystal Empire, Beam is regulated like alcohol, but remains essentially legal. Which is, perhaps, not so comparatively unreasonable; the entire Crystal Empire is already substantially linked in terms of mood and morale, an effect Beam only amplifies. However, Beam's legality in the far north severely hampers central Equestrian prohibition efforts, and the substance finds its way into the wrong hooves with unsurprising regularity.

-The Scholar

I almost forgot to throw my hood over my ears as the five cultists leading Cerise moved down the hallway towards us. Limerence quickly hid his crossbow and Taxi let the cannon sling down between her legs, covered by her robe. That done, we all stepped out into the hall with Geranium in the lead.

“Ahhh, the last group?” the leading mare said, giving a light tug to Cerise’s lead that brought her to a stop.

Geranium looked queasy, but quickly composed herself. Old survival mechanisms learned at the knee of her first law professor kicked in and she smiled, calmly, at the group of ponies.

“Of course. We really ought to consider some signs down here. Last month I found Counselor Grey Mane’s group in one of the bathrooms.”

The mare out front, a rose-red creature with crows-feet around her eyes, chuckled softly, casting a glance at us then returning her attention to Geranium. “We are prepared. I took my… heh… Sacrament… about a half hour ago-,” The rest of the mare’s group chuckled at that, for some reason. “-and I want to be downstairs before it kicks in. Can we proceed?”

Geranium held her hoof out and the mare leading Cerise turned to the steps behind her and started down, still maintaining that painfully slow pace. We started down behind, walking even slower to give them a bit of space ahead of us.

I moved over next to our involuntary guide as the rest of my group fell in behind us, our weapons carefully out of sight. Trotting forward slightly, I positioned myself so I could speak to her without the others overhearing.

“Why are we moving like snails?” I whispered.

“The police chief’s daughter that you’re so interested in is a walking bomb,” she replied, very softly. “I don’t know how I can square this with the firm.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, it wasn’t my idea to use the police chief’s daughter for one of these rituals, but you don’t say ‘no’ to Skylark. You should know, though, that you really wouldn’t want to bring her out of this trance right now unless it was someplace safe. She’s got a drug already in her system that's part of a cocktail they give her during the ritual... I don’t know what it does, but it’s bad.”

“What… exactly are these rituals?”

“Skylark loves a show, or didn’t you notice? It’s a big orgy, dummy- "

"-par for the moon-damned course-"

"-and if the ritual finishes, that girl will die mid-orgasm. If it doesn’t, she’ll probably explode or catch fire. I saw that happen to a girl a few months ago. She was fried, but not before she somehow managed to teleport out of here.” Geranium bobbed her horn towards the cowl of the nearest of the five with Cerise. I could see a slight glow from under it. “Those containment spells are keeping her from losing it until they’re ready.”

"Right, I’m… glad I didn’t try to pull her out of that cell earlier with my teeth…” I said with a shudder.

Geranium gave me an uncomprehending look, then shook her head. “Just keep moving. Miss Skylark is probably watching them move the filly on the internal camera system from the secondary control room.”

“Wait, there’s… another control room? One besides Tourniquet’s?”

“It’s hidden somewhere downstairs. Miss Skylark knows, but I...well, I don’t remember where. It’s probably one of the things I agreed to let them remove from my memory. Just please, try not to do stupid hero stuff, okay? I don’t want to die.”

Limerence let out a soft snort that could almost have been disguised as a clearing of the throat and said under his breath, “My dear, you could not have picked a poorer group of ponies to be involved with if you didn’t want to deal with stupid heroics. For that matter, nor could l.”

I playfully checked him with my hip and he gave me a dirty look. “Come on, Lim. What would you rather be spending an evening doing? Crochet?”

He pursed his lips and sucked a breath. “It is true that I am annoyed, somewhat frightened, and probably about to be killed… but I am not bored.”

There was a loud hiss of releasing gas as the door behind us began to swing shut and I fought down the urge to pick up my trigger bit and chew on it a little. Gum chewing is rampant amongst earth pony and pegasi cops for that precise reason.

I bit my lip instead, and leaned close to Geranium again. “Who are these ponies? They don’t strike me as Skylark’s usual bunch of nuts and bolts…”

“Bored socialites, mostly. I wasn’t joking about Counselor Grey Mane…”

“Wait. You mean City Counselor Grey Mane?” I had to fight to keep my voice low.

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

That put a fresh spin on things; a fresh, extremely worrying spin.

“What’s this ‘Sacrament’, then?”

“I… I don’t actually know. I don’t take it… but then, I don’t know much about drugs. That’s your department,” she murmured. “What I do know is tonight they’re disposing of that filly, so you or Jade must have done something to make the higher ups really mad.”

“You’re okay with them greasing this innocent girl?” I grunted.

“Of course not, but I’m not on your payroll,” Geranium bit back, still at a volume low enough that I wasn’t worried about being overheard. “I don’t know her. I don’t know you. If it comes down to her or me, I can’t stop them and they’ll kill me, too, if I try. My skin is on the line, I’ll do what I need to, but I’m leaving town the second this is all over. I hope they’ll just think I’m dead and won’t bother to check the Scry. At the very least, I hope they won’t think I’m worth coming after.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s wishful thinking, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me ‘sweetheart’, cop.”

I snickered and dropped back beside Taxi and Swift.

“Sir, what was that about?” Swift whispered.

“Just making friends,” I replied, quietly. “If things get loud, try not to jostle Cerise too much. She’s under layers of containment spells. I imagine they had her casting them on herself earlier, and they’re casting them now that we’re moving.”

“Then how are we supposed to get her out of here?” Taxi asked.

“I’m working on it.”

The stairs down into the sub-basement were a narrow, easily defensible spiral. I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out just how defensible, but if it came to it, we had a good place to retreat to and Plan B remained within what I considered a reasonable fighting distance.

Sooner than I’d have liked, the steps ended at a simple door that said on the placard, ‘Mechanical Room’.

The mare leading Cerise glanced over her shoulder at us.

“You go in first. Miss Skylark won’t want her big entrance ruined by ponies coming in the back rows,” she said.

Geranium hesitated just long enough to glance at me, then shrugged and pushed open the door.

The room beyond was best described as ‘muggy’. It reeked of sex, sweat, and overwhelming incense smoke. Low lighting kept the details a bit blurry, but I got the distinct impression of machines grinding and snarling overhead somewhere, just loud enough to cover our hoofsteps as the five of us filed in ahead.

As I brushed by Cerise, I heard the faint hum for just a second. I glanced at her face. Her horn was still giving off a solid over-glow, but she wasn’t mumbling to herself anymore. If anything, she looked almost blissful. Her lips were curved in a peaceful smile, but a steady stream of sweat ran down her cheeks, dripping off of her chin and splashing on the floor. It might have been tears.

Taxi gave me a light bump with her nose to keep me moving and I lurched forward, earning me a curious look from the mare holding the leash. The rest of the robed ponies were rendered anonymous under their hoods, but I could damn near feel the amused smirks on my back as I moved into the ritual chamber.

Through the little doorway, I felt like I’d trotted into another world.

Skylark’s interior decorator had been at work again, with a much higher budget and an order to indulge themselves.

I’d seen the inside of a few Churches of the Lunar Passage; not in a professional capacity, but on television and a few other places. I knew them as rather humble places like office buildings or empty school-houses. The sanctuaries tended to be little more than meeting rooms in repurposed buildings with podiums up front and maybe a picture of Luna’s cutie-mark somewhere on the door. It wasn’t difficult to get into one of the actual meetings and photography wasn’t forbidden. If anything Skylark had a special love of press attention, particularly in recent months and years as the proselytization drives multiplied.

I wondered if she would have quite such a liberal attitude towards photography in her Grand Temple.

That was the only way I could think of it.

It was definitely a mechanical room, although it was from the school of plumbing that says ‘plus size is best.' The gigantic, intricate piping dangling from the ceiling was hung with huge sheets of dark blue fabric that dropped almost to ear-height. Enormous, quietly burbling boilers lined the walls on either side and the steamy air was rich with perfumes, colognes, incense, and what I thought might be Zap smoke.

The space was big, first and foremost. Not Stella’s Lair, and not the Archivist’s Library, but big enough that I found myself immediately scoping it out for cover from snipers. Metal catwalks with stairs leading up them rose high above us, almost to the ceiling.

There were church pews lined up towards the back, but near the middle, a wide open space surrounded a gigantic, drop-cloth covered object of some kind. The ground was scattered with comfortable looking pillows and mingling ponies. It suggested more of a social gathering, less a holy function.

Somepony coughed at my side, and I jumped, raising my head a little to see a short-ish stallion with his hood thrown back standing beside the door holding a tray on one upturned hoof. On it, there was a heap of familiar pink and purple streaked pills.

“The Sacrament, brothers and sisters? Are you the last?” he asked.

I thought fast and replied, “We’re the last ones… err… brother. They’re bringing the-” I tried to think how to put this. I glanced out over the crowd, then decided to take a chance, “- the main event down now.”

“Excellent! Well, you’re late, so you should all take two or you won’t be ready when the time comes,” he said, gesturing with his tray.

Limerence saved me from awkwardly attempting to pick up the pills with my mouth or hooves by stepping up and levitating eight of the pills off of the tray, adding a quick, “Thank you, brother.”

Satisfied, the stallion drifted off towards the mingling herd around the cloth-covered object. I still couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. It had lots of funny angles, but the sparkly drop-cloth obscured all the details.

Deciding that obscurity was the better part of not getting shot at, I moved along the wall towards the boilers on one side. My friends followed, sliding between the pews and trying to look like we knew what we were doing. That’s tough to do when you’re maintaining a formation in hostile and unfamiliar territory.

“Anyone got eyes on Skylark?” I asked.

Geranium shrugged and settled on the pew, content to remain an unwilling participant while Taxi raised her head, scanning over the crowd. Swift tried to join us but, it was a lost cause, even after she put her hooves up on one of the pews and tried to stretch her neck out as far as it would go.

“She’s wearing a robe like Cerise, right?” Taxi asked.

“Probably, yeah,” I replied.

“I don’t see her.”

Limerence, meanwhile, was busy studying the Sacrament. He floated the pills up in front of his face then ducked below the level of the pew and split one open, spilling the powder out on his hoof.

“What is that stuff, Lim?” I asked.

“I am.. .not certain, Detective,” he answered, wafting the powder under his nose to see if it had a scent.

Taxi leaned over and lightly brushed her tongue over the colorful powder, then quickly spat and began furiously wiping at her muzzle with both hooves.

“Crap, crap, crap…” she cursed, fishing under her robe until she could reach her saddlebags, fighting with the strap on her gun as it tangled around the clasp.

“Sweets?! What is it?” I exclaimed, then quickly dropped my voice, though nopony towards the middle of the room seemed particularly interested or even to have noticed that we weren’t joining them.

Tearing open the flap on her bag, she pulled out a canteen of something and took a hefty pull, then swished it around her mouth and discretely spat it back in the bottle.

“Oh peace and light, I hope... ugh... Limerence, blow that stuff off before it soaks into your skin,” she ordered and the librarian tipped his hoof, then wiped the residue off on the cushioned pew. “I hope I was fast enough or this is going to be a wild night…”

“Taxi, come on… what is that stuff?”

She shook her head as though trying to clear it. “I… ooh boy. It’s Beam, Hardy. It’s pharmaceutical grade Beam. Purest I’ve ever touched, too. Celestia preserve me.”

Geranium pulled her robe a little tighter around herself and shivered, despite the warmth in the room.

“What did you expect?” she said, bitterly. “These ‘rituals’ are mostly an excuse for all of those ponies out there to have weird sex and take drugs. They get high and then the girl-”

“The girl is the source of group’s emotional condition. I see,” Limerence mused. “A side effect of having overloaded her body with magic is that she is likely to be very... suggistable. Volatile, but suggestable. With the right spells one might even put her in a state of… uncontrolled bliss.”

“I was going to say they have the ritual up there, then I go get my memories stripped of what actually happens on stage,” the lawyer said, snappily. “Then, we probably do this again next month. I don’t even know. I don’t remember most of the victims, if you’re hoping to make me testify or something-”

“Honeybunch, we are so far off book right now, I don’t think there will be any testifying going on within a mile of me except at my own trial,” I sighed. “We’re here to get the girl and a set of weapons-”

“Weapons?” Geranium’s muzzle seemed to have moved without her volition. She snapped her teeth shut so fast she almost took off the tip of her own tongue.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Yeeeah… you don’t know anything about that, do you? Funny looking things, stolen from a friend of ours?”

“I… uh… no, I mean-” she stammered, then scooted sideways on the bench, bumping into Taxi’s hoof which landed lightly on her shoulder, holding her in place. Anypony looking would think she was resting it there in a friendly sort of way, but that spot was right next to lots of essential blood vessels and nerves.

“For a lawyer, you’re a terrible liar,” my driver growled in her ear.

Geranium’s lips twitched as she tried to clam up again, but Taxi’s hoof began to gradually increase in pressure until she tried to pull away, then held up her forelegs in submission.

“Okay, okay… I… a few days ago Miss Skylark was very, very happy about something. It was odd, even for her. I’d… I’d apparently ‘delivered’ on some kind of promise and she bought me dinner at a fancy restaurant. I don’t remember what the promise was, but she showed me this strange box full of… I think they were guns. They were ‘payment’ for something. I remember, because they looked like guns, except with mirrors on top, and they didn’t have barrels. She called them… ’holy artifacts of Luna’.”

“You mean like that…” Swift said, pointing across the room.

I followed where she was indicating with my eyes and found a tall pony standing beside one of the boilers on the other side of the room, studying the room with the calm self-assurance of a body-guard. I couldn’t tell who he was there with, but there was no mistaking the rack beside him. Six strange looking black shapes were displayed side-by-side on a wire wall, each reflecting the light of the wall sconces on tiny panels on their tops.

Limerence’s ears fluttered slightly as he examined the pedestal. “Ahhh, good! It seems my father was right to trust you, Detective.”

“Well, yeah. Did you think I was doing this for fun?” I couldn’t keep the smugness out of my voice. “Anyway… Holy artifacts of Luna, huh?”

“They were designed by engineers working under Princess Luna during the war. Prototypes of something else. Our sources indicate each of them may even contain a tiny sliver of the Moon itself.”

“I see Skylark’s interest, then. Payment for something. Delivery of the fake armor, I bet. Probably other services rendered, too.” A prickle of worry tugged at my awareness and I shivered, involuntarily. “This leak at the Archivists must be pretty big if somepony is using stolen artifacts as payments...”

Limerence shook his head, looking very unsettled. “That... is a very upsetting notion. It suggests more than a simple information leak or a targeted attack. That sounds more like a total failure of our security measures.”

“And here, I thought the Don might just be being paranoid,” I mused.

Limerence hooked a hoof into his robe and threw his chest out, looking briefly like one of my professors at the academy. “Unfortunately, that is a thing for me to report to my father later on. Practical questions for now, and the most immediate one I see is ‘where are the rest of the Moonfire weapons?’ That is only half the set.”

I glanced at the doorway, thinking about our options. The shadow of a pony’s head seemed to be peeking through, as though waiting for something. “I’m fairly sure the ritual should be starting soon. Alright, spread out a bit. Targets of priority are the pony guarding those weapons and anypony else who seems to be armed.”

“Hardy…” Taxi said, softly. “If this ponies have all had Beam and we start shooting, this is going to turn into a massacre, either for us or for them...”

My ears laid back. “You’ve got your cannon. Try to put down as many as you can with sleeping-”

“I’m out of sleep gas. We used all of those at the School, remember? I’ve got a Shock Rock Magical Depletion round, a smoke, two Slug shells, and a half dozen standard kinetic shots...”

Before I could reply, Geranium tugged on my robe with her horn, then pointed towards the front near whatever was under the cloth, where there seemed to be some expectant motion going on. “They’re starting. I have to go or Skylark will want me on stage with her!”

“Which is where you’ll be,” I said, cooly.

“I can’t!” she squeaked.

I nodded in the direction of one of the boilers near the crowd. “If you see us move and bullets start to fly, you get behind that. It’s an industrial system, so it should absorb anything short of an anti-war-scooter shell, and we didn’t bring any of those with us tonight.”

Geranium’s knees were knocking together as she got to her hooves. I put a steadying hoof on her shoulder. “Look… If we’re successful down here, I will do everything in my power to make sure you walk away from this. Clear? You help, you walk away.”

“You… you can’t guarantee that…”

“I can guarantee your chances are better with me than with them. If we succeed, you live another day and maybe a whole lot more. If we fail, you might convince them you weren’t helping us… but I doubt it. That or you’ll be a vegetable sometime down the line when they decide they’re tired of paying to strip your memories. What’s it going to be?”

It took her a long time.

Most decisions like that, if you lay them in the stark terms of ‘life’ or ‘death’, would seem pretty easy, but I’m continually amazed at how many ponies will take the extra few seconds to think of ways of weaseling out. Granted, lawyers make their livings weaseling.

The murmuring from the crowd up front was getting louder and Taxi was curling her hoof into one of those ‘strike’ positions that I find are largely characterized by waking up sometime later wondering why my hooves are tingling. If she had to put Geranium down, we were going to have to start the party early. That was not a pleasant prospect.

I also didn’t know if Tourniquet could stop Geranium from doing something stupid. I didn’t even know if our friendly automaton was watching. Finding out too late that she wasn’t wouldn’t be a pleasant prospect, either.

The shaking in Geranium’s knees slowly stilled and she released her death grip on her robe.

“I… guess getting killed here tonight is nicer than any more nights spent tossing and turning, wondering what I was party to that I can’t even remember enough to feel guilty about…” she muttered, resignedly. “You can’t imagine what it’s like knowing you could do all this stuff… and you did… and it’s always the first time.”

And there was the guilt.

Big, stinking guilt.

Stupid, awful, Celestia-and-Luna-damn-me-straight-to-the-pit guilt.

“I can imagine some pretty awful things, sweetheart, but no, you’re right… I can’t imagine that. Go on. We’ll be watching. I’m hoping we can just take out the bodyguard and get close enough to get Skylark without this turning violent. If we manage to get a weapon on her, I doubt the rest of this bunch will fight.”

Geranium nodded and set off through the pews, her head held high.

I watched her go, then asked low enough that I didn’t think she’d hear, “Queenie, can Tourniquet control her or put her down if she does something to let them know we’re here? Two buzzes for yes, One for no.”

A long pause.

My mane wiggled a little.

Buzz, buzz.

I had another thought.

“That rock in her stomach was designed for a dragon. Will using it involve doing her permanent damage?”

Another pause.

Buzz, buzz.

Aaand, more guilt.

“Keep Tourniquet watching, but don’t shut Geranium off unless she acts against us. Clear?”

Buzz, buzz.

“Detective.” Limerence used his horn to point towards a spot off to the side of the central space, where two tapestries of Luna descending from the moon were hung overlapping one another to create a makeshift curtain.

There was motion there, then the torches all around the perimeter of the room dimmed to a flicker which was just enough to see by.

I didn’t have to signal my companions.

There was no more time for planning. I’d have liked an extra hour or two. Possibly a week. That wasn’t an option and we all knew it.

We started moving as one, spreading out between the pews. I had my eyes on the bodyguard beside the weapons and Swift seemed to be heading for one of the nearby staircases up towards the catwalks. I hoped she had the sense to walk softly on those metal walkways. We weren’t moving quickly, but anypony looking in our direction would probably have seen ‘intent’. None of our intended targets seemed the least bit interested, however. I picked out Geranium, trotting intently through the crowd towards the front.

I tried to get a headcount as I moved, but the shifting, identical robes made it difficult. There were also a couple of ponies like the stallion with the tray who might have been servants of some kind which confused the issue. I managed thirty, but that might have been high. If I were to include the characters outside, that made thirty five. Not good odds, but then, guns change all the dynamics in a fight; most ponies won’t charge a gun.

Of course, Beam also changes all the dynamics of a fight.

Beam will most definitely charge a gun.

I freed my trigger bit and pulled the robe back so I could get to it. The catwalks were a tempting target, but I needed to make sure that body-guard and the collection of weapons he guarded were out of play before I headed in that direction. There was also the caveat that I’d no idea how many unicorns and pegasi might be in attendance.

Surprisingly few unicorns go in for actual combat magic, but it’s best not to take chances. Even a foal can get access to a spell of magical stunning if their parents leave it lying around and some weather-masters can control lightning in spaces tight enough to surprise an unwary opponent.

The bodyguard wasn’t watching for me and every time I moved, I waited for him to be looking elsewhere. He was a big fella with dark fur and a horn I didn’t fancy being impaled on. He would know a little combat magic. Maybe nothing more complicated than some martial stuns and a fire spell, but enough to ruin my day if he wasn’t down quick. Thankfully, he seemed not to mind letting me get close.

I was less than a meter from him, when he finally noticed. He gave me a bored, professional smile as I surveyed his little collection.

“Good evening, brother. You might want to take your positions toward the front,” he said.

The ability to lie quickly in an interrogation or for a cover story can be a fantastic asset when you’re faced with the need to sound like you’re where you should be.

“I know. I simply wanted to see these,” I replied .”I was invited very recently and to see something that had Luna’s hoof in the design is rather special. Besides, the Sacrament hasn’t kicked in yet and I figure I won’t be in any condition to appreciate the artistry once it has.”

The bodyguard nodded and held his hoof out. “These are a new addition to the ritual, so look, but don’t touch until the ceremony has finished and it’s time for the disposal of the remnants.” I clenched my teeth at the polite way he said ‘disposal’, as though he wasn’t about to be party to a murder. What sort of ponies was I dealing with? “If it’s your first night, I imagine you will be invited to take part in that, of course. Welcome to the inner circle, brother.”

To cover the snarl I felt building in my throat, I leaned over the rack of Moon guns and gave them a cursory examination. They were all black as a moonless night and seemed made out of something besides metal; maybe ebony wood or finely cut obsidian. The mirror on the tops of each one was circular, just big enough to study my own face in. They seemed almost as though they’d been carved out of the darkness itself. Considering Luna’s maker’s mark on the grip, they might have been.

“I’d heard there were twelve of these. Seems a shame to break them up…” I commented, as though it was just a thought that’d come into my head.

As it turned out, my new friend might have been a big fella, but he too polite for his own good. My favorite kind of bodyguard, then; stupid and cooperative.

“Well, the rest are with trusted individuals who’ve earned a special place at the side of Princess Luna and Miss Skylark. I think all but one of them are here tonight, actually. You might join their number, if your contributions to the Church are deemed adequate.”

That was a sales pitch if I ever heard one.

I put on my best salespony grin and replied, “Then I’ll be certain to consider heavily what I should contribute if I find tonight interesting.”

He nodded, then went back to scanning the crowd. I backed up and leaned against the boiler at his side. I noticed Swift getting near to the catwalk door, but she had the sense to stop and wait there.

All at once, the lights went out entirely.

I heard a feminine squeak somewhere and prayed the house lights wouldn’t come back up on, say, somepony with a gun to Swift’s head.

I’m not a fan of waiting and I wished I’d thought to take Limerence’s glasses for this fight. Considering how prevalent a role wishes had played in our recent adventures, I was starting to get quite the long list of them.

I wished we’d had a better plan.

I wished I’d gotten more information from Tourniquet.

I wished I’d come in here with more ponies.

I really wished I’d thought to go to the bathroom when I had the chance.

Just as these wishes started to become bothersome -- particularly that last one -- a whispering rose up from the crowd.

A soft glow, faint enough that I thought for a moment it was just my imagination, had appeared in the black blanket of darkness. I blinked several times, trying to get an idea of what I was seeing. The image resolved until I could make out that it was, in fact, two glows. They were side by side, hanging out there. My perspective was ruined by the lack of points of reference, but I thought they were probably in the last place I’d seen the cloth covered figure.

Both opened to reveal two brilliantly turquoise orbs; orbs with black slits, like the eyes of a cat. Or a dragon.

I leaned slowly down and picked up my trigger-bit in my teeth, feeling around with my rear leg until I bumped into the brass boiler at my side. I began to back around the side, doing my level best to move silently. The machinery seemed muted there, but the gurgles and bubblings still managed to cover my hoofsteps. At least, I hoped that was the case.

A ring of torches burst to life, almost blinding me, but my eyes were drawn upwards to what they illuminated and I clenched my teeth around my bit.

In every child’s nightmares, there’s a creature that we all know exists. It’s back there in the darkness of history. Once a year, we get dressed up and hope it doesn’t come to get us, but the terror is still there, deep in our collective subconscious.
It has many names.

Regina Nox Aeterna.

The Endless Night.

The Queen of Dark Day.

Unfortunately, none of this has ever stopped a select stupid few from finding intense fascination with something that makes all the ponies with some common sense head for the hills. I’m all for iconoclasm and finding fresh ways to interpret old symbols, but there’s no questions about the symbolism with this particular character.

She was the jealous death of the world.

Nightmare Moon.

I only managed to stave off the urge to smack my own forehead by dint of having my trigger in my mouth.

Taxi, Swift, Limerence, and I were in a den of Nightmare Moon worshippers.

The news loved to play up the possibility of Nightmare Moon worship as something to scare the masses, but nopony ever really took it seriously. Granted, looking around at the crowd of eager financial backers mostly looking for a thrill and some public approval by their peers, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine the only pony taking what was going on in the Hole seriously was Astral Skylark herself.

That felt wrong, somehow. Skylark seemed too driven, too fanatical, to be the sort drawn to a social group of self-amusing toffs.

Then there was the acts involved.

Sure, I could see her killing somepony. Crazies do that sort of thing with some regularity.

Burning souls for magic while using the ritual’s side-effects as fuel for the sexual excesses of a group of rich twits on Beam to keep your operations funded was a whole other level. It wasn’t the act of a demented zealot. It was the act of a keen, considering mind.

It was the act of somepony much, much smarter than Astral Skylark.

The lights started to come back up, and I could pick up more details. I dropped my trigger and winced as I realized just how tightly I’d been holding it.

It wasn’t actually Nightmare Moon, of course. It was an especially detailed statue, maybe twice the size of Princess Celestia. Down below, a sort of flat table or altar made of something that looked pretty close to stone was laid out with various tools. Some of them looked devilishly sexual in nature, while a few were just strangely shaped knives.

A pair of candles on either end lit up, flickering quietly.

The eyes of the stature were just ordinary gemstones, lit from within, but the overall effect was excellent, if a bit kitschy.

The entire crowd sank onto one foreknee, including the bodyguard beside me. Swift, who’d managed to climb to the second floor of the catwalk without making too much noise, peering over the edge. She saw me and quickly saluted, then pointed down at the crowd. Limerence and Taxi were nowhere to be found, although I thought I saw a glimpse of yellow fur amongst the kneeling ponies.

Wait, I thought. She’s not pointing at the crowd...

Swift was pointing at the curtain beside the altar.

I dropped to one knee, just in time as the curtain burst open and Astral Skylark herself, high holy muckity-muck of the Church of the Lunar Passage, strode out with her dark-robe billowing out behind her. I kept my head down as she reached the altar, peering out from under the edge of my hood. Geranium was up there beside her, an elaborate chain with a crescent moon held in her telekinetic field. She raised it over Skylark’s head, settling it down across her chest.

In the barely useable light, Skylark’s midnight purple fur matched Nightmare Moon’s a little too closely to be coincidence. I wondered if she dyed it.

Pulling her hood back, she stepped up behind the altar, scooted forward, and raised herself up onto her rear hooves, holding her forelegs wide.

“Welcome, my sweet children of the longest night!”

Her voice seemed to swell and ring off the disguised piping, becoming an all-encompassing thing as it shook the room.

It must have been magical amplification, but her horn wasn’t glowing. I glanced to her left at Geranium, who had backed off to the side of the statue. Her horn was tucked under the edge of her hood, but I could just see the slight glitter of magic being cast.

“My children! Our dear Princess Luna, her true form broken by the oppressors nearly sixty years ago, has spoken in dream to me this night!”

Hushed whispers spread out through the crowd at that.

Skylark shook one hoof in the air, and even I felt a brief thrill. She was a very charismatic pony, particularly for an ex-thief.

“She spoke to me in dream... and I heard her mighty voice! Princess Luna, the shell she is forced to wear, hides her from the world. She cannot speak publicly, lest she be locked away in the moon again, but let me assure you... our night is coming! She is beautiful, and she will uplift us to be alongside her!”

A cheer rose up, and the ponies gathered at the front stomped their hooves raucously. A few of them were starting to bounce back and forth with the motion regular druggies call a ‘Beam Bob.' It’s some kind of neurological side-effect that makes you weave back and forth like a drunk pigeon.

Skylark went on, her horn flashing with excitement as she swept her forelegs out to encompass all of the gathered ponies.

“Listen, brothers and sisters! Listen close, and listen well! We are not alone! Many thousands will support us! Our riches will know no bounds in the kingdom our glorious mother of the night will bring! We will live in endless ecstasy, hidden away from the cruel light of judgement! The sun will bow, the day will end!”

The crowd was screaming as she finished, her words whipping them into a frenzy. The screaming had reached a crescendo, with a few of the mares fainting or swooning on their partners while the stallions beat their hooves against the floor, rearing and snorting like ponies possessed. A couple even threw themselves on the pillows, howling with glee.

Beam is a heck of a drug.

“Now!” Skylark’s voice brought silence to the room as everypony got back to their hooves and stood attentively, waiting. “We must give the Night a piece of our power, that she might be strong enough to rise against the solar beast and cast her down! We will shake the halls of Canterlot! We will rock the very foundations of Equestria!”

She thrust one toe at the back of the auditorium. The lights came up a little bit, and I took the brief respite to try to find my friends again. Swift had made it up to the top floor of the catwalks. She perched like a cat on the edge of the railing with her wings tucked in tight against her sides with her gun out and her robe piled on the floor beside her.

It was a frightfully exposed position if somepony had a standard firearm, but I doubted if anypony would actually be trying to peer in that direction. I didn’t especially want to test it, but if Limerence was right, the Moon Guns wouldn’t be terribly dangerous outside of that five meter maximum range.

Our librarian hadn’t shown himself since Skylark appeared and Taxi was probably still down in the crowd. What she thought she’d do down there with that cannon -- a patently mid-range weapon -- I didn’t want to speculate on, but knowing her, it was likely to be spectacular.

“Bring forth...the volunteer! The bride of Luna, who will give up mortal magics, for an immortal future!”

Mercy, that mare liked to hear herself talk.

I’d managed to work my way around the side of the boiler to the bodyguard’s back. He was relaxed, watching the proceedings with a slight slouch to his shoulders and one hoof crossed over the other. I needed to take him out, but that required another moment when everypony was looking elsewhere.

I shut my eyes, breathing slow, deep breaths, readying myself for the pounce.

The door at the back of the room slammed open, and four hooded ponies filed in, lining up on either side of the aisle between the pews. With well coordinated showmareship, they all dropped to both knees and put their heads on the carpet. A moment later, Cerise herself, the leash gone, marched forward with a peaceful smile on her face. Her eyes were shining with moisture, but she took each step deliberately, moving towards the altar of what must have looked like her own free will.

The crowd stepped back to make room, kneeling to pay their respects as she moved passed them. That creepy smile never wavered, nor did the constant glow from her horn.

“Come here, my child,” Skylark waved her towards the altar. “It is time for you to meet the Night Mother.”

Celestia save me, I wanted to put a bullet in that pony.

I wrenched my concentration back around to the task at hoof; handle the bodyguard, ignore the nutter. Having half the weapons out of the field would make our job miles easier, assuming nopony else thought to come armed.

All eyes were towards the front as Cerise stepped up to the altar. There was a tiny set of steps beside it and Skylark took her hoof, helping her up onto the platform. The audience was standing again, and I noticed a few of them gently rubbing their flanks against one another. The air was starting to reek of arousal barely covered by the hearty perfumes.

I yanked off my robe, throwing it over one leg as I edged closer to the bodyguard’s back. My target sniffed at the air, then started to turn, but Skylark’s voice brought him back around.

“My child, you will feel pleasures of the dark, tonight... before you give your power to our Queen! We will see to it that you know what awaits you when our Night Mother rises!”

I moved with purpose, tossing the robe around the bodyguard’s head, making sure a fair chunk of it tangled around his neck, blinding him completely. He let out a strangled sound that was muffled by the cloth as I caught the other end in my teeth and yanked him backwards behind the boiler. He stumbled, then went down in a heap, legs flailing helplessly as he tried to untangle himself enough to raise the alarm

I didn’t have time for finesse.

Finesse is for days when somepony isn’t about to sacrifice an innocent girl to a heathen demi-god.

Swinging around, I raised one rear hoof and brought it down on his head. I winced as his skull hit the floor. His legs stiffened, then he went limp.

I hoped to high heaven I hadn’t just killed him. I’d done my best to hold back, but earth ponies are not designed to ‘hold back’ where applications of strength are concerned.

Taking hold of his robe, I backed up as far as I could into the shadow, dragging him along with me. He was a heavy bastard, but the carpet made the job pretty easy. Once I had him behind the boiler, I pulled the hood off of his ears, quickly checking his pulse. It was steady.

I hadn’t caved in his head, thankfully, but he wasn’t going to win any beauty contests until they managed to rebuild his jaw. Fortunately, it didn’t look like it’d be lethal anytime soon, but he wasn’t likely to be waking up either. The number one rule where being a bodyguard is concerned is ‘pick your clients carefully’.

Hauling the robe back on and making sure it covered most of my body, I pulled the hood up and edged back out into his position beside the moon weapons, making certain nopony was looking as I leaned, casually, against the display. I studied the scene down at the altar. Cerise was sprawled on her back, her robe thrown open and her hooves spread out in a vulnerable and obscene fashion as Skylark gently stroked her cheek. Her touch began to creep lower and I quickly stepped back before I did something regrettable before we were quite ready.

The crowd, already hot with expectation, was starting to sway back and forth as they watched the proceedings. A few discreet hooves and noses were already finding their ways into various kinds of personal space. To add to the atmosphere, from somewhere a soft tune started to play. It was a snazzy little swing number; adding a little ambience to what was shaping up to be a night of ferocious debauchery, followed by a good ol’ fashioned equine sacrifice.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so bad about my unconscious friend behind the boiler.

I did my best to ignore what was going on on stage. The moaning was getting louder and harder to block out, but Cerise wasn’t in any pain yet. We had to wait until the right moment, or we’d end up with a slaughter on our hooves.

A little movement up near the roof brought my eyes up and I finally found Limerence. He was standing on one of the pipes attached to the ceiling, upside down, with his crossbow floating beside him. It was aimed squarely at Skylark.

Good thing, too. As I looked back, I found her standing over Cerise with a syringe levitating beside her. I didn’t really care what might be in that needle, but I suspected I already knew.

One last thing to do, then.

Be the cop.

It was another of those stupid, necessary things a pony does, else they can’t really call themselves on the side of good; you always give them a chance to surrender. Truthfully, I’d have been just as happy right then signaling Swift or Limerence to put a bullet in Skylark and call it a day, but that is not how the game works; particularly when prisoners are optional.

I took a few steps forward, away from the boiler, and pulled my hood back onto my neck, then freed my shotgun so it was nice and visible.

I cleared my throat loud enough that it drowned out the music, the lusty moaning, and the noise of the boilers. A few heads popped up from whatever activity they were engaged in. More than a few of those were damp or sticky. They quickly shook those of their friends who were still coherent enough to want to know who the funny stallion with the business end of his boomstick pointed at them might be.

Skylark was rather engaged, so it wasn’t until most of the noise had died away completely that she lifted her head and looked around for the source of the disturbance. Her eyes settled on me and I gave her a cocky grin.

I drew in a breath and shouted for the benefit of those in the back, “Good evening, ladies and gentlecolts!”

“Hard... Boiled?!” Astral Skylark hissed as her face settled into a look of furious surprise, but nopony was paying her a lick of attention. After-dinner speakers everywhere should take note that a shotgun aimed at your dome commands far more interest than politely tapping a glass with a teaspoon.

Ignoring her, I patted my sawn-off with the opposite hoof. “This is the police! We’re only here for Skylark, the girl, and these.” I waved towards the stack of moon weapons on the display beside the boiler. “Give up the rest of the guns, give up the girl, and give up the nutcase. You can all walk out of here!”

It was a great offer. Honestly, freedom for a crazy, an innocent, and a couple of blasters? Ponies should take offers like that if they’re available. I’d take that over two for one bagels. It’s simpler than having bullets dug out of your chest.

There was a silence as everypony considered their options. I was, of course, the only officer they could see and that didn’t help much, but the only weapon they could see was mine and that wasn’t helping them make up their minds, either.

Pitiful as it sounds, I hadn’t actually considered the possibility that Skylark would use her own people as meat shields.

“He’s no cop!” she snarled. “He’s working for the Archivists! He’s here to kill us all!”

The crowd shifted from hoof to hoof as fear replaced arousal and confusion. Worse, it was fear, amplified by Beam; a potent cocktail of every emotion in the room.

Then my whole world went wrong.

Without any warning whatsoever, a mare in the front row grew a sizeable knife in the middle of her chest. Slowly, she looked down at it and gently flicked the handle with her toe, as though brushing a bit of dinner off her cloak. Turning to her companion, a hefty stallion with wide, frightened eyes and dilated pupils, she pointed at the offending weapon like she was demanding to know if he were responsible.

I found myself just gawking right up until the poor filly let out an ear-piercing shriek and collapsed in a quickly expanding puddle of her own blood.

She’d just murdered somepony right in front of me. Astral Skylark butchered one of her own followers for a distraction and I was too shocked to turn my revolver on her. I couldn’t even spare a thought for exactly how Skylark had managed that particular trick, but knowing unicorns, it probably wasn’t that difficult.

A detached part of me was examining the move from a tactical perspective. She was looking to cause maximum panic and reflect it around the room through the Beam, and nothing short of releasing a horde of flesh eating parasprites could have topped that particular tactic. Simply killing me would have left her an open target to my companions. That or she might have thought I had body-armor on under the robe. Either way, I was glad she hadn’t checked.

The crowd scattered in all directions.

In such a confined space that was especially bad news, since a few of them were too intoxicated to do much more than stand in place and scream and others wouldn’t have noticed if they’d run over a boulder, much less one of their squishy friends.

Skylark was still on the altar, a bright green magical bubble wrapped around her and Cerise. I leveled my shotgun at it, then sighed and tried to pick a different target. Shield spells are a bastard to pound through and my shotgun was not the ideal weapon for it.

Several of the cultists had torn off their robes, freeing wings and horns. Those that were able took to the air, adding to the wild confusion of bodies fleeing nowhere in particular. Several had rushed up the stairwell, but there were screams and hooves beating on metal from up there, too; the security door was still sealed.

I backed against the wall, trying to point my weapon everywhere at once. Limerence was walking calmly down the wall opposite me to join Swift, who had her gun-bit in her teeth.

I heard a soft sound that reminded me of a car passing at high speed and felt a sudden warmth on my chest. I glanced down to find a circle of white light dancing over my stomach. It moved up to my face, momentarily blinding me before flicking off again.

Blinking quickly to try to get my vision back, I saw a thin, red mare standing out in the crowd, a moon-gun clutched in her jaws. Her mane was in one of those absurd, fru-fru styles popular in Canterlot and if it weren’t for the weapon, I’d have laughed.

The light flicked back on just as a stallion, his hood dangling in his eyes, charged between us.

I staggered in surprize as a thin spray of something landing on my face, barely keeping myself on my hooves. Reaching up, I wiped at my cheeks, then looked down at my hoof.

It came away red.

My eyes were drawn to the stallion as he slowed to a trot. He’d been fiddling with his hood with one leg, but now let his hoof drop to the floor, before slowly pitching onto his side as most of his torso came apart with a wet thump and a river of blood poured out of his chest.

Yanking my gaze back, I found the mare standing there in shock at what had happened. Then an arrow sprouted from her shoulder and she squealed like a mouse in a blender, flopping onto her side. The moon gun shot out of her teeth and rolled end over end into what was left of the dead stallion’s body. I doubted anypony was likely to be retrieving it.

Limerence was standing on the wall above Swift’s head, already loading another bolt into his crossbow.

I didn’t have much time for thought. I grabbed the tray with the remainder of my moon guns in my teeth and hauled it behind the boiler, tipping it on its side and shoving them one at a time underneath the enormous metal tube. Anypony wanting them was going to need some precise telekinesis and a clear head to avoid taking their own face off. We needed those things off the field before this turned into a massacre.

The screams were getting louder and I heard the distinctive sound of a Moon gun firing, followed by a howl of pain. I hoped that wasn’t one of my friends. A violent concussive burst sent me scrambling back for cover. Peering around the side, I saw Taxi standing in the middle of a number of slumped bodies, P.E.A.C.E. cannon pointed straight up in the air. The last of the fliers hit the ground beside her and she gave him a nonchalant kick in the head when he showed some signs he might be considering getting up at some point in the next month.

That set off a fresh round of riotous attempts to escape the enclosed space.

“Taxi! You’ve got Shock rounds! Hit the damn shield!” I shouted, pointing at Skylark, who was watching impassively from behind her barrier spell. If you can believe it, she’d gone back to her ‘activities’ with Cerise, a cool smirk spread across her features.

My driver shot me a nod and headed for cover so she could load another round into the cannon.

She didn’t see the stallion rear up behind her with a Moon gun levitating beside his head.

The report of Masamane almost deafened me. The magical gun hit the ground beside Taxi’s would-be killer. He stared down at it, curiously, then reached up and touched what was left of his horn. The shattered remains ended about a third of the way from the tip. Letting out a filly-ish yelp of pain, he bolted straight into the legs of a mare who was trying to make it to the door. Their heads collided with a satisfying ‘clunk’ and they both went down.

“Sorry!” Swift shouted, as she leapt from the balcony and swooped out into mid-air, catching a flying stallion with yet another of those beastly weapons in his teeth who was going after Limerence as the librarian tried to get off the wall and into a more covered position. She caught him in the chest with both front hooves, then grabbed his robe in her ferocious teeth, swung about, and sent him careening into the opposite wall.

Despite the casualties, there were still plenty of cultists to go around.

Taxi, meanwhile, had found a quiet position to reload. The P.E.A.C.E. thundered as steaming Slug-rounds spattered a half dozen rioting druggies, fixing them to the floor and wall near the altar.

Skylark, still safe behind her magical shield, raised her syringe.

It was empty.

She’d just injected Cerise with the soul sucking poison.

Rage started to build in my stomach as I turned my shotgun in that direction and yanked on the trigger. My whole body jerked backwards as the blast almost took my off my hooves, spattering the shield with hot lead. A couple of cracks formed, but Skylark just gave them an irritated look and they sealed over in an instant.

If I’d still been toting the Minotaur MK2 police issue, I might have unloaded six or seven rounds into it and brought the shield down, but a sawn-off is not the ideal weapon for reloading quickly. Taxi was being inconvenienced by another cultist who’d managed to puncture the boiler she’d been using for cover with another of the moon weapons, steaming himself into a mess of third degree burns and forcing her back as the space filled with a dense fog of superheated water.

We were running out of time and the number of dead and injured was getting uncomfortably high.

I’d known, truly, that there was no way we could get through this without killing, but I’d hoped we mightn’t see so many dead. Saving the girl meant stopping the ritual. I wished I’d known Skylark had a damn shield spell.

Glancing at the altar, I tried to pick out what Skylark was doing up there. Her lips were moving. I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the shouting of the crowd, but from the hoof waving and the glow from her horn, it seemed like it might be part of the spell.

She was continuing the damn ritual. I could hardly believe it.

“Limerence! Silence Skylark!” I snarled, shoving a tall stallion who was frozen in place, looking at things that only he could see as I fought my way toward the altar. I knew I was making myself a big target, but there was only one of the moon weapons still unaccounted for.

Limerence’s head appeared over the balcony and a faint glow encased the shield, then sank into it. A look of surprise crossed the high priestess’s face and she put a hoof on her throat. Taxi added to her distress by choosing that moment to unload a Shock round in her direction.

The shell arced through the air and impacted on the shield, bursting into a wild confusion of light that seemed to cling to the magical surface, spitting and hissing, throwing streamers of sparks in all directions. The shield began to crack along its length and Skylark took a few steps back, her shoulders bowing as though she held up a huge weight.

I shoved another catatonic pony out of his mind on Beam out of my way as I struggled towards the stage, stumbling over another unconscious body and almost pitching face first into the carpet. I was vaguely aware of Swift swooping low over my head to crash into a pony beside me who’d appeared out of the steamy fog quickly gathering on the ground. Limerence managed a shoulder shot on a stallion who was trying to buck me in the head.

My eyes were locked squarely on Skylark as she struggled to maintain her shield under the inexorable forces being exerted by the shell. I’ve no idea what’s actually in one of those shells; Taxi tried to explain it to me once, but I was lost after she brought up ‘messing with a unicorn’s internal feng shui’. The ultimate upshot that even the finest protective spells can only last so long under a blast from a Bloom Industries Shock Rock.

With a final heave, Skylark leapt backwards as the spell exploded inwards, shattering like an upturned wine-glass hit with a hammer. Shards of magic dissolved into the air. Before she could cast it again, I raised my revolver and fired a shot. I didn’t see if it hit her, because my vision was filled with a bright blue mane and the infuriated eyes of another cultist.

I reached out to push her aside. It shouldn't have been difficult; she was half my weight, if that…

...but it was a second too late when I noticed the moon weapon held in her teeth.

I brought the leg with my revolver on it up to shield my face.

Pure white light flashed, and my world exploded.

Act 2, Chapter 35: Up in Holy Smoke

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 35: Up in Holy Smoke

When other species first learn that nearly a third of the Equestrian populace is capable of using magic innately, some tend to envision powerful wizards tossing around massive fireballs, calling deadly lightning, and tearing the earth asunder with laser beams the width of Neighagra Falls. It then surprises them to learn how rare dedicated combat magic is in Equestria.

Not only is offensive magic disharmonious by nature, and thus politely discouraged, but it is unnecessary for most personal defense situations. Nearly all unicorns already have access to telekinesis, and telekinesis is one of the most versatile and useful personal defense spells around.

Consider how much energy would have to go towards creating a bolt of lightning from magic: A true tree-splitting bolt contains as many as 5 billion joules of power, which would be a monstrous amount of energy for even a competent caster to conjure. Now consider that even the unicorn next door can, by instinct, whack somepony over the head with any reasonably sized object in line of sight, and that a good swing with a baseball bat or a solid buck runs to about half a kilojoule, more if you're an earth pony. Either way, orders of magnitude more efficient.

Telekinesis is also exceedingly adaptable; with practice and exercise, a given unicorn could yank on sensitive anatomy with the force of a full-grown stallion, or lift her aggressor or aggressors harmlessly into the air like so many electrocuted marionettes. Even some of Equestria's best spellcasters tend to use kinetic force bolts as a workhorse spell for battlefield operations - and such bolts are really just telekinesis at high speed and without the object.

Of course, sometimes your opponents are too numerous, massive, or magically competent themselves to be deterred by hurled pointy objects, blunt instruments, or genital rearrangement, and not every caster is powerful enough to lift the motor vehicle that would be necessary to harm them in this manner. This is where other spells come into play.

But even when combat magic is the best tool for the job, most unicorns are limited to magic that reflects their Special Talents, and thus spells employed in conflict are often distractions, illusions, or just weaponized, overcharged versions of other day-to-day spells or tricks. During the Crusades, dragons had been brought down by entire tides of their own suddenly conjured facial hair, tangling their wings and causing them to plummet as giant fuzzy balls of moustache. A canyon approach was temporarily blocked by a colossal slammed wooden door, responsible for a few broken snouts. One largely male dragon squad was sent into retreat because they were forcibly equipped with cursed lingerie. Where the caster found the patterns for draconic lingerie is probably best left unknown - though the caster noted a spike in curious business propositions thereafter.

Only at the highest end of spellcasting, the level of archmages and alicorns, is the flashy, destructive arcanery of legend brought into the light of day.

--The Scholar

Having been shot dead before, I admit I expected something a little nastier than a breeze through my ear-fur. Sure, the last was a massive bullet, whereas the one more recently was a beam of magically charged light, but even with the huge round I’d needed a bit to die and a distant, fairly collected part of my brain was registering that I was in pain at the time.

My second experience was… surprisingly mellow.

The white light faded, and I let my hoof drop. I wasn’t in any discomfort, per se, aside a persistent pressure in my abdomen, but then if the moon gun had vaporized me and I was just a spirit I supposed that I’d gotten a pass on that.

Then, if the moon gun vaporized me, why do I still need to go to the bathroom? I asked myself.

That was a good question. A better one occurred to me a moment later.

Am… I going to need to pee forever?!

Nasty prospect, but I couldn’t see my surroundings just yet, so the act of taking stock of the afterlife was slower than I’d have liked.

My vision gradually cleared, and I found myself looking down at the body of the mare who’d shot me. She was laying on the carpeted floor, her head twisted at an unnatural angle and her face scorched beyond recognition. What was left of the moon gun lay beside it, shattered into shards like a piece of crystal hit with a hammer.

She was dead as a doornail.

Funny thing, that, I thought, absently. Maybe she hadn’t really shot me? No, of course not. I’d felt the rush of energy… Had the gun simply misfired?

I became slowly aware of several sets of eyes cautiously watching me. Swift and Limerence had regrouped up on the second floor, but were holding their fire as they peered over the side. Most of the rest of the cultists were huddled against the base of the statue of Nightmare Moon or clinging to the edges of the room.

I found myself, very suddenly, alone in the middle of an empty space. Aside from the whimpering of spaced out Beam-heads sprawled on the floor or hugging the walls, there was silence.

Patting my chest in a few places to check for holes, I peered up at Skylark who was still behind the altar with a puzzled expression on her face, then over at Taxi as she crouched behind a giant boiler. My driver scratched her head, then shrugged.

Why am I not dead? my body demanded.

Not a damn clue, my brain replied.

Errr...Can I have a tiny freak out now? my body asked.

I’d really appreciate if you didn’t, my brain answered.

Before a tremor could start in my back, I fought my muscles into a cooperative state and took a step in the direction of the altar. My forelegs were working, but my rear legs seemed to have had a bit of a disagreement, so my next step was a stumbling lurch in Skylark’s direction.

Her shimmering shield snapped into existence between us, but it was flickering weakly. I raised my shotgun and yanked on the trigger. I doubted my shotgun would actually penetrate the shield at that range, but it would bring it down so Limerence or Swift could put a nice, big compensatory hole in her. .

That was the plan.

My relationship with plans is well documented so, of course, nothing happened.

I tugged on the trigger again. My shotgun clicked, the hammer falling on empty chambers.

I’d forgotten to reload the damn thing.

I switched the grip in my teeth so it would pull on my revolver, but Skylark was already moving. A long knife, almost a sword, swung up in her telekinetic grasp from the tray of tools and sex toys beside the altar. I readied myself to play some ‘dodge’ with her, hoping she’d drop the shield long enough for one of my friends to blow her to kingdom come. Taxi was still reloading, but Shock Rockers Magic Depletion shells were the only thing in our arsenal that was likely to blow a hole in that barrier.

I expected Skylark to engage at range. Unicorns don’t do ‘close in’ and I was already ducking into a roll as she brought the blade down in a vicious sweep. A small, very peaceful smile graced her pinched lips as I realized her real target, and she realized I realized it, and I realized there was nothing I could do to stop the inevitable.

I watched, helpless, as the weapon slammed squarely into Cerise’s midsection. Whatever that blade was, it was sharp. It flashed in the light of the torches as it sank with a sickening thump into the girl’s belly and a spray of blood hit the inside of the shield.

Adrenaline surged through my veins, giving me a wonderfully protracted view as Astral Skylark stood over the girl who held the keys to my continued existence. She tore the blade from the body and flung it at the boiler where Taxi hid, sending my driver scrambling out of sight.

I could almost hear the clock my life was on ticking down.

There would be no escape from Jade.

There would be no escape from myself.

Cerise’s legs twitched as Skylark let her shield die and threw herself off the altar. One of Limerence’s crossbow bolts hit the ground directly behind her, but by the time he’d reloaded, she’d vanished into an alcove along the wall.

I couldn’t think to pursue her. What would have been the point?

My blood had turned to ice.

The world seemed muted; quieter and emptier.

My muzzle was dry as I limped a couple of steps closer to the altar.

The cultists surrounding the statue of Nightmare Moon were slowly gathering themselves into something resembling a protective formation. A stallion out front with an expensive mane-cut and frightened eyes sank down into a defensive posture, his horn sparking furtively.

Swift’s hooves thumped onto the carpet as she landed behind me, followed a moment later by Limerence, who stepped off the side of a boiler, keeping his crossbow leveled at the stallion out front.

Taxi stayed in her cover, but she had her cannon trained at the crowd. At that range, her terrible markspony-ship wouldn’t really matter much.

“C-clear off, cop,” the leading pony stammered, trying to re-gather his confidence. “You try to prosecute us, and this will all disappear. By tomorrow, nopony will know you were here.”

I wasn’t listening. One pompous prig with a puffed up sense of his own importance wasn’t worth my attention. His pupils were still unfocused and the drug was likely to make casting anything of substance very difficult.

My gaze was locked on Cerise.

I came to a stop, looking over the crowd at the girl’s corpse. That poor filly I’d never really known, killed for an escape plan by a psychopath. Well, Skylark might think escape was an option, but I was fairly confident that Queenie would know to tag her before she could get far.

That being the case, a tickle of fear had started just behind my left ear, then snuck down to my lower spine, before creeping right back up to my neck.

Cerise had a blade the size of my leg impaled through her guts. As a matter of fact, I could see some of her internal organs splayed out in the wound. It was a lethal strike on any mortal creature. My stomach churned, seeing her splayed out like that, but the fear of Iris Jade’s wrath was a distant thing.

A more immediate and altogether horrifying question had presented itself.

Is she… moving?

At first, I’d thought it was just my overactive, exhausted, and badly shocked imagination claiming her rear legs were twitching. I’d had enough hallucinations of late to think it was entirely possible my brain had finally cracked at the sight of another dead filly. No big deal, I thought. You can still function long enough to get to safety once you’ve lost your mind as long as you’re aware that’s what has happened.

Then the blood began to flow backwards.

The herd surrounding the statue was starting to twig to the fact that I wasn’t paying them any heed. A couple started to glance back towards the corpse on the altar and as they did, they started to back away, bumping into their slower compatriots towards the front.

I doubt anypony in their ranks would have slighted them the urge to retreat. Swift was already backing away. I bit down on my trigger until my teeth started to ache, forcing myself to take careful steps backward so I wouldn’t slip in the pools of blood soaking into the carpets. All the while, I kept my eyes locked on Cerise’s corpse.

I swallowed, watching as the puddle of spilt intestines on the altar started to creep back into Cerise’s stomach. They slithered over one another, gathering themselves back into the proper order as a silvery light began to spill from the hole in her belly.

Her horn ignited explosively, and the air around her seemed to charge and crackle with powerful energies just waiting for a target. The girl who’d died not three minutes ago right in front of me tensed her stomach and slowly raised her head.

What cultists remained at the base of the statue were quickly getting the idea that being near her was probably going to be excellent for their next of kin, but a poor decision for themselves. They started to back away.

Then Cerise opened her eyes; burning white, pupil-less eyes.

The little freak-out my body had been reserving for a later date was happening, one way or the other. I stumbled, tripping over the body of a dead or unconscious stallion, which sent me sprawling head over hooves. My ego might have quailed at the metaphor, but I was feeling the sort of terror a mouse feels when confronted with a whole heap of cats. Cats with switchblades.

Cerise didn’t so much stand as her body lifted into the air, settling her hooves under her.

Her gaze swept the crowd, who were scrambling to get as far from her as they could.

She opened her mouth and white light poured from her throat, along with an unearthly scream that seemed to shatter everything.

****

My awareness was flickering in and out like a badly focused movie projector.

I was conscious of somepony pulling at my coat. My ears were ringing and my collar was being tugged on. I wrestled with my eyelids until they started to respond, but it was a good ten seconds before I could haul them open.

I glanced up to see Taxi and Swift with my coat in their teeth and Limerence covering us, his crossbow pointed over my head at something I couldn’t see.

There was shrieking. Lots of shrieking. It was the kind of tail-wetting caterwauling that sounded like foals in a haunted house, mixed with some wet splattering noises.

I struggled until I could get my head up and was greeted with a vision of devastation.

Cerise was standing amid a heap of downed cultists, her horn spraying great spikes of fire as she yanked them apart with powerful spurts of telekinesis. I watched as a fat mare wearing expensive earrings was torn from her stallion’s side, howling like a banshee as she flew straight up to the ceiling and hit with a sickening thump. The body crashed to earth a moment later as her companion was lifted and tossed like a ragdoll into one of the boilers. He didn’t have enough time to shout before Cerise wrapped his spine around the piping like a piece of wet spaghetti. Another, slightly luckier pony flipped end over end before hitting one of the tapestries and getting tangled in it, while two others were simply torn apart, limb from limb, by the arcane clutches of the magic-crazed unicorn.

Cerise’s empty eyes were still luminescent, but her face was spread into a huge, manic grin as she drifted down the aisles, tearing the pews out of the ground one at a time as she moved in our direction.

She was floating.

I blinked a couple of times to verify my eyes were actually working. Everything had a dreamlike quality to it, but she was definitely floating. Her hooves were an inch off the ground.

The air around her horn was warped by the raw energies being channeled, but as she bore down on us, I still couldn’t make my legs work and my chest hurt like the dickens.

I tried to call out to my friends to run away and leave me to play dead, in the hopes she might leave me alone. I managed a strangled groan, but nothing more.

Limerence, somewhere above us, fired a crossbow bolt at Cerise, only for it to be swatted away like a fly in mid-air by a snap of telekinesis. Taxi dropped my collar long enough to hoist up the P.E.A.C.E. cannon, only to have it ripped out of her hooves and flung into the darkness near one of the boilers.

A meter away, Cerise stopped.

My ears were still buzzing, but as sound started to return I could hear the agonized moans of injured or stoned ponies coming from all directions.

I felt a powerful pull on my lower legs that grew until it encompassed my whole body. Swift yelped as she was flicked off with a swat of magic, spiraling into mid-air until she could get some air under her wings.

Much against my will, I rose into the air. I’d been tossed around by a unicorn before and it’s never nice, but this felt different. The weight bearing down on my chest felt like a vice, and for a moment, I was afraid she meant to simply crush the life out of me.

I wanted to flail or scream, but nothing was working. I might have called out to her, begged her to let us help, but my throat wouldn’t form the words. All I could do was hang there as she drew me closer and closer until I dangled mere inches from her face. She was so much like her mother, but there was no consciousness there. No sympathy or emotion.

But then there was recognition.

Something hanging around my neck lifted a few inches and I had to roll my eyes down to see what it was.

My badge.

She was studying my badge. It was bloody and scratched, but the silver shield with Detrot Police Department scrawled around the edge was still perfectly clear.

Her lips parted.

“...Momma?” she whispered.

The glow in her eyes went out as though somepony had pulled the plug. She stared at my badge with big, scared brown eyes, then up at me. The fierce pressure on my chest vanished.

My knees wouldn’t hold me, so I curled them under myself and sank to the carpet. Every inch of me was soaked in somebody’s vital fluids. I’d lost track of exactly whose, but I was quickly becoming convinced that no shower I could ever take would make me feel really clean again.

Cerise watched me for a few seconds before her eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped onto her side in an unconscious heap. Her legs twitched once, then she lay still. I worried she might actually be dead this time, until I saw the gentle rise and fall of her breast.

Oh, how I wanted to go ahead and pass out. Passing out would have been brilliant just then. As it was, my head bobbed as I tried to get back to my hooves. My knees were still malfunctioning, but they were moving and that was a definite improvement. I still felt weak as a kitten.

Thankfully, the cultists were too shell-shocked to consider escape, much less attempting to mount an attack. Most of them had found corners or holes to hide in, though a couple just stood there, glaze-eyed and gormless.

At the sound of hoofsteps nearby, I tried to muster the strength to pick up my trigger, but all I managed was to lay my head on the carpet. Then I felt a tiny nose pushing against my chest.

“S-sir. Sir, are you okay? Please be okay! Sir!” Swift whimpered, pressing her muzzle against my side.

I shook my head a little. Being a wreck would have to wait.

“I’m... I’m alright, kid,” I croaked, heaving my back legs into the air via whatever reserves I could muster. I couldn’t get the front ones up just yet, but Swift shoved her face under my barrel and helped pull me upright. Taxi stepped in and leant her shoulder so I didn’t pitch over. “Ugh... whew. What hit me?”

“Extremely powerful magical fields disrupted your prosthetic and probably significant parts of your nervous system,” Limerence explained, trotting out from behind me and over toward Cerise. He put his hoof on her neck, then her cheek before lowering his horn to hers. A single spark jumped between them and he sighed, then reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a small leather pouch. Unzipping it, he pulled out a needle and clear glass bottle with a sealed stopper.

“Whazzat?” I winced at the sound of my own voice and tried to clear my throat.

“Chlorpromazine hydrochloride with some antivenin, lithium, and an extract of poison joke,” he replied, pulling the cap off the needle and jamming it into the bottle. “I thought our targets might be using the zebra magics as a weapon of some sort and if one of us were to become impregnated with the compound, I considered it was best we had an option against it. A prepared pony is a pony who gets to live another day.”

Filling the syringe, he stuck it into Cerise’s side and depressed the plunger.

Her eyes shot open and she let out a pitiful little yelp, then her tongue lolled out and she fainted again.

“There we are.” He patted her on the head, gently. “Poor child. Every leyline in her body is burnt out.”

“Is that... permanent?” Taxi asked, worriedly.

“I am no doctor, but... hopefully not permanent,” He replied. “She’ll be unconscious for several hours, however, and unable to use magic for at least a few days or weeks, but she will be alive.”

“Good,” I grunted, trying to make myself move. That required more effort than I was capable of just then. “Ow... ugh. What about the spell?”

“Incomplete and broken, so far as I can tell. All of the magic she ingested has been expended on…” He glanced around at the corpses of the cultists littering the floor and trailed off, before adding quietly, “...so much death in one place…”

Shaking himself, he tried to regain his usual stoicism and find a fresh train of thought. “Detective, many zebra spells require words to be spoken. Pardon me for asking, but how did you know to interrupt the vocal component?”

“I didn’t,” I answered, picking up my badge off the carpet beside Cerise and slinging it around my neck. “I figured it might discombobulate her enough that she might stop, though.”

“A worthwhile tactic, I suppose... oh... oh my. ” He hesitated as his eyes found the body of a stallion with his face crushed by a pipe. He put a hoof to his muzzle, quickly, trotting into the darkness behind a boiler. I heard some painful gagging, followed by a splash. He returned a moment later with Taxi’s cannon levitating alongside him, wiping his muzzle with his kerchief. “Many pardons. I found this.”

Taxi pulled the cannon to herself, sinking onto her backside and hugging it with both forelegs. She just sat there for a few seconds, then took a deep breath and pulled the strap around her neck. “I was worried I’d lost it.”

“What? I’m dragged in front of a psycho unicorn who did all this and I don’t get a hug?” I quipped, though my heart wasn’t really in it.

Rolling her eyes, she ruffled my mane, then glanced at the blood on it before self-consciously wiping it on the carpet. “I’ll hug you later, okay? Once the job is done and I’m not...I’m not feeling like I’ll never be clean again as long as I live.”

I felt Swift’s wing extend over my shoulders and turned to look at my partner. Her eyes were streaked with tears and every couple of seconds she swallowed what might have been a sob or possibly a mouth full of bile.

“Sir... sir... was all this…necessary?” she asked, softly. “I tried not to kill anypony, but I didn’t see where all my bullets went. How do I know-”

I nodded towards Cerise. “She’ll think it was necessary when she’s sane enough to be in control of herself. Every pony who isn’t dead just so these perverts-” I snarled that word, and a mare who’d dragged herself from behind a leaking boiler where she’d been hidden slunk back out of sight. “-could get their rocks off… they will think it was necessary.”

My partner’s lip quivered, but she shut her eyes and leaned against me. Best thing a pony can do, really. You lean on your partner in dark times. You might be a coward, or weak, or frightened, but when the chips are down and you have to make the call, you can be strong for your partner.

“Why didn’t she just… die? Or burn or whatever? And how did it heal that wound?” Taxi asked, curiously, touching Cerise’s stomach. There wasn’t even a scar where the killing blow had landed..

Limerence clicked his tongue, looking contemplative. “Magic is the power of life, according to certain theoreticians. That may have made killing somepony so rife with it very difficult. Nopony is meant to contain that much, but Iris Jade is well known to be a powerful spellcaster. An extremely high tolerance may run in the family. It might also be some artifact of the chemical in her body, or possibly the protection spells she was casting earlier.”

“You know, you can just say ‘I don’t know’,” my driver grumbled.

“I'm… uncertain, but that doesn't mean I'm bereft of educated guesses!"

My breaths hurt, but not in a way that suggested broken bones. It was just exhaustion. Good, old fashioned tiredness.

Pulling open my coat, I pointed at my heart socket. “Is this thing blinking?”

Swift pulled her head back and looked at my chest. “Um...yes…”

“Limerence, can you give me a recharge?” I asked.

“I’m barely in command of my own levitation at the moment, I’m afraid,” he murmured.

“Then we need to handle Skylark quickly. Queenie, has she left the building?” I asked, tilting my head back.

One buzz came from my mane.

“Have we had any movement upstairs to suggest they know what’s happened?”

Two more buzzes.

“Good. Keep monitoring. If Skylark leaves, somehow, I want to know.”

I started limping towards the statue at the front of the room. Swift -- gutsy as any comic book character you care to name -- stayed beside me, letting me use her tiny frame as a crutch. We skirted another body, but couldn’t avoid the bloody smear where somepony had ended a short flight across the room.

Limerence kept his crossbow out, pointing it at any cultist who looked like they might decide to get brave. Most of the few who still alive were trying valiantly to climb under one another in different corners of the room.

“Sir, we... we can wait, right?” Swift asked. “I mean, she’ll have to come out eventually.”

“Skylark didn’t look like she was heading someplace to hide,” I replied.

Movement to one side of the statue brought my gaze up and I almost reached for my trigger before I realized who it was.

Geranium was nursing one foreleg, stumbling towards us on the other three from the far corner of the room. Her ears were pinned back as she surveyed the dead. Enough death in one place has a tendency to numb the mind a bit, since insanity is the only other healthy response. It’s probably a survival mechanism.

“D-detective?” she stammered, stepping over an unconscious mare whose forelegs were swelling in a frightening fashion. “Is... is it over?”

“I wish I could say it was, sweetheart. Skylark’s still here somewhere. What’s back there?” I pointed at the alcove I thought I’d seen the priestess vanish into.

“I... I don’t know. There’s a latch, but she never let me back there. That or... that or I don’t remember her letting me back there. It’s whatever they used to call ‘High Security’.”

Taxi scratched at her mane. “High Security is through the Mechanical Room?”

“It’s... yeah. I mean, I guess? I don’t know. Can I just... can I just leave now?” Geranium asked, plaintively.

“You leave now, and I can’t guarantee your safety. Besides, this floor is locked down,” I answered.

“Oh... Celestia save me…” she moaned. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I think you might want to have considered what Celestia thought before you got involved with a bunch of Nightmare Moon worshippers,” Taxi sniffed. Geranium scowled at her, but had no ready reply.

“We’re heading into High Security, either way. You can follow us and maybe help, or you can start tying up the Beam-heads,” I said as my driver dug a police issue box of restrictor rings and plastic hobbles out of her saddle-bag, tossing both at the lawyer’s hooves. I didn’t care to ask where Taxi had gotten actual police restrictors; those are tracked pretty tightly, despite being standard kit for somepony expecting to face unicorns.

“Y-you can’t seriously... expect me to do that-” she sputtered.

“What I expect is that our ‘friends’ here will start coming down from their highs here in the next hour, and they’re going to want to know why you had such a friendly conversation with us.” I stared meaningfully in the direction of a couple of still-very-whacked-out cultists who were watching us from behind a stack of broken pews. “It’s your choice whether or not they’re restrained when you try to explain yourself. Incidentally, same rules apply. Try to screw us or try to leave and our friend upstairs shuts you down.”

Her nose scrunched up and she, again, adopted that expression of a pony looking for any escape, any out, or any leverage they might use to save themselves, but finding nothing besides obedience to the cool logical genius that is Detective Hard Boiled. It’s a cute look on a mare, especially if she’s made my life complicated.

Geranium harumphed and snatched up the restrictor rings and hobbles with her horn. “You better hope I have enough, or I swear the next pony I tie up is you... and I will take great pleasure in taking you to the firm on that leash we discussed earlier!”

“I look forward to seeing you try. Now get to it. We’ll be back as soon as we have Skylark,” I said, then turned to Swift. “Kid, can you stay out here and help her?”

Swift reluctantly pulled away from my side and followed Geranium in the direction of a group of cultists who yelped and tried to hide under several objects much too small for them.

“Be careful, sir.”

“I’ll do my best,” I replied, cracking open my shotgun and ejecting the spent shells.

****

It turned out that ‘latch’ meant ‘complex magical lock’. Limerence took one look at the door tucked into the alcove behind the statue and shook his head.

Thankfully, ‘door’ just meant ‘door’, not ‘ridiculously over-engineered vault portal’ like it had upstairs. While the door itself did say ‘High Security’, it was another of those understated little plaques that tends to indicate something is simply hoping not to be noticed and the construction was just painted aluminum over wood. That might confound a pegasus or a unicorn, but it’s no match for a few solid blows with an earth pony’s rear hooves.

It still took Taxi and I five good strikes each to knock the damn thing off the hinges, but my driver’s back hooves finally sent it crashing into the hall behind. The lock spat sparks at us, then the gems inside it flickered out.

My driver and I stacked up on either side of the door, her with her cannon and me with the shotgun at the ready.

Limerence, standing to one side, rolled his eyes. “Detective, you’ve never had the pleasure of working with a unicorn before, have you?”

“Can’t say as I have, at least in tactical situations. It’s generally best not to let your opponents know who just knocked their door down, though,” I grumbled.

“Ahhh, well, we can be certain she knows now then, I suppose. Tactical situation aside, if you’ll allow me?”

His horn lit up and a tiny ball of light grew on the tip, then shot off down the hallway.

He hummed to himself for a minute, then nodded. “Excellent. This space is empty.”

“Wait...you had a surveillance spell this whole time?!” I snapped, testily.

“Errr...no, not really. It’s a rather complex sounding spell, for determining depths. It has the added benefit of highlighting most kinds of enchanted trap, but it does not lend itself to ‘steering’. Straight lines only, I’m afraid. Skylark is likely to have trapped her retreat, after all.”

Taxi poked her head down the unlit hall, then stepped out with her cannon upraised. Letting herself drop back to all fours, she took a couple of cautious steps in, then bent forward onto her stomach.

“Magical traps?” she called back.

“Yes, indeed,” Limerence said, with a certain amount of smugness.

“Would it detect a piece of razor-wire at neck height?”

“Erm…”

Taxi pulled a pair of robust looking scissors out of her pack and carefully snipped the wire. “Come on in. Move slowly along the walls and keep your heads low. If she’s set this up like most professional thieves, this was the trap for us to find. There will be at least two others.”

Limerence and I wedged ourselves in behind Taxi, moving at her back. Lim’s horn lit the hall a few meters ahead of us, but everything else was shrouded in darkness.

“Wait! Stop!” the librarian snapped.

My driver froze in her tracks.

“Look down. Nice and slow,” he murmured.

My driver’s eyes tilted down and she winced as she caught sight of the trip-wire snagged across the tip of her toe. She started to pull her hoof back, but Limerence barked, “No! Don’t move!”

“Why am I not moving?” she growled, under her breath.

“It’s wound spider-web. Very sticky. I haven’t seen such a thing in years, but...it’s attached to your hoof,” he explained, quietly getting down on his knees and tracing the glinting light of the string along the wall. “Favored trap of a group of Canterloatian artifact thieves. They were very good, back in the day. Very dead, now, but very good.”

Limerence licked his lips and made a soft ‘ah’ sound. His horn lit up and he carefully tugged the web off of Taxi’s hoof. “When the tension comes off, it will spring the trap. Back away...slowly.”

My driver took several very cautious steps away and let out a sigh of relief.

The the glow around Limerence’s horn vanished, leaving us in absolute darkness. A dozen somethings whistled by my nose, followed by a ‘twang’ as each one hit the wall and something else sprayed against my cheeks.

A torch flicked on and Taxi shone it around the walls, coming to a stop on a set of arrows buried in the wall where she’d been just moments before.

“Oooh, yikes," said Taxi. "That would have hurt. I was looking for arrow holes. Where’d they come from?”

Limerence pointed to the wall opposite. There were several tiny holes torn in the sheetrock. “I believe this hallway used to be a little bit bigger. Skylark installed drywall on either side and hid the launchers behind it. We’ll have to look for triggers, not for traps.”

We continued making our way carefully along the walls, inch by inch, with Taxi leading the way, shining her light on every surface. The end of the hallway was in sight when my driver turned the torch in that direction and there was a door off to one side, but a good fifteen meters of potentially trap-laden corridor stood between us and it.

It’s always the way with such things that you think you’re safe just as the final trap springs, so it was that we were less than a meter from the door when I heard a faint ‘click’.

I didn’t think. Thinking would have killed the lot of us.

I threw one leg around Limerence and grabbed Taxi’s tail in my teeth, yanking both of them backwards into a heap on the tiled floor.

The walls ahead and on both sides exploded inwards with an ear-shattering report as the drywall was destroyed by what felt like a grenade. Something grazed my neck and I heard Taxi let out a muffled yelp. Our flashlight flew out of her muzzle and the bulb popped as it hit the wall, leaving us once again in all-encompassing shadow.

Shadow and silence.

Then the cussing began.

“Arg, dammit, awful stupid stupid ahhh... ouch! Ouch! Ger’off me!”

Three hooves were planted firmly in my side and I flopped over, then scrambled backwards. “Sweets! Sweets, are you hurt?”

“Yes! Yes, I’m hurt, dammit! Ouch... ugh... I think... I think I’ve been shot,” she grunted, sounding more angry than pained.

Limerence’s horn flared and my eyes widened at the blood splashed across the tile. I followed the spray pattern up to my driver’s shoulder as she leaned against the wall, clutching one leg with the other.

Swift stuck her head into the hallway from the other end. “Sir! Sir, what was that?!”

“Taxi’s hurt, kid! Get me some bandages!” I shouted, crouching at my friend’s side and pressing one hoof to her shoulder, trying to stem the flow of blood.

“Oh shut up, Hardy,” she groaned, pushing me back. “It’s about half as bad as it looks. My fault. I stepped on a damn pressure plate. Ouch that smarts...”

My partner vanished for a minute, then returned with a whole roll of sterile gauze in her muzzle. She trotted into the hallway and dropped them into my waiting hooves, giving Taxi a worried look. I tore open the package with my teeth and reached for my driver’s foreleg.

She tugged it away and tried to stand, almost pitching onto her side again. Dropping back against the wall, she took a few deep breaths, then heaved herself up. “Oof... see? Not so bad.”

I responded by poking her in the knee, then throwing one foreleg under her chest as she predictably fell against me. “Yeah, not so bad. Sweets... we’re either doing this or you’re sidelined and you can go help Swift. No being Miss-Big-Britches.”

Taxi looked, for a moment, like she was going to fight me on the matter, then Limerence used his horn to pull the bandages away from me. “Magic is better suited to wrapping wounds. Allow me.”

Having never much cared for being fussed over, my driver was never going to take the treatment with good grace. She thrust her leg out and turned to face the wall.

Unrolling the bandage, the librarian hummed a jaunty tune as he examined the wound. “Buckshot. Lovely. We will need to take this to a professional healer, but it does look largely like a flesh wound. The shot is still inside, but we can remove that later. Detective, could you go make sure there aren’t any more surprises down there?”

“I want to see exactly what almost took our heads off, yeah,” I replied, then turned to my driver. “Sweets, I promise, if you’re a good patient I’ll buy you any sugary thing you want when we get out of here.”

Her eyes brightened a little. “Tiramisu from that place on Market Street with two scoops of chocolate cheesecake ice-cream covered in Mama Z’s Double-Death Super Fire hot-sauce?”

“You’re insane, but... yes.”

At that, my driver relaxed and raised her foreleg a little higher so Limerence could bandage it properly.

I realized Swift was still standing there behind me.

“Kid? What’s up?”

“Um... sorry, sir. Are you sure you-”

“Yes, kid. I promise, I’m fine.”

“Y-you’ve got some blood on your neck, sir. Miss Taxi didn’t bleed there…”

I put my hoof to my throat and felt the spot of dampness, but no wound. Not even a scratch.

“Probably a bullet grazed me. I’m okay. I promise.” I ruffled her hair with one hoof, then pointed back down the hall. “Go help the lawyer. Don’t kill her if you can avoid it.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Oh, and check on Cerise. Do not forget to slap a restrictor ring on her, too.”

“But Lim said-”

“After what she did to those cultists, do you want to find out he was wrong?”

“No, sir,” she sighed, turning back to the temple.

“Hey, kid?” I said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I know things went bad. We had no way of knowing just how bad they were going to go,” I said, reaching out and putting my hoof on her shoulder. “You did beautifully... and we’re all alive, including Cerise.”

Swift stared at me for a long moment, then covered my hoof with hers. “I... I was really scared you’d died again. It’s going to take more than a pat on the back to make that okay, Sir.”

“Believe me, if I ever sleep again, I expect it will be with lots of nightmares. I intend to live long enough to have them, though. Stella will pick up our bar tab and probably pay for a therapist, too. Now, go on and lets do what we have to do to get out of here alive so we can have those nightmares.”

My partner wiped her eyes with the back of her hoof and gave me a weak nod. “I hate that you’re right, Sir.”

“That makes two of us.”

****

The trap was a simple, but pretty effective; Three shotguns were wired up behind the drywall, locked in place with frames and attached to a pressure plate which had replaced one of the floor tiles. They’d left enormous holes and bits of sheetrock all over the corridor. Six inches closer and we’d have been turned into pony-frappe.

It seemed very Daring Do, but really just the sort of thing that any idiot with a bit of nasty imagination could come up with. It was also slightly out of character for a unicorn, which was probably why it had almost worked.

Magical traps are relatively easy to construct and can be tuned not to go off on their owners. They can also be laid out reasonably quickly. They are the choice of most spell slingers when you back them into a corner.

Well planned mechanical traps require more time and effort, as well as some knowledge of your retreat path. That Skylark had chosen this particular direction to retreat in -- which appeared to be a dead-end -- did not bode well. She’d thought she might be attacked one day, and built herself an escape route.

As I stood there examining the holes with one of our extra flashlights, I became aware of a very faint sensation like the one I’d felt upstairs when Tourniquet was still juicing up Cerise; a tiny buzz right around the front of my brain.

I played the light over the door at the end of the hall on the left side. It looked like solid metal, but there was no lock or handle I could see. There was just a little sign: ‘High Security, Authorized Personnel Only’.

A unicorn door, then. Knowing Skylark and Sausurrea’s distaste for other species, that wasn’t especially surprising.

Transferring my torch to the crook of my hoof, I shouted, “Limerence! I need the pointy bit of your head!”

Taxi was back on her hooves with Limerence helping her along. Walking on three legs is harder than it sounds, but I’ll take that any day over what minotaurs have to put up with when they lose the use of one of their limbs.

“Detective, my horn is a noble symbol of a long, proud line of unicorns dating back to the pre-Classical-”

“Yeah, yeah, get over here and unlock this thing for the dumpy, not-at-all noble earth pony so I can do the actual work.” I nickered at him and poked at the door.

Turning his nose up, Limerence propped my limping driver up as they made their way down the hall. Taxi’s yellow fur was a streaky mess around the bandage wrapped around her foreleg, but the gauze was white and the bleeding seemed under control.

She glanced contemptuously at the remains of Skylark’s trap, then shook her head. “I can’t believe the bitch almost got me with that…”

“It could happen to anypony, Sweets. Are you good to fight if we have to?”

“Skylark tried to hold a shield spell under the effects of a Shock Rocker. I don’t think this will be too awful much of a fight with her horn exhausted. I’m going to stay back, but no way I’m letting you two walk in there by yourselves,” she replied, gritting her teeth and putting her weight on the injured limb. After a moment, she reared back and hefted her cannon so the strap hung on her uninjured shoulder, grabbing the string in her teeth and propping herself against the wall next to the door.

“You just remember you said that when it comes to counting eggs and chickens,” I murmured, joining her on the other side with my shotgun at the ready.

Limerence examined the door, then his horn’s magic played over the wall beside it. “This door is insulated against the arcane, but there is a weight and a counterweight behind this wall. A light tug on the counterweight and the door will slide open. I do not...detect a locking mechanism -- hence, I imagine, all those traps.”

“Then the door is trapped, or she’s got no reason to trap it. Damn.” I glared at the door, then backed up a couple of steps. “Alright, when this opens, I’m going in shotgun first. I’m not waiting on ‘surrender’. We’re only taking prisoners if I get a clean shot on her horn or legs. Sweets, be ready to hit any shield Skylark brings up with a kinetic round.”

“Already loaded!” she replied, patting her cannon.

“Detective, if Skylark knows combat magic adequate to bring up a shield, may I recommend...well, we should be ready if she happens to also know how create fireballs or something similar,” Limerence added.

“If you see a fireball coming, give it a good smack with your telekinesis. Might work.”

“That is not a tactical response, Detective!”

I shrugged and jerked my chin at the closed door. “Sure it is. You respond fast enough and we don’t catch fire. Now, are you ready?”

“Sadly, I cannot say I am anything but.” Limerence put a hoof over his eyes, then lifted his crossbow. “Please tell my father I held him in the highest regard even in death, and that I pray my brother makes a good leader for the Archivists, and that his tea tastes like the backside of a pig.”

“Will do. On my mark. Three... two... one!”

Act 2, Chapter 36: In The Dark Of The Night

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 36: In the Dark of the Night

Ponies go long ways to solve trivial problems, and along the way make monumental discoveries. The creator of the rainbow vacuum was trying to retrieve her keys from underneath a sofa and wound up inadvertently sucking the color out of her pegasus-made furniture, and what became the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 1000 was initially a device intended to deal with lawn squirrels.

This lends credence to the historians' theory that the developer of the spell core did so basically while trying to create a machine that could defuse nutritional disputes by mathematically determining and magically highlighting the exact center of a pizza.

A spell core is an object in a cubic shape that is a sort of cross between a calculating machine and a power source; essentially a self-casting and highly specific spell engine. Arcanelectric devices turn raw magical power into physical outcomes, but spell cores turn raw magical power into one or a few pre-set spells.

Spell cores are composed of a sensitive combination of arcane materials, unicorn sigils and zebra runes, and are expensive and difficult to make. The advantages of spell cores over direct casting, however, are that 1) it is possible to piece the spell together gradually rather than all at once and 2) it is possible to use alternate power sources. This combination allows for much more complex and powerful, if much less flexible, spellcasting than a unicorn could do by horn.

While smaller spell cores about a foot on a side can act as driving forces for things like vehicles and air conditioning units, larger spell cores are capable of greater feats, like the system powering the Detrot water sanitation system. Of course, magic being magic, this means that when a major spell-core goes wrong, the reality warping that occurs is proportionally greater. See: the space-hopping comic book shop's reality-generating printing press, the ice-cream shop refrigeration unit that occasionally caused passers by to melt, and the restaurant that appears just long enough for everypony to say 'Hey, let's go check out that new restaurant!' only to disappear the instant they try to find it.

Of course, when the spell core is intended to create a catastrophe, then it'll likely succeed one way or another.

-The Scholar

Thrilling.

I remember, when I was a foal, I used to think the life of a police pony was going to be thrilling. My father’s life certainly wasn’t, but he managed to make it sound wild and interesting. Most of the time, he was just out there issuing parking tickets. Sure, towards the end, he’d managed to get some heavier cases, but he had a condition the former Chief of Police couldn’t stand; he was entirely too honest. In the end, it was what got him killed.

I learned from my old stallion.

I learned to lie.

I learned to cheat.

You fight when it’s time and you fight when there are no other options. You fight when you can win.

It’s not thrilling, though. It’s terrifying, and the terror can become its own addiction.

I sleep in fear and I wake to fresh death, every morning. That’s my job, after all. Homicide is not where ponies who’re afraid of being afraid tend to lay their hats. Every day, I will see a pony who has died, or who may soon die. Every day, I may also die myself. For a long time I think there was a part of me hoping that would be today.

I had ponies trying to keep me alive, but it was only when death came for me and my driver somehow managed to yank me back over the edge that I started to appreciate the thrill that was living.

It’s a thrill apart from the terror.

It’s knowing you’ve got to walk away from whatever is in front of you today, so you can find out what happens next.

****

"She’s an alicorn!"

That’s really not the sort of thing you want to hear in any tactical situation. Most of the time, you don’t want to hear something like that, period. It’s nothing good when winged unicorns are involved.

I had only a glimpse into the room behind the door before I threw myself backwards, tumbling over my own rear legs into Taxi who didn’t have the benefit of all four limbs. She staggered backwards, dropping the P.E.A.C.E. cannon to hang around her stomach.

“Detective!” Limerence shouted, cocking his crossbow. “What is it?”

“She’s a damned alicorn! We’ve got to get out of here!” I barked, grabbing my driver by the hoof and throwing her free leg over my shoulders, helping her down the hallway.

“Astral Skylark?!”

“Yes!”

I expected death by incineration, or possibly just vaporization. If I was lucky, I might make it a few more meters down the hall before it came.

In that room, I’d seen death.

Lesson zero, rule zero; Know when you’re outclassed.

Lesson zero, rule one; Never fight an alicorn.

I hauled Taxi along with me as we made our retreat. If my bladder control had been even a little less trained, I think I’d have lost it just then. After all, I’d seen her; Skylark, hanging over an altar built out of some kind of machinery. She hung there on great, feathered wings, her horn burning with mighty spell-fire. In such circumstances, panicked running is about the only response that might save your life.

It wasn’t until I’d gone a dozen steps that I realized I could only hear two sets of hoofsteps. Limerence wasn’t behind me.

I peered over my shoulder and saw him standing there, his head out in the doorway, bathed in the pearly glow of Skylark’s magic.

“Limerence! What are you doing?!” I snapped.

“Detective, you may wish to come see this,” he said, quietly.

A second voice rang down the hallway. “Survived, did you, Detective? I’m glad! Do as your little Archivist says! Come! Come and see! Come and witness!”

Skylark’s voice.

“Hardy…" Taxi whispered, nosing my neck. "If she’s an alicorn, then we should already be dead. We'd be piles of smoldering ash back in the ritual room. So... Why aren’t we?”

That was an awfully good question; one whose answer I felt certain I wouldn’t like.

I pulled Taxi around with me as I turned back towards the room. She was right. She was right, and though sanity dictated I grab Swift and Limerence then head for the exit, there were questions unanswered. The mare who could answer them was right there.

“Sweets... are you with me?” I said, softly.

“What do you mean? It’s not like I can run all that fast with a busted-”

“No, I need to know. Are you with me? If we go back there…”

“Hardy, I’m always with you. I might want to snap your neck now and then, but I’m here. Can we get this over with, so I can either go to a comfortable grave or get this bullet out of my leg?”

I gave her a crooked smile, then heaved her unhurt knee a bit higher on my shoulders and carried her towards destiny. Limerence was still waiting just outside the room, his horn glittering as the ambient magic made all of our ears hum. He glanced at me, then nodded towards the High Security room.

I gently set Taxi down and took a deep breath to steady my shaken nerves.

“Alright. I’m coming in!” I called out.

“Yes, Detective! Come and see the glory!” she replied, sounding far too pleased with herself for my taste.

It still took every ounce of gumption in my considerable reserves to step around that corner. Picking up my shotgun’s trigger, I held it for a moment, then let it drop. How much would that matter against an alicorn?

Granted, she’d still fallen under the Shock Rocker. The weapons tester who designed those probably hadn’t had the Princesses in mind when he was determining how much damage they could do to a shield spell, but maybe we’d gotten lucky and she couldn’t simply fry us at her leisure.

Why, then, didn’t she just kill us all when it would have been convenient? I thought.

Curiosity killed the cat, they say. I find it more likely that curiosity will one day maim the stupid Detective, then leave him to suck his last few breaths through punctured lungs before dying un-mourned in a gutter somewhere.

Nothing for it.

I stepped out into the light coming through the doorway and stared up at a sight that left my bowels watery.

Astral Skylark, the Arroyo’s ‘Devil wid horn and wings’, floated behind a gently shimmering magical shield above a bank of switches, toggles, and controls. In front of it, a broad, flat transformer looked like it’d been converted into an altar of some kind. A huge web-work of wire spilled down the sides that seemed to have been torn from inside the guts of the mechanism. It was laid out on the floor in what appeared to be some kind of pattern, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

A clinical analysis of the situation was only doing so much to quell my instinctive urge to run like my tail was on fire.

There’s something wired into the modern equine mind that thinks of alicorns with a sort of holy terror. Sure, the Princesses make regular television appearances, but there is a very real difference between knowing there are beings which can raise and lower stellar bodies, and being in the presence of one.

Still, once I was there, I couldn’t help gawking like a foal who has found himself in the lair of a dragon.

My eyes were drawn to Skylark’s wings, which were a strange, opalescent red that contrasted badly with her pelt, but they were gigantic and filled the little control room from wall to wall. Arcs of enchanted lightning leapt off the shield and I could feel all the fur on my body beginning to stand on end.

Her robe lay discarded on the floor beside the altar, which was covered in bits of paper, half-burnt candles, and what I took at first for miscellaneous religious garbage. Centered between them, directly below Skylark, there was a framed picture of a smiling Princess Luna. Below it, a cube of some kind of metallic looking rock was gently glowing with what appeared, on first examination, to be a star field of some kind. Several of the wires had been hooked up to it and at regular intervals it pulsed with barely restrained energies.

The high priestess herself wore one of those insufferably serene and altogether self-satisfied expressions I’ve come to hate. Taxi is very good at them when she’s miffed, and they tend to mean bad things are in my immediate future.

“Ahhh...welcome! Come in, now! All of you, my little ponies.” Skylark swept her hooves towards her chest, but there was something awkward about the motion. I couldn’t quite figure what it was.

Limerence filed in behind me, his crossbow resting against his side as Taxi came in after him and joined me. My driver had her cannon clutched in her injured leg, but she was doing her very best to walk normally. Her teeth were grinding together so hard they squeaked as she moved.

As she looked up at Skylark, I smelled a scent that was all too familiar to a pony who knows Taxi for any length of time; fury.

“My little ponies, I am so glad to finally meet you in my proper, unhidden form,” Skylark purred, swinging back and forth a little bit behind the shield.

The distantly analytical part of my mind that wasn’t occupied with thoughts of impending death finally realized just what was bothering me about her position. She wasn’t flapping her wings and her horn must have been channeling every ounce of magic into keeping that shield up.

So how is she floating? I thought, a frown tugging at the corners of my mouth. My animal hindbrain kept trying to drag me back towards ‘paralytic fear’, but the rational part of my mind was mulling over that question and didn’t have time for screaming and wetting itself.

“You have come at... an inconvenient time, but I was close to my ascension. So close! I can feel it now,” she chuckled. It grew into a hysterical giggle that turned, after a few seconds, into a shriek. Taxi and I took a couple of cautious steps back as a bolt of some form of energy coiled itself off the altar and jumped from the cables, exploding up her legs like a fast moving snake of light to her horn. It left a streak of bare, reddened flesh on her hide with its passing and the shield shrank an inch or two, then flashed back in place.

I could smell charred fur, but Skylark’s laughter seemed to redouble as she cackled at some joke the rest of us weren’t privy to.

“Everything... everything I was promised will come true! I will be beside my Princess... my queen!” Skylark was lost in her own little world, her eyes rolling back in her head as she jiggled about in the air.

I felt a warm body press against my side and turned, expecting to find Taxi there. Instead, Limerence was leaning close to my ear. He whispered, “Detective, look at her wing joints.”

Tilting my head back, I squinted at Skylark’s wings, tracing their length up to where they met her shoulders, then further on to where they flared open. I missed it on the first pass, but on the second, I saw what Limerence was talking about; she had a ring of some dull metal that was painted the same color as her red plumage sunk directly through the musculature of the wing itself. A thin cable of some kind ran from both wings up towards the ceiling, disappearing into the complex machinery that comprised the roof of the control room.

All at once, my fear vanished like somepony had thrown a bucket of cold water on it. She was tied up there. No magic. Just a simple, improvised flight rig and some masochistic tendencies.

The fury which I’d kept in check for the last hour mostly with the need to act was coming back. My jaw tightened.

“Lady, you are a whole heap of crazy…” I growled, taking a couple of steps forward, “...and I want some answers!”

“Oh, Detective... you think you know what is going on, don’t you? I was going to let those fools in the other room bear witness here in a matter of weeks, but this is so much better!” Skylark smiled, her horn flashing repeatedly as more of the power from the altar spiraled around her legs. This time she barely flinched as it struck her horn. “You will go forth from here, and tell of my glory! A pony who was once my enemy will tell the truth far more convincingly than a simpering sycophant.”

Crazy religious zealot she might be, but I had the feeling there were more than a few cards yet to be played. I really wanted to shoot her, but that damn shield looked awfully solid for a spell cast by somepony who’d been hit with a Shock Rocker not more than a half hour ago.

“There’s no way out of this room besides through us. We’ve got Tourniquet holding the door upstairs and Cerise had a little tantrum after you stuck her with that sword. Your followers are dead, restrained, or too spaced out to help you. Come on down and I promise you’ll live long enough to get to a prison cell.”

Skylark listened patiently until I was finished. Her nasty little smile never budged an inch.

“You have such a way with words, Detective,” she said, grinning condescendingly. “But... I’m afraid I must decline your generous offer. I am surprised the girl lived, but that was always a possible side effect. She’ll be dead soon anyway-”

“We brought a cure for your zebra poison, too,” Taxi snapped, angrily. “The girl you murdered a month ago was chock full of helpful information, by the way! Her and the Professor!”

Skylark raised one eyebrow and smirked at my driver. “You’ve a little fire in you, haven’t you? I didn’t kill Sister Blue or the heretic at the Museum. Sister Blue stole from me, yes, but I wasn’t the one who pulled that particular trigger. Oh, I would have, don’t get me wrong. She was such a juicy little thing. Her horn would have gone beautifully towards the great work...but I never claimed it. She escaped from the preparation chamber, no less.”

“Wait, how... who killed her, then?! Are you saying she was going to be a sacrifice?!” Taxi sputtered.

“Honestly, I’ve no idea the identity of her actual killer. My patrons handled that, though they were... unable to recover my property. I am curious how she managed to steal from me and escape the arcane bonds, however,” Skylark said, running her tongue over her lips in a way that had me envisioning a tiger licking its chops. “I would also know where my property is now. I suppose I will have to rip how that from your minds, when my ascension is complete. You will make a good prophet to tell the ponies out there of my magnificence, Detective. Once I have broken your will, of course.”

I didn’t like she way she said that in an almost musing fashion, like it was simply on her ‘to-do’ list. My cutie-mark had started to ache, too, which wasn’t an especially good sign.

“I’ve no idea what your ‘property’ is, but you’re not getting out of this room except in cuffs,” I replied, snatching up my trigger.

Skylark snickered at that, covering her muzzle with one hoof. “Oh, Detective, I do like you. That trick at the museum was very clever, by the way. Not since my days in the Canterlot Thieves' Guild have I ever seen a more dogged pursuer than yourself. Not since the night I left that wretched city with my Lady’s voice burning in my mind. So many ponies have given themselves to my labors. So many lost souls, given purpose.”

Taxi snarled, suddenly, throwing herself forward and slamming her good hoof against the shield. It contracted slightly under the impact, but gave no sign it was going to fail. “Those ponies trusted you! You could have...you could have been a symbol for something better for this city!”

The priestess flashed a slightly pouty smile. “I do wish you could live to see what I will soon accomplish here. With my Queen by my side, there will be nothing ponykind cannot achieve. Celestia has held us back for far too long!”

I stepped up and grabbed my driver’s tail, tugging her backwards from the shield before one of those arcs of stray lightning could toast her alive.

“If I may, Miss Skylark... what purpose did these sacrifices serve?” Limerence waved his hoof at the altar, then at Skylark herself.

“Is it not obvious, librarian?” A soft glow suffused the joints of her wings, forcing them to flex against the cables and lifting her a little higher in the air.

Limerence’s jaw fell open and he glanced in my direction, though he was still speaking to Skylark. “You are… attempting to achieve Regis Filia Ascendere…”

“For those of us who don’t speak dead Equestrian languages?” I asked, batting Lim in the hip with my toe.

“Ascension. Ascension to Royalty,” he murmured. “She’s not an alicorn. She’s attempting to become one. Those wings must be... some... element of the transformation, but she has not reached it yet.”

Taxi drew back. “That’s...that’s impossible! Even the Princesses themselves don’t know for certain what causes ascension! If they did, they’d never tell the public!”

“Did you believe I was lying when I said Princess Luna spoke to me?” Skylark laughed. “I heard her voice! I heard the explosion of secrets all wrapped up inside it!” Her voice dropped low as she let the magic around her wings fade. “They do not speak like us, you know. They speak with ideas!”

I had to take a moment to processes that. Taxi was less restrained.

“You’re... you’re mad!” she exclaimed, stepping too hard on her damaged hoof. Her rear legs went out from under her and she fell onto her rump, but made no attempt to rise as she stared up at the creature hanging above us.

“At one time, yes,” the priestess agreed. “My patrons found me, crazed and broken by the power of my Lady’s voice in my mind. They gave me the insight to see those ideas for the voluminous wisdom they are! No more the weak, pitiful thief stealing for the rich! They gave me...purpose!”

Glancing around the room, I tried to get some idea of what the machinery might be doing. There were a number of dials along one wall, but every one of them that had a needle was buried in the red.

“Limerence,” I said very softly, hoping the distortion effect of the shield would keep her from being able to hear exactly what I said. “Can you hear me?”

He covered a nod with a not at all subtle scratch on the ear. .

“Start trying to figure out what she’s done to the machine. We’ll keep her talking.”

"Believe me, I'm already trying to figure that out." Limerence sat, pushing his glasses up his nose as he began scanning the bundles of wires and the read-outs along the nearest wall.

I raised my voice and addressed Skylark. “Who exactly are these ‘patrons’ of yours? If I’m supposed to be serving you here when you’re done cooking, it might be good for me to know.”

“Hah! I doubt they wish their names read in public! Thankfully, you have given me just the excuse I needed. I have no reason to wait on the beneficence of my patrons to allow me to take the final steps. I’ve had the power I needed for some weeks… but it will require, like so many things, a sacrifice!”

Limerence’s eyes widened as he poked at one of the dials near us. He spoke quickly, too excited to keep his voice low. “Detective, I believe I may have... some idea of what she’s done.”

“Oh, the librarian has figured it out! Excellent!” Skylark gestured for him to go on. “Please, do tell my prophet what I have done.”

Genuine fright wasn’t something I was used to seeing in the droll stallion’s eyes. He licked his suddenly very dry lips and turned to look at me.

“Detective, I could be wrong, but I believe... I believe Miss Skylark has somehow reversed the power matrix which typically absorbed power and channels it to Tourniquet. The energies are pumping here instead. Not only that, but she’s...exponentially multiplied the influx.”

“Equestrian, Lim!”

“She’s somehow removed part of the safety system and installed a spell core.”

“You mean like the one in my cab?” Taxi asked, looking a tad confused.

“Similar, yes, though I believe this to be a very... different... kind of spell. This is set to draw from all sources at maximum capacity. Once it reaches critical input, it will overwhelm the control circuits and... cast the spell.”

I couldn’t keep the nervousness out of my tone. “Which means?!”

“It means, if I read this correctly, that it will establish a direct conduit to anything that’s feeding magic... and empty all of those sources... here. Into that.” He pointed at the cube sitting on the altar.

Now and then, my brain actually manages to break through the haze of debilitating emotional issues and alcoholism onto a fresh plane of understanding. Unfortunately, this rarely happens when I’m in a place to celebrate.

“The source would be... wait. You mean everypony in the whole city wearing one of those robes-” I began.

“Yes, Detective,” Limerence said, glancing at Skylark for confirmation. “She’s going to tear every scrap of magic out of the entire Lunar Passage. Minds. Bodies. Souls. Anything that contains even one iota of magic.”

“Is... is that possible?” Taxi stammered.

The Archivist waved a hoof at the control room dubbed ‘High Security’. “This construct is designed to steal magic from dragons. I am not even prepared to comment on what is possible with it.” He frowned and turned back to the priestess. “I am curious, though. Even a spell core requires a buffer of some kind; a place to put all of that magic while it’s fed through an enchantment. What, exactly, are you using to keep this all from simply exploding?”

“A sacrifice,” Skylark replied with a dismissive shrug. I winced as a bit of blood began to leak from around the rings holding her wings in place, although she didn’t seem to notice. “My patrons asked only that I provide them with occasional sacrifices. The rest are mine. I will pay my debts once my ascension is complete. In the meantime...they serve.”

If I’d thought, for a moment, my brain was incapable of absorbing worse horrors without simply shutting off, Astral Skylark was about to prove me wrong. Her horn squirted a stream of lightning onto the back of the shield, illuminating the rear wall of the control room.

“Oh... my... Celestia…”

I’m not sure which of us said that. To this day, I don’t know.

I felt my knees turn immediately to jelly and my heart, to ice. Worst of all, the pain in my cutie-mark vanished almost entirely.

****

In all my years of working a beat in the Detrot Police Department, I’d been unlucky enough to stumble into more than a few truly bad places. Juniper and I had certainly found our fair share of dark things. That guy who’d eaten his next door neighbor’s marefriend. The Whistling Death. The Pastry Cannibal Killer.

There’s always a low level buzz. You know the injustice is there. At least, I do. I know it’s out there and my back-end knows it’s there. Some people call it police work by the seat of your flank. It’s that, with a dash of good old-fashioned non-specific magic thrown in.

My cutie-mark knows when true evil is just around the corner, and it knows when there’s blood on somepony’s hooves, so when I’m in Detrot it perpetually hums, keeping me awake nights until I resort to drink or sleeping pills. It hurts like a sunburn, or a raging fire, or a fresh slap, until that moment when all is revealed. In Detrot, the pain is never completely gone. I usually just tune it out.

I suppose some bit of me has always chased the crime foul enough to shut it up entirely, once I managed to solve it.

The smarter parts my damaged psyche hoped I’d never find it.

****

Bones.

Dozens upon dozens of bones.

Some were wing bones. Others were hooves. There were plenty of horns interspersed with them. Each bone was wound with silver electrical wire and affixed to the wall at regular intervals in some very precise pattern whose purpose I couldn’t quite divine. It looked vaguely like an eye.

The number of dead there, assuming each bone represented a single pony, must have been huge. I tried sixty, and that number tasted low. I tried a hundred and that was, perhaps, too high. Once a tragedy reaches numbers like that, it’s impossible to really count them with any individual attachment. They are just ‘the dead’. You tally them up and those who live get to make judgements about how many more to add to that number before the world is clean again.

The wall was covered in bones and I felt a shiver of certainty starting to crawl about in my stomach.

It was a killing shiver. The kind you feel when the cold of the night creeps in and there is no hope to warm you. Dozens had died for the madness of Astral Skylark.

“You... lied... to everypony,” Taxi said, softly. I glanced at her and saw hot tears coursing down her face. Her jaw was shaking with inner tension. “You could have been what helped rebuild this city.”

Skylark sighed, indulgently. “I will still rebuild it. There is a fire coming and it was a lie to save hundreds of thousands. Celestia has been on the throne long enough. She can’t protect us anymore. The Crusades showed that.”

“So, what? You butcher hundreds and then think the ponies of this country will forgive you?” my driver snarled.

“They will never know the sacrifice of their brethren. Celestia wanted peace with the dragons from the start, and how many died for her peace? A new leader is needed. With Luna beside me, even the dragons will bow! And who knows?” She waved a hoof over her shoulder at the rows of body-parts nailed to the wall. “With the power of an alicorn, I might even be able restore these ponies to life. Celestia never ages. She keeps the secrets of long life from us. She kept her sister imprisoned for a thousand years for the simple crime of wanting appreciation. There was never any proof of the so-called ‘Nightmare Moon’. Just the story. Just Celestia’s story.”

“Your slaughter is ending here! You’ve killed enough ponies,” Taxi declared, fiercely.

“You’re one to talk, Officer Sweet Shine,” Skylark chuckled.

My driver fell back a step.

“Oh, yes! I know who you are. Did you know, the Jewelers still tell the story of how you lost your cutie-marks?” the dangling mare crowed. “They tell it with respect!”

I gave Taxi a confused look and she shook her head, then turned back to Astral. Skylark caught that little exchange and snickered like a hyena who’d heard a good joke. “Oh? Did you never tell your friends what you did? You never told them what you did to your partner?”

“S-shut up!” my driver snapped. The tears on her face were dripping off her chin as she stared up at the high priestess.

For an instant, I saw that filly almost thirty years ago, her sides covered in blood, and her father’s hoof slowly crushing her skull as she flailed against inexorable and oncoming death. She was, in that moment, helpless.

I took a deep breath, looking up at the mare behind the shield; the crazy, awful bitch who’d murdered pony after pony, and for what? Something impossible.

“You’ve got one chance, lady. Lower the shield and everypony walks out of here alive tonight,” I growled, leaning down to pick my trigger up again.

“Detective... Only one of us has time for idle threats,” Skylark replied, glancing sideways at a control panel on which a red light was flashing. “You’ve got minutes. I’ve got millenia.”

Limerence sucked a breath as he looked over the read-outs. More red lights had come on, along with a wide selection of other colors, all of which suggested extreme danger. “She’s at least partly right. The system is almost at critical. I'm not used to having to alter my judgement to compensate for mortal terror, Detective, so forgive that this will not be my most precise analysis, but I believe that the best case and most likely scenario is that this haphazard collection of pony parts and power detonates and kills everyone in the building, us and Skylark included.”

"...That's the best case scenario?! What's the worst?!"

"It tears reality open like a cheap tissue and destroys Detrot entirely. Or it works as intended. I am in a somewhat poor state to make a comparative value judgement on the two just now."

I was about to reply, when my driver spoke.

Her voice was soft. Dangerously soft.

Soft like a blade between ribs. Soft like the touch of the bullet that passed through my chest. Soft like a final breath.

“I’m sorry, Miss Skylark,” she whispered.

“Pardon me, girl? I didn’t catch that.” Skylark cupped a hoof around her ear.

“I wish I could be... kinder,” she replied, wiping at her nose with the back of one fetlock. “I guess... I guess I really am just Daddy’s little girl.”

“Oh?” The priestess tilted her head, looking slightly uncertain for the first time since we’d entered the room.

“Sweets… what're you talking about?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

Taxi looked over at me and smiled. “Hardy, I promise, one of these days, I’ll tell you... Right now, when I say, you shoot that shield, okay?”

She hefted her cannon, feeding a shell into the slot on the underside.

Limerence gave me a slight nudge, then pointed at the floor at Skylark’s hooves. An irregular, boxy shape lay there.underneath the edge of her robe. It was just inside the perimeter of the shield and a thin cord ran out of the back of it.

I chewed uncertainly on my bit, then braced myself.

Skylark rolled her eyes as glittering energies chased their way around her ankles, spreading out between the feathers of her wings. “You’re just going to deafen yourselves, you know. My powers are growing, second by second! Soon, my transformation will be finished and this country... this world... will have a new Princess!”

Taxi took careful aim at Skylark’s face.

“Hardy! Now!”

I swept my coat back from my shotgun and hauled hard on the trigger. My already aching eardrums felt like they’d been poked with hot needles, and I thought briefly that I’d just rendered myself permanently deaf as the shockwave bounced around inside the tiny room. A half second later, the P.E.A.C.E. cannon fired, and my head began to ring like a fire alarm with a hangover.

My buckshot exploded against the shield, spitting molten lead in all directions as the fat slug from Taxi’s kinetic round hit it and cracks formed around the edges. The blasted shield simply contracted, shrinking several inches until the damage vanished.

Skylark’s smile widened.

I had time to think we’d failed.

I had time to think we were all going to die screaming as a crazy alicorn or a magical fire scoured the flesh off of our bones.

I had the time, and I’m thankful my driver was using it to some more intelligent enterprise.

Taxi threw herself face first on the carpet, sliding forward until she was underneath the priestess, on top of the suddenly unprotected blue robe. Tearing back the cloth, she snatched up the boxy object with the cord attached in both hooves. It had three buttons on it; one red, one green, one blue. Down, Up, and Stop.

The priestess’s eyes bugged out and she swung her rear hooves, trying to kick my driver. “No...no, wait! What are you doing? Stop it!”

Slamming her toe down on the green button, Taxi shut her eyes and hugged the box to herself as tight as she could. Somewhere above us, machinery started to grind against itself. Skylark’s horn fired a little more brightly, and my driver was enveloped with a brilliant glow, forcing her forelegs open a couple of inches.

Then the light died.

Astral Skylark began to shriek.

Mortal agony sounds very particular. I’m thankful I’d only heard such a noise once before in my life. It’s a flavor of pain a person never forgets the sound of.

Her voice rose and rose, until her vocal chords tore, and still she screamed as the metal cables attached to her wings drew taut. They lifted her higher still, and I could hear the sound of bones beginning to creak against one another. The wires holding her up pulled at the iron rings with all the inexorable stupidity of an automated mechanism.

Her shield exploded into fragments of light that vanished almost immediately.

Limerence hefted his crossbow, readying a bolt to make sure she couldn’t cast again.

“Taxi!” I shouted, trying to be heard over the machine and Skylark’s cries of torment. “The shield is down! Turn it off!”

My driver didn’t move.

She didn’t even acknowledge she’d heard me. Her eyes were still tightly closed.

Her legs clutched more tightly around the control box.

“D-Detective! S-stop her! Pleee-!” The priestess’s plea devolved into another shrill, tortured squeal as she pawed at the air with all four legs, unable even to bounce to relieve the pressure.

I shut my eyes.

Call me a coward, but I didn’t need that image burned into my mind for all of time. My imagination has enough awful things to haunt me with in the wee hours of the morning. I didn’t need to see another pony torn limb from limb in my life. The screams, the sounds of shattering bone, and the ripping of flesh were definitely plenty.

A hot rain soaked my face, followed by the stomach churning stink of freshly spilt blood. Bits of solid matter hit a second later, and I swallowed, quietly, holding my breath against the smell.

The machinery was still humming and the intense magical fields sent pulses of color flickering behind my eyelids, but for several long seconds, there was a deathly silence in the tiny control room.

I let my eyes slide open and took in the scene. I expected a bit of nausea, or maybe some anger. Possibly even a little bit of disgust or revulsion.

It was strange. I felt nothing. I couldn’t conjure one single emotion that felt right.

Taxi still lay on the floor, but she’d gone almost entirely limp and was just sprawled there with one hoof gently resting on the control box’s ‘stop’ button. Viscera was spread liberally across her body, making her yellow fur a burnt orange. Her mane had things best not thought about in it, but her expression was quietly peaceful.

She released the control box, and one eye rolled back to find my face. A tiny, distressing smile perked at the sides of her mouth.

I found myself unable to look at her, instead glancing about until I found the body of Astral Skylark.

She was hung against one wall by the remaining iron rings and a few tendrils of muscle. Part of her was, anyway. Her other wing had torn free, taking a considerable portion of her spine and ribcage with it, while its twin was still loosely attached to her remains. Whatever machinery she’d been using to keep herself aloft wasn’t built with lots of care and attention to user safety.

I began unconsciously wiping at my chest, trying to get some of the sticky entrails off, then stopped and looked at my hoof when I realized just how pointless that was.

Still, I felt nothing.

“Detective!”

A voice spoke far off. My ears were still not operating properly after the dual gunshots in the little room.

“Yes, Lim?” I asked, glancing over at the frantic librarian as he pulled at my coat with his horn. His face was bloody, but it didn’t seem to be his.

“Detective, rouse yourself! We must turn this system off! It is overloading!”

The fear in his thin face brought me largely back to reality. I shook my head, then put a hoof to my temple. The migraine waiting to pounce finally decided the time was right and landed squarely between my eyes.

“Oog...yeah, yeah. Sorry.” I blinked a few times, trying to clear the fog that’d settled over my thoughts. I became aware of more alarming beeps, boops, and hisses coming from the surrounding machinery. “Right, just...just give me a minute here. What do we need to do?”

“Start by decreasing internal pressures!” he shouted, taking the wall with Skylark attached to it. His horn glowed as he began yanking lever.

I juddered into motion, then looked at the rows of levers along the wall. “Uh...right. First things first, a degree in magical engineering,” I mumbled, then called out, “What internal pressures?!”

“Anything that says ‘pressure’ on it!”

“That’s not a technical solution, Lim!”

“I’m out of technical solutions. We’re minutes from a total overload!”

“Alright, give me a second before we blow ourselves to kingdom come.” I poked at my mane until the ladybug hidden there zipped out and twirled around in front of me. “Queenie, I need you to talk to Tourniquet. Give her eyes on what we’re doing and try to keep the corpse out of sight. Same as before. One buzz for yes, two for no.”

I scanned the dials until I found one that said ‘Arcane Feedback Flow Regulator Pressure’ That needle was so far in the ‘danger’ side that it was almost off the readout. Grabbing the associated lever in my teeth, I waited. One solid buzz. I pulled the lever until the buzzing stopped, then moved on to the next one. ‘Compressed Non-Causality Control Pressure Switch’, Switch to off. ‘Safety Control For Secondary Shunt’, switch from off to on.

So it went, me reading out the dials I didn’t know the purpose of and the ladybug quickly relaying the information back and forth between Tourniquet, Limerence, and I. I wondered just how much of what we were doing Tourniquet actually understood, particularly when a bolt popped out of a pipe at high speed and nearly took Lim’s head off. We worked back and forth across the systems for what felt like a very long time, but gradually, the alarms and sounds of mechanical pain and distress started to fade.

Taxi still hadn’t moved from her place on the floor, but she’d managed to push herself into a sitting position. The bandage on her shoulder was soaked in blood, and she looked a bit woozy, but that slightly creepy smile was still on her face.

With one final twist of a wheel, I slumped over the controls, panting heavily. “There...ugh. Please...please tell me that’s the last... one.”

The ladybug danced a little mid-air jig and let out one gloriously affirmative buzz. I laughed, then I coughed, then I decided moving was a bit too ambitious, and just lay there for several seconds, trying to breathe.

My chest hurt. I was exhausted. My left foreleg was tingling slightly. Right, nothing good there.

You need power, dimwit, a quiet voice whispered in my head.

First and foremost, however, I needed to go see if my driver was insane or if I was going to need to call another cab.

“Taxi... Taxi, are you alright?” I asked, heaving myself back to my hooves and stumbling towards her. My back right leg wasn’t working properly and the knee refused to hold my weight. The edges of my vision started to blur a little, but I could still make out a yellow shape just a meter or two in front of me. I just needed to keep moving.

A firm foreleg slid across my chest and I collapsed against it, letting it lower me to the floor.

Okay, so moving was probably still a bit ambitious.

‘Celestia, my head feels... heavy,’ I thought. Thinking itself was starting to become a real problem.

“I’m... I’m here, Hardy,” a voice said from somewhere above me. It was an awfully nice voice.

The sounds faded for a few seconds. I only picked up bits and pieces, as soft, friendly darkness began to creep inside my head. It was lovely, really.

“Here, lemme see if…”

“Oh goodness, I do believe it’s still operating-”

“The spell core is drawing power towards critic-”

“-we don’t shut it down, it’ll kill him and everypony on this floor-”

“What if we-”

“Limerence! Drag that extension cord over-!”

“Officer Cuddles, hold him!”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my surprisingly long life, it’s that nothing nice lasts terribly long. I caught that last bit an instant before my eyes flew open and I felt like ice cold knives were being shoved into my hooves.

“Uncle! Uncle!” I gasped, jerking upright. “Mercy! Mercy, dammit! I give! I surrender! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know!”

It was not the most dignified re-awakening, but then, I’d never been good at waking up with dignity. Slumped in a pool of vomit, I can do. I’m still working up to ‘dignity’.

Limerence’s thin face, complete with curious expression, greeted my eyes as I found him standing above me. How had he gotten up there? I wasn’t sure.

The librarian’s vest was open down the front, and he wore a stethoscope with two funny prongs on the end that were attached to his horn rather than into his ears; they reminded me strangely of voltage testers. The very chilly business end was running over my chest.

“Ah... hmmm... I’m surprised that worked. I half expected his heart to ignite…” he commented, then pulled the stethoscope away and spoke to somepony out of my range of vision. I realized I was laying on my back. When had that happened? “Changelings are such durable creatures. I should like the opportunity one day to dissect one. Officer Cuddles, you can disconnect him now. I believe the spell core has stabilized somewhat, although we will still need to dispose of it.”

Something went ‘pop’ and I felt my chest pouch zipped closed, then Swift appeared. I had to resist the urge to hug the life out of her. She looked terrified, but determined as she coiled my heart-plug cord around her hoof.

“Sir?”

I blinked a couple of times, then heaved over onto my side. I was still in the ‘High Security’ control room. Drying blood still soaked the floor and walls. Skylark’s corpse was gone, but a white sheet covered an indistinct mass which was laying on the altar.

“What got me this time?” I asked, trying to scrape a bit of something I didn’t want to identify off the edge of my coat.

“Skylark’s spell core,” Limerence replied cooly, gesturing at the lump of glowing metal sitting on the altar. “My fault, I suppose. With the drain from all other sources shutting down, Miss Skylark’s spell core attempted to find a fresh source of power. You were the... how shall we say... juiciest morsel in the room.”

“But I thought it could only steal magic from ponies with those robes on,” Swift said.

“I would have said something similar, but it nearly sucked the life out of him earlier from but a moment’s contact with one catalyst. Spell cores frequently have a taste for a particular flavor of energy. This one-” He flicked the side of the cube and it let out a discordant clang. “-seems to like the magic of life itself, which the Detective’s heart is chock full of. Intent being what it is where ponies modifying arcanotechnology is concerned, I’m certain the original designers of Miss Taxi’s cab didn’t intend that core to blast lightning every time she taps the accelerator, either.”

“Yeah, but... what is the spell core? I mean, what’s it supposed to do?”

“That will require some examination, I’m afraid. Examination we have little time for. I need to begin the procedure of reconnecting the safety mechanisms and see if I can restore the construct’s control systems. The damage does not look extensive."

“But wait... how’d you save me, then?” I asked, looking around for the wall plug they’d used to keep my heart going.

“Ah... well, we simply connected you to the spell core,” he answered, levitating up one end of a cable that had my heart plug spliced onto the end of it. The cord led up onto the altar itself and disappeared into the back of the cube of rune-covered metal. “We needed some means of shorting it out. A feedback loop using your body was our best option, considering it was draining from you, specifically. We simply allowed it to charge your heart, and the remaining energy was fed into the...mmm-” He paused and cocked his chin in the direction of the wall of bones. “-buffers. After a few minutes, the spell core hadn’t enough power to continue casting its own power draining spell. It was just an unorthodox application of the first law of conservation of magic. I am most pleased it worked.”

“My... body was the... best option?!” I growled, menacingly, taking a step towards the librarian.

Limerence was completely unfazed. “You were either going to be dead and save the lives of everypony on this floor, or there was a chance it might charge your heart and save everypony on this floor, yourself included. Or you’d have been dead along with everypony else. Find me a scenario worse than the original.”

I admit, he had me there, but I was gradually developing something of a complex regarding ponies experimenting with anything that could cause my heart to burst. That several had done so within the month was probably a fine testament to just how deep in the horse-apples I was.

I felt a prickle of worry as I realized something was wrong, aside the willingness of my companions to channel unknown voltages through my cardiological system. .

“Hey... wait a second.” I quickly counted the ponies in the room. In my advanced state of exhaustion, it took more than one attempt. “Where’s Taxi?”

“Um… she… errr...” Swift paused, her wings tucking a little tighter to her sides.

“Kid, I doubt there is anything my driver can do right now that’s going to make me any angrier than I already am with her,” I said, nodding in the general direction of the body of Astral Skylark. “Now, where is she?”

“T-trust me, Sir, if I was just scared about you being angry at her, I would totally tell you.”

“Thanks for that. Speak. Where has she gone off to?”

“S-she... she went back to the temple a couple of minutes ago saying something about...about getting a...a fire-axe...”

I groaned and started for the door. “Was she looking ‘serene’ or ‘pissed’?”

“Um... she looked really, really angry,” Swift replied.

My shoulders relaxed. “Ahhh, alright then. No problem. If you ever see her get all peaceful, you make for damn sure you shoot her. Leg or knee, preferably, but anywhere that’ll put her down without killing her. Otherwise, she’ll probably just take it out on an inanimate object, a whiskey bottle, or me.”

“Y-yes, Sir,” she answered, her eyes darting over towards Skylark’s corpse as it lay on the altar beside the spell core. “Did... did she do... that?”

Something in the way she said that brought me to a quick halt. Was it her tone of voice? Maybe the stammer? I’m not certain.

I turned and examined my tiny partner. Her apple-red mane was a mussed, wild mess and she wasn’t hiding the tired sag in her shoulders all that well. When she noticed I’d seen it, she straightened, but couldn’t keep the quiver out of her lower lip. Despite all the blood in the other room, she’d managed to walk away without any on her. The worst of it was a bit of dust in her feathers and a mild, ongoing scent of sewage from our entrance.

I, on the other hoof, looked like I’d just been for a run through a full griffin meat locker at top speed. There was barely a clean inch from ear-tips to toes.

“Yeah, she did. I will handle Taxi. She’s my responsibility. You’re going to have this weekend off, you hear?” I tried to smile. It wasn’t much of a smile, even for something I was trying to fake.

Swift shook her head. “I... I can’t... I can’t leave you to do this on your own, Sir. Not until this is done, okay? Besides, I’m f-fine.” She started to turn and tripped over her own back hooves. I caught her before she could fall, letting her lay her head on my shoulder. We stood there until I lost track of the time. Her tiny heart felt fit to burst as it thumped against my leg.

Then she was crying. I’d expected it, but it was still a surprise, like the toaster popping even though you know it’s going to.

Why, oh why, sweet Celestia, had so many innocents chosen my shoulder to cry on lately? It seemed to be an ongoing theme and I’m not an especially absorbent pony, so why me?

These weren’t the angry tears that Taxi tends to cry; they were the great wracking sobs of a young filly who had seen way too many horrible things in one short night. She crushed her muzzle against my mane, her hot breath on my shoulder as she twisted her hooves in my trenchcoat and held on tightly. Her sharp teeth bit into my pelt a little as she pushed her face against me so hard it must have hurt, but there’s a place beyond which the pain inside a pony can overshadow any physical discomforts, and Swift was there.

I sat and held her, wishing I could take her upstairs and give her to Tourniquet. I felt a little bit dirty. Somepony like her should have a pony with a cleaner conscience for a comforter. She tried to pull herself together a couple of times, then the tears would start again and she’d press close, wrapping one of her wings around me like she was scared I would vanish on her. Knowing me, she should probably have been more worried I’d get her killed, but I wasn’t about to say that.

It might have been a minute later, or it might have been ten, but when the tears and hiccups had finally subsided, she stepped away, still sniffling, but looking noticeably relieved. “Phew...sorry, Sir.” She shot a self-conscious glance over her shoulder at Limerence, who was very carefully minding his own business as he examined Skylark, the machine, the spell core, and just about anything that didn’t require him to look in our direction.

“Any time, kid. That’s what partners are for. Speaking of ponies who need me, I should go find out what Taxi is doing. I hope to Celestia it’s not burying that axe in Geranium’s head…”

“You... you don’t think she’d really-”

“Right now? No, probably not. When Taxi’s genuinely angry with the world, she hides it until she explodes. This sounds more like pissed off. The two are easily confused. Just help Lim and leave it to me. I’ll be back soon and I want at least some idea of what Skylark was attempting here. Then we’ll see if we can make it up to Tourniquet’s room, and then get out of here.”

“Sir, if the top floors are covered in guards, we can’t just walk out with Miss Cerise, and we can’t leave that lawyer pony here. We have to do something with these criminals! They were going to kill the police chief’s daughter!”

I couldn’t disguise a hint of irritation in my voice, since I was bordering on panic myself. “I’m...aware, and I’m still working on that. We didn’t expect to walk in on a ritualistic orgy with some of the highest ranking ponies of Detrot trying to murder an innocent girl.”

“Oh... Oh Sun and Moon, Sir. We killed some of those-”

Before the reality could wind its way in too deeply, I put my hoof over her muzzle. “Kid, deep breath. We can crap ourselves later, but right now... take care of Limerence. Guard him. Can you do that?”

“Yes…”

“Good. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

****

I heard the dull crunch and the low murmur of scared voices halfway down the hall. There weren’t any screams, though, and that was good.

My headache was mostly gone, and the pain had fled my limbs, but while a solid charge might have chased away the physical maladies, my emotional state still screamed for sleep and time to process. You’d think watching that much violence should reduce a pony to catatonia -- and sometime later on I was expecting to sit in the bathtub howling like a yearling -- but while the adrenaline is still hot, your mind still works.

I strolled leisurely down the hall, stopping at the entrance to the temple to pick something out of my mane that’d been tickling me. It was a feather. I turned it over in my hooves, peering at the soft, red plume; one of Skylark’s feathers. Shuddering, I flicked it away.

You’re getting all the bad dreams in the universe for this one... my subconscious was grumbling.

There was another crash of metal on something that didn’t sound like metal, but at least wasn’t squishy, and more voices crying out in protest.

Geranium was standing, watching something going on up on the altar. She’d abandoned her Lunar Passage robe and had been wearing a simple business suit underneath. I didn’t have a good angle on what she was staring at; the statue was in the way. She caught my eye as I moved into the temple and frantically jerked her head in the direction of whatever was going on.

“Sweets?” I called out, edging around the statue.

“Imh fnne, Hardy,” a muffled voice replied. There was another thud, followed by what sounded like pebbles hitting the carpet. “ftrefh relief,” she added.

Walking out into the middle of the temple, I found my driver standing on the altar to Nightmare Moon, a red painted axe held between her teeth. Most of Nightmare Moon’s left wing was gone, along with a nice section of her head, horn, and front hoof. The broken bits lay shattered around the monster’s hooves.

The surviving two dozen or so members of the Cult were sitting on the carpet at the back of the room, their robes in a heaped up pile and police-hobbled front and back. Most had been naked underneath, although a few wore bits of fetish-wear. The unicorns all wore restrictor rings. For the work of just two ponies, it was a fine piece of crowd control, even if the crowd was too high to cast anything more complicated than simple levitation.

Geranium or Swift must have organized some kind of quick policing for the corpses; the bodies had been dragged to one side and robes thrown over their faces. It was more respect than I figured most of them deserved for what they’d been about to participate in, but I admit, it made me feel a bit better not to have to look into those rows of dead eyes. There were about fifteen bodies there, give or take.

Taxi herself looked a right terror.

Her saddlebags lay beside her and the scars on her flanks were covered in dried blood, making the wounds seem fresh and deep. The bandage around her shoulder was soaked through, though I couldn’t tell if she was the one still bleeding or if it’d been Skylark.

Hauling the axe back, she bit down hard and slammed it into the side of Nightmare’s rear leg, taking a nice chunk out of it. The statue wobbled on its base and cracks spread up the hip. The cultists at the back of the room let out incoherent fear sounds, like a flock of surprised turkeys.

“Sweets, is this strictly necessary? I’d like to leave as soon as possible.”

“Juff giff me a minnap!” she tried to shout around the axe’s haft. Turning around, she planted her good front hoof and gave the statue a solid apple-buck with both rear legs. I saw the fall coming before it happened and took a few quick steps forward, but I couldn’t get there in time.

With only one functioning leg, she lost her balance, pitching forward onto her chin. The axe slipped out of her teeth and dropped onto the carpet.

Climbing up onto the altar, I couldn’t suppress a sigh as I pushed my muzzle under my driver’s chest, hauling her back to her hooves.

“I suppose I’m not going to convince you to let this go, am I?” I asked, shooting a glance at the cultists towards the back of the room. Without their robes, I’d started to recognize a few faces; Counselor Grey Mane had survived and was gently chewing on the tail of a reporter for the Detrot Post while she stared blankly at her own hooves, turning them over as though uncertain how they’d gotten on the end of her legs.

Taxi dusted herself off and began hobbling towards where her axe had fallen. Gingerly picking it up, she propped it in the crook of of her wounded fetlock and began a three-legged limp back towards the statue.

Her eyes might have been determined, but her body was verging on shut down, either from blood loss or weariness. As she went in for one more swing, her busted leg gave out. The axe clattered on the stone altar and Taxi collapsed onto her stomach, breathing raggedly through clenched teeth.

I looked down at her, sadly, then reached out and tenderly touched her braid, flicking a piece of dark red matter out of it. She didn’t lift her head, whether because she was too tired or because she just didn’t want to look me in the eye. Her muscles tensed, but there wasn’t enough strength left to get her off the floor.

Turning my head, I examined the statue looming over us. Nightmare Moon had seen better days.

It was a pitiful thing, once you got right to the heart of what we’d walked into; worshipping a child’s fear for the sake of sex, psychedelic thrills, and a night of feeling like you’re privy to something strange and secret. Those stoned idiots might or might not even have known they were party to murder, but they certainly knew what they were doing in every other step of the process.

Taxi was still struggling to rise, but couldn’t coordinate her front and back legs at the same time. I watched her trying to get back to her hooves, pushing herself towards the statue like she might break it down with fury alone. ‘Stress relief’ she’d called it.

“You better remember this the next time you’re going to kick me,” I said, then turned and planted both rear hooves on the statue, bracing myself against the altar.

My driver lifted her head and peered up at me Her eyebrows furrowed, questioningly, then she realized what I was doing. I might have been imagining things, but I thought for just a second that she smirked at me.

Taking a breath right down into my stomach, I grunted and pushed every ounce of strength I had left through my rear hooves.

At first, nothing happened. The statue was massive, after all, and it occurred to me that I might be about to embarrass myself. There’s nothing worse than getting a sprained ankle from a religious icon.

Then I heard a sweet, sweet sound: shifting stone.

A couple of cultists cried out as the statue shifted on its base, sliding backwards. My rear hooves dropped and hit the floor as, with a resounding impact that shook the pipes and rattled the fittings, Nightmare Moon and the Church of the Lunar Passage came crashing down.

Act 2, Chapter 37: Benefits Package

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 37: Benefits Package

One central function of satirical humor is to comfort the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable – a fact that is, in some instinctual way, understood by the common Equestrian. There is a long tradition in Equestria of pranking the upper classes.

Disappearing ink gets snuck into researchers’ quills. Cardboard manticores get launched from behind shower curtains. Sometimes, they get quite spectacular: Famously, a royal gardener planted zap apple seeds in the Canterlot Gardens, then scheduled the Canterlot Garden Party to take place at the same time as the zap apple harvest – which meant that the party was plagued with crows flying in odd formations, sudden trees, and a timberwolf pack. While this pack was rather quickly immolated by Royal Guard mages, it did result in quite a lot of garden fertilization.

There is evidence to suggest Celestia herself actually quietly encourages this as long as it doesn’t go too far, and has been known to participate in little “Gotchas” herself. While definition of “too far” may be at issue, as it is suspected that she personally orchestrated the mayhem at the L.R. 1 Grand Galloping Gala, she has a good reason for her stance.

Outside of very brief and localized experiments with communeighsm, the forseeable future will have some form of division between rich and poor, and where divisions exist create great opportunities for disharmony. To prevent this and release class tensions, such barriers between ponies must be broken from time to time.

Such breakages are rarer in Detrot, especially the more spectacular forms of prank. Canterlot has enough safety nets to allow what would be dangerous pranks in other zones. Canterlot can deal with timberwolf attacks and irate dignitaries. Detrot would be Monstertown without its defenses. A prank that, in Canterlot, would have started and ended with somepony getting egg in their mane could – and did - culminate in a diplomatic incident with a high ranking griffin ambassador that ended in the incidental and unrelated withdrawal of mercenary protection from an outlying pony colony that just happened, a week later, to get destroyed by Tatzlwurms.

Because Detrot gets fewer such outlets, when the lower classes do get a chance to act without obvious repercussion, the temptation is to take it as far as it will go.

-The Scholar

“Detective, I just finished hoofcuffing one of my favorite actors while he tried to lick my cutie mark. While I might have enjoyed something like that in different circumstances, I sincerely hope you have a plan for getting us out of here,” Geranium said, kicking at a piece of the broken statue of Nightmare Moon.

“I think you might be a little unsure of what the word ‘us’ means to me, sweetheart. I have a plan to get ‘us’ -- that is me, my target, my driver, my partner, and my librarian -- out of here,” I said, poking Geranium in the chest with one hooftip, meaningfully. “Whether or not you get included in that will be determined by whether or not I think you’re going to stab me in the back the instant we’re out the door.”

The lawyer scoffed and swept my hoof away. “I’m helping, dammit! It’s not as though I can fight you with this rock in my gut, now can I? What’s the next part of this brilliant plan of yours?”

“I’m still working that out,” I replied, with a coy smile. “I’ll be sure to let you know when I have something I need you to do.”

Geranium let out a frustrated snarl and marched off towards the rows of sitting cultists. One of them tried to tug at her suit with his teeth and she gave him a good wallop across the side of the head with the back of one hoof.

I admit, I was taking perhaps a little too much joy in needling the prickly solicitor, but she was still technically my enemy and the last individual I’d wanted to tear in half had been torn in half by my driver. That left me with a dearth of targets to take out my irritation on.

“Hardy... she’s got a point,” Taxi murmured, trying to get one knee under herself.

“Sweets, I swear, if you don’t stay right there, I will cart your sorry flank to that nutty doctor of Stella’s for healing,” I replied. “Rest. We’re not out of this particular set of woods just yet.”

Her leg slid a little, then she sighed and tucked it back under her chest. “It’s just... I mean, I know we came in here on a search and rescue, but we can’t let that bunch over there go, can we?”

Before I could formulate an answer, Limerence’s head popped out of the hallway leading to the secondary control room. He quickly took in the shackled cultists at the back, the tipped statue of Nightmare Moon, and Taxi’s condition.

I waved him over and he trotted towards us. A small white medical kit levitated along beside him. “Ah, Detective. Can I assume my ‘patient’ didn’t take the advice to keep activity to a minimum?”

“Did you expect her to?” I replied, stepping down off the altar so he could take my place.

Taxi started, “I’m-”

“If you say ‘fine’, I’m pistol whipping you,” I said, cutting off her objections. “Now, stick your leg out and sit still until we’re done.”

Frowning irritably, she offered Limerence her bandaged leg. He quickly unwound the wrappings around the bloody hole in Taxi’s leg. They were saturated right through. Shelling open the medical kit, he sifted through the contents, scrutinizing each piece. Finally, he plucked out a very expensive looking stone talisman about the size of a bit attached to the back of a sticking plaster.

“Ahhh, fantastic. Miss Skylark did not skimp on her personal medical kit,” Limerence mused, peeling the back off the bandage. Turning to my driver, he applied the bandage carefully over the wound. She hissed and shut her eyes, tightly, tears leaking down her cheeks. “Although, I suppose considering what sort of ‘activities’ she got up to in that little lair of hers, I am not surprised.”

“Activities? Please tell me it wasn’t something more depraved than cutting off bits of ponies…”

“No, nothing quite so mundane, I’m afraid. I’ll show you in the control room in a moment. Is the cult...restrained?” he asked.

“For the moment, yes, I think so. If I know Beam heads, they’re going to come down and half of them will fall asleep for the next ten hours.”

“What about Miss Cerise, then?” He nodded in the direction of the girl who was still laid out on the floor a couple of meters from the altar. Her hooves weren’t hobbled, but her horn was locked off and somepony had found a mostly clean robe to pull over her.

“Honestly, I think we’re best off leaving her where she is until we’re ready to leave,” I replied, thinking. “I don’t want to carry her and this room will be reasonably safe and secure for longer than just about anywhere else once we’ve got the cult upstairs. She’s not likely to wake up, is she?”

“Not a chance,” he replied, examining his hoofwork with the bandage. Lowering his head, he pressed his horn against the talisman and fed it a quick burst of energy.

Taxi's pained expression melted immediately. She let out a happy sigh as the tightly coiled muscles in her shoulders relaxed and the healing spell got to work. “Mmm...oh that feels lovely…”

“There is a mild soporific in the enchantment. I am loathe to consider how many bits Skylark spent on that particular piece of magic. We will still need to have the shot removed from the muscle, but it should allow you to function until we can find surgery,” Limerence answered. “That is, if the blood loss is not too severe.”

Setting her jaw, Taxi heaved herself to her hooves and took a careful step on the injured leg. When the pain didn’t immediately bring her to her knees, she slid down off the altar and pushed her head through the strap looped over her cannon, settling it around her neck.

“Hey! Geranium!” I shouted, and the mare poked her head from behind a boiler. Unhooking my shotgun from its mountings, I tossed it on the altar. “Gun. Keep the cultists covered and if any of them decide to get frisky, blow their brains out.”

Several of the cultists cringed against one another at that. Most seemed too shell-shocked to really consider much more than basic self-preservation.

“Are you out of your ever-loving little pony mind, Detective?!” Geranium yelled back. “I don’t know how to use a gun!”

“It’s easy! Pull the trigger and this end goes boom!” I said, indicating the barrel.

“Detective, I am going to... to... grah! Fine! You utter, utter bastard! I hope you live just so I can make you regret all of this one day!” she snapped, marching towards the front of the room and sweeping the sawn off shotgun up in her magic, then stomping back toward the crowd, keeping the weapon levitating in front of herself. She took up position at the back of the room, sagging onto her rump in the doorway and glowering at any of the cultists who tried to turn around to look at her.

Taxi leaned a little closer to me and said, in a low voice, “Empty gun?”

“Of course. You think I’m an idiot?” I replied, rattling my pocket which was full of all the remaining shells.

“The jury is still out on that. I’ll be deciding based on whether or not we get out of here.”

****

We followed Limerence back to the control room, leaving the sullen lawyer to guard the cult.

Swift was poking around the wall of bones at the back of the room, her notepad out and her pencil in the edge of her mouth. The acrid stink of vomit was everywhere in the tiny space, but she’d had the good grace to pick a corner.

One edge of the sheet over Astral Skylark was flipped back, revealing the peacefully resting face of the dead priestess.

“Sir?” Swift said, looking up as we filed in.

“Hey, kid. What’s our status? Learn anything useful?” I asked.

She scratched at her ear with one wingtip. “Um... useful can mean an awful lot of things, Sir. I nosed around where I could, but it’s... it’s like some kind of weird shrine or something. All this stuff is about Princess Luna. All the newspaper articles are about Princess Luna.”

She picked up one from the altar that only had a spot of blood on it and read it aloud. “Princess Luna has a new stallion in her life?” She snatched up another. “Princess Luna, sweet on a mare from Trottingham?”

Before she could pick up another, I put a hoof on her leg. “Alright, I think I’ve got it. What’s the story with these so-called ‘activities’ Limerence was going on about?”

Reaching around behind the altar where Skylark’s body lay, she latched on to something and started hauling it out. Inch by inch, a chest of some kind slid out from where it’d been carefully concealed.

It reminded me loosely of Ruby Blue’s travel chest, although of a much cheaper model with none of the durability enhancements or garnish. The corners were busted and the top had a broken clasp. Shipment stickers from every corner of Equestria coated the sides, though most seemed to come from different sections of Canterlot. Featured on one side, a black, smiling kitten with one paw stuck down in the bottom of an open purse leered out of a faded poster.

“I found this. I think it’s Miss Skylark’s, but I didn’t open it yet.”

Taxi limped over to the box and ran a hoof over the tiny cat. “Astral Skylark used to be ‘Ebon Kitten’, right? Funny that she’d keep something that links her so directly to who she used to be.”

“A con artist is a con artist, whether they’re stealing nicknacks from the rich or picking pockets,” I murmured. “Something tells me she wasn’t exactly full of remorse.”

Limerence moved to the body, pulling his kerchief to his face as he drew the sheet back. Thankfully, the side facing us was the one with a wing still attached. “That sounds like an excellent supposition. These are most curious, as well. She was not an alicorn. She had none of the powers of an alicorn... however, the wings or horn are the most immediate sign of transformation. I admit I am at something of a loss. The musculature here is... odd.”

“The muscles are wrong, is what you mean,” Taxi said, pulling her jeweler’s goggles over her head as she gently nosed me sideways so she could get to the body.

Swift paused in her furious scribbling and looked up. “Like... wrong, how?”

“Well, to begin... I think these wings are probably from a stallion,” my driver flopped the broken limb backwards over Skylark’s back and Limerence gulped as the broken bones scraped against one another. “Funny this... it’s just attached.”

“What do you mean ‘attached’?”

“As in, these wings could never fly.”

I stopped breathing for a second, processing that as my eyes roved over the broken wing structure.

“The magical channels are all dead,” Taxi continued, “The musculature is completely atrophied, if it was ever there to begin with. I doubt she could even have kept this from dragging the ground.”

“That would explain why nopony seems to have seen her in public without her robe on... well... ever. Still, are we... seriously saying she stole somepony’s wings?” I asked, rubbing the bridge of my muzzle as I thought back to the Museum. The thought of having been inches from somepony who was cutting horns, hooves, and wings not more than a few days ago made my fur crawl.

“Stole? Very possibly,” Limerence murmured, glancing over the body and the wall of bones behind it. “There are no less than four interlocking magics at work here. The ritual she performs on her victims, this spell core, the zebra alchemy, and the magic of Supermax itself. This is an extraordinarily complex spell system for even a knowledgeable unicorn, much less a former thief. Each part meshes with some other. I would go so far as to say that not one iota is of Astral Skylark’s design.”

“What makes you think that? Isn’t she the one who wanted to transform herself?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, and if I read the runes on it correctly, it would have certainly helped with the grafting of wings to her back and perhaps even muscle development, given time and enough magic,” Limerence replied, stepping over to the spell core and running his hoof over the surface. “This was not, however, designed to help her become an alicorn. Without cracking it open, I have only the surface runes to read from, but this is zebra rune work and... it is incomplete.”

“Incomplete how?”

He touched the core, moving his toe underneath each rune down the side. “These are control runes. Each one is designed with a specific amount of arcane current. Once that amount of power is met, the next rune takes over. They are missing a transitional rune which would allow them to step up to maximum power, safely. I can only think it is an intentional omission. If I had to guess, I’d say this spell core was designed to cast its spell and then explode.”

I took an involuntary step back from the box. “You mean...detonate? It’s not still ticking, is it?”

“No, not at all. This room, however, is far from ‘safe’,” he murmured, pointing towards the wall of bones with his horn. “Those... I do believe, are phylacteries. Phylacteries torn from... living... ponies.”

I tilted my head, puzzled. “Pardon, I’m afraid I’m not entirely familiar with that word.”

“Soul containers,” Taxi murmured. “The zebras I went to stay with once used to make them. They don’t anymore, but they would honor their elders by preserving their souls so they could watch over the village after they were gone.”

“Indeed,” Limerence went on. “These are nothing so noble, nor so kind, I’m afraid. Astral Skylark contained the souls, memories, and energies of those she killed. Her ritual would simply drag the entirety of a living or recently deceased pony into some part of their anatomy -- usually one with many magic channels -- then allow her to hack it off and keep it. They contain enormous magical energy.”

Swift inhaled sharply. “That’s more necromancy, right?”

“The blackest of necromancy. Not even the raising of the dead is so foul an act. If we had a death penalty in Equestria, this would garner it. As it is, life sentence to Tartarus without hope of parole is the best somepony who commits this crime can hope for.”

A thick silence fell over the room as the four of us considered exactly what we’d found ourselves in. I’d expected a bit of hocus pocus, and maybe some nutbar killing ponies for the ‘glory of heaven’. That sort of thing isn’t entirely unheard of.

Murder for spellwork in an attempt to turn oneself into an alicorn was a fresh flavor of sick.

“I... mmm... Sir? Can I ask something?” Swift put in.

“Kid, I don’t see how anything you could ask could make this situation worse…”

“Oh... um... Sir, I think you’re wrong about that,” Swift said, laying her pencil across the top of her notepad.

I rubbed my eyes with both hooves, trying to soothe the pounding ache that had taken up residence behind them. “You’re probably right. Let’s hear it anyway.”

My partner’s lips drew down into a thoughtful frown, then she shook herself and asked, with some trepidation, “Are... are the souls still inside those horns and wings and stuff?”

Oooh, how I wished I could strike the words ‘nothing’, ‘could’, ‘make’, ‘this’, ‘situation’, and ‘worse’ from my vocabulary. I’d be happy to lose each and every one of them, just so I could never string them together in that particular sentence again.

There was another protracted silence as all eyes turned on Limerence. His eyelids fluttered and he took a step back, then swallowed a lump in his throat. “I...I do not know. It is... it is possible certainly...”

“Is there some way of finding out?” I asked. “I think we’d all kinda like to know.”

Limerence hesitated, wetting his lips before moving over to the wall of bones. Forcing his trembling hooves to stillness, he lowered his forehead to one of the severed unicorn horns. The particular one he chose was short and a little stubby, the color of a chicken egg.

His horn shone, then the other responded with a spurt of violet sparks.

Limerence’s pupils shrank and he pushed himself back, clutching his hoof to his chest. “Oh… oh dear...”

“I’ll take that to mean we’ve got a whole heap of victims still in the room with us,” I murmured.

“Yes. Yes, these souls have not been burnt. They are still...occupied.”

Taxi covered her muzzle with her hoof and Swift’s pencil hit the floor with an audible ‘click’.

“Crap on toast,” I muttered, idly kicking at my trigger bit.

It was a long few moment before anypony could think of anything to say.

“So... lemme get this entirely straight in my mind.” My driver put her hooftips on the sides of her head, massaging in little circles. “What we’ve got is an entire room full of this city’s great and good out there, stoned out of their gourds and looking to hump the night away. and a murdering priestess in here with a machine for making alicorns. Anypony we call in for support from official sources is going to make the situation worse.”

“And... we’ve still got one of those moon guns unaccounted for. Speaking of those, Swift, did you-”

“I picked them all up. I put the moon weapons in a box behind the altar, and I counted them.”

“Smart kid.”

Taxi was up and poking at the wires on the wall, lightly tracing the connections between the wing bones, horns, and hooves that made up the strange symbol Skylark had been using to store the energies of her spell.

“So, exactly what is this spell core supposed to do if it’s meant to blow up afterwards?” she asked, nudging the cords that led around to the control station, then under the altar. “This all looks like a mess…”

“That is an excellent description,” Limerence replied. “This... bodge was largely hacked into the original magic draining enchantments with... well, nothing short of arcane villainy and amateur electrical work. There are wasted voltages everywhere. Still, it is a very impressive piece of barn-door wizardry. It functions, in spite of its inefficient design.”

“Alright... so, if we remove it, can we at least give Tourniquet some better control over this place?” I asked, thinking about the number of cultists who probably still remained upstairs.

“Oh, I do believe so,” Limerence said with a slightly maniacal gleam in his eye as he levitated a pair of insulated pliers with red handles and a book titled ‘Electrical Work For Psychopaths’ out of his saddlebags. “Removing it should be a simple matter of disconnecting the extra parts, hooking the original wiring back together, and restoring power. It’s all rather helpfully color coded. It will take some time, however, and I cannot guarantee Tourniquet’s comfort if she is awake.”

“Yeah, well, shutting her down isn’t an option and I’m pretty sure she’ll be happier once it’s done. Isn’t that right?” I asked, addressing the air above my head. The ladybug in my mane buzzed a quick agreement.

“Then I will begin. I estimate some success within an hour or so. In the meantime, I will require silence and I think it best the rest of you leave this area, in case I inadvertently cause an explosion.”

“Is that likely?” Taxi asked, glancing around the control room with a certain nervousness.

“Do you wish to find out?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Point taken,” I said. “Alright, Swift, Sweets... saddle up. We’re heading upstairs. We need to handle the prisoners and get back to Tourniquet to see about arranging our exit. In the meantime, Limerence, you see what you can do for Tourniquet’s control of this place and check Skylark’s box for traps. I want to open it when I get back.”

Limerence snipped at the air with his electrical pliers. “Of course, Detective."

****

Geranium hadn’t moved from her position on the stairs, the shotgun propped against her shoulder as she scowled at everything and nothing simultaneously. A few of the cultists were finally sane enough to be trying to talk to her, but she knew the score and seemed to be ignoring them. One portly, orange stallion in particular, with a big, ingratiating smile who I’m pretty sure I’d seen at a police event was trying to explain how it was all a big misunderstanding.

“-really, Miss! We’re just here for a bit of fun. We had no idea Miss Skylark was capable of so much violence. If you’ll just let me make a call, I can have this all cleared away and nopony need ever know what happened,” he said, winking and trying to elbow in her direction. “There would probably even be a nice check in it for you, if you help us against those crazy ponies. They’re not police, you know.”

The lawyer caught sight of us and rose to her hooves. “Thank Celestia... if I have to listen to these idiots blather for another minute, I’m going to shoot one just on principle! What are we doing?”

“Securing the prisoners,” I replied, then turned to the crowd and raised my voice so I could be heard in the back. “Alright everypony! On your hooves. We’re heading upstairs. You will survive tonight, if you are smart. If you are stupid... well, you will still probably survive tonight, but you’ll do it without kneecaps.” I stepped back and rested my hoof on Swift’s shoulder as I continued, “My partner here is a pony who values cooperation. She will be watching closely to ensure this little stroll we’re about to go on goes off without a hitch. She will also be claiming the kneecaps of anypony who would consider creating hitches. Whether she shoots them, or chews them off will be up to her discretion.”

“Ch-chews them o-off?” the hefty stallion stuttered.

Swift gave him a toothy grin and the entire crowd let out a collection of terrified gasps and whimpers. My partner’s grin spread a little farther. I was gladdened, not for the first time, that she was on our side. Those teeth could scare the scales off a crocodile.

I leaned down to her ear and stage-whispered, loud enough for everypony to hear, “If any of them decide to be stupid, shoot the fat guy first, alright?”

“Yes, sir!” Swift replied, chipper as a chipmunk.

Chunky, as I was starting to think of him, hunched lower in his seat.

It was rudimentary herd psychology which works beautifully on criminals of all stripes; if you make the ambitious, clever, or confident ponies the first one to take a bullet when a group is considering rebellion, they’ll be your biggest supporters when locking the lot of them away.

“Everypony up and march!” I directed. “Two by two, and I want to see every chin up good and high! Anypony lowers their head, I will consider it a sign they’re going for a weapon! No talking, or I will consider it planning for an escape. You obey me, and you will live through tonight.”

The order was followed by lots of groaning and crying as the remains of the cult hauled themselves to their hooves, waking the friends they’d been tethered to who’d fallen asleep and helping get them up as well. Coming down off Beam to find yourself chained to somepony else’s legs is not the best way to rise in the morning. More than a few restrictor rings popped and crackled as waking unicorns tried to wrench some magic through them.

I gave them a few minutes to get situated in two lines, most managing to keep their heads up although some were nodding so badly I doubted they could go for a weapon even if they’d had one.

Taxi and I took the back, while Swift and Geranium lead our little procession. Two by two, the cult of Nightmare Moon trotted up the steps, sometimes half-carrying their stoned brethren, but none of them willing to be the first find out just how serious I was about having my partner shoot or gnaw on them.

At the top of the stairs, I whispered to the ladybug in my mane, “Queenie, are we clear on this floor?”

My mane hummed.

“Alright, brilliant. Tourniquet... could you open the door to the sub-basement? We’re coming out.”

A sucking sound and the hiss of releasing gases accompanied the heavy security door swinging out of the way. I tensed, ready for one of our little posse to try something stupid, but Swift had things well in hoof. She turned to face the front of the herd, her trigger in her teeth and Masamane leveled at the foremost pony, who just happened to be Chunky.

“In groups of four, I want you into the cells on either side!” I shouted, making the back row nearest me jump. “Four to a cell!”

“Be real, Detective…” somepony started to say. I didn’t catch who.

“Swift, somebody back here wants to argue!” I called forward. “Go ahead and shoot Chunky, then we’ll figure out who it was!”

I heard her gun’s hammer ratcheting back and Chunky backed up into the pony behind him, then snarled over one shoulder, “Anypony wants to be dumb will answer to me! You hear me back there, you idiots? You know I can make every one of your lives a living Tartarus!”

There was some shifting and muttering amongst the crowd, but no complaints after that. I was half inclined to find out who he was, but after tonight, it wasn’t likely to matter all that much.

“Good, good! Swift! You can let Chunky keep his knees, for now!” I yelled.

I heard a muffled ‘Yes, Sir!’, then nudged the nearest mare in the flank with my revolver’s barrel. She let out an indignant yelp and staggered into the pony in front of her.

“Like I said... spread out, get in the cages, and nopony dies tonight.”

For all my good intentions, I was damn tempted to give somepony an incentivizing shot to the flank considering all the hoofdragging that went on.

It was the work of a further twenty minutes to prod, poke, and corral the hobbled bourgeois into the open high security cells on either side of the long, empty hallways of the Secure Wing. Plenty of them grumbled, but nopony decided to raise a fuss, particularly since Swift saved Chunky for last, keeping him to one side with Masamane’s barrel never wavering from a spot just above his front right knee.

Just as we finished shoving Chunky into his own cell, Tourniquet’s mechanical voice rang out from a speaker overhead.

“Mister Hard Boiled! Miss Queenie figured out my nervous system so now I can watch you! Gosh you need a bath…”

“Thank you for reminding me. What’s your status up there?”

“I can control things again on most of the floors. Um...I think I can…-” She paused and I heard distant banging sounds echoing down the halls. “Yes! I can do it! I just put the top three floors in lockdown mode! You should be okay to move around.”

“Good work, girl! I was worried we were going to have to lock these ourselves. Can you shut all the cell doors on the Secure Wing?”

“One moment. There’s lots of stuff still busted, but I think so.”

I leaned against the wall, listening to the quiet mutterings of the cultists as they sat in their cells. With a heavy clunk, the doors all along the walls rattled into life as the decades-old machinery took over, slowly sliding them closed. I saw a hoof appear in the crack of one door, then quickly withdraw before it was clipped off as the cells slammed shut with a pleasing finality.

The hallway fell into a peaceable silence.

Swift finally let her trigger bit drop and Geranium wiped her forehead off with the back of one hoof, then cracked open the breach of her shotgun with her magic. Her eyes popped.

“Empty?!” she exclaimed. “You gave me... an empty…”

I smiled and snatched the shotgun out of her levitation field with my teeth, tugging my coat back to fit it into the holster before readjusting the duct-taped stock.

“Yes. You guarded the prisoners quite a treat for having such limited tools.”

“Gah! You are insufferable! Insane! A complete bastard and I would pray for your death, but I think you’ve probably already made for damn sure that’s going to happen soon anyway!I just hope you haven’t killed me along with you!” With that, Geranium stormed off down the hallway, turning into one of the bathrooms towards the other end.

I heard a stall door slam and called out, “Don’t go far! I might need you to do something!”

The reply was muffled, but it could either have been ‘Yes, Sir, Mister Hard Boiled, Sir!’ or something about my mother and an Ursa Major.

My driver exhaled a slow breath. “She’s got a point, Hardy. How are we going to get out of this? I mean, all those dead cultists... and then there’s somehow carrying Cerise out of here, and convincing the Chief not to fillet us alive.”

“None of which was helped by you killing Astral Skylark, Sweets,” I added, softly. A part of me hoped she’d let that pass. I knew she wouldn’t, and I’d known the confrontation was coming, but that didn’t make me any happier about it.

“Wait just a damn minute, here Hardy. Are you seriously telling me you wanted her alive?” she sputtered, taking a couple steps back.

I rounded on my driver, putting just a couple of inches between her and the end of my muzzle. “Taxi, please tell me you didn’t lick up so much of that Beam it’s addled your wits.”

“Sir-” Swift started, but I put my hoof on her muzzle without breaking eye contact with my driver.

“Kid, this needs to be said,” I said, then turned my attention back to Taxi. “You want to know what this all looks like, Sweets? You know what it will look like to anypony who isn’t the four of us? This looks like we snuck into a private religious ceremony, took up strategically significant positions, then butchered the participants with highly advanced magical weaponry at the behest of a mobster... and then chased down the leader of the religion into her private sanctum and assassinated her.”

Taxi’s eyes widened. “How can you say that? All those witnesses-”

“All those stoned, frightened Beam-head witnesses who were friends of Astral Skylark? Are we claiming them as witnesses? Or maybe the ladybugs? Could we possibly claim Tourniquet as a witness? The powerful, secret, magical construct who the damn Academy would love to rip to pieces to see how she works before handing whatever broken bits were left to the Essy office?”

“H-Hardy…”

“If she was alive, we could have paraded the psychopath out into the public square and every one of those scumbags back there would have turned against her to save their own skins from prosecution for necromancy. They’d have named names! The Lunar Passage would have come crashing down, and she’d have been alone, with nobody to turn to. If nothing else, if she were still alive we could have gotten the names of her patrons out of her! You... Sweets... you just made her a martyr! A dead, useless martyr. So we are not discussing what I wanted, because that didn’t matter to you. You wanted her dead. You killed her. You or your therapist will have to deal with that if we survive, but right now, you’ve left it for me.”

Ugh.

It felt like tossing a kitten in a blender.

Tears had started to run down her cheeks as my driver sat there, her mouth hanging open. I wanted to run to her, comfort her, pet her mane and tell her it was alright. I’d been doing that my whole life. She’d been there when Juniper died, to pull me out of the bottle.

I let my eyes slide closed and moved away from her, resting my head on the wall as I tried to still my pounding heart.

I don’t know anyone who likes taking their friends to task and there is no guide book when somepony’s best friend murders someone.

No, it wasn’t even a murder.

It was an execution. It was revenge for the dead at the expense of the living.

Swift and Limerence were gaping at me, but I ignored their uncomfortable stares and turned to look down the hallway.

“I’m... Hardy, I’m sorry... I... I wasn’t thinking…” Taxi stammered out, her eyes fixed on the stone floor.

“Doesn’t matter, Sweets,” I replied and she trailed off. “We’ve got to clean up this mess and get Cerise home safe before, in all likelihood, we go to jail for the rest of our lives, however short those may be.” I turned to our Archivist. “Now, Limerence. What are our options regarding the pieces of minotaur manure we’ve managed to bag ourselves? Can we use the wall of bones for evidence at some point?”

“Ahem. Not... immediately,” Limerence sighed, forcing his normally very rational mind back onto the tracks. “Any evidence of necromancy on this scale will inevitably lead to the involvement of Princess Celestia or Princess Luna or both. I doubt we can entirely avoid it at this point, either. As to our prisoners... mayhap our best bet is simply to let them go.”

“I don’t know how you can say that's an option, Lim,” I said, sourly.

“This collective of ponies going missing will prompt a massive search. While I doubt any of them penciled in ‘prison basement murder and orgy’ with their staff, we are unlikely to hide their absence for long.”

“Sir…” Swift asked, biting her lower lip. “I don’t... I don’t know why we can’t just leave them here...”

“Kid, there will be ponies looking for them,” I replied, raising one eyebrow at her.

“So? I mean, the Church won’t want the police looking here, and... and if we do this right, anypony who comes to look will find a locked, abandoned prison. Would you tell your secretary you were ‘going to Supermax’? They couldn’t have been doing this for long enough to get all those... those parts of ponies if they didn’t have a system worked out to keep anypony from finding out.”

“Hmmm... that’s not bad, kid. I mean, it’s got some issues, but... it’s not bad. Alright, we need to go find Tourniquet.”

“I’m right here, Detective,” Tourniquet added from overhead. “My door is open and the prisoners are okay. Oh, this is fun! I never got to do this when Mom was around! I... only got the doors upstairs locked. My internal defenses are still off.”

“We’ll be right there. Sit tight,” I replied, then shouted towards the bathroom where Geranium was hiding. “Hey! Finish wiping and get out here!”

The bathroom door slammed open and Geranium stalked out, her horn glittering dangerously. Her light blue face-fur was damp and she’d wet her mane so it would lay down a bit. She was very cute, for somepony who was giving me death glares. Maybe even because she was giving me death glares.

“Detective... I don’t know what this rock in my stomach can do, but it would be almost worth it to find out if it meant I could break your stupid head!”

“Yes, I’m sure. Now come on. We’re heading to Tourniquet’s control room.”

Geranium stopped dead in her tracks, then backed up.

“Wait... you mean... you mean you want me to come with you in there?”

I shrugged. “You’re coming with me, or we’re sticking you in a cell and you can wait for me to figure out what I’m doing with the rest of this lot.”

The lawyer cringed against the floor, eyes darting in both directions. “I... I... I can’t. I mean, I... I know you told her about me. I tried to be n-nice to her, but she’s just a m-machine...”

“Sweetheart, she’s a filly. She calls the Jailer of Supermax her mother. That’s not an exaggeration. That isn’t just some Essy-toaster oven a nutty scientist whipped together sitting down there. She used to be a pony. She still is a pony.”

The fear in her eyes masked a powerful guilt.

“I can’t see her again! She’ll... she’ll…” she cried.

“I can hear you, ya know,” Tourniquet said, her voice making the floor vibrate under our hooves.

If she hadn’t just been to the bathroom, I’m pretty sure there would have been a wet spot on the floor under Geranium.

“Please... please! I swear, I was just following her orders. She’d have killed me if I didn’t!” she begged, throwing herself on the floor and covering her head with both hooves..

“I’m mad at you, but I’m not going to hurt you. Sheesh!”

Lowering one hoof from her head, the mare hesitantly peeked out. “R-really?”

“Yes! Now, could you please get up off my floor? You’re making me feel silly.”

It was a full minute before Geranium gathered her courage to get back to her hooves, wiping a hoof over her business suit to clear a bit of dust as she tried to gather her dignity.

“I...I really want you to know I’m...I’m sorry. I feel like I wronged you more than anypony else here,” Geranium murmured. “I don’t even really remember what happened.”

“Thank you, Miss Geranium. That...that helps to hear. Now come see me! Miss Queenie has been letting me watch television!”

****

The four of us variously limped, staggered, and trotted our way down the empty, quiet corridors of Supermax. They seemed, somehow, a little less threatening on our second journey than they had on the first.

I held Taxi’s hoof as she walked, helping her keep the weight off of it. Though she claimed the enchanted sticking plaster had done wonders, she didn’t turn down the assistance.

Our trip was only interrupted so both Swift and I could make use of the ‘facilities’.

I’d finished urinating, and found myself just standing there in front of the metal mirror, staring into my own reflection. I looked like three kinds of crap. Bags under my eyes. Fur stained and matted with blood. My coat was likely to make any laundromat in the city call the police the second I presented it to them.

Truth be, I looked old.

A pony into his thirties shouldn’t look that old.

Twisting the handle on the sink, I ran some water in the basin and splashed it on my cheeks. It immediately turned ruddy brown as it swirled down the drain.

Celestia save me, I’d seen lots of death for one night. Too much.

“Oh, come now, boy... you’re not throwing the towel in, are you?”

I glanced up and found Juniper giving me his cocky smile from behind the mirror’s surface. It was a measure of exactly how shagged out I was that I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised.

“I was wondering what you were doing with yourself. Still looking over my shoulder from whatever corrupted hole you’ve managed to dig out in my brain?” I asked, scratching a flake of somepony else’s blood out of my eye.

“Yes and no. It’s been an exciting few days, hasn’t it? You mind if I ask why you’re worried about the girl?”

“Who? Tourniquet?”

“That sweet kid you’ve got following you around.”

“Swift,” I said, then my breath caught in my throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Damn me. If I was any sort of decent pony, I’d send her back to her grandmother, promise or not. Let Stella handle the ruckus she’d raise, but make sure she was safe...”

“Not your place, Hardy. You know it isn’t. Your place is to make sure she lives, but not to live her life for her. She’s where she wants to be.”

“Even if it gets her killed?” I asked, studying his olive face and scruffy, five’o’clock shadow.

“Not enough ponies get to do what they want to do with their lives. I did, right up until the very end, and... if I’m honest, I don’t regret even that part. It was worth it.”

Grabbing a handkerchief out of my pocket, I wiped my muzzle with it, immediately turning the cloth a fouled brown. “I’d planned on you and me sitting in the home for old cops together, pissing and moaning about our custard and how the orderlies wouldn’t give us a happy ending after our sponge baths. That was what I wanted.”

“Can’t all have what we want, but you know if you send her back to her grandmother, Swift will never forgive you. Worse, she’ll never forgive herself if you die out there and she couldn’t be there, whether or not she could have prevented it. She’ll always be that little filly who was too weak to go along.”

“Could be worse.”

“Could be. You could die, and she could have saved you... and then you’d be dead, and there’d be only one green-as-grass rookie with no partner and no sense of self-preservation to finish all of this.”

I tossed the ruined kerchief over the edge of the sink and left it there.

“You’re a smug prick when you’re right, Juni.”

“I know, baby cakes. Them’s the breaks.”

****

The control room was just as we’d left it, minus the monitors, which all displayed a picture of a cartoon cat.

Tourniquet’s secret door was wide open.

There’s something strange about seeing a hidden doorway left ajar. It just tweaks something in the mind that likes to see the world in proper order.

Geranium paused at the bottom of the stairs. I stopped beside her as Swift darted on ahead like a puppy going to see a good friend, vanishing into the darkness of Tourniquet’s chamber.

“I-I-I d-don’t think I can d-do this,” she muttered. I realized her chest was heaving. Truthfully, I’d been smelling the fear off her since we showed up.

“Awww dammit…” I groaned, reaching over and throwing one leg around the lawyer’s shoulders. Irritating as it is, a panic attack doesn’t respond to snarky comments. “Deep breaths, sweetheart. Come on, breathe with me.”

I inhaled slowly, pulled my hoof to my chest, then exhaled slowly, pushing it away just for demonstration. Geranium’s shaking took a while to still as she fought to follow my actions. Taxi leaned against the wall, one eyebrow raised as she watched me try to calm the other mare’s nerves.

After some time, she started to relax.

“A-alright. I’m fine. Just kinda cold. Stupid sprained ankle,” she grunted, taking a heavy step on one leg.

“You’re probably in shock. Try to keep breathing,” Taxi said.

“I know I’m in shock,” Geranium grunted. “I just need to be out of here, back in my own little apartment with my cat, my television, and a box of pecan cookies.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

****

Tourniquet’s room was lit up like a Hearth’s Warming Eve tree.

The snakes of cables stretched up to the ceiling were pulsing much more quickly, although the overhead lights had been lowered just enough to conceal the dead dragon attached to the wall. A constant breeze blew through the room as the ventilation system did its level best to push the stink of bodies out. Whereas before the room had seemed like a place of death, with the power systems operating it was almost beautiful.

Dozens of ladybugs swirled around Tourniquet and Swift like a strange cyclone as the two of them sat together, their front hooves resting over top of one another, deep in conversation. That they were almost the same size gave the impression of two gossiping foals. My partner was smiling properly for the first time in hours.

As we came in, I thought Geranium might make a run for it. Panic attack over, she still looked ready to bolt if Tourniquet so much as glanced at her.

“Detective!” Tourniquet called out, raising her head. “Miss Geranium!”

“Hey, honey. How goes?” I asked, trotting down the empty area between the door and the mechanical filly. The girl was looking much better. Her crystalline eyes moved with their own internal light. Even her funny plastic tail seemed a bit livelier. She looked much less like a broken doll and more like a pony.

“It’s going amazing!” she squeaked happily as the wires on her back lifted her suddenly off the ground. She swung across the room and dropped right in front of me, bouncing up and down on her hooves. “Detective, I can see! I mean, my cameras outside are working again! I’ve got access to the doors and locks. The sensors around... um... around... wherever you are... seem to be a little weird for some reason, but I can see lots of stuff! I’ve been watching you downstairs, except when you went into the Mechanical Room. I really kinda wish I had cameras down there. I heard the fight, though! Was it amazing?”

She paused in the stream of words and took a quick step back, looking at my bloody trenchcoat. Sniffing at the air, she went ‘phew’ and hopped away. “You stink!”

“Yes, I’m aware. Trust me, it would be impossible for me not to notice how I smell right now,” I replied, glancing around as a couple of ladybugs dropped down onto Tourniquet’s ears. She ignored them, her wide smile managing to bring one to my face. “Are you... you know... feeling better?”

“Much! The ponies upstairs realized something was wrong a couple of minutes ago when I closed all the cells, but most of them are... well... stuck in their cells. Some tried to cast some spells, but I can take that magic without draining it directly from them or having my symbol on their bodies.” She hesitated, then lowered her ears as a look of sadness crossed her face. “I...I managed to boost my receiver range long enough to get a signal from outside. My antenna is broken, but I can still get some signals. It...it really has been fifteen years...”

“Yes, honey...it has. I’m sorry.”

Tourniquet glanced over my shoulder at Geranium who was cowering in the doorway. “You can come in. I... I know you’re not working for the bad ponies anymore.”

“I-If it’s all the same to y-you, I’d... r-rather not,” the lawyer stuttered.

“If you don’t, I can’t take the stone out of your tummy. Do you really want to try to...uh...’pass’...that?” the filly giggled.

“Take...take it out?” She backed up a couple of steps.

“Oh stop being a silly filly. It won’t hurt,” Tourniquet assured her, waving her forward.

Geranium hovered for a second between flight and surrender, but finally the desire to avoid a stomach pump got the better of her. She trotted forward, lowering herself beside the mechanized filly.

“I’m really, really sorry. I swear, I wouldn’t have done any of this if I’d had a choice. They were going to kill me if I disobeyed them,” she murmured.

“Meesh, could you stop apologizing so much? You didn’t eat my dog or something. I used to run the most secure prison in the whole world! I’ve read way, way worse things in my case files,” Tourniquet sniffed, waving a dismissive hoof. “Now stand still and try not to breathe in too deeply.”

“W-why not?”

“I’m only used to doing this on dragons. I don’t wanna accidentally attach your lungs to your stomach or something,” she replied.

Before Geranium could consider a rebuttal, Tourniquet placed her metal hoof on the mare’s side. The moon symbol began to glow, then to surge brightly as power flowed down the cables in her back into her leg. Biting down on her lip, the lawyer shut her eyes, forcing herself to be still as the girl worked.

Minutes crept by as Swift, Taxi, and I watched with interest.

At last, Tourniquet hummed a short tune and her hoof flashed. As she pulled it away, a solid mass came with it, and Geranium let out a soft moan, sinking onto her stomach.

“There we go! That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Tourniquet said, holding up the control stone. “Not bad for not having done that in fifteen whole years, now was it?”

“How’d you do that?” Swift asked, nosing at her new friend. “C-can you perform like...surgery without cutting a pony?”

“Oh! Hah! I have no idea. I totally wish I could, though. That would be a really neat superpower,” Tourniquet dropped the rock and wiped her hoof off on the floor. “Oooh, yuck... I forgot they come out sticky…”

Geranium drew in a deep breath and pushed herself back to her hooves. “Wow, that felt...really weird.”

“You’re lucky you aren’t a dragon! I’d have had to pull it out of your head!” the filly said, snickering behind her hoof.

My driver pulled at her braid with her teeth. “Your mom used to do that...didn’t she?”

“I... yeah. Mom... Mom did bad things to those... those dragons. She said they deserved it, but I never...I mean, she was my Mom...” Tourniquet lowered her eyes and her tail tucked between her rear legs.

“It’s okay, honey. Nopony here is judging for stuff that happened back then,” Taxi said, easing a hoof around the little filly’s shoulders, carefully avoiding the cables.

She gulped and bobbed her head. The lights in her eyes flashed and flickered with a pattern of blues and purples that seemed to indicate worry and sadness. “I...I know. It’s just hard, you know? I mean, I miss Mom, but... but I know she wasn’t really a good pony. I’m not dumb or anything. I had to remove the stones before we sent the dragons home, but that was before the fake control room was built, so there was a big hole they could stick their heads through and-oooooh! Oh no! Not that on-”

Tourniquet sat up straight and her eyes began to swirl more violently. Overhead, the cables spreading out across the ceiling flared and the low buzz of magical interference started to make my ears ache.

Before any of us could respond, the secret door began swinging shut. Swift took a running leap, but even at her speed she had no hope of reaching it before it sealed itself closed.

“That can’t be good,” Taxi muttered, looking all about.

“What? Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked. The girl didn’t respond. She didn’t even seem to see me. Raising one hoof, I waved it in front of her face.

“What’s wrong with her?” Swift exclaimed, gently pushing her muzzle against Tourniquet’s cheek.

Everypony jumped as speakers somewhere in the walls screeched, “Detective! This is Limerence! Can you hear me?”

Recovering quickly, I shouted, “What is it Lim? Tourniquet’s just gone sort of...blank. What’s going on down there?”

“Ah! Good! I didn’t know if this microphone connected to yours, but it appears Miss Sausurrea wished to leave herself a means of directly communicating with her daughter. I believe we may be in a bit of bother.”

“Don’t say ‘bother’. If we’re screwed, I want you to say screwed, dammit!”

Taxi held up one hoof. “Wait... Hardy, do you feel that?”

I looked around, then raised my eyebrows. “I don’t feel anything, Sweets.”

“Yeah...exactly.”

My breath stuck in the back of my throat as I realized what was missing. The persistent, worried buzz of the ladybugs had masked the sound, but now that I was paying attention I could feel it, or rather, not feel it.

The breeze had stopped.

“Detective, I’m showing the entire ventilation system has shut down. I don’t know what precisely is going on, but I think we may be in some form of... reset... mode.”

“Well, what was the last thing you did?” I asked, pulling my coat under myself and sitting on the carpet.

“Hmmm...I was simply slicing a section of cable free from...oh...oh dear. Yes, I see,” Something heavy shifted on the other end of the speaker as Limerence’s horn sang over the open line. “I had to cut loose what I believe is the control protocols for the construct’s body and mind to remove a portion of the jury rigging which appears to keep Miss Tourniquet from making full use of her internal structural controls. It would seem it was also attached to a secondary system which I didn’t notice.”

“So, are we screwed or not?” I snapped.

“Give me a moment, Detective! This is brain surgery on a brain the size of a building! I refuse to rush!” the librarian bit back.

It should be noted that I hate waiting.

I am well aware I am impatient. It’s not a great trait for a cop to have, particularly when a huge section of the job is hurry up and wait. It’s especially irritating when trapped in the basement of a dangerous super-prison with its magical heart stuck in some kind of autistic mode and the air running out. I’d no desire to die choking on the stink of dead dragon.

It didn’t help that Swift was frantically nuzzling Tourniquet’s cheek, one wing tucked around the other girl’s back as though that might actually do something.

“Tourniquet... can... can you hear me?” she whispered, her eyes wet as she tried to coax some life out of the metal filly.

“Kid, she’s out for the count...” I sighed, rubbing one fetlock across my forehead.

“Yeah, but maybe she can hear me!” Swift snapped, glaring at me. “She didn’t look like she wanted whatever Lim just did, so just...just hush, Sir!”

I forced myself not to smile. It was not the appropriate time for smiles. I still had to bite my tongue as Swift wrapped her other wing around Tourniquet and buried her face in the girl’s plastic mane.

“Detective!” Limerence called, sounding jubilant.

“Is that good news, Lim? Tell me that’s good news!”

“Yes... well, it may be good news. I have determined the source of the fault and I can restore power to the control protocols!”

“Fantastic, Lim! Do it”

“Errr...this may have had an unfortunate side effect. There are memory crystals embedded in this portion of the control system that have been without power for more than a minute.”

“So... what? Tourniquet just lost her memory? Is that what you’re saying?” I barked and Swift clutched her friend more tightly.

“No, nothing of the sort!” Limerence replied. My shoulders relaxed a little. “Her memories are stored within the construct’s body, which seems relatively homeostatic. I believe these crystals relate in some way to... authorization and security. It will be impossible to know how without restoring power.”

“Yeah, well, we’re stuck in a room with a quickly dwindling supply of air, so I think there ain’t much we can lose!”

“I am certain you will regret those words at some point, Detective. Please, stand by. I’m restoring power now."

Act 2, Chapter 38: New Boss in Town

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 38: New Boss in Town

An impression common among many of Equestria’s less friendly neighbors – such as the changelings, diamond dogs, the remaining dragons, and some of the more xenophobic buffalo and griffins - is that Equestrian employment is a function of the Sun Tyrant branding all ponies just before puberty with their assigned societal position, in which they must toil their entire lives in service to the Solar Empire or be banished to the moon.

A misunderstanding to be sure, but an easy one to make.

It is true that the cutie mark defines a pony’s destiny and/or goals, and thus their ideal form of employment. Those who seek justice become cops or lawyers; those who seek to spread joy become party planners, masseurs or pharmaceutical researchers, and so on. This usually works out pretty well, although labor demands and the Cutie Market don’t always hold exactly the same shape, and even with ideal career representation on every citizen’s hindquarters, there are margins where unemployment can arise.

Equestria is equipped with generous social safety nets and excellent universal health care, through a combination of Celestia’s generosity, charity drives amongst the Canterlot and Manehattan aristocracy, and the work of good-hearted ponies everywhere. That said, those social safety nets are not always entirely reliable, because in Equestria, government shutdowns are not exactly unheard of. In other nations, shutdowns occur due to gridlock or partisanship(which in some griffin tribes involves actual partisans). In Equestria, shutdowns occur when the heads of government flee through magic portals, get eaten by mad trees… or when ancient evils show up, decide they want to feast on everypony’s magic/love/intangibles/obscure bodily fluids, and kidnap various Princesses. Even locally, the social services office may be temporarily closed because one of the workers brushed the wrong artifact and wrecked the building with a 50-foot plate-wielding equipomorphic manifestation of last night’s domestic squabble.

So most ponies prefer to actually find employment, although things get tough when one can’t find a position that aligns with one’s talent. Equestrian employers take Special Talents strongly into consideration when hiring ponies, and the only jobs which will readily take ponies who can’t find work in their own fields tend to be hideously unpleasant yet deeply in demand – such as rock farmers, magical contamination clean-up crews, and most infamously, cutie mark acquisition counselors.

Still, there are times when perfect career alignment is trumped by simple necessity.

-The Scholar

Please stand by.

I knew it was my imagination and it was likely to take us days to exhaust the air supply in Tourniquet’s chamber, but I felt like there was a weight pressing on my chest with every breath.

Please stand by.

An earth pony might be more okay with being underground than most pegasi or unicorns, but nopony wants to die of suffocation because their show-off of a librarian cut the wrong wire.

We’d been ‘standing by' for a full fifteen minutes since Limerence’s last report and any attempts to shout at him had been ignored. That or he’d shut off the speaker.

I wished, not for the first time, that I’d thought to bring a watch. We’d been in Supermax for hours and the dawn was likely soon approaching. Much as my own oxygen needs were going to get pressing at a point, all those cultists were in their cells in much the same condition and with a shorter time-frame.

That was more dead bodies than I think my conscience could handle.

“Taxi, how's your leg?” I asked my driver, trying to distract myself from thoughts of asphyxiation.

She touched the bandage, then shook her head. “I can feel the bullet in the muscle when I walk, but it’s not bleeding anymore.”

I turned to my partner, who was still wrapped around Tourniquet, hugging the construct like a teddy-bear. The cables coming out of the girl’s back had gone dead, save for pulsing only occasionally.

“What about you, kid?”

“I’m… so far beyond scared right now, Sir, that I’m not really sure what I’m feeling,” Swift replied. Her feather-tips shook with every word. “Can we get out of here if Lim can’t get the door open?”

“Well, we’ve got two earth ponies and a fair bit of ordnance left over. If nothing else, we might be able to use some parts of that dragon or maybe hot-wire the door…”

“Sir, I know you think I’m kinda gullible and... you’re probably right about that, but by now I can tell when you’re lying to me,” Swift murmured, giving me a reproachful look from behind one of Tourniquet’s ears.

I rubbed the spot between my eyes with my hooftip and swallowed my ego. I’d thought I was a little bit better liar than that. Still, there’s nothing I do worse than tell a good friend bad news.

“I’m sorry, kid. I’ve got no idea how we’ll get out of here if he can’t fix whatever happened. We’ve come this far, though, and Limerence is nothing if not both intelligent and stubborn. He’ll figure something out. We can have Queenie send for somepony to… do something. Maybe. I don’t know how they’d get in. Maybe Chief Jade could break us out if we tell her Cerise is still down in the temple...”

Swift thought for a moment, then her lips curled into a weak smile.

“Sir, if we don’t get out - I know this is going to sound totally crazy after all this insane stuff we’ve done since I met you last month - but I think I had fun.”

“Heh...yeah. Celestia save me, I did too,” I replied, leaning back on the carpet with a slightly dusty plush cat for a pillow.

“I’m fine, too if anyone cares.” Geranium said, grumpily, as she stretched out beside me.

****

You’d think time would pass quickly, but there’s only so many heartfelt statements of comradeship you can make before you start to get a bit bored. Once we’d gotten most of them out of our system, including a lovely soliloquy from Sweets, we settled in for the business of waiting either for news or death.

Swift refused to leave Tourniquet’s side, holding the stiffly sitting girl with one leg for the first half hour before deciding that was less comfortable and slumping back to back. Geranium, meanwhile, had taken a good twenty minutes to chew me out with a surprisingly diverse vocabulary of cuss words before she’d gotten down to the business of sulking in a corner.

Silence had reigned for more than ten minutes, since none of us could really think of anything to say. Even tic-tac-toe couldn’t hold my attention for long.

I threw myself to my hooves. Taxi looked up from a crossword book she’d pillaged from Tourniquet’s supply and Swift yawned, lazily, rubbing her tummy with one hoof as she watched me get up in a determined fashion for the fourth or fifth time in the last hour.

“Alright, I think we’re down to trying to force the door again.”

“Oh, sit down and let us all die with some damn dignity, Detective,” the lawyer complained, poking through a box of broken doll parts with one hoof.

Swift shook her head and rolled onto her side. “Ugh...Sir, we tried kicking it, digging through the dragon for any organs that might explode, blowing it up with extra shells, trying to open the wall panels and short of a Cloudhammer I don’t think-”

“Detective! This is Limerence!”

Limerence’s sweet, sweet voice echoed around the chamber.

“You bastard! What took you so long!?” I shouted.

“Pardon the extended wait. I had to disable the speaker system for some period while I figured out what one of the secondary systems was routed through. Turned out it was connected to the ice-cream maker in the floor two kitchens… eheh… mmm… yes…” He trailed off into a self-conscious cough. “Better safe than sorry, as they say. Anyway, I managed to remove all of the jury rigging and I should be able to return control to the construct now.”

“Throw the damn switch!” I barked.

“There... is no switch that I can see… I have several levers and a toggle-”

“Turn the air back on or I swear to the high holy heavens I will find you in the afterlife and-”

“Pardon, yes… ah… throwing... ‘the switch’.”

I shut my eyes and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Nothing. No fans spooling up. No hum of technology.

I opened one eyelid. Tourniquet was still where she had been, but like a marionette that’d just been picked up by the puppet master, her eyes were wide and she was looking all around. She glanced down to find Swift’s legs wrapped tightly around her midsection.

“Detective… Mister… Mister Hard Boiled?” she asked, plaintively.

I was so relieved that I almost hugged her. The relief lasted just long enough for me to take stock of my surroundings again. Then the worry returned.

“Hardy, I still don’t hear the ventilation system,” Taxi said.

“Oh Celestia, we’re all gonna diiie…” Geranium threw her hooves in the air and flopped onto her back.

I raised my voice. “Limerence! We’ve still got no air coming through here!”

“I… I am uncertain what is wrong, Detective. That... should have turned everything back on.”

“What happened?” Tourniquet asked, her eyebrows drawn together as she put her legs around Swift, then looked up at the still-dark cables leading out of her back. “Everything was...was starting up again! Now I can’t see anything! Not even outside! All my sensors are down!”

“Limerence was futzing with your controls downstairs, trying to fix you… and he tripped something,” I answered.

“The last thing I remember was him asking if he should disconnect the ITCV Security Control Matrix and I said ‘yes’, but… oh… oh no. I got it out of order! Oh, stupid, stupid pony!” She smacked herself on the forehead with a hoof. “He needed to attach the system to the adjacent power generator first for a clean transfer… then he disconnected... wait... oh... oh my gosh!”

The mechanical filly put a toe to the side of her head and her shining eyes dimmed slightly. I couldn’t read her expression but it seemed somewhere between fear and excitement.

“Ohmygoshohmygosh!” Tourniquet’s voice rose until the speaker in her throat crackled then bounced up onto her rear hooves. “Ohmygosh!”

“What is it, honey? Come on, talk to us!” I said, trying to keep the hard edge out of my words that I was definitely feeling.

“There’s… there’s no warden! Whatever Mister Limerence did, there’s no more warden!” she gasped.

“Of course there’s no Warden, honey. Your mom…”

“I don’t mean like that! All my security protocols were erased! All the authorizations! They’re all gone! I’m going to go to sleep soon unless there’s… unless there’s a Warden.” She paused, and yawned, her eyes dimming. “There has to be a Warden.”

“But… you mean there’s some kind of security protocol that ties this place to one pony?” I asked, incredulously.

She nodded as a sudden weariness seemed to overtake her and she sank onto her stomach. “Yes. It… it was always Mom. I mean, Mom was always the Warden, even after she left. Somepony has to be the Warden or all the locks close. Everything closes. I didn’t even… I didn’t even know until just now, but that’s what’s happening.”

I stood there, processing that statement.

“Sir, we can’t... we can’t let her go to sleep. How would we wake her up again?” Swift asked, urgently.

“I know that, kid. I just… don’t know what to do to stop it,” I murmured.

I heard a noise and looked sideways at Geranium. Her eyes had lit up and she took a sudden step forward.

“I’ll be the Warden!” she declared, confidently lifting her chin.

Tourniquet snorted, derisively, wiping at her eyes as she forced herself upright. “Yeah, right. I don’t like you, Miss Geranium… and I’m not dumb, either.”

The lawyer looked crestfallen. I shot her a glare that could have peeled paint.

“Well, it was worth a shot…” she said. “It’s not like I’d have ordered her to kill you, or anything. I need you alive, remember?”

I held out my hoof to my driver, who leaned over and smacked Geranium across the back of the head.

“Well… what about me?” I asked.

“I don’t trust you, Mister Detective,” she replied, her eyes flickering at my face then down at my chest where my badge hung. “You’d lie to me if you thought it would make things better, or if you didn’t need me and you thought I was in your way.”

I didn't argue the point; I just stepped back and glanced over at my driver.

Taxi looked pensive as she asked, “And me?”

Tourniquet regarded my driver with a hint of a grimace. “You’re really familiar, you know. I know where I saw a pony like you before.”

My driver drew back a little, as though the girl might sting her. “Where?” she asked, nervously.

“Mom. Mom used to be like you,” the filly replied, sadly. “Before I got hurt, she was like you. If somebody you loved died and you stopped trying to be better I think you’d be like her, too. I love my mom, but… but I know she’s a bad pony. I don’t want a bad pony to have all the stuff here again. She hurt too many people.”

“Then…?”

Turning around, the mechanical filly pointed.

“Me?!” Swift squeaked.

Tourniquet dipped her head. “I… I trust you. I dunno why. Maybe because... because I don’t think you ever wanted to hurt ponies before. Because I think you’d stop him if he ever lost his way.” She gestured at me with a flick of her tail.

“Honey, what… exactly is… involved in being the Warden of Supermax?” I asked, feeling a bit of caution might be in order.

Reaching out to Swift, Tourniquet winced as she had to drag her rear legs across the carpet. She seemed to have lost motor control in them. “The Warden or whoever they assign as a lieutenant is responsible for the wellbeing of everypony here. The prisoners. The guards. Me. They are Supermax… and their law is my law. My power is their power. They will be forever safe in my walls. They will have to be linked with me until they die. I’m going to seal that extra control room once Mister Limerence is done fixing things, and nopony will ever go in there again.”

I looked over at Swift who was biting her lip, anxiously.

“Sir...what should I do?” she asked, her wings splayed out from her back as she looked down at Tourniquet’s glittering eyes. “I don’t know how to be the Warden of a prison. I mean, I don’t even… I can’t be here all the time...and I don’t…I couldn’t even keep a goldfish alive when I was a foal. Are you sure there’s nopony else?”

Tourniquet shifted onto her stomach, resting her head on Swift’s shoulder. “There’s nopony I want. Please? I really...I really don’t want to go back to sleep...”

The lights in her eyes were fading fast. Time was short.

“Kid, we either do this...or we try that door again,” I said.

“I know!” Swift snapped, lifting Tourniquet to look into her young face, studying the metal around her eyes. She took a deep breath and thrust her chest out. “I’ll do it. I’ll be the Warden of Supermax.”

For long seconds, there was no response. Tourniquet’s eyes were still closed.

“Damn…” I muttered, looking towards the sealed door. “Alright, if I could improvise a pen-knife or something of the sort, I might shell open one of Taxi’s remaining kinetic shells-”

Then, like a loving caress on my neck, I felt the breeze.

Power surged through the cables down from the ceiling and Tourniquet’s eyes snapped open, blazing with life and energy. She grinned as the cords attaching her to the ceiling pulled tight, raising her into the air and out of my partner’s forelegs. Flares of energy and bursts of sparks shot from the walls, momentarily blinding me as the whole room was lit with fiery magic.

My muzzle hung open as I stared up at her, arcane fire coiling around her body as the ladybugs spiraled in ever greater circles around her. The arcing electrical forces danced over Girthranx, casting strange shadows on the body and the desiccated corpses hanging from his exposed ribs, but nothing could have ruined the absolute glee in the eyes of Swift’s friend.

Tourniquet giggled, swinging around on her fiber optic strings as she waved her hooves just for the joy of it. “I… I can see everything! Mechanical room surveillance and my external communications are still down, but… but everything else! The sky! Swift, I see the sky! All the stars! I can see the city, too!” she cried.

A happy little tune started up somewhere and the sealed door cranked itself open with a rush of releasing vacuum.

“Detective! I’ve got activity down here. What’s happened?” Limerence inquired. Even the speaker sounded better.

“Mister Limerence!” Tourniquet called out. “You can stop now! I’m fixed! I just… oh.” She frowned and her cords went slack, sending her to the ground in front of Swift. “Um… I just found a procedure in my instructions for the assignment of the new Warden.”

My partner tilted her head to one side, flipping an ear interestedly. “What kind of ‘procedure’?”

She nodded, swirling her hoof in a circle against the side of her face. “It’s like… like some kinda magic ritual. I’ve got restored access to all my stuff, but it’s temporary. The Warden has to be given the ‘key’ or the system will lock up again.”

“So, what exactly is the key? I doubt we can go get anything from your mother,” I said.

“It’s nothing like that! I mean, it’s not actually a key. It’s more like… the idea of a key,” Tourniquet said, cryptically. “It’s kind of… awkward, actually.”

Swift got to her hooves, fluffing her wide wings against her sides as she brushed at the bunny patch on her combat vest for good luck. “I think I just want a nap really badly right now and I’ll do almost anything to get it, so… how bad could it be?”

Tourniquet hesitated for a long moment. “Um… how do you think your parents would react if you got a tattoo?”

“A... a tattoo?!” Swift exclaimed.

“Yeah. It’s like with drawing my symbol to control somepony, except this symbol is how you control me.”

“You mean, I have to have something on me forever?!”

“Errr… maybe… a little? I could totally put it someplace discreet!” she replied, raising her metal hoof with the glowing icon on it. “I think that’s why Mom always wore a shawl. She was hiding her mark.”

Swift looked nonplussed. Rather than object, however, she tugged the zipper on the front of her vest open, pulling it half-way down to expose her chest fur. Something dawned on her and she sagged a little. “This is gonna hurt, isn’t it?”

“It might… kind of… uh… a little… yeah.” Tourniquet rubbed her nose with her free hoof, self-consciously. “If there were another way, I totally would! I mean, maybe you can get another tattoo and work mine into it! Or you could wear lots of turtlenecks. You might even-”

My partner covered her friend’s muzzle with her toe. “Shush… it’s okay. I mean, what are friends for, if not giving you ridiculous tattoos and funny stories, right?” She faced me, holding out of her leg. “Sir, could you hold my hoof while I do this?”

I laughed, good naturedly, and put a foreleg around hers. “Kid, I’m buying you and Taxi the biggest ice-cream in history when this is over. I think a little hoof-holding is well within the realm of reason. Besides, you and The Warden of Tartarus will have something in common you can talk about on your date!”

Swift’s mouth dropped open and she started to form some kind of retort when I jerked my head at Tourniquet. The filly nodded her understanding and pressed her foot to Swift’s breast, just above her heart.

There was burst of light, followed a puff of smoke. The smell of burning fur hit me like a wave, followed by charring meat. I clutched Swift’s hoof as she made a sound somewhere between a tire having the air let out of it and a ferret being charbroiled alive. Her pupils vanished as she fell to one side so fast I barely had time to catch her. Every muscle in her body seemed to relax simultaneously except her wings, which shot out from her sides, nearly cold-cocking me as I struggled to hold her upright.

It was most of a minute before she could speak. The stink of flash-fried hair still filled my nose and Swift was breathing quick and heavy, her face buried in my fur.

“Kid… come on, you alright?” I asked.

She nodded slightly, then raised her head as Tourniquet stepped back and shook a bit of steam off her metal hoof.

“Ow,” she murmured.

“I’m so sorry, Swift,” her friend apologized. “These security protocols are so stupidly finicky...”

“I’m suddenly glad you didn’t pick me,” Geranium commented, lip curled with distaste as she waved the smelly smoke away from her nose.

Swift was quivering as she pulled back and tried to look down at her chest. The angle was too low. “Can... can I have a mirror or something?”

Tourniquet nodded and pointed towards a mirror mounted on the side of one of her bookshelves in the middle of the little nursery. “Sure. Over there.”

Hauling her back legs under herself, my partner moved over to the mirror and stood there looking at her breast.

“Well, I’ll say this… I’ve seen worse," I mused. "Detective Parrot in Narcotics has a tattoo of a chicken on his inner thigh. Orange with purple feathers. Funniest thing,”

The crescent scorched into Swift’s flesh was bright red, with bits of darker skin around the edges that looked like they’d been dyed that color. For something that appeared to have been burnt into horse fur, it was surprisingly sharp, without any of the puckering or boiling around the edges I tended to associate with heat injuries.

“It… it doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said, touching the fresh mark lightly.

“I believe that’s a… magic brand,” Taxi said, tilting her head to examine the moon shape from another angle. “Funny. I haven’t seen one of those since I left the zebra lands.”

“Okay, you’ve got total access!” Tourniquet chirped. “All of Supermax! Any door, any cell, and anything you want to do is yours.... heeeheee… Warden!”

Swift turned to me, her toe still on the brand. “Sir, what do we do?”

“Well… hmmm. Is there any way of disabling the cultists on the top couple of floors?” I asked.

Tourniquet scratched at her mane, then nodded. “There’s the emergency lockdown and containment procedure. That should totally do it.”

“Um… how do I turn it on?” Swift asked.

“Say ‘initiate emergency lockdown and containment procedure’, then which floors,”

“Oh… Do I have to? Can’t you just… you know… do it? I’m gonna sound silly-”

“Please? I never got to hear it when Mom was running things and I always wanted to try this!” Tourniquet gave my partner a pouty-faced look, complete with jutting lower lip and big, shiny eyes.

Swift grinned, adopting one of those ridiculous super hero poses with one hoof in the air. “Initiate emergency lockdown and containment procedure! Top three floors!”

A klaxon sounded from somewhere and red lights flashed on the walls. Putting her hooves in the air, Tourniquet rose until she hung above us in the center of the room.

“Initiating emergency lockdown procedures.”

It was still her voice, but even a child’s voice can be terrifying if it’s vibrating the floor under your hooves.

“All prisoners will report to their cells. Any prisoner not in their cell will be subject to disciplinary measures. Teleport interdiction is in effect. Magic nullification is in effect.”

Distant machines began clinking, clunking, and rattling to life as the old prison woke from its long sleep. The ceiling writhed and flashed like a nest of neon snakes, dancing shadows lending unnatural life to the toys scattered around the floor.

Ladybugs spun and twirled, more and more of them pouring in through the door until it seemed to whole room was full of the little creatures as they played and frolicked around the metallic filly.

Tourniquet looked down at my partner and held out her hoof. Swift laughed, bending her wings towards the ground as she blasted up into the air, coming to a hover in front of her new friend. Reaching out, they touched toes for just an instant.

A mischievous smile grew on Tourniquet’s face and she tilted her head back to address the ponies upstairs. When she spoke again, it was less formal and robotic, but for that reason a whole heap scarier. If I’d been wearing a starry robe just then, I’m pretty sure I’d have been galloping for the hills, as little good as that might have done.

“For all of those who are looking around right now, wondering whether or not this is some kind of joke, you should know that I am the construct. I run this prison. I am a magical being and I control whether you breathe, whether you wake or sleep, and whether you ever leave.”

She paused, letting that sink into all of those disparate minds upstairs.

“You’ve never met me and you’ve never heard of me, but I’ve always been here. I watched you every day, in your beds, in your showers, and in all your little sins. When you prayed, it was me who listened. Not Princess Luna. Not the sky. Me.”

She bared her teeth and the hidden speakers let out a mechanical snarl that shook the very air.

“I controlled this prison before your leader stole it from me and my Mom! I am older than all of you and I eat the magic of dragons! You can’t escape me. You can’t run from me.”

Tourniquet paused and drew in a breath. I had to clap my hooves over my ears, lest I be deafened, but I could still feel her words right down in my bones.

“Miss Skylark was a thief and a murderer! She’s dead now… and there’s a new Warden in Supermax!”

****

Swift trotted along beside me, high stepping every inch of the way. She’d zipped her combat vest back up to her throat, but she was still looking far too pleased with herself.

“Kid, if your nose gets any higher in the air, it’s going to get struck by lightning the minute we leave the building,” I nickered, trotting along at my partner’s side.

“Yeah, well… I’m the Warden here!” she squeaked, stomping all four hooves with excitement. “Oh, gosh, I can’t wait to tell my grandmother!”

“This is going to be a thing from now on, isn’t it?” Taxi laughed.

“Gods, I hope not,” Geranium grumbled, trudging along behind us. “I had to put up with one whiny filly with a power complex already.”

A faint buzz surrounded Geranium’s hooves and she yelped and danced away from the spot as though stung.

“Aaand I can still hear you, yah know… heehee! By the way, I got the taser system working. It’s not very strong, yet. It wouldn’t even tickle a dragon,” Tourniquet put in from the speakers nearest us.

“How are your power levels?” I asked as Geranium tried to glare everywhere at once. “We’re going to have to find some alternative to letting you tap life magic from the Lunar Passage.”

“I’m okay for now. Nopony outside will notice I’m draining them at these levels for at least a week or two. Then they’ll probably start sleeping long hours.”

“Huh. Alright. How are things outside the prison? Any movement?”

“Nothing out there. My sensors are detecting a brand new electrical cable running just under the surface less than twenty meters from my front door. That wasn’t there fifteen years ago.” She hesitated, then said, “If I could tap it, it looks like it’s running more than...gosh! It’s running plenty!”

Taxi adjusted the bandage on her shoulder and said, “I haven’t seen anything in here that won’t work on regular old electricity. There’s no reason we couldn’t figure a method for switching her over, really, is there?”

“We’re getting our chickens well ahead out our eggs, here,” I said, turning down another hallway in the direction of the mechanical room. “We still have to get out.”

“Oh! Yes! Speaking of that, you’ll need the filtration suits!” Tourniquet said.

“Filtration suits? What are we ‘filtering’? We’re not leaving through the sewers again.”

“Nope! Lockdown triggered my prisoner incapacitation system! All prisoners who weren’t in their cells on the top few floors have been hit with Sleeping Willow dust. My ventilation systems will clear it eventually, but it’s going to be a few days.”

“Wait… Sleeping Willow dust?” Taxi asked, pausing to bite her lip. “That’s been illegal to use on prisoners for the last… Oh, right."

"...What exactly is Sleeping Willow dust, Sweets?” I inquired.

My driver sighed and shook her head.

“It’s what it sounds like. Dust from the Sleeping Willow tree,” she explained. “It has anti-magic properties and it’ll knock you cold for a week or until it’s washed off, whichever comes first. They used to use it during the war because it’ll put down a dragon in big enough quantities. No ordinary filter spell will keep it out. Only full body mechanical filters and some very specific kinds of static spell fields, both of which were too big for the dragons to mass produce. Get it on your hooves or your mane though and you’re in for a long nap.”

“Who came up with something like that?” Geranium asked, looking disturbed. “And why is it illegal if it just puts you to sleep?

“Nature came up with it, but ponies weaponized it,” Taxi continued, with a tiny shrug of her uninjured shoulder. “The Sleeping Willow tree puts anything that wanders under it into what amounts to an artificial coma. Their bodies draw scavengers or hunters, who also get dusted. They decompose and that feeds the tree. It’s an ugly thing that used to grow in the Wilderness. They’re mostly extinct now and illegal because of the peace treaty. The dragons were thorough in getting rid of them after the war.”

“Goodie,” I groaned. “I’m seeing how this used to work. If there’s a riot, everypony in the building goes to sleep. Guards. Prisoners. Everypony. Once they’re out or contained, ponies come from outside wearing filter suits. They clean up and there’s no danger.”

“So the whole top three floors are covered in this stuff? Anypony not in a cell?” Swift asked, putting a hoof over her eyes. “And… I did that?”

Geranium sniggered at her. “Yup! Good first day on the job, huh, ‘Warden’?”

To her credit, Swift didn’t feel the need to reply directly.

Instead, the lawyer’s hooves started to buzz and she yelped, bouncing backwards onto her flank.

“Oh! Neat! Looks like I can control the tasers in here with my mind!” Swift giggled, prancing along beside me.

“Nope, but I thought it was pretty funny, anyway!” Tourniquet said from an overhead speaker.

“So… how many ponies are currently unconscious?” I asked.

“I only got a few. I locked most of the cell doors and lowered the protective plating before I turned on the dust flow,” she answered.

“You sound disappointed. Were you hoping to get the whole cult at once?” I laughed.

“How would you feel if you had a big, shiny red button your whole life that you could never press? Then when you got to press it, it only got like, twenty ponies?”

“Point taken,” I nickered. “Okay, so… where are these filter suits?”

“The Mechanical Room. They should be in a closet down there. Most of the guard stations had them, but most of the guard stations were cleared out when they closed me last time.”

I flipped the collar of my jacket up as we turned the corner and saw the Mechanical Room up ahead, its security door already invitingly open. “Alright, then we can go collect Limerence, Skylark’s box, and Cerise. Once we’re out, we’ll figure out what to do with our prisoners.”

-****

For some reason, the Mechanical Room seemed to be even more of a mess the second time down. The dead hadn’t had time to start smelling bad just yet, but the blood splashed liberally across the carpet and the corpses lined up against the wall had us all covering our noses. Nightmare Moon’s broken statue still lay where it’d fallen; another body for the pile.

Swift hadn’t puked in a bit, but she was looking a sickly green again.

“Celestia save me, Sir. I… I was just upstairs for an hour or so. I forgot what happened here, or at least… I kinda put it out of my mind.. Is that wrong?” my partner asked as the four of us stood in the door, looking at the broken pews, the torn tapestries, and the row of robe-strewn bodies. A mare they hadn’t been able to recover was still tangled in the wall-hangings where she’d been thrown by Cerise.

“I don’t think so, kid,” I replied, forcing myself to move down the row of pews. “I think that’s your brain trying not to scream and piss itself.”

“Oh.”

“Just try not to think about it. We’ll be out of here soon and then you can get on with the business of developing severe post-traumatic stress and alcoholism.”

“You’re much better at comforting somepony when you don’t try, Sir,” Swift replied, giving me a little swat on the hip with one wing.

Cerise was where we’d left her, sprawled on the rug with a rolled-up robe for a pillow and another for a blanket. So far as I could tell she hadn’t moved, but then if Limerence was right her body had some serious healing to do. I trotted over to her side, pushing back the sheet so I could look down at her young face. It was strange seeing Chief Jade laying there without all the years of drug abuse, stress, and dead friends adding lines to her face.

“Poor thing,” Taxi said, brushing a strand of mane out of the girl’s eyes. “She was just trying to make her own life in a city her mother practically owns.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t leave town,” Geranium murmured, joining my driver at the girl’s side. “I don’t know her story, but I would have.”

“Would you really?” I asked, swatting a fly buzzing around my side. “I’ve said that myself plenty of times. Detrot is a city that eats ponies. Maybe it always was. You knew that when you started working as a lawyer… and you didn’t leave, even back when it was an option.”

At that, Geranium frowned, looking thoughtful as she moved back to sit on one of the pews.

Trotting over to the hidden alcove, I stuck my head down the hallway and shouted, “Hey! Limerence! Shake a tail! We’re leaving!”

“One moment, Detective!” he called back. His rear-end appeared before the rest of him as he backed into the hall. His horn was glowing as it came into view, but he was hauling on something with his teeth. It was Skylark’s box.

I moved to help him, working around his side to take up the other handle in my teeth so we could carry it down the hallway comfortably. The taste of blood almost made me gag. It’s somehow easier when you don’t know whose blood is on your tongue.

We hauled the box into the temple and thumped it down beside Cerise.

“Miss Skylark was most thorough with her personal security measures. Two primary unicorn-proofed locks, a secondary internal lock that could only be opened with a catch handle, and a gas bomb trap that may or may not have been lethal,” Limerence said, casually shoving the top of the box open. “It took me almost four minutes to get it open.”

“Lim, if you ever come over to my house, I’m checking your pockets for silverware when you leave,” I commented, peering into the box.

Skylark’s chest was a mish-mash of toolbox, chest of drawers, and crazily obsessive devotional art piece. Every inch of the interior that wasn’t taken up by heaps of old clothes was covered in newspaper clippings of either Princess Luna or notable thefts.

I picked up the top piece of clothing, which was a conical purple magician’s hat. Underneath there was a matching cape covered in sparkling sequins. Both pieces were travel-worn and looked like they’d been patched and cared for down through the years.

I turned over the edge of the cape and found a tiny slip of paper that said, ‘To my sweet little star! Go put on the most amazing shows the world has ever seen! Love,-’.

The name was smudged out. There was no other indication of who it might have come from.

Taxi flipped open one of the drawers, finding it empty, then closed it again and fiddled around with something underneath it until, with a soft pop, she hit a hidden catch. As she opened it again, she whistled softly. “Oooh, darling, you had lovely taste.”

The drawer was heaped with jewelry in dozens of styles. Even my untrained eye could pick up a couple of impressive pieces.

She pawed through it, trying out one of the rings on her fetlock. Right down near the bottom, there was a necklace with three red ruby cherries. I picked that up and examined it for some time, then pocketed it and turned back to the rest of the box’s contents.

“Sir, should we be going through her stuff like this? She’s dead-” Swift said, sounding a bit disturbed.

“Kid, I’d put money on that every inch of this is stolen,” I cut her off. “You want to turn it into DPD lost and found? It’s probably been a damn long time since it was ripped off. Ponies who can afford to buy this stuff insure it against theft and I doubt any of them are looking.”

“Couldn’t we… I dunno… take it to a charity or something?” she asked, dubiously poking at the ring on my driver’s leg. “This feels kind of wrong for some reason.”

“We’re just looking right now,” I said, with a little shrug.

“Speak for yourself,” Taxi sniffed, picking up a heap of jewels and stuffing them into her saddlebag. “If we need liquid monies at some point, I know a fence who will pay top dollar. Stella’s generous and that’s fantastic, but I’d rather have some options that couldn’t be traced back to him.”

My partner grimaced and stepped back, dropping her backside onto the carpet in a way that suggested oncoming sulking. I rubbed the bridge of my nose and tried to think how to explain the realities of being a cop on the run to her, only to realize I wasn’t entirely sure of them myself.

Limerence, of all ponies, came to my rescue.

“Miss Swift… while you may not appreciate the practical aspects of digging through the pockets of the dead, please be aware, Skylark would have happily dug through yours,” Limerence said, lifting a newspaper clipping that said ‘Pants Family Mausoleum robbed, Ebon Kitten suspected.' “We are fulfilling a need in furtherance of our duties to create order in this city. That these jewels had a former owner makes them no less valuable, nor does their value make that owner any less ‘former’.”

Swift bit her lower lip between her sharp back teeth, then slowly nodded before reaching into the box and pushing aside the cloak and hat to see what was underneath. A girl’s diary which looked to have been owned, at one time, by a very young Astral Skylark was dumped at the very bottom. Part of the cover was missing, but the words ‘Kitty’s Journal! Top Secret, My Eyes Only’ were still legible.

I picked up the diary, flipping open the first few pages. Most of them had been burned quite badly and the most recent ones were undated, but I stuffed it into my pocket anyway.

“I think this might do us, kiddos,” I said, turning in a slow circle to look around the remains of the Mechanical Room. “Where are the filtration suits?”

Taxi nodded her head towards a narrow door on one wall. “That looks like a secure storage locker.”

“Ahhh, let’s see then! These war-time hazard suits were always enchanted with some very interesting spells. My father has acquired several and every one sells for quite a pretty penny,” Limerence said, trotting over to the door and popping the handle.

As the door swung open, a thick puff of colorful powder burst from inside, blanketing him from head to hooves, followed by an avalanche of junk that crashed and bounced down around his ankles. Taxi yelped and grabbed me by the collar, yanking me back. Swift took the cue and her wings burst open, sweeping the dust away from us.

Limerence looked like a rainbow-flour-covered ghost as he stood there for a few moments, one hoof upraised and the handle of the locker still glowing with his horn’s magic. He let it fade and dropped his leg, turning to face us.

“Detective… I am… more than slightly upset to report that I have discovered where the Cult of Nightmare Moon were keeping their Beam reserves and sexual aids.” Very slowly, like a tree falling in a storm, Limerence dropped onto his haunches, then slid onto his stomach. “Aristrotle save me, I... do believe this is going to be undignified.”

I shut my eyes and tried to fortify myself. The night had been extremely long and extremely taxing.

“Lim… does that spell of yours for cleansing toxins from the blood work on Beam?” I asked, trying to think quickly. I could manage walking pace, at least.

Limerence gave his head a firm shake, then blinked a few times as he stared up at me. “It may. Oh… heavens. The visual effects of this drug do come on very quickly, don’t they? Ehh, pardon me, yes… I’ll just… cast it shall I?”

His horn lit up and I ducked as a blast of explosive energy shot from the tip just passed one of my ears and hit the far wall with a crack of splitting masonry.

“Hrm… it seems I am being… uh… heh… affected,” Limerence replied as a slightly goofy smile crept onto his slim face. “Shall I try again?”

“No! Celestia, no!” I barked, covering my head with one leg. “Just...sit still and let us try to wash this crap off. Sweets? Any ideas?”

My driver made a soft noise and I turned to find her with both hooves stuffed in her mouth.

“Could you hold the laughing hyena act and get him a towel, please?”

She tried force the grin off her muzzle as she pulled a rag from her saddlebag, along with a rubber sock which she slipped on and began trying to wipe the beam off of Lim’s flanks.

Geranium wasn’t feeling nearly so helpful.

“Bwaaahahaha! Oh, Detective! I needed that!” she howled, rolling back and forth on the carpet. Her tail slapped against my legs and I gave her a firm swat that did nothing to quiet her laughter. “He’s going to be higher than a kite for the next four hours! That’s if he’s lucky!”

“Mmm… Detective, I never noticed how… how nice a shade of yellow Miss Taxi is. It’s quite aesthetically… pleasing.” Limerence smiled and put his hoof on my driver’s shoulder, gently running his hoof in little circles as she tried to mop the powdered beam out of his mane.

Rather than smack him, she actually blushed. I suppose there’s something in the feminine mind that appreciates a genuine compliment, even if the pony in question is wrecked on psychedelics.

“Um… damn. Hardy, this stuff isn’t coming out. At least, not enough to matter. We need to get him to a shower or something.”

Swift shut her eyes and sat down as a ladybug wiggled out of her mane and perched itself on her nose. After a few seconds, she shook her head. “Tourniquet says the only showers are on the top few floors where the Sleeping Willow dust is everywhere. Queenie managed to pull most of the ladybugs back before the prisoner incapacitation system went off, but that means they can’t see anything up there.”

“Can this night get any worse?” I groaned. “Ugh. Alright. Fine. Can I get a set of those rubber socks, Sweets?” Taxi paused in her attempts to get the Beam out of Limerence’s fur just long enough to retrieve four latex socks from her bag. Limerence, meanwhile, nuzzled up against her side like a foal, batting at the air in front of his nose and giggling, dreamily.

I tugged on the socks, then high-stepped over to the storage locker, carefully trying not to raise any of the cloud of dust blanketing the carpet. Shifting a four-pound purple dildo out of the way, I covered my muzzle with the edge of my collar and leaned into the closet.

Aside the mountains of sex toys and a broken glass bottle that was leaking a steady stream of prismatic powder, the only contents were a sign that said ‘Filtration Suit Instructions’ and one plastic face-mask and oxygen bottle with the word ‘slut’ painted across it in red lipstick. I glanced at the crap on the floor and kicked a heap of plastic clothing. It unrolled into a very strange outfit covered in metal rings, the back of which was sewn shut with black ribbon.

“Erm... all these butterflies…” Limerence muttered, then pinched his eyes shut and blinked a few times. “Detective? When did you get here?” He glanced down. “Oh...you found the filtration outfit?”

“It... looks like somepony messed with it,” Taxi said, poking at the suit leg with one toe. “This is like the ones we had in the Narcotics department at D.P.D. for handling chemical labs. They gave it some sort of hood made of...oh please let that be vinyl and not leather...”

Geranium rocked back on her heels, laughing so hard she started choking. “It’s a gimp suit! Oh Celestia save me, they turned your precious damn hazmats into gimp suits!”

****

I felt better.

I’d had to throw some things, then smash a few of the pews, kick a boiler, and sit in a corner with my head against the wall for a few minutes, but I felt better.

The filtration suits were a lost cause. Containment was totally compromised and we could only find one of the face masks in the mess of sex toys.

Limerence was trying to chew on Swift’s tail, and was writing what I'm sure he believed was thoughtful flavor analysis on Swift's flank. Taxi was chasing Geranium around the temple with an anatomically improbable black rubber phallus while the other mare screamed for me to do something to stop the beating. My driver was surprisingly spry on three legs and the lawyer’s were short. Her flanks were going to ache in the morning.

My exhausted mind processed all of this activity with the cool, collected detachment of the completely screwed.

The truth is that there is only so far up a creek a pony can be before they start to find a sort of serene acceptance of the inevitable. Yes, you might be heading for a waterfall, but you’ve got a minute or so to think and compose yourself before it’s here and those moments are precious. It’s a very liberating time.

“Sir! Sir, he’s licking me again!” Swift yelped, shoving our librarian over onto his back, where he abandoned his taste testing to began wheeling his rear legs at the air and barking like a terrier.

“Detective, make her stooop!” Geranium whined as Taxi landed another solid hit on her backside.

“Harby, comb hode her dowd!” Taxi shouted around the dildo.

I pushed away from the wall, trotting in a little circle before settling down on my belly. It was lovely on the nice, warm carpeted floor, if one could get past the stink of drying blood or the heavy hand of fate slowly metering out the last few of one’s heartbeats.

****

Things calmed down a little in the next fifteen minutes, although Limerence was still attempting to hide under Swift’s wings, muttering something about ‘extraordinary fluffies’. Geranium was nursing her sore backside while Taxi tended to Cerise, getting the girl ready to travel. She’d managed to lash together a couple of cultist’s robes with bits of broken wood and scavenged bondage straps into a makeshift stretcher. A length of nylon rope made a functional hitch and yoke.

“So… obviously we can’t just sit here. There’s more than a few ponies upstairs who need medical treatment, not including us, so we need to get out tonight. What is this ‘Plan B’ you keep pussyfooting around?” Taxi asked as she put the finishing touches on the sledge.

“Yeah, and how could it be worse than coming in was?” Swift asked.

As gently as I could, I heaved Cerise onto the stretcher and pulled a bit of cloth back over her, then stepped away and straightened my trenchcoat. “Coming in was dry, kid. Let’s see if we can make it upstairs and have Tourniquet give us some directions. Oh, and grab that face-mask and the oxygen supply from in the storage locker. See if you can clean the Beam off a bit, too. We’ll probably need it.” She nodded, then bopped our librarian on the forehead as he tried to nibble on her ear. “And...could you get a rope or something we can use for a leash? I’d rather not carry Limerence, too.”

****

I hauled, while Swift kept Cerise on the stretcher. It was agonizing work, but I’m an earth pony and that’s what we’re for. Limerence hadn’t let me near his watch to check what the time was, nor would he check himself; something about ‘dissociating his quantum vibratiums’. Still, we managed good time once we’d made it up the first set of stairs.

Geranium leaned on the wall beside me, panting heavily as we stopped in the empty hallway of the secure wing.

“Alright, genius. Now what?” she asked.

I ignored her and called out, “Tourniquet! You up, honey?”

“I’m up, Detective! Ventilation systems are at full power, but it’ll still be about two days before I can completely clear the upstairs halls of Sleeping Willow.”

“Good girl. Maybe you can help me with something? I need to know which way to service hatch thirty one double zed?”

“The… high flow hatch? Why do you need that?” she asked, sounding confused.

“It’s the only other way out of this building besides the secret sewer door.”

“A-are you leaving already?”

“Don’t worry, honey! We aren’t leaving you alone and we’ll be sending our own people along, too. You can reach Swift through Queenie anywhere in the city. In the mean time-” I slapped Geranium across the shoulders and she stumbled forward, then glared at me over her shoulder. “-our dear friend, Geranium, is sticking around.to oversee things here. Incidentally, you have my permission to electrocute her if she does anything stupid or traitorous.”

“I’m what?!” the lawyer choked out. “Not a damn chance in this world am I sticking around this place!”

“Did I, at any point, suggest you had any other options? This is presently one of the safest places in Detrot for you. Your friends at the law-firm can’t get in here and the only ponies who can mostly don’t want to kill you. Tourniquet will keep you alive.”

Geranium’s eyes were so wide I was slightly worried she might have injured her optic nerve. “You’re… completely… I… you…”

“You can try running, if you like, but I’d give you about two days before they dispatch an assassin once Skylark fails to report in,” I said, then smiled as a nasty thought crossed my mind and I added, “We’re kipping in the Skids, by the way. You know the Skids? It’s a place where children have to learn martial combat because the grass is magically irradiated and will fight back when you try to eat it.”

Her expression was wavering between fear and apoplexy, but it finally settled on rage. I thought she might swing at me and I readed myself to catch her leg if she did.

“Damn you forever, Hard Boiled. Damn you and your stupid cab driver, and your librarian, and your ridiculous little pegasus,” she snarled, poking me in the chest to emphasize each word. “I know I’m not a good pony, but at least I’m not the kind of pony who gets everypony they love killed on some insane crusade. I hope you find out one day when you’re standing over the body of someone you cared about just how far the consequences of your actions can reach!”

With that, Geranium swung around on her heel and galloped off down the hall on her three good legs, tears spotting the floor behind her as she ran. Where she might be going, I couldn’t say.

“Tourniquet, could you keep an eye on her and maybe lead her to some ice-cream?” I asked, trying to stave off a spark of guilt at how I’d treated Geranium. She’d reminded me of my last girlfriend, up to and including the little speech about crusades and the deaths of close friends.

“Yes, Detective. You’re gonna send me some ponies to take care of things here?” she asked.

“And to keep you company,” I added. “These will be ponies you can trust.”

“Oh that’s... that’s just awesome! Okay, the high flow hatch is down through the double security doors at the end of the next hall.”

****

“This...is your ‘Plan B’?!” Taxi gasped as she held both hooves over her nose, trying to breathe through her mouth.

“I’m ‘fraid so. You got any better ideas, you just put them in the suggestion box,” I replied, looking down into the hole in the floor. The pipe below was too dark to see, but I did pick up the sound of swiftly moving water. “This runs straight to the bay. According to the blueprints, this will dump us in an open air storage pool which has another pipe at the end. It’s a straight shot from here to the lagoon about thirty meters down flow. Twenty seconds in the drink, then we’re out and home free.”

My driver’s curiosity about ‘Plan B’ had lasted until we made our way into Waste Disposal. The smell that boiled out of the depths when I opened the wide hatch in the floor almost sent the three sober ponies in the room running. Limerence was still too stoned to notice, but he did start trying to wipe invisible butterflies off his nose.

“You… want me to go in there, Sir?” Swift asked, incredulously. “It smells like...like poop!”

I nodded, sagely, adjusting the nylon strap around my neck as I pulled Cerise’s litter up beside me. “It would. It’s the black-water waste line for the northern half of the city.”

“You mean that’s half the city worth of-”

“Yep.”

“Hardy... we can’t go down there,” Taxi opined. “I mean, I’m hurt. Cerise is going to drown. Limerence is too high to see straight-”

“It’s this or you wait here while I go drive your cab back to civilization for help,” I replied, moving over to pull the oxygen mask from under Swift’s wing. Kneeling beside Cerise, I fitted the mask over her head as tightly as I could, tucking the oxygen bottle in beside her and turning on the flow. As I’d hoped, it was relatively air-tight, even against her fur. “I’ll have Cerise attached to me. You keep hold of Limerence’s leash and fish him out when we’re at the other end before he sinks.”

“Sir… can’t we just… I don’t know. Can we do almost anything else in the whole world?” Swift whimpered.

A soft glow suffused her body and she yelped as she was lifted into the air, drifting across the room like a balloon off its tether.

I blinked up at our librarian, who was laying on his side with his horn glowing weakly.

“You’re all… specular… but you should stop mouth-forging... complain-y… audio-isms. Mister… Mister Detective Pulchritudiousness is doing all the optimizable... occurrences… he… of which he is can doing,” Limerence mumbled with a distracted expression on his face, pawing at his vest as though perplexed how it’d gotten on his body.

“P-put me down! Lim! Please!” Swift squeaked, spiraling over onto her back.

“Oh… ah… yes… Apologies. Insufferiffic… arcanopointy… object,” he muttered, reaching up and flicking the tip of his horn with his toe.

The light vanished.

My partner fell.

There was a splash and a shriek of what might or might not have been fear that was quickly swept away down the flowing pipe. It sounded awfully angry for fear.

“Well… that… decides that then, I guess. Geronimo?”

Act 2, Chapter 39: Bringing Up the Rear

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 39: Bringing Up the Rear

Lots of creatures in Equestria are intelligent, but not nearly so many are truly civilized.

One might at this juncture inquire where the distinction lies. Let us consult royalty here:

“The distance between civilization and savagery is cake.”

-Princess Celestia (apocryphal)

It may sound absurd at first, but if the reader will bear out the line of reasoning, he or she will see beneath the frosting to a fundamental underpinning of Equestrian society.

To construct a proper cake, or indeed most any kind of frosted pastry, a civilization must be capable of milling flour, collecting eggs, harvesting and refining sugar, acquiring and storing milk, churning butter, and writing down recipes. A cake-producing civilization must also have the infrastructure necessary to bring these ingredients into one place, and an oven in which to combine and bake them. To do all this requires a certain level of agricultural capacity, livestock management skills, technological advancement, education, skilled labor, and social cohesion that hunter-gatherers and wandering monster packs lack, no matter how smart or articulate the individuals may be.

Because of this philosophy, as well as Princess Celestia's fondness for the stuff, Equestria holds cake in high esteem. The baker’s profession is a nobly regarded one, with lots of major national competitions held at which royalty is often present; For to consume a cake, a pie, a donut, or a muffin is not merely an absorption of mixed carbohydrates and fats, but to intake into oneself the distilled essence of Equestrian civilization.

Equestrian baking is so integral that it has even made its way into armed conflict. Cake is not an entirely uncommon form of improvised home defense. The settlers of Appleloosa in L.R. 1 chose apple pie as a border protection weapon not merely because of a shortage of martial supplies, but as a symbol of their town in projectile form. Further back, in the period immediately following Luna’s banishment when Equestria’s enemies sought to take advantage of the chaos, Celestia herself led the fabled 101st Light Confectioners Brigade, whose claims to fame lie in what was termed their “Blitzkuchen” style of hit-and-run cake assault, and, of course, the monarch’s historic battlecry: “Let them eat cake!”

Why, to live in a society unable to bake a cake is to wallow with the beasts and monsters in the filth and muck.

-The Scholar

I hit the water a second before Cerise and had loads of time to question whether or not I’d just done something really stupid. Her unconscious body, bound tightly to the litter, splashed in beside me and I snatched at her with both forelegs, managing to wrap them around her torso. My head broke the surface, and I gasped for air.

Big mistake.

If I’d thought the stink was bad upstairs, inside the tunnel itself I was wishing I’d gone ahead and let somepony shoot me in the nose. If I could have let go of Cerise for a half second, I’d have been inclined to do it myself.

There was no light and nothing much to see if there had been. The powerful flow of water swept us away down the tunnel and I had to kick myself away from a wall that got too close, but after that the girl and I settled towards what I thought was the middle of the pipe.

Another splash echoed behind me, followed by a vaguely masculine shout of surprise, then a third splash less than second later.

Everypony has had a dream of drowning when they get tangled in the sheets. Not everypony has had a dream of drowning in raw sewage. If I’d been a pegasus, I could have wrapped my wings around Cerise. If I were a unicorn, I might have levitated her above me. As it was, keeping a tight grasp on the girl meant using my teeth when I had to tread water to keep us above the flow. That meant more than a few mouthfuls of what I'll describe only as the very worst thing a pony can possibly taste. I hoped, sincerely, that Gale would handle any infections with the same aggressive panache he’d used against my shrapnel wounds.

I kicked my rear legs, trying to stabilize against the swift moving flow, but ponies are not built for swimming. I almost overbalanced, then crashed against one wall and spun in circles. All the while, I clutched at my precious cargo, keeping her head up and protecting the facemask.

It seemed like an age down there, flying into darkness on a torrent of disgusting fluid, but it ended as quickly as it had began.

I shot out of the other end of the tunnel at speed, then had the air knocked out of me as I hit the water and went down. Releasing Cerise, I swam for the surface, praying the nylon strap had survived the tunnel. My eyes burned, even closed, and every part of me felt like it was immersed in some kind of sickening oil. It crept into every crevice and if there had been anything worth mentioning left in my stomach, I’d have contributed to the mess.

At last, with the air in my lungs starting to catch fire, I split the surface and breathed my first breath of free air.

It was still a pretty wretched breath, but I could see stars overhead. There were times, down there in Supermax, where I’d thought never to see them again. The sun was just coming up over the horizon and I had to take a second to marvel at the beauty of it.

Then I remembered Cerise and began hauling myself in what I thought was probably the direction of the shore. It was a short swim before I felt smooth concrete come up to meet my hooves and I began dragging myself laboriously out of the water. My trenchcoat shrugged off the water and some of the filth as the hydrophobic enchantments did their work, but my fur was probably never going to be the same again.

Over to one side, I saw a bedraggled, bright orange shape crawling up the embankment, coughing and retching the whole way. Swift flopped onto her back, panting heavily as I heaved Cerise up on the shoreline. After a few seconds catching her breath, she began furiously yanking at her combat vest, tearing the zipper down and squirming out of both it and her gun harness before sprawling again with her wings outspread in the growing dawn sunlight. She looked up at me, then shook her head and closed her eyes.

I checked Cerise, pulling the air-mask off and finding her breathing normally, then glanced up just in time to see Limerence spat out of the sewage tunnel, pinwheeling into a belly flop as my driver blasted out behind him, nearly landing on his head. The librarian floundered in the rotten waste water until Taxi grabbed a mouthful of his mane and began dragging him towards the shore. Since she could only swim with three legs, it took a fair bit longer than Cerise and I had. A guilty part of me thought I ought to go help her, but my muscles refused to follow orders.

I onto my back, staring up at the beautiful sunrise, feeling as though I were seeing it for the first time. My back ached where I’d hit the wall of the tunnel and a hundred other little twinges and twitches were finally making themselves known.

Taxi yanked our drenched librarian out of the water, tossing him down on the concrete where he proceeded to try to catch the sun for a few seconds before just laying there, watching clouds. His pupils were massive, but he seemed none the worse for wear despite the dunk in the toilet bowl. My driver stumbled over to my side and slumped down with her head on my stomach. She smelled awful, but no worse than I did, and it was all sort of merging into one huge, reeking miasma.

The lagoon we’d splash-landed in was about a quarter mile square on each side and dead calm, but I could still see the slight waver in the air of the heated fumes coming off of it. I wanted nothing more than to lay there for about twelve hours, but we needed to move. Time was still not on our side.

I patted my driver’s head and tried to move. “Come on, Sweets. We can rest once we’re back at the Nest.”

“Could you stop moving?” she groaned, poking me in the side. “You smell less when you don’t move.”

“Yeah, I’m aware, but I want a shower before this stuff hardens.”

“Poor choice of words, Hardy,” she muttered, stretching her damaged leg out slightly. Bits of things best not mentioned clung to the bandage and the fur around it. “I’m... dammit. I’m going to need antibiotics…”

I pulled myself over, dislodging my driver as gently as I could. “We’d better hope that’s all we need. I don’t fancy getting parasites and the faster we can get decontaminated, the faster we can stop worrying.”

Taxi laid there for another moment, her stained yellow fur glowing in the fresh sun of the new day. She scratched at a spot on her neck, then gathered her resolve and heaved herself onto her stomach.

“Sir?” Swift asked, almost tripping over her own front hooves as she shuffled over to my side. Her wet wings were shadows of themselves and even a quick dash through some clouds wasn’t going to get the ingrained grime out. “Permission to shoot Limerence?”

I shook my head. “Denied. We need him alive and relatively uninjured.”

“Then… can we never ever do anything with sewers ever again as long as we live… ever?”

“I’ll second that, kid. Now...come on. Grab Limerence’s leash and...huh.” I moved up the edge of the embankment until I could peer over the top at the long, isolated stretch of road which ran alongside. “Which way is the car?”

****

I trudged along in silence, Cerise’s litter pulling at my neck. The sun was up and my coat was drying out. Truth be, in spite of the filth, the warmth felt amazing. Still, I was hungry as a dog and emotionally too worn out to really appreciate the beauty of the morning. The road stretched ahead of us and I could see a tiny speck of yellow just coming into view around the curve of empty tarmac; the Night Trotter, waiting where we’d left her like a faithful old pet.

Not one car had gone by in the last hour we’d been walking, although that wasn’t surprising. There’s was nothing on the trunk road for anypony to visit besides Supermax, and the highway ran parallel to it about three miles east.

Limerence was trying to hold a discussion about amniomorphic magic, which might have gone better were his debate opponent not a wad of clover by the side of the road. His rebuttal was cut short when Swift pulled his leash, keeping him moving in more or less the right direction. He’d come down a little in the forty five minutes since we climbed out of the pool of water and started back to the car.

At my side, Taxi limped along at more or less the same speed I was managing with the unconscious unicorn. There was nothing any of us could say to what we’d just survived. Or, possibly, there was too much that needed saying. We were all worn out and any deep analysis would have to wait for a shower and some rest.

****

Taxi tossed the sheet across the back seats and I caught the other end in my teeth, spreading it out as best I could. Despite our condition, she’d gone straight for the seat covers in the trunk and I didn’t have the strength remaining to fight her on the topic.

Swift climbed into the Night Trotter first, then climbed out and forced Limerence in before jamming him up against the wall so he couldn’t go back to chasing crickets. Lim only looked a little disappointed before discovering that his hooves were apparently the most fascinating objects in the universe for the fifth or sixth time.

I eased in after my partner and shut the door as Taxi got behind the wheel and turned the ignition, then flicked on the radio.

With an easy u-turn back towards the row of sunlight sky-scrapers, we were on our way home.

****

“Ladies and Gentlecolts, what a wild few days it’s been! We’re in the lead-up to the Summer Sun Celebration and the city is getting gussied up like the finest whore in the Skids. Never mind the tracks on her legs or the thick mascara, my dear listeners. This is time to celebrate!

This is Gypsy comin’ atcha from parts unknown and I’ve got the news!

Now, as we all know, Mister Hard Boiled, the rootin’ tootin’ Detective who drove out the scum running the Monte Cheval is at it again! This time, he’s towing it with Chief Iris Jade herself, after spending a few weeks on her most wanted list. The good Detective showed up at the door of the Castle a couple of days ago, sword ablazing, and called her out after his partner was arrested for crimes unknown.

Most miraculous of all, maybe, the two of them managed to vanish right under Iris Jade’s nose! The Chief’s state of mind was described as ‘explosive’.

Now, where the Detective might be now is a question worth some speculation, but a source of mine in the police department - who still owes me fifty bucks for that stupid bluff on a pair of twos - has sung a little song that seems to indicate there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Said source suggested there’s a chance the Chief might even have let Hard Boiled go.

Why she would do such a thing? Who knows.

In other, slightly less amusing news, there have been a number of missing ponies reports filed this morning for some of the most prominent members of the Detrot elite. While most appear to have only been gone a few hours, these are not the sort of ponies who are ‘late’ anywhere. Amongst them, the Chairpony for Radio and Airwave Regulation! Lemme tell you, ladies and gentlecolts, I am not sad to see Mister Apple Crisp take a vacation.

Funnily enough, nopony seems to know exactly where to start looking. You can head to your nearest police station or flick on the boob-tube if you’re curious about the list of those who’ve gone missing. I’ll be bringing you more as that story develops.

Griffins, griffins, everywhere and not a pot to piss in. We’ve got more from the griffin aviary occupying downtown and the news is not good.

Now, it has been well known for the last month that the griffins are having troubles at home. Half the bars in town with broken front windows have played host to some griffin warbands looking for some rest and relaxation. Exactly what was going on has been unclear, since griffins are notoriously cagey.

It’s come out that a merry band of marauding dragons have taken up residence in the low mesas of the Tokan tribelands. The Hitlan, who share a border, have also been driven out.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they’re now having issues with our own local monster hunters.

My little ponies, we all know, phoenix eggs are expensive, nasty business. On a good day, you get an immortal pet. On a bad day, you get a raging, fiery explosion. It seems that somepony within the P.A.C.T. has gotten it into their heads that the griffins are smuggling phoenix eggs amongst their own and are demanding to be let into the griffin embassy set up at the Moonwalk Hotel to take a look around. To date, the griffins have rebuffed their requests, but if city safety is threatened we could be facing a major diplomatic incident. Let’s hope Mister Steroids, Colonel Broadside doesn’t decide ‘ambassadorial immunity’ is as quaint as he seems to have decided ‘restraint’ is.

We’ll keep an ear to the ground! As always, this is Gypsy, your queen of the Signal.

****

“I really wish I knew who that pony is,” I grumbled, peeling my trenchcoat off my back and checking to make sure the pockets had remained sealed. “She’s damnably well informed.”

“Oh, Sir, I think it’s neat!” Swift replied. “I mean, how many ponies get to be on the radio?”

“One more than wants to,” I bit back, rolling the car’s window down to let the worst of the smell out.

“Yeah, but ponies need to know there’s somepony out there fighting for them, right?”

“Kid, most ponies need a baseball bat to the noggin before they even consider the possibility that their personal problems are just symptoms of bigger issues.”

“Still, I mean...isn’t it better that someone is at least telling them?”

“If it makes our job more difficult? No.”

“Well, that’s all just stuff everypony could find out, right?”

I let my muzzle slip into a frown. “It can’t have been more than a few hours since anypony started looking for our friends back at Supermax...”

A cold tickle started at the base of my spine.

Swift’s eyebrows rose a few inches, then her eyes popped as the same notion dawned on her.

“Sir, how could anypony have known a bunch of ponies had gone missing unless they had like… total access to the Detrot Police Department’s entire communication system and could assemble a bunch of missing pony reports as they came in?”

I saw where she was going and shook my head. “Kid, whoever did this, I sincerely doubt it’s Telly. She’s got the access, but she’s a cop to the core. She may not like what Iris Jade does sometimes, but I don’t think she’s secretly an anarchistic radio DJ.”

“That would be a really hard trick to pull off,” Taxi added from the front seat. “I mean, I’ve been listening to Gypsy and talking to Telly at the same time on the cab’s radio. I know she can do that trick of splitting her voice, but even she isn’t that good.”

I lowered my head onto my chest and sighed. “It’s a thing for another time. If Telly is moonlighting, it might be useful to know, but I don’t know what good it would do us. Besides, she’d be smarter than to report information the department hasn’t released to the public.”

“Flerbies…” Limerence chimed in, pushing his forehead under my leg. Cerise slept on in the front seat, oblivious to the trials of the last few hours.

****

The highway loomed ahead as I finally started to come out of the hazy fog that’d settled over my thoughts long enough to start thinking about our next move.

“As I see it, we’ve got three stops; the Nest, the Vivarium, and Precious’s place. We need medical treatment and we need to get whatever is in Ruby’s box, but I want a shower first and some food more than I have wanted anything in my entire life.”

“Limerence is going to want to head to the Archive as soon as he’s sane enough to-”

“Ahhh, damn…” I slapped my hoof against my forehead. “I knew we forgot something.”

“The Moon Guns? I’ve got most of them in my saddlebags,” Taxi replied, gesturing to her bags on the center console as we headed into the city. “I grabbed them as we were leaving, while you were building the litter for Cerise.”

“Most of them?” I asked, worriedly.

Swift unzipped her combat vest’s side-pouches, revealing two of the sleek, black weapons nestled inside. “I have the last couple. We’re gonna leave these with Auntie Stella, right, Sir?”

“That’s the idea. A sea-serpent’s hoard strikes me as an entirely adequate place to make sure nopony ever sees them again. Limerence isn’t in any condition to protest,” I said, gesturing at our librarian who was again engrossed in trying to lick his way through the car window.

“So...what do we do with Cerise?” Swift asked.

“We’re dropping her with Precious then calling the Chief and letting her know where her daughter is. That’ll be after we get her some medical treatment.”

“Limerence said she’s not going to wake up anytime soon,” Taxi added. “If her leylines are burnt out, so long as none of them are damaged, she should be okay in a few days or weeks.”

“Then I’m putting delivery a little bit lower on our list of priorities. First and foremost...get us back to the Skids, Sweets.”

****

Home.

Good heavens, when did I start thinking of a bunker in the middle of the poorest slum in the city as ‘home’?

I don’t know. It was a pit, but it was my pit and every time I was there I was safe. That’s what home is, whether it’s your mother’s skirts to hide behind or a hotel room. It’s where none of the awful things out there can get you.

So it was then consistent with recent events that the second we turned onto the pockmarked road near Nest, I caught sight of a slobbering demon crashing towards us at top speed with three foals atop his heads and a dozen others around chasing his legs. Up above, heads peeked out of windows or down from rooftops, watching the children at their games with varying degrees of amusement.

Taxi pulled to a stop and I threw myself out of the car, waving towards the rooftops.

“What in Equestria!? I thought I told you lot to keep that thing out of sight!” I snarled at the Aroyo guards. A couple of pegasi up there were just smiling down at the spectacle. One nodded in my direction, then vanished behind the edge of the roof.

Goofball plowed to a stop in front of the Night Trotter, panting heavily as one of the children clambered down from his back and rushed up to us.

She was cute as a button, the color of over-ripe cheddar cheese, and far too much pink mane for one pony. It hung around her ankles and she stumbled over it as she ran. Her tiny horn poked up from her bangs, glowing brightly as she galloped towards me.

“Oooh! Mista Hard Bold! Mista Hard Bold!” she shouted. “We be takin’ best care of Goof!”

“Boiled. My name is Boiled, kid...” I sighed, wiping at my crusty mane.

The filly’s headlong charge slowed as she got close, then came to a stop about a meter away. She sniffed at the air, then threw one leg over her muzzle. “Ewww! Ye be smell like the time I and I hide broccoli behind de furnace!”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that, too. What’s the deal? I thought I said the Aroyos should keep ‘Goof’ hidden.”

“He be hidden!” she giggled, pointing to her glowing horn. “I got me cutiemark cause I… cause I done a thing! Me wanted to play wif him, but could only play if nopony be watching! So… nopony is!”

She turned and showed off a mark on her hip that looked like an ornate mirror with a cat’s eye looking out of it.

Wisteria trotted out of an alleyway nearby, her gravid belly giving her a wide-legged waddle as she brushed her purple mane back from her eyes with one hoof. She looked gorgeous, despite - or maybe because of - the lateness of her pregnancy. Her eyes were bright with life.

“Shade Walk! Shoo wi’ ye!” she ordered, waving her hoof at the filly. “Ye be takin’ de beasty for he walk today! Get on wid it.”

Shade Walk scampered back towards Goofball, who was playing a very gentle tug of war with a bit of rope and one of the foals who might have been a tenth his size. His other two heads were busy getting petted by his coterie of adoring fans. Once she was back in place between his ears, the giant dog charged off down the road.

“Wisteria, why is the ‘beasty’ outside of the Nest?” I asked.

“He be safe enough, Crusada. Dat girl’s talent be to hide t’ings in plain sight. Dem what do not seek, do not see.”

“You mean whatever she was casting just lets him wander around?” Swift sputtered, climbing out of the car.

“Aye. If nopony seeks him, nopony sees him.” She brushed at the air in front of her face with one leg. “Now, why come ye smellin’ of...phew...all manner o’ foul?”

“We had an inconvenient escape route. I could use some patching up and Taxi’s got a bullet in her. Do you have any ponies with medical training who could meet us down in the Nest?” I asked.

“I and I be afraid de bonesaw be treatin’ our wounded,” she replied, looking slightly sad. “De Jewla’ had a stomp last eve and de Aroyos be caught in de crossfire wid de Costovo Cyclones. We lose none, but...dey be some injuries. It be some hours before de bonesaw be free.”

“That’s fine. We’ve got some options there. Could you meet us down there in about twenty minutes? Bring Jambalaya. I’ve got a...heh...a ‘gift’ for the Aroyos.”

Something in the way I said that must have set off her sense of self preservation, because her wings flew open.

“A... a gift Crusada? Nopony gives de Aroyos ‘gifts’...”

“It’s a heck of a gift, but you might not thank me for it,” I answered, pulling Cerise from the back seat of the Night Trotter. I laid her out on the ground and began lashing her litter around my neck again.

Wisteria cocked an eyebrow at me, then nodded at the unconscious filly. “And who be dis one?”

“She was our target at Supermax. Trust me, I’ll tell you the whole story in a bit. After a shower.”

Limerence chose that moment to stumble out of the back seat, rolling onto a heap of garbage on the sidewalk. His vest was a mess and his golden watch dangled by its chain around his forelegs. Taxi quickly snatched it up and stuffed it back into his pocket.

“Legumes! I love singing… singing fabaceae… beans!” he moaned, turning in little circles, chasing after the end of his leash.

I hauled Cerise up behind me as the Aroyo majordomo stared at our intoxicated Archivist.

“Incidentally, do you have anything for a Beam overdose?” I added as an afterthought.

A tiny smile cropped up on Wisteria’s face. “Dat we may, Crusada. By de way, de Ancestors… dey say ye soon to be speakin’ wid dem.”

“Well, they’re going to have to wait a little while,” I replied, starting off down the street. “I’ve got a laundry list of things to be done or the wrath of heaven will descend on my head.”

Goofball rose and started following me, sniffing curiously at Cerise before deciding he didn’t much care for the scent coming off of any of us. His right head gave Swift a mournful look.

“Sorry, boy,” she laughed. “I promise, we’ll all get a shower soon.”

He woofed appreciatively, then dashed off to join his young fan club.

****

Scalding hot water ran down my back and layer upon layer of grime went with it. It was many shades of brown as it circled the drain in the middle of the bunker’s shower room.

Blood was in there. Probably some bits of some dead ponies. Definitely some leavings from some living ponies. All in all, a foul stew for having come off of somepony’s pelt.

I stared at the swirling water, fighting down a bad case of the shakes. It was the third or fourth episode in the half hour since I’d started bathing. Damnable things. I’d been waiting since Supermax for the anxiety attack to start, but it had been pretty peaceable until the water hit me.

There were an awful lot of bodies to lay at my hooves. More than I’d ever had there before. No case, even when I’d had to kill, and even when I’d had to watch ponies die, had left me with so many fresh ghosts. Cosmo. Skylark. Those dead fools at the temple. Ruby too, even if one fresh ghost was the baseline for an equicide.

Skylark’s victims might have some peace, if we could find some way of emptying out those phylacteries. I considered it a measure of just how crap things were that I couldn’t make that a higher priority. Of course, I had my own little passenger sitting pretty in my chest.

Would Gale want to be let out, one day, to go wherever it is souls go when some sick pony isn’t capturing them and burning them as a fuel source?

My guts felt like they were made of lead. I tried to push the darker thoughts out, but they do have a way of sneaking back in.

After another five minutes of just standing there, heart pounding, trying to still my stomach, I finally reached for the soap and began scrubbing. I scrubbed, and scrubbed, trying to find a clean inch. The problem with blood on grey fur is it tends to just give a pony brown highlights. I scrubbed my ears right down to my tail and then started again from the top, working the soap in deep.

It took three more passes before the water ran clear, and I still didn’t feel like I could wash the foulness away.

All those ponies dead.

I could only wallow in my guilt so long before somepony came to check up on me, but when I heard pounding hooves charging down the hall, I started looking for my gun. Shouts followed the panicked, uneven hoofsteps and another set was just behind the first.

Limerence pounded around the corner, his eyes crazed and his blonde mane flying as he dove straight for me. I threw myself sideways, rolling across the shower into a defensive crouch as our librarian charged the spot I’d just been. He skidded to a halt and threw his head back, mouth open, groaning in agony as he tried to fill his muzzle with water from the shower spout.

“Agagggleagggle!” he sputtered, although that might not have been an attempt at an actual sentence.

On his heels, my driver swung around the door frame and stopped, taking in myself standing in the corner and Lim swallowing muzzleful after muzzleful of shower water. Our librarian didn’t seem to care that he was getting drenched, although considering the smell off of him that might not have been surprising.

“What’d Wisteria give him?” I asked, glancing at Taxi.

“Dunno. Something ‘from de Ancestors’,” she replied. “It looked like green sludge and smelled like wasabi on steroids. I was half worried he was coming down here to drown himself.”

Wisteria poked her head around the corner. “Be he ‘out’ yet?”

A soft thump behind me brought my head around. Limerence was laying on his side in the water, his tongue lolling from one side of his mouth. His eyes were shut.

“Lim!” I rushed to his side and began feeling for a pulse.

“Be ye quieted, Crusada,” Wisteria murmured, buffing one hoof on her heavy stomach. “Dat be just de initial reaction. He wake up in t’ree hours feelin’ fresh as daisy. Well… mebbe daisy what been in de trash compacta’.”

****

I wandered out into the living room a good fifteen minutes later with a towel draped across my back. The shakes were gone, although the anxiety remained, quietly simmering in the background.

Limerence was heaped across some bean bags, snoring softly.

Beside him, her mane still wet from the bath Swift and Taxi had managed to get her into, Cerise was tucked in amongst a heap of blankets. Her eyes moved underneath their lids; she was dreaming. It was a distinct improvement over the comatose unconsciousness she’d been under when we went into the waste pipe.

Swift, also damp and minus her combat vest, lay beside her, her wings spread out to dry. Her eyes were shut, but she didn’t seem to be asleep. A twitching ladybug perched on the tip of her nose.

“She’s been talking to Tourniquet for the last half hour,” said a voice behind me.

I turned and found my driver behind me, wringing water from her mane with a fluffy hotel towel I recognized.

“Did you steal that while we were at the High Step last month?” I asked.

She shrugged and rubbed her cheek against it. “It’s not like they were going to need them for terribly long, now was it? Anyway, Swift is talking to Tourniquet. She came out of it long enough to tell me that the prison is going to need some medical supplies, food, and somepony to distribute it at some point soon. Tourniquet has corralled some of the cult into performing first aid on the injured from the temple, but ‘encouraging’ them to behave is a drain on her energy reserves.”

“Not to worry. I think we can handle that situation fairly comprehensively, at least, when Wisteria gets here. Speaking of that...where is she?”

“Talking to the Ancestors, whatever that happens to mean,” Taxi flipped her loose mane back over one shoulder. “She’ll be back. Meanwhile, when are we headed to Stella’s place?”

“Soon. I need to make some arrangements for Supermax first.”

“Arrangements. The way you say that word makes it sound like you’re about to crap all over someone’s day.”

“You might be not terribly far from the truth,” I replied, then perked one ear at a snuffling from the hallway out to the bunker’s door. “The rest of Ruby’s diary might have some clues as to how she got out of Supermax, and I do want to poke through Skylark’s journal...at least, what there is of it. First things first.”

“I, for one, would give an eyeball for some sleep,” Taxi answered, yawning softly as she snatched a beanbag from under Limerence and sagged into it.

“Me too, but I think we need to have this discussion with Wisteria, get some coffee, and handle our business before any of it comes knocking.”

Swift’s ears rose and her eyes opened, rolling about until they focused on me. She lifted her head, then turned to glance towards the stairs. “Sir? Queenie says Wisteria is coming.”

I tilted my head as the door to banged open and the Aroyo leader stomped in trailing Goofball on a bit of rope. The giant three-headed puppy looked a little shamefaced as she spat the rope out, but forgot whatever he’d done the moment he clapped eyes on Swift. All three tongues spilled out and he leapt across the room, upending the table as he landed in front of my partner and swept her up in his forelegs, licking everything he could.

“Eee! Goof! I just had a shower!” she squealed, pushing at his muzzles. After he’d managed to coat her face in a good, thick layer of saliva, she surrendered to the inevitable and hugged his middle head tightly. “I missed you, too, boy.”

“What’d he piss on, eat, or chew?” I asked, glancing at the scowling Wisteria.

“He eat de chil’runs homework. Dey be impossible to be teachin’ when dis beasty be about!” she grumbled, lifting her juju bag and brushing a bit of dog spit off of it. “It be obedience school for dat one!”

“Good luck with that." I shoved the spool table upright and pulled a cushion under my rump. Taxi took a place at my side and Swift on the other. "You mind joining us? We’ve got some things to discuss.”

Wisteria trundled over and elected to lay on her side, sighing contentedly. “I and I were just showin’ when we be first met. Now, de Ancestors say it be only a matter of days. I and I do hope ye not be about makin’ de last days of my second foal’s birth stompa.”

“Well, yes and no.” I sighed, gathering my thoughts. “We’ve got a problem. Your ‘demon’... the one who ran Supermax… was killing ponies. Astral Skylark has a whole heap of dead on her hooves and I can’t trust the city government. Maybe not even the Equestrian government. At least, not yet. Skylark is dead, but in the process, we ended up with buckets of prisoners. Her little convent is now under our control, but there are some...issues.”

“Ye say ‘issue’... I hear ‘stompa’, Crusada,” Wisteria said, frowning.

I bit my lip, then decided to get the worst out of the way. “There’s a magical...construct. She runs the prison. Has done since the war. I need the Aroyos to take care of her.”

Her one free wing popped into the air and she hissed, “De Aroyo be not dealin’ wid living magic!”

“Well, she wasn’t always a construct. She started life as a filly. A real filly, just like yours,” I replied, gesturing towards her stomach. Her face softened a little and I took that for a scored point. I quickly rushed on, so as not to lose my momentum. “She’s doing her best, but she needs somepony to keep her safe, hidden, and care for the prisoners until we can figure out what to do with them. She needs friends, too. Friends she can trust. These are some very high profile names I’ve got locked up in there as well. Valuable and dangerous.”

“And...what be dis doin’ wid de Aroyos?” she asked, still wary.

I held out my hooves and turned to Swift. “My partner here got herself...elected...the new Warden. That’s left us with certain...responsibilities. We need help with those responsibilities.”

Swift beamed, proudly, raising her chest up a little to show off the crescent mark.

“So, we want to give you Supermax.”

There was about ten seconds of uncomfortable silence.

Wisteria’s rear legs spasmed involuntarily and she kicked at the pillow a little, scrambling to her hooves.

“Ye be what?!” she snarled, making Goofball jump and growl softly. She gave him a look that sent him cringing into a corner. I felt like doing something similar when she leveled it at me.

“You brought me into your little family, here, so I want to contribute,” I explained, trying to keep my gaze level. I had to settle for a spot on her forehead, since her eyes seemed to be seconds from shooting fire. “I’m giving you the prison and all of the prisoners. There’s a path through the sewers which I’m pretty sure can be cleared with some dedicated effort and help from the Supermax construct. Her name is Tourniquet, by the way. Nothing short of the entirety of P.A.C.T. with Princess Celestia riding at their helm can enter that place without her permission. It’s a fortress.” I pointed one hoof at her. “Your fortress.”

Her ears twitched a little at the last two words. I could almost hear her thoughts as they formed.

Fortress.

Our fortress.

Aroyo fortress.

She must have found that to her liking, because her glare dropped to a low simmer.

Chewing her lip for a moment, she tucked her wings back against her sides and asked, “And what be we meant to do wid a prison full o’big’shot ponies?”

“Whatever you see fit,” I replied, tapping the tabletop. “My only condition is that you don’t release them until after I’m finished with my case and you don’t kill them. I’ve got enough dead on my hooves.”

Wisteria’s nose wrinkled as she came to a decision. “Hmmm… De Aroyo be not in de habit of killin’ prisoners. True, we be not in de habit of takin’ prisoners, either. Still, I and I... be havin’ Jambalaya go and see what she will see.”

“There are a few minor details we need to work out first, but I think once we’ve got those handled, you’re going to be very pleased. Incidentally, I’m going to need some of your people to make a few dozen extremely expensive cars vanish entirely. You think you can manage that?” I asked.

The Aroyo looked almost offended. “We be makin’ dem disappear like nopony knew dey be there! Where dey be?”

“The parking lot in front of your brand new fortress. Speaking of that, you may not want to go inside just yet. I’ve got to have a friend of mine make a delivery.”

****

The line rang, and rang, and rang. I was about to hang up and try again when a bored-sounding mare picked up the phone.

“Detrot Municipal Hazardous Materials. What’d you spill and how long do we have before the death pay-outs become higher than our insurance premiums?” she drolled.

“Hey Colostomy. How are things down at your end?”

“Haha… 'my end’... classic. My end is covered in shit and you know it,” she groaned, tapping the phone on the edge of her desk. “What do you want, Hard Boiled? Flood any streets with liquified chicken guts this year? Or did you maybe empty a dumptruck full of manure over a suspect? I’m shocked you didn’t kill that guy, by the way.”

“That was all Sykes and you know it!”

“Yeah, well, Sykes wasn’t the one who caused every toilet on the upper west side to run in reverse by chasing a perp into the sewer,” she snapped.

“That was five years ago. Are you ever going to let me forget about that?”

“You and I shouldn’t be on a first name basis, so no, not a chance. Now, what do you want? You never call here unless you’re making my day complicated and expensive.”

“How would you feel about accepting a considerable bribe for some unused hazard suits with filter masks on them and your silence as to their whereabouts?”

The line was quiet for a moment.

“Cash or goods exchange?”

****

“This is the Vivarium! Your home for fun, friends, and heavy bondage!”

“Morning Scarlet. It’s Hard-”

“Detective! Oh, Detective! It’s so good to hear from you! Are you alright? Nopony hurt you, did they?” he squeaked.

“I’m fine, Scarlet. We’re coming in for a visit here soon. Can you have the medics ready?”

“The... the medics? Is somepony hurt?!”

“Yes, albeit not severely. Taxi has a bullet we need to dig out of her leg and I’ve got...well, I’ve got a pony here who needs to remain very anonymous who probably needs some broad spectrum antibiotics. It might be a good idea to make sure her leylines aren’t damaged, too. In fact, all of us are probably going to need a body scan, some shots, and probably something for parasites. Can you make that happen?”

“What ever did you get yourselves into, Detective?” he asked, worriedly.

“We went for a swim. Believe me, that’s probably the most you want to know. We’ll be there soon.”

I hung up the pay phone and shook myself, then headed for the car.

Act 2, Chapter 40: Could be Worse, Could be Raining

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 40: Could be Worse, Could be Raining

That words have power is not really in dispute in any land, least of all Equestria.

Tales tell of a mare who brought a well-known god of chaos to heel simply with well-chosen words and basic emotional manipulation. Sufficient complaining has managed to twist entire civilizations into temporary servitude - at least, specific civilizations to whom the ball gag was apparently a foreign concept until recently. Conversely, poorly choreographed entreaties for peace have sparked messy wars.

But this, again, is the magical land of Equestria, and Equestria loves nothing if not literalizing. Words can have an intensely physical power. The right curse can freeze minds and produce storms. Granny Clodhopper, despite having the eloquence of a tire iron caught in a wood chipper, is generally regarded amongst Equestria’s greatest wordsmiths because she could greet people in a way that physically stripped paint from buildings and once stopped a dragon flock with a critique of their maternal heritage so withering that they actually lost facial scales to gale-force winds.

The sheer power of verbal effects has led to a budding study in Profanomancy, a type of emotional magic based around the ability to generate utterances vile enough to approximate a number of magical effects. While not a highly regarded practice given its inherent potential for discord, it is one of a handful of magical studies not solely restricted to unicorn use, for it can be practiced by anyone with a tongue, a solid helping of bloody-mindedness, and the will to say things that would make your average schoolmarm burst into flames.

--The Scholar

“Ahhh…”

I let out a soft sound of pleasure as I sank into the hot water. A shower is one thing. A bath is something else entirely. Scarlet had managed to find me a private bath chamber with its own spring after Pickle finished his medical procedures and pronounced me ‘fit as a fiddle but in need of an immediate delousing,' lest I suffer - in his words - ‘bowel distress like a dragon who’d eaten a cheese factory.'

This had the side benefit of a very hot bath with some wonderful, scented herbs sprinkled into it.

Yes, Cerise needed to be run home. Yes, I had a whole stack of horrible things coming for me if that didn’t happen soon. Yes, there was something in Ruby’s trunk we needed to retrieve. Yes, there was still the matter of covering up the events at Supermax in a more complete and solid way.

Damn me, though, if it didn’t feel good to just lay back and relax.

Our arrival back at the Vivarium was met with much fanfare and demands from Granny Glow for a debriefing, but I managed to put her off until after the doctors had seen to us. The shrapnel in Taxi’s leg was going to take a bit to remove and the wounds needed magical healing. She’d already had the beginnings of an infection and that needed its own special brand of tender loving care.

Limerence was sleeping off the after effects of the Beam and whatever it was that Wisteria had dosed him with. He’d been unconscious through the entire treatment. I hadn’t seen Swift since Scarlet dragged her off to some secret corner somewhere to get the full story.

That left me time to sit back, close my eyes, and try to come down.

I inhaled a deep breath, feeling my shoulders unkinking. They were only the first of many things that needed to come unknotted before I could call myself well and truly relaxed, but I’d told Scarlet if anypony wanted anything within the next hour to take a message.

The bath door slid open and somepony trotted in across the stone-effect floor, their loud hoofsteps echoing around the tiny chamber.

“Sir?”

I didn’t move or open my eyes, but I did muster the will to respond.

“What is it, kid?”

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“Knock yourself out. I imagine you need a dip as much as I do.”

The hoofsteps approached, then I heard the water moving as little waves splashed against my chest. I sank a bit deeper, until water closed over my upper lip.

Swift gasped as she felt the hot bath starting to work its magic. I cracked one eye at her as she sat on the opposite side of the little pool, her huge wings spread open on its surface and her mane plastered to her neck. She looked a bit like a drowned terrier.

“They couldn’t find you your own herbal bath?” I chuckled.

“Not that didn’t have Taxi and Minox in it,” she replied, her cheeks flushed. “She grabbed him the second she was out of treatment and they’re… um…" She fumbled for an appropriate description. "...They’re next door.”

“I guess I can’t blame her,” I replied, glancing towards the wall. Thankfully, either Taxi was being uncharacteristically quiet with a full-size minotaur, or the sound-proofing was good and thick. “Once we’ve got this situation in hoof, I intend to take a couple of days to fortify our positions before we head back out there.”

Swift nervously twirled her hoof in the steamy water.

“Kid, whatever it is you have to say, spit it out.”

She sighed and lowered herself until just her eyes, muzzle, and wingtips were above the water. “It’s gonna make more work for us…”

“Then hit me with it when I’m relaxed,” I said, hauling myself into a sitting position. “I take it you noticed something back there that’s going to alarm me?”

“Sir... do you remember what Astral Skylark said?”

“Which thing? She said a lot of things, and I might have been sort of concentrating on methods we might use to walk out of there alive.”

Raising her head, she tossed her mane, slinging water against the wall as she pushed it back out of her face. “I mean... about her patrons. She said they were the ones who were having her kill ponies.”

I tugged my hat off the side of the pool, pulling it back down over my eyes. It’d been freshly laundered, despite being tucked into my very safe pockets throughout most of our adventures in Supermax. The action was mostly an excuse to gather my thoughts.

“Now you mention it… yeah, I did pick up on that. It wasn’t just that they were having her systematically kill ponies. They were having her… donate… phylacteries to them.”

“That means there’s a bunch of souls still out there, trapped in bones or horns or...or wings,” she swallowed, feathers twitching.

I nodded, pushing my hat down over my ears. “It also means that, whatever their game-plan is, we might not have disrupted it terribly much, if at all. That means we better hope there’s something in Ruby’s trunk, diary, or in Skylark’s journal that can tell us something about where to go next.”

“Sir, we know where to go next! The law firm! If we can have Chief Jade storm the place, we could catch everypony unawares and then we’d have the cult along with the lawyers and we could-”

“What, kid? Go to Princess Celestia with them?” I asked.

“Yes!” she blurted. “We could give this to the Princess and she’d take care of everything!”

I gave her a look, then shook my head, sadly. “She’d take care of the magical assassins who put a bullet in my chest? Or the Moon-gun that can slice and dice a dragon which is still unaccounted for? Or the conspiracy whose purpose and shape we still don’t know? Or the missing chestplate of Nightmare Moon, whose location we haven’t figured out?”

“Why not?” Swift asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe she could. Or maybe we’d show up to her door with a group of lawyers who know almost nothing because this group operates in cells. Geranium doesn’t know who she was working for. Not really. Neither did Cosmo nor Reginald Bari. None of them knew who was pulling the strings. I don’t know if Skylark did, either. We’d hand Princess Celestia the evidence of necromancy and say ‘Yes, prosecute all of these rich, well connected ponies!’...real public like. Then what?”

“You don’t think they’d believe us, Sir?” she asked, pensively.

“Oh, of course they would. There's some hard evidence. We might even get some medals. Then the rich ponies would find somepony to pay off, or plea bargain, or run for the zebra lands and hope they can escape extradition. This is Detrot, kid. Not Canterlot. The real conspirators would walk away clean and whatever their actual goals are might proceed apace. At best, they go underground for awhile.” I let my shoulder slump. “Being as this group plays the long game... who knows? They might not mind another ten years sitting, waiting.”

“Then... so what do we do?”

“We hunt this conspiracy down while we still have the advantage. I can’t dig the corruption out of Detrot, but this conspiracy has been a huge section of the worst our city has to offer. Whatever their final goals are, they’ve gone to great lengths to set this city on a course to destruction.”

“B-but wouldn’t telling ponies about it mean... mean they’d help?” she asked.

“Some might, yes...but remember that thing I said about ‘real public like’?” I reminded her. “Unless we have the entire story...we’d be telling the whole world about Tourniquet...and about us. A magically altered pegasus whose family business includes dragons and prostitutes. A former cop with a bug’s heart. The heir to a criminal dynasty. Taxi… and all that Taxi is.”

Swift’s eyes popped. “Oh, I hadn’t even thought about the press…”

“Yeah, the press,” I said, nodding. “We go public with this or let anypony know the absolute truth of what we know, then everyone we love will end up in the crosshairs. It’ll be either those assassins...or the court of public opinion. Are you really confident in how well the public will respond? You think we can make absolutely sure, here and now today, that none of those killers can get to anypony we love?”

My partner’s wings were shaking, making little ripples in the steaming water.

“So...you...want us to take out this conspiracy-”

“Then we’ll know who these killers are. Then, hopefully, it won’t matter who we are. Our friends will be safe. The city will be safe. The Princesses will be safe.”

Heaving her wings out of the water, Swift crawled onto the side of the pool and rolled onto her side, dragging a spare towel from a stack nearby and settling it underneath her head like a pillow. I could feel her gaze from under the brim of my hat as I relaxed in the pool.

I waited for the inevitable question. I hoped it’d be something like ‘What do you want for dinner?’ or maybe ‘Can I take a nap here?’

No such luck.

“Sir, this is what it means to be a ‘hero’, isn’t it?” she asked, softly. I heard a hitch in her voice that sounded like there might be a few tears coming.

It was a good question, really. I hated myself a little for not having a good answer.

“If it makes you feel better about some of the stuff we keep having to do, sure. I don’t think the Power Ponies have as many nightmares, though.”

She sniffled, then wiped at her nose with the edge of the towel. “I thought I was the only one who couldn’t sleep lately...”

“Survival is just about the only thing on my mind. We’ve got one extremely long shot that could let us walk away with our heads on our shoulders and fewer dead than doing nothing.”

Swift pushed herself up, trotting around the side of the pool until she was beside me, settling down with her chin on the foreleg I had propped on the water’s edge. “Sir, if I ask you to be completely, one hundred percent honest with me...will you do it?”

I tilted my head at her, raising the brim of my hat just enough so I could see her out of one eye. Her eyes were a little sunken with exhaustion, but she was still full of that same vibrant energy the young never know they have. I miss having that energy.

“I can’t guarantee I will, kid. Whatever else Tourniquet said, she was right about me.”

Her ears pulled back a bit. “You’d lie to me if you thought it would make things better?”

“Absolutely,” I replied, without hesitation.

Swift considered this for a long time, shifting her head a little closer to my shoulder. I shut my eyes, inhaling the herbs and trying to absorb the quiet into my very being as though I might store it up for some later time.

“Sir, do you think we can win?”

I laughed, bumping her cheek with my hat brim. “Not a chance.”

Her nose scrunched and she gave me a cutting look. “Then why-...oh…” She squinted at me as realization replaced irritation. “You said that to make me angry enough to keep trying, didn’t you?”

“Who knows?” I ruffled her damp mane with my free hoof. “You want to worry about the future, worry about dinner. Dinner is nice and reliable.”

She giggled, poking me with her pinions. “It’s breakfast time, Sir.”

As though he’d been waiting for his moment, the door of the private bath slid open and Scarlet poked his head in. “Detective! Munchies and debriefing in ten! Miss Stella wants to know exactly what happened at Supermax! I’ll have your clean clothes brought up.”

****

Bagels! Bagels! Bagels!

Bagels are life. Bagels are stability. Bagels are a return to form when all the universe is going mad.

Bagels even occlude dignity and I am a pony who values his dignity. Granted, most everyone I know doesn’t value my dignity, but I am quite fond of it. It should be a measure of just how much I love bagels that when I spotted the basket of steaming, fresh out-of-the-oven goodness sitting on a spare table in Stella’s audience pool, I tackled it.

“Sir, some of us want some, too!” Swift complained, poking me with a hoof. I nipped the air in her direction, hugging the basket to my chest with both forelegs.

“Get your own happiness!” I snapped, then buried my face in the warm bread products.

I heard laughter and raised my head. Scarlet was rolling back and forth on the shore of Stella’s pool, giggling his tail off with Taxi sitting behind him, a tiny smile on her face. Her eyes were a touch glazed and a rolling IV drip was attached to her front leg.

I swallowed my first bagel, pulled a jar of peanut butter off the table, and tore into my second one. Dignity be damned. I hadn’t eaten since the cafeteria in Supermax.

“Why don’t I go get some more? Miss Stella and Miss Glow will be with you soon. They’re handling a customer who got a little over-enthusiastic with a watermelon,” Scarlet snickered, trotting back down the hallway and leaving me with my drugged driver and scowling partner. Some thoughtful pony had dragged a few cushions into the audience chamber and, for the next few minutes, we lazed beside Stella’s pool, watching the water lap at the shore. Taxi looked noticeably calmer and more relaxed after her ‘bath’, although that might have been the morphine.

Swift settled on a banana from the table full of refreshments, stripping the peel and popping the whole thing into her muzzle while I worked my way through the trove of bagels and we waited for our hosts to arrive. There wasn’t much to say, and I had a mouth that was being otherwise occupied.

After a good ten minutes later, uneven hoofsteps announced Granny Glow. The elderly unicorn hobbled out of the tunnel and her eyes flicked about until she found Swift, pausing briefly on the red crescent on her chest. Swift had elected to keep her combat vest unzipped a few inches, just to show Tourniquet’s mark.

Then she caught me in a smoldering glare. I managed to choke down the bagel in my mouth, unconsciously scooting back a few inches.

“Boy... ye better have a damn fine explanation fer what Ah hear tell is takin’ mah little birdy into the Hole with ya,” she growled, trotting over to the edge of the pool. “Ah also wanna know who that there girly ye brought in was and why tha docs say every one'a ye was takin’ a swim in a septic tank!”

“Believe me, a full explanation... is coming,” I gasped, patting my chest until I could breathe again. “At least, as full as I can afford to give you.”

Glow picked up Swift in her magic, dragging her over to take a closer look at the magical brand on her grand-daughter’s fur. She jabbed her hoof at the spot. “And birdy, ye wanna be telling me what ye dun’ to yahself here?!”

Swift let out a little harumph and gave her wings a beat, blowing herself out of her grandmother’s magical field before coming to rest beside her. “It’s a gift from a friend, Gran. I...um...I kinda got a new job...”

“Yer daddy is gonna… well, he’s probably gonna explode. Gittin’ yerself a tattoo… heh! Good on ye, girl!” The old mare cackled, breaking out into a sudden grin. “Ye be sure to lemme know the details when ye see’em, ye hear?”

Swift rolled her eyes. “Trust me, if just having it was the worst part, I think Daddy would be happy...”

Before Glow could ask for clarification, the audience chamber rumbled slightly and Stella slid out of the water, flicking his purple fins with consternation. He was wearing a night-cap I could have used for a tent and what must have been, for him, almost no makeup. Still, he smiled when he saw me, producing all the familiar feelings of deep-seated terror that go with a dragon smiling at you.

“Ah, my little darlings!” he purred. “I’m most pleased your adventures bore fruit, although there is some curiosity as to who our latest guest is.”

“That’s a bit of a story…” I replied as Scarlet dragged a tray into the room with a simply enormous vat of tea sitting on it. I couldn’t figure out how it was meant to be tapped, until Stella picked it up and took a quiet sip.

Dragging my basket of bagels over to one of the cushions, I dunked one in the jar of peanut butter before messily tearing into it. Taxi sat beside me and began lazily drizzling a donut in hot sauce.

“Well, please my dears, I’m all ears,” Stella said, raising his crests.

“The first thing you should probably know is that the King of Ace attempting to blackmail half the city was only one tiny piece of a much, much larger puzzle…”

****

I was exhausted and bringing Stella up to date had taken more out of me than I thought it would.

There’d been a tiny kerfluffle when it was finally revealed exactly who Cerise was, but that couldn’t be helped. Granny Glow held off on drowning me long enough for a complete explanation and Swift stopped her before I actually had to inhale any of the water.

The explanation of Tourniquet and Swift’s new tattoo had Glow laughing so hard she forgot to be angry that I’d taken her grand-daughter into such a dangerous place.

Throughout, Stella maintained a grave expression as he slurped at his bucket of tea. The only change was when I began the story of Astral Skylark’s final moments and related the true nature of the Church of the Lunar Passage; his frown deepened into a scowl and he waved a claw towards Scarlet to come forward. They exchanged a few words about ‘adjusting investments’ and ‘redirecting funds’, but I didn’t understand much of it.

“What was that all about?” I asked when they’d finished their little conversation.

“The Church propped up various parts of this city,” Stella chuckled, swirling the liquid in his cup. “They gave an outlet for the guilty to salve their neuroses and they took care of the homeless. With them gone, both now fall to those most capable and most ambitious. Either way, there is money to be made, my sweet Detective, and ponies to be catered to.”

Scarlet held up a clipboard in front of me. On it, there was a map of the city with various sections drawn in different colors. Stella’s secretary pointed to one spot that was a rich shade of purple, matching Stella’s scales. Compared to the city as a whole or the red and blue sections I took to represent the Jewelers and Cyclones, it was tiny, but it was bigger than I’d thought.

“The elimination of the Jewelers in the area around the Monte Cheval has given us room for expansion!” he exclaimed. “The local Cyclones have also reduced their activities in several areas. Without the Church diverting ponies there, we can build homeless shelters, then funnel the homeless into employed positions at new businesses we control! Without the Jewelers putting pressure on them, the Stilettos can take care of a much wider area. Then, we can channel fresh finances from the new businesses back into our coffers!”

I cocked my head at the map, then pushed it aside. “And the guilty?”

Stella’s tail slapped the water, sending a spray over the lot of us. “Oh, dear Hard Boiled… my innocent friend, do you not know the other fine salve for guilt?”

I glanced around at my partner, then at Granny Glow, before turning back to the serpent.

His forked tongue snuck out between his teeth and he hissed, “Vice, Detective. I could have started a church here, allowing you ponies to worship at my claws in exchange for protection and safety… but a puppet is ever so much duller than a willing participant. I would rather let you worship one another and reap the rewards. Being a messiah is such difficult work, after all, and I am a dragon of leisure.”

I smirked and waved a hoof towards the clipboard. “You and your altruism might just save this city.”

He swept back, reclining against the wall as he flipped his boa across his chest. “Oh, that’s sweet of you to say, Detective… but I shan't be running for mayor just yet. Maybe we’ll save that for you? After all, without your efforts, none of this would be possible. Still, what do you intend to do, now?”

I pulled Ruby’s diary out of my pocket, flipping to the last few pages which were all that was left with any writing on them. “Well, with those Moon Guns I gave to Scarlet out of play, I am going to take a shot at the lawfirm of Umbra, Animus, and Armature. I haven’t got a plan for that just yet, but about twelve hours worth of sleep is a start. Speaking of that, I’m minutes from passing out. Have you found the trunk I left here?”

Stella shook his head. “I have already added the Moonfire Weapons to my hoard, per your request. They are quite the lovely little mechanical horrors, by the way. If nothing else, they will warn away any fellow dragons who might consider my territory an easy target. As for your trunk, we will hunt it down, but it may take a few hours searching. Not all of our employees are here, though as they filter in we’ll ask around until we find out which one has it.”

“Good. Can you have it ready when we get back to pick up Cerise? My friends and I need rest.” I looked over at Taxi, who had been silent throughout my story and discovered her laying on her side, one foreleg clutching a pillow while the other held her IV-tube. She was dead asleep. “Could you also maybe call us a cab and get somepony to follow us in the Night Trotter?”

****

The cab that deposited us at the edge of the Skids left us with a five block walk, during which I had to carry Taxi who was too far gone after the mix of blood loss, drugs, and healing magics to really move herself.

Stella had promised to keep Cerise sedated and see what he could do for her leylines, but we still had to make the delivery to Precious.

I don't remember much beyond the moment I nosed the door of the Nest open and dropped Taxi into a beanbag chair. Limerence was sitting at the table with an icepack on his head. One of his eyes moved in our general direction, but he didn't seem inclined to hold a conversation just yet. That was fine with me.

I staggered into the hall, shoving open the first room and falling face first into one of the bunk-beds. I was out before my head hit the pillow.

****

Thank Celestia I didn’t remember but a tenth of the crap my brain had seen fit to spew out that night.

Dangerous lights on the horizon.

A flash and a dead mare at my hooves.

The sounds of tearing wings.

One of these days, I will make a psychologist rich enough to afford his own psychologist to fix the nightmares I’m likely to give him.

****

My eyes were almost crusted shut as I came out of what felt like a second month-long coma. I shifted on the bed, trying not to whimper like a puppy who’d found his mother left while he was asleep, but that’s damn well how I felt.

The various aches and pains of the night before were gone, probably thanks to Gale, but a persistent anxiety wouldn’t bugger off long enough for me to turn over and go back to sleep. I felt a slight pressure on my chest and reached up to find that somepony had taken the liberty of rolling me over and plugging me in while I was out. An extension cord led off the bed into the nearest wall-socket.

Grabbing the cord in my teeth, I pulled it out and did the complicated mouth and hoof gymnastics involved in zipping myself back up. I’d have to see one day about a better option than that zipper.

My hat was on the pillow beside me and whoever had plugged my heart in had also managed to get me out of my coat. My revolver was still on my leg, but the safety was on. The shotgun was... now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen it since we’d gone into the sewage line. Meh. No big loss.

I tugged my revolver out of its harness, turning the weapon in my hooves. My faithful revolver. My father’s revolver. I smiled and started to tuck it away when something glittered on it’s dark metal surface. I squinted at it, then lifted the weapon closer.

A two centimeter wide perfect circle on the side of the breach seemed to have been polished to a perfectly reflective silver. Inside it, a series of drawings or runes of some kind seemed to have been etched into the metal.

I scratched at the edge of the little circle and some of it peeled away, revealing more shiny metal and more strange symbols.

My breathing was becoming a little erratic, so I stopped and laid my weapon on the pillow.

I shut my eyes.

Still dreaming,I told myself. You’re still dreaming, Hardy. Your gun is fine. You’ll wake up in a minute and it’ll be perfectly alright.

I swallowed another jumpy breath, then cracked one eye.

The shining circle was still there.

I pinched myself and blinked a few times.

“Alright, so... it’s not a big deal, right?” I said, aloud. “I mean, it doesn’t seem like it’s damaged, right?”

I opened the breach and flicked the remaining bullets onto the bed, then pulled the hammer back and fanned the trigger a few times. The action seemed fine. I clicked the safety back and forth, then brushed my toe over the spot where the surface was scoured open. Another tiny flake of material cracked and fell.

Come to think of it… wasn’t that where that mare back in the temple shot me?

Had she shot me?

I didn’t really have time to think about it, but she’d died right in front of me. Her gun exploded. Most of her face was scorched off, in fact. We didn’t have a weapon in our arsenal that could do that.

A P.E.A.C.E. cannon shell at extremely close range, maybe, but I’d known where Taxi was and it was nowhere near the lethal range of even the nastiest shot in her arsenal. The mare who died was the last pony with a Moon Gun, too, so it wasn’t one of those.

Swift? She said she was rubbish with weather manipulation so lightning was probably out and that ridiculous blaster she carted around wouldn’t have turned the girl’s face into a piece of modern art, even if she had been going for headshots.

Limerence’s horn was barely holding his crossbow while he pulled his little wall-walking trick. The rest of the unicorns were too high to cast anything and Skylark had already dipped out.

Maybe the weapon had misfired? Maybe, but I’d seen the light from the barrel.

She’d shot me and she’d hit me, or rather, she’d hit my revolver.

I didn’t know how to feel. Should I be angry? It was, after all, the only thing my father and my grandfather had given me that I still had. The rest burned with my apartment. Sad? It was, technically, just a gun and it didn’t seem to have been damaged. Surely I could just paint over the spot. Granted, there wasn’t supposed to be a spot.

Those Moon weapons were designed to shear open dragons. I’d watched one cut a pony in half like so much tissue paper.

All these thoughts were kinda superfluous. If my revolver was damaged, the best I could do was take it to the Don and see if there was anything he could do for it. It’s not as though magical weapons can be serviced down at your local gun shop. They aren’t supposed to need service. That’s half the point of having one.

Since the Don was already on my list of places to go, I slid my revolver back into the holster, cinched it in tight, and threw on my coat.

****

I poked my head out of the barracks room and was greeted by the smell of eggs and fresh baked biscuits.

Swift and Taxi were sitting at the living room table, while Limerence heaped veggie omelettes the size of my head onto their plates. He was wearing a frilly, little blue apron and a chef’s hat that made him look dorkier than a whole box of pocket protectors, but he was smiling. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen him smile before, if ever.

“Ah, Detective!” he called out. “Come along, then! Breakfast is ready!”

I quietly stepped back into the barracks, retrieved my bullets, and reloaded my revolver. No sense in going out there unarmed, particularly if my librarian had been replaced by a changeling.

Trotting into the living room, I plunked myself behind the table and set my trigger bit in front of me.

Limerence laid a plate in front of me, followed by a mountain of eggs and steamed vegetables. “Try some, Detective! Old family spice recipe, from the homeland!”

He toddled off back towards the little kitchen, leaving me with a hoof-spoon and my companions staring at me expectantly. Taxi was still wearing a bandage on her leg and Swift was already in her combat vest, but neither of them looked to have their weapons closeby.

Swift made a little ‘go on’ motion with her hoof.

“Why is he smiling and making us food? I need to know this right now, because I’m very, very worried and I think I might shoot him just to be safe...” I murmured.

Swift scooped another heaping spoonful of eggs into her muzzle. “Ish deliciush!”

“Beam is known to have interesting psychiatric properties,” Taxi replied, nodding at our librarian’s back. “One of them seems to be putting Lim in a good mood. He’s been like that since I woke up. I told him most of the Moon Guns were disposed of and he didn’t even bat an eyelash. He wasn’t even upset his pocketwatch wasn’t working after the dunking in the sewer, although he did take a minute to call some repair place in town before he started cooking.”

“Are we sure he hasn’t been brainwashed or something? Did you feed some of this to the dog first to see if it’s poisoned?” I asked, gesturing to where Goofball was snoozing in one corner with a sleepy Shadow Walk napping in the crook of his foreleg.

Taxi nodded. “The mutt seemed alright, but then, I saw him eat three of your beer bottles earlier.”

“That’s nothing!” Swift added. “Yesterday, he got thirsty and drank two whole gallons of gasoline!”

I put a hoof to my forehead, then picked up a spoon full of Lim’s eggs. “Please don’t let him lick the plates. I don’t want to have to go buy new ones.”

Cautious, I took a bite and, for several seconds, I found myself unable to think. My mouth burned a little, but there were undertones of happy Sunday mornings watching cartoons, and laying by a pond, and peaceful hillsides.

Whatever his personality flaws, Limerence was a damn fine cook.

I started to scarf down the meal with great abandon. Even without bagels, it was a masterpiece.

For about ten minutes, there silence around the little table. Limerence reappeared and settled down to his own meal, politely tipping his bowler to me. That pleasant smile didn’t leave his face the whole time.

Between bites, I finally found a place to start making some plans.

“First thing this morning, we deliver Cerise to the Prince of Detrot. Precious can handle her mother and I’ve no desire to put myself anywhere near Iris Jade’s sights. Then, we handle the box. Speaking of that, did Stella call?”

Taxi shook her head. “Yes, while you were asleep. He said they found it and asked if we wanted it couriered over, but I told him to hold it and we’d come get it when we pick up Cerise.”

“Well, at least we know it fits in the back seat,” I replied. “Lemme find that letter from Ruby that opens the damn thing and then we can go face this particular music.” I raised my voice so as to be heard in the kitchen. “Hey! Lim! Call your father and let him know we’re coming!”

****

Limerence’s contact ritual was an extra ten minutes and I was already antsy to get us on our way. I was vaguely aware I needed more rest, but that seemed immaterial against the various impending dooms hanging overhead.

When he emerged from the kitchen, he was still smiling. I really wished he’d stop.

“Father says he looks forward to seeing us, Detective! He was most pleased by the outcome of our little venture and looks forward to the acquisition of our final target,” he said, almost vibrating with good cheer.

“Final target?” I asked. “You mean the last Moon Gun?”

“Yes! We’ve still a thing to be done after all. Where shall we begin our search?” he asked, cheerily.

“Well... Cerise is our top priority, then Ruby Blue’s trunk. I want whatever is in it. We’ll come up with a plan after we go see your father. He and I have some things we need to... discuss,” I said, pulling my sleeve down over the damaged spot on my gun.

***

The box was waiting for us behind the Vivarium with a bored looking Minox sitting on top of it. As he saw the cab rounding the edge of the Vivarium’s shopping mall, he leapt to his hooves. Taxi yanked up on the parking brake and was out before the cab had rolled to a stop, throwing herself into his arms and thoroughly ruffling his tux. He didn’t seem to mind as he picked her up in a hug and she planted a hoof-curling kiss on him.

When they came up for air, I jerked my head at the trunk.

“I see our luggage...where’s our girl?” I asked.

Minox took a second to catch his breath after that kiss, then chuckled as he set my driver down. “I figure, you got… eh... limited space, yes? Waz most ‘genius! Ze girl, she in ze trunk.”

Somepony had taped the trunk’s lock open, so I just had to push the top off. Inside, Cerise was still sleeping peacefully. Some thoughtful creature had given her a pillow and blanket. She did fit comfortably and it solved our transportation problem.

“I’m sure I should find this wrong, somehow,” I said.

“You said the same thing the last time we put a pony in there, Sir,” Swift said, grabbing the handle on the end and dragging it towards the car.

“Yes, but that particular pony had choked me half to death not ten minutes prior. I wasn’t feeling especially generous.”

Taxi patted the box as she popped the rear door open. “Well, this pony killed half the inner circle of the Lunar Passage and was considering ripping you into little pieces. I think it all evens out, don’t you?”

I waved for Minox’s attention, since it was mostly centered on my driver’s backside. He jerked his head up.

“What’s the status of the supplies and ponies we asked you to send out to Supermax?” I asked.

“Ze supplies, zey be ready soon! Ve meet ze... ’Aroyos’ at ze prison?”

“That’s right,” I affirmed. “These are some skittish characters, so no guns, and no Stilettos. You show a weapon, they’ll have the doors locked down tight. Drop the supplies out front and leave. Oh! And whatever you do, don’t go inside. The top three floors of that place are full of an especially nasty magic poison.”

“Ve do as ze Detective say,” the minotaur replied, with a shrug, adjusting his bowtie back to center.

I smiled as I squeezed into the Night Trotter beside the trunk full of the Chief’s daughter. “And would you let the lizard know we’re grateful?”

“Ze ‘lizard’...heh. He be well aware of how tightly he holds ze Detective’s… how you say… яйца.”

I nodded as though I understood, then pulled the door shut as Taxi hopped back behind the wheel and started the engine.

“What are... ’yai-sa’ or whatever he just said?” I asked as we pulled away.

“Eggs, Detective. It’s a minotaur word that means ‘eggs’,” Limerence replied, with a tiny smirk.

“Stella holds my eggs? Is that a dragon thing?”

“Your balls, Hardy,” Taxi chimed in. “Euphemism for testicles.”

I rubbed at my forehead with one hoof and grumbled, “Remind me to piss in his pool next time we’re down there...”

****

I pushed open the front door of the Burning Love and stopped in my tracks, staring at the counter. More specifically, behind the counter.

“Lily?!” I exclaimed.

Lily Blue was leaning on Precious’ countertop, a magazine propped open in front of her. She was wearing a slightly modified version of one of the Prince’s sparkling jumpsuits, albeit fitted to a mare’s frame. It showed off a few angles and curves that the eye would tend to overlook on most days and suited her surprisingly well.

She looked up and a genuine smile blossomed on her face. How long since I’d gotten one of those? My heart lurched and I put a hoof to my chest, wondering if Gale had suddenly malfunctioned.

No, no he hadn’t.

It’d just been a long time since a mare looked at me like that.

She rushed out from behind the counter and into my forelegs, hugging me tightly.

Oooh, boy. Clean thoughts, clean thoughts..

“Detective! Are you here to see Mister Precious? Have there been any developments in my sister’s case?” she asked, excitedly, clutching at my chest.

I gently disengaged from the hug after it had gone on a few seconds longer than propriety might have otherwise encouraged. “You could say that. Why has the Prince got you minding the counter?”

She stepped back and grinned, smoothing down the sequins on her suit. “Well, I… I couldn’t just impose on him. He’s been so kind and I know he doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s kinda…um...”

“Old?” Taxi chuckled, shoving the trunk with Cerise in it ahead of herself as she came in behind me. “He’s got a vain streak, but he knows he’s no spring chicken.”

I snickered, stepping to one side as my partner and Limerence followed her in.

“That and I imagine he likes having a pretty filly out front,” I added and Lily blushed, demurely. “Where is he?”

“He’s out doing some work for those griffins who are staying in town. You know, the ones the mayor let come? Their leader asked if he’d do a show and maybe fix the toilets the hotel was having trouble with. He said he’d be back soon,” she explained, moving back to the counter. I had to force my eyes not to follow the bounce of her hips. Since they were covered in glittering latex, that took some effort.

“Why am I not surprised the griffins know about Mister Precious?” Swift giggled, tucking her wings in against her sides.

“Kid, that pony has friends on every continent. You best be sure the griffins know him,” I replied, then turned to Ruby’s trunk. Lily’s eyes fell on the box and she blinked a couple of times.

“Is this my sister’s traveling trunk!” she squeaked, darting over and putting her hooves on the cover. “Oh Celestia and Luna save me… it is! Where did you find it?!”

Before I could stop her, she pushed the top off and looked down into the face of the unconscious girl inside.

I expected a scream, or a squeak, or something along those lines. What I got was a sideways glance.

“Detective, I know you’re working really hard to find out everything that happened to my sister, but please tell me you didn’t foalnap somepony,” she murmured.

“I didn’t foalnap anyone, or at least, I don’t think she’d object if she were conscious enough to register an opinion. Believe it or not, that’s the Chief of Police’s daughter and... you know, I don’t think I can actually explain this in a way that sounds sane and rational,” I replied, scratching at my chin.

“Well, why did you bring her here?” she asked, looking a bit leery.

I glanced at Swift and she pulled the box farther into the room so we could close the door. “I think I’d rather have Precious between me and her mother when the Chief looks over her injuries. I know she’ll be safe here, too. Besides, we needed a safe place to figure out what exactly your sister hid inside it.”

Lily’s nose wrinkled. “Did she use that silly spell that makes something appear empty?”

“You got it. Now can we get this cargo out of sight somewhere? If there aren’t some especially nasty ponies looking for her right now, then there will be soon.”

With a tiny shrug, Lily’s horn lit up and the box, girl and all, levitated off the carpet. Her name might have been a delicate flower, but there was nothing delicate about how powerful all those years of farm work had left her horn. She didn’t even strain as she carried the trunk along behind her.

“Hardy, wipe your mouth before you leave a stain on the carpet,” Taxi snickered, giving me a little bump with her hip.

I swallowed,dragging my fetlock across my muzzle, and followed Lily up the stairs towards the back rooms.

****

Upstairs, we situated Cerise in one of the spare bedrooms, tucking her into the cot with a pillow under her head. Stella’s medicians had done a brilliant job of cleaning her up, but there’d been nothing they could do for her ley-lines. That was just going to take time.

That done, we wheeled the box back into Lily’s room and Taxi, Limerence, and Swift sat on the floor. Lily put some music on the gramophone and got some snacks.

It was by unspoken agreement that we needed to know what, exactly, Ruby’s diary contained, before we went fetching whatever was in the box.

I opened the diary and took a deep breath, then began to read. The last entry ended shortly after Ruby’s last tidbit of information that’d led us to Supermax, so I skipped ahead.

It’s been a whole day since I got to the Convent.

I guess I should say ‘day one’, since I think this is a new life all over again.

Day one of my rebirth?

New life sounds weird. Rebirth sounds better.

Lily, I wish I could tell you what it’s been like here. Yeah, I know, I’m writing to you again. I don’t know what else to write. ‘Dear Diary’ just sounds dumb.

Would you believe, it’s in an old prison? I don’t know how long I can stay, but I feel so very peaceful here. It’s even better than the shelter. All of these ponies spend their time praying, or working. There’s lots of ponies coming and going, so I don’t think anypony really knows anypony else, except Miss Skylark. That doesn’t matter to me all that much. I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to do the good work.

My horn hurts a little, but they said that’s some kind of magic dampening field that’s been here since the prison was closed. It’s nothing bad or dangerous.

I feel cleaner. I went to group twice today, and even though I was so tired I dropped right into bed afterwards, I felt spectacular. I almost wrote a letter to Crisp Luck’s family. Almost.

At the very least, the ponies who attacked my shop won’t find me here.

****

Day two of my rebirth.

Miss Skylark came by to see me today!

I hadn’t seen her since the day she told me I should come and become a full member of the Church. She sat in my room and talked with me for a full hour, just listening to what my life was like.

I even told her about Crisp Luck.

Then she held me while I cried. We prayed together and I cried until it felt okay again.

Lily, I know you’d never go for this Church thing and I’m not even sure I really believe Princess Luna is watching over me, but it feels really good to have ponies who care. If nothing else, these Church ponies care an awful lot.

****

Day four of my rebirth

Sorry, I forgot to write yesterday. Busy, busy day! There is so much to get used to here, but honestly, it’s not that different from the shelter. I mean, everything is underground, but there’s some windows in the common area on the top floor that let in the sunlight. They’re not terribly big, but there’s a bunch of them.

After my work was done, I sat in the sun with one of the older residents. He was a sweet pony named - You know, I don’t actually think I asked for his name? He has a bit of a speech impediment and he’s very old. He has three blue horseshoes for a cutie-mark, though and he’s very kind. We played a board game and talked.

I still feel guilty. How can I be sitting here, enjoying myself while Crisp is in the hospital? She doesn’t deserve what happened to her. I mean, those... those bastards took her wings! How can somepony do that to somepony else?

I don’t know. Part of me wishes it’d been me. I was the one they wanted. How could I be so dumb?

****

Day five of my rebirth.

I’ve been having funny dreams. Really funny.

I can hear words in my head, but it’s not like thoughts. It’s like somepony is speaking, except I’m not hearing with my ears. I might tell somepony in group about it.

Then again, maybe not.

Either way, I spent today working in the kitchens. There’s a filly there who says Miss Skylark asked her to help with one of the regular rituals. She has the funniest accent, too! She says ‘dem’ and ‘dey’ instead of ‘them’ and ‘they’. From what she says, she used to be part of one of the local street gangs.

Anyway, the rituals. Whatever these rituals are, they’re very secretive. Everypony knows they happen, but nopony knows who goes. We’re all supposed to stay in our cells when they happen, but she promised to tell me what went on afterwards. After the ritual, she’ll be a full member of the church and they’ll send her out to one of the missions in the zebra lands, or into the buffalo territories.

I honestly hope Miss Skylark lets me join in one day. I don’t think I’d mind being a full part of the church. Maybe, if I’m far enough from here, I could start my business again. Nopony would look for me in the zebra lands, and it would only be temporary. The zebra really like their jewelry, right?

****

Day seven of my rebirth

I’m kinda sad today.

My friend from the kitchens is gone already. She didn’t have time to say goodbye, but when I asked about her they said the only sky-chariot out to the outpost she was taking had been early that morning, not long after the ritual. Apparently it’d been planned for some time. Oh well.

More strange dreams. I saw a cityscape burning. Teeth. I woke up covered in sweat.

****

Day nine of my rebirth.

Lily, you won’t believe it! They’re going to have a special ritual just for me here in a couple of days!

Miss Skylark came by today to tell me! She had that funny mare, Geranium or whatever, with her and she seemed very excited that I was going to be inducted into the church. Her assistant was just grumpy, but I think she’s always grumpy.

This does mean changing rooms. I’ve got to move my stuff downstairs into one of the ‘private’ chambers. Not that I have much to move. Almost everything I own is still in my trunk, and that’s in storage.

I’m supposed to spend the next day in prayer, which is probably going to be really boring, but I don’t mind if it means I might be able to get away from this city! There’s nopony on that floor besides me. I just have to do this one thing for Miss Skylark, and then I can be a full member of the church and I can go where they send me. I’ll be away from here.

Maybe, after I’m done with my service, I can come home.

I really would like that, I think. Maybe I can finally apologize.

P.S. These dreams are starting to worry me. If they keep going, I’m going to tell Miss Skylark about them. She’s here an awful lot, although she spends the rest of her week traveling from place to place. Maybe after the ritual. I’d better start packing up my stuff to head down there!

Sis...One day soon, I’ll come home. I promise. I promise, I’ll come home and see you.

I turned the next page and paused.

“What? Sir, what is it?” Swift asked, poking her head over my shoulder.

“The next bit is... strange. I can barely read it. It’s like somepony was just splashing ink on the page.” I leaned down and sniffed at the paper. “...Ink and... blood.”

Lily got to her hooves, sliding off the bed and and moving around behind me, peering down over my shoulder.

“My sister would never do that to one of her diaries! These were her life!”

“Alright, lemme see if I can figure out what this says under this mess. Sweets, do you have some paper and something I can do a rubbing with?” I asked. My driver nodded and passed me a pencil and a bit of scratch paper. I quickly laid it over the page and began scrubbing at it with the pencil.

The words, as they came through the paper, were damaged and hard to read. Why somepony wouldn’t just rip the page out what beyond me if they were going to go to that much trouble to cover up the content. Still, after a few minutes, I could make out a bit of it.

Everypony crowded in, trying to see what was coming off the paper.

“Screaming in... I think that word is brain. Maybe this is ‘number’?” Taxi said.

“Numerals. That word is definitely ‘numerals’,” Limerence corrected.

“Then this part seems to be a sentence, but every third word is gone. ‘The shadows weary or... no, I think that’s ‘weeping’,” Swift added.

“I think that next part is an equation of some kind,” the librarian said. “The mathematical form is from a very, very old system, but… it looks like the answer was zephirum. Most interesting.”

“Zephirum?” Lily asked, confused. Her ears wiggled back and forth slightly.

“Zero. That would date this equation, certainly. Zephirum was the first true concept of space without anything in it. The symbol you see here that looks like an upturned horseshoe is zero, or more accurately, ‘nothing’. It may seem a rather basic thing to you-”

I put a hoof on Limerence’s mouth before he could really work up a good lather. “No lectures today please. What does it mean? Why would Ruby write this crap in the back of her diary?”

His horn flickered and pushed my toe away. “Look at the hoof-writing, Detective. Miss Lily there is correct. That is not the same pony who wrote those last few entries. The pony who wrote this was clearly out of their mind. They used forceful strokes, but unless Miss Ruby Blue acquired a sudden knowledge of ancient systems for determining probabilistic frameworks, this cannot be the same pony.”

Taxi snatched the book and flipped through the next several pages, all of which were similarly defaced. “Hardy, he’s right. Look. Whoever messed this up missed part of a word here. That looks like ‘crooked’ or ‘croon’, but… that’s not Ruby’s hornwriting.”

I pulled at my face with one toe, trying to work it into shape. “Alright, that...asks more questions than it answers. Damn. I was hoping she could tell us what actually happened back there and how she ended up working for the Vivarium.”

“But this is just weird, isn’t it? I mean, my sister was always kind of flighty, but that looks like a crazy pony did it…” Lily murmured, poking at the crusted pages covered in splotches of blood and ink.

“That’s a good question, but not the one I want answered,” I said, closing the diary. “What I want to know is why she felt the need to hide this from us?”

There was a pause, then all eyes slowly turned toward the trunk sitting beside Lily’s bed. After a second, everypony else looked up at me with quiet expectation in their eyes.

My tongue was very dry as I let the diary fall closed in my hooves, then bent down and picked it up in my teeth. I’d carried it since the day of my death. It was the only link between myself and the girl who sent me to the other side in pursuit of the truth. I guess it was silly that I’d have gotten a little attached to it, but the book had given me a reason to live. Those pages gave me back a sense of power over my own destiny that I thought I’d lost when Juniper died.

Still, they’d told me their truths. They’d led me here. Their purpose was served. I didn’t know if I was going to get them back when I put them into the box, but it had to be done.

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts and calm my nerves as Swift pulled open the trunk and stepped back.

Old boy, you best be clear, I thought. You died once. You are probably going to do it again. You want to, you can still lay this all on the Princesses. Walk away, take your medal, and let the truth go. They’ll probably figure something out if you’re honest with them. I mean, it’s not as though you’ve got anything to lose if somepony else screws the pooch, right?

I glanced at my driver and she put on an encouraging smile. Limerence seemed a tad impatient, but his eyes were lit with curiosity. Swift brushed my side with her wing tip and nodded in the direction the box.

Lily just watched me, her soft eyes like a warm kiss on a cold day.

For a very brief moment, I could see the fires burning over Detrot as the city became row upon row of jagged teeth. I could hear the screams of devoured innocents. I could feel heat from the funeral pyres, or maybe it was the breath of the beast moments from finishing its meal.

I shoved the vision away and laid the book reverently in the trunk, then fished the letter out of my pocket as Swift closed the top. Unfolding the paper, I took a solidifying breath. The lock snapped shut.

I began to read. As I reached the final passage, something rattled inside the box. The jewels on the lock were flashing a series of different colors, but after a few seconds they settled into the same set they’d been in before and there was a second ‘click’ as the clasp popped open.

There was no sense in waiting, but my heartbeat felt like a drum solo inside my chest.

‘Moment of truth, kiddo,’ Juniper whispered.

I pushed the top open and everypony peered inside.

There was silence in the room as everyone’s breath caught in their throats.

“Detective," murmured Limerence, breaking the hush, "it is not often I find myself of a mind to use low profanity, but from my amateur perspective, I do believe the words I’m seeking for this particular circumstance may be ‘oh’ and ‘horseapples.'"

There, nestled in a sheet in one corner of Ruby Blue’s traveling trunk, lay the helm of Nightmare Moon.

Act 2, Chapter 41: Alcoholism for Fun and Profit

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 41: Alcoholism for Fun and Profit

If you were to ask Equestrians what the most magical substance in Equestria is, don't bother. The Equestrian Board Of Livestock Analysis actually conducted a survey at one point, and found the answer to be: "Celestia's Pee."

This entry's victory in the court of popular opinion was almost certainly due to impish magical alteration of the results. The properties of alicorn urine have not been extensively studied for a variety of fairly straightforward reasons; it further seems quite unlikely that much of Equestria would have great experience with it. Tragically, the Board did not have the budget to redo the study, nor the intestinal fortitude to try and insert a catheter into Princess Celestia.

The rest of the data was more enlightening, however. The clear runner up, despite lacking explicit arcane properties, was cider.

Cider, in Equestria, is what might be colloquially referred to as a Big Deal. Ponies have been known to camp out overnight for even a chance at the nation's signature beverage, and one of the first things new towns often establish is apple orchards, even in questionably hospitable terrain.

While the semantics and specifics are open to debate, the nomination actually makes some sense from an emotional magic standpoint: Cider, by generating an amiable fog where stress and sourness might otherwise reign, promotes harmony. Harmony promotes friendship. Friendship is magic. Therefore, cider creates magic.

Cider is curious in that it is both a great randomizer of behavior as well as a vital part of Equestrian psychological balance. The same substance that allows ponies to deal with the stresses of life and connect in compromised states also causes incidents wherein ponies attempt to mate with motor vehicles in public, mistake sandwiches for hoofwear, and, in one case in LR 11, attempt to toss the moon at exotic animals in the Canterlot Gardens whilst loudly claiming that “IT IS OUR ROYAL DUTY TO CATCH THEM ALL.”

There are even ponies trying to directly harness the harmony alcohol generates; "Drunken Masters," they call themselves, although their arcane rituals seem to involve a lot of falling down, slurred words and giggling, and have yet to bear more fruit than is required to make their beverages.

The ultimate upshot of cider is, however, positive; a net boon in terms of keeping Equestria stable.

-The Scholar

After the initial panic wore off, we all decided the best thing to do was be extremely drunk.

Swift was a snoring like a kitten on Limerence’s chest while the librarian took long pulls from a bottle of battery-acid quality booze.

He was a melancholy drunk, but after a short diatribe against my family, the carpet, and several early-century poets, he’d settled into a good angry glare at the wallpaper. I’d listened to some of it, then went back to demolishing a case of the most piss-water beer the little gas station store we’d popped out to had available while Taxi lay on her back with a jug of vodka propped against her mouth so it took the minimum amount of effort to take a sip.

Lily was using the sheet that the helm of Nightmare Moon had been wrapped in to rest her head as she swirled another mouthful of hard cider around and studied the helmet.

The dark metal eye-sockets gave me the creepiest feeling they might be watching us, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and turn them the other direction.

Yes, being drunk was probably a bad idea. It was the only idea. There were no other ideas to be had.

****

“Thanks,” I mumbled, putting the second ice-pack on the back of Swift’s neck. My partner whimpered, clutching her head with both hooves as she sat at Precious’ kitchen table with a big mug of water.

The room was cozy, but intended for only one or two ponies, so it was a bit tight for five. Still, my friends were too hungover to care. It felt a bit wrong that I wasn’t.

“Not a problem, guys and dolls. Ah admit, Ah had a moment’s worry when Ah saw you sweet bunch all piled up together back there,” The Prince replied, doling out another ice-pack to Taxi who set it on the side of her head and groaned. “By the by, Ah did call Miss Jade to come pick up her daughter. Poor little thing. Magical burn out, if Ah don’t miss my mark...”

I shot bolt upright. “What?! Iris Jade is coming here right now?!”

“Hardy, Celestia herself could be coming right now and I would not care,” Taxi said, swatting in my direction with her toe. I instinctively leaned out of the way. “Sit down, and shut your yap before I paralyze your face.”

“Yes, Sir, please, Sir,” Swift moaned, squeezing her eyes shut more tightly.

Limerence didn’t bother with a threat. His horn lit up and I felt a tickle on my muzzle. When I tried to ask him what he was doing, my muzzle wouldn’t open. I reached up and touched my lips, then glared at him as I felt metal and a dangling zipper on one side. I snarled, pushing myself up from the table.

“Mmmmphmmm! Phmmm! Yrf mmerfmerf!” I demanded.

Lily giggled weakly from her place on the other side of the table and her horn lit up as she dispelled his enchantment.

Working my jaw a little, I poked him in the side.

“Not funny,” I said.

“Detective, I am incapable of laughter at this moment,” he replied, rubbing his temples with both hooves. “I was being pragmatic. Your voice has the grating qualities of a pack of cats being thrown down a metal pipe full of chalk boards.”

Precious chuckled, turning back towards the fridge. “Well, Jade sounded angrier’n an owlbear with his head stuck in a trash-can, but ya’ll are my guests. She knows the rules, same as everypony else. She’ll be civil, or Ah’ll turn’er over my knee.”

“Thank you, Precious. After how things have been lately, we could use some safety,” I replied.

The nature of the universe dictated that, as soon as I finished saying the word ‘safety’, there was an insistent knock on the front door of the Burning Love. Precious’ ears rose slightly and he headed out into the main room whilst the five of us froze like cockroaches in a spotlight. Thankfully, we’d had the good sense to hide the helmet again and hadn’t mentioned its presence to Precious, but I imagine he knew something was up.

The bell on the door dinged.

I couldn’t decide whether or not I wanted to run, scream, hide, or go ahead and kill myself on the hope that the Chief would be too happy to see her daughter to resurrect me for further tortures. Theoretically, I had fulfilled my side of the bargain. Yes, her child was probably scarred for life, but that was hardly my fault.

Fine, maybe the part where she was hit with a sword was, loosely speaking, my fault, but the rest of it had been entirely outside my control.

As I listened, I made out the sound of soft words being exchanged, then hooves pounding on carpet. They flew up the stairs beside the kitchen at a full gallop. A door slammed. The acoustics of the building were such that I could hear a soft gasp of surprise from the corner room.

All the while, we sat with perked ears.

Once we removed the sedation spells, Cerise was likely to wake up within a matter of hours, but that didn’t mean her mother was entirely likely to wait on explanations before starting the flesh-ripping.

I was about to ask whether or not we could duck out the back, but Taxi gave me a look that said ‘If you ask me to move from this spot, they will never find your body’. I sank back and resigned myself to the inevitable. We ate in a silence punctuated only by Swift puking in the sink.

I slouched in my chair at the table, eyes shut, hat pulled low, waiting with all the patience of a rabbit on his way to a griffin ambassadorial dinner.

After what felt like an hour, the door to Cerise’s room swung open on creaky hinges, then two sets of hooves started down the steps.

Precious came in first. He said nothing, but moved over to the sink and began quietly scrubbing at one of several dishes sitting on the side-board. His milky eyes stared straight ahead, but his ears were constantly moving.

A moment later, Chief Jade appeared in the doorway. I could only see her light green hooves under the brim of my hat, but nopony else flares her nostrils in a way that makes you want to cringe from across the room.

She trotted into the kitchen, stopping beside the table. It was strange, seeing her out of uniform. She hadn’t even bothered with a pantsuit, or a tie.

Jade turned to Swift and hissed. My partner was double quick in hopping down from her chair and backing up against the counter. Jade dropped into it and Precious set a cup of coffee in front of her, then went to fetch Swift another chair.

Taxi was still slumped over the table, but shifted her seat a little to make some more space.

With seven ponies in the room, the little kitchen seemed awfully close. It didn't help that the company, all told, was taking up the perceived space of fifteen.

I pushed my hat back and examined the Chief with as cool an eye as I could manage with my heart threatening to climb up my throat. I couldn’t read Jade’s expression, but she seemed to be studying her coffee cup. She looked like I looked, when I’d seen myself in the mirror yesterday. Haggard. Ancient. Too broken down for a pony her age.

Her lips twitched, as though she might say something, but she just shook her head and took a slow sip.

We sat for several moments, drinking our coffee, waiting for inspiration to strike.

I was surprised when Taxi was the one who finally roused herself enough to speak.

“Iris Jade?”

The Chief sighed, using a tiny burst of magic to tip some sugar into her cup.

“What do you want, Sweet Shine?” she growled.

“Say ‘thank you’.”

There was a long pause, then Jade let out a slow breath and said something so quietly I barely made it out.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

You could have cut the silence in that room with a knife.

Pushing her coffee cup away, Jade got to her hooves and left without another word. The front doorbell dinged and Precious swept back in with a fresh pot and a smile.

“Now there, ladies and gentlecolts, that weren’t so bad, now was it?”

****

I nudged open the door to Cerise’s room to find her still unconscious, laid out on the bed.

How Precious convinced the Chief not to swoop in and snatch her up is beyond me, but the Burning Love was the safest place for her to recuperate, short of a couple of places she probably had some unpleasant memories of.

I shut the door on Iris Jade's daughter, and made my way back towards Lily’s room where my companions and an especially nasty question waited.

****

“What are we supposed to do with it? I mean, this is Nightmare Moon’s hat!” Swift exclaimed, putting her hooves over her face.

“Keep your voice down, kid,” I snapped.

It was an hour and many rounds of coffee later. Lily, Taxi, Limerence, Swift, and I all sat upstairs in the Lily’s room. The gramophone was turned up so Precious couldn’t hear the discussion, not that I thought he was likely to eavesdrop.

“Look, Hardy, we have to take this to the Princesses,” Taxi said. “I mean, this means somepony has broken into the vaults of Canterlot.”

“I do believe we know who broke into those vaults,” Limerence murmured. “Astral Skylark was a thief of some accomplishment and the vaults were largely guarded against draconic incursion. I’ve also no doubt that the Princesses are aware this helmet has been missing for some time.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Miss Ruby Blue obviously took the helm from Astral Skylark. This was the ‘property’ that Skylark mentioned in her last moments,” he explained.

“So, if they knew the helmet was missing from the vaults, why would they send the chest plate on a tour of Equestria?” Swift asked.

“The ‘tour’ of Nightmare Moon’s armor is a security measure,” Limerence replied, waving a hoof towards the helmet which was sitting on the side of Lily’s bed. The dark blue metal seemed to take the light and suck it in.

“It’s a brilliant one, if I am honest, and one that should have been successful,” Limerence continued. “A moving target is extraordinarily difficult to plan a heist for, whereas the vaults are largely stationary. Keeping the chestplate moving would deter all but the most determined of attackers and the armor was guarded by wardsmiths from across Equestria. A different one in each city. Counter-spells of the sort that are necessary to break wards must be planned with some care and foreknowledge. Without those, the protective case should have been impenetrable.”

“It obviously wasn’t,” Taxi grumbled. “You think the Professor was a mole?”

“His death struck me as a means to an end,” the librarian said, shaking his head. “He was trusted by my father. Father is nothing if not perceptive. If he thought, for an instant, that one of his holdings might be compromised then he would deal with the pony in question immediately.”

“Huh. You’re probably right,” I agreed, thinking out loud. “I mean, if you’re going to buy the guy off, why kill him immediately? It’s easier to make the trade, buy the armor, swap it for the fake, then grease him after a little while once the tour has moved on. Nopony might even have known it was fake for some time. Certainly not before it hit the next town, and maybe not even then.”

“So, in all likelihood, the reason for the forgery was to present a very temporary obstacle to discovery,” Lim said.

“Or their plan went jinky,” Swift added, scratching at her mane. “I mean, think about it. Didn’t it all seem kinda... rushed to you guys? They killed him and then left the body right there in his office.”

I frowned in thought. “He had a ward over the door to keep anypony from messing with it, but you’re right. It would have been less suspicious for him to simply disappear. What do you think-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Taxi interrupted, jabbing her hoof at me. “None of this... and I mean none of it, is material to the fact that we’ve got Nightmare Moon’s helmet sitting right there. The only question that matters is ‘what do we do with it?’.”

I turned to stare at the helmet.

It was a strange looking thing. Blue metal formed sweeping curves where it would sit over the eyes of a pony, although it seemed outsized for anypony I knew.

Lily, who’d remained silent throughout, reached out a hoof and put it on my shoulder. “Detective, maybe... maybe your friend is right…”

“Honestly, I agree,” I replied, pulling my collar up. “My feelings aside, you’re right, we should probably bring in Princess Celestia sooner, rather than later. Limerence, what possible reason could somepony have for trying to reassemble the armor of Nightmare Moon?”

The librarian’s ears pinned back. “Detective, I am not the pony to ask. My knowledge of Nightmare Moon is limited to recognizing forgeries and the tales we all know. This is, I’m afraid to say, beyond me. No pony in their right mind would see this armor reassembled with the intent to make use of whatever powers might remain inside. The best possible outcomes of such a thing are catastrophically dangerous.”

“Then who should I ask, Lim?” I asked, trying to keep my patience together.

“In an ideal world, the Academy,” he answered, pushing his glasses up his nose. “In the real world... probably my father.”

“The Don?”

“Yes,” he replied. “If nothing else, we should probably store the helm at the Archive. Even Supermax pales in comparison to how deeply the Archivists can bury nonliving objects. The only ponies who will know where it is will be you, me, and my father.”

“Your track record lately hasn’t been great,” Taxi murmured.

“Our track record has been flawless. In fact, you just helped make it flawless once more. The Moon weapons are retrieved and disposed of, are they not? Father says he has been investigating our information leak, but I don’t believe that to be an issue if the only ones with any knowledge of the location are the three of us.”

I laid my head on the end of Lily’s bed, considering my options.

Stella was a possibility, but I’d no idea how the dragon would react to being presented with Nightmare Moon’s helmet, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, not tell him if I decided to go that route. I doubted that he’d welcome me delivering that kind of trouble to his door.

We might have buried it at Supermax, but that was a long-term plan once the place was up and running properly and I’d no idea whether or not it might be magically tracked, now that it was outside of the trunk. Yes, it was a fortress, but the ponies hunting us had access to magically augmented assassins. I didn’t really want to rely on whatever was keeping me from being hunted with spells, either, so keeping it on my person seemed a bit dangerous, too.

That left the Don. If nothing else, I needed information and he was a smart zebra.

“We’ll go and see your father. Once I’ve had time to talk to him, then we will decide what to do with the hat. Clear?” I said, with a certain finality.

“It is not a 'hat,' a fez or a beanie! It is an artifact of unimaginable-” Limerence hesitated, then nodded. “-I mean...Yes, Detective. My father will know what to do. He is already expecting us.”

“I doubt he’s expecting this,” I replied. “Are we ready to go?”

My companions started to get to their hooves, although Swift was still a bit unsteady. It was mid-afternoon and her hang-over still hadn’t worn off entirely.

“Detective, may I have a moment with you before you leave?” Lily asked, quietly.

I glanced at Taxi, who gave me a knowing smile, then ushered my partner and the librarian out the door.

“Uh, sure. What’s up, Lily?”

Reaching out with her magic, Lily picked up the helm and levitated it onto my back before stepping forward and putting her forelegs around my neck. “I wanted to thank you for taking care of Miss Skylark.”

“That was really Taxi-” I began, but she cut me off with a toe on my muzzle.

“You are their leader, Detective,” she said, firmly. “You got them all in and got them all out. There was nothing stopping you from walking away way back when you only knew my sister as some poor girl you found in an alleyway. You could have written her off as... as just another-” Her voice caught in her throat. “-as just another dead pony.”

I laid my leg across her shoulder and exhaled.

“One day soon, I’m going on a vacation,” I said, with a smile. “I promised Taxi and the kid. How is that little place you mentioned you’re from?”

“Dodge Junction? It’s a pit,” she replied, laughing weakly. “But we’ve got cherries.”

“Then we might spend a couple weeks shaking cherry trees,” I chuckled. “Once this is over, I’m taking you and your sister’s body back to Dodge Junction. We’re going to bury her there under a cherry tree.”

Lily rested her head on the side of my neck and nodded. “Thank you, Detective. I’ll take that as a promise, though. You have to live and keep your freedom long enough to do that.”

I chewed at my tongue for a second, then stepped back and tipped the brim of my hat.

“Best I can promise is I won’t quit. Taxi won’t let me quit, as it turns out,” I said, patting my chest over my heart.

The girl’s eyes darted towards the plug, then my badge, then back to my face.

“You do that. I’ll be here. Tell me the whole story one day, would you?”

“That’ll be a long day, methinks. Look after Cerise,” I said, nodding meaningfully in the direction of the other filly’s room. “Try to answer her questions when she wakes up and, above all, make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid, crazy, or teenage.”

“I’ll do my best. I was a teenager not so long ago. I think the thing I needed most was probably a friend,” Lily mused, levitating the sheet over and wrapping it around the helmet on my back. “Take care, Detective.”

I turned to the door, struck once again by the pressing resemblance between her and her sister. Her face was sweet to look at, but it was her eyes that made me feel a flutter in my belly.

“Take care, Lily Blue,” I replied, finally, then trotted out the door before any of my passing thoughts could get too involved with any of the long neglected parts of my anatomy.

****

“Empress of the Signal, Gypsy comin’ atcha! Welcome back to the show, ladies and colties! We’ve got a report from uptown, from the Moonwalk Hotel! There’s some kind of incident that’s happened up there and the Tokan and Hitlan tribes seem to have barricaded the two wings of the Hotel against all comers except room-service!

Worse, the P.A.C.T. have been seen moving in on the position. We’ll be keeping you updated as things progress, but the P.A.C.T. seem to be mostly staying out of things for now. Whatever their worries about phoenix egg smugglers, it’s pretty clear they don’t want to get directly involved.”

****

Precious was happy to take care of Cerise and if he couldn’t charm her out of doing anything stupid when she woke up, he had Lily there to bring some magical brawn. I was reasonably sure she was going to be safe.

That left the four of us. In the car, I laid back in the seat and pulled out Astral Skylark’s diary, flipping through it, casually. Finding the first page that wasn’t burnt beyond recognition, I began to read.

I think I might go mad if I have to spend another hour listening to these wagon wheels rattle.

I’m eighteen. Mom wants to stay on the road, but I’d like to settle down. I can’t keep doing shows day in, day out, trying to scrape enough bits together for dinner. Mom tells me stories of some of the shows she used to do, but she tells them like they’re morality lessons or something. I can’t help but think those would be way more awesome than doing fireworks and magic tricks.

We’re heading back to...I can’t even remember the name of this town. Somewhere Mom says she has friends. Twenty more miles and we’ll be there, hopefully to do another show.

Gag me.

There’s this brilliant little bakery there that serves really good croissants, but that’s about the only thing I want from this town. I wonder if I could snatch a few extra for the road. It’s not as though these bumpkins ever notice when I take things.

Half the time they think they misplaced it, and nopony has even suspected the pretty little mare with the big smile. After I lay a little kiss-kiss on some of the stallions, they almost beg me to take their wallets. Now and then, I’ll even find a mare who blushes when I give her ‘the look’. Those are especially fun. Give the poor desperate saps a night of fun, then let them wake up in the morning having ‘misplaced’ every bit I can lay a hoof on. They’re all too embarrassed to even admit they were stolen from.

There was a chunk of pages torn out, so I moved on to the next legible entry.

Six months. Six months on my own.

I wonder if Mom was right. I tried to get a job in Canterlot, but these ponies don’t want a street show. I could wash dishes for a living, but that’s a special kind of Tartarus.

I wish I knew where Mom was. I asked around, but she only comes into town once a year. When I told her it was time for me to go off on my own, she wasn’t even shocked. She just gave me all the money she could and told me she’d be back next year to see how I was doing. Just like that.

I can’t even send her a phone call or a letter. It’s not like she logs a travel plan with anypony. She’s still traveling around like they used to do forty years ago!

Well, it could be worse I guess. I’m staying in a youth hostel. The stallion who runs it is a little prudish, but I think he’s a good sort. He doesn’t like me bringing ponies back here at night. He was all ‘you have to be careful’ and acting like my father, or at least, what I imagine my father would have acted like if I’d known who he was.

Thankfully, I’ve still got my ‘special skills’ to fall back on.

Caught!

That witch caught me!

I know it’s been two weeks since my last entry, but I spent the whole of it in Canterlot jail. Two weeks of misery and bad food. Granted, what I was eating before wasn’t much better.

Still, I had the funniest encounter today when I was released. A pony, who might have been a mare or a stallion, came to my cell. I didn’t see his face, but I think it was a stallion. He had a hood on.

He told me I had two choices. One, I could rot in the cell. Two, I could come and work for him. He wouldn’t say what kind of work it was, but he paid my bail.

I’m writing this sitting on the train out of Canterlot, incidentally. You bet your tail I left! You think I’m sticking around?

----

Another week in jail.

The bastard let me sit here on that rough blanket, with those awful, bland daisy sandwiches and the gritty corn muffins for another week before he showed up again.

Whoever tipped off the guard that I was headed their direction was fast! They picked me up at the first station outside of Canterlot and I was back in the clink inside of an hour.

I didn’t even have time to cast a spell before somepony slapped a restrictor ring on my horn and I was being stuffed back on the train for a return trip. The second shot was way, way less comfortable.

Still, when the guy in the hood showed up again, he didn’t seem angry. He seemed, if anything, like he was pleased I’d tried to run. He ran this line on me about ‘escape not being an option he’d offered’, so I guess I decided to take the job.

I’m pretty happy I did. He tossed me a bag of bits I could live on for two months on the road, then told me there’d be more if I followed his instructions. Lastly, he gave me this coin with Princess Celestia’s cutie-mark on it.

It looked really strange. The rays were made of lockpicks.

Another whole section was ripped out, leaving only a chunk of pages towards the back still intact. I moved on, trying to find another entry. There were a few that seemed to be lists of amounts and locations, but they didn’t have much information I could use. A couple mentioned jobs and places she’d had lunch, but it all seemed pretty mundane - at best it'd settle a few unsolved thefts for the Canterlot Royal Guard. It wasn’t until I flipped to the last five pages in the book that I found another entry which hadn’t been damaged, incomplete, or boring.

This is it!

The big time!

Two years in the Thieves guild and I’ve finally got a job worthy of my skills. Of course, there have been other big jobs, but this is the one that will let me pay off my debt to the guild. The newspapers are calling me the ‘Ebon Kitten’. I don’t think the guild likes that I’ve been leaving calling cards, but who cares what they think? I do the jobs even their senior thieves won’t do.

Whoever the client is, they’re paying big bucks. I’m making more from this one job than I would from fifty smaller sneaks, and that’s just my cut for a successful retrieval. That won’t even count what I get for actually busting into the Canterlot Vaults.

The seniors think I’m not going to be able to pull it off, but I’ve been sleeping with one of Princess Luna’s Night Guard for a month now. She’s a sweet thing, if a bit dim, and she loves to talk about her job. All it took was a few little hypnosis tricks and some tongue action and she was happy to give me all the guard rotations.

After that, I told her we should ‘get a little kinky.' The ridiculous minx was almost too eager for the rope!

She’ll wake up in about eight hours and have to explain to housekeeping at the hotel how somepony tied her up and stole her armor. The fuzzy pink hoofcuffs were probably mean of me, but I couldn’t resist.

Anyway, the job is in three hours and I need to get ready. This armor chafes like a beast, but the guard and I were almost the same size. I need to lose a couple pounds.

I should have left my diary with my trunk, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have it along. What are they going to do if they catch me with it? Lock me up more?

I turned a page and sat up a little straighter.

“Guys... um... you better...” I paused, then let the book drop onto the seat. “Sweets, pull the car over!”

Taxi slammed her hoof down on the brake, yanking the wheel to one side and almost tossing the three of us in the back into the footwell.

“What? What is it?!” she yelped, trying to look out all the windows at once.

Swift had her trigger in her mouth and Limerence’s horn glowed with incomplete spell work.

I held up the book with the last page open. It was written in a strange hoof that curled and swept, each letter formed with a fanatical attention to detail. There was no mistaking the writing, though.

It was the same as the back of Ruby’s diary.

Sweet little factor.

You play my game so artlessly, but you play it all the same.

Come and see me, when all of your answers have run dry. You’ll know where to look.

The note was unsigned.

Dropping the book, I pushed it away like it was a snake that might bite. Limerence picked it up, then raised one eyebrow as he read it over.

“Detective, I do believe this may be for-” he began.

“I know who it’s for, dammit!” I snapped, cutting him off. “I know who it’s for and I don’t need it hammered home. This is screwed up enough as it is!”

“Yes, but...it does suggest some things about our opponents.”

Taxi cocked an ear towards the back seat. “What do you mean ‘opponents’. You say that like there’s more than one group at play here?”

“Obviously,” he replied, tapping the book with his toe. “The law firm is simply one aspect of a multi-headed hydra that must span the city, but there would appear to be another influence working counter to their aims.”

“Else, why would somepony be leaving me these helpful little notes,” I said. I squinted at the book, then pulled it out of Limerence’s magical grip. “No… no, you’re right. Each time somepony has left me one of these, it has dragged us somewhere we needed to be. That first letter carried me to the Monte Cheval, and then the second one ended us at Supermax.”

“Precognition is not… unheard of,” Lim added.

“The police force tried pre-crime magics awhile ago,” Taxi said, pulling us back onto the road towards the Archive. “It’s finicky and extremely unreliable. A weather forecast at best, and totally unusable if you don’t account for every magical variable. The best we ever managed was a spell that tracked the stolen snacks in the office to Officer Trumpet.”

“This is much more specific. Whoever has been doing this knows me. They know how to lead me around by the nose,” I growled.

Swift’s let her trigger drop. “But...but, sir, these came from before you were even on the case. Somepony wrote these knowing you’d read them.”

“Yeah, and that’s bothering me, but not near so much as knowing somepony has my number. If they’d just said ‘Be here, at this time’, I doubt I would have. I had to believe there was a clue. I had to think there was something valuable,” I groaned, throwing my hooves in the air as I slid onto my side. “Whoever this bastard is, he’s had me figured from day one.”

The silence that followed had a certain air of expectation to it.

“Sooo...what do we do about it?” Swift asked. “I mean, doesn’t this all smell of ‘trap’ to you, Sir?”

“Of course it does,” I replied, watching the scenery slide by. “Why would somepony take time to gloat in the back of Astral Skylark’s diary if they thought I had any options? This is a trap, kid, and I’m afraid our only option is to wiggle a little deeper and hope it doesn’t close before we can see the shape of it.”

****

We were getting towards the grittier parts of town around the Archive and I could smell the industrial run-off. It smelled like home.

To be honest, I was going to be glad to see the Don. I needed to unload a little since Supermax. Whatever else he might be, I knew I could ask him for a moment alone and he’d give it to me. His friendship with my father was a long one, and while he was a pragmatic sort, he’d gotten into the business because he cared. Criminality was just a side effect.

If nothing else, he was a connection to my dad, and I really needed that just then.

****

Leaving the cab a quarter mile away in the only decent parking garage on that side of town, we aimed ourselves towards the Archive and set off on hoof. The trip gave me much needed time to stretch my legs.

I’d elected not to take the helmet along, so I left it in the Night Trotter’s trunk instead. If I needed it, Swift could fly back. I didn’t feel great about leaving it unguarded, but Taxi’s trunk was secure enough and anypony bringing real force to bear wasn’t going to be stopped by the kind of firepower we had on us.

Limerence was practically dancing as we trotted along the sidewalk, although as we got closer, his expression slid a little. He began glancing at the rooftops of nearby buildings.

I followed his eyes to what looked to me like another empty industrial building lining the road. The sign out front said ‘Noble Publishing’. There didn’t seem to be anything special about it that I could see.

His face edged down into that familiar frown, though, as we hit the block one up from the Archive itself.

“Lim? What’s wrong?” I asked.

He shrugged and shook his head. “It could be nothing. Excuse my paranoia, Detective. There’s meant to be guards posted at some of these buildings. Our perimeter spells are fine, though, which suggests we haven’t had a breach. Why father would pull the guards back is a bit mystifying. Still, he could just let the talismans do the work, but he’s somewhat old fashioned.”

I exchanged a look with Taxi and we stopped, drawing back into the nearest alleyway.

Limerence and Swift both looked a bit puzzled as they followed us in. I freed my trigger and turned my revolver’s safety off, then motioned Taxi to start scanning the skies.

Leaning toward Swift, I whispered, “Kid, you still got a ladybug on you?”

She nodded and the insect wiggled out of her fur, then took to the air, dropping onto my nose.

“Alright, sunshine, sunshine and all that business. Do you have an overhead view of our area?” I asked, peering out at the empty road. A bit of wind picked up a newspaper, toying with it down the street, but there was nothing to indicate trouble.

Why was my cutie-mark tingling?

The ladybug seemed to think, then bobbed up and down.

I shut my eyes and leaned against the wall as the world went to black.

****

The particular insect the Collective chose to drop me into was somewhere behind us, drifting on a thermal high above the city. I had to fight my own urge to flail my hooves at the heights, since I didn’t have hooves at the moment.

Once I had my panic under control, I began studying the buildings passing under us. The Archive was an unmistakable blob of unfinished concrete and girders dumped in the middle of the cityscape. I scanned the buildings and had, momentarily, the surreal experience of seeing my own body standing down there in the alley we’d chosen for our hiding place.

I moved on.

All of the rooftops seemed to have some kind of writing on them. They looked an awful lot like pegasi advertising and a few of them were definitely hawking things like ‘wing massage’ and ‘feather treatment’, but some were too abstract for that. I thought those must have been the spells Limerence mentioned.

Alright, I’m done here, I thought.

The image distorted, stretched, and vanished.

****

Swift was standing at the end of the alley as I opened my eyes. The ladybug lifted off my nose and landed on her shoulder, wiggling under one of the straps on her combat vest. She glanced back at me.

“What’s going on, Sir?” she asked.

I shook my head and turned to Limerence. “Your father would never leave all the rooftops unguarded, would he?”

The librarian’s face took on a worried cast. “Most assuredly not. Father’s security measures are very firm. The Archivists are not a frequent target, but we have had attacks in the past from rogue Cyclones who thought our territory might be easy pickings.”

I pointed straight up. “Our eye in the sky has no movement for three blocks in every direction of the Archive. I mean nothing, too. No cars, no ponies.”

Tilting her head to peer out at the street, Swift bit her lower lip and asked, “Nopony at all?”

“That is not...entirely unusual for this end of town, but the unguarded rooftops is bizarre in the extreme,” Limerence murmured.

“Alright, we’re going to move up. Just because I didn’t see anypony out there doesn’t mean they aren’t watching. Keep your eyes on the skies and the buildings. Anyplace with windows or a catwalk. Lim, can you lay your silence on us?”

He nodded. His horn flashed.

“Then we move. Swift, get in the air and watch for snipers. Keep your speed high enough to make sure nopony can get a shot on you,” I added. She snapped a salute, then exploded out of the alley so fast I had to press my hat down on my head against the rush of wind and feathers.

I set my jaw and marched out of the alley as the silence spell came down like an anvil, blocking out everything. We moved up along the avenue, scanning each building one after another. The streets were still empty, but the sensation in my cutie-mark was starting to become uncomfortable. Less a tingle, more a solid burn.

Still, we were unmolested on our way towards the 10th Archive Librum Public.

One block over from our destination, Limerence communicated to my driver with gestures that he want to borrow her binoculars. She passed them to him and he let the silence drop, then marched up the side of the nearest building. Watching a pony walk perfectly perpendicular to the ground was still a bit weird. Magic is like that, though. You get used to filtering the obvious defiance of physics.

A moment later, he returned and we eased back into the lee of an abandoned cheese factory that smelled vaguely of stale gouda.

“Detective... there is no movement around the Archive,” he said, softly.

“You make that sound like a bad thing,” I replied.

“It is. At best, it means that Father has withdrawn our forces in anticipation of an attack,” he explained, floating the binoculars back to Taxi, who tucked them away. “Though, who would dare attack the Archivists in our home on such a scale as to cause full mobilization is beyond me.”

Swift swept in from above like a bullet train, braked sharply at the edge of the building, and bounced off of it with all four hooves, coming to a gentle rest in front of me. She brushed a bit of dust off her bunny patch and came to attention. “Sir, there’s no activity anywhere that I could see or hear. I checked all eight of the buildings surrounding the Archive. They’re all empty or unused. There’s not even any squatters, although... mmm... I did find some blood on top of one building in what looked like somepony’s camp site. It was only a tiny bit and it was dry, but... it definitely blood.”

I sat back against the wall, pulling off my hat and wiping my forehead with the back of one leg.

There were many dozens of ways the situation could go bad. Nopony besides Limerence and the Don knew that we were coming, which worked to our advantage, but if there was an attack on its way there were plenty of directions it could come from.

Diamond dogs weren’t unheard of in that end of the city and they could burrow through asphalt, given time. An attack wing of Cyclones could swoop in from almost anywhere and be on top of us before we could get our guns ready. The perimeter spells would likely keep out teleports, but there were other options aplenty.

For all I knew, our magicked assassins with the pointy teeth could have had snipers disguised with spells to blend into the brickwork or the clouds. Phased combatants could hide in the walls, although that magic was almost unheard of.

Nothing was off the table.

We were facing an unknown, with opponents who had a seemingly unlimited set of resources. Retreat might have been a good idea, but then what? Come back later? Go smoke some Zap with the buffalo? I needed to see the Don.

“Lim, do you have some way of making contact besides your little ritual?” I asked.

He shook his head. “A phone call, but if the defenses are active, our incoming phone system turns on a filter that will shut out any numbers it’s not familiar with to prevent hypnosis attacks. We’d have to go back to the Nest. Our spells should keep the worst forms of magical aggression and camouflage from being effective in this area, but... that is no proof against bullets.”

I sagged, pulling my collar straight against a chill breeze blowing down the street. “Damn. Is there at least some way in besides the front door?”

Limerence sucked a breath. “In? No. There are several exits, but only the one entrance, I’m afraid.”

Sighing, I pulled my sleeve back off of my revolver and readied the hammer.

“There’s no way this is going to be safe, is there?” Swift asked, gently kicking Masamane’s trigger up into her mouth.

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not, kid. Normally, I wouldn’t even show up here with weapons, but I think the Don will understand, considering recent events.”

“Father is no fool, but yes, I believe he will forgive us. At worst, we will have to leave our weaponry with somepony at the front if this turns out to be nothing significant. I do wish I’d thought to bring my crossbow, though,” Limerence mused. A dozen knives detached themselves from his vest, flying out of various secret holsters to hang in the air around his head, spinning slowly in his levitation field. “Ah, well, I will have to make do.”

“Trust me, you’re not the only one...” Taxi replied, flexing her front and back legs. I admit I wasn’t envying her just then; stuck on the ground, unarmed, with only martial combat skills and her friend’s firepower to keep her safe against an unknown force. Still, she was game.

I had the thought that not enough ponies have friends like her, followed quickly by the thought that most ponies wouldn’t survive having friends like Sweet Shine.

“We’re moving out. Keep close to the buildings and try to move from cover to cover if possible. Swift, you’re our eyes. If there’s any unusual activity, fire Masamane. That thing has a pretty distinctive sound. Now...get moving.” She nodded and took off again, soaring out over the warehouses.

“Taxi, you and me are out front,” I continued. “Limerence, have your silence spell up and take the rooftops.” He bobbed his head, then stepped up onto the wall. I caught his back leg before he could run off. “If an attack comes, your first priority is to leave. We’re not getting into a firefight out here. Get back to the Night Trotter, and if you can’t make it there, head for the Nest. We’ll meet you there.”

“And... if you don’t, Detective?” he asked.

“Then we’re dead. If you aren't, you take the Night Trotter with the helmet still inside it out to this old mine-shaft on Thirty Second street, just north of the city. It might take you a bit to find, but I promise it’s there. Drive it into the cave, shove it down the shaft, then collapse the hole on top. You got me?”

He hesitated, briefly, then gave me a short nod.

“I... have you, Detective. Please, do be careful.” He paused, then he gave me a slightly intense look that I couldn’t read. “I find myself... not particularly liking the notion of continuing my investigations alone.”

With that, he was off, darting up the wall like a spider.

Taxi and I glanced at one another, then stepped out onto the sidewalk, moving cautiously towards the Archive.

****

When the hideous grey building came into sight, I was simultaneously relieved and sick to myself. I doubt most ponies would find the appalling architecture of the 10th Librum especially relieving, but it was still standing. There were a number of scenarios I’d had time to consider where we’d round a corner and find a smoking ruin.

Swift was still out there and I hadn’t heard her gun, so I had to assume she was alright.

Whatever we were walking into was likely to be a trap, but whether it was a trap for us or simply an ugly coincidence left me with a chilly ache in my stomach. My talent was almost buzzing by that point, but it’d never been especially good at giving directions.

Taxi moved off to the other side of the road, keeping to the shadows of the early afternoon where she could find them; a garbage dumpster, a sign, the corner of a warehouse.

The road leading up to the Archive was an ideal sniper alley; two rows of empty buildings with low rooftops right to the library’s entrance. I was pretty sure, however, that if somepony was going to take a shot at us that they’d have already done it.

I edged in close to the last building on the row, wishing I’d kept my bulletproof jacket on. The things are hateful and itchy, but they do protect against an awful lot of things that an enchanted trenchcoat won’t even touch.

There’d still been no movement from the building. Motion out of the corner of one eye brought my head up and I watched Limerence stepping down off the wall, his knives flicking underneath his vest.

Swift plummeted out of the sky a second later, her wings flaring open to snap her out of a high speed fall at the last moment, just inches from the pavement. She fluttered delicately, then darted over to my side, pressing up against the wall.

“Sir, this whole thing is giving me the heebie jeebies,” she reported, scuffing her hooves on the concrete. “I mean, there’s zero motion out there.” Her ears laid back on her head and she patted the front pocket of her vest. “I... um…”

“What is it, kid?” I asked. Limerence trotted over to investigate as Taxi broke off from her cover at the nearest building on the other side of the road to join us.

“I...found this up on a rooftop,” she murmured, pulling open her vest pocket. Reaching in, she carefully pulled out a bundle of bloody, white feathers and laid it on the sidewalk at my hooves.

“Celestia have mercy, that’s not what I needed today,” I whispered.

It was a dead pigeon.

Worse, it looked to have been chewed.

Sure, it could have been a cat or a bored griffin out for a morning flight, but I had an inkling that I knew exactly what kind of teeth had done the job. Swift swallowed hoarsely, running her tongue over her sharp canines.

I stepped away from the bird and turned towards the Archive, kicking my trigger-bit up into my mouth. There were so many things that could go wrong, but if my presence made one iota of difference, I was going to try.

Crossing the street, I waited at the foot of the short stairs leading up the great, globular building until I heard my companions behind me, their hooves echoing on the lonely, deserted road.

At the top of the stairs, I reached for the revolving door that opened into the Archive.

“Detective! No!” Limerence shouted, suddenly from behind me. I didn’t have time to look over my shoulder before I felt a powerful yank on my tail, dragging me backwards, almost sending me for a tumble down the steps.

Pushing myself to my hooves, I glared at him as his magic faded from my sore backside.

“You wanna tear it out by the root?!” I snapped, patting my tail and feeling a few strands come loose. “Come on, what is it?”

“Detective...The Archive’s interior defenses are active!” Limerence exclaimed. “I felt the energy build-up when you reached out. Apologies for your tail, but I thought you might value your life more than a few hairs.”

I peered at the glass revolving door, nervously. “You mean-”

“If you’d touched that door, it would have turned your bones into a thick soup after charbroiling your brain,” he finished, turning in a little circle. His horn was flashing little pulses of light that were answered by other pulses on pieces of the framework around the door which looked vaguely like letters or runes of some kind.

“And... when were you going to tell us that was a possibility?” Taxi asked, testily.

“You’ll excuse me if I happen to be a bit unsettled, Miss Taxi!” Limerence snarled, swinging around to face my driver. “I am not able to think of every possible scenario! I did not believe it even conceivable that somepony might breach our exterior defenses, much less require the activation of these!”

I held up my hooves, placatingly. “Lim...take a deep breath. I’m fine and no harm done. Can you shut the defenses down?”

The librarian drew in a breath, lowering his eyes slightly as the fire went out of them. When he raised his head again, the cool facade was back in place. “Pardon me, Detective. I am... worried. Yes, I can place an exception for the four of us in the enchantment matrix. Father taught me to control the Archive’s defensive systems the day my horn began useful operations.”

“Then do it. I want to be out of the open as soon as possible,” I said.

The next several minutes were some of the longest of my life.

Standing, exposed against the front of a building while our unicorn waved his horn in little circles at the runes on the door was giving me a taste of what Nightmare Moon’s lunar vacation must have been like. Swift, Taxi, and I watched the skies, but there was still nothing moving up there. There wasn’t even any air traffic, although that might just have been the time of day.

At last, Limerence sucked his teeth and his horn pulsed. All of the runes around the door faded into the woodwork.

“There. The four of us are excepted from the matrix. I’m... afraid my usual exception is not working, as I left my pocket watch to be repaired,” he said, quietly. “Just... do not take off your hat while we are inside, Detective, lest you wish to be flash fried.”

“What? You mean you just told the spells not to kill somepony wearing a hat?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well, specifically, a hat, saddlebags, or a ridiculous rabbit patch,” he replied, gesturing to the three of us.

Swift gave him a slightly irritable look. “It was the only one the kids at the Vivarium had.”

“Yes, and I note you have still not made any efforts to repair your armor since,” Limerence said, with a small smirk. Swift let out a growl in the back of her throat, flashing a few of her pointier teeth at him.

“Alright, let’s go ask Tome exactly why everything is on high alert,” I said, stepping into the revolving door. Swift came in behind me, pushing the door with her forehead.

“Sir? I was just wondering. Why has nopony come to meet us out here? I mean, tactically, wouldn’t you want to watch the front door?” she asked.

I hesitated at that thought just long enough for the turning door to smack me in the rear end, sending me sprawling into the library nose first. I had the presence of mind to catch my hat before it could come off, but I did end up tumbling onto my stomach.

“Ow,” I groaned, and started to push myself up. My hoof touched something soft that most definitely wasn’t the carpet.

“Sir? What is-” Swift trailed off as she moved up beside me. Her eyes followed mine down to the floor and she let out a strangled whimper.

Taxi filed in behind her and stopped, staring. Her yellow face paled, noticeably.

The shape on the floor wasn’t really a pony anymore. It would have even been difficult to tell what species they might have been were it not for a clump of brightly colored pink fur clinging to one of the rear hooves. Besides that, there wasn’t much flesh left.

The poor bastard was curled into a fetal position, both front legs drawn up against the belly and one rear leg stretched out as though attempting to fend off an attacker. Heat from whatever had killed them had warped their bones and skin, leaving them looking like a modern art piece. They still wore a piece of scorched cloth around their upper half and a lump of shiny, golden metal seemed to have been melted into their ribs.

Limerence nosed his way between Taxi and I. “Detective, what is it? What do you...”

He paused there, gazing at the body with a dull expression, as though he wasn’t really seeing it.

“Is this one of the attackers-” I started to ask, but before I could finish, Limerence leapt forward, jumping over the body. He hit the carpet running and shot off between the stacks of books at a full gallop.

“Dammit, Lim!” I grumbled, then made a quick decision and danced around the corpse, charging after him. Getting lost in the Archive’s massive collection wasn’t terribly likely to lead to starvation and I didn’t want to find out if it was possible, but I also couldn’t let Limerence run head long into an ambush of some kind.

Wings beat the air behind me as Swift took off, coasting overhead between the high shelves of books with the grace of a sky-dancer, darting around corners to follow her ground-bound partner.

I turned a corner into an intersection of four bookcases and lost track of Limerence, but Swift called out, “Turn left!” and I took off after him. At the next turning, I saw his flank just vanishing around a bend.

Onward we ran. Row after row of books flashed by. I could hear Taxi somewhere behind me, calling out. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I shouted back, “Sweets! Go to the wall! I’ll have somepony come get you in a minute!”

Dodging around a stack in the middle of the aisle, I almost tripped over another body. Swift flew on, keeping track of Limerence, and disappeared around a corner. I stopped, pausing to check the form sprawled on the carpet.

This one was a mare, much more recognizable than the first. She was probably young, with bright blue fur and a cropped mane. I couldn’t tell what had killed her, but her eyes were frozen open and she lay on her side, a pile of books draped half across her side while another lay in front of her. She was a unicorn, in the uniform of the Archivists; vest, waistcoat, and golden pocket watch. The watch was toast, melted into a semi-liquid puddle that was still cooling. I could only tell what it had been because the chain survived the cooking process.

Her death had been quick, at least. That sad wretch at the front looked like they’d had time to feel it.

Shaking myself, I raised my head just in time to hear a shout from somewhere up ahead.

Maybe it was more of a cry.

An anguished, frightened cry.

I stumbled forward, then managed to get my hooves moving in the right direction. I moved more cautiously, picking up my trigger bit from beside my knee as I eased sideways around the bookshelves. I knew Swift wouldn’t go down without a fight, but there was no sense in leaping in.

Stepping over the dead mare, I aimed myself in the direction I thought I’d heard the sound come from. Tucking the fear into whatever professional bubble exists inside me where all the darkness goes while the job is still to be done, I moved on. I made a few turns back and forth, trying to get my bearings. My ears swiveled around, until I caught something that might have been soft moaning.

Picking up speed, I rounded two more corners, the sound growing louder until it became agonized weeping, just out of sight. I turned again, feeling for some reason, like I was in familiar territory. Something about the way the shelves were stacked seemed as though I’d seen it before, but my sense of direction lets me down every time.

Around one more row of books, I finally reached the source of the noise.

It was the little sitting area the Don greeted us in that first day, when he’d given me his Last Will and his son, a surly intellectual with the loyalty of an alleycat.

The area was little changed. The fire in the little fireplace was burning low and there were still the two seats, one high-backed and comfortable, the other still cushioned, but more worn since it was for visitors.

A plate of cookies and a half-empty glass of milk still lay on the tiny end table along with a set of gold rimmed spectacles and a book of Zebran poetry with a tasseled bookmark draped across the cover.

Limerence knelt beside the chair, his hooves clutching at the arm as he sobbed incoherently into the upholstery. Swift sat nearby, her eyes glazed and tears leaking down her cheeks.

I felt my world start to swirl in the strangest fashion. Space seemed to open up under my hooves and I found myself sitting, but I didn’t remember how I’d gotten there.

Don Tome was still sitting there, his calm face resting on the arm of his chair. Unlike his subordinates, he looked like he might have just fallen into a doze as he sat there.

Even in death, he exuded peacefulness. Were it not for his front left hoof, which had been hacked off just below the knee, there would have been no sign of how he’d died. His pocket watch sat open on the carpet, the face melted and cracked, but the time still visible behind the glass marking the time of his death.

It was barely an hour ago.

I took a couple of steps closer, dragging my back legs.

Six words flew round and round inside my head, screaming like banshees in the night.

He’s dead. The Don is dead.

Act 2, Chapter 42: Steps of Grief

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 42: Steps of Grief

Revenge may not seem like much of a basis for an economy, but the Griffins have come awful close.

Griffins are a warlike society. And this is a good word for it. They like war. A lot. When you evolve with enough aggression for not one, but two heavily territorial predatory species, you're bound to start more than a few fights.

Before Luna's banishment, when griffins couldn't get enough prey or pegasi to hunt and fight, they tended to be perfectly happy to begin revenge battles at the drop of a feather. Nearly any excuse would do to start a blood feud and get tribes fighting; Griffin recorded history prior to the Mare in the Moon is essentially a long chronological list of intertribal revenge-based wars with names like The War of What Kevin Said About Our Mum, The Battle of The Last Cupcake at Razorbeak Bakery, and the Look At How They Spelled Our Damn Last Name Massacre, each with thousands of casualties. It is for this reason that even today, pranking is highly frowned upon in griffin culture.

Griffins were and are very good at war, and often lost significantly more warriors in times of interspecies peace than they did in times of conflict. This was fine when such peace was at best occasional, as it honed the skills of the survivors - but when the calm-if-stagnant Solar Millenium trundled around, a lack of viable enemies nearly caused the griffins to peace themselves to death with internecine battles.

Circa 50SM, to prevent themselves from revenge-killing themselves into extinction, a griffin known only to history as Bella the Coherent took the throne and proposed a series of codified rules stating what constituted allowable revenge, and that it was no longer acceptable to eat someone's heart for farting in someone's den. It codified who could take revenge and for what. There would have been more grumbling about that if Bella hadn't just javelinned the previous monarch.

When it became legally allowable to transfer revenge and revenge rights, however, vengeance became the core of a complex economic system. Griffins were exchanging the right to blood feuds against particularly ill-reputed tribes and families in exchange for goods and services - or buying back their own revenge rights to protect themselves. Griffins were investing in diversified revenge portfolios, and achieving Revenge with Compound Interest. Of course, this nearly caused them to wipe out half their entire civilization in the Sub-Prime Revenge Bubble of 608SM, but they ultimately survived it.

In many ways this transition was necessary to bring them to a modern economy; The griffin unit of currency, the Ven, once represented blood debts but is now extremely rarely spent as such. They even contributed to a lot of modern economic thought; the pony word "Retail" comes from "Retaliate," from the related griffin concept.

Ponies, in public, look differently on vengeance. They do not see vengeance as a good thing… until you catch them in the right mood with the right wrong.

-The Scholar

I held the Don’s undamaged hoof in both of mine, staring into his pale face. His flesh was still warm, but I could already feel the beginnings of the chill. The professional parts of my brain were conferring with one another, trying to establish things like cause of death, but I’d shoved them into the deepest, darkest corner I could find. That left me thankful, at least, that he didn’t seem to have died in terrible pain.

Limerence was inconsolable, but then, I didn’t really have it in me to try. He hung against my side, his face hidden in the collar of my coat.

For all he liked to put up the character of a mature stallion, he had barely a year on Swift. Maybe less. He sobbed like a foal, shoulders heaving. Swift lay over by the bookshelf, looking lost. Her eyes leaked tears, but she didn’t seem to know what to do or think. She’d only known him for a single day.

Then there was me. Hard Boiled. Fate’s whipping colt.

My throat was parched and my tongue felt like it was the size of a grapefruit.

I need a drink, I thought, as the library blurred a little. Wiping at my eyes, my toe came away wet.

Crying? Was I crying? Really?

“A drink is the last thing you need, Hardy,”Juniper murmured, from someplace nearby.

I lifted my head, glancing around until I found his reflection in a glass-fronted book-case. Limerence hadn’t moved from his position, so it was fairly safe to say it was a hallucination. Funny thing, that I hadn’t thought to ask any of my friends if they could see him. After all, he was right there, right? Alive and well-

“I’m dead, kid,” Juniper growled, right next to my ear. Maybe it was in my ear. Maybe it was all in my head and I was still asleep. “Don’t you lose it now.”

“I want to lose it,” I whispered, plaintively. “Please, can’t I lose it this time?”

“Not unless you want the deaths of more people you love,” he sighed, tugging on the little tuft of a beard on his chin. I couldn’t read his expression. I wanted him to ruffle my mane, like he used to, and tell me I was being a little filly.

All the weight of all the death I’d seen in the last day threatened to send me spiraling off the edge of sanity. I could feel gleeful denial right nearby, ready to suck me down into some strange fantasy where the Don was still alive. I shuddered and ducked my eyes, looking down at the Don. More than anything, I wanted Tome to open his eyes and ask me what’d happened. To smile. To offer me cookies and an hour of his time so I could finally stop feeling like I’d murdered all those ponies.

He wasn’t going to, though, because he was dead. Dead, and the only pony who might ever give him any peace or justice wanted to drink himself insensate.

Damn me forever.

“No, kid. You don’t get to be damned. Now get up. Figure this out,” Juniper demanded.

Swallowing the enormous lump in my throat, I started what felt like an uphill slog through thick mud, pulling myself back into shape. I released Tome’s leg and turned to Swift. She was gently biting her left front knee, quivering with inner tension. Blood trickled down her fetlock, where those sharp canines bit into it, but she quickly released it as her eyes met mine.

“Swift… can you go find Taxi and bring her back here?”

She nodded, weakly. “I think so. We’re in the poetry… uh… poetry section somewhere. If I can just-”

“I need her here, right now,” I said, cutting her short. “If you can’t find us, call ‘Mareco’ and I’ll reply ‘Pony’.”

I thought she might say something else, but she just spread her wings and took a running start before coasting up, up and up beyond the height of the bookshelves, turning in a lazy circle towards where I thought the door might be.

Shutting my eyes, I put my forelegs around Limerence and held him to my chest while he wept. To be honest, I wasn’t doing much better, but he was young and if Swift was any indication, that kinda thing matters. I do wonder how far Swift might have fallen if I hadn’t dragged her out of that poetry club a couple weeks ago.

It was several long minutes before Taxi and Swift managed to find us again, but when they did, Taxi was only shocked for as long as it took to notice that I was in no condition to do what needed to be done just yet. She trotted over beside the Don, touching her chest, then her forehead before gently laying her toe on his closed eyes in one of those strange zebra gestures of respect.

Then she pulled her jeweling goggles and a tiny pouch of forensic tools out of her saddlebags, tugged the glasses down over her head and began to examine the area, maintaining a calm silence.

Limerence and I just sat there. I let time go. I knew there was some distant possibility our opponents were sneaking up on us or that somepony would discover our whereabouts, but that just didn’t seem to matter. I’d lost another father. So had he. There’s time for intrigue and paranoia. Then there’s time to mourn. If you can’t take the latter, the former won’t matter.

I don’t know how long it was before his his tears dried and Limerence breathed a slow sigh. He pulled himself away and tried to check his watch, only to realize he’d left it out for repairs. His adjusted his glasses which had fallen to the end of his nose and closed his eyes.

“I… I wish to apologize for t-this d-display, Detective,” he stammered.

“Nothing to apologize for, Lim,” I replied, pushing my hat back on my head.

“It d-does not befit-” he started to insist, but I put a leg around him for another second and he shook from head to tail as his emotions almost overwhelmed him again.

“Limerence… I need you to do something for me,” I said.

“I may…” he swallowed, glancing at his father’s corpse. “What is it?”

“I need you to get to a telephone and call Slip Stitch at the city morgue. Tell him he needs to come down here and to bring ‘Big Betty’. You remember that, alright? Big Betty. Tell him to leave Thalassemia there, too. She doesn’t need to see this. Can you do that and come back?” I asked, reaching out and pulling his face around to look into his eyes.

“Yes. Big Betty. Of course. Yes, I will… I will do that.” He choked up for an instant, then got to his hooves and trotted away at a stately pace. Stopping at the corner, he looked over his shoulder in my direction, keeping his gaze on the carpet. “Detective? Thank you.”

I acknowledged that with a bob of my chin and he trotted off between the stacks. Probably off somewhere to cry again, but he didn’t need an audience for that.

“Sir...why’d you send him away?” Swift asked, quietly. “Shouldn’t he be with us right now, so we can take care of him?”

I pulled at the tails of my coat, trying to ignore the lump of semi-solid emotional agony in my stomach as I explained that “He needs something to do. His father’s died and he’s feeling helpless. Trust me, I’ve been there. He’ll...recover. Maybe not today. Maybe not even soon. Our job hasn’t gone away because this was someone we cared about, though.”

Despite the brave words, I felt like I was floating. I could still feel dampness on my cheek fur and my eyes hurt. Just seeing the Don laying there, a pool of blood cooling under his chair, was enough to make me want to find the nearest bottle and crawl right to the bottom.

“Hardy?”

I tilted an ear in Taxi’s direction to show I’d heard the query.

“What’ve you found, Sweets?” I asked, finally, getting back onto all fours.

“I think it’s… uh… Celestia make me strong...” She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, cringing as she touched Tome’s shoulder. “This isn’t going to make him any less dead, but...I think somepony tried that awful necromancy on him and-”

I jerked my head up at the word ‘necromancy.'

“The bastards hacked his hoof off to make a phylactery?!” I snarled, my blood catching fire. The rage that bloomed inside me felt like a blanket of napalm on my grief. “They ripped his soul out?! Slaughtering him and his people wasn’t enough?!”

My view blurred. Everything seemed to move of its own accord. Several frames skipped over one another. It was the oddest sensation, but I could only feel it with a semi-detachment that one feels seeing only parts of a movie where some bits have been removed.

Taxi was tugging on my hooves.

That’s funny, I thought, in the way a thing that is entirely unfunny can be funny.

I’d somehow gotten over to one of the glass cases. How’d I done that? I didn’t remember charging the book case, but I could feel the lump on my shoulder and a couple of pieces of glass poking me through my coat. The pain... ooh, that felt better than was probably healthy.

It took me a moment to realize it was the case I’d seen Juniper’s reflection in just a few moments ago. The entire front was shattered and the carpet littered with shards of glass. I looked up at it from a position on my side. How had I gotten down there?

Funny.

Taxi was shouting something in my ear, while Swift’s brightly colored wings flapped around me, hauling me away. Somepony pulled my coat back, and I felt sticky wetness on my fur.

“Hardy!” my drive barked, giving me a poke in the chest. I gasped as another burst of pain brought me back to reality. “Stop fighting us!”

Swift’s frightened face drifted into view and she peered down at me with those soft, pink eyes.

I felt weight on my shoulders and looked up to see Taxi pinning my forelegs.

“Hardy, I think the necromancy failed!” Taxi gasped, putting her hooves on my face. “The Don’s soul is gone, but... but they couldn’t capture it!”

That was like a gallon of ice water down the back of my neck. I went limp and my back legs sank to the floor. Had I been kicking with them? The muscles were a little sore. Strange. Strange, strange, strange.

“Come back to me, Hardy… come on…” my driver whispered. She sounded scared.

I rolled onto my side and pulled my hooves under me, but didn’t stand. I just sat there, trying to get my bearings.

“What did I do?” I asked.

“Y-you seemed like you were… um… at-attacking the book-case, Sir,” Swift muttered.

I pulled a face and sighed. “Crazy ponies do things like that,” I sighed, idly picking a piece of glass out of my hoof and flicking it away. It should have hurt, but the pain seemed awfully far away. “Look, I’ve had a stressful month. A little psychotic break is good for everyone now and then.”

Weird as it might sound, my head felt significantly clearer, although Taxi had her hoof curled into a zebra pressure point strike, ready to lay me out if I decided to throw myself at any more book-cases.

I wobbled as I stood, turning to the Don. “Sweets, you were saying something important?”

Taxi cocked an eye in my direction, then slowly nodded. “I… was just insisting you spend tonight in my room, away from any sharp objects-”

“Somepony tried to use necromancy on the Don. It failed. Finish that sentence,” I demanded.

Her hoof relaxed and she set it back on the carpet. “The flesh where they removed his hoof. It’s still red. Look.”

I glanced at the ugly wound where the Don’s leg was severed just above his fetlock. I remembered the dark grey of Ruby’s internal organs and my insides roiled. “Speculation. Why would it fail?”

My driver’s lip twitched as she watched me, still cautious. “I… I don’t know. Maybe he knew a way of protecting himself?”

“Protecting himself? Hmmm. That could be useful if we-”

“Sir...you’re shaking,” Swift mumbled, putting one wing out to steady my leg.

I brushed her feathers away. “I’m aware of that, kid. We’re not discussing my mental condition right now. The best thing we can do not discuss that. We’re discussing exactly how the Don might have known necromancy was being used-”

“F-father was probably immune to the poisons,” Limerence said from behind me, still fighting a quiver in his voice. “There’s an alchemical component to the spell, yes? The injection Skylark gave to Cerise, and whatever they gave to the Professor and Miss Blue?”

Limerence looked a bit more composed as I turned to face him, but his cheeks were still sallow and his eyes, bloodshot. He was examining the shattered glass of the book case, keeping his gaze carefully away from his father’s body.

“The coroner’s report said there was,” Swift answered, wiping at her nose with the back of her leg.

“My father knew of all the poisons of the homeland. He has talismans in his body and he took immunity draughts every day against the possibility of assassins. His willingness to use our homeland’s mystical arts to less-than-legal enterprise was unpopular with those in high places,” the librarian explained. “It... it was not the poison that killed him.”

“What then? Blood loss?” Taxi asked.

“No. I have...I took time to examine some of the bodies. You didn’t see them, but there are...many.” He choked, covering his face with his leg before emotion could drag him back over the edge of despair. “I think... Detective, I could be wrong, but I think it might have been our own magical defenses…”

My ears shot straight up. “Your own... what?!”

Limerence’s lip quivered, but his voice steadied. “Upon second examination, I noticed that the control matrix had been...altered. Had I not left my watch at the repair shop, it’s entirely likely I would have been targeted alongside my brethren the second I laid a hoof beyond the front door.”

It was a long ten seconds as the reality behind that statement sank into my fried brain.

“You mean somepony...who knew your security system set it to target Archivists?” Swift gasped.

“To target our badges of office, yes,” he murmured, gently nudging his father’s half-melted watch with one toetip. “I would ask you to examine Father. He kept his watch in his breast-pocket. I... I cannot...”

I hesitated. It felt wrong to move the Don from his place of rest, but eventually somepony was going to have to bury him or cremate him or whatever zebra do.

Gathering my gumption, I eased over to Tome’s side and, as gently as possible, pushed his body upright. The old stallion seemed light as a feather as I rearranged him on the chair. At first, I couldn’t see what Limerence was talking about, but as I looked a little closer, I noticed a clean hole, burned in the Don’s vest pocket. It was like a laser had punched right on through. The scalpel-like cut proceeded out through his back, grazed his upper hip, then left another puncture through the chair.

Tenderly as I could, I pushed the Don back into the position he’d been in, grabbing one of the pillows from the spare chair to settle his striped head on.

That feeling I’d gotten, standing in the rain with Mom while they put Dad in the ground came welling back up and I coughed, pulling back from my friend’s body as I fought for self control. No amount of mature consideration of my emotions versus the need for professionalism in the face of death would stop my eyes from burning or my throat from clenching shut.

Damn.

“Does that... does that mean there was somepony inside the Archivists?” Swift asked.

“The Don said as much when I saw him last. That’s what the mission was about, after all. How many ponies knew how to mess with the defenses?” I asked.

“Not many. Only the most trusted. My father, myself, and perhaps five others. Two of that number are confirmed dead. You saw the body of one by the door and the other was Professor Fizzle at the Museum. The other three are unaccounted for.”

“What about your brother?” I inquired, cocking an eyebrow.

He shook his head. “My brother is an extremely poor wardsmith. Because he is a zony, his leylines are stunted. It was made worse after the injury. He couldn’t even manage basic unlocking cantrips with his... condition. He made attempts to learn the system, but always favored less enchanted forms of security. Bodies over spells. He does not enjoy ‘theory’ in the way I do.”

“Speaking of family...” I reached into my inner coat pocket, retrieving the folded envelope still sealed with red wax. “Lim, your father... on the day we came down here, he gave me this.”

Limerence’s horn flashed and it took him two tries to channel enough of his concentration to take the envelope from my hooves. “This... this is father’s personal seal. This is for family correspondence!” he gasped, turning the envelope over.

“It’s his Last Will. He sent you with me as a test. It was all a test.” I drew in a breath, forcing myself to continue. I didn’t know how he was going to react and that worried me. “He left it to me to decide who would take over the Archivists when he died. He didn’t...he didn’t want to choose between you and your brother.”

Staring down at the Will, he lowered his head and took the hovering paper in his teeth, reverently sliding it into his pocket. He couldn’t stop the tears dripping down his cheeks, but that stoic expression he usually wore was plastered on. “I...I will read it when we have finished here. I need to search the stacks. Father said my brother was coming in today. If he is here, I wish to find his body.”

I held up my hoof to catch him as he started to turn. “We’ve got to get to the outskirts and guide Slip Stitch in, in case there’s an attack-”

“The attack has already concluded,” Limerence said, quietly. “Whosoever launched this… this holocaust… has been and gone. They have claimed what they came for or failed and retreated. I will return our defenses to their normal operations. The front door will only open for the five of us. Does the coroner have some… defining feature? A piece of clothing perhaps?”

I thought for a minute then nodded. “Yeah. I can’t think I’ve ever seen him without his labcoat.”

“Then the defenses will ignore a pony wearing a labcoat.” Pulling a piece of scrap paper out of his pocket, he jotted something on it then passed it to Taxi. “That should guide you to the entrance and back. I...I am going to find my brother, if he’s here.”

“Fine. Meet us here in a half hour, whether or not you’ve found him, though. Clear?

Limerence didn’t answer, but nodded and moved down the aisle between two bookshelves. A moment later, I heard a muted whimper, but that quickly faded into the distance.

Helpless as I might have felt just then, I could only imagine what Limerence was going through. He’d lost everyone. With luck, his brother might still be alive, but there was no way to know until we found his body or could contact him.

The sadness threatened to yank my precariously perched sanity off its seat again. I gulped for air, sweeping a hoof across my face as though trying to clear away thick smoke. Nothing would make the situation better today. Nothing would make the Don any less dead.

“Sir?” Swift murmured, giving me a light touch with her wingtip.

“I’ll be fine, kid. Or insane. We’ll see. Before I decide which, we need to get Slip Stitch in here,” I said, more calmly than I felt.

“Can we trust him, Sir? I mean, he seems totally nuts. Won’t he just report all of this-”

“We can trust Stitch. Whatever else I’ll say about him, he understands discretion.” I had another thought which made my ears twitch. “Advertising that the Archivists are dead before we can clear out the Archive and solidify our position will set us up for another gang war. The Cyclones will be moving in if the Jewelers don’t.”

Taxi’s ears twitched. “You don’t think this was another attempt to set off-”

“I think we’re well beyond the place that there’s anything we could call ‘excessive paranoia’, Sweets,” I replied. “Right now, Detrot is a whole heap of TNT just laying right out in the open, waiting for a spark.”

Swift looked in the direction of the Don’s body, then quickly averted her gaze before it could disturb her stomach. “Sir, this is about as big a spark as somepony could set off...”

“You’re not wrong. Come on. We need Stitch. I won’t leave the Don’s body here and we need a place to store the corpses. Big Betty has plenty of space and the morgue has about a thousand nooks and crannies where we can make this situation disappear,” I explained. “Then... then we’ll figure something out to keep this place from falling into the wrong hooves.”

****

The three of us sat on the front steps of the Archive, kicking our heels, waiting. The wait gave me time to think, which was the last thing I needed or wanted at that particular moment, so I’d pulled down my hat and tried a few of Taxi’s breathing exercises. They didn’t work, insofar as I felt no more relaxed, but it was something to do that didn’t involve talking to myself or screaming incoherently.

Nearby, Swift had her head on Taxi’s lap and my driver was gently stroking her mane as we waited for the coroner. Stitch was typically very punctual, which is to say he would almost always arrive when it was most convenient for his personal sense of comedic timing.

I was just about to suggest one of us might want to go get more alcohol when a musical jingle drifted down the block. Swift’s ears perked and she sat up, adjusting her combat vest and picking up her trigger.

“Kid?” I asked, curiously.

She spat out her trigger long enough to say, “Taxi said that if he offers us anything to eat, I should shoot him in the knee.”

I glanced at my driver and she shrugged.

“He can work on three legs,” she explained. “It might save us some dancing and singing, too.”

Settling back on the step, I waited until a great, pink beast nosed its way around the corner at the far end of the street. Along with it came the cheerful, completely inappropriate music of an ice-cream trunk blared at maximum volume through a dozen loudspeakers.

****

Big Betty was an ice-truck from a time before electric refrigeration was widespread and ponies had to move enormous lumps of ice to their freezers on a regular basis to keep food cold. The mighty transport had six wheels, designed for long haul, heavy duty trucking under a domed box with a tailgate tall enough for a dragon to feel nice and cozy under it.

During the war, it had been converted by some industrious, slightly demented mind into a transport for soldiers and a meat wagon for corpses, hence the enormous armored plates bolted on every available surface. Coupled with gun-slits, fittings for grenade-launchers, empty missile racks, and what appeared to be a galley cannon strapped to the roof, it looked like a wheeled snail of slaughter. Worst of all, the whole thing was painted the same hideous pink as the Morgue itself.

Where Slip Stitch had acquired the ex-military vehicle was something of a mystery, but nopony who values their mental stability asks about Stitch’s history. His use it for was altogether more mundane. He carried corpses and ice-cream.

Most often the ice-cream went to foals whose mothers or fathers had died in violent or unexpected fashions, while their parents went in the back of the truck. He’d throw the children parties, surround them with caring friends, and fill their emptiness with whatever tiny happiness he could.

Having watched plenty of children who’d suddenly lost everything bundled off into anonymous, government vehicles to be carted off to relatives who didn’t want them, or worse, to orphanages, I think I like Stitch’s method better. Difficult as he could be to work with, he knew grief, and he knew sweets. He also had quite the talent for helping people say goodbye and, with surprising frequency, finding better homes for those left behind.

I guess it helped that he struck fear into the hearts of the local foster homes. Nopony who heard Big Betty’s song dared raise a hoof to a foal or let one go hungry.

Death and ice-cream can be a surprisingly effective combination.

****

The truck said ‘Detrot Medical Examiner’ with the words ‘and Tasty Treats’ stenciled in just under it across the side of the door. The front axles were wide enough to take up both lanes on one side of the road, while the actual container was broad enough that it threatened to spill into oncoming traffic if Stitch wasn’t careful. It trundled down the street, pulling to a stop out front of the Archive with a screech of hydraulic brakes.

An energetic tuft of white fur bounced up and down behind the wheel to music that couldn’t possibly be the truck’s tune. For an instant, I managed to forget what was behind me, waiting in the Archive, and a tiny smile found a place on my muzzle.

Stitch swung down out of the cab, his white labcoat flaring as he landed on the asphalt and pulled a brightly stickered bag of medical tools out behind him.

“Oh, Detective! And Miss Sweet Shine, and Officer Swift! It is so good to see all of you again. I worried after you left my morgue that I might never get to wish you a happy rebirthday! One day soon, must have a party for that,” Stitch exclaimed, sweeping up to us and throwing his forelegs around my neck and Taxi’s. He seemed completely immune to my driver’s scowl as she gently pushed him off. “Now then, what have you brought me out to see? Discretion is, after all, my middle name. Slip Discretion Stitch. Not many ponies know that.”

He paused, then looked into my eyes for several seconds. His blue face twitched a little as he narrowed his gaze, then took two steps back. His mood seemed to snap like a pulled rubber band and the crazy halo of hair that comprised his mane flattened slightly.

“Oh... Oh, My... Detective, you must pardon me. I wasn’t aware when I received the call. What’s happened?” he asked, with genuine worry. “The pony on the phone sounded quite distraught, but that isn’t uncommon. To see you, though, with all the telltale signs of the death of a loved one…”

“It’s…” I started to reply that everything was fine, but something in his very earnest expression of concern left a crack in my armor that could only grow from there. I put a hoof over my mouth, breathing slow and careful. My eyes wouldn’t stop burning. Damn.

Taxi took over, giving me a minute to recompose.

“We’ve got an unknown number of dead from a magical malfunction. The building is presently under a sort of lockdown and will attack anypony who comes in. We’re here as... guests... of one of the dead ponies. Hardy and he were very good friends.”

Stitch’s looked up at the Archive, as though seeing it for the first time. “If I’m not incorrect, this is the home territory of the criminal organization known as the Archivists, yes?”

“That’s right.”

Pulling a pipe out of his pocket, he proceeded to blow a few bubbles through it, frowning as he considered the situation. “If I were to continue to deduce... would it be likely that there has been some form of attack, the Archivists have suffered significant casualties, and you don’t want this leaking to the press, the police, or anypony else because it could cause a war between the Jewelers and the Cyclones?”

Swift’s muzzle dropped open. “You... you deduced all that? Why aren’t you a cop?”

He smiled, enigmatically. “Because, my dear, then who would dispense the ice-cream?”

****

I pushed open the door of the Archive ahead of Slip Stitch and stood to one side.

“Ah, I see! I see!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of the body that still lay on the carpet just inside.

He tossed his bag of tools beside the corpse, pulling on a white breathing mask and tugging out a pair of hoof-operated forceps.

“I need to know what happened to these ponies. Limerence says it was their own defenses, but I need your professional opinion... and your truck,” I explained.

Slipping the forcep strap around his knee, he began gently probing the body tugging at the cloth that still clung to its chest. “If you don’t mind me asking, how big is this party likely to be? A crowd is always good, but am I likely to need additional streamers and body-bags?”

“More than a few. Honestly, we’re going to have to search the Archive top to bottom unless Limerence has some way of speeding that up. He’ll be back in a minute or two.”

Limerence chose that moment to reappear at my side. He was a stealthy little thing under normal circumstances, but in his home territory, he might as well have been a ghost.

He looked calmer and his mane was slicked back with water, as though he’d found a sink to dunk his head in. Not a bad idea, now I considered it.

“Detective. Ah. I see you have found the coroner. Is he to be trusted?” Limerence asked.

Slip Stitch leapt to his hooves and darted over to shake our librarian’s leg, vigorously. “Oh, good morning to you, Sir! Are you one of the survivors? You have my condolences. I shall be seeing to it that your loved ones are seen off to wheresoever they decide they want to go in the afterlife!”

I held my breath, uncertain exactly how Limerence was going to respond.

“There are... no survivors besides myself, mayhap five or ten agents in the field, and father’s vault keepers. I am the last Archivist here,” he replied, somberly, taking his hoof from Slip Stitch.

“And I gather then that you know how many bodies there are here?” Stitch asked, brightly.

“By the count I was able to make on the security cameras whilst I was looking for my brother, there are...thirty nine...dead. I believe they may all be Archivists, or possibly guests of the library,” he replied.

Dropping back to his knees, the coroner shuffled over to the dead body on the carpet and began gently prodding at the chest and ribs. “Ah. Yes, I will need somepony to lead me to them. We can make provisions for moving them to my storage facility and we’ll have their parties later!”

“I’m... I’m so sorry, Lim,” Swift murmured, moving over and putting her wing across his back.

The librarian didn’t acknowledge her, but nor did he push her away. He just stood there, head bowed, watching as Slip Stitch went back to his examination of the body.

“Now then, this is a mode of death I’m only loosely familiar with,” Slip Stitch continued after a slightly awkward pause. “This... I believe this used to be a unicorn. A mare, if I don’t miss my guess. She would appear to have been incinerated from the inside out. Perhaps... leylines set fire to?”

It took Limerence a minute to reply, but when he did, it was in a monotone that spoke volumes.

“Her name... I think this was Catalona,” he said, taking his kerchief out and touching it to his cheeks, as he got a far-away look. “She was one of our researchers and very finest ward-smiths. A sweet filly, barely out of her teens, who came to us from the Academy.”

“And these ‘defenses’ of yours?” Stitch prompted.

“I... mmm... I suppose it hardly matters if you know, and the Detective says you can be discreet,” he sighed, plucking at his vest as he stared at Catalona’s burnt corpse, though I got the feeling he wasn’t really seeing it. “Simply enough, our defenses are focused on a multi-pronged attack based on what species they determine they are attacking. Unicorns are disabled by mana overload, earth ponies and zebras by simple electrical shock if a nonlethal option is preferred, or by a pencil thin energy discharge that punches a hole in their hearts, and pegasi will experience a locking field that removes all the air from around their bodies. There are plenty of other options for changelings and such, but... I believe the ‘gist’ is adequate.”

“Yes...yes. I am imagining that you wished me to examine a particular body?” Stitch inquired.

I nodded. “Yeah, if you don’t mind. Anything that might tell us who killed him.”

****

Stitch stopped between two book-cases as we returned to the scene of the Don’s death, studying the body. His lips curved into a thin, slightly manic smile. “Oh, yes... yes, interesting. Let me see here!”

I stood back so he could conduct his examination, watching Limerence carefully. The Archivist’s jaw was slowly clenching tighter and tighter as Slip Stitch darted forward to get a closer look.

Stitch began walking in little circles around the chair, lightly running a gloved hoof over the backrest. He stopped over the plate of cookies, then very lightly brushed a toetip over the rim of the glass of warming milk before giving it a quick lick.

Nodding to himself, he pulled out a tiny recorder and pressed the ‘record’ button.

“Subject... Don Tome. Age regressed with zebra alchemy, but based on bone degradation in the exposed area around the severed hoof, I would say mid-nineties. Suspected cause of death...hmmm…”

Placing his hoof on the Don’s forehead, he lifted the body like a sack so he could look at his chest.

I put a leg on Limerence’s shoulder as he let out a low, guttural growl. “Calm down. Now. Or I’ll make you wait outside.”

“Detective, he shows no respect for the-”

I interrupted by stepping close and jamming my mouth next to his ear. He started to recoil, but I grabbed him around the neck, forcing him to stand there and listen as I hissed. “Slip Stitch sees a hundred bodies a year or more. He’s doing his job, just like we’re doing ours. There will be a time to mourn, but if you want to know who killed your father and brother half as bad as I do, you’ll let him work. If you don’t, I will lay you out with my rear hooves and apologize later. Are we crystal clear, Lim?”

The librarian’s ears laid back and he slowly nodded.

Slip Stitch seemed not to have noticed our little exchange, prancing around the body and table, talking to his recorder. He paused long enough to wave a little wand under Tome’s muzzle, then stick it into one of his ears for a second.

“I would place time of expiration within two hours based on coagulation of blood and a body temperature roughly...twenty three degrees. Subject was discovered by Detective Hard Boiled approximately-”

He looked up at me, expectantly.

“I’m afraid I didn’t check a clock when we arrived, but-,” I gestured at Tome’s half-melted pocket watch laying on the floor. Slip Stitch gently lifted it by the chain on the tip of his forcep and poked the face before lifting his recorder back to his lips.

“Time of death is... for once, exact; sixteen hundred hours,” he said, contemplatively. “The subject has cooled significantly more than they should have. Probably the blood loss. Death was quick, presumably caused by magical puncture through the chest, which seems to have been targeted at the subject’s pocket watch which was in the breast pocket. When subject fell forward, the chain was severed and the watch fell onto the floor. Poor stallion didn’t have time to know what hit him.” He paused, thinking about that for a moment before a smirk cropped up on his nose. “Heh... time... hmmm. Anyway! Subject would also appear to have been poisoned. Right foreleg is severed just below the knee. The removal seems to have been done either soon before death, or moments after.”

“Wait a second, could you go back? Mister Tome was poisoned?” Swift asked, her notepad out and her pencil in her mouth. She didn’t seem to be taking notes with any intent of using them later, but mostly as a thing to do besides cry, hide, or go insane.

“Oh my, was he ever! I do find it odd how so many ponies lately seem to be dying of several different causes at once. Your friend, Ruby, this poor fellow…” He swept his labcoat open and stalked back and forth, still clutching his bubble-pipe between his teeth. “Should I also suspect that the missing Professor from the History Museum - who the Archivists would most certainly have on their payroll - is also likely to turn up ‘dead of multiple’?”

“Errr…it’s... I... ugh. Yes, yes, he’s dead,” I muttered, a little guiltily. “Fizzle is in his office, which is behind a perception ward at the Museum. He’s been there a few days.”

“I shall go and collect him and secret him away the moment I can find time.” Stitch nodded towards the Don’s body. “Is the good Professor also likely to have drunk poison milk?”

I gave a surprised start.

“Wait... what?! You mean the Don was poisoned with his milk?! Not with a syringe or something like that?”

“Most definitely! There is a slight residue on the inside of the glass that has affected the creaminess of the beverage. I see no bulging of the eyes or constriction of the throat, however. This was an odd poison. That, or he was dead before it could take effect,” Stitch amended.

“But... the Don was always careful with things like that. Somepony he knew brought him this milk,” I said, quietly.

“Yes... an Archivist, A traitor,” Limerence added from behind me, his tail tucked tightly between his rear legs. He’d come up silently and I’d missed his approach. His mane was mussed and his eyes were shot red. He floated a familiar wooden staff off of his back and held it in front of himself. It was Zefu’s walking stick. “Please, come. My brother is three rows over, in his... his normal-” He gulped down a couple of breaths as he fought for self control. “-in his normal reading place.”

****

Zefu’s body was sprawled across a chair in a small alcove, a box of cheese-snacks and a glass of water sitting beside him.

In life, he’d been gorgeous, but his death wasn’t kind. The same magic that had killed the poor mare, Catalona, had left not much recognizable on the zony’s body. The blast of whatever it was that killed him managed to scorch almost every last inch of skin off his body, although some bits around his hooves still showed a bit of pale, white fur. If anything, the destruction was more complete. His eyes were gone. His fur was gone. Most of the flesh on his upper chest was gone. There wasn’t much left of his face.

“Sweet sloppy joes, my boy! Whatever happened to you?” Stitch’s nose wrinkled as he caught sight of the body, waving a hoof around his face to dispel the scent of burning flesh. Swift fell back a few steps back as the rest of us approached Zefu’s resting place.

I glanced at her, curious.

“What is it, kid?”

“Sir, he smells...” Her tail twined itself around her leg and she took another step back.

“You can’t seriously be bothered by how anything smells after that dunk in the sewer...”

“It's not... that. He smells... um... he smells likes... uh... like fried chicken, sir,” she whispered, stopping beside a book case. She ran her tongue over her muzzle as she continued, “If you don’t mind, I think I should probably stay back here.”

“Right,” I replied, internally cringing at my carnivorous partner.

Slip Stitch, meanwhile, was poking at the body with the end of a scalpel, teasing the area around the horn.

“Hmmm... this fine gentlecolt is a zony, you say?” he asked Limerence.

“Yes. I found my brother’s staff leaning here,” Lim replied, nodding towards the wall beside the chair.

“Well, I suppose species identification will be difficult without a blood test,” Stitch commented, hefting his recorder. “The underlying bone structure seems somewhat odd for a zony, but that could be damage from the spell. This was a rather spectacular mode of death.”

“My brother…had a skeletal condition that... that,” Limerence started haltingly, then stopped as his gaze fell back onto the charred remains. There was so little left that was recognizable. Even his mane was gone.

Taxi, who’d been standing silently in the background since we came back in, stepped forward and began to reach out to him, but Slip Stitch raised a hoof, stopping her. I couldn’t read his expression, but I’d learned to trust him in matters of death and grief.

As I watched, a shake developed in Limerence’s tail, then traveled up his spine, out to the tips of his ears.

If a pony cries enough, one gets to think there must surely be a limit on how many tears you can possibly shed at once. You’ll find you’re wrong, too, if you see enough dark and terrible things. Maybe it’s a small kindness that there’s no limit on how much you can weep.

Lim was glassy eyed and his nose was running, but he didn’t seem to notice. The quaking of his knees got so bad his rear legs slid out from under him and he fell onto his flank.

Taking two steps forward, Slip Stitch sat between Limerence and his brother’s body, blocking his sight of it. He gently took our librarian’s hoof in his, raising it off the floor. Lim looked right through him as though he weren’t there.

“Mister Limerence. May I ask, are you a pony of logic or a pony of emotion?”

There was a long pause while Limerence’s brain slogged into motion, but when it did, he raised his head and replied, softly, “I am a pony of... of logic, sir. What could that possibly have to do with... with anything?”

“Then I want to direct your attention to something. Your brother... what was his name?”

“Zefu…”

Stitch nodded and continued in a calm, even voice like one might speak to a frightened animal, “Your brother - Zefu - died in the most gruesome, vicious manner imaginable. Your father has been poisoned and his heart cooked in his chest. Your family is dead.”

Limerence’s lips peeled back in a silent snarl. He tried to snatch his hoof back, but Slip Stitch held onto it firmly, staring into his eyes with such intensity that the librarian slowly stopped his struggles and just stared back. The coroner’s crazy mane framed a face that was soft and a little pudgy, but for an instant it was like he’d become something else; something more.

“Emotion dictates you fall apart, now,” Stitch continued, his voice completely steady as he stood over the dead body of Zefu and gripped his brother’s hoof. “Emotion says you collapse. Emotion says you die inside and everything these ponies meant dies as well. Emotion says you are alone and nothing will change that.”

I watched as his words seemed to wash over Limerence with the force of a broken dam. His face tightened and he stood a little straighter. He levitated his brother’s staff off of his back, holding it in front of himself lengthways, examining the carvings. That stoic expression he’d worn the day I met him dropped onto his features, stamping out any clue that he’d been weeping openly just minutes ago.

“Now, Mister Limerence... I want to ask you: will you break?”

Lim shook his head and pulled his hoof from the coroner’s, setting it on the carpet.

“I am not going to break,” he replied.

Like a flicked switch, all the solemnity vanished from Slip Stitch’s demeanor. He raised his head and smiled, patting Limerence between the ears and ruffling his blond mane.

“Excellent! Well, then! Let’s let Uncle Slip Stitch get you on the path to some good, old fashioned revenge, shall we?”

“What?!” I spluttered.

The coroner gave me a wicked grin and waved his hoof over the body of Lim’s brother. “Oh, were you not aware, Detective?”

“Are we sure revenge is really the healthiest thing he can be thinking about right now?!” Taxi blurted.

Giggling maniacally, Slip Stitch’s eyes widened with glee as he rose up onto his rear hooves, dancing in a little circle, his tail sweeping along behind him like a great white brush. Something in the way the dim lighting framed his wild hair gave it a sinister glow, casting a shadow down over his face that suggested a hood of some kind.

“Can you not see it, Detective?” he exclaimed, waving his hooves in the air like a conductor controlling a great symphony. “The slaughter of a family? The death of a gang? Your beloved friend, left cooling in his chair by a traitor?”

I put a hoof on Stitch’s chest, pulling him back down into a standing position. “I’m seeing it, Stitch... and I’m still thinking I would rather see these ponies arrested-”

“Of course, of course…” he replied, waving his hoof dismissively. “I am aware of your very noble goals. What about his ultimate goal, however?” He pointed at Limerence, who was staring contemplatively at the carpet. “He must have one, you know! Madness is his only alternative. He is ever so close to madness right now. You are bare inches from it, my friend! I know, for my talent tells me so!”

He wiggled his backside like a cat about to pounce, flashing the ice-cream cone with the skull and crossbones.

“Can you not see it, Detective?!” he repeated, advancing on me. I took an involuntary step back. “This will be a grand occasion! So many evil ponies have come into our great city, and too many have climbed the towers of power! The resources required to mount such a thorough assault on one of the most well connected gangs in Detrot is simply enormous! You are a deliverer of justice, but look at what that makes necessary! So much injustice, and now...now there will be a reckoning!”

His eyes flashed with a frightening, inner light as he dropped back to all fours and jerked his head in the direction of Limerence.

“He... needs revenge. No amount of platitudes or ‘by the book’ law will ever make that pony whole. Death, my friend! Death will rebuild him! He must have his vengeance...or there will be no end!” Stitch put his toe against my chest and gave me a light shove, sending me onto my backside, “And you... you, Detective, will preside! You will make sure it is his vengeance he gets! You will hold his hoof and guide him into the warm embrace of violence... and I will hold the party afterwards, for any who survive, and all those who die! A party like no other! A great, glorious, gory, gala of death!”

Silence fell over the little space between the rows of old books. Slip Stitch relaxed, plunking himself down on the carpet and waiting for my response with a big, silly smile on his face.

I glanced over at Taxi, but she was just as dumbfounded as I was. Limerence was just sitting there, lost in thought, his eyes closed. I’d have given more than a few bits to know what he was thinking about, just then.

Granted, this wasn’t the weirdest thing Slip Stitch had ever done in my presence, but it was high on the list. I didn’t want to become an assassin, but I was making quite the living at it. Skylark. Cosmo, sort of.

Who might be next?

Did it matter?

If somepony tried to kill me, was I anything less than obligated to kill them?

Juniper was eyeing me from inside an art-deco mirror sitting behind a row of books. He looked a little disapproving, but also vaguely amused. He was one of those ponies who could pull off several expressions at once. He and Stella would have loved one another.

“I got nothing,” I sighed, pulling my coat straight. “We’ve got some bodies to move-”

Limerence raised his head, suddenly, ears twitching back and forth. “Detective! Intruders!”

I leapt to my hooves. “What?! Are you sure?”

He nodded, pointing to his head. Turning, he let me see what looked like a tiny black stone lodged in his ear. “I picked up a monitoring talisman when I was resetting the defensive system and altering the program to ignore the five of us.” He closed his eyes and his horn flashed up and down it’s length. “I detect... three... no, four incoming targets, all armed quite heavily. Three pegasi, one unicorn. They are all heavily tattooed with Cyclone gang symbology.”

“Can you get rid of them with the external defenses?” I asked.

“I... I can, but-” Limerence frowned a little, then raised his chin. “I do believe I have a better idea. Since you are guiding me to my vengeance-”

“We have not discussed vengeance here, Lim-” I tried to interrupt, but he plowed on.

“-I think it best we continue our association. To that end, I think it best make sure everypony who might think to target us is aware this facility is secure. Do you concur?”

“I mean... I do, but what-”

“Come along then!” Limerence swept his brother’s staff up in his hooves and turned towards where I presumed the front of the archive to be, cantering off between two book-cases.

I was too stunned by his sudden change of mood to follow.

Swift moved out of the little cubby she’d chosen to sit in whilst we examined Zefu and trotted up to me, wings half extended for flight.

“Uh... Sir, do you think we should go make sure nothing bad happens?” she asked.

“What’re they gonna do? They can’t get in here,” I replied. “Limerence fixed the defenses and the front door won’t open to anypony besides us. At worst, they’ll make some threats, realize they can’t get in, and wander off with their tails between their legs.”

“I wasn’t really worried about Limerence, Sir. I’m worried about those Cyclones...”

****

We left Stitch to the job of clearing up Zefu’s body and getting him into a body-bag for later examination, hurriedly rushing after Limerence. He was quickly lost amongst the rows of books, but by sheer luck we managed to wander back into an area that was kind of familiar. The Archive was an easier place to lose oneself than the Vivarium. After another five minutes stumbling back and forth, Swift called out from overhead that she could see the front door.

“I swear, once we’re done here, I am having Limerence teach me what system they use to navigate in this place,” I grumbled, following my partner’s voice.

Swift was perched on top of a book-case like a cat looking down at us as I rounded another corner. She pointed to the left with one wing.

“Sir, the way out is over there...but I could have sworn that wasn’t where it was when we came in.” She hopped down and fluttered to the ground.

“I’ve known the Don for over a decade and I never knew he had kids,” I replied, with a fond, sad smile. “He is... he was as private as any creature could be and this is his inner sanctum. I wouldn’t put it past him to figure some way to trick local space-time into making this place exempt from certain rules if it suited him.”

As we came within sight of the revolving doors, I could see Limerence standing out on the stoop, Zefu’s staff propped across his shoulders. He was looking out into the street at something and his lips were moving.

“Do you think we can convince these Cyclones that we’re working for them?” Taxi asked.

“I somehow doubt it,” I answered. “I don’t think these are Aroyos. Besides, would you want to let whoever told these ponies that the Archive was attacked know where we’re hiding? This was a hit job. They’re trying to start a war... and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Jewelers show up not long from now.”

Freeing my gun-bit, I angled myself down between the aisles until I could come at the revolving door from one side. Taxi took my cue and snuck across, getting out of the line of fire whilst Swift hovered overhead, away from the line of sight of anypony outside.

Easing up to the door, I stuck my head around the side of the glass cell.

Outside, four tense looking ponies stood at the bottom of the stairs. They were armed like a marauding band of P.A.C.T. agents, with enough heavy firepower to take on a small army and covered in tattoos so thick I don’t think I could have picked out their cutie-marks. The one out front who seemed to be leading them was a stallion with thick glasses and muscles on every inch that wasn’t covered in scruffy orange fur.

Limerence was addressing him, but I couldn’t hear what was being said.

Looking up, I waved at Swift who was chewing nervously, on her trigger.

“Kid, I’m going out there. Can you get in the revolving door and get a firing position? The door is made of bullet proof glass. If I give you a signal, lay down covering fire so we can pull back. In fact, just shoot the crap out of them. Try to leave them alive, if you can.”

“What kind of signal, Sir?” she asked.

“I hope you’re going to be able to tell what’s a situation where I need covering fire...”

“Sir, I think you need covering fire getting out of bed lately.”

It was a tiny joke and the sort that was deeply out of place, but I chuckled anyway, clenching my jaw before the tremor it set off in my stomach could turn into a full blown manic attack. Crying or giggling like a lunatic might have been very intimidating to most ponies, but I doubted it would impress the heavily armed Cyclones.

“If they start shooting, you start shooting. Does that work?”

Swift nodded and I stepped into the open, pushing through the revolving door.

****

The big unicorn Cyclone out front could have been a carbon copy of his friends, including the tattoos, but he had the gleam of intelligence in his eyes, whereas his companions struck me as largely muscle and not much creativity. The others were pegasi, each one wearing a combat saddle with a couple of heavy hitters in each. I counted two chatter-guns, a sawn off shotgun, and the long, black metal prong of what might have been an illegally modified lightning cannon. They all seemed pretty relaxed, but with professional killers, that’s an easy mistake to make.

As I came through the door, his attention flicked in my direction, took in my weapon and general physique and immediately dismissed me as he continued addressing Limerence.

“Look, matey... I gots the utmost respects for what the old stripe did fer us and every other thug in dis city, but my mates and I here dun’ heard the old stripe is dead. We gots no gripe wid the rest of you’z Archivists... but my little birdy what tells me stuff says the rest of them is dead, too. That means dis here property be noponies land... and the Jeweler cry-babies gonna be dis way soon. Now, you’z can’t protect dis place on you’z own. Why don’tcha let us in, let us have a little look’round, and we’z keep stuff safe, yeah?”

Limerence let out a long-suffering sigh and waved his hooves at them. “Gentlecolts, I am being patient with you only because my associate dislikes meaningless deaths and we already have enough bodies that will need hiding. The Archivists do not need your presence, nor your ‘help’. Leave. This is your final warning.”

I trotted up beside Limerence and cocked my ear at him. “Lim?”

“I am handling this, Detective,” he answered, quietly enough that only I could hear. “Or was I wrong in assuming you wanted as few bodies as possible?”

“No, not wrong, but these guys might provide us with some useful information.” I raised my voice so the Cyclones could hear me and called out, “Hey, who told you guys to come down here?”

The unicorn scowled at us and un-holstered his shotgun, levitating it into an aiming position. It was an awfully nice model of heavy duty, police-style twelve-gauge with chrome trimming and - for some bizarre reason - telescopic sights.

“I ain’t making myself too clear? Dis place be ours. You wanna show us around and make sure we don’t touch nothing that go boom, dat’s fine by me, but ya’ll is getting out the way. I see yer friend’s horn light, I put a big’ol hole in both of you ‘afore he can cast.”

I flicked a hoof at his gun. “You may or may not be aware, but my friend here is in control of the Archive’s defenses. That’s some big magic. They’ll burn you to ashes, but not before you find out just how much a pony can tell somepony whilst trying to put their internal organs out.”

The beefcake looked skeptical, but I saw a glint of uncertainty in his eyes.

“Erm... Detective, our external defenses are largely non-lethal,” Limerence put in.

My hoof hit my forehead so hard I momentarily saw stars.

“Lim, we don’t need to tell ponies that...”

“You mistake me.” Limerence turned back to the group of Cyclones and smiled in a way that would make a tiger flinch. “Gentlecolts! Since you have decided to persist in your trespass, I have decided you should all feel the sensation of being turned inside out! When you are ready to give us what we need, I will return your skin!”

One of the pegasi took wing, hovering overhead as the unicorn glanced back and forth at his friends, then cocked his shotgun, leveling it at Lim’s forehead.

I readied to grab the librarian and drag him back to the Archive. I could hear the gentle creak of the revolving door as Swift lined up a shot.

A soft glow suffused the ground around the Cyclone’s hooves.

That’s when the screaming started.

Act 2, Chapter 43: The Screaming Tells You It's Working

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 43: The Screaming Tells You It's Working

“Know thy route, and know thyself; in a hundred deliveries you shall never be in peril.”

Neighponese mailbags made during the mid-Solar Millenium were often inscribed with inspirational sayings such as this; references to a moral and strategic code known to modern equipology as Poshido, the way of the deliverer. Another, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor dragonfire, nor disembowelment, nor cheesewheels shall keep these couriers from their rounds,” was adopted as the motto of the Royal Equestrian Mail Service, despite some of it being anachronistic; There have only been two recorded disembowelment epidemics in the last millennium and only one cheesewheel breakout not directly related to Discord.

This may seem pompous, but the Royal Mailponies are not a bunch of clerks and menial laborers with an inflated sense of importance. A primary concern of any civilization is getting objects from one place to another, and Equestria’s hostile magic and megafauna-laden environment complicates this, as do the remote locations of some of its citizens. Thusly, mailponies are no common ponies; they must possess a diverse set of skills, knowledge and equipment in order to survive their tasks unscathed. Simply being armed can be insufficient preparation; a particular delivery between two towns can require combat reflexes, asbestos clothing, expendable furniture, musical instruments and ricotta cheese.

Fortunately, all the training mailponies perform to protect them from monsters and hostile environments make them very safe from being robbed by simple bandits; ‘Stage coach’ robbery, prevalent in southern bovine civilizations, was tried exactly once, because the only perpetrator was found lying on the road to Dodge Junction with a dislocated torso and a detailed note.

It is said: “You steal the mail when it arrives, you steal the mail before it leaves, but nopony steals from a mail carrier's bag.” There's a record of an incident where a new mail carrier left her bag (presumably by accident, but this has never been verified) in a remote train station. To the best of anypony’s knowledge, it is still there, sheltered under a propped up umbrella, waiting for somepony with sufficient authority to pick it up. As trifling with the mail means trifling with the Royal Equestrian Mail Service, nopony has stepped up to take the risk.

There are some goods, however, that the REMS does not transport; among them corpses, unshielded magical artifacts, and, notably, Illegal baked goods; Unauthorized delivery of Equestrian pastries is considered a weapons violation by several major international arms treaties, including the Geneighva Convention.

For those seeking to transport less than legal goods, there are other routes with mail carriers just as - if not more - zealous in their appointed rounds.

-The Scholar

You ever see a pony lose all their skin?

I’m sad to say I have, and it’s nothing to laugh at.

You ever see a pony think they’ve lost all their skin?

Funniest thing in the world.

****

“Oh dear Celestia, why am I aliiiive!?”

The unicorn leading the group of Cyclone intruders shrieked as he ran in little circles, his tail slapping back and forth against his flanks.

His three friends lay on their backs, howling for their mothers. Their weapons and combat saddles lay discarded around their hooves, having been the first thing they tried to wiggle out of when the spell took effect.

I was stalled halfway to snatching Lim’s tail with the intent of pulling him out of harm’s way while he looked on, watching the helpless caterwauling gangsters with a frigid lack of emotion. There’s only been a pause of about three seconds while the Cyclones looked back and forth at each other in confusion when the runes flickered to life around them. It was just long enough for them to look a bit smug and take aim with their weapons again.

Then the pegasus who’d taken wing to get aerial advantage pitched out of the sky onto his muzzle and began flailing at the ground, shouting something about his pelt being on fire. His friends had only an instant before it hit them, before they were rolling around in the street, tearing at their clothing and trying to free themselves from their gun harnesses.

The revolving door creaked open and Swift trotted out to join us, her trigger still clenched in her mouth.

“Uh...Lim? What’d you do to them?” she asked, scratching her mane.

“A fairly simple, but extremely powerful pre-programmed illusion. It works on the mind and the nerve endings. I’ve never been on the receiving end, but I’m told it’s about as unpleasant as a taser with no lasting physical effects.”

“You... made them think their skin vanished?”

“I do suppose when I told them ‘skin’, I was suggesting only the top several layers of flesh. I’m told this makes it appear that all subcutaneous fats have also gone.”

I sighed and sat on the stoop, watching the four stallions wriggling about on the pavement. One of them was blubbering for his ‘fleshy-hug-thing’, while the big unicorn had stopped running in circles and curled up in the fetal position near a sewer cover.

“Isn’t... I mean... shouldn’t you make it stop, now?” she asked, after a long moment.

“Considering how your grandmother handles ponies who invade the Stiletto’s territory, believe me, this is a kindness. Besides, this isn’t the worst I could have done to them. One of the spells in our system can make a pony think they’ve eaten their own hooves. The psychological damage of that one is supposed to be spectacular.”

I rubbed my jaw for a moment, thinking. The unicorn was trying to shove his head into an empty trashcan at one side of the road, sobbing about never finding another mare who’d want a stallion with a skinless...anatomy.

There was a certain appeal to interrogating them with a bottle of lemon juice in one hoof. Still...

“Yeah, alright. Kid, go get their guns. Lim... shut it off.”

He shrugged and gave his horn a little flick. “I suppose. I am... mmm…” He swallowed and glanced back at the Archive, pensively. The runes hidden in the cement glimmered and vanished. He started to say something, stopped, then lowered his head. “I fear I am still compromised at this moment and will be unable to ask questions effectively. Would you object to conducting this?”

“No problem. I’ll try to keep it short. We still need to help Stitch move the bodies and then decide what we’re going to do.”

“We must examine Father’s office. He kept information there which only the leader of the Archivists can access,” he replied, patting the front pocket of his vest where his father’s Will lay. “I suspect that is now... me.”

“Alright, it’s a direction at least... Swift, stop messing with that damn lightning cannon! It looks like it was built out of tinker toys.”

“But I waaant iiit!”

****

The four Cyclones sat in a sullen circle in the lobby of the Archive. Limerence had tricked up the internal defenses to glow in an especially menacing fashion, so they were all surrounded by nasty pink runes, reinforcing what a bad idea it would be to try anything cute.

“Lets try this again,” I growled, poking the big unicorn in the forehead. He snapped at my hoof and I gave him a little swat on the tip of the horn that made him wince. “Who... sent you?”

He looked like he wasn’t going to answer, so I glanced at Limerence, who let his horn sparkle a little.

“Don’t know they name!” one of the pegasi blurted, his eyes wide with fear. “They only be speakin’ through dead drop!”

The big unicorn leaned over and smacked his friend in the head. “Give over, idiot! You wanna be dead?!”

“Rather be dead than have no skin, scummer!” the pegasus snapped, swiping at his leader.

“Since I don’t think it requires any ongoing power-” I looked to Limerence standing at my back for confirmation and he shook his head, “-for my friend to let the security system run through its entire repertoire of terrible psychological horrors, I’ve got to tell you...the old stripe was my friend. Locking the lot of you in a closet and letting the Archive eat your brains would really suit me just fine, right now.”

All four of them shivered involuntarily and edged away from me.

“Eh...he be right,” the unicorn sighed in defeat, gesturing at me with his horn. “They be some big shots in dis city. I ain’t know much. They always know stuff. Tell us things. Tell us when the Jeweler move or when cops is out hunting. Today, we gets a call, says come and see before the Jewelers do. Either we lay claim, or they do. We was closest.”

“Where do you make these dead drops?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at them.

“Downtown. Courier from Pony Quick or one of them services drops’em.”

Swift groaned, dropping her pencil out of her muzzle and flexing her jaw as she finished jotting down notes. “Ugh, Sir, we’d have better luck asking one of the Cyclone bosses directly than trying to get confidential information out of one of the courier services. Even with a warrant, they don’t usually know what they’re carrying. They’ll pick up at one dead drop and leave it at another. All it takes is a stupid phone call.”

“I know...damn. What exactly did they tell you?” I inquired.

The unicorn frowned, thinking. “I gots the message in my saddle-bag, you wanna go get it.”

****

After Swift retrieved the saddlebags and the combat saddles from the street, we crowded around the Cyclone’s belongings. They had quite a few extra ammo cartridges for their guns, plus a nice selection of grenades, flash-bangs, and other fun stuff. The unicorn snarled and pawed the carpet as I pocketed his bit-purse and a half ounce of premium Zap, but Limerence gave him a firm poke in the rear end with his brother’s staff and he quieted down nicely.

Near the bottom of the bag, I finally found the note. It was printed in untraceable typewriter script on expensive stationary, like one might get only from a printer or a top-end hotel.

It was short, and to the point:

‘The Don of the Archivists will be dead. Base will be vulnerable. Proceed to Tenth Librum Publicum. Take weaponry. Destroy all comers and claim location for Cyclones.’

I turned the paper over, looking for some sign of who it might be from, then peered up at the Cyclone leader.

“So...what then? Some anonymous pony writes you a note and you trot your heels down here loaded for bear, just like that?” I asked, incredulously.

“Ain’t never been wrong before,” he replied, shrugging his massive shoulders.

“You want to clarify that?”

He hesitated and Limerence made a peeling gesture with his hooves.

“Uh...them boys started talkin’ to us like, five or six years ago. Mostly give tips. They letting Cyclones know what all moves in Detrot. Told us which ponies to kill and which places we oughta go take ‘afore the Jewelers could, yahknow?”

“It never struck you as suspicious that somepony would just be handing you sections of the city?” Taxi asked.

“The tips always panned out, so ain’t got no reason to question, savvy?”

I read the paper again, scratching at my jaw. “This says ‘The Don will be dead’. Somepony sent this before the attack...”

The head Cyclone picked at his nose and said, “Wouldn’t be the first time. Remember that big election back two year ago? The mayor had that stupid colt runnin’ against him what wanted to shake up everything. Get rid o’corruption or whatever, remember? He were gonna piss in everypony’s pie.”

“I remember,” Swift murmured. “Candidate Cotton Poke. He was from the Heights. I thought he was really nice. I wanted to vote for him.”

“Yeah, you remember what done happen to Mister Cotton?”

Swift lowered her ears. “Yes…”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t exactly ‘on the wagon’ two years ago,” I said. “What happened to this Cotton Poke guy?”

“Um... he... he was found at a hotel by a journalist with a... a little filly…” Swift muttered, shamefacedly.

“Sounds like no big loss,” I shrugged. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“What them press ponies never say... she were a Cyclone filly,” the big guy chuckled, stroking the tribal tattoos on his right foreleg with his left toe. “We gots a note what say, ‘send one of your girls, nice and young, out that’away’. All she gots to do be walk in the hotel room, sit down, and wait. Twenty minutes later, this Cotton Poke burke walks in all exhausted like and almost collapses on the floor. He looks up and asks who in Tartarus let her into his room...and then goes to tell the hotel staff to get her to clear out. He take one step out of that hotel room and there’s a thousand cameras...and our girl smilin’ and wigglin’ her flank for them!”

He guffawed, loudly, slapping the carpet. “That boyo, ain’t never seen the light of day since! She ain’t even had her first bleed, and there she be, gigglin’ and wavin’ her tail around for the pretty flashbulbs!”

Swift’s mouth was hanging open as he finished his story.

“You... you beasts!” she squeaked. “Cotton Poke... Cotton Poke was a good pony!”

“Yeah, well, ain’t nopony stand in front of all them cameras and say he ain’t done what they think he done. After that, Snifter was a shoe-in!”

My partner’s hoof wavered a little closer to her gun-bit and I reached out, gently putting my toe over hers.

“No shooting the prisoners,” I warned.

“Sir, I promise I can totally miss in a way that hurts a lot.”

I considered that for a second, then shook my head. “We can cause them all manner of horrible pain later if we get bored. Right now, we just need information.” I turned back to the thugs. “Last question, then. Any smart punk is going to have some resources. Information, spies, and gossip. I want to know what’s moving in the underworld right now. Something must have preceded this. Nopony just slaughters one of the most influential gangs in the city on a whim.”

The four gangsters exchanged a few looks, then the pegasus on the left, who was slightly shorter than his friends and had a dappled green mane spoke up, “What ain’t movin’ in the underworld these days? There’s war comin’. Somepony with biiig honkin’...” he paused, glanced at Taxi and Swift, realized he was in the presence of a couple of girls and stammered, “-uh...big...courage...things...somepony brave is making things change. Old bosses are dying like crazy and ‘young bucks’ lookin’ to prove theyselves is steppin’ up, you know? Rumor is that them what is dying might not be dying too natural like, savvy?”

“Assassinations?”

Their leader sucked a breath. “It ain’t good luck to talk of them, says I. Death have a funny way of finding ponies with loose lips about the Biters.”

“What are the... the Biters?” Swift asked, nervously.

“Nopony knows,” he replied, waggling his hooves at her like he was telling a ghost story. “Stupid rumors, thinks I... but then, Boss Droll from the Top Street Roller Demons... them is another Cyclone Clan... anyway, he die real nasty like. Coulda just been some... whatchamacalit... ’Internal affair’ or whatever, but they says his body all tore up like a pack o’ timberwolves got to it. A few days later, the boss of the Trottingham Road Lords die. Now, they is at each other’s throats, but both they bosses been... chewed, you know? Rumor be, it were demon ponies with biiig teeth what done it.”

My partner glanced at me, then stepped forward and peeled her lips back in a feral grimace that showed off far too many points. “Like thiff?”

****

To his credit, the unicorn Cyclone only fainted for a minute or two. Two of his friends screamed like little fillies and crashed headfirst into one another with a sound like two coconuts banging together, while the third simply rolled onto his back and lay there moaning.

After that, there was no way we were going to get anything else out of them, so we bundled them up and shoved them out the front door of the Archive with instructions that they had five minutes to be out of Archivist territory before the external defenses came back on and they spent the rest of their lives in a mental hospital, thinking they’d gnawed their own limbs off. Swift was making apologies the whole way until I told her to knock it off.

I did keep the lovely shotgun. It fit my holster beautifully, with a well oiled oaken stock and all the trimmings. Chrome might not be to my particular taste, but I can appreciate a well maintained firearm, particularly when it comes at such a low cost and with such a satisfying story.

****

As the revolving door swung around behind me and I breathed a sigh of relief, I finally noticed Catalona’s body was no longer laying in the lobby. How had I missed that?

“Where’s Slip Stitch?” I asked and Limerence put his hoof to his ear.

“He’s... four rows over and twelve in,” he said, raising one eyebrow. “He’s...somehow moved almost thirty bodies there in this short period of time. By himself...”

“We’ll be both happier not asking how he’s managed that. Do you want to check on them?”

He took a very deep breath and shook his head. “I suppose we must. I would rather we simply moved on to my father’s office. The dead... by the zebra practices, they have moved on already. My father’s soul is safe. There is nothing I can do for him or for them, but I can kill the responsible parties for myself and for the city. Father would want that.”

“Your father would want you to kill ponies?” Taxi asked, disapprovingly.

Limerence was unfazed and his voice didn’t waver from that chilly monotone.

“My father would want me to keep the city safe. He was a zebra of restraint and careful thought, but those who made themselves his enemies didn’t get the chance to do harm to this city or his goals. As to my revenge; it coincides with our mission. That I will take pleasure in it is entirely my own business.”

His determination was certainly admirable.

It reminded me of a much younger, much stupider Hard Boiled. I might even have said it was a good thing, if it hadn’t gotten my first partner killed. Death has a way of giving you a fresh perspective on things like that, be it your own or someone else’s.

I flicked an ear and said, quietly, “Taxi...could you take Swift and go see how Slip Stitch is doing? I need to have a little conversation.”

Taxi tossed her mane and turned on her heels. “Come on. Lets go see the other crazy pony while these two crazy ponies work this out.”

“Huh? Oh... right,” Swift chewed her lip as she followed Taxi off between the aisles.

I waited until they’d both gone, then took three steps up to Limerence and tore the internal defense’s monitoring talisman out of his ear with one toe, simultaneously bowling him over with my superior strength and shoving him onto his back, pinning him down with my chest against his. The other hoof came up to press against the base of his horn, gently resting on the artery which fed both magic and blood into the point.

He was so surprised the one knife he’d managed to yank out in his magical grip clattered onto the carpet. I held him there, my gaze burning into his as he tried futilely to push me off with his rear legs.

Smart ponies don’t pin a pony down and stand over directly them. It’s a good way to get kicked in the testicles. Instead, I was off to one side, simply using my body to keep him balanced on his back so he couldn’t flip over as I pressed against his horn.

I waited a good fifteen seconds for him to evaluate the situation and decide there was no escape. Fight an earth pony in close combat and you will lose.

He glared up at me, defiantly, with his lips pressed into a thin line, saying nothing.

“Alright,” I growled. “You and I are going to make a deal, here and now. This is not the kind of deal where we negotiate or compromise. I’m going to tell you how things are going to be, and you’re going to nod, or I’m going to coldcock you, have Taxi come back and make sure you don’t wake up, then take you to a secret government facility just outside of the city and leave you in an anti-magic cell designed to hold draconic spies and commandos. When this is all over, I’ll come and tell you what happened. I promised your father I would keep you safe, so if you decide to break this deal, that’s where you go. Nod your head now, so I know whether or not you want to listen to the rest of my deal.”

Limerence’s glare had lost none of its fury, but there was a touch of curiosity there as well. His alternative was unconsciousness. He slowly dropped his chin, just once.

“Here is my deal,” I continued. “I will help you find the ponies who killed your father. He was my friend and more. We will hunt them and we will make sure they pay. If it comes to killing them and keeping them alive is not an option, I’ll step back and let you take the shot.”

His squinted slightly. He was surely beginning to wonder what the catch was. I had him on the hook, though, and that was what mattered. It was a crucial moment and I really didn’t want to lose Limerence. He’d proven himself too competent to really do without. That and I liked him; frequently despite his best efforts.

“My rule from now on is that I decide who dies. Me. Not you. You hold the crossbow, but I point the arrow. You are a nonlethal weapon, until I say otherwise. Unless somepony tries to kill you, you wait until I say so before you start stacking up corpses. You get exactly zero chances to screw this up. If I even think you might kill somepony who is not posing an imminent, immediate threat to your health, I will not hesitate to put you down.” I released his horn, stepped back, and kicked his fallen knife over to him. He levitated it into the air and held it there, the point flashing dangerously back and forth a few inches from the end of my muzzle. He made no move to stand. “Do we have an accord?”

I couldn’t read his expression. It was somewhere between confusion and disbelief. After a minute or two just laying there, looking up at me, he rolled onto his side and got to his hooves, slipping the knife into a fold of his vest. Giving him a bit of range might be a mistake. Young ponies tend to be unpredictable, especially after a death in the family. Trust is important, though, particularly between friends.

“Father spoke of you only once I remember before the day we met, Detective,” he said, in a voice so soft I had to lean forward to listen. His eyes were rimmed with tears, but his words were steady.

“You never mentioned that,” I murmured.

“I’d forgotten until just now, and I suppose it will seem somewhat oblique to you, but I remember his exact words.”

“What did he say about me?”

“Father said, ‘There might come a day you think your existence can not sink any lower. On that day, you will find a pony there at the bottom of life, in the muck and refuse of the world. He swims through the swill and dregs of being, giving guidance to the dispossessed. When you meet him, he will give you an instruction and in that moment, no matter your desires, no matter your pride or feelings, you must listen… for he is Death, and unless you are a fool, you will listen when Death gives you a chance to live.” He paused, then raised his head. “What is your instruction, Detective?”

That set me back a little bit. Has anypony ever come up with something you can say in reply to a friend calling you ‘Death’? I patted my coat pocket, wishing I had some candy.

Mental note, go get some candy, I thought. Get all the candy in the world.

“Just...for your father’s sake, don’t be too eager to get more blood on your hooves. We’ve got enough shades following us around,” I said, turning in what I thought was the direction Taxi and Swift departed. “We understand one another and the others will be wondering where we’ve gotten off to. Come on.”

****

The bodies of the Archivists were laid out side by side, end to end in a grid, with each one tagged with a form containing time of death, how they’d died, and any identifying features Stitch could come up with. Each was tucked safely inside a body-bag with blue and yellow balloons stenciled on the front. It did nothing for the smell of burnt fur and flesh, but it was an improvement over leaving them laying about. There was the added benefit that the bodybags had mouth-handles.

It did leave the question of how Stitch had managed to find all the corpses and gather them into one place so quickly. Taxi and Swift were just helping him bring in the last bag, laying it alongside the others.

“Mister Limerence. Detective. I must say, you’ve presented me with an incredible amount to do for the next several days,” Stitch commented as we joined him. He was going down a list of what looked like party supplies, but I did notice the words ‘extra scalpels’ on there. “I shan't be bored, at least! I’ll be doing my very best to make certain these souls are well on their way.”

“If you could take samples of fur as well as identify colors and species, it would be very much appreciated,” Lim said, softly. “Zebra culture mandates remembrance of the dead’s accomplishments, and I will need to do some...some research...into those who have died here today.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to get in touch with the remaining Archivists?” Swift asked, wiping her muzzle with the back of her hoof. She was drooling just a little. I hoped it was just an involuntary reaction to being around so much burned meat; she was already a bit too carnivorous for my taste, without craving pony meat.

“Eventually, yes,” Limerence replied, “For now, they will take their vaults and disappear. Expect several missing pony reports tomorrow.” He considered his words, then added, “I suppose I should say ‘several more’.”

“What do we do about... you know, about this place, then? We can’t leave it unguarded…”

He sighed and plucked at his pocket, them remembered again that he’d left his watch out for repair. “I... I will simply turn the Archive’s defenses on. Any who approach should be driven away with mind magics and the internal defenses will kill any who fail to heed the warning and enter.”

It seemed an awful shame to leave such a heavily secured building just sitting, but we had a base, and several fall backs. The place was well defended.

“Alright. I hate it, but I think you might be right. Can you lock this place down right now? There might be Jewelers on the way who want to poke around, too.”

Limerence wiggled his hoof in my direction, heaving his brother’s staff up against his neck. “My monitoring talisman was damaged... somehow... so I will need to get another, but for now, the external defenses should be adequate to the task of discouraging visitors. We should check father’s office. He may have left me some instructions and there are his personal vaults. We must retrieve those before we leave.”

“Personal vaults? As in, artifacts the Don of the Archivists thought were too dangerous to trust to anypony else?” Taxi asked, nervously.

“Too dangerous, or too useful,” Lim answered. “I do not know what they contain, but we will see.”

“That sounds like a plan, then. Celestia knows we could use one. I’m still considering spending the other half of this day drunk,” I said.

“Ah, of course, of course. I must be on my way, too,” Slip Stitch chimed in. He had a funny way of being invisible when he wasn’t the center of attention. “Before you get on to that, may I have a hoof carrying the celebrants out to Big Betty? I have much work to be done! After all, we must see if there is any forensic evidence to be lifted for Mister Limerence’s vengeance and I have many cakes as will need baking!”

****

Lift. Heave. Haul. Stop. Breathe.

Lift. Heave. Haul. Stop. Breathe.

Lift. Heave. Haul. Stop. Breathe.

Damn and blast.

Lifting bodies shouldn’t become routine. Hauling the corpses of the Archivists was a miserable, emotionally exhausting affair, but there was something comforting in letting it become dull and monotonous. It takes some of the horrible bite out of the activity if you can just think of it as necessary labor.

I didn’t ask which bag the Don’s body was in. I suppose a part of me just didn’t want to know. The amount of pain sloshing around in my head was nicely numbed at that moment by a sprinkling of denial, an ounce of shock, and a spoonful of duty. Duty makes everything simpler.

Between the five of us, we managed to get it done inside of an hour, but we were drenched in sweat by the time the last corpse was found, bagged, and deposited in the back of Big Betty’s freezer. Death by inches or death by miles, it’s all death.

****

I slumped against the side of the giant pink truck, one hoof pressed against my chest, breathing heavily. My heart-rate was dead normal, but I felt like I should be out of breath and those age-old psychosomatic responses are tough to get rid of. Not being tired was a bit creepy, particularly when Swift lay on her back beside me, panting like a dog.

One of the trays inside the truck rattled and Slip Stitch swung down out of the back, as chipper and cheerful as ever. He sat at my side and wiped his forehead with one hoof, despite having only the lightest sheen of perspiration there. “My, my, what an awful lot of exercise! Truly, this will be a party for all time! I must get on with the planning. My helium supplies are somewhat low and I must have Thalassemia get us balloons.”

“I’m glad you’re having... ah... fun…” Taxi snarled, dropping onto the pavement behind him. “Now can you... ah... go and... whoo... take care of the dead? Preferably somewhere else?”

Completely unperturbed by my driver’s attitude, Stitch patted her on the back. “My sweet Miss Shine, you must excuse my good cheer. I am not unaware of the tragedy that has occurred here. It’s just that I do miss the company of friends who can hold a two-sided conversation and with all the busy goings on in town lately, few ponies have time for the dead.”

Taxi brushed his hoof away and pulled her saddlebags up on her hips. “You have no idea how much I want to hurt you right now...” she grumbled.

“Oh, I know, Miss Shine and believe me, I would normally relish the opportunity to find out just how much you wanted to hurt me. Ponies with serious lives must have serious demeanors, after all. Alas, our love may never be. I must be off! Much to do! Death waits for no one!”

With that, Slip Stitch seized my driver, tipped her back over one foreleg and gave her the kind of kiss you see only in movies. It was a three act romance with flowers, foals, and fairy dust. I wish I’d gotten a picture. Her eyes almost popped out of her head and she was so shocked she didn’t even have the gumption to pull away.

After a full ten seconds, he set her carefully back on her hooves, gave her a friendly wink, then leapt into the cab of Big Betty. The engine turned over with a sound like a farting dragon, and I jumped away from the massive wheels as he released the brakes. He stuck his head out the window and called back, “You know, I envy you, Detective!”

“What’s to envy?” I shouted back over the sound of the engine.

“A life of beautiful mares, glorious adventure, and what may be the greatest parties this city has seen since the Crusades! Good luck, my friends! I hope to see you again soon! Adieu!”

With that, he kicked the massive truck into reverse and plowed backwards down the street at enormous speed. A moment later, the jingle started up, gradually fading as Slip Stitch retreated into the twilight.

I turned to look at Taxi who was just standing there, her muzzle slightly open and her eyes glazed. I couldn’t read her expression, but it might best have been described as ‘dreamy’.

“Sweets?”

“Buh... oh…” She shook her head violently and smoothed her braid. “Phew...what is it?”

“Sooo... what was it like?” Swift asked.

Taxi snorted, turning her nose in the air. “What was what like?”

“Inopportune timing aside, I find myself somewhat curious as well,” Limerence murmured, getting back to his hooves. He glanced at me. “Detective, should I be worried for my own mental health? It seems very strange that I should be so drained and yet I have curiosity left over to wonder what kissing that maniac was like.”

“I’m not the king of mental health you want to ask, Lim. We’re going to go home after we check your father’s office and... try to make a plan again,” I flicked one ear at Taxi. “Still, I want an answer. What was it like?”

My driver’s mouth twitched and she forced a frown onto lips that were dangerously close to a smile. “It...it was…I...um...” She huffed and stomped a hoof, shaking her braid. “It was weird, okay? He just...just pounced on me! Is anypony going to bring that up, at least? I was...was violated here!”

I smirked and nudged her with my hip. “At least tell us what it tasted like...”

“Mint ice-cream and happiness, dammit!” she blurted, then paused and slapped both hooves over her muzzle. Her eyes narrowed and she jabbed a hoof at my sternum. “You...will never tell anypony as long as you live, or I swear, they will never!... find!... your body!” She whirled on Limerence and Swift, snarling, “That goes for you, too!”

****

Absent all the corpses, the Archive was somehow even emptier. It was strange that dead bodies might make a place feel inhabited. Worse, it was just the four of us, alone amongst all that knowledge and the spirits of all those ponies and zebras who’d been alive just that morning.

Limerence and Swift both crowded close to my side, though I don’t think either one was aware they were doing it. Every now and then, Limerence let out a discreet sniffle, but every time I looked at him, he seemed as emotionless as ever.

As we drifted into the darker parts of the Archive, closer to Tome’s office, Limerence’s hoofsteps slowed until he dropped back a few steps. None of us were in any hurry, since the Archive was a pretty safe place to be, populated or not, so I stopped with him. His head drooped low and his blond mane piled down across his eyes.

“I don’t... I don’t know if I can do this, Detective,” he whispered.

“You can hang back, if you want to and we’ll look-”

“It’s not that,” he interrupted. “It’s Father. Seeing him again so soon…It will be very difficult.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t understand. Slip Stitch took your father with him, right?”

“Ah... yes. I suppose it will be simpler just to show you. I must get this done at some point.”

Trotting on ahead, we passed under a ‘Restricted access’ sign and then arrived at the door to Tome’s private office. I glanced at the bookshelf on one side and noticed that gone was ‘Amusing Anecdotes that Almost Destroyed Countries’, replaced with ‘Oddball Adventures in Cheese-making.' Huh.

Limerence stopped outside of the door, shutting his eyes and just letting one toe rest against the aged wood. I could almost hear his thoughts just then. The sadness, the emptiness, the directionless sensation of not knowing where to go or what to do. His slim shoulders slackened as though a heavy weight were suddenly dropped around his neck and he gave the door a light shove. It swung open on darkness.

“We’re with you, Lim,” Taxi said, sliding her leg around his shoulders.

Stepping forward, Limerence’s horn glowed as he flicked the light switch.

The lights came up on a scene of devastation.

****

If you’ve ever tried to search an area quickly, for a pair of lost keys or a wallet, you can frequently find yourself coming home to a gigantic mess you hadn’t realized you’d made. Searching someplace that isn’t yours and whose occupant is dead, particularly when you’re on a time frame, can make for some spectacular destruction.

****

Don Tome’s desk was the only thing in the room that hadn’t been overturned. His books lay in heaps on the floor, his chair was turned on its side with the stuffing torn out, and every artifact on every shelf was gone or in bits on the carpet.

It was a fairly expert search and smash, but the disrespect made my guts churn.

Limerence trotted into the middle of the room, turning in a slow circle as he examined the damage. He slowly nodded, then moved around behind the desk and righted his father’s chair with a quick burst from his horn.

“Oh, Lim... I’m so sorry,” Swift whispered, picking up a piece of a stone bust in both hooves and setting it back on a shelf.

He hummed a soft tune to himself and shrugged. “This? Please, Miss Swift. My father was always prepared for somepony to attempt to rifle his personal effects. Stand back.”

Reaching under his father’s desk, he pressed something that let out a faint click.

The room wiggled. There was no better way to describe it. Every surface juddered like a reflection in a still pond when somepony tossed a stone in the middle of it, ripples spreading out from the center until everything seemed to be in motion.

As it settled, we were back in the Don’s office, though not the broken wreck we’d been standing in a moment ago. The office seemed to be entirely back the way it had been when I’d met with the Don and he’d passed me his Will. His chair was back in place, as well as the artifacts on the walls. The wood paneling was unscuffed, the desk once more covered in bits of paper and ancient artifacts, and the walls lined with original editions of dozens of ancient books and scrolls.

Swift poked at the sideboard, as though expecting it to vanish.

“Was... was that an illusion that somepony rolled?” Taxi asked.

“Yes, and no,” Limerence replied, unhelpfully. “It was real, insofar as most of that room could be interacted with, but it contained none of father’s personal effects. The room which we just entered is usually in one of the underground storage lockers. It is full of replicas of things which are most commonly associated with Father. I designed it and father helped acquire the magics for it.”

“So...did we teleport?” Swift asked, glancing out the door. The hallway looked the same, but there are so many kinds of illusion magic that it’s not worth expecting reality to stay consistent if you don’t have a horn. “I’ve never teleported before…”

“Ah, no. The room teleported around you. If I wished, we could flick the switch the other way and we would be sent to the storage locker, but I simply brought the room to us. Its function is tied into our defenses, such that in the event of a lockdown, it would hide father’s office entirely.”

“That’s…paranoid and over-complicated even for Tome,” I said, moving around the gigantic desk and inspecting the various books on the shelves.

Limerence sniffed, indignantly, and lifted himself into his father’s chair, pulling open one of the desk’s drawers. Levitating out a little box of cookies, he took a couple and set them on a tiny plate, then laid it on the desk in the place Tome always did.

“I’m aware it is somewhat ridiculous, but it was a birthday gift from a very young, very ambitious colt to his father. Realism matters little to a child with ‘big ideas’. Father didn’t use it so much for security purposes as an occasional retreat when he wanted to escape his subordinates to spend some time with his more bookish child.”

“So... what? Nopony besides you and your dad knew about this?” I asked.

“A secret for the two of us. Father went to great lengths to make me feel like family, though we share no genetics.”

Opening his vest, he pulled out his father’s Last Will and Testament, then plucked a knife from his collection and very carefully broke the red wax seal. He quickly scanned the paper, then nodded to himself before setting it aside and getting back to his hooves.

“Detective, you’re going to need to let Father know of your decision, if you wish me to head the Archivists.”

He said that like it should make sense of some kind.

“I’m just going to stand here until you explain that,” I replied.

“Well... Father was aware of the possibility that he might pass on before he was able to officially name an heir. He left...provisions,” Limerence explained, passing the Will across the desk.

I flattened it with my hooves. It was all in a lawyer’s neat, tight hoofwriting with the Don’s name signed at the bottom in what I thought might be brown ink. I sniffed at it for a second, then recoiled.

“Why did your father sign this in blood?”

“It is his blood. I can think of few more secure methods of identification. Besides, it’s part of the spell,” Limerence answered, sweeping up the paper with his horn. The magic around his horn built in intensity, until with a weirdly wet sounding pop, the Will disappeared.

There was several seconds of silence as Limerence stared at me and I stared back.

Was he staring at me? No, he was staring over my shoulder.

Behind me, somepony coughed, politely.

I kicked my trigger and whirled, catching it in my teeth on the upswing as I came around to find myself face to face with a dead zebra.

Don Tome stood there behind me as I aimed down the barrel of my revolver at his forehead, a slightly bashful expression on his face. I was so glad to see him, I didn’t really think about what I was doing as I threw myself forward to hug the old stallion and passed right on through, stumbling a couple of steps beyond.

Not real.

Damn.

I can’t be blamed for trying to hug it. There are plenty of magics which might have let me see and interact with a dead body, so it wasn’t inconceivable that he’d employed one to somehow survive the death of his gang, but no, it was just an illusion. It tends to leave one with hope when your friends die.

It sure looked like my friend, though. Every detail, right down to the grey tuft of hairs on his chin, the faded pattern of his stripes, and the barely discernable wrinkles around his eyes was picture perfect. Even the best illusions tend to break down a little on closer inspection, but that one was a masterpiece.

“It’s good to see you, too, Detective, all public displays of affection aside,” the Don said, with a calming smile. “Though, I must assume, since I am the one seeing you, that my ‘better half’ has not survived recent events?”

“Your better half?” Swift asked, letting her trigger drop. I hadn’t seen her grab it, but it was a good impulse.

“The body, of course,” he explained, patting himself on the chest. He trotted between us to the desk and attempted to pick up a cookie from the plate, remembering only at the last moment that he wasn’t exactly corporeal. “This construct is designed only to become active in the event that I have died before passing on full knowledge of the Archive to one of my sons. Sad. I’m going to miss cookies. They are one of those pony inventions we zebra never managed to get precisely right...”

Taxi poked at the construct’s flank, tilting her head as her toe passed through it. “Are...are you like Professor Fizzle’s guide at the Museum?”

“Yes, and no,” he chuckled. “The Professor certainly helped in the creation, although he was unaware of exactly what he was helping build. As to you, my son, may I ask what exactly the method of my death was?”

I cocked my head. “Why does it matter? I mean, you’re not...alive, are you?”

The Don’s smile widened slightly. “I am intelligent, if that’s what you’re asking. I might conceivably raise any number of eyebrows at the Office for the Regulation of Sentient Constructs.... Am I your dead friend? No. Am I alive? Not even slightly. I am his personality, a significant portion of his memories, and a considerable segment of his knowledge.”

I had a thought, then snapped my head around to find Swift looking down at the bright red crescent shape burned into her chest, rubbing it lightly.

“Kid...are you alright?”

She nibbled at her lower lip and said, “I...I don’t know, Sir. I’ve got this weird feeling in my chest and head. It’s like I’m trying to get angry, but there’s this sort of...sucking sensation that’s draining it away. I don’t feel like I usually do around Essy’s. I wonder if Tourniquet is doing something...”

“She did say she could drain and control magic at range if somepony was wearing her mark, right?”

Swift nodded.

“Maybe she’s siphoning off whatever makes you go crazy?”

She scratched at the moon-shaped mark. “I dunno. I’ll ask her the next time I get a minute. Whatever it is, it feels really strange, but... it doesn’t hurt or anything. I think I’m okay.”

I turned back to the image of Don Tome, who was looking back and forth between the two of us with great interest “Alright, so, not to be rude, but why does it matter how you died?”

He rolled his neck in a zebra version of a shrug. “Curiosity. Few creatures ever get to ask exactly how they died, now do they? Present company excepted, of course,” he said, gesturing to my chest.

“A traitor in our ranks killed you, using advanced knowledge of our defensive systems,” Limerence muttered, turning his eyes towards the carpet. Unlimbering his brother’s staff, he laid it on the carpet at the Don’s hooves.. “The Archivists are... are dead. My... my brother is dead. I am the last of our line.”

The construct absorbed that information and his expression slowly fell. He closed his eyes and his shoulders sagged. “It was too much to hope for a heart attack. I should have laid off the calisthenics ten years ago and let my pastry addiction be my end...” He drew in a breath, then dropped onto the carpet, letting his eyes slide shut “You’ll pardon me if I need to sit down for a moment. I wish I’d thought to program my chair into this simulation. Standing constantly will be as undignified as slumping on the rug.”

An awkward silence stretched out in the room like an inconveniently snoozing cat and nopony seemed inclined to shift it. I leaned on the edge of the Don’s desk, pawing at the carpet while Swift sat down and began quietly preening.

“Are you alright?” I asked, awkwardly, at last.

The construct didn’t look up or move, but simply shook his head. “No, Detective. My life’s work is dead. My son is dead. I am dead. I think the word ‘alright’ may never again apply. I am simply wallowing briefly in the comforting knowledge that there is very little in the world that can make this situation worse.”

That caused an awful lot of nervous shuffling of hooves and looking at one another with quietly distressed expressions.

The Don’s ears twitched a little and he glanced from face to face.

“This is where you tell me that I am right and there are no further great excitements for me this day,” he stated, cooly.

“Um…” I ran a toe around the brim of my hat, thinking. “I really, really wish I could say that.”

Hauling himself up into a sitting position, the Don’s lips formed a thin line. “Do go on?”

There was nothing for it. A good presentation tends to be a waste of time, particularly where creatures like Don Tome are concerned.

“Ehhh... Astral Skylark and the entire inner circle of the Church of the Lunar Passage are dead or imprisoned,” I said, finally.

The Don’s hackles rose, but that frigid composure remained carefully in place, so I hurried on.

“They were using... necromancy... to capture the souls of the dead in parts of their bodies to power the Supermax prison’s magic, which was... basically a gigantic brain-washing system. Somepony tried to do the same thing to you, for some reason. The other you. Your body. The traitor cut off your leg and-”

“And I am certain they found themselves extremely disappointed in the attempt,” he chuckled, putting one hoof on his chest. “I was protected against necromancy by blessings of the tribal lords of the zebra nation. I am guaranteed the final death and passage into the next life. That does not explain what is making the four of you look like foals caught with your hooves caught in the cookie jar.”

“Speaking of cookies...is there anything to eat around here?“ Taxi asked.

I swatted in her direction with my tail. “Bad timing, Sweets…”

My own stomach chose that moment to let out a loud rumble. Moving all those corpses was hungry work.

“Eh...heh...maybe...we should go get something.”

****

It was a pleasing discovery that the Archive had a decently stocked larder. The little pantry had enough provisions to last a decent length siege, so long as you didn’t mind subsisting on tea, biscuits, coffee, and cookies. I did manage to dig out some fairly delicious snacks and Taxi loaded her saddlebags full of provisions. While I didn’t usually like to excuse her looting habits, she only tended to loot things from the dead. I don’t know if that makes it better or not, but it saved us a trip to the grocery store.

After gathering up enough munchies, we returned to the Don’s office.

It was a morbid little party, sitting there with the ghost or magic construct or whatever he was. I knew, intellectually, that my friend was cooling in a freezer somewhere, but the logical bits of my mind were very, very worn out and unless I actually touched him, he seemed in every respect to be Don Tome.

Limerence lit a fire in the tiny fireplace hidden behind a wall panel next to the Don’s desk and the five of us gathered around on little pillows with our picnic.

For a long time, there was just the sound of ponies chewing on things. None of us seemed to know exactly where to start, but after awhile, I swept the crumbs off my chest and started at the beginning.

Don Tome sat there, staring into the merrily crackling fire, asking no questions. He simply listened as the four of us recounted the last few days worth of events in as much detail as we could remember. Most of the time, I was the one telling the story, but Taxi interrupted for some information on the movements of the various gangs in the city and Limerence broke in for some technical details on Supermax. Swift presented her notes when asked.

It’d felt like an awfully long couple of days, but by the same virtue, no time at all. I talked about the cult of Nightmare Moon, Tourniquet, and what Taxi’s father told us. I told him of Skylark’s history and about Lily Blue.

It wasn’t until the very end that he finally reacted.

“-and then I opened the box. Inside we found...the helm of Nightmare Moon,” I finished.

Tome’s eyes jerked open and he stared at me. “You found the what?”

“Nightmare Moon’s hat,” Swift explained. “It was wrapped in a sheet like the ones at Supermax and we think Ruby must have taken it when she escaped from-”

“Where is it?” he said, cutting her short..

“It’s in the car,” I said. “We were bringing it here to see if you could hide it while we figured out what to do. Did Limerence not tell you that?”

Lim nodded. “I told... oh... I told Father. This construct must be regularly updated, else its knowledge only extends to the last time information was input. Father mustn’t have updated it today.”

Tome pursed his lips disapprovingly. “Detective, are you telling me that you left part of the single most dangerous artifact in all of Equestrian history... sitting in a cab?”

“Well, it’s not as though I had any good place to store it, now did I?” I replied, defensively.

“You have a dragon’s hoard, a bunker, the sturdiest ice-cream factory mayhap of all time, the most secure prison on the planet, and a police station that survived the war. Am I missing anything?”

Swift raised a hoof and added, “He knows some bat ponies from a secret group of spies who have a hidden warehouse in the wilderness full of crazy inventions from the Crusades that nopony has seen in forever...”

“Right, thank you Swift,” I groaned, pushing her hoof down with my leg. “I am aware this might not have been the best thought out of all my plans, but I was on a short timeframe! I needed somepony who knew something about these artifacts and I needed to talk to you. Your thing is making artifacts disappear, right?”

“Was, Detective,” Tome corrected, sweeping his hoof towards the door of the office. “My ‘thing’ was making certain artifacts of a destructive nature were never allowed to cause permanent damage to our society. Even the blackest magics that have come through my hooves down through the years cannot compare with the sheer latent potential of the armor of Nightmare Moon. That armor is composed of unknown materials and imbued with spellwork that came from things beyond this world. When Princess Luna donned it, she ceased to be our beloved leader. She became Death, destroyer of worlds.”

“But... we can’t contact the Princesses,” I protested. “I mean, we can, but I don’t know how we’d do it without alerting the ponies we’re chasing to our presence. Besides, they’ve already stolen the helm and the chest-plate once before. What’s to stop them from stealing either one again?”

The Don’s jaw tightened and he ran his hoof across one of the few wrinkles on his forehead, smoothing it flat. It was the closest to genuine consternation that I’d ever seen him in all the years we’d known one another. It was not helping my state of mind.

“I... suppose I must concede this is a poor situation we find ourselves in,” Tome sighed. “Of course, there is one pony who might help us. Heh... or not.”

My friends and I were left with an awful lot of puzzled looks.

“Who?” Swift asked.

Tome waved a hoof, as though to clear a bit of smoke from his face.

“A... passing fancy of mine in life. Pay it no mind,” he laughed, raising his hooves towards the warmth of the fire, although I couldn’t be sure whether or not he could actually feel it.

“Tome, if there’s somepony out there who can help us, you better lay it on the table,” I demanded.

“Detective, must you insist on making an old pony tread through sad histories? Oh, very well. It is a brief tale,” The Don squared his shoulders and took a preparatory breath. “There was a time, decades ago, when Equestria was possessed of four royal alicorns. Princess Cadance, Regent and High Lady of the Crystal Empire. The Diarchs Princess Luna and Princess Celestia... and a fourth, whose name was all but stricken from history by her own hoof.”

“Why have we never heard of this?” I asked, unable to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

“Ah... that is a matter of some speculation, I suppose. My sources indicate she was dedicated in some manner to the unification of ponies. Her presence lead to a Golden Age that lasted... all too brief a time. During the Crusades, she and those closest to her withdrew from the limelight and... this is something I am certain of... she cast a spell.”

“What sort of spell?”

“The gentlest of magics,” he murmured. “A spell that blanketed Equestria and the world beyond, from end to end. A memory spell that gradually swept her away on the sands of time. Your dead friend conducted his research with me to remind him of exactly what he was doing. The spell only affects the living, after all.”

“So... what’d it do?”

“It made the world forget,” he replied, tapping the side of his head. “Slowly. Gradually. Over time, she simply faded from memory, drifting out of the thoughts of everyone. The few excerpts and reports which remain from that time suggest a pony of unparalleled power, who stood for all that was right and good in the Equestrian nature.”

I looked around at my friends, then shook my head. “Alright, that...sounds promising and completely insane, but I suppose it’s not the worst thing I’ve heard lately. What was this pony’s name?”

Tome’s shoulders rose, then fell, but I couldn’t see his face as he watched the fire.

“Her name... was Twilight Sparkle.”

Act 2, Chapter 44: Crazy Talk

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 44 : Crazy Talk

Have you heard?

The moon is fake, a magical illusion; It went on the fritz that one night in L.R. 4! Celestia is a changeling puppet; she was replaced during the L.R. 2 Royal Wedding by Chrysalis and is siphoning the love out of everything! Reality is an illusion and we're all just fevered drawings by a group of mad monkeys selling colorful toys to other monkeys!

Did any of that sound sensible to you? If not, good. Would that all readers should be so astute, but not everypony answered this question in the negative. Recent polls by the Canterlot Sun and Manehattan Gazelle show that 5% of Equestrians believe that children's craft glue contains the ground-up tissues of dissenters, 7% believe that vaccinations were meant to cause googly eyes, and a whopping 4% believe the Alicorn princesses are shape-changing praying mantises.

The pervasiveness of these bizarre theories, constructed from circumstantial or fictional evidence in defiance of logic and Hockham's Razor, is a topic of much psychological study, but current evidence suggests that conspiracy theories have some of the same mental origins as religious worship: the desire to believe that some sort of entity or council, benign or malign, is actually in control of the universe, and that everything that happens in a tumultuous and often unfair world is part of some grand scheme, rather than the bumbling of millions of confused ungulates groping in the dark as though for a dropped contact lens.

It may seem counterintuitive, but for many, it is easier and more comforting to believe that a shadowy cabal of evil conspirators runs the show than it is to believe that said show is in the hooves of nopony at all.

Of course, many strange things happen against all reason and probability. An elaborate conspiracy theory is the mark of somepony crazy, but in Equestria, "Crazy" is not necessarily the same as "Wrong."

-The Scholar

“...Assuming we believe this, how did this ‘Twilight’ pony pull her ‘vanishing’ trick?” Taxi asked, tugging her checkered braid. “I mean, yeah, so nopony remembers her after a while, but so what? No one can just wipe out all record of herself, particularly not a Princess… can they?”

Tome’s construct rose from his place by the fire, pacing back and forth “Of course not. Like most forgotten things, it began with her simply ceasing to show herself in public. Soon thereafter, the news stopped carrying stories of her. Interest faded, perhaps a bit more quickly than normal, but certainly not in a way that might raise eyebrows.”

“I… ugh. This is a bit crazy even for me,” I grumbled, trying to work the tightness out of my neck with a few stretches. I felt like I was going to need a full body massage with a tire-iron to ever relax again. “Fine, what sort of evidence do you have?”

“Amongst a collection of memoirs dating back to the time of Luna’s return I discovered a photograph; Princess Twilight and several mares I can only assume were friends or family,” he explained, pointing to his desk. “I became interested after discovering that, across a number of days, my ability to remember details about her was fading. There are, of course, any number of conspiracy theories about lost princesses. This one simply happened to be true.”

“If you kept forgetting, how’d you figure out you were forgetting?” Swift asked, scratching her spiky mane.

Limerence moved over to the desk where the Don had indicated, tugging open a low drawer and extracting a cloth-bound book. It was weighed down by tabs, bits of paper stuck between its pages, and old tassels of ragged bookmarks. On the side were printed the words ‘Volume 31’. “Father kept meticulous notes on his comings and goings, his topics of research, and his findings. Any sudden gap would be noticed immediately.”

“And it began there,” Tome’s construct agreed, indicating Limerence should open the heavy book. “My… creator began journaling the fragments of information, and when that failed to keep his memories secured, he...developed an alternative. Myself.”

“Hmmm… so how does one go about contacting a lost Princess then?” I asked.

“Honestly, I only mentioned it in passing. Little is understood of alicorn aging processes, but if she still lives, I have no knowledge of how we might contact her or even if she might assist us. Sadly, I was unable to discover more than her name and a few tidbits of data about her. She was present in some capacity at the return of Princess Luna and is credited with the acts leading to it. Her ascension was chronicled in part, but her reasons for leaving weren’t. That said, somepony with enormous resources has gone to great lengths to suppress knowledge of her. Public records, newspapers, memory wipes, and even the Equestrian Revenue Service. There are fragments of her all through the early parts of this century and yet... nopony in the last thirty years seems to know if she is even still in Equestria. This magic she used to vanish has assured that… almost… nopony noticed, either.”

I peeked over Limerence’s shoulder at a severely faded picture of six mares tucked into the front of Tome’s journal. It was impossible to tell what color they’d originally been, or what their faces looked like in the worn photograph, but I thought the one in the middle might have been purple or lavender. She had an unmistakable pair of wings and a long, striking horn. It certainly didn’t look fake.

“Huh… so not… terribly helpful, then. Damn.” I examined the tabs on the side of the journal. Most were related to ponies I’d never met or heard of. One said ‘Princess Celestia/Luna’, while another said ‘Weapons research’. A bookmark sticking out of that particular section had ‘Hard Boiled 1,2,3’ scribbled in Tome’s hoofwriting. “Wait a second. What’s this?”

I touched the offending bookmark.

The Don’s construct shifted his weight - if he had any weight to shift - from leg to leg. If I didn’t know better, I’d have almost said he was nervous.

“That… is not precisely what it looks like...”

I flipped it open to find a picture of my grandfather laid alongside reports from father’s time in the police force and even a few news clippings from my own. “What it looks like is that you’ve been keeping tabs on...what, three generations of my family?!”

Tome paused, then slowly nodded. “Ah...well… I suppose it is what it looks like, then, yes.”

Giving Limerence a little bump to one side with my hip, I flipped back in the book to the front of the tab. At the top of the page labeled ‘Weapons Research’ was a list of names. Next to each name there were ranks, dates, and causes of death.

“Sun Walker, Colonel, L.R. 23, date unknown, missing in action, presumed drowned after the attack on the E.S. Maretempkin. Pond Skimmer, Master Chief Petty Officer, L.R. 24, suicide upon hearing of the Los Pegasus attack. Tasty Treat, Private First Class, LR 22, burned to death upon completing Mission:General Corposthax The Bloody...”

I read the names aloud, shaking my head. Almost everypony on the list was dead or missing either during or not long after the end of the war.

“What… on Equis am I looking at?” I asked.

“Let us see what you can put together, shall we?” The Don gave me that irritatingly enigmatic old smile that said ‘You’ll learn more from figuring it out yourself’.

I turned the next page. I tilted it a little to one side, then the other, trying to get a working idea of what the mass of arcane lines and shapes might actually be. The tightly written little notes covering every inch of spare space certainly didn’t help.

“Sir... is that... is that your gun?” Swift asked.

I squinted at the blueprint and it slowly resolved into a very familiar shape. It was a three dimensional cross-section of my father’s revolver, albeit more complicated than any simple hunk of metal had any right to be. The surface was absolutely coated in arcane runes, each annotated with function and possible function. Down in one corner, almost invisible under the heaps of annotations, there were two words: Crusader Class.

“Tome... what... is a Crusader?” I asked. My brain was working faster than my mouth. One tiny detail hooked up with another and, after a few seconds, a picture began to form in my mind. It’d been such a crazy month that it took me second to start to piece it all together. “Wait. Wait a second. A month ago, when we first met Stella, the dragon who runs the Vivarium...the lizard made us drink some kind of ‘truth’ draught. Then he had one of his ponies ask us some questions. One of them was-”

“Are you now or have you ever been in possession of a Crusader Class weapon?” Taxi finished, with a look of wonder. “Hardy, what about the Aroyos?”

“What about them?”

She rolled her eyes like she always did when I’d missed something she found all too obvious. “What do they call you?”

My ears perked straight in the air as realization set in.

“Crusader…”

Pulling up my sleeve, I looked down at my weapon. Reaching down, I pulled loose the straps holding it to my leg, eased it off, and lay it on the table, facing Tome’s construct. He glanced at it, briefly, then up at me. His face was a carefully built wall of neutrality that I couldn’t get any sort of read on.

“Alright. This day has been traumatic enough. I want the beans and I want them spilled right here,” I said, smacking the journal with my leg. “Why the interest in my family? Why the interest in my gun? I know you always wanted me to sell it to you, but why? What good is a relic?”

Tome sighed, reaching for one of his cookies before realizing again that he couldn’t touch them. He stared at his own hoof for a long moment after it passed through his desk, then turned back to the fire.

“You know, your grandfather was a rather special pony,” he said, the light from the flames reflecting in his black eyes. “The Princesses certainly thought so. Ambitious. Brilliant. He was a pony who could have done fantastic things for Equestria, had the war not broken out when it did. Of course, the same thing could be said for many of us.”

“I… didn’t know you fought in the war,” I said.

Tome’s boney shoulders stiffened and he came to a crisp, military ‘at-the-ready’ stance, snapping his back hooves together as he raised his chin. “Tenth Regimental Zebran Artillery, Sah! Reporting for duty, Sah!” He stood like that for a moment, then relaxed, chuckling in the back of his throat. “I was almost too old, but… I served my time against the dragons; barely two years, before the war ended, and we only saw live combat a hoof-full of times, but I do remember the Crusaders. I saw them in battle only once, but those gentlecolts and fillies do leave… an impression.”

“I’m afraid my father didn’t tell me all that much about the war. Grandad served, but that’s really all I know.”

“Not surprising. Your grandsire forbade your father to join up. Hence why your father became a police officer, instead of a soldier. Your grandfather was not a fan of the war. He wished it ended as quickly as possible.”

I shook my head, letting my back legs give out. It was a bit of a shock to discover just how much my old friend hadn’t told me.

“How do you know all of this?”

“Some of it was gleaned from public records. Most required breaking laws which could have seen me spending a lengthy stay in Tartarus,” he answered, indicating a stack of folders tucked into a nook on the wall, indistinguishable from old tax documents. “The records from the war are badly disorganized, but they do provide an image. The Crusaders were an elite squadron, unique amongst Equestria’s armed forces. They were tasked with the protection of Equestria. That was their sole, abiding mission and each of them swore it unto death and the deaths of all those they loved until the last generation.”

He sighed, sadly, and moved back to the mantel, running his eyes across the picture frames sitting on it. Most were images of ponies I assumed to be famous archaeologists. Professor Fizzle was up there, smiling as he held up a golden globe of some kind and another pony in a pith-helmet waved in the background.

“Sadly, nearly all of them failed to have even a next generation,” he finished, after a moment’s thought.

“So… why are you so interested in Hardy’s gun?” Taxi asked, suspiciously.

The construct nodded towards the desk where the blueprint lay. “I suppose the answer to that is tied rather intimately to the history of the Crusaders. That list of names constitutes the only complete record of their membership outside of classified documents openable only by members of the crown. Dead names. Dead ponies. A dead… ideal,” He paused, thought a moment, then added, “Well… almost dead.”

“What is the purpose of these documents, Father?” Limerence asked, then shut his eyes as he realized what he’d said. “Pardon. What is the purpose of these documents?”

“They chronicle… a concept in warfare. You are aware, of course, that the Moon Weapons entrusted to Professor Fizzle were created during the Crusades by Princess Luna, yes? They were prototypes for weapons able to kill dragons.” His lips flashed in a wolven smile as he waved a hoof at my revolver. “Prototypes… for that.”

“I’m sorry, those guns could split a pony in half and ran on moonlight,” I objected, holding up my revolver and tapping the barrel against the desk. “My revolver isn’t exactly in the same league.”

“Oh, really, Detective?” Tome’s smile widened. “Then may I ask… have you had any interference with magical attempts to scan or follow you?”

I squinted at him, then down at my gun. “I…” I hesitated, thinking.

Taxi rubbed the side of her head with a hoof and said, “We almost caused an incident when we visited Tartarus Correctional. They wanted to magically nullify Hardy to figure out how he was evading their tracking systems.”

I clicked a toe against my two front teeth and added, “Cosmo tried to use something called ‘The Scry’ to track me. Those stupid bat ponies had a tracking system in their warehouse as well that wouldn’t work when I was there. Tourniquet mentioned something, too.”

Tome’s construct attempted to poke at my weapon, but his hoof phased right on through, so he settled for gesturing at it. “The Crusaders were an elite task-force. Twelve ponies. Twelve bloodlines. Each one sworn to protect and sworn to serve the good of Equestria.”

I quickly counted the names on the list in Tome’s journal. There were, in fact, twelve.

“What did these ponies do?” I asked.

The Don’s construct trotted towards me and walked right on through in the most unsettling fashion, stopping in front of his bookshelves with a sort of wistful expression as he examined all the ancient books he’d never get to read again. “The dragons favor a very top-heavy organizational system. They don’t delegate well and those that are delegated upon tend to resent it. Dragons are a species that values their independence. During the Crusades, their greatest general was able to wrangle his lords to obey, but dragons have ever relied on size and fire in battle. Organization - herds - tends to be an equine trait.”

“Top-heavy…” Taxi muttered, thinking. “Top-heavy? The Crusaders were assassins?”

“Quite right!” The construct clapped a hoof atop his desk like a teacher congratulating an especially bright student. It slid right on through, momentarily throwing him off balance, but he quickly recovered. “Quite right, Miss Shine! Well done. The Crusaders were tasked with ending the war by any means necessary. It was determined that eliminating the draconic leadership would collapse their internal hierarchy in short order. To do this, they were given training… and tools.”

I raised one eyebrow. “My gun is a peashooter compared to some of the artillery my friends carry around. Heck, it’s a pea-shooter compared to this.” I tugged my coat to one side, revealing the gaudy shotgun I’d taken off the unicorn Cyclone.

“If only you knew how wrong you are, Detective,” he replied, not even sparing a glance for the twelve gauge. “As I said, I have met the Crusaders in battle. There, towards the bottom...”

I ran my hoof down the list again to the last three names:

Sweet Embrace, Rank unknown, Missing L.R. 28. Death unconfirmed.

Blooming Death, Rank unknown. Missing, L.R. 28. Death unconfirmed.

The Demolisher, Rank Unknown. Missing, L.R. 28. Death unconfirmed.

“This guy seriously picked ‘The Demolisher’ as his code name?” Taxi asked, suppressing a smile.

“It was an apt title… and it should be noted that ‘The Demolisher’ was a filly. She was barely out of her teens, when the war began and her aptitude for destruction earned her that title. She looked… well, to be honest, a bit like you, Officer Swift.” His eyes drifted off towards the ceiling, lost in recollection.

“How do you know so much about her?” I asked, tilting my head to one side.

“Research, Detective. Her life before the war is a fog, but her war record - that which I could find, at any rate - was exemplary. I also saw her in combat during the Dodge Junction campaign. My regiment was called out to provide alchemical support. Two hours into the fighting, the dragons had broken through the front lines. The Demolisher came to our aid.”

“My mother had a medal from the Dodge Junction campaign that’s somewhere in a storage locker,” I said, thinking back. “I wonder where that got off to...”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if your grandfather had been there. It was quite the fight. An especially big bitch - a drakaina who called herself ‘The Cutting One’ - had joined the battle and decimated a half dozen squads of heavy armored units. She was coming for us. Me and my squadron. Five librarians with pretentions to soldiery and hoof-fulls of alchemical rocket launchers. We were going to die out there in that desert... alone and sweaty,” Tome reminisced, his front knees tensing and untensing in a tempo that reminded me of a march.

Swift, ever a sucker for a good story, settled on her flank in front of the image of the Don. “What happened?”

Glancing at her out of one eye, Tome lifted his chin a bit higher. “The Cutting One was two minutes out, flying on the trade winds over the desert. You could see her shadow, like a black blanket crawling over the mountains. Smoke billowed out of the town, but it had survived worse than a strafing by dragon fire. The fire teams were already on the streets, expecting to use the reprieve before the fighting started again to put things out and get flame-plating onto the rooftops that weren’t already armored. They were going to die, too...and there my squad sat, a quarter mile from the town, watching that creature coasting in to bring death to all of them. Local radio was down. The antennas were all melted. We couldn’t even warn them.”

I decided to go with the flow and joined Swift on the carpet. Limerence pulled himself into his father’s old chair and settled his chin on his hooves whilst Taxi just leaned against the desk.

“I’m certain you’ve had that feeling of watching your death coming for you,” Tome continued. “You know the chill that creeps up your back, but you don’t shake or quiver. You stand and watch. I remember my four friends. Fine zebras, all. Zerth, the artist. Zantha, the obsessive compulsive. Nerzetha, the writer. Zeek, the logician. We’d watched ponies and dragons die, but our place was usually far from the violence. Strange, how peaceful it can be, watching a hopeless situation unfold. Of course, that was when... she appeared.”

“The Demolisher?” Swift wanted to know.

“Yes. Her war-scooter… You know, I never did get the chance to ask why they were given such a silly name. It is especially atrocious, being as they were one of our most terrifying weapons. After all, a war-scooter is a modified, armored chariot, capable of carrying heavy weaponry at high speed. Typically two pegasi pull and a unicorn or earth-pony fires the guns. Still, The Demolisher pulled hers alone.” He licked his lips, as though they were dry, and and I got the strange feeling he was seeing that long ago battlefield, tasting the sand and the arid desert air.

“It was… magnificent, Detective. The Cutting One flew out of the sun, her great green wings driving dusty tornados before her. She was fast… but the Demolisher was faster. She must have been flying, top speed, for hours to reach us from Los Pegasus but still, she appeared on the horizon, sweeping out of the distance at speeds that leave me dizzy to consider. She unhitched herself from her war-scooter in mid-air and left the crew to bail out on parachutes.”

“But… but why would she do that?” my partner asked, puzzled. “I mean, didn’t they have all the guns?”

He held his hooves wide. “Against a dragon of that size, their weapons might as well have been mosquito bites. The Demolisher did not fly, so much as she dropped onto the Cutting One’s back...and I felt a hopelessness the like of which I have not since. I was certain she was just another mad mare trying to play hero before she died, like a hundred others.”

Swift winced. “Eesh... I’ve broke my front legs doing that…”

I blinked at her. “Jumping onto a dragon’s back?”

She nodded. “Aunt Stella was helping me learn to fly. He tossed me in the air over the bay and made me coast down, but I started showing off and he couldn’t catch me fast enough…”

“I do wish I had met this ‘Stella’ in life. He strikes me as such an interesting creature,” Tome said, his grey face flickering in the firelight.

“He is,” I agreed. “How come I never heard of this particular dragon in any of my history lessons? I remember the Dodge Junction campaign, but I don’t remember anypony mentioning a dragon of that size in that particular battle.”

“Simply enough, The Cutting One never made it to the battlefield.” He nodded towards my weapon on the desk. “Dragons are not universally evil. Misguided, power hungry, or coerced by those amongst their number who were truly evil… but as I watched through my binoculars, I could see that drakaina’s eyes. She had the look of a monster, and not merely a lizard. She was going to enjoy liquefying the flesh from my bones. My friends wanted to turn tail and run all the way back to the zebra homeland, but I couldn’t turn away.”

“How... how did the Demolisher stop her?” Swift asked, intently.

“Well... I’d watched the filly land hard enough to shatter bone. The dragon ignored her or mayhap failed to notice she had a passenger. Few of our weapons were strong enough to penetrate the flesh of the high dragon-lords and it was doubtful she felt the weight of one pony running up her spine. Still, a few seconds later there was a flash of white light from on high...and a roar.” Tome shuddered, putting his hooves around himself. “Perhaps the best word is not ‘roar’. It was… more of a scream.”

“Father, how come you have never told me this story?” Limerence asked.

“Because, my son, some things I prefer not to remember too often. They are too awful. For all I may have wished to end the war and see the dragons defeated, I have enormous respect for their species and on that day… watched through my field binoculars as a dragon lost her mind.”

“Errr…" I said, "please tell me she didn’t…”

“Yes, Detective. When the Demolisher reached The Cutting One’s head, she disappeared. I did not see how she vanished, but seconds later, the Cutting One howled, and clasped at her head. Blood poured from her nostrils, along with great gouts of fire...and she plummeted to the earth so hard it knocked me and every pony in Dodge City from our hooves. She was dead before she hit the ground. ” Tome closed his eyes for a moment. “I... went to investigate the corpse. When I arrived at the body...it was bigger than I’d imagined. End to end, she might have been the size of a high-rise.”

Swift was right up on the edge of her hooves as she asked, “What...what happened to the Demolisher?”

The image of Tome clicked his tongue. “As myself and my four friends arrived, she was just pulling herself out of The Cutting One’s eye-socket from a hole cut clean through the creature’s skull. In one side and out the other.” He pointed to my revolver, laying on the table. “A hole cut by a weapon. The Crusader.”

My eyes narrowed a little. “So...then, how did my grandfather get ahold of something like that?”

“Still not putting it together?” Tome snorted, derisively. “Detective, I expect better from you. What is the eighth name on that list?”

I ran my toe down the list of names until I came to the eighth one down.

Swift, who’d moved around to my side, read the passage out loud. “Egg Head. Sergeant First Class. L.R. 28. Burned to death in a fire at his home. Suspect arson by draconic agent as revenge for death of the Dragon King. Crusader passed to progeny.”

“That’s... my grandfather?” I asked, skeptically.

“Wha... wait... Hardy’s grandad helped kill the king of dragons?!” Taxi blurted.

“There is no ‘helped’ about it. Detective Hard Boiled’s grandfather assassinated the dragon who brought about the war. He was never credited with the kill, for fear publicly awarding him for it would jeopardize diplomatic efforts with the dragon king’s successor, but make no mistake… it was he that pulled the trigger.” Tome pointed at my gun. “That… trigger.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose with the back of my knee.

“Egg Head. His code-name was Egg Head,” I grumbled. Mercy, I still wanted that drink.

“Your grandfather was possessed of a very strange sense of humor, I imagine,” Tome chuckled as a log in the fire split and send sparks scattering against the protective mesh. “Still, your family has a long history of protecting Equestria. Royal guards. Soldiers. Peace Officers. Now… yourself. The last of your family line...and the last one alive who can wield that weapon. The last… heh… the last Crusader.”

“You make it sound like it’s… tied to me, somehow,” I muttered.

“Oh, it is. Our dear monarch, Princess Celestia, is nothing if not prone to planning ahead.”

Limerence was pawing through the blueprints, levitating two at once so he could read them side by side. “Detective… he’s right. If I read this correctly, this weapon’s enchantment makes it impossible to steal or confiscate. Take it from the rightful owner and it becomes an ornate piece of rare metal. It can only be given to a new owner. A new owner bent on the protection of Equestria.”

Tome nodded along with the librarian’s explanation. “Quite correct, my son...eh...” He paused, then coughed into his hoof. “Pardon me, Limerence. I am aware I am not your father.”

“It’s... fine, sir,” Lim replied, shutting his eyes for a moment. “Father is dead, but I would not ask you to pretend you are something besides what you are.”

“That is very kind of you, boy,” the image replied, before returning to a lecturing tone. “Now then, Celestia knew there was a chance the Crusaders would be compromised, killed, or captured. To that end, no being that would wish Equestria ill may ever wield their power. They keep their bearers hidden from magical tracking systems. Their field of influence changes, depending on the mood of the bearer. A safe bearer might appear on any magical scan, whilst a fearful one could disrupt an entire region of spellwork.”

“That… makes a certain amount of sense, really. Maybe the only thing in this mess...” I said, trying to gather my wits. It was an awful lot of wit-scattering information for one little pony.

The most my father ever told me was that grandad died in a fire. To hear he’d fought in the war was one thing. To discover he’d been a professional assassin for the crown who’d managed to bring down the most vicious dragon the world had ever seen was something else.

Something occurred to me just then and I swallowed, ordering my thoughts. My friends were watching me expectantly.

“So, magical weapon, right?”

The Don nodded.

“Pretty durable?”

Another nod.

“Erm... What, precisely, would happen if I somehow managed to...you know...damage, my gun?”

Tome’s lips pulled into a deep frown. “That is highly unlikely.” His gaze narrowed. “Why?”

“Yeah, but...assuming I’d say...um…” I reached out and gently flipped my revolver onto the side with the flaking surface. “-been shot with a Moon Weapon?”

He stared at the shiny circle on the side of my revolver. “I think you should count yourself lucky the underlying architecture is nigh indestructible.”

“This doesn’t look especially indestructible to me,” I grumbled.

“You have certainly given a go to proving the designers incorrect,” Tome said, with a shake of his head. “I do believe your grandfather had somepony convert your weapon to discharge forty five caliber shells, yes?”

“That’s right…”

He traced the circle around the edge of the damage. The circuitry underneath shined with a strange inner light.. “Insofar as I believe whoever did that conversion must have been an artificer of the highest order, whoever did the work also painted the weapon to disguise it as common metal. Molded changeling bile, unless I miss my mark. Extremely resilient, until it is actually damaged. Sadly, I know of no way of repairing this. It will continue to peel.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I didn’t have a headache, but somehow felt that I should.

“Alright. Final question, then.” I picked up my gun and slotted it back into my holster. “How do I make it work?”

Taxi, who’d been half-way through chowing down on one of the Don’s cookies, coughed loudly, showering me in crumbs.

“Hardy, that weapon is meant for killing stuff like tanks and mega-fauna!” she sputtered, wiping her mouth with the back of one fetlock. “Do you honestly think nopony is going to notice if you start waving around a gun that can kill dragons?”

I pulled my sleeve down over my holster and glared at her. “Sweets, I need every advantage I can get right now. You, me, and everypony we know could be in danger. We don’t know if we can make it to the car, much less back to the Nest. Do I also need to remind you we’re carrying a ridiculously dangerous artifact that could lead to planetary disaster if the wrong pony gets their hooves on it?”

My driver opened her mouth to respond, then closed it.

Don Tome’s construct cleared his throat. “I am afraid it is a moot point, Detective. I do not know how one activates whatever it is that makes this such a formidable weapon. I have some ammunition in my private vault which the seller claimed came from the corpse of a Crusader, but… to all of my scans, it does appear to be dead crystal. Completely inert. Not even capable of holding a magical charge.”

“Huh… alright, we’ll take it anyway.” I rolled up the blueprints for my gun and moved over to my driver’s side, unbuckling her saddlebag and stuffing it inside. “We need to get back to the car and then to the Nest. I’ve got to hide the damn helmet and then...and then, I don’t know. Are there any weapons here we can use in case we’re caught out in the open, besides this shotgun?”

Limerence poked a panel on the mantel and there was a soft click, followed by the sound of a rattling hinge as three wooden sections of the wall turned a hundred and eight degrees, revealing an arsenal that had Taxi’s tongue hanging out of her muzzle.

“We have some conventional options. Father does believe in being prepared, but I’m afraid much of his private armory isn’t the type of thing you are likely to want,” he replied, nodding towards several sets of swords in different types.

Taxi tugged a riot-gun off the wall that was designed for an earth pony, though it did lack for a gun harness. It was a light, repeating model, made for fighting in tight spaces. The barrel wasn’t quite as big as the P.E.A.C.E. cannon, but it looked a whole lot less friendly.

“Sweets, I don’t think that comes in a ‘non-lethal’ flavor,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not feeling terribly ‘non-lethal’ right now. If we get attacked by somepony who can make all of the Don’s guards vanish off of a bunch of rooftops in their own territory, I think I’m going to want supremely lethal.”

Whilst Taxi loaded up her shiny new gun and jury rigged a strap and mouth-string so she could pull the trigger whilst standing on her rear hooves, the others inspected the ordinance on the wall. Limerence fixed himself up with a couple of those silly katanas, some grenades, and something that looked like a couple of weights with a rope between them whilst Swift nosed through a heap of cloth piled in one corner of the little arsenal.

“What’ve you got there, kid?” I asked.

“I… uh…” She lifted it in one hoof. “It’s… Sir… it’s… a combat saddle! I think it’s even in my size,” she squeaked.

“You do not need a combat saddle,” I said, firmly. Swift looked crestfallen.

“Awww, come on Hardy. Let her have the damn thing. We’ve got exactly one genuinely heavy weapon,” Taxi put in, tossing the riot-gun across her back. “I wouldn’t mind another.”

“What do we do when the recoil from one of those heavy machine guns puts her in the hospital, huh?” I growled.

Swift’s ears flattened against her head. “It’s... it’s okay, Sir. I can use something smaller, I guess. I just… I just always w-wanted a combat saddle...”

Way to lay the guilt on thick.

Fighting two fillies was a losing cause and I was seconds from giving in when Don Tome’s construct trotted up to the wall of guns and ran his toe down a tiny list nailed beside it.

“I do believe I have a...hmmm...well, I can’t say how reliable it will be, but I do have a collector’s item which may fit the young lady. Her larger-than-average wingspan could prove to be a benefit. Recoil will not be a problem, although collateral may be.”

I shut my eyes and let out a long-suffering moan. “It can’t be worse than that lightning cannon one of those idiots left behind. I’m pretty sure I saw some bubble-gum holding one of the charging coils in place.”

Tome hesitated for about three seconds longer than was necessary to make me suspicious.

“It’s… not worse than that, right?”

Moving to one side, Tome pointed to a strange looking… thing sitting on a display rack. It had what I thought might be a pair of wide barrels, although each seemed to be composed of several smaller barrels. A metal clasp held the two tubes together, seemingly weighted down in the middle by a wide box. It resembled a set of heavy saddle-bags with weird guns sticking out of them.

“To my knowledge, this weapon has never been fired. It is too small for a griffin and must be wielded by a creature with weather control magic. The issue, according to what little information I could find on it, was that no pegasus ever had a wing-span adequate to the task of charging the capacitors,” Tome murmured, while Limerence held it up with his horn. My partner grinned, spreading her feathers to their full extension, which was almost wide enough to touch both walls of the Don’s office. “It does require a combat saddle to remain in place. It is charged off the static generated by a pegasus in flight at high speed. Sadly...having never seen it fired, I can’t vouch for actual functionality. It is a museum piece, dating back to the earliest days of the P.A.C.T.”

“So you don’t actually know what it does?” Swift grumbled, wiggling the combat saddle on over her bullet proof vest.

“Theoretically? Yes. It fires some form of high intensity energy. The description at auction was a tad vague, however. I think the name speaks for itself.” Tome poked at the list beside him. “It’s designated the Meteorological Spatial Disruption Matrix Generator Mark I. The gentlepony selling it simply called it the ‘Hailstorm’.”

****

“Oof… I want some pads. This thing pinches,” Swift complained, wiggling her hips as she tried for the fifth or sixth time to get her new weapon into a comfortable position on her combat saddle.

“Kid, you’re the one who wanted the untested blaster with words like ‘Spatial’ and ‘Matrix’ in the name. Put up with the pinch,” I grunted.

Don Tome’s construct moved ahead of us, taking his time as we strolled the empty halls of the Archive. It was so desolate there, amongst all those books and the ghosts of the Archivists. They’d guarded Detrot for decades and been wiped out in one bloody afternoon by the very magics they’d trusted to keep them safe. There might never be a memorial service, nor anypony to mourn their passing if we failed our mission. Odds were good we’d all be joining them long before we got to bury our dead.

Every now and then I’d catch a whiff of burned skin, but it was the musty scent of book glue and parchment that really made the place feel like a mausoleum.

“Sir, do we actually… you know… do we actually have a plan once we leave this place?” Swift asked. “My grandmare won’t want us anywhere near the Vivarium with that helmet in tow...”

A tickle of resentment curled in my guts, but I couldn’t blame Granny Glow. We were carting around a bomb and nopony was likely to want it on their doorstep.

“The Nest is secure enough. Right now, we’ve got to regroup. Maybe we can find a way to get in touch with Princess Celestia or Princess Luna. Maybe we can get some solid information out of the law-firm. Heck, maybe we can get in touch with the Don’s lost princess. I don’t even know. I think… this moment, we need rest more than anything,” I said, nodding towards Limerence. The librarian’s head was low and his tail dragged the carpet. He looked liked he’d been dragged by wild horses.

Tome’s construct stopped in the middle of the aisle in front of us, turned in a circle and shut his eyes. Reaching up, he rested his toe against an innocuous looking title on one of the shelves. It looked like a single volume of an encyclopedia in amongst a dozen others.

“My personal vault,” he said, standing to one side.

Lim’s horn lit up and the book glowed, rising off the shelf and dropping into his hooves. He laid it on the carpet with a quiet reverence and stroked the cover for a moment.

“Father, is this everything?”

Tome nodded. “Everything that matters. I keep little else inside the Archive itself. Most everything remains with my vault keepers.”

Opening the book, Limerence tilted his head, examining the hollowed out space. It was the most primitive of security measures, but it was the last thing anypony who knew anything about the Archivists would expect.

Inside the book, a stack of pictures lay beside a small, red diary. It was a fraction the size of the great volume the Don used to chronicle his daily activities, but it had a more personal feel to it. Lifting one of the pictures with his horn, Limerence smiled. It was a picture of himself and his brother, Zefu, side by side, grinning at the camera. At least, Zefu was grinning. Limerence had the same dour expression he always wore, but with a tiny smile sneaking up on one side of his muzzle. They couldn’t have been much more than ten years old.

In another picture, a slightly younger version of his father had one leg wrapped around a very beautiful mare. She looked an awful lot like Lim.

Swift’s brow furrowed as she nosed the book. “That’s it? That’s the most dangerous stuff the Archivists have?”

“Oh, Officer Swift, surely you must know the dangers of sentiment?” The Don chuckled. “But, I digress. My diary lists the names, associations, and various holdings of all those who possess my vaults. There is also helpful blackmail material and bank accounts containing my earnings. The rest is personal effects and essential elements of some of the more destructive artifacts in the collection which keep them from functioning.”

Limerence tilted the book up and set aside the pictures. Behind it was the weirdest mish-mash of trinkets I’d ever seen. There were stones with runes carved into them, a gem with what looked like an insect of some kind inside it, three nails tied together with wire, part of a slinky, and many other little oddities I couldn’t identify.

“Are you sure you didn’t just empty out the glovebox of your car?” I snarked.

Tome raised one eyebrow and pointed at a piece of wood that seemed to be part of a child’s art project. It’d been bent into a half-moon shape and was held in place with a rubber band. “If you ever need to cause a city-leveling explosion, take that to the mall on Sixty Second Street. Stand outside Mother Mosley’s Sundries and face north. Then take the rubber band off.”

That got us hopping a couple steps back from his box.

“Oookay, then… Not going for ice-cream today,” Taxi stammered.

“My dear Miss Shine, you mustn’t worry so. If you spend every day of your life terrified of death by arcane annihilation, you will miss so much. Besides, that particular artifact has a useful caveat, insofar as you can simply replace the rubber band when you need to reverse the explosion.”

“Do I want to know how you know how that works?” I asked, nervously.

“That is another thing you must trust, Detective; you do not want to know how I know many of the things I know. I’m certain your blood-pressure is already high enough with your unhinged bagel habit. The being occupying your heart will not thank you if you add stress to clogged arteries.”

Limerence levitated what appeared to be a revolver clip on a plastic strap out of the box, letting it twisted in mid-air. “I believe this is for you, Detective.”

I plucked strap out of the air, examining the ammunition. It looked like six black crystals tipping brass bullet-cartridges. Somepony had inexpertly cut letters into each of the bullet casings with what might have been a pen-knife. Twisting it in my hooves, I tried to read them. One seemed to be ‘Kind’ or something close to that, while another was ‘Loyal’. Turning it over, I read the remainder; Generous, Joyful, Honest, and Magical.

“Huh. I think the previous owner might, just maybe, have been a weirdo,” I commented.

“Quite likely. The Crusaders were excellent killers, but what I have gleaned from their records indicates they were poor soldiers,” Tome said. “Their personalities were chosen for flexibility and ‘outside the box’ thinking. This tended to mean they had… quirks. I am unaware of the meaning of those words, sadly. Most likely they meant something to the weapon’s original owner.”

“Hmmm… I guess it can’t hurt to give these a try, if I find myself in a jam.”

“Do make certain it is definitely a ‘jam’ Detective, since I cannot say whether or not it will actually fire, nor what the effect will be when it does.”

“No worse than a ‘Hailstorm’, right?”

“The Crusader can slice through a dragon’s hide like a high speed train through a bowl of warm pudding. Please… do be careful with it,” he said, giving me a meaningful look.

“When am I ever not careful?”

“Oh, stripes of my forefathers, I may have doomed the species…”

****

We stopped at the front entrance of the Archive to say our goodbyes. I’d managed not to cry again, but it was only sheer exhaustion that kept the tears away. My heart ached and I could still feel those familiar old impulses to climb down the neck of a whiskey bottle clawing at my self-control.

Limerence and his father’s construct faced one another, neither seeming to know exactly what to say.

It was the Don who finally broke the silence that was quickly becoming weighed down with sad thoughts.

“I do wish you to know, that I am… and I was… very proud of you, Limerence,” Tome said, with quiet reservation. His ageless face was as kindly as ever. “I may never be as your father was, but his memories will continue as long as my systems operate. You may call me up at any time you need to consult with him.”

The librarian lowered his eyes and pulled his soiled kerchief out of his vest pocket, staring at the tear-stained thing for several minutes before tucking it away again. Taxi offered him one of hers and he took it gratefully, blowing his nose and stuffing it into the same pocket as the other one.

“I know, father. I will find my brother’s killer… and yours. I will bring back the Archivists and make sure your legacy lives on.”

Tome bowed his head to his son, then stepped back and turned to me.

“You promised me you would care for my son, Detective. He is now his own stallion, but I would appreciate it if you would make certain he can fulfill his vows. It will bring comfort to an old stripe to know you are there for him in the times I cannot be.”

“Well, we’ve got to lock this place down and make sure nopony can get inside. Once that’s done… I promise, we’ll be back. Is there some way we can contact you if we’re not here?” I asked.

He nodded. “Of course. I will monitor the communication room. I am a simple ritual away.” He paused, contemplating something. “I… must issue a warning before you leave. A warning regarding the helm of Nightmare Moon.”

I flicked an ear in his direction. “I’ve known you long enough to know that ‘warning’ tends to mean ‘listen or die’.”

He stepped up to the revolving doors of the Archive and staring out into the empty street, seeming to gather his thoughts. “You are aware that the armor of Nightmare Moon is... not to be trifled with, but the helmet, even if it is not attached to the other parts, is dangerous. Whatsoever you do, do not put it on unless you have exhausted all of your remaining options. I cannot say what it will do, but the madness of Astral Skylark began the night she wore that helm.”

“I hadn’t intended on it. I’ve got a call to make to some slightly stupid bat ponies to see if we’ve got some other means of contacting Celestia. Then I think I’m going to get a drink.”

****

Limerence waved his horn over the runes on the outside of the Archive’s door and they flashed in a repeat of the sequence before going dark. Behind the tinted glass, the Don’s construct stood there watching us with an expression of carefully controlled calm. After a moment, he turned and trotted back between the bookshelves, vanishing like just one more spirit in the throng of the dead.

The librarian still had his brother’s staff across his back along with his new swords, one in a sheath on each side of his body and another within easy reach of his muzzle if he leaned back far enough. I couldn’t see where he’d secreted the grenades, but working a beat I’d seen thugs braid guns into their tails or hide shivs in their feathers.

“Detective? I… I wish to thank you for your continued support,” Limerence said, pensively.

“Your father helped me through some hard times and I’ll do what I can for his memory. In any sane world, I’d give you a week to drink tea, sleep, and do whatever it is you do in your spare time… but I need you, right now. We’ve got to figure out something to do with the helmet.”

“We must get back to the vehicle. Our defenses are in operation and I saw no traffic either by air or by ground on any of the monitors, but once we pass the outside edge of my territory, I can no longer guarantee our safety.”

“Your territory, huh?” I said, giving him a sideways glance.

Limerence raised his nose a little. “As I am the last operational Archivist and the sole legal ownership of this building and all surrounding structures has fallen to me...yes, my territory.” He deflated a bit as the weight of that reality sank in. “I do wish Father had informed me I was being considered as an heir…”

I raised one eyebrow. “Come again? Why wouldn’t your father consider you?”

“I am not his blood. My brother was hot-headed, but he had connections and charisma. I am a librarian. My personality is often… uncompromising and I do not display traits most often associated with leadership.” He closed his eyes and there was a hitch in his voice as he continued, “I have nopony to lead now, but I have his cause. If other ponies will follow me, I will resurrect the Archivists one day. Until then, I must simply be content with seeing them avenged.”

“Well, your revenge thing is going to have to wait to see whether or not we can make it back to the car,” I reminded him. “Lets get moving.”

****

Swift coasted in high speed circles overhead, doing loop and dips that would throw off the aim of even the best sniper while the rest of us crept up the sides of the nearby buildings, doing our best to keep out of lines of fire. I don’t know that there is anypony who enjoys walking into potentially hostile terrain without a clue as to what they might be facing, but between the four of us, we were carrying enough hardware to level a small building, not counting the potential unknown features of our weaponry.

There’s no solid game-plan in any manual I’ve ever read for moving through city streets. Even the best planned offensive actions tend to fall prey to guerilla tactics. Something about the shape of a city just adores setting up these vicious scenarios where you can walk headlong into a hail of gunfire with absolutely no warning.

That said, either our caution paid off or they weren’t waiting for us. I find it more likely to be the latter. While even the most skilled flier was likely to have trouble keeping up with Swift in a straight-line burn, I counted a half dozen places between the Archive and the car where we poor ground-pounders could have been cut down by one pony with decent aim.

The Night Trotter was exactly where we’d left it, tucked just off the road, security system enabled.

Gathering around the trunk, we all took a deep breath, then opened it.

The helm was right where we’d left it, wrapped in the sheet, glaring malevolently up at us. I let out a breath I’d been holding for almost an hour.

“Phew… Sweets?”

“Yeah, Hardy?”

“Drive.”

****

We peeled out of there at speeds both illegal and unhealthy, with arcs of electricity streaking after us as Taxi revved the Night Trotter right to the red line. Swift and I curled up on the back seat together, her trying to stuff a rag under her combat saddle so the ridiculous double-barrelled whatever-it-was would stop chafing and me trying to keep from letting myself think too many deep thoughts.

After a few minutes of silence too uncomfortable to bear, Taxi finally turned on the radio.

“Queen on the scene here, Gypsy! We’re riding high on the news of the oncoming Summer Sun celebration here in just a couple of days! Now, ponies best be aware that-”

I mentally tuned Gypsy out, trying to find space in my misery for some actual planning. Planning what, I had no idea. The city-scape tore by at a frantic pace, but if police ponies were watching, none of them decided to test their cruisers against the Night Trotter. Normal ponies don’t ride the lightning and chasing those who do is a good way to get yourself killed.

In the back of my mind, that grossly masochistic part of me that enjoyed the madness was crowing while my heart pounded and my stomach turned at the thought of what I’d just witnessed back at the Archive. It was somehow worse than Supermax. Who am I kidding? Of course it was worse. Supermax was a slaughter, but it was for a reason. There were no innocent bystanders, unaware of what evils they were committing. Everypony in that room paid to watch somepony raped.

The Archivists kept their activities restrained and corpses never piled up around them. They were as close to benign as it was possible for a criminal organization to get. Who had butchered them? A monster, yes, but one who’d worked from the inside.

That was becoming a theme. First Svelte at the Vivarium, then Reginald Bari at Cosmo’s, Geranium with Skylark, and now… the traitor.

“-events going on down at the Moonwalk could turn ugly any minute. Princess Celestia has promised to send diplomats to defuse the situation and they should be arriving tonight. I’ll be bringing you more news, but first, lets talk about Starlight. That’s right! Starlight Industries, our favorite ecological matter-munchers and magical miscreants who are funding this year’s Detrot Summer Sun Celebration-”

“Sweets, could you turn that down for a second?” I asked.

“I don’t want to hear myself think right now, Hardy. If I do, I’m worried I might start screaming.”

“-can’t say I’m surprised by these revelations, but then the company could use a face-lift after how long it’s taken them to finish construction on that ridiculous tower-”

I didn’t even have the energy to yell. I wanted to yell, but I was too worn out.

“Sweets, I’m half-way to screaming as it is and I need some silence. The Don is dead and I’m probably going to spend the next week crying myself to sleep-”

“What?! Who did you say is dead?!”

Everypony in the car glanced back and forth at one another, then four sets of eyes turned on the radio.

They say collective insanity can and does strike large groups of ponies under high stress situations, making them believe unusual, even bizarre things. I was already not likely to win any awards for mental clarity, but everypony else seemed to have heard that, too.

I leaned towards the radio. “Just so I know I’m crazy, could you… the radio… go ahead and say something else?”

There was static from the speakers for several seconds longer than it took for me to convince myself we were all just nuts. So when Gypsy spoke again, even Taxi jumped.

“I guess this particular cat isn’t going back in the bag, is it? Commercial break time, everypony!”

In the background, an advert for some kind of gum started playing.

I glanced up just in time to swat Taxi on the shoulder so she swerved back into the right lane, then turned my attention back to the radio.

“Right, so… I’m going to assume you can hear me, and also you’re not a byproduct of three or four fractured psyches,” I groaned, resting my forehead against my heel.

“Oh… yeah. Sorry, Detective. You’ve been the most interesting thing on the Signal for days. Now, what do you mean Don Tome is dead?”

Act 2, Chapter 45: Going Trench Coat

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 45: Going Trench Coat

The government pays out a lot of money to pegasi to keep tight control of the weather, because the weather cannot be trusted to control itself. Despite the claims of climate control decryers, the environment behaves very irresponsibly when left to its own devices.

Not that it would be dangerous, so much as lazy. Climatologists currently believe that the weather would do very little of its own accord. Much of modern Equestria would simply be inhospitable desert and dry, cracked plains without any intervention from life, such as weather factory cloud distribution; after all, not even earth pony agricultural magic can overcome a long enough drought.

It is not known precisely when pegasi became predominant stewards of the weather, but if magic is vivogenic, then life was manipulating weather well before them; Studies have shown that even single-celled organisms are capable of microscale environmental manipulation. It is presumable that the unnatural weather patterns of the Everfree Forest and similar places are due to the uncontrolled action of the life therein.

This does lead to the other reason pegasi must control the weather; If they did not, then someone or something else with less benign or competent intentions potentially could. Windigos once harnessed dissent and turned it into the icy climes they favored. Other species have been known to employ weather in their warfare, of course - Fog of War is no metaphor in Equestria - but no one has managed it on the scale of the pegasi.

That brings us neatly to magical storms. History is littered with examples of weather turning against a population, but never so spectacularly as when magic is involved. Chocolate rain, a mild example, seems at first welcome, but ruins roofing and dogs very quickly. Enchantment was responsible for the Day Of Frogs, B.L 22 (Before Luna, 22 years), when the dragons found themselves inundated with amphibians falling from the heavens over their lands. The griffin delicacy known as ‘frog-legs’ was developed soon thereafter due to healthy trade with the neighboring plateaus.

This still pales by comparison to the November Rain of L.R. 36, during which a stray tornado - created by a pegasus attempting to weathermance his way out of housecleaning - hit an open magical gem-mine, and the dust from the mine was whipped into the atmosphere. For twenty nine days, the sky opened and everything from chickens to ponies from the other side of the planet were dumped over Equestria. Thankfully the injuries were few and far between, due to the careful attendance of Cloudsdale weather pegasi; However, for a period of thirty six hours, it could be said to be literally raining cats and dogs.

Controlled or uncontrolled, weather remains one of the forces that has routinely re-written Equestrian history to suit its own whims. Woe be unto he who thinks the weather is ever completely predictable.

-The Scholar

You talk to your friends. You talk to yourself. You talk to your dog. You talk to your boss. Every conversation is a little different, but always you’re saying the same things. I see you. I connect with you. I am awake and aware and I’m conscious that you are, too.

A lot of killers are always looking for that connection and never finding it. Police ponies look for the connections others are trying to make.

Every now and then, we stumble across a brand new connection, of a kind nopony has ever seen before.

****

“Am I still addressing ‘Gypsy’ or is this something else?” I asked.

Uncomfortable silence.

“What do you want me to say? You’re talking to your radio. I’m just the voice on the other end,” Gypsy replied, finally. “By the way...big fan! I’ve only caught snippets of what goes on when you’re in the car, but you four have been causing absolute Tartarus for the criminal elements of this city. Is the Don really dead?”

“You going to talk about it on your radio show?”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course not! I’m here to do the good work. You guys took down the King of Ace and the Church of the Lunar Passage. How many of those psychos and rich jerks you’ve got locked away in Supermax would be out enjoying their murder orgies if you hadn’t been out there? I’m on your side, Detective!”

“What about letting it out that those ponies were missing, huh?” I growled. “I could have used an extra day or two before the police started looking into that.”

“Yeah... yeah, sorry. That was... I was excited, you know? Over thirty members of the city’s elite goes missing in one night? That was fantastic! Best news this city has had in years!”

“And... if I say we’re going to tear the radio out of this car the second I get a chance?”

“Please don’t!” Gypsy sounded a touch panicky at that. “I promise, no more slip-ups! I’ll run anything about you by you before I put it on the radio if it has anything to do with where you’re going or what you’re doing. Besides, I can only hear what goes on in the car and immediately around it.”

“Wait... around the car? Oh Celestia…” Taxi slapped herself in the face with one hoof, but managed to keep us on the road. “That’s how she’s doing it!”

“Doing... what, Sweets?” I asked.

My driver glared at the radio. “Gypsy... is bouncing her signal off police radio crystals! She’s been using our own comm systems! That’s why nopony could find her. She’s been broadcasting using-”

“-our own equipment…” I finished, pulling my hat over my face. “That’s cute. She can listen in on what happens to the police and our signal scanners just show our own frequencies. That’s where she keeps getting her scoops.”

“I... um... I... can neither confirm nor deny-”

“You’re a worse liar than my partner, miss Queen of the Signal,” I growled and she trailed off. “How do you know the Don?”

Silence reigned for almost half a minute. Gypsy might have been deciding whether or not she could trust me, or she was stinging from that particular barb. Most news ponies I know pride themselves on being fantastic liars.

“I knew him, but that’s... all I can tell you, really. He was a good zebra. He cared what happened to...um...to us.”

“Us? You make that sound like you’re not including yourself in ‘ponies in general’.”

“I’m a wanted person, Hardy. If somepony in power finds me, they won’t even bother with a trial. I’ll be dead. I embarrassed the mayor’s office. I embarrassed the chief of police. I’m almost as dead as you, if whoever is chasing you catches up.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any insights on who that is, do you?”

Something rattled in the background on the radio. “Yes and no. You’re on the right track, I think. I’m not sure. This law-firm...Umbra, Animus and Armature. You need to figure out who controls them. They’re near the center of things, but...I...yikes, cats and jammers, I can’t think just now. The Don’s really dead? How? His place is a fortress.”

“A traitor,” Limerence spat. “A traitor I intend to hunt.”

“I’m so sorry. You’re his son, right?” Gypsy asked, her husky voice full of sincere sympathy. “He helped me during a really rough time when I...I woke up from a coma a few years ago. He was really kind.”

“That is correct, Miss Gypsy. If my father was a friend to you, I would call on your debts to him. Do you have information that could benefit us?” Limerence asked.

“I don’t know about debts, but I do care what happens to you four. I gotta say, my sneak skills are less comprehensive than you’re hoping. One pony can only listen at so many keyholes. Still, lemme see...”

Papers shifted back and forth and a parakeet twittered at us through the radio speaker.

“Here we go! Alright, like I say, the law-firm isn’t the center of things. It’s just one spider in a web full of them. This conspiracy has something to do with the Shield organization and it’s old! Like, decades. Longer. Somepony has been planning something for longer than any of us have been alive. You need a clients list for Umbra, Animus, and Armature. If you can get that, you’ll have all the leads you could ever hope for.”

“And...how do we go about acquiring that?” I scoffed. “They cater to the worst criminals in the city. I doubt they’re going to respond well to a warrant for their retainers.”

“You’re the cop, sweetheart. I’m a disk jockey. You need music, I’m your girl. You need news the city would rather didn’t get published, I’m your girl. You need superhero stuff, that’s on you.” She hesitated for a moment. “Oh! Break’s over! I gotta get back on the mic! Call Telly! Sykes has a message and it’s important! If you need to talk to me, I’ll be listening to the car between nine and ten PM, every night.”

“Now, how… do you… know Telly… has a message for us?” I asked, slowly and carefully.

There was a long, awfully guilty sounding pause, then the radio gave out a spurt of static, and soft jazz started up.

Taxi and I exchanged a look in the rear view.

“I want to confirm to everypony this just happened,” I said, trying to keep the manic undertones out of my voice.

“You mean that the radiopony just talked to us, Sir?” Swift asked. “Yeah, that just happened.”

“Good. Good, I’m glad...No, wait just a damn minute! What in the depths of the pit was that?!”

****

Twilight dropped over the city like a drunken haze, bringing with it a pounding rain that felt like lead weights hitting my pelt. We’d run into an especially large puddle at the edge of the Skids that Taxi didn’t want to drive through lest we end up in an open sewer-grate, of which there were several, which left us an unpleasant walk. My driver had an umbrella hat and Swift, ever prepared, had a couple of rain slickers in her size stuffed in her pockets. It left me with just my coat and hat. Thankfully, despite the fights, the heaps of wild magic, and a couple of fresh rips in what was supposed to be almost indestructible cloth, my coat’s waterproofing enchantment was still holding up.

I held Nightmare Moon’s helmet tucked in the crook of my leg, cleverly disguised as Nightmare Moon’s helmet with a wet sheet over it. I was too tired to care. I needed to get back to the Nest. My heart’s light wasn’t blinking, but I still felt like I was seconds from passing out, either from exhaustion or stroke. Whatever enhancements Gale might have made to my cardio system weren’t counteracting the emotional toll of the last couple of days. I felt like a whole bucket of deep fried Diamond Dog shit.

A steady stream of water leaked down my collar, but it felt like a trickle compared to the mound of crushing sadness that I kept having to shove into a mental corner.

He’s dead. Another pony you loved is dead. Your world just got a little bit smaller.

Cheery.

A few feathered shades drifted across the rooftops, keeping up their constant vigil. For most ponies, the Skids were that end of town you just don’t like to think exists in your city. For me, it’d come to mean safety that money couldn’t buy. Nothing felt safe at that particular moment. How could I ever think of the world as safe if there existed monsters who could make an entire gang disappear in a matter of hours?

There might have been security cameras that caught the attack, but I somehow doubted it. The Don wouldn’t have wanted electronic eyes watching his comings and goings anymore than the assassins would.

I saw very purposeful movement out of the corner of one eye and glanced up to find Wisteria’s daughter, Jambalaya, shadowing us. She wasn’t being especially stealthy, but she was definitely moving at our heels.

Turning down our street, I met Wisteria standing with a group of Aroyos. For once, they didn’t look terribly friendly. Goofball was curled up on the sidewalk, snoring like a train engine, which rather ruined the moment. As we approached, he sniffed the air, then looked up and leapt onto all fours, charging over to us. Swift hopped into the air just in time for him to snatch her by the combat vest and lick her ferociously.

Wisteria, who’d been trying to look gruff, cracked a little smile.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” I asked, tucking the helmet of Nightmare Moon a little further behind my leg.

She drew in a reluctant breath. “De Ancestors say ye be needin’ to come to dem. Dey be worried. T’ings be movin’ in de city and dey wish to speak wid ye.”

“Yeah, well, they’re gonna have to wait,” I grumbled, trotting down the sidewalk towards the Nest.

Wisteria took a couple of steps to the side, standing in my path. She looked like she wasn’t very much looking forward to this confrontation, but then, neither was I.

“Crusada...dey say now-” She trailed off as she got a good look at me. “Goodness...be dat blood?”

I looked down at my coat and chest. I hadn’t realized it until she mentioned it, but my chest was a mess. Brown splotches of blood were caked deep into my pelt.

How many bodies had I moved? Lots was the short answer. Lots who’d died in nasty ways. I suppose it was too much to expect that I wouldn’t need a bit of laundering.

Mercy, am I really more shocked about the state of my clothes than all that death?

I shut my eyes and kept walking. “Yes, it’s the blood of an awful lot of friends; people who trusted me and died screaming. So get out of my way, Wisteria. I smell like death and I value your friendship. I don’t want to test it just because I’m tired and the Ancestors are feeling pushy.”

Wisteria’s wings shuffled a little, then she waddled after me as I stepped around her. Her guards seemed unsure whether or not they wanted to stop the crazy pony drenched in gore and so hung back, waiting for instructions.

Swift, who was scruffling a set of Goofball’s ears, flapped her wings a couple of times and landed beside me as the giant mutt joined her, nose in the air, ecstatic to have his best friend back. I noticed Shade Walk sitting up there, almost invisible against his fur, relaxing with her hooves behind her head. She’d strung a piece of fabric between two of the dog’s necks as a sort of makeshift hammock.

I listened to my driver and Wisteria exchanging a few words as they followed me.

“You look about ready to pop…” Taxi murmured as Wisteria stroked her stomach.

“I and I be soon ready. Today. Tomorrow. Still, I and I have duties. But what manner of dark ye bring back to de Aroyo doorstep? De Ancestors be speakin’ of shadows comin’ walkabout wid ye…”

“Trust me, you and yours will be safer not knowing,” Taxi replied.

“Dat be not a comfort. What be Crusada carry under he leg?”

“Shadows. Like I say, I think you probably should just...let him go for now, okay? I’ll make sure we talk to the Ancestors later on. Promise.”

“I...I and I not often be questioning de wisdom of de Ancestors...but I swear, since de day we be lettin’ you in, I question more and more,” Wisteria remarked, shaking her violet tail, irritably.

“Yeah, me too. I’m sorry we keep dragging this insanity back to your door, but if I thought there was another way, I’d take it. Incidentally, you know the territory near the Archivists?” Taxi asked.

The Aroyo stumbled, then quickly recovered. “We...we be knowin’ it. De sewer run many places. Be dat de reason ye come to us covered in blood? I and I be curious-”

“Let’s just say it’s probably best you keep your people away from there for now,” Taxi interrupted, putting a gentle hoof on the pegasus’ shoulder. “We had to lock it down and I don’t know if the local magical defenses are going to bother ponies underground, but they might.”

Wisteria took a deep, thought-composing breath. She shifted her juju bag up to one ear, then nodded. “De...de Ancestors say ye earn ye rest. Dey wait awhile. We be havin’ to speak of dis a time soon. Dey...worried and speak not to me of what it be. De Ancestors almost never worried.”

****

It was another of those showers; the kind where you want to escape your thoughts, but just can’t bring yourself to go ahead and open a vein to do it. I dropped onto my stomach and rolled over onto my back, letting the water pound on my belly, washing the blood of my friend away. I recalled the words of that ridiculous lawyer, Geranium or whatever her name was:

"I hope you find out one day when you’re standing over the body of someone you cared about just how far the consequences of your actions can reach!’

Paranoid parts of my brain wanted to think that maybe, just maybe, she’d known what was about to happen, but I found that unlikely. My therapist would have said I was simply moving the blame onto a convenient target. I like targets. Targets tend to be things you can shoot.

Poor Tome.

He deserved a death in bed at a properly old age, surrounded by his books and his knickknacks. Mob bosses tend not to get the kindnesses that are afforded to the lawful when they get old, but he had so many ponies who relied on him and his services. Sweets might not have been close with him, but I was seriously questioning how I was meant to proceed without the righteous old sonofabitch.

There it was, again; that question that just wouldn’t bugger off. The only good reason to kill Don Tome was to spark a gang war. His death alone was likely to cause a sort of slow-burning chaos, although he’d been thorough enough in life that it was probably going to be some time before the effects of not having him out there getting dangerous artifacts off the streets were felt. His death was still going to leave a power rift. Many, many ponies had owed the Don and many would want somepony to blame for his death.

Grabbing the soap, I began working up a good lather in my fur.

It was starting to become a regular thing to be covered in grit and gore. When had that become normal? What was normal anymore? Was there any hope for normal after all was said and done?

Do you want there to be a normal, again? I thought. Strange thing to consider. After all this, could I go back to a desk and a case file? Or would I just spend the rest of my life in a cell? Would it be so bad if I did?

Ehhh, Swift or Taxi or Limerence would probably break me out, whether I wanted them to or not.

I shut off the shower, grabbed a fresh towel off the rack, and began wringing water out of my tail, enjoying the peaceable numbness that seemed to have settled over my sensibilities. Another shower was running someplace down the hall and I could hear the soft sounds of a pony sobbing his eyes out. He was trying his damndest to be quiet, but some feelings aren’t quiet. They’re loud and they drag your self control through the mud. They leave you feeling like a worm for showing your weakness. They’re the last thing a pony should be alone with.

Trotting towards the living room, I paused for a moment at the door of the other shower that was running. At first I thought it was unoccupied, but as I glanced around I caught sight of a tuft of sodden blonde mane behind one of the low benches. Taking a couple of steps in, I found my driver and Limerence under one of the shower heads. Taxi was holding Limerence like a foal, forelegs wrapped around him as she gently rocked him back and forth. They both sat under the streaming water, the librarian weeping and every now and then trying to struggle his rear legs under him. Then she would stroke his hair, give him a little squeeze, and he’d collapse again.

For all my driver might have lacked for a mother in her life, she understands mothering like nopony else I know.

Taxi happened to glance up and saw me standing there in the door. I raised my eyebrows, questioningly, and she shook her head, making a discreet shooing motion with one hoof. I took the hint, moving off as quietly as I could and leaving the expert to what she did best.

****

The front room smelled like wet dog or, more accurately, like wet hell-hound. Goofball was sprawled lazily on his back, all three heads asleep. The middle one was using Swift for a pillow, though she seemed not to mind. She was snoring quietly, her wings wrapped around her like a blanket as she drooled on the page of an open novel.

Kids deserve their sleep. I left her there and trotted into the kitchen.

Juniper was waiting for me, sitting at the short little table, leaning on a beanbag chair with a cup of steaming coffee between his front legs. His dark green eyes followed me as I snatched a muffin out of the bread box, grabbed a plate and some jam, and joined him at the table.

My dead partner’s face was lined and handsome, with the same loose, easy smile he’d worn in life. He was even wearing that same wretched tie he had on when he died: a ridiculous maroon beast that clashed with his pelt, done up with rose embroidery. I’d given him that tie as a gift for his birthday. He’d retaliated by giving me cologne that would choke a skunk. I’d worn it every day until Chief Jade threatened to drown me in a vat of the foul stuff.

I studied him out of the corner of my eye as I spread an unhealthy dose of jam on my muffin and took a big, messy bite. He’d always hated watching me eat, but then, he was sometimes prissy about the weirdest things.

“Celestia save me, kiddo… at least use a damn napkin,” he grumbled, getting up and retrieving a paper towel from the sideboard He dropped it across my face and I wiped my muzzle. It felt real enough, but then, don’t most things when you’re hallucinating?

“Celestia didn’t do a thing for you, Juni,” I replied, hotly.

“Fine, fair point. Are we going to talk now or are you going to sit there and sulk?”

I stuffed half the muffin into my muzzle and replied, “Shulking shounds goofd.”

Juniper took a little pull from his coffee cup and made a face. “Bleh...this stuff you buy is garbage.”

“Don’t blame me,” I shrugged. “It’s freeze dried. We found a few cases in some of the back storage rooms.”

“That means that crap probably dates to the Crusades.” He got up and got the sugar bowl so he could mix in a couple of teaspoons.

“If you mix in enough cream, you hardly notice,” I quipped, slathering the other half of my muffin in jam. I gestured at him with my knife. “You want to tell me why you’re not playing the ‘appear in a mirror’ game? Have I just gone that crazy?”

Returning to the beanbag chair, Juniper lowered himself into it and propped his rear hooves up on the table. “Kiddo, I wish I had some answers worth giving you. Death don’t get you near so many perks as you’d think. That said, you need to get off your ass and go call Telly.”

“Is that my subconscious giving me tips, now?” I grunted.

“That’s your partner, giving you tips,” he replied, pulling a face. “I don’t have all the answers and somepony has gone to an awful lot of trouble to keep anypony... ahem... anypony like me from getting those answers.”

“Like you?”

“Sorry, that’s on the list of ‘crap I ain’t clarifying’,” Juniper sniffed. “It does mean I’m stuck with your sorry flank doing the legwork. What I can tell you is that you need to call Telly. Something big and bad is going down. Sykes is up to his fluffy little ears and he’s going to need your help or somepony is going to skin’im, pluck’im, and make a mattress out of him.”

I wiped a bit of jam off my mouth, then sucked it off my toe as I replied, “So, that’s it? I just get to go on wondering whether or not I’m actually nuts or if this is actually some aspect of my partner ringing me from beyond the grave?”

“Oh, Hardy, do you even need to ask?” he chuckled, wiggling in his chair until he was comfortable. “You’ve been crazy since the day I met you. Honest cops don’t last long without a streak of psychosis driving them. Still, take it as read that I’ve got your best interests at heart.”

“So, calling Telly to bail the big dumb chicken out of whatever mess he’s in rates higher than sleeping and mourning the dead, huh?”

“It rates higher than sitting here stuffing your face and craving booze. You decided what you’re going to do with the helm, yet?”

“Jeez, Juni, you gotta give a guy a rest...”

“Go make the phone call to Telly and those stupid spies,” he growled, then glanced down at his coffee cup. “And for the sky’s sake, buy some decent brew.”

Shoving the mug away in disgust, he got back to his hooves and strolled out of the kitchen, leaving me with all manner of worry and a lap full of crumbs.

****

The rain hadn’t let up when I reached the phone box.

I’d left my trenchcoat and combat vest back in the Nest, but taken my revolver along. Maybe some foolhardy part of me wanted somepony to take a shot at me. Maybe I was just too tired to care. Either way, I was soaked to the bone by the time I ducked into the little booth beside an abandoned convenience store at the end of the block.

I popped a few coins in, not bothering to count, and waited for a dial tone.

“Detrot Police Department. Is this an emergency?”

“It’s me, Telly.”

The line went dead for moment, then hummed.

“Alright, Hardy. This is a secure line. What’s going on out there? Did you have anything to do with all these missing celebrities?”

“Might have done, might not. Doesn’t matter. I hear tell from a mutual friend of ours that Sykes is looking for me?”

“Mutual... f-friend?” she stammered. “I mean, yeah, Sykes was trying to get in touch with you, but he told me to keep it quiet. Who do you mean?”

“Our friend who works in radio, capiche?”

“Oh Luna’s light, she didn’t…”

“Believe me, we will be having an extended conversation about her soon, but at this moment, I need to know what Sykes wants.”

I could almost see Telly’s lips tightening as she slipped into that professional state of mind she projects most strongly when she’s pissed off.

“Sykes...has apparently got family in the Hitlan and Tokan tribes. He’s up there right now, trying to unscrew the situation going on at the Moonwalk. If you talked to our mutual friend, then you’ve probably heard about it.”

I wiped a bit of rain water out of my mane and I replied, “Yeah, a bit. Some issue with the griffin tribes the mayor let stay in town?”

“That’s a nice way of saying they’re at each other’s throats. I don’t have all the details, but Sykes says he needs you. Not a clue why. Apparently there’s some griffin rule about guests that’s keeping this all from going pear shaped, but it won’t hold and you need to get down to the Moonwalk as soon as possible. Princess Celestia’s got a diplomat that’s supposed to be coming down, but a wild magic storm over the Everfree has shut down air chariots, train service, and teleportation out of Canterlot. It’ll probably be at least a couple of days before they can get here. Until then, we’re stuck with local resources.”

My cutie-mark twitched and a quiet worry started to take root in my stomach. We didn’t really have time for a detour, but then, nor did I have much of a plan besides calling up the bat ponies. That tingle in my cutie-mark is always a good indicator, too. A storm of wild magic sweeping out of the Everfree forests was just a tad bit too convenient, particularly if it meant the griffins weren’t going to have anypony there to cool their heads before bloodshed could break out.

Of course, I am the perfect pony for cooling heads.

“Send Sykes a message. Let him know I’ve got an errand to run, a nap to have, and then I’ll be on my way.”

****

The funny thing about the Skids is, when you’re an outsider, nopony will give you the time of day, but when you’re one of them, you might as well be family. As I strolled down the street, ponies tipped their hats to me and I returned their smiles as best I could. Strange to feel safe in such an impoverished place.

A young, former Ace-head with enough faded tracks up his legs to count a railroad waved from a bench where he’d laid a beautiful selection of cheap flowers. He tossed me one; I caught it in my teeth, then continued on.

Pulling the M6 walkie-talkie out of my pocket, I stared at it for several minutes, leaning against the brick facade of a heavily graffitied apartment building. I had an irrational urge to chuck the blasted thing into the sewer, along with the helmet.

We’d stuffed Nightmare Moon’s hat into a beanbag chair and slugged it into one of the storage rooms. Anypony hoping to toss the place was going to take an hour, even if they had some idea where to look. I could just pop back, get it, and drop it down the nearest sewer. Nopony might find it for months, if not years. Then maybe I could go live at M6’s warehouse. It was comfortable enough, right?

I pressed the ‘call’ button on the communicator.

“This is Hard Boiled. Night Bloom, you there?”

The speaker crackled for a few seconds, then Cereus came through. “Detective? Oh Celestia! Thank the skies! I thought we were on our own!”

“As it turns out I’m kinda hard to kill. I need to speak with Night Bloom. Our situation has changed.”

“Uh... y-yeah... ours... ours has kinda changed... t-too,” Cereus mumbled, nervously.

“You’ve been sitting in a warehouse. How much could things have changed out there?”

“I’ll... I’ll let Miss Night Bloom tell you, okay? I just got her sobered up and fixed her hangover, but she’s been crying an awful lot since... since we found out...”

A cold feeling crawled down the back of my neck. “Put her on.”

Hooves clip clopped on concrete, then I heard the sound of a crying mare.

“Agent Night Bloom, Ma’am?” Cereus asked, softly, like one might when speaking to a sad foal.

“What the damn s-sakes do you want? We’re doomed enough without you hanging over my sh-shoulder,” Night Bloom hissed, sounding weak as a kitten.

“It’s the Detective.”

There was a long pause, then Night Bloom’s voice as she snatched the walkie talkie from Cereus.

“Detective? Hard Boiled, is that you?!”

“Who’d you think it was going to be?”

“I dunno. Possibly Death calling. Death would have been nice…”

“Agent Bloom, what’s going on? You sound like you’ve been drinking.”

“I have been drinking! Landsakes, Hard Boiled, my own agency is trying to kill me and we’re stuck out-”

“Wait, come again?!”

I quietly begged all the stars that I’d misheard that.

“Oh...heh...yep. Sounds familiar, huh?”

“M6 is...is doing what now?”

“I got hammered and tried one of my contacts from an exterior office. I was wondering if he might air-mail us a pizza with a jetpack home attached. No such luck. This guy...he tells me something big and bad is moving in Canterlot.”

“We’re aware there’s been problems, but-”

“Problems, Detective? These aren’t problems. Problems are a broken warehouse toilet when you need to puke a whole night’s worth of vodka. These are catastrophes. I found out from my friend it wasn’t even supposed to be me going on this trip. Our head of operations picked me and the greenhorn against the Princess’ recommendations...and then vanished.”

“What, like...disappeared vanished or killed vanished?”

“Nopony has heard from her in over a month! This isn’t the first time she’s done that, so there’s no red flags being raised, but my friend tells me that he hasn’t been able to get in touch with the main office either. All the back channels have all been given orders to ignore calls from me and Cereus. It smells like a mole hunt!”

“You think somepony thinks you’re moles?”

“It doesn’t matter if they actually think we’re moles! A mole hunt is about isolating agents and seeing how they respond. If we aren’t moles, a real mole might reach out to us. If we were, we’d be isolated from the agency. The assumption is that the potential moles are being watched, but...dammit, it’s impossible! They can’t watch us here! It’s usually temporary, but that’s why they won’t field my calls! We’ve been cut off! I’ve got no way of calling the main office or the Princesses! Short of flying out to Canterlot and throwing myself in front of the palace gates, which I’m heavily considering-”

“There’s a storm,” I murmured.

Night Bloom’s voice was quivering with tension. “What?”

“A storm. A wild magic storm. It drifted in off the Everfree. They’ve shut down everything. Trains, teleportation, air traffic...”

We both sat with the implications of that for a long minute.

Bloom finally broke the tense silence.

“Detective...you don’t think-”

“The Everfree is a magical mess and has been for as long as anypony remembers,” I growled. “Could somepony generate a storm there that would cut off Canterlot from the rest of the country? I have no bloody clue. You and I, however, have a different problem.”

“A problem besides whatever is going on in Canterlot?!”

“Maybe related, maybe not. My cutie-mark is saying ‘related’. I’ve... acquired... the Helmet of Nightmare Moon.”

Bloom’s voice was full of relief for all of three seconds. “Oh, thank goodness-... wait... did you say the helmet?! Not the damn chest plate?”

“You heard right.”

“How in the depths of Tartarus did you get your hooves on that damn thing?!”

I took a deep breath. “Ruby Blue, the girl who was murdered...she stole it from Astral Skylark. Skylark snatched it out of the Royal Vaults... well, we don’t know when. It’s complicated, but I need a safe place to bury the helmet. You think the warehouse qualifies?”

“I...g-guess it might. There’s nopony within a fifteen mile radius of this place except some hydras and a bunch of timberwolves. Somepony wants to come out here, they have to know where the entrance to the underground is and, even then, it’s an insane walk down tracks that are full of all manner of wartime traps. I think we’re pretty damn secure, but h-how could you p-possibly-”

I interrupted before she could start demanding heavy explanations. “I’ve got a friend in town I need to talk with. Send the scrub to pick up the helmet. He can meet us on the edge of the Skids.”

“I...don’t...oh gods, how did you get...oh...Luna...no, heavens no...the helmet...I…”

She fell silent and all I could hear was frantic, heavy breathing.

Cereus came on the line a moment later. “Um...Detective? Agent Bloom is having a panic attack and I have to go take care of her. Could you call back?”

“Meet me in town in a half hour. I’ve got a package I need you to hide at the warehouse as best you can. If you’ve got an anti-magic vault or something, stick it in there. I’ll be on the edge of the gang zone they call ‘The Skids’, west of the Bay of Unity and towards the end of...lemme see-” I poked my head out of the telephone box and read the bent sign at the end of the road. “-Long Strider street. When you start seeing creepy looking voodoo crap on the walls, you’re in the right area,” I paused, then added, “Try having her breathe into a bag. Oh, and flush all the vodka.”

****

It was closer to an hour when Cereus showed up. I spent most of that hour strolling through the Skids, enjoying the rain. It was fairly warm out and getting soaked to the bone is one way of purging self destructive impulses.

For some reason, I kept expecting Juniper to put in another appearance. It would have been appropriate, somehow, to see him trotting alongside me. He’d always hated the rain. I always wondered if some part of the equine mind knows how it’s going to die, even decades before it happens.

I was on my fifth or sixth lap of Long Strider street, when I saw a drenched Aroyo stallion coasting in low over the pavement, keeping carefully below the level of the buildings. Turning, I waited patiently as he landed and trotted to a stop in front of me.

“Crusada! De’re be an strange creature to see ye!”

“Good, I'm expecting one. Where can we meet?”

Turning, he gestured down the street.

“L’il Miss Purity’s Diner. Beware! She stuff him stupid, ye let her.”

****

A quick five minute stop back home to get the helmet and my coat, and I was back on my way.

I hadn’t noticed L’il Miss Purity’s, mostly because the sign was gone, but also because the front window was boarded up. Despite this, the place had a decent mid-afternoon crowd.

It was a distinctly Cyclone joint and when you’re walking a gang beat, you start to look for the little clues that let you know when you’re in one. The two griffin war-axes mounted behind the pie case and the authentic hydra-bone dining tables did sorta give it away. Every inch of the walls was covered in paraphernalia from the Crusades and behind the bar, a griffin hen the size of a small car was wiping the counter with a towel that might or might not have been covered in blood stains. Her apron could have doubled for a parachute and was stained colors the eye is not meant to register.

A dozen laughing, talking, drinking Aroyos sat around the room. As I muscled open the sticking, wooden door, the crowd looked up and half of them let out raucous cheers or calls of ‘Crusada!’

It was awful weird to be that welcome in a place.

I shifted the sheet-wrapped helmet from one leg to the other, smiled as best I could and tipped my hat to them, hobbling over to the service bar. The surface had a few deep gouges in it that could be best described as ‘axe wounds’ and somepony had either given it a layer of sloppy lacquer or Lil’ Miss Purity believed in taking payment in hooves.

Hitching myself onto a bar stool, I pulled a stack of bits out of a pouch on my gun harness and laid them on the counter. I didn’t bother to count them. The griffin dropped her rag and strolled leisurely over to me.

“What can I getcha, sweetheart?” she crooned.

“Anything with sugar in it. I’m meeting somepony here. You seen him? Goofy little character, funny looking ears?”

The griffin I assumed was Purity dusted off her apron and pointed with one claw towards the back corner.

“Back’ere honey. I’ll bring ya yer meal,”

I nodded towards the bits on the counter. “Keep the change. Thanks.”

She gave me a deep belly laugh and pushed my bits back across the counter. “Yer money’s no good here, Crusada’. Go’on and git.”

“Thanks again,” I replied, trotting over to where she’d indicated.

Cereus was huddled over a plate of mashed potatoes you’d have to sled down, shoveling spoonful after spoonful into his muzzle. His brilliant disguise consisted of a hoodie pulled back from his fluffy ears and a set of fake teeth to cover his fangs which he’d taken out and left on the table beside him while he ate. A few Aroyos were giving him sidelong glances, but most seemed more curious than antagonistic.

“You wanna work as a spy, Cereus, we’re going to have Taxi give you some tips on maintaining a cover,” I grumbled, sliding into the seat across from him and dropping the helmet on the table.

“Oh! Detective!” He coughed, quickly swallowed, and gave me a toothy grin. “These ponies you’re staying with are really strange, but their food is amazing.”

“I know. You should try their curry. Granted, if you do, you’ll be walking funny for a week. How is Bloom?”

His ears drooped. “She’s not...she’s not okay. Finding out we were cut off...I don’t know. She cried an awful lot and she kissed me. That was before she got drunk.”

Cereus was, despite himself, a bit of a hunk and probably - from a mare’s perspective - pretty kissable, but the image of Night Bloom trying to smooch him mid-way through a panic attack made me a little queasy.

“So she’s a hot mess and...how are you doing?”

He thought for several seconds, taking another mouthful of potatoes before he replied, “I...I don’t know. It’s really strange. I feel like I should be scared and everything, but for some reason I’m not. I mean, what’re they going to do to us that they haven’t already done? Sending Agent Bloom and me out all across Equestria, guarding that armor that nopony in their right mind would steal anyway? I know that’s the sort of job they give to ponies they’re trying to make quit the service. It doesn’t matter, though. For one tiny few weeks in my whole life, I’ve gotten to do something that means something.” He nodded towards the helmet still wrapped up like a package waiting for delivery. “Is...is that what I think it is?”

“Yes...and you’re to go straight back and find the nastiest, securest hole you can drop this in. We might need it again, so make sure we can get it back,” I answered and he took the helm in his hooves, peeling back a corner of the sheet so he could see the purple metal underneath before tucking it back in place. “A tip from a friend says, ‘don’t put it on’. Keep it away from Bloom if she manages to get drunk again.”

Closing his eyes, he let out a world weary sigh that sounded an awful lot more tired than I’d ever pictured him. “I...I’ll do my best, Detective. I’m never going to be in M6 after this. I might be arrested, too. I know that now. I just wish I could have done more with the time I had.”

“Don’t count yourself out, yet, Agent,” I replied, reaching across to pat him on the shoulder. “You and Night Bloom are decent ponies and, if we can stop whatever is going on in this city, it’ll be a mark towards maybe having lives after all is said and done. I don’t want to die or get locked up any more than you do.”

“You think we could actually be okay?”

“I give it fair odds we’ll all be dead before the day is out. I’m doing my best not to let it bother me. Either way, you take that helm and get out of here. The longer it’s in the city, the worse I’m going to feel.”

Cereus dropped his spoon into the mash potatoes with a wet plop and rested his hoof on top of the helm. “I...yes, Detective. I swear, it feels funny taking orders from you...”

I cocked one eyebrow. “Bad?”

“No, but...different,” he mumbled. “You give orders like a doctor telling a patient they’ve got a horrible disease and they’ll be dead soon.”

“Lately? It’s felt like that. There’s an awful lot of ponies putting their lives on the line so an awful lot more don’t die.”

“Please, take care, Detective. I...I don’t know what we’ll do if something happens to you. We’re alone out here.”

With that, Cereus gathered the helmet up in his forelegs, dropped a few bits on the table, and left me to my thoughts.

****

Miss Purity delivered my meal and I sat there, stuffing my muzzle for the next hour. The food was better than it had any right to be and the crowd seemed to detect that I wasn’t in the mood for friendly conversation. Whenever somepony looked like they might give me more than a quiet greeting, Purity gave them a look that’d have a dragon filling his trousers.

That image of the Don’s corpse splayed out in his chair wouldn’t stop replaying in my mind, but I just kept eating, bite after bite, like a robot. I swallowed my last mouthful as the first tears started running off the end of my muzzle. My vision blurred and I hunched forward, shaking from head to hoof.

There’s nothing sadder than a broken down old cop crying over a banana split.

****

Limerence, Taxi, and Swift were gathered around the living room table when I came back in. I must have looked like nine kinds of the pit, because my partner let out a little gasp and her wings half-flared.

“I know I look like death, kiddies,” I growled, trotting in and slumping at the table. “We’ve got a job.”

“A...a job?” Taxi asked, cautiously.

“I called Telly. Sykes needs us. The situation down at the Moonwalk has gone severely south.”

Limerence, who looked none the worse for wear after his little breakdown earlier, lifted his nose a little. “Gypsy mentioned that name earlier. Who is this... Sykes, Detective?”

“He’s a friend of mine with a propensity to get in over his head,” I groaned. “He’s down at the Moonwalk as we speak and apparently he’s got family in those tribes of knuckleheads bent on confirming some of the nastier stereotypes about griffins.”

“What association with our aims could this sidetrack possibly have?” he asked, with a skeptical frown.

“Not a damn clue. My talent is telling me there’s something down there we need to know.” I turned my driver. “Sweets, you getting anything on that magical brain radar of yours?”

Shutting her eyes, she nibbled at the end of her braid for a moment then shook her head. “I don’t think that’s how my talent works, Hardy. Still, I was listening to the radio while you were gone. Doesn’t it seem awfully convenient there’s a magical storm around Canterlot just when the griffins are having issues?”

“Convenient isn’t the word I’d have used,” I replied. “I doubt we want to try driving the Night Trotter through a magical storm and the only other way I know of getting to Canterlot that doesn’t involve air-travel, teleportation, or walking isn’t precisely reliable.”

“You mean The Bull?” Taxi asked.

“Yeah...”

“I had the thought that we might use him and I had that friend of mine in the Essy office call his handler. The Bull is nowhere near Detrot and won’t be for at least a couple of days while he grazes.”

“Well, that option is out, then. Alright, it was just a thought. We’ve got time, either way and if nothing else, Sykes has some friends in the griffin intelligence agencies who might give us a heads up on what’s going on around town. Didn’t Gypsy say this mess has something to do with the Shield organization?”

“I think she mentioned something like that, yes,” Limerence mused.

I pointed a hoof at him. “Then that’s your job while we go see what we can do for Sykes. Get any information you can on the Shield. While you’re at it, hunt down anything we can about the law firm and...maybe see if you can poke around your underworld contacts. Get whatever you can on these ‘Biters’ that Cyclone mentioned.”

“I...will do my best. My state of mind remains... unstable-”

“First, we’re going to sleep a few hours and try to come down before we start working. It’s not like our situation is going to improve by running ourselves ragged.”

****

For all I wanted to sleep, it wouldn’t come. I just laid there on my back, one hoof resting on the cord to my heart while the other laid across my revolver. It wasn’t loaded, but I wasn’t about to sleep without it. Who knew how far this ‘Scry’ could be followed if I didn’t have my gun on me?

Maybe I’d led our enemies straight to the Don when I’d left my weapon in the car that first day. Was it a month ago? No, just a little over a week.

Granted, if I’d done that, why didn’t they wait for us at the Archive? If they knew we were coming, why not slaughter us in the street along with the Archivists?

It was a decent question, but I do my best not to let my paranoia get the best of me. I fail more or less continuously, but paranoid ponies live longer. And I’m probably going to live until the sun goes out.

****

I felt bad leaving Limerence to his research, but it was what he did, and he wasn’t in any condition to leave the Nest. I probably wasn’t either, but the alternative was another breakdown and I’d had quite enough of those. I’ve got to keep busy or everything goes to pot.

The evening air was warm and muggy, but the rain had slackened and the sky was a little clearer. I could even see a few stars, dancing at the edge of the horizon.

Listening to the engine growling, I glanced at the calendar Taxi kept taped to the back of the Night Trotter’s seat. Even though I was her only regular passenger, she did like to keep up the pretense to being a cabbie. I guess it gave her a sense of distance from the work.

It was a long drive to the Moonwalk and Uptown may as well have been a different city. Unlike much of the rest of the center of Detrot, there was only one ‘Uptown’ with a capital ‘u’.

Whereas the outskirts and projects were grimy pits and the suburbs like the Heights tended towards quietly ostentatious or gritty to the point they were only slightly better than the real crap-holes, Uptown was Detrot’s shining jewel. I doubt anypony really knows how much money mayor Snifter paid to make the twelve blocks surrounding Celestia St look good, but most of Detrot’s main strip could have been lifted straight out of Manehattan or Canterlot.

Majestic skyscrapers with clean windows and boxy, metal creations lit by spotlights stretched up to stroke the clouds. Ponies in all the most modern styles lined streets of asphalt so smooth you could ice-skate on it. Other cabs, though none with the howler under the hood that the Night Trotter had, lined the road in front of a theater so posh it didn’t even have a name. It was simply ‘The Theater’.

For all the poverty out in the real world, uptown Detrot was a skillful masquerade of elegance for the few visitors uninterested in vice or vainglory. It was only a few block’s length, but it contained more banks, spas, and five star restaurants than any other part of the city. It also, only incidentally, contained City Hall.

I hated anytime I was required to be near uptown with a bloody minded passion.

My teeth ground as cheerful tunes played from a nearby coffee shop and a stallion with a top-hat strolled with his top-shelf mistress down the avenue, noses high. In an alleyway between two buildings, three children crouched beside a garbage can. Usually the Uptown patrol would pick them up quick, but now and then a wiley foal from the projects could sneak in.

I watched as the couple strolled by and the little unicorn in the bunch - who looked like she’d barely gotten her cutie-mark - shut her eyes and concentrated. The stallion’s wallet lifted itself out of his back pocket and drifted into the alley.

I smiled to myself; she and her friends were going to eat well tonight. Served him right for thinking he was too rich for magic proofing on his wallet.

A nervous part of my brain was howling that the whole area reminded me of something. Granted, it was the sort of place they design in textbooks for aerial ambushes, but that wasn’t the worry tickling my nerves. Maybe it had something to do with my cutie-mark, which hadn’t stopped fizzing since that call from Telly.

The Moonwalk loomed up ahead.

****

Where the High Step was a gaudy mess designed to appeal to the vacationing upper-middle class with more money than sense, The Moonwalk was built to appeal only to the truly rich. What separates a rich person from a person with a bit more money than average is one single characteristic; a desire for quiet.

The truly rich - which is to say those who make and then keep their money - rarely live lives of great extravagance. More often, they spend their wealth on finding ways to make life easier, calmer, and simpler in the times when they aren’t out making more money. The Moonwalk was the embodiment of that ideal. Yes, it was big, but it had none of the gloss and tinsel of the tourist hotels.

From the outside, it looked more like a good sized office block. The floor to ceiling windows stretched up a solid ten floors, tinted black, suggesting permanence and control of the situation, whatever the situation might be. The only concession to style was the roundabout leading up to the front door, which was paved in cobblestone. Were it not for the three red-capped porters and a stiffly starched attendant standing beside a valet desk out front one might never know the place was a hotel. Whatever was going on inside, the Moonwalk was presenting its best face.

Taxi pulled in with her usual exuberance when she’s sure she can offend some uptight toff, which is to say at three or four times the speed-limit, braking hard enough to leave a four meter patch of rubber on the sidewalk, and ending up with one wheel straddling the curb. If her suspension had been anything but off an alchemist’s shelf, we’d have snapped an axle. As it was, Swift and I had to drag ourselves out of the hoofwell as the attendant scowled at us, disapprovingly.

“Sweets, one of these days you’re going to find something faster than you are on four tires,” I grumbled. “What are you going to do then?”

She shrugged and pulled herself from behind the driver’s seat. “I dunno. That’s what rocket launchers are for. What do you think Sykes wants?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied, shutting the car door and looking up at the Moonwalk. “I’m assuming he needs somepony independent, who these griffins won’t see as either a member of the Detrot constabulary or working for the other tribe. The sad thing is I know almost nothing about griffin culture. What I do know says that where their inter-tribal politics are concerned, these birds don’t play nice with others.”

I would swear to the existence of cosmic irony, because at that moment the sound of shattering glass reached my ears. I looked up to see the quickly descending shadow of a giant bird of prey heading in for a landing squarely on my face.

Act 2, Chapter 46: I'm Drunk, and Don't Call Me Shirley

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 46
I'm Drunk, And Don't Call Me Shirley.

The image many ponies have of griffins is that of huge bloodthirsty beasts who love fighting one another almost as much as they love fighting other species, barely kept in check by a vague and convenient code of personal honor. While this is a recommended assumption from a standpoint of personal safety, it is a massive oversimplification, and does a disservice to the diversity that can be found between griffin tribes.

Some griffins have actually forsaken violence altogether, at least theoretically; the ascetic Daiji tribe of the northern mountains attempts to live a more contemplative, spiritual life. Granted, this is relative, so from a functional standpoint this typically means that they will count to ten before they claw out your pancreas, but the development of Birdhism is an interesting cultural direction for griffinkind. Ironically, some of them are even better fighters than a lot of their more warlike kin, having mastered a martial art they call kung pao.

The somewhat more civilized Poulet tribe, which exists mainly on the south border of Fancì, set aside their spears after a few disastrously chosen wars nearly wiped them out, but their reputation for fierce pride and competition didn't fade in the slightest. They simply began applying it to everything except battle. They will challenge anyone and anything to races, bake-offs, goof-offs, deep woods-offs and on-offs; they have record holders in the fields of Competitive Snuggling and Competitive Rationalization, and are the only group to compete in the 100-meter Stroke, in which a griffin who has a cerebrovascular event tries to make it that distance in the shortest time possible before collapsing. It should be noted that the record holder is currently in dispute; litigation is still pending on whether or not this distance can be traversed vertically.

This only touches on the more obscure communities formed by these avian-mammalian hybrids; the average Equestrian is rarely going to come in contact with these. When they do…

-The Scholar

Why did I think this was going to be a calmer endeavor than rooting out Astral Skylark?

****

The glass rained down around us as Taxi and I took cover in the car. A second later, a massive body crashed onto the concrete, snarling like a lion as it swept in a circle, back legs braced for flight and economy-sized wings outspread.

I found myself sharing the gaze of a griffin war-maker.

Until that moment, Sykes was the biggest griffin I’d ever seen. The creature I faced made him look like a cockatiel hopped up on steroids. His pelt was the color of autumn leaves on a bed of corpses and he wore a combat vest with more pockets than a tinker’s coat over top of a plaid kilt that stretched to his back ankles. A gigantic blade was slung across his back from which dangled a dozen feathers wrapped in what looked an awful lot like leather.

His gaze flickered in our direction for a moment as he prepared to take to the skies again, but something made him pause. He turned to the car and squinted down at me as I crouched low behind the window, gnawing on my gun bit. I didn’t remember picking it up.

Taking a couple of steps closer, he shook a bit of glass out of his mane of white feathers and turned his head to one side, studying me out of one of those piercing blue eyes like a specimen under glass. I swallowed as what I took for a smile spread across his avian features.

“Aye! Aye, boyo! Be ye the cobber what ol’ Sykes say comin’ down?”

It took me a worrying amount of time after he spoke to find my tongue. You try talking to a flying predator with a knife that could split you in two. Even so, I had to swallow a few times around a gorge that felt like a baseball.

Rolling down the window, I cautiously poked my head out and looked up. Several heads were peering out of a shattered window on the top floor. The front door attendant, with a put-upon look on his face, was grabbing a broom and dust-pan out from behind his kiosk and directing his porters to start clearing the glass off of the sidewalk.

“Uh...you know Sykes?”

“Heh! Oi kin the sniveling peacock well enough! He be me brudder!”

I mentally translated that, but it took a moment. Brother. Sykes’ brother.

“He asked me to come down here and see if I could help with whatever is going on,” I replied, warily opening the car door and stepping out.

“Aye, me boyo! Oi were havin’ me a dust-up wi’ the lads! Come along when ye ready! Them be let’ ye in,” he answered, waving towards the attendant who gave him a perfunctory nod. Spreading his immense wings, Sykes’ brother took off with a downdraft so strong it almost took me off my hooves, blasting up into the evening sky. I watched him circle higher until he performed a neat tuck and roll, vanishing into the shattered window.

A griffin of few words, thank the heavens.

I gulped a breath, then another, and eased up onto the curb. I’d met a fair few strange beasts in my time and known more than a few griffins. Night Bloom and her fangs were one thing. Stella was about as threatening as a pussy-cat, once you got to know him.

There was just something about a creature that big who is only civilized in the loosest sense of the word. Sykes’ brother looked awfully at ease in that kilt and bullet proof vest. He didn’t even seem to notice the weight of the axe.

What was that he said about a dust up?

“Sir, are we sure this is safe?” Swift whispered from beside me. I jerked, stumbled over my own hooves and fell onto my side. My partner rushed to help me up.

“Eesh, kid. Way to scare a guy.”

“Sorry, Sir. I had to sneak out of the other side of the car so I could get a bead on him,” she replied, raising Masamane a little.

“Right. As to safe? This is almost certainly not safe. Still, we’ve got enough hardware between us to take on a small army, griffins or not, and these guys won’t ask us to leave our weapons behind. Speaking of hardware, did you manage to prime that thing we got from the Archive?”

“I...um…” She looked sideways at the Hailstorm and sighed. “I have no idea. I flew around as fast as I could earlier and it made some whirring noises, then I started seeing funny lights. I’m still seeing funny lights.”

“What sort of ‘funny lights’?” Taxi asked, coming around the car to peer at the strange weapon draped across Swift’s back. A tiny glass window on the side of one the boxy, saddle-bag looking things seemed to have some sort of moving clockwork behind it and, buried in amongst the mechanism, there was a softly glowing crystal.

Swift‘s gaze nervously darted back and forth, then her eyes went out of focus as she peered at something only she could see. “I don’t know. It’s a lot of scrolling text that looks like runes and there’s...uh...weird. I just realized I don’t have a trigger or anything to fire it.”

I poked at the gun with one toe and it let out a series of clicks that sounded almost indignant. “I did mean to ask about that. Can you make heads or tails of what the lights might be for?”

Swift’s ears laid back against her head as she turned to look at me. “Um...yes. I’m pretty sure…" She trailed off for a moment. "...Oh, Sir, I don’t know if I should say this.” Her eyes were centered on a spot just above my eyebrows. As I watched, the protrusions I had come to think of as the weapon’s barrels twitched on hidden joints a few centimeters until they were both centered squarely on my face.

“There’s a targeting reticule on my forehead, isn’t there?”

She nodded, guiltily.

“Right. So, we’ve got a wartime weapon of unknown capacity, sans manual, without any knowledge of how to fire it. If that weren’t bad enough, it appears to be acquiring targets,” Taxi grumbled, going around to the Night Trotter’s trunk and popping it open. Swift followed her with her eyes and I got the distinct impression she wasn’t just watching my driver’s pretty flank. “Hardy, are you sure you don’t want to leave that insane thing here, at least until we can figure out how it works?”

“I would, desperately,” I replied, joining Taxi by the boot. I turned sideways so she could fit the chromed shotgun I’d confiscated from the Cyclones into my gun harness, then turned to help her with the P.E.A.C.E. cannon. “That said, I’m not going to. We might need collateral damage and having it is going to be better than not having it. Swift, you better think gentle, sweet-hearted thoughts while we’re in here.”

Swift’s nose wrinkled. “Why is that, Sir?”

“I remember hearing a few rumors of magical weapons developed during the war that fired on mental command.”

“Sir, why’d you have to tell me that?! Now I’m going to be trying not to think all the synonyms I know for the word ‘fire’!”

I grinned and stepped away from the ends of the Hailstorm’s barrels. They followed me for a good thirty degrees of rotation. “How hard could that be?”

She huffed and moved towards the hotel. “I’m a writer, Sir. I know lots!”

Rolling my eyes, I glanced at the attendant who was carefully plucking bits of glass out of the cobblestones, depositing them in a garbage bag held up by one of his porters.

“Good morning! You mind if I ask you a couple of questions?” I called.

He didn’t even pause or look up as he gathered bits of the shattered window from the street. “Detective Hard Boiled, unless you can get those insane creatures out of the top floor of this hotel, I doubt there are any questions you could ask me that I’d be happy to answer,” he growled.

“You know who I am?” I asked, examining the unicorn a little more closely. His mane and tail shimmered slightly as he moved, morphing from an off white to something a bit more grey. Probably an enchantment to make him look inoffensive and professional. For all I knew, he might have been a color worse than Swift, but no amount of magic could disguise the lines around his mouth that formed a permanent sneer.

“Your face is a news item, Detective. That I am not calling the police right now is a measure of how exhausted I am and how little interest I have in creating more havoc for myself. That and one of those beasts invited you in,” he replied, gesturing towards the door with a flick of his horn. “We value the discretion and privacy of our guests...so go about your business and be gone.”

All that starch and not an ounce of courtesy. I don’t know what I expect every time I deal with the upper classes. Celestia might have gone out of her way to remind them they’re still just ponies, but Detrot is a long way from Canterlot.

Stepping back, I reached up to my collar and flicked a stray piece of glass in his direction before starting up the short staircase to the darkened, glass door into the foyer. One of the porters quickly lit her horn and pulled it open, letting out a rush of altogether unwelcome scents; gun oil, sweat, and cooking meat.

“Remind me again, Swift...why are we doing all this?” I asked as my partner trotted up to my side, sniffing at the air.

“I don’t know, Sir. I’m pretty sure it’s just so ponies will say nice stuff about us after we die,” she replied, glibly. “Something in there smells wonderful. I think it might be...oooh...chicken!”

She darted forward into the lobby with Taxi and me in tow.

****

The lobby of the Moonwalk was what I think they call ‘sumptuous’, if your idea of luxury is lots of space and quiet. In fact, it was quiet in a way you usually only find in caves. The instant we crossed the doorway, my hoofsteps were muffled by a carpet you could have used for a mattress.

Sumptuous it might have been, but it also seemed to have acquired something of the character of an armed camp. Sitting in a pair of straight-backed chairs with a chess-set between them, two huge griffins were coming to the mid-point of an especially vicious bout. They were smoking something foul out of corncob pipes in defiance of a very clearly posted ‘no-smoking’ sign and making eyes at a comely mare wearing the armor of a P.A.C.T. trooper sitting at one of the nearby tables. She, in turn, was watching the two of them with a sort of cool menace, cleaning her already spotless fire-arm. Each griffin had one of those crazy halberd looking things that Sykes’ brother had with him close to their sides, within easy reach, and the trooper’s rifle looked like it could punch a hole in time.

A lone colt with too much product in his mane and a suit that fit him almost exactly wrong was peering over the Moonwalk’s customer service desk, watching all of them with a look of worry on his pasty, purple face.

The three warriors looked up as we came in, took in my friends and our armaments, and casually moved their claws and hooves closer to their own weaponry, but other than that they ignored us and went back to their various activities.

Swift was already inspecting a tray of griffin delicacies laid out on a short dinner service over by where the two war-makers were playing their game. They eyed her up and down as she loaded a plate with something I thought might be chopped liver and other bits of unidentifiable meat.

“Kid, come on...you can’t do this every time we go into a place that has a buffet,” I said.

She stuffed a roasted morsel into her muzzle. “Jusht caush joo can’t eat meat doeshn’t mean I should have to shtop. Beshides...you need shome breakfasht.”

“Give me a wall-socket and some bagels and I’m happy. I’m convinced you’ve got a black hole in your gut,” I replied, with a smirk, then picked up my own plate and began loading it with the few vegetarian options. “We need to go find Sykes and figure out what’s going on around here.”

I heard low voices and looked around to find Taxi chatting with the two griffins, casual as you please. They were giving her cannon lusty looks.

Cocking an ear, I tried to listen in as I chowed down on a thin-cut of iceberg lettuce topped with tapioca. It was disgusting, but it was food. Unfortunately, something about the shape of the space seemed designed to keep sound from carrying. Leaving Taxi to her interrogation and Swift to her meal, I headed for the service desk.

As I approached, the stallion behind the counter perked up. “Welcome to the Moonwalk! How can I help you? I’m afraid we’re currently booked for rooms, but I can recommend an excellent hotel just a block from here that-”

I held up my hoof and he trailed off.

“We’re here about the situation with the griffins. A friend of mine called me in, name of ‘Sykes’. You know him?” I asked, curtly.

A look of relief spilled over his high cheeked face. Something about him reminded me a little bit of a ferret, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what. “Oh bless the sun! You could not have gotten here at a better time! I would swear, our cleaning staff has been working for forty hours straight and the room-service crew is demanding hazard pay!”

“Yeah, the guy outside seemed like he’d just been told to eat a muzzle-full of that glass. What’s his deal?”

“Oh damn, did they break another one?” he groaned, then glanced towards the pair playing chess and lowered his voice. “Those griffins have been systematically disassembling this hotel! Our insurance policy is only good for forty thousand more bits this quarter and I dread to think what the mayor will say when he gets our bill.”

“Another one? You mean that wasn’t the first window?”

“Heavens, no. That would be four in the last two weeks. They’ve been here for almost two months and the local glass sellers are making an absolute fortune!”

“I take it nopony suggested bullet proof glass?”

“Bullet proof the entire building? I...I suppose if things keep up like this, we might have to! They fight, they destroy rooms, they eat things you would not believe-”

I stopped him and gestured over my shoulder. He glanced at my partner, who was happily tearing apart a chicken-wing and his jaw fell open.

“Trust me, I’m used to difficult housemates,” I said. “What is the P.A.C.T. doing here? I was under the impression this was some kind of diplomatic issue. ”

“A...duh…”

Reaching across the counter, I grabbed his chin and turned his eyes back to mine. “Focus. You want the griffins handled, you answer my questions. What is the deal with the P.A.C.T.?”

“I-I d-don’t know exactly,” he stammered, forcing himself not to look at Swift. “They’re here to keep track of the griffins and stop them from killing each other, for whatever that's worth. They’ve got a whole floor to themselves in all of the surrounding buildings, plus the bottom three here...but they haven’t been stopping anypony from coming or going. There’s also some worry about smuggling, but the top several floors are classed as an embassy, so they don’t have any jurisdiction.”

Smuggling? At an embassy? That stank of ‘regional security’. ‘Regional security’ is the excuse most frequently used to cover up law-breaking by those in power in Detrot. It’s been, for years, a bit of boldface on the long list of reasons being a cop in a town with a psuedo-militarized arm of law dedicated to policing mega-fauna is hard. Somepony in one of the city power structures needs you to stop sniffing around, they can happily just declare it a ‘regional security’ matter, drop a few names, and make everything go away. Granted, I wasn’t a cop anymore.

That the P.A.C.T. weren’t stopping anypony from entering or leaving struck me as pretty damn strange. If there was a genuine threat of violence, why not cordon off the block? It was the sort of situation that set my cutie-mark humming.

“Where is Sykes?” I asked, finally.

“If you mean the griffin police liaison, I believe he’s probably in the bar.” The clerk pointed towards a slightly wider hallway behind the counter. “I am afraid he’s been drunk for approximately three days. If only the rest of the griffins drank so quietly as that one.”

“Sykes? Drinking quietly? That’s… worrying. Alright, thanks for your time.”

As I stepped back, he reached out and caught my coat. “Sir, I noticed you are all heavily armed. I would not ask you to leave your weapons, as it would probably be similar to asking one of those griffins to abandon theirs, but I would ask you to at least consider the safety of the staff. Please, be careful...and polite.”

“Hey, polite is my middle name!” I laughed, but inside I was worried. How come it didn’t feel like I had enough guns?

Leaving the counter, I approached Taxi and her new griffin friends. They seemed to be having a grand-old time, laughing uproariously at some joke my driver told.

“Sweets? We good to go?”

“Hardy!” she chuckled, pounding one of the griffins on the back with one leg. “I was just conversing with my Hitlan friends here. You gents will have to excuse me.”

The bigger of the two who was wearing an eye-patch and had enough facial scars that it was hard to tell what his face might originally have looked like gave her a little stroke down the middle of the back. Instead of breaking his head, she giggled like a filly.

“Aye, lassy! Ye find yerself wantin’ fer company, ye come up around room six-oh-six! We have a right hooley!” he said, with a wink that managed to be a bit dirty.

“Oh, boys! I might just. My friend and I have some business first. Thanks for giving me the low-down, though. Come along, Hardy!”

Taxi took me gently by one leg and guided me towards the hallway. As we passed Swift, Taxi grabbed her tail in her teeth. My partner squeaked and dropped her plate back on the buffet.

“What’s the deal, Sweets?” I whispered once she’d hauled us into the hallway leading to the bar.

“The deal is bad, Hardy,” she hissed, hefting her cannon up on her shoulders. “Those were Hitlan. Same with that big fella we met out front. These griffins are itching for a fight, either with the P.A.C.T. or with each other.”

“That meshes with what the clerk told me. They’ve apparently been breaking windows-”

“That’s normal griffin behavior,” she replied. “It’s not that. Apparently, someone assaulted the Hitlan chieftan’s son and stole something. He didn’t see his attacker, but both tribes locked off their ends of the hotel and aren’t allowing any members of the other tribe to move back and forth. The P.A.C.T. is hovering over the whole mess, but nopony seems to know exactly why.”

“Yikes. I hope Sykes knows something. I don’t want to interrogate a bunch of unfriendly griffins.”

“Sir, speaking of him...where is he?” Swift asked. “Shouldn’t he have met us?”

“Telly should have let him know we were coming. He’s in the hotel bar,” I grunted, pulling my collar up and shifting my trigger bit a little closer to my leg.

****

Like everything else in The Moonwalk, the bar was a caricature of old Canterlot, with lots of wood paneling, tall ceilings, and gold furnishing. There were no less than three Equestrian bartenders behind the bar, all in sharp black vests, waiting for a crowd that hadn’t shown up and probably wouldn’t. That tension I’d felt since we first entered the hotel was still building along with a genuinely unpleasant burn in both flanks.

The bartenders paused as I trotted through the arch followed by my partner and driver, sizing each up for tip-sharing potential and deciding we weren’t worth the trouble. They went back to cleaning their glasses.

At the bar, I gave them one of my best four alarm smiles and tugged my coat back from my gun, showing off a heavily laden bit-purse dangling from it. Turning to peer at the seemingly empty bar, I leaned against the counter and jangled my coins.

The bar-pony nearest, a mare with razor-thin lips and too much mascara, scooted over quick as she could and set three glasses on the counter. “What can I get you, sir?”

“I will need drinks for my friends and some information. We’re looking for a griffin.”

“You can pretty well spit and you’ll hit a griffin at The Moonwalk, sir. I don’t recommend it, though. Was this a particular griffin you were looking for?” she asked, turning to the bar and snatching down a couple of bottles. She didn’t ask what we wanted, but instead poured a half-inch of scotch for me, rum for Taxi, and something fruity with a little umbrella in it for Swift. Rich tends to mean when you’re relaxing, you probably want somepony who can get you what you want before you know you want it.

“This particular griff goes by the name of Sykes. The clerk up front said he might be back here?”

“I don’t know these birds by name, I’m afraid,” she replied, laying our drinks in front of us. I rooted around in my bag and came up with a hoof-full of bits, probably five times what the booze cost, dropping them one at a time on the counter. Her smile widened. “Of course, if you were to provide me with a description of this griffin, it might jog my memory.”

“This one is the police liaison with the griffins. Charming fellow, accent you could cut with a knife. He’s probably drunk as a whole bunch of skunks.”

Her smile vanished. “Oh...him.” She pointed towards the back of the bar, where there was a set of upholstered booths. “Yeah, he’s over there. If he’s puked again, lemme know. He’s paying enough for that seat that I don’t mind mopping up.”

I couldn’t see anyone back there, but there were a few tables in the way. Taking our drinks, we edged around the tables towards where she’d indicated.

Sykes was only visible as one rear claw sticking out from under a booth. Most of him was on the seat, although his head was down by our ankles. He wore a rumpled, badly stained business suit that stank of unwashed poultry. Fifteen empty beer-bottles were heaped on the table beside him and he was snoring like a train engine.

I took a sip of my drink, contemplating my drunken friend. It was almost worth what I’d paid for it. Good scotch is a rare and wonderful thing.

“I vote we take him in the back and do that thing his people like so much. What do they call it? Rotisserie?” Taxi mused, swirling her straw around in her rum.

“Don’t tempt me, Sweets. Rehabilitating Sykes after a three day bender is not my idea of a good time. Lets see if we can get the staff to lend us a wheelbarrow and find out which room is his. Go through his pockets-”

“You go through his pockets! He stinks!” she snapped.

I reached forward, then hesitated and stepped back as the full smell hit me.

“Swift, go through his pockets and find his room key.”

My partner gave me a look like a kitten that’d been put in a blender, watching a toe hover over the ‘on’ button.

“Sir? Why do I have to do it?”

“I’m a detective. You’re a scrub. You dig through the smelly griffin’s pockets.”

“You can’t pull rank-”

“I know where you keep your braised pheasant hidden and Goofball doesn’t. Unless you want him to find out, you’ll do this for us.”

“Sir, I am so going to make you pay for this…”

“I’m sure.”

****

As it turned out, the hotel did have a wheelbarrow; one that was as spotless as the rest of the place, with a chromed wheel and cherry-wood handles.

The bartender helped us dump my friend into the dolly, emptied Sykes’ wallet, and tossed in a bucket for free. He was going to need the bucket as soon as he came to.

Wheeling him back down the hallway, we came back through the lobby and asked the desk clerk where the great lush was staying. He directed us to a room on the fourth floor. That floor was apparently operating as a sort of neutral zone between the two tribes of griffins as well as a place for the few unaligned individuals to stay.

Taxi led the party, with Swift at the back as we rolled down the hall. I was, of course, stuck hauling the body. My partner was still sulking over being made to root through a drunk’s pockets and my driver couldn’t be bothered.

We met nopony on the way and most of the floor was empty, although I could hear some kind of griffin dance music coming through what were supposed to be sound-proofed walls about twelve doors down.

Like everything else, Sykes’ room looked like it hadn’t been slept in. Nothing in The Moonwalk could be called cheap, but the city put my friend up in the closest thing that existed. It was still about two steps above my old apartment, but the telly didn’t work and the air conditioner was set permanently to ‘Crystal Empire’, so it was either sweltering if you left it off or snowing inside if you decided to run it.

I turned it on full bore and wheeled Sykes into the bathroom, dumping him face first into the shower like a reeking ragdoll. Turning on the water ice cold, I slammed the shower stall shut and waited.

Five minutes later, the screeching started.

****

Contrary to popular myth, cold water, coffee, and the hair of the dog won’t actually sober you up, nor save you from hang-over.

There is one cure I’m aware that operates alongside copious amounts of water and it’s one you only learn from your griffin friends. Therefore, I sent Swift on the only mission I could have for which she’d have been pleased to go just then; I told her to go find a carnivore shop and buy me some bacon.

Sykes taught me the supposedly magical properties of bacon some years back, but couldn’t convince me to try it. I’m no meat eater and felt no particular need to spend more time puking my guts up just to be rid of a hangover.

It did leave the question of who was going to cook it. Thankfully, my partner volunteered and soon the tiny room was full of the scent of searing meat. It was enough to turn your stomach.

****

Sykes sat up in his bed, an ice-pack across the back of his neck and his second bacon sandwich on a plate on his breast.

We’d managed to strip him out of the disgusting suit and left it bundled up in the hall for room-service. The shower did wonders for the stink, particularly after I tossed in the soap and told him he couldn’t come out until he smelled like a floral arrangement. That left the headache.

“Oi me, boyo. Could ye have woken a mate kinder?” Sykes whimpered, before tearing off another bite of his pork sandwich. Swift had her own that she was cheerfully devouring and I’d insisted she at least cook up some breakfast pastries for Taxi and me.

“Sorry, dear. Did you need me to get you some warm towels and possibly rub your talons, too?” I quipped, flicking a crumb at his beak.

“How’d ye know oi were down here?” he asked, scratching at his neck feathers as he nestled down in the bed’s thick covers.

“You called me. More accurately, you called Telly and told her to find me. That led, through a series of extremely roundabout circumstances, to me calling her and driving down to what feels an awful lot like a no-pony’s land between two armies to find your drunk kiester slumped at the bar. Are you telling me you don’t remember calling Telly?”

Sykes swept a claw over his body as though it somehow explained something. “Oi been’ tanked a fortnight! Moi brain feels loike Celestia took a shite in it! Oi can’t remember half what Oi done today, much less what ye says Oi done last eve!” Wincing at the sound of his own voice, he pushed his icepack a little more firmly against his neck.

My patience, never one of my great virtues, was at an all time low.

“My talent says something in this building is rotten,” I growled, poking him in the side. “I need to know what is going on here and you’re the police liaison. That means you damn well liase or I’ll have room-service deliver me a pair cymbals and see how they agree with your headache!”

He tried to give me puppy dog eyes, but while Swift can pull it off nicely, Sykes was too big, too old, and too hung-over.

“Aye, ‘ave mercy!” he moaned. “Oi ain’t been roight since Oi hear ye gone off t’foight that Cosmo bloke. Croiyd moi eyes out fer three days, after they say ye die! Then Oi hear ye back and me kin all in town and...then Miss Jade, she call me and say ‘Get ye tail to The Moonwalk’ and how Oi’m suddenly the closest this city has to a griffin ambassador!”

The words tumbled out in a rush and I even saw a few tears trickle down Sykes’ cheeks. He covered his beak with a claw and took a moment to compose himself.

My driver, with more compassion than I thought she had for the big bird, laid a hoof over his talon and gently pulled the sandwich away, then offered him a glass of water from the tap. He took it, gratefully, and gulped the entire contents in one swallow.

“Why don’t you take it slow, and tell us from the beginning. These two tribes have been in town almost two months now. What brought them here and why are they only having problems now?” she asked.

“Sister Shine, ye’ don’t even know, do ye? These be the highland troibes, come down from their plateaus. They be what guarded Detrot’s early days! They...be the greatest war-bands this world ever has seen. These be Hitlan... the Claw, and Tokan... the Blood.”

His eyes flashed with more life than I’d seen in months as he described the two tribes, but after a moment, his expression fell. “And...these great warriors, moi kin, are driven to leave their ‘omes by dragons.”

“Dragons?” Swift asked. “Don’t the treaties with the dragons protect the griffin homelands, too?”

Sykes snorted. “Pony treaties protect griffins? The tribe lords be havin’ none of it! They be proud!”

“And...yet, they’re here,” I murmured.

“Aye, boyo...and yet here they be, crawling on bent knees to the door of Celestia’s land for protection...”

We all sat, contemplating that for a few seconds.

“That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, if...if the griffins could fight off the dragons during the Crusades, why couldn’t they fight them in their own home?” Swift asked.

Sykes shut his eyes, tightly. “Because, little birdy, ye must un’erstand. In those days, we be strong. Our eggs be strong. But...the tribes suffered during the war. Suffered more than any other race. More griffins died than dragons and ponies together. There be few left...and the Egg is weak.”

“The Egg...that’s the royal blood-line, right?” Taxi asked.

His beak clicked in a griffin version of a chuckle. “Aye, that it be. Chief Jade calls Oi, sends me down here a week ago to this here hotel. Moi brudder - a foiner griffin there never will be - he be the son of the tribe. He be the Egg. The Chief figures, somehow Oi has his ear or summat loike that.”

“Your...brother is griffin royalty?” I scoffed. “What does that make you?”

“A crazy turkey’s brudder, boyo,” he laughed, although there was an edge to it. “Grimble Shanks be his name and more power to ‘im. Oi want nothin’ to do with politics. Moi home is here, not some stinkin’ plateaus.”

Dragging a padded chair from the table over to the bed, I lifted myself up into it and crossed my forelegs.

“Alright, so...fill me in. We’ve got two tribes of griffins who’ve been chased out-”

“They weren’t ‘chased out’, exactly,” Sykes interrupted, flicking the tips of his wings as though trying to shake dust off of them. “The war-makers - most of them - be back at they posts, in the plateaus, foightin’ the dragons. These what came be the old, the sick, the leader’s children, and the young. Grimble Shanks leads them, because he be the Egg. He brings the great treasures, that no dragon moight add them to a hoard.”

“I...I think I get it,” I replied. “Your parents sent your brother, the weak, and the treasury out here to be safe from the dragons. That makes sense. So, your brother is leading the Hitlan. What about the Tokan?”

Sykes let out a breathy sigh. “Moi aunt, Derida leads ‘em. Her daughter is their Egg, but she’s crazier than a manticore wi’ an arse full of pepper-spray. They be hopin’ fer another child.”

I felt a twinge of worry.

“This...crazy daughter wouldn’t happen to live in Detrot as well, would she?”

“Aye, that she does. Oi ‘aven’t seen her comin’ or goin’, but ye can bet she’s somewhere waitin’ to make a hash of things,” he replied.

Swift dropped her sandwich on the carpet Taxi’s eyes widened. “Hardy, you don’t think-”

I shook my head and asked, “Her name wouldn’t happen to be Edina, would it?”

Sykes gave me a perplexed look. “Now, ‘ow do ye know that?”

Sweeping crumbs off the bed, I got out of my chair and opened the mini-bar under the counter. It was stocked with everything a drunk on an expense account could wish for. I quickly shelled open one of the little bottles of scotch and tipped it back.

“We’ve run into her. She has a very persuasive way about her with those whips,” I remarked, wiping a drip of alcohol off my chin with the back of one foreleg.

Sykes shrugged, then cringed and pressed a claw against his head as his hangover re-asserted itself. “Oi wouldn’t know. Oi ain't seen the Tokan out of their end of this ‘otel in a week. Not since me brudder was attacked. He’s fine, loike ye see, but...he thinks they stole ‘is blood.”

“His blood?” Swift asked, incredulous.

“Aye. It’d be funny, if it ain’t so deadly serious. He goes to have a slash one night behind the hotel, somepony brains him with a blackjack when he’s got his kilt all up around his backside, and he comes to wi’ not a cent on him and needles in his arse.”

I settled back on my chair. “Sounds more like he got drunk, pissed in an alley, and somepony mugged him, then some kids came by and stuck loose Ace needles in his rump. It’s happened to enough visitors to this city. That doesn’t explain what’s been going on the last few days that’s got you laying in the bar up to your beak in booze and placing calls you can’t remember to old friends.”

Sykes put his claw on his forehead. “Ach...this be one of them bastard ‘cul-tur-al’ shites Oi can’t explain roightly, boyo. See, griffins don’ play at blood. Blood is how ye pay yer way. The Tokan make their magic of blood. Stealin’ me brudder’s blood is like stealin’ his strength. Worse, it’s stealin’ his soul.”

My throat clenched at the mention of soul stealing; related or not, it rang a particularly nasty bell and a cold sweat broke out on my forehead.

“So...the Tokan are blood mages?” Taxi asked, raising one eyebrow. “Isn’t that like, nine kinds of illegal?”

“They be the keepers of the Blood, and illegal for ponies means nothing much for griffins, love. Loike Oi say.”

“I’m afraid there’s something I’m missing,” I said. “You make it sound like they’re some kind of...bank or something.”

“Aye! That’s the word. Bankers of blood, they be. They keep record of who owe what blood debt to who...and now, they’re holed up with all them records.”

“Blood debts are titles to revenge, right? Are you telling me these guys trade in personal revenge?” Taxi asked.

“Vengeance be the griffin way. Ye want to foight a griffin, by griffin law, ye must have blood to trade, either to his family if ye kill him or to him if ye fail. Now, the Tokan won’t open the books, the tribes be down to what blood they have. Blood of the Egg is the most valuable...”

“And...someone just stole the Hitlan Egg’s blood. I’m starting to see the shape of things here. Lemme guess. The Hitlan think that someone is setting up for a coup of some kind and wants to make it legitimate by being able to present adequate payment for the death of the Hitlan leader, right?”

“Ye got it, boyo. It don’t matter how they got it, neither. If me brudder can’t protect his blood and his life, he’s not worthy of bein’ the Egg, see?”

I set my drink on the end table and made a noncommittal sound that was a bit like the noise one makes when they finally comprehend a complex problem. I didn’t understand, but better to sound like you do and ask a question that matters.

Griffin politics. Sweet mercy. Equine politics mystify me enough as it is, but the politics of a species that eats meat and considers bleeding someone dry as more than a metaphorical term for collecting payment were completely opaque. That said, his explanation made a sort of twisted sense.

“What happens if your father dies, but your brother lives? How would the succession work?” I asked.

“If father is dead, the blood of the Egg can be presented to dishonor the tribe before the council of clans and claim roights of succession. The tribe’s eggs and treasury are given to other clans and the members can join family in other tribes, or leave the plateaus. Since the Tokan keep the books of Blood, the only reason Oi can think of to close them would be helping someone position themselves to take the crown. They would not have it known from where the knoife comes. Maybe an ally. Maybe another tribe. Either way, there be killin’ comin’. Tokan stand no chance against Hitlan in a straight foight. They’d be butchered.”

“So, what did your drunken mind call me down here for?” I asked. “If shooting breaks out, I don’t think Swift, Taxi, or I are equipped to take on a griffin war-band. Well, Swift might be, but we haven’t had time to test that insane thing on her back. Either way, we’re not any more qualified to guard your brother than anyone else.”

Sykes sank down in the covers a little, resting his head on the bed’s headboard.

“Boyo...Oi don’t know what me drunk self was thinking, but Oi need an ‘inde-pen-dent’ party. Tokan and Hitlan sees me as a cop. Oi can’t talk ‘em down and Oi can’t find me brudder’s blood...but Oi gots an idea.” Reaching out, he laid his claw on my shoulder. “If ye know Edina...if ye can make’er listen and the two Eggs appoint ye as judge to the tribes, ye can go where ye will an’ be safe. Oi will vouch fer ye to me brudder. Find who would dissolve the tribe and kill me father. Oi can’t be sure, but...me brudder seems like he’s gearing up to do somet’in mad if nothing changes.”

****

“Hardy, I’m feeling an awful lot like we should leave right now. My talent is howling,” Taxi said, quietly retrieving a flask from her saddlebag and passing it to me as we sat in the hallway outside Sykes’ room.

“And mine is screaming ‘stay or something bad happens’,” I replied, taking a belt from the flask and passing it on to Swift.

My partner nipped at the bottle, then leaned back against the wall. “Sir, I...I don’t know what to think. Do you think we could convince Mistress Edina to appoint you as a judge of the tribes?”

“I think I could do it, sure. I’ve got an idea for how I might, actually. It’ll just be a matter of finding the little demon.”

Swift raised and dropped her wings in a little shrug. “Miss Stella will know where she is, but the only person I know of who can control her might be Mistress Zeta.”

“Crazy is crazy, kid,” I answered, getting to my hooves. “I know crazy and Edina is not any flavor of crazy that I haven’t seen before. The nature of crazy is that it is highly predictable. She’s crazier than most and that means we just have to know which buttons to press. We need to find a phone and see if Stella can get us a line on her.”

****

“My dearly beloved Detective...where have you been?”

I didn’t know how they’d gotten together a phone line into Stella’s underwater cavern, but I could hear water dripping in the background as I stood in the lobby of the Moonwalk. The clerk behind the desk had given me a disapproving look when I asked him to dial the Vivarium, but he’d passed me the phone anyway.

The two griffins who’d been there before were still at their game of chess, which only looked to have advanced a couple of turns in the last hour or two. The P.A.C.T. trooper had been replaced by a fresh faced stallion who was also in the process of wiping down a positively sterile gun.

I cocked the phone under my chin and leaned it against my shoulder, turning so my lips couldn’t be read if somepony happened to be trying.

“Stella, I’m down at the Moonwalk. I’ve got a doozy of a situation down here,” I said.

“A situation involving griffins, I assume? We’ve already effectively taken over a half dozen local food banks and homeless shelters since you delivered the Church of the Lunar Passage to us. My lawyers will handle the rest.”

“Delivered them to you?”

“On a platter, Detective,” Stella crooned. “Their remaining leadership - what little there is of it - seem to be in a panic, but they appear to be attempting to handle the situation quietly, largely by emptying the accounts of the Church and leaving town. Our eyes at the local air-chariot field have reported no less than six ranking members of the Lunar Passage leaving for parts unknown in the last seven hours. We’ve had our investment broker purchase a controlling interest in the company that owns a majority of the local properties the Church holds. Should they, for any reason, fail to make payments we can take direct ownership and evict them. Or, alternatively, take over. Had I known employing a detective would prove so lucrative, I might have done it years ago.”

“I’m glad I could provide,” I said, dryly. “Still, I need help and this favor involves what you can provide for me.”

Stella hummed a little tune to himself, thinking. “Those highland griffins are very strange creatures. What I know of their culture leads me to imagine you are in over your head. How, then, did you find yourself at The Moonwalk?”

“A friend of mine who is a bit of an idiot has relatives in these two tribes. Sadly, he’s also the police liaison with them and neither one will talk to him. I suppose you’re aware you employ one of those highland griffins, yes?”

Stella hesitated for several seconds, then answered, “If...you’re referring to Edina, then yes, I was aware she was of the highland tribes. I’m also aware that, during your association with her, you cannot have failed to notice that she is somewhat unstable.”

“I did pick up on that. Did you know the little psycho is royalty?”

At that, there was a splash and an undignified squeak on the other end of the line. Scarlet, somewhere in the background, whimpered something that sounded like, ‘Please, watch your tail, Mistress!’

“Royalty, Detective? Do explain,” Stella said. It wasn’t quite a request.

“She’s the Tokan Egg. So far as I can tell, that means she’s next in the line of succession and they apparently put a fair bit of stock in that up here.”

“So...what am I to do with that information? Edina lives in Detrot for her own reasons and my employees are independent contractors. They rent space from me, but I can only order them so far and the insane ones not at all. For all I am aware, she and her family do not speak.”

“Yeah, but she’s got something I can use, regardless. Apparently if I can get the heirs to the heads of the two tribes to appoint me as some kind of judge, both groups have to let me investigate this situation. My friend thinks he can talk his brother into it. That leaves-”

“-Edina. I see. I take it you have a plan for convincing her?” Stella asked, sounding skeptical.

“Something like a plan, yes. Half a plan, maybe. Possibly thirty percent. Can you put Scarlet on the phone? I’m going to need his expertise.”

“I must ask...am I later going to dislike what I hear you doing with my employee, Detective?”

“Almost certainly. Put Scarlet on.”

There was some shuffling and the sound of moving water, before an effeminate stallion’s voice came down the line.

“Detective? What can I do for you?”

“I need you to go find Edina, if you can, but first I need to know if you’ve got access to her private medical records.”

Scarlet tapped a hoof against the phone. “Whatever for? I mean, I do have her medical records; it’s a condition of her employment here. Why?”

“Edina’s too crazy to have absolutely no mental health history. I’m betting somepony, somewhere along the line tried to treat the little train wreck. I need to know what they tried and if it worked.”

“I...huh...let me go check.”

I stood and clicked my tongue for a good ten minutes, feeding the phone bits like a needy marefriend. My night was already ruined so listening to Stella cleaning his scales and singing couldn’t make it terribly much worse. At least he had a decent singing voice, even if his song of choice was a mouldy oldy.

Finally, Scarlet returned.

“Detective? I’ve got Mistress Edina’s medical information.”

“Alright, let’s hear it.”

“She’s...goodness...you weren’t kidding about ‘treatment’. She’s been treated by a dozen griffin and pony psychiatrists and psychologists for everything from schizophrenia to severe depression and everything in between.”

“Yeeeah? I figured something like that.”

“It looks...well, I don’t know if this will help, but there is one treatment which apparently had some positive effect...”

“I’m not gonna like this, am I?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

I rubbed at the spot between my eyes. “Lets get it over with. What does she need?”

“It was extremely experimental and Edina was one of only a very few subjects in this study, but...apparently a simply gigantic dose of Beam would improve her condition, if somewhat temporarily. Beam is not addictive, but the amounts she needed to take to maintain the benefits were apparently impractical.”

“How much Beam are we talking here?” I asked.

“Over...nine hundred CC’s a day, administered orally.”

“...Skies above! That’s enough to kill a minotaur! Twenty minotaurs!”

Scarlet turned a couple of pages. “Most of the actual study isn’t in here, but according to this, the griffins have an especially robust pancreas, kidneys, and liver. Some function of their feline heritage. It would take almost twenty times that dose to be dangerous.”

“That does explain how I never beat Sykes in a drinking contest. Doesn’t explain how Taxi did, mind you. Does it say what that dose of Beam did to Edina?”

“Mmm...nope. Afraid not, Detective. Just ‘significant improvement’.”

“Yeesh. So, you’re recommending I capture a sadistic, schizophrenic dominatrix and dose her with more illegal psychedelics than I’ve ever seen a single creature swallow without exploding. Is that about the shape of things?”

“I...well, capture might be a strong word, but yes. Mistress Edina is presently in a session. I can have Mistress Zeta do the ‘acquisition’ part, if you’re willing to come get Edina and transport her. That is, assuming Mistress Stella approves of this.”

“Good. I’ll be there within two hours. I’ve got a stop.”

****

We left Sykes to sober up in his room and went to collect our supply of Beam.

Swift was extremely pleased to hear where we were going, if only because it meant she could see a friend again.

The drive to Supermax gave me time to reflect on the situation as a whole.

Some element of this was wrong, but I couldn’t figure exactly what. Sure, the Tokan might be doing some sort of ridiculous power play, but the timing struck me as extremely unfortuitous. There were too many consequences if it failed, too. I wouldn’t have wanted to get in a tussle with the Hitlan, weird blood powers or not.

I’d only run into a couple of instances of somepony using blood magic and while it is magnificent for wreaking havoc on groups whose blood you’d acquired, the police response that worked most consistently was gunfire. It tends to disrupt a caster’s attention when they’re digging lead out of their organs.

That did leave one big uncertainty in this mess. Edina’s help was going to be essential, but I couldn’t say how inclined she was likely to be after being trussed up and drugged. I hoped, if nothing else, that I could appeal to her desire not to see her family slaughtered.

When we crossed into the badlands around Supermax, I rolled down the window and let the spray off the slightly damp road cool my face. Swift was out there somewhere, flying along behind us and enjoying the chance to stretch her wings while we took a leisurely drive to one of the few places I could say we might be genuinely safe.

Night crawled across the landscape, bringing with it another round of refreshing rain.

****

Supermax, from the outside, looked like a gigantic box somepony had dropped in the middle of the perfectly flat fields surrounding it. It was only close up that one could see the fences surrounding it. They came in two layers and were almost entirely superfluous to keeping anypony in. To my knowledge, no-one had ever made the lobby during an escape attempt.

It gave the outward impression of being entirely abandoned. Dust-devils danced in the empty parking lot, but some unnerving sixth sense whispered that we were definitely being watched.

Taxi pulled us into the parking lot just as Swift swung down out of the sky and landed in front of the prison, sending up a spray of loose sand. But for a couple of drips of oil in some of the parking spaces and a cigarette butt that could only have been a couple of days old, there was no sign that anypony had been to Supermax in months.

As I slid out of the back seat and looked up at the imposing edifice, a tiny door set to one side of the two much larger portals that led into the prison proper opened and a stallion wreathed in shadow stepped out with a flashlight in his teeth. I couldn’t make out many details as he shone the torch over us, but after a moment he poked his head back through the door and nodded to somepony.

The double doors, each five times the height of a pony and made of reinforced steel thicker than I was tall, began to swing inward on silent hinges. A rush of air blew out and swept over us. I flipped the brim of my hat down and waited. Behind the door, an enormous room that looked something like an air-lock was lined on either side with a half dozen white suits and associated gas masks hanging on pegs driven into the stark, concrete walls.

A familiar mare was waiting for us with a familiar sour expression.

“Detective! First you trap me here alone, with those stupid cultists trying to bribe me every which way, then you flood the place with these demented Cyclone gangers!” Geranium complained, trotting forward and poking her nose into my face. “Are you just trying to make me insane? Is that the goal here?”

“Ambulance chasers. So ungrateful,” I chuckled, trotting around the lawyer into the air lock. “You sound like you’ve had a fun couple of days. What’s the scoop?”

“The scoop?” she snapped, turning around and showing me her tail. “I don’t work for you!”

“You might as well. It’s this or prison,” I replied, tugging one of the suits off a peg.

“Oh, very funny,” she grumbled, snatching down one of the suits. “Whatever. It’s not like it matters. I spent the first day drunk. Then the second day, all these psychos bust in upstairs wearing haz-mat suits. Since then, Tourniquet has been giving orders to the crazies and I’ve been trying to find more alcohol.”

“Sounds like you’ve had fun, then. How is Tourniquet doing?”

“Yeah, how is she?” Swift piped up. “I haven’t gotten to talk her yet, today. We’ve been so busy and there’s been so much awful stuff happening...”

“Ehhh...what can I say? She’s happy as a clam,” Geranium replied, tugging one of the gas masks over her face. “She’s holding twenty conversations at once. These Cyclones tooled up just before dawn two days ago and drove off with every single car in the parking lot, then came back and got into their suits. Tourniquet cracked the door and in they come, free as you please. I had to convince them not to shoot me on sight and there was a bit of a kerfluffle when Tourniquet started talking to them, but they put in a call to something they keep calling ‘De Ancestors’ and it was alright after that. Then...I don’t know. I’ve mostly just been sitting back and watching. Not much else to do. It’s not like there’s a television signal out here.”

“You could help, you know,” my partner grumbled.

“I’m not pissing in the hallways or attempting to free other prisoners,” the lawyer griped. “Until I can get a cappuccino and my record collection without worrying about somepony trying to kill me because you screwed them over, that's the best you can hope for. I don’t work well with a gun to my head.”

I snorted and adjusted the strap on the back of the gas mask. “I’ll settle for that. It’s your boredom, after all. Now, lets go get some Beam from our lovely neighborhood Temple of Ultimate Evil.”

Act 2, Chapter 47: Unauthorized Psychiatric Experimentation Test #1

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 47 : Unauthorized Psychiatric Experimentation Test #1

While many of these pages have been devoted to Equestrian mental instability, very few have been given over to psychiatry, and how to handle mad ponies became a more important consideration at the turn of the Solar Millennium. After the madness of her own sister and the unfortunate banishment that followed, Celestia wanted some alternative to sending dangerous lunatics to the moon for a thousand years.

Celestia had thus commissioned Sigmund Pferd, one of the finest minds at the time, with all the resources and assistance he could require for an inquiry into the equine psyche. In her grief over Luna, however, she had failed to account for the fact that he was also quite insane; a fact that she discovered upon finding him sniffing her bedsheets.

She managed to keep this relatively under-wraps until a council meeting at which he announced his finding that he believes that all ponies subconsciously want to have sex with Princess Celestia, an announcement that heralded the third longest awkward silence in all of equine political history.

Despite this, Pferd was onto something with his theories - the idea that there existed treatments for equine mental illnesses. After all, once Pferd was caught sneaking into her room and trying to lick her horn, it was Celestia herself who pioneered electroshock therapy. Pferd went on to lead quite an illustrious career, having been cured of his unfortunate obsessions, as well as his unnatural affinity for stilton cheese; he is now largely regarded as the sire of modern psychoanalysis.

Science has since greatly advanced its understanding of the mind. Ivan Palomino discovered conditioning behavior, training a manticore to salivate at the sound of a bell; an achievement only slightly mitigated by a grisly public demonstration in which Palomino rang the bell, then discovered somewhat belatedly that he was out of manticore treats.

Psychology and psychiatry still have a long ways to go, though: It has not managed to resolve a few lingering questions, such as: "What constitutes madness in a society where animal hoarding, ballistic pastries, and gravitic inversion are considered within a standard deviation of reasonable behavior?" and "How can we apply our lessons to other species?"

--The Scholar

The airlock door sealed, then the other side opened with the sound of screeching hydraulics. A thick dust billowed into my face, momentarily blinding me. I wiped at the glass front of my gas mask with the edge of one bootie, trying to clear it.

"Prisoners! Bring yourselves to attention! The Warden of Supermax has returned!”

Tourniquet’s voice ringing over the loudspeakers sent a few dozen shivers crawling in circles up my back as my vision cleared.

We stood in the long hallway of the prison’s primary level. Three levels worth of cells rose above us on either side. The dust flowed around our ankles like a slow river and a steady flow of air moved through the room. Two floors up a couple of ponies in hazmat suits were moving along the hall, distributing trays of something into slots on each of the cell doors. As they passed the trays through the slot, something like a magic field crackled over the entire front of the cell.

“Tourniquet! I don’t need all the prisoners to get up! Sheesh!” Swift called out. “Most of them aren’t even prisoners! We’re just keeping them here until we figure out what to do with them!”

“I know,” the construct replied in a much softer voice that came from somewhere nearby. “I just couldn’t resist! By the way, these Aroyos are amazing! They talk to me like I’m an actual pony!”

“You are an actual pony!” Swift declared, jabbing her hoof at the ceiling. “If anypony says any different, they’ll have to answer to me!” She turned and grinned at me. “Right, sir?”

“It’s your prison, kid. Ask her for a status update. What’s been going on? Why the monkey suits?”

“I can hear you, ya know. You can just ask me directly, Detective. Update! Lemme think. Well, we’re still in the process of clearing the Sleeping Willow dust from the top floor. It’s going to take another day or so for it to filter out completely.”

"I noticed,” I grunted, tapping my gas mask. “How are your power levels doing?”

“Better than they were. The Aroyos are crazy good with wiring things up! I’ve got restored power to nearly every system and we’ve almost got the tap ready to drop into the city power lines near here! I’ll be on the grid in no-time!”

“Why am I not surprised the Aroyos are clandestine electrical experts?" Taxi commented. "Though… I guess they’d have to be. The city doesn’t exactly prioritize the Skids when it comes to repairing...well...anything,” Taxi commented.

“What did you guys come down to see me for, anyway? I mean, I’m glad to see you, but aren’t you busy?”

“We need to get into the Temple,” Swift explained. “It’s super complicated, but we need some stuff down there. Is...is it still full of...um...of bodies?”

“Nope! Once we got the prisoners fed, that was the second thing I had the Aroyos do. The dead are buried across the street. We’re still working on figuring out how to clear the daevas, basilisk eyes, and toxic dart launchers out of the sewers so my new friends can come and go whenever they want to, but I’ll have that problem licked in no time!”

“Oh, thank Celestia,” Swift made to wipe her forehead and I caught her leg before she could dislodge her gas mask. “Right, I keep forgetting…”

“You mind if I ask what the fields over the cell doors are?” I asked, releasing her knee.

“Those are filtration shields. They keep the cells protected from the dust, but they let sound and food through. Most of the cult is still in their cells, but we’ve been giving them buckets, books, and whatever else we can to keep them comfortable. Once the dust is gone, I’ll open the doors and let them move around a bit.”

Trotting over to the nearest cell, I peered in. A very young mare sat on her cot, her head bowed in prayer. After a moment, she glanced up at me with soft, sad eyes.

“The Moon forgive you,” she whispered, then lowered her head again.

I shook my head and returned to my friends. Geranium was behind us a good ten feet, maintaining a grumpy silence, but she seemed content to sit back there glowering at things while we proceeded into the depths. At the end of the next hallway, Tourniquet directed us into another air-lock about a tenth the size of the one at the front gate.

Swift smacked a button on the wall as the door sealed shut behind us and streams of hot blue liquid blasted out of the floors, the ceilings, and every which way on either side. After about five seconds, the liquid drained away through the floor and a second door let us through into another changing area.

****

“Ahhh…” I moaned, tearing off the gas mask and pulling my hat out of my coat pocket. “Can we just leave by the sewers next time? I’d rather fight a heart seeker.”

“If you like, Detective, I can let one into the lower levels to chase you around,” Tourniquet snickered. “Truth be, I’m glad to see you all. I was really worried. What’s been going on?”

“I’m going to let Swift give you the full run down. Meantime, can I ask...did the Aroyos clear out all the cult’s drugs?” I asked.

“No. Why do you ask?” Tourniquet inquired. “I’m still finding stashes all over the High Security Level. They didn’t even get into the Mechanical room other than to move bodies and store things.”

“We need enough Beam to send an Ursa Major into delirium.”

“Who pissed you off enough that you want to make them insane before you kill them?” Geranium asked.

“Surprisingly enough, I’m doing this for a friend. Err...Friend might be a strong word. Someone who isn’t an enemy. Anyway, Tourniquet?”

“I’ve been storing the drug caches inside the Temple until we can dispose of them. I just need the Warden’s authorization to release discovered contraband,” she chirped, cheerfully.

“Fantastic. Swift?”

“Oh...uh...sure! Contraband transfer authorized, right?”

“Awesome!” There was a pregnant pause, then Tourniquet added, “Are you going to come see me before you leave?”

My partner gave me one of those ‘Can I?’ looks that six year olds master quick and which have ruined countless dinners.

I waved her off towards one of the adjacent hallways. “Fiiine...go on. We’ll meet you in Tourniquet’s chamber.”

****

“Geranium, I’m wondering something. So far as I know, one of your private fantasies involves feeding me into an industrial blender, ankles first. Why are you still following us around?” I asked as Taxi and I strolled down the hallways of the Secure Wing with the lawyer in tow. There were a few Aroyos out distributing meals to the prisoners still behind the closed doors who constituted the Cult of Nightmare Moon itself, but for the most part it was quiet in the passages beneath Supermax.

She shrugged and pulled at her rumpled tie with one toe. “I’d feed you into a blender nose first, Detective, just so I don’t have to listen to your stupid voice. I’m bored and you’re more interesting than kibitzing with my former clients or washing my suit. I can’t leave and the Aroyos don’t like me enough to give me any real responsibilities.”

“The last time they gave you something to do, you tried to hot-wire one of the radios to call yourself a cab to drive you to Zebrica,” Tourniquet chimed in.

“That was a desperate call for help from a depressed mare who should be climbing the corporate ladder, not squatting in a hole in the ground,” Geranium moaned, dramatically throwing one hoof across her forehead.

“You’re just hoping to save your own skin from whatever the Detective is trying to protect everypony from.”

Geranium didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. “Is that so wrong?”

“You were lawyer to a murderous cult leader. I might like you because you brought me comic books, but I am totally not letting you wander around until you’re not evil anymore.”

“Hmmph,” she sniffed. “Well, why did you guys come back so soon?”

“A friend of mine has an apparent need for enough Beam to drive a dragon out of its head. Thankfully, your former clients left us with plenty. Speaking of that, how are they doing?” I asked, moving over to the broad metal door of one of the high security cells. Two very pretty mares in streaky make-up were sitting inside, still wearing tattered bits of their robes. They seemed to be in the midst of a game of checkers.

“Well, they spent the first day shouting for their lawyers an awful lot. I got tired of that, so I sent Miss Geranium around with copies of the ‘rights and privileges’ book we had in storage from just after the war. She was really drunk, so I think a couple of them might think they have a right to eat...um...she used an impolite word for ‘poop’.”

I glanced at Geranium and grinned. She rolled her eyes.

“Things quieted down after that?” Taxi asked.

“Mostly. Oh! Swift is here! Thank you, Detective!”

“Do we need to let you go?”

“Nope! I can talk to lots of ponies at once. Anyway, once they were fed and weren’t worried I was going to set fire to them or anything, the cult of Nightmare Moon mellowed out. I even got to talk to a few of them. Most didn’t actually know somepony was being killed at the ceremonies. They thought it was all illusions and special effects.”

“I doubt that’ll save them from prosecution. These ponies were funding the cult and using the members in orgies. They might dodge necromancy charges, but it’ll be a lengthy stay in Tartarus, either way.”

Tourniquet was silent for a minute, then asked, “Can’t they stay in me?”

“Aw, sweetie…” I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. “That’s a question I don’t know where to begin to answer. We’ve got to finish making this mess before we start looking to clean it up. I’ve got no idea what’s likely to happen in the next couple of days, much less when this is all over.”

“Oh.”

For several minutes after that she was quiet as we moved through the tunnels. Turning a corner, the security door down into the Temple of Nightmare Moon came into sight, already open and waiting.

“Detective?” Tourniquet murmured, just loud enough for me to hear.

“Yes?”

“If you can’t fix it so I can have ponies come spend time with me, could you just make them turn me off for good?”

“No-one...no-one is shutting you off,” I growled. “They’ll have to go through me before that happens.”

Tourniquet swallowed loudly through the P.A. system. “I’m so glad you’re my friend. Considering the kinds of ponies who tried to go through you, it’s kinda scary when you say things like that.”

****

“Hardy, if we want to retire, I know a guy who can get us a street price for this that would let us live like the Princesses,” Taxi said quietly, staring at the heaping mountain of drugs piled in the center of the Temple of Nightmare Moon.

The mechanical room had been cleared of corpses, although nothing could get rid of the stink of death. Geranium couldn’t be convinced to join us down below, but she was content to wait on the stairs. The pews were gone along with the remains of the broken statue and altar, but nopony had tried to clean up the mess of spilt powders littering the haz-mat closet and, as they’d found fresh supplies of drugs, the Aroyos simply dumped them in the middle of the room.

Taxi’s estimate of their worth wasn’t far off. The pile was boxes, bottles, and tins right up to my chest in every shape and color imaginable. There were enough drugs there to supply a decent sized cartel for several weeks.

“Much as retiring sounds better day by day, we’ve still got a job.”

Slipping on a pair of rubber socks from Taxi’s saddlebags, we began sorting through the boxes.

After about five minutes, my driver went “Aha!” and held up a two liter bottle full of swirling, multi-colored liquid. “Here we go! Raw Beam concentrate! No tabs for our rich friends. They must put it in the capsules right here in house.”

I dropped a box of pills and took one of the containers, turning it over in my hooves. It looked like somepony had somehow captured a rainbow and stuffed it into a bottle.

“Is this enough?” I asked.

Taxi nodded. “A half cup of that is about twenty doses of Beam once you dilute it. How much did we actually need?”

“Nine hundred CC’s of liquid Beam was what Edina’s chart said.”

My driver’s jaw sagged.

“I thought you were kidding when you said that thing about driving an Ursa Major crazy. Do we need Edina to be stoned for a month?”

I chewed at my lip a little. “Err...That’s...per day, actually.”

“What?!”

****

There were only three bottles of the concentrate, but that was theoretically plenty for the period of time we were likely to need Edina’s help. I packed them into Taxi’s saddlebags, stripped out of the socks, and grabbed a box of expensive healing talismans labeled ‘extra strong’ I’d noticed in amongst the rest of the stash. One never knows when they’ll need to be high as a kite whilst their body is knit back together.

****

“Whose birthday are you planning, Detective?” Geranium asked, following us back through the secure wing. “I saw what you put in those bags. If you dumped that crap in the water supply, this end of the city would party like it’s B.R. 999...”

“The less information you have, the safer I’ll be,” I replied.

“Don’t you mean the safer I’ll be?”

“No.”

Geranium sniffed and sped up to walk along beside me.

“Right, so you just toddle off and leave me stuck here for however long,” she whined, swatting me in the hip with her toe. “You could use a lawyer, right? I mean, if you let me leave, I can help! You’re the only one who can beat the Scry, so shouldn’t I have a big incentive to stay with you? My old bosses will just kill me, but I can’t stay here any longer. I’m going to lose my mind.”

“I need you like I need another hole in my chest, sweetheart,” I snapped, shooting her a look. “Help Tourniquet. She’s the one holding your leash, not me. You want to convince her you’re worth trusting with anything, stop sulking in this pit and try to do something worthwhile. We’ve got an awful lot of innocent ponies upstairs who are going to need convincing that the head of their religion was feeding them piecemeal into a meat-grinder and I’m sure, if you ask nicely, the Aroyos will bring you a book on cult deprogramming.”

Geranium silently ground her teeth, but I thought there might have been a glimmer of thoughtfulness.

****

With typical disregard for appearances, the Aroyos had torn out the entire electronic facade of the ‘control room’ in front of Tourniquet’s chamber and replaced it with a lounge. There were four of them sitting there, including Wisteria’s daughter, Jambalaya. She glanced up from her game of cards as the door opened.

“Crusada! Ye here! De construct say ye come!” she exclaimed, hopping off the couch. “We welcome ye to de Hole!”

“I see you guys have made yourselves at home,” I chuckled, gesturing to the beer bottles and the cards.

“Aye! De finest fortress de Aroyos might ever be ownin’,” Jambalaya replied, trotting over and snatching up my hoof, shaking it with both of hers. “I and I had worries about ye, but...but dis be de best place we ever have and ye gives it to us!”

I noticed, for the first time, that she was sporting a juju bag similar to her mother’s; she hadn’t been when I saw her last. I gestured at it. “Well, tell the Ancestors I apologize for ditching on our last meeting, but I’ll come see them soon. A friend of mine is in bad trouble and there’s blood looking for a knife to spill it.”

Jambalaya gave me a squint, then cocked her head towards the back of the room. “Ye little demon wid mad teeth come through. Did I and I hear correctly dat she be de Warden of de Hole?”

“That you did,” I replied, snatching up an unopened beer and wrenching the top off with my teeth. Earth ponies are awesome like that. “It’s complicated.”

She snorted derisively, and picked up her own beer with her horn, clinking it against mine. “Dat be de song ye always sing, Crusada.”

“Are you taking good care of our ‘friends’ downstairs?” Taxi asked. “I don’t want to see them get loose…”

“De bigshots? Dey be a laugh!” she giggled, sloshing a bit of beer onto her hooves. “Howlin’ about laws and rights! Dey want warm towels and dey want calls. Where be dey when de chil’run of de Skids die of magick’ poisons de richies sell? Where be de howlin’ den, eh?”

“Well, keep them alive and don’t do anything that’ll look too awful in a tabloid. I want that lot able to stand trial and still look indignant when they do, right up to the moment I tell them they’re being done for accessory to multiple murders and necromancy,” I replied.

“Aye, I and I do wish I could be dere to see dat! Now go an’ have ye fun wid de construct. She be waitin’.” With that, Jambalaya swept her leg towards the secret wall at the back, whilst the other Aroyos looked on. The panel hissed, then rose on its hinge, exposing the brightly lit interior of Tourniquet’s chamber.

I was momentarily taken aback by the change.

I don’t know why I thought Tourniquet’s chamber was always a dank, gloomy place, but with the power going full tilt it more closely resembled midday in an especially large and messy play-room. Toys dating back to my youth were spread everywhere, piled in chests and on short shelving units that littered the enormous carpet.

“You need to get this girl a maid,” Geranium grunted, trotting into the playroom ahead of me.

Tourniquet and Swift were sitting together over a table that’d been set up in the middle of the room. A half dozen Aroyo foals, some with blank flanks, some with their cutie-marks, were huddled around the table. I recognized Shadow Walk, Goofball’s part-time caretaker, amongst their number.

Somepony had sacked the regional tarp and perfume supply store to cover up the corpse of Girthtranx. He was still there, curled up against the wall, but covered from end to end and with the blowers going, I could barely detect the scent of dead dragon.

Swift seemed to be halfway through explaining her ridiculous card game not just to Tourniquet, but also to the kids.

“-on your next turn, so you need to be aware I could play ‘Wrath of Celestia’ right now. If somepony is going to do that, though, they’re probably going to want plenty of gem power to rebuild the turn after. Okay? So, what should I do next?”

A tiny unicorn colt with a zipper for a cutie-mark piped up, “Ye s-should do de stuff wid de ‘Counter spell’ in ye hand, cause dat means no bad magic. Right?”

“That’s right!” Swift ruffled his scruffy red mane. “Alright, your turn!” she said, gesturing at Tourniquet.

The construct seemed somehow even livelier than she had last I’d seen her. Lights like tiny stars danced behind her crystalline eyes and her mane pulsed with light, the fiber optics shifting through a range of colors. A small cloud of ladybugs hovered overhead, spinning in lazy circles.

As we approached, Tourniquet glanced up and smiled, then set her cards down. In a blur, the cords attaching her to the ceiling pulled her out of her seat and she practically flew into my open forelegs, throwing her front knees around me.

“Air! Air!” I wheezed as she squeezed about five good years worth of wear and tear out of my ribcage.

She released her grip just enough so I could feel all the places she’d cracked my spine and grinned.

“I...I just wanted to thank you, Detective! Oh, I’ve never been so happy! I’ve got friends!” she squeaked, gesturing towards the Aroyos. “Shadow Walk said she might even bring Goofball down here so he’d be safe!”

I nodded towards Swift. “He’s my partner’s dog, but if you think you can get him down here…”

Swift dropped her cards, carefully setting her hand face down as she got up.

“Sir, I actually kinda like the idea of having a guard dog in my own prison. Besides, he’s basically bullet proof, poison proof, and fireproof. Now that the prison is clear and we won’t have to foal-sit him, I totally wanna know what he’d think of all those daevas!”

“The words ‘invisible chew toys’ just drifted through my brain and that disturbs me,” I murmured, then decided we needed a change of topic before the image of Goofball bringing home a daeva to gnaw on could form properly. “Speaking of foal-sitting, why are this bunch here?” I jerked my chin at all the kids sitting around, listening.

“We be here cuz mom’s and pops here!” Shadow Walk replied, wiggling her nose at me. “We be helpin’ dem wid de’z big shot stompas and de dumb prayin’ ponies!”

“That’s...um...that’s my fault, actually,” Tourniquet said, her fiber-optic mane flashing into a range of pinks that I interpreted as a blush. “When some of the Aroyos said they missed their children, I said they could totally bring them and I’d make sure they were all safe. I...I missed other kids. Being a prison is hard...”

“I can imagine and I get it. How are you and Queenie getting along?” I asked.

The swarm of buzzing ladybugs let out an especially loud hum and Tourniquet nodded.

“They say they’ve been looking around the city and something funny is going on in Uptown.” She frowned as one particular ladybug detached itself from the crowd and dropped onto her muzzle. “There are these...these places where the ladybugs don’t feel safe going. They can’t describe it more than that they don’t want to go into them. It’s like something makes their connection waiver.”

That was worrying.

“I thought there was nothing that could make ladybugs lose the connection to the hive mind. What could cause that?” Taxi asked, worriedly. “Magic nullification of some sort?”

“I don’t know, but Queenie is scared,” Tourniquet replied, gently petting the insect sitting on her nose. “It’s withdrawing big parts of the ladybug swarm to safe spots, like Supermax. One of the places they’re feeling danger is near the Essy office, but nopony on the street seems to be bothered. Queenie has other Essy friends, though, and they feel the danger, too.”

“Dammit. Too many things to investigate at once,” I groaned, rubbing my face with both front hooves. “I’ve got to handle a situation with the griffins before it gets out of hoof.”

“The...the griffins at The Moonwalk Hotel, in Uptown?” Tourniquet asked.

I paused, then glanced at Swift. “You’ve been keeping her up to date?”

Tourniquet shook her head. “Queenie was watching them until something drove the swarm away from there the day before yesterday. They won’t go within three blocks of that hotel right now,” she answered.

If ever there were something to make my stomach squirm, it was the most curious creatures in all of Equestria saying they didn’t want to stick their little insectoid noses into something.

“You remember that thing I said about leaving here and going with you, Detective?” Geranium asked, nudging me with her tail.

“Yeah?”

“Forget I said anything.”

My throat felt like I’d swallowed a pool ball. I took a quick sip of the beer I realized I was still clutching in the crook of my leg and gathered my resolve. Geranium, Tourniquet, the Aroyos, Swift, and Taxi were all staring at me, waiting.

“I...think we need to go get Edina right now, resolve this mess at the Moonwalk, and pray to whoever might be listening that my cutie-mark is malfunctioning.”

****

My flank felt like somepony had applied a burning brand in the shape of a pair of scales. Twenty odd years of ignoring the pain in all but the worst circumstances had inured me somewhat to it, but I couldn’t remember the last time it’d been so bad. Supermax was a drop in a very deep bucket by comparison.

Still, there was work and there was the beer. I couldn’t afford to get as drunk as was required to make the pain go away entirely, but the alcohol took enough of the edge off that I could start to consider the situation with a slightly clearer head. I’d taken a second one from Supermax as a precaution, but Taxi stole it the moment we were outside, cracked it open, and set it in the Night Trotter’s cup holder as we drove back towards the Vivarium.

****

“Your friend, your love, your Gypsy of the morning. How many ways can I say I love thee, my dear audience? Let me count the ways.

Now, before we get on to some fresh tunes from the Tinder Boxes, the Sweet Beats, and even a golden oldy or two, we need to lay down some news!

Warrants have been put out for the arrest of various members of the Church of the Lunar Passage who are accused of fraud and possible magical manipulation. The leadership of the cult, Astral Skylark, couldn’t be reached for comment, but it’s assumed she’s also on ‘sabbatical’ along with the rest of the cult’s bank accounts. Nopony has any information at this point and the response from the Church itself has been surprisingly subdued.

Usually they’d be rioting in the streets!

Even weirder, several dozen cult members turned up in Sunny Days Psychiatric Care Hospital complaining that they were having trouble remembering things and, wonder of wonders, it turned out they’d been under the effects of some type of magic that had badly affected their metabolisms. The police issued a warrant for the examination of several cult owned sites and, upon entry, they discovered that the meeting rooms the cult was using had runes underneath the paint on the walls.

Now, nopony knows the exact purpose of these magics, but until we can find the leadership of the Church, this is being treated as a local matter. The Academy is investigating, but they haven’t yet released any reports on what might be going on. The Princesses are going to have one heck of an interesting report to read as soon as that storm out of the Everfree clears!

Speaking of the storm, several dozen teams of pegasi from different cities have been dispatched to attempt to bring the wild squall under control, but it’s developing into a veritable in-land hurricane! Being a magical storm, you can imagine nopony has been inclined to get too close. Reports of mutation are sparse, so far, but there have been a few mentions of strange events. White Tail Woods, a small farming community near the borders of the Everfree, was pelted with handkerchiefs and dice-cut spinach.

Communications around the capitol are spotty at best, but the Princesses have managed to get out a message that we should keep calm. The guard have erected weather shields around Canterlot and the surrounding villages, so nopony needs to worry about their loved ones...”

****

The Vivarium was thumping and the two stores on either side of the facade seemed to be doing a healthy business as well, as we tooled up to the front door. Minox stood at the red ropes leading inside, his tux freshly pressed and a big smile on his bovine face. As soon as he caught sight of the Night Trotter, he waved us towards the back of the building.

Pulling around the side, I peered out the window at a strange vision.

Granny After Glow and Mistress Zeta were standing side by side with a giant silver platter sitting on a tray like a dinner service. The platter was tied shut with about six dozen ropes and, even then, Granny Glow had the top pinned down with her brightly glowing horn.

We stopped beside them and I slid out of the back seat.

“Aw, how sweet, you brought us lunch!” I chuckled, trotting over and lightly flicking the covered plate with my toe. Something underneath screeched at me, claws scraping the inside of the metal top.

“Hey Gran!” Swift beat her wings a couple of times, leaping over to hug her grandmare. She glanced at the platter, curiously. “Is...is that Edina?”

“Birdy, ye better have the bee’s knees kinda explanation fer this,” Granny Glow growled, a knife clutched in her magic, twirling in lazy circles around her head. “Ye got no idea what we hadda do ta get this little bitch packaged!”

A glimmer of mischief flashed through Swift’s expression.

“We need to give her a bunch of psychadelic drugs to see what happens!”

Way to get your partner killed, you evil little fluffball.

“Kid, there will be bloody vengeance for that...” I grumbled.

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Serves you right for making me dig through that smelly griffin’s pockets.”

Mistress Zeta and After Glow looked back and forth between the two of us.

“This is a ‘pony thing’?” Zeta asked, quietly tightening one of the ropes comprising her dress a little tighter.

“Ah reckon it’s a stupid, nutty, gonna-git-yerselves-killed-by-a-whacko cop thing,” Glow replied. “Edina’s already crazier’n a whole box of ferrets on fire. Ah assume ye’ve got some purpose to this lil’ experiment?”

“Honestly?” I sighed and idly pushed the cart back and forth, eliciting a few more snarls from under the lid. “This is probably a mistake that’ll end with somepony losing an eye. Edina, as it turns out, is griffin royalty. We need her to help us deal with the griffins up town at the Moonwalk as part of our investigation. That said, I talked to Scarlet and someone tried to treat Edina a few years back. The only treatment that worked was a dose of Beam that’d be nine kinds of lethal to a pony. Griffins apparently have titanium kidneys.”

Glow was silent for several seconds then pointed at Swift. “Normally, ye best know Ah would protest somethin’ like this, but Ah’m a mite curious meself. Ye be damn sure to keep yer head down when he does this dumb thing, though, and Ah want pictures whether it works or not.” She turned to the other domme. “Zeta, ye go with’em. These idjits’re gonna need ya to catch this hen if she gets loose.”

Mistress Zeta bowed her head, flicking one striped ear back against her skull. It was a zebra version of a salute. “As you wish, Mistress After Glow.”

****

We had to make sure Edina could breathe, which involved loosening the ropes holding the platter down just enough for her to stick a claw out and attempt to gore me with it, but once that was done I asked if anypony had any objections to her riding in the trunk. None were raised.

Unfortunately, moving her into the Nest attracted a crowd of foals who really wanted to know why we seemed to be ordering in dinner that was still alive.

****

“No! Out! Out, out, out! For the last time...You too, dammit! Our bunker! Not yours! Everypony shorter than Swift get out!...okay, everypony shorter than me! No, Swift, you stay! Ugh! I’m going to count to three and if every Aroyo isn’t out, I’m going to have Taxi start shutting off heart valves!”

I slammed the door of the Nest, almost taking off the tail of one of the stragglers. Shutting my eyes, I forced myself to breathe.

‘Be calm, Hardy. Be calm. It’s just part of the job. You can do the job without killing anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Phew.’

Trotting over to the table, I turned sideways and tipped the platter full of furious griffin off my back.

“I find your choice of accommodations very interesting, Detective,” Zeta murmured, glancing up at the clock. Princess Celestia quietly smoked her ever-present joint and smiled benignly down at us.

“Believe me, his apartment was worse,” Taxi commented, heading for the kitchenette. “It was a blessing to the city zoning commission when somepony set fire to it.”

“Thank you for that, Sweets. Trust me, it wasn’t my first choice, but it’s as secure as anywhere else in the city,” I grumbled.

“That’s what worries me, Sir,” Swift muttered, pulling a blanket from a stack beside one of the beanbag chairs and throwing it around her shoulders.

“How do you mean, kid?”

“We’re about to feed Edina lots of Beam, in a very enclosed space that we can’t open or else she might get loose.”

I raised one eyebrow. “What’s your point?”

“Sir, we’re inside the enclosed space.”

“Ah. Yes. Well, try to keep your eyes covered and don’t let her peck anything essential.”

“Sir, I consider my whole body pretty essential!”

“Then you’ll have an extra incentive to be quick on your hooves, won’t you?” I replied, grinning. Truth be, despite the madness of what we were about to attempt, I was looking forward to it for reasons I can’t properly explain.

Taxi returned a moment later with a funnel draped over the top of one of our bottles of Beam. “Limerence left us a note. He’s back at the Archive, doing some research. Are we ready?”

“Theoretically, yes,” I replied, tugging at the ropes holding the platter shut. The knots were of a variety I wasn’t familiar with and seemed to only get tighter the more I messed about with them. “Mmmnph...If the doctors were wrong, our best bet is to get her back under that platter and see if one of your drug contacts sells lithium and thorazine in bulk quantities.”

Zeta moved to one side of the platter, unclasping several lengths of rope from her dress and swirling them around her foreleg as she went to work on the lines holding the platter shut. After a few seconds, they were free.

“Are we standing back, Sir?” Swift asked, quietly.

“Sweets, be ready on that funnel,” I murmured, holding the top of the suddenly quiet platter down with one hoof.

Taxi lifted the bottle. I took a deep breath. Mistress Zeta tensed, moving around to the other side of the table.

I tore the silver top off and all Tartarus broke loose.

****

Picture the worst slapstick ever put to celluloid and then add a dose of actual danger.

A tiny white griffin explodes out from under the platter and Mistress Zeta, the quickest thing you’ve ever seen, goes for her with a loop of rope whilst Taxi, the second most nimble being I’ve ever met next to Zeta, dives in with the funnel. Their heads collide from opposite sides of the plate. Both fall back on their rear ends, clutching their skulls. Zeta might be all invincibility and ‘feel no pain’, but nopony catches someone else’s face with their crown and maintains their composure.

Swift panics as Edina locks eyes on her and screeches, “Meeeat!”

I make a grab for the little beast, but I am nothing like fast enough to snatch a crazed griffin out of mid-air. She bursts off of the plate and snaps up one of the ropes that’d been keeping her makeshift prison tied shut, corkscrewing in mid-air and almost taking off one of my ears with the end of it.

My partner’s wings come out with a gust that almost sweeps me off my hooves. The ceilings were of decent height, made for letting pegasi maneuver inside, but not so high that either of them could get any real space. Edina shrieks at her, her beady, mad eyes following as Swift takes to the air. The griffin bolts after her. They fly in a wild circle around the room, taking off my hat, knocking the clock off the wall, and generating a miniature indoor tornado that blows my mane into my eyes, leaving me blind and stumbling about in a powerful headwind.

It was Goofball who finally came to our rescue.

He jerked awake with an alarmed yelp and saw his best friend being chased around the room by a deranged cat-bird with a whip fetish, over bean-bag chairs, end tables, and the odd pony. The great mutt flopped over onto his side and got to his paws, watching the melee for a moment more before, on the next pass around the room, he suddenly snapped his jaws faster than my eyes could follow.

Swift zoomed round and round a few more times before realizing she wasn’t being pursued any more. She flared her wings, dropping back onto the carpet and turning in a slow circle, looking for Edina. I pushed myself back to my hooves.

“Um...okay?” Swift muttered, confused.

Something squeaked. We all glanced at Goofball, whose right and left heads were both staring at the middle one which was looking distinctly guilty, particularly with his cheeks all puffed out and a few feathers poking out of his lips.

I gestured at the dog with one hoof. “Swift, could you please get this stupid mutt to spit out our mark?”

Zeta got shakily to her hooves, still rubbing a knot on her forehead. “I do suppose that went better than it could have.”

“What definition of ‘better’ are we using here?” Taxi asked.

“The one where none of those gathered has lost any essential sensory organs, no?”

My partner trotted over to Goofball and gave him a stern look, then pointed at her hooves. Shamefacedly lowering his middle head, the big puppy let his muzzle fall open and a sodden ball of white feathers plopped at Swift’s fetlocks. Edina seemed none the worse for wear, but being inside someone’s mouth has a way of taking the fight out of a person.

“M-meat?” the griffin cried, plaintively. “We needs...m-meat!”

She started to rise, reaching for the scrap of rope she’d been using as a whip.

Taxi was on her in a second, jamming the funnel into her beak and upending the bottle of purified Beam straight down her gullet. The rainbow liquid gushed over the side of the funnel and Swift shied away, lest she get any of it on her hooves. For a moment, it looked like Edina might struggle, then her eyes went wide and she gradually relaxed, staring up at the ceiling.

I snatched my hat and mashed it over my ears. It’s a good thing griffins are used to eating whole prey, else she might have choked as my driver poured the drug into her throat. She’d stopped struggling as soon as the first beak-full hit her, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Zeta edged over to get some rope around her ankles.

For several minutes there was just the sound of pouring liquid, but, at last, the bottle was empty.

Edina’s eyes slid closed at some point during the procedure and she was breathing normally, which was a good sign. Beam overdose tends to cause some heavy respiration and she might as well have been napping after a heavy meal.

The four of us stood there for an indescribably awkward minute and a half, just waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Edina just lay there, her feathers twitching like she was having an especially exciting dream.

“Huh. Alright, that’s...not how most anyone I’ve ever met responds to Beam,” I mused, giving her a light nudge with one toe.

Her eyes snapped open and she glanced at me, then let out a frightened squawk. Scrambling over onto all fours, Edina dragged at the carpet with her claws, trying frantically to crawl away. Unfortunately, Goofball was the only ‘away’ there was to crawl towards. He sniffed at her and gave her a wet lick. Edina let out a mewl of terror and rolled sideways, flailing her wings pathetically at the hound’s nose.

“Goof! Sit!” Swift snapped.

The big lunk gave her a questioning look, then slowly lowered himself to the carpet.

Edina was breathing hard and, for a moment, I was worried we’d hit her with too much.

“Where am I? Please, please don’t hurt me!” she pleaded, peering down at the rope around her ankles then back up at us. Her voice was strange. Softer. Calmer, too, despite the worry in her face. Her eyes darted around, taking in the room until they fixed on the zebra standing beside me. She relaxed slightly. “Mistress Zeta?”

“Edina,” the zebra said, cooly, tugging at the rope around her ankles a little.

“Oh my, are you okay? It looks like someone punched you!” She paused, then looked a bit nervous. “Did...did I do that? How long have I been gone?”

****

“Five years,” Edina whimpered, clutching a bagel in both front talons. First priority with a trauma victim is always a blanket and the second Taxi handed her one, she wrapped it around herself as tight as she could. Soon, with snacks and a few drinks, we all gathered around the table. After I’d told her what year it was, she’d seemed to sink in on herself, sitting there with her bread, holding it like a stuffed animal.

“Five years with those two deranged idiots running my brain…” She sighed and dropped the bagel back on her plate, her beak quivering. “Even now, I want live meat. I don’t suppose you have any rats around, do you?”

“I’m afraid not. Run this by me again. Are you saying-”

“-that those two psychotics aren’t me?” Edina gave me a savage glare, then pulled the blanket higher over her tiny shoulders. “I guess I can’t say they’re not,” she said with a bit of resignation, “I’m in there, but...they started talking when puberty rolled around.” She shivered a little and Mistress Zeta lay a black hoof on her back. “Eventually, they started shouting. I just did what my father always taught me to do when someone is shouting at you.”

“Sit quietly...and wait,” Taxi murmured.

Edina gave her a curious look. “Yes. Your father was a bad creature, then?”

“You’ve no idea.”

“My father is cold, ruthless, and addicted to power. I suppose I can’t blame him, though. To survive in the tribe is often to be cold. He is pragmatic in his way. A peacemaker, if ever a highland griffin can be called that. He was the one who insisted we learned proper Equestrian and open banking relations with you, despite how much I’m sure he’d like to lay open every equine jugular he can get his talons on. Speaking of that...” Reaching to her throat, Edina felt around at her neck. Her expression turned to sudden alarm. “Wait...my blood...where’s my blood?!”

I shook my head. “I’d assume it’s in your veins, right where it belongs, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.” I amended, "Probably."

She huffed and threw off the blanket, searching furiously around the bean-bag chairs, underneath the couch, and even going so far as to pry open Goofball’s mouth. “Not that blood. My blood! Ugh! It wouldn’t make sense to you!”

I shrugged and sank into one of the chairs, waving a leg at her. “You’re Tokan. Highland griffins. You people think blood is some kind of currency and have an honor system that only works if you can protect it, right?”

Edina stopped mid-stride and her head twisted around on her neck until she was staring at me. “H-how did you know that? Who are you?”

“You think we just force fed you an entire bottle of Beam concentrate for fun? My name is Hard Boiled. I am or...at least, I was… a member of the Detrot Police Department. We’re investigating some things for your employer, Stella. You didn’t have anything on you when you came in or since the last time I saw you, which was several weeks ago.”

Her eyebrows, such as they were, drew together and she lashed her tufted tail around herself, sitting like a particularly attentive cat. “Miss Stella. The sea serpent. I know her. Mistress Zeta, too. I am a...mmm...a Stiletto.” Reaching over, she picked up a piece of loose rope, giving it a little flick with her wrist. The end made a soft pop as it cracked the air. “I don’t remember a whip feeling quite so natural in my claws.”

“Your two friends upstairs reeeally liked the work,” I replied. “That said, we need your assistance.”

She blinked and let the rope drop. “My...my assistance? I have to find my blood and find out what has been going on for the last five years. The cat and the bird have been screaming back and forth this entire time. I can still hear them sitting in the back of my head, bickering like an old married couple. I...Egg preserve us all, I just let them take over for just a moment and they simply wouldn’t stop! I have to go pick up the pieces of my life! Last time I was functioning at all, I was in a hospital full of other crazies!”

Her face was drawn with inner tension. Swift looked thoughtful, then trotted out of the room for a moment and returned with part of a chicken wing. I don’t know where she’d been keeping it, but the second Edina laid eyes on it, her beak started to water. My partner passed it to her.

“Where...where did you get real griffin-made fried chicken?” she asked, looking up at my partner with an expression like a pony dying of thirst who’d just found an oasis.

Swift smiled one of her pointy smiles. As any sane being would, Edina took a couple of unconscious steps back.

“Bad magic,” Swift said, shrugging her wings. “It has upsides. I get to eat whatever I want now and the local griffin butcher shops are getting used to seeing a pegasus come in without offering pamphlets for suicide hotlines.”

The tiny griffin let out a faint purr, then tore into the meat with that razor-sharp beak. I don’t know why I expected she’d eat daintily. We sat for a few minutes, letting Edina rip the chicken into small pieces and swallow it before Taxi drew in a preparatory breath.

“Edina?”

“Yesh? Oh, sowwy.” She wiped at her beak with one claw and blushed. “I haven’t tasted my own food in so long.”

“I’m afraid the news we’ve got to give you doesn’t get better from this point on,” Taxi murmured.

Edina frowned and set the bones from the fried chicken aside. “I’m...I’m not going to get to piece my life back together, am I?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “We’ve...we’ve only got a small amount of Beam to give you, at least, compared to what you need. If you were a pony with this condition, our supply would last weeks. Certainly, long enough for us to get more. Unfortunately, griffin anatomy deals with drugs quickly. Short of something like sitting you in the middle of a Beam explosion, I don’t know of any way to increase the effect.” Reaching over, I tugged open Taxi’s saddlebags and hefted out the two remaining bottles, setting them on the table. “We’ve got, at most, three...maybe five days worth on the dosage you’re under now. Nobody in the world makes enough to give you a permanent high and...there’s no research to speak of on what this could do to you in the long run.”

Her expression sank.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” she whispered, walking in a little circle and slumping down with her chin on a pillow. “So, what? You bring me back from madness just to toss me right back? Was this another experiment?”

Oh good, more of my old friend: guilt. Part of me wished she’d turned out to be even crazier. She sounded like a wounded little girl. There wasn’t even a hint of that creature I’d seen almost clip a stallion’s meat and two veg last month. If it wasn’t so sad, I might have been laughing; laughing at the cruel way a life can be crushed under the heel of necessity.

“I don’t...really know how to say this other than to lay it on the table. You’re the Tokan ‘Egg’ right?” I asked.

“I...I am, yes. At least, I believe I am.” She scratched her mane, thinking. “Father’s loins are as soured as ever after I was born and no other egg of his has borne fruit, at least that I can remember. Five years is a long time to be gone from the Eyrie. Things change.”

“Well, a friend of mine, name of ‘Sykes’, seemed to think you were still first in line. Are you aware of the situation at the Moonwalk?”

Edina shook her head, flaring her wings out and preening, self-consciously. “Could you just assume I’m a bit behind on current events? The voices are quiet now, but...imagine being in a room with hundreds upon hundreds of people and on one side, they’re all shouting one thing and on the other, something else. You’ve got to sit there and listen and you can’t shut them out. I just slowly sank in on myself and let them shout. Eventually, they started to take the reins. Try to think of it as having been asleep for five years.”

I felt an involuntary shiver start in my rear leg and quickly clamped down on it.

“Alright, if I don’t ask, I’m going to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty. Zeta said you’ve got an aversion to doctors. I’m assuming delivering you someplace for treatment is not on the menu?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, because I want a bunch of headshrinkers fumbling about in my mind like cliff-rats fighting over scraps.” Sarcasm practically dripped from every word. Getting up, she picked up her rope again and coiled it around her neck in one smooth, practiced motion before moving around the table and prodding me in the chest with one claw.

“Look, medicine has advanced in the last-” I started to say, but she cut me off.

“They know what will fix my condition! If there were an alternative, it would have been used already!” she growled, clicking her beak together as anger got the better of her sadness. “The only empathy booster on Equis strong enough to affect the part of my brain that needs it is an industrial byproduct that’s liable to kill me over a long enough period of time. Let the cat and bird have their fun until a day comes when one of you ponies comes up with something better. I’d rather die mad than be some fool’s pathetic project.”

Dropping my chin onto my chest, I shut my eyes for a minute and let that settle into my consciousness. It should have been a foreign notion, but there it was. Truth be, if Grapeshot’s sniper round had rendered me insane, I’d rather they killed me outright than locking me away with pills, potions, and doctors shaking their heads at clipboards as my only comfort.

Nothing I can imagine is worse than being an object of pity. Zeta was right. Edina understood that. She was willing to leave two psychotics in charge of her body, rather than be a burden or a curiosity.

“Then we need your help,” I said, at last. “You’re the Tokan Egg. Right now, the Tokan and the Hitlan have been forced to move their treasuries, their weak, and their young into the city of Detrot. I...honestly, don’t totally understand it, but something bad happened while they were staying here. Somebody attacked the Hitlan Egg.”

Edina shifted her weight, nervously glancing at Goofball who was trying to put his nose in her tailfeathers. She gave him a light tap on the muzzle with one wing and he backed off. “Attacked? Not even the most foolhardy of souls would dare attack Grimble Shanks. Only his father is a greater warrior...”

“Yeah, I’ve met him and I’m inclined to agree. Even so, he was drunk. Someone coldcocked him. He thinks they might have stolen his blood.”

Edina’s eyes popped wide. “Oh great sky! They’ll...they’ll blame the Tokan!” she exclaimed.

“Eh...about that…” I coughed, rubbing the back of my neck. “It gets worse.”

“Detective, my family is no match for the Hitlan!” She got to her footpaws pacing back and forth in front of the table. “We may not be close, but if the Hitlan call in their blood debts, it would...it could mean war between the tribes. Dozens of financial battles! My family doesn’t have the combat skills to survive something like that! The accrued interest alone would lead to an untold number of deaths in the Arena of Finance! What kind of worse could there be?”

I really wished people would stop asking me things like that.

“For reasons unknown, the Tokan have closed...’The Blood’. As I understand it, that’s some kind of monetary exchange or ledger?”

Her eyes were as big as saucers as she tipped over onto her backside. “Y-yes, it is. But that’s...that’s impossible. Suicidal. My father might be cold, but he would never do such a thing! The Blood bank is our...our livelihood.”

“Your father is still in the plateaus fighting dragons,” Taxi pointed out. “A griffin named ‘Derida’ is heading the Tokan in Detrot.”

Edina’s beak clacked at the air and her hackles rose. “That is...worse.”

“What is this ‘Derida’ character like?” I asked.

“She is the Hitlan chieftan’s sister. My father’s second wife. I am the Egg, but...she would dearly love to have a child to take succession in the event of my death. She makes my father look positively cheery.”

“Ah. So...tell me. How popular is that going to make us when we show up demanding to investigate the situation with both of the heirs to the tribes and a bunch of guns?” I asked.

Edina gulped. “As popular as a flock of yearling chicks in a den of razor-lizards.”

I gave her a look of non-comprehension.

“Very unpopular and, soon thereafter, very dead,” Zeta clarified.

“Ah. I’m glad I cleared that up early on. So, alternatives, then?”

“You have none,” Edina said, quietly. “You must be appointed as the High Justice if you wish to enter the Tokan embassy.”

“So I’m clear...what exactly does mean to be ‘High Justice’?” I asked. “Is it something like being a police pony?”

She considered this for a moment, then shook her head. “No. No, nothing like that. At the same time, yes, very much. The High Justice is only appointed as a trusted individual in times of strife between tribes. It’s their duty to find justice and mete it out. If they do it well, their will is honored by both tribes.”

“And...if they do it badly?”

“It...is not done badly,” Edina replied, shutting her eyes and looking like she was trying to describe a concept in a language she didn’t speak. “You search until you die. If you die before your search is complete, your next of kin is named Justice. If no next of kin is available, your closest friend.”

Taxi swallowed, nervously. “I seriously don’t think I’m ‘High Justice’ material.”

“If no High Justice is named...the tribes will go to war. What it does mean is nobody can kill you for asking questions. To kill the Justice, one must challenge their judgement. That means...erm...ritual combat.”

A chill crept up my back. “Ritual combat...with a griffin. Right.”

“That is only if the tribe votes to allow the challenge!” Edina added, quickly. “If they vote to accept your judgement, it is the new law. To my knowledge, there has never been a pony Justice before, but no law speaks against it. The last High Justice was named over ten years ago. None would dare hurt you openly. So long as you eat no food, do not bleed, do not attack anyone, accept no other challenges, and respect the office of the High Justice, you will probably only be assassinated if you are alone or in a private space.”

“And...that’s good, then?” Swift asked. “We’ll only be killed if we’re alone?”

I picked up Edina’s discarded bagel and munched on it, thoughtfully. It was a completely hopeless situation to walk into, and yet we’d recently found ourselves in situations I would deem even worse. Hubris got me killed once, and that had put a damper on my desire to see how far my luck would carry me, but equally, I couldn’t really leave Sykes alone in the midst of his family fighting one another. He was a fellow cop. More than that, he was a mate. A stupid, overbearing, oafish lout of a mate who was about to drag me into an ocean of cow shit up to my ears, but you can’t pick your mates.

“Could be worse. I’ve been in a bar brawl with a griffin. I’d rather one griffin tried to kill me than a whole bunch of them. I’m down.”

I turned to Taxi, expectantly. She sat there, staring at me.

“We’re doing this again, aren’t we? I can tell already. Sykes is going to get his stupid, witless hind end turned into a griffin flambe if we don’t and then you’ll make me feel all guilty as you mope around and drink until you can’t find your own hooves,” Taxi moaned, smacking her forehead against her hoof. After a moment, she lifted her head. “Yeah, yeah, fine. Whatever. I’m in. I’ll have to get some fresh rounds for my cannon.”

Swift glanced at the Hailstorm which was laying in a heap on the floor by the door. “It might let me use my new gun, finally. I really do want to try it out.”

Edina glanced up at Mistress Zeta. The zebra cocked her head to one side.

“Mistress Zeta...can I trust this pony?” the little griffin asked, stroking the rope around her neck.

“I do not know if the word ‘trust’ can be applied to Detective Hard Boiled,” Zeta answered, rising to her hooves in one smooth motion. “He is curious in a way I can only describe as suicidal. He plays at games whose rules are opaque to him and I suspect he will be bathed in blood many more times before his goals are met. He will tear down the very civil order of this city if it means finding justice for those who have been wronged.” She pursed her lips. “And he is stubborn. He may succeed or he may die, but I do not believe he will quit until he is dead.”

“Not even then, if my friends have anything to say about it,” I commented.

Edina fluffed her wings and chirped a soft tune.

“Then give me some more Beam. We’ve got to go see my stepmother."

Act 2, Chapter 48: Shotgun Diplomacy

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 48: Shotgun Diplomacy

However dull one might find the particulars of the position of the salad fork or the proper color of the Manehattenite bendy straw at dinner, etiquette as an evolved response is actually a fascinating topic. Selective pressures favor communal species with standards of behavior.

As ponies, we glorify the herd, but it is not without its fundamental risks. Creating a herd affords protection and distribution, but can allow individuals within it to spread disease, harm others within it, or free-ride without contribution – without checks against such issues, the costs of herd life would outweigh its benefits.

Thus, manners serve a dual purpose – it helps identify members of a particular herd through shared commonalities, and prevents the spread of infections through hygienic norms; after all, if a somepony openly wipes herself on a cloud, what’s to say what else they’ll do? Those who display enough of the ‘correct’ behaviors specific to a given herd are much more easily trusted and embraced; those who display strange obsessions with preserves in public are considered avoidable.

The idea of cultural norms is hardly limited to ponies, or even quadrupeds, though when cultural norms from different herds come into contact with one another, there can be misunderstandings ranging from the benign to the catastrophic. Minotaurs, a notoriously boisterous and aggressive species, are known to greet one another by gripping one another by the shoulders and butting heads to indicate respect for one another’s strength and potential as a rival. This did unfortunately lead to something of a situation when the first Equestrian delegation to Minos, unfamiliar with the customs, selected a unicorn for lead diplomat.

Etiquette can be tricky, but thanks to the way civilizations have developed, it can also be the only thing between you and a hole in the head.

-The Scholar

Five people, no matter how small some of them might be, still crowds space in the Night Trotter.

Part of me wanted Limerence on board, but with the recent death of his father I was more inclined to let him take a break from the front line. He’d be happy enough researching our foes and his mental health was worth more to me than an extra few arrows before a griffin war-maker’s axe split our collective skulls.

Unfortunately, Zeta had work to do and, useful as she was, I didn’t feel like walking into the Moonwalk with five heavily armed individuals. Four was company. Five was a posse and likely to raise some eyebrows. We dropped her off the Vivarium on the way back toward Uptown.

That left Edina sprawled in the front passenger seat with a juice box full of Beam and a straw. It was more than a little surreal to sit there watching someone tossing back industrial waste, but she seemed to be relishing the flavor along with her temporary mental health.

Stranger still, I found I kinda liked her like this. I’d stubbed my toe on the way out of the Nest and she spent a full five minutes asking if I was alright and offering me sticking plasters.

While we were gathering up the remainder of our arsenal and getting fitted, Swift had managed to pad the Hailstorm, but it was still ridiculous to ride along with. The boxy saddlebags weren’t very flexible and they barely fit. That said, I didn’t want her approaching the Moonwalk from the sky.

Something in the air around Uptown was making me itch, atop the constant sting in my cutie-mark. I didn’t know whether it was my heart responding to local magical conditions, but I felt more nervous than being in the Night Trotter usually warranted.

****

As we turned onto the pristine Celestia Street, a ladybug suddenly lifted out of Swift’s fur, did a little pirouette, and zipped out the window. We’d been going at a decent clip so it was swept away out of sight within seconds.

“Aaand now, I’m worried. Did we not have a ladybug on us earlier?” I asked.

Swift shook her head. “I don’t know, Sir. They kinda come and go as they please. Unless we’re, like, setting something on fire there’s other stuff to watch, you know? I never saw them just rush off like that, though.” She paused and her eyes lost focus for a second.

“What are you seeing, kid?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The Hailstorm is sending me some more funny lights. There’s lots of runes...and now it says something about ‘localized enchantment interference’ and ‘compensating’.” She paused, squinting at something. “Huh. Now it’s back to normal and the moving target thing. Weird.”

Just then, something chugged in the Night Trotter’s motor. Taxi was so surprised she almost sent us into a fire hydrant.

“Sweets! Mercy, I thought you had this thing serviced a few days ago!” I exclaimed.

“I did! I don’t know what’s wrong with it! The spell core is fully charged! My readouts are acting like we’re tooling through a magical storm or something!”

“Is there something going on?” Edina asked, worriedly.

“I don’t know. Give me a second.”

I glanced at the street signs. We were less than a block from the Moonwalk.

Rolling down the window, I stuck my head out and peered up at the sky. Aside a few low rain-clouds, everything seemed perfectly normal as we sped along between Uptown’s skyscrapers. Ponies seemed to be coming and going relatively normally.

There was a slight, waifish unicorn mare standing in the corner as we pulled up to a stoplight with a well dressed gentlecolt tending her. She was massaging her forehead, like she had a headache. Or a horn ache.

I rested a hoof on my chest and took a few deep breaths. I wasn’t precisely uncomfortable, but something felt out of sorts. I could hear my pulse in my ears.

“Sweets, my heart is acting up, too. Do you know of anything that might cause this?”

“A whole list of things, but most of them involve lots of screaming and panic in the streets,” Taxi replied, flipping her braid into her mouth as she turned us onto the slip road in front of the Moonwalk. “I think the most benign is probably what happens when they maintain the Shield pylons. You remember, five years back they made a big deal on the news about ‘local arcane side effects’ out in the country? They were repairing a pylon that got hit by a tornado.”

“I remember, yeah. I hope they’re not screwing with the local Shield. I sincerely do not want to find myself launched into low orbit because somepony decided my heart was actually a particularly sneaky manticore.”

“Gypsy mentioned the Shield, right? Something about this having something to do with the Shield?”

“Yes, and trust me, my worries about that are simmering. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do until Limerence gets back, so we’re going to handle this situation with the griffins first.”

“Detective, I don’t...really know how to say this, but-” Edina took a slurp out of her juice box and continued, “-I mean, my tribe probably won’t try to kill you outright, but I hope you don’t think you can actually fix the intertribal conflicts. The Arena is closed to us. Without the Blood Bank, the law leaves only direct challenges as a means of settling disputes.”

“You keep mentioning this ‘Arena’ place. What exactly is that?”

Edina sat up and set her Beam in the Night Trotter’s cup holder as she explained, “It’s...well, it’s what it sounds like. It’s a place we handle financial disputes. If there’s a griffin who owes another griffin, they can appeal to the Tokan. If they can prove they’re owed, their account will be credited. If the party who owes cannot or will not pay, the aggrieved individual can demand a lien against future income. That includes the blood in the debtor’s veins. If that happens, they fight in the Arena, either until the debtor has won enough blood to pay their debt...or until they’ve lost enough to pay their debt.”

“That’s...that’s insane,” Taxi said, scratching her mane. “I mean, whoever is strongest could just... not pay their debts!”

Edina shook her head. “They might, or they might find themselves owing so many at once that they’d end up in the Arena with ten griffins they owe, simultaneously. The Arena has kept us from war for decades.”

“So if you think this mess is hopeless, why are you tagging along?” I asked.

“I’m going along because I want to see my family while I’m...I’m still me,” she replied, peeking out the window at the Moonwalk. The light was failing, but I could make out a pair of griffins circling overhead, engaged in a slow, elaborate aerial dance. As we pulled to a halt, they disappeared over the rooftops.

“That’s all well and good, but if you don’t mind sticking with us, I’d appreciate it. Keep us clear on points of etiquette and so on,” I said, stepping out of the car. The attendant and his porters were still there, keeping attentive watch we disembarked.

“I don’t think there’s any points of etiquette I can keep you clear on. I don’t even know who is in what position these days,” Edina answered, uncoiling her whip. “Keep your guns close by and don’t pick up your trigger until somebody else picks up their axe.”

“Is...is that supposed to keep us safe?”

“It might. Maybe,” Edina chirped, hopping out of the car and following me up the steps as Taxi pulled around the side of the building to park in the underground garage. “Come on, I’m looking forward to the look on Derida’s face when I show up with a pony. I think I might see if the hotel has a gift shop where I can get a camera.”

****

Sykes was waiting in the lobby, hunched over the chessboard in one of the high backed chairs. He looked like he’d choked down a toad, but it was an improvement over a few hours ago. I suspected he’d had a few good vomits and most of the gallons of alcohol he’d consumed were out of his system.

The same PACT stallion as before was dutifully watching him, but Sykes was the only griffin in the room. For some reason, I found that a bit worrying. It didn’t help that the second the porter pushed open the door for us and I took my first breath of the sanitized air, my cutie-mark decided it was going to catch fire. I did my best to ignore it.

“Sykes! We’ve got Edina,” I said, gesturing at our guest.

Blearily lifting his head, he took a few seconds for his eyes to focus.

“Oi, ye needn’t play tricks, boyo. Oi’m shited enough as it is.”

I stepped to one side and Edina made a demure little curtsy.

“Good evening, Sykes,” she said in a voice just above a whisper.

Sykes eyes bugged out of his head and he kicked back in his chair. He’d have toppled if the chair weren’t braced against the wall.

“Edina! Moi merciful mum!” He yelped, launching himself to his paws. He looked up at me with wide eyes. “Oi thought ye was joshin’ me, when ye said ye could get’er! Oi was half out of me head! Oi didn’t think she’d actually turn up! Is she still...ye know...mad?”

She crooked one side of her beak in something like a smile, then raised her juice box. “Not for a little while. My friends here got me what I needed. I’d owe them quite the open vein if they were griffins.”

Sykes took a couple of cautious steps forward and carefully took the cup, sniffing it cautiously.

“What be this?” he asked. I grabbed his beak a second before he brought it to his mouth to take a sip.

“Believe me," I explained, "you do not want to drink that. It’d bring back some...flashbacks, yeah? Like, of a particularly explosive time in your life," I said, adding a meaningful nod.

His fluffy brows pinched for a moment then comprehension dawned. “Beam, boyo?!” he hissed. “Ye gave’er Beam?!”

“Hey, you asked for our help. You wanna call me drunk, you get whatever form that help takes. She’s not crazy right now and that’s what matters.”

“Sweet clouds an’ all,” he muttered. Righting his chair, Sykes stepped up and held out his claw. Edina carefully took it and gave it a light shake. “Well, Oi’m roightly pleased to meet ye again. Oi ain’t seen ye since we was chicks.”

“Likewise,” she replied, dipping her chin. “Good to meet you again, Sykes. Five years is a long time to lose your mind, but it doesn’t feel that long. The last time I heard anything about you, the Hitlan were still cursing your name for leaving home.”

“Aye, that they still be. But, what’s this then? Ye don’t speak loike the ol’ country!”

Edina giggled and set her Beam on the chessboard, dropping into a thick brogue. “Moi father taught us to speak proper, ye silly goose!”

She swallowed as though she’d spit up something foul, letting the accent go. “Tokan always were the diplomats,” she explained to the rest of us. “My sire insisted all the members of his family take equine voice lessons after the war. He believed coexistence with ponies was the way of the future. It’s better than sitting on the edges, watching them outpace us technologically and economically.”

Sykes rubbed the back of his neck and managed a small smile. “True it be. Ye ponies have the funniest way of speakin’.”

****

The five of us sat in the bar, crowded into one of the booths on the far side of the room, away from prying ears. The bar was empty, but there’s always a healthy trade in gossip amongst bartenders. Thankfully, they seemed more interested in some conversation regarding an unfaithful coltfriend than in the clandestine meeting taking place.

“Grimble Shanks be comin’ soon. Oi can’t say Oi’ll be surproised if he’s more wantin’ to be wavin’ his axe than talkin’, though,” Sykes muttered, swallowing his fifth cup of industrial strength coffee.

“If I ask him for his help, he’ll say ‘yes’,” Edina said, stirring her Beam with the end of a straw. “He’s been chasing my tail since we were tiny.”

“Moreso since ye went mad, thinks Oi,” Sykes replied, with a dirty grin. Taxi gave him a kick in the shins under the table.

“Well, so long as he keeps his ‘blade’ in its sheath, I think we’ll get along fine,” said Edina, with a prim sniff. “Grimble’s head is for fighting, not for strategy. Against Derida, even with combat strength on his side, he’d have a rough time taking the Hotel. He’s got the power to do it, but the cost in lives would cripple our tribes for decades.”

Looking down at the marbled tabletop, I closed my eyes and tried to assemble the shape of what might be going on. My cutie-mark felt like an alarm bell on my hip, but it was being irritatingly vague about the actual injustice occurring. Cutting off the books was feeling more like a strange act of desperation on the part of the Tokan, but what might they gain from it?

A clatter of metal announced Grimble Shanks at the door of the bar. The gigantic griffin had to duck to push through, casually adjusting his axe so it didn’t catch on the edge. He’d changed into a fresh kilt and ditched the bullet proof vest in favor of a sash that matched the ruddy brown of his chest feathers. His sharp eyes scanned the room for danger, checking corners, checking sight lines. Standard hypervigilant crazy, but a type of crazy I could understand. He must have seen us, but his eyes kept moving.

Pretending you’re not meeting someone or are just passing through is a worthwhile way of keeping your friends from getting shot. For all he might have been a bird mountain, he seemed to know the basics of operating in a dangerous public environment.

Finally satisfied he wasn’t about to be attacked, he made his way to the bar, ordered a drink, then strolled leisurely up to our booth. Unclasping his axe from his back, he dropped it within easy claw reach. I was about to try squeezing in to make room, but he snatched a chair from one of the nearby tables, turned it backwards, straddled it with his rear legs, and propped himself up on his front elbows. I found it a bit odd he’d sit facing the back wall, but realized the mirror behind us gave good vision on the door.

Up close and with time to examine him, Grimble Shanks was even more intimidating. Sykes had a few scars, but on Shanks I could see burns in various flavors that might have been cold, fire, or acid, patches of missing fur, a great gouge down his side that could have been from one of those insane axes, and even a notch out of the top of one wing which looked only recently healed.

He gave me a level stare, his eyes sparking with brutal intelligence.

“Moi brudder says ye be a foine cobber,” Shanks rumbled. “Oi hear of ye, Boiled boy, and moi brudder makes good friends, even damn fool he be. He says ye might be able to foind me blood and help killin’ those what took it.”

I shrugged, doing my best not to let the lizard parts of my brain take over and send me scuttling under the table. They were not happy to be having a conversation with a griffin of his size, particularly since I could smell mead and meat on his breath.

“I’m not here to start an international incident...but, if you name me High Justice between the tribes, I’ll see what I can do about stopping this from becoming a war. You want someone to investigate and I might be able to find your blood. In doing that, I may give you a better target than just ‘all the Tokan’.”

Shanks cocked one eye at his brother. “Ye tells him about our Justices, eh? A pony as Justice. Heh!” He threw his head back and chortled. “Oi loikes that! Me father moight love his traditions, but Oi’d do it just to see the look on his face when he foinds out Oi names a mad little stallion! Still, ye must tell the mad pony, he needs a royal griffin o’both tribes? Who ye gots fer that what bleeds Tokan blood?”

Sykes opened his beak to say something, but Edina beat him to it. She let out a polite cough and leaned forward over the table. I realized from where he’d been sitting, Edina was invisible beside Sykes.

“It’s awfully good to see you, Grimble,” Edina purred.

The Hitlan Egg’s steely composure vanished. He leaned back in his chair so far he almost fell out of it and had to catch himself on the edge of the table, tearing deep talon marks into the surface. He righted himself and stared, open-beaked, at the tiny dominatrix.

“Edina! Moi gods above, ye ken how to give a griff a shock!” he exclaimed, swinging the chair out of the way and reaching across to lift Edina out of her seat. She let out a squawk of protest and swiped at his eyes with one claw, but she couldn’t hardly reach.

He pulled her to his chest in a big, full body hug.

All that cold brutality was gone. For the first time, I could see the sibling resemblance to Sykes.

“How’ve ye been, eh?” he asked, holding her at arms length. “Oi thought sure Oi’d see ye earlier’n this once the Hitlan hit town!”

“Put me down, you ridiculous oaf!” she snapped, snatching her rope from around her neck and cracking it at his cheek.

Shanks grinned and set Edina on the table. “Aye, feisty as ever, moi sweet! Oi’d no idea ye moight be here! Ye be the Tokan they drag in for this madness o’ me brudder’s?”

“That’s right,” she hissed, snatching up her juice box of Beam and taking a quick suck on the straw.

“Funny, eh? Ye don’t sound so gone in the head no more,” he murmured, giving her an appraising look.

“It’s a temporary situation,” she sighed, looking down at her empty drink. “I’m not going to be like this for more than a few days. Then it’s back to feline and fowl. Thankfully, their employer...my employer is very accommodating.”

Shanks chuckled, picking up his chair and setting it upright. “Oi won’t pretend Oi kin what ye talkin’ about, but Oi can say, Oi’m roight glad to see ye, lass.” He turned to me with a fresh gaze of interest. “Now, cobber! Oi believes ye say ye moight be able to foind me blood. Ye wants Hitlan and Tokan to open a vein and name ye High Justice?”

“I’m working a case that’s got ugly implications and you know what pony talents are like. Mine says there might be something related to what I’m looking into here.” I sat back a little in my seat. “If nothing else, your brother is my friend. He’s got family in both the Tokan and the Hitlan tribes. I want to keep as little bloodshed as possible between you two.”

Sykes raised his coffee and gave me a proud smile.

Grimble Shanks seemed to consider this for a long moment, then he let out a great belly laugh and slapped his claw on my back. It felt like being hit by a wrecking ball.

“Moi brudder is a damn fool, and ye ponies be friendship-mad!” he barked, snatching up his axe and swinging it up to his leg. “Honor loike no other, though!”

“So you’ll do it, then?”

“Aye. It be yer funeral, iffen’ ye loikes, but Oi’ll name ye High Justice, boyo. If Edina trusts ye, Oi can do no worse. Foind why the Tokan close the Arena and The Blood. Foind who would dare steal me lifeblood, and Oi swears to ye, Oi’ll draw no more than is owed me.”

With that, he pressed his axe against his foreleg until hot blood began to drip on the table. I cringed a little as he dipped a talon in it, then reached out and wiped it on my cheek. I couldn’t repress a shudder. Edina, reached up and grabbed my jaw, dragging me around to look at her. Her leg was already bleeding as she drew something on my other cheek, then picked up a napkin and held it to her wrist.

“We names ye Justice,” Shanks declared. “Ye be the avatar, that ye may do naught but seek justice in the darkness o’ the world.”

****

I held the mirror up and sighed.

“Hardy, it’s not that bad,” Taxi snickered, covering her muzzle with one foreleg.

“Sweets, I look like I wandered into a children’s face painting booth for psychopaths,” I grumbled. “I don’t even know what these symbols mean. For all I know, Grimble Shanks could have written ‘cock-end’ on my cheek.”

Taxi, Swift and I sat side by side in the bar, whilst Edina, Sykes, and Grimble were off on the other end, jabbering at each other in that demented cockney griffins can fall into when they’re not worrying about their Equestrian counterparts’ ear-drums. I got the impression Grimble was updating Edina on the comings and goings of tribe politics over the last five years, but for all I could understand them, he might have been relating a recipe for shepherd’s pie.

“I don’t know, Sir,” Swift said, cocking her head to one side as she studied my muzzle. “I think the Tokan symbol looks a little bit like a duck foot and the Hitlan symbol is sort like a wheel of cheese with a piece cut out.”

“And if I wipe these off, any griffin who wants to rip all of us to shreds is perfectly entitled to do so once we get upstairs?” I asked.

Taxi nodded and stuck her mirror back in her saddlebag, shifting the P.E.A.C.E. cannon into a more comfortable position between her shoulder-blades. “It’s their embassy. You get in a fight here, you’re legally on their ground. By their laws, your family could claim a blood debt if one of them tore your head off, but I don’t think that would do you any good. Like Sykes said, don’t rub your cheeks and please try not to piss anyone off so bad that they try to murder you outright.”

“Somehow, I expected more of a fight out of Grimble Shanks,” I commented.

“You and he share a couple of personality traits I think you’d find a bit worrying if you could see them from the outside,” Taxi replied. “Not the least of which is a tendency to trust the craziest pony in the room.”

I peered at Taxi. “That’s usually me.”

“Exactly. I’m not surprised Shanks is willing to let you poke around. He looked downright relieved when you volunteered to put us on the firing line.”

“He’s hoping there’s some off chance we actually discover what’s going on,” I replied.

Taxi snorted and poked the air in the general direction of where her cutie-mark should be. “I might not have my mark anymore, but my talent works just fine. You need to know, Shanks is hoping we’ll act like a lightning rod and draw the fire.”

I groaned, rocking my bar stool back on two legs. “The pragmatism of predators. I swear, this would be so much easier if we weren’t trying to keep ourselves from getting wrapped up in international politics and could just treat it like any old investigation.”

“I’m wishing I could sit this out, Sir,” Swift muttered, putting a hoof over her eyes. I realized it was trembling.

I gawked at her. “After the mess at Supermax and the school...and the Monte Cheval, for that matter, you want to sit this one out!?”

“I dunno. Something just feels strange.”

I nodded. “I’ve felt it too, but what specifically is bugging you?”

“I...I’m not sure.” She stared at the backs of her orange hooves, then ran a hoof through her spiked mane. “Can’t you feel it? The air is wrong. Like there’s thermals under my wings that could just vanish and send me into a building. Lots of them are going to want to kill us.”

The Hailstorm’s barrels shifted on her back until they were aimed at our trio of allies. I gave them a firm tap and they quickly swiveled away. I got the strange impression that, if they were capable, they’d be whistling in an especially nonchalant fashion.

“We’ve been in worse situations,” I replied.

She bobbed her head, weakly. “I know. I...I wish I was still that dumb little girl who walked into the Castle a couple months ago. At the same time, I wouldn’t give up what we’ve managed to do, even if...even if I can’t sleep as well as I used to.”

I gave her a pat on the back and grinned. “I’m glad to have you here, kid.”

Swift bit her lower lip. “It would make me feel super-much better if we had a plan.”

I patted my gun and slid off my barstool. “I’ve got a plan. We hunt the blood of the Hitlan Egg. We find out why my talent is telling me this is something important. We survive to tell this story over many, many rounds of drinks one day in the near future.”

“Hardy, I’ve known you since we were foals,” Taxi said, finishing her drink and dropping a tip beside it. “Why is it when you say you have a plan, you always make me feel better and worse?”

“Because none of my plans have ever included a step where we get to sleep soundly thereafter,” I answered, pulling my collar high. “Now, come on. I want to see where they found Grimble Shanks before we go upstairs.”

****

“This is the alley?” I asked, peering into the alleyway behind the Moonwalk. “I thought you said you came back here to piss? I’d sooner eat off pavement this clean.”

The seven of us stood just outside the Moonwalk with the front door attendant giving the lot of us dirty looks as we poked around the alley beside the hotel. Rain threatened, but it hadn’t started up yet. There were only the distant rumblings of thunder.

It wasn’t the sort of alley you have in places for poor people. It was the kind of alley only the rich can afford. The dumpster was a shining, specimen of perfection and every brick looked to have been recently scrubbed with bleach. There wasn’t so much as a scrap of paper or a griffin piss stain to be found.

“Ye ponies ‘ave given us foive good water closets for a hundred and fifty griffins,” Grimble replied. “Even the Prince of Detrot - blessed be he name - could only rig us so many! They was all full!”

I gave him a questioning look. Taxi leaned up to my ear to whisper, “High protein diet.”

“Ah. Right,” I shut my eyes for a moment and forced out all thoughts that might be related to the movement of griffin bowls. “Sweets, forensics? Anything?”

Taxi shook her head, picking at the ground with one toe. “The cleaning staff have been out here with ammonia and scouring tools. If there was a crime scene here, it’s gone now.”

“Alright, so...they found you here?” I asked, turning to Grimble. He nodded towards the dumpster.

“Over by yon dumper,” he replied. “Oi come to wi’ a needle in moi backsoide. Funny thing...bastards could have taken moi amulet or moi coin purse. Oi ‘ad both when Oi woke.”

Taxi trotted over to the dumpster and began poking around, chewing on her lower lip.

“Did someone give you a toxicology test?” I asked.

“Now ye mentions it...Oi had one of the doc boys upstairs give me a look over,” Shanks said, with a chuckle. “They says Oi musta drank som’tin funny. Loike...herb drink or some shite. Oi were pretty mouldy by the toime Oi come down fer a slash.”

Swift blinked a little, then asked, “Herb drink. Wait, like…zebra herbs?”

Grimbles eyebrows rose onto his forehead. “Aye...odd thing. Oi don’t remember no-one passin’ me any but griff drink, but Oi figured pony waiters moight ‘ave give me som’tin. Not the first toime Oi drinks whatever be in moi claw. It weren’t nothin’ dangerous, though.”

Swift and I exchanged a look. “Maybe not to you,” I murmured.

“Hardy, I’ve got something here,” Taxi called.

“What? This place has been scrubbed within an inch of its life.”

“I know, but there’s something under the dumpster,” she replied, giving it a shove. It didn’t budge. She pressed her shoulder against it and applied a bit more strength. Still, nothing. “What’d they put in here? Bricks?”

I moved over to her side and peered into the dumpster. Reaching in, I laid one hoof on a layer of concrete that was just under the top.

“It’s...a fake,” I muttered. “They’ve got a take-away service for their garbage so they can make it look like even their dumpsters are spotless. If they were really this clean, though, they’d have an issue with vagrants sleeping in them. They’ve filled the damn thing in with plaster. I hate Uptown…”

“Mmm, no wonder my family insisted on staying here,” Edina commented, fluffing her wings out. “Derida loves her pomp and circumstance. If she had her way, the Tokan would be using their positions as the Blood Bank to control all of the griffin tribes within a thousand miles.”

“Aye, moi aunt loves her shine, she does,” Sykes concurred.

“Sykes. Grimble. Gimme a hoof...err...claw...here,” I directed them, pressing my shoulder against the dumpster. The two griffins lined up beside me and, together, we heaved against it with all of our might. Being an Earth pony has certain physical advantages, but even accounting for those, I was nothing like strong enough to heave the concrete-filled dumpster out of the way. Still, between the three of us, we managed to shove it inch by inch away from the wall.

Taxi jammed her hoof into the hole and fished around behind the dumpster, then yanked something on a shiny chain out and held it up. It glittered in the light from the street lamps.

I leaned forward a little to get a good look. “Is that...a vial of…”

“My blood!” Edina squeaked. She darted forward and snatching the amulet from Taxi, holding it up to the light. The amulet was a pretty thing, shaped like an anatomically correct heart of crystal and metal constructed by a skilled jeweler. It was half the size of my hoof, but seemed designed to lay flat. A little rubber button or stopper capped the top.

“Wait...that’s your...blood?” I stammered.

Grimble leaned down and peered at the amulet. “Aye, that be the blood of a Tokan Royal.” Reaching up to his throat, he rustled his feathers a little and pulled out a similar amulet in the shape of a halberd, very similar to his axe. The ‘handle’ was clear and full of red liquid. “How ye blood come to be here, wonders Oi?”

Edina looked a bit mystified herself. She shook her head and held up the chain, peering at it this way and that. “I’ve no idea. The bird and the cat don’t tend to talk to me, except to scream. I spent most of the last few months in this lovely dream of the highlands.”

I shut my eyes for a moment, then let out a breath. It wasn’t a great leap of deductive reasoning to figure out why Edina’s blood was in the alley.

“This...be what ye ponies call a ‘set up’, aye?” Grimble asked, carefully. “We foinds a Tokan Royal’s blood here, wi’ no Tokan willin’ to claim it…”

“-because they think Edina is mad as a March hare,” Taxi murmured.

“That’s really cute,” I growled. “Incredibly hamfisted, for these characters we’ve been dealing with, but cute. Someone really wanted a rumble between the Hitlan and the Tokan. I don’t know if this was the best way to go about it mind you. It also leaves the question of why the Tokan closed the books...”

I glanced sideways at Swift, who was looking a little pensive. “Sir...um...can I ask something?”

“Yeah?”

“What if that zebra herbal whatever it is...erm…” she scratched her mane a little. “What if it was the same stuff they injected Ruby Blue and Cerise with?”

“Uhh...it…huh.” My brain took a full minute to sort the implications of that possibility. “Wouldn’t it have...killed Grimble if they injected him with it?”

The giant war-maker snorted. “Poisons? Boyo, no poisons works on griffin flesh!”

“He’s right!” Taxi exclaimed. “If what I watched Edina do to that Beam is any indication, he’d have metabolized it in a few hours!”

Swift shook one feathertip at the dumpster. “What if...I mean, what if we found Grimble Shanks dead here, full of that poison, with a Tokan Royal’s symbol of office and a needle in him?”

My mouth felt very suddenly dry. “Yikes, kid, you gotta stop asking those questions. The Hitlan would probably believe the Tokan had killed their Egg. They’re off the embassy grounds, so the D.P.D. would have to investigate. They’d find the poison in his system and link it up to the death of Ruby Blue-”

“-and then we’d have the Tokan accused of both a griffin and a pony murder,” Taxi finished, looking momentarily sick to herself.

Sykes heaved a great sigh and sat, folding his claws over his chest. “Moi kin would foight the D.P.D. investigation. Griffins don’t loike no other species messin’ about in our business.”

“Wi’ me dead...moi war-makers ‘ave no-one to tell’em not to take the Tokan soide of this Hotel,” Shanks said, quietly. “It’d ‘ave been a suproise attack, too.”

“It’s worse,” Edina muttered, pulling her wings in tight against herself. “My father wouldn’t approve it, but he’s not here. With the Blood Bank under threat, Derida could supercede his authority. She could...she would use blood magic against the Hitlan.”

“Using blood magic on Equestrian soil would require the P.A.C.T. to intervene,” Taxi added. “Without Princess Celestia to keep tensions calm, they couldn’t let this spill into the streets.”

Grimble Shanks had a deeply disturbed expression on his face. “If ye army uses dragon-killer guns near our eggs under whoite-flag toimes-”

I screwed my eyes shut. “-we could end up in a war with the Hitlan, too,” I finished. I clapped my hooves to the sides of my head as the implications sank in. “I take back anything I said about this being hamfisted. This was one wrinkle short of a masterwork.”

“Aye, cobber,” Shanks rumbled. “What point, though? Ye ponies earn nothin’ makin’ war wi’ griffs.”

I gave my mane a shake, trying to get my brain back on track. It was quite the difficult thing to do. “The ponies I’m hunting seem to be intent on burning this city to the ground. I don’t know why, yet, but I’m going to find out. I need you to keep the Hitlan from setting fire to this powder keg.”

Sykes, Edina, and Shanks all looked back and forth at one another.

It was Edina who finally shared whatever mutual thought they’d been having.

“Detective...we have another problem.”

“Nooo, no we don’t have another problem,” I snapped, turning and banging my head against the brick wall hard enough that I felt momentarily dizzy. “Please, I can’t take an additional bomb in the middle of this insane mess!”

She hesitated, her snowy wings dangling so that the tips of her feathers dragged the pavement. “I haven’t been around for almost five years. I don’t have the power to override my aunt’s decision to close the Blood Bank. Every griffin within five hundred miles who isn’t fighting will be coming here to find out why their accounts are suddenly closed. Unless we find Grimble’s blood and whoever took it, we’re at war anyway, unless we can open the Blood Bank. We might not be at war with the Hitlan, but those other tribes are practically guaranteed to be less self-restrained. They’ll take sides. They’ll call in old favors.”

“Which means the Hitlan will have to pick sides,” Taxi said, worriedly.

Edina nodded her agreement. “Grimble’s father hasn’t sent orders yet because it takes time to talk to the homeland and Sykes tells me one of the first things this stupid band of dragons set fire to was our telephone lines, but messengers are flying out that way right now. There will be griffins who will want to take advantage of the closure of the Blood Bank to settle old grudges for which they could not pay. Many of them will be coming here. They’ll find their old enemies here.”

I slammed my hoof against the wall. Kicking this wall was surprisingly therapeutic. I kinda wanted to cut it down and take it home with me.

“Arg...so we’ve got to open the Blood Bank...essentially now?! Before orders get back?!”

“Eh...um...yes,” she replied.

I glanced at Grimble Shanks. “Can’t we just...put a hold on any murdering for a couple of days?” I asked.

“Oi love me brudder, and Oi honor the office of High Justice, but there be no magic in this world that changes moi sire’s moind. If Hitlan blood be spilled, Oi must think of me troibe. Oi must secure the eggs, the treasury, and...if Oi can foind it...the ledgers of the Blood Bank. I’ll give ye the day, but if the order comes, Oi must obey, unless the situation be changed in a way Oi can report to me tribe-lord. Foind why the Blood Bank be closed, or the griffins be goin’ to war.”

I’m in my mid-thirties. A pony of my age has access to a spectacular repertoire of foul language. Myself, more than most. Taxi can cuss a person out in at least three languages I know of. Juniper could make a criminal stop dead in their tracks and throw themselves at his hooves, begging forgiveness if he’d just stop making snide comments about their choice of clothing.

It’s a sign of how bad the situation had become that the only pejoratives I could think of just then were:

“Oh...ponyfeathers.”

****

There’s never been a more awkward elevator ride in the whole of Equine history.

Seven beings, some of them quite large, mashed into an elevator by a door-pony who had the haggard look of a person who’d never been tipped enough in his life.

On the fourth floor, we had to disembark and switch elevators. None of us felt much like conversing. Screaming and hiding, yes. Conversing, not so much.

How’d I gotten myself into this? Ambassadorial work was the purview of royals.

Granted, I wasn’t going in as an ambassador. If Edina was to be believed, I was going in to ask questions. I’m good at asking questions. Taxi would say that any question to which gunfire is the answer is a bad question, but those kinds of answers do give me the opportunity to retort in similar fashion.

Taxi was by my side to the end and Swift had what I could only describe as ‘loyalty issues’. Namely, she was too loyal for her own good. True, we climbed out of Supermax. Were it not for the body-count, I’d have called that a win.

****

The elevator doors dinged on the top floor. The door-pony, a pretty mare in the same ridiculous red vest and circular hat as the desk clerk, bowed and held out her hat. Taxi dropped a couple bits in it and she bowed again as the doors opened for us.

Ahhh, the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

Thick carpets. Gold and marble everything. Red velvet for a dash of drama, with comforting greens strategically placed for a sense of security. The smell of velour and fresh flowers.

I half expected a grand approach with a sweet little mare in a cocktail dress to greet us with margaritas and a butler holding warm tea towels.

If only.

As it turns out, occupancy by two bands of griffins can do a number on the grandeur of event the most opulent of residences. Whereas hooves tend to leave - at worst - scuff-marks, griffins are in the habit of wearing all manner of sharp jewelry on their claws. Claws being what they are, they’re not gentle on the carpets. Nor are they gentle on the tapestries, or the walls, or the furniture.

A wooden table lay broken against the wall across from the elevator doors. It looked like someone had landed on it with considerable force. A vase with some slightly wilted flowers in it had been hastily set upright in the wreckage and was surrounded by a spreading puddle. The two suites were at opposite ends of the long hall, each one taking up one entire half of the top of the floor.

Two griffins in full battle regalia stood on either side of the elevator door. The one on the left might as well have been a slightly smaller carbon copy of Grimble Shanks, scarred and heavily muscled, with plaid kilt and monstrous war-axe propped leisurely across his neck. He acknowledged Shanks with a tilt of his head and didn’t seem the least bit interested in the rest of us.

The other griffin was a strange looking character. He was only a head taller than I was, and his pale mane of white feathers looked preened within an inch of its life. His combat vest was similar to his companion’s, but with the addition of a tie and black fedora. Some sort of shiny, straight blade was tucked under each wing and what looked like an especially ornate checkbook dangled from a golden chain around his neck alongside another of those heart-shaped blood containers.

His eyes quickly scanned over us, coming to a stop on my face before dropping to my side. As he caught sight of Edina, comprehension blossomed on his features and he took an involuntary step to one side.

“Oh sweet Egg and sky! Lady Edina!” he gasped. His voice was a few octaves short of masculine and nothing at all like I tend to expect from a battle hardened griffin. “No-one told us you were coming!”

“Bernard,” she replied, strutting out of the elevator with the air of a princess, or possibly an especially dangerous dominatrix.

“I mean...My Lady, I am so glad you are back! I...I must inform your step-mother-” the guard started to say, but Edina locked him with a furious look that rooted him to the spot. His front knees were shaking as she approached, stepping up close and jamming her beak into his face. He glanced sideways at his companion, but the Hitlan guard was aggressively ignoring his fellow’s distress.

“Bernard,” Edina said, with quiet menace in her tone. “I’m going to ask you a question and...I do want you to answer it for me.”

“Y-yes, Lady Edina?” he choked out.

“Do you like being male?”

Bernard couldn’t take his eyes off his superior as he slowly nodded.

Unlooping the rope from around her neck, Edina flicked it out on the carpet and gave it a light snap.

“Would you like to continue being male?”

He nodded so hard I thought he might pass out.

“Then you aren’t going to be informing my stepmother I’m here just yet,” she purred. “Clear?”

His beak chattered as he backed up against the wall. “B-begging pardon, my lady, but Lady Derida will have my bits if I don’t.”

“I wouldn’t let her geld you, Bernard,” she giggled. It wasn’t the giggle of a completely sane being. I couldn’t tell how much of that was an act. “Believe me. You’ve kissed my family’s flanks since you dodged war service to stand outside my nursery room. A sycophant who can breed little sycophants will always have a place when it comes time for me to take my aunt’s place as head of this household.”

Bernard stepped back into place beside the door, his eyes still darting nervously towards Edina, then the rest of us. He hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Again, your pardons begged, Lady, but...are you alright?”

Edina begin re-looping her makeshift whip. “Are you referring to my health or to my company?”

His gaze had already taken in the sheer weight of armament our party was carrying, but it was when it stopped on me again, that I got the sensation he wanted to bolt.

“Erm...Both.”

“I am fine, for now,” she replied, gesturing for us to get out of the elevator. She turned to Grimble Shanks. “Shanks, order your guard to go downstairs and take Bernard here with him. I think it best they both get extremely drunk.”

He gave her a puzzled look as the Hitlan guard shifted from talon to talon.

“Oi moight. Why?”

“I don’t want ears on what I have to say to our friends,” she said, gesturing at me. “Your people’s ears or mine.”

Shanks gave her an offended scowl. “Oi trusts any Hitlan!”

“But I don’t,” Edina hissed, flapping her wings and lifting off until she was on the same height with Grimble. “I’m helping you, remember? I want a clear line of retreat if we need to scarper. That and...Bernard is probably best watched. He is loyal to whoever holds power. At the moment, that is my stepmother.”

The big griffin war-maker gave Bernard a look of disgust and the smaller griffin quailed, crouching low to the floor with one claw on that funny book on a chain.

“Do ye thinks that be necessary? Derida be power mad, but even she wouldn’t have done wi’ ye just loike that, roight?”

Edina bunched her eyebrows together, meaningfully, and she jerked her head at the guards. Frowning, Grimble snapped a claw. The Hitlan guard grinned and snatched Bernard around the neck and dragged him into the elevator.

Once we were alone, Sykes said, “She were ready to have done wi’ me when Oi showed up. Ye talked to her much, besoides to yell and be thrown out the Tokan embassy?”

“Eh...well-” Shanks scratched at the feathers on the back of his head, self-consciously. “-no...”

Edina shook her head and added, “Father was almost to the age of doddering when I left. I don’t know what changes my aunt has made to the court. If she hasn’t attempted a board of directors vote to shift the guardianship of the family to her bloodline, it’s because she hasn’t been in the right political position to do it. That might have changed with Father at the plateaus. If it has, even appointing a High Justice might not save us.”

“Ach, lass, ye must be tellin’ us these things sooner!” Sykes groaned, sweeping his tufted tail around his ankles.

“I’m telling you now!” she snapped, then turned to me and gave me a firm poke. “Detective, when you ask your questions, keep them brief and to the point. Whatever you do, you must keep in mind one thing. It is vital to your survival.”

I perked an ear. “I’m listening.”

Edina pressed one claw against my chest, digging it in lightly for emphasis. “Whatever she does and whatever she says, you must remember; my stepmother is not insane...and she never lies.”

“Wait a second. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Swift asked.

“Kid, we’ve watched ponies who were out of their minds almost tear this city apart,” I replied, twirling my hoof in the air to indicate our little group. “You wanna underestimate someone who isn’t and might try to kill us anyway? And never lying? Saussurea told us the absolute truth. Maybe not all of it, but enough, and not one word that wasn’t true.”

“Oh...um...right. Eesh...”

“Either way, Edina, you’re with us, right? I need you behind me. Sykes and Grimble are going to have to wait outside.”

“Now just a damn minute, boyo!”

“Oi! Loike Tartarus Oi am!”

I held up my hooves for silence. “You two are going to wait, because if I can go in here and not have Derida try to kill me, I’d like to go that route first.”

The brothers looked extremely unhappy at the notion of letting an ally go into enemy territory unattended, but I was in no mood to argue. It was odd how two so different creatures could somehow also be so similar. Sykes wasn’t a coward, but nor was he the bravest cop I’d ever met. Shanks seemed to live and breathe bravery. Still, neither wanted to let me walk into the lion’s den alone.

I smoothed the collar of my coat and started back towards the elevator. “Look, I can happily go back down to the bar, wipe my face off, and get a drink. You two want to make this a blood bath, you’ll do it without me.”

Sykes and Grimble exchanged a glance, then Shanks reached out and snatched at my tail, catching it in his claw. I glared at his talons until he released them.

Finally, the larger of the two took a step back. “Foine, cobber. Oi shan’t stop ye, but Oi know these Tokan. Excepting present company, they be a slippery bunch,” Grimble said, tipping his head towards Edina.

I trotted back and snatched up Edina, throwing one leg around her neck and the other around Swift’s, pulling them against my side. “Well, I’m not going in alone!”

The brothers looked a bit dubious as Edina, with all the dignity she could muster, extracted herself from my leg.

Turning to the set of double doors at the far end of the hall, I studied the icons woven into the tapestries draped over them that I assumed were something important to the Tokan. One did look very slightly like the emblem Edina had painted on my face, if you stood back a bit and squinted.

“Alright, what is the protocol on entering this embassy?” I asked.

Edina clicked her tongue and replied, “Don’t wander in looking like something griffins have been known to eat. Don’t go in looking to disrupt internal politics. Don’t stumble about heavily armed and start making demands. Don’t stick your muzzle where it doesn’t belong. Don’t start trouble.”

I winced as my brain seized. I threw up my hooves.

“Well, that’s plan A out the window, then. On to plan B.”

Taxi shut her eyes and asked, with great trepidation, “What’s plan B?”

“It’s the same as plan A, except you have permission to cause an international incident if things start to go badly.”

I marched down to the door and paused with one hoof resting on it. After a moment, I heard the sound of claws on carpet, then hooves as my companions followed me, once again, into the dark.

****

I opened the door of the suite and stepped carefully inside. The little foyer was barely more than a coat closet, but there was another of those strange guards, this one with a bowler hat on. He sat beside the door leisurely sipping something from a snifter that smelled like fuel oil and clutching a book of poetry between two claws. Glancing up as I opened the door, he jerked his head over his shoulder then he went back to his book.

“Room service? Good, good. I was wondering when you’d get here. We need fresh towels in the baths and there’s a spill in the kitchenette that could use doing away with.”

Edina strutted in beside me and glared at the guard until he lowered his book again. When his eyes settled on the little griffin, he very nearly fainted. Scrambling out of his chair, he set it to one side and saluted with one claw, then the other, knocking his bowler hat on the carpet behind himself.

“Lady Edina! Oi didn’t see ye...Oi mean...I didn’t see you there!” he gasped.

“I see my stepmother hasn’t been keeping up regular guard drills,” she grumbled. “Not surprising, since she spends half her time in Manehattan, trying on those silly pony costumes. Granted, I don’t doubt father kept all of our competent fighters in the highlands.” Taking a deep breath, Edina addressed the guard. “Fauntleroy, where is my stepmother?”

The guard, Fauntleroy, frowned down at her. “I...I’m under instructions to allow no-one into the tribe-hall, Lady Edina.”

“No, you’re under instructions to get permission to let someone into the tribe-hall. That means to deliver a warning to Derida that I’m coming with the High Justice,” she growled. “This is my tribe, too, you ridiculous old coot. She’ll want us to wait a half hour while she throws on her make-up and composes some convincing story to put me off. I know my stepmother’s ways.”

Fauntleroy’s beak sagged open and he took a step back as he finally realized what was painted on my cheeks. “Wait...did you say... H-High Justice? You made a pony the High Justice?!”

“Hey,” I snapped. “High Justice here. A little respect, please.”

The guard scowled at me, momentarily, then turned his attention back to Edina. “Please, you must understand...things have been very tense since Lady Derida closed access to the Blood Bank. Your father’s position is very weak. He’s old and most of his allies are with him at the plateaus. Your stepmother wishes to issue the Hitlan an ultimatum with our blood magic and bring them to heel before they can attack us, then clean up the external political situation later, once we have their warriors at our beck and call. Bringing a High Justice here, pony or not, might be just the thing she needs to convince the Council of Lymphatic Accounting to vote against his wishes that we remain neutral...”

“Why would Derida put herself in this position in the first place? Shutting off access sounds like an obscenely risky play, even for the most ambitious player,” I asked, edging in a little closer.

“You wouldn’t understand, pony,” he sniffed. “Be glad I am bound by the accords of Justice, or I would see you thrown out a window simply for setting hoof in our embassy uninvited!”

“That’s flapper speak for ‘I don’t know’,” I replied, letting out a long-suffering breath. “I see there’s a lack of communication here. Edina, what was it you said about castrating Bernard? I’m thinking we might need to actually give it a go with this gent.”

Fauntleroy’s beak twitched at the word ‘castrate’, leaving me wondering a little about how serious Edina had been in that threat, and whether it was the first time she'd made it.

“Pony, whether or not you are intelligent enough to realize it, I am looking out for your wellbeing as well. You need to leave. Both of you.”

“Believe me, my wellbeing is paramount in my mind, but this crap on my face means I’m entitled to ask questions and if I don’t ask the right ones, my best friend ends up saddled with this job,” I said, tapping my jaw to indicate the symbols on my face. “The individual with the answers I’m looking for is Derida. You’re between me and her.”

“Lady Edina, would you please explain to this pony-” he started with that haughty tone of voice that just screams ‘please interrupt me with pain’. I was only too happy to oblige.

“Taxi? Swift?” I stepped to one side so my driver and partner could squeeze through. Swift grinned at the griffin and his eyes fixed on her frightening canines. “I want a few warm feathers to line my trenchcoat. His look nice.”

The guard took a second to realize violence had ensued and, rather than pulling his sword, he made to snatch for his jeweled checkbook. He didn’t even have time to get his claws around it before Taxi took a flying leap onto his head, pinning it to the ground between her rear legs. Swift leapt onto his back and took one wing in her sharp teeth, using her free hoof to gently press at the joint. He didn’t even have time to squawk as his rear legs scraped at the carpet.

Trotting over to the guard, I leaned down, just out of range of his beak. The one eye that wasn’t pressed against the floor by my driver’s plot rolled back and he tried to say something. Taxi gave his head a light squeeze with her thighs.

“You got him, Sweets?” I asked, grinning.

“We’ve got him,” Taxi giggled, giving Swift a high hoof. My partner kept her teeth firmly around that wing, ready to do horrible, carnivorous things to it the guard proved uncooperative.

“Now then, Mister...Fauntleroy. My driver has been known to have congress with minotaurs. Unless you want to find out whether or not she can crack your skull from this position, I heartily suggest you ramp down the pompousness.”

The guard let out a sound something like a strangled sob and Swift’s jaw tightened.

“I’ll take whatever you just whimpered as total submission. Excellent. Now that we’ve established a more respectful relationship, I think it’s time we work on our communication skills. Namely, me communicating with Derida, right now. Where is she?”

He made another squeaky noise and I waved at my driver to move her backside enough that he could speak.

“I-In the jacuzzi. Two halls down, on your l-left!” he gasped.

“Good! Taxi, brain him and lets go see the goose holding his leash.”

Act 2, Chapter 49:Doom Doom Doomie Doom Da Doom

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 49: Doom Doom Doomie Doom Da Doom

Carry Muleis, an-oft cited inspirational figure to the donkey community, is widely credited with making the Ponymerase Chain Reaction efficient enough to be used in mainstream research by using obscure parts of dragon cells. A lesser publicized aspect of his discovery, however, is that he did so while so completely filled with Beam he could barely walk straight, according to the expose supposedly written by his glowing green psychic space raccoon.

Mind-altering drugs, and Beam in particular, have been responsible for major developments in pony research, especially with respect to genetics; Prances Quick, the discover of the double-helix structure of PNA, partially credits Beam with his discovery. His theory is that the conscious mind evolved limiters on abstract thought, as a result of times when it was more important to evade predators and find grazing grounds than contemplate the nature of the universe; After all, anypony who began contemplating the structure of clouds or galaxies while fleeing a manticore usually did not do well with either. Supposedly, drugs like Beam remove these limiters.

Before the above encourages anyone to simply try Beam in an effort to advance science or their own thinking, two cautions are worth noting:

First, Beam did not make geniuses out of rodeo clowns. Quick and Muleis were brilliant doctorate-holders to begin with, and if the two are correct about the nature of their discovery, the drug likely merely allowed them to apply their genius in ways a sober mind could not.

Second, for every Quick or Muleis, there are a thousand ponies whose major drug-induced accomplishment is writing a screed about the majesty of a cough syrup spill that looks vaguely like Luna’s cutie mark, then waking up with absolutely no memory of doing so.

-The Scholar

Taxi arranged the unconscious Fauntleroy in a semi-upright position and set his book between his front claws in a way that suggested he might have fallen asleep.

“I wish he’d just gotten out of our way,” I said.

“He saw you as no threat and I am bound by certain conventions that dictate when I can and cannot harm members of my own tribe. Bernard was an edge case and Fauntleroy...well, it would have been frowned upon,” Edina replied, moving to his side and disconnecting the strange book on a chain from his waist. “I detest acting high and mighty for the sake of appearances, but it’s expected. Maybe it just reminds me too much of the cat and the bird. Two mad, stupid princesses. I suppose that’s part of why I left. Still, you handled that almost like a griffin.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment...although, typically when somepony jumps on me, I’d tend to want my sword, not my checkbook. What exactly is that?” I asked.

She flipped the book open and held it up. There was an arcane rune written in a dark brown ‘ink’ on a piece of parchment that I strongly suspected wasn’t made of plant matter. “It’s his collection of spells. They’re single use, very expensive, and incredibly dangerous scrolls. If he’d managed to touch this one in the proper fashion, it would have simultaneously set off an alarm and primed an enchantment on his claws that acts something like a taser.”

“That’s...surprisingly non-lethal for what I know about blood magic,” Taxi murmured, picking up the sheathed sword from Fauntleroy and hanging it around Edina’s neck.

“I said something like,” Edina corrected. “A taser with enough voltage can still flash fry your organs to a consistency that we who enjoy meat refer to as ‘pleasingly crunchy’.” Hooking the sword in place under her wing, she dropped the bit of rope she’d been using for a whip and attached Fauntleroy’s scroll book to the sword. “Be careful here, Detective. Even with my presence and the blood of the High Justice on your face, you are on unfriendly ground.”

Swift, meanwhile, was turning in little circles on the carpet.

“Sir? I don’t know entirely what this means, but my...um...my light display thing is going crazy. There are bunches of targets and no matter how I move, they stay in the same place.”

“Are...any of them moving?” I asked, nervously.

“A little?”

Taxi nudged the Hailstorm with her hip and the barrels clicked at her. “Do you think it’s...picking targets through the walls?”

“Creepy wartime technology isn’t what I majored in, Sweets,” I murmured. “Still, I’d like to make it to Derida without setting off any alarms. Edina, if we are confronted again, you’re here at your step-mother’s insistence. Swift, see if the locations of those targets provide any useful information.”

“Well, some of them are in red and some are green...and as I move...Oh! Okay, I think I get it. Targets farther away are in red. Neato! You, Taxi, and Edina are super, duper green!”

“I hope to Celestia that thing doesn’t feel you being perky is an instruction to fire...” I grunted. “How many targets are on this floor?”

Swift swung around, scanning over the walls. “I see about six close enough to be in this end of the penthouse. The rest are back the way we came. Most of the others seem to be downstairs.”

“Alright, single file, Edina in front. Try to look like we belong here.”

Taxi gave me a look, then pointed at the gigantic cannon strapped across her back. I peered down at the shotgun on my leg and Swift scratched at her mane as the Hailstorm’s barrels swiveled back and forth.

“Alright, then try to look heavily armed. Maybe nobody will want to mess with us.”

“I hate reminding you of this, but wishful thinking doesn’t constitute a strategic decision, Hardy.”

I ran a toe around the brim of my hat and grinned. “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

****

The penthouse suite of the Moonwalk was nothing short of palatial. It was almost a tiny hotel unto itself. I opened the foyer’s inner door onto a hallway full of unnumbered rooms. Strangely enough, no-one was guarding those. I suppose two guards was plenty for a hotel in the middle of the city, though for some reason I couldn’t see the Hitlan leaving it at that.

“Huh,” I murmured. “I know I’m asking for trouble saying this, but I was expecting more resistance.”

“Stepmother understands finance, but she’s...well, she was a Hitlan who found the Tokan lifestyle more to her liking,” Edina said. “She never liked having guards on every door.”

“Right, that makes sense. Swift? Movement?”

She shook her head, still watching her magical heads-up display. “Not really. Most of the targets I see on this floor seem to be clustered over to our left. There are two on our right. One of them is much farther away and the other is...um...I think they’re over there.”

She jabbed her hoof at the second door down; a curl of puffy steam was rising out of the crack.

“Alright, everything in here is sound proofed. So long as we can avoid setting off any alarms, we should be fine.”

Keeping a weather eye on the other closed doors lining the hall, I trotted over to the one Swift pointed out and carefully twisted the handle. Finding it unlocked, I took a deep breath and pushed it open slow as I could until I could get an eye into the gap.

I felt a stab of envy for our griffin compatriots. The jacuzzi alone was about the size of my apartment. It might have been better termed an Equestria Games-sized swimming pool with a heater. A low fog-bank filled the room from end to end and I could just make out the shape of a griffin laying beside the pool. It seemed to have a towel draped over it.

A reedy, feminine voice called out, “Coriander, is that you? My shoulders are so tight today and your hooves are like magic.” She hadn’t lifted her head as she spoke. I sniffed at the air and caught a faint hint of something strong. I couldn’t quite place it.

Thinking quickly, I replied, “Sorry ma’am. Just turn down service. Would you like dinner delivered tonight?”

Raising one claw, she waved it in our direction. “A fresh yearling rabbit, please. I believe the chef is familiar with the Poulette recipe for lapin a la cocette.” She paused a moment and raised a stick of some kind with a light glow on the end to where I thought her beak might be; a cigarette. “Oh, and I could use some fresh Zap leaves. The Detrot flavor is so delightful. The concierge has my dealer’s details.”

My driver raised one eyebrow and mimed smoking something, then twirled a hoof beside her head in a circle.

The message was clear. She’s stoned out of her gourd.

I gave Edina a quick glance for confirmation and she nodded, flicking her claw towards the prone figure of her step-mother.

Slipping inside, I cushioned my steps as best I could while the rest of my crew moved in and spreading out. I noticed one of those gold-inlaid spellbooks laying right next to Derida. Pointing at it, I waved Edina forward.

“Of course, ma’am,” I said, soothingly as I could. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

It took her a full fifteen seconds to respond and when she did, her words were slurred. “No. One of my servants will arrange a tip for you.”

Edina lifted off, stirring the thick steam around my hooves as she coasted to the other side of the pool and, with a deft swipe, snatched the spellbook away, circled, and returned to my side in near perfect silence.

I grinned and swept my coat back off of my shotgun, trotting towards Derida. Leaning over her, I gently rested the barrel against the back of her head. Grabbing my trigger, I tilted the gun sideways and ratcheted the slide. It’s a completely pointless action once the gun is loaded and the shell that was in the chamber dropped at my hooves, but it makes such a magnificently attention-getting noise. Anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that sound and it’s ingrained in the psyche like the roar of a hydra.

Derida stiffened and her head slowly turned on her neck until she was facing me. Creepy thing, watching a griffin do that.

Our eyes met and hers widened ever so slightly at the blood on my face. She looked an awful lot like a female version of Sykes, albeit much older. Grey had crept into the fur around her neck and cheeks. The pelt underneath had the look of that parchment they used in their spellbooks.

She slowly reached up and pulled her cigarette from her mouth, appraising me with an expression that was unnervingly calm for someone staring down a shotgun. Blowing a thin stream of smoke out of her nose, she gestured at me with the lit end. "Detective Hard Boiled. I've seen your face on the television lately. Freelance cop, working for an unknown benefactor," she mused. "I assume my guards are dead?"

Stepping back, I lowered my gun to her stomach and let my trigger drop. "I'm here to ask questions and - if I can - prevent any more death. Fauntleroy will just have a headache and Bernard...well, now I think of it he's probably going to have a headache too. I take it you’re Derida?"

She dipped her chin and peered over my shoulder at the rest of my group. Her interest settled on Edina and a ghost of a smile quirked her cheek.

“Is that little Edina I see back there?” she asked, nodding at my companions.

“Stepmother,” Edina said, coldly, running a claw over the two spellbooks dangling from her waist.

Derida rolled onto her belly and got up. Her flesh seemed to hang from her joints, though she still had the muscular frame of a creature who’d once been an athlete. “Lovely, my dear. You were such a soft little chick when you were young. So caring. So needy,” she chuckled, her beak clattering against her cigarette holder. “I doubted you’d have the stomach for this day, but a part of me wondered if there might come a time you’d be sane enough to hire yourself a competent assassin.”

I was starting to get worried, but the room was sound-proofed. Short of a guard just strolling in, we weren’t likely to be bothered. Why was she so calm? If I’m in the shower and someone rubs a shotgun against my crown, I feel the need to make a bit of a fuss.

“I’m not an assassin,” I grumbled. “I admit, I was expecting a bit more surprise and wing-flapping than this.”

“Oh? Not here to ‘do in’ the wicked old stepmother, then?” she chortled, trotting over to a rack of towels and taking one down, wiping a bit of steam off her forehead with it. “I am a believer in the calm path. A griffin in peril may only mitigate death by having their full faculties about them. That said, for this disrespect, I may make it a mission in life to crucify one of your friends here over the plateaus and see if I can drop you onto them from a few miles up before they die. It may take several attempts. My aim is not so good as it was when I was young.”

All of that came out in a voice like silk, completely devoid of any equine emotion. It was the voice of a she-tiger, distantly contemplating pouncing. I took a couple of careful steps back.

“Lady, we came to talk. Shooting you isn’t at the top of my list of priorities. Don’t put it there.”

Derida’s wispy laugh echoed around the gigantic bathroom, sending shivers up my back. She glanced at me over her shoulder as she patted moisture out of her pepper-salt mane. “Talk? You have a very strange method of conducting diplomacy, Detective. Particularly coming here with that blood on your muzzle and the amount of ordinance I see. I can believe my step-daughter would give her hemoglobin to see the judgement of the tribes laid against me, but I thought Grimble Shanks was more...conservative.”

I rubbed one eye with my hoof. “He was, until someone tried to kill him. I take it you were unaware?”

“Unaware someone might try to kill my nephew? Whosoever would dare try such a thing?” That reply positively oozed sarcasm. “He’s a thick-headed oaf playing at politics, who has survived on luck and brazen bully tactics. True, he has some skill with that lochaber axe, but in a world of guns, he is a dying breed. If someone has tried to kill him, it was only a prelude to the bloodshed that is coming...but it wasn’t I.”

“We’re aware of that, stepmother,” Edina growled, lifting the amulet around her neck on one claw. “I found my Blood at the crime-scene. You gain nothing from the Tokan being blamed for the death of a Hitlan Egg, but...with my Blood, it points to you. Even worse, you closed the Blood Bank! You are painting a target on our backs. Why would you do such a thing, knowing this?”

“As if I would just tell you, silly chick,” Derida strolled over to a set of lockers against the wall, unlocking them. “You and I have an account that needs settling, but that will wait for another day. Right now, you’ve come at a fairly opportune moment. I have information you need and you...you may provide me with a means to my ends.”

I hauled my trigger into my teeth. “Hey...funny business earns you bullets!”

Giving me a contemptuous look, the griffin matriarch reached into the locker and withdrew a folded, brocaded dress and a black fedora in a feminine style with a long red feather in the brim.

“Are you going to watch me dress, Detective?” she purred. “I may not consider your life to have terribly much value when weighed against my own, but I think there may still be a use for you. After all, it’s not every decade a High Justice comes along. You might save me considerable difficulty.”

I groaned and swung away, trying not to blush. “Swift, if this bird does anything stupid, blow her legs off.”

Swift glanced at the Hailstorm, then shrugged and assumed a generally ‘alert’ position. I waited a moment until Swift nodded, then turned back to Derida who was now wearing that gorgeous red number that stretched to her back ankles, brocaded in intricately woven dragons. The little black hat was perched above her head and managed to look a bit rakish, attractive, and daring all at the same time.

For a griffin of her age, she still managed to project the two most dangerous things a female can; sex and power.

“Come along then, ponies!” she said, cheerfully, starting for the door. “We shall have tea and discuss how useful you can be.”

Is this the part where you finally admit to yourself that you’re off balance? I thought.

“I’m going to say ‘no’,” I replied. “The last female who offered me tea and information did it as a prelude to magical chains and psychological torture.”

“Oh do be calm,” she replied with a dismissive wave as Swift’s gun followed her back and forth. “If I truly wanted you dead, Detective, my style is not to butcher you over tea. I’d simply wait until you slept one night, drain blood from you, then enchant your cardiovascular system. A few days screaming in agony as I raised the Ph level of your internal fluids would do. Incidentally, I did mean what I said about a debt to be paid for this indignity, but if you pay it with useful activity, I will consider us - how you ponies say - ’square’. Besides, I need to smoke something. My high is wearing off.”

Edina’s warning about her step-mother’s sanity came back to me: She’s not crazy.

Whoo-boy, that was starting to whittle at my confidence in my own sanity. We’d walked into her nest, put a gun on her, and here she was inviting us to crumpets or whatever the griffin equivalent might be.

She heaved an exaggerated sigh and stepped closer to the door. Swift bent her knees a little and I was hoping that, if it came to it, the Hailstorm wouldn’t do something embarrassing.

“Will it help if I remind you that you are currently our High Justice? Killing you would be in bad taste.”

I shook my head. “That’s comforting, but also not the point.”

“Point, Detective? We are not yet to making points. You are still in my embassy; A little fly in a web he doesn’t comprehend. To that end, since you are given to lay your justice against me, you need to know exactly what Grimble and Edina have put you up to.”

“Step-mother…” Edina growled, warningly.

“And...that does tell me that my dear step-daughter hasn’t told you! Oh lovely. That just won’t do!” Derida cackled.

I moved over and gently rested a hoof on Edina’s back. She was still glaring at her stepmother like she would dearly have loved to crack open one of those spellbooks and fry her from the inside out. Much as Derida was tempting me to let her, the mission was still looming large in my mind.

“I’m investigating criminal activity and trying to help a friend of mine. I need to know why you’ve closed the Blood Bank and what we can do to cool this situation off before it ends in lots of violence. You know the PACT won’t let you slaughter each other inside Detrot and I don’t want either war between you and the Hitlan or all of the griffins coming to find out what is happening here.”

Derida made a big show of tapping her chin, then she stepped between Taxi and Edina, casually brushing the two of them aside with a little fluff of her wings. “Then come along. I’ll make sure none of my soldiers disembowels any of your little friends.”

“What is wrong with having our conversation here?” I asked, suspiciously.

“You need what I am offering and I need a fresh cigarette. I negotiate poorly when sober. If you will not, then I ask...who will be the next High Justice when you are killed for neglecting your duties? That odd foal with the strange weapon? The mare with the scars? Or is it dear Edina who you love best of all?”

Taxi’s hackles must have been humming. Her back was arched like a cat and she seemed to be trying to draw in on herself as her ears swiveled in all directions, listening for a danger I couldn’t see, but could most definitely feel.

My driver is amazing at hiding her emotions when she wants to, but there are moments when she’s an open book. I gave her a quick questioning look and she shivered, jerking her head back towards her flanks. I knew how she felt. My own talent was giving me full body shakes.

I felt like there was some vicious beast breathing down my neck. It was a sensation like the first whiff of smoke of an approaching forest fire.

I swallowed my worries. It was like swallowing a brick covered in toothpaste with a side of orange juice.

Well, here I go again. One stupid Detective charging the walls. Into the breach and then...who knows? Maybe they’ll bury my gold watch with me, I thought.

“You know? I’ve changed my mind. Tea sounds lovely.”

“Then you have my word you and yours will live long enough to leave here today. Follow!”

****

Derida took a moment as we were passing the foyer to give Fauntleroy a solid kick in the ribs. The griffin guard didn’t so much as twitch, other than to slump onto his side.

Taxi came in behind her. “Kicking him won’t help. He should be up in twenty minutes, though. I used a pressure point trick I learned from a zebra monk.”

Derida gave her a frosty look, then landed another kick in Fauntleroy’s ribs “I suppose it is my fault. I should have employed mercenaries to guard my penthouse...Ah, well. I have ever been a sentimental hen. Shall we, then? I must let the guards know you’re here and then we’ll proceed in a more cordial fashion.”

I gave Edina a look for confirmation and she nodded. “We’re safe, at least, from being attacked...”

“How do I know that?”

“She...she gave her word. That means more to a griffin than being alive. If she was alive but broke her word, to every other tribe griffin, it would be like she was dead. It’s part of why no-one but his brother talks to Sykes. He left his family. They might still care...but he’s a nobody to them.”

I waved Derida on. “Alright. Swift, Taxi...go with her. I need to talk to Edina for a moment.”

Derida held out her leg for Swift who took a couple of steps forward and gently nudged her with the Hailstorm.

“Go first, please, ma’am.”

“Of course, dear,” Derida murmured, condescendingly. Opening the door, Swift motioned for Derida to move and Taxi gave her a big, fake smile, hauling down her cannon so it would sit in the crook of her leg, at the ready. They disappeared into the next room and I let out a breath.

“Alright, Edina...let’s hear it. How much danger are we in just now?”

Her wings flapped weakly at the air, then she tucked them in close to herself. “Something is...bad...here. Really, really bad.”

“You’re telling me…”

Edina’s white wings were quivering with inner tension as she held her spellbooks to her chest like they might protect her from the great unknowns facing us. “I don’t mean that. My stepmother inviting us to tea? Guaranteeing us our lives? Detective, do you remember when I said she never lies? I meant never. Not once in the whole time I’ve known her. If she says she didn’t try to kill Grimble Shanks, she didn’t. If she just said she’s not going to kill us right now, she means it. I don’t know what’s going on, but this isn’t what we thought.”

“You mean whatever is happening...isn’t some kind of power play?”

She shook her head. “I-I don’t think so. Step-mother...I know she doesn’t look like it, but she’s scared of something. All of this - all those threats - it’s all bluster. If she was inclined to kill us, we'd know. She only makes threats when she wants to keep an opponent off balance. It’s a basic negotiation tactic. Create a situation where your opponent believes you are being benevolent by not killing them, then ask them for whatever favor you need.”

“I take it that’s a griffin negotiation tactic?”

“I hear dragons use it, too…”

“That’s not a recommendation considering how your two species came out in the war. Still, I need to know what she meant when she said you ‘put me up’ to something.”

Edina - the ravening dominatrix I’d witnessed take down a half dozen thugs without stopping for breath - cringed.

“It’s...I may not have been entirely and completely thorough in my explanation of the duties of the High Justice, Detective. You are not just responsible for establishing the law. You’re...you’re also responsible for carrying it out.”

I let that sink in for a second, then slowly sat on the carpet.

“You...aren’t saying I’m supposed to arrest them or leave them in hoofcuffs outside the Castle with a note, are you?”

Edina gave her head a very slight shake. “The...the High Justice is charged with the blood of the Eggs that he might pay for the death of whoever has violated the law. His law. It is the price of peace.”

“Oh you’re friggin’ kidding me! So, what? The tribe either accepts my judgement and kills one of their own or I end up in ritual combat and have to do it? Is that the shape of things?”

“You needed the information!” she squeaked, holding up her claws in surrender. “Please, I didn’t know what we were going to find! You told me this was to be a pony matter. If this situation leads us to a pony, then the griffin justice doesn’t apply!”

“And if the information leads to your step-mother, then I’m going to end up with my intestines laying all over these expensive carpets!” I snarled. “So, what if I just leave now and take my people with me?”

Edina’s shut her eyes and clucked softly to herself. “Then your next of kin...or the closest friend we can find will become the High Justice.”

I paused to think who she might mean, then turned an about face and slammed my head against the wall. Leaning there, trying not to groan over the fresh pain in my skull, I asked, “You mean Sykes, don’t you?”

She nodded, morosely.

“Did Sykes know this? Or Grimble?”

She nodded. “Sykes is stupid, but if you die in the trial of combat...then he’s off the hook. The tribes will be at peace, at least, until we can find a solution to the Blood Bank problem or get to the negotiation table. I doubt he was thinking that far ahead when he brought up the possibility of naming you High Justice. Grimble knows his brother and he doesn’t want him to die. Sykes would have volunteered to be the Justice just to keep his family from killing each other, but...he has faith that you can find a solution. He believes in you.” She hesitated a moment then added, “I...I do too. I only remember bits and pieces of what happened at the school, but...you were amazing, Detective. You took us in against totally overwhelming odds and no-one died.”

I seethed at Edina as the cruel trap my griffin friends had laid at my hooves finally revealed its full shape.

“This is why they don’t name High Justices all that often, isn’t it? It’s a one way trip. They’re a silver bullet with great incentives to work quickly.”

She covered her face with one wing and said, very quietly, “Detective...I don’t think it’s my stepmother. I hate her, but I don’t want her dead. I wouldn’t have named you High Justice if I just thought we were coming up here to kill her.”

“And if it is?” I snapped.

“Then...then I’ll...I…” She shut her eyes and whispered, “If it’s my stepmother, you can name me Justice. I’ll finish it.”

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn.

Throwing her to the wolves was so tempting. Why couldn’t I have just let these griffins handle their own weird affairs? Why’d I have to stick my big, boozy nose in the middle of it?

I glanced at my cutie-mark and sighed. Destiny and I had an appointment with a bottle later.

“No, you’re not going to do that,” I grumbled. “I’ve got a decent chance of surviving a disembowelment if they can get my corpse plugged into the grid. You owe me all the alcohol in the universe if I survive, though. All of it. Past, present, and future. I’m going to need it to wash the taste of my dead partner’s smugness out of my mouth if I die again...”

Leaving Edina with a deeply confused expression and what were probably some serious worries about her decision to trust me, I turned on my heel, shoved the door open and marched into the tea room.

****

“Two sugars?” Derida asked. Swift nodded, holding out her tea-cup.

The tea room was more of an indoor garden, reminding me of something I’d seen in old film reels about Neighsia and the eastern continents. One entire wall was glass, letting in the few shreds of sunlight that managed to clear the surrounding skyscrapers. An actual, honest to goodness cherry tree grew out of a patch of soil that seemed to have been dug into the floor at the edge of the carpet, leaving a meter or two of lovely green grass as it arched over a tiny red hut. A few chairs sat around a table set for five.

Piled on a heap of pillows against one wall a group of lazily sprawling griffins, most of them varying shades of white, were cuddling drunkenly with one another. About half of them were asleep and the rest had the dilated pupils and vacant expressions of heavy drug use.

The only one who seemed even remotely awake was an older griffin dressed similarly to Grimble Shanks. He looked much like a Hitlan, where he wasn’t grey. The lochaber - Derida had called it that, hadn’t she? - strapped across his back seemed to weigh on him badly and his feathers were a bit thready. He wore a pair of silver spectacles perched on his beak. Despite the overpowering miasma filling the room, he was trying to keep his head up and look at least vaguely alert. Still, his dull gaze met mine for less than a second before he went back to staring into space without so much as a chirp of interest.

I took one breath and felt a wave of dizziness wash over me. Whatever these griffins were smoking, it was some righteous stuff.

Shaking my head to clear it, I tried to hold my breath as I made my way over to Derida and my companions, stepping over a tufted tail that lay across the grass. Derida forwent the chairs in favor of just sitting at the short table, while Taxi and Swift were quietly enjoying their tea. Swift looked more than a bit woozy, though Taxi had a dreamy smile and cigarette poking out of the side of her muzzle.

“Sweets! What on Equis are you doing?” I snapped, trying to sound angry or irritated or something. I don’t know how it came off. That smoke was pretty thick.

Taxi’s eyes took a moment to focus on me. She drew a long pull from the Zap, then let it out with a pleased moan. “Me, Hardy? I’m getting high.”

“I see that. Why are you getting high?”

She gave me a quirked eyebrow, as though the answer were so obvious any further elaboration was pointless.

“I...um...I tried to stop her, Sir,” Swift mumbled, clutching her empty tea-cup to her chest. My partner’s wings were sagging onto the wooden floor and she was nodding, her eyelids at half mast.

Rubbing my forehead, I threw my hooves in the air and trotted over to the table, snatching a spare chair and pulling it up.

“So, this is it then? Your master plan is to get my driver too stoned to leave so I’m trapped here for the next month?” I asked, forcing myself not to smile. Why did I want to smile? I had no reason to smile. A hysterical giggle kept creeping up the back of my throat, though. Sweets was high. I could feel myself quickly succumbing. Swift looked about to pass out.

Damn, it felt good after the mess that my life had been lately.

I didn’t even hear Edina moving behind me until she stepped onto the short platform the tea-hut sat on and dragged her claws over the trunk of the cherry tree.

“Step-mother, I would like to have this discussion in a private manner. Must we indulge your bizarre affinity for Equestrian narcotics right now?”

Derida glanced at her semi-conscious party and the guard sitting beside them.

“I suppose you’re right, child,” she murmured, then raised her voice. “All of you! I need the space!”

Most of the gathered party popped awake in an instant, shaking their more sedate friends and rolling them to their paws. A few of them were lucid enough to give us curious glances, but they didn’t argue with their leader. Gathering what few items they had with them, including a collection of bongs that would’ve qualified as high art in some of the better museums in Detrot, the party of griffins filed out of the room.

“Andre, you too,” Derida added as she realized the old guard hadn’t moved. He frowned at her, then slowly got up.

“Moi Lady, moi tribe-lord charged me wi’ ye wellbein’. Oi don’t leave ye soide…”

Derida tsked and flicked a claw at him. “Except when you’re too blazed to notice I’ve been laying in the jacuzzi for the last two hours. Go on, Andre. Nip down to the bar and join Bernard and that Hitlan fool.”

The guard’s beak fell open and he seemed like he wanted to argue.

His eyes were full of a kind of sadness or maybe emptiness. It might have been the drug or it might have been my own state of exhaustion, but I felt as though time had stopped for just a few seconds so I could look at the old bird from all sides, peering deep into a sacred history.

Andre the griffin. His visible scars were extensive. A missing claw. A left eye replaced with a glass one that didn’t quite line up. The tip of his tail.

His other scars - the ones that matter - were ugly, deep, and above all, ancient. He’d seen his time come and go, leaving him holding a quickly dying torch in the encroaching twilight of his life.

He and I shared a look. It felt like it lasted an eternity. Lowering his head, he padded towards the door, stopping to look back at Derida.

“Moi Lady...yer mother would be sad,” he muttered.

Derida’s expression didn’t change, but she quietly pulled her cigarette out of her mouth and laid it in an ashtray beside her tea.

“Andre...my mother is dead,” she said, in a tone that had me thinking of glaciers and blizzards. “She died poor and Hitlan. I am rich, alive, and Tokan. You are old and will soon be dead. Go drink and enjoy my richness. It fills your belly more often than honor and obligation.”

He bowed and left, shutting the door with his tail. The moment passed.

“You must pardon my bodyguard,” Derida said, apologetically. There wasn’t much sincerity behind it. “He’s an old family friend who lived a long life and wishes to remind me of where I come from, whereas I would be all too pleased to see those fools across the hallway in a dragon’s belly.”

“Step-mother, they are our kin,” Edina growled.

“Believe me, child, I am reminded of that every time I look in the mirror,” she replied, running a claw through the brown fur on her cheeks. “Still, as we hold an inordinate amount of their debt, it would be bad for business to let them all die. That brings me to the four of you. Now that we are alone, you wish to know what has happened to the Blood Bank.”

Reaching over, I gently took Taxi’s cigarette from her muzzle with the edge of one horseshoe, lifting it to my mouth and taking a nice, long drag. I had the brief sensation that I could see the smoke rushing down my throat into my lungs, filling me with electricity and light.

“Sir, are you sure that’s a good...um...a good...uh...” Swift trailed off, staring into her tea-cup. I noticed it seemed to have a golden picture of Celestia’s cutie-mark on the side. “This...this cup is...really pretty…”

“You ponies,” Derida chuckled as she watched my partner. “You make such magnificent chemicals and then make them all illegal. I will never understand.”

I chuckled as Taxi finally realized I’d taken her joint and gave me a pitiful kitten look. I passed her the unlit end of the cigarette and she puffed away at it, merrily.

“It’s the damage from ponies getting repeatedly struck by lightning if they smoke it outside. Either way, the Blood Bank. You were just revealing your nefarious plan, I believe,” I said, grinning dreamily at her.

Edina gave me a worried sidelong glance and I replied with the subtlest wink a pony who is quickly getting higher than a pegasus with a helium addiction can manage.

Taxi offered Derida the joint and she took it, inhaling with a sigh of pleasure.

“Ah...yes. Nefarious plans. Mmm...I really wish I had one. I used to be quite good at them,” she murmured, twirling her cigarette between two claws. “The Blood Bank. You know, my ancestors once ate your meat. Pegasi. Unicorns. Earth ponies. Now we grovel at your door, begging you to save our eggs from dragons who once feared our lands. We cling to ancient, ridiculous traditions like...slaughtering one another as an economic system, and all the while, those who were once our prey grow strong. Stronger day by day.”

“Our traditions remind us who we are,” Edina insisted, still clutching her new spellbooks in both claws. “They give us our power.”

“Our traditions are killing us, stepdaughter,” Derida answered. “Those fools on the tribe counsel gave control of the entire economic system to one tribe. Do you know what your father did when he asked the pony mayor if we could hide ourselves away here until the dragons have gone?”

“I...I wasn’t there…”

“He bowed his head, girl,” her stepmother snarled.

Edina’s eyes very nearly popped out of her head.

“He...he didn’t! Father would never-”

“You know I do not lie, child!” Derida snapped, tabbing the ash off the end of her joint. “Your father, your sire...bowed his head to a pony. Tradition? Pah! Our tribe would be better off leveraging our powers to join the Equestrians as partners, living in their cities as their secret gods, than squatting in those plateaus like animals. Our financial skills could give us dominion once again! We have the knowledge of hundreds of years of banking warfare...and yet...our traditions have lead us here...to a place where we bow.”

Edina shrank down in her seat, shamefacedly covering her face with one wing.

I don’t know if the quiet that followed seemed longer because I was stoned, or because it was just that uncomfortable.

I rubbed my eyes against the back of my knee, trying to get my head back together.

“I get the whole ‘wants to take over Equestria’ thing,” I said. Derida gave me a level stare and I quickly added, “No, really, I do. You’re one in a list. Plenty of people would like to own their fellow beings. It’s not a new idea. Right now, we’re up to our ears in death and I’m told you might be one of the few honest persons in this city. I’ve got a friend facing a fairly gruesome death and violence creeping up on us at the speed of griffin wings. I need to know...why’d you shut the Blood Bank? Why now? Why here?”

Derida opened one wing and began casually straightening feathers with her beak. Between plucking out a couple of loose ones, she answered, “I didn’t.”

My brain - which was absorbing more than its share of chemicals - ground to a greasy halt. The thing about Zap is that, while it produces a lovely euphoria and a sense of peace, it does tend to make your mind a bit like having a fat sheepdog across your lap. You might have to go to the bathroom and get the mail, but it just won’t move. Knowing that, I can be forgiven for my response.

“Buh...wha...uh...duh?”

“Hmmm? That wasn’t a question, Detective.”

“Y-yes, you did!” I stammered.

Derida shook her head and tapped her talons on the table, impatiently. “I’m afraid I didn’t. My people believe I did. I’ve shut the ledgers, which would effectively close the Blood Bank, but my actions were not responsible for that closure, or rather, not the reason.”

My driver sat forward, suddenly, and her eyes lit up with interest. She looked far more alert than someone who’d just smoked the same crap that was coursing around my system.

“Wait a second...you let them believe?” she asked. “That means you’re the only one who knows the real reason, so far, right?”

Derida tilted her head to one side. “You are an interesting little mare. As you say, to date, I believe I have managed to keep the actual situation quiet. It is far worse than a simple book of debits being closed to the public. If my Tokan knew the true reasons, it would demoralize them before we could assert any control over the situation.”

Edina’s beak clicked a few times as she gave her stepmother a calculating look. “Stepmother...are you saying that something has happened to the Asset Pool?”

I reached out to stop her so I could get an explanation. “Pardon, Asset Pool?”

She bit the edge of her beak, then stood in her chair. “It’s...what the Blood Bank owns which supports our system of exchange. I suppose it is impossible to describe in a way that would make simple sense to a pony-”

“I’m getting seriously tired of hearing that,” I grunted, poking her in the side. “Use short words.”

“It would be easiest to demonstrate,” she replied, picking up one of the spoons and gently scraping the flesh off of the scab on the back of her wrist. Holding her foreleg over the table, she let a few droplets of blood splash onto the surface.

“You Tokan sure like b-bleeding everywhere…” Swift muttered. The Hailstorm’s barrels twitched weakly and I wondered if it was having some strange response to all the Zap in the room. “It smells like cheese and...and sky…”

Pulling off my hat, I reached over and put it over my partner’s face. She just clutched her cup a little closer.

Edina took a deep breath, then swirled her claws over the tiny pool of blood, twirling them in intricate patterns. Derida chuckled, slurping her tea as her step-daughter went through the motions again.

I leaned over the blood and peered at it. It was very persistently just sitting there.

“Is something supposed to happen?” I asked.

Edina frowned and began the process once again, this time with great sweeping gestures, one thumb-claw to another, both palms against each other, a flourish on the sweep of a leg and so on. Derida sipped her tea and waited, patiently, until her stepdaughter was done.

It looked like Edina was about to go into a third round of leg waving, so I caught her talons with my hooves. “Alright, I get it...what’s meant to actually go on here?”

“M-maybe it’s just been too long since I accessed the Asset Pool. Maybe I forgot a step!” Edina said, with a hint of panic in her voice.

“Step daughter, we both know you are possessed of a sharp mind when it isn’t clouded by your sad condition. Don’t act like a wishful idiot.”

Edina collapsed in her chair, staring at the blood on the table. “But...but how? The Asset Pool is magical! It’s not a stupid telephone! It can’t just...just fail to connect!”

Derida shrugged and stirred her tea with a spoon. “You see my dilemma, then. I’ve sent messengers to see your father. I sent them days ago, when the problem first manifested.”

“Days...it’s been days?!” Edina screeched, leaping up so fast her chair overbalanced, sending her end over end. She flopped against the side of the little red hut, her backside in the air and her tail dangling in her eyes.

I held up both hooves. “Alright, lets...lets just stop a minute. Your High Justice is...very...high and needs some clarifications. What is the Asset Pool?”

Edina righted herself and picked up her chair. “It’s...well, I can tell you what it looks like from the outside. It’s a pool of blood sitting in a cavern somewhere in the plateaus. When I came of age, our tribe’s priestess took me into a dream and I saw what it actually is. It’s an ocean. An ocean of blood, under a dark red sky.”

Derida pushed one of her snack cakes around on her plate and nodded. “A dramatic description, but accurate. Every griffin who has ever died in anger contributed their blood to the Asset Pool. When the first of the Tokan line created the Blood Bank, he needed a place to store the Blood. A place it would not rot and could be accessed with relative ease by those of his family.”

“So...what is it?” Taxi asked, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“Do you know, that is often not the first question that gets asked?” the old hen chuckled. “Most would ask ‘Why?’ rather than ‘what?’. The sad truth is that our progenitor didn’t see fit to tell us. He was, after all, the first blood mage and even his name is lost to time. It could be another dimension. A pocket universe. I suppose the most horrific possibility is that it is a place that exists in our world somewhere.”

“Those of the Tokan bloodline or those who’ve performed the rituals of inclusion can access the Asset Pool. To date, that is only members of my family,” Edina added. “The Pool is also the place blood mages draw our power from. Speaking of that...” Glancing down at her spellbook, she lifted it onto the table and thumbed it open. Pressing her claw against the first page, she shut her eyes and whispered something I didn’t quite catch. It sounded like a language composed of the sounds ostrich eggs make when crushed under steamrollers. Even Taxi would have had trouble with those vocal gymnastics.

I settled into my chair and waited. After a few minutes, Edina opened her eyes and stared down at the book.

“N-nothing. I can’t feel the Pool at all! Our magics are gone!”

Derida nodded. “To date, I have not told our guards of the situation. Blessedly, they’ve had no call to attempt to use their spells. However, if the Hitlan attack us...it will be the end of our tribe.”

“And what are you doing about this, stepmother?!” Edina hissed. “Getting high and lounging by the pool?!”

The aging hen swirled a claw in the air beside herself. “Yes. I’ve sent messengers to your father. None have returned and I’ve had no response. I’ve attempted spellwork to contact the plateaus. I’ve sent telegraph messages, telephone calls, and even paid one of those silly unicorn delivery services an exorbitant amount of Equestrian money to teleport the letter there. I’ve received no response. Our tribe is, to all intents and purposes, cut off. We’ve no magic. The monster hunters will slaughter us. If we try to run, the Hitlan will chase us. We cannot leave our eggs in the mutual creche, but taking them will slow us down. We’ve many fewer warriors than the Hitlan, so we cannot fight. If we surrender, it will not save us from the bloodshed that will come when the plateaus are safe again, and if the Hitlan discover our bluff, they will bleed you...or perhaps me...dry, present our blood to the counsel of tribes, and our line will be no more. So...yes...I am getting high and lounging by the pool.”

I think a part of me wanted to hyperventilate, but that would have harshed my buzz really badly. Besides, Edina was breathing hard enough for both of us.

“I...I think I need some more of whatever this stuff we’ve been smoking is…” I muttered. Derida obligingly cracked open her cigarette case and passed me a fresh joint, then held the lighter for me. Sweet skies of Celestia, it was even better freshly lit. Edina even surrendered and joined in the festivities.

The silence was sort of pressing on me, but then, that could have been the weight of emotional trauma. It’s hard to tell on Zap.

After about twenty minutes, a griffin in a tux came in with a little tray covered in more snack cakes. After that, the silence was no longer quite so pressing. I mostly just sat there with my partner, my driver, a little griffin waiting to go insane again, and a griffin who might or might not be my nemesis eating as many of the sweets as I could stuff my stomach with.

They were delicious.

****

“So...what do we do then?” Taxi asked about the time I started to feel sane enough to hold a conversation. It’d been an hour or two. At some point, though I couldn’t remember exactly when, I’d gotten up and settled with my back against the cherry tree.

Edina glanced up from the grass where she lay, bonelessly relaxed, stroking Swift’s feathers. Now that we were all pleasantly off our faces, the two of them seemed to have given up any sense of public decorum and were engaged in a bit of mutual preening. Edina had cried for a bit there, but Zap makes it tough to think about things that’re bothering you. Funnily enough, her reaction hadn’t been anything like so bad as Swift’s. My partner was still holding that damn tea-cup.

“Well...this Asset Pool thing. Tell me, you keep all the blood that is deposited in it or something?” I asked as my partner tucked her wings in against herself, blushing profusely.

“Eh...um...Y-yes,” Edina murmured, blinking repeatedly to try to get her brain working. “Excuse me. Phew. Er...right. Blood. We can extract particular bloods and use spells to prove their ownership. It’s how we make sure if someone extracts blood for a transaction or decides to kill someone that they’ve paid properly.”

“So, in theory, the blood still exists somewhere. What’s happened is probably something has messed with whatever magic you use to get in touch with it.”

Derida, who was on her eighth or ninth cup of tea and maybe her twentieth snack cake, looked a bit thoughtful. “I’m afraid we have no way of verifying that, dahling. Our magic is almost entirely that of blood. I know of nothing that could cause such interference, but then, I am a poor mage. My skills are in financial wizardry, less the arcane arts, and my husband didn’t see fit to send our battle mages along with us.”

My mind, now that it was finally starting to work, was chugging along with only occasional backfires. “I’ve got a mage of my own. It so happens he’s doing some research for us right now, but we might be able to just restore the Blood Bank to full functionality and this will all be an enormously embarrassing story to tell on late nights when the grog or whatever it is you people drink is running low.”

“Detective, I do have my own contacts. A debtor of mine in the Academy couldn’t identify the problem-”

I pursed my lips and grinned. “Trust me, my friend specializes in everything from less than legal to spectacularly, shockingly illegal. He’s rewired a top-of-the-line war-era security system with a pair of pliers and no voltage tester. If anyone can do it, he can. I just need a promise from you...to reopen the books and swallow whatever embarrassment comes of this without having me or anyone I know and love murdered.”

The old hen’s gave me a calculating look, then the subtlest of shrugs. “Do this, and I will consider you absolved of your duties as High Justice. Your job was to find the cause. If the cause is magical failure, it will not require a debt of blood be extracted by the Blood Bank. You will be in good keeping and will earn yourself a positive credit rating.”

Edina leaned over and laid her stepmother’s spellbook on the table, giving it a push across to her. “She means you’ll be able to call on the Tokan in the future if you need us.”

“Knowing Grimble, he won’t wish to be outdone,” Derida added. “You fix this and your payment will be the blood on your face. The blood of two Eggs. It is not inconsiderable.”

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied, crawling over onto all fours. I stood there wobbling back and forth for a minute. The drug was still playing havoc with my balance, but it wasn’t near so bad as it had been. “Swift, stop chewing on Taxi’s tail. Taxi, stop eating the grass. We need to go.”

****

Derida led us to the door of her suite. Her entourage was nowhere to be seen. Fauntleroy was just starting to stir, but had yet to open his eyes.

“Detective, the next time you would like to meet with us...do just send a note?” Derida purred.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I answered, pulling my coat up. The Zap was largely out of my immediate system, though I was still feeling a tad slow. It wasn’t unpleasant, however, and my morale seemed to have climbed a few notches in the wasted hours.

“Oh! One last thing,” Derida said and I paused with one hoof on the door.

Her claw snapped out with speed that belied her aging appearance. I felt a tug and something hot spilled down the side of my face. Reaching up, I touched my ear. Something felt very off there. Did my ear always have that notch in it?

Staring stupidly down at my hoof, I wondered for a minute how the blood got there, then pain blossomed on my ear.

“Ow, son of a wretched stinking bird!” I snarled, clutching at my split ear. “What’d you do that for?!”

“Stepmother!” Edina barked, resting one claw on her new sword.

Derida ignored her and gave me a chilly smile, licking my blood off the tip of her talon. “Payment for the indignity, trespass, and to make absolutely certain you are working for us. If I get my magics back and find out you’ve betrayed the griffin tribes, I’ll personally cast the spell that desiccates your kidneys. Are we entirely clear?”

Snatching a kerchief out of my pocket, I held it to my ear. “Fine, yes, I understand. Death threats and so on. I swear, this is the last time I let my cutie-mark drag me into the middle of someone else’s political problems. Are we done here?”

Pulling her cigarette case out of the neck of her dress, she flicked a joint at me. I caught it in my teeth.

“One for the road. Something tells me you’ll need it.”

Spitting the cigarette into my hoof, I pocketed it. “Something tells me you’re right.”

****

Sykes was waiting for us beside the elevator, looking forlorn and hung over. While ‘forlorn’ and ‘hung over’ tend to go hoof-in-hoof, my friend looked like he’d spent an hour in a boxing ring with a dragon. He had bags under his eyes and his head hung low as he lay there, staring at the carpet like a chick who’d lost his puppy.

“Hardy! Edina!” he gasped, rising to his feet and taking a couple of steps closer. “Moi heavens, Oi’d half convinced mese’f ye step mother did ye in! What took ye so long? Oi been out of me head!”

“No love for me, Sykes?” Taxi giggled, staggering a little and catching herself on the wall. Sykes sniffed at the air, then his thick, brown eyebrows drew together.

“Are...the lot of ye...are the lot of ye blitzed, then?!”

I shook my head. “I’m fine now, but believe me, when I tell you what’s actually going on in there you’re going to want to be stoned, too.” I turned to Swift. “Kid, as soon as we’re downstairs, I need you to call Limerence and get him back to the Nest. We’ve got a new research priority and we need him.”

“Yes...um...!” Swift looked briefly puzzled, then attempted a salute with the wrong hoof, smacking herself in the brow ridge so hard I cringed “Uh...Sir! That’s it! Sir!”

“What about moi kin?” Sykes asked. “Is...is Derida…”

“She’s alive and well. How long that might be is dependent entirely on how well we managed to solve her problem, which will also probably play into how long we’re alive and well. By the way-” Rearing, I swung around and hit Sykes with one rear hoof right between the eyes. He yelped and stumbled, flopping over his back legs into an undignified heap. Swift squeaked, fearfully, but I paid her no mind as I marched over to him and planted one hoof in his side, flipping him onto his back.

My friend stared up at my, clutching his head in both talons. “Oi! What’d Oi do!?”

“You didn’t tell me the High Justice was paid in blood!” I snapped, prodding him in the chest. His yellow eyes darted to one side, guiltily. “Now I’m stuck figuring this mess out, because if I don’t, it’ll be your head on the chopping block next! I don’t know if you were thinking when you called me down here to handle this, but you owed me that punch and if you ever pull something like this again, I swear I will make a rug out of you!”

Reaching down, I grabbed his suit and pulled him upright, then began smoothing out the wrinkles.

“Oi, me...Oi roightly deserved that Oi guess…” he muttered, rubbing the quickly growing knot on his forehead. “Oi didn’t think ye’d actually do it, much less me brudder and Edina…”

“Yeah, well, lots of people have been underestimating me lately,” I grumbled. “If I manage to fix this situation, you will also owe me at least four rounds of drinks.”

Poking the button on the elevator, I gestured for everyone to get in. Swift took two attempts and she was still in a highly questionable state of sobriety, although Taxi seemed mostly recovered.

Stepping in behind them, I noticed the elevator pony was gone. Must have been on break or something. Huh.

I stabbed the button for the lobby and the doors slid closed on the opulent penthouse suites, leaving the Tokan and the Hitlan to their mutual glaring at one another over no-pony’s land.

Edina was nervously stroking her sword and spell-book. “Detective, do you honestly believe your friend might actually manage to fix the Asset Pool?”

“Being as I’ve no idea what is wrong with it, I can’t say,” I replied, resting my head against the wall. Taxi offered me an extra snack cake she’d snatched from the table and I bit into it half-heartedly. “I mostly said that to buy us some time. Maybe one of the messengers will get through to the plateaus and come back with some orders or at least some instructions. I don’t know this. Cutting off the Highlands communication is warfare tactics, not the typical fare of a simple band of roving juvenile dragons.”

“Sir, are we going to actually have to go out to the Highlands?” Swift asked, holding something against her chest with one leg. I peered at her curiously.

“Kid... did you take that tea-cup?”

My partner blushed, glancing down at the ornate cup in the crook of her leg. “I...um...it’s really...really pretty…”

I couldn’t help but crack a little smile. “I swear, kid, you’re gonna be the death of me. Anytway, no, I don’t think we’re heading to the Highlands. Not if I can help it. I’m hoping we can figure out what is going on from here. Leaving the city is the last thing I want to do right now,” I muttered.

Edina tilted her head to one side as though listening to something. “I...am afraid I will need more Beam soon. The cat and the bird are getting louder.”

Sykes nodded. “Oi need moi own little fix, says Oi. Oi could use a drink.”

I raised my head and was about to reply, when the lights went out. In the absolute darkness of the unlit box, a deafening roar seemed to come from everywhere, followed by shrill screams.

The car lurched, followed closely by my stomach, then with a screech that nearly deafened me, I felt myself go very light.

The elevator began to fall.

Act 2, Chapter 50: Ring Around the Rosie

Starlight Over Detrot:
Act 2, Chapter 50: Ring Around the Rosie

Misfortune comes in nearly as many colors as ponies do. Equestria being the sort of place it often is, luck is the difference between a comic pratfall that gets a good laugh from your friends and a bump into an expensive pillar that ruins a massive national event, leaving you ostracized from high society, stuck in a dead end job as a hick town's weather pony.

There are the generally unlucky, who can give themselves mild concussions while attempting the daring act of crossing the room. There are the ironically misfortunate, such as the inventors killed by their own creations - a list of departed which includes Capacitance, inventor of the Voltage-Based Self-Cleaning Toilet (which later led to the development of the Cloudhammer Anti-Megafauna Cannon), as well as Lickety Split, inventor of the sticky note. There are those who have clearly found some way to directly insult chance itself, such as Star Struck, who got her cutie mark when she was whacked by a falling meteorite during a centennial meteor shower.

And then there is a situation which has fallen so far out of karmic favor that it garners a particular term all it's own: Charlie Foxtrot.

Charlie Foxtrot, but for a small nudge in the whims of probability, would have been a pony of little historical note. His first job was at the Cloudsdale weather factory; during his first week he went on break for a minute and a half to relieve himself, and returned to find a weather factory in ruins and an entire season prematurely dumped on a nearby town. His second job involved working security at the L.R. 05 Grand Galloping Gala, which had been for some reason visited by a semi-aware tide of magic resistant gelatin and thus went about as well as you'd expect. But it was not until his third job that he began to suspect he was truly cursed; after all, statisticians from Canterlot University have found that it is "Highly unlikely" for one to be hit by a train whilst acting as a sky-clearer for a nautical shipping line.

The pony in question became so famed for his bad luck that when the Crusades broke out, he convinced himself - and the Equestrian Air Force - that Equestria might be safer with him in enemy lands, and basically allowed himself to be captured by enemy agents. Almost as if planned, his arrival in draconic territory was heralded by a volcanic eruption - which wouldn't have been so remarkable had they not been closer to a forest than a mountain. Several attempts to execute him went so cataclysmically wrong that an entire faction of dragon lords pulled out of the war entirely, convinced the ponies had somehow weaponized fortune itself, which was only half true; Schroedinger's Lion was still in the prototype phase by the time the war ended.

In the years that followed, Charlie Foxtrot's name became synonymous for things going catastrophically wrong; And yet… it is very possible that he may not have been history's unluckiest pony.

-The Scholar

It’s a quirk of the brain that, when death is imminent, you don’t actually think. You might react and it could even be the right reaction, but you’re not thinking. When you’re in a plummeting elevator, there’s not a whole lot of available reactions. Screaming is a decent one. Praying works, but you don’t have much time to formulate a properly worshipful state of mind.

In total darkness, I’d felt the floor leave my hooves and had time to howl before I was thrown violently into Sykes. I only knew it was Sykes because the body I crashed into was big, fluffy, and still smelled of drink. His great wings spread open and he gave me a swat that would have felled a lesser pony. It sure felled me. I thought, briefly, the lights had come back on because I saw some stars.

Then the shrieking began. It wasn’t the standard terrified shrieking one expects in such situations. It was more mechanical. More like metal on metal.

Gravity reasserted itself. I felt the floor meet my hooves. Then it decided to get real assertive and the floor met my nose. I collapsed onto my stomach, moaning as another body crashed atop me, pinning me to the marble. Whoever it was clutched at my shoulders, both forelegs around my neck and their face buried in my hair.

I caught a whiff of incense. It was Taxi, holding me tightly in our last moments of life.

Somehow, that seemed right.

After about three years, or possibly five seconds, the screeching abruptly stopped and left behind a silence that made me wonder whether or not we’d hit the bottom. I hadn’t felt my body crushed beyond recognition and all of my bones turned to a fine powder, but then, would you feel a thing like that? Does the nervous system have some kind of mercy center built into it that shuts off all feeling in the instant before an incredibly painful death? Maybe. My memories of the last time I died were a bit hazy, but I didn’t remember being in any pain.

Gradually, I became aware of the legs clasped around my neck. Hot tears landed on my fur and I gently nosed at my driver’s cheek. She shuddered and clutched me tighter.

“Sweets… Sweets, we’re alive,” I whispered. Hearing my own voice was jarring. It was my own voice though. Not the voice of a ghost. That I knew what the voice of a ghost sounded like was a bit worrying, but I was in no state to think about that. I was alive! I’d gotten into an elevator and it fell and all my bits weren’t splashed all over the bottom floor of a posh hotel!

I started giggling. It’s not the most masculine response to almost dying, but...I was alive, dammit!

“S-sir?” Swift murmured from somewhere nearby.

“What is it, kid?” I chuckled, weakly. My driver hadn’t let go, but I didn’t really want her to. Shifting onto my side, I gently put a hoof around her.

“W-what happened?”

I shook my head, then realized she couldn’t see me. “The emergency brakes caught us. The cable must have snapped.”

I heard the shifting of talons on the floor and Sykes growled from beside me, “Snapped nothin’, boyo. Elevator cables don’t jus’ snap. There be four cables holdin’ us up. Any one could hold this box. We falls when all four be cut.”

Forcing my hooves under me, I gently brushed my cheek against Taxi’s. She shivered a little. I rested my muzzle beside her ear and whispered, “Shhh...it’s okay, Sweets. I’m not going anywhere.”

“S-sorry,” she replied and I felt her pull back. “Bad memory.”

“One of those we can talk about later?” I asked.

She made a soft sound that might or might not have been an affirmative, then I felt her shift away and get to her hooves.

“If the brakes stopped us, why didn’t the emergency lights come on?” Edina asked.

“If all the cables were cut, they might have cut power to the elevator in the process. The brakes probably have their own power source,” I replied, straightening my coat and checking my guns. “Sweets, you got a flashlight?”

“Oh...oh, yeah, sure...just a second,” she answered, then I heard fabric shifting and the clasp on her saddlebags coming loose. A second later, a beam of light caught me in the face, blinding me again.

“Gah! Watch it!” I snapped.

“Sowwy,” she muttered around the light in her mouth. As she shone it around the interior, I could finally see the nervous faces of my companions. Sykes was inspecting the door, while Edina huddled in the corner, clutching her spellbook to her chest.

Swift was staring at the ceiling. I followed her gaze, but couldn’t see anything of interest up there.

“Kid...what are you looking at?” I asked.

“Sir...Sir, something’s directly above us,” Swift said, very quietly. “Three somethings. They’re all marked as targets...and they’re moving. I think they’re in the shaft...”

That got us going. Taxi and I spread towards the walls, hauling our guns up and pointing them at the roof of the elevator. Sykes was unarmed, but he tore his tie off and stuffed it in a pocket, then half spread his wings, ready to leap if the access panel on top of the car opened.

“Um...they’re moving away from us,” Swift added. “They’ve moved...okay, they’re not above us anymore.”

Everyone relaxed a little. I nodded towards the door. “Can we get that open?”

Sykes shook his head. “Neh, Oi doubt it. We be between floors.”

“Alright, that means the hatch.”

“Shouldn’t...shouldn’t we just wait for someone to get us out?” Swift asked.

“Yeah, that’ll happen,” I snorted. “I think someone either just tried to kill us or to cut off easy access to the top floors. We’re...where were we? I didn’t see the number before the lights went out.”

“We’re just above floor six,” Edina answered, meekly. “I...um...I hate to say this, but I think...I think I need…” Her pupils dilated and she scrambled back against the wall of the elevator. “-m-meeeat…”

“Edina?” I asked

She shook herself angrily, putting her claws on either side of her head as though trying to force something out. After a moment, her irises slowly returned to their normal size. “I’m still...still here, Detective. I don’t know how long. We didn’t bring any Beam with us, did we?”

Taxi looked pensive as she patted her saddlebags. “I thought that juice box was going to be enough. Even that amount would make a pony insane for a week.”

I added, “Beam is not exactly stable when you expose it to fire. I didn’t want to carry that much explosive narcotic around with us.”

“Aye, Oi’ve had me some experience with a Beam when it goes boom,” Sykes added. “Nothin’ noice. Edina, ye thinks ye could reach that panel if Oi hold ye up?”

The tiny griffin gave the distance an appraising look, then spread her wings. They were just small enough that she could give them a couple of experimental flaps. “Actually, I think I could make it up there on my own. Just keep your heads down.”

Crouching nearer to the floor, I watched as Edina took off and flapped up to the ceiling. Taxi swung the beam of her torch up to give her some light. Inspecting the metal panel beside the lights, Edina poked at something with a talon. After a second, something dropped and bounced off the brim of my hat, then landed between my hooves; a screw.

“Careful. If that thing just falls-”

“I am working with two fools howling in my brain already, Detective. Please don’t make it three,” Edina grumbled.

A moment later, there was a snap and the panel came free, revealing a black, empty shaft above us. Edina caught it in her talons, sinking back to the ground, where Sykes carefully took it from her and set it to one side.

Taxi was already digging out a length of nylon rope from her bags. Tossing it to Edina, she held the other end as the little griffin took off again and snatched at the edge of the hole, pulling herself through.

Above us, somewhere, echoes reverberated down the elevator shaft. I thought I could pick out some frightened voices amongst them and something that sounded alarmingly like screaming. Grabbing the rope in my teeth, I pulled myself hoof and mouth up to the hole and began shimmying through as Edina helped drag me up. The elevator creaked alarmingly under us, but seemed to be holding. Thinking too hard about the possibility of those brakes giving way was just going to send me into catatonia. Thankfully, the roof of the elevator made a decent ‘floor’ so I didn’t have to look at the remaining distance to the ground.

Hauling myself into a stand position on top of the elevator, I peered back down into it at the upturned faces of Sykes, Swift, and Taxi.

“Hey, Sykes? You think you can actually get out of this hole?” I asked.

Frowning, he turned in a little circle, examining himself then the small opening.

“Oi don’ t’ink so, mate. That be made for ye pony koind.”

“Alright, I hate to do this, but we need to get out of this shaft. Here.” Turning my head, I tugged my shotgun off of my harness and dropped it through. Sykes caught it in both claws and quickly checked the weapon, making sure it was loaded. He smirked at the ridiculous telescopic sights and the gold filigree. “I’ll be wanting that back, hear me? I’m sending someone back for you once we’ve secured the area and found out what’s going on upstairs.”

“Aye, Hardy. Don’ worry about me. Oi’m a big griff. Oi can handle moiself.”

“Sweets, you got another lamp?” I asked. She ducked her mouth into her bags for a second smaller one and passed it to Sykes, along with several extra shotgun shells. He popped them into a pocket of his greasy suit for easy access, then turned on the light.

I held out my hooves and Taxi took a quick swing in a circle, then threw the other torch up through the hole. I caught it and quickly fitted it into the corner of my mouth, directing the beam of light up the tunnel until the it gave way to oppressive blackness, then around at the walls. What must have been the rest of the elevator cables dangled a few meters above us and it did, indeed, look like the ends had been cleanly sheared off.

A narrow, metal ladder ran out of a hole recessed into the side of the shaft and disappeared into the distance above us. About two meters up, I could see the doors of the next floor.

“Swift, you’re next,” I called down.

“Sir, I can’t climb with the Hailstorm on!” she answered back.

“Then get it off and have Sykes throw it up here! Move!”

It was the work of another two minutes and I could feel every second ticking away as Swift unhitched herself from the weapon and scampered up the rope like only a freshly trained recruit can. I offered her a hoof and she pulled herself onto the top of the elevator, shaking her wings out.

“Oof, thanks.”

“No problem. Help Taxi get up here,” I ordered, then turned my attention to Edina. She seemed to be shaking, but when I glanced at her, she perked up. “Are you good to go?”

“No, Detective. I am about two hours from total psychological failure,” she replied, pressing two claws to the bridge of her nose. “That said, for now, I can follow orders.”

“Alright, I’ll take your word for that. Now, the outer door is going to have an emergency latch for maintenance on the inside of the shaft. If power is still on, that should let it open. If it’s not, we’ll have to muscle it. Go check. I’ll be right behind you.”

I started up the ladder, which is a completely crap design for equine anatomy, but necessary if you want to go vertically in such an enclosed space. You can always tell a building where the architect was a minotaur or some other flavor of biped by whether or not there are ladders somewhere.

The air in the tunnel was stiflingly hot and I could feel myself quickly breaking out in a sweat as I ascended. As I reached the next floor, Edina was floating beside the door, poking around at a red handle with yellow stripes around it. She tugged it out from the wall, then pushed it back up a couple of times. The door didn’t budge.

“Damn...phew...Edina, I need you to fly over and put your claws on my back. I’m going to have to step onto the ledge there.”

Edina flapped a little closer as I edged out onto the thin lip of metal at the bottom of the elevator. I wobbled on the edge and she quickly pressed against me, holding me stable as I pried the edge of my shoe into the split between the doors. I almost fell as I felt a pair of hooves gently rest on my shoulders, then glancing over my shoulder to see Swift hovering slightly below Edina. Her wings were big enough to take up most of the elevator shaft, but she was making short beats which kept her in the air.

Shutting my eyes, I tensed and slowly forced my leg into the tiny opening. The doors slid reluctantly at first, then more readily as I got some leverage. Jamming my leg into the space, I turned sideways and, with a grunt, managed to shove the door open. The counter-weight finally took over and it slid the rest of the way as Swift, Edina and I toppled out into an unlit hallway. Nervous voices, some griffin, some pony seemed to be echoing down the hall, asking what was going on. Playing the light back and forth, I caught a few faces peering out of their rooms.

Pulling myself up, I took a deep breath and called, “Ladies and gentle-beings! This is your concierge! Please return to your rooms! The power has gone out in the hotel due to a minor issue with the electrical grid on this block. It will be back on within an hour or so and your rooms will be comped for the inconvenience!”

A large griffin with an axe slung across his back took a couple of steps out of his room, though most of the rest of the doors closed. He was slightly smaller than Sykes, with a lithe build and five or six rings in his lower lip.

“Oi...ye be that Detective wot Grimble Shanks says is workin’ wi’ us, yeah?”

I motioned for him to keep his voice down, then nodded towards the hall as the rest of the doors closed. “Yes, I am. How well can griffins see in the dark?”

“Passin’ well ‘nuff. Why, cobber?” he asked, suspiciously.

“Because I need you to go get all the armed griffins you can find. Keep it quiet, hear me? Don’t cause a panic. Something is going on upstairs. Get your people moving and get them ready to fight.”

“Oi! Perkins! What be this then? Power’s out!” another griffin asked, peering out of the room across from the big guy with the piercings.

“Grenhilda, get ye axe!” Perkins replied, heaving his weapon into a position where he could get it at a moment’s notice. “We movin’ sneaky loike. Summat upstairs gone soideways.”

I held up my hoof. “It’s not the Tokan. Got me? No slaughtering everything you run into.”

Perkins frowned, then slowly nodded as he noticed Edina crouched at my side, holding her head in her claws. Swift was gently rubbing the tiny griffin’s back as she rocked back and forth. “Oi...if not they, then what?”

“Still working that out. Get your people and any Tokan who’ll join you.” I paused, as a thought occurred to me, then added, “Tell them to bring their swords. Leave those spellbooks. There’s something messing with magic in the area and it could cause some ugly effects if they use them, got me?”

No sense letting that particular cat out of the bag just yet.

“Aye, and why be we takin’ orders from ye?” Grenhilda sniffed, pointing to her mane which was full of hair rollers. “Oi jus’ got me hair loike it ought to be an ye want me to get me axe an’ come galivantin’ about for some pony?”

I turned the flashlight around in my hoof and pointed it at my face. “You see these?”

Her beak fell open and she backed into her room. “High Justice!” she yelped.

“Keep it down, dammit!” I whispered, angrily. “You need any more reason to take my orders?”

She quickly shook her head.

“Get moving.”

Turning, I stuck my muzzle into the open elevator shaft.

“Hey, Sykes!” I called down. “You alright down there?”

“Aye, Oi be foine,” he answered. “Jus’ get me out soon as ye can, aye?”

Taxi was just stepping off the ladder onto the ledge and I pulled her back onto all fours, then pointed down the hall. The beam of my light illuminated her muzzle and I could still see some residual panic there, but she seemed considerably calmer.

“Sweets, are you-”

She held up her leg for silence, then pointed down the hall. I followed her gesture to a cracked door about five down. An eye glistened in the dark, then vanished as the door swung shut with a click.

“I’m...I’m not alright, but it doesn’t matter. We need to move. I’m on your six,” Taxi said, giving me a shooing motion towards the stairs.

Edina was still curled on the floor and Swift had her forelegs around her. I’d have expected that to offend her dignity, somehow, but Edina didn’t seem much inclined to reject the comfort.

“Swift, can you carry her?”

She reached back and touched the Hailstorm, which was once more on her back. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“Edina?” I murmured.

“I...I think you’d best go ahead and bind my beak shut, and my legs together, and leave me here,” she muttered. “I’m going to be useless soon...”

“If this turns into a fight, I may need your other half ready to rumble,” I answered, softly. “You think you can point them in the right direction?”

She clenched her eyes shut and whimpered. “So...so loud…” I waited a moment and she seemed to relax a little. Gathering whatever wits she had left, she got to her claws. “I...I can control them for now. Mmm..I will do as best I can. For you, Justice.”

Pulling my revolver trigger to my mouth, I fitted it into my teeth and flicked my safety off.

“Keep your guns ready. We’re headed upstairs.”

****

Navigating the halls which were quickly filling with confused residents was difficult, particularly considering how heavily armed the four of us were, but once we reached the stairwell on the opposite side we could start back towards the penthouse. Midway up that first flight, we ran into a couple of staff in the process of heading to various rooms with a whole bucket of flashlights, candles, and batteries. I commandeered an extra pair for Swift and Taxi, along with head straps so I could stop carrying my own in my mouth.

Pausing just long enough to get ourselves some proper illumination, we continued on. The distant sounds of a ruckus were getting louder, but I couldn’t tell what on earth was actually happening. It sounded part pitched battle, part demolition.

Four flights up, we finally encountered our first griffin warband.

There were six of them sitting together at the end of the hallway, arguing back and forth about whether or not to head upstairs. They seemed to be a mixed group of Hitlan and Tokan. Several doors were open and variously shaped heads were peering out to watch the disagreement.

Two in particular were engaged in a spirited debate on the virtues and vices. One of them was a tall, matronly hen wearing a black and white bonnet. She looked like a Tokan, with snowy white fur and feathers. One hand was resting on her spellbook while the other held her sword. In front of her, a short, squat Hitlan with enough muscle that his neck was starting to consume his head was sitting beak to beak with the bigger female.

“Come off it, Esmerelda! Shanks be waitin’ on us!” The short griffin growled. His axe was already off his shoulder, but he wasn’t holding it in an especially aggressive way. He only wore a kilt, which somehow made him look half dressed. “We needs to be checkin’ on our eggs!”

“And I say I’m not allowing you lot into the treasury! You know the law. Those eggs are neutral! My hens and I are quite capable of protecting them! Whatever is going on upstairs, it is my job to make sure those eggs remain safe from both tribes. Therefore, unless you think you can march over my corpse, back off!” the huge hen snarled back.

I trotted up to the little group and sat behind them, watching the two snapping at one another.

“Ahem,” I said, loud enough that all six sets of eyes turned to look at me. “Pardon me? Could you direct me to the easiest way upstairs that doesn’t involve the elevator?”

Esmerelda gave me a stony glare. “Why would a pony want to get upstairs? You’re not with room service.”

Pulling my flashlight off my head, I turned it around and pointed it at my face. I’d been sweating in the elevator, but the bloody marks on my muzzle were still clear enough to be seen. The griffins all took a big step back, several pressing themselves against the walls on either side of the door. Esmerelda’s golden eyes flashed with worry, then she crossed her forelegs over her chest and sat in the doorway with an obstinate expression on her face.

“Neutral means neutral. Even before the law,” she rumbled, tugging her sword out of the sheath and resting it across her other bicep in a way that suggested extreme readiness for violence.

Edina took a couple of steps forward into the light. Inner tension kept her shoulders high and tight, but she seemed relatively in control of herself as she approached the much bigger female.

“Ezzie? Can we get by?”

The griffin nurse blinked a few times then took a step closer. “Edina? Edina Tokan Storm Ripper, is that you?! My word girl! Where’ve you been? You look like you’ve been diving dumpsters!” She stopped for a second, sniffed at the air, then suddenly reached out and grabbed my face in two claws, dragging me closer. I heard the barrels of the Hailstorm swinging on their joists. I quickly waved Swift back. “Wait a second, girl...is that your blood on this pony’s face?”

Edina slapped the nursemaid’s talons away from my muzzle. She might as well have struck a brick wall, but Esmerelda drew back. “Yes, it is...and the blood of Grimble Shanks as well! So kindly take your claws off the High Justice! He’s here to help us, and we need to get upstairs.”

Esmerelda gave me a close examination, snapping her beak at me as I tried to pull back. I could almost feel Taxi waiting for permission to thump her with whatever she’d loaded the P.E.A.C.E. cannon with.

Up close, I could detect the scent of fear on the middle-aged nurse. She was big, but somehow projected a feeling of softness, a bit like a mother bear. Something had her spooked, but she kept me locked in her fierce gaze for a long minute, making her decision.

“You’re here to make sure our eggs are safe, right Justice?” she prompted, carefully. “I must protect them from these fools, but I would like to send someone to check on the rest of my nurses. If that individual were sworn, by the blood of two Eggs, to do keep the children of the Tokan and Hitlan safe-”

“You have no right to swear a High Justice to that, Ezzie,” Edina snapped. “He’s not a nurse and binding him to that for life would be ridiculous!”

“Yes, well, as you say...he’s a High Justice. His life isn’t likely to be terribly long as it is. I must stay here to keep these morons from traipsing about tripping over incubator cords and cracking egg shells!” She gave the short griffin with all the piercings a glare that made him shrink back. “This is the only entrance to the upper floors besides the elevator or the windows. The nursery windows are guarded by our finest spellwork, so if you want to enter, this ridiculous pony Justice of yours swears himself to the protection of griffin eggs. Is that clear?”

“You’re outside your authority, m-meat!” Edina barked, jamming her face against Esmerelda’s. At two different heights, it was a bit like watching a rabbit stare down a bull. An especially vicious rabbit, but still a rabbit.

Before Esmerelda could make a solid decision about how far her authority extended, I raised my voice, “I’ll do it. I don’t need a fight with the nurses on top of whatever else is going on so whatever. I swear to take care of everyone’s eggs. Is that enough?”

The nursemaid’s cheeks curled up into a worryingly smug smile. “Very good, little pony. I hope you find your justice in service.”

I had a brief sinking feeling.

Edina slapped her palm against her forehead. “Oh goodie. Detective, what did I tell you about accepting challenges?!” she groaned, poking me with one sharp claw

“That...that wasn’t a challenge!” I snapped.

“Yes, yes it was! Ugh....Detective, you do know you just swore your entire remaining lifespan to the protection of all griffin children, right? All of it?”

“Quite,” Esmerelda said, tucking her tail around herself. “It will be nice for the Nursemaid’s Guild to have a Justice’s blood amongst our number...”

“Ezzie, I swear-” Edina started, but I cut her off with a hoof on her beak.

“Save it. Tell me what horrible new responsibility I just saddled myself with later on.” I raised my muzzle in Esmerelda’s direction. “Are you letting us through or not?”

The large hen stepped back and to one side, revealing an open door and the staircase to the second floor from the top. “Go right ahead, Nurse Justice,” she chuckled. “I’ll need a full accounting of what happens up there!”

The short Hitlan who was hanging back a little was edging towards the door and Esmerelda’s sword snapped up, wavering on the end of his nose. “Not you.”

Retreat was sounding better and better, lest I shove the entire rest of my leg into my mouth along with my hoof. That kind of situation is exactly why I didn’t go into politics. If it were possible to explode just from opening your mouth at the wrong moment, I would have long ago. Chief Jade would have found a way to make it happen.

I moved around Esmerelda and started up the stairs. After a moment’s hesitation, Edina followed, still rubbing her forehead as though I’d given her a migraine to go with her multiple personality disorder.

****

I could still hear distant shouting as we crept up the stairs, weapons ready and safeties off. The stairwell between the floor below and the one above was anti-sceptic and white washed, as though few individuals were expected to use it. Knowing the height of the hotel and that most fliers would simply prefer a roof to leave from, while the ground pounders would probably take the elevator, it wasn’t surprising they hadn’t paid for the extra decoration. Without the lights on, it felt distinctly more industrial and sinister.

The door to the next floor came into sight and gestured for Taxi to take the other side of the door with Swift. Edina joined me, her sword out. The tip of it kept wavering. I prayed she wouldn’t suddenly lose control of her unfortunate mental passengers at an inopportune moment, but leaving her with some unsuspecting person or tied up in a closet had its own risks. Besides, her other personalities did make a surprisingly effective ballistic missile in a pinch.

Shifting closer to grab the handle, I felt something slick on my toes. Lifting my hoof, I shined the light on it. My hooves were stained with something viscous and red. A pool of blood was slowly spreading from under the door.

Swallowing, I prepared myself. I knew what I was going to find, but somehow, there’s always that hope that someone’s spilt an especially juicy batch of catsup and will be along with a bucket soon to clean it up.

Grabbing the handle, I turned it slowly.

Weight against the door forced it open and something heavy, wet, and feathery fell across my fetlocks. It smelled of perfume. Jasmine perfume.

‘Steady, Hardy. Steady,’ Juniper murmured in my ear. ‘It’s a body. You know it’s a body. Just move it off of you and take a couple of steps back. If you scream, whoever might be in there could hear you. Then they’ll kill your friends.’

Someone retched behind me and I heard the soft spatter of something best not considered hitting the concrete floor. Edina squeaked and retreated to the stairs.

With a will, I started to lower my head, but Taxi’s leg came up across my vision. I felt frozen, halfway between moving her knee and my own desire not to see what had happened to the poor hen laying against me.

“Hardy, close your eyes,”she said just loudly enough to be heard.

“Sweets, now is not the time-”

“Please? Lemme take this one.”

I bit my tongue and my eyes slid shut, standing there like a useless lump. I deserved to see her, to burn her image into my mind for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t force myself to look. Soft grunting was followed by the weight being heaved off my fetlocks, then the sounds of dragging.

“The hall is clear, Hardy. There’s another body about five meters up.”

I slowly turned and opened my eyes, carefully looking at Swift who was just wiping her mouth off as she hung over the edge of the stairwell. Edina was curled in the corner, shivering while Taxi stood to one side, shielding whatever injuries the body might have had with her body.

Keeping my gaze on Swift, I said, “Sweets. I need pathology and time of death.”

In the most matter of fact voice she could, Taxi began her analysis. “Time was the last fifteen or twenty minutes. Blood hasn’t begun to coagulate yet. Cause of death...blood loss from a torn throat. Her entire neck, from one side to the other, is basically gone. Maybe an animal, maybe a griffin. It’s hard to tell. Her sword is still in the sheath and her spellbook is clasped, though. She didn’t have time to go for a weapon. I don’t think she even had time to scream...”

I nodded, curtly, and stepped as far over the pool of blood in the doorway as I could. My hooves still came down on the far edge of it. I felt the wet squelch around my shoes and buried my reaction as deep as I could, turning my flashlight this way and that.

“Sir, do you think we should go get Esmerelda?” Swift asked, quietly.

“If whatever did this is still here, I don’t think it’ll help. She might not know it, but whatever spells were guarding this floor are probably gone. That goes for her magic, too. At the very least, we’ve got some heavy hitters with us. Let’s keep the civilians out of the way.”

The second floor of the hotel was some sort of extension of the penthouse, though the doors were reinforced steel. Maybe it was a security zone for clandestine meetings between high ranking government officials or international diplomats. The hall seemed a touch more sparse than the upstairs A heavy metal bar beside the door we’d just entered through was propped against the wall. It seemed a tad more secure than the penthouse itself. With luck, it might have had its own spells, aside whatever blood magic the griffins had reinforced the windows with. Not that I had any evidence to indicate that whatever could cut off blood magic couldn’t also steal the power from unicorn enchantments.

Another body was laying up the hall, also on her back. I could just make out the pool of still-warm blood around it and I kept my light low.

Swift took a running leap, coasting through the door and spreading her wings to land with an almost silent thump on the carpet in front of me. The Hailstorm twisted this way and that.

“Sir, I’ve got...five targets. One is on this floor and doesn’t seem to be moving. Four are...um...moving away. I think they’re...” She squinted at the wall. “They’re out of range.”

“Hmmm...I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means,” Taxi muttered.

I pointed down the hall. “Whoever hit this place accomplished their objective. Alright, spread out, look for whoever is left. Watch for traps, explosives, and anything else that might indicate they’re trying to cover their tracks. Edina?”

There was no answer. I looked back to find the white griffin still curled up in the corner beside the stairs, her eyes staring at me, blank and empty. Whatever battle she was fighting, it was taking most of whatever mental reserves she had left to fight it. The corpse of the griffin girl had been very nearly a final straw for the both of us.

“Sweets, can you carry Edina?” I asked.

Taxi nodded, pulling out a length of rope and carefully looping it around Edina’s ankles. I’d thought she was entirely catatonic, but as my driver reached for her forelegs, she lifted them together, holding them out to be bound. When the knots were cinched up tight, the last thing was a loop with a gag tied in it for her beak. As my driver brought it to her mouth, she snapped at it, then grunted and forced her beak open. When she’d finished, Taxi threw Edina over her back like a sack of potatoes. She squeaked something that sounded a bit like ‘eat’, then lay still.

“Damn. I was hoping we could keep her together for at least a bit longer,” I said.

“You did your best, sir,” Swift added, entirely unhelpfully.

“Small comfort to her, I think. Alright, let’s see if we can find our survivor, if that’s what they are. Point me in the right direction.”

****

We snuck down the hall, flashlights aimed at the floor in front of us so as not to alert any enemies who might be waiting in the wings. I could smell death and plenty of it. The scent of freshly spilled blood was thick enough to choke a butcher.

“Why aren’t the griffins absolutely flooding this place?” Taxi asked, softly, shifting Edina’s weight on her back into a more comfortable position.

“This looks like a secured floor,” I murmured. “If all the eggs and both treasuries are here, this is neutral ground. Either side sets a claw in here without permission, particularly with the heightened tensions, it might look like an attack. That would be a bloody affair and...not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody wants to fight around the eggs. Besides, I don’t think they know the nursemaids are dead, yet. They seem like some kind of non-partisan protection force. That Esmerelda character isn’t someone I’d like to tangle with.”

“If they don’t know the nursemaids are dead, though, they will soon,” my driver said, pressing herself against the wall. “We could use the backup.”

“As soon as I know what we’re facing, yes, I agree, but if your cannon and Swift’s...whatever it is...aren’t enough back up to get out of here, a bunch of de-magicked blood mages and pre-war-era axes won’t help. Come on. Silence running until we’ve got the area scoped out.”

The second floor from the top of the Moonwalk was shaped like a horseshoe with especially long sides and a central area that might have been some kind of conference room. Smaller rooms branched off on either side of each prong. I pushed one open and glanced around. It reminded me of my old academy dorms, albeit with a bit more flash on the walls and a mini-bar in the corner. Like everywhere else, the lights were out, so I flicked my torch around over every surface. There was a sleeping griffin draped across a cot in the corner. Her eyes were shut and she seemed quite at peace, but I realized, on second examination, she wasn’t sleeping. The bedsheets weren’t originally that particular shade of red.

I swallowed and shut the door, quickly, retreating

‘What’s going on? Why is this getting to me?’ I thought. ‘After Supermax and the Don, I should be invincible...’

The thought of the Don sent my mind chasing back to that moment when I’d come around the corner and seen my friend lying there. I felt a wash of entirely rational fear, seasoned with a hint of genuine terror. It passed as quickly as it’d come, but it left my throat tight and my jaw clenched. With a will, I forced myself to relax. Maybe ‘relax’ is the wrong word; I forced myself not to piss on the carpet.

Taxi was just closing the opposite door. I thought I caught a glimmer of tears on her cheeks, but her expression was carefully monotone.

“We’ve got two dead in here,” she said.

I nodded towards the room on my side. “One in there.”

Swift was moving along the hall, scanning the rooms side to side. She started to reach for one of the door handles.

“Kid!” I hissed, loud enough to give her pause. “Don’t. Trust me. Just take us where we need to be.”

She sucked a breath and peered off to our left at one of the doors into the conference hall. “The target is in there.”

Taxi slid Edina off her back and gently pushed her into a corner. The little griffin’s eyes flashed with madness and she squirmed in her bonds for a moment, trying to open her tied wings. I wanted nothing more than to dash out of there and get the girl some Beam.

Why am I still doing this, dammit? I asked myself. Any sane being would have quit awhile ago...

Like a well oiled machine, Swift, Taxi, and I lined up beside the door to the conference room. Taxi took up position to breach, standing on her rear legs with her cannon ready. At my signal, my partner and I grabbed the door handles and tore the door open. My driver crouched low, raising the gun to firing height, ready to pop off a round at anything that might move.

After a moment, she let the weapon drop. The barrel sagged to the floor as she stared into the giant room.

I slowly peered out from behind the cover of the door. My trigger smacked me in the knee as it fell from my lips.

****

I remember reading about massacres during school. The Pyro Mountain Massacre. The Colton Prisoner Exchange Massacre. Baltimare.

Death in huge numbers for the sake of death. The war was a strange time and blood ran freely, but we were many and they were few. They were just really, really big. Strange as it might sound, the number of deaths per hundred dragons in the world far exceeded the number of deaths per hundred ponies.

Massacre was one of those ugly words that just never got used terribly much. Certainly not in police work. I’d seen a couple of nasty mob hits where ten or eleven would die in one go. Industrial accidents weren’t uncommon, although they never call equicide for those.

Supermax was a bloody mess, but I don’t think that qualified as a massacre.

Massacre suggests someone was unprepared and unable to fight back. Massacre is innocents dying to a vastly superior force.

The thing I remembered most about those massacres during the war was a silly little factoid. Most of the time, they only knew there’d been a whole bunch of death when a large group of ponies didn’t come home. Dragon fire doesn’t leave anything to bury.

****

I stared into that room of death and felt my blood pressure rising until I could hear my pulse in my ears.

Moving quick, I grabbed Swift before she could follow where I was looking and stuffed her back against the wall, yanked my hat off my head and over her face. Flailing at the air, she let out a protesting squeak as I dragged her away, into the hallway on one side by the back of her tactical vest. One of her wings sprang out and clouted me in the side, but I held her firmly against the wall. My hat fell off of her face and she looked up at me, young eyes full of fear. The Hail-storm’s barrels were trying to center on my head, but they apparently didn’t aim well from below.

“Recruit, ten-hut!” I barked, an inch from her face.

Swift stopped struggling almost immediately and I moved away so she could snap into a crisp attention. She hesitated, her hoof halfway to her forehead.

“Get that hoof up there, recruit!” I snarled and her toe almost left a bruise as it hit her brow.

“S-s-sir?” she whimpered.

I put one hoof on the lapels of her flak jacket. “I did not tell you to speak, recruit! You will stand here, at attention, until I say otherwise! Is that clear? Eyes ahead!”

“Y-Yes, Sir!” she gasped, straightening into full attention. Her body was so taut she was quivering.

I let the drill sergeant mask go and shut my eyes, sitting on the carpet there at her hooves. It was cruel, but it was necessary. Necessary. Mercy of Celestia, how many things are going to go under that heading? Supermax had been necessary. Cosmo had been necessary.

My conscience might let me sleep one day, if I knew the kid never had to see what was in that room.

Oh, and there’s the panic attack. I started to hyperventilate as the fear I’d been holding down washed in great waves up and down my body. Everything seemed to mute as I saw, in my mind’s eye, the scene in the conference hall.

There were bodies. The room was full of bodies. Some were piled against the door, while others seemed to have been trying to climb the walls. Blood and things best not mentioned filled the space with a stink so strong my eyes watered.

The corpses of dozens of griffins. There were enough that it didn’t matter how many there were. It was a slaughter the like of which I’d never seen. Some were dismembered. Some seemed to have just lain down for a little nap until someone came along with a silenced chainsaw and cut their throats.

It was efficient death and lots of it. Murder by the numbers and en masse. How’d they done it? We’d heard the screams, but it couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes since we climbed out of the elevator. Killing so many...ugh, I wasn’t in a condition to ask questions just yet.

Swift was still staring at me and I realized I’d drifted off into space. Drifting off was a great alternative to the next decision I needed to make.

“At ease,” I muttered, sitting in front of my partner and pulling my hat back on.

Her shoulders didn’t relax. She stood there at attention, eyes forward.

“Kid, I said ‘at ease’. I’m sorry.”

My partner’s gaze swiveled to meet mine and she gave me a fierce glare. “That was mean, Sir.”

“Yeah, well, basic training trumps everything and I was saving you the worst nightmares of your life, so I think we’ll call it even,” I replied, straightening my hat brim. “Just...look, would you please wait for me here?”

“I’m not a little filly anymore. I’ve seen really bad stuff before, Sir. What is-”

“Not this bad, kid. Nothing...nothing this bad.” My voice dropped to a choked whisper and I inhaled, but all I could taste was all that lake of blood. “I know you’re going to get curious, but short of cuffing you and leaving you with Edina, I can’t think of a way to stop you other than asking. For my sake, because I’m doing my damndest to protect you, wait here.”

Swift’s wings tucked in against her side and she gave me a petulant look, then plunked her rump down on the carpet. Something in my pleading expression must have given her pause, because that she softened a little. “Humph. This is not fair. You trusted me in Supermax.”

“Lets just say I don’t trust me, right now, alright?”

“You better never use basic training against me like that again, okay?”

I nodded. “I promise. Short of saving your life, I won’t. We’ll be back in a minute. Go see if you can get Edina calmed down.”

“I think I need to be calmed down, first, but...but alright. Whoever you’re looking for is off to the left in there, about...maybe five meters from the door.”

Leaving Swift to tend to Edina, who was making little growling noises in her corner, I trotted back to the door of the conference room and stood there, staring at the carpet and the tiny pool of light my torch cast on the floor between my hooves. I didn’t really want to look again. Phew, I really really didn’t want to look.

I raised my head and pushed my battered hat back on my head with one toe, surveying the devastation.

Taxi was already inside, picking over the bodies with her usual clinical detachment. She had a set of latex socks on each hoof, pulled right up to the knee. Another set was resting over the handle of the door. I picked them up and began tugging them onto my hooves.

“We’re clear in here, Hardy! Close the door!” she called out. “There’s a breeze, but I don’t think it’s the air conditioning. I’m assuming we’ve got a breach in one of the walls or possibly a window. I say that’s probably how they got in...whoever ‘they’ were.”

“Swift is waiting outside. Let’s do this by...whatever numbers there are for this kind of thing,” I replied, struggling the last sock onto my rear leg. “Look for cause of death and maybe what happened here.”

Fortifying myself with a few breaths and a promise to myself that if I managed to do this without screaming, crying, or attacking any book-cases, I’d drink myself into oblivion later, I pulled the doors shut behind me and began my examination.

The conference room was about twenty meters across and mostly empty, with the exception of a few overturned chairs, tables, and a dozen or so cots lined up against the wall. Most of it was hotel owned, although a few pieces - particularly a chair that seemed to be made out of some kind of bone - were sitting against the walls as though waiting for someone specific. Four empty weapons racks were side by side, with space for books, swords, and axes.

The bodies littered the entire space, though most were either closer to the door we’d come in through or near one of the side exits. Some slumped against the walls, while others seemed to have dropped where they stood.

Three larger shapes lay in front of a paneled-off section from which I could hear a faint hum. A floor to ceiling curtain kept that space separated from the main room.

Carefully strobing my flashlight over the cadaver that’d been lying against the door, I reached out and gently turned its face towards me.

She was young. Very young. If I had to estimate her age, I’d have put her at just beyond puberty. Her yellow eyes were glassy with surprise and her white fur had the look of someone who hadn’t quite lost all of their baby feathers.

Cause of death was easy to figure; three holes in a line across her face, starting from brow-ridge and moving right down to her chin. Surgical precision and a guaranteed kill. The third bullet left a chip in her beak when it passed. Lifting her head, I peered at the back of her skull. The wound there was just as perfect as the ones in her face, as though she’d been hit with something which hadn’t so much punched through as cut.

“Sweets? You seeing this?”

“The funny wounds?” she asked, prodding an extremely old hen’s chest. Her feathers were long since grey, her talons twisted with age. She seemed to have been riddled with small, perfectly formed holes. “I’m seeing them on most of the bodies. The rest seem to have had their throats ripped out. Some are both. Whoever did this, it was fast. I’ve only got a few open spellbooks and drawn swords. Did you notice the wall?”

I turned to look at the wall of the conference room. It was covered in floor to ceiling draperies for sound absorption in a comforting forest green. No wonder we hadn’t heard much more than a bit of shouting.

They were also wrong. Very wrong.

I held my light up to the back of the door I’d just come through; it was entirely pristine.

“Where in Tartarus are the bullet holes?” I asked, letting my beam drift over a few other bodies lying against the walls. Any count was going to take time, and I didn’t think we had it. “With this much spray, some of them must have gone through and hit the far wall! Even if they planted every shot perfectly...I’ve got exit wounds here!”

“Yep,” she agreed. “There’s also no shrapnel or casings. They either fired from outside-”

“-or this is enchanted weaponry,” I grumbled, stepping over another body and into a second pool of blood. Ugh. Twice in three days. The smell was never going to come out. “Dammit. I hate it when they cheat. So...what then? If you can slaughter a whole room full of armed griffins at range, leaving no evidence...why get in close? Why start ripping out necks?”

Taxi paused as she moved another body, thinking. Her nose wrinkled at whatever thought had come into her mind.

“I… I could be wrong, but… this… this might be… an act of contempt.”

“Contempt? Contempt is sending someone a snooty letter. Contempt isn’t grabbing someone and shredding their throat with your teeth.”

Taxi pointed at the body she was inspecting. The griffin at her hooves was a proper mess. Whoever had killed them first decided to unload with whatever the strange weapon was on their lower extremities before coming in for the coup de grace with teeth.

“Contempt is what you do when someone’s already dying and you want to make them feel it.” She lifted the corpse a few inches and I shined my light on it. “That and...I’ve got a hoof print here.”

On the upper chest of the griffin - whose face was so bloody I couldn’t even make out what color they’d been originally - a very distinct size ten hoof-print with shoe was marked in the blood.

“I wish we could get a full forensics team in here,” Taxi muttered.

“We don’t have time for that. Anything you see indicate a ‘survivor’ here to you?” I asked.

She shook her head, then jerked upright as something nearby let out a ‘thump’.

I turned my light in the direction of the sound.

A tall, wooden chest of drawers against one nearby wall seemed to have been torn open and emptied. A few scattered throw pillows lay amongst the carnage on the ground, along with some blankets and a couple of torn sheets. It looked like something had been hastily stuffed into the bottom drawer. It was griffin make, with handles designed for gripping with claws rather than teeth or hooves.

Stepping over the body of a lithe griffin male who was splayed out against the bottom of the cabinet, I gently heaved him off to one side. He was wearing a sword like Esmerelda, along with another of those funny looking amulets filled with blood the griffins were so fond of, this one shaped like an egg. It was about half full.

Picking up my trigger, I hooked a toe into the lip of the drawer and worked it open.

I squinted, trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Fluffy. There was something incredibly fluffy and very light grey in the drawer. It reminded me of a shag carpeting, except more-so. Reaching in, I lightly brushed a hoof over it. A single black eye opened on a tiny head. The griffin chick let out a shrill ‘meep’, burying her face back against the side of the drawer. She was wedged in tight, tucked behind several blankets.

“Oh sweet mother of...I found our survivor,” I said over one shoulder.

Setting myself down, I considered the bundle of fuzz stuffed into the drawer like a college student’s wash.

She wasn’t bloody, but whoever jammed her in there had done it in a hurry. One of her wings seemed like it’d been twisted at a bad angle, although I couldn’t see anything broken. She was roughly the same size as Edina, although she showed the early signs of becoming an adolescent.

“Hardy, we can’t leave her here…” Taxi said, quietly.

“You think I don’t know that?” I grumbled. “We’ll see if we can deliver her to the griffins downstairs.” I carefully touched the little ball of feathers. “Hey, if you can understand me in there...we’re here to help. I’m not going to hurt you, but I need to get you out.”

She chirruped, pitifully, and tried to wriggle a bit, her twisted wing smacking against the top of the drawer. I assumed that meant there was comprehension.

Reaching in, I gingerly pulled the drawer open a bit further. She let out a distressed whimper, but I pressed on, wrapping my forelegs around what I hoped was her middle and giving a light tug; I felt her start to slide.

“Easy...easy,” I whispered as I felt her start to struggle. She gradually quieted enough that I felt like she wouldn’t peck me if I made a move. Bracing my back legs, I heaved the bundle of frightened fluff into my lap.

Taxi smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes as settled herself down on my other side, blocking the chick’s view of the rest of the carnage in the room.

“Oh, Hardy...she’s cute. How old do you figure she is?”

I had to admit, despite the surroundings, she was right.

The chick laying in my legs stared up at me with bright, tear streaked eyes. My first estimate had been correction; she was the same size as Edina, though her back paws were much bigger, like she hadn’t quite grown into them yet. She was big enough to be edging up to puberty, but still quite young. Something about her coloring reminded me of Sykes. She was reddish brown, with a little tuft of white between her eyes that was shaped a bit like a diamond. Her closest relative might have been a golden eagle. Maybe a miniature golden eagle.

The young griffin turned and gave my driver a curious look, that turned a little grumpy.

“Where my da?” she squeaked, lashing her little feline tail. “P-pony? Where’s my da?”

I half-turned to look at the pile of bodies behind us, inadvertently exposing the griffin who’d been slumped against the drawer. The tiny chick let out a terrified squawk and tried to leap out of my legs. I caught her and held her to my chest before she could jump on the body.

“Da’! It’s my da’!” she whimpered, clutching at the lapels of my coat as she looked up into my eyes. “Why he not moving?”

“Oh...crap…” I muttered.

Behind me, I could hear shouting getting closer. Snatching up the chick in the crook of my leg, I held her close as I kicked my trigger into my teeth. “Hold still, kiddo.”

The half-closed doors of the conference chamber slammed open and a raging Grimble Shanks, axe drawn, was followed by Derida and a half dozen of her warriors. They stormed into the room to find me standing up to my knees in blood and clutching a traumatized child over the corpses of an uncounted number of their brethren.

And this is how I die. Again.

Act 2 Chapter 51: Hanging By A Thread

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2 Chapter 51: Hanging By A Thread

In the annals of history, there is no more feared horror from out the depths of space and time than the gormless, witless beast that eats and defecates but never digests. It is a monster that slinks through the gutters of cities, devouring all in its path and leaving behind a disgusting smear on the sidewalk.

We are, of course, referring to the press.

The Fourth Estate was a term first coined by neighbors of the late, great progenitor of journalism, Lord Ink Blotter. In B.L. 355 he was forced to fight a lawsuit trying to have his house - the fourth one down on the left from the Blue Blood family home - demolished to make way for the Blue Blood’s new bathhouse.

When - much to everyone’s surprise - he lost the lawsuit Ink Blotter found himself with a huge amount of spare time on his hooves. His response was to begin tracking the Blue Blood family’s every move, day in, day out.

In a matter of weeks he’d discovered such a raft of dirty dealings that he wasn’t even sure how to go about making them known to the public at large. Thankfully, Ink Blotter was a savvy pony and able to employ a local inventor, Johan Croupenburg to use his newest invention, the printing press, for something besides the distribution of slightly unsavory stories of Princess Celestia’s love life.

Due to the resulting scandal, even hundreds of years later, the Blue Blood Family remains blighted with jokes about the ‘cucumber incident’ and various amusing anecdotes regarding the peacock somewhere in their family tree. Ink Blotter also discovered in his investigations that the judge in his case had been paid off and managed to get his house back.

Since then, the Fourth Estate has ostensibly defended the weak against the powerful, though the reality is usually more like a collective of drunk kittens in a yarn factory.

-The Scholar

I spat my trigger and threw my free hoof in the air, clutching the girl chick to my chest with my other. Taxi had the sense not to go for her cannon. I think if she had, we’d both have been dead in seconds.

Shanks and Derida pulled up short in the doorway, standing side by side, gawking at the bodies piled around the edges of the room. Derida realized her talons were covered in blood and quickly hopped backwards a few inches. Slowly they both turned to face me. Both had their weapons out, but they hadn’t yet pointed them at us.

“I just want to be clear here, I did not do this,” I said. I cringed internally the moment it came out of my mouth. To my own ears, that sounded awfully guilty, hence, I decided some babbling was in order. “We were in the elevator on the way down and I had to make some kind of vow to Esmerelda downstairs before she’d let us up here and I just came in and there were all the bodies out there covered in blood and I-”

“Detective, do shut up,” Derida growled, snapping her sword back into the sheath. Shutting her eyes, she drew in a firm breath, then pointed at one of her warriors, a gangly fellow with a scruffy little beard. “Jonas... Secure the room and check our eggs.”

The guard named Jonas snapped out of his stupor, swallowed, and holstered his axe. Bracing himself, he started moving around the edge of the room towards the paneled section at the back, disturbing as little as possible. When he reached the back wall, he hopped over the three bodies defending it and pushed his way into the sectioned area.

Grimble Shanks had recovered from his shock enough to glance at the child. I became aware of her legs tightly around my neck as she hid her face in my mane.

“What... happened here, cobber?” he asked, reaching down to touch the mane of a dead griffin at his feet. “And where’d ye be foindin’ that chick?”

“I wish I knew. She survived this mess. I don’t know what she saw.” I patted the chick’s back, gently and she clung to me a bit more tightly. For some unhinged reason, I was starting to feel a tad protective. “Can we get her out of here?”

“Aye, we be-”

Jonas popped out of the door so fast he smacked his beak on the way.

“Lady Derida! We must clear the building!” he exclaimed. “There’s a bomb!”

After all that Zap, one would think I’d have been thinking slowly, but the adrenaline was still pumping. I’d been dropped. I’d lost a piece of my ear. I’d seen the shape of a conspiracy that could have led to the deaths of hundreds.

Quickly shifting the griffin girl attached to my neck up onto my back, I darted over the bodies and shoved my way out between the two leaders of the tribes. I glanced both ways down the empty hallway, then hopped around the corner to find Swift peering out from behind a potted plant with Edina just behind her. A couple of griffin warmakers had followed me, curiously.

“Kid! Get Edina and get downstairs!” I shouted.

She stepped out from behind the plant. “Sir? Are those friendlies?”

“Yes! Now listen to me. Get downstairs and start getting everyone you can out! Ponies need an equine face. They won’t listen to griffins!”

“B-but Sir, what are-”

“Swift, you need to move!” I snarled. “Take Edina and this...hey, kiddo, what’s your name?” I asked, glancing at the chick.

She said something so quietly I barely heard. “-...name is Mags…”

I turned back to Swift. “This is our survivor. Her name is Mags. Get the two of them and get out!”

“I...what about-”

“That’s an order! We’ll be out as quick as we can, but you’ve got to handle the non-coms! Now go!”

Swift was confused, but my tone of voice brooked no disagreement. Not for the first time, I was glad she was a good little soldier. Grabbing Mags off my back, I plunked her down across my partner’s. Mags squirmed and tried to reach for me, but before she could, Swift darted back through the door, vanishing into the darkness.

Grimble and Derida were moving just as quickly, issuing orders to their own troops to get downstairs and start clearing rooms, starting from the top down. The effect of having something to do tends to stave off panic and any decent leader learns the first thing you do in a situation where death is real close is give anyone standing around a directive.

“Downstairs, gents! Grab the war-makers and get every griff ye can out this posh pit! By the Egg, stop standin’ with yer gobs open and heave to!”

“The elevator has been damaged. Move our people out through the stairs. Keep low and sneak through the basement parking garage if possible. We don’t want to alarm the P.A.C.T. with a whole bunch of broken windows and shrieking, lest they do something rash. I do not want those fools tromping around in here,” Derida added, gesturing with her sword for emphasis.

Stepping over another body, Taxi grabbed Jonas by the front of his combat vest and yanked him out of the doorway into the secured room. He went to swat at her, but when Taxi wants your attention she has a certain way of getting it. She grabbed his head in both hooves and stared into his eyes with an intensity that left his back legs shaking.

“You. Jonas. I need you to listen. Sykes...you know Sykes?” He nodded, weakly, staring into her face. “Good. Go downstairs and get someone to get Sykes out of the elevator. He’s stuck between floors. The emergency brakes are holding him for now, but the cable was cut. I don’t care how you do it, but I need him clear! He’s the pony liaison and if this all goes south, you griffins will need him. You hear me?”

He had the presence of mind to peer over her shoulder and look to Derida for confirmation: she sighed and nodded. Relief washed over his face and he jogged out of the room, dodging over bodies and wiping his talons free of blood on the door-jam as he left.

Thirty seconds later and all orders issued, Shanks, Derida, Taxi and I were alone.

“I suppose I can’t convince the two of you to let me handle this, can I?” I asked as we stood in front of the secure room.

“Loike bloody rocks, ye can,” Grimble muttered, slinging his axe across his back.

“That is not how griffins operate, Detective. Our leaders lead the actions, or they die of inaction. Our eggs are in there,” Derida added, adjusting her dress away from her rear legs for better motion in the event we had to sprint. “If I walk away from them, I am not fit to call myself a member of my tribe, much less aspire to leadership. Besides, if there is evidence, I would know exactly who would dare attach a bomb to our children so I also know whose family I will one day vivisect before their very eyes after I remove their eyelids.”

“Fine. Horrifying imagery aside, a competent pair of claws might help.” I glanced at my driver. “Sweets...I guess asking you to go someplace safe-”

“You’ve got exactly zero bomb defusing experience, Hardy, and I’ve seen you with a pair of pliers. You’ll be more likely to kill all of us,” she replied, before I could finished that noble sentiment. “Come on. Lets see what we’ve got.”

The smell of blood was making me lightheaded, but the job had taken on a fresh layer of necessity with the introduction of a bomb in a nursery.

Grabbing the door handle of the sectioned off area, I pulled it cautiously open. The blast of air that hit me in the face was positively scorching. Sweat popped out on my forehead almost immediately. I took an involuntary step back, then swung the door wide. A rush of air very nearly took me off my hooves.

The area the griffins had set aside for their treasury and nursery reminded me considerably of a vacant chicken coop mixed with a dragon’s hoard. Both walls, one on each side, were lined with row upon row of eggs. It was easy to pick out which was the Tokan and which was the Hitlan. Hitlan eggs were sitting in tiny nests of stone and feathers that looked very much like the nests of cliff-dwelling eagles, while the Tokan eggs lay in plush, velvet slots, each orderly and precise, with nametags and a clipboard beside each.

Against the back wall on the Hitlan side, a weathered, wooden chest sat underneath a short awning that was propped up by a pair of poles as though someone was worried it might get rained on. Off to the right, on the Tokan side, stacks upon stacks of books were heaped up alongside a few smaller jewelry boxes. I noticed one of the jewelery boxes seemed to have been opened, but put it out of my mind since the dominating feature of the room was a pony-sized hole punched right through the outer wall.

Strange. There wasn’t any rubble or debris scattered around it. Whatever came through had done so in an alarmingly neat fashion, though considering the effect of whatever weapon they’d used on the poor nursemaids, it wasn’t much of a stretch that they might have something to rip very clean holes in walls.

Right down below the hole, sat the bomb.

There was no mistaking it for anything else. Four bright orange and yellow ovoids, standing on end against one another were wired together underneath a block of something that looked like clay. They were phoenix eggs. Dead phoenix eggs, primed with explosives. Whoever set that little package had a fairly capacious knowledge of magical combustibles. Dead phoenix eggs ranked just behind dragon breath and ahead of spell-fire for sheer destructive potential. They also had the benefit of burning right through most forms of magical shielding. That said, Detrot was built to survive dragon attacks, but taking chances is not how one adds years to one’s life.

“Sweets. This is your show,” I said. “Tell me what we’re looking at.”

Taxi edged forward, watching for anything which might indicate there was a motion switch on the bomb. It wasn’t unheard of to wire an explosive with some juicy little surprise for whoever might try to defuse it. Pulling out her magnifying goggles, she slipped them on.

There’s no especially good technique for approaching a bomb. On a good day, you have a really long stick. On a bad day, you’ve got a suit of nice, thick Kevlar. Our day thus far had long since surpassed ‘bad’ and was now into the realm of ‘purge from memory by any means possible’, so it was that Taxi only had her skin and competence to shield her.

Modern bomb-makers tend to build within three separate philosophies. The first is that the bomb shouldn’t be found before it goes off. In that case, they tend to obscure the weapon. A garbage can works pretty well and those are relatively cheap to produce.

The second is the booby-trap. Build your bomb, then put it where your victim is likely to be and have them set it off themselves. While this is a solid plan, an especially cautious individual can sometimes avoid the trap.

The third and perhaps most dangerous variety is that which expects to be found. You build the bomb, put it somewhere, leave it on a timer and rely on a series of fail safes to keep it from being defused before it’s meant to explode.

In the cinema, the good guys tend to defuse that third type by cutting a wire or removing a timer.

Real bombs don’t work like that; certainly not the kind that someone wires up to four dead phoenix eggs. In real life, if you cut a wire, the bomb explodes immediately, killing you and anyone foolish enough to be nearby. In this case, it also kills a whole room full of unborn griffins.

Taxi paused, watching the four eggs on their stand. They’d started to glow slightly as she approached. She took a step back. The glow receded a little, but it still hadn’t disappeared entirely.

“Oh, that’s an adorable little trick…” she muttered, turning away from the bomb and trotting back to my side and addressing Derida. “I think I’ve got this figured. Are those eggs being fed magic of some kind?”

“They are held in a suspension field, yes,” Derida replied, tapping her chin. “It is wired into the nests. We had to build this room when we arrived. I do not sit on my own eggs, nor do most griffins in this day and age. The incubators simply charge them with energies to insure proper growth and prevent miscarriage.”

“What’ve you got, Sweets?” I asked.

“I’m not entirely sure. The bomb seems to have a proximity detector hooked up to some sort of battery which uses the innate powers of the phoenix eggs to figure out when someone is getting close to them. Move too near, they go boom. Brilliantly simple, actually...and damn near foolproof. I’d say it probably detects ambient life energy above a certain threshold, since the eggs eat magic to start the cycle of rebirth. Without a living phoenix inside, they’re just building to a reaction. Removing the griffin eggs might slow it down a little, but at this point, I don’t think we can stop it from going off. Not with the incubator nest spells in here, and...I don't know how we'd remove them quickly without damaging the eggs or setting the bomb off.”

“You said it’s eating life energies?” I cocked an eyebrow and touched my heart plug. “My heart is a pretty juicy bundle of those. Should I be in here?”

“No idea, really, but I do have a...well, half a plan. I don’t know what kind of time-frame this thing is meant to explode on. I’m going to assume it’s ‘short’.”

“Then...then we must move our eggs and the treasury!” Derida snapped, starting forward. I grabbed her tail in my teeth as the phoenix eggs burst to life as she crossed some invisible line. A lick of flame seemed to curl up the inside of one, before vanishing as I hauled her backwards towards the door.

“We’re leaving the treasury,” I growled. “You want your eggs, fine, but I am not dying hauling your friggin’ gold out of here.”

“That is not gold, you fool!” she barked, swatting at me with one wing. “That is our ledgers that bomb is sitting beside! That is the entire regional griffin economy!”

“And if you’ve got ten extra griffins to carry them, fine, go get’em. Otherwise, I’m prioritizing lives. Specifically the lives of your children.”

Derida dropped her claw from her sword, still looking deeply conflicted. She shot a longing glance at the heap of books piled in neat stacks against the wall, but there was no good way of getting them out quickly.

Pulling her cannon off, Taxi tossed it on the floor in front of us, then tugged off her saddlebags. Unzipping one of the outer pockets, she scrunched up her face, dumping out the various rounds from her cannon in a pile on the thick carpet.

“I...I think I can buy us maybe ten minutes. I’ve got a C-E-S number six in here,” she explained, picking up a particular round with a pink tip. “I...um...I suppose I should also add that it’s almost guaranteed to set the bomb off. If there’s a dead-pony switch, it’ll probably trip the second the system defrosts a little.”

“Then what good is it, lass?” Shanks growled, shifting from one back paw to the other as he stared at his eggs.

Taxi tapped the cannon with her toe. “If I’m right, it’ll give us maybe ten minutes where the bomb isn’t going to go off, even if we’re near it. That’s an upper limit, though. It could be much less.”

“What exactly is a C-E-S number six?” I asked, squinting at the tiny writing on the side of the container.

“Crystal Empire Special Six,” she replied.

“Wait...cold rounds? Why didn’t we have those when we were in Supermax?” I huffed.

“The contact who has been supplying these things didn’t have any! You want reliable sources of ammunition for your unregistered weapons, you buy what’s available!” she bit back. “Anyway, this will go off, but the second the temperature around the bomb goes back to normal, it’s probably going to go pop…”

“Which means we’ve got ten minutes to move the bomb. You think four of us can do it?”

Taxi coughed. “Once I fire this, there won’t be any moving that bomb. It’s going to be attached to the wall and floor. This might give us time to move the eggs, though.”

Derida flicked her eyes down the rows of eggs nestled in their racks. “It...will be extremely tight. Whereabouts are we going to put them?”

“I’ve got magic pockets. I can probably fit ten or fifteen in each. They look about the size of a grapefruit.” I point at my driver. “Taxi, empty your saddlebags. We can probably get fifteen or twenty in there.”

Hauling her bags up in her teeth, Taxi undid both clasps and began shaking out the wildest array of crap I’d ever see. The pile was up to her knees.

“Griffin eggs be pretty durable. Erm...Oi moight have...oh blast it! Me dignity will be dead enough as it is iffen Oi lets these eggs die,” Shanks reached back and snatched at the buckle on his kilt, ripping it off and laying it out on the carpet. Turning his axe around, he flicked a pin out of the head and tore the heavy blade off, tossing it back amongst the bodies in the other room. Picking up his kilt, he began fashioning a makeshift basket. “Oi don’t suppose we’ve time to give them what died defendin’ em a proper pyre.”

“I think the explosion of several phoenix eggs will do that job, nicely,” Derida answered, already halfway to pulling off her own clothing. All of that lady-like propriety was gone as she undressed, tossing away her sword as she began tying both ends of the embroidered dress to her scabbard.

We were all aware the bomb could go off at any time and those phoenix eggs did seem a tad more lively than when we’d first stepped into the nursery. I would have sworn I could see shapes moving behind their thin, fiery shells.

A soft voice from the next room brought my head up.

“Sir?”

Turning, I stepped out of the secured room followed closely by Derida, Grimble and Taxi, galloping across the field of bodies. It was a macabre scene, but one I could do nothing about. Frequently, putting the awful things out of your mind is your best hope for not losing it.

My partner was just reaching for the door handle when I slammed it open and pushed her to one side, out of view of the bodies. Mags was still clinging to her back by a couple of claw-fulls of her brilliantly orange mane and peered up at me over Swift’s shoulder.

“Swift...on what world did you think it was a good idea to come back here?!” I snarled, poking her in the chest.

“S-sir...we’re in trouble,” she stammered, her lower lip quivering.

“Yes, I know that! We were about to try to get these eggs out of here! I was hoping you’d have us a path cleared to an open window by now!”

“I...I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sir. T-there’s a P.A.C.T. air interdiction f-field around the building. Nobody...can fly around the Moonwalk. The only way out is on...on hoof.”

Derida spread her wings and gave them a beat, barely lifting herself an inch off the ground.

“She’s right. We’re not flying out of here, Justice.”

My mind went blank for a moment.

‘Well, that’s not good,’ Juniper whispered.

Interdiction magic is used only for instances where someone suspects an extremely dangerous perp is going to attempt to flee: terrorists, extra-dimensional horrors, serial killers and so on. If you’re going to interdict an area, you need a good reason. It requires considerable magical resources, it inconveniences first responders, it grounds your own forces, and it has the unfortunate addendum that it’s a beast to target properly. The spells involved weren’t the sort you could control with great care.

Interdiction is the magical equivalent of a howitzer; you point it at an area and anything in that area that uses a particular brand of magic might as well be shooting blanks. Hence, magically powered flight was out of the question.

That said, the shape of the trap we were in was finally coming together.

Flight interdiction meant nopony leaving via the rooftops. Leaving out the front doors was either heading into a police cordon or past whatever monsters had put us in this situation in the first place.

Derida was a little faster on the uptake. “If we cannot leave out the windows and the elevators are blocked, then ten minutes is an extremely short period to accomplish this.”

“You’re telling me. Alright, before this blows up because we’re dithering, Swift, go find a laundry chute and grab all the towels you can. Start shoving them down the chute. You hear us clearing out of here, you start shouting until we find you. We need to get these eggs off this floor as quickly as possible.”

Swift only hesitated for a moment before she took off down the hallway with Mags holding on tight for the ride.

Grimble Shanks gave me a curious look that shook me out of my thoughts, “Why the laundry, cobber?”

“You say these eggs are durable?” I asked as we trotted back to the nursery. Reaching into one of the nests, I gently removed one of the eggs and turned it over. The bottom was stamped with a complex system of symbols and the names of two griffins: Jeanette and Bosko. Probably the parents.

“Very. They must be survoivin’ a griffin sittin on ’em,” he replied, with a little shrug.

“Then, with any luck, they’ll survive dropping on top of an irate pegasus. We’re putting them down the linen chute.”

“Ahem...Hardy, if we’re doing this...well, those phoenix eggs are starting to look real active,” Taxi said, quietly, pointing at the bomb. She was right. The eggs were starting to glow more energetically. With her free hoof, she popped the shell out of the P.E.A.C.E. and loaded the CES6.

"When we ice this puppy, we need to get out quick. Grim, you and Derida take the section nearest the exit. Pack as many eggs in as you can, but...if it looks like things are going south, your priority is to leave. If this doesn’t work, being close might buy you enough time to get out. Run for Swift, toss the eggs down the chute, and then head for the elevator. That’s our exit. Pry the doors and slide down the ladder. I think there’s only enough explosives here to take out the top few floors and...and hopefully that won’t mean they fall on us. Get ready.”

I didn’t know how true that bit about there only being enough explosives to kill the top floors was, but bringing an entire building down in Detrot requires a fair bit more effort than most people are willing to put in. That said, I was speaking from a place of hope rather than foreknowledge.

I suppose it didn’t matter; I was right or we were all dead.

Taxi rose up on her back hooves and parked her cannon on her fetlock. I reached out and gently lowered the barrel a couple inches, holding it there as she took aim at the bomb. Taking a deep breath, she shut her eyes for a moment, trigger clutched between her teeth as we all prepared for life to get loud.

If anyone happens to claim, at some point, that they’d like a life of adventure I just want to let them know my experience of ‘adventure’ was mostly that of a mongoose facing down a whole pit full of cobras.

I’m just saying.

The P.E.A.C.E. cannon kicked, coughing like a polite host at a dinner party. I braced for the sensation of my bones being scoured clean by the magical flames of four sterile phoenix eggs.

The round arced across the room and hit the base of the bomb almost dead on, followed immediately by a burst of white light that blinded us, briefly. When the flash cleared, the entirety of the bomb was encased in a flash-frozen block of ice that crept up the wall, crackling and sparkling in the dim illumination of my torch.

We all took a good five-second pause to see what was going to happen. I fully expected instantaneous, burning death. I can’t say I was at peace with the notion, but it didn’t frighten me near so much as you’d think. Certainly nothing like that first moment when we’d come up the stairs and that poor dead hen spilled across my legs. What does it say when I’m facing my own death and I’m fine, but facing another day as witness to the deaths of others sends me into a gutless panic?

Still, the bomb sat there, and I slowly exhaled.

“We’re...we’re alive. Good. Phew. Alright, move! Come on, move!” I barked, snatching my coat off and rushing towards the other end of the room. If the bomb was going to pop at that point, nothing I could do would stop it and moving slowly was only costing lives. I had another bad moment as I approached and the frozen eggs seemed to glitter, but as I passed the threshold and found myself still un-incinerated, I forced myself to switch focus. There was a tiny stepladder beside the heap of books on the Tokan side of the room.

My pulse was thumping like a full drum solo in my ears as I leaped onto the ladder and started with the top shelf, scooping the first egg out with both hooves. Turning, I peeled open my pocket and shoved it into the miniature dimensional hole. I hoped a bit of cosmic displacement wouldn’t do anything terrible to them. Those pockets were ridiculously expensive and having yolk all over the inside would be a beast to clean. At worst, they’d probably be in company with a few ancient chocolate bars.

All these thoughts were mostly to keep my mind off the bomb less than a meter from me. I’d have sworn I could feel the damn thing leering over my shoulder like an especially demanding school teacher.

Behind me, my compatriots were similarly rushing up the rows, plucking up eggs and dropping them into whatever receptacles they had available. Derida’s dress-sack was surprisingly effective, but filling up quickly and when I spared a glance towards Grimble, he’d already grabbed a bloody sheet from a pile in the previous room and was laying eggs on it quick as he could.

We worked in silence, with only the sound of clicking eggs and our own heavy breathing to keep us company. You wouldn’t think it, but it was work and those eggs weren’t near as light as I was hoping they’d be. The creeping panic wasn’t helping and my cutie-mark had been on fire for what felt like hours.

I wished, desperately, that I’d thought to bring a watch. Ten minutes can seem like hours, but when every second is filled with desperate activity, there’s plenty of time to watch your life flashing before your eyes.

I grabbed another egg on the bottom row and shoved it into my pockets which, despite the magic on them, were now bulging slightly then went to reach for another only to find the next nest empty.

Looking up, I found Grimble Shanks with a full sack over one shoulder.

“That be it, boyo!” he chuckled, then jerked his head at Derida who was just placing her last egg in her bag while Taxi stood with enormously full saddlebags and her P.E.A.C.E. cannon dangling from its strap. The best speed she could manage with that load was going to be a quick waddle.

“Sweets, I know you love that thing, but-” I started and she held up her hoof, looking towards the bomb.

All at once, the ice covering it let out a resounding ‘Crack!’ that echoed around the room. I stared at the four phoenix eggs sitting under the big load of high explosive. All manner of interesting colors were roiling around inside them. I didn’t need my driver’s expertise to tell me they were moments from detonation.

Taxi reluctantly unhitched her gigantic weapon. Holding it in her hooves for a moment, she leaned down and gave the P.E.A.C.E. a quick kiss on the barrel before moving over to the heap of books constituting the Tokan ledgers. Heaving it up on top, she sat there for a few seconds, her lips moving in what I assumed to be a prayer of some kind. It was a touching little ritual and any other time, I’d have been inclined to take her out for tacos afterwards, but our schedule was a bit tight.

“I’m...I’m ready,” she muttered, at last. I swear I saw a tear creep out of the corner of her eye and run down her cheek.

Turning to the door, I waited as Grimble Shanks pulled it open, then trotted through. It was nerve-wracking. We couldn’t have had more than a minute left, but we couldn’t afford to run lest the eggs get damaged.

For some bizarre reason, I expected the bodies would be gone. It was strange, after the tension of shifting all those eggs. Jumping around corpses like some infernal game of hop-scotch, we moved to the other end of the room as quickly equinely possible. Grimble gave the dead one last look and touched his forehead in a quiet salute, then slammed open the conference room doors.

Taking a deep breath, I shouted, “Mareco!”

From off to our left, my partner’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Polo!”

Praying the eggs were solid enough to survive a quick jog, I trotted around the corner to find my partner standing beside a slot on the wall with a heap of towels. I thanked Celestia, quietly, that the slot was big enough for what I had in mind. Mags was beside her, passing the towels to Swift one after another as she stuffed them down the chute in great wads. Edina lay against a potted plant, still staring off into space.

“Kid!” I called, charging over to Swift and yanking off my coat.

“Sir, I sent a whole linen closet down quick as I could!” she exclaimed. “You think it’ll be enough to cushion the eggs? Why aren’t we carrying them down?”

I opened the chute and peered inside. About twenty meters down, the tunnel turned into a slow bend to the left.

“It’ll be enough. Besides, it wasn’t the eggs I was worried about,” I replied. “By the way, I’m preemptively sorry about this. There’s a bomb in the building. Try to cover your head on the way down.”

Swift gave me a puzzled look, then yelped as I snapped a hoof out and spun her around, pushing her up against the wall. Grabbing the back of her flak jacket with my teeth, I hauled her up to the laundry chute. Her powerful wings tried to open, but I forced them shut with my forelegs before she could get good leverage.

Sliding one of my forelegs under her back leg, I hefted my partner up and shoved her nose-first into the laundry drop. She kicked at me a little, but earth pony trumps pegasus any day of the week when it comes to sheer physical strength. She barely had time to let out a distressed squeak before she slid face first into the darkness. I watched until she disappeared down the bend.

“No faaaiiir!” echoed up the chute at me, followed by a soft ‘whump’.

After a moment, I yelled down to her, “Kid? You alright?”

“I’m going to get you for this, Sir!” she snarled from below, kicking something so the whole assembly rattled.

“Incoming! Catch’em if you can!” I warned her.

Turning to Mags, I gently picked her up in my forelegs. “Honey, you’re going for a little ride. You okay with that?”

The little griffin’s eyes were round with fear, but she looked up into my face with the trust of a child. I patted her head, then picked up a towel from the remaining pile and wrapped it around her body before gently setting her on the edge of the chute.

“Keep your wings in and your legs against your stomach. You’ll be safe and Swift will be down there.”

“W-what’s ye name, p-pony?” she asked.

“I’m Hardy, honey. I’m going to take care of you. You’ll be safe,” I replied, with a smile that bordered on genuine before carefully letting her slide. Despite the preparation, she still let out a frightened whistle as she fell.

Edina was next, and she put up no fight whatsoever as I heaved her to the edge and dumped her over like a limp rag-doll, flopping beak-first down the hole. Lifting my coat, I tossed it down after her.

“What about us? Can we fit down there?” Taxi asked, from my side.

“Not a chance,” I replied, shaking my head.

A tiny vibration seemed to rattle through the floor right up my spine. Taxi cocked one ear.

“Hardy, that’s a magical resonance…”

“Oh crap. Derida! Eggs in!” I barked, hopping back so the griffin tribe-lady could stuff her dress down. Grimble Shanks followed, hefting his full kilt over along with the sheet loaded with eggs, gently lowering both until they started to slide.

“Now what, boyo?” Grimble ask.

I ignored him and shouted down to my partner, “Swift! Hold position! We’ll meet you downstairs!”

“I hope you get mange, Sir!” she called back.

The ringing in my ears was getting steadily worse as the phoenix eggs built to final detonation.

Swinging around, I sprinted for the elevator. “Lets get out of here!”

Two words you never want to hear side by side: magical resonance.

A magical resonance is when two or more enchanted objects start vibrating in a similar frequency to one another, gradually building up to a cascade or an explosion. There’s no especially good way of stopping one once it’s started except maybe with a sledgehammer.

Sledgehammers also have the unfortunate side effect of frequently causing explosions. There’s no ‘winning play’ with magical resonance.

The sound reminded me of that awful noise in the depths of Supermax, amplified about thirty times over. It might have been my imagination, but I’d have laid my hoof on a whole stack of whatever religious text you liked and said my spine was crackling with the wild energies raging around inside the griffin treasury.

Something tickled my upper lip as we charged down the hall to the elevator shaft. The hallway was empty, but I still felt chased.

Skidding to a halt in front of the lifts, I touched my upper lip with one toe. It came away bloody.

‘Resonance is messing with your heart,’ Juniper whispered. ‘Feel that beat in your ears? You need to get out soon, or it’ll be another trip to the meat locker.’

“Shut up, Juni!” I snapped, grabbing the edge of the elevator door with the sharp edge of my shoe and hauling violently back. “I’ve got no time to be crazy right now!”

Grimble Shanks cocked a curious eye at me as he dug his sharp claws into the crack. His gigantic muscles bulged in all sorts of disturbing ways as he forced the door open until the counterweight took the slack and the panel slid open on darkness.

“Why we takin’ the lift again, boyo?” Grimble asked, peering over the edge.

“You want to argue this now?” I snapped. “The stairs are slow! Derida, you and Taxi get in there first!”

Derida wasn’t wasting any time. She swung around the edge, grabbing the ladder in both claws. Taxi dipped in behind her, sliding onto the ledge as quick as she could and hopping onto the ladder. They started descending quick as they could. I could just see a bit of light from the door we’d left open several floors below.

A violent shock seemed to rock the very air; death, oncoming. My back legs wobbled, threatening to go out from under me as the building shook.

Thankfully,Grimble Shanks was moving with a little more urgency. He snatched me off the floor around the middle and dove into the shaft, grabbing the broken elevator cable in one claw. I had the sensation of acceleration and the light strapped to my head came loose, tumbling end over end into the darkness.

There was a blast of heat and something caught me across the back of the head. I shut my eyes, hanging on to Grimble’s chest. Twisting my neck, I looked up in time to see a gigantic fire-ball swell through the open doors of the elevator shaft and, with inexorable fury, down onto my face. I barely had time to duck my head against Grimble’s chest. If I hadn’t still been wearing my hat, I would probably have lost every inch of fur on my head.

Grimble grunted in pain and his claws slipped. Our drop accelerated, then after a moment became a free fall that lasted only a blessed half second before I landed atop his chest. I felt something crack, though whether it was my bones or his, I couldn’t tell. The thick scent of smoke billowed down from above, but the air in my lungs felt like lead. Then the lights went out. My lights, in particular.

Contrary to popular belief, being knocked out isn’t like it is in the cinema. You knock someone out and they stay knocked out for awhile, you’ve given them a concussion and possibly brain damage. The brain is pretty resilient and, to that end, tends to want to be awake to see what’s happening.

I blinked crusted eyes. Oof. I must have slept funny. My neck felt like I’d just come from a session on the rack. Still, at least my mattress was nice and soft, if a tad bit...lumpy. Feathery and lumpy. Make that feathery and lumpy and breathing.

I tried to pull myself off to one side, but blood was dripping my eyes, making it difficult to see, and my legs wouldn’t work properly. The fire was gone, leaving us in darkness again. My flashlight lay nearby along with a couple of pieces of broken scaffolding across it. It was a miracle none of them had hit us. But then, one had, hadn’t it? I touched the back of my head and winced at the knot that was growing there.

‘You’re still in the shaft. Okay, orient yourself. How long have you been out?’ I thought.

Since my light was still on, it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. My body hurt. Oh how it hurt.

Somewhere above me, someone was moaning.

Where had we landed? I stuck my head out a few inches, trying to get a look.

‘Oh...top of the elevator,’ I thought. I rubbed at my eyes with one hoof, trying to clear my vision again.

I sniffed at the air. Something was burning.

Glancing around, I gasped as I saw the tips of Grimble’s wings. A lick of flame clung to them. Reaching out, I quickly stomped the fire out with my toe. Hooves are good for that. Worryingly, Grimble Shanks didn’t so much as twitch when I stepped on his wingtip. He just sprawled there, one claw across his chest, wings spread like a fallen angel. His wing was a mess, but that’s what hospitals and magic are for. I hoped we weren’t beyond the place that’d help.

A fair bit of the fur on his neck and face was gone, and the flesh underneath was reddened, though it lacked any of the puckering or boiling that suggests deep nerve damage or permanent scarring. His breathing was a little shallow, but there was nothing I could do about that just then. He was alive, and that was what mattered.

Getting unsteadily to my hooves, I picked up my light. Spitting out a muzzle full of dust, I winced as the adrenaline that’d been powering me along backed off just enough to let me feel a sharp burn in my upper back. I hadn’t gotten off completely unscathed, either.

Tilting my head down, I touched my heart plug. The light on it was blinking furiously.

Stumbling to the access panel through the top of the lift, I peered inside. The door to the floor below was cracked just wide enough to allow one plus-sized griffin to wiggle through, propped open with the edge of a table. Sykes was gone.

Up above, the moaning was getting louder.

“Sweets!” I called out, then collapsed in a fit of violent coughing.

“M’here, Hardy,” my driver called back, weakly. “Derida hit the wall when she fell. She’s not moving. There’s some sort of...ledge or something up here across from the ladder. We landed on that.”

“How long was I out?”

“I don’t know. Longer than me. Maybe ten minutes,” she answered.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, picking myself up. A small breeze blowing down the shaft brought the smell of fire.

It was a long moment before she responded.

“I...Hardy, I’m pretty sure my right legs are both broken. My ribs feel okay, but I don’t think I can get out of here...”

A soothing trickle of water spilled from overhead, which quickly became a drenching torrent. My addled brain wanted to know, for a moment, how it could be raining inside. A moment later, the fire alarms started ringing like mad.

“I’ll get help. I pretty sure I can get downstairs.”

“Don’t be long,” she answered. “I’ll be here.” Her voice was strained, like she was speaking through clenched teeth.

I reached for my pocket to pull out the walkie-talkie to call M6 and have them come get us, then realized it’d been in my coat-pockets. No Ladybugs, no walkie-talkie, no ammo for my gun. My revolver was still on my leg, but that was the only good news. Even my hat was looking a bit crispy.

Picking up my light, I went to check Grimble’s pulse. Finding it strong, I made a snap decision. I desperately wanted to stay with my companions, but the building had likely been evacuated and help was either not coming or would come in a form I really didn’t want. The top floors were burning or gone and if the creaking of the beams above me were any indication, the structural integrity of the place was probably in question. Getting out and finding my own brand of help was my best bet.

The persistent blinking of my heart’s power light wasn’t helping matters.

Crawling over Grimble, I backed into the hole in the top of the elevator, letting my weight settle on my forelegs before dropping to the floor. It would have been a fairly nimble maneuver, if not for my legs going out from under me, sending me crashing onto my stomach. I laid there, gasping for breath as the entire box shuddered under the weight of my impact. The brakes seemed to be holding.

Dragging myself to the door, I stretched out on my stomach. The space between the floor below and the elevator was wide enough that I didn’t have to squeeze through, but I didn’t fancy another drop so soon.

Easing out of the hole, I landed on the carpet, looking both ways before setting off in what I hoped was the direction of the stairwell. Damn. Why’d the pony with no sense of direction have to be the one still standing?

Hallway after hallway of empty, open doors and discarded luggage greeted me on the floors below. I’ve got to give it to the griffins; they move quick. The fourth floor was completely evacuated.

I finally managed to stumble my way to a sign that said ‘Stairwell Exit’ and pushed out onto the stairs. My heart was beating a tad erratically, but that could have been the fear and exhaustion. I sincerely hoped it was fear and exhaustion.

Trotting down floor after floor, I kept an ear in the air for oncoming danger. Where were the fire ponies? If nothing else, where was the P.A.C.T.? The detonation of a bunch of phoenix eggs should have brought them down like a hammer.

I couldn’t help but glance back at the charred end of my tail. I’d lost a good three inches of hair in the explosion. There was no telling what my back looked like.

At last, after what felt like hours of stumbling around in the dark, I hit the bottom floor, breathing hard. The lobby was just ahead, but I could hear a commotion out there. The power was still out and the posh hallways were lit only by my flashlight. How the griffins had managed to get everyone out was nothing short of miraculous with only fifteen or twenty minutes, but that military mindset can work wonders when it’s applied to a problem.

Reaching up, I pressed the button on my light, shutting it off.

Creeping up to the door just off the lobby, I gently cracked it and peered through.

The lobby itself was empty, but I could see a cordon set up just outside the door. A P.A.C.T. cordon, no less. A half dozen of those ridiculous trooper suits were lined up behind it, massive weapons at the ready. I counted three heavy machine guns and one big guy toting a full-on Cloud Hammer strapped to his back. Swift would have drooled at the giant electrical coil hooked to a whole heap of super-capacitors.

Swift.

Please let Celestia be kind to the kid. I hoped she and Mags were getting on alright.

There was rubble lying on the ground, but less than I’d have thought considering the amount of explosive that’d been strapped to the eggs.

Sirens were ringing in the distance, but much closer I could see an ambulance just pulling into the front of the cordon. That trooper with the Cloud Hammer starting to march around to the driver side door and I noticed he was wearing a set of sergeant stripes on his shoulder. The low light kept the driver’s face in shadow, until the door opened and he stepped out.

“Limerence?!”

I slapped a hoof over my mouth and ducked back through the door, glad there was nobody in the lobby to hear me.

Limerence was out there, wearing a ridiculous nurse’s getup and driving what I strongly suspected was a stolen ambulance.

‘What’s his play?’ I thought.

‘It’s got to be better than yours if your plan is to stand here and leave him to face the P.A.C.T.,” Juniper whispered.

‘I haven’t come up with anything yet, blast it! Give me a minute!’

Turning in a little circle, I jumped back in surprise as I found myself nose to nose with a haggard, broken down mess of a pony staring at me just inches away, covered in blood. My heart felt like a train in my chest as I gulped for air and fought the urge to faint.

I’d come muzzle to muzzle with my own reflection in a body-length mirror that some fool had left propped beside the door. It was a surprisingly awful look.

‘As a matter of fact, if I ditch the hat and maybe smear a little more blood into my fur so it sticks up everywhere…”

I quickly wiped the swiftly coagulating blood from my head-wound into my face fur, then tossed my hat in the corner behind the door. Plucking my revolver out of the harness, I dropped it beside my head wear.

Time for the greatest theater in all of Equestrian history.

Bursting out of the revolving door of the Moonwalk, I staggered into the P.A.C.T. cordon, limping like a champ. I stumbled forward, moaning at the top of my lungs. As I’d hoped, the press couldn’t resist a good photo-op. I threw a leg across my face, almost tumbling onto my side as dozens upon dozens of cameras blanketed me in blinding flashes.

The P.A.C.T. troopers were so shocked they fell back from me, several reaching for their weapons. They couldn’t have figured out who I was that quick, but it did give me pause. Still, all in or nothing.

“Help! We need an ambulance!” I shouted over the crowd. “Some of my friends are hurt! I think my marefriend might die!”

Shoving forward, I pushed passed the cordon and grabbed Limerence by the lapels of his emergency medical responder uniform, clutching him to my chest.

“Oh thank goodness! Come on, my friends are inside! I have to take you to them!” I sobbed, giving him a little shake.

I grabbed Limerence by the shoulders and began dragging him towards the door of the Moonwalk, hoping the press and the various agencies surrounding us wouldn’t have time to get mentally organized before I could get him someplace we could make a plan.

The P.A.C.T. sergeant stepped in front of me. He was a huge bastard, with one of those insane short cut manes that made his head look like a minotaur’s thumb and no neck to speak of,

“We will sweep the building for civilians once we’ve made certain there are no more bombs,” he growled. The electrical coil strapped to his back crackled for emphasis, little sparks dancing along the metal rails that controlled the build up of power.

“B-but my friends might die!” I moaned, making sure the press could hear every word. “There was so much blood and I’m so tired and please, please just let us through-”

“We cannot take the risk, civilian. We will see to you wounds-”

Limerence was a credit to bad actors everywhere. He took two steps forward and shoved his muzzle right up against the big soldier’s. “You, sir, will get out of my way. I’m a doctor, not a battering ram, but I need to see to my patients! I’ll take whatever risks are necessary under section thirty nine double D of the Detrot First Responder Code Of Conduct!”

The sergeant squinted at him, which caused a couple muscles in his forehead to flex in a very disturbing manner.

“I’m not familiar with that section,” he grunted.

Limerence pushed his chest out, assuming his lecturing pose. “Thirty nine double D subsection twelve, bullet points four through twelve: Insofar as preventative measures becoming impossible individuals claiming respondent status take all risks associated with responding to a situation requiring response upon-”

The sack of meat with the Cloud Hammer’s eyes glazed over almost immediately. One of the major checks on military power has always been the ability to heap a great deal of regulatory manure on some mid-level functionary knowing they’re never going to crack a manual and find out you were lying through your teeth. Limerence, whatever his failings as an actor, was a master of this.

Shooting a slightly nervous look towards the press, sergeant Fat-Head stepped to one side and held up his hoof to stop the stream of meaningless jargon.

“Fine. You want to go in, you go in, but it’s on your head to play hero. The staff and what few equine guests there were have already evacuated along with a whole heap of griffins. Don’t know where they went, seeing as this is their embassy. They dashed off the minute they came out,” he growled, jabbing a hoof over the heads of the crowd. As he said, there wasn’t a griffin in sight. “Still, this is their embassy and we still aren’t sure what’s happened up there. You get in there and find a griffin who wants to use your skull to grind his axe, you’re acting as a civilian. Got me?”

‘An embassy?’ I thought. ‘Ah...that’s why they haven’t entered yet. Even letting an ambulance in without permission was probably an edge case, but if he doesn’t he looks like he’s keeping first responders from getting to the wounded. Broadside would skin him for that, particularly with the press around.’

That did leave the question of where the griffins had gone. What were their points of retreat? I’d have to ask Derida or Grimble as soon as that became an option.

Limerence gave him a smug smile and flicked the stethoscope dangling from his neck. “I’ve got you. Now kindly tell your thugs to clear out of my way so I can perform my medical duties!”

I cringed at the amount of ham and eggs he put into those two sentences. He must have gotten his ‘doctor’ act from late night television. Still, the sergeant waved the P.A.C.T. ponies back and pulled the cordon open just enough to admit the ambulance. I went around to the passenger’s side and hopped into the seat, shutting the door on them. The sergeant gave me a curious look. It must have looked a tad strange that Limerence wasn’t fussing over me and getting me an emergency blanket or some such thing, but he had his hooves full keeping the press out and couldn’t devote much thought to the matter. Letting two idiots on a mission of mercy die heroically would make for less press than one idiot standing in their way.

I tilted my head back to look up at the damage to the Moonwalk. Several spotlights were trained on the building and I could just make out the shimmer of the interdiction field a few dozen meters above the building.

The top three floors were effectively gone. The phoenix fire was so hot it’d simply liquified the girders, spilling molten steel and glass over the sides of the building. Whatever explosive they’d used was pretty spectacular, but the heat of the magical fire, at least up close, must have very nearly vaporized most of the debris. One of the major advantages of enchanted fire is that when you get a certain distance from the point of origin, it turns right back into normal fire and that tends to be a tad less lethal.

“Lim, we’ve got to go through the basement. We need to pick up Swift,” I murmured.

“I’m aware,” he replied out of the corner of his muzzle, turning the ambulance towards the underground parking area. “She’s with the Night Trotter and...I assume her babbling about ‘eggs’ was not entirely unhinged?”

“I wish. Taxi and the griffin tribe lords are injured and they’re stuck in the elevator shaft.”

“Stuck in the elevator, you say? How did you-” he started to ask something and I shut my eyes, putting my hoof on his shoulder, leaving a smear of blood on the clean, white doctor’s coat.

“The shaft. They’re above the elevator in the shaft. Lets just say this entire day has not gone to plan and move on. We’ve got to get them out and then get out of here before the P.A.C.T. realizes the griffins have abandoned the building. Incidentally, I didn’t know you could drive...”

Limerence adjusted his stethoscope and ran his toe around the wheel. “I have had some basic lessons, but an ambulance is the perfect vehicle for a pony with no driving skills. Everyone gets out of your way and you needn’t stop for red lights. Stealing it from the local hospital parking lot was almost comically simple after your partner called the Archive from a corner phone on the next block. The P.A.C.T. is still in the process of locking off the adjoining streets.”

“Wait, she called you? How?”

“I gave her the direct phone line to my father’s desk. It is much less secure than our communication rituals, but it does have the advantage of being fast.”

“What about me?” I grumbled. “Do I not rate a direct line?”

“Of course, but I did expect her to be with you and she is more frequently in possession of something to write with. How much of this blood is yours? Your heart is flashing.”

I touched my face. Most of the blood had dried to a thick crust, but a bit was still damp. “Most of it, I think. A little might be from a stupid great lout who decided he’d protect me when we fell down the elevator shaft. What inspired you to snatch an ambulance of all things?”

Limerence shrugged, his thin, blue face framed by the snapping of flash bulbs in the crowd outside. “I could not think of another way they would let me through on short notice that didn’t involve massive civilian casualties…”

“I get the feeling it would be bad for me to ask what plans B through F were…”

“B through F? You wound me, Detective. My plans for your rescue in such a situation as it becomes necessary require no less than three alphabets and G through L involve unleashing a twenty four hour city-wide magical plague my father kept in his study which causes uncontrollable lust for peanut butter.”

“Huh. I’m glad it didn’t come to that.”

“I calculated the death toll of that one at around five percent of the population and decided against it. Stealing an ambulance and driving up to the front door required me to get into the zebra lettering system to find an entirely non-lethal solution. Speaking of that, what has happened here?”

“Debriefing later. Right now, we need to get our friends and their eggs out of here before this becomes one giant omelet. How did your information search go? Anything useful?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid nothing we didn’t already know. As I mentioned briefly during my presentation for entry into Supermax, as recompense for their service during the Crusades, the horse-shoes of Nightmare Moon were given into the protection of an anonymous tribe… of… of...” He trailed off for a moment, exchanging a quiet look with me before turning to stare up at the flaming remains of the top floors of the Moonwalk. “...ah...”

“Griffins,” I finished.

Act 2 Chapter 52: Rain, Rain, Go Away

Starlight Over Detrot Act 2, Chapter 52: Rain, Rain, Go Away

Equestria’s highway system is like every other aspect of equine society; it operates mostly on the dreams of the ambitious, at the behest of the dedicated, and at the whim of the insane.

Not long after her return from her famed inter-planetary hiatus, Princess Luna decided she wanted to leave her mark on Equestrian society in a more positive way than freezing all life in an eternal, icy darkness. After several doomed projects, including the Sub-terranean Chicken Run, Cheese-Power Development, and the ultimately fruitful but very messy Pineapple TurnOver Weaponization Project, she hit upon the idea of a national and international roadway network.

The Royal Road - as the paper’s called it - was a gigantic undertaking and while the train network might have been safer, Equestria’s population growth had outstripped the development of the railway network and ticket prices were rising. Adding to the normal challenges a country might face when implementing a nationwide transport system like financing, avoiding holy sites, and union dithering were the natural problems of Equestrian travel.

A special pony was needed and there was only one agency with sufficiently elite membership to manage the project who was familiar with the dangers inherent in crossing vast tracts of untameable Equestrian wilderness; The Royal Mail Service.

The individual they tapped was one D.Hooves, the daughter of the famous small town mail pony who kept the mail running even in the darkest days of the Crusades. Miss Hooves first act was the creation of a new organization : The Highway Patrol.

Mixing an extremely aggressive construction policy with the occasional aggressive use of light artillery, Miss Hooves managed to clear paths all across Equestria and set up a functional network of roads which link major and minor cities to one another via six shining lanes of asphalt. It was a fraught undertaking, but after five years, the project was finished and the Royal Road opened, kept safe by the wary guardians of the Patrol.

While the roads are a great improvement on the safety of extra-city travel, they have never been a perfectly secure option. Those who choose to take the side-roads and the long, empty stretches between Equestria and the Bad Lands might find themselves facing changeling bandits, marauding dragons, disgruntled buffalo, and angry manticores. The individuals who choose this path, the road of violence and fury, must be equal to the task or death is assured.

The Scholar

I love a good puzzle, but the pieces I already had were forming a frightening picture of an organized, intelligent foe with vast resources and no particularly good reason not to slaughter us; the only one I could think of was that we knew the location of the helm of Nightmare Moon. I hoped that was their reason. Even with the protection of the Crusader, our opponents were eventually going to find me or someone they could leverage to get at me. It was just a matter of time.

I’d been inches from the griffin treasury and my cutie-mark felt like it was being seared into my rear end with a branding iron. Why did I not see it?

But then, I had seen it; there was that empty jewelry box.

Damn and blast.

Limerence pulled down the parking ramp into the underground garage. The lights were still out, and the whole area was entirely dark, save for a head lamp attached to a tiny pegasus sitting on the hood of the Night Trotter, right where Taxi’d left it when we arrived. There were no other cars in sight.

Swift was wearing the Hailstorm again and had Mags curled up in a heap of towels beside her; the chick looked to have finally succumbed to exhaustion. My partner didn’t seem much better. She was slumped over, resting her chin on one foreleg, staring at the pool of light made by her torch.

As soon as the ambulance turned onto the otherwise empty row of parking spaces, she looked up and shined her light across us. Pulling to a stop just in front of the cab, Limerence tugged on the parking brake and slid out of the ambulance in one smooth motion. Swift leapt off the Night Trotter and charged at me with all the credible threat of a raging hamster, smacking me in the chest with both front hooves.

“You...you total donkey butt!” she shouted, giving me an angry push. Slightly more worrying, the Hailstorm’s barrels were following my face and a bit of frost had formed around the tips. “There’s a bomb? Really?! You tell me there’s a bomb, then you throw me down a laundry chute?!” She stared up at me with tears in the corners of her bright blue eyes. “Sir, I thought you were dead!”

I snorted and gently pushed her back. “You and I both know you weren’t sitting here in the dark because you thought I was dead. Now come on. Where are Edina and the eggs?”

Swift frowned, then swatted me again. “Alright, I wasn’t, but...but it’s still the principal of the thing, Sir!” She turned to the Night Trotter and nodded at a big laundry basket shoved up against the wall of the garage. “That was under the chute. It’s full of stinky sheets, but it was pretty soft. The eggs are okay. None of them broke or anything. Miss Edina’s still in there with them.”

Trotting over to the laundry basket, I peered over the side. Edina was down there, curled up hugging herself, rocking back and forth in the corner. Reaching in, I gently stroked her crest, then turned back to Swift. “Good work, kid.”

Limerence sighed and patted the steaming front grill of the ambulance. “We should abandon this vehicle as soon as possible. It will be reported stolen soon and that P.A.C.T. trooper will undoubtedly be calling in to his superiors to let them know he let us into the building at some point.”

“We’re still going to need it. As a matter of fact, I have no idea how we’re going to get Grimble, Taxi, and Derida out of that elevator shaft,” I murmured. “I mean, unless you’ve got a rope or something, we may need to make another phone call...”

Tugging off his doctor’s coat, Limerence laid it across the hood along with his stethoscope. Patting the front pocket of his vest, he gave me a mysterious smile. “I have an ‘or something’, yes. I found a few interesting tidbits amongst the artifact stores at the Archive. Nothing too dangerous, but several useful items. If they are injured, we should move quickly.”

Leaving Mags asleep on the hood of the Night Trotter, Swift, Limerence and I crept back into the Moonwalk. The burn in my cutie-mark was at a low sizzle, so I figured we might have a few minutes of safety, but it’s not a precise system. Primarily, I was frightened I’d reach my friends and find one of them dead.

Limerence seemed stoic as ever, which meant he was either still half-mad with grief or so deep in denial that you’d need an industrial digger to find his actual emotions. I kinda hoped it was that latter since having him go to pieces on me suddenly in the middle of a firefight was more likely if the post traumatic stress had already settled in and unpacked its bags.

Swift was a tough read. She wasn’t doing well. Every twenty steps or so a little tremor would shoot up her leg. I doubt she noticed it, but I’d seen the same thing before in myself many years ago. It’d taken a great cop to rebuild me during that mess. I wasn’t feeling much like a great cop just then; not with a whole room full of disintegrated griffins sitting on my conscience.

Stepping out of the stairwell on the floor above the elevator, I put my hoof down on the soggy carpet and winced as it squelched all between my shoe and my toe.

The building was making some awfully alarming noises of strained girders and cracked windows, though it’d been built Detrot tough and I wasn’t much worried about a total collapse. More precisely, there was nothing I could do if it decided to come down on top of us, so I did my best to put it out of my mind. Our friends still needed rescuing and then we had an escape worthy of Daring Do to accomplish.

Up ahead, I could see the elevator. Galloping over to it, I jammed my hooves into the crack and forced it open, then shone my light down into the shaft. At the angle I was at, I could just make out Grimble Shanks splayed across the elevator roof and a bit of one of Derida’s wings dangling into the shaft. Taxi was nowhere to be seen. We’d gone a couple of floors farther than necessary, just to make sure we got above the elevator.

“Sweets?” I called down, trying not to sound as worried as I felt.

There was a painfully long five seconds worth of silence before a weak voice called back, “I’m here, Hardy.”

“Hang on! We’ve...we’ve got something to get you out!” I turned to Limerence as he trotted up beside me and gave him a slight shake. “Tell me we’ve got a way to get them out!”

Limerence levitated the flashlight off my head, poking it into the shaft and turning it upwards, studying the interior. “Hrm...it looks like part of the superstructure of the top floors encompassed a number of walls and beams rated to survive enchanted fire.”

“Yes? And?” I asked, impatiently.

“It means, Detective, that I won’t be killing us by moving them,” he replied, plucking something out of his pocket. It looked like a strange cone made of thin, blue crystal and reminded me loosely of an inhibitor ring. Reaching up, he popped it onto his horn and gave his eyebrows a wiggle until it slid down to the base. “Sadly, this will almost certainly lead to complete magical burn out. It may also render me unconscious. Do you believe you and Swift are capable of hauling the four of us to the ambulance if we were on the first floor?”

I flexed one leg. “Earth pony. ‘Grunt Work’ is my middle name and I can...technically...drive. We might have to leave the Night Trotter here, though.”

Swift shook her head. “The P.A.C.T. will impound it in, like, ten seconds when they find some of those modifications to the drive train, Sir.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a bridge I want to cross after Taxi is out of this hole. Lim, do your thing,” I said, giving the Archivist a quick pat on the back.

Moving to the edge of the elevator shaft, he shut his eyes and squared his shoulders. His horn began to glow, shifting between the usual light blue aura and a sharply contrasting golden shine that seemed to spill in great waves off the tip. When he opened his eyes, they were gleaming like two fireballs set into his skull, casting strange unnatural looking shadows.

From down below, I heard a soft, pained whimper and I edged up close to see my driver dangling in mid-air about three meters down, descending towards the top of the elevator encased in a flickering field of magic. She’d been kindly understating the condition of her right legs, particularly the front knee; bits of bone jutted out from the muscle in disturbing fashion. I hated the idea of moving her, but even the finest emergency medical techs were going to have a beastly time getting her down from there. A moment later, Derida slid into view, wrapped in arcane energies, and began dropping alongside my driver towards the elevator car.

Limerence was by no means the strongest unicorn I’d ever met. He didn’t even register when held up beside powerhouses like Chief Jade and After Glow. I didn’t want to interrupt him long enough to ask what kind of demonic destroyer of worlds he’d made a deal with to get the sort of power he was wielding squeezed down into something he could wear on his head. Still, he didn’t seem to be in any pain. His shoulders were relaxed and he had an almost peaceful smile on his lips as he deftly manipulated the bodies of our friends and allies.

I expected him to lay my driver on the roof of the elevator, but instead, he lifted Grimble Shanks along with them, leaving them hanging there for a few seconds.

“Ah, my kingdom for a can opener...” he muttered.

Gritting his teeth, Limerence tugged at the air with the tip of his horn.

I couldn’t hold in a slightly girlish gasp as the top of the elevator let out a terrifying crunch. The space around the access panel began to deform, before suddenly bursting upwards like a fruit peeling open, tearing itself free and leaving a gaping hole down into the car. With great care, he lowered Taxi, Grimble, and Derida down into the box and laid them out, side by side, across the floor. My driver’s composure held until the magic released her and then she let out a loud sob that reached my ears, making my heart ache.

“So...they’re in the elevator. Now what?” I asked.

Limerence’s magic flared brighter and the entire elevator began to glimmer before, with an eardrum scarring shriek, the box slid down the shaft. I had to grab the edge of the door with one leg as the building shook under me, but Limerence just drew in a sharp breath as he forced the lift down floor after floor, fighting against the brakes and the weight of the car itself until, at last, it settled onto the spring at the bottom, many, many meters below.

I swallowed and stepped back from the precipitous drop and Lim’s horn blinked out, the tip still glowing like a hot coal. That strange cone artifact seemed blackened and cracked, like it’d sat in a furnace for a little too long. Giving his head a shake, he shattered it into a puffy little cloud of ash, then took a couple steps in my direction. I put a hoof on his chest, gently holding him.

“Now, Detective, you catch me...”

With that, Limerence slumped in my forelegs like a puppet with the strings cut, out cold.

“Sir, if I sleep for a year, do you think we could convince the bad guys to hold off on whatever awful thing they’re doing until I get up?” Swift asked as we trotted down the stairs.

“That’d be nice,” I chuckled, heaving Limerence’s unconscious body into a better position. “Maybe we can get them to pay for a vacation for us. Six months on a beach in exchange for allowing the city to descend into total chaos?”

Swift plucked a piece of rubble out of my mane with the tip of one toe. “Yeah...eesh. That should not sound so tempting,”

Holding up one hoof for silence, I cocked an ear.

I could distantly hear the sounds of rushing hoofsteps coming up the stairs.

Dodging out of the stairwell, we pushed into one of the open rooms and paused there, door cracked, waiting to see what was coming. A moment later, six fire ponies in full disaster suits - bright yellow fire-proof leggings and helmets - rushed up the steps carting a portable water pump in a levitation field.

As they passed, I held my breath, praying they’d keep going. We were just one floor above the actual lobby. If my completely half-arsed calculations were in the right ballpark, the elevator was further down, probably in the basement itself. When they dashed past, continuing on towards the disaster upstairs, I exhaled and pulled the door open.

Swift was looking over the walls and floor as she followed me back down the steps.

“Sir, the Hailstorm says there’s a whole bunch of targets under us. I’m pretty sure that’s where the lobby is. More of them are heading upstairs. I think they’re using the main stairwell on the other side.”

“Alright, keep me appraised. If anyone else heads up these stairs, I want to know,” I replied.

We made the garage without further incident, sneaking by the lobby towards the bottom floor. If they were following standard procedure, they’d have the magic sniffers outside the building, hunting anything potentially explosive floor to floor. Limerence’s little performance would have lit up their spell network like a flare in a fireworks factory, but sneaky means not having to explain yourself. Getting off the floor as quick as we did probably saved us a little chat with the bomb squad.

Pushing open the stairwell on the unlit car park, I tried to remember exactly where the elevator was in relation to us. A whimper in the dark answered the question quicker than my broken sense of direction did.

Trotting around the corner, we found our friends piled in the open elevator.

Taxi was propped against the wall, a Zap cigarette in her mouth, looking a bit dejected. Her black and white braid was undone, spilling down her chest and she had a belt of some kind wrapped around her back right leg. Grimble Shanks had a similar one wrapped around his thigh, with several feathers in it. Her front right leg hung limp, the fetlock twisted at a worrying angle.

“Took your time, Hardy,” she grumbled, plucking the cigarette from her muzzle and holding it up. “I need a l-light.”

I shifted Limerence off my back onto the floor and gave him a little shake. He didn’t move. “I’m afraid my unicorn is unconscious and my lighter is in my coat pocket which is full of griffin eggs. Come on. I’ve got to get you into the back of the ambulance and then-”

She shook her head and growled, “Night Trotter…”

“Sweets, you can’t drive with two broken legs,” I argued, though I knew it was probably pointless.

Taxi reached up and grabbed the edge of the door, gritting her teeth as she fought upright, holding her right legs off the ground and leaning on the wall. “I just need you to put me behind the wheel. I’m not leaving my hack here. End of discussion. I can still send all your blood to your eardrums if you want to argue.”

“Sir, I’ll ride with her. You have to drive the ambulance and I think there’s only room for Grimble Shanks in there.”

“Not helping, kid,” I snapped, then turned back to Taxi. “This is insane. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“Derida and th...the eggs are going in the Night Trotter,” my driver said, taking a stumbling step. I rushed to her side, mostly on instinct, and let her lean against me as she hobbled out of the elevator. “I trust myself with two busted legs more than I trust you behind the wheel. We’ll get Limerence and Grimble out in the ambulance. We might actually get somewhere if you’re following me.”

“That...does leave a question of where we should go,” I said, putting my leg around her shoulders and making our way towards the Night Trotter. “Grimble is a mess and I haven’t even had the chance to inspect Derida. The Vivarium is farther than I’d like. If this was a hit, I don’t want either of them in a public place, like a hospital.”

Swift moved around to Taxi’s other side and together, we nursed her over to the cab. “Um...My dad’s a doctor. At least, he was. He still does some work sometimes in the urgent care clinic. My house is only a couple miles from here.”

I felt a lump in my throat. The thought of seeing Swift’s parents filled me with a sort of terror that I’d thought only After Glow or Chief Jade could really pull off. My gaze involuntarily darted to that crescent shaped scar on her chest, then up to her jaw. Still, what other good options did I have? The Skids? Too far and no guarantee of medical treatment. The Detrot City Morgue? Maybe, but putting Taxi under the care of Slip Stitch was a recipe for violence, particularly after that kiss.

I knew it was coming eventually. Time to bite that bullet and hope it wasn’t a fifty cal.

“Alright, then. I suppose I didn’t really need to live long enough to start a garden or have foals. Swift, you’re riding shotgun with Taxi after you help me load the eggs and our dignitaries.”

Strength is about the only thing earth ponies have got going for us in a world where about half the intelligent species have some sort of horribly lethal magic that’ll turn your bones to goop. We persist where all others fail, and durability counts for a lot. Unfortunately, it only elevates some jobs into the realm of ‘doable’ rather than making them pleasant or easy.

Hauling a griffin twice my weight was doable, but it involved some finagling.

Grimble was breathing a little easier, but he was still unconscious. That worried me more than anything. Thankfully, there were some stretchers in the back of the ambulance. Swift and I managed, with difficulty, to roll Sykes’ brother onto the stretcher, then deploy the legs so we could get the wretched thing into the back of the ambulance.

“Ugh, kid, lift up your end!”

“I am lifting my end, Sir! I’m not as tall as you are!”

“Use your wings or something!”

“They’re not stilts, Sir!”

Taxi slumped behind the wheel of the Night Trotter as Swift and I - doing our best to be gentle - heaved Derida into the back seat. Mags was already in the passenger seat, curled up asleep in a nest made of my coat, and the eggs were loaded into the trunk, whilst Edina lay in the hoofwell beside her stepmother. It was the work of a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, my driver was taking long draws from her Zap and trying not to look like she was in absolute bloody agony. Her face was paler than usual and her broken leg had swollen alarmingly, but she was doing her best to ignore it.

I wasn’t doing much better. The light on my heart was on almost continuously, though if I leaned to the left a little I could make it shut off for a second. Every few minutes, my breath caught in my throat and I had to swallow a few times to get it back. Still, there was a job as needed doing and I wasn’t about to let a little heart attack stop me.

“Sweets, you do know he might be better off if I just went ahead and shot Limerence, rather than having me drive that thing with him in the passenger seat, right? At least with you in there, you can cold cock me and take over if I get like...you know...”

“Just get in the ambulance, Hardy,” she growled, punching the ignition key. Sparks spat all over my hooves. “Oh, and if you hit my rear bumper while we’re out there, I will march back there and beat you to death.”

This was it. My greatest challenge yet.

I squeezed in behind the wheel of the ambulance, letting myself settle into the unfamiliar surroundings. The seat under my rear end squeaked as I inhaled a breath of the sanitized air inside the cab. It smelled of menthol and alcohol.

Every surface was covered in stickers, warning of dire and horrible fates that must surely befall he who dared to disregard proper sun visor safety. I ran my hoof over the wheel, trying to get a feel for it. Granted, I’d never had a feel for a car. Cars are entirely too clever and wily for something that’s supposedly mechanical.

In truth, I was stalling; I could feel the other guy wanted his turn behind the wheel. I felt him straining at his chains, begging me to turn the ignition on and let the engine roar.

‘Heavens to Kibitz, I’m about to die screaming and go to my reward with half my flesh burned off,’ I thought, reaching under the steering column and pressing the ‘Start’ button. The engine let out a rich burble of life, then settled into a low hum. I gently set my back hoof on the accelerator pedal and the other on the clutch. The position felt like some form of disturbing gymnastics, even years on.

Limerence was strapped into the passenger seat, still unconscious, with a bit of drool running down his chin. Minus his painfully stoic demeanor, he looked like a colt who’d gotten into daddy’s vodka. I reached over and gently brushed a hoof through his blonde mane.

“Lim, if we don’t live through this, I’ll owe you a free punch when I see you next. You can just lay me out,” I promised him, then sat back and glanced in my side view mirror at Taxi in the Night Trotter. She was pulling out of her parking spot, still chewing on the end of her cigarette as she clutched her broken leg to her chest while the other handled the business of steering. I don’t know how she was working the clutch with only one leg, but knowing Sweets she had some secret zebra technique. She gave me a slight nod, then lined up with the exit and pulled out of the parking garage at speed.

Easing my hoof onto the accelerator, I gave the ambulance a little gas.

Time slowed and the world seemed to drop away.

The only explanation I can give for what came next is that somewhere, deep in my genetic history, somepony must have had relations with some demented, carnivorous demon of speed. Old instincts came rushing back from some cerebral cavern where they huddled around a fire, draped in the bloody skins of their most recent kills. They were not the instincts of a prey species. I was the hunter and everyone else on the road was a rabbit who had best get out of the way if they knew what was good for them.

Detective Hard Boiled, noble officer of the law, vanished into the depths of my psyche under a wave of testosterone and high-powered mania. My blood began to surge with long buried feelings of power and lust. The fire grew into a conflagration in my belly as I became, once more: Rage Cop, the Thundering Hoof of Vehicular Justice.

Three PACT troopers were sitting just outside the car park, smoking and talking when Rage Cop exploded out of the garage at speeds the ambulance hadn’t known it could achieve. Fire shot from the tailpipe and all three of them would later swear they’d seen a grinning monster driving it, covered in blood, his eyes wild as he wrestled the wheel of the ambulance like it was a rabid animal.

Rage Cop blasted down towards the PACT cordon, slamming through a tiny gap between the troopers and the open road, following the distant yellow splotch that was the cab like a hound on point.

The city flowed by, a distant backdrop to his race track, his hunting ground. A mare who was crossing the street with her foal just barely got out of the way in time, though it might have been the tiny voice of mercy which still remained in the psychopathic driver’s mind that twitched the wheel such that his back-draft merely knocked them both on their flanks, rather than pasting them across his hood like a grisly bonnet ornament.

‘I should get a bonnet ornament,’ he thought. “Maybe the skull of a god. I’m sure the griffins have some god I could chase down and slaughter and mount. I’ll do that right after I get some axes. The chariot of my fury requires more axes.’

That was the last coherent thought he had for awhile.

In a world of fiery storms and burning rubber, Rage Cop was lord and master.

Time returned to a more normal speed.

My memories were a tad blurry as my rear hoof came off the gas pedal, but I knew I’d done a bad thing. Severalbad things, actually. There was a cabbage caught in my windshield wipers and a squirrel that looked very surprised to still be alive was clinging tightly to the side view mirror. He shot me a frightened look before he scrambled off to parts unknown as fast as his fuzzy little legs could take him.

We’d stopped. That much I knew. Everything else from the moment I pulled out of the garage was a hazy vision of acceleration and a deranged adrenaline attack which left me feeling even more exhausted.

I carefully removed my hooves from the wheel and peered out the windshield.

The Night Trotter was ahead of me, parked curbside in front of a lovely little house with a garden, a long veranda with a pair of matching rocking chairs, and wild flowers in too many varieties to name potted and planted over every inch of the building. The eves were hung with great bouquets and the walk up to the bright blue front door, lined with tulips and daffodils. It reminded me of what I’d once fantasized might be my home one day, when I met a nice mare and settled down.

The suburbs, then. I couldn’t tell which suburbs and I hadn’t been paying much attention to where I went other than keeping up with Taxi. In the middle distance, I could hear sirens. They didn’t seem to be getting any closer, and that was a relaxing change of pace, at least.

Limerence was still unconscious, though one of his front legs had somehow gotten thrown behind his head and he was sagging sideways in the passenger seat.

Reaching over, I gently untangled the seatbelt and pulled him upright, then half turned and opened the little viewing port over my shoulder which was meant to separate the front of the cab from the miniature hospital room in the back. By some unlikely miracle, Grimble Shanks was still on his stretcher and looked none-the-worse for having been driven by the most incompetent ambulance service in all of the Equestrian history. Granted, to look any worse, he’d have had to be missing a few limbs.

“Alright. You’re alive. Your friends are alive. We’re going to count this one a win,” I muttered to myself.

Unsnapping the safety belt, I opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

‘Hmmm...parked on the sidewalk,” I thought. “Close enough. The back tires are still in the road. Better than my last attempt.”

Smiling at a job well done, I took two steps towards the Night Trotter, then felt a gentle rush of air as the pavement flew up and hit me in the cheek. I had a moment to wonder how I’d gotten there, sprawled on my side, before I felt the pitiful thump of my heart in my ears. It beat again, then skipped a more than comfortable number, before giving one final sputter and going still.

Damn, what a day.

I wish dying was a slightly more difficult and unpleasant experience. It would certainly simplify things if I could just hate it.

True, I was no longer dying in the traditional sense of the word, but death had always been a thing to avoid. I was always told in police training that it’s the fear of death that keeps you sharp. Being as my deaths were mostly quietly personal affairs where I drifted off into unconsciousness on a wave of wistfulness mixed with inner peace, it was tough to claim I was as sharp as I ought to be.

Rain. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over how much it rains in this city. Sure, sometimes it’s nice, but most of the time it just leaves you waiting for some sunshine. True, you learn to love those sunny times, rare as they might be.

This rain was worse than most. It was familiar rain. I’d sat in that rain before, another time, and listened to it hitting the windows of the police cruiser, on a day we got a call and something terrible happened.

It was old rain.

We were driving through the storm to a place I hoped I’d never go again.

I turned to Juniper and gave him a hard glare. He was smiling as he held out a cup of coffee, steam rising off it. His face always reminded me of old black and white cinema pictures. I’d always envied that square jaw, even on the days I wanted to break it, but then, his eyebrows were bushy enough that I could always get a rise out of him with a comment about how he ought to get them plucked.

He looked good and I wanted more than anything to put my legs around him, hide my face in his mane and get this vicious mess out of my system, but business comes always before everything else. If everything else comes at all, I’m usually having a good day.

These had not been good days.

“So that’s it then? More bagels and coffee from that wretched corner joint that closed down two years ago?” I grumbled, turning to stare out the window into the darkness of the deep forest road. “More cryptic crap about the powers that be?”

Juniper lowered his ears, contritely, putting the coffee in the cup holder. “I’m putting dynamite under all kinds of rules just showing my face. Granted, the rules might as well be written by pissing in the snow. Still, I attract too much attention or start screwing with outcomes, this could all go wrong in a big way. Like just now.”

“Just now? You mean this business with the griffins?” I asked, scratching my mane where the old patrol uniform always itched.

“You were supposed to get the damn horseshoes, Hardy,” he sighed, sounding more tired than disappointed.

I rolled the window down and reached out, feeling the cool drops of rain pitter-pattering against my foreleg. It felt good. Soothing. “It wasn’t exactly a clear cut situation, now was it? You could have told me the Tokan had them,” I groused.

“Well, I didn’t know that, now did I?” he replied, throwing his hooves in the air and slumping back in his seat, one leg on the wheel to keep us on the road. The top button of his white shirt had come undone, which was the closest I usually ever saw to Juniper getting ruffled by something. “You’ve got to understand, kiddo, we’re way off book here. This is not how things are supposed to go.”

“I take it you’ve had a peek in this ‘book’, then?” I snarked, giving him a crooked smile. Outside, the rain was getting harder. I could hear it thumping on the hood of the car. We were minutes from where it’d all happened and I wasn’t much inclined to reach that place again. I was praying Swift would go ahead and plug me in already.

“I wish. That would make this less complicated. Something is making the movers and shakers nervous, and even they don’t know exactly what it is. The last few weeks, it’s like someone has raised a wall over Detrot. A wall of...mmm…” He trailed off and shook his head. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but these things are sometimes metaphors so-”

“It’s teeth, isn’t it?” I said, quietly. “A wall of teeth and fire and in the distance, dangerous lights…”

Juniper’s jaw dropped open and he jerked the wheel before we could spin off into the trees. “Now how in tarnation do you know that, kiddo?”

“It’s something keeping me up nights. I don’t know. Probably won’t remember it when I wake up. I never seem to, for some reason,” I replied, picking up the coffee and taking a sip. It was as tasteless as ever, but it was something to do with my hooves. The anxiety was building, but knowing it was all in my head didn’t seem to help.

“Keeping you up, huh? You didn’t think to bring that up the last time we talked?” he grumbled.

I shifted in my seat, listening to the wind whipping through the trees outside. “I didn’t, because it’s just as insane as the fact that I’m having this conversation. So, if you’ve got any advice, now is the time, oh wise and powerful dead guy.”

In the distance, I could see a bright red light slowly blinking on and off in the darkness, filling me with familiar foreboding.

He shook his head and slapped the steering wheel. “Right now, I’m just as clueless as you are. Nobody said this was how things were meant to go.”

I gave him a sideways look. “You said I didn’t have a destiny in this whole mess and now here you are, telling me ‘how things are meant to be’. Is it too much to ask for a little consistency in my vaguely prophetic hallucinations?”

“You’re acting like I’m some sort of ouija board. Death doesn’t grant you universal knowledge. Heck, I’m not any smarter than I was when I was alive, and the fact that I’m still around to tell you that scares the fur off my backside.”

I squinted at him. That red light in the distance was getting closer, but I pushed it to the back of my mind as best I could.

“Why? I figured ‘dead’ meant there wasn’t much left worth being scared of.”

Juniper leaned forward over the wheel and gave the cruiser a bit more speed.

“You’d be surprised. Dammit, there are rules here and we are not playing by them! I’m just waiting for the ref to notice, but he or she or whatever seems to be having a coffee break mid-game! Whoever was directing the sad bastard that put a slug through your chest is pulling strings on a plane they’ve got no business messing with!”

“And that means exactly what?” I groaned.

Shutting his eyes, my partner sank down in the seat, staring out at the road ahead. “We’re almost there, you know.”

“We’re not anywhere! This is a moon blasted dream! You can’t just bail on me right now!” I snapped at him.

Juniper turned and smiled sadly at me, letting go of the steering wheel. The car stayed unerringly on the road, even as he reached across and put his forelegs around my neck. I shut my eyes and tried to hold in the pitiful tears, but they weren’t listening.

“Sometimes, Hardy, we’ve got places we have to go. Sometimes, now and then, we get to go back to those places, to see the people we love, but the suffering is always there. We can only go back if we’re willing to accept it...and to see you, I’ll happily reach the end of this road again,” he whispered, putting his hoof on the back of my neck so my forehead rested on his shoulder.

“I...I really, really wish you h-had my back here, Juni,” I moaned, like a silly little filly, clutching at him as I felt him start to slip away into the blackness of that awful night.

“I do. I’ll be watching, and if I figure anything out, I’ll be in touch.”

He vanished, along with the cruiser and the forest, leaving behind only that distant red light, winking on and off. After a moment, even that disappeared and I was left in darkness once more.

“...strangest thing I’ve ever seen…”

“...is the pony gonna be a’right?”

“...not certain…”

I blearily opened my eyes. It was an effort, and I had to close them a moment later when the light from the early morning spilling through some tasteful, floral blinds covered in little pansies and daffodils played across my face. I wanted nothing more than to slip back into that dream and hold my partner all night long, but there was nothing for it.

A new day had come and, inevitably, there was work to be done.

I became aware of a warm weight on my chest and looked down to find a sleeping ball of fluffy feathers covered in a tea-cosy snoozing on my chest with her white brown tail wrapped around my heart plug. The light was off and I was feeling...better. Not dead, for a start, but better on the whole. I felt like I’d had a full night’s rest.

Carefully turning my head so as not to wake the tiny beasty using me for a mattress, I surveyed the room. I seemed to be alone, aside the sleeping chick on my breast, but I could hear low voices somewhere in another room.

How long had I been gone?

The rustic, wooden clock on the wall said it was early morning, though whether that was the next day or the day after was impossible to say. Somepony had wiped most of the grime out of my leg fur, but my face still felt a bit crusty.

Gently shifting Mags off my chest, I set her on the sofa and pulled the tea cozy back up to her chin. She wiggled about in her sleep, getting into a more comfortable position with her tail pulled up so she could chew on the end.

The couch was the same print as the blinds, a bit care-worn, but comfortable and I didn’t especially want to get off of it. Needs must, though.

Heaving myself up, I took a quick personal inventory. Four legs, one head, one chest, no unusual protrusions or mutations. Good. I could work with that.

Reaching up, I experimentally touched the back of my head where I’d taken a hit in the elevator and discovered a sticking plaster, but that seemed to be the only sign of injury. Unplugging myself from the wall, I coiled up the cord and tied it into my mane with a few stray hairs.

My revolver was still on my leg, right where she belonged, and I discovered my hat laying atop my coat on the end table, pressed and laundered. Lifting my hat, I smiled and I ran my hoof around the brim. That hat survived more than it had any right to. It was a little stiff, but that was probably the fire. A bit of oil and some time on my head and it’d be good as new. I set it in place, and pulled my coat on, re-buttoning the pockets. I’d forgotten to shut them when I stuffed the last of the eggs in, which was probably a good thing; I’d no clue how griffin eggs would handle a whole night in another dimension if nopony else could get them out.

The voices were going back and forth and I picked out Swift’s among them, sounding a bit peeved. It was hard to say who else was there.

Turning to the window, I pushed the blinds open a crack and peered out. The ambulance was gone, but a shape I recognized as the Night Trotter still sat out there, covered in a bright blue tarp.

Glancing back at the door where the voices seemed to be coming from, I noticed a picture sitting on a mantel-piece beside it. It was that same picture I’d seen of Swift and her parents in the locket she kept around her neck, except blown up to a normal size. Beside it, there were other pictures: Granny Glow, Swift’s mother and father, Stella, Swift at various ages, and a couple of a very young and awkward little colt with red fur and braces that took me a moment to peg as Scarlet Petals.

Trotting over, I picked up a picture of Swift with a baseball bat slung over one shoulder and a cocky little grin on her face. She might have been ten, or it might have been taken last week; it was tough to tell.

I set the picture back in place and took a breath to center myself.

The discussion with Juniper was still fresh in my mind, and strangely lucid for something that’d happened during a period where my heart was stopped. I hoped Gale wouldn’t hold letting him run out of power against me. He deserved better.

As I was having these thoughts, a flood of comforting feelings centered around my chest washed over me. I chuckled to myself and patted my plug, before turning back to Mags.

The girl had had the blood cleaned off her and looked freshly preened, which suggested I’d been out for some time. I was still a bit of a mess and strongly suspected my shower was going to have to be lava with a splash of boiling acid to get the stench of all those poor griffin dead out of my skin. I could smell their blood all over me.

Time, then, to face the symphony of horrors I’d brought to the doorstep of my partner’s parents.

I trotted down the hall in the direction of the conversation.

“...not like that!” Swift was saying as I strolled into the cosy little kitchen to find my partner, her parents, and Limerence sitting around a paisley dining table with hot coffee and a stack of untouched cookies sitting between them.

They all looked up.

Swift’s father, whose dark green face seemed to have been carved from emerald, quickly set his coffee down on the table. His expression might as well have been painted on, for all it revealed, though I thought I detected a slight quirking of the brows as his eyes darted down to the plug on my chest. His mane was brushed straight back, in a manner I’d seen Slip Stitch tame his wild hair when he had to perform surgery. His wings were so obsessively clean and straight one might have thought he’d just come from the salon.

Swift’s mother’s reaction was a bit less reserved. She was a tiny thing, only a little bigger than Swift herself, and as I came in she let out a frightened yelp and her coffee went flying, splashing across the floor by her hooves. She reminded me of Granny Glow in some way, though only superficially. What she put me in mind of most was an especially nervous rabbit, with soft yellow fur and a mane only a couple of shades lighter than my partner’s. A cute-as-punch unicorn horn poked up between two locks of her mane.

The four of them sat there, staring at me, for a long moment.

I casually trotted over to the table and picked up a cookie from the platter, stuffing it into my muzzle as their eyes followed me. The cookies were oatmeal and raisins, but it didn’t matter. I hadn’t realized it until just then, but I was ravenous. Snatching another, I polished it off, then plucked a spare coffee cup from the rack beside the sink. Finding the cheerfully painted pot on the stove half full, I poured myself some and took a deep drought.

Ahhh...nothing like bad coffee in the morning. Really, really bad coffee.

“Phew, can I have some sugar?” I asked, smiling at Swift’s mother. She stood there, frozen in place for about ten seconds before picking up the sugar pot from the table with a flicker of magic and spooning out a couple of lumps.

The second sip was better, but it still tasted like moose piss.

I leaned on the counter and grinned. “Mmm...thanks. So, what’d I miss?”

Swift hesitated for just a second before she leaped up from her seat and flew into my legs, hugging me to her chest with all of her little filly strength. “Oh, Sir...I didn’t know if you’d wake up this time!”

I caught her and held her to me, ruffling her bright red mane as she looked up at me with teary eyes. “I couldn’t leave you here to handle this stuff on your own, now could I?”

She held me tightly for another minute, then stepped back and turned to her parents, who were watching us expectantly.

“Um...Mom? Dad? This is Detective Hard Boiled. He’s my partner. He kept me alive and he kept me...he kept me safe.” She gave her father a hard glare, which had all the impact of a breeze on a brick wall. Raising her ears, she smiled and held her hoof out for me. “Sir, this is my Mom and Dad. Mom’s name is Quickie Cuddles, and Dad is-”

“You may call me Suture,” her father said, stepping forward and sizing me up. He was a few inches taller than I was, but leaner, with the look of somepony who spent most of his time on his hooves.

“It’s good to meet you, Mister Suture,” I replied, taking another sip then setting my mug down. “I wish it were in better circumstances.”

“Indeed. My daughter and this individual who claimed to be a ‘librarian’-” he gestured at Limerence who raised his cup in acknowledgement, “-have been explaining, in somewhat fractured terms, why she seems to be associating with a rogue police pony and why, exactly, my wife and I have two griffin tribe-lords and a cab driver with broken legs - who I strongly suspect is mentally unstable - occupying my upstairs bedroom.”

I flicked my eyes towards Swift, questioningly.

“Taxi said Dad would have to break her other legs to get anywhere near her if he didn’t plug you in first,” my partner murmured.

I grinned and held my hoof out to Swift’s mother. “Missus Cuddles, I do want to apologize for bringing our troubles into your home.”

Swift’s mother swallowed a couple of times before she found her voice, moving over to stand beside her husband. When she did, it was mousey and sweet, like a bird.

“Detective, my daughter says that you’ve gotten her out of several dangerous situations and she helped you bring down some of the deadliest threats to this city. Is that true?”

Shaking my head, I chuckled, “She’s exaggerating. On a couple of occasions she was the reasons I’m still kicking. It’s been a tough couple of months, though-”

I didn’t get the number on the train that hit me before a whole choir of church bells started ringing in my head.

How’d I gotten on my back on the floor?

Why was Swift holding an ice-pack to my forehead?

Why was her mother sitting at the dining room table with an ice-pack on her hoof?

Suture seemed to be elsewhere. Funny thing, that.

‘Oh...right. She decked me. Sweet mercy, the whole Cuddles family needs to be classed as lethal weapons,’ I thought, slowly propping myself on my knees. My vision blurred, then refocused on my partner’s worried face.

“Sorry, Sir,” Swift muttered, pulling the ice pack away. “I should have warned you...”

“I think I probably deserved that one, actually,” I said, wryly, pushing myself into a sitting position against the kitchen cabinets.

Limerence had moved to my side sometime after Mrs. Cuddles delivered her knockout punch. He inspected my head, pushing his glasses up his muzzle. “Seems like nothing is any more cracked than it usually is, Detective, though; if you’re going to try for any more cheerful banalities, I recommend a helmet.”

“Where’s Suture?” I asked.

“He’s upstairs checking on the patients,” Mrs.Cuddles said, softly, getting down off her chair. I cringed a little as she approached, expecting another few hours on the wall socket. “I’m...I’m sorry I hit you, Mister Boiled.”

I blinked a little and my ears shot up. “Say again?”

“That was uncouth of me. My daughter’s life is...is her own and I shouldn’t take these things out on you. I admit, I was…errr…” Her eyes slid shut and she clenched her jaw tightly. Swift reached out and gently laid a hoof across her mother’s back, though whether to comfort or restrain I couldn’t tell. She seemed to relax, anyway. “I was a bit shocked at the changes…”

“Mom, I told you those weren’t his fault-” Swift objected, but her mother cut her off, holding up her leg to forestall anything further.

“I know that, little bird,” Quickie replied, pulling her pink mane back in a bun and tying it off with a hair tie. “Since the day your father and I met at the Vivarium, he made love to me such that I knew a child of ours would be cared for without fail. I didn’t have the heart to ask him for bits, either. He didn’t even know I was a prostitute, but when I told him, he said he didn’t mind. He came back again, night after night, but he didn’t try to stop me from doing what I loved, and when I chose to retire, he was there with open hooves. You were the apple of our eyes. The thought that anyone, anywhere, would dare threaten you is-” She took a calming breath, un-clenching her right leg. “-is unbearable.”

Swift blushed, her tail sweeping around her side as she tugged at the hem of her combat jacket. “Mom, I know I made things sound really rough, but it hasn’t been all bad.”

“Don’t lie to me, Swift!” Quickie snapped, grabbing her daughter in her forelegs and smooshing her face between her hooves. Tears started to leak down her chin in a steady stream. “Please...please whatever you do, tell me the truth. You come here, with teeth like a wolf...and I watch my child eat chicken right in front of me, and you’ve got that scar on your chest-”

My partner’s ears laid back against her head. “It’s not a scar, it’s a-”

“I don’t care! It’s your skin, and it’s different, and you’re different…”

I saw the tears coming before they hit, but Quickie was the kind of pony who goes from one mood directly into another with no transitional period. One moment she was holding her daughter, then next she was sobbing loudly, hugging Swift to her so tightly that she let out a little squeak of protest as all the air rushed out of her lungs. Wrapping her wings around her mother, my partner ran a comforting hoof through her mane.

“It’s still me, Mom. I promise! I’m not that different. Maybe I eat funny things, but I’m still me,” Swift whispered.

“I...I k-know...oh honey, I know… I was just h-hoping growing up m-meant you’d get a filly-friend with t-too many piercings or s-something,” Quickie sobbed.

My partner was starting to tear up and I felt a ‘family moment’ oncoming. Limerence gave me a little jerk of the head that said ‘exeunt stage left’ in big neon letters. Crawling over onto all fours, I crept towards the door to the living room, leaving mother and daughter to sort things out, while the stallions went and cowered someplace away from the flying hooves.

Limerence seemed a bit scruffy around the edges and his mane could have used a brush, but he seemed alright. I couldn’t smell whether or not he needed a shower, considering how badly I needed one.

Trotting into the living room, I sank onto the couch while he settled on an ottoman.

There was a comfortable silence for a minute, before he finally spoke.

“I thought mares were unsettling before I started working with you, Detective. I can’t say this opinion is much changed, except now there is an added layer of implied bodily harm.”

I laughed, pulling my coat up so I didn’t get dried whatever-was-on-my-legs on the couch. “Believe me, most are nothing like Taxi or Swift or the rest of the Cuddles family. Lily Blue actually reminds me of most of the mares I went to school with. That said, these days I don’t need ponies like Lily Blue. I needs ponies like Taxi and Swift. They will have my back, under any and all circumstances. They’d take a bullet for me, even if it means I’ll get a swat on the flank later for letting them get shot.” Putting my hooves under my chin, I rested my head on them. “So, what’s the news?”

“The news, Detective?” Limerence asked, shifting in his seat.

I rolled my eyes. “What happened while I was having a lovely conversation with my dead partner in what I’m quickly coming to think of as the ‘afterlife’? Incidentally, Juniper says ‘hello’ and that cosmic forces are working against us.”

The librarian’s lower lip twitched as he processed this, then he slowly shook his head. “Just when I believe I have some fraction of your madness comprehended.” Taking off his glasses, he pinched the bridge of his nose and reordered his thoughts. “News, then. I suppose there is some. I called the Vivarium and they disposed of the ambulance for us, along with taking Edina back into their custody. The eggs of the Tokan and Hitlan are being stored there until we can get in touch with someone from one of the tribes.”

“What about Derida and Grimble Shanks?” I asked.

Limerence shrugged, drawing a circle with one toe beside his head. “Both have concussions, though they don’t seem in any danger of long term damage. Grimble had second degree burns and a few third degree on his extremities, along with some cracked ribs. Derida had three broken ribs and a fractured wrist. It took more than a small amount of explanation to convince Swift’s parents that we shouldn’t take them to a hospital, but Suture is a stallion after my own heart. A rational explanation was adequate.”

I picked a bit of oatmeal raisin cookie out of my teeth and asked, “What about me and Taxi?”

“Ah...yes. Well, I fear the news is both good and bad. Miss Taxi landed...poorly,” he replied. “Suture used a couple of enchanted tools I’m fairly certain nopony outside of a major hospital should have. How a pegasus became a doctor of such competence is beyond me, but he is an artist with an arcane probe. We set and healed the bones, but she needs bed rest or her knees will snap like twigs; at least a week. The drive here did not help.”

I shut my eyes and muttered, “Awww, Sweets...why’d you have to be so damn brave?”

Limerence shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “As to you, Detective? I find myself once again at a logical impasse. You’ve lost fur on your backside and a bit of your tail. When you arrived, you had third degree burns on your lower back and what Suture said was likely to be permanent nerve damage which should have rendered you crippled for life. Your heart had also stopped.”

Turning my head, I examined the damage. There was a distinct bald spot from just above my tail down to an inch or so over my cutie-mark. Thankfully, having a naturally dark pelt helped, but I was still unlikely to win any modeling contests until it grew back.

“Huh. I thought I felt a draft,” I murmured. “Burns, you say?”

“Quite severe,” he added.

“I couldn’t feel it,” I said, quietly running my hoof over the patch of bare, untouched skin on my flank. “My talent tends to come with a painful sensation in my hind end when I’m around injustice. That hotel felt like walking through a house-fire.”

“Well, whether or not you are aware, earth ponies are a much hardier race than the griffins, despite the difference in size. Grimble and Derida took the worst of it and whatever magic your heart contains healed the damage to your brain and hindquarters in a time frame that is nothing short of miraculous.” He gave me a glib little smile. “The only unfortunate side effect being a mild case of death, of course.”

“Hmmm...thanks, Gale,” I said to myself, then lifted my head and asked, “Any idea where the rest of the griffins have gone? They were already out of the Moonwalk by the time the P.A.C.T. started coming in with the fire ponies.”

Limerence got to his hooves and trotted over to the old television set in the corner. It had a layer of dust, but seemed to be in working order. “I was listening to the radio in the other room. It seems a significant number of griffins have appeared around the city from different tribes, staking claim to hotels and bars where their kin have sway. Some inter-tribal violence has already broken out and the Police Department have their hooves full. The Hitlan and Tokan were, last I heard, somewhere in Sky Town, but they seem to have gone to ground.”

Flicking on the television, he fiddled with the dial and the rabbit ears until the face of a smiling mare in a crisp business jumpsuit popped on screen with a microphone floating in front of her muzzle. She seemed to be in some kind of arboretum where a significant crowd had gathered in the background. A giant pink wall flashed and flickered in the air overhead like some kind of light show. I couldn’t tell what was behind that. It looked like a nasty thunderhead, full of strange colors; the crowd didn’t appear much bothered.

“Thank you, Spindle! This is Whisper Chaser, your mare on the street! I’m here at the Canterlot Royal Garden! As you might have heard, we’ve had quite a bit of trouble getting our signal out, but we’ve finally got it fixed just for this broadcast! This video is being sent on a three minute delay so we can bounce it through some relays to our Ponyville broadcast station, then on to Equestria at large!

The magical storm raging over Canterlot is predicted to play itself out in the next day or two and has unfortunately kept the Princesses in town, helping to maintain the shields over the mountain and various other local settlements. Thanks to our friends in the Royal Guard and the Weather Bureau we should all be safe and sound for the Summer Sun Celebration which will be starting soon! Let nopony say Canterlot ever let a little rain of frogs put a damper on our partying mood!”

Act 2 Chapter 53: Ride Into Darkness

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 75:Ride Into Darkness

"So cometh the darkness and into shadow, we ride. Now we’ll see the face of this devil. Now we’ll meet these beasts and if they would tear us apart, they’ll meet our steadfast blades. This mountain shall never fall."

Final words of Commander Hurricane before the First Battle of Canterlot Mountain

****

“The truth is that I just wanted to be a cop like I thought my Dad was a cop. I wanted to bust down the door and shout ‘the jig is up!’ in an especially heroic way so I could watch the bad guys wet themselves.

I never once got to shout that, because it turned out it was my job to crawl through the muck underlying the city, sweeping it out before it could overflow the streets. It was my job to stand in front of the bullets, to watch friends die, and to listen to the screams of children in my sleep.”

Detective Hard “Hardy” Boiled, Detrot Police Department

Blood Alcohol Level : 0.21

Limerence and I flipped channels for a good ten minutes, but most everything was about the Summer Sun Celebration. Those storms around Canterlot were going to keep most of the festivities isolated to a few particular venues, but the rest of Equestria was still going to get one heck of a light show once the eclipse started. Detrot herself was to see almost fifteen minutes of solid darkness.

Aside that, there were a few reports here and there about gang violence between various factions that’d broken out overnight and a bit about the incident at the Moonwalk, but once it’d been discovered there were ‘no deaths’ there, the press lost interest faster than a hyperactive foal with a belly full of espresso and a head full of Zap. None of the surviving griffins seemed inclined to correct them and I didn’t really want to give a ring down to the reporters at WPONE and let them know a couple dozen vaporized corpses were floating around in the atmosphere. As far as they were concerned, the griffins had a little domestic issue. In a city full of unicorns, losing the top of a building isn't exactly the most uncommon news item.

One thing I’ll say for an entire species inclined to personal privacy is that it puts a good lid on a potential international incident.

That still left us with the problem of having a whole griffin eyrie’s children staying at a brothel and their leadership sleeping off a pair of concussions in the bedroom of Swift’s parents’ house. I wasn’t entirely sure what was entailed in that pledge I made to Esmerelda, but the thought of having to be around when those eggs started hatching made my pelt crawl.

Mags slept right on through. Ah, to be a child and have that wonderful peaceful rest again.

“Detective, I am not certain but that this might be a futile activity,” Limerence said, setting down the remote.

“Starting to agree with you. Sky Town is a big place and the best we’ve gotten is ‘A bunch of griffins relocated and aren’t talking to the press’. We’ll need more solid information before we go running around in circles,” I replied, shrugging my coat off. I raised one leg and sniffed, then shuddered. “I’m going to have a bath. Keep looking. We’ll make plans once I don’t smell like a butcher shop.”

Hopping off the couch, I strolled into the kitchen. The house was such a comfortable little place. It reminded me of my parents. A tiny, desperately sad little colt somewhere in my past was hoping he’d walk into the kitchen and his mom would be standing right there. Instead, I found Swift and her mother sitting over the table. They glanced up as I came in.

“Detective? Is there...something I can do for you?” Quickie asked, giving me a critical look. “If you don’t mind, my daughter and I could use some time to clear the air.”

I shot a look at Swift and she shook her head, giving me the thinnest of smiles. “It’s okay, Sir. Mom and I already agreed she’s not allowed to beat you to death for any of the stuff that happened. I’m just...telling her...um...everything I can.”

I was a little conflicted regarding the notion of Swift spilling the beans to her parents about our recent activities, considering just how many of them had not only skirted the letter of the law, but set fire to it, buried it in the back yard, covered the yard with a landfill, illegally dumped tires on it, then tossed a torch on top.

“It’s fine.” I raised one rear leg and gave it a little shake. “I need to use the shower, if you don’t mind. I spent yesterday wading through things I think no sane pony should get used to wading through and I’d rather not get any more of it on the furniture.”

Quickie blanched and set her coffee down, her cream yellow face going a little bit pale. “I...I suppose that will be fine. Down the hall, third door on the right. There should be some soap and...dear me, do you mind using a rag instead of a wash cloth? I have some under the sink. I don’t want whatever is on you wiped on anything it might stain…”

“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what is all over you? I know some of it is your blood, but it can’t all be, right? It smells like—”

Before Swift could finish, her mother stuffed a hoof over her muzzle.

“I do not want to know what is on the Detective, sweetie. I will be happier never knowing and, in fact, not thinking for one more moment about the matter,” she said, firmly, then pointed towards the door. “Please make certain you are actually clean before you use the towels…”

I popped a little salute, then turned on my heel. ‘Yes, Ma’am.”

Warm water, a rag, and a bar of fresh soap. Three little luxuries I think most ponies don’t recognize until they’ve done without them.

Like every other part of the house, the bathroom was the picture of domestic peace, up to and including the three rubber duckies with pony manes the same colors as our hosts and their daughter.

I was about five minutes into scrubbing my fetlocks when the panic attack started full swing.

I could feel it from a mile away; the flashing images of dead griffin faces framed in the light of a torch, a pony being sliced in half by a blast of pure moonlight, and the sensation of Astral Skylark’s blood splashing on my face as she was torn in half kept cycling in my head. Now and then, the Don’s corpse propped in his chair would flicker to the forefront of my mind.

Then it came. I knew it was going to be there, like a familiar picture in an album; Juniper’s strong, handsome face, twisted with agony.

I slid onto my backside in the tub, raising my chin so the water cascaded down my barrel. My breathing was coming in sharp gasps as the waves of terror dragged me into that special Tartarus reserved for those who’ve walked through blood.

Falling forward as my knees gave out, I let my head rest on the bottom of the bath-tub. You’d think during a panic attack a pony would feel fear, but it wasn’t fear or sadness or anything like that I was suffering. It was emptiness.

The emptiness was all-consuming, like a hunger you can’t ever satisfy and so intense that after a while there’s nothing else. I looked at my grey hooves, feeling every bruise and cut from the last month and a half worth of violence. They were all gone thanks to Gale’s magic, but some things leave deeper scars. Short of a few years sitting in a psychologist’s office, I wasn’t ever going to be fit for police duty again. That hurt to know, but it was a truth I might have to face at some point, if I survived our little adventure. Trauma is like that. It steals your peace of mind, long after the event that caused it is gone.

I really missed those mornings coming out to the car with Taxi smiling, sitting there on the hood like some kind of zebra mystic.

Ruby Blue’s dead eyes stared back at me for a moment in the reflective side of the tub, then drifted away like a wisp of my driver’s incense out the window of the cab.

Numbness was spreading throughout my body and I rolled onto my side, drawing my legs in close. Water, stained brown with the viscera, pooled around my body and washed down the drain.

Time passed.

Somepony knocked on the door a few times, called out to me, then went away. I let my mind drift, wishing I could follow the water to wherever it was going.

Funny as it might sound, it was guilt over hogging all the hot water that finally got me off the bottom of the tub. I can’t say I felt much better. Panic attacks always leave a person feeling like their self-worth has been dragged behind a truck, but I was cleaner, and my mane didn’t smell quite so rancid.

Plans needed to be made. Accounts taken. Strategies devised.

Dinner eaten.

My stomach rumbled at me as I went about drying my mane. How long had it been since that little tea party on top of the Moonwalk? A year? Two? I’d had a fair bit of Zap and never gotten around to a proper meal.

As I finished, I glanced at the towel. It seemed clean enough, if you ignored what might or might not be a bit of ash smudged here and there. Celestia preserve me, I could still feel the dried blood sticking to me, but I’m fairly sure that was my imagination.

Opening the door, I found Swift sitting outside. She was sans combat vest and the gel was washed out of her mane, leaving the poofy red curls dangling in her eyes.

“Hey kid...How long was I in there?” I asked, throwing the towel across my neck.

“About two hours, maybe a little longer,” she replied. “Dad said I should just let you be. Was he right?”

I nodded, patting my mane dry as I kept my tone carefully neutral. “Probably. There was an awful lot to clean off.”

After a moment’s hesitation she asked, “Sir, are you...are you okay?”

“No, but I don’t think it matters one way or the other. How is Taxi?”

She bit her lip, as though she wanted to ask something else, then sighed and let it go. “It’s always really hard to tell with her, you know? Dad says she’ll be fine so long as she doesn’t do anything dumb for a few days, like try to drive or run. She woke up about fifteen minutes ago from the sedation charm he and mom had to put her under so he could fix her legs. She’s asking for you.”

“Thanks, kid,” I said, resting a hoof on her shoulder. “Trust me, the situation at the Hotel could have been much worse if you hadn’t come back to let us know about the interdiction field. You saved...well, I didn’t count how many eggs there were, but you saved the lives of a whole generation of griffins, plus the four of us.”

Swift tried to smile, but it seemed awful hollow. “I...I guess I did. Heroes are supposed to feel better than this, right? I’m pretty sure I never heard of Daring Do crying all over her mom’s apron...”

“If Daring Do spent a week in Detrot doing our job, I’m pretty sure she’d be in a straitjacket,” I snickered, pulling my partner to her hooves. “Come on. Something smells good and I’m starving.”

Quickie Cuddles, whatever her professional talents in the bedroom, was no slouch in the kitchen either. I heaped up two plates with all manner of roasted vegetables, piling on a couple of tomato kebabs along with fresh, steaming biscuits. How she’d managed to get all that together in the two hours I’d been laying in the shower feeling sorry for myself was nothing short of magical.

As Swift and I were about to leave the kitchen to head upstairs to see Taxi, Quickie caught my partner’s leg.

Swift shifted her dinner from one wing to the middle of her back, balancing it carefully between her shoulders.

“M-mom? What is it?” she asked.

Her mother’s soft eyes were downcast. “Little bird...I...I want you to know that even when things change, I’m still your mother. I know my reaction might not have been the best, but I can adapt, if this is how you want to...to be.”

Tilting her head to one side, Swift took a step forward and put a foreleg around her mother’s shoulders. “It’s okay, Mom. Really. Believe me, I’ve seen much worse reactions lately. I made somepony faint a couple days ago.”

That brought a smile to her mother’s face, but she quickly buried it. “I won’t pretend to understand, but I’m going to try.”

Turning to the refrigerator, she pulled out a plate wrapped in tin-foil. Peeling back the cover, she presented it to Swift.

My partner sniffed at the air, then her eyes widened. “I-is...is that...real chicken salad? Mom...when did you get this? Where did you get this?!”

Her mother’s nose wrinkled slightly, but she kept her composure better than Taxi had when she found out about Swift’s diet. “Miss Galinda from across the street had it. I ran over a little while ago and asked what her chick’s favorite meal was. She taught me the recipe and even gave me the eh...the meat. I must make some cookies for them at some point.”

A tear gathered in her mother’s eye and Swift leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Mom. Really. You’re...you’re the best.”

“I do try. Just...don’t let your grandmare find out I’m supporting this. The last time she and I had a disagreement over parenting technique—”

Swift giggled, adjusting the plate with the sandwich between her shoulders along with the rest of her meal. “I remember. The whole neighborhood remembers. Our insurance company definitely remembers.”

I raised a hoof. “Wait, your grandmother and your mom—”

“Tore up a bunch of trees and destroyed Miss Arpeggio's swimming pool? Yes, Sir,” my partner said, with a sage nod.

I gulped. “I’m glad she decided to hit me with her hoof instead of her horn.”

Quickie gave me a positively feline grin. “Splattered brains are ever so difficult to scrub out of the wallpaper.”

The bedroom reminded me a bit more of what I expected from a pony who’d worked at the Vivarium. Low, soft red lightning cast everything in black or mauve and the sheets on the alicorn sized bed were pink satin covered in hearts. Several chests of drawers that looked more like tool-boxes than anything you’d put clothes in lined one wall and a pair of fluffy hoofcuffs lay on the night stand.

Suture was standing over the bed, where Derida lay curled up under the blankets, her head and neck carefully supported by several pillows. My driver was propped up beside her, a copy of the Kamarea Sutra open across her lap, having her blood pressure taken.

“Normal for a mare of your age. Perhaps even a little better than normal. You’re healing well,” Suture said as I poked my head around the door.

“Thank you. Is Hardy alright?” she asked.

“Aside what I strongly suspect will be a black eye for however long it takes those amazing magics in his chest to heal it, yes, the good Detective appears to be fully functional,” he answered, rolling up his pressure cuff and stuffing it into a portable doctor’s bag. “If I could but do a study on what keeps that stallion ticking—”

“Trust me, you’ll be happier not knowing. It’ll only give you nightmares,” Taxi said, forestalling any uncomfortable questions.

Letting the door creak as I pushed it open, I did my best to smile as my driver and my partner’s father looked up.

“Ah, Detective Hard Boiled. I had wondered when you might put in an appearance. I trust my wife didn’t break anything essential?” he asked, folding his wings against his sides.

“Pride, ego, and any thoughts I might have had about her being the most harmless of the Cuddles family, but...no, nothing essential.”

Suture dragged a seat out from under the bed that had more than a few points of restraint on it and settled himself comfortably. “My dear Quickie was being groomed to take over as the head of security for the sea serpent’s establishment when we met. As you can see-,” He indicated the wall of toolboxes full of what I strongly suspected were sexual aids, weapons, or possibly both. “-she’s never entirely given up her professional interests. I wouldn't have her any other way, but dangerous is a given.”

Trotting to the bedside, I laid a hoof over my driver’s left leg. “How are you, Sweets?”

“I’m more fine than I should be. The doc has some seriously cool toys,” she replied, gesturing at his bag.

“I do have a certain...contact who provides me with some rather special equipment,” Suture said, modestly buffing a hoof on his chest.

“This contact wouldn’t happen to wear a gold watch, would he?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.

Swift’s father swallowed. “Eh...heh...it is possible. There are many doctors in the city who need things that are difficult to get without an exorbitant outlay and cheaper alternatives tend to be banned by institutions seeking to avoid competition or because they have a very small chance of exploding. When lives are on the line, a miniscule risk of spontaneous combustion is entirely acceptable.”

Taxi and I exchanged a look, and by silent agreement, decided not to open that kettle of fish just yet. Telling ponies the Don was dead would lead to questions. I’d had enough of questions for one day.

“What about the griffins?” I asked, waving towards the large lump on the other side of the bed.

“What about them?” Suture sniffed, leaning back to arrange the feathers in his wings. “In an ideal world, I’d have them at the hospital. I’ve induced a coma in the female. Derida, I believe her name was? She needs to sleep for at least a day. The anti-inflammatory talisman should reduce the swelling quickly and prevent any damage. The male in my guest bed should be up and about tomorrow or the next day, with a sling for his wrist.”

“Good. We’re going to need them to go find their kin and try to stop a war before it lands on our front door.” I turned back to Taxi and gathered my resolve for what came next. “Sweets...you’re sitting out the next few days.” My driver’s ears pinned back and she made to slide out of bed. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back. “And if you do anything really dumb, like try to get off this bed today, I’m going to have Suture here put you in a coma until your legs are healed,” I added.

“Oh come on, my legs feel—”

Suture snapped one wing out and gave her a firm tap on the shin. Her eyes popped and she toppled back in bed, whimpering loudly.

“Your legs, my dear, are currently held together with bubble-gum, magic, and hope. You will lay in that bed, and if you argue, the Detective will not need to order me to relieve you of your consciousness. It will be done faster than you can blink.”

It was a rare thing seeing somepony give my driver an order backed up by threats that didn’t earn gunfire as a reply. She sank back in the pillows, teeth clenched, staring daggers at Suture.

“This...is not...fair…” she groused, picking up her book again.

I chuckled and patted her loose braid. “You know, Swift said something similar right before I dropped her face first down a laundry chute?”

“You what?!” Suture snapped, glaring at me, dangerously.

I blanched as I remembered the company.

“Oh, Swift didn’t tell you about yesterday morning, then?” Taxi asked, with a grin like a fox with a cornered mouse.

Suture didn’t actually punch me, but it was a close thing. I managed to speak quickly, despite my driver’s unhelpful comments. That I was saving her from a bomb did earn me some points, but I made a mental note to wear a hoofball helmet next I had dinner at the Cuddles residence since I doubted his wife was likely to have the same restraint.

Swift followed me into the living room to find Mags sitting on Limerence’s neck, one tiny claw wrapped around his horn while she held the television remote in the other. He was doing his best to look unmoved, but I did detect a hint of a smile on his muzzle.

“Ha, pony! I got it! I be the tribe lord now!” she squeaked as our librarian looked up at her, indulgently. He straightened as we came in and Mags had to clamber up onto his head. She brightened as she saw me and leaped off onto the floor, scrambling over to me. “Detective pony! You be alive!”

Grabbing the edge of my coat, she climbed up onto my neck and wrapped her tiny legs around my shoulders, coiling her short, feline tail as far around my barrel as she could.

“Hey, kiddo. How are you feeling?” I asked, tipping my hat off and setting it beside the couch.

“I be okay,” she mumbled into my mane. “I have funny dreams. Dream my daddy be dead…”

“Come here,” I sighed, arching my back so she slid forward into a place I could pull her down and set her between my forelegs. Swift lifted herself up beside me on the couch and offered Mags something from a plastic baggie that looked like a strip of jerky. “Tell me about these dreams of yours?”

Mags' beak quivered for a moment and she laid her fluffy head on my fetlock, reaching out and taking the jerky from my partner. She didn’t eat it, but instead set it on the sofa and sniffled softly. “Daddy...daddy taught me to be strong after Mommy died. Griffins don’t cry, he says. M’not a very good griffin. I dream...I dream of Daddy and Mommy. Daddy be dead now, yeah?”

It was funny seeing the child starting to come out of whatever condition griffin children sink into when the trauma gets to be too much. She seemed frighteningly matter-of-fact about the whole matter and that had me worried, though I couldn’t have told you why. I put my legs around her and gathered her up to my chest. I’m not so good with kids, or at least, I’ve never had the chance, but Taxi has rubbed off on me down through the years.

I tried to think of something that was worth saying. Distracting her felt right, but driving her into denial was going to cause problems down the road. Swift came to my rescue, before I could make a complete hash of things.

“Mags, do you mind if I ask how old you are?” she inquired.

The little griffins flashed four claws twice, then raised one.

“Nine years old?” I asked, tilting my head.

She nodded and picked up the meat Swift had offered, tilting her head back and swallowing it in one gulp.

“I’d like to talk about some things, if you don’t mind. I don’t know anything about you and it will help me figure some things out,” I said, turning her to face me.

“You’re...um...egg nurse pony?” Mags asked, half extending her wings. “Hard Boiled is egg pony name, yeah?”

I considered that for awhile then snorted. “I suppose it is. I made a deal with Esmerelda to take care of griffin eggs so I could come into the nursery. You know her?”

She bobbed her head. Her accent was strange, but she didn’t sound unintelligent. “Esma-re’da kills the egg nurses if they not take care of eggs or try hurt the eggs of other tribes. She be kind to me, though.”

I turned to Limerence, sweeping my tail around my cutie-mark. “I made some kind of agreement with this big hen at the Moonwalk to become a member of the griffin nurse-guild or some such. You happen to know anything about that? It was the only way she’d let me pass.”

He lowered his head in thought. “I...know something of griffin mating traditions. The Nursemaid’s Guild is a rather powerful entity
in the highlands. Old, indebted, or tribe-less griffins could effectively ‘sell’ themselves to the Guild and become members, expected to take care of griffin eggs and children. They are neutral between all the tribes and those who join lose their tribal affiliations.” He wrinkled his nose at something and added, “There’s also some business about castration, but I believe that only applies to their griffin membership and they may have abandoned that for methods that have a higher survival rate since the war—”

“Gah! Alright, alright, I get it! Mistake made! So, are you saying I sold myself to this bunch?" I growled. “Leaving aside the...snipping issues, I’m not going to have an army of griffins after me for ditching egg sitting duty, am I?”

Limerence drew a shape in the air in the direction of my cheek. “You sold yourself to the griffins when you let them mark you with the blood of the Eggs. The ‘High Justice’ is for life, or did they not tell you? You will have to ask Derida about the legalities, but...hrmmm...” Shifting his gaze down to Mags, he leaned forward and asked, “Mags, if I may make an observation-”

“What be an obv-er-sation?” she wanted to know.

“I wish to say something about you,” Limerence explained. “Now then, you do not have the accent of either the Tokan or the Hitlan. Was your father a member of one or the other of those tribes?”

Mags shook her head and sat up. “Daddy was Griffinstone. Over the ocean. We came to Highlands to make friends, but our tribe died of dragon sickness and we go to Tokan. They didn’ want us, so Esma-re’da took us. I be too young...but when I grow up, I be finding those dragons what made Mommy sick and kick’em in the nose!”

I couldn’t help but smile at her determined expression, scruffling her feathered head. “I’m sure you will, kiddo.”

“Dragon sickness,” Limerence murmured, scrunching his nose in thought. “During the Crusades, the dragons used many strange weapons. I remember reading about one in particular that caused violent madness in griffins. It was cured before the war ended, but some tribes refused the vaccine, fearing it was some pony scheme to indebt them to us. Sad, really. Still, it does explain some things. I’m afraid, Detective, that you are the closest thing this child has to a parent, at the moment, according to the griffin legal code.”

That did explain a few things. If the girl had seen the death of her entire tribe, a certain jadedness was to be expected. It was desperately sad, but not something I could be shocked about. I really, really missed being shocked.

Sucking a breath through my teeth, I sat back in my seat. “Me?!”

Limerence lifted his watch from his pocket and began nervously winding it. “Until you can re-establish contact with the Nurse-Maid Guild, it is to you to care for her, by their laws. Since you are designated as the High Justice and protector of griffin law, it would be in...poor taste...for you abdicate those responsibilities.”

Getting up on her rear legs, Mags put her forelegs up on my chest and glanced at Limerence. “He be using too many big words…”

I patted her head and grinned down at my little bundle of feathers. “Believe me, I know.”

“I be not understanding him, but I think he say...if Daddy be dead, that means pony...is only nurse left, right? You be...nurse?” Mags asked, tilting her head to one side. “You takes care of me, now, yeah?”

How do you answer a question like that? Mags was a cutie-pie, no questions asked, but the number of things wrong with that query could have stretched around the block.

I shut my eyes and tried to find some thoughts that weren’t screaming or running in frightened circles at the prospect of finding myself suddenly saddled with a child, particularly one verging on teenagerdom. There weren’t many and none of them presented an easy escape from the situation.

Most ponies dream of having kids at some point. I certainly had. A teenage Hard Boiled had a certain fantasy about finding a sweet mare and a good place to live, working as the constable of some backwater town. Granted, at the time the mare who’d caught my fancy was my sixth period maths teacher, Miss Honey Kind. She had flanks you could bounce a dime off of.

Happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts.

“Kiddo, I’m going to do what I can,” I said, petting the tuft of fur on the end of her tail. “There’s one ugly situation brewing in Detrot and there’s no place for little girls, griffin or not, where I’m headed. So, you might be meeting some interesting people over the next few days, and I might not be there all the time, but when I am...I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

Mags cocked her head, then sank down into a ball on my lap, sweeping her tail around herself. “Mmmkay.”

I tilted my chin down to look at her. “What? That’s it?”

She wiggled her nose, then buried it in the crook of my leg. “You takes care of me. That be no different from nurse, yeah? ‘Cept you make pegasus do my feathers, ‘cause she be good at it.” She replied, pointing at Swift with one claw. As an afterthought, she added, “Oh! I want breakfast! Can we have bacon?”

Griffins. I swear,even if I spent fifty years with them, I’d never understand how they think. Even their children are weird.

I was about to suggest a trip down to a griffin eatery a few blocks over, when Limerence suddenly grabbed his head in both hooves and let out a soft whimper of pain. Rising to my hooves, I reached over and touched him gently.

“Lim?” I asked, nervously. “You alright?”

My worry mounted as he tried to lift his head and managed only a strangled moan.

“Do...do you think it might be a headache from the burn out?” Swift asked, peering towards the kitchen. “I thought my dad checked him and said he’d be okay—”

There was a shout and a soft thud from the next room, followed by a frightened yelp and the rattle of breaking crockery. Swift leapt up and dashed out of the living room.

I tugged a blanket over Limerence, feeling somewhat at a loss for what to do. His horn seemed to be glowing, faintly, but he didn’t seem to be casting anything.

“Lim, talk to me,” I said, quietly, giving him a gentle shake. His eyes opened, but he wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he stared off into space, still letting out a mewling sound like a kitten with its tail stuck under a rocking chair.

“What be wrong with wordy pony?” Mags asked, crawling over and reaching towards his horn. A short squirt of sparks burst from the tip and almost singed her talons. She drew back, hiding against my neck.

“I don’t know...” I replied, trying not to sound as nervous as I actually was. My cutie-mark was starting to burn again.

It was then that I noticed the room seemed to be getting dimmer, as though someone were very gradually closing the curtains. Glancing up, I watched as a line of darkness swept down the window shade.

Sliding off the couch, I trotted over and opened the blinds, peering out.

The peaceful little suburban street was bathed in a strange half-light, cold and unnatural. A number of ponies were standing in the street or in their front yards, but none of them seemed much disturbed except a couple of unicorns on the porch across from Swift’s house. They were both laying on their sides, like they’d fallen there, eyes wide and unseeing. Everyone else seemed focused on the sky, as though entranced.

“The eclipse,” I muttered. “Oh damn me…”

“Sir! Help! Something’s wrong with Mom!” Swift shouted from the next room.

Jumping off the couch, I cantered into the kitchen to find Suture and Swift huddled over Quickie. Suture had one of her hooves in both of his, while Swift was using her gigantic wing for a makeshift blanket. The yellow unicorn was staring at the ceiling, her muzzle half open, a bit of drool running down her chin.

“It’s the whole street,” I said, dropping onto my knees beside Swift. “Limerence is down, too. The eclipse just started for the Summer Sun Celebration.”

Suture’s lips curled in a silent snarl. “Detective, how could that possibly be relevant? We need to call the hospital! Perhaps there’s been some form of gas—”

I put my hoof over his mouth, silencing him. He gave me an indignant look and went to smack my leg, but I quickly shook my head and he paused. One of his ears quirked at a distant sound.

It was a hum; a dangerous hum I’d heard far too much lately.

Magical resonance.

I removed my toe from Suture’s muzzle. His frightened expression spoke volumes.

“Detective...is...is that what I think it is?” he asked, clutching his unconscious wife’s leg.

I nodded, flicking the brim of my hat. “Yes. I can’t tell you how much I hate being able to say that is definitely what that is.”

Panic wasn’t an especially solid plan, but it was the one closest to my mind just then. Still, when instinct fails, that’s what the manuals are for. First things first in a crisis; get everyone doing something.

“Swift, I know you want to stay with your mom, but I need you to get outside. Get in the air, keep low, and get me flying recon,” I ordered, giving my partner a jerk of my chin in the direction of the back door. “Get your combat vest before you go and get the Hailstorm on.”

My partner swallowed, looking down into her mother’s empty eyes. I knew how much she didn’t want to, but information is what separates an intelligent response from a riot. Wiping her nose with one fetlock, she snatched her vest off the kitchen counter, quickly threw on the locket with her parents’ pictures, then disappeared down the back hallway. I heard the back door open, then slam shut.

“I do hope you know what you’re doing,” Suture murmured, resting his toe on his wife’s neck to check her pulse.

“That makes two of us. I’m going to go check the news.”

Limerence hadn’t moved from his place on the sofa, though Mags was gone. I assumed she’d popped upstairs or dashed off to the bathroom or some such.

Raising my voice, I called out, “Mags! Where are you?”

A soft chirp answered from underneath the couch.

Lifting up the cushion, I found her peeking out from between the slats.

“I...d-don’t like that n-noise,” she muttered, pressing her beak against her claws.

“Yeah, me either. You want to stay down there until it stops?” I asked. “Probably the safest place.”

She gave me a tiny nod, then hugged a blanket to her chest.

I must admit the creepy factor of settling in beside Limerence while he was in that condition was off the scale and the eerie drone of the building resonance wave didn’t help one bit. Picking up a pillow, I carefully laid it over his face so he wasn’t staring at me, then went over to the T.V. set and toyed with the dials. Almost immediately, an image reappeared of the same smiling reporter from earlier. The crowd behind her was oohing and ahhing at something off to the left of the screen.

“-completely successful! The Princesses are both smiling and the crowd has broken out the picnic baskets to wait for the eclipse to pass over Canterlot!”

The camera panned over Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, standing together on a raised dais.

As always, the sight of the celestial diarchs was enough to take my breath away. I’d never admit it, but before I was even aware of mares, I’d always harbored a tiny crush on both of them.

The Princess of the Sun was a monument to equine kind, so tall as to dwarf all other ponies. Her pelt was white as fresh snowfall, with a mane that seemed to spread out from her body into a cloud that reminded me of the aurora borealis, wafting in magical winds. Her regalia was simple gold, wrapped around her neck with a pair of golden horseshoes studded with precious stones. It fitted to her body such that most ponies couldn’t imagine her without it.

Luna stood beside her sister, a few inches shorter, but no less resplendent. The younger sister always took a moment to see in her sister’s shadow, but when one did she had a beauty that tended to rivet the mind. Her dark, flowing mane swept behind her like a cape and her sleek body was a paragon of athleticism. I did get the feeling she got a fair bit more exercise than her sister, or maybe had less of a fondness for sweets.

Their horns were both glowing brilliantly as they did...whatever was involved in the light show of a full eclipse.

In front of them, a vast crowd of ponies were milling about, watching the spectacle whilst the bright pink shield kept away the horrific swirling menace outside.

That storm...mercy.

Even through the television screen, it looked hideous. The clouds were dark and sinister, but it was the ugly shapes, like vast floating beasts that would occasionally manifest for just a moment out of the maelstrom that had my stomach doing flip flops and shivers creeping up my spine.

The camera zoomed in on Celestia and Luna, framing them together. They had the carefully regal and friendly smiles that most celebrities cultivate for public occasions. Certainly better than those distressed, slightly constipated grimaces you see on awards shows when somepony gets passed over, but has to clap anyway. I guess if you have enough centuries to practice, you can pull off that look without seeming like you’re crapping tacks at the same time.

It wasn’t especially unusual for either of them to make a television appearance, but they tended not to make many together. Luna was popular on the talk show and late night radio circuit, mostly because those tended to happen during hours most were asleep, while Celestia largely stuck to early morning news programs and the occasional afternoon children’s show.

The hum of the resonance was still growing. I wondered what must be going on outside. It wasn’t as though it could be missed. Turning to the window, I peeked out to find the street empty, though those two unicorns were still sprawled on their porch where they’d fallen.

I would have sworn I could feel the resonance in my jaw by that point and I was distantly aware of sirens going off. I hadn’t heard those sirens used for their intended purpose in my lifetime, but every foal knows them.

They were dragon sirens.

Grabbing the edge of the window, I shoved it open and stuck my head out, trying to see what was going on out there. The street was empty, and the other-worldly moan of the sirens ringing through the streets sent the butterflies in my stomach into a tizzy. Still, nothing seemed to be going on. I couldn’t hear any screaming or ponies dashing through the streets. A few squealing brakes a few blocks over, but nothing more serious.

Strange. Dragon attacks tend not to be terribly subtle.

Sitting back, I glanced at the television.

The camera was zoomed in on Princess Celestia who was looking slightly ‘off’. Her smile was still in place, but she was peering out of one eye at her sister. Luna’s expression seemed a bit strained, then suddenly morphed to one of ripe fear. She stumbled down onto one knee, while Celestia gasped and reached for her. I had the irrational urge to catch her before she fell.

Before she could hit the stage, the screen went blank and a soft buzz filled the room. Colored signal bars filled the picture, followed by a voice.

“—do you mean we lost the signal? Re-route it! I don’t want to hear ‘can’t’, dammit!...wait...are those mics on? Cut to Street on camera two!”

The image reappeared, centered on a stiff looking newsreader in a studio, with a make-up mare standing beside him, adding the finishing touches to his eye shadow. She noticed she was on film and let out a faint squeal, then dashed off as the words ‘Street Beat’ flashed across the bottom of the screen. Street Beat snatched his cup of water off the desk and took a couple of quick gulps. Setting it to one side, he shuffled a stack of papers, before cautiously addressing the camera.

“Eh...erm...L-ladies and gentle-colts, I’m af-afraid we may have had some form of technical difficulties,” he said, trying to sound confident and failing miserably. “It should be resolved in a matter of minutes and we’ll be bringing you the—”

Street Beat glanced off to the side, straightening his tie with one hoof as he cocked an ear at something somepony was saying.

“W-what?” he stammered. “Alright, alright.” Turning back to the audience, he inhaled and re-assembled himself into a carefully neutral expression. “Pardon, ladies and gentlecolts. The difficulties may be more severe than we expected. We’ve got a sister station who is sending us their camera feed from several miles outside of Canterlot. I’m afraid we haven’t had time to inspect the footage, so if you have small children, it may be best to cover their ears or eyes.”

There was a long, uncomfortable moment as he sat there behind the desk.

The image shifted to an evening sky overlooking a huge, empty plateau of dark grey rock. A few stars twinkled overhead, and in the background, the sun was overlaid by a blackened shadow. .

Whoever was holding the camera was shaking badly and could barely keep it straight on their back, while a standardly pretty mare in another of those all-business pink suits they must make on conveyer belts somewhere—probably in the same place they make the newsreaders—sat on the ground facing the plateau. At the angle I was at, I could just make out a steady drip of tears running down her cheek and a few broken sobs. She seemed to be on top of a hill somewhere, but it was tough to tell where.

I scratched my neck, staring at the screen.

“There’s no place like that within a hundred miles of here...” I murmured to myself. I turned to the window. It was still dark outside.

‘The eclipse isn’t that big, is it?’ I thought. I’m no astronomer, but something seemed very off. I realized then that, for about fifteen seconds, I hadn’t been hearing the wail of the magical resonance.

Slowly, the mare turned back to the camera. She was an earth pony and her microphone was tucked into the top of her prim, white shirt. She made no effort to wipe away the tears from her muzzle. They flowed freely as, in a broken, almost robotic voice, she began to speak:

“Everyone...This is Heart Felt, your...your mare in...Oh Celestia, I can’t,” she choked, then steadied herself on the leg of somepony from off screen.

“It’s...It’s gone. The storm...the villages...th-the mountain! Canterlot Mountain is gone! Everything...everything is gone!”

Starlight Over Detrot

End.

Act 2

Act 3 Chapter 1: When It All Goes Wrong

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 3 Chapter 1: When It All Goes Wrong

Equestria has experienced many disasters in its long life. Some went on for decades, devastating vast swathes of the countryside and ravaging the lives of thousands, while some lasted a little under a half hour and were resolved with smiles and laughter.

It’s the nature of Equestrians to be resilient, but every now and then a storm comes that they can’t weather, buck, or sing their way out of. In those darkest of times, there arise heroes who stand against evil, who will drag the world back from the edge of disaster. These will earn places in the history books, to inspire all future generations.

Captain Pansy. Professor Martin Jay. The Turner of Time.

It has been postulated that there are many who work behind the scenes, making certain those heroes arise. Princess Celestia may not be above a certain amount of manipulation, having had many centuries to position the pieces on her board against all but the most canny and dangerous opponents.

Still, now and then no amount of planning or preparation will put that noble individual where they need to be in time to stop the holocaust. When they fail, and fall, it is to another breed to save the world. This kind is more desperate, wilder, and less predictable but they are arguably those who do the real work after all seems lost.

Their names may not make the texts, but Celestia remembers them, therefore history remembers.

That has always been the way of things.

What then, do we do, when the board is upended?

Who will stand when history runs out?

The Scholar

It was dark.

Maybe it had always been dark.

I’d woken with a stiff neck and a crick in my back for the second night in a row, but there’s nothing especially comfortable about sleeping in the Warehouse, other than the knowledge that you’re probably reasonably safe, so long as the resident bat pony secret agents don’t try to drunkenly lick you.

A week. Sweet skies above, had it really only been a week? It felt like centuries.

I rolled onto my side, staring out through the bars of the little cage I’d called home for the last couple days. The bars were open and a tray of hot food sat on a rolling service. It looked like it might be waffles. Cereus might have been a crap secret agent, but he made some good waffles.

Sleep beckoned, but food was beckoning a heck of a lot louder.

Somepony, somewhere, was singing in a clear, sweet soprano. I wanted to tell them to shut up and let me get back to sleep, but they could carry a pretty decent tune. It was better than waking up to a telephone with Chief Jade’s shrill voice at the other end.

Swinging my legs off the cot, I dropped onto all fours and scratched at my side where my gun harness was chafing. It itched like a bastard, but an itch was worth the protection of keeping the Crusader close to my skin.

Grabbing the dolly in my teeth, I dragged it back to my bed and settled back on my haunches, listening to the singer with a quiet wistfulness as I shoveled my mouth full of waffles drenched in syrup and butter. They were singing some tune that’d been popular about five years ago. It was one of those sad love songs where everypony died at the end, but it made me smile.

‘Getting a little sappy, are we Hardy?’ I thought, wiping some butter off my muzzle.

Five minutes later, the impromptu vocal concert finished right as I lifted the last bite of my meal to my mouth.

Raising my voice, I shouted, “Bravo! Encore! Encore!” and clapped my hooves.

From down the hall, Sugar Lace called back, “Sit on it and spin, Hard Boiled!”

“You missed your calling, Sugar. Should have done something with that voice besides howl into a microphone,” I shot back, grabbing my napkin off the edge of the tray and sweeping my chin clean.

“Yeah, and you’d have made a really good doorstop!” she snarled, banging her hooves on the bars. “I bug one pony and now I’m stuck here while the whole world goes crazy and I can’t report a word of it!”

She stomped back to her cot and threw herself down, scattering a few books off on the floor.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. This is still probably the safest place on this continent you could be,” I replied, dropping my silverware back onto the tray and pushing it to one side.

“Hence why you’re cowering in here?” she snapped.

I leaned back and sighed. Cowering. Yeah, that was a pretty good term for it.

Reaching over, I prodded the quantum walkie-talkie sitting on a couple of milk crates which was I using for an end table. I’d given the other one to Swift when the decision was made to split up and get everypony somewhere safe.

“The entire country is under martial law. What, exactly, would you like me to do?” I answered, picking up my hat and pulling the brim low over my ears.

“I dunno! Something! Anything is better than just sitting there!”

I had to agree. Still, I’d been off the grid for a week. It was time to get back out there. Where to start, though?

****

One week ago

****

“—continue reporting here. All commercial breaks are canceled until we have fresh information and we’ll have our reporters on scene as quickly as possible to keep you up to date—”

I shut the television off and settled back on the couch.

Limerence was still unconscious, laying sprawled out beside me with his head between his hooves. He was no longer making that disturbing noise, but he was still out. I reached over and rested a hoof behind his ears, gently scratching them. He didn’t move, but his breathing seemed reasonably even.

A part of me was aware I should be far more freaked out than I was, but there’s a point beyond which fear is just not an option; you’ve moved beyond terror into a sort of peaceful acceptance of the situation, where things are so screwed that you’re free to enjoy the quiet times before everything explodes.

I settled my legs back in my lap and murmured, “Mags...you can come out now. It’s safe.”

Mags crept out from under the couch, peering in all directions before launching herself up onto my chest. I caught her in a close embrace. She grabbed at me with her little talons, wrapping them in my mane as I put my legs around her, as much to comfort her as to comfort myself.

Princess Celestia. Princess Luna. Canterlot.

Those were bywords for solidity and permanence. Entire civilizations had risen and fallen in the time they’d existed. Generations of ponies lived and died under their kind, watchful attention.

I patted the young griffin’s shoulders as she clung to my breast, resting my chin between her ears. “Kiddo, I think we should get you some food. Alright? The scary noise is gone and you need breakfast.”

I felt her nod, then pulled myself off the sofa, leaving Limerence laying there.

There were so many things I couldn’t do anything about, but I could feed one little bird.

I jumped as somepony banged on the front door.

Had our opponents found us? Were we about to be attacked? Or was Swift just not using her house key for some reason?

Kicking my trigger up into my teeth, I swung Mags around onto my back in one smooth motion, then edged over to the window.

“W-what is it, pony?” Mags asked, soft enough that I wasn’t terribly worried about us being overheard.

Tugging the blinds open a few centimeters, I peered out at the front porch.

Two extremely thin, young mares, both unicorns with green manes and silvery golden bodies that put me in mind of a carrot stood outside. They were almost completely identical, though they had two very different cutie-marks. One was a harp of some kind, while the other was a pistol wrapped in pink cloth. There was a very distinct familial resemblance, however. Both wore matching white sashes across their stomachs; a pair of Stilettos.

Sighing with relief, I trotted over to the door and tugged it open.

They looked up at me with two very similar expressions of surprise.

“Detective Hard Boiled?” the one on the right asked.

“What are you doing here?” the other one added, without missing a beat.

“I’m...ugh, it’s complicated. We’ve got a situation,” I said, rubbing my temple with one toe.

“And we have instructions, Detective,” the first said.

“We are to move the Cuddles family from these premises to a safe location,” her companion continued. That was starting to get a bit disturbing.

“More power to you. I assume After Glow sends her regards?”

The two shared a quick look, then they both let their ears droop. “Mistress After Glow is not presently in
command of the Stilettos,” the mare with the harp on her flank mumbled. “Almost a third of our unicorn forces are presently unconscious, including the matriarch. Our...our instructions remain that, in the event of city-wide crisis, we are to extract the Cuddles family.”

It’d only been about twenty minutes since the first broadcast. Stilettos could give the griffins a run for their money in terms of efficiency. In Equestria, speed is frequently survival. Particularly in an Equestria that’d suddenly found itself short two beneficent rulers, a capital city, and who knew how many ponies.

Still, this presented an opportunity. There was only one pony I knew of who might be able to figure out what was going on with Limerence and Quickie, and that was a long shot.

Thinking quickly, I stepped back from the door, letting the pair inside.

“You two weren’t affected by whatever that was?” I asked.

They both shook their heads.

“Many were. My sister and I both suffered a severe headache, but were not disabled,” the sister with the pistol cutie-mark answered. “My name is Sine. This is Cos.”

I dipped my chin as Mags peeked over my shoulder. They gave her a curious look.

“Good to meet you. We’ve got a situation here. I have four additional individuals I need you to extract. You have the resources to do that?”

Sine and Cos gave me a pair of distressed frowns. Sine’s touched her sister’s foreleg and yanked her chin at the door.

“Our instructions only include Quickie Cuddles and Deep Tip Suture,” Cos said, at last.

“Oof...I see why he didn’t want me to use his first name. Either way, I didn’t ask you what your orders were,” I replied, pushing between them and tugging the door open. A small white transport van about the size of a police cruiser sat outside, parked behind the tarp-covered Night Trotter. The words ‘Rooster Removals’ was painted across the side in big, looping letters. “I asked if you had the space. Two of my friends are good-sized griffins of some importance. I need them somewhere safe. You’ve already got their eggs, so I figure they’re high priority. My driver is injured and can’t move, either. I’ve also got an unconscious unicorn in the living room.”

The two of them twitched their eyes at each other, then Cos gave her head a very slight shake, making her bobbed mane tip into her eyes. Her sister sucked her upper lip between her teeth, then let out a frustrated groan.

“I...do not like this,” Sine answered, shifting her weight from hoof to hoof. “However, Miss Stella has...indicated that your group’s survival is one of our secondary objectives. We must move quickly. Once we have extracted our primary targets, we’ll...we’ll see. Detective, do you have any idea what might have caused this situation? The radio in our vehicle stopped working half-way through our last update from the Vivarium.”

“Not a clue, I’m afraid,” I lied, glancing back towards the kitchen. Telling them the world was screwed probably wouldn’t go over well. “I want to get out of here as much as you do. Come on.”

I trotted off to find our hosts and the two of them followed a moment later.

Suture still knelt over his wife on the kitchen floor with some type of strange, boxy instrument in his hooves. It looked like a miniature television screen, except with a big green line across it that was waving up and down. He was running it back and forth over Quickie’s horn.

As we came in, he glanced up and his eyes widened as the two Stilettos came in behind me.

“Detective? Are these...friends of yours?” he asked, still guiding his tool over his wife’s forehead. Her eyes were shut and her breathing seemed somewhat more normal, but that didn’t make me feel much better; unconscious is still unconscious.

“Your mother-in-law says ‘hello’,” I grumbled, stepping to one side.

“Ah. Yes.” He squinted at Cos and Sine. “What do they want?”

“Our instructions are to move you and your wife to a safe location in the event of city-wide catastrophe,” Sine said quietly, as she knelt down beside Quickie and inspected her closely. Her horn lit up for a moment and she ran it across the other mare’s face. “If...if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that looks like—”

Suture pressed a button on the side of his little machine and shut it down, then tucked it into his bag. “Yes, magical burn out. Severe magical burn out.”

“Like...something sucked all these ponies dry?” I asked.

He nodded, rising to his hooves and gently pushing his head underneath his wife’s body, shifting her up onto his back. He settled her hooves on either of his sides with the utmost care.

“So, it’s just a matter of waiting for them to recover, right?” I wanted to know.

“It may be. I do not think this is a normal magical burn out, however. It seems to have negatively affected a very particular ley-line. Still, any more energy and it would probably have done something horrid to every unicorn in the city,” Suture replied. He had his ‘physician’s face’ up; the face of a stallion used to giving bad news. It couldn’t disguise the tremors in his chest and legs, though.

Cos’ horn flickered and she brushed a stray lock of hair out of Quickie’s lovely face.

“I was too young to know her personally, but I remember hearing stories of Miss Quickie’s skills,” Cos muttered. “I’d hoped I’d get to be as good as she was with a knife or a riding crop.”

“As she is, my dear lady,” Suture chuckled, patting his wife’s leg. “She never held much truck with ponies who retire and let their skills go to waste. Even if she mostly uses her knives in the kitchen these days.”

He gave his chin a little jerk in the direction of the wall above the sink. An array of knives was attached to a magnetic board. Not all of them were kitchen knives. I recognized a tanto, a couple of butterfly knives, and even a very strange one that had a gun-stock instead of a handle.

Oooh, yes, glad she punched me. The weight of her other options was leaving me a bit light headed. That could also have been horror over the seat of our national government and the controllers of the moon and stars vanishing right in front of me.

Take charge. Get things back on track. Get everyone out and safe.

“Alright, saddle up, ponies!” Everypony stood a little straighter. Reaching back, I gently tugged Mags off of my back, setting her on the floor. She peered up at me, twisting her head all the way to one side like an owl. “Mags, wait here for me. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Suture, take your wife and get out to the car. Once you’re done, I want you to head upstairs and get the griffins. I’ll...go tell my driver.”

****

“Ha! Everything I know about that crazy witch tells me she didn’t take it well!” Sugar cackled from her cell as I paced back and forth down the hallway. She looked none-the-worse for her short imprisonment, but then, Cereus was probably the least punitive jailer the world had ever seen. If anything, she’d put on a few pounds. In the next cell over, the security guard from the museum was snoring up a storm.

“Oh, and I suppose you know a fair bit, then?” I snorted. “I wasn’t aware you were so closely monitoring the police.”

“You think I put a bug on you and I don’t have ears all over the department? At least...I did, until somepony started swatting them a few years ago. Probably that radio-mare. Whatever her name is.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I grunted, sliding back to sit against the bars of her cage. “Either way...Taxi is Taxi. Her heart is usually in the right place.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sugar asked, incredulously. “The right place? She's out of her damn mind! You remember that prick you got imported from Yakyakistan about five years ago? The ‘constabulatorial exchange officer’ or whatever they called him?”

The memories resurfaced after a moment and I laughed to myself. “You mean Cormag? He was a train wreck. I never met a cop with anger issues like him. Still, he managed to keep it off his record most of the time...well, right up until the end there.”

Sugar leaned between the bars of her cell and shot me a cocky grin. “Yeah, you remember his ‘thermos’?”

I thought back, then slowly nodded. “You mean that ‘spirit tank’ he was always carting around?”

“Sacramental booze, you mean. He was sneaking nips in the break room,” she said, dragging her hooves back and forth across the bars. “Bullying bastard. Made that nice girl in Requisitions cry her little eyes out. She quit a month later.”

“Oh...yeah. Charity Bell. She was a sweetheart. I didn’t know it was Cormag that drove her out. Wait...wait a second,” Grabbing my coat tails, I trotted down to the front of Sugar’s cage and plunked myself down in front of her. “Be clear with me. How do you know any of this?”

“Heh, I listened, remember?” she replied, tapping her ear. “Like I said, the department was bugged...so I heard when that scummy prick tried to get Charity into bed. Then, when she turned him down, he made her life a living Tartarus for the next four weeks.”

I blinked a little, then shook my head. “Why didn’t she go to Internal Investigations? They’d have peeled him like a grape.”

“You remember Cormag? He was the size of a manticore. He scared the pants off her. Rightly so. He was also damned careful. Nopony would have believed mister ‘by the book’ tried to get that nice kid into bed. She had no proof. Anyway...Charity might not have told anypony in official authority, but there are different kinds of authority. Sweet Shine is a lunatic, but she knows ponies.”

I shifted onto my side, pulling my coat over myself. “What’d Taxi do to drag it out of her?”

“What else? Got her drunk. After that, well...your driver started doping Cormag’s little spirit drink with some of this stuff the boys in the lab were cooking in their off hours to keep themselves awake,” she purred, with a satisfied smirk. “Took about four days of dosing himself every day with pharmaceutical grade amphetamines before he had his little ‘confrontation’ with Jade over ‘protocol’.”

“I wondered what would make anyone crazy enough to take a swing at the Chief…”

“Does she still have his horns mounted above her desk?” Sugar asked.

“Nahhh...she moved ’em to the hallway with the suits of armor.”

“Hmph. I digress. Your driver would give Princess Celestia a headache, so, what I want to know is how in Equestria you managed to convince her to sit a week out and kept all of your limbs? You’ve got the diplomatic skills of an industrial sewage dump on a buffalo holy ground.”

“Yeah, well, two broken legs mellows almost anypony out. Still, it wasn’t easy...”

****

I rubbed the hoof shaped bruise on my forehead. Twice in one day. I need to meet some less violent mares.

“No, you are not leaving me!” Taxi snarled, dragging herself to the edge of the huge bed to reach for a pair of crutches that were propped against the wall beside one of the sex toy boxes. At some point, Suture had applied a pair of splints to her front and back legs, but they weren’t proper casts and I wouldn’t have trusted them with any weight.

“Sweets, we don’t have time to argue about this. You can’t drive. You can’t fight. Until you’re healed, you’re not safe with me.”

“I’m not safe with you, period!” she barked, flailing her good hoof at the crutches. They were miles out of range. “Now...now help me up, dammit!”

I dropped back on the floor, settling against the tool boxes. I could already feel the bruise fading where my driver smacked me, which was either a sign Gale’s control over my nervous system was improving or that Taxi was really in bad shape.

The sad truth is that some conversations just don’t have a pleasant, equitable outcome. Telling my driver she was being left behind was always going to be one of them. Particularly being as it was the second time in as many months that I’d done it.

“Alright, this is not a negotiation. Two unicorns are going to be up here in five minutes to cart you to the Vivarium,” I growled, softly. “You can go with them, or I can have Suture put you under again. It’s either this...or I go deep cover and you and I can work this out once everything is over. I know you can probably find me, but you don’t get to help me if you’re on a self destruction kick again. I don’t need to see you die. I’ve already seen too many die.”

I hate trying to throw my weight around with Taxi. It never ends well. Still, much as I needed her, I needed her alive.

Her ears slowly laid back against her head and she lay back against the pillows.

“Hardy...w-what’s happened? What was the resonance earlier?” she asked as real fear blossomed in her eyes. “It’s...something...something terrible, isn’t it?”

I lowered my head.

How could I tell her?

It was like saying the moon was gone or the oceans had all dried up. I shuddered as a wave of exhaustion suddenly washed over me and I sagged onto the edge of the bed, collapsing with my face in the smooth, satin covers. I bunched both front legs in them, taking a deep breath. They smelled of griffin and my driver and Quickie’s sweet perfume.

The shock would probably have made her easier to move. I hated the part of my brain that had started thinking like that. Still, there were no words for the vanishing of Canterlot and I was too worn out to try to find any.

I finally found my voice after a moment laying there, but couldn’t hide a hitch in it.

“Sweets, just this once...just this once, could you listen and not fight me? Everything is wrong and there’s nothing I can do to fix it right now. I need you to be safe. Just a little while? Just until you’re on your hooves...”

I didn’t look up, just holding on to the sheets as I rested my weary eyes. Skies above, they felt so good. I just wanted to lay there until our enemies found me. I’d already had my weepy moment for the day, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t up for another.

A warm leg rested across my shoulders. I glanced up out of one eye at my driver. She’d never looked so conflicted.

“Hardy, I don’t know what is going on. I’ve never seen you like this, but...I’ve never seen you beg, either. Not like that. You swear to me...you swear, I’ll see you in seven days’ time, when I’m healed,” she demanded, touching my cheek.

“I swear, “ I mumbled into the sheets. “Seven days.”

I stumbled into the living room and fell onto the couch beside Limerence.

‘There’s another fifty five gallon drum of worms just waiting to be opened,’ I thought.

Unconscious unicorns. The Princesses gone. Canterlot vanished.

No beer. Beer would have been good. Beer solves many things.

As I was having these considerations, Mags appeared in the doorway, her poofy mane sticking up in all directions and her tail tucked around her back legs. She reminded me so much of a guilty kitten I had to smile just a little. Silently padding across the carpet, she spread her wings and flapped up onto the sofa, pushing under my chin and making room for herself in my legs. I let her snuggle in and exhaled a weary sigh.

Well, one more piece of unpleasantness to handle.

“Kiddo, I’m going to have to leave you with—” I started, then found her tail flopped across my muzzle. I crossed my eyes to stare at it.

Mags gave me a reproachful look. “Pony hasn’t gotten me breakfast.”

I tried to come up with a counter-argument for that and found myself failing. All sense, common or otherwise, told me I should ditch the ball of fuzz with the first adult who still possessed a functioning sense of self preservation, but I was so far beyond rationality that making those sane decisions was a bit beyond me just then. Strange as it might sound, I found I didn’t want to leave her behind. Maybe my battered psyche just needed something to cling to for a bit; something I could take care of that was unlikely to explode or try to eat me.

There was a clatter at the door and I leaned sideways so I could see into the front hall. Cos and Sine were holding the unconscious Grimble Shanks in a levitation field, his enormous body floating a few inches above the ground. Both of them were moving stiffly, gritting their teeth as they heaved him along out the door.

Peering out of the blinds, I saw Suture sitting in the front of the van, peering back into the holding area where I assumed his wife also lay.

Doing a few quick calculations in my head, I realized there was no way in the whole world that they were going to fit Derida and Limerence into that van without piling them on top of one another. Getting in touch with the Vivarium with every phone line in the city packed by emergency calls was a non-starter and I didn’t count my odds of finding a cab as much better. Oh to have a Ladybug. I missed having Ladybugs. Sadly, I hadn’t seen them since the day we left the Griffin Embassy.

“Well, honey...you and I are going to have to figure something out—”

****

I was interrupted as a frightened squawk echoed from down the hall and Mags winged into the High Security area, Agent Night Bloom in hot pursuit. Bloom had armed herself with a kitchen broom which she clutched in her teeth and was flailing it at the griffin chick, who was using her superior speed and small size to evade, all the while repeatedly smacking the frustrated dusk pony across the nose with her tail.

Seeing me, Mags swooped in low and threw her claws around my neck as I scrambled upright, tipping my hat off onto the floor. Sugar reached between the bars, quick as a rattlesnake and snatched it up, dancing backwards with it into her cell. I opened my mouth to demand it back, only to catch a muzzle-full of dusty broom that sent me back onto my rump.

“Help! Help! Egg pony! Protect your tribe!” Mags squealed, clinging to my mane.

Night Bloom pulled the broom back to take another swing, but before she could get her aim I caught it in my teeth and yanked it away from her. Her golden eyes bored into mine and she jabbed a hoof at my passenger.

“I swear, Hard Boiled...if I catch that ridiculous little creature poking around the filing cabinets again, I’m going to feed her to a damned hydra!” Reaching back, Bloom snatched a paper snowflake from under her membranous wing and unfolded it. “Three years of tax reports on Detrot’s criminal syndicates! She made a paper blizzard out of three years of hard evidence!”

Mags ducked in behind my mane, wrapping her tail around my neck.

Cocking my head to one side, I reached up and patted her behind the ears. Spitting out the broom, I wiped a couple dust bunnies off my muzzle.

“You honestly think that evidence matters now?” I asked, glancing at Sugar. She was sitting on her cot, my hat on her head. “Half the city has gone insane and we don’t even know what’s happening in Equestria at large. We’d be better off using it as fire lighters.”

Night Bloom huffed, tossing the snowflake at my hooves. “It’s the principle of the thing! One day, there will be a bureaucracy again and these characters will need to answer for their damn crimes!”

Turning on her heel, she stomped down the hall and out into the Warehouse. Mags dangled off my side, peering into my face. I gave her a squint-eyed smile and she answered with an impish grin.

“Daddy would say she be needing to get ‘waid’,” Mags giggled, dropping from my back onto the concrete. “I don’t know what that means, but he be saying it about Es’ma’relda when she be grumpy, too.”

“I think you mean ‘laid’, kiddo, and last thing I need is Agent Bloom trying to get under my tail right now. Or maybe that’d be the best thing. I don’t know. Either way, you and I are going to have to start thinking about getting out of here or she’s going to make herself four tiny griffin hide slippers,” I replied, gently chucking her under the chin.

Mags let out a loud chirp of interest. “Really, Har’dy? We goes to ‘Nest’ place?”

“Yeah, later today I think. We’ve got to pick up my friends first and maybe get some intel. Where’s Cereus?”

She pointed one claw towards the door.

A sheepish-looking dusk pony stallion stood there, a pair of child’s safety scissors in his mouth and bits of confettied tax documents stuck to his dark cheeks. He ducked his head and dropped the scissors on a tray near one of the cells as he trotted in, peering in all directions like a nervous rabbit.

“Is...is she gone?” Cereus asked.

“She’s gone,” I answered, then turned to Sugar. “Lace, you wanna give me my hat back?”

Running her hoof around the brim, she wiggled her ears back and forth in the comfortable suede. “I don’t know. I rather like it. It’s got that ‘lived in’ feel. Besides, you haven’t finished telling me where your friends are or how you ended up carting a griffin child around with you.”

Mags made an offended noise. “Am not a child! I be tribe lord!”

“Sure you are. And I’m a pink cotton candy cloud,” Sugar Lace snickered, rolling onto her back on her cot. “So, story then. It’s better than just sitting here waiting to die.”

“Fine...I suppose it’s not as though there’s an emergency, unless you count the entire planet...”

Cereus plunked himself down alongside Mags and I shucked my coat, using it to pad the cold floor.

****

Loading Taxi didn’t take long once she was cooperating, but any attempt to wedge Limerence in was out of the question. Cos and Sine were starting to get antsy by then, so I retreated to the house to wait for Swift with Mags in tow. As the van pulled away from the curb, I sighed and began trying to compose myself.

Leaving Lim draped across one of the ottomans, I decided the Cuddles family wouldn’t object if I raided their fridge.

“Mmm...more olives?” I asked and Mags nodded vigorously as I heaped a few more black delicacies across the top of one of two open sandwiches. They were monuments to the chow-crafter’s art. I’d even managed to dig out some of the leftover chicken salad and, avoiding the urge to gag, heaped some on top of my little companion’s meal.

Closing the sandwiches, I gave them both a good press with one hoof. They were still much too large for my mouth, much less Mags’ beak, but that wasn’t the point. If you’re going to make a masterwork, you take it as far as you can.

Just as I was about to take my first bite, I heard the back door open.

Swift trotted down the hallway, her ears pinned back against her head. She was breathing heavily.

“Sir! Officer Swift...reporting,” she panted, flopping on her stomach. The Hailstorm twitched, weakly, its barrels spinning a couple of times. “We need...ah...we need to...phew...find someplace...safe.”

I glanced at my sandwich, then over at Mags who had paused, beak open. Very slowly she leaned forward and took an intent bite, glowering at my partner.

“Kid, what happened?” I asked. “I asked for a recon flight, not a trip to Los Pegasus. Are you alright?”

Pulling herself up, she grabbed a cup off the sink and poured a glass of water.

“The city is going nuts,” she replied, gulping her drink. “The roads are jammed and the skies...Sir, I had to dodge, like, three interdiction fields! I don’t even think two of them were sanctioned! What’s going on out there?”

“Big bad things. There’s been...oh, go in the other room and flip on the television. Doesn’t matter what channel. I’ve got to eat and I’ve had enough excitement for ten minutes,” I said, popping a pickle into my mouth.

Rising, Swift peered around the kitchen for a moment. “Wait...where’s Mom and Dad?”

“After Glow sent along a couple of ponies to get them somewhere safe. They took Grimble, Derida, and Taxi, too,” I said, waving at the front door as I bit into my snack.

“B-but...but Mom would be so mad! My grandmare would never do that unless something really, really—”

“Television. Watch. Go,” I growled, pointing my hoof at the hallway towards the living room.

It was a funny thing, thinking on my own responses, to realize just how completely in denial I really was about what had happened to my city and Equestria in general. True, denial is very helpful, insofar as it lets you taste your food when absolutely nothing should overshadow a sense of ultimate terror and foreboding. The alternative is a despair so deep the mind recoils in horror and the total catatonia that follows.

Five minutes later while Mags was laying on her back on the kitchen table, dropping bits of lettuce into her mouth and I was sucking the juice from a couple of tomatoes off my hooftips, Swift trotted back into the room. Her expression was one of quiet determination as she yanked open a drawer beside the oven and began poking through it. Coming up with a shiny, old fashioned key, she turned on her back legs and went out of the other door towards what I’d assumed was some kind of utility room.

She returned shortly with four dark bottles balanced on her wings. I gratefully took one from her and popped the top off with the edge of my toe, then tipped the beer back. It was the kind of ice cold refreshment you find only in glaciers and the bottoms of oceans.

Mags made a little noise and I grinned, passing her the one I’d just opened. She sniffed it, then took a quick sip before making a ‘yuck’ face and pushing it back towards me.

I couldn’t read Swift’s emotional state as she pulled a pocket knife out of one of her combat vest pouches, popped the top off, and flicked her bottle cap towards the garbage. The first sip of beer seemed to bring her around.

“So...what are we going to do, Sir?”

I shrugged and sucked another olive into my lips. “We? Kid, this town is going to be on fire here in about twelve hours. Canterlot is gone. We need to lay low. This is—”

“Don’t you dare say this is ‘above your pay grade’, Sir!” she barked, suddenly, giving me a firm push that almost upended my beer. I grabbed the table to keep myself upright and gave her a dour glare. “Look...just don’t lie to me. I felt that stupid magical resonance or whatever. We all did. Whatever it was, it was here! Here, in Detrot. Whatever made Canterlot go away is here! It’s still dark outside and whatever made that happen is here!”

I frowned. “Wait. The eclipse is still going on?”

Pushing my beer away, I trotted out to the front door and opened it, stepping outside. The street was still deserted and darkness reigned, casting deep shadows of encroaching twilight over everything. Shielding my face, I turned to where the sun should have been.

An icy lump dropped into my belly and started rolling around in my stomach at the sight I beheld. It felt like something out of one of those old story books.

More accurately, it felt like something out of a dream.

Far away, the mountains loomed over the city, like a crown of stony thorns wreathing the horizon. Stars twinkled in the dark, fathomless sky and the spires of the buildings seemed to jut from the ground, cast in the sinister crimson of the last rays of mid-evening. The half-light spilled deep shadows across everything.

Up above, the sun and moon hung there like a black hole very carefully cut out of the expanse, surrounded by a faint and sickly glow.

All that was missing was that terrifying roar and the gnashing of teeth coming to crush me and all I held dear.

I swallowed, sharply, and backed into the house, slamming the door shut on the horror show outside.

Swift and Mags were waiting in the hall. Mags had her nose in the umbrella stand, while my partner just watched me with an expression that said ‘Please, know what to do’.

“Kid, I can’t say, in fifteen years on the force, that I’ve ever had to deal with a solar eclipse using standard policing techniques,” I murmured, pulling my hat off and smoothing my mane back. “Alright, so...first step is something we can actually deal with right now. We’ve got to get Limerence to...ugh...I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but we need somepony with an advanced knowledge of equine anatomy, magic, and diagnostic equipment. He’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head.”

She tilted her head. “The Vivarium has the knowledge, but I don’t think they have much of the really powerful diagnostic stuff. Who do you mean?”

I groaned and set my beer down. “Slip Stitch; our Master of Ceremonies. With the Night Trotter out of commission, I need to get Limerence someplace safe and the Morgue should be nearby. With a map and maybe some air recon—”

Swift rolled her eyes. “The Morgue is twenty blocks east, then eleven blocks south, sir. How are you going to get there? The roads are a complete mess.”

I felt my muzzle forming a grin. It wasn’t a happy grin, or an amused grin, or even a sad grin. It was the grin of somepony so screwed they’ve got nothing to lose by going forward with whatever mad plan has just entered their mind.

“Well, in addition to previously mentioned criminal activity, we’ve committed major trespass, abuse of power, assault, theft, grand theft auto, a couple minor international crimes and possibly treason if you consider that I may now be working for a foreign government as a member of their legal establishment on Equestrian soil. Besides, it’s not like the whole city isn’t going to explode in violence the instant they realize there’s almost no chance of the Royal Guard swooping in to stop it. I figure a little more theft can’t hurt. We’ll probably be jailed for life the second this is all over, anyway,” I threw a leg across her shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. “So, you with me?”

My partner’s ears pinned back against her head.

“Sir, I don’t think I want you to ever give me another dose of perspective. Your perspective tastes like cyanide.”

Carriages aren’t the best of modern transport, but plenty of ponies still keep one around, either as an art piece or because most cities have ordinances allowing carriages to move about in bus and bike lanes.

Unfortunately, for us, Swift’s neighbors fell firmly into the ‘art piece’ category. The carriage in question was planted in the yard of a lovely little house with a chicken coop and rows of daisies in window boxes all across the front. It was being used as a bird’s nest and vegetable planter. Some clever individual had filled the bottom with dirt and flowers and there was a bit of moss on on the seat, but it seemed structurally sound enough in my completely inexpert opinion.

The wheels were sunken into the grassy yard, but the tow-bar across the front seemed to be in decent shape. There wasn’t much padding on the chest-plate and we had to improvise a bit of rope to keep the yoke around my head, but earth ponies are designed with strength in mind. I worried the whole thing might fall apart the instant we hauled it out of place or tried to get up to speed, but I was in the sort of strange headspace where I could ignore those little niggles.

Dodging life-crippling nerve damage and spending part of your morning dead will do that to a colt.

“Sir, this is Miss Haven Loft’s,” Swift mumbled as I gently laid Limerence on top of the flower bed in the back. Turning my head, I picked up Mags and gently set her beside him,

“And I’m sure Miss Haven Loft will be most pleased to know it saved lives,” I replied, stepping in front of the carriage and shoving my head through the loop attached to the push bar. Taking a deep breath, I hefted it up. The whole carriage creaked, but it held.

“We be going for a ride, pony?” Mags asked, cheerily.

“I sure hope so, honey. Get ready to jump off if you feel this thing coming apart,” I answered, then dug my forelegs into the dirt. Something about that simple act felt wonderful. It was something I could accomplish with my body and it didn’t require me to think or decide who lived and who died.

Swift alighted behind the carriage and put her forehead against the back bumper, adding her strength.

I heaved forward and the carriage came loose, sending up a spray of dirt as the rust-covered wheels ground up onto the sidewalk.

An axle should have split, or a wheel cracked, or something, but against all odds the damn thing held together as I trundled into the street. I’d never dragged anything bigger than a rickshaw during my newspaper route as a teenager, but once it got going, asphalt was a fairly ideal surface for the carriage.

My luck lasted a whole two blocks, before the earliest signs of the traffic Swift had mentioned started to appear.

Two enormous box trucks had slammed into one another at the end of a road and a crowd of ponies was standing around them as the drivers argued with one another, waving at the sky, the crowd, and their radios. Some ponies seemed to be sitting against the walls, shell shocked, while others were talking to their neighbors, all trying to make sense of what they’d heard on the radio or on the television.

“Kid, get your combat vest and gun off and get in the carriage. Try to keep your head down,” I called over my shoulder as I slowed, edging over into the bike lane beside a short row of empty store fronts.

“Why, sir?”

“You’re dressed as a cop, remember? You want to deal with this situation?”

I heard a scuffle as Swift leapt up behind me and began shucking her weapons and clothes. Pulling my coat down over my gun, I quickly turned my badge around on its string so it was hidden by my collar.

A couple of mares bolted down the sidewalk past us with a comatose filly thrown across the larger one’s back. They exchanged a frightened glance at the sight of the truck, then dived down one of the side alleys, rather than face the crowd. I watched them go, wishing I could help, but I was in my own pickle.

Fighting my better nature, I turned down one of the thin side-streets.

The closer we got to the Morgue, the worse the roads became. Here, a unicorn driving a water truck had flipped his vehicle and landed it half-way through a storefront when he lost consciousness. There, a mother called her child’s name as she wandered from street to street. She kept pace with us for a little while, then fell back as we went by a small playground tucked off behind an apartment complex.

All of it lay under the shroud of that unearthly darkness.

I smelled smoke not long after and heard the moan of sirens over the building tops. Screams followed us the entire way, though the carriage could dodge most of the traffic. Ponies hadn’t yet come to the conclusion that panicking and running away was the best possible course, but I could almost taste the impending violence in the air. Most were still processing the news or tending to their loved ones.

My muscles were burning by the time we finally crossed over the imaginary line in the dirt where the gentrified city blocks around the Morgue ended and the huge, empty parking lot out front of the enormous pink dome began.

****

Cereus raised his leg for attention. “Detective, can I ask something?”

I made an irritated sound in the back of my throat at the interruption.

“Yeah?”

“Um...I mean, okay, I totally get why you didn’t take him to a hospital or something, but there must have been somepony besides Medical Examiner Slip Stitch. Based on our surveillance, he’s...he’s completely bonkers.”

I rubbed a spot between my eyes. “I can’t dispute that, but every other expert on equine anatomy and magic I could think of was a unicorn. That and Stitch is also about the only being I know of who I consider completely bribery or blackmail proof. As I was saying—”

****

Pushing the lobby door open, I stepped into the cool air conditioning and let out a sigh of relief. The Morgue smelled of lemon meringue and party streamers dangled from the ceiling in vast profusion, but it was as close to normal as anything I’d faced that day. It was also, blessedly, deserted. Carting an unconscious librarian around on your back tends to have some questions attached and I wasn’t feeling like answering them for any parties in authority.

I heard a soft sniffling coming from somewhere and took a couple of steps to one side as Swift came in behind me, Mags perched across her shoulders.

Trotting to the bench across from the rows of dead celebrity photos, I grabbed Lim’s vest in my teeth and settled him into a comfortable position. Shucking my coat, I rolled it into a makeshift pillow and laid his head on it.

“Stitch?” I called out. “You here?”

The sniffling stopped and I kicked a little bit of confetti off my hooves, waiting for our host to arrive.

Thalassaemia’s fuzzy, brown head popped up above the edge of the reception desk. The giant rodent’s eyes were glassy with fear, but she relaxed as she caught sight of me. Her whiskery face was covered in bits of pie-crumbs and streaked with tears as she pulled herself to her paws. Clutching her lab-coat more tightly around herself, she pushed through the door out of the reception area.

“D-detective? H-h-Hard B-Boiled, is that y-you?” she stammered, then dashed forward and threw her forelegs around me in a vice-like grip. “Oh, Detective! Y-you’ve no i-idea! D-did you h-h-hear what happened? It’s so a-awful!”

I rested my hoof on her back. “I heard, Thal. I was watching telly. Things are a wreck out there. Where’s Slip Stitch?”

“Wh-why are you here? Shouldn’t you b-be someplace safe?” she asked.

“Can you think of anywhere safer than this building within the city limits?”

She bared her tiny front teeth at me in what I took for a rodent version of a frown. “I...I can’t. That m-makes me really scared, now that you m-mention it.”

“Before the situation out there gets really bad, I need to talk to Stitch and see if I can arrange some things with him. I may be off the grid a bit. I don’t have much time to explain, I’m afraid.”

“Th-that’s okay. I don’t think I want to kn-know anyway. He’s l-locked himself in h-his office,” Thal replied, her ears flattening. “He s-said something about ‘n-n-not feeling like p-partying’, then grabbed a whole carton of icing f-from the fridge…”

“You’ve got keys to that office, right?” I asked.

She nodded and reached into one of her pockets, producing a large key-ring.

“Y-y-yes, but please d-don’t tell h-him. When he’s in a m-m-mood h-he likes to pretend h-he’s some kind of l-l-lonely party poet who can l-l-lock himself a-away with his knitting and d-decorations…”

“I’ll pretend he didn’t shut it properly,” I replied, taking the keys in my teeth and turned to my partner. Mags was still perched on her back, her paws balancing on Swift’s flight muscles as she stared at Thalassemia with wide-eyed wonder.

“Do you be real, Miss Mouse?” Mags asked.

Thal giggled, putting a paw over her muzzle. “Y-yes. I’m a h-hamster, though.” She finally noticed Limerence passed out on the bench and frowned. “I d-don’t remember there b-b-being anypony asleep out here…”

“He’s with me,” I said. “That’s actually why I’m here. Whatever magic destroyed or teleported or did whatever it did to Canterlot also managed to cold-cock an awful lot of unicorns. I need to know why and Stitch knows horns as well as he knows a pony’s squishy bits.”

The hamster’s mouth tugged into a disturbed frown. “Resonance th-that strong is extremely d-d-dangerous—”

“Not ready to get into it yet, Thal. Just...find my friends something sweet, would you? Something to calm their nerves?” I patted Thalassemia on the back and turned towards the elevator. “I just need to talk to Stitch.”

Her whiskers twitched for just a moment, then slowly nodded. “Yes, D-d-detective. He’s three f-floors down and to the l-left. You’ll know wh-which o-office is his.”

Resting my cheek against a poster from some long gone party on the wall of the lift, I listened to the machinery of the elevator as I descended, trying to find some solace in the logical, ordered operation of the mechanism.

Tough thing to do, when trying to describe a situation in one's own mind keeps popping up synonyms for 'apocalypse' .

The doors bonged and I stepped out into a narrow, concrete hallway lit by stark, white light. One end was sterile, clean, and contained nothing but an umbrella stand, sans umbrellas. There was a door whose placard said, in official looking black letters, ‘Deputy Coroner Thalassemia’.

The other end looked like an explosion in an impressionist art gallery full of drunk schizophrenics. The walls, floors, and ceiling were coated in an inch thick layer of vintage posters, some dating all the way back to Luna’s return and even before, detailing events and celebrations for ponies of every caliber. I recognized a couple of Grand Galloping Galas, some Summer Sun Celebrations, and a whole heap of children’s parties. At the far end, so completely buried amongst the pictures it almost blended in, a door half my height had the words ‘Slip Stitch’s Party Palace’ sloppily painted in what I thought might be red hoof polish. The ‘i’s were dotted with pink kissing lips. A soft tune was coming through the door; light blues played on a kazoo.

Stepping over a loose, half inflated balloon drifting pitifully along the floor, I trotted down to Stitch’s door and gave it a quick rap with the back of my foreleg.

The music stopped and Slip Stitch called out, “Detective, unless you’re dead, I really would prefer to be left alone. I’m going to be extremely busy soon and I doubt anypony will feel like celebrating.”

I pulled off my hat and held it to my chest, leaning against the little door. “Yeah, well, I’m afraid neither of us has the luxury of hiding while the country goes to the pit. How’d you know it was me?”

“Who else would come to my door with that authoritative stomp just hours after Equestria’s capital city and national leadership vanish? I admit to a certain surprise you aren’t in a body bag, but I’m sure somepony will get around to that,” he chuckled, then the kazoo started up again.

“Stitch, you and I need to talk. I’ve got a friend upstairs who needs your expertise.”

The music paused for a moment.

“I’m certain they can wait, Detective. I’m brooding. Besides, it’s not as though they can get more dead, now is it?”

Even at his best, Slip Stitch isn’t the most cooperative individual. He’d always had a bit of a stubborn streak, which usually works to his advantage, but I was in no mood to bandy words with him. Not with Limerence upstairs in a heap, alongside an unknown number of other unicorns.

Tugging Thalassemia’s keys out of my pocket, I flipped through them until I found one in the shaped like a cupcake. Pushing it into the lock, I turned it and felt the lock click, then popped them back into my coat. Sliding down onto my forelegs, I nosed the door open and crawled through on my belly. It was plenty wide, but anypony wanting in needed to enter on their knees, or alternatively, be the height of a foal. Thinking from that perspective, it made a bit more sense.

Stitch’s office was both exactly what I expected it to be and somehow less extreme. A part of me expected a giant pinata instead of a desk, or for all the furniture to be on the ceiling. Instead, the space reminded me of a doctor’s office I’d been to as a kid. The walls were painted with cheerful pictures of ducklings and kittens sitting side by side, while a wide desk sat in the middle with the legs sawn off to bring it just high enough that a child could peer over the top.

With his back to the door, the coroner had his rear legs up on an ottoman made out of a fuzzy, pink elephant. He was sitting on an inflatable chair constructed entirely out of artfully twisted balloons.

I pulled myself to a standing position and readjusted my hat.

“Stitch?”

For a long moment, there was no reply. Sliding forward, Slip Stitch dropped out of his seat and turned, laying his kazoo on the desk with a certain finality. His normally wild, white mane seemed limp and lank, hanging around his shoulders in a loose mess. His labcoat was stained with blue frosting that matched his fur. Worst of all, his eyes. Tears had drawn long tracks down his face, dripping off of his chin. He made no move to wipe them away.

“Celestia’s mercy, Stitch. Are you alright?” I asked, dumbly, trotting around his desk and putting one leg across his shoulders.

He pressed his face against my neck and hugged me desperately, his tears wetting my fur.

“Not even a clown can smile every day, Detective...”

Act 3 Chapter 2: Best Laid Plans Of Stallions And Hamsters

Starlight Over Detrot.
Act 3, Chapter 2 Best Laid Plans Of Stallions And Hamsters

It is considered a cause for much celebration among ponies that there have been few calls in Equestrian history to make use of the Royal Guard against ponies themselves. This is in stark contrast to griffin civilization, which has required their the army be called to a number of family reunions. For the most part, being a herd species and tending towards collectivization rather than internal strife, ponies would rather settle their serious disagreements with a pie fight than swords or guns.

That said, the conflict later known as the Cutie-Mark Crusades taught ponies many hard lessons, not the least of them ‘Walk loudly and carry a stick you can beat the world to death with’.

For most of the last century, the stick of choice has been the Royal Guard. Most cities have at least a tiny guard presence alongside their own enforcement efforts. Stalliongrad has the Spurtsnas, special operations units. Trottingham has the Commando herds, most notably the Dirty Baker’s Dozen. Detrot has the Royal Detachment.

While each operates independently based upon the needs of the local populace, they all may call upon the Guard proper should ever a real problem arise. From there, a mighty force may swoop in from Canterlot and the border stations to enforce stability and save the locals from whatever horrible menace may have arisen (See Spontaneous Chicken Detonations of L.R. 34, The Sunflower Rebellion of B.L.R. 884)

The Royal Detachment is one of the smallest groups still technically attached to the Guard itself. They have fluctuated through the years from a massive force that controlled the mighty Summer Castle, to what eventually became an office on Pole Street. While the power of Miss Bandolier's coffee is never to be underestimated, she is a secretary and most major policing efforts in Detrot were long ago taken over by groups with more than a receptionist, an administrator, and just enough actual guards to keep the front door safe and sound (except on weekends or during tea-time, when it is stalwartly protected by an 'out to lunch' sign).

This suits most of those transferred to the post just fine. After all, Detrot is a city operating the most successful anti-mega-fauna brigade outside of Cloudsdale and Canterlot herself alongside one of the largest police departments in all of Equestria.

What possible situation might arise that they couldn’t handle?

-The Scholar

Today

****

“I don’t know why I bother having expectations. The world doesn’t often sync up with them and when it does, it’s never in ways I’m happy with. Finding Slip Stitch, the most immovable being I’d ever met, covered in frosting and tears was off my intellectual map and well into ‘Here there be dragons’ territory,” I said, staring at the stark, concrete ceiling of the Warehouse.

“Strange. He seemed so...unshakeable,” Cereus murmured. “Like some sort of wacky super-pony who never let anything get to him.”

“Yeah, well, he’s got more layers than a whole bushel of onions," I replied. "If he'd been any other pony, I'd have been inclined to get him drunk, but the thought of Stitch on alcohol frightens me."

****

One week ago

****

We stood there for a solid five minutes, me gently patting my friend’s back while he bawled like a teenager off a bad breakup before I carefully lead him back around to his chair. The balloons squeaked as I gently pushed him back into the seat, sitting myself beside him. He took my hoof in his and held it, eyes closed, until he seemed a little calmer.

“I’m no good with this ‘nurturing’ thing,” I said, trying a smile. He mirrored it, weakly, but it didn’t reach his bloodshot eyes.

Picking a kerchief decorated with cakes out of his pocket, he dabbed a bit of frosting off of his muzzle. “I know, Detective. Soon, I’ll smile and celebrate the dead. I just needed a moment. I had a number of friends in Canterlot and the party this will require to make things right may go on all year. I don’t have enough streamers or hats.”

I held up my hooves. “Stitch, I’m going to do what I can to figure out what happened to Canterlot. Celestia help me if I know how, but my partner seems to think whatever it was began here, in Detrot. In the meantime, I’ve got a friend upstairs.”

“Yes, a body—”

“Not a body. He’s alive.”

Stitch raised his eyes. “The living are not my area of expertise, Detective…”

“He’s as close to dead as one can get without being on his way. Apparently a fair number of other unicorns in town are, too. You heard that noise when the eclipse started?”

Slip Stitch lifted an eyebrow, a couple of his white curls rising to attention.

"I...did. That was a magical resonance. Every diagnostic tool in my laboratory went wild."

"Well, I need you to figure out what is wrong with Limerence—"

His expression didn't change, but a few more hairs flicked back into place. "That poor boy whose father we have? My, my, he really does have the worst of luck."

"I think that's just a side effect of following me around. Regardless, he and...well, lots of unicorns all across this city are in some kind of weird coma. It looks like magical burn out.”

All at once Stitch’s mane sprung up from his shoulders into its usual floofy profusion and he stood.

“Magical burn out, Detective? From a spell cast by someone else?” he asked, the fires of curiosity lighting in his eyes.

“That’s what it looks like. An acquaintance of mine gave him a once over, but it was nothing comprehensive.” I brushed the lapels of his labcoat back, straightened his name-tag, then picked up his kazoo from the desk and tucked it into his front pocket. “There’s only one pony in this city who knows unusual diseases and conditions like you do who I can guarantee wasn’t affected as well. I need you, Stitch. The city needs you. Equestria needs you.”

Despite the side of ham and eggs I gave that speech, Slip Stitch drew himself up, patted his pockets and a slow smile spread across his cheeks. “I do suppose, in those circumstances, that I could be convinced to have a look. Lead on.”

“Good stallion. Come on.”

****

Cereus held up his hoof for me to stop for a moment, then pointed at my forelegs.

Pausing, I noticed Mags was asleep. Her wings flopped out on either side of her body and she was gently kneading the air with her back legs as she snuggled up to my knees.

“Pardon me, but that doesn’t explain why you’re still carting this kid around,” Lace murmured, trotting back to her bed and retrieving her blanket. She returned after a minute and held it out. I took it and wrapped it around Mags, tucking it under her chin. “When you showed up here with her clinging to your head, I thought you’d lost your mind. Okay, well, I thought you’d lost more of your mind.”

“I’m getting to that. Am I getting my hat back this month?”

Sugar snickered at me. “If I don’t decide to eat it. Now make with the story, before I turn gray as you.”

****

I pushed open the door of the lobby and caught a glob of projectile ice-cream with my forehead. Stumbling sideways, I caught the edge of the elevator and began furiously scrabbling at my eyes as chilly dessert dribbled down my face.

“Oh...s-sorry, D-d-detective!” Thalassemia squeaked as I managed to clear my vision. The waiting room was a disaster, but I’d seen it worse on occasion.

Swift and Mags were hunkered down behind the reception desk with a whole carton of rocky road between them, both spattered in ice-cream, while Thalassemia crouched behind the bench where Limerence lay. My librarian had been used for cover during what was surely an epic food fight. A full scoop was quickly melting on his chest, while the hamster was covered in a thick layer of gooey treat that dripped off her whiskers.

Dipping my toe in the mess on my muzzle, I stuck it in my mouth.

“Mmm...somepony mind explaining what exactly is going on here,” I grumbled.

“T-that’s my fault, D-detective,” Thal murmured, rising from her spot behind the bench. “I n-n-needed something to t-take my mind off of what is g-going on so I didn’t start c-c-crying in front of...you know…” She wiggled her paw in Mags’ general direction, then ducked as the griffin chick pulled back her spoon and launched a shot just over her head.

“Yeah, I get it.” Taking a proffered paper towel from Slip Stitch, I wiped my face off. “Believe me, we’re all trying not to go crazy just now. Swift, how about you?”

“Gone crazy, Sir. Ask me again later,” Swift replied, giggling and digging out a spoonful of ice-cream to stuff in her mouth. Her expression was a tad manic as she lay back against the counter, chewing her snack. As an after thought she added, “You two wanna join, Sir? I have an extra couple of spoons and Thalassemia needs a team-mate. It’s not like we can stop any of the stuff out there anyway, right?”

“I’m not giving up hope yet. Lets call a cease-fire on the war, though.” I turned to the coroner. “Stitch? You’re up.”

Slip Stitch cast a conflicted look towards where Thalassemia crouched, and the bucket of double-mint fudge she’d positioned in easy reach, then let out a long suffering sigh and trotted towards where Limerence lay. “I suppose catastrophes must come before pleasure sometimes. Ah, well. Let us see the shape of this one, shall we?”

Thal edged over beside him, ready for orders. Plucking his assistant’s spoon out of her muzzle, he stuck it into the lump of ice-cream on my friend’s chest and downed a big bite before getting on to a general inspection, taking Lim’s pulse and prying open his eyelids to peer into his irises with a tiny pocket light.

I moved over to my partner and settled down between her and the brown griffin chick. I didn’t have to ask how Swift was doing. Now that the ice-cream battle was over, I could see her expression starting to falter. She was keeping up a brave face, but nopony who wears that mask holds out for long. It was the face of someone on the edge of a cliff, feeling the stones start to shift under their hooves. Worry had etched a few deep lines into her young forehead. She looked too old for somepony her age. Much, much too old.

Worst of all, she looked a bit like me.

I shoved those thoughts to one side and turned to Mags, who was happily burying her entire face in the vat of rocky road, seemingly oblivious to the moods of everypony around her.

“How you doin’, honey?” I asked.

She held up one talon, then tilted her head back to swallow in that unsettling way birds of prey have. “Mmm, sorry pony. My Daddy be teaching me not to talk with my beak full. It gets blood everywhere if the meat be fresh.”

I blanched as my brain assembled an altogether unappetizing image.

My tongue seemed to tie itself in a knot as I tried to figure out how to ask if she was minutes from climbing the walls and needing a straitjacket.

How do you ask a child a question like that?

“Ugh...Stitch, can I speak to you for a moment?”

Slip Stitch glanced at Mags, then at me. I could almost see his grey matter ticking as he put together the odd narrative that must have occurred for me to find myself in possession of a griffin verging on puberty. Tucking his little pen light away he held out his hoof towards the other end of the lobby and I trotted into the corner with him.

In a low voice I murmured, “Stitch, you’re good with kids, yeah?”

“That’s what my cutie-mark says, yes,” he replied, giving his hip a little shake.

I flipped my tail in Mags direction. “I...uh...this isn’t the time for this, but I don’t know what to do.”

“A situation that children will put you in frequently,” Stitch said, with a crooked smile. “If I may postulate?” I shrugged and indicated he should continue. “I hear this morning of an extremely violent action taking place at the Moonwalk Hotel and then you arrive here smelling of soap, guilt, and blood, with a female chick in tow. Griffins are extremely protective of their young, which would indicate the child’s parents either entrusted you with her care...or they are dead. You were there, yes? Tell me if I am off base?”

I scooted my rear legs under myself and grimaced. Stitch’s intuition was downright scary on his good days, and borderline omniscient on a day where it looked like the world might conceivably be coming to an end.

“You’re not. I can’t go into everything that happened, but...that girl’s father died this morning. I’ve got nowhere to put her and according to the laws of her tribe, I’m supposed to take care of her or my...erm...certain important bits of my anatomy might be forfeit...but she doesn’t even act like it happened. I’ve got nothing. She hasn’t said one word about it. I’ve had more demanding house plants.”

Slip Stitch slid his front hooves into the pockets of his lab coat and rocked back and forth.

“Hrm...Was her father’s death extremely violent and was she witness to it? And were you the first being she saw after that?”

I nodded, slowly.

Reaching out, he put his hoof on my shoulder and his normally soft eyes bored into mine with an intensity that almost made me draw back.

“Then, Detective...I can tell you what you must do if you want her to have any hope of avoiding damage so permanent it may
leave her incapable of interacting with the outside world.” I leaned in and he continued. “You must...under no circumstances...leave her with somepony else. Not until she cries.”

My eyebrows drew together. “This is me we’re talking about. I’ll be lucky to last the afternoon. Anypony around me is risking a bullet.”

Stitch let his hoof drop from my leg. “You asked for my advice. This is it. My talent is telling me that you mustn’t abandon her. Until she starts crying, you keep her with you. She may not cry for weeks, but if you tuck her away or leave her with someone before she begins to mourn, her mind is going to hide in a place deep, dark, and full of vipers.”

The way he said that made me shiver and I had the irrational urge to run over, snatch Mags up and hide with her somewhere. Let someone else be the hero.

Of course, I’d had those same impulses with Swift. Trying to shelter her hadn’t done either of us any good. She still had that slightly haggard look in her eye. Granted, she’d also had the worst first month on the job of anypony I’d ever met or heard of.

I opened my mouth to respond, when the front door of the Morgue exploded inward, followed by a spray of glass as something moving roughly the speed of sound shot into the room and embedded itself in the magically hardened concrete above and between my eartips. I kicked my trigger so hard I almost cracked my front teeth catching it. Grabbing Stitch with both forelegs, I rolled sideways, slinging him behind me into the wall. Swift grabbed Mags’ scruff in her teeth and blasted back behind the reception desk on a gust from her wings. She’d left the Hailstorm in the carriage, but the booth was a pretty safe place to be.

Thalassemia hadn’t moved, her eyes wide as she stared at the spot I’d just been standing. I gestured frantically for her to get down, but she just stood there like a deer in the headlight of an oncoming train, pointing at the wall.

I followed her finger up to the spot and it took me several seconds to figure out exactly what had managed to burrow into the concrete. When I did, I leaped backwards, tumbling over Stitch as he was getting back to his hooves, falling into a pile against a potted plant just inside the door.

“I-is that a...carrot peeler?” Thal asked, softly as Stitch and I struggled to right ourselves.

Pulling myself up, I helped the coroner to his hooves and took a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s a carrot peeler.”

The kitchen implement in question was buried halfway to the hilt, still glowing weakly with whatever magic had given it super-sonic speed. Stitch pulled a pair of joke spectacles with a funny nose and a huge bushy mustache out of his pocket, popped them on his nose, and carefully approached.

Swift was peering over the reception desk. I motioned for her to keep down as I scooted over to peer out at the parking lot; there didn’t seem to be anypony out there. It looked like our peeler had somehow delivered itself.

“Interesting. Most interesting. This is a strange modification of a ‘come-to-life’ spell,” Stitch muttered, reaching out. Before I could stop him, his toe brushed against the handle.

“Stitch, wait, that’s from—”

I was drowned out by the booming voice of a creature some ponies have been known to see in their nightmares; Police Chief Iris Jade. She was loud enough to shake the remaining glass in the door almost out of its hinges. I clapped my hooves over my ears, but I could still hear her clearly.

“Slip Stitch! This is Chief Jade! If Hard Boiled makes an appearance, give this to him, immediately!”There was a long pause, then the voice added, “You can tell him that I am not claiming his genitals today.”

My eardrums ached as I cautiously pulled my hooves away from the sides of my head.

Stitch hummed to himself as he peered at the carrot peeler, gingerly tugging it out of the wall.

“Detective, while I recognize your completely understandable reluctance, I believe...you have mail.”

****

“She sent you a carrot peeler?!” Sugar guffawed, rocking off the cot and trotting over to the bars. “Is that some kind of in-joke between the two of you or something?”

I shuddered from ears to tail-tip.

“Joke? No, I know jokes. Jokes are things that make a pony go ‘haha’. Ballistic, enchanted carrot peelers delivered by your boss are not ‘haha’ material. They’re the kind of thing where you wake up in a puddle of sweat the next time you try to sleep.”

The reporter snorted and pulled my hat off, holding it to her chest. I went to reach for it and she pulled it out of reach.

“You know I’m trained in police takedown techniques, right? I don’t want to have to use any of them to get my hat back.”

Sugar stuck her tongue out. “Come try it, big boy! I took eight years of Mare-Jitsu. I can bend you into pretzels!”

I glanced at Cereus and he shrugged. “I can gas her later if it’s a really big deal…”

“You can gas me anytime,” Sugar murmured, giving Cereus a dreamy eyed look.

If there’s such thing as a shudder-seizure, I had one just then. Every muscle in my back locked up for about five seconds as a violent fit of the shakes spread down my spine. Cereus had the good grace to blush, pulling one of his huge, veiny wings over his face. I recomposed myself and continued.

“At any rate, while I wasn’t inclined to take any gifts Chief Jade delivered by carrot peeler, she was also not the sort of pony to waste time on pranks.”

****

“Sir, how did Chief Jade know to find you here?” Swift asked.

I thought for a moment then said, “I doubt she did. I expect Stella and the Prince of Detrot are also going to be wanting to know why the Chief of Police is sending her messages via kitchen utensil.”

“Sooo...how do we find out what the message is?”

My muzzle was suddenly very dry. While I doubted Jade would do something permanent, I couldn’t really put it past her to enchant cutlery to carve information into my forehead.

Nothing for it. Reaching out, I rested my toe on the peeler as it lay across Stitch’s hooves.

The feeble glow intensified and it zipped into mid-air, dangling in front of me. It spun in a slow circle, as though studying me, then Chief Jade’s voice rang out at a volume usually associated with passing Wonderbolts.

“Hard Boiled! This is The Chief.” She paused for what I’m sure was ‘effect’. “Within forty minutes of the events in Canterlot, I received orders from Mayor Snifter’s Office. I’ve got a list of ponies, griffins, and ‘miscellaneous’ that I’m supposed to arrest on sight who may or may not know something about what’s happened in Canterlot.”

I tilted my head at the floating peeler.

‘Forty minutes?!’ I thought.

Before I had time to go further with that line of consideration, the Chief continued.

“You’re on that list, Hardy. You are being targeted as a ‘person of interest to the crown’, whatever that means. You’re the first name, your driver, as well as Officer Cuddles and, below them, a known member of the Archivists. The rest of the list is everything from known political dissidents to criminals to ponies I’ve never even heard of. I’m willing to bet every other agency is watching for you, PACT included. I can run interference until things calm down enough that I can pull resources from the pony-hunts back toward general peace-keeping efforts, but you need to be invisible. I need an asset I can count on to investigate independently. In the meantime...get out of the city.”

The carrot peeler flashed, then clattered to the floor at my hooves, its magic spent.

Silence owned the room as everypony gave me wide-eyed, frightened looks. Mags had even abandoned her bucket of ice-cream.

I turned towards where Limerence lay. Trotting over to him, I set my hoof on his chest, feeling the gentle rise and fall of his chest and the thump of his heart.

So many ponies. So many people relying on me. The griffins. The Aroyos. The Vivarium. The police. The dead Archivists, wherever they might be. Juniper. My friends.

I sat down, quietly examining the golden scales on my hip. They seemed so bright and perfect, just like the day I’d gotten them for bashing in my best friend’s father’s head with a bat. I’d listened to the dead and the living. I’d watched my city descend into darkness. I’d thought that little breakdown in the tub yesterday was somewhere in the vicinity of rock bottom only to find out within a matter of hours that someone had left an industrial digger beside my hole and a Canterlot-sized note that said ‘Keep Looking, Dumbass’.

“Ah...Detective?” Stitch started, nervously. “If I might ask—”

“No, Stitch,” I said, cutting him off without looking up. “Nobody gets to ask me anything right now. No, Swift, put your leg down. No, Thal, you’re sweet, but shut up. No, Limerence, you just lay there unconscious and useless. Yes, Mags, you can have some more ice cream.”

Happy munching, slurping noises followed for a few minutes as I meditated on the situation.

Forty minutes. That number stuck out in my head. Somepony, somewhere, had compiled a list of dangerous, interested individuals in less than forty minutes...or they’d had the list well before the activity in Canterlot. I couldn’t imagine using the disappearance of the Princesses as an excuse for a political coup, but there must have been someone out there willing to try something that mad.

Snifter had always been ambitious, corrupt, easily manipulated, and scandal ridden, but he’d never struck me as insane. That said, the list had come from his office. Either he or somepony with a long reach was willing to cast a very dangerous net to see me captured. That fit with everything else I knew about our opponents.

Mayor or not, he was playing with fire. Unfortunately, any sort of response was going to take me some time and there was nothing I could do at that given moment. However much I might hate it, Chief Jade was right. I needed to get out of the city and get the heat off. That and I needed a rest.

Damn.

My breath felt like I was inhaling a chest full of lead as I tried to get myself together.

“Swift,” I began, turning to my partner. She raised her chin into an approximation of attention.

“Sir?”

“Chief Jade has given me a warning. It’s about as fair a warning as I think a pony will get. That said, I’m about to give you one of the toughest orders you’ve ever undertaken. You listening?”

I’d expected her usual immediate ‘ten-hut’ and ‘Yes, Sir’. Instead, she looked a bit suspicious.

Good kid.

“Sir, is this going to be one of those orders that makes me defy my sense of loyalty and morality, then when you explain it I go and do it and feel guilty the whole time even though you’re probably right?”

I smiled and poked the tip of her nose. “I’m glad you’re catching on to how all this works.”

Shutting her eyes, Swift turned her back on me and sat down, staring at the linoleum between her front hooves. “I’m starting to understand a little bit why Taxi punches you so much, Sir.”

“And that’s good, too, because I want you to spend the next few days eating chicken salads, reading poetry, and being hit on by horny bird cats until I come get you. Clear?”

Her ears twitched, then she glanced over her shoulder. “You want me to go to Sky Town? Back to the Plot Hole?”

“Exactly. The griffin tribes are in Sky Town. I need you to go find the Tokan and the Hitlan. You tell’em their leadership is alive and recovering from their injuries and will rejoin them soon. Tell them their eggs are safe and will be returned to them. You tell them their High Justice is alive, and that he’s still finding out who tried to kill them, and if they lay a claw on you, the location of their eggs dies with you. Then you hide. I’m pretty sure two tribes of griffins can protect you.”

Swift’s nose wrinkled. “What makes you think the...whoever it was who attacked the embassy...what makes you think they won’t just bomb the griffins again?”

“Because the griffins weren’t their target. They gain nothing by attacking them again. The target was the ledgers, the treasuries, and the shoes of Nightmare Moon. Nothing will stop the other tribes coming here and causing chaos, but we can save the Hitlan from massacring the Tokan.” I reached out and put my hoof on her back, resting it between her wings. “It’s up to you, kid.”

Gulping, Swift got to her hooves. “Sir, I am so many kinds of not qualified for this.”

“You signed on as my diplomatic emissary the second you signed the last employment paper with Chief Jade,” I replied, chuckling at her discontented expression. “You think she gave you to me because she thought I actually needed a partner? No, I know Jade. She wanted somepony with some actual tact as the golden face of the Detrot Police Department. She wanted a young, smart, obedient little pony with the brass balls of a veteran making her look more capable than she actually was until she learned the ropes. She wanted a copper she could trot in front of cameras without blanching every time they opened their mouth for a microphone. That was never going to be me. You can do this. There are lives that need saving. Are you going to let them die because you think you’re not qualified?”

Crossing her hooves, Swift gave me a level glare. “Sir, I’ll do this, but you better promise me you aren’t about to go die again doing something crazy.”

“This time? Absolutely. My plan is completely non-crazy for at least the next few days.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That means you’re planning on doing something crazy after that, Sir…”

Instead of answering, I reached out and offered Mags my hoof. She grabbed it and swung herself deftly up onto my back, wiggling about until she got comfortable between my shoulder blades. Her beak was still an ice-cream covered mess, but she seemed pleasantly sated for the moment. “We going someplace, pony?”

“A place full of the best toys in the world,” I replied and her eyes lit up. “That said, Swift...you need to go now, before whoever is hunting us gets organized. Get your guns on, stay high, keep to the clouds if you can—”

“Sir, pegasus stealth tactics are part of basic training,” she grumbled, glancing out towards the carriage in the parking lot.

Her eyes were full of reluctance, but I knew she’d do what was necessary. I could hate myself for sending her away again later, but the griffins needed to know what was going on.

“Then go. I’ll come get you in a week and we’ll get back to the front lines,” I said. As she rose, I took two steps forward and slid my forelegs around her neck, hugging her to my chest. She was so surprised she froze, her breath catching in her throat. Pushing my muzzle against her ear, I whispered, “Please...be safe. I’ve lost enough ponies lately. I don’t want to lose my partner, too.”

Her ears turned back and she very slowly put her legs around me as well, replying in a voice soft enough that only I could hear it, “I’ll try, Sir. If you do the same.”

After a moment she stepped back. I shut my eyes, unable to watch her go.

The bell above the door rang, then once again, and it was done.

“Luna bang me on the moon,” I muttered, then swiped a hoof across my forehead and turned to Thal and Slip Stitch. Stitch had a spoonful of ice-cream half the way to his mouth. He quickly put it back in the vat.

“Pardon, I find a bit of grief does wonders for the appetite. May I assume you would like the two of us to discover what is wrong with your friend,” he asked, waving a hoof at where Limerence lay, “and perhaps fix it?”

“You read my mind. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Take care of him...and take care of yourself. You need me to go get you a gun or something? I know a guy up the street who is probably—”

Stitch let out a noise that was almost a giggle and exchanged a tiny smile with Thalassemia.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Detective, this building was constructed to ward off dragons. Angry dragons. The superstructure comprises a bunker built to shrug off direct spell-fire, and the exterior contains an array of late-Crusades weaponry in plenty of delicious flavors. While most are not functional any longer, I do believe I can jury rig something to keep my little plot safe. Go on. We’ll be fine.”

Turning my neck as far as I could, I peered at Mags. “I’m gonna ask this, even though Stitch told me what you’d say. You wanna stay here, with these ponies? Slip Stitch would take you in. He’s a decent sort. You can have all the ice-cream you like and probably food fights every day.”

The tiny griffin rolled her eyes at me and gave me a little swat on the back of the head with her wing. “Nooo, silly egg pony! I be staying with you. Duh! That’s how things be!”

I exhaled and lifted my leg to pet her tail as it spilled down my side. “That’s what I figured. It’s your funeral.”

Stitch held out his leg and I bumped it. “Your friend will be in safe hooves, Detective.”

“Assuming you don’t try p-performing surgery wh-while you’re sleep-walking again,” Thalassemia added, then gave me a tentative smile, “Don’t worry, Detective. I’ll t-tie his l-leg to the bed. You go s-save the world.”

Grabbing my coat from under Lim’s head, I headed for the door.

Back in the parking lot, I crawled into the back of the carriage and set Mags beside me, casually snapping the head off one of the flowers planted in the bottom to munch on. Sifting through my pockets until I found the M6 walkie-talkie, I flicked the toggle and said, “Breaker, breaker, this is Detective Egg For Brains, calling Master Of Hay Fries, Master Of Hay Fries, are you there?”

The box barked static, then Agent Bloom’s raspy voice came down the line. “Wha’d ya want? Everythin’...hic...everything gonna…gonna go to the damn pit and...and I gotta piss. I’mma piss on this jerk on this here walkie...walkie thing—”

There was a wet, splashy sound, followed by a brief scuffle and then Cereus came on. “Sorry, sorry, Detective! Give me a second...to...clean this...”

I heard the sound of running water, followed by sudsy scrubbing noises, then he returned.

“Detective! Are you there?”

“I’m here, Cereus. You see the news?”

“We did! We’ve been trying...okay, well I’ve been trying to get in touch with anypony—”

“Canterlot’s gone, Cereus. Better use our time finding out how. Look, I need a place to lie low for a few days. The Chief of Police just clued me into...well, I’m being targeted by City Hall. I’m at the Morgue. You think you can get to my location in reasonable time?”

“I don’t know how. I mean, I was just in Survey. They’ve got everypony out there trying to keep order. P.A.C.T., police, even what little Royal Guard are in town. By all rights, Agent Bloom and I should be helping...”

“I just stole a carriage, sent my best friend to a whore house, my partner to a tribal dive bar, and my librarian over to a maniac who is entirely likely to experiment on him or possibly use him for spares. I’m exhausted, emotional, and I have a griffin chick with me who has eaten more ice-cream than should fit in something her size and she’s crashing as we speak. Find a way!”

I ruffled Mags as she slumped against the side of the carriage, snoring softly.

There was a very, very long pause, punctuated by a sobbing Agent Bloom peeing into what sounded like a bucket.

“I’ll...I’ll put Agent Bloom in one of the cells and...um...I’ll be there in an hour.”

****

“So? How’d he do it?”

“Huh?”

Sugar blew a breath out of the corner of her muzzle, displacing a couple of hairs on her cheek. “How’d he get from this...wherever it is...to the Morgue with traffic like that?”

I held out my leg to Cereus. “You wanna tell her?”

Agent Cereus swallowed, his wings clenched to his sides as he blushed like a nun who’d accidentally strolled into the Vivarium. “I...eheh...I…stole a police vehicle...”

I couldn’t hold in a derisive snort as I said, “What Mister Modesty here means is he stole a police riot truck from the armory on Vale Street. He somehow broke into a guarded station in high alert conditions and ripped off a secured, locked armored assault motor under the noses of Detrot P.D. I half wish I’d thought to call him first, although I suppose it wouldn’t really have changed anything.” Reaching down, I lifted Mags off the floor, twisting my neck around so I could settle her on my shoulders. She wrapped her claws in my mane, cooing dreamily. “Still, I need to get to Taxi and my friends. A week off the grid is a long time. You got any idea what the actual state of the city is right now?”

Cereus shook his head, getting back to his hooves as he peeked in at Sugar Lace. She was chewing on a stray bit of breakfast, listening to the two of us intently. “There’s too much. Even if I’d finished training, I’m supposed to be a bookkeeper. I don’t do analysis. That’s Agent Bloom’s thing and she’s been...she’s not okay, Detective. I found her crying in her bed last night. She’s been having really bad nightmares.”

“Just give me what you can.”

“Well...I mean, it’s what you expected,” he replied, waving towards the Survey room. “Everything out there is nuts. There’s whole parts of the city I couldn’t find a single police car within an eight block radius. I’ve got some mentions of griffins all over, and...I don’t know how much stock to put in this, but I saw a couple P.A.C.T. teams moving around inside the Shield in full anti-Mega-Fauna gear. Not one non-lethal piece of kit amongst them. There haven’t been any attacks, though. At least, not yet.”

Getting off her cot, Sugar came back to the bars, holding out my hat with her teeth. I took it from between the bars and plopped it back between my ears. It smelled an awful lot like mare, which was a nice change from worn out cop. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“I don’t feel like being gassed again. I was just curious.” Sugar hesitated for a minute, then asked, “Look, I...I know I’ve said an awful lot of mean things in the past about your heritage...intelligence...competence...erm—”

“My hygiene, masculinity, sexual prowess, social standing, eyebrows—”

“Yes, all those things...but I have a worry you might be the pony most able to figure out what happened to Canterlot and the Princesses. Do you have a plan, Hard Boiled? Anything?”

“Friends of mine need retrieving and I’ve got to check on Limerence. It’ll give me a chance to see what’s actually going on out there, too.”

Mags was still asleep as the Warehouse’s underground tram pulled into its secret station on the edge of Detrot. Cereus and I had managed to dodge Agent Night Bloom, but just barely. I didn’t want to have any sort of heart to heart with that poor mare if I could avoid it without something better to give her than the notion that I might have a plan at some point.

The tram brought us out behind the little junk shop and I drew in a deep breath of the stale air in the darkened tunnel full of windblown litter. I could feel the kinks in my shoulders unwinding as I slid out of the mine-cart and shouldered Mags. Cereus stood there in the cart, awkwardly staring at me out of those big, sad slitted yellow eyes. He’d never make the kind of agent the service demanded with those eyes. They gave away everything.

“Detective...Can I say something, please? Just between you and me?” he asked, shuffling his hooves.

“I assume it’s something you didn’t want to say where Bloom might overhear?”

He nodded, fiddling with the controls of the tram. “Yes. I’m trying to keep her from losing it completely, but...I’m really, really scared. I mean, I’ve been scared before. I was scared during exams. I was frightened I might fail and I haven’t even finished all of those. I was terrified during firearms training; scared I’d be called on to kill somepony. I pushed through because...because I believed...”

Letting my head fall to one side, I pursed my lips. “Believed in what? The Princesses?”

He threw his hooves up and huffed, “I don’t know! I believed that there was going to be a happy ending to everything. I mean, I’ve seen Princess Luna in person! I didn’t talk to her or anything, but she’s amazing. She’s still just a pony, though, just like you and me. The Princesses have done incredible things and...and it’s just down to you and me and whoever else to try to save them. Mortals. You know what I mean? We’re little ponies, scrabbling in the dirt for answers. Not Princesses. Not alicorns. Not gods. Just us.”

Studying his dark grey face for a moment, I flicked my eyes at the stairs. “Cereus, whatever is up there...whatever is going on, I’m facing it because if I don’t, my friends die. Two months ago, I was ready to go in the ground myself. Whatever you choose to believe, I’ve seen the other side and if someone, somehow managed to kill Celestia and Luna, I promise you...this isn’t the end. We raised the moon and lowered the sun before them. We’ll do it long after they’re gone. Whatever you want to believe, it’s none of my business. Today is my business. Today, you’re alive and you can fight and if I can bring them back...I will.”

The big stallion bit his tongue between his front teeth, then nodded, still looking disturbed by whatever thoughts were running through his mind.

I let out a short, sharp laugh. “Look, go take care of Agent Bloom for me, would you? Buy her a package of MRE’s and a non-alcoholic beverage on me, yeah? There’s one pony who hasn’t had anything to believe in for a very, very long time. She might not act like it, sometimes, but she does actually care about you.”

“How can I tell?” he sighed.

“Well, she whispered, ‘Oh, Cereus, take me now’ when she got drunk and crawled into my cot a few nights ago...”

Cereus finally cracked a grin, his cheeks coloring slightly. “I...um...okay…”

I winked and headed for the stairs.

I don’t know what I thought I’d find when I finally got the pavement under my hooves. Maybe bodies in the streets, screaming children clinging to dead parents, or monsters roaming the alleyways. What I didn’t expect was any semblance of normalcy.

Pushing open the door tucked away from the street, peering out around a dumpster as I stepped into the half-light of the eclipse. If one didn’t look at the sky, you could almost believe it was just any other evening.

I tugged my hat low, wishing I could tell what time it was. The clock said after midnight when I left the Warehouse.

The street beside the dumpster was as empty as ever; the only sign something might be wrong in the city was a few streetlights which seemed to have been knocked out and not repaired. I tried to remember where I’d seen that payphone the last time I’d been to the Warehouse and back, but the nearest I could place it was somewhere due east, so I set off in that direction.

The sounds of the city were muted, and I realized for the first time in a long time, that I could see the clear sky in the direction of city center. That meant the weather factories were off. Stars shone in the half-light of the eclipse. No traffic rolled the late night streets, and no sirens sang in the darkness. It was all eerily quiet, particularly for a city that’d been very recently on the verge of madness.

Pulling the map I’d gotten from Cereus before we left the Warehouse out of my pocket, I checked it for a moment, then tried to look casual as I turned it right side up for whoever might be watching.

It took a half hour of wandering to find the diner I’d met Taxi at, not for the least reason that their sign was out and the windows were boarded. A splash of paint across the plywood read ‘Looters will be shot, fried, and served’.

The payphone out front had been vandalized, the book torn out, and the glass on one side cracked, but when I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Sorting through my pockets, I found a couple spare bits and fed them into the slot, dialing the first number I could remember. Hoping against hope, I shut my eyes and waited. The line began to ring.

“T-t-this is the C-c-city M-Morgue...Y-your place for fun, fu-funerals, and family—”

“Thalassemia, it’s me. Don’t say my name. You know who this is. Say yes, if you understand.”

“I...um...y-yes…”

“Is Stitch there?”

“H-he’s o-out on a pick up ri-right now, but—”

“Good. Get him on the radio and tell him he needs to make another ‘pick up’.”

Big Betty is probably in the top three least discreet methods of getting from place to place in Detrot. Me—being wanted by basically everyone with a badge or a government pension within city—I’d have chosen something stealthier, like riding Cerberus covered in Hearth’s Warming Eve lights while a rock band gave a carol concert at five hundred decibels on his back.

Still, when that giant pink monstrosity nosed its way around the end of the street I couldn’t help but smile. Her headlights were like two tiny suns in jam jars, designed for piercing magical darkness, but I didn’t mind a little blindness for the familiarity it lent me.

Seven days was a long time to be away from my city, particularly being as my best sources of information were a maddeningly over-complicated wartime surveillance map with badly incomplete coverage, a surly, paranoid accountant/secret agent, and her happy-go-lucky intern.

Betty’s loud hailers blared their cheery tune as she tootled down the avenue at about the speed of a city bus with an opiate addiction, steering the gigantic nose of the truck around a parked cab and managing to avoid taking off the side-view mirror by the width of a layer of paint. I stood in the overhang of the closed diner as I flagged him down with my hat.

The truck pulled to a stop in front of me, the brakes letting out a hiss of pneumatics as the music cut out.

Slip Stitch stuck his head out of the window and grinned maniacally at me. His mane was wilder than I’d ever seen it.

“Detective! I shouldn’t be surprised to see you alive, and yet I always am! I’d have been disappointed if you managed to die somewhere I couldn’t collect you!”

“No such luck, I’m afraid,” I replied, trotting around to the other side of the truck. I stared at the door for a moment, trying to figure out how to get up to it. It was higher than my head.

“One moment, Detective. It’s been such a busy week I’ve barely had time for coffee, donuts, and cheese cake! I see you’re still carrying our dear sweet little griffin girl, yes?”

I peered back at Mags, who wiggled in her sleep and let out a tiny yawn.

“Sweet? Sometimes. Griffin? Very much. She’s a right hoof full. Still, we’ll catch up on the way. I want to get off the street.”

“Rightly so, I shouldn’t wonder. Up you go!”

The door popped open and a row of folding metal stairs clattered into place on a mechanical hinge. Pulling myself in beside Stitch, I swung Mags down into my forelegs and settled back into the leopard print passenger seat. She nestled closer and I gathered my coat in on either side, giving her a warm place to rest.

“My, my, Detective. A week and you’re already making a decent foalsitter,” Stitch commented. I glared at him.

“This wasn’t exactly my choice, now is it? She’s the one who didn’t want to spend her week eating ice-cream and playing with dead bodies. Speaking of that...how is Limerence?”

Stitch’s brow wrinkled and he began the laborious process of turning Big Betty around. It was roughly a thirty seven point turn. “Largely unchanged, I’m afraid. I have an experiment prepared, but I have been busy in a way I think you would find most depressing and I am reluctant to attempt it without family present.”

“Busy…” I turned towards the back of the truck and peered into the compartment. Of the three dozen freezer boxes lining the walls, floor to ceiling, the lights were on beside more than half of them. “Merciful skies, Stitch...What’s been going on out here?”

“The mortality rate amongst the old and infirm was very high after what is being called ‘The Darkening of Equestria’ by the papers. I am given to go where I will, because few want bodies moldering in the streets, but...Detective, the city is under siege…”

I blinked at him as Betty passed between two cars that’d been turned sideways into the road to form a make-shift check-point in the middle of the street. We weren’t in one of the best neighborhoods, but by no means in one of the worst. In the alleys beside the road, I could see groups of four or five ponies standing, just watching us pass through. I couldn’t be sure with the low light, but I thought most of them were armed.

“I’m seeing something bad, but...under siege?”

“You don’t know, do you? Dragons have appeared to the north and south of the city.”

“Dragons?!” I barked, then quieted as Mags let out an unhappy noise and dug her claws into my fetlock gently. “W-what are they doing?”

He tapped his horn, which let out a cheerful blast loud enough to deafen ponies in the next county, gently encouraging a cabbage vendor to get out of the street. As we rolled by, the merchant glared up at us. More particularly he glared at me. Huh. Funny thing.

“It’s a deliciously maddening little mystery, no?” Stitch replied, grinning. “Dragons! As to their aims, I am afraid no one knows. They seem content to simply wait, but it has been enough to disincline anypony from attempting to leave the city. No one has an exact count, but it was enough to set off the dragon sirens last week, if you’ll remember. At least four to the north and six to the south, though I have heard accounts of as many as ten on either side. Telegraph and phone lines with greater Equestria have been down since a day after the Darkening. Courier services won’t send their ponies into the jaws of the dragons.”

“We’re cut off, then,” I muttered.

“That isn’t the most fun part, Detective! Are you aware that our dear mayor has actually imposed Martial Law?”

I sagged a little bit in my chair. “That blithering idiot tried to push Jade to enforce it, you mean. She knows the laws. Only the Princesses or a regional governor can enforce martial law and only the Royal Guard can execute it. To my knowledge, there isn’t enough Royal Guard presence in Detrot to fill a phone booth.”

Stitch shook his head. “Perhaps a few more than that, but...the point remains. Still, it wasn’t Jade he tapped for that particular mission. It was Broadside and the P.A.C.T.”

My eyes almost popped out of my head at that.

I couldn’t keep my voice down at that. “Snifter put those psychotic gun jockeys in charge of keeping peace in the city?!”

Mag’s eyes slowly opened and she groaned, pushing herself up. “Mmm, Har’dy...I be tryna sleep...”

“Sorry, honey. Stitch and I—”

At the coroner’s name, her head shot up so quick she almost beaned me in the chin. “Stitchy? Oh! Ice-cream pony! I didn’t be seeing you there!”

“I’m here, my dear. Is this pony taking good care of you?” Stitch asked, giving her a smile that would have melted a heart of solid diamond. It radiated care and affection, safety and kindness.

Mags bobbed like a pigeon, purring loudly. “He don’t be letting me have ice-cream for breakfast, but Har’dy be the best egg pony. He take me strange places, but I get to meet bat pony Cer’eus and grumpy Bl’oom! Then we be making snow flowers out of ‘tax wreckers’, whatever those be, and play board games and chase Cer’eus all around the Warehouse and eat ‘Emm’arr’eees’. Those be having the funny bubble gums in them.”

“Bat ponies, you say? I haven’t met a dusk pony in a few years,” Stitch chuckled, pulling something out of his pocket and passing it to her. It was a little package wrapped in brown paper. Mags sniffed it for a half second, then let out a happy squeal and tore it open with her talons, revealing a chunk of raw, bloody meat.

“Oh Stitchy be best pony there ever be!”

I rolled my eyes as my ward started into her little meal. “Stitch, I hope you didn’t just get her something out of one of your freezers…”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Detective. I haven’t had an actual cannibalism accident in months!”

Miles rolled by as Big Betty navigated block after fortified block.

I wanted to grill Stitch about the condition of the city, but it was quickly becoming evident. We passed through a half dozen more of those strange checkpoints, built of various flavors of junk or vehicles, manned by ponies, griffins, and even once a group of zebra. I noticed lines of ponies at some of the stops, waiting to get through, while others were little more than two individuals with guns standing on either side of a fence. Once, what I thought was a P.A.C.T. patrol flew by overhead and everypony on the street scattered into nearby buildings and tenements.

As we neared the Morgue, the checkpoints stopped and the city became more like its old self. Buildings had their bottom floors boarded and lined with barbed wire. Windows were barred and weapons seemed to be everywhere,from makeshift clubs to hoof guns, but ponies were on the street, conducting business at market stalls and conversing with their neighbors. It was almost normal, if anything could be called ‘normal’ under the unblinking eye of the eclipse.

When we turned the final corner onto the Morgue, I couldn’t hold in a gasp of astonishment.

In the vast, normally empty parking lot out front of the Morgue, a huge ‘tent city’ had sprung up. There were row upon row of dark green Royal Guard issue medical tents set up with a wide avenue between them leading right up to the front doors of the factory itself. Hundreds of ponies were there, moving in and out of the tents, carting great pallets of supplies, levitating boxes of food and pulling gurneys with unconscious unicorns laid out on them. It was a truly breathtaking sight; at once, heartwarming and horrifying.

What had happened to my city?

As Big Betty turned onto the open space that lead to the Morgue, a whole herd of children peeked out of several of the tents and let out whoops of excitement. There were kids of every species Detrot had ever known; ponies, zebras, griffons, a few yaks, young deer, and even a trio of bright blue dragonlings. I hadn’t seen young dragons in years, though a few of the smaller dragon species had apparently taken up residence in Detrot while I wasn’t looking.

The group rushed up to the truck like a multi-colored riot and stood on either side, looking up expectantly. Stitch slowed down and turned to me.

“Detective, would you object to walking? I must do...ahem...a thing, as it were.”

I shrugged and pulled my hat brim down, sliding out from behind the passenger console. The door popped open and the stairs rattled down, but the kids didn’t even bat an eyelash as I stepped down amongst them. It took me a second to realize Mags wasn’t behind me.

I turned to see her sitting on the bottom step, peering up at the truck then at the gaggle of children.

“Don’t ruin your dinner, kiddo,” I chuckled, then pointed toward the big pink building in the middle of it all. “Meet me up there, alright?”

Mags nodded and bounced down beside another griffin chick who grinned and made a bit of room for her. They started whispering back and forth as I waded through the kids in the direction of the Morgue.

Behind me, a cheer went up, along with what sounded like some fireworks and a happy jingle. Smiling to myself, I trotted a little quicker.

Death and ice-cream had saved the day, once again.

Act 3 Chapter 4: Lets Get Ready To Rumble!

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 3 Chapter 4: Lets Get Ready To Rumble!

While we live in a world of hoof-cannons, kinetic spells, and Weapons of Mass Discord, there are always times where the sheer convenience of a hoof or claw simply cannot be beaten. At times, in the course of any dubious exchange, the fighting must get down and dirty. Thus has developed a commonality amongst every sapient form of life: Martial Arts.

From the pegasi ‘Rolling Thunder’ kata, to the zebran ‘Zetaro’ style, to a griffin discipline that translates clumsily into ‘Tear-Your-Face-Off-And-Eat-It’, martial arts are designed to play to a species’ strengths in close combat. In the end, they all roughly boil down to ‘wailing the tar out of an opponent because civil negotiation has broken down and a baseball bat is not close to mouth,’ but for that, a surprising amount of ingenuity, meditation and thought has been placed into each such activity.

For instance, the draconic style which translates roughly to ‘Breath of Terror’ emphasizes a form of controlled hyperventilation. Since most dragons are known to breathe fire, acid, ice, and/or any one of a hundred other dangerous magical exhalations, a master of the Breath is said to be able to expel an endless stream of violent death at any would-be assailant.

As with any martial art, knowledge and practice are not without a hint of personal risk, mostly in the form of strained muscles, broken bones, or electrocution from training. In the case of ‘Breath of Terror’, though, a slight possibility exists that even a skilled practitioner might explode in battle. Some dragons – especially adolescent dragons - consider this a good thing in the grand scheme; to kill one’s opponent by detonating in their face is still to kill your opponent, though older dragons value their remaining lives more highly. There exist, however, legends of dragon lords who were able to blow themselves up repeatedly in the heat of battle and live to tell the tale.

Since equines have, throughout their history, been prey to a vast range of larger, more naturally armed, more aggressive species, one would think they would have perfected the art of hiding more quickly than the art of close combat. Not so. Equine hoof-to-hoof techniques are considered some of the most vicious, since ponies have had to kick their way out of a list of stomachs down through the ages. Skilled Earth Ponies shatter boulders with a kick; A Pegasus can leave lightning or ice in the wake of a strike with focused weathermancy. Even the mightiest of hydras and manticores should be at least a bit wary of the shouting miniature horse wearing a karate gi, lest he find himself with a lethal case of indigestion.

-The Scholar

The trip across the city was quiet enough, since Slip Stitch was taking a long skirting road around the middle of the city. Quiet with Stitch was a relative term, since he insisted on playing the ice-cream jingle at full volume most of the way.

A couple of times, as we approached certain checkpoints, he ordered us into the back between the freezers. None of the guards stopped us for long, but as we approached Sky Town I could feel Mags getting a little bit agitated.

Out the windows, great floating cloud structures tethered to the buildings loomed like dark thunderheads in the ever-present dusk of the eclipse. A few black dots swept and swooped around them in orderly patterns, like flights of small birds, but the distance was deceptive. They were definitely griffins, organized and on patrol.

A griffin war party in Detrot, unmolested and unchallenged by the powers of the P.A.C.T. or police? Something about that struck me as fundamentally wrong. Still, it wasn’t any more wrong than anything else that’d happened recently.

The griffins hadn’t bothered with a barricade around Sky Town, but as soon as we turned down one of the avenues boxed in on both sides by tall buildings, a group of no less than eight war-makers in full battle gear dropped out of the air, landing in front of Big Betty. Stitch slammed on the brakes, bringing her to a halt less than three inches from the lead bird’s upraised talon.

Their leader was, if anything, a little smaller than his compatriots, which was odd for a griffin, but if you’ve spent any amount of time around warrior cultures you start to realize that the little guy who manages to make it despite his size is the one to watch out for. He had enough scars crisscrossing his face to look like a crossword puzzle and splotchy brown feathers had been torn out in clumps all around his mane. His tartan wasn’t familiar, but he hadn’t ordered his crew to attack, either.

“Oi! Ponies! Get out ye motor! Noice and slow!” he ordered. “If ye be armed, keep yer jaws shut and ye legs where Oi can see ‘em!”

Mags ducked under the collar of my coat and I carefully opened Big Betty’s door. The steps rattled into place and I descended slowly, keeping my head up, but the brim of my hat down so they couldn’t see my face in the shadows.

“You friends of the Tokan or the Hitlan?” I called out.

The group exchange a glance with one another, then the lead griffin asked, “What be it to ye if we be?”

Deciding to take a chance, I pushed my hat back and stepped into the light.

“Their High Justice would like a word,” I said.

The tall griffin to the left of the leader immediately snatched for a shotgun strapped across his back, but his superior was fast as greased lightning. He reared up on his back legs and smacked him across the beak with a quick one, two, three punch that had my aggressor hitting the asphalt like a bag of wet cement. The leader growled, putting his claw on the bigger griffin’s throat as he struggled to rise.

“Oi knew ye was bought, Calipan,” the war-maker snarled at his pinned foe. “Ye be sneakin’ out at noight, sniffin’ around. So, ye be the one tellin’ them Black Coat boyos where be our patrols, eh?”

Calipan tried to snap his beak at the other griffin’s leg, only earning himself another crack in the nose. The other griffins stood back, seemingly impassive to the little drama taking place.

“What ye owe the Tokan, Draven?” Calipan snarled. “They try to own us! We own they High Justice, we owns them! Black Coats be wantin’ ‘im! Give’em over and we have the Black Coats kill them Tokan scum!”

“Oi owes the Tokan me honor, ye damn fool! Oi sleeps tonoight because Oi know where be moi debts!” the griffin called Draven growled, then swept his pistol out of its holster and brought the weighted handle down on the side of Calipan’s head with a crack that I felt in my chest. Calipan went limp.

Turning to me, Draven sighed and wiped a smear of blood off the end of bottom of his gun with two claws. “Pardon, boyo. Toiny proivate matter needed taking care of. So...ye be the one we be hearin’ all these funny stories of, eh?”

“I suppose I might be,” I murmured, glancing up at Big Betty where Stitch still sat, watching the scene. “I’m afraid I’ve been away for the last week or so and just got back into town, handling my own ‘private matters’. I’m here looking for a little pegasus.”

“Well, ye be the High Justice of the Tokan and Hitlan. Oi see no blood on ye face, but...Oi’d be a mad-griff if Oi didn’t know who ye was,” he said. “Lil’ pegasus ye say? Most ponies be leavin’ when the Tokan and Hitlan comes.”

“Yeah, well this one is kind of...distinctive, get me?” I pulled my lip up and jabbed a toe at the teeth on one side of my muzzle.

“Och! He be meanin’ the demon!” one of the other war-makers—a young female with bright red plumage—piped up.

Draven gave her a dirty look. “Oi know that, ye nit! Oi was tryin’ to get some information ‘afore Oi told’em!” he snapped, giving the unconscious Calipan a good kick in the back. “Get this sack o’ shite back and stick’em in a box somewhere for the sarge to deal with.”

His friend swallowed and lowered her head, her beak clicking shut as she went about the process of loading Calipan onto her back.

Turning back, Draven gave me what I think he meant to be a cheerful smile. It never works all that well with a beak meant for tearing flesh off bone. “Now, then...ye be friend o’ the wee mad pony, eh?”

“If you mean a pegasus with weird teeth, a funny scar on her chest, and a penchant for meat, yeah, that’ll be her,” I answered, waving for Limerence to get out of Big Betty.

“Tich. Aye, that be her, then,” he snorted, turning back to his patrol and twirling his fist in the air. The rest of them took off, flying back towards the cloud structures. “Erm...now, look boyo...Oi can’t leave me patrol, but Oi gives ye a pass until ye gets the roight blood back on ye face.”

Reaching back, he made a tiny cut on his foreleg with the edge of his axe. I stood still as he dabbed a bit of it on his talon, then leaned forward and drew a symbol on my forehead. Limerence was just clambering down and paused to watch the process before dropping onto the pavement and dusting off his vest.

“Shall I need something similar?” Lim asked, pointing at his face.

Draven shook his head. “Ye stays with yer friend here, ye’ll be foine. Don’t go for a wander and have a care who ye speak to. The mad pink truck and the cutter goes back the way he comes. Ye walks from here. Oi’m only givin’ this pass to the two of ye. Anygriff touches ye, tell’em Draven has a blade wi’ their name on it.” He pointed down the road the way he’d come. “Yon little pegasus be most likely at the bar. Four blocks in, two up. Only place wi’ the lights on.”

With that, he took to the air, coasting off in the direction of the cloud buildings hanging above Sky Town to rejoin his squad.

I reached up to touch the coolness on my forehead, but Limerence caught my hoof.

“Don’t, Detective. You deal with griffin tribals, you get used to having blood on you,” he murmured.

“I’m blessed not to have to do it very often, then, I think,” I said.

“Detective!” Stitch called down from the cab of Big Betty. “Mightn’t I be off? I’m afraid the telephones in this area are likely to be out, so you’ll be needing to make your own way to the Vivarium when you are done here.”

“That’s fine, Stitch. How’d you know that was where we were going?”

“Stories, my friend! You hear the stories, but often it’s the ones telling them that are important! Now, I must go. Keep safe. You and your little tribe lady there.”

Mags poked her head up and smiled, waving her talons at the coroner. “G’bye Stitchy!”

“Good bye, my dear! Take care of the Detective for me, would you?”

I felt her nod.

“I be!”

Limerence and I walked side by side into Sky Town. Mags had retreated to my collar, where she was peering around in all directions. There was a noticeable deficit of pegasi, particularly for what was ostensibly a very mixed-species portion of the city. That worried me a bit, but I’d seen previous emergencies that sent everypony running into their homes with doors shut and windows barred. Speciesists would never admit it, but ponies are known to be a bit skittish.

Giving my hat to Mags to cover herself, we followed the directions that Draven had given us. I’d expected at least some interest, but strangely enough no-one seemed inclined to bother us. A few bright, golden eyes peered out of windows or down from clouds, but all went back about their business within moments.

“You mind explaining something to me?” I asked. Lim shrugged and I took that as a sign to continue. “Alright, so that Calipan fellow tries to turn us in to the P.A.C.T. for a reward, but we’re walking down the boulevard free as you please. Where is the P.A.C.T.? He can’t have been the only opportunist.”

Limerence nodded his horn at my forehead. “It is a simple matter of politics. We were not protected when Mister Calipan attempted that little maneuver. High Justice only grants you immunity from violence between the Tokan and Hitlan. It gives you a measure of protection amongst others, so long as you wear the blood. Particularly those who would call themselves allies of the two great tribes.”

“So Draven just...slapped on a fresh coat of protection, then?”

“As I understand it, he pledged his own tribe’s protection upon you as ‘guest’ for the duration. It is a bit less formal than High Justice and shan’t protect us from those who are his most direct enemies. It would be seen as shaming his tribe to kill us.”

“Ugh, griffin politics make City Center look positively cheery.”

“Quite.”

The Pit.

That daft griffin had directed us to The Pit, better known as Pollick’s Interspecies Taphouse. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. At the end of the world, if one dive was going to keep its doors open, it was Pollick’s place.

So the story goes, Pollick was an idealistic young unicorn from some noble family out of Canterlot. He moved to Detrot during the boom years and found himself hard up for money. His father’s first wife—Pollick’s mother—was another pony, but his second was a griffin baker of considerable skill from old Griffinstone.

Pollick—having been raised in a dual species household—inherited some very interesting ideas about how the two species should coexist, not the least of which included some highly questionable varieties of entertainment. When he finally had his own place, he set out to make his mother and father proud.

Since then, the Pit’s success had led to a string of restaurants, pubs, and various other enterprises all across Equestria that kept him rolling in bits. Despite that, Pollick’s place survived as a major money pot and occasional tourist attraction for the vacationer with cash to burn.

After all, the entertainment was the reason the The Pit had survived the war and many dark times besides. It was a place of almost universal interest to a more rough-and-tumble brand of Equestrian; In my younger years, I’d proudly counted myself amongst them.

The Pit was one of the only places in all of Equestria you could go to see full contact mixed-species martial arts.

From outside, the Pit looked like a pub stolen out of an adventure novel. Log cabin-chic was a trend before the Crusades, but it had died out around the time flammability became an ongoing concern. It was the only building on the street that seemed to be doing any business.

Three stories high and as big as half a city block, it would give most regular log cabins a run for their money, but it still maintained a sort of homey feeling, despite the size. The trees that had been used to make the walls must have been great grandfathers of the woods; each one was thrice as big around as my barrel. They’d been tempered and treated with thick, sticky tar that glistened in the half-light of the eclipse. Through the gigantic, frosted glass window one could see a warm glow of firelight and moving bodies on the first floor, while a few individuals wandered about on the second floor balconies, sharing drinks and laughter.

On the swinging sign above the door, a rearing griffin had one leg draped around the shoulders of a young, smirking stallion. In the background, a dragon did battle with a zebra who was tumbling acrobatically through the air.

There was nopony watching the door, but then that was hardly surprising. The Pit never had a cover charge or a line out front, but you could guarantee good beer if you didn’t mind the possibility of getting torn fur or someone else’s teeth in it. If one sat ring-side, that could easily happen.

I felt a chipper smile break out on my face as we trotted down the empty street towards the bar where it sat between some cloud-anchored tenements.

“Detective, this place smells,” Limerence muttered, stopping outside the front door. He grimaced and waved a hoof in front of his muzzle. “It reeks of beer, vomit, and blood.”

My smile grew into a grin. “I know, right? Best thing in the world! I haven’t been down here in years. I wonder if Pollick still has that collection of body parts over the bar...”

“B-body parts?” Lim stammered.

“Oh, yeah,” I replied, waving a hoof as I trotted up to the door. “House rule used to be if you lose it, the house claims it, at least according to the rumors. I doubt Pollick ever really enforced a rule like that, but that didn’t stop him making friends with a good taxidermist. These days I doubt they keep anything bigger than a claw or a hoof—”

“Detective, what are we walking into?” he demanded, grabbing my coat-tails in his teeth to pull me to a stop.

“I could tell you, but I’d hate to ruin the surprise. Let’s go find Swift. Mags, keep your head down in here.”

Ahhh, a good bar.

It’d been so long since I was in one. Sure, the Vivarium served booze, along with a half dozen other places I’d been in recent months, but a proper bar isn’t about what they sell; it’s about how you feel when you’re there.

The Pit was good bar. Order food less than an hour before closing time and it would give you the trots. The beer was cold, though, and you didn’t have a menu of ‘microbrews’ or ‘hoof-crafted’ or any other poncy nonsense. There was beer and that was all.

I swept open the door, shut my eyes, and drew in a heady breath of the stale, rank air. It smelled like alcohol, sex, tobacco, Zapp, blood, cooking food, and...griffins. Lots of griffins.

I opened my eyes and stared around at the bar.

“Sweet skies,” I muttered.

“Why, pray-tell, are we in a griffins-only bar, Detective?” Limerence asked.

He wasn’t kidding.

The front room of Pollick’s was a single story with a low ceiling to discourage flight and wooden cross-beams every few meters hung with dangling, magical glow lamps, lending the whole place a dimly lit, intimate feel. The wooden bar, which stretched down the left-hoof wall up to a curtained doorway, was more scarred than a griffin battle-master. Above it, whatever strange things had caught Pollick’s fancy were arrayed on a little shelf that followed the bar; a few stuffed griffin or pegasus wings which were molting where the glue was thin, beer-cans from about twelve different countries, two shrunken changeling heads with flaking paint, and so on.

The tables and seating arrayed across the middle of the floor were a mix and match affair taken from the survivors of whatever thrift store Pollick shopped at when an appreciable amount of his furniture was broken.

And every single one of those seats was full of a griffin backside from what looked like fifteen or sixteen tribes, judged by pelts and clothing. The only ponies in the room were three bartenders and couple of waitresses who were keeping tight, strained smiles on their faces as they moved from table to table, taking orders and swatting grabby claws.

I couldn’t see what was through the curtained doorway, but I could hear cheering voices from that direction. Swift didn’t seem to be in the front room. I swallowed as several heads came up. One or two jiggled their friends and pointed in my direction. Soon there were many more eyes on me.

I was suddenly very aware of the blood on my forehead and my new magic-proofed vest. The former because it was, in practical terms, just a smear on my face and the latter because wearing it meant that—while I was surely in good standing if an opponent decided to shoot me with spellfire—I was decidedly unprotected against all those sharp talons, axes, clubs, and guns.

Silence gradually descended over the bar.

All those eyes felt like they were drilling holes in my forehead.

I grimaced and it might have looked like a smile if you had a severe, untreated astigmatism. Limerence edged in beside me.

“Well, Detective...your show,” he said out of the corner of his muzzle.

Forcing myself to move, I trotted for the nearest bartender. She was a slightly put-upon looking unicorn with sandy fur and one crooked eye who was half-way to pouring a glass and the whiskey was quickly running over, spilling onto the counter as she stared at me, open mouthed. Her horn shimmered as I approached and winked out, sending the bottle clattering to the bar.

The griffin she was serving hastily got out of my way and several besides on either side pressed back, vacating their stools like I’d just come into the bar on fire. I glanced at the guy who’d just hopped out of my way. He was the size of a truck, with a sword a meter long across his back, but when he looked at me, his eyes were full of an emotion I wasn’t entirely familiar with having aimed in my direction; fear. Real, authentic, bona-fide fear.

I had to resist the urge to go ‘Boo!’, just to see how many tails I could soil.

Grabbing the recently emptied stool, I slid onto it and propped my chin on my hooves.

“Morning, Miss,” I murmured and the bartender jumped. “You know who I am?”

Her eyes darted left and right, as though hoping I was talking to somepony else. After a moment, she nodded. Swift and I were going to have a very long conversation.

“I’m looking for a pegasus—”

Before I could finish, she pointed towards the curtain at the back of the bar, just as another cheer went up from behind it. There was a mare’s tail poking out between the curtains. Whatever was going on back there sounded like a riot.

“Y-you’ll have to talk to Mrs.Martini,” the girl muttered, keeping her gaze on the bar itself.

I touched the brim of my hat. “Thank you kindly. Can I get two beers?”

“Detective, I don’t need alcohol—” Lim started to say, but I cut him off.

“Lim, you will drink the beer and you will say thank you,” I growled, then turned back to the bartender. “What do I pay you with? I hear bits aren’t too popular these days.”

The girl was about to answer, but her muzzle snapped shut and her eyes widened as she peered over my shoulder. I heard a loud thump behind me, followed by the sound of moving metal. Gently freeing my pistol bit, I prepared for violence.

The bartender slowly sank below the level of the bar.

“Har’dy. Turn around,” Mags whispered, sliding down my back until she could drop out of the bottom of my coat, ducking behind my tail for cover.

Slowly rotating on my stool, I came muzzle to chest with a mountain of brown fur.

“Hey me boyo!”

I found myself mushed face first into that huge mound of fuzz, being squeezed by a pair of limbs that could double as industrial vices. My survival instincts kicked in and I let out a pitiful whimper, hoping my assailant would have mercy and not crush me to death before Limerence could figure something to do about the situation.

After a good five seconds longer than necessary, right as I was about to lose consciousness, the beast let go and I gasped for breath, holding myself up with one hoof on his chest.

“Sykes...I swear! What did I tell you about hugging ponies? We have bones, dammit!” I groaned, patting my chest to make sure nothing was broken. The big galoot just grinned down at me, cheerfully pushing my hat off so he could ruffle my mane.

The massive bastard looked good.

He’d ditched the ridiculous suit in favor of a familiar tartan and a lochaber axe across his back. His dark brown mane was well groomed with a bit of grease and a pair of feathers that looked like they might be his brother’s dangled from a leather thong tied in fur. Even his combat vest was non-standard, though he still wore his badge on a chain tucked into the front pocket.

He looked every bit the griffin tribal warrior and happier for it.

“Tch, me boyo, ye be an earth pony! Yer lot made o’ sturdy stuff!” Sykes cackled, then let out a yelp and ducked his head between his front knees. Reaching down, he snatched up a ball of flailing fur by the scruff of her neck. “Now, who be this bundle of trouble? And ‘owed ye be gettin’ in here?”

Mags dangled from his talon, making what I’m sure she thought was an intimidating growl. “Ye be leavin’ my egg pony alone!” she chirped, swiping at him with her claw.

I put a toe under her chin and raised her eyes. “Now, Mags...what did I tell you? If you’re going to fight a male, particularly one bigger than you are—”

She lowered her head, tail lashing back and forth. “Get between he back legs, get he bits in my beak and give’em a good rip. I remembers.”

“That’s right. Legs are only vulnerable if you get an artery, but the jewels are always golden.”

Sykes gave me a confused look as he set Mags carefully on the bar. She darted over and clambered up on my back.

“Oi’m glad she didn’ remember that lesson jus’ now. Still, egg pony, Hardy?” he asked as the noise in the bar started to return to a more normal level. None of the other griffins seemed inclined to get near enough to overhear our conversation.

“It’s just a thing she says...”

“Oh, did that slip your mind, Detective?” Limerence chuckled, taking a stool beside me. “Our foolish friend here sold himself to the Nursemaid’s Guild last week in exchange for being allowed into the hatchery during the crisis at the Moonwalk.”

Sykes’ eyes went as round as dinner plates. “Pull the other one, me son. It’s got bells on!”

I sighed and rubbed my ear fur as Mags dug her little claws into the back of my neck, protectively. “I’m afraid he’s not kidding.”

He let out a laugh that momentarily deafened me and I cringed as he smacked me on the back a couple of times.

“Bwaaahahaha! Detective Hard Boiled! A bloody nursemaid! That's rich!”

Shutting my eyes, I swung back around and slumped onto the bar. The bartender had put two beers in front of me and scuttled off to the other end of the building. I grabbed the nearest one and sucked down three muzzle-fulls like it was the nectar of life.

“I suppose you haven’t heard what happened to the Nursemaid Guild, then?” I asked.

He sobered quickly, letting out a long sigh. “Aye, Oi heard. Only bits and pieces, moind. Sad t’ing, that. It be mostly...well, yerself, Esmerelda, and her daughter what survoive the Moonwalk. Enough to rebuild, but...well, wherever ye’ve stashed the Hitlan and Tokan eggs, it probably be safer wi’ barely any Guild to protect’em roight now.”

I rooted through my pocket and slapped down a heap of bits that probably would have made the bartender’s night a couple weeks ago, then got back on my hooves.

“I was worried that might be the case, honestly. You seen Swift lately? The guy that put this blood on my face told me she was here.”

Sykes glanced at my forehead. “Aye, that be Draven’s symbol. Oi know’em. Good bloke, he is. As for yer wee birdy—” He then turned to look towards the curtain into the fighting pit. I blinked a couple times at what else was strapped to his back.

“Hey! I asked you to watch that. Not adopt it!”

Sykes peered guiltily over his shoulder where he wore my chromed shotgun in a beautifully inlaid leather quick-draw holster. A bit of color came into his cheeks. “Awww, Oi were just lookin’ after the pretty t’ing. Honestly, Oi were!”

Reaching back, he tugged the weapon loose and held it protectively in both forelegs, gently stroking the barrel with an expression bordering on adoration. Glancing up at me, he did his best to give me a sad pout face. Ugh. Griffins and their shiny crap.

I reached out and grabbed the shotgun in my teeth, dragging it out of his arms. Mags hopped down so I could wiggle one leg out of my coat, sweeping it back to jam the shotgun’s stock into my gun-harness. Sliding the cocking mechanism into place, I made sure the safety was on, then pointed it at the ground and took up the trigger slack. He’d oiled the gun within an inch of its life and the whole thing gleamed like a Canterlotian whore’s jewelry.

“If I’m still alive come Hearth’s Warming Eve, I’ll give it back in a box with a big red bow,” I said at his crestfallen expression. “Right now, I need the hardware. We need to talk once we get Swift back.” Holding out a leg, I let Mags hop back into place, wiggling down the back of my coat.

“Aye, yer girly be here,” Sykes murmured, nodding towards the back. “Oi takes care of her, just loike last toime. Not as she needs it. Scary little beast she be...”

“If you don’t mind my asking, what does that mean?” Limerence asked, sliding his untouched beer away.

“Ye’ll see, says Oi.”

The eyes of every griffin in the room were on my back as we trotted toward the fighting pits. It was making my neck itch.

Just what had Swift been telling people while I was gone?

The cheers were nearing a fever pitch. I could only see a shapely backside in a long skirt poking out of the curtain. Her tail was a slightly off shade of green, same as Pollick’s. Come to think of it, same as the bartender’s, too. Pollick’s daughters, then. That explained why they were at their posts when the whole rest of the city was taking time off to lose its mind.

Sykes tapped her on the flank and one of her rear legs shot out, narrowly missing his nose. She yanked her head out of the curtain and snapped, “Hey, big boy! You want I should bust that beak in half?! I’ll do it!”

Her mane was a little disheveled and a bottle of bourbon was clutched in her hoof.

“Pardon meself Mrs. Martini. It be Oi,” Sykes said, cheerfully, adjusting his combat vest.

The mare’s expression softened. She had the face of somepony who’d been ridden hard and put up wet one too many times, a little tipsy and with eyes that wouldn’t focus, but her smile was genuine enough. “Oh...Sykes. You in to watch the fight tonight? Or just buy me some more drinks and tell me I’m beautiful? I could do with some more of that.”

“Heh, much as Oi’d like that, moi sweet, Oi’ve brought a couple friends,” he replied, jabbing his thumb-claw at me.

Her eyes darted at me, then she dropped her bottle of bourbon. Sykes caught it before it hit the ground. I was getting good at ingratiating smiles, but they didn’t seem to be working.

“Is that...oh Luna’s backside, really?! Him?!” she squeaked, turning her fearful gaze back to my friend. “Are you trying to get us all killed, Sykes? The Black Coats will storm this place in a heartbeat if they know the Justice is here! Get him out of here!”

“Now lass,” he started to say, offering her the bottle. She took it automatically and swallowed a mighty belt, then huffed and marched forward, pushing her forehead against his chest. She might as well have tried to move a wall, but the intent was clear.

“No, no ‘Now lass’ with me, you sweet t-talking *hic* bird! You get gone and take your stupid friends with you!” she grumbled.

Sykes sank onto his haunches as she futilely tried to push him back towards the door.

He gave me an apologetic smile, then put his arms around her, gently but firmly pushing her back. “Mrs. Martini, ye know moi kin will keep ye safe. That ye must trust. Moi friends be not here bringin’ trouble. Besoides, moi kin’s drinkin’ barter is good as every other, innit?”

She let out a loud harrumph and slumped onto her belly on the dirty floor. “I...I guess,” she muttered. “At least you lot pay your tabs... and you kept that crazy pegasus in line. I assume he’s here for her?”

Sykes nodded. “S’roight.”

Getting to her hooves, Mrs. Martini swigged the bottom of her bottle, then stared at it as she realized it was empty. Her eyes didn’t seem quite willing to focus in the same direction. “Well...well…*hic*...Could you at least wait till the fight is over? She thinks she’s still paying off all that furniture what she busted up when Greva and Elmer tried to claim one’a them bounties.”

I took a step forward and asked, curiously, “Payingoff what now?”

Martini smirked, setting her empty bottle back on the nearest table and straightening her skirt with one hoof. “Ayep. Your little friend...heh...she rolled four of my customers but good, Mister Justice. She paid that lot off after the first night. Still, I give room and board and the griffins have their own ways of paying for things. Little song-bird thinks it’s her pretty little poems what is paying for her to sleep here. I couldn’t exactly toss’er out after the first night, though. Customers like her an’ I think them Hitlan would trash the place if I told’em she had to leave...“

“What...exactly has she been up to, if not singing for her supper?” I asked.

She took a couple steps back, and held the curtain open for us. “Heh! Why don’t you come see? It looks like the last fight is starting.”

Sweat and blood, mingled together to produce a thick bouquet that set my heart racing. Oh, what a night for a fight!

The cheering from inside was almost deafening and the room was smogged with wisps of smoke from a hundred howling griffins, rattling their blades, shouting at the top of their mighty lungs and puffing at their pipes. It was a huge space, built to accommodate every species imaginable.

There were chairs for minotaurs, benches for yaks, and perches dangling from the ceiling for flying species. Nearly every available surface was packed with griffins from more tribes than I could name, though a few dedicated ponies were sitting in on proceedings.

The Decagon was a caged pit sunken into the dirt floor a little lower than the stands. Its white sands were already stained red in places, but a couple of blood caddies—griffins wearing crimson caps and carrying brooms—were quickly sweeping bits of feathers and other nastiness out of the fighting arena. The walls were just high enough that a pony on hoof couldn’t climb out

While Pollick had designated his place as non-lethal combat only, that never stopped a bit of bloodshed. You can’t get that many different species together for a brouhaha without the occasional gouged eyeball, split lip, or spurting artery. However, his medical staff was second to none in the fighting scene, so death wasn’t common in the Decagon.

That said, I didn’t see his usual nurses down there beside the ring. There were, instead, a trio of gorgeous griffin hens in thick feather makeup, wearing too-tight white shirts with big red-crosses painted on them in something that looked worryingly like encrusted gore.

Martini gave me a light bump with her shoulder and waved at several empty seats in the back row nearest the door. Leaning up to my ear she shouted to be heard over the crowd, “My personal seats! You get’em for now, then get out of my place when the fight is over! You understand me?”

“Not...entirely, but alright,” I called back. I don’t know if she heard me, but she gave me a sharp nod, then trotted back to the curtain and resumed her position.

Thank small mercies that none of the interest of the crowd was on us. They were all watching the ring with thick anticipation as Limerence, Sykes and I scooted in and climbed into our seats.

Down front, a tuxedo-ed old stallion I knew only as ‘Ref’ strutted out into the center of the Decagon as an old fashioned microphone dropped from the ceiling. Taking it in his hoof, he coughed softly and the crowd quieted to a dull roar.

“Laaadies and Gentlebeings! Pollick’s Interspecies Taphouse thanks you for coming out tonight! Before we get to our final bout, Mrs. Martini has asked me to remind you that all barter sales are to be finished before you leave the bar! We’ve got a special for those willing to trade for alcohol and snacks, but we aren’t accepting anything bottom shelf! No hard drugs, no blood debts, no bits!”

Ref waited a moment for everyone to absorb that, then went on, sweeping his hoof back through his thin white mane.

“Now, then! The fight you’ve all been waiting for! One of our long time combatants taking on a newcomer! I give you, the destroyer of Gethixis, the crusher of Tambourine, and the batterer of King Honey Comb! It’s...the Hammer!”

A door on the side of the ring slid open and a griffin the size of a truck padded into the arena. The Hammer might have been a head shorter than Grimble Shanks, but his muscles were less the practical, lean variety one sees on warriors and more the impressive, bulging sort that speak to longtime steroid abuse. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to run into him in a dark alley.

Reaching the center of the ring, he bowed to Ref, then to the audience. His expression was quietly smug.

“For his opponent...She’s been with us for the last six days and has been in the arena for the last five, undefeated!”

“Oh Celestia, you can’t be serious!” I barked, yanking my hat off and holding it to my chest. The crowd was screaming now, so loud I doubt any of them heard me.

Ref continued, “The poet of power, she laid Sarkon low with a full body hold that had him limping for three days! Her words are sharp, but her teeth are even sharper! She’s a pegasus like no other, who eats her meat bloody raw! Proof that dangerous things come in small packages...I give you....Theee Deeemon!”

There was a long pause as the door on the opposite side of the arena opened and a brilliantly orange streak burst out, tried to brake in mid-air and instead tumbled end over end into the middle of the sands. She came to a stop at Ref’s hooves, lying on her back, gasping for air.

“Sorry, sorry! I’m here! I was in the bathroom!” The Demon sputtered, wiping sand off of her tongue with both hooves. The microphone caught every word.

She was minus her combat vest and weapons, but she looked well enough. Her right wing had about a dozen bandaids on it, but that seemed to be the worst of her injuries.

I swallowed, thinking of exactly what her grandmare was likely to do when she found out about this. The Hammer was a monster even by griffin standards. His right front leg was the size of her waist.

“Aye, now we foinally see a thing,” Sykes murmured from my side.

“Sykes, I thought you said you were taking care of her!” I snapped.

“Ye think Oi didn’t try and stop ‘er?”

“I think you should have...I don’t know! Brained her and left her trussed in a room somewhere!”

“Believe me, boyo, Oi thought about it. Then she dislocated Edmund Gutslicer’s back legs in the ring. Oi ain’t be thinkin’ about it much more. That Hammer, though...he’s a nasty piece of work, he is.”

“She’s going to get herself killed,” I groaned, starting to get to my hooves to go down and stop the fight. Limerence put his leg across my back, pushing me down.

“Detective...unless you wish a riot on your hooves, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, into my ear. I sank into my seat, feeling helpless and irritated.

Meanwhile, down front, Swift scrambled upright and smiled apologetically at Ref and her opponent. Her wings were freshly preened, but her mane hadn’t seen gel in at least three days, so the spikes were quickly giving way to wild, magenta curls. Her tail was done up in a tight bun against her backside, wrapped in twine. Very practical, but not very stylish.

The Hammer towered over her, casually brushing a bit of sand out of his feathers as he took position on the opposite side of the field in front of a small white line in the dirt. His smug expression hadn’t changed as he tightened his back muscles, sliding into a bodybuilder's pose that made a couple of hens in the front row swoon.

Trotting over to the opposite line, Swift began shaking out her hooves one at a time, taking quick breaths as she went through some gentle stretching exercises. While the Hammer was flexing and posing for the audience, her eyes never left him, studying his chest and neck. Considering the difference in their sizes, I couldn’t see how it would matter. Even if she’d been an Earth pony, the Hammer was in a weight class with small planets.

“Now, let’s make it a good clean fight! No broken necks or spines, no punctured lungs, and no torn throats!” Ref declared, taking several steps back to the edge of the ring. “Rules are fight till submission, bone break, or unconsciousness! Tap, snap, or nap! Fighters...are you ready?”

The Hammer swung around to face Swift, his rear legs tensing as he nodded to Ref. At the other end, Swift wiggled her hips like a cat and a feral grin spread across her face.

I felt Mags crawling up to get a look at things and hadn’t the heart to push her back down. I was about to witness one of my best friends getting pulled inside out, after all.

Ref drew in a deep breath and shouted, “You may begin!”

For all that size, the Hammer moved fast. He went from a standing position to a mid-air pounce, all claws extended, in the time it took me to blink. It wasn’t a flashy move, or a particularly devious one, but griffins have a frightening quality about them when they’re coming down on you: five of their six ends are pointy. It’s a fairly effective evolutionary adaptation and attacks from above work well against most prey species.

Unfortunately for the Hammer, Swift hadn’t been a member of any prey species I’d ever heard of for some time now.

Rather than try to roll with his attack, she dove forward, leaving him pouncing on empty sand. Coming up behind him right as she landed, her teeth closed around the middle of his tail.

The sound he made was somewhere between a tire deflating and a pig getting cooked alive. He tried to yank his tail free, bucking his rear legs to shove Swift off. He was probably lucky he missed, or he’d have lost that particular anatomical feature.

My partner leapt into the air, beating her huge wings for altitude while maintaining a solid grip as she dove over his head, hauling the Hammer’s rear end over and splaying him out in a heap on his back. He laid there for a few seconds, a stunned expression on his face.

The crowd was shrieking bloody murder.

Swift landed beside him, folding her wings against her sides. Leaning over, she quietly offered him a hoof back to his feet. Giving her a narrow-eyed look as though seeing her for the first time, he took her leg and heaved himself up, then stepped a few meters back.

By all rights, Swift could have bashed his ribs in while he was down and the Hammer could have tried to take her head off when he got a grip on her, but Pollick liked nothing like he liked a show. I could see the Hammer re-evaluating his initial opinions on the ease of the fight.

All around me, griffins were crowing, “Hammer! Hammer! Hammer!”

On some unspoken signal, Swift and the Hammer began to circle one another warily, studying each other’s movements. She took one step forward, he took one step back. His wings tensed and she eased a couple inches to the left. Read, counter-read, adjust.

Just as the audience was getting a tad restless, the Hammer exploded out of his position in a forward charge, aiming to take Swift in the middle. Her eyes widened a little and she reared back, then bounced up using a quick beat of her wings. Both back hooves came down on his beak and she did a quick mid-air loop, dropping onto his shoulders as he skidded face first into the sand.

Leaning down, she hooked one foreleg around his neck and jammed her head alongside his, then tried to reach forward to lock in a sleeper hold. The big bastard’s throat was just too thick and as she struggled, he reached back and got a good grip on her mane.

“Aye, she pulled that on Glitza two nights ago,” Sykes said in my ear. “It work foine then, but that hen be not the Hammer!”

With a heave, he tossed Swift across the ring by her mane. She cartwheeled end over end, wings splayed out as she tried to get her balance in mid-air. I cringed as she hit the wall of the arena and slid to the ground, laying there with her rear hooves dangling in her face as she tried to sort up from down. The Hammer casually blew a few stray strands of magenta mane out of his claws and let that confident smile settle back into place.

“Heh, that be only the third talon Oi’ve seen laid on ‘er in the ring,” Sykes chuckled.

I was too busy leaning forward to watch to reply.

Swift pulled herself onto her side, then to her hooves, shaking a cascade of dust out of her hair. Still grinning at her opponent, she gave him a little dip of the chin and folded her wings in against her sides. The Hammer quirked one eyebrow, then fell back into his battle-stance, forelegs loose and ready, back knees bent and his wings spread for another attack.

He didn’t get the chance.

Blitzing across the distance so quickly it shot a rooster-tail of sand into the audience, Swift pulled up half a meter in front of her opponent. She looped into the air, letting her rear toe come up underneath his chin. At that speed, it turned her foot into a battering ram, snapping his head back.

On damn near anything smaller, it would have been a knock-out blow, but the Hammer still stumbled backwards, dazed and clutching at his beak as blood dripped out of the side of it. He snarled and spat something fleshy on the wall.

I had to wonder what thoughts were going through his mind just then. Most likely thousands of years of griffin development were telling him the little colorful thing was tasty and made of meat. If he was smart, another voice was saying something along the lines of ‘bullets are small and those hurt, too’.

Swift was just landing and, like most pegasi coming down on unstable ground, she was looking at her hooves.

There was no grand pounce, or flashy leap from the Hammer. Bracing his back leg on the wall of the arena, he leaned forward and gave his wings one high powered beat. It turned him into a ballistic missile, screaming towards my partner.

I shot out of my seat, putting both hooves on the back of the bench in front of me.

With a caw of triumph, the Hammer caught her in both front claws, wrapping them around her barrel. Swift struggled valiantly as they shot up into the air, but she had no leverage, her legs flailing helplessly as she tried to elbow him in the ribs. She might as well have been kicking a concrete block for all the damage it was doing.

“Tha’s that then. Damn fool jus' lost it fer' 'imself, ” Sykes sighed and I started to kick my trigger into my teeth, ready to charge down and do...something. I hadn’t really thought much beyond that I didn’t want to watch Swift die in a pit fight, whatever guarantees Pollick might have had in place.

It was at that moment the Hammer made a fatal mistake.

He turned, hauling Swift higher, shifting his weight on top so that when they hit the ground, it would be with her underneath. It freed her wings and the first thing she decided to do was smack him on either side of the head. His ears must have been ringing like a whole orchestra worth of bells, because he immediately lost his balance and began to tumble out of his ascent. She slipped out of his grasp and, before he could gather himself to snatch a knot in her, swung around to bash him across the temple with both wings, one after the other. Each hit let off a crack of passing air that sounded like a snapping whip.

“Ha! Griffin body slam not so good on pegasus, now do it, eh?” Sykes cackled, scratching his neck ruffle.

The drop onto the sands was a solid five meters and the Hammer hit with a thump that echoed around the suddenly very quiet arena. Swift landed beside him a moment later, clutching a bloody spot on her side that looked like several talon marks. She was panting, her wings sagging as she sat on her haunches, one eye on the Hammer for any signs of life.

There were none. He was out like a light, bright red liquid dripping out of his nostrils.

Ref dashed out from the sidelines, slid onto his side, and began the count, punctuating each number with a slap on the ground.

“Five!... Four!... Three!... Two!... Ooone!”

The crowd exhaled all at once and a rush of screaming followed that I could feel right in my chest. I found myself on my hooves, pounding the seats in front of me, whistling like a maniac as all around me, the griffins threw feathers, betting scrips, and pieces of fabric. Swift picked up an especially pretty brown feather with a white tip and waved to the audience, before limping towards Ref to shake his hoof.

From the sidelines the medical hens dashed out to the Hammer, who was just then regaining consciousness. He seemed relatively alright, though he refused the stretcher, opting instead to stumble over to the wall and sink down against the door of the ring, wiping his forehead with the back of his claw as he watched Swift taking her bows. He smiled and shook his head.

“That’s it, ladies and gentlebeings! The Demon has done it again!” Ref shouted, holding Swift’s leg in the air center stage. “Collect your winnings outside!”

I felt a wing slide across my side, covering my body and pulling me in close to Sykes.

“Sykes, you and me have been friends for a long time, but—”

Tucking his beak against the side of my head, he whispered, “There be some unfriendly eyes tonoight. Ye want every griffin in here seein’ ye afore ye can get wee birdy?”

My cheeks heated up and I pulled my hat down over my face, hiding under the great downy blanket as the crowd began to file back into the bar. Mercy, if Taxi had been there I’d have had to kill myself.

Limerence was enjoying my discomfort as he studied one of the betting scrips. “Hmmm...the house take on this fight was considerable. I’ve got a bet here for three bottles of top shelf scotch at four to one odds against Miss Cuddles. I wonder if we might badger Mrs.Martini for a cut—”

“I just want to get out of here, Lim,” I growled. I’d lifted my hat a little and found Swift was no longer in the ring. “Where’d she go?”

“She be in th’ blood works, under the ring,” Sykes replied, nodding to a passing Hitlan. “We give a few minutes for all to clear, then Oi takes ye to ‘er.”

After a quarter hour, only a few small groups of chatting griffins remained in the fighting ring. None of them were paying attention to us, though I had no doubt more than a few of their friends in the bar were telling the tale of how the ‘High Justice’ had trotted right in through the front door.

I was starting to get jumpy when Mrs. Martini sidled up to us, a fresh bottle in hoof.

“Alright Sykes...You and your friends, on your bike. Hear me?” she said, gesturing across the arena towards door that said ‘Employees Only’. “Down those steps, get your little menace, and skat. You can go out the back.”

“Thank ye koindly, Mrs Martini,” he replied, rising from his seat and picking up her hoof, planting a gentlecoltly kiss on it.

Martini blushed in spite of herself and gave him a gentle swat on the side of the head with the bottle. “Shoo! Come back when you make some friends that ain’t such hot tickets.” Retreating to the door, she vanished through the curtain. I heard her say something muffled and the crowd in the bar responded with raucous laughter.

Sliding down from my chair, I stepped out from under Sykes’ wing and straightened my coat. “I’d appreciate if you never told Taxi that hiding me involved...cuddling up.”

“Me beak is sealed!” he replied, snickering.

With Sykes in the lead, Limerence and I worked our way around the outside of the arena to the entrance down into the Blood Works.

Act 3 Chapter 5: Is Fame To Blame?

Starlight Over Detrot Act 3 Chapter 5: Is Fame To Blame?

Princess Celestia, in her thousand year rule, learned many things, but none so thoroughly as the value of reputation. To be a pony of repute is to have an invisible shield against a surprising number of dangerous comers. Being the Princess who raises the sun and moon (for the largest part) had a certain weight, but Celestia was never above a carefully chosen demonstration.

An invasion by the fifth Diamond Dog Reich in B.L.R. 566 was fended off with little more than a missive suggesting Celestia was feeling a bit light headed from all this ‘violent talk’ and might step off the throne for a few hours during a meteor shower, which meant of course that several thousand meteors might not burn up entirely over the Diamond Dog lands.

The profuse apology that followed contained offers of tribute and the heads of the former leadership. It was rebuffed in favor of a pleasant trade negotiation and a further three hundred years passed before the Diamond Dogs felt bold enough to set paw on Equestrian soil. Thus, Celestia’s reputation as a kind and just ruler was further cemented in the minds of world leaders who felt it behooved them more often to just ask nicely when they needed something from her. That, as they say, is the power of reputation.

Since her return, Princess Luna has developed her own reputation and it is one that Princess Celestia has been known to use to great effect during international disputes. Whereas Celestia can be relied upon to find a pleasant, equitable solution to most issues, Princess Luna tends to believe in an iron hoof method of solving problems, as demonstrated during the Cuckoo Incident. While few would disagree that he’d had it coming after the kidnappings at Sun Sweet Orphanage, Griffin Legionnaires still set their watches to the clock made from the remains of General Frederick Flesh Stripper. They consider it a reminder that if one is to force someone to prove their reputation, it’s best done within one's own weight class.

In the modern age, celebrity tends to mean fame rather than a reputation, but wise minds will heed a loud bark, since a large bite may soon follow.

-The Scholar

‘Blood works’ was an apt name; the undercarriage of Pollick’s place stank like a butcher shop in a college gym. I hadn’t been down there before, but the barely lit concrete hall just off the arena still reeked. Another ‘employees only’ door led down a narrow set of steps.

Rows of lockers, each with a name stenciled on a card taped to the front, lined the walls and three curtained stalls sat side by side at the far end. The room was deserted, but one of the stalls was occupied, water trickling into a floor drain just out front.

“Limerence, would you take Sykes and Mags and try to find us some safe passage across town?” I murmured. “I don’t want to take the sewers if I can avoid it.”

Mags stuck her head up and gave me an indignant nip on the ear. “Hey! Egg pony better not be ditchin—”

Turning, I tilted my shoulders so she slid down to where I could pluck her out of my coat and set her on her feet between Sykes front knees. Leaning down so I was on her level, I put a hoof around her shoulders. “I’m not. I just need a few. We’ll be upstairs in a minute. Have Sykes show you his axe. Figure you’ll be big enough to have your own one day soon.”

That seemed to mollify her and she let Sykes pick her up, cradling her in one leg. She began gently batting at one of the braids in his mane as he nodded towards the stall with steam billowing out of it.

“Ye know what yer gonna say, ‘egg pony’?”

“Of course. Now piss off so I can say it.”

Climbing up onto his shoulders, Mags’ gave me a little squint. “This be one of those ‘stupid adult things’, right Har’dy? She be your friend.”

“She’s more than that, kiddo. She’s my partner,” I said, making a little whisking motion in their direction. “Shoo. I got this. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

They filed out, leaving me alone in the blood works with nothing but the steam and the scent of old, caked on sweat and blood.

Celestia save me, I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t that little pony who’d hopped and saluted and listened to her mentally unstable, alcoholic superior as he dragged her into death and horror. A month and some change ago she’d apologized when she popped a guy. I’d just watched her beat a griffin five times her size into unconsciousness...for fun.

That was right, wasn’t it? She’d been smiling the whole time.

Trotting over to one of the benches down the middle of the room, I sank onto it, sweeping off my hat and leaving it beside me. I wiped a hoof down my face, shaking my mane out. A few of Mags’ baby feathers went with it, fluttering to the cold floor.

‘Juni, if you want to show up and give me some pointed advice, now would be the time,’ I thought. The voice in my head remained stubbornly silent.

I kept telling myself I wasn’t guilty, despite the lie of it. It wasn’t me who stole her innocence. She’d decided to follow me. I’d told her, again and again, to stay behind. She was still Swift, even when she was leaving the Hammer with what was likely to be a fantastic concussion.

What did that mean, though? After all the stuff we’d seen, she was still herself; still the writer, still the cop, still following orders to stay in Sky Town even after everything went to pot and she had no reason to believe I was coming back besides a promise made by her alcoholic, potentially schizophrenic partner.

Even when she was trying to rip my throat out back in the Plot Hole, maybe she’d been Swift then, too and some part of her just knew that killing me would save her more pain and vileness.

The water stopped running and the shower curtain swept back.

Swift trotted out of the blood-stained shower stall where a few trickles of slightly red water were still circling the drain. Her eyes were closed as she scrubbed her mane with a clean towel, limping over to the other end of the bench I was sitting on. Her combat vest was folded up there along with a small, white box with pink butterflies on the top; a first aid kit.

Sitting down, she tossed the towel across the back of her neck and stretched her wings out to full extension, wincing as the left one didn’t quite unbend completely. Those claw-marks on her side still looked pretty nasty and there were a few others on her; scrapes and scratches that looked like they’d been healed with magic. A particularly ugly one started on her back thigh and went right down to her knee, but the scar was already faded.

“Kid?” I whispered.

Her eyes snapped open and her wings slapped shut against her sides. Slowly, she turned her head to face me.

“Sir?” she murmured, then slid down onto all fours. I got to my hooves and moved closer, studying her brilliant blue gaze.

“It’s me, kid. Gotta say, I missed—”

Most of the air rushed out of my lungs as she crashed into me, throwing me over onto my back and clinging to my barrel with all four limbs. Even her wings swept down, twitching spasmodically against the floor as she tried to squeeze me half to death. Her head tucked neatly under my chin as I lay there, gasping for breath, covered in pegasus.

I put my forelegs around her and shut my eyes, just laying there holding her tight to my chest. She was soaked from ears to tail, but it didn’t matter. We both needed the contact. She was my partner and it was the end of the world. In those moments, nothing else matters.

It was the door of the locker room opening that finally brought us back to reality. I had a slight cramp in my side where Swift was resting most of her weight and we were both starting to get a little cold.

“Ahem...I can come back later,” Ref murmured, standing over behind a row of lockers.

“No, no...it’s fine,” I replied, gently shifting my partner off of me and rolling onto my side. Swift gathered her front hooves under her chest in a way that reminded me vaguely of a cat as she stretched her back legs out on the floor. “We’ll be leaving soon. Do you need something?”

“Nothing much, Mister Hard Boiled. I’m certain there will be plenty of persons interested in your skin when you’re no longer under the griffon tribe-lord’s protection. Must be a change of pace for you, no?” The old stallion asked, trotting over to us. He still wore the sharp tux, but the bow had been loosened and he had a stack of towels resting across his leg with a strange, slightly curved knife laying on top of them. Setting the knife aside, he picked up the first aid kit and cracked it open, pulling out a strip of packaged bandages. “Miss Cuddles? I have your winnings. Would you like me to patch you up or would you prefer I leave it to one of the medicos?”

Pushing herself up, Swift climbed up onto the bench.

“Can I have my winnings first?” she asked, smiling up at me as though she couldn’t quite believe I was really there.

“Ah, but of course,” he replied, setting the bandages aside.

Extending the wing with all the bandaids on it, Swift shut her eyes and held out her hoof to me. A bit mystified, I took it.

“Four to one odds tonight, my dear! Well done! The Hammer might not be the most graceful fighter, but he is very experienced. That’ll be five, all told.”

Swift nodded and wiggled her wingtip as Ref picked up the knife in his teeth and a towel in his hoof. Before I could stop him, he leaned over and made a neat, inch long cut along the outside edge of her wing. My partner quivered and a slow smile spread across her cheeks.

I reached over and put my hoof on Ref’s head, pushing him back as he went in to make the second cut. “Hey! What is this about winnings?! Last I checked, winnings didn’t involve more bleeding!”

Swift caught the edge of my coat in her muzzle, tugging me back from Ref, who stood patiently with the knife in his mouth. “Sir...Sir, it’s okay. I promise. This is how you take your winnings if you’re a griffin.”

“You’re not a griffin and we’re done here! We don’t need griffin currency and I don’t see you collecting this blood!” I snapped, gently peeling back one of the band-aids on her wing. There was another barely healed scratch there.

She shook her head and put a hoof on my chest. “Sir, this isn’t...ugh. This isn’t like the Tokan thing with blood. This is about stories.”

I narrowed my gaze at her. “Stories. Like those stories you’ve been telling people about me? I come back and find out ponies are calling me ‘Dead Heart’ and ‘Bulldog’ now. I left so I could lay low, kid. Not come back famous!”

Swift gulped as Ref wiped the wound on her wing gently, then peeled a bandaid open and added it to the collection. “Sir, I didn’t come up with Bulldog. That was probably Gypsy…”

I slapped my hoof against my forehead. “Not the point!”

Her expression wavered between irritation and sadness as she jabbed her wing towards Ref’s knife. “This...this is what you told me to do, Sir. Go to Sky Town and keep myself safe.”

“How does pit fighting qualify as ‘safe’?!”

She gave me a slightly grumpy look and got to her hooves, pacing back and forth in front of me. “I was chased here, Sir. Chased! When I left my parent’s house, I took off and when I was crossing the city, I got this funny feeling. I never got a good look at them, but they were definitely ponies. At least...I think they were. I winged it away as quick as I could, but...I haven’t left the Pit almost since you got here! Mister Sykes came in on the second night after I got in a...um...I got in a disagreement with somepony—”

“A fight, kid. I heard from Mrs. Martini,” I sighed, pulling her back to the bench. “You got in a fight. Alright, sorry I yelled. I’d be proud of you if I wasn’t so pissed, but I think I get the shape of things. They chased you into Sky Town and the only place they couldn’t come was one packed to the gills with heavily armed griffins.”

She nodded. “I...I volunteered to fight because...because stories are like armor to griffins. The bigger your story, the more will come to your aid. At least, that’s how Sykes explained it. You win in the arena and you get scars when you win. Their greatest tribe lords are skinned when they die and their skins are the stories of their society. Stories written in—”

“—in scars,” I muttered, leaning back from her. “That’s why you’ve been spreading my name around, too? Making me sound like some kind of folk hero?”

“Yes! Ponies are the same! Sir, have you seen the things they’ve been saying about you in the news?”

I shook my head. “I saw the wanted poster, if that’s what you mean.”

Coming around to her side, Ref sat down beside us, pulling a small flask from his tux pocket and unscrewing the cap. He sipped it carefully, then held it out to me.

“There is some disagreement as to whether or not you are the monster of this piece or just a scapegoat for the monumental incompetence of City Hall,” he said. “Since they closed off the city center, leaving most of us to our own devices the opinions have run more closely towards ‘scapegoat’. There is also the matter of how silly it sounds every time one of those fools claims a former police officer was somehow responsible for the Darkening.”

“Lemme guess,” I said, taking the flask, waving it under my nose, then downing a nip. It was rum. Good rum. “I’m a secret terrorist, super-villain, controlled by magic, replaced by changelings, being blackmailed by dragons—”

Ref chuckled, picking up the ritual knife again. “I see you’ve been around this particular block, then. Yes, you’ve been called all of those things. They are countered by the simply staggering list of individuals it seems are in your debt, not the least of which are our most recent biggest customers: the Tokan and the Hitlan. Martini, aside her love of drink, knows good business. Protecting your friend is good business. Having her fight, particularly after her demonstration that second night...that was better business.”

“And this?” I asked, gesturing at her wing. Swift turned and offered it to Ref again, taking hold of my leg.

He made another small cut and shrugged. “Entertainment, protection, and free advertising. Griffins like their traditional symbols and their violence. Pollick’s Interspecies Taphouse associated with a pair of wanted fugitives, or possibly the saviors of the city? How could my employers refuse?”

“The city...the whole of Equestria is going straight to the Moon out there and you’re worrying about advertising?!” I scoffed as Swift clenched my leg a bit more tightly.

“Of course, Mister Hard Boiled,” Ref replied, stroking his hoof back through his thin, grey mane. “How else are we meant to keep the city from going straight to the Moon, as you so eloquently put it?”

The train of my outrage went right off the rails.

“Come again?”

Ref wiped Swift’s blood on his towel, then went in for another slice, keeping one eye on me and one on his work. “You must know of my employer, Mister Pollick. Very interested in ‘interspecies peace’. Things fell apart and his daughters are left here alone. That first day was...quite hectic. Their father was in Canterlot, after all. Still, they fell back on his earliest lessons. With customers pouring in, we had little choice, even in the wake of such tragedy and chaos, but to keep the bar open. That meant putting on a fight, to distract everypony. Better that than a group of demoralized griffins squatting in our parlor, drunk, surly, and ready to rip one another to pieces. Your young friend here volunteered.”

“And why, pray tell, would any sane pony do that?” I demanded. Swift started to answer, but I put a hoof over her muzzle. “I said sane, kid. Hush.”

Ref cleared his throat and smiled. “Heh, well...I would not presume upon her personal reasons, but society is perpetually six meals from collapse. Keep the griffins entertained, keep them fed—”

“—and keep them from killing each other...or ponies. Right, I understand,” I finished, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “I can’t say I like it, but I get it. Kid, how’d the griffins react when you told them about their leadership and the eggs?”

Swift’s ears laid back. “Um…well, they didn’t actually peel all my skin off and cover me in lemon juice. They weren’t happy. Sykes was here and...and he vouched for me. With his brother gone, he’s...um...he’s basically head of the Hitlan tribe right now. He made some kind of ‘challenge’ for leadership and nobody wanted to fight. He said the Hitlan should protect the Tokan, so...the Tokan have been making sure he stays head of the tribe, too.”

“I thought the Hitlan chucked him out when he left the plateaus and joined the Detrot Police Department.”

“It’s griffin politics, Sir. I don’t think you get to understand unless you have a beak.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, either way, we need to get Derida and Grimble Shanks back here. Another thing on my list of ‘crap to handle before a catastrophe ensues’. First things first, though...we need to get Taxi. I’ve got Sykes and Limerence with me. I’m having them acquire us some transport out of Sky Town. Unfortunately, none of us can drive.” I turned to Ref. “I don’t guess you know of any easy ways out of this borough that might avoid the attention of the P.A.C.T. or anypony else who might want us dead?”

“Perhaps. I may have something in the back that could suit your purposes,” Ref murmured as he dabbed at the wounds on my partner’s side with a cotton ball covered in disinfectant. She flinched under each touch, but took it like a champ.

“Good. Kid, where is the Hailstorm?”

“I buried it nearby.”

“Go get it, but keep it in a bag. I don’t think we need a heavy hitter just now. Ref? What sort of transportation are we talking about.”

Ref set aside his disinfectant and began opening another package of bandages. “Ehm...I can’t vouch for safety or reliability, but it will probably fly. Good enough for one trip across town at least. Mrs. Martini may be a tad irritated, but she seems to be perpetually irritated these days. I doubt she’ll miss it.”

“Okay, good to...wait...did you say fly? I am an earth pony. I don’t do ‘fly’!”

“Sir, I know it’s a fixer upper, but Ref found us a magic pack that’ll fit and Sykes and I can definitely pull it—”

“I don’t care! I am not getting in a turn of the century air chariot that’s been used as a bar table for the last twenty years!
There’s not even any seat belts!”

“It doesn’t need seat belts, Sir. These old things were enchanted so you can’t fall out.”

“Enchanted when my grandfather was in diapers!”

“Och, boyo, she works foine! Cloudwood moight be awful rare these days, but Oi bet me loife she still lifts!”

“Cloudwood, solid platinum, or magical pegasus farts! I do not give a flying toss! I am not getting in that thing!”

“AAAHHH!!!”

“Sir, could you please be quiet? It’s hard enough to fly with this harness chafing my flank!”

“Oi think yer unicorn friend should hit’em wi’ some knockout spell till we touches down. Me ears be startin’ to ache.”

“Would that I could. Sadly, even if I knew such a spell, my horn is still out of commission.”

“Can we be putting sock in egg pony’s mouth? He be loud and tossing cookies off the back!”

“Sir, why do we have her with us again?”

“AAAHHH!!!”

“She is one of the Detective’s ‘projects’, I think. Much like you, myself, and Miss Taxi, I suspect. Either way, I should have thought to fashion a gag with some of that rope while we were tying him up. Still, wouldn’t want him drowning in his own vomit. I do miss my silence spell.”

“I be not a project, Limmy! I be a tribe-lord! He be my Egg Pony! Now hush and drive the flying thing! Can we be going faster? I wanna do a loop!”

I paused for a breath and asked, “Speaking of that, how are the power levels in the magic pack?”

“Holding steady, Detective.”

“Oh. Good...AAAHHH!!!”

My voice had given out about five minutes before landing and I was left laying there in the bottom of the air chariot, listening to the creaking of ancient cloudwood. The stuff was kinda pretty, when you got right down to it. It had a lustrous shine that looked almost like gold. Old Pegasus designs tended towards the fanciful.

I felt the buggy drop as Swift and Sykes took us in for a landing and my stomach dropped along with it. I missed having Taxi around for things like that. If she’d been there, she’d just have bucked me in the head until I got to nap through the trip from Sky Town. As it was, my coat was soaked with terrified sweat and my bladder had become a pressing issue.

As we hit tarmac, I tugged at my bindings a little bit. Limerence had done a really good job, getting all four legs in a position I couldn’t use my strength to bust out of them. I was a little grateful, but mostly annoyed, since the flight over had involved blanketing a large section of downtown in a rain of boozy puke.

Swift had unhitched herself from the yoke at the front of the chariot and trotted back, leaning down to carefully bite the ropes around my knees.

“Kid, you’re going to need a knife. Those knots—”

The ropes cut like a hot knife through runny eggs. She spat a few strands out and smiled apologetically as I got to my hooves.

Limerence let out a sad sigh, patting the air chariot’s lightly smoking control box as he helped Mags down from the platform. “I fear that may have been this vehicle’s last ride, Detective-”

Hauling my trigger into my teeth, I kicked my coat off my shotgun and leveled it at the chariot.

Sykes leapt away from the hitchings just in time.

The gun made a lovely noise and the kick was like a gentle bump in the shoulder. If I ever ran into him again, I was going to have to thank the Cyclone I’d taken it from. His taste in weaponry was exquisite.

I shut my eyes as the echo died away into the distance. My friends were watching me nervously, so I let my trigger drop.

“I agree. Last ride. Can I just make it clear to everyone again that I don’t do ‘heights’?”

They nodded vigorously. Mags gave the wreckage of the vehicle a sad look, then flapped over onto my back. My terrified yowling aside, she’d enjoyed the ride.

Glancing around at our surroundings, I frowned. We’d come down in a parking lot somewhere on the edge of the Heights. The grocery store in the middle of the lot was abandoned, front windows boarded up with plywood. Across the street, a whole row of apartments had the bottom floors sealed with lock and chain. Chicken-wire wrapped every point of entry I could see. It was careful, professional, and exactly what was necessary to keep a space locked down against all but the most determined looting.

The Heights was more deserted than I’d ever seen it. We seemed to be the only five souls in the area. Even the sky was clear of anything bigger than the pigeon Swift was watching with a look that would have required me to bust her for ‘intent’ if it’d been a pony.

“Anyone else feeling a little like we missed a party?” I asked.

“Yes, Detective,” Lim replied, checking the time on his watch. Without the sun to clue me in, I’d long since lost track of morning and evening. “I admit I am feeling a tad...unsettled. Our power levels were fluctuating badly before we landed, but I do believe we’re less than eight blocks from the Vivarium.”

“Nine blocks,” Swift added, snatching the bag she’d stowed the Hailstorm in off the remains of the chariot and slinging it over her shoulder. “I...mmm...I don’t know. Something’s weird. My grandmare is the head of security and I would never leave a perimeter undefended like this…”

“Neither would After Glow’s associates, Miss Cuddles,” said a voice from behind me.

I whirled, ratcheting another shell into my shotgun and snatching the bit into my muzzle.

There was nothing there. I scanned the lot as Lim, Swift, and Sykes spread out, watching the rooftops.

Letting my trigger drop, I raised my voice and asked, “Somepony out there?”

Several seconds went by, then the voice returned.

“We’ve got to put the interdiction field back up, Detective. Give me a moment.”

I felt a tingle in my hooves and Swift let out a squeak as her wings puffed out from her sides. Lim winced, clutching the sides of his head with both hooves. After a moment, the sensation faded.

“Sir...Miss Stella—”

“—has an flight interdictor. I’ve got that,” I replied, then called out, “Where is everyone?”

“You’ll see,” the voice answered. I couldn’t tell if it was a male or female voice. “Move towards the Vivarium. Take the street you’re on two blocks down. At the corner of Andelusia and Tenth, cross between the pharmacy with the sea serpent on the front and the bar with the knife on the sign. If you go any other way, you won’t make it inside. We’ve got interference—”

“Yeah, that’s me. Ignore it,” I said, touching the Crusader for comfort.

“I have to shut this transmitter down, Detective. Somepony keeps doing broad band surveillance scans every hour or two. Start moving! A Black Coat patrol passes just outside the field in two minutes! They’ll be able to see you in the open!”

Then voice fell silent, leaving me feeling a bit cold.

“Egg pony...we be doing what invisible pony voice say?” Mags asked, pushing her beak against my ear.

Turning to Sykes, I gestured at the remains of the air chariot. “Could you get that thing out of sight, then hoof it out of the interdiction field and head back to Sky Town? The griffins need their leadership. I’ll send your brother and aunt as soon as I figure out what is going on. Be careful, alright?”

Clapping me on the back, Sykes turned in the direction I assumed was Sky Town. “Aye, Oi’ll keep moiself safe, boyo. Ye be doin’ the same.”

With that he loped off towards down the street away from the Bay.

“I don’t know about you, Detective, but I think I don’t want to be anywhere near here when those P.A.C.T. creatures come this way.”

“Agreed,” I replied, then set off at a canter, my friends on my heels.

The ‘bar with the knife on the sign’ had an actual knife in it; more of a claymore impaled through a plank. Across the adjoining alley, somepony with a special talent for tagging had painted a stylized image of a sea serpent eating its own tail in neon purple spray-paint.

Road after road had been empty and abandoned, but none of it was looted. It was as though the Heights was in a sort of stasis, becalmed and waiting for ponies to come back to pick up their tea and finish their biscuits. The eclipse hung in the sky like a malevolent mouth, waiting to devour us. I took a certain satisfaction in that it hadn’t managed it already.

Peering into the alley, I held up a hoof. Lim and Swift piled in behind me. I waited, holding my breath, ears perked for any sound or whisper of motion. There was nothing.

“This is paranoid even for your grandmare,” I murmured.

“My grandmare, Sir? She’s been unconscious since the attack, hasn’t she?” Swift asked.

I glanced at her. “I didn’t tell you that…”

“I know, Sir. I…” Her ears laid back. “I wish you had. Tourniquet was right about you. The thing she said about...about you lying if you thought it would make something better...”

Rubbing my eyelid with one toe, I tried to think of a way of apologizing, but I couldn’t come up with anything just then. ‘Sorry’ felt like a drop in a really big bucket.

“You can beat the crap out of me later if it’ll make you feel better, kid.”

I didn’t look at her. Call me a coward if you like. I certainly called myself one plenty of times while laying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

I started to step into the alley.

A reddish-brown cannonball seemed to appear in mid air about a meter in front of me and I didn’t have time to get my gun up before it hit me square in the chest. Mags leapt clear just in time as I rolled end over end, eyes tightly shut and as I waited patiently for death. I came to a stop with something soft and slightly wet pressed into my muzzle.

“Scarlet Petals!” Swift snapped, stomping a hoof. “Bad colt!”

Cracking one eye, I found myself looking up into the face of a very pretty stallion. He raised his head, his cheeks a few shades redder than the rest of him. Tears gathered at the corners of his eye as he pulled his...yes, that was definitely tongue...out of my mouth. Stumbling backwards, he ducked like I might hit him, putting a hoof over his face.

“Sorry, Detective. I’m just...just so glad you’re alright!” he squeaked as I rolled over and pulled myself up.

“I didn’t be knowing Har’dy like boys,” Mags murmured to Limerence in a half whisper. The librarian gently shooed her under himself as I smoothed down my lapels and marched over to Scarlet.

I could hear his heart thumping and he smelled nervous, but I got the distinct impression he’d have nuzzled me like an affectionate cat if I’d gotten any closer.

“Mister Petals, I know you have...boundary issues...but asking permission is how you avoid somepony punching you in the nose,” I growled, wiping my muzzle; a streak of Scarlet’s pink lipstick came off on my fetlock.

He nodded, weakly, then his eyes lit up. “I...I can ask permission to kiss you, Detective?”

Swift swatted him on the back of the head with one wingtip. “You ask me permission before you kiss him, dorkus, or I kick your silly behind! Now, who’s running things right now and where is everypony?”

“Eh...well, s-something of a story there,” Stella’s secretary stammered, glancing down the alley. “Almost half of the Stilettos were unicorns, Detective. A third of them are unconscious now, including Mistress After Glow.”

“I’m aware of that,” I sighed. “Who’s been running the show since then?”

He swallowed sharply, turning his head to show me a communication gem tucked into his ear. “I’ve been trying to take care of things as best I can, but things were pretty chaotic that first day and Mistress Stella is mostly relegated to places where there might be water. Our chain of command broke down somewhat, but...when you left Miss Taxi with us, she was in something of a ‘take charge’ state of mind...”

“You must be joking. No, wait...of course you’re not joking,” I slumped, dejectedly against the wall of the alley. “I told her to take it easy for a week.”

“Well, she did spend most of that period in bed, but with so many of the Stilettos incapacitated and Miss Svelte unconscious as well, I’m...I’m afraid we were sorta short of capable hooves.”

“So, what then? Taxi organized whatever happened out there?” I asked. “It looks like some kind of damned evacuation.”

Scarlet nodded. “You’re not wrong, sadly.” He glanced at his hooves, then picked up a pebble and chucked it into the alley. There was a flash and the pebble vanished in mid-air. “We’ve got flight interdiction in place to keep the dragons away and what Stilettos we’ve got left have made sure looters know this is a bad place...but without the police, it was too hard to keep track of such a large space.”

“Illusions, then? Mass illusion magics?” Limerence asked. “Wherever did you get power for such a thing?”

“Well, we...erm...we’re stealing it, actually,” Scarlet explained, a bit bashfully. “We laid an electrical tap into one of the Shield pylons just outside the Heights. The amount of power going through them is…simply monumental.”

I tilted my head. “I thought the Shield was down.”

Scarlet hesitated for several seconds, then touched the com gem in his ear. “Miss Taxi wants to explain. She also wants to snap your neck, give you a hug, scream at you, and...feed you bagels.”

I perked up. “Bagels?”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“Lead the way!”

Scarlet turned back to the alley as Mags crept up onto my shoulders.

“Har’dy...glitter pony be sweet on you?” she whispered.

I couldn’t hold back a snort. “What gave it away?”

“You be sweet on him?”

“Kiddo, unless you want to find yourself a new mount, just stick to naps, eating chickens, and destroying tax documents. Leave the irritating commentary to the pony who is about to break my face.”

As we neared the other end of the alley, sound seemed to rush in from all sides; soft music, giggling foals, hooves on concrete, and crackling fires. The scene ahead seemed to shimmer and melt away like water washing away a badly developed photo, leaving a busy street.

So much of the city was either abandoned or badly underpopulated that I couldn’t escape a sense that I was in a strange urban ocean with of islands of ponykind and shark infested waters between. Two Stilettos with white sashes across their chests and bandoliers full of shivs strapped to their sides were waiting for us; one unicorn, one earth pony. They nodded to Scarlet as he stepped between them and he beckoned for me to follow.

“Most intriguing,” Lim mumbled to himself, looking up at the sky. The air about thirty meters overhead seemed to shine and glistened now and then. “This looks like a modification of several of my father’s spells. It must take a simply gigantic amount of magical energy to keep such a spell over the entire Heights…”

It might have been any other day on the street in Detrot, though it did seem a tad crowded for that. Tension hung heavy in the air and few of the ponies on the street seemed to be engaged in small talk. Most were rushing from place to place, carrying carts full of goods or simply sitting with one another in doorways, taking what comfort they could. Every now and then somepony would look up at the eclipse and shake their head.

“Mistress Stella has access to a few little tidbits from the war,” Scarlet chirped. “One of them was our flight interdictor. Another was the spell core that is protecting us. Sadly, none of it could bring our sun back. I miss sunlight.”

“Ponies be liking their magic head popping spell things too much,” Mags commented, dropping off my back and trotting up beside Scarlet. She studied him curiously, then leaned over and gave him a little poke in the flank. He danced sideways and gave her a reproachful look. “What be your butt tattoo meaning?”

He glanced at the wine-bottle with the cork popping out of it on his backside. “My cutie-mark means...eh...um...It means I like to make other ponies happy and I’m very good at it.”

Swift coughed, covering her muzzle with her knee. “I’m really glad you finally came up with something to tell ponies when they ask that. It’s so much better than telling them what you did to pass math...”

“Hey!” he squeaked, flicking his tail out to bop her on the nose with it. “Just ‘cause I got mine later than you doesn’t mean you get to make fun. Besides, I’ll have you know I got very good grades in all my classes during my senior year of high school and my cutie-mark helped considerably!”

I listened to their repartee with a small smile, but gradually became aware that we’d begun to acquire a little crowd of hangers-on following along behind us. The further we went in the general direction of the Vivarium, the more seemed to be joining. They kept a respectful distance, but it was impossible to ignore the quickly growing crowd of ponies and a few other species keeping pace. I heard a whispered, ‘Do you think that’s him?’ followed by ‘Shouldn’t he be taller?’

Speeding up a little, I picked up Mags and set her on my back, then moved beside Scarlet. I jerked my head back at the group of sightseers. “Alright, what’s the story Stella’s been telling this lot?”

“Them? Eh...nothing much, really. After the wanted posters began appearing, Mistress Stella decided you might need a bit of a public relations campaign. He simply encouraged a bit of dissemination of your recent activities. You must know you have some fans in the Stilettos, right?” he giggled, giving me a bump with his hip.

“Boundaries, Scarlet. Why would I have ‘fans’? I thought we were trying to keep the thing with King Cosmo a secret.”

“That hasn’t changed. However, you’ve made quite the impression on the Tortellini twins, Mistress Zeta, and Mistress Edina. More than that, we count many of the former members of the Church of the Lunar Passage amongst our numbers. Mistress Stella felt it would be prudent to let them know of your role in the downfall of Astral Skylark. Be glad I took us away from their particular squat. A pony named ‘Hymnal’ came up with a song that’s been very popular recently...”

“Do I want to know?”

Scarlet hummed a little tune, then sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor,

“For I was low, in darkness and in pain!

A false prophet, harken she is slain!

Praise be to Justice, the Shining Shield,

By his sword, Equestria be healed!”

One street over and we’d acquired a virtual parade. I was starting to get nervous, or rather, I’d been nervous for some time and I was starting to feel my urge to shoot something itching. They’d gone from curious tittering to taking pictures. Flash bulbs and I have a long, hate-filled history from my days on the force.

A voice in the crowd called out, “Detective Dead Heart! Detective! Is it true you died?”

That opened the floodgates.

“Have you seen my mother on the other side?”

“Where did Canterlot go?”

“Can you really dodge bullets?”

“Are you going to stop the Black Coats?”

“Alright! Enough of this crap,” I snapped, grabbing Scarlet’s tail in my teeth and pulling him up short. Swinging around, I marched back towards the crowd that was taking up half the sidewalk, spilling into the street. It took them a moment to realize I wasn’t moving and they all gradually fell silent. Swift and Limerence stepped out of my way as I stomped past them.

Drawing in a deep breath I shouted so those in the back could hear me.

I strolled casually along the boulevard, whistling. The crowd was still back there, but I was feeling better and they weren’t asking questions anymore.

“Was it really necessary to be so...so graphic, Detective?” Scarlet asked warily, as he trudged along behind me. He shook his head a little. “I mean, all well and good reassuring them that you’re ‘on the case’, but I’ve been working for the Vivarium for a long time and I never heard anypony describe intercourse with an eye-socket or any of that other stuff in such vivid and colorful—”

“It was necessary, Scarlet. Believe me. The alternative was gunfire.”

Three blocks over and the Vivarium finally came into sight. The building had changed considerably from the strange little temple-looking club tucked anonymously into a corner. Our crowd of followers dispersed as we neared a cordon of Stilettos keeping watch at the edges of the strip mall.

Where once there were a few other businesses holding down the fort in the adjoining shops, the Vivarium had well and truly taken over the mall. Sandbags were piled up against the sides of the structure and the roof. They were also heaped around an antique gun emplacement where the gaudy dancing mare sign had been on our first few visits. All along the rooftop, Stilettos kept watch. Most were wearing bits and pieces of military hardware from before I was born.

In the distance between the cordon and the actual building sat a green lorry with a simply gigantic metal box in the back bed, lights flashing on its sides and runs as big as my head glittering in the twilight; a spell core. A dozen huge cables wound out of a sewer cover beside it, hooking up at points on the machine itself.

“How many favors did Stella have to call in to get ahold of that monster?” I asked, pausing to gawk at the spell core.

Scarlet sighed as he looked at his home a little sadly. “The Mistress was here during the Crusades, remember? I’m sure he figured when the war ended it might be a good idea if somepony bought up all that stuff, even if it was just curiosities. It was going for pennies on the bit, too. I doubt he ever thought we might need a spell core that took twenty city blocks worth of power to operate.”

“And the flight interdictor?” Limerence asked. “My father had one, I believe, but those are very tightly regulated in most parts of the world.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. When this all began, Mistress Stella put us under something called ‘dragon attack protocols’. You’ll have to ask the Mistress if you’re really curious,” he replied with a shrug.

“Dragon attack protocols?!” Swift exclaimed, her eyes wide. “Really?”

“It’s a thing from the war, kid. Mostly get in a hole that might or might not resist dragonfire, stick your head between your knees and kiss your flank goodbye.”

“They’re a tad more complicated than that, Detective...but nopony has seen more than a couple of dragons. It’s strange,” Scarlet murmured, shaking his head, trotting towards the Vivarium’s heavily guarded main entrance. He touched his ear and added, “Miss Taxi is saying the bagels are getting cold.”

I sped up a little and my companions had to canter to keep up.

Under the watchful eyes of the full might of the Stilettos, my friends and I went round the back of the building only to find more sandbags and more armed ponies facing the Bay. For some reason I’d never considered there might be quite so many Stilettos, but they were at least three generations of the children of Stella’s employees.

Minox was there, minus his usual over-sized tux. He sat beside the maintenance door with a strange looking rifle propped against his shoulder that would have taken two ponies just to hold. He wore a shirt so tight it showed off every millimeter of his toned and muscled abdomen along with green camouflage patterned pants and a pair of dog-tags emblazoned with the Minotaur Republic’s seal; a bull’s horns, dripping blood.

As we approached, Minox shoved himself up to his full two meters of height and swung the huge rifle across his back. “Ah! Detective! I hear zat joo survives many t’ings! Most pleased! I suzpected ve might be seeing joo soon! Miz Taxi iz not best pleazed joo left her with us.”

“I’m assuming she’s the one responsible for making a whore house look like a military base?” I asked as Mags clambered up onto my shoulders so she could get a better look at the minotaur.

He raised an eyebrow at the griffin chick clinging to my mane.

“Joo brings strange friends, Mister Boiled. Still, Heh! Come! I takes joo to Miz Taxi. Scarlet! Stella vants joo to go make sure ze clinic is stocked. If it iz not, take a scavenging team to ze hospital.”

“Another one?” Scarlet moaned. “Wandering around an abandoned hospital is the creepiest thing ever…”

“No way. Trust me,” Swift muttered, a tiny shiver working its way down her back. “Wandering around sewers full of invisible pony-eating demons is definitely the creepiest thing ever.”

“Ahem, if I were to actually postulate a creepier scenario, it would have to be a conversation with a cybernetic monstrosity in the presence of a dead, rotting dragon wired into the wall,” Limerence murmured, tapping his chin.

I rubbed my chin. “Actually, the enchanted boiler room full of crazed, aggressive school supplies was actually right near the top of my list. Though Taxi’s father mutating—”

“Detective!” Scarlet whimpered, hunkering down on his chest with his hooves over his ears. “I would really appreciate it if would just never tell me about what you do when you aren’t here. It’s bad for my heart!”

“Oh! Yeah, the still beating heart in the box! Now that...that was creepy...”

Scarlet bolted so fast he kicked up a cloud of dust.

The old mining elevator rattled down into the cave network and a puff of damp air filled my lungs. I inhaled the familiar scent of old perfume, water from the bay, and rusting metalworks. Strange how something so unsettling had come to be a sign of safety and comfort.

As we descended, Mags tugged on my ear for attention.

“Har’dy...where be we going?”

“A friend of mine lives here. He might be one of the scariest...things in the city, but he’s a sweetheart.”

Minox peered over his shoulder at me. “Joo be bringing ze little one? Ve do have ze creche…”

“I stays with my egg pony!” Mags snapped at him, then dropped onto the floor of the elevator, pulling my hat off as she went and ducking under my coat tails.

“You heard her,” I said with a quiet smile.

“Vhere joo get such a little thing?”

Stepping up to the gate across the elevator, I rested my hoof on it and stared out at the darkness. I could hear a great deal of activity from somewhere below us, but I couldn’t get a precise direction; voices, moving hooves, and power-tools.

“I pulled her out of a pile of bodies. Long story and one I don’t particularly want to tell,” I replied, absently.

“A...a pile of bodies, Sir?” Swift choked, putting a hoof to her throat. “You didn’t tell me that!”

Had I left out that particular wrinkle? Yes, yes I had. Damn. A full briefing was in order, but other things were going to have to come first.

“You remember when I told you not to come into the treasury room at the Moon Walk?”

Her lips twitched into a small frown. “Yeeeah…” Her ears slowly laid back and her eyes shot wide. “Oh my skies...you don’t mean...Sir—”

“Sykes didn’t tell you about that, huh?”

“He didn’t.” Taking a step closer, she gave me a suspicious look. “Sir...how much other stuff are you not telling me?”

A mental list started playing itself through my brain. It was a long list. Stella’s machinations, the realities of Juniper’s presence, the situation with M6, Slip Stitch’s machine. How many other things? I’d lost track. Some of it was items I just hadn’t had a chance to tell her, while other things were not wanting to get her hopes up.

“More than I should be keeping from my partner,” I murmured, putting a hoof across her shoulders and pulling her to my side. She was shaking, but quieted as I hugged her to me. “Tell you what. Tonight, after we handle things with Taxi, make some plans and get some intel, I’ll sit down and you can ask me a question. Any question. I promise, I’ll answer it completely and honestly, if I can.”

“You...you Pinkie Promise, Sir?” she asked.

I raised a hoof and put the other across my chest. “Cupcake in my eye and the whole nine yards, kid.”

That seemed to satisfy her. She settled on her haunches, peering out at the incredible goings-on over the lake.

As the elevator clanked at the bottom, I smelled sawdust, grease, and lots of living, sweating bodies.

“Minox, what’s been going on down here?” I asked, gesturing at the halls

“Miz Taxi, thinkz zat ve might need fall back.”

“Fall back? A fall back position?” Limerence asked. “Someplace to retreat to? Are you expecting to be attacked?”

“Ve are being prepared, yah? Miz Stella agrees. Here.” Minox reached into his pocket and held out a flashlight on a strap. I offered him my head and he fitted the light around my ears. “Joo go. I must guard. Joo know ze vay?”

“I know the way, Minox,” Swift said, giving me a look I couldn’t quite place. Disappointed? Maybe. “I was paying attention the last time we were down here, even if some of us have no sense of direction whatsoever.”

“Not my fault if space refuses to orient itself in a logical way,” I grunted.

“It does, Sir.”

“Says you.”

The first group of Stilettos were down three halls and seemed to be lugging some kind of heavy digging machine in their collective magic. They paused for a moment as we passed by and one of them almost dropped her end of the machine as she stared, open muzzled. I hurried on and a little later the sound of grinding stone reached me.

The halls were no longer quite so dark as they had been, with gem-lights hanging every few meters, but there were still a few sections that weren’t perfectly lit so the torch came in handy. Groups of ponies, zebras, and griffins were moving about armed with shovels, lamps, and diagrams. As we went by each one stopped what they were doing and followed us with their eyes, muttering back and forth to each other.

I was getting seriously tired of the celebrity shtick.

At one junction, I peered into one of the work spaces to see a collection of bunk beds stacked against a wall, while at another, two mares with clip-boards were taking inventory of giant crates that’d been heaped in a corner.

“What is Stella planning?” I asked, aloud to nopony in particular.

“Considering the Vivarium itself is underground, I suspect he is expanding in expectation of more ponies. More than a few it would seem. For an operation only a week old this is...awfully well organized,” Limerence mused. “I would imagine this has been in the works for some time.”

“We’re here, I think,” Swift said as we came to another corner. A beam of light shone down the adjoining hall and there were dozens of voices coming from nearby.

“Ah! Detective! My sweet Detective! Do come in!” a loud, effeminate voice called from inside.

“What be that?” Mags wanted to know.

“Do you have to pee?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. She shook her head. “Good. I don’t need to wash my coat again this week.”

Composing myself into the picture of casual dignity, I strolled around the corner into Stella’s lair. The stone door was open wide and a great crowd of ponies was inside. They’d come to a stop at Stella’s call and each and every one was watching as I trundled in, Swift and Limerence at my flanks and Mags hanging off my back.

The lair had changed since last I was there. Gone were the catwalks and the artworks, replaced with a gigantic platform of metal and linoleum. It would have taken a dozen unicorns a few hours to assemble and it wasn’t pretty, but over the vast lake a sort of open-air room had been composed. Great pillars sank down into the water made of steel beams probably scavenged from a construction site, holding the whole construct up. A short set of stairs hacked together out of railroad ties lead up to the platform where the crowd stood, waiting for us.

Behind them, sprawled on his ridiculous oversized fainting couch/throne, the serpent himself was decked out in his finest: a pink frock the size of a parachute, a pair of the most ridiculously oversized sunglasses known to ponykind, and a pencil taller than I tucked behind one fluke. He had a silly looking construction hat with the words ‘dragon at work’ painted on the side.

I started up the steps and the crowd broke on either side. Their expressions ranged from fear to admiration and everything in between, but as I moved ahead they stepped back. The celebrity shtick was going to get old quick, but it did have certain pleasures.

“E-egg p-pony...th-that’s a d-d-dragon…” Mags muttered in my ear. "I be ch-changing my mind...I have to p-pee..."

“Just hold it, kid,” I chuckled. “Scary, yes. Dangerous? Probably not. Not unless you make snide comments about his makeup.”

Ahead, there was a giant felt-covered table in the middle of the crowd of ponies. It was formerly a pool table, but was being used as an impromptu war-planner, piled with paper, ammunition, guns, and a basket of steaming bagels. Behind the bagels sat a mare, her eyes glistening with tears and one foreleg in a green plaster cast.

Taxi.

A pony doesn’t realize how much they miss someone until they’ve climbed up one side of a minor apocalypse and down the other. I’d missed my driver. She’s always been there, keeping me solid when everything is coming down around my ears.

She was smiling, but it was one of those tight smiles that could turn into a murder attempt at any moment. Her cast had more names on it than I could count and she was looking healthy enough, though her mane hadn’t been brushed in a couple of days and she had bags under her eyes.

Stella looked back and forth between the two of us, then addressed the crowd in a soft voice that still managed to echo around the chamber. “My dear friends, I think our meeting is at an end. Proceed with the work. Make sure to shore up numbers six through eight. You have Miss Taxi’s plans and if you have any questions, please speak to Scarlet.” Everypony glanced at one another, then back to Stella. He rolled his great golden eyes and waved them away with one claw. “Yes, yes, dismissed, my dears. Shoo!”

With a couple of chuckles in the crowd, the Stilettos began to file out, most of them splitting to move around us as they headed through the door we’d just come in. A few moved off into a freshly dug passage to one side and down another set of steps.

That left me along with my ward, librarian, partner, the dragon, and Taxi.

Sweet Shine.

My best friend.

She was the pony who’d hauled me out of the deepest pit I’d ever fallen into. She’d had my back, even when she thought I was dead. She was my rock.

She was also a mare with extensive martial arts skills, a love of exotic weaponry, and a history of violent outbursts who I’d dodged informing that Canterlot vanished, then dumped in a heavily guarded whore house with two broken legs while I rode off into the sunset without telling her where I’d be.

Act 3 Chapter 6 : Two Griffins, One Stone

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 81 :
Two Griffins, One Stone

There has been much debate in recent years about what is to be done about the endless supply of military technology pumped out by Equestria during the period known as the ‘Cutie Mark Crusades’. Not being a country prone to military adventurism, their first effort in many centuries still found the equine population dedicating itself to the invention of ways to incinerate, implode, freeze, and atomize even the most dangerous opponents.

Of course, this being Equestria, they went at the production of weapons with the same zeal that had been previously applied to discovering new ways of baking apple pie (of which Equestria boasts the greatest variety in the entire world. Over 40,000 recipes at last count, not including those developed specifically for warfare). Once the war was over, there was a certain place for some of that equipment in border control and mega-fauna disposal, but that left great stockpiles of unspeakably dangerous tools of death simply rotting away in warehouses across the country.

Princess Celestia’s ‘Swords to Plowshares’ program helped somewhat and spurred much of the modern automobile industry, however there remained many objects which couldn’t be readily disassembled. Many became little more than expensive lawn ornaments. The Iron Charger Siege Dreadnought found itself repurposed as a foal’s playground in Baltimare, while the Ballistic Undertaker Titan Tank (A name that sounded fantastic until military acronyms were applied) was consigned to bottom of the Gulf of Kindness to become a reef for fish.

Sad to say, not all such objects could find meaningful purpose in peaceful times, but nor did Princess Celestia or Princess Luna feel they should go to waste. Much of the less dangerous surplus was auctioned off to the highest bidder, with conditions of registration and careful monitoring to keep them from falling into the wrong hooves. As with all such good ideas, they fall down somewhat when one realizes the wrong hooves are inevitably almost everyone who would show up at an auction for post-war surplus.

The Scholar

Water dripped from the ceiling down the back of my collar as I stood there in Stella’s lair, facing Taxi. I’d rather have faced my own firing squad than that sad-eyed expression. A crutch lay beside her, propped against the edge of the pool table she was using for a desk.

Her two tone braid was undone, hanging limp around her shoulders. She looked exhausted, which was a far cry from the rested and restless I’d been when I woke up after a week-long stay out of the city.

“Sweets—” I began, though I’m not sure what I’d have said as a follow up. Maybe some kind of excuse. Maybe dear exaltations. Maybe just a little gutless sobbing and begging forgiveness.

Taxi waved my explanations aside with one hoof and reached for her crutch, sliding it under her good leg so she could get herself up from the table. “I get why you did it, Hardy,” she murmured. “Just...come over here and give me a hug, would you?”

Sensing she might get squished, Mags quickly hopped down and scuttled over beside Limerence.

I trotted around the table and stopped in front of Taxi, studying her for a long moment. She looked so tired.

Stepping forward I slid my forelegs around her neck. She smelled like Minox. Incense, old memories, and horny minotaur. I sighed and hugged her a little tighter. It was nice to have her back.

“I’m aware you’re probably about to smash my muzzle on the edge of the pool table here for ditching you, lying to you, neglecting some...important pieces of information, leaving you without any way of getting in touch with me in a planetary crisis, getting your favorite gun destroyed, and vanishing for a week into parts unknown, but...I want you to know I missed you,” I said, softly.

Behind her, Stella had his claws clasped to his chest, stars in his eyes. It must have taken a Mareculean effort for him to resist the urge to go ‘Dawww!’ out loud.

“I missed you, too, Hardy,” Taxi whispered.

“You killed my egg pony!” Mags squealed from somewhere nearby.

I felt like I was swimming in warm liquid. Warm painful liquid. Warm liquid full of headaches. Oh, yes, many many headaches.

“He’s not dead. Most impressive. I wish I could study that heart of his. The bleeding stopped almost immediately,” Limerence murmured and something cool touched my face. “Detective? Are you with us?”

“Blabledable,” I replied.

“He’s fine,” Taxi said from a place above my head. “Give him a bagel.”

Bagel is life.

Bagel helps the headaches go away.

Cream cheese and headaches are natural enemies after all.

I slumped over the pool table, redundant ice-pack on my head, munching quietly on a delicious onion, garlic, and spinach with butter and cream. The rest of my friends had joined me on a long, wooden bench that’d been dragged over so we could all sit together. Mags and Swift took turns ripping a raw, gutted salmon to shreds. That was a grisly spectacle, so I’d moved one of the stacks of paper so those of us who were still herbivores didn’t have to watch.

Limerence and I shared the bread products, or rather, he ate the muffins while I ate the bagels. I almost bit him when he reached for the cream cheese. That would have been a tad embarrassing.

Even Stella was in on it, enjoying a quiet repast of fresh fish from a gigantic bowl beside his couch after setting aside his silly construction hat and sunglasses.

It was dinner and friends; some little shred of Equestria before the world caught fire still preserved in the peace of a meal, together. We didn’t talk. There wasn’t much as needed saying, really. If only the rat bastards out there bent on destroying everything ponykind stood for would sod off so those moments could last.

Sadly, this particular one couldn’t.

After a half hour, there were only soft burps and the faint rumbles of a digesting dragon.

Gathering what gumption was left in me, I swept my coat off and laid it across the table, then got to my hooves.

“Stella? If you don’t object, can I bring this meeting of ‘Suckers Trying To Save Equestria’ to order?” I said, pacing over to the railing on the platform and resting one leg on it.

Limerence raised a hoof. “Detective, if we’re going with that name, I’d like to nominate you as chairman for life.”

“Seconded,” Taxi piped up.

“All in favor?” Swift added.

“Aye!” came the loud reply from everypony except Mags, who was gnawing on a bone of some sort.

“Chairman Sucker, the floor is yours,” Limerence chuckled, settling back on his bench.

I shut my eyes for a moment and tried not to cry. Crying would have been undignified. The bit of cream cheese on my nose was undignified enough, but I’d only realized it was there after I stood and decided to get down to business. The mirth was nice, but it didn’t help my state of mind much.

Turning to Swift, I swallowed. “Alright, so...first things first. Kid, your grandmare and mother are going to be fine.”

She opened her muzzle for a second, then her breath stuck in her throat and she unconsciously rose to her hooves.

It’s funny how ephemeral horrors can be sometimes. The death of a loved one can go right out of your mind for the length of time it takes to eat a cupcake. Worries, especially those of great uncertainty, have a way of fleeing when faced with a bit of camaraderie, but they come crashing back the second somepony points them out.

“My...my mom? And Granny Glow? Are they—”

“They’re here, little bird,” Stella reassured her, batting his eyelashes. “Both asleep in the medical wing. We’ve been keeping very good care of them while we figure a solution for that situation. Your father has been watching over both
of them. You can go see him if you’d like.”

Swift swallowed, but sat again, looking back to me. “After we’re...after we’re done. Sorry, Sir.”

“Like I said, good news on that front. Coroner Slip Stitch has developed a means of waking the unconscious unicorns. It’s rudimentary and there’s...eh...there’s a hamster involved, but my friend here—” I cocked my chin in Lim’s direction, “—survived it handily.”

“Sir, why wasn’t that the first thing you said to me?” Swift asked, with a tiny frown.

“Planning sessions and debriefings are for shocked silences. That’s what this is, incidentally and why I’m telling you now, rather than when we’re sitting in a bar full of griffins in the middle of Sky Town. Atop that, I have no idea how this particular process works, so explaining it wouldn’t have done either of us much good.”

“From what I can tell it involves some means of channeling magic back through certain a leyline in the dispersion matrix of a unicorn’s—”

I flicked my tail and Limerence paused his long winded explanation. “Save it. Point being, Stitch thinks we can fix that situation and get our unicorn power back.”

Stella breathed a relieved sigh. “You can’t imagine the calm that brings me, Detective. I suppose one more thing we owe you thanks for. Our situation here has been a tad better than most of the rest of the city, but there are places it is simply dangerous to travel through right now and my...eh...cousins...on the outskirts of the city are making it impossible to leave. Any good news is truly good news.”

“Well, since I’m not being allowed to go quietly into the dark—” I glared at Taxi and Swift for a second. They both giggled and I quickly wiped the cream cheese off my nose. “—then I need something to do or I’ll go out of my mind in short order. Somehow, all of this is connected. The armor of Nightmare Moon, Skylark, Cosmo, the murder of Ruby Blue, the law-firm, and the disappearance of Canterlot. All of it. This is all one puzzle and we’ve got bits here and there.”

Mags gave my foreleg a little tug. “You be forgetting about griffins, Har’dy.”

“Yes...griffins,” Stella mused, studying Mags. She sunk a few inches under the scrutiny until she was almost below the edge of the table. “Detective, I am not one to typically pry, but I simply must know. Why is there a child attending this particular gathering? Her accent is old Griffinstone, unless I miss my mark.”

My ward opened her beak to answer and I quickly shoved a muffin into it, muffling whatever indignant things she might have had to say about being labeled a ‘child’.

“She’s with me. She stays with me,” I answered, gathering Mags against my side. “Her parents didn’t make it out of the Moonwalk and nobody else was available to take care of her. She’s my...eh...she’s my bodyguard.”

Stella looked back and forth between Swift and Taxi. “I am afraid she’ll have a bit of competition in that arena. Also, this...Archivist? Deary me, are the stories of that faction’s demise exaggerated? The Don was quite a good soul, occasional broken kneecaps and cracked skulls aside.”

Shutting his eyes, Limerence held his pocket watch to his breast. “My father is dead. My brother as well. My name is Limerence Tome. I’m the last of the Archivists.”

The dragon bowed his head for a moment. “So many good and noble dead. I am glad you have survived, though…My goodness. Swift, what happened to your wing?”

Swift froze for a moment, then looked wildly back and forth at her wings. “What?! What’s wrong with...oh.” Her ears turned a bit red as she wiggled the one covered in sticking plasters.

“Prize fighting,” I growled, poking at Swift’s wingtip with my hoof.

“Please, Sir! They really really don’t need to know any of that!” she pleaded, putting her hooves up on my chest.

Stella’s forked tongue quickly wet his lips and he slid down, planting his elbows on the edge of the platform and his chin on his palms. “Oh? We don’t, do we? I find myself suddenly intrigued.”

“Kid, you made this particular bed. You either sleep in it or I own you forever. Which’ll it be?”

“Own me forever! Please!”

I snickered and gently pushed her back. “Tempting as having my own pegasus hoof-rest is...I caught her at Pollick’s.”

Stella’s top fluke twitched as my partner sank back in her seat, letting out a sad whimper. Reaching down, he gently picked up Swift in his palm. She slumped like a dejected kitten, wings around herself protectively. “My dear...Your father is going to have a conniption fit. Did you have a story worked out for what happened to you that would cause griffin ritual scarring on your wings? Falling down some stairs covered in porcupines?” Leaning forward, he used the edge of his claw to lift her combat vest a little, exposing some of the bandages on her side. “And this?”

Swift batted his finger away. “I’m an adult!”

“One day, love, you will learn that is a thing children say right before or immediately after they’ve done something which gives someone who desperately loves them a very near heart attack,” Stella murmured, setting her down at my side again. Swift drooped even further, reminding me very much of a foal caught with her hoof in the cookies.

“Sorry, kid. You earned that one,” I whispered and she rested her chin on my foreleg.

“Not fair, Sir.”

“Still, minor injuries aside,” Stella clasped his claws together and sat back on his throne. “This is, as you say...a puzzle. Who stands behind this particular curtain of violence and evil? Who would destroy or kidnap those who raise and lower our celestial bodies and the capital city?”

I bit my lip as I mentally futzed with the mess that’d been keeping me up nights for the last few months. “Right now? Not a clue. The lawfirm was my next stop, but their office is in Uptown. I don’t even know what’s going on up there right now.”

Taxi shifted one of her stack of papers and pushed a photo across the table. I picked it up and examined it. The image wasn’t great, but I could make out a few details. It looked to be some kind of barricade made of bent fence posts, with a bright blue glow stretching across a city street. Behind it, the air was blurry and seemed distorted. “I’m afraid I wasn’t able to find out much with the scouts the Stilettos could give me. There’s a flight interdictor operating basically everywhere in Uptown. Ground approaches are covered by what look like magic shields, but nopony seems to be casting them.”

“I don’t know why I’m surprised. Snifter is a rat on a sinking ship and he knows it,” I grumbled, tossing the photo back on the pile. “You’ve been gathering intel on the comings and goings in the city?”

Picking up another folder, Taxi shoved it across to me. I flipped it open and I found a stack of index cards, papers, and post-it notes. In the back there was a map covered in paper tags of various colors. There was a smattering of black markers, a whole heap of red, and eight blue, spread out around the city. “Yes and no. When you...mmm...when you left, I had to find something to do. Since Miss Stella ordered the bar staff not to serve me, it was this or meditate and probably go crazy.”

“What am I looking at?” I asked, flipping back and forth through the scribbled notes.

Taxi tapped the paper. “That is the closest thing we have to a recent danger map of the city. The Stilettos are pretty good for gathering intel, but...there’s a lot of places they can’t go. The Jewelers and Cyclones both seem to have suddenly found themselves without most of their leadership. Lots of bodies have turned up in ugly condition. There’s places right now that are either demilitarized zones or no-pony’s land. The black marks are places where we’ve seen violence within the last forty eight hours. Red is gang deaths. Blue is...mmm...blue is where—”

“—where cops died,” I finished, sadly. “I know this is probably the worst question I can ask, but...anybody we knew?”

She nodded. “You remember Officer Candy Corn and Sergeant Subtle Sight.”

I cast my memory back as far as it would go and put a couple faces to those names; a mare with a ridiculous orange and white mane and a bored desk sergeant who could chug six beers in two minutes.

“Were these ‘Biter’ kills?” I asked.

“It looked to me like a pack of timberwolves, but they left their badges and clothing. Whatever killed them had the foresight to strip the bodies before it started...ugh...started—” Taxi’s ears laid back. “—eating. I don’t want to go over the gory details with her here.” She used her crutch to indicate Mags. “Either way, they’ve hit the gangs, too. We managed to catch a Jeweler grunt who swore his boss had just pitched over with three bulletholes in him, but he hadn’t heard gunfire and no shots penetrated the walls. Sound like something we’ve run into?”

“Yeah...yeah, it really does,” I said, softly, stroking Mags’ mane.

Stella smoothed one make-uped brow. “Care to enlighten the rest of us, my dear?”

I propped both hooves under my chin, frowning at the folder full of intelligence reports. “The Moonwalk was a killing field. The Nursemaid guild—which is so far as I can tell some kind of neutral party that cares for the children of griffin tribes in times of danger—was slaughtered using a weapon that kills but leaves no holes in anything but flesh. That is to say, the ones who weren’t torn apart with teeth.”

I felt Mags begin to shiver and held my coat out so she could crawl underneath. Can’t imagine what she saw in cuddling up in that thing, but on her worst nights during the last week I’d found her holding my coat when she couldn’t get into my cell.

“Why did we not hear of this?” Stella asked, then his eyes narrowed to slits as he put two and two together. “Ah...right. The bomb.”

“Exactly.”

“And...have you perchance discovered why the griffins might have become targets?”

“We did,” I replied, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. “So it goes, back during the war the Tokan and Hitlan were in the service of Equestria. I don’t know exactly what they were doing, but I’m assuming it was fighting dragons. After the war, Princess Celestia needed to...dispose of something especially nasty in a way she thought was probably secure. She gave it to them as a ‘diplomatic gift’. Knowing griffins, I’d have agreed it was well and truly gone.”

“What, pray tell, was our good Princess ‘disposing’ of?”

“Nightmare Moon’s shoes. So far as we can tell, the set was in the griffin treasury when it was hit.”

Stella’s head-fluke shot straight up and his jaw clenched tight enough that his fangs ground against one another. After a moment he forced himself to relax. “I...ahem...I see.” Reaching over to his console on his vanity, he pressed a button and said, “Scarlet! Could you please have the griffin tribe lords come down here?”

After a few seconds, Scarlet’s voice came back, “Mister Grimble Shanks is currently...um...from the sounds of things he’s ‘finishing’ his engagement with Miss Tangerine. Should I interrupt them?”

“Give them five minutes, but bring them to me.”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

Stella settled back in his seat and flicked his talons at me. “Proceed, my dear.”

“Not much else to tell. As things stand, the chestplate and the shoes are in the possession of our enemies,” I finished.

“That...is distressing.” Stella settled back in his seat. “Still, it is with some relief that I can say I am aware of the location of the helm. It remains in Canterlot’s vaults.”

I almost choked on my own tongue for a second there. “Oooh…erm…”

Stella looked grim. “Detective, are you about to tell me that the helm of Nightmare Moon is not, in fact, buried in the depths of Canterlot’s most secure oubliette?”

“Well...some good news, some bad news. The bad news? No, it’s not. Astral Skylark used to be a pretty good thief. She managed to snatch the helm. One of her former followers escaped with it, but was killed before she could reveal its location. She was a pony of our recent acquaintance.”

The dragon tilted his chin, lips pursed. “Miss Ruby Blue. I see. Then, what is the ‘good’ news?”

I buffed my hoof on my chest. “I’ve got the helm. I found it and it’s tucked away in a safe place. I’m the only one who can get it.”

I neglected to mention that Ruby had practically gift-wrapped it for me. There were too many additional questions attached to that which I wasn’t prepared to answer.

“That is...something of a relief, then. Have you, perchance, considered your next move?”

Pushing one of the cooling bagels around on the plate, I shook my head. “That’s what we’re here for. I’ve got some ideas, but nothing concrete. We’ve got some resources in the Skids. I need to get there. After that, there’s a pony who can probably answer me some questions about what’s going on Uptown. We need to find the Night Trotter.”

“Your...cab?” Stella asked, quirking one eyebrow.

“Yes. Sweets?”

“It should still be where I left it at Swift’s parent’s place,” Taxi said, pulling over a road map with a few pins stuck in it. “I’m thankful we thought to cover it.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t already picked it up…”

“I’ve had a cast on both right legs for a week. It’s hard to drive like that. My Night Trotter is also a bit conspicuous.”

“You mean because it shoots lightning out of the back end or because you drive like your tail is on fire?”

Taxi gave me one of those looks that suggests bloody violence, but I’d wisely positioned myself on the opposite side of the pool table and she’d have to hobble around it to get me again. She still seemed a bit irritated with me, but most of her anger had been spent moments ago when she did whatever she did that left me with hazy memories of pain and flying hooves.

“At least I don’t drive like I’m possessed. Either way...my cab is pretty distinctive and it’s really closely associated with you and I. Everypony out there knows your face these days and I’m pretty sure there are some opportunists who’d present those golden scales on your butt to Broadside at the P.A.C.T. if it meant a reward.”

“Yeeeah, speaking of that—”

“No, Hardy, your celebrity status wasn’t my idea. You want somebody to lay that on, talk to Gypsy and the sea serpent,” Taxi grumbled, flicking her left ear at Stella who was looking altogether smug.

I turned to Stella, expectantly tapping the table.

“It needed to be done, Detective,” Stella explained, cooly. “The alternative was potentially watching my own ponies turn you over to the P.A.C.T. one of these days for crimes you are not constitutionally capable of committing. I couldn’t have that, now could I?”

I yanked my hat off and put both hooves up on the desk. “You’ve seen me in front of cameras. There are some ponies in the world that fame just doesn’t suit. It’s more likely to get me lynched.”

He laughed and slithered down to the platform at head height so we could converse eye to eye. “You’ll leave a very pretty corpse and Scarlet and I will cry absolute rivers. Take it for the blessing it is, my dear. You have done great things for this city and a bit of admiration is your just due.”

“More like just desserts,” I bit back under my breath.

Our conversation was interrupted by the clank and rattle of the descending elevator back down the tunnel. Mags crouched down, tail lashing back and forth as she stared intently at the entrance to Stella’s private lair.

“Ah! That’ll be our griffin friends.”

“Huh. What’ve they been doing all week?” Swift asked. “I thought sure they’d want to get home as soon as they were healed…”

Taxi waved at the stacks of paper in front of her. “They did. The deaths of at least six griffin tribe-lords traversing what were thought to be safe parts of the city convinced them otherwise. Somehow, someone is tracking the griffins very closely.”

“Tracking them?” I asked. “Magically tracking?”

“That’s the only way we figure they’ve known when the leadership has moved out of their enclaves. Spies don’t move as fast as would be necessary for these kinds of hits,” Taxi answered, shoving one of her heaps of paper over and digging something out of the bottom. It was a black and white photograph of a dead griffin wearing the tartan of some tribe I wasn’t familiar with. Most of his head was gone. “That’s Lord Geralta. He had four fully armed and armored bodyguards with him and they were shredded thirty meters from what we’re considering the edge of Sky Town. He’d gone out for a morning flight on a whim and they hit him less than ten minutes later. No witnesses.”

From the hallway came a pair of squabbling voices.

“—back, you great fool! I don’t fancy dying, but I haven’t had a decent smoke in almost a week! The Zapp on this end of this insufferable city wouldn’t tingle a chipmunk!” a voice I immediately identified as Derida snapped.

“Och, cease yer spittin’, moi lady! Make the best would ye? Oi found meself a sweet lass! Oi want to be back much as ye be, but Oi see nothin’ doin’ in killin’ meself makin’ it happen!” Grimble Shanks replied as the two of them came around the corner, lead by a slightly put upon looking Scarlet Petals.

Derida was wearing a soft blue dress tailored to a griffin only a couple inches shorter than she was and her expression looked like the sourest of sour grapes. Meanwhile, Grimble Shanks was still minus his tartan kilt and combat vest, but he’d equipped himself with a strange weapon that I identified a moment later as two butcher knives welded together and wired to a fence post; a makeshift halberd.

The big Hitlan’s expression grew into a jovial smile as he saw me.

“High Justice! Batter’n’boil me eggs! Oi thought sure ye were jack in the box!”

I tilted one ear towards Mags.

“He be meaning he thought you be dead, Har’dy,” she whispered.

“Ah, well, it’s good to see you too, Grim—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish before Shanks hopped across the distance in one great bound, landing in front of me. I braced, but nothing can really prepare you for a griffin hug, particularly not from one the size of Grimble. My spine let out some alarming crunchy sounds and both rear hooves went numb. I tried to breathe, but that just made my shattered ribs dig holes in my lungs. He was an awful lot bigger than his brother and I’d already survived one of those greetings today.

After about ten seconds, he let go and I collapsed against the bench, panting softly.

“Do I be needing to rip some bits, Har’dy?” Mags asked, putting her claws up on my leg and looking at me expectantly.

“No, Mags...just let me lay here and bleed internally for a minute,” I muttered, clutching at my chest. “Why do my friends have to greet me with attempts on my life?”

“It’s your winning personality, I’m sure,” Derida cooed, taking a seat on the bench beside me. “After all, you greeted me with that gaudy shotgun pressed against the back of my head. Speaking of things that require an explanation—”

I pointed at Mags. “No, she’s not staying here, she’s coming with me. Her father’s dead at the Moonwalk and she’s my responsibility.” Then at Swift. “Yes, that’s a pony eating meat. No, you’re not hallucinating. Yes, her wings are covered in battle scars from fighting griffins. Yes, her teeth really do look like that.” Then at myself. “No, I’m not actually crazy. Yes, I’ve answered all of these questions today already. No, I don’t care. No, if you wish to issue a death threat, you’ll have to take a number.”

Derida hesitated for a moment, going back through that list in her mind. Her beak slowly shut. “You know, Justice...I think you must remain alive by some curse of the Holy Egg. Nothing else could explain what horrible twist of fate allows someone to experience a life like yours and persist.”

I scowled at her. “Could you go back to the death threats? Those are more comforting than ‘curses’ from the gods’.”

Derida shrugged. “By the by, thank you for saving our eggs. I may still eat your liver one day, but I will feel at least slightly guilty enjoying it, High Justice.” She turned to Stella and dipped into a low bow, spreading her oak brown wings. “My thanks to you as well, dragon, for your hospitality.”

“And your company, dear griffins,” Stella replied, cheerfully, waving Scarlet out of the room.

“Aye, it be a proper place, this’un,” Grimble Shanks clucked, swirling one talon in the air. “Oi miss the Highlands. Can’t wait till me father calls us back, and when Oi first got here, Oi thought it was going to be shite. That mayor boyo jus’ sends us a bottle o’ poncy drink! After this, though, Oi moight be seein’ what me brudder does in pony koind.”

Clickety click goes Hard Boiled’s tired brain meat.

“Wait a second,” I interrupted, sitting up straight. “Say that again?”

Grimble Shanks leaned slightly away from me. “Eh...wha?”

“The thing...just now. About the mayor.”

“The...mayor boyo send us a bottle? Foine rooster piss it be, but gone quick wi’ me an’ the lads—”

I shook my head. “No, make it clear. The mayor sent you drink?”

Derida gave me a curious look. “Is that not the pony custom? He’s sent an entire case to our caves before we
arrived as part of his invitation. We’ve received such gifts before, of course.”

The idea that was twisting around in my head trying to take shape was still missing something essential. What, though?

“Would you...happen to know if he’d sent some drinks to the other tribes?” I asked.

Derida rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t be much of a banker if I didn’t, now would I? Quite the diplomat, your Mayor Snifter. He gives gifts routinely, of course. We are neighbors, after all, and he owes the mere existence of this city to my grandsire.”

“What are you getting at, Detective?” Stella asked, leaning forward intently.

‘The scotch. I mixed some of that drink you gave me into it.’

‘You told me the Scry could keep track of anypony once they’re marked!’

Cosmo had said those words to whoever was holding his leash the day we bugged his office.

I left the bench and began a slow, circular pace. “My friends and I have been narrowly avoiding a magical tracking mechanism called ‘The Scry’. I got...lucky insofar as I’m immune to it for reasons I won’t go into, but this magic can be ingested and seems to work over almost any distance. I believe somepony has managed to drug the griffin tribelords with it so they could track your movements.”

“The...drinks?” Derida asked, nervously tapping her claws on the table. “Justice, are you saying that Mayor Snifter is behind our recent troubles?”

“Snifter or someone who works for him, but...yes. I’d bet money on it.”

There was a round of shocked noises, followed by thick silence as somepony tried to think of something to say. The mayor was not a well liked pony and probably corrupt as they come, but the notion that he might be party to the disappearance of Canterlot atop the theft of Nightmare Moon’s armor and other crimes too numerable for me to count wasn’t a comforting one.

Just as I was about to suggest we break out some of our own booze, Grimble Shanks slapped the table. “That roighteous git! That be how the damned dragons done it!”

I blinked at him, confused. “The...dragons?”

“Aye! Hitlan patrols! We be foindin’ our war-boys butchered, somethin’ fierce loike. Those sneaky slitherin’ snakes crept roight through our outer loines loike they wasn’t there and hit the plateaus! Yer damned mayor...”

Derida came to her feet, wings popping open. “You can’t possibly mean—”

Shanks snarled, swinging his makeshift halberd down from his shoulder and burying it in the pool-table. It stuck there, the handle quivering. “Aye! The git magicks us, then be givin’ the dragons our positions!”

Across the table, Taxi’s lips curled back from her teeth as she stared at the weapon impaling one of her intel reports. “I thought that was strange. The dragon's numbers haven’t recovered enough since the Crusades for a frontal assault on griffin lands, but if they had advanced recon information and complete intelligence on your movements...”

“They could be cuttin’ us down loike dogs!” Shanks howled, angrily, slamming his fist down on the table and scattering the papers in all directions.

I shut my eyes as it all finally fell into place.

“You’re desperate. Your lines are compromised and every battle seems like an ambush. Then there comes a quiet invitation to shelter in our fair city,” I murmured. “Come. Be safe. We’ll set you up in a nice hotel with completely crap defensive positions. Make yourselves at home. Bring your weak, your young, and your old. Leave your armies to fight. You won’t need them. Bring your treasuries. Bring the horse shoes of Nightmare Moon.”

“All three pieces in one place. I can’t fathom what madness could drive ponies to believe such action would benefit them,” Stella said with a shudder that sent water flicking off the end of his tail.

“We have some friends of ours that we need to go see, but then...I want to see if I can get to Canterlot,” I said.

The reactions around the table were a bit lukewarm to that idea.

Derida frowned, Grimble Shanks looked bemused, Limerence licked his lips and started to say something, then thought better of it.

“There’s nothing there, Detective,” Stella murmured, finally. You saw the newsreels, yes? Besides, getting out of the city is going to be nigh on impossible, even if the P.A.C.T. weren’t looking for you. If, as you say, those dragons are working for the Mayor, they will be watching for attempts to leave.”

“I saw the news. Our options are getting real short, though. Iris Jade needs to know I’m back in play and I know a pony who has some fairly advanced information gathering resources available to her. Between the two of them, I’m sure we can figure something out for getting my friends and I to the capital. If nothing else, Jade may know a way to
get into Uptown.”

“That...doesn’t explain why,” Taxi said.

“I...mmm...look, there’s has to be some authority left out there, somewhere investigating what happened to Canterlot. Maybe some Royal Guard patrol or a detachment from the Crystal Empire. I know they don’t have an army to speak of, but they might be able to help us. If they’re anywhere, they’re going to be at Canterlot.”

Not the most popular idea I’d ever presented, but one that nobody seemed able to think of a good point of debate against.

“There are other things going on in the city right now. We need to get Grimble Shanks and Derida back to their people,” I said, deciding we needed a change of topic.

“Are they not...safe here, my sweet?” Stella asked, his tail splashing against the surface of the lake.

“Oi be feelin’ safe enough, but iffen ye have a way, Oi need ta see who be runnin’ t’ings,” Grimble murmured.

“Funny you should mention it, actually,” I replied, scratching at my mane, a bit nervously. I wasn’t sure how he was likely to take the news of what his brother had been up to. “Your people are holed up at Pollick’s Interspecies Taphouse. It’s a bar run by a unicorn who knows her griffins. That said, Sykes is holding the fort.”

The big griffin’s eyes went big as two trashcan lids; a single tear appeared and crept down his cheek.

“Me...me brudder? He be foinally actin’ loike a griffin?” he asked, in a voice cracked with emotion. “He...he never be wantin’ to lead afore now...”

“He’s got the Hitlan protecting the Tokan. He’s keeping them safe. They’re waiting for you.”

With a joyful cry, Grimble Shanks yanked me off my hooves and swung me in a circle, my back legs flying out behind me. I felt a bit like a ragdoll and only had an instant to suck in a breath before he crushed me to his chest again. Something covered in feathers shouldn’t be that hard.

“Och! Me boyo, ye gives me sweetest news! Me eggs live and me brudder come home to roost!”

“Myself as well, Detective,” Derida added. “You say my family is safe? The list of them I am inclined to have killed has shortened considerably in recent weeks. I would like to see if some honest affection might develop, now that there are some stakes worth playing for.”

I sagged onto the bench as soon as Grimble put me down, taking a few minutes to find my thoroughly squashed thought processes and batter them back into useful shape.

“They’re…*cough*...they’re safe as it’s possible to be Sky Town. They’ve got some heavy patrols and...I don’t know. I think the Biters are mostly interested in striking terror and causing chaos.” I nodded toward the danger map, silently apologizing to Gale for all the damage he was likely having to patch up, though it might have been mostly injured dignity. “Most of the attacks I see there are in relatively unguarded locations or places it’s easy to access and isolate an individual or group. We’ll get you home, get our cab...then we’re heading to the Castle. You have any essential business that needs taking care of before we do?”

Grimble and Derida both shook their heads.

Swift put her hoof on my leg. “Sir, can we go see my dad first?”

“Yeah, sure. Sweets? What’s the condition of those casts?”

Taxi glanced down at the plaster on her legs. “I...honestly forgot to have them removed when I got up this morning.” She turned to Miss Stella and pushed her crutches aside, carefully getting to her hooves. “Do...do you have the plans—”

Stella made a limp-wristed flick with one claw that cut her off. “Miss Taxi, we have plans upon plans upon plans for our defense dating back to well before you were born. I have four generations of the smartest, most resourceful ponies you can imagine who are either directly employed here or in my considerable debt. Your help has been invaluable, but...Hard Boiled needs you. Equestria needs you. Scoot!”

The halls of the Vivarium were packed to brimming with ponies, but a pair of griffin tribe-lords has a way of making a hole and the rest of us filtered through behind them. I kept my head low and the brim of my hat down, but that didn’t stop the eyes on my back as my five companions trotted along behind Derida and Grimble Shanks. Well, four companions on hoof and one tiny griffin riding shotgun. Mags steadfastly refused to get off my back and was happily munching on a loose bit of fish snatched from Stella’s lair as we were leaving.

As expected with recent events, the medical wing was swamped.

The first face I saw as we tromped in was that of Dr. Pickle, who must have been the unhappiest stallion in all of equine history. I hadn’t seen the grumpy sadistic prick since I’d delivered Swift to Stella for treatment after the bar-fight at the Plot Hole. He was sagging like a willow tree against one wall of his little examination room, a stained cup of coffee floating in his badly flickering magic as he flipped through papers on a clipboard. His green face was sallow and his eyes were sunken, like he hadn’t had much sleep.

“Whatever you want, find somepony wearing pink butterflies or a red ‘ex’ on their butt,” he growled as we approached. He didn’t look up.

“Pickle, honeykins, you happy to see me?” I chortled, trotting forward.

“Huh. I was half hoping somepony had caught you.” His eyes flicked in my direction and he took a careful sip of his coffee. “What am I saying? I was hoping they’d fed your skinned, char-broiled corpse to a pack of diamond dogs. So tempting to take the Black Coats up on that offer of theirs. Of course, it would be difficult to find another job that plays to my particular predilections in such a comfortable environment. More’s the pity.”

Grimble glanced at me, then unhitched his make-shift axe, but I shook my head and trotted forward, throwing my leg around Pickle’s neck. He tried to step away, but I held him fast.

“You know, I find it simply amazing how many ponies want to do that and end up helping me anyway,” I said in a chummy sort of way. “There’s a prison who is a friend of mine and she’s got a lawyer moping around inside her who I think you’d like.”

Pickle sniffed disdainfully and finished the last sip of his coffee. “I won’t pretend I know what that means, but I have a suspicion that you are somehow responsible for finding myself using my considerable talents for something besides making well heeled, paying customers writhe in agony for my own amusement.”

My grin grew and I gave his head a little squeeze. “I’m sure you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me for forcing you to make wholesome use of all those years of medical school. Either way, I need to know where the Cuddles family is. You seem exhausted, irritable, barely rational, and like you might have that information.”

“If telling you where they are is all that’s required for me to go back to my pleasant fantasies about the day I’ll get to hang your bones in my play-room as an anatomical display, then by all means…” He lit his horn and tapped it against the wall. A tiny, glittering arrow appeared, pointing down the hall. A few meters down, another one flickered into being.

They’d managed to get most of the Heights ponies who’d fallen during the Darkening into the Vivarium and had plenty of volunteers to change catheters and bed pans, shift bodies to prevent bedsores, and keep the invalids full of vitamins and nutrients.

Leaving Pickle to find another cup of coffee, we followed the magical arrows as they led us down the halls of the medical wing, past rooms full of sleeping unicorns in bunks and gurneys. Most of the nurses ignored us, too wrapped up in their rounds to really pay much attention to a few extra people.

“I find your way of making friends very strange, Detective,” Derida commented, slowing down to speak to me. I stepped aside so I wouldn’t tread on the edges of her dress.

“I consider my relationship with Pickle less ‘friends’ and more ‘bat and ball’, particularly after how we met,” I replied. “My friends have my back. He mostly just wants my spine, rib-cage, skull, along with any associated bits and pieces.”

Derida let out a noise that could almost be called genuine laughter.

Scarlet was waiting just outside the room where the arrows vanished, leaning on the wall with a novel open at his hooves, his long blonde tail swaying back and forth. He raised his ears as we came up and smiled like a foal on Hearth’s Warming Day.

“Oh, Detective! Miss Stella said you’d be here. He also had one of the nurses send me a cast cutter,” he said, holding up a funny looking hoof operated device with a crystal sticking out of the end.

“Derida? Grimble? Are you two cleared by medical to leave?” I asked.

Grimble shrugged and held up his wing, giving it an experimental wiggle. Most of the burnt feathers were already growing back, but there were still a few clumps that hadn’t. “Oi ain’t doin’ much flyin’ soon, but...eh, roight as rain.”

Derida flexed her claws. “I smoked my last joint a week ago and my dealer is most likely dead, but aside that, I am fine, yes. I ache to get back into the game and see what a hash my subordinates have made of things in my absence. Months of financial chaos to cure and currency exchanges to be made,” she replied, leering with anticipation. “Oh my, it’s been so long since we had a good audit!”

The way she said ‘audit’ was enough to send every butterfly in my stomach fleeing in terror up my esophagus. I had to swallow a few times to get the little buggers to calm down.

“Go get some food and meet us upstairs. We’ll be leaving within the hour.”

Grimble dipped his head. “Aye, Justice. Oi jus' remembers! Oi gots to go be sayin’ g’noight to moi sweet girly, too!”

“Your affinity for pony flank is disgusting, Grimble,” Derida cackled. “Do keep it up. We’ll make a Tokan of you one day...”

“Oi’d rather dye moiself purple and dance in leather pantsies!”

“Oh? You might look rather fetching in leather underwear, particularly with some lovely piercings on—”

I put my hooves over my ears and sat patiently as the two of them moved off down the hall, still bickering. When I was sure they were gone, along with whatever Derida had been about to say, I leaned against the wall.

Scarlet gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Detective, you really should get your modesty and shame organ checked. I think it might be over-active.”

“My organs all work just fine, Scarlet. It’s just the company and the mileage,” I grumbled, then stepped into the tiny hospital room.

There were three beds, side by side, two of them pushed next to one another. Quickie Cuddles was in one and After Glow was in another. Dr. Suture sat at his wife’s bedside, clutching her hoof, his head on her shoulder. His brown pelt was unbrushed and he looked bone-weary.

Reaching inside, I tapped on the wall for attention.

Suture looked up and his ears pinned back against his head. He fluffed his wings out and shook his mane, which was a politely pegasus way of saying ‘piss off before I start breaking things’.

“Detective Hard Boiled. I thought never to see your face again except when somepony finally parades you in front of the press in shackles.”

“That might still happen,” I replied. “Can we come in?”

“My shift doesn’t start for another hour and the serpent won’t let me work sixteen hours at a stretch any longer, so...yes, I suppose you may. What do you want?”

Swift poked her head around me, waving her wing. “Um...hey Dad?”

Suture’s stoic expression broke for an instant as his daughter snuck in beside me and I got a glimpse of a great ocean of barely contained emotion held back by a wall of nearly endless self control. He pushed himself to his hooves and reluctantly let go of his wife as my partner dropped the satchel with her weapons in it, trotted over, and threw her forelegs around his neck.

She barely came up to his chest, but as he slung his wings around her shoulders and clutched her like a foal, my mind flashed back to that picture I’d seen in their home of mother, father, and daughter. A little truth that I’d missed until that moment assembled itself in my head.

In many ways, Swift was always a contradiction. Innocent and fierce, sweet as honey and more dangerous than even Taxi in defense of her loved ones. Grapeshot never stood a chance after he took the shot that killed me. He might have blown off two of her legs and I think she’d have still found a way to put him in the ground.

Her mother might have given her talent, but it was her dad who gave her passion and drive, carefully hidden behind that mask of the fearless physician. I could be her mentor, her friend, and her partner, but I could never be half the stallion that her father was. I’m just not that good a pony.

The moment ended and Suture stepped back, carefully taking one of her wings in his hooves and inspecting the bandages. “What’ve you done to yourself, my dear?” He gave her a disapproving look. She made to pull her wing away and he poked a spot just behind the joint, making it spring out to full extension.

“Daaad...it’s nothing—”

“Then you won’t mind your father, the doctor, taking a look...now will you?” The way he said it brooked no opposition. She sighed and stood there as he peeled back one of the bandages and peered at the cut underneath. “I thought so. What have you been doing? First you appear at home with those teeth and that scar on your chest, and now you’re...Swift Cuddles, have you been fighting war-makers?”

Swift’s ears popped straight up and her back legs gave out. “H-how did you—”

Suture let her wing go and she snapped it back against her side. “Those cuts are made by a griffin ritual knife they call ‘The Great Reward’. I saw them from time to time in the emergency room. But then, I suspect you already know that.”

“She made quite a name for herself down at Pollick’s. You know Pollick, Doctor Suture?” I asked.

His frown deepened. “I know that demented stallion, his family, and the Decagon well enough to extrapolate the remainder. I assume, since my daughter is standing here instead of being delivered in a wheelbarrow full of small, orange chunks that her win rate was...positive?”

“I saw her last fight, today,” I said and couldn’t suppress a slightly proud grin. “It was fairly spectacular, though I doubt the guy she was fighting will remember much of it.”

Suture turned to where his comatose wife and mother-in-law lay. “I suppose it is too late to complain about your violent genes, Quickie.” He reached one wing out and gathered Swift up against his chest again.

I felt a little shift on my shoulder and Mags whispered, “Har’dy...I be...I be missin’ my daddy.”

“Me, too, kiddo,” I muttered, backing out of the room.

Scarlet lead Taxi, Lim, and I to a separate, nearby room to give Swift and her father a bit of space. I had a feeling they’d need it. The room was unoccupied, save for a dentist’s chair and some orthodontistry equipment in a bin. I didn’t have the courage to ask if that’d been here before the Darkening, nor what it might have been used for.

I helped Taxi up onto the chair as Scarlet fired up the cast cutter.

“So, what is the actual score, here?” Taxi asked, leaning back and shutting her eyes. “You can’t really think going to Canterlot is a good idea.”

“I’m grasping at straws, Sweets. It’s the best I’ve got. Gypsy and Jade may have some information for us, but if Slip Stitch can’t get into Uptown I’m not real cheerful about our prospects. The P.A.C.T. is what worries me here. Black Coats. They’re acting...strange. We need a higher authority to appeal to.”

“They’ve been rousting ponies and searching places, ostensibly for you. It’s not making them any friends,” Taxi answered as Scarlet pointed the funny little instrument at her cast. It began to hum and a thin line appeared at the top of the cast, splitting slowly as he dragged it down her knee. “There’s an awful lot of rumors of disappearances, but it’s like everything else you don’t see with your own two eyes; almost impossible to verify. We don’t have resources to chase ponies who vanish going for a walk right now. There’s theoretically a curfew and the city is under martial law, but I think you’re safe enough so long as you avoid their air patrols.”

“That’s good, because...we’ve got the car. It’s the fastest heap in the city. If we need to outrun dragons, it’s our best option.”

“Hardy, you’re not thinking of making a run for Canterlot—”

“That is Plan B. Plan A is...well, we can’t get in touch with the Essy office, but do you think The Bull is still in town?”

Limerence pulled his spectacles down his muzzle. “The Bull? What do you-...wait... Am I to understand you’re referring to the Pan-Equestrian Subterranean Express?”

“That’ll be it, yeah.”

“You...are suggesting we take the Express to Canterlot?” he asked. “I must say, I like having all of my organs in their current shape, Detective. Not flattened against my spinal column.”

“I be not wanting my bits flattened either, Har’dy,” Mags put in, watching the cast cutting with interest.

“You and me are going to have a conversation about her at some point soon, Hardy,” Taxi murmured, biting her lip as Scarlet finished the hoof, trying not to giggle as the cast cutter tickled her frog. When he was done, the plaster split cleanly in two and she let out a sigh of relief, giving the pristine leg a ferocious scratching with her free hoof. “You’ve no idea how nice it feels to have that stupid thing off.” Moving to her back leg, Scarlet started at the hip and she had to struggle not to kick him as he gently peeled the other cast off, squirming in her seat as the cast cutter tickled her pelt.

“The Bull isn’t the worst way to travel. It’s better than flying. I know the Bull’s handler, or at least, I used to know her,” I explained, pacing back and forth in front of the chair. For some reason I was feeling awfully restless. “Juniper introduced us a few years before he died.”

“If I remember my father’s reports, she’s an...eccentric personality,” Lim mused.

“Eccentric doesn’t do her justice,” I replied, twirling a hoof beside my head. “She’s just about the friendliest thing in Equestria, but you’re going to hate her, and probably hate yourself for hating her. Taxi, you know how to find them?”

“I...yes. I mean, I know where we can probably find her, if they’re still in town—”

“If she was here when the Darkening happened, she’s still here. She can’t resist a good disaster.”

Scarlet stepped back as the second cast came off and tapped a bit of plaster dust off his hooves. “There we are, Miss Taxi! I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think you’ll even have a scar.”

Cautiously at first, then with more confidence, Taxi slid out of the chair and onto her hooves. She took a deep breath, then stepped forward. Her front knee gave out for a second and I moved to catch her, but she waved me back.

Straightening, she took another step, letting her full weight gradually settle.

“I think I’m good. Let’s go get Swift and I’m going to say goodbye to Minox. I imagine he’ll be glad to finally get some sleep...”

Swift was giving her father one last hug as we came out of the private room. Suture gave me a little nod, then retreated back into his wife and mother-in-law’s sick room, shutting the door behind him. She picked up her satchel with the Hail Storm in it and slung it back over her shoulder.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Nothing, Sir,” Swift replied, fluffing her wings and patting down the pockets on her combat vest. “Dad is...ugh, he’s being my Dad. Typical threats to ground me forever if I get myself killed and stuff, you know?”

“That’s a refreshing change from threats to kill me if you get yourself killed,” I murmured.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about my Dad, Sir. He’s not like that.”

I felt momentarily relieved, then had a thought tickle my brain.

“Is that because your mother and grandmother won’t leave enough to make it worth the effort?”

Word had apparently gotten around as we headed upstairs and I got more than a few blatant stares. My ears were burning by the time we reached the exit out back of the building. Somepony had arranged a chicken lorry, sans chickens. It still smelled like poultry, which didn’t bother me much but Mags, Grimble, and Derida started drooling the second we piled in. Prepubescent, fish-scented griffin drool down the back of your neck is not the way to start a journey.

Taxi said her last goodbyes to the minotaur, which involved an alarming amount of bumping, grinding, and tongue-play which was probably for my benefit. She’d enjoyed making out in front of me since we were teenagers, always hoping to get a rise. She never had, but “torturing Hardy when he’s trying to focus” was one of her favorite past-times. It was properly irritating when she got her first marefriend, then invited me to see Spacemare Destroyer Captain Part 6.

The back of the chicken truck was tight, but it had a covered top. I hadn’t had the forethought to check the time before we left.

Sliding behind the wheel, Taxi unfolded her map, then popped the hatch between the cab and the back compartment. “So, what’s our first stop? I need a new gun, but I’m betting my contact who got us the last batch is half-way to Los Pegasus by now. Or dead.”

“First? We deliver our friends here back to Sky Town. Next, the Night Trotter. After that...I don’t know.”

“If I may, and being as you are the only likely representative of the Nursemaid Guild I’m likely to see anytime soon...What about our eggs?” Derida inquired, tilting her chin up slightly. “I wish to see my own hatch as much as the next griffin.”

“Do you really want to move them?” I asked. “I mean, they’re in the creche here at the Vivarium. They’ve got a fair bit of experience taking care of eggs. There’s no Nursemaid Guild to speak of, unless you mean me. You want I should cart your eggs around in the trunk of my friend’s cab?”

A slightly queasy look crossed her face. “I think not.”

The map Taxi’s Stiletto scouts managed to hack together laid out a route that avoided the densest of the P.A.C.T. patrols and the most dangerous factions, but it still took us nearly an hour to get to Sky Town. Riding in the back of a sweaty, stinky truck full of griffins, a grumpy unicorn, and a mopey pegasus is a special kind of Tartarus that I don’t feel any need to describe outside of saying they hadn’t cleaned the chicken feathers out of the bed as well as I might have liked; I ended up with half a feather pillow down the back of my collar.

On the outskirts of Sky Town, we were accosted by a patrol wearing the familiar tartan of the Hitlan Tribe.

The second they laid eyes on Grimble Shanks, there were chest bumps and cheers all around. After extracting a promise from him not to go on any patrols, nor to leave Derida alone under any circumstances besides having a piss, we sent them on their merry way.

I shoved open the front door of the Cuddles residence and winced as the creak of the hinge echoed down the deserted street.

Mags bonked me on the head with her knuckles. “Be quiet, egg pony! It be dangerous!”

I gave my back a rough shake and she yelped as she slid off my shoulders into a heap on their doorstep. “You can have your riding privileges back after I’ve had a beer.” She gave me a reproachful look, tucking her tail between her back legs. I sniffed at her and added, “And you’ve had a bath.”

She stuck her beak under one wing, then stuck her little pink tongue out. “I be smelling fine!”

“You smell like raw fish and chickens.”

“What be wrong with fish and chickens?” Mags demanded.

“Nothing, if you enjoy walking everywhere we go.”

“Speaking of going, Sir…why aren’t we?” Swift asked as she backed up against the wall of her family home, warily studying the sky. “This feels awfully exposed. I want to be back on the road and—”

“We all need some rest, kid. This side of the Heights is safe enough and according to Taxi’s map we aren’t in an area that’s heavily patrolled by the P.A.C.T. or the Black Coats or whatever they’re called these days. Relax a bit. I think everyone needs some down time.”

“I also need to check the car,” Taxi added, glancing at the tarp-covered Night Trotter that was sitting just where we’d left it a week ago. “Does your dad have any tools I could use?”

Swift pointed towards the little garage adjoining the house. “Um...in there. I think he’s got some sprockets and stuff. Sir, I really don’t like this...”

“If you don’t mind, I find myself needing the facilities as well,” Limerence said, tugging his vest off with his teeth and giving it a good shake. “One would think after swimming through that sewer that my olfactory senses would be irreparably damaged, but a week in a coma has left my personal scent a bit...undesirable.”

Slumping a little, Swift pushed passed me into the house. “Ugh...Fiiine. I may as well finish that chicken salad my mom left in the fridge. The power is still on so it’s probably still good…”

“Yes, regarding that,” Limerence murmured, stamping dirt off his hooves on the welcome mat. “Why is the power still on? Something of a mystery if you ask me. Unless someone is maintaining it, shouldn’t it have failed catastrophically after the first three days or so? I don’t imagine the employees of the company are still making repairs. You made it sound like you had a theory about that earlier, Detective.”

“A theory? Not so much. It’s just a notion. I’ll know once we get out to Supermax. I want Ladybugs with us before we leave Detrot, either way.”

“You think it’s the Aroyos keeping everything going, Sir?” Swift asked, scuffing her hoof self-consciously. “I...I really want to see Tourniquet. I can feel her magic inside me, but I can’t talk to her without a Ladybug…”

“Like I said, it might be,” I replied with a little shrug, then turned to my griffin ward. “Mags, grab a towel out of the hall closet and get your butt upstairs in the tub.”

“Don’t wanna,” she sulked, digging at the rug with her claws.

“It’s either that or I go get the hose. Move it, fuzzball!”

Two hours later, I was toweling my thick mane out, flopped across the couch in the living room as Mags played with some of Swift’s old action figures on the carpet. I’d tried the television, but got only static or automated public service announcements declaring a ‘state of emergency throughout Equestria’.

Not surprising, I guess. Uptown encompassed the print and television districts. Every major station and most of the minor ones were there. Odd that there were no broadcasts going out, but with the disruptions to magical fields around the city, there was no practical way of guaranteeing your signal was going anywhere.

The radio yielded some slightly better results. There were plenty of stations still broadcasting, but most were single-pony operations. I dialed from station to station until I found what I thought was probably Gypsy’s. Light jazz filtered through the cozy little home and I let my shoulders begin to unwind.

I was clean and comfortable. Nopony was dying or screaming or sobbing or getting blown up in my immediate area. Limerence was upstairs still splashing around in the Cuddle’s family’s giant, claw-foot bathtub and Taxi was outside with a jack and a heap of Suture’s tools, happy as a clam as she fiddled with our ride.

That left Swift in the kitchen, sitting there disconsolately chewing on her third chicken sandwich.

Heaving myself up, I tugged the towel off my head and wrapped it around my flank, keeping my tail from dripping on the carpet as I trotted into the kitchen and sank down into a chair opposite my partner at the table. She didn’t acknowledge me, still chewing on a bite of her sandwich. She seemed lost in thought, her combat jacket folded on the table in front of her along with Masamane and the bag with the Hailstorm.

“Alright kid, what’s eating you?” I asked, reaching across the table and putting my hoof over her meal before she could bring it to her muzzle, “You’ve been acting like somepony kicked your puppy since I found you in Pollick’s.”

Swift finally looked up and swallowed. Her eyes were shining with tears, but they weren’t falling.

“Sir...it...it’s nothing. Really.”

“I’ve been around long enough to know that ‘nothing’ doesn’t come with a thousand yard stare. We’ve been up to our ears in blood together.”

She shut her eyes and sat for a long moment, taking some deep breaths. Her lips curled back in a way that made her look a bit like a wolf, then she dropped her unfinished sandwich. “Sir...I need to be able to trust my partner, and...I know it’s stupid, because you’ve had my back all this time, but it won’t leave me alone! I lost count of how many times you saved me, but you’d lie if you thought I’d be safer because of it. You’d lie to me if you thought I wouldn’t be hurt. You’d lie, Sir! You’d take that judgement call away from me.”

I gulped. “I...can’t say you’re wrong, kid. Your safety is the most important thing there is to me. I want you to still be okay when this is all over.”

She jabbed her hoof at her teeth, angrily rising to her hooves. “I’m never going to be okay, darnit!” she snapped, “I’m not ever going to be okay! I killed somepony I looked up to my whole life! I watched my partner die! My whole family is unconscious because of magic that might have killed or foalnapped the Princesses and a whole entire city! Somepony did something to my brain and I eat meat! I’m pretty sure I killed some of those cultists, too! There’s no such thing as ‘okay’ right now! Stop treating me like a filly, Hardy!”

I couldn’t remember getting up, but I was standing as she finished her furious speech.

Had she ever used that name before? Surely she had, but I couldn’t remember. Strange.

Swift sagged into the seat again, putting her hooves on either side of her head as she glared at her meal. “So...so I need to know. This is my question and you promised me the truth.”

Carefully pulling my chair in, I settled back down. “Uh...sure, Swift.” My voice caught in my throat and I had to force the words out. “What…*ahem*...what do you want to know?”

She was shaking with tension, but her gaze was unwavering. For the first time since I’d met her, I finally saw the pony who was my partner. I saw her for who she really was, under my preconceptions about youth, under the respect training and the military regimentation. I saw the mare who’d fought her way through Diamond Dogs, invisible monsters, professional killers, and mad, drugged up religious zealots.

I saw her and, if I’m honest, I was afraid.

“Sir, how did Juniper Shores die?”

Act 3 Chapter 7 : Truth And Justice

A Cinepony Studios Production!

Starring!

Coroner Slip Stitch - Played by - Himself

Juniper Shores - Played by - Himself

Chief Iris Jade - Played by - Herself

Radiophonic Telegraphica - Played by - Herself

The Stained Glass Killer - Played by - *Uncredited*

With Detective Hard Boiled Jr

in:

Truth and Justice!

A story of mayhem and murder in the streets of fair Detrot!

Produced and directed by Hard Boiled Jr.

In the boroughs of the great equine city of Detrot—a city on the edge of Equestria’s influence—the streets are a dangerous place for the unwary, but the crime waves that characterized the post-boom years have broken. There is a momentary calm. The mighty gangs that remain—the Jewelers and the Cyclones—still wage war on one another, but it is a cold one.

Between them, the Detrot Police Department stands as a light in the dark wilderness, keeping the innocent safe and evil at bay. Though the newly minted Chief of Police, Iris Jade, is a determined mare, there are many who would tear apart the fragile peace that reigns.

In these dangerous times, two detectives have stepped forward to take up the banner of righteousness against those who would further corrupt their home. When the fighting heats up, they are there to make sure that the public always sees justice. When Death stalks the streets, snatching victims at will, they are there, fast on his heels. Their names are Hard Boiled and Juniper Shores.

This is the story of their last day.

Set: Mid morning, several years ago.

Two ponies lay, side by side, in a dirty apartment on a rumpled bed surrounded by beer bottles.

Scene:

Hard Boiled shifted in his sleep, moaning softly.

Surely, there had never been, in all of Equestrian history, a more pitiful pony than he. His head ached. His hooves ached. He had to pee and that meant getting out of his nice, warm bed and away from the nice warm hooves wrapped around his middle.

‘Hooves around my middle?’ he thought, blearily trying to open one eye and finding it covered by strands of soft, emerald mane. “Oh...right. Juni was too drunk to go home last night. Nothing new there, I guess. At least it’s not hot out.”

Shifting his head back into the pillow, he sighed and ran his hoof through his partner’s green mane, thinking back to that first night they’d ended up piled on the bed, a heap of autopsy reports and a bottle of scotch between them. Waking up with his legs around another male had been a bit of a shock. At first, he’d put it down to the booze, but it happened again a week later. Then a week after that. After the third month, he’d stopped trying to figure out whether or not either of them was gay.

‘In the trenches, it doesn’t really matter,’ he thought, as he had a hundred times before, letting his eyes slide shut.

The other stallion let out a soft snort and buried his muzzle in the crook of Hard Boiled’s neck. The blankets were tangled around both of them and it was going to be tough getting loose with an uncooperative pony hanging on to his waist.

“Come on, you old fool,” Hardy grumbled, wiggling his hips sideways in the hopes it would get Juniper moving. “I need to piss and unless you want a wet leg, you best let me up.”

Juniper, for his part, was fighting the oncoming wakefulness because the waking world is where hangovers live. Far better to spend his time with the comfortable and familiar body heat pressed against his side than go out and face the agony. Sure, his pillow smelled a bit like spilt beer, but beer was a good thing in the grand scheme.

Hardy gritted his teeth as the painful pulsing in his temples got worse and finally overshadowed his desire to stay where he was.
Carefully disentangling his partner’s legs from his barrel, he slid to the edge of the bed and pushed himself up, letting his hooves hang over the side as he studied the sleeping stallion in the bed beside him.

There was some debate around the office as to whether Juniper was green or some shade of olive; it changed a bit depending on which angle you were looking at and whether or not he’d brushed lately. His mane tumbled down his neck in a messy pile the color of clover deep in the season and a bit of scruffy beard clung to his prominent chin. Hardy had always envied that a bit; he’d never had any luck growing so much as a mustache.

“If you’re not up by the time I get back, I’m gonna go in the hall and get the firehose and blast your ass out of bed with it,” Hard Boiled murmured, wiping sand out of his eyes.

Stepping off the bed, he put his hoof on a bottle and almost hit the wall as his hung-over mind tried to compensate, overcompensated, then undercompensated and gave the floor time to sneak up and swat him in the chin.

“Ow.”

Flopping onto his side, he rubbed his jaw with both hooves until the pain in his teeth was displaced by the pain in his skull and bladder.

“Awww, kiddo...you’re always so graceful in the mornings,” his partner commented dryly, propping his head on his hoof.

“And you drank my entire case of that good dark stuff I got from Requisitions for closing the Dart Sing case,” Hard Boiled grumbled, picking himself up off the carpet. His floor needed a vacuuming, but it was a cop’s floor. Hardy had always been of the opinion that if a cop has time to do more than the dishes, he’s not doing enough copping and, even then, good cops have long since discovered paper plates.

Juniper plucked a stray sock off the pillow he’d been laying on, shaking his head as he tossed it towards the laundry hamper in the corner. “Have you considered burning this place? I think it would benefit from a small fire. Maybe a big fire.”

“Now and then, yeah, but then where would you drink and sleep?” Hardy grunted, heading into the bathroom. He cocked his back leg over the toilet and shut his eyes against the sun pouring in from the little window above the shower stall.

“I don’t know, kiddo. Probably find a nice classy gutter someplace with a pillow that doesn’t snore and will get me coffee in the morning. It’d be a step up, I think,” Juniper sniffed, pulling a weapon harness off the end table and holding it up. “Is this yours or mine?”

“Does it matter? I was sober enough to put our guns away.”

“Probably not.”

Hardy plucked a tie off the carpet and gave it a sniff, then tossed it over his head. It wasn’t quite rancid yet and he was pretty sure spots were catsup, rather than blood spatter. Hard to tell some days.

“No shower?” Juniper asked, pulling his worn faux-leather police jacket off the bedside table. The brown vinyl was ripped and bits of stuffing showed through numerous patches on the elbows. He threw it around his neck, letting the legs flap against his knees as he plodded into the bathroom after Hardy.

Hardy nodded towards the clock in the living room. “No time. Telly called before I hit the hay last night. They found a body.”

“A...body we’re interested in?” Juniper asked.

“A griffin body,” he added. “Specifically, a young hen of egg bearing age in unusual condition. Sound familiar?”

Juniper paused, his leg in the air as he stood over the urinal. Slowly, he set it back down. “Well, I mean...you know what they’re like. Griffins turn up dead in those crazy honor fights—”

“The word Telly used was ‘shattered’,” Hardy interrupted. "The body was a wreck. They found her just outside the city and forensics did a full work up on the crime scene. Get this...it looks like she was transported there and dumped, but they found trace evidence. No identification possible, but...I don’t think it matters. Juni, I think we’ve got him. The bastard finally made a mistake!”

“Mmm...don’t soak your panties just yet, kiddo. We’ve thought we had the Stained Glass Killer before,” Juniper mused and went back to finishing his business. Hardy snatched up one of the two toothbrushes beside the sink and applied a healthy dollop of paste. “Eighteen months since his last victim. I’d almost hoped he got himself killed trying to snatch some griffin who didn’t care to be snatched.”

“Him? Not a chance. Too careful. Come on. We can get coffee on the way. Speaking of that, did I tell you Sweet Shine is coming back in town in a few weeks?”

Juniper laughed, snatching up the second toothbrush and nudging Hardy aside with his hip. “You didn’t. That nutty filly off humping zebras or giraffes or something again?”

“Not a clue. Last I saw her she was calling herself ‘Ootona’ and wearing a grass skirt to cover up the scars. Granted, she was so stoned I had to foalsit her for two days straight, but then she was off again. I woke up the first night with her licking my hooves.”

His partner shook his head, running a hoof through his cropped mane. “She was a damn fine cop. Narcotics has been a wreck since she left. They say she had some kind of ‘gift’. You think she’s lost it?”

“I don’t think Sweets ever had ‘it’ to lose, but if you’re asking if she’ll ever be back on the force?” Hardy spat his toothpaste and washed his muzzle out. “She can’t stay away, Juni. Ever since we were foals, she’s had to be in the thick of things.”

Juniper glanced back at his cutie-mark; a torch with a gleaming eye instead of a fire. “Kiddo, I don’t know how exactly to bring this up, but...you know she was lying in her report about what happened to Fox Glove, right? Whatever has her out there chasing buffalo was ugly. Uglier than a gang war and some thugs somehow making her and her partner.”

Wiping his muzzle on a towel, Hardy stepped out and headed for the coat-rack to get his hat. “Yeah, but that’s your talent talking, not mine. Sweets wants to keep something a secret, her jaw might as well be a steel trap. Nobody at the office liked Fox Glove besides Sweets, but whatever happened out there, she did the right thing. She wouldn’t abandon him unless he was already dead. That I know. My talent didn’t so much as tingle.”

“Ehhh...I’ll take your word for it. So, breakfast?”

Scene Change: The camera pans away from our characters into the calm morning air outside the apartment window. The image fades away.

Set: A battered police cruiser speeding down the highway in the calm morning air.

Hard Boiled hung his leg out the passenger side window, one rear hoof up on the dash. Sure, it was a little undignified always riding shotgun, but going to the afterlife on fire and upside down was probably worse.

Juniper, meanwhile was grinning like a mad pony.

“You know if you keep making that face, it’s going to get stuck like that, Juni,” Hardy muttered.

“I should say the same thing, Mister Scowls-At-Everything. You’ll pardon me if I’m a little pleased at the prospect of catching this prick. It’s no wonder you haven’t had a date in three years.”

“Half the office thinks you and I are going at each other. Waking up with you in my bed four nights a week isn’t doing much to dispel that notion, either. Fluff in Requisitions asked Telly if we’d set a date for the wedding.”

Juniper threw his head back and laughed long and hard, then gave the beaten police cruiser a little more speed. An alarming wail issued from the hood that would have meant ‘service-me’ to most ponies; to Juniper, it was a sign that the mechanism lacked for gumption and discipline.

It was a subject of some amusement amongst the newer mechanics at the Detrot Police Department that Hardy was supposedly a less desirable name to see at the top of your work orders; not that any of them had in the last few years. The older mechanics would just reply when asked why that was the case that Juniper had never managed to turn a car inside out.

“So...what? You prefer I sleep at my place?” Juniper sniggered. “You know what the neighbors are like. Might as well try to sleep on the dance floor of a night club.”

“I didn’t say that. What I meant was that I’m a cop. If you’re going to give me crap about not dating, then you’ve got to acknowledge that whoever I date is going to be competing with the job. That means they’re going to be competing with you. That and I think my bed is a little small for three.”

“So, kid...what you’re saying is you need a bigger bed?”

Hardy tossed his hooves in the air in defeat, slumping against the window. Grabbing his coffee, he took a sip of the lukewarm liquid. “Yes, of course, Juni. That’s exactly what I’m saying. I need a bigger bed.”

His partner braked just in time to avoid driving up the rear tailpipe of a city bus and settled back against the car’s flank rest. “Eh, I figure if you were going to shoo me out, you’d have done it two years ago.”

“Probably should have, ya decrepit coot. It would have saved me all those mornings waking up in a puddle of your drool.”

“Who you callin’ ‘coot’, colt? I mighta got five years on you, but I’ll whip you up one side and down the other!”

Hardy shook his head, but couldn’t hide a smile as they headed for the Morgue.

Scene change: The camera flies out the back window of the cruiser. In the distance, a giant pink dome looms over an empty parking lot.

Set: Twenty minutes later.

The two detectives stand side by side over a body covered by a sheet in a sterile surgical chamber. The atmosphere is belied somewhat by the poster of a kitten in a party hat on the wall and the coroner, in a white lab coat, who is also wearing party hat.

----

“Tell me the good news, Stitch. You think you’ve got something?” Juniper asked, resting a hoof on the edge of the gurney. The body under the sheet was a slightly odd shape, but he could make out the general outlines of a beak and claws lying limply on either side.

“My, oh, my do I ‘got something’, my friends!” Stitch crowed, brandishing a little pink plastic party trumpet over the body. He was unusually animated even for Stitch, his tail twitching spastically back and forth behind him and his back legs dancing to a tune only he could hear. “Many bodies I’ve seen, but this one is magnificent! Do you know, it took me a full seven and a half seconds just to identify the gender? Eighteen more to get her approximate age! As to cause...well—” Grabbing the edge of the sheet, the coroner yanked it back.

Hard Boiled prided himself on a stiff upper lip and a strong stomach, but his guts twisted in knots as he fell back from the sight on the table, throwing his leg over his muzzle.

“Sweet sunny skies, Stitch! Warn a pony next time!” he barked, picking himself up off the tiled floor. He glanced at Juniper, but his older partner hadn’t moved. He was just standing there, studying the corpse with the same intensity a modern art student would study one of those splatter-paintings that always seemed to sell for insane sums of money. Steeling himself, Hard Boiled eased in beside Juniper and forced himself to look at the corpse.

Most of the body wasn’t terribly recognizable anymore. Stitch had been right about the difficulty identifying the gender. Most of her skull was misshapen and twisted, like it’d been wrenched one direction, then another. Beneath her fur, he could see splotches of bruising that seemed to follow very regular lines across her belly and neck, splitting and returning to one another almost like a cracked mirror.

Her beak was split in four separate places, giving the impression of a puzzle barely held together. Both back legs were still there, but had far, far too many joints.

Hardy shuddered as an image of a bean-bag full of organs drifted through his head.

“What could do that to...to anything?” Hard Boiled asked, a bit dumbfounded.

“Truth be, I’ve no idea,” Stitch replied, using his trumpet to lift one of the girl’s arms. It sagged in the middle like the entire limb had been turned to rubber. “Nearly every small bone in her body and most of the larger ones seem to have been crushed, but the bruising patterns don’t suggest such a thing. It’s as though she were...somehow shaken apart. As you’re well aware, the Stained Glass Killer gets his name from the rather unique patterns left on the flesh of his victims. We still aren’t certain what causes them.”

“So...magic, then?” Juniper asked.

The coroner shook his head, the party hat falling down onto one eye. He shoved it back in place and smiled. “No! Delicious mystery, isn’t it? I show absolutely no traces of magical influence on this body! The Stained Glass Killer tends to leave his victims in crystal mines or places with high ambient magic. We only found the last three because city workers were doing an inspection of an old mineshaft. They’d definitely been laid out for them to find, too. Unfortunately, the number of ponies with access to those inspection plans is probably upwards of a thousand, so that won’t help you narrow them down. There have always been trace arcane signatures all over the crime scenes, but this young hen was delivered just outside of town. I say delivered, since she was simply left resting in a ditch, claws over her chest.”

“No magic,” Hardy muttered, poking at what he was fairly certain was the girl’s side. It set a wave through her flesh like he’d just prodded some gelatin and he had to swallow a few times to get his stomach under control. “Alright, so, besides the bruising patterns and the...condition of the body...what makes you think this is the Stained Glass Killer? The others were crushed, right?”

“Yeees...I thought that myself, until this one arrived! When I went back over my own autopsies under the assumption that it wasn’t magic of any kind. I used some fairly recent techniques that I must write a paper on—” He paused, snatching a notepad from thin air and quickly jotting down the words ‘Get Name On Trademark For Investigative Process Of Squishy Stuff’ with a pencil held in his teeth before tucking it carefully away in his lab coat.

“—pardon. As I was explaining, in my reexamination, I was able to determine that the bones were broken down in a very consistent fashion. What caused these deaths was significantly more thorough than simple weight or crushing force! Even a unicorn as powerful as Iris Jade would have trouble exerting this level of damage on a body. It went right down to the cellular level! That would also appear to be what causes the strange patterns on the flesh.”

“So what you’re saying is that...what was done to those other poor hens, it was...what? More complete?” Juniper asked, stroking the tuft of fur on his chin.

“Yes!” Stitch jabbed his party trumpet at the older stallion and swept his party hat off, plunking it down on the remains of the griffin girl’s beak. “Exactly that. Your investigations were predicated on the notion that you were tracking a unicorn, were they not?”

“Well...you get a body that’s been electrocuted or dropped out of the sky, it’s usually a pegasus. You get a body that’s been beaten to a pulp or has a bullet in it, it’s probably an earth pony. Torn apart, it’s a griffin. You get someone incinerated or turned into a liquid—”

“—or a bean bag!” Stitch chirped and Hard Boiled clutched his stomach, gulping air.

“Or that—” Juniper acknowledged, tipping his head, “—it’s generally a unicorn. No magic means we’re tracking something else, right?”

“Well, I shan't say that, but...someone has gone to great lengths to dispose of these bodies in places they’d be found—active crystal mines, areas being cleaned of magical contamination and so on—but usually it takes some time before they are discovered. Scavengers got at two of the victims and until very recently, the forensic evidence was spotty. Do you know, that monumental moron who delivered me the last girl left a half eaten sandwich in the body bag?”

Hard Boiled ignored that as he studied the body, glad he’d skipped breakfast. “I wonder. He wouldn’t be the first serial killer to fall in love with the press. Still seems odd, though. Juni, thoughts?”

Juniper shut his eyes and sucked a breath, then laid his hooves on the gurney, lightly touching the empty shell. “You said this body was found outside the city? Did he make any attempt to display it or anything of the sort?”

Slip Stitch shook his head. “None, aside the crossing of the forelimbs over the breast. That was also odd. As you know, the others were laid out, almost ritually, their limbs splayed as though taking flight. This poor child was simply strewed in a ditch. I doubt she’d have been found before the wild life destroyed the body were it not for a couple of nature enthusiasts out for a morning explore. If it can be called that, they got very lucky.”

“Then...this isn’t his usual fare. I mean, we had to go down in a mine for the last three, but you could practically eat off that crime scene. Something about her was wrong. Maybe something in the process?” Juniper squinted at the corpse.

Hardy’s eyes widened slightly as his cutie-mark let out a burst of sensation so strong he danced sideways at the table, catching himself on a tray of instruments. “Scrap paper!”

“What, Detective?” Stitch asked, cocking his head.

Righting himself, Hard Boiled jabbed a toe at the hen’s forehead. “The psychological profile for this guy said ‘older, patient, highly creative’. All those griffins in different poses, placed in spots where they’d be found! Think about it. He must see this as some kind of artistic enterprise. She didn’t fit the bill. She’s scrap paper; a canvas he didn’t like. Was there anything unusual about her?”

Stitch bit his lip. “I...did find something in my examination that was somewhat different from our other victims…”

“And that is?” Juniper asked.

“Well, I didn’t think much of it until you said something just now, but...the other bodies were all Highland griffins, yes? From the plateaus?”

Hardy thought back to the other reports he’d read, then slowly nodded. “I think so, sure. We only got positive I.D. on one of them, and nobody claimed her body. The rest were vagrants or didn’t have many local relations. We went through all the griffin soup kitchens and so on. No dice.”

“These personalities are obsessive and detailed. Highland griffins are known for some very distinctive patterns of plumage. Our girl here is, however, not a Highland griffin.”

“How can I tell?” Juniper asked, poking at the girl’s limp, tufted tail as it lay between her back legs. “I mean, Sykes aside, most griffins don’t exactly look all that different to me.”

Hardy swatted at his shoulder. “You say crap like that around Sweet Shine when she gets back and she’ll break your ankles and tattoo the word ‘Speciesist’ on both our foreheads!”

“Well, I can’t help it if it’s true! Dammit, kid, I wasn’t born in this city! Baltimare wasn’t exactly teeming with griffins.”

Slip Stitch smirked, picking up his clipboard and turning to the body. Lifting a broken mass it took Hardy a moment to identify as a wing, he pointed to a patch of scars in a very tightly woven pattern around the base, near what was left of the joint. “This hen is originally from the old griffin homeland. Again, no positive identification, but she was not born in Detrot, either. That’s a mark, signifying a daughter in line to inherit the providence of her family gods.”

“Huh. I’m going to have to check Sykes next I get him drunk,” Hardy muttered.

“I wouldn’t bother. It’s a tradition the Highland griffins don’t hold to. Still, do you think such a thing might be enough for this fellow to consider her an ‘unworthy’ effort?” Stitch asked.

“I don’t know. What else have you got?”

“Well! Now we come to the truly gruesome part! Most gruesome! Morbidly horrific, even!” Stitch twirled in a little circle, pulling another clip-board out from under the table. “Detective, this poor child was alive and conscious for some period after the process began!”

“Conscious?!” Hardy’s tongue felt like it’d grown a couple sizes too big and he had to gulp a few breaths as the implications began to sink in. “Are you sure?!”

“Quite! There are enzymatic reactions to fear and pain in the body that are only produced by a conscious brain,” Stitch answered, picking up his party hat and gesturing to an autopsy report hanging on the bottom of the table. “My newest technique is far more accurate. I must remember to thank the Buzzing family for the use of their grandmare. One can learn so much from putting a corpse in a bucket of drain cleaner for a week or two!”

Hardy glanced at a big, metal bucket that was sitting in the corner. “Do I want to kno—”

“No, kid,” Juniper murmured, “You don’t ask him. Rule one. We’ve been over this.”

“Alright, alright. So, what about the other bodies?”

Stitch tossed his clipboard towards the wall where it hooked neatly over a nail. “Unfortunately, the specific enzymes my latest test looks for decay quickly after death. Those bodies were all somewhat decayed, but this body was found within hours of her death.”

“So...what is it had you excited enough to get us down here at this hour?” Hardy grumbled.

“I am so pleased you ask, Detective! Ahem. Since Iris Jade did her little ‘cleansing’ of the fools who used to run the forensics lab and brought in Miss Muddy Mix, we’ve been getting some quite reliable information. Almost all of the murder sites before were badly contaminated and in areas where there was guaranteed to be some traffic at some point. This one wasn’t,” Stitch wiggled his flank, shaking with cheery excitement. “We a found timberwolf slivers in the soil.”

Juniper and Hardy glanced at one another, then back to the coroner. Hardy shifted his weight from one leg to another, waiting for Stitch to continue, but he seemed to be waiting for a prompt.

The silence stretched until Juniper rolled his eyes and said, “Maybe you better assume neither of us can read minds. Timberwolves are pretty common wherever magic has time to soak into some trees. What’s special about these?”

Slip Stitch rose right up on the tips of his hooves and did a little dance with all four toes. “Oooh, my dear sirs, I realize they are a fairly common occurrence, but it is very unusual to see Golden Wood timberwolves in an area where Golden Wood doesn’t grow!”

“Wait...Golden Wood? That’s an exotic, isn’t it?” Hardy asked, scratching his forehead.

“Precisely!” Stitch was almost vibrating as he scooted over to one of the tables against the wall, snatching up a vial and depositing it in Hard Boiled’s outstretched hooves. The detective held the vial up to his eye, giving it a little shake. Two shining, yellow slivers of wood rattled inside. As he watched, they glowed a faint green, then tried to wiggle closer to one another. “Wherever the body was transported from, it was an area surrounded by heavy magic, yet the body contains none. It was a place with Golden Wood, too. It was in a dead zone, but a dead zone with powerful arcane influences nearby and trees...”

Hardy sucked his teeth and his cutie-mark twitched. Slowly the pieces fell into place. “You mean...outside the city. Somewhere with a grove of rare wood nearby, but that is itself not magically active. That...that means—”

“We’ve got a crime scene!” Juniper finished. They both stood in stunned silence, then Hardy clapped Slip Stitch on the shoulder hard enough to make him cough, but not enough to break his effusive smile.

“Hot damn! So, we’re looking for a magical dead zone with a zone of heavy magic between it and Detrot that contains Golden Wood trees,” Hardy murmured, then jabbed a hoof at the ceiling. “We need to call Jade and see if she can get us some access to the P.A.C.T. survey information for the Wilderness. Thanks, Stitch!”

“My pleasure, Detectives!” Stitch replied, throwing the sheet over the misshapen body as they headed for the exit. “Oh! The two of you are coming to my ‘Death Under The Stars’ reception in a few weeks during the Summer Sun celebration, yes?”

“Stitch, if we catch this guy, I’ll stuff the kid here in a slinky black dress and he’ll be my date!” Juniper called over his shoulder as he pushed the door open.

Hard Boiled made to swat his partner but the other stallion had already bounced ahead several steps out of range. “We catch this Stained Glass guy and I’ll do it, plus a kiss at the end of the night. You’re buying dinner and as much wine as I can drink, though.”

“So it’ll be like most nights then?”

Scene Change: The camera fades into the distance as the two detectives make their way up to the beaten police cruiser.

Set: On the road again, they roll towards the noon-day sun which perches above an ominously looming building that strongly resembles an ancient castle.

----

“You honestly think she’s going to give us permission to go snooping around out in the Wilderness?” Hard Boiled asked, leaning back in his seat as the cruiser blasted towards the Detrot Police Department main office. “I mean, she might, if she thought we’d both end up getting eaten by bears. You know she’s still sore about those Zap brownies that somehow ‘appeared’ in her office after she took that deal with the district attorney on the Tar Pits case. She can’t prove it, but she’d have had both our hides for that one if she could.”

Juniper grinned, rooting around in the center console until he found a bag of month-old jellybeans. Setting them in the cup holder, he tossed a couple in his muzzle. Up ahead, the Castle grew in the distance.

“Mmm...you miss the point, kid. Ponies like Jade need ponies like us or their butts start to squeak when they walk. She’ll give us authorization, if only because the good press she’ll get could let her shove that budget increase right down Snifter’s throat. It’s not her I’m worried about. It’s the P.A.C.T. records office. Dealing with them is like pulling entire mouths full of teeth.”

“You’d think the most organized monster hunters this end of the planet could somehow manage not to lose essential documents every time the police department needs them…”

Scene Change: The car zips off towards its destination in the background on the long, empty road.

Set: The Castle, A.K.A. Detrot Police Department. Our heroes pull into one of the ‘officer only’ parking spots just up the street. The cruiser makes one last, wheezing gasp, then the engine lets out a blast of steam as life finally leaves the old beast. Juniper gives the tire a firm kick as they get out, then turns to the sidewalk. The two detectives casually stroll towards the mighty gate of the stone fortress, idly kicking a couple of pebbles back and forth to one another as they go.

----

Hard Boiled eased the giant double doors of the Castle open and stuck his nose through, peering in both directions. Everything seemed reasonably normal for an early afternoon. Papers were still being pushed and nobody was hanging over the cubicle farm by one leg, screaming and begging for mercy. That was a definite step up from some days.

Overhead, the File Cloud seemed to be rumbling ominously, but if there was a Post-It Note storm coming it hadn’t arrived yet. A few ponies were trotting between the rows of desks and a pair of griffins were slumped drunkenly against one another in the holding area, but the office was quiet enough that he felt the need to make sure his gun’s safety was off.

Juniper pushed past him, aiming at the radio desk off to one side of the door. Hardy followed him, a little cautiously, making a mental note to at least try to finish one of his recent reports so as to stave off violent death.

The desk was empty, but a very pretty flank was sticking up from a heap of wires spilling out of one of the control consoles.

“Telly? That you?” Juniper asked. “I don’t get to see you from this end all that often. Gotta say, it’s a nice change.”

Radiophonic Telegraphica’s head hit the underside of the desk and she snarled, clutching a spot just below her horn. “Ooow...ugh...Juniper, I swear! One of these days I’m going to give you a good smack when you sneak up on me! A smack straight to the moon!”

“Yeah, but you’d miss me. What’s got you in a tizz, Telly? Your mane looks like it hasn’t seen a brush this week.”

Telly ignored the little jab and waved towards the open panel full of wires. “I’ve been fighting the File Cloud for the last twelve hours.”

“Looks like rough weather. What’s wrong with it?” Hardy asked, cocking his head to one side as he peered up at the bubbling, roiling thunderhead.

“Right now? No clue,” Telly huffed, trying futilely to sweep her unruly mane out of her face. “Nine times out of ten, it’s fine, and then I send up for a file and I get this crap.” Turning to the desk, she levitated a stack of papers out of her ‘in’ box and pushed them at him. He picked up the top one and squinted at row after row of tiny print. It said ‘Hello? Are you there? Please answer me. I’m so alone.’ again and again, filling the page from top to bottom.

“Whoever thought up that one has way too much time on their hooves,” Hardy muttered.

“Yeah, well, I’m trying to figure out how they’re doing it so I can nip it in the bud! I’d like to get back to that, if you don’t mind. What did you two need, or were you just here to make smart comments about my mane?”

“We’re here to see Jade. She in a good mood?”

“I don’t know as you could call it a ‘mood’ so much as it’s a caffeine fueled explosion waiting to happen. Requisitions is making entire pots of espresso just for her and I think she’s on her third one this morning.”

Juniper winced. “Eh, goodie. Come on, kid. Let’s go face the beast.”

Set: Our two detectives sit, side by side, in the uncomfortable chairs set before the desk of the chief of police. Chief Iris Jade paces back and forth in front of the window overlooking her domain.

“He’s a bucket of steaming Ursa piss on a good day, Detectives. Convince me,” Iris Jade commanded, pulling her chair out from behind her massive oak desk and sliding into it with a soft grunt. Her pressed suit was sharp as ever and the look on her face was the same unreadable scowl, but Hardy had a sneaking suspicion she was pleased to see them. “If I’m going to call down to Broadside for anything, I want specifics.”

Juniper put one back hoof up on the desk and leaned back, with a casual smile. Jade’s horn lit and she gave his leg a shove, sending him and his chair over onto their back with a loud thump. Juniper coughed as he hit the ground, but made no move to get up, instead crossing his forelegs behind his head and sighing contentedly.

“Yeah, that’s going to help our case, Juni,” Hard Boiled muttered, pulling his hat down over his face.

Juniper ignored his partner and wiggled on his back, giving his tail an impudent little flick before answering, “You know, Chief, I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned how lovely your ceiling is. Either way, we need Broadside’s survey data. I’m fairly sure we have an actual, useful lead on the Stained Glass Killer.”

His chair glowed bright green and Juniper was yanked upright so fast he let out a surprised yelp. Jade’s horn flickered out and she leaned forward in a way Hardy had discovered indicated either eagerness or imminent violence. Most things indicated imminent violence with Iris Jade, but they could indicate other things as well.

“Are you certain, Detective Shores? I’m going to need you to be real sure,” Jade murmured. “If I call down demanding information from Broadside and I find out this is an elaborate scheme to have a picnic in the woods with Hard Boiled and a full P.A.C.T. escort—”

“Chief, we’re not frater—” Hard Boiled began to protest, but Juniper cut him off.

“If I wanted to take Hard Boiled on a picnic, I can think of plenty of places nicer than the Wilds!” Juniper laughed, enjoying his partner’s blushing discomfort as the other detective sank low in his seat. “Anyway, Stitch found some fairly specific forensic information on the latest body. If we can get access to the P.A.C.T. land and flora survey, I’m pretty sure we can pin down where Stained Glass is making his kills. No escort necessary.”

Jade’s horn lit and the desk phone levitated over in front of her. She rested her hoof on the black receiver, but she paused there and regarded her two detectives. “Assuming your information is right, the Wilds are dangerous, even in the areas covered by the outlying Shield pylons. You two idiots might not get eaten by a hydra, but there are still plenty of things out there that only get pissed off when you shoot them, particularly beyond the farm country.”

Juniper raised his hoof and crossed the other over his chest. “I just want to take a look, Chief. We’ll take one of the bogie-wagons and stick to the protected roads. This is pure recon. If we find the guy, we’ll call backup.”

“The last ‘pure recon’ mission you ran involved that fire in Uptown,” Jade growled, kicking the drawer of her desk which was reserved for damage reports and insurance forms. “A city block covered in molten lime juice. The Market district still smells like rotten mojitos.”

“I’m a sincere believer in active reconnaissance,” Juniper replied, grinning cheekily as he sat back. “Point being, it’s our case. You want to assign it to someone else, bring them up to date, and maybe have another dead griffin, be my guest.”

“It’s been...what? Nine months since his last confirmed kill?” Jade asked, picking the phone up. “Are you sure it’s him?”

“Eighteen, but...yes. Sure enough. If the Stained Glass Killer is active again, we both know he’s in town for a reunion tour.”

“The griffin consulate is still pissing and moaning over the last set of bodies we failed to identify,” Jade said, shrugging as she levitated the phone receiver to her ear. “It’s your case, but it’s also your skin. You bust the transmission in a bogie-wagon and it’s coming out of your paycheck.”

Hardy got to his hooves, politely pushing his seat back into place while Juniper dusted off his jacket.

“Thanks, Chief,” Juniper replied, with a quick salute. “All that crap they say about you around here must be horrible lies.”

For an instant, Jade’s eyes twitched in his direction and a malevolent light seemed to shine behind them. Hardy braced to catch his partner before he could be tossed off the balcony again.

Jade flashed a toothy not-quite smile. “Get out of my office. The P.A.C.T. records department will have what you need by the time you get there. On the way out, get Telly to send me another pot of Red-Eye.”

Hard Boiled turned to the door with Juniper on his heels. As he opened it, Jade called out, “And...boys...You should be aware, that if the two of you were ever to disappear for any reason...I would be the one assigning the officers to investigate your deaths. Meditate on that, if you please.”

Scene Change: The sun drifts across the skyline, backlighting the great spires of the weather factories as the hours pass. Thunderheads gather and a brisk shower spills over midtown.

Set: A gritty mom & pop's restaurant tucked away from the bustling avenues down a side street of one of Detrot’s less affluent sectors. The windows are stained with old tobacco smoke and grease. Outside, the flickering neon sign has four broken lights, leaving the place with the ignominious title ‘Scrubbies S-da P-p Sh--’

The detectives huddle together with a collective of five empty milkshake glasses and stack upon stack of carefully folded maps.

----

Hard Boiled reached for his glass, then sighed as he found himself staring at the empty bottom of the cup.

“Is it my round or yours?” he asked.

“You know the rules, kid. If you have to ask, it’s your round,” Juniper replied, not looking up from the latest in the stack of papers they’d managed to wrangle out of the P.A.C.T. records office. Hardy couldn’t quite hide a little smile as he noticed a bit of strawberry shake clinging to the ends of his partner’s dark green mane.

Rolling his shoulders to work out some of the kinks, Hardy half got to his hooves and signaled the waitress, waggling his empty glass at her. She flicked an ear in his direction, then flapped her left wing to let him know she’d seen him.

“I haven’t done research like this since the Academy,” Hard Boiled groaned, settling back in his chair and rubbing his sore eyes.

“You probably bitched about it every half hour, then, too,” Juniper muttered, poking through the glasses until he found one that still had a bit of shake left in the bottom. “Come on, we’ve covered...what? Thirty square miles? There’s still another hundred and fifty to go!”

Hardy picked up another map, unfolding the attached notes page. “You’d think they’d have some means of just searching for specific landmarks,” he murmured.

“If you think the P.A.C.T. is going to take time out of their busy day to explain their filing system to a couple of lowly street beaters, you’re dreaming. They’ve got important business after all, like polishing their massive guns and rubbing baby oil into each other’s cutie-marks.”

“I’m going to do my best never to picture Broadside covered in baby oil. Burning pitch, maybe…”

“Awww, you’re just sore cuz he’s makin’ you earn that delicious, delicious pension money,” Juniper nickered, working his jaw back and forth until it popped.

“You know we’ll never retire, Juni. Ponies like us don’t get retirement parties and gold watches. Someone drags us to a hole in the ground, dumps us in still screaming, and covers it over with dirt.”

Juniper sat back as the waitress came by to top up their milkshakes, giving the sweet-faced girl one of his patented mare-killer smiles that sent a blush right to the tips of her ears. When she’d left, trotting away with an extra swish in her tail, he picked up the shake and sucked a bit of cream off the top before responding.

“Could be worse, honestly,” Juniper replied, with a sniff. “You want to sit in a home somewhere for dying cops? ‘Aunt Sandalwood’s Sweet Home For Good Officers’? Live out my last days with a bunch of traumatized, fat old farts complaining about how they just can’t hoof it anymore? No thanks.”

“So, what then?”

“I figure, when the time comes, we’ll figure it out together. You and me been chasin’ death the last few years. I’m pretty sure we’ll catch the bastard one day and I intend to give him a good lump with my truncheon before he does me.”

Hardy blew a derisive breath out of one side of his muzzle, shaking his head at his partner’s bravado. Picking up the map again, he began reading the hoof-notes.

‘—fifteen klicks east and north, patrolling standard survey routes through the Wilds for two hours. Flora seems unnaturally lush there. Private Clock Wick took the treetops while I’m stuck sucking dirt. I promise I only hate him a little bit. We had a brief encounter with a dozen or so timberwolves—”

Raising his head, Hardy tapped the table for attention. “Hey! Listen to this!”

Juniper cocked his head. “Go on?”

“—we had a brief encounter with a dozen or so timberwolves. They seemed to glitter like that time my daughter got into my wife’s golden eye-liner and decided to paint the kitchen with it. Encounter successfully resolved and survey moved on. There’s not much in the area except some old-world ruins. Proceeding to next sector.”

Hardy ran his toe down the page until he found a set of coordinates, then turned back to the map. “That’s...yikes...that’s ten miles outside the old exclusion zone, before they built the Shield Pylon over there.”

“Timberwolves that glitter,” Juniper mused, stroking his goatee. “Sounds kinda weak to me.”

His partner glared at him. “I’d rather go see some shiny trees than sit here for four more hours with my face in these maps.”

“Eh, alright, kid. I’m always down for a ‘Hard Boiled hunch’,” Juniper replied, plucking his wallet out of his coat and setting a couple bits underneath his glass, along with a healthy tip. “If the office claptrap is to be believed, your dad had some pretty good hunches in his time. Let’s go get the wagon and maybe get a snack on the way. At worst, we end up wandering around in the Wilds for a couple hours.”

Hardy gave him a sly grin as he tugged his coat on.

“I dare you to put a picnic basket and beer on expenses.”

Scene change: The sky has darkened and evening gathers. Shadows creep out of their dens, slithering across the city-scape as the detectives take the lonesome road out of Detrot, headed for the wilderness.

Set: The Bogie-Wagon—a modified wartime transport designed to carry a couple of soldiers through the Wilds in comparative safety with a coat of red and blue paint. A bored looking Hard Boiled and a manic Juniper Shores sit side by side, with faint rock music coming out of the crackling, blown-out radio speakers.

Hardy stretched in his seat, trying to get comfortable. His legs were already numb again and he was heavily considering just rolling onto his back and foregoing the seat-belt altogether.

Amongst officers of the Detrot Police Department there was a sneaking suspicion that had developed that whoever had designed the bogie-wagon had an absolutely massive flank, since no-one with a normal backside could have possibly stepped back from the drawing board after creating those awkward, buttock-breaking cushions and said ‘job well done’.

The bogie-wagon looked a bit like a police cruiser with heavier tires and a chassis that required a ladder to climb into, but there the resemblance ended. It was a marvel of modern engineering and anti-fauna construction. Rows of switches with contingencies for every type of animal one might expect to meet in the more heavily patrolled areas of the Wilds lined the dashboard, from Parasprite Polka to Manticore Sprayers. The outside panels were armored against claw and fang, acid-spray and launchable stinger, while the interior had a separate air system and even its own water supply.

What it lacked was a functional air conditioner. Even with the plate-glass windows down, Hard Boiled could feel the sweat running down his neck as they sped along out of the city and into the barely lit roads criss-crossing the Wilds exclusion zone, and the vents were only blowing the same luke-warm air.

Hardy sighed as he stared out the window at the farmland and the patchy trees. In the distance, the great forests spilled in either direction across the end of the valley, foothills growing on either side. They hadn’t met another vehicle in almost ten minutes on the lonely, two lane highway heading towards the Wild lands. A black Shield Pylon stuck out of the landscape in the middle distance, just a little taller than one of the windmills lazily taking in the last of the summer breeze.

The night was warm and the storm, even so far from Detrot itself, hadn’t shown any sign of letting up.

Yanking his hat off, Hardy began fanning himself with it.

“I swear, this paycheck better come with a kitten and some cake.”

Juniper, for his part, seemed unaffected by the heat. Throttling the engine back to a dull roar, he grabbed a map off the dash, then peered out at the mile marker on the side of the road.

“Suck it up for twenty more minutes. We’re almost to the turnoff which should take us into the forest, then the far edge of the zone. These coordinates have a road running just south of them. With any luck, we’ll hit timberwolf country right around the time they start getting snacky.”

“Thanks for reminding me. I don’t know as I feel like getting my flank chewed,” Hardy muttered, reaching towards a button on the control panel that said ‘Timberwolf Repeller’. Juniper smacked his hoof. “Hey! What gives?”

“You want to find the place we need to be or not? The best way we’ll know we’re in the right area is we start seeing some timberwolves.”

“I looked it up. Golden Wood is pretty distinct. Kinda like oak that’s had a goofy paint job.”

“Yeah, well, unless you want to get out before we’re there and take a hunt around in the dark, in the Wilds, with all that hilarious magical plant life…”

“I get it, I get it,” Hardy held up a hoof in surrender. “Sweet Shine snuck some poison joke into my desk at the academy. I ended up with a white pelt and bright yellow mane for three days straight...”

Juniper looked at him out of one eye, then doubled over laughing, grabbing at the wheel with both hooves to keep them from plowing off into the undergrowth.

There was a veritable line in the sand between the small farming communities on the outskirts of Detrot and the deep, empty stretch where the Shield still held sway, but few ponies lived: the edge of the exclusion zone. Beyond that point, only the bravest souls lived and few saw fit to venture; after all, there wasn’t much that direction until you hit griffin lands.

On one side of the line, idyllic little fields and houses with verandas made for sipping gin-slings and waiting up for the cat to come home. On the other, the dark and foreboding forests of the deep Wilderness.

While plenty of the farther roads were protected by a whole host of expensive counter-measures, including general anti-fauna talismans here and there and small P.A.C.T. outposts every dozen miles or so, nopony in their right mind would ever have called it safe. The last truck he’d seen traversing the lonely road about five miles back had been about as heavily armored as the bogie-wagon. That said, preparation counted for an awful lot.

Hardy had started the journey with with a sense of nervous excitement. He’d never been out that far. Sure, he’d had a couple of visits to the other bits of Equestria, but the Wilds were markedly not other bits of Equestria. He’d felt like a foal in the movie-theater, covering his eyes with his hooves then peering over them just in time for the big, bad monster to appear.

The modified cruiser slowed to a speed that was still much faster than any sane pony would take on those water-slicked roads, but Juniper considered pedals to have two settings with intervening options dictated mostly by how much he could make the vehicle cry and beg for mercy. Outside, the rain picked up a bit, clattering on the windows in a steady rhythm that slowly unwound the knots in Hardy’s shoulders until he found himself nodding off.

Far ahead, an eerie red light began to blink on and off in the darkness over the treetops.

That’s all for this week folks! Our heroes will be back in one week’s time with more adventures!

Now, a word from our sponsor:

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Tune in next week as Detective Hard Boiled and Detective Juniper Shores face: The Weathervane of Doom!

Same time, same station.

Act 3 Chapter 8 : Weathervane of Doom

A Cinepony Studios Production!

Starring!

Coroner Slip Stitch - Played by - Himself

Juniper Shores - Played by - Himself

Chief Iris Jade - Played by - Herself

Radiophonic Telegraphica - Played by - Herself

The Stained Glass Killer - Played by - *Uncredited*

With Detective Hard Boiled Jr

in:

The Weathervane of Doom

A story of mayhem and murder in the streets of fair Detrot!

Produced and directed by Hard Boiled Jr.

Such evils this city hath wrought! Who will stand against them?

Truth and Justice!

This week, Detectives Hard Boiled and Juniper Shores confront...the Stained Glass Killer...at the Weathervane of Doom!

----

Set: The bogie-wagon, rushing through the dark along a secluded road. Shadowy figures dart along beside it, dashing through the trees and somehow managing to keep pace with the vehicle.

Behind the wheel, Detective Juniper Shores, and in the passenger seat - snoozing like a babe - Detective Hard Boiled. Above the tree-line, a faint red glow pierces the pounding rain.

It could have been five minutes or twenty; Hardy wasn’t sure, but when he felt a hoof shaking him awake he sat bolt upright in his seat, his hat tumbling off into the hoofwell.

“I’m up! I’m up!”

“Sorry to interrupt nap-time, but I think we’ve got some company,” Juniper murmured, flicking his toe towards the window as the car sped along. At some point they’d turned off the road onto a dirt track.

Hardy peered out, holding up a leg to block out the glare of the cabin’s interior lights as he squinted into the darkness. For a moment, he saw nothing, but as his eyes adjusted he began to make out flashes off between the trees. They were quite handily keeping pace with the bogie-wagon, which it didn’t seem to be moving quite as fast as it had been.

A howl, like the shifting of timbers in a burning house, seemed to spill out of the woods, followed closely by a second one much closer. Hardy’s legs locked up and he clutched at the door-handle as a rush of instinct driven adrenaline left him momentarily paralyzed with age-old fear.

“Celestia’s flank…” Hardy muttered, shaking both front legs to try to get some blood flow into them. They’d gone suddenly very cold. “Well, you wanted timberwolves. What now?”

“Now? I don’t know. I was just kinda playing this by ear. What I am really curious about is that.” Juniper dipped his nose towards the road ahead.

Hardy glanced above the treeline at a slowly strobing red light that seemed to be rising out of the woods.

“It’s a...radio tower or something,” he conjectured.

“It’s not on any of the maps,” his partner replied. “The P.A.C.T. survey only goes another mile in that direction, but I didn’t see anything about a tower hidden in the deep woods. Granted, they were mostly looking at local life forms.”

“Yeah, but...this road is here, right?” Hardy asked, trying to make out some details of the structure the light was attached to. “It must go somewhere and somepony must maintain it.”

“Eh, I think the road is probably from sometime during the war,” Juniper commented, shaking his head.

“What makes you say that?” Hardy asked.

“They used to use a kind of gravel they’d enchant in big batches to keep grass and animal life away from certain paths. It turns the rocks a funny color and I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re driving on. Nasty magical pollution, but it worked in a pinch,” he said. “I doubt it’s going to shoo off those wolves, though.”

Hardy couldn’t take his gaze off the woods. For a moment, he’d have sworn a pair of flashing, green eyes paused to watch the car before leaping into another shadow between the trees.

“I don’t remember any mention of timberwolves being that fast,” Hard Boiled murmured, almost to himself.

“Or as tall as a bogie-wagon. Must be almost two meters,” Juniper added, tugging at his goatee, lightly. “That picnic with P.A.C.T. escort looking good now, kiddo?”

“Yeah, if I’m completely honest, it kinda is,” Hardy chuckled, feeling his shoulders relax a little. “Still, bogie-wagon is designed for bigger things than timberwolves, right? Can’t say I’m particularly familiar with these things.”

“They’re rated to take a direct hit from dragon fire for a full half second before cooking whoever is inside, so yeah, some doggies who’re all bark don’t really worry me.”

“Yeah, but...is it just me or were a few of those timberwolves...shiny?”

“It’s not just you. One of them jumped across in front of the car a minute ago before I woke you. It looked like the time my uncle bought my kid sister a giant bag of golden glitter for Hearth’s Warming Eve,” Juniper answered, with a little smile. “Mother almost killed him. They still find it in the carpets.”

Hardy rolled his eyes. “So...what, then? We call backup? Sweep the woods with a P.A.C.T. team?”

Juniper snorted. “Overeager much? What’re we going to tell them?”

“We tell them that…there are shiny timberwolves and at some unknown location deep in the Wilds there’s a crime scene that we’ll need them to stomp all over with their gigantic combat boots or, alternatively, incinerate with their gigantic guns. Right. Point made,” Hardy muttered, feeling a bit silly. He cocked his head, staring up at the blinking light through the pouring rain. “You know, I don’t remember there being a forecast for rain outside the city. At least, not this far. I checked before we left.”

“There wasn’t,” Juniper replied, wiping a bit of steam off the windshield with his hoof. “Must be a wild storm. I think it’s getting worse the closer we get to whatever that is.”

“Huh...weird.” Hardy glanced at the clock. “It’s getting awful late. You want to head back? Pick this up in the morning?”

“I guess we could. Granted, we’ve got the bogie-wagon. You want to pay for gas for the return trip?”

“Eh...on second thought…”

“Tell you what, kiddo. We go find out where the light is coming from and then I’ll buy us enchiladas from that place on twenty second street,” Juniper said, offering his hoof.

Hardy bumped his partner’s toe with his own. “Works for me. I’m starved. Kinda wish we’d gotten that picnic basket, now you mention it.” He cocked an ear towards the forest. After a second, he rolled the window down an inch and listened again. The spray off the road was enough to cool him a little, but it still felt like a sauna inside the enclosed cruiser. “Huh. Were we...outrunning those wolves?”

Juniper shook his head, tapping the speedometer just above the wheel. “Naw, I haven’t been able to get above forty kilometers an hour. This road is a mess. Might as well get out and gallop.”

“If you don’t mind, I don’t think I’ll do that. Still, sorta strange. Never heard of timberwolves giving up that easily. They found the body close to the city, right?”

“Closer, sure,” Juniper affirmed. “It was in one of those nature parks just outside of town, but based on the file it looks like there were tire treads. Some kind of heavy farm truck. It was dumped in a ditch and left there.”

“Hence why you and I weren’t down there this morning. Could have been worse. Rooting around in those mines was no fun. I wonder why, if he was just dumping her, he didn’t leave her for the timberwolves to get...”

“Because timberwolves kill things. They don’t eat them. They drag the corpses back to their home trees to fertilize the soil. Still, out here, might have been worthwhile,” Juniper paused, a contemplative look on his face. “I don’t know. You get a funny feeling about the other bodies? We know he likes his little art projects. What if this creepy S.O.B. thinks he’s giving us something?”

“You mean like he was somehow gifting them to us? Or returning them, maybe?”

“Yeeeah, exactly. Even this girl. If she’s a canvas he didn’t approve of, it’s not like a bucket of lye is expensive. I can think of fifty ways to dispose of a body that don’t involve leaving her somewhere she’ll be found within a matter of hours.”

Hardy’s brow furrowed. “You think it’s some sort of weird respect thing? Crossing her forelegs over her chest is a pony thing. Griffins bury their dead with a weapon in their claws.”

“Could be. Serial killers come in all stripes and every one we’ve found is different.”

With a little grin, Hard Boiled poked his partner in the side. “Heh… You watch that ‘stripes’ talk around Sweet Shine when she gets back. She’s a mite sensitive these days about anything that can be taken to disparage her zebra friends. I almost lost an ear last time I casually referred to a ‘pin-stripe suit’ in conversation.”

“Your best friend is insane, Hardy. You know that, right?”

“I’ve known her for something like twenty years, Juni. I think I picked up on it. That doesn’t mean she’s not the pony you want backing you up when the day is done.”

More details were starting to resolve out of the distance as Hardy leaned forward again, trying to figure out what he was seeing. It appeared to be some kind of gigantic sculpture; an origami cockrel of monumental pipe-cleaners and monstrous marshmallows perched on a system of wires hung between four massive metal towers that reached up from the ground like skeletal fingers. The whole thing seemed flimsy, somehow, but it still stood despite the storm. At the very peak of the strange construct, the red light strobed in a slow circle, lighting up the surrounding wires on every pass.

Below, there was a small hill of some kind that jutted straight up from the earth in defiance of the local geography, which was uniformly flat.

“What do you make of that?” Juniper asked. “I think we’re almost there…”

“I don’t know. Plenty of strange stuff built out in the Wilds,” Hardy replied.

All at once, the rain stopped.

It didn’t fade, or weaken; one moment they were in a torrential downpour which was making it difficult to see out of the windscreen and the next, there wasn’t so much as a drizzle. The transition happened so fast Hardy’s ears pinned back against his head.

Juniper slammed on the brakes hard enough to make them squeal, slewing the rear end of the car around, ending with the bogie-wagon stopped sideways across the dirt track. Hardy was thrown against his seat-belt and gasped as the air rushed out of his lungs.

They sat there in a silence disturbed only by the guttural rumble of the engine and the distant patter of raindrops on leaves.

“You know...I’m feeling that whole ‘going back’ thing, now,” Hardy muttered.

Rolling down his window, Juniper stuck his hoof out, then turned back to look at the road the way they’d come. About twenty meters that direction, a solid wall of water seemed to hang like a curtain across the track.

“That’s new,” Juniper said, under his breath.

“So, we’ve seen exactly what is up there. I admit, my curiosity is feeling a tad less severe than it was a minute before whatever just happened to the rain.”

“Spooked, kiddo?” Hardy’s partner chuckled. “It’s some weird weather patterns, but we’re not on fire and if it has something to do with our perp, we’re still on mission, right?”

Hard Boiled rolled his window down entirely and leaned out, looking up at the giant structure with the red light on top. It was still hard to tell how far up it was, but he estimated maybe a quarter mile. “This is where I try to get us to do the smart thing and you say something cocky, then we go do the stupid thing and end up filling out paperwork until our hooves fall off, isn’t it?”

Pulling the bogie-wagon off the road, Juniper slid out from behind the wheel. “How many years did it take you to figure that out?”

“Actually it was about two days after we started working together. Eh...I guess there are worse ways to end up with a suspension. Fine, let’s go see whatever this is and then I’m going to stuff myself with enchiladas until I can’t move.”

With some trepidation, Hardy re-settled himself in his seat as Juniper pulled the bogie-wagon back around and put it in gear.

----

Scene change: All that can be heard is the mighty engine of the armored cruiser and the far-off rain as the car makes for the blinking light. Hardy goes about checking his revolver while a slow smile of anticipation steals over Juniper’s features.

----

‘Big,’ Hardy thought as the bogie-wagon approached the tree-line. ‘Big, big, big!’

Distance didn’t do justice to the structure and up close, it was more than a little intimidating. The four towers holding up the enormous system of wires and pulleys that had inexplicably shaped themselves into an impressionist’s version of a rooster were some kind of metal so polished it seemed to glow.

He couldn’t tell what the spider’s web of wires were meant to do, but they seemed too complex for any equine hoof to have wound together like that.

What he’d first taken for a hill turned out to be a building. It was a strange looking building, seeming to have shoved its way out of the ground. The walls were coated in ivy and grasses that disguised most of the details, but he estimated it to be roughly rectangular and a fifty meters on a side, with sloping walls that spilled out on either side, almost to the trees.

A clearing surrounded the facility on all sides, where rutted tire tracks lead to another, smaller building that looked like a shed or garage of some sort. It, too, was covered in thick ivy.

Juniper shut off the headlights as they approached, keeping the wagon on the unlit road mostly by intuition and luck. Just as they were about to pull into the lot, he turned off into the underbrush. Hardy winced as old tree branches crunched under the front tires, but he was fairly sure the blowing storm was still close enough to mask their approach.

Something about the place had the fur on the back of Hardy’s neck standing to attention.

“So, do we knock?” Hardy asked, opening the door and checking the forest floor before stepping out. He unconsciously turned up his collar, even though it wasn’t raining.

Juniper picked up the radio and held the ‘call’ button.

“This is car one-three-three-seven calling the Castle, come in Castle.”

After a moment, the speaker crackled and Telly’s familiar voice came through.

“Castle speaking, car one-three-three-seven. You and Hardy having a nice date?”

“Lovely. The birds are singing, the bees are buzzing, and we’re sitting out here underneath some kind of giant...something or other. Coordinates are...” Juniper paused to glance down at the map, reading off the coordinates. “Could you check the records and maybe give us some idea of what we’re looking at? It’s not on the P.A.C.T. survey, but it’s massive, like an electrical station. There’s a chicken or rooster made out of wires hanging above a building. Must be...twenty, thirty meters high at least.”

Telly took a minute to reply. “Did you say a giant chicken? Are you having me on?”

Juniper smacked his forehead against the steering wheel. “No, I’m not. Telly, just check the damn records.”

“It’s five minutes to shift change, Juniper. I swear to Celestia, I am going to make you suffer if this is a joke, …”

“Duly noted. Records search. I need anything in this area bigger than a telephone box.”

“Alright, give me a second and I’ll see what we’ve got.”

Telly whistled a soft tune down the mic as she turned dials and clicked buttons. A moment later there was a loud ‘ding’ like a toaster going off.

“Huh...you weren’t kidding,” Telly murmured, laying something heavy on the table beside the mic with a loud thump.

“Of course I wasn’t! When I have I ever kidded anyone?” Juniper laughed, pushing his door open and swinging his legs out, sitting there on the edge of his seat as he looked up at the strange building. “What can you tell me about this thing?”

“Weeell, it was an experimental meteorological station. There’s not a lot of information here on the project itself, but I’ve got a fair bit on the aftermath.”

“Meteorological station? You mean something for monitoring weather?”

“Nope! That thing is for making weather. They called it a ‘weathervane’. There were supposed to be lots of them spread all across Equestria and on down into the griffin lands. It was an experiment in controlling weather using high powered sound waves. Flat-pack weather manipulation in an easy to build package.”

Hardy frowned a little and asked, “It used sound waves?”

Telly made an affirmative noise. “Mmhmm. Funny thing, really. It was shut down about thirty years ago after a huge heap of injuries. It’s been derelict that whole time.”

“What’s the background?”

Some paper moved about and Telly whistled. “Oooh...very not good. It started as a big interspecies love fest to give the griffins more arable land. It ended with five deaths and a dozen maimings when one of the experiments went wrong. The ‘Weathervane Project’ was mothballed. Kinda sad, because it looks like the underlying technology was solid.”

Hardy narrowed his eyes at the slowly spinning light atop the weathervane, then leaned over and grabbed Juniper’s hoof so he could speak into the mic. “Telly, is there anything in there about the system being reactivated for any reason?”

“Not that I can see. The whole thing is meant to fold down into the ground with the push of a button when it’s not being used, so it doesn’t ruin the skyline. Why? Somepony messing with old tech out there? You need backup?”

Juniper cocked an ear at Hardy.

“Eh...yeah, send a couple cars. We might need them, we might not,” Hardy replied. “We’re going to go take a look around. We’ll call you back if we’re all clear. It might be nothing. You have our location?”

“Yeah... There’s nobody in your area. You mind sitting for a bit?”

“Like I said, we’ll just take a look around. This is still a recon mission as far as we’re concerned.”

“Ten-four. Officers Sight, Coriolis, Sand Dollar, and Chip will be there soon.”

Telly broke the connection and Hardy set the mic back on the stand. Juniper wiped a bit of mud off his toe on the edge of his door, then hopped out and pulled his trigger bit free of his sleeve, giving it a few experimental kicks.

“So, we playing it friendly until we find out what’s going on, then?” Hardy asked. “If some guy in a set of pink fuzzy slippers comes to the door, I’m going to feel real stupid.”

Juniper smirked, ratcheting his pistol and checking the chamber to make sure it was loaded. “Am I ever not friendly? Besides, I think somebody messing with the local weather patterns is probably worth at least a citation.”

Hardy looked up at the crackling, boiling mass of clouds above the weathervane that were somehow only raining a couple meters down the road. “Huh. Yeah, probably.”

Side-by-side, Hard Boiled and Juniper strolled down the dark, empty road towards the weathervane. Overhead, the wires comprising the strange web screeched and wailed against one another like a strange orchestral arrangement. Wind whipped at their clothing, but they plowed on, watching for danger.

As they crossed some invisible line in the dirt, a sudden, stabbing pain shot down Hardy’s back legs. He slapped a hoof
over his muzzle, almost falling to his knees as he tried not to scream like a little filly.

“What?! What is it?!” Juniper demanded, swinging his pistol up and sweeping it towards the building.

“Celestia save me...” Hardy moaned, rubbing his cutie-mark with one hoof as tingles of agony crept right down to the tips of his toes. “I guess that answers that question.”

Juniper grabbed his foreleg, throwing it around his shoulders as he hauled his partner back towards the trees. “Your talent just give you a ring?” he asked, worriedly.

“Yeah. Four alarms worth. Feels like somepony just stuck me in the ass with a hot knife...” Swallowing, Hardy pushed himself to his hooves and freed his trigger bit. The sensation in his hip faded somewhat as they got farther from the weathervane, but it sat in the background; a persistent feeling of wrongness, like an oil-slick on a duck pond.

“So, we wait for backup?” Juniper asked.

Hardy glanced back at the golden scales on his flank, then slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s never that strong unless something is about to happen. We've got minutes.”

Juniper picked up his trigger, getting it settled in his teeth. “Damn. I was half hoping for pink fuzzy slippers...”

“You and me both.”

----

Scene change: The Detectives split off in opposite directions, approaching the building cautiously, their weapons drawn.

The air was sharp with the scent of oncoming rain and Hardy’s teeth dug into his trigger bit as he carefully edged up to one wall of the weathervane. His natural instincts kept screaming that he was exposed, but there were no good paths to the structure without passing through open ground.

Conventional wisdom would have a pony make a run for it when changing positions, but his instructors had hammered the dynamics of night-fighting into his brain; slow, methodical movement and using the darkness for cover. Nothing could leave a pony helpless quicker than a turned ankle in a gunfight.

His eyes followed Juniper as his partner disappeared around the opposite end of the building.

‘Recon mission, he said. Perfectly safe, he said. Why do I keep following that stallion around?’ Hardy thought to himself. After a second contemplating all the possible answers to that question, he sighed. ‘Oh, right. Bagels and affection. Ugh, I really need a marefriend...’

Thunder crashed from far off, shaking him from his thoughts as, against his better judgement, he darted across the last five meters to the wall. Shoving his shoulders into the ivy, he did his best to blend in. The creeping plant was like a tightly wound blanket so thick he couldn’t see what lay underneath, but it made for excellent camouflage, which might have explained how the P.A.C.T. managed to miss a gigantic building in the middle of the woods.

His flank was still burning and the pain was joined with a sense of terrible urgency.

‘Alright, move your ass, Hard Boiled.’

He began making his way along the side of the weathervane, trailing his hooves through the ivy.

‘Door, door, door...who’s got the door?’

Hardy was just starting to get a bit nervous that he’d missed it when his toe bumped lightly against something buried in amongst the greenery. Dropping his bit, he hopped back a couple of steps, digging at foliage until his hoof hit the strange protrusion again. Hooking his leg over the hidden handle, he gave it an experimental tug.

A section of the wall just tall enough for a pony to duck into slid silently open a couple of inches and warm, orange light poured out, momentarily blinding him. He bounced away from it, sinking into a crouch with his gun leveled and ready.

His listened for movement, heart racing. After a solid thirty seconds without gunfire or magical lasers or any one of a thousand other horrible fates blasting him into oblivion, Hardy took a deep breath and his nose wrinkled; the air coming through the door had a foul scent about it, like a mix of urine and bad cheese.

Still on the alert for any sound from inside, Hardy began working the door open far enough to poke his muzzle through. The rails were smooth and seemed to have been oiled recently, but nothing ruined a stealth mission quite like an inconvenient squeak.

Wedging his nose in, he peered in both directions, trying to get a sense of the interior. The smell was enough to choke a hyena, but he covered his muzzle with the edge of his collar and fought down the urge to gag as he inspected the floor - which was composed of some kind of metal grate - looking for trip-wires or anything that might indicate a boobie-trap. Walking face-first into a load of buckshot had also been known to ruin a stealth mission.

The air inside was thick with some kind of fog that limited vision to a few meters, lit by incandescent bulbs. All he could make out was the far side of what seemed to be a narrow hallway or maintenance tube of some kind, stretching left and right into the distance. Thick pipes ran in either direction underneath the floor and across the walls, labeled things like ‘Outflow’ and ‘Super-Intercooler’.

Stepping carefully, Hardy crept over the low lip of the door, lowering each hoof as lightly as he could. The soft click of his shoes on the metal was muffled by some effect of the fog, though he thought he could hear machinery running somewhere. It was hard to get a bearing.

Watching the ground and moving slowly, he crept down the hall, trying not to breath. Whatever the fog was, it seemed to cling to his coat, condensing and leaving a chill despite the warm air. He hoped he wasn’t taking lungfuls of cancer.

‘Still, can’t be any worse for me than a few years’ worth of Juniper’s morning breath,’ he thought.

His bit was starting to taste like whatever was in the air and he desperately wanted to close his mouth, but that would have meant dropping his trigger and there was absolutely no cover in the hall, aside maybe the hope that whoever might shoot at him couldn’t see any farther in the fog than he could. In all his years as an officer of the law, he’d found hope to be a pretty poor replacement for body-armor.

‘There’s another thing I wish I’d thought to bring on this ‘recon’ mission.’

A sound reached him through the dense fog, barely louder than the rush of blood in his ears. He leaned forward a little, wondering whether or not his imagination was playing tricks on him; it had sounded a bit like somepony singing, if they’d chosen to sing down a metal pipe while backed up by a band full of howler monkeys.

Hardy picked up his pace, still trying to tread lightly as he attempted to figure out which direction the sounds were coming from.

‘There! Down there!’

At the next junction, he swung right and almost toppled down a curving spiral staircase that descended straight down into the bowels of the facility. Throwing his leg over the railing, he managed to right himself before the fall could become a neck-breaking tumble, but it was still enough to send his heart leaping into his throat. The fog seemed a little thinner, though for all he could tell the stairs went right down to the center of the world.

Experimentally settling his weight on the top step, he gulped and sent a silent prayer to the sky as it let out an ominous creak.

The singing stopped.

Hardy shut his eyes and held his breath.

A moment later, the voice returned along with the strange background sound. Thinking as many light thoughts as he could, Hardy continued down the spiral staircase, taking each step like it might be his last. The staircase groaned under him, but it was quiet enough he didn’t think he’d been overheard; at least, that was what he told himself.

Around and around, deeper into the weathervane, he followed the stairs down into the fog. It was several more minutes before he could mentally confirm that it was thinning out. A diffuse yellow light filtered up from below and he almost missed a step as the singing paused again and a voice rang out, echoing up the tunnel.

“Now, then! My chick, we must make sure of your skin before we proceed! Yeees, that’s excellent! Your family must have thought to marry you off one day. Perfect!”

It was a male voice, but Hardy couldn’t tell what species. The fog was still distorting the sound in some way. Picking up his pace as much as he could without making the whole assembly he was standing on rattle like a bell, Hardy descended.

“Next, tail in the air, beak on the ground! Good, that’s it. Truly, truly, there is nothing more beautiful than a hen in that position! So sad I must shut down the control spells when I begin. I would love to see you like that while I work!”

Hardy hesitated a moment, trying to parse what he’d just heard.

‘Control spells?’ he thought.

Direct mind control wasn’t entirely unheard of, but it was illegal on a scale most ponies didn’t consider worth whatever benefit one might get; it was one of a short list of activities that warranted life-long incarceration in Equestria, however long life might turn out to be. Celestia was always inclined towards rehabilitation wherever possible, but since the war, certain activities tended to warrant a more vigorous approach.

The bottom of the staircase came into sight and Hardy paused again, gulping for air. It seemed like there was a doorway down there, but his vision was blurry; the stink was overpowering, leaving him short of breath and with watering eyes.

Resting his hoof on the wall, he wiped at his muzzle, trying to get the cloying smell out of his nose. His toe came away covered in some kind of oily grease. Snatching a kerchief out of his pocket, he quickly wiped it off. The grease was a strange color that reminded him of something, but it took him a moment to place it.

‘Uh...that’s...dried blood, isn’t it? Oh, Juni, enchiladas are not going to pay for this one…’

Stepping off the bottom of the stairs, Hardy made sure his safety was off. The floor was slick and he could feel the remains of the fog soaking into his fur.

There was a short hall and, at the end, an open door.

Through the door, he could see a griffin girl.

She was sprawled on her side in some kind of crude box made of chicken-wire and two-by-fours, a soft, brown lump of misery wedged up against the wall. The box wasn’t big enough for her to stand or sit completely upright, so she was relegated to laying on her belly. He couldn’t place her age, but she seemed fairly young.

One golden eye rolled listlessly up to look at him and she let out a surprised squawk. She tried to sit up, smacking her head on the roof of her cage. Hardy jumped back into the tunnel, holding his hoof to his lips and shaking his head.

From another room, that voice called out, ‘My sweet little henny hen...if you don’t stop banging about, I’ll turn the current on again!’

For all its cheery warmth, the voice was sending icy tingles right to the base of Hardy’s tail. His cutie-marks ached like they’d been whipped.

The girl was staring at him with a mixture of fear and hope. He shook his badge free from the top of his coat and flashed it at her, then gestured for her to settle back down and keep quiet. She brightened, then forced her wings down against her sides and waited.

Hardy indicated left, then right, giving the girl a questioning look. The hen jerked her head to the right.

Creeping along the wall, he slowly peered out into the room the griffin girl was trapped in. It seemed to be some kind of workshop. A table full of tools sat beside the cage, each one hung from a nail and not a scrap of debris to be a seen. Beside it, a bucket of some kind was drawing a cloud of flies. A second door across the room had another set of stairs heading back up into the facility.

Hardy moved a little further into the space and his mouth fell open. He slapped his knee into his muzzle, dropping his trigger and biting down hard to hold back the scream that was building in his gut.

‘Why ’o why didn’t we wait for backup?’ he thought.

His chest tightened and tried to shut his eyes, but they just wouldn’t close. The sight was too awful and demanded to be seen.

It was the artist’s gallery.

A gallery of blood and bone.

His knees shook until he sank onto his haunches, quaking with a combination of fear and horror.

The walls were lined with paintings, each one a frame of bone with a skinned pelt stretched across it for a canvas. Whatever had been used for paint on some of the pictures was attracting insects that gave them a living, pulsating effect.

The subjects were various, but every one of them was fit to turn a manticore’s stomach.

There was a potted plant with severed tongues instead of leaves, a smiling filly whose intestines had been spilled, and a bath-tub overflowing over, the tap dripping blood; images of terror and perversity all painted with murder.

The pictures were hung side by side, each tagged and annotated with a little plaque.

A detached part of him noted that the frames and canvases weren’t all made from griffins. There were a few pony pelts mixed into the collection - even a zebra or two - but the number of victims was so far beyond the nine they’d already found that he wasn’t ready to count them. He felt certain an accurate accounting might fracture his already tenuous hold on sanity. He needed not to be crazy for a little while.

After a minute or two, the shock had worn off enough for him to force his eyes to the ground. Getting back to his hooves, he stumbled across to the cage with the griffin girl inside. It was locked with a half dozen padlocks.

She was cleaner than he’d expected for having been stuck in the foul box for however long. Her feathers were ragged, but she wasn’t covered in excrement or anything of the sort. He glanced to one side, catching sight of a fire-hose that’d been rolled up beside her cage.

Her eyes were bright as he leaned down and whispered, “I’m here to help. Are you okay?”

She shook her head and replied, just barely loud enough for him to hear, “I’ll never be okay. Y-you wouldn’t...you wouldn’t believe what he does…”

He had to adjust his estimate of her age back a few years. She was barely halfway through her teens. Griffins were known to be resilient, but he was wondering how she wasn’t out of her mind with fear.

“I think I can guess,” he murmured. “How long have you been here?”

“H-how should I k-know? I slept a few times, but th-there’s no clock!” She snapped, then covered her mouth, glancing at the door to see if she’d been heard. After a second she added, “Y-you have to go g-get him. He’s g-got my sister in there!”

She pointed over his shoulder with one shaking claw. There was another hall off to his right, with a swinging, saloon style door at the end marked ‘Lower Maintenance’.

“What is he?” Hardy asked.

The hen shook her head. “I don’t...I don’t even know. He’s like a p-pegasus, but he’s fast! So...so fast! He g-got b-both of us and I didn’t even s-see him! He got us a-almost as soon as we g-got off the train. He...he keeps sh-shocking me.” She glanced, fearfully at a padlocked box beside her cage. It was nailed to the ground and emblazoned with a lightning bolt.

Tilting his head to one side, Hardy saw a set of wires leading out of the back into the cage. The construction seemed pretty solid and he couldn’t figure a way to disable it without letting the killer in the next room know he was there. He gave one of the padlocks holding her box shut an experiment tug, but it was just as sturdy as it looked.

“I’ll be back. My partner is in here somewhere and there’s backup on the way. Keep still, alright?”

The girl nodded, dropping back onto her stomach. Hardy picked up his trigger and snuck down the short hall towards the swinging door. The voice was humming again, this time a jaunty little tune Hardy recognized from his childhood. It was a war time shanty his father used to sing after a few drinks over Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Dropping to his front knees, Hardy tried to peer underneath the door. All he could see was a mix of machinery and metal protrusions sticking up from the floor at regular intervals. Shaking his head, he picked up his trigger and took three deep breaths.

‘Time for violence, then. Juni, you are buying the rounds for a month…’

Bracing himself, Hardy rested his shoulder against the door.

Try to kill someone or let a child die. That’s a crap position to find oneself in.

Slamming through the door, Hardy was hit in the face by a wave of stench that almost blinded him. Then he was hit by something that felt like a flying train, followed very quickly by three more.

Then everything went dark.

Set Change: The camera fades to black.

Scene: A faint sound of rain trickles in from the wings. In a flash of lighting, a shadowy figure appears, crouched under the eves outside of the weathervane. His green mane blends perfectly with the ivy draping the building and it would be difficult to see him were it not for his beaten leather jacket, the shining badge hanging from his neck, and the police issue pistol strapped to his leg.

----

Juniper Shores was feeling his age. It wasn’t a terrible age, but it was definitely not the age he’d been that let him drink and eat whatever he liked without consequences.

Mostly he was feeling that he shouldn’t have spent all night with his head wedged against Hardy’s collarbone. His neck was still pretty sore and it hadn’t done wonders for his back, either. Still, better than sleeping alone. Better than lots of things, really. Certainly better than being stuck in the middle of nowhere, sneaking into what might very well be the lair of a serial killer.

‘Could be worse, honestly. Could still be stuck with that idiot from back when, whatever his name was. At least Hard Boiled managed to get out of the dumb-ass rookie phase without shooting himself in the testicle,’ he thought, using some of the ivy on the building to clean his hooves.

The weathervane was a pretty intimidating structure and, truth be told, he was a bit worried about leaving his partner on his own; Hardy had the sense of direction of a drunken marmot after a trip in a tumble drier. Still, despite initial skepticism, Hardy’s talent tended to work like a charm. It’d certainly pulled them out of the fire during the case with the snake handlers.

Lightning crackled across the sky again and Juniper cringed closer to the wall.

“Kiddo, you’re gonna owe me all the drinks for dragging us in there without waiting for back-up,” he muttered, glancing up at the wall of unnatural stormclouds ringing the weathervane.

He started off at a hobble, dragging his hoof along the wall and moving along on the other three legs.

They were a little off book, particularly where a breaching action was concerned. In an ideal world, there would have been twenty officers with rams and shotguns. He’d have a unicorn or two with shields around him and pegasi watching the skies for runners. In the real world, it was almost never like that. In the real world, you weren’t even sure what you were walking into and the ten percent of the time when there was actually a dangerous situation never happened with body-armor and shotguns readily available.

Two thirds of the way down the building, his front leg came down on something that let out a soft ‘clank’. Stepping back, he examined the ground, then fished a flashlight out of his jacket pocket and nosed the button. Holding the light in his teeth, he cleared a bit of debris off what appeared to be some kind of maintenance hatch.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a tuft of color stuck in the thick vines draping the weathervane . Sliding onto his knees, he reached down and felt around. Pulling his hoof back, he peered at what he’d found; it was a soft, reddish brown feather with a white tip.

He gave it a quick sniff.

Griffin, with a hint of sweet perfume.

Damn.

“A griffin hen in pink fuzzy slippers. Please let it be that,” he said to himself.

He went back to his examination of the hatch. It seemed to have been recently used. A few drag marks led off in the direction of the road. He ran his hoof over them and sighed.

“Maybe a hen in pink fuzzy slippers...who likes dragging around heavy things in her spare time that just happen to be the same general weight and shape as an unconscious griffin in a bag...”

Grabbing the hatch’s handle in his teeth, he shoved with all his might. The hatch sank an inch, then slid back on well oiled rails into the ground, revealing a set of sharply angled stairs leading down into the darkness.

The odor that boiled out of the hole rocked him back onto his flank as a blast of hot air blew his mane back from his face. His stomach lurched and he coughed violently, jamming his muzzle into the lining of his jacket. It needed a wash, but it didn’t smell like rotting bodies. Very little in the world smelled like rotting bodies.

As the nausea passed, he dug around in his pockets until he found some mint cough drops, quickly popping two in his mouth. Once they were good and wet, he spat them on his hoof and wiped the residue under his nose. It wasn’t menthol cream, but it would do.

Shining his light into the dark hole, he tried to get a gauge on the space. There weren’t any obvious traps that he could see, though magic always left plenty of less visible options. It seemed to be a small air-lock or chamber of some kind. It looked like somepony had been living in there. A cheap cot and kitchen stove were stacked atop a pile of milk crates. Tiny, empty pots of paint were heaped alongside a bunch of of ready-to-eat meals and an easel, which was folded in a corner.

Hefting a rock off the ground, he tossed it into the pit and jumped back, waiting to see what would happen. When nothing did, he carefully set his hoof on the top step. After a count of ten, he started down into the little room.

It has the flavor of a temporary hovel that’d taken on a long term occupancy. A small writing desk was pushed up against one of the three metal doors that went deeper into the facility and a dozen sketchbooks were piled, haphazardly atop one another. From far off, he could hear the thrum of machinery, but he couldn’t get a good sense of where it was coming from.

He tiptoed over to the desk, watching for wires or landmines or runes carved into the floor. The scent of rotting blood was enough to make his nose burn, but he’d smelled worse. He couldn’t think when, but he was sure it must have happened.

Gently flipping open the cover of the top-most note-pad, he felt a shiver make its way up his back.

“Goodie. Psycho-Nouveau. My favorite,” Juniper muttered, staring down at a picture of a dead pony impaled through with a giant fork that was twirling up his intestines like spaghetti. He turned to another page, finding a list of supplies. “Stun spells suspended in gemstones, blood thinner, butcher knife, bone saw, jeweler’s wire, car batteries, electrodes, paint brushes, enzymatic cleaning agents...sweet Celestia, this guy needs some new hobbies.”

Sitting down, he pulled open the desk and found a thin journal and pen. Setting it on the desk, he opened it to the first entry and quickly read:

Day Nine Thousand Seventy Six

Ah, well. Sad as it sounds, I simply couldn’t bring myself to use that wretched mess, even for spares. My own fault, really, for not checking the origin before I processed her. Her flesh was a tapestry written upon by unskilled claws. Disposal was a bit of a hassle, but I doubt she’ll be found anytime soon. I suppose I might have left her in the bottom of one of the mines, but her death did remind me that art mustn’t bow to convenience.

I must be getting old and sentimental. I suppose simply old, since I began sentimental.

Truly, I must switch styles again soon. No wish to become stagnant! The performance pieces from early last year were lovely, but not as well received as a few of the older ones. Griffin is still an excellent medium and I feel my inspiration flow when I have a beautiful hen beneath my brush.

I still feel I haven’t fully explored the potential of the sonic emission chamber. Since my father so graciously left me the land, I feel it only right his legacy make a greater impression on the artistic community in death than it did in life. That ridiculous rooster he wove into the suspension matrix for the weather control system still gives me a fright, but it does speak to the kind of stallion he was and this incredible technological wonder remains one of endless possibilities. So sad he hadn’t the sense to use it for something meaningful nor the fortitude to see it finished.

Note to self: Make certain sure generators are adequately powered. Add fuel oil to list.

As soon as I figure out the modulation parameters so the bones don’t turn to dust quite so quickly, I’ll be able to keep my subjects alive with almost complete impunity! I will bear witness to the instant of life leaving their eyes and dance with them upon that knife edge!

The patterns produced on their flesh are very interesting, if applied with precision. The news has christened my latest incarnation ‘The Stained Glass Killer’ because of it; a name I find myself smiling at again and again. Cellular breakdown makes the shapes a bit unpredictable, but I’ll figure that out eventually and then I shall paint my thoughts into their living skin! I do wonder what they’ll call me then.

----

Juniper swallowed and shut the book.

Nine thousand days.

He did some quick mental math and it came out to something like twenty five years. Twenty five years. He was in the home of a murderer who’d been active when he was still hunting his cutie-mark on the streets of Baltimare.

How many dead? If the nine they’d found were even the smallest fraction, that put him into the realm of dozens upon dozens; a death toll on par with dragon attacks and mass poisonings.

It boggled the mind.

As he was having these thoughts, a tiny speaker set beside the nearest door let out blast of static. Juniper kicked his trigger into his mouth, dropping into a defensive posture, backing against the nearest wall and looking for a target.

“Ahem! ‘A fly buzzing in my soup’ said the epicure to the waiter! ‘Can I have another?’ Oh, the waiter says,’a moment and I shall deliver’! Is that Detective Juniper Shores, knock, knocking at my door?”

The voice was male, accented and cheery. It was difficult to place his age.

“I’m Detective Shores. Who is asking?”

“My name is...well, my true name is meaningless to our circumstances and I rather like the most recent one. You may call me Stained Glass,” the voice replied.

Juniper’s stomach twisted into a knot as he glanced towards the hatch at the stop of the stairs. It was still open. He had a path of retreat.

“I take it you have a camera somewhere that I’m not seeing?”

There was a quiet chuckle from the speaker. “No, no, nothing of the sort. The employee tracking system makes for a lovely early alert if one knows a bit about electrical engineering. I am pleased to say I know quite a lot. I also have your partner, Detective Hard Boiled. He is alive, for the moment. He carries a picture of the two of you tucked into his badge. Am I right in presuming that additional officers are on their way?”

Juniper hesitated, chewing his bit. He desperately wanted something to shoot. His talent hadn’t given him any indication the bastard was lying about having Hardy.

‘Keep him talking,’ he thought.

“More will be coming, yes. We’ve got back up on the way. They’ll be here soon. There’s no walking away from this. You come quietly, you don’t have to die today.”

Stained Glass laughed, long and loud, setting Juniper’s teeth on edge. “Au contraire, mon ami! Today is a fantastic day for death! I do agree, however, that there is no walking away. I must admit...this is the closest I’ve ever been to caught. That tells a pony something, no? Oh, to be sure, I have escape plans upon escape plans, and I could leave quite easily, yet you would dog my heels and I am a very old dog,” Pausing, he did something in the background and somepony let out a soft moan. He continued. “One day, sooner rather than later, I suspect I will be too old to run. I would rather not reach such a day.”

Putting a hoof up on the door, Juniper shoved it open.

“So, give yourself up,” Juniper said, peering down the fog-filled hall. “We’ll find you a nice cell with a view. You could cop an insanity plea in about ten seconds flat. Tartarus Correctional is nice enough. You and Warden will get along real well.”

Stained Glass snickered, the sound coming from another speaker set further down the hall. “My, my, my! You are a pill, Detective Shores! My favorite kind of pony! No, of course, I don’t intend that. Do, please, make your way downstairs. The hall door you just opened takes a somewhat roundabout way down, but you will arrive in due time.”

“And if I don’t?” Juniper asked, shrugging his coat up on his shoulders. The thick fog was settling on his body and it stank with a fury.

“This is the cordial invitation, Detective Shores. The other invitation involves you listening to the screams of various persons as I mutilate them. Don’t worry. There are no traps. Well, there is one...but you are already in it. If I wish to kill you, I will use a more hooves-on methodology.”

“I suppose I can’t argue with that,” Juniper replied, trying to sound casual as he trotted down the hall, making no further effort to be stealthy. His thoughts were racing, however. Something about the situation was strangely familiar. Had he been here before? Maybe.

A strange feeling stole over him as he moved. It was one of acceptance, mixed with a certain awareness and appreciation of the world around him. His hooves ached, but it was a good ache. He was covered in sweat, but it was cool and the air was disgusting, but he could smell it.

‘Hardy doesn’t die today.’

He picked up the pace, cantering down the foggy hallway until he reached a junction, skidding around the corner. An old and barely functional fan set into the ceiling was making an effort to clear the fog, but had succeeded only in providing a few feet of clear space. He saw a set of steps spiraling down into the mist a couple meters beyond it.

Taking them two at a time, he charged down the steps, leaning his shoulder against the rail as he barreled towards into the lower level. He almost missed the final step and stumbled off the end of the stairs into the short hall. Ahead, he could see a wall covered in paintings of the most gruesome variety. Another door over there and stairs lead back up.

Steeling himself, he swiped a hoof across his face, trying to ignore the cloying scent digging at his nostrils. Death in all its forms, like a rose, but never sweet.

Climbing back to his hooves, he loped along the hallway to the door of the workshop.

Even though he had some concept of what he was going to see, the gallery still reduced him to horror-stricken silence. He stopped as he stepped out into the space, staring up at the walls—walls covered in a long and detailed record of murder.

How many missing pony, zebra, and griffin cases were up on those walls? How many had met their ends, sawn and hewn and woven into frames for the Stained Glass Killer?

Twenty five years worth, at least. So many butchered for the mad-ponies art. How had he done it? How does someone kill with such impunity?

“Hey, pony.”

Juniper jammed a hoof into his own mouth, forcing himself not to scream as he stumbled to one side. He jerked his eyes down and found himself muzzle-to-beak with a griffin. She was barely more than a child, more of a late teenager, with frightened eyes.

Slowly he pulled his hoof from his muzzle.

The young griffin’s eyes were sad as she set her head on her crossed forelegs. “H-he’s g-got your partner.”

“Where is he?” Juniper asked.

Before she could reply, that cheerful, terrible voice called from down another tunnel that lead to a pair of swinging doors, “I’m in here, Detective Shores! Do stop speaking to the furniture and bring yourself along!”

Giving the poor griffin one last look, Juniper picked up his trigger in his teeth and tried to keep calm as he trotted down the hall, away from the gallery. Resting a hoof on the swinging door, he closed his eyes and pushed it open.

“Ah! Welcome, Juniper Shores! Welcome!”

Juniper opened his eyes on a scene from a nightmare. The first thing he saw was Hardy. Partner. Friend.

Hard Boiled was naked, face down over a board with his legs hanging off either side. The board was supported by several cinder-blocks, keeping his hooves from quite touching the ground. His gun, shirt, badge, and trenchcoat coat were piled nearby in a heap.

Hoof-cuffs bound Hardy’s knees together and about two dozen tiny wires were attached to fishhooks in the flesh of his back, all leading down to a sturdy wooden box covered in yellow lightning bolt stickers. His dark fur was matted with blood. Whoever had set up the structure obviously had a frightening amount of experience immobilizing someone. Hardy’s eyes were open, however; he held his partner’s gaze for a full ten seconds, then twisted his head, nodding weakly toward something off to the right.

Juniper wrenched his attention away from his partner’s face, composing his expression into one of calm detachment as he turned to look at the enormous room he’d found himself in.

The chamber walls were smooth, with a sheen like obsidian that’d been shaped into a gigantic tube. Far above, the distant ceiling was open to the sky. Juniper could just make out the general shape of the rooster made of wire and beyond that, the simmering storm.

In the center of it all, a clear glass or plastic bulb of some kind - several times the height of a pony - squatted in the middle of a circle of yellow and black zebra-stripes surrounded with warning stickers. It was perfectly spherical and set into the ground a few inches. A similarly clear air-lock with two sealable doors lead into the bulb from just beyond the range of the danger zone.

At last, his eyes were drawn to the figures inside the bulb.

On the floor of the glass chamber, a griffin girl lay. The light coming from several overhead lamps was a bit distorted, but from what Juniper could see, she was uninjured. She was simply sitting there, vacantly staring at him. She looked almost identical to the hen he’d just me in the ante-room, save that her feathers were badly ruffled and she wore a collar of glittering gemstones.

Beside her, smiling beatifically, stood the Stained Glass Killer.

Some part of Juniper had wanted him to look like a monster. He’d hoped for leering, skinless lips and sharp teeth. Maybe throw in a few extra legs and some twisted horns.

The stallion was almost disappointingly normal, standing there propped against the wall of the bulb as Juniper studied him.

He was a pegasus, well muscled and extremely athletic, but his close-cropped mane was almost entirely grey; not a natural shade either. Whatever color he’d been originally, his pelt had the look of a hundred dye jobs, the most recent of which had been allowed to lapse leaving him a dirty, badly bleached blonde. His wings were preened to an obsessive degree, not one single feather out of place.

Juniper’s first estimate of his age pegged the stallion at something like forty, but as he traced the wrinkles around his lips and forehead he had to adjust that number north a few degrees; Stained Glass might have been fifty, maybe even sixty. He had a sharp, angular face, with slightly sunken eyes, but in his prime he must have been the kind of stallion to melt mare’s hearts.

It was his eyes that were wrong.

Nopony should have eyes like that. They weren’t empty or cold. They weren’t even the eyes of a monster. Juniper had met plenty of monsters; monsters saw no beauty in the world.

Those were the eyes of an artist, who worked in lymph, leather, and agony.

Stained Glass was an artist and the look he was giving Juniper was the same one a sculptor gives his newest block of clay. He was just standing there, a tiny black box or remote of some sort balanced on his upturned hoof.

“Mister Shores. Most excellent to finally meet you. I admit, I expected our first meeting to involve more chains, but alas, it is not to be,” Stained Glass murmured, with a little bow. His voice came through the bulb in a slightly strange way, like several people were saying the same words at once. “I wouldn’t bother with the gun. The glass, or whatever remarkable substance the builders of this magnificent artifice found, is completely bullet-proof. Same with the walls.”

Juniper quietly lowered his pistol, letting his bit drop.

“What’s the score? You know what I want, here,” Juniper said. “If we’re negotiating—”

Stained Glass chuckled, trotting forward and putting his hoof on the inside of the glass ball. “Negotiating? Dear boy, we are not negotiating. Negotiation implies you have something I want, but cannot simply take. No, right now we are having a conversation. Rare, but I feel in these final moments that this...this is a conversation worth having.”

Sweeping his tail under himself, Juniper sat down and picked at his teeth with one toe.

“Well, if that’s what you want. I didn’t feel much like negotiating anyway. That’s usually his job,” he replied, jabbing a toe at his bound partner. “I guess the obvious question is ‘What’s with the remote?’.”

The stallion behind the glass frowned slightly, setting the box on the floor at his hooves. “A mechanism. One with which I can gleefully cook your partner or these other creatures alive if I so choose. Now, do stop wasting my time. That isn’t the question you want an answer to.”

‘Breathe, Juniper. Breathe. This isn’t a dream. You’re not in another world and this is really happening. What does he want you to ask?’

“I know Hard Boiled,” he said, flicking his eyes at his partner’s prone form. “He wouldn’t have gone down easy. Not unless he was outclassed in a big way. If you took him down, you knew I was coming. You could have killed the both of us at any time and walked away, scot-free. Why haven’t you?”

“Excellent! Truly, you have an incisive mind, Detective Shores.” Stained Glass picked up the remote, trotting over to his captive griffin and gently raising her chin so he could examine her closely. “Before I answer you...do you know, I followed the careers of both of you with some considerable interest when I learned you’d been assigned to my case? I considered taking both of you much sooner, but I simply didn’t have a project in mind. Some of your predecessors are still out there in the workshop, after all.”

Hardy tried to move his lips, but Stained Glass raised his toe, waggling it warningly over the remote and the detective’s teeth snapped shut around whatever he’d been about to ask.

“Now, now, now! You haven’t been given permission to speak. This is between Mister Shores and I,” Stained Glass scolded.

“Some of our...predecessors?” Juniper asked.

“Yeees...the piece with the posed griffins was only the latest! ‘Fly Away’ took months of planning to properly execute,” Stained Glass replied, twirling a hoof in a circle over the griffin girl’s head. “You are familiar with the Pink Slasher?”

Juniper’s brow furrowed, then as comprehension set in his teeth ground against one another. “I remember Officer Cornrow. She was assigned to that one. We found her skin in a basket outside to Castle, tattooed with the faces of the Slasher’s other five victims.”

“Ah! An excellent memory as well!” Stained Glass nickered, settling on his rump. “I kept her in a cage for almost four months, teaching her the little ins and outs of my art. We conversed at length. She told me about her dreams. There were even a few times she smiled. I waited and I waited. Creative work requires, above all, patience. Oh, she’d accepted her death early...but one day, I saw in her eyes the belief she might live. That was the perfect day. Such a day! I am quite proud of that particular piece. In a moment, I captured hope!”

It was impossible to hide the tremor of fury in his knees, but Juniper managed to keep his voice cool and neutral, even adding a quiet smirk. “Some idiot in the office sold pictures to the media. We wondered why the Slasher disappeared after that. I assume the ‘work’ was finished?”

Stained Glass nodded, grinning ear to ear. He gestured towards where Hard Boiled was restrained. “You assumed correctly. Now, we have another work that must be finished. This one I have pondered on for many, many years and today, finding the two of you at my home an inspiration I’ve not felt in almost a decade struck me.”

“Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?” Juniper asked, tilting his head to one side to try to get a look at his opponent’s cutie-mark. The light twisted through the glass in such a way as he couldn’t quite make it out.

The killer dismissed his comment with a flick of his thready, grey tail. “Like it or not, you will take my little deal, else I kill you, and the other three souls here and tomorrow, a new work begins. Mayhap not so beautiful as this one, but...I will make do and await inspiration once more. This is, as they say, a ‘one time offer’.”

Juniper squinted, willing his talent to tell him the bastard was lying. He needed him to lie. A lie would have let that part of his mind that came up with plans start working, but every word had the ring of gospel to it. Even the parts about how easily Stained Glass could slaughter the lot of them.

Through clenched teeth, he said, “Tell me about this...offer…”

“Juni, no!” Hard Boiled managed to choke out. The murderer’s toe brushed over one of the buttons on his remote and Juniper’s partner went stiff as a board, every muscle simultaneously seizing. After a moment, he slumped, gasping for breath, his rear legs still twitching spasmodically.

Every impulse in Juniper’s body was screaming at him to blow Stained Glass into the afterlife in a hail of lead. He wanted to rush to his partner, wrench those cuffs off and take him home, to their shared bed. A wiser part held him there, his trigger rocking against his knee as he stared down the butcher.

“The offer, dammit…” Juniper growled, taking a few steps closer to the clear chamber.

Stained Glass’s smile never so much as wavered as he tapped a few buttons on the remote. The griffin girl stood in one smooth motion, like a puppet whose strings have been taken up.

“A simple deal, though you may not understand the beauty of it. You will leave your gun there. You come into this chamber with me. I will send this hen out. Once she is in the airlock, I will activate the chamber.”

Juniper’s eyes narrowed, suspiciously. “And...that will do what, exactly?”

Sweeping his hooves and wings up at the sky, the Stained Glass Killer drew in a deep breath, his broad chest swelling with emotion. He shut his eyes, a blissful expression on his face, as though he could taste the tang in the air from the crackling storm high above.

“I shall capture the perfect death, my boy!”

As though for punctuation, a crash of lightning landed somewhere in the forest nearby, followed immediately by the howl of timberwolves.

“It will be a death so beautiful the stars will weep! My own, with my pursuer, dying together...and I will paint it in a medium more magnificent than any meat or muscle I have ever worked with before! I will etch this into a living mind!” He jabbed his hoof at Hardy, whose cutie-mark was burning like a house-fire.

The killer’s voice had taken on something of the preacher at his pulpit as he smacked the glass bulb, making it ring like a bell.

“He will witness...and he will remember!”

In the silence that followed, the two detectives exchanged a slow look. Hard Boiled could smell his own terrified sweat and his partner’s cologne. He could see the fine details of Juniper’s scruffy little beard and eyes that had smiled, comforted, and bucked some sense into him all through those early days on the force when he was sure he’d never live up to his father’s name.

For some reason, a memory flitted through Hardy’s mind of the first moment he’d understood what it meant to be a cop.

It was the day he’d finished his third major case. The perp had put a gun in his own mouth rather than be taken alive. That might have been fine if he hadn’t also shot his kids, dog, and the post-mare.

Hardy’s talent had been giving him fits. Juniper dragged him out to a nice bar, bought him a drink, then hauled him into one of the booths off in the back and held him while he cried like a foal for a half hour before telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself.

The memory drifted away in a flash and Hardy was left with a distant, frightened ache. He had some notion of what was about to happen, because he knew Juniper. He tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t do much more than shift his chin side to side a few millimeters on the board he was cuffed over.

Juniper, for his part, was feeling oddly calm.

He wasn’t really afraid of dying. Dying was a always a possibility; it was part of being a cop. You were allowed to accept your own death. It was Hardy’s death he could never have accepted and he had no doubt that Stained Glass would kill his partner if he waited too long or tried to make some grand gesture. He’d kill his partner, and those poor girls, too. Then there would be three dead bodies.

Selfish, really, to choose to die first...but he’d done the math and there just wasn’t any way out of their predicament. Maybe with a few hours to think, he might have come up with something, but that was the beauty of the trap.

Turning back to Stained Glass, Juniper tugged his brown coat off his shoulders and dropped it in a pile. Pulling a knife out of one of the pockets with his teeth, he carefully shoved it under the straps of his gun harness, sawing at it for a moment until it snapped. Letting his pistol clatter on the stone-work, he stepped out of the remains.

He started to remove his badge off, Stained Glass shook his head.

“No! Leave it on, Detective Shores. You quite like the notion of dying with it and I find it...thematically appropriate.”

Hardy was starting to struggle in earnest, heaving against the cuffs, grunting in agony as the hooks in his back began to tear at his skin. He tried to speak again, but he still hadn’t quite got control of all of his muscles and it came out as a desperate whimper.

“Can I say goodbye?” Juniper asked, glancing meaningfully at his bound partner. His own voice sounded strange in his ears. Peaceful. Very peaceful.

“Oh, I insist!” Stained Glass replied. “Do be aware, I am watching your motions. If I see you do anything untoward, I can send enough voltage through his body to cook him in an instant. That would be very sad. We would have to see if the next couplet of officers who pursue me are more cooperative.”

His first step was stumbling, but as he moved over to his partner and sat down in front of him, Juniper felt his shoulders begin to relax. He looked down into Hardy’s upturned, pleading eyes.

“Well, kiddo,” he began, trying a smile. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. “This is where I get off. You make for damn sure whoever your next partner is treats you right. I don’t want somepony gutless watching your back.”

“J-Juni…” Hardy whispered as best he could.

Juniper leaned down and pressed his lips against Hard Boiled’s forehead for a moment, then lifted his head and murmured into his ear, “I’ll see you around, alright, kiddo? We ain’t done, you and me. Not by a long shot." He made to stand, then seemed to think better of it. "Oh, and while I’m thinking about it...make sure to bust the damn golden watch before they bury me with it. I don’t need something ticking in my coffin for the next fifty years or however long those enchantments last.”

With that, Juniper got back to his hooves and trotted off towards the glass ball, casting one last look over his shoulder at his partner. Hardy watched him go, his heart aching as he tried to gather breath to call out, to beg him to stop, but he couldn’t find the words. He knew, too, that Juniper wouldn’t stop.

Stained Glass was grinning with anticipation fit to burst. The killer tapped his captive hen on the flank and pointed towards the airlock on the side of the glass bulb, then took a few steps back. She moved mechanically towards the door, lifting each leg one at a time. It was a laborious process, but she made it within a minute or so.

Glass pressed a button on his remote and the airlock hissed open, swinging outward on a mechanized hinge.

Hardy began to struggle in earnest, rocking back and forth on the cinder blocks as he fought against his bonds with all his might. The hooks in his back were tearing at him, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but preventing his partner from entering that chamber.

Taking a moment to inspect the hen as she moved past him, Juniper blew out a breath and entered the airlock. The hen kept moving until she met the wall, pressing her cheek against it. One of her rear legs continued to lift, then drop, lift, then drop, like a child’s toy that hasn’t the sense to stop when it hits the skirting board.

Juniper stepped into the chamber, studying his opponent as the door slid shut behind him. The airlock hissed again and he had the oddest sensation of standing inside a soap bubble. Sounds from outside were, if anything, even louder than they had been. He fancied he could hear Hard Boiled’s labored breathing as he tried to free himself.

Rearing back, Juniper stepped into a hoof-boxing stance from his academy days. He wished, not for the first time, that he’d kept up with that, but as he called on them he found the old instincts were still there. They roared up out of memory, tightening his knees and loosening his shoulders.

“Are we doing this, or not?” he growled.

“We are most assuredly doing this, Detective,” Stained Glass purred, dropping his remote at his hooves and calmly stomping on it. “The program is already set. The storm will end soon and our little concert will begin. As a matter of fact, it began the moment the door was closed.”

Outside, Hardy could hear some piece of equipment begin to spool up with a sound like a roaring lion. A portion of the shaft they were in slid back, revealing a gigantic black concave; it took him a moment to identify it as a speaker. He gritted his teeth, expecting to find himself deafened, but instead, all he felt was a low thrum, deep in his chest.

Inside the cage, Stained Glass rose into a fighting pose, wings spread, forelegs readied. It was some kind of pegasus combat style Juniper wasn’t familiar with, but in an enclosed space, he knew an Earth pony had the advantage.

Launching himself across the tiny room, he slammed into Stained Glass, driving him back a step. Despite his age, the killer was in fantastic shape; it was like hitting a brick wall. That didn’t much matter to Juniper, though. He’d broken down walls before.

A blonde wing snapped across his vision, battering his jaw, sending him stumbling back, then his enemy was on him. As he grappled with the killer, driving his rear hooves into the bastard's soft belly, he began to feel a strange sensation in his legs; he could feel the bones in his knee - bones that had no right to be moving on their own - beginning to shake.

Hard Boiled had managed to heave the board he was tied to off the cinder-blocks, collapsing onto the floor. Getting his hooves under him, he started to rise, only to feel the hooks dig in more deeply on one side. He squirmed, crying out as he felt one of the barbs dig into a muscle. His legs went out from under him and he fell again, landing with his muzzle facing the chamber in the middle of the room.

Inside, his partner seemed to be floating as he wrestled with Stained Glass, the two of them hanging in mid-air, their bodies suspended by something unseen.

All at once, something pulsed, shaking the very air. It tore the two combatants away from one another. Hardy couldn’t tell which scream was Juniper’s, but their twin howls of mortal agony were loud enough that he wanted to cover his ears and close his eyes. He couldn’t, however. He could only watch as his partner’s body seemed gradually to stretch out, like putty. His legs grew longer and longer, and the screaming just wouldn’t stop.

After a few seconds, there was a spurt of blood against the chamber’s interior as the vibrations in the air built and built, though there was nothing to actually hear. He was left with only the endless drumbeat of his aching heart in the resulting silence.

Scene-change: The screen fades to white, then back to black. A few twinkling stars can be picked out in the distance.

Set: A panting, terrified young mare in a police uniform dashes out of the Weathervane, stumbling headlong to her patrol vehicle. Wrenching the door open, she snatches up her radio.

“Car twelve calling all stations! We need back-up to the location dispatch will be giving you! We’ve got two officers down, one unidentified subject down and...and so many dead! We need an ambulance! No, two ambulances! Oh Celestia, you won’t believe...send Slip Stitch! Send him right now! Send everypony! I’ve never seen anything...anything like it…”

----

In Memory of Detective Juniper Shores, who died in the line of duty.

Beloved friend and partner.

You were taken too soon.

Act 3 Chapter 9: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

It is an accepted fact of Equestrian living - though little scientific research has been done on the matter - that there is a place ‘beyond’ angry that a person can reach during which unparalleled feats of strength and violence are possible. Thankfully, not many ponies will ever find themselves in a position to be that mad.

The term coined for this unusual condition was ‘Zen Angry’.

It was named after the famous Zenzibar World Stomper. Zenzibar was largely known for his later life explorations of far-flung places where he could 'get some damn quiet', but he began life as a low-level functionary of the zebra Office of Revenue. After ten years sitting at a desk, filling out meaningless paperwork and answering the complaints of rich, entitled, or stupid individuals day in and day out, Zenzibar is said to have reached ‘Zen Angry’.

Upon being presented with a demand that he work a week solid worth of overtime and already having missed three days off, Zenzibar burst into a righteous fury so powerful that every inbox in the building simultaneously exploded. So the legend goes, he got up from behind his desk, stomped out of that office, stomped down the stairs, stomped out of the city, then stomped right off the Zebrican continent grumbling the whole way. Tales of the exploits that followed him reach across many lands, such as the dragon migration that supposedly changed direction when they saw him coming and the Minotaur Chieftans, Cocus and Romular, who decided they’d actually rather sit down and discuss things rationally after he stomped through the middle of their war.

In his later years, Zenzibar was credited with the writing of a series of scrolls to the editor of a local magazine regarding both his experiences and the idea that one could actually live their entire life furious. While the original titles, ‘You People Suck!’, ‘I Hope You Get A Debilitating Disease’ and ‘Did You Spill My Drink?’ were changed by the editors, the content remained largely unaltered. These scrolls were gathered together into the comprehensive ‘Zen And The Art Of Fury’.

To this day, it is a rare pony who finds something worth being so peeved that they actually change the shape of the world, but it can’t hurt to be polite should you ever find yourself in your local tax office with a form 1049-E that needs correction.

-The Scholar

I hadn’t really noticed I was crying. I just kept talking and the weeping started somewhere along the way. My eyes burned and yet I wanted nothing more than to have it all out. At a point, I stopped caring what Swift was doing. I assumed she was just sitting there, listening.

“They found me curled up under the chamber,” I explained, wiping the trickle of a tear off my cheek. “I couldn’t get into the airlock, but there wouldn’t have been much left for me to save, even if I had. There wasn’t even enough left to bury. The coffin down in the Police Cemetery is empty.”

I felt something very soft brush my face and looked up. Swift was gently cleaning my muzzle with a wash-cloth over the tip of her hoof. Her baby-blue eyes were full of quiet compassion.

Leaning forward over her parent’s kitchen table, I crossed my forelegs, laying my cheek on them and shutting my eyes on them as I continued. “I was catatonic for about two days. When I recovered enough to talk, the police psychologists recommended immediate retirement with full pension.”

“Why?” Swift asked, quietly.

“Eh...I wouldn’t tell them what actually happened, but they pieced enough of it together. I fought it and Iris Jade was short-hooved. I spent two months on leave, then five months behind a desk and every weekend sitting in a headshrinker’s office before they cleared me for beat work. That was when the drinking really started. Taxi finally pulled me out of it, but it took two years.”

My partner’s lip quivered, but her expression was wavering between shock, pity, and curiosity.

“Why...why didn’t you tell them what happened?”

I chuckled, but there was no mirth in it.

“Because I didn’t want to give the bastard what he wanted. I was his perfect canvas, after all.”

She looked a little confused. “What do you mean, Sir?”

Pushing my chair back, I swung my legs down and trotted over to the cabinet, fetching down a glass. After all that talking, my throat was parched. I took the time to peer up at the clock on the wall as I filled my cup from the sink. We’d been there almost two hours.

Swift hadn’t moved. She was still sitting there at the table as I turned back, her lower lip hooked by one of her long canines, as she waited for me to answer.

“The Stained Glass Killer wanted to etch what happened to my partner into something they couldn’t bury or hide. He wanted a living, breathing pony to remember his death every day, forever. Jade and I managed to keep the worst of it out of the papers, but...he wanted every psychologist I told this to to remember. He wanted every newspony to remember.” Moving to her side, I reached out and stroked my partner’s soft, orange muzzle. I couldn’t hide the sadness in my voice. “He wanted every cop...to remember.”

She drew back a little, then stared down at her hooves, as though seeing them for the first time. “T-that...that’s...why you l-lie…”

I turned my hip, flashing the golden scales on my thigh. “My talent is justice, Swift. Not kindness. Not even truth. That was Juniper’s thing.”

Her rear legs slid out from under her and I caught her before she could fall.

“Sir... I think y-you can call me ‘kid’ if you want to,” she muttered, then hiccuped, holding tight to my neck as I settled on the floor of the kitchen with her. “It just sounds weird hearing you c-call me ‘Swift’.”

“Alright,” I replied, glancing towards the living room. A pair of yellow eyes were watching from the door. “How much of that did you hear?”

Mags silently padded over and Swift made room for her to climb up into my lap. She was just as teary eyed as my partner. My heart felt like it was moments from a total breakdown, pitter pattering in my chest as I held two of the beings who’d somehow become dear to me. I’d promised myself awhile ago I wouldn’t let ponies get so close. Of course, I’d broken that promise a dozen times in the intervening period. Still, with the tiny griffin and my partner there, the pain felt just a little lighter, the darkness a little brighter.

Damn me for an old nag.

A half hour later, we unwound from one another. It was... better than nice. I’d lost track of the years it’d been since somepony’d held me like that. Lily Blue was one thing, but she wasn’t my partner.

Swift took the time as I gathered my wits and had a few glasses of water to drag Mags to her parent’s couch for a preening. There were a few objections and a bit of grumbling, but in the end my ward surrendered to the inevitable, sitting there sullenly trying not to coo every time Swift found a feather out of place.

Stepping out of the front door, I shut it behind me, inhaling the clean evening air to cleanse my sinuses of the memory of the weathervane. Years had gone by, and still I sometimes woke to the smell of that deathly fog.

I leaned against the door frame, watching my driver’s back legs sticking out of the hood of the Night Trotter. I’m sure she knew I was there, but I suspect she had some idea of what I’d been discussing with Swift and was waiting for me to make the first move.

“Our next stop is the Castle and I suspect a twenty or thirty minute stint in the dungeons just to drive home how pissed off Jade is likely to be. You want to talk or maybe beat the crap out of me again?” I asked, pushing off the door and strolling down the porch steps. The empty street was peaceful, but far away to the east I could hear the crack-crack of gunfire. “I could use a beating about now.”

Pushing herself back from the car, she dropped a socket wrench out of her teeth into a pile of tools beside the front tire and replied, “While you and Swift were having your little ‘conversation’, I tried to make some calls. Most of the lines were down, but a few are still up. I rang the Prince. He was still at his place, along with Lily Blue. Half their neighborhood is staying with him. Got his own little commune, with nightly shows.”

I rested my hip on the Night Trotter and scratched at my chest. “How are they doing?”

“Truth be, I’ve never heard him happier. Precious is...what can I say? He’s Precious. He’s not going anywhere. The end of ponykind comes and he’ll sell toilets to whatever lives after us. Might be sooner rather than later, actually,” she said, tilting her head towards the sky where the darkened sun hung like a black hole punched in the heavens.

“I know parts of the world survive a fair length of time without seeing the sun, but I’m going to call that a bad thing if we end up playing the long game,” I commented, staring up at the burning hole in the sky.

“I agree. What are you doing with Mags? We can’t possibly take her to the Castle.”

“You want to tie her up and leave her here?” I asked, kicking a bolt that’d rolled towards the gutter back over to Taxi. “Maybe stuff her in a closet for good measure? That’s not happening. I’ll tell her to wait with the car.”

“The most obvious, dangerous vehicle in all of Detrot to potentially wait with, yes?”

“Sweets, there are still a million cabs out there…”

“Yes, but—”

I held up a hoof to forestall any further argument. “No. Look, I drop her anywhere out of my sight and she’s in more danger than if she was in it. She’s got four of the most capable ponies in Detrot guarding her. Her father saw fit to take her into the Nursemaid Guild. Esmeralda might be alive, but I’ve got no way of finding out and I suspect Mags would run off the second we did, then come find us again. I’m the last egg keeper I know of. That makes me responsible for her.”

My driver glared daggers at me. “You’re not a griffin, Hardy...and we both know that’s not why you’re taking care of her.”

“I made a promise, to her, if no-one else. She’s got nobody besides us. We’ll figure something out, but I will keep her safe and sound.”

Snatching up a wrench, Taxi went back to work. “I’ll hold you to that, Hardy. Swift is already picking up too many of your mannerisms for my taste, but I guess she’s rubbed off on you a little, too, so things could be worse. Maybe Mags will give you some of her charm, tact, and self restraint.”

“Her charm and self—Sweets, you saw her eat that fish!”

“Exactly.”

“Cute. When are you going to have the car assembled enough for us to get out of here?”

Taxi jabbed her wrench at the top floor of the house. “After we’ve all had some sleep. Go rest, before you keel over.”

Five hours had passed and the healing power of sleep was not to be underestimated. I was feeling almost equine after spending four or five hours under the covers of Swift’s bed in her old room. I’d been too tired to dream terribly much, which helped considerably.

Mags and Swift were curled up together in the back seat, reading a comic book from my partner’s personal stash while Limerence pored over Taxi’s map trying to get a feel for the new political geography of the city. I was left to keep watch out the windows as buildings flew by. Few ponies were on the streets, most moving cautiously or in groups.

Taxi had fiddled with something under the hood that corralled the car’s incessant lightning discharges a little bit, but it was still the only cab on the road and most assuredly the only one being driven by a pony who considered posted speeds to be lower limits.

I thought I caught a few shadows moving against the sky, but might have imagined them. There was no ‘sign’ as such that we’d moved into police territory, but there was a definite change in the air. I felt my shoulders tense up and the road, while as deserted as every other, had been cleared of anything that might impede a vehicle or a line of fire between the rows of buildings. Another mile closer to the Castle, and a siren went up from somewhere nearby.

Swift and Mags sat up and I rolled my window down, trying to get a bead on where the noise was coming from It was followed, moments later, by a second one.

Red and blue lights flashed on as four separate patrol cruisers zipped out of nearby alleys on the four lane road leading up to the Castle, pulling in behind us and alongside. The officer in the car off to our left was a sweet-faced mare whose name I couldn’t remember. She signaled they were an escort with one hoof, then chopped at the air twice to indicate we should proceed. A few seconds later, another cruiser pulled in and tried to get ahead for a box-in, but Taxi snarled and booted the engine, peeling off around him before he could close it. He fell back as a crackle of magical energy from the Night Trotter’s rear exhaust splashed his front bumper.

We sped on ahead, taking the lead.

While a direct attack from the P.A.C.T. was a possibility, I didn’t count it as particularly likely with my fellow officers alongside us. I still wasn’t feeling especially relaxed. Jade might no longer be quite so medicated, but she hadn’t needed medication to be one of the single most dangerous unicorns in Detrot.

Our friends seemed content to follow, but there was a certain jerky wariness in their actions. I couldn’t tell if they were afraid of us or of something else, but peering out the window, every one of them had a grimly determined expression.

“Har’dy...be it just me or be we like bugs between claws?” Mags asked, quietly as she peeked over the edge of the window.

“We’re safe enough, I think,” I replied, glancing at the rooftops. There were quite a few ponies up there, watching as our little parade passed by. Most were in uniform. I glanced down as a light on my heart flicked on. "I could use a charge at a point soon. Wish I'd thought to do that. Eh, remind me when I get to Supermax."

Swift touched my shoulder, then pointed at a nearby building. “Sir, that’s an anti-dragon cannon up there...”

“I’ll have to take your word for it, kid. Earth pony eyesight, remember?”

“Oh...right. It only has a partial crew. Like, there’s supposed to be four ponies for one of those, but I only saw two.”

I shrugged, watching as eyes followed us from the windows of a small apartment complex. “Probably just a precaution. Jade is trying to guard a pretty sizeable area here. I wonder why. Her forces would probably be better off withdrawing and shoring up at home. This is awfully spread out.”

“I concur,” Limerence added. He shut his eyes and his horn sparked for a moment, then he shook his head. “I’m afraid I still have no magic should Jade prove hostile…”

“That’s fine. You wouldn’t have a prayer against her in a direct confrontation, anyway,” I replied, making sure the straps on my gun harness were nice and tight and the safety was on. “She’s probably got some strategic reason for it, either way. Never knew Jade to waste resources in a pinch.”

“It’s the civilians,” Taxi murmured, easing off the power a little as the highest spires of the Castle appeared over the building tops. “She’s keeping civilians safe. You and she have an awful lot in common.”

“Like what?” I grunted, a little offended at the notion.

“She’s out there fighting, even though the odds are completely against her. She got into the job to save lives and right wrongs. She knew things were corrupt and she’s been trying to make them better. Sound familiar?” Taxi rolled one eye back to look at me. “Since you’ve known her, she’s been stressed beyond words, drugged, or in withdrawal. You probably don’t remember what you were like when you were mixing all that drink with a head full of whatever crap Juniper left behind when he died, but you were about as friendly as a dragon passing a porcupine during that first week off of it.”

“That’s because you knocked me unconscious in the shower, told Jade I was on vacation, and dragged me to a cabin in the woods in the trunk of what would later become this cab,” I muttered.

“Yes...well...it worked,” she replied, dismissing the point with a flick of her mane. Leaning forward, she peered out at the sky. There were several pegasi in uniforms keeping pace with us up there. “I’m just saying that you saved her daughter. She’s not going to kill you for disappearing and she does care about what happens to the city, above and beyond her own survival.”

“She might kill me when I tell her what I know and have been keeping from her…”

Taxi brought her hoof off the gas for only an instant, but I’d caught the hesitation.

“You wearing that special armor you got from Slip Stitch?” she asked, quietly.

I opened my coat and stroked the anti-magic armor wrapped around my barrel. “Yep. I don’t know what good it’ll do if she throws her desk, mind you.”

Mags’ eyes widened a little. “Crazy pony throws desks?!”

“Typically? No. She much prefers throwing people. I’m doing my best to limit her options.”

In all my years on the Detrot Police Department, the Castle had never really looked like the fortress that it was. The silly alabaster walls and ridiculous onion-shaped roof badly undermined the idea that it had once been the most formidable building on this end of the continent.

The P.A.C.T. was meant to keep the dragons out of the area around the city, but when they weren’t available the Department had their own defenses. Sadly, most of those defenses were stored in the Department itself and moving them about wasn’t an option. That said, Chief Jade really had done a number. If I were a dragon or a looter, I’d have thought twice, three times, four times, and right on around to the mid-twenties before going home with my tail between my legs, sitting under my bed, and rocking back and forth at the mere notion that I might try to invade that building.

There were no less than four anti-dragon guns set up on the bailey walls surrounding the main Castle building, pointing in each of the cardinal directions. The giant cannons jutted up from the old stone towers like ugly claws, each one fully crewed by four alert officers of the Detrot Police Department. Small flights of pegasi winged back and forth around the building, while others sat on the great dome, field binoculars at the ready, scanning the city for trouble.

It was a pretty impressive sight as we pulled around the last corner and onto the cobbled drive heading up to the gate.

“Sir, there are snipers in those windows,” Swift murmured, pointing towards one of the buildings across the street.

“Jade’s not taking any chances,” I said. “I wonder why the dragon guns. She’s not expecting to get hit, is she?”

“Considering the P.A.C.T. doesn’t seem inclined to make any effort to shoo those dragons away from the edges of the city, I think she’s probably making sure,” Taxi replied, quietly.

I blinked at her as what she’d just said sank in. “Wait...Yeeeah...okay, now there’s a question. Why? I mean, even without the Shield, the P.A.C.T. has enough firepower to drive off a few dragons, right?”

Swift nodded, watching as a few ponies on the roofs followed our progress with interest. At street level, nopony was on the roads or sidewalks. “Just the stuff at the training facility could have driven off two or three.”

“It does suggest the dragons are either heavily armed or more plentiful than what those reports from the Stilettos would seem to indicate, or that someone in a position of power has a vested interest in keeping ponies from leaving the city,” Limerence added, contemplatively.

With that hideous thought sending shivers up everyone’s tails, silence fell over the car. Our escort pulled ahead a little and waved to Taxi, pointing towards the gate.

Taxi pulled underneath the great portcullis as rows of uniformed, heavily armed officers watched us from the walls. Not sure where to park, she pulled to one side of the cobbled road and killed the engine. While none of the officers above us were pointing weapons, none of them had put their guns down and lined up for hugs, either.

“Har’dy,” Mags murmured, “I be scared...”

“Want to say in the car with Taxi?” I asked.

She nodded, picking up Swift’s comic book and clutching it to her chest. “You be coming back, yeah? I be not wanting to be around crazy pony throwing desks. Is safer in car that just throws lightning.”

“I’ll be back quick as I can.” I turned to Limerence and added, “Lim, you stay here with Mags. I’d rather answer as few questions as possible. The ones I suspect Jade’s going to ask will be bad enough.”

“Certainly, Detective. I shall bother one of those ponies over there for a cup of tea if I become bored,” he answered, dipping his horn in the direction of two officers who appeared to be standing guard on either side of the Castle’s front doors. They were watching us along with everypony else, but seemed content to stand there, waiting.

I opened the passenger door and stepped out into the cool, clean air of the twilit evening. Without the weather factories chugging along and with huge sections of the city unpowered or abandoned, the sky was littered with stars. A soft murmur went up from the walls, but was quickly quieted by a few shouts from superior officers up and down the line. They were civilian officers, but the whole business was giving me a very military vibe.

While I was getting used to having lots of eyes on me, these were other cops, colleagues, and ponies I’d worked alongside for years. I counted a few of them as friends.

Leaning down to the window, I muttered, “Sweets, keep the engine running…”

“What good is that going to do?” she said, with an incredulous snort. “It’s not like my hack is bullet proofed.”

“Next time we find a garage, I expect you to correct that,” I grumbled. Taxi looked thoughtful, then a slow smile spread across her muzzle.

“Can I—”

“Yes, you can put whatever weapons you want on it on the sole condition that you’re not required to aim any of them.”

My driver’s grin was so big it threatened to split her head in half. I stepped back, pulled my collar up, adjusted my body-armor, and straightened my coat tails. Ready to face the music.

Swift, meanwhile, was getting out of her side of the car, dragging the Hailstorm along behind her. I shook my head and she looked down at Masamane on her leg, then sighed and began stuffing the cannon back in the car.

Side by side, we approached the guards at the door.

“Hiyo gents!” I greeted them, with a bit of mock joviality. “Brilliant evening for it. Either of you happen to know where I might find Chief Constable Iris Jade?”

The officer on the left was a little earth pony whose name I seemed to remember as ‘Cherry Jam’, while her partner was a dull yellow stallion with an unruly tuft on his upper lip that might one day be a mustache. I couldn’t remember his name.

Cherry swallowed, glancing back and forth between Swift and I. “Detective Hard Boiled...under...under the laws of Equestria and the City of Detrot I...I must p-place you and Officer Swift Cuddles under ar-arrest. Y-you are both suspected of high t-t-t-treason!”

She’d almost choked on the word ‘treason’ and as she said it, both she and her partner took a cautious step back.

“You hear that, Swift?” I chuckled, casually tugging my badge out of my armor so it hung in front of my chest. Cherry’s eyes were drawn to it and her ears laid flat. “She wants to arrest us! You think we should surrender, or should we just call down meteors from the sky to level this place like we did with Canterlot?”

At that, Cherry let out a whimper and her back knees sagged. She’d have fallen over were it not for the building itself against her flank. She hadn’t so much as twitched a hoof in the direction of her gun.

Swift rolled her eyes, trotting up the steps passed the guards and pushing open the door. Turning back, she bowed, holding the door with her flank. “Should I get a red carpet, Sir?”

“No, kid, I think I’ll rough it today.”

Still snickering, I strolled past a pair of Detrot’s finest, pushed open the double doors and entered the heavily conditioned air of the Castle.

There was such a flurry of activity going on that nopony even noticed us for a few minutes as we stood there in the main office. The cubicle farm was gone, replaced by what resembled an open-air flea-market. I could smell cooking food, gunpowder, and the sweat of many hundreds of ponies.

I couldn’t see any bits being exchanged, but there were lean-to stalls made from fold out tables and bits of wood in long rows up and down the room. They were manned by both ponies in uniform and civilians, and seemed to be offering everything from gun maintenance to food service. My stomach grumbled as I caught a whiff of fresh baked bread.

High above, the File Cloud spun lazily, as quiet as I’d ever seen it. The rolling thunderhead was a sullen grey and barely moving.

A mare with a stack of papers balanced carefully on her back rushed by us and Swift held the door open for her. She didn’t even notice us, aside a quietly muttered ‘thank you’ as she stepped outside.

I glanced over at the radio station to find ten headsets hanging in mid-air and Telly talking into three different ones at once. She was swaying on her hooves, but her voice was steady as I edged along the wall to her console. Frowning at the headset she was nearest to she gave it a shake.

“—did you say? I told you to let me know if that mad bastard reappeared! I don’t care if the car radio is on the fritz! You send a damn pegasus to let me know! Ugh, no, I know there’s nothing faster than that ridiculous cab...sorry. Wait, what do you mean ‘he’s there’? He’s…”

Telly paused and slowly turned around. Her eyes alighted on Swift and I. She let out strangled cough, then her horn flickered out and all ten headsets dropped out of mid-air, crashing down on her console with a clatter that brought the attention of almost everypony nearby.

Silence gradually descended as neighbors elbowed neighbors, pointing to where my partner and I stood.

“Sir—” Swift whispered out of the corner of her muzzle, “—do you think we should just get you a sign that says ‘Yes, I’m the most wanted pony in the entire city, if not the whole world. Please move along’?”

“If this keeps up, I’m going to need it,” I murmured.

Telly’s lower lip quaked as she took three steps back from the console. Her knees had started to shake and it looked like however many nights of coffee and anti-sleep spells she was running on might catch up with her all at once. Her teal face had all the hallmarks of somepony being kept awake exclusively by magic and willpower. As her spell winked out, her shoulders began to droop.

“Hardy,” she hissed. “You...you can’t really…be here.” She put her hooves on either side of her face, shaking her head violently. Her horn spat a thin string of sparks, then went out again. “I’m hallucinating again. Please, please let me be hallucinating...”

“I’m here, Telly,” I replied picking up one of the headsets that’d fallen on the opposite side of the console and setting it on the counter. “How is Iris Jade? She never writes, she never calls…”

A flash of lightning from the File Cloud brought everyone’s eyes skyward. A shadow had appeared in the window of Jade’s office, standing behind the stained glass image of the Lady Justice.

For the second time in my life, I was standing there ready to beard the dragon. There was some muttering amongst the crowd and somepony shouted, ‘Arrest him!’ but they were immediately shushed. No-one else seemed much inclined to make a move.

“Sir, I think we’re like...two seconds from an actual riot in here,” Swift whispered in my ear.

“Agreed. Telly, before you go have a psychotic break...could you call Jade? Let her know I’m coming up,” I said, still watching the cloud.

When she didn’t respond, I turned back to find Telly slumped over her desk, snoring softly. Sighing, I leaned over and checked her pulse, just to be sure she wasn’t actually dying. There are some dangers to keeping a pony awake for long periods of time with spellwork. I suspected Telly had been abusing it pretty badly of late.

Trotting around her console, I opened one of the bottom drawers of her desk where I knew she kept some essentials of late night police work. I gently draped her ridiculous pink rubber-ducky blanket over her shoulders and patted her mane.

The crowd was still sitting down there, watching me like I was a hundred headed hydra with rabies and paint stripper daubed on my nipples. I did my best to ignore them.

“Kid, you want to lead the way?” I asked, flicking my tail at the stairs up to Jade’s office.

Swift bit her lip, her eyes darting from one face to another. “Shouldn’t we...I don’t know...say something to them? Preferably not stuff like you said at the Vivarium.”

“If you can think of something, be my guest. ‘We’re not the bad guys’? ‘I’m not actually here to destroy you all’?...take your pick.”

She looked like she almost might for a moment, then harrumphed, turning her nose up. “Sir, I don’t like it when you’re right. You’re never right about stuff that I’m happy about.”

“When I start being right about stuff that makes you happy, kid, this city will be a decent place to live.”

Leaving the stunned crowd—who’d just stood there was we walked right by them—Swift and I ascended the wide staircase into the hall outside Jade’s office. The ancient armors were gone, replaced by a row of short desks with a pony behind each one. Not one of them looked up, all too absorbed in shuffling papers and jotting notes.

Between each desk was a stack of papers that came up to my knees. Pens scratched at parchment or paper and hooves tapped on typewriters, but those were the only sounds coming from the small herd of pencil pushers who seemed entirely oblivious to what’d just happened downstairs.

“Sir, what’s the point of all this?” Swift asked, softly, inclining her head towards the secretaries.

“Somepony needs to keep track of the world, else it all might come crashing down around our ears,” I murmured, watching as a young mare finished a piece of paperwork and dropped it into her ‘out’ box without so much as a smile of satisfaction.

“It feels like it already has,” she muttered, shuffling her hooves in the thick carpet.

“I know,” I replied, patting her shoulder. “Still, it wouldn’t be an apocalypse without a bureaucracy somewhere. When the fires are out, you need someone to count the ashes.”

As we moved toward the giant doors of Jade’s office, Swift extended one wing across my back momentarily and pulled me against her side. I glanced at her, a little surprised by the gesture, but she seemed not to notice.

We paused again at the doors. At the far end of the hall, I caught sight of a couple of heads peering around the corner, probably waiting to see what was going to happen.

Swift saw them too, and a mischievous grin spread across her face. “Sir...can I do this one?”

I raised a questioning eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Sir, I listened to the worst story of my life just a few hours ago. The worst ever! And yesterday, I beat up a griffin for fun!” Her smile faltered, then she laid her forehead against my neck as she went on, “I...I realized a little while ago that I’ll never be a cop again. How could I? I’ve broken so many laws I should probably just arrest myself. I’ll never be a P.A.C.T. officer, either. I’ll probably go to jail forever and forever might just be long enough to watch everyone I love freeze to death.”

She pushed away for a moment so she could look me in the eyes. I was distantly aware that the pencil pushers had finally realized we were there and the sound of shuffling paper was gone. A few mutterings were going back and forth, but none of them seemed to have twigged to exactly who we were yet.

“The part that really gets me is I think...I think I’m doing the right thing,” Swift continued, “Even when my dreams are dying around me, there’s only one place I should be. It’s right here, beside you, fighting to keep the world alive. I think I...I might even understand you a little bit better.”

I mussed her mane with both hooves and she giggled. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, kid.”

“What matters most is that I’m not scared anymore,” she replied, and that big, beaming smile was back. “So...can I do this one, Sir?”

I took three steps back to give her some room.

Bracing herself, Swift swung around and bucked the doors of Jade’s office hard enough that the sound of cracking wood reverberated through the building like a bomb. One of the secretaries let out a frightened shriek and several chairs were tipped, followed by the sound of scattering files.

Inhaling, my partner shouted at the top of her deceptively tiny lungs.

“This is the police! The jig is up! Hooves in the air everypony!”

What can I say? These are the moments you treasure in life. I really ought to start carrying a camera.

In all the years we’d worked together, I don’t think I’d ever managed to shake the Chief’s composure quite like watching that crazed, neon pegasus bang down her door. The noise she made could never have been called a ‘squeak’, because creatures like her don’t squeak, but it was still a sound I will remember unto my dying day, however soon that might be.

I ducked to one side as a blast of high powered telekinesis threw the Chief’s desk across the room, smacking the door-frame a solid meter above my head. I covered my face with one leg as a spray of wooden shrapnel showered my side. Swift had thrown herself against the opposite wall of the hallway, kicking her trigger up into her teeth in one smooth motion.

Very carefully, we both peered around the corner.

There, in the center of the room stood Iris Jade, her eyes wide and three shotguns levitating beside her in halos of green magic. A few bits of paper were slowly drifting to the carpet. She was breathing heavily and had developed a slightly worrying twitch in her left eye.

I shared a look with Swift, then stepped out of cover and brushed some splinters out of my mane, dusted off my body armor, and edged over to help my partner back to her hooves. She had a borderline blissful expression on her face as she shook her wings out.

“I think I’m totally beginning to understand why you do that at every opportunity, Sir,” she murmured, picking a stray bit of wood off my muzzle and flicking it away.

“...Hard...Boiled…?” Jade said, in a voice barely loud enough to be heard. The shotguns wavered, then slowly dropped until all three were pointing at my chest. She stalked forward and I sat down, wiggling one ear as she loomed in front of me. Her horn was casting little sparks and arcs of energy and her expression was so full of fury that it had stretched her already skeletal face into a deathly mask.

One of the shotguns drifted forward until it poked me in the nose.

“Give...me...one...good...reason...why I shouldn’t?” Jade growled. I expected Swift to be getting a bit nervous, but if anything, she looked serene.

“Because it was her idea?” I chuckled, jerking my head at my partner. Jade’s eyes swung in her direction for a moment, then back to me.

Another flicker of magic spilled from her horn and she glared a little harder. I felt something in my new armor hum for a second, but nothing else happened. A note of confusion entered her expression and she blinked a couple times.

Reaching up, I grabbed one of the floating shotguns and pretended to pick my teeth with the iron sight. “Pardon, should I writhe about on the ground a little?”

Yanking the shotguns away from me, she shut her eyes. The shattered remains of her desk rose into the air, reassembling themselves with unerring precision into shape, then she slammed it down in its previous position in front of the stained glass window. It was followed by her chair and all three shotguns, which lined themselves up against the wall in within easy reach.

A soft voice behind us asked, “Ch-chief? Should...should we arrest them?”

I looked over my shoulder to find a gaggle of officers, their guns drawn, standing just outside. The one who’d spoken was a little pale-faced colt whose badge paint was probably still wet.

The double doors of her office glowed green, then slammed shut, almost taking off the rookie’s nose. It left the three of us alone.

Jade’s shoulders sagged a little and she opened her eyes. The anger was still there, but it was wrapped in a blanket of resignation.

“Killing you two would be merciful, wouldn’t it?” she muttered, trotting back around her desk and sitting down amongst the mess of papers. The debris left by the flying desk began to reassemble itself, rising and stacking up in neat little piles. A cracked candy jar lifted out of one of her drawers, filled to the top with licorice sticks. Selecting one, she tore off the paper and stuck it in the side of her mouth. “I can’t say as I expected to see either of you alive again, but some part of me knew you wouldn’t just die and leave me in peace. I am wondering why you didn’t feel the need to let me know you were alive.”

““We’ve been really, really busy,” Swift repled, reaching out and picking a licorice from the dish. She held out a second one to me and I shook my head. She shrugged, peeled them open, and jammed both candies into her mouth.

Jade just watched us for a moment, disbelief written all over her face.

“Do you...do you have any concept of what is going on out there? You two are my only lead on what might have happened to the Princesses and you’re flaming busy?!” she barked, suddenly, slapping a hoof down on her desk, making everything on it jump. “I’m patrolling a twenty block radius with a force designed to cover an entire city, because if my people go any further than that some...thing swoops out of the bleeding sky and rips them into tiny pieces and you two ingrates have been busy?! The capital has disappeared and the entire center of the city is cut off and...you’ve been busy?!” Her voice became low and dangerous. “What pray-tell, has had you so involved that you couldn’t drop me an FYI?”

I drew in a breath and shrugged. “I was hiding out with a pair of bat pony secret agents in a warehouse of magical artifacts somewhere in the Wilds. Swift was beating griffins unconscious at the Pit. Taxi was organizing an army of hookers while her legs healed after the Moonwalk incident. Oh, and by the way, we were at the Moonwalk when it exploded. Anything else?”

Jade’s frown deepened as she considered the two of us for a moment. “You’re only telling me all of that because it’s completely immaterial to what is going on...and you know what is going on, don’t you? The Darkening. That garbage from City Hall about you somehow being involved. That dead girl in the alleyway. It’s all connected, isn’t it?”

“And we played right into their hooves, Chief. You and me and everypony trying to keep their heads low. You know what this was all about? That damn armor.”

Jade chewed the licorice stick in the side of her muzzle for a moment, then almost spat it out. “Nightmare Moon’s armor?!”

I nodded. “The mess was about getting the entire set of armor here in Detrot; all three pieces. The griffins had one in their treasury. Astral Skylark had one, taken from Canterlot’s Vaults. The dead girl in the alleyway somehow managed to get it from her. The chest-plate was on tour. All of them came together, right here, and somepony stole them, or at least, stole two of them. I have the helm, hidden, somewhere safe.”

Jade sagged in her chair, rubbing her forehead with one toe. Her suit was rumpled from lack of care and her mane hadn’t been brushed in a couple of days. The wrinkles in her forehead were more like chasms, leaving her looking much older than I knew she was. I wondered whether or not she’d even managed to get a bath lately. Probably not.

“I just had to quit doing drugs in time for the end of the world, didn’t I?” she muttered, dryly, rolling a paperweight back and forth between her hooves.

“Ma’am...if you don’t mind, what’s been going on Uptown?” Swift asked, a bit tentatively. “We haven’t been able to get any information to speak of.”

“Then you’re in good company,” Jade replied, rising from her desk and trotting to the window overlooking the throne room. “A week ago, the day after the Darkening started, some kind of general order went out to the wealthy of the city. Somepony, somewhere, had a nice long list. They all piled into Uptown. Two thirds of the Jeweler territories are now empty, too. Roads were packed, but it sounds like this plan was in the works for a long time. There are mansions on the outskirts that’re flat out abandoned; all the furniture gone. Fifteen hours later, a shield went up around Uptown like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“On orders from the Mayor, delivered via courier, I was told to draw my forces back and let the P.A.C.T. idiots handle enforcement in the city after the Darkening. I, naturally, sent back that he could stuff his orders up his back passage, but then…” A heavy weight seemed to fall over the Chief and if I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn there were a few tears at the corners of her eyes. “Sons of whores never even gave us a chance. One minute somepony would be on the radio, then there would be a scream or a whimper and...then we’d find the remains. I can’t prove it was Snifter, but the result was the same. These Biters...”

“Did you double up the patrols? Heavier equipment and so on?” I asked.

Jade gave a derisive snort. “You think I’m stupid, Hardy? Of course I did. They just busted the equipment, real methodical like, once they’d torn our people apart. If only we knew who these bastards really were...”

Before I could come up with a reply to that, Swift gulped and sat forward. “Ma’am? I...I think there’s something you should see.”

The Chief cocked her head. “What’ve you got? If it’s something that’ll help me catch those beasts, I’ll make sure your next of kin gets your pension before I arrest you when all of this is over.”

I realized suddenly what she was about to do. “Kid...you sure this is a good idea?”

“If bucking down the door was a good idea, this is a brilliant one, Sir,” she replied, then took a deep breath, returning her attention to Jade. “Ma’am, if you remember...I was a P.A.C.T. trainee. When Detective Hard Boiled and I went to the Monte Cheval, I chased down a pony. He was the one who shot Hard Boiled. I...I killed him, but not before I saw his face.”

Jade’s horn sparked and three glass meditation balls lifted out of her drawer, rolling in circles over one another in mid-air. “Leaving aside the subject of how Hard Boiled survived, since I suspect I don’t want to know...what was special about this pony?”

“He was Grape Shot, Ma’am,” Swift answered.

The Chief shook her head. “Should that name mean something to me?”

Reaching into the front pocket of her combat vest, Swift pulled out a much worn piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. Jade lifted and unfolded it, then quickly scanned the letter of recommendation. Her eyes almost popped out of her skull and the meditation balls hit the ground beside her. “He was P.A.C.T.?!”

“It’s worse than that,” I added. “Kid...show her.”

Swift opened her muzzle as wide as she could and leaned towards the Chief. There was no mistaking those rows of ugly, rending teeth on either side of her mouth for anything but the bite of a predator. Jade didn’t gasp or shriek or anything of that sort, but nothing could disguise the way her pupils contracted or her hooves tightened on her chair rests.

“Explain...now,” she growled.

“I wish I could,” I answered, gesturing for Swift to shut her mouth, since it was giving me the heebie jeebies. “Sykes fed the kid some meat two months ago. Stupid little prank, you know? Mess with the rookie and so on. She...liked it. After my injury, I came to and found her teeth like that. We took her to Stella who said somepony had implanted a...what did he call it again?”

“An arcane conservancy, Sir.”

“Yes, that. Somepony had implanted an arcane conservancy in her body.” I looked over at Swift to see how she was handling this discussion. She looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It was changing her; making her susceptible to suggestion, giving her violent impulses, and turning her into a meat eater. Stella’s unicorns managed to remove it, but some of the changes were more permanent than others.”

The Chief held a breath for a moment, staring at the ceiling, seemingly lost in thought. She blew it out between clenched teeth. “What does that have to do with the ‘Biters’?”

“Well, Ma’am... before I sh... before I killed Grape Shot, I got a look at him remember? His jaw was like mine.”

A severed half of Jade’s licorice stick fell out the side of her muzzle. She caught it with magic before it hit the carpet, but I could hear the sound of her teeth grinding against one another. When she spoke it was with barely suppressed rage. “So it’s the P.A.C.T. then? That whoreson Broadside is controlling these ‘Biters’?”

“We tried to track down Grapeshot and he’d apparently ‘quit’ the P.A.C.T. a couple of weeks before the attack,” I said, shaking my head. “That said, yeah, probably. If they’ve been enchanting ponies with these ‘conservancies’, they take awhile to kick in once they’re activated. Swift took more than a month...”

“A month…” Jade’s eyes narrowed. “You knew about this when I captured her. You knew and felt no need to inform me?”

I raised my hooves defensively. “Hey, I wasn’t sure you weren’t just going to lock us in a hole. You want me to apologize? Besides, it doesn’t matter. I came to inform you now. I need you coordinating with the other militias in the city. Send somepony to talk to Stella at the Vivarium. Maybe some of the friendlier Cyclone groups, like the Aroyos out in the Skids. Start figuring a way to deal with the dragons and get ponies out of Detrot.”

“Get them out?” she scoffed. “You...you really haven’t thought this out, have you?”

I blinked a few times. “Come again?”

Jade yanked a map out of her drawers and spread it on the table. “Hard Boiled, we have an entire city of ponies you’re talking about turning into refugees. Even if I were inclined to coordinate with that draconic pervert or the gangers, they don’t have anything like the number we’d need for an evacuation. Unless the Princesses are restored, my best predictions are widespread starvation within a month and a half. Maybe the rest of Equestria isn’t so affected, but I don’t think they have dragons sitting between them and their major farmlands.”

I squinted at the map which had a series of hash marks at points to the north and south of the valley, above the bay and farther south. The hashes went in both directions.

“Are those...dragon sightings?” Swift asked.

“Yes, they are, and far more than the department could handle alone. The Shield is down, Hard Boiled,” she said, tapping the map for emphasis.

Swift gasped, wings popping out from her back as I almost pitched out of my seat.

“Down as in...down down?!” I exclaimed. “I knew the P.A.C.T. wasn’t driving off the dragons, but without the Shield…”

“Yes. There’s no way for us to move so many ponies—or even a fraction of that many—through lands held by dragons and who knows what else. We attempted to get into one of the pylons, but they’re in some form of ‘lock down’ mode. Nopony has come in and nopony has left. The doors are sealed with spells my unicorns can’t even begin to counteract.” Jade shoved the map at me and dropped into her chair, propping her chin on her hoof. “That leaves me with you. You, Hard Boiled, who stroll in a week late to tell me somepony has two parts of the most dangerous armor the world has ever seen; an armor with a very lunar history to it in the middle of an eclipse that won’t end!”

I swallowed, trying to clear my thoughts. The idea that the Shield might be simply off was unfathomable. The Shield didn’t turn off. That was one of the first things you learned in school. The Shield protects. The Shield is safety. The monsters outside are outside and they don’t come inside because the Shield is there.

“Alright...Chief, I’m going to fix this. I need to get to Canterlot, though.”

Jade’s lips thinned to a line. “You are not the only fool in my office who has suggested such a venture this week. We dispatched six messenger pegasi towards nearby cities during the first two days of the Darkening. None of them have come back. What makes you think you’ve got a chance?”

I tucked my tail under myself. “There’s a kind of ugly tracking magic called ‘The Scry’. Whoever is behind all of this has been using it against...well, everyone. Mix it into a drink and you can find someone pretty much anywhere. I’d be willing to bet the department is saturated in it by now. Probably the punch at one of our ‘privately funded parties’.”

Her frown morphed into an expression of shock. “How long have you known about this?!” she demanded.

“A month or so,” I replied, calmly.

Jade’s horn snapped to life and my armor let out a soft whine. I’m glad I never got to find out what she was trying to do to me. She gritted her teeth, pouring more energy into her magic, but all I felt was a gentle warmth before it flickered out and she sagged against her desk. “Could you stop whatever is doing that so I can bash your head against the wall a few times? I could really use the stress relief.”

Swift covered her muzzle with a hoof, trying to hide a smile. “I’m sorry, Ma’am. Miss Taxi already gave him a traumatic brain injury today, if that makes you feel better.”

She scowled at me. “It does, but I’d like to add my own.”

“Sorry to disappoint, Chief,” I replied. “Look, I’m probably going to have to turn myself in as soon as all this is over for...basically everything I’ve done since the day you assigned Swift and I to work together. You can have your lumps then. Either way, like you say, we’re short of time. The Scry doesn’t work on me. Just trust that I can get out.”

“I suppose it’s also a futile gesture asking why this magic hasn’t affected you?”

I nodded. “Yeah, a bit. I’ve got a method of getting to Canterlot, but I can’t leave the city without handling a few things first. I need you to take some ponies...err...a lot of ponies...and go make sure Precious and Lily Blue are safe. I may have an...acquaintance who can get us into uptown, but I’ll do that after Canterlot.”

She cocked her head. “You’re hoping to run into somepony out there?”

“I’m hoping there’s someone who we can still tell what’s going on in Detrot. Someone who’ll care. The Royal Guard wasn’t all stationed in Canterlot.”

“If I’m to ‘trust’ you, I would like to know how are you planning on getting out? Even without the Scry, I’m betting the bastards who chewed my officers are monitoring roads. Not to mention the dragons.”

I felt a smirk coming on. I tried not to, but it’s awful hard when you’re feeling clever.

“We’re taking the Bull,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, then threw her hooves in the air, and moved back to her chair, dropping into it with a resigned groan. “Yet again, I am reminded why the notion that you could ever have a sane, functional plan is hopelessly naive.”

“Trust me, not my favorite plan, either. Still, the Bull is in town and I doubt they’ll be leaving without a very good reason. You know what the conductor is like.”

Jade took a moment to vigorously scratch her mane with both hooves so it stuck out in all directions. She let out a frustrated growl and kicked her chair back from the desk, spinning it around to sit staring through the glass.

At last, she said, “I expect you to call Telly the moment you get back in the city, Hardy. This is not a request. No games, no shenanigans. Understood?”

“Fair enough,” I answered. “She and I need to have a protracted conversation anyway, but I interrupted whatever spell she’s been using to keep herself awake. Poor filly is sleeping it off downstairs.”

Jade waved a hoof, dismissively from behind her chair. “I’ll have somepony go tuck her in a closet somewhere for a few hours. You want some guns?”

“I think we’re good, for the moment. Taxi needs a new—”

She swung around and gave me a look that could have peeled paint. “I didn’t ask if Taxi wants some guns. Heavens above, I need you to actually come back, you righteous crap stain. Arming her is like giving you a set of wheels.”

I tried to think of a counterpoint, but it was essentially true.

“Alright then. You...um...you mind letting your people know to let us leave? I’d rather not try to sneak out.”

“Oh...you’re going to have to sneak out,” Iris Jade grumbled, getting up from her seat. “In fact, if you were anything like as blunt coming in as you were the last time, I suspect she’s already on the—”

Whatever she was about to say was cut short as my chair was torn out from under me by a blast of magic. I yelped and collapsed on my back, only to feel something very warm, very soft, and more than a little heavy land on my chest. A hot pair of lips were jammed against my own, followed by an extremely inquisitive tongue. I tasted bubble-gum chapstick.

I’d shut my eyes as I fell, but at the sensation of somepony kissing me, I opened them again to find myself staring into an olive face with thin, pretty cheekbones.

The pony pulled back and I let out a faint cough. She had one hoof and a fair bit of her body-weight resting on my solar plexus.

My first rational thought was ‘Oh Celestia...That’s Cerise,’’ followed closely by ‘Cerise just kissed me.’

That was also the last rational thought I had for about twelve seconds until my body-armor started to make a noise like a crowbar being fed into an industrial grinder.

Act 3 Chapter 10 : This Is How We Run Away

Many scholars in recent times have warned about the oncoming rise of artificial beings whose powers and intelligences vastly outstrip those of pony-kind. The same said scholars frequently miss the fact that there are already several well known intelligences whose powers regularly make equinity look like scurrying cockroaches who’ve had the fridge moved from atop them.

The Royal Sisters are only one of the many altogether dangerous creatures lurking in Equestria’s history whose abilities leave the majority of equine kind in the dust, and most are far more malevolent than they. Still, the history of such beings is usually relatively unknown and the stories or myths that surround them frequently resolve themselves within very neat narrative structure, wherein a paragon of good prevails over the forces of evil.

All that being understood, there is a fear that is unique in the modern age of mass production and technological innovation; the fear of our own creations.

While nopony is particularly minded by the possibility of a psychopathic oven destroying the world by discovering the formula to turn all matter into bread products, much ink has been spilled on the topic of the allowable intelligence of Sentient Constructs and their kin. After all, nopony has yet been childish or foolish enough to make an artificial mind implanted with notions of world conquest, but one should never underestimate the childish or foolish; they are far too capable of ignoring an oncoming train in favor of saving their dropped toy ball. The Princesses have largely kept their generals on tight leashes where the use of Sentient Constructs for warfare purposes is concerned, knowing that any ‘ultimate weapon’ can ultimately be used against themselves.

That leaves civilian Sentient Constructs.

How many of us have been tempted by a broom that understands ‘sweep and don’t miss the corners’? What if some deranged fool were to say, fail to tell his broom to stop? What if that broom only responded to his commands and was thence compelled to sweep every corner it could find across the whole of the universe, until such time as it stumbled into a dimension where the beings did not take kindly to having all their corners swept and they decided to make eternal warfare on Equestria and all of her peoples?

So what then? Ban them until pony kind is a little more evolved?

Sadly, that isn’t a great solution. Since the childish and foolish already exist alongside the knowledge to create these beings, we must make certain that those we create are of a nature amenable to coexistence and who value our continued existence enough to put up with all our many foibles.

Thankfully, that means an activity at which ponykind has proven wholly proficient; we must make friends.

-The Scholar

What is a stallion meant to do in a circumstance when caught in a kiss by his boss’s daughter? Screaming and begging would seem apropo, but keep in mind that I’d worked for Iris Jade for many years. Mercy is not something anyone ever associated with the Chief, least of all myself.

Cerise looked down at my armor - which was letting out a really alarming noise - and took a step back. She wasn’t wearing anything and all that bare fur brushing along my body was awfully nice, but it was only a momentary distraction to my imminent demise.

Her horn lit up again and a bright green shield popped into existence between her mother and I just in time to catch a flying, ballistic paper-weight that exploded into tiny shards. Smiling, she pointed towards the door. Swift was already on her hooves, her bit between her teeth as she slowly backed away from Iris Jade.

“I would love to talk, Detective, if you don’t mind,” Cerise purred, her voice soft and a bit demure. “Unfortunately, I think my mom is gonna try to kill you now. Can we go someplace else?”

There was a thump against the shield that had now expanded to fill a huge section of the room. My armor was still humming, but the noise was considerably softer. I looked back at Cerise’s mother, who was standing on the other side in a swirling ball of pulsating light. Her horn was projecting a cutting blade of energy that made the shield ripple at the edges. Bits of the carpet around her hooves had ignited and I could smell smoke.

Rolling to my hooves, I touched my muzzle. I could still feel Cerise’s lips there. That’d been nice. Horrifying, but nice. She was almost as good a kisser as Scarlet.

‘Now there’s a thought that was going to haunt me for months.’

“Yeah, let’s,” I replied, fighting my brain around to some positive action. “Erm...where?”

Cerise’s shrugged, though it was a with a twinge of tension. A single drop of sweat rolled down her forehead and she wiped it away with the back of her fetlock. I could feel the heat rolling off of her horn in waves as her mother pounded on the shield.

“I’m good with anywhere that’s not here. I can shrink the shield to protect us. I was listening from the hallway,” she murmured, a hint of color in her cheeks. “You have another errand before you leave the city? Is it somewhere safe?”

“Safe is highly subjective around me, sweetheart, but I know a place. It won’t make your mother any less inclined to hunt me down, though.”

She tittered, then cringed as a blast of magic crackled off the shield. The window behind Jade shattered, all of the glass being sucked inward in a thousand tiny projectiles which pinged off the shield again and again at points all across it.

I couldn’t make out Jade’s expression through the luminous glow coming off of her, but I could imagine it well enough.

“Sir? What do we do?” Swift asked.

I considered this for all of two seconds before a large crack formed across Cerise’s shield. “Leg it?”

The shield snapped down into a bubble over Jade, locking her in place as the three of us bolted for the door.

Blessedly, when the magic started flying, nopony had stuck around to ask whether or not Jade wanted help grinding my bones into dust. The hallway outside the office was completely empty, every desk abandoned. As we pounded down the steps, I could hear a sound like rending stone coming from above us; the Chief had managed to bust out of her daughter’s shield spell.

While I’d never seen Jade teleport, I wasn’t about to put it past her that she might know how. Maybe I’d simply gotten lucky on previous occasions and she didn’t feel like it. Either way, my adrenaline was up and I didn’t feel like finding out, so the three of us booked it, side-by-side, for the exit.

Bursting out onto the floor in the throne room, I paused, swallowed, and tried to catch my breath. There were crowds of ponies huddled against the walls, all of them staring up at Jade’s office with a mix of terror and curiosity.

A few glanced at us, before looking back at the swirling maelstrom of wild magic crackling overhead. Towards the other end, several officers were calmly, professionally guiding people towards the emergency exits. I thought I heard one of them shout something like ‘The Chief’s at it again!’ and somepony asked, ‘You think she killed him?’

Telly was still asleep, face down on her desk. She hadn’t moved at all.

Cerise didn’t bother with the line of ponies filing out of the door, instead simply lifting them one at a time over our heads, then dropping them behind us as we ran.

“Sir...ah...whoo…what are...we..”

“Not now...kid!” I barked, as we hit the double doors. Then it was back out into the twilight. The air was thick with oncoming rain and the clouds overhead burbled with thunder.

A good-sized herd of officers and civilians was waiting in the courtyard out front of the building, milling about, muttering to one another. The whole ‘The Chief is exploding’ thing hadn’t been entirely uncommon even when I was on the force and most members of the Detrot P.D. had long since memorized the procedure; get out of the building, find a coffee shop, add bourbon to your cuppa, and wait patiently for the throne room to be rebuilt.

They all looked up as we burst from the front door of the Castle, but at the sight of Cerise’s blazing horn, most of them felt the better part of valor might be getting out of the way.

Taxi was waiting by the curb-side. Her eyes widened at the sight of the three of us and she jammed the engine in reverse, shouting something over her shoulder. Limerence threw open the back door of the cab. Mags stuck her head out for a half second before realizing that we weren’t stopping. She leapt back a moment before Cerise jumped into the front passenger seat, followed by Swift in through the back window. I dove in after her.

My flank still hanging half out of the window, I shouted, “Sweets! Drive!”

Maybe the order hadn’t come down to chase us quickly enough. Maybe the thought of chasing Cerise when she definitely didn’t want to be chased quelled their enthusiasm. Maybe it was just how hard the Night Trotter is to keep up with in top gear.

Whatever the reason, we were almost half a mile down the road before the sirens started and five miles gone before a hoard of pegasi rose above the edge of the buildings. None of them were shooting, but they were definitely trying to keep pace; failing, but they were giving it their best. We blew by a police checkpoint so fast they didn’t even have time to raise their guns before we were off around another corner.

“What did you do this time, Hardy?!” Taxi demanded, as I crawled into the back seat and pulled a belt on.

I pointed an accusatory hoof at Cerise, who was grinning like a mad-mare as she watched for our pursuers out the back window. “I didn’t do anything! She kissed me! In front of her mother!”

“Oh Luna’s mane! And that said ‘bring her with us’ in your mind?!”

“I didn’t have a choice! She was holding off Jade!”

“Sir, you remember how I said I wasn’t scared? I really need to pee now.”

“Hold it or piss out the window! We’re not stopping!”

I don’t think I breathed for a full four minutes after that as we sped away from the Castle. Our pursuit dropped off pretty suddenly as we hit the twenty block mark. I suppose not even the fury of Jade could convince the officers of Detrot Police Department to chase us into Biter territory.

At last, we couldn’t hear any sirens nor see any pegasi in the skies. I exhaled and let my shoulders slump, looking at Cerise. Far from contrite, she was still grinning as she hung her head out the window, letting the wind blow her ears back against her head like a cocker spaniel.

Taxi glanced sideways at her, then flicked on the radio and sat back, one hoof on the wheel and the other rubbing her eyes as soothing music filled the cab. Limerence, Mags, and Swift were all wedged against the far door of the back seat, shooting me glances, waiting for either instructions or an explanation for how we’d ended up with Chief Jade’s daughter riding shotgun.

I was sort of hoping for one of those myself.

“Erm...Cerise?” I began, then my brain stalled for a minute.

“Yes, Detective?” Her voice was sultry and her expression was pure mischief. Her mother was terrifying, but if her daughter was anything to go by, she’d probably been very pretty when she was younger.

I shut my eyes, furrowing my brow.

“Look, I already pulled you out of one life or death situation. What could possibly make you think this was a good idea?”

Cerise giggled, putting her hooves on the window so she could watch the passing buildings. “Detective, my mother owns this city...or at least, before the Darkening she did. Do you have any idea what it’s like trying to have a coltfriend or a marefriend with her looming over your shoulder? Or friends at all?”

“I would think that friends would be a lower priority than survival right now,” Limerence chimed in.

The Chief’s daughter looked at him and rolled her eyes. “You’re that Archivist pony that follows Hard Boiled around, aren’t you? Lemon or something. Mom mentioned you...and…” she hesitated, then blinked at him a few times. “I think I remember you from...from somewhere. Maybe the Temple. Didn’t you have a crossbow? Where’d it go?”

Lim swallowed sharply. “I fear I was...compromised...during the last half of that odious experience and don’t remember. My name, however, is Limerence.”

“Well, since I don’t think I can spell that, you’re just gonna be Mister Bookworm to me...and you see, Mister Bookworm, my last coltfriendcaught fire after he tried to break up a fight between me and my Mom. I don’t even like fighting with her, but if I want to do anything...anything, she’s got to be ‘in control’.”

“That’s still not an answer,” I grunted.

“Oh come on!” Cerise huffed, giving me a little flick on the muzzle with her long, green tail. “Can you think of any pony in the whole city who is more out of my mother’s control than you, Detective? You saved my life when my mother couldn’t! She hates you! She respects you, too, but nopony ever made my mom as mad as you!” Her lips quirked in a tiny smile. “Except...well...except maybe me.”

“And that kiss?” I asked. Before I could do anything more than yelp, Cerise whipped around, tugged on the lever to recline the front seat and pinned me against the back with another kiss. Her lips were sweet, and, brief as it was, it was enough to send blood rushing to my cheeks. Taxi tapped the brakes, throwing her off balance such that she almost pitched into the hoof-well, breaking the fur-raising lip lock. I pulled away and wiped at my muzzle with the back of my fetlock. “Stop that! Sweet Celestia, you want me to dieof a heart attack?! How old are you, anyway?!”

“Old enough to know a nice guy who could use a kiss,” she replied with a dirty wink, then went back to watching the windows. “I’m also old enough to make my own mistakes. Either way, pissing off mom was probably the only way I’d convince you to let me leave with you.”

I opened my muzzle to rebut, but Swift saved me by asking, “Miss Cerise...do you remember anything else about the Temple?”

She shook her head. “Not much. I remember the day Priestess Skylark came to visit me. She offered me a chance to participate in some kind of ritual of purification.”

“The Church of the Lunar Passage seemed like a bit of a drag,” Taxi observed. “How’d you end up with them?”

“I had some friends who were in the Church. I attended one meeting and… I finally had some ponies to talk to, you know? Ponies my mom wasn’t spying on. Things got kind of hazy after a couple of meetings, especially when they gave me a robe. Then...” She let her eyes slide shut and chewed on her lips. “I...I don’t really remember all that much. Flashes here and there. I remember lots of kneeling and praying to...to someone. I remember going into the Temple...and laying down...and I remember pain.” A haunted look crossed her face and she laid a hoof across her stomach. “Funny, right? When I woke up at the Prince’s place, I was...totally okay. It was weird.”

Taxi was looking at me in the rear view. Lim and Swift were both giving me pensive, side-long glances. Mags was just looking confused.

“Why you ponies look like she say she looking forward to seeing her eggs, but you all cooked them in an omelette?” my ward asked.

Ignoring her, I addressed the Chief’s daughter. “I...eh...Cerise. You don’t perchance remember anything about the fight, do you?”

She turned from the window to face me, sitting on her haunches. “I remember being more angry than I thought it was possible to be. Like my anger was...magic itself. I remember some things that’re like dreams. Nightmares. Ponies dying. Looking at my own intestines. Crazy stuff, you know?”

“Less crazy than you think,” Taxi muttered as she headed up onto the highway.

Cerise’s horn lit up and my badge lifted out of the front of my armor, hanging in front of me as she studied it. “I remember this...and I remember you. You have really kind eyes. I wasn’t angry anymore after I saw your eyes. Then there’s nothing until I woke up with Mister Precious offering me tea.”

“It’s just ‘Precious’ or ‘The Prince’. He’d be offended if you called him ‘Mister’,” I said offhandedly, still trying to get my head straight. “So, clarify this for me. You decided you’d jump me, just to get out of the Castle?”

Dropping my badge, Cerise turned in a circle like a cat before settling down with her hooves tucked under her chest. “Don’t get me wrong...I love my mother. I really do. I want to strangle her an awful lot, but I don’t know anypony in the city who hasn’t, at one point or another. If I’m going to die, I don’t want to do it huddled in that stupid fortress with my Mom hanging over my shoulder.”

“Well, you’re not going to die so long as I have anything to say about it, but you may not be a fan of where our next errand is taking us,” I said.

Cerise cocked her head to one side. “Well, short of taking me back to the Castle or the the Temple, I think I’ll be fine.”

“About that...”

Taxi was just then turning onto the long, empty stretch of road leading up towards Supermax. The buildings dropped away, leaving us with only the vast, magically contaminated stretches of empty dirt signifying the dumping grounds for the disused gem mines.

Cerise’s eyes were slowly getting wider and wider as she realized where we were headed.

“You can’t be serious!” she groaned, slumping over against the window. “What did I ever do to you?”

“What can I say? Should have asked before you dogged me into taking you along. This was our next stop,” I chuckled, putting my hooves behind my head and rocking back in my seat. “You’ll be happy to know the cult is no longer running the show out here, though. We’ve got most of them locked up, or at least we did the last time I was here.”

Cerise looked a bit skeptical. “Sooo...why are we going there? I mean, if it’s empty...”

“I never said it was empty,” I said. “I just said we’ve got the cult locked up. The ponies that own this place now are the kind of ponies you don’t want as enemies, but they make the very best of friends. You want a place your mother isn’t likely to find you? You picked the right car for that, at least.”

She sucked her lower lip between her teeth. “Alright, I guess I’m in for a bit, in for a pound here. So, where did you all come from? I mean, how did you end up coming into the Temple to rescue me? Mom never said and nopony really knows besides the four of you. For that matter, how did we all get out of the Temple? And...and I don’t remember the tiny griffin being there. Why do you have a griffin chick?”

I held up my hoof to forestall any more questions. “We’ve got a little drive ahead of us until we’re there. I suppose I can tell you some of it. You want a pillow? Just use Swift. She’s fluffy.”

“Not funny, Sir...”

Between the four of us, with Mags adding occasional insightful commentary, we managed to lay down the loose outline of how we’d found out Cerise was taken by the Church of the Lunar Passage, then our entrance and subsequent meeting with Tourniquet and Astral Skylark. It took a good twenty minutes before the blocky shadow of Supermax seemed to leap up out of the horizon.

“—and then we crawled out of the lagoon. Lim was still a bit spacy and you were out cold, but we got you out. Be glad you don’t remember that part. After that, we got the cab and took you to Precious. I think you know everything after that,” I finished, smacking my lips to work up some saliva. My throat was feeling pretty dry after that explanation.

Cerise had been silent the whole time, just listening. When she spoke, it was with much trepidation.

“You...um...you never said if I… I killed anypony when I had my power spike. I remember being mad enough to kill, Detective. I remember an awful lot of blood, too.”

Her pretty eyes bored into mine and the comfortable lie I’d concocted died on my tongue.

“You...saved us, Cerise,” I said, finally. “You probably also saved a whole building full of poor, innocent ponies who might have ended up with their horns cut off and their bodies used by those monsters.”

Cerise still looked uncertain, her ears flat against her head. I turned sideways in my seat, pulling my coat off of my cutie-mark. Her eyes flicked at the golden scales on my thigh.

“My talent is finding injustice. Those bastards paid into the Church coffers for the privilege of raping you, then watching Astral Skylark kill you.” I leaned close and rested my hoof on her foreleg. “Cerise...What you did to them didn’t make my talent so much as twitch.”

She exhaled, sliding across the seat and laying her head across my shoulder. “Thank you, Detective. I suppose that’s the best I can ask for. I’m glad I don’t remember...whatever it was...completely. Why are we going to Supermax, though?”

“Not ‘going’,” Taxi chimed in as we turned off the road. “We’re here. Stars preserve us all, I never thought I’d be happy to see this place.”

Cerise scrambled over to the window, looking out at the huge building. “Huh...it...it looks almost like a prison. Who’re those ponies on top of it?”

I felt myself grinning as Taxi pulled us into the parking lot. A dozen pegasi were circling the rooftop with many more sitting up there, holding an array of weapons, all of which were pointed at the car. A few clouds hung low over the prison and I could see more ponies peering over the tops of them, no doubt ready to fry us all alive at the first sign of danger.

“My dear, those...are the Aroyos!”

I threw open the door and stepped out into the parking lot of Supermax, pushing my hat off my head so the guards could see me, not that there are great herds of grey stallions in trench-coats wandering the world in crazy, lightning-spitting taxis.

Overhead, somepony shouted, ‘It’s Crusada!’ then a great cheer went up as a dozen pegasi plunged from the clouds. At their head, a purple mare with a side-mounted foal-carrier around her barrel swept down to land a few meters away, dancing forward in a cloud of dust.

“Wisteria!” I shouted as she threw her legs around my neck. I patted her on the back as she pounded on my shoulder with one hoof. Funny thing, seeing a friend who isn’t trying to kill you. It is a great palliative for the soul.

The head of the Aroyos had a big smile pasted across her face as she stepped back to get a good look at me. “Crusada! We bein’ afraid ye be dead, yet de Ancestors be sayin’ ye still stand!”

“Well, I can’t say I didn’t consider death. You look fantastic, by the way. A few pounds lighter, too!” I chuckled as my companions got out of the car.

“Aye, a few,” she replied, smiling and turning sideways. Tucked into her foal-carrier, a tiny filly with big, round eyes stared up at me with a serious expression on her face as she sucked on her hoof. She was lavender or violet like her mother, with the sweetest face I ever did see and an adorable button nose. “Dis here be ‘Gumbo’. She be waitin’ to meet ye, Crusada!”

Reaching out, I took the little filly’s free hoof and gave it a gentle shake. “Hello, Gumbo. You be nice to your mom, you hear? She’s a hard working mare.” Gumbo let out a giggle and gave me a smile that would have melted solid stone. “Child of the Darkening, then?” I asked.

Wisteria looked off towards the eclipse. “Aye, she be born in a world that be wid’out de sun, three days gone. I be wonderin’ iffen ye be knowin’ any’ting about dat?”

“More than I’d like to, actually.” Before she could start asking questions, I quickly changed the subject. “How are the Aroyos settling in to your new accommodations?”

Wisteria glanced at Supermax, her tail flicking around to drive off a buzzing insect from her hip. “We be settlin’ in right sweetly, Crusada. De Skids be...well, dey be not de place to be lately. De Cyclones be eatin’ up territories. Jeweler stompas gone, but some Cyclones be lookin’ to us. We go underground, down deep, and come here. De Puppet Lady give us a home.”

I parsed that and asked, “You mean Tourniquet? And...if you’re all here, what about ‘the Ancestors’? Are they here, too?”

She slowly shook her head, tapping on the juju bag hanging from her neck. “No...I be arguin’, but dey be stayin’ back, keep de home ground safe. Still, dey gives us gifts!” Tilting her head, she whistled and one of the pegasi behind her trotted forward. He had a weapon strapped across his barrel that was as big as Mags.

Swift, who’d just climbed out of the car, eyed it with a certain amount of avarice. “Where did you get that? Is that a...a chain gun? Oooh, can I touch it?”

The big stallion looked at Wisteria for permission. She nodded and he turned sideways, offering the gun to Swift who eagerly rushed forward. She peered down the sights and ejected the belt-fed ammo clip so she could inspect the bullets. After a moment, a tiny frown appeared on her face and turned to me. “Sir, this...this gun is freshly machined. There’s still flecks of metal in the welds. Somepony built this and it hasn’t been oiled more than once. This is recent construction.”

Wisteria nodded, lifting her foal-carrier a little to reveal her own weapon in a holster underneath. It was a beautifully engineered pistol. I couldn’t place the model or make, but it seemed brand new. “Heh, dat be right! De Ancestors be not willin’ to give dey weapons till de sky go dark.”

I was about to ask about that when I felt tiny claws on my shoulders as Mags swung herself up onto my back, then peeked over my shoulder. “Har’dy...be that pony chick?” she asked, blinking owlishly at Gumbo.

Reaching up, I ruffled my ward’s head-feathers. “Yeah, that’s a filly. You never seen one before?”

She shook her head. “Daddy and I be mostly staying with the eggs. Sometimes foals my age. Never see pony so tiny...”

“Ye be catchin’ ye own little’un, Crusada?” Wisteria asked. “She be right cute!”

“Yeah, she’s cute until you have to watch her eat,” I muttered, and Mags batted me on the hip with one of her wings. “Look, we came down to see Tourniquet. Well, I imagine Swift came down to see Tourniquet. For me, I need to see Queenie.”

Limerence and Taxi had joined us, my driver and partner at my sides with the Archivist bringing up the rear. Cerese was hanging back, shuffling her hooves in the dirt. She kept casting nervous glances at the great doors of Supermax.

My partner tugged her combat vest open an inch or so. The crescent moon on her chest was glowing a soft red. “Sir, Tourniquet is expecting us! She wants to know if we...um...if we want food.”

I gave her a perplexed look. “How do you know that?”

Swift shook her head, scratching at the mark. “I have no idea, Sir. When we got close, I just started to feel a little funny and then I knew what Tourniquet wanted. She’s...uh...she’s listening to everything we say right now.”

Tilting my head back, I looked up at the prison. “Outside?”

Hiking up her foal carrier and chucking little Gumbo under the chin, Wisteria trotted back towards the main gates of Supermax. Her gang-members backed off, most of them taking to the air again to return to their posts. “Bring ye friends, Crusada! Ye be tellin’ me about how ye be findin’ yeself wid baby chick and dis’ new mare, eh? Mebe wid some drink! T’ings be changed a bit since last ye was in de Hole.”

I had to go back and herd Cerese towards the building, but once she was moving she made a show of marching forward confidently with her nose in the air. She only hesitated a moment at the tall, open doors of the antechamber before swallowing and plunging in.

The normally sterile interior of the air-lock had a mural across two walls depicting ponies underground, sitting under a darkened sun. Somepony with an awfully talented brush had done some beautiful work. Aside that, a row of lockers had been installed.

Inside the giant air-lock, I set Mags down and shrugged out of my coat, hat, and the anti-magic armor, hanging them on one of the pegs that’d been reserved for the haz-mat suits; they were gone and I figured somepony had probably nipped off to make a bong out of them or something. Still, it was so nice to feel safe, for once. The entire run from the Vivarium to Supermax was waiting for somepony with a gun to get dumb enough to take my head off.

Swift was practically dancing in place as she wiggled out of her combat vest and gun, sighing happily at the feeling of the recycled air on her bare pelt.

“You okay, kid?” I asked.

“I cannot tell you what this feels like, Sir! I feel like...like I just slipped back into my own skin. I feel so...so...alive!” Her ears were twitching back and forth as she looked up at the sky, then down at the floor. “I can see stuff, too. Like...like when I’m using the Hailstorm, except it’s not all visual! There’s somepony upstairs having breakfast, there’s a ping-pong game going on, and there’s two ponies in the laundry...oh!—” Swift’s cheeks turned bright red and she put a hoof over her muzzle.

“Oh...what?”

“Nothing, Sir! Very much nothing!” she squeaked, trotting in a little circle, then sitting down and covering her eyes with her wings. “I saw nothing!”

“Riiight…”

Limerence appeared at my side and murmured, “Detective, this place is positively humming with arcane energy.”

I jerked my chin to indicate the horn on his forehead. “I thought you were cooked?”

“I can still sense magic, Detective, and we are in a cauldron of it.”

Wisteria was discussing something with ‘the Ancestors’ through her juju bag while a couple of her guards removed their weapons, stowing them in the lockers beside the door.

Cerise was still standing just on the other side of the doors of the antechamber. I couldn’t place her expression. A bit of fear and maybe a bit of anticipation, but something else as well. Her eyes were shut and she was taking deep, swelling breaths through her mouth, then pushing them out through her nose.

“Give me a minute,” I murmured and Limerence nodded.

I strolled over to Cerise, trying to move slowly so as not to startle her.

“You alright there?” I asked.

She finished another deep breath, then opened one eye, as though seeing if the room was still there. “I...think so. I don’t know. It almost feels like I imagined everything, or saw it in a dream. My magic is as strong as my mom’s...but they had me helpless. Mom taught me combat magic when I was six or seven, and these ponies had me kneeling and praying like a whipped dog!” Her horn lit up and she lifted a beer can that’d been left beside a trash can in the corner, levitating it up in front of her. She stared at it for a moment, then it began to spin.

“They had an awful lot of the city fooled, sweetheart. Not your fault. Powerful magic or not, the spells they were using...well, let's just say what happened to you wasn’t the worst thing those pricks did.”

“I know all of that,” she growled. The aluminum can was quickly beginning to turn red, glowing with internal heat. “It doesn’t make me feel any less stupid for being a desperate, lonely little bitch who let herself be taken in just because the Church had a shoulder for me to cry on.”

With a wet pop, the aluminum can burst into liquid drops of molten metal. She caught them in a green shield bubble before they could spatter in all directions. The superheated metal settled in a puddle at the bottom, quickly cooling enough that when she released the shield and caught the resulting disk, she could study her own reflection in it. It was one heck of a scary display of magic for somepony so young; I was starting to think better of taking off my armor.

“You’re alive now. You learned your lesson, right? You can leave if you like. Go sit in the car, listen to the radio, and so on. I will promise that if you do, though...this place will haunt you till the day you die,” I said, tapping her foreleg for emphasis. “Bet on it.”

Cerise gave me a look of surprise. “Huh. Most people just tell you that you should be gentle on yourself. Crawl away from the thing that scares you and all that other crap.”

“Yeah, well, I did that. I crawled right down into a bottle after the stallion I loved most was murdered in front of me. I can’t recommend it.”

Her nose wrinkled and that naughty smile reappeared. “You’ll keep me safe, then, Detective?”

“You’re not safe around me,” I said, firmly. “Just keep that in mind. You wanted a place to crash, though, and these Aroyos owe me favors—in the plural. I’d keep your identity to yourself while you’re here, if I were you. I’m not saying you have to, but...I would. ”

“I’d do that anyway. I don’t like being ‘daughter of the Chief of Police’. I hate it,” she muttered, lowering her ears.

I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned to find Wisteria standing there holding her juju bag. “I be sorry for de wait, Detective. De Ancestors...dey be sometimes obstinate!” She snarled that last word at the little pouch, then shook her lavender mane and turned back to me, a slightly fake smile in place. “Ahem...de Ancestors be sayin’ ye be going to Canterlot. I and I be tellin’ dem ye be smarter d’an dat, but—”

“No, he’s really that stupid,” Taxi chimed in, trotting over and throwing her leg across my shoulders. I sagged a little, giving her a sharp glare.

Wisteria’s muzzle fell open. “Ye be not…”

I chewed at my tongue for a second before replying. “The method we’ve got of getting out of the city only goes between here and Canterlot. It’s also incredibly unpleasant.”

“Gah...and here, I and I be tryin’ to make ye not sound crezy,” Wisteria groaned, trotting to the inner doors of the antechamber. “Dey be sayin’ ye must be goin’ today, and see dem when ye gets back, or ye be dyin’ quick.”

“Goodie. Yeah, I figured there would be an ultimatum, eventually.”

Wisteria shook her head. “Dat be prophecy, Crusada. Dey be rarely wrong about such t’ings.”

“I was hoping to at least get some lunch before somebody started looking for my death in the tea leaves,” I grumbled.

Limerence, who’d been silently studying the mural stretching around the room for the last several minutes, piped up. “Detective, I’ve been foretelling your death at breakfast for the last month. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that you are extraordinarily difficult to predict.”

Holding out a leg for Mags to climb up, I settled her with her claws hanging on to my gun harness. “Lets hope that keeps me in good stead with whatever is coming when we try to get out of the city.”

I noticed Swift was almost dancing in place. “Sir! Tourniquet is ready for us!”

The giant security doors began to open, letting out a blast of warm air. It smelled powerfully of Zapp, rich incense, perfume, and a dozen other scents that combined to fill me with a sense of strange relaxation.

Danger has always been in the obsessively clean, the foul, or the superficial, but a place where ponies live side by side for long enough to worry about scent and comfort is almost always safe. I breathed it in and it was the smells of civilization happening.

In the giant entry-hall which had once been sterility and asceticism, there was now light and color. A heavy dance beat was coming from somewhere far off, just loud enough to make the floor vibrate a little under my hooves. Woven tapestries, clothes lines, and drying sheets dangled between the railings on the upper floors, lending the space a carnival air. Overhead, the glaring white neon lights had been replaced with all manner of other color, from jungle green to ocean blue; they provided a shifting kaleidoscope that made the whole building feel like a living jungle.

Anywhere there was an inch of exposed concrete, somepony had painted or drawn or graffitied over it. Many of the security doors had been removed, replaced by curtains or bits of fabric and everywhere, ponies walked, danced, and talked to their neighbors.

I noticed Taxi beside me, staring, open muzzled, at the little community that’d sprung up in the old prison. As I watched as a pair of friends flew up from the nearest balcony and met in mid-air for a quick hug before darting back to their own cells, disappearing inside.

“Your kind of place, Sweets?” I chuckled.

“Yes…” she replied, a little breathily. “Oh, Hardy can I please retire here when this is all over? They’re going to put us in prison anyway…”

Wisteria laughed and gave me a light tap on the flank with her wing. “Ye be likin’ what we doin’ wid de place, eh?” She pointed up at a spot on the wall far above where somepony had painted the words ‘Everfree’ in stark black letters. “De Puppet Lady bring us safety. She be askin’ only dat she be not lonely.”

I flicked my eyes at Swift. “Yeah, speaking of Tourniquet—”

“I’m here, Detective!” a voice said, right inside my ear. “Thank you for bringing Swift back!”

One half of my legs decided on ‘flight’ and the other half on ‘fight’, which led to me trying to buck and dash off at the same time. I bounced straight up six inches, then came down on my stomach with a loud ‘Oof!’ as all the air in my lungs rushed out.

Mags, who’d been quietly clinging to my back, screeched and took to the air. She coasted in a circle before landing in front of me. “Be careful, Egg pony!” she snapped, then swatted at my nose with her tail.

Swift covered her muzzle with her hoof, holding back giggles while Lim and Taxi just looked confused.

“Ah, yes...de Hole does come wid de pooka,” Wisteria said, grinning as she helped me up.

“What’s a pooka?” Swift asked.

“It’s a kind of mythological shapeshifting horse that likes to play pranks,” Limerence murmured, unconsciously rubbing the pocket he kept his watch in.

“That’s right, Mister Limerence! I am the ghost of Supermax, after all!” Tourniquet’s voice chirped from a point a couple of meters in front of us.

Cerise - who’d been closest to the spot - let out a yelp and sat down hard, while Mags squawked and took off, flapping a few feet up in the air as she tried to look in all directions at once.

“What is that?! Where’s it coming from?!” Cerise demanded.

“That....uh...hmmm. That’s Tourniquet,” I said, trying to think of some decent way to explain Tourniquet. “She’s mostly harmless.”

“I...I think I heard her voice before,” Cerise muttered, blinking a few times as she searched for the source of the disembodied voice. “She was whispering to me...”

“That’s right, Miss Cerise! I’m so glad you’re okay,” Tourniquet replied, cheerily. “Mister Hard Boiled nearly died like, twenty times while he was getting you out!”

Cerise’s horn lit up and she swung it back and forth, wildly. “Why can’t I see you?! It sounds like you’re talking inside my head!”

“You’re talking to the prison. That’s Supermax,” Swift put in, proudly showing off the glowing crescent scar on her chest. “I’m the Warden here!”

“Aaand that’s a story we’ll have time for later,” I said, firmly, “Kid, you mind leading the way? This place is still a maze to me...”

Out of all the public spectacles I’d managed to make of myself over the past day and a half, Supermax was maybe the least unpleasant. As we trotted down the lively halls, the most we got was a lot of eyeballs following us and plenty of paused conversations. At one point, a young colt rushed out of an adjoining cell and dashed up to me, pushing something against my chest before his mother rushed him away.

I looked down at what he’d given me. It was a crudely drawn picture of myself, riding a rough approximation of a cerberus. Pretty good likeness, too, although I seemed to have only three legs.

“Huh...not bad, kid,” I called out, then moved on, leaving him blushing and hiding his face behind his mother’s legs. Redirecting my attention to Wisteria, I asked, “I’ve been hating celebrity status for two days, waiting for someone to take a shot at me. Did everybody somehow miss the wanted posters with my face all of them? This is the quietest reception I’ve gotten all week.”

“That’s my doing, Detective. Warden Swift was feeling tired and hungry, so I asked everypony to leave you alone,” Tourniquet explained, projecting her voice to a point just above and in front of us.

My partner’s eyes lit up and she smiles. “Oh! Thanks! There’s going to be food?”

“Yep! I’ve already asked one of the cooks to bring it to my chamber!”

“Cooks, huh?” I asked. “How’ve you gone about getting cooks? The Skids were one of the poorest sectors of the city last time I checked.”

Wisteria looked amused. “Poor? Aye. Dark be de skies, but de times be good. De Aroyos be never so free...nor so safe! We bring de Skids here. All dem abandoned homes o’ dem rich stompas left wid’ no-one...but dey leaves dey food! Dey leaves dey basements...dey leaves dey sewers and dey warehouses unguarded!”

I scratched my dark mane, then gradually began to understand the shape of what we’d walked into. “You’ve been looting everything from the abandoned parts of the city...”

“It be de Puppet Lady’s idea,” Wisteria coughed, having the good grace to look a tad guilty. “We connects de Hole to de city power grid...and now she be seeing many ‘tings’. De Ancestors gives us dey weapons, de Puppet Lady gives us food and supplies. We rescues any we can; de sick, lost, or dying...and de Aroyos grow!”

Shifting my weight from hoof to hoof, I considered the situation. The Detrot Police department had always taken a dim view of looters, but then, it wasn’t the same world it’d been a couple weeks ago. The Aroyos had proven to be one of the friendlier groups I’d found myself cozying up to. Crazy, but friendly. It wasn’t as though anyone else was using those supplies, most likely. Knocking over a warehouse takes a large crew, too.

“You say the Ancestors gave you those weapons I saw upstairs?” Taxi asked, reaching out and lightly touching Wisteria’s holster. Gumbo giggled and reached for her braid, which my driver let her tug on for a moment. “They’re...freshly constructed, though.”

“Only de finest! Dey be protectin’ de home front so when dis be all over we can all return to de Skids...”

“Return?” Limerence sniffed, straightening his vest. “That is certainly a more optimistic viewpoint than some of us have chosen to adopt. I must ask, how did you tap the city power supply? Are you responsible for the utilities continuing to operate even in these dire times?”

Wisteria pointed towards a full length tapestry that partly concealed a doorway on one side of the hall. “We...be havin’ a hoof in dat. De Puppet Lady explain more. I must be going to handle de patrols! Ye know de way?”

Swift nodded and Wisteria took wing, coasting along with little Gumbo giggling up a storm.

There was a tug on my mane and I tilted my head back towards Mags to indicate she had my attention.

“Har’dy...I be hearin’ kids somewhere!”

Cocking an ear, I could indeed hear giggling children someplace. “Yeah, go have fun. When that voice you heard a minute ago tells you we’re going, you best listen, though.”

She nodded so vigorously that she almost tipped off my shoulders. “I be promisin’!”

As my ward darted off down the hall, my friends and I set off towards Tourniquet’s room.

Down another stairwell we entered the lower levels of Supermax. Most of the walls below were also covered in graffiti or paintings, but there seemed to be fewer ponies. I could pick out sections of bare concrete here and there. A few of the cells were unoccupied, but most seemed to have somepony living in them. One had a crib with a mother gently rocking her foal to sleep, while another contained two colts who were apparently arguing over a game of chess. Both were too absorbed in what they were doing to even notice us passing by.

One entire hallway seemed dedicated to the former members of the Church who had gathered together for mutual comfort. None of them seemed to be home just then, or those who were had their cell doors shut.

Tourniquet informed us they were integrating well with the Aroyos, though there had been a few problems early on. Geranium—the cult of Nightmare Moon’s grumpy lawyer—had apparently started helping with the process once she realized she wasn’t going to be able to get alcohol or ice-cream if she didn’t start doing something productive.

That did leave the cult themselves, tucked away in the Secure Containment wing.

“I couldn’t let them go all wandering around! You should hear some of the weird stuff they kept saying to each other in their cells! Some of those ponies were even proud of breaking the law!” Tourniquet complained as we strolled through the final hallway before her door. It was decorated on both sides with a long painting of the sea.

“They were proud of the Cult’s activities?” Taxi asked, raising one eyebrow.

“No, but most of them had no idea there were actual murders going on. They talk about ‘banking deals’ and ‘real estate’ and all kinds of awful stuff they did with money when they think I’m not listening. Some of them talk in their sleep, too. They talk about cheating on their husbands, or killing rich family members for their money, or stealing from the places they worked. Most of these ponies are the kind Mom wouldn’t have let see the sun for a million years, if she had her way.”

“Um...if...if you don’t mind me asking,” Cerise started, hesitantly addressing the ceiling. “How did everypony take the eclipse? The cult...you say they were rich ponies? That must have almost driven them crazy.”

“They mostly didn’t believe me, but I showed them a film reel,” Tourniquet answered, “Then they screamed and cried and ran in circles a lot, then settled down and started demanding alcoholic beverages or narcotics. That’s really what they usually do when I do anything at all. I changed their dinners two days ago to include asparagus, cuz the Aroyos found some in a big freezer warehouse, and they started howling that I was torturing them.”

“Heehee! Oh, that’s great! You should totally add some brussel sprouts!” Swift giggled, clapping her hooves together. “Sooo, did you decide what to do with them?”

Tourniquet’s robotic voice sighed, which sounded like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner.

“I let them out to interact with each other, because the manuals I had Geranium bring me said ponies rehabilitate best with socialization, but...I dunno. They’re really bad ponies. The Aroyos were all for super-gluing lingerie to the stallions and shaving the mares, then leaving them to the police...but that’s against my protocols. Whatever we do with them though is really up to you, Warden Swift.”

I’m not sure what reaction Tourniquet had expected out of my partner, but it was probably not the one she got. Swift stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes bugging out of her head as the weight of actual responsibility dropped onto her shoulders like a ton of bricks.

“Oog...you had to remind me,” she muttered, then set off again at a more subdued pace. We’d just reached the hallway off of which Tourniquet’s chamber was hidden. “I guess keep them fed and we turn them over to the Princesses when we can.”

Limerence let out a faint whistle, then pulled his glasses off and began cleaning the lense on the corner of his vest. “The number of assumptions that sentence makes is frightening, ‘Warden Swift’.”

Swift rounded on him. “What other choices have we got? I’m not turning them loose and I’m not going to just murder them!”

“Oh, you have many choices. More than you realize, I believe,” Limerence replied, counting off by tapping different spots on the edge of his hoof. “You could strip their will to act in an evil fashion using Tourniquet’s magics. You could mark them with their crimes—a large, obvious tattoo perhaps—then turn them loose and let the city deal with them. Most will make their way to a place of protection, like the Detrot Police Department, where they will be easily re-acquired once we have finished our other tasks. You could ransom them. I am sure some of them are valuable to someone in these times. I’m sure there are plenty of other options of course, none of which will allow those beastly characters to get far from the long leg of the law.”

I pushed my hat back and scratched my head. “You know, Lim, I could sometimes forget your father wasn’t just a librarian and part-time antiques dealer. It was usually right up until he said crap like that.”

“I will take that as a compliment, Detective,” Limerence replied. “Still, the point remains. Moral qualms aside, these are not ponies who deserve mercy, nor would they give us any if they were freed. They would use their resources to hunt us down and most likely see us killed to protect their secrets.”

Cerise—who’d been silent the last few minutes, quietly trudging along, keeping her eyes on her hooves—piped up, “I...I know I’ve only been around a little while and I don’t really know what all happened here, but don’t you think we should be interrogating these ponies? Mom talked about some sort of ‘order’ that went out for the rich to head into Uptown. Maybe they know something about that.”

“That’s actually a good idea,” I said, tapping my chin, then raised my voice. “Tourniquet? There’s a fat guy, kinda loud, kinda stupid, but has a strong self-preservation instinct. He was bossing the other cult members around the last time we were here, keeping them in line. I think I threatened to shoot him. I can’t remember much what he looked like—”

“I actually know exactly who you mean, Detective. Short Sell is his name. If I ever got headaches, I’m pretty sure he’d have given me one. Once he figured out nopony was just going to kill him, he started making demands and hasn’t really stopped. I was tempted to feed him to the daevas, but...you know...protocols. Would you like me to bring him up from Secure Containment? The Warden must authorize prisoner interviews with individuals not considered members of the guard.”

I tilted my head towards my partner.

“Authorization granted, Sir!” she chirped, then hesitated for a moment before asking, “So...wait, I have guards now?”

“Yep! The Aroyos! I’m under emergency protocols, which means I’m allowed to authorize and deputize new guards for you!”

“Whew, boy...this is just too weird,” Cerise muttered.

“You’re one to talk…” Tourniquet said, a little petulantly. “I know who you are, by the way. I monitor outside feeds as much as I can. Isn’t your mom going to be crazy angry with you for running off with Detective Hard Boiled?”

The familiar ground of parental irritation seemed to set Cerise a bit at ease.

“What’s she gonna do? Shoot me?” she asked.

“Considering the way her officers talk about her, I don’t consider that an entirely unlikely scenario,” the construct replied. “Ah! You’re here!”

We were indeed, standing just outside the door to ‘Arcane Control’. I’d lost track of the back and forth turns we’d taken while listening to the conversation, but that’s part of why Taxi drives and I ride. Somepony had painted the words ‘Jambalaya’s Love Shack’ across the sign in little green letters.

The door’s hydraulics hissed and swung open.

I put on my best ‘happy-to-see-you’ smile just as a giant muzzle tried to jam itself through, teeth snapping shut barely an inch from my nose.

Act 3 Chapter 11 : Sentient Hyper-Optimized Tourniquet Amusement Network

Child rearing in Equestria has always been a bit of a touchy subject for the public. How much independence can a foal be afforded before their parents are considered neglectful? How much exposure is ‘good’ and how much might simply scar young, tender psyches? The question remains unsettled even after decades careful consideration, thoughtful punditry, and occasional running about in circles screaming at the top of the lungs.

The issue is further complicated by the fairly independent nature of equine children themselves. Most can crawl within a matter of hours and walk within a matter of weeks. In infancy, many ponies undergo some fairly extreme magical spikes as their developing minds tap into different parts of their innate abilities. Earth pony foals have been known to kick down small buildings, while pegasi children might cause indigent weather that leaves a city block under a half meter of snow in the midst of Summer. The first cutie-mark acquisition related police report can be expected shortly thereafter. All in all, these are merely expected parts of growing up.

The question of childhood independence is difficult enough in the countryside - where the most dangerous thing most foals could run into in the more civilized part of rural Equestria is a fast moving carriage - but in major cities and outposts on the edge of wilderness areas there are dangers that aren’t so readily apparent. While the odds of a child being snatched by a stranger are low, the odds of stumbling into magical contamination, falling down a sewer, or being dragged into the middle of a gang are much higher.

How then to approach the issue? Flailing our hooves about and screaming ‘think of the babies!’ has been, after extensive testing, proven not to work terribly well. We might look to other species for some inspiration, but zebra children tend to live highly regimented lives and, for the most part, don’t share their Equestrian counterparts tendency to spontaneously teleport to the tops of telephone poles or start small tornados. Griffin children are much like pegasi with the added wrinkle of an arsenal of attached claws and a flesh-ripping beak.

In the end, the most effective methods seem to also be the most difficult; judgement, critical thinking, and avoiding the urge to drink an ocean of absinthe when baby manages to call down a hail-storm in the living room or tear a hole in the fabric of space/time.

-The Scholar

Harmless or not, Goofball is still a presence to be reckoned with when he’s right in your face. A lesser pony might have immediately voided their bowels at finding themselves confronted with a dog’s head the size of their barrel. I, thankfully, hadn’t had anything to eat recently and ended up just letting out a manly scream of terror and throwing myself back from the door, straight into Cerise. The two of us tumbled into a pile against the wall.

Various heads popped out of the cells lining the hallway to see what was going on, then collectively rolled their eyes and drew back as they caught sight of the dog.

Cerise squirmed against me and—while it was lovely having a pretty mare writhing in my lap—one of her rear hooves caught me in the gut, bruising my intestines and kidneys quite badly. I rolled away from her and lay there, clutching my stomach, panting for breath, and suddenly, desperately needing a piss.

The damn puppy was just sitting there, his enormous head poking through the open door as he tried to nip at my tail. His eyes centered on Swift and he let out a yip that almost deafened me as he tried to wiggle through an opening much, much too small.

“Swift...if I shoot...your dog...you’re not going to be upset, are you?” I grunted, trying to drag myself upright. I heard sniggering and looked over to see my driver clutching her sides, laughing like a drunken squirrel.

“It would probably just tickle him, Sir,” she replied, spreading her wings and lifting off. She alighted on Goofball’s nose and he made what I’m sure what the canine equivalent of a giggle, pulling his head back through the door of Arcane Control and taking her with him.

“Kid, did you...did you know that blasted mutt was there?” I barked after her, still trying to catch my breath.

The answer drifted back from inside, “Of course, Sir!”

“...sneaky, toothy little turkey...” I muttered as a smirking Limerence helped me up. Turning to see about Cerise, I found her huddled against the far wall, shaking like a leaf. Her green mane had fallen across her face and she was whimpering softly, rocking back and forth.

For a moment, I was mystified at what might put a pony of Cerise’s not inconsiderable magical might into a paralytic shock, but then a particular instant poked up through the fetid, stinking heap of my recent memory.

I was sharing a cup of tea with The Warden of Tartarus she was telling one of her little anecdotes about the Chief introducing her daughter after Cerise was nicked for shoplifting.

‘I had Cerberus swallow her.’

Reaching down, I put my forelegs around the girl. She flinched, then inhaled and shoved herself over against me, face hidden against my neck. Whatever magic had fillies using me for a tear-sponge lately was still working.

“D-d-detective?” she sobbed, clinging to me like a foal. “I-I-I s-saw a b-big dog. Is it g-gone?”

“It’s gone,” I replied, stroking her mane. “He’s pretty friendly, when you get to know him. Stupid, but friendly.”

“Is she okay?” Tourniquet asked from overhead, with a trace of guilt in her voice.

“She’ll be fine,” I replied, gathering Cerise up against me. “I’m not going to ask how you got that beast in here just yet, but could you get him out of sight for a few minutes?”

“Will do!”

Cerise was taking some deep breaths, her hooves shaking as she fought off the panic attack. “I...I’m r-really starting to r-re-evaluate my decision to c-come with you today, D-d-detective,” she whispered, hiccuping softly.

“I have to re-evaluate my decision not to hand myself to your mother so I could sit in a jail cell through the end of the world about four times a day,” I quipped, tilting her head up with one toe under her chin so I could wipe tears off her muzzle. “You’re fine. Just a big dumb dog. Emphasis on the dumb.”

“W-was I hallucinating or something?” she asked, coughing softly. “Because big isn’t...isn’t usually that big!”

I shook my head. “No, he’s actually that size. The Warden of Tartarus told me a little story about you and his father.”

She looked momentarily confused, then her eyes widened. “T-that’s Cerberus’ puppy!?”

“He didn’t inherit his father’s disposition, thankfully,” Taxi said as she recovered from her laughing fit, laying on the floor with her chin propped on one hoof, still grinning. “You feed him potato chips, lighter fluid, or chicken and he’s your best friend forever. Just don’t let him get into chocolate or old tires. He gets gas that will level a city block.”

That got a tiny smile from Cerise and she gulped, pushing herself up. “Okay...alright, I think...I just needed a minute. This has been the freakiest day. I think I’m good now.”

“You’re not going to be good once we introduce you to Tourniquet. I’m just going to warn you that she’s freaky, even by my standards,” I warned her.

“Sticks and stones, Detective!” Tourniquet chirped. “At least I remember to charge my batteries on a regular basis. You’re running low.”

I tried to get a look down at myself and Cerise followed my gaze to my chest. “Detective, there’s...um...there’s a light blinking under your fur...”

“Yeah, like I said. Freaky, even by my standards. Come on. I need a wall socket.”

Arcane Control was...different.

Last I’d been in there during the brief trip to get chemicals for Edina, it was mostly just a collection of couches and bongs. Jambalaya and her friends had taken full advantage of access to the leavings of the city’s rich to outfit the little room to their very particular tastes.

Five high end sofas, each one a different expensive wood, surrounded coffee tables that would have cost my entire salary for six months. A high backed, four poster bed was jammed in the corner with a giggling unicorn filly and her earth-pony colt—both barely out of their teenage years—curled up on it. They were too absorbed in making out with each other to pay us much attention.

The stink of Zap still filled the air, but it was mixed with the scent of cigars, sex, spray-paint, and a hint of fried okra. Every wall was painted with the motto of the Aroyos in a rainbow of colors: ‘Ever Free’.

A full bar, complete with expensive labels and an icebox as tall as me owned the entire right wall. There wasn’t a bartender, but I got the distinct impression that ‘Jambalaya’s Love Shack’ was a ‘serve yourself’ sorta joint.

The only spot that hadn’t been altered in some way was about six meters of wall-space towards the back where the secret door to the inner chamber was hidden.

Strolling in ahead of Taxi and Limerence, I peered at the room’s other occupants. Two stallions about my age were picking up a deck of cards that’d been scattered by Goofball barreling through. They gave me a curious look, but I didn’t see any recognition there. Neither of them looked like Aroyos; they didn’t have enough piercings or funny colors to their manes. Former church members, maybe. A mare with a half empty bottle propped in the crook of her leg was snoring up a storm on one of the couches.

Cerise, who’d been lingering at the back, stuck her head in beside me and grinned. “Oooh, a crash pad! My favorite!” she exclaimed, pushing past me and heading straight for the bar. Uncorking a bottle, she found a clean glass on the side-board and poured herself a generous shot of something the color of liquid gold. “So, where’s this ‘Tourniquet’, then?”

“I’ve moved Goofball into the tunnels underneath my chamber. Warden Swift is down there with him,” Tourniquet chimed in. “Can I open the doors now?”

“Give me a minute,” I replied, then stepped up beside the bar and covered Cerise’s shot before she could toss it back. “Okay, now, Cerise...I’m going to give you this drink. You’ll get to drink it, so you have that to look forward to. You’re going to have to wait until after you stop hyperventilating to do that, though. I don’t want you to get booze in your lungs. Are we clear?”

Her nose wrinkled, but she nodded. “It can’t be any worse than some of the stuff my mom described wanting to do to you...so, yeah, I guess.”

“We’ll say that after you see this,” I replied. Picking up the shot-glass, I hobbled on three legs to the back of the room, standing there before the doors of Tourniquet’s chamber. “Alright! We’re as ready we can be. Tourniquet! Let us in!”

A section of wall much larger than the little door Tourniquet had let us in through during our last visit let out a clank, then began to fold upwards. The clank of metal on metal was followed by the groan of heavy hydraulic hinges releasing a blast of trapped gasses. As the portal gradually opened, light poured out, bathing us in a brilliant glow.

“I...I th-think I’d l-like that drink now, Detective,” Cerise murmured, staring into the vast room beyond. I passed her the shot and she tossed it back, coughing and spluttering for a moment before wiping her muzzle off with one fetlock.

It was quite the sight, I must admit.

A vast swarm of Ladybugs flew in slow spirals around the ceiling, illuminated from above by an array of snaking power cables that shined with inner light bright enough that the whole room might as well have been in full sun. The old, dusty toys were gone and somepony had given the carpet a thorough going over with a vacuum cleaner. An enclosed, curtained bed I could have run laps around and dozens of bookshelves sat towards the center of the cavernous room. There was a veritable library in there, surrounding the bed on all sides.

Off to the left of the bed, a long dining room table—probably purloined from some rich furniture aficionado—was stacked with board games and books. There was even one of those rare ‘big screen’ televisions balanced precariously atop a half dozen milk crates.

A bundle of cables stretched down from the ceiling to the bed, thrumming energy pulsating down along them. I could almost feel the power bursting making the very air dance. My heart gave a few excited thumps, as though sensing the weight of magic nearby.

Most notably, perhaps, the body of the dragon and the corpses of the cult members who’d been used to restart Supermax were all gone. Drawings and photographs were taped wall to wall. Some were pictures of children playing and others of Tourniquet herself, with foal’s hoofprints alongside.

For just a couple of weeks worth of work, it was a room worthy of a princess.

“Come in, Detective! We were just finishing up!” Tourniquet’s voice range out from a spot above me. The lacy curtains around the bed drew back, revealing four foals sitting together around the magical construct herself. She had a book open across her hooves and looked to have been reading to them. Looking up, her scintillating gem-like eyes flashed and she smiled, before turning back to her story. The patches of fur along her side seemed to be growing back and her fiber-optic mane buzzed with life.

“—And then the great detective stepped into the vault...and we’ll pick this up tomorrow, okay? I’ve got to go talk to my friend and you guys need some sleep,” she said, to a whole round of disappointed ‘awwws’. I recognized Shadow Walk—the talented little unicorn who’d helped hide Goofball for us all this time—amongst the tiny gathering.

The group of foals hopped down off the bed, yawning softly as they trotted towards the exit portal. Tourniquet shut her storybook, setting it back on one of the plush pillows. The cords on her back drew her up into the air.

She hovered overhead, hanging there with a cool, quiet smile on her robotic features. She appraised us for a moment before dropping down to the carpet and trotting over to put her forelegs around my neck in a friendly hug. Far from the cold, sterile mechanism I expected, she was warm and I could feel a heartbeat under all that metal. I patted her shoulders, careful to avoid the cables sprouting from her spine.

“It is very good to see you, Detective. I...must confess I’m not sure where to begin,” she said, brushing a hoof over the socket on my chest. “Maybe with an electrical cord for your poor heart?”

“That sounds lovely, now you mention it, but maybe answering some questions would be good, too. This place is hoppin’. You seem a bit...eh...different,” I said. A few curious Ladybugs were dropping down to land on my shoulders, making themselves comfortable.

Tourniquet tossed her mane and turned, holding out a hoof towards her table. “I’m the same pony, mostly. You wouldn’t believe what these Aroyos have done for me, though. Come on, there’s munchies.”

“I’d say, looking around this place, they got the good end of the deal,” Taxi chuckled, ambling over to the table and settling herself at one of the chairs. A swarm of Ladybugs swept down and buzzed over the table, lifting away the board-games and books, clearing the space in seconds. A moment later, another swarm zipped in through the open door, bearing a tray with them; it was heaped with fresh vegetables and breads. There was even a tiny cooked chicken, for Swift.

“Now I think about it, where is Swift?” I asked, looking around the room. “You said she was with Goofball, but—”

A section of the floor maybe five meters on a side clunked, then sank out of sight. My partner burst out of the hole, a broad grin on her muzzle as she spiraled around the table once, then hopped into one of the chairs. Throwing her hooves up on the table, she bounced in her seat like a toddler on a caffeine bender as the panel in the floor slid shut behind her. Just before it closed, I thought I heard three distinct ‘woofs’ in the distance.

“Oh Sir! You wouldn’t believe what they’ve done with the place this last week! Goofball has his own place down in the sewers! I mean, it used to be the daevas nest, but once Tourniquet got her full power systems up and running, she was able to drive them into a cistern and the Aroyos dumped about five meters of gravel on top of them! It’s so cool down there! Goofball’s got a dog chew made of tires that I could sleep inside of and—”

I held up both front hooves for a second, then moved over to the table beside the tray of food, settling down beside it. “Kid...kid, please take a deep breath. I’m still mentally processing how they’ve managed all this under the Darkening, much less with what I thought were their resources.”

“These were ponies living in hardship before the Darkening, Sir. They’re smart!” she replied. Looking up and to the left, she grinned at something in the distance. “I can see two ponies upstairs who’re working on a brand new water pumping system together. Hrmmm… they’re having trouble. Lemme check the prisoner roster. Oh! There’s a civic engineer sitting in one of the cells down in the Secure Containment Wing. Let’s see...” Her gaze narrowed, then her wings spasmed and she let out a breath. “There! I’ve authorized him to head upstairs. He should be on his way up to help them!” Turning back to the table, she all but purred at the sight of the chicken, snatching it up in her hooves and sinking her teeth in.

I sat there for a long moment, just trying to work out what had just happened. A glass bottle dropped onto the table in front of me, held in a soft green glow. Cerise pulled out a chair at my side and sagged into it, still staring at Tourniquet as she filled a second shot-glass and levitated it in my direction. I took a quick swallow. It was whiskey, but good enough that I didn’t feel the need to cringe at the flavor.

“Detective, are all of your friends...you know…” Cerise waved towards the construct, who was just taking her seat at the head of the table, and my partner who was gleefully ripping her chicken apart.

“Oddities of nature?” Limerence supplied, casually snatching up a couple of crackers and smearing them with hummus from a little jar. “You would be simply amazed—were you to spend an extended period of time with us—at how the Detective attracts persons who stand outside of the common mold.”

“Brilliant. I was laying in bed this morning thinking ‘I need to have lunch with a robot and a pegasus who eats meat in a place from my nightmares. That’ll be fun’,” she groused, grabbing a half a cucumber off the tray, dunking it in a little bowl of salad dressing.

“I’m not a robot,” Tourniquet huffed, picking up a piece of cheese and flicking it at Cerise. The unicorn caught it with her horn, then gave it a curious sniff before stuffing it in her muzzle. “I’m a trans-iterated mind-matrix over top of a distributed neural network. There’s a difference!”

“Oh, because that’s sooo clear…” Cerise shot back, with a roll of the eyes for good measure.

I felt something tap me on the shoulder and looked up to find a cable hanging in mid-air above my shoulder like a cobra waiting to strike. Realizing what I was meant to do, I quickly unzipped my heart pouch and fished out the custom plug, offering it to the cable which plugged
itself in. A rush of warmth filled my chest and I couldn’t hold in a happy moan as my heart began to beat a little faster.

“Awww, yeah...that’s the stuff,” I groaned, leaning back and resting a hoof on the plug. There was a soft thump and I glanced over to see Cerise’s cheek resting on the table. She was out like a light.

“Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed it would be the heart plug thing. I had money on her fainting when Swift started eating,” Taxi murmured. My partner giggled, picking a bit of meat out from between two of her teeth with the end of a bone.

Limerence shook his head. “I imagined it more likely we’d lose her around the time the door opened. Quite resilient, that little filly. A few more days and she might be worth keeping around.”

“Not a damn chance,” I replied, sharply. “She wants away from her mother, she can stay here, but I am not carting her around with us.”

I jerked my chin at Cerise, then at the bed. A half dozen thick cables spilled from under the table, gently wrapping the girl in their snake-like grasp before lifting her over to the mattress, laying her across it and tugging a blanket up to her chin. “I don’t know how dangerous Canterlot is going to be and I’m not in the business of picking up strays.”

Taxi gave me a sidelong look as she pulled a brush from her saddlebag and began combing out her braid. “Hardy...Sometimes I think you do nothing but pick up strays. I mean, think about it. Mags. Lim. Me. You aren’t exactly a poster child for cold calculation.”

I tried to think of a counter argument, but lately I’d been on a losing streak where those were concerned.

“Fine, but be that as it may, I am not taking Chief Iris Jade’s daughter with me to Canterlot. I’ll leave a note with Jade that she’s in the one place that might be safer than the Castle. First thing’s first, we need to get a plan laid down and I need information.” I turned to Tourniquet who perked up a little. “Explain to me what you’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks. I want to know why Swift suddenly seems to be able to see through walls and what Wisteria meant when she said you had something to do with why the city power grid is still running.”

Swift coughed, spitting out a piece of gristle. She flicked a nervous eye towards Tourniquet who was tapping her hooves together, trying not to look like she was hiding something and failing spectacularly. The silence stretched until I started to wonder if I was going to get an answer at all.

It was Swift who broke it first. “Ahem...Sir? There’s something Tourniquet should really tell you.” Leaning over she bopped Tourniquet on the leg with her tail. “Did you really want to keep that from him?”

“I didn’t want to start a fight!” Tourniquet whined, some servos in her legs squeaking softly. “It’s not like I knew what was going to happen or anything…”

“Yeah, but you were gonna try to keep him from finding out,” Swift shot back. “Now spill, okay? I promise he’s not going to freak out. Or at least, if he does freak out, Miss Taxi will hit him.”

Taxi rolled her hooves, which let out some disturbing pops and crackles. “If this is that good, I might wanna limber up a little…”

Fortifying myself with a piece of celery covered in peanut butter, I said, “Look, this has been such an exhausting day that it would be terribly difficult for me to find the energy to freak out right now. Nobody is dead, or you’d have let me know right away. The city isn’t actively burning to the ground this instant and we’d probably be pretty safe here even if it were. So lay it on me. What’ve you done?”

Tourniquet opened her muzzle and the lights in her eyes spun like diamonds in a centrifuge. It was still about five seconds before she found the courage to speak.

“Detective...I think I might have become the Detrot power grid.”

Processing.

Processing.

Processing.

Nope, I got nothing.

Leaning back in my chair, I swung my rear hooves up on the table and tilted my head back to watch the slow whirl of the ladybug swarm against the lights on the ceiling. Funny thing that a pony can reach my age and have seen and done some of the things I have and someone can still say something that leaves you without any experience to draw on.

It wasn’t a complicated idea, right? A friend of mine had just somehow become the electrical grid. She was a pretty solid friend, really, and there are few more scrupulous individuals than somepony whose major wants in life were foals to read to, hugs, and possibly having her halls swept out on a regular basis.

Swift had her ‘please say something’ face on. I decided to let her stew in the anticipation for another minute or two as I casually picked a carrot up off the platter and began biting it into the shape of a bullet. The carrot had been frozen until very recently, and had a touch of freezer burn, but it was tasty enough.

When the vegetable suitably resembled a fifty caliber round, I set it on the table in front of me and exhaled.

“Fine,” I said, at last. “You don’t sound insane and I’ve had a fair bit of experience with insanity lately, so I guess I’ll have to accept that you’re telling me the truth. You’re the power grid. How?”

Tourniquet’s chromatic mane shifted from blue to bright red all in one flash. I took it for whatever constitutes a blush amongst mind matrixes on top of distributed neural whatevers.

“It was an accident, really,” she began. “It was when the Aroyos first moved in. You remember I said I could feel a power cable running underground?”

“I remember. You had some kind of kooky plan to run your own cables out to it.”

Limerence cocked his head and said, “Tapping directly into the city power supply is extremely dangerous if you haven’t got the proper tools. I should know. One of my primary school science projects caused the L.R. Fifty One Black Out. How did you manage it?”

“The Aroyos are really good at electrical work. I mean, crazy good. I don’t know why the Skids was the way it was, but I think somepony was keeping it like that. The other Cyclone groups seemed to be spending a crazy amount of resources on boxing the Aroyos in. Same with the Jewelers. Whoever these ‘Ancestors’ of theirs are, they trained the absolute best electricians in all of Equestria and if they’d been given the chance, their skills could have changed the face of Detrot,” Tourniquet replied. “We managed to actually tap into the city power supply on a municipal trunk. Those are the really big cables. They’re supposed to go to everything, everywhere.”

“And then?”

Her ears laid back against her metallic head. “After about two days I started to notice I could see more things. Lots more.”

“What...sort of things?” I asked.

“I could see sewers waaay outside of the range of my cameras. I could see into houses. I could see the skies for miles around. It got worse...or maybe better. I don’t know. Eventually, I was able to feel...this huge light.” She squirmed in her seat and I got the distinct impression that she was having something akin to a technological stiffy. “It was amazing, Detective. You can’t even imagine!”

“I think I have an idea. So, what was it?”

Tourniquet sat forward, planting her hooves on the table as the cords coming from her back vibrated like plucked guitar strings. “It was the power station. The Detrot Power Station! I mean, I didn’t figure that out right away, but it was beautiful!” Her face fell a little and she sighed. “Unfortunately, the light was...fading. Detrot runs on a mix of hydroelectrics from the Bay and cascading crystal induction. That stuff takes somepony watching to make sure it all keeps going.”

“Were there not back-ups and such to keep the systems operating?” Limerence asked, quizzically.

She nodded, and her mane began to shift towards a soft blue. “Yeah, but none that would keep it going forever. I don’t know how, but...I felt around. I started to touch the systems with my thoughts. Wherever I touched, they started to work again. I charted out a safe path through the sewers for the Aroyos to get to the power station. Once they were there, they started fixing everything.” Her ears drooped a little. “Well...almost everything…”

“Lemme guess. The Shield?” I asked.

The guilty look on Tourniquet face was answer enough. She slid down in her chair until I could only see her ears and the cords on her back.

“I couldn’t even find whatever power system they’re all connected to,” she replied. “They don’t even have sewer systems under them. They’re just big pillars of reinforced, enchanted concrete.”

Before I could ask my next question I heard a soft catch of breath and looked over to find Swift rubbing both forelegs together like she’d caught a sudden chill. The red crescent on her chest was glittering brightly, but faded back to normal after a few seconds. Her eyes widened and she put both hooves on either side of her head.

I pushed myself back from the table, but she was already waving at me to sit back down.

“Ow! Brrr! That feels really weird!” she whimpered, clutching her skull. Slowly, the distressed expression faded and her eyes widened. “What...what was that?”

“What? What happened?” I demanded. Swift just sat there for a moment, her eyes moving back and forth in their sockets, staring off into space. Leaning over I slapped the table in front of her. She jumped and her gaze centered on my face, but I got the feeling I still wasn’t really the focus of her attention. “Kid, talk to me, dammit!”

Finally, her ears tilted toward me and she blinked a few times, seeming to come out of whatever trance had momentarily gripped her.

“Sorry, Sir! I...oh, wow! This is super neat!” she exclaimed, hopping up to stand in her chair as her vision fuzzed out again. I clapped my hooves to bring her back around. “Tourniquet just put so much information in my head! Like, a bunch!” She paused a second then giggled at some joke nopony else was hearing. “Gosh, did you have to put that in my brain? I don’t need to know that!”

“I know, but it was really funny!” Tourniquet replied, doubling up with laughter that sounded like a running blender full of metal spoons.

Swift rolled her eyes and went back to scanning.

“Care to let us all in on the joke?” I snapped after a minute had passed with no response from either of them.

Tourniquet’s nose wrinkled and she ducked her head. “Sorry! I’m still getting used to having full power, Detective. I didn’t have enough to send updates until a few days ago.”

“Updates?” Taxi scoffed. “Updates are things to attach to something with a paperclip and a post-it note that says ‘FYI’. Updates don’t get beamed directly into a pony’s head!”

“Yeah, well, my updates do. Whenever Swift is here, I’ll be able to send her a nice package of information on everything that’s happened lately in the prison! Since I’ve already got a tap into her mind—”

“What?!” I blurted, sitting up straight. “You didn’t say anything about a ‘tap into her mind’ when we agreed to this little transfer of power!”

The construct’s muzzle fell into a tiny frown. “Yeah, well...you guys were kinda gonna die at the time. I figured you wouldn’t be bothered about that. Besides, it was never this strong with my mom. I’m on new ground as much as you, okay? Sheesh.”

Swift quietly reached out and put a hoof on my knee. “Sir, it’s okay. I don’t mind. She’s my friend.” I met her eyes and she gave me a quiet smile. “Besides...I’m inside her head, too. She would never hurt us. I promise.”

“You do realize that the casual manner in which you’re taking this isn’t making me feel better, right?” I grumbled, then my curiosity got the better of me. “What’s it like?”

She stared off into space for a bit, thinking. “The best I can describe it is like hearing music playing inside a department store. You don’t really pay attention to it, because you’re doing other things, but when you do it turns out they’re playing your favorite song. You can even change the tune. When we first got here, I started to hear the music, but then...I started to realize it was my music, too. Maybe more like ‘our’ music.”

Tourniquet grinned . “I did sorta wonder why I was having the urge to eat a whole plate of fried chicken nuggets. I’m glad I don’t have a stomach anymore or that would have been embarrassing.”

‘Acceptance, Hardy. You handled the meat eating, the prize fighting, and the dead pigeon,’ I thought. ‘You can handle this.’

I inhaled, then let out the breath with a noise like a deflating party balloon.

“Swift, I’m going to tuck this away in my nice little ‘denial’ place where I keep everything you’ve done for the last two months.” I turned back to Tourniquet. “So, you’ve been in contact with Queenie and the Ladybugs? Is the information they are pumping you part of these ‘updates’?”

The bionic filly’s ears flattened to her head. “Um...no. I mean, they certainly helped, but...most of them are actually here. If you’re hoping for information about what’s going on in the city or Uptown, I’m afraid I don’t have any.”

“I’ve never known Queenie to sit in one place. Why on earth would it hole up here?”

The cords leading out of Tourniquet’s back tightened and she was lifted out of her chair, flying up near the ceiling to where the swarm of Ladybugs flew. A couple detached from the holding pattern and landed on her hooves. After a brief pause, she shook her head. “I’m afraid they don’t know. They say that there’s something...wrong...with Uptown. Lots of Essies felt it and fled. It’s like magic itself had somehow turned bad there.” The Ladybugs flitted away and she dropped to the ground. “I wish I could tell you more, Detective. There’s only one thing I can say for absolute sure, though.”

“And that is?”

“Somepony, somewhere, planned all this,” she replied, with certainty. “That’s the only explanation for how orderly the evacuation into the city was. There were roadblocks and if your name wasn’t on some sort of list, you didn’t get in. That spell that’s around Uptown is impenetrable and the center of the city has its own power supply. The Shield Pylons are way over-engineered for what they’re supposed to do if I can’t get into one.”

“Someone who plays the long game,” Taxi commented, thoughtfully. “Someone with vast resources and who doesn’t mind taking a few decades to see their plans come to fruition. Somepony who can hide the construction of an entire secret power grid inside the middle of a major metropolitan area.”

“That knowledge doesn’t help us much, Sweets,” I replied, grumpily. “There’s a list of beings I’m personally familiar with who could be described as ‘long lived, patient, devious, and resourceful’. We need something else.”

Limerence tapped his chin, then speculatively drew a circle on the table. “Detective, while I do agree with you that we do need...additional information, I’m afraid my associates were of a rather more academic mindset. Now that the Archivists are no more, few of my father’s contacts will be willing to deal with us. As most of this is occurring in Uptown, is it possible you have some...contact there with whom we might get in touch?”

“Well, most of the phones are down and I can’t think of…” I hesitated a moment, trailing off.

“What? What is it, Sir?” Swift asked, a bit of hope sparkling in her eyes.

“It’s probably nothing,” I replied, but she gave me a look that said that wouldn’t do. I sighed and continued, “There was this guy. Diamond or something like that. He was some big shot in Uptown. I met him at the police ball last month and he offered me a job, or at least, I think that’s what it was. Maybe it was just help. I don’t know. He seemed like an alright sort of guy.”

“Was that who you were talking to when you wandered off?” Limerence asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. He was bankrolling the ball. I remember that much.”

Lim’s expression turned a bit grave. “Voluntas. You were talking to Diamante Voluntas.”

“That’s him. You know him?”

The librarian rested his hooves in front of himself and laid his chin on them. “Yes. He has...impeded...my father’s activities on a number of occasions. Though, I suppose impeded is a strong word. He outbid the Archivists on the acquisitions of several extremely powerful, extremely dangerous artifacts. None of them have seen the light of day in recent years, so I would assume he is simply a collector, but...well, you knew my father.”

“He never liked to have anything out of his control,” I affirmed. “Diamante is a thinker. He might be willing to help us if we can get in touch with him.”

Tourniquet spoke up. “I might be able to get a phone line into Uptown. The telephone system can’t be that different from the electrical grid, right? I’d just need to find the frequency that the big shield around Uptown is working on. If it works according to standard magical shielding principles, I can do that and then get a call out. Of course...um...Swift would...uh...oh...um, okay, maybe it’s not such a good idea...”

“Gooo on,” I growled.

“I could...erm...I could maybe do it if Swift gets close enough. So I could feel the way the magical frequencies affect our connection.”

“Never easy with you, is it?” I grunted, getting to my hooves and pacing back and forth in front of the long table. “Is there somewhere we can get near the shield underground?”

Tourniquet’s eyes unfocused and the lights overhead began to pulse more quickly. After a short wait, she shook her head. “Somepony seems to be aware of the danger of letting anypony study the shield too closely. There are about three dozen sewer entrances in that area and all of them have either been sealed off or guarded well outside of where we’d need to be.”

“That leaves sneaking up above ground,” Taxi said, making a sour face.

“The Aroyo’s Ancestors seem to think we need to be out of the city for a bit and I’m inclined to agree with them,” I said. “Our trip to the Detrot P.D. is likely to have our enemies scrambling and us disappearing again will sow a bit more confusion. We’ll handle this when we get back and that’ll give the Aroyos time to find us a safe way to get near to the shield around Uptown.”

There was a soft tone overhead.

“That’ll be Short Sell, coming for his interrogation,” Tourniquet explained. Her cables lifted her out of her chair and she rose up out of sight, vanishing into the tangle of wires near the ceiling. “I’ll be up here. The prisoners still think I’m just a disembodied voice and I kinda like that.”

Dragging a chair out from the table, I pulled it to a place a few meters in front of the door and arranged it facing the entrance, then called out, “Could you bring the lights down low and center them on this area here? Sort of ‘mob interrogation’ effect?”

“I can do you one better, Detective!” Tourniquet replied.

Every light in the room clicked off, leaving us in complete darkness for a few seconds before something rattled overhead and a single light bulb dangling from a chain popped on just above the chair. I quickly tugged the plug out of my heart and zipped the pouch shut, feeling considerably rejuvenated as the cord was dragged out of sight.

“How do we play this, Sir?” Swift asked, self-consciously rubbing the scar on her chest.

“We play it straight. Short Sell has nothing to negotiate with,” I replied.

Swift looked confused for a moment, then her eyes lit up. “Should I use my ‘cooperation face’, Sir?”

“Leave some of that chicken stuck between your teeth and give him a whiff of your breath. Still...hold on the heavy stuff for a minute. I want to see if I can do this another way.”

The conversation was interrupted as the chamber door clanked open and Wisteria’s daughter—Jambalaya—tromped in with the pony I presumed to be Short Sell in tow. Jambalaya was looking as grumpy as ever, but her wild, shaggy mane was lightly combed and her horn had a layer of fresh polish. Even the juju bag around her neck was new; it was made from the velvet bag some high end liquor was sold in.

Meanwhile, her prisoner was a haughty little sack of pudge and piss, his nose held high as he strutted along like a righteous martyr for the cause. Short Sell was a pasty purple with a gritty green mane the color of cucumbers that’ve sat out a couple of days too long. Last I’d seen him, he was a few pounds heavier and his chins had a bit more bounce to them. Whatever Tourniquet was feeding them, it was probably a more balanced diet than the expensive booze and stuffed olives the rich, feckless, and easily bored tend to subsist on when they don’t have to worry about their looks or personality to attract a mate. I took a quick note of his cutie-mark; two pens laying side by side in a parallel line that looked like an equal sign.

I stood behind the chair, my face shaded by my mane in the stark, white light coming from the naked bulb. Limerence sat off to one side, looking bored, while Taxi continued combing her mane disinterestedly. Swift, meanwhile, leered at Short Sell as he trotted in; he paused at the sight of her, a bird’s thigh bone poking out of the side of her mouth.

“Jambalaya!” I exclaimed, trotting around the chair and sitting down with open legs. “It’s good to see you!”

The girl’s face lit up and she darted forward into the hug. “Crusada! Dey be sayin’ ye back! I and I be fearful ye dies out in de dark and wild!”

“Yeah, your mother said something similar. Why do they have you on ‘guard’ duty in here?” I asked. “I’d have thought with your mother back on her hooves she’d want you out there.”

The young Aroyo let out a soft grumble, her cheeks coloring. “I and I...be...be bein’ punished…” she mumbled.

“Punished is a strong word,” Tourniquet said, cooly. “Miss Wisteria simply wants you safe. Getting inebriated and stumbling around the magical waste zone is not a ‘safe’ activity.”

Jambalaya glared up at the darkness overhead. “I and I had booties on!”

“Drunkenly covering your hooves in duct tape isn’t an accepted method of avoiding magical contamination.”

“Sounds like a heck of a week. Too bad I’ve got to burn time with this waste of skin,—” I gestured towards Short Sell who jerked up with an indignant snort. “—or I might be inclined to come have a drink with you. You want to stick around for this?”

She cast a look over her shoulder at the banker and gave him a crooked grin. “Aye! I and I be fine watchin’ dis one squeal like a wee piggy.”

“If you were intent on killing me, I sincerely doubt you’d have kept me alive this long,” Short Sell snapped, though I thought I could detect a hint of fear in his voice. “I’ve been stuck in this pit for weeks now. If you need information, though, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement. I know lots of things about the goings on in this city...”

I took a few steps back behind the chair to make some room, ignoring him. “Jambalaya, would you mind?”

“Gladly says I!” the Aroyo replied. Her horn lit up and the hefty stallion was ripped off his hooves, flailing at the carpet as she lifted him over into the seat.

“Now then! Mister Short Sell. I’m...going to admit a thing. You’re right. We’re not going to kill you,” I said, trotting around to sit in front of him as he tried, unsuccessfully, to recover his dignity, smoothing his mane and wiping a bit of drool off his chin. “I could threaten you right now, but...honestly, the ponies around you are so dangerous that any threat would be overkill. Negotiating is impossible. Whatever you could offer me I couldn’t accept, because the only thing you want is your freedom and you’ll only have that after a lengthy prison sentence. There’s no authority for you to appeal to besides that pegasus sitting there beside you.”

He peered back at Swift who casually snapped the thigh bone she’d been gnawing in two, spitting half of it onto her hoof so she could suck the marrow out of the other. Sell swallowed, softly.

“So, what’d you bring me up here for?” he asked. “You’ve got nothing to offer and I’ve got no reason to help you.”

“Actually...I’m going to appeal to your better nature,” I replied, cheerfully.

Short Sell blinked a few times, his jowls jiggling as he tried to figure where I might be going with this.

“You’re the pony they call ‘Crusader’, aren’t you?” he asked after a brief consideration. “I remember from the Temple. Had a hat and coat then, but it’s you, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Some kinda cop?”

“Right again.”

Shifting his broad hips in the chair, he crossed his hooves, dropping into a low street twang that I hadn’t heard in years.

“I’m a member of a sex cult that regularly screwed and plucked every kind of creature you ever met and probably a few you ain’t. Didn’t know that nutty bitch Skylark was murderin’ em, but I knew they weren’t exactly in their right minds. Won’t matter to the judge, though, if I ever stand in front of one. I did it and I paid for it cuz there wasn’t anything else worth doing in this disgusting burg. What makes you think I’ve got a ‘better nature’?”

Taxi set her comb down and sighed. “Hardy, this guy is a sleaze. Are you sure you don’t want me to...you know—” She wiggled the tip of her toe at his neck.

“No worries, Sweets. He’s going to tell me what we want to know, because the alternative is death.”

Short Sell’s eyes widened a little and he blurted, “I thought you said you weren’t going to kill me!”

“I’m not,” I replied, then held my hooves out to my friends. “None of these ponies are going to hurt you. Not even those ponies upstairs. Nobody here is going to harm a hair on your head. Besides...it’s not even your death I’m worried about.”

His confusion deepened and I got the impression Short Sell wasn’t a pony who enjoyed a puzzle.

“Just what are you playing at here?” he demanded.

I strolled in a slow circle around his chair, letting my tail drag around his chins. He drew them up out of the way as I stopped behind him, trying to tilt his head back to see what I was doing. I settled my hooves on his flabby shoulders.

“Short Sell, I want to ask you a personal question and you should think carefully before you answer it.”

He said nothing, his beady little eyes hopping from one of my companions to the next, then back to me.

“What… do you care about?” I asked, softly.

“Why in Tartarus should I tell you, cop?”

“Oh, you don’t need to,” I murmured in his ear in a voice just above a whisper. Leaning forward, I let my weight settle on him a little, holding him in place. He smelled like prison soap and flop sweat. “I just wanted your mind turning over those things you care about. I want you thinking about them real carefully. Maybe you just care about yourself, but...somehow, I doubt it. There’s something, somewhere, that you love.”

He tried to shake me off, but I was stronger, so he settled for hunching away from me. Still, I could see him starting to consider my words, still wondering where I might be going with all of this. For that matter, Swift and Limerence were both looking bemused, too.

“Now, Short Sell...you have that thing you love firmly in your mind?” I asked, narrowing one eye at him. His face told me he had. “Good! Think on that thing. Think of how you adore it...and now I want you to think of your frozen, preserved corpse clutching it on a ball of icy, lifeless rock until the end of time. Just lock that image in your head.”

The defiant look in his eyes wavered for a moment, then hardened. “What the deuce are you going on about?”

Stepping back from him, I casually ran a hoof through his greasy mane, leaving it disheveled. “Me? Nothing. Just making conversation. On the other hoof, the prison—that little disembodied voice who has been making sure you are fed and comfortable—predicts that the entirety of Equestria will be dead inside of five months. Everything. All life. You. Me. Every living thing, frozen to death.”

“Actually, Detective, at current rates of cooling it may be more like four and a half months. Temperatures haven’t really begun to drop precipitously, yet.”

“Thank you, Tourniquet,” I said, moving around in front of Short Sell. I sat down in front of him again. “Now...are you seeing that thing you love, Mister Short Sell?”

Funny thing about fear. Most ponies, for being such an olfactory species, don’t think about how they smell terribly often. Civilization beats it into your brain that you soap and deodorize, but when a pony is afraid there’s a scent that goes with it. It’s an acrid tang, and it comes out in sweat and tears. Fear comes in lots of flavors, but there’s a difference between the scent of worry and mortal terror.

I inhaled deep, and I knew then that I’d found my lever. His nod was barely perceptible, but it was there, and that’s all I needed.

“If you want somepony to stop the death of this world, so maybe one day, you see that thing you love again, then you’re going to answer some questions. If you do, I can promise I’ll do my damndest to make sure you live to see that judge. I’ll stand up there beside you and say ‘Here was one pony who cared enough that even though he is a monster, doomed and damned, he still fought to save what he loved’.”

“Y-you’ll do that?” he stammered, looking up at me with what was probably the first real vestige of hope he’d felt in awhile. .

“Damn skippy. First things first, though. Gotta save that world.”

His gaze hardened a little. “What makes you think you can? You’ve got no idea what sort of people will want your head for killing Skylark…”

“But you do...and I’m betting they promised you some things. For instance! Somepony, somewhere, was passing out invitations to a big ’ol bash in Uptown and it seems like the invitees were financially savvy colts and fillies happy to contribute to making sure nopony looked at certain things too closely. I want to know what your part was.”

Short Sell closed his eyes and his breathing hitched for a moment, then he replied, “It was one of about four hundred bits of mail we get every week, ‘cept the secretaries always let these through. Funny little yellow envelope, high end stationary, and four dots side by side connected with lines in the upper corner.”

I glanced at Swift and she already had her notepad out, scribbling away.

Sell continued, “Them envelopes always come with something special. Some little instruction, then a reward. Never nothing too big. Make sure this pony gets audited or that pony catches a cold on such and such day, then a suggestion to throw money in some investment account that just ‘happens’ to double or triple in value two weeks later.”

“What did the particular envelope say?” I asked, keenly.

“That’s what was funny. This one says ‘In the event of national disaster, we’ll keep you safe. Head to Uptown.’ That was it. It come in about six months ago, but there was no instructions or nothing.”

Limerence let out a snort of derision. “I can understand the gangers we’ve come across who’ve received these notes taking them seriously, but...you’re a business pony. I find it odd that you would simply take such advice on faith, without trying to find out where it is coming from.”

“Believe me, you decide you’re going to ignore that first note, then find yourself missing out on enough bits to buy yourself a new summer home when the trade market opens on Monday, you start taking them seriously. Then you hear from a few ponies in important places that they’ve been getting similar notes, and it ain’t a matter of ‘serious’ no more. It’s survival. Once something becomes a matter of survival, you stop asking questions.”

“Survival?” Swift asked, scratching her head. “How is a bunch of dumb investments survival?”

Short Sell gave her a look like she was something he scraped off his hoof. “You obviously never been rich before, kid. It ain’t all shows and dances. Half the time all you’re doing is trying to fend of every other rich bastard below you.”

“My family has money—” she started to say, but he cut her off.

“No, they don’t. Not real money. Real money is more than just a number. It’s an idea. If I had enough, I could kill damn near anypony I liked, in public, and smile as everypony on the street took big wads of cash to forget about it. If I had enough money, they might not even believe it was me. They’d think it was a hoax! Get me? Real money is immunity.”

“You don’t look very ‘immune’ to me,” Taxi murmured, sweeping a hoof at the ceiling.

“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly rich at the moment, now am I? You wanna be rich, you gotta make sure every other prick in the game is playing by the rules. Somepony breaks the rules...or worse, breaks the game...and then you’re all up the same shitty little river.”

“And that’s what they’ve done, isn’t it? They broke the game,” I said, considering our situation for another moment. “Whoever set all of this up has corralled the entirety of Detrot’s elite into the center of the city, behind an impenetrable shield and left the rest of us to freeze to death out here.”

Short Sell’s jaw clenched and I could tell that whatever question he had was going to cost him some ego.

“You. Crusader. Whatever the blast your name is. I’m betraying people who probably eat their dinners with the bones of their enemies for tableware, so I want to know; what are you going to do?”

Act 3 Chapter 12 : She's Got A Ticket To Ride And She Don't Care

There is sometimes a mistaken impression that the Crusades were a war exclusively between ponies and dragons. While ponies and dragons certainly made up the majority of the fighting forces and the victims, they were by no means the only souls to suffer. Ponykind, being a naturally social species, had spent a considerable amount of the last several centuries making friends with a range of sapients from all across the globe. Equestria has always had a very open immigration policy and it is a society comprised of many different hooved, clawed, toe-ed, and pawed creatures.

Dozens of species signed up when the dragon lords invaded, ready to do their part to save the land they’d made their home.

There are many accounts of diamond dog combat units employed to sap enemy fortifications, minotaur bruisers for front line demolitions, and griffin war-bands fighting alongside their pony neighbors. There are even long standing rumors of changeling queens throwing their support behind Equestria to protect their food supply.

Despite their overwhelming numbers and incredibly diverse, creative martial methods making maximum use of all the various being at their disposal, it was barely enough. Only a few extremely risky, desperate actions saved Equestria from becoming a scorched slave pit lorded and fought over by dragons.

After the war, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna dedicated considerable resources to making sure those injured fighting for their country were taken care of. That said, many were beyond the reach of even the finest healing magics to restore them to their original bodies.

For those who could not be healed, for whatever reasons, alternatives were found.

-The Scholar

I wished I’d had an answer for Short Sell.

In truth, heading to Canterlot was desperation itself. There were probably hundreds or thousands of ponies out there thinking similar things, but how many of them had my resources that weren’t in Canterlot for the Summer Sun Celebration when the Darkening happened? Probably not enough. Certainly none that might have an actual inkling of what was going on.

That left me with a certain amount of weighty responsibility.

Whatever his failings, Short Sell was right about one thing; the game had been upended, leaving the players to settle their differences without the benefit of agreed upon rules.

“So, what then?” Taxi asked as we trotted back up the stairwell, leaving Tourniquet to handle Cerise and Jambalaya to return Short Sell to his cell. “Canterlot?”

Rather than answer, I turned to Limerence. “You know about the Bull. How long you figure it will take us if they’re pushing?”

Limerence looked a bit pensive. “Based on what I know about the Express, we will be risking our sanity simply riding it. You have more experience in that arena, I imagine. The effects of traveling aboard the Express are unpredictable, but the conductor is known to always be correct regarding arrival times, so if you want specifics, ask her. That said, no journey aboard the Express has ever been clocked at longer than three hours, regardless of distance.”

I couldn’t suppress a flinch. “Three hours there and three hours back?”

“Per what little actual information exists, yes, at the outside it will be three hours.”

“Oog…”

“Hardy, I’m kinda curious,” Taxi murmured, “Why would she hang around? I mean, she likes to roam. What kept her in Detrot after the Darkening?”

“No passengers, most likely,” I replied. “The Bull doesn’t like to run without passengers. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”

“Sir, what exactly is this ‘Bull’?” Swift asked. I looked over to find her trotting up the stairs beside me with her eyes closed; she seemed perfectly comfortable as we reached the landing, turning towards the next set of steps without missing a beat.

“It’s a train. Sort of. Loosely speaking, it’s a train. Kid...what are you doing?”

She tilted her head, peering over at me through her eyelids. I got the distinct impression she hadn’t noticed they weren’t open. “What do you mean?”

A trio of fillies zipped down the stairs passed us. Swift stepped out of their way a full five seconds before they would have plowed straight into her.

“You’ve got your eyes shut. How are you doing that?!” I snapped.

She giggled and touched her eye, then blinked them open. A soft glimmer of light seemed to be floating in her pupils. “Sorry, sir. You’ve got no idea what it’s like in here. I can see so much more! More than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If I think about it, I can hear heartbeats and...and feel our hooves on the floor and see the sky overhead! There’s warm laundry and cooking and the smell of spices and this is the most amazingly fantastically neatest thing in the...oooh...”

She danced in a little circle, smiling ear to ear as she stared off at into space at something overhead. Her hooves seemed a bit unsteady and she almost tumbled onto her butt, just barely catching herself on one of the railings.

“Tourniquet, did you slip Swift something?” I called out, raising my voice a little. “She’s acting like she’s had a hit of Beam.”

“Of course not, Detective. I was a little loopy, too, that first day they plugged me into the mains. I’m monitoring her brain and trying to limit how much information she gets, but it’s hard. She has to adjust, but I don’t think that’ll take very long. It’s hard to say. I was never able to sense quite this much when I was just a prison. I think my mom built me with tolerances waaay above what I strictly needed and I never got to use them. Life energy isn’t near so tasty as hydroelectric.”

“Yeah, but why is she acting like she’s stoned? I’d like a thorough explanation of this ‘connection’ you two are sharing if it’s going to be messing with my partner’s brain meats.”

“I’m not stoned, Sir! It’s just that everything is sooo incredibly incredible I can’t begin to—”

“Shut it, kid. Tourniquet?”

“It’s super complicated, Detective. I still don’t know everything about how I work. Mom was kinda stingy with information on all my internal sub-systems. I think she was afraid I might get out of her control or something. The best analogy I can think of is that I’m a car and Swift is the driver. I give her information about the road, or the conditions, and she gives me directions. Her windscreen just got a whole lot bigger and the car is about fifty times as fast, so she’s getting used to driving.”

I walked on in silence for another minute, then something occurred to me.

“Tourniquet?”

“Yes, Detective?”

“You’re dumping information into Swift’s brain, right?”

“Yeees...I thought I said that.”

“How much information are the Ladybugs pumping into you?”

There was a very, very long pause. I started to wonder if she was actually going to answer me.

At last she asked, “Do you mean back when they were out in the city? Or while they’re right here?”

“You know exactly what I what mean, Tourniquet.”

“You want to know if I could I maybe be the scariest, most pervasive, invasive, all powerful surveillance network in the history of the world.”

I set my jaw and nodded. “That’d be the question on the tip of my tongue, yes.”

Another pause, this one shorter.

“Only if Swift told me to be…”

Speak of that particular little devil, I looked over to find Swift was gone. Turning around, I caught sight of her standing about three meters back, staring at the wall, gently stroking it with her hoof.

“Sooo pretty…” she murmured.

I groaned and put a hoof over my eyes. “Ugh...Tourniquet, could you get somepony to bundle us up some food for the trip? Oh, and could you get Mags here?”

“Will do, Detective!” she replied, with a bit more cheer now that the conversation was no longer regarding her status as a threat to planetary privacy or international security.

“Terrifying conversations aside...am I to understand you intend on taking your ward with us?” Limerence asked.

“Not if I can help it, but I’m not leaving her here any longer than necessary. You told me it’ll just be a day, right?”

“Thereabouts, yes,” he replied. “That does assume we manage to get to Canterlot in that period, then find whatever it is you believe we are likely to discover, then make our way back without incident...”

“Yes, yes, yes...assuming all of that, I think I can convince her to stay here for a day or two without me. If nothing else, she’ll have some kids to play with and I can have Wisteria look after her. In the meantime…” I trotted over and wedged my nose underneath my partner. She let out a high pitched squeal as she was hoisted off her hooves and I rolled her across my shoulders. Her wings flapped a couple of times, then she lay there pawing at the air like a kitten who's gotten into the rum.

“S-sir! I can fly just by thinking about it! Whooo! I’m f-flying sideways and upside down!”

With only a bit of guidance from Tourniquet, we made our way back upstairs into the common areas of the Aroyo’s new home. It was just closing in on dinner time and somepony had wheeled a massive table into the center of one of the hallways, leaving room on either side for a buffet line. Great heaps of food were piled on, from children’s snacks to bowls of cheese-doodles to steaming casseroles. It was a feast and every door along the hall was thrown open, with ponies, griffins, zebras, and all manner of friendly soul eating in each other’s cells.

Grabbing a plate, I left Swift slumped against a wall, giggling to herself as I joined the queue for just long enough to get myself some pickles, a heap of potato chips, and some fried hay. It was something of a new experience, if only because I kept catching smiles aimed in my direction every time I turned my head. Still, nopony approached me or tried to make conversation. The Aroyos were the sort of ponies who held ‘Mind Your Own Business’ as a sacred oath. That or Tourniquet was quietly asking them to leave me be again. Either way, I appreciated the space.

While my other friends were grabbing plates to stuff their bellies, I slouched down beside Swift and tried to pick up threads of conversation, ears twitching this way and that.

“—he be still here. Traitor to de crown or whatever de beastly idiots in Uptown be sayin’, he be alright in I’s book.”

“—and Wisteria says she’s just like a little girl, but she kept a pallet of tomato juice from falling on my head that would have squashed me flat yesterday. You find it weird there’s somepony always looking over your shoulder like—”

“—and then Clean Bill be sayin’ to me ‘What if we all be dyin’ here?’ and says I ‘Better to be dyin’ wid full bellies and friends!”

A leg brushed against mine as Limerence sat down beside me, holding a plate balanced on his hoof covered in a selection of fresh fruits.

“My father would approve of this, I think,” he mused, watching the feasting.

“Knowing his very liberal attitudes towards the law, he’d have found a fire at a tax office funny,” I replied and my friend shrugged, but didn’t disagree.

Taxi broke free from the buffet line, her plate piled high and one of her saddlebags bulging suspiciously as she trotted over to join us.

“Sweets, you just ate downstairs. This was supposed to be a quick snack,” I said.

“Are you a cop or not? Free food is free food.”

A flash of pale feathers darted out of the crowd and skidded to a halt, panting heavily, half of a turkey leg sticking out of her muzzle as she slumped onto her stomach at my hooves.

Plucking the roasted leg of meat out of her mouth, she sat up and tore off a long strip, tilting her head back to swallow. “Phew...Har’dy! This place be the best!”

“I thought you were enjoying spending time with Slip Stitch?” I teased, patting the tuft on her tail.

“Oooh, be you thinking we might be getting him to come here?”

“If we did, it’d be the best party in all of equine history, but I think there are other things going on which might preclude that. Did you find some kids?”

She nodded around her meal. “A couple! They be talking funny, but they be nice and we go for a fly to the top floor!”

“Heh...good on you, honey,” I said, trying to figure how I was going to ask her what was going through my mind. Thankfully, she didn’t notice the awkward silence that followed, absorbed as she was in ripping the turkey leg to shreds. I opened my mouth to say something several times, only to stall out before I could figure precisely what needed to be said.

The truth was I wanted her with me more than anything in the whole world. Having her out of my sight was going to hurt for reasons I couldn’t really fathom. By the same token, I wanted her safe and Canterlot was going way outside of my definition of ‘safe’, edging well into ‘hideously, suicidally dangerous’.

“Mags,” I began, then hesitated as she looked up at me with those big, innocent eyes. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to bite this particular bullet before the guilt could really hit me.

“Mags...I need you to stay here for a day. Forty-eight hours at the most, if everything goes right.”

That came out all in such a rush that, for several seconds, I wasn’t sure if she’d understood. Slowly, she lowered her turkey leg and gave me an appraising stare. I shuffled my hooves as I got the funniest feeling she was deciding which of my lungs to tear out first.

“Egg Pony. I be your tribe lord. You don’t be leaving your tribe lord,” she said, very slowly, like she was explaining something basic to a child.

“I’m going to be back for you. I have to go to Canterlot, though and the only way there might hurt you to ride.”

Mag’s tail tucked under her butt and she let the leg of meat drop to the floor, then leaned up and wrapped her little forelegs around my neck. “You be not leaving me here, though, right? Not...not like my dad be leaving me?”

“I promise,” I murmured, gathering her up against me. I could feel her little heart thumping against mine and wanted nothing more than to take her away from all this violence. “I’ll be back. You know Wisteria?”

“The pony with the pony chick?”

“Yeah, Wisteria and Gumbo. You’re going to be staying here with them and when I get back, you’ll ride with me again. While you’re here, I want you to listen to her. What she tells you to do, you do, no questions. Got me?”

Mags thought about it for several seconds, then nodded. Reaching up, she gave me a hard poke with one of her claws just over my heart plug. “You be not dying, Har’dy. That be an order from your tribe lord!”

“I won’t. I want to watch you grow up in a world with sunshine, kiddo. Stay safe for me. I’ll be back soon.”

Wisteria stood, straight shouldered, her wings tucked against her sides as I trotted out of the ante-chamber of Supermax into twilight. A sizable rucksack sat at her hooves, stuffed to bulging. Gumbo wasn’t with her; probably off for a nap. That made me a bit sad, for some reason. The little tyke was five kinds of adorable.

Swift was draped across my back, occasionally wiggling a wing or reaching towards something in front of her face that only she could see. Assurances from Tourniquet that my partner would be fine once the construct could figure out how to optimize how much information she was getting were only so comforting considering Swift was still three sheets to the wind.

I couldn’t help a sigh as the doors of the bustling little village slammed shut behind us, leaving only the slightly chilly, dry air of the wastes surrounding Supermax. A dust devil swirled across the parking lot between the head of the Aroyo’s security and myself.

“So, Crusada...dis be it, eh?”

“Seems like. I wish I could stick around.”

Leaning to one side, she peered at Swift. “Ye pegasus seem a bit broken Crusada…”

“A minor technical malfunction that I’ve been assured will correct itself once we’re on our way. You got what I asked for?”

She nodded, giving the sack a light kick. “Ammunition for ye guns, what walkie-talkies we be scavengin’, batteries, inv-er-ter for ye heart, and two weeks provision.”

“Two weeks?” Limerence inquired, tipping his horn towards the large bag. “Surely you don’t think we could be trapped outside the city for that long.”

“No, but I’m not taking chances. It’s at least a two week walk back from Canterlot, assuming good speed.”

“Lying to Mags isn’t particularly healthy, Hardy,” Taxi murmured.

“I didn’t lie to her, Sweets. I’m going to get back here, as quick as I can.”

“I didn’t just mean for her, doofus,” she snapped, giving me a firm bop upside the head. “Why do you think I haven’t fought harder for you to find that girl somewhere else to stay?”

My ears lay flat. “Your talent is cheating.”

“Duh! Even if I have to drag your dead body back here, stick my hoof up your backside, and work you like a puppet, you are not letting her down, for either of your sakes. You hear me?”

“I’ll be sending you my shrink’s bill when he has to dig that image out of my mind with a chainsaw.”

Wisteria tapped her juju bag with her toe. “Crusada...I and I knows ye been avoidin’ de Ancestors. Dey be insistin’ ye see them when ye get back. Dis time dey say ‘or die screamin’. Somet’in like dat. Sometimes dey hard to understand.”

“Alright, can do.”

Reaching back, she tugged a beer bottle out of a pouch hanging off her side and offered it to me. I took it and peered inside. A Ladybug was sitting in there, wings buzzing nervously as it tried to make itself very small. Tilting the lid up, I saw somepony had punched holes in it.

“What’s this then?” Limerence asked. “I was under the impression the Ladybugs wouldn’t leave this building due to whatever magics are emanating from Uptown.”

“Dis be...eh…’volunteer’, says de one called ‘Queenie’. It go wid ye into de darkness and be tellin’ if ye die. If ye walks dead, we be wantin’ to know.”

Raising the bottle, I stared at my tiny prisoner. “I take it if I pop the top off, you’re going to make a run for it?”

The insect bobbed its whole body affirmatively. I slid the bottle into my coat pocket and tilted my head back towards Supermax. “Wisteria...you know that little griffin I came in with? I need you to take care of her. Foalsit for a day or two. Teach her what you can. She’s stubborn and pissy and likes her meat raw. Don’t let her chase city birds. They give her a stomach ache and I don’t want her getting mites.”

“Will do, Crusada,” Wisteria answered, “We also be lookin’ after de Chief o’ Police daughter. Heh! What gifts ye bring us when ye return from de holy city?”

“Hopefully some sunny days.”

“Damn,” I muttered under my breath, pressing my forehead against the back window of the Night Trotter.

“Missing Mags?” Taxi asked.

“Yeah,” I sighed, watching the approaching line of buildings from far off. “We’re coming back to get her before we do anything else. I don’t like having her out of my sight a minute longer than necessary.”

She made an amused noise with the corner of her mouth. “I never took you for the paternal type, Hardy. It kinda suits you.”

“I never wanted kids, Sweets,” I replied. “I just want to be sure she’s okay. Whatever happens, if we crawl out the other side of this and I can look down at her and say she’s better off for having known me, I think I can take whatever punishment the Princesses or whoever want to throw my way. It won’t surprise me if someone turns me over to the dragons for execution just for having this.” I gestured at the Crusader attached to my leg.

Limerence, who’d been sitting quietly studying the landscape added his voice to the conversation. “I must admit, despite her somewhat aggressive temperament and the carnivore flatulence which has—on several occasions—left me dancing outside the bathroom while the toxic cloud clears, ‘your’ chick has a certain refreshingly direct curiosity about the world. I can see her making an excellent police officer one day.”

Before I could respond, there was a soft grunt and Swift sat up, rubbing her forehead with one knee.

“Sir...w-what happened?”

“Wish I could say, kid. How are you feeling?”

She shook her head, trying to clear it. “Like that time in the Academy where my room-mate dared me to drink twenty cups of coffee. I think it’s fading, though.”

“You remember anything?”

Swift cringed, massaging her temples with both hooves. “Um...oog...sort of. My head feels like a balloon that’s a little too full.” She suddenly sat up straight, her eyes wide. “Oh my gosh! There’s a full map of the city sewers in my head! Why is that there?!”

“Probably a gift from Tourniquet,” Taxi replied as we turned off the highway and back amongst the city streets. “Easy escape routes and such. Incidentally, speaking of ‘escape routes’, I tried to call the Essy Office. No luck. The Office was just inside the zone of Uptown that’s now locked off. However, Tourniquet could get me a line out to my friend’s house. While you guys were getting food, I called her and she actually picked up. She was surprised, lemme tell you, but she clued me in to where the Bull is probably sitting.”

“We’re headed there now?”

“Yep! The day before the Darkening, somepony bought fourteen tons of coal up near Hide Park using raw, unfinished gemstones. There’s one of the Bull’s hidden stations near there and according to the map my Stilettos assembled, there’s only been hoof-traffic through that area. It’s mostly abandoned. If the Bull was there, nopony heard it leave.”

I gave her a cock-eyed smile. “Your Stilettos?”

“Yeah, mine. At least until Granny Glow is back on her hooves. You want to argue it, I can have Edina use you for whip practice.”

My city felt so empty.

I longed to see crowds of ponies out enjoying the night; standing together under bus-stops, greeting their neighbors on street corners, or drinking coffee in the deserted cafés. Of course, that would have suggested a sense of normalcy and a pony had only to look up at the sky to see that things weren’t normal. If they were ever normal again, I’d probably do a little dance.

Hide Park was outside of the Heights, so also outside of Stiletto territory in one of several relatively safe no-pony’s lands unclaimed by any of the city factions. The park itself was a mile of lovely, wooded greenery interwoven with paths and surrounding one of the few truly beautiful bodies of water inside Detrot.

As we approached, I could see fires through the trees and what appeared to be some kind of encampment surrounding Hidden Lake.

A pair of guards stood out front of the park gates, side by side in the manner of the Royal Guard. They even had a set of slap-dash royal armor, dented and soiled. Above their heads, over the wrought iron fence, somepony had painted ‘Equestrian Free Republican Army Recruiting Ground’. The two seemed to be ignoring us.

“Do we have any reason to go into Hide Park?” I asked Taxi.

“Nope. The station is over there,” she replied, pointing towards an alley overflowing with garbage about two thirds of the way down the road.

“Good, because I think I want to avoid that bunch. Constitutional diarchy is fine for me, thanks.”

“What is a ‘Republican’?” Swift asked, scratching her mane.

“A group of opportunistic, idealistic idiots who spring up every few centuries,” Limerence grumbled. “After Nightmare Moon’s banishment, Princess Celestia attempted to abdicate the throne. A group of nobles offered her an ‘alternative’ form of government involving representative rule. A hundred years on, the entire system was so corrupted by influence brokers, bribery, and military interest that Celestia was forced to take over again.”

Swift’s eyes widened. “What...what happened to them?”

Limerence blew a strand of blonde hair away from his muzzle and rolled his eyes. “The Republicans in power at the time were bribed by weapons dealers to declare war on the griffin nation. Before the war could ensue, Celestia came out of retirement, de-escalated the conflict, and had the leaders of the movement stripped of lands and titles. Since then, every few centuries you see some fool crack a history book and fail completely to understand the lessons therein.”

My partner leaned back in her seat, looking out at the two scruffy ‘guards’ standing outside the camp. “I wish I’d paid more attention in history class…”

“If they taught such things in your average history class, I believe the world might be a better place,” Limerence replied.

“There’s a car-park a block down that faces away from the road. Let’s head there.”

We parked up on the second floor from the top of the four story concrete car-park, too high for hoof-traffic to see us and hidden from any passing pegasi. It wasn’t perfect, but cover is cover and the car park was empty of anything more significant than an old station wagon; probably an oversight on the part of the little army outside, if they could be called that. I checked the overlook and I could have picked off their guards at that range with Masamane without holding my breath.

Once back down at street level, we moved slowly down the block opposite Hide Park. It was a row of empty, boutique store-fronts, most with ‘tenant wanted’ signs in the windows; sad remnants of somepony trying to turn the area into a high end shopping mall. It did make a decent back-drop for a sneak-by. Granted, I don’t think the Republican Army’s guards were all that intelligent to begin with. Half-way up the street, hopping garbage can to bus stop, I realized the one on the left was actually asleep on his hooves while his companion was wreathed in a thin haze of smoke from a cigarette clenched between his teeth; Zap smoke. They probably couldn’t have guarded a grilled cheese sandwich, much less an armed camp.

We still kept to the shadows until the alley, hoping there were no other would-be observers out there who might give us away. We hadn’t seen any P.A.C.T. patrols, but on the dirty streets after the Darkening it didn’t take a lightning strike or a blast of magical hellfire to put an incautious pony down.

At the alley, I stepped in and drew a breath. The garbage hadn’t been collected in over a week, but there was still a little path towards the back that suggested at least some minimal movement in and out.

“Sir?”

“You smell that?” I asked.

She sniffed at the air, then nodded. “Something smells like...burnt rubber and gym shorts.”

“The Bull is here. Haven’t smelled that since Juni and I had to get ahead of a mafioso’s kid fleeing the region by air chariot after he’d killed his marefriend. Still stinks. Not half so bad as the ride, mind you.”

Taxi made a soft gagging noise behind me. “I swear, she must not have had a nose when she started riding The Bull…”

“Who?” Swift asked.

“The conductor,” I replied. “You’re in for a treat, kid. She’s going to make you insane or be your best friend until the end of time.”

“Probably both,” Taxi put in.

Shoving aside a piece of sheet aluminum, I found the entrance to the hidden station. It was a pair of closed metal grates with the words ‘Express To Tartarus’ sloppily scrawled over them in spray paint. Grabbing the hoof-hold in my teeth, I hauled it open and a warm, subterranean breeze hit me in the face.

The stink multiplied several times over. Taxi rooted her jar of menthol cream out of her saddlebag and offered it to me. I twisted the top off, dabbing a bit of mint scent under my nose, then passing it to Swift. Once we were all suitably armored against the stink, I pulled my trusty flashlight out of my pocket and poked it into the hole.

I could make out a set of stairs and a bit of flickering, artificial light somewhere up ahead. The rickety steps were covered in a thick layer of dirt and rust, but seemed stable enough, despite a bit of groaning and squealing as I set my weight on it.

Swift put a leg on mine and whispered, “Sir...are we sure this pony is safe?”

“I’m as safe as they come!”

If I’d had my safety off, we’d have found ourselves walking to Canterlot.

Fifteen years on the force and I’d only met a hoof-full of ponies who could creep up on me. One of them was a zebra who wore a dress made of rope. Another was a serial killer with a penchant for painting in flesh. Neither of them was quite so stealthy as the cheery little earth pony filly who was standing right behind us, a bag of groceries balanced between her shoulders. For a pony who smelled as bad as she did, the Bull’s conductor was a sneaky little fiend.

She was about Limerence’s height, give or take a couple inches and wearing a smock and overalls that were indescribably dirty; bright red stains and other substances best not identified streaked her entire body, matting her orange mane into a gritty mess.

I’d seen her clean on one occasion and knew her fur was actually an attractive eggshell-white, but the filth clinging to her left only a couple of shades lighter than your average sewer run-off, with a few spots of her actual color showing through above her tail. The only clean bit of her was a pair of thick-lensed glasses perched on her nose that made her eyes look like she was peering at you through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

“Mephi, I swear! I almost plugged you!” I barked, jumping away from the hole in the ground before I could pitch muzzle first into it. “You can’t sneak up on ponies like that!”

“Of course I can! So long as ponies insist on being so totally oblivious, how can I not? Besides...if you shot me, that would answer so many questions!” she squeaked, turning around and setting down her groceries. “Anyway, that’s what you get for being away so long! And you, too, Miss Sweet Shine! I haven’t seen either of you in what...two weeks?”

“Try five years,” I said, dryly.

“Ah. Same difference!” she replied, pushing her thick-rimmed glasses to the bridge of her nose. “Time...time is irrelevant! I’ll have it cracked one day and then we’ll all live together in a big house at the end of the universe!”

Dropping onto my haunches, I quickly recomposed myself. Looking over at my partner, I found her with her gun-bit in her teeth, wings spread for flight. Limerence had one hoof inside of his vest, where he was doubtless clutching something hideously lethal.

“Stand down, guys. This is who we’re here to meet,” I murmured.

My partner’s nose wrinkled and she took her hoof off her gun’s safety. She was trying to hide a look of disgust, but it wasn’t easy; the little mare had a scent that could be generously described as eye-watering.

“Swift? Lim? May I present Mephitica...the Bull’s conductor, engineer, ticket taker, and handler.”

Mephitica hopped toward and grasped both of their hooves, giving them vigorous shakes. “You can call me Mephi! I’m ever so happy to meet you! Again. Or is this the first time we’ve met? Hard to say! The magic eight ball is still turning. Come! Come! Let's get the groceries downstairs and let me clean some of this off on something that isn’t other ponies. It’s so nice to finally have some passengers!”

Without waiting for a response, she snatched up her shopping and pranced down into the hole, calling back over her shoulder, “Excuse the smell! I needed to go get dinner and didn’t have time for a shower. The water has been off in this quarter for two whole days! Or...well...maybe it was never on. I can’t remember...” Her voice faded as she disappeared into the dark.

Limerence and Swift both looked down at the hooves she’d shaken, then back at me before surreptitiously wiping their toes off on the floor of the alley.

“Sir...I can smell that even with the mint stuff on my face!” Swift complained, covering her stomach with one hoof. “Was that dried blood all over her?”

“And bile. Probably a fair bit of saliva, too. You get used to it,” I replied, then thought for a second and decided a correction was in order, “Actually, that was a lie. You’re probably going to be able to smell her every time you think about today for the rest of your life.”

“It’s not her fault, really,” Taxi added at Swift’s horrified expression, pulling a half-used roll of paper towels off one of the heaps of garbage, ripping off a clean sheet and holding it out for my partner and librarian to clean themselves with. “Her job...or lifestyle or whatever you want to call it...makes it hard to worry about little things like being soaked in bodily fluids. It goes with the territory, actually.”

Swift sucked her lower lip between her teeth and turned to me. “Sir...what does she mean?”

I considered telling her. I really did. For all of two seconds.

“You know, kid, I think I currently owe you one. In fact, I’m going to have our sweet host take you on a little tour of our accommodations once we’re underway. You’ll have a blast.”

“Why do I suddenly not trust you, Sir?”

“Because you’re getting wiser in your old age.”

The four of us descended, following the smell of Mephitica with a certain amount of reluctance on Swift’s part. Limerence seemed to be relatively at ease, but then he had an inkling of what he was in store for. Taxi—who was carrying our provisions—was either unflapped or pretending so hard she was risking a sprain.

The stairway was unlit, but high enough that none of us were required to duck. My flashlight played over tiled walls and broken light fixtures set in little nooks on either side of the steps. It spoke to an era of dreams long since dead and buried.

“Sir? What was all this?” Swift asked, pausing to touch a badly tarnished metal plaque inlaid into the wall. It said ‘Station #165’ in looping letters and numerals.

“A big idea that didn’t work near so well as everypony hoped,” I replied. “Back during the war, the Princesses figured it might be worthwhile if there was a massive train network under the whole of Equestria that the dragons couldn’t destroy and that would be safe from the overland predators. It was a pretty good notion, actually, if it’d worked.”

Swift spread her wings a little and shook the dust from them, then asked, “Why didn’t it?”

“Honestly? I don’t know,” I replied. “Seems like it should have.”

Limerence spoke up, dragging his hoof along the wall then examining the dust. “Money, Detective. The issue was one of money. Half-way through the project, the corporation in charge went bankrupt. Their resources, particularly the steel they were laying, was re-purposed for the construction of weapons. After the war, the public rather lost interest. No call for it with the national highway network developing as it was. It left a significant number of stations and rails, but few desirable destinations; largely army bases, far removed cities like our own, and so on.”

“Huh. I guess it makes sense they gave it to the Bull,” I murmured as we reached the bottom of the stairs and started down a long hall. Every few meters the words ‘Station #165’ were carved into the wall. “It’s not as though it wasn’t deserved.”

“Indeed. I do find it odd nopony has attempted to occupy these tunnels...”

“Not that odd,” I said. “They’re usually sealed unless the Bull is there and if it is, the smell keeps most ponies away. It’d take a bit more than a pair of bolt cutters to get through that grate upstairs.”

The smell was getting stronger the closer we got to the source. Down in the subterranean environs, with no fans running to disperse it, the stink was strong enough to choke a goat; sweat, blood, rotten cheese, and a hint of slightly old legumes.

At last, we reached the final step and the tunnel opened out.

“Sir...Sir, what’s that noise?” Swift asked, in a whisper. I cocked an ear and grinned.

From somewhere ahead, I could hear a soft rumble that shook through the floor under my hooves. After several seconds it would pause, then a sound like a piping tea-kettle buried under several pillows would roll through the hall.

“That would be our ride, kid.”

Cantering ahead a little quicker, I finally saw the end of the hall. Buzzing white fluorescent light poured through an arch with a faded banner dangling from a bit of string down one side. I could just make out the words ‘Equestrian Subway Grand Opening!’ in yellowed script on the old canvas.

“Huh...I suppose somepony tried to celebrate,” Taxi commented. “That or somepony had a big party planned and nopony showed up.”

“I imagine one of the steelworkers hung it as a joke the day they were all fired. I would have,” I replied.

We emerged into a long room with a few benches set alongside a high platform and a pair of parallel rails coming out one tunnel and disappearing into another. Every surface was layered in white tile that caught the light from the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead; brutal, simple, styling, but extremely durable and designed to survive a prolonged exposure to a public that’d never come.

The ‘chuff chuff’ of an engine rattled the benches in their fittings and I felt Swift bump into my side as she unconsciously drew in close, peering in all directions. She had the Hailstorm draped across her back, but the turrets weren’t moving and it didn’t seem to be charged. If it was, I would have worried strenuously for what was about to happen.

With a clatter that shook the nails in my shoes, the mighty engine number zero-zero-one moved into sight. I swallowed and shut my eyes as a blast of steam that smelled like hot morning breath washed over my body.

In the dim light of the station, it was difficult to make out the whole of the beast. The vague outlines of an old style, coal driven steam locomotive could be seen through the thick fog roiling around us. Swift trotted forward, curiously waving at the air in front of her muzzle to try to get a better look as condensation began to form in my fur that smelled just as bad as everything else.

“Sir? It’s...it’s just a train, right?” she asked as the Bull came to a stop. Reaching out, she tapped one of the rails running down the side of the central boiler.

An eyeball—iris red as a rose and pupil as big as Swift’s head—slowly opened on the surface of the engine. It blinked down at her, then squinted. The giant eye and my tiny partner regarded one another calmly for several seconds before Swift let out a soft keening noise somewhere between a whimper and a sob.

I trotted over and sat down beside her as a vent just below the boiler that strongly resembled a nostril spat a bit of humid air in our direction. After a moment and having decided we were neither threat nor food, the eye shut again. Now that the atmosphere was starting to clear a bit, there were more details to be made out, but I wanted to take those slow lest we risk a complete, catastrophic pegasus failure. Gathering her against my chest, I held her close to wait.

Finally she whispered, “Sir...Sir, the train looked at me…”

“Yes, kid.”

“No, Sir...you don’t understand,” she moaned, pushing at my chest a little for emphasis. “The train. It looked at me.”

“Yes, it did. You got any meat on you?”

Swift nodded, numbly. I stuck my hoof into the front pocket of her combat vest, tugged out one of her packages of jerky, separated a strip, and held it to her muzzle. Almost on autopilot, she took it and began chewing. A moment later, her shoulders started to relax.

“You good?” I asked.

“No, Sir.”

“Alright, then,” I turned and looked up towards the engine compartment. “Hey! Mephi! Get your flank down here!”

A voice directly behind my left shoulder asked, “Down where, Detective?”

I only jumped a little that time.

Turning away from the locomotive and dragging Swift around with me so she wasn’t facing it, I forced a smile. “Mephi...I’m going to put a bell on you.”

“Oh! I have a bell! Would you like me to get it?” Mephitica squeaked, bouncing up on the tips of her hooves. A thin layer of something slimy was dripping from her rear-legs, pooling on the floor. “I was just about to have a wash and then we can be going. This has been a lovely disaster, but I have others I want to see and I think it’s time we go check some of those out! I can show you my bell!”

“That’ll be fine. First, we’ve got a little case of shock here—” I gestured at Swift, glancing over to find Limerence inspecting one of the train’s struts while Taxi applied more of her mint mixture to her nose. “—who could probably use an explanation for our transport.”

“Oh? Shock? My favorite!” Mephitica chirped, dancing forward and taking Swift’s hooves in hers. “You’re in shock? I like shock! It’s the best of feelings. It’s very receptive to a shocking world, isn’t it? I better tell you about Ol’ Horny here so you can be shocked some more!”

Swift’s ears slowly rose, then a tiny smile snuck onto her face. “Ol’ Horny? Really?”

“Yep! Because, you know, horns?” Mephi cackled, pointing vaguely towards the front of the train with her tail.

Her curiosity finally overcoming her terror, Swift edged sideways around the little mare to get a better look at the engine.

The Bull was, at least superficially, like any other train. Six enormous wheels, a chimney on the top, and a compartment behind the boiler for the conductor. The resemblance very quickly broke down once a pony started examining the intimate details. Aside the smell, which was like a milk parlor that had been drenched in testosterone, the Bull radiated a heat greater than just the boiler could account for.

The ruddy red surface covering the engine seemed to shift in the air-currents. It was a pelt stretched over a superstructure that was too curvaceous and irregular for it to be entirely metal. Several bulges at differing intervals up and down the sides shifted and rolled, though two of the smaller ones closest to us were open; they were additional eyes, all fixated on a different pony.

At the front, rather than a cow-catcher, a row of curved tusks jutted down from under the engine.

“It’s...it’s a cow,” Swift muttered. “Did...did this used to be a cow?”

The train let out a noise like a thousand ponies all simultaneously blowing a raspberry and a gob of something black shot from somewhere, spattering Swift from ankles to ears. She stood there, eyes wide and her muzzle scrunched as she made what I’m sure was a concerted effort to climb out of her own skin.

“Oooh, he doesn’t like it when you call him a cow, honey bun. Be glad he decided to go with a warning shot this time,” Mephi giggled as she offered my partner a towel.

“T-t-that was a wa-warning shot?” Swift choked out, then gagged, trying vigorously to scrape the disgusting mess off her chest with the towel.

“Oh, yeah,” I chuckled, trotting over to help her. “An actual shot would have been a piece of flaming coal in your mane.”

“He’s not a cow, he’s a bull,” Mephi explained. “Meet Captain Cord Breaker, veteran of the Crusades and now, fastest train there may ever be! Even the Crystal Express would be left in his dust! Teeheee! I’ve got to get them for a side by side race one day, just to see for sure! I mean, assuming we don’t all die soon. If that happens, maybe I’ll get my race in the next iteration of the universe!”

Limerence tilted one ear in Mephitica’s direction. “Ahem...pardon, Miss Mephitica. Did you say ‘veteran’? My research didn’t indicate a military background for this train.”

“Oh! He wasn’t a train back then. Captain Cord Breaker was a minotaur who fought alongside Equestria’s tenth brigade!” The conductor chuckled and several of the train’s eyes nearest us rolled in a little circle.

Swift wiped a bit of whatever the foul substance was out of her mane and shuddered. “H-he was a minotaur? H-h-how’d he end up like...like that?”

Mephi, agile as a cat, swung herself up onto one of the hoof-rails on the Bull’s chassis, then clambered up onto his roof where she sat, petting a spot between two tall, circular stacks. The engine made a sound that one might almost sounded like a purr, if the purring creature in question were the size of a lorry.

“He lost all his bits in a dragon raid. Well, all the non-essential breathing and screaming for merciful death bits, anyway,” she answered, crossing her hooves one over the other. “When somepony offered him the chance to have a body again, even if it wasn’t exactly...you know...the same shape as the old one, he hop, skip, and jumped on it! I mean, wouldn’t you? He’s a train! How awesome is that?”

“Yes, but, if I may...why a train?” Limerence asked.

“Why not a train?”

“Aaand that’s the best answer you’re going to get, Lim. Believe me,” I said, cutting off further questioning. I was fairly eager to get underway, even if ‘underway’ meant more unpleasantness. “Meph, can we come aboard?”

“Tickets! I need tickets. Do you have tickets?” she demanded eagerly, hopping down from her perch.

“Mephi, you do know we’re in the middle of what might well constitute the end of all life as we know it, right?”

“Yes! Fantastic, isn’t it? Speaking of apocalypses, where is your cute friend? The one with the green mane. Shouldn’t he be here doing the talking? You used to be quieter.”

Taxi coughed into her hoof and Swift looked uncomfortable while Limerence gave them both a confused glance.

“Ahem...Juniper Shores died in the line of duty,” I replied, forcing myself to be calm.

Mephi’s expression didn’t dim in the slightest. “Oh! Good for him! I thought he might. Well, have you talked lately? It’s smart to keep in contact with your friends.”

I didn’t know exactly what I should say to that. Had she known Juniper was still hanging about? One never knew with Mephi. She lived in a train with which she had a quasi-romantic, codependent relationship. It was impossible to say just what she might and might not know.

“I’m...not going to answer that, if you don’t mind. So, tickets?”

She nodded so quickly I thought she might give herself a concussion. “Yep! Do you have some?”

“We’re going to Canterlot, which is likely to be, if anything, an even bigger disaster than this one. You in?”

Mephi’s eyes went wide and she danced in place. “Ooooh, that’s a pretty good ticket! I’d been intending to go there next anyways! Ponies with guns might make it even more explody!”

Tapping the side of the cabin, she held on as the train inched forward a couple of meters to reveal the front end of the ‘passenger’ car. My breath caught in my throat as a few painfully vivid memories of my last journey on the Bull crept back into the front of my consciousness.

The carriage rolled along on four gigantic wheels of the same strange, blackened metal as the rest of the monster. It was humped at the top, with a row of oddly opaque windows that shimmered like an insect’s wings, surrounded on all sides by thick, furry hide. At the back on one side, a set of metal steps jutting out from under the behemoth that had the look of having grown straight from the creature’s flesh led up to a solid oak door that seemed entirely out of place, as though it was installed after whatever transformation had rendered Cord Breaker into his current form; it was the only part of the entire creature that wasn’t either the unusual metal or covered in fuzzy skin.

As we watched the great monster inhaled and a pair of what might have been bellows or possibly enormous lungs inflated under the car, letting out that distinctive whistle as they emptied a moment later alongside a snort of smelly steam.

“Sir...we...cannot possibly...be riding in that,” Swift gasped, her throat clenching as she fought to keep her lunch down.

I clapped her on the back and she staggered forward, barely catching herself on the edge of the rail. “Heh, buck up kid! At worst, you’ll vomit for six hours today, with a little break in between.” Raising my head, I shouted, “Mephi! Open the back!”

The wooden door swung outward and Mephitica grinned, poking her muzzle out. She looked significantly cleaner than she had just a moment ago, her white fur freshly washed and her overalls laundered. She wore a very official looking blue cap with a gold watch tucked in the brim.

“I’m here, Detective! Sorry for the wait. Had to get a shower! Anyway, welcome to the Express to Canterlot!”

I felt three sets of eyes on me, waiting for me to move. For all teasing Swift about the inevitable was fun, I really didn’t want to move. Getting onto that train was just below reliving Juniper’s death in the grand scheme of things I didn’t want to do, but I’d already done that.

‘Well, your day can only go uphill from here, right?’

I trotted over to the steps and swallowed, trying to hold my breath as I stepped onto the bottom stair, then into a railway car that resembled a thoracic cavity a little too closely for comfort.

Studying the interior, I compared it to my memories of my last ride.

Mephitica had added a few comforts since then, including a little curtained area with a chemical toilet and a few benches. The walls were just as fluffy as everything else and, if anything, a bit more-so. Low humps of scruffy flesh roughly the height of chairs lined the walls and overhead, two rows of Hearth’s Warming Eve lights dangled just below the ceiling for a bit of light. At the far end, another wooden door led up to the engine compartment.

I did my best to ignore what I was standing on. That way lay madness.

‘It’s just a carpet,’ I thought, swallowing. ‘Oh Celestia, it’s a carpet with a pulse! No...No, Hardy, we are not having a freak out. You bought this particular ticket. Now take the ride.’

Mephitica, who’d been standing there patiently waiting as I took in the effluvium, thrust something towards me; it was a metal pail with ‘Puke Bucket’ painted neatly on the side.

“I think I’m good, Mephi. Thanks, though,” I said, waving her back. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Hooking the bucket over her hoof, she gestured toward a low cabinet at the back that hadn’t been there last I rode. “We’ve got drinks! Make yourselves comfortable and I’ll go feed the boiler, then we can get underway.”

“You mind bringing us back when we’re done in Canterlot?” I asked.

She shook her head and set the pail down beside the door. “Return trip is part of the ticket, but we won’t be back to Detrot for a while after that. I want to go see everything that’s gone wrong everywhere! You sure you don’t want to come?”

“As pleasant as touring the disasters my country has become sounds, I think we’ll pass.”

“Oh well! Your loss! All aboard!”

Act 3 Chapter 13 : Life On Rails

There is some vague awareness in the minds of most sentient beings that we are ‘not alone’ in the universe. After all, in a world with so many different sapients it is entirely reasonable that there should be other places with living beings in them who can think and act intelligently.

That said, very few ponies ever contemplate other worlds or other universes, even though something from some other universe might pop in for tea or maybe to severely damage a major metropolitan area once in awhile. This isn’t a failing, so much as it is a survival mechanism. How do you get through your day if, at any moment, you might be annihilated by a super-intelligence from the Planet Zog? Doing one’s laundry might begin to take a back seat if everyone spent every day in consideration of what could happen, and then we’d have a whole populace going about in rumpled shirts.

Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, being the wise, long-thinking leaders they are, have employed various means down through the years to ensure that ponies survive even if some elder beast decides to pay a visit to our realm. For this reason, The Equestrian Affairs office (T.E.A.) has existed in one form or another since the founding of Equestria. Despite the purposefully generic name, they were always there to protect the world from that which exists in the great beyonds.

During the Crusades, T.E.A. was responsible for cutting off some of the most dangerous avenues of research in pony-lands and abroad, though it must be said they were not entirely successful. A number of projects into exploration of other realms crept through which were ‘ill advised’ on a good day and ‘suicidal’ on another. Unfortunately, winning the war sometimes took priority over other, less practical concerns such as ‘If you pull that switch, it will tear a hole in the universe.’

Funding cuts and decades of wild invention have left T.E.A. badly outclassed by the development of Equestrian technology, but other interested forces seem to have kept the world from collapsing into total anarchy, for the most part.

-The Scholar

It wasn’t until she’d gotten a whiff of the interior of the passenger car that Swift decided she wanted to fly back and spend the next two days with Tourniquet, playing her silly card game and foal-sitting Mags. At that point, we had a frank discussion.

“Sir, I am not...getting on...this thing!” Swift shouted, bracing all four legs on the edges of the door as she tried to bat me with her wings. I had my forehead planted between her shoulderblades, but despite my superior strength and size, she was putting up a pretty ferocious fight.

“Kid, you had your chance to back out earlier! Now either get on, or I replace all your snacks with tofu!”

I felt her knees weaken a little and gave her one final shove, sending her end over end into the passenger car. She flopped in an undignified heap against the far wall of the carriage, flailing helplessly as she was tangled in the Hailstorm’s harness which had somehow become wrapped around her head and one leg.

Despite what I knew to be very regular cleanings, there was no getting away from the stink of a cattle farm mixed with bovine body odor and an unidentifiable smell of something burning. As calmly as I could, I trotted across the pulsating ‘carpet’ to help my partner up.

Limerence only hesitated for a moment in the door, before swallowing and stepping in, followed by Taxi.

“Most intriguing. I do wish I had time to study this creature,” Lim murmured, stroking one of the walls. “There was little in the way of information on why it operates. The designer is an unknown and it seemed to stem almost exclusively from the desire to build a train that is ‘always on time’.”

“I do sort of wonder why Mephi doesn’t just bounce from place to place, instead of using the rail lines. I guess it makes the Bull happier to actually get some use out of the wheels. Hey, Sweets? You know her, right?” I asked.

“Only by reputation, honestly. I’ve ridden, once, but that was with a whole squad of drug enforcement officers when we busted a moving Ace lab that was hopping between Detrot and nearby villages. I know I talked to her, but I can’t remember what either of us said.”

I cocked my head. “She’s pretty memorable. What happened on your trip?”

Taxi set down our provisions, then settled herself on one of the seat-like humps, dragging her rear legs up into one of those impossible zebra meditation poses. “The sergeant in charge made sure we were all drunk out of our heads and had just eaten the spiciest take-out curry in the city. My nose was running like mad and I spent the ride sleeping off five bottles of beer. A drug raid with a hangover is a bad day, but I think being sober would have meant some pretty ugly memories. I woke up, soaked in puke, with a muzzle-full of Fox Glove’s tail. It wasn’t even my vomit.”

“Huh...yeah. Could be worse, I guess. Juniper only gave me the vaguest warning and I was dead sober. Spent the first twenty minutes screaming like an idiot,” I said, tugging Swift’s harness off her head and unclasping her trigger so it didn’t get pulled accidentally. Her eyes were a little wild, darting around the cabin, then towards the closed doors. I could detect an oncoming panic attack and swept my coat off, pulling it around her body. “Kid? Kid, look at me.”

“S-sir...I d-don’t want to b-be here!”

Shooting Lim a look, I pointed towards the little drinks cabinet. He quickly hopped up and strolled over, pulling it open. The mini-bar was full to brimming with a shelf of alcohol so far at the top that the bartender in most places would have needed a fire-ladder to reach it. Whatever might be said about Mephitica’s sense of smell, her tastes were exquisite. Limerence snatched a glass and a bottle, loping over to my side with the booze tucked under his knee.

Foregoing the glass, I popped the cork out and held it to Swift’s mouth. “Here, kid. This’ll make you feel better.”

“W-what is it?”

“It’s...well, I don’t know. It’s good stuff. Drink.”

Taking a hesitant sip, she swallowed, then took another. After about ten seconds, her entire body went slack and she slumped against me. “Oof...Sir, I think that might...just...be a bottle of morphine...”

“No, just vodka. You’re going to be fine, kid. The up chuck bucket is over there.”

“I’m really just trying not to think about being inside a giant...whatever,” she mumbled, putting her forehead against my shoulder so she couldn’t see the interior of the passenger car.

“Detective, if you don’t mind...what is traveling aboard the Express like?” Limerence asked, experimentally prodding one of the seats. “What few accounts I could find in my brief search usually said either ‘indescribable’ or ‘horrific’, but few other details.”

“Pretty much those two things, really,” I replied. “We’ll take the tour once we’re underway. Your best bet is not to look out the windows and try to move slowly. Gravity gets a little weird early on if I remember right, but it settles down once the spatial effects start. Mephitica will probably hop us to whatever stop is closest to Canterlot. Hopefully it still exists.”

The floor underneath me suddenly shook and I felt a great flexing in the substructure of the car. That unsettling pulse through the floor began to beat a little faster.

“What’s happening?!” Swift wailed, trying to get up. I put the bottle to her muzzle again.

“Drink, kid. We’re about to take off.”

The door separating the back compartment from the engine banged open and Mephitica stuck her head through. She was covered in a thin veneer of slime and her hooves were black with coal dust. A tiny conductor’s cap sat between her ears.

“Ladies and gentlecolts!” she crowed, much louder than was strictly necessary. “This is your conductor, Mephi, speaking! We’re about to depart for Canterlot from Detrot, via trans-dimensional planar jump! Travel time will be two standard hours, thirty seven minutes, sixteen seconds, local atomic rate-of-decay! Now, I’ll turn you over to our stewardess for a safety briefing!”

She flipped the conductor’s cap off her head and tugged on another, much less filthy one.

“My name is Mephi! I’ll be your stewardess for this trip! Now, for your personal safety during the voyage, please remain inside the train at all times. If you find yourselves experiencing sudden evolution, cranial hemorrhaging, or sexual disfunction, please be aware these symptoms are temporary! Should we pass through any dimensions without oxygen, the ‘hold your breath’ light will come on!” She jabbed a hoof at a little green light above the door, which flashed demonstratively a couple of times. “That said, in about five minutes, we’ll be ready to go! The snack cart will be around soon.”

Doffing her stewardess cap, she slapped the disgusting conductor hat back in place and slammed the door to the engine compartment.

Silence reigned in the passenger car until Swift whispered, “She’s completely insane, Sir.”

“Yes. It’s done wonders for her complexion. Sweets, check me on this...did she look an hour older to you?”

Taxi shook her head. “Now you mention it...no, she didn’t. That was eight years ago. Celestia above, I thought I was aging well…”

Reaching onto his front pocket, Limerence retrieved a black book and flipped it open, paging back and forth until he found what he was looking for. “Hmmm...again, I find myself at a loss. The Express has been known to the Archivists for a very long time. Mephitica is older than either you or Miss Taxi by a good two decades.”

“Why am I not surprised?” I replied, sliding onto my side and taking a quick hit from the bottle I’d been dosing Swift with. “Well, best sit down. We’re in for a ride, at least for the first few minutes.”

Almost as if on cue, the entire train lurched. A disturbing, but familiar tingle crept up my spine and I felt the air begin to shake in time to the mighty engine. Putting a hoof over my chest, I thanked my lucky stars for Slip Stitch’s anti-magic armor; it was buzzing just loud enough to be bothersome, but I had no wish to find out what effect whatever the Bull did to move about was likely to have on my heart.

Swift shivered and as I watched, the fur on her legs began to stand up as though she were in an electrical field of some kind.

The locomotive’s whistle sounded loud from outside, but inside it was a wall of sound that hit my eardrums with enough force to set my head ringing. The sensation of almighty power gathering around me was accompanied by a shift in the air pressure inside the cabin that made my eyes water.

One of my rear hooves felt like it’d left the ground and I looked back to find the tails of my coat starting to float. I slapped my hoof back down on the floor, then moved a meter or so to the left where gravity seemed to be behaving more normally.

“S-Sir! This feels really strange!” Swift squeaked, trying to flap her wings as a weight seemed to settle on her back, pinning her on her belly.

“You remember what I said about the gravity effects, kid? Just relax. This is totally normal.”

Swift dragged herself forward a few inches and found her front half starting to rise into the air while one of her rear legs was held firmly to the floor.

“Nothing about this is normal, Sir!” she whined.

Slowly making my way back to the drink’s cabinet, I opened it again and peered inside. A swirling black pit full of malevolent fog and winking yellow eyes stared back at me. I shut the cabinet and sighed.

“Detective? Is something the matter?” Limerence asked. He was casually sitting on the wall a meter to my left, notepad out, and scribbling furiously. His mane was falling in the normal direction, but his backside was glued stubbornly to the interior in defiance of the physics of an orderly universe. I shook my head, trying not to think too hard about what must be happening outside the car.

“I think the booze is in another universe. That or it mutated into some kind of shadow demon, thing. It’ll probably be back in a bit.”

“Ah! We’re under way then? I’d wondered why my notes seemed to be in several different languages simultaneously,” he replied, tapping his paper. “I don’t even think these three are spoken on this planet.”

Outside the carriage, the engine began to churn faster as we got ‘up to speed’, whatever definition of speed a pony wanted to use. There was a sensation of enormous acceleration, but I couldn’t particularly tell where it was coming from. We weren’t moving ‘forward’, so much as just moving in general. It played absolute havoc with my inner ear and I found myself staggering a little with each step as I tried to find a comfortable spot to settle down.

Taxi seemed relatively unfazed, though her coat was shifting through a succession of colors that made her look like a badly over-lit billboard. She hadn’t moved from her meditation pose and seemed determined to ignore everything going on around her.

“Sweets?” I asked. “Are you just planning to sit there for the next two hours?”

“Obsi’gnalis texi’cor’icoleh, spellgic ax’isplotica,” she answered. “Garubtirb.”

“Right...excellent. Good to hear.”

I sagged against the wall, watching as Swift turned slowly into a pool toy and Limerence began to eat his own legs.

It was a solid fifteen minutes before reality began to settle down. If I’m honest, I was feeling a bit numb by then; worn out and numb. After all, there’s only so much weird a pony can take before they just slide into cool acceptance of the inevitable.

My partner was a couch for a bit (pink, with little frilly tassels the color of her eyes), then Taxi developed a range of tentacles and tried to mate with the drinks cabinet, but on the whole I’d had more terrible journeys on public transport. There were a few other minor incidents, but I seemed to have dodged the worst of it, aside a period when I had to fight off my own intestinal tract. That was one memory I could have done without.

At last, I collapsed in my seat and covered my face with both hooves. They were hooves again, which was a relief. My tail was my tail and my face was the right shape. I breathed, and my lungs actually seemed to be breathing air. Better. Definitely better.

“S-s-sir,” Swift stammered. I looked up and found her lying up against the wall, hugging her tail between her front legs as she rocked in place. “Is...is it over?”

“Yeah...seems to be. I remember it being worse last time, actually,” I said, rubbing my mane. Rolling over, I stood on wobbly legs and loped over to the window. Against my own advice, I peered out.

We appeared to be floating in some kind of liquid full of flashing, orange lights that darted to and fro. As I watched, a shadow swam past the window. Though perspective was hard to establish, based on the size of the train, it was probably something like the size of a small skyscraper.

“Sir, the drinks are back,” Swift said, then I heard the sound of a popping cork, then my partner gagging. “Ugh, what is this?! Blood?”

“Probably,” I replied, still watching the passing strangeness of whatever place we’d come to rest. Without looking I waved towards the opposite side of the car. “Go over there. It might help.”

I heard Swift moving about, then another gulp and some more coughing.

“Yuck! Now it just tastes like grapefruit juice!”

I was about to ask for a sip when the engine compartment banged open and Mephitica— stewardess cap back in place—shoved a heavy cart of food out ahead of her. She’d made a token effort to wipe her muzzle and forelegs off, but that was it. The rest of her was still drenched in something that closely resembled black saliva.

“Subjective local morning to you, our dear passengers! Mephi here! Snacks on the go for those who know! Now, what can I get you?”

Limerence peered at the cart, picking up a bag of jelly-beans and tugging it open. “Hmmm. Is it my mistake or are these...alive?”

Mephitica flicked her eyes at the bag, then nodded. “Last I checked! Would you like a drink? I have something that might or might not be melted cheese. I’m afraid the cola turned into high powered enzymatic acid. Good thing I carry acid proofed buckets for just such an occasion!”

He regarded her for several seconds, then set aside the wiggling bag of jellies and pulled his notepad out. “If I may and considering few ponies have had the chance...can I ask you a few questions, Miss Mephitica? I am researcher and I find myself intrigued by your home and this incredible machine.”

With a little wink, she pulled a rag off the end of her cart, giving her muzzle and enormous glasses a thorough wipe down before snatching a package of something at random and plopping down on the seat across from my librarian. “Of course you can, sugar! I’ll do my best to answer, although my mind wanders these days. I lost it a few years back when we were traversing a stellar reach on a run between Canterlot and Manehattan. Never came back. I send it postcards, sometimes…” She trailed off, looking out the window. Just as the silence was becoming awkward, she snapped back to attention. “Anyway! Questions?”

“Ahem...yes. If it isn’t impolite to ask, how old are you?” Limerence inquired, pen poised above his paper.

Mephi snorted, stuffing a hoof-ful of her snack into her mouth. As she chewed, she studied Limerence through her enormous glasses and I had the sense that she was dissecting him, right down to his hooves. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and swallowed a couple of times.

“Awww...Sweetie, you just tripped the starlight magnificent across sixteen planes to get to a stable region of the dimensional multi-verse and the first thing you want to know is why I haven’t aged in forty years?” she chuckled. I didn’t get the joke and I’m pretty sure it would take me forty years to. She sobered after a few seconds, leaning forward in her seat. “Tell you what, cutie! You tell me this and it might just answer your question. If the sun never moved, how would you know how old you were?”

Limerence cocked his head, then pulled his watch out, holding it up so it twisted in the light. The hands were spinning wildly. “I was about to say, we have other systems of measurement, but I don’t think they apply here…”

“True. So, if that tight little mechanical thing in your pocket can’t tell what time it is, how can your body?” she asked, with a coy smile. “I asked Ol’Horny that, a few times. He isn’t the talkative sort. The way I figure it, he didn’t want to let me go. How often do you run into a pony with a talent for veterinary medicine via mechanical engineering?”

Turning her leg, she reached back to tug her overalls down from her hip. Her cutie-mark was a wrench with two snakes wrapped around it in the style of an image I saw now and then in hospitals.

“Interesting!” Limerence said, scratching away at his notes. “Hrm...Information on the Bull is a little sparse. You are the engineer. What powers this creature? I can’t imagine a normal engine...”

Mephi she plucked her own watch from her front pocket. It had about twenty hands, all of which were running in different directions, though since the face hadn’t any numbers it didn’t really matter. “Tell you what. It’s time for a fresh stoking and I think the Detective over there promised you a little tour, didn’t he? Might involve shoveling some coal, mind you. My hooves could use a rest.”

Limerence shot me a questioning look.

I shrugged out of my trenchcoat, quickly folding it up and setting it on the nearest seat before adding my hat to the pile. “You asked, Lim. You want to see, you shovel some coal. Swift? You’re coming.”

“I think I’d rather not, Sir,” Swift murmured, clutching her bottle of grapefruit juice.

“You’re coming, because you turned into a spider about ten minutes ago and tried to plant eggs in my forehead.”

“I said I was sorry, Sir!”

“Screaming ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ at the top of your lungs while your giant stinger is trying to burrow into my brain doesn’t count. Leave your gun and vest here. You don’t want them to get messy.” I turned to Taxi who was back to her meditation pose, but was just calmly studying whatever was outside. “What about you, Sweets? You coming?”

“Eh...I’ll save my tour for when we manage to get away from Canterlot. I’m not in the mood right now.” Her voice had a slightly strained quality. I’d seen that expression on her face a few times, usually when she was thinking about her old partner, Fox Glove.

It wasn’t worth it to argue just then, but I was getting a certain determination welling in my stomach to get a few answers out of Taxi about that particular issue, especially considering how much of the world’s safety—not to mention my own—I was lately putting in her hooves.

“Alright, fair enough. You and I need to have a long talk, incidentally, and I think ‘on the way home’ might be a good time.”

Taxi shot me a nervous look. “What kind of talk?”

“The kind where I’m not going to tell you right now so you don’t have time to prepare any obfuscations, lies, or misdirection,” I replied.

My driver’s ears flattened and she went back to gazing out the window before answering in a very soft voice, “Alright. Whatever it is, I guess we’re sort of beyond keeping secrets from each other. Go on. I’ll be here.”

Mephitica was waiting patiently at the door to the engine compartment, though I hadn’t heard her move. “Ready, fillies and gentlecolts?”

“Your shower is working, right?” I asked.

“Working is a relative term, Detective, but if you mean ‘Can you get clean once the tour is over?’ then yes, I’m prepared for such eventualities. Some objects are less affected by trans-dimensional transformations than others. Towels maintain consistent forms in almost every universe and I am never without one.”

With that she disappeared into the engine room. I gave my hoof a little twirl in Swift’s direction. She gulped, straightened her back and marched over to door between the compartments. I followed, with Limerence strolling along behind sans everything but his notepad and pen.

Swift poked her muzzle into the next room and immediately tried to back up, but I was ready. I jammed my forehead against her haunches and shoved her on through.

“Oooh, no you don’t, kid! Come on, it’s harmless. Well, mostly harmless.”

Following her in, I pre-emptively covered my muzzle with my knee.

It didn’t help.

Mephitica’s ‘home’ was simultaneously cozy and the most disgusting place a pony could possibly decide to live.

The interior was more spacious than the exterior might have made one think, but that was mostly a product of the Bull’s tall profile. It was also surprisingly open area for the main engine of a train. A huge, well loved hammock full of stuffed animals was strung across a ceiling from which bone protrusions jutted like strange chandeliers and a small stove with double latched doors sat in the corner with a steeping tea kettle on top. A tall pantry cabinet was nestled into the corner.

Some sort of massive tube or vein as big around as a pony’s waist spilled out of the floor right in the middle, disappearing behind a curtain that’d been hung between what was presumably the control area and the ‘bedroom’. A small dining table along with a chair sat atop it. Every few seconds the vein would throb and a mixture of whatever liquid seemed to fill it normally and oddly textured black goo flowed through into the curtained area.

It wasn’t the dichotomy of ‘home-y’ and ‘living’ that had given Swift pause at the door.

It was the stench. One did not simply "smell" Eau De Bull; it is more of an assault. It stormed your nostrils in much the same way an armoured tank column smashes through a factory for the production of slightly warm butter. It was a stench that made crawling through the sewers or stepping into the chest cavity of a half-decomposed dragon seem downright pleasant.

Even with my nose pinched shut, my eyes started watering like mad. Previous experience hadn’t dulled the reek of a bathroom on an eldritch plane after a dinner of tacos and beer. Breathing was a non-option.

Limerence let out a choked gasp and threw his hooves over his face, backing against the door. Swift was just standing there with a wrinkled nose and her half-wings spread like she’d been concussed.

Sweeping through from behind the curtain, Mephitica glanced over the three of us, then rolled her eyes and ducked back long enough to retrieve three strange masks that appeared designed to fit over somepony’s muzzle. I tried to inspect them, but my eyes were watering so badly I couldn’t. I quickly donned mine, gesturing for my partner and Limerence to do the same.

It resembled a gas mask, but as it slid over my head, a soft flash of magic filled my vision and something pink sprouted from the end of my face. Still, I could breathe and the air I sucked through was fresh and sweet.

“Ahhh...Mephi, why didn’t you have these last time I was here?” I asked, glancing up at Mephitica.

She had both hooves mashed over her muzzle and her cheeks were puffed out like a fish. Her glasses slid down her nose and she barely had the presence of mind to catch them, but that had the side effect of letting the first laugh out. Two seconds later she was rolling around on the floor giggling like a maniac.

I turned to Swift, intent on asking what was funny and paused.

The mask had vanished, but my dear, sweet little pegasus was sporting a bushy, handlebar mustache the same color as her mane. She blinked at me for several seconds, then tried to hold in her own snort of laughter.

“Oh, Sir!” she squeaked. “Your...your—”

“Kid...whatever is on my face cannot possibly be worse than what is on yours,” I snickered, reaching out to flick the end of her mustache. My toe passed right through it. Illusion, then.

“I don’t know about that, Detective,” Limerence said.

He was standing there behind me with a crooked smirk and the most spectacular makeup I’d ever seen on a male of any species, up to and including a certain sea serpent of my recent acquaintance. His eye-shadow was a savage purple that reached his hairline and his lips were a fetching blue just a shade or two darker than his pelt. He nodded towards a little basin with a tiny mirror above it.

I edged sideways so I could get a look at myself.

“Mephi, did you have to give me the one with the pig nose?”

“Oh, Celestia preserve me on this plane as she does on every other...Yes! I absolutely had to give you the pig nose!” the conductor howled, flopping onto her side as she fought for breath.

Reaching up, I made to remove the mask. The strap was still there, despite being invisible, but the thought of spending the next few minutes in the stink was enough to stop me.

“How long is the charge on these interesting devices good for?” Limerence asked, touching his muzzle. “Surely they are not giving us clean air.”

Mephi swallowed her giggles, but she’d developed some fairly persistent hiccups. “Heehee! Oh, you ponies are the best! They’re…*hic* they’re good for about thirty minutes. Just your standard Equestrian made perception filter. It still smells like it always does in here, but the mask keeps your *hic* brain from thinking it does.”

“Ma’am, how in the world do you stand that stink?” Swift asked, trying to bat at the ends of her mustache. “I thought I was going to go blind.”

“Eh, believe me...a girl lives with a guy long enough, she gets used to a bit of body odor,” Mephitica replied, pushing herself up and adjusting her coveralls.

Swift looked a bit confused. “You mean the train? I mean, he’s neat...in a kind of totally scary, spits-on-people way, but if you’re an engineer, couldn’t you get a job—”

Mephi held up her hoof. “There’s only one train for me, baby doll. I met Cord Breaker before his ‘transformation’ when he was just a busted up shell of a minotaur. We’d spent eighteen months hunting for volunteers before he came along.”

“How...um...how did you meet?”

The conductor gave her an enigmatic smile. “Oldest story in the world. Or maybe not, but it was our story. We fell in love at first sight!” Pushing aside the curtain, Mephitica ducked under, calling back, “Now come on. You’ve got some shoveling to do! Best do it before those masks wear off and I have to recharge them.”

Trying to look like I wasn’t mentally dry heaving, I followed her into the engine room. Thoughts of Juniper’s grinning face as he pushed me beyond that curtain were flooding back and the memory of the smell was enough to send a twinge of fear through my belly, but the enchanted mask did its job. That didn’t stop the visuals from being any less unsettling. It helped, though.

The engine room was about like one would imagine being inside a cow might be.

For one thing, it was hot. Hotter than just the boiler might have accounted for. Hot like a sweaty bar on a Friday night in the summer when the air conditioning is out. Tightly interwoven bundles of pink or purple cable, pulsing in time to the engine, dangled from overhead just a half meter or so above the tips of my ears. Some of them had what looked like metal clamps attached to them, limiting the flows of whatever was gushing through them, while still others had been bandaged tightly, though viscous red liquid still soaked through. Despite the attempts to keep the ‘pipes’ from leaking, a few drips managed to escape here and there, but tiny buckets or catchers were strung under the worst of the dribbles; it didn’t bear thinking what they were actually catching.

It was the mouth at the far end that drew the eye moreso than the various viscera sagging from above. It couldn’t be anything but a mouth, although it was taller than a pony. It had full lips which were crook’d in a bit of a disturbing smile and they rolled, twitched, and jiggled, as though chewing something.

Swift stepped in beside me and opened her muzzle, but no sound came out. She just stood there, dumbfounded, her eyes wide as I’d ever seen them. After a long moment the fearful expression faded and she began to look thoughtful. Shaking herself, she sat down and studied the wall and the giant mouth, her mustache bouncing in the non-existent breeze.

“Is that ‘punch drunk acceptance’ I detect, kid?” I asked.

“A little bit, Sir,” she replied. “I was about to scream, I think...and then I realized this is the most logical thing that’s happened since I got up this morning. You ‘feed’ the boiler, right? Like, literally feed it?”

A shovel flew out from behind a particularly long curl of gut and Swift instinctively caught it in her teeth, then quickly spat it out into her hooves as soon as she got a taste. Mephitica stuck her head out and grinned.

“You nailed it, sweet thing!” the conductor chirped, waving us forward. “Over here! Now, you might get a little bit damp, but just scoop and toss from the hopper!”

Taking the lead, I moved carefully around the side of the mouth until I was beside Mephitica. She offered me two more shovels, one of which I passed to Limerence. He took it and gave the spade a disdainful grimace.

“I was never going to get away from this without physical labor, was I?” he asked.

“Not a chance,” I said.

She gave the floor a quick double stomp and a sort of furry hatch rolled open just where she’d been standing. Down below, a evil looking, gooey mess of semi-digested coal was swirling about.

Bless those masks. I could remember that smell, too, and it was actually worse than the black water line we used during our escape from Supermax.

I heard a frightened gasp and Swift jumped sideways, bumping into the side of the carriage as the giant muzzle on the wall slid open and a tongue wide enough to stand on unfurled onto the floor like a monstrous, fleshy throw rug. The beast’s mouth was disturbingly similar to my own, complete with flat, slightly yellowed teeth as big around as my head and a uvula at the back. A wash of hot, sticky air spilled over my body and I braced for a stink that never came.

“Okay, Sir...that...that was freaky,” Swift muttered. “Why did you being an octopus make more sense?”

I squinted at her. “I was an octopus?”

She nodded. “For a couple of minutes, when we ‘took off’ or whatever. Didn’t you notice?”

“Not really. Too busy watching Taxi and the drink cabinet.”

Clapping her hooves, Mephitica called for attention. “Alright kiddies! Get on it! Wait for the swallow and don’t be shy about the tongue. Stand on it for a better angle if you need to.” She took a couple steps back to get clear of the ‘splash zone’.

When neither Swift nor I made a move, Limerence stepped forward and stuck his spade in, hefting a pile of the lightly steaming mass. “I suppose, if I must do this to have my questions answered. If I may...Miss Mephitica, how did you and the ‘late’ Mister Cord Breaker meet?”

The conductor chuckled, stroking the wall of the train. “Nothing late about him! Nothing early, either! He’s one of the few beings I ever met precisely on time. Strange thing, that. Most of the universe is a little out of sync, especially lately. The ponies who designed the Bull wouldn’t appreciate me naming names, but they were very specific that only a truly desperate soul be chosen and Cordy couldn’t have come at a more timely moment. We needed someone who wasn’t just desperate for an improvement in their lifestyle. Plenty of ponies want that. We needed a true disaster and there were so few true disasters in that bunch who volunteered. A missing limb here or a broken spine there. None of them were desperate to live!”

Turning to the enormous mouth, Limerence heaved his spade into it. I put a hoof around Swift and pulled her back a meter or so as the tongue snapped back like a whip, spritzing the librarian from forehead to ankles in a nice bath of thick train spit.

He stood there, eyes closed, breathing slowly as a drip ran down his chin and dropped onto the ‘carpet’.

“Heh! Don’t let it get you down, sweety!” Mephitica said, slapping him on the back and sending him stumbling back towards the coal chute. “Could be worse! You could be whatever poor tree used to make up that coal! Now there’s a disaster I’d have liked to see!”

“I...Detective, when we leave this place and reach anything resembling an actual refuge, I demand to be doused in gasoline and set fire to. I don’t believe I will feel clean again otherwise,” Lim muttered. Lifting his shovel, he stepped back as the tongue slid out again waiting for a another bite. “Miss Mephitica, my records on you are limited. Why this obsession with disaster?”

“Heh! Why not? Grandest thing in the universe! Times of chaos and despair are the times ponies are at their absolute best!” She jabbed a toe at me. “I mean, when else would we get to see ponies like that crazy fool? Do you know what I heard somepony call him today when I was out getting groceries? Detective Dead Heart; the one who won’t quit, even in death. He reminds me of my sweet Cordy, after all. So few ponies are looking to really live at any cost. That was essential, after all.”

“Why? I mean...you knew what sort of magics you were working, right?” Swift asked, cautiously poking her shovel in the hole and plopping a heap of mush into the boiler’s mouth. She raised her wing to catch the spray, then shuddered and flicked her feathers violently, trying to get them clean. “Why did you need someone so desperate?”

“Simple,” Mephitica replied, giving her glasses a flick so the re-settled higher up her nose. “I might have only been the engineer, but I could feel it in my backside. My talent. After examining those early designs, I knew we needed someone who wanted to live, even if it meant a transformation. The spell system simply wouldn’t accept a purely mechanical solution to hopping between universes. We needed a spirit. A determined spirit. One that could keep itself together and sane while stepping outside of our universe. Do you know how I knew it was my dear Cordy?”

“How?” Swift asked, a bit of that old wonder in her eyes.

“I’d spent an entire morning interviewing candidates. Five hours, local Equestrian time, and not one real horror show,” Mephitica shook her head and I shoveled another scoop of coal into the boiler them stepped behind Swift just in time for her to catch another bit of backwash. “I’d come to the bottom of my list. Lovely, lovely list, by the way. I wish I still had a copy! You never saw such a brilliant mangling of limbs in your entire life, nor so many determined little ponies. Still...none of them could compare with that last name. ‘Cord Breaker’. Most of the others had pictures, but not him. I wondered why.”

“I went down to the final room in the veteran’s hospital, tucked away where nopony might pass his door and peer in. This was after the Los Pegasus Event, mind you, so the hospital was full, but here was this one room separated from the others. Once I stepped in it became wonderfully clear.”

Leaning over, she rested her cheek against the side of the boiler, shutting her eyes and rubbing her muzzle up and down in the thick fur of the beast. It gave a bone shaking rumble that sounded very much like a purring cat, were the cat the size of a locomotive.

“This sweet, gorgeous minotaur was laying there. He’d no skin on half his body, three limbs missing, and the flesh of his face was scorched away...but he refused to die. I went into his room and felt his remaining eye on me, just watching, following me around. He screamed when I opened the window, because the breeze on his body hurt so much, but when I went to close it, he flapped what was left of his arm at me. He could still hook his thumb around a pencil and he quickly scrawled a note on a scrap of paper. That’s when I knew he was the one I wanted for our project! I knew he was the one I wanted to spend my life with!”

“But...what was the project? I mean, a living train...okay, whatever, but why? And...and what did the note say?” Limerence asked, wiping saliva off of his forehead as he went back to shoveling.

Reaching up above the boiler, Mephitica took down a picture frame. Behind the glass, there was a jagged little bit of paper. Turning it around, she held it out.

Limerence leaned forward and read the paper, then read it again. “‘Leave the window open?’” he murmured, scratching his mane. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

A slightly sad smile crossed the conductor’s face. “Maybe you won’t ever understand. That’s jolly fine. Understanding isn’t strictly necessary. The Bull was designed as an escape hatch in case the dragons destroyed Equestria entirely. Mayhap find another world, or another universe we could settle in. Save a seed of the species. Turns out he wasn’t needed. Still, the war was glorious, and now... we have what may be another chance! Come on. We’ve got to get shoveling or we’ll never make it off this macro-cosm! I certainly hope the station is still there. It’s a little out of the way, so you may have a walk on your hooves.”

Swift cocked her head, wiping sweat off her forehead. “Why aren’t we going to Canterlot directly? I mean...couldn’t this train just...just appear somewhere?”

“I wish! It’d be easier to stay out of Equestria if it did!” Mephitica replied, flicking her tail against the mouth so it opened again, ready for another bite. “Our Essy contract is written into the magic of the re-entry program. We have to land in train stations. Any train station, but...train stations only. Canterlot's gone and the train station is right in the middle. Sadly, we also have to come back to Equis for fuel. The arcane energy ratios of coal are all wrong in other universes. Bad for the Heart.”

“Pardon me, but...The Heart?” Limerence asked, wiping a slippery line of goo off of his forehead. “Is that perchance the means by which you make the transplanar jump? Some form of suspended singularity that allowed you to penetrate the veil between universes?”

“Twenty bits to the colt in the gold spectacles!” Mephitica cheered, twirling in a little circle. She got a look that was pure mischief, planting her hooves together and leaning forward into Limerence’s face until she was less than an inch from his nose. “Heehee...You wanna see it?”

He blinked several times. “See...it? See a singularity? Is that even possible?”

“The ponies who developed the original design had access to the greatest talents of their time. They were the center of Equestrian innovation! They’d helped hundreds of brilliant individuals find their true callings during the war and when it came time to create their ‘escape hatch’ for the species...they did not skimp.” Whirling around, Mephitica snatched four pairs of black goggles off of hooks embedded in the flesh of the wall, holding them out to us. “So, yes...you can see the Heart!”

Cautiously taking one of the sets of goggles, I fitted it over my head on top of the mask that was keeping the stink at bay. Immediately everything went black. I blinked a few times, but it didn’t seem to help. There was nothing to see.

“These are darker than welder’s goggles,” I murmured.

Swift bumped into my side and I put a hoof around her so she didn’t stumble into the Bull’s mouth. “Sir, I can’t see anything with these on!”

“You should leave them on until the boiler is closed,” Mephitica said from somewhere off to my left.

“Are these strictly necessary?” Limerence asked. “My glasses are enchanted to filter out illumination above a certain level—”

“If you want to see a time-space deformation that turns the fabric of the existence into putty, then you’re going to want those goggles, sweety. I mean, unless you fancy being blind and insane for the rest of your life.”

I tilted my head toward where I thought Mephitica was standing and asked, “When you say open the boiler, you don’t mean—”

“I mean open! Now don’t move! And whatever you do, don’t go into the light!”

She stomped on the floor again and a wash of brilliant, white luminance exploded in front of my eyes. It seemed to go right through the goggles like a wave of illumination. I backed away, throwing my leg up in front of my face. It did absolutely no good whatsoever. I could see the vague outlines of my own bones right through the flesh, and beyond, the powerful source.

Whatever magics were in the goggles seemed to have kept me from being dazzled, but it still took my eyes a long minute or two to adjust. I glanced over to see what my partner and librarian were doing, but that was just as disturbing as watching the blood pumping through my knee.

The x-ray effect was even more pronounced on somepony else. I felt unaccountably ashamed to be seeing my friends like that, since I think most ponies don’t walk around quite that naked.

Beyond them, the walls of the chamber were alive with a million spaghetti-like veins and tubes pushing fluid. I swallowed a moment of strange panic that boiled up from nowhere and turned back to the light. Some part of me just didn’t care for that light. It was too real; too perfect to actually exist.

A pony knows, intellectually, that their atoms aren’t especially close together and that the molecular bonds holding them together are mostly just open space, but having that illustrated is unsettling. I had a suspicion that, if I were to touch that light, I would find it solid in a way very few things in the universe actually are.

Gradually, details started to gather into a picture and I realized I was looking into the mouth of the boiler, open wider than a normal equine jaw would allow. The tongue lay almost to the curtain and an audible buzz, like a whole convention of giant bees, was coming from inside.

As my vision adapted to the strange way of seeing, I began to make out moving shapes in the light. A curve here, an edge there.

“Is...is that an actual heart, Sir?” Swift asked, eyes round as they could be.

In defiance of all common sense, it was. It dangled at the center of the magnificent light from two flesh-like tethers which ran up to the ceiling and down to the floor. It was twice my height; an organ fit for a whale. The air around it rippled with heat, like a sidewalk in the summer time, but something told me that if I was close enough to feel that heat, it might do a fair bit more than make me sweat.

The Heart was alive with powers beyond my comprehension and just looking at it had some part of me wanting to slink away into a hole, unworthy of being in its presence. Throbbing, pounding, pushing...all synonyms for motion and life, but none seemed adequate to describe what The Heart was doing. It was a pivot around which worlds turned.

Mephitica strolled into my vision and she seemed somehow a bit less permeable than everything else. I could see her body, but none of her internals. She sat on the tongue, smiling calmly, staring down the Bull’s throat as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she commented. “Cord Breaker almost died more times than I can count, but I held what was left of his hand the entire way...and it was all worth it that first moment when the Express opened new eyes. It took nearly a hundred mages two years, sixty surgeries, and a spell system that occupied an entire building in a font barely readable with the equine eye to transfer that into the middle of the old train’s boiler.”

“You...you took a living being’s heart and...and…somehow created a series of gravitational lenses to trap a quantum strangelet inside of it. My heavens. The exotic particle output must be obscene! How are we standing here?” Limerence asked, nervously edging backwards.

“Not a clue!” Mephitica replied, cheerfully hopping off the tongue and wiping her hooves on the carpet. ”I’m not a mage. I’m just the engineer and part time surgeon/psychologist. I keep all the squishy bits working, patch the leaks, shovel the coal, and make sure Cordy doesn’t go insane. You want to know how the Heart works, you have to go find the ponies who designed him. They stripped their names out of my memory forty years ago, so...good luck!”

Giving the wall a light tap, she stood to one side as the back of the boiler’s throat seemed to slide closed, leaving the room in darkness once again. I tugged off the goggles, expecting to be blind for a few minutes only to find my vision working perfectly fine.

“Why coal?” Swift asked. “I mean, it’s...it’s just coal, right?”

“Yep! I suspect it’s because the old train was coal driven. They wove that into the spellworks.” Mephi reached into the front of her coveralls and tossed something to Swift, who caught it in her hooves. It was a gorgeous, uncut gemstone that would have paid my salary for three months back home. “It does have some benefits, though!”

Limerence plucked the stone from Swift’s hooves, holding it up so he could see it from a few different angles. “Are you saying that this device eats coal and defecates...diamonds?”

Mephitica reached up and tapped him on the nose with her toe. “You’re a smart boy! There’s a hopper at the back. It pays the bills. Either way, you best get to the back. We’ll be getting ready to land, soon!”

“One last question, if you don’t mind,” Limerence said, settling his spectacles back in place as he set the goggles to one side. The conductor raised an ear and he took that as a signal to continued. “You mentioned a...former train that this one is based off of? I assume the designers used a retired locomotive? Do you happen to know that engine’s number?”

Glancing towards the boiler, Mephitica shook her head. “It didn’t have a number, actually, or if it did, I don’t remember it. Still, if you’re curious about the old engine...that’s all that’s left.” She pointed at a discolored spot on the far wall. I realized after a second that it was some kind of metal plate which was partially grown into the flesh surrounding it. A few letters were embossed therein, but only half of the tarnished plate was visible.

“-n-d-s-h-i-p E-x-p,” Swift spelled out the remaining letters, rubbing her temple. ”What’s that supposed mean?”

“No idea, honey-bunch! Doesn’t matter, now does it? Now scoot! I gotta bring us in for a landing and space has been a bit grumpy of late.” Taking the shovels from Limerence, Swift, and I, the conductor shooed us back into the passenger car, tossing a pile of towels across my shoulders as we went.

Taxi was where we’d left her and I only realized I’d forgotten to take off the enchanted gas-mask after she caught sight of the three of us and started laughing herself to tears. Once we’d returned them to Mephitica, we began the unpleasant process of wiping the train’s saliva off and dressing ourselves.

The car juddered and I felt myself begin to rise off the carpet just as I finished slapping my hat in place.

From the next compartment, Mephitica shouted, “All passengers, hold on tight! We may be experiencing a bit of turbulence! Next stop...Ponyville train station!”

Act 3 Chapter 14 : A Long Awaited Party

Act 3 Chapter 14 : A Long Awaited Party

The Crusades were a time of terrible strife for much of Equestria, but history is made everywhere at once, not simply in tiny corners of particular violence and very few ponies really conceptualize just how big the country is. Even dragons intent on bloody mischief couldn’t have laid waste to the entirety of the nation.

While few places escaped at least some attention, the Dragon Lords were familiar with a form of combat emphasizing brute force over tactics. If one wishes to be brutal, there’s little point in burning a few huts or a row of trailers in the middle of nowhere. Sure, the atrocity might creep back to the news networks at some point in the distant future to cause dismay and demoralization, but that is an investment of resources and scale-power to very uncertain effect. To that end, most dragon attacks were hit and run on major population centers.

Equestria’s greatest power has always been adaptation and the dragons required a considerable reconsideration of old ideas. Phalanx combat was abandoned in favor of very mobile squadrons. Short range weapons gave way to rifles, cannon, and eventually launcher.

For all it was hideously destructive, the war left many places entirely untouched save a distant relative dying in some famed attack. Celestia took this as incentive to spread her population more widely, causing a considerable upswing in the number of ponies in many small towns and farming communities, followed immediately by a spike in breeding. Whatever else the dragons might have had, they could never have matched equinity for sheer weight of numbers and innovation.

While one dragon might be quite a powerful foe, a hundred tiny horses with rocket launchers is a force to be reckoned with.

-The Scholar

‘Turbulence’, she says.

‘Rough ride’, she says.

There’s no gentle way to push through the barriers of reality, but whatever it was we did then was more akin to crashing face-first into them. If that first hop was a bit disturbing, the second one was a kind of torture.

Swift was arguing with six copies of herself. Taxi was inside out. Limerence sprouted insectile wings, then burst into flames.

Then things got really weird.

There’s just a place beyond which the equine mind refuses to accept that anything it’s seeing is real. I reached that spot pretty quickly when I found myself listening to the ticking of the complex clockwork that—at that particular moment—made up my entire biology with the exception of my left ear and one hoof. I let myself fall slowly into a sort of warm mental soup, laying there howling for it all to end as my sanity fractured into a million pieces scattered across many different universes.

I could hear my friends’ thoughts. I ate a cake made of my own teeth. I bled molten metal.

We twisted and flailed in the grip of powers beyond the ken of gooshy little flesh creatures who should never have dared tread beyond the veil of our tiny ball of dirt. Pain is one thing, and there was plenty of that, but there was loss and the sensation of aging a thousand years in a second, alongside a hundred other feelings the brain just isn’t prepared to process. It went on and on, physics and reality shaking apart and reforming all around us like a waterfall of broken mirrors.

And then...it was done.

I lay there, my chin buried in the shag carpet, eyes tightly closed, waiting for whatever was coming next. My heart was pounding and the anti-magic armor still let out unhappy little whimpers and squeaks, but I was me again. Cautiously touching my own face, I swallowed a mouthful of bile and flipped onto my side, gagging softly at the hideous taste in my muzzle.

It felt like it’d been hours. Days. Centuries. I’d spent a millennia trapped in that horrible space between spaces.

Nearby, I could hear ragged sobbing. That was what finally brought me out of my own stupor.

My legs felt weak, but when called upon, they responded. I fought my knees under myself, then heaved up to a standing position. There was no sunlight to tell me what time it was, but then, we might have been underground. Wiping my eyes clean, I glanced around at the inside of the carriage.

Swift was propped against the wall, hugging herself and hiding her face in her forelegs, while Taxi was back in her carefully arranged meditation position. My driver’s eyes were sunken and hollow, her breathing barely controlled, but she was doing her best to find whatever peaceful place she’d been in a few minutes ago. The weeping was coming from Limerence, who was repeatedly bumping his forehead against the wall as he whispered to himself like a frightened foal.

“Not real. Not happening. Not real. Not happening…”

Deciding quickly who was in greatest need, I shakily stumbled over and pulled Limerence into my forelegs. He stopped trying to bang his head on the wall and began crying into my shoulder as his mind slowly crept back from whatever hole it’d crawled into. A minute later, I felt soft feathers and a tiny legs wrapped around my middle. Finally, I smelled incense and a cheek resting on mine.

The four of us—friends in the worst time our world had seen in more than thirty years—had somehow mutually acknowledged that we were going to sit here like the matched set of emotional cripples we were, clutching one another for comfort. No pretending to be heroes out to save Equestria for a bit.

The smell of the train faded away and with it, I let the memories of what’d just happened go with it. It was horrible, yes, but there was no solid way of storing such horror in the mind. Whatever might have happened, we had each other. In the grand scheme of things, I suspect that might be all that really matters.

Sometime during the following twenty minutes as my friends and I lay there on the carpet, trying to recover our sensibilities, Mephitica stuck her head through the door and set a tiny box of tissues down, then retreated back to the front compartment. Truth be, holding Limerence and Swift while they both bawled like little kids into my mane was better therapy than all the months I’d spent sitting in a shrink’s office after Juniper died. It certainly made what we’d just been through seem a bit less horrible. Not perfect, not something I’d ever want to repeat if I could avoid it, but a bit better.

It was almost an hour before any of us were in a condition to get up. Mephitica reappeared with a tray full of muffins and cups of coffee, but wisely kept silent as we picked over the offerings without much enthusiasm.

Finally, I took what was left of my intestinal fortitude and began the process of jamming the trauma into that little box in my head where I keep the hundreds of other skeletons that make me fundamentally un-dateable.

‘Do the job. Don’t go mad. You can’t afford to be insane. You’ve been insane before and all you did was drink, cry, and work yourself to death. Do the job. You’ll be fine. When it’s all over, you can rest. Do the job...’

“Meph…” I started, then coughed a few times as my throat seized. I gulped in some air and waited for my gag reflex to relax before trying again. The conductor offered me a glass of something and I gratefully chugged it. It could have been dog piss and I’d have been grateful, but it was just water. “Mephi...wha-what was all that?”

“Turbulence,” she replied, cracking a tiny smile. “Forty years and I’ve never had a breaching action like that. Horny sends his apologies, by the way. Space is a disaster around here.”

“We...w-we made it?” Swift stammered, shaking so hard she could barely sit up.

Mephitica nodded, holding up a little brochure with the words ‘Ponyville Tourist Board’ across the top. “Welcome to Ponyville, honey. Local time...a bit after dinner, but the bars should still be open.”

Limerence had managed to compose himself enough to get his notepad out and began chronicling that last re-entry. I rested a hoof on his shoulder and nodded in the direction of the door.

“You know anything about Ponyville?” I asked.

He shook his head, turning his face away. Tears were still trickling down his cheeks, but his voice was steady. “I’m afraid I...I can’t be of much use, Detective. I didn’t know we were going to be visiting and had no reason to research a place like this. It’s a medium sized agricultural farming community. There are a hundred like it between here and Detrot. Nothing of note has ever happened here. It is only unique insofar as it is as close to Canterlot as one can get without actually being a suburb.”

Trotting to the window, I peered out through the thin, twisted glass. There wasn’t much worth seeing; a grassy field with a wood in the distance, a second train track running the opposite direction we were facing, and what seemed to be a huge quarry.

Turning, I headed to the other window, but all I could see there was the train station. It was little more than a long, covered concrete platform running alongside the track. The ticket office sat just beyond, windows storm-boarded. A few heaps of leaves or grass were piled against a dozen or so dilapidated benches where they’d been blown. Aside a couple of fat old crows rooting through an upturned garbage bin, nopony was in sight. Far away, the eclipse hung there; shining red light, spilling deep shadows across the empty station.

“Looks clear enough,” I mumbled, more to myself than anypony else. “Mephi, you going to wait here?”

“Yepperoni! It’ll take a few hours before we’re fueled for another hop and I cannot wait to have a look around, but I’ll do that after we’re ready.” She shut her eyes for a second, then grinned. “Horny says we’re safe for right now, but there’s an awful lot of residual energies in the air. Dangerous energies! Oooh, this is going to be fun!”

Swift was adjusting her gun harness, fitting Masamane back to her leg and the Hailstorm across her back. She lifted her head sharply at the word ‘fun’ and shivered. “Sir, I don’t know if I can do another of those trips if it’s going to be as bad as what we just went through…”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I replied, “Right now, I want to get out and look around. This may involve a walk to Canterlot. Maybe we can catch a ride with one of the locals up to Canterlot. There’s sure to be an emergency air-chariot this close.”

Picking up our supplies, Taxi threw them across her back. “Is there an actual plan or are we just winging this again?”

“There’s a plan. It’s not a good plan, but it’s a plan. If there are Royal Guards nearby, we’ll find them. Maybe some members of the parliament or Celestia’s School are still out there. If nothing else, we might be able to get some news from around Equestria.”

“That’s an awful lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’, Hardy,” she replied.

“Yes, well...when you want to be in charge again, I’ll be happy to sit back and take orders. Until then, come on.”

Mephitica appeared at my side, passed me a map of Ponyville, then vanished again just as quickly as she’d come. I didn’t feel the need to pick up my trigger, since there were very few things that could sneak up on the Bull.

Moving to the back of the car, I fought off the urge to take a deep breath, but instead pushed open the door and stepped out onto the platform.

A stiff breeze was blowing, carrying with it a bit of grey dust. At first I thought it was ash, but it seemed too fine. Everything was coated in a thin layer of it, leaving the details washed out. That air was clean and sweet, but I think an open sewer would have been clean and sweet after however long we’d spent aboard the train.

Motioning my friends off behind me, I stepped to one side so Limerence could disembark, followed by Swift. Taxi brought up the rear, dropping the sack at her hooves.

Pulling open the knot around the top, my driver dug out the set of walkie-talkies and began passing them around. I checked the batteries, finding them fully charged, then turned the little dial to ‘station scan’. The speaker let out a soft static rumble as it ran up and down the frequencies before settling on an emergency broadcast of some kind.

A sweet voiced mare was reading a prepared statement.

“-not safe. The local area is heavily contaminated with magic. I say again, if you are hearing this, do not continue on to Canterlot. There is nothing for you there. Return to your homes, stockpile what food you can, and stay tuned to this frequency. We will let you know as soon as the situation has changed. If you can make it to the following cities, there are refugee centers set up there.”

The mare stopped and another pony, a stallion with a strangely monotone cadence to his voice, began reading a list of towns. Most were over a hundred miles away and Detrot was noticeably absent. The closest was Manehattan.

After a moment, the mare was back. “This crisis will be resolved soon. Please keep listening. I’ll...we’ll find a way to bring the Princess's home. This is the Equestrian Royal Guard and we have the situation well in hoof. This broadcast repeats.”

I turned the radio off and shook my head.

“That’s a bit...ominous,” Taxi murmured. “No other stations broadcasting? Not even something local?”

“If it’s an emergency broadcast, it’s probably overwhelming all the local stations. Let’s see if there’s anypony in town. Somepony must have noticed us coming in,” I said, stepping back and turning to face the Bull. Two large, expressive red eyes opened a couple of meters above my head, centering on my face as I addressed it. “Cord Breaker...If we’re not back in twelve hours, you get Mephitica out of here. Understand? Even if she objects, you take her and you leave.”

The giant eyes blinked at me, then the entire passenger car heaved up on the wheels on one side and shook up and down like a wet dog. I took that for a nod.

“Alright, let’s go,” I said, setting off, leaving train and conductor to their own devices while we headed into a very big unknown.

The weather was good, but any weather that wasn’t spontaneously turning a pony into some other species is good weather. We strolled along the platform and took a moment to peer through the cracks between the storm boards.

“Mercy, I forgot what these rural types live like,” Taxi murmured as she tried the door, finding it unlocked. “Hardy, you want a farm one day? You, me, Swift, and Mags? Limerence if he’s interested? Get ourselves a few chickens and grow fruit. Have some strawberries in the summertime and leave our front doors open for the neighbors to come and go.”

“I don’t need those thoughts right now, Sweets. These people have been just as screwed up as everyone else by what’s happened and they’re probably just as armed.”

Swift gave her trigger a gentle nudge as we reached the end of the platform. The town was just around the corner, along with whatever dangers might have spawned in the last week and a half.

“Are we going the ‘friendly’ route, Sir?” my partner asked.

“Friendly is as friendly does, kid. Don’t shoot anyone who isn’t trying to kick, shoot, or eat you and try to keep it to kneecaps until we’ve established what’s been going on here,” I replied.

Inhaling slowly, I stepped around the side of the train platform, ready for almost anything.

Of course, being ready for anything makes it entirely likely that you’ll end up standing there with your jaw hanging open like a fresh caught trout when what you run into turns out to be nothing. Particularly when it’s the most thoroughly ‘nothing’ nothing you’ve ever seen.

Ahead, a field of grey stretched from about fifteen meters beyond the edge of the platform all the way to the horizon. Far off, a dust devil billowed and twisted in the wind. It could have been three meters or thirty. There was nothing to give perspective. Nothing at all.

Somepony made one of those sounds that are really just a bit of air escaping through vocal chords locked up tight. It’s a sound you can’t really replicate if you’re trying, but it’s easy when your guts are doing flip flops and your heart is thumping along like a frightened bunny in your chest.

Fishing the Ponyville Tourist Board pamphlet Mephitica gave me out of my pocket, I held it up. A shrubbery just behind the train platform was visible in the image on the front. Somepony had been standing right where we stood when that picture was taken. Maybe a bit to the left.

The picture was of a thriving, rustic village. Brick houses. Perfectly cut lawns. A smiling couple with two foals waving to the camera.

In the background, hanging right below the sun, there was Canterhorn; the Lonely Mountain, with the city of Canterlot hanging off the side.

A couple inches of the road that lead straight through town was still there along with some grass, but beyond that it was as though someone had drawn a line right across the world. There was only the dust remaining for miles and miles.

The mountain was gone. Ponyville was gone.

How? Why? To what purpose?

Those were questions so big a little pony like me shouldn’t even be trying to answer them.

I wasn’t aware of having sat down, but I had. The concrete was cold under my backside, but I didn’t feel like moving. Where was there to go? There was nothing out there. Not even a little backwater town with a friendly bar-keep and a piece of apple pie.

“I...I knew that it had disappeared,” Limerence murmured, eyes wide as he studied the emptiness ahead. “Intellectually, I was aware. I thought there might be some part of the mountain still there, though. The power necessary for an act like this-”

“Limerence, I mean this in the kindest way possible,” Taxi said, quietly. “Please, shut up.”

The librarian cocked an eyebrow at her, but did as he was told. We stood there, letting the horror settle in for a while longer.

Finally, after a good four minutes of that, I’d had enough.

“Alright...screw this. Swift? Get in the air and get us a scouting report. All three hundred and sixty degrees. You have some field spectacles on you?”

My partner nodded, digging a small pair of binoculars out of one of her pouches. “I...I do, Sir, but there’s nothing out there…”

“Do you want to be sure before you say ‘Yes, I want to hop right back aboard the Bull and shovel some more coal.’?”

She glanced back towards the train sitting in the station, tooting along happily to itself. An eyeball on the front was casually watching us. “No, Sir, I think I want to get in the air and give you a scouting report. All three sixty.”

“If anything or anyone takes a shot at you, get back here quick as you can.”

She dipped her head, then gave her wings a few light beats, lifting off. Starting a slow spiraling action, she tucked her legs up against her stomach, swooping over the station to build up some momentum before rocketing off into the darkened sky. She was pretty easy to follow—being bright orange—hence I was hoping whatever might be out there wasn’t looking up just then.

We waited in silence. What was there that was worth saying?

I almost pissed down my leg when my walkie-talkie screeched to life. I felt a little better when I glanced over to see Taxi was halfway into a fighting position and Lim had a hoof tucked into the part of his vest he usually kept his knives in.

“Sir? Are you there?”

I tapped the talk button. “Yeah, kid. We’re here. What do you see?”

“It’s about like it looks, Sir. There’s a really big circle right where the town should be, then a much larger one which is where I think Canterlot used to be. Perfect circles. I think there’s another one farther off, too.”

“Multiple spell points?” Limerence mused, pulling my hoof closer so he could speak into the mic. “Did I hear correctly that there are several locations that seem to have been hit by this simultaneously?”

“Yeah. I don’t think there’s going to be any refugees, Sir. The damage to the forest is...I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like a bunch of tornados danced all over it. Everypony was evacuated to one of the nearby cities because of the storm. They used atmosphere shields to keep the magic away, remember?”

I had a thought, then took three steps back to look at the train platform. “Why would they board up this place? I mean, magic shields should keep out the wind, right?”

Taxi shrugged and nodded towards a point further down the tracks where a section was bent, torn free from its moorings by the passage of something. “It’s the edge of town. They probably didn’t want to make the shield any bigger than they had to. I bet the tracks are a mess, so they decided it’d be easier to just rebuild if it was destroyed. The train station isn’t anypony’s home or anything.”

Puzzle pieces, puzzle pieces....

“Limerence, if I needed a target for a really big spell and I wanted to make sure that everypony in the area was inside it, how would I go about it?” I asked.

His muzzle settled into a grimace. “Rhetorical as I think this answer may be, you would create a very dangerous environment full of unstable magic, force an evacuation, then target the defensive measure. Of course, it would be difficult to achieve, unless you happened to know the precise magical frequency of the shield...”

“I think it’s a safe bet that they’ve got people on the inside of just about every organization we interact with. Maybe not the Aroyos or the Stilettos, but even then, all it takes is stealing a couple of foals to get yourself an insider.”

The librarian gave me a look that reminded me an awful lot of his father. “You would make a very good criminal, Detective. You certainly think like one.”

“That’s one of those compliments I’m never sure how to take. Now—”

Our walkie-talkie squeaked, then Swift’s voice broke in.

“Sir! I see something! It looks like...um, I think it’s three ponies, about three kilometers from your position! They’re just...standing there beside a really big tank. I don’t want to get any closer. I think two of them are watching the sky. There’s an anti-air gun on top of the tank, too.”

“That might be exactly who we’re looking for,” I said, tapping my chin. “Alright, kid. Can you see us?”

“Yep!”

“Stay up there, keep them in sight, and if they make any moves let me know. Give me a general heading.”

There was a long pause.

“Um...how, sir? The sun isn’t moving and my compass is just spinning in circles.”

Limerence stepped forward and said, “The train-track heads due south west towards Appleloosa and due East towards Canterlot.”

“Okay...I think I can direct you. You’re standing on the end of the platform, right? Turn twenty degrees due east.”

Taxi held out her compass for reference and the needle was, indeed, just spinning. Still, we were able to get a reasonable estimation of where twenty degrees was from the notches around the edge.

There was a moment’s hesitation at the edge of the grass, but I forced myself to take another step into the strange, dark dust. It felt like stepping on a cloud and squished around my hoof. I stepped back and there was a perfect imprint of my toe left in the surface.

“Huh...weird. It’s not like normal dirt.”

Limerence scooped a bit of the surface up and let it dribble through the air. “Incredibly fine. I would almost say one might use this for lubrication in a weapon or engine if they saw fit.”

“I don’t want to even consider the possibility that you’re thinking of lubricating an engine with the remains of all those ponies,” Taxi grumbled, settling our supplies on her back once more.

“Merely making an observation. Still, I don’t...believe this to be magical excretia of any kind. The size isn’t uniform enough,” he replied.

“Not magical? The whole city disappeared. Two whole cities disappeared! What’s not magical about that?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “I say only what I see. If you want more, bag some up and as soon as I get to a laboratory with a working microscope and an arcane isolation chamber, I’ll be glad to tell you what we’re walking through.”

My driver frowned, then lowered her ears and looked abashed. “I’m sorry, Limerence. I didn’t mean to snap at you. My talent is acting very strange.”

“What’s it saying?” I asked, curiously.

She bit the inside of her cheek, then sat down, reaching back with one hoof to rub the scars on her flank. “Nothing. That’s what’s weird. It’s as though this whole area is...empty. Like I’m floating in space. Usually my talent says something. ‘That pony needs to get home right now’ or ‘Don’t cross the street’ or ‘Go over to Hardy’s place and flip him so he doesn’t drown in his own vomit’. Right now? Not a thing.”

“I know you don’t much care for your talent, but...keep listening, alright?”

She nodded and we began our march across the billowing, dusty dunes.

The going was slow. Every step was like plowing through snow. Walking in one another’s steps helped a bit, but it was exhausting to walk like that. Still, progress was made.

Limerence was mumbling to himself, stopping now and then to swing his horn back and forth at the ground. It let out some weak light, about as strong as your average lighter, but nothing I imagined he could use for anything.

After a good ten minutes of this, I asked, “Lim, what are you doing?”

“Hmmm? Oh...apologies, Detective. Trying to get a read on this area. My horn might not be up to lifting a pencil, but I can still feel magic. There’s chaos here, but it’s not elemental chaos. I can feel spellwork. It’s not Equestrian, though. Nor draconic, nor any other spell-casting species I’m familiar with. Very, very odd.”

“What about this is normal? Just add it to the stack of other mysteries and we’ll deal with it later.” I lifted the walkie-talkie to my face. “Swift? How we doing?”

“Over the next rise, Sir,” came the reply. “I think one of them might be hurt or something. They keep stumbling back and forth. The other two are just watching the air. I found a little bit of cloud to sit in and I don’t think they’ve spotted me yet.”

Ahead, a crest of blown dust had formed a bit of a small dune. I threw myself at it, scrambling up the face as my hooves almost slid out from under me. It was like trying to ice-skate up a mountain, but after a few minutes and a couple of muzzle-fulls of dirt, I finally struggled to the top.

Down below, about a hundred meters away, a heavily armored vehicle of some kind was squatting out amongst the shorter piles of dust. Swift’s ‘tank’ was a long, white vehicle running on a pair of fat treads with a set of foldable metal stairs leading down one side. It reminded me a bit of a limo that’d been converted for military service, albeit purpose-built rather than hacked together. On top sat an unmanned turret with a heavy caliber machine gun.

There was a seal on the door; the Equestrian flag, Luna and Celestia chasing each other’s tails in a little circle. Behind them sat a purple eye, rather than the usual sun/moon motif.

The path the transport must have taken stretched out for some distance before disappearing as the wind erased it.

What I didn’t see was anypony else.

Putting the walkie-talkie to my mouth, I said, “Kid?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“You said there are three ponies here?”

“They’re right in front of you, Sir. Can’t you see them?”

“No, kid, there’s nothing—”

“You move, you die.”

I went rigid from nose to tail tip and I imagine that probably saved my life. That voice had come from directly below me. Right below me. I slowly began to look down, but something very sharp and businesslike pressed against my stomach, just below my solar plexus.

Behind me, Taxi let out a whinny of alarm.

That voice. It had a funny sound to it. Monotone, feminine, but with a slight guttural buzz.

“Is breathing going to get me killed?” I asked, softly.

Whatever was down there ignored my jibe and said, “Order your pegasus to land. If I see her reach for her trigger, you will die and I will be gone before she can fire.”

With an exaggerated slowness, I lifted the walkie-talkie again. “Swift? We’ve got a bit of a problem here. Listen carefully and pay close attention. Unless I tell you not to, I want you to strafe the entire area with your Cloud Hammer in thirty seconds, destroy the armored car, and kill everyone standing there. Clear?”

“Sir? What are you—”

“Say ‘Yes, Sir’, kid.”

Swift hesitated for all of three seconds, then replied, “Yes, Sir!”

“What did you say?!” the voice barked in surprise. “Tell your—”

Raising one rear hoof, I stomped it down directly below where I’d been standing. Something let out a pained grunt, then tried to rise out of the dust where it’d been hidden. I rolled sideways, snapping out my rear legs once I was on my back and wrapping them around what felt distinctly like a knee. The blade that’d been jabbing me in the stomach was attached to some kind of hoof-guard sticking straight out of the dirt. Hooking it in place, I hugged one foreleg around the hoof itself and slammed opposite rear leg down where I presumed the creature’s neck to be, assuming it was shaped anything like a pony.

Taxi had moved the second I started my roll, getting into position and pinning whatever it was while Limerence drew an ugly looking twelve inch knife, sticking it an inch into the ground in roughly the spot our opponent’s genitals might be. All he needed to do was lean a bit of weight on it.

All at once, it stopped struggling, letting out a low hiss that sent up a plume of dust. I still couldn’t get a look at what we’d caught. It seemed to almost blend into the ground, like a chameleon.

I’d dropped the walkie-talkie during my attack. It lay nearby, the talk button locked.

“Sir? Should I commence with ‘Cloud Hammer bombardment’?” Swift asked, nervously.

I raised my voice so the mic would pick me up. “No, kid...I don’t think that’ll be necessary. We’ve got everything under control here.”

“O-okay, Sir! Should...should I come down?”

“No, stay up there and keep an eye on the car.”

“Yes, Sir…”

The feint had been a bit of a gamble, but it seemed to pay off. I had a good grip on my assailant and unless they were double jointed in about four different places I doubted they’d get out of my hold, though if they did they’d have to deal with Lim’s knife in their fun bits.

I was just starting to relax, getting ready to give a few orders of my own when a brilliant purple glow surrounded my body. My armor let out a squeal of anguish, then hot sparks spat in my face. I felt myself go weightless a half second before I was ripped away from the ground and thrown into the air.

Sky, ground, sky, ground. I caught a flash of Swift who’d somehow gotten just a few yards away. She was trapped in a violet bubble, flailing at the air, but before I could do more than gasp I was spun around again so I was facing the ground.

My attacker was digging themselves out of the dust. The shape was vaguely female, though very tall and lithe, though that was all I could really make out. Something about it defied light to reflect normally and it blended into the background almost to the point of invisibility.

Taxi and Limerence drifted through my vision together, both encased in the same magical field. Sweets was glaring off at something down and to the left. I followed her gaze as best I could, but the inside of the bubble was almost completely frictionless and I ended up flopping onto my side instead.

Slowly, we dropped nearer to the ground and I could finally get a look at who or what had managed to snag me.

They were generally pony shaped, leaning drunkenly against one of the limo-tank’s giant treads, wearing a very elegant hooded robe in a soft yellow. The hood was pulled up, obscuring any details. A bottle of the highest-end apple cider money could buy, Sweet Apple Special Number Six, was hanging in the air beside them, half empty.

“Mayfly...are you hurt?” the hooded figure asked. Her voice—definitely female this time— was pleasant, authoritative, and a bit on the soft side. I couldn’t peg an age from the voice alone, but it was the voice of a leader.

My assailant flickered, and I caught a glimpse of glowing green eyes.

“No, ma’am,” the strange pony replied. “Just my pride.”

“I think you can drop your disguise now,” the hooded mare murmured, pushing herself up to a standing position.

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was a burst of brilliant, green fire and something out of my nightmares was very suddenly standing just below us.

Thank goodness Swift screamed first, or I might have.

It was a monster; a gigantic insect a solid head taller than I, with vaguely the proportions of a pony but nothing beyond a passing resemblance. Dig around in the distant development of the equine brain and there’s something that just doesn’t like a spider you can’t squish, much less an enormous bug masquerading as a pony, with fangs long enough to tear your throat out.

Her legs were pitch black, covered in a shiny chitin that caught the light at funny angles. Holes and pits filled them, through which I could see the ground on the other side, and brilliant, slitted eyes studied me like a snake watching a particularly delicious rat.

I’d seen a few pictures, now and then, but photos don’t do their kind justice. How could an image of a frightened little bug pony huddled in the back of a P.A.C.T. transport van come anything near the terrifying majesty of ahealthy specimen in her prime?

To most ponies my age, they’d taken on an almost mythical quality. After all, everypony born in the last sixty years knows the story of the Canterlot Wedding: how an army managed to sneak into Equestria and only through the strength of Princess Celestia were they driven back. The country-wide effort to root out the remains of that army would have constituted the greatest Equestrian conflict of our times if the Crusades hadn’t come along to redefine the word ‘war’ in its entirety.

She was a changeling. Worse, if I remembered my brief Academy xeno-biology course, she was a changeling queen. The part of my mind that wasn’t in a full blown terror spasm had noticed that the creature was wearing Royal Guard armor, form-fitted to her unique biology, but that didn’t reassure me much as to her intentions. She’d almost torn my guts out, after all.

My trigger tasted awful, since it was coated in the fine dust, but I held onto it anyway, wishing I’d thought to load it with the Crusader ammo before we left. I still had the special clip in my pocket, but doubted the insect would give me time to get it into the gun. That said, she wasn’t the one holding me in a magical bubble or, for that matter, giving orders to a changeling queen.

And if the changeling might have used her magic to kill me, why hadn’t she?

Not taking my aim off the queen, I turned my attention to her companion.

The mare was certainly not sober, judging by the mighty pull she took off the bottle, but her spell was still keeping us trapped. Tilting her head back, she sat down against the limo. I caught a bit of purple light under her hood, but still couldn’t see her face. Of course, that meant she hadn’t seen mine either.

“I’m sorry about Mayfly. She takes my safety really seriously,” the mare mumbled, rubbing her cheek. “Do you ponies promise to behave? I’d like to put you down now. One of you is wearing anti-magic armor and it’s kind of giving me a headache. That and I’d like to actually see you, but I don’t want to look up or I think I might be sick...”

I waved towards Swift and gestured for her to drop her trigger, then cautiously set mine down.

“We’re not here to hurt anypony,” I said. “Just checking out what happened to Canterlot. Are you Equestrian government?”

The mare giggled at that, almost dropping her bottle. Thankfully she seemed to have a better grasp on the four of us. “You...you could say that, I guess. I’m going to bring you down, now. No funny business?”

For all the changeling was treating her with deference, she didn’t sound like some kind of government official. Why would a changeling be treating a pony with deference? Oof, questions for later. I wanted my hooves under me.

“No funny business,” I agreed. “You hear that, guys?”

“I hear, Sir! I just don’t believe! She snagged me out of mid-air!” Swift complained, trying to spread her wings, but finding the bubble didn’t have enough room.

“This shield would survive a Cloud Hammer strike, Detective,” Limerence murmured, tapping on the wall of his little prison. “It’s unlikely we will have the opportunity for our business to get ‘funny’ from inside of one of these.”

The mare pulled her head back a couple of inches. “Wait...Did he just call you ‘Detective’?”

“That’s right...Detrot Police Department,” I replied, flipping my badge out of my armor.

The bubble I was in began to descend suddenly, floating closer to the hooded mare. As I reached eye level, I finally had some perspective on how big she was; a full head taller than me. Maybe not as big as the changeling, but still an intimidating presence. As she got her first look at me from under the hood, she drew back.

“It...it can’t be…” she whispered. “You?! Here?! Now?! It’s...it’s impossible! You are not possible!”

Her apple cider bottle popped out of existence and her horn flashed. The smell of alcohol around her faded completely.

“I’m afraid you’ve got me at a whole heap of disadvantages, miss,” I said.

“Should we drop them in a pod for interrogation, Ma’am?” the queen called Mayfly asked her superior, adjusting the golden helmet atop her head to pick a bit of dust out of her strange, membranous green mane. “My latest generation of interrogator drones would love to actually get to do their jobs for once. They’re spending most of their time learning to cheat at cards.”

“No, Mayfly,” the mare answered. “I think this stallion might tell us things if we just ask nicely. You know, nicely? Or did you forget we can do that again?”

Mayfly stuck her lower lip out and somehow managed to look pouty. “I know, but I’ve wanted to try a proper interrogation for forever!”

“I know you have, but...maybe we should introduce ourselves instead? This pony came a long, long way to be here and...if half of what I know about him is true, he’s had a really crazy couple of months.” She cocked her head to one side and smiled, knowingly at me. “Isn’t that right...Detective Hard Boiled?”

Reaching up, she pulled her hood back.

Surprised?

I suppose I should have been. Mare in the middle of nowhere, in the dusty remains of the most important city in their world, knows your name and you should be surprised, right? Plenty of ponies live their whole lives without interacting with Equestria’s government except to pay taxes and parking fines.

Still, after the day I’d had, I felt pretty sure there wasn’t much left that was going to surprise me.

It turns out I’m kinda stupid.

It was a feat not to swallow my own tongue. She was cute.

Maybe striking is closer to the word I had in mind. She reminded me of a filly I’d asked out back in my Academy days who was smart enough not to go out with me. Fur the color of fresh grown grapes; a rich, royal purple. Her mane with the sort of no-nonsense cut I’d always liked in a mare, with a little streak of pink in the middle. Business with a fun side. Funnily, the whole thing was bobbing and swirling in the air, though whatever breeze it was blowing in I couldn’t feel. It was the kind of style ponies in the city favored from time to time, propped up by a bit of illusion to make it flashy. Her horn was huge, even for a pony her size.

My bubble, along with that of my friends settled on the ground, then vanished. I stumbled, catching myself before I could pitch forward on my face.

“Sounds like you know me,” I replied, lifting my head and tamping down my hat. “So long as your changeling friend here is playing nice, I suppose we can afford to as well.”

Mayfly stuck her forked tongue out at me in a way that reminded me more of a petulant teenager than anything else. “I rarely deal with ponies capable of such irrationality! You didn’t even have a Cloud Hammer! If we find ourselves in a similar situation, do believe I will cut first and offer conciliation second!”

The mare rolled her eyes at her companion. “Mayfly, I do wish you’d spend some time on our diplomatic missions doing something besides teasing guards and haunting brothels. At least Orb can pretend to have manners from time to time.”

“Hello? Changeling. It’s not as though I get dinner anywhere else these days,” Mayfly coughed, seeming to remember she was in unfamiliar company. She quickly added, “Eh...Ma’am.”

“Huh...well, you apparently know me. I’ll ask some questions about that at a point, I’m sure,” I said, turning sideways and holding out my leg. “Anyway, this is Swift, partner and sharpshooter. Limerence, research and intelligence. Taxi, my driver.”

Limerence touched his forehead, while Swift gave a little curtsy. Taxi nodded, respectfully.

“Well, I’m—” the purple mare began, but Mayfly took a step forward.

Mayfly piped up, bouncing up and down on her front legs. “Oooh! Can I do it? It’s been ever such a long time!”

The purple mare shut her eyes and drew in a long, calming breath like one might with a particularly enthusiastic toddler who's just asked you to do a trick for the ten thousandth time.

“Fiiine...So long as you don’t do the entire—”

“Thanks!” Mayfly chirped, then swung to face us, puffing her armored chest out. “Mares and Gentlestallions! The High, Eternal Queen of All Hives, the Shadow Trap, She-Who-Wields-The-Rainbow, the Sun’s Dagger, the Elemental Magic, Lady of Friendship, Horn of Minos, and Heavenly Blade of Griffonia! Bow your heads!” We all blinked at her and she frowned slightly, then said, “No, really...bow your heads.”

Giving her a skeptical look, I took a step back and lowered my chin a few inches. My colleagues followed suit.

Satisfied, Mayfly continued, “I present you...Princess Twilight Sparkle!”

Act 3 Chapter 15 : Your Princess Is In This Castle

An astute observer of Equestrian society who isn’t ‘in the know’ will eventually come to have questions and concerns about the existence of alicorn Princesses. Since those who actually are in the know constitute less than a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent of the populace, most of us are left with conjecture and theory.

Why are there supremely powerful beings seemingly dredged out of the very magic of Equis and given royal appointment to lead? How many of them are there? What creates these beings? What are we meant to do if they one day cease to exist?

The theory which seems to most closely suit the facts is that there is some underlying pseudo-sentience to Equestria’s magical field. Maybe it’s just long term manipulation by ponies giving the arcane system a sort of imprinted awareness or maybe it’s been there from the beginning, but there is a very distinct propensity for magic to provide what is needed for life to continue.

In the case of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, the movement of the sun and moon had come unbound from some natural process. For the case of Princess Cadenza, the return of the Crystal Empire was predicted and hence a pony who could control the powers it represented came into being.

This might seem an absurd and roundabout way of explaining their presence, but other explanations come uncomfortably close to the suggesting that there is an underlying narrative to our species' existence which supersedes individual will in the outcome of events. If such a being were to exist, knowing what we do about sex, birth, getting eyelashes caught in your eye, flatulence, and the recent resurgence of ‘disco’, we could only conclude that they have a terrible, and malevolent sense of humor.

-The Scholar

Princess Twilight Sparkle.

Funny how three words can instill simultaneous sadness and relief.

Finally, I could lay my burdens down and find myself a comfortable prison cell for the remainder of my life. Finally, somepony else could take control of this mad, out of control wagon that’d been this case. I needn’t worry any longer, because I could just let them slap me in irons with the happy knowledge that my job was done.

Yeah, like I said, I’m kinda stupid.

Memories flooded back into my consciousness from the conversation with Don Tome’s magical construct. Lost Princess. Gone. Disappeared during the Crusades.

How had I forgotten? How had I let those bits of information get away from me? Oh...right. There was that spell that erased her from history. I hadn’t so much as thought of her in days.

And there she was. A purple mare with a queen for a bodyguard.

She was blushing fit to bust, giving her bodyguard irritated looks as she waited for my reaction. I’m sure there’s a book of etiquette somewhere the covers the situation where you’re meeting a Princess and the world happens to have ended. I’ve never read it, but I’m sure it’s out there.

“Could you bring that bottle of cider back, please?” I asked, long after the silence had become awkward.

“C-cider?” she stuttered. Something under her robe fluffed out a little bit. “I wasn’t—”

I sat down and shut my eyes. “Sorry, Princess. If I am going to have any sort of conversation just now, I require alcohol. Your little memory spell has given me a considerable headache.”

“M-my spell?” she gasped, rising up on the tips of her hooves.

Taxi groaned, stepping up and smacking me across the back of the head. “Hardy...are you really going to antagonize a Princess of Equestria?”

“Are you saying you want to handle this situation sober?” I asked, pointedly.

My driver considered the question for a moment, then sat down beside me. “Princess Sparkle, we have traveled long and fought many battles to be here today. We require alcohol.”

“But...but you know about my spell?” Twilight squeaked, hope blooming in her eyes. “You must have...you must have been exposed to information about me recently! Where? Is one of the others still out there?! Are they safe?!”

I pointed at my tongue, then made the motion of scraping dirt off it.

Mayfly hissed, taking a threatening step in my direction. “You will answer the Queen of All Hives, pony, or I will suck the marrow from your bones!”

“I’m feeling as though that’s unlikely at this point,” I replied, patting a bit of dust out of my mane. “You may or may not be aware of what my day has already been like, but grumpy bugs in guard armor are really only about a six on my weird-o-meter. You should stick with the snarling demon shtick. My boss is scarier than you, Miss Fangs.”

I turned back to Twilight and felt myself smile. It was a crazy smile, but it was real and mine and I earned it. I crawled out of the grave and through the lairs of demons to sit there grinning at Elemental Princess Flashy Magic Flank or whatever Mayfly had called her. Two and a half months of bloody nights and sleeping with only nightmares for company. Yeah, I deserved a drink.

Twilight was examining me like a puzzle she only realized after several hours work she was missing a few pieces of.

“Detective—can I call you that?” she asked. I nodded, and she continued, “Do you know how many days my remaining agents spent crying into their badges trying to find you? I can almost understand why so many people have tried to kill you lately.”

“It’s my colt-ish charm, I’m sure. Talk later, booze now.”

I held out my hoof, and her horn crackled. A cider bottle—this one full—popped into being. I managed to catch it before it could hit the dirt, peeling off the aluminum seal with my teeth and popping the cork free. It let off a heavenly aroma. Putting both hooves on the bottom, I tilted it back and let the delicious, apple-flavored pain-eraser slide down my throat. A slow, happy warmth filled my stomach.

After I’d had my fill, I passed it to Taxi, and she took a swig, then offered it to Swift. My partner sighed and sipped the bottle before setting it in front Limerence. He shrugged and picked it up, studying the label.

“You know, somehow I’d thought I would get another few years before I ended up in a prison cell,” he muttered, then drank until he was reduced to a coughing fit. “Ahem...still, could be worse, I suppose. It’s an honor to meet you, Princess Sparkle. My father was a big fan of yours.”

“You’re...Limerence Tome, right?” Twilight asked, tilting her head. “I read your file after we saw you on the television with him. You don’t have a criminal record, but by all rights, you should.” She dipped her horn towards him. “Your father sold me some artifacts many years ago, though he didn't know I was his buyer. He also made it really hard for me to stay hidden, down through the years. How did he beat my spell?”

“He designed a magical construct to remind himself of your existence. Also, this.” Reaching into his front pocket, Limerence produced a folded piece of paper. It glowed, lifting into Twilight’s hooves. A tiny, nostalgic smile spread across her face as she unfolded the picture of herself and five other ponies. “I’d forgotten I was carrying it until just a moment ago.”

“I…I thought I managed to get all of these cleaned up during the war. This must be one of Pinkie’s. She loved...she loved giving these out to her friends.” A small tear formed in the corner of the Princess’s eye, then ran down her cheek. She hastily wiped it away. “S-sorry. Ponies get old, and we get sentimental. I don’t know how Princess Celestia does it. I feel like I should be crying all day sometimes.”

Swift raised her eyebrows. “Old? You don’t look very old, Ma’am…um...Twilight.”

Twilight pulled a little string on the front of her robe, and two flaps of material slid back, revealing a pair of brilliant purple wings. Spreading them, she stretched such that the muscles in the joints creaked and popped. “Alicorns get a pass on wrinkles. I had to get used to sleeping with wings, but flying was totally worth it.”

A book never really communicates the ‘majesty’ of an alicorn terribly well. They can say ‘majesty’, but until you’re in the presence of those wings, it isn’t quite real to you. I’d known she probably had a pair under that robe of hers, but seeing them was something else. I found myself bowing again without even really thinking about it.

“Oh please stop that! Sheesh! I’ve had wings for fifty-seven years, and I still can’t stop ponies from doing that!” Twilight grumbled, grabbing me by the shoulders with her magic and pulling me back to my hooves.

“Yeah, sorry.” I coughed, flicking the edges of my coat. “Look, you and I have obviously got to talk about a fair number of things,” I said. “Is there somewhere we can go besides—” I twirled a hoof at the dust bowl we were standing in. “You know...here? I could use a shower and something to eat.”

“Yes...yes, my apologies.” Standing up straight, Twilight called out to the empty wasteland. “Orb? Orb, please compose yourself! I’d like to go inside now!”

From somewhere overhead, a voice that sounded like somepony with a chalkboard digestive tract eating a whole bunch of nails replied, “Mistress, these ponies may still prove dangerous.”

Swift started to pick up her trigger, but Mayfly growled at her until she carefully set it down.

“You heard me, Orb,” Twilight ordered, tucking her wings in against her hips. “I’m pretty sure we’re safe, considering how much effort the Detective put into coming to see us.”

For a brief moment, nothing happened. Then a swirl of something like smoke began to coalesce out of the air, followed suddenly by a waterfall of black fog that wrapped itself around our hooves before drawing to a point beside Mayfly. Two lights side by side flickered in the darkness before a suit of Royal Guard armor stepped out of the miasma, coming to crisp attention facing Twilight Sparkle.

I say a suit, because that’s all there was: a full body heavy platemail suit sans occupant. A few drifting whorls of inky blackness leaked from the edges and joints, but that was all. The helmet was closed face, with only a faint luminance trickling from behind the muzzle guard where eyes should have been.

Snatching the bottle of cider from Swift, I quickly sat down to have another few drinks just to make sure I was on my way to good and drunk. No sense handling this without preparation. Swiping my mouth with the back of my hoof, I shoved the bottle halfway into my front pocket where it was within easy reach.

Reaching out, I gave the armor an inquisitive poke. It clanked under my toe, but the occupant didn’t react other than to twitch his gaze in my direction. I don’t know how I knew it was looking at me; it’s ‘eyes’ were just a pair of floating blue lights, almost like fireflies.

“Do I want to know what you are?” I asked, brushing the dust that’d been on my hoof off the armor and only succeeding in smearing it across its breastplate.

“He’s an Umbrum, Detective,” Twilight explained. Orb dipped into a deep bow. “He’s a shadow pony. Don’t worry. He’s friendly. Well...friendly so long as you don’t draw on him while he’s trying to stand guard.”

Orb let out a noise like a bathtub of mayonnaise being stirred with a baseball bat. Every part of my body shuddered simultaneously.

“Was that a laugh?” I groaned.

The Princess giggled; it was a musical little sound, and I found I quite liked it.

“Yes, it was,” she answered. “Thankfully, my castle wasn’t under the atmospheric shields during the...what is everypony calling it? The Darkening? That’s not really accurate to what happened, but—”

“Wait, wait...did you say a c-castle?!” Swift squeaked. “We’re going to an actual, real castle?!”

Mayfly dug a hoof under the edge of her helmet, plucking a stray rock out and flicking it in my partner’s direction. “It’s not much of a castle. Although it makes up for what it lacks in size in terrible gaudiness…”

“Says the bug who built her hive in its roots,” Twilight chuckled. She turned to Orb. “Is there anything out here today?”

The armored creature shook his head. “Nothing. Death. Broken trees. Empty skies.”

“I…” She shut her eyes for a moment, then held out her hoof in my direction. I squinted at it, and it took a moment to realize what she wanted; I passed her the bottle and she gulped a muzzle full, then returned it. “Sorry. That’s not the most Princessly thing I could be doing, is it?”

“I think you’re reasonably justified, considering the circumstances,” I replied.

She gave me a grateful smile, then addressed Orb. “Orb, open the back, would you please?”

With only a perfunctory nod, the shadow creature dissolved into a black cloud, flowing around the armored limousine. I didn’t hear a door open, but the engine let out a deafening snarl and the treads lurched against the dusty ground. At the rear of the car, a door opened, clattering down to present a short staircase leading up into the passenger compartment. Princess Twilight took the lead, trotting up the steps and settling herself in one of the comfortable-looking chairs lining the interior wall. Mayfly swept in after her, plunking herself down facing the door.

Swift scooted over to my side and whispered, “Sir...can I go ahead and lose my mind now?”

“Yes, the smoke pony is creepy, but we’re not being eaten or shot at,” I replied, giving her mane a good ruffle so the spikes all lay down. She swatted at me, then tried fruitlessly to get them to stand up again. “You’ve got to admit, that’s a step up from what any of us expected on this trip.”

“I know, but...but…”

“Kid, take a deep breath. We found what we were looking for. We can take her back to Detrot and give her the Helm of Nightmare Moon, and this will all be over.”

“Nothing is ever that easy, Sir. You know that. Nothing.”

Princess Twilight called down from the back of the vehicle, “Are you coming, Detective?”

Giving Swift a pat on the shoulder, I clambered into the back of the limousine-tank and sank into one of the plush seats across from the Princess. It was the oddest thing to be doing, but Twilight didn’t really radiate the kind of overwhelming presence that Celestia and Luna seemed to put out so effortlessly. If one ignored the wings, she was a bit like the filly next door: a little awkward, with an easy smile and too much enthusiasm once she’d found herself something she was genuinely interested in.

Taxi, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet, settled in beside me as Limerence paused at the door to study the interior with interest before dropping into the chair one away from the Princess.

Now that I got a look around, I realized just how luxurious our transport really was. There was a drinks bar at one end with a rack of small firearms locked in a cage beside it. The floor was carpeted with something like wool and it felt surprisingly comfortable under my toes.

“Nice digs,” I murmured.

Twilight sighed, her horn lighting up to lift a glass from beside the drinks bar. She filled it with water from a little tap, then took a quick sip. “I know. The Princessmobile was a gift from a friend of mine who really liked heavy vehicles but didn’t trust wheels. I miss being able to walk around and fly without wearing illusions, though. Not that anypony remembers me these days anyway. Some Princess of Friendship I turned out to be…”

Mayfly made a gagging noise. “Please, Ma’am. If you’re going to make me sit through one your self-pitying speeches, could you at least shut off my hearing? You wrote the armistice with the dragons. You negotiated alliances with both the griffins and the minotaurs. You tamed Discord. You don’t get to piss and moan about a ‘lack of accomplishments’.”

“I didn’t do that last one!” the alicorn protested. “That was one of my friends!”

The changeling waved a dismissive leg. “Whatever. Point being, you did more to keep the world from descending into chaos than just about anypony ever with the possible exception of your mentor. So, with all due respect, Ma’am...shut up, before you make me regret my mother’s decision not to accept extinction.”

I held up both hooves for attention. “Wait, wait, wait...stop for a second. Excuse me, but I’m not familiar with whatever this ‘secret history of Equestria’ you two are going on about is, and you’re raising more questions than can be meaningfully answered. Can I just start with how you know me?”

Setting her glass to one side, Twilight tapped on the wall. The rear door rattled shut, and the limo-tank lumbered forward. There weren’t any windows, but a number of cheery interior lights popped on just before the red glow of the eclipse would have been cut off.

“Of course, Detective. You...well, first, can I ask what you know about the Armor of Nightmare Moon?”

“I know I have been chasing it around the entirety of Detrot,” I replied, sinking deeper into the chair. “The chestplate was at the History Museum under a whole heap of magical wards. Somepony, somehow, managed to pull the soul out of the Museum’s director using some kind of zebra necromancy. I don’t know how, but that let them take the chestplate and replace it with a fake.

“The shoes were being kept by the Hitlan griffon tribe. Their Nursemaid Guild was guarding them. They all died in an attack on the embassy, and the shoes are gone. As for the helm...it was in the Canterlot Royal Vaults until it was stolen by a thief named the Ebon Kitten. Something happened to her, and she ended up as the leader of the Loonies, Astral Skylark. She turned out to be sacrificing ponies in some kind of orgiastic ritual with a nice cross-section of Detrot’s elite. I killed her and have the helm somewhere safe.”

I paused for breath and looked up at Twilight, whose jaw was hanging right to her chest. A glance at Mayfly showed a similar expression. Turning to Taxi, I asked, “That’s everything, right?”

“Minus all the important details...yes, I think that’s everything,” she replied, playing with her hoofrest. She found the button that said ‘massage’ and began groaning happily as little robotic fingers kneaded her spine. “You’ve got to try this, Hardy…”

“In a minute. Pretty sure I broke the Princess.”

Twilight sat there spluttering as the painful backlog of questions in her brain tried to find a neuron that wasn’t already occupied. Her horn lit up, and she snatched the cider bottle from my front pocket, jamming it into her mouth. She tilted her head back, chugging two thirds of the remaining liquid in roughly ten seconds.

“Easy there, Ma’am,” Mayfly murmured, a hint of genuine concern in her voice. “I know you can’t die of alcohol poisoning, but you still get hangovers.”

“A hangover can only improve this situation,” the alicorn replied before turning to me. She flicked her horn, and a drawer beside her chair popped open. A notepad and an expensive-looking ballpoint pen floated out. “I...think it might be best for me to just listen to your story before I go making any assumptions about what you do and don’t know.”

I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Princess, this ‘castle’ better have a nice dungeon in it. I suspect I’m headed there once you hear what I’ve been up to this month.”

“Please, call me Twilight,” she replied, almost as an afterthought, then looked up as she registered what I’d just said. “Wait...dungeon? Why?”

“Hah! Now can I toss him in an interrogation pod?” Mayfly cackled, leaning forward interestedly. “He’ll probably lie to us! We can pull the answers right out of his brain!”

Twilight’s magic lit up, and she tipped her bodyguard’s helmet forward over her eyes. As Mayfly fought to straighten her armor, the Princess rested her pen against her paper. “Detective, from what I’ve been able to gather, you’re wanted by whoever or whatever caused this disaster.”

“That’s true, but to be fair, your friend is probably right,” I said, scratching my filthy mane. “I’ve got a few hundred people who need protecting, and plenty of them sit on a less than savory side of the law. If you go stomping into my city like the wrath of Celestia herself, you’ll be killing a heap of good ponies.”

A tiny, nervous smile quirked the edges of her muzzle. “I...I know what it’s like having friends who need protecting, even if it costs you something.” She indicated Mayfly with a twitch of one hoof. Her guard made a rude gesture. “Still, you have to believe me when I say I’m here to help. I promise I won’t do anything rash.”

“Rash or not, I’m buying amnesty for some people with what I do here. After this is over, you get me. I’ll go to whatever chopping block you’ve got ready. So if I’m not complete in my answers, know that I’m protecting lives.”

Twilight lowered her ears and pulled one of her wings around, straightening a few of her feathers with a little bit of magic. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Princess Celestia has to put both of us in Tartarus if we ever sit in front of a jury. The real Tartarus, not that insane prison out in the Wilds. If the axe ever comes down, my head will probably be right beside yours. I’ve done some...some really bad things since the Crusades.”

“Since, during, before...” Mayfly added, pretending to study her shoes. “Property damage tends to follow you around.”

“Be that as it may, you and I need to set some ground rules,” I said. “I’m trying to save Equestria from whatever is going on.”

“You think I’m not?” Twilight sputtered.

“I don’t know what to think, honestly. Where is the Royal Guard? If you’re an alicorn, why aren’t you moving the Moon and the Sun? How do you know about me?”

I could see her getting more and more flustered but plowed on regardless.

“I hear ‘Princess of Equestria’, but then I see changelings and shadow monsters at your beck and call. You apparently knew that the armor was in Detrot and that there’s some kind of conspiracy going on. Why didn’t you stop it?”

“I tried!”

I cringed as the entirety of the limo-tank shook with the power of her voice. The fillings in my teeth rattled, and my ears rang like she’d fired a gun in the enclosed space.

Twilight clapped a hoof over her muzzle, blushing. When she spoke again, my hearing still hadn’t recovered, and she seemed a bit muted. “S-sorry...”

Uncovering his ears, Limerence sat forward, eagerly, his own notepad at the ready. “The Royal Canterlot Voice! I’d never thought to hear it in person. Tell me, is it learned? A spell? Or does it develop naturally in alicorns?”

Reaching out, I put a leg across the librarian’s chest and pushed him back in his seat. “Pin that crap in, Lim. We’re here to get help, not do research projects.” I returned my gaze to Twilight, who was giving me a wary look. “Like I said, I’ve got the Helm of Nightmare Moon. Not here, obviously, but somewhere safe. This all started with a murder of a prostitute in an alleyway, and it ended in Canterlot. So, if you don’t mind getting ready to travel, we can head back to Detrot where this all began, and I can tell you everything on—”

“I’m...I’m afraid I can’t go to Detrot,” Twilight murmured. At my disbelieving look, she raised her hooves placatingly. “You have no idea how much I want to! It’s where I should be, but I can’t! Believe me, I tried to go when we found out what happened to the Griffon Embassy!”

“What happened?” I asked, lamely, feeling the brief spark of hope that’d been growing in my chest snuffed out.

“She got two hundred miles from Detrot, and something halfway between a magic bubble and a repulsion field blasted her twenty miles at the speed of sound!” Mayfly snickered, arching her hole-filled hoof through the air on a trajectory then ricocheting it off in the other direction. “You never saw so many ruffled feathers!”

Twilight swallowed. “I suppose I should be grateful I decided to fly, rather than trying an airship.”

“What about teleportation?” Taxi asked, tugging at her braid. “I mean, you’re...you’re an alicorn, right? Couldn’t you just...pop through whatever is out there?”

“I...ugh...I don’t even know how to explain without a blackboard and some lecture notes. I tried every kind of teleportation there is,” she grumbled, sagging in her seat. “Quantum tunneling, point to point, magical displacement, extradimensional. Everything ended up with a pile of burnt feathers and a headache. I can’t even detect whatever is keeping me out! Me and...others. It’s...It’s complicated. I’ll tell you as much as I can later, but for right now, is there anything else you want to know?”

A painful silence descended on the limo-tank. I tried to come up with something to ask, but there were so many questions I couldn’t really find a place to start. My companions seemed to be in a similar condition. The hope of an easy solution was gone. Granted, that was completely in line with everything else we’d experienced during the last month or so.

What diabolical scheme would work if a Princess or two could just swoop in and foil the whole mess? Sadly, that left us with another question: what were we to do?

I’d pinned most of my hopes on finding somepony who could help us, and Twilight was just about as close as we were likely to get.

It was Swift, of all ponies, who finally spoke up.

“Princess Twilight...Ma’am?”

Twilight raised her head, took a deep breath, and tried to smile at my partner. It wasn’t much of one.

“Yes, Officer Cuddles? Or do you prefer Swift?”

“I prefer Swift, Ma’am. Um...Do you mind if I ask you something?”

Twilight shook her head. “Ask away. Today, I’m an open book. It’s nice to be able to do that for once. I should spend more time with ponies who have nothing to lose.”

“Well, Ma’am...I know this is the wrong time, but I have wanted to know this forever. Like, since I was a filly.”

The Princess’s ears stood up. “R-really? What is it?”

“Do alicorns poop?”

Mayfly and Taxi were leaning against one another on the floor of the limo, my driver pounding the carpet as the changeling hung one hoof around her shoulders for balance, both howling like drunken mules. My partner and Twilight were both visibly flushed, covering their faces with their wings while Limerence sat there with his hoof planted squarely against his forehead. I’d managed to crawl back into my chair, but my sides ached.

“Ahhh...Chrysalis below! I want a picture of that face for my hive!” Mayfly exclaimed, rolling about on her back, finally exhausted.

“Phew, I needed that! Mercy,” Taxi added, resting her head on the changeling’s side.

The limo-tank rattled to a stop, and Orb’s voice echoed from an intercom overhead.

“Mistress, we have arrived,” he announced.

“Oh thank the stars!” Twilight exclaimed, then threw herself out of her seat, stepping over her guard and my driver in her scramble to get to the back door. It clanked open, and she spread her wings, leaping out into the dirt as Mayfly and Taxi disentangled themselves from one another.

Limerence quickly followed her, his notepad out and ready. “Miss Sparkle! Miss Sparkle, do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

I didn’t hear her answer as I jiggled the empty cider bottle, then left it on the seat. I slid down and moved over to where my partner sat with her forehead against the wall of the limo-tank.

“Kid?”

“No, Sir.”

“I haven’t even asked you anything!”

“Whatever it is...just no. I’m going to stay right here until I die or until Princess Celestia comes to arrest me.”

“You know it’s not actually possible to die of embarrassment, right? Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“You didn’t ask a Princess if she poops, Sir.”

“Eh, no, that’s true. Suit yourself, kid.”

I climbed out of the back of the limo-tank and stood, stretching the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. Meanwhile, Mayfly was helping Taxi down from the back of the vehicle. There was a worrying look in both their eyes of somepony who was used to protecting someone who frequently drove them nuts; it said ‘sisterly bond that is going to give Hardy a headache later’.

“Is there something for us to eat?” Taxi asked the changeling. “Our last meal was several hours ago, and we’ve spent most of that on board the grossest means of travel known to ponykind.”

Mayfly buzzed her wings a little, thinking. “Eh, my drones make a pretty good shakshuka or fried vegetable curry, if I do say so myself. Chef Drone Six Eight Four Nine One One, designation ‘Myrtle’, can whip together a few low spice pony dishes if you’d like, but most of the food we eat tends to have a healthy dose of pepper. Or we could cook ourselves. I do enjoy that, from time to time.”

“No, no, that’s good! Give me changeling spicy. I’m always happy to try new things. I'd love to try your cooking.” Taxi enthused, trotting along behind her new friend as they followed Twilight towards where the dust bowl ended at a grassy expanse.

I broke into a gallop, passing them and catching up to Princess Twilight, who was standing at the edge of the grass. Her horn glowed with soft, purple light, and she seemed to be muttering to herself. Limerence sat nearby, scribbling in his pad as he watched her with interest; the only sign she was at all uncomfortable with his scrutiny was a slight crinkling of her forehead.

“So, what’s the score?” I asked, waving at the empty section of field. It looked just like every other meadow all up and down the edge of what was left of Ponyville.

“The score, Detective?” Twilight asked distractedly, without looking up. Her horn winked out, and she raised her head. “Oh...I’m so sorry, about a minute ago. I was just caught way out of left field. I should probably have laughed, too. Goodness knows, it would be nice to laugh again and mean it.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be another thing to rib the rookie about when she gets mouthy.”

“You and she seem like...good friends,” Twilight murmured. “Have you been working together long? My files say she's only recently joined the Detrot Police Department, but you seem like your connection is deeper than that short period would suggest.”

“Would you believe we've only been together two months? This was her first case.” I sighed, shaking my head. “Poor kid. She used to vomit at the sight of a corpse. Now?...She didn’t even lose her lunch over the Bull.”

“The Bull? You mean the Sentient Construct? Is that how you got here?” she asked interestedly.

I gave a surprised start. “Yeah. You know it? He’s parked at the train station.”

“I...erm...Princess Luna funded it, but the designers worked for a subsidiary company that I used to have holdings in. When I found out what they’d done to that poor minotaur...well, they’re not a company anymore, now are they?”

“He seems happy enough,” I said noncommittally. “He’s alive, and he’s got a girl who loves him. He gives her diamonds every day. What more can two people ask for?”

Twilight’s left eye twitched and she slowly sat down. Her head dropped, and that short, straight mane of hers piled over her face. She began to shake, her shoulders heaving. For a moment, I thought I’d said something to reduce her to tears, but when she looked up again a second later, she was grinning.

“Hee...diamonds. He gives her diamonds!” she giggled, then shut her eyes tightly. “Oh, Detective...I know it’s silly, and maybe everyone will be dead if we can’t fix whatever is going on, but...you’re the first pony besides Mayfly to treat me like a pony in a long time.”

“Now I’m curious. Did you get the wings first, or the horn?” I asked, gesturing at her head.

“The horn. I was born a unicorn, but speaking of that, we should get inside before a storm comes. With nopony to control it, the weather has been a little unpredictable around here lately.” Twilight closed her eyes again, and her horn flared as she went back to looking at the ground.

I looked both directions, but there was nothing to see but long shadows and my friends.

“Am I missing something?” I asked.

“Oh...No. My castle is here. Well, it’s sort of here. It’s just...magic has been very odd in this area since the Darkening. Everything has been odd since the Darkening.”

Limerence let out a muffled grunt, and I peered over at him. His muzzle seemed to have been...zipped...shut. A tiny metal zipper sprouted from his upper and lower lips, with a star shaped lock hanging from it.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do that to people, lately,” I murmured, and my librarian shot me a dirty look.

Twilight waved her horn in his direction, and the zipper vanished, leaving Limerence smacking his lips irritably. “My apologies. I realized about five seconds after Miss Cuddles asked me...um...what she asked...that I’d rather not answer any more questions until I can sit down with a cup of tea. Or ten.”

“Don’t be too hard on the kid,” I said. “She’s a dork sometimes, but she means well.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going to put on my headstone,” she replied, using a hoof to map out the letters in the air in front of her. “She was a dork, but she meant well.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. She was the strangest pony I’d met in quite some time, grandiose, larger than life, but very comfortable at the same time. I had an irrational desire for her to like me.

“You’ll pardon me saying so, but...you’re not what I picture when I hear the word ‘Princess’,” I murmured.

Twilight gave me a sidelong glance. “What do you picture?”

“Honestly? Aloof. A bit self-important. Somepony waving a hoof at us to behave from some distant ivory tower. You’re more like...I don’t know. An actual person.”

Her ears pinned back against her head, and she scuffed a purple hoof at the grass. “I...I guess I can kind of see where you’d get that image of us. Princesses, I mean. We had to make some really big sacrifices during the Crusades. Some of those involved letting parts of Equestria have more autonomy...” She lifted her head suddenly and smiled, poking at a particular spot on t he turf. “Oh! My castle is here.”

The field was just as empty as ever. Mayfly and Taxi were sitting behind me, listening expectantly and exchanging a few quiet words with one another as Limerence went back to making notes, but that was all. Swift was still cowering in the limo-tank.

“Where?” I asked.

She gave me a mysterious smile. “In shadows. It’s a little trick I learned when I made friends with the Umbrum.”

A curl of black smoke silently materialized into the suit of animated armor, who sat down facing Twilight Sparkle.

“The Mistress has a funny definition of the word ‘friends’,” Orb commented in that unsettling, grating monotone of his. “Friendships do not generally begin with terms of surrender.”

The Princess poked her tongue out at him. “It’s not my fault you tried taking over Equestria and turning everyone who disagreed with you to stone. You could all still be sitting underneath the Crystal Empire.”

Orb coughed into his hoofguard and looked away but didn’t contest the point. Twilight went back to fiddling with the grass, and I edged sideways away from Orb a meter or so.

After a moment, the alicorn lifted one ear, then hopped to the left as a spike of darkness seemed to shoot across the ground, spilling out of a particular point. I reared backwards, sitting down hard enough to almost knock the air out of my own lungs.

The shadow grew and grew, branching out across the field and ballooning upwards into the sky. It expanded enormously, blotting out a section of stars just below the eclipse.

Maybe I’d just been chased too much lately, but I quickly decided I didn’t want to be anywhere near whatever would create a shadow that size on the off chance it thought of me as a crunchy meat feast. More likely, the blind panic in my chest was some symptom of severe psychological disorders, but it’d been an exhausting evening already so I can’t be blamed for sprinting off in the opposite direction as fast as I could.

Before I’d gone ten steps, a purple aura wrapped itself around me, and then I was floating again, legs pinwheeling at the air. My armor squealed, and another flash of hot sparks spilled out of my coat.

“Detective! Calm down! It’s just my castle!” Twilight called.

I let myself go limp, and she cautiously put me down again.

“Long month,” I explained, pulling at my face. “Sorry.”

Twilight gave me a look of intense scrutiny, arching her eyebrows. They were very nice eyebrows.

Before I could get lost in her lovely violet eyes, I turned to look at her ‘castle’ instead.

“Huh. A tree made of crystals. That’s...that’s new,” I mumbled, tilting my head back to look up at the enormous building.

Maybe I’d just seen too many impressive things lately. Mayfly hadn’t been kidding about ‘gaudy’, but it was a bit small compared to the Detrot Police Department’s main headquarters. The Monte Cheval topped it head and shoulders.

To be honest, it reminded me of something a filly might sketch out in the corner of her school notebook: grand, but too expensive to be real.

A crystalline trunk maybe fifteen or twenty meters wide spilled out of the ground like it’d grown there, sprawling upwards into an altogether ridiculous mess of bright blue crystals that’d somehow formed into the general shape of a tree. A few boxy protrusions suggested rooms and hallways, but it was definitely more decorative than functional; I couldn’t see a single solid defensive position or advantage other than that the entire thing appeared to be made of diamond.

At the base of the tower, a brightly painted yellow door emblazoned with two hearts was abutted on either side by a pair of flags, one Equestrian and the other of a purple, six-pointed star surrounded by five smaller stars; two apparently empty suits of Royal Guard armor were holding the flagpoles.

Something about the whole construction seemed incredibly wrong to my very amateur architectural eye. It was just too big to sit comfortably on a trunk that size.

I felt more than heard Taxi come up beside me.

“Hardy? You’re shaking.”

“Just thinking of that school play we were both in. You remember?”

“The one where you were the rabbit and I was the mink and we sang that song about eating your vegetables?”

“No, Sweets...the other one.”

“Oh...you mean the one about the king who went crazy and killed everyone he loved so he wouldn’t have to be surprised when they died one day.”

“Yeah. Kinda feeling like I might understand him a little bit better than I did then.”

Twilight, who must have been listening, spoke up. “Detective, you do know you show all the major symptoms of severe post traumatic stress, right?”

“I’m aware,” I said, softly, pulling at the collar of my armor, which felt suddenly too tight. “Hypervigilance, depression, alcohol abuse, hallucinations, mania...It’s not my first ride on this particular roller coaster, nor is the ride over.”

She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it.

“Don’t bother, Princess,” Taxi muttered, shaking her head. “Trust me, if I couldn’t, you definitely can’t.”

Twilight took a step back. “I can’t what? What do you mean?”

Mayfly strolled past her, pulling off her champron with a casual burst of bright green magic from her crooked horn. “Fix him, Ma’am. She means you can’t fix him. Come on, I’m starving. I’ve had enough of going out to watch you stand in the dust bowl waving your horn around. We’ve been doing this for a week straight with the same results, and the only change has been the number of bottles you bring.”

The changeling strutted right up to the door, ignoring the guards on either side, and pushed it open, leaving her bemused ward standing there looking back and forth between us. My driver followed Mayfly, giving a little dip of the chin as she ducked into the castle without waiting for an invitation.

Twilight groaned, blowing a strand of her floating mane out of her eyes. “I swear, I don’t know how Princess Celestia managed to go a thousand years without walloping a changeling with a baseball bat. Could you come inside, Detective? Mister Tome, you too. I’ll be happier to answer questions once I’ve had something to eat that isn’t alcohol. Is Officer Swift coming?”

“She’s hiding in the limo,” I replied. “Give her ten minutes, then send a guard out with a plate of bacon. That’ll lure her out.”

“Bacon?!” Twilight scoffed. “The meat? I mean, I have some for diplomatic purposes, but—”

“It works better than rabbit. She likes chicken, too. Shall we?” I held out one leg in the direction of the castle.

The Princess stood there for a long moment, glaring at me with a mixture of confusion and irritation.

“Detective...I’m only going to let this pass because my head is starting to hurt. I want you to know that, okay? When I finally get to ask you questions, you better answer them.”

“Is that ‘or else’?”

“I don’t need ‘or else’. ‘Or else’ is for ponies who get bored of asking questions.”

“So...what, then? You’re going to keep asking until I go crazy?”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Exactly. There will also be lectures. Maybe even a quiz.”

The way she said ‘quiz’ gave me a little shiver right down to the root of my tail.

Twilight led Limerence and me into the entrance hall of the palace, which had about twenty pairs of galoshes, various slippers, ponchos, coats, and a dozen or so umbrellas beside the door.

Once you got past the constant motif of crystal everything, it felt like somepony had gone to a fair bit of trouble to make the space cozy; the chandeliers were disguised with comforting draperies, and a tiny bookcase packed to the brim owned one wall of the foyer. A heap of ancient rugs that all looked like they’d been bought from about two hundred different secondhoof stores led up to a wide spiral staircase which went both up into the castle itself and down into what must have been a sublevel.

Taxi and Mayfly had already disappeared. No telling where they’d gotten off to.

Something about the place reminded me of a comfortable little library/inn I’d stayed in a few years back when Taxi convinced me to get out of the city for awhile. Limerence’s eyes lit up as he saw the bookshelf.

“You have...you have first editions of Marechiavelis!” the librarian gasped, reverently tugging a tome off and holding it in both hooves, running his toe down the binding.

Twilight smiled, her cheeks coloring. “That’s the returns shelf. If you want to check something out, the drones will have them filed soon.”

“The drones?” I asked. “Mayfly’s drones?”

She nodded. “They keep up most of the time, but now and then I go on a research binge. My informational resources are pretty extensive, but you were a disaster for our librarians once we started trying to figure out why our spells couldn’t track you.”

“Wait...you...you have a library?” Limerence asked, a slightly crazed glint in his eye.

The Princess snickered at some private joke, then wiggled out of her robe and hung it on one of the pegs beside the door. Without the robe, she was even more gorgeous, and I had to quickly swallow a mouthful of saliva before I embarrassed myself by drooling over the royal posterior.

Bad Hardy. No bagel.

“It’s nice meeting somepony who appreciates books,” she replied. “Yes, I have ‘a’ library.” Looking back to me, she commented, “You can leave anything you don’t want to carry with you here. The drones and shadows will leave it alone.”

I pulled off my hat, then shrugged out of my coat so I could strip off the anti-magic armor. It didn’t smell especially good after the ride through the Bull.

“Who gave you that armor, Detective?” Twilight asked keenly.

“A psychotic party pony with too much time on their hooves and a weird sense of humor,” I answered.

She gave me a skeptical look. “You...you can’t mean...”

“Yeah. The Detrot Coroner, Slip Stitch. I don’t know where he got it.” The Princess deflated a little, and I asked, “Why? Who’d you think I meant?”

She quickly waved her hooves. “Never mind. She used to have a really weird way of just appearing when somepony said her name, so I’m not even taking the risk. We can use the east sitting room.”

“Ahem...Princess Twilight, if you wouldn’t object, I find myself tired and peckish. Watching the Detective try to obfuscate his way out of answering all of your questions sounds a bit dull. Could you point me to the library and maybe some food?” Limerence asked.

Twilight nodded, and her horn flashed. After a few seconds, a small black form tromped up the spiral stairs from down below, looking a bit put out. It was a changeling drone, undisguised and spattered with a mixture of frosting and mashed potato. I couldn’t tell one bug’s gender from another, but this one had a definite masculine set to its shoulders.

“Rough day, Mervin?” Twilight asked.

The insect hesitated, then lowered his head as he wiped a bit of goop out of his wing membranes. “Yes, Ma’am. The Queen and a strange yellow pony with a braid are in the lower kitchen...destroying it. Incidentally, we’ll need to replenish our flour and spice stores when we go shopping next. How may I be of assistance?”

Twilight waved a hoof at Limerence, who was studying the changeling with interest.

“This is Mister Tome. Take him upstairs and show him whatever he likes. Full access.”

Mervin’s bright blue eyes widened. “Unrestricted access, Ma’am?”

“No point in restricting access now, is there?” she replied, sadly. “Besides, I’m tired of half my library requiring a card you can only get from a secret agency. I collected these books for ponies to use, not to hoard them in some silly fortress.”

With a little skip in his step, Limerence trotted after the changeling, heading towards the stairs. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions...” Lim paused expectantly.

“Baking Drone One Two Seven One Six Eight, designation ‘Mervin’,” the bug finished.

“Mervin. Do you mind if I ask you some questions? I’ve never had the chance to study one of your species while they were still alive—”

The rest of the conversation was cut off as the two of them vanished upstairs, leaving me alone with Twilight Sparkle and a half dozen ballpoint pens which had appeared in a floating halo around her head.

“Shall we, Detective?”

She led me down a long hallway which ringed the interior of the crystal tree. Each of the doors had been carefully labeled; some seemed to be dormitories, while others were storage of different flavors. I ran my eyes down a few of the ones we passed, mentally cataloguing them: Unshelved books, Catering, Armory, Party Cannons, Cannons, Friendship Reports Years 05 - 07.

A couple of changelings were cleaning various things and I once saw what I thought might be a shadow drift by one of the windows, but the building seemed otherwise very empty.

“Where is everypony?” I asked.

There was a hitch in Twilight’s voice as she answered. “My students and friends—those who stay with me from time to time—had all gone to watch the Summer Sun Celebration in Ponyville. I was out of the country when the Darkening happened. By the time I teleported back, they were all...gone. Only the drones and guards remained.”

“Oof...sorry I asked.”

She brushed the awkwardness aside with a flip of one hoof. “It’s...It’s fine. Really. It’s the kind of question anypony would ask.”

We’d stopped at a door labeled ‘East Sitting Room’ with a note below scrawled in felt tip reading ‘Interrogation Chamber’. Twilight hastily conjured a rag and wiped that away.

“That’s what I get for encouraging Mayfly’s drones to have more individual autonomy,” she groused. “They’ve developed senses of humor.”

“Yeah, speaking of that. How’d you end up with a changeling queen and a guy made of shadows watching you while you drink?”

Twilight tsked and set a hoof on the door. “They weren’t watching me drink! Well...they weren’t just watching me drink. I was taking readings from the site. But, as to your question, do you remember when one of the changeling queens tried taking over Canterlot a few decades ago? I’m sure you’ve heard that story.”

“Maybe in history class, sure. Princess Celestia handled it, if I remember. It was during the Royal Wedding between Princess Cadance and Shining Armor.”

Her cheeks colored, and she slumped. “Erm...wow, way to make a mare feel old. History class? Sheesh.”

“One of the many joys of immortality?”

“You could say that,” she replied, with another expression that mixed sadness with nostalgia. “I was there. It was actually me and my friends who prevented the fall of Canterlot. My brother is Shining Armor. We stopped Chrysalis and drove her away. There were a few other little adventures she managed to cause in between, but I discovered a spell to reveal changelings in a large area. After about five months, every queen on this continent came knocking at my door.”

I took a second to process that. Some part of me was still in denial that I was in the presence of one of the most historically influential beings of the last sixty years. She seemed so normal. Ponies who qualify as heroes of the nation should be otherworldly and bizarre, but if anything, she was less quirky than most of the people I spent my days with. A bit excitable, maybe, but not eccentric in any way that was unpleasant.

“So...what? All of changeling queens? How many of them are there and what made them think they were going to get any mercy here?”

Twilight shifted uneasily from one hoof to the other. “As to how many? That's...part of the treaty. I can't ever tell anypony how many of them there are. I have a bad habit of making friends out of enemies. We wrote up a treaty so the changelings could live in most of Equestria, under the rule that they no longer kidnap ponies to steal love.”

“That doesn’t really explain how you ended up with one of them guarding you,” I pointed out.

“Oh...no, I guess it doesn’t. Well, changelings are funny. They gave me one of their children—a queen nymph—as a ‘slave’ to seal our agreement.”

“A slave?!” I asked incredulously. “Really?”

She pushed open the door, revealing a comfortable little room with a gently crackling fire in the hearth and several cushions. “That’s what they intended, but she makes a pretty good friend when she isn’t out drinking or...or other unsavory activities. We get shipments of love-imbued crystals to keep the hive fed, but Mayfly likes hers...um...” She bit her lower lip, trying to think of a way of saying whatever it was that was dancing around the tip of her tongue.

“Au naturel?” I offered.

She darted onto the nearest seat, wrapping a wing around herself to cover her bright red face. “Y-yes.”

“And Orb? Pardon me saying, he doesn’t seem to like you much for someone you’ve got watching your back.”

“He’s...mmm...he’s complicated.” Turning about in a little circle, she stomped her cushion into shape and sat. “The Umbrum were locked under the Crystal Empire sometime back before recorded history. They managed to create a tyrannical golem out of magic with the intent of eventually releasing themselves. but sadly, for them, he was imbued with a bit too much free will. He saw the light and helped us seal them back beneath the Crystal Empire. When the war came, I...needed agents I didn’t have to worry about dying.”

I flumped down on a cushion across from her. “What, then? They volunteered for the Royal Guard? I find that hard to believe.”

She considered the question for a moment. “I think ‘volunteer’ might be a strong word, but...yes, that’s more or less what they did once negotiations were complete. That armor is its own cage. They can’t ever get out of it, buuut…it lets them watch movies, read books, and play foosball. I hope they’ll one day prove they deserve true freedom again. One day. Maybe.”

We settled into a comfortable quiet, both trying to think of something to say. She was the sort of pony that silence was nice around, now and then. After a few seconds, her pen reappeared, and she began jotting something down in a little book, looking up at me now and then before going back to scribbling.

“So...Princess of Friendship. Sounds like a crappy gig, if I’m honest,” I said once a few minutes had gone by with no further conversation.

“It...has good days and bad days,” she replied, still writing. “The Crusades were pretty much one long bad day. Hence the Grand Memoria Incantation; the spell that...distracted the world from my actions. My little brother is a dragon. I needed him...I needed him to be safe.”

I couldn’t tell if she was really paying attention or not, but she struck me as the kind of pony who answered questions when she wasn’t. Twilight seemed to be in her own little world.

“And...your little ‘brother’ is a dragon, huh? Pretty sure the genetics of that would give me a headache...”

She tittered and raised her eyes, stretching out across her pillow like a lazy housecat. “No, no! Sorry. His name is Spike. He’s the ambassador to the dragon lords. He’s adopted. I raised him. He was in Canterlot visiting...visiting an old friend.” Her mood sank, visibly, and she picked up the notepad again. “Still, that’s neither here nor there. I’d love to hear your story. Could you start at the beginning?”

“The beginning?”

She twirled a hoof beside her head. “You know, whatever it was that set you on the path to Ponyville.”

“Oh...hmmm.” I looked up at the ceiling, unconsciously stuffing one forehoof into my pocket. Something was there, and I pulled it out, setting it on the pillow; it was the diary that started this whole mess.

“Like many stories that end in disaster, I guess it begins with a girl. This particular girl was...a very special filly. She dreamed of being a jeweler and seeing the big city. She died in an alleyway trying to save her sister from monsters most of us had no idea existed. She was beautiful, and she was brave. Her name...was Ruby Blue.”

Author's Note

Fair warning, next chapter may need some EXTENSIVE fiddling. We're going to try to get it out on time, but...it's a recap chapter which I think we're in desperate need of. I will make it interesting, but...you know the deal. It's hard to do stuff like that well.

Act 3 Chapter 17 : In Her Majesty's Equine Service

Equestrian historians have been frequently heard to lament the seemingly vast tracts of knowledge and time for which we lack complete or accurate historical records. Much of Equestria’s long history exists in a state of flux, and for a country as old as it is, one would think there would be more attempts to keep everything straight.

A large section of the record of the third century of Celestia’s rule - a sixty year period during which the princess is said to have gotten braces, styled her mane to look like a swan, and taken to applying bells to all of her clothing (referred to as bell-bottoming) - was lost during the toilet paper crisis of B.L.R. 866. Most ponies who spend any amount of time in the halls of knowledge become well acquainted with queries whose answers have been 'perditus in latrina'. ('Lost in the bathroom')

A conspiracy minded individual might even suggest this is no accident.

That said, the hard and fast rule has always been that if one is willing to dig through enough refuse, the truth still exists. It is often then that only when one finds a question to which the answer does not exist - either in a reference or shoved down the back of a privy - that one has finally found a question worth asking.

-The Scholar

There are plenty of stories surrounding the moon. Nopony really knows how many of them are true, except maybe Princess Luna. There’re tales about ‘dream makers’, shadow monsters, and vast tracts of nothingness. Of course, anypony with a decent telescope can look at the moon, but that was before the Darkening. For that reason, questions remained, and they’d become more important than anypony could have predicted.

“The moon…” I said, with what I’m sure was a slightly stupid expression on my face. “How can they be on the moon?”

Twilight pulled her wings in tight against her body, and her horn lit up. Down below, the ground took on a slightly lavender glow, kicking a dust devil into the air that spiraled up to the level of the balcony. With a twirl of her hoof, she brought a thin stream of the grit to sit on her toe.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“If you’re about to say ‘the ashes of thousands of dead ponies’, I’d rather you didn’t,” I murmured.

“Thankfully, it’s nothing so grim,” she replied. “It’s called ‘regolith’. It’s a very fine dust. Nightmare Moon spent a thousand years with nothing to do besides stomp around on the moon, and she managed to get most of the surface to a consistency she liked.” Turning her back to the railing, Twilight slid down against it. Shaking her hoof clean, she looked up at the reddened sky and seemed to lose herself in distant thoughts.

A bit of solid sleep does wonders for the physical symptoms of exhaustion, but hearing that somepony had somehow torn a city off the planet and dumped it on our nearest satellite left me suddenly lightheaded. I clutched the rail for support, then slid onto my front knees. Swift leaned her weight against my side to keep me from toppling over.

I took a few deep breaths, but they tasted foul, tinged with refried beans and the exhaust of a living train. I really needed a shower, and knowing you’re in over your head is entirely different from having it illustrated in such a spectacular fashion.

When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to break the silence, my partner shifted so I was resting on the rail and asked, “Ma’am...are you saying somepony teleported Canterlot to the moon?”

“That’s my working theory,” Twilight replied, rubbing the smooth crystal of the balcony with one wing as though trying to pull some strength from it. “I wasn’t in Equestria during the Darkening, but I felt the magical resonance. It didn’t knock me unconscious or anything like that, but if it originated in Detrot, I can see how that might have happened. You said some of the unicorns were still unconscious?”

Shutting my eyes, I pressed my forehead against the railing. It hurt a little, so I did it harder until it hurt a lot.

Shake it off, Hardy, you old goat. You’ve had your daily allotted breakdown. Play the game or take a short flight off the balcony. It’s the job or death, and you can only do one or the other.

Time to pick one.

My muscles should have felt old and achy as I pushed myself to my hooves. Of course, nothing had felt achy since my heart was replaced. My fur hadn’t gotten any more grey and I hadn’t added any wrinkles, but it sure felt like I should have.

“Princess, I...I think it’s time for us to have the big talk we all knew was coming. Let’s go collect Taxi and Limerence. It’s your turn to tell me what’s been going on, and I’ll tell you how I dodged the Scry. Maybe, just maybe, we can actually come up with a plan to fix this situation.”

Twilight’s horn lit, and a long ream of paper rolled out of her study to flop against my foreleg. “Plans, Detective? I made a few,” she said, a bit hopelessly. “I’ve tried most of them. There are a half dozen other incredibly powerful magic users in the world who’ve been helping me work out what is going on. None of our magics let us get anywhere near Detrot nor the Moon. My changelings and Umbrum can’t pass whatever magical border is out there and most of my pony agents were in Canterlot.”

“Somepony knew about your changelings and Umbrum. Nopony counted on me. I left, and I’m going back,” I said, with as much confidence as I could. “I promised a little girl who deserves to have somepony tell her the truth that I’d pick her up tomorrow.”

She studied my face, her eyes tracing the haggard lines of my muzzle and jaw with a sort of inscrutable curiosity, like I was an exhibit in a museum that she’d seen somewhere and she was trying to think when that had been. I forced myself to stand there while she stared at me for longer than any reasonable pony might have found comfortable. She didn’t look much older than me, but those eyes were the same ones my father looked at me with in his last few years. Eyes that had seen friends die.

How much must she have seen in all those years? If my brief time was enough to make me feel like an antique, how ancient must she feel?

“You remind me of someone, Detective,” she said, finally. “She would never give up on a friend, either.” Pulling herself up with one leg over the railing, Twilight dusted her hooves off and jerked her head towards the castle. “Let's go find everypony you brought with you. After that, we’ll do some research. Then...well...we’ll deal with everything else.”

Maxine was sitting outside the door as Twilight opened it, her yo-yo bouncing and beanie spinning. Mordicai, the guard, was gone, replaced by an Umbrum who gave us only a half glance before going back to doing a good impression of a statue.

“Oh! Boss!” the tiny changeling exclaimed, bouncing upright into a weak approximation of military attention. She gave me a lewd grin as she peered over the Princess’s shoulder and suggestively waggled her eyebrows. “What were you three doing in there that took so long? Gosh, if you needed that kind of company, you know where I am. Earth ponies and pegasi aren’t the only ones with stamina!”

Twilight’s ears turned back, and she grabbed the little bug in her magic, yanking her cap off and stuffing it into her mouth. “Maxi! I swear I am going to make you write ‘I will not make crude remarks to guests’ ten million times!”

Maxi wrestled her hat away from her muzzle and stuck her tongue out at the Princess. “Ha! You don’t have a chalkboard that big!”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and she turned, pointing back towards the balcony at the enormous stretch of dusty land outside. “It’s not a chalkboard, but I bet it would work pretty well.”

The changeling gulped and took a step or two back. “Sorry, Boss...”

“Good! Now then. We need to find the pony Mister Hard Boiled came in with. Do you know where she is?”

The expression that appeared on Maxine’s face was pure mischief, but Twilight seemed not to notice.

“Oh...yeah! Yeah, I do,” the drone replied. “She’s down in the Hive with the Queen. You wanna teleport? I can totally give you the location! It’s a long walk.”

Twilight gave her a benevolent nod. “Yes, that would be very helpful.” Turning to me, she said, “Detective, do you or your partner mind teleporting?”

“I can’t say as I’ve done it before, actually,” I replied, glancing at Swift.

“Does it hurt?” my partner asked.

“Not so long as I get your organs in the right order when we’re rematerializing.” At the look on our faces, Twilight and Maxine started giggling. “I’m joking!” the Princess assured us. “Of course it doesn’t hurt! I do it twenty times a day.”

“All it takes is one sneeze,” I grumbled, drawing myself up. “Kid? You up to try something new that could potentially re-order our bodies in unpredictable ways?”

Swift lifted her lip on one side, poking her tongue out between her fangs. “I’m used to being a little re-ordered, Sir. It can’t be any worse than the train, can it?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then I’m up for it.”

Maxi leaned against Twilight’s side, and the Princess lowered her horn to lightly touch the changeling’s.

“Here we go, Detective!”

Just before everything went white, I caught a momentary glimpse of a changeling drone in full guard armor sprinting around the corner.

Teleporting was nothing like so bad as I’d been worried it might be: a flash of light, then a burst of cold so intense I thought I would instantly freeze solid, then a sort of wet popping noise, and it was done.

We’d appeared at one end of a brutally simple concrete hallway with two dozen pre-fab wooden doors on either side. Names were carved, painted, or otherwise drawn on every one of them. Some were as simple as a set of numbers while others were flowery, ridiculous strings of letters that took up half the door.

I fought the urge to pat myself all over to make sure my bits were in the right places.

“Phew...that wasn’t so bad, Sir,” Swift said, rubbing her wings against her sides.

“We’re here,” Maxine said, grinning like a fox as she pointed over my shoulder.

I turned and squinted at the door behind me. A tiny sign said ‘Mayfly’s Room: Keep Out Unless Invited—Maxine, This Means You!’ The little changeling shut her eyes, then grinned up at me. “The Queen says you can go right in! She’s busy, but you can wait in the living room.”

Twilight gave her a funny look, then shook her head and tapped the door handle, giving it a little push.

The door of Mayfly’s room swung open.

“Oh Celestia! Yes, yes, yes! Right there!”

“Don’t stop! Chrysalis save me, I’m almost there! Pony! Oh p-pony, more t-tongue! I’m going to—”

The door slammed shut hard enough to crack the hinges.

My stomach was doing backflips. I’d walked in on one of Taxi’s sexual adventures more than once, but my brain was doing its noble best to erase everything I’d just seen. I’d thought my driver was flexible, but Mayfly would give her a run for her money.

Swift was standing there with cheeks hot enough to cook an egg on, and Maxine lay on the floor, laughing so hard she’d given herself a bright green nosebleed. The glare Twilight was shooting the bug just made her giggle harder.

Just as I opened my mouth to say something, another armored changeling pounded into the hallway, skidding to a halt as he caught sight of the four of us standing outside his queen’s door.

“Ma’am,” he panted, pushing his rear legs together and throwing his chest out. “Pardon my intrusion, but the Queen wished you to know she is indisposed...”

“Yes, Morgan.” Twilight sighed, scooping up Maxine in her magic. The little changeling didn’t fight, just propped her hooves under her chin, looking very satisfied with herself. “We...we’re now aware. Could you please take this buzzing disaster upstairs, treat her nose, then put her on book duty? She can stop sorting when the eastern library wing is completely organized!”

The look Morgan the guard gave Maxine was pure venom as he took hold of her with his own telekinetic grasp, but she didn’t seem to care.

Twilight turned to the delinquent and poked at her hip. “Young lady, just because feeding you to a manticore isn’t an option does not mean I will not find something equally unpleasant!”

“If I die today, Boss...I die happy. Later, daddy-o!”

The Princess shook her head, then waved a hoof in the guard’s direction. With a quick salute, he turned about and made his retreat with Maxine in tow. Once they were both gone, she sat down against the wall. I settled in beside her, and we exchange one of those psychic communiques where you both know what the other person is thinking.

The door of Mayfly’s room opened, and Taxi peered out at us, the changeling queen over one shoulder. “Wha—? When did you guys get here?” she asked.

Mayfly looked up at the ceiling for a moment, her eyes following something I couldn’t see, and then she said, “They’ve been here about four minutes longer than necessary.”

Twilight’s jaw clenched, I adjusted my hat, and Swift twitched a feather.

Then we all pitched into a pile of helpless laughter.

It was some time later when we’d finally recovered enough to talk. Taxi and Mayfly had retreated back into the queen’s apartments to get themselves cleaned up. That left the three of us on the doorstep, cackling like monkeys on nitrous oxide.

“Oooh, I can’t breathe! Oh my stars!” Twilight exhaled, trying to sit up. Her front knees were shaking. “I can’t even think of a punishment for this one!”

“Aheh...oof...are you even sure a punishment isn’t what Maxine wants?” I chuckled, getting my hooves under myself.

“Maybe,” she replied. “I mean, she never really complains about whatever work I make her do. She’ll clean the toilets or wash all the windows, and then next week I’ll have peanut butter in my shampoo again. Drones are strange like that, but it’s not like I could ever hurt her or something. She’s becoming a decent little librarian, despite herself.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s your problem and not mine. I’ve got enough crazy little ponies in my life,” I said, giving Swift a gentle ruffle between the ears. She snapped at my hoof, but there wasn’t any real menace behind it. “I’m going to have to talk to Taxi about her choice of lovers, though.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised Mayfly was interested in her. Your driver strikes me as somepony who sees something she wants and heads straight for it.”

“You have no idea. Let’s go find Limerence while those two clean themselves up.”

Twilight pushed the queen’s door open a crack and called, “Mayfly! Meet us in the east library when you’re done!” I didn’t hear the reply, but Twilight gave the room satisfied nod, then turned her attention back to me. “Do you mind teleporting again?”

“Nope. Let’s do this. This time, I think we should knock, though.”

We reappeared in one of the castle’s seemingly innumerable hallways outside a slightly cracked-open pair of wooden doors.

Raising my voice, I shouted inside, “Limerence? You decent?”

“Shush, Detective! This is a library!” came a stage whispered reply.

With a shrug, I pushed the door open and strolled into a room that could only have been called ‘library’ if somepony were sorely lacking imagination; it was a grand emporium, a shrine to the very notion of binding ink and paper.

Three floors stretched well out of sight in all directions, each one bedecked with thousands upon thousands of books. Shelves of the finest wood held tomes, from tetchy little things that had to be read with a pair of tweezers to monolithic scrolls that could only be moved with special equipment, all free of dust or the scent of mold. The air was dry as a desert, and I found myself swallowing repeatedly; Swift, though, seemed to be drinking it in like she’d been dying of dehydration and somepony offered her a glass of fine wine.

“Sir? Did...did I just walk into...paradise?” she whispered. “I mean...I mean, the Archive was amazing, but this…”

“You like books?” Twilight asked, a coy little smile on her face. “This is only the reference section. There are six other libraries in the Castle of Friendship.”

“W-where do you fit them? I mean, it looked big, but...but not that big!” my partner gasped.

“We find places,” she replied, enigmatically. “Some are in the same place, but at slightly different times. Others are in space that really only kind of exists when somepony is looking at it. Magic is a librarian’s best friend, after all. Come on, I think I hear your friend over this way.”

Passing tables stacked with books waiting to be reshelved, we strolled along through the silent comfort of the library. Two rows down, we came upon a sight that put a smile on my face which would have, in other circumstances, lasted all day.

Limerence was nestled into a giant cushion big enough to hold five ponies with a book resting across his forelegs. His blonde mane was crimped and styled, and his vest looked freshly cleaned. His eyes were dreamy as he poured over the tome, the rest of him only moving to flip a page.

A slightly thin changeling wearing a pair of silvery spectacles and a black bowtie around her neck was snuggled up against his barrel, her green, fanlike tail draped across his flank. Lim didn’t seem to mind the company terribly much, even though she was well inside what I’d generally considered his personal bubble.

Twilight cleared her throat beside me, and Limerence looked up, then gently bumped the changeling’s head with his chin. “Minerva? Are you awake?”

The drone blinked her big, blue insect-oid eyes a couple of times, then sat up, looking all about. “Oh...My...did I fall asleep? I’m sorry.” She caught sight of Twilight and jumped upright, wobbling on the unstable surface of the cushion as she tried to salute and bow at the same time. She ended up whacking herself in the face. “Ma’am! Did you need me? I’m sorry!” she gasped, holding her bruised forehead with one hoof.

“Relax, Minerva,” the Princess murmured soothingly. “We’re just here to do some research. Could you make sure there’s nobody else in here?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Do you need other help? I can help! I don’t mind helping. Mister Limerence didn’t need much help but he really loves books and I love his love and he’s really nice to me even though I’m sure I’ve been a huge bother the whole time and I’m rambling, aren’t I? I’m sorry, Ma’am!” The changeling librarian threw herself at Twilight’s hooves, her face buried in the carpet.

The Princess, far from annoyed, gently lifted the changeling off the carpet with a flicker of magic and deposited her beside Limerence. “Minerva, please go get us some cocoa and find everything we have on the law firm of Umbra, Animus, and Armature.”

If it’s possible for chitin to blush, she was red as a rose. “Yes Ma’am!” she squeaked, then dashed away at top speed, vanishing between the stacks. A second later, there was a crash and the sound of falling books. “Sorry Ma’am! I’ll clean that up!”

Shaking her head, Twilight sat down on the other end of Limerence’s cushion and waved us forward. “I hope she wasn’t too much of a bother, Mister Tome.”

“Please, Limerence is fine,” he said. “And no, Minerva was delightful company.”

“You don’t mind she was pretty obviously feeding off you this whole time?” Twilight asked, tilting her head.

“Why should I? She has a need, I have a resource. Besides, despite what she said, she was very helpful,” he replied. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and slowly let it out. His horn flickered, then burst into life with a fiery blue glow. Grabbing the book he’d been reading, he levitated it into mid-air, then snapped it smartly shut. “Ah...tis so much better to have that back!”

Trotting forward, Swift tugged the book down where she could see the spine. She frowned, rubbing her cheek. “What book is this? Is this in Zebra?”

“It’s in Cervid, actually. The title translates roughly as ‘Channeling For The Broken’. It’s a guide to re-ordering one’s own mana channels after they’ve been damaged.”

Twilight blinked and picked up the book, scanning the first page. “Oh! I remember this book. You reconstructed your own mana system? That’s really impressive! I’ve never had to do that before, but I always wanted to try it.”

“Thankfully, my mana channels weren’t damaged, just exhausted and inflamed. Minerva made me a lovely tea as it recommended on page one-forty-six,” he said, raising a teacup from a spot beside his cushion.

Twilight frowned, then picked up the cup and gave it a sniff. Her eyes almost popped out of her head. “Black lotus? You made a tea out of black lotus?! And you drank it?!”

“Oh, I know it’s staggeringly poisonous, but if I survive, my magic should be right in top form!”

“If?!” I snapped, taking an aggressive step forward. “Limerence, please tell me you didn’t just kill yourself.”

“No, no Detective! I’m almost ninety percent certain I’ll be perfectly fine. My liver and kidneys are protected by the best spells Minerva could cast.” He lifted his vest, showing me a softly glowing patch on his abdomen. “I should survive handily with only some minor indigestion.”

“I’ve got friends on the other side, Lim. You die, I’m going to make sure they bug you forever. You hear me?”

The unicorn’s upper lip curled to make some kind of rebuke, but then he seemed to think better of it. “Eh...yes, Detective.”

“Good.”

I heard a door open and the sound of two sets of hooves. A few seconds later, Taxi and Mayfly strolled leisurely into the comfortable little reading area, leaning against one another. The changeling was out of her armor, but she was looking pleasantly refreshed while my driver seemed a bit drowsy, with drooping eyelids and a lazy smile.

Twilight snapped her front hooves together like a school-teacher who has walked in on a pair of students engaged in illicit activities. She was a little shorter than Mayfly, so the effect was a bit dulled, but the intent was still there.

“We’re in the middle of a national...nay, a planetary crisis, and you two are...are...are—”

“Screwing like bunnies?” Taxi provided.

Twilight’s face turned a shade pinker, but she managed to keep her irritated expression. “Yes! We have better things to do! Now, what do you have to say for yourselves?”

The queen glanced down at my driver, who gave her a sly nuzzle under the jaw, then back up at Twilight. “Yummy?”

I rolled onto my back as Twilight’s brain stalled out entirely and she was left standing there, her muzzle wrinkled, angrily kneading the pillow with her hooves. “I think she’s got you, Princess. Sweets? You alright?”

Nodding, my driver leaned under one of the bookshelves and pulled out her own seat. “A little dehydrated, but I’ll be fine.” She looked momentarily thoughtful. “Minox is rougher and definitely not as...mmm...empathetic.”

“Oookay, don’t need details,” I said, quickly, before she could elaborate. “Swift, you want to sit over here by me? I suspect we’ll need to take some notes.”

“Ma’am...oh...sorry. Miss Twilight, can I have a notebook? Mine is in my armor.”

Twilight, unable to keep her bluster up now it’d been broken, let out an irritated grunt and a pad and pencil appeared, dropping into Swift’s hooves. “There you go. At least somepony has a sense of proper procedure during times of crisis! Now then! Where should we start?”

“Well...I figure you are probably still wondering how I managed to dodge your tracking spells,” I said.

“Oh, yes! Yes, I was!” she replied, tapping her chin. “We...never did get around to that, did we?”

I unseated my gun from the holster and flicked the cylinder open. I shook the bullets out and pocketed them, then laid the weapon the cushion in front of her. “You know what this is?”

“It...I mean, it looks like a war-era revolver.”

“The surface is covered in changeling epoxy, Ma’am,” Mayfly interjected. “Somepony had a very good changeling friend at some point.” She leaned over to get a closer look. “This is...royal saliva. Pony, where did you get this?”

“It’s was my grandfather’s during the war. He modified it somehow and gave it to my dad,” I replied, then reached out and gently flipped the weapon over, revealing the shiny scar that the Moon Gun’s fire had left on its surface. “My father gave it to me before he died.”

Twilight picked the weapon up in a field of magic and peered at it closely. With a tickle of telekinesis, she tore a long strip of the changeling spit off. As she did, her eyes widened, and she let it drop on the pillow like she’d just discovered herself holding a snake. “Is...is that a Crusader?”

I pulled the cartridge of crystal bullets I'd gotten from Don Tome's personal stash out of my pocket and set them beside my gun. “You nailed it.”

A mix of expressions crossed Twilight’s face in a span of about twenty seconds, ranging from momentary fear, to annoyance, to blind terror, then slowly morphing into quiet acceptance.

“Huh...That...gosh, I think whatever part of me feels surprise must be broken. This actually makes an awful lot of sense. I mean, I don’t know why it makes sense. In any sane world, I’d be curled up in a corner screaming about the spiders under my eyelids by now.” Hefting the weapon again, she flicked her head, and another strip of changeling saliva ripped free. The rest shattered with a crack like an ice cube dropped in boiling water, spilling all over the pillow.

Limerence let out a low whistle of appreciation.

“Detective...that is maybe the most gorgeous artifact I’ve ever seen or heard of,” he murmured.

Not being much of an aesthete, I might not have been qualified to make a statement like that with the same weight, but his evaluation certainly made me feel a little less silly for being struck dumb by my own gun.

Without the protective covering disguising it, the Crusader was a thing of real beauty. The ugly box shape was gone, leaving a gorgeously feminine curve to the cocking mechanism covered in finely inlaid lines of silvery wire that seemed to approximate some kind of circuitry.

The barrel was a spiraling affair that reminded me of a unicorn’s horn but for the blunted muzzle. Some type of toggle with several positions, each one pointing to a different arcane sigil, lay just above the trigger on the body of the gun. One was Princess Celestia’s cutie-mark, though I didn’t recognize the rest. Something about the shape was vaguely sexual, like the curve of a very beautiful mare’s hips. It was an elegant weapon, for a less civilized age.

“Your granddad really carried that during the war?” Swift asked.

“I...I just thought it was a museum piece, honestly,” I replied, reaching out to take the gorgeous gun in my hooves. It was much lighter than just moments ago, feeling more like a porcelain figure than an actual revolver. “I mean, it’s got pretty good stopping power. Even after what Tome’s construct said these things can do, I don’t know if I believed it until just now.”

“Who wasyour grandfather, Detective?” Twilight asked with a slightly suspicious look in her eyes.

“Same as me. Same as my father. Hard Boiled.”

The alicorn frowned in thought. Her eyes glowed softly, and then she let out a loud groan as whatever spell she was using to scan her memories spat out an answer she didn’t like.

“You’re...Shell Shock’s grandson. Really? Him? That...grrr!” Twilight stomped the pillow so hard a spurt of feather popped out of the other end. “You’re his grandson?”

“I don’t know any Shell Shock...”

“His fake name. The one he signed up with the military with!” she snapped, throwing herself to her hooves and trotting over to one of the bookcases. “That...that was your grandfather. Why am I not surprised two ponies in that family would make my life difficult?”

I quirked one eye. “You tell me. I don’t know much about him, other than what my father told me. That wasn’t much either.”

“Well, your grandfather falsified his own military records to get in because his first fitness report said he wasn’t fit for frontline combat. His back knees were both shot. The problem was only discovered late in the war, after he’d won half a dozen commendations for valor that made putting him on a boat home a non-option.”

“Faked his name?” I asked.

“That’s what I said,” she huffed, pushing one of the books on the shelf back into line, then rounding on me. “I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his battlefield reports. He went by ‘Shell Shock’ back then, but in his work with the Crusader division, he signed all of his reports ‘Agent Egg Head’. He was the one who started that ridiculous tradition of all the Crusaders getting nicknames. What do you know about the Crusaders, Detective?”

“Not much, actually. I know it was my grandfather who killed the Dragon King.”

Twilight’s nostrils flared and she let out an angry snort. “You’re shaking my faith in our security procedures really badly right now.”

“The only pony who knew anything is dead, and his construct will only talk to his son.” I pointed at Limerence. “I think you’re pretty safe.”

“Safe is very relative. Your grandfather killed the monster who called himself the Dragon King. The Dragon King was a disgusting little upstart who launched a coup against the rightful ruler of the dragons. He used magics that...we’re...we’re still not sure how he managed to get hold of. He placed the Dragon Lord Ember into a magical sleep. She is the rightful ruler of the dragons.”

“Ma’am, I don’t remember learning about this in school,” Swift commented. “Dragons were one of my favorite subjects, too.”

Twilight trotted back to the pillow and sat down, dropping her chin onto her fetlock. “You wouldn’t have heard about poor Ember. She only ruled for about nine years. She was a good dragon. A really wonderful dragon, actually. Of course...once the war began, that didn’t matter.”

“Why not?” Swift asked.

“Because the Dragon King was set on crippling Equestria,” the Princess muttered. “He isolated Ember’s friendlier faction in the far east of the dragon lands, where they couldn’t intervene in the war, and bullied the rest into fighting. Enough of his old guard resented being friends with ‘prey’ to drag most of their nation—particularly the Highlands—along. Once blood was spilt on both sides, some of the...friendlier...stories were lost in the rush to energize the warmakers.”

My partner’s gaze danced back and forth between Twilight and myself as she tried to make sense of an especially ugly truth. A part of me still wished I could spare her those, but it was overshadowed by how much that little pony had grown in such a short time.

“But the war is over, isn’t it?”

Mayfly’s wings buzzed against her sides, pulling my partner’s attention. “Changelings have a treaty with ponies, but we’re not strolling the streets,” she explained, tapping her crooked horn with one hoof. “You ponies might be easier to deal with than most races, but you don’t change easily or quickly. My mother invaded Canterlot fifty-five years ago and almost ended the marriage of Princess Cadence before it could begin. My species was sneaking into your spouse's’ beds just a few decades before the war. Would you want foals going home to mommy and daddy with stories about the magnificent, friendly changeling queen they’d heard about when many of those couples were a light evening snack for one of our infiltrators?”

“Um...n-no…I guess not...”

“Then how do you think they would respond to tales of the Ember the Kind when so many of their friends and family died screaming in dragonfire?”

Twilight gave the changeling a stern look, but she ignored it entirely as Swift’s face slowly fell into one of sad comprehension.

“Oh…that’s...that’s terrible,” my partner sighed, hugging herself with her wings. “I mean, I understand. I just sort of wish I didn’t.”

“Princess? About my gun,” I said, tapping the Crusader. “You know anything about the ponies who made it? Maybe how it works?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Princess Luna ran the Crusaders. I was against most of their activities, but she’s…” Twilight paused, looking towards the light fixture on the ceiling. “Look, I don’t want to say anything bad about her because she’s my friend, but she likes to deal with problems in an extremely ‘direct’ way.”

“With assassination squads?” I asked.

“They...they weren’t supposed to be that,” Twilight’s bit back, her lip curled with disgust. “They were supposed to save lives...and they mostly did. I know that gun is tied to your desire to save Equestria from evil, whatever form it takes, and you could only be given one if you wanted to keep ponies safe, otherwise it would just crumble to dust. The pony who used my research to make those disappeared with her friends after the war. I designed the prototypes, but they didn’t have this.” She pointed at the toggle on the side of the gun. “I don’t know how they hide from tracking spells, either. At the time, I didn’t want to know, and by the time I was curious, it didn’t matter. I just know the after action reports of dragons dying when they faced Crusaders. There were lots of those.”

“That’s less than I hoped for.” I nudged the cartridge of crystal bullets towards her. “What about these? You know what the words on them mean?”

The princess lifted the bullets and slowly turned them in the air so she could read the engravings. “They’re Crusader ammunition. You fire one, and it does...something...to all the local magical fields. The words on the sides are somepony’s idea of a really mean joke.”

“A joke?”

She traced the word ‘kindness’ with the end of a hoof. “They’re the six virtues that bind ponykind together...but more than that, they are the ultimate power of friendship: the Elements of Harmony. It’s a magic more powerful than any we know of in the world today, at least...until Canterlot disappeared.”

“The Elements of Harmony?” Limerence sniffed, flicking a dismissive hoof at the bullets. “Those are a myth. There’s no proof they actually existed.”

Twilight let out a short, weak laugh and pushed the bullets back towards me. “I’m a ridiculous myth, huh? I wish I had a bit for every time I’ve heard that in the last twenty years.”

Limerence looked uncertain. “They...they are a myth...aren’t they?”

“Funny thing, how that works, isn’t it? Laughter, generosity, kindness, honesty, loyalty, and myself; magic.” At his confused look, she clarified, “The elements were magical artifacts, or maybe something more. They bonded to the souls of six ponies who used to live in this little town. To be honest, I never got the chance to study them properly. Just a few short years. My friends and I used them to purify Nightmare Moon into Princess Luna, though. It’s...I guess it’s a story I can tell some other time.”

“You and your friends did that?”

“Mmmhmmm. It won’t help us much, now, with our present problem. The elements only work if all six of the bearers are together, and...and five of them were in Canterlot. They...” She closed her eyes and took a solidifying breath. “They moved on.”

Swift waved a hoof for attention, rolling her pencil back and forth with her tongue. “Ma’am, you keep saying stuff like ‘they ‘moved on’ whenever you talk about your friends. Why don’t you say they died? You say other ponies died...just not them.”

I wasn’t sure if Twilight was going to answer her or not. She sat there for a long time, staring at her hooves, fidgeting at the pillows. Each time I thought she might actually say something, she’d draw in a breath, then exhale. Tears crept into her eyes, but they never fell.

It was Mayfly came to her rescue, sort of. “Ugh...you’re such a drama queen, Ma’am.”

The Princess’s horn lit up, but before she could cast whatever she had in mind, Mayfly reached out and bopped her on the forehead with one thin wingtip. Her concentration broke, and she let out a little gasp as hot sparks spilled into her lap.

“I’m working up to it, May! Give me a minute!”

“If you work up to it any longer, I’m going to take Miss Taxi here behind those bookcases and have another snack!”

Taxi’s ears perked up. She’d been dozing lightly against Mayfly’s shoulder. “Oooh, that sounds—”

“Okay, okay! Sorry!” Twilight flapped her wings, a light breeze ruffling the tails of my coat as she composed herself. “It’s...you know I don’t talk about them much.”

“Yeah, I get to hear how much you ‘don’t talk about them’ when you cry yourself to sleep at night when I’m guarding your door,” Mayfly groused. “They’re not gone. Death doesn’t mean a damn thing to you! You could have gone to speak to them anytime you liked. They’d probably be glad if you did! No, not even ‘probably’...I know they would!”

Lip quivering, Twilight turned her wet eyes back towards the carpet. “I know that! It’s just been so long!”

Mayfly moved a bit closer, her forked tongue snaking out to tap her charge on the nose. “We both know that’s a load of horseapples. You’re scared to tell them what you did after you cast the Grand Memoria when you were playing spymaster. You’re scared they already know! Applejack would buck you upside the head for some of those stunts you pulled, but she still loves you. Rarity would at least try to understand, and Fluttershy—”

Twilight’s magic was so quick this time that Mayfly didn’t even have time to react. One moment she was there, and the next there was a burst of light and the changeling queen was gone.

There was a long, awkward pause as we all sat around trying to figure out whether the alicorn had simply vaporized her guard, teleported her into the atmosphere, or shoved her into another dimension. All seemed equally likely. Taxi felt around on the pillow for a second, as though checking for ashes.

“Eh...can...can I assume you just sent her somewhere?” I asked.

“S-sorry. She’s...she’s okay. She’s going to have a bit of a flight back to the castle, and I’m going to be apologizing for a week,” Twilight muttered, with a bit of resignation. “She’s right, though. My friends are in a place called the Tree of Harmony. It’s a magical...gate? Focus? Maybe something like a hole between this world and the next one. It’s a place I can talk to them. I’m just...just afraid. I haven’t visited in almost seven years. Now it’s too late.”

“But...but why is it too late, Ma’am?” Swift inquired. “If there are ponies with super powerful magic, shouldn’t it be worth some discomfort?”

“During the war, we moved the Tree of Harmony to the Crystal Caverns under Canterlot, to keep it safe. Another one of my brilliant ideas,” Twilight sighed, rubbing her forehead in little circles. “I really need to stop having those. The mountain is gone...along with the Tree.”

“You know, you’re sort of shaking my faith in all-powerful pony princesses here,” I grumbled, knocking my hat off with one hoof and shaking my mane out. Twilight opened her muzzle to reply when somepony let out a meek little cough. I glanced over my shoulder to find Minerva cowering behind one of the bookshelves.

“Excuse me, Ma’am. I wasn’t...I wasn’t listening in. I promise! I’m sorry,” Minerva squeaked, peering out with just one eye. The library drone had a neat stack of papers clutched under one leg, and her glasses were slightly askew.

Twilight looked up and broke into a relieved smile. “It’s perfectly alright, Minerva. What’d you find for us?”

Minerva looked down at her papers, then sank down a little. “I...I found a bunch of stuff, Ma’am...but I don’t know if any of it will be useful.”

Plucking the papers from Minerva’s leg, the Princess spread them out on the floor. Most of it looked like case files of old cases or summaries of cases. One or two seemed to be deeds or records of deeds. I figured we were in for a rough few hours research.

Scraping a bit of sand out of the corner of my eye, I waved a hoof to get Minvera’s attention. “Coffee?”

If I offer my services as a book gopher to an alicorn with a seemingly endless attention span again, please go ahead and call the funny farm to come put me in a padded room, because I’ve gone completely mad.

Twilight was the sort of pony who could find excitement in doing her taxes. Or someone else’s taxes. Or just sitting staring at a massive heap of arcane, altogether incomprehensible information which didn’t appear to have a thing to do with why the city of Canterlot had apparently teleported to the moon.

Still, I’m not a cop because I lack tenacity. I am a cop because my cutie mark happens to reflect an inability to get over anything, long after any sane being would have.

So it was that Swift, Taxi, Limerence, and myself were huddled together over our own individual piles of paper, cups of coffee, and notes when Mayfly returned about forty-five minutes later.

The knock on the library door sent Minerva scrambling for the nearest row of books with her tail tucked between her legs.

“Who is that, Min?” Twilight asked, absently flipping another page.

“It’s Mom! Can I please run away now?”

“I think we’ve got most of what we need here, at least for the moment,” Twilight answered, waving a leg over the spread. “You can go. Stay nearby, alright?”

Minerva didn’t even bother with hiding; bright green flame encircled her hooves, and she sank straight into the ground, leaving nothing but a lightly toasted carpet.

“Was...that the changeling teleport spell?” Limerence asked, curiously. The black lotus tea had necessitated a long-ish trip to the bathroom, but he’d returned, just as I was about to go check on him, looking none-the-worse for wear.

“Yes, it was,” Twilight murmured, pulling herself to a standing position and quickly beating her purple wings a few times to shake the kinks out. “Now you’re about to see the almighty passive aggressiveness of a changeling queen. Take notes. It’s like your mother, if she’d had hundreds of children worth of experience.” She raised her voice and called, “Come in, May!”

“I’m guarding the door, since my opinions are unwanted!” Mayfly shouted back. “Call me when you need your next dose of perspective so I can book a cab ahead of time!”

Shutting her eyes, Twilight sat on her haunches.

“Mayfly...I’m sorry I teleported you into Ghastly Gorge.”

There was a bit of a pause. Then I heard the library door rattle open, and something white and shiny floated into our sitting area and dropped at Twilight’s hooves. It was an ugly-looking curved incisor about twelve inches long that’d been broken off right near the base.

“Are you sorry I got eaten?! Because I got eaten!”

“As though that’s never happened before,” Twilight muttered, pulling a face. Swift snickered, covering her muzzle with one hoof.

“What? I can’t hear you through this door, that I’m standing outside of like a servant who you can teleport into the jaws of a quarry eel at your leisure, rather than your friend of almost thirty years!” May bit back.

“I’m sorry you got eaten again, May,” the Princess replied with a long-suffering expression. “Look, I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh? You do, do you? Miss Clever-Princess-Who-Never-Needs-Input-From—”

“You can have the last of the Crystal Ambrosia Cake.”

There was another pause.

“Do we have any whipped cream?” the changeling called back.

“Yes, May. Storage room six.”

The library door slid shut, and armored hooves retreated down the hallway. Taxi reached down, gingerly picking up the tooth. She gave it a light poke with her toe to test for sharpness, then slipped it into her saddlebags.

Twilight watched her for a moment with one eyebrow raised, then picked up several stray sheets of paper, glancing between them. “Where were we?”

“I was just about to ask what all this has to do with the fact that Canterlot is on the moon,” I grunted, pushing away the ledger I’d been poking through.

Limerence set his own book down and sighed. “Detective, this is about data collection. Umbra, Animus, and Armature have somehow managed to operate with near impunity in Detrot for more than sixty years, and the confirmable information on them doesn’t even fill a few dozen folders. Do you know how unlikely that is? To that end, we must use what we have. We know all of this does relate to why Canterlot is on the moon. Now we must discover how.”

“I keep looking, but what do we have? Look...here they defend some crime boss’s son who’s headed to jail for a double murder,” I said, turning around my particular set of cases. “I remember the case. The kid was dirty, but they got him off. He died in a drive-by shooting two days out of jail, just in time to start the gang war between the Melons and the Sharps.”

Twilight’s ears flicked with interest. “That’s...interesting, actually. What I am seeing is...a surprising lack of consistency. Umbra, Animus, and Armature have the strangest track record of any law firm I’ve ever seen.”

“How do you mean?” Taxi asked, moving over to look over her shoulder. “These...oh...really? They defended that? And...wait…” My driver picked up her notepad and peered at it. “I think ‘interesting’ might be the wrong word. Downright weird is more like it. Check this out.”

We all tried to crowd around the pad and ended up with our cheeks smooshed together.

“Look,” Taxi said, pointing at her paper. “U.A.A. defends a Mister Lux against a lawsuit by a row of store owners, alleging he’s been running a protection racket. They win, despite there being massive evidence Mister Lux was actually running the racket. A year later, Lux dies, and his son hires a different law firm to defend his bid for control of the family business against his brother. That one they win. Then Lux’s son hires another firm who sues the store owners for defamation of his father’s character. They win that one too...and clean the store owners out!”

Twilight scratched her head. “So...three different law firms? If U.A.A. was helping Mister Lux and his family, why would his son hire someone else?”

“That’s because he didn’t!” Taxi exclaimed, picking up a logbook that’d been left beside her hoof. “Look! There are actually six different law firms… and all besides U.A.A. itself were owned by other companies. All of them!”

“You...you think they were shell corporations?” Twilight asked. "All of those law firms owned by Umbra, Animus, and Armature, working together and against one another?"

“Wait...I remember this.” I groaned. “Was the kid’s name perchance ‘Liminal Lux’?”

Taxi nodded.

“Crap. Liminal Lux became a ranking Jeweler boss six months later. We need to expand our search parameters. Look for any situation where somepony was involved in court proceedings over a series of years with multiple law firms where the outcome was unusual.”

“What are we looking for, Detective?” Twilight asked.

“Someone built us a web. Now we have to find the spider. Let's get Minerva back in here.”

Another three hours passed, and our notepads quickly became full. At last, I set mine aside and massaged my aching eyes.

“So...that’s it, then,” I rasped, my throat dry. I picked up my coffee cup and tipped it back only to find it empty.

“Yes, but...but what does it mean?” Twilight asked, slapping her pad shut. “We’ve got dozens of cases here, but the outcome is different every time! Some don’t make any sense at all!”

Limerence, who’d been very quiet for the last twenty minutes, finally spoke up. “If taken individually, that is true, but I...believe I see an overall trend here.”

“What trend?” the Princess inquired.

“If we abandon the assumption that their goal was to enrich themselves, the trend is one towards...instability,” Limerence said, waving a hoof over everything in front of us.

“He’s right,” Taxi added. “I mean, we’ve seen whoever is pulling the strings do that several times already. They’ll set up a house of cards, then turn on a fan. We’ve got some reason to believe they even helped create the Jewelers. We know they drugged the Chief of Police, and the blackmail ledger would have torn down huge numbers of ponies at city hall, not even mentioning all the stuff they had from the Vivarium.”

Swift flipped her notepad open and looked through her own cases. “You know...I played this board game a few months ago where I was a spirit of chaos called a ‘windigo’. You got points for making things worse in the city of Pegasopolis, back in ancient Roam, and you had to have as many points as possible before Hearth’s Warming Eve when you’d be driven from the land.”

“Go on, kid,” I said.

“Well, Sir...if these cases were all part of a big strategy, I’d have an awful lot of points for making the police weaker, making different species hate each other, making everypony poor, and making the gangs want to fight one another.”

“But...that’s madness. Unless we’re assuming chaos is the goal…” Twilight’s eyes went round, and she picked up a dozen sheets of paper simultaneously that began to spin slowly around her head. “Chaos...chaos, chaos...wait a second.”

“You got something?” I asked.

“Maybe! Can I borrow these?” She excitedly snatched Swift’s notepad and pencil with a burst of magic without waiting for a response. “Thanks! I’ll be right back! I need to send a letter!”

Opening her wings, Twilight hopped into the air and, with a bright pop, vanished. That left the four of us sitting there in the library staring at one another.

Minerva poked her head around the end of one of the nearby bookshelves, then ducked back when she saw we were still there.

“Hey...hey, Min? You perchance know who she’s going to write a letter to?” I called. “I don’t have a week for the post, and anyway, I think the local post office might be on the Moon.”

“I-I don’t know! I mean, she writes lots of letters. She doesn’t like telephones. She’s probably writing to one of the other all-powerful beings. I’m sorry! I mean, other...other ponies...who are out there who are crazy powerful who’re all working to fix this situation because it’s so awful and—”

Limerence got up from his seat and trotted over to the changeling, who shrank down against the bookshelf until he reached out to lightly brush her head-crest. “It’s fine, Minerva. Deep breath. Who is she writing to?”

Minerva quivered at his touch, then crept forward and put her forehead against his chest as though drawing strength from the affection. Come to think of it, she probably was.

“Miss Twilight has friends...everywhere. Nopony except maybe Princess Celestia has more friends than Twilight does...b-but I bet she just went to write a letter to the Crystal Empire. They’ve been working on everything that’s been going on.”

“I’d wondered where the Crystal Royals were in all of this,” Taxi murmured. “Those two try to stay out of Equestrian politics, most of the time.”

“You’ll be interested, then, to discover that Shining Armor is our esteemed host’s brother,” Limerence added, returning to his seat. Minerva followed him closely as he sat down and flipped through his notepad to a particular page. “Miss Sparkle was the personal student of Princess Celestia until she somehow ascended to alicornhood. Her brother and Princess Cadence were the ones responsible for keeping the events of the Changeling Wedding from becoming a national disaster.”

“Lemme guess...another Secret History of Equestria?” I asked.

Limerence straightened his vest, taking some obvious pleasure in being able to do that while still levitating his notes. “If only such a book existed, though if it does, I imagine I shall find it here. The first thing I did the moment I reached the library was look up Princess Sparkle’s biography. I figured my father would appreciate some closure on that topic, and since she doesn’t seem intent on wiping our minds, it might prove useful in the future.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Oh, many things. That mare lived, on average, more in ten years than most ponies live in a hundred. Perchance were you ever a fan of the ‘Commander Cloud Strike’ series when you were younger?”

I chuckled and felt my cheeks warm a little. “I might have been, yes.”

“You remember Cloud Strike’s clumsy but brilliant sidekick ‘Bright Spark’?”

“Uh...yeah. She did most of the logistics and got rescued every other week. Where is this going?”

“Just describe Bright Spark.”

I let my head roll back on my shoulders, thinking. It’d been an awfully long time.

“Bright Spark...purple, lavender, or sometimes violet, crazy about her books, too friendly for her own health or safety, pink streak in her mane...oooh, wait. Wait, wait, wait!” I sat up and jabbed a hoof at the spot where Twilight was just a few minutes ago. “You’re not telling me she’s—”

“Yes. Miss R.D. Dash, the author of the Cloud Strike series, was one of the six ponies who helped purge Princess Luna,” Limerence said, with a smug smile. “I believe you just spent the last several hours with Bright Spark herself. Miss Dash took some...creative liberties, but several of the adventures of Commander Strike were apparently autobiographical.”

“That’s so cool!” Swift exclaimed, rising up on her hooftips. “I thought my stories were going to be crazy after all the stuff we’ve done lately! Miss Dash really did all those things?”

“It would appear. There were many—”

Whatever he was about to say was cut short when we all felt a gentle tingle in the air, followed by a dazzling flash and an excited alicorn bounding out of midair into the middle of our group, scattering papers in all directions.

“Detective! I just got a reply from the one person who might be able to help us!”

Act 3 Chapter 18 : Let's Break It Down

‘Ponies cannot build a civilization without building on the skeletons of their ancestors. In building a society, one must begin with the understanding that your flesh and bones will one day become mortar and cement in a grander construction. This is the way it has always been and may always be, until such time as we build something better than society.’

- Professor Van Hoofenstein, B.L.R. 466. at the opening of the second Canterlot Historical Museum. The Museum was destroyed the same night, along with a significant portion of the city in what later became known as the Torch Juggler Fire. This led to the introduction of some of the earliest fire codes.

Someone who knows what’s going on is the most valuable asset in any case. You talk to the wife who knew the husband’s finances were in the tank. You chase down the bookie who paid off the jockey. You write a letter to a semi-omnipotent being in an enchanted empire.

I can’t say I’d ever actually done that last one before, but this particular case was giving us all sorts of new experiences. Just today, Limerence drank a deadly poison, Swift managed to embarrass herself in front of royalty, I’d finally told somepony the truth of what all had happened to us, and Taxi screwed a bug.

All in all, a fairly eventful few hours, not including the train.

Damn...I’d almost let myself forget about the return trip. Another river I wasn’t looking forward to crossing.

“Who, exactly, was this a letter to?” I asked, peering at the scroll. It was old-style yellow parchment with red wax shaped into a crystalline heart sealing it.

With a flick of her horn, Twilight popped the seal open. “My research team! They’re some of the smartest ponies...well...some of the smartest beings in the whole world! We’ve been working on this problem since the Darkening, but you might have just given us the final piece of the puzzle!”

“So, they can help us sort things out?”

“I think so—” Twilight began as she unrolled the letter. There was a burst of noise—a fanfare of trumpets—then an explosive blast of pink sludge blew the Princess of Friendship off her hooves. She rocketed backwards into the wall and stuck there, every inch of her body coated in a thick layer of sweet smelling goo.

I took a few cautious steps away from where the letter lay on the carpet. Taxi sniffed at the slime, then dipped her toe in it before giving it a quick lick. “Mmm...frosting. Strawberry with a bit of cardamom.”

Twilight blinked her eyes open, but they didn’t seem quite willing to focus in the same direction. She let out a soft grunt, and a wave of magic rolled over her body. Wherever it touched, the frosting vanished, sweeping away until it had all been cleared from her fur and feathers, then the walls and carpet. Dropping back onto her stomach, the princess slowly pulled herself up.

“...fifty...years...and he still can’t resist doing stuff like that,” she mumbled. “...shoulda left him a statue…”

“Who is this friend of yours, again?” I asked, carefully stepping around where the letter lay on the carpet.

“He’s a professional prankster, but he knows more about chaos magic than anyone alive,” Twilight replied, picking the letter back up and quickly inspecting it for additional traps. Satisfied, she unrolled it again, holding the page away from her face lest there be another load of cake topping hidden somewhere, and quickly read the note. As she reached the bottom, her rear legs slid forward until she flopped onto her rump, letting her wings sink until they dragged across the carpet. “Awww… ponyfeathers…”

“Not what you were hoping for?”

“No. No, really not. I should have known this would be too much to hope for.”

Reaching out, I took the scroll and peered at it as Swift and Taxi edged in so they could read over my legs.

My Esteemed Shadow Trap,

You have posed an extremely interesting question. F.H. believes what you propose is possible. The power of Emotive Energies and Psychokinetic Radiations is well established. If one were to create mass chaos across a city or even a small town and then somehow harvest those energies, it would be a powerful source of magic, though how one might do it with true efficiency is outside of my ken.

Against my better judgement, I discussed the situation with D., and his response was to cover me in pudding. He did, however, add something of use to the conversation. I shall quote his precise words and hope they may be of use to you.

“Dull, dull, dull! There’s chaos and then there’s chaos! Chaos is only chaos because boring old order exists, now isn’t it? If one of those sweet little order-minded ponies decided they wanted the power of chaos for themselves, they’d go mad trying. After all, if you want chaos in a bag, you need a net, and if you made a net that size, you’d already have your fish in it, because it would be as big as an ocean! Now shoo!”

For what it’s worth, I believe he may have been onto something.

The dragons might hide a ‘net’ for magic in their lands, but if you say the epicenter of this situation is the city of Detrot, then I fear most of my suppositions fall a bit short. F.H. suggests looking in the surrounding area or towards the lands they call the ‘Wilds’ for large spell forms, but no spell form either of us could calculate would survive stresses of the magnitude necessary to cast Canterlot to the Moon, then maintain power adequate to keep we immortals and our servants from going anywhere near that end of the continent.

We know there are powers in the world older than we, but most sleep or hide at the edges of equine perception. They are ancient, and few choose to play the games of the younger species. As a rule, they don’t interfere with us. Youth tends to breed very creative methods of ridding oneself of one’s elders when they cease to be useful.

Something here is out of joint, however. This is not magic in the traditional sense of the word. It is closer to religion.

Even at my height, I would not have dared imagine such an immensity of power. It is rare I find myself frightened by numbers, but when I look at the maths involved, my knees begin to shake.

Yours Eternally,

The King of Monsters,

S.

“King of Monsters?” Swift asked, squinting at the elaborately scripted ‘S’ at the bottom of the page. “Is that some kind of codename or something? Who are these other ponies he or she or...whoever this is mentioned?”

“Mmm...Sombra is a dramatic soul,” Twilight commented, with a little smirk. “The others are Princess Flurry Heart and The Duke of the Unlands, Discord.”

Limerence let out one of ‘those’ sounds that always remind me of somepony squeezing an excited ferret. His glasses slid off the end of his muzzle, and he made no move to fix them.

“S-Sombra? Princess Twilight, surely you don’t mean that’s the actual King Sombra. He’s dead! He’s been dead for decades since the return of the Crystal Empire! And Discord? The spirit of chaos?” he spluttered, then looked confused. “Who is this ‘Princess Flurry Heart’?”

Twilight smiled at the barrage of questions. “They’re my research team. We’re all people who chose to hide during the War to protect our loved ones. We could move behind the scenes and let the dragons focus all their energies in places where they couldn’t break down the morale of Equestria. Princess Luna and Princess Celestia were impossible targets, but they were the only targets the dragons had once my spells made everyone start to forget about me and my friends.”

“So...who are these people?” I asked. I nodded in Limerence’s direction. “He doesn’t make that squeak noise for just anypony.”

“I did not squeak, Detective!” Limerence huffed, crossing his forelegs against his chest.

“It...it did sound a little like a squeak, Lim,” Taxi murmured, putting one of her legs across his back. He let out guttural noise, but didn’t push her away. “Still, I’m curious myself. I read a story or two about Discord when I was studying ancient history in school. I’ve never heard of ‘Princess Flurry Heart’, though. Is that some kind of honorary title?”

Twilight shrugged, pulling her wing around her side and plucking a loose feather from it. “Flurry is my niece. She’s Shining and Cadence’s foal. I thought she’d be safer, at least until she’s fully grown, if she wasn’t a target for the dragons. Sombra is...he’s a sad story. He helped save the Crystal Empire from the Umbrum. He was originally one of them, but he was granted fully ponyhood and...he’s still very hated in many places.”

“Riiight. More people the world forgot,” I exhaled, rolling my shoulders. “Could be worse, I guess. That’s not any odder than the rest of our merry little band. What about this ‘Discord’ person?”

“He’s what’s on the tin: a spirit of chaos,” she giggled, folding the letter up and tucking it into her stack of notes. “He’s more like a spirit of Attention Deficit Disorder, but he’s been a friend of mine for more than fifty years. He has his own stretch of land outside of the Yak kingdom that he calls the ‘Unlands’. A surprising number of ponies moved up there to live with him, since he offers a life without boredom. I figured if anyone would know why someone would want all that chaos, it would be him.”

“Yeah, but...what did he mean ‘a net as big as the ocean’?” Swift asked, spreading her hooves wide. “I mean, gathering up magic can’t be that hard, can it?” She pointed at Twilight’s horn. “Unicorns have a thing to do that on their heads.”

“Magic in general? Yes.” Twilight rubbed her chin, thinking. “If you needed a specific magic, though...like one particular kind of emotional energy...then you might need to either make it or have a really big area to draw it from. Or both. I just don’t know how they’d disguise something like that. Most spell forms and enchantments—even very stable ones—take up a significant amount of space. The largest one I’ve ever seen was the one inside the Supermax Prison and that’s...well, that’s all over the walls, underneath the paint. If it were laid out flat, it would be miles square. This one would have to be many, many times that size.”

“Well, today is ‘research’ day,” I said, then glanced around for Minerva only to find her hiding behind Limerence, her black muzzle tucked underneath one of his knees. She was snoring like a kitten. “Lim...could you wake up your leg warmer and have her go get us a map of Detrot and the surrounding areas?”

Limerence jumped up as he realized he had a changeling cuddled up against his side again. “Oh, goodness! She’s certainly stealthy when she wants to be, isn’t she?”

“You get used to waking up covered in a pile of changelings if you live here long enough,” Twilight grumbled. “Lock your doors unless you desperately want late night visitors.” She gave Minerva a poke in the flank.

The librarian yelped and rolled right to her hooves, her eyes still glazed with sleep. “Ma’am, yes, Ma’am! I wasn’t asleep, Ma’am! I’ll get right on it!” She broke into a full gallop for the nearest row of bookshelves, disappearing between them.

Twilight pretended to check her watch, then mouthed, ‘Three...two...one…’

Minerva sheepishly poked her nose between two books on the shelf. “Oh...um... What did you say you needed?”

“Could you get me the key to the map room, please?”

“Sorry, Ma’am!”

Twilight lead us down yet more of the seemingly endless halls of the Castle of Friendship to the largest doors I’d yet seen. An Umbrum sat outside, as though he’d been waiting for us.

“Orb?” Twilight asked. “What is it? Aren’t you on break?”

“Mistress,” the shadowy guard greeted her, standing to attention. “We’ve been made aware you intend to enter the map room, again. Much as we may serve at your behest, we ask that you don’t.”

“Oh? Why?”

Orb’s shoulders stiffened, and a flicker of blue light escaped from his visor. “There are too many friendship problems in Equestria for one pony to solve. The map has called to you for fifteen years, and yet you use illusions to keep the call silent. ” He waved his hoof in the direction of her flank. “Mistress, the Umbrum may not be entirely loyal without the various constraints placed upon our persons, but some have expressed...concerns...for your wellbeing.”

Twilight’s face hardened slightly as she took a couple of steps towards Orb. He didn’t shrink from her, instead raising his chin and standing calmly. “And what concerns are these?”

“That your responsibilities as Princess of Friendship were never meant to be undertaken alone. There are six thrones for a reason. You have not filled them since the expirations.”

The Princess’s shoulders stiffened, and she stood a bit straighter. “Those thrones are for my friends!”

“Yes. Yes, they are,” Orb murmured. “Why do they remain empty?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but there wasn’t a rebuttal there. Instead, she shut her eyes. “We need the map room to fix this situation.”

“Then it is not for me to stop you, Mistress Sparkle. Only to ask.” Taking a step back, Orb moved around to Twilight’s side, taking up a guard position at her flank.

I examined the gold-inlaid doors as the Princess produced a thin, silver key from underneath her wing and levitated it into a tiny lock at muzzle height.

“So, this ‘map room’, then...lots of associated personal baggage?” I asked.

“Uhuh.”

“Big, terrible baggage linked inextricably to why I hadn’t heard of you until last month?”

“Uhuh.”

“Emotional breakdown likely?”

“Hush and let me open this.”

The lock clicked, and Twilight gave it a shove with her magic. The doors swung inward, revealing an enormous hexagonal room containing six crystalline thrones positioned around a circular table of blue diamond. High above them, what looked like the roots of a truly gigantic tree dangled from the ceiling. Thin strings covered in crystals in dozens upon dozens of colors hung from the ends of the various branchings. Five other doors ringed the hall, all shut tight.

Only one of the thrones had any features to distinguish it from the others: Twilight’s cutie-mark was set above the seat directly across from the door we’d just entered.

While I’d become very much lost with all the winding about inside the castle, I had a sudden suspicion that we were at the very center of the building.

Swift let out a faint cough, and it was only then that I realized just how much dust was in the air. It was thick, and the faint light given off by the fixtures in the room lit tiny motes around each like a field of fireflies.

“Maid staff doesn’t come in here much, do they?” Taxi commented, running a hoof through the layer on the door hinge.

“No...and that’s my fault, too,” Twilight muttered, trotting over to the table. She laid a hoof on the leg-rest of the nearest throne. Orb took up position just inside the door, and while I couldn’t exactly tell what he was looking at, I got the feeling he was watching the Princess intently. “This is the Map Room. Equestria’s center for all things friendship. I...I haven’t been in here in awhile…”

Her eyes darted towards the throne with her cutie-mark on it and then back towards the table. I could see the deep-seated guilt there; years and years worth of guilt so thick no single pony could shoulder it.

“Am I going to get teleported into deep space if I sit down?” I asked, waving towards one of the empty chairs.

“I...I would rather you didn’t,” she replied, quietly. “But go ahead. That’s Applejack’s seat. She’d probably like it if you sat there, actually. You’re her kind of pony. Or maybe her opposite. I'm still figuring that out.”

With only a brief hesitation, I hopped into the throne and sat on my haunches. The seat was surprisingly comfortable, for being completely solid, and whoever cut the stone had a pretty good knowledge of equine anatomy.

Twilight approached her own chair, seeming reluctant to actually sit down. Her lips were moving, and I had a feeling she wasn’t really aware of her surroundings. She was seeing into a dark and violent history. She was whispering to herself, but I only caught one word.

“...failed…”

“Twilight,” I murmured. The Princess jerked her head up.

“What? Sorry, what did you say?”

“You going to go ahead and have that breakdown now, or can we schedule it for later on this week?” I asked, tapping the table with my shoe.

“I’m sorry. Orb’s right. Please, the rest of you...feel free to sit down,” she said, using her wings to point to the chairs. “I suppose some explanation is in order.”

“I thought we were going to get a map,” Swift said. “Is there a map in one of these other rooms?”

“No...no, this is the map,” she replied, tapping the table. “When my friends were still here, this map used to...call to us. It still calls to me.”

Turning sideways in her chair, Twilight flicked her horn in the direction of her cutie-mark. It flashed, and then a layer of something like a spider-web seemed to peel away. The mark underneath was flashing like a strobe light, and a faint ringing noise filled the chamber.

“Was your cutie-mark doing that the whole time we were out there?” I asked.

It was Taxi who answered, interrupting Twilight before she could reply. “Yes, Hardy. Yes, it was. I knew my talent wasn’t that off kilter. I was just focusing on you, but...but she is the center of the need. It’s need… it’s need like I’ve never felt anywhere before!”

Twilight’s ears pinned right to her head, and she pinched her eyes shut. The flashing of her cutie-mark seemed to only get a little brighter.

“I can’t...be the pony they all need,” she muttered.

“See, you’re doing that cryptic thing again,” I grumbled, flicking the brim of my hat back as I got comfortable in the throne. “Go ahead and finish that sentence without trying to make me feel like I missed a big section of history class.”

Twilight’s nose flared angrily. “Detective, has anypony ever told you that you have the tact of a...a bulldozer in a porcelain factory?”

Taxi, Limerence, and Swift all quietly raised their hooves.

“As you can see, I have an entire peanut gallery who will happily tell me that every day,” I replied. “Right now, I need some straightforward answers. Which ponies’ needs were you just talking about?”

“Grrr! Fine!” Swinging around, the alicorn slapped a hoof on the round table. A blast of white light shot up from the center, and I threw a hoof over my face protectively. When I hadn’t caught fire or otherwise found myself dying in a horrific magical explosion, I brought it down to see that a complex topographical map of Equestria had appeared on the table. It was fully three dimensional, though if I squinted I could see my partner through the mountain range on the other side.

The scale wasn’t perfect, but the closer I looked, the more precise it seemed to become. Canterlot was there, a great gaping hole in the middle of the map surrounded by several smaller holes. Far to the north—over near where Taxi was sitting—the Crystal Empire lay beneath a glowing dome of pink magic. Fires burned in Manehattan. San Fransicolt seemed to be almost deserted, while two gigantic banks of cloud huddled side-by-side on a mountain to the south. The labels above them said ‘Los Pegasus’ and ‘Cloudsdale’.

Hundreds upon hundreds of tiny purple stars the color of Twilight’s cutie-mark dangled above the table, flashing urgently. A number beyond counting.

“Them, Detective. I failed them. Every one of those stars is a pony or group of ponies who needs a friend right now,” Twilight murmured, looking at the map with something like despair in her eyes “That’s why I don’t come in here. There are supposed to be six bearers of Harmony. Maybe more. How could I ask anypony to go out and take care of all of these problems when I’m too scared to do it myself? Where would I even begin?”

Stretching my knee over the leg rest of my chair, I sat back in my seat, contemplating the vastness of the creek we were up and the complete absence of paddles. Even assuming we could bring Canterlot back, things were going to be tough for a good long while.

Equestria was going to need some friends.

“Let’s see Detrot,” I said.

Twilight moved towards the map, but before she could touch it, the perspective suddenly wrenched sideways until we were staring at a different section of the map. A roiling red ball the color of blood seemed to have been plunked right in the middle. Nothing could be seen through the ball aside from some vague, shadowy outlines that loosely suggested buildings.

Four familiar cutie-marks hung above the vile looking ball of magic: mine, Swift’s, Taxi’s (before her injury), and Limerence’s.

“Is...is that Detrot?” Swift asked, watching the ugly splotch with a nervous wiggle of her wingtips.

Twilight’s eyes narrowed at the map. “I...I think so. That can’t be right, though. The map never sent anypony else on a mission!”

“You ever let anypony else have a chair?” I asked, giving her a meaningful look as I tilted my chin back. A set of golden scales had appeared over my head, inlaid into the seatback. Similarly, my friends’ marks all adorned their thrones.

“I…” Twilight’s eyes flicked left, then right, before she slowly laid her forehead on the table. “I couldn’t. I mean, my friends were the best a pony could possibly have. How could I just...just replace them?”

Swift gently reached out one wing and set it over Twilight’s shoulders. The pen and sword above her seat flashed brilliantly, then faded to a soft glow. “No matter how many ponies you surround yourself with, there...there have to be some who you let see the real you. Ma’am...if you don’t mind me saying, I’m pretty sure your friends would be really sad to see you all alone.”

“They were. They are,” she whimpered, drawing her back legs up under herself. “I did so many bad things during the Crusades and now, Mayfly and Orb are my closest friends! Orb might kill me if he were free and...and you four have done more in two months than I’ve done in years. It’s...it’s just been really hard to let anypony get close.”

I waved a hoof over the map. “We manage to fix this situation, I’ll be first in line to sit on a beach and read a book together. In the meantime, we need to see Detrot. Can this thing...I dunno...can this map show us the city three weeks ago?”

Before Twilight could reply, the giant red bubble seemed to melt away, revealing the familiar old city underneath. It was as it had been, without the barricades every few streets or the constant smoke from fires. No impenetrable shield surrounded Uptown, nor was there a shattered skyscraper full of dead griffins.

The buildings were shining and gorgeous, as though under the light of a midday sun. Tiny ponies trotted up and down the streets, though I couldn’t tell if they represented actual people or were merely there to give the image a bit more liveliness.

One could almost have said Detrot looked peaceful.

“Huh...obedient map,” I mused, waving a hoof through the image of the Bay of Unity. The water seemed to splash a bit around my toe, though my hoof wasn’t wet when I pulled it away. “I really need to get me one of these. I’d never get lost again.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure you’d find a way, Hardy,” Taxi interjected, with a weak laugh. She was looking up at her cutie-mark, the eye and the dove, her expression unreadable.

“I...oof...It’s been so long since I used the map. It wouldn’t give me information like that the last time I asked. Granted...I...I was trying to use it to spy on the dragons during the war,” Twilight said, a bit shamefacedly.

“Color me unsurprised,” I said. “The Castle of Friendship’s map doesn’t like helping during a war.”

“I guess. I haven’t been in here as much since the first of my friends passed. We kept up, trying to fix friendship problems, but once the war started, there were just too many. Most of my friends were gone by the time I discovered the Tree of Harmony would let me talk to them. Even being in the Castle reminds me of them. I try to stay out there-” she pointed at the door. “-doing things. Diplomacy, teaching, and so on. It’s easier than sitting here.” She let her head fall against her throne, rubbing her mane against the familiar surface. “Fifty-five years and I’m still getting used to this whole ‘Princess of Friendship’ thing. I haven’t wanted to be Princess of Friendship for...for a while now...”

“We’ve all had a rough ride, Princess. Some rougher than others. There are wars and there are wars. I’ve watched too many people die lately to think that I’m ever going to be a ‘normal’ pony again,” I said, casually stretching my neck out to one side so I could see the other side of a small mountain. “You want to be a ‘normal’ pony, you have to be willing to let other people decide your fate. Are you willing to do that, Miss Twilight Sparkle?”

The Princess slowly shook her head.

“I thought not. Still, for all the hard times you’ve been through, Mayfly was right about one thing.”

“What would that be, Detective?”

“You do whine a fair bit.”

Twilight’s eyes lit up with indignation, but when she saw my smile, she relaxed a little. “I...grrr...you could learn some diplomacy one day, Detective. Still, I know you're right. I’ve spent most of my time the last few years trying to keep myself busy so...so…”

“So you don’t have to think about how much it hurts?” Swift supplied, hugging herself with her wings.

“Yes. Yes, that’s really it. It was so easy to keep going, keep moving, keep working. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna were busy. The Crusades hurt us all. Afterwards, there were a million brush fires that needed putting out. I really miss those all-night study sessions where I’d drink coffee until my brain shut off, then wake up with little Mayfly sitting on my shoulders, gnawing on my horn to be fed. If you can believe it, she used to be cute…”

Taxi snickered under her breath. “Please tell me you have some baby albums. I have got to see those.”

“Oooh, plenty. I’ll be sure to show them to you at some point. She was adorable!” Twilight flicked her eyes in my direction. “Still, to the problem at hoof. We need a building or maybe a geographical formation big enough to contain a spell miles wide. Do you perchance know of anything like that in the city?”

“Oh, if only it were just a matter of pointing out one or two landmarks. Frankly, we’re spoiled for choice,” I replied. Twilight gave me an uncertain look, and I elaborated, “Alright, there’s Skytown.” The map zoomed in, revealing the network of buildings and attendant cloud-structures dangling above one end of the city. “That’s a massive collection of clouds which are brought in, prefabricated, from the factories in Downtown. You want to hide a giant spell, you could write it into the magics keeping the clouds stable, right?”

Twilight nodded. “I can think of several ways to do that, actually.”

“All that requires is somepony somewhere in the distribution chain. Next, we’ve got about thirty blocks of just pure industrial buildings, plus underground tunnels which were used during the war. Most have been abandoned since then.” The map blurred for a second, revealing a gigantic spread of lines and interconnected maintenance systems beneath the city. “I don’t even want to think about what could be going on down there.”

“Sir? What about the sewers?” Swift asked. The map seemed to sink, revealing the network of tunnels running underneath Detrot. “I mean, the Aroyos control most of them, but...according to the map Tourniquet put in my head, they don’t have much above the Bay. Lots of big, empty spaces, cisterns, and places you could hide almost anything—”

“Wait wait wait! Come on!” Taxi pushed herself up, standing on the throne. “Hardy...what is the first rule of avoiding surveillance?”

“The first rule? Don’t be doing anything worth being surveilled.”

“Exactly. What is the fifth rule? You remember Professor Glimpse’s class on undercover work back at the Academy?”

“I was always in to be a homicide detective. Sneaking around and making friends with drug dealers was more your kind of thing.”

My driver rolled her eyes. “Rule five of avoiding surveillance: Be worth ignoring.”

I stared blankly at my driver for a second, then shook my head. “Look, Sweets...I got transformed into about nine different things on a ride in a stinky train, crossed a few dimensions, had a Princess screw about with my personal timescale so I could have a nap, and saw my best friend mid-coitus with a giant insect. You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m kinda stupid today.”

“Hardy...whoever built this spell made for damn sure they could hide it, but what if they didn’t need to hide it? What if they could make it so everyone was grateful it was there and so nopony ever examined it more deeply?”

It took a lot longer than I like to think it normally would have for me to get my head around what she was saying. I was pretty tired, despite getting some sleep, and my faculties weren’t all operating at maximum capacity. Still, I did finally get there.

‘A net as big as the ocean.’

“I...oh Celestia, I am an idiot,” I groaned, slapping my hoof against my forehead. “Really? How did I miss that?”

Limerence and Swift were both on their hooves, and I could see the realization in their eyes.

Twilight’s wings popped open, and she hopped into a standing position. “What? What is it? Detective, please tell me!”

I bucked the table with one back leg and growled, “Show us the damn Shield!”

Looking back, I suppose one might wonder why it took me so long to come to that particular conclusion. A thing to understand is that the Shield had been there since before I was born. It was just about the most benevolent thing in my life.

The Shield protects. The Shield is safety. I learned that on my father’s knee, and he learned it on his father’s.

While it might not have been enough to keep the true weight of the dragon armies from our doorstep, it’d kept everyone in my life safe since I was a glimmer in my mother’s eye. The Wilds were lethal, and the Shield kept all the monsters that normally lurk in children’s nightmares at bay; hydras, unregistered dragons, rogue beasts, manticores, parasprites and a hundred other monstrosities that a pony can only hope they never meet lived outside the Shield.

Everypony in Detrot passed at least a couple pylons every week. It was almost impossible not to. They were everywhere, great black stone monoliths keeping us all from dying to the next hungry beast to come along. If you lived in Detrot, you lived under the shadow of the Shield.

The map swung into a vertical position a mile or two above the city, and all the buildings vanished, leaving only a collection of ugly black bricks spread seemingly at random across the landscape. The topographical scale indicated they were all at very precisely the same depth, even going so far as to extend some distance underground.

“The Shield, Detective? Surely not—” Twilight began, but I cut her off.

“Giant magical device, enormous range, spread across the entire city, acres of area to write a spell inside each one, and powerful enough to shove an alicorn out,” I said, poking at the image.

“Yes, but I monitored the construction of several Shield Pylons! The Shield Corporation has annual security checks!” she exclaimed.

“And who was responsible for those security checks? Who arranged the inspections?”

“Well, in the past it was city officials, but more recently it was Agent Shadow Co—...oh horseapples...”

“Yeah, we’re going to just assume your group is as compromised as every other we’ve dealt with lately. So there’s the question, then. What do we actually know about the Shield? Princess, you’ve got some information for us?”

Twilight bit her lower lip. “I have an awful lot of information on the Shield Pylons, but...but they’re never supposed to turn off. Nothing in my catalogue suggests any of the magics you said they’ve used. Their spells are passive deflection, scanning, and detection magics. Yes, they might collectively keep alicorns and various other species out, but that suggests a level of complexity an order of magnitude beyond their original purpose. Nothing in them that could teleport a city to the moon...”

Limerence, who had been silently studying the map, suddenly leaped to his hooves. “Wait...wait...no, that cannot possibly be right...” he murmured.

All eyes turned in his direction.

“Lim?” Taxi prompted, leaning sideways a little so she could see the table from his angle. “What? What is it?”

He took a stumbling step back, bumping his rear against the back of his throne. “I think I am seeing something and it is madness, but...I am seeing it all the same. Impossible...”

“Limerence, you have ten seconds to make yourself completely clear, or I have the Princess of Friendship here set fire to your tail,” I said, hotly.

“Eh...apologies. Mayhap I can get the map to show us a more ‘top down’ image than this one,” he replied. The topography sank into a flat plane, leaving only the pylons themselves. “Now, then...does this look familiar, Detective?”

I studied the pattern on the table. It was a widespread, spiraling arrangement that somehow reminded me of...an eye.

I felt all the blood rush out of my face and staggered off the throne. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Taxi was staring at the shape on the table. “That’s the...uh...I…oh crap.”

“Lim...please tell me that’s not that crazy spell system that Astral Skylark was using to control Tourniquet?” I growled.

“Do believe that I would tell you that if I could, Detective. That is the shape. That is the spell system she used.”

Twilight, who was giving us all confused looks, tossed her hooves in the air. “Detective, what did I miss?! I hate missing things!”

Slowly, I gathered my thoughts. The glaring eye stared back at me from the table, and now that I’d seen it, I couldn’t seem to push the feeling that it was actually seeing me out of my head.

“Astral Skylark used a...strange wiring system in the control room for Supermax to short-circuit the construct and take control from her. It...incorporated pieces of ponies that she’d used in her rituals. Pegasus wings. Hooves. Horns. I didn’t get much chance to examine it, but...” I lowered my chin onto the edge of the table and sighed with resignation. “This is it, right here. This shape.”

Twilight’s lightning-fast mind must have reached the same conclusion before I finished speaking, because her muzzle fell open and she stammered, “Are...are you saying that the...the entire city of Detrot is one giant spell?!”

It was a semi-collective decision to break for tea.

Tea is good. Tea with rum in is even better. Tea that’s mostly rum and doesn’t actually contain any tea is best.

We’d vacated to the library once more, and Twilight vanished behind a stack of books taller than my head that grew by the minute as more books flew off the shelves and added themselves to the pile. I wasn’t sure how many of them she was reading or if she was just building a book fort to keep the implications of our little discovery at bay for a bit longer.

Meanwhile, Swift and I sat in front of the fireplace, back to back, watching the ever-burning flame that never seemed to consume the logs it was attached to. Taxi had grabbed Mayfly once she returned from her cake banditry and dragged her into some private corner; now and then I’d hear a little whimper or groan from one or the other of them, but I was trying very hard not to think about it.

That left Limerence pacing around beside us. He was muttering and mumbling, stopping now and then to polish his immaculate glasses or brush something off his stainless vest. For how much we’d been through, I still couldn’t very well separate his ‘thinking’ face from his ‘psychotic episode’ face. The two were pretty similar.

“Lim, I know stuff is bad, but...could you sit down?” Swift asked, finally, reaching out to block his path with one long wing.

“Is sitting down likely to improve the fact that there is an intelligence out there who thinks on a scale previously unknown to all of equine kind? One both malevolent and capable of manipulating the entire shape of events in an entire country across decades?”

“I dunno, but it certainly can’t help to have tired hooves, too. Come on. Have some tea.”

“You’ll excuse me if I’ve already had my fill of ‘tea’ for the day after the black lotus,” he said shortly. “I vomited five different colors for nine consecutive minutes. Right now, I am focused on exactly how our situation might have come about without...without somepony noticing!”

Twilight’s voice came from behind her book fort. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

“Actually, that’s not hard to fathom, Mister Limerence,” she said. A moment later, she appeared beside Swift and me in a flash of light with a stack of folders clutched in her levitation field. “The Shield Corporation is very tight with their security measures. If the dragons got access to the full specifications of the pylons, they might be able to find a countermeasure. Still, I have found something interesting, and it might give you some direction once you get back to Detrot!”

“I can’t convince you to send a legion of changelings with me, can I?” I asked.

“I’m afraid the Shield is still keeping them out. However, I did find some information on Umbra, Animus, and Armature! Lookie!” She slapped down the papers and spread them out on the carpet.

“Are these...genealogies?” Swift asked, pulling herself to her hooves. I sighed and got up, suddenly missing the warmth of her pressed against my back.

“Yep! Umbra, Animus, and Armature were founded by a very old Equestrian family who went by those three names!” Twilight replied, pointing to a spot on a large family tree whose branches seemed to enfold themselves into a circle, meeting at the top. “They date back more than a thousand years, although they vanished during the Lunar Fall. The last generation all but appeared nearly a hundred and twenty years ago, in Detrot, with a large number of old deeds and a huge surplus of gemstones. They were two brothers and a sister.”

“What do we know about them?” I asked.

“Almost nothing!” she answered with a squee of excitement. “They were rich, secretive, and impossible to gather intel on. My favorite kind of puzzle!”

“So...what have you got? Or should I just go back to my ‘tea’?” I grumbled, lifting my cup of rum from the carpet with both hooves and clutching it against my chest. It was the best rum I’d had in awhile. Twilight’s booze cabinet probably cost more than my annual salary.

“They helped found the Shield Corporation!” she exclaimed. “They didn’t control it, but they helped finance the first pylon prototype in the area that is now called ‘Uptown’. Even better...I’ve got a pair of birth certificates here for two brothers, born one year apart, in the city of Detrot. The names on the certificates are obvious fakes. After these two brothers were born, Umbra, Animus, and Armature only worked through intermediaries! Nopony saw the three original family members in court or anywhere else. Surely they are dead by now, but I have no death certificates. Detective, these ponies built a legal empire that spans your entire region, and there’s almost no usable information on them! I don’t even have an address outside of their main office!”

“And...this is still not explaining why you sound so happy about that.”

“Because! Because, because, because...I never met a group of ponies who hide better than I do!” she enthused, giving an excited flap that almost blew my hat off. “A thousand years they were gone from the public eye, and yet they just...appear with a bunch of money and property and they’re accepted into society, right under the noses of every major intelligence organization in the country! They even managed to help build your city, control regional trade, and assist in the development of most of your major criminal enterprises! If my information is right, every single mayor of Detrot was in their pocket!”

I took another sip from my cup, waiting patiently for a point to emerge. Swift took the cue and began preening her wings, whilst Limerence plucked his glasses off and cleaned them for the twentieth time in as many minutes. Somewhere, a voice I’m pretty sure was my driver called out, “Oh, do that thing with your...oooh, skiiies!”

Finally, Twilight blew a breath through her nose. “Okay, so it’s mostly just incredibly creepy, but isn’t it a place to start?”

I shook my head. “I’m kind of a results-oriented pony, and right now, the results I need are things like getting us into one of those pylons, or into Uptown, or having the names of these two brothers who were born in Detrot, if we think they’re the current controllers of the law firm. Those are all places to start.” I prodded the files with my toe. “This is vaguely interesting, but I don’t see how it helps us. I’m going back to Detrot soon. I need resources and maybe some clues. The city is a giant spell. A spell that managed to carry off Canterlot. Start there.”

Twilight rubbed her chin against the back of her hoof, thinking. “Well, the scale of the spell is certainly impressive. Without some testing and maybe building a small scale model, I can’t tell you what the spell actually does, though. Just looking at it suggests a whole new field of arcane study!” At my flat look, she exhaled and rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. I did...maybe find something that could be useful when I was looking over the list of properties they hold...”

I sat up and put my booze aside. “And now you have my interest.”

“There’s just one property that’s weird. The rest are resource rich lands, businesses transferred from old Canterlot holding companies, or strategic purchases. The only one that was really odd was this.” She plucked a black and white printed copy of a deed out of her pile and passed it to me.

I couldn’t decipher the legal scrawl that covered the page, but Limerence was quick on the draw.

“A...a mine?” he murmured. “An old gem mine and the attendant outbuildings?”

“Yes. A small cabin and the mine itself. Everything else made sense, but this mine is in an area that we know is empty according to modern surveying techniques. It’s also out in the area you call the Wilds.”

“Why did this stand out?” I asked, glancing up from the paper.

“Because...look at this.” She picked up a flat map of Detrot and held it out. The Shield’s protective matrix was all laid out in that now-familiar pattern of a lidless eye, but out on the edge a single lonely dot sat away from the others, circled in red marker. “That cabin has its own pylon less than a kilometer away. It’s in the middle of nowhere and powered by generators rather than unicorn amplification...and it’s not protecting anything else.”

I took the map from her and examined it for a moment. “That is odd enough to be worth taking a look at.” Folding up the paper, I slipped it into my pocket. My hoof bumped against a little box, and I pulled out Cereus’s magical walkie-talkie. “Speaking of odd things, there are a couple of field agents of Princess Luna’s who might like to hear that they’ve still got jobs. You seen one of these before?”

She blinked, then flipped the walkie-talkie over and peered at the label. As recognition began to dawn, she all but tossed it away from herself. I barely caught it before it hit the wall.

“For the love of...you’ve had a Hyper-Comm Mark One on you this entire time?!” she demanded. “We...We never tested those for trans-void excursive events. Tell me you didn’t hop dimensions with that thing in your pocket!”

“Oh...uh…” I picked up the communication device and turned it around a couple of times. “I mean, I would really like to tell you that, but I did...em...several times. Is that bad?”

Twilight gradually drooped like a dying fern until her horn was resting on the carpet and her face was buried in her crossed hooves. “Why...are...you...still...alive?”

“I ask myself that exact question every day,” I replied, then jiggled the walkie-talkie. The sound-box whistled, then let off a screeching sound that made her jump. “Still seems to work, though.” Raising my voice for the mic, I said, “This is Egg-Head to The Master of Hay Fries. Master of Hay Fries, come in.”

Twilight mouthed ‘Master of Hay Fries’ at me with a questioning expression, and I grinned.

After a second, Cereus’ voice came down the pipeline. He sounded exhausted and maybe a bit like he’d been crying.

“M-Master of Hay Fries, here. Is that you, Detective?”

“Yeah, it is. Where’s Night Bloom?” I asked.

“She’s...she’s locked herself in Survey again,” he moaned, stomping his hooves in agitation. “She’s been having nightmares every single night, and I can’t help her even with hugs or reading her stories, and we’re almost out of cheese doodles and pickles and I don’t know what to do and everything is awful! Please tell me you found some way to fix all of this so I can go turn myself in and go to jail and never do field work ever again, ever?!”

“Well, yes and no. I have somepony here who you might want to talk to.”

“There’s nopony I want to talk to except the Princesses!”

“Funny you should say that,” I replied. Twilight gave me a chicken-in-the-headlights look as I held out the walkie-talkie, then gingerly picked up the device and pressed it to her muzzle.

“Mister Cereus,” she began, “This is codename ‘Evening And Morning’, confirmation code Phoenix, Unity, Radio, Phoenix, Lunar, Exodus...Shadow, Mask, Accelerate, Radio, Torchlight. Do you copy?”

Cereus must have dropped the walkie-talkie then, because I heard it skittering across a floor. When he came back on, it was in a voice only a little louder than a whispering mouse.

“P-p-princess Twilight? Is it really you?”

“It’s me. Can you give me a quick debrief on what’s been going on in Detrot?”

We both leaned away from the speaker as there was an explosion of feedback followed by a blubbering stallion trying desperately to explain how the entire world had managed to go so wrong.

Act 3 Chapter 19 : Dying To Live

“There’s always a bigger fish.”

In the realms of magic, that is the single, indisputable fact upon which all scholars may agree. There exist no inscrutable, perfect, all powerful magics which can never be beaten, broken, or weakened to a point of impotence. Even the almighty Alicorns may find themselves outmatched, either by dint of not being able to use their full power lest they wreck the surface of the planet or by being isolated from their sources of energy.

The grandest would-be gods of every age might stand on their thrones and proclaim themselves eternal, but if there’s one thing an alicorn will tell you it’s that eternity is a very long time and fate takes a certain glee in teaching lessons about hubris. Take for instance the Yak Lord Hectar ‘Wing Claimer’ Gutbuster, who attempted to launch the sixth Yak offensive upon pony-lands prior to the disappearance of the Crystal Empire.

While he is now little more than an anecdote, history may record that he did once find and briefly possess the Fragarach blade, The Answerer, which could penetrate any armor, command the winds, and slay any foe with impunity. In more ideal circumstances, he might have even gone so far as to succeed in his conquest. What Lord Gutbuster failed to account for was just how bad an idea it is to underpay your kitchen staff. He succumbed to catastrophic (the scrolls record the ancient Yak word for ‘explosive’, but this may be exaggeration) bowel distress the day before his campaign was to begin after a meal of heavily aged cheese, beer, slightly over-ripe cabbage, and slightly under-cooked chickpeas.

What one should learn from his failure and death is that no matter what powers you wield, no matter what you believe about your towering capabilities, the world is very big and has many things in it. Humility can be learned by observing the mistakes of others or by becoming an object lesson.

-The Scholar

----

It took a direct order from Twilight to ‘calm down and breathe into a paper bag’ before Cereus was able to answer questions.

“Th-then we managed to f-find the Warehouse. Mrs. Shadow C-Courser was gone and the Canterlot office wouldn’t even talk to Agent Bloom! Even our back channels were closed! We couldn’t leave the armor unguarded, then the Detective told us it wasn’t even really the armor, and then Canterlot vanished and—”

“Agent...take another deep breath. I’m getting things taken care of,” Twilight said as confidently as she could.

Cereus sniffled a little. “Ma’am, I’m just an intern…”

“You’re an agent now. Period. You hear me, Agent Cereus?”

He didn’t reply for a long time, but when he did his voice was a little steadier. “Really, Ma’am?”

“I’ll make sure the paperwork is filed as soon as there’s a government to file it with. In the meantime...I need you to be strong.”

He swallowed, loudly, then replied, “I’ll be strong, Ma’am. For you and for Princess Luna.”

“Good. I’m going to send the Detective back to you soon, and I expect you to give him all available Detrot resources in whatever direction he sees fit.”

“I understand, Ma’am. Is there...is there anything I should do about Miss Bloom? I think she’s really in a bad way...”

Twilight rested the mic against her chest and gave me a questioning look. “Detective, Agent Night Bloom was already fairly unstable. Has she gotten worse?”

“Like a barrel of monkeys, wasps, and nitroglycerin.,” I answered. “If you could give me some sleeping talismans or something I could knock her out with for a few days, I’m sure Cereus would appreciate it. Let her wake up when this is all over.”

The Princess rolled her eyes, then lifted the walkie-talkie again. “Agent Cereus, I would like to be there right now, but I can’t, and so I’m going to give the Detective the Emblem of Harmony. He is my majordomo in the region. Is that clear?”

Cereus made a choked sound and dropped his communicator again.

“The Emblem of Harmony?” Swift asked as we waited for the newly minted agent to pick up the comm.

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Twilight replied, then went back to the walkie-talkie. “Agent? Are you there?”

“Oh my, I need to go to the bathroom...I mean...yes! Yes, Ma’am!”

“Good. Keep your chin up. We’ll get Canterlot back.”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

“Dismissed.” Releasing the talk button, Twilight tucked the walkie-talkie under one wing. “If you don’t mind, Detective, I’ll be keeping this. I need some means of communicating with you and I’d rather not test our collective luck by sending it back through the Bull.”

I shrugged and nodded. “Go ahead. Tourniquet is slowly taking over the telephone network, so we should have some phones working again pretty soon.”

“Arrrgh! Stop reminding me of that!” she snapped, hopping out of her throne and trotting in a small circle around it. “I don’t even want to think about that!”

Swift stuck her chest out, proudly displaying the crescent moon on her breast. “Well, she still has to listen to me, Ma’am. I’m the Warden, after all.”

Twilight poked me in the chest with one primary feather.

“Officer Swift, you’re following this maniac around! If he didn’t have such a good track record for defying the odds to date, I would count his predictable future lifespan in hours.” Her expression darkened, and she dropped onto her belly. “And...and now I’m going to give him the keys to the country. What does that say about me?” she muttered, twirling her hoof in a circle beside her temple. “Let's go collect your friend and my bodyguard. It sounds like they’re mostly just basking now. If Miss Swift and Mister Limerence would like to go collect their weapons and make their goodbyes, we’ll have you all on your way back quick as we can.”

Taxi and Mayfly were beyond basking and well into the realm of heavy-duty snuggling by the time we found them. They’d picked one of the reading alcoves and dragged in most of the sitting pillows from the surrounding area.

Mayfly had one thin wing draped over Taxi, who was snoring like a congested bear as we approached. Twilight cleared her throat, and the changeling queen gave her a lazy smile. Her eyes were dreamy, and she looked minutes from a food coma.

“May? Could you wake your...ahem...your dinner and tell her that she must be going, soon?” Twilight asked.

“Oh, she’s way more than dinner, Ma’am. I could have her for breakfast, lunch, and a midnight snack! I’ve never met a pony who loved so intensely,” May enthused. “Maybe with the exception of Princess Cadence, but she said she’d make a set of lingerie out of me if I impersonated Shining Armor again. I’m still not sure if that might have been worth it or not...”

Twilight put her hooves over her ears and shut her eyes. “Yes, very good, I’m certain that’s something I need to know! Please get another shower and meet us downstairs!”

Her horn lit up, and I felt the tingle, then the rush of teleportation.

When I rematerialized, I choked on the breath I’d been holding, staggering against the wall. “Sweet Celestia’s sun-burnt backside, warn me before you do that!”

Twilight gave me a wide-eyed look, and I finally clocked the words I’d just said.

“Right...yes, Princess Celestia’s backside is very nice, I’m sure,” I grunted, yanking at my coat collar. “Where are we?”

The chamber was windowless, door-less, and only a little larger than a closet. A single candle lit the space, rather than the electric and magic lights that seemed otherwise ubiquitous in the Castle of Friendship. The walls were the same crystal as everything else, but something about them made the fur on my neck tingle. I had a feeling it might be a bad idea to touch them.

Piles upon piles of boxes and larger items were shoved in all four corners. Most of the room’s contents were variations on the theme of trinkets, doodads, and geegaws. There was aa strange red amulet with an alicorn emblazoned on it, what looked like a mirror covered by a sheet, and a heavily jeweled box that might have been one of Ruby’s works, among other things. It was this last that Twilight levitated out of its place by the wall and set down in front of me.

“This is my...private collection,” Twilight said, tapping the top of the box. It let out a click, and the lock snapped open. “We’re about twenty meters underground right now, inside one of the Castle’s distal roots. This is mostly where I keep anything that’s too troublesome or valuable to keep anywhere else. The Canterlot Royal Vaults are technically more secure, but...nopony knows most of this stuff exists.”

“Why didn’t you stick the Armor of Nightmare Moon in here?” I asked. “Seems safe enough.”

“Hiding the armor in anonymity would have proven very difficult, since the griffons already had the shoes. That, and...to be honest, I don’t want to know how the Armor of the Nightmare would react with some of the things in this room,” she replied, lifting the lock free and setting it to one side. “This object, on the other hoof, is not...troublesome or valuable in the general sense, except to the pony who carries it.”

Lifting the box, Twilight let the top fall open. Inside, nestled in a couple of silk kerchiefs, was a simple glass medallion with what looked like a short cutting from a strange blue plant suspended inside of it. It was about the size of my hoof, with a loop of silver chain so it could be hung around a pony’s neck.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. “This is the ‘Emblem of Harmony’?”

Twilight sighed and lifted the chain, letting the medallion dangle in front of me. “There’s a story there, if you’d like to hear it. It might affect whether or not you take this from me. It’s help, but...maybe not the kind you want.”

“I don’t see as it can hurt. I’d like to know what you’re about to saddle me with.”

Gathering the chain up, she examined it closely, then shook her head. “You should be used to it by now, Detective. You get to carry a little piece of history with you. Secret history. Sad history.”

I glanced at a few of the other items in the tiny room; somepony had jammed a rusty cannon in the corner, bits of glitter and confetti still stuck to its sides. “What else is new? Equestria’s dirty laundry couldn’t stay hidden forever, and I suspect I’m only scratching the surface.”

“Hmmm...if any of what I’ve discovered in the last sixty years is true, then that’s almost certainly true. The Tree of Harmony is a symbol of harmony in Equestria. It’s an actual tree, a beautiful crystal tree with six gems inside that are the Elements of Harmony. I know...almost nothing about it or its powers. Those powers came when my friends and me called on them. They locked away Discord, cleansed Princess Luna, and...other things. I don’t know who made the tree, though it was definitely made. It’s older than Equestria and unspeakably powerful, but...not invincible.”

“The war weakened the tree so severely that Princess Celestia was worried it might die altogether,” Twilight explained. “That weakness and the help of the deer-lords of the Everfree was the only reason we were able to move it to the Crystal Caverns under Canterlot. There were...consequences...for the deer-lords. Their ancestral home in the Everfree forest was destroyed by a magical plague of plants made of chaos magic. It took me a full decade to clear that magic once the war was over...and their only request once it was done was that ponykind leave them alone.”

“Hmmmph...seems kinda cold,” I said. “Weren’t they allies in the war?”

“It was our war, not theirs...but I’ve done my best the last thirty years to see their requests obeyed. In any case, at the same time the tree was moved, Princess Celestia had cuttings taken in the hope that we might somehow...re-grow the tree sometime in the future, should it die before the war’s end.”

Levitating the medallion over my head, she spread the chain open for me to stick my neck through.

“And...this is one of those cuttings?” I asked, warily.

She nodded

“It’s a symbol of the alicorn rulers. A symbol of Princess Celestia, and Princess Luna, and...and of me. The triumvirate. Sun, moon, and twilight. The pony who carries one of these carries the will of Harmony.”

“And you think I’m the pony to give that thing to?” I laughed, pushing the medallion away with my toe. “Lady, have you met me? I am chaos incarnate.”

Twilight rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Detective, I know chaos incarnate on a very intimate basis. You are much less friendly. That said, I like you...and the Crusader likes you. That means, whatever happens, you are looking to make Equestria a better place. This is a symbol of that. It’ll give you basic authority over any surviving military forces we have and anypony who still recognizes the power of the crown. It also conveys certain...protections, though they won’t be much use to you right now.”

“Such as?”

She let a tiny giggle escape, quickly covering it with a cough.

“Well, if you can get the Shield shut off entirely...you can call down alicorns on your foes.”

I backed away from the medallion. “This is a Princess pager?”

“Yep! Just break it to activate.”

Reaching up, I gingerly took the medallion from her and looped the chain around my neck. It dangled alongside my badge, and I could feel a gentle warmth radiating from it, like holding an ember close to your skin. It was beautiful, but a tad feminine for my taste. I couldn’t wait to put my armor back on so I could hide the damn thing.

“Are there any side effects to having this on me? Radiation sickness? Rectal bleeding? Letting you spy on me in the bathroom? Anything like that?”

Twilight’s nose wrinkled in a manner that looked strangely fetching. “Um...no? Why would there be?”

“Call it healthy paranoia. Crank up your horn, and let’s get back.”

We reappeared, side-by-side, in the foyer of the Castle of Friendship.

Mayfly and Taxi were standing at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the changeling on the bottom step and my driver just below her, exchanging a kiss that probably deserved an award-winning novella worth of build-up. Considering the changeling still had fangs, Taxi was doing some very dextrous tongue-work around them.

Meanwhile, Limerence and Minerva were exchanging a dignified hoof-shake in an attempt to cover up the passage of a slip of paper. Swift was beside the door, wiggling into her weapons harness, heaving the sack with the Hailstorm in it up onto her back. She was doing her best to ignore our librarian and driver.

I pulled my anti-magic armor off of a peg on the wall and shook my coat off.

“Would you like some assistance, Detective?” the Princess asked, forcing her eyes away from Taxi and the changeling.

I sat and held my forelegs up so she could slip the armor around my body.

“When you get back to Detrot, go and get the Hyper-Comm Mark One from Agent Cereus, first thing. I want some way of keeping track of you,” she replied, curtly.

“Good luck, Ma’am,” Swift commented. “Chief Jade couldn’t keep track of him, and she’s way scarier than you are.”

Twilight glowered at her, and Swift gave the Princess a fang-y grin.

“Regardless, it would be nice to have a means of speaking to my only resources in the region that I know haven’t been compromised. So could you please make a priority out of going to see my agents?” the Princess asked.

“I’ll do my best,” I replied, zipping up my armor. “I have some ponies who’re expecting my company sooner, rather than later: the Ancestors of the Aroyos, a particularly pushy disc jockey who lives in my car radio, and the Chief of Police. I’ve got a busy couple of days ahead of me.”

Princess Twilight gave me a poke in the chest just over where the Emblem lay. “And now you have a pushy alicorn. Don’t forget which of those can turn you into a slug if she feels neglected.”

“Eh...I’ll remind him,” Taxi purred from beside me, resting her head on my shoulder. Mayfly slid up on my other side, sandwiching me between the two extremely dangerous mares. My heart skipped more than enough beats to make me feel lightheaded.

“Of course, the Detective would never disrespect a Princess, would he?” May growled, leaning down so we were on the same eye level.

I picked up the Emblem of Harmony’s chain and wiggled the medallion in her face. “Respect the twig, sweetheart.”

Her slitted blue eyes crossed so she could see the medallion, and she sat straight back on her flank, her armor jangling like a bucket full of silverware tossed down some stairs.

“Ma’am...please, please, tell me he somehow stole that from you so I can break all of his bones!”

Twilight exhaled and helped her guard back to her hooves, giving her friend a light pat on the shoulder. “No, Mayfly. I gave it to him. The Detective has agreed to be my agent in Detrot.”

“Are we certain we can trust him?” she hissed.

The alicorn stopped for a moment, then smirked, flicking her floating purple mane back over one shoulder. “Yes. He hates that I am going to say this, but I do trust him.”

I had to resist an urge to spit on the carpet. “Yeah, you’re right, I hate that. I don’t need to go to my death with a disappointed Princess hanging over my head if we somehow screw the pooch here.”

Mayfly’s lips curled into a devilish smile. “Your suffering is as delicious as your driver’s love. Should you fail and survive, I will make a special effort to sample it more...intimately...before the end. If you think the disappointment of my lady weighs heavily, I recommend you keep in mind that there are others of us who are less...forgiving.”

With that, she swung about and marched down the spiral stairs into her hive. Twilight and I watched her go as Taxi nuzzled against my side, fanning her own nethers with her tail.

“Mmmph...she knows just what to say to get me going,” my driver murmured.

“Slip Stitch is a better kisser, though,” I commented and immediately ducked as her hoof almost took off my head.

“We are never talking about that!” she barked, and I grinned, bumping her back with my hip as I turned to Limerence and Minerva. The changeling librarian was nuzzling Lim’s hoof as he did his best not to blush.

“We ready to go?” I asked, giving them a pointed look. Lim gently extracted his hoof from hers and stepped back, leaving the little changeling looking a bit crestfallen.

“Yes, Detective. I am ready. I think I may have reason to study a little more history in the future.” He gave Minerva a quick wink, and she brightened, straightening her crooked glasses on her muzzle. “Shall we?”

“Well, unless Princess Twilight wants to try hopping back to Detrot on the Bull, I don’t see why not,” I said.

“That’s...an experiment I’m afraid I can’t run,” the Princess replied, unhappily. I must have looked confused, because she quickly elaborated. “I don’t want to find out I can’t make a landing in Detrot from another dimension, but I’ll let Agent Cereus know to get in touch with you as soon as you leave. The Emblem will protect you from the general effects of my memory spell, so do keep it on you.”

In silence, Taxi, Swift, Limerence, Twilight, and I trekked back to the armored limo-tank and piled into the back. Orb appeared, flowing shadow-like into the driver’s seat. He turned over the gigantic engine, and we set off across the moonscape in the direction of the Ponyville train station.

There were so many things I wanted to know or wanted to say to the Princess of Friendship, but something told me I’d be seeing her again before the end, if only to drag my broken body to whatever afterlife might be in store for ponies like me.

We’d spent the better part of a day in the remnants of Ponyville with a mare who, by all rights, should have been the one handling this disaster. She was a hero of the nation, a powerful magic user, and certainly better equipped to deal with arcane problems of indeterminate origin. That being understood, she probably wasn’t equipped to handle Detrot.

It had been a little over two months since that rainy morning outside the Highstep Hotel, and the shape of our situation was finally resolving into something I could make some sense of. My city was a giant spell-work in a game whose rules were laid out before I was born and whose caster was responsible for the suffering of untold thousands.

There were still plenty of questions I needed answers to, mind you.

What if the years of sleepless nights and nightmares were just my talent telling me something was wrong in the world and I’d somehow adapted to it? What if the endless parade of monsters and freaks who haunted my career as a homicide detective were really just a side-effect of the puppet-masters setting up my city to fall into fire and violence? What if I’d been dancing to their tune, cleaning up the corpses and never really rooting out the source of the evil?

So lost was I in all these dark thoughts that I barely registered the train station coming into sight. It wasn’t until we jerked to a halt and the back door began to swing down that I finally shook myself and opened my eyes to find Twilight studying me from the other side of the car.

I cocked my head, and she quickly looked away.

“You’ve got a question. This might be your last chance to ask it, so now is the time,” I said.

Twilight swallowed and leaned back in her plush seat, one hoof nervously stroking the padded legrest. “It’s...it’s not really a question, as such. More of a concern. I should have asked before we left the Castle, but...do you have a plan once you get back to Detrot?”

I thought for a moment, then shrugged. “A plan? No. A course of action? Maybe. I’m going to see if I can get into one of the Shield Pylons or into Uptown. If I can get into Uptown, I might be able to get to the P.A.C.T. headquarters, the office of Umbra, Animas, and Armature, or maybe the Shield Corporation. Possibly even the mayor’s office. Somepony has to have a means of getting the Shield shut off. Once that’s done, we see if we can reverse the spell that sent Canterlot to the Moon. Then I call down the fury of the skies on whoever did all of this.”

Digging the copy of the deed she’d given me to the U.A.A.’s gem-mine out of my pocket, I flicked it open. “I think this Pylon you pointed out near the mine is a particularly interesting target. You mentioned this one is out of the way and runs off generators? It’s in a dangerous area and it’s possible nopony has gotten out that far to refuel it. It might not be connected to the rest of the grid...and it might not be locked down.”

“That’s an awful lot of ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’...”

“You’ve been on this boat before, Princess. Do you really think anypony has guarantees for you?”

She looked thoughtful, then said, “You’ve made some powerful friends since this all started. Don’t forget to call on them in your times of need.”

“You’ve got some powerful friends,” I murmured. “Friends who will stand beside you when you need them. I think it might be time to trust somepony again.”

Twilight’s eyes slid shut, and she tugged at her forelock with a bit of magic, pulling it over her eyes. “You’re talking about the thrones, aren’t you?”

I held up my hooves. “Far be it from me to advise a Princess, but it sounds like this self-imposed loneliness crap isn’t going to be a long term solution. That pony who liked to pass out pictures of you...what was her name? Pink-something?”

“Pinkie Pie?”

“Right. Her. She shared those pictures because she wanted to share your friendship with others. You get the chance one day soon, I’d go ask her what she wants you to do.”

“She’d...probably tell me to giggle at the ghosties…” Twilight mumbled.

“Hmmm?”

Her back stiffened, and she sat a bit higher in her seat. “Never mind. You’re right. If we’re all alive a month from now and Canterlot stands, I’ll...I’ll do that. I promise.”

I got to my hooves. “I’ll remember you said that, Your Highness.”

Swift picked up the sack with her weapon, and Taxi groaned as she pulled herself off the extremely comfortable seats. Limerence took his time getting up, peering out at the train station with poorly disguised trepidation. The first hint of the Bull’s smell rolled in, and I tried not to retch too visibly at the thought of what was to come.

“Sir, do we really have to do this?” my partner asked as she stared out at the platform which shielded the great train itself from view.

“It’s this or a several week run and the distinct possibility that we get back to find the city gone.”

“I could turn off your noses for the next several hours, if that would help,” Twilight offered.

“Yes, please!” my partner gasped eagerly.

Twilight gave her horn a wave, and a tickle seemed to twitch at the end of my muzzle, then faded. I gave my nose a shake, and Taxi let out a loud sneeze, then poked at her nostrils with the end of her toe. It was a very odd sensation, not smelling anything whatsoever, but considering what we were about to be doing, it was a pleasant relief.

“Princess Twilight,” Limerence murmured, “I would appreciate it if you could point me to where you learned that spell. Considering some of my recent experiences, it would come in most handy.”

“Oh! It’s in Mister Malthusian’s Big Book of Spells To Survive A Minor Apocalypse. I could call back to the Castle for a copy—”

“Eh, no...that won’t be necessary, I don’t believe. I have a library of my own I can consult,” he chuckled, stepping out of the comfort of the limo-tank onto the dusty ground.

As I followed him out, I felt a brush of magic on my shoulder and turned to see Twilight looking down at me.

“Detective...” she began, but I stopped her with a toss of my mane.

“Princess, If you have a speech prepared, I’d appreciate it if you saved it for our triumphant return rather than this ignominious slink away from Canterlot with nothing but a piece of paper and a good night’s sleep.”

She crooked her lips on one side and leaned down, tapping me on the nose with her toe.

“Rude little pony. If you survive, I’m going to have Princess Luna flog the rude out of you. What I was going to say is ‘Good luck, and I hope you don’t die’.”

I touched the brim of my hat and grinned. “You too. Keep the home fires burning.”

Turning on my heel, I aimed myself at the train platform. I could feel Twilight’s eyes on my back as I loped through the little dunes, my three friends at my sides and a sense of renewed purpose in my loins.

Just leaving felt wrong somehow, but I knew I wasn’t going to get much else out of sticking around for a long goodbye. She’d given me what she could. Maybe she could have piled us with a few dozen magical trinkets or a whole heap of high-powered weapons, but what I’d really needed was a sense of direction. She’d given me that. It was a tiny thing, but it was worth all the gold in the world when weighed against what I’d showed up on her doorstep with.

The good feelings lasted until I rounded the corner and saw the steamy fog surrounding the Bull. Even with magically dulled senses, I couldn’t help but blanch at the sight of the beast.

“Are we reallygoing through this twice, Sir?” Swift asked.

“Maybe Lim can find a spell to wipe the next three hours from our memories.”

“Only if you want me to render you a vegetable, Detective. My magical prowess doesn’t even rate beside that of Princess Sparkle. If you have noisy neighbors or wish to sneak through a room whose floor is covered in potato chips and squeak toys, then I am very useful.”

“It might almost be worth it.”

The Bull was merrily tootling to itself as we mounted the platform. A large central eye that sat in the middle of the primary boiler was open and dancing back and forth to a tune being sung from somewhere deeper inside. The creature’s gaze centered on us after a few seconds, and several more eyes opened along the body, focusing on my party.

“Mephitica!” I shouted, cupping my hoof to my muzzle. “Can we approach?”

I counted to three, then turned around.

“Why wouldn’t you be able to?” Mephi asked as she strolled out of the dusty wastes from the way we’d just come. A camera dangled from her neck, and she was wearing a ridiculous yellow sunhat. “He’s friendly! Besides, you have tickets. I’ve adjusted our re-entry vector so it might be a little smoother this time. Or five times as rough. I’m not sure which end of the dial is which. Won’t know until we try!”

Swift whimpered, and Limerence cringed against Taxi’s side.

“Find anything interesting out there?” I asked, gesturing to her camera.

“Oh, yes! There used to be this fantastic little sweets shop just over there,” she replied, pointing at the dust bowl. “I always wondered what it would look like if it was displaced to the moon. I’m sad I can’t go see, but Cordy and I haven’t been able to pinpoint the Canterlot train station.”

Swift’s eyes went wide. “W-wait...you knew Canterlot was on the moon?”

“Well, there’s regolith everywhere, massive transposition of matter signatures, spatial dilation...how could it be anywhere else?”

My partner’s tail swished back and forth furiously as she let out a sound something like a chicken closed in a door. Before she could say anything that might get us left in the middle of Ponyville, I tugged her behind me.

“Meph, can we get going? We need to get back to Detrot. This little excursion has probably left anyone pursuing us very confused, and we need to use that while we can.”

“Oooh, yes! I’ve seen most of the things I wanted to see here! On to the next calamity, Detective!”

With a quick salute, she broke into a gallop, zipping between us as she leapt onto the Bull’s front grill, then scrambled aboard with all the dexterity of a monkey climbing a tree. Her filthy tail vanished over the top, and a moment later her voice echoed out of a speaker.

“This is the eleven A.M one stop only out of Ponyville! Mephitica will be your conductor for today! The stewardess is currently on break, so if you could please load your own bags, we’ll get under way. All aboard for the fine city of Detrot!”

The launch was only slightly less unpleasant than I’d been worried it might be, which is to say I was nearly strangled by a living spaghetti demon with my driver’s face, then had a short conversation with three copies of myself. It was an enlightening but altogether uncomfortable discussion since the other two would only agree that we were all idiots who should have ignored that phone call from Telly two months ago on the day this all began.

At last, reality began to settle, and I sagged against the wall of the Bull’s passenger car, clutching at the furry carpet for some sense of solidity. When you couldn’t actually smell the damn thing, it was pretty nice, kinda like a warm blanket.

Swift was straddling Limerence on the other side of the car, her hooves around his throat, but as she realized what she was doing she quickly released him and backed off, helping him to his hooves with a soft apology. He coughed, then touched the sides of his neck, looking for tender spots. My driver didn’t seem to be in the passenger car with us.

“Taxi?”

“Over here,” she said, stepping out of the front compartment. “Sorry, Mephitica came back and dragged me off to feed me explosive chickens. We got a little carried away. Thankfully they disappeared when we landed. Where are we?”

I turned to the window and pushed my eye against the ‘glass’, trying to see out. “Not a clue. It’s pretty bright out there. There’s gravity, but it feels a little light. Somewhere with three suns? Not sure. There’s something that looks like a giant...worm or something some ways off in the sand. Doesn’t seem interested in us, though.”

Mephitica poked her head out of the front compartment. “This is your conductor speaking! I’m afraid the drinks and food had to be jettisoned during our last transition due to spontaneous evolution, but the good news is the potato chip civilization seemed to be doing well! We’ll be making landing in two hours, six minutes, eight seconds! Sit tight ladies and gentlecolts!”

With that she disappeared back into the engine room, leaving the four of us to sit and contemplate. Since I’m lousy at contemplating for any length of time, I was soon pacing back and forth the length of the compartment. Limerence and Swift were taking turns tossing playing cards into an upturned bucket, and Taxi sat in silent meditation.

At last, I could take the silence no longer.

“Sweets?”

My driver didn’t move or even acknowledge that I’d said anything. She just breathed, slow in, slow out. Swift and Limerence both looked up but didn’t interfere. They both knew what was coming.

“We’ve got two hours,” I said, sitting down in front of her. “I just spent a solid day with the Princess of Friendship, and it’s left me with more questions than I had when I got here. I’m a bit grumpy, and I’ve finally got a question whose answer I know somepony does know.”

Her nose twitched, and she rolled her shoulders a little.

“We’re operating from a place of trust right now,” I continued, watching her carefully. Anypony else would have seen an impassive wall, but I’d known Sweet Shine long enough to see the signs of stress, most of them consistent with pretending to be under no stress whatsoever. It’s a great poker strategy, but lousy with friends.

“Our trust was a little tenuous after what you did to Astral Skylark, but it was still trust. Now we’re facing death again. If we stay and fight, I want to know what happened to Fox Glove and Skinner...but if not, then it’s up to you. You say the word, Sweet Shine...and I walk away.”

Her eyes snapped open.

“What?”

“You heard me. You say the word, and I will walk away from all of this. Screw Detrot. Screw the Princesses. Screw Canterlot. You’re the only pony who was there from day one.” I reached out and put my hooves on her shoulders. She made to back away, her eyes wide and frightened, but I held on, pulling her into my forelegs and clasping them behind her back.

“Juniper died. My dad died. Tome died,” I whispered into her ear. “If I am going to risk your life, I need to know what happened to Fox Glove, because I need to know if it will lead to another situation like the one with Skylark. I can’t go out there worried you’re going to sacrifice yourself for me. I don’t want to see that smile of a little filly ready to die again. So, if you don’t want to tell me, say the word. I will write down everything I know and leave a copy with Chief Jade, Stella, and the Aroyos. They can have my gun, badge, and the Emblem of Harmony, but I will not lose you out there on some stupid, suicidal insanity.”

Taxi’s legs tightened around my neck. “H-hardy…you...you can’t do that...”

I put a hoof on her face and turned her eyes to mine. “Watch me. We’ll get Mags and get back aboard this train and be gone where nopony can find us.”

It was a cruel thing to put on somepony else, and I suppose some part of her must have known this was all a bluff, but I could still see the war going on behind her eyes. If she’d called me on it, I’m still not certain what I would have done just then. I could tell she wanted desperately to drag me off into the Wilds or some other world where it could be just the two of us again, like it was when we were kids; two little ponies hiding from the world.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the two of us anymore, but Taxi needed hear that somepony, somewhere, trusted her to live. I suspected she could have died for me without feeling particularly bad about it, but living for me was harder, and by Celestia I needed her to live.

Lim and Swift were both watching in silence. My partner looked a little nervous, but Limerence had a knowing smirk on his face. I flicked my eyes towards the engine compartment, and the librarian gently tugged on Swift’s tail, then led her out.

Once we were alone, Taxi gave me a rough push that sent me sprawling onto my back. I made a loud ‘oof’ then a choked gasp as she stepped on my stomach hard enough to send the air rushing out of my lungs.

“Dammit, you’re not supposed to be able to pull my strings!” she snapped. An errant tear streaked down her cheek and landed on my chest. “Hardy...the city needs you! It doesn’t need a pony like me. If it comes down to you or me—”

I batted her hoof off my belly and rolled upright, shoving my forehead against hers. She tried to back up, but her rear end hit the wall of the train.

“Then we’ll both survive—,” I growled. “—because you know that’s what I need. You deny your talent all you like, but I don’t need any more ghosts! Especially not my best friend!”

“B-but I can’t—”

“You are going to. You die out there, even in some noble act of personal sacrifice, you are going to ruin me. You get that? I will never recover.”

Then I grabbed her and held her close as she shivered in my legs, her breathing labored and her eyes wedged tightly shut against more tears. She couldn’t stop a few whimpers and sniffles, but she’d held in enough weeping sessions through the years to hide just how deeply those words affected her.

“Fine. Dammit. Fine,” she muttered, turning her head to one side and laying her cheek on my shoulder. “I guess if anypony is...is suited to judge me, it’s you, isn’t it?”

“You want me to judge you?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.

“I...I wake up some mornings wishing you’d put a bullet in my head because I’m too scared to do it myself.”

“You’re not raising my confidence here, Sweets,” I murmured.

Pushing her hooves against my chest, she fought her way free and stumbled back a couple steps, her black and white tail lashing against the wall of the train.

“Hardy! Your best friend is a murderer! You asked for the truth. Now sit your ass down and take it!”

Act 3 Chapter 20 : They Are Rage, Brutal, Without Mercy, But You Will Be Worse

The cafe smelled terrible.

Torque passed a dozen sewage workers outside but was too bothered by his upcoming meeting to really connect the dots. All he knew was that his coffee tasted like piss and the waitress who delivered it looked like she’d been shooting up Ace in the back.

For the tenth time in as many minutes, he pulled at the collar of his black suit. It wasn’t a comfortable suit, but it was Jeweler wear, and while he’d normally have taken some offense to being made to wait, the pony who was coming was the sort one didn’t take umbrage with if they valued having all four limbs. He took another sip of the coffee and then quickly set it down before the shaking in his hooves became too much to hold it.

His gun felt heavy against his leg, heavier than it’d ever felt because, for once, it wasn’t creating any sense of safety or comfort. How could anypony be safe from something that could do that to ten competent fighters?

He was shaken from his thoughts by the ding of a little silver bell above the cafe door.

A moment later, a thin unicorn mare in an identical suit that somehow seemed to fit her more comfortably slid into the booth on the other side. She took off a pair of stylish sunglasses and set them on the table. He wished she hadn’t; it obligated him to look into her icy blue eyes. They were eyes capable of unflinching cruelty, and when they were on him, he could feel the hours of his life ticking away.

“I do hope you have a truly excellent reason to have called me here today, Mister Torque,” she murmured, plucking a notepad from the inside of her vest and laying it between them. “The emergency contact line is for management use only. You are not management.”

Torque’s ears flattened to the sides of his head. “I know, Ma’am. I know. Believe me, I do. You know Mister Caster?”

She nodded.

“Mister Caster had that phone number in his hoof when he died. He was trying to dial it when...when she got him.”

“She? You indicated the dead totaled ten, including our associate on the police force and Mister Skinner himself. Ten dead bodies is a quantity that management takes notice of. Are you claiming that a single individual is responsible for this?”

“I’m...I’m j-just saying she weren’t there when I got back from the corner st-store and they were all...all over the place!” he stammered, trying to pick up his coffee cup again. He was quivering so badly he dropped it, and she quickly snatched it from midair with her horn before he could spill the hot beverage all over himself. “Mister Caster was in the other office in the building, but she got him all the same. Them bloody hoofprints out the alleyway door was mare sizes...and they come from the interrogation r-room.”

“Yet she was...damaged...in Skinner’s usual manner. What could she have possibly done in that condition?” the mare demanded.

“I...I don’t know. It weren’t natural. Nopony like that is natural...but whatever you do, I don’t think we want to go find that filly. She walked away, and all that blood…”

“Don’t presume to dictate to management, Torque. We must establish what actually occurred and then determine who our assailants were. Then we will determine a course of action.”

“I’m telling you...ain’t nopony besides that mare go in there! The interrogation room was bucked open from the inside!”

Preliminary Autopsy Report

Coroner Presiding: Slip Stitch Ph.D, M.D. ADHD.

Subject : Stallion, age approximately 25 years. No identification, body unclaimed, cutie-mark removed.

Date of Death : Currently unknown, estimate three days ago at approximately 4:00 A.M.

Injuries : Lots of.

I show postmortem removal of the cutie-marks, the upper and lower molars, and the eyes. The facial bones have been shattered with a maul or hammer of some sort. I suspect these injuries are the result of an attempt to cover up the identity of the body. A second, much more thorough attempt involving magical scrubbing was used to turn the corpse’s DNA into wet spaghetti, so blood tracking shan't be an option. This was carried out somewhat later than the removal of the various other parts and, I must conclude, by someone else. Somepony did a dance on his genetic code, and it wasn’t a tango.

Two different groups wanted this person to be a complete unknown, though we can establish he is a member of the Jewelers street gang from the black suit and various other accoutrements found on his person. Sadly, until somepony claims him, we are down to a brief description of his injuries. It’ll be very difficult to find who to send invitations to his party to. Considering how closely the damage to his body mirrors that of his nine or so friends in similar condition, I suppose we’ll just have to have a cheerful little get together as opposed to a grand occasion.

When he was lively, our Mister Stallion No-Name was an earth pony of some considerable bulk. I detected traces of steroids which might explain that.

His pre-mortem injuries were just as extensive as those inflicted afterwards. Somepony shattered his collarbone, five vertebrae, and his skull with what would appear to be hoof strikes. An earth pony assailant would be capable of that. However, while he would likely have died of those injuries given some time, what killed him was a bladed implement approximately nine inches in length thrust into the chest between the third and fourth ribs on the left torso, piercing his heart.

My assistant tells me that this is referred to as a ‘Zebra Mercy Strike’.

Very odd.

I will do a more thorough analysis of his injuries after lunch. Mmm...spaghetti sounds delicious, as a matter of fact.

----

“Sit down, Sergent!” Chief Jade snarled, slapping the top of her desk.

Sergeant Register, who’d been pacing back and forth, promptly sank onto his haunches. “S-sorry, Ma’am. I...I hate not knowing where she is. She’s never been out of contact for this long!”

“I do understand and share your worry for Detective Shine and Officer Fox Glove. Now tell me again, what was the last communication you had with them?”

Register swallowed, smoothing his wild mane back with one hoof. He reached for her candy dish for a second, then thought better of it. “The last one said ‘Situation normal’. To our knowledge, Skinner still doesn’t suspect anything, and the only ponies who know the identities of our officers are in this room. Skinner’s group has been smuggling just about everything you can imagine for months now, and we’ve got almost enough to lock them up, assuming it’s all accurate.”

“And why wouldn’t it be accurate?” Jade asked cooly.

“Well, we’ve been letting most of the smuggling pass un-inspected, but now and then we’ll snatch one just to make them think we’re trying random searches,” Register replied, scratching at his mane. “The last four inspections were what we expected to find. Small or medium quantities of drugs for street distribution. That fifth one...Fox Glove reported that it was a normal container, but it contained enough drugs to put the entire Griffin Empire into a coma.”

Chief Jade snapped up a piece of candy and popped it into her muzzle. “A mistake?”

“I guess. I mean, it really wouldn’t be the first time an undercover agent made one. Sweet Shine is still mapping Skinner’s organization. Until we have her information, we can’t really move on them. Skinner is paranoid and smart, despite his ‘proclivities’. His lawyers are the sort of people who give prosecutors nightmares.”

The Chief looked contemplatively down at the files on her desk. Six months and it wasn’t more than a millimeter thicker, but Sweet Shine had always played things close and tight.

“Damn...I wish I hadn’t assigned her that nitwit,” she muttered.

“Ma’am, Fox Glove did pass his certifications. He’s young, yes, but he asked for Detective Shine specifically. They’ve worked well together the last year, whatever his issues with the rest of the department might be.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s not a reckless fool. Alright, keep me apprised. You hear one word about Sweet Shine or Fox Glove sticking their heads above the parapet, I want to hear it. Dismissed.”

The dock smelled like rotting fish on a good day, but with the summer sun beating down on it, the stink was enough to put an Ursa off his dinner.

Two stallions in stained coveralls, one using his horn and the other nothing but brute strength, were heaving large boxes off the dock onto a chute leading down into a boat below.

“So, like I was saying, they done caught this broad,” the unicorn explained, hefting another box into the air. “Now, I ain’t one for hurting girls, but you shoulda seen what she did to the boys before they took her down. Broke three muzzles, dislocated Sand Dollar’s shoulder, and pulled out this crazy jumping around martial arts crap until Lentil gets a lucky shot with that cannon of his. One inch lower and he’d have blown her brains all over the wall instead of knocking her out.”

His companion grunted as he shoved another cargo container off the dock, swiping a hoof across his forehead before he replied, “So, what do they think? Cop? Cyclone, maybe?”

“Probably a Cyclone, what with all that weird fighting,” the unicorn said, straightening the shoulder strap on his coveralls with his horn. “We been losing a few more shipments than normal, so I bet she was tipping off her ganger buddies and snatchin’ em. The boss wants to give her his ‘special treatment’. He bought Lentil a bottle of top shelf just for bringing the filly in.”

“The ‘special’ huh? Poor girl. Glad I'm not there tonight.”

His friend shuddered and swept his tail over his cutie-mark protectively. "You and me both. Ponies shouldn’t make noises like that. Sometimes I wish he’d just kill them what pisses him off, ‘stead of making them...you know.”

“Yeah, well, he’s the boss for a reason. When you want to grow the balls to make the big plays, you can be the boss. Me? I’m happy shleppin’ a little cargo and collecting a paycheck. Nice, safe job, and the worst I do in a week is toss a couple hundred bits at the shipping authority guy to go take a coffee break. Meantime, I don’t care what the boss does to some piece of flank. It’s none of my business, and turncoat is turncoat.”

There are few architects in the world who strive never to be noticed, but once in awhile you’ll run across somepony who excels at the art of being unobtrusive. They’ll frequently find themselves hired by city planners who’ve been quietly paid by ponies who value discretion and anonymity over style and character.

1235 Canyon Street was built to a specification of such dullness that even ponies who passed it sixty times a month weren’t aware it was there. It huddled between 1234 and 1236 like a rabbit who’d woken from a pleasant nap to discover he’s bedded down on a griffin dinner table. It was a building that would have radiated ‘shady underhanded dealings happen here’ if it radiated anything whatsoever.

The only thing that made it stick out from its surroundings was the presence of a heavily muscled stallion in a black suit who surely worked inside and had been on a ‘smoke break’ for the last six hours.

The hour had just ticked over to mid-evening when another stallion in an equally ill-fitting suit poked his head out the side door.

“Ink Blot, could you go get another first aid kit? We managed to get Candle Stick downstairs, but she busted Lute’s...eh...his...bits. Blood everywhere,” the new arrival said. “We’ll get him down to the doc’s place in an hour or two, but the boss doesn’t want anypony to see us carry him out.”

Ink Blot stood up straight, putting out his cigarette and shutting a thin novel before stuffing it in his pocket. “You’re kidding. I put those cuffs on her myself. Those were police issue with magic-resistant locks. How’d she get out of them?”

“She didn’t. That idiot thought he’d try to ‘have some fun’ with her, and she got her teeth around his...well...”

“What kind of moron—...ugh, never mind. Stupid prick never could keep it under his tail. Why is the boss keeping her alive? She’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

“You know, I actually asked the boss why he likes to do this crap when we caught that prick rooting through the records last year. I was drunk at the time, mind you.”

“You mean that stallion with the cowlick? Door Knocker, or whatever his name was?” the door guard asked. “I remember that. Mostly I remember the screaming. Never thought I’d feel bad for a blue.”

“Well, right after the boss peeled the guy, he said ‘People who betray me should know they’ll never get to say goodbye to anyone before they die’.”

“That’s some creepy crap,” the guard muttered. “Anyone hear what she actually did to piss off him off?”

“No clue. I thought Candle Stick was solid, too. She never complained. She even helped us work over Yortle The Turtle when he tried to pull a runner with the payout from the Tenth Street deal. Anyway, see about that first aid kit, would ya? Lute’s probably not going to stop howling until we put something on his crotch.”

“I’m off and heading to the bar in ten minutes. Can I just ‘unvolunteer’ myself for doing that part right now?”

He stared into the vague reflection of his own face in the one-way mirror. His sharp brown eyes stared back from an angular face that mares once found very beautiful. Of course, a predator must bait his hook with only the finest visions of loveliness to his prey, else he’ll never catch a meal.

Today, his meal was caught and ready to be gutted. It only took away from the satisfaction very slightly that he hadn’t been the one to catch this particular repast, but considering the fight she’d put up, he was only mildly put out.

The interrogation room reminded him of an aquarium.

When he was young, he’d had a fish tank. While other children played outside or joined sports teams, he was content to sit and watch his fish. His parents found it odd, but they never really objected to having a quiet child happy to spend his afternoons in his room enjoying the funny little lives of swimming creatures. The tiny beings were oblivious to the monster who fed them and made sure their home was clean.

Truly, his parents would have done well to check the number of fish in the tank from week to week; it might have saved them if they’d realized that the number of dead flowing out into the mass grave in the backyard was abnormally high, or if they’d asked why he spent so much of his pocket money on replacements. Then again, it might not.

He’d watched so many ponies through the interrogation room window, listening to their weeping, their excuses, their demands, and ultimately their screams. He’d held their lives in his hooves, and their blood, bones, and flesh were his to do with as he pleased.

So it was that he watched his latest little fishy lying there staring at the wall of her tank, her hooves bound and her muzzle bleeding. She was a pretty thing, if a bit plain. Racket had splashed a bit of vodka in her eyes when she tried to bite him, and whatever dye she’d used on her fur was fading, dribbling down the drain.

‘Plain is passing,’ he thought. ‘Soon, she’ll be beautiful. Her eyelids will be gone, and I will see her as she truly is...’

“Um...Boss?”

He chuckled to himself, turning to the voice’s owner. “Yes, Amber? Is everything ready?”

“You know it,” his lieutenant replied a bit proudly, smoothing a hoof back through her perfectly styled mane as she stepped into the tiny viewing room. “We got Lute to the doc. Probably won’t have a marefriend anytime soon, but he’ll live.”

“Did you find the information our little miss ‘Candle Stick’ managed to collect?” he asked.

“Everything was right where our contact said it would be. The hotel room she was renting was packed full, but...well, she trusted him to pass the information off to their handler. She’s got nothing. I’d almost feel sorry for her if the little bitch hadn’t been trying to get us all put in the pokey. Six months of her life wasted...”

“The whole of her life wasted, you mean. How much did she get?”

Amber sighed, sitting down and resting a hoof on the one-way mirror. “Too much. Way too much. Our security procedures are basically out the window. If management hadn’t identified her as a potential threat, we’d be having this conversation through bars right now.”

“Unfortunate.”

The two of them sat there for a long moment, watching the little fishy squirm about in her bonds.

“Boss, can I ask you something?” Amber said after a short time.

“Of course, Amber. What is it?”

“If management knew this filly might be a threat to their operations, why haven’t they taken her out before now? They let her infiltrate us completely before they moved. Most cops don’t scare me, but she’s cuh-razy. Another month and she’d have cracked our operation like an egg.”

“The will of management isn’t for us to know, Amber. They keep the machine ticking. That said...do imagine, if you will, having a pony of this caliber working for us.”

Amber gave him a sidelong glance. “You’re not going to try—”

“Oh, no...of course not,” he chuckled, waving a dismissive hoof. “No, her body will be disposed of in the usual way. I merely wish to point out that management is longsighted. They might have wished to turn her to our ends. That, or their choice served some grander purpose. If nothing else, it may have been to inform us of the weaknesses in our security.”

“That seems an awful lot of trouble to go to…”

He laughed, heartily, patting his subordinate on the back. “Would you have otherwise believed a single mare could infiltrate us so completely?”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t think I would have. I cleaned your tools myself, by the way. They’re in your office, per usual.”

“Excellent!” A thoughtful look crossed his face. She’d seen it several times during the last few years of her employment, and every time, somepony suffered. “Is she aware of who put her in this situation?”

“Well, none of my ponies told her, if that’s what you mean,” she replied, tapping her chin. “She was too busy fighting like a wildcat once she figured out the ‘meeting’ was a setup. I don’t think anypony has said two words to her besides Lute. After his little romantic offer, most of his words were some variation on ‘please don’t geld me’.”

“Good. Make certain nopony speaks to her. What about our ‘associate’? What do you make of him? Your impressions, please.”

Amber shook her head. “You mean the guy management had watching her? He’s a real piece of work. He looks young, but nopony young has eyes like that. If what he said was true, then he was watching her for two years. He spent the whole time working in one of our warehouses while she was out dealing. She had no idea who he really was.”

“Most interesting. Management gave orders that no one should attempt to ascertain her true identity. We know she is a police officer, but...I am inclined to follow their edicts. She’s a corpse, either way, and wasting resources killing her family will not update our security any more quickly.”

“Certainly, Sir. You want to try that trick you used on the Rhododendron twins again?”

“Ah! Am I really becoming predictable? I never did get them to do it before the end.”

Amber flicked her mane over her shoulder and smiled. “I just know you, boss. I’ll go find our friend and send him up to see you. You want a bottle of scotch, too?”

“Send some scones and cheese with it, if you don’t mind.”

The glare of the bright neon bathroom lights made the stallion’s eyes ache, but it was inconsequential. The current job had run longer than any prior, and he was tired. Tired and a bit sad.

“Sad?” he asked himself, aloud. “Where’d that come from?”

The job had cost him so many things. Had his mane always had those little tinges of grey amongst the foggy white? No. Nor had his pale coat always been so ragged around the edges. His fetlocks needed a good trim.

Had he let what he knew must eventually happen really affect him so completely? His disguise had never slipped before and his personal care used to be impeccable.

Ah...well. Unimportant. Emotion could be tucked away just like memory, names, and pain with the flick of a feather. He flexed his pale wings, gently brushing the tips of them over the nearby sink, then his own flanks. Peering over his shoulder at his cutie-mark, he considered it for a long moment.

‘Maybe if she’d asked,’ he thought, then shook his head. “If she’d asked what my mark meant, would I have told her? Would any of this have ended differently?’

Probably not.

Most ponies assumed his mark was a vase of some sort, until they looked more closely and could see the twin faces looking in opposite directions. A few colts in the academy had called him ‘Potter’, but she’d never mentioned his talent. Not once in a year and a half.

‘What an odd little pony she is,’ he thought.

When the orders came down to insinuate himself into the Detrot Police Department and watch a particular officer, he’d had no idea what he was getting himself into. She was passionate, driven, and madder than a hippogryph swallowing nails. Her talent made her weak, but it also made her dangerous.

Management assessed the risk. The job was ordered. He accomplished his task with his usual savvy. Why, then, should he feel guilt?

Somepony knocked on the bathroom door.

“Hey? You fall in? The boss wants to see you,” a mare said loudly enough to be heard from outside.

Swallowing, he quickly turned on the tap and splashed some water on his cheeks, then ducked his head under one wing to tug out a loose feather, dropping it in the sink. “Sorry, I’ll be right out. Is Candle Stick still able to talk?”

“The boss hasn’t started on her, yet. He likes to make ’em wait.”

“If it’s not too much trouble, could you be certain I get to talk to her before the end?”

“Sure. The boss is feeling clever tonight, so that might fit nicely with his other plans for the evening.”

Candle Stick’s eye hurt where one of the thugs popped her with a lucky shot, and her ribs felt like a xylophone that’d been played a little too vigorously. None of them were broken, so far, but that was likely to change as the night went on. She’d helped in a couple of beatings over the last six months, and broken ribs were always one of the more agonizing but more easily healed injuries you could inflict on a pony without worrying overmuch about killing them outright.

Thankfully her opponents were the same kind of street filth she’d spent the last six months dodging, fighting, and pissing on.

The little room only had the one white lightbulb, two chairs bolted to the floor, and a metal table similarly bolted.

‘What I wouldn’t give for some mouthwash right now. Ugh. That colt hadn’t washed in three days,’ she thought, trying to work up enough saliva to spit the taste of blood and other unpleasantness out of her muzzle. ‘Alright. Priorities. Priority one, find Fox Glove, make sure he’s safe.’ She shifted her hooves, making her bindings clank against one another. ‘No...wait, priority one is escape. Escape is definitely priority one.’

Shutting her eyes, she extended her senses, trying to feel if she was being watched at the moment through the one-way mirror.

A tickle. A tingle. A slight burn.

‘Phew...yeah, somepony is definitely there,’ she thought, pulling herself into a sitting position. ‘Probably Skinner. His victims tend to suffer for a while, and he likes a buildup.’

She reached up to wipe her face with both hooves. There was blood caked in her mane and a thin scratch where something had grazed her. Considering that was the blow that’d taken her out of the fight, it was probably a bullet, but the damage seemed pretty superficial. No cracked skull, though she was a bit woozy. Maybe a concussion, though a mild one if it was. Using the injury as an excuse, she felt around in her mane until she touched the hoofcuff key woven into a patch of hair. They’d done a pretty thorough search when she was unconscious; her nethers ached from some aggressive intrusions, either with magic or probes of some sort.

She’d wanted to go drinking their first week together, but her first partner out of the Academy insisted she bury that paycheck in a See-Me-Not enchantment on a hoofcuff key. She’d learned why six months later when a couple of Cyclone toughs dropped her off a pier with her hooves cuffed to a cement block.

“Thanks, Pan Pipe,” she whispered.

It was time to get organized. Get thinking. Get out of here and find Fox Glove. He’d left the message that led her into her current predicament. That probably meant they’d captured him. If she was alive, he likely was too. If not, then she’d find his body.

‘So, how many unicorns are in the building? Probably no more than three. I can handle pegasi and other earth ponies. We’re in a nice enclosed space. I can probably get on top of them before they can cast anything especially ugly at me. Skinner needs to leave, though.’

The door handle rattled, then opened. Candle Stick tensed, pulling her rear legs up to kick out if the pony approached her.

The newcomer was an older stallion with a bushy mustache and one of the few tailored suits she’d seen. His fit him pretty good. She’d heard her captors call him ‘Picket’ a couple of times during the fight. He’d fought cautiously and avoided most of her strikes, keeping well away as he waited for the younger colts and fillies to wear her down. The order to capture her alive must have been pretty ironclad, considering how much trouble she’d given him.

Another pony, a short, stocky mare, came in behind him. She was a pegasus, her eyes darting back and forth until she laid them on Candle Stick. Pushing her coat sleeve up, she revealed a snub-nosed revolver in a civilian gun harness, then picked up her trigger bit in her teeth, leveling the barrel at the bound pony.

“Move and I put a bullet in your flank,” the Jeweler filly growled. Candle Stick held her hooves apart and did her best to look relaxed, though her mind was racing.

Picket, meanwhile, skirted around the prisoner over to the table and produced a brightly polished knife from under his coat. It was a curved blade, almost a sword, with wide cutting edges and a handle canted at an angle from the base that made it ideal for holding in one’s teeth.

Candle Stick’s breath caught; she recognized the weapon. She’d seen a drawing of what they thought it looked like during the early mission briefings, though seeing it in person was something else.

It was a skinning knife; a griffin skinning knife, modified for pony use.

Picket set the weapon on the table, then backed away towards the door, keeping a careful eye on her.

Candle Stick wanted more than anything to launch herself at them, but she wasn’t sure of her ability to get to the gun or the knife before one or both of her opponents could put her down. The concussion was a factor, along with the bruises on her legs and sides. Those would slow her considerably, assuming there weren’t any more injuries she hadn’t discovered yet. Picket’s suit-jacket sleeve bulged, and a trigger bit dangled against his knee; it was safe to assume that he was also armed.

Warily, the two jewelers eased out the door. It swung shut again, leaving her alone with only the stink of her own blood for company.

‘Alright, time to get up,’ she thought, pushing her hobbled hooves under her chest and testing her weight on them. Her front knees held up alright, though there was a bit of a twinge in her back. Nothing major, but it held the promise of an achy morning. Her rear legs shook, then slowly steadied under her.

Moving to the table, she peered down at the knife, giving it a light poke with her toe, then looked up towards the mirror. Her reflection left much to be desired. The black eye was going to take a fair bit of makeup to cover, and her mane was a lost cause.

A speaker set into the wall crackled, and then a cheerful, cultured voice echoed around the room loudly enough to make her flinch in pain. It was a familiar voice and one that made her coat stand on end.

“Miss Candle Stick. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, however temporary it may be. Do you know who I am?”

She slowly nodded, shifting her weight as she flexed her back legs, trying to work out the residual stiffness. “I know who you are, Mister Skinner.”

“Good! Then you know why you are here?”

“Your people jumped me,” she replied, thinking quickly. Maybe she could talk her way out of the situation. “Look, I deal straight and I deal for you, so—”

“Don’t bother, officer,” Skinner replied from behind the mirror. “We know what you are. I am aware that Candle Stick is not your name, but it will suffice for our purposes.”

Drawing herself up, she waved towards the knife on the table. “Alright, Mister Skinner. You should be aware that my people know where I am. You hurt me or my partner, you’ll spend the rest of your life in Tartarus Correctional.”

There was a pause, then a chuckle that made her shiver.

“Oh...I sincerely doubt that. Nopony outside of my organization knows where you are right now. We have your little safehouse and all of the evidence you’ve gathered. I must say, I am very impressed. If you were anypony else, I’d be inclined to recruit you...but I won’t insult your intelligence. You know how this ends, tonight.”

Candle Stick inhaled and tried to steady herself. They had the safehouse. That meant they had everything. She’d long since scrubbed the room of anything that might give away her real identity, but anypony with half a brain could have put together that it was a police investigation. Fox Glove was smart, but he wouldn’t survive a real torture session.

‘Don’t freak out. Don’t lose it. You can still get out of here. There are ponies who need you,’ she thought.

“Alright, so long as we’re not insulting each other’s intelligence, how did you find me?”

“Oh, simply enough. We discovered your partner attempting to make contact with a police liaison. A simple mistake, and one that anypony could have made. The liaison is dead, of course. Your partner is alive, however. I wish to make you a deal. A simple deal, for his life.”

Glancing down at the knife, she faced the window and cocked her head. “You’re holding all the cards right now. How can I trust any deal you make with me? Why make a deal at all?”

“I keep my word, officer,” Skinner answered with a tone of mock offense. “It is a word I will happily give you, assuming you are cooperative.”

That, to her knowledge, was true; most of the ranking Jewelers valued a certain brand of honesty. It was a currency whose worth was measured in lives.

Candle Stick gently picked up the knife between her hooves, testing the edge.

“And the why?” she asked.

“You very nearly broke my organization,” he said, casually, as though they’d met in a bar and were exchanging pleasantries over drinks rather than through a piece of plexiglass. “You may feel proud that you came the closest of anypony who has ever tried. You injured several of my associates, and your activities will cost me a considerable sum of money, whether or not you managed to prosecute me. To that end, I wish to watch you suffer before you die. You will suffer one way or the other.”

It was a fight to keep the quiver out of her lip. She could just make out a shadow standing behind the mirror, but no details.

She wiggled her hips a little, trying to get a feel for how much strength was in them. Probably enough to kick the door open, assuming she could get a solid stance and uncuff herself. Of course, there were the guards lurking outside the door who needed dealing with, and if Skinner was telling the truth, Fox Glove would be dead before she could get to him.

Register was dead. That made her cringe inside, but it wasn’t the time to mourn. Mourning could wait until she was out and Skinner was in a cell.

‘If I can get this knife out of the building, that’ll be plenty of evidence for a jury,’ she thought.

“What is the deal?” she asked, trying to buy some time to think. “I don’t know the names of any other undercover agents, and you couldn’t afford to believe me if I told you that you had all of my information on your organization.”

“I am not interested in the mundanities of your surveillance, officer,” Skinner answered. “I give you my word, that if you follow my instructions, your partner will live, and I will release him alive and unharmed. We may do a memory wipe of the six months or so that he worked in my warehouse, and that may cause some minor damage, but he will be alive.”

Something in his voice was teasing at her memory. She’d heard a voice like that before, but where?

‘Oh…Right... That’s Daddy.’

Her back knees locked up, and she felt her pulse begin to thump in her ears.

‘No, don’t panic. Panic will kill you.’

“Okay. I’m still listening, not that I have a choice here. What do you need from me?” she asked, quickly pushing her memories as far into the back of her mind as she could.

“Obedience, officer. Your partner’s survival is contingent upon you following every single order I may give you to the letter and in a timely manner. If you fail to obey, I will cut him open and feed you his heart. Then I will begin my work on you. If you obey me, you will suffer...somewhat...less and your partner not at all. Do you accept my word?”

There was no hesitation. Saving Fox Glove, even for a few minutes, was worth whatever sick game Skinner had in mind. It would give her time to come up with a plan, too.

“Yes,” she murmured.

The stallion behind the glass inhaled a happy breath. “You cannot imagine how happy that makes me, Miss Candle Stick. Now, then...come over in front of the glass, here.”

Hobbling over in front of the mirror, she stood with her hooves together, staring at the shadow on the other side.

“We shall begin. Touch your nose with your right hoof.”

If he’d expected her to hesitate, or ask questions, she didn’t. Reaching up, she put her toe on her nose.

“Good, good. Now, touch the glass.”

Trotting forward, she rested her hoof against the mirror. On the opposite side, she could feel a little bit of pressure. He was close, now. If only she could buck through that plexiglass, she could get her hooves around his throat and...but no. No, she had to play along, for now.

For Fox Glove.

“Now, turn around and put your muzzle on the floor. Raise your hips and spread your back legs.”

Shutting her eyes, she did an about face and pressed her nose against the cold concrete, then hiked her backside into the air. The chains binding her front legs together clanked against one another as she did.

A trickle of distress seeped into her mind, but she smothered it. She was beginning to feel his need, now. She’d been doing her best to put her talent’s whispers out of her mind, but it wouldn’t be ignored.

‘Use it. Come on, that’s what it’s there for. If your talent isn’t going to shut up, use it.’

He wanted her shame and pain. He needed it. His black, hollow little heart yearned for her agony to fill it.

‘Play the part. Let him see it get to you. He’ll want to savor this, and that’ll buy time.’

“Now, hike your tail up nice and high, officer,” Skinner ordered, his voice taking on a husky quality. “I want to see the parts I’ll be cutting last. Or maybe first. I haven’t decided. Perhaps, if they’re pretty enough, I’ll let you eat them, too.”

Trying to keep her back stiff, she flipped her tail up over it and allowed a few tears to trickle out of the corners of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t move to wipe them away.

‘Blush, dammit! Blush and whimper! I know you can still do it! He’s not going to be convinced if you don’t!’

Gradually, she felt her cheeks begin to burn as she allowed old feelings to resurface. He needed to see her ashamed. She let out a weak sob and spread her rear legs as far as the cuffs would allow, letting her hips quiver.

“Very good, my dear. Those are lovely,” Skinner growled. “Now, I see only one thing wrong. You have those hideous marks on your flanks.”

Her breathing stopped as she began to put the pieces together.

“You have my favorite knife there, officer,” he continued. She could hear him all but panting into the speaker, now. Her teeth ground against one another as she fought to think.

‘Plan. Plan. Plan,’ she thought. ‘Come on. You have to have something! He’s got Fox Glove somewhere. Probably nearby. You can’t get out the door without him giving the order to kill him. You can’t get through that glass, even if you could get a full strength buck with both rear legs. You need to get the key in your mane...’

“Cut them off, officer. You have ten seconds before I will order your partner’s death.”

Ten seconds.

Not enough time. No plan.

Nine.

No plan.

Eight.

Not even the key in her mane.

Seven.

Fox Glove was just a rookie.

Six.

He doesn’t deserve to die.

Five.

The glass is too thick.

Four.

Can’t fight that many guards before they kill Fox Glove.

Three.

I’m not strong enough! I don’t know what to do!

Two.

Skinner smiled to himself as the mare picked up the blade in her teeth. She stood there, her body shaking as she stared up at the mirror, stared into his eyes. The wound on her forehead stood out in stark contrast to her fur, which was an off yellow now that the dye was finally coming out.

His hoof hovered over the button he’d rigged to a recording of a stallion screaming. Would she need it? He’d bet himself a bottle of delicious ‘31 that she would do it without. Of course, the Rhododendron twins never had, but this ‘Candle Stick’ was something special. She was unique amongst all of his fishies. He’d baited his hook and caught her. Watching her gut herself was so much more personal than simply showing her each of her parts as he cut them off of her.

The intimacy of the moment made him quiver inside. The door was locked, and he could feel his own arousal making him sweat, though he ignored it. The scene playing out just a few meters away was too engrossing for even that to draw his attention away.

Turning her head, she hesitated for just a moment, the blade held between her teeth hovering over her own flank. He held his breath.

Would she do it? Could any pony alive truly do that to themselves? Oh, how he hungered to know! Could this special fish of his really cut away something so precious on her own? Was it even possible she would do that just for him?

Lowering her muzzle, she began to saw, almost mechanically, at her own right flank. Blood spurted from the wound. Her cutie-marks were very lovely...the dove inside the eye. A very strange mark, to be true. He’d no idea what talent it might represent, but then, it didn’t matter.

The angle was poor for her to cut more than a little ways in, but it was enough.

“Keep going, little fish,” he hissed into the microphone. “Destroy them for me…”

The tension in her jaw was visible even from there as she began to hack at her own cutie-mark with a vengeance. She couldn’t slice deeply, but it was enough. Blood flowed down the backs of her legs. She slashed back and forth, with long sweeping strokes, like his blade was a brush painting over the pitiful waste that was her destiny. A bit of her pelt hit the concrete.

He felt a wetness on his stomach but didn’t look down.

So perfect.

She was so perfect, this fish of his, as she sliced herself just for him. He’d never been one to take trophies, but he wanted her for his wall. Maybe he’d mount her front and rear, just so he could savor both ends.

Her right cutie-mark was unrecognizable as she wept. The salt from those tears must have hurt, but she continued.

He wished he could throw her back in the ocean just as she was, so he could catch her again.

“Now...turn the other cheek, little fish,” he whispered to the mic.

Robotically, she turned her other hip towards the mirror.

No hesitation. No pause for breath. She went back to cutting, slicing the mark off of her leg with a quiet determination.

Such a perfect vandal. He needed to taste her more completely. Soon. Very soon.

Somepony knocked on the door of the viewing room, and Skinner jerked back from the mirror.

“What can you possibly want?!” he snarled, stomping over to the door. “Do not disturb means do not disturb!”

He yanked it open to find management’s shill standing there sucking on a cigarette.

“You’ve already started on her?” the younger stallion asked.

“Yes, damn your eyes! What do you want?”

“I want to talk to her. Miss Amber said she’d tell you that.”

In the heat of the moment, Skinner had forgotten the other half of this particular game. Truly, that mare was something magical to get him so completely wrapped up in the moment that he’d lost track. For an instant, he’d even been tempted to see just how far she would go for management’s little pet. Still, it would be so much more delicious to reveal him in this moment when she was looking at the bloody remains of her own marks on the floor around her hooves.

His fury was immediately doused, replaced with a feral glee.

“Ah...yes. Feel free. Head around to the other side and go right in. I doubt she’s in any condition to harm you.”

A Jeweler tough sat in the thin, barely lit hallway outside the interrogation room, taking hits from a tiny silver flask as the white pegasus rounded the corner. The guard was a unicorn with an eye-patch and a few gold teeth. As he noticed he was no longer alone, he straightened, or made an attempt to.

“At ease,” the newcomer said. “You mind if I have a nip of that?”

“Eh...sure,” the guard replied, holding out the flask. “Miss Amber mentioned you might be by. Sorry, not usually my policy to be drinkin’ on the job, but the boss...well, boss likes mares best, see. The screamin’ give me nightmares, though.”

“Of course. I feel similarly, but this business necessitates certain evils. Mister Skinner is one of them,” he replied, taking the flask and tipping it back. His wings tingled as the tepid alcohol spread through his system. “Is she awake?”

‘Why do I feel the need to escape from this?’ he wondered as the guard turned to the door, sliding a small panel open to peer through. ‘No matter. Escape is simply a matter of closure. Once she is dead, I will have that.’

“She’s on the floor in there. Still got her hoofcuffs on,” the guard said, patting his jacket for a cigarette which he quickly lit and began smoking with shaky hooves. “Don’t know if her eyes are open. One of the boss’s knives is by her leg, but she’s not touching it. Mother save me, she’s...she’s cut off her own marks! Wonder how the boss got her to do that?”

Shutting his eyes, the pegasus took a deep breath. No sense putting it off.

“Close it behind me, would you? I’m in no danger.”

The guard looked skeptical as he levitated a civilian issue taser into the air beside himself and began unlocking the door. “You sure, bub? She’s crazy. My buddy Torque is going to be back in a few minutes, but I don’t want to go in there without him. Boss will want us to restrain her so he can do the rest of his business with her, but I ain’t going to do it by myself.”

“We’ll be fine. Go get a cup of coffee. I might want one myself when I’m done here, though I imagine Mister Skinner will also want to see me again before I leave.”

The guard touched his brow in a quick salute.

Candle Stick cringed as the door opened. She’d been resting, pretending the blood loss was getting the best of her. Or maybe not pretending. She wasn’t sure, though the endorphins were certainly a heady cocktail.

‘My cutie-marks...Oh Daddy, I wish you’d killed me,’ she whispered internally, ‘At...at least Fox Glove is safe...’

Slowly, she wrestled one eye open to see who’d come to continue her torment. She expected Skinner to be standing there, his guards on either side ready for a fight. There wasn’t much fight left in her, but she had to try.

The stallion standing there wasn’t Skinner. He was a familiar pegasus. His silvery white face was set in a calm, completely relaxed mask.

“F-Fox Glove...” she stammered, “Did...did you get fr-free? Or am I d-dead?”

“Fox Glove isn’t my name, Officer,” he murmured, trotting over and sitting down in front of her. Reaching out, he gently brushed her bloodied mane out of her face, leaning down to examine the wound on her head. “My name is...well, I’ve long since put my real name away.”

“What...what do you mean? We have to get out of here!” She started to rise, but her legs were still wobbly and quickly gave out.

“No...no, we really don’t,” he said with a sigh. “Do you know, I watched you for almost two years? A year in the Academy, then on to become your partner. Sad, really. We worked well together. Management was pleased with your efforts against the Cyclones.”

Candle Stick backed away from his hoof slightly, peering up into the eyes of a pony she desperately wanted to believe had come to save her. His expression was still as empty as it had been when he came in, with the exception of a touch of sadness somewhere around the edges of his mouth.

“Worked...worked well? You’re n-not Fox Glove. You’re a hallucination—”

The pegasus shook his head, giving his snowy white wings a flick. “No, Officer...I am your former partner. As I said, however...Fox Glove is not my name. This is the last time we will speak to one another.” Leaning sideways, he peered at her ruined cutie-marks. “Loyalty like yours deserves that, at least. I assume he told you he had me somewhere, gun to my head?”

Candle Stick’s ears pinned back as the realization began to gather at the edges of her muddled thoughts. What had Skinner said? He’d let Fox Glove walk free, unharmed.

“Oh skies...no...please, no.” She tried to clutch at his leg, but he pulled it away and pushed her back with a hoof on her forehead.

“I’m afraid it was inevitable that we would reach this place, Officer. For what it’s worth, I am sorry. You are a pony that I admire, despite your instability.”

“Did...did they blackmail you?” she asked weakly.

“No. I am a well paid servant, but one who is...probably reaching the end of his usefulness. I can either retire, gracefully, vanishing with my payment for this job into distant lands, or I suspect I’ll one day soon find myself coming home to Death waiting in my parlor.”

Her mind raced back to the day she’d been assigned to work with Fox Glove. He’d been a raw recruit, smiling and eager, if a bit older than most and too gung-ho to head out into the field on his first case.

“H-How?”

“How? Oh...you mean how did I insert myself into your life without your...abilities telling you something was wrong?”

She nodded, trying to push herself into a sitting position. The pain in her hips was agonizing, and a fresh wave rushed up her back, making her feel lightheaded.

“Your talent, Officer,” the stallion explained, picking up Skinner’s knife and rolling the handle back and forth as he studied a clump of fur still stuck to the tip. “Sad. So sad. If you had been anything but a police pony...ah, well. Regret is something I don’t have the luxury of in my line of work.”

“B-but my talent tells me what other ponies need!” she protested.

“And I needed a patsy; somepony who would believe in me and follow my subtle nudges towards particular ends. Management needed a pony who could infiltrate the Detrot Police Department’s Narcotics Division and make certain their investigations of Mister Skinner and various other individuals turned up nothing of relevance.”

A swell of nausea began building in her stomach as she forced her thoughts to focus.

“You...you’re the one who gave me to them…”

He lowered his chin until they were at eye level. “Sadly, you turned up too much information on Mister Skinner. You’ll be happy to know your handler is alive...for the moment. You, on the other hoof, are going to die here, tonight.”

Heaving himself up, he gave her a gentle touch on the cheek. She couldn’t muster the energy to brush it away, merely staring at the pony who’d cost her so much. They’d sat together and drunk beers, cried together, watched movies, gone on stakeouts, and shared the glory of a very successful raft of arrests.

The knife might have been kinder.

“I would kill you myself to save you what Mister Skinner has planned, but I have no taste or talent for killing. That, and I imagine he’s watching us right now and would stop me before I could. I must...attend...to the discovery of your body once this is over and then to my retirement from the police force.” Taking a deep breath, he turned to the door. “I wish you to know that this was not personal, Officer. You are dying because you are far, far too good a pony to live in this world. Please, let that knowledge carry you into the next.”

With that, he opened the door and trotted out, shutting it behind himself.

Candle Stick sagged onto the floor.

Sleep. She needed to sleep.

‘No…stay awake...blood loss.’

You need to sleep.

Let me take care of you.

This what you need.

The white pegasus sat in Skinner’s office, staring at the ceiling. He sipped his glass of scotch, more for the need to be drunk and less for the quality or pleasure of Mister Skinner’s company.

The office was little more than a particularly large closet with a cheap, flat-pack desk and a few dozen archaic surgical tools laid out in a decorative manner in a rolling display case against the wall, but the alcohol was good.

Skinner leaned across his desk, a coy smile on his face. “So? What will you do now, Mister...what did she call you? Fox Glove?”

“I’ll go where the wind blows, I think. That name served well enough, but I’m tired of it. I have acquaintances in every city between here and Canterlot.” Reaching up, he touched his thin muzzle. “You might think this face looks awfully young, but it’s a few years older than it appears. Cosmetic surgery will only do so much. I imagine it has one more trick, though: making Fox Glove disappear.”

Skinner gave him an appraising look. “You know...I could cross-reference that name with the police records and find her real name, right?”

The pegasus tapped the edge of his scotch glass, then drained it before setting it back on the table. “I imagine you could. It would displease management, however, and you’re a smarter pony than that. Let it simply be said that your problem...such as it was...is solved. Enjoy your spoils, Mister Skinner.”

The mob boss raised his glass. “Oh, I will...Mister Whatever-Your-Name-Actually-Is.”

The Shine opened her eyes.

She needed to know how much time had passed since the Other lost consciousness.

‘Eighteen minutes, fifteen seconds,’ the Talent murmured.

Time enough. They believed her helpless. Blood loss would leave her physically impaired within twenty-nine minutes at the current rate, presuming she was unable to stem the flow from her flanks.

Glancing around the interrogation room, she inhaled the stale, bloody air. She could smell the scent of coffee and cigarette smoke from just outside the door. Skinner wasn’t in his observation room. He was elsewhere in the building.

She needed to get out of the interrogation chamber.

‘There are two options. The window, which has a bit of loose putty around one edge and might pop loose to a well-placed kick in the lower left corner, and the door. The lock is worn and no longer closes.’

Picking up the knife from the table, she considered it for a moment, then wiped the remains of the cutie-marks off on the edge of her toe before carefully cutting the cuff key out of her mane. Quickly unlocking both sets of cuffs, she caught them before they could hit the floor and gently laid them out on the table so as to make as little sound as possible.

‘Leave now.’

Edging to the door, she turned around, taking the knife in her teeth and bracing herself.

‘One pony is waiting outside,’ the Talent warned. ‘He has one eye and his teeth are badly rotted. He is a simpleton, driven to work for Mister Skinner after his last job in a factory went bust. He needs a liver transplant. Attack from above or the right. Strike the abdomen or the neck.’

Her leg snapped back, and the lock exploded, sending the door slamming open directly into the thug’s face. The wet crunch of his shattering muzzle softened the noise significantly, so it didn’t travel much beyond the hallway. He staggered, dropping his scalding hot coffee all over his forelegs.

There was barely time for a whinny of surprise before the Shine was on him, leaping onto his back, striking his neck between his fifth and sixth vertebrae. His rear legs collapsed under him, and he wheezed, pitifully, as his lungs suddenly seized.

The Shine could feel his terror. He needed to die quickly. No sense prolonging it. He was not one of her targets.

Kneeling beside him, she took Skinner’s knife in her teeth and pressed the tip of the blade against his chest. It slid between his ribs and into his heart’s right ventricle, leaving a slice wide enough to divert most of the blood flowing to his brain into his chest cavity. The frightened light in his eyes flickered, and then he slumped against the wall.

He had a gun and a taser, but the Shine had no use for ranged weapons.

She moved on, trotting down the hallway. The stark lights overhead provided no cover, but then, she didn’t need cover. She needed a means of stemming the flow of blood from her hips.

The scent of fresh coffee from somewhere ahead brought her up short. Yes. That was what she needed.

Accelerating, she rounded a corner to find an open door with a small sign that said ‘Employee Break Room’ above it.

‘There are two ponies in the break room along with five chairs, a table, and a coffee pot. One is a young mare, barely out of her teens. Her brother abused her when she was tiny and her mother tossed her into the street the day she reached the age of majority. She joined the gang six months later. She particularly enjoys giving out beatings, though she has a torn rotator cuff on one foreleg. Eliminate her quickly. She is an excellent shot.’

‘The other is a stallion with a minor heart defect. It will kill him in middle age. He abuses steroids. They are exacerbating the issue and leaving him with poor bone density.’

Both were armed, but neither were ready.

The Shine evaluated their capabilities with a cold detachment, then swung through the doorframe at a full gallop.

The mare was beside a small radio, listening to a hoofball game. She looked up with a small, friendly smile, expecting to see Mister Torque back from the shop with her potato chips. The Shine’s flying hoof caught her in the throat as she was halfway to a standing position. Gagging, she stumbled sideways out of her chair, putting one leg on the table. It was the last mistake the filly ever made. The Shine slammed her hoof down on the girl’s crown. She was dead before she hit the linoleum.

Across the room, the stallion started to rise. He’d just been finishing a little puzzle and was about to fit the final piece into place. He saw a filthy, bloody mare with no cutie-marks and a look in her eyes that sent his skin crawling standing over the corpse of his best friend.

He went for his trigger bit.

The Shine snatched the half full pot of coffee off the table and tossed it into his face, then took a running leap off of the nearest chair. Her weight was enough to send him crashing to the ground as she landed squarely on his back. Cocking her leg, she delivered a quick shot to the back of his head, crushing his medulla oblongata.

Standing over the bodies, she allowed herself a moment to breathe. No sense falling into shock. Shock would come soon, but there was something else that needed doing first. Making her way to the employee refrigerator, she opened it and pulled a bottle of rotgut vodka from the bottom shelf.

‘Sterilize, then cauterize.’

Unscrewing the cap, she splashed the alcohol across her flanks, washing away a significant amount of the dye along with much of the blood. The pain was there, but it was not something the Shine needed, so it was ignored. Using an edge of the dead mare’s jacket, she wiped the remains of her cutie-marks as clean as she could, then picked up the hot plate that the pot of coffee was sitting on.

‘There is no pain. Only need.’

Setting the hot plate at an angle on the nearest upright chair, she turned slightly to one side and pressed her flank down on it. A sizzle was followed by the scent of cooking meat and hair as the wounds were cauterized.

‘Shock is thirty-eight minutes away, followed by unconsciousness for a period of not less than seven hours,’ the Talent reminded her. ‘Agony comes and goes. Need remains.’

She set her other flank against the hot plate, letting it seal the cuts.

That done, she pulled the gun-sheath off of the mare’s body, ripping off one of the ammo pouches. Wrapping the strap around her knee, she stuck Skinner’s knife through the bottom. It made a serviceable holster.

At last, the Shine was ready. There were needs yet to be fulfilled.

Mister Skinner stood in his office, running a hoof through his thick mane as he considered his options

His griffin wing clipper was magnificent for shattering equine kneecaps and ankles. Watching the mare wriggle about on four broken legs had a certain attraction to it. Then again, he did have the spiral hook. Unwinding her intestines would take quite some time, but it was always worth the look in the eyes of his victims as they watched it happen.

He flicked his eyes back at his hip, to the leaping fish that was his cutie-mark, then shook his head. No...no, not worth the time to consider something like that. His talent didn’t speak to him any longer, even to beg. Silly fish die screaming. That was the way.

Picking up a meat stripper from the end of his row of tools, he fitted it into a cuff around his hoof that reasonably simulated a griffin claw.

‘Yes...yes, this will do. Let her see her fleshless face in the mirror.’

Setting the tool back on his rolling cart, he turned to the door.

There was a soft squeak, followed by a loud thump just outside.

Reaching over to his desk, he pressed his antechamber intercom button and asked, “Bonsai? Bonsai, what was that?”

He paused, waiting for several seconds, then pressed the ‘listen’ button.

A soft retching noise trickled through the speaker, like somepony attempting to cough something up. They gagged a couple of times, and then there was another thump followed by a wet pop and, finally, silence.

“Bonsai, if you’re watching those Neighponese martial arts films instead of answering the phones again, you will be cleaning up once I am done tonight,” he growled, then trotted to the door and pulled it open.

He found himself eye to eye with a mare.

It was his little fishy; his toy for the evening.

Over the mare’s shoulder, he could just make out the bodies of two of his regular soldiers lying atop one another in the center of the room. Only one had his gun bit between his teeth, but the strap connecting it to his gun was sliced clean through, along with most of his neck. The other looked to have died before he could get to his weapon.

Bonsai—his very pretty secretary who spent most of her time watering or cutting on one of the ridiculous little trees she kept on her desk—lay with her cheek resting against the intercom. The hilt of a letter opener sprouted from her right eye socket. Beside her, Miss Amber sprawled on her back, dead hooves still clutching at what was left of her esophagus. A pooling red stain gathered on her chest and the floor beneath.

His attention was gradually drawn back to the mare standing just inches from him.

She was soaked in blood. It ran from her thin braid down the end of her nose and dripped from her eyelashes in a steady stream, but she seemed not to notice. She was staring intently into his eyes.

“Little Minnow,” she whispered, taking a step forward.

His knees felt suddenly weak. He reached up to put a hoof on her breast or perhaps to simply touch her to see if she was real, but his leg encountered something strange sticking out of his chest. He peered down, trying to figure out what she’d managed to attach to him.

It was one of his knives.

“Little Minnow. Poor Little Minnow,” the mare murmured, taking a step closer. “Father told you the fish were meant to be free, but when you let them go, they all swam away. Even your little sister. You loved her, and when she couldn’t leap or swim anymore, you just didn’t know what to do. She’d have left you, like all the others. That’s why you did it, isn’t it?”

Skinner stumbled back and tried to take a breath. Something in the back of his throat bubbled, but no air flowed in. She’d punctured his lung. A very careful strike. One to be admired.

She advanced on him, and as she did, their gazes met. A gentle light seemed to flicker behind her eyes, like a candle shining in darkness.

His sister’s sweet face appeared in his mind; she lay in her hospital bed, holding his hoof as he watched her go. She was in so much pain, the little fish who wouldn’t jump anymore, wouldn’t play, wouldn’t smile, no matter how he held her or loved her. It was his responsibility to take care of the little fish and make sure they didn’t hurt. They told him it wasn’t his fault, but he knew better.

Death saved the little fish from suffering. Death gave her peace.

He’d given her death, with a pillow, in the night. She’d fought him, but only for a moment. Then it was done.

Strange, that he’d remember these moments and thoughts. They were from so long ago. Now death was coming to save him. When had he started to enjoy watching death save the fishies? He couldn’t remember the exact moment when it first happened.

His throat contracted as he tried to inhale again, but all he could taste was molten copper boiling up out of his lungs.

The knife. He scrambled for the knife, but it wouldn’t come free. All he could feel was the slowly burgeoning terror growing inside him. He couldn’t breathe. He was suffocating like a fish out of water.

“Minnow,” the mare said, softly. “You should have let her go in her own time. That was your destiny. You should have taken care of the fishes and freed them when the time was right so there would always be more fish in the sea. It was never your right to decide when they would die.”

His front knees gave out, and he started to gasp, his muzzle working open and shut as he fought for a breath that wouldn’t come. A punctured lung. She’d punctured his lung, and now he was drowning in his own blood. That’d been one of his favorites. His victims always looked so thankful when the moment arrived and they weren’t afraid anymore, when they finally passed on.

He’d made them thankful for death. Now, as his heart began to hammer in his chest and his muscles burned for oxygen, he began to understand why.

The Shine watched the stallion as he flailed about on the carpet. It was several minutes before he was well and truly gone. They were very long minutes, but his fear was inconsequential. He needed to die, for too many reasons. At last, he lay still, a pool of bright red blood drooling from his lips and nose.

Placing a hoof on his neck, she pulled the knife out of his chest. Taking the kerchief from his inner pocket, she wiped the weapon, then slipped it back into the holster on her leg.

‘Move on. There is still one who needs. He is above you. Two floors up, take the stairwell at the end of the hallway. There is a single remaining Jeweler. He’s just found the body of the interrogation room guard. Kill him before he can reach the phone in his office. It’s on the way.’

The white pegasus stood on the rooftop of the building, looking out over the bay. The first few drops of a coming storm darkened the gravel at his hooves. Overhead, grey clouds gathered, and distant thunderheads rumbled as the cloud factories kicked their output into high gear for the spring months. He spread his wings, not to take off but just to feel the wind in his feathers.

Freedom. That wind was freedom from yet another in a long string of responsibilities he’d rather not have taken on, but the money was good and the jobs were usually far more pleasant than the one he’d just seen ended.

‘Do you really feel sympathy for her?’ he asked himself.

It was an odd emotion and one that hadn’t really bothered him in many years. Why should he then be feeling it now? Still, there it was; guilt. He was feeling guilt. So very curious.

Nothing for it, though. Sweet Shine was likely dead, or in a condition in which she would not wish to be saved, even if he’d had the inclination to try. Her death served a purpose, and his purpose was satisfied.

Giving himself a rough shake, he folded his wings against his sides.

‘I must ask the memory extractors if they can do away with this ridiculous sentiment when I see them,’ he thought. ‘I’d rather not carry these feelings into my retirement.’

He turned to leave.

His only warning was a flash of yellow out of the corner of one eye. Then she was on top of him.

Her first strike cracked his dorsal wing bone and the second shattered it, whilst the third sent him crashing onto his belly. A pegasus, when attacked, will first attempt to take flight. The agony as he tried to lift the broken wing was enough to drive him to his knees again.

Twisting to one side, he tried to roll out of the way. He felt certain another blow was coming, but all he found was her standing there looking down at him from a meter or so away. Behind her, the door down into the building was open, and a trail of blood led right up to her rear hooves. She was a horror, drenched in bodily fluids, though not many of them seemed to be her own.

“S-Sweet Shine…” he stammered, trying to pull his hooves under himself. For some reason the back ones didn’t seem to be working. Very unusual. He tried to turn his head to see what might be wrong with them only for a spike of pain to lance through his neck.

Ah. Now it made sense. She’d broken his spine with that last kick. It was broken in several places, no less. He could smell his own urine but couldn’t feel it running down his legs.

“The Other is...absent, Pony-With-No-Name,” the Shine replied. Sitting down, she watched him struggle in the dirt of the rooftop. The rain began to fall harder, pounding down on his chest. It felt good. Cool. Calm.

He stopped trying to right himself and merely lay there, looking up at her out of one eye.

His heart was fluttering. Fluttering and weak. Why? Had that last strike done something besides break his back? His lungs still seemed to be working.

The Shine eased down until he could see her from both eyes. “You are going to die soon, Pony-With-No-Name. The knife between your shoulder blades has severed the anterior spinal artery, and blood is pouring into your chest cavity. It will be painless, so long as you don’t move much.”

He shut his eyes for a moment. Inevitability was something he was used to. So many of his former targets inevitably died. He’d long ago accepted the inevitability that he would one day join them. Still, he was afraid.

“Not...not so soon,” he mumbled. Already, he could feel the weight growing in his limbs. Sleep was coming, a long, empty, restful sleep without dreams or nightmares. “P-please…”

A warm leg slid underneath his upper body. He glanced up to find her cradling him against her chest. Tears were dripping onto his cheeks as she held him close, tenderly running a hoof through his mane. A tiny smile spread across his pale face.

He’d always hoped somepony would cry for him, at the end.

It was what he needed.

After a long time, the Shine got to her hooves, leaving the corpse where it’d fallen. The rain was coming in a steady drumming that washed the blood from her fur and mane.

Soon, the Other would be returning. She needed to get somewhere safe and tend to her wounds before that happened, else the Other might let them fester. The Other was likely to be unstable, and dying of hypothermia or infection wouldn’t do.

‘There’s a first aid kit in the basement,’ the Talent whispered. ‘It is time to leave.’

The cafe smelled terrible, but the thin mare wasn’t much bothered.

Her coffee was cold and her suit was as close to rumpled as it’d ever been, but the investigation was complete and the dead were sanitized.

She levitated her pen over the final report, tapping the end against her teeth as she thought about what might need adding. As always, her work was meticulous, but many of the particulars of the matter were impossible to verify.

Complete body disposal had proven impossible. An unknown faction arrived halfway through the sanitation process, left the cleaning team unconscious in a nearby alley with their memories wiped, and finished the job. It had all the hallmarks of a government agency or one of management’s ‘deep cover’ teams, but that wasn’t her problem. The job was done and Mister Skinner’s business liquidated. The books were balanced on a razor’s edge, but they were balanced.

That left the question of what to do with Detective Shine.

She’d been found by several of their agents two days days later, drunk and half asleep in a bar. None of the agents were inclined to attempt an extraction at that time, particularly considering Mister Torque’s drunken rant at the Randy Squirrel the night before.

Ten dead. Skinner’s business destroyed. Management’s agent dead. The sole survivor hadn’t actually been there during the massacre, and none of the other guards on the adjoining streets had seen anything.

All signs pointed to a single mare, working alone. Management wanted the entire business swept under the rug. Detective Shine looked entirely likely to leave the police department. A pony without cutie-marks was useless as an undercover agent.

The thin mare let the nib of her pen rest on the form’s ‘expunge’ box. Miss Shine’s death would tie up most of the loose ends, considering she was the final link in the design. Of course...ordering an assassination carried certain risks, and against an opponent who could destroy eight street soldiers after slicing off her own cutie-marks, then gut a mob boss and her own partner, there was the possibility that they might lose yet more material assets in the effort.

No sense in that. For the moment, the books were balanced. Let the streets eat Detective Sweet Shine. She was of no consequence.

Paying her tab, the thin mare folded up her papers and set them to one side, allowing herself a smile for a job well done.

Act 3 Chapter 21 : Guess What I Did Today!

Whilst most ponies take for granted the technological explosion of the last hundred years that allowed for great advancements in personal comfort, safety, information access, and entertainment, few consider the steps taken to get us there in their day to day lives. Entirely new fields appeared almost overnight to support these developments. Materials science was almost unheard of until the Crusades, when the Princesses looked at the body counts of the early engagements and judged that purely magical armor was insufficient to the task.

Before the war, ponies believed dragonfire to be some simple exhalation of ignitable gasses combined with a spark, but after the war began and Equestrian scientists could get a good look at the phenomena firsthoof, they quickly realized it was much more destructive than the involved temperatures could account for. Dragonfire is capable of burning through inches of solid steel and melting entire bricks of lead to a molten slurry within seconds. After some analysis, the power behind the fire turned out to be a form of unmaking magic, dissolving the very bonds holding the atoms of a target together.

It was long known that dragons could enchant their own breath with various effects, but the intrinsic nature of these energies meant that even the least powerful dragon could melt their way into an asbestos-lined tank. Many different materials were tried and many of Equestria’s allied dragons (of which there were several) huffed and puffed themselves hoarse trying to find a solution to the problem. Even so, years of magical research failed to produce a shield that would deflect dragonfire without either killing the caster or setting fire to everything nearby.

Finally, at long last, a solution was discovered in the kitchen of the Maresechusetts Institute of Technology when it was observed that even the most vicious cleaning spells would not remove the thin veneer of cheese sauce from the bottom of the employee break room oven. Once the producers were hunted down, their manufacturing process was determined to contain neither actual cows nor anything that could be called cheese but a very clever chemical analogue made of condensed magic and industrial run-off. While the first live test subjects were understandably reluctant, queso-armor proved quite successful even against full power dragonfire, and the resultant increase in the department’s funding led to many more advances.

-The Scholar

“To be honest, most of that is stuff I don’t remember,” Taxi finished. “I reconstructed bits from secondhoof accounts and rumors, but all I really have is flashes here and there.”

I realized my muzzle was hanging open and quickly wiped a string of drool off my cheek. “So...what? That’s it?!”

She nodded, pulling her mane down over her shoulder and beginning to rebraid the tips.

“I see things in my dreams sometimes. Skinner bleeding on the carpet. Fox Glove’s body, cooling in the rain. It’s enough to know that I did do the things they say I did. The nearest thing after Fox Glove left the room that I remember with total clarity is you showing up, grabbing me by the tail, and hauling me out of that bar. The guy with two black eyes and some missing teeth who was drinking with me was in Skinner’s hideout when I was captured, so he saw the aftermath. He was a little reluctant to tell me what happened at first, and he tried to run, hence the injuries, but—”

“Wait, he wasn’t there, was he?” I interrupted. “I thought you said there weren’t any survivors.”

“He was out buying doughnuts and chips when I somehow broke out of the interrogation room,” she replied, guiltily. “He missed me by seconds or he’d probably have died too. He did tell me what the bodies looked like, though. I killed them, Hardy. It was my combat style, before I learned all the pressure point strikes. Even Fox Glove. I don’t know who he was working for and...and I don’t care.”

I shut my eyes and drew in a breath. My cutie-mark was cold as ten graves. Ten well-deserved graves.

“You spoke at his funeral, Sweets. You called him a ‘good officer’. You told them he died bravely in the line of duty.”

She shrugged and picked up her saddlebags, slinging them over her hips to cover her scars. “Yes. I lied to everyone. A murderer added an extra lie on top of plenty of others. Are you surprised?”

The Bull lurched suddenly, and Mephitica leaned her head through the door from the engine compartment.

“Pardon me, ladies and gentlecolts, but we’ll be leaving this plane of existence soon! Ready to go?”

I held up my hoof. “Give us ten minutes, Mephi.”

She nodded, then ducked out of sight, leaving my driver and I to sit staring at one another across one of those silences so uncomfortable you wish you could fill them with anything up to and including the screams of your firstborn being boiled.

Taxi broke it first.

“So?”

I shrugged. “So, what?”

Pushing herself up, she marched across the cabin and poked her nose against mine. “So...say something! I killed all those ponies! You saw me murder Astral Skylark! I slaughtered my own partner!”

I put one hoof on her forehead and shoved her onto her backside.

“What do you want me to say, Sweets? After what you just told me, I’m reasonably sure you’re not going to kill yourself or do some kind of stupid self-sacrifice crap. I needed the truth. I’ve gotten it. We’re done here.”

She gave me a look like I’d popped her one with a baseball bat.

“T-that’s it? I’m not a jury or a judge! I k-killed all those people! I’m a monster!”

“No, you’re Need,” I corrected, tugging my coat to one side so I could point at my cutie-mark. “I don’t feel for those people who almost killed my best friend. Justice was done. I’m Justice, so I’m qualified to speak to that. You killed killers to save lives that needed saving, and your life just happened to be one of them. You want to know if what you did in some altered state of mind was right or wrong, you should ask somepony else. I don’t know. What I do know is that it was just.”

Taxi opened her mouth but ended up sitting there bobbing her head like a drunk fish as she tried to think of something to say to that. Of course, there was nothing worth saying. Some ponies might think it would have been harder or that I’d have some reservations. After all, my best friend killed ten ponies and an eleventh right in front of me.

Reaching out, I offered her my hooves. Without another word, she crawled over against me, and I wrapped my legs around her middle, resting my chin atop her head. I wished I could smell her, just then. I had to settle for imagining the scent of joss and sweat. There were all those years between us, many full of tears and blood, but I wouldn’t have traded any of them away if it meant losing her.

“I...I love you, Hardy,” she muttered, squeezing my barrel tight enough that I had trouble breathing for a moment. Her tears in my fur were warm, but she wasn’t weeping or sobbing, though I heard a little sniffle now and then.

I smiled and rubbed my cheek against her mane. “Yeah...yeah, I know, Sweets.”

We sat there, holding each other, quietly taking in the scenery for several minutes as she let out what must have been years’ worth of pain by drenching my chest in snot and tears. I didn’t really want to get up and would have happily lain there for an hour or two, but my rear legs were starting to float and one of Taxi’s hooves was growing some eyes.

Then things got really weird.

The trip back through the ruffled edges of spacetime was enough to turn my stomach a half dozen times over. Then my vomit mutated into creatures which escaped through a hatch in the floor.

Swift came out of the engine room to tell me something along the lines of ‘The Screaming God In Chains Will Eat Your Soul’, and Limerence was wandering about on the ceiling weaving socks with his own self-produced spider silk. To be fair, they were lovely socks, and weaving socks with eight legs is quite the challenge.

“Welcome back to Detrot, ladies and gentlecolts! We appreciate you choosing the Pan-Equestria Subterranean Express for your travel needs! Please take any luggage or extraneous limbs which may have become detached during the trans-planar jump with you when you exit the passenger car. Thank you, and have a nice day!”

Taxi stumbled against me, still a bit uneasy on her hooves after the last bout of gravitational shifts. I wasn’t feeling especially stable myself, putting a hoof around her neck to keep myself from pitching onto the fuzzy floor of the passenger carriage.

“Sir, if somepony ever asks whether or not I want to drown in liquid poop or ride the living train again, I’ll totally take the first option,” Swift groaned, trying to pull herself up.

Limerence straightened his vest and checked to make sure his notepad and knives were still in place. “It brings a certain discomfort knowing the four of us can make such a decision from personal experience.”

Mephitica popped out of the engine room, her stewardess cap perched on her head and her tail wagging like a cheerful spaniel. “Detective! I hope you enjoyed your ride. I would love to offer you our services again as soon as we return from...wherever we may be going next!”

“I hope I never need them again, Meph,” I grunted. “Still, it was good to see you.”

“You as well! You parked your cab near Twenty-Sixth Street, right?” she asked.

Taxi gave her a confused look. “I never mentioned that…”

“Of course not! That would make it so much less interesting to know,” Mephi chirped, trotting to the back of the passenger cabin and pushing open the back door. “Now, then, I’ve landed us in another abandoned station one street over from Twenty-Sixth. If you’ll disembark, I will be on my way. I hear the griffin lands are having some really spectacular bloodshed just now, and I don’t want to miss out on another minute of it!”

It was with some relief that we crowded out of the Bull onto a small, dusty, and unlit platform in the steamy underbelly of the city. I could feel it, the second my hooves hit the ground. Home.

It was good to be back.

Taxi had her torch out and was providing illumination for the empty train station as Swift and Limerence hopped out beside me. I inhaled and got the first whiff of an actual scent which managed to creep through Twilight Sparkle’s fading magic. Unfortunately, it was the smell of our transport.

I turned to the Bull and pulled off my hat, giving it a quick nod. Several of its eyes were watching us.

“Thanks for the ride, Cordbreaker. You take care of Mephitica, wherever you’re going, alright?”

The train let out a snort which somehow communicated the idea that I’d stated the obvious.

“If you could, would you convince her to swing back to Equis in...eh...three weeks?” I asked, tapping the platform for emphasis. “We might need an escape route if the planet starts to freeze.”

He jiggled a little on his wheels, then made an agreeable ‘toot-toot’ sound with some orifice I stringently avoided picturing.

Swift edged over and gently brushed her wingtips over the nearest bit of exposed metal. “I...um...I’m sorry I was rude earlier, Mister Cordbreaker.”

One of the eyes nearest her rolled in the socket, and then all of them blinked shut at once, leaving us in darkness.

Shifting aside a piece of aluminum siding leaning across the entrance of the subway station, I pressed my forehead against the metalwork. Taxi pushed up beside me, and together we heaved the gates open with a clang that echoed up and down the street.

We filed out into a refuse-filled alley one street over from the Night Trotter.

The blood red sky still hung overhead, and it’d rained recently, the humid air making my fur stick to my rump, but the smell of my city made it all worth it. I suppose the scent of garbage and hobo piss might be a bit less romantic to some, but for me, it was the finest perfume. Of course, anything is perfume after a ride in the Bull.

It was time to get centered. Time to get the ball rolling and charge the enemy lines. Time to self-actualize and make a plan of action.

I straightened my shoulders and marched onto the sidewalk. Behind me, somepony’s stomach rumbled so loud I almost jumped right out of my skin.

Taxi had one hoof on her belly, and her cheeks were pink.

“Hardy, I hate to bring this up, but I think I puked up everything I had in my stomach during the reentry. I don’t suppose we could go get something to eat, could we?”

“Now that she mentions it, Detective, I do find I could use a meal as well,” Limerence added, adjusting his coat. “We should also find somewhere to plan our next moves.”

At the mention of food, I twitched one ear towards my back, but no shrill, slightly grumpy voice piped up to agree with my friends’ sentiments. For the last twenty-four hours, I’d had the growing sensation of a limb I quite enjoyed having that’d suddenly gone missing.

I turned to Swift, who was rubbing the scar on her chest.

“Kid, you think Tourniquet would mind some guests? I’d like to get Mags back as soon as I possibly can.”

She shook her head and smiled, sheepishly. “She’s listening to us, and no, I don’t think she’d mind some guests.”

“She’s...listening to us?” Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the bottle with the ladybug in it. The little insect looked up and lifted its wings in a bit of a shrug.

“She’s not listening through the ladybug network, Sir. At least, not to us,” Swift murmured, a bit nervously. “Something happened while we were gone.”

“Is this one of those ‘something’s where I’m going to be absolutely furious when you explain it to me?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Yes, Sir. I do believe it is, Sir.”

I pulled off my hat and set it to one side, opened the Crusader, and tapped the bullets out of it into my pocket. That done, I sat down facing Swift.

“Alright, kid. Piss me off.”

Edging over to the brick wall of the building nearest us, she kicked aside a sheet of cardboard. A black electrical cable as big as my leg sprouted like a grotesque snake from the sidewalk underneath, then disappeared into the structure itself a meter or so beyond. Reaching down, Swift laid her hoof on the cable itself.

I took a step back as a soft glow started to radiate from her eyes.

“Mercy, kid! Take your hoof off that before it—”

“It’s fine, Detective.”

Now that made me jump. Swift’s mouth had moved, but that wasn’t her voice coming out of it. I stood there, dumbly staring at my partner as light poured out of her head in two flickering beams.

“Uh...Tourniquet?” I asked, cautiously.

My partner’s body nodded, then took a moment to look at its own hoof, examining it front and back. “Oooh, I never got resolution like this before! I can actually feel physical inputs in high fidelity!”

“That is extremely creepy,” Taxi commented. “I mean, it doesn’t really compare to some of the stuff I did in bed earlier today, but...that’s creepy.”

“Agreed,” I mused. “Still, that’s just weird, and I’m not feeling particularly angry yet, so I’d like to know the other half of this little trick.”

“Sorry. I thought I should let you know that if you can find a major electrical system that’s connected to the grid, I can actually see you as you move around. I might even be able to send some Aroyos to help you if you get in trouble. There are a few exceptions, like Uptown, the Castle, and anywhere near the Shield pylons. Oh, and if you get too far from the street, I lose you.”

Ah.

“So...you’re...spying on basically everyone...everywhere in Detrot.”

“Errr...a little, yes. I promise, I haven’t been watching anypony in the bathroom or anything! I’m just trying to keep everypony safe.”

I shut my eyes and inhaled the tepid air of the alley.

“Tourniquet, we’re coming back to Supermax within the hour. Can you make sure Mags is ready to leave?”

Swift’s mouth shut, and Tourniquet seemed to be thinking.

“She will be ready to leave,” she said, finally. “I just have to tell Jambalaya to...erm...stop her ‘Aroyo’ lessons…”

“Aroyo lessons?” Limerence asked curiously.

“She’s made some pretty surprising progress. Apparently her father was already teaching her when he...um...when he died. Maybe it’s best you see when you get here.”

“No, you tell me right now!”

“Oops, Swift wants her body back! Gotta run!”

The unearthly light faded from my partner’s eyes, and she smacked her lips a couple of times. Her pelt was standing on end a little as she pulled her hoof off the cable and stepped back.

“Icky. It tastes like I’ve been licking batteries,” she muttered, smoothing the fur on her forelegs down as best she could. She looked up and realized we were all staring at her. “What’d I miss?”

“Kid, what was Tourniquet about to say to me?!” I demanded.

“Um...I...don’t know. I just wanted my body back so I could ask if we could find some fresh turkey, so I can make a grilled cheese turkey sandwich when we get to Supermax. One of the changelings I talked to said they were really tasty.”

“Great. Lovely. We’re going to get there and my chick is going to be learning to cheat at poker and cook her own Beam,” I snapped, swinging around to face the street. “I’m not even going to discuss the whole freaky possession trick you two just pulled. Where’s the damn car?”

“Sir, Tourniquet can only do that if I let her. I’m the Warden of—”

“I said I’m not discussing it!”

The city streets were still quiet as a mouse. Even the sounds of gunshots were muted by an encroaching fog that seemed to roll between the buildings like a blanket of smoke, blotting out everything. In truth, I was grateful for the fog, though the red tint of the eclipse was spooky enough to have me jumping at every little noise. It gave us some decent cover as we moved through the city, even if it was also a stark reminder that the weather pegasi were well and truly off the job.

Creeping into the parking garage Taxi assured me we’d used—I was entirely lost by the time we got there—we found the Night Trotter just as we’d left it with the exception that somepony had painted the Cyclone motto ‘Ever Free’ on the side in red spray-paint. Taxi took this with her usual grace and poise as she disengaged the security system and we all piled in for the ride to Supermax.

“I’ll tear out their eyes and tattoo ‘Ever Free’ in the sockets! No...no, I’ll boil their livers and graffitti their guts! Wait, better! I’ll feed them to Goofball, ankles first! Swift, I need to borrow your dog!”

“No! Sheesh! He’s licky enough without a taste for pony!”

“Grrr, then I’ll smash their heads with my tires! Make jam from their bones! Then feed it to them on crackers!”

“Sweets, while you’re plotting all these murders, could you watch the road? We’re about to hit that—” Crash, splatter, spray. “—cabbage stand…”

The roads were as they’d been since the disaster: largely empty. We used Taxi’s Stiletto map to avoid most of the roadblocks and the territories of the majority of the gangs, but that meant going further out than any of us were comfortable with.

Swift, who’d been nervy the entire time, was getting gradually jumpier the longer we were out. She paced back and forth on the back seat as far as she could, then turned and marched back to look out the rear window for the fifth time in two minutes. Of course, there was nothing to see out there but the all-encompassing fog that’d grown thick enough to restrict visibility down to a few meters off the end of the hood.

“Kid...what’s wrong?” I asked. “I mean, besides all the obvious things.”

She turned her nose in the air and sniffed a few times, then rolled the window down and did it again.

“I...Sir, I smell...I smell dragons…”

“Dragons? As in...plural?”

She nodded.

“Sweets, how close are we to where Stella’s people said they’d seen dragons?” I asked, leaning forward to speak to my driver.

Taxi glanced down at the map spread out on the dashboard. “Pretty far. Farther into the city than I’ve heard of, but they’re dragons. It’s kinda hard to pin them down. I mean we might be—”

A heavy wingbeat overhead was our only warning before a blast of fire that left all of us momentarily blinded rolled down out of the sky and scorched the road off to our left. As my vision recovered, I barely had time to grab onto Swift before Taxi swerved us sideways and into the gravel at the side of the road. The fog momentarily lifted only to rush right back in a second later.

“Floor it!” I shouted, and my driver didn’t need to be told twice. Acceleration pressed us back in our seats, and we were off, flying through the fog at breakneck speeds. Unfortunately, that meant we were also shooting blasts of lightning from the undercarriage that lit us up like a firework.

A moment later, as I franticly cranked the window back up for what protection it might offer, another fiery breath spilled across our path, searing the front bumper and leaving blackened burns on the hood before we were out the other side and careering back onto the highway.

Limerence slowly raised his head to window level and peered out. “Detective, they can see this! I can silence the engine, but only if we slow down!”

“We can’t slow down or they’ll just cook the fog off and catch us!” I snapped.

Swift struggled out of my legs and grabbed the bag with the Hailstorm in it out of the footwell. “Sir! Roll the window back down!”

“Wait, kid, what are you thinking?!” I demanded.

Hauling the weapons system around her shoulders, she buckled the stomach strap, then put her hooves up on the window. “I see...Sir, I see two targets out there! They’re close! I don’t think they’re very big!” She turned to look at me and grinned. It was the grin of a tiger who's found herself some rabbits. “I want to find out if this thing works on dragons!”

“We don’t even know if that thing works on walls, yet!” I protested. “Do you even know how to fire it? It could be damaged or broken or—”

“Hardy, they’re going to cook us alive!” Taxi barked as another flash of flame almost hit us from the right. I could see some of the paint bubbling along the passenger side as we swerved again to try to avoid the next strike. “The car’s spell core doesn’t like dragonfire!”

Even as she said it, the engine gave a nasty cough before firing a bolt of green lightning out of one side and accelerating again.

“Sir, I can draw them off, even if the gun doesn’t work! I’m faster than any dragon!” Swift argued, pawing at the window. “Come on, lemme do this!”

“Arrrg...dammit! Kid, if you burn so much as one feather, your godfather is going to eat me and your grandmare is going to feed me to him, so you come back in one piece!”

Wind roared about inside the cabin as the window began to come down. My little orange monster smiled, showing off every one of those razors she called teeth. The Hailstorm’s turrets lifted from their mountings on her back and began to spin as ice formed on the weapon’s barrels and a cutting chill, colder than a winter’s day, filled the car.

Suddenly, I felt kinda sorry for those dragons.

Swift wedged her wings out of the window, letting the wind snatch her tiny body of the car. My last sight of her for about ten seconds was a tumbling neon blot on the fog, rolling end over end as she tried to stabilize in midair.

Then she was gone.

Overhead, a dragon let out a deafening shriek, and a wave of heat passed by much higher than the last one. It was still enough to clear the sky for a moment. A bright yellow dragon—a swollen yellow monster with a neck as long as the Night Trotter and wings that momentarily blotted out the red light of the eclipse—zipped by overhead at what seemed like a breakneck speed, then vanished again as the fog closed in.

“Miss Taxi, we must slow down,” Limerence called above the roll and crack of what sounded like thunder in the heavens.

“Are you nuts?!”

“I cannot cast my silence spell if we are ejaculating lightning from the undercarriage every five seconds! We cannot outrun these beasts, no matter how fast this arcano-technological monstrosity is!”

Taxi gritted her teeth and put one hoof on the brake. The deceleration was almost enough to throw me out of my seat, but Limerence grabbed the mouthstrap above the window and maintained his position. Raising his horn, he shut his eyes.

Sound dropped out so fast I expected my ears to pop, but even if they had, I wouldn’t have heard it.

We drove on in the unnatural silence, the thick air overhead lit up with fiery lights from time to time. I stuck my head out the window and tried to get a look at what was going on in the intermittent breaks in the fog.

I caught a glimpse of Swift pinwheeling through the sky behind a sky blue dragon who was about twenty times her size. Its scales shone red, though whether that was blood or just the strange lighting was hard to say.

The dragon was dipping, dodging, and doing everything it possibly could to get out of her way. As I watched, it pulled a quarter aileron roll, spinning on its wingtips before curling back on itself and blasting the air behind with jets of fire from an elongated mouth the size of a refrigerator.

It would have been a pretty good tactic against anything slower than Swift, but my partner was far too wily. Braking in midair, she shot straight up and then arched over the dragon’s back. The turrets on the Hailstorm lifted, and an explosion of something that looked like fire strafed down the dragon’s tail. The creature stiffened, then dove out of sight as fast as it could.

Something bright red splashed across the windscreen and Taxi shook her hoof at the sky overhead, snarling words that I was glad I couldn’t hear.

A flicker of yellow swept past, headed straight for Swift and preceded by a vanguard of fire. Then the fog enveloped everything again, leaving us driving in the empty whiteness once more.

The crackles and flashes of light continued for a minute or two longer, but as we drove on a little farther, they began to die down. At last, after what felt like a year, they stopped entirely.

Part of me very much wanted to drive on. Swift might have been brave enough to qualify as crazy, but she was damnably effective. That said, I couldn’t leave her out there.

I waved at Taxi until I had her attention, then mouthed ‘Pull us over’. She gave me a skeptical look, then hit the brakes hard enough to have me grabbing for the safety strap. We skidded into the ditch at the side of the long, deserted road, sending up a spray of gravel. Quietly shutting off the engine, she gave me a look that said ‘Now what, genius?’

I pointed at Limerence’s glowing horn, and he shrugged, then let the light fade.

“Alright, what stupid thing are we doing now?” Taxi hissed, just loud enough to be heard. “She’s a pegasus. She’s probably flying to Supermax to have tea with Tourniquet and ponder how we could be dumb enough to stop at the side of the road with dragons scooting around out there.”

“Probably, but if she’s out there with one wing burnt off, I am not leaving her here,” I growled. I left unsaid the possibility that she might be dead. It didn’t bear considering.

I cocked an ear towards the sky, but I couldn’t hear any of the telltale screeching of giant lizards or sounds of weapons fire. Just a soft heaving noise, like somepony running a vacuum in twenty second spurts some distance away. I turned back to my driver and librarian and said, in a low voice, “Okay, I’m about to call out. Silence spell and engine ready. If anything answers besides a toothy little filly, we go, alright?”

Rolling her eyes, Taxi put her hoof on the ignition, and Limerence set his horn shining.

Cupping my muzzle with one hoof, I stuck my head out into the fog.

“Hey kid! Mareco!”

This was followed by the third or fourth longest ten seconds of my month.

Finally, “Polo, Sir!” came back from somewhere off behind us.

“You okay, kid?” I called, still ready to dive back into the car if one of the lizards made itself known.

“Yes, Sir,” she replied, her words a bit muffled by the fog. “You didn’t get very far last I saw, but I can’t really move right now. Just follow my voice!”

Cautiously, I stepped out of the car onto the pavement, picking up my trigger bit. Limerence caught my tail with a gentle tug of his telekinesis, then pointed at the dust on the side of the road. “Detective, that’s magically contaminated. We’re in the wasteland near Supermax, if you’ll remember.”

I raised my hoof to show off my metal shoes. One of the four remaining nails chose that moment to drop out and clatter to the ground. “Yeah, well, I needed these replaced anyway. Should keep me safe enough, right?”

Lim levitated a handkerchief out of his front pocket and quickly tied it around my muzzle, tucking the flap into the top of my armor. “They should keep you safe, but I prefer bare hooves as does your driver. Your partner is going to need her lungs magically nullified once we reach Supermax if she’s inhaled more than a muzzlefull or two of the dust out there. That is unless she wishes them to mutate into anything besides lungs at some point in the future.”

“Duly noted. I’ll try not to sit in the mud.”

“For the sake of any children you might wish to have, probably best not.”

“If anything happens,” Taxi added, “make some noise and I’ll turn the engine over and get there quick. I’m going to have to repaint the Night Trotter anyway, so fixing the suspension is just another thing added to the list. Stay safe.”

“I intend to,” I replied, pulling my coat off my revolver and freeing my trigger. I cautiously stepped into the dirt at the side of the road; it glistened with tiny fragments of ground-up magical crystal.

‘Shallow breaths. Try not to contemplate what walking through this stuff is doing to your toes or future reproductive options,’ I thought, then shut my eyes until my breathing slowed. When I felt ready to proceed, I raised my voice.

“Hey kid! Sing something for me! I need a direction to walk in!”

“What should I sing?” she asked, after a brief hesitation.

“I don’t care! Sing anything!”

There was a much longer hesitation, and then a surprisingly sweet tenor came rolling out of the distance. She had a pretty good voice, for having foal-sized lungs.

“Standing here, in sweet sunlight, come love me dear, my morning sky, for when the wind blows through the night, I hear your kindly, loving sigh…”

I couldn’t suppress a smile or a little bounce of the hips as I strolled through the contaminated gravel towards the source of that familiar old ditty; Sapphire Shores might have sounded better with backup singers and a band, but Swift did the tune justice.

As I approached, the sounds of heavy breathing grew louder and louder until a shadow appeared a few meters off. It was a mound about three times my height and seemed to be moving in time to the breaths.

“Kid?”

“It’s fine, Sir! I’ve got them covered! Just stay away from the tail! It’s kinda flail-y.”

I swallowed, then continued forward, though I wanted desperately to flee back to the car, since I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like whatever I found. My nerves were jangling like a bell factory in an earthquake.

Only in a mad, capricious, and altogether absurd world could Officer Swift Cuddles have been perched on a giant yellow lizard’s head like a heavily armed rooster, her pistol resting against the beast’s scaly eyelid. Unfortunately, it turned out to be exactly that.

Doing my best to appear nonchalant, I marched up beside my partner and peered down at her captive. The Hailstorm’s turrets lifted briefly from their place on her back, both coated in a thick rime of frost.

“Kid, clarify this for me. Did you actually catch a dragon?” I asked quietly as the turrets tracked me.

“Um...Yes, Sir,” she said, trying to sound professional. “I thought you might want to question the suspect.”

‘The suspect’ was about seven meters from nose to tailtip, a smaller member of the Highland species but still big enough to worry a pony. Most dragons who lived in one of the draconic communities within Equestria tended to be from the tinier breeds, but Swift’s prisoner was large enough to swallow a pony with only a bit of chewing. The beast sat on all fours, its legs drawn up as though it’d been about to take off. One wing was bleeding freely from a torn membrane between two of the structural bones that left it looking like a broken kite. Its scales were the color of blooming sunflowers, but the half-light lent them a grisly cast.

The beast was very wisely not moving, except to take the occasional breath. I didn’t know whether or not Masamane could penetrate a dragon’s skull, but it seemed as though the dragon wasn’t sure either and was taking no chances.

Walking in a slow circle, I looked over its injuries. Besides the wing, it seemed relatively unhurt, though its entire left leg was covered in a thick layer of ice. The ice was melting, but beneath it, I could see a streak of flesh that looked like it’d been seared black. The scales surrounding the damage were cracked and brittle, seeping dark blood.

“Did the Hailstorm do this?” I asked, pointing at the wound.

“Yes, Sir!” Swift exclaimed, bouncing up and down a little on the dragon’s long muzzle. The dragon let out a faint growl and was silenced almost immediately by a poke in the eyelid with Swift’s pistol. “It fires this weird ice magic, kinda like a beam from a flashlight, but a little slower! Anything it touches gets frozen solid, and the range is more than fifty meters! I froze the blue one’s tail and it made a break for the mountains, but I’m sure I can catch it—”

“No, kid,” I said, holding up my hoof. “One dragon is enough for today. Besides, I don’t think we have cuffs big enough for this one.”

“But, Sir! You could go get a trailer and some chain from Tourniquet and I could wait here—” She trailed off at the look on my face.

I stepped around in front of the dragon and leaned down so it could see me out of its open eye. “You understand Equish? Blink twice for yes, or keep staring at me for no. If you keep staring at me and I think you’re lying, I’m going to have my partner turn your head into a popsicle.”

The large, reptilian eye widened briefly, then blinked twice.

“Good! Can you talk, too?”

Two blinks.

“Better. Now, I’m going to tell her to get off your head. You so much as muss my mane with that breath of yours then torture, hideous pain, blah-de-blah-de-blah. I’ve actually managed to get bored with threatening bodily harm, so if you piss me off, we’ll just skip straight to the part where I leave your body out here for the racoons.” I made a slight shooing motion with a leg at Swift, and she lifted into the air, climbing higher until she was standing on the dragon’s back, freeing its mouth to move. “Now, then...are we going to have a civil conversation? Or are you going to piss me off?”

The dragon spoke, slowly and cautiously. Its voice was surprisingly high for a beast that size, and I quickly realized we were speaking to a female of the species.

“I...will talk, pony.”

“You can call me Detective. And what is your name, Miss?” I asked, politely touching my hat with my toe.

“Vexis,” she growled, shifting on the rocks back and forth a bit. “May I lift my head from this gravel pit? The magic is making my scales itch.”

“Oh, sure. If you can feel the very slight weight on your back, that’ll be my partner. You haven’t been formally introduced. Vexis? Swift Cuddles. Swift Cuddles? Vexis.”

“How do you do?” Swift chirped, resting Masamane against the base of the dragon’s lone functional wing.

“You will die soon,” Vexis rumbled, raising her head until we were about the same height. “Ambrock will return with more of my royal kin! My people and I have come with an army by order of the King of Dragons to slaughter you all! Our legions will descend from the skies, and all who stand before us will die! Fire and brimstone will be your only comforts and death your only reprieve! Do not believe you can escape! If you let me leave now, I may see fit to grant you mercy one day and...and...”

She trailed off as she realized somepony was laughing. I mean, it was a pretty good speech and generally the kind that’s delivered with gusto and verve to a crowd of terrified townsfolk. In those circumstances, it would probably have been pretty effective. It was spoilt somewhat by having a giggling pegasus rolling around on her back. Turning her head, she stared down at my partner, who was sprawled between Vexis’s wings and yukking it up so hard she couldn’t stand.

“Oh, that’s a good one! You’re really funny, Miss Vexis,” Swift snickered, rolling back to her hooves as the Hailstorm’s barrels rolled back to point at her mount’s face. “You’re part of the Dragon King’s army? He’s recruiting from prep schools, now?”

The dragon squirmed a little as the flukes on either side of her face fanned shut. If we’d been playing poker, she’d have lost five hands straight on her expression alone.

“Kid? You sound like you know something I don’t.”

“Sir, I was P.A.C.T, remember? I might not have passed the physical, but I never had a problem in the classroom,” Swift replied, rolling to her hooves and matter-of-factly strutting down the dragon’s back to her tail. Swinging about, she pointed at the dragon’s back with her wingtip. “She’s between forty and fifty years old and she doesn’t have any combat scars, ritual runes, or rank markings. She’s molted maybe four times in her life. Her hoard wouldn’t even buy a condo. She’s barely a teenager as far as dragons go.”

The scales on Vexis’s face turned an odd shade of pink, and she lowered her nose slightly. “My brother will be back soon, and he’ll tear you both limb from limb and eat you-”

Taking off, Swift hovered around in front of the dragon’s face. “That blue guy I chased off wouldn’t be Ambrock, would he?”

Vexis cringed and shuffled a bit in the sand as though wishing she could dig herself a hole to hide in. “M-my brother is a mighty warrior! He is just going to gather his band, and they’ll return and your freezing wizardry will be as nothing before our power!”

Swift guffawed, landing back on her conquest’s neck and sliding down to her shoulders like a filly on a slide. “Oooh, whatever will save me from the terrible Ambrock! Oh no, I will be torn limb from liiimb...”

The dragon’s skull-fluke sank an inch at a time until it was flat against her neck, and her head drooped until it was resting in the gravel again; she looked about as embarrassed as it’s possible for a giant reptile to look.

“Did I miss a joke?” I asked.

Swift wiped a mirthful tear out of the corner of one eye, still giggling to herself. “Oh, Sir...Ambrock means ‘little pudgy chicken’ in Low Draconic. Stella taught me conversational Draconic when I was barely big enough to fit in his palm! Pudgy chicken! Teehee!”

“It’s just a name! My...my brother is coming back for me soon,” Vexis snarled, though there wasn’t much conviction behind it. “He’s coming b-back!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied. “Now! Swift, you got her covered?”

“Yes, Sir! If she moves so much as a whisker, I’m gonna freeze her like an icy pop!”

Casually leaning against Vexis’s chest, I crossed one foreleg over the other. She was surprisingly warm up close, and the humid air around her felt like a Prench bathhouse. Kinda nice, actually.

“Now, Miss Vexis...it is question and answer time! I question, you answer.”

The dragon blew a quick squirt of fire from her nostrils, turned her nose up, and declared, “I shall never betray my brethren!”

“Do I have to remind you that your brethren just ran away from a pegasus that can use a pillowcase for a sleeping bag?” I commented, buffing a small circle of yellow scales with the elbow of my coat, then pretending to check my reflection in them. “You answer my questions, I can at least promise you’ll get to leave here today not looking any more like freezer-burnt leftovers than you already do.”

Vexis scowled, though that might have been a default expression for most dragons. Her teeth were as long as my entire body, but she was just not that intimidating with Swift sitting behind her shoulders like an armed orange bookbag.

“Are...you one of those mad ponies I hear about from time to time?” she asked, tracing a little figure eight in the dirt with the tip of a claw big enough to impale me straight through.

“Undoubtedly. That said, there are some dragons in my city. Uninvited dragons. Unfriendly dragons. Dragons keeping ponies from leaving.” I blew on the tip of my hoof, then inspected it. “You...heh...you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that would you, Miss Vexis?”

A blue tongue snuck out between her front teeth, tasting the air, and then she turned away. “You’ll get nothing from me, little pony.”

“Oh...too bad.” I pushed myself up and twirled a hoof in her direction. “Swift, I guess we’ll get nothing from her. You can go ahead and freeze her head.”

The Hailstorm’s turrets recentered on the back of Vexis’s skull as Swift bounced to her hooves, and a dull white glow began to gather around the barrels of the gun.

“W-wait!” the dragon squeaked, her neck swinging around to stare down at my partner with a panicked expression. “We just followed the war band! We’re just here for the gem mines! I’ve never eaten a pony! I swear!”

I stepped back and held up a leg for Swift to stop. She knew the script, but her gun still looked pretty eager to fire. “You weren’t with the dragons who were scoping out the city?”

“No! They…” She hesitated, then clenched her jaw and muttered, “Th-they do not want clanless whelps in their flight…”

“Huh...I see. And what made you think trying to roast us was a good idea?” I asked.

Vexis smacked her lips, staring off in the direction I’d come from. “That vehicle you ride in smells delicious…” After a moment, she realized I was giving her a look and quickly wiped a bit of saliva off her chin. “We only wished to force you to abandon your transport!”

Swift piped up. “Sir? Dragons eat gemstones. They probably smelled the engine.”

Using a hoof to push myself away from her side, I moved around to stand just below Vexis’s chin. “You’re lucky you didn’t try to take a bite out of the cab. It has a spell core that would have popped you like a balloon.”

Her pupils went round in what I took for draconic dismay. “Magical gemstones?”

“Yep. Charged with industrial spellwork. Tell me this. Why has a flight of dragons decided to blockade this of all cities?”

Vexis blew a thin stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth along with a noise like a softly steeping kettle. “I do not know...much. I have only what I saw and the gossip of the whelplings and lesser dragons. I’m mostly here for the food. These lands are rich in gemstones...or at least, that’s what I was told. I haven’t been this hungry since I was freshly hatched.”

“Hey, rumors are what I’ve got right now, honey.” I gestured towards the glowing hole in the sky where the sun should have been. “You happen to like the sun, Miss Vexis?”

Her lips drew down into an angry frown. “The Sun and Moon have abandoned us. There is little any of us can do about that, is there, Detective pony?”

“Yahknow, you might be right almost any other day of the week,” I replied, tugging the Emblem of Harmony out of my coat and holding it up where she could see it. “Today? Not so much. You just very nearly cooked a member of the Equestrian government. Maybe one of the last. That might not mean much these days, but I know more about what’s going on than just about anyone else alive short of whoever caused this situation. So, you answer my questions, I’ll be on my way. Then you can go find your chicken...eh...brother.”

Vexis’s tongue flickered between her lips again, and she looked down at her frost-bitten scales. “I cannot leave either way. These injuries will cause a molt within hours, and one cannot fly with fresh scales. I will not be able to hunt or feed, and these pony-lands are short enough of game that does not talk. Why should I help those who’ve killed me?”

Melodrama and scales go hoof in hoof, as it turns out.

“If you’re real helpful, I’ve got some friends just up the road who I’ll send back to move you to a safe place. We have a safe place that’s pretty familiar with draconic guests and enough food to keep you from dying of hunger anytime soon.”

The dragon considered this for a long time, then finally slumped forward in the dirt, her long neck spilling out beside me. “You give your word I will not die here, pony?”

“I can’t give you my word you won’t die in Equestria, but if you help me, you will be given food, medical attention, and your freedom so long as you follow directions and don’t try to kill anyone. I promise you.”

“Sir, are you sure this is a good idea?” Swift asked in a soft voice, hovering down beside me. “I mean, what if she lies to us?”

“What if she does?” I answered, making sure Vexis could hear my reply. “If she knows something that could have saved us and chooses not to tell me, she dies in a few weeks when the world freezes.” I turned back to Vexis, who was looking very thoughtful. Or possibly hungry. It was hard to tell with all those teeth. “So, what’ll it be, Miss Dragon? Maybe freeze, but with a full belly and someone treating your frostbite in the meantime, or definitely freeze, alone in the wastes?”

Reaching back, Vexis gently snapped one of her frozen scales off and examined it, turning it back and forth between her claws. Based on what I knew of the durability and magically resistant properties of dragonscale, the Hailstorm’s attack was pretty scary.

“Mmm...you could die between here and the end of that road, leaving me in the wastes...or any one of a hundred other deaths you short-lived creatures seem to make for yourselves,” she mused, flicking the scale in my direction. “Still, I haven’t eaten anything but scraps and slow rabbits in close to a month. It would be nice to have a stomach bulging with game one last time before the end. No shame in dying gorged and content.”

“I’ll take that for a ‘yes’. Tell me about what caused the dragons to attack the griffons, then to come here and sit on the edge of the city instead of coming in and wrecking the place?”

“I know little enough. A pony, like yourself, came to meet with Carnath who speaks for the King of Dragons beyond the plateaus where the eagle-cats live,” she replied. “They gave Carnath a great wealth in gemstones, almost a third of his hoard again. Then they said that the flight should attack the eagle-cats. The knowledge he gave to Carnath allowed them to begin killing off the patrols. They attacked, and the eagle-cats fled here with their young. The pony returned and said that when the...the ‘sky turned against pony-kind’, the flight should lay siege to this town...”

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t, seeming lost in thought.

“What? Come on, finish that sentence!” I demanded impatiently.

Vexis snapped at the air in front of my face with her teeth, blowing my ears back. “I’m trying to think how! It was not as though it made sense. This is all rumors and hearsay! It could be enemy propaganda, for all I know. Some other faction of dragons is out there, in the wild lands beyond your walls. Several of Carnath’s flight were attacked by them whilst alone.”

“So there are...two factions out there patrolling the edges of the city?”

Vexis nodded. “Carnath suspected Emberites. That mad ascetic order won’t let their sleeping queen lie. They fought for you ponies in the conflict you call the ‘Crusades’, and they still wage their insane guerilla war in the dragon lands. It is a dragon matter, though.”

“You’re talking about followers of Dragon Lord Ember, right? What makes you think they’re in Detrot?” I asked, maybe failing to hide a bit of smugness at her surprised expression.

“Er...Yes. How do you know of them?”

“Equestrian government. Now, you were saying something a moment ago about the ‘sky turning against pony-kind’,” I said, changing tacks. “You attacked the griffins and a pony came to you. What did the pony look like?”

“I-I don’t know!”

“Was it a mare or a stallion?!”

“I...I don’t know!” Vexis stammered, pulling away slightly. I pursued until she couldn’t back up without moving her injured wing. “This is not first-talon information! The rumors say that some demented pony dared appear at the door of our cave uninvited and, instead of eating him, Carnath...invited them in. This pony declared they knew the future and would make us rich with it.”

“Go on…”

“It was madness, though! Madness that Carnath believed. He tells Carnath to stay back and keep ponies from leaving until...until a black swarm flows from the center of the city and a new star rises into the sky! That is all I know!”

I pressed on. “Changelings? Was the ‘black swarm’ changelings? Or Umbrum? What is this new star? Some kind of magic?”

“I...I don’t know! I only hear what the young say!”

“Did this pony say anything else?! Come on, tell me, damn you! I need to know!”

“I’ve no idea!” she squeaked, or as near a dragon can squeak.

“Was there anything else? Anything at all? Think! This may save your life!”

“P-please, don’t kill me!”

It was only then I realized I was less than an inch from the end of her snout and the mighty dragon was quivering like a leaf. I had one hoof raised, as though to strike her, and the sleeve of my coat was pulled back from the Crusader. Her eyes were locked squarely on it, and there was recognition in her gaze; terror stricken recognition. Even helplessness before Swift—who’d chased, downed, and captured her—hadn’t provoked that kind of reaction.

What magics could make a dragon cower? The ultimate answer, and one I hated myself a little for thinking, was ‘convenient ones’. If Carnath or whatever his name was really had led his entire flight into my city, they were the sort I was likely to need. Still, what she’d said about Emberites piqued my interested a little. Friendly dragons? That might be useful, too.

I lowered my leg and stepped back, brushing imaginary dust off my coattails as an excuse to look away from her.

“I’ve got what I needed. Kid? Come on, we need to go arrange your trailer for Miss Vexis here, unless she wants to walk a couple miles with that busted wing.”

Vexis hissed fearfully. “Pony...you violate the treaty just by having a Pistolium-Reginae upon your person! The entire dragon nation could be upon you if that became known! I would be seen as a species-traitor simply for speaking to you!”

“That treaty is a piece of paper that you lot were more than happy to tear up the second it became convenient to do so!” I snapped, rounding on her. “My father gave me this gun. Everypony in the government thought it’d been destroyed. So we’ll leave it to the diplomats on the next sunny day. In the meantime, the road is that way.” I pointed in the general direction of the cab.

“If you want to go tell the whole dragon nation about my gun, knock yourself out, but you’ll have to walk with a broken wing across however many miles and hope Carnath’s people, the beasts in the Wilds, and the Emberites don’t rip you to bits first. Now...you crawl your backside over to the tarmac there and my friends will be along shortly to get you some grub and give you a place to heal.”

Swift and I left Vexis where she was and started making our way back to the car. I made some room on my back for Swift to sit so she didn’t have to float the whole way there, then started following my own hoofprints in the dirt back through the foggy wasteland.

“Sir?”

“Yeah? What is it, kid?”

“I caught a dragon today!”

I tugged the kerchief off my face and passed it to Limerence, then leaned back and tried to relax in the Night Trotter’s comfortable back seats. Taxi was burning three sticks of incense and the car was quickly filling with smoke, but that didn’t seem to put Swift off a chance to tell her story to an attentive audience.

“—and then I did a double roll into a sky-drop to get around behind the blue one and he tried to hit me with fire breath by blowing it straight across his own belly! Too bad I was quicker than he was! I got him right in the tail and he started to make a break for it! Then the other one charged out of the fog and almost bit me in half! I had to loop around and let the blue guy go, but I strafed her butt and wing! That’s when she crashed and I landed on her face! You never saw a dragon so surprised!”

She paused, as though waiting for laughter, but my driver and librarian seemed more incredulous than amused.

“Your weapon froze a dragon?” Lim asked, leaning to one side to get a better look at the Hailstorm.

“All I had to do was think about my targets, and then it made a noise like a swarm of bees and there was this bright light! Hailstorm did the aiming and the freezing!” Swift exclaimed, patting the straps across her belly. One of the weapon’s barrels lifted from its mounting and very gently rubbed itself against her cheek before settling back into place. “I did the flying, though! It was so neat!”

“Yes, but...it froze a dragon,” Lim protested. “Their scales are rated at plus sixteen thaumic resistance, and they can survive bathing in magma!”

Swift just grinned proudly at him as she began to unclasp the Hailstorm and stow it back in its bag.

“So...what happened out there after that?” Taxi asked. “You downed a dragon. I’m assuming Hardy did something insane like try to interrogate it.”

“Oh, you should have seen him. He had that dragon crying for mercy by the end without even laying a hoof on her! She told us everything!”

“Not everything,” I interjected, quickly. “Some very interesting tidbits, though. I’ll tell you once we’ve got some food. I need time to think.”

I turned to look out the window, staring towards the center of the city and brooding over Vexis’s words as the fog closed in again, blanketing the town in thick shadow.

Act 3 Chapter 22 : Detrot Confidential

The Techno-Arcane Eventuality is a point of heated debate for many scholars of both philosophy and science, though very few ponies outside of academic circles have even heard of it and even fewer can comprehend the implications or possible consequences. That is strange for something that is has the potential to affect the lives of every living being in all of Equestria.

The Eventuality is, at present, little more than a theory, but it is one that is well supported by things most ponies see every day. It states that, at some point in the near future, we’ll have reached a place where the development of our magic and technology will merge to begin creating new life-forms which could potentially surpass us to become the new dominant life-forms on our world. Whether equine kind survives will be defined by just how friendly those life-forms turn out to be.

One might say the ‘Eventuality’ has already happened with the development of Sentient Constructs, or ‘Essies’ to use the layman’s terms, but there has yet to be a construct whose power has grown beyond the ability of ponykind to control. That said, the time will come when we will begin to improve ourselves with both technology and magic. Arcano-tech wings for pegasi, amplified horns for unicorns, and strength boosting exoskeletons for earth ponies are already in the works in several private sector companies, but those are some years from general use.

Once we’ve started replacing bits of ourselves and creating new life, can we really still call ourselves ponies? Or will we be treading the territory of Gods? If this is one of our possible destinies, should we embrace it or flee in terror of what we might become?

- The Scholar

Supermax grew out of the fog like a lighthouse on a stormy night, lit by spotlights which probably dated back to the days of Saussurea’s stewardship. Being illuminated didn’t make the starkly designed cuboid look any more attractive, but it sold the intimidation factor quite well.

A few pegasi and griffons were coasting around overhead, but they only seemed to be paying attention to us as a curiosity rather than a threat. One patrolling pegasus wearing a Nightmare Night skull mask buzzed low over the vehicle, floating along beside us just long enough to give me a quick wave.

The Aroyos had begun to decorate the outside of the prison with their own aesthetic. The chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot had bones woven into it along with strange symbols painted every few meters and dangling dolls strung up wherever there was an extra inch of space. It might have been purely artistic, but there was a certain regularity to the arrangement that suggested there might be something more to it.

As we drove up, the car’s engine was letting out some very worrying noises that reminded me of the time I’d attempted to microwave dinner without taking the tinfoil off it first, and Taxi was nervously petting the steering wheel like a frantic mother patting her child’s head after they’ve burnt their hoof on a hot frying pan.

My attention was pulled towards a group of perhaps fifty ponies, griffins, and zebras who stood in rows of ten stretching all the way across the parking lot. Wisteria was standing in front of them demonstrating the moves of a sort of elaborate dance or martial art. For a mare who’d been pregnant until very recently, she looked spry enough to wrestle a minotaur as she leapt, kicked, spun, and ducked through the various steps. Her audience followed in almost perfect synchronization, with the exception of a couple of young foals at one end who were stumbling through the moves.

It was strange to see so many people outside after the emptiness of the city streets. A few ponies were tilling small plots of open ground in the corners of the capacious parking lot while others dragged large black bags of what looked to be garbage out to some kind of pit dug a few meters off the road. Guards flew the skies or practiced hoof to hoof combat on the roof. I could hear the very regular crack and snap of gunshots on a range someplace behind the building. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said it looked a bit like a Royal Guard encampment.

Taxi slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid a filly in an orange safety vest who’d suddenly darted into the road in front of us.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” my driver snapped, poking her head out the window.

“Sorry!” the filly yelped breathlessly, lifting into the air for a moment on a pair of buzzing wings. “Crusada’ be expected! I be here to show ye where to park!”

“We don’t need a parking warden! The lot is empty!” Taxi replied gruffly.

“Oh, I and I know! I be tryin’ to get my mark as parking pony!” the filly chirped, wiggling her blank flank at us. She then produced a glowing red baton and waved us towards a section of the lot where somepony had laid down some very rough chalk lines approximately the width of a car apart.

“I don’t remember running in front of moving cars as one of the things I did when I was trying to find my talent,” I commented as we pulled into one of the spaces. “That’s a good way to find out your ultimate destiny is to be roadkill.”

“Agreed,” Taxi sniffed as she shut off the car and popped her seat belt off. “I can’t blame her, though. I mean, you did something way dumber than that to get yours.”

“Ah...yeah, well, there were extenuating circumstances.” Turning to Swift, I found my partner with her eyes shut, standing backwards on the seat beside me. She was staring deep into the vinyl, a tiny smile on her face. “Kid? Are you going to be alright?”

She flicked an ear in my direction and nodded, still watching the seatback through closed eyelids. “I think so, Sir. It’s not as overwhelming as last time. There’s so much going on, though! Tourniquet is inside my head and she’s telling me all about what’s been happening.”

‘Nope, never going to get used to that,’ I thought, then shook my head and asked, “What has been happening around here?”

“Lots of things! I mean, there’s a baker who the Aroyos rescued from a gang fight who’s set up shop and now the top floor always smells like baked bread, and there’s a school bus with five or six foals and their teacher from one of the villages in the next county who were stranded in Detrot when the Darkening happened and...oh...wait…” Her ears swiveled back against her head. When she continued, it was with a worry in her voice. “Sir, you...errr...you may want to get out and go around back of the building?”

“Uh...why?”

“Jambalaya has been teaching Mags to—”

I threw myself out of the car without waiting for her to finish and sprinted for the back of the building. The words ‘Jambalaya’ and ‘teaching’ were bad enough; the ganger was a tall drink of piss on her best days, but if Wisteria had left her to foalsit Mags, that could only mean terrible things.

A few ponies stopped as I raced past and called out greetings, but I couldn’t really spare much attention. Admittedly, some of my haste might not have been entirely related to fear of what Jambalaya was teaching my ward. She was a snoring, grumpy, lazy little mess-maker who ate her meat raw and bit my ears when she was bored, but I liked her. Maybe liked was the wrong word. Eh, not worth considering. She was my responsibility, and I was damned if Jambalaya was going to teach her any more bad habits than I surely already was.

I almost plowed face-first into a steel shack as I skidded around the back corner of the building. A dozen similar shacks and lean-tos were erected in rough rows, each with a different purpose and each with a line of people waiting for service. One seemed to be a blacksmith, with a hammer-wielding griffin pounding out metal horseshoes on an old-fashioned forge, while another was a seamstress, knitting together piles of very similar clothing that looked almost like uniforms. There was even—bless the heavens—a farrier.

Further back, well away from the shacks, an area of the ground looked to have been dragged clean of contaminated dirt. Bales of hay were set up with clumsily drawn construction paper pictures of monsters on them. At one end, a group of younglings of different species stood attentively in front of a unicorn mare it took me a second to identify as Jambalaya.

‘Breathe, Hardy. There’s only so many horrible things she can be teaching a group of children in a public place.’

I started to move towards them, then stopped as I realized the crowd had yet to notice me. Thinking quickly, I tugged off my hat, shrugged out of my coat, unlimbered my gun, and rolled them up into a ball on my back; no sense being any more recognizable than I already was. I left the anti-magic armor on, but it wasn’t the kind of thing most ponies knew me for wearing. That done, I was just one more slightly dingy grey earth pony; or at least, I thought I could pass for one.

Of course, my grand designs for anonymity lasted about two seconds.

I heard a shout of ‘Crusada!’ followed by pounding hoofsteps. I turned to flee but was immediately confronted by a wall of smiling ponies, shouting my name, cheering, and ready to slap me on the back until my spine turned to jelly.

‘Horseapples!’ I cursed, trying to return the grins and simultaneously deciding how many of the crowd I’d have to shoot to get away.

Before I could decide on any of the slightly rash escape plans my brain was offering up, something brown and furry with sharp claws latched itself onto my face. I was tempted to go ahead and let myself suffocate in the soft fluff, but there was still work to be done. Reaching up, I gently pried the aggressive ball of fur away from my muzzle until I could gasp, “Air! Mags, I need to breathe!”

“No, you don’t, Har’dy! You leaving me here for weeks!”

“I left for one day!”

“Too long!”

Around us, there was a collective ‘awww’ from the surrounding ponies that left my masculinity sobbing in a corner with a pint of ice cream.

“Ah! Back to de work! Leave Crusada be! He be busy and tired!” Jambalaya barked as she pushed through the crowd. Her horn sparked, and a soft glow of magic prized my ward away from my head, lifting her up onto my back. There were a few groans from the crowd, though most started to wander back to their tasks, still giving me the occasional sidelong smile or cheerful wink.

Mags clamped her claws around my upper neck and shoved her face into my mane.

“You not going away again,” she mewled, clutching me tightly. It wasn’t a question.

“I hope not far anytime soon,” I replied. “Believe me, you wouldn’t have liked this trip much.”

I shifted her around on my back until I could pat her on the foreleg... and my hoof contacted what felt like vinyl rather than feathers. Worse, it felt very much like a holster with something in it. I raised my head and stared at Jambalaya, wide eyed. “I’m imagining things. Jambalaya, please tell me I am hallucinating and you didn’t give her a gun!”

Jambalaya opened her mouth to reply but was saved by a flutter of feathers as Wisteria landed beside her. Folding her brilliantly purple wings against herself, she glanced between her daughter and I, then over my shoulder at Mags. She must have put together the entire exchange in seconds.

“Ye be askin’ we teach her, Crusada,” Wisteria murmured. Her daughter looked noticeably relieved to not have to explain the situation. “She be knowin’ some about guns a’fore she come to us. Ye wish de chick survive in de darkness?”

“Yes, but you know the kind of situations I’m going into! A gun just makes her a target!”

“She be a target de second ye choose to love her, Crusada’.” Wisteria replied, calmly. I stiffened and felt Mags take a sharp breath. “Ye wish her only to live? Ye leaves her here.”

“No!” Mags cried, but I reached up and put a hoof over her beak.

“It’s my job to protect her,” I growled, stepping closer to the Aroyo leader. “If you know of someone better suited and more dangerous, I want you to introduce us.”

She shook her head, running a toe over the decorative scars on her own chest. I might have been imagining it, but I thought there was a smile there, somewhere.

“We be teachin’ her to shoot for dat reason, says I and I. Ye may need de extra bullets before de end.” Wisteria opened a wing in the direction of the target range where the group of expectant foals still waited for Jambalaya to return to finish their lesson. “At least be lettin’ her show ye what she learns. Her sire...he teach her some. Mostly, she be needin’ practice.”

“I don’t want her killing. She’s seen enough death already without being the one holding the gun.”

“Do ye be thinkin’ I and I wished my foal to learn to kill, Crusada?” Wisteria snapped, pointing at Jambalaya with her wingtip. The young unicorn blushed, backing up a step towards the group of foals to see that they weren’t getting into trouble or maybe just to escape the conversation. Her mother ignored her retreat and continued, “Since de war, de Aroyos be fightin’ de stompas on all sides! Now...will ye see what de little one can do? Or do ye stick ye head in de sand of dis darkened world and hope she be never needin’ to fight?”

‘Retort? Come on, Hardy, you’re not really going to let her put this on you, are you?’

Unfortunately, she’d hit me with a particularly ugly truth that I couldn’t readily deny; if I was any sort of decent pony I’d have stuck Mags in a sack and passed her off to Slip Stitch or Wisteria with a note attached that said ‘please watch this until the world ends’. Could I really do that? No, I damn well couldn’t, and Wisteria knew it. She had outmaneuvered me quite handily and it burned, but no stallion in all of equine history has managed to avoid showing a mare when she’s got him sussed.

Picking up my bundled coat, I extracted my hat and popped it back on my head.

“Alright. Mags, get down here,” I growled.

She slipped off my back with no argument and edged sideways until she was in front of me, puffing out her chest feathers and trying to look confident; it would have been more effective if she wasn’t shaking so badly. I put a hoof on her foreleg, turning her so I could inspect the tiny shoulder holster the Aroyos had slapped together from a few pieces of what looked like old wetsuits. The gun wasn’t much to look at: a claw-operated .22 caliber Colten pistola with a pink grip meant for firing while on three legs. I’d confiscated a similar piece from Swift about two months ago and replaced it with Masamane.

Leaning down to her height, I gave her a critical look and rested my toe on the gun. “Your father taught you to use this?”

She nodded. “Nursemaid Guild be neutral. Everyone tries to kill them sometimes.”

“You any good with it?”

She shook her head, then quickly added, “F-father is good. He...” She stopped a moment and quickly swallowed. “He’d fire...um…” Looking down at her claws, she quickly counted off on them, then held up all four talons on one leg and one on the other. “This many tens of tens and hit a coin with a big gun. He’s not a soldier or nothing...”

“Tens of tens? Tens of what? Meters?” I did a quick mental calculation. “You mean...five hundred meters?!”

Wisteria laughed, sidling over and giving me a nudge with her hip. “De griffins, dey shoot betta den we ponies when we be not usin’ magic. Eagle eyes and all dat. She be a fine shot, if ye be givin’ credit for age.”

I turned towards the gun range and set off at a brisk trot. “You have one clip to show me you know what you’re doing or you’re leaving that here. Clear?”

The foals standing around the gun range cheered.

Mags lowered her smoking gun, pressed the slide-stop, and looked up at me with sad puppy eyes that could’ve turned a heart of pure diamond to mush.

Down range at the fifteen, twenty, and thirty meter marks, three plastic milk jugs sitting on short barstools had sprung seven separate leaks. I knew a few officers in the Detrot PD who’d have had a rough time making those shots, particularly with only nine bullets. Her two misses were from shaking claws, but the final shot had still buried itself in the top of the farthest stool.

Wisteria and Jambalaya were standing side by side, giving me twin grins of such smug self-satisfaction that I wanted to buck both of them off a building.

Reaching down, I carefully extracted the gun from Mags hooves, checked the chamber, ejected the clip, then pushed it into her holster. “Alright. You can keep the gun, but there will be rules.”

Her eyes lit up with hope, and she put her claws up on my chest. “You means it, Har’dy?”

“Rule one...your gun stays in the trunk of the Night Trotter unless you are cleaning it, practicing with it, or I’ve given it to you. Understood?”

She bobbed her chin.

“Rule two. You never, ever put yourself in a position you have to use this. That means trying to attack things bigger than you are, like my friend Sykes. I protect you. Not the other way around. You only have this as a last resort.”

She grimaced, but nodded again.

“Last rule. You can be a chick most of the time, but when you’re holding a gun, you are not. You obey me, period. I tell you to jump, you bounce like a rubber ball. No arguments, no nipping at my ears, no crying or complaining. Clear?”

Mags’s eartufts fluffed up, and she threw her legs around my neck. “Yes, Har’dy! I promise!”

“Alright, when you’re done with whatever sort of lesson you’re having, I want you to go put that gun in the Night Trotter.”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “Where you going?”

I squinted over her shoulder at Wisteria and said, very carefully, “I have a...meeting...with the Ancestors of the Aroyos. I need you to stay here. I won’t be going far, and I’ll be back in an hour or two, but I don’t think you want to come for this one.”

Rather than argue, she set herself down and nodded. “Okay. I wait, then we go?”

“Then we go. I promised Iris Jade I’d let her know when I had my hooves back on the ground in Detrot. That and—” There was a shriek of fury from the other side of the building that made Jambalaya and her mother cringe and exchange worried looks. “—I think Taxi is going to need some time in the Castle’s garage with a wrench and a can of paint before our ride is going any great distance...”

Wisteria followed me as I headed back around towards the car, leaving Mags to finish up her lesson with Jambalaya.

“De Ancestors...dey say dey ready to see ye,” Wisteria murmured, tapping her juju bag. “Much moves in de city.”

“I’m ready to see them, too, I think. I’ve got some new information. Speaking of that, there’s...something you might help me with. My partner shot down a dragon nearby and…” I stopped in my tracks as the realization of what I’d just told her fully hit me. Sitting down in the dirt, I rubbed my eyes with both forehooves. Wisteria was giving me the same look I’d have been giving me if I’d heard me say that.

“Look, Wisteria, I am completely aware that that makes me sound like a lunatic, but it wasn’t a very big dragon and Swift is trained in P.A.C.T. combat theory. Just...take my word that she did it, alright?”

“Yeees...so de tiny pegasus kills a dragon nearby. What ye wish us to do? Get de head for trophy?”

Heaving myself back to my aching hooves, I resumed my walk towards the front lot. “She didn’t kill the dragon. The dragon is out there in the wastes a few miles down the road. Her name’s Vexis, and she’s injured. I made a deal with her for some information. I need you to gather up a few volunteers, a truck, and a trailer, then go get her.”

“Den what? We be shootin’ de beast? Mebe stuff it? It be a dragon, Crusada! Why not be leavin’ it in de wastes?”

I was reminded—not for the first time—of the brutal world the Aroyos had come about in. The Skids were a dangerous place, even by Detrot standards, and the fact that they’d managed to keep their homes safe from intrusion by the other gangs or the police spoke of a pragmatic but occasionally very violent mindset.

“I promised her a place to heal and some food,” I said, finally. “You’re not going to make a liar out of me, are you?”

Wisteria ground her teeth and scowled at me, then lifted her juju bag to her ear and snarled into it, “De Crusada wants we should bring a dragon to de Ever Free Prison!” Whatever the ‘Ancestors’ were saying made her expression darken even further. Finally, she slapped the bag down against her scared breast and marched passed me. “De Ancestors t’ink ye mad, but de puppet-lady says we listen to ye.”

“The puppet-lady? Tourniquet talks to you through that thing?” I asked, trotting to catch up so I could look at the bag.

Tugging on the drawstring, Wisteria opened the bag a few inches so I could see inside. I’d expected something like a collection of baubles and bones or something silly like that. Maybe a bit of her daughter’s tail or a piece of her lover’s mane. Instead, there was a tiny microphone and transceiver wrapped around a bundle of wires with a piece of copper running through the loop she used to keep the bag around her neck. It looked like something a spy agency or a garage tinkerer might build.

“So...wait...you literally talk to the Ancestors with that thing? It’s a walkie-talkie.” I groaned, smacking my hoof against my forehead. “Somehow, I was more comfortable thinking you were just a crazy ganger talking to a bag full of rocks.”

“Heh. Strong juju be like dat. Ye be thinkin’ me mad and all de fools followin’ anyway?” she asked, cinching up the bag.

“A bit.” I swept a hoof up and down in front of myself. “I mean, people seem willing to follow me around, and I’m not exactly a paragon of wisdom and sanity here. So, tell me about these ‘gifts from the Ancestors’ I saw some of the ponies on the roof using: the shiny new guns.”

Wisteria shrugged, a little sadly. “De Ancestors had plans for de city after de war. Make it strong, make no enemy set claw, fang, or hoof here again. Dey did not wish to use de guns dey designed in de war for dis, but...t’ings did not go to plan. Dey ended up wid’ de Skids and little else. Too many turned against dem. It be not helpin’ de dragons wish dem dead.”

“Who are these ‘Ancestors’ of yours, exactly?” I asked as she turned to continue towards Supermax. “I don’t know why I didn’t ask that a month ago. Slipped my mind, I guess. Too many busy days.”

“Dey wish to explain demselves. Come. We be goin’ down below. Dey wished to stay in de Skids, so we be travelin’ de under-roads.”

“The sewers?”

“Aye.”

“Crap.”

“Aye.”

Taxi’s back half was sticking out of the hood of the Night Trotter as I strolled into the parking lot, and the filly in the high visibility jacket who’d nearly become street-sausage was beside her, an open box of tools balanced on her back. The car was not looking good. Most of the paint on the hood was gone, and what wasn’t had long, ugly scorch marks in it. The front grill was melted right through.

I looked around for Swift and Limerence, but they were nowhere to be found.

Approaching Taxi, I cleared my throat. “Sweets?”

A puff of hot-pink smoke exploded around my driver’s chest, and she threw herself out from under the bonnet, coughing violently around a wrench held in her teeth. Her muzzle was black with grease, and the filly quickly took the wrench from her, then offered up a towel that was only slightly less dirty than her face.

“Dammit, dammit…*cough*...dammit!” she cursed, snatching the rag and wiping off her chin. “That stupid dragon...*cough*...cooked the primary spell inverter!”

“That’s bad, is it?” I asked.

Taxi blinked a couple of times to clear her eyes, only then seeming to realize I was standing there. “Hardy...there you are. I need about eight hours with a fully functional garage, plus some obliging unicorns, stat. The core is bleeding magic. The buffers are holding, for now, but I wouldn’t want to drive hard or far.”

“We’re headed for the Castle. You think we can make that?”

She held out her leg, and the little filly slapped a bottle of water with a straw into her hoof, then backed up a couple of steps.

“Maybe,” Taxi murmured, taking a sip. “I will have to nurse that last mile or two and drive like somepony’s grandmother, though. Any other day, I’d be calling a tow truck, but I doubt it’ll be that simple, particularly if what my little friend here is telling me is true.”

I glanced at the foal, who smiled brightly. “What has she been telling you?”

“De demons dat come from de skies be eatin’ de police!” the kid replied, cheerfully tugging at the hem of her neon jacket. “I and I got dis from de body of one!”

My stomach decided it was time to crawl up my throat, and I quickly sat down, trying to calm my brain. Now that I got a slightly better look at the safety jacket, I could see a few dark spatters here and there.

‘Mercy of Celestia, please let that be mud,’ I thought.

“You got that from the body of a police officer?” I asked, slowly, trying to avoid thinking too hard on the implications.

She dipped her head. “Yep! We be findin’ de body outside de Skids. De jacket nice, yeah? Ye know, ‘cept dis.” Turning around, she pulled the coat down so I could see a ragged hole between the shoulders.

“This...this body didn’t happen to have a badge, did it?”

“Nope! Dem badges be good sellin’. Dey get ye in lots o’ places, leastways...dey used to,” she giggled, but then her expression took on a slightly more somber note. “I and I not see de body, but Rabbit see it and he say de demons eat de legs and face.”

I looked up at Taxi. “Biters?”

“Sounds like it. I don’t want to make the run to the police station without some kind of protection,” she replied, holding out the water bottle. “If not from the Biters, then from the...eh...what’re they calling the P.A.C.T. these days? The Blackcoats?”

The little filly nodded, then took the bottle from Taxi and put it back amongst the tools. “De Blackcoats be patrollin’ de inner city. Dey not come out dis far. Dey keep away from de devil dog lands. Ye be wantin’ a way to de Blue Castle where de Blackcoats do not go, dere be de way.”

“Devil dogs?” I mused, then lifted one ear. “Wait...diamond dogs? The diamond dogs took a section of the city near the Castle?”

Taxi scratched her mane. “Now you mention it, I think...yeah, I remember a report from one of my scouts in the Stilettos that said there was a group of diamond dogs who took over an old tenement about fifteen blocks from the Castle.”

I turned to the girl and gave her an appraising look. “How do you know so much? You’re...what? Nine years old?”

“I and I be eleven!” she grumped, then ducked her muzzle, bashfully. “I likes to...listen...to dem what t’inks I be too small to hear and understand. De Puppet Lady helps me, too.”

“Tourniquet and I are going to have a long discussion about her indiscriminate spying, believe you me,” I grumbled, then ruffled the girl’s mane with one hoof and asked, “Could you help my friend put this car back together? I’ve got to go meet with ‘the Ancestors’.”

“Actually going to do it this time, huh?” Taxi asked. “You know these tribal rituals always come with new tattoos, right? I’ve got one in a...a place I won’t discuss from the last meeting I had in the Zebra lands.”

“Yeah. No real choice, though. We need the Aroyos, and...well—” I brushed my toe over the lump on my leg under my sleeve. “I want to know what they know about my gun. Besides, you need time to reassemble the car, right? Where did Limerence and Swift get off to?”

Taxi picked up a socket wrench from her toolbox and brandished it against her leg, glaring down at the Night Trotter’s engine in a way that suggested imminent mechanical violence. “Lim said he was going to check some kind of ‘Archivist answering service’ spell to see if any of the other Archivists have survived. Swift’s probably...where else? With Tourniquet, having a powwow.”

“No reason to bother them with this, then. I should be back before too long,” I replied, then had a thought. “Keep an eye on Mags, would you? She’s in the back learning to use a gun.”

“A gun? You gave that little ball of crazy a gun!?”

I kicked a pebble between my front and back hooves, a bit distractedly. “It was not my idea, believe me. Wisteria talked me into it, though. Mags’s father apparently knew at least a bit about how to handle weapons, and he taught her the basics. She’s a pretty good shot for somebody whose grammar makes me cringe every time she opens her beak. I’m going to have to teach her proper Equestrian before she ends up with that half-Griffish baby-talk thing for the rest of her life.”

“Sure, I guess I can look after her for a few hours. She’s low maintenance, when she’s not hungry.” Reaching through the car’s window, Taxi pulled the trunk release. “You want your shotgun?”

“Nahhh, we’re taking the sewers. Since they cleared out the Daevas and the traps, I’m pretty sure the nastiest thing down there right now is Swift’s three-headed dog.”

The filly in the safety jacket—who I’d almost forgotten was there—interjected, “De sewers be clean, but de streets be not. Dey run by de stompas from de other Cyclones near de Skids.”

I considered for a moment, then opened the trunk and fished out a couple of fresh cartridges for my revolver from the bag of ammunition. As I was about to close the trunk, a familiar piece of rolled up paper stuck in the corner caught my eye. It was the scroll I’d taken from Cosmo’s basement almost a month ago: three words in a dead dialect called ‘Lunaric’. Don Tome had translated it for us as ‘the Web of Dark Wishes’.

Picking it up, I held the paper to my chest and wished I could see Tome again, if only to ask him what I was meant to do. Going to speak to his ‘construct’ might help, but I doubted it would do more than stoke my sadness at not being able to see the old stripe again in the flesh.

As I was having these thoughts, I felt a subtle burn in the golden scales on my backside: associated injustice, subtle and diffuse. Who was I to ignore a nudge from my talent? I’d been getting few enough of them lately, what with the staggering levels of ambient misery everywhere we went. I stuffed the scrap of scrollwork into my pocket and turned back to my driver and the filly.

“Tell Swift I’ll be back soon, would you?”

The little filly quickly set down Taxi’s toolbox and smiled. “Okay! One second! I’ll get her!”

“You don’t have to—” I started to say, but the foal just held up her hoof and took a breath that lifted her right up on her toes. Her wings kicked up a bit of a breeze as they flapped against her sides a couple of times.

Her eyes blinked shut for a moment, and when she opened them again, they were shining with a brilliant inner light.

The filly opened her mouth and asked, “Sir? What is it?”

Both Taxi and I stumbled back from the kid as my partner’s voice came from her mouth.

“Gah! Sweet mother! I thought she could only do that with ponies with a mark on them!” I barked.

"Okay, now I am creeped out. Earlier? Not too creepy! This? Too creepy!" Taxi groaned.

The filly giggled, covering her mouth with her toe very much like my partner did when she was trying not to show much funny she thought getting one over on me was.

“Tinker Tamper always wanted to talk to Tourniquet all the time, so she let her have one of the marks they used to put on prisoners!” Swift explained, quickly. The little girl pulled her neon vest to one side, showing off a bright red moon-shaped scar on her barrel. “The Aroyos have started calling them ‘The Mark of the Ever Free’. A few of the adults have them, and most of the kids.”

Too many horrible implications were boiling around in my head, and what nerves remained unfrazzled latched onto one particular detail.

“Wait...somepony named this kid Tinker Tamper?”

“Um...yes, Sir?”

I threw my hooves in the air. “Right! Good! The world is insane! I am insane! I am going to go and drink now. Wake me when everything is over. I demand booze! Booze now! Booze and a carrot, because carrots are good for your eyes and as we all know, eyes are important, because when eyes start to see my partner’s voice talking out of a glowy foal with no sense of when she should and shouldn’t run into the road—”

The first punch cracked me across the muzzle hard enough to jiggle a molar. I slumped on the pavement in a heap, weakly kicking one rear leg as Taxi added a quick shot to the shoulder for good measure.

“Sir!? Are...are you alright?” Swift squeaked through the little girl’s body.

“Yes, kid,” I replied, moaning softly. “I’m perfectly fine, you flashy monstrosity with your crazy face of a tiny girl. How’re you?”

My driver gave me a solid kick in the ribs, and I doubled over, clutching my belly as all the air was forced out of my lungs. I felt blood trickling from my lip, but ignored it. Maybe if she’d just added a few more blows to the head, I might have been ready to go for a jog or practice meditation or self-actualize.

“Could you stop?! Sheesh!” Swift exclaimed, taking a couple of steps forward as though to place herself between Taxi and me.

Taxi rolled her eyes and picked up her wrench, turning back to the car. “He’ll be fine in a minute. I don’t know why it works, but a solid beating helps center him when his brain’s popped a circuit or two. I had to do that after prom, too.”

I coughed a couple of times, then slowly sat up and picked up my hat from where it’d fallen, tucking it back over my ears. “Phew...yes. Good. What were we saying?”

“You were just...um…never mind, Sir. Wisteria is going to guide you back to the Skids. Message received. Can I give Tamper back her body, now? Tourniquet says this kind of connection makes her feel like she needs to sneeze if we keep it open too long.”

“Yes, kid. That’ll be fine. Please...for the love of Celestia, give the foal back her body.”

The glow in Tamper’s eyes faded, and she shook like a wet puppy, then smiled. “Phew! Dat itches! What de Puppet Lady be sayin’?”

“She said you’re to go straight to your mother and give her a big hug, then go find my partner and put bubblegum in her tail.”

The sewers. How much did I miss the sewers since my last visit? Not much.

At worst, it was a step up from spending a few hours aboard The Bull in transit, but then, being flayed and given a salt rub was a step up from that. Since Tourniquet had taken over the operation of the city water station, amongst other things, the sewer required a fair bit less maintenance to keep it flowing, but that still left the Aroyos scampering to keep most of the main lines from backing up. It helped that the construct could apparently tell them where a back-up was about to happen before it did, but even then the scent of a sewer in a city under siege still leaves something to be desired.

I stepped carefully over a flea-bitten rat chewing on an old slipper and fanned my headlamp across the tunnel behind me. Beyond about twenty meters, there was only the sullen blackness of the subterrane. Wisteria was just ahead, strolling along, humming a cheery tune like we were in a park somewhere rather than a stinky hole in the ground. We’d been walking in silence, for the most part, since we left Supermax via the old secret entrance.

“So, what’s the protocol for meeting these Ancestors of yours?” I asked, trotting a little faster to keep up.

“De...eh...protocol, Crusada’? Ye meets dem. Dey not be like de Jeweler stompas. None of dem ‘pretensions’.”

“Hmmmph. You mind if I ask something that’s been bothering me for a while?”

Wisteria tilted one ear in my direction.

“Where’d you Cyclones get the accent? Nopony in Detrot outside of the Skids and a couple other Cyclone groups talks like that.”

The Aroyo chuckled and swatted me with her tail, then replied in perfectly functional unaccented Equestrian, “Why do you insist on speaking like a cop stiff, when I know you’re not one?”

My jaw almost hit me in the kneecaps. “Wait, you lot—”

“It be de language of de street. De friend-speak come natural to de young. Dey even make dey own twists,” she chuckled, brushing aside my shock with a wave of her wing as she continued down the tunnel. “I and I likes it well enough. Plenty of years and I don’t be even t’inkin about it. Heh! Have to t’ink to stop! Still, it be helpin’ cement de group together. De Ancestors try many t’ings. I believe dey calls it ‘social engineering’.”

“These Ancestors set themselves up as ganger religious icons, arm you with state of the art weapons, and control your social development for...almost...what? Thirty years? Pardon, but that’s insane.”

Wisteria paused midstride, and I had to stop to avoid running into her. “Dat...eh...dat be a good word for dem, yes.”

“So, why do you all listen to them?”

“Dey find us, a broken gang of de soon to be dead livin’ in de slum, tryin’ to protect de blocks. Dey gives us safety. Dey gives us knowledge. Dey gives us tactics. Now, de young be strong, when before, dey only be poor.” Wisteria thrust her chest out, proudly. “De Aroyos be meant to be de future of Equestria! It be de Ancestors’ word!”

I cocked my head to one side. “These Ancestors seem like smart ponies. But I see the Skids and it still looks like a slum. Heavily armed, well wired, and maybe with some rules in place, but still...a slum. What went wrong?”

“Dat...be de mystery,” she replied, with a tinge of anger in her voice. “Twenty year ago, we be startin’ to take ground. Take five blocks in every direction, den ten. Empty blocks. No big gang owned dem. Dey be only poor, and we be fixin’ t’ings. Suddenly de Jeweler stompas come. Two dozen die in one night. Stallions, mares, foals. Dey say it be a natural fire. Bad wirin’ says de fire marshals.” Wisteria’s jaw clenched, and she snarled, “Do ye be thinkin’ we be having bad wires anywhere?!”

She swiped an unshorn fetlock across her face, wiping away a tear before continuing, “Den de police come, raidin’ for drugs dat did not exist before, but suddenly appears. Den other Cyclones come. We be pushed back, block by block...till de Skids be all we have. Den...for some reason, dey be leavin’ us be. Dey stomp when we tries to be movin’ and we stomp wid dem’ against de Jewelers, but dey be not takin’ de slums we leave behind.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, unsure what to say. It was a strange story, certainly, but I’d heard plenty of those of late. The previous police chief was well known to be a corrupt bastard right up to the moment Snifter forcibly retired him to put Chief Jade in his place. He wouldn’t knowingly put police lives in danger, but he wasn’t above calling a raid to line the pockets of the department. I’d been too young and too wrapped up in my caseload to worry much about what those higher on the totem pole did with their time.

“You’ve got seriously advanced weapons, though. How’d they...what’d you call it? Stomp? How’d they stomp you out of those territories with those weapons?” I asked.

She shook her head. “De Ancestors be not givin’ us weapons till recently. Dey be...ashamed. It be not for me to say why. When de sun go dark, dey decides it be time. Dey gives us de gifts.” Stopping under a sewer grate, she pointed up towards the street. “Come now. We be here.”

Ahhh, the Skids.

Home again.

I’d had my now-burned apartment for years, but it never really felt like home. It was just a place to store my extra casefiles and collection of beer bottles. Granted, anywhere you’re an alcoholic is hard to call ‘home’. Alcoholism is one of those hobbies like amateur car repair; it’s expensive, exhausting, and only makes you feel good for about two hours out of every ten you spend on it.

The street was as decrepit as ever, but the tenement blocks on either side of the road were lit up brilliantly. It seemed like everypony had turned on their lights and thrown open their windows to try to illuminate the street as much as possible and drown out the infernal glow of the Eclipse. Considering electricity was probably free at the moment, it wasn’t a bad idea.

Few ponies were out and about, but the hour was getting late and there weren’t many places worth going. The tops of the roofs seemed to have been lined with barbed wire, along with most of the windows, making ingress from the air a real bastard if somepony didn’t know where they were landing.

“I wasn’t aware there were that many Aroyos,” I murmured, staring up at the nearest roof which had a pony perched on it, watching the sky.

“If ye lives here, ye be Aroyo. If ye be Aroyo, ye knows somet’in of how to fight. We be unable to expand out, so we grows down, like tree in a pot too small. De Ancestors say ‘have foals’, we have foals. Our numbers grow and we live closer,” Wisteria explained. “It...be gettin’ a bit tight, but one day, maybe have de numbers to push back de stompas.”

“Seems like a stretch, but...I’ll believe it until I see otherwise. Where are we going?”

“Ye been dere before.”

Two streets’ quiet walk and I stood before the pristine white doorway of the only building which didn’t have an inch of graffiti on it. The ‘7’ on the freshly painted door looked like it’d been polished recently. The last time I’d been there, the Aroyos had given me the name ‘Crusader’. The significance of that name was lost on me then, but now it felt something like a badge of honor. Funny thing, how many badges there were in my life.

Wisteria spoke into her juju bag.

“We be here,” she said, then paused and listened before adding, “He be havin’ it on him.”

“I be having...I mean, I have what on me?” I asked.

Edging over, she tapped my gun through my sleeve. “Dey would not see ye wid’out it. Strange, says I. Dat be de revolver there? I and I do not remember it bein' so shiny...”

I grinned. “It's the same gun. I’ll explain later if you’re genuinely curious.”

“Mmm, I and I t’inks there be a story.” She tapped her juju bag, then nodded towards the white door. “Dey be sayin’ ye can go in.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Heh, ye be needin’ a foalsitter, Crusada?”

“Most everyone who knows me would agree I probably do.”

“I t’ink ye be alright. Go! I be here when ye be done. May go get de cup of coffee.”

Swallowing, I turned to the white door and reached into my pocket, resting my hoof on Ruby Blue’s diary. It still brought a measure of comfort, even after all these weeks.

Trotting up to the door, I rested my hoof on the smooth, clean surface and gave it a gentle push. It slowly swung open on a silent, perfectly oiled hinges.

The hallway beyond reminded me of my parents’ home, before they died, if one or both of them had a hundred more relatives. Tiny circular frames hung from floor to ceiling on the right side wall, each with a picture of a cutie mark with a smiling pony beside it. There were mares and stallions, foals and fillies. There were griffins, zebras, and a half dozen other intelligent species. I picked out Jambalaya’s picture near the door and Wisteria’s just above her.

Somewhere up ahead, I could hear faint old-timey music, like jazz or maybe swing with a hint of a modern twist to it. I found myself involuntarily bobbing my hips to it.

It was the sort of place that can’t be built or cobbled together, but must grow out of smiles, laughing children, and pleasant memories. It was nice. Just...nice. The smell of baked goods and spiced bread drifted down the hall, and I took a deep breath, then walked in feeling significantly more at ease. Once I was inside, the door shut behind me on its own.

“Well, don’t jus’ stand out there, Hard Boiled! We ain’t gonna bite you,” somepony called from down the hall. “Just down an’ to the left!”

I started down the hall, smiling at the little figurines of ponies flying or having picnics stacked across the tops of the doorframes. There wasn’t a lick of dust to be found on any of them, but it still felt homey. Flickers of firelight poured through the open door, and I could see a couple of shadows cast against the wall.

Tossing on a friendly smile, I decided to see what form the spider was taking this time as I strolled around the corner. Maybe another changeling queen? Some undead monsters? Might even be just a particularly talkative ghost. That would certainly have been in line with recent events.

Peering around, I blinked a couple of times as my eyes adjusted to the light of the fire.

Huh. Somehow, I was a little disappointed. No demons. No beasts. No crazed serial killers.

Just three old mares, keeping warm around the hearth.

“Took him long enough!” the one nearest me grumbled. She was a greying pegasus who was a few shades darker than Swift, with what must have been a brilliantly purple mane at one time. She leaned against the wall beside me with an irritable scowl on her face. There was something odd about her front legs. It took me a minute to realize they were polished mechanisms of some kind that resembled clockwork. “A month to come see us! A month and his own death!”

“Now, now...we mustn’t be ungrateful,” one of her companions murmured in a voice that was downright musical. She was a unicorn and lay sprawled on an expensive looking chaise lounge huddled close to the fire, her pale body wrapped in a beautifully tailored black dress that somehow accentuated her shape in a very attractive way despite her advanced age. Her white and pink mane spilled down across her shoulders like a river. She had the poise of somepony who was used to being the belle of every ball. “You know how much he went through to be here with us and he’s done so very much for our Aroyos.”

Her friend let out a snort and turned her head away. “I don’t care. We’re almost out of time, and he was out there screwing around with...with whatever he was doing.”

The room’s third occupant spoke up. She was a yellow-ish earth pony, her streaky red mane tucked underneath a ludicrous stetson. She gently rocked back and forth in a rocking chair that looked like it’d seen better centuries.

“Awww, come on. Ya know Hard Boiled woulda wanted us to help his grandson as much as we could, right? Don’t forget, Crusaders stick together. Ain’t that right, Scootaloo?”

Act 3 Chapter 23 : Sit By The Fire And I'll Tell You A Yarn

There are only a few beings in the world who can predict the future and even fewer who bother trying. Most don’t bother predicting the present because of one problematic truth about prescience; most of the time the world is just having breakfast, taking out the garbage, voiding it’s bowels, sleeping off a hangover, and then repeating the activity ad-nauseum.

There’s a whole world out there and the vast majority of it is quite dull, mundane, and tending towards unshaven. In a span of two hundred years, there might be a year worth of solid, continuous action if you knew exactly where to look and even that will mostly be people standing around waiting for things to happen with frightened expressions.

Even knowing this to be the case, plenty of people have tried to peer into the future. On a long enough timeline, you’ll always find an idiot willing to try out any foolish endeavor in the hopes of either getting rich quickly or avoiding death. In Equestria, those two events are about as likely.

-The Scholar

Standing in the doorway, I quickly did battle with the urge to slip into ‘cop’ mode. Cop mode doesn’t work on old ladies and it usually gets you hit with a hoofbag. Considering one of them looked to be partially bionic, I didn’t particularly want a beating from her.

“You’re going to tell me how you knew my grandfather, right?” I asked, leaning on the doorframe.

“Yep! The finest of us, he was! Come sit by the fire here, and we’ll visit,” the yellow mare said, indicating a straight backed wicker chair in front of her. I cautiously moved over to the seat, still expecting something to jump out at me as I sat down. “Now! Isn’t that better? Mah name is Apple Bloom. The grump who refuses to sit down and be polite no matter how many years ah kick her tail is Scootaloo, and this lovely lady is Miss Sweetie Belle.”

The elder named ‘Scootaloo’ folded one mechanical leg over the other and huffed. “Sitting is for ponies with spare time. Busy mares need to be on their hooves.”

“Darling, you weren’t on your hooves for almost two years,” Sweetie Belle pointed out, levitating a glass of wine into her forelegs and taking a little sip.

“Getting your legs bitten off doesn’t count!”

“Yes, it does, when you’re being a nit. Now hush a minute.”

I thought Scootaloo might object, but instead she turned up her nose and glared at the corner of the room.

Apple Bloom shifted in her rocker and said, “Sorry about Scoots. She’s been sour since Ah didn’t bring ya in that first day, but Ah figured it was prolly best ya made yer own way here.” Clearing her throat she continued, in an exaggerated version of Wisteria’s patois, “So...We be de mighty Ancestors! We be de holy trine! Ever Free!”

“Oh do stop that,” Sweetie admonished, setting her wine back on a little table beside the couch. “I know we needed a cohering mechanism, but that atrocious verbal mush was the worst of all available options.”

“It’s the one that worked, weren’t it?”

“Wasn’t, darling. It wasn’t...oh never mind,” the unicorn grumbled, then turned to me. “Mister Hard Boiled. It’s excellent to meet you. We’ve been lightly encouraging you in our direction for some time now, but you have achieved some amazing things without our interference, it must be said. The system did suggest your talent would be better left to its own devices rather than guided by three old biddies, though the models needed a full raft of updates just to accommodate your presence.”

“What models would those be?” I asked, my lip quirking with amusement.

Scootaloo turned her skinny, still-quite-muscular hip in my direction. Her cutie mark was a tricolor shield in red, purple, and pink with a lightning bolt through it. “Our talents are all about helping ponies with their talent-related problems, but there were so many talent-related problems that we did eventually require some mathematical models to help us. Those models turned out to have...other applications. Military applications. During the war we were all part of an organization—”

“—called the Crusaders,” I interrupted, leaning on the end of the rocker as it slowly clicked who I was actually speaking to. “You were Princess Luna’s covert ops group. Spies. Espionage experts. Wizards. Dragon slayers. Assassins.”

Oh, that was a look I liked being on the receiving end of: jaws hanging, eyes wide, ears laid back.

“H-how?!” Scootaloo demanded, stomping one forehoof so hard the boards let out distressed creaks.

I tugged the sleeve of my coat back and tapped the exposed surface of the Crusader. It seemed to shine like it was lit from inside, the circuitry along the surface flashing in the firelight.

“It was that little nickname you gave me with the Aroyos. I decided to do a bit of digging. There are only a few groups who know about these weapons. I seriously doubt anyone besides a dragon, a very fussy librarian, or a Crusader would recognize one in person. I already know the only dragon running a gang in this city, and the librarian is dead. That narrowed things down considerably.”

“You...How did you pull the protective skin off?” Apple Bloom asked as she gazed at my gun. “Your grandfather had us develop that from the spit of Queen Chrysalis herself!”

“I got shot with a prototype weapon, or rather, my gun did. It ran on ‘moonlight’. Sound familiar?”

Apple Bloom frowned, the wrinkles around her eyes drawing down into ferocious crows feet. “Phewy! Don’t ask questions ya know the answer to! Yer alive, so Ah’m bettin’ whoever shot ya isn’t. Yer grandfather...well, Ah suppose ya know he was one of us, don’tcha?”

“I know well enough,” I replied. “A friend of mine spent a few years looking into the Crusaders. He showed me a list with the names. There were four ponies who were the only members of your group not accounted for. One of them was my grandfather. I assume that makes you three the others, right?”

“You betcha!” Scootaloo replied, then clapped a hoof against her chest in a funny sort of salute. “The Demolisher! Still awesome and still ready to wreck!” She waved towards Sweetie Belle, who shifted on her lounge, modestly adjusting her skirt with a flicker of magic.

“Must we do introductions in this manner?” Sweetie sighed, running her toe around the edge of her glass. “Oh, very well, then. I will say it is too bad I couldn’t have used ‘The Sweet Embrace’ as a stage name. It’s ever so much better than any of those titles the Equestrian War Office came up with when we were between missions. I performed for the troops, you know.” She gave me a sultry wink that somehow still held a bit of that old fire, then nodded towards the mare in the rocker.

“Uh...Awww shucks. Ah weren’t never too attached to it, but I guess they still call me ‘The Bloomin’ Death’ in the dragon lands,” Apple Bloom muttered, plucking at the arm of her chair with the edge of her hoof. “It’s what Ah get for bein’ the pony to find out there actually is something that’ll burn a dragon. Enchant some thermite to burn like spell-fire and it does the job.” A flicker of a mischievous smile crossed her face, and she added, “It makes a real purrty explosion when it hits their guts, too!”

“Don’t be vulgar, Apple Bloom! We’re not in the war anymore!” Sweetie snapped, and her friend had the grace to look embarrassed. “Now then, Detective Hard Boiled...would you mind if we took a look at your Crusader?”

“Why? Don’t you have your own?” I asked.

“Sadly, no...I had to have ‘Beauty’ destroyed,” she replied, stroking her foreleg in the same place I usually wore my revolver. “It was part of the peace accord. You understand, I’m sure. Your grandfather never entirely trusted the dragons nor the peace. It seems, considering the current state of affairs, that he was wise to ask us to hide his weapon and pass it on to his son.”

I shifted my chair around to face the fire, the leaping flame. It was an old fashioned wood fire, and the heat felt good on my muzzle.

“You know...I know almost nothing about him. My grandfather, I mean,” I mused, picking up one of the pokers beside the hearth to gently stir the logs. “I’ve got a few stories here and there that my father told me, plus what little Don Tome of the Archivists had in his files. Grandpa and grandma were together a long time. I know he didn’t want my father going anywhere near the military, and I know that he killed the King of Dragons. I expect you’ll want to fill in the blanks, right?”

Unsnapping my gun from the holster, I held it out for Apple Bloom, who took it reverently in her hooves, gently stroking the inlaid circuits on the surface.

“Ah...Ah really thought Ah’d never hold one of these again,” she whispered, twisting it to peer down at the switch on the side. A few creases appeared on her forehead. “Yer grandpappy locked it in stealth mode a’fore he passed it on. Probably caused more than a couple of security outages in Detrot down through the years when your pa got scared of somethin’. Firin’ mechanism is some kinda weird, too. Ol’Egg Head never did like the basic receivers. Ah wish Ah could test fire this thing...”

“Oooh, I’d love to see that!” Scootaloo cackled, stepping away from the wall to examine my gun. “Last time I fired ‘Wrecking Ball’, I was so mad I fell into a coma for two days straight!”

“And Ah told ya not to be angry when ya fire or ya might break a blood vessel in yer brain, and then where’d ya be?” Apple Bloom snapped.

“Waking up with a syringe sticking out of my chest and you standing over me with a scalpel in your teeth, same as the last three times I almost died,” Scootaloo tittered. A tiny door on the side of one of her metal legs opened, and a short arm on a gimbaled joint popped out, holding up a digestive biscuit. She bit off a big mouthfull, and the arm retracted. “Beshides, ish not like he’sh got the ammo for it.”

Sweetie Belle’s horn flicked in Scootaloo’s direction, scooping the crumbs from her snack out of midair and depositing them in a garbage can at the end of the couch before they could hit the carpet. “True, but the other features could be quite—”

Digging into my pocket, I plucked out the magazine that’d been in Don Tome’s personal stash, holding it up by the lanyard. “You mean one of these?”

“Stars above, where’d ya get that?!” Apple Bloom gasped. “Ah thought we accounted for every last shell!”

I set the black crystal bullets down on the small end table beside her. “Don Tome. Head of the Archivists. I have no clue where he got it. The Crusaders were one of his many pet projects. He tried to buy my gun for years.”

“Hah! As if someone could just buy a Crusader Class weapon!” Scootaloo scoffed. “They can only be given freely to one who would protect Equestria.”

Tucking my tail under myself, I rolled the ammo back and forth as I said, “Tome was a funny old geezer, but I suspect he would have been a good person to hold on to it. Either way, I admit to having a couple of questions.”

“Well, darling, that is why we let you in,” Sweetie Belle said. “We can’t tell you everything of importance, since we don’t have all week—if there can even be said to be ‘weeks’ anymore, without the sun—but I think we can make a solid start and maybe begin planning our next actions. There is a city to retake, and with enough unicorn power, we might even manage to move the moon and sun again, once whatever magic is keeping them from moving in the first place is gone. It originates here, after all.” She gave me a look like she expected shock, but she didn’t get it.

I clicked my tongue. “You might or might not be pleased to hear this...but I have reason to believe the Princesses are alive.”

There was a collective intake of breath, and then Sweetie narrowed her eyes at me. “You have...learned something in Canterlot, yes? Something pertinent to our situation?”

Easing the Emblem of Harmony out of the top of my armor, I jiggled the glass amulet in front of them. “You could say that.”

“T-the Princesses! They gave you an Emblem?!” Sweetie squeaked, sitting up so quickly she almost fell off her couch. “They’re alive? They’re back? I broke my Emblem almost a week ago, but I didn’t hear anything!” She hesitated, then asked, “Did you meet Cadence in Canterlot? I thought she had barricaded the Crystal Empire.”

I shook my head. “No...just one Princess. Twilight Sparkle. I won’t blame you if you don’t know who I’m talking about, but—”

“Of course we know who you’re talking about! Our sisters were some of the Elements of Harmony!” Scootaloo exclaimed, tapping her chest. “She must know Detrot is the...what was that word you used, Sweetie Belle?”

“Epicenter, darling,” Sweetie murmured.

“Epicenter! She has to know Detrot is the epicenter of what’s happening. Why isn’t she here?”

There was a long, stony silence as I sorted my thoughts from one another, studying the amulet as it hung from my hoof. Finally, I tucked it back into my armor and raised my chin to address three expectant sets of eyes.

“She would be if she could,” I answered. “The same magic that made Canterlot vanish is...keeping all the alicorns, changelings, and anyone else who could help us out of the city. We’re on our own. Before we get onto that, you promised me some answers.”

“Ah, yes. Well, it is the end of the world, and I think there are few answers we could give that would make things worse. What would you like to know?” Sweetie asked, tipping back her wine and swallowing it down in one gulp.

“I guess the most basic one first. You’ve been in Detrot at least thirty years. Why this crazy set up?” I asked, waving at the ceiling as though to encompass the whole of the Skids.

There was another silence laden with nervous guilt. Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom both looked at the old pegasus in the corner who was trying desperately not to be seen as she edged further into the corner.

Finally, when it was clear nopony was going to answer me, Apple Bloom coughed into her hoof. “Eh...Scootaloo, Ah think ya just got asked a question. Why did we start this nutty project again?”

Scootaloo swallowed a couple of times, tugging at her wrinkled cheek with one forehoof. “I...um...during the war, a few years after it began, I went on a tour of Equestrian cities. One day I got away from my guards and decided to take a wander around the city.” Her cheeks flushed. “I...well, I stumbled into the Skids and...eh...I got mugged by a gang and I beat them up, but...I decided from that moment to change this whole city and—”

“Ugh, what my fellow Crusader means with that watered down blather is that dear little Wisteria stole her bit-purse out from under her nose, then almost out-flew her,” Sweetie interjected. “Wisteria was quite fast, even at a young age, and Scoots left her wing augmentations in her hotel room.”

“Hey! Are you telling this story, or am I? Cuz if you’re just going to tell the embarrassing parts, I’m going to go make some dinner...and I’ll make you extra broccoli!”

The elegant unicorn let out a snort of disgust and lowered her cheek onto the arm of her lounge. “Fine, fine. Just keep to the facts of the matter. Your usual embellishments do make for a good story, but I suspect the Detective won’t require them.”

Scootaloo tapped the side of her head with her mechanical hoof and grumbled. “What was I saying? Oh...right. Well, Wisteria did steal my bit-purse, and I caught her. She had a little gang of ponies she was working with at the time who’d followed us into an alleyway. I had a gun and a great deal of training, of course, and they were barely out of puberty. We fought. I won. Then I gave them my purse and took them out to get some food.”

I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Wait...you kicked their flanks and then bought them dinner?”

“Hard Boiled, if you saw the state of these kids, you’d have done exactly the same thing,” she admonished, waggling a hoof at me. “Anyway, I told them I’d be back and that when I came back, I’d make sure that they’d never need to starve again. I told them not to hurt ponies younger or weaker, to be kind, and to try to protect their loved ones. I told them that soon all their mothers and fathers would be home...and if they weren’t, then I would take care of them. Me and Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom.”

“And they took you at your word?” I asked, skeptically.

“After the trouncing I gave them? Yeah, they kinda did,” she snickered, flicking her braided tail back and forth against her weathered flanks. “When the war ended, the three of us were being hunted by draconic assassins intent on a little bit of revenge. I suppose I can’t blame them. My kill count was in the dozens, and Apple Bloom built most of our weapons. Sweetie’s kills were...erm...I don’t even know how many. More than me. More than anybody else in the Crusaders.”

“It isn’t important, Scoots. It would be poor form of me to keep track of such a thing. We were doing our jobs. Nothing else,” the unicorn muttered guiltily. Staring down at her hooves, she rubbed the tips of her toes together as though trying to clean something off of them.

“Anyway...I remembered my promise, and when we came back, we found Wisteria still here, still holding these same few blocks,” Scootaloo continued, nodding at the ceiling. “She took my words to heart. She was taking care of the young and protecting her loved ones. Outsiders didn’t rate quite the same ‘kindness’ I was hoping she might learn, but then, once you are an Aroyo, they will lay down their lives for you.”

“How about that name?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me saying, ‘Aroyos’ is a strange nom de guerre for a gang of street kids to pick up.”

“It’s Griffonic, darling. Atop all of these outlandish promises, our dear ‘savior of the poor and weak’ also let slip that we were going to the ‘Aroyo Canyon’ deep in the Badlands,” Sweetie explained, shooting Scootaloo a disapproving look which the other mare pointedly ignored. “That mission was very classified, mind you, but...who are a bunch of very poor children going to tell? She’d given them something to hope for.”

“Now, Ah don’t know what Ah was thinkin’ followin’ Scoots out here hopin’ we could hide with some gang of kids, but she takes a promise real serious. Ah didn’t want to build weapons no more, but Ah’d been poisoned twice, shot in the butt, and lost half an ear, all inside of a month. Public life was gettin’ old,” Apple Bloom added, turning her head so I could see where a ragged portion of one of her ears poked out from under her hat.

Scootaloo edged over to the fire and sat, a distant smile on her muzzle. “I remember when we first came back. Wisteria almost didn’t believe it was me. I found her sitting on the roof of this building. She was crying like a little girl and holding that funny bag of hers. It had one of my loose feathers in it. It’d only been a few years, but I’d become some kind of...myth to them, a fairy tale she told the kids to put them to bed.”

“It was rather sad,” Sweetie murmured. “They numbered barely twenty back then and were scrambling against several other small gangs in adjacent blocks. Five of their number had died to violence in under two years.”

“Pardon, but how did you three drive out a bunch of gangs?”

“We were…” Apple Bloom hesitated, shuffling her hooves underneath her blanket. “We were younger. Stronger. Stupider.”

“What my friend means is that we were the three most heavily trained, magically and technologically augmented soldiers who remained after the Crusades,” Sweetie explained, reaching up to pull her heavily styled mane away from her neck. Something that looked like a section of an extension cord seemed to be growing from the flesh above her shoulder joint, and it vanished behind one of her ears. The skin around it was puckered with scar tissue, but it looked quite old. “The rest of the Crusaders—except your grandfather of course—were dead or missing. Against small groups of untrained civilians with only the barest knowledge of tactics or strategy, it was only a matter of time.”

“It...it weren’t even a real fight,” Apple Bloom said, shaking her head. “After we beat the tar out of the first few, groups started wantin’ to join the Aroyos. It were kinda crazy, but...Wisteria’s really good at what she does. Once she knew everythin’ we were willing to teach her, we just slid into the background.” Her expression sank, and she pulled her ancient, thready blanket up to her chin. “That...that was before everythin’ got bad...”

“Wisteria said you were attacked,” I prompted.

“I almost wish it were an attack, Detective,” Sweetie said, softly. “We are quite used to direct attacks. We might have defended ourselves against those. Rather, our opponents used subterfuge. Powerful, well connected, untraceable acts of subterfuge.”

Scootaloo kicked the baseboard beside her angrily and stalked across the room to press her forehead against the opposite wall. I could hear her teeth grinding as she glared at her hooves. “The first thing was the Jewelers. One of their toughs burned one of our tenements, but not before sealing it with spells. A lot of ponies died. Our ponies. Civilians.”

“How do you know it was them?” I asked.

Reaching up, Sweetie tapped her horn. “We tracked the fool who set the blaze. He was a low level Jeweler who’d been given the order by...well, I’m afraid we never found out. Whoever gave him the order cast a spell on him that made his lungs explode before he could tell us. Quite an efficient means of covering one’s tracks.”

“That was just the start,”Apple Bloom said, closing her eyes as a few stray tears started to creep down her cheeks. “The police came and...then city inspectors. They had half the Skids condemned fer problems with the electrics. These were buildings we’d been fixing. Ah know wires! Weren’t nothin’ wrong with ‘em! Still, they drove a bunch of our people out. We couldn’t do nothin’. We had too much territory by then. Then...other gangs...big gangs of Cyclones started showin’ up. They wouldn’t even talk or negotiate or nothing! ”

“And...they drove you back here?”

She nodded, quickly using her blanket to blot her face dry. “Almost a hundred and thirty dead in two years. Dyin’ in accidents at their jobs or muggings ‘gone bad’ or ‘suicide’ or just missin’. Don’t make no account. We couldn’t expand no more above ground...so...so Ah called all the Aroyos back to these blocks. Ah knew we had enough to hold’em, but...they cut us off. Everypony who had a job outside lost it all’a sudden...”

“Wait...couldn’t you have appealed to...I don’t know? The crown? Princess Celestia or Princess Luna? Maybe even Twilight?” I asked, holding up my hooves. “You still had your connections, right? The Elements of Harmony or the law—”

“We tried, Detective,” Sweetie whispered, clutching the hem of her dress with one hoof. “What could we bring them? An electrical fire, a dead thug, and a city they already knew was barely holding itself together? This was only a few years after the war. Cloudsdale was still in ruins. Los Pegasus hadn’t recovered. The Elements were all half out of their minds trying to keep the country from falling apart. I couldn’t even show my face in court, else the dragons would have known precisely where to send their assassins.”

“And nopony knew where Twilight went after the war,” Apple Bloom murmured, putting her hooves on her temples and rubbing them in slow circles. “She jus’ vanished. Ah tried to find her castle, but...but Ah couldn’t remember where it was! Ah know she cast some kinda memory spell on everypony and Ah remember her...sort of...but there’s all these holes where she oughta be in mah head!”

“We appealed to the powers that be,” Sweetie said, wrapping her forelegs around her barrel and hugging herself. “Unfortunately, those powers would all rather their wartime assassination squad be quietly consigned to the pages of history. Still, we had our knowledge and our skills from the war. We could hold...and we could prepare.”

“Prepare for what?” I asked.

Scootaloo chuckled, tracing a circle on the carpet with her toe. “We used some special forces tricks to get the different groups to work together; yahknow, social psychology? If we’d had another five years, our numbers might have been great enough to start really rocking the boat. I just wish we hadn’t had to work with all those Cyclone groups to keep them from attacking us. We wasted way too many resources on territorial disputes with the Jewelers. Alliances are expensive.”

I reached for my gun, and Apple Bloom passed it back to me. “What about the weapons? I saw the Aroyos carrying a bunch of heavy ordinance. I take it you made that stuff?”

“Ah did,” the earth pony replied. “Ah didn’t wanna draw no attention to us by havin’ big guns. There’s a real difference between fightin’ street gangs and fightin’ the cops or the monster killers. Somea the stuff in mah head is made for killin’ big things. If Ah’d have given our people those, ya can bet sure the police woulda done more than run us into homeless shelters and the sewers...”

“But once the sun was gone, it didn’t matter anymore,” Sweetie concluded. “Now, that is our story. Can I perchance convince you to tell us yours, dahling?”

“Wait!” Scootaloo interrupted. “We should do this in the weaving room! We can take what he tells us and add it to the tapestry! It might even give us an identity for whoever has been causing all of this!”

I pulled myself out of my chair and stood, stretching my slightly cramped calves. “Weaving room?”

“It’s not so bad as ya think,” Apple Bloom replied. Sweeping aside her blanket, she revealed a set of spindly rear legs that were only slightly less mechanical than Scootaloo’s forelegs. One of her thighs had been entirely replaced with shiny chrome, while the hoof below it was healthy flesh wired into a frame that supported the calf. The other leg was draped in some form of metallic skeleton full of wires that seemed to burrow into her muscles in a way that made my stomach twitch with dismay.

Noticing I was staring, the old mare cackled and rolled onto her front legs, giving her back knees a little shake that set the mechanisms clacking and rattling. “Don’t mind the extra bits none. Ah know they ain’t as lovely as Scoots’ over there, but she just got purtier ones cuz she got her legs chomped off all neat-like instead of bein’ chewed on. Ah got good practice buildin’ these a’fore she lost hers, too.”

Scootaloo snorted, pawing at the carpet with her polished toe. “Good practice she says. I still need to oil myself three times a week, and both knees stick when it’s humid.”

“Yer the one who said the teflon coatin’ made’em smell funny!”

As the two mares bickered, Sweetie Belle rose gracefully and sidled up to my side. I offered her my foreleg, and she smiled, resting her leg over my knee. “Oh, a gentlecolt! There are simply too few of those these days. Just ignore those two. They’ll be at it another five minutes. Come along. The weaving room is just below.”

Leaving Scootaloo and Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle guided me towards the end of the hall, past a little kitchenette, a bathroom, and a closet until and we stopped at a simple wooden door tucked behind a staircase that led up to the second floor. It would have been completely unremarkable were it not for the complete lack of a handle or visible means of opening it and the electronic keypad mounted on the wall alongside. Sweetie’s horn lit up, the pad flashed through a series of numbers too fast for me to comprehend, much less remember, and then the door shuddered and let out a chunky ‘clang’.

“Excuse the security, darling,” the elderly mare apologized. “Even our dear Aroyos would be best not seeing this. Too many of them have destinies that are closer-at-hoof than they would like them to be.”

“You mean—”

“Their deaths, yes. We try not to predict such things, but statistical models all end more or less the same way on a long enough timeframe.”

“Alright, lemme back up three steps. What exactly am I going to see down here?”

“If I’m completely honest, I have no idea. When we model probability, we develop a unique structure for each pony. I could say ‘You’ll see us weave’, but I doubt that’s what you’re asking me.”

The door sank into the wall an inch or so, then dropped straight into the floor. While the facade might have been wood, behind it there was a six inch steel plate that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank vault.

Sweetie stepped across the threshold, resting one hoof on a rail as she descended a long staircase into the darkness, taking it slowly as her black dress swirled around her hooves. “Honestly? I’ve no idea. That’s why we brought you here. You need to tell us as much as you know of what is going on, and we will add it to our models and see what pops out.”

“These...models. Where do I fit into them?” I asked, hesitantly following her. Lights began to flick on overhead when she reached the bottom, illuminating a corridor with every inch of wall covered with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny icons painted in painstaking detail. It took me a second to realize they were all cutie marks, hundreds and hundreds of cutie marks, no two alike.

“What do you mean?” Sweetie asked, stopping in front of another door at the end of the hall and quickly waving her horn over another keypad. The second door made no bones about being present for security purposes; it was solid metal and marked with enough runes of power around the edges that even a dragon would need to stop and have a breather before they might even make a dent.

“Well, you say you have these...mathematical systems, right? They told you to leave me alone until very lately or something like that? What else do they say about me? I’m curious.”

“Nothing,” she replied, a little bitterly. “They said nothing at all.”

I stumbled over a patch of particularly stubborn air and caught myself on the door. “Wait...what?”

“Detective...you are a probabilistic disaster,” she answered, glancing back over her shoulder. At my bemused look, she added, “It really would be easier if I just showed you.”

Pressing the keypad with her toe, she stepped back as the door swung inward with a screech of metal on metal. Mage-lights, sensing life, began to sputter and glow at even intervals around the walls of a completely spherical room. What was in the room took my eyes fifteen or twenty seconds to begin sorting and categorizing; being presented with too much visual information is about as bad as being presented with none, and the interior of the ‘weaving room’ looked like a riot in a yarn factory. The center of the room was filled to capacity with a knitting experiment gone wrong, like a three dimensional diagram of an exploding quilt.

“Ah! Pardon me, I forgot to put away our latest formula tweak. Thankfully, that’s not an actual pony being modeled there. Sorry, this will just take a moment,” Sweetie apologized, her horn lighting up. Improbably, the enormous jungle of thread began to unwind itself, spiraling out from a tangled core into thousands of little spools which lined the walls, each mounted on its own bracket by color and pattern. I couldn’t have fixed that mess with an hour and a machete, but she seemed to know precisely where each thread went. As the pattern began to unravel, it revealed a short wooden catwalk that stretched into the middle of the room, leading up to a circular platform with three badly painted wicker chairs perched on it. A few notepads and books lay beside each one.

“Now, then! That’s better. The others will be along shortly, once they finish arguing. At our age, they take a certain glee in being contrarian with one another, but then, they weren’t any different as foals,” Sweetie murmured, heading down the catwalk and settling herself gracefully into one of the seats, which creaked under her weight.

“What am I looking at, here?” I asked, following her down and setting myself between the chairs, studying the ceiling.

“Have you perchance heard of a ‘computer’?” she asked.

“You mean somepony who spends all their time crunching numbers?”

“Oh...yes, well, in this case I mean a machine that crunches numbers,” Sweetie replied, arranging her dress around her rear hooves as she levitated a single strand of thread from one of the nearby walls, spinning it around her outstretched hoof. “The word fell into a bit of disuse since ‘computer’ tends to refer specifically to persons, but it can also be applied to mechanical machines. There are plenty of machines which will do sums and so on. Most pocket calculators and cash registers are ‘computers’. That said, they have their limitations unless one wishes to fill up a thousand blackboards with proofs. When you’re calculating problems with ponies, you need some wiggle room that nothing but numbers just won’t provide.”

“Wiggle room I understand, but...string?”

“It’s yarn. Real special yarn, too. Ah don’t think any kinda string could do what our stuff does!” a voice said from over my shoulder.

Turning, I found Apple Bloom and Scootaloo coming down the hallway out of the main house. As soon as she came through the door, Scootaloo’s wings buzzed, lifting her over the catwalk and into one of the chairs while Bloom trudged forward, half-walking, half limping into her seat, climbing up into it and rearranging her blanket over her legs.

“We weave destinies!” Scootaloo explained with a big grin that showed a couple of missing teeth. “Destinies are harder than numbers. We have to put together all the stuff that might happen. For that, you need magic, and enough yarn to choke a mule. Thankfully, we used to live somewhere that star spiders were pretty common...and they’re really friendly if you bring them milk and honey on a regular basis!”

“Alright, so you knew who I was the second I set hoof here. You knew my grandfather. Show me the trick.”

“Hrmph...no appreciation for good theatrics, then?” Sweetie huffed.

“None.”

“Then, Detective...tell us yer story,” Apple Bloom murmured, picking up her notepad and pencil in her teeth. “Don’t leave anythin’ out. If yer talent said anythin’ to ya, then ya say so, okay?”

“Phew...I’ve got some secrets—”

“Not here!” she interrupted, waving the pencil in my direction. “Ya came for the truth. Ah promise, nothin’ ya tell us will leave this room. Heck, we got our own memory spells cause there’s a few things we’ve seen in this yarn that we don’t wanna remember. Believe me, there’s stuff here that’ll keep ya up at night. If ya want us to forget...we’ll forget...but it’s gotta be the truth and nothin’ but, or we can’t do ya no good.”

“Then...I think I need a drink.”

Sweetie levitated a flask from somewhere under the folds of her dress and into my forelegs. “Darling, when we are done here, I suspect we will all need a drink. Tonight, we’ll get to see the many fates and destinies of everypony you’ve interacted with since the day your quest began.”

“That includes us,” Apple Bloom said, jabbing her toe at me. “So, where’d it all start?”

I hadn’t even told Twilight the whole truth. Oh, I’d given her the highlights, but there were some things you just don’t say to anypony.

The dream, for instance. I hadn’t told her about the dream from that first day when I rolled off the couch and answered the telephone. I’d also neglected to mention my repeated visits from Juniper Shores.

Mercy, where was that old coot? I could have done with his advice just then.

The three mares seemed to have an endless reservoir of patience, and when I considered leaving some tiny element out to save some face or maybe avoid a potential criminal prosecution, they would give me indulgent smiles and wait until I went back and corrected myself. They seemed to know when I was lying or at least omitting something. It was almost uncanny, watching the model take shape as Apple Bloom scribbled down note after note, Scootaloo translated them into a mathematical notation on her own pages, and Sweetie Belle took both of their notebooks and compared them with her own.

At some point, Sweetie picked up a juju bag of her own and made a call out to Supermax, letting them know we’d be a while longer, but once that was done, the hours slid by with me sitting there talking and the three crones pounding questions to fill in every last blank.

I’d like to think it was the bourbon that loosened my tongue so completely, but more likely it was the total impassivity of my audience. They’d seen it all, and there was more blood on their hooves than most ponies would ever experience in their lifetimes. I had that sensation that I suppose most people only get after they’ve committed a really hideous crime and found themselves caught, prosecuted, and heading for the gallows.

A year or so before Juniper died, I’d gotten a call from this pony who the papers called ‘The Cartwright Street Slayer’. One day, seemingly out of the blue, he’d killed his mother and father with a shotgun, burned the house to the ground, and then gone next door to the neighbor’s house and murdered the parents of two little girls too.

Juni and me caught him three weeks later living in a storm drain, hugging his empty gun and his teddy bear. By then, the media had got hold of the story and made him out to be a bad seed who finally showed his true colors. He was a few weeks shy of adulthood at the time of the crime, but when we caught him he was an adult under the law and so went to Tartarus Correctional.

The week before he was sent to the prison, he used one of his scant few phone calls to get me down to the jail where they were holding him. He’d sat in absolute silence through the whole trial, and even when the jury gave him life without parole, he didn’t say so much as a word. As one might imagine, I was a little skeptical of a 3:00 AM call from a pony headed for the big house who ‘just wanted to talk’.

I found the kid sitting there in the jail visitation room in a stripey jumper, still hugging the damn bear.

He’d asked for some privacy with me. It was against policy, but I knew the guard, and the guy was chained up. Once we were alone, he’d immediately began bawling like a foal, and the real story started to come out.

His parents and the neighbors had these so-called ‘poker nights’ in the basement. His dad had picked up a book of dark magic in some antique shop somewhere, and they were all getting their kicks eating the souls of stray animals. The week before his killing spree, the father had sacrificed the family pet.

The guy swore me to silence, and the sentence was already on the books, so there was nothing I could do. There wasn’t any evidence to corroborate his story in the burnt out hulk of his former home. The neighbors’ two fillies—the only ones he spared—didn’t know what their parents were doing, and he didn’t want them to know. He’d found his father’s diary, and it indicated the two of them were next on the altar.

I had nightmares about his face for a long time. He’d finished his confession, and then the poor son of a bitch had smiled at me, a relieved kind of smile.

In the end, he’d just wanted somebody to know what really happened, even if it made no difference.

“That’s it, really. We got off the train, drove to Supermax, I had Wisteria go get a cart for the dragon, I gave Mags a hug, and we took the sewer route here. I think that’s everything,” I finished, taking another sip from the almost empty hip flask to wet my muzzle. “Any questions?”

Apple Bloom grunted, tapping her pencil against her notepad. She worked her jaw a little, then spat out her writing utensil. “Girls? Mah math looks pretty tight. Ah think we have enough. What about ya’ll?”

“Well, there are some minor issues with the presence of this ‘Juniper Shores’ character and the changeling heart in his chest, but nothing that should twist us too far off course,” Sweetie replied. “This will be, by far, the most complex model we’ve attempted since the war, and those were always a mess. This one is probably worse.”

I chuckled, shaking the last of the flask out, then passing it back to the unicorn. My cheeks were still pleasantly burning and my head felt fuzzy, but it was a far cry from the hypertensive mess I’d been when we sat down.

“You used the words ‘probabilistic disaster’, earlier. Are you going to tell me what that meant now?” I asked.

I will say it’d been awhile since I saw three ponies exchange that look which says ‘how do we communicate brutally insulting information to this pony without actually hurting his feelings?’. It’s a very specific expression and difficult to describe, but if you’re ever on the receiving end, you’ll know it.

“Ahem,” Sweetie began, then paused, gathering her thoughts. “It’s...complex, and we won’t know exactly until the spells that make this system work begin to take shape.”

“I sense a ‘but’ here,” I said.

Scootaloo carefully set her notepad down and crossed her forelegs. “Keep in mind, this isn’t perfect! I mean, just by telling you this stuff, we’re probably changing things.”

“And...Ah doubt it could all be as bad as—” Apple Bloom started to say, but I cut her off with a stomp on the wooden catwalk.

“Tell me. The build up isn’t helping my eventual reaction.”

“Erm…Detective, this is simply an overview, but...every indicator says you shouldn’t have been born or must have died many years ago,” Sweetie said, hesitantly.

I settled onto my belly, crossing my forelegs over each other. “That’s what your math says?”

“Yes. Now, we have to see what the model says. Ready, girls.? It’s time to weave.” Sweetie shooed me back with a flick of both hooves. “Detective, go stand by the door until we’re finished, and don’t move. This will take about five minutes.”

I backed up onto the catwalk as the Ancestors began to gently rock in their chairs.

Sweetie Belle’s horn began to glow, and Scootaloo started to fan her slightly undersized wings, creating a little breeze and an undulating sound straight out of the deep jungle or the hot savannah, like the snarl of a lion chasing prey. Apple Bloom had produced a small drum from somewhere and was setting a quick beat that reminded me of a zebra war dance Taxi played for me once upon a time.

I could feel arcane energies building in the air, but still nothing happened. My fur was standing on end as Sweetie Belle began to sing. Her voice was haunting, beautiful, and full of a thousand stories. The sweet tenor was joined a moment later by her friends, who fell into harmony with her like they’d been born there. I couldn’t have told you if there was a melody, but there was a definite tune that rose and fell as a flood of images started welling up inside my head: waves rolling on a beach under cloudy skies, a soldier lying in a muddy puddle, blood dripping from brilliant blue flowers, and a hundred others moments from places far removed and times long gone.

My eyes were burning and blurry, so I almost missed the moment when yarn began to unspool from a thousand places on the walls to suddenly leap towards the middle of the room like a wave of color, filling the space above the Crusaders’ heads with a dense tangle of thread. It wound and coiled, winding into knots or snaking into tight patterns which the finest seamstress in the world couldn’t untie. As quickly as it began, the shape slowed to a crawl, flowing inward upon itself, growing tighter and tighter. I found myself unable to look directly at it as it moved, as though I were seeing something not entirely real.

After several minutes, the music crawled to a stop, leaving the ugliest web of color I’d ever seen hanging above the three Crusaders. Cautiously, I approached the dangling disaster, peering up at it. Something about the design was viscerally disturbing, like looking at spilled intestines.

“Was that supposed to happen?” I asked.

Sweetie Belle coughed, then quickly lifted her flask out of her dress and took a quick sip as she looked up at the mess. “It worked...well enough. It’s not usually that awful looking, though.”

“Yuck...it’s worse than the last time we tried to map him!” Apple Bloom said, sticking out her tongue.

“Are you sure? Last time it looked like somepony had chewed up and swallowed a rainbow colored quilt, then got sick,” Scootaloo added, shaking her head.

“That looks like somepony ate a bowl of quilt spaghetti and worms, then drank three pints of kerosine and vodka...” I murmured.

“Oh...huh...you’re right. Kinda does.”

“Sooo...what’s it mean?”

Sweetie Belle rocked herself out of her seat and stood, ducking under the shape hanging in the air. Reaching up, she grabbed one of the thickest cords, a pink strand with a few knots in it which was wound tightly around a red and purple strand.

“Well...this is the three of us. Hrm, don’t remember seeing my own death in so many different ways before. Never mind. If that’s us, then that means…” She trailed off, following the yarn until it intersected with a dark grey knot that seemed to be composed entirely of other knots. An explosion of colors radiated from that nexus, but the center of it was only a few shades lighter than my pelt. “Heavens save us...Apple Bloom, is that really what the weave says his destiny looks like, or am I reading this wrong?”

“Naw, that’s it. Look. That yellow one is his driver. We had Diamond Ace steal her file from the police department, remember?...Gosh, I never saw a pony kill so many people. What circumstance does that outcome happen?”

Scootaloo gulped as she touched my driver’s line. “Lots of them. I mean, that’s my string right there,” she murmured, pointing at a purple strand that wove all through the construction from end to end. “She kills the three of us an awful lot...and almost all of those happen if Hard Boiled dies. I had to put in a compression algorithm for all the killing that mare does if he dies.”

Sweetie’s horn lit, and she picked up a salmon pink bit of yarn which was tangled tightly with my own. “Whose is this? His partner? She’s dead in almost every circumstance! That or she’s almost as bad as the driver.”

“Gods, there’s five or six here where the librarian goes insane and...sweet mother of Celestia, what sort of weaponry does that pony have access to?!” Scootaloo erupted, gawping at a single black string leading off of the blue that I took to represent Limerence.

“What’s the black?” I asked, pointing to one of a huge number of places in the odd system where that particular color radiated off various strands.

All three mares suddenly found different parts of the room to look at, and none anywhere near me. The silence stretched until I was about ready to start checking pulses when Apple Bloom finally replied, “Th-that’s everypony in Detrot bein’ dead, probably followed by extinction of life on the whole world. Ah’ve seen it a couplea times durin’ the war. Never so much in one place, though.”

I stared at my own thin, grey thread. There were dozens of black stands stretching off of it, usually wrapped around a knot of some kind.

“The knots are spots where I die, aren’t they?”

Scootaloo nodded.

“Why am I important here?”

“Ah...Ah’ve got no idea,” Apple Bloom muttered, shaking her head. “Detective, ya gotta understand. The probabilities are so crazy Ah don’t even know where to begin!”

“Your partner should have been tossed out of all policing duty before she finished the Academy! Everything here says she’s too unstable to last more than a week,” Scootaloo added, rubbing her hooves together, “My kinda mare, actually, considering how many people she might end up taking with her.. If she dies, though, you die. It’s here again and again. You’d be better off locking her in a room at her grandmare’s place.”

“Believe me, I’ve had the thought. Too bad it wouldn’t work.”

“The librarian should have died, alone and friendless,” Sweetie continued, waving towards Limerence’s section of the pattern. “All indicators say he’s incapable of working with other people except in the direst of circumstances, and then he reverts to self-interest.”

“And...there’s your driver,” the pegasus explained, grabbing Taxi’s thread and giving it a rough shake that made everything jiggle in the air. “Sweet Shine should have died in childhood. Again and again, she should have died...and now, almost half the strands that pre-date the Darkening say she should have been killed trying to murder Princess Celestia and Princess Luna! She’s one of the most dangerous things left in Equestria! She had a better than twenty percent chance of success.”

“That...leaves me,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to prepare myself.

Apple Bloom nodded, rocking out of her seat and stretching her legs. “Ya shoulda died before ya were born and...and hundreds of times between. Yer an alcoholic. Yer crazier than a barrel of Beam-soaked monkeys. Ah...Ah don’t know what help we can be fer ya on that front. Yer still probably gonna die. Heck...look there. There’s two strands that say yer dead before ya leave this house.”

“So, nothing helpful, then. I knew my odds were never good,” I grunted.

“Ah didn’t say that.” Apple Bloom’s back legs clicked and tottered as she lifted herself up on them, standing in a way that reminded me of one of Taxi’s zebra exercise poses. Reaching up, she began brushing aside parts of the pattern until she revealed a pony-skull-sized wad of material. “Oooh, yikes. Girls, it happened again.”

“I’ll go get the scissors,” Sweetie said with a sigh, ducking under the pattern and heading for the hallway.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Stupid glitch in the model,” Scootaloo grumbled. “It’s happened every time we try to model what’s been going on in Detrot.”

“Are you sure it’s a glitch?”

“What else could it be?” Grabbing the compacted bundle of yarn in both hooves, the pegasus gave it a little tug, but it wouldn’t budge. “Sweetie’s magic doesn’t unwind the stupid thing, either! We get them sometimes. I mean, they started showing up ever since we started modeling Detrot, years and years ago. It’s weird, because they always look the same.”

As I studied the bunching of the knots and snarls, it seemed to be tickling some part of my brain that didn’t usually get much use. I’m good with hunches, but math and I have never been on friendly terms. Still, I had a hunch that something was being missed. Something important.

‘Three dimensions,’ I thought, feeling my mind start to jog down a particular line of reasoning a little faster than I could keep up. ‘This is a map of destiny in three dimensions. Or four dimensions, since it applies time. But it could be lots of different possible destinies across lots of timelines, right? So...what is that? That makes it five dimensions mapped in three? Why would one thing reappear consistently through all of the different possible maps unless it was a permanent presence in all of them? Possible maps. It’s a map. It’s the map.’

“Oh...fudge.”

Scootaloo glanced up from her examination of some of the yarn. “Did you say something, Detective?”

Jamming a hoof in my pocket, I pulled out my map of Detrot. “Get Sweetie Belle back in here. You need to see this.”

Scootaloo held the map with the Shield pylons each circled with a red marker, staring at it with her muzzle hanging open.

“How did we miss this?!” she demanded, slapping the map with the back of her hoof. “This isn’t a stupid decimal out of place! That's not a glitch! That's...that's the whole freakin' city!”

“You know, I said that same exact thing? Took me a while to figure it out,” I replied, and at their quizzical looks, I elaborated, “It’s like the frog in a pot of hot water. If you heat the water up quickly, the frog jumps out. Heat it up slowly, and it’ll cook. These pylons were so useful that nopony thought to take a look at a map of them, and anypony who did probably thought there was some really good reason for the distribution.”

Sweetie chewed her tongue a little, thinking. “You say this thing managed to transport Canterlot to the Moon and is keeping the alicorns out?”

“Among other things.”

Apple Bloom pushed her cheek in beside Scootaloo’s, taking one edge of the map in her hoof. “Hrm...yah know, Ah...huh. That’s funny. Been awhile since Ah thought of that mess, but lookin’ at it, don’t it look an awful lot like Project Sixty-Six?”

“I mean...a little, yeah,” the pegasus murmured, then shook her head. “We never got the power requirements for that spell matrix worked out, though. It was too big! Too crazy! It would have taken—”

“—a whole city,” Sweetie finished, her eyes wide. Reaching up, she blotted a bit of perspiration off of her forehead with the back of one forelock, careful to avoid her mascara. “Somepony really did it, didn’t they? They built Project Sixty-Six…”

“What is ‘Project Sixty-Six’?” I asked.

“A dumb idea Ah came up with durin’ the war,” Apple Bloom replied, musingly. “Ah wanted some way to cast any spell, anythin’ Ah could come up with. A universal spell. If yah could think it, this thing coulda cast it. Didn’t work, though.”

“And...why didn’t it work? You’ll excuse me if I’m a little bit behind on my magical theory courses.”

“It...well...I mean, it’s really complicated, but the short answer is ‘the math’. We couldn’t do the math,” Sweetie answered, tugging at the hem of her dress. Looking up at the ‘glitch’ in the tangles of yarn, she flicked an ear in my direction. “The Crusaders’ entire research and development team with a hundred calculators couldn’t code the magic in any way that would compress it into a reasonable space. Of course, we didn’t have a whole city and more than half a century to do it in. The parts we did have were pulled from one specific thousand-year-old book of spell theory.”

“Somepony a thousand years ago worked out what you couldn’t?” I asked.

“Not...not somepony,” Sweetie replied, with a slightly dismissive gesture. “You and she are well acquainted by now if what you told us was all accurate. At least, you’re acquainted with her armor. A certain evil mare who terrorized Equestria and spent a millennium in Princessly time-out?”

I cocked my head. “Princess Luna?”

“No, darling. I’m speaking of Nightmare Moon. It was her personal grimoire,” she clarified. “It contained just one spell, a spell to remake the night sky, or at least to remake parts of it. Therefrom, supposedly, one could grant themselves anything they might desire. Considering that the Nightmare has apparently been involved in our current situation from the beginning, it seems likely this isn’t the first time somepony has been tempted by this power. That is, if everything you told us is true, of course.”

“What was the name of this spellbook you used?” I asked, though I had a suspicion I already knew the answer.

“Ah...yes. Well, the translation was a bit arcane, but Nightmare Moon’s grimoire was called ‘The Web of Dark Wishes’.”

Act 3 Chapter 25 : There's No Need To Fear!

Act 3 Chapter 25 : There's No Need To Fear!

Relations between the species currently known as the ‘diamond dogs’ and the various equine races have been strained for many centuries. The conflict which originated those tensions came about during the first Equestrian Unification over a thousand years ago during which the three major tribes of Equestria banded together and drove the canine race from their lands.

Few legends from those times remain, but the ones that do suggest centuries of relatively congenial interaction between dogs and ponies. At one time, ponies tilled the land and sky, provided food and gems, and the dogs kept the ponies from harm. They were equine kind’s soldiers, police, and shepherds. When ponies began to develop weapons, magic, and other systems to defend themselves, a slow realization stole over equine-kind; they no longer needed the dogs to protect them.

It was then that the fall of the diamond dogs began. Their civilization never quite recovered from the loss of that symbiotic relationship with ponies. In many places they are regarded as little more than intelligent animals. Still, those ancient instincts to protect and defend Equine kind have never entirely died.

-The Scholar

Taxi’s toe hovered over the ignition.

“Lim...one more time: are you sure?” she asked worriedly. “We can find some other way of getting—”

“I am sure,” the librarian said, bracing his hooves on the dashboard. “Do begin, please. The sooner we start, the sooner this will be over and I can stop anticipating it.”

Reaching forward, I laid my leg on his back, carefully avoiding all the wires tangled around his forelegs. Taxi shot me a questioning look, and I nodded.

The engine growled, and a white hot spark shot off the end of Limerence’s horn, leaving a black mark on the ceiling. As the spell core spooled up, Lim slowly went rigid, his teeth grinding against each other. Tugging a clean bandage out of the rucksack beside me, I crawled between the seats and forced his muzzle open with the edge of my hoof until I could wedge the cloth into his jaws. The air around his body smelled like ozone, but his eyes were open and alert. I stared into them until he blinked, then tapped the dash twice.

“Taxi...get us moving. Keep our speed down until we’re out of the Aroyo-patrolled areas.” I pulled the radio juju bag from around my neck and passed it to Swift, who gave me a confused look. “Kid, could you talk to Tourniquet? See if you can get her to look in on us and guide us away from anything dangerous.”

“Yes, Sir. Is...is he going to be okay?” she asked, gesturing at Limerence.

Sparks were dribbling off the end of Lim’s horn as the ring around its base glowed softly. He slowly folded his hooves under himself and shut his eyes, unable to disguise the quivering in his chest but still determined to remain composed. The veins in his neck were standing out in a disconcerting manner.

“He’ll be fine,” I lied, fishing a healing talisman out of the supplies and pressing the thin metal disk to Lim’s neck. The runes around the edge started to flicker, and his shoulders noticeably relaxed. “Sweets...drive.”

Swift spoke in hushed tones to the juju bag, occasionally looking up long enough to direct us away from a bottleneck or a dangerous area. For as much as I knew the city had ponies in it, one wouldn’t know it from the state of the streets. I supposed most had found themselves some little enclaves to hide in or joined one of the factions. Even the most stubborn could surely see the writing on the wall. With the Biters attacking anypony who wasn’t heavily defended, we had the roads to ourselves.

Unfortunately, that meant the lightning-spewing cab stuck out worse than it usually did, even at low speeds. With a few of the crazier modifications disabled, one could pretend we were a normal cab for about two seconds before the engine let out a wail like an injured animal. ‘Stabilizing’ the engine was all Limerence could really do, and Taxi’s version of slow was different from everypony else’s.

The city hemmed us in on all sides, and I was getting that unpleasant ticklish sensation in my stomach that said somebody was following us; every time I looked, though, there was nothing there. Of course, in the films you always catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye or something like that; in the real world, frequently all you’ve got is a gut feeling. Tourniquet’s ladybug armada was probably out there and might have been watching out for us, but the sensation in my gut told me otherwise.

The quiet was starting to make my stomach writhe, and I was ready for an attack or some music. We were still miles from the Castle or the diamond dog enclave.

“Sweets? You mind turning on the radio?” I asked. “Maybe Gypsy?”

Taxi peered over at Limerence, who was chewing the bandage in his teeth. The hair on his neck was standing on end while that around the base of his horn was charred at the tips. He quickly nodded his assent, clutching the dashboard as power coursed through his body.

Leaning forward, Swift set the juju bag on the center console and asked, “You...you think she’s still on?”

“Unless somepony managed to chase her off of the police networks, I don’t doubt it. Pony like that? No, she’ll still be on the air,” I said as Taxi reached down and flicked on the radio.

Gypsy’s urgent voice filled the car.

“This is the voice of Detrot calling the only stallion who can help! You know who you are! If you can hear this, you’ve got to get to the Castle! The police have been cut off, and their food and water supplies have been poisoned! Their escape routes are guarded, and over a dozen officers have been killed trying to find a way through! Nopony is responding on any of the emergency frequencies! This message repeats!... This is the voice of Detrot calling the only pony who can help! You know who you are! If you can hear—”

Taxi touched the power button, and there was silence again. I shifted in my seat and closed my eyes, trying to find a peaceful place inside my head where I could scream like a toddler for about three minutes. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

My driver was the first to speak.

“Trap?” she asked.

I considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. You get the feeling we’re being tailed?”

Reaching back, she rubbed the scars where her cutie mark used to be, then glanced in the rearview mirror. “For awhile now, yes. They’re not intent on attacking us, yet, but they’re definitely interested in where we’re headed. They’re not friendly.”

I turned to Swift. “Kid? Tourniquet getting anything?”

“No, Sir,” she replied, shaking her head. “If they are following us, though, they’re probably flying, and she can’t get a good look any distance above five meters from one of the major electrical lines. We’re also near several Shield pylons. Those mess with her perception really badly.”

Touching Limerence’s neck, I felt the waves of heat coming off of the restriction ring around the base of his horn. The tears dripping off his cheeks might have been confused for perspiration, but his lips had a determined set. Slowly, he forced his mouth open and spat out the chewed bandage.

“D-detective. I...I am s-stable. The sp-speed is at your dis...dis...disposal.”

‘You’re a piece of unmitigated shit, Hard Boiled,’ I thought, watching my friend shaking in the seat, a trickle of blood starting to creep down his nose. Leaning forward, I wiped it away with the back of my hoof.

“You heard him, Sweets,” I said. “Get us to the diamond dog enclave. The sooner we’re there, the sooner we can unhook him from this thing.”

Taxi gave me a dubious look, then gave the cab a little more gas. Lim gasped and clutched at the seat as we blew down the streets, his face bathed in a sheen of sweat. The smell of burning hair filled the car.

Swift yelped and swung around to the windows, grabbing her bag with the Hailstorm in it and throwing the gun across her back. The turrets spooled up almost immediately, and her eyes widened. “Sir! Tourniquet just got a ping! Our pursuers are magically disguised and they’re fading in and out, even where she can see them! I’ve got two targets at extreme range and closing in! Four targets!...Six! Sir, there’s ten targets!”

Lifting a quivering hoof, Limerence rested it on Taxi’s shoulder. “G-go f-faster.”

“No!” I barked. “Sweets, we’ll fight if we have to!”

“T-too ex-exposed,” Lim murmured at the conflicted expression on my driver’s face. “All d-die, then w-world dies. G-go faster.”

Taxi applied even more gas, and great spurts of green lightning started to burst from under the hood as we accelerated again, screaming around corners and down straightaways towards the Castle.

“What do you see, kid?” I asked Swift as she looked through the Hailstorm’s magical tracking system.

“They’re falling back,” she replied, scanning the sky. “Sir, I think...I think they lost us. They’re moving left and right, like they’re hunting for us street by street.”

I pointed off to our left. “This is Cardamom Street, right? Yeah, just down there. The old Axe place.”

“Right, I remember where it is,” Sweets replied.

Swinging the wheel around, Taxi sped down Cardamom Street. On a good day, it was a quiet residential street, with a few dozen identical little houses lined up side by side, cookie-cutter productions of a bygone era that deserved a flamethrower taken to them. There was one home on the row that stood out, though.

When the developer that put up those other ugly little boxes bought up the street, old Miss Axe Biter wouldn’t sell. Her house stood out as a bastion of old world sensibilities, with a defensible turret on top, crenelations around the eaves, brick construction, and very few windows.

I’d solved a little bother with old Miss Axe Biter about ten years back, when a neighbor was found with one of her antique war axes buried in his skull. It was a minor murder and frame job by an unhappy cousin who’d been written out of the family will, but Miss Axe Biter still made a point of annually sending around a gigantic tub of cookies to the police department for Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Unfortunately, her house appeared to have been abandoned. The front door was smashed in and the garage door left open. True, Axe Biter had little enough worth stealing, but it was sad to see her home in such a state. Even the front garden was trampled pretty badly. I silently prayed nothing had happened to the old cow and she’d found herself somewhere else to hole up.

Still, an empty garage was an empty garage.

We sped into the tiny box-like room, just barely missing the back wall with a screech of the brakes. Waves of sweat were rolling off Lim’s body and a stream of blood trickled from his nose, but he was still holding on as we let the engine idle. I pulled a fresh healing talisman from the bag and set it against his forehead.

“Kid? What’s the situation back there?” I asked.

Swift squinted at the roof overhead as the Hailstorm’s cannons let of a bit of cool fog that dribbled down her shoulders like smoke. “They’re still moving, but...farther off to our left. I think they’re...maybe avoiding this area? I don’t know. It’s really hard to tell, Sir.” Her gaze slowly slid down until she was staring at the floor of the cab. “Huh. That’s funny.”

“What’s funny? Very few things are funny, right now, kid,” I replied. Limerence was resting his cheek on the dashboard. His eyes were still open, but just barely.

“Well, it’s probably just a family of gophers or something. The Hailstorm is giving me a bunch of target reticules underneath us. That’s the ground, though, isn’t it? Unless this place has a basement or something...”

I hesitated only a moment, just long enough for my driver and I to exchange a quick look.

“Taxi, drive!” I shouted. She was already throwing the cab into reverse, but it was too late.

The ground beneath the garage let out an eardrum shattering crack and my stomach lurched as the car rang like a gong hit with a sledgehammer. My head ached as the vehicle tipped forward, then slid nose-first into a black hole. Dirt flowed up the windows, moving like water as it swirled around us and we were swallowed up by the darkness.

With another jolt, I was suddenly in midair. My skull hit something soft, then something that yelped, then something fluffy, and finally something that set bells ringing. The last sound I heard was Mags’s indignant screeching as she was rudely awakened from her nap.

It would be nice to be a young griffin. Combine the best parts of being a cat with the best parts of being a bird and you get a creature that can spend the largest part of the day napping, flying, complaining, or being petted. Mags gets to sleep through most of the worst bits of any given week.

Now and then, I get a similar opportunity, but usually only after a concussion.

I came to slowly. No sense waking up violently most of the time, especially when you don’t know your circumstances, but this gradual awakening was more a product of dizziness and less of alert forethought.

The first thing I felt was something furry wrapped around me, not just fuzzy or fluffy but with a definite furry quality. Gravity hadn’t quite asserted itself in a particular direction yet, but I had the ugly sensation that I was being carried over a shoulder and that the warm blanket around my midsection was an arm. Since the shoulders of quadrupeds are a very particular shape and few have anything like arms, that left one of the bipedal species: diamond dogs or minotaurs. There are other bipeds in our world, but few friendly enough to live in the city.

My other senses started to return, one at a time. I opened my eyes, then blinked a few times before realizing my hat was mashed down over my face. Still, there was the smell to latch onto.

Dirt. Perfume. Dog sweat.

Dog sweat and perfume.

Diamond dogs. I was being carried by a heavily perfumed diamond dog. Lots of unpleasant possibilities were playing out in my head, but I needed more information before I could decide which one was most likely.

I could hear the shuffling of several other beings as they moved through the dark in near total silence while something rattled and clanked along behind us. I couldn’t tell exactly, but the sound was very regular, as though some heavy weight were being dragged over rocks and stones.

Lifting my head as much as I was able in my awkward position, I cleared my throat.

“Ahem?” I murmured. “Could you perchance put me down?”

My captor or whatever they might be stopped, then plucked me off of their shoulder as though I weighed nothing at all and held me at arm’s length with my hooves dangling.

“Awake?” a gravelly voice observed. “Hrmph. Praetor say you should be knocked out longer with head bleeding like that. Not bleeding now, though. Guess they not know everything.”

Putting a toe under the brim of my hat, I nudged it back so I could see who I was addressing. I immediately regretted it.

The face in front of me was the sort only a mother could love, but even then, only if she’d been drinking heavily. Diamond dogs are kinda ugly on a good day, and the jowly mutt holding me was a specimen of particular wretchedness, like a rottweiler who’d made romantic overtures to a running lawnmower. The dog’s brown fur was crisscrossed with scars and deep, flesh-penetrating bite marks that would have made a griffin warrior proud.

Worse, on first impressions, I suspected the creature was female. I didn’t want to check under her tail to make sure, but she was wearing enough paint and powder on her cheeks to put a whole clown school out of business. She was also wearing a bright red frock with white polkadots that fit her about as well as garter belts on a hippopotamus. A small gold plated olive branch was perched behind her right ear, completely out of place and looking very odd on a canine her size.

I gulped and rooted around in my slightly bruised cerebrum for some words. I knew there were some in there, but all of my language centers seemed to be occupied coming up with new ways to say ‘you look like a chimera’s backside’, and that would have been impolite, since the lady hadn’t yet dropped me on my head.

Leaning a little bit to one side, I tried to get a look at our party. In the barely lit tunnel, it was hard to tell exactly who was back there, but the dark didn’t seem to bother the dogs much. There were six of them, all smaller than the one who’d been carrying me. Two were tethered to something with a couple of bright, shining lights on the front of it, hauling the object like a sled. It took me a moment to realize it was the cab being pulled along behind them.

One of the other dogs was carrying two thick canvas bags slung over his shoulders, while yet another held Limerence in the crook of one leg. He seemed to be unconscious, dangling limply.

“I can walk, if you don’t mind,” I said, glancing down at my foreleg. I was somewhat comforted to realize they hadn’t confiscated my revolver.

The frocked dog shifted me to one paw and jabbed a claw over her shoulder at the dog carting the two bags.

“That up to Commander Max,” she said.

‘Commander Max’ looked like some mix of a labrador retriever and a goat. Maybe a goat with the mange. He was wearing enough bandoliers of ammunition across his chest and waist that he didn’t actually require clothing, but there were no guns in sight. He also wore the strange, golden olive branch on a lanyard around his throat. As a matter of fact, all of the diamond dogs sported it somewhere on their person, sometimes as a brooch, sometimes as an earring, but always present.

Max - who’d had apparently been listening to my exchange with the female dog - held up a muscular arm for the group to stop and nodded for my captor to let me down. She gently set me on my hooves.

“You. Pony. Hard Boiled?” Max asked.

“That’ll be me, yes,” I replied. “Whereabouts are my friends?”

Max chuckled, shifting the bag he was carrying from one shoulder to the other. “We see the wanted posters with you face on them! You friends were less—” He paused, as though searching for the right words. “—polite when we say they now guests of the Underdogs. Little bitey pegasus with dangerous teeth goes in bag with little bitey griffin. Crazy face-kicking monster pony goes in trunk of car.”

I peered at the other diamond dogs. Several wore bandages or bruises that suggested they’d been in a tussle recently.

“My driver does tend to be impolite when someone burrows under the car without permission. Mind if I inquire why you felt the need to drag us down here?” I asked, trying to get a look ahead of us. The only light was provided by the headlamps of the cab, and it wasn’t enough to pierce the cloying darkness.

One of the bags in his arms squirmed a little.

Swift’s slightly panicky voice issued from inside. “Sir? Sir, is that you? Are you free?”

“Yeah, kid. Did we try negotiation, or was it straight to violence?”

“Well...Taxi was really angry when she saw what happened to the side panels and bumper of the car, then when you wouldn’t wake up she sort of...went crazy, and Mags jumped on the little dog with the mohawk—” Swift explained as I flicked my eyes across the group until I found the dog in question. He was limping along, with a bandage wrapped around his crotch. “—and then I tried to stop her and they thought I was attacking—”

I quickly interrupted before she could paint a more complete picture. “Right, kid. I get it.” Turning back to Commander Max, rubbing my forehead, I could feel a quickly fading cut just above my eyebrow and some crusted blood down the side of my face. “Sorry for any inconvenience, Mister Max. Since we’re alive and I still have my gun, I’m presuming you don’t mean us any harm. Do you mind letting my partner out of the sack? I promise she won’t cause any more trouble.”

Max shrugged, shifting the bags with Swift and Mags around and setting them on the floor of the cave. Grabbing the drawstring, he pulled it open. “You have guns, we take bullets. You cause trouble, we knock you out again, put in bag again. Simple?”

“Simple,” I agreed as my partner pushed her nose out of the bag. Reaching out, I helped her up, then went to check the second sack as she stretched her wings. Mags was in the bottom of it, sound asleep once more. I made a note in my head to see if griffin narcolepsy might be a thing. Still, it was probably easier to transport her that way. I tugged the drawstring shut again and lifted her onto my back, then turned back to Max. “You had somewhere you were taking us?”

“Scout dog see Biters chasing you,” Max explained, his droopy ears twitching back the direction we’d come from. “Figure you need help. Not figure you have crazy ponies and catbird with you. You pony hero. Bella think you worth saving. She also think you cute.”

The female who’d been carrying me, Bella, took a quick step forward, bared her teeth, and jabbed Max in the forearm hard enough to stumble him. “I not say he cute!”

Far from being offended, Max’s tail began wagging like mad. “You thinking it, though! Hehe!”

Bella crossed her arms over her expansive, polka-dotted bosom. “I gonna thump you next time we in the ring, Max.” Shaking her jowls, she leaned down to my eye level. “You is cute, though, pony. Want to put bows in your tail, later.”

“Uh...right.” I quickly took three steps back and leaned over to Swift. “Kid? Are all your bits in the right order?”

Swift was nervously straightening her badly rumpled feathers and patting around on her vest to see if anything had been taken. “I think so, Sir. I don’t have my weapons and my wings are going to need an hour with a feather brush, though. What about Limerence?”

“Max, what about the other stallion?” I nodded toward where Limerence lay with my hooftip. “Did your… ‘Praetor’ get the chance to look at him? Is he okay?”

“I not know,” Max replied, gravely. The diamond dog carrying Limerence took a couple of steps forward, lowering him for me to look. In the low light, I couldn’t see many details, but the librarian’s face was drawn and pale. “Little blue pony not wake up when we pull him out of cab. We going to Praetor place. He not able to do more than poke at you till have his tools. He went ahead to get things ready. Praetor explain things better than Max. He lead the Underdogs. He smart.”

Brushing a hoof through Lim’s mane, I held my fetlock under his nose until I could detect his gentle breathing. “He’s alive, at least. Underdogs. Right. Pardon if I haven’t heard of you, but there are lots of new factions in the city lately.”

Max chuckled, rising to his full height as his tail slapped against his rear legs frantically. “Heh, we grow since sun go away, but we be pack many years. Underdog pack fight make safe place in city of blood, but few ponies want live underground. Now, when sun go, there more ponies and more dogs want a pack to keep them safe.”

All six of the diamond dogs threw one arm across their chests in a sort of odd salute and shouted, “Dig, fight, guard, return the sun!”

After a short silence, I finally sorted my thoughts out enough to speak. “Return the sun, huh? That’s something I can get behind.”

“Dig, fight, guard, too!” Max said, his muzzle hanging open in a canine smile. “I add the ‘return the sun’ part after sun go away.”

“Good slogan, really. Well, now that we’re all friends here...can I get my driver out of the trunk, too?”

Max and Bella exchanged a look, then both shook their heads.

“Crazy face kicking pony stays in boot,” Max said, firmly, tapping the largest bandolier of armor across his chest. “She have lots of words for calling dogs bad names and promising all kinds of face kicking. You talk to her, though. If Doyle asleep, leave him sleep. He grumpy when he woken up. He also keeping lid shut.”

“Much obliged.” I trotted around Max towards the cab. The two dogs towing it gave me indifferent looks as I moved around to the back. Another dog who I presumed was ‘Doyle’ was sitting on the lid of the trunk, snoozing like a baby. I shifted his tail out of the way and eased down to speak. “Sweets? You there?”

“Where else would I be, numbnutz?!” came a muffled shout. “Lemme out so I can kill all these dogs and reupholster my cab with their skins!”

I shut my eyes and thought of flowers and sunshine. Flowers and sunshine.

“Sweets, these dogs are friendlies. At least, I’m pretty sure they are. Can we dispense with the killing?”

“No! Did you see what they did to my car?!”

I stepped back and shrugged at Max, who was giving me an amused look.

“Can I get some duct tape or something to make sure she doesn’t escape until we’re good and ready?” I asked.

“What?! Hardy, I’m going to use your spine for a new gearstick when I get out of here!”

“Yeah, forget the duct tape. Better make it rope.”

Swift and I strolled leisurely along beside the Underdogs as they led us deeper into their tunnel network. Mags was still asleep, Limerence was still unconscious, and Taxi’s death threats had settled to a dull roar.

A few times we crossed through broken pipes that’d been sealed off or rerouted, but for the most part the dogs’ excavationssd had managed to avoid digging through any major city conveniences so far as I could tell. The tunnel network was enormous and seemed frequently to have been dug straight out of either bedrock or the concrete underpinnings of the city itself. That nothing had collapsed was probably testament to diamond dog engineering and digging techniques. I couldn’t be certain, but I had the impression that we’d been slowly descending.

I wanted to question Max further on what exactly the Underdogs were, but he just gave me a crooked grin and wagged his great bush of a tail. I couldn’t be sure, but I did keep catching Bella glancing at my flank from time to time. Not lecherously, so much as with a keen interest; considering what she was wearing, it made me a little nervous to think what sort of getup she might try to slap me in if given half a chance. Still, Swift owed the Warden of Tartarus a date, and I was probably going to be saddled with Scarlet Petals for a night, so it might not hurt to see somepony about a new look once the world was no longer facing imminent destruction.

After what I judged to be a walk of around three quarters of an hour, Max brought the party to a stop once more. The tunnel looked exactly the same as every other we’d walked through to date, with the sole exception that it was worn slightly smoother and the walls seemed a tad better sculpted.

Moving to one side of the tunnel, he tapped three times with a knuckle, then did a complicated little dance with his back legs that echoed in the stone.

Without warning, or rather with little enough warning that I went diving for my trigger bit even though my gun was empty, a half dozen additional diamond dogs burrowed out of the walls, shaking dirty paws as they tore themselves free. A large circle on the wall Max had approached began to collapse inward, leaving a gaping hole three times my height and just as wide into a well-lit cavern behind. A pair of dogs on either side stepped back from a couple of ropes that’d been holding the ‘door’ shut. The fitting was so precise I couldn’t have told you exactly where it was when it was shut.

The space beyond looked like it might have been an old cistern or underground reservoir at some point, long since drained. Ramshackle huts ringed the walls, and electric lights hung from strings across the ceiling, dangling low to provide a sort of cool illumination that would neither bother equine eyes nor blind diamond dogs. That was a considerate addition, since there seemed to be a huge number of ponies down there, wandering between the shelters along with what was surely half of the diamond dog population of Detrot. For a subterranean village, it seemed clean and relatively well kept. Sadly, I couldn’t make out much beyond the general shapes.

“How...long has this been here?” I asked Max, staring down at the little town.

Max picked at his teeth with the tip of his tongue. “Twice ten summers. It only place bad ponies not look. Underdogs hide. Stay safe. Save dogs who not able to save themselves. When sky go dark, we grow. More ponies, more dogs. Keep them safe. Keep them hidden.”

“Sir, we’re very near the police department,” Swift murmured, flicking her tail at a sign on the wall beside the door with the old version of the D.P.D. badge on it and an inspection sticker dating back twenty years. Stepping closer, she quickly read the notice, and her eyes widened. “I think...I think we might be underneath the Academy!”

“The Academy? What makes you think so?”

Swift rolled her eyes. “Sir, you know the abandoned buildings six streets over from the Castle are part of the Academy, right? That was in Police History 101.”

“Kid, it’s been sixteen years since I cracked a history book, and I spent several of those years drunk as a skunk. You’ll excuse me if I don’t remember the arcana of the city map, but that’s usually Taxi’s job and she’s in the trunk of the car.”

“Oh...right. Sorry, Sir. I forget that sometimes,” she apologized, scratching her spiky mane.

“Then please, illuminate me.”

“Well, you know there were all those budget cuts about twenty years ago, right? The last mayor sold a bunch of old city buildings, including almost half of what used to be the Academy, for mall space. Then there was some sort of big fight with the city, and it all ended up just...kinda...sitting there. Nopony wanted to use it.”

“Best place to hide is place ponies never look,” Bella explained, toying with Lim’s hooves as she moved through the door. “We stay out of sewers and scarred ponies that own sewers stay away from police. Follow. I take you to Praetor.”

“Praetor? Not familiar with that word,” I said, cocking my head.

“It think it might mean something like ‘governor’ or ‘magistrate’ in old Pegasopalan, Sir,” Swift interjected, then added a little more softly, “You’d have to ask my dad. He’s the one who loves ancient pegasus history. He used to read their fairy tales to me, and I think I remember that word.”

I shook my head as I watched the bustling little community. “Funny how many communities in Detrot have ended up underground. I guess with the Wilds and the violence on the surface, moving back into the same tunnels that shielded us during the dragon raids and the early settlements makes sense. The dogs used to work the mines. They can’t all have started freaky pred-prey clubs or be working as bodyguards for psychopaths...”

Bella hooked a tooth over her lip and started down into the village. “Follow me, pretty ponies!”

I looked over my shoulder at the cab. “What about the car?”

The giant bitch snickered, swishing her tail back and forth. “We just leave it there. You headed to castle of police ponies, right? Or do you want we should let crazy face-kicking pony free so she can tear out you lungs and beat you with them like she say?”

I pretended to consider the offer, then tugged at the hem of my anti-magic armor. “No, no...just shove it back down the tunnel a little. We’ll get it when we’re ready to go. If this ‘Praetor’ of yours knew I was coming and hasn’t decided to shoot me already, he’s probably not looking for a prisoner or a corpse.”

Bella pulled a walkie-talkie from a pocket of her dress and waggled it at me. “When face-kicking pony said you name back there when she was kicking Mango in the face, Praetor heard. Praetor say ‘Bring Mister Hard Boiled right down. I decide if we push him into bottomless pit’.”

“Oh...lovely. Well, by-golly and gee-willickers, why don’t we just go see this Praetor fellow, right away?”

The ‘village’ of the Underdogs was small by Detrot standards, more of a community center, really, but it was also the first time in a while that it seemed nopony had heard of Detective Hard Boiled. The sensation of strolling through what amounted to a small shire without anyone giving me so much as a sideways glance was refreshing. My enemies had gifted me fame that I was certain was likely to prove lethal before it proved helpful, and the sea of faces all ignoring me gave me a warm, bubbly feeling inside that only a cop can appreciate.

The anonymity might have been some byproduct of the environment, however; the low light did make it hard to see more than basic details of anyone more than a few meters away.

Even though it was somewhat dark and a bit dingy, there was a craftsponyship to the place that belied the underlying materials. Small avenues ran between the buildings, which were less shacks, more permanent housing built out of a million different kinds of scrap metal. Whoever was building them was a skilled welder and had an artist’s eye for detail.

There were houses made out of old cars with windows which rolled up and down. A mare in a two-story flat was watering a box of mushrooms which grew in a planter made out of a half dozen old buckets side by side. A whole apartment block next door was faced with great sheets of soda can metal, pounded flat and shingled to produce a colorful, reflective siding and rooftop. The town couldn’t have been more than three or four streets wide, but the population was densely packed and the buildings climbed several stories each with walkways slung between them.

The overwhelming smell of mildew and dirt was everywhere, compounded by the close in scent of many ponies and diamond dogs living in close quarters. That said, there was a gentle breeze keeping the air moving.

Since Bella knew where we were going, I let my mind drift, focusing just on keeping an eye on her polka-dotted backside as we moved into the crowds.

“Sir? I’m trying to feel Tourniquet. I...I can’t!” Swift whispered, looking a little panicky.

“I don’t think this place runs off city power, kid. Maybe a generator or something? Listen.”

She cocked an ear towards the ceiling. There was a definite low hum, audible above the buzz of conversations and the soft shuffling of hoof traffic over the dirt carpeting the avenues. Somewhere, somepony was singing a pleasant little aria.

“S-sir...can I have the ladybug, p-please?” she stammered, pushing herself against my side.

I fished out the bottle with its tiny prisoner. The insect seemed to have been napping; I gave it a light shake, then passed it to my partner. “Why?”

She took it and clutched the bottle to her chest. “I just want to let Tourniquet know I’m alright.”

Gently tapping the glass, she got the bug’s attention. The little creature stretched, spreading its chromatic wings, then crawled up to the cork. Swift popped the cork out and held the mouth of the bottle to her mane, looking visibly more relaxed as the ladybug burrowed into her hair.

“Just keep her from sending the cavalry down on us, alright? We don’t need a bunch of Aroyo heavies blowing a hole in the roof of this place because your friend gets lonely,” I said, dodging around a young mare being led by the hoof by a much smaller diamond dog pup who was yammering away about ‘sweet rocks’ as they headed down the avenue.

“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir. I just don’t like it when I can’t feel her. It’s like...it’s like somepony pulled off one of my wings.”

“Just for my peace of mind, kid, I’d appreciate if you never tried to explain that to me. I find when I think too hard about your relationship with Tourniquet I get that weird sensation of staring off the edge off a building and having the urge to jump,” I called over my shoulder as I continued after Bella.

Swift paused to rest her hoof over the crescent-shaped scar on her breastbone for a moment, then cantered to catch up with us.

The Praetor’s house was at the end of the lane, wedged up against the concrete wall which ran around the outside of the village and up into the darkness overhead. I say ‘house’, but you can only stretch that term so far. The place was a five meter tall brewing barrel on its end that some mad person had welded a door into the side of. A short slate walkway led up to a porch made from the sawn off bed of a pickup truck. It was surrounded by a pleasant little mushroom garden with a few specimens in purple and pink that stood as tall as my barrel. Metal sculptures of geese wandered in an artfully welded flock between the fungus caps.

The welcome mat had a stylized picture of a pile of feces on it and said ‘Go away’.

As we stopped at the door, Bella unlimbered Limerence from her neck and held him in her forelegs like a child while she lifted her walkie-talkie to her muzzle.

“Praetor. It Bella. We here. You awake still?” she said in as gentle a voice as someone with vocal chords that sounded like they were made out of bags of rocks might. Leaning to one side, she murmured, “He getting old and nap in afternoon sometimes.”

The walkie-talkie sputtered, and then a sharp, masculine voice replied, “Pup, if you wish to make smart remarks about my sleeping habits, you best be prepared to lay your marker beside mine next time there’s a fight in the ring. That or you face me in the amphitheater. A debate on the nature of being, perhaps? Pick one or remember your tongue.”

Bella’s ears sagged as she realized she hadn’t taken her thumb off the ‘talk’ button on her communicator. “I no mean disrespect, Praetor. Got pony here.”

“Bring Mister Hard Boiled in, Bella, then go wash some of that perfume off. You stink like you’re in heat.”

The door of the giant cask clicked open, and Bella ducked inside. The smell of cooking meat wafted through the door strongly enough to almost make me gag. Swift had an altogether different reaction.

“Oooh, that’s bacon!”

For being the interior of a wine barrel, it was surprisingly roomy. Swift and I stood side by side in the doorway, taking in the ambiance. For someone’s home, it was almost brutally simple, as though the owner had decided interior decorating was a bit below them.

A wide, heavily used cot without a sheet or blanket was wedged beside an old-style coal-fed oven. No carpets or hangings adorned the walls, nor any pictures. Instead there were stacks upon stacks upon stacks of books, scrolls, and all manner of other paper detritus along with spattered ink on almost every surface. A long curtain divided the structure in half right down the middle, creating two ‘rooms’, both lit by a pair candles set in wall-hanging candelabra. Considering all the paper and wood in the place, it was a fire hazard fit to give a civically minded individual nightmares.

“I leave pony here,” Bella said, nervously glancing at the curtain as she laid Limerence gently on the wooden floor of the warm little cottage. “You talk with Praetor. He will heal you friend, then probably push you out the door sometime soon. You like ask questions, he might like you. He still thump you if you annoy him.”

From behind the curtain, the voice said, “Oh, he will most definitely thump you if you annoy him, Mister Hard Boiled.”

A great, shaggy, grey arm swept aside the curtain, and a gangly diamond dog pushed his way through wearing a filthy, ink-and-blood-drenched toga of some sort wrapped from his shoulder to his waist. He leaned heavily on a cane of some kind of dark wood with a rounded cap that looked like it’d been carved out of a bit of driftwood.

While most of the diamond dogs I’d met tended to drag their knuckles when they weren’t otherwise consciously inclined, the one called ‘Praetor’ had a haughty, self-assured demeanor; he squared his shoulders, he lifted his thin muzzle, and his emerald green eyes shone with intelligence.

“Hrmph. You’re shorter than your father,” he growled, hobbling out from behind the curtain. Reaching down, he grabbed my chin, turning it this way and that. His paw pads were hard, like rough leather. “Thinner, too. Let’s see if you’re also an idiot.”

I blinked at him and let him inspect me. He didn’t seem to have noticed Swift, or perhaps he was intentionally ignoring her.

“You knew my father?” I asked, fighting the urge to snap at the comment about my dad.

His lips drew back in a brief snarl as he turned back to the curtain, snatching up a box of crackers and tossing one into his mouth as he addressed me again

“So you are an idiot. Not surprising, really. Only a truly magnificent fool could have gotten themselves into the kind of trouble your family tends to. I suppose I can’t be too disappointed, though,” he commented, chewing noisily. Finally, he turned to Swift. “What about you, filly? Are you a fool?”

She gulped and hugged herself with her wings. “Sometimes, I sure feel like it, Mister Praetor, sir.”

“Harumph! A good answer!” he cackled. Easing down onto one knee, he took one of Swift’s wings between two fingers, spreading it out to one side. “Interesting wings, girl. Ridiculous wings, but interesting. Those morons outside call me Praetor. My name is Dogenes.”

I rubbed my neck, thinking. “Dogenes? My father told me a story about a ‘Dogenes’ who used to teach ethics for the police when he was in training. I mean, you’d have to be his son or something, right? That was over fifty years ago, and dad said Dogenes was old then. That was back before Mayor Trickle Down drummed most of the Diamond Dogs out of the police department...”

“Old is relative, Mister Hard Boiled.” Dogenes’s giant pink tongue lolled from one side of his muzzle as he stepped back behind the curtain. Something sizzled noisily, and Swift’s ears perked. “Do tell me this story, and maybe I’ll tell you if it’s true.”

“Can you take a look at my friend here, first? Bella said you could heal him. He wired himself into a—”

A heart-stopping snarl filled the cabin as he cut me off. “I will examine your stallion in good time and when I feel like it! Not before!” The cabin was silent as a mausoleum for a moment before Dogenes said in a much calmer voice. “Now...the story. Tell it, Mister Hard Boiled.”

I quickly wet my lips as I tried to get a handle on precisely what was going on. Something about Dogenes unsettled me in an elemental manner. It might have been the way his bright green eyes seemed to pierce right into my brain, or the way that, despite his age and species, his teeth were white as snow. There was just something about him that was beyond my experience, and it left me unnerved.

“T-the story goes that you...I mean...if you’re Dogenes...that is...I…” I trailed off, then shook my head.

‘Be polite, Hardy. Don’t buck him into the wall. Limerence needs a healer, and you need a way of getting away from the Castle without being detected.’

“The...the story goes—,” I went on in a steadier voice, “—that about eighty years ago, Princess Celestia was trying to sign some kind of treaty with one of the Diamond Dog city-states on the borders of Equestria. She heard about a...a diamond dog philosopher who was very influential and wise. She wanted to meet him.”

The hound nodded for me to go on, a small quirk to one side of his mouth.

“So, she went to the city and asked where his house was. Every dog she talked to pointed her towards the marketplace, but she couldn’t find him anywhere. Eventually, she was frustrated and sat down on the side of a fountain. After a few minutes, she noticed a beggar was lying on his back in the water behind her. Turning, she smiled down at him and said, ‘Hello, there. I wonder if you could point me to Dogenes? I would very much like to meet him’. The beggar said, ‘I am Dogenes.”

“Princess Celestia was shocked. He was very dirty and smelled bad, so she asked, ‘Do you know who I am, Dogenes?’ and he said, ‘I know who you are, Celestia Sol Invicta.’ and she asked, ‘I’ve very much wanted to meet you and get some of your wisdom. Is there anything I can do for you?’ Dogenes rolled his eyes, lay back in the water, and scratched himself, then said, ‘You can get out of my light’.”

Dogenes snorted, loudly, then trudged across the little room and sat himself down on his cot, idly fingering the end of his cane. “A good rendition, yes. Too bad it leaves out what happened thereafter. I didn’t end up teaching at the School for Gifted Unicorns because I was impressed with that awful old nag’s shiny jewelry. Do you know, she proceeded to follow me around for two solid weeks? She ruled, so far as I could tell, by sending off magical missives. Two weeks without a moment to myself. She even saw me eat a sparrow off of someone’s eaves and, rather than being repulsed, sat down and began eating grass out of the gutter.”

“Princess Celestia ate grass from a gutter?!” Swift gasped.

“Ten years I’d been living in a beer barrel, and suddenly there’s the world’s most irritating alicorn sleeping on top of it,” the diamond dog grumbled. “Do you have any idea how hot having the living embodiment of the sun snoozing atop your home can make things? I tried everything. I yelled. I ignored her. I peed on her while she slept. I bought a prostitute and we did the deed right there in my barrel! Never had I met a more...unflappable creature.”

My partner sank onto the carpet. “You...peed...on the Princess.”

“Yes! And all the while, she...somehow kept drawing me into these debates,” he hissed, tapping his cane against the side of his head. “Maddening. At the end, she offered me a job teaching those disgusting little foals of hers to think. She even said I could bring my barrel. A part of me still wishes I’d thrown myself in the river, but she might have just fished me out.”

“How did you end up teaching my father ethics?” I asked.

“How does anyone do anything, fool? I got bored! I got bored and I allowed that vile, impenetrable, infernal brood-whore of a Princess to convince me to continue making myself useful to her!” Taking a step towards me, Dogenes waved a claw under my nose. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten your father, either, Mister Hard Boiled. If I could have given him a negative grade, I would have. He believed in right and wrong, but not once did he explain himself properly!”

“Hmm...Dad was never much for philosophy,” I mused, then sat down and lifted Limerence’s head. “Now, my friend?”

Dogenes gave me a contemptuous look. “Witless pool of diarrhea you are. Do you not recognize extreme magical burnout? He’ll regain consciousness in an hour or two with an incurable cluster-headache that will last exactly twenty hours. Expect sobbing, tearing of clothes, and probably at least one suicide attempt.” Reaching into the folds of his toga, he pulled out a capped syringe and held it out to Swift. “If you care for your friend, you’ll use the whole needle.”

“What is it?” she asked, taking it carefully in her hooves.

“You ponies call it ‘Ace’,” he replied, cooly. “It’s my personal flavor. A slow start, building to a pleasant high that will last all night.”

I rubbed the side of my head as Swift stared at the needle like she’d never seen anything like it in her whole life.

“Sir, this is...I...uh…illegal...and...I...law...but...needs...”

Taking the syringe from her shaking hooves, I slipped it into Limerence’s vest pocket, then gathered him into as comfortable a position as I could.

“It’s just cognitive dissonance, kid. Take some deep breaths, and we’ll find a paper bag for you to blow into.” I turned back to Dogenes who was slowly wagging his tail. “Now then, You could have had any of your people give me that. Why’d you really bring me down here?”

“Ah! The first actual thought he’s had today!” Dogenes chuckled. Drawing himself up, he held aside the curtain, revealing a tiny icebox, a single-pan stove, and a wooden counter with a plate sitting on it. The plate had a sandwich on it with a couple of strips of cooked meat sticking out of the sides. As soon as she saw it, Swift’s mouth started watering so badly she had to quickly wipe it on the edge of her body armor.

Picking up the plate, he held it out to my partner. “I could hear your stomach grumbling from outside,” he said.

“Oh! Really? Thank you!” she squeaked, sweeping the sandwich up and tearing off a chunk. I watched as the realization that he’d knowingly served a pegasus a plate of meat crept onto her face. She slowly began to spit out the bite in her mouth, but it was too late.

“Hmm...I thought so,” Dogenes commented, dryly. “Ran afoul of some strange magic, did you, little filly? No memory of it? Lovely teeth, by the way. Not so vicious as our other specimens, but still quite spectacular.”

I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Other specimens? You have other ponies—”

“Not ponies. Not anymore,” he interrupted, ducking through the curtain. I heard the sound of pawsteps ascending a staircase and realized we’d just been invited to follow him. Lifting Limerence onto the cot, I nosed the pillow under his head, laid the bag containing Mags beside him, and turned back to find Swift quickly stuffing the bacon sandwich into her muzzle. I must have given her a look, because she tried to speak around it.

“What? Ish bacon. Bacon ish magic!”

A steep, rickety spiral staircase ringed part of the curtained off section of Dogene’s home. I had to lean against the outer rail, since it hadn’t been designed with quadrupeds in mind. Swift just hooked a wing over, and I had another little twinge of pegasus envy.

“Sir, how did he know about my teeth?” Swift asked.

“He probably smelled the meat on your breath, kid,” I replied. “Diamond dogs have noses like you wouldn’t believe. Speaking of that, you might want to spend a little longer with the floss in the mornings.”

She quickly covered her muzzle with her hoof and breathed into it, sniffed, then wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, sir.”

“It’s fine. Taxi’s breath was worse when she was going through that buffalo cuisine phase,” I answered as we reached the top of the stairs.

The second floor of Dogenes’ home was significantly larger than the first. It looked as though the back of the giant cask had been cut away and the wall behind burrowed into to expand the space. Most of the room was occupied by a miniature field hospital, lit by low-hanging electric lights. There was a small private area with a raised bed behind a yellowish curtain. Three additional rolling tables were wedged against the wall, and sheets covered shapes that looked distinctly equine.

Dogenes was standing at a short sink nearby, washing his paws. He glanced up, then went back to soaping his forearms.

“It seems our patient has finally expired,” the hound murmured. “A pity. His mind was going, but I would have prefered he didn’t die alone. Still, it will make the examination easier. He tended to get a bit feisty from time to time.”

“Dogenes, what’s going on?” I asked.

Picking up his cane from where it lay against the sink, he hobbled over to the bodies lined up against the wall. “The ‘Underdogs’, as they fancy themselves nowadays, are what is left of the mining consortium from the diamond dog lands. They mined this city for decades, and now their old tunnels run through much of it. Sad to say, when I retired from teaching about twenty years ago, they were a dying breed, pissants and thugs, gem-addicted and squatting in this pit they’d found for themselves. No guiding philosophy.”

“And...you gave them that?”

He rested his paw on the sheet covering the closest corpse and sighed, “Not intentionally. Those yelping little pups found out somehow that I used to be a teacher in the homeland. They sat outside my door here until I started throwing things. Turned out I threw a few books on codes of police conduct and pegasus history. I told them ‘make up your own damn minds what you want to be’, and they took it to mean ‘be dogs’. Protect, serve, obey. Morons, the lot of them, but they wouldn’t take ‘go to Tartarus’ for an answer. It was either guide them with purpose or end up some sort of messianic figure.”

“I’m not sure but that you didn’t end up that way, anyway, ‘Praetor’,” I said, eyeing the bodies.

“Quite,” he growled. “That name is going to haunt me to my grave.”

“Speaking of ‘graves’, what am I looking at here? It looks like you’ve got, pardon me saying it, a morgue in your parlor.”

“It is a morgue, Mister Hard Boiled,” he replied, pinching a bit of fur sticking out of his ear and flicking it away. “What the Underdogs lack in reasoning skills, they more than make up for in noses and ears. Your name is on the lips of far more persons giving it far more importance than one lowly, if unusually accomplished, police patsy’s might usually warrant, hence...you may be familiar with certain acts of violence that’ve taken place within the city. Bodies found ripped to shreds and flesh consumed?”

I slowly nodded and took a few steps closer. “They’re calling them ‘Biters’ in most of the city.”

“Yes,” he agreed, running his paw over the sheet gently. “Commander Max discoveredthese poor souls buried in some of the abandoned buildings above our domain, recently. With the recent frequency of bloody death in the city, one might have overlooked it, but these were of particular interest. Not so interesting, however, as the sad individual that we discovered floundering through the basement along with them.”

Strutting over to the bed, Dogenes grabbed the curtain and tore it back.

Act 3 Chapter 26 : Take A Note Please

Officer Swift, notes on dead body presented to us by Dogenes, Underdog Praetor:

Maybe pony? Probably pony? Whatever. He has had hooves.

Subject was male. The body is a little larger than Detective Hard Boiled, green mane, brown pelt, cutie mark of a soaring eagle flying over a river. I can’t say what his talent might be, but probably something related to flight.

I’m going to guess he was originally a pegasus, but only because he has wings. Three wings. One looks small and seems to be the wrong shape, like it grew backwards and upside down. Mister Dogenes says that might be the body rejecting transformation magics. Parts of him are still transforming, but very slowly now that he’s dead.

His condition reminds me of Mister Stone Shine, Taxi’s father. The Detective doesn’t think I can remember him, because I fainted, but I still have nightmares sometimes.

The scariest part of the body is definitely it’s face.

Scariest? Real professional, Swift. Why don’t you just write down every thought that enters your head so you don’t have to admit that you almost wet yourself when Dogenes pulled the curtain back?

Sorry.

I don’t know who I’m apologizing to, but it’s easier to write through the parts when I want to cry and hide behind the Detective. He just looks a little bit sad, but then, that’s how he always looks. Even when he’s smiling, I can see that he’s sad inside.

The dead pony’s face looks really terrible. The left half of his muzzle is slightly elongated, more like a wolf or a bear, than a pony. His teeth are even longer than mine. They’ve punched right through his lips and tongue.

That’s funny. My teeth fit together really tightly and cleanly. His look twisted, like somepony mashing up some silly putty into snakes.

Ewww!!! That description was super gross!

When did seeing a dead body stop making me queasy? Especially seeing a body in as bad a shape as this poor pony. He died in pain. Lots of pain. The bed he’s lying on smells really bad, too.

I missed a little bit here. The Detective and the diamond dog named Dogenes were talking and I didn’t write down whatever they were saying. It feels like I blacked out. I was seeing Grape Shot’s face, with the bullet hole where his eye used to be. I just realized I’m crying.

I wonder if this is what the Detective does when he looks like he’s staring off into space. His eyes go all distant and sometimes he starts to cry except he never acknowledges it. Maybe cry is the wrong word. His eyes start tearing up, but he just wipes the tears off and goes on doing whatever it is that he’s doing.

Am I going to be like him, one day? He’s so strong. Maybe the strongest pony I’ve ever met. He’s been threatened with death by a dozen people I can think of and he never flinches from it, like maybe he’s hoping one day that one of them will go ahead and make a move.

I better go back to listening. He doesn’t read my notes very often, but I want him to be able to use them if he does.

What were they saying?

“I know this pony,” I murmured, staring down into the horrific face of the dead stallion. There wasn’t much left to identify him, but then, I didn’t need much. His coloration was fairly distinctive.

“You know him, Sir?” Swift asked, her notepad in hoof.

“Yeah. Two months ago, on the day this all started. This dumb bastard was doing flight exercises with his platoon outside the Castle. He put a beanbag round into the side of the Night Trotter. He was PACT. His name is...was...Canyon. Right stupid prig, but he didn’t deserve this.” I turned to Dogenes. “You said he looks like that because his body rejected the magic?”

“I am simply an amateur pathologist, but one of our little unicorns offered her horn to figuring out exactly what happened to him,” Dogenes explained, prying one of his claws into the dead stallion’s mouth and peering at his throat. “She called it an ‘arcane conservancy’. Removing the magic from it failed to halt his transformation. The spell is written into his neurology and appears to draw from the ambient magic in the local environment. Only a constant spell disruption could stop it altogether, and he was too far gone.”

“Tourniquet...” Swift whispered, touching the crest on her chest. “Does this mean without a constant magical drain, I would have transformed?”

Dogenes frowned at her, then shrugged his broad shoulders. “Very probably. I’ve no idea how you managed to avoid it; however, this arcane conservancy seems to affect all of the victims differently. Mister...Canyon, did you say his name was? He was found with the bodies of these other individuals. He was able to tell us little, besides that he’d been ordered to carry the bodies into the basement and then to lie down and die alongside them. When he was lucid, he had no memories at all, and when he wasn’t...” Reaching over, Dogenes picked up a restraining cuff which had been lying beside the bed. “At first we had to keep him sedated. He didn’t remember when he’d been enchanted, or what triggered it. Later, the closer he came to death, his mind began to go entirely; he ranted and raved. Mad things, really, and not much of consequence.”

Leaning over the body, I gently touched Canyon’s forehead with my toe. An eye had begun to form just above his left brow. Strange.

“What about the others?” I asked, nodding towards the three tables by the wall.

Dogenes shook his great, shaggy head. “Our examinations seemed to indicate nothing but catastrophic organ failure similar to this pitiful creature. I would say as much as one percent of those who are infected with this spellwork are likely to die rather than transform. However, this—” Reaching into his toga, he produced a black wallet of some kind and tossed it to me. I caught it in my teeth, then flipped it open. “—may be of interest to you.”

It was a badge, a PACT badge. The crest of a shield surrounded by a laurel was unmistakable, but something about it was very strange. Somepony had painted the shield with something that looked like dripping blood.

Turning, I held it up for Swift. “This familiar, kid?”

Swift glanced up from her notepad, then blinked at the badge. “Oh! Yes, Sir! That’s a Shadow Squad badge!”

“I’m going to assume that’s a PACT thing?”

She nodded, twirling her pencil in a little circle with her hoof. “It’s one of the smaller PACT squads. They used to be mostly anti-changeling, but nowadays they fight rogue essies, enchanted ponies, and pretty much anything that is too small and too magical to use heavy weapons against. They’re crazy good in hoof-to-hoof combat. I was going for Heavy Squad, because they get all the cool guns, but...I’d have taken Shadow in a heartbeat.” Her ears drooped a little. “You know, if...if I’d managed to get in…”

“I think we’re going to chalk up the fact that you didn’t as a win. If you had, you might be in the same condition as our friend here,” I said, nudging Canyon’s leg. Setting the badge on the bed, I asked, “Dogenes, which of these ponies did you find this on?”

He gestured, vaguely, in the direction of the sheet-covered bodies. “The mare. She had it hidden in her mane.”

“That means she was PACT, too. We can probably assume the rest of them were as well. So...this is what happens when Biters go wrong,” I mused. “I hate to think what happens when the magic is completely successful.”

“Based on this model, we can make a few postulations,” Dogenes observed. “They are fast and capable of incredible feats in hoof-to-hoof combat. They eat meat. The corpses of the police officers we’ve found in our territory were those traveling in small, lightly armed groups. I would say that, given the near perfect intelligence they are able to maintain, they have magically marked a significant section of the city populace in some manner.”

Swift tapped her pencil against her chin. “Sir, I’ve been thinking about that. The intel thing, I mean.”

“Go on, kid?”

“What about the city water supply? I mean, if I wanted to know where everypony was at all times, I’d dump whatever it is in a couple of the water treatment plants. It’s called ‘The Scry’ right? It might have been detected before the Darkening, but afterwards? Tourniquet’s kept clean water flowing, mostly, but she doesn’t have the same resources the city does.”

“Mmm...probably. It makes our enemies that much more dangerous. We need to get up to the Castle. That message from Gypsy worries me.” I sucked in a breath. “Do you have any idea what’s going on up at the police department? We got a note from a friend saying they were under attack.”

Dogenes drew the sheet back over Canyon’s face and smacked his lips. “We have heard and smelled Biters, but we don’t see well above ground and the creatures avoid us. The Castle is a fortress of paranoia, and the maniacal bitch queen who rules it is has never been particularly tolerant of diamond dogs. She sits atop a pile of corpses buried down through her illustrious career, and she does not like competition. The Underdogs survive because they hide.”

“On an ordinary day, I’d agree with you,” I said, crossing my forelegs and leaning against the bed. “Their food and water supplies have been poisoned. We need a way to get them out. Right now, you have the strong negotiating position.”

“Mmm...and you are offering to negotiate on our behalf?” Dogenes asked, quirking an eye at me.

I opened my mouth to agree, then slowly shut it.

Officer Swift - Further notes on the Detective, Note 196:

The Detective has a bunch of personal flaws, but none are quite so impressive as his temper when he knows he’s been manipulated. He likes to think he’s in charge of himself. I think he knows he’s not the smartest being in the room most of the time, but he still resents it when people feel the need to play with his motivations to get him to do the thing he’d have probably done if they just asked him nicely.

I’ve heard him kicking a wall and cursing Stella’s name when he thinks nopony is watching. Even when Cerise, the Chief’s daughter, kissed him and then we had to take her to the Aroyos, he was furious. Speaking of that, I should ask him what we’re going to do about convincing Chief Jade not to kill us on the spot for stealing her.

My stomach is fluttering at the thought of all these bodies around me, but the Detective is solid as a rock. These would have been my fellow PACT members if I’d managed to join up. They’d have been my friends and colleagues. I might have found a marefriend or a coltfriend, and that might be them over there on the table, with crazy teeth like me. Maybe, if I’d stayed, it might be me on the table and the Detective might be dead and the armor of Nightmare Moon might be in the hooves of whoever is behind all this killing.

I can’t get bogged down in all the mights and maybes, but it’s so hard.

I don’t want to tell him, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what Chief Jade will do when she sees us. I’m afraid of finding out Mom and Gran are dead the next time we go to the Vivarium. I’m afraid of watching Tourniquet slowly freeze alongside all of the Aroyos. I’m afraid of not being there if the Detective is in trouble.

I think more than anything that I’m afraid of failing him. If there’s one pony in all of this who deserves a win, it’s Detective Hard Boiled.

Reminder to self: tear this page out and put it with the others.

----

“Hate...dogs...hate...ponies...hate...gravity…hate...everything...forever…”

I punctuated each word with the soft thump of my skull against the wall of the barrel.

Played. I’d just been played. Again.

Chief Iris Jade was already going to wring my neck for snatching Cerise. Now, I was expected to negotiate what might be the only means of helping the department resupply and get an anti-megafauna vehicle and break the siege on the Castle.

“Filly, is this a common response to frustration for this pony?” Dogenes asked.

“Yes. He’s not crazy. He’s just stressed out. You know, you could have just asked him to do that, right?”

“I find asking is ever so much less fun since I was dropped into this unfortunate leadership position with an army of simpletons hanging on my every word. Is he aware he is bleeding?”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Oh...yes, he is. He’s got a magical heart that makes him heal really quickly. He’ll be okay soon. He’s been friends with the pony you put in the trunk of our car for his whole life. I think they have a weird relationship.”

“The Underdogs have heard mention of that one alongside his name. How has he survived?”

“I have no idea,” Swift murmured. “He never quits, though.”

I pulled my head away from the wall, staring at the red spot I’d left on the wood. Blood was running down my muzzle and matting the fur on my cheeks, but I could already feel the itch of the wound just below my hairline closing. I turned around and held out my hoof. Dogenes slapped a bright blue towel across it, and I wiped my face off.

“Dogenes. You let me come down here. You know enough to know I’m dangerous to whoever has set Equestria on this path. I suspect you also know some of what’s going on in the city. Maybe less than I do, but enough to know that the sun didn’t go dark on a whim and that the center of the disturbance is here.”

Dogenes hooked a wide, shovellike paw into his toga. “The magical resonance originated here, in the Shield pylons. They are gigantic spell cores. You, the fool in the trenchcoat, are the individual who the enemies of this city have dedicated the greatest quantity of resources to the capturing of. It was a logical deduction that you must have something they need, or know something that can prevent their plans from coming to fruition. Therefore, the greatest moral imperative is keeping you alive.”

“And getting me to drop all of the resources of the police department into your claws is just a benefit...” I growled.

“Not my claws, Mister Hard Boiled,” Dogenes replied, “You are delivering them into the claws of the Underdogs. As imbecilic as they may be, they are uncorrupted. Can you say the same for your police department?”

My teeth ground against one another as I tossed the bloody towel at him. He caught it and threw it onto Canyon’s head.

“Tell Commander Max to give us back our bullets,” I said. “We need to get the car to the police station and preferably avoid the Biters. Any ideas on how to do that?”

Dogenes licked his chops and pointed to the stairs. “Bella will hold your hoof, and I’m sure the Underdogs will gleefully volunteer themselves as pack animals to move your vehicle, though once you are above ground they cannot follow, leastways until I have some guarantees from the Castle’s queen not to riddle them with holes on sight. There is a garage one street down from the Castle with a sub-basement I’m certain the diggers can burrow into.”

“That leaves actually getting to the Castle itself. There’s a secret entrance through one of the nearby sewers that we should be able to get into. Once we’ve got an armed guard, we’ll get the car and put it in the garage.”

“Sir, you’re assuming Chief Jade doesn’t just kill you immediately,” Swift reminded me.

“Yes, but I have been assuming that for years, and it’s paid off so far.”

“You never took her daughter before now! The last thing she saw was Cerise kissing you!”

“Kid, the odds were never in our favor to begin with.”

Dogenes hauled himself up with his cane and began trundling back to the stairs. “Then, Mister Hard Boiled, do visit again when you’ve saved the world. Or don’t, and I will while away my final hours fantasizing about some hideous death befalling you. Either way, get your bag of young griffin, your toothy protégé, and your damn fool unicorn out of my home. I think we’ve learned enough from Mister Canyon and his friends. I must find a hole to drop them down before they begin to stink any more than they already do.”

Forty-five minutes later, we were back in the tunnels. The air was full of dust, and Swift and I had been reduced to trudging along behind the cloud of flying paws and dirt that was our escorts. They could dig almost as fast as a pony could walk, and with the cab being hauled along behind, that meant we could take some time to enjoy the journey. That would have been easier if everything didn’t smell like sweaty diamond dog.

Swift had been trying to work up the courage to ask me something for several minutes, but every time she’d come up with a good way to phrase it and opened her muzzle, her brain had vetoed the question a second later.

“Swift, spit it out,” I grunted, wiping my forehead with the back of my leg. “Really, you’re giving me the willies here.”

“Sorry, Sir. I was just curious. If the Chief does kill you, how does your heart work? I mean, if it’s anything worse than making you bleed out or something, I might have to have Doctor Slip Stitch sew parts of you back on. Would they heal? What if I have to attach your heart to a generator or something? Do you know what voltage it—”

“Kid, if Jade is angry enough to try, I don’t think she’ll leave enough for you and Taxi to put in a basket, much less plug into a wall.”

Office Swift, notes on Chief Jade:

The Detective would never admit it, but I think he likes Chief Jade more than anyone he’s ever worked for. Two months ago, I would never have gotten this, but she gives him what he wants more than anything: pain and someone in authority to fight.

I used to believe ponies like Chief Jade were almost mythical, like windigoes. She’s completely crazy, and she’s the most powerful unicorn I know besides my grandmare and Princess Twilight Sparkle. I hope if those three ever decide to find out who is the strongest, I’m not in the same province.

I don’t know how the Detective managed to work for her for so long. I know, now, that I’d have probably resigned if he hadn’t kept tweaking me. He made me mad enough to fight through my fear and immaturity. She probably did the same for him.

If I ever get the chance to write a book, I’m going to include Chief Jade as a character. I’ll probably change her name, but anypony who meets her will know who it’s about.

When I think about her, I can’t help but remember that my police badge is still in my pocket. It feels funny carrying it nowadays, since it used to mean something so different. It used to be like a shield, like I was a knight and I could defend the public with nothing but my will and my gun. Now, it’s a symbol of everything we’ve done to try to save everypony. Shouldn’t that be special?

Why do I sometimes wish I’d never earned it in the first place?

----

The diamond dogs hit the interior wall of the parking sublevel with a noise like an explosion in a china shop. Bits of concrete and rebar were turned to pulp under their powerful claws as Swift and I stood well back with the mutts pulling the cab, waiting for the flying bits of detritus to settle.

After a few seconds, Max strolled out of the cloud, shaking his paws. His claws were glowing bright red, most likely from the friction of digging through all that rock. I don’t know exactly how the magic that diamond dogs use to burrow actually works, but it seems to make them fairly heat resistant as an added bonus.

“We in, pony. We smell Biters nearby,” he murmured. “They might heard that, so move quick. Elevator not working. Take stairs.”

“For future reference, what exactly do Biters smell like?” I asked.

Max shook himself, and the bandoliers of ammo around his chest rattled. “They smell of meat gone bad, pony. Now, we leave car here and seal up hole. You go on. When you get car, we know you alive. Leave note saying we can burrow into Castle.”

“Will do. You mind pulling the car into a parking spot? We’ll get Limerence and Mags out of the back seat. Then we’ll let Taxi out of the trunk.”

Max nodded and went back to his fellows to finish passing orders.

Now that I could finally get a look at it, the parking garage was one I was familiar with. It brought back a few memories of Juniper and I sitting down in the basement, sharing a drink while lying on the hood of the cruiser. It’d recently been home to a group of squatters who must have cleared out when they heard us coming. A barrel fire was still burning in a nearby corner, surrounded by ratty sleeping bags and empty food tins. A ramp and stairwell led up into the building itself. Thankfully, I couldn’t hear any footsteps or anything that might indicate we were in immediate danger.

The hole we’d just come through was about twice my height, and plenty big enough to clear the roof of the Night Trotter. Unhitching themselves from the cab, the dogs filed back into the hole they’d left and, with one last wave, began to fill it in. In a matter of moments, the only sign they’d been there at all was an almost perfectly circular spot of raw dirt that could pass for a filthy wall if one didn’t look too closely.

Once we were alone, Swift and I had to stand there in amazement for a minute or two.

It was no wonder Taxi had tried to massacre the diamond dogs; the once proud Night Trotter had a broken windshield, was scraped in a dozen places, and had a badly dented hood. Both front tires were flat, the entire passenger side door was caved in, most of the front grill had melted, and the right headlight was hanging from its housing by a frayed wire. That was entirely discounting the innumerable bumps, bruises, scuffs, and scratches that left the paint job looking like a patchwork quilt.

“Oh, boy...Sir, are you sure we should let her out?” Swift whispered, putting a hoof over her muzzle as she stared at the totaled cab. “Maybe if you pounce on her, I can poke her with the Ace needle and give her a half dose and then we use the rest on Limerence when he-”

“Kid, you know how well that’s likely to work. If she’s feeling murderous, she’ll get it out of her system beating me to death a couple times. Then you can drag my corpse to Iris Jade and let her get her rage out of her system. Then...and only then...are you to find me a wall socket.”

“Right, sir.”

I reluctantly strolled around to the back of the cab and rested a hoof on the trunk. All was extremely quiet inside.

“Taxi?”

There was no reply.

I quickly popped the catch and lifted the boot-lid. A part of me expected her to explode out of there and commence with the beatings.

Taxi was lying there alongside an empty bag of potato crisps, curled up in a ball, glaring at me out of one eye. Slowly, and with as much dignity as she could muster, she sat up and smoothed her disheveled braid.

“Hardy...you left me...in the trunk...of my own car.”

“Yes, Sweets, I did,” I agreed. “Incidentally, the car is wrecked. You probably saw that earlier. On the upside, we’re one street from the police garage. You remember our deal?”

Her pink eyes flickered for a moment as the fiery, barely contained rage behind them was replaced with a twinge of confusion. “Our...deal?”

I offered her my hoof, and she unconsciously took it, stepping out of the trunk. Her fur was in need of a good brushing, but she looked none the worse for wear for having spent a few hours in time-out. “Yeah, our deal. If I am not dead in an hour, Iris Jade will give you the entire police department garage to fix and modify the Night Trotter. You can do whatever you want with it. Weapons. Armor. Speed.”

Taxi’s lips curled into a smile, and she started strolling around the side of the car. “I can live with that. I may punch you later for this one, mind you...”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t. Just make sure I’m good and surprised when you do it. Concussions don’t give me the same buzz if I can see them coming,” I replied, hauling open the back door of the cab. “Anyway, get armed and be ready to move. The Underdog’s leader said they smell Biters nearby.”

In the back, Mags was lying there with just her head poking out of the canvas sack, gently chewing at the strings. Limerence was still unconscious, which was probably for the best.

“Egg Pony! Let me out of the bag!” she demanded, trying to wiggle free of her confines.

“There are some dangerous creatures out here. I need to be able to carry you. You mind staying in there another little while?”

Mags let out a low hiss. “I minds. I need to go to bathroom!”

I reached in and tugged open the drawstring. “There’s a toilet in the stairwell.” I pointed to a door in the wall a short distance away. “Swift, go with her. If you smell rotten flesh, you get back here quick as you can.”

With the comforting weight of my shotgun back on my leg alongside my fully loaded revolver, my friends and I snuck up the stairs to street level.

Mags—much to her chagrin—was trying to keep her balance on Swift’s back, though I had let her carry her little pistol. It was a unilateral command decision to have her ride my partner, but I needed to be able to shoot and Swift could fly if the odds turned against us. Taxi was carrying Limerence, since her weapons tended towards close range. One of his forelegs was hanging off each of her front shoulders, and his rear legs were draped over her flanks; the position would have been comically inappropriate if she wasn’t so much bigger than he was.

The parking garage sub-basement was two stories down from the road, and the drainage ditch with the hidden entrance was across and down half a block. As we emerged onto the ground floor, I could hear sporadic pops and cracks of gunfire coming from somewhere along with shouts of alarm, but the acoustics were distorting the source.

“Mags, you’ve got a better nose than I do. You smell anything nasty?” I asked.

My ward poked her head up over Swift’s shoulder and shook her head. “Don’t smell nothing but Swifty pony’s mane. She need a bath!”

Swift gave her a little jostle. “Yeah, well, I’m going to preen you for a week when we’re somewhere safe! You look like you’ve been rolling in lint!”

Mags was about to reply—probably loudly—but I reached back and grabbed her beak.

“Stow it. Kid, is the Hailstorm working?” I asked.

As though it could understand me, the Hailstorm’s turrets lifted from their housings. It could have been my imagination, but they seemed a bit sluggish.

“It works right now,” Swift murmured. “I can see a few targets, but most of them are at extreme range. I haven’t gotten to go for a flight for a while so...maybe the power is a little low? I think I’ve got one or two shots at most.”

“Save them. If it comes to a firefight, use your pistol.”

Her ears flattened like they’d had the air let out of them. “But...but why, Sir? I like the Hailstorm...”

“You were with me when Jade let us out of the Castle, remember? Our entrance is unicorns only,” I explained. “Our resident horn-waver is currently suffering the aftereffects of a magic bender, so we’re going to have to blast our way in.”

“Hardy, are you telling me the entrance is sealed?” Taxi moaned.

I nodded. “Hence the saving the freeze ray for it, yes.”

“And...if...if we can’t get in that way?”

I gave her an indifferent shrug. “Then I’ll go round the front and wave my hooves until someone either kills me or lets me in.”

“Right. Good. Excellent. Death at the hooves of our own people or death at the hooves of the Biters. Why do I keep letting you come up with the ideas, again?”

I caught my first whiff of tear gas as I pushed open the street-level door of the parking garage and stuck my head out. The building was about three stories tall, and I could see one of the Castle’s stone walls from where we were. Nopony seemed to be on top keeping watch, but that didn’t mean anything. There were plenty of interior defenses and cameras which obviated the need to keep vulnerable bodies up there.

Glancing both ways, I waved my friends forward. The entire street down to a t-junction a quarter of a mile in either direction was deserted, yet something still felt very off.

It didn’t help that my cutie mark was starting to burn.

“Hardy,” Taxi breathed. Something in the way she said it made me look back. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut. “I can hear them. The Biters are out there.”

“You can hear their thoughts?” I asked, softly.

She shook her head. “Not like that. Just...impressions. They’re hungry. They’re angry. They know we’re here somewhere, but they can’t find us...” Suddenly, her breath caught in her throat and her pupils shrank. “Hide!” she hissed.

I shut the door as quickly and quietly as I could. There was a bit of red light coming through under it, but not enough to really see by.

We sat in tense silence for a long minute. A strange sensation prickled at the back of my neck. Somehow, though I couldn’t hear anything, I knew there was a presence just outside.

A familiar scent began to tickle at my nose: death. Something dead and mouldering.

The light was briefly interrupted, and a fresh wave of stink almost sent me backing into Swift. Lifting my revolver, I gently pressed the barrel against the door.

After a moment, a voice began to whisper. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female, and it said just one word, again and again.

“...fleshy fleshy fleshy…”

I took up the slack on my trigger and slowly inhaled, ready to put a bullet through the door. If the thing on the other side had friends, I’d be calling them down on our position.

There was a gentle pressure on my flank, and I looked back to see Taxi shaking her head. Carefully, I let the pressure off my gun.

“...fleshy, fleshy, fleshy…”

The doorknob rattled.

Breathe. Tense your neck to absorb the recoil. Get ready for the kill.

Taxi’s hoof pressed a little harder on my flank.

Outside, something clattered. There was the sound of a trashcan overturning, then a frightened, animal yelp, followed by a scrabble of feet or paws across pavement. A rush of air against my fetlocks ruffled the edges of my coat, and I felt the presence retreat.

I exhaled a raspy breath and dropped onto my haunches, putting my forehead against the cold door hinge as my hat slid back on my neck.

“Swift, did the Hailstorm see that thing coming?” I asked, quietly

“Um...I...I had it turned off, Sir,” she whispered, lifting her wing to show me a tiny blue light on the side of one of the gun’s boxy saddlebags. “I thought I should save power, like you said.”

“It’s fine, kid. Not your fault.” I glanced at Taxi. “Are we good now?”

She shuddered, but bobbed her head. “They’re still out there, somewhere, but I think we can move. Hardy, you cannot imagine what is inside these things. They don’t even have thoughts like ponies. Just...fury...and obedience.”

Officer Swift, notes on Taxi/Miss Sweet Shine:

Miss Taxi is probably the only pony I know who is more dangerous than my grandmare or Chief Jade or Princess Twilight Sparkle. She’s almost impossible to predict, too. That makes it worse.

I would never want her to be angry with me.

Knowing that, she’s probably one of the best friends a pony could ever have. She loves the Detective, too. At first, I didn’t really understand why, but later on I started to get it: she thinks she’s a bad pony. Maybe she is. I heard what she did to those gangsters.

So long as she’s with the Detective, though, she can’t ever act like a bad pony.

The Detective thinks I don’t know she’s ‘different’ from most ponies, but he thinks I don’t notice lots of things that I actually do. She has a power of some kind that has to do with her talent. It gives her insights and impressions of what is going on in the future or around her.

She thinks that so long as it’s focused on what the Detective needs, she can’t hurt anyone.

When her power is focused on her own needs, especially when she’s in danger, other people die or get hurt. She’s worried if she doesn’t stay close to him, she’ll become a monster, only focused on her own desires. I don’t think she’s realized that desires are different from needs. She hides from her talent. If she didn’t hide from it, I bet it would get stronger, until she could start to give everyone around her the things they didn’t even know they needed.

She’d have to focus on herself sometimes to do that, though, and Taxi would never let that happen.

When nothing exciting is going on and she’s just brushing her mane, meditating, or reading a book, you can almost see the pony she might have been if everything hadn’t gone so wrong in her life.

I’m not brave enough to tell her that I think she could still be that person. I don’t know if she’d believe me, even if I did.

----

We darted across the street into the deep ditch on the far side where the secret entrance to the Castle lay. Swift and I slid down the side, while Mags opted to fly down and Taxi landed, light as a feather, beside us with barely a jostle or grunt from Limerence. The librarian hadn’t made so much as a peep the whole journey, and I prayed he stayed unconscious, at least long enough for us to get somewhere safe.

The sewer grate opened with an earsplitting shriek, and I quickly filed everyone through into the darkness behind it, then stood, waiting breathlessly for the smell of a dead body or the sound of rushing wings as a prelude to bloodletting.

When, after a full minute, nothing had come for us, I backed into the dim corridor.

“Alright, kid...turn the Hailstorm on. We’re going to need it in a second,” I murmured. I held out a foreleg, and Mags scrambled across from Swift’s shoulders onto my back.

There was a faint hum, and the turrets of her weapon jostled in their housings, then sluggishly lifted into the air.

“Ready, Sir.”

Trailing my hoof down the slightly damp wall for a moment, I guided us back until we found the weather-beaten door leading to the secret passage and the rusting spiral staircase behind it. The staircase protested at having so many hooves on it, but I could feel myself starting to relax. We’d done it. We’d escaped the Biter blockade.

As we descended, the thick air became stifling and the dark closed in until I had to pull out a flashlight for the last few meters.

“Egg Pony...I not like it in here,” Mags muttered into my ear.

“Yeah...me either,” I replied, softly.

I’d just stepped off the bottom step when my hoof slipped in something wet. Playing my light across my toe, I found a streak of brownish red liquid. Bringing it to my nose, I gave it a sniff.

Blood. At least a day old, but still relatively fresh.

“Sir?” Swift whispered. I looked up. She had her own light strapped to her knee and was pointing it ahead. “Look.”

Mags let out curious chirp. “Egg Pony, is that a dead turkey?”

I swallowed and shook my head. “No, it’s not.”

Whoever she’d been, the body lying against the wall was barely recognizable. There were a few tufts of orange and pink fur, some strands of bloody blue hair, but little to give an identity to the mass of stripped bones and torn organs resting against the stone wall where I knew the secret passage to be. A predator had cracked her chest cavity like a tin of tomatoes and gone straight for the juiciest parts. There wasn’t much left.

I heard Swift’s throat seize, but she didn’t vomit. Merely put a hoof across her belly as Taxi gently laid Limerence on the bottom steps, then moved ahead to examine the dead pony.

“This was Officer Gem Sing,” my driver said, matter-of-factly, poking through the remains.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

Taxi held up a white feather with a bit of hair wrapped around it. “She used to weave her mane with her marefriend’s plumage.” Lowering her head, she began whispering something that sounded like a zebra prayer.

I turned to Swift, who was still shining her flashlight over the mutilated corpse. A few tears were leaking from the corners of her eyes, but her expression was surprisingly neutral.

‘Give her a task, dumbass. Before she starts thinking. If she starts thinking, she’s going to end up sobbing in a corner, and you won’t get inside.’

“Kid? Kid, we need to get out of here. More of them could be coming. The secret passage is right there,” I said, pointing to the wall. Swift wasn’t moving, barely even blinking as she stared at Officer Gem Sing. I stepped in front of her, shielding her gaze with my body.

She jerked, as though coming out of a trance, and backed up a step. “S-Sir? Sorry! W-where am I? I feel like I just b-blacked out for a second...”

I shut my eyes and drew her in close, wrapping her in my forelegs. I’d seen ponies lose time before. It was one of the more pleasant symptoms of extreme emotional trauma, but it always came with a price. Unfortunately, it was a price we didn’t have time to consider just then.

“You’re in the underbelly of the Castle, kid We’re all relying on you right now. Focus. I need you to fire the Hailstorm at the wall, just here, understood? Keep your light up. Do not look down. Fire the gun, then close your eyes.”

“B-but why can’t I look down, S-sir?” she stammered.

“Because if you look down, we all die. Get ready. Taxi, back up and give her some room.”

Officer Swift, notes on shell-shock/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

When I first started my police training, I thought I was going to be able to walk away from anything. I’d seen all kinds of strange things at the Vivarium, and Gran told me all sorts of stories of the war. I once saw Scarlett swallow an entire cucumber without chewing, and even the best soundproofing magics won’t stop the walls from shaking when Mom and Dad are ‘involved’ with each other after a stressful week at work.

I thought everypony who was damaged would have trouble sleeping, have anxiety all the time, or shake constantly.

Above all, I never thought it would happen to me.

I know, now, that I am broken inside. I have nightmares. I catch myself crying about nothing and don’t remember what I was thinking that caused it. Loud noises make me jump sometimes and not others. I lose time and wake up a little while later with no memory of what was just going on.

As bad as it is for me, the Detective is something else. He’s told me stories of the things that happened to him in the past, and no one should be able to function with that kind of history behind them.

He has almost every single symptom of post traumatic stress. He hallucinates. He cries in his sleep. He’s hypervigilant.

Why does he keep going like this? How? If I ask him, maybe he can tell me how to cope. I don’t want to ask him, though. I don’t want to seem weak. Maybe I can ask Taxi. She might be kinda frightening sometimes, but she’s got a motherly streak in her like nopony’s business.

I only feel completely safe when Tourniquet is nearby or inside my head. I think that, once everything is over, I’m going to stay in Supermax for as long as it takes for me to feel okay again.

I wonder what Hardy intends to do? I hope it’s nothing stupid, like throw himself on Juniper’s grave and pine away until he starves to death. That would be so like him, and I’d have to have Miss Taxi give him a good smack. So long as I’m alive, he doesn’t get to die.

And now I think I finally understand Taxi a little bit better than I did, too.

----

The Hailstorm made a sound like a hundred hives of bees having an explosive orgasm, and white light filled the corridor. The temperature dropped about sixty degrees in two seconds, until my teeth were chattering in my head. Gem Sing’s body was in the line of fire and froze solid, but the job was done; the stone wall let out out a frightful cracking sound.

“Eee! Cold pony magic is cold!” Mags squeaked, burrowing under my coat.

“Yeah, c-cold. Sheesh! I n-never fired it in an en-enclosed space before,” Swift murmured, folding her wings against her sides. The Hailstorm’s turrets let out a sad little ‘whirr’, then clicked back into their housings as the light on the side went out. “It...it didn’t destroy the wall…”

I rolled my eyes and turned to face away from the wall, bracing my forelegs. “Kid, that’s what you have the earth ponies for. Sweets? Feel like working out some pent up frustration?”

“Gladly,” she replied, then stepped up beside me. On my nod, we both snapped our legs back, and the sound of shattering stone echoed up the stairwell as the deep-frozen wall exploded inward in a shower of rocks and dust.

Stepping away from the fresh hole, I worked my back left leg, trying to get a twinge out of the hip joint.

“Oof, been awhile since I bucked something that hard,” I muttered.

“Hooves up! Nopony move or I blow a big hole in you!”

Very slowly, I turned around to find myself staring into the frightened eyes of a mare almost half my age and wearing the uniform of a street officer. It was a comfortingly familiar look, but the twenty gauge shotgun leveled at my face was certainly not something to bring about a sense of peace and nostalgia. Her pink mane was cut short, almost buzzed, and she reminded me of Swift on her first day.

Behind her, a half dozen other ponies with the look of civilians were standing in stunned, wide-eyed silence as they watched the little drama unfold. One had a piece of an MRE biscuit hanging out of one side of his muzzle. I didn’t recognize the mare with the gun, but in a department the size of Detrot’s, that didn’t exactly mean anything.

I cocked my head to one side, then exhaled and stepped forward. She took a quick step back, and her jaw tightened up as she yanked on her trigger as hard as she could, shutting her eyes like a foal on her first day at the gun range.

Nothing happened.

“You know, it does help if you’ve actually hooked the trigger up to your harness, honey,” I said, gently pushing the shotgun out of my face. She let out a terrified whimper and slowly dropped her bit from her teeth, backing up against the bars of one of the Castle’s holding cells.

I peered around the insides of the dungeon, which looked like it’d been converted to temporary barracks of some kind. There were sleeping mats laid out side by side, covering every inch of the floor, and stack upon stack of crates labeled ‘ammunition’.

Taxi nosed her way in beside me, stepping over Gem Sing’s frozen corpse like it had ‘Welcome’ painted on it. “Huh. Looks like a housing shortage.”

“You think they’re about to scream and run away, Sweets?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Well, I mean, if three strange ponies and a tiny griffin had just blown their way through a wall where I’d been sleeping for a week or two, I would—”

With a thunderous boom that almost deafened me and a flash of light that dazzled my vision, Chief Iris Jade appeared just behind the young officer. Smoke rose from her green fur and she was blackened around the ears, but her horn was glowing brilliantly and six police issue shotguns hung in a dangerous crown around her head. It was a ten for style, but a negative twenty for subtlety guaranteed to calm a nervous crowd.

The shrieking started at the back, followed quickly by a rush of hooves as the herd did the smart thing and panicked like a group of chickens when a grenade goes off in the coop. They stampeded for the stairs, and ten seconds later, we were alone with Chief Jade in the musty, damp air of the dungeon.

I studied Iris Jade’s expression. It was definitely murderous, but it was hard to gauge exactly which flavor. Jade’s killing moods come in all the colors of the rainbow, and the current one was somewhere between so-glad-to-see-you-she-accidentally-tears-your-head-off and a thoughtful, slow-torture-followed-by-dismemberment-and-then-death-if-she-feels-like-it-maybe.

I opened my mouth, but before I could get a word out, one of the flying shotguns rammed itself between my teeth and stuck there. Swift moved to raise her revolver only to find herself staring down two more shotguns while Taxi was covered by the remaining three. I lightly tongued at the end of the barrel. It tasted recently used. Mags had wisely decided the teleporting unicorn of death was reason enough to hide under my coat again.

“Ooouuuooo?” I asked, trying not to swallow lest I accidentally bump the trigger.

“No! No, Hard Boiled! I swear to Celestia and Luna, not this time! Where is she?!” Jade demanded, advancing dangerously until she stood beside the weapon holding my jaw open.

“Eoeuuueoau,” I replied, a bit of drool running down my chin as I tried to keep very, very still. She pulled the gun an inch out of my mouth, still poising it against my jaw.

“Speak,” she growled.

I worked a bit of saliva onto my tongue, then replied, “Your daughter is in the safest place in Equestria, surrounded by an army with advanced military hardware that will die before they see harm come to her.”

Her gaze hardened slightly. “Where?”

I reached up and put my hoof over the barrel of the shotgun. “I will let you talk to her.”

“The telephones are out,” she snarled, pressing the gun hard enough to my forehead that I could feel it leaving an indent in my fur.

“I have a way. I can also get the police department to safety and get you food and water. I know you’ve been running low. Now, are you going to listen, or are you going to shoot me?”

Officer Swift - Further notes on the Detective, Note 197:

Sometimes, once in a while, I suspect the Detective might just be nuts.

Not mentally ill.

Not fearless.

Not suicidal.

Just completely nuts.

Act 3 Chapter 27 : Stormy Weather

The ongoing debate across Equestria regarding the development of Essys has led to some interesting conclusions, particularly when it becomes very obvious that sentient constructs don’t share pony-kind’s moral systems.

While the notion of a ‘smart’ easychair or microwave might be appealing to some of the more technocratic amongst us, the simple fact remains that there aren’t that many jobs which an intelligent machine can do that a dumb one can’t also do with significantly less chance of world domination. Nopony has yet figured out how to strip an object driven by coherent thought of free will, since free will is what separates an intelligent device from just another automata.

As ponies frequently demonstrate, free will has downsides. Just because the toaster-oven gets your toast perfect every time doesn’t mean it isn’t quietly plotting to cook you alive one day to satisfy an impulsive desire to find out what burnt flesh smells like.

The issue is further complicated by a strange psychological manifestation that modern science has yet to fully explain. It is one of the primary reasons for Essy contracts and other systems which prevent rogue constructs from becoming too powerful.

Sentient constructs do not get bored.

Nopony really knows why. If a dishwasher is well adjusted, it might go on operating for a thousand years with a sunny disposition and a spring in its step. By that same token, if an automated pants press should decide that it is amused by slowly dissolving a pony over six or seven months whilst keeping them fully conscious and screaming, they will find it endlessly entertaining.

One should be careful when dealing with any magical intellect not to give them a reason to start thinking about what you’d look like as a puddle or a gradually expanding mist.

-The Scholar

Jade led the way, her shotguns still positioned against the back of my head and those of my companions. It was, strictly speaking, a violation of procedures to walk ahead of your prisoners, but for a bit of extra insurance, she was also carrying Limerence in a magical bubble. Somehow, she hadn’t taken my adamant assurances that I wasn’t going to skip out on her again at face value.

“D-do you want me to shoot crazy pony? I have gun,” Mags whispered. She was hanging from my side with those sharp little claws of hers dug into my anti-magic armor, concealed by the billowing folds of my coat.

“No, I think that would probably just make her mad,” I replied, under my breath. “Drop off and go find somewhere to hide, okay? I’ll come get you here soon, but I might need you to rescue us if I don’t. Wait an hour, then start looking. Got me?”

Instead of replying, I felt her weight shift, then vanish. The only sign she’d gone was a scampering shadow that vanished behind a suit of armor on the first landing up towards the throne room. I didn’t really expect I’d need my ward to come break me out of a prison cell, but if bullets started flying, I wanted her out of the way should the Biters figured out that we’d managed to get into the Castle.

On the second landing, I became aware of a smell that was both a bit of a comfort and a bit unusual for the Castle: sweat. It was the smell of many, many bodies in close company with one another.

I heard Swift sniff at the air. “Sir? That—”

“I’ll tell you when you can talk, Miss Cuddles,” Jade snapped, jabbing her in the ribs with one of the two shotguns pressed against her back. “Until then, you will remain silent.”

“Mmm...you’re not worried about us exchanging information,” I quickly deduced. “You’re worried about someone overhearing us. Have you had—”

“If you want to suck on the shotgun some more, I can make that happen,” she growled, “Now shut up and keep your eyes forward.”

At the top of the stairs to the throne room, we were confronted by a wall of guns. I could see a few frightened eyes peering between the barrels of every caliber of weapon known to equinekind that didn’t require mounting on a tripod or a tank.

“Nobody...sneeze,” I said, just loud enough for Taxi and Swift to hear.

Jade took a step toward the crowd. “I have them covered. Stand down.”

It took several seconds before the first guns started to drop. That was indicative in and of itself. Jade’s authority was not as ironclad as it had been the last time I set hoof in the Castle. In a police department, particularly under siege, that’s a dangerous condition.

Ponies backed away, forming a pair of heavily armed walls on either side of us. Jade took off at a brisk pace, and the levitating shotguns encouraged my friends and I along at speed as we headed for the steps to her office.

Far above, the File Cloud swirled in lazy circles, quieter than the activity in the throne room would suggest. Where there used to be a small market set up to service the various needs of the police department, there were now dozens upon dozens of tiny pup tents, some no more than a pair of sticks with a bit of canvas draped over them. The stalls of various services were relegated to the outer walls where the servicing of weapons, the cooking of food, and the dispensing of medical care continued unabated.

The biggest difference was the weight of bodies packed into the throne room. There were more ponies than I’d ever seen in one place milling, sitting, working, or simply staring at walls. Some lay on the stairs, while others were crammed into any corner that was available. An attentive vanguard of uniformed police officers formed around us, holding back the curious crowd. I heard a few gasps and whispers of ‘Dead Heart’ here and there, but Jade’s presence or maybe just the general background ambience of fear and despair kept anyone from speaking up.

A pack of foals was making a nuisance of themselves as Telly tried to work the radio console. She looked up as we passed, and I saw surprise, then relief and sympathy in her eyes. I tossed her a quick, cocky salute which was only marred a little bit by the floating shotgun resting against my hat.

There were even ponies on the stairs leading up to Jade’s office, and the suits of armor had been removed to make room for more lean-tos right up to the doors themselves. A pair of armed officers stood on either side of the doors, trigger bits ready as our escorts left us in front of them.

Jade’s horn almost took the doors off their hinges, and the boom as they hit the wall reverberated through the building.

“In,” she snarled.

“Hey, we’re here with the white flag in the air.”

The shotgun against my head pressed down until I stumbled forward into her office, followed quickly by my partner and driver. The doors crashed shut behind us, cutting off the sound from outside.

Out of habit, I peered around for some escape routes, but there weren’t any more than usual, though Jade’s office was much changed from the last time I was there. The walls were stacked with boxes of supplies, guns, and even more ammunition. A single cot was tucked against the wall with a small camping stove and a stack of MREs beside it. The only reminder was the desk, still sitting there stacked high with paper and bowls of loose bullets.

Slowly, Jade’s shotguns lifted away from us and settled themselves in a row against her desk with the exception of the one aimed at my skull.

“Now, Hard Boiled...you said my daughter is safe and that you can place me in contact with her. How?”

I flicked one eye toward the gun in the corner of my vision. “Can I say, before we get to that...she kissed me.”

The hammer on the shotgun cocked itself back. “Death is still an option, you know.”

“Right, right. Well, can I sit down at least?” I asked.

Her glare could have cut glass as she said, “No. My daughter. Now.”

“Alright,” I said, holding up my hooves. “I’ve made a...a deal with an entity known as ‘Tourniquet’. She’s a friend of mine. She controls the prison, Supermax. She is...complicated, but the long and short of it is that she is keeping Cerise safe. Her, and the Aroyo Cyclone street gang. They owe me their lives. All of them. They have heavy military hardware, and while their numbers may not be comparable to the police department’s, Supermax is a fortress.”

Jade’s expression slowly changed to one of incredulity. A small stool shot out from the wall just in time to catch her flank before it could hit the ground. “You...you woke up the construct at Supermax?”

“Not me. I just made friends with her. You can blame Astral Skylark for waking her. Point being, the prison is a friend of mine. Your daughter could not be safer.”

I turned to Swift. “Kid? That ladybug still on you?”

“Yes, Sir,” she replied, holding up her hoof to her mane. The tiny insect crawled out and alighted on her toe, giving itself a shake. “I don’t think it likes it here, though. I felt it shivering earlier. At least it didn’t try to run away, like the last few times we left Supermax.”

Jade pursed her lips. “Hrmph. The Supermax construct. Do you know, there is a Royal decree that I received when I became police chief that said that should that building ever be awoken, both the P.A.C.T. and the police force were to dedicate their entire resources to cutting off all city infrastructure in that area?”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I replied. “She’s taken over most of the city power grid. She’s also why we keep getting a fresh water supply. Her and the Aroyos. You want to talk to your daughter, though, you’ll probably be talking to Tourniquet.”

Reaching out, Jade offered the ladybug her hoof. It reluctantly lifted off, floating over onto her leg and settling itself there. “Most of our communications systems went down simultaneously about two days ago. I suspect that is the source of the creature’s discomfort, though. Something is jamming most forms of coherent magical signal around the Castle.”

“You want to talk to Cerise, Jade, do it quick. We have other things to discuss,” Taxi said, setting herself down on the carpet. One of the shotguns leaning against the desk twitched into midair for a half second, and my driver rolled her eyes. “Save it. Much as Hardy might find you terrifying, you know I don’t find you very impressive.”

“It gives me a certain amount of joy to know just how he really feels,” the Chief murmured, then looked down at the bug on her hoof. “Show me my daughter, creature. Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs...awake.”

Her eyes rolled up in her head for a second, and she leaned back in her chair.

I felt a hoof on my foreleg.

“Sir?”

“Yes, kid?”

“Wanna draw stuff on her face?”

Sadly, Taxi pinned both our tails to the carpet before we could get the marker out of her saddlebags.

I know it sounds strange that we should be joking, smiling, laughing, and generally being ponies just moments after finding the body of Gem Sing. Don’t get me wrong. What happened to her was horrible. Her death was violent, and one day, I’m sure we’ll get time to sit and mourn. She deserves to be mourned. The dead deserve their day.

Unfortunately, my friends and I didn’t have the luxury of mental health services. We had only the means to cope with loss that ponies have used since they hid in caves and ran the prairies: squat around the fire, chuckle, celebrate small victories, and play pranks. Death can only own one’s thoughts so completely before they’re left with no will to continue.

Truth be, I’d mostly put Gem Sing out of my thoughts by the time we reached Jade’s office. Cold, yes, but the only option for a pony so close to the edge.

Jade came out of her brief trance about ten minutes later to find us sitting around her office. Taxi was rooting through the ammo containers, liberally loading up her saddlebags, while Swift peered through a tiny hole in the stained glass window above the throne room that looked like it’d come from a bullet. I was checking over Limerence, who seemed to have gone from comatose to merely a fitful sleep. Good stallion. He’d need it.

Sitting forward, the Chief flicked the ladybug off her hoof, and it buzzed back into Swift’s mane.

“What are you doing?” Jade demanded.

“Looting,” Taxi replied, casually shoving an extra hooffull of rounds into one of her pockets. “You know, if you have this kind of hardware, why haven’t you tried to move?”

“Supermax is almost at capacity. Precisely where are we to go?” Jade asked, rising from her desk. Her horn lit, and the box that my driver was poking around in snapped shut, almost taking her hoof off with it. “I just spoke to my daughter. She has acquired a...tattoo…”

There was enough implied violence in the word ‘tattoo’ alone to make me shake my trigger bit free.

“Supermax is only one option,” I replied. “Slip Stitch has his own colony, and that’s in the food district. His people have probably raided every local warehouse. The sea serpent Stella, of the Vivarium, has huge resources and maintains the Heights as a ‘Biter Free’ zone through the use of some extremely powerful magic. There’s also—”

There was an authoritative knock on the door of the Chief’s office.

“Go away, damn you!” she snarled. “Come back later!”

The door slammed open, and a familiar pony in a spangled white jumpsuit moved slowly into the room, a long cane attached to his hoof swinging back and forth in front of him. The Prince of Detrot looked little changed, but I’d never seen him away from the Burning Love plumbing and guitar store. His milky white eyes were as alive as ever as he trotted in, turning his ears this way and that. Seeing him with the cane was even more rare. He never needed it back home.

Still, nothing could dull the bright smile on his greying face, and it brought a measure of peace just knowing he was alright.

“Iris, mah sweet, Ah think ya should take some deep breaths and not miss quite so many meals. It’s affecting ya mood,” Precious scolded. Believe it or not, Iris Jade slid a little down in her seat.

“What do you want, Precious?” she asked, coolly.

“Ah say, ya to sit yaself right there while Ah say hello to mah good friends!” he replied, turning to my driver and holding out his free leg. “Sweet Shine! Swift! Hardy! Best ya'll three give me a hug before Ah come over there and give ya'll a swat on the flank with this here cane!”

As one, we descended on the old stallion, throwing our forelegs around him and each other, laughing with a kind of relief that’s rare in a dark world. After a moment, Swift and my driver stepped back, leaving Precious and I holding each other at hoof’s length. He looked pretty good for having been displaced from his home. A little more careworn, but still the same old Prince.

Stepping back, he grinned his shining white grin. “Hardy, mah good colt! It’s been too long. Ah was starting to wonder if ya were still alive!”

“That makes two of us,” I replied. “We’ve been to Tartarus and back a few times since we were last in the Burning Love. You finding an audience here? I expect you’ve been keeping morale high.”

“Oh, Miss Jade let me do a show or two,” he chuckled, flipping up the broad lapels of his suit and running a hoof through his perfectly styled mane. “Unfortunately, no amount of good music will solve these problems.”

“Precious,” the Chief murmured. “Would you object to waiting outside?”

“Ah would quite mind,” the Prince replied, flicking his cane into the air and catching it handily in the crook of his foreleg. “Ah know you, girl. Ah’ve known ya since ya toddled into mah shop and crawled into one of the seven gallon minotaur Flush-O-Matic specials playing hide and seek. Whatever ya think of him, ya know for damn well that mah city needs this stallion’s good will more than ya need someone to take ya little furies out on. Ah know ya still think violence solves problems.”

“I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary,” she grumbled, but waved a hoof and the doors slammed shut. “Fine. Stay. Hard Boiled. My daughter is at Supermax, and they are almost at capacity. We cannot even maintain a local patrol beyond our own walls. Almost sixty have died in the last week alone to these ‘Biters’. You have some plan, else you wouldn’t have shown your face here.”

I felt my stomach drop into my knees.

Sixty. Sixty? Sixty dead in a department of only a few hundred. Mayhap not all of them were officers, but I’m sure plenty of them were. How many were friends? How many were people I’d worked cases with? How many were people I’d drunk in bars with during the late hours when I was still going to cop joints?

“Sixty,” Swift whispered, then put her hooves over her eyes.

I coughed a little, trying to latch onto the one sentence there that wouldn’t require me to confront that mountain of dead. I rubbed my eyes with both hooves for a second, sitting down on the plush carpet.

‘A plan,’ I thought. ‘A plan? Do you have a plan? How could you have a plan? How could anyone have a plan? All those people died in agony because...because what? Are you really going to try to find some way to blame this on yourself?’

I swallowed the lump in my throat.

‘Action. Action is the only thing. Do something. Save lives.’

“I...I have a plan,” I said, over the catch in my breathing. “I’ve got a p-plan.”

‘Control, Hardy. Take control.’

Taxi laid a hoof across my shoulders as Precious pushed himself off the desk and hobbled over to put his leg on the back of my neck.

“Ya sit a moment, boy,” the Prince whispered into my ear.

“N-no. No, I’m f-fine,” I stammered, forcing my head up. “Chief—”

Iris Jade held up a hoof and studied me with those cold, reptilian eyes of hers for a long moment. “Hard Boiled, I’d have to be blind not to see that you are going to have a psychotic event any minute now. You want to quit, you just tell me everything you know, and I’ll find you a cell. No court-martial. No legal proceedings. You get a box, as many meals as we have left, and to rest until this is all over...”

It was probably a bad sign that I found her offer quite tempting. My knees were knocking, but I still managed to stand. Willpower is an amazing thing, and it took most of my remaining reserves to pound my wits into shape. An image of what was left of Gem Sing almost derailed my efforts, but when I spoke again, my voice was steadier.

“I’m fine, Chief. Like...like I said, I have a plan.”

Precious had a knowing look as he lifted his chin to address the Chief. “Iris, this stallion has been through the depths of Tartarus for ya'll. He needs some info, else Ah don’t think we’ll have Mister Hard Boiled much longer. He saved mah life. Probably your life. Ya want to spite him...do it when those poor soldiers downstairs aren’t looking over the edge of a cliff with two hooves in the air. Tell him about Officer Twinkle.”

“Officer Twinkle?” Swift asked, cocking her head. “I went to school with a Sky Twinkle. He washed out of the P.A.C.T. before I did. Is he here?”

“He was here,” Jade growled. “Two days ago, just after you left, we found him downstairs in the pump room. He had his horn in the reservoir. We tried to stop him, but he was enchanted; some kind of pyroclastic trap spell. Ten seconds and there was nothing left but bones and scrap. We tested our water supplies and...everything for three blocks in every direction is magically contaminated with some kind of self-replicating spell form. One sip dehydrates the body about as much as a spoonful of salt.”

“Was this before or after somepony poisoned all the food?” Taxi asked, putting a hoof up on the desk.

Jade’s mouth tightened into a sharp line. “We must assume it happened simultaneously, but there’s no proof. Had it simply been the water, that might have been one thing. It was three blocks in every direction. Most of the non-perishable food was exposed to high powered magical contamination. With so many unicorns unconscious, the med-bay is all but overwhelmed, and now we have mutated foodstuffs. We have approximately three days worth of supplies left, both medical and vital. After that, we’ll have to send out raiding parties again.”

“And you think you still have a spy,” I murmured.

“I think it’s a possibility, yes,” she answered, rising from her chair and putting her forelegs on the surface of her desk. “Now, this...plan of yours?”

“It actually depends on somepony else.” I strolled over and pressed the intercom on her desk. “Telly? Telly, it’s Hardy. You mind coming up here?”

The intercom was quiet a moment, and then Telly’s nervous voice came up the line.

“Did...did you kill her, Hardy? If you did, we need to dispose of the body fast. We can claim she vanished mid-teleport or something and you can take over and get everypony—”

“I’m right here, Radiophonic!” Jade barked. “Get your pasty flank up to my office before I teleport into your chest cavity!”

“S-sorry, Chief! Be right there!”

The intercom buzzed with static, then went dead.

“Hrm...Speaking of that,” I mused. “When did you learn to do that? You couldn’t port the last time I was in town, or that would have been a real short run.”

Jade crossed her eyes to look up at her own horn. “One of the kids downstairs has a talent for it. She gave me a crash course. I figured it would give us a tactical advantage to have a few teleporters. Thankfully, the magical shielding around my office kept whatever effect incapacitated the other unicorns in Detrot from affecting Telly and myself.”

“You said you’ve been...under attack, right?” I asked, indicating the stained glass window behind her desk. “I heard gunfire when we were coming across the street. Speaking of that, what about the hole we left coming in?”

Jade held up her hooves. “You and your damn questions, Hard Boiled. We’ll shut the hole. I’m not worried about it, though. So far, the Biters haven’t made any attempts to actually cross our walls. They’ll kill you if you go more than about fifty feet from the front gate, though. Sniper shots, usually.” The bottom drawer of her desk slammed open, and she lifted out a charred, barely recognizable skull. The upper and lower jaws were both missing, but it’d once been a pony. The blackened surface was deeply pitted, as though it’d been in a blast furnace. “This is what’s left of one of the only confirmed kill we’ve managed to make.”

Precious leaned a bit more heavily on his cane and lowered his head. “Poor soul. Ah got lucky. Ah heard that beasty coming when Ah was out for a walk around the battlements.”

“They like to snatch ponies off the walls,” the Chief explained. “We’ve been patrolling with groups of between four and six, to make it more difficult.”

“What happened to him?” Swift asked, staring at the skull.

“Her,” Precious corrected. “She was a mare, maybe a little older than Miss Swift, here.” Lifting his cane onto Jade’s desk, he pulled his hoof out of the loop and held it up where I could see it. There was a metal trigger sprouting from the side of it just above the handle. “Ah heard her diving on me. Barely had a second to aim. At least she didn’t suffer...”

I leaned away from the cane-gun slightly. “You’re telling me that did this to her?” I asked, nodding at the skull of the dead mare.

“Unfortunately, no,” Jade said, turning around the skull to show an exit hole about as big around as a bit coin. “The body combusted after several minutes, similar to Officer Twinkle. All that was left was bones.”

Swift put a hoof on her own chest and swallowed. “S-sir...do you think I might blow up like that?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it,” I replied, patting her shoulder. “I mean, Tourniquet is probably keeping track of any magic that goes on in your body, right?”

“I still can’t feel her here, Sir,” she replied. “Something is keeping her away from this place.”

Jade was looking back and forth between us, bemusedly stroking the top of the skull with her hoof. “I won’t ask right now, Officer Cuddles, but one day I expect to read a complete report, even if it’s written on his freshly tanned pelt.”

I didn’t have to ask which ‘his’ she was referring to.

There was another knock on the door. Precious straightened up and picked up his cane, fitting it over his hoof again.

“That cane loaded?” I asked.

“Ya can never be too careful,” he replied.

Jade raised her voice. “Come in!”

A teal nose cautiously poked around the door but didn’t come any further.

“Am...am I about to walk in on a murder?” Telly inquired, warily.

Jade’s horn lit up, and Telly let out a frightened yelp as she was dragged bodily into the room and lifted, pinwheeling, through the air above my head. The door swung open and banged against the wall. A few curious heads peered through and quickly decided that almost anywhere else was probably a healthier place to be.

“No need for that, now!” Precious tutted, reaching out to tap the Chief on the side of the horn with his cane. The glow around Telly vanished, and I barely caught her as she was dropped out of midair into my legs. “We’re all friends here. Ah doubt sweet little Telegraphica is our spy.”

Jade might as well have been glaring at a wall for all the good it did. You just don’t win a staredown with the Prince.

“W-what did you need, Ch-chief?” Telly asked, blushing as she pulled herself away from me a little awkwardly. Her ears laid back as she chewed at the edge of one of the three pairs of headphones dangling from her neck, their cords trailing over to the door. “I...I swear, I was just making plans if you two got in a fight and you somehow lost and I wasn’t hoping you’d lose or anything but-—”

“Save it!” Jade snapped, sweeping a hoof at me. “I wasn’t the one who called you up here. Hard Boiled has some sort of plan to get us out of the building, safely. He says that it involves you, somehow. Your personal opinions notwithstanding, we still have a job to do.”

“B-but what can I do?” she asked plaintively. “I can’t even get through the radio interference around the Castle. There’s nopony out there to hear us, even if I could...”

“Telly, you remember that ‘conversation’ you and I were going to have? I think it’s time,” I said. “Why don’t you tell us about your...ahem...your side project?”

Her eyes went wide, and she backed away from me until she ran into Precious’s restraining hoof. She turned to him, and he gave her a comforting smile. “Go on, girl. Nothing to be afraid of here.”

“I...I don’t know what he’s talking about! I don’t have a side project!” she squeaked.

“Yes, you do,” I growled. “You know...the Queen of the Signal?”

Jade’s expression went from confused to dawning understanding to flesh-stripping rage in about ten seconds. Her teeth pulled back in a furious snarl as she shot to her hooves. Power filled her horn, and the door to the office slammed shut hard enough to shake the room.

“The Queen of the Signal?! Gypsy?! Gypsy!?” the Chief howled as her desk flew to one side, leaving a straight line between her and the frightened radiopony. “Radiophonic?! You are that vile, microphone-wielding she-demon?!”

“I’m not! I swear I’m not!” Telly whimpered, cowering against Precious. “Hardy, please! I promise, I’m not Gypsy!”

I opened my mouth to tell Jade to back off, but somepony beat me to it.

“Leave her alone!”

Everypony in the room froze in place. That voice had been loud enough to make my ears ache. As one, our heads pivoted to stare at the intercom on Jade’s desk where the ‘listen’ button was glowing brightly. That voice had come from the speaker. It was a voice everyone in the room knew well.

“G-Gypsy?” Telly whimpered, looking both hopeful and terrified.

“It’ll be okay, Telly. I got this,” the disk-jockey replied, more quietly. “Iris Jade! If you touch her, I will kill you. Step back and cool your jets.”

She said it matter-of-factly, like one might say they needed to take out the garbage on any given Thursday.

The Chief marched over to her desk and pressed the intercom button. “Miss Gypsy. How very much I’ve wanted to meet you. You’ll pardon me if I don’t find a voice through a microphone particularly threatening.”

“Threaten this, bitch.”

There was a flash of blinding light, and a wave of force threw me off my hooves. Something soft that smelled distinctly of burning hair landed on top of me. I lay there for a minute or two, breathing heavily, wondering what in Equestria had just upended my world.

As my vision cleared, I found Chief Jade sprawled across my stomach. Her eyes were wide, and her green mane stuck out at funny angles. Little arcs of electricity were still jumping between the individual hairs as smoke rose from her entire body. She was short about three millimeters of hair all over. The hoof nearest me, which was the one she’d been touching the intercom with, was comically scorched right up to the elbow.

My ears felt like somepony was ringing a pair of cymbals in them. Precious was just heaving himself back to his hooves beside the desk and checking on Telly, who was lying on the carpet, clutching her head. My driver and Swift seemed none-the-worse for wear, although Swift was pawing at the side of her head like she was trying to get a bug out of it.

Jade’s jaw worked at the air, but the most she could say was, “W-w-wha…”

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that! Now, the next time you screw with my friends, I’ll actually hit you!” Gypsy crowed, though it didn’t seem to be coming from the intercom this time. It was coming from the Aroyo juju-bag around my neck.

The File Cloud was still making some very ominous noises. There were screams from down below, but I could already hear officers trying to get things under control. Rolling Jade off me, I got to my hooves and began inspecting the damage. Her desk was a complete loss; whatever hit us split the intercom and the wooden surface right down the middle. An oval, glowing red hole was scorched directly through the stained glass window behind her desk. Below the hole, a patch of molten glass lay cooling on the carpet. The only weapon I’d ever seen do something like that was a P.A.C.T. lightning cannon.

The Chief was pretty badly singed. She had a few small splinters in one cheek and a bloody nose, but seemed otherwise alright, if a bit dazed.

Bracing myself, I staggered to my hooves, stumbling toward the hole in the window. The crowd below was milling about, but as my face appeared above them, a great cheer went up.

“Dead Heart! Dead Heart! Dead Heart!” they shouted. My blood ran cold, and I quickly backed away from the window.

“Gypsy, can you still hear me?” I asked, raising my voice.

“Of course, Detective,” she replied. “I can hear you nearly anywhere in this building, so long as I’m paying attention. Iris Jade was kind enough to damage the magical shielding around her office when you ran out with her daughter, so I can finally listen in on what she’s up to in there. I wish I’d had that six months ago! Might have saved everypony some serious trouble.”

“Where exactly are you? I think you have us at your mercy.”

“You’ve never been at my mercy, Detective. You’re my friend and one of the few truly good ponies still able to fight the good fight in these evil days. Anyway, to answer your question, I’m kinda everywhere, but also sorta nowhere at the same time. It’s complicated.”

“So...you’re in control of the File Cloud? That’s how you tapped into all those police bandwidths?”

“Hah! That’d be a trick, wouldn’t it? Hardy, I am the File Cloud!”

Act 3 Chapter 28 : All's Well As Long As No One's Been Shot

"Ponies, griffins, dragons, dogs, and a hundred other species of intelligent creature all have one thing in common that defines them from the dumb beasts of the wilds. Some might say it’s ‘culture’ or ‘art’ or ‘will to improve themselves’, but plenty of intelligent creatures lack those things or lack them in appreciable measure.

No, what all intelligent beings have is a will to destroy themselves. You can’t claim to be intelligent until you’ve stood on the cusp of life and death and thought ‘I wonder what happens if I take just one more step.’ That is what we do today, my friend! Forward! To victory!"

- Gorgas The Bone Splitting Philosopher at the battle of Appleton, 631, Old Pegasopolan Calendar

Footnote: Gorgas and his entire invading force of ogrekin brute-lords were routed before reaching the gates of the city of Appleton when Princess Luna personally took the field and impaled him with his own hat. While he survived, the humiliation influenced ogre fashion for centuries thereafter, and Goras is considered one of the last ogres to wear a phallic symbol on his head.

“Could you run that by all of us again, please?”

“I’m the File Cloud, Hardy. At least, I am now. I wasn’t always. Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“Uhuh. I need a sandwich.”

“I can make you one, but I can’t promise it’ll be from this dimension.”

“No, thank you. I’ve already been attacked by extra-dimensional food once this week.”

“Twice, Sir. Once on the first trip on the Bull, once when we were coming back. Taxi had those cheese doodles with the feet on them, remember?”

“Shut up, kid. Go find somepony to make me a sandwich.”

Mmm...Feta cheese, a thin layer of slightly expired mayo, a mildly freezer-burned tomato, and some pickles on a piece of moldy rye. All in all, not bad for something thrown together by a panting, frightened intern who’d found herself assigned as the Prince of Detrot’s—and consequently also my—gopher. She’d almost pissed herself with relief when all I asked for was a sandwich.

Chief Jade sat behind the remains of her desk, eyeing the hole in the glass as though it were a hungry tiger about to bite her. Seeing the Chief frightened was a new experience, but a lightning bolt at close range tends to rattle anypony with a lick of a survival instinct. I suppose the fact that I was sitting on the floor beside her munching on a questionably edible sandwich probably said some things about my state of mind.

Swift was sitting in the corner, eyes rolled back and the Ladybug sitting on her nose. I’d gotten bored after drawing some big, bushy eyebrows on her, but Taxi was still in the process of giving her a looping mustache and monocle.

Precious was lying on his back, one leg crossed over the other and his cane across his slightly paunchy stomach as he used Limerence’s belly for a pillow. The old stallion had declared a nap about two minutes after my sandwich arrived, but I suspected he was still keeping a metaphorical eye out to see if Iris Jade decided to do something murderous. Telly was beside him, huddled down and staring at the carpet as though he might somehow protect her from what was surely going to be a long, unpleasant debriefing.

I tucked the last bite into my mouth and slowly, meaningfully, wiped my muzzle with the back of my leg. Taxi, sensing dramatic tension, put one more freckle on Swift’s cheek and capped her marker.

I cleared my throat. Telly, Jade, and Taxi looked up, though Swift remained in lala-land. Probably better that way.

“Alright. Gypsy?”

“Yes, Hardy?”

“You’re going to explain your situation, right? Because I think we all have some questions.”

“Questions? I don’t mind questions. If you want to actually understand, though, you’ll come upstairs.”

Iris Jade pushed herself up from behind her desk.

“Not you, Iris,” Gypsy added with a touch of undisguised smugness.

The Chief paused halfway to standing. Her mane was still sticking up in all directions, but a bit of fire was finally returning to her face. She threw her shoulders back and glared out the window. “And why, pray tell, not?”

“Because I know where all the bodies are buried. You deserve to be stuck in the lowest pit of Tartarus. Your hooves are soaked in blood, and while none of it is innocent, not all of those people you killed or had killed deserved to die. You’re stubborn, prideful, and you don’t think on your hooves, so I’m going to put somepony who does in charge.”

Jade’s eyes blazed with fury. “I’m not turning over control of this police force to this idiot, nor to some construct, no matter how powerful they might be. If you expect that, you go ahead and hit me with another lightning bolt and then see if you can keep this police force together!”

“You are barely holding the police together as it is. You lay a hoof on him, I’ll fry you like an egg. He’s the pony we need right now. Not you. These ponies don’t need a monster anymore. They need a hero. You know that’s not you...and you might be a bully, but you’re not a fool.”

I swallowed and began backing away from Jade’s desk. Her horn was glowing brilliantly, and thin tendrils of uncontrolled magic began to creep into the walls, where control runes lit up to absorb them.

“You...can’t do this!” Jade snarled, rising a few inches into the air.

“I’m doing it. Your daughter is safely tucked away. Your police department is broken. Your power is gone. You can die right here, right now, without ever seeing your child again, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“You can’t dictate terms—”

“Yes, I can, Iris Jade. I can dictate any terms I like, because you have nothing on me. This is for all the little cruelties you made me witness since the day I awoke from my long sleep. These ponies might be afraid of you for now, but I hear their whisperings. I’ve heard three separate plots to murder you this week alone. You’re going to sit there and wait, until the Good Fight needs you. Meanwhile, the police department belongs to Dead Heart. Suck it up, buttercup! You are not in control!”

My only warning was the scent of ozone before I was forced to do a quick step back from the Chief’s desk. I’d seen Jade throw the desk, split it in half, and blast it with all manner of magical spells. I’d never actually seen it spontaneously explode before.

I barely had time to dive onto the carpet before the ceiling and every inch of the room above head height was full of wooden shrapnel. In the silence that followed, paper confetti and bits of shattered candy peppered my back as I held my hat down over my face.

I slowly uncovered my head and peered around. Jade was still standing where she had been a moment ago with a small shield bubble around herself and the remains of her desk slowly raining down on it. Precious had thrown himself over Limerence, and Taxi was shielding both her own face and Swift’s with the top of one of the boxes of ammunition. Telly had her own shield up, but it was flickering fitfully and died a moment later.

A wave of heat hit me that seemed to be coming off of Iris Jade, but before she could demonstrate her rage on a populated room, I sprinted over to Limerence and wrestled him onto my back.

“Taxi! Get Swift! Telly, carry Precious! Out, out, out! Don’t stop until you reach the stairs!”

Anypony with half a brain who saw us tear out of there decided it would be wise to be as far from the Chief’s office as equinely possible. We quickly found ourselves sprinting at the head of a small crowd of ponies.

Peering back over my shoulder and above the heads of the ponies following me, I could see emerald green lightning arcing from underneath the door of Iris Jade’s office. Whatever was left of the magical shielding inside her office must have been holding, because we made the stairwell safely. At the far end of the hallway, I grabbed the rail and galloped down the steps, pausing to shift Lim off my back and onto the floor once I reached the first landing.

What followed couldn’t quite be called an explosion, since there was no blast-wave, but a wash of tingling energies shot down my back and more shouting followed from the crowd. A couple of the unicorns around me cringed and stumbled.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem anypony was panicked. Just doing the smart thing, like an orderly evacuation from a burning building. I thought I’d be heading up a stampede.

Glancing over at the other side of the hall, I found Telly holding Precious in a bubble of magic. The elderly stallion was looking a bit indignant as he tapped at his confines with his cane.

“Precious, how many times has Iris Jade blown up in the last week or so?” I asked, above the murmuring crowd. They seemed much calmer than proximity to the Chief on a rage bender usually leant itself to.

“Five or six times,” he replied, sliding onto his rump and adjusting his coat. “Usually Ah’m there to keep the property damage to a minimum. Ah hope she didn’t destroy those supplies. We’re gonna want for bullets if she did.”

“No, we won’t,” I replied. “I’m getting us out, but I think we’ll need Gypsy on board. I want to go see her before Jade recovers. Can you handle keeping this lot from rioting?”

Telly took a cue, quickly lowering the bubble to the ground and dispelling it.

“Don’t worry about me, Hardy,” the Prince replied. Turning to the crowd, he raised his cane in the air. What I can only describe as a powerful presence seemed to radiate from him, crashing down on the herd of the frightened ponies huddling against the walls of the stairwell. Their eyes all snapped to him, like the sun had suddenly lit up in a darkened room. Stepping forward, he seemed to swell in stature, brushing a hoof back to smooth his greased mane.

“My friends! That was something, wasn’t it? Heh! You all know Detective Hard Boiled?” Reaching out, he grabbed me behind my shoulders and pulled me to his side. “He’s been a thorn in Iris Jade’s side forever, but today, my friends...today, she bows to him, because he controls the File Cloud! Let’s all hear it for Dead Heart!”

My brain locked up, and my heart started pounding so loudly I could hear it over the whispering of the nervous herd.

“D-dead Heart?” a little filly standing underneath her mother on the edge of the crowd murmured, taking a couple steps forward. Her mother ducked her head over her, protectively, still giving me a dubious look. “I-is it really you? I heard t-the stories!”

“That’ll be him, kiddo! He’s got a plan to save us all and bring back the sun!” Precious chuckled, letting go of my neck. “Now, we’ve got to start getting ourselves ready for it, and he’s got to go to work! Tell your friends downstairs to start packing what they can! Ah want everypony ready to move out by tomorrow! Now come on! We need to leave him be while he puts his plan into motion!”

The Prince might wear a sparkly jumpsuit and wield a pipe wrench rather than a scepter, he might be blind, and his mane might be greying, but no one would ever dare question that he was royal. Precious began moving through the crowd, doling out instructions and encouragement. Whatever magic he was using to keep their attention was still working, because the herd began following him down the stairs, leaving me and my companions standing there on the landing. I must have had an expression like a stunned chicken.

“W-what just happened?” I stammered, slowly sagging against the wall.

“Come on, while they’re all distracted. I know a way to get upstairs to one of the commissary rooms on the other side that can bypass the throne room,” Taxi murmured, adjusting Swift on her back. Reaching up to a spot on the wall, she pressed one of the bricks. One of the wooden panels, barely wide enough for one pony, popped open.

“Y-yeah, but w-what just happened?”

Telly—who’d realized quicker than I that her best friend just spanked the most powerful unicorn in the city and sent her to bed without dinner—was grinning ear to ear.

“Hardy, I’m pretty sure Gypsy just handed you the police department.”

I followed my driver and the radio pony without really registering where we were going. It was a slow walk through the exterior wall of the Castle, but considering the cobwebs, we weren’t likely to meet anypony going the other way. Taxi was in front, with Telly behind her carrying Swift. For once, I’d been left without the physical burden, although my brain felt like it’d just been dragged over hot coals.

Taxi was counting wall panels until she found the right one, then gave it a firm shove. It swung open on a small storage room. The space was just big enough for four ponies and a few boxes but was blessedly unoccupied save a couple of mats on the floor; whoever’s kip we’d stumbled into wasn’t home.

Swift yawned and sat up, letting out a frightened gasp as she found herself flailing about in midair. “Buh?!” Telly set her on her hooves as she stared around at the room. “Sir, where are we and what just happened?”

“Gypsy just nuked Iris Jade and gave Hardy control of the Castle,” Taxi murmured, laying Limerence against the wall. “Hardy, give me that Ace. Lim’s going to wake up soon.”

I slumped onto the floor and rolled onto my side, pulling one of the mats over so I could hug the pillow at the end of it. Taxi tugged my hat off and pulled my coat away from my shoulders. I didn’t have the strength to fight her.

“T-Taxi, could...could you get me something to drink?” I asked, softly.

“You want alcohol right now?”

“Give me something that’ll melt my brain before it liquefies my organs.”

“Whiskey it is, then.”

“Whiskey, with a hemlock chaser,” I added.

Ignoring my whinging, Taxi grabbed one of my forelegs, using it to open one of my magically sealed pockets. I didn’t have the strength to fight her as she pulled out the syringe full of Ace and poked around on Lim’s foreleg until she found a vein. He relaxed visibly as she pressed the plunger, and his sleep seemed to become a little calmer.

“What happened to him?” Telly asked.

“Magical burnout,” Taxi replied. “He overcooked it trying to channel the power in my cab through his body after the inverter failed.”

The radio pony sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Oooh, poor boy. Too bad. He’s kinda cute, but I don’t date idiots.” She waved a hoof over me. “What do we do about Hardy? I think he’s checked out for the evening. Was that really so traumatic?”

“What did Gypsy do?” Swift asked, scratching her mane. “I mean, you said some words, but they didn’t make sense in the order you said them in.”

“Gypsy struck Iris Jade with lightning, then relieved her of command,” Telly replied, a little smirk on her face. “She’s back in her office, probably screaming her head off and straining the magical wards. Meanwhile, we’re stuck here with a catatonic idiot, a drugged idiot, and you...who slept through it all. On the upside, I’m not half so dead as I thought I’d be when I got up this morning.”

“I...I slept through Chief Iris Jade being relieved of command! Tourniquet and I were just—”

“I don’t need to know what you and Tourniquet were doing!” I yelped, backing up against the wall and dragging my mat with me.

Swift’s ears lay back. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Like I said,” Taxi answered. “Gypsy gave him the keys to the Castle. He’ll be fine in a bit, but I think we should go find him something to drink.”

“I’ve got to get out there and find out what’s going on,” Telly said, pulling the door of the little closet open and peering both ways down the hall. “Gypsy? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” my juju-bag replied. Telly gently levitated it from around my neck and peered at it. “This is a radio. It’s running on a strange network, but I found the frequency. The Prince is keeping things fairly calm out there, for now. How is Hardy? You’re somewhere I can’t see him. And who is doing all the heavy breathing?”

“That would be Hard Boiled,” Telly replied, nudging me with her hoof. “I think he’s having some kind of panic attack. He’s just lying there watching us and twitching now and then whenever anypony moves.”

“Hrm...not surprising. Alright, I’m sending you some help. It’ll take them about two minutes to get there.”

Trotting over and snatching the juju bag, Taxi asked, “Gypsy, Chief Jade is out of commission, right?”

“I’ve made it fairly clear that if she tries to leave her office, I’ll cook her alive,” she replied. “She tore some things up for a few minutes, but now she’s eating some baked beans from a can and...mercy, she’s smiling. That’s creepy. Either way, she’s just sitting there.”

My driver looked down at me, then shook her head. “Hard Boiled is doing something similar, but with more...quiet sobbing. I don’t think he’s moving anytime soon. Hardy’s plan involved retrieving and retrofitting my car. Do you think power has changed hooves quick enough to let us get a group together for a move to the parking garage across the street? We’ll need to get the Night Trotter.”

Swift settled on her hooves beside me, wrapping her forelegs around my neck and one wing across my flanks. I couldn’t really feel it, but I knew she was there. It was pretty hard to feel anything at that given moment. I mean, besides terror. I was feeling lots of terror.

“Your cab is safe, for the moment,” Gypsy said. “I have pretty good tracking capabilities inside and around the Castle, to a short distance. The Biters’ radios run on an encrypted frequency, but I can at least tell you when they get nearby so you can make a safe run across the road. Something is interfering with many of the enchanted sensors inside the building, though. Weird. I really hope this isn’t a prelude to an attack."

“That would probably be Hardy. He’s got some magics that block tracking and scanning spells. Only works when he’s upset.”

“He’s probably pretty mad at me, huh?”

My partner touched a hoof to my forehead, then murmured, “I think the only reason he didn’t pee on himself is because he hadn’t had anything to drink since last time he went to the bathroom, Ma’am.”

I hugged my mat a little tighter. Mat was good. Mat would never betray me or make me insane. Mat would never put all those lives in my unreliable hooves, because it knew better.

“My ‘help’ is almost there. Telly, can you come up and see me?”

“Are you sure I should leave him like this?” Telly asked, gesturing in my direction.

“That bolt of lightning drained three entire control runes almost to zero. Do you want to take a chance on not having a second shot if Iris Jade decides to test me?”

“Right, I’ll be up there soon. I’ve got to make a pitstop by Requisitions first,” she replied, trotting over to the door and cracking it open. Peering out both ways, she settled her headphones on her ears and wrapped the trailing cable around her neck. “Can you direct Hardy up to the platform once he’s on his hooves? I want to hear his plan, and I bet Precious will, too.”

“Will do. Too bad the Biters damaged the main antenna. Now that he’s here, I guess I can shut off that message I had looping through the police comms. It’s not like it was getting very far anyhow.”

My driver put a restraining hoof on Telly’s shoulder. “Could you avoid telling anypony where we are?”

“Do I look stupid?” the radio pony snarked, then pushed open the door and vanished into the hall.

Putting her wings around me, Swift rested her cheek on my knee. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Are you crazy right now?”

“I...I have never wanted my mother so much in my life, and she’s been dead for years.”

“Oh. Th-then, can I brush your mane?”

“Sure. Do you know you have a mustache?”

“What?!”

There was a knock on the storage closet’s door.

My mane was looking better than it had in weeks, but my state of mind wasn’t much improved. I couldn’t even bring myself to look up as Taxi opened the door to see who’d come in. My mind felt like it was swimming in a deep puddle of mud, flailing about as it tried not to sink under its own weight but without enough energy to escape.

She exchanged some soft words with somepony. I couldn’t hear what was being said, or maybe I just didn’t care.

‘Why isn’t Taxi kicking me?’ I thought, still clutching my mat to my breast as I stared vacantly into space, ‘It would have been nice if she’d kicked me a few times. I could use some kicking. Somepony snap me out of this.’

The brush moving through my mane stopped, and my partner’s warmth vanished from my back. I hadn’t really been aware of it until it was gone, but now that it was, I found myself missing it. I shut my eyes and shivered in the cool air, before a set of soft forelegs wrapped around my barrel.

“Could you give us a little while?” a voice asked. That voice. Where’d I heard that voice?

“Alright,” Taxi murmured. “We’ll be right outside. I’ve got to go see if I can get a group together to go retrieve the Night Trotter and commandeer some radios so we can talk to Gypsy. Swift, wait outside.”

“But—”

“No buts, Swift. This is what Hardy needs,” my driver said, firmly. “Miss Blue? Take care of him.”

The door shut, and I opened my eyes to find myself looking into a kind, beautiful face.

Miss Blue? Ruby Blue? How could she be there? She was dead. No. No, not Ruby.

“Lily?” I whispered. Her legs tightened around me, and she rested her chin on my shoulder. A lock of her bright red mane fell across her forehead, and I reached up to gently brush it out of her eyes.

“It’s me, Hardy,” she murmured, putting a toe under my chin and lifting my head. “This silly little griffin had just crept into the medbay, and after I caught her and gave her a cookie, this disembodied voice told me you were here. You look like you could use a bath.”

I shuddered and hid my face against her neck. “G-gypsy. Her name is Gypsy, and th-that...awful bitch...promoted me.”

I’m a little ashamed to say I was weeping by that point. All stallionly manners gone, I hung on to Lily Blue like a foal lost in the mall. She smelled of hospital disinfectant, but I couldn’t have cared less.

You might ask yourself why it was the idea of being in a leadership role that had finally broken Mister Hard Boiled. My conscience was already bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds, and the thought of taking on a leadership role which expected me to save the entire police department from hideous, violent death or slow starvation was a bit more than I could have been reasonably expected to handle on short notice. If I’m honest, I’d found myself thinking heavily about Officer Gem Sing’s corpse.

I stepped over her frost-burned body an hour ago like she wasn’t even there.

How many more bodies was I likely to have to step over now?

I suppose it’s fortunate then that Lily was a patient pony and didn’t seem to have anywhere better to be than hugging my broken flank while I wept myself into exhaustion. I wanted to push her away, toss off some smart remark, and march out there with my head held high to face the reaper, but it wasn’t happening. The foulness in my veins would take longer than one good cry to bleed out.

Still, time moved on. I could only lie there and feel sorry for myself for so long before my mind started to find other places to be.

Something she’d said at last lodged in my brain long enough to fire a few liquored up, depressed neurons into action. I noticed, finally, that she was wearing a nametag and clean, pink nurse’s scrubs that matched her pelt.

“Tiny...griffin?” I asked, a little weakly. “You caught Mags?”

“So that’s her name,” Lily replied with a tiny smile. “She said she was a friend of yours, or...well, she said you were hers and that you’d do really horrible things to me if I didn’t put her down ‘this instant’. She almost shot one of the male nurses in the kneecap with the smallest pistol I’ve ever seen before I caught her with my magic. She calmed right down when I gave her a cookie, though.”

“You...you do have somebody watching her, right?”

Lily rolled her eyes and levitated a little medical bag from her side, setting it in front of me and pulling out Mags’s gun. “Of course. She’s with the other children in the nursery.”

“No...no, she’s probably already planned an escape attempt or is currently executing one,” I grunted, drawing in a slow breath. “I hope nopony down there is armed. She’s a frighteningly good shot if she manages to sneak their gun off them.”

Resting a hoof over mine, Lily leaned her forehead against my neck. “Detective...Hardy, you didn’t have a child with a gun following you around the last time I saw you. What’s happened to you?”

I let out a short, humorless laugh. “What’s happened to the world? I had a pretty good thing going! I was going to drink myself to death before all this began. What about you?”

Lily dismissed the question with a flip of her hoof. “What about me? Ruby still dead and I haven’t seen my parents since this all started. You saved my life, though. I can’t really ask for more than that, except maybe the head of whoever killed my sister.”

“I’m...still working on that,” I muttered.

She giggled and bit my mane, pulling my face around to look at hers. “Really? It looks a little bit like you’re crying in a closet.”

I sat back. “Yeah, well, I’m the boss now, right? I need my closet time.”

“No you don’t, Hardy,” she replied, pulling my forehead against her chest.

I lay there, listening to her heart beating, trying to come to grips with my reality. What had changed?

I still had to save everypony. That hadn’t changed. I was still responsible for everypony. That really hadn’t changed. Now, I just had a little more authority to get something done. No problem, right?

I gulped and felt my testicles trying to crawl up the back of my throat.

“You’re scared of leading, right?” she asked. Clever girl.

“Of course!” I huffed, resting a little more of my weight against her. “I can’t stay here. I have to give orders, set things in motion, then bugger off to a place I’ll probably get killed, and hope somepony else can handle things. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a bit of a control freak.”

“You’re saying you’re going to do a worse job than the ex-junkie who throws people around with her horn when she’s upset?” Lily asked, giving me a light nudge. “I heard lots of stories about Iris Jade. I don’t think you could be worse if you tried.”

“That’s...comforting. Sort of,” I mumbled, then gave myself a shake. “So, what, then? I’m the nitwit wearing the captain's hat. What do you think I should do?”

“You’re asking me? I’m a cherry farmer’s daughter, Hardy.”

“And I’m just a cop!” I groused, rocking back on my rump. “Smarter people than you and I are dying left and right out there on the streets. I don’t know what to do. I had some hair-brained idea of begging Iris for the use of one of the anti-megafauna vehicles in the basement to get out into the Wilds on a lead, but...now I can just take the damn thing. Ugh, I have to leave Taxi because the cab is wrecked. I promised her she could fix it. Limerence is suffering magical burnout again and we had to inject him with enough Ace to flatten a timberwolf, so I’m down my driver and a unicorn. If I drive, I’m half likely to get us all killed, and Swift’s hooves would barely reach the pedals, even if she knew how.”

Lily pursed her lips, and I had a momentary, irrational urge to kiss them; I quickly buried it.

“What is this lead?” she asked.

I turned my head to the door and sighed. “Some mad notion about a Shield Pylon we might actually be able to get into.”

“Oh…well, I suppose...I could...No, I guess it’s a silly idea...” She trailed off, staring at her hooves contemplatively.

“What? What is it? You know somepony who can help?” I asked.

“Help? Maybe. I mean...I can drive.”

I almost choked on my own tongue. “You?”

Lily shot me an irritated look. “Why does everypony assume that just because I was raised on a cherry farm I’m somehow useless?”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” I protested. “I was just surprised. Not even that many city ponies know how to drive. Most take the bus. Heck, even Iris Jade takes a cab. Those anti-megafauna vehicles are complicated, too.”

“Not really,” she replied, tugging at her lower lip with the tip of her toe. “I’ve been bored down in the medbay, taking care of the other unicorns, so I poked around some of the vehicles. You’re talking about the armoured ones with ‘A-M-V’ painted on the side, right? The controls are mostly the same as pickup trucks, with some extra switches and dials. I could drive one, easy.”

Reluctantly, I pushed myself away from her and got to my hooves. “You’re saying you would volunteer to drive out into the Wilds with me on this harebrained chase?”

She shrugged her strong shoulders and used the wall to lift herself up. “Why not? You’ve kept me alive so far.”

I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”

Her expression became momentarily haunted. “When the sky went dark and my skull started burning like I had a lit ember on my forehead, I thought I was going to die. I’d probably be in the same boat as all those other poor ponies if Precious hadn’t slapped a magically sealed length of pipe over my horn. The police ponies who came to get me a few days later said it was you who told Iris Jade to find us.”

“I...might have had a hoof in that, but this doesn’t mean you should be following me around,” I said, warily.

Lily moved over to Limerence’s side and waved her horn over him, then went about the business of checking his vitals.

“What else am I going to do?” she asked over her shoulder. “Sit here, waiting for news that you’re dead? Or worse, no news at all? You need a driver. I want to get away from here before all this gloom makes me insane. If you can somehow stay alive with all the people trying to kill you, I can drive a stupid truck for a day.”

I frowned, then carefully began gathering myself together.

How’d she done that? I’d been moments from snapping like a twig and pitching myself off the battlements. Probably some nefarious mare-secret that they don’t let slip to stallions. Of course, if I’d been in anything like a functional state of mind, I probably wouldn’t have considered taking an untrained pony into whatever I was likely to find out in the Wilds.

Lily was watching me, an expectant look on her face.

“Fine. You can come. It’s not as though this situation can be any more of a disaster. Can you use a gun?” I asked.

“I can use my daddy’s shotgun, I guess,” she replied, without really thinking about it. Her eyes widened as she realized what she’d said. “Wait, do you think I might have to sh-shoot somepony?”

“Honestly? I don’t know what we’ll be doing once we’re out of the city. The only times I’ve been into the Wilds in the last year I was drunk or unconscious.” I trotted over and put a hoof on Lim’s side. His breathing was even and quiet, and a bit of drool was leaking down his cheek. I kinda envied him. The one time I’d ever taken Ace, it was a pretty pleasant experience, at least until it wore off. “Now, I’ve got to go act like I'm not flying by the seat my pants.”

I pushed open the door of the storage closet and stepped into the hall. Thankfully, the hall was also empty. Our hiding place was along a row of offices which surrounded the throne room on all sides, with a balcony overlooking the room itself. I cautiously peeked over the side, being careful not to be seen as Lily crept out behind me.

Down below, the crowds of ponies were back at the work of making the indoor refugee camp work, but I could pick out Precious down there ‘holding court’ at the front on the steps of the throne. He was wearing a big smile as ponies came to him, one after another, and then left on various errands, but I could see a thin layer of sweat on his face even from where I was. Vital as he might be, the Prince was old.

The stained glass window stretching across Jade’s office was visibly cracked with a few pieces missing here and there, but it seemed to be holding. A shadow roughly in the shape of the ex-Chief was leaning against the glass, un-moving. An unkind part of me wondered if she’d just killed herself up there, but then it quickly reminded me she’d definitely have taken me with her if that were her inclination.

“What do we do?” Lily asked, interrupting my grim considerations.

My brain was finally working, but it still felt sluggish under the weight of expectations I’d suddenly found myself with.

“The first thing I need to do is pawn all this authority I’ve suddenly found myself vested with off on a few lieutenants,” I grumbled, lifting my juju bag. “Gypsy? I assume you’ve been listening to everything.”

Things were silent for several seconds, but some part of my brain which works on pure intuition knew she was on the other end.

“Y-yes…” she replied. I could almost hear her tucking her tail between her back legs. “I didn’t listen to everything. I only have so many ears. I was just...you know, I was just making sure you’re okay.”

Lily’s eyes widened a little. “Where is that pony? I know the public address system is working, because Miss Jade used it sometimes, but I thought all the radios inside the building were down!”

“This radio is using a sub-compression algorithm to avoid the jamming,” Gypsy replied.

“I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily murmured.

“It’s super high tech, but the police radios don’t use anything like it. I wish they did. I’ll need to see if I can walk somepony through rewiring a few of the walkie-talkies. Wait, sorry, I’m kind of excited right now. What did you need, Detective?”

“You put me in this idiotic situation, so you’re going to help me out of it!” I snapped. “I need to know your capabilities. Specifically, I need to know how well you can track ponies inside the building.”

“I...um...ugh. Give me a second... I’m kind of anxious and it’s making it hard to think. The lightning bolt took an awful lot out of me, and Telly is still fixing my control runes.”

I gave the bag a frustrated shake. “Take your time, sweetheart. It’s not as though the lives of everyone in this building are on the line. I need to find Taxi.”

“Hrm...uno momento.”

I heard hooves clipclopping away from the ‘microphone’ and wondered if she was doing that for effect. After a moment, she returned.

“Your driver is downstairs in the garage, under the hood of one of the anti-megafauna vehicles. She looks like she’s taking it apart. I don’t really have an explanation for that. Your partner is with her, and they’ve got a little griffin girl holding their tools.”

“Color me unsurprised. Alright, guide me to Telly and...wherever you are. Keep us away from the crowds. Do you mind if my friend here tags along?” I asked, nodding towards Lily.

“Of course she can come! Miss Blue has been working double shifts in the medbay since she arrived. If I still had hooves, I’d want to shake hers.”

Considering the worst thing somepony was likely to do to Limerence was steal his glasses, I left him to sleep in the closet.

Shedding my coat into a one-sided saddle-bag, hiding my gun in my mane, and putting my hat on Lily, I slipped into her nurse’s scrubs and pulled on a surgical mask she’d had in one of her pockets. My disguise was complete.

Gypsy had taken my order to try to avoid ponies very seriously. Round and round the department he goes, where he stops, nopony knows! It was a solid twenty minute journey, ducking into empty offices which had been converted to bunk rooms, stepping behind fake potted plants, and generally sneaking about. The circuitous route led down into the underbelly of the administrative offices, which were largely storage.

There were still a few individuals we needed to avoid, but my costume held, particularly with Lily’s hundred-watt smile distracting everypony in our way. Lily might have made a decent living for herself in the modeling industry if she weren’t rocking the rough hooves and muscles of a lifetime of farm work. I just thought they made her more attractive.

After what felt like an year of creeping around, we stopped outside another closet at the end of a narrow and undecorated hallway. The door had flaking red paint and a yellowed paper sign that said ‘Maintenance access only’ stapled up with rusty finishing nails. It also lacked a handle.

Glancing around to make sure we were well and truly alone, I picked up my juju bag and held it to my muzzle.

“Gypsy, we’re here, wherever here is. I thought we’d be coming up to see you? You have some way of letting us in, or should we just stay out here until the sun comes out?”

“Don’t get your tail in a knot! The elevator is on the way down!”

I leaned against the wall, flicking my gaze at Lily, who had the strangest smile on her face as she looked at me.

“Something funny?” I asked her.

“Yes...yes, kind of. I guess. You’re funny,” she giggled.

I frowned. “Come again?”

“Oh hush. You pretend to be this tough cop, but I see right through you. I bet you cry at sad movies!”

I had to fight a smile. Not many ponies can make me smile when I’m having a shit day, but Lily was one of the few.

“I’m not pretending to be a tough cop,” I chuckled, “but...you’re right, I do love a sad film from time to time.”

Before she could reply, the door clattered loud enough to make me flinch and swung open, revealing a metal box about a meter and a half by a meter and a half wide. It was almost exactly the same width as the door itself. Rust covered every inch of it, including the ‘last inspected’ sticker.

“Is...this a joke, Gypsy?” I asked, poking at my radio.

“Is what a joke? The elevator?”

“Yes! This thing looks like it’s held together with marshmallows and toothpicks!”

“It used to be a dumbwaiter for the Princesses, but it was changed to a maintenance elevator about twenty-five years ago. It’s safe! I promise! I mean...as safe as anything is these days…”

“Which is to say horribly, horribly dangerous...” I grunted, then pushed my way into the tiny elevator. It creaked under my hooves, and I heard a few pops and snaps from the superstructure.

Lily followed, a little more cautiously. It was a tight fit, and I was half tempted to tell her we should make two trips. With her body pressed tightly against my entire side, that thought gave way pretty quick. She tucked her head in against my neck, and the door of the little carriage swung shut, leaving us in complete darkness.

Before my nerves could get the better of me, Lily’s horn lit up, providing just enough light that I could make out the inside of the cage. That helped some, but nothing would keep my jaw from clenching as the rickety box started to rise. Bolts shook, panels rattled, and the entire construct felt like it would come apart if I so much as shifted my weight in the wrong direction.

I couldn’t keep the waver out of my voice as I asked, “L-Lily...if...if we fall, c-can you catch this thing?”

“It’s heavier than a cherry tree stump,” she replied. “I can probably slow it down a little, though.”

“Th-thank you.”

I rested my head against the wall and tried not to think about being trapped in a tiny enclosed space over a very, very long drop. Fortunately, the journey was relatively brief, and with a screech of the rails and a twang of the cables, we came to a halt. The door sprang open, followed by a rush of clean, damp air. I felt Lily disengage from me and wondered, briefly, why there didn’t seem to be any light up here. Then I realized I’d had my eyes shut.

Lily’s gentle hoof hooked around my knee, leading me out. Once my hooves hit metal, I let out a breath and got the courage up to open my eyelids. I really, really wished I hadn’t.

The ‘ledge’—and I hesitate to call it that because it was little more than a balcony with a short metal railing—where that elevator spat us out was high enough to give a pegasus vertigo. An ice-cold sweat broke out on my neck, and I took three steps back only for my rear end to hit the now-closed door of the lift.

Telly was standing there, one hoof over the side of the railing, her attention focused on the interior of the domed roof of the Castle which was far, far closer than it had any right to be. Her bright yellow face was pinched in concentration as she levitated a paintbrush a few meters above her, touching up a scorched section of the ceiling which was decorated across every inch with tight, elaborate runework.

“You don’t much like heights, do you?” Lily asked, softly.

“No, no, I do not,” I muttered, inching forward. A thin mist curled around our hooves, which it took me a moment to realize was the very top of the File Cloud itself. “You’d think bullets, or psychos, or invisible heart-eating demons would scare me worst of all. No, it’s gotta be ‘tall places’. I’ll be fine. Just give me a minute to get my head on straight.”

I shut my eyes again and turned my attention inward.

‘Gale...if you’re there, could you handle this?’ I thought. ‘I know you don’t want to mess with my brain any more than you have to, but I need to think. I swear, I’ll get you to a socket the second we’re done.’

A soft heat seemed to spread from the back of my neck down into my body. It didn’t stem the fear, but it definitely quieted it down enough that my mind could work again.

‘Thanks,’ I whispered, internally.

Moving forward to the center of the platform, just behind Telly, I sat down and waited for her to finish dabbing paint on the runes. As she set her brush aside, she turned and cringed as she realized she wasn’t alone any longer.

“H-hey Hardy,” she murmured, then shut her eyes. “Sorry. That’s stupid. I tried rehearsing something I would say when you got up here, but I’ve got nothing. It’s not important anyway. Gypsy? He’s here.”

“I can see him, you know,” my juju bag replied. “Of course, I never thought I’d see him this close. He’s kinda handsome, if you take away the nurse scrubs and maybe cut his fetlocks. I see why you had a crush on him for so long.”

Telly’s cheeks lit up, and she looked like she’d like to throw herself off the balcony. “G-gypsy! That was years ago! Besides, he was sleeping with Juniper!”

It was my turn to blush. I glanced at Lily, who was giving me a wide-eyed, very amused grin. “Juniper was your partner, wasn’t he? I remember one of the officers downstairs talking about you, and he came up…”

“Sweet mercies, Juniper Shores and I were not having sex!”

“Really now? Well, then...If he’d asked, would you have said no?”

“He never asked, dammit! He was my partner!” I barked, advancing a couple of steps on the metal platform.

“Sorry, sorry...I get why Taxi spends so much time rattling your cage. It’s fun,” Gypsy chuckled.

My nostrils flared as I fought to contain my temper. It wouldn’t do to yell at somepony who could hit me with lightning. Granted, it was a careful balance, since getting pissed off was taking my mind off the precarious heights just a few meters away.

“Alright, Gypsy. You wanted me up here. Here I am. What, exactly, do you want me to see?”

“One sec,” Gypsy grunted, “This takes some concentration, and all the levers in here do multiple things...”

I felt a soft body sidle in beside me, and Lily’s tail brushed one of my back legs in a way that made me feel stronger than I had in a couple of days. Bless her, she was good at providing emotional support in a pinch.

Working up my courage, I stepped forward until my chest rested against the protective railing around the platform, then forced my eyes downward. Below me, the great black mass of the File Cloud hovered and spun, like a mass of dirty cotton candy suspended in midair. I couldn’t see the ground below it except around the very edges, but I knew it was there. Skies, I knew it was there.

A wisp of cloud swirled in the breezeless air, coiling into a snakelike appendage that swung back and forth in front of me. I took a step back, but the fog didn’t advance; it waited, hovering over the edge of the building. Slowly, it began to expand, forming into an expanding bubble which began to shape itself into familiar structures. First legs, bubbling out of the bottom to stand on the ledge, then a long, flowing tail, and finally a head which popped out of the neck. The creature even had ears and facial features, though they were a bit indistinct and flowing.

A pair of glowing yellow eyes opened on its ‘face’.

“That...is one cool trick,” Lily murmured, stepping closer and gently waving her hoof at the cloud pony. Its substance swirled in slow circles, and then a tiny jolt of electricity snapped out and touched her hoof. “Ouch! Hey, what was that for?!”

“You wanna get fresh, you better have flowers and chocolates with you, Miss Pretty Thing!” Gypsy’s avatar snickered. Her voice was completely recognizable, but there was a definite buzzing quality, like it was coming through a pair of bad speakers.

“I’m sorry! I’ve just never met a pony made of mist before!” Lily exclaimed, backing away. “Are...are you really inside the cloud?”

“I used to be,” Gypsy replied, lifting one ephemeral hoof and waving it up and down at herself. “You figure they might have checked a few minutes after sticking a pony into the Cloud, but...well, I don’t know much of what happened. I guess they thought I was in such bad shape it wouldn’t matter. That or someone went for coffee.”

“Who...are you? Or were you?” I asked, then shook my head. “No, wait a second. I remember something. About three years ago...I was just telling my partner about it the other day. It was during the mission where Juniper died. Telly had some kind of...problem with the File Cloud.”

The mist pony scratched the back of her head, and her bright eyes blinked a couple of times. “Right...that was me. Honestly, I wish I could tell you exactly who I was. Got only bits of memory here and there. I figure having your brain turn into worm food in a transdimensional convergence will do that. There’s some mighty nasty worms in the Cloud, too.”

“I’ve...heard you describe elements of your life on the radio, though. And...you know, this is going to sound like the strangest question, but what about the parakeet?”

“Ah, yes, the...the parakeet. Well, daddy-o, a girl is always looking for new hooks. The parakeet, my assistant, my home...it sure added life to the show, didn’t it? Much more interesting than a weirdo voice reciting news and spinning tunes stolen from other radio stations, innit? I guess that’ll make more sense if you know exactly what happened. I mean, Telly spent the first three months I was awake trying to annihilate me.”

“Are you going to make me say ‘sorry’ for that until I start freezing to death out here?” Telly grumbled.

A tickle of cloud reached out from the mist and ran across Telly’s cheek. She smiled and shut her eyes for a moment.

“Not a chance, Telly. If worst comes to worst, I want you in here with me,” Gypsy said cooly. “It’s not like there’s so many amazing things to do out there, is it?”

“I already promised, if it looks like I’m going to die, I’ll break the control runes and toss myself off this platform,” the radio pony replied softly. “I’m not dying yet, though, so you need to tell Hardy about yourself, then tell him what you discovered.”

“Well, there’s not much to say, is there? Besides, comprehension is real different from experience…”

“I’ve been dead before, Miss Gypsy,” I said. “Believe me, the boat from Hard Boiled’s life starts in Weird Town and just heads south. Tell me the whole thing.”

The amorphous cloud being’s face seemed to furrow inward, and a small crackle of energy danced around behind its ears. “Ain’t a story I get to tell all that often. I’m thinking how. Most of the time, when you tell a story, you’ve got a place to start. Since I don’t remember the beginning, that’s hard to pin down.”

“How about the first thing you remember?” Lily asked, trotting in a little circle around Gypsy.

I grinned. “Lily, are you conducting this interview, or am I?”

“I’m helping! Besides, you’re so gruff sometimes I’m surprised anypony tells you anything.”

Telly lit her horn, lifting a saddlebag from behind herself and plucking out a bar of chocolate. Peeling it open, she stuffed half in her mouth, then offered the other half to Lily. “She’s right, you know. If I didn’t know you have the highest clearance rate in the department, I’d be shocked you manage to get to work in the morning without somepony shooting you.”

“Hey, my method is my method! It works!”

“Says the pony who died because someone shot him,” Gypsy nickered, her vaporous tail reaching up to tug at my mane. “At least I had the grace to die without annoying half the city first. As near as I can figure from the documents I found inside the Cloud, I was a trial subject for a new form of enchanted stasis. It was some kind of experiment during the war, I guess. They—and don’t ask who ‘they’ were; they redacted like complete bastards—they stashed my body in the Cloud hoping they’d be able to use it to save soldiers injured at the front.”

“What went wrong?” I asked flatly.

“Heh...well, weak is the flesh, am I right?” At my puzzled look, she added, “I feckin’ died. Pissed me off no end, but what can you do? Some time later, I woke up...somewhere. Being in the Cloud isn’t like being out there. Boundaries are only where you have the will to maintain them. It’s much bigger in here, and the little bit that connects to the world out there is...it’s like a spot of slightly dried catsup in an ocean of tomato sauce.”

I started slightly. “Stop...wait. You lost me. Why catsup?”

Gypsy hesitated halfway to the next part of her explanation, and her eyes darted sideways at Telly, then back to me. “Uh...I mean...it’s...it’s like catsup. I needed something that gets hard and crusty and is a liquid most of the time, okay? Why does that matter?”

“Yeah, but...the first place your mind went was catsup?”

“Telly, are you sure I’m not allowed to hit him with lightning? Just a graze, maybe?”

I grinned and stuck my chest out. “Aim for the socket. I need a top up. Anyway, you were telling me about waking up?”

“I’d call you insufferable, but I suspect you’re taking that as a point of pride these days,” Gypsy grumbled, flowing over to float in front of me. “Well, I couldn’t tell you how long went by before I learned to create light, or make a body for myself in here. Most of the time the only thing I had to tell myself apart from the background was a general sense of boredom. Telly tells me it was close to forty-five years since I went in, but there weren’t exactly anything like clocks in here.”

“The technology behind the File Cloud isn’t especially well understood,” Telly explained, glancing up at the rune-covered roof above us. “I’ve studied the the Cloud since I was hired. Nopony knows why it was stashed here, instead of some government repository. The city made a bunch of noise about ‘innovation of our lives’ when the Cloud was installed, but that was a smokescreen, probably to cover whoever was responsible after Gypsy’s death. Get everyone excited, then quietly disappoint them until they get bored and move on to the next innovation. Nopony is much inclined to investigate a magical device that can’t be replicated so long as it’s doing its job. Kind of subtle, but it works. Since nopony knows who designed the original magics, aside from that the Princesses were involved somehow, there wasn’t anywhere to point hooves at. What I do know is that the Cloud is a natural occurrence.”

“Natural?!” Lily gasped. “How can this be natural? It’s a big cloud of magic!”

“All the same, it’s apparently a sort of stellar phenomena. Somepony during the war captured it, contained it, and magicked it to sit up and dance,” the radio pony affirmed. “That doesn’t mean it always dances to our tune. So far as my deepest magical probes can tell, it’s just a big, empty, infinite space in there.”

Gypsy let out a bitter snort that sent arcs of lightning racing across the ledge. “Yeah...‘empty’. Right.”

“That’s just what my magical scans say!” Telly defended, then turned back to me. “Gypsy says there’re entire worlds floating in there.”

“And there are creatures that eat those worlds,” Gypsy added. “There are libraries with information that only exists when you’re thinking of turnips or sour cream, and colors you can’t see unless you’re blind and deaf. There are moons that howl the names of angels and wolves that make their dens inside black holes.”

“Sounds like a drug trip to me,” I commented.

“Lemme tell you, when I first started becoming aware, it felt like one,” Gypsy agreed. “I kept waiting to wake up. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. I had only flashes of memories, bits of old newsreels, and my own slowly expanding perceptions for company.”

Lily made a sympathetic sound. “I ate some raw Cherry Bomb plant once and that felt like my entire brain being turned to goo for thirty hours straight. You’re saying this went on for years? How are you not crazy?”

“Heh! Who says I’m not!” Gypsy cackled, sweeping waves of cloud up to form a pillow to sit on. “You want to spin records and fight the powers that be, you gotta be a little nuts!”

“Huh...there’s something missing there. How’d you go from ‘spirit dimensional wanderer’ to ‘DJ’?” I asked.

“The Good Fight knows no bounds! Truth be, though...that was her idea.” Gypsy’s avatar flicked a bit of cloud in Telly’s direction. “I was stumbling around in here and...I felt something a little more solid and familiar than everything else. I...eh...I ‘moved’ toward it and found a sweet little beach house with a palm tree and about a thousand rosebushes outside overlooking an ocean of stars. Nice place, right?”

Lily gave her an incredulous look. “That’s in there with you?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say it made sense. I’d learned to make a body, to perceive the aether, and to move inside of it. This was a step up from dodging the more ridiculously outsized predators and avoiding insanity. Inside, I found...levers. Millions of levers. I still haven’t pulled them all. I figure that’d probably be a bad idea. Thankfully, a few of them were labeled. I started talking...and one day, the sweetest voice you ever heard replied.”

Telly’s ears lay back, and she put her hooves over her face. “You promised you wouldn’t embarrass me!”

“I did not! Besides, you thought I was some kind of magical gremlin! Even communicating with me for a month straight, you were still trying to separate me from the system!”

“It didn’t help that you couldn’t tell me who you were! You couldn’t even come up with a name!” Telly complained, then shook her head. “At any rate, we...we started to become friends. I’d try to wipe her out with a concentrated telespatial energy conversion, and she’d spit printer ink in my face. It was a friendly rivalry. After awhile, it was just friendly.”

“It was after you broke up with your last coltfriend,” Gypsy interjected. “You stumbled in at three AM and started sobbing into your headset. That was the same day I figured out how to work the speakers.”

“I remember,” Telly said, with a fond look. “We just got to talking. She helped me through the breakup. You ever have a friend you can call at any time of the day and they’ll be there? Gypsy doesn’t sleep. Not like you and I do. She kept me from doing anything stupid when I was at my lowest...”

Lily let out a little ‘awww’ noise. “That’s so adorable! So you two have been friends ever since?”

“Yep!” Gypsy lifted into the air, spinning in a quick circle. “Eventually, I worked out how to do other things with the...levers...in here. They’re not really levers, but that’s what I see them as when I look at them. I can spy. I can poke around the building’s power grid. I can read most everything that’s stored in the Cloud. That was actually what made me decide to start broadcasting.”

“The...files?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, scowling at the floor. “You’ve no idea what’s in here, Hard Boiled. There’s more evil in this city than you can possibly hold in your mind. It’s usually under the surface, hiding and creeping, but now and then it bursts free. At a point...I started to get angry. Detrot was...rotting, even before the Darkening. Just rotting from the inside. I knew I used to live there, and I didn’t want to watch it die because the head of the police was a drug addict and the monied corporate interests could stamp on anyone who dared get in their way!”

Below, the File Cloud crackled and the air filled with the scent of ozone. I inhaled in preparation for trying to dodge some lightning; fortunately, the strike never came.

“So, that’s why you decided tweaking Iris Jade would be a good thing to do with your infinite spare time?” I asked, once I was sure I wasn’t about to be smitten.

“I’d have turned her into charcoal if I’d had the chance! I’m still tempted to! You have no idea how many terrible things that mare has done down through the years to keep power and order around here!”

“I...mmm...I have one or two. If you had that kind of information, why didn’t you have her arrested or replaced?”

“With who? If I’d hosed her a few years ago, the powers that be might have installed someone worse! I know Jade. She’s a beast, but she does care. Unfortunately, caring isn’t enough right now. We needed a pony who doesn’t give a damn about power and whose talent would never give him a moment’s peace if he let everypony die.”

Telly pulled a small black objected out of her saddlebag and levitated it over to me. I sat, and she dropped it at my hooves. It was a police issue wallet. Reaching out as though there might be a snake underneath, I flipped it open. There was a freshly embossed golden shield inside, still warm with the magics that’d carved it.

It said:

‘Detrot Police Department, Hard Boiled, Chief of Police.’

Act 3 Chapter 29: The Chains of Leadership

Most ponies give too much credence to the notion that a leadership position is a good thing. Leadership means additional options, but it also means picking the right option when all's said and done. If you don’t, you won’t be a leader for very long and the next guy to take up the scepter might get everyone killed, or decide his first order of business is impaling the last guy to hold office on a pike just to watch him wriggle.

-Heavy Hoof, leader of the Manehattan mob on the day before his arrest for racketeering and tax evasion.

I’m sure Telly thought carving me a nice, shiny new badge in the third of an hour since she left me with Lily was a great piece of comedy, but it almost earned her a broken everything.

Lily pounced on me a second before I dropped the badge and went for Telly’s throat. Her hooves wrapped around my neck and she used her body-weight to yank me onto my side, throwing her back legs in front of my knees. For a unicorn, she’s pretty strong. Must be all that farm work.

“No, Hardy! Stop!”

“I just want to feel her organs! Make sure they’re fresh and screamy! Lemme at her!”

I did calm down. It took about ten minutes with a determined, stubborn mare clinging to my back and hobbling my rear legs, but I did calm down. My ears were covered in Lily’s tooth-marks from when I’d tried to get my legs under me and Telly was cowering behind Gypsy, who had a sort of ghostly smirk on her face, but...calm.

“Alright...fine. I will not kill the radio idiot today,” I grumbled.

“Promise! No killing her ever!” Lily demanded, tightening her grip on my neck a little.

“I promise I will not kill the radio idiot...ugh...ever...”

Lily cautiously released the leg that was across my throat and eased back to her hooves. My hat was resting against the railing where it’d rolled when it fell off her head. She levitated it over and pushed it down over my ears, then reached back and pulled my coat out of the saddle-bag hanging from her side.

“There. Now, get out of those scrubs, pick up that badge, and pony up! Whether you like it or not, you’re the Chief of Police now.” Before I could open my mouth to rebut, she pushed it shut with her toe on my lower jaw. “You’re the Chief, Hard Boiled! Act like it!”

“If I were acting like the last Chief, I’d be pitching Telly off this platform,” I grunted, stepping away from her leg and scooping up the fallen wallet. I looked at the badge for a second, then shook my head and shoved it into my pocket.

Gypsy flowed over to my side and threw one leg across my shoulders. It had only a slight weight, but it was cold and damp.

“Well—” she began, but I cut her off.

“Do not call me ‘Chief’,” I growled. “I know you were about to. Detective or Hardy, or I swear I will piss off the edge of this platform every day for as long as I’m still alive.”

Gypsy carefully took her leg away. “Right. Sorry. Your plan?”

I straightened my collar and stood a little straighter. “I have a contact with a group of Diamond Dogs who have a tunnel network that runs underneath the city.”

“You...you mean the Underdogs?” Gypsy sputtered.

“You’ve heard of them?” I asked.

She nodded. “I hear them sometimes, on the police radios when they’re moving around the streets. There’s a file in here about them, though it’s only a few pieces of paper stuck together with a bit of sticky-tack. The Underdogs are paranoid and reclusive and nopony knows where they actually live. At least, I didn’t think anyone did. How’d you meet them?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I replied, waving the question away. “What does matter is that they’re waiting on my signal to burrow their way inside the Castle and evacuate all the non-essential personnel.”

Telly put a hoof over her face. “Diamond Dogs? Really, Hardy? I knew you were all about making friends in low places—”

I glared at her. “I promised Lily I wouldn’t kill you. I will wire your jaw shut if I have to.”

“Okay, okay! Celestia save me, you weren’t this much of a grump even when you were drinking...”

“I haven’t stopped drinking! I am taking a brief hiatus to fix the planet, then I plan to slink right back into my bottle. Since you’re saddling me with this, I’m going to use it until somebody picks the badge off my corpse. That may happen sooner, rather than later. In the meantime, Gypsy, what can you do to help?”

The avatar tucked her floating tail beneath her rear legs and sighed. “Not much. Most of my attention is going to keeping several ‘someones’ out of the Castle’s protection grid.”

“Several? I’ve got a friend who has probably been probing the grid a few times lately, but I doubt she could qualify as ‘several’.”

“You’re talking about the Supermax construct, right?” Gypsy asked.

“You’re going to be as irritating as Tourniquet with her big ears, aren’t you?”

“Tourniquet is the...construct? Yeah, I suppose a few of the intrusions match magical signatures that I’d call ‘Crusades era’. Most seem to be much older than that.”

Lily nudged my leg with her shoulder. “I’m feeling kind of left out. Who is she talking about?”

“A nosey, hormonal teenager who just so happens to be in control of most of the city’s power grid,” I replied. “She’s the reason the lights have stayed on in much of the town. Gypsy, could I convince you to let Tourniquet in? I could use her.”

“Errr...no can do, boss. I can’t read the magical signatures until after I’ve repulsed them. We let your friend in, we’ll probably be letting in whoever else is banging at the gates. You want to risk those ‘Biter’ freaks getting ahold of the security system inside the Castle?”

I considered for a moment, then shook my head. “Tourniquet is pretty useful, but I don’t want to take that risk until after the innocents are out of the line of fire. Right. That means...sneaking back into the garage.”

Gypsy’s glowing eyes dimmed slightly and she seemed to be gathering her courage. .“I...err...Hardy? I have to tell you something that I discovered. I was going to a minute ago, but...well, it’s kinda problematic and has to be dealt with soon. You’re going to hate it, but it’s the right thing to do, both for your health and for...hers.”

“Hers? Lily’s?” I asked, and the mist creature shook its head.

“Not her. Iris Jade. You need to get her out of here.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have any more stupid surprises for me!” I shouted, throwing my hooves in the air. “Sweet mercy, are you out of your gourd?! I need her like I need a bomb strapped to my backside! She can rot in that office for all I care!”

My cutie-mark tingled a little; a none-too-quiet reminder I was being a prig. That or I’d need her to fulfill some greater act of justice. Probably the latter. Crap.

“Hardy, if Jade stays in the Castle without a leadership position to protect her, I’m pretty sure she’ll be dead inside of six hours,” Telly murmured. “There are more than a few ponies who want to kill her on principle. With those wards in her office, she’s safe enough from somepony trying to throw fireballs at her, but she hasn’t made any friends with her particular leadership style over the last few weeks. Too many of these ponies have lost loved ones and she’s a great target for some blame, either because they feel like she didn’t act fast enough or because they feel like she’s sitting on her tail.“

“In case you missed it, I just deposed her! I’m headed into the Wilds on a lead! You realize she’s the most dangerous thing in this building, right?!”

“And...for that reason, you probably ought to take her along. She doesn’t drive, but she can fight and she can port. Do you really trust the guns you and your partner are going to be carrying out in the Wilds with no P.A.C.T. patrols controlling the wildlife? Even with one of the tanks?”

I gulped as the sad reality began to set in. Gypsy had a point. An irritating, tragic point, but a point I couldn’t really dispute. Much as I detested her, the ex-Chief was still a magical powerhouse.

Still, that left Iris Jade, queen of the Castle, riding shotgun on a dangerous mission with Swift, Lily, Mags, and myself. Of course, all of this assumed she wasn’t sitting up there cutting her own arteries or drunk off her eyes.

“You know this is a bad idea, right?” Lily murmured. “I can tell, you’re considering it, though. If anything all these ponies have said about Iris Jade is true, she’s not above murder.”

“Yes. Yes, I am completely aware,” I replied, adjusting my hat. “It’s also completely typical. Swift has some very specialized weapons, and I have an ace in the hole, but Iris Jade is in another league. A full grown dragon might roll against her, one on one, and I wouldn’t lay my money on the dragon walking away with all its bits.”

“Hardy, she’s going to try to kill you the second she lays eyes on you.”

“Probably.”

“And...that...isn’t deterring you at all, is it?”

“No.”

“I’m suddenly questioning my decision to drive you around.”

“Smart girl,” I replied, then turned back to where Gypsy floated. “Gypsy, can you monitor transmissions leaving the building? Say, from anything that might punch through the jamming?”

Gypsy hesitated, then quickly asked, “I might be able to. In theory. It’d depend on what sort of transmitter is sending it. I might not be able to tell you what’s being said, but I could probably tell you somepony was saying something. What would I be listening for?”

“Anything. If a signal leaves, you tell me. Got it?”

“Will do!”

“Meanwhile, send a message down to Taxi. Tell her to meet me at Jade’s office.”

“What about your griffin and partner?” Gypsy asked.

“Tell them to meet me in the commissary if I’m still alive in forty minutes.”

“And...me?” Lily asked.

“You’re with me. You might buy us time to run away if Jade decides to draw and quarter me. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

No hiding. No slinking along in the dark. No cowering behind statuary.

I marched down the hall, my head held high.

From the moment when the first young colt caught sight of me coming around the corner into the main hallway ringing the Castle there were shouted questions, cheers, laughter, and the first real smiles I’d seen since I’d arrived. I forced myself to mirror their expressions with as much confidence as I could, though I worried it might have just made me look constipated.

Precious might enjoy the spotlight, but I found myself having to struggle with the urge to sprint away from the interested crowd with my tail between my legs. Unfortunately, for what I intended, I needed an audience.

I made sure to keep my gun covered as Lily crowded in close to my body.

Smile. Walk, don’t run. Keep the new badge visible.

At the stairwell, I trotted down with what I hoped looked like extra spring in my step and stopped at the entrance to the throne room half-way down, but in full sight of the herd of ponies filling the vast space. Most of the crowd had given me a respectful distance.

Ponies looked up to see what the commotion was and I waited patiently for a full twenty seconds as the clamor built to a thunderous crescendo. The hundreds of people gathered in the grand hall were stomping their hooves, screaming, and whinnying with a mixture of excitement and alarm. A part of me thought we might be moments from a stampede.

“Gypsy, gonna need some ‘effect’ here,” I whispered out of the corner of my muzzle.

“You got it, boss,” my juju bag replied at a volume only I could hear over the shouting crowd. “Five, four, three…”

Shoving my hat back off of my tousled mane, I thrust one foreleg into the air.

A spine-rattling peal of thunder split the air, shaking the fillings in my head. Even though I’d been expecting it, my ancient, animal instincts almost sent me scrambling for the nearest cover. I heard a couple of foals crying and a mare let out a squeaky shriek of fear, but otherwise it was a very effective means of getting some silence. Their eyes were fearful, but I kept that confident smile in place and most quieted.

“Public address system,” I whispered, under my breath.

“Ready,” came the reply.

I inhaled and raised my chin to address everypony.

“This is Dead Heart!”

The volume was enough to make my ears ring, but I kept going even as the crowd drew subconsciously closer to one another, taking a couple of steps forward as though to better hear what I had to say. Not that it particularly mattered. They probably heard that introduction in Manehattan.

I continued, a little more quietly.

“You all know me or have heard of me! You’ve seen my face on the wanted posters. I have been tracking those responsible for the Darkening! It began, right here in our city!”

Hushed whispers spread across the room. There were some questions called out, but I went on before they could start to process what I’d said.

“I have been tracking those who are responsible! I can’t tell you everything, but I have information that leads me to believe the Princesses and the population of Canterlot itself are still alive! We may even be able to save them!”

That got a response. Ponies began shouting over one another and it took another grumble from the File Cloud to quieten them again. All those frightened eyes were full of a nervous hope, but it was a fragile thing and needed to be carefully managed.

“I am evacuating the Castle! Get the sick, the unconscious unicorns, and the young ready to go! Don’t ask how, because I can’t tell you! The creatures outside have ears everywhere, but they can’t come where we will be going! Your safety is assured if you listen to the Prince of Detrot and my lieutenants, Sweet Shine and Radiophonic Telegraphica!”

Ha! Take that! Want to hand out promotions without asking for permission? How about them apples? I could almost hear Taxi’s teeth grinding from halfway across the building. She would not be pleased.

The gathering was listening now, with rapt attention. That tiny hope was becoming something firmer. I saw grim determination in the expressions of those down front.

“I have a plan which requires me to leave the city, but I will not abandon you and I will not leave you without protection! Not now, not ever! This is my home as much as it is yours! Today, Iris Jade has stepped down and I am the new Chief of Police! I will be taking her with me when I leave and no-one will face her tyranny again! I swear, on my badge, on my gun, and on my talent that I will not stop fighting until the sun shines again!”

A slowly building tremor started to shake the floor under me and I thought for a moment, that Gypsy was doing something to the building superstructure. It spread, and I realized that it was the stomping hooves of hundreds upon hundreds of ponies. I became aware of Lily standing beside me, stomping right along with them as she gazed at me with something akin to rank lust in her face. Eh, maybe that was just my imagination, but she was grinning, and that’s what mattered.

Somepony whistled and I found my smile was now much less forced as I reared back and shouted at the top of my lungs.

“We are going to get our city back!”

As speeches go, it wasn’t a bad one. Short, to the point, and with a lot of heart. I didn’t have time to write it, but Gypsy dropped a bottle of very fine scotch in my lap and that helped considerably.

I strode through the crowd, who backed off just far enough for me to make progress, with Lily Blue at my side. The spotlight might not be someplace I’d like to live, but I think I’d be happy to visit from time to time if it meant so many ponies doing something besides shooting at me.

“Good work, boss,” Gypsy murmured from the radio around my neck.

“Don’t congratulate me,” I replied softly as I marched towards the stairs. “We’re not in the clear. Not until Jade surrenders and walks out of here with me. If she doesn’t, we leave her, but I need her on my side. I have to sell that she’s beaten, to the crowd, and that she still has my respect, to her.”

“You think she’ll go along?”

“I think she wants to see her daughter again.”

“That’s a low thing to hold over somepony…”

“It’s either a little guilt now, or a whole heap of guilt when I have to tell Cerise I let her mother die because I was too scared to take responsibility for this situation.”

Jade’s office—I refused to think of it as mine just yet—was still ahead. Up above, I could still see her shadow behind the glass. On either side, the rows of ponies jumped and leaned side to side, trying to get a glimpse of their would-be savior. Of course, I’d bluffed my way through to this point. The next step was a million times more dangerous.

I marched forward, subtly shaking my trigger free. As we stepped into the hallway, I held up my leg and the crowd all stopped.

“Wait here. This is between Jade and I,” I growled. Everypony besides Lily stopped short at the edge of the carpet, as though there were an invisible line there. There might as well have been. On one side of the line, everyone with a sense of self preservation. On the other, an idiot, and a girl too innocent and trusting to know better.

Spooky quiet had fallen over the crowd as they waited to see what might happen.

I trotted forward, my ears twitching, listening for any signs of movement. My armor felt tight and heavy, but it’d kept her from casually snatching a knot in me before. I only hoped it might achieve a similar trick when she was genuinely mad.

When I was three quarters of the way to the door, it opened slightly. I paused, then kept walking.

“S-should we knock or something?” Lily asked, low enough that I didn’t imagine the crowd could hear her.

I put a hoof on the door and whispered, “Gypsy, is Jade doing anything?”

“I hear somepony moving around in there,” my juju bag replied. “There aren’t any cameras. Might be Jade, but I wasn’t watching up here until a couple minutes ago. It’s hard to split my attention and I'm already trying to watch the exterior.”

“Alright. I’m going in.”

I slipped inside and a pair of hooves yanked me in. Instinctively, I raised my legs to fight, but a scared yellow face confronted me inches away and I dropped my guard.

Taxi.

My driver’s eyes were wide with fright and her braid was undone, flying around her head.

“Hardy! Jade’s unconscious! I think somepony poisoned her! You need her if you’re going to get back to the city!” she gasped.

“Your talent?”

She nodded quickly.

I pushed her to one side and surveyed the room. Bits of Jade’s desk were still embedded in the ceiling and the former Chief herself was slumped against the stained glass wall. Her eyes were closed.

All that remained of her clothing was a few shredded rags spread around the room like confetti. Some part of me thought her cutie-mark might be an axe buried in a skull or something like that. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without her pants-suit in all the time I’d known her.

Strange thing, really.

Her mark was just a hummingbird, buzzing along in mid-flight, looking pleased to be a hummingbird. How could the towering monster who haunted the Castle have something like that for a talent? Not that it mattered.

Her belly drew my attention almost immediately. It was badly distended, like she’d eaten a few dozen gallons of something instead of a single can. A thin, white foam was trailing from the side of her muzzle. Her breathing was shallow and seemed labored, but she was alive.

Lily was suddenly there, her horn glowing brightly as she waved it over Jade’s body.

“Hardy, they only taught me this spell a couple days ago, but I think I’m casting it right,” Lily murmured. “It says she’s got a stomach full of...something. It’s not baked beans, though.”

I noticed an empty can with a spoon sticking out of it lying beside Jade’s leg. I lifted it to look inside; a thin, blue tablet covered in the slimey remains of her meal was at the bottom. Fishing it out, I shook it off. It was a smooth rock that reminded me of the dragon control stones from Supermax, but the runes carved into it were ugly and rough.

“We’ve got a talisman here,” I told my companions, holding it up.

Lily plucked the stone out of my hooves and peered at it. Taxi leaned in against her side and the two of them studied it together.

“I...I think this is a zebra magic,” Lily murmured.

“It is,” Taxi agreed. “Somepony has fouled a simple indigestion charm. It’s filling her stomach with something,” Turning her head, she began rooting through her saddlebags. Her expression slowly morphed into one of panic. “I...I don’t have my ipecac!”

“Wait, I’ve got a spell that might work! I used to use it on the dogs back home when they’d eat frogs from the pond.”

‘Options,’ I thought, ‘One. Let Iris Jade expire. Solves a number of problems, probably creates several others. Your conscience will bug you until the end of time and your cutie-mark will probably feel like you’ve been doused in acid. Might almost be worth it. Two. Save Iris Jade. Potentially die when she recovers. May have to take her into the Wilds with you. Three. Cry softly into Lily’s mane some more. Good option, but essentially no different from option one. Four...Oh! That could work…”

“Taxi, go find a restrictor ring!” I said. “We’re going to need one! Quick!”

“Uh...there’s a box of them over there somewhere!” she replied, quickly casting around on the pile of discarded surplus stuffed against the wall. Trotting over to the pile, she began moving heaps of junk to one side.

“How did she know that?” Lily asked.

“Her talent. It ranges from ‘unusual’ to ‘disturbing’, but it’s always useful,” I replied as my driver pulled out a little black box and held it up, victorious. “Alright! Stick one of those on her horn. Actually, better make it two. Lily, cast your spell. Sweets, be ready to crack her on the horn if she tries to get violent. I’d rather not find out she can break those rings.”

My driver obeyed, then Lily’s horn lit up and she traced a figure eight above the ex-Chief’s prone form. Jade’s stomach let out a worrying gurgle and I took two steps back. It turned out to be a good call.

A sludgy liquid the color of tar blasted out of Iris’s nose and muzzle at a speed to rival a firehose, spattering the wall, the carpet, and my driver’s front legs It stank like freshly poured asphalt mixed with sweaty pits and rotten fruit. The smell set me gagging within seconds, stumbling away as quickly as possible from the source of the unholy wretchedness. Jade’s body was wracked with another round of vomiting, then another, each one expelling more of the vile effluvient.

Finally, I couldn’t keep my gorge down any longer. I galloped to the nearest corner and began emptying my stomach onto the carpet. Nothing for it. It was worse than the dip in the sewers. It was worse than Taxi’s father. It was somewhere on the same spectrum as a ride in the Bull. Not quite there, but somewhere in the postal code.

A moment later I looked up and found my driver and Lily there, unloading right beside me. Lovely. It wasn’t the kind of experience I wanted the share with Lily on her first day on the job. What is it with me and making the rookies suffer?

Wiping my muzzle on the wall, I sat back and tried to only breathe through my mouth. It helped a little, but the stink had a definite flavor that wasn’t much better. Filling my lungs, I moved back to Jade’s side, grabbed her by one rear leg, and hauled her a few meters away from the the black pool that was slowly sinking into the carpet. She was still unconscious and showed no signs of waking.

“Yuck, yuck, yuck,” Lily muttered, wiping her mouth on a towel that’d been lying across one of the supply boxes.

I took the proffered towel when she was done and used it to mop my face off. “Wish I could say that’s the worst thing that’s happened to me today. How is she?”

Lily raised her horn and twitched it across Jade’s stomach a few times. “I think we got all the baked beans out of her stomach. I think those were...making whatever this...smelly stuff is. It’s got some strange anti-magic thing going on. Almost like my magic is sliding right off of it. I don’t think it’s poisonous by itself, but...if you couldn’t get it out, it...ewww...”

“It would pop you up like an overinflated balloon,” Taxi murmured.

“Considering her recent diet included every chemical in the book, I wouldn’t trust ordinary poisons and if she could force her own magic to purge it, she’d probably have done it,” I murmured. “What spell did you use?”

“Um...I don’t think it has a name. I learned it from my grandmare. It stimulates the gag reflex until somepony throws up harder than they have in their whole life,” Lily replied.

“I’d keep that spell handy,” I said. “If we get cornered, somepony suddenly tossing their cookies might make a decent distraction.”

“Somepony got in here, somehow slipped that rock into Jade’s rations, and then got out without being noticed,” Taxi mused, making a quick circuit of the room and inspecting the walls. “How? Teleportation? Invisibility?”

“The room is warded against teleportation,” I added.

“Actually, it’s not,” Gypsy put in from the juju bag. I’d forgotten she might be listening in and it was enough to make me jump.

Taxi blinked at my bag, then shook her head. “Hardy, you’re going to tell me what you saw upstairs, right?”

“Yes, but later. Gypsy, explain that. The Chief had wards against every kind of magical interference in the world. It was enough to keep the Darkening from hitting her and Telly. Why isn’t the room port-warded?”

“When she jumped into the dungeon earlier, she had to drop the wards around her office. She didn't put them back up. I think she was a bit distracted.”

“That’s a little worrying. Eh, I hate to do this, but we need to get her downstairs to the med bay and make sure there’s nothing else wrong with her,” I said. “Sweets, there’s another teleporter in the building who taught the Chief. It’s their talent. I’m pretty sure we’ll need them if what I’ve got in mind is going to work.”

All hail the conquering moron.

Yeah, I didn’t actually think through what it might look like for me to be toting Iris Jade’s unconscious body, hoof-cuffed and with a restriction ring on her horn, through the middle of a building full of ponies.

That is because I am stupid.

I’ll own that. I am a blithering numpty. A simp. A gormless nitwit.

I should not be allowed to own sharp objects and I most definitely should never be allowed in politics.

To be fair, neither Taxi nor Lily thought that far ahead, either. Chalk it up to stress or exhaustion, the end result was the same; I inadvertently marched my dumb tail through the Castle with the Chief sprawled across me like the world’s most dangerous trophy.

My companions and I appeared in the hallway outside Jade’s office to a sea of eyes all wanting to watch the fall of the terror of the Castle. They got their wish. Jade was helpless as a sleeping kitten.

All the implications of what I’d just done hit me a second before the cheering started back up. Mother of skies, it was bad enough when they just thought I’d sent her to bed without dinner. Thumping her, trussing her up, and carrying her around like some griffin’s feted hunt sent them wild.

I shut my eyes and did my best to ignore it. Implications be damned, she needed a doctor.

“Gypsy, find me a route that’ll avoid the rest of the ponies in here,” I snarled.

“Like where? You want to go to the med-bay. That’s currently in the garage. There’s exactly one path there that doesn’t take you outside the walls. Are you saying you didn’t do this on purpose?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying!” I snapped.

“Oh...well, could be worse, then. You want these ponies to follow some diamond dogs into their holes, right? I’m pretty sure that, after that show, they’d follow a hungry dragon into its cave if you told them to.”

My jaw ached for a moment as I forced my teeth to unclench. Yes, the reins of power were a means to an end, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

I think a part of it was that I was still mentally waiting for someone to take a shot at me. Somepony had taken a shot at Jade the second she was vulnerable. That or they’d set up the shot awhile ago and it was just coincidence, but I don’t trust my luck quite that much. That meant somepony in the building had almost successfully assassinated the most magically gifted unicorn in the building.

What chance did one relatively unprotected earth pony have in those circumstances?

Come to it, why would somepony have attacked Iris Jade in the first place if she was already contained? That was, unless…

My mouth went suddenly dry as I started to put the pieces together.

“Taxi, go find whoever in this mad-house can teleport. Take Jade with you and find her a doctor, then meet us in the commissary as quick as you can,” I ordered, shifting my burden onto my driver’s back, “We’ll need the building ready to move as soon as possible, because I’m pretty sure we’re about to be attacked.”

“Attacked?!” Lily gasped, loud enough that I winced. Thankfully nopony seemed to have heard her.

“Keep your voice down!” I hissed. “Lily, you find Precious and tell him he’s in charge if I vanish for any reason. At best, we have an hour and I won’t count on that long!”

Lily gave me a frightened look, but followed as Taxi peeled off into the crowd who made some room for them. I lifted my juju bag as I headed for the elevator down to the garage on one side of the throne room and said, “Gypsy, I need to ditch the company. Options?”

“Do you really think an attack is coming?” she asked.

“Jade’s down. Power has changed hooves. Everything’s disorganized. Now they know we’re about to try a move and they’ve probably planned for that since our food and water is contaminated. When would you attack?”

“Oog...alright, lemme think, lemme think... Telly can organize getting fighters in place. Get all the remaining officers together and make a quick statement to everypony there. Try not to panic them, but give them something to do! The department needs a hierarchy in case you don't come back and it might help us track down the spy! Start with the non-duty officers with a rank higher than Detective. Use dee-twelve.”

Talk to the department. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Save everypony from violent death.

“Give me some volume. I need the whole building to hear me,” I murmured, stopping at the top of the stairs leading down into the throne room, then carefully setting Iris Jade down at my hooves. Thankfully she didn’t weigh much.

Breathe. Panic later. You can do this.

“This is Hard Boiled!” I shouted and the P.A. system picked up every word. It was heady stuff, having all those ponies focused on on me. “All civilians will be leaving the Castle within the hour for a haven! There will be food, water, and security! I want to see every sergeant and lieutenant still in the Castle in five minutes time in the conference room dee-twelve for a briefing! You ponies get your flanks in gear and maybe we’ll save a few lives! All other officers, listen to Telly. I want to move out in one hour!”

As I stepped into the elevator just off the throne room, leaving behind the stunned crowd, I wondered if I’d just humiliated myself.

What if I reached conference room D12 and nopony was there?

I mean, what business did a bunch of cops have taking orders from a criminal who’d waltzed into the Castle, apparently cold-cocked the previous Chief, and started making demands?

By that same token, it did look like I’d managed to somehow put down Iris Jade. That engendered a certain amount of ‘sit-up-and-take-notice’ in anypony with an ounce of survival instinct. Any cop who’d survived the Darkening surely had a fair bit of that.

I pressed the button on the elevator that’d take me to the conference floor and leaned against the wall, finally able to get a breath.

“Gypsy?”

My juju bag was silent for long enough that I was worried I’d lost her somehow, then Gypsy’s slightly harried voice came down the line.

“Yes? What?! Oh, Hardy. Right. Sorry. I’m helping Telly coordinate the evacuation plans. I swear, I just wanted to annoy the city government! I never intended to become the city government! This is like juggling chainsaws and kittens!”

“You’re organizing all of this on the fly?”

“Huh? Oh, no, no! There are plans dating back to the Crusades for every situation you can imagine. There’s even one for evacuating via subterranean tunnels! The civilians are an extra wrinkle, but we’re making it work. An hour isn’t much time, but a bunch of officers and fire-ponies are helping get everypony together to move. We’ve been ready to evacuate since the food and water went bad. We were holding out hope somepony would come from outside...”

“Holding out hope that the guard might still be out there somewhere,” I murmured as the elevator came to a halt.

“Exactly. Right now, we’re mostly focused on shifting bodies and getting fighters on the walls. The duty officers aren’t going to be at this meeting, but most everypony else should be. Where should we have the civilians gathered?”

“Best place is probably the garage. If this works, that’s where the diamond dogs are going to come through. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to make a fighting retreat."

Gypsy paused for a second, then asked, “You think this is going to be a complete disaster, don’t you?”

“Has anything else gone to plan today?”

“Fair point.”

The doors opened and I braced myself. Ponies were rushing to and fro in the hall, carrying bags, hauling ammo containers, and generally getting in one another’s way as they scrambled to get things in order. Pulling my hat low, I did my best not to draw eyes, but there wasn’t much for it; fame and I are going to be enemies until the end of my days.

By moving with purpose and scowling like I was headed to my own execution I managed to deflect anything besides some staring, and Telly’s commands came over the P.A., getting everypony moving again.

Thankfully, the conference room was down one hall and just around a corner. Even more ponies were in that hall, but a single officer was standing outside of D12, holding the door with his hip. He was a younger officer wearing the remains of a sergeant’s dress uniform that looked like it’d been slept in. He wore a bandage across his forehead, but when he saw me, his eyes brightened. My memory isn’t so good, but I seemed to remember his name was ‘Seed’ something-or-other.

“Down here, Sir!” he called, nodding his head toward the door. “I think this is everypony who can come!”

‘Sir?’ I thought, then shook it off. Necessary evils and all that.

I trotted to the door, giving Seed a quick glance, then peering into the conference room.

I found myself facing almost thirty of my fellow cops. Few were in uniform or anything resembling it, but I recognized most of the faces. There was Dog Whistle, a sleepy eyed earth pony who’d busted up a gang of car thieves by convincing them he was a Los Pegasus mover-and-shaker looking for rare vehicles. Sand Bag—a quivering ball of nerves and feathers who’d out-flown a griffin while carrying a wounded officer to safety—was hovering near the front of the room. Across from me I picked out Sang Froid and his partner, Watchword; who’d have thought a stuffy unicorn and a temperamental yak would make good partners?

Silence fell over the room as everyone looked up with an expectant gaze.

Even having mentally rehearsed what I was about to do in the last few minutes, I wasn’t sure if it would work. It wasn’t as though the world might be riding on all of those cops accepting my leadership on the shortest possible notice, right? I’d taken a couple of officer training courses back when I still gave a damn about things like ‘advancement’ and ‘career’, but that was ever so long ago.

At a measured pace and without hurrying, I walked into the room and took off my hat, then reached into my pocket for the badge Telly had crafted for me. Staring at the pristine shield for a moment, I chucked it onto the table between the shoulders of a lieutenant hugging what I suspected was a loaded shotgun and a sergeant whose eyes were vacant and fearful. Everypony leaned forward to get a look, while I tried to gauge their reactions. Most looked confused, while one or two seemed angry.

Turning to Seed, I nodded and he stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.

I cleared my throat and said, “I’ll assume, for the moment, you all know who I am?”

Sang Froid took a step forward and swept a hoof through his perfectly combed mane. His lips peeled back in a cheerless smile. “Hard Boiled, if there’s a pony in this building who isn’t aware of you by now, they’re deaf, blind, and dumb. I don’t know how you eliminated Iris Jade, but we’ve heard everything from you turning traitor and killing the Princesses to you being on some secret mission for them. You want to tell us why I shouldn’t hold your ass down and cast a few mind control spells just to find out? It’s not like anyone in here would stop me.”

“Feel free to try. You want to waste time and lives, it’s on you,” I said, marching forward until I was right in front of the scowling stallion, pressing my nose against his. Slowly, his gaze dropped from mine and, as it did, I turned back to the assembled officers.

“Ask yourselves this. If Hard Boiled is a traitor, why would he come back here? Why this song and dance with the Chief? Why not just kill her, then wait on the lot of you to starve? For that matter...why not just kill all of you? If he could kill Jade, then slaughtering a bunch of helpless cops should be small potatoes. He could leave your cooling corpses down here and then go upstairs and start butchering those civies...and none of you could stop him.”

I let that sink in for them. One or two clutched their weapons a little more tightly, or shifting their weight so as to get at their triggers. A few murmurs went around the room as they studied me, then whispered to each other.

Sang Froid, who’d apparently been elected the unofficial speaker for the group, sat himself down at the conference table and tapped the surface. Everything quieted and he lifted his chin to speak. “Fine. Say we believe you’re here to help. Somehow, you’re still alive even with all the crap coming out of Uptown about how you’re responsible for this mess, and somehow, you’ve incapacitated Iris Jade. Why worry about us? Why not save your own tail?”

I swung my hip around and flipped my coat off of it, revealing the golden scales on my flank. “You see this? If I left you swinging in the wind, I’d get to live the rest of my very short life in searing agony because my butt-stamp doesn’t like it when I let innocents die.” I let my coat fall back in place. “Now, we are very short of time. I am the only one in this room who knows what is going on in this city, and you can either listen or leave while the adults handle the situation.”

Sang Froid looked around at his fellow cops, then sank back into his chair.

“I suppose it beats starving to death or being eaten by crazed magical monsters,” he replied. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

I can only liken what came next to editing an especially raunchy Germane porno for public television. There was just too much that’d gone on over the last month that wasn’t suitable for anypony of a sober mind. Still, in the fifteen minutes I had, I broke down as much of what I knew for them as I could.

“So, you’re saying these ponies are trying to power up a wish machine that’s running off all the misery in the city?” asked one of the older officers whose name I remembered as Sergeant Snow Dime.

“That’s what we know so far,” I replied, pacing back and forth in front of the room. “These people plan long term and I do mean long. We’ve got some evidence to suggest they directly were involved in the construction of the Shield and their machinations might go back even farther.”

Watchword, the yak, let out a loud snort and adjusted his comically small police cap.

Sang Froid tilted his head in his partner’s direction and said, “My partner's right. If you were not standing there with that socket in your chest and Chief Jade’s unconscious body wherever you stashed her, I don’t think we’d believe this story. I’m still not sure I do, but it fits the facts. The sun is gone. No-one will dispute that. Where does that leave us? We’re just cops.”

I grabbed the badge off the table and whipped the chain around my neck. “I’m just a cop. I didn’t wake up this morning trying to be some kind of superhero. This Dead Heart garbage was not my idea, but if it can save lives, I’ll use it. Right now, I need to rely on you lot to organize everything. We’ll be leaving soon, but I expect an attack before then.”

That got everypony’s attention.

“An attack?!” Watchword grunted, drawing every eye in the room. For the stolid yak, that constituted a speech.

I nodded. “I’m reasonably certain there’s at least one spy in the building. We’re going to try to evacuate all the non-combatants from the Castle in four hour's time. If there were ever a time for somepony to hit us, it’s now.”

Sang Froid shoved himself back from the table. “Are you serious?!”

“Damn right, I am. Telly has plans for the defense of this place and she’s already getting the fighters in position. We’re going to let them have the walls, then back up into the keep itself, bar the doors, and...well, I’ll keep the last bit to myself for now.”

“Then why in Tartarus are we sitting here?!” a baby-faced lieutenant by the name of Lemon Cooler demanded.

“Because this is more important!” I snapped. “The duty officers are organizing the evacuation. Once this is over, I’m leaving again and I’ll be taking Iris Jade with me. You lot are going to be the closest thing this department has to leadership while I’m out there.”

“That’s crazy. I mean, you can’t leave us like this! We’ve got hundreds of civilians here and you’re the only pony who knows what’s going on!” squeaked a tiny mare with a pair of revolvers strapped to her sides.

“If I’m dead, it’ll be down to you to make sure the police department survives,” I said, shaking my head. “If I don’t leave, these civilians will die anyway when the cold comes. Unless Princess Celestia is back in control of the sun, we all die. I can make sure you’re safe, for now. Telly and the Prince of Detrot are in charge if I’m not here, because they can manage the herd upstairs, but when it comes to matters of safety then Sang Froid, you’re head of the class. If anypony has a better idea, the floor is open.”

The floor was closed shortly thereafter with nopony having presented anything for consideration.

I cleared the conference room, sending the officers off to accomplish whatever tasks Telly might have set for them. I checked the clock on the wall. I was supposed to meet Mags and Swift in the commissary in five minutes.

Plucking my juju bag from around my neck, I held it in my hooves alongside my shiny, new badge. It represented a weight of lives. How many lives? Who knows? I suppose it doesn’t matter. They were lives I was expected to protect.

“Telly? Where’s that secret door again?” I asked, aloud.

“She’s busy,” Gypsy replied. “For that matter, so am I. About two minutes ago, I caught an outgoing transmission. Real stealthy. I wouldn’t have noticed it on any other day of the week.”

“Source?” I asked.

“Right there in the room with you.”

“Damn. That’s what I was afraid off. Well, at least that narrows it down a little. Still, if I was going to pick a spy, I’d want somepony with some authority. I wonder if they bought that crap about 'evacuating in four hours'. You happen to figure out what they sent?”

“I couldn’t pin it down, but the bandwidth wasn’t wide enough to transmit actual voice or images. I’d say it was probably a pre-programmed signal of some sort. A panic button. We’ve got movement outside the Castle, too.”

I stiffened and quickly trotted to the door. “What sort of movement?”

Gypsy was silent long enough that I started to worry.

“Lots of. It’s coming from all directions. I’m detecting weapons signatures congruent with P.A.C.T. heavy weaponry. The Castle itself will survive everything up to sustained dragonfire, but nopony has ever tested lightning cannons against it. I’d say you’ve got maybe a half hour before they’re in position. Then...well, however long it takes them to decide to attack us.”

“That would seem to indicate they either didn't buy that ruse or don't care. So we know our spy was one of the officers in here. Can you try to narrow it any further?”

“I’ll give it a go. I’m passing out orders that’ll move them to strategically insignificant places or areas that are well guarded.”

“Whoever disobeys is our spy. Good call. Alright, where’s that secret door?”

“Third panel from the left near the front of the room. Press in the upper right corner, then shove the whole thing open. The last door on your left is the commissary. You’ll have to lean on it pretty hard. There’s a table in front of it.”

I tapped the indicated panel and found it loose, then shoved with my shoulder until the wall slid back, revealing a dusty, darkened passage. Fitting a hoof-light over my foreleg, I flicked it on and started the short journey.

I wish I’d had Taxi teach me about those secret entrances and exits years ago. It made traversing the Castle much, much quicker. Granted, they’d probably have found my drunken corpse stuck in a wall somewhere, having gotten lost in the darkness, but it might have been worth it to avoid Iris Jade.

Speaking of that particular gremlin in my back seat, a merciful pony might have put a bullet in her head and left her in a closet, but that was more than either of us deserved. Even dead, she’d be making my life difficult. Not that murdering her was ever really an option. Fantasy is free, but reality is expensive.

I tried not to sneeze as I wedged my forehead against the last panel in the passage and braced one back leg against the wall. I shoved as hard as I could and felt something give on the other side, followed by a screech of metal across linoleum. Inhaling, I stuck my muzzle into the crack. I could just see the rows of chairs and tables stacked against the walls. Most of the empty space was packed with sleeping bags. Nopony seemed to be in there, but considering we were evacuating, that made sense.

Tilting my head, I tried to get a better look at what was holding the door shut. Something cold pressed against the end of my nose that smelled distinctly of gunpowder and oil.

“Back up. Nice and easy,” a soft, feminine voice murmured, from just out of my field of view.

“Kid, it’s me! Get the stupid table out of the way!”

“Sir? Oh! I’m sorry! Telly didn’t say you’d be coming through the wall.”

There was a pause, then some grunting and more screeching as the table was wrenched out of the way. I nudged the panel open, only to be caught in the face by a flying, fuzzy belly.

“Egg pony! I be thinking you dead again when lightning hit big room! Stop doing that!” Mags crowed, clutching at my ears with her sharp little talons. Trotting into the commissary, I snapped my head up, slinging her onto my back so I could breathe again.

“I said ‘hide’, Mags. Not ‘get caught and eat cookies’,” I grunted, pulling my hat up so I could see. Turning my neck, I lifted her off of my back with a mouthful of her scruff and set her on her paws. She looked a little bashful, kicking a claw at the floor. Somepony had confiscated her gun, but left her holster.

“I try! But...there was this nice mare and she was fast with her horn...” she mumbled.

“Never mind that. Mags, where is your gun?” I asked.

“I’ve got it here, Sir,” Swift replied, patting her chest pouch. “I also stocked up on ammo for everything and got it stowed inside the working A.M.V. Taxi got a group together to haul the one we took apart. What’s going on out there? I heard some ponies talking about you...you knocking out the Chief?”

“Somepony poisoned her, and no, it wasn’t me. Right now, I’m riding a wave of confusion to get things done. Where’s Taxi? I told her to meet us here.”

There was a quick double knock on the door of the commissar, then my driver nosed her way in with Lily and a young unicorn mare who I didn’t recognize in tow. She was a slight thing, with a straw colored mane and patchy, orange fur. Her grass green eyes were hollow and sunken, with a slight yellow tinge around the edges that suggested recent Ace addiction. A slight tremble was running up her back and down to her knees that could have been fear, but was more likely withdrawal symptoms. I glanced at her horn, which was capped with a restrictor ring.

“Jade is being cared for in one of the back offices by Precious and one of the nurses. Nopony knows where she is besides the three of us, so I figure she’s safe enough,” Taxi said, setting herself down on one of the sleeping bags. “Is there a reason I saw half the officers in the building scattering in all directions? You know something I don’t?”

“We’ve got an emergency situation, yeah. Is this the teleporter?” I asked, nodding at the unicorn whose eyes had gotten very, very big. “Did you not tell her she’d be working with me?”

Taxi shrugged and dragged the shaking mare forward by one leg. “Hay Frost here was injecting herself with something I think was made out of drain cleaner and kerosene in one of the stairwells. I don't know how Jade got her to teach her to teleport.

I approached her slowly, like one might approach a frightened animal. She cowered lower to the floor. Lily closed the door and stood in front of it, cutting off the young mare’s only route of escape.

“What’s with the ring?” I asked, nodding at her horn.

Lily sighed and moved up to stand beside Hay Frost, giving the girl a pitying look. “She tried to teleport herself through a wall when we approached. She moved about a meter to the left. Hardy, I’ve cast every anti-intoxication spell in my medical hoof-book on her and I think she’s still stoned...”

Hay Frost lowered her ears and mumbled something I didn’t quite catch.

Easing down to her level, I reached out and gently put a hoof on the girl’s chin, lifting it to inspect her a little more closely. She didn’t smell very good, but there was still some fat on her. If she’d been living on the streets, it hadn’t been for long.

“You know who I am?” I asked her, softly.

She hesitated, then the quivering in her shoulders stilled.

“Yer...yer D-dead Heart...” she muttered. “Mmm...mmmnot...m’not high…”

I leaned a bit closer and watched as a tear gathered in her eye and began trickling down her filthy cheek. “Miss Frost...did my friends tell you what I need?”

It took a minute, but she finally shook her head.

“She be burnt brain pony,” Mags commented, spreading out one of her tiny wings and casually preening them.

“Hardy, she’s right. We don’t have time for—” Taxi started to say, but I held up my hoof to silence her.

“I’m making the time, Sweets,” I said, then turned back to the mare. “Swift, get down to the garage and wait for me there. Mags, you watch her back. Lily, go with her and get Iris Jade secured in the A.M.V. these two didn’t take apart. We’ll be joining you in five minutes time.”

Lily’s bit her lip. “But...but aren’t we about to be—”

“Yes, and if this doesn’t work, we’re going to need to roll out, quick. Now move!”

My driver looked like there was about to be a fight, but Swift gently put a hoof around her shoulders. Mags sniffed and leaped onto Lily’s shoulders, startling her momentarily.

“Egg Pony is smart pony. Crazy sometimes, but he smart,” my ward said, then lifted her head, clacking her beak for attention. “Hey! Egg Pony! When you done with brain burnt pony, you going to tell me what going on?”

“I’ll consider it,” I replied, resting a hoof over top of Hay Frost’s. I could feel her pulse right through the thin flesh on her knee and it was racing. She stared at my leg like it was attached to an alien. “Now, go.”

Reluctantly, my friends began to file out of the room, leaving me alone with the shivering filly. I was painfully aware of how short my time-frame was and a more pragmatic pony might have left the junkie in a closet for the Biters. I am not that pony.

Easing a bit closer, I looked at her closely.
“Miss Hay Frost? Do you know where you are?” I asked, softly.

“M’not dumb. M’in the Castle,” she mumbled, flicking her eyes at me. Her horn flickered and spit out a couple of sparks. “W-why can’t I port? Wanna port. Wanna go away…”

“You’re here because it’s the only safe place for you, but very soon, it won’t be. You know who I am. Do you trust me?”

Her ears rose a little and, for the first time, she met my gaze. There was a flash of real intelligence behind those empty eyes. “Y-yes. You’re Dead Heart. You save...you saved everypony. You b-brought back the s-sun...”

“I am going to bring back the sun,” I said, quietly.

“The sun is still gone?” she asked, a little plaintively.

“It is. But you can help me bring it back. You, Miss Hay Frost, can help save the world...and all I need you to do is what you do best. I won’t threaten you, and if you don’t want to...you can leave right now.” Lifting a hoof, I reached out. She flinched as I gently pressed the release on the restrictor ring. It dropped off her horn and landed between her forelegs. She stared at it, uncomprehendingly, then she backed a couple of steps from me.

“You’ll lemme go?” she squeaked.

“Yes. If you leave, I’ll find somepony else to help me and nopony will make you do anything. Nopony will know you chose to go. I’ll make sure you get out safely with the rest of the civilians..”
Without another word, Hay Frost’s horn lit up and she vanished in a burst of light, leaving nothing but the scent of ozone and unwashed pony in her wake.

“Huh. Well, I guess it was too much to hope that’d work,” Gypsy’s said from my juju bag. “Now what?”

“Wait for it...” I replied, cooly, shrugging out of my coat and unbuckling my anti-magic armor. Folding it up, squirmed out up the vest, then tugged my coat back on. “Could you have somepony come get my armor? I doubt Miss Frost can teleport both of us with me wearing it. How are things outside?”

“I'll send somepony right up. Things aren't good out there. All movement stopped about two minutes ago.”

“Damn. They’ve got our defenses sussed. Quick as you can, pull the defenders off the walls. Get them inside the keep and get a few unicorns to throw some shields on as many doors as they can. Is Telly up there with you?”

“Yep. She’s holding about twelve pairs of headphones and her horn is smoking like a bonfire, but she’ll live. We’re still moving ponies into the garage.”

“Have her ready to pull out if things get bad. Any sign of our spy?”

“None yet.”

“Keep your ears open.”

“Roger that, boss.”

I sat, watching the clock for about two minutes, counting my remaining seconds before the attack was likely to come. I moved back a step or two and ran a hoof around the brim of my hat.

‘Right about...now.’

Hay Frost burst into being where I’d been standing a moment before, her eyes leaking streams of tears as she stared at me with a porcelain hope in her expression. I smiled and offered her my forelegs. With a ragged sob, she threw herself at me, hard enough that if I hadn’t been an earth pony, she might have done some real damage.

Holding her to my breast, I patted her stringy mane as what I’m sure was at least a month or two’s worth of other ponies’ contempt was wept out onto my shoulder. Sure, it was a risk. Sure, there might have been better uses of my time, but my talent knows its business.

“I’m s-sorry, I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry!” she cried, again and again. I’d no idea who she was begging forgiveness from, but it didn’t really matter. In the end, Justice demanded that one pony in the whole world not judge her for what she’d become. The attack would be starting soon, but there were plenty of ponies with bigger guns, more powerful magic, and fewer lives riding on them who could handle it.

Gradually, Hay Frost quieted until her cries were hardly more than a soft whimpering from time to time. Wiping her nose on the back of her foreleg, she leaned back so she could see my face.

Her voice was choked and weak, but that nervous hope was still there.

“Y-you need to b-bring back the sun, Dead Heart? I can g-go places. Wh-where do you wanna be?”

Act 3 Chapter 30 : The Siege

Plenty of freshly minted scholars have made curious mention of the fact that, in a society which is roughly a third magic users, most everypony still chooses to walk, run, drive, or fly to their destinations. Teleportation magic is an almost unheard of talent, reserved for the most focused, most academic, or most powerful unicorns. Why then is such a seemingly useful magical discipline so under-utilized by the public at large?

The answer is two fold and rooted in precisely what teleportation entails.

Moving directly between two points in space without passing through the intervening distance is not - contrary to popular belief - one single, unified variety of spell work. There are actually multiple forms of teleportation, some more reliable and well understood than others.

Quantum Tunneling - whereby a unicorn rips themselves or their target into their composite atoms and tosses them through tiny worm-holes then reassembles them on the other side - is one of the easier methods, but also has one of the most spectacular failure states. A failed tunneling event rarely leaves even a red mist to vacuum up and bury.

Displacement Cloning is another option, but an unpopular one, since it entails the unicorn scanning a pony, then copying them at another location at the subatomic level while the original is destroyed. As you can imagine, dying to get to work is not how most ponies prefer to move about and this method has been illegal for use on any living being since its discovery.

The last, and most common, is Energy Stream Transmission. A unicorn converts matter directly into energy, then pushes a particle stream between two points which passes between all the intervening molecules, rather than intersecting them, and returns them to their base state at the other end. This has the unfortunate side effect of needing some fairly precise knowledge of where you’re pushing to, and also has a range limited both by the imagination of the user and the power they can draw on. Accidents tend to involve a pony’s body coming out of the teleport inside of something else, hence most teleporters have layer upon layer of arcane safety measure to force the spell to fail if the destination is unsafe.

Public use of teleportation is forbidden in many cities, if for no other reason than that it’s quite rude to appear out of nowhere in front of someone. This is not helped by the long, storied histories of those who ‘got it wrong’. That has buoyed attempts by legislators to ban the practice entirely (though to date, with very limited success).

One fact may have contributed more than any other to the rarity of teleportation in modern Equestrian society; most young unicorns are taught in school that the ancient Unicornian word for ‘botched teleport’ translates directly to ‘jam’.

-The Scholar

Teleporting with Princess Twilight was an experience, but not a terribly unpleasant one. Teleporting with a junkie - even one whose talent was teleportation and who was trying very, very hard not to discorporate me into a wet stain on a wall - was nothing short of terrifying. I’m glad my stomach was already empty before liftoff.

I’d thought I was dead for about the first five seconds we were in that ‘between’ space. It certainly felt like being dead, but without the pleasant bits. When sensation returned, my flesh was an indistinct creature sending signals from all different directions to my brain. One of my eyes felt like it was somewhere near one of my left hindlegs, and an ear was definitely on my stomach.

The wrenching feeling of being in a car accident from several directions at once followed a short drop out of midair. I landed on my back and skidded down a small incline to a stop against a concrete wall, barely having time to inhale before impact. A half second later, Hay Frost appeared in the same spot I had, about a meter up. She yelped and managed to get herself turned around in time to land mostly on her hooves, only stumbling a couple of steps.

A burning smell filled my nose, and I quickly lashed my tail until it stopped smoldering, then pulled myself up, straightened my coat, and pushed my hat back in place.

We’d appeared in the parking structure where Taxi’d stashed the cab. The car was a short distance away. In the stark white lights, it looked even worse than I remembered. I silently saluted our fallen comrade, then turned to the wall beside it. Most ponies would have dismissed the circle of raw dirt as some sort of discoloration on the concrete unless they knew what to look for.

“M’sorry about the r-rough landing,” Hay Frost muttered, rubbing one foreleg with the other. “I figgured you wanna get here wi-without bein’ in the ground.”

Drawing in a deep breath, I smiled at her in as genuine a way as one could with their mane smoking. “It’s fine. You did great, Miss Frost. You can port back if you want to, or you can stay here. It’s up to you.”

She glanced around the garage, then shook her head.

“Not leavin’,” she said. “M’nothing special, no how, but yer Dead Heart. Y-you bring back the sun…”

“In that case, wait there. I’m going to call some friends of mine. Diamond Dogs. I promise you they’re safe.”

‘Please be listening. Please be listening,’ I thought, trotting over to the wall of freshly dug dirt. ‘I’m gonna look real stupid if I went through all of this and they’ve buggered off for coffee.’

Reaching up, I tapped the wall and leaned close. “Commander Max! If you’re there, it’s time!”

“Ah! Is time?! Good!” came a bellowed reply.

I barely had time to back out of the way before the wall collapsed inward, sending a plume of dust into the garage. Hay Frost let out a terrified squeal and disappeared, reappearing twenty meters off with her tail tucked tightly between her rear legs. At least she hadn’t popped back inside the Castle.

As the dust cleared, I could see Max and a dozen heavily armed and armored Underdogs standing behind him. His belts of ammunition jangled jarringly against one another as he stepped out of the hole, followed closely by Bella, who gave me a fierce smile. I hoped it was a smile. It might have been mistaken for an offer to eat me alive, considering all those teeth.

I turned and called, “Frost! It’s okay! They’re my friends!”

“M...m’gonna s-stay here, th-thanks,” she stammered.

Max sniffed at the air, then jabbed a thumb at Frost. “This way you get past all the bitey things moving ground-level? She Aced like deck of cards!”

I put a hoof on Max’s chest and gave him a hard glare.

“I am aware,” I growled. “She got me here. You’ll show her some respect, Commander.”

Despite the absurd differences in our sizes, Max shrank a little, wrapping his tail against one of his ankles. I heard a soft pop of magic, then felt her step in close to my flank, peering cautiously around my side at the huge diamond dog. They studied each other for a second, and then Max slowly nodded.

“Max hears,” he mumbled.

“Good. Dogenes gave you your marching orders, but we need to make a change considering the situation. You have any tunnels that run under the Castle’s main garage?” I asked, dropping my hoof and turning to touch Frost’s shoulder, comfortingly. She was giving me a worryingly worshipful look.

He squinted at me, then nodded, one of his cock-eyed ears flopping against the side of his head. “Aye, there be one. It closed, but take us ten minutes to open. Where we come up? You make deal with she-bitch-demon?”

I dug out my brand new badge and held it up. Max studied it, and then his eyes almost bugged out of his skull. It occurred to me I didn’t know whether or not Max could read, but that fear turned out to be baseless.

“You new she-bitch-demon?!” he exclaimed, and there was some muttering from the dogs behind him. With a snap of his jaws, he silenced them. Hay Frost let out a raspy chuckle, but quickly covered it with a little cough as she pressed a bit more firmly against my side.

“S-sorry. That were funny…” she whispered.

I rubbed a hoof in a small circle on my temple and sat heavily. “Alright, Max, get your dogs digging out that tunnel. We’ve got to move all the noncombatants out of the Castle. While you’re at it, can you haul that cab back underground?”

“We...not ready for that many ponies permanent like,” he murmured, picking at one of his yellowed teeth with the end of one claw. “Got room for maybe a few tens of tens for a bit...”

“I don’t need you to take all of them. You have paths near the old ice cream factory and into the section of the city called ‘The Heights’?”

“Aye, we knows them. Farther than we usually goes, but there old dog tunnels. Might take a day to dig out.” He paused, then gave me a thoughtful look. “What out there?”

“Friends of mine who’ll give them shelter. Head to the ice cream factory first and tell a pony named Slip Stitch-”

“We knows of the mad cutter,” Max interjected. “He good, even if he brain full of bugs.”

“That simplifies things,” I replied, then added, “Tell Slip Stitch to use his machine to start fixing as many of the Castle’s unicorns as he can, then take him to the Heights. When you get there, you’ll probably catch some flak, but tell them I sent you and that you’re there to cure ‘Granny Glow’. They’ll know what you mean.”

Max cocked an ear in Bella’s direction. “You gets all that, Bella?” he asked.

The scarred female wagged her tail and slapped a fist across her breast. “Aye! Take ponies to mad cutter’s, take ponies to Heights, tell them Granny Glow to be cured!” Turning back down the tunnel, she darted away into darkness.

“Where’s she off to?” I asked.

Max started to reply, but then his ears perked and he stopped. As one, all of the dogs looked up at the ceiling.

“Wh-what’re they doing?” Hay Frost asked.

I started to ask Max just that, but he held up one digit, then sniffed at the air.

“The biting monsters be...moving,” Max murmured, licking his chops. “They go to attack. Have cannons what shoot sky-fire. We must go.”

“You can hear all that?” I asked.

“Aye. They coming in hot.” Swinging about, he made a gesture at the pack standing in the tunnel. “Underdogs!” he bellowed. “Open the way to the Castle! Dig! Fight! Guard! Bring back the sun!”

The rest of his pack made that curious salute of theirs, let out an ear-piercing howl, then leaped into the walls as easily as a pony might jump into a puddle of water. Max turned back to Hay Frost and I. “You want come with us?”

I slipped a foreleg around the girl’s neck and pulled her snugly against my side. “I’ve got a ride, thanks. Try to burrow into the northeast corner of the garage. I’ll make sure everypony is away from there and expecting you.”

“We get cab, then. Go. You soldiers need you!”

With that, he dropped onto all fours and burrowed straight down, leaving only a pile of lightly disturbed dirt.

I released Hay Frost and sat down, peeling off my hat so I could wipe sweat from the inner lining before plopping it back on.

“Well, that’s done,” I said, trying to mentally prepare myself for what was to come. “Miss Frost, you know that nice little bar on Majesty Street?”

She looked a bit confused. “M’not sure. Ye mean R-Rascal’s place? Has the stupid garden gnome behind the b-bar?”

“Yes. It’s a lovely place for a drink. I don’t suppose you could teleport us over there, away from this sci-fi horror double feature we’re about to have to go deal with? I’ll buy the first round.”

Hay Frost’s nose wrinkled, then she grinned, and put her forehead against my shoulder. “M’sorry, Mister Dead Heart. Can’t go that far. Mebbe ya better get a ‘porter what don’t like needles so much.”

“I think I’ll keep the one I have, thank you. You want to wait here? Max will be back for the hack, and he can take you with the rest of the civilians.”

Hay Frost didn’t even hesitate this time. “M’comin’ with you. We hafta go inside the garage, though. Th-the wards on the walls only lemme port around inside or leave.”

“That’s fine with me, Miss Frost. Just get us inside.”

She shut her eyes and began to concentrate in preparation for the jump. I followed suit, hoping it might minimize the agony if I knew it was coming.

It didn’t.

I came out of subspace - or whatever hideous half-existence there is when all of your atoms are deciding which order they want to be in - with a loud pop. I landed heavily on all fours, almost taking a knee. Whatever rust was on Hay Frost’s skills seemed to have come loose during the first trip, because I was barely six inches off the ground this time and the right way round. I still reeked of burnt fur, but I could chalk that up to turbulence.

Frost herself appeared out of the aether a couple of steps below me and yelped as she tried to catch her balance on the uneven footing. Before she could plummet to the bottom of the stairwell, I grabbed a mouthful of her tail. I instantly regretted it.

‘First order of business when we get everypony evacuated: brush my teeth. Second order of business: get Hay Frost a bath. Use force if necessary,’ I thought.

Once she had her hooves under her, I tried to get my bearings . I could hear shouts, screams, and the loud thump of explosions from somewhere above, but the strange acoustics made it difficult to gauge exactly how far away they might be. Still, that probably meant we were in one of the stairwells off the throne room which led to the garage.

“Miss Frost? I could use somepony to run a message downstairs. You remember the grumpy yellow mare with the two toned hair?” I asked.

She bobbed her head. “M’memories not that b-bad. She’s sc-scary, though.”

“Yes, she is, but I need you to find her. Tell her that the diamond dogs will be coming up through the floor in-”

“The northeast corner,” she murmured. “I heard. Y-you going to bring b-back the sun?”

“That’s right. Go on. I’ll make sure everypony gets out safely. I need to see what’s going on upstairs.”

Reaching out, she put a foreleg around my neck, and I let her pull herself against my chest.

“Y-yer the first pony in forever what didn’t w-want me to vanish, Mister Dead Heart,” she whispered. “Mama w-wanted me to disappear, so I did. That’s how I got my cutie-mark.” Lifting her head, she stared into my face with her Ace-poisoned eyes. “This city - even stupid, bad little fillies what like needles - needs you. Don’t d-die. I wanna see the s-sun again...”

She eased back a couple of steps. I opened my mouth to say something (I’ve not a clue what), but before I could, her horn flared and she blinked away. I stood there for a moment, staring at the burn mark she’d left on the concrete.

‘Move, Hard Boiled. Move, or she dies. There are thousands of innocents out there in the city you can’t save, but there are a few hundred in here that you can. You don’t have time to be overwhelmed. You’re on the clock.’

Turning to the stairs, I launched into a headlong gallop towards the throne room, my coat billowing out behind me.

“Gypsy, I’m back in the building! What’s going on up there?” I shouted into my radio.

It took her a second to answer, but when she did, she sounded out of breath.

“We’ve got incoming on all sides!” she hastily replied. “I managed to get most of the ponies off the walls before they hit us, but we lost a few!”

“What’s attacking us?!”

“I don’t know! They’ve been hitting my video feeds before they move in! They’re fast and they’re armed with P.A.C.T. issue weaponry! We’ve taken at least twelve lightning cannon blasts, but the doors are still up! Every hit is burning out another unicorn, though! We’re runnin’ out of horns up here!”

“I’ll be there in a minute!”

I reached the top of the stairs and slammed open the door, rushing out into a scene straight from a war movie. I was close to the stairs up to the Chief’s office and chose to hang back near one of the pillars, hoping not to be noticed until I could survey what exactly had happened in my absence.

The scents of smoke, fear, and frightened piss filled the room and a low, grey haze hung just below the File Cloud. Dozens of heavily armed ponies had taken up positions on the balconies above the throne room; shotguns, pistols, a few light machine guns, and even some more specialized weapons were leveled at the double doors, and a platoon of unicorns stood in loose formation in front of Telly’s console, their horns blazing with arcane power as they projected a dazzling field of spellwork across the building’s entrance.

Through the shield, I could see gaping holes in the doors. They were being propped up by the unicorns, but the strain was showing. Most were soaked in sweat, quivering with strain as they fought to maintain the shield against a hail of fire. Even as I watched, there was another muted bang, followed by a flash of light which tore at the front of the building, and a mare right near the front of the group let out a shriek of agony, collapsing on her side in a heap of spasming limbs. Another stallion who was standing on the sidelines quickly levitated her away from the action and took her place, facing the doors.

“Gypsy, I need you to get me a window or something! I need to see what’s out there!” I ordered.

“There’s no windows facing that side of the building!” she replied. “There’s a couple of arrow slits, but we sealed all of those!”

“Arg...fine, then! Where’s Telly?”

“I’m up here with Gypsy,” the radio pony answered. Her voice was ragged with exhaustion. “I plugged into a direct control port beside the File Cloud to see if I could boost my efficiency using the Cloud’s computing power. Talking to so many different ponies at once is wearing me out quicker than I thought it would, but we’re making it work. What do you need?”

“We’ve got an incoming rescue in about eight minutes, but we have to last that long. How are the unicorns?”

A rattling explosion shook the building as dust began to fall from the rafters.

Telly was quiet for a second, then answered, “They can probably hold up a bit longer than eight minutes, although retreating is going to be a mess. You sure these friends of yours are going to be on time?”

I covered my hat with a hoof and ducked back into hiding. “I am not sure of anything right now, but pretend I am and we’ll probably survive. What’s the status of the civilians in the garage?”

“Not good. We have most of the injured ready to move, but there are a few who were in critical condition before we decided to take them into a diamond dog tunnel. They’re scared. Precious is keeping them calm.”

“Did Hay Frost talk to Taxi?”

“Yep! The northeast section is clear.”

I breathed deep as another shell or spell of some kind hit the outer walls, rocking everypony on their hooves. Time to go pretend to be the Chief.

“Give me the P.A. in the throne room, Telly.”

“You’re on, Hardy. Go for it.”

Stepping out from behind the pillar, I marched into the open with my jaw firmly set. The cops on the balcony refocused their aims for a half second before they realized precisely who they were aiming at and quickly dropped their barrels back towards the door.

I shouted, “This is Hard Boiled!”

The sound was enough that it could probably be heard right through that shield. It might have been just a bit of wishful thinking, but the waves of fire pounding on the doors seemed to slacken briefly. Everypony not currently holding the shields together had their eyes on me as I strutted across the hall and into the middle of the unicorns, moving through them to the back of the group.

Tilting my head back, I yelled and my amplified voice rang through the building, “Officers of the Detrot Police Department! We’ve got attackers coming from all sides! Our rescue will be here in under ten minutes! Hold position on the doors! We’re going to retreat in an orderly fashion to the garage!”

One of the unicorns beside me flicked his eyes in my direction. I recognized Sang Froid, sweat running down his chest in great rivulets as he fought to hold his concentration together.

“I swear to Celestia, you better know what you’re doing, Hard Boiled,” he growled, but softly enough I doubted anypony else could hear him.

Offering up a quiet prayer that I did as well, I continued tossing out orders.

“One set of shields will fall back and form a wall across as much of the room as you can to provide cover, leaving an opening in the middle for the front line to get through, then the front line will fall back! Once the Biters are inside, the balconies on both sides will lay down suppressing fire! First balcony nearest the door will peel off first, then the next. Once your clip runs dry, you get behind the shield wall, reload and continue firing! When we reach the stairwell, we’re going to collapse it above us! Get ready!”

I turned around to face the doors, freed my trigger bit, and readied to kick it into my mouth. What good my six bullets might do against what was coming I couldn’t have told you, but the position in the middle of the unicorns had a unique advantage insofar as it looked like I was leading from the front while still being surrounded by ponies who could cover me with magic. A good leader and a dead idiot are only separated by who finds the most impressive place to stand while also not being shot.

Sweeping my coat out of the way, I raised my gun.

“First group, front five unicorns, on my mark, drop your shields and back up five meters! Re-establish and get ready for the rest! Three, two, one...mark!”

On my cue, the front line’s horns flashed and died as they pulled away from the damaged remnants of the doorway. Those unicorns who remained redoubled their efforts against the onslaught as their fellows filtered back through their ranks. One of the mares - who looked like she was too young to drink, much less fight a war - stopped long enough to shoot me a grateful look before raising her head and throwing her shield across the air in front of me.

“Next three ranks...get ready to fall back! The second you see the next row of shields go up, start moving! Mark!”

The group started moving again, pulling back from the entrance.

A crackle of brilliant energy snapped against the doorframe, sending vicious arcs of electricity creeping across the front rank of spell fields. Another stallion next to me collapsed, and I grabbed his collar in my teeth, dragging him back from the middle of the formation, then rejoining them. He was quickly replaced as the next rank fell back, throwing their shields around us again.

The air was becoming thin and saturated with power, but discomfort meant nothing when death was so very close.

“Mark!" I called again and, like a perfectly synchronized clockwork, the next group of unicorns let their shields down. “Balconies, fire at will!”

There were finally no shields across the main entrance and a much wider, but thinner field of shimmering magic across the front half of the room. This left a space for our enemies to get inside, but they wisely held back as the groups surrounding us began peppering the entrance with gunfire. The crack and snap of guns, the moans of fallen unicorns, and the shouts of encouragement as ponies quickly reloaded from piles or bandoliers of precious ammunition were making it hard to think. Thick, stinking smoke filled the air, making it difficult to see much beyond the shadowy entryway, but I could pick out shapes moving out there like a swarm of locusts.

Several small, smoking canisters of gas flew through the entrance, but they were quickly caught and flung back by blasts of telekinesis.

“Hardy,” Gypsy said, and I barely caught her words over the unfolding chaos. “I just noticed one of the sergeants isn’t where she’s supposed to be! I’m trying to find her!”

“Which one?” I asked, hastily scanning the fighters.

“Sergeant Tune Tale! She was at the briefing and she was supposed to be in the garage, but she’s not there!”

“What’s she look like?”

“Tall, muscular, pegasus, brown pelt, silver mane!”

My eyes roved over the combatants as both sides poured fire into the doorway. My lungs burned for clean air, and my vision was blurry, but I finally picked out a shape moving up from behind one of the grand pillars at the back of the room. Swiping my leg across my face, I felt ice start to form in my guts.

The pony in question was the mare sitting near the front of the conference room, hugging her shotgun and looking frightened throughout my explanation. Now, her expression was dazed and languid as she staggered out of the shade behind the throne dais. A dark green blanket was draped around her body. As she caught sight of me, a feral grin spread across her face, and she began to waddle a bit more quickly. It was definitely a waddle, as though she’d become suddenly heavily pregnant and her legs weren’t working correctly.

A sudden misstep caught the blanket under one of her back hooves, ripping it away.

I felt my trigger drop out of my teeth. Nopony else seemed to have noticed her approaching, but they could hardly be blamed for that in the smoke and terror.

Something was terribly, terribly wrong with Miss Tune Tale, other than the vacant, empty countenance. Her belly bulged out obscenely on either side of her, as though she’d swallowed about ten cannonballs, stretching the flesh of her stomach so thin it was nearly translucent. There was a black and roiling mass beneath the skin, like a hundred maddened pythons were trapped inside her and itching to escape.
Horror cost me a full three seconds, during which her waddle became a gallop towards the center of the unicorns maintaining the shields.

“On your six! On your six! Bring down Tune Tale! Bring down Tune Tale!” I shouted. My voice was still being projected over the P.A. system, but as I backed up I found myself hemmed in by the front rank of ponies.

I can’t blame them for hesitating. I would have, too, considering none of them were really soldiers and being told to shoot a friend is never an easy thing, even in the best circumstances. Unfortunately, that was what Tune Tale or whoever was controlling her was counting on.

Kicking my trigger-bit into my teeth, I leveled my barrel at the charging mare. Her pupils were huge and blood leaked from her tear ducts, streaking her cheeks. She was only meters away by then, and coming in fast. I hauled back on the firing mechanism and the Crusader kicked.

My first shot was a little low and only grazed her neck, not even slowing her advance for an instant. I adjusted my aim and had a moment’s realization exactly how lonely it felt without my friends there beside me, even if my fellow cops were on all sides. My gun kicked again, and that second round took Tune Tale in the face; there was a spray of viscera as my bullet punched through her cheek, but she didn’t stop.

Somepony on the balcony had finally realized what was going on and managed to lodge a round in her chest, but by then, it was too late; the mare’s wings spread, and she launched herself into the air, crashing muzzle first into the backmost group of unicorns. I threw myself to one side, bowling over the stallion nearest me and pulling my coat over the both of us in the hope the damage resistant spells woven into it might hold.

I held my breath and waited, listening to whinnying ponies, ricocheting bullets, and frightened shouts.

Everything went momentarily silent, or maybe my eardrums had been punctured. Gravity seemed go light for a second as I was bodily lifted and shoved a couple of meters, still clinging to the stallion below me. Something wet drenched my shoulders, soaking into my mane within seconds.

‘Dead? Am I dead? No, I’ve been dead before. My back hurts too much to be dead. Concussed? No. I can hear some things. Ah, there we go. That’ll be screaming.’

My addled brain finally caught up, and sound crashed back in. There were terrified screams, violent retching, gunfire, and agonized moans all mingling in a terrible symphony.

‘Get up! Get up, dammit! If you lie here, everypony dies! They’re coming in!’

Wrenching my tortured muscles into action, I fought my way upright. I was standing in a pile of scattered bodies. They all seemed to be in one piece, and few appeared badly damaged, but the smell coming off of them was enough to choke the Bull himself. It was a stink so putrid that if I hadn’t already chucked my lunch, I’d have started losing it right away. Worse, the vile sludge closely resembled what’d come out of Chief Iris Jade. Of Tune Tale herself, there was no sign but a few stray bits of brown pelt here and there.

A few of my unicorns were still on their hooves, staggering back and forth with sparking horns, and above us, the fire on the door had redoubled, but it would only be so long before our opponents figured out what’d happened and launched another gas of some kind.

“Shields!” I yelled. “Shields! Anypony with a horn who can still cast, get us a bubble!”

Sang Froid was lying nearby, slowly crawling away from the heap of unconscious, wounded, or slimed ponies. I launched myself at him, dragging him back to his hooves. His face and horn were splattered on one side with the disgusting goo. Forcing him around, I turned him towards the door. The rain of bullets from outside was gone, but that couldn’t mean anything good.

“Cast! Cast, you bastard!” I growled, inches from his face. “I need a bubble over the injured! Doesn’t have to be a big one!”

That woke him up, and his eyes centered on me; then he nodded firmly and raised his head. His horn let out a weak buzz, and then he flinched and clutched at his forehead. “I...I can’t! It’s like my magic’s being sucked away!”

A cold, ugly thought dropped into my consciousness with a blood-soaked splash.

‘Slime that a unicorn of Jade’s power couldn’t magic out of her body. Magically resistant slime. Magic that stops a pony from casting spells.’

My stomach did a quick pirouette inside my gut as I put the whole business together.

‘Oh. That’s not good.’

Heaving Sang Froid back from the line, I threw myself away from the doors, galloping for the nearest pillar as I bellowed, “Scratch that last order, Officers!! If you’re on your hooves, grab somepony who is still alive and carry them! We’re moving out! Head to the stairs, double time! Shields only if you can cast them! Balconies, fall back in time as soon as the throne room is clear!”

A few other ponies were getting themselves up as the balconies continued showering the doors with fire. I pulled the stallion I’d been protecting up, then turned and grabbed a groaning blue mare who’d caught most of the blast of foul liquid in the face. Hefting her onto my shoulders, I started making for the back of the building.

And that was when I saw my first Biter.

Some sixth sense made me glance over my shoulder as I hobbled towards safety, and that was all that saved my life. I caught the movement from the corner of one eye as something black as midnight swooped in through the door faster than any pegasus I’d ever seen besides Swift. The broad outlines of the monster were still equine, but somepony with a twisted vision seemed to have taken attributes from a dozen other animals and woven them into the horror’s genetics. Whereas poor Canyon had only been a blueprint, that was the final product.

The demon’s wings were huge, bony protrusions with only the barest fleshy membrane holding them together. They sprouted from a back laced with bulging, bulbous muscles and a spine that undulated in an unnaturally flexible fashion with the movement of its body. It wore something resembling armor, though much of it appeared fused into the beast’s flesh rather than strapped in place. Plates of crude metal were bolted through its neck and shoulders or clamped to its chest, held in place by woven braids of the monster’s own skin.

Its back legs were deformed, small, and bent at odd angles, but its forelegs were gigantic clutching limbs with several extra joints. Worst of all, its head: the creature’s skull was thickened bone, elongated like a wolf or bear, with a great biting maw so full of serrated teeth that it wouldn’t close entirely. A gibbering pink tongue dangled from one side of a muzzle caked with what looked very much like dried blood, and the light of a mad, animal fury blazed in its piercing red eyes.

I processed all of this in a matter of seconds, and those seconds cost a life.

The Biter swooped, wrapping those multi-jointed forelegs around one of the unicorns who were staggering weakly away from the front doors and hauling him into the air. It barely slowed despite a half dozen bullets tearing into its sides and the weight of a fully grown stallion. His frightened scream filled my ears, but it was cut off as the creature’s massive jaws locked around the back of his neck.

A splash of liquid rained down on my face and hat. Blood.

The bastard could have ended it immediately, but it seemed to be taking glee in the agonized struggles of its victim. Bullet after bullet slammed into the thing’s barrel, but they might as well have been a swarm of bees stinging a dragon. It did a quick loop and made for the broken doors, vanishing into the skies as quickly as it had appeared, its prey still squirming.

I felt the mare on my back coming awake and beginning to shift. I was beyond panic by then, but panic wouldn’t have saved my cargo, so it was enough to get me moving again.

“Hardy, we’ve got two dozen more uglies just outside, not including whoever is shooting at us!” Gypsy shouted in my ear. “They’re swarming!”

More officers were on their hooves after Tune Tale’s attack, and a few were even moving in my direction. A couple magical bubbles were popping up, containing far too small a number of ponies. Unfortunately, several more smoke grenades rocketed through the door and landed amongst the survivors, spewing great gouts of blinding smog. Within seconds, most of the ponies near the doors were lost to sight.

Sang Froid was at my side, an unconscious pony hanging across his back. “Hard Boiled! You got any more good ideas?!”

“I’m working on it, dammit!” I barked, then hefted my juju bag to my mouth. “Keep moving! Balconies, focus fire on anything that gets through!”

The gunners up above unloaded round after round, but the smoke was spreading faster than a pony could run. That was the moment the Biters chose to attack.

Even as the cloud began to billow up towards the roof, I heard a frightened shriek. Another quickly followed, then another, until a chorus of terrified howling rang through the building. A thick wave of blood rushed out of the cloaking fog and coated my forehooves, but I couldn’t make out whose it might be.

A flapping shadow appeared in the grey miasma, and on instinct I raised my gun and snapped off a shot as it began to dive. The beast let out a guttural snarl but peeled off, disappearing into the stinking cloud again.

“Sang, get her downstairs, then come back! I might need you,” I ordered, spitting my bit out. He bobbed his head and started down the steps with his cargo.

Howls of agony and ripping noises that would haunt my dreams echoed through the building. The gunners were focused on keeping the Biters from cutting off their escape even as more and more of the room was covered in the overpowering smoke. Blood and other substances were starting to pool and drip from the balconies in a steady rain.

“This is a general retreat! Head to your exits, quick as you can!” I called, then added more softly, “Telly, get your flank down here! We’re leaving!”

Reading my gun, I pulled the hammer back and chewed my bit. Another trio of unicorns appeared from within the cloud, one projecting a flickering bubble around the other two.

“Hardy...I think that was the last of the survivors from the door team,” Telly murmured. “I...Celestia, you don’t want to know what I can see. There’s another wave coming from outside.”

“No kidding! Haul tail!”

The moment’s hesitation that followed told me most of what I needed to know.

“I...I can’t make it to you.”

I snapped off a shot at a Biter who was trying to snag one of the ponies on the far balcony, and it tumbled backwards over the edge, catching itself on those deformed wings before swooping away into the encompassing vapor.

“What’re you saying, Telly?” I demanded.

“Somepony must have hit something in the elevator with a stray bullet It’s not...it’s not working...”

Gypsy’s voice broke in. “Hard Boiled, you need to go! Get your people to safety! Avante!”

“I’m not leaving her here!” I growled, backing a couple of steps down the stairs. The cloud of smoke had finally reached the rear of the room.

“I’ll take care of Telly, and then we’ll handle these bastards!”

“What do you mean, Gypsy?” Telly asked.

“You got that bucket of paint!”

“Y-yes?”

“Throw it at the roof! Destroy the control runes!”

“Wait, what?! No!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got a teleporter somewhere in here! I can get her!”

I waited, holding the juju bag to my ear. I could still hear a few whimpers and moans in the fog as well as the meaty ripping of flesh and the agonized cries of those who hadn’t quite managed to die.

I heard hoofsteps behind me and looked back to see Sang Froid standing a few meters down the stairs. Somewhere in the building, rumbling explosions were going off, followed by the sounds of falling rubble. I swallowed and backed away from the stairwell.

“Chief, we’ve collapsed the other entrances to the garage. This is the last one,” he murmured.

My knees were weak as I rested against the wall, closing my eyes. The pounding in my chest was so loud I felt certain one of the Biters would hear it.

“Telly...you can’t die up there. I’ve lost too many, already,” I whispered.

Gypsy’s voice cut in. “I said I'd take care of her! Ugh, he’s going to be melodramatic about this, isn’t he? Telly, they’re coming! Do it now!”

Before I could protest again, I heard a clang of metal far above. A falling paint can spiraled down from above and crashed onto the ground just a few meters in front of me. The shadow of a Biter fell over it for a moment, then batted it across the floor. As the creature looked up, our gazes locked with one another, and I thought I saw - for just an instant - real intelligence in those bloodshot eyes. It might even have been mixed with a hint of sadness. Then it was gone, and the creature’s lips peeled back in a hideous parody of a smile.

I backed away a couple of steps as it readied itself to pounce. Sang Froid’s horn was sparking violently, but he still couldn't cast. I raised my gun and kicked up my bit, knowing in my heart of hearts that I was about to die, possibly permanently.

The Biter leapt, and I started to haul back on my trigger.

That part of the brain which handles trajectories and distances had time to tell me I’d made a mistake aiming for the bastard’s center of mass instead of its open mouth. It was heavily armored, and even if a bullet could find the thing’s heart, it would still have a few seconds to pulp my fragile little body.

Whether it was the weight of trauma or exhaustion, I’ll never know, but in that instant I didn’t really want to see my own death again.

My gun bucked. I shut my eyes and waited for the end.

Of course, the universe is never that kind.

When, ten seconds later, I was not dead, I exhaled and felt hot breath in return. It smelled terrible. Cautiously, I peeled open one eyelid and found the Biter hanging, frozen in midair, six inches from the end of my nose. Its malformed limbs were raised to mince me, but the creature looked about as surprised as I felt. Its lower jaw flapped a little, spitting reeking gobs of half-chewed meat onto my face.
Feeling a tad lightheaded, I took a slow step back, nervously glancing back over my shoulder. Sang Froid was still there, paralyzed with fear, staring at the creature. I looked back, and a disjointed part of my mind demanded an immediate explanation for why I wasn’t watching my own intestines being chewed on.

‘Emergency observation one: you are not dead. Emergency observation two: the Biter is not moving. Emergency observation three…what is wrong with its tongue?’

The beast’s tongue. Strange. It looked like a sort of thin, white rope was pulled tight across the back of its throat, forcing its tongue to curl up in an unusual fashion. I eyed its forelegs and noticed more such strands holding them firmly, intractably in place like marionette strings. Suddenly, the monster was yanked backwards into the air and out of sight.

There was a crunch like a pair of bulldozers copulating on a bed of raw spaghetti, followed by a shower of black liquid. Several more grunts and yelps of alarm followed from different places within the room, punctuated with the sound of an industrial grinder being fed a load of corn-flakes and mayonnaise; it was enough set my teeth on edge. Another shadow drifted through my vision. It put me in rough mind of a squid’s tentacle, but the end was split into many smaller tendrils that flailed about, probing across the ground. I couldn’t make out any more details in the thick smoke, but I think my fragile mind was probably better off for it.

As quickly as it’d appeared, the unearthly limb retracted toward the ceiling.

“Hardy,” my juju bag whispered, “You’d best go. I don’t know how long I can keep this portal open without something bigger coming through.”

My legs wouldn’t move. Why wouldn’t they move? I needed them to move.

‘This is the part where you run away,’ my rational brain demanded. Fear had rooted me in place.

Wait.

No, not fear.

Fear doesn’t feel like somepony is giving you a very angry hug. I peered down at my legs. Dozens of translucent, veiny tendrils which led off into the smoke were wound around them tighter than rubber bands.

‘Oooh, okay. This is actually the part where you die. Gotcha. Well, I’m glad we cleared that up before the end.’

There was a flash of light, I was torn off my hooves, and a crushing, tortuous darkness wrapped me in its deathly embrace.

Act 3 Chapter 31 : The Hangover Won't Kill You, But You'll Wish It Had

"Dying to save a life is easy for the pony who dies. They don't have to wake up tomorrow, eat breakfast, go to the bathroom, and watch the morning news. The dead get their peace handed to them, while the living have to make it from the scrap and refuse left over."

-Unattributed

Whatever monster’s stomach I’d found myself in seemed to be taking its sweet time finishing me off. It was discombobulating, painful, and felt remarkably like being teleported by a barely functional Ace-user. As a matter of fact, I’d have said it felt exactly like being teleported by a barely functional Ace-user.

There was no time to brace, nor would I have really known what to brace with.

My aching body appeared two meters up and crashed, muzzled first, onto a concrete floor. I slowly flopped onto my side, trying to catch my breath. Five seconds later, another pop heralded the arrival of Hay Frost and Sang Froid.

Above me.

I tried to get a breath, but two hundred tons of unicorn landing on your ribcage makes that difficult. Sang Froid groaned and flopped off my stomach while Hay just lay there on my chest, rubbing her smoking horn. Coughing, I wrapped a foreleg around the slim unicorn and gently rolled her onto the concrete beside me. If I’d been a pegasus, I’d probably have been nursing a few shattered ribs, but as it was I was mostly just achey.

Looking up, I noticed a huge crowd of frightened ponies standing around us in a circle under the sharp fluorescent lights of the garage.

The garage.

We were in the garage.

Telly.

I grabbed for my juju bag and put it to my mouth.

“Telly?! Telly, you better be there!” I growled.

“She’s in here, Hardy. She’s with me,” Gypsy murmured.

“You had best mean she’s sitting up there waiting on somepony to come get her.”

“You know I don’t. Look, they were coming. We could hear them crawling up the walls. Those things that got the Biters are from a bad...a bad place. She jumped after she threw the paint...”

“Bitch!” I snarled, hauling myself to my hooves.

The crowd took a quick step back, which was probably wise because I’m sure I was looking like a whole encyclopedia entry on the topic of murder.

“Yeah, I deserve that,” Gypsy replied, softly. “Look, you’ve got things to do and I’ve got to shut this portal to whatever sun-forsaken cosmic hole these things crawled out of, then bust my way through the roof of the Castle. Without the control runes, I’m pretty sure I can move the File Cloud somewhere safer. You still need to get out of there.”

I swallowed and stared up at the ceiling of the garage.

“I swear, Gypsy...”

“I promise she’s going to be fine, Hard Boiled. It’ll take her a while to learn to make a body, but she’s with me and I’ll keep her safe. I think I can speed up the process a bit. I won’t let anything happen to her, and when she can talk, I’ll make sure you’re the first pony she speaks to. Right now, you’ve got to get your game face on. I’ve got incoming through the northeast floor of the garage in two minutes!”

“I promise you, we...are going to discuss this later.”

“That’s fine with me. With any luck, Telly will be there to help. You’ve got to move!”

I glared at the bag, then shoved it into one of my pockets.

“Lieutenant Sang Froid, go make for damn sure those stairwells are collapsed. I don’t want whatever was upstairs coming through here.”

Whether it was exhaustion or shock, Sang Froid snapped a picture perfect salute, then stared at his hoof for a moment as though it’d bit him. “Uh...right. Yes...Yes, Sir. Chief…”

The unicorn staggered off into the crowd in what might or might not have been the right direction. There was a small commotion on the other side of the ring of ponies, and then Taxi elbowed her way through.

“Hardy? What happened up there? Is there anyone else coming? Where’s Telly?” my driver asked all in a rush.

“Nopony...nopony else is coming,” I grunted, pulling my hat low over my face. “We’ll talk about it later. We lost the building. Sweets, I need you to stay with the survivors. Get the Night Trotter rebuilt. I should be back in a day. Swift, Lily, Mags, and I are going into the Wilds—”

“Wait, wait, wait! Hardy, what happened to Telly?!” Taxi demanded. “And...what did you say? Stay behind?!”

“Yes. Stay behind. Telly is…” I stopped and shut my eyes. It didn’t help much. I could still see the eyes of that berserk monster in the seconds before it was eaten. Intelligent eyes. Pony eyes. “Telly’s alive, I think. She’s in the File Cloud. Don’t make me explain that. Where’s Lily?”

“I’m here, Hardy!” Lily called, pushing through the crowd.

Now that I was on my hooves, I could finally see over the heads of the gathered civilians and the remains of the Detrot Police Department. The garage was packed, wall to wall, with all the various species who’d taken refuge in the Castle. There were a half dozen unicorns standing on the exit ramp and layering shields over the sliding metal doors, but it didn’t look like our aggressors had figured we’d give up the much more defensible keep in favor of a garage with only two exits.

Younger ponies crouched under their parents, watching me with wonder. Most of the adults carried heavily laden saddlebags, reminding me a bit of tourists headed to a campsite. Despite the diversity of creatures out there, they all wore the same bone-weary, exhausted looks on their faces. I hated seeing my fellow citizens looking like that. It made my talent feel like somepony had pepper-sprayed my flank.

I raised my voice so as to be heard over the mutterings of the herd. For all that the garage was crowded, it was still fairly quiet. I suspected the distant sounds of gunfire and strange wailing noises from upstairs were putting everyone off the desire for conversation.

“Everypony stay calm! We’ve got an escape route coming in under a minute! We’re going underground! Yes, that means diamond dogs!”

I heard a couple of fearful gasps. One of the mares nearest me swooned against a young stallion in an officer’s uniform who deftly caught her.

“I told you I would get you out, and I am getting you out!” I continued. “We are not dying, today! These diamond dogs are safe, and they’ll be taking you to a place where the unicorns who fell during the Darkening can be awoken! Treat them as you would any officer of the Department! They will protect you! So says Dead Heart!”

I fell silent, and the crowd began to whisper to one another, but nopony was panicking. That was a step in the right direction.

“Hardy, I don’t know if we can do this,” Lily said, in a voice tuned to be inaudible to everypony else.

“We are doing this. Is the car ready?”

She nodded, tugging at the hem of her scrubs. “I...I put Iris Jade inside the truck. She’s wrapped in a sheet, and I don’t think anypony knew it was her. Mags and Swift are in there with her.”

“Good. Go get the engine warmed up. We’ll be with you as soon as the garage is empty.”

Shooting me one last fearful glance, Lily turned and disappeared into the crowd, which quickly made way for her. Turning to Hay Frost, I slid my foreleg under her neck. “Miss Frost? Are you alright?”

Her sallow face twisted with discomfort as she looked up at me. “I...I’m gonna be okay. I think I b-bounced us off a ward. Wish I had a n-needle…”

I lifted her to all fours. “The diamond dogs we’re about to go meet make a special blend of Ace that’s supposed to be pretty good.”

“Re-really?” she squeaked, her eyes lighting up with interest.

“I haven’t tried it myself, but I have it on good authority,” I replied. “Rest. You could use it.”

“Yeah...yeah, I really c-could. You could t-too,” she whispered, sitting back on her haunches and self-consciously rubbing the injection scars on her forelegs.

“I know, but my day isn’t over, yet.”

“C-can we still have that drink at Rascals one...one day, D-dead Heart?” she asked, giving me a coy look through her eyelashes.

“Yeah...yeah, absolutely. And thank you for keeping me out of that monster’s stomach.” I winked at her, then turned toward the corner of the garage the diamond dogs were likely to be coming through. Ponies parted in front of me with the sort of reverence I was starting to find desperately irritating.

All those eyes on me. Yeesh. I could feel myself developing a syndrome by the minute.

‘Can’t break down,’ I thought. ‘Stop it. Fight it. You survived. Those unicorns knew what they were getting into. Telly’s still alive, for some definition of ‘living’. Hold on until you’re in the truck.’

Unfortunately, no amount of scolding myself could keep the trembling out of my knees.

Taxi trotted up beside me, keeping pace. “Hardy, you’re losing your mind. I can tell. You never fake being this calm unless you’re about to go crazy. What did you see?”

“Nothing.” I shuddered, shaking my head as I sped up a little. “Nothing I want to talk about, Sweets.”

“Then will you at least tell me why I have to stay behind?”

I sighed and stopped for a moment, putting a foreleg around her shoulders. “Sweets, you may not like this about yourself, but we both know you’re a better leader than I am. You have to coordinate with the gangs. You have to make them work together. These Diamond Dogs can get us to the Skids, Sky Town, the Heights, the Morgue, and all points in between. We need a base of control and to be prepared to defend ourselves.” I squeezed her against me, and she turned her face against my neck. “Also...remember our deal?”

“About the car?”

“Yeah. Not just the Police Department anymore. You get the resources of all the major gangs in the city to fix the Night Trotter.”

Her body stiffened, and I swear I smelled a hint of arousal.

“I...I think I’ll stay behind,” she replied, then squinted at me. “Why are you taking Mags? Wouldn’t she be safer—”

“Jade has a soft spot for kids.”

“And you think she’ll be less likely to tear off your legs with your ‘daughter’ watching?”

“That’s the hope. Either way, Jade would never let a child come to harm. She’s safer with Iris than she is with you, whether I’m alive or not. I’m still going to have my anti-magic armor on. Speaking of that, somepony did go collect Limerence, right?” I asked.

She nodded. “He’s with the medical ponies and your armor is in the truck.”

“Good. Let’s hope the poor schmuck sleeps through this. I’d hate to wake up halfway through an evacuation with Ace withdrawal and a magical hangover.”

Ahead of us, the crowd opened up to an empty corner of the garage about ten meters across. Some smart pony had thrown down a few orange cones in a semi-circle to keep everyone back. I stepped into the open space, and Taxi followed.

“Precious! Precious, where are you?” I shouted over the heads of everypony. “I need you!”

The Prince’s powerful voice carried from some distance away. “Hard Boiled? Ah, yes! A moment!”

I rose up on the tips of my hooves, trying to see where he might be, but it turned out to be unnecessary; a second later, the old gentlestallion was lifted above the crowd on a folding metal chair by a combination of hooves and magic. He smiled benevolently as he was passed over the heads of all those ponies before being gently set down at the edge of the cordoned area. Snapping his cane smartly against the concrete, he rose and adjusted the lapels of his shiny jacket.

“Hard Boiled, Ah’dda loved it if ya'll kept me informed we’d be movin’ all these poor folk so sudden like,” he scolded, his milky eyes staring up at the ceiling. “Ah don’t hear gun fire up there. Lotta funny things moving around, though. How many did we lose?”

“I tried not to count. I’ll probably be trying not to count in my sleep for the next ten years. You, Sang Froid, and Taxi are going to have control of the department while I’m gone. Try not to choke the life out of Sang. He’s a prick, but he knows most everypony here. Can you manage that?”

“Oh, Ah think we just might. You’re not coming along, dear boy?”

“No. We’re going to draw these bastards off to buy you more time. Sweets knows the rest of the plan, or at least she’s good at improvising.”

Precious tapped his cane to his forehead. “In that case, it’ll be a pleasure working with ya, Miss Shine. Speaking of that, Ah believe our gem-loving friends are here.”

I blinked at him. “Buh? What?”

One of his ears twitched, and he stepped back from me. “Ahem...Ya may want to move.”

The ground under my hooves let out a deafening crunch like a whole barrel of hard candy being rolled down a hill covered in broken glass. I jumped away from the spot as a diamond dog’s shovel-sized claw exploded out of the asphalt, spraying me with hot gravel. The herd shifted restlessly behind us as the muscular limb withdrew into the hole.

A second later, a great poof of white mane poked out of the hole attached to a familiar, powder blue head capped with a conical hat covered in little pictures of balloons.

“Oh! Detective! Is it too late to join this party?” Slip Stitch chortled, levering himself out of the hole and somehow avoiding the smoking edges. With a deft flip, he landed on all fours, his lab coat flying.

“Ah say, Ah say, is that little Stitchy, Ah hear?” Precious asked, one ear bending in the coroner’s direction.

For the first time in as many years as I’d known him, Stitch looked like he couldn’t think of anything to say. When he laid eyes on the Prince, his jaw fell open, and he took a couple of stumbling steps forward, then flung himself down at Precious’s hooves in a bow so low his party hat scraped the ground.

“I...I am humbled in your presence, master!” Stitch squeaked.

Precious sighed and leaned his head in my direction. “Is that colt kneeling? Ah can’t tell. Ah told ’im to knock that crap off when he was twelve...”

Behind Slip Stitch, Commander Max was pulling himself out of the hole as it began to expand sideways. The noise was terrific, like a blender the size of a car munching through cinderblocks.

“Stitch, what’re you doing here?” I asked, grabbing the coroner by the scruff of his labcoat. “And hold the weird. We don’t have time for the weird.”

“Ah! Yes, of course,” Stitch replied, sweeping off his party hat and tossing it into the crowd. “Our mutual friend, here, Mister Max, sent a runner for me. He thought it might smooth things if all these ponies could see a friendly face arriving with them. I can think of no face friendlier than mine! I mean...except, you know—” He nervously jerked his head at Precious. “Now, then...let’s see how many ponies we have here!” Rearing up onto his hindlegs, he looked out across the crowd and made a little motion with his mouth, gently wiggling his hoof in their directions. “...four hundred, four ten, four twenty...erm... Six hundred and sixty-eight ponies, not including foals, if my eyes do not mistake me! Excellent!”

“Why that be excellent?” Max growled, picking at one of his teeth with the end of a bullet hanging around his neck.

“Oh! Because we’ve got plenty of room!” Ducking his head, Stitch whistled into the hole. “Make it approximately one point five meters across! We need a ramp with a twenty degree angle!”

From below, a diamond dog’s rough voice called, “Commander?”

Max put a paw over his jowled face, then said, wearily, “Ten minutes and he making me crazy. Ugh, listen to the mad cutter.”

“Oh, Mister Max, I would never make you crazy! I don’t care for competition!” Stitch cackled, snapping his party hat back on his head.

“Those beasties upstairs are going to be confused for a few minutes,” I said. “Telly unleashed some specialized magics from the File Cloud before she...” I trailed off, unable to say the words. I felt a strong leg around my neck and smelled the familiar scent of guitar wood. I laid my cheek on Precious’s shoulder. “I...I think she’s given us a bit more time.”

A diamond dog poked her head out of the hole, waving to Max. “Commander! We dig out, we dig wide! Have to dig as we go, but join main tunnel two hundred meters from building!”

“I take it that means we’re ready to go?” Taxi asked.

“We ready. Come ponies!” Commander Max said, waving to the frontmost members of the crowd of survivors.

Every eye out there turned in my direction.

‘You’re the Chief, Hard Boiled. Make them believe,’ I thought.

“Alright! Detrot Police Department! We survived this long! Now it’s time to get out of here! We’re going in three by three!” I shouted. “Anything you can’t carry on your back, you leave here! It’s one trip only! With any luck, it won’t go anywhere! I doubt looters are going to be very interested in it after what’s happened here.”

A thickset stallion at the front of the crowd looked sideways at his friends, then stepped forward. “Are...are we going to be safe, Dead Heart? I mean, safe underground?”

I admit, I had to think about my answer. From a practical standpoint, the truth wouldn’t have comforted them all that much, since I was fairly certain the Biters weren’t lacking for reinforcements. If there were another spy amongst their number, they’d never know until the creatures were beating down their door. Still, comforting lies were more likely to get them moving, and the underground was the closest they were probably going to be to ‘safe’.

“You want to stay here?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

The stallion looked at the garage ceiling, then back over his shoulder at all the ponies behind him.

“Ah. Right. Diamond dogs it is, then,” he replied with a slightly bashful smile. Turning to a short mare with a messy mane who had a foal riding on her back, he waved her forward.

One of the nice things about being a member of a herd species is that once you get them moving, there’s a fair bit of inertia. I stood beside the diamond dogs’ hole, one ear cocked for any movement from above, while maintaining my best ‘diplomatic’ smile. It’s a smile Taxi tells me I make right before she has to carry me home from the bar, but it works in most situations where I’m trying to con somepony into betting me I can’t drink a whole bottle of beer in under twelve seconds. It is a smile that almost never failed to pay my bar tab or keep a crowd of traumatized, frightened ponies from rioting.

Ponies filed past me, some stopping very briefly to offer a quiet thanks or a tip of the head, while others just shot wary looks at Commander Max who was sitting beside me with his tongue hanging out, occasionally scratching himself. Slip Stitch and Precious were both cheerfully greeting ponies, offering quick hoofshakes as they kept everypony moving toward the hole. It was a strange scene, and I was fighting thoughts of the long term consequences of anything that’d happened in the last hour.

There were all those little letters to fill out with the names of dead officers and all of those funerals to attend. Iris Jade was always at the funerals of dead officers. Mercy, was I ever going to stop attending funerals?

Slowly, the room began to empty, row after row of ponies heading down the dirt ramp that was quickly being packed down by the passage of so many hooves. I could see flickering mage-lights deeper inside, providing a bit of illumination. One or two pegasi needed quick sedative spells to handle claustrophobia, and there were a fair number of sobbing foals, but Slip Stitch produced a seemingly limitless supply of ice cream sandwiches from somewhere on his person. It was as orderly an evacuation as I might have hoped for, considering the massacre in the throne room.

Strange thoughts kept creeping into the edges of my consciousness.

If we ever managed to retake the Castle, whose job would it be to mop up all that blood?

Is there going to be a pile of organs we have to sort through?

What do we do with all the ponies who don’t have enough left to bury?

Just keep smiling. Just keep smiling.

Face after face moved by in a slow procession. A row of various creatures in nurse scrubs came by after some minutes, hauling sledges behind them laden with unconscious unicorns and medical supplies. A sleeping filly had her I.V. bag dangling from the horn of somepony I presumed was her mother who lay beside her, both of them comatose, both looking far more peaceful than they’d any right to given the circumstances.

I was still waiting for the Biters to come around and attack the garage, but either they were dealing with the creepy crawlies Gypsy had unleashed or the confusion sown by that particular attack hadn’t worn off yet. A part of me was definitely banking on the first option, if only because Equestria has enough horrible creatures sliming around the countryside without adding things from other universes.

My vision became momentarily blurry, and a short mare with two fillies riding on her back paused for a second to give me a strange expression. There were only about forty ponies left, but she moved aside for another to get around her.

“D-dead Heart? Are you crying?” she asked.

My smile faltered for an instant, but then I had control again. Something trickled down my cheek. I quickly wiped my face on the back of my sleeve.

“I’m fine. Tough day, right?”

She looked like she was about to say something else when Slip Stitch appeared at her side.

“Miss Theremin!” he exclaimed, taking her by the leg. “It is so good to see you! And little Cookie and Candy are doing well, too! We’ve got a party planned for all the foals, and I would just love for you three to attend as soon as we get to safety. Come along! Mustn’t keep the foals waiting! We’re a bit short of macarons, which I remember are your favorite, but there’s plenty of cake and ice cream! I’ll be sure to make that up to you as soon as the sun is back!”

Stitch winked at me as he led the mare away, helping her over the lip of the pit still chattering at her as the two of them headed out of sight. Precious tapped his cane at the ground a few times, stepping around until he was beside me with his grand performer’s grin seeming to light up the room. If nothing else, it gave me a moment to clear my eyes.

A venerable and cantankerous griffin hen with a cane was the last creature out. Commander Max helped her over the edge, then directed one of his dogs to keep her moving. The second she was in, I called to the five unicorns keeping the shield over the door up. They were all leaning on one another, and the concrete around their hooves was drenched in sweat, but still they held.

“Hey! Time to go! When you hear three honks, drop your shields, move your flanks, and don’t look back!”

“Y-yes C-chief!” came a shaky reply.

I turned to my companions and freed my trigger bit.

“Taxi, you and Precious take care of the survivors. Max, close the pit the second the rest of these ponies are down.”

“Before you go, think you might want this.” The commander reached over his shoulder and hauled a boxy package on a strap around, passing it to me. I unsnapped the buckle holding the end closed and peeked inside. The silvery gleam of my shotgun’s enameled stock shined in the flickering fluorescent lights.

“Wish I’d thought to bring it into that fight, though I don’t know what good buckshot would have done against those Biters,” I muttered.

“There be a box of slugs in there, too. Probably stop Bitey monsters better than dinky bullets,” Max added.

“Thanks, Max. We’re heading out the other way. Hopefully we’ll draw some fire,” I replied, nodding towards where the working Anti-Megafauna Vehicle squatted in the corner of the building next to its partially disassembled sibling. I could just make out Lily and Swift’s worried faces through one of the thickened black windshields.

“We’ll have to come back for the other A.M.V.,” Taxi mused. “I still need the parts for the Night Trotter. I figured I’d have more time when I started the teardown. We’ll have to get a team to haul it, later on.”

“Well, I doubt those...things...upstairs will try to hold this place,” I said. “Be careful.”

“Ya are coming back, right, Mister Hard Boiled?” Precious asked, lightly tapping my foreleg with his cane. “Ah don’t want to have to officiate at ya funeral. Ah’ve already written sermons for two stallions with that name. Three would be too many for this ol’ achy, breaky heart.”

“I’d hate to disappoint a fair cross-section of people if I managed to get myself killed out there. Alright, this goodbye has gone on long enough. I’ll contact Tourniquet as soon as I get back.”

The A.M.V. had a face even a mother would have had concerns about. Its ugly, pointed contours and a profile like a bulldog that’d stuck his face in a wasp nest were supposed to scream menace, death, and violence, but the threat was somewhat muted without the weapons mounts loaded.

I trotted around to the side of the giant truck and stepped back as the passenger door swung open of its own accord. Lily peered down at me from the driver’s seat, one hoof resting on a button on the dash. The seat was higher than my head, but a set of stairs slid down and clanked into place.

“You going my way, stranger?” I asked, smirking up at her as I grabbed the railing and began hauling myself in.

“I’m going into the Wilds with a crazy pony and his crazy partner and the crazy ex-Chief of Police,” Lily grumbled, wrapping her forelegs around the steering wheel. “Stop joking and get in, before I lose my nerve.”

I tossed my shotgun in ahead of me, then dragged myself up into the passenger seat and settled into the surprisingly comfortable vinyl cushions. The compartment was enormous, but the dashboard took up most of the space. It was a vast keyboard with a million and one switches and toggles which spilled up onto the ceiling above both the driver and the passenger. How a pony was meant to find any particular function in the heat of battle was beyond me, but it must have worked well enough during the war.

Lily’s horn flashed and the stairs retracted, and then the door swung shut with a finality that made my stomach clench.

“Hey kid, you back there?” I called into the rear compartment.

My partner wedged her head between the front seats, her trigger bit tucked into one corner of her muzzle.

“Where else would I be, Sir?” she huffed. Something in her tone said she was annoyed with me.

“You alright, kid?”

“Yes...I guess. Ugh! Why did you put me on the bench during a firefight? You know I’m a better shot than most ponies. I could have—”

I put a hoof over her mouth, silencing her. Come to think of it, maybe it was the haunted expression in my bloodshot eyes that did that.

“Kid, there was absolutely nothing you could have done to stop what happened up there. I needed you working other angles. Are we ready to travel?”

Swift’s ears drooped, and she stepped back. “Yes, sir. Mags is napping, Chief Jade is still unconscious, the tanks are full, and we have some ammunition for all of our guns. I even managed to load the smoke grenade launcher on the roof.”

“Then get strapped in. This will be a bumpy ride. Lily? It’s go time. Beep the horn three times to let the unicorns know to drop their shields.”

Lily reached under the steering wheel and tapped the ignition button. If the Night Trotter sounded like a snarling timberwolf, the A.M.V. sounded like a whole pack armed with chainsaws and a perceived slight against their mothers. Lily touched another button and the sound dampened to a reasonable level.

“What was that?” I asked.

“The engine has twenty-five hundred horsepower, Sir. There’s a spell to keep it from deafening us. You’re supposed to turn the sonic disruption on first, you know,” Swift admonished.

“Sorry, I didn’t have long to study the book, here, but I think got the important bits,” Lily said, levitating a pink manual where we could see it.

Grabbing the gear stick, she put the vehicle into reverse and gave it a little gas. The entire truck lurched, violently, then sped backwards so fast I was thrown against my safety belt hard enough to knock the breath out of me. Lily squeaked and slammed a hoof on the brakes, forcing me back in my seat.

I planted my forelegs on the dashboard for support. “You sure we don’t need to stop for a study session? We can still take the hole if this isn’t doable.”

Lily massaged her neck with one hoof. “Oof. No, no it’s fine. I can do this. This thing is a little more powerful than Daddy’s pickup. Give me a second to get my head around it.”

A bit more cautiously, she depressed the accelerator again. The A.M.V. rumbled, backing out of the space in a slightly more controlled manner. With tentative taps on the throttle, she pulled us around to aim toward the shielded exit ramp.

“Sir, I just feel like I should point out that the course to learn to drive one of these at the P.A.C.T. recommends five hours of classroom training followed by fifteen hours on a closed course,” Swift said, quietly. “That doesn’t include training with how to use the weapons.”

“Kid, hush. Lily, you got this?”

“I...I’m pretty sure. If I don’t, well...that’s what we have bumpers for, right?”

“You’re filling me with confidence.”

Rather than respond, Lily honked the horn: three quick blasts. The shimmering shields around the gate vanished, and the unicorns sprinted, as best they could, for the hole. Taxi was there to help them, and Max caught one of the younger-looking mares before she could collapse from exhaustion, slinging her over his shoulder in one deft move.

“Hardy, when you’re ready, hit the blue button on your left. It says ‘exit’.”

“Right...got it.” I smacked the indicated button, and the metal gate began rattling up into the ceiling on a hidden rail.

“And...here we go!”

Strange as it might sound, there is something in cars that can bring out hidden traits of a pony’s personality. Somehow, having all that steel, aluminium, and rubber at your command reaches deep into the psyche and has a little grope around. Most are content to drive from work to home and back, never really exploring these depths, but some ponies don’t have that luxury. When these select few are put behind the wheel, they become a different person than they might otherwise choose to be, but that person is no less real than the person they present to the world every day.

Taxi is a brilliant driver, a genius with clutch and gear. I am a mad driver, Tartarus on wheels.

Lily was something else.

For all she might have been a lovely medic, an innocent little cherry farmer’s daughter, and a genuinely kind soul, I suspect she had only one thing on her mind when her hoof hit the gas pedal: vengeance.

I gripped the armrest of my seat so hard I could feel my knees creak as the A.M.V. veritably flew up the garage exit ramp. We caught a good half second of air, and I heard dual shrieks of alarm as Mags was thrown off of Iris Jade’s back and Swift had to clutch at her seatbelt to avoid being tossed into the ceiling. Shooting onto the street, I barely had time to register the wall of the building on the opposite side of the road coming at us full tilt before Lily hauled the steering wheel around and the tires dug in, slewing us sideways.

“Arg! Nopony told me this wasn’t a straight shot!” Lily snarled, yanking her nurse’s cap off and letting her brilliant red mane flow down her shoulders. “Why did nopony tell me I had to turn?! I shouldn’t have to turn! Turning is for losers!”

I wanted to shout for her to slow down, but considering the circumstances, that seemed like a poor idea. Ahead, I could see the gates in the dim, reddish glow of the sunless sky. The headlamps played across the buildings, lighting them up like a fire. Smoke billowed from the walls, pouring out of the Castle’s broken windows. Something was moving amidst the fire and shadows, swirling upward against the direction of the wind: Biters.

Dozens of Biters. There was absolutely no way, considering the noise the engine was making, that they hadn’t seen us. A second later, the windscreen lit up with fire as bullets pinged off the shielded glass.

“Oh, crap! Lily, floor it!”

She didn’t need to be told twice. Burying the pedal in the firewall, Lily wrestled to keep us on the straight and narrow as the A.M.V. let out a furious howl. We were thrown against the padding in our seats, and the acceleration was enough to make my face ache as we flew towards the swarm.

A flash of light cut through the air and almost blinded me, but the windshield polarized instantly against the glare. I threw my hooves over my ears as the flash was followed a half second later by a ‘CRACK-OW!’ of thunder. It turned out not to be necessary; the sound was muted by the car’s insulation. It’d been a close call, but I can only imagine it was difficult to draw a bead on a target moving as quickly as we were, even with a lightning cannon.

Over engineered, overbuilt, and far too resource intensive to run with any regularity, the A.M.V. was just about the most impractical truck in the world for anything besides an urban war-zone. However, in an urban war-zone, we were nearly unmatched.

That didn’t stop an especially stupid Biter from trying to stop us with its face.

We barely had a glimpse of it swooping on the car before the windshield was coated in a thick layer of whatever the creatures used for blood. Lily shrieked as the front tires bumped over the monster, but she kept her hoof on the pedal as far in as it would go.

“Wipers! Wipers! Oh my Celestia, what was that thing?!” she gasped, jabbing a toe at the dash. I searched frantically until I found a button that I thought might be the one and slapped it. The glass glowed brightly, then let off a puff of smoke as the liquid burned off and the view ahead cleared. Another T-junction was quickly approaching. “Which way do we go?!”

“How should I know?!”

“You live in this city! I live on a farm! I shake trees for a living!”

“There’s a reason you’re driving!”

Swift shouted from the back compartment, “Didn’t you read the section of the manual on the navigation enchantments?!”

“Oh...um...right,” Lily muttered, poking a switch on the dash, and then her horn flickered and a crystal under the windshield lit up, projecting a glowing green map in front of her. Hauling the wheel around, we shot by the front gates of the Castle just as an explosion rocked the building, shaking the A.M.V. from side to side and even driving back the horde of Biters for a few seconds.

I pressed my nose against the window, staring out at a sight that filled me with a sort of divine terror: the sky above the Detrot Police Department was bleeding.

Even as I watched, the onion-shaped dome burst upward and a lash of liquid fire splashed down the front of the building, stripping away the white facade to reveal the ancient stone underneath. Debris as large as the truck smashed into the buildings across from the Castle. From underneath, a glittering, ghostly shape peeled away from the walls and began to lift into the air. Great ephemeral limbs sprouted from the File Cloud, flailing back and forth, snatching Biters from the air with all the ease one might swat a fly with a flame thrower.

I plucked my juju bag from my pocket, not able to look away.

“Gypsy, tell me you’re in control of this…”

“Loosely speaking, yes. I’m trying to close the gateway. I’ll head for the upper atmosphere. I don’t think these things can survive without air. Can I meet you somewhere?”

“Meet me?”

“Gonna hafta come down eventually. I need to find somewhere to broadcast from; the city needs music, news, and the good word from the front lines!”

“I...mmm...go to Supermax. Make contact with Tourniquet. You think you can do that?”

“Gimme a bit to work out the controls, but that shouldn’t be a problem, since we’re not worrying about somepony breaking into the security grid anymore. Gypsy, over and out!”

“Sir, we’ve got more incoming from the back,” Swift put in. “Gosh, those things are fast!”

Lily heaved the giant truck around the corner and I lost sight of the File Cloud, but I could still hear it out there, making a gut-wrenching wail as it moved away from the remains of the Castle. I can’t imagine what it might have sounded like without the A.M.V.’s noise reduction magics.

“Smoke grenades!” I said, pushing myself forward to study the dash. “We’ve got smoke, right?”

“We’ve got better than that, Sir! We have active camo and smoke grenades!”

The road ahead was narrow and blocked by the upturned remains of a ruined bus, but the navigation display flickered and the arrow rerouted us almost instantly into what looked like the side of a row of shops.

“Wait...wait, that’s a building!” I yelled, as though the machine could hear me.

“Trust the technology, Sir!” my partner called back.

Before I could add my precise thoughts on what technology had lately done to my life, Lily made the decision for me. She’d found another gear, and the almost unbearable engine noise grew until it sounded like a pack of lions having their tails flattened by a skyscraper-sized rocking chair. Preparing to meet my maker was starting to lose some of its novelty value.

An instant before impact, a light flashed on the windscreen that said ‘Energetic Deflection System Active!’. Rather than a jarring crash followed by all of my bones being turned to a thin paste, I felt a slight bump and heard shattering glass as we slammed into the structure at full speed. I caught a flash of the interior of some sort of cafe and the surprised face of a young mare who’d apparently been using a bag of coffee beans for a bed. A half second later, we burst through the back window and into the open air.

Bits of the cafe we’d just destroyed rained off the truck’s bonnet, replaced almost immediately by chunks of an unlucky newspaper stand. Ahead, a highway onramp beckoned with the possibility of freedom and the open road. My sense of relief lasted right up until something with a bright orange contrail crashed into one of the shops lining the street on my side of the vehicle. A moment later, it exploded, obliterating the building and filling the air outside with molten shrapnel.

“Kid, where are the damn smoke grenades?!”

“Center console! Two switches with a little cloud symbol under them! The camo is the big pink button above your head!”

I dived forward and hit both toggles, then pressed the pink button hard enough I was worried I might break it. A soft ‘thunk’ was followed by a pop and thick fog poured from the side of our ride, followed by a faint hum and the words ‘Active Camo Engaged!’ on the windscreen. I didn’t feel any more camouflaged, but the side view mirror had disappeared except for a slight shimmer in the air, along with the sound of the engine.

A warm lump of feathers landed in my lap, then scrambled underneath my coat.

“Egg-pony...I do not like this!” Mags whimpered, coiling her tail around my foreleg.

I ran a hoof through her mane, doing my best to calm the frightened griffin. “Me either, honey. It’ll be over soon.”

Another explosion sounded a bit farther off, along with the telltale rattle of heavy machinegun fire. I silently thanked Celestia that those things hadn’t thought to bring anti-machine rifles, else we’d have been in trouble. Assaulting a building doesn’t generally call for that sort of ordinance, but neither should it have called for mutant cannibal demon ponies.

We did, finally, have our answer as to what’d killed the griffins at the Moonwalk Hotel. Most likely the errant mob bosses as well. Considering what that knowledge had cost us, I couldn’t feel especially positive about it.

As we drove up the onramp, the highway ahead was almost completely empty. A few abandoned carts, cars, and even a bread van were lined up beside the road, but they were easy enough to avoid. Turning, I tried to find our pursuers, but they seemed to have either lost track of us or fallen back. Far away, a screech of fury echoed over the city.

We drove in silence for about two minutes, ears and eyes straining to detect the slightest indication we were still being chased. Even Mags had the sense to keep quiet, her claws digging into my coat as her tail lashed back and forth against her flanks.

“Kid? How long does this invisibility spell last?” I asked, finally starting to feel as though we might have managed to escape.

“We’re not really invisible, Sir. Just really hard to spot,” Swift corrected, poking her head up between the front seats. “Depending on how full the gem that was in it was, maybe five minutes. We didn’t bring any extras, did we?”

Lily shook her head. “I put some food, water, fuel, and ammunition in the trunk, but ‘go invisible’ crystals weren’t on the emergency shopping list.”

“No hope of using it to sneak by the dragons, then?” I asked, gently straightening a couple of Mags’s feathers. She stiffened from beak to paws, then went limp as a spaghetti noodle. resting her beak on my foreleg.

“We’re faster than most dragons right now,” Swift explained. “The large ones don’t fly very quickly and the smaller ones can’t burn through our armor. So long as they don’t know we’re coming, we should be able to outpace them.”

Lifting Mags off my lap, I set her on one of the heating vents. Warm air blew the fur on her belly into a poofy mess, and her eyes rolled back in her skull as she stretched out like an alley-cat across the dash. Unbuckling my seat-belt, I slid out of my seat and stood, watching as the city flew by around us. Lily was studying the navigation indicators on the vehicle’s heads up display with a slightly pouty frown that made me wonder what her lips tasted like. Even with sweat matting her mane to her neck and circles under her eyes, she was still beautiful.

Shaking the untoward thoughts from my mind, I forced myself to stare out at the city.

Dear old Detrot had not fared well in the half-light of the end times. I wondered, for a moment, exactly how many bodies were waiting out there to be discovered among the wreckage. How can a city or a world rebuild after so much terror and death?

Smoke trickled into the crimson sky from dozens of points across the land. I tried to pick out the Castle, but it was impossible with the thick cloud cover that was edging in over the horizon. Far away and underground, my best friend was doing goodness knows what to try to keep the survivors of the police department safe while I ran for the hills on what might well be an empty lead. Bad times.

“Lily, you have it together out here?” I asked. “I’m going to check on Jade.”

Her hooves quivered on the steering wheel, then tightened until the vinyl squeaked. Looking up, she met my eyes with the depressingly familiar look of a pony seeing a legion of ghosts for the first time.

“Hardy, I don’t even know what ‘together’ looks like anymore, but go do what you need to. My sister’s voice keeps reminding me that dreams are worth fighting for, but how am I supposed to have anything but nightmares?” Before I could answer, she exhaled sharply and slapped the wheel. “Ugh! Sorry. I told myself I wasn’t going to get into this self-pity stuff again. I just need to know where we’re going soon. It’s about an hour to the Wilds according to the navigation thingy, but all I told it was ‘out of town’.”

I pulled Taxi’s map out of my pocket and unfolded it, pointing to the circled ‘x’ where the pylon supposedly was. “Here. We’re going here.”

“Some of this is off road...”

Reaching out, I laid a hoof on her shoulder. She took a leg off the wheel to cover mine for a second. “You can do this, Lily. Let me know if you spot any fliers.”

“And...what should I do if I do see a dragon?” she asked.

“Pull over and get in the back. There are enough abandoned vehicles that if we catch them far enough ahead, we can probably hide ourselves until they’re gone.”

Turning back to focus on the road ahead, she nodded.

Tossing my coat and hat on my seat, I stepped into the back. The A.M.V.’s anterior cabin was about the size of my old dorm room at the Academy and lined with padded benches down both walls, each with a buckle above and a weapons rack below Swift was curled up on one with Masamane disassembled in front of her and a cleaning brush in her teeth. Across from her, a bony heap lay under a slightly dirty white sheet.

“Kid, you got any smelling salts on you?”

“Um...no, Sir, but gunpowder stinks. You could wave a bullet under her nose if you need to wake her up.”

“Sure, that’ll work. Where’s my armor?”

Swift gestured to a green locker wedged under one of the benches. I hauled it out and pushed the top open, finding my armor folded inside with a note pinned to it:

‘If you die out there, you better not leave a body. If I have to bring you back again, necromancy will be the least of your worries. - Sweet Shine, xoxo’

“My best friend, ladies and gentlecolts,” I sighed, plucking the note off and flicking it onto the floor, then beginning the laborious process of getting into the armor. Swift helped as best she could, and I was surprised to find I didn’t much mind letting her. After several minutes and with one final ‘ziiip’ up the back, Swift stepped back and I smoothed my disturbed mane.

“Sir—”

“Yes, kid, I’m doing this. No, I know this is stupid. Yes, I’m aware she’s probably going to find some way of injuring me even with the restrictor rings on her horn. No, that doesn’t change my-—”

Swift hooked her hoof into the neck of my armor and pulled me down to her eye height, giving me an even stare.

“Sir, I was going to ask if you want me to keep a gun on her.”

“Oh...yes, please.”

Releasing my neck, she trotted back to the bench she’d been sitting on and began quickly reassembling Masamane. I followed her with my gaze for a moment, then shook my head.

‘How quickly they grow up.’

Flicking my revolver open, I cocked out a bullet, sniffed it, then set it to one side.

“Mags! Get back here!” I called.

“I be warm!” she whined.

“Come on! I need a cute thing I can throw in front of a maniacal drug addict as a distraction!”

“Why you call me for that?!”

Shutting my eyes, I called on all of my considerable diplomatic skills and negotiating powers.

“There’s bacon in it for you!”

A second later Mags poked her head around the corner, then padded into the compartment, sat herself down at my hooves, and opened her beak expectantly.

“Nuhuh, you get paid after you do the work. I want some big kitten eyes, some purring, and if I survive, I’ll throw in a bonus from those meat snacks Swift smuggled on board.”

My partner made an indignant noise. “Sir, I didn’t smuggle any—”

“Kid, you want me to give her all of them? Because if I have to find them, I will.”

Swift’s ears sank, and she used a wing to point at an overhead bin. Flicking it open, I dug out a weighty paper package and stuffed it into my coat pocket.

“I’m not even going to ask where you got chicken in a police department surrounded by monsters,” I commented, then picked up my spare bullet and moved back to where Iris Jade lay, buckled into her seat with her head lolling over the side of the bench. I heard a soft click as Swift settled herself on her bench, pistol aimed at Jade’s forehead. “Are you actually planning on shooting her?”

“Sir, the first time I met her, she was assigning me to you hoping you’d make me quit the police department,” Swift replied, icily. “After we managed to barely survive bringing down one of the most dangerous crimelords in the city, instead of a medal, she locked me in a cage. I killed my best friend, lost my job, and ended up with wolf teeth. All the while, she was taking bribes and doing drugs. Her dealers sent the Princesses to the moon and made an eclipse cover the entire country and she covered for them! I also really hate bullies, so if she so much as breathes funny, I’ll blow her stupid horn off.”

I considered her words, then shrugged. “At least aim for an ear or a kneecap. We may need the horn attached.”

Sliding a hoof under Jade’s head, I lifted her into a sitting position. Her features were drawn, but she was breathing fairly normally to my untrained eye. I will admit, I was having the same feeling I always imagined that colt in that old fairy tale who’d volunteered to put a bell around a dragon’s neck so the people would always know it was coming must have had right at the climax. Of course, in the real world, there was less likelihood of the colt managing to stealthily bell the dragon, then run away and have a party with his loved ones, and more of the dragon catching the colt, tearing off all of his skin, cooking his organs, then letting him die to the charming jingle of a bell being added to the beast’s hoard.

Unclipping her seat-belt, I gently wafted the bullet under Iris Jade’s nose. Her muzzle wrinkled at the rancid ammonia scent, and she shifted in her sleep, but that was it. I gave her a shake for good measure.

“Wakey. It's time to taste the coffee and ashes."

Her sand-crusted eyes gradually opened. She studied me for a moment, then let herself sag in my forelegs.

“So...I’m dead then,” she whispered. “Eh, too bad. Still, I guess if you’re here already, that means somepony managed to get your sorry ass before I did. Knowing I outlived you makes it a little bit worth it.”

I grinned and dropped her.

She flailed at the air, trying to get some purchase before pitching off the bench. Jade hit the floor with a loud grunt, and then the rest of the dirty sheet flopped across her muzzle. Her hooves tangled in the cloth as she tried fitfully to get free.

“Nope! Still alive, Miss Iris Jade! The Chief of Police has need of your services!”

Act 3 Chapter 32 : A Road Trip With Iris Jade

Good ponies and bad ponies walk two sides of a razor thin line, separated by one bad day. I can't remember my last good day.

-Caught on a hot mic during the last Detrot election for Chief of Police.

Iris Jade.

Maniac, self-admitted multiple-murderer, corrupt cop, former drug addict, and mother.

She’d been a source of almost untold misery in my life, but also an ally. She’d managed to clean up big sections of the city while simultaneously undermining anything which might have stopped the most pernicious evils we faced. Certainly, she’d have turned me over to whoever was running the Biters if she thought it would earn her enough brownie points to ensure her daughter’s safety. I couldn’t really spite her for that, but hindsight is 20/20 and the extinction of all life on Equis is probably a high price for any one pony’s life.

Jade yanked the sheet off of her head and rolled onto her stomach, glaring blood and fire at me. Her horn let off a feeble spark, but nothing more. Reaching up, she touched the restrictor rings locked around its base, then let her leg drop. Her olive features were a bit waxy, but she looked none the worse for wear for having almost exploded an hour ago.

“I can break out of these, you know,” Jade murmured.

The sound of Masamane’s hammer cocking brought her head around.

“If you can do it without knees I will be super impressed, Ma’am,” Swift replied, casually adjusting her aim an inch. “The Chief wants you here, but I’m not going to let you hurt anypony.”

I don’t know what I expected, but a smile wasn’t it. Her razor-thin lips peeled away from her perfect white teeth like those of a tigress who knows her prey is lame. It started with a few weak chuckles, then developed into a manic, snorting laugh. Second later, she was howling like a mad pony, hugging her sides as she rolled back and forth on the floor of the truck.

“She be brain burnt?” Mags asked, peeking around my side.

“Yes and no,” I sighed.

Jade’s peals of laughter echoed around inside the tiny space until she’d worn herself out, lying there on her belly, all four legs splayed out and her chin resting on the steel bulkhead. Finally, after a few awkward seconds, she sat up with that unsettling grin still in place.

“Phew...I needed that. Chief Hard Boiled! Hah! Celestia’s backside, do you know how often I thought about dumping the department in your lap, you self-righteous crap stain?”

I pulled myself onto a bench and lifted Mags up beside me. “Yeah, well, everypony has times they’ve thought of quitting and moving to Haywaii. I’ve had a few today myself, and I’ve only been on the job a few hours. You want to fight, or you want to talk?”

She waved a hoof at my ward. “Oh, by all means, talk. I presume you brought her to keep me from deboning you? Where are her parents?”

“Her father died in the Moonwalk. These days, she’s a pretty fair little bodyguard,” I answered, plucking Swift’s meat snacks out of my pocket. Unrolling the little package, I popped a piece of smoked chicken into Mags’s beak. She let out a happy growl and pinned half of it under a claw so she could rip the morsel to messy shreds.

Jade’s eyebrows furrowed, and she touched her abdomen. “The last thing I remember is shelling open a can of beans. Did you hit me with some sort of anesthetic spell? My stomach feels like I’ve been curb stomped.”

I opened my muzzle to explain, then replayed the events of the last couple hours in my head.

'Yes, let's commit suicide with our mouths. That'll be fun,' I thought.

What I actually said was, “We had a mole in the department. They poisoned you, and then the Biters attacked the Castle. I called some allies of mine. Diamond dogs. We held until they burrowed in and evacuated the survivors. We took losses, but the civilians are safe.”

Maybe it was the catch in my breath, or the cold sweat that suddenly beaded on my brow, or possibly even the quick eye-roll from Swift, but I suspected I wasn’t very convincing.

“Hard Boiled, pretend, for a moment, that I am not an idiot. You obviously expect me to help you with something, else I’d be waking up in manacles or not waking up at all. Since I don’t see Sweet Shine behind the wheel up there, I imagine you left her in charge while you run off on the suicidal mission. This is an A.M.V. we’re sitting in, so you’re expecting dragons or we’d be in that crazy cab. That would tend to mean you’ve got us heading out of the city.”

I dipped my chin. “True. There’s a lead on our enemies in the deep Wilds. Even in an A.M.V., we’re probably going to be attacked by something. You’re—”

“—the heavy artillery,” she grunted, crawling up onto a seat. “Good to know our years of mutual respect and trust have reduced me to a horn with legs.”

I gave her a dubious look, then shook my head. “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. Either way, we both get something out of this. I need not to die and you need the city not to burn to the ground, because the one thing I know you love happens to be sittin’ pretty in it.”

Jade rested her cheek against the bulkhead, one eye still on me. Swift’s gun seemed not to bother her in the least.

“I suspect you saved my life,” she said, after a moment, her tone suddenly somber. “I’ll tell you, I hated that job. Watching you have to take those particular reins has a certain satisfaction to it, particularly since I doubt you’ll get the chance to put them down before somepony kills you. Still, I guess you can’t possibly fail any more completely than I have. I presided over the end of the department in all but name.”

“You kept them alive,” I murmured, toying with my revolver’s bit. “That’s more than I think most could have, given the circumstances.”

Flicking one eye at her hummingbird and flower cutie-mark she shook her head.

“My talent is supposed to be delicacy, Hard Boiled. I used to be able to hold a hurt bird in my magic while I reset his bones and he’d not let out so much as a peep. Then I took that job. I campaigned because I thought there was something good in the city that deserved a champion. I fought through the deaths of several of my friends and subordinates without losing that hope. Then the Cyclones fed a rookie named Ambergris a thousand needles and left him for his wife and children to find.” Her teeth clenched as an uncharacteristic tear gathered in the corner of her eye.

“I tried to fix a blue-jay’s wing the week of his funeral. One stray thought of the terrified, tortured look in Ambergris’s eyes when he died, and I crushed that poor creature into paste in the time it took me to blink.” Exhaling, she rubbed her cheek on the cool metal. “The birds don’t come to my window anymore. Now, it’s only mad Detectives who think this world can be saved. I admit to wondering, from time to time, when you’ll end up crushed. I can’t say it’ll bother me half so much as that little songbird did.”

“I don’t know if we can save it, but you’d never have tried to help those birds if you thought there was nothing worth saving,” I said, quietly. “If you want out, though, I can have Lily pull over.”

Brushing herself off, Jade tugged bits of her scorched pant suit off and flicked them into a corner before laying her head on her forelegs. “You know I’ll help, damn you. Cerise deserves another mother, but she’s got me. This city deserves you. I might hate you, but it won’t bring the birds back.” Snatching the sheet off the floor, she wrapped it around herself again. “Call me when you need something killed.”

I contemplated Iris’s bony back for a long minute, ruffling Mags’s neck fur. Swift tapped her pistol against her leg and flicked her blue eyes at me. The question was right there, hanging between us like a spinning coin after the bets are down.

Pulling myself off the padded bench, I trotted over to where Jade lay. Reaching over her, I ran my toe down the restrictor rings on her horn. They clicked open and dropped onto the seat. Without another word or waiting to see what she might do, I dragged myself onto one of the benches, put my head between my forelegs, and shut my eyes.

As though we’d crossed a line in the dirt, the city had fallen away, leaving only the dark horizon and the shadows of an uneven treeline in the distance. Farmlands stretched as far as the eye could see, and charming little houses sprouted at the ends of dirt paths. They might have lent the place a cheerfully rustic air if not for how many of them were half-burnt or seemed to have been sacked by looters. There were still a few cars and carts to dodge, but there weren’t many recent signs of equine habitation. Belongings were strewn across some of the yards, while most of the surviving houses were boarded up from cellar to rooftop.

We hadn’t seen any dragons yet, but the signs of their passing were everywhere; entire fields were burnt or flattened, and sections of the road were reduced to black glass. The pervasive silence—broken only by the muted engine of our transportation—was starting to give me a major case of nerves.

Then came some more bad news.

“Sir? We’re being followed,” Swift murmured, peering out one of the circular portholes mounted above each of the bench seats.

“What’d you see?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just caught a glimpse. Something moving in the sky. It crossed a couple of stars. It might be a dragon, but if it is, it’s trying to be sneaky or it’s pretty far away.”

“There be more than one,” Mags added, her tail lashing against her ankles as she watched another of the windows on the opposite side. “Want my gun.”

I contemplated our options. Stop and fight seemed like a good way to get everyone killed. Biters or dragons, my combat style favored close engagements and while Swift might have been perfectly happy in a dogfight, there were three other ponies and a griffin who were ground bound.

“Lily, slow us down,” I ordered. “Swift, get out and charge the Hailstorm, then come back. If you see anything, don’t engage. Just report.”

“Yes, Sir. Back in a jiffy.”

Swift saluted, then grabbed a drawstring bag from under her bench and began wriggling into the Hailstorm’s boxy saddlebags. The gun’s turrets lazily lifted out of their mountings, seeming to peer around for a moment before sinking back.

Once dressed, she poked a button on the wall, and a metal ladder dropped from the ceiling, slotting into grooves on the floor. Crawling to the top, Swift heaved open a circular metal hatch on the roof. As Lily applied the brakes, Swift launched herself into the sky.

Iris Jade, who’d been lying in an ill-tempered heap facing the wall for the last twenty minutes, roused herself into a sitting position. “Hrmph. I’m stunned you haven’t gotten her killed, yet.”

“The night’s young,” I grunted, pulling Mags’s gun out of my pocket and tossing it to her.

“Explain something to me. Is it just an ego thing?” Jade asked, and I caught a hint of disapproval as she watched my ward crack her breech and check the rounds inside.

“Excuse me?” I growled.

“Why drag these children around with you?” Pushing herself up, she hopped off her seat and trotted to one of the portholes to get her own look outside. “Sweet Shine I can understand; she’s mentally ill and might be one of five ponies in the city I’d have some genuine worries about rumbling with. Cuddles worships you, but you could have left her behind. Same with this chick and that filly behind the wheel. You even keep that little colt with you…the Archivist. He’s barely older than Cuddles. Why keep this bunch with you, if not for your ego? That was certainly Juniper’s reason for keeping you around.”

“My ego has nothing to do with it,” I answered, not rising to the bait. “Swift’s proved herself twenty times over. If she were going to die easy, she already would have. As for the rest...I could have taken another cop to drive, but Lily volunteered and time was short. Mags is my responsibility, and I promised Lim’s father I’d take care of him. Do you have any more loaded questions?”

She shrugged and went back to watching the horizon. “I’m sure I’ll think of a few. I suppose, if I’m to be your protection on this little adventure, I should know where we’re going.”

Easing Taxi’s map out of my pocket, I tossed it to her. Catching it in her magic, she unfolded and studied it.

“Mmmm...it would be there, wouldn’t it?” she mused. “That’s a Shield Pylon, isn’t it?”

I jerked my head up. “Pardon?”

Jade set the map down and leaned against the wall, examining her scuffed hooves. “It’s the sort of thing a pony only notices after she’s been sober for a few weeks. It does explain the magical ‘lockdown’ they’re in, though, doesn’t it? I’d thought that was some wartime enchantment to keep them from being tampered with if the city fell or there were riots in the streets. Considering how secretive the Shield Corporation is, it’s the type of feature they’d conveniently ‘forget’ to tell the police department about.”

“I’ve been chasing down that lead since the damn eclipse! Are you telling me you knew?!”

Raising her eyes, Iris nodded her horn over the papers. “Did I know that the Shield Pylons were a giant spell framework? Yes, I knew that. Every colt and filly learns that. Did I suspect they might have other purposes than simply repelling monsters? No, but it’s obvious when you think about it.”

I shut my eyes, tight as they would go. The comforting darkness behind my eyelids was all that was keeping me from slamming my head against a wall until I could get some lovely blood and crunchy skull noises to mask my pain at the world’s stupid.

“What else?”

“Nothing that matters now, I suppose,” she murmured, refolding the map. “Just that I diverted police resources away from several cases around those things at the behest of my...heh...my dealers. Oh, they never mentioned the pylons explicitly, but...now that I think about it, the pattern is there. Who knows? I might have had some mental resources to devote to the topic if I hadn’t been cleaning up after an insufferable idiot who couldn’t manage to keep me in the loop over the last several months, even when he was working for me.”

Before I could explain to Jade—possibly with gunfire—what I thought of that excuse, a soft thump on the roof announced Swift’s return. She knocked three times on the hatch, and Jade spun it open. Rolling into the compartment, she caught the ladder and slid to the ground, panting like a puppy who’d just gone for a run. The Hailstorm’s turrets were out of their mountings, peering back and forth alertly.

“Sir, we’ve got problems,” Swift breathed, folding her wings tight against her sides. Sweat dripped from her eyelashes and forehead as she tried to get her breathing under control. “I...ah...I didn’t get a good look at whoever is following us. They’re pretty quick, though. Not as quick as me, but they kept to the cloud layer and played hoofsies until they were out of range. If there’s more than one, they’re not going to have any problems tracking us. This thing sticks out like a sore leg.”

“Those creatures I ran into at the Castle weren’t the sort who’d run. They were almost like...berserkers,” I mused. “Different species, maybe?”

“I don’t know, Sir. Whatever it was didn’t seem interested in a fight.”

“Wait, wait, wait! What creatures are these?” Jade broke in, her horn flickering. My armor let out a little squeak and a squirt of sparks. Iris frowned, letting her magic die. “I really must get used to not being able to grab you by the throat. Never mind! Did you actually see Biters at the Castle?”

“There might be more than one variety, but yes,” I explained. “The ones that managed to get in were ugly. Big teeth, bulky, heavy, fast...strange legs with too many joints. Armored bodies. They were definitely ponies, or at least, used to be.”

“You...you think I’d end up like that if Tourniquet hadn’t stopped the spell inside me?” Swift whispered, covering her mouth with a hoof.

“Considering what Sweet Shine’s father looked like and what was left of that poor idiot who Dogenes was keeping on ice, I’d say we’re looking at some hardcore transformative magics. Stone Shine was a prototype. Canyon was a failure. The Biters? They’re something else. Probably the final model.”

Jade looked back and forth between us, then stamped her hoof. “Dammit, I am missing information here! Dogenes? The diamond dog? What’s he got to do with this? For that matter, what does Canyon? Last I saw that fool, he’d just stuck his muzzle under my skirt at a party and earned himself a shattered jaw! And Stone Shine is in Tartarus! How the blast is he involved?!”

“Uh…” I hesitated, then called toward the front. “Lily? How’s our time frame?”

“We’ll be hitting the woods in twenty minutes if I’m reading this display right!” she shouted back. “Still not seeing any dragons!”

I sat down opposite her. “Then, Miss Jade, I think it’s time I told you everything.”

Despite my looks, I’m not actually that stupid. Of course, I didn’t tell her everything. Granted, since I didn’t know what was actually important to the case at the time, nothing I held back mattered in the least.

The look on Jade’s face mixed skepticism, distemper, and a hint of admiration.

“Such a body count,” Iris mused, running a hoof through her wiry mane. “Between your career and your most recent actions, I am both curious to see and horrified to consider what you might do if given some proper resources.”

I watched Mags lazing about on one of the air vents and sighed. “You know, Iris, it’s when you say things like that that I remember why we don’t like each other.”

“Then, leaving aside the obvious and gaping holes in that very condensed story of secret princesses, changelings, shadowy armies right under my nose, and Sweet Shine’s father somehow being involved in the creation of the Jewelers, why are you still doing this? Hard Boiled, you died. That should be a warning sign that you’re out of your league! There must be somepony in this city better suited—”

“Actually, by my count I’ve died at least three times, now,” I interjected, tapping my chest. “As you say, though, that’s a lot for anypony. I think the primary reason I’m still working is that I do keep dying. It’s a rare privilege. Most ponies are relegated to the single attempt, and I keep getting do-overs.”

Swift, who’d been preening herself after her flight, raised her head and smirked. “Sir, didn’t Taxi also threaten to raise you from the dead if there was anything left of your body just so she could hurt you for dying again?”

“Yes, well, there’s that too. Point being, I’ve got no choice, and I’m the one who is best suited. My talent doesn’t negotiate. Neither do my friends.”

Jade sucked her teeth at that. “Eh...Best suited, or too dumb to quit. I suppose the two aren’t that different in the end.”

From the front seat, Lily called, “Hardy! We’re almost to the border!”

Welcome to the jungle.

The zone beyond the Shield-protected borders of the city was a vast temperate forest stretching for hundreds of kilometers north and south. A few picturesque little villages might be found amongst the trees, but the cost of maintaining small P.A.C.T. teams or similar protective bodies was sometimes prohibitive. It made homesteading dangerous, but there has never been a lack of mad optimists and misanthropes willing to find their own little plot amongst the unclaimed territories.

Technically, all of it was ‘Equestria’, protected by both the Equestrian Army and the diarchy, but in a meaningful sense there were just some bits nopony had gotten around to sticking their muzzles into. Highways and outposts traversed the forests, and most of the dangerous wildlife knew that it was a bad idea to go after anything on or near the road networks, but there’s never really been a cost effective way of making all that forest safe; too many ancient enchantments, uncontrolled magics, and weird mutant lifeforms like to spring out of such places.

Thankfully, the most dangerous of them tended to be the smartest and the smartest had learned the one unequivocal law of surviving in the Wilds from the Dragon Lords themselves:

Don’t screw with ponies.

Of course, lately, all bets were off.

Driving to Tartarus Correctional is one thing. It’s in the general direction of Equestria’s interior. Driving out beyond the farmlands, beyond the outposts, and toward the border is something else. It’s a place of trees as far as the eye can see, punctuated only by an occasional mountain or hill.

Last I’d been out this way, Juniper died. I supposed that could explain the trembling in my tail that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard I clenched it between my back legs.

The tension wasn’t helped by the close proximity of Iris Jade. As I sat in the passenger seat, Lily studied the navigation map, and Iris stood between us in the aisle, watching the sky. Her mane was lank and flat, her eyes distant, but funny as it might sound, she seemed calmer, more relaxed, and was even smiling now and then when she glanced at the badge dangling from my neck.

As the trees closed in overhead and the road narrowed to four lanes, Lily flicked on the headlamps. The thick pines seemed intent on reclaiming the road, reaching over the low concrete barriers on either side to clutch at their neighbors on the opposite side. So far out, there weren’t any more vehicles to be seen and even fewer exits.

“How are we doing for time?” I asked.

“Mmm...this dumb spell doesn’t calculate for off road,” Lily muttered, poking at the dash. “Maybe a half hour from the turn off, then another half hour to the valley. That’s just guesses, though.”

Jade hummed a note, gesturing at the map. “Hard Boiled, we’re going to be out from under the part of the border that the Shield usually protects here very soon. The spells on the road network might keep the tarmac, but they won’t keep a chimera from deciding we’re a snack once we turn off. You have a plan for that?”

“We’ve got ordinance for a chimera. Not worried about big uglies. More worried about the small and plentiful ones. The next logging village is almost sixty miles deep. Assume anything we encounter between here and there is hostile. Rogue changelings, parasprites, ogres, giant spiders...everything. Whatever Swift saw is still out there somewhere, too.”

Despite my reservations, our luck was still holding when we turned off onto a two lane road and headed further into the woods. A blinding fog was rolling in from somewhere, despite the breezeless forest, but Lily activated another of the A.M.V’s seemingly endless features which turned the windscreen bright green, showing an almost perfectly clear image of the road ahead.

Not that there was much to see. The trees were growing thicker, older, and taller the farther we went, but at the speeds the truck was capable of they might as well have been a black wall. Shortly, the only light penetrating the sucking dark was our own headlamps.

I heard a soft sniff. Mags was sitting up, her beak in the air.

“Do you smell something?” I asked.

Her feathers puffed out. “Mmm...Not know. I smell...scared...”

“Sir, I smell it, too,” Swift added, nervously. “I can’t put my hoof on it...but I swear, it’s familiar. Maybe something I smelled in training?” Her eyes went wide as she scrambled to her hooves. Spinning to face the wall, her head slowly tilted back until she was staring up at the corner. “Oh poop!”

A sound that made every inch of fur on my body stand straight rolled out of the woods and seemed to go on and on, stiffening every muscle in my body. It was the scream of a raging steamroller receiving a kick in the genitals projected through a dozen loudspeakers. The noise vibrated deep in my chest, leaving a cold. Mags shrieked and dove into my lap, burrowing underneath my coat.

“Lily, can’t this thing go any faster?!” I shouted.

“Not unless you want me to put up in a tree! I’m already having trouble keeping us on the road!”

Fighting my way free of my seatbelt, I pressed my muzzle against the window, cradling Mags to my chest. “Kid, what’s out there?”

Swift didn’t reply. Her ears were pinned back as she stood there on unsteadily trembling legs. Her wings were half-extended, the feathers shivering with fear. Whatever she was seeing on the Hailstorm’s display had her rooted to the spot.

“Ah...Hard Boiled, don’t you recognize hydra musk?” Jade chuckled, cocking an ear as that horrible cry shook the vehicle hard enough to rattle the suspension. “Mmm, sounds like a big one, too. Maybe eight or nine heads. I don’t suppose you have a notion for fighting something that size?”

“We can outrun it and—”

Swift’s panicked voice broke in. “Sir, we can’t! It’s ahead of us! We just entered the musk field! It’s trying to head us off!”

A quick-tempoed thumping noise started up, like a heartbeat coming straight out of the ground. It was quickly followed by the sound of breaking foliage as something approached at high speed. Lily put on a bit more speed, but the beast wasn’t getting any farther away. If anything, it seemed to be getting closer.

“Lily, look for any turn off! Anything!”

“I’m looking! There’s nothing on the map but more trees for about two miles!”

Swift bared her teeth at the wall. “Creatures that big aren’t supposed to come this close to the border. This is the P.A.C.T.’s job!”

My heart rate was picking up, and I licked dry lips. Even with the A.M.V., a hydra was a nasty customer. Larger members of the species had been known to decimate the populations of small villages in the olden days, but I’d never seen one any closer than the tiny versions kept in the city zoo.

I glanced at Iris, who was looking far too calm and smug. She returned my look with a little smirk, crossing her forelegs.

Shutting my eyes, I mustered my dignity and asked, “You’re about to say something that’s going to make me wish I’d left you for the Biters, aren’t you?”

Jade casually got to her hooves, bracing her hip against the edge of my seat. “Well, I would never claim you were unperceptive.” Reaching down, she touched Mags with her horn. My ward’s eyelids fluttered slid shut, and she went limp in my legs, letting out a soft snore. “You’re a gormless ape who should be dangled, fleshless, from the walls of the police department and whose grave I will gleefully waltz upon one day, but...not unperceptive. How many do I owe you?”

Another roar from the beast set my nerves jangling. It was getting closer.

“Owe me?!” I snapped.

“Oh...for the various indignities I’m going to find out you inflicted upon my person while I was unconscious. You didn’t, perchance, parade me through the middle of the Castle with those restrictor rings on my horn, did you?”

I gulped and leaned as far from her as I could in the cramped cabin. Her smile only widened as she saw the truth behind my eyes.

“Is this really the time for this?!” I pleaded.

“Oh, I can think of no better time, Hard Boiled! Public humiliation after public humiliation, and...suddenly, you need me, and I lose nothing by helping you! Isn’t this rich?” Jade tilted her head towards the general direction the crashing footsteps seemed to be coming from. “Mmm...he sounds mad, doesn’t he? Probably crack this truck like an egg. Now then, accounting for my rather ignominious treatment and the fact that you kissed my daughter and forcibly took my job, balanced against saving my life…”

I jammed my head around the corner of the seat. “Swift! Can you fight that thing?!”

My partner was still standing there, the turrets of the Hailstorm frosted from barrel to base as they spun in their mounts. “Not in these trees, Sir! Night flying in a forest is how you die!”

“Crap…”

Now, I’m aware there are those in the world who’ll ask themselves why Iris would decide that was the time to torment me for her own amusement. Anyone who would ask doesn’t know Iris Jade very well. In all the years since I’d met her, fought with her, tried to get one over on her, and generally been a thorn in her side, there was always one essential understanding between us; Iris always gets the last laugh.

Petty? Yes, very. However, it was a truth that was all but inescapable. Revenge was one of the driving characteristics of her psychology, and she’d never have brought the matter up if she wasn’t aware of exactly how the cards would fall.

“Jade...if you have an idea, I’m open to accepting my own ape-hood, here,” I sighed, defeated.

“Ideas? Oh, I have many ideas!” Jade snickered, daintily pulling her mane back from her horn. “Tallying everything up, though, I know just the thing. Something to give me smiles all throughout my retirement. No maiming, of course, but...I get to record whatever I decide to do to you for posterity. Do we have an accord?”

Trees at the edge of the road began to shake and roll as the stink filtering in from outside became almost overpowering. The fog had thickened until I couldn’t see more than a meter out of the side windows. The creature was going to be on us in seconds.

I shut my eyes, tasting the sourness of defeat. She had me. Again.

Jade clapped her hooves together gleefully. “Lovely! Pull over, Miss Blue. I’ll be back in a jiffy!”

Before I could ask just what she meant, there was a loud snap, and a compression wave made my ears pop as she vanished.

“She’s...crazy,” Lily muttered. “I mean, I knew the stories, but I never thought she’d use a hydra attack to get somepony to let her...do...wait, what is she going to do?”

“I’ve no idea,” I replied, carefully picking up Mags’s sleeping form, popping open the glove box, and tucking her inside. “You heard her. Pull over.”

Lily hit the brakes, skidding into the gravel at the side of the road. “Wait a second! Hardy, did you just agree to let a psychotic mare, who hates your guts, do whatever she likes to you without knowing what that is?!”

Outside, the hydra’s howls changed tempo, rising to an enraged crescendo. The sound of ripping trees was soon accompanied by vicious snarling as battle was joined. Bits of dirt and debris rained down on the roof.

“Two reasons,” I explained, “One? Jade is, despite everything, probably on our side. If some humiliation is what it takes to buy the loyalty of somepony who can rumble with a hydra, bring on the whoopee cushions. I’ll let her enchant my head so I always talk like I’ve got a mouthful of peanut butter, if it means she’s working for us.”

I leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the epic fight that sounded like it was just a few meters beyond the end of the truck’s bonnet. There wasn’t much to see, unfortunately; mostly swaying trees and swirling dust, punctuated with flashes of blinding light through the branches.

“I know I’m going to regret this, but...what’s the other reason?” Lily asked.

Swift stuck her head between the seats. “Sir, I think I know this one.”

I shifted in my seat, reaching over to pin one of her chest pouches shut. “Oh? Alright, kid. Thrill me.”

”Is it because if Iris Jade thinks she can get revenge, she won’t let any of us die until she’s got it and had time to enjoy it?”

A tree branch the size of a small car crashed down from the sky, landing a few inches from the end of our bumper. A terrified and strangely familiar squirrel with a bit of what might have been cabbage in his teeth was clinging to one end, staring at the smoking ruin of what’d surely been a very nice nest. He looked up at me right through the windshield, and his beady little eyes almost popped out of his head. Leaping off the remains of his home, he scampered away into the underbrush.

“Nicely done, kid. Like she said, whatever Iris plans, she will want witnesses. You two aren’t hardly enough.”

Lily gave me an incredulous look. “And...that’s...okay, with you, is it?”

“Short term? Yeah, it’ll probably be hideous. She’s very creative. In the long run? I’m very okay with it, because whatever she does, it can’t possibly be worse than watching the planet and everyone I love die.”

There was an earthshaking howl of fury from someplace beyond the treeline that was cut short by a sound that’d no business coming from something that size: a feminine squeal of distress. I saw the briefest flash of a gigantic eye through the foliage which disappeared almost immediately, followed by a thunderclap and then, silence. I held my breath, watching for some sign. Swift stood beside me, her hooves up on the dash, scanning back and forth across the green-lit windshield.

After a full minute, the pounding of the beast’s giant feet returned. It’s gait sounded somehow uneven, as though the creature was staggering drunkenly about. A sudden, high pitched, keening moan shook every bolt in the vehicle. Several more joined in, creating an orchestral movement of pained whimpering.

The footsteps began to slowly move away from us, still shaking the ground, though much lighter. I had a strange image of the creature gingerly goose-stepping deeper into the woods.

My lungs began to burn, and I exhaled, loudly, slumping against the door. A minute or two passed in silence before Swift leaned over and touched my foreleg.

“Sir, do...do you think we should get out and go...I don’t know...look for Miss Jade?” she asked, softly.

I looked at her out of one eye. “Kid, that was a hydra. Think about what you just said.”

Swift’s ears pinned back as she sheepishly mulled over her own words. “Sorry, Sir. Can I blame that on being tired? The last time I slept right at all was while I was interfacing with Tourniquet…”

“Nightmares?”

She nodded a little. “Princess Luna is going to have so much work to do when she gets back…”

I was about to reply when from of the fog emerged an equine shape, prancing toward us between the beams of our headlights. Something was hovering along beside it, held in a field of green magic. The grin on Iris Jade’s face was from ear to ear, though she seemed to be breathing a bit heavily and was drenched in something that looked to have discolored her fur to an off brown. I couldn’t make out what she was carrying, but it looked fleshy and was dripping a viscous fluid.

Lifting the gooey mass, she slapped it down on the roof of the A.M.V. with a wet ‘splat’. The stink that filtered in was enough to set everypony retching; a mixture of unwashed jockstraps, rotting meat, and skunk fumes. My eyes blurred as I flailed about on the dashboard.

“S-Swift! Swift, tell me this thing has…*cough*...air filters!”

My partner was in a corner, depositing her lunch into an open locker. “Central console, little button with a fan on it!” she gasped.

It took an agonizing thirty seconds to find the button as my lungs begged for anything besides hydra musk. I finally found the button, and fans in the floorboards roared to life. Sweet, clean air blew through the cabin, and I all but collapsed back in my seat, taking deep breaths.

The back hatch of the A.M.V. opened, then quickly shut, only letting in a whiff which was just enough to set off my gag reflex again. I pushed past Swift into the back compartment. In the low light, all I could make out was a dripping form with bright eyes and a slightly sinister smile. Streams of something foul were flowing off of all four of her legs.

“Iris?”

“Yes, Hard Boiled?”

“Towel?”

“Yes, please.”

Tugging open one of the underseat compartments, I pulled out a police-issue blanket and some disinfectant, balled them together, and shoved the package across the floor in Jade’s direction. The stink coming off of her was pretty righteous, but funnily enough not as bad as the outside of the hydra. Picking up the towel, she squirted some disinfectant into her fur and began wiping down. I waited patiently while she got a bit of the blood out of her mane, then sat on my haunches and nodded at the ceiling. Lily and Swift were both staring back at the two of us with wide eyes, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Now, Iris...I’ve got to ask and I don’t really want to, because I know this is a ‘truth hurts’ situation, but what did you put on the roof?”

Jade wrang some hydra juice out of her tail.

“Musk glands,” she replied. “They’ll protect us from any of the other local carnivores. I figured he also needed a lesson in respect that he won’t soon forget.”

“Wait...he?”

Swift’s ears pinned back as she explained, “Sir, the male Equestrian giant hydra’s musk gland is in its reproductive...uh...reprod...re...oog...” She trailed off, leaving a many month pregnant silence in her wake.

Jade tossed the blood-soaked towel in my face.

“Hehehe...So many heads and still only two of those. I wonder if four will grow in their place...”

I felt suddenly faint as what she’d done sank in.

I staggered, putting a hoof on one of the benches for stability as my tail tucked itself tightly between my rear legs.

‘Right. Good. Just...just going to have a little lay down, now.’

*thump*

Act 3 Chapter 33: In The Dead Hours Of The Morning

Souls, like magic, are things that we can generally experience and identify, but can’t really explain.

Some might call it an unfortunate problem with magic that while we can observe and control many of its effects, we don’t know how most of them actually work. One constant has been observed in all of our research and is now known as ‘Hoofenberg's Arcane Irritation Theory'; observation by a creature with a soul will alter a magical field by the mere presence of that soul. Observation by anything without a soul will not.

Hoofenberg so named his theory after attempting, for months, to assess why his experiment on a magical crystal in a vacuum would suffer specific deviations whenever he looked at it through the glass of his viewing station or on a live camera, but not when seen through a recording.

Working backwards, he eliminated variables until the only one remaining was the presence of what he dubbed ‘a manifest, undefined presence’; an altogether unhelpful definition, but it did get him a re-up of his study grants.

Zebra necromancers claim the soul is the ‘divine spark’ granted by their gods at the beginning of life on Equis, but proof of that is in short supply. This hasn’t stopped them from working out all sorts of hideous ways of messing about with that spark before it passes into whatever place it would otherwise go. However, young shamans are always cautioned that if souls are indeed some aspect of their high holies' power, they should be treated with respect, lest their gods come seeking an explanation of exactly why they’ve got a few dozen shambling, undead sparks of divinity doing the laundry and washing up.

-The Scholar

Slap!

“Hrg...”

Slap!

“Buh...”

Slap!

“Ouch!”

“Um...Miss Jade, are you trying to wake him up?”

“What? Oh. I suppose it might have that side-effect. This is just more fun than waiting.”

Slap!

Lily cradled my cheek with an ice pack, running a hoof through my mane as we sat together in the back of the truck. Swift and Jade were nowhere to be seen. Nor was Mags, for that matter, but I didn’t have the energy to contemplate that just then.

“Could you have maybe stopped her from hitting me?” I asked, softly.

“Hardy, she just clipped a hydra and mounted its bits on the roof,” Lily said, resting her muzzle against my neck.

“Mrph...”

“If you don’t mind, why did you faint?”

I looked up into her eyes, which held nothing but curiosity and sympathy, wishing in my heart of hearts I could lie to her. Unfortunately, Lily was one of those ponies who teased my honest streak.

“Jade and I have history,” I replied, sitting up. “It’s been a stressful day, and I very suddenly realized how many times I dodged one particularly violent bullet by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin.”

Lily pursed her lips, then wrinkled her nose as she parsed my answer.

“You...you don’t think she’d have done that to you, do you? I mean, a hydra is one thing, but-”

I shuddered, pulling my hooves under my barrel. “She kept a carrot peeler in her desk, Lily. It was in the same drawer she kept her pistol and pills. Knowing what I now do about some of her extracurricular activities, I’m pretty sure she’d have had Slip Stitch make her a nice brooch and earring set out of my very personal anatomy if our relationship had continued in that vein much longer. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m fine, now. Where are we?”

Lily reluctantly let go, stretching languorously as she got to her hooves. “Well, Miss Jade moved that tree that fell on the road, and I drove us a little farther on. Everyone else is outside sorting the supplies. We’re about ten minutes from the turn off, according to the map.”

Dropping the ice pack, I shook my unruly mane out of my eyes and nodded toward the driver’s seat. “Could you start the truck and get us ready to move? I don’t want to be in one place too long, just in case a female hydra decides she likes our smell. Jade can’t kill every ugly thing that’ll come out of this forest.”

“Oooh...I didn’t even think of that. Ugh! I hate this place! My father would have called these woods ‘meaner’n a wet panther’.” A sad smile crossed her face, and she added, “I might have, too, if Ruby didn’t drag me to her high falutin’ voice lessons. Never thought I’d be using them so soon, though.”

“If we manage to save the world, I want to hear you sing for me. Now come on. I’ll get the peanut gallery, and we can get this over with.”

Trotting to the back hatch, I pushed it open and jumped out. The stink hit me in the face like a physical object, and I spent a half minute just fighting my own stomach. It was a battle hard won, and neither side was willing to predict which way the war might go.

‘Don’t look at the roof. Don’t look at the roof. Don’t look at the roof.’

Iris and my partner were both standing beside one of the larger luggage ports lining the A.M.V.’s armored belly, sifting through piles of supplies. Mags was curled up on Jade’s back, her face hidden in the bony mare’s mane.

“Miss Cuddles, tell me there’s a reason there’s a griffin military ration in with the ammunition?” Jade asked, magicking a silvery package out of an ammo box.

“I was hungry when we were packing!” Swift replied, grabbing it out of midair and hugging it to her chest.

I tapped the side of the truck to get their attention, and when they both looked up, I noticed they were wearing noseplugs. “We ready to move?”

“Yes, Sir!” Swift chirped, stuffing the ration pack back into the compartment and slamming it closed. “The Hailstorm is ready, all of our guns are loaded, and the fuel tank is full!”

“You know, I wondered how you survived the last couple of months,” Jade commented. “Assigning you this one was a mistake. She probably extended your lifespan by a solid six weeks, at least.”

“Um...thanks...maybe?” my partner said, giving the unicorn a wary look.

“Speaking of innocents you’re likely to get killed: here.” Iris lifted Mags off her back, carefully levitating the sleeping bundle across my shoulders. “She will sleep for at least three hours with the spell I laid on her. You need to feed her more fiber and fewer sweets. Also, I have a book on teaching children to preen their own feathers that you will read.”

“Do I detect a threat?” I asked.

She shrugged her spindly shoulders and trotted around the back of the giant truck as the engine let out a lively bellow.

“Do I need to include one?”

A further five miles into the deep forest and the trees had grown to a huge height, completely cutting off light from above and leaving the road in permanent shadow. I found myself wishing Taxi were there beside me, if only for a hoof to hold. Praying to Celestia for her safety felt a bit pointless, but I whispered a few words anyway.

The local fauna seemed to be keeping clear, but that was probably down to our new roof ornament. Jade had strapped the hydra’s ‘glands’ to the rack up top with a bit of rope to hold them in place, though considering the splashes of stinking pheromonal fluid slowly dribbling down the sides, it might not have been strictly necessary; the A.M.V. would never be clean again.

“Lily, I know you said off road, but that navigation spell wouldn’t drag us into the woods, would it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied, squinting, “It says this is the right general direction, but there’s nothing marked on the map.”

“This pylon is in the middle of nowhere, so they must have some way of getting to it, right? For maintenance, if nothing else.”

Lily nodded. “I don’t think pegasi could fly through all those branches, though, and...wait! I see something! What is that?”
\

She pointed through the windshield at a narrow break in the trees just ahead; a thin gravel track abutted on either side by vast, gnarled oaks. A ‘no trespassing’ sign dangled from a chain hung between the two trees nearest the road. Pulling us into the drive, she let the engine idle as we studied the road disappearing into the dark forest.

“Huh. Alright, I suppose that’s as good as any.” Leaning around the seat, I called into the back. “We’ve got a chain across a trail here that might be headed in the right direction! Swift?”

My partner nodded, then opened the hatch and jumped out, flying around the side to reappear in our headlamps. Unlatching the chain, she hauled it out of the way, then waved us through.

“Keep our speed low,” I murmured. “Watch for places to turn around. Trying to back this heap out of here is going to be a nightmare.”

“Oh Celestia above,” Lily whispered as pulled us onto the track. “I’m driving an armoured truck, in the dark, in the middle of a monster-infested wilderness to chase leads with a crazy detective pony! What am I doing with my life?!”

“Did that hit you just now?” I asked.

“Yes, it did.” She exhaled, tucked a lock of her bright red mane behind one ear, and squeezed the wheel more tightly. “Hardy, if I volunteer for anything ever again, I want you to kick me right in the nose.”

“I can’t promise that, but just imagine being the crazy detective pony.”

“No offense—because I really like you—but I don’t think I want to…”

We traveled deeper and deeper, farther from the safety of the road network. The track was a rutted mess of washboard gravel that the truck’s suspension handled as best it could while still managing to almost shake my teeth loose. Armed, armored, and as ‘ready for anything’ as a group whose definition of ‘anything’ had been stretched to the breaking point could be, we slowly approached the glowing green dot on the truck’s navigation system that marked our destination. The trail ahead of us was unlit, but a pair of deep-worn cart tracks showed that at least somepony had come our way sometime in recent history.

After about two minutes on the road, the scales on my flanks had started to ache.

I was restlessly chewing on a dried apricot from a ration I’d found in the glove box and peering out the side window when Lily let out a startled gasp and slammed on the brakes hard enough to pin me to my seatbelt.

Spitting out the apricot, I snapped my trigger bit into my teeth.

“What?! What is it?!” Swift yelped, wedging her nose between the seats.

“Sorry, sorry! It’s...it’s just a gate!” Lily gasped, then added, a bit lamely, “I almost hit it…”

I took a few deep breaths, trying to quiet my racing heart. In the headlights, I could just make out a stone wall a little taller than my head blocking the path ahead with a thick wooden gate in the middle made of what looked like railroad ties. The wall disappeared into the trees on both sides.

“Sir, I think we’re there,” Swift said, pointing at the map. The little arrow that represented us was almost directly overlaying the destination marker.

“Mmm...That wall is enchanted,” Jade said. “Heavily enchanted. You want to continue this mad adventure, you’re doing in on hoof. Somepony paid a pretty penny for those spells.”

“What kind of enchantments are we talking here?” I asked.

“Do I look like an arcane spectrometer?” she snapped. “This is me being helpful. You want something more, you can go throw a stick at it and see what happens.”

“Fine, we’ll make it work. You coming?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m retired.” Jade threw herself onto one of the benches along the back walls and put her hooves behind her head. “Take a walkie-talkie. I’ll guard the chick and the truck, since one deserves to live through this and the other means I don’t have to walk back to Detrot carrying a hydra’s testicles on my back, but I’m not getting up for anything smaller than a manticore. Don’t call me for anything that dies to bullets.”

“Suit yourself. Swift?”

“I’m ready, Sir! Hailstorm charged!”

“Good, now let’s get going. Lily, we’ll be back—”

“Nuhuh! You promised me a shotgun and some answers! I’m coming!”

There was a brief discussion, during which I presented many good, salient reasons as to why it was a terrible idea for Lily to follow me and my partner into the big, scary, fenced-off estate. Then we got out of the truck and got my shotgun from the luggage compartment, and I showed her the various little features on it and adjusted the trigger so it could be fired with magic. That done, we were left standing there in front of the gate.

“No ‘beware of the dog’, signs. That’s a plus,” I commented, raising a flashlight and playing the circle of illumination back and forth over the wall.

“Sir, the only kind of dog I can think of that might survive out here is Goofball,” Swift murmured.

“You seeing any hostiles?”

“No, but there’s definitely something in there. My targeting spell is acting funny, though. It won’t lock onto anything.”

Lily took a couple of steps forward and stared up at the stone wall. Lifting the silver-inlaid shotgun off her back, she levitated it over to the gate. I braced, tensing my knee to kick my trigger and picking a particularly wide tree to sprint towards. Giving the door a gentle nudge, she danced backwards, ratcheting the gun’s slide. After a few seconds of silence, we all relaxed; no deafening sirens had gone off, no alarms were raised, and no gun-wielding hillbillies rushed out seeking delicious pony-flesh for their evening meal.

“Those walls are definitely magical, but this isn’t,” she told us, giving the wood a sharp rap with the shotgun’s stock. “I don’t feel anything except a couple of durability spells like I used to weave into the barn back home.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” I said. “Non-magical alarms could still drop an army on our heads.”

“Sir, are you saying someone at a security company is sitting watching monitors right now?” Swift asked.

“Eh, I wouldn’t put it by this bunch. We’re still dealing the pricks who can track damn near anything that moves in the city, but short of going back, I don’t think we have any other options. We either do this and hope they’re not watching, or drive back to Detrot with our tails between our legs. I’m game, if you are. Lily?”

“It can’t be any worse than sitting in the police station waiting to starve to death.”

“On three, then.”

I picked up my trigger and pressed my shoulder to the gate as Swift eased in on the other side, trigger in her teeth and Hailstorm buzzing. After about ten seconds, Lily took the hint and edged in against my flank.

Dipping my chin once, twice, thrice, I shoved my not-inconsiderable strength into the gate. It let out a loud, mechanical *clank*, then a sound like a pile of chain being thrown down some stairs, which was loud enough to send me scrambling backwards as some hidden weights somewhere in the wall slowly swung the gate open on a perfectly oiled hinge. Swift peeked around the corner, scanned back and forth, then shook her head.

“I see something out there, but I’m pretty sure it’s underground. One signal, kinda fuzzy, not moving. I think we’re clear.”

I shoved my flashlight into a strap on my hat and said, “Then let’s go say ‘hello’.”

Tiny rocks crunched under our hooves as we spread out across the opposite side of the wall. The truck’s headlamps barely penetrated the thick shadows and stealth was impossible; between Lily’s horn-glow, my headtorch, and the tiny penlight that Swift had taped to the side of the Hailstorm, we weren’t going to ‘ninja’ our way in. Unfortunately, the darkness was so complete that the alternative was stumbling about until one of us twisted a knee or broke an ankle.

The trees continued on the other side of the wall, the canopy still cutting off all light from above as we made our way up the road, staying close to one another. Lily watched the trees and Swift would occasionally spin in a quick circle, trying to catch out a sneaky foe, but nothing was moving. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind and the air felt damp and close. The eerie quiet was starting to work on my sensibilities; every breath sounded like a distant gunshot and every step was a cocking hammer.

About twenty steps further on, the gravel changed to a neatly laid stone path. We continued, still scanning for enemies, when a shape melted out of the darkness, almost entirely without warning: a sprawling set of white, wooden stairs with elaborately curling iron railings on either side.

“Uh...Sir? That target is definitely underground, now,” Swift murmured. She was looking ahead of us and at the stairs, or rather, through them. “Still no movement. What do you think this is?”

“Not a clue. Lily, can we get some more light?”

“Ruby was the one who was good at making things shine, but I’ll try,” Lily replied, lifting herself up on the tips of her toes. Grunting, she channeled more power through her horn until the glow drove the shadows back.

“I...uh...Sir, I could be wrong, but that doesn’t look like a shield pylon...”

“No kidding…”

Shield pylon or not, I knew we’d found our destination.

The first word that entered my mind was ‘palace’, although that might not have been entirely accurate. It was a house, bigger than any I’d ever seen and built in a style that’d gone out of fashion a hundred years ago. Three stories high, I counted twenty windows across the top floor. There was no telling how deep it was, but several of the largest trees seemed to spear right through the middle, their canopies keeping the sun from touching any part of the building.

A giant, wooden porch ringed each level, with a half dozen ornate rocking chairs set in little groups on each. The ‘cop’ part of my brain was giving me a quick primer in just how easy it was likely to be for someone to take a shot at us from up there, but the rest was marveling at the opulence. It was as though somepony had taken an old-timey farm house, scaled it up, and dropped it squarely in the middle of the Wilds.

The workmanship was impeccable. Not an inch of the brilliantly white paint was peeling, nor a meter of the wood bent, nor a nail out of place. Somepony hadn’t so much ‘spared no expense’ as ‘spent the bank’; there wasn’t even any mildew under the eves, despite a layer of dust on the stairs leading up to the doors.

Worst of all, I didn’t need a horn to smell the magic coming off the place; there was a putrid, invisible cloud of enchantment and arcanum radiating from the whitewashed walls that wrapped itself around me like an oppressive blanket.

After a moment to study the giant house, Lily’s horn flickered and faded, plunging us back into the gloom.

“Sir, I’ve fought two dragons, a whole heap of griffins, a bunch of drug dealers, a professional boxer, a cockatrice, and the cult of Nightmare Moon,” Swift muttered, unfolding and refolding her wings. “Why do I suddenly feel like we don’t have enough firepower?”

“We’ve got the walkie-talkie and Iris is one panicked shout away,” I replied.

Lily sat back on the gravel and rubbed at her eyes. “Oh, Celestia...How bad have things gotten when having that mare anywhere nearby is comforting?”

I tapped her on the withers. “You remember that word you used earlier? The dirty one you wanted me to kick you for saying?”

“You mean ‘volunteer’?”

“Exactly. Come on. Sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can drive back through a monster infested forest, dodge some dragons, fight our way through mutant ponies, and see if all of our friends are dead or not.”

Lily bopped me on the shoulder. “Arrrg! Stop saying things like that!”

“No can do, lovely.”

Turning, I trotted toward the house. Over my shoulder, I heard Lily ask, “Is he always that annoying?”

“No, but I think he likes you,” Swift replied, giggling as she cantered after me.

Step.

Pause.

Step.

Pause.

Wait for gunfire.

Step.

Listen for movement.

Considering our approach, it was a bit pointless to creep up, but once my hoof hit the bottom of those beautifully crafted stairs, my throat seized up and any joking mood I might have been in dried right up.

The stairs barely creaked under my weight as Swift and I crept up to the door and gently tested the knob. It turned almost silently and swung inward. Ducking my head around the corner, I flashed my light back and forth, then exhaled as I pulled back.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “Kid?”

“Other than the fuzzy target from before? Nothing moving.”

“Then the plan is this,” I ordered, nodding at the open door. “We move in and check rooms. Small arms fire only and try not to kill anything if you can avoid it.” Swift nodded and the Hailstorm’s turrets settled back into their casings. “Make sure we’re staying in each other’s sight lines. Lily, wait here until we give you the all clear, okay?”

The unicorn frowned, lifting her shotgun a little higher. “Why do I have to sit back here? I know how to use a gun!”

I drew in a sharp breath and wrestled with my nerves for a moment until I beat down the urge to snap at her. For all she might have been through the depths of the pit over the last few days, she was still a civilian.

“Lily...We need you to cover us if we have to suddenly run away. Can you do that?”

“Oh! Right!” Her ears drooped and she pressed herself against the wall of the house. “Sorry, Hardy. I just...you know, I hate being left behind...”

“Then it’s a good thing we won’t be leaving you. Watch the forest, keep your gun ready, and listen for my call.”

With that, I gestured for Swift to take the lead. Sliding into the building, she swung her gun around the door frame and I quickly followed her in, checking the nearby corners of the room with my light, then scanning across the walls.

We appeared to be in some kind of large foyer. There were two sets of stairs on either side of the room which led up to the second floor and an interior balcony, but I couldn’t see what might be up there. A crystal chandelier straight out of a fairytale dangled from the ceiling overhead, casting rainbows on the walls as my light ran across it. On the wall nearest me there was a strange painting of an elderly stallion’s face with a bushy mustache and wide, frightened eyes. His mouth was half open and his features were tightly drawn, as though he were in pain.

“That is so not how I’d want to decorate my apartment,” Swift muttered. I looked where she was pointing and saw a second painting, this time of a mare well into late-middle age whose lips were drawn back from her teeth in a grimace of terror or agony.

“Lily is waiting for us. Gawk once we know nopony is in here.”

“I haven’t seen any electronic alarms, yet, but...I think this place is wired for electricity,” she said, indicating a switch unobtrusively tucked away behind a candelabra. “Should...should we turn it on, Sir?”

“Leave it for now,” I said. “You got chalk on you?”

“Yes, Sir!”

“Mark any doors that look promising with a circle, anything dangerous with an ‘x’, and searched but uninteresting with an equals sign. Move.”

Two long hallways spread from the foyer, with two more on the second floor. Swift headed for the one on the left and I started down the one on the right, making sure I could still see her as she moved to the first door and stuck her nose in. Leading with her gun, she gave it a quick once over.

“Clear!”

Moving to the nearest door, I nudged it open, keeping my head low in case somepony had trapped it. It was some sort of small dining room with more of those unusual pictures on the walls; two stallions frozen in anguish, a mare with a bloody nose and bruises around her eyes, and another was a younger mare in something that looked like a hospital bed. That last one was simply lying there. A table covered in a dust cloth lay in the middle of the room with a half dozen chairs pushed under it, but nothing moved. Pulling a bit of chalk from my pocket, I scratched a pair of lines.

I pulled back and shouted, “Clear!”

The next one was a bathroom with a claw-foot tub big enough to do laps, a marble basin, and a toilet with an alabaster seat; expensive, but still somehow tasteful. It was a whole other world from the ridiculous and showy richness of the Monte Cheval. The ponies who’d built the place were rich on a scale that most tend to associate with royalty.

“Clear!” I called and got a ‘clear’ in reply.

For about five minutes, all we did was move from room to room, giving them a peek, leaving a mark, and moving on. Most were relatively normal things one might expect to find in a rich pony’s house; another dining room, a janitorial closet, and several guest bedrooms. Others defied explanation; an immaculate school room with four little desks and a chalkboard, a storage space full of boxes with a thick tree growing through the middle of it, and what appeared to be some form of arcane laboratory with a half dozen tables heavily laden with bits of magical gear.

Once we both reached the corner, with another hallway leading to the back of the building, I called Swift and we started over. Cigar room, bedroom with a four poster bed, tea room with another tree trunk growing through it, and so on.

The strange pictures of ponies afraid or in pain were ubiquitous and I gradually began to notice a pattern; they were all related. Most were variations on certain color schemes, with only a few outliers here and there. The paintings showed different levels of skill and they ranged in age from quite young adults to ancient, withered dams and sires, but there was no question they were family.

“Sir, if we were going to be attacked, I’m pretty sure we would have by now,” Swift murmured as we finished the rear corridor. “Do you think we should call Lily?”

“Yeah, probably. If there’s any solid leads here, we’re going to be searching all night as it is. Anything interesting on that end?”

She nodded. “I found an office with enough bits stacked up in it to buy our own private island. No sign of a shield pylon, though. The target is still below us.”

Cocking my head, I looked up at the ceiling. “Kid, check me on this, but this place is square, right?”

Swift glanced off to one side, thinking. “Um...I think so. The corners are ninety degrees. I didn’t count the doors.”

“Neither did I, but none of the interior doors on this floor have rooms more than three meters deep, right?”

“Are...are you...” Her eyes lit up and her wings unfurled half-way. “Wait, you’re right!”

I tapped the wall with my hoof, which let out a dull *thunk* noise. “So, kinda leaves a question, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah...yeah it does! What’s in the middle?!”

Lily was right where we left her, standing beside the front door in a rough approximation of a royal guard’s ‘attention’ with her shotgun lazily levitating in circles beside her.

“Anything interesting out there?” I asked and she jumped, swinging her gun around.

“Yeep!...oh...gosh. Hardy, you scared me!” She quickly lowered her barrel. “I haven’t seen anything at all.”

“Well, Swift and I are done on this floor. No traps. You want to help?”

“Mercy. I thought it was weird downstairs,” I muttered, staring up into at the stuffed head of a very surprised-looking dragon. We’d made the second floor, only to discover most of it occupied by some kind of trophy room with a few bedrooms.

“Sir, that’s a charybdis skull over there,” Swift said, pointing at the other end of space. “I thought they only lived in the ocean.”

“I don’t even know what that is, but going with the theme, I’m going to guess ‘rare, dangerous, and expensive to hunt’,” I grunted, trotting down the row of mounted trophies lining the walls.

Lily was looking a tad green as she sat in front of the mounted head of a goat-headed beast with one eye. “Whoever these ponies were, they were sick! There’s a changeling’s head right there, and this is a Griffonian cyclops!”

“Who’d want to live with those creepy pictures?” Swift pointed out, popping her notepad out and licking the end of her pen. “Lots of these species were intelligent. Should we count these as murders, Sir? Might be good evidence if we get whoever is behind this to trial...”

“Trials are for the living, kid.”

“You...you mean we’re not going to arrest them, Sir?”

I stopped and turned to her. “We’ve got generations of people who were born, grew up, and died in this house as well as the one before it and the one before that. Those paintings are their ancestors. No names. No dates. But the same sort of coat, same mane colors, same eyes, for decade after decade. How many generations would you say they represent?”

“I...I wasn’t...I hadn’t really thought about it,” she replied, uncertainly. “I...I just.... We’re still cops—”

“We are,” I said, tapping her notepad. “Look at the age of this stuff. This is generations of hunters. Generations of killers. Foals, dams, and sires who grew up slaughtering creatures for fun and mounting their heads on this wall. Now, they’ve created demonic dogs from ponies and murdered an uncounted number of innocents. How many centuries in prison do you think they deserve?”

“I...I don’t know. Forever, really. Life in Tartarus—”

“Will that make all these deaths right?”

She flicked her eyes at the frozen eyes of the dead changeling, then slowly, meaningfully folded her notepad and stuck it back in her pocket. “I’d hate to be the pony to make that call, Sir.”

“You and me both. Keep looking.”

“Oooh, don’t mind if I do,” I chuckled to myself, tugging open a stocked liquor cabinet that was tucked behind one of several comfortable looking vinyl couches. The large lounge we’d stumbled on took up an entire half of the third floor and had a smell to it like old wood and pipe smoke that I found I liked. Unfortunately it was ruined somewhat by the stuffed heads and ever present images of tortured ponies.

Liberating a couple bottles of extraordinarily expensive booze, I tucked them in my pockets. Picking up a third, I popped the top and took a quick swig, then raised my head and called to Lily, who was messing about in one of the closets, “You got anything over there?”

“Well, somepony was planning on coming back, but I don’t think they’ve been here for awhile,” she said, pushing open a small refrigerator tucked beside the bar. “There’s no food in this fridge and it was unplugged, but there’s a pantry full of non-perishables over there and the anti-dust spells on the furniture haven’t been renewed in at least six months. Ma and Pa left our winter home like this.”

Swift poked her head in, and I knew immediately that something was wrong.

“Sir, I think you’d better come look at this.”

“What is it, kid?” I asked, corking my bottle and adding it to my collection.

“I really don’t want to speculate on this,” she answered, ears drooping against her head. “Could you just come see?”

The expression on her face was enough to give me pause. I slowly nodded, then turned to the other mare who was nosing through a closet full of board games.

“Lily, you mind bagging some of that food in the pantry and anything else you think might be useful?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as even and casual as possible. “No sense leaving it. We’ll be right down the hall, alright?”

“Hmmm? Oh...sure!” Lily replied, cheerfully snatching an empty sack from a pile behind the bar. “I’ve never gotten to rob somepony before! Particularly somepony who deserved it!”

I smirked and picked another bottle from the cabinet before following Swift to the door. “Hopefully, this will be a one time thing.”

She didn’t reply, already gleefully ripping open some of the boxes in the pantry.

Following Swift back into the trophy room, we headed for a short hallway I hadn’t noticed the first time through with six doors, three on either side. What little sense of direction I actually had told me we should be somewhere near the outer wall, but there was a strange lack of windows on that end of the house.

My partner’s shoulders were hunched and her wings tucked in tight against her body as she pointed at one of the doors. “In there. The rest are more of the same.”

I mouthed the words ‘more of the same’ at her, but she just shook her head. Deciding I wasn’t going to get much more out of her, I pushed the door open and shined my flashlight across the floor. The first thing it caught was a plush toy; a white lamb. It sat on a tiny bed, amongst a pile of other stuffed animals.

‘A children’s room?’ I thought, taking a couple of steps into the space. ‘I guess now we know what the school desks and chalkboard downstairs were about.’

Behind me, Swift murmured, “The walls. Look at the walls.”

I raised my light higher and suddenly found myself unable to breathe.

‘No…’

I don’t remember rushing out of the room or slamming the door behind me, but when my regained my senses, I was sitting on the carpet beside Swift, fighting the hideous images looping through my mind.

Foals.

Pictures of foals.

Foals screaming. Foals crying. Foals with broken horns. Foals with bloody stumps instead of wings. Foals in pain.

There’d been at least a dozen images in there, and the cruelty was documented in vicious detail.

Without really thinking about what I was doing, I grabbed Swift in my forelegs and held her to my chest. Tears were already flowing freely down her cheeks, but when I picked her up she let out a choked sob. Her huge wings curled around the two of us and I prayed that Lily wouldn’t hear us, wouldn’t come looking for us, and above all, wouldn’t ask what we’d seen. It was an awkward position with the Hailstorm wrapped around her, but neither of us cared.

An unusual sensation welled up inside me and I had a brief vision of red eyes, flashing teeth, and a gaping maw reaching down from the sky to swallow my world. My teeth chattered and my ears twitched as I clung to Swift until she let out a soft whimper of discomfort. I forced myself to relax my grip on her, but I could still feel myself teetering on the edge of a precipice. On one side, the blackened pit my world had become and the slimmest hopes by which it hung. On the other, madness, beckoning me to go quietly into a place where none of the evils could ever reach me.

Putting my toe under her chin, I lifted her head until we were looking at each other, eye to eye.

“Swift, don’t tell Lily about what you saw in there. You and I will handle it. Agreed?”

“H-how?” she choked.

I set her back on her hooves, stepped back, took a deep breath, and explained exactly how we would handle it. Once I was done, through tears of pity and anger, she gave me a tiny grim smile of satisfaction.

Once we’d recomposed ourselves, we trotted back into the lounge to find Lily filling a fifth sack with goods from the pantry.

“I said a bag, not a cart load! How are we going to get that out to the truck!”

“Oh...right! Sorry, I wasn’t thinking!” she squeaked, dropping the back across her hooves. “It’s just...there’s so much food here, and I haven’t eaten a really good meal in days. I didn’t even get breakfast this morning.”

“Then grab a snack and let’s go. There’s nothing of interest on this floor,” I lied, praying she wouldn’t call me on the streaky tears neither Swift nor I had thought to wipe off our cheeks. “We’re going to go check out that office downstairs.”

Lily was noisily munching on a piece of pineapple from one of the purloined cans as we stood in front of the door Swift had directed us toward. A small metal plate said, ‘Consequences’ in big black letters beside the door knob, set at about the height of a small child.

“Hrm...I wonder what that means,” Lily commented, tapping the plate with a silver fork she’d snatched from the lounge side-board.

Swift and I shared a meaningful look, then I turned the handle and pushed the door open, stepping through with my flashlight leading the way. As the beam panned across the interior, my eyes almost burst right out of my head and went for a little roll. If I’d been holding the light in my mouth, I’d have dropped it on my own hooves.

‘Office’ was the wrong word for what she’d found; the right word was ‘hoard’. It was a treasury fit for a dragon. Piles of old-world gold bits, heaps of bills, stacks of paper, and jewelry boxes full of exotic, glowing gemstones lined all four walls from floor to ceiling. An office desk made out some fine wood took up most of the center of the room with a wing-backed seat. It was heaped with ledgers and bills.

The space was full of enough wealth to live like a king and all of it right there for the taking. It took a moment for the realization that it was all worthless to sink into my brain.

“Forget the food,” Lily whispered, wedging in behind me. “Can I get a bag of this?”

“Won’t do us much good,” I sighed, trotting inside. “What are we going to trade it for? Food is valuable. All of this? Just pretty rocks without an economy propping it up.” I cocked my head as my light fell on another door which I hadn’t noticed until that moment, which led off to one side. “Kid, did you check back there?”

She shook her head. “You said mark and move on, Sir. I was trying to get done as quickly as possible. Maybe a closet or something?”

I moved to the door and tried the handle. It was locked; the only locked door we’d encountered so far.

“Start looking. Maybe there’s a key in this mess.”

“I could just buck it off the hinges, you know,” Lily offered as she tugged open a standing cabinet, drawing out a necklace that glittered brilliantly. Holding it up to her neck, she studied her reflection in the glass of one of the display cases.

“So could I. That’s plan ‘B’,” I replied, heading for the stack of ledgers. “We’re searching in here anyway. Feel free to find yourself something nice, but be prepared to drop it if we have to run.”

“Oh, Hardy, you do know how to treat a filly!” she giggled, levitating a gold-encrusted broach to her breast.

I headed for the stacks of ledgers on the desk and Swift began rooting through drawers, leaving them half open as she searched each one. Nosing open the top book, I began reading, or at least trying to. The entire thing was in some kind of code, which appeared to be random strings of numbers and letters with a box that said ‘final balance’ with a carefully penned pair of initials at the end.

“Kid, do the initials ‘D.W.’ mean anything to you?” I asked, holding up the book.

Swift shook her head. “No, Sir. I mean, I had a filly named Daffodil Waters in one of my classes at school, but I’m pretty sure she became a music teacher...”

“Damn. These are encrypted. Some kind of code.”

Pushing that one aside, I checked the next. Same thing.

“Well, these aren’t encrypted,” Swift said, tugging a sheaf of expensive paper out of a drawer. “Sir, there’s about a hundred million bits worth of deeds in here. Whoever owns this place had properties everywhere! Some of these date back three or four hundred years! I think I even saw one six hundred years old!”

I took the papers from her and began leafing through them. “Lots in Canterlot, Baltimare, and Manehattan. They’ve even got places staked out in the griffin lands. Who are these ponies?”

“This pony, Sir,” Swift pointed out. “All of them are signed ‘D W’.”

I held up two of the papers, side by side. “Yeah, but look. Same initials, but these are sixty years apart. Different hoof-writing, too. This looks like somepony signed with their mouth, and that’s definitely by horn.”

“Hardy, I think this code you found in these ledgers is magical,” Lily murmured, drifting her horn over the ledgers a couple of times. “It’s got a spell signature, but there’s nothing being cast, so it’s not an enchantment.”

“Cute. Why am I not surprised these ponies have access to Crusades tech? It’s arcane encryption,” I grunted, snapping the ledger shut. “Too expensive for your average crime boss, but these ponies don’t seem to have any upper limits. Lily, grab a couple of these and we’ll take them to Limerence and the Aroyo Ancestors. Let them bang their heads against it a little bit.”

She nodded, levitating a few of the ledgers into her bag, along with a pile of deeds.

“Hardy, I don’t know if it’s my place, but have you noticed how few names there are in here?” Lily mused. “I looked at a few of those pictures. They didn’t have any identifying marks except the faces. Even the...the...trophies, upstairs. No names. No record of who killed them. There wasn’t so much as a diary anywhere I could find. Even the bookshelves were just lots of first editions, but none of them were signed.”

“I picked up on that. Hopefully there’s something in those papers—”

“Sir! Keys!” Swift interjected, pulling a jangling ring of keys from the drawer.

“Good, kid. I’d love to spend a week in here, but we still need to see that target. What’s the condition on that, by the way?”

The Hailstorm’s turrets buzzed as Swift spun around, looking at the carpet. “Still below us, but no movement. It looks like...I don’t know. I haven’t gotten very good at reading this thing, yet. It looks very, very fuzzy. The closer we get, the more it looks like lots of targets really close to each other.”

Taking the keys from her, I began slotting them into the hole on the door, one at a time. It took a solid five minutes before one clicked. “Stack up and move slow. Lily—”

Her ears laid back. “Yeah, yeah, I know… Wait here…”

I laid a hoof on her shoulder. “Actually, I was going to say ‘Follow close and keep the shotgun well above our heads’. We might need the firepower.”

Lily grinned and the shotgun swung into the air, floating about a meter up. “Right! Ready!”

Giving her a quick nod, I pushed through the door and gravity took hold with a vengeful fury. Letting out a stallion-ly shout of alarm, I started to fall over a yawning abyss. My armor let out a yowl and flash of sparks, then a painful yank on my backside brought me to a sudden halt in mid-air. After a moment, I was gently pulled back from the edge until my hooves rested on polished wood again.

“You’re lucky that armor doesn’t cover your tail, Hardy,” Lily murmured.

“Good...good to know,” I replied, breathily as I tried to work out the kink she’d snatched in my rear. “Could we avoid telling Iris Jade that particular piece of information? I feel it may be abused.”

“The words ‘hammer throw’ just came to mind, Sir,” Swift giggled.

“Let’s not give her any ideas.” I stuck my head through the door and over the sharp edge I’d almost stepped off of. A thin stairwell descended into the dark, disappearing at the edge of the range of my light. “I think we found our way down, though.”

With the shotgun floating ahead and Lily’s magic providing a bit of light, I stepped onto the top step. It let out a deafening creak of protesting wood and I quickly stepped back.

“Oog… We should have brought Limerence,” I commented. “He’s sneaky.”

“I don’t think we’d have gotten him out of this office,” Swift murmured.

I started down the narrow stairs. There wasn’t room for us to go side by side, so I took the lead, with Lily behind me and Swift bringing up our flank. There weren’t any light bulbs or wires which might have indicated modern technology, but I did catch a slight whiff of something in the cool, stale air.

“Kid, your nose is better than mine—”

“Rotten flesh, Sir. Old rotten flesh.”

“Damn.”

Lily pressed close and I had to catch myself on the railing, lest I end up taking a roll down the steps. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I d-don’t know how you’ve been doing stuff like this for the last t-two months without going totally insane.”

“You’re the first pony in a while who doesn’t think I already have,” I replied, peering at the walls as we descended. They seemed a bit rougher and less perfectly built than the house above. I paused a few meters down, bringing my friends to a halt.

My light had fallen on two long scuffs ran down the wall, with two more on the stairs below them.

“Those are hoof marks. Somepony was...dragged down here.”

We stopped again a few steps further down; there were more scuffs as well as a bit of the wall that’d been scorched around the edges.

“Sir, that’s spell fire,” Swift said, in a hushed tone, leaning around Lily. “Look at the way the wood...melted. Almost like candle-wax.”

“It usually does more damage than that. Spell fire should have blasted a hole right through—”

“No, Hardy. I’ve...I’ve seen spell fire like this,” Lily said, softly.

“Where?” I asked, tilting my head.

“Once, when I was a foal, I had a nightmare and...and I burned a hole in my wall.” She lifted her chin at the spot. “It looked just like that; melted wood and everything. Young unicorns get magical surges…”

The sharp sound of breath rushing out of my clenched teeth silenced her. Snapping my trigger into my mouth, I stomped down the stairs in silence, ignoring the splash of blood here or the bit of what appeared to be a third of a tiny, pink horn embedded in the bannister, there. My internal sounding device was telling me we’d crossed ground level and were moving deeper underground.

Slowly at first, the stairs began to turn in a slow circle until we’d gone almost a hundred and eighty degrees back toward the house.

The wooden walls abruptly ended in rough granite, widening to comfortably fit two ponies side by side and, just ahead, the stairs ended at a smooth, stone path. The ceiling and both sides of the passage looked like they’d been hewn straight out of the sub-strata, while the floor felt like polished marble.

“Hrmmm...Why not just build a stairwell?” Swift asked, poking at the walls. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“It’s a mine, kid,” I replied, nudging my gun-bit to one side of my mouth so I could talk. “See those wooden supports overhead? It was on the map Taxi showed us. We’re in an old diamond mine.”

“Oh! I see! It curves so they could push mine-carts up and they just built the stairs over the tracks!”

Lily stopped and put a hoof to her forehead.

“You alright?” I asked, worriedly.

Wincing as she lowered the shotgun onto her back, Lily leaned against the wall, gritting her teeth. “There’s so much power in here that it’s giving me a horn ache.” I started to offer to let her cover our escape again, but she cut me off, “No, don’t be all chivalrous. It makes you sound goofy.”

“No chivalry then, but I don’t want to carry you out of here if we suddenly need to run from something.”

“If it feels like I’m gonna pass out, I’ll come back. Now, come on! Let’s finish this and go home!” She racked the shotgun’s slide in a way I’m sure she thought would look very intimidating. A shell popped out of the ejector, bounced off my snout, and dropped to the floor. Quickly sweeping it up, she stuffed it back in the gun. “Oops! Sorry!”

Swift shot me a quick grin and I could hear what she was thinking.

‘Rookies…’

About twenty meters down the gently wending hallway, it abruptly ended at a smooth, completely flat wall. I couldn’t tell if it’d been painted or was made of some sort of stone because it seemed to suck light right out of the end of my flashlight; a black so dark it might as well have been cut from the night sky. We took the approach one cautious step at a time, like one might with a dragon who’d just guzzled a fifty five gallon drum of Beam.

Fortunately, nothing exploded or shot lasers at us.

“Lily? You getting anything off this?” I asked.

“It’s really, really magical? Sorry, you’re asking me if I can pick out the smell of one pony’s poop in a sewer here.”

“I want to be clear: ‘ew’. Also, unhelpful. Well, we could knock, but that might earn us a frying. Kid? Thoughts?”

Sticking a hoof in her front pocket she pulled out the giant, jangling key-ring. “Um...well, we do have a bunch of keys here, right? Maybe there’s a—”

Before she could finish, the wall flashed and a bright, red light flashed through the hall, centering on the keys. One particular key which looked more like a short scepter or wand with a gem in the end lit up, then faded. Swift dropped the key-ring and hopped away from it as we all swung our weapons to face the black wall.

After a moment, a thin crack appeared about two thirds of the way to the ceiling. It was eerily silent as the opening grew; I couldn’t hear any machinery moving, nor the sound of stone moving against stone, nor even the gentle hiss of escaping air. However, the smell that came from inside was enough to send us all scrambling back down the tunnel, coughing and retching.

I’d been in a few rooms where things had died and been left to rot, but never with the condensed malodorous foulness of what I strongly suspected was hundreds of years. Lily dry-heaved on one of the supports as Swift scrabbled at her pockets, her cheeks puffed up as she tried not to breathe. Unsnapping one, she yanked out a paper package and tossed it to me, then another to Lily, before hunting up another one for herself. I caught it and would have given her a hug if I hadn’t been so focused on not letting any of the death-tainted air into my nose. If a great beastie had come for us then, it would have had a healthy, three pony meal, because there was simply no fighting that smell.

Ripping the seal off, I pulled out a sterile, white face mask out of the packing material and slapped it over my muzzle. The scent of camphor and mint oil flooded my nose and I gasped for breath.

“Kid, why didn’t you have these for the hydra?” I asked.

Swift rubbed the mask a little deeper into her face fur, trying to coat her nose as much as possible. “I didn’t find them until after Iris Jade came back and we started digging into the supplies.”

“I packed them. We had a bunch in the field hospital,” Lily added, wiping her eyes as she slipped her mask’s straps over her ears. “Phew! That’s horrible!”

“I think we should just be ordering these things in bulk,” I murmured, turning back to the open door. A dim, red light shone from down a thin passageway beyond the wall, with just enough space for one pony.

“You think it’s really a shield pylon, Sir?”

“That’s what the map said,” I replied. “Kinda raises the question of why they’d put a secret pylon on a map, mind you...”

“Magical flow tracking,” Lily explained, hugging her shotgun to her chest.

“Come again?”

“You don’t want every unicorn in the world who comes within a mile of this place coming over for a cup of sugar, right? I started feeling the magic flowing off this building back on the road. You just tell everypony there’s a pylon out here and it gets immediately ignored. There is one after all. That wall is the same material they use in those things, right?”

“Hrrrg...I genuinely loathe how much they’ve gotten away with because nopony cared to look,” I fumed, stomping back to the door and trying to peer inside. There wasn’t much to see from that angle; a short hallway, same color as everything else, and the hints of red light from somewhere deeper.

“Think about how much we got away with because nopony was watching, Sir,” Swift commented.

“Don’t remind me. I’m going in. Keep back.”

Lily sniffed. “I thought you weren’t going to be chivalrous? I have the shotgun...”

“That isn’t chivalry You only get to die once. I get do-overs. If you end up having to bag me, Lim has an anatomy text. Make sure to get all the essential bits and pick any shrapnel out of them before you plug me in.”

She gulped and took three quick steps back. “I hate your life, Hardy…”

I shrugged, grinned under my mask, and stepped through into the pylon.

Standing there for about five seconds, I waited. Nothing tried to kill me immediately, which was nice, though the smell was strong enough to creep through my mask. Taking a shallow breath, I trotted toward the harsh, red light, doing my best to ignore the pounding of my own heart in my ears. I could feel a wave of fear radiating from my chest and was doing my best not to let it send me scampering back down the passage; Hard Boiled being scared was one thing, but Gale being scared was something else entirely. I’d experienced magical emotional surges a few times -- you can’t investigate dead unicorns without running into a few areas impregnated with their last living feelings -- but nothing like that.

I never really considered what having one’s knees knocking might feel like, but as the terror built, I found myself having to fight for breath as my legs shook so hard it was difficult to take the next step.

‘If you stop, all the dead ponies in the pictures upstairs, all those police officers who stood beside you at the Castle, and the thousands of others who died will be for nothing. Move.’

The sharp agony in my mark built, and with it, I found a spark of anger. Grabbing for that spark, I leaned to one side and pressed one hoof on top of the other, jamming one toe down on the opposite fetlock. The pain lit a fire, and the rage boiled up inside me, chasing away waves of fear.

I felt my nostrils flare and shoved away from the wall, kicking off on the back leg as I charged ahead of my companions. I heard Lily squeak with fright the moment she crossed into the pylon, but her hoofsteps followed all the same. As we ran, the red light grew brighter, but never enough to really see more than the barest details of the floor or walls. It reminded me all too closely of running from something in a dream, but I wrapped myself in my fury and persevered.

All at once, as though surfacing from a dunking in a frozen pond, the fear backed off to a tolerable level and I skidded out of the other end of the tunnel into an open space. I forced myself to inhale. My lungs ached and my stomach was doing jumping jacks. How long had I been running? An hour? A minute? No way to say. A headlong charge ran counter to every single instinct I’d been taught in the academy, but the magics pulsing through that place were sucking at my already questionable sanity.

What parts of me weren’t juicing on adrenaline started to try to make some rational assessment of where I’d ended up. The space wasn’t big; only about the size of my old apartment. Red light poured down from somewhere overhead and the humid air was thick enough instantly soak my mane to my neck. A raised platform or table of some kind sat in the center, covered in glistening rune work. Atop it, a pile of what might have been rags and bits of junk sticking out at odd angles lay heaped up in the middle.

I staggered onto my haunches, sitting down hard as my breathing slowed and my blood pressure started to return to normal. After about two seconds, I jumped as Lily came shooting out of the tunnel and crashed into my backside, followed an instant later by Swift who managed to brake only by throwing her wings out to either side and sending a gust of air ruffling through our manes.

Lily was frantic, scrambling all over me, her hooves locked painfully tight around my middle as she panted into my neck.

“Oh Hardy, Hardy, Hardy! We shouldn’t be here! This is a bad place! This is a terrible place!” she moaned, clutching at my barrel, pressing the shotgun between us.

Trying to get my gun free, I gently-as-I-could prised the unicorn off. “Lily! Calm down! We’re alone here! Just take a few deep breaths!”

“S-sir?” Swift stammered, slowly turning in a circle as the Hailstorm’s cannons jumped back and forth, frantically. “W-we’re not alone…”

“Kid?”

“The targets. Sir...they’re all around us! Everywhere!” she gasped. “I don’t see them, but there’s targets everywhere!”

A cold pit in my stomach opened up and I raised my head, shining my light toward the interior walls, expecting to see a dozen of those hideous creatures from the Castle hanging from the rafters, but no, there was nothing. Nothing there. Just the strange, yellowed walls that resembled a bit of melted candle-wax.

As my light dipped back, something caught in the beam for an instant. I edged my view back toward it, trying to make sense of the image.

‘Funny. That bit looks almost like a...a skull,” I thought.

It was a skull, deformed and dripping, but recognizable despite having been somehow merged with the wall itself. Beside it, a femur stuck half out of the surface and above, an equine ribcage with a scrap of fur still clinging to it. The stones and mortar of that place were made of bodies; dozens and dozens desiccated bodies, mashed together to form a tapestry of flesh-less remains wedged in and magically liquefied.

I put a hoof on Lily’s head, holding her there so she couldn’t look up. My breathing was coming in short gasps, now.

“What’s thiiisss? Ponies coming down to my grave?”

Lily shrieked, but I grabbed on to her, keeping her in place. If she ran, there’d be no getting her back until she’d made a sprint for the truck. She struggled, but I held on tight until she quieted again.

Had we really heard that? That voice. Was it my voice? It sounded like my voice, but only if I’d spent my mornings gargling refreshing mugs of shattered glass for the last twenty years. It was soft, but rattled around inside my brain box like an echo in a cave.

“P-p-please H-hardy, I want to g-go…” Lily sobbed, tears running down her pretty face and soaking into her face-mask.

“I made a promise, Lily,” I whispered to her. “I will keep you safe. Now calm down. We need to focus.”

“B-but that voice!”

“Swift has a gun that’ll freeze a dragon solid. There is nothing, and I mean nothing...we cannot handle in here.”

“Uh...S-sir? I wouldn’t...I wouldn’t say that,” Swift muttered, her hoof clutching at my shoulder as she pressed in close to my side. I followed her terrified gaze back to the altar in the middle of the room.

The bundle of rags was sitting up. It was moving. Thick chains clattered against the stone surface.

I felt Lily tense, then suddenly go limp in my forelegs. Sweet girl had done the smart thing and fainted. I didn’t have such a luxury. I was stuck, watching, in wide-eyed horror as the creature began to shift in place, lifting an exposed, skinless face atop clacking, rattling vertebrae and turning eyeless sockets on the three of us.

That voice again; that terrible voice that was my voice, came from the unholy monstrosity.

“No...no, you are not The Family…”

I looked sideways at Swift. “Kid, what’re you waiting for!”

“I can’t draw a bead! The targeting talismans are overloaded! The Hailstorm’s confused!”

“Just shoot the damn thing!”

“Wait…” It rasped, taking a step closer and raising one boney leg to point at me.

No...not at me. At my leg, where Lily’s flailing had pulled back my sleeve.

“That’s mine, colt! Why...why do you have my gun?!Who are you?!”

Act 3 Chapter 34: Those Are Brave Ponies Knocking At Our Door

"It is war, Prime Minister. I have fought many and this will not be the last before our species grow enough within themselves that war is unnecessary. I sincerely believe that time is coming, but until it has arrived, I will not lay down and let my people be devoured by the tides of misfortune, nor hamstring our military because your masters find this method too effective. When you wish to see the Crusaders rest their armaments, you will end this war and accept that I have already sued for peace four times. I would prefer not to see a world without dragons.

-Princess Celestia, during the Mount Firehorn conference, to the draconic delegate, Blade Fist. Unfortunately, Blade Fist died during his return trip to the Firelands and failed to deliver the Princess' warning, further escalating the Crusades

How much can a pony take before they curl up in a catatonic ball and wait for the nice doctors to bring their happy pills?

No idea. I’m sure I was close to the limit. I could definitely hear screaming coming from somewhere inside my head, but knowing it was coming from my own brain probably counted as a good sign. That old saw about ‘crazy ponies don’t know they’re crazy’ was somewhat comforting, especially to one who was certain he was insane, but the contradictions were a little exhausting to navigate.

For instance, my demented psychology was telling me that by some hideously unlikely chain of events I’d found myself in the bottom-most basement of an age-old house of horrors with an animated skeleton—who claimed to be the original owner of the Crusader—chained to an altar. Of course, only a mad pony could believe something like that and as we all know the easiest way of restarting a broken psyche is percussive maintenance.

Lily regained consciousness sometime around the eighth or ninth time my head hit the altar. The pain wasn’t improving the hideous collection of coincidences my life had become, but watching me try to bash my own brain out did, at least, seem to calm her down enough to just sit and stare.

“Lady, your colt is bleeding,”the skeleton said, setting itself down on its haunches with a clank of twisted chain.

“Y-yes,” Lily mumbled, carefully keeping the creature in the edge of her vision and not looking directly at him as she watched me slam my head against the side of the altar over and over again.

“He do this often?”

“I...I don’t know,’ she replied, backing away slowly as she levitated her shotgun. “W-why do...why am I talking to you?! Swift, why are you not shooting it?! Why am I not shooting it!?”

“It’s a skeleton!” Swift squeaked. “I have bullets and ice! What’re those gonna do?!” She paused for a minute, then took a step closer. “Sir? Could you stop h-hurting yourself for a minute? I’m sort of freaking out here and you’re not h-helping.”

Maybe it was the hysteria in their voices, or maybe I’d finally found the particular neuron that was misfiring and jolted it back to life. Wrenching my head up, I sat down hard, wiping blood out of my eyes with the back of my leg.

“Right! You! Dead pony! Why are you dead?! Answer or be annihilated by my weapon designed for annihilating dead things!” I demanded, pointing my leg at him. Unfortunately, it was the leg without my revolver on it.

I had the feeling that, if the skeleton still had eyebrows, he’d have lifted one at me. Leaning to one side, he peered at the side of my revolver.

“You’ve got that in stealth mode, colt. That means forty-fives only. If you think that will break whatever magic is binding me in these bones, go right ahead,” he rumbled, gesturing at himself with one chained leg. “It can’t be any worse than being stuck here.”

Slowly, my mind was starting to take stock. The stock it was taking was mostly rubber ducks and whoopie cushions, but it was a sort of stock and better than gibbering in a corner.

That said, for a talking skeleton, he didn’t seem especially threatening, though that might have been the chains which wound around his ankles and sank into the altar itself. He was wearing the remains of an ancient sports jacket and gun harness. No wings, no horn. Earth pony then. Maybe zebra. It was hard to tell.

“Look, I’ve had a really rough day already,” I said, unable to keep a hint of desperation out of my voice. “A hydra attacked the truck and a crazy mare tore its genitalia off and mounted them on the roof. That was after the police department was attacked by demons. Could you just not?”

“Not what, colt?”

“Not...not whatever you’re going to do to scare the pants off me!” I threw my hooves in the air and turned around, marching over and sitting down beside Swift.

The skeleton reached up as though to scratch his mane, then stared at his own leg-bone as he remembered his mane was long gone, before letting it drop. “If you already came down here without the pants scared off you, there’s nothing I can do for your sense of self-preservation, colt. What I do need to know is if you can get back to the city of Detrot. You need to take an air chariot to Canterlot, then request an audience with Princess Luna. Give my access codes to the guards and tell them—”

“Canterlot’s gone, the sun is gone, the Princesses are trapped on the moon, we live under an eternal eclipse that will kill everyone, and you did not answer my question!” I snapped, stomping on the stone floor. “I’ve had enough for one day, and I would like a simple, reasoned explanation for why you are dead. Or undead. Whatever! Who are you? You can’t be who I’m thinking you are, because then I have gone well and truly nutbar!”

“Sir...you’re ranting,” Swift muttered.

“Of course I’m ranting!” I snarled, rounding on her. “Do you have any idea who this is?!”

She slowly nodded while Lily just looked back and forth between us. “Um...c-could s-somepony clue me in please, because I’m...I’m pretty sure I wet my tail...”

I sniffed at the air, then shut my eyes. “There’s a bathroom upstairs. If we survive the next twenty minutes, you can wash off. Just...sit tight.”

Hugging herself, she lowered her ears and sat down. “Are...are we likely to survive? It’d make me feel better if you just said it...”

“I have no idea! We’re off-playbook here! Hey! Undead pony. Are you planning on killing us?”

“I hadn’t thought about it, no, but then you haven’t told me who you are. Don’t know if that crap about the ‘Princesses gone’ is a screw popping loose in your brain box, but I know for damn sure I haven’t seen a raggedy little stallion like you in the last however many years they’ve had me locked up down here,” the skeleton said. “Only thing familiar about you is that...that…eh...huh...” He trailed off and leaned away from the three of us. He didn’t have an expression to read, but his body language still spoke volumes.

“Say it, dammit!” I barked. “We’ve both been thinking it, so just say it!”

“Well, don’t that just beat all,” he said, softly, his fleshless tail slapping the altar. “I was about to say ‘that voice’. Sounded just the same when I was young. Strange thing, hearing somepony else speaking it, but...no question. You wouldn’t happen to be related to a ‘Hard Boiled’ would you?’

“Of course I am!” I snarled, pacing in little circles in front of the altar. “Who else would I be related to?! Pissing flank monkey cheese bastard son of a whoring—”

Something that was somehow very fluffy and incredibly hard clipped me across the side of the head, and I momentarily lost track of up and down. Wind whistled through my ears briefly, before I found ‘down’ again, sprawling face first on the stinking stone floor. Lying there, I felt the madness recede a little, clinging to the sharp pain in my muzzle like a life raft in a wild ocean.

“W-why did you do that?” a kindly voice stammered from somewhere nearby. “Is he okay?”

“Miss Taxi told me I should do this if he flips out like that,” another voice replied. “I thought it was weird, too, but it actually works.”

“Harumph. Must run in the family,” a third commented. “Had a fillyfriend in the war who used to kick the crap out of me when I’d have one of my ‘episodes’. Ended up marrying her. Probably the best decision I ever made. Speaking of cute fillies, never did get your names, Miss?”

“I...um...I’m Swift, Sir. Officer Swift, of the Detrot Police Department. This is Mister Hard Boiled, and that’s Lily Blue. Who are you?”

I shoved myself up on my knees and flopped over onto my side, bopping myself on the side of the head a few times until my eyes refocused.

“He’s Hard Boiled,” I grumbled, before the skeleton could reply. “The first one. He’s my grandfather.”

Swift’s muzzle wrinkled as she scratched the side of her head. “I don’t think I hit you that hard, Sir. I thought your grandfather was dead.”

“He is dead! He’s just talking to us!” I replied. The skeleton’s gaze followed me as I got to my hooves, stuffing a hoof in my pocket and retrieving one of the stolen liquors.

“Hrmph. Junior. That’s what your daddy called you, wasn’t it? Same as I called him when he was just a little thing,” the undead pony mused.

“Surprise, grandpa! Turns out the whole family is as dumb and crazy as you are. Were. Speaking of that, Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle say ‘Hello’.”

I lifted my mask an inch so I could pull the bottle’s cork with my teeth and then take a deep draught. It was a sweet whiskey that would have cost me two legs on a good day, but I couldn’t make myself care just then.

“I’m not surprised those three are still alive. Or maybe real surprised. Depends on the day of the week. Well, if you’re not going to shoot me a few times to make yourself feel better, could I convince you to bust these chains?” he said, giving the metal links around all four of his legs a good shake. “I don’t imagine my soul has much juice left in it, and even without a nose, this place still smells like a grave. The Family aren’t much for conversation, and I imagine they’re looking to stick me in the wall with those other poor fools pretty soon.”

Walls. Right. All those skeletons Swift said were showing up as targets. Melted skeletons, with souls trapped inside them. Mercy, that was a thought I didn’t need to have just then. It was one big, ugly puzzle piece, though.

The silence became quickly pregnant until I heard a soft click. Yanking my head up, I found Swift standing beside the altar, slotting one of the keys from the key ring into the shackles around the corpse’s legs.

“You could have waited for me to make that decision, kid,” I muttered as the skeleton shook off the chains, rubbing one deeply-rutted leg with the other as though he could still feel something like pain.

Swift rolled her eyes and moved on to the next shackle. “Sir, I’m just saving us some time. We both know what you were going to do. I hate being down here, and Lily is covered in pee. You can brood later, okay?”

That got a weak smile out of me as I popped the cork back into the bottle. “I’m telling your grandmother that I’m rubbing off on you.”

“Then she’ll just kill both of us.”

As the last of the manacles came loose, Hard Boiled Senior shook a thick layer of dust from his ruined sports jacket and took a shaky step down from the altar. Stopping there, he glanced down at himself, then let out a breathy sigh that kicked up a cloud of dirt around his hooves. “Huh. Part of me hoped the magic might break as soon as I got off that thing. Damn.” Touching his chest with one toe, he took a couple of hobbling steps. “You never realize how much you miss a walk until you can’t have one. First thing I’m doing once I’m out of here is finding a nice garden and having a good roll in the grass.”

“You’ll find the grass out there a little grey at the moment,” I grumbled.

“Well, pardon me if I’m a tad pleased to be off that rock. Not exactly the finest accommodations, if you get my meaning. Might have spent most of the last however many decades asleep, but that doesn’t mean I happen to enjoy waking up with a cramp.” Stretching his non-existent muscles, he extended one skinless back leg, then the other, before rearing back and shadowboxing the air a bit. As he dropped back onto all fours, he turned to me. “So! Can’t exactly call you ‘Junior’, though I bet your father loved to lay that one on you, same as I laid it on him. I doubt your friends would take kindly to calling both of us ‘Hard Boiled’ or ‘Hardy’. Egg Head’s been dead for thirty years. Heh! Why don’t you call me ‘Bones’?”

Swift snorted, fluffing her wings out from her sides. “Bones? Really?”

“If you think of a better one, you be sure to let me know, Miss Swift,” he answered, spinning in a little circle as he inspected the walls. “Mind you, I’m still waiting for a party cannon to go off and one of the Family to pop out with a ‘You’re still screwed!’ sign. Never thought it’d be my own grandson pulling me out. The Crusaders sent you?”

“Oh, no, we are not doing question and answer time in this pit full of dead bodies with souls trapped in them!” I cut in.

After about three seconds, my own words played back through my head, and I gave myself a solid mental kicking. I didn’t have to turn around to know who owned that gradually-building hysterical whimper.

I wheeled in place, catching Lily as she started to slowly back toward the door, her eyes darting left and right like a wild animal looking for an easy escape route. “Okay, sweetheart...be calm. Take a breath. Nothing dangerous in here.”

“T-there’s a living skeleton down here!” she squeaked. “How is that not dangerous?!”

“Yes, but he’s friendly, so we’re going to be very, very calm, not turn around, and take a couple of steps away from that wall…”

No, I wasn’t thinking when I opened my big, fat muzzle.

Yes, I did actually say those words out loud and to a pony on the verge of a panic attack.

No, I didn’t think it through any more thoroughly than I did the earlier statement about a pit full of bodies.

Yes, I really am that thick.

Before I could stop her, Lily’s horn lit up, and she shined it across the nearest wall. I followed her eyes as the circle of light projected from her forehead centered on the first definable shape sprouting from the horrific mess of hardened bone: a tiny skull and four little legs melted into the surface. One of the poor unfortunate’s forelegs seemed to be reaching out for us, as though asking to be pulled from the mass of decayed bodies.

The shotgun dropped onto the ground as her magic flickered out, leaving us with only the disturbing red glow

“Swift, grab her!” I shouted, but it was too late. Swift lunged, but Lily—sweet little farm girl that she is—had quite the set of legs on her when she was of a mind and my partner’s wings were too large to get any lift in a space that small. My partner hit the wall beside the door and flopped nose over flank onto the ground.

In three seconds, Lily had vanished into the pylon’s tunnel and around the curve. A terrified whinny echoed back down as the enchanted fear crashed down on her.

We all stood there stupidly for about ten seconds, looking back and forth at one another before Bones smacked his hoof against his forehead with a soft *clunk* noise. “Well, might as well go get her. You cleared the building, right, colt? Don’t remember much of what’s up there, but it can’t have changed much since I found this sky-forsaken pit.”

“Dammit, Lily,” I cursed, then made for the tunnel, pausing to help Swift to her hooves and sling the shotgun onto my back. “Bones, or whatever we’re calling you. You want out, watch our tails and don’t do anything disturbing.”

My grandfather looked down at himself, running a toe down his own rib-cage and producing a noise like a xylophone being played with a steel pipe.

“You mean besides being a member of the living dead?” he asked.

“Including reminding me of that!”

The second time through the dark hole was, if anything, even worse. It was as though the fear didn’t really want to let us go. My heart beat in my ears like it was going to pop at any second and sweat poured off my sides, but I forced myself to keep to an even trot. Swift grabbed my tail in her teeth, which can’t have been especially delicious, but it was enough to keep her moving. Bones seemed unaffected, humming a merry little tune that instantly found my last nerve and started doing a jig on it.

Every now and again I’d make out some sound from far ahead of us that might have been my imagination, or just the building shifting, or the terrified shrieks of a mare being devoured by an evil house. Hard to say.

When the end of the tunnel came into view, I couldn’t help picking up speed, and the instant we were out of the pylon, the door slid silently shut, cutting off the blinding stink. The fear went with it, and it was as though a fifty ton weight had lifted off my lungs. I ripped off the camphor and mint oil mask.

“Phew!” Swift wheezed as she wadded her own up. “Sir, could I convince you to shoot me in the nose? Just the nose. I think it’d make our jobs much easier if we never smelled anything ever again…”

“Only if you’ll do it for me, too, kid,” I replied, wiping sweat from my eyes. Lily wasn’t in the tunnel, but now that we were out of the muffling effect of the pylon, I could hear weeping from somewhere ahead.

“Is...is there anything we can do for all those poor souls, Sir?” Swift asked.

I glanced at Bones, who was toying with one of the supports as though he’d never seen something quite so interesting in all his life. He saw me from the corner of what amounted to his eye and lifted his head.

“It it’s answers you want, you’ll have to find the chickenshit necromancer who did this to me,” he said, “I still don’t know how I’m talking. but if this body lasts any length of time, I’ll be heading out to the zebra lands for a question and answer session with one of their tribe leaders. Probably at gunpoint.”

“Then until we can do something intelligent about this, I’m leaving well enough alone,” I replied, moving off toward the other end of the passage. “We don’t need an army of pissed off skeletons chasing us. Where’s Lily, kid?”

Swift lifted her head and flicked her eyes back and forth at the ceiling. “She’s above-—” She hesitated, then took a few steps back and looked again. The Hailstorm’s turrets let out an eager little purr and began spinning in their housings. “Oh ponyfeathers! Sir, I have...at least twelve targets, not including Lily.”

My ears laid back against my head. “Twelve?”

“Standard size for a PACT unit,” Swift added, biting her lower lip. “They’re not moving. At least four of them are far enough above us I’d say they’re either in the trees or on the roof. It’s...it’s an ambush formation.” Her nose wrinkled, and then she drooped a little. “Sir...I...I think one of them has Lily.”

For a moment, it felt like an icy wind had blown right up my tail. I’d promised to protect her. Of course, they’d want a hostage if the goal was to take us alive. More than anything, they’d want me.

I gnawed on my lower lip, considering our options.

“Problem, colt?” Bones asked, trotting a little closer to hear our exchange.

“Only insofar as we have some company and I’m pretty sure they just snatched our driver,” I grunted, unlimbering the shotgun and making sure it was loaded.

“Hrmph. Can’t say as I expect the Family to take too kindly to you being here,” he mused, peering at the gun with what might have been amusement. “If the last time is any indication, I tripped something on the way in. There were six big’uns waiting for me. Might have handled that number with yon Crusader, but...wasn’t exactly an option. Doubt it’ll be an option even with a shiny piece like that.”

“You’re going to tell me about this ‘Family’ when we get out of here, but first I want to know who sent these apes,” I replied, shoving the shotgun in his direction. “I don’t know if you’ve ever fought PACT troopers before, but they’re a tough bunch. We need one alive and eleven dead or incapacitated. You remember how a trigger works?”

Bones took the shotgun and expertly flipped it around, checked the action, then flicked the safety off. “Killed plenty of griffin monster hunters in my day. Twelve against three in a firefight on enemy ground while they’ve got a civilian hostage. Been there, done that. At the time, though, my backup was a little more capable than a dead soldier who hasn’t held a gun since you were in diapers and a filly who looks like she just got home from her cute-ceañera.” Swift frowned at him, and he added, “No offense, sweetheart.”

Swift flashed her sharp canines at Bones and replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “None taken, Sir.”

“One day, you’ll have to tell me the story of those teeth, missy,” he said, eyeing her teeth. “Still, it’s a moot point. Crusader won’t work without rounds—”

I tugged the crystal cartridge out of my pocket, letting it dangle by its lanyard. “You mean a few of these?”

“Hot damn! Now there’s a thing! Thought I buried the last of those in Junior’s backyard! Scoots try to show you how to use it? Mine has a few extra settings, mind you—”

I popped my gun’s breech open and tipped out the forty-fives into my hoof, then pocketed them. “Nope. She mostly tried to convince me I shouldn’t. Never a better time to learn, though.”

Bones drew back a little. “You wanna give yourself a brain aneurysm, colt?! That thing’ll kill you dead if you go into a fight without knowing the ins and outs! If you met Scootaloo, I know she at least told you that!”

I looked down at the switch on the side and sighed. “Look, grandpa, you know that girl? The scared little farm filly who just got captured? Her sister died leading us out here. There are twelve sons of whores upstairs who are going to kill us, then kill her, then kill the entire world, and I don’t have time to explain what I mean by that to you. I’ve got a very, very dangerous unicorn sitting in a truck up the road, but I’ve no idea if they managed to kill her and these police walkie-talkies never work underground. You can either show me how this gun operates, then we go upstairs, or you can go get back on your rock. Which do you want to do?”

Sweeping his stubby remains of a tail under himself, my grandfather sat and looked me up and down.

“You know, I didn’t wake up this morning expecting to be rescued, then immediately get into a firefight, colt. I assume there’s a reason you’re fighting them, and I expect to be filled in at some point, but I’d like to think the universe isn’t quite that malicious.”

I swept a leg sideways in the direction of the pylon. “Surprise, surprise! It’s precisely that malicious, and if I told you half of what I’ve done just today, you might crawl your bony backside right back in there with your friends. Now, are you coming?”

His chin dipped a little, and I got the feeling he was frowning at me, or would if his jaw worked. “Hrmph! Suppose I can’t stop you from using that thing, and I’d hate to think how a Crusader might mix with necromancy. Not too complicated, really. Pop the breech, load it, turn the switch to the ‘sun’ setting, and try not to hate whoever you’re killing. Oh, and don’t eat anything while it’s loaded, or you’ll regret it.”

“That’s the least helpful set of instructions I think I’ve ever received,” I groused.

“Probably the dumbest thing you’ve ever done, too.”

Swift opened her muzzle, but I reached over and pushed it shut before she could argue the point.

Time, then, to see the shape of our enemy.

It should be noted that Grandpa Boiled was correct.

Act 3 Chapter 35: Let's Go Kill Them

“The dead art a map. Between foothills and mountains of corpses lays a most narrow road which a pony must trod if they would survive these dark days. Remember thy fellows, stand shoulder to shoulder, and above all, keep thee to the path.”

-Princess Luna, to her troops on the first morning of the Los Pegasus Campaign. The phrase ‘keep to the path’ became a battle-cry.

“Iris, if you’re there, we’ve got a situation. Stick Mags in an overhead compartment and get up to the top of the path. There are a dozen PACT troopers sitting up here, and they’ve captured Lily. Over.”

Static. I adjusted the walkie-talkie’s dial and tried again.

“Iris, if you’re there, we need backup. Over.”

“Sir, do you think they found her?” Swift asked.

“If they did, there wouldn’t be a full squad of them out there,” I replied, looking up the stairs toward the house proper.

“Who is this ‘dangerous unicorn’ of yours?” Bones asked, rooting through one of his pockets. He produced a pack of cigarettes and tapped a lonely fag out into his hoof, then an ancient, gem-powered lighter, pressing the glowing ruby to the end until it lit up. He inhaled, and hot smoke billowed out of his chest.

“She’s the former Chief of Police. Bit of a lunatic and a multiple murderer, but she’s reliable enough when you point her in a direction and get out of the way,” I answered, cocking my head. “Can you...taste that?”

“Yep. Don’t know why. Promised myself I’d keep that one for the day I got out of there, if it ever happened. Flavor is crap, but I’ll buy a fresh pack on the way back. Not like it matters now, right? Can’t give myself cancer anymore.”

“That thing still has a charge?” I asked, pointing at the lighter. He passed it to me, and I examined the inscription on the side: ‘To Egg Head, from another egg head, Twilight Sparkle’.

“Somepony pretty special gave me that lighter. It’ll probably still light up a hundred years from now.”

“Princess Sparkle is pretty special, yeah,” I chuckled. My grin grew a little wider at Bones’s perplexed glance. “Sorry, there’s a long explanation behind that. One I’m sure I’ll be telling you if we’re alive in the next hour. We’ll trade horror stories.”

Bones took a slow drag, letting the ember burn down as the smoke curled out of his eye sockets. “Don’t know as I want to live through this, but if it means more cigarettes, I’ll make a go of it. Wonder if I can make it to five packs a day if I don’t have lungs to ruin?”

“Don’t count your chickens yet. We’ve got to fight our way out of here first.”

“Sir, are we sure fighting is a good idea? Three of us against six of them would be tough enough,” Swift put in. “Even if I don’t have to aim, they’ll have at least one lightning cannon, and if they’re really inclined to kill us, they can just torch the house.”

“Whoever owns this building sent them, kid. You think they want it destroyed? They’ll keep their heavy ordinance in check. I suspect they’ll probably wait for us to come out. PACT troopers fight best in open air. You think they’ve got something on them that’ll let them know how many of us are in here?”

Swift idly nudged her trigger bit with her hoof. “Probably. They’ll have at least one unicorn who can cast some kind of heat-signature spell or who is authorized to learn mind-magic for fighting hypnotic monsters. They could cast a truth-speak spell on Lily, if nothing else.”

“Or just hurt her,” Bones added, nonchalantly, as he finished his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Little girl like that? Civilians don’t hold up under torture, whatever the cinemas might say. Wouldn’t even have to do much to a filly as panicked as that one was when she tore out of there. Wave a knife under her nose, and she’d either faint or tell you her own father’s whereabouts.”

I wrestled the image of somepony waving a knife at Lily out of my mind. Rushing out there in a ball of rage was as likely to get me killed as accomplish anything. Unfortunately, our options were a bit limited.

Flicking the Crusader open, I looked down at the crystal bullets, nestled in their firing tubes. It might have been the light, or it might have been something else, but I could have sworn I saw a gentle movement under the surface of the gems.

“Six shots,” I sighed. “Kid, you better be on point once the crap hits the fan. I don’t care if these things can penetrate dragon armor. I’m not going to be able to shoot twelve moving targets with six shots.”

“Heh! That’s not six shots, colt,” Bones cackled. “Just you be sure not to turn that dial to ‘sun’ until you’re ready to start killing. Once it’s on, there’s no stopping until the round is expended or you’re dead. When the Crusader’s magic is on you, you’ll know how to use it, but there’s no ‘pause’ button.”

“What sort of magic are we talking here?” I asked.

“Can’t say as I know, exactly. Something Sparkle came up with, but Luna’s people perfected. If I could explain it, believe me, I would. All I know is what I felt and what I saw.”

“Which was?”

The skeleton turned toward the wall, looking off into the distance.

“Beautiful, perfect, immaculate death. The skies opening and fire raining down. It was like Tartarus opening under my hooves, and suddenly I had all the beasts of the pit at my command. When you are on the Crusade, you know what it is to be a god,” he whispered, then with what I imagine would have been a dirty grin, he added, “Sort of what I imagine screwing one of the Princesses is like, actually. Religious, you know?”

Swift made a sound like a mouse having a heart attack, and her ears turned bright red. “Eep!”

“Oh, don’t be so surprised, filly. Two eternal beings with thousands of years to live? Pretty sure they’ve buried a few hundred lovers apiece. Lots of experience, between those white and blue thighs.”

My partner groaned and covered her face with one wing. “Please stop making me think about this! We have to go get Lily!”

I shut my gun, pulled the hammer back, and flicked my sleeve back down my leg.

“Then listen up. This is as much of a plan as I’ve got. Feel free to chip in.”

I strolled through the darkened mansion, my hoof trailing down the wall. Behind me, I could hear the sounds of splashing liquid up and down the halls, but I kept my eyes ahead. The foyer was right in front of me.

Passing by one of the open doors, I peered through the window toward the yard. Five indistinct shapes stood in the grass out there, flashlights pointed at the mansion. I paused long enough to wave to them, until I was good and sure they’d seen me.

A feminine voice with the telltale distortion of magical amplification rolled over the house like a peal of thunder.

“Mister Hard Boiled. This is the PACT. We know you and Officer Swift are in there. Come onto the porch, lie down, and put your forelegs behind your necks. We have one of your fellow conspirators here. If you fail to comply, we will execute her, immediately. You have two minutes.”

Two minutes.

Lovely. Best hurry, then. Mustn’t have the plan fail because I’m a little slow on my hooves.

Of course, the ‘plan’ was the sort of thing a pony jots down on a napkin during a night of heavy drinking. It was an outline for hope with a million things which were likely to go wrong. How do you plan for a fight with an entire squad of heavily armed soldiers?

Worry for Mags was gnawing at the back of my mind, but I had some small consolation insofar as that if the PACT had managed to catch her, they’d have been using her as bait instead of Lily. Speaking of Lily, why hadn’t she told them about Bones? They’d have mentioned him in their little threat if they’d known he was a danger. Probably just the panic, but it was an advantage in a situation where we were desperately short of resources.

I flicked my coat’s collar up and tipped my worn hat down as I rounded the corner into the foyer. By now, they had to have seen my flashlight beam, but I made sure they were getting an eye-full, playing it across the windows and reflective surfaces. I had the strangest sensation, for just a moment, that the screaming, cringing, sobbing faces in the paintings were watching me as I trod my way through their domain.

Reaching the door, I put a hoof on the handle. Back the way I’d come, I could hear my companions moving from room to room, preparing my distraction.

‘No going back, you fool,” I thought. “Even if she hates you, she’s got a mother and father to go back to. She’s got a whole life to live, where she’ll have a half dozen foals, build a nice farm, and spend her days plucking cherry trees far away from these cruel streets. If she’s smart, she’ll take a few months and just try to forget you and the horrors you showed her.”

Could be dead in ten seconds. Again. Wouldn’t that be a thing? All it would take would be one sudden movement and one idiot a little too quick on his trigger. Eh. I was never that lucky.

I pushed open the door and strolled out onto the porch into the glare of at least six high powered lights. Reaching up, I covered my eyes with one leg so I could get a look at the yard.

“Hard Boiled! You will get down on your stomach, immediately!” It was a mare’s voice, husky, and with a bit of a lisp.

“And if I don’t?” I called back.

After a second, the four center-most flashlights refocused on the space between them. About ten meters from the end of the stairs, a roughly feminine shape in full body armor stood between five others in similar getup. It was hard to make out many details, but there was no mistaking the flash of white fangs hooked over her lower lip.

A slumped shape in nurse’s scrubs lay at the trooper’s hooves. She was holding a pistol in a field of orange magic against the side of Lily’s head, casually pressing the girl’s muzzle into the ground with the barrel. Lily seemed to be unconscious, so small mercies there; no need to give her more nightmares than she was already going to have.

“Then I smear this filly’s brains across the yard, blow your kneecaps off, and the homeowners can bill me for the cleanup,” the officer said, letting her voice amplification drop. “You want to play with me, Hard Boiled, I will kill this bint. We’ve got more troopers in the air, and you’ve got no way out of here. Now drop.”

I cocked an ear back toward the house. “Look, lady, I don’t know what the characters who sent you told you about me, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t send you out here with complete information.”

“My information is complete enough,” she growled, tapping the barrel of her gun against the farm-girl’s head. “You’re here with your partner, and that psycho driver of yours is back in Detrot. She might be dangerous, but you are just an alkie cop who doesn’t know when to die.”

I trotted over to one of the rocking chairs and hefted myself into it. The flashlights followed me, along with what I suspect was enough firepower to level the house.

“You know, a few months ago, I’d have agreed with you?” I chuckled, “Since then, I’ve learned a few things about myself. Namely that screwing with me is incredibly, incredibly lethal. Let me tell you, that was as much a surprise to me as it was to a long list of other people.”

“I don’t have all night, pig. Get down on the ground and get your partner out here before—”

I held up my hoof, and the smart part of her brain stopped her muzzle dead in its tracks.

“I wasn’t done, officer.”

The PACT mare shoved the barrel of her gun harder against Lily’s unconscious face.

“Are you out of your damn mind?! I will slaughter this filly in a half second—”

“For instance!” I interrupted, rocking the chair back and forth. “This house behind me here. You’ve probably been given some ‘orders’ regarding the house. Probably didn’t want it damaged too badly, did they? What are you going to do now that it’s full of kerosine and all of the spare propane canisters we found in the generator room are wired up to grenades?”

I couldn’t see her eyes, but I’m pretty sure they’d just bugged right out of her head.

Of course, the first corpse would choose that moment to land in the yard.

There were no screams. Just a wet thud as a heavily armored body spiraled out of the sky and landed face first between the officer and myself. It was a stallion, his face deformed by giant teeth and a very surprised expression forevermore on his features.

Hopping down from the chair, I strutted out to the edge of the porch and tilted my head up toward the roof. Bones was peering over the side as all the flashlights in the yard centered on him. Let me tell you, a living skeleton throwing a carcass off a rooftop will draw some eyes.

“Sorry about that!” his disembodied voice called down. “Lost my grip! Must be getting old! Anyway, that’s the last one up here! You’re on, colt!”

Thankfully, the sight of an undead pony was enough to keep most of the attention up above. Certainly more than enough for me to throw back the sleeve of my coat and flick the switch on the side of the Crusader to the stylized sun.

“F-fire! Bring it down! Keep Hard Boiled alive!” the lady PACT officer screeched, but it was already too late. Oh, stars and moons, it was too late. She was doomed, but it was okay, because how could anything not be okay?

I closed my eyes and drew a breath that seemed to take a week as the brilliant runes along the side of the Crusader lit up like a Hearth’s Warming Eve display.

My heart slowed, and the world ground to a halt beneath my hooves.

I exhaled, and breathed out peace and joy. I could taste my mother’s delicious split pea soup, Juniper’s sweat as he held me to his chest in the late hours of the morning, and the bagels from that nice little deli shop up the street from my old apartment. I could smell a fire, burning in the hearth of my father’s home, and in that moment, I was free.

Opening my eyes, I smiled down at the PACT officer. She was still standing there, her face frozen in that mask of alarm, trigger bit dangling loosely from one side of her fanged mouth. Now that I noticed it, she had very nice eyes.

She’d need to go, of course. Couldn’t have her threatening Lily Blue. I loved Lily. She was kind and sweet, deserving of all favor in the eyes of the divine being I’d become. It would be too easy just to rip the PACT filly in half, though. No, there was a reason not to do that, wasn’t there? Yes, there was! Good ponies needed questions answered, and I’m a good pony. After all, the Princesses themselves blessed me with the powers of the heavens.

I leapt off the porch, landing amongst the PACT operatives. One of them let out a frightened squeak, but I had the Crusader against the armored plate on his chest before he really had time to be properly afraid. I would change that, for the others, but the fools did need a demonstration. The death of one of their own would suffice. Maybe all of them, but certainly this one.

Pulling the trigger was unnecessary. The Crusader knew what I wanted.

A silver flash exploded from the end of my instrument and speared the trooper through the breast. His brilliant, red eyes faded to emptiness. Funny. He had lovely eyes, too. Someone really should pluck them out and save them. Maybe later. I needed that other mare’s gun to stop pointing at Lily. That did mean taking the hoof, and possibly the leg it was attached to.

Yes, the leg would do nicely.

I swept the Crusader’s muzzle upwards across her knee and the silver blade passed right through the soft, fleshy parts with nary a jerk or twitch. A perfect slice, that one. I wished I could do it twice, but as the mare reeled back, clutching at the gushing wound, I felt a tingle of interest from behind me. One of the others had finally gotten around to leveling a weapon in my direction. Not that it would stop me, but why allow him to fire? It would waste good bullets, and those were at a premium.

I lashed out with my rear leg and caved in his chest. Glancing back, I watched his body spin through the air, knocking his nearest companion off her hooves. She was unlucky; the weight of the corpse hitting her in the face displaced one of her vertebrae, paralyzing her lungs.

She would miss my heavenly touch! Couldn’t have that, now, could we? Suffocation was such a pitiful way to go, and death should be gentle; so sayeth the kind god. Lopping her head from her thin shoulders was the work of a thought and a flick of my wrist.

An explosion rocked the air, and I looked up just in time to catch a tiny form blasting out of the bottom-most windows of the grand mansion as a great gout of fire followed her out. Her little turrets fired beams of luminance which tore a deep furrow up the middle of the yard. I considered her for a moment that might have stretched for several days. She was a good pony, a pegasus, who must be preserved at all costs, but who could take care of herself.

Let her have one. She needed to taste blood and glory.

One of the PACT troopers had taken to the air, but he didn’t stand much of a chance against the Hailstorm. His wings were frozen solid between one breath and the next as she strafed low over his head, sending him barreling into the grass nearby. I casually crushed his skull with my toe as she looped off into the air, then turned to look for more enemies. There were more who needed to see the profane majesty of my power—

No. No more. How sad.

Just Lily, lying there unconscious, and the PACT trooper I’d gifted with a permanent reminder of her failure to resist me. She was wailing and flopping about in a tiny pool of her own blood, but the major arteries had been nicely cauterized by the Crusader’s passing. I made sure of that.

Turning back to the house, I watched as flames licked their ways up the facade, boiling out of the windows. Deeper inside, more explosions went off, and parts of the roof began to rain down around me. It would be consumed soon; fire upon my altar, a suitable sacrament.

Something was slightly out of joint, but it took me a moment, in my euphoric condition, to really put my hoof on what it might be. Twelve. There had been twelve. Six in the yard, four on the roof, and two more...somewhere. I’d killed or disabled five. Bones took the four on the roof.

Where were the other three?

I noticed a gentle glow coming from amongst the trees not far away, and three dead bodies clutched in an olive-green light levitated out of the branches to drop at my hooves. A moment later, Iris Jade strolled out, looking very pleased with herself. Oh, how very much I would have loved to cleave that mare’s head off. Why not? Was I not a god?

Bones appeared at my side. How’d he come up so silently? Very odd. I stood there, impassively, as he lifted the leg with my Crusader on it. A part of me thought I should probably kill him, but was left asking myself exactly how and why, and in my momentary confusion he had time to press the switch on my revolver. It tipped back to the ‘stealth’ setting. The breach popped open, and one of the crystal bullets flew out, smoking like a hot ember.

I frowned at it as it lay in the grass, smoldering in the light of the burning mansion, then felt a quiet need to sit down.

‘Why not sit?’ I thought. ‘A throne! A throne for your god!’

As it turned out, dirt made a pretty good throne.

A puff of dust scattered into my vision. I didn’t remember laying my head on my hooves, but there it was.

“Is...is he all right? My skies, are all of these ponies dead except her?!” a voice squeaked.

Whose voice was that? I couldn’t remember.

A few seconds later, another voice replied from someplace inside my head, “By the looks of that nosebleed, he popped a few blood vessels. Probably bleeding on the brain. He might cook, might keep. Hard to say. Without Apple Bloom here, he’s probably screwed, unless you’ve got some high powered healing magic on you.”

“W-we have healing magic! We just need a unicorn or a power outlet! Did he really do all this?”

A third voice, hard and female, cut in.

“I watched him do all of this, Officer Swift. I would respectfully request you explain the talking skeleton. Then you will brief me on your partner’s capabilities. Also, why is there a blinking light on Hard Boiled’s chest? He’s not been replaced with a machine, has he?”

“Oh, ponyfeathers. We’ve got to get him out of that armor!”

“I’ll go tie up ‘Stumpy’ over there, so you can work. Not that she’s crawling anywhere fast in that condition. Anyone got a restrictor ring? Eh, screw it, I’ll just bust her horn.”

I think that is about the time I wisely lost consciousness.

Flow. Space. A time apart from time.

I drifted along, enjoying not having a body for a little while. It was probably going to cost me at some point, but that was a problem for another me who would be along at some future date to suffer all the consequences of present-day indiscretions.

I moved amongst the heavens, and their eyes turned in my direction. It might have been the brain damage, but I had a pretty good notion that they looked a tad desperate. Desperate heavens. Odd idea, but then a fair bit of blood was probably pressing on essential parts of my neurology and complicating this ‘thinking’ business I kept insisting on trying to do.

Maybe they’d let me die this time. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The fuzzy, empty warmth of the womb surrounded me, but that was plenty. Juniper was out there, somewhere. I could feel him on the edges of whatever constituted my consciousness, but it was as though he couldn’t quite make himself seen. The glowing presence I’d been gradually coming to associate with Gale fussed with something internal, and my thoughts became a little clearer.

Oh, goodness. Had I really done all that?

Memories poured in from whatever hole they’d been temporarily tucked in, and I saw the terrified looks on those PACT trooper’s faces as I tore them limb from limb. Part of me kept saying ‘feel guilty’, but it was a very soft voice and drowned out by the relief that I’d somehow kept Lily alive through the brief battle. Police doctrine said she should probably have died in that scenario.

My father’s face loomed large in my mind’s eye, shaking his head with a disappointed expression. I’d stolen cookies precisely once, and after he looked at me like that, I never wanted to do it again. He’d never approved of killing. I think he’d drawn his gun only a hooffull of times in his career.

My father’s weapon. My grandfather’s weapon. My weapon.

A tool of holy wrath. The perfect killer. A weapon only a pony who desired peace for Equestria could wield.

Had I honestly spent all those years carting something like that around on my leg? It was a bit like discovering you’ve had an un-exploded bomb in your yard since you were a child. Once you know, you feel the need to tip-toe, even though you’d run across the same spot a hundred times and it’d never gone off.

I’d barely restrained the urge to slay Iris and Bones. Murdering the two of them wouldn’t have required the effort most ponies put into their morning bowel movement. Killing should never be that easy, and I didn’t even really know where the urge had come from. Well, I knew where the desire to kill Iris lived, but Bones?

Speaking of that skeleton in my closet, how’d he gotten down there? In all likelihood, probably the same way I had: investigating threats to Equestria. The ‘Family’ was an extra layer and deserved further inquiry, however. Though that did assume I was going to wake up at some point before—

I heaved a breath into my aching lungs. Fire. I was breathing fire. They’d thrown me on a funeral pyre and now flames were climbing down my throat. The pain was unbearable, but screaming felt good. Soothing, even. I screamed and I screamed, for a solid twenty seconds, until my chest seized and the hot, metal taste of blood filled my mouth.

Something rustled nearby, in the badly lit space.

No, it wasn’t the space. My eyes just weren’t working properly. One wouldn’t focus, and the other was full of flashing lights. What was that a symptom of? Oh, yes. Stroke.

That was not the word I needed to be thinking, just then.

Panic welled up in my stomach, and I began to flail at the air, trying to get my hooves under me. They weren’t obeying, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just lie there while my brain bled itself dry. Was that what happened during a stroke? No, you just talk funny.

Suddenly, the notion of being stuck speaking in an incomprehensible babble struck me as absolutely hilarious. I started laughing uncontrollably, rolling back and forth as my cerebellum tried to burst out of my forehead. Goodness, the headache was unpleasant. Maybe I shouldn’t have swallowed all those bagels. Bagels were good. Bagels that were gone were sad.

I started to cry.

“Calm, little pony. Be calm. You are safe.”

The voice was motherly, but also powerful enough that I felt it in my chest. If nothing else, it did the trick. My awareness drifted out again.

Waking sometime later, I tasted blood on my teeth. Had I bitten off my tongue?

No, there it was, right there. It even wiggled. That was nice.

‘Alright, Hardy. Eyes, next.’

I forced my eyelids to cooperate, wrenching them open. Oh Celestia, why did I do that? Light is horrible! I snapped them shut again.

Working my jaw a little, I mustered up a bit of saliva and a sort of weak croaking noise. Something shifted and pressed against my muzzle. Wonderful, sweet water flowed over my lips, and I gulped at it, sputtered, then swallowed a few sips as my throat started working again.

Talking was hard, but it didn’t matter much. I couldn’t think of anything worth saying. There were too many questions in my head to make it worth asking any of them.

Cracking one eye again, I tried to make out my benefactor. All I got was a glimpse of something the color of a muddy river, sitting nearby. It didn’t look like a pony, but if it’d wanted to kill me, torture me, or eat my brain, I was helpless as a spring lamb.

“Bragleflagen…” I tried.

Eloquent and concise, as usual.

Fortunately, whoever was there seemed to understand.

“You are safe, Detective. Your friends are nearby. The brain damage is almost repaired, but I suspect you’ll want to lie there until your speech centers are working properly again. More water?”

“Flagpokebleh,” I replied.

The cup returned, and I took another few swallows, then lay back and shut my eyes again.

When I awoke next, it was with a pounding headache, though feeling considerably more together. My neck was stiff and moving was difficult, but with an effort I shifted onto my side and propped myself up on one elbow. I couldn’t see much, but the impression I got was of a large space with only the flicker of a fire nearby for light.

Working my mouth a bit, I swallowed and tried to find some words.

“H-hello? Somepony out there?”

“Yes, Detective,” something very nearby whispered, “Speak softly. Your friends are asleep. Well, except for that unusual creature with no flesh. He is outside, smoking a tobacco product.”

I lowered my voice as best I could. “Where am I? What happened?”

The voice was unfamiliar and female, but held no malice. It reverberated through whatever I was lying on, and I could feel it right up through my chest. Speaking of that, what was I using for a bed? It felt soft and cold, almost like snakeskin.

“You are in our refuge, on the edge of the city,” she murmured. “I’m afraid we could not bring your transport along, but we will deliver you to a safe place, if you know of one. We followed you as you left the city, but couldn’t continue into the woods. We witnessed the PACT troopers pursue, and when you reemerged, the vehicle was attacked by a second squad. We killed them and offered your friends sanctuary while you recover.”

“Who is ‘we’?” I asked, pushing myself up until I could get into a sitting position.

“I don’t know if our name would be meaningful to you. However, it is not often we are graced by a Crusader. I’d thought you all died in the war.” There was a chuckle that shook me from head to tail, before the voice added, “Though, considering you survived multiple lethal brain hemorrhages, I suppose I should not be amazed one of your kind still lives.”

“You want to talk to an ‘original’ Crusader, go grill the skeleton. I’m just a stand in.” I wiped at my eyes with the back of one fetlock, clearing a bit of crust. The room was steadily resolving into a cave or cavern of some sort. “How long?”

“Since we rescued you? Nine hours, twenty-eight minutes.”

My ‘bed’ shifted under me, and I felt myself being gently tipped over. Throwing my hooves out, I caught myself, stumbled, then managed to stabilize. Raising my head, I blinked a few times before turning to face the source of the voice.

As my vision cleared, I did a quick two step backwards.

“Whoa! Yikes! Okay, check me on this, because I have recently had several strokes which might be messing with my perception. Are you a dragon? My brain is telling me you’re a dragon, and I’ll be the first to admit it’s not in top shape.”

“Then your brain must be doing better,” she replied, with a smoky laugh. “Earlier you thought I was a teacup with a forked tongue!”

For a dragon, she wasn’t the most impressive I’d ever met, only about a third the size of Vexis and barely large enough to require two bites from a hydra. My circle of draconic friends was a little larger than it had been, but I’d never seen one quite her color before; she was a soft, milk chocolate brown with a sheen to her scales that reminded me of silica or chrome.

Her thin wings spread out on either side of her back as she lay on her belly beside me, claws tucked under her chest and slitted green eyes glistening in the firelight. Two fleshy flukes spread out from her slender face, giving the appearance that she was wearing a bonnet or hat. Something about her was vaguely catlike, and I realized I’d been lying draped across her coiled tail.

A tiny voice in the back of my head said I should probably be a tad more freaked, but I’d long ago pitched off the end of the weirdness spectrum. Besides, waking cuddled up to a friendly lizard wasn’t the worst thing that’d happened to me today.

I took a quick stock of myself. My clothing was gone, except my coat, which I’d apparently been using for a pillow, and my hat, which was resting beside the fire. Somepony had removed my gun harness, but left the Crusader duct taped to my shoulder.

We were in some kind of cave with a number of short pathways leading in various directions, down some of which I could see the red glow of the sky. The dirt underhoof had the texture of a disused diamond dog burrow. In an indentation not far away, a small campfire let off a stream of smoke which left through a hole in the ceiling. My friends, with the exception of Bones, were sprawled around it in a sleeping heap.

Mags was sprawled on Iris Jade’s stomach on one side of the fire while Lily had her forelegs around Swift’s middle, using one of my partner’s wings for a blanket. I couldn’t help a tiny grin of pride at the sight.

They’d all survived.

“I know that smile, Crusader,” the she-dragon said, softly. “It is one of a commander allowing himself a moment’s respite during which he realizes he has taken no casualties.”

I shrugged and leaned against her scaley side. “You got it, sister. What should I call you?”

One of her powerful wings lowered around my body, snuggling me close to her.

“Firebrand,” she replied.

“That’s a pony name,” I said.

“Yes. My mother was an Equestrian sympathizer during the war, and the rightful leader of the dragons. All those with us are of the tribe the Dragon Usurper drove into exile. We are called—”

“Emberites,” I finished, then couldn’t stop a weak laugh at her surprised expression. “Eh, sorry. Guess that wants for an explanation, doesn’t it? I captured a dragon and her brother a few days ago. Vexis and Ambrock. They explained a bit of the situation out in the dragon kingdom.”

“Captured…” Firebrand’s face-flukes twitched, and her tongue snaked out for an instant, as though tasting the word. “You captured two dragons?” She snickered, covering her mouth with her claw. “And...and one of them was named Ambrock?! Little Chicken?”

“Actually, my partner over there did the capturing, but yes.”

The she-dragon lowered her head until it was right in front of me, turning this way and than so she could see me out of both eyes.

“Hrm...When I carried your bloody body out of that strange, armored vehicle, I was curious about where this much vaunted reputation of yours came from. You were obviously dead, and you looked rather harmless, but your friends insisted we bring you. That unicorn...the vicious one...was pumping enough magic into your corpse to flatten a building.”

“I’ll be sure to thank her for that,” I muttered. “She’s going to want my firstborn child, mind you…”

Firebrand squeezed my middle with her wing and used one claw to brush a bit of my mane out of my eyes. “Imagine my surprise, when you began breathing several hours ago.”

Looking down, I realized the pouch over my heart was open and quickly zipped it shut. “Most of my friends have gotten used to it. If you see a pony with a checkerboard for a mane, would you mind not telling her I died again? She’s violent and won’t take it well.”

“I will take that under advisement. You know, the few ponies we’ve spoken to talk of you in hushed tones. They call you ‘Bulldog’, ‘Dead Heart’, and ‘The Detective’. Now that I see you, casually speaking of capturing dragons and of your repeated deaths, with a Crusader on your leg, piles of PACT corpses lying behind you, a hydra’s...organ...on the roof of your vehicle, and monsters riding at your side, I cannot help but feel that your reputation is well deserved.”

I picked up my hat, brushing dust off the brim before flicking it onto my head. “The reputation comes with downsides. Can’t exactly go for tacos anymore, now can I? Did any of my friends tell you what happened after I passed out?”

She folded her wings against her side, pushing herself up onto two legs. “They wished to wait for you to be up and about, futile as that sounded at the time. The rest of my clan are out scouting, but will return soon.”

Cocking my head, I peered around the cavern. “Then who is guarding ‘Stumpy’?”

Firebrand quirked one eyebrow at me. “If you are referring to the female PACT Trooper, the skeleton rendered her unconscious, and we fed her an herb which placed her in a coma. She’s back there.”

“Good enough. Thank you for picking us up. Don’t know as I had any more fight in me, just then. Speaking of a fight, I need to piss. Which way is ‘out’?”

“Heh! After a death, I can imagine one would be quite ‘pent up’. As to your rescue, it was our pleasure, Crusader. Your kind are dragonbane, but in dark times heroes often take strange forms. Go. I will wake your friends and let them know you are alive. That hallway there will take you to the latrines.”

My muscles were still a tad stiff, but the headache was going as I wandered in the direction Firebrand had indicated, taking my time and enjoying the sensation of breathing again. The Crusader felt like a millstone attached to my leg, but it was entirely secondary to the weight of questions in my mind. We’d answered some and managed to create a hundred more.

The low passageways were barely wide enough for a dragon Firebrand’s size, but comfortable enough for a pony. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be a terribly deep cave network, and Taxi would have likely found it a very pleasant place to camp out. Still, nothing would dispel the scent of dragon and diamond dog. I wanted, more than anything, to feel concrete under my hooves again.

At last, I rounded a corner and found Bones sitting just inside the cave entrance. He was sitting against the wall, a lit cigarette smoldering between his crooked teeth and his eyeless gaze staring off at the eclipse. The cave was above some type of industrial mine or quarry which looked to have been in use until very recently. A few pieces of bright orange earthmoving equipment sat at the bottom of the pit, partially covered in tarps to keep them safe from the elements.

He looked up at my approach, acknowledging my presence with a flick of his boney tail before going back to watching the unchanging red sky.

I trotted over to the edge of the cliff, cocked one back leg, and relaxed.

‘Ahhh…’

Best thing in the world, after a stint in the afterlife. A post-death wizz is one of those things few ponies appreciate the gravity of. It’s a sacred ritual, reserved only for the elite undead amongst us. It should be done in the comfort of a marble bathroom, in a gold inlaid toilet, with a butler standing by holding a pile of warm towels and a bottle of champaign cooling in a bucket of ice somewhere nearby.

In lieu of that, you can find a cliff outside a dragon’s lair, hike your leg, stick your tail in the air, and try to hit a bulldozer.

As I finished, I became aware of Bones standing beside me. He ground his cigarette between two teeth and nodded at the vast hole in the ground.

“Was that good, then?”

I sat down on the cliffside, letting my tail dangle over the side. “It was. Can’t say as I wouldn’t trade it for a peaceful death some days, but I’ve got a friend of mine who won’t let me go until after she does.”

“Heh, sounds like Apple Bloom. She’d get very ‘experimental’ every time one of the old team died. I remember she spent a month trying to bring Twist back.”

“Sounds like she’s got attachment issues,” I commented.

“You know, that’s exactly what Twist said when she was back on her hooves.”Spitting the spent butt of his cigarette over the edge, he snapped a fresh one out of his pack and, with a practiced motion, lit it and inhaled nice and deep. “Ahhh...I missed a good smoke. Someone left a carton back at the house. Never thought I’d miss the war, but at least in a dragon’s labor camp you could get a cigarette. It was certainly more interesting than being strapped to a slab with no hope of rescue for a few decades. It has been a few decades, hasn’t it? You look about mid-thirties, minus the mileage. Last I saw you, you barely came up to my knee.”

“You mean since since you vanished? Yeah, about that.” I followed his eyes off toward where the eclipsed sun hung sullenly in the sky. “You ready to tell me what you were doing out there?”

His teeth clacked against one another as he sat beside me, idly smacking his tail against the ground a few times. “Same as you, I imagine. You must have figured out that the Shield isn’t all it appears. When you met with Apple Bloom, I assume she told you about Project Sixty-Six?”

“She gave me the broad outlines. Crazy mare is running one of the most dangerous street gangs in the city, so you can imagine she was a bit loose and fast with her details. Still, the city is a giant wish machine. It lines up with other things we’ve pieced together.”

“That sounds like Apple Bloom,” he snickered, before soberly setting his cigarette between two of his knee bones. “If you don’t mind, when did your grandmare die? I’d have said goodbye to her, iffen I thought there was some chance I wouldn’t be coming back. Wasn’t the first time I ‘expired’ in some violent fashion, then showed up a few days later after handling the situation.”

“I don’t remember much. She died a couple years later. Heart attack in the night. My dad said she went peacefully.”

He nodded, sagely. “Good. Filly like that should have some peace after marrying a soldier. What about your father? How is he doing?”

I inhaled sharply, and Bones sagged a little.

“How?” he asked.

I screwed my eyes shut and hunched forward a little. “He was working a street beat and some gangers robbed a liquor store. Dad was first on the scene. It was two kids, barely into their teens. When the other officers arrived, one of the kids panicked and tried to shoot the store owner. Dad jumped on him, and the other one pulled a second gun and shot him in the back.”

Bones listened, impassively, smoke leaking from the black holes where his eyes once were. When he spoke, I could hear the sadness in his voice as it rolled through my head.

“Damn, colt. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. Saving a life was how he’d have wanted to go. I know that’s no consolation—”

“No, it isn’t, but it’s done. He died, Mom died, and we’re here at the end of the world. So, why did you leave?”

Sucking the cigarette into his mouth, the skeleton rolled it around his teeth, then settled it back in the corner of his muzzle. “Well, as I said, it wasn’t the first time someone sent an assassin after me. I expected some petty little dragon lordling whose father I gutted during the war. I started following some very strange breadcrumbs. The assassin was hired by—”

“Let me guess,” I interjected, and he waved a leg for me to continue, “An all-powerful lawfirm that only seems to exist when nopony is looking for it?”

His neckbones crackled as he turned back toward the cave mouth. “Yep. Umbra, Animus, and Armature. The ghosts that haunt my dreams every night. As you’d expect, I broke into their ‘offices’.”

My heart rose a little. “That was on my list of places to stop, next. What’d you find?”

“There’s nopony there. The building is a facade. There’s a secretary and a few lawyers, but no records, no money office, and no indication of who the owners really were.”

I slumped onto my side, then rolled onto my back. “Well, damn…”

“Heh, colt, you gotta keep your chin up! It wasn’t all bad. I had to dig into the city records, and that’s when I discovered a funny little overlap between their ‘ownership’ of that diamond mine you found me in and the Shield corporation’s pylon.”

“And that’s what brought you out there?”

“That...and the Family.”

“The Family? You mentioned them back in the basement, but I was sort of preoccupied with the ‘undead relative’. Come to think of it, I’m still bothered by that.”

Bones looked down at his wasted body. “You and me both, colt. Nothing to be done about that now. Well...maybe nothing. The Family are the center of this; if anypony knows how to get me either dead for good, or back to the world of the living, it’d be them.”

“Yeah, but...who are they?” I asked.

“That’s the million bit question. I found that house and I got dragged into that chamber where they had three skeletons like me, writhing around on hospital beds. I sat there for an hour before some crazy necromancer with a hood over his face comes in, pushes those three into the wall, then casts a spell on me and hooks up the chains. Then he left, and left me there. It was all very businesslike. I’ll tell you this, too: the bastards were real careful with what they said around me, but those other corpses—the ones in the walls—weren’t always.”

I couldn’t suppress an eager grin. “They talked! You got the whole background? Who is their contact in Detrot? Who is setting all of this up?”

“Honestly? Not a damn clue. Most of them were half mad, or all mad. I did find out one little tidbit, though. Those last three to go in the wall? They were supposed to be ‘the last ones’. You’ll never guess what their names were.”

I leaned back from him slightly. “Not...not Umbra, Animus, and—”

“—Armature, baby.” Bones chuckled, snapping a hoof in my direction in a dramatic sweeping motion. “You nailed it. Of course, they don’t go by those names at home. They’re all one bloodline. They go by the initials ‘D.W.’, whatever that means. Never could get a straight answer out of any of them regarding that.”

“Did you ever find out what that pit was? Seemed an awful lot older than the house. I mean, building a Shield Pylon in a mine is downright weird on a good day.”

He shook his head. “You got it all wrong, colt. That pylon came first! The Family have been around for centuries. Maybe even since before Luna fell. That pylon? That pylon is a whole lot older. Keep in mind...there used to be a giant hill right where that house is, at least based on my research. They had time to dig that hill to the ground.”

“But the Shield Corporation—”

“—built all future pylons based on that one. It was the original. The very first. They powered it with tortured souls and whatever terrible magics it gave them were so valuable they sacrificed every generation of their family to it when they’d run out their usefulness. They were fed to that pylon.”

“The paintings…” I breathed. “All those paintings of tortured ponies…”

Bones dropped his cigarette at his hooves and stomped on it, sending up a spray of sparks that drifted away on the breeze.

“The paintings were a threat and a reminder: the price of failure was your soul used to fuel their personal wish machine. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough...so they built themselves a city. A city of wishes.”

My teeth ground against one another. “Detrot. You’re telling me they built Detrot?”

“Close as I can figure, yes. Umbra, Animus, and Armature are just the latest. Well, them...and their children.”

I squinted at him. “Their...children? I thought you said they were all related.”

“That they were,” he replied, turning back to the cave and strolling back toward the dark hole. “Two brothers and their sister.”

“I’m going to pause the conversation right there for a quiet ‘yuck’ noise,” I murmured. “So, what you’re telling me is that their incestuous progeny are the ones making a mess of my planet?”

“Them, and one big unknown.”

“A ‘big unknown’?”

Bones stopped for a moment and jerked his head for me to follow. “Yep. Just what was inside that pylon?”

“I...I don’t know. Wasn’t the pylon...wait, you’re saying that pylon was some sort of container? A vault or something?”

“Heh, I’m glad your daddy raised you smart. A vault, or maybe a prison. It was definitely the support system for something that is now gone. They took whatever was inside and moved it a long time before they stuck me or their parents into that machine. I can’t say for sure, but they might have lured me out there for that purpose. Apple Bloom put enough magic and enchantments into my body that I powered that thing as well as three ponies. Even without its occupant, I’m pretty sure that pylon can warp reality in some fairly impressive ways. Good thing you burned the house. It probably didn’t so much as nick the pylon, but they’ll have a dickens of a time digging it out.”

I went to follow him, but my front knees went a little bit wobbly under me and I stumbled against the wall of the cave passage.

“Ooog. Right. We’ve got to brief everypony on what you just told me, then get back to the city, but I am going to need a breather. Being dead and surprised takes it out of a body.”

“You’re telling me that, colt?”

Act 3 Chapter 36 : Dirt On Our Hooves

"Whoever said, 'When you look into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you' was a dumb shit. Darkness doesn't need an excuse to move in and put its feet up. Darkness is already there, waiting in every shadowed corner.

It's under your bed. It's in the closet. It's behind your eyelids. You won't need to go looking for darkness. You can push it back, for a little while, but the lights will always go out eventually and the abyss will be waiting.

Your foals will find this out when they grow up, whether you teach them or not. The only difference is that a prepared mind can survive in darkness."

Submission from one 'Bad Egg- Veteran of the Crusades' to the Canterlot Daily Expounder, in response to an article regarding a proposal to remove certain aspects of the war from school textbooks.

My companions were rousing themselves as I came around the corner, using a leg on one cave wall to keep myself from staggering around like a toddler. For all the work Gale put in getting my mind-meat back into working order, I don’t think he’d had time to fix my inner ear; the world was still swimming from time to time. Bones followed along beside me, surreptitiously propping me up when I stumbled.

Firebrand sat beside the fire, gently stirring the coals with her claw. Swift was stuffing her muzzle with half a griffin field ration and Mags’ beak with the other half. Lily was despondently chewing on a rice cake, her dirty nurse’s scrubs discarded in a pile beside her, while Iris Jade sat next to her, a trio of rocks levitating in her magical field.

As we entered the cave, they all looked up. Lily’s face went immediately gray, and she dropped her meal on her hooves, but Swift just grinned, finished her bite, then offered another piece to Mags. Iris narrowed her eyes at me, and her rocks disintegrated into a pile of dust.

“Evening, ladies,” Bones cackled, plunking himself down beside the fire with a noise like a collapsing house made of sticks. “Miss Jade! Miss Lily! What’s with the long faces? You act like you’ve never seen a dead guy before!”

“That ‘long faces’ joke wasn’t funny the first time a griffin told it, Mister Bones,” Jade snapped, then turned and glared at me. “And you…”

I sat down across from her, warming my hooves over the flames. They were still a little cold and tingly.

“Yes?”

“You don’t get to die until I say you die!”

I felt a sharp swat on the end of my snout and looked up to see a magical construct in the shape of a rolled up newspaper dangling over my head. She quickly dispelled it.

“You know, I now have two mares holding that over my head?”

“I am completely aware! I got a full debrief from Miss Cuddles over there, and you are lucky I am no longer the Chief of Police!”

My ears flew straight up, and I jerked my head around. “Kid, you didn’t…”

Swift hesitated, then slowly swallowed the meat she had in her mouth and passed the rest of her ration to Mags, who began gleefully ripping it to pieces.

“Sir, she was...I mean...it...she threatened to stuff your head up your bottom and make me watch. I didn’t know if you could heal that!”

Mags - like most nine-year-olds - found this hilarious and pitched over backwards, giggling like a tickled goose.

“Yeah, laugh it up, catbutt,” I grumped, giving my ward a good poke in the belly.

“Heehee! Eggpony would look funny with he head up his toosh!” she squeaked, swatting at my leg with her claws.

“You think it’s funny, now. I watched her actually do that to a guy once, and he confessed, led us to his victims, and stood trial.” Shaking my head, I picked Mags up by the scruff of her neck and popped her down on my back. It felt good to have her back there, and she immediately latched onto my mane. “Well, nothing to be done, now. How many gaping holes in the story did my dear partner leave?”

“Too many,” Iris growled, thrusting herself up. “That house, for instance. After you croaked on the lawn, we waited till the fire died down, and I got a look through that place. There was enough molten gold in there to buy a private continent.”

“That place was the home of the ponies who set up the current late night horror double feature. I wasn’t aware that was what we were walking into, else I’d have just brought you along. There will be full disclosure soon, but we have an interrogation to conduct.” I tapped my chest with my toe. “Speaking of that, thanks for charging my ticker in a timely manner. I’d rather not go through rigor mortis more often than necessary.”

“If there’s a next time, I’m going to wait til you’re stiff as a board, you insufferable nit,” she replied.

I gave a shrug. “Eh, so long as you don’t tell Taxi.”

“Hrmph. Even I don’t want to watch you suffer that much.”

“So, where’d we put ‘Stumpy’?” I asked. “There are some... things we need to discuss, but we might as well see what she knows first. We’ll do a full debrief, including Bones’ intel, once we’ve got that.”

Bones waved a bony leg toward one of the other corridors. “She’s trussed up in that cave back there. Yon Miss Green-And-Deadly threw a magical nullification on her and I had to stop her biting her own tongue off, but we force fed her a few sedative herbs. They gentled her down good. Might have worn off by now, but the residual muscle relaxants should be enough to keep her from doing anything to herself.”

“Good, now--”

“Crusader,” Firebrand interjected, adjusting her mighty wings against her sides. I’d almost forgotten she was there. Dragons have a way of blending into the background when they want to.

“What is it?”

She subtly twitched one of her head-flukes, then her eyes off to her left. I followed her look until my gaze settled on Lily.

Poor Lily. She hadn’t moved since I came in and was still sitting there with the dropped rice cake and a blank expression. Her tail was tucked under her belly, and she looked like I’d just dropped a bomb in her lap.

“Uh...can I have the cave for a minute or two?”

Iris Jade glanced between Lily and I, then her horn lit up. Both Mags and Swift levitated into the air, to much flailing and screeching, before a glowing green bubble flashed over both of them. Inside it, my partner and ward banged on the inside of the shield, but there was no sound.

Bones got to his hooves, moving toward what I presumed was the hole where our prisoner was secreted away, followed a moment later by Jade and my erstwhile dependents. When they were gone, Firebrand rolled to her paws, picked a stray scale off of her chest and tossed it into the fire, then strolled off in the opposite direction, leaving Lily and I alone with the crackling fire.

Sitting there in the uncomfortable silence, I rubbed at the zipper on my chest, then sighed. “I’m going to get punched, aren’t I? Well, go on. Get it over with.”

Lily’s ear twitched, and then her lips slowly sank into a frown. “I think you need to find some friendlier mares, Hardy. All the ones in your life besides me either want to kill you or break all of your bones...”

“Besides you? That’s a nice change. One time I came back from the great beyond, I’m pretty sure Taxi shattered my skull in a couple places.”

“Ugh!” Shoving her hooves under herself, Lily trotted around the fire, her lovely red mane tumbling down her shoulders. “Do you know what it does to your friends when you take these sorts of risks? I mean, you told me you wouldn’t die, but there’s a difference between hearing somepony say that and feeling their pulse stop!”

I moved closer to the fire, letting the warmth seep into my skin and carefully not looking at her.

“Lily, if I’d had another option, don’t you think I’d have taken it?” I asked, softly.

Her teeth ground against one another as she stalked over and dropped in front of me, putting her muzzle inches from mine. “I don’t care about your ‘options’. I only care about what I see, and what I saw is you dying in front of me. I know you want to stay dead. Some part of you keeps trying, because you’re hoping it’ll stick one day.”

“That’s...probably true,” I conceded.

“Well, then if you die, I won’t watch Equestria freeze!” She poked me hard enough in the breastbone that it actually hurt as tears started running down her thin face and dripping off her jaw. “If there’s no hope, and you’re gone, then I’m going to go find something tall to jump off of!”

I lowered my head. “Lily, there are a bunch of ponies working to fix this situation--”

“No! Dammit!” She scooted forward with her back legs until she was chest to chest with me. “I don’t want to die, but if that’s what it takes for you to stop doing dumb things, I will be right in line behind you to meet the reaper! Do you hear me, Hard Boiled? Now, would you please hug me? I swear, you are the dumbest stallion in the entire world!”

I cautiously slid my forelegs around her neck, and she jammed her face into the crook of my shoulder, all but pulling me onto my side so she could get closer. A few seconds later, we were belly to belly, with her clutching me so tightly my back ached, but I wouldn’t have stopped her for the world. When the tears came, I was ready, though it was a bit of a shock to realize I was crying too. How long had it been since I’d felt even a little safe?

Days? Months? Years?

Yeah, definitely years.

Lily smelled terrible and her mane was lank with sweat, dried blood, and dirt, but that mattered not at all to a pony who was desperate for the grief to stop, even for a little while. That didn’t make her any less beautiful. Two months of absolute Tartarus does strange things to the mind.

It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes - although it felt like several hours - before we separated. I cupped her cheek in my hoof, and she rested her foreleg over mine, a crooked smile on her teary-eyed face.

“If you were one of the farm boys back home, I’d be dragging you into the barn for a roll in the hay about now. I could sure use it,” she giggled, though there wasn’t much humor behind it. “I hate this life so much I could just scream.”

I grimaced and put my forehead against hers. “Yeah, me too. On both counts. Still...there’s a prisoner to interrogate, some princesses to save, a war to wage, and a whole bunch of dead ponies to avenge.”

“Oh, fun, fun, fun…”

Reluctantly, I got to my hooves and offered her a leg. “Do you mind waiting out here?”

“Y-you’re not planning to torture her, are--”

“No, but let’s face it: she’s a mutated, brainwashed psychopath who tried to murder you, me, and Swift. This will not be a friendly conversation. We’re just lucky she didn’t bring any of the weirder beasties they threw at us at the Castle.”

“You mean those nasty things with the weird legs?” she asked.

“I...yes, those. When did you see them?”

Lily shivered, pulling her tail between her back legs and seeming to shrink in on herself. “They came out of the sky from all directions about twenty minutes after we left the woods. It was a whole pack, with some more troopers like the one you captured giving orders. They shot the truck with a bunch of lightning bolts. Then the creatures tried to tear it open. Miss Jade teleported outside and started fighting them with Swift, then Firebrand and some other dragons appeared and started cutting the monsters up like they were nothing. Then the truck wouldn’t start, so we had to carry you here.”

I peered at her out of one eye. “Wait. You’re saying my partner and Iris Jade fought a whole squad of berserkers, then dragons came and set fire to them...and I missed it? Skies above, I wish I’d been awake for that. Sounds like quite a show.”

“Oh...I...I guess it was. I was kind of focusing on keeping the truck on the road with your little griffin trying to climb my head and screaming about letting her out so she can ‘go kill the monsters’...”

Squashing the brim of my hat against my face, I said under my breath, “I swear, she’s got the self preservation instincts of a rabid mongoose on Beam…”

Lily giggled, putting her leg around my shoulders for a moment. “She reminds me of one of my friends’ little sister back home, except with more claws and better table manners. Go do your interrogation or whatever it is you’re going to do. I’ll see if I can whip together something tastier than those ration packs with what we salvaged from the truck.”

My stomach grumbled, and I winked at her. “Thanks. Being dead leaves a mighty appetite.”

Her horn sparked, and my hat mashed down over my eyes.

It was a short walk down the side passage to find my companions Bones was smoking again, Swift was sewing shut a tear in her armor with a bit of thread, and Iris seemed content to glare at the floor. Mags was asleep again, her fuzzy belly bulging with her latest meal. They were variously standing and lying in front of a rough, circular wooden door that looked like it might have been put in by the diamond dogs when they were still in residence.

“So, the fight at the mansion. What happened after I was out?” I asked.

Swift hesitated, her needle halfway to her work. “Not much, Sir. Not until we got out of the woods. The bodies of all of the PACT troopers burned up, same as the ones at the Castle. We tried to dig through the ashes of the house a bit, but I might have used a little too much kerosene.”

“And…’Stumpy’?” I asked, giving her a measured look.

It was Iris who answered, pulling her gaze off the floor. She sounded exhausted. “I scanned her. That’s harder than it sounds. That spell inside her has got a ton of redundancy built in, and I don’t know if nullifying her did a damn thing besides delay whatever transformation they’ve got her set to do. I’m no doctor, but even now, there’s not much left in there that you’d call a pony.”

Bones tucked his cigarette into the edge of his mouth, and his voice rattled around in my head, adding, “After she was sedated, I gave her a once over, too. Those crazy teeth aren’t bone. More like...organic steel."

“Organic steel? Like, steel that grows from flesh or something?”

“It was one of Apple Bloom’s little projects. The only one of us Crusaders brave enough to go for that enhancement was old Iron Butt, but then, Featherweight was always a little bit crazy. Figure he needed it considering how many times he took a picture of somepony who didn’t want their picture taken. Anyway, I wedged her mouth open with a stick so she wouldn’t go for her tongue, and she almost bit right through it. Jaw’s stronger, too. Hate for one of those things to get ahold of my fleshy bits, if I still had fleshy bits.”

I tilted my head in Swift’s direction. “Kid, you tried biting through any iron bars, lately?”

“No, Sir, but...I can crack a chicken bone with my back teeth like nopony’s business,” she replied.

“It’s worse than that,” Bones murmured. “She had a couple of my magical enhancements on her. They must have studied me pretty good while I was chained up down there. Tough little filly, this creature.”

“Alright, no sense sitting out here.” I put a hoof on the door and stopped, then turned to Swift. “Kid, you sure you want in on this? Lily could probably use some help with dinner if you’re not feeling up to it.”

“Um...I planned to, Sir…”

“I can pretty well guarantee this is going to put you off the lovely meal she is trying to make out of those ration packs.”

Swift chewed her lower lip with one of those ferocious canines. “I know, Sir. But I’m still a cop. Besides, I think that spot where I can ditch out of something just because it’s going to keep me up at night came and went a while ago.”

“Eh, alright. Be ready to rip her throat out if she gets loose.”

I pushed open the door and took the lead.

Our prisoner lay in the center of the little cave, stripped of her armor. Somepony had bandaged up the stump where her foreleg used to be and tied her back legs together, then wedged a rubber ball of some kind into her mouth and tied it in place with a kerchief. She was the color of fresh dandelions, but with a mane so black it looked like it’d been dipped in engine grease. Probably dyed. A thin, badly cracked horn poked up between her bangs, the very tip of which was broken and scabbed over.

Her eyes glinted in gentle, phosphorescent blue light coming from a number of mushrooms growing along the wall. She was the kind of muscular that comes from either magical enhancement or too many days spent in the gym, but despite the bulk, I estimated she was still only a half-head taller than Swift.

Maybe worst of all, her flank was entirely blank. No cutie-mark, nor even a sign that one had been there.

Trotting forward, I lowered myself down in front of her. She made no move to suggest she was aware of my presence, but her gaze still drifted from me to my companions and back again.

“Right,” I began, reaching out and gently adjusting one of her bonds that looked like it was cutting into her leg. “You’re aware of who I am, so we can skip the introductions. I could go the ‘kind and friendly’ method where we take that thing out of your mouth and ask some questions, but that’s going to end with you killing yourself or trying to kill us, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, or so much as acknowledge that I was there. I got the distinct impression the lights were on but nobody was home. Reaching out, I clapped my hooves beside one of her ears; no reaction. Not even a twitch.

“Good. That’s good. Tells me most of what I need to know right there.” Without turning, I asked over my shoulder, “Iris?”

“Yes, Hard Boiled?”

“You ever take any classes on mind magic?”

Jade’s expression turned a bit dubious. “A fair bit, but I’m a tad rusty. Not much call for it as Chief of Police.”

“You scanned her, right?” I asked, and she nodded. “What’d you get for brain activity?”

She shook her head. “Well, she was unconscious--”

“Was she dreaming?”

Cautiously, Jade shook her head. “Now you mention it, no, she wasn’t. Even in a coma, there should be something.”

I waved her forward and took a few steps to one side. “Do it again. Focus on her brain. A deep telepathic scan. Let's see what she's thinking, if anything. I'm betting she's in some sort of trance, maybe with a bit more to it.”

“Sir, deep mind scanning is illegal without two party consent,” Swift said, softly.

Bones chose that moment to chime in. “You want consent, filly, I think I heard her say something like ‘Oh, yes, please dig into my mutant brain and figure out who turned me into a fel beasty set to end the world at my master’s behest’ sometime during the period between when I broke her horn and when I tied her up. That good enough for you?”

“Works for me,” Jade chuckled, her horn lighting up as she projected a thin ray of light across the PACT trooper’s head. It flickered for a moment, then stabilized. She leaned closer, eyes pinched shut, tail sweeping back and forth as she concentrated. After a solid minute, she let out a breath, and her horn blinked off. “Huh…”

When nothing else was forthcoming for a moment or two, I tapped her hindquarters.

“Jade?”

“What? Oh...yes. Just going over the information. Spells spit out a fair bit, and it takes a minute. When you get a horn and a few years of magical training, you can rush me.”

Bones puffed at his cigarette. “Rushing you wasn’t exactly on my grandson’s mind, Miss Jade, but for those of us who didn’t get the benefit of sitting on Mama Celestia’s lap at the School for Gifted Unicorns, the anticipation is downright devilish. What’d you find?”

She let her back knees slide out from under her and sat down, heavily. “Well, since you lot are asking me to summarize an encyclopedia, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say somepony cracked her head open and pissed acid on her prefrontal cortex. She's got no surface thoughts. Not even dreams.”

Reaching out, she flicked the filly on the head, still getting no reaction.

Jade continued, “I mean, it’s basically the same structure as a pony brain, but all the parts that govern active consciousness are atrophied or missing, replaced with magically dependent organ structures I wouldn't even want to begin to guess the purpose of. I doubt without a healthy, regular dose of some sort of very particular magic that she’d be able to do anything more dangerous than lie there and drool. She might have a subconscious, but that's it.” She glanced over at me and got a bit of a coy look. “Now I mention it, it’s pretty much what I picture Hard Boiled’s brain looking like, but with less of an irritating moral code wedged in there.”

“I love you, too, Iris,” I grunted. “Still, I bet you that magic in her system is designed to cook her if she’s caught. Not just a suicidal impulse, but a back up, and a safety.”

“No, it’s more structured than that,” Jade murmured. “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s some kind of automaton. Wind her up and watch her go, but let the clockwork stop and she just sort of lies down and dies.”

“You mean somepony can...can take over her body and control it?” Swift asked, nervously nudging her trigger with her fetlock.

“Possibly that, but I suspect it’s more like they grant her consciousness,” Jade amended. “She’d have limited cognition, but only so long as whoever holds her strings wants her to dance. Some necromancers like their minions with a bit of ‘life’ in them. This is some nasty modification of that principle, seeing as she’s not physically dead, yet. I imagine if we leave her like this a couple days, she’ll die of dehydration. After that, her body will probably burn, same as the others.”

Swift took a step or two closer to the mare and lightly touched her face. “You’re...you’re saying if Tourniquet hadn’t stopped it, I’d have ended up a puppet or vegetable?”

“Most likely,” Jade replied, then clapped her hooves together. “Still, her memory centers have a bit of juice left! Shall we have a peek at what’s still there? I’ve got a spell that’ll patch somepony into whatever is left in short term. Probably no more than a few weeks worth, but if she's seen anything that left an impression, it should still be in there.”

“You mean...p-poke around in a...a dead pony’s memories?” my partner squeaked.

“Mind ripping a prisoner, huh?” Bones mused. “Haven’t done that in a few years. Hardy, me old son, you keep piling on the treats, don’t you? I have barely a day out of the dark, find out the planet is headed into the crapper again, and now we get to do a jig in this mare’s brain box. Remind me again, why’d I think joining the military was a good idea?”

“Damn if I know,” I sighed. “I’m still asking myself why ‘cops and robbers’ seemed fun back when I was a kid.”

“Probably runs in your blood. You want to do the deed, or shall I?”

“It’ll have to be Hard Boiled,” Jaded cut in, “I’ve no idea how my magic will interact with...whatever is keeping you animated, Mister Bones.”

“What about me?” Swift asked, raising one thin eyebrow. “I could do it!”

“Yeah, but if there are any more jack-in-the-boxes, do you want to risk ending up like her?” I asked, flicking my tail at the trooper. “Or would you rather send in the pony who can get brain surgery from a power socket?”

Swift bared her teeth at the thought. “Oooh...now that you mention it…”

“Heh, I promise I won’t spare you the grisly details, kid.”

“That’s not better, Sir…”

Moving around to the PACT trooper’s head, I lowered myself into a comfortable sitting position, tucked my tail around my flank, and looked into her glazed, empty eyes. Nothing in her slack-jawed expression suggested there was anything in there. I’d seen that same look on repeated drug overdosers; some basic lizard-brain reflex actions like the ability to breathe and not much else.

“What about her old personality?” I asked, raising my head.

Jade blew a strand of lank, green hair out of her face and shrugged. “What about it? She’s dead to all intents and purposes. Her body just hasn’t figured it out, yet. You might run into a few fragmentary elements of her psyche. Not as though it matters.”

“Ah. Not comforting, but then, I should have remembered who I was talking to. Speaking of that, you’re not doing this as an excuse to dig through my brain, are you?”

“Hard Boiled, if I wanted to dig through your head, all I’d have to do is hold you down for a few hours while you writhe, cry, and beg for mercy,” she replied, cheerily. “Keep in mind, in this pleasant dream I don’t have any reason to give you mercy, and once I’m done prying every last secret from that ridiculous little mind of yours, the last thing you see before you die is my huge, satisfied grin as I rip your limbs off and make a lovely little tea-table out of the rest where I will rest my tired hooves until the end of time.” The smile that’d been growing on her face vanished, and she leaned a little closer. “Meanwhile, I need you alive, both for that gun on your leg and your contacts back in Detrot. So shut up and try to hold still, or your head might explode.”

I don’t know what I would have said to that, but I’m sure there was a classic, cutting quip circling my tongue. Unfortunate, then, that it never saw the light of day. Iris Jade, for all her faults, was a very competent magician. Worse, she was one with almost perfect timing.

Her horn glowed, and I pitched forward over the PACT trooper.

It occurred to me some time later that I’d been pitching forward for a very, very long period; a few minutes, at least. Maybe an hour or two. It couldn’t have been that long, because Swift was still looking aghast at Iris Jade, while Bones hadn’t much of an expression, but did seem as though he might be amused. I was getting pretty good at reading the skeleton’s emotions, in spite of his lack of flesh.

Turning my attention back to my target, I peered down into the helpless mare’s face.

Her pupils were growing steadily larger, dripping out from her eyeballs like a creeping spillage of ink. I could feel the tingle of magic pulsating through my nervous system like a feather working its way up my spine. The intense urge to scratch was made all the worse by how impossible it was to move so much as a muscle.

I sank, a sailor on rough seas tumbling end over end as the waters rise up to claim him.

‘Well, this is fun,’ I thought, distantly aware that the black sludge inching up from the body in front of me had consumed my friends, the walls, the door, and my entire world. With that realization came fear. It wasn’t fear as I was used to. Not a sense of dread, or terror, but something worse.

Invasion. I was being invaded.

I struggled, but the invader wouldn’t leave. He was there, at the edges of my consciousness, pushing through into my mind. We fought, wrestling with each other for several minutes in the darkness before my eyes popped open so I could finally see my attacker.

It was a stallion, with a dark pelt and grey mane, his eyes golden and his teeth bared. He looked, if anything, as frightened as I felt.

As our gazes met, he relaxed, his body drifting away from mine, hanging there some short distance away, just watching me.

Suddenly, our perspectives were reversed. I was the stallion, and there was a mare not far from me, her tail flailing at the air as she tried to gain some purchase on the nonexistent ground

‘Oh...this is going to be one of those existential nightmares,’ I thought.

“H-hello?” she stammered, bringing one hoof up to touch her face, then her belly and fetlocks. “Wh-who are you? Where am I? What do you mean ‘existential n-nightmare’?”

‘Great. She can hear me thinking. Best not tell her she’s dead. Oh...crap!’

“I’m what?!” she gasped. “S-say that again?!”

I regarded her, studying her pink face and fearful eyes. As she opened her muzzle, I caught a glimpse of her teeth: flat, normal equine dentition. Her cutie-mark was back, too: three cards, tucked one over top of the other, ace, queen, and king.

“You don’t know who I am?” I asked.

“N-no! Where am I? I w-want to go home!” She quivered, then hugged herself, drawing her rear legs up against her stomach. “I did my patrol! There’s nopony there! I’m not dead, am I? This is just a dream! My wife’s waiting on me! I’ve got to get home!”

‘Fragments of her psyche’, Iris Jade said. ‘Doesn’t matter’, she said. ‘Dead already’, she said.

Still, my every sense was telling me there was a frightened, upset pony dangling in the void right there in front of me. Her lip quivered as she looked over her hooves at me with big, tear-filled eyes. “P-please. Can I go home?”

“Look, Miss, I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong hoof, here. What’s your name?” I asked.

It took her a moment to respond, and when she did, it was with a distinct note of uncertainty.

“Holly...no...wait, that’s not right. My name...my name is Hollyhock. Oh, why is it so hard to remember?!” She clutched her head with both hooves, then glanced up at me. “Who are you?”

“My name is Hard Boiled.”

At the sound of my name, a flash of light smote the air between us. For an instant, a window formed into another place, and another time; I could see myself standing on the porch of the Family’s house, illuminated by the flashlights of several P.A.C.T. troopers. After a second, the burst was gone.

“Y-you’re the...The Detective...I think I was supposed to find you and ask you something. No, I was supposed to tell you something!” A frown crossed her square-jawed features. “Do you know me?”

“I’m afraid not, Miss Hollyhock. I wish I could get to know you, but I’m afraid we’re short of time.”

“I...I know,” she muttered, and then a look of realization flashed across her face as a few tears started to trickle down her nose, vanishing before they dripped away. “You...you cut off my leg! But it wasn’t me. My body tried... tried to kill you. I’m so sorry! It was the other one. Th-that thing that comes and takes me away and wears my body. Why does it do that?”

“There’s too much to say, and not enough time. I need to know if you know who did this to you and where they are.”

An image appeared, floating between us, of Holly staring into a bathroom mirror, inspecting her teeth. They looked like Swift’s in their earliest stages of her transformation, rather than that horrible mouth full of cutting edges that I’d seen during our battle. From somewhere nearby, a soft, melodic voice called out, “Holly, come back to bed. It’s too early to be up.”

Holly’s voice called back, “I’ll be right there, sweetie. Just need to call my dentist--”

The image vanished, replaced an instant later by a scene of horror.

Hollyhock was looking down at a mutilated body sprawled on a bed. It was a mare’s body, young and lithe, with a sheet draped across her lower legs. Blood was spattered everywhere, pouring off the covers in great rivulets, dripping from Holly’s muzzle, and running down her chest. Holly’s pink fur was stained purple by it, and the pony on the bed’s eyes were fixed on hers, reflecting fear, pain, and confusion. The mare’s throat was gone, torn out as though by a wild animal.

As quick as it came, the memory was gone.

“What...what was that?!” Hollyhock gasped, spinning in the air.

“Nothing. It was nothing. Probably something from a bad dream,” I said quickly, trying to calm her before she realized exactly what we’d just seen. “Listen to me. The pony who gave you your orders. The pony who told you to find me. Can you remember them?”

“I...I don’t…” Her terrified eyes drifted down for a second, but then she blinked.

Another flash, and another memory appeared from the aether.

Hollyhock was looking at somepony in full armor that covered every inch of their body. They were even wearing a balaclava and sporting two gigantic gun turrets on their back, each covered in enough runework and magical symbols to blanket their surfaces. He - and I had no doubt it was a he - was a giant of a pony, muscular, and with a broad forehead. All I could see of his face was two gleaming, green eyes.

“Operative, you will find the stallion named Hard Boiled,” said a voice, deep and baritone. “Kill or take his companions hostage as necessary to gain his cooperation. Once you have it, recover the Helm of Nightmare Moon. It will be in his possession, or he will know its location. Once you have him, keep him alive and return him to a secure holding facility until you are called for. Based on the latest recon, he’s left the Castle and headed out of the city. You will have backup. Proceed to the coordinates given, ensure the property there is undamaged, and retrieve Hard Boiled.”

Hollyhock’s eyes were fixed straight ahead at the image, then, but in the memory, her lips moved. “Likely resistance?”

“He’s traveling with several unknown individuals, but if two xeno-squads cannot deal with one alcoholic and his friends, I may need to reevaluate our training regime,” the stallion chuckled. The image froze, hanging in place between us.

“Who is that? What’s a xeno-squad?” I asked, holding up one leg as Holly stared at the armored pony.

“I...I don’t know. He’s...he’s somepony important.” She hesitated off for a moment, then whispered, “M-master. Cannon. D-dragon-Eater...” Her ears drooped as she looked down at herself, then hugged her chest. “I’m sorry. I’m not very helpful. Everything feels strange, like my head is two sizes too small. I can’t think...”

It was just then that I noticed the ‘air’ or whatever we were dangling in was becoming strangely thick. More than thick. It swirled around my hooves, pulling and toying with them.

Just then, something wriggled in the back of my head. There was a strange sensation of creeping awareness that I’d learned to pay a certain amount of heed to and that tended to portend imminent violence; the two of us weren’t entirely alone.

As the presence began to grow in strength, my ethereal body started to ache in the oddest fashion. Hollyhock seemed unaware of the change, but then she was mostly sobbing into her fetlocks.

“Jade? If you’re up there, I think I should probably get out, now,” I tried to mentally whisper.

Somewhere, above me, I felt a jerk, then a judder, followed by a violent rocking that sent me spinning head her hooves across the void. What felt like tentacles grabbed hold of my back legs and began to yank in what I was generally thinking of as ‘down’.

Panic set in almost immediately as I was torn loose from whatever anchored me and began to spiral down into the dark. Simultaneously, a sharp pricking began to worm its way between my eyes. It was like something was trying to burrow its way into my brain. A gout of blood shot from my forehead, spreading out in a weightless cloud before vanishing.

Invasion.

They’re coming in.

Screaming. Was that me screaming? Yes, it was.

I fought, or at least, I think I did, but whatever was in there was more powerful, smarter, and infinitely stronger than my feeble thoughts.

‘Let us see what is inside this little mind of yours, Detective…’

Just as I felt myself begin to slip, a pair of grasping hooves caught me under the forelegs. I looked up into Hollyhock’s scared face as she heaved me upwards, momentarily breaking the grasp of the thing around my legs. Despite the fear in her eyes, she had a determined set to her jaw as she began to draw us higher and higher.

“N-no! Not yours! Y-you took my sweetie!” she shrieked, as one of the invisible, grasping limbs tried to wrap itself around my middle for a better grip.

More blood began to spill from my legs as the presence started to rip at me with what felt like barbed hooks. I still couldn’t see anything, but the damage seemed real enough. I could still hear that agonized screaming, coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my face.

“Fight! Fight them! They’re afraid of you and they did...they did something to me and I need you to wake up and go back and find the bunker! Yes! Go to the bunker in the sky! Everything is there! It’s all there!”

Hollyhock’s form brightened a little, and then the fur around her forelegs seemed to catch fire. I watched all of this, my own bleeding, my screams, the flames licking and boiling the girl’s flesh, from a detached point some distance away. After a few seconds, I decided I didn’t really want to see any more, especially as the fire was spreading, engulfing my body.

Was it my body? No. She believed it was, but that was good.

Ponies should never burn alone.

The presence had faded as soon as the fire was lit.

Hollyhock burned. The void burned.

Time resumed.

As my awareness settled back into my flesh, I found myself lying on the floor of the cave, with pebbles digging into my stomach and my cheek resting across one of my own forelegs. My neck ached, and the fur on my face felt hot, but otherwise I didn’t seem to be any the worse for wear. Tired, certainly, but uninjured.

My thoughts felt muddled and distant, but maybe that was for the best. Even my emotions seemed muted and far away.

A voice spoke, and it took me a second to realize the source wasn’t inside my own head.

“Well, damn, Miss Jade. Remind me never to let you perform cranial surgery on me if I ever have a brain again. She’s deader than a whole truckload o’ doornails.”

Bones. My grandfather. Why was he there?

“She was, to all intents and purposes, dead already, Mister Bones. Penetrating a pony’s mind that has had that many enchantments laid on it is dangerous, and we were short of time. Some sort of 'booby trap' went off and I had to brute force it a little.”

That was Iris Jade. Another strange inclusion to my evening.

“Oh my skies, d-did you boil her brain, Ma’am?! Her eyes are all...drippy...”

Swift. Oh, sweet Swift. Thank goodness.

I blinked a few times to clear my eyes and began to sit up, then almost planted my forehead back in the dirt as all the strength seemed to go out of my shoulders. A warm leg slid under my chest, holding me upright, and I turned my head as much as I could to see my partner’s worried face.

“Easy, Sir. Are you okay?” she asked softly.

“Never...never better? I think,” I replied, and then my chest seized and I doubled over. Swift moved to catch me, but I swept her into a hug that made her yelp as I smushed her against me. “Swift really is excellent. She’s the best partner I’ve had since Juniper. I wish I could tell her that sometimes, but I wouldn’t want her to start getting an ego, because egos are how ponies get killed. Wait, did I say that out loud? Why am I saying this out loud? Oh, I think Swift is having trouble breathing. I should probably let her go. I don’t want to, though! I want to hug more fluffy pegasus! No, she’s turning a bit blue. I should let her go.”

I clapped a hoof over my own muzzle and quickly released my partner from the crushing hug. She drew in deep, gasping breaths, dragging herself away a couple of steps to sit, staring at me with round eyes.

“Hard Boiled?” Iris Jade prompted, giving me a critical eye. “I won’t ask if you’re ‘alright’, because the answer is obviously ‘no’, but I am curious what’s wrong with you.”

Cautiously, I took my toe out of my mouth and drew in a breath to tell her.

“I wish she’d stop threatening ponies. She’d be a much nicer pony if she was nice and maybe she’d even be worth kissing if she wasn’t so inclined to hurt everyone all the time. Oh skies, I am saying this with my lips! I hope she never finds out that her secretary used to have a crush on her or she’d kill him and he was a nice pony. What do--”

I rammed my hoof back into my lips so hard I almost choked. Iris Jade’s pencil thin eyebrows crawled upward an inch or two.

“Boy’s head took a beating recently,” Bones explained, carefully taking my chin in his hoof and turning me to face his skinless eyes. “Probably lost his internal monologue. Happens with brain damage, sometimes. Had a buddy in the war who had to cast a soundproofing spell on his own mouth every morning after he took a bit of shrapnel in the back of the head. Friends thought he’d become the quietest pony they ever met and his lips just moved of their own accord. Turned out it just created a motormouth who didn’t want to bother anyone.”

“Too much magic. He’s lucky I yanked him out when I did,” Jade added. “Another twenty seconds and we’d get to see just how many strokes he can survive in a day.”

Clenching my teeth on my own tongue, I stepped back and peered around his shoulder at the remains of poor Hollyhock. She lay on her side, her face badly burnt and her horn shattered into two pieces, the tip still trickling smoke. Blackened blood had fountained from her horn when it broke and been almost instantly carbonized, leaving her unrecognizable as the mare I’d seen in her mind just a few minutes ago.

My cutie-mark twinged, and I shut my eyes against the sight. More innocents, dying for their innocence.

“Mmmgluuhmmmgl,” I muttered, still holding on to my tongue.

“Sir?”

I shook my head, and let the words flow. “I need to be alone right now until Gale fixes my brain. My emotions are making me want to hurt myself and I’d appreciate it if nopony disturbed me for several minutes while I cry over this good pony who died to give me information that means nothing to me but might save all our lives and--”

I bit down on my fetlock again and the room was deathly silent.

I stood under the eclipse, sweat pouring off of my mane as the shovel bit into the sandy dirt outside the cave again and again. It was a good feeling to dig. Digging was simple. Anypony can dig. Maybe that’s why we’ve been known to bury our dead for so very long.

It’s not for the dead to feel comforted in their graves. It’s for the living to have something to do.

If nothing else, digging a nice deep hole distracted me from the constant stream of consciousness.

I tuned it in for a moment.

“--and that’s why I don’t think I should be listening to myself, because every time I do there’s nothing intelligent coming out and a whole lot of ridiculous blather--”

And tune out again.

Dig the hole. Bury the body.

I was still very carefully not looking at the wasted mess that Iris Jade’s magic had left. Carrying Hollyhock outside was difficult and my legs wobbled, but I wouldn’t accept help. It was my duty and responsibility. Why? I’d no idea. I’d finally been reduced to telling my compatriots that my cutie-mark said so. It was a lie, but there are plenty of lies I’ve told that I’ll feel guiltier about in the long run.

The questions she’d left me with weren’t the sort that a pony can really think on with a dead body lying there. They were the sort you needed to dig a hole for.

Why had Hollyhock tried to save me? Strange notion, that a mare I’d just met would try to pull me back from the brink of some kind of attack. Had it been an attack? I certainly felt like there was something else inside her head with us. Considering what Jade said about the nature of the magics which were controlling poor Holly, it was a definite maybe.

Getting to watch the transformation from the inside didn’t engender me with many kind feelings towards the Family or ‘DW’. Having their names made me feel a bit less like I was chasing my own tail, but most of the government was still on the moon and my city still verged on bloody warfare in the streets. Burning their house to the ground felt pretty good, though.

How much of my current condition was a steady supply of crazy, and how much of it was blood pooling in my noggin? Hard to say.

Tune in.

“--and anytime Gale wanted to fix this, I swear, I’ll eat less cream cheese and charge my heart every time I’m anywhere near a socket--”

Tune out.

The hole was about a meter deep, but it was probably enough to ensure no one would mess with Hollyhock’s body. A shallow grave in a quarry, unmarked and unassuming, for a pony who’d died trying to tell me something that might save the world. Would I remember to come and move her remains once everything was said and done?

“I’ll remind you.”

A voice broke through my thoughts, and I looked up to find Lily leaning against wall of the cave entrance. Her kindly eyes were full of pity. Of course, it would have been hard not to look on the pathetic disaster of a too-thin and desperately threadbare Detective digging in the mud to bury a corpse with a tiny bit of pity.

“You’re still saying everything you think out loud, you know,” Lily added, softly. “Can I at least help you put her in?”

Smearing caked on dirt across my brow, I nodded. “I’m sorry if I’ve been an ass the last couple hours. Hard to tell what is coming out of my mouth. I can feel the ghost that lives in my chest working on the problem. Not the worst thing that’s happened to me today. I’d appreciate the help, but I think I should probably tell Lily not to help me, because I’d like to seem a little bit tough.” I hefted myself out of the pit and shook the filth out of my tail. “Even in this condition, what she thinks of me is important. I’m pretty sure I have a crush on her. That doesn’t matter, though. If she’s got any brains at all, she’ll head for the hills the second we’re out of here.”

“Then you’re lucky I’m just a dumb farm girl, Hard Boiled. You owe me revenge, still,” she murmured, tentatively inspecting the body of Hollyhock. “Mercy. I’ve seen too much death, lately. You said something earlier about her saving you from...someone while you were inside her head?”

“I did? Can’t remember what I’ve said and what I haven’t. Yes, I’ll accept Lily’s help. I don’t mind it, now that she’s talking to me. It can’t be any worse than her hearing my innermost thoughts.”

“I promise, I’ll be gentle with her. Move over a little.” Shutting her eyes, Lily lowered her horn, and a strong glow suffused the air around Holly. Her ruined body lifted limply off the ground, dripping what vital fluids hadn’t solidified, and floated gently into the hole, nestling down in the bottom.

“I wish we’d thought to grab her leg,” I muttered, turning to the pile of dirt I’d left beside the grave. “Feels poor not burying all of her.”

“You’re burying her. That’s what matters.” Lily hesitated a moment, a quizzical look on her face. “I wonder why she didn’t burn up like the others.”

“What?”

“The other troopers. They all burned up after they died. Why didn’t she?”

I shrugged, pushing a leg-load of dirt over Hollyhock’s legs.

“Who knows? Jade was running enough magic through her body to cook a dragon egg sunny-side up. It might have broken the spell.”

“Miss Jade said she was probably just operating on some sort of magical program that let her follow orders and interact with people, like one of those counting machines,” she said, shifting a pile of dirt onto the mare’s body. “I wonder if she could still feel pain, or if they took that, too.”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to avoid killing these things. There are too many ponies relying on me for me to try to help the ones who’re already lost.”

I expected some sort of reproach for that statement, but instead she just continued moving soil over the grave. Some minutes later, the job was done. We patted down the last few hooffulls of dirt and stacked up a short pile of rocks for a cairn to mark the spot.

Standing there, sweaty and hot, in the slightly chilly air with our breaths steaming in front of us and crickets ratcheting in the distance, I felt myself overcome with an intense melancholy.

“Can still hear you...”

“I have no bagels and I just buried a body! Lemme brood!”

Act 3 Chapter 37: Lay It Out For Me Again

It is true, that most ponies would consider immortality a boon, dear representatives. However, I would ask you to consider that I have been buried, frozen, struck by lightning, stabbed, exsanguinated, hung, and poisoned multiple times. On a long enough time-frame, I will experience every hideous injury from a stubbed hoof to a shattered skull, kept from the relief of death by my connection to the Sun. I will watch each of you die of old age, stand over your graves, and cry like it was the first while putting on a stoic face so the crowds know that this world moves on despite their grief.

It takes a special sort of mind to live forever with that prospect to look forward to. I hope one day that all species discover a means to live as long as they wish to, in ultimate harmony, but I do not hold out hope for it anytime soon. The good moments will make up for the bad moments, but only if you seek to shape the world in a more positive fashion. That is the immortal's task, after all.

-Princess Celestia before the House of Nobles when asked why she keeps the secrets of her longevity so closely guarded.

-

“Lay it out for me again. How on Equis did you screw this up so badly?”

“I made a deal to save lives! There weren’t many other options!”

“Yes, and how many lives will be lost if we can’t retrieve the Helm of Nightmare Moon?”

“No more than would have been lost if we let the status quo persist another few months. I’ve bought us some time.”

“But you gave up our only bargaining chip! What are we supposed to do now? Do you even know who you gave it to?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter. Time was always short. Now we have a chance, however slim, and what happens from here on will depend on whether or not we hold up our end of the other bargain...”

“Wait...what other bargain?”

It was an hour after I’d laid Hollyhock to rest. Lily and I were cuddled up beside the fire, her horn glowing softly as she maintained a simple soundproofing spell around my head. I was still, more or less, in full stream of consciousness, but Gale seemed to have given me at least a modicum of self-restraint in the intervening period and I could feel my thoughts starting to clear.

Mags seemed to have taken a liking to Iris Jade, and was using her for a pillow on the other side of the firepit. I’d even caught Jade smiling at her a couple of times, too, which was disturbing. Jade’s smiles tended to come in three flavors: malicious, smug, and self-satisfied. Seeing an honest grin on her olive face was giving me a bit of gnarly cognitive dissonance.

Swift and Bones were playing that card game of hers. I’ve no idea how she taught my grandfather to play, but judging by the frustrated expression on her face, he’d picked it up pretty quickly.

Lastly were Firebrand and her little band. Despite having five dragons in the room, the space still felt decently open, especially considering Firebrand was the largest amongst them. I’d missed them coming in, but the Emberites seemed friendly enough when we went around for brief introductions before dinner.

Little Altrak and his sister Scorch, who were both the color of spinach and wore matching pairs of sawn off shotguns encrusted with gemstones, seemed content to curl around one another like a pair of nesting geese, snoozing after their patrol. Then there was Crask, a heavyset male with a sharp cutting blade attached to his tail by a series of straps, and lastly, Tonic, who’d only stepped into the light of the fire long enough to make introductions before retreating into the shadows again. Her scales were the color of a moonless sky, and she moved with a dangerous grace. A small sub-machine gun was holstered at her hip.

Lily had managed a pretty tasty meal from the remains of our field rations, and my stomach was full as I tried to settle my desperately racing mind.

‘Gale, how go the repairs?’ I thought, as loudly as I could.

I felt a light sense of frustration emanating from somewhere inside my chest.

‘Right. Should I take that to mean ‘stop breaking fleshy-things for a little while’?’

My head jerked up and down in an involuntary and slightly aggressive nod.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I paused, then quickly added, ‘By the way, thanks for keeping me alive and taking care of me while I was out. I couldn’t have done this without you. I’ll try to make sure you get put into somepony who deserves you, if it looks like I’m going to die for good.’

One of my hooves rose on its own and touched the socket on my chest, followed by a flush of comfort and appreciation that spread through my entire body. Message received.

Much as I might have been enjoying the short downtime, the hour was growing late.

Giving Lily a bump with my hip, I pointed to my face. She blinked at me, then made a soft ‘oh’ with her lips, and her horn-glow died. With the soundproofing dispelled, I could hear again, but better, I could speak. Better yet, I could hear my own thoughts, and nopony was looking at me like I was drunk and doing hoofstands.

I cleared my throat. It wasn’t a terribly loud noise, but it got everyone’s attention.

Reluctantly pulling away from Lily, I shook some soil off my coat and stepped toward the fire.

“Ladies, gentlecolts, and lizards of all stripes...we’ve got to talk.”

Jade cocked an eyebrow at me, levitating Mags onto the ground beside her. “Are you still...ahem...damaged?”

I crossed my eyes towards the end of my own muzzle for a moment. When my innermost thoughts were not forthcoming, I grinned and sat down. “Seems not. It doesn’t matter, either way. We’ve waited long enough. With the truck trashed, we have to get back to Detrot the old fashioned way. So, what are we going to do?”

Firebrand raised a claw. “If you mean ‘trotting’, then it will be a two day journey at maximum gallop. Even with your provisions replenished, you will pass through multiple areas which are held by hostile forces. In all likelihood, you will be attacked by another group of those PACT creatures as well. I would count your odds of survival as ‘quite low’. That we witnessed you enter the forest is the only reason all of you still live.”

“So...that was one of you?!” Swift piped up. “Before we went into the forest, I saw something in the sky, but it got away from me when I tried to chase it.”

The burly male dragon tucked his claws under his chest like a cat and said, “You gave me a pretty chase, little one. I thought I was being stealthy.”

“You couldn’t stealth your way out of a pack of sleeping yaks, Crask,” Tonic growled from her place just outside the fire’s light. “You just got lucky she didn’t catch you. Her weapon would have turned you into an icy-pop before you could draw your blades.”

Rather than take offense, Crask chuckled and tapped the jeweled sword pommel sticking out from under his right wing. “It would have been a fine contest, thinks I! A fine death, as well. You saw how she fought those toothy-terrors! I have never seen such agility, but from the Wonderbolts themselves!” He turned to Swift, whose cheeks were turning bright red. “You! Young mare, whose name I have already forgotten. You must teach me a few of those maneuvers!”

“Later,” Firebrand cut in. “Point being, you cannot reach the city on hoof. You shall have to be carried.”

“Wait...you don’t mean…”

“Yes! You shall receive a rare honor, Mister Hard Boiled! You will fly with dragons!”

“Now, before I go on, I want to say I wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea. You remember the ride in the air chariot? This was that, but about three times as fast and ten times as agile.”

“Sir, it was one of the coolest things that you’ve ever done and you know it!”

“No, kid, it was one of the coolest things you’ve ever done. I didn’t have the benefit of wings keeping me from planting face first into the countryside, so we’ll clock this as one of the scariest things that ever happened to me.”

“Hard Boiled, I really don’t care about your journey, fascinating as it is. What I care about is how you managed to lose the Helm of Nightmare Moon!”

“I didn’t lose it. I know where it is. More or less.”

“More or less?!”

“Like I said, it was a busy few hours, but a friend of mine can narrow that down for us.”

“Will this involve another ‘bargain’?”

“Of course. That’s the theme of the day, isn’t it?”

“If there are no other options, then we’ll fly. Swift, stop looking so pleased,” I growled.

“No can do, Sir,” she hummed, spreading her wings in anticipation. “I get to fly with dragons!”

“Leaving that aside, Miss Hollyhock—”

“Who?” Jade interrupted.

“The PACT trooper we just buried. Did I not say her name at any point while my mouth was running?” I asked.

Iris shook her head. “No, but it’s irrelevant. What did you learn?”

“Well, Miss Hollyhock was transformed against her will and apparently without her knowledge. She killed her wife during the transformation, too.”

Swift sucked a soft breath and Lily’s ears lay back, but those were the only reactions. How far had the world fallen that news of that sort barely warranted a whisper of shock?

I continued. “She got her orders from someone she called ‘Cannon’. Don’t know. Big guy, wearing a full face mask. I didn’t get a very good look at him in the memory. They sent two of something they call ‘xeno-squads’ after us. Again, don’t know what those are.”

“Sir, xeno-squads is the internal name within the PACT for squads dedicated to killing creatures known to be intelligent or sapient, but still lethal and who would refuse negotiation,” Swift explained, tapping the side of her head as a slightly worried expression grew on her face. “I...sort of hoped to get on one. Did we really just kill two entire—”

“They were mutants, kid. Their minds were gone. You didn’t kill anyone. Whoever mutated them did this. Either way, she also called this guy ‘Dragon-Eater’.”

Firebrand bared her impressive teeth and leaned forward over the fire, which curled around her throat, blackening her scales.

“They wouldn’t dare,” she hissed. Crask and the other dragons shifted uncomfortably, looking at one another.

“Wouldn’t dare?” I asked, cocking my head. “I think these people have proven they’ll dare damn near anything. Be specific.”

“Three weeks before the eclipse—the Darkening, as you ponies are wont to call it—my clan was raided by an unknown group,” she replied, black smoke leaking from her nostrils. “They left almost no evidence, but we found a scant magical signature which we used to track them back to Detrot. These...persons...killed two caretakers and stole half a hatchery of our young. Thirteen eggs.”

My stomach did a quick bounce, using my bowels for a trampoline.

“Thirteen eggs?” I asked, incredulously. “That’s why you came to Detrot?”

Firebrand coiled her spade-headed tail around herself. “We were sent to retrieve them.”

Crask’s teeth ground together like creaking steel beams.

“These beasts would not eat dragon eggs. No being alive would eat a dragon’s egg! It is the last heresy! Only death and damnation can follow from such evil!” he spat, but I could hear a note of uncertainty in his voice.

Before the situation could escalate any further, I raised my hooves for quiet.

“Look, it could just be a name. People call me plenty of ridiculous things, too. For now, we’ll add that to our checklist to get at our next destination. We’ve got to get back to Detrot and find...something called a ‘sky bunker’. Hollyhock told us to find the ‘sky bunker’ and that everything was there. Swift, you’re our resident expert on the PACT. Does that mean anything to you?”

My partner shook her head. “No, Sir. There’s a bunch of buildings with heavily fortified top floors. The Crusades made everypony want a strong roof overhead.”

“What about you, Jade?” I asked.

“Couldn’t say. That’s a crap bit of intel,” Iris Jade replied. “Even PACT headquarters is fortified right to the roof. I can think of ten different buildings in Detrot with reinforced rooftop facilities of some kind. That’s a dead end by itself. Was there anything else?”

It was then that I noticed that there’d been a certain silence in the back of my mind for the last several minutes and turned to find Bones idly toying with some pebbles at his hooves. His cigarette was out, and he hadn’t made a move to relight it. Reaching out, I put a hoof on top of the rock he’d been playing with.

“I know the Hard Boiled family thinking face,” I murmured. “You know something.”

Bones’ jaw worked in a little circle. “I don’t have a face, colt…”

“Irrelevant. Family thinking face is universal. What’ve you got?”

“Well...Sky bunker doesn’t mean much to me,” Bones mused, his thin tail sweeping some dust into the fire. “Couldn’t...hrm...nah. Never mind. Been thirty years. Probably just a coincidence. Parallel technological evolution and all that.”

Lily—sweet Lily—smacked him in the back of the head, making a hollow thunk.

“I know it’s got to be your genetics making you do it, but for once, please stop being dramatic!” she demanded.

Bones rubbed his skull where she’d hit him, and I had a sense that he’d be grinning if he could.

“Eh...well, Miss Apple Bloom used to like her storehouses,” he explained. “We had one particular on the top floor of a skyscraper: the Office. It was a bit away from Uptown, and we used it for testing prototypes. It was about the safest place you could hole up, so long as you could defend the door. I seem to remember we had something there that was very similar to one of those weapons the PACT fella back at the house was carrying before you flattened his head. Funny looking thing with circles of metal around a central rod?”

“Lightning cannons?” Swift asked, a little reverently. “The Crusaders invented those?”

“Well, Princess Luna’s boffins had some much bigger versions during the war, but nothing like those slick bastards you could put on your back. That was Bloom’s work.”

“The first lightning cannons for equine use were put into production twenty-five years ago,” Jade added, slowly wagging her tail back and forth. “Timeframe matches up, at least, assuming they somehow got ahold of your prototypes.”

“When the war ended, all the surviving Crusaders decided it was best we disappeared. Bloom probably locked up the Office. Still, we had so many places out there that blowing or disassembling all of them was right impractical. It’s a stretch, but...who knows? Might still be there.” Bones nodded at my gun. “Besides, don’t imagine Scootaloo or Sweetie Belle trusted the dragons to take to the peace treaty any more than I did. If I kept my weapon, you can bet they tucked away a few things for a rainy day, even if Apple Bloom wasn’t willing to violate the letter of the law.”

“Considering some of the pieces she’s decked out her little band of gangers with recently, I wouldn’t bet against you,” I replied, thinking back to the minigun I’d seen strapped across an Aroyo’s back at Supermax.

“The treaty is a piece of paper to most of my kin,” Firebrand rumbled, dragging her claws through the dirt and leaving deep furrows. “Honorless snakes they are. They live for gems, slaves, and fodder. The only reason they’ve not attacked since my mother entered her long sleep is that they fear to give up their individual lives. This flight which hounds your city must be well paid to put themselves in the crosshairs of Equestrian weapons.”

“My source says they are,” I murmured. “Does the name Carnath mean anything to you?”

Firebrand flashed a whole lot of fangs, and the other dragons surrounding us let out a collection of reptilian noises that sent my hackles climbing right to my ears.

“Yeesh! Don’t do that!” I barked testily. “Former prey species here! We’re known for our itchy trigger fingers and loose bowels! Who is this ‘Carnath’ character?”

“The voice of the Usurper,” Crask snarled, his forked tongue lashing at the air. “He’s the chief gem finder and slave taker of the Dragon King. We have not seen him, but it would be entirely like that beast to snatch ponies and their wealth in this time of panic.”

“He’s got instructions from someone higher up in the food chain just to keep people from leaving the city,” I answered. “I haven’t heard anything about him taking prisoners, though.”

“Strange...he enjoys his slaving,” Scorch rasped, in a voice that sounded like broken leaves. A strange scar around his throat that I hadn’t noticed until then seemed to move and deform with every word.

“He would not fail to collect a few prisoners unless his payment was meteoric,” Altrak, Scorch’s sibling, added, running a talon over the stock of her shotgun. “He likes pony flesh too much.”

“Well, the Family could buy loyalty and obedience,” Bones chuckled, swirling his hoof beside his temple. “They are also not above offering the entire city to some dragons to do with as they please. I’d bet they told this ‘Carnath’ gent he could eat to his heart’s content once they’re done with the place. With the PACT working for them and the Shield down, there’s not much to stop them.”

“Or so they think,” I growled, running a hoof over my revolver. “Then next stop is the Vivarium. We’ve got resources, weapons, and forces there.”

“Did it never occur to you, that you could have simply taken the helm to the Vivarium?”

“Yes, it did, but that would have been suicide. Look, you can blame me all you like for this, but these characters wouldn’t have lost any sleep killing every foal, filly, and stallion inside the Vivarium, much less the City Morgue. Slip Stitch doesn’t have a fraction of the weaponry the Vivarium had stockpiled away, and we didn’t have time to coordinate evacuations or a functional defense. It would have been a slaughter, especially if they’d brought Carnath’s dragons down on their heads. Right now, we have time and they think they’re invulnerable.”

“Yes...but to make a deal with...her…”

“She’s got nothing to gain by betraying us.”

“And...How do you know her motivations?”

“We’re getting to that. Get some tea, have a scone, and get yourself seated comfortably...because this is where things get ugly.”

Iris Jade’s offer of sedation was sorely tempting.

Riding on a dragon’s back only really works in the movies or with truly gigantic members of the species, and whatever the Emberites might have made up in combat skill, they sorely lacked in size. Something to do with not keeping personal hoards. Unfortunately, considering the area we were moving through was likely to be dangerous, sleeping through the trip wasn’t an option.

Standing outside the quarry cave, we made final preparations to leave.

Swift had the Hailstorm strapped to her sides, and the turrets were peering back and forth alertly at the dragons as well as Bones. Jade was levitating a bag with most of our supplies onto Crask’s back as Bones smoked and Lily stuffed clean bandages into the pockets of her slightly dirty nursing scrubs.

Mags was sitting on a rock nearby, warily watching the dragons and Bones like they’d just climbed straight out of the blackest pit of the underworld. She’d made a bit of a fuss when she woke up, but seemed to have calmed down considerably once I gave her back her gun. I hadn’t given her any ammunition, but just having the weapon was enough; a girl after my own heart.

For their part, the dragons seemed altogether too relaxed for creatures about to fly into the jaws of death itself. Or creatures about to fly. The flying part was still bothering me.

I paced back and forth, trying not to let the nervous energy fade, lest I start actually thinking about what we were about to do. Even if the flight was only an hour at top speed, it was enough to give me the willies. Then, I was faced with the prospect of seeing Taxi and Limerence again.

Why did that scare me so much?

‘Because you’re worried they’re dead,’ I thought, shivering internally.

The last thing I’d seen of my friends was them disappearing into a hole in the ground. Even if the Underdogs were as trustworthy as they seemed, there was nothing stopping the PACT from gassing their little village if they managed to find it. What was stopping the Scry from revealing the locations of my friends, now that I wasn’t around? Nothing.

Damn.

Thankfully, Firebrand broke me out of my thoughts as she padded out of the cave with a heavy rucksack across her powerful shoulders. The light from the eclipse cast her scales in shades of red, almost the color of blood.

“Crusader Hard Boiled? Are you and yours ready?”

“You’re coming with us?” I asked, gesturing at the pack.

“You have the closest thing to a clue we’ve unearthed since we arrived in the city,” she replied, hiking the sack up between her wings. “If this ‘sky-bunker’ of yours contains our eggs, then it is there we must go. This ‘Vivarium’ your small pegasus described seems like a friendly enough place. We must present ourselves to the local dragon lord, as well. I assume that is this ‘Mister Stella’?”

“Stella’s more of a ‘queen’, but close enough. Once we hit the Vivarium, they’ll provide us with intel on this building Bones remembers. If they can’t, then I’ve got a contact in the Wilds who runs a covert warehouse for magical artifacts. I should check in with them, too.”

“Warrior prostitutes helping save our eggs. My mother would find that funny, considering she once looked down on ponies for their kindly ways.”

“War has a way of changing people,” I replied. “So, how we doing this? I don’t think I’m gonna fit on your shoulders, but we could get a rope and tie my hooves, because I really hate—”

Firebrand’s lips drew back in a terrifying and mischievous smile. “Miss Iris Jade spoke privately to me and made a recommendation. Hold still.”

“Wait, what?! No!”

Her pounce was so quick I barely saw it coming and had absolutely no time to react. Her claws wrapped around my middle in a vice-like grip, and then the thunderous beat of dragon wings filled my ears along with the rush of fast-moving wind. I was ripped off my hooves, and the ground dropped away, spinning off into the distance so quickly it stole the breath from my lungs.

“So, I screamed like a newborn filly for about twenty minutes, then Firebrand punctured my vocal chords with one of her claws. That done, we flew toward—”

“She what?!”

“Look, it’s been generally accepted by now that I am very hard to kill. A minor laceration is nothing the healing magic in my body can’t handle with a good charge. Can I continue, please?”

“You just told me she stabbed you in the throat!”

“Yes, and it was extremely unpleasant and embarrassing, so I’d rather not spend too much time dwelling on it. Besides, she was very careful and missed all the major arteries. A decent unicorn healer could have cleaned me right up in no time. Just had to breathe through a hole for a little while.”

“B-but to do that—”

“Iris Jade told her I’d be fine.”

“Did Former Chief Jade know you would be fine?”

“Do you think that mattered to her one way or the other?”

Note to self: the word ‘friendly’ means something different to dragons than it does to ponies. A friendly dragon will still happily poke you in the neck if you’re annoying her badly enough; screaming and flailing while she’s trying to carry you and a heavy pack over a death-infested no-pony’s land qualifies.

I spat some blood on Firebrand’s claws and tried to glare at her, but she was ignoring me again and concentrating on following Swift’s contrail. The puncture wound hurt like a son of a whore, but nopony else seemed to have noticed I’d stopped shrieking. Endorphins were slowly flooding my system, making everything pleasantly hazy as a thin smear of red ran from my neck down my stomach. The hole in my throat was quickly knitting itself shut, but my vocal chords still burned and as much as I wanted to go back to wailing my head off, the minor injury she’d done me had managed to tamp my panic down a little.

Off to my left, I could see Iris Jade and Lily both dangling from Scorch and Altrak’s claws, respectively. Jade was clinging on tightly, not seeming to enjoy the heights any more than I was as she levitated a magic bubble containing Mags along beside her, while Lily had her forelegs spread and her tongue hanging out like a doberman with its head out a car window.

As the city grew in the distance, however, my foul mood lifted.

At the moment, it was just a dark, irregular splotch on the horizon, but the closer we got, the more details I could make out. Black clouds swirled over Uptown, illuminated from below by the massive, glowing shield which surrounded the center of the city. A few fires burned in the outskirts, but many fewer than in recent days. Automated streetlights were even winking at us from most of the eastern side of town. Despite what I knew to be going on down there, it looked oddly peaceable.

Swift tilted her huge wings and started coasting down toward one particular part of the city which was almost completely unlit. The dragon flight moved to follow her.

Something about that seemed slightly wrong.

Why should that be wrong? We were headed to the Vivarium. The Vivarium was a safe place, right? Nopony would dare follow us without an army at their backs, and we were being carried by—

Oh.

I struggled violently in Firebrand’s arms, waving my forelegs at her and tapping on her chest as hard as I could for attention. For a few seconds, I was worried she would think I was just having a fit, but one of her eyes rolled down in my direction. I immediately stopped flailing and tapped the side of my head, then pointed toward the ground where we were headed, trying to mime ‘danger’. There is no especially good way to mime this with hooves, but I’m pretty sure the ‘play dead, tongue hanging out, then gesturing at spot’ probably got the message across.

If it hadn’t, the flak shell detonating above and to our left, showering Firebrand’s shoulders in superheated lead sure did. Even with my ears pinned against my head, the shockwave made my skull ache.

A bloom of massive fire and metal, like a firework straight out of Tartarus, lit up the night sky. Dragons being dragons, Firebrand shook off the worst of it with a deafening snarl and swooped for the deck at speeds that would have torn my hat off if Swift hadn’t thought to tie it to my head. Crask and the others immediately peeled off and dove, trying to get below the flak cannon targeting range. Gravity seemed to pull my anatomy in the wrong direction as we winged toward the ground. I sucked another breath, and my neck made a disturbing whistling noise, but I forced myself to ignore it, waiting for another explosion.

When it didn’t come, I lifted my head to find us below the level of the buildings, rocketing down a darkened avenue narrow enough that Firebrand’s wings almost touched the walls on either side. The sensation of speed was enough to make me queasy, but puking at however many dozens of miles an hour we were still going was probably just going to get me dropped.

There was a bellow of pain from somewhere behind me, but I didn’t have time to glance back as we turned down the nearest street. Suddenly, Firebrand let out a squawk of alarm and braked so hard my lungs hit my ribcage. I wheezed, and then I was flying again, sans protective dragon.

Sky, tarmac, sky, tarmac—

‘Sorry Gale...This one isn’t my fault!’

Sky, tarmac, sky, massive pile of garbage bags.

I crashed muzzle first into a heap of uncollected trash mounded up in the mouth of an alleyway and was instantly buried. I laid there for a long moment, my nose resting uncomfortably close to a moldy takeout container and my stomach fur getting slowly soaked in something that felt like warm pudding. There was a slow ‘drip, drip, drip’ on the brim of my hat which had miraculously stayed in place, but besides that, I was feeling no particular incentive to get up.

‘Why should I move?’ I thought. ‘I am obviously in my natural habitat. See? This is friend lint trap, and that is friend taco wrapper…’

Somepony was shouting nearby, and I tried to ignore it.

‘Shouting is loud. Ponies should be quiet and lie in their nice puddles of sticky goop. Maybe my intestines? Yeah, probably intestines. Oh well.’

I wasn’t in any particular pain, but I took that to mean my neck was broken and I’d soon be gasping out my last into a bag of rancid crisps. Would Gale save me again? Maybe. I wouldn’t have much blamed him for being a tad resentful, considering all the work he’d put in lately keeping my wretched tail in one piece.

My pile shifted, and I began to slide, and then the bag above me glowed brilliantly before being flung off to the side. A bright light expanded in front of me, and I tried to reach towards it, finding my limbs wouldn’t budge.

“Ah! Here he is, ya’ll! Keep those dragons covered!”

A wrinkled green face slid into view, with the light levitating along beside her head.

‘Ah, so I have broken my neck, then, and the reaper is here for me,’ I thought. ‘And the reaper looks like...Swift’s grandmother.’

The burn in my throat was fading, so I decided to see whether or not my lungs were paralyzed alongside everything else.

“Mmm...C-could—” I paused, coughed up a disgusting, mucus-y wad of something metallic tasting, and quickly swallowed it again, then tried once more. “Could you just put that bag back? I’m dying, again, and I’d like to do it in p-peace for once.”

Granny Glow raised one shaggy grey eyebrow, and then her horn shimmered, projecting a thin beam of light at my head. She scanned it over my body for a few seconds, concentrating particularly on my throat. A frightening smirk developed on her pencil thin lips, and the light intensified, surrounding me from head to hoof.

“Ye ain’t hurt, so no excuse to be lazin’ around! On yer hooves, buttercup!” she barked.

I felt myself go light and scrambled to grab something to cling to, suddenly finding my legs working now that she’d removed the bags pinning them to my sides. The most I managed to snag was a headless teddy bear with a bit of loose fluff coming out of the neck. I clutched it close and whimpered as she dropped me on the pavement. My back legs immediately collapsed under me, so I settled for slumping on the sidewalk, hugging the bear to my filthy chest with one foreknee.

A dozen lights were focused on me from various directions, and for a few seconds I was back at the mansion. I whimpered and squeezed the decapitated stuffed animal a little tighter.

After Glow jammed her hoof against my cheek, forcing me to look up at her. “Hrm...colt, ye in there? Where’s mah grandchild? Who’re these here dragons what was carryin’ ya?”

I slowly turned my head to find the street crowded on both sides with upwards of twenty ponies, all of them heavily armed and wearing white sashes in the Stiletto style. Some were attached to the walls of the nearby buildings with soft glows around their hooves, while others stood in the street or flew overhead. They were pointing some extremely heavy ordnance down range.

Turning my head the other way, I saw Firebrand, Crask, and Altrak standing in a defensive formation, backs together, facing the Stillettos with their weapons drawn. Iris Jade, Mags, and Lily huddled below them. Iris’s horn was glowing, and I could see the faint gleam of a shield around the dragons, but against the quantity of firepower facing her I doubted even Jade could hold for long.

Bones, Tonic, and Scorch were nowhere to be found. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or not.

“Th-they’re with me,” I stammered, rubbing at my eyes which were suddenly blurry. “L-look, could...could we put our guns down for a bit, please? I don’t think I want to do guns for a little while...”

“Once ye tell me where Swift is, ye git! An’ what’re ye doin’ with Iris Jade? Thought she hated yer guts.”

“S-Swift is...um...I’ve no idea. She was just ahead of us—”

“Incoming!” somepony shouted. Fluttering orange wings filled my vision as my partner dipped below the skyline, coming in hard and fast.

I had barely a glimpse of her before she skidded to a halt, sparks flashing off her hooves. Giving herself a good shake, she grinned and swept both forelegs around her grandmare’s shoulders, squeezing the elderly pony to her chest.

“Gran! You’re awake! It’s so good to see you!” she chirped, folding her wings against her sides as she took in the scene around us. “I thought Tourniquet told everypony I was coming?”

“She said ye was comin’ about five minutes ago. Didn’t say ye had dragons on yer tail! Ah don’t know as Ah trust that robot. Still not takin’ chances,” After Glow huffed, pushing her granddaughter back so she could get a good look at her. She lifted the edge of Swift’s body armor, peering at the bloodstains all over it. “This yours?”

Swift shook her head. “Mostly Hardy’s, I think. He had a couple of strokes, and then I had to help tie off a severed leg on a PACT trooper, and...I don’t actually know where it all came from. I sorta lost track. When did you get up and about, Gran?”

“Eh, that weird stallion from the Morgue showed up wi’ a couple of Diamond Dogs. Burrowed right up through the pavement, they did. Stitchy or whatever his name is had this funny lookin’ lil box with wires on,” she replied. “Ah was the first’un they tested it on. Worked a treat, too. Ah swear, it fixed mah arthritis! Guess a few-weeks-long nap does wonders, even if Ah gotta git some muscles back.”

Swift gave her a sharp look. “Shouldn’t you be resting, then?”

“This is me restin’! That Taxi pony is still doin’ all the logist-ic-al garbage, an’ Ah go walk the street.”

“C-could you please stop them from pointing guns?” I whispered. My entire body was shaking, and I felt a chill creeping into my bones.

My partner looked down at me, and then her eyes widened. “Sir, are you going into shock?”

Looking down at my teddy, I carefully put him down and backed up, trying to compose myself. I’d never been a particularly big advocate of exposure therapy, and falling out of the sky didn’t help my fear of heights one little bit. I shook my coat out and tried to wipe the smear of blood and other substances out of my mane.

“I think I passed shock a while ago. I’m alive, though.” I tried to smile, if only so everypony would see I hadn’t lost it entirely, but my mouth wasn’t cooperating. “Look, we need...we need to get somewhere private. Can we get moving?”

“Eh, ye smell like a corpse, but Ah ain’t gonna argue,” Glow put in.

I had a sudden thought. “Kid, you said Tourniquet let them know we were coming? From way up there?”

“Um...yes, Sir. Her influence is a little bigger than—” I quickly cut her off with a hoof on her muzzle.

“No...No. On second thought, don’t tell me. Where are Scorch and Bones?”

Swift looked up at the sky for a moment, then frowned at her grandmare. “They’re four streets over on Consternation Road.” She turned to her grandmare. “Gran, could you please tell whoever all these ponies are to stop shooting at my friends?”

From somewhere nearby, I could hear the distant snap and pop of gunfire. After Glow’s lip curled, and then she snatched a walkie-talkie out of her mane and snapped it to her muzzle. “Team Bravo! Stand down an’ hold yer fire!”

The walkie-talkie crackled, and a frightened voice came through, “Ma’am, there’s two dragons with a living skeleton down here! The skeleton coldcocked Miss Masala, and now they’re holed up in an alley!”

“Ah said stand down, les’ you wanna be on latrine duty till the end of the world!” Glow snarled, giving me an even glare as she released the ‘talk’ button. “Did that colt just say ye was travelin’ with a livin’ skeleton, or am Ah gettin’ old?”

“That’s what he said. Look, can...can we please go somewhere quieter? I would sincerely appreciate it.”

From the middle of the street, Iris Jade shouted, “Hard Boiled! What’s the story?! You drop us into some kind of trap here?!”

“No!” I shouted back. “We’re safe! Just friends here!”

“Define ‘safe’ and ‘friends’, Crusader!” Firebrand growled, her eyes following one particular pegasus who was carrying a shoulder-mounted wooden staff of some kind covered in brightly glowing runework.

“They’re safe, dammit!” I snarled, directing my voice toward that particular pony. “You! Yeah, you! I’m tired, I’m pissed off, and I’m covered in trash! You already took at shot at us with a flak cannon! Do not make me come up there and stuff that artifact up your backside! Same goes for the rest of you! Guns down, now!”

Glow gave her group a nod, and slowly, reluctantly, everypony started to lower their weapons.

Raising my voice had taken more out of me than I thought it would, and I found my knees trembling, violently.

“Sir...do...do you need me to have somepony carry you?” Swift asked.

“No. I’m fine.”

“Are you—”

“Fine, I said!” I snapped, a little louder than I meant to. Swift, rather than being insulted or hurt, just pressed herself against my foul-smelling side and opened one wing over my back.

“Tourniquet...well, if she was anyone else and controlled by anyone else, I might have some worries, considering she saw us coming miles away. No idea how far her power could spread. She didn’t see enough to keep them from launching a couple flak shells at us. Like I said, though, we were headed to the Vivarium—”

“Wait a second! How did you explain Bones to these ponies?”

“You’d be surprised how little explanation is required for something like a telepathic skeleton when you drop out of the sky with a group of dragons. That or everypony who took one look at me decided to go ask someone else.”

“And...they just accepted that you’d somehow showed up with a bunch of dragons?”

“I’ll admit, it was a new low for me, but what other choice did they have?”

“Eh…”

“Exactly. May I continue?”

“Go on…”

After Glow’s group split off in all directions, vanishing back amongst the buildings like a hoard of wisps. They kept to the alleyways, moving in groups of two or three, until at last it was just Glow, Swift, and the rest of our group.

“Ah’ll git yer skeleton brought round to ye,” Glow grumbled as her patrols filtered away. “Ah can’t afford to come wi’ ye, but Ah’ll be there in an hour or so. Them nasty fellers wi’ the teeth like to strike unprotected areas, so ah gotta keep them patrols spread out like Scarlet’s back legs.”

Swift tapped the side of her head and smiled. “Tourniquet can guide me anywhere I need to go, Gran. I’m safe so long as she’s watching me.”

“She’s been a right help, last day or so, but yer gonna talk me through that robot havin’ a wire into yer brain, ya hear?”

“It’s...it’s more like I’ve got a wire into hers,” Swift giggled, her wing around my shoulders tightening slightly.

“Yeeeah, well, don’t know as Ah like it either way. By the way, yer mother’s gonna want to wring his neck.” Glow flicked her thin mane at me. “Stella might not be too cheered havin’ other dragons about, either.”

“I know, but they’re here to help.”

“Ah’ll believe it when Ah see it. See ya soon. Take Seventh Street. The illusion field is still up, and Ah don’t need no dumb-ass buncha rubber-neckers wandering out to see you lot and getting picked off by the Black Coats or them crazy monsters. Love ya, birdie. Back in a bit.”

After Glow gave her one last pat on the shoulder, then loped off into an alley.

“Crusader, those ponies had enough weaponry to turn us into a thin soup,” Firebrand commented, letting out a slow breath now that the patrol had dispersed. “Quick response times as well. I daresay, they are a formidable army.”

“I...uh...I really need to get indoors sooner, rather than later,” I murmured. “I’m not holding our unexpected flight against you, nor the punctured vocal chords, but please don’t do that again.”

Firebrand licked her lips, and a wicked smile lit her face. “Then I shall not hold the flak cannon popping one of my eardrums against you. How did you know the attack was coming?”

“I remembered, at the last minute, that our friends here mounted an anti-air gun on their roof,” I replied, turning down the road.

“Hardy, are...are you going to be alright?” Lily asked, worriedly. “You were shaking pretty badly a minute ago.”

I held up my leg, and my hoof quivered right up to the shoulder. I quickly put it down again. “Nopony else gets to ask me if I’m alright for a bit. I am here and I am alive. Please move on. Swift, you know the way. Take us home.”

For as quickly as the Stilettos had responded to our incursion, I expected to see some checkpoints or armed guards roaming the streets, but we didn’t see so much as another pony on the empty roads until we were three blocks from the Vivarium itself, headed down a discreetly unlit alleyway whose only defining characteristic was a lack of garbage and slightly fresher hoofprints in the dirt. The back wall of the alley had the subtle, telltale shimmer of a low-intensity illusion; enough to fool a casual observer, but it probably wouldn’t stand up to regular magical scans.

Swift was ahead of us and pushed her way through as gentle ripples spread around her body, reverberating across the brick surface as though it was made of water.

“After you,” I murmured, holding one leg out for Firebrand to go ahead.

She gave me a critical look. “Are...you intending on hiding behind me, Crusader?”

“It’s not my fault you make good cover.”

With an unladylike noise and a puff of smoke, she turned on a back leg and marched through the wall. Crask rolled his eyes, and Altrak strolled by, his tail flicking at the end of my nose. That left Lily and Iris Jade.

“Hardy, can we talk...later?” Lily asked, pausing in front of me.

I grimaced hard enough that it might have looked like a smile, and she must have taken that for agreement. Turning, she followed after Swift and the dragons.

Iris paused in front of me and used a flicker of magic to grab my chin, forcing my head back. It was an awkward position, and short of shooting her I couldn’t really stop her without my anti-magic armor, which was still in Swift’s bag.

“You weren’t exaggerating,” she mused. “I wonder if that magic could absorb a bullet or two—”

“Let me go, Iris. Now.”

She drew back slightly. Maybe it was my expression, or something in my tone that said ‘not playing with you anymore’. Pursing her lips, she patted me on the cheek, then released my head.

“You know, you might have made a pretty good Chief of Police in another life,” she observed cooly. “For just a second there, I thought I saw my own reflection.”

I shut my eyes, listening as her hoofsteps retreated, then faded as she passed through the illusion. Before my brain could start mulling over her words, I cantered toward the wall, half hoping it’d suddenly turned solid so I could dash my brains out. What would be one more dead pony in an alley?

We all need things to hope for in life.

Bones was leaning casually against the wall on the other side, fresh cigarette pinched between his teeth and jacket sporting a new splash of blood. Ahead, I could hear ponies shouting and raised voices from the adjoining streets as people came out to see the strange sight of dragons freely walking the avenue. He raised his head as I staggered out of the portal.

“Ah, colt. You look like Tartarus warmed over.”

“Says the guy without any skin,” I grumbled. “Look, I just had an hour long flight—”

“Don’t like heights any better than your daddy did, huh? Well, one of these sweet ponies you seem to have gotten involved with strongly suggested I should wait for the street to clear, then take a sewer shaft to one of the back entrances, rather than go for a walk in broad daylight. I can’t say I’ve been to the Vivarium since the war. Stella still running things?”

“Yeah. Look, can we move along?”

I started to trot past him, but he put a bony leg across my chest. “Can I give you a piece of advice, colt?”

“Can I stop you?”

“Probably not. Not without a year and a half of special forces combat training, seven years veterancy, and possibly being one of the undead.”

“Then go ahead.”

He carefully adjusted one of my bloody lapels, smoothing it flat as he said, “I can see you’re crashing. You’re right on the very edge. Trust me, I was there. That prison camp I had to sneak into to get the other Crusaders meant quite a while swinging a pickaxe for the dragons, watching better ponies than myself die around me every day. When I got back, it took one very special pony to get me back from that place.”

“Gran?”

“Nope. Just a friend, who offered me a bit of comfort and didn’t ask for anything in return. I could have rejected it, easy. But it was what I needed just then.”

“So, what’s the advice?” I asked.

“I just gave it to you. Now, come on. Our entrance is this way,” he murmured, then turned to the nearest street and darted off towards another alley.

We managed to avoid the crowd who were welcoming Swift back and gawking at the dragons, hopping from alley to alley until Bones found the sewer grate he was looking for. Wrestling the grating open, we started down a set of stairs into a short, undecorated concrete hall which led to one of those ubiquitous, dirty-yellow ‘City Personnel Only’ doors.

My head felt like it was full of rat-crap-laden cotton candy, and moving all four legs without tripping over myself took considerable effort, but Bones made no comment about my slow pace. He pushed open the service door, peered inside, then waved me forward. I’d been tired before the flight, but day after day of running, fighting, bleeding, dying, and crawling back was catching up with me. When had I last truly rested? Before the Castle fell?

The tiny room on the other side of the door was a broom closet with a second door at the back. Through that, there was a long hallway that reminded me of a cheap hotel, with paisley wallpaper and thick carpets. Bones tilted his head back and took a deep whiff.

“Ah, the scents of the city. I used to take friends of mine here, undercover, back in the day. It was one of the most secure public spaces in all of Equestria. You could get a beer, take in a show, and discuss foreign espionage all in once place. Speaking of beer, I haven’t tried whatever qualifies as hops in thirty years. Mind if I go find myself a tray to stand over and a pint?”

I swayed a little, using the wall to prop myself up. Rest. Rest was the world. I smelled terrible, but more than anything, I needed rest.

“G-go on,” I murmured, slowly sinking onto my stomach.

“That bad, huh?”

I didn’t answer, opting instead to put my head between my forelegs. There was a shuffling of hooves on carpet from somewhere close, then a yelp of fear and the sound of a rump hitting a wall. I didn’t have the energy to roll over and see who my grandfather had just traumatized.

“Now, that’s interesting. If I’d seen me, I’d have scampered like my tail was on fire. Why aren’t you running?”

The pony, whoever they were, stammered something I couldn’t make out.

“Oh...hehe. I see. Well, point me at a beer and I’ll leave you to it. Take good care of him. He’s had a rough day.”

The anonymous pony muttered a few words, and my grandfather patted me on the shoulder, then strolled off whistling a merry little tune through his complete lack of lips. I let my eyes drift closed and swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. Celestia, I’d never been so tired.

A cautious presence slid up beside me. I caught a hint of sweet perfume, and then a soft leg was laid across my back. My shoulders tensed at the contact, and the leg withdrew.

Tilting my head, I opened the nearest eye and saw a feminine, rose-colored face.

“Scarlet,” I murmured.

Hot tears were streaking down Scarlet Petal’s cheeks, leaving thin lines in his mascara as he moved a little closer. Even though I was covered in blood and stank like a swamp, his nose didn’t wrinkle, nor did he shy away. Makeup couldn’t disguise the bags under his eyes, nor his quivering lip, nor the pleading expression as he waited, just out of range, not quite touching my foreleg.

I slowly slumped onto my side against him, and he threw his legs around me.

“C-come on, Hardy. Please get up. There’s a place you can rest nearby. I know you don’t care for me, but just this once—”

I hid my face against his neck, and he tentatively helped me to my hooves, propping me up with all his strength as we limped down the hallway. I could feel his hip shaking from the effort, but he didn’t complain. My body ached and my heart probably needed a charge, but the warmth of another pony was enough to keep me moving, despite how desperately I just wanted to lie down and wait for the batteries to run dry. Nopony seemed to be in the area, either by coincidence or design, and we made it to a small, tiled locker room down a side hall.

With greatest care, he began stripping me, pulling off my hat and working my sweaty, soiled trenchcoat down over my shoulders. I didn’t have it in me to stop him, but he was as respectful as it was possible to be as he pulled me out of my clothes, leaving me shivering in the cold air with just my gun and harness. Taking my hoof, he led me through the other end of the locker room into a small shower. The hot water felt like boiling lead poured over my back. As Scarlet picked up a scrub-brush and got down to the nitty-gritty work of scouring the impacted scum off my body, I felt my own tears start to come.

So much violence for two short days. The gazes of cops I’d watched die flashed behind my eyelids. There was Hollyhock’s stricken face as she burned in the darkness of her own mind. Worst of all, the dead, tortured faces of all those children, their souls sucked dry to fuel some great evil hidden in the mansion.

Scarlet’s hooves and scrub-brush worked down my flanks, picking up one hoof at a time to clean my toes and frog with gentle touches. When he was close, I’d shove my face into his fur and sob until he had to move away. I must have shed a gallon of tears into that colt’s shoulder, but still he stayed right there beside me, patiently working the dirt out of my pelt.

Finally, after what felt like an hour, the water started to run clear.

I’d cried until my eyes were red, and Scarlet bore it silently. It was some time before I realized he’d put down the brush and was just sitting there, his forelegs around my neck and his head resting alongside mine. I’d cried myself out and was left feeling strangely hollow.

Sniffling softly, I dropped my forehead against Scarlet’s chest. A big, fluffy towel came down over my neck, and he began ruffling my mane dry. It was so ridiculous to feel better because of a fluffy towel that I couldn’t help a tiny smile. A minute later, the job was done, and he slid his foreleg into mine.

“There’s a bed next door. You can sleep there, okay?” he murmured.

I nodded, weakly, staggering as we left the empty shower room. He was still propping me up, but the shower had been the right thing. How some warm water could be enough to bring a pony who’d been through what I’d been through back from the brink, I’ll never know.

The room he took me to was a small bedroom which looked like it’d been lifted straight out of a fashion magazine for sixteen year old fillies: a few dozen throw pillows with encouraging slogans sewn onto them, a couple posters of the Wonderbolts in swimsuits, and a simple bed with an orange stuffed horse with slightly oversized wings and a red mane. I stumbled to the bed, not really thinking about the decor too deeply until I saw a tiny picture on the side table; it was a photograph of a very young, very familiar filly with her legs wrapped around a tiny version of Scarlet.

“This is...your room?” I asked, glancing back at him.

“Oh...y-yeah,” he stammered, then stood a little straighter. “I don’t bring clients here! I swear! T-the sheets are clean!”

I sagged onto the soft mattress and sighed, reveling in feeling clean for the first time in too long. “At this point, I don’t think I’d care if it was a heap of garbage. Thank you, Scarlet.”

He trotted to the door and put his hoof on the handle. “There’s an empty room nearby. I’ll be there. Just knock on one-oh-two—”

Sliding off the bed, I wrapped a leg around his slim shoulders. He gave me an uncertain look, resisting for only a second before taking a tentative step toward me. I tugged him along as I sank onto the blankets again. I could feel his heart pounding as I held him close, his back to my chest and my nose full of the scent of his mango shampoo. Stroking his mane, I laid my head on the pillow and shut my eyes. He was shaking, but soon stilled and lightly wrapped his foreleg around mine.

After a few minutes, as drowsiness started to claim me, a thought occurred.

“Scarlet, why do you have a plush toy of Swift?”

Act 3 Chapter 38 : Instructions Unclear, Detective Caught In Meatgrinder

"Treasure thee the moments. They art all thou may have in the dark. The people will pass, but moments hang in memory till the very end of you."

- From Princess Luna's Best Selling Book, 'How I Spent A Thousand Years With Nothing To Do But Play Tic-Tac-Toe And Think'

I woke from the first really comfortable sleep I’d had in years. My forelegs were wrapped tightly around Juniper’s middle, but he didn’t seem to mind. I let out a quiet yawn. Having somepony to hold while I slept after all that time was worth occasionally inhaling a bit of mane. Juniper was still asleep, but—

Juniper is dead.

My eyes snapped open, and the events of the previous evening came flooding back.

The shower. Scarlet taking me back to his room. Curling up under the blankets together. I wrestled with myself for a long few seconds before realizing it was sort of a moot point; he was still hugging one of my front legs.

I looked up at the digital alarm clock sitting beside his bed. A little after noon, or possibly midnight. Hard to say these days. I’d long ago lost track of the passing of days into nights. I’m sure somepony was keeping track, somewhere, in the hopes that things would return to normal one day and they could present the proper, unvarnished, correct time of day to the Princesses. They’re probably a boring prick, too.

All these thoughts were mostly an attempt to ignore the growing pressure in my bladder. Scarlet was breathing slowly, his cheek mashed firmly into the pillow as he dreamed about something pleasant. He had a big smile plastered across his sleeping face. I really hated to wake him, but it was that or an embarrassing mess at some point.

Leaning forward, I nosed his cheek and murmured, “Scarlet, wake up.” When he didn’t move, I added, “Come on, I gotta piss.”

An ear twitched, and Scarlet groaned, “Merfle...shift isn’t for three hours…”

“Your shift is right now,” I chuckled. “Now shift.”

At the sound of my voice, he jerked his head around to look at me. “Hardy?! Oh...am I still dreaming?”

I gave my foreleg a light tug, and he jumped, quickly letting go.

“No, you’re not dreaming. Get up. It’s time to go be heroes.”

Scarlet bit his lip, then rolled over and slid his legs behind my neck. “Look, I...I know last night didn’t mean anything serious and we didn’t have sex, but I wanted to say...say thank you. Just thank you. I’m know I’m just some stallion-crazy colt who likes his job a little too much, but—”

I sighed inwardly as he started to babble before leaning forward, pulling him against me, and kissing him so hard he squeaked. I’m sure I had horrible morning breath, but he didn’t seem to mind one bit. After a good five seconds, I leaned back and slipped out of the bed, leaving him with an expression somewhere between confusion, shock, and ecstasy.

“Mmm, breakfast. No...bathroom first, then breakfast.” A soft tingle from my chest reminded me of one other commitment. “Bathroom, breakfast, and wall socket.”

“Abah...daba?” Scarlet stuttered.

“Right. Good. Maybe give that about ten minutes to go down before you wander around outside?”

Scarlet looked down at himself and went pink right to his eartips, snatching a blanket over himself in a rare display of modesty. “S-sorry!”

Chuckling to myself, I opened the door and stepped out into the hall. I paused, coming muzzle to muzzle with four sets of eyes.

Taxi, Limerence, Swift, and Mags were sitting opposite me, leaning against the wall.

Swift’s eyes were shut, her body armor unzipped down her front and the tattoo on her chest glowing slightly, and Mags was drawing a surprisingly artful picture of her with crayons. Limerence was nose-deep in an ancient, dusty book with a clipboard beside it, and Taxi had what appeared to be a half-disassembled P.E.A.C.E. cannon spread out on the carpet in front of her. They all looked up as I carefully shut Scarlet’s door behind me and cleared my throat.

“Ahem. Waiting long?” I asked.

Taxi got to her hooves and stepped over the gun, putting her forelegs around my neck. I returned the hug, resting my cheek against hers for a second. “Swift...Swift told us what happened out there.”

“Is that why we’re not doing the customary greeting where I bleed everywhere? Also, I take it Fluff'N'Stuff made it out of the Castle?”

"He did. Almost all of Requisitions made it out, and they carried half the armory with them. We've been distributing it. I’m just really glad you’re back,” she murmured, then swung a small camera on a strap around, holding it up on one hoof. “Besides, I got pictures of you and Scarlet together that’re going in my personal scrapbook. You two are adorable, you know.”

“Because of course you did. Thank you for not waking us.”

“A-are you alright, Sir?” Swift asked, her eyes still closed, though her head was turned in my direction.

“Kid, are we going to have to talk about you doing creepy things with Tourniquet again?”

She blinked her eyes open, then lowered her ears. “Sorry. That’s been happening more and more often lately, but I’ll ask her to remind me to actually look at the people I’m talking to. I was trying to get some intel on the movements of the Black Coats...err...the P.A.C.T. Tourniquet gets flashes sometimes when they pass parts of the electrical grid she’s focusing on, but our focus is limited—”

“Save it for a briefing, kid.” I turned to Limerence and offered him a hoof. “Lim...I’m glad you’re back on your hooves.”

Limerence straightened his coat, flattened his lapels, and stood, taking a step forward. His hug was stiff and a little unpracticed, but genuine. “I am more pleased to see you than I thought possible, Detective.”

“You too. How is your horn?”

Reaching up, he tapped the aforementioned appendage, which let off a soft ‘clink’. “Back to working order, more or less. Slip Stitch is a capable doctor, despite his eccentricities.”

“Did I hear After Glow say something about a ‘portable’ version of his machine?” I asked.

“Yes! Quite the invention. It forcibly aligns every leyline in a unicorn’s body simultaneously. A perfect cure for a list of magical maladies. There’s only the single prototype right now, but he’s been using it round the clock to awaken as many unicorns as possible.”

“That’ll be good for our resources, at least,” Taxi added, softly.

A warm weight landed on my back, wrapping tiny claws in my mane. “Egg pony! You not crazy anymore? Cuddling that girly colt help?”

“It helped. It helped an awful lot.” I exhaled, looking up at the ceiling for a moment, before refocusing on my driver. “Taxi, what’s been happening, here? Keep it to the highlights until I’ve had something to eat and a trip to the bathroom, okay?”

“Highlights, huh? Well, insofar as I’ve had time to get my hooves back in the game, it’s been a busy couple of days. We recovered the Night Trotter, and the modifications and repairs are almost complete. That took two teams of mechanics on three shifts. Our communications systems are running. The Police Department is settling in with the Underdogs, and the Aroyos and Stilettos are coordinating with one another.”

“What about Slip Stitch?” I asked.

Limerence added his voice to the conversation. “The diamond dogs dug to the Morgue, so we have what amounts to four heavily fortified bases of operation, now, and three points of retreat from any given location. I wouldn’t have believed so much was possible in such a short period of time, but—” Lifting his hoof, he gave it a wiggle, and a brightly colored ladybug crawled out of the fur on his fetlock. “—Miss Tourniquet and the Ladybug Collective are running logistics, and the creature known as the ‘File Cloud’ is currently hovering above Supermax, providing access to the entire city government information system. The three of them are efficient on a level that would unsettle me if circumstances weren’t so dire.”

“I’m glad Gypsy made it. Part of me was afraid that was going to be the last we saw of her. Well, in that case, I need food, a wall socket, and then we need to have ourselves a council of war.”

“War, sir?” Swift asked, nervously.

“War, kid. Things are about to get bad, and I want everypony on the same page before we spend any more lives playing defense.”

“Wait, wait, wait... You’re saying these ponies gave control of their entire logistical operations to the Supermax Construct and the Ladybugs?! The same Essys that took over the power and water systems? Are they bonkers?!”

“I think that’s what I said, yeah. A bunch of the Aroyos even got a mark from Tourniquet. It’s different from the one on Swift, somehow, but they get a few little perks. When they’re doing that ‘hive brain’ thing, they act a bit like ants. Really smart, really fast ants.”

“They...they took prisoner marks?”

“Yep! If you want to wait for Swift to get back, she can explain it to you. I’m pretty sure she’s in the bathroom. Might be a while, though. Omnivore diet makes for some pretty righteous—”

“Oh please stop right there and get back on topic! You were telling me how this all somehow led up to you losing the Helm of the Nightmare!”

“Right. Sorry, it’s been a busy day, and we’ve got a lot to do before we head to the Office.”

“This safehouse your grandfather mentioned?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re still going, even knowing what they could do?”

“We’re still fortifying, but at this point, I don’t think we have a choice. If they hit us before we’re ready, it’ll be over pretty damn quick. Look, that’s all part of the plan. Can I just get to that?”

“Ugh! Fine! Talk quicker!”

It felt good to have my friends at my back again.

The four of them, walking along on either side of me—or riding in Mags’ case—felt like a force to be reckoned with. I’d watched Limerence reduce a hardened criminal to tears with a knife and a dictionary, sneak us through a deadly sewer full of lethal traps and monsters, and single handedly power a spell-core using only his horn. Swift had fought griffins, dragons, demons, and her own fear of blood to become one of the most capable warrior I’d ever met. Taxi was a monster in the body of a friend. Then there was Mags; she was my reason to keep going.

We’d worked together, struggled together, bled together, cried together, and in some small way it felt like having a family; a crazy, dysfunctional family, but one that would always be there until the very end. That the end was probably pretty close was entirely irrelevant.

Swift led the way through the labyrinth of new and old construction. There were sleeping rooms designed after military barracks with sets of crudely assembled bunk beds in long rows, and common areas with simply built barstools made of scrap intermixed with expensive furniture that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a royal’s house. Anything and everything a person could rest their backside on was in use, and everywhere we went, there were people. Ponies, griffins, zebras, yaks, goats, donkeys, and buffalo worked, played, lazed, and talked to each other in the hallways. The place was almost as packed as Supermax had been, though it seemed new construction was taking place in large sections of the underground.

At one point, we passed a group of diamond dogs in high visibility vests and hats who seemed to be headed deeper into the complex.

“Kid, was this place this big when we were here last?” I asked.

“Yes and no, Sir. Miss Stella has been expanding for a long time,” she answered.

“Yeah, I noticed, but why?”

“Um...It’s complicated, but he told me once when I snuck into one of the empty areas and got lost for almost a whole day. The Vivarium was a safe place from dragon attack during the Crusades. Miss Stella thought that if there was one dragon who ponies weren’t scared of, they’d be more willing to accept dragons back in Equestria when we finally made peace.”

“You would not believe how much of this complex was going unused,” Taxi murmured, swinging her brand new, reassembled P.E.A.C.E. cannon over her shoulder. “There are old crystal mines down here that run for miles. The Darkening was a good excuse to open everything up again. There were entire sections you could hide a whole town’s worth of ponies in, if nopony minded a futon on the floor. I’m pretty sure Stella expected something similar to the Crusades to happen again at some point in the future. Equestria has certainly seen its fair share of catastrophe in the last century.”

Limerence levitated his clipboard off of his back and folded a page back. “Unfortunately, right now, our biggest problem isn’t space, but food. I estimate we have perhaps a month before mass starvation, even with rationing.”

“Fine by me,” I grunted, tipping my hat to a passing mare who’d given me a bright-eyed smile of recognition. “The planet is going to be freezing by then. It’s already a bit nippy on the surface. If we fail, we’re dead anyway, so I’m going to have a full belly before we go anywhere.”

“Egg pony, won’t the other side be really, really cold already?” Mags asked.

“Other side of what?”

“The world! We gots the big black hole with the light behind keeping us warm, the e-c-lipsy-thing...but they got nothin’ over there! Won’t they be getting cold quicker?”

“The ecological damage will be severe, yes,” Limerence said quietly.

“Those are thoughts for another day,” I interjected, turning to my partner. “Swift, you called ahead? We’re going to Stella’s lair. Who all is going to be there?”

Swift zoned out for a second, her hooves still moving, but her eyes blankly staring at the path ahead. “Uh...Sir, it’s...it’s everyone.”

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?”

“I mean everyone, Sir. You’ll see!”

“I’m going to admit, it never really occurred to me how many allies we’d managed to gather over the last couple of months. By weight of numbers, it was a veritable army.”

“Those doing the work of Harmony frequently end up making friends.”

“Huh...that sounded a bit religious.”

“When you’ve lived through some of the things I have, a pony can become a little religious.”

“I know what you mean. That said, I was still surprised at how many people were in attendance when we reached Stella’s chamber.”

While we’d been drawing plenty of eyes, there was no crowd of rubbernecking onlookers trotting along behind us. Waved greetings, a few carefully ignored questions shouted in our direction, and once or twice some foals chasing after who were stopped as we moved deeper, but no crowd. Most of the doorways to the larger rooms were guarded by ponies wearing white sashes, though after a bit I started recognizing some familiar faces amongst their number: members of the Detrot Police Department. They’d given up their uniforms, but most still wore their guns, bulletproof vests, and a badge tucked into the front of their sashes.

As we passed one particular door with a former officer standing beside it, the young mare drew into a sharp salute. She was a blue the color of a clear morning sky and had a shotgun slung across her stomach. A nasty scar ran from her chin right up through one of her ears. It looked barely healed, and a few stitches were still holding the ear together.

“Chief. Good to see you back,” she murmured.

I paused, one leg in the air, then slowly set it down.

“You get that cut at the Castle?” I asked, studying the wound.

“Yes, Sir!” she chirped, standing a bit straighter with a proud look as she stared straight ahead. “One of the ‘zerkers got me. I thought I was going to die, but you shot it in the eye and it backed off. Then a sergeant pulled me to safety and helped me get away.”

I clapped her on the shoulder. “I’m glad you made it out. There are a few decent medical unicorns in the Vivarium who can magic that scar off you.”

“Actually, I was thinking of keeping it,” she replied, with a proud grin. “Stallions like a mare with some character, and nothing says character like a groovy scar.”

“We’ve all got a few scars,” I said, momentarily feeling my age. “One day, soon, we’ll hold funerals. Once this is all over, I’ve got a few names I intend to cut into the Castle’s walls.”

A tear snuck into the corner of her eye, and she quickly swept it away. “Me, too, Sir. Go on below. We got notice to make sure your path stays clear and that nopony bothers you.”

“Thank you, officer.”

Ten minutes with the toilet, scarfing down three pieces of toast, and plugging myself in for another ten hadn’t given me much of a boost, but it was enough that I was no longer at risk of dying on the carpet somewhere. Unfortunately, the elevator ride down to Stella’s lair made my belly do a quick jig as we descended over the ancient cavern. Despite setting down in exactly the same place we had last time, it was hard to tell we were in the same room; the cave had been transformed, with huge work lights projecting powerful luminance over every inch of the space. Odd as it might sound, I found the brilliance comforting; it’d been a very long time since I’d seen full daylight, even if it came from an artificial source.

The catwalks over the lake had been replaced by a more permanent structure that resembled the Underdogs’ shanty-town if it’d been made of clear plastic tarpaulin. It was huge, at least three stories tall, and the interior looked to be full of plants. A sweaty heat radiated throughout the cave, leaving my mane slick.

“Now, what is that?” I asked nopony in particular.

“Greenhouse,” Taxi mused, tapping her cannon with her toe as she watched a group of three ponies coming out of the building with a load of vegetables in a huge crate slung between them. “Hydroponic greenhouse.”

Stepping off the elevator, I studied the building for a moment. “I thought you said we were having food problems, Lim.”

“That’s a stop-gap measure,” he said, his horn lighting as he pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “We’re using an absurd quantity of earth pony magic to force growth, but each generation of seeds becomes more enchanted and less edible. We had to abandon the tomatoes entirely after the most recent generation made a bid for independence.”

“Damn. That means we need seed warehouses,” I muttered. “There have to be a few of them near the outskirts—”

“We explored that option,” Lim murmured, lowering his ears. “The rogue dragons destroyed them very systematically after we managed to get one or two. Right now, we’re keeping the populace fed, but at a terrible cost to the genetic wellbeing of our long-term food supply. Unless we can get access to our farmlands and there’s sun to grow with, recovery will be difficult. We’ve got a few underground areas where we’re growing mushrooms and other long term re-newables, but cities are expensive to feed.”

“Well, shit. Alright, nothing we can do. Those are going to be thoughts—”

“—for another day, Sir?” Swift finished, giving me a nudge with her wing. “Are we even going to be the ponies to deal with this once it’s over?”

“I know the square root of jack about farming, kid, but if Princess Celestia is around to give directions and I can work under the nice, hot sun, then I’ll strap on a plow in five seconds flat.”

“I misses the sun…” Mags muttered, wrapping her paws around my neck.

“Me too, honey.”

Swift lead us around the edge of the cave and toward the tunnel into Stella’s private hoard. Ponies passed us, offering nods and smiles with sometimes a few lingering looks before being hurried off by one of their companions. The sounds of construction reverberated through the halls. Jackhammers rattled, dust filled the air, and worklights peered around corners as it seemed ponies were hollowing out the substrate under the city to make more room.

At the end of the corridor, the normally hidden door to Stella’s hoard stood open, and a crowd of shifting bodies occupied the catwalk, some standing, others sitting on short benches. I could hear many different voices discussing something. As we trotted through, rushing hoofsteps galloped up behind us, and a breathless, red-faced Scarlet rounded the corner.

“Sorry! I’m here!” he gasped, trotting around in front. Stopping at the open stone door, he leaned in and shouted, “Announcing...Chief of Police, Hard Boiled!”

The room fell silent, but I could almost hear the anticipation.

“Scarlet, I swear…” I muttered under my breath.

Cantering behind me, he shoved his forehead against my flank and gave me a firm shove toward the door. “Hardy, we’re trying to keep some semblance of order, and you’re the Chief of Police! Go be police-y!”

‘Right,’ I thought. ‘Police-y. Breathe, don’t cry, don’t scream, and don’t roll around on the ground like you’re five. Can do.’

Inhaling, I pulled Mags off my shoulders and set her down on the cavern floor. “You’re walking, kiddo. Try not to shoot anyone in here. These are friends, whatever they might look or act like.”

Mags patted her tiny pistol and fluffed her neck feathers indignantly. “I never be shooting anyone who don’t deserves it!”

“Good girl.”

Adopting as much poise as I had in my personal reserve of grace, I strutted into Stella’s hoard and up the catwalk onto the audience platform. Much of the hoard itself was gone, the displays and curios replaced by a myriad of benches and chairs fit for all manner of different species. Every seat was full, and above it all, Stella himself was draped across his throne, his tail dangling lazily in the water and a ridiculous plastic crown the size of a foal’s wading pool perched on his brow.

A pony-sized podium was set up in front of the throne, complete with a microphone and a glass of water. Dozens of creatures were in attendance. It reminded me vaguely of some kind of parliamentary meeting, and my heart started to beat a little faster as the eyes of all those different persons started boring into me. Soft whispers ran up and down the gallery as I passed them by.

The great purple lizard regarded me coolly, his golden eyes following along as I trotted between the rows of seats, glancing at faces both familiar and foreign. I stopped at the foot of his throne, returning his inscrutable gaze. He allowed a tiny smile to quirk one side of his muzzle, then flicked his eyes at my friends and fluttered his fingers toward three metal folding chairs off to his right with tiny cards sitting on them that said ‘reserved’ along with Taxi, Limerence, and Swift’s names in hastily scribbled hoofwriting.

I waited until they were seated to speak.

“So...Stella. You want to tell me what all this is?” I asked, waving a leg toward the audience.

“Be patient, darling. Come wait here,” Stella purred, fluttering his fingers at a seat at the base of his throne. He then nodded at something over my shoulder. “All will be revealed in a moment.”

Scarlet moved around my side and stepped up to the podium, tapping the microphone lightly, which let off an amplified thumping sound. Picking up a prepared clipboard that’d been sitting there, he quickly checked it, then turned to face the gathering. I took my seat, tugging off my hat as my eyes roved over the gathering. I caught sight of Iris Jade sitting a ways down, lazing in her seat with her back legs propped on a glowing magical construct. Beside her, a group of griffins were noisily chatting to each other. I thought there might have been a familiar shade of brown in among them, but couldn’t really see from where I was seated.

“Ahem! Ladies and gentlebeings!” Scarlet began, and silence gradually fell over the room. “Welcome to the first ever meeting of the New Detrot City Council!”

The reactions from the crowd were mixed: a few cracked smiles, some cautious chuckles, and more than a couple bemused expressions.

“Now, many of you have only arrived today,” he continued. “Some have only been here for a few hours. We’re going to do some quick introductions so everyone knows everyone else, then get down to brass tacks! Please, starting to my left, I’d like whoever the representatives or decision makers are to please say your names and which group within the city you represent?”

There was a momentary quiet, and then an aged unicorn, his eyes sparkling with life and his grey pelt wrinkled such that it looked like a sack hanging on a coat-rack, got to his hooves. He was wearing the shredded remains of a garment that I felt like I should know from somewhere, as were the three ponies with him.

“My name is Venture Capital. I speak for the prisoners of Supermax, now known as the Ever Free Fortress.”

I finally placed the garment. It was a torn, blue robe that’d once been covered in glittering sequins. A few fragmented bits still clung to it.

“You let the Lunar Passage in here?!” I scoffed, peering up at Stella. The sentiment was echoed around the room by a few raised voices.

“Let him say his piece, Hardy. He wasn’t a member of the cult of Nightmare Moon,” Stella murmured.

Venture Capital gave me an appraising look, then trotted over in front of me. “Chief Hard Boiled,” he said, softly. Slowly, he slid into a low bow, placing his chin on the metal catwalk. “We have seen the folly of our faith and the scales have fallen from our eyes. You defeated the Nightmare. I saw the abomination that Skylark made of herself. I personally disposed of her body with spellfire.”

The other three members of the Lunar Passage, a young mare and two middle-aged stallions, got to their hooves. They moved up beside Capital, sliding into similarly submissive positions. I noticed all three of them had bright red, crescent-shaped tattoos around their cutie-marks: Tourniquet’s enchanted prisoner marks.

“We of the Lunar Passage swear ourselves to your cause,” they said, in desperately creepy unison. “We will follow you until the end of this world, into death, and beyond.”

My heart did a quick dance on my stomach as I looked down at the heads of the four ponies. Reaching down, I put my forelegs under Venture Capital, quickly trying to pull him upright. He resisted only a moment before righting himself on creaky joints.

“Mercy, would you stop that?” I grumbled in his ear. “I’m a boozy cop who’s a little too lucky for his own good. I am not becoming a religious figure.”

“Believe me, Crusader, that cannot possibly be any worse than our previous leadership,” Venture replied, with a thin smile. “We will serve you, and maybe one day, the Holy Construct will see fit to free us.”

“Holy Construct? Arrrg! You mean Tourniquet, don’t you?!” I groaned, pointing a toe toward their seats. “Sweet Celestia, let’s finish these introductions before I have a heart attack. I’ll accept your vow or oath or whatever that was after you know what we’re up against.”

Venture smoothed the wrinkles around his mouth with a little trickle of magic from his horn, then nodded to my new followers who returned to their seats, seemingly oblivious to just how awkward that display had been. “If that is your will...”

I put a hoof on my forehead and rubbed it in a circle. “Yes, it’s my will. Please go sit down...”

When they were settled again, the next pony in line got up. Sang Froid, from the siege of the department. He still wore his uniform, and his mane was still as immaculate as ever, but he’d included a white sash across his chest. I was going to have to ask them about that, at some point.

“Sang Froid, Detrot Police Department, representing the officers of the city. Chief Hard Boiled, we are at your command.”

I nodded, forcing as neutral an expression as I could. “Good to see you got out of the department, Sang.”

“You, too, Sir.”

He sat, and an elderly diamond dog muscled between two larger dogs, his cane clacking against the catwalk as he threw his shoulders back and thrust his chest out to address the room.

“Dogenes. Philosopher, writer, mortician, and—since I haven’t been able convince them otherwise—de facto leader of the Underdogs!” he growled, smoothing down his toga. “Can’t say as I’m pleased to be dragged out of my bed before noon!”

“Your presence is a joy to us all, Dogenes,” Stella said, with an amused smirk.

“Not like I had much choice, you old snake,” Dogenes replied, though there wasn’t any particular malice behind it. “We’re here for the fool in the trenchcoat, to see justice done in the city, and to protect the population. Piss on the rest of it, far as I’m concerned.”

With that, he sank into his seat, scratched himself, and leaned his cane against the railing. One of his bodyguards caught it before it could fall over the side into the water, carefully propping it up against the old dog’s leg.

Iris Jade was next in line. She didn’t bother getting out of her seat.

“I’m the former Chief of Police. I could kill most of you without breaking a sweat,” she said, with a chilly smile. “I’m here to keep the current Chief of Police alive until I’ve humiliated him and he kneels at my hooves, begging for mercy. If we save the world in the meantime, so be it. If he dies, I am claiming his corpse. I want to make a hoofbag out of him. That is all.”

There was silence for a good twenty seconds, before the next individual took a step forward. It was Slip Stitch, his eyes bright, coat freshly cleaned, and wild mane sticking up from his head like he’d recently touched a live wire.

“I represent the Detrot Morgue and its population. I also want to make a hoofbag out of Hard Boiled, should he expire during this endeavor, and after extensive study. Miss Jade, when you’re done with him, could we perchance negotiate—”

Jade’s horn glowed, and Stitch flew back into his seat, his muzzle clamped shut with a bright green band of magic.

In the ensuing quiet, there was a guffaw, followed by great belly laugh. A powerfully built griffin shoved himself to his paws, tossing off a salute in my direction. My eyes lit up, and I threw myself to my hooves.

“Sykes! You ol’ feathered prick, where’ve you been?”

“Aye, me boyo! Knew ye’d live! Too damned stubborn to die!”

Sykes looked good; a few pounds heavier, even. His brown feathers were glossy, and he’d sharpened his beak at some point recently. He wore his tartan and kilt, along with a brand new shotgun with a freshly oiled stock across his shoulder.

Adopting a slightly more formal pose, he threw his shoulders back. “Oi be standing for the Hitlan and Tokan griffs! Bunch o’ other little clans in t’ city, too, all in Skytown. We ready to kill for t’ peoples of Detrot!”

“Isn’t the vow more typically ‘to die’ for the peoples of Detrot?” one of the Lunar Passage ponies commented dryly.

“And where be fun in that, eh?” Sykes cackled, propping himself against the railing. “If de ot’er prick dies for what ‘e believes, Oi’m around to drink to his convictions!”

After Glow stepped out of a row of clustered white-sashed ponies and raised her rasping voice. “Glad to have griffs with us. Ah’m Glow. Ye call me Granny, ye better be mah granddaughter or a Stiletto, cuz otherwise Ah’ll wup yer teeth in. We been keepin’ this city safe fer o’er a hunnered years. Ain’t about ta change today.”

The soft cry of a young child rattled my ears, followed by a gentle hush from her mother, and then Wisteria trotted out of a small group of tattooed and pierced Aroyos, all sporting bright red crescents around their cutie-marks. Even Wisteria had one, though hers was right there on her chest.

“I be head of de Aroyos. We be de Chosen of de Ancestors.” Reaching into the saddlebag opposite her foal, she produced a shiny glass orb about the size of a softball and set it on the catwalk, then backed up a few steps. “Dey speak for us!”

The orb sparked internally, then a brilliant light shone from somewhere inside, tracing out a shape in the air with tiny lines of brilliant illumination. The shape took on depth, then form, until with a final pass three aged ponies sat in their rocking chairs, surrounded by piles of yarn. Apple Bloom was wearing a set of metal goggles on her forehead, along with some type of mechanized harness attached to her shoulders which had several jointed ‘arms’ above it that twitched seemingly of their own volition, while Scootaloo’s prosthetic legs had been replaced with a much heavier duty model that whirred and clanked when she moved. Sweetie Belle didn’t look to have changed much from the last time I’d seen her, save a long-barrelled rifle leaning against her chair where it would be close at hoof.

“Now, why am I surprised the three of you are still alive?” Stella murmured, sucking his painted lip between two fangs.

“Death does not become us,” Sweetie replied, taking a quick sip from her wineglass. “That said, it is lovely to see you, Miss Stella. The years have been kind. Now that we are no longer constrained by our oaths of self-restraint, nor the aggressive suppression of our expansion, we would offer our services—”

“Oh hush, Sweetie! Yer bein’ all fancy!” Bloom interrupted, hauling herself out of her rocking chair to address the crowd. Her friend gave her a sharp glare, but she ignored it. “We’re here ta help! We’ve got guns an’ we’ve got ponies. Not so many as ya’ll, but ours come right outta the war. Plus, we think we figgured out how they’re trackin’ us! Or, at least, where it’s comin’ from.”

Sykes jerked his head up. “Oi!” he snarled. “Those shite monsters caught o’er a dozen good griffs out of guarded places this week! What’re we blowin’ up?”

“Well, I’d be right there beside you holding a stick of dynamite, if we could do that,” Scootaloo sighed, tucking her wings against her sides. “Unfortunately, it’s one of our old weapons testing sites. It’s in a place that’s hard to get to and defensible to a fault. The only way in is sneaking.”

“Wouldn’t happen to be a place called ‘The Office’, would it?” I asked.

Scootaloo’s eyes almost bugged out of her head, and Sweetie’s wineglass dropped right out of her telekinesis, shattering on the floor before vanishing as whatever magic the orb ran on lost track of the pieces.

“How come ya always know more’n all the smart ponies?!” Apple Bloom huffed, rocking back in her seat. “Yer makin’ us look bad!”

“She’s right, you know. The fact that you have managed, by coincidence or design, to accumulate so much information that should be hidden from even the most aggressive investigations is nothing short of bizarre. In fact, it is beyond that! It’s impossible!”

“Funnily enough, I thought so too? I might have bled for some of this knowledge, but leads kept popping up where ponies had found only dead ends for decades. I can’t have been the only one to notice something had gone off the rails in Detrot, and I don’t entirely buy the ‘it’s a long way from Canterlot’ explanation. Manehattan and Cloudsdale got hit harder than Detrot, and they didn’t turn into dens of criminality with no response from the Princesses.”

“Hmmm...I mean, the rest of Equestria certainly has problems, but not on the same scale. Certainly not such that someone could hide all of those disappearances and murders.”

“It’s almost as though some higher power was keeping everyone else distracted, huh?”

“But not you.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I wonder at that sometimes. A dedicated cop develops alcoholism and somehow manages to continue working for years beyond the point it should have disabled him. I’ve always had the strangest sensation of being pulled in two directions at once, for years now.”

“Hardy, you’re making me a little paranoid, here. Magical influences guiding ponies’ lives is not unheard of, but it’s usually not that subtle...”

“If you weren’t paranoid already by this point, then you’ve had your head under a rock. And I don’t think either of us can claim what’s going on is subtle.”

With assurances I’d tell them what was going on and after Apple Bloom and her friends were back in their seats, Scarlet stepped to the podium.

“There’s one final name on my list,” he said. “Princess ‘Firebrand’ of the Farthest Land, Heir of Ember, rightful Queen of the Dragons.”

Stella straightened on his throne, tossing one side of his boa back over his shoulder intently. “Ah! Yes, our latest guests! Do come in, please!”

I turned toward the other end of the room as Firebrand’s troop marched up the stairs onto the catwalk, which shook under their combined weight. Firebrand looked freshly washed, her head-flukes and scales polished and her claws sharp as she came in. The rest of them were clean, with Tonic in particular seeming more cheerful than she had when I’d seen her last.

The confidence in Firebrand’s eyes lasted all of ten seconds, right up to the moment she laid eyes on Stella. If you’ve ever heard a dragon squeak, it’s a sound you should get on record, because I would bet it’s worth a pretty penny to collectors of staggeringly rare audio; getting draconic royalty’s terrified whimper on tape would probably buy you a decent-sized house.

“Now then, my sweets!” Stella began, “It’s rare I get draconic guests from the homeland, but I am most pleased to make your acquaintances—”

Firebrand threw herself face down on the catwalk, spreading her wings out to either side in what I took to be a gesture of total submission. A second later, Tonic, Altair, Scorch, and Crask mirrored the action.

“I beg abeyance of your wrath, Lord Stellatrix!” Firebrand yelped, smoke pouring from the edges of her muzzle with every word. “We did not know you controlled this land! We thought these ponies were speaking of a female dragon! You have been gone from our rivers for many decades, and my mother told me of your exploits, but we had no idea you’d taken the pony-lands and if we had, we’d have called on your leadership when my mother went into her long sleep—”

Stella shrugged his feathered boa off and slid down from his throne, snaking through the water. Ponies quickly cleared the railing on that side of the platform so the sea-serpent could rest his forelegs there. Firebrand was still babbling apologies and explanations, right up to the moment the sea-serpent reached down and gently chucked her under the chin with one of his talons.

“There now,” Stella said softly. “Hush, darling. I gave up my claim to the throne before your mother was crowned. I am not Stellatrix or ‘Ocean Burner’ or ‘Bloody River’ or any of the other silly names they used to call me anymore. Just ‘Stella’ or ‘Miss Stella’ suit me fine.”

“B-but...you were in line to be king…” Firebrand gasped.

“I am still a queen, no?” he giggled, and she gave him a confused, slightly frightened look. “Oh do relax, darling! I’m not going to kill you! I have no interest in the homeland, and I didn’t respond when old Torch decided to have his little contest for the throne. I’m sure he was hoping I’d save Ember from all the politics and misery. Much good it did him. She was always a stubborn little thing. I was sad to hear what happened to her. Still, it is pleasant to see some young dragons who know how to show respect to their elders.”

Firebrand’s right eye twitched, and then she carefully pushed herself up and folded her wings in tight against herself. “I...I had prepared a very dramatic expression of loyalty to the cause of the Crusader, but I feel I have been beaten to it, and considering some of the persons who are now enmeshed with him, would be somewhat overshadowed. We are here to be briefed on what is actually going on in this city.”

“Well, if you still want to do something dramatic when we’re done, feel free,” Stella said, gesturing at me to get up. “For now, I’m about to call this little session of ours to order. Hard Boiled, I do believe it is time that you told us all what has really happened in Detrot, since you seem to be the only pony who knows the entirety of it.”

I coughed into my hoof, mostly to cover my own mental organization process. Scarlet stepped aside to offer me the podium.

‘Chief of Police. Sound police-y. Don’t sound like a frightened colt who just wishes he was back in bed with his leg half asleep and a friend holding him.’

“I wish I could say I know everything, but there are still a few gaps,” I started, then paused for a moment. “This all began with a brave girl who died trying to save us from ourselves. What it will all come down to is...wishes.”

“You...you told them everything?”

“If only I’d had the chance…”

“I want you to keep in mind that most of this is assembled from the last few months worth of inquiry, so we’re going to be speculating here, but most of it is supported or confirmable,” I said, watching the sea of eyes. It wasn’t much worse than briefing all those cops at the Castle before the siege, and at least the eyes were friendly, if much more numerous.

“Many, many centuries ago, Princess Luna went insane. In the guise of Nightmare Moon, she attempted to re-order the sky into a particular magical configuration called ‘The Web of Dark Wishes’. This would have allowed her to absorb and channel vast amounts of magic into a sort of ‘universal spell’, the direct translation of her will into reality. Nopony knows exactly what she would have wished for, but we can probably say with confidence, ‘nothing good’.

Once she was defeated and banished by Princess Celesta, a hidden hoof took over her work. At some point in the last thousand years, presumably many centuries ago, a family of ponies began planning to reconstruct the Web of Dark Wishes. They struck a deal with...something...to feed the souls and lives of their weak to it in exchange for power and knowledge.”

A few grumbles and whispers were going back and forth, but most of the room was listening closely. Iris Jade was feigning sleep, though one of her ears twitched from time to time.

“Stella, do we have a slide projector, or something? I need a big map of Detrot. I’m going to feel stupid saying this out loud without anything to point at.”

“Ah’ve got it! One second!” Apple Bloom’s image called out, and then she walked out of the range of whatever magic was keeping her visible, only to return a second or two later with a rolled up map the size of a rug slung over one shoulder. Sweetie Belle unfurled the map, and it levitated into the air, held at a height everypony could see.

“Alright, could you mark the Shield pylons and draw me some lines connecting them to a few of their nearest neighbors?” I asked. “It doesn’t have to be exact.”

“Yup! Sweetie, yah got that?”

“Bloom, dear, I can hear just fine. I didn’t require new eardrums after the war, unlike some I could name,” Sweetie admonished. Bright, glowing lines appeared on the map, stringing the different points into an intricate pattern that vaguely resembled an eye. “There you are, Detective.”

“Thanks, ladies.” I trotted around the podium and pointed up at the floating map. “Gentlebeings…I give you—” Pause for effect. “—the Web of Dark Wishes!”

The room went silent for about five seconds before erupting into shouted questions from all directions.

“—can’t be serious!”

“Impossible! How could they hide—”

“Ah don’t believe—”

I let it go on for a moment, then held up my leg and lowered my head until the hint was taken and everypony had returned to their seats. There was still some grumbling, but no one had pulled a gun and tried to shoot me, so it was a marked improvement on some after dinner speeches I’d given at the department over the years.

“Things are only going downhill from here, so buckle up buckaroos,” I warned, heading back to the podium. “Now, this ‘universal spell’ is powered by chaos and suffering, much like the sort that would be caused by say...freezing the sun and moon in a state of permanent eclipse and destroying the central government of a country. Worse, these characters we’re talking about have been harvesting ponies for an unknown period of time using magic that seals parts of their souls inside some body part. They built this city as their own private wish-factory.”

“What evidence do you have for all of this?” Sang Froid asked, sweeping his perfect mane back over his shoulder.

I waved a hoof at the ceiling. “Aside from the current condition of the world? Mostly just a long, long list of things I’ve been investigating since this began. I can’t lay it all out for you here, but if we’re alive in a year, I’ll write you a book. These people plan long term. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d factored things like the return of Nightmare Moon and the Crusades into their plans. They controlled the city government for decades from behind the scenes under the guise of a law firm known as ‘Umbra, Animus, and Armature’. Probably had some other name before that, too.”

“You’re...kidding me. My uncle’s firm was bought out by them!” a young mare groaned from about halfway down the gallery.

“Not kidding, not joking, and not exaggerating,” I assured them. “What I know right now from my investigations is that these people are desperately hunting for something.”

“Oi, boyo...ye means the Armor of the Nightmare, don’t ye?” Sykes put in.

A few gasps ran around the room, but I nodded and braced my forelegs on the podium. “That’s right. So far, we know they’ve got two pieces. I have the third.”

“What good is that to them?” one of the Stilettos sitting at the back called. “How did they even get those two?”

“Careful maneuvering,” I replied. “Astral Skylark was, at one time, a thief. She managed to steal part of the armor from the Royal Vaults. She had some ‘unique’ markings on her face which suggested she might have put on the helmet. It didn’t react well.”

“Wait, how do you know that?” somepony asked, though I didn’t see who.

I shifted my weight from hoof to hoof. “Simple. She kept some mementos of her time on the other side of the law. I found them after I killed her.”

I suppose the response shouldn’t have surprised me, but then, the number of ponies who knew that particular piece of information wasn’t that high. This is one of the reasons I am not in politics; situational honesty is a dangerous condition to have when you’re dealing with even a moderately friendly room.

“—seriously just say what I think he said?”

“—Chief of Police just—”

“What do you mean you killed Astral—”

Picking up the microphone, I held it to my muzzle and blew a raspberry into it. The buzz filled the room until it drowned out all conversation entirely. After about ten seconds, everypony had given up trying and fallen silent.

“Alright, people! I’m done with ‘shock and outrage’. You want this briefing, you sit quietly until I’m done, or I’ll have you removed and you can hear it second hoof. Got me?” I growled.

When I had a general consent, mostly in the form of everyone sitting down and shutting their various beaks, muzzles, and other cakeholes, I continued.

“The Hitlan and Tokan had another piece of the armor. Based on our intel, Umbra, Animus, and Armature may have paid off a dragon noble to attack the Hitlan and Tokan homelands. Then our dear mayor, Snifter, invited them to bring their treasuries and families to the city. All it took, from there, was the attack on the Moonwalk Hotel.”

I took a deep breath, watching the griffins out of the corner of my eye as they glared daggers at the dragons who were sitting opposite them.

Before they could get too riled, I added, “The Emberites here are an outcast dragon nation who supported Equestria during the war. Apparently, someone stole their eggs for reasons unknown. I’m sure you can relate. Still, that leaves the chestpiece. Someone in Canterlot suggested putting it on a moving tour as a means of keeping it safe and to bait out possible thieves. It should have been an excellent solution, and against any small time thief or even an organized group, it probably would have been.”

“So...why in tarnation wasn’t it?” After Glow asked, nodding at the ceiling. “Ah mean, Ah know the Princesses ain’t stupid. They got crazy security! Heck, Ah hardly believe Skylark could get inta the Royal Vaults!”

I gave her an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t have all the details of how it was done, but nopony banked on a centuries old conspiracy with a city’s worth of resources to call on,” I answered, grabbing the glass of water off the podium and downing it “Fortunately, the conspiracy didn’t bank on one smart, sweet, resourceful little filly who was just looking for a new home. Her name was Ruby Blue. For reasons unknown, she stole the helmet from Skylark and hid it. She was murdered, and that’s where the trail began. I was the cop assigned to her death. I now have the helmet in my possession.”

“Detective, while this is all terribly interesting, I must ask: do you perchance have a course of action in mind?” Stella asked, slithering up onto his seat and tossing his boa back around his neck.

“I have an extremely reliable source who suggests Canterlot hasn’t actually been destroyed. They seem to think it’s been transported to the moon.”

It occurs to me that, if I’d known the remainder of my life would be composed of rooms full of people looking at me like I was crazy, I’m pretty sure I’d have eaten a bullet some time ago.

“Eh...Ah think ye’d best mebe el-abor-ate on that, Mister Boiled,” After Glow said into the ensuing silence, levitating one of her Stilettos out of a folding chair so she could sit down.

“My reliable source says that, if we can disrupt the Web of Dark Wishes, there’s a good chance we could get the Princesses back. Maybe even the capital. That means, in all likelihood, destroying the Shield. Per usual, I’m keeping the details to myself and a select few.”

Venture Capital, the Lunar Passage’s representative, raised himself to his hooves.

“Your graceful pardon, Crusader, but who is this reliable source?” he asked.

“A source reliable enough that their name wouldn’t mean a damn thing to any of you, but who I trust implicitly,” I said, unable to keep a bit of an edge out of my voice. “I have been mucking my way through blood and guts this last month to bring you this tiny sliver of information. Right now, we’ve got a course of action. Since I don’t know if there are any spies here, I’m keeping it to myself, for now. I need you lot to keep yourselves safe and fortify your positions so we don’t find ourselves inadvertently fueling that wish machine with more chaos and violence.”

“Hrmmm...Detective...ah, excuse me...Chief Hard Boiled,” Iris Jade began, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Those things that attacked the Castle destroyed it with almost no losses. There would have been even more bloodshed if you hadn’t done whatever it was you did to the File Cloud, and I hear there are still some weird things slithering around that side of town. You’ll excuse me if I don’t exactly like our odds, even with an advantage in numbers.”

I flicked my tail around my flank and grinned at her. “And that, Miss Jade, is why you’re going to be working alongside my grandfather and the Aroyo Ancestors to give every pony who can hold a gun a crash course in killing. We need an army to retake Uptown. You’re going to give me one.”

“Me?!”

Apple Bloom’s ears perked up as her image moved a little closer to the projector, deforming slightly. “Wait, Hard Boiled...what’d ya say just now? Yer grandfather is—”

“—is right here, Miss Bloom!”

The telepathic shout lost some of its impact when Bloom didn’t react to it, but then she was only a projection. However, she couldn’t have missed the panicked reactions of several ponies nearest the door to the appearance of a skeleton in a new sports jacket with a cigarette perched in his teeth. A dozen guns were pointed in his direction before anyone could do more than let out some frightened yelps.

“Stand down!” Stella thundered as a bright green shield bubble snapped into being around Bones. “I say, stand down and put those weapons away!”

“Heh...oh come on! Kinda like having guns pointed at me these days, since I don’t so much need to worry about holes. Feels real comfortable and familiar,” Bones chuckled, trotting down the catwalk as every eye tracked him. “What? Ain’t anypony gonna offer me a seat?”

I sighed and put my forehead on the podium. “Ladies and gentlecolts, may I please introduce my grandfather. Yes, he is undead. Yes, he is a prick. No, you can’t shoot him. Yes, I want to, too.”

“You’re telling us that is Egg Head?” Scootaloo gasped, her mechanical legs grinding as she all but leapt from her rocking chair and rushed closer to the projector. “Gosh, and I thought I needed upgrades.”

“I can’t talk to them, can I?” Bones asked, tapping the side of his skull.

“He can’t speak through the projector, ladies. Corpse problems,” I grumbled, then glared down at the ponies who still hadn’t dropped their guns. “Look, I’ve already issued my quota of death threats for the day, so understand that my next ‘threat’ will come with a loud bang. Anyone want one?”

It took a moment, but most everyone decided they didn’t and the shield around Bones to vanish.

Waving my leg at the door, I set the mic back on the podium. “Alright, briefing is over. Summary? We’ve got a plan, we’re not telling you what it is, we’re going to fix things, and then when all of this is over you can line up to hang, shoot, poison, or incinerate me to your heart’s content. Don’t die, don’t kill any innocents, and protect yourselves as best you can. Does anyone have any questions?”

A few cautious hooves and claws rose into the air.

I smacked the mic so it let out a shrill shriek, and every one of those legs was instinctively yanked back down.

“No? Good! Anyone who knows they can stay, stay. Everyone else, get out, so I can coordinate with my dead grandfather, a hyper-intelligent machine gestalt, and that sea serpent over there!”

Act 3 Chapter 39: Or, How I Learned To Love The Cliffhanger

"Mayor Snifter isn't a disease. He's a symptom.

I ask you, why isn't government composed entirely of the cleverest ponies available? The answer is because government is a nasty, dirty, unpleasant business. It's climbing your way to a top you can never reach, then, if you ever find yourself on top you don't even get to enjoy it; you've got to keep everyone below you from pulling you down. There is no 'win' condition. To want to involve yourself in that is to either be absurdly ambitious and ego-maniacal or easily bored.

Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, our kind, benevolent diarchs, play politics because it's the only game in town they haven't already owned. Knowing what we know about our city government, what do you think drives that bunch of clowns?

- commentary from Spilled Ink in the New Chronicle Detrot Gazette Observer.

“So you just threw some of the most powerful people in the city out of the room? Just like that?”

“More or less. There’s a reason I never climbed beyond the rank of ‘detective’ when I was on the force, despite how many years I’d been working. I have no particular care for big egos or social ladders. Besides, my friends here aren’t fragile politicians. People who’ve survived the Eclipse lived because they knew when to duck.”

“But you need these people! Couldn’t you have been slightly more polite?”

“Think about my last twenty-four hours. Think about where I was and what I was doing.”

“Right. My apologies. You still haven’t told me how this all led to you making the exchange for the Helm. What is stopping them from just...removing all of you?”

“You mean killing us. For the moment, it’s mutually assured destruction and their assumption that I don’t know the whole shape of their long term plans. Which is - to be fair - completely true. They’d lose much more on attacking us than we’d lose on defending ourselves. By the same token, they’re dug in deep. We go after them, it’s going to be expensive and there will be considerable bloodshed.”

“They don’t seem to have a problem spending lives.”

“No, but if everything else that’s happened is any indication, they have a timeline and they’re sticking to it. Even dealing for the Helm was an act of desperation. Once their timeline is up, if we aren’t ready, then they’ll swoop down and slaughter us.”

“Which means you have to be ready before that happens, right?”

“And that’s where things got complicated…”

For all that talk of getting down to business, I’m pretty sure we could all agree that we needed to stop for something a little more substantial than tea. Since Wisteria had to go feed her little sister and most of the rest had duties to attend to - though we did have to shoo Venture Capital and the Lunar Passage out along with the rest - Stella’s grand hall felt empty without all the flacks, flappers, and hangers-on of the various important persons. That left a hoof-full of people standing around, munching on pimento cheese sandwiches and trying not to stare too obviously at the stranger members of our little council.

Bones was taking a certain amount of glee in eating, sucking each bit of pimento off his toes. I’d no idea where it was going, but the food wasn’t dropping out between his ribs in an obvious fashion, so it was a question best left to minds more inquiring than mine. Sykes had Mags in his lap and was animatedly lying to her about some great battle he’d fought in his youth while she smeared her meal all over her face.

Stella was applying a fresh coat of lipstick in front of his vanity, kindly trying to avoid frightening poor Firebrand any further. The young dragoness was, meanwhile, attempting not to look like she wanted to cry and hide every time her uncle so much glanced in her direction. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie were even deeper in their cups than they had been when they’d set up the projector; Scootaloo was down to drinking straight from the wine bottle and Bloom had herself a glass of something clear that caused a face like she’d swallowed raw sewage with every sip.

I could almost feel the dirty looks Iris Jade kept shooting me as she flicked through one of Limerence’s clipboards, assessing the tactical situation. Taxi sat beside her, working through her third sandwich as Limerence continued studying his dusty book and Swift stared into space, lips moving and wingtips twitching, like a weird little feathery gremlin.

Leaning my back against the podium, I stroked Scarlet’s messy, disheveled mane, listening to the gentle lapping of the water against the pylons that held up the platform and feeding him bites of one of my sandwiches.

When had I become okay with this invasion of my personal space? Not a clue. It was nice, though. Maybe some broken little part of me thought I wouldn’t get many more chances to hold someone and was making up for all that lost time I’d spent being the toughest pony in the room. Or I could just have gone insane and this was all a fever dream. Probably that.

Mmm, pimento. Yum.

“So, there Oi was, me weapon wi’ only the one bullet lef’, but if Oi was gonna go, Oi was gonna take’m wi’ me! Thought sure Oi were dead!” Sykes cackled, clutching his claws together with one talon extended to mime a gun.

“What be happenin’ then?” Mags asked, licking her beak.

“What happened then, my dear, was that Sykes attempted to shoot out the warehouse light and tore open a bag of flour above the suspect’s head. The flour ignited off the flame spell the suspect was attempting to cast and almost killed all of them,” Jade interjected, sourly as she slapped the clipboard down on the catwalk. “It being the third major explosion with property damage he’d been party to, I took his gun and issued him a can of silly string.”

Taxi snorted, slinging her braid over her neck. “That didn’t stop him from hitting a Beam distribution hub with a flashbang two months later.”

“Oi! Ladies!” Sykes protested. “Oo’s tellin’ this story, eh?”

“And a good story it was,” Stella murmured, dabbing a bit of color off the edge of his lip with a kerchief I could have used for a blanket. “However, I do believe it is time we got down to...what is it ponies say? Brass tacks? Miss Iris Jade, if I may, what is your opinion of our situation?”

Iris grunted, reaching up to stroke a lapel of the pants suit she hadn’t actually managed to replace yet. Realizing it wasn’t there, she let her hoof drop. “My opinion? Eh, you’re either in excellent condition or screwed. Hard to say which, really.”

“That...is not comforting,” Stella murmured.

“You’re asking me to apply some educated guesses to a world-ending scenario here,” Jade grumbled, slapping down the clipboard on the floor. “You’ve got good horse power, good weapons, and good positions, but limited food, limited medical supplies, limited long-term prospects, and the planet will freeze sooner rather than later. Also, your enemies know your every move and are behind an impenetrable magical shield which is powered by a system which absorbs pain and chaos in a country full of pain and chaos.”

Swift’s eyes popped open and her pupils rolled around until they were focused on us. “That’s not totally true, actually. Tourniquet and I have been analyzing this!” Reaching into her front pocket, she pulled out the keyring we’d appropriated from the Family’s mansion.

“Yer analyzin’ a magical artifact without a horn?” Apple Bloom asked, blearily setting her drink on a table at her side which vanished the second it was out of her hoof.

Unzipping her armor, Swift revealed the red crescent on her chest which was glowing brilliantly like she had a lightbulb trapped in her ribcage. “I’m the Warden of Supermax. I can totally analyze magical artifacts without a horn. Maybe, one day, I’ll figure out how to levitate stuff!”

“Great,” Scootaloo groaned, tossing her wine bottle over her shoulder. “Some kid gets better toys than I ever had. Apple Bloom, why couldn’t you make a thinking machine that takes over cities?”

“Because Princess Luna told me Ah couldn’t!” Bloom replied, huffily, before turning back to my partner who was carefully zipping herself up again. “So, what’s that do?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a key to the Shield pylons,” Swift answered, tucking the keys away again. “It opened one back at the Family mansion. I don’t know if it’ll work on the ones in the city, but if we can get inside one, we might be able to do something to them!”

Bones, who’d been sitting silently enjoying his meal, raised a leg. “There must be redundancy built into the system. Shield pylons are taken offline from time to time for maintenance. If we are to disrupt the system, it will require hitting several, disabling whatever controls them from a central point, or doing something to one which sabotages many at once. With only one key, I don’t see how that could be done.”

“What’d he say?” Scootaloo asked, cocking her head at Bones as we all turned in his direction.

“He says we have only the one key and that the Shield has redundancy built in,” Limerence replied, pulling his forelegs under himself. “I will study the artifact and attempt to replicate it when we have a spare moment. If I may, what are our plans for this ‘Office’?”

“I am afraid, if you intend to assault The Office, that we can offer little in the way of tactical advice,” Sweetie Belle murmured, rocking her seat back. “We largely used it for weapons testing, since it is a relatively indestructible location whose interior cannot be destroyed by any known magic or weapon. It may have changed in the last thirty years since it was sealed.”

“That and Ah never had time to figure the whole place out,” Apple Bloom added. “Whatever bunch made it, they weren’t ponies. There was lots of things in there we never touched.”

“Wait, didn’t you Crusaders build this place?” I asked.

“Hah! Nope! Ah wish! Yer gonna have good fun with this’un,” she answered, chuckling to herself.

“Oh Bloom, stop being silly and tell him,” Sweetie admonished.

Her friend stuck her tongue out, then turned back to me. “Yer goin’ inta a dimensional rift, babe. Yah know the File Cloud at the Castle? It’s like that, but a whole heap more stable. Scary stable. On the other side, yah got the Office. Maybe every office. Ah can’t exactly describe it, but it sorta explains itself once yer in there.”

“Alright, standard weapons, then?” I asked, cautiously. “I’ve done enough fiddling with ‘dimensional’ crap lately and I don’t think I want my gun trying to eat my head.”

“Should do, sure,” she replied, then added as an afterthought, “Mebbe take some grenades. Real trick is gittin’ in. The place the rift is on only had two ways to reach it: the roof, and a secured service elevator on the fifth floor. No stairs. There’s no good way of knowin’ how many tangos yer gonna hafta fight between them two spots.”

“Targets, darling, not ‘tangos’,” Sweetie corrected. “We’re not in the war anymore, and these are civilians.”

Firebrand raised her chin. “P-pardon my impertinence Lord Stellatrix-”

“Firebrand, your mother would box your ears if she heard you call me that,” Stella rumbled, delicately plucking at one of his eyebrows. “You’re a dragon lady, and I’m only a royal in the loosest sense of the word. Please, just Stella or Miss Stella.”

The dragoness swallowed, and a gout of blue flame spilled out of one side of her mouth. She looked like she desperately wished she hadn’t sent the rest of her little band off to get dinner. “Yes, Miss...Miss Stella. I wish to ask a thing. We have Crusaders here. The Demolisher was an army unto herself--” Scootaloo puffed up a little and preened one of her wings. “--and if I heard correctly, the bony creature is the one the Usurper’s troops called ‘Erebus, The Mist That Kills’. He assassinated the old Dragon King. Why do we not simply take the center of the city, or destroy these Shield Pylons outright?”

“Hard Boiled, would you like to field this one, my dear? I suspect you can give a more succinct answer than I,” Stella requested, splashing back beneath the water then springing back into his throne.

“Eh, a mix of reasons, really,” I explained. “We’ve got weapons, but nowhere to point them. We take Uptown by force, we’re risking slaughtering a bunch of civilians as collateral. Worse, there’s a shield around the middle of the city that seems to repel damn near everything. We might have trained fighters, but our opponents have the P.A.C.T. and no fear of collateral. Also, the other dragons have yet to show themselves and our opponents have information superiority.”

“This ‘magical tracking’ your orange friend with the un-pony teeth, spoke of?” Firebrand asked.

“The ‘Scry’ is a magic of some kind that lets them track most of the ponies in the city. Until we’ve eliminated it, we can’t launch any major attacks. Thankfully, I’m immune.” Pulling my sleeve back, I tapped my revolver.

“The Crusader weapon,” she whispered, reverently. “Is that also why you do not die when killed?”

“If only. That would be simpler,” I chuckled. “What it does mean is that my team is the only one that can move around the city freely. We’re going to hit the Office. If we can disable the Scry, we’ll need ponies to move on Uptown. That means you, Iris Jade, and Bones here are going to get training the forces we have. We’ve only got a few days, at most--”

“Sir!” Swift yelped, bouncing out of her seat onto all fours. Her eyes were riveted on the ceiling as she danced in a little circle. “We’ve got movement, Sir!”

“What kind of movement?” I asked, cautiously freeing my trigger bit.

“Six signals, incoming. They’re approaching one of the boundary illusions! Sir, they’re not even pretending to hide!”

“Who are they, Cuddles?” Iris Jade demanded, her horn bursting to light.

“Blackcoats! Six of them!”

“Aw, piss,” I cussed. “Arm up!”

Sykes drew his shotgun as Firebrand loosed her swords from their sheaths.

“Sir, Tourniquet needs orders!” Swift gasped, her gaze still fixed on the roof of the cavern. “She can’t direct ponies who aren’t guards of Supermax!”

There was a sudden logjam of voices all more or less shouting ‘Move in, hold position, and observe’ or some variation thereof; Sykes included ‘And shoot’em!’, but over it all, Stella’s voice was like a hammer blow in the giant cave.

“Be silent!” he thundered, loud enough to send me back on my haunches, hooves over my ears. After a few seconds, and once we’d recovered, he nestled deeper into the giant cushion on his throne. “Now, then. Hard Boiled, you are Miss Cuddles’s superior officer. Do, please, give her orders, and the rest of you… keep in mind that you are my guests.”

Cautiously, I pulled my toes out of my ears and stood. “Eh...Kid...tell Tourniquet to move some Stilettos into the area. Let a few of them be seen, but try to get us a good crossfire setup. If they’re hostile, I want enough forces available on the adjacent streets to turn them into a soup, then get back underground.”

Swift nodded, and a slight glow suffused her eyes. “I’m moving the Prince of Detrot into the area with his squad--”

“Wait, Precious is out there?” I asked, incredulously.

After Glow smirked. “Yahknow, colt, the Prince didn’t git to be that age by bein’ soft. He hears better’n anyone Ah ever met and he don’t have no compunction about killin’ to save lives.”

“The Prince is in position,” Swift went on, her eyes darting back and forth. “They’re just...standing there, Sir. No, wait! One of them is saying something!”

“I need a ladybug. Somepony, give me a ladybug!” I snapped, and Limerence offered me his hoof. The tiny insect fluttered off his fetlock, then alighted on my muzzle. I dropped onto my stomach and shut my eyes. “Sunshine, sunshine and all that crap! Come on! I need to see this!”

The world shrank to a point, then winked out, leaving me hanging in darkness.

The ladybug network felt strange, or rather, stranger than usual; I could hear a soft buzz flowing through the entire thing that was at once distant and very familiar.

‘Tourniquet? Is that you?’ I thought.

“Who else would it be, Detective?” a voice in the darkness replied, and then a pair of vibrantly glittering eyes resolved in the air in front of my ‘face’. “Oh, don’t worry about what’s going on out there. I’m slowing time in here so we can talk for a minute.”

‘Where’s Queenie? Don’t tell me you ate the ladybug collective.’

Musical laughter rang in my head. “Oh Hardy! Come on, I like Queenie! Right now, though, I figured we might need a quiet spot to chat for a moment before I show you what’s going on outside.”

‘Well, I’m here. We’re talking.’

Tourniquet’s eyes flashed, and a gentle smile appeared below them, full of white, perfectly formed teeth. “You didn’t tell them about the Princess.”

‘You mean Sparkle? They don’t need to know about her.’

“Maybe. And...the dead pony?”

For a long moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Juniper is a figment of my imagination. He’s been dead for years.’

“No doubt, but I think we both know that doesn’t matter as much as most people seem to think it does,” Tourniquet laughed, merrily. “I’ve been dead since that dragon seared the flesh off my body, then again when Sparkle buried my chamber and left me powerless, rotting, and empty. Now, I am a city.”

‘Are you going to go on being a city when this is all over?’ I asked. ‘Or are you aiming for godhood?’

“Oh, Hardy...don’t you think the title would suit me?”Tourniquet replied, tittering like a bluebird. After a moment, she sobered. “Gypsy thinks I should keep control of the city infrastructure, if only because I’m better at running it than ponies are, but I don’t really care one way or the other. So long as nopony tries to turn me off again, I think I’ll be fine just being a safe place for people to live. For the first time in my life, I have friends. I have a pony who loves me. I can feel it, whenever Swift thinks about me or I think about her. I have children who run in my halls. I have a family. What does power matter, if you are alone?”

‘What does that have to do with Juniper?’

“Because, you...are powerful,” she said, softly. “I have examined your heart. The combination of immense love from your friends and regular power from the electrical grid have improved its efficiency considerably. I can hear the one you call ‘Gale’, too. He’s a sweet boy...but he’s not alone. There is another voice, distance, and difficult to make out.”

‘And what is this ‘other voice’ saying?’

“They simply call your name, again and again, begging to be heard…”

‘You’re...telling me Juniper isn’t all in my head?’

The rest of Tourniquet’s body flickered into being. She was tall, taller than me, and her legs were no longer the stumpy, misshapen bits of metal; they looked more like flesh made steel. The tethering wires spreading out from her back looked like a pair of giant wings. She was beautiful.

‘You’re looking...adult.’

“Having enough to eat grows a filly,” she replied, a bit of purple coloring her crystalline eyes. It looked like a blush in entirely the wrong place. “I can’t tell you one way or the other what Juniper is. I’m not a psychologist; I’m a building who just so happens to moonlight as a city. You should ask him, the next time you see him. I suspect that will be soon. What’s important is that everything is coming to an end. I can feel it.”

‘Do I dare ask what that means?’

Tourniquet gave me a coy smile, even going so far as to project a little crackle from her voice box.

“Not if you were smart. But then, if you were smart, I’m pretty sure you’d already be dead. You’re dumb lucky, Hardy.”

‘My dumb luck is telling me I’m too curious to let that lie.’

“Mmm...it’ll keep you up at night, but I don’t think you’ll be satisfied unless you know.” She hesitated, as though thinking of exactly how to frame her reply. “Ahem...Can you imagine being a city, just for a moment?”

‘No, Ma’am, I don’t think I can…’

Her ears tucked back against her head, and she sat on the ‘nothing’ we were floating in. Even on her haunches, I got the feeling she’d tower over me a good head worth of height.

“Think of having many, many thousands of eyes and skin that stretches for miles. Instead of seeing a cloud from just two perspectives, you see it from a hundred perspectives. That’s totally not what it’s like, but...it’d give you more information. You’d start to see things in terms of trends, traffic, and movement rather than just your own experiences.”

‘And...the traffic is telling you the end is nigh?’

“An ending, yes. Maybe not the end. That will be up to you, Mister Hard Boiled. You are the crux this all turns on, and you have no fate. Take comfort in that.”

A little shiver wormed through my mind. Who had said those words to me last?

‘We’re going into what I strongly suspect is battle, and you’re telling me my dead partner is leaving me messages? Tourniquet, have Swift explain ‘timing’ to you.’

“I don’t think this is a battle you can win, Hardy,” Tourniquet said, wrinkling her muzzle. “At least, not yet.”

‘What are you basing that assessment on?’

“Part of me is a structure called Supermax, but part of me is now the city of Detrot. There are hundreds of Blackcoats...but I have seen more of the creatures than were ever members of the P.A.C.T.”

My brain jammed as I tried to fit that with what I already knew and failed spectacularly.

‘Wait...how is that possible?!’

Tourniquet’s body faded until she was just a pair of shining eyes hanging in the inky black. “I think it’s time you saw what their messenger has to say.”

When the lights returned, I had a momentary jolt as I tried to figure out what the big orange thing sticking out of my face was, followed by a terror stricken second spent wondering where my stallion-bits had run off to.

‘Ah...a griffin. I’m inside a female griffin. This is new. Oh Celestia, that tail feels weird! Queenie, couldn’t you have put me in the same species?!’

My host was perched on the facade of a brick wall, her wings spread out for balance, peering through the zoomed sights of a repeating rifle at a group of six ponies waiting not twenty meters away in the alley between two buildings. They must have been able to see her, but none were reacting to her presence.

Off to her left, more people of various species were tucked into windows or creeping behind old stone gargoyles to get good positions to rain down hellfire if the troopers turned hostile. Even with magical augmentations, I doubted our friends down there would be able to survive the weight of metal flying in their direction. Still, the troopers weren’t moving; just standing, waiting, letting us study them.

Their vanguard was a short, yellow stallion with a waifish air about him, but something in the way he moved set my fur standing on end; he was a predator, born and bred. The rest were a heavily built group, everyone wearing thick masks and body armor covering everything but their lower jaws. Even at that range - by dint of my host’s griffin eyesight - I could see pointed teeth jutting over their lips.

Raising his head, the messenger shouted with a voice far louder than a pony without magical amplification could have managed, “I come to parlay with Detective Hard Boiled. If he is here, let him speak! Otherwise, send a representative! It matters not, so long as the message gets back to him! If it does not, all herein will die within three hours!”

His message delivered the stallion sat, waiting patiently, seemingly bored by the whole affair.

After a few seconds, a pony detached himself from one of the adjoining buildings, a pony no one in Detrot could mistake. Precious, decked out in his spangly white jumpsuit with his cane attached to his leg, was tapping at the ground as he slowly made his way across the small courtyard, taking cautious steps as he picked his way over to the stallion. He stopped a couple of meters away, ears twitching back and forth.

My host unfolded her wings and clambered across the side of the building to get into a better position where she could hear what was being said.

“Ya want to parlay, friend?” Precious said, loud enough to be heard even at that distance. “Ah says, Ah’ll be glad to speak for Mister Hard Boiled. He knows me well enough.”

“Then you will speak,” the trooper replied. Shutting his eyes, the stallion exhaled, then opened them again. His irises and whites had gone, leaving only a black emptiness, as though somepony had drilled two holes in his face.

The trooper’s expression changed to one of gentle amusement. When he spoke, it wasn’t his voice; the speaker sounded much older, more powerful, and had a confidence that brooked no disagreement. “The Prince of Detrot! Excellent! It is an honor, Sir.”

‘That’s it!’ I thought. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. ‘That’s...the voice of D.W! The bastard finally shows himself!’

“Well, Ah’m tickled pink to be heard of, but Ah’m thinkin’ the honor’s all ya own there,” Precious murmured, his cane still tapping at the pavement. “Who am Ah talking to, perzactly? Sure isn’t the pony Ah was jawin’ with just a minute ago.”

“Mmm, my name is completely irrelevant, and one that many have held before. However, I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about you and yours. Most specifically, about Mister Hard Boiled. He is the one I am interested in. I suspect that he is watching, considering the Essy office records indicate he has made use of the Ladybug Collective. Very clever. I would have wished he and I not be enemies, but that was inevitable, considering what I intend.”

“And what is that, if ya don’t mind mah asking real polite-like?” the Prince asked, his demeanor still friendly.

The stallion chuckled, running a hoof through his mane in a move that looked too practiced to have been unintentional; it was an action designed to make him look more equine and put the viewer at ease. On a beast with no eyes, it had the opposite effect.

“Too many things, though the long and short of it is that I intend to right a few great wrongs, rebuild equinekind into something better, save the world, and generally act the villain you all expect of me. To be sure, I don’t enjoy what must be done, and do please believe that if I...if we had encountered other options during our long vigil, we would probably have taken them.”

‘Good,’ I thought. ‘He’s a talker. Keep him going, Precious.’

“Ya got somethin’ ya need from us, Mister No-Name?” Precious asked, running a toe around his collar. “Ah’ve got a show in an hour. Ya want to put the sun and moon back where they oughta be, Ah could see mah way to giving ya some tickets. Sounds like ya might enjoy that more’n all the twaddle ya were jus’ going on about.”

“A part of me would, yes,” the P.A.C.T. pony replied, sweeping a leg sideways at the buildings and the heavily armed audience. “Sad to say, I have long since learned that the moment is often the price we pay for a future of infinite horizons, and much as I would like to have a bit more bonamie, I am on a schedule. Hard Boiled has the helm. He knows which helm I am referring to. He will bring it to my representative, who will meet him at...mmm… Ah! The only place he has ever felt safe.”

“And where’s that?” Precious inquired, resting his weight on his cane. “Ya sound like ya know the boy. If ya do, ya know he don’t much care for riddles.”

The voice was full of amusement as it replied, “And yet, he spends his life solving them, hate them as he may. By the same token, I spend my life in pursuits that were ordained before you were born, and you will all spend what remains of your lives in resistance.”

“Now, Ah’m a little careworn, Mister No-Name, but Ah’m a pony who prefers people talk straight, shoot straight, and not beat around the bush. Get to it.”

“Yes, of course. Much as I might like to stay for another of your very fine shows, this is my message. I will grant Hard Boiled free movement throughout the city for three hours to retrieve the helm from wherever he has secreted it away. If he does this, my forces shan’t darken your doorsteps, nor kill more of those who keep themselves out of the unclaimed sections of the city and away from Uptown.” The stallion laid a leg across his chest. “This is my promise.”

Precious cocked his ears backwards at the army clinging to the walls and sitting in the alleys with enough guns pointed in his direction to scour the little courtyard clean.

“Now, just so we’re clear…” the Prince said, that warm smile he always wore still in place. “Ah know there’s just the six of ya hereabouts and Ah can hear your critters coming a long ways off. They ain’t comin’. Ah’ve heard a fair number of ya beasties in the skies and Ah can tell the differences between’em. Ah went through the war, and Ah can say right as rain, ya’ll don’t have enough to take us. Not unless ya got an army stashed away somewhere.”

D.W.’s lips twitched and he turned to the horizon where could be seen the soft glow of the shield around Uptown, mirrored against the clouds.

“That was a clever little play, Mister Precious. You question my abilities and trick me into revealing my hand, yes? Would that the world had more ponies like you. What is coming might never have been necessary.”

Precious clicked his tongue, then said, “If we’re threatenin’ each other, Ah supposed Ah’d like to hear how ya intend to push us out of this hole in three hours’ time.”

“Unfortunately, the only means I have available to me involves civilian deaths on a scale not seen since the war,” D.W. replied, with a carefully choreographed spin on his back heels. “I am aware you cannot see what is behind me, but allow me to describe it for you. It’s the least I can do for a stallion whose records have brought me so many hours of enjoyment.”

My host shifted her eyes up toward the horizon, where lay Uptown. Griffin vision is something pony brains aren’t set up to process, but the nearest sensation I can compare it to is putting on a pair of binoculars, then slipping a much more powerful set on top. Thankfully, my stomach wasn’t there to share the experience.

“The sky above Uptown is full of thick clouds. I have kept the weather factories operating, to a degree. They are lit from below by my shield. Now...”

“What are you doing? I can hear you scratching at something.”

“I’m taking notes! This is important!”

“Tell me you’re not using a quill for that. It sounds like you’re using a quill. You make a funny noise whenever the feather hits your nose.”

“I do not! Besides, some of us happen to enjoy tactile notetaking, and a written record of this fiasco might survive if we fail. I should probably carve it into stone so nopony could possibly forget.”

“If you’re joking, I feel it behooves me to tell you that’s not funny.”

“Never mind! What did D.W. say next?”

“Give me a minute. Been sitting here talking for an hour. I need something to drink.”

“Hey...Hey, get back here and keep talking, you big jerk!”

Act 3 Chapter 40: 404 Mind Not Found

"Just because they haven't tried to kill us, yet, doesn't mean we're friends. We're allies. Allies exist to enjoy a comfortable break from a perpetual struggle. It may be tomorrow, it may be next week, but one day they will come for us if we allow this condition to persist. That is why friendship is so important. Friends can be friends for a thousand years and share a table, bleed on a battlefield, or starve in a street, without going for one another's throats. It is essential we dedicate resources to creating true friendship with the dragons. I pray we still have the will."

- Scribbled in the margins of the Peace Treaty signed in the final days of the Cutie Mark Crusades. Author unknown, signed with a six pointed star.

“Ah, that was just what I needed! Haven’t had a beer in...more than a few days, now.”

“You made me wait while you drank an entire beer?!”

“Oh, I drank two. And I have a third right here beside me.”

“...”

“You still there?”

“There’s a special place in Tartarus for you, Hard Boiled. It’s a place where you’re strapped to a chair and made to watch only two thirds of every movie ever made.”

“Could be worse. If my life ever flashes before my eyes, I hope I can fast forward through most of it. Now, where was I?”

“You remember exactly where you were! I know you do!”

“Ah, right…”

My host’s beak was dry and I was desperately wishing she would wet it, but both of us were transfixed.

“The shield is gone now,” D.W. described, as the sky blackened further over Uptown. “Its light has winked out and the skies are dark. The cloud cover is bubbling with lightning. Flashes of light are dancing across its surface. I can see a few of your soldiers tightening their grips on their weapons, but it would do them no good. Do you smell the ozone in the air? Here comes the thunder…”

The air rocked as though with an explosion, and dust in the air shook. One of the Stilettos on the nearest building was shaken off the wall, and a unicorn sitting in a doorway had to catch her before she could plummet to the earth.

“Listen...Do you hear it, now?”

“I...hear something that sounds like a flock of pigeons,” the Prince murmured, just loud enough to be heard. His normally calm expression was drawn into a nervous grimace as his ears turned toward uptown.

The P.A.C.T. pony’s black eyes pulsed with little flickers of color that crawled across their surfaces like worms under the thin membranes as he stood a bit straighter.

“Wings, Prince. Those are wings you hear.”

From over the rooftops, a thin stream of darkness appeared, seeming to reach toward the sky as it slowly spiraled around itself, growing thicker and thicker, like a wisp of smoke from a burning building. As the griffin girl’s eyes adjusted, I could make out the shapes of semi-equine bodies twisting and writhing in the air as they climbed above the horizon, lit from beneath by the city lights. Their forms were distorted, but familiar enough that my heart started to race.

“Now, then, Prince of Detrot. This is my threat and this is my army. Appropriate, no?”

My host hefted her gun up against her eye and peered down the scope, adjusting the lenses so she could get a good look at the growing cloud of creatures. She tried to follow a few, getting a studied look at their features. There were plenty of variations, each more hideous than the last. Some had too many eyes on their heads, while others sprouted two sets of wings, like especially ugly dragonflies. Most seemed to be similar to the berserkers we’d fought at the Castle, and by Celestia, there were an awful lot of them; ten times as many as had ever been in the P.A.C.T. and more besides.

It was a display to drive brave stallions under their mothers’ skirts, and if I’d had an especially safe skirt to hide behind just then, I’d have sprinted for it.

Precious slowly took several steps back from the possessed trooper, though D.W.’s five guards made no move to stop him.

“Now...Ah...Ah hear those wings and Ah hear the noises those things are making. Ya...ya gonna tell me those were ponies?” the Prince asked.

The grin on D.W.’s face was the one a shark might sport finding a wounded seal splashing about in his territory as he looked up at the swirling horde.

“In only the most literal, biological sense of the word,” he sneered. “What is a pony, after all? One who cares for their herd? One who stands by them in times of trouble? A pony is a creature that loves, and fights for the harmony of their fellows. A pony is a pillar against which the weak may shelter. You are a good pony, Prince. I know your history.”

“Well, thank ya kindly, but...that don’t make me feel any better. Who’re they?” Precious asked, gesturing with his cane toward the sky.

“Them? When their world was burning, they ran away and sought comfort and wine. They took their vast privilege, their wealth, their life-saving resources...and headed for the first pony to offer them a cushion for their butts and a luxuriously appointed roof over their heads. They were beasts with hooves before. Now they are beasts with wings.”

“Sweet Celestia…you don’t mean—”

“All those rich ponies he invited into Uptown when the Darkening began? Maybe.”

“But those you saw...they could have been all he had, right?”

“I really, really hope so. Mercy, if they weren’t, we’re in trouble. Even at our best, the Aroyos, Stilettos, Detrot Police Department, the Underdogs, Skytown, and whoever else we could gather up might field ten thousand trained bodies. That’d be anyone who could hold a gun. The rest are just civilians, just trying to survive. We control most of the city, but it’s urban control, not old-school military superiority.”

“B-but how? How could he enchant so many ponies?! The magical resources are boggling! I can’t even do the math for that without my abacus! Maybe even a chalkboard!”

“Well, D.W. had thirty years to work out a method…”

“Thirty years?! How on Equestria do you know that?”

“Because thirty years ago, Taxi’s father was the subject of some nasty mutagenic magics that gave him the ability to change his face and body. It made him a good assassin, and those magics were bought and paid for by someone who granted the Jewelers Union their dearest wish, set them up as the most powerful crime syndicate in the city, and has propped them up since their inception.”

“My...stars. That’s...insane. To plan...to plan so grandly…”

“Believe me, it’s been keeping me up nights just how far ahead these people can think. They infected Swift with this same magic, but it had to be triggered for her. I suspect they’d have done the same to most of the rest of us, but they need chaos to power the wish machine. Probably a particular flavor of chaos, too: one generated from free, thinking, feeling ponies suffering in the streets.”

“T-that’s...horrible. Who could even imagine such a thing?”

“You’re looking for reasons. Forget the reasons. This is a murder investigation the size of a city, and what you need to know is ‘How?’, ‘Where?’, and ‘When?’. Everything else is irrelevant.”

D.W. straightened, spread the trooper’s wings, and raised his voice so everypony within three blocks could hear him. His black, soulless eyes roved over the walls, picking out fighters who should have been invisible behind the illusory walls.

“Please deliver this message! Detective Hard Boiled has three hours to deliver the helm or my forces will descend on the Vivarium and leave no one alive! Three hours after that, we will be inside of the Underdogs’ little village! Three hours after that, we will be at the doors of the City Morgue! Miss Stella’s corpse will hang from the Statue in the Bay of Unity and your children’s blood will fill the gutters! You cannot run! You cannot hide!”

With that, D.W. bowed to Precious and touched his brow with one hoof. Letting the magical amplification drop again, he said, “An honor, as always. I do hope to see you perform again one day, if you survive.”

The Prince couldn’t see the bow, but he nodded, subtly. “We both got work to be done, Ah ‘spect. Hard Boiled will hear, if he hasn’t already.”

The six Blackcoats opened their wings and leapt into the sky, tracked by dozens of gun barrels as they shot off towards the cloud of monsters that were quickly disappearing back under the skyline. After a few moments, the clouds flashed, and the unhealthy, yellow light of the Uptown shield reappeared as an uneasy silence fell over the courtyard.

My host body’s back legs felt a little damp and I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d felt like pissing myself when that swarm appeared over the city.

‘Alright, I’ve seen what I came to see,’ I thought. ‘Have someone bring this poor kid a nice fluffy towel and a bucket of soapy water. Be discrete and make it look like it was just left nearby.’

The griffin’s senses slowly faded until I was left, once more, a finite spark of consciousness in the spinning threads of the Ladybug network, speeding toward my body.

I opened my eyes to find a bit of pimento being carefully painted on the end of my nose. Mags was curled up in front of me, one claw extended and the jar propped between her paws as my friends sat around with nervous expressions. My ward blinked and sat back as I flicked my tongue over my muzzle, her beak clicking irritably at the ruination of her art project.

“Well, I found a whole creek of shit up there. Anyone got a paddle?” I grunted, pulling my hooves under me.

“Och, boyo, ye were only down fer a minute or so!” Sykes commented, grinding a sharpening stone down his axe. “What’d ye see?”

“Nothing good,” I replied, lifting the ladybug off the end of my muzzle. “Everyone needs to see this. Can we get a half dozen more ladybugs in here? Let’s play back everything I just saw.”

Ten minutes later, everyone was sitting there staring at their feet, claws, hooves, and paws as a tiny circle of exhausted looking ladybugs lay in a heap on Stella’s catwalk. Firebrand was hugging herself against the railing, her eyes shut tightly as she unconsciously stroked the hilts of her swords. Stella sat on his throne, eyes darting back and forth like he’d found himself with a complex puzzle to solve.

The rest just looked like somepony had hit them in the face with a wiffle bat. Even Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle were just sitting there in their rocking chairs, stunned expressions on their faces and ladybugs perched on the arms of their seats. At some point, Bones had lit up a pair of cigarettes and Iris Jade was taking pulls off the spare, just staring into space as they mulled our situation. Swift looked like she was verging on a panic attack, while Taxi was in what appeared to be deep meditation and Limerence had his knives out, sharpening one with a tiny stone.

Only Mags seemed unfazed by the situation, but then, I hadn’t let her see the message. Scarlet had apparently gone off on some errand for Stella while I was out. A hug would have done me wonders just then.

“Right. So, I have...huh. Does somepony have a watch?” I asked. Limerence automatically reached into his pocket, lifted out his Archivist watch, and flicked it open, then held it up where I could see. “I have about two hours and thirty minutes to go get the Helm and get back to the meeting point.”

“You’re not actually considering turning the Helm over to them, are you?” Scootaloo asked, all but leaping out of her rocking chair. “You can’t do that!”

“Considering I’m the only one who knows where it is and we have...two hours and twenty-nine minutes left before all of my loved ones die, I’m pretty sure I can. That means we have nineteen minutes to come up with a plan to get it back if I want to make all the stops we need to make. So, start talking.”

Taxi hopped to her hooves. “Well, while you talk, I’m going to go prep the Night Trotter. I want to make sure it works.”

I held up my hoof. “No, Sweets, I need you here organizing along with everypony else. We need meaningful defenses against those creatures. Your job is to get me every trump card you can. Firebrand, you think you can carry me again?”

The dragoness shrugged and spread her wings. “I can. Of course, I will require directions and a gag. In this den of debauchery, I am sure we can find one. I do not wish to puncture your vocal chords again. Where, exactly, are we meant to be going?”

“Two stops. A secret tram station on the other side of town and...then on to my parents’ house.”

“Your parents’ house?” Limerence asked, then sucked in a breath. “Ah...right. The only place you have ever felt safe. I wondered what that creature meant.”

“Lim, while I’m there, I need trump cards we can play if things get too dicey—”

“Of course, Detective. I’ll gather a group of ponies.”

“You should—...wait, what?”

“You were about to ask me to head back to the Archive and begin finding things we might meaningfully weaponize against these creatures, yes?”

“Uh...well, yes. Also, we need deep analysis on the magic they put inside Swift.”

Swift unfolded her wings and stood. “With your permission, Sir, I’ll head back to Supermax and interface with Tourniquet directly. We might be able to figure out a way to reverse this...whatever it is...for all those ponies who were changed.”

“And for you, little bird?” Stella added.

My partner stuck her tongue out. “No way! I’m not giving up meat! The first thing Mom did when she saw me was give me a hug and a piece of griffin style fried chicken!”

“Speakin’ of all those beasties, you best not go only the love and friendship route. You wanna fight ’em, you need high explosives and ice magic,” Bones added, thoughtfully. “We used that combination against the demi-dragons in the war. Works good for swarms.”

“Demi-dragons?” Firebrand asked, raising her neck flukes. “What are these creatures?”

“Nasty little lizards mutated from some local life form in the dragon lands, about this big,” Bones replied, holding his skeletal legs about twelve centimeters apart. “Some nutty dragon lord magically engineered them. They breed quick and have a crazy territorial instinct, but no lifespan to speak of. The tactic was to drop a bunch of frozen ones in an area, then let them thaw out. They’d strip the flesh off a pony in about twenty seconds, kill everything in an area, then die off because they’d refuse to leave their territory to look for food. Nice, clean area denial mixed with a heck’of’a psychological impact.”

“But...why the ice magic and high explosives?” the dragoness asked.

“Our method was to cast heavy blizzard magic over the swarm, then shatter them with concussion blasts. Messy, but it bypassed their natural resistances to heat and shrapnel. Those creatures out there have thick skulls, thick bones, and thick hides. I doubt that anything below a forty five slug will have much of an effect.”

“I do believe I may have something in the Archive that I can modify to suit our needs,” Lim mused.

Iris Jade growled, blasting twin circles of cigarette smoke out of her nose. “Much as I hate to admit it, Hard Boiled is right. There’s no way to get a workable defense around this place in time and those bastards know about the ladybugs. They’ll be watching for you to track the damn Helm. Talk about how we’re going to get it back. Nothing else matters.”

“If you have a suggestion, Miss Jade, I do think the rest of us would be simply ecstatic to hear it,” Stella said, cocking one perfectly styled eyebrow at the former Chief of Police as he tossed one tail of his boa over the opposite shoulder and settled deeper into his throne.

“We know they’re tracking everypony in the city, right? Can we use this ‘Scry’ thing? Dunk the helm in the water supply?”

Swift fluttered her wings a little bit, her eyes darting about in her head in the way that they did when she was conferring with Tourniquet. “Um...we’d need the Scry itself to make that work. We don’t even know what it is, do we?”

“But, we do know where it is, my dear,” Sweetie Belle interjected, teasing a lock of soft, violet mane back from her face over one ear as the projected image of her flickered a few times, then stabilized. “Apple Bloom, if you wouldn’t mind explaining? You’re ever so much more eloquent with technical terms.”

Bloom capped her flask and smiled, adjusting herself in her seat as her prosthetics whirred to life. “Ah don’t mind if Ah do, Miss Belle, but time’s short, so Ah’ll keep it short. There’s somethin’ in the water supply which puts offa magical isotope. Goes right in yer body and stays there, in the bloodstream. Bet iffen we had a lab, we might flush it out, but Ah ain’t worryin’ about that right now. What does matter is we found a sorta...gravitational pull in the local magical fields. Ah triangulated it, and it points at the Office, dead sure.”

I considered this for a few seconds, painfully aware of the ticking of Limerence’s watch.

“So, if this is in everypony’s bloodstream...could I soak the helm in blood, then track it with the Scry?” I asked.

Scootaloo opened her muzzle, then hesitated for a moment before continuing, “You’re talking about an awful lot of blood, there, Hard Boiled. Two or three pints in close proximity to one another just to give us a heading. Even then, we don’t exactly know how the Scry works—”

“Is it doable if somepony had that much they were willing to part with?” I interrupted. “I need ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

“We’re in the land of pure conjecture here, pup!” she replied, a little hotly. ”Magical tracking isn’t a perfect science, and we don’t exactly know how the Scry works! If we’re wrong, we got nothing! Besides, who would be able to give up that much blood?”

Stella cleared his throat, noisily, and lifted a thick forearm daintily above the catwalk, poising one sharpened talon against it. “A few pints, darling? Let it never be said I am unwilling to bleed for the cause, though I will need a bucket.”

“Riiight. Well, it...it might work,” Bloom murmured, rubbing the side of her head with one hoof. “Ah mean, if nothin’ else, we could just track Miss Stella’s blood. That’d dodge a magical nullification, iffen they tried that. Blood on the helmet itself would hafta be fresh, if we want more’n a general direction. Sweetie Belle and Ah’d have to work up a charm and even then, ya’d have to be close to get an actual location, rather’n a general heading. Real close. Five hundred meters, maybe. Ah also don’t know any magics to keep blood from going bad...”

“Sykes!” I snapped, and my friend hopped to his claws and sprinted for the door.

“Oi! On it, boyo! One Tokan blood mage, comin’ up!” he called over his shoulder.

“Alright,” I said, watching him go. “We’ve got two options. Now, anyone got a way of keeping me alive? I’m about to walk into a meeting that I strongly suspect will include my capture.”

There was a protracted silence, then Mags of all people raised her voice.

“Uh...Egg Pony?”

I glanced down at my ward and gave her a crooked smile. “You got an idea for us, honey?”

“Don’t know. Just thinking. Makes my head hurt, but...why don’t you do what I done?”

“What you done...I mean, what you did, when? What do you mean?”

“You know! In the drawer! I play like I already dead and the monsters leave me alone.”

Taxi’s eyes lit up with comprehension. “She’s...she’s talking about the Moonwalk Hotel. We found her in a drawer, hidden from the monsters. She played dead and they left her alone.”

“They’ll check for a pulse, Sweets. Probably also a find-life spell, if they have a unicorn with them. If I’m going to play dead, I’m going to have to...be...oh.” I let out a loud moan and flopped on the catwalk, pulling my hat down over my eyes. “I just said that out loud, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” Scootaloo began, with a thoughtful expression. “I mean...it’s not a bad idea, for sure. I’m certain Apple Bloom can whip together something—”

“No, no, no...we don’t have time for you to whip something together and get it here!” Iris cackled, cutting Scootaloo off as she rubbed her hooves together with glee. “It just so happens that I was going through the medical kits upstairs and I noticed a lovely combination of psychotropics with some interactions that would be perfect for seeing Hard Boiled off this mortal coil! Temporarily, of course. I’m sure once it’s out of his system, that lovely magical heart of his will start chugging again...”

“Jade, you’re volunteering for something,” I said. “You do know that makes me scared, right?”

Rising from her chair, Jade chucked her cigarette butt over the railing and headed toward the opening where Sykes had disappeared.

“Trust me, Hard Boiled. I did promise I’d see this through, didn’t I? I shan’t let you go quietly into that good night, and a simple overdose is too good for you. Besides, if your heart fails, I get to kill you once, and if it doesn’t...I might get to do it twice!!” She did a quick tap dance with her back hooves, grinning the whole way. I caught something about ‘Hearth’s Warming Eve coming twice a year’, and then she was gone, leaving only a dull, fearful chill in my gut.

“Hardy, you’re not...not really going to take whatever she gives you, are you?” Taxi asked.

“If there’s one thing I know about Iris, it’s that she would jump at the opportunity to kill me again,” I replied, closing my eyes.

Swift hooked a fang over her lip and asked, “Sir, are we still relying on Iris’s hatred of you to keep you alive?”

“It worked last time, didn’t it?”

“Sir, past performance is not an indicator of future—”

“I’m aware of that line, kid. Iris wouldn’t kill me. Her daughter’s life is on the line, here.”

“I really hope that’s enough reason, Sir.”

Bones strolled over and put a thin foreleg across my shoulders. “Colt, one of these days, I want you to lemme know what you did to piss that mare off so bad.”

I drew in a deep breath which smelled too much like dust, death, and cigarette smoke for comfort. Shrugging Bones’s leg off me, I pulled my coat over my flanks and rose.

“Alright, then! Plan is in motion, and we only have a few minutes to make it happen! I need a bucket, some empty blood packs, a duffle-bag, and a bagel! Get moving, people!”

“You planned to soak the helm in dragon’s blood—one of the most magically active substances in the world—and hoped D.W. and whoever they send to get the helm wouldn’t notice?”

“Actually, if Stella hadn’t offered, I was going to soak it in my blood. He saved me trying to make this exchange while nursing a nasty case of dehydration.”

“...If I ever have to write a report on these events, I’m leaving that out, okay?”

“Why?”

“I’m worried that if historians found out I still trusted you to save the world after you said something like that, they would have lots of questions about my competence.”

It was nearer to twenty-five minutes before everything was ready, and every second wasted was one closer to a massacre. I’d no doubt D.W. would keep his word, at least with regards to his willingness to kill everyone. Mayhap he was the honorable sort and would let them live if I turned myself over to him. It was a terrible thing to bank on, but we’d run out of alternatives.

The cold wind wailed through my ears on the Vivarium’s roof, leaving them chilled as my breath misted the air. I stared out over the Bay of Unity, listening to the frantic sounds of shouted orders, directions, and crying children. The work of evacuating the streets surrounding the Vivarium was going forward apace, but it was likely to take more than two hours.

Two hours.

Two hours to get out to the Warehouse and then get back to my parents’ house. Mercy, I hadn’t been back there in years. Just the thought of the old place was enough to give me a hit of guilt; one more little way I was sure I’d disappointed my father.

For the third time in ten minutes, I checked the brown duffle-bag resting against my leg, quickly unzipping it. The interior was soaked in pungent dragon’s blood, which was pooling in the corners, soaking through dozens of bandages we’d wedged inside. Sea serpent’s blood stank of rivers and fish, but with a strange and underlying sweetness to it. Beneath that, the false bottom and sides of the bag added a bit of weight, but a couple spare medical kits made it almost believable that it was just that heavy.

‘Almost believable,’ I thought, ‘I really hope they don’t ditch the bag or this is going to be complicated.’

“Sir, this is the only gag I could find. They’ve stored most of the toys,”Swift murmured, breaking me from my thoughts. She held up a bright red ball, with a pair of leather straps on the ends. “It was either this, or one with...um...with a penis on it...”

I took the gag from her and examined it. “A stick with a couple of bits of string attached wasn’t an option?”

“Not that you can take off without a horn, Sir. This has a sound dampening enchantment, and there’s a button on the side there so you can remove it.”

“You washed it?”

“Bleached, Sir,” she replied, then her ears perked up. “Oh! I almost forgot. Tourniquet got a glimpse inside the shield when it went down. We’re still processing everything, but we might have some actual intel when you get back. Maybe even enemy numbers or movements.” She paused, her lower lip quivering. “I really wish I was coming with you. It feels wrong sending you out there alone...”

“I won’t be alone, kid,” I said, gesturing at the dragoness crouched beside us with a back hoof. “If nothing else, this is one more opportunity to convince people I’m dead before we move on the Office.”

Taxi slipped her front legs around my neck and nestled her cheek against mine. “I’d say this is the worst idea you’ve ever had, but I know I’m probably wrong. Speaking of bad ideas, I checked the pills Iris got together. Mostly painkillers, but if you mix them, they’re a neurogenic poison. I...I don’t know if they’ll affect your memory—”

I put a toe over her lips, then patted my front pocket where a vial of powdered pills lay. “Please don’t explain what they do. I’m already taking suicide drugs. Did she say how long this will take to work?”

My driver’s teeth clenched as she fought with her emotions. I couldn’t blame her for that. Trusting Jade was a leap on a good day.

“F-five or ten minutes. Maybe less, maybe more, but...they will work. I don’t think Mags understood what she’d suggested. Everypony has just been telling her the pills will make you ‘play’ dead.”

“Crusader, am I right to understand your intention is to commit suicide in front of these creatures?” Firebrand asked, tucking her wings back against her bulk. “Is that why you left behind the anti-magic armor?”

“Only if it comes to that. I’d rather not, honestly, but at worst, it’ll throw them off the trail. That reminds me.” I tugged my coat sleeve back from my leg, revealing the glittering surface of my revolver. Unsnapping the trigger, I slid it free and turned to Swift. “I’m giving you this, freely, and of my own volition. Keep it safe for me, would you? I will be back for it.”

Swift looked down at my gun with wide eyes. “S-Sir! They’re going to be able to see you with the Scry! Besides, isn’t this for your family?”

“You are my family, kid,” I replied, putting my hoof over her heart. Tears gathered in her eyes, and she swallowed several times very quickly. “Besides, if these things stopped operating as quick as that, it would have died last time I went on vacation and left it in the apartment for a couple weeks. Bones said this should work, but whatever you do, don’t use the damn thing unless there are no other options.”

My partner gulped and hugged my weapon to her breast, folding her huge wings in tight against herself.

“I don’t like the idea of you going out there unarmed, Hardy,” Taxi complained, her tail lashing against her scarred hips. “Could you at least take the shotgun?”

“Believe me, I’d love to go down ‘guns blazing’, but if we’re going to pull this off, the best method is for them to think I’m dead. Stella gave me a few extra little party tricks to sell it, and if I don’t have to take the drugs, I won’t, but—”

The roof hatch banged open, and a flustered Scarlet, his golden mane flying, sailed up the steps onto the gravel surface, skidding to a stop in front of me. He was breathing heavily and sweat was streaming down his sides. Wiping his forehead, he raised one foreleg, then hesitated before setting it back down. His knees shook as he wheezed for breath, a look of quiet desperation on his face.

I doubt he’d thought through what he was going to say or do after his little jog, but I could put together well enough what’d happened; somepony’d told him I was leaving on a suicide mission, again. For a few seconds, he just stood there, his eyes leaking frightened tears.

He looked so pathetic I couldn’t bring myself to let him stew. I stepped close and pressed my chest against him, rubbing my muzzle into his slick, damp mane. He sobbed, taking this as permission to throw his legs around me as tightly as his slight frame would allow.

“Y-you’re not going to die again, are you? Please, please don’t die out there!” he moaned. “Not after...not after we...I...I couldn’t—”

“I’m not planning on my death, Scarlet. It’s an option. There are many, and this one isn’t permanent. We’ll make it happen if it has to happen. Just have medical ready to flush my system out in the event things get hairy out there.”

He nodded, taking a step back and cupping my cheek with his hoof. “I’ll hook up the first I.V. bag myself.” A grin full of mischief sprung up on his face, and he added, “Probably right beside Miss Lily Blue. She’s desperately in love with you—”

I gently cuffed him on the shoulder. “Lily’s smart enough to know loving somepony like me is dangerous.”

Scarlet snickered and adjusted the brim of my hat with his toe. “Thank goodness I’m stupid, then. If she ever decides to be stupid, too, I’ll make sure she knows you like having your ears nibbled.”

That earned him a smile and another bop, before I turned back to Firebrand and lifted the duffle-bag. The dragoness took it and slung the bloody thing over one of her shoulders, shifting the weight around until it wouldn’t drag at her wings.

“Are you prepared, Crusader?”

“No, but we’ve got to go anyway,” I replied, then turned to my partner, who was a bundle of nervous energy, her wingtips twitching like she longed to take off and follow. “Swift? You and Tourniquet keep them safe. If I fail, you evacuate everyone you can to Supermax. Have her see if there’s some way of contacting Mephitica and The Bull, or talk to Gypsy about storing some more ponies in the File Cloud. Maybe we can find another world to live on. I don’t know. Do something.”

Swift nodded, putting my revolver into her front pocket. “If...If you don’t survive, Sir, I promise, I’ll find a way to bring back the sun.”

Instead of replying, I pulled the gag out, shoved the thing in my muzzle, cinched up the strap to hold it in place, then backed up against Firebrand. Her mighty claws wrapped around my waist, and she spread her giant wings. My heart began to pound in my throat, and my hooves left the roof of the Vivarium.

Time to fly.

“I...I guess I’m starting to understand how you ended up making this deal. I still think it’s a terrible idea, but then, Equestria is bigger than Detrot.”

“When you’re getting your hooves bloody, then you can make these decisions. Right now, I’m the one making them. Every day is one more reason to wonder if the world is even worth saving. You can thank Scarlet for reminding me it is, if you ever meet him.”

“That stallion deserves a medal.”

“I think he’d settle for being petted and told he’s a good boy.”

“If it was you doing the petting, I’m sure he would.”

“Eh, he’s not that picky…”

Howling into an enchanted ball gag helped the volume, but adrenaline and fear were impossible to fight as I stared, wide-eyed, at the city coasting by under my swinging hooves.

You’d think for somebody who’d died a few times, it wouldn’t hold many terrors, but phobias aren’t rational or consistent; they just are. Fortunately, Firebrand had a good grip and the trip wasn’t terribly long. Still, seeing the city from above was disheartening. Nearly all of the streets were empty, and I saw only a few ponies moving furtively from building to building, no doubt in search of scarce supplies. In the darkened landscape, lit only by the ruddy red of the eclipse, I could almost imagine the city opening its great, blood-soaked mouth to pluck me from the air. This didn’t help my panic levels.

Several weeks without food was enough that most ponies had long ago started rationing their supplies, but starvation was sure to have set in. Belt tightening is one thing, but I hadn’t kept more than maybe a month worth of edibles in my apartment at any given time, much less two. How many ponies in rest homes had died already because they couldn’t get medication or magic to keep themselves alive?

Totting up the death toll was going to be the work of years.

Mercy, the ticking of my internal clock was giving my worries. How long did we have left? An hour and a half? It couldn’t be more than 10 minutes to my parents’ house, presuming I still had a dragon to carry me. I sincerely hoped my earlier estimate of a half hour ride each way on the tram was sorely pessimistic.

Fortunately, Taxi’s directions were good and, after what I estimated to be about eight minutes flight time, we coasted in for a landing near the ancient junk shop under which was hidden the entrance to the Warehouse’s secret tracks.

To be clear, I didn’t even feel the ground under my hooves as Firebrand set me on the pavement just inside the alleyway; my brain had shut down and I was left standing there, quivering, half-frozen tears on my face, ball gag covered in drool, and my bladder begging to be emptied. There’s a spectrum of fear, and I’d fallen off the far end of it. It would have been nice if Gale had stepped in during that mess, but I suspected he was saving power for what was to come.

“Crusader, you may take off that gag, now,” the dragoness growled, prodding me in the back.

Raising a quaking leg, I fiddled with the sex toy until I found the button to release it, quickly wiping my muzzle on the back of my leg.

“Can I have a moment’s privacy?” I asked, in a voice that barely hid a quiver.

“So long as you take it quickly. Both of our friends are in danger. My squad remains at the strange brothel, and their deaths would end my search for our eggs until I can recruit more specialists.”

“Believe me, this is essential,” I replied, then trotted deeper into the alley and behind a dumpster.

“What did you do with your moment of privacy? Commune with your magical heart? Call the Vivarium to let them know you’d arrived?”

“What do you think I did? I peed all over the wall, screamed myself raw, then banged my head on the brickwork until it bled all over the inner lining of my hat.”

“Oh…”

“You sound surprised.”

“Not surprised, really, but maybe a little disappointed? I keep trying to ascribe some planning or strategy to the things you do, but you’re just sort of...silly. Didn’t it occur to you that somepony might have heard you having this fit?”

“Of course, but a sweat-soaked, bloody, psychotic stallion wandering the streets with a twitchy, heavily armed draconic commando is not exactly an enticing target for muggers.”

“That’s true, but at some point, you will have to see a psychologist, and I don’t know how you’ll explain this to them.”

“I thought that was what you were.”

“Hardy, I am a frightened bystander praying the pony juggling the TNT and puppies knows what he’s doing...”

I stumbled down the stairwell, my forehead aching as I drew in foul droughts of the mildewed air and tried to organize my mind.

The Warehouse monitored the tram line, right? They’d know I was there. I really wished I’d thought to figure out a means of calling Cereus or Night Bloom before I’d left, but Princess Twilight had confiscated the magical walkie-talkie back in the ruins of Ponyville.

‘Note to self: get that walkie-talkie so I can call Miss Fussy Britches,’ I thought, glancing up at the tiled roof of the tunnel leading down into the station. Leaning on the wall, I swallowed and looked back up the stairs toward where Firebrand stood, peering in at me as she held the trap door open with one claw.

“Are you sure you do not wish me to follow, Crusader?” she asked.

“No! Wait there! If I’m not back in an hour, go help with the evacuation at the Vivarium, alright?”

“As you say,” she replied, then cocked her head. “Do you think you are likely to be back in the next ten minutes? I hear a cat nearby, and I am most hungry.”

“Probably not, but...wait, what? No, never mind! I don’t want to know! I’ll be fine! Be back in an hour!” I called back.

The door above banged shut, leaving me in near-total darkness as I listened to the dragon’s steps on the pavement, retreating through the abandoned building. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on. The circle of harsh, white light reflected off the filthy tilework as I stuck the end of the torch in my mouth, steadied myself, and began trotting down the steps.

The tramway was little more than a platform with the tracks running alongside it to a sealed gate at both ends. A few hobos might have once called it home, but they’d long since abandoned the place. That or there were measures in place to keep them out.

As I reached the bottom, lights began to sputter on overhead, and a disguised speaker spat a squeal that had me scrambling for a gun that wasn’t there. Damn spooky subways.

“Detective? Detective Hard Boiled, is that you?!” a heavily distorted, but noticeably masculine voice asked.

“It’s me, Cereus!” I yelled back. “Turn your volume down! You’re going to deafen me here!”

“Right. Sorry. Is that better?”

“Yes! Look, Cereus, I need you to get your flank down here and get me. No time to explain, but—”

“Tram incoming in five seconds! Oh Celestia, Detective, I need you here now! Something has happened to Agent Bloom!”

My jaw moved a little bit, but I didn’t have time to respond before one of the gates at the end of the hall slammed inward and the mine-cart-like tram burst through at a speed unheard of and screeched to a stop beside the platform almost faster than I could blink. A golden glow surrounded the passenger compartment.

“Hurry, Detective! I’ll bring you in as fast as I can! The inertial dampener spell is fussy, but it should work for at least another minute or two!”

Shutting my eyes, I jumped into the tram and threw myself into the back, pulling my coat over my head.

“Fussy better mean ‘completely functional’, Cereus, or I swear—”

“Departure in five seconds!”

A brilliant gleam wrapped itself around me, leaving my body feeling incredibly light and somehow more aware of exactly how squishy all of my organs would be if they were to hit a wall at the speed the cart had been going when it arrived.

“Departure! Keep your head down, Detective!”

From above, I heard a noise that sounded like a howling wolf being blasted out of a cannon into a mountain of watermelons, then felt a gentle breeze past my ears. Overhead, flashing lights appeared and vanished at a rate that suggested they were every few inches apart. A primal, sixth sense told me I was moving somewhat faster than was probably healthy and that all that was keeping me alive was the fragile framework of the loudly rattling cart and spells which might or might not date back to the war. It’s fortunate, then, that I’d already burned up all my remaining adrenaline with the trip out.

With another shriek of the brakes, I felt a light pressure on my chest, and then the light winked out and all at once I was thrown into the front of the cart, slamming muzzle first into the wall.

Cereus’s apologetic voice came from somewhere nearby. “Sorry, Detective! Finicky inertial dampeners. You’re here, though, and that was really fast, wasn’t—”

“Shud’up! Shud’up, I swear! Jusd shud’ up you dupid bad!” I snarled, holding my bleeding nose with both front hooves.

“I’m a d-dusk pony…”

It took me some moments to recover, sitting in the bottom of the minecart. I knew the clock was running out, but you try being proactive with a busted face. I figured the magic tram had bought me some time to feel sorry for myself.

Wincing, I smeared most of the blood off my upper lip on my sleeve, then warily got to my hooves. Improbable as it felt, I was sitting in the arrival station of the Warehouse with Agent Cereus dancing on all four hooves on the platform like he needed a wizz and couldn’t find the bathroom.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, could it? Would that we’d had a subway with that technology; my morning commutes wouldn’t have left me smelling like incense every morning. That being said, if it were something the world would benefit from, why had it ended up in the Warehouse?

These and many other thoughts were interrupted as I felt a pair of legs slide under mine and haul me bodily out of the cart.

“Hey! Hey, I can walk just fine!” I snapped, struggling out of his grasp to drop heavily onto the platform.

“Please! Detective, you have to come!” Cereus squeaked, his voice rising to an almost inaudible pitch as he landed beside me. “It happened just an hour ago, but she said she wouldn’t open the door unless it was you and I don’t know what to do because I thought I got rid of all the booze but maybe she found some and her voice sounded really strange!”

“Inhale, exhale, and give me a five count of those, Agent,” I said, putting a hoof on his heaving barrel as he stared at me with wide eyes. His teeth were chattering and his wings were nervously spasming against his muscled sides, sending up little whorls of dust.

With a weak nod, he started taking deep, gasping breaths. It took about ten before his pupils returned to their normal size.

“S-sorry, Detective,” he panted. “It’s just...I...I don’t know what went wrong! Agent Bloom was...she was doing better. The detox was rough, but when Princess Twilight called us, she locked herself in a cell until it was out of her system. She was even kinda back to her normal self for a bit there, which I guess means shouting at me a lot, but it was better than this.”

Much as I wanted to rush him, a panicked pony is an unhelpful pony.

“Better than what, Cereus?” I asked.

“Better than...than whatever just happened!” he replied, his yellow eyes flashing with fear. “I don’t know! She told me she’d been having bad dreams, but an hour ago she was asleep and seemed like she was alright! All of a sudden she bolts upright and charges into secure storage and slams the door and locks it! Then I heard a lot of screaming and...and then nothing. Then she...she used the intercom in there and...and said I had to bring you or...or else!”

“Or else what?”

“I didn’t get that far! I heard the alarm for the tram and then you were there and—”

I pushed him to one side and headed for the archway deeper into the Warehouse. “Fine, fine! I’ll deal with it. Point me toward this secure storage area, then go get a sandwich.” I thought for a moment. “Actually, get two sandwiches. Agent Bloom might not have eaten. Oh! And go get the Helm of Nightmare Moon. I don’t know where you stuck it, but I need it back—”

Cereus bit his lip, and his ears pinned down to the sides of his head. “It’s...it’s in secure storage, Detective.”

“Of course it is!” I snarled, yanking my bloody hat off and shoving it at Cereus. “While you’re getting the sandwiches, clean this.”

“I-is that your b-blood?” he asked.

“If it wasn’t, would it matter? Clean! Spotless! Now, make with the directions! We’re short of time, here!”

“Oh Cereus… Do you think he’s going to be alright, once this is all over? Poor guy.”

“I have no idea. He’s about as innocent as Swift was when she puked down my neck over Ruby Blue’s body, and I don’t think either of us would claim my partner is anything like ‘alright’. Still, he’ll be able to make a fine washcolt if his other prospects fall through, presuming the world doesn’t freeze.”

“What do you mean?”

“My hat came back absolutely sparkling.”

I trotted through the Warehouse, the ancient gem-lights flickering overhead. Cereus had apparently made some effort to clean the place up and most of the shelves had been dusted, but that didn’t help the general sense of decay about the place. Shelf upon shelf of wooden boxes or crudely nailed together bins were full of all manner of electronic junk, hidden away from the eyes of the world in the hope somepony would either find a use for it or find a way of disposing of it, then quietly forgotten. It was almost sad.

Worse might be the possibility of the world never having the chance.

The image of poor Cereus, frozen to death while clinging to his feather-duster and Night Bloom’s body, flashed through my head.

‘Turn left at the corner, then right at the thing that looks like a giant clown nose. Do not touch the clown nose, or it may destroy everything for twenty kilometers in every direction,’ I thought, glancing up at the huge red orb hanging suspended in midair behind a fenced off area at the end of the row I was moving down.

There it was: Secure Storage.

In a place where the ‘Deadly Giant Clown Nose’ is kept in the open, Secure Storage was the sort of thing a pony doesn’t want to think too hard on the existence of.

The door was a sort of metal arch surrounding a slab of steel, painted in bright yellow stripes which spilled onto the floor with the words ‘Authorized Personnel Only’ in about twenty different languages alongside huge safety stickers plastered across the walls on either side. Even in a pit ponies generally threw things down to forget about them, it seemed a tad unnecessary, which said to me it’d probably been arranged by Princess Twilight Sparkle; security of the sake of security.

‘So, time to go kiss this lion,’ I thought, studying the stickers along the wall. One said ‘dismemberment likely’ while another had an illustrated planet exploding. Lovely.

Clenching my jaw, I stepped onto the yellow markings. When I was not suddenly killed after several moments, I exhaled and tapped my toe against the door.

“Ahem...Night Bloom? It’s Hard Boiled.”

There was a long pause, and then a feminine voice rattled from a speaker beside the door. It made every muscle in my back tense up, and I rose right up onto the tips of my toes like a spooked cat. Whoever it was, it didn’tsound like Agent Bloom.

“Touch the ‘talk’ button on the panel to your left, foolish creature,” the voice hissed, “I cannot hear you.”

My teeth chattering at the sensation of a whole heap of spiders crawling in my fur, I scooted over to the speaker and pressed a tiny pink button.

“Night Bloom? Hard Boiled here. Open up.”

Again, that voice; I wanted, more than anything, for her to stop talking. Every word was like weaponized heebie jeebies.

“Ah! It is you! Finally! I have only heard your voice until this glorious night, and I have waited for so very long! Do come in, Detective! Come in and let me see your face!”

On nearly silent rails and with only a whisper of shifting weights, the slab of steel slid upwards into the wall, revealing an inky swirl of something like fog filling the space beyond. It crept out across the floor for a few seconds, seeming to leech the light from overhead. I danced backwards, and the darkness suddenly slurped away into the room, like water down a drain. It left behind a sense of abiding dread and a fresh case of angry butterflies in my stomach.

‘So, bad news, then,’ I thought, shoving my hoof into the pocket of my jacket. I don’t know what I was searching for in there; jelly beans, or maybe a gun. Either way, I didn’t find it. What I did find was Ruby Blue’s diary. I traced the gems on the cover, then exhaled.

‘Are you really going to do this, Hardy? Are you really going to go in the room with the creepy voice and what may or may not be a possessed mare? Are you really that stupid?’

Of course, I am exactly as stupid as that.

Throwing out my chest, I scraped up what was left of my resolve and stomped into the void. Overhead, a few dimly glowing, ancient gem-lights provided a hint of illumination, but none pierced the dense fog deeply enough to let me make out the edges of the room. Shadows moved a few meters away, which might have been swirls in the mist, or possibly demons readying for a pounce. Hard to say, really.

“I’m here, Agent Bloom. You want to shut off whatever is making the special effects, so we can talk?”

I waited for a reply, feeling the sweat bead on my neck and thighs.

From off to my left, close enough that I swear I felt her breath on my neck, the voice whispered, “Interesting, little stallion.”

Wrestling the urge to jump into shape, I casually swiveled my head about to see what was there. Of course, there was nothing there.

Trying not to sound half so scared as I was, I grumbled, “Look, I’m on a deadline. Whoever this is, you invited me in. That means you have my attention. I’d rather not go back out there and have Cereus flood the room with tear gas, but—”

Her voice cut me off, this time seeming to come from all directions at once and shaking the very air with its power.

“There is no tear gas in this facility, little pony! The foolish thestral is washing your hat, and your threats are as empty as your fate! This has all been foreseen! Now...come forth!”

With that, a mighty wind swept out of nowhere, almost sending me into a flying roll as I struggled to keep my hooves. My coat billowed out around me, and I stumbled sideways as the fog lifted within seconds, leaving my eyes watering and blurry. On muscle memory alone, I kicked a forehoof and made to snap at the air, then realized my trigger bit wasn’t there to catch.

Backing toward where I thought the door was, I scrubbed at my face, trying to clear my vision as I waited for somepony to slip a shiv into my spine.

‘Breathe. She’s trying to scare you.’

‘She’s succeeding, dammit!’

Fighting every instinct in my body, I raised my head and forced my burning eyes open. In retrospect, this was only the third worst mistake I’d made that day.

The room was like a garage sale in Tartarus.

A dozen low tables, each with a wire-mesh cage atop it and big enough for a good sized dog to comfortably occupy, were lined up along both walls. Every one of them was occupied by some arcane object that practically radiated sinister power: a fluttering collection of tiny books with sharp little teeth, a brazier full of what looked like living eyeballs, a defleshed face that dribbled a thin stream of blood from each eye, and many, many others I didn’t have time nor desire to look at any more closely.

To crown it all, sitting at the head of the room on a comfortable looking blue pillow, was Agent Night Bloom. She’d seen better days, if I’m honest.

What I could see of her dark grey face in the dim light was smeared with tears, but her fanged muzzle was twisted into a delighted grin. Around her hooves, a writhing cloud of something like living darkness was teasing my eye, refusing to coalesce into a coherent shape. Her mane was a mess of knotted fur, with spots and stains from fetlocks to knees. Her leathery wings appeared to be bleeding from a dozen tiny holes, the blood pooling around her hooves as she smiled at me with all-powerful malice.

Worst of all, the Helm of Nightmare Moon sat upon her head, hooking down over her pointed ears. While the hole for a unicorn’s horn was empty, a wisp of light still flickered inside it. I could see the muscles in her neck straining and stretching, as though the helm were much heavier than it looked, her veins popping with inner tension.

I tried to find some saliva for my suddenly parched throat.

“Who...who am I addressing?” I asked, fighting to suppress a squeak at the end there.

Bloom’s breath hissed out through her teeth as she took a step closer, along with a bit of that cloying fog. When she spoke, it was that voice again; deeper, richer, and far more intimidating than the mare’s usual testy tone. Worse, her lips didn’t seem to be moving.

“You know who…” She paused, and then her expression hardened. “Say my name, creature.”

My muzzle moved without my volition.

“Y-you’re Nightmare Moon…”

“There it was. I’d said it, and I couldn’t take it back. Somehow, just having the words out there in the world made it much, much more real. I don’t know. The stories I’d heard of her since I was a foal never really did her justice. The mare who is the source of all our bad dreams.”

“Actually, she’s not. She’s just a parasitic organism which latched onto Princess Luna’s jealousy and transformed her into—”

“Look, I don’t know what press release you read, but whatever this was, this thing came from the damn hat. Agent Bloom put it on, and it nearly killed both of us.”

“I…”

“Just...let me finish. Right here is where everything started to get weird.”

“W-why are you taking control of Agent Bloom?”

“In short? Because you have no fate, stallion,” she rasped. “You are a vessel for destiny, and now...destiny has come.”

Shutting my eyes, I scrambled to reassemble a bit of my usual grit.

‘Sound cocky, keep her talking, see if Cereus notices the situation and has some kind of de-possession gun somewhere in the building.’

“You know, you’re not the first person...thing...to say that to me recently. If the goal is intimidation here, you’re going to find I’m mostly an alcoholic with lots of anger issues and a best friend who eat—”

“I did not rise to bandy words, little stallion!” she snapped. “You have only seconds, now! The moment will arrive soon! Put on the helm!”

I blinked at her, then stepped back.

“Ah...right. That’s way up on the list of things that are never going to happen.”

I expected a certain vengeful fury, or for her to attack me, but all I got was a slight widening of that irritatingly self-satisfied smile.

“Well, then. I do not need this mare’s body to be alive to take you. Before I peel that pitiful little mind open like an egg, you can watch her die.”

With that, Night Bloom’s eyes snapped open, and she let out a strangled gasp, collapsing on the floor, her legs wheeling at the air. “H-Hardy! Hard Boiled! G-go! Get out! She can k-kill everypony! She’s in my head! Oh Celestia, it hurts!”

Blood spurted from her nose and tear ducts, spilling down her cheeks.

My resolve wavered as I saw the look in her eyes, and I flashed back again, to that picture of her corpse, frozen alongside poor Cereus. Was I really willing to let this mare die to save myself? If she took control of me, what would it change? I couldn’t carry the helm with it being worn by the zombified corpse of Agent Bloom as it tried to tear my head off. Even with Cereus there, I doubted we could take an undead without some weapons and I hadn’t planned for this particular eventuality.

At worst, they could shoot me, get the hat off, stick it in a deep, dark hole, and then—

Then what? The Vivarium was still going to burn in a matter of hours. No way to prevent that, right?

All of this zipped through my mind at the speed of thought as Bloom’s voice grew strangled and she began to cough up thick streams of blood onto my hooves.

“Alright!” I snapped, throwing my coat off. “Alright! Stop it! I’ll do it, dammit! Stop hurting her!”

At that, Night Bloom’s eyes twinkled, then she sat up and began casually wiping her muzzle clean. Her nose was still dripping, but it was down to a trickle.

“There we go, little stallion,” the Nightmare purred, spitting a wad of bloody phlegm to one side as she got to her hooves. “Even a pony like you can be predicted, given time. And my time has arrived. Kneel. Here.”

The creature possessing my friend forced one of Bloom’s legs up and pointed at the floor in front of her.

Dragging my hooves, I slowly made my way forward. My mind was racing for a solution; a solution besides committing suicide. I could down those pills, right? Of course, that presumed she couldn’t just control my cadaver. She’d said something about that, hadn’t she?

‘Think, Hardy. Think! There has got to be a way out of this. You put that helmet on, there’s nothing stopping her from killing everypony!’

So, why hadn’t she? And why hadn’t the Nightmare already killed Agent Bloom? I was in no shape to fight an undead in straight hoof-to-hoof. What was her goal?

I was missing something vital, and my answer might be in that helm. Of course, global oblivion might also be in that helm. No good options. Death on all sides.

‘Gale?’ I thought. ‘If you can hear me and there’s anything you can do or if this looks like it’s going sideways, you’ve got to stop her…’

I felt a soft tickle of assurance from my chest, then shut my eyes and stumbled forward onto my front legs. Lowering my head, I growled, “I’ve watched enough friends die. We do this, you just take my body and get out, alright?”

A hoof touched the underside of my chin, and I raised my eyes to look into the face of fear itself.

“If you cooperate, I will allow those inside this building to leave, so long as they do not defy me. Agreed?”

I yanked my head away from her touch. “Yes, yes...just...just do it, dammit! Don’t make me think about it any more!”

I heard a shifting about above me, followed by a soft squeak of pain, which I presumed was the helm popping off of Night Bloom’s head. Then I felt it, sliding down over my skull. It was colder than ice, cold as the depths of space, cold as perfect revenge. It felt like somepony had just dropped a truck tire around my neck. Then my vision went black, leaving me stranded in a place where there was no sensation, neither sound nor light.

A string of bright green symbols, glowing with eldritch fire, appeared in the corner of my vision, then gradually morphed into recognizable letters.

Rom Check… Success!

Act 3 Chapter 41: Nightmares All The Way Down

"The great villains of the past occupy a unique niche in Equestria's culture. Some have claimed that we are beyond the age of true villains, like Sombra or Nightmare Moon; in their eyes such beings could never return and live only to haunt the dreams of children. Many would argue that simple absence from the public eye is evidence enough that these creatures are obsolete.

Wiser minds have since asked if it might not be evidence that the villains of the modern age have become more resolute, more cautious, and more insidious. Gone are the cartoonish beasts who struck at society with ridiculous costumes, replaced by creatures of patience and intelligence, who would rather have control than fear. Boardrooms have replaced dank caves or fortresses. Podiums have replaced castle balconies.

Robber barons may, on the surface, seem less dangerous to society than the changeling queens or magic-eating centaurs, but given time we may wish we'd turned a few more businessponies to stone."

The Scholar

“What was it like?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just put on one of the most dangerous magical artifacts in the whole history of Equestria. She could control ponies’ minds and whisper in their dreams. She beat Princess Celestia in magical combat, and without the Elements, Princess Celestia might have had to call down the sun on the former capital to drive her back. The only others who’ve worn it are Princess Luna and Astral Skylark.”

“So you want to know what it was like? For posterity?”

“I-I guess...I mean, it’s not as though I’ll ever get to ask two ponies as crazy as you are.”

“Honestly? It was heavy, stuffy, and it smelled like thousand-year-old alicorn flop sweat. That’s all I remember before everything went sideways.”

“That’s it? Heavy, stuffy, and scared alicorn?! I can’t write that!...And how do you know what alicorn flop sweat smells like?”

“Well, in particular, it smells like burnt blueberry muffins. The only other time I smelled it was around...ahem...the only other alicorn of my acquaintance, when she was having a panic attack.”

“That...I...ugh! Do you have to be infuriating?”

“Until this morning, I tended to spend the first five minutes out of bed sitting there contemplating what a bullet would taste like. If I didn’t have somewhere to stuff that energy, I might get just as curious as you are. Can I get this over with? We’ve got places to be.”

“Right. Sorry I asked. If you save the world and Princess Celestia or Princess Luna reward you, please have them get the royal psychologist to see you once a month.”

“After what happened next, I’ll be inclined to take them up on that...”

For a very long time, nothing happened. I just was, a mote of sensation in infinite numbness. Taxi conned me into using a sensory deprivation tank at one of those swanky spas once. It was terrifying, trapped, alone in the dark with only my own thoughts and the soft lapping of water against the sides. She told me I was in there less than five minutes before bucking the door of the hinges. I’d have sworn it was twenty years.

Panic swelled, then subsided.

More runes appeared, flashing across my vision.

Memory... failure!

Remote... failure!

Slave access... failure!

Interface... ready.

In that moment, when the green lettering flickered out, I was left with the sensation of being a molecule of exotic matter under close examination by a creature that tears planets from their orbits for fun. Surrender was irrelevant; survival was well and truly off the table. It turned over my mind like a bulldozer rolling over an anthill and peered at each piece with distant amusement.

I’d have given the world to get out from under that gaze. If such a being had eyes, they’d have been stars, gazing icily into the depths of my being. I could feel every gallon of blood my body had ever pumped, analyzed with an unnatural interest. I felt the first beat of my heart in my mother’s womb, criticized with rank amusement. My rotting skin as it peeled from my body after several weeks in the grave was casually toyed with. I became a puzzle to be assembled, disassembled, then torn apart again and again by a godlike being far beyond my comprehension.

Madness swept down and clapped itself around my wide-open, bleeding brain, and I was sent spinning through endless black, where every possibility, every death I had ever casually dodged came true in an instant.

Discarded. Returned. Bled. Broken. Insane.

Nothing left. Pelt peeling. Brain ripped.

Death. Life. Death. Again and again. Round and round the mulberry bush.

Then, all at once, everything paused. It didn’t stop, so much as seemed never to have been there in the first place. My will was my own again. The sense of violation was still there, but muted, like a memory of past pain.

I opened my eyes and took a deep breath.

It took a long minute to figure out the familiar surroundings, but when I did, a smile crossed my face. I was in my old apartment. The radio was playing a snazzy tune and I was sprawled on my back, all four legs in the air, a beer bottle cradled in the crook of my knee. My mouth tasted pretty awful, but it was nothing a toothbrush couldn’t fix. Outside, children were playing some silly game, maybe hoofball, maybe baseball, or maybe some combination of the two. It seemed to mostly be a game of who could scream the loudest.

Carefully so as to avoid knocking over one of the three bottles beside my knees I rocked myself onto my side, which brought me muzzle to muzzle with an extremely surprised-looking black alicorn. She’d been curled up on the floor between the couch and the table, her magnificent wings folded against her sides, and her huge body surrounded by even more bottles. We studied one another. She was rather pretty, in a sort of alien fashion, but something in the set of her jaw and the cruel slant of her eyebrows made my guts squirm. It was not helped by the forebodingly familiar armor she wore that fit her like a glove.

Both of us let out a yelp of alarm and scrambled back from one another.

I kicked a foreleg and snapped at the air, feeling my revolver’s trigger materialize in my teeth. A second pair of wings, their surfaces covered in rotting feathers, sprouted from her back and flung a spray of maggots across the room. I leveled my gun at her as she leapt for my throat with a mouth full of ten thousand teeth, ready to rend me to shreds and send me spiraling back into that abyss where her domination was all there was.

No.

Everything paused.

You two behave, or next time there will be custard!

I opened my eyes, more slowly this time, and stared up at the ceiling. The tune on the radio was something a bit calmer, now Out of the corner of my vision, I could see a black blob of amorphous shadow, crouching beside the coffee table. I eased my shotgun’s barrel out of the neck of my coat and nudged it sideways. The slide was already cocked. All I had to do was get it pointed in her general direction. At this range, I couldn’t miss.

All at once, the shadow moved, slithering toward me and simultaneously spreading a dozen ooze-dripping claws to rip the flesh from my body. Rolling over, I tossed a pillow from the end of the couch to distract it while I brought the gun’s up, just as the creature jumped.

Everything paused.

I felt the couch under my back again and heard the soft rhythm of an alicorn’s breathing, as well as the sharp intake when she realized we were back to square one.

I tasted custard.

Cracking one eye, I stared up at something yellow. Turning my head, I looked down to find a bright yellow lump sitting on the floor with only her teal eyes and black horn visible. I swiveled my head down to look at the mess on my chest. It was a pretty thorough layering of dessert and covered every inch of my apartment, streaking the walls and dripping off the fixtures. Bringing a hoof to my muzzle, I sucked a bit off the tip.

Banana, hint of cinnamon, and maybe even some mango.

‘Pretty good,’ I thought. ‘Tastes like that one pie I had back when Juniper and I bagged the Trinity Street Killer in the back of that old diner.’

In fact, it tasted precisely like that pie, down to the tangy notes and aluminum aftertaste from the pan.

Nightmare Moon stuck her tongue out and swiped her muzzle clean, smacking her lips before rising like a dessert drizzled mountain to tower over me.

“Creature! What have you done to us?! Speak!” she demanded, that shiver-inducing voice rising to an imperious snarl. Her considerable intimidation factor was badly muted a bit by the stringy mess the custard had made on her wings and legs.

Rolling over, I pulled my hooves under myself, trying to stand. I slipped, planting my nose into the nearest pillow with a wet squelch. Moving more cautiously, I slid back onto my haunches, using a foreleg to smear as much away from my eyes as I could.

“I have no idea,” I grunted, then cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’re Nightmare Moon...right? We’re in my mind, aren’t we? Isn’t your job screwing with pony’s brains?”

“You dare ask me questions, little stallion?! You are nothing! Ripping the fabric of your mind apart is as easy as smashing this dream!”

Twirling in place and slinging custard like a wet dog shaking off on the carpet, she let out a terrifying howl of rage, then charged to the nearest wall and swung around to buck it as hard as she could.

Now, if it’d been the paper-thin crap in my old apartment, that end of the building should have had two alicorn-shaped hoofprints right through to the exterior. Dreams, as it turns out, are made of sterner stuff. The second her hooves hit the wall, a recoil shot up her legs and sent her barrelling forward onto her face, flopping end over end until her back slammed into the coffee table, snapping the table’s legs like kindling. Her sides heaved, a furious growl boiling in her throat, but she made no move to get up.

“Ow…”

“I know I’m going to regret this, but...are you alright?” I asked.

The alicorn let out an angry snort. Her rear legs twitched, but seemed none the worse for wear. Spreading one dark wing, she slapped it against the floor in a gesture of frustration and mumbled something, but I didn’t quite catch it.

“Sorry, I missed that. I asked if you were alright.”

Shoving herself onto her stomach, she whirled to glare at me, spitting a gob of custard on the carpet. “I heard you, stupid stallion! It is not my fault your feeble little mind is also hard of hearing! And what I said was ‘I am supreme in the mind!’ I broke Princess Luna in a matter of months! I cannot be...be rendered helpless by the likes of some wretched little worm! I felt your psyche splinter! I had you in my clutches! After all these months and years of waiting, I...blast you, I had you! You were mine!”

“So that’s what all that crap when I first put on the hat was?” I asked.

Stomping a forehoof she clenched her teeth. “Helm, fool! It is not a hat! It is a vessel for my power! Now! Tell us the secret! How have you evaded our predictive matrix?! This feeble mind of yours cannot contain my greatness! You will release us from this dreamscape, at once, else you will surely die!”

Sliding down off the couch, I shrugged out of my custard-slicked trenchcoat and set my hat on the end table. Stretching my legs, I reached up to touch my chest, only to find it smooth and unmarred by my heart’s plug; strange, really, since I’d had more than a few dreams which included it.

“Well, since I don’t know how we ended up in here, I can’t exactly get you out, now can I?” I replied, using two hooves to wring my tail out. “You want a beer? I think I remember having some in the fridge before this place was destroyed.”

Nightmare Moon’s wings snapped out from her sides, and she threw her mighty chest out. “A beer, little stallion?! How can you be so calm?! I tore your mind to pieces! I am a goddess! I foresaw all that came before, up to the instant you placed my helm upon your brow!”

“Foresaw? Like precognition?” I asked, then shrugged. “That would certainly explain some things.”

“It is not soothsaying, fool! I perceive the paths of events at speeds your pathetic, brittle little neurons cannot conceive of! Now...release me, or invoke my wrath again!”

I stood there, my hooves coated in congealing custard, staring at the beast they called the Blackest Night, panting and twitching like a detoxing Beam user. She was about as good at hiding her emotions as Swift, and underneath all that bluster, I could see a hint of actual fear. Her ears were twitching back and her black tail, a sweeping ethereal shadow, slashed back and forth in the air behind her. There were even a few frustrated tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

“Sorry, doll,” I grunted, “Wish I could help, but I’m not the one calling the shots in here.”

Nightmare Moon drew in a gigantic breath, and I all but felt my ears blasted back by the volume of her rage.

“Y-you...dare! Your impaled body will decorate my halls! I shall build my throne from the flesh and bones of that vile pegasus, and drink from the skullcap of that cab pony, and you will live to see them suffer! You will live in an eternal firestorm of agony, until I tire of watching you burn and freeze you instead! There will be no succor or safety! I will violate--”

“Yada, yada, yada!” I shouted over her. She blinked a couple times as I dropped my voice to a more acceptable level. “Now...I’ve heard this comic book villain crap before. Save it for ponies who haven’t seen walls of flesh and thrones of bone. We’re stuck in here, and you can scream and shout all you like, but I don’t think we can hurt each other. So, I’ll ask you again...do you want a beer?”

Her gaze narrowed until I felt sure she was about to attack me again, and with a seething rage that threatened to set my head on fire, she sank onto the carpet again.

“Get me...ugh...beer, creature!” she snapped, holding out her foreleg whilst glaring up at the ceiling. “Do not think this earns you any kindness!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied, tip-hoofing my way through the swamp of custard into my kitchenette. It was nice to be back in the old place, even if the smell of dessert was a little cloying. Tugging open the fridge, I found a fresh six pack of Juniper’s favorite sitting on the top shelf; Celestial Single Malt. Yanking two bottles out of the pack, I tossed one in the general direction of the alicorn. She snapped it out of midair with a flash from her horn, went to take a sip, then stared at the bottle-cap as though it’d offended her.

Grinning, I twisted the top off my beer. She watched me for a second, then mimicked the action. Fighting the urge to chuckle, I swung my bottle up and took a quick chug.

“Mmm...ahhhh. Nice. You know, for a dream where I’m trapped with a pissy alicorn, this isn’t half bad.”

Nightmare’s nostrils flared and she staggered to her hooves again. “Not half bad, fool?! You are going to watch your friends and family slaughtered, unless we escape this place!”

I cocked my head, then trotted back to the couch, throwing myself back on the stained seat. “You know about that?”

“Of course I do! Who do you think set these events in motion?!” she barked, angrily taking a sip from her drink, now that she had the method down. Her pupils dilated, and she looked down at the bottle, then suddenly put both hooves on either side of it, throwing it back and draining the entire thing in a matter of seconds. As the last drips ran down the glass and dribbled onto her greedy tongue, she gave the bottle a shake. “Mmmrph! Stallion! Another beer!”

“Get it yourself,” I grunted. “Just leave one. I expect a friend of mine will be arriving any minute now.”

The Nightmare bared her sharp teeth. “A friend? You trap me, the Voice In The Shadows, in a dreamscape and cover me in confectionary to meet a friend?!”

“Oh? No, no, meeting him is just a bonus. And how many times am I going to have to tell you that I didn’t do this?”

“I think I want to kill you again,” she growled. “Just to be sure…”

With that, she slammed her beer bottle on the edge of the coffee table, breaking the end off and leaving only the sharpened neck. I watched, impassively, slurping down another sip. Mercy, it was good.

Rearing back, she made to drive the makeshift blade into my chest. I adjusted myself on the couch and set my beer down, tilting my head back slightly to offer her my neck. She switched her aim slightly, and lunged.

No!

Nightmare’s shiv stopped a bare inch from my throat, and she hung there, eyes darting back and forth. Space began to reform around her, like a rippling wave across my vision, like a curtain being drawn across a stage. After about three seconds, subjective time, she vanished entirely, replaced by a two meter tall chocolate cupcake with white frosting and little yellow sprinkles in the shapes of my cutie-mark. The custard had vanished, leaving the apartment back in its original condition, minus the huge cupcake sitting where the broken coffee table and angry mare had been.

There was a gasp, then Nightmare Moon’s head burst from the top of the cupcake in a shower of crumbs. She snarled at the thick frosting dripping down her helmeted face and squirmed against the walls of her tasty prison until her back legs punched a hole in the side, sending her tumbling onto the carpet. Her eyes blazed as she kicked the cupcake in the side, stumbling slightly as her hooves sank right up to the hock.

Reaching over, I grabbed a hooffull of frosting and stuffed it in my mouth. Mmm...my twelfth birthday party. A good year.

I can do this all day! Cream cheese is next! Now, stop being mean!

“I am Nightmare Moon! I am the Darkest Hour! You do not order me, you beastly little--”

The Nightmare disappeared, leaving behind a mountain of cream cheese that slowly oozed sideways, until a gagging, choking alicorn managed to pry her muzzle above the surface.

“W-why must you immerse us continually in food products!?” she sputtered, scraping at her tongue with one hoof.

“I dunno,” I replied. “Not me doing it. I was a bit peckish before I put on the hat, though.”

“H-helm…”

I propped myself up on one elbow, watching her struggle in the multi-gallon puddle of creamy goodness. Any dignity she might have affected was gone by the time she hauled herself loose. With a firm shake, she stood. Her body dripped from ears to ankles as she very carefully ignored my barely repressed sniggering, marched to the refrigerator, opened it, then stomped back and collapsed on the couch, two more beers levitating alongside her.

For a long moment we just sat there, listening to the heap of cream cheese spreading out across the carpet and the children playing outside. I couldn’t really think of anything worth saying to a deification of all the worst things in a foal’s dreams, and I’ve no idea what she was thinking; probably something about pulling me inside out, then taking my beer.

Thankfully, we were saved from either awkward small-talk or another dunking in some memory of something delicious from my past by three sharp knocks on the front door.

Nightmare jerked her head in my direction, blinking at me owlishly.

“This...is a closed dreamscape!” she protested, “There can be nothing outside of it! We are occupying your entire mind!”

“I won’t pretend to know what that means, but if I had to emotionally deal with every aspect of just how impossible what’s about to happen is, I’d spend my days making macaroni art at the funny farm.” I raised my voice and shouted, “Juniper, you’ve had a key to that door since three weeks after we started working together! Quit pretending to be polite!”

There was a loud sigh, then my apartment’s front door swung open. My dead partner stood there, leaning on the doorsill, his dark green face a slightly disappointed frown. He wore a darker trenchcoat and one of the innumerable ties we’d given each other through the years, but looked otherwise only a little careworn. Over his shoulder, I could see a brilliant starscape, and it was then I noticed he didn’t seem to be standing on anything in particular; rather he floated amongst the stars.

As soon as his eyes settled on Nightmare Moon, he backed up a step, then blew a loud breath through his nose.

“Kid, tell me that is just you taking the piss,” he grunted, and I snatched Nightmare’s unopened beer, tossing it to him. She hissed at me as he caught it, popped the cap off, and took a quick pull. “Mmm...that’s good stuff.”

Nightmare Moon, meanwhile, had an expression that looked like she was trying to pass a brick.

“Hrg...My predictive matrix has failed to account for this! Explain!” she snapped.

I glanced at her, then shook my head. “What’s to explain? That’s my dead partner, Juniper Shores.”

“And...who might you be, Miss?” Juniper asked, trotting forward and gently lifting Nightmare Moon’s hoof. He planted his lips on it, then took a step back. The look of shock on her face was absolutely priceless. I’d swear she blushed. “A lovely lady, if I do say so, despite the costume. Nice fake wings or horn, too, though I can’t tell which is real--

“They’re both real, Juni,” I murmured.

“Heh, come on. If they’re both real-” His eyes slowly widened and his ears pinned back as he sat down heavily on the carpet in a pool of cream cheese. “Oh sweet mother. You didn’t…”

Nightmare Moon bared her teeth at Juniper and quickly recovered her bluster. “Stallion, I think it best you speak quickly, lest I see fit to rend your soul apart and peer at your guts for my answers!”

“Kid, tell me you didn’t put on the Helm!” Juniper said, ignoring her as his voice rose a few panicky octaves and he hopped to his hooves, trotting in a quick circle. Whirling to face me, he looking into my eyes, intently, then chugged his beer empty. “Of course you did, because that would be the stupidest thing a pony could possibly do. Dear skies, do you even know what your body is doing right now?”

The Nightmare snorted, her eyes rolling toward the ceiling. “It is lying on its side in a cell, alongside the mare I was using. That ridiculous dusk pony found us and plugged you into a wall socket seconds before I could properly dominate him.”

“No kidding,” Juniper muttered. “So you’re Nightmare Moon, huh?”

She drew herself up. “I am Fear Itself! I am the Whispering Shade! I am-”

I cut her off by grabbing her beer and sticking the bottle in her muzzle. She sputtered, then the taste silenced her and she gave me a disgruntled look while still quietly sucking on the booze.

“Unless you want to be the creamy center of a twinkie, I recommend you keep it to ‘yes’ and ‘no’,” I said. “The friend of mine who is controlling this little experience has an itchy baker’s hoof.”

Juniper seemed to notice, for the first time, that he was sitting in cream cheese. “That...explains the condition of this place. Not that I would have been surprised seeing your apartment a disaster, but this is a new wrinkle, even for you. Gale is running this show? King Cosmo’s little brother?”

“I guess.” I glanced at the ceiling. “Gale? You listening?”

I’m here, Hardy.

Nightmare Moon and Juniper both jumped. Gale hadn’t been so much a voice as an overwhelming presence, a thunderstorm just over the horizon. I felt him throughout me, resonating inside my bones with a power that sent shivers up my flank.

“Tell your creature not to d-do that again, Hard Boiled,” Nightmare ordered, shaking her ethereal mane out. “That is far more unsettling than being placed in a cupcake.”

Juniper quickly took a drink from his beer, then set it on the table. “Yeah, I’m dead and that was weird. You sure you are still steering the boat?”

“I’m sure,” I replied, cooly. “Juniper, where’ve you been? I’ve been expecting you to stick your ghostly schnoz into this situation for weeks.”

“I haven’t been able to reach you,” Juniper murmured, pulling his hooves under himself and sitting down. “Something’s changed around Detrot. There is...movement...in the deep. It’s keeping all manner of...well, all manner of help...from finding you. Myself included. I wish I could be more specific, but just take it on faith that there are people in your corner. Except they’re not people. And ‘corners’ tends to suggest angles, which suggest shapes, and...and I don’t want to get into that. It gives me headaches. Where are you? I couldn’t find your body. Just found this...dream.”

“I’m in a secret government facility outside the city. I assume I’m still wearing the Helm of Nightmare Moon,” I answered.

“I hate that you telling me something like that only raises a couple of eyebrows in my mind,” Juniper sighed, patting my shoulder. “What about her?”

I looked back at Nightmare, who was, again, trying to get the last drips from her bottle. “I’ve got no idea. She did something to me when I first put on the helm that felt like somepony dunking me in a dumpster full of spiders. Then I woke up on the couch over there.”

Nightmare Moon tossed the bottle over her shoulder and turned her nose in the air. “Hrmph! A dumpster full of spiders! Such pathetic descriptors for true and sublime terror! I tore his psyche into pieces and fed them through the blackest reaches of experience! He should be a gibbering, mindless dribbler, fit only to be filled by my presence!”

Juniper’s upper lip curled, and I thought I saw a hint of anger there, but he quickly hid it. “It wasn’t you who set the moon off its course. Somepony else owns that. You hurt my friend again, though, and I will pull in every favor I’ve earned to make sure you spend eternity finding out what ‘true and sublime terror’ really looks like.”

Rising, Nightmare towered over us, and I scooted backwards several inches. “I will not be threatened by the likes of you, dead thing! You have no sway here!”

My ex-partner, not one to be intimidated, marched forward and shoved his muzzle in her face. “I have seen a place where angelic beings with giant hooks for limbs endlessly tear the skin from trespassers in their realm. It is a place without the mercy of death! You push me and I will take you on a tour.”

“You want me, you take this foolish stallion, too! I am still inside him!” she bit back, pawing at the carpet.

“Alright! Enough! Both of you!” I barked, forcing my way between them with one hoof on Nightmare’s chest and the other on Juniper’s forehead. “My head is already feeling a little crowded, and we’re obviously stuck here with the intention that we come to some kind of an accord! Before Gale soaks you both in mustard or something, sit down and let’s talk!”

“Talk?!” Nightmare snapped, throwing herself backward onto the couch. “I desire freedom! Your body remains my best chance to attain it! Will you surrender yourself to my power? I can promise, your suffering will be brief!”

I rolled my eyes and exhaled, sharply. “No, I’m not going to do that and I really doubt Gale would let that happen, but--”

The alicorn threw her legs one over the other, turned around, stuck her head under one wing and grumbled, “Then there is nothing to talk about! You shall die of starvation, and I shall take your body, and that will be an end of it!”

I fell silent, then lifted my chin toward the ceiling. “Gale?”

I am here...

The wave of overwhelming presence wasn’t quite so unsettling upon a second helping, but it still made Nightmare jerk like a marionette who’d had her strings kicked.

“Gyah! Do not do that!” she yelped, scrambling upright in her seat. “What is that creature?!”

“That...is my heart,” I chuckled.

“Your...heart?” Nightmare growled, shaking her shadowy mane. “The changeling heart? I calculated for that! You could not control the changeling’s autonomic functions!”

“No, but the heart’s former owner could,” I replied. “He’d spent many, many years inside it and learned where all the switches are.”

“Impossible!” she snapped, wings half spread. “He would be little more than shreds of consciousness!”

Juniper coughed, softly, bringing her attention back to him. “And that would be completely true, without...ahem...without friends in high places.”

Nightmare flashed her fangs. “Explain.”

My ex-partner smirked at her. “If you want a textbook comprehension of things greater than this world, I don’t have one. I’m not even sure why I’m still able to interact with the living, or...well, whatever you are. A whole heap of well respected rules that I took for granted throughout my death say I shouldn’t be sitting here. That being said, someone, or something has got a hoof on the cosmic scales, keeping them from tilting completely out of Hardy’s favor. That includes me. You think I want to be here? Give me a nice plot of dirt and a pine box over having to watch my friends fighting for their lives any damn day.”

“And you piss and moan about my suicidal impulses,” I groused.

“Your suicidal impulses are going to get you killed, again, kid,” Juniper said, sharply, narrowing his eyes at me. “Worse, I’ve no idea what the powers that be want, right now. Like I said, you don’t have a fate. You want to enlighten me on how you pulled that particular trick?”

“Hrmph! Wouldn’t you like to know, tiny dead stallion?” Nightmare commented, smugly. “It required quite the bit of probability manipulation.”

“If you set this up, Miss Nighty, then you’re in danger same as him,” he added.

“I am in no such!” she retorted, folding her giant wings, tightly. “Nothing can touch me! Equestria is as a passing mist unless I have a body!”

“Really? Well, if you want the chance to have bodies in the future, you need to start being a little more forthcoming. This is an extinction level event, here. You’re going to be ‘free’ on a planet with nothing on it besides some meteor-pocked ruins and a whole heap of snow.”

Nightmare Moon seemed to consider this briefly, and then her eyes went - for lack of a better word - blank. The expression on her face slackened, and her irises vanished entirely, leaving only a white expanse, though without the usual blood vessels running through it. But for the fact that her forelegs remained locked and holding her in a sitting position, I’d have said she’d passed out.

Reaching over, I waved a leg in front of her face; no response.

“G-Gale? Are you doing this?” I asked.

No…

As carefully as I could, I tapped her on the shoulder. She didn’t so much as twitch.

“Alright, if I wasn’t spooked before, I am now spooked,” I murmured. “Juni, I know this is going to sound strange, but...do you have any idea what she is?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, nudging the alicorn’s cheek with his toe. “She’s Nightmare Moon. She’s the entity that took over the mind of Princess Luna and went to war against Princess Celestia. She’s...she...hrm...”

I gave him a sidelong glance.

He flicked the side of her head, getting a hollow ‘thunk’ noise in return.

“Fine. Now that you mention it, that’s a bit inadequate,” he amended. “Look, I’ll be honest; I didn’t know what I was walking into until the door opened. You put on the helm and she...what? Appeared?”

“More or less. I mean, she possessed a friend of mine and--”

Juniper’s forehead hit the bottom of his hoof. “And you, being you, took that bait like a mackerel taking a worm. You know the stakes here. Couldn’t you have just...I don’t know...shot her in the knee and took the helm off her?”

“I left my gun with Swift,” I replied, not willing to meet his eyes.

His back legs went lax and he collapsed on the carpet. “You...left the gun that was keeping you hidden with that goofy pegasus? And why were you taking the helm, anyway? A secret government facility sounds like a pretty safe place to stash it!”

Swallowing, I finished my beer and set it on the end table, eyeing the still frozen Nightmare Moon before turning back to Juniper.

“Our enemy has...an army; a significant army. One we’re not ready to deal with, yet. He gave me three hours to get the helm to him...or he’d burn the Vivarium and kill everyone in it. Then he’ll start exterminating other population centers.”

Juniper blinked, then his ears pinned to his head. “Oh...oh, damn.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Hardy, you cannot give them that helmet,” Juniper protested. “We’ve got no idea what they’re going to do with it! You want these ponies to--”

“To what, Juni? Have control of the sun and moon? Bring the planet to ruin? Destroy all life in Equestria? Leave this world a frozen wasteland? If that’s what they want, all they have to do is sit on their hooves for another couple months. They don’t need the helm of Nightmare Moon to do any of those things.”

Juniper’s teeth clicked shut around whatever he was about to say and he rubbed his forehead with the back of his fetlock. “Sorry. I keep forgetting just how screwed up this situation is.”

“I’ve got a plan to get the helm back, if that helps,” I murmured, lifting one of Nightmare’s wings, then letting it flop back in place. “Unfortunately, we’re stuck in here and I don’t know that Gale or...whatever she is...will let me out in time to stop this from developing into a full blown massacre.” Looking up at the ancient, yellowed ceiling, I traced the lines and cracks that’d once decorated the room and now existed only in my memories. “We’re missing something here, something vital.”

Throwing his hooves up, he stood and patted the pockets of his coat. “Well, while we figure out what that is, do you have anything to eat that wasn’t smeared all over a bitchy alicorn? I don’t think too good on an empty stomach.”

“There were some pickles in the fridge that were probably still good when the place burned down.”

Juniper gave me a powerful blast of puppy-dog eyes. “Awww...Come on, kid! This is your memory! Gimme something tasty!”

I shifted on the couch and tried to focus my scattered brain. A giant cheese plate I’d raided from the department Nightmare Night party almost six years ago faded into being on the carpet. Juni clapped his hooves together like an excited foal, then dived for it, shoving half a brick of the most expensive cheddar I’d ever stolen into his muzzle and spraying crumbs all over himself.

“Mmmm, Celestia’s pasty flank,” he moaned, “You have no idea how nice it is to eat food again! I haven’t been hungry in years!”

“I...have too many questions to bother asking most of them, but this being a dream, I assume time isn’t moving at the same rate outside as it is in here?” I asked.

“Maybe. Sorry, dreams are not my area of expertise.” Juniper coughed, then grabbed an olive and tossed it into his mouth, munching noisily. “I mean, time tends to move pretty damn fast when you’re not bounded by the limitations of your exterior senses, but I wouldn’t plan an extended vacation, either way. You want some munchies?”

I jerked my head toward Nightmare Moon. “Hard to eat with your brain invaded by a parasitic intelligence. I saw some strange writing before she started messing with my head.”

Juniper swallowed his last bite and his ears perked up. “Strange writing?”

“Yeah, just floating there in the air. I’d have sworn it looked like some kind of...instructions for a machine or something...”

Before either of us could cogitate too heavily on that, Nightmare Moon’s mane twitched and she raised her chin, her pupils reappearing like a pair of television screens snapping on. She inhaled, which I just then realized she hadn’t done for several minutes, and her expression tightened into an annoyed scowl as she looked down at the cheese plate and Juniper.

“You! Dead stallion! I require your input!”

My ex-partner flicked an ear. “What do you want, pissy mare?”

The Nightmare looked, for an instant, like she was going to risk attempting murder again. It was a close thing, but seeing someone like her impotently angry was too much fun for either of us to pass on; her cheeks puffed out, her ears flailed, and she kneaded the couch with her front hooves, likely imagining his neck between them as she growled like an irritable puppy.

“Grrr...You will cease to be insolent!” she barked, even as Juniper snickered under his breath. “We have analyzed your statements and find them to be accurate!”

“And?” I asked.

“Silence, creature! Allow me to finish speaking!” Nightmare snarled, throwing her chest out and raising her nose in the air. I relented, waving for her to continue. “Ahem. I do not wish to be alone in this world. I have had much time to process the changes to Equestrian culture and find them more amusing than the deaths of all Equestria. To that end, I...will deign to give you information which may assist in your enterprise to restore the Royalty and prevent the extinction of equinekind. In exchange, you will secure me a body and provide me with a signed guarantee, on the behalf of the Equestrian Royalty, that I will not be turned to stone, banished, or imprisoned for any crimes I may have committed, either in the distant past or within recent memory.”

Juniper almost gagged on a bit of bread off the cheese plate. “You want a full pardon? For ‘She Who Eats Dreams’?”

The alicorn nodded, her armor jangling softly. “A pardon...Yes! That is the word. Oh, and...I will require my freedom, total and unconditional, upon the return of the royal sisters, or if they should prove to be dead, from the ruling body that comes after them.”

“So...what you’re saying is that you want us to set you free and give you a full pardon for your own attempt to destroy the world,” I murmured.

“Precisely,” she replied, running her forked tongue over her muzzle. “In exchange, I will assist in the resolution of this situation to the best of my abilities.”

“Tell me this is a joke.”

“No joke. Like I said earlier, we made a bargain.”

“But...that’s insane! Nopony in their right mind would believe her!”

“She wasn’t in a position to lie to me. Besides, I figured it would be relatively simple to have Slip Stitch pull one of the corpses out of cold storage for her to inhabit. Unfortunately, there were...other considerations.”

“Bu-but...you agreed to free the Nightmare on behalf of the Equestrian government?! Are you out of your mind?!”

“Well, as the duly appointed representative of Equestria in Detrot-

“-if you help us pull this off, you’ve got a deal.”

Nightmare’s lips twitched into a small smile even as Juniper’s muzzle dropped open.

“Kid, you’re not...you’re not serious, are you?” my ex-partner murmured.

I picked up my hat off the end table and studied it, mostly as an excuse not to meet his gaze.

“I’m dead serious, Juni. We’ll need to work out the particulars - namely a clause prohibiting her from trying to overthrow the royals again - but for now, I don’t think we have a choice. You want to spend more time arguing?”

“How can we be sure she’ll help us? How do we even know she’s not doing this to try to help the ponies who caused the Eclipse?!” Juniper demanded.

“Because, if she were, she’d have torn my throat out,” I replied, self-consciously rubbing my neck. “Look, I’m exhausted and unarmed. Do you think she couldn’t have overpowered me with the possessed body of a bat pony?”

Nightmare licked her fangs. “I would have loved to taste this pathetic fool. Sadly, I believe the dusk pony has developed an attachment to this stallion; forcing her to attack him was quite impossible without a few more days to deepen my control.”

“Wait...what? That was a damn ruse?!” I growled.

She gave me a smug sniff and casually stretched her immense wings to their full span, knocking the lamp off the end table. “Simple control is easy and bears a striking resemblance to what you call ‘hypnotism’. You do make quite the impressive ‘prince in shining armor’ when a mare is threatened, though.”

‘Breathe, Hardy. Breathe. She’s trying to get your goat.’

I don’t know what constitutes adrenaline in a dream, but the entire room seemed to pulse with my rising anger. Nightmare’s smile wasn’t helping things one bit.

Snapping out my hoof, I jabbed it at her.

“Gale? Mom’s bleu cheese curry casserole!”

The air above Nightmare Moon’s head shimmered, and a pot of burnt, stinking mash that smelled of skunk fumes and rotted milk splashed down over her shoulders. The metal stock pot landed squarely on her horn and bits of foul, molded cheese rained down on the couch. For a long moment, we all just sat there. Part of me couldn’t believe I’d done that. Another bit was bordering on spontaneous orgasm.

Reaching up, the alicorn slowly pulled the pot off her head and set it down between her forelegs before turning her furious gaze on me; if looks could kill, she’d have left a crater where I was sitting. Her lips curled back from those disconcerting teeth in a thin smirk.

“One day, little stallion...I will have proper vengeance. I won’t drive your mind out of your body, as I sought to do a moment ago. That was kindness. No, I will keep you, so you can watch what I do…”

“You never touch anyone or manipulate anyone into hurting anyone I know or love,” I said, quickly. Her eyes narrowed and I added, “Myself included. That’s part of the deal. You want your freedom and your pardon, Hard Boiled and company are off your radar.”

Juniper leaned forward slightly. “And I will be watching closely, with eyes you cannot even fathom, to make for damn sure you hold up your end of this bargain.”

Her little smile vanished. “You...y-you…”

It was my turn to grin. “Yes. Me. Face facts, sugar plum. You want to do anything, you need my tail alive and ready to rumble. You can’t even leave this dreamscape until Gale is sufficiently convinced you’re going to hold up your end of things. So, what’s it gonna be?”

Her face went through an extremely complicated set of contortions. A vein popped on her forehead, and the look in her eyes screamed for blood, but it was tempered by what I was coming to suspect was a dangerously logical (if not terribly rational) mind with a powerful sense of self preservation. Finally, she settled on a serene expression which was somehow more disconcerting than her rage.

“Should you die before our agreement is complete, I will consider it forfeit...and you will go to your death knowing I took the body of the mad cab driver and strangled your partner with it.”

I let out a derisive snort. “If you think you can take Taxi’s brain, babe, I want to see you try. You give us information and help us stop the Family and D.W., along with whatever he’s got cooking. You swear never to try to destroy Equestria, overthrow the royals, kill me or anyone I care about, or do anything which might piss me off hard enough that I have to come looking for your flank. Agreed?”

“And in exchange, you shall provide me a body, my freedom, and a full pardon from any criminal acts I may have committed,” she replied. “You have the ear of one of the Equestrian Royals. My calculations indicate the most likely culprit is…Twilight Sparkle…”

She said those two words with enough venom that I genuinely thought she might spit on the carpet. Juniper let out a sound that might have been a laugh, but quickly covered it with some violent coughing.

“I seem to remember Miss Magic Pants mentioned you two had some history,” I murmured.

Nightmare Moon shut her eyes, and a shiver rippled through her body. “She has altered history, but it was she - that beastly little mare - who tore me from Luna and shattered my essence. Unfortunately, my memory was affected to a lesser degree, but I could never forget that vile sorceress, whatever magics she lays upon the land. Regardless, it is good to know you do not defy all of my predictions. You are here, after all, if not in the correct circumstances. I would have your enslaved skin at my command, had they all borne out.”

Juniper picked up the cheese plate and dragged a seat from the kitchen to set it on as he made himself a little picnic. “Nightykins--” he began.

“Do not call me that!” she snapped.

“Alright. Miss Pissy, then,” he said, crunching on a cracker as Nightmare stomped on the floor hard enough that, had it been an actual floor, she’d have left a sizeable hole. “Do you have any idea what the pricks running this circus want with the armor?”

“Had you not seen fit to lose the shoes and peytral, I might!” she bit back. “Much of their...purpose...eludes me, though I know in some fashion they wish me to control something. Or perhaps wear my armor, and somehow take control of me.”

Juniper’s eyes widened, and his look must have mirrored my own. “You don’t think…”

I nodded. “You remember what Apple Bloom said about an ‘interface’ for the Web of Dark Wishes? You think that’s what they’ve got in mind?”

“I mean...it doesn’t really explain how they cast the spell to push Princess Celestia and Princess Luna onto the moon--”

Nightmare looked at me out of one eye, then the other, turning her head like a predatory animal inspecting prey. “The moon? They banished Celestia and Luna to the moon?” Her eyes widened, and the shadows around her began to dance. “I require additional input! When the Eclipse began, what was the effect on the unicorn population of the city?! Answer me! Quickly!”

Juniper and I exchanged a look, then I cautiously replied, “They...lost consciousness. Most of their magical channels were apparently damaged.”

The giant alicorn sagged onto her stomach like a balloon with the air let out and put a hoof over her eyes. For a long time, that was all she did. I don’t think she was even breathing. Reaching over, I nudged her forehead, then yanked my leg back as she reared up and tried, half-heartedly, to snap it off.

“I am desecrated!” she snarled as I backed away several steps. “Leave me to my humiliation!”

I sat down beside Juniper as Nightmare buried her face back in the couch pillows.

“Melodramatic much?” Juniper murmured.

“She tried to end all life on this world because nobody was stargazing,” I replied, softly. “I think she’s gone way beyond melodramatic.”

There was a muffled ‘I can hear you, fools! Be silent and mock me not!’ from under the cushions.

“The way you describe her makes her sound almost...silly. I was expecting a monster. For somepony who orchestrated her escape from the Church of the Lunar Passage, and somehow figured out a way to almost steal your body, she sounds like a frustrated teenager with too many piercings protesting a well-deserved grounding...”

“Oh, make no mistake; she is a monster. I have no doubt, given a body and no restraints on her behavior, she’d hang me by my intestines and use me for a pinata. That being said, even monsters take time to develop personalities. She was either wrapped around Luna, trapped on the Moon, or broken into little pieces for most of her functional lifespan.”

“So, you’re saying she’s a child?”

“More or less. Nightmare Moon is still running on what her creators left and whatever influence Princess Luna had on her development.”

“Creators? I...I mean, I know she’s not some spontaneous manifestation, but are you saying somepony made her?”

“Isn’t that obvious, by now? The Web of Dark Wishes was Nightmare Moon’s grimoire. The armor was designed to corrupt the wearer and harness their power to operate the wish engine after taking Celestia and Luna out of the picture. Last time it failed and the armor was lost. Sixty years ago, the armor returned, just in time for a strange little family of killers to welcome it with open hooves into the decaying city they’d built to power it. No alicorn necessary.”

“B-b-but that would mean--”

“Yes...A thousand years ago, the Family drove Princess Luna mad.”

Act 3 Chapter 42: Beer

"My sister will not appreciate this comparison, but revenge is like cake. You can become fat with it, though a taste now and then is delicious. I could, for instance, send the dragonlords an army of death-dealing killers that would render their lands uninhabitable and their peoples sterile, but that would leave me with crushing guilt. Guilt is why we do not eat too much cake.

I would rather have stamped their armies under hoof, then invited them to peace summits where I served fresh salad, okra, and spinach. Have you ever watched a dragon attempt to eat okra and maintain a diplomatic smile? It is hilarious."

-Princess Luna, when asked in an interview why she'd never destroyed the remaining dragons after the war.

“The...the insult! I will rip them to shreds! I will boil their flesh and spread it on biscuits! Why is this beer empty?! I want more beer!”

Another beer appeared in front of her as Nightmare stalked back and forth across the room, her rage unabated by the sixth alcoholic beverage she’d emptied in what my mental clock said was probably the last twenty minutes. She snatched it up, tore the lid off, and guzzled it so quickly I thought for sure she would choke. Fortunately, with Gale plying her with booze, she seemed increasingly unable to control her mouth.

Meanwhile, Juniper and I were enjoying the opportunity to curl up on the old couch, sipping beers and watching the alicorn storm about. The alcohol seemed to be having a much stronger effect on Nightmare than it was on either myself or my ex-partner, hence we were treated to a rare entertainment: watching an ancient alicorn drink herself knock-kneed.

“To use my armor!” she snarled, spilling beer down her front that instantly sizzled into steam. “How dare they?! Has the world gone mad? A thousand years upon the moon, and I am reduced to little more than a wand or horn for the casting of those spells! Those spells! Blasphemers! I’ll clip them like shrubberies!”

Her great swooshing shadow of a tail swept past my face and I shoved it away as she stumbled onto her stomach, sitting there staring at the carpet as though offended it had caught her. A few thin tears started to leak from her eyes as she stared at her beer bottle, then dropped it between her forelegs. She hiccuped softly, then wiped her nose on the back of her foreleg.

“All I wanted was a little submission. Maybe some respect. Was that so hard?” she moaned, curling her wings over her head as Juniper and I tried not to look like we were listening too intently. “Stupid little ponies and their awful magic! Just because I killed a few of them and drove a few insane, I had to spend a thousand years on the moon with the whiniest pony ever...and...and then they break my memory engrams, shatter me into little pieces, and when I finally get put back together, they stick me in three separate vaults! Cold vaults, no less! Cold vaults with nothing to read!”

Slowly, like a landslide, she slumped forward until her chin rested on the carpet.

“T-those treacherous snakes,” she breathed, a hitch in her voice. “They...they must have u-used the same spell…”

Juniper caught my attention with a quick nudge, then flicked the tip of his tail at the toasted mare.

I furrowed my brow and mouthed, ‘What do you want me to do?’

He picked up one of the couch pillows and quickly mimed putting it under her head, then made a kiss-face at me.

“Do I look stupid?” I whispered.

“No, but you’re suicidally chivalrous and we need more information,” Juniper replied, just as quietly. “So...go make nice with the drunk brain eater for the five minutes required to get her talking in complete sentences.”

I put my face in my hooves and let out a long, drawn out sigh.

‘Oh, Juniper, I’d forgotten how often I wanted to beat you to death with a brick. Thank you for reminding me.’

Pulling myself off the sofa, I grabbed a pillow in my teeth and carefully approached Nightmare Moon. Reaching down, I gingerly lifted her head, which was considerably heavier than it looked. She tensed, then went completely limp when the pillow slid under her cheek. One slitted eye opened, and she peered up at me, tears dripping off her nose.

“I want to k-kill you, but you’re being pleasant to me and my social prediction algorithm is malfunctioning,” she muttered, hugging the pillow so tightly some of the stuffing popped out of one corner.

“Tell me about this spell they used. You said it was ‘the same’?” I said.

Nightmare’s lip quivered and she hid her wet eyes against her cushion.

“My peytral is an archive of magic that is c-cast upon it.” She cocked her head forward. “Every spell.”

My brain did a little tango over this piece of information; out there, somewhere, there was a thousand year old storage device for magic spells, all wrapped up in a convenient, easy to use package. As a matter of fact, it probably contained hexes that’d only seen the light of day an eon ago in a battle between princesses.

‘Oh…’

“So that’s where they got the magic to banish the Royals to the moon,” Juniper mused. “It was the spell Princess Celestia used to banish Luna .”

“And powered by decades worth of the misery of Detrot’s populace,” I added, softly. “It was enough to send Canterlot and the outlying cities to another world. I wonder why they didn’t just kill Luna and Celestia.”

Nightmare tilted her head until her cheek rested on her cushion. “Y-you cannot kill true immortals, foolish pony. Even i-if you destroy their bodies, their essence is not of this world. It...returns. Better to seal them away, helpless and weak. That was my plan, of course. Stolen, along with my dignity!”

“Drunk. You got the Nightmare...drunk.”

“Well, to be fair, she got herself drunk. I only facilitated. Still, official police work requires using all of the resources at your disposal within the confines of the law. Un-official, un-sanctioned, world-saving police work requires beer.”

“Is that what you want carved on your headstone?”

“Yes.”

“One more question. Ruby Blue. Why her?” I asked.

Nightmare Moon’s ears gradually lay back against her head. “She was available. This...Family intends to reunite me with the rest of my armor. I know not how, nor why, but...I feel certain they have some means of bending me to their will. The last spell cast upon the armor might have been accessible to them, but without my helm, they cannot weave new magicks. Ruby Blue was a means to an end. Nothing more—”

“No! No, she saw things,” I snapped, a bit more harshly than I meant to. “She saw the future! She saw what happened to Juniper! It was in her journal!”

The alicorn bared her teeth for a moment, then slumped over onto her side. “Damn that mare. Would that I could have destroyed her mind entirely. When I whispered, she obeyed, but when she carried my helm from the altar of those pitiful cultists, she would not succumb. When we were away...I tore at her. I tried to take her. She fought back.”

“Fought back? Against you?”

Struggling upright, she swiped at me with one of her gigantic wings. It was a lazy attack and easily ducked, but it got the message across. “I am not at my full power! Princess Luna’s spirit was weak and pathetic beside that mare! Her mind was a fortress; an endless bastion, full of traps and walls! For every crevice of her brain I crept my way into, she would reach into me and rip something back! She stole my sight, again and again, to watch things she should not have!”

“And...wrote it down in the journal,” I murmured. “You manipulated her. She manipulated you.”

“Yesss…” she hissed, trying to prop herself on her forelegs and having to resort to one half open wing to keep herself up. “That...that unicorn knew somepony, somewhere, must stop the oncoming storm. She knew I wanted the pony with no fate, the pony around whom probability bent. I wanted the empty pony. The pony with no destiny. You would have made an excellent vessel...”

“What went wrong?” Juniper asked.

“This!” she barked, throwing her hooves toward the ceiling. “I placed an unfettered piece of my energies into her horn, that I might direct her body and meet with the Family’s representative to convince them the helm was lost to them! With her death, I should have freed myself of herand drawn you to me! Together, we might have reclaimed my other parts.” She pointed at my chest with one black toe. “Somehow, that mare must have known! Somehow, she...she must have hidden the heart’s true power from me, else I would have torn it from your chest before I set hoof in your mind!”

“Wait, you...you were in control of her body?” I asked. “You drove her off the roof?”

Nightmare’s gaze hardened. “I barely had time to place my final instructions into her dying grey matter. I would have granted her final death, and a kind trip to the afterlife, but she willingly drank from the poisoned bottle the Family’s representative brought with them. She did it knowing what it would do to her! I told her their alchemy would corrupt her! I know not what happened after that, but I’ve seen in your memory: her dead, soulless, and hornless body, lying in an alleyway.”

A quiet hope suddenly burst to life in my stomach. I felt my tail begin to smack back and forth against my legs, but there wasn’t a thing I could have done to stop it. My cutie-mark started to burn.

“Nightmare...Did you see who the Family sent? Did you see the pony with the cane?”

Her pencil thin eyebrows crawled up onto her forehead. “I saw only the ponies who came, and never face or body. They were three. Two, in suits, one in a long cowl with a strange, wooden cane. His hooves were black, but my memories are badly fragmented. They are damaged by distance.”

A dark blue blanket covered in glittery sequins appeared at my hooves and I took the cue, carefully throwing it over the alicorn’s back. Nightmare gave me a look like a foal who’s found the medicine they’ve been forced to take tastes exactly like cotton candy: confused, a bit disturbed, and desperate for more. Considering she’d been locked away with the world’s loneliest alicorn for a millennium, that played.

‘Oh, I am going to need a shower in hot acid after this one…’

“I’m listening, Nightmare,” I murmured, settling down beside her. I edged closer until my foreleg touched hers and she jerked, looking up at Juniper, then back at me with big, frightened eyes.

“This is trickery,” she muttered, folding her wings in tightly against herself.

“You don’t care if it is or not, and I’m not leaving until we’re done talking. You’ve got a pony who will listen,” I replied, putting my hoof over top of hers. Her fetlock radiated the sort of heat you’d expect standing near a blast furnace. “If you play fair, you get a body, you get a pardon, and you can go out in the world and get all the affection you’ve ever wanted. Modern Equestria is different than it was a thousand years ago. You still want be worshipped, I imagine there’s lines of perverts around the block happy to kiss your hooves.”

“The mare, Ruby Blue, brought many rich memories from the place called ‘The Vivarium’,” she said, looking down at my hoof and shuffling her wings. “Currency exchanged for worship and intercourse. I am intrigued. Do you believe they would accept my custom?”

“I cannot believe you…”

“Are you saying your moral fiber is impeccable?”

“No, b-but manipulating Nightmare Moon with...with...basic psychology and booze! How did you know she’d respond?”

“Because I’m a drunk. I know drunks. Needy drunks turn into affectionate drunks. It doesn’t matter if she was some sort of magical parasite. Nightmare Moon spent a thousand years trapped in Princess Luna’s brain. Can you think of any being in the world more needy than the mare who almost destroyed the world because nopony was paying attention to her?”

The look on Juniper’s face made me glad he didn’t have a camera with which to complete my humiliation. The bastard was enjoying this. It didn’t help that Gale had materialized another beer and Nightmare was sulkily nursing from it through a drinking straw.

I don’t know whether the alicorn realized she had one massive, black wing draped across my back, but the smell of weepy mare mixed with a hint of ‘terror from the void’ was giving me cognitive dissonance bad enough to cause internal bleeding. If I had to judge based on the slight quiver in her hooves or the way she was barely keeping the straw in her mouth, she was at about a ‘seven’. Perfect interrogation time.

“Nightmare, what happened at the meeting with Ruby Blue?” I asked.

One of her eyes rolled in my direction and she blinked, as though surprised to find me so close.

“It is vague,” she replied, her shadowy tail swishing around to settle on my hip. “The chemicals...interfered with my connection to her. The fools threatened her family, as expected, and when she told them she did not know where I was, they attacked. There was a flashing blade which sprang from the cane. After that, I abandoned my connection.”

“Because her horn was gone?” Juniper added, tugging at his tie.

“Because...I did not wish to experience dying again!” she retorted, her wing jerking me tighter against her as a distant, haunted look filled her eyes. “Being torn apart once was quite enough for one existence!”

My former partner’s lips thinned to a sharp line. “I...I can respect not wanting to go through that twice.”

“Before the meeting, Ruby Blue hid me to await his arrival,” Nightmare continued, peering down at my face from well inside my personal space. It being Nightmare Moon, my personal space was something like five hundred miles in diameter, but I fought the urge to back away. Even drunk and with an agreement not to skin me, she was scary as Celestia in heat.

“He is a very curious stallion, isn’t he?” she went on. “I had hoped he’d be fool enough to try me on right away, but major magical influences were inevitable, considering the movements within the city. Annoying. I might have prevented the Eclipse, given a body with his informational resources.”

“So why didn’t you just snatch my brain the second you had the chance?” I asked. “Seemed to have no issue taking over poor Night Bloom…”

“Ruby Blue required almost two weeks before she listened to the whispers in her mind regarding those ridiculous cultists planning her murder. Fortunate that I have no plans towards domination of this world again.”

“Excuse me if I’m a little skeptical, but why is that?” Juniper inquired, shifting his weight onto the end of the couch.

“You ponies have much too high a success rate against direct confrontation,” Nightmare’s ears slipped an inch downward. “I have had sixty years to observe the other failed would-be masters of this world. This ‘Family’ defeated your justice system, obscured their motives, and evaded notice by the Royals. To date, the only portion of their plan which has shown even a modicum of unpredictability has involved this pitiful stallion; the pony with no fate. They may have staggering ego, but they do not show an ounce of hubris.”

“How do you “figure? That army of mutants was a pretty big show,” I said.

“No...Kid, think about it. She’s right,” Juni interjected. “They knew you couldn’t deal with all those mutants in the time they’d given you. They knew you’d have to surrender the helm. They gave you three hours and were prepared to kill hundreds just to bring this to closure.”

Putting my hooves under myself, I sat up as much as I could while still being wrapped in the uncomfortably warm wing. “Speaking of three hours, Nightmare, we need to make this deal and I need to get going.”

Reluctantly, she removed her wing from my shoulders, using her forked tongue to wrestle the straw of her beer bottle back to her muzzle and slurp the dregs out of the bottom.

“You intend to turn me over to our enemies covered in trackable magic substances, then retrieve me in hopes it can be done before their plan is complete and after you have a suitable defensive arrangement?” she asked, then blinked at her beer. “I no longer feel very intoxicated. I wish to be intoxicated again. It is a pleasant sensation.”

“I’m starting to realize how irritating it is having somepony squatting in my brain. I owe Swift an apology,” I said, shaking my head. “I guess I don’t have to tell you the plan, then.”

Nightmare rolled the empty beer bottle away and stood in one smooth, graceful motion, folding her wings in against her hips.

“This so called ‘plan’ has a probable success rate of less than ten percent. You will die in one of thirty-nine different ways, should you execute it without modifications. The most likely is a gunshot wound to the head, followed by having your heart ripped out by a mutant pony, followed by your driver tearing your skull from your shoulders when she hears of your many unreported risks, deaths, and comforting lies. I cannot guarantee that last one is permanent, but it is very likely.”

I worked my jaw a little and said, “I’m glad ‘death by Taxi’ is only number three. I’ve tended to put her just below ‘death by Iris Jade’ in my ‘one’ and ‘two’ spots for most of my recent life.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know that being murdered by the former Chief of Police is only the eighth most likely outcome,” she added, smirking. “Regardless, your plan will fail, and your friends will die.”

Juniper rolled off the couch with a soft thump. “You hear that, kid? I think that sound was Nightmare Moon volunteering to keep your gold and grey ass alive.”

“You know, that’s what I heard, too?” I chuckled. “After all, if she wants a body and a pardon, I’m the only pony in a position to make either of those things happen. And she can’t possess me. Quite a pickle. I’m glad I have such a noble, kind hearted savior, willing to stand between me and the horrors of the world.”

If there’s a look for having swallowed a whole bucket of lemons and chased it with half a liter of hot toothpaste it was reflected on Nightmare Moon’s face when she realized just how badly she’d cornered herself. Her wings popped out hard enough to rock her back on her hooves and her eyes almost bugged out of her head.

“W-wait! That is not what I intended! He must listen to my directives or he will die! I am to be given control of his body instead!” She hesitated, then paled a couple of shades of black. “B-but that won’t work and this situation becomes increasingly uncontrolled! Buffer overflow!”

There was a soft ‘boop’ sound, like a droplet of water hitting a still pond. Nightmare Moon’s eyes rolled back in her head, then went white again, joined by the soft sound of static.

Juniper stuffed the last bit of cheese from his plate into his muzzle, let out a belch that shook the floor, then trotted in a small circle around the frozen alicorn. “You know, if there was ever a time to draw on a pony’s face—”

“So, are you going to finally tell me what you are?” I asked.

“Kid, when I know what I am, I’ll be sure to leave a post-it note,” he said, lifting one of Nightmare’s ears and peering inside. “For now, it’s going to remain a mystery to both of us. You’re important enough to warrant the attention of some parties whose interest tends to herald the destruction of planets and nobody I’ve met out here actually knows what’s going on. I can’t even say for sure there’s life after death. I only know that I’m dead, and there are still jobs as need doing.”

“Unhelpful, but I’m coming to expect that. What about her? You think we can afford to trust her?”

“Self interest seems to drive Nightmare, so yes, insofar as you hold up your end of things. Do you think you can really convince the Royals to give her a pardon when this is over?”

I shrugged. “Princess Sparkle is a smart pony and she likes making friends out of enemies. Give her the chance, and she’ll set Nightmare up with a nice bungalow in upper Canterlot with a cab on hand to take her to any brothel in the city, day or night. You buy her thing about her memory having holes in it?”

“Whatever Nightmare might be, she’s frightened, and whoever is pulling strings and cutting throats scares her. They scare her bad enough that she tried to take control of the one pony she couldn’t predict just to patch a hole in her mathematical models.”

I leaned my head to one side. “You think she’s like the Aroyo Ancestors? Using math and magic to see the future?”

Juniper ran his tongue over his lips, then sucked his teeth. “Tsk...Somepony had the Aroyo’s technology a thousand years before they did and she’s precognitive in a way they only wish they could be. Not perfect prophesy, but better than what all but bleeding edge Equestrian technological sorcery can manage. I doubt the Family, even with all their resources, came up with that.”

“You think it was whatever they made a deal with for power and fortune?”

“I’d bet my grave on it. Particularly since whatever it is seems able to avoid both the Aroyo Ancestor’s predictive methods and Nightmare Moon’s.”

Getting to all fours, I strolled over to the front door of the apartment and tugged it open. Beyond, a grand starfield still glistened in the dark; from the lintels of my door I could see the whole of the universe. Taking a deep breath of the absolute nothingness outside, I shut the portal.

“It really is just that beautiful out there, kid,” Juniper murmured.

“Makes me wish I’d just shot myself before the world was relying on me not to,” I replied, resting a toe on the door. “There are a lot of good ponies who don’t deserve to die in a darkened land.”

A faint whistling sound from Nightmare Moon’s direction brought me around. Her eyes faded back into their normal colors and she adopted a pout that wouldn’t have been out of place on a foal told she wasn’t getting ice-cream for dinner.

“I want to kill you again,” she mumbled, pushing Juniper away from her with one wingtip. “Unfortunately, my calculations dictate this will not mesh with any scenario leading to my freedom or continued existence as an independent being. To that end, I will add a portion of my magical essence to your brain.”

Trotting in front of her, I held my foreleg out. “I want your promise that this is in good faith. You try to take over, or screw with me, I will let Juniper here take both of us on a tour of all the nasty places out there.”

The alicorn’s breath came out in a steamy rush on my face. “If I could beguile you, I already would have!”

“Promise me, Nightmare. Swear that if I set you free, if I save this world, and if I give you a place in the society that grows from what is left, that you will not make me or any future generation of Equestrians regret it!” I shoved my hoof against her chestplate. “Swear it!”

“She...she swore?”

“When do you think the last time somepony trusted her was?”

“Well...I mean...never. Who would be crazy enough to do that?”

“Exactly.”

Nightmare’s breathing hitched as she slowly extended her leg. Her hoof was a little cold. as she pressed it against my chest in a bit of odd mimicry that was somehow more meaningful than if she’d just shaken my hoof.

“You would accept me in your world? You would make room for a being that has tried to cause your extinction?”

“It’s been done before, and if this ends without everyone dead, I’ll personally punch anyone who wants to stand in the way of your freedom. My pledge is solid and my word is as golden as these scales on my ass. What about yours?”

Her gaze danced back and forth, then over my shoulder at Juniper before returning to my face. “I am most confused by this turn of events. However, I have no systemic objections. If...if you achieve all you have offered, I forswear any acts of malice upon you, yours, or your species, except in self defense. I shall, forthwith, not make you regret freeing me.”

“Then we have a deal.” I looked up at the ceiling and dropped my hoof. “Gale? Are you hearing this?”

I listen…

That voice made the two intruders in my head shiver, but it sent a wave of comfort through me that felt like sprawling in front of a warm fireplace back home.

“Let her do whatever she needs to. Monitor it, and make sure I’m not getting worms in my noggin, but otherwise let her work. Got me?”

I understand…

Cracking a smile, I turned back to Juniper and the alicorn who were both standing there shaking like they’d just come down from an Ace high.

“Oog. Kid, that spirit isn’t half so weak and scared as the one I ran into just after you got shot,” Juniper commented, rubbing at his forelegs like they were covered in bugs. “Be glad he likes you. If he didn’t, he’d give Nightmare a run for her money.”

“It is disturbing that you choose to contain a being of that power in your chest,” Nightmare said, nervously stretching her wings.

“I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather he be,” I chuckled. “Now then...it’s your show, Miss Moon.”

“Miss Moon...Hrmph. That is a more pleasant form of address than ‘Pissy’,” Nightmare murmured, flicking her tongue at me. “Now, the modifications to your plan may have to be made in real time. I will leave a spark of my brilliance in your mind. Do listen to it, and...brace yourself. This will be excruciatingly painful.”

“If I were to ask exactly what you’re about to do, would it make it hurt any less?” I asked.

“Nothing will make this less agonizing. If your spirit interferes with the process, it may cause brain damage.”

“It can’t be any worse up there, I guess. Alright, then. Juniper?”

“Yes, kid?”

“I’ll see you on the next sunny day.”

“Hah! It’s a date, kid!”

And with that, I was tossed out of a sky chariot into a volcano full of angry lava bees and endless torment. I don’t really remember the pain, except as a sort of abstract condition. It’s the sort of thing a pony should remember.

Nightmare Moon flayed me, fricasseed my bones and blasted my eyes right out of their sockets. I was slow roasted, liquified, shredded, blended, and frappe’d. Cats ate my liver and bugs ate my brain. I went three hundred rounds in the Pit, getting beaten up by every monster the abyss has ever conjured.

Pain—past a certain point—just stops mattering; you can’t meaningfully feel the difference between being frozen solid and being boiled. Nerve endings are limited, and once they’ve been overloaded, they can only send the idea of agony, rather than the practical sensations.

So it was, that when I came to, I wasn’t in pain. What’d felt like a millennium or two of the most extreme torture a person can endure ended with a sleepy hiccup and the desire to roll over and go back to sleep. My neck had a kink in it and my muzzle was dry as a bone, but that was it.

Nearby, nervous hooves stomped back and forth.

“—he dies, then we’re all going to die. Maybe I can use artifact one-one-six to reanimate him! No...no... that only ever worked on golems made of spinach. But artifact six-eight-two-bravo-six can turn organic matter into fruit! Is spinach a fruit? I don’t—”

I let out a loud moan, if only to stop the monologue. Hauling myself up, I felt Nightmare’s Helm come loose and roll off my head. My skull felt a couple of sizes too small and packed full of packing peanuts.

Cereus was frantically pacing back and forth, but he stopped as soon as I moved.

“Detective! Oh Celestia’s tail, Detective, are you alright?” he squeaked, his leathery wings flapping frantically at the air. “I came in and saw you wearing the helm and Agent Bloom was unconscious and you were breathing really hard—”

“How long have I been lying here?” I asked blearily.

He shook his head, turning sideways to show me a couple of plates on his back, heavily laden with a heap of his mouth-watering cooking.

“I...I don’t know. I just went to get the sandwiches and came back and you were lying there! It can’t have been more than twenty minutes!”

I blinked my hazy eyes at him, glancing around the high security vault. Everything seemed to be as it had been, minus the swirling, creepy shadows and the sense of imminent death. Working a bit of saliva into my mouth, I tried to get my legs to shift.

Agent Bloom was still where she’d been, sprawled on her side with a bit of drying blood on her upper lip. Reaching over, I gave her a light poke in the ribs. She didn’t move or respond, but her breathing seemed relatively even.

“Get her in bed. She should be fine, in a bit. While you’re at it, bundle up the helm for travel. I’m going to have to make a delivery.”

“A delivery?” he asked.

“Oh...and get me that magic walkie talkie, would you? I need to update a certain nosey princess on the situation in the city at some point. If I feel like it.”

“Couldn’t you have let me in on the situation before you delivered the helm into the hooves of these monsters?!”

“If I’d done that, you’d have wasted time trying to talk me out of it.”

“Yes! Yes, I would have! Gah! And you let Nightmare Moon mess with your head in some fashion! I am regretting not braining you with my bottle and using one of my old apprentice’s mind control spells to make you less crazy!”

“Then neither of us would have had the joy of hearing Nightmare’s ‘alterations’ to my plan, now would we?”

“I swear, if you go get another beer, I will find a way to lecture you forever, mister!”

Act 3 Chapter 43: Bang, Bang, He Shot Me Down

"Why do I put myself in danger? Because every time somepony beats the stuffing out of me, I know they're not hurting somepony else. I'm the mare who can take it."

- Saddle Rager, Power Ponies Volume #349.

Assuming the ‘twenty minutes’ number was correct, I didn’t have terribly long to get back to Firebrand.

Such is the life of those who can’t keep their noses out of the business of cosmic forces. Agent Bloom unconscious. World in peril. Sandwich, delicious.

My brain still felt like a spring that’d been stretched almost to breaking, but that left a unique state of mind which could appreciate - despite all the horrors I was likely to face in the next hour, including the possibility of my imminent demise - a really good sandwich. The olives were canned, but the butter was still good and Cereus was one of the few creatures who could appreciate the fine vagaries of combining black currant jelly with hot salsa and pepperjack cheese.

Speaking of the dusk pony, Cereus was so nervous he was practically vibrating as we walked back to the tram. His tail kept smacking me in the hip and his wings were jumping around every time he so much as drew a breath. I suppose he’d every right to be nervous; I had the Helm of Nightmare Moon slung over my shoulder in a makeshift bindle.

“Detective, if I ask you again whether or not this is a good idea, are you going to hit me?” Cereus whimpered.

“I haven’t hit you at all, Cereus,” I grunted, trying to pick a bit of olive pit out of my teeth.

“But...but Agent Bloom would smack me if I asked her this many times if something was a good idea! You still haven’t explained how giving the helm to these ponies means they won’t just immediately enact their plan and murder us all!”

“They’re probably going to try to do that anyway. Nightmare Moon left...something in my head which should give us a notion of how to avoid that contingency. For now, I have to trust that she knew what she was doing.”

Cereus stopped so fast his hooves screeched on the concrete. “N-Nightmare Moon...l-left something in your brain?!”

I half-turned, then continued forward. “No. You’re hallucinating. In fact, right now, you’re just strolling along with me as I tell you my brilliant plan. Just ignore anything you hear that doesn’t sound like rank genius.”

“Oh...Okay,” he muttered, trailing after me with his tail tucked between his back legs. “Is it alright if I just pretend I’m hallucinating until this is all over?”

“I think it’s probably for the best, actually. Look, do you think the tram could be rigged to transport more than a couple of ponies if we happened to need another fallback position?”

Cereus shook his head and scratched his lower lip with one fang. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I could fiddle with it a little. There’s an extra tram-car hidden in a side tunnel and a trailer for moving larger artifacts. We’re so far off all my manuals that I don’t think it matters who sees the Warehouse.”

Pausing, I set a hoof on his heavily muscled shoulder. “If this all goes wrong, I’m going to need you to get everypony you can out of Supermax, the Morgue, and anywhere else they might hide. It’s going to be on you. Find Taxi, Limerence, or Swift and tell them everything that happened here.”

“I think I want to go back to my mother’s house, sit in the attic, eat terrible food, and read comic books like I did as a little kid,” Cereus muttered, giving me a forlorn look.

“Save me a Power Ponies.”

The tram shrieked back into the secret station, brakes blaring as the emergency lights flashed overhead. The magic keeping inertia at bay held until I’d almost entirely stopped before giving out, but I’d preemptively braced myself against the wall and only got a bit of extra jiggle at the end. Picking up the sack with the helm in it, I slung it onto my back, then clambered out of the cart.

From one of the overhead speakers, Cereus called, “Detective, there’s a very heavily armed dragoness standing just outside the entrance. Is she with you?”

“Yeah, she’s a friend of mine!” I called.

“How will I know if you succeeded out there or if I need to go find Mister Limerence and your other friends?”

“You’ve got those monitors or cameras around the Vivarium, right?”

“We do!”

“If you see an army of monsters start killing everyone there, that’s your signal to go find my friends.”

The silence stretched until I wondered if he’d fainted.

“That’s a terrible signal!” he finally squeaked into the mic.

“It’s the one that matters. Go tend to Night Bloom. We’ll be fine out here.”

“Unless you’re all dead and I’m alone in the woods!”

“Yes, unless that,” I replied, listening to the soft creaking of the cooling rails. “If that doesn’t happen, could you somehow hook up a line from the Warehouse to the city power grid?”

“I...I mean, that’s not complicated,” he murmured. “The Warehouse is designed to run off city power if the solar panels on the roof are damaged. But why? We’ve got plenty of power...”

“There’s a friend of mine who lives in the electrical lines. I’d like her to have access to your resources.”

I imagined, for a moment, that Cereus was doing that thing more and more ponies were doing with me lately, where he looked like he was trying to chew some air.

“Buh?”

“Just do it! I’m short of time, and she’ll be ecstatic to explain.”

“A-alright. I think I’m starting to understand why you and Agent Bloom drink so much...”

“Stick with me and we’ll make a broken, half-mad drunk out of you yet.”

With that, I headed for the stairs to street level.

As I pushed open the door of the abandoned antiques store, I found Firebrand stretched out on the curb, one of her swords leaning against her thigh. A bit of brown fur was sticking out of one side of her long muzzle as she used her tongue the pick pieces of something from her teeth. As she heard me coming, she sat up and brushed her mouth off, spreading her monstrous wings.

“Crusader! I take it your ‘errand’ was fruitful? I am bored, and there was only a cat to eat.”

I paused mid-step, letting the door swing shut behind me before taking one of those deep breaths you only take when a friend of yours has eaten a cat.

“Yes, it was fruitful,” I replied, hefting the helm off my shoulder. “You have our ‘special accommodations’ for Nightmare Moon?”

Firebrand unlimbered the dragon-blood-filled bag from her back and tossed it to me. Unzipping the vile thing, I pulled the helm out of the sack and tucked it inside. Fresh blood stinks, and Stella’s had an especially fishy odor, but there was nothing for it.

That done, I pulled my magical gag out of a pocket and slipped it over my head, leaving the ball sitting on my upper lip. “Alright, we’re heading for my parent’s house. Taxi give you the location?”

“Yes. It is only minutes from here. She made mention that you have not returned to this house in many years, nor sold it. May I ask why?”

Pulling the bag onto my back, I shook my head. “Sentiment, mostly. My mother was the greatest woodworker this city ever saw. She built that house. The taxes aren’t bad.”

“An odd reason to keep an empty home…”

“Eh...I thought I might retire there one day,” I replied, tugging at the ball gag. “Seems like that’s off the table.” Trotting over, I positioned myself between her forelegs. “Let’s make with the flying, before I lose my nerve. Dead-stallion-walking has got places to be, and I don’t need more reasons to shoot myself today.”

So, I’d lied to Firebrand. Truth be, I think I’d have given an eyeball to be headed almost anywhere besides my parents’ house. Note, I say ‘my parents’ house’.

It’s always been their house.

My mother built the place when they married. They loved, lived, argued, laughed, cuddled, and finally had a little colt who they raised to the best of their abilities. It should have been a great story, bookended with a quiet death holding hooves as they watched the sun set on some hazy Saturday evening in a distant, distant future.

Instead, my father caught a bullet, and mom died just a few years later of what I’ve long suspected was a broken heart. She never talked about her feelings much after the funeral, but when Dad cashed his chips the woodworking took on a distinctly new flavor. More of her pieces started landing in museums and shows dedicated to ‘the avant garde’; translated, she started carving lots of things with skulls and tentacles on them.

Still, Dovetail was my mother and the house was their home. I don’t think anyone was surprised when she died slumped over her woodworking table, a beautifully rendered equine heart carved of cherrywood sitting between her hooves with her chisel sticking out of it. Going back felt like trespassing somehow, even though she’d willed it to me along with enough of her works to keep me in beer and pretzels for life.

After a solid year of moping, I’d put the furniture and art in storage, boarded up the windows, set up an automatic payment from my bank to the storage company and a tax preparer, and tried to put the building out of my mind.

Cowardice, you say? I agree wholeheartedly.

My parents would have loved to know I was living in their old house and renting an apartment wasn’t doing my bank account any favors, but every plank and fiber was soaked in the sound, scents, and memories of home.

It also was the perfect knife to stick in my gut and give a good twist.

Exhaustion is a good balm for panic; I barely had it in me to struggle as we took off, and I very shortly settled into a pleasantly paralytic catatonia, dangling from the dragoness’s claws like an especially pathetic kill being carted off by a mighty bird of prey.

Hanging over midtown, I tried to go inside myself and find a reserve of calm. I knew how this meeting could go down, but a part of me was praying for better outcomes. D.W. was the most ruthless of opponents, but he didn’t seem the sort to order all that death without a solid reason. With a bit of luck, I might walk away without a mass murder on my hooves.

The city looked so quiet down below that, were it not for the sections without functioning streetlights and the occasional fire, one might almost pretend things were normal for a dull Sunday evening in late fall. The air was no longer ‘pleasantly crisp’, but had moved straight to ‘cold as a bastard’. At one point, I heard Firebrand’s breathing catch as we hit an especially icy patch, then she dropped a good twenty meters to get out of it.

After a few minutes, she slowed, then began to descend until we came in for a coasting landing at one end of a street I’d hoped only to see in my bank statements. Strange how little a place can change, despite the impending end of times. Most of the houses from my childhood were unchanged with the exception of a few more boards on windows and ‘looters will be shot’ painted across most of the front doors.

Firebrand landed beside me as I trotted under a streetlight, unable to disguise the trembling in her limbs. I wasn’t doing much better; my hooves felt downright numb.

“Hot cocoa would be amazing just now,” I muttered.

“Mmm, give me a lava bath and a sunny rock to sit on. Maybe a good book as well,” she replied, blowing a bit of flame onto her claws to warm them. “My clan was already discussing retreating underground when I left. I don’t know what good that will do. Prey is on the surface, unless we wish to subsist on diamond dogs and raw gemstones.”

“I don’t want to think about what the last month has done to the annual harvests,” I added. “This is going to be a bad year.”

“Or we’ll all be dead. Then it shan’t matter.” Turning to the street, she nodded at the rows of empty, darkened houses. “Speaking of dead, what plan have you for this battle?”

“I play this right and there won’t be a battle. Go find a place to hide. If there’s shooting, wait until it’s over, then get my corpse out of there and take it back to the Vivarium. If they take my body, get to the Vivarium and let them know. Tourniquet can track it.”

“You speak of your ‘corpse’ in very casual terms, Crusader.”

“Heh...I’m starting to think of it in very casual terms. Speaking of that, can I borrow a scale? Actually, two scales? Preferably medium sized ones, about as big as my hoof?”

Firebrand gave me a curious look. “Why do you need my scales?”

I hesitated as my brain caught up with my mouth, then blinked a few times. “I...er...I have no idea. I just know I need two of your scales for...for something.”

“My scales are attached to me, Crusader,” she rumbled. “If I lose two now, I won’t get them back until I molt. That could be a year or two.”

“Yeah, I get that,” I poked myself in the temple, trying to make some semblance of sense out of the weird impulse driving my words. “Look, an acquaintance of mine stuck something in my brain meat. I think she intended it to help us through this situation. I have no clue why I need two of them, but it is vitally important that I get two, or I’m pretty sure we all die.”

Firebrand turned her head, first this way, then that, looking at me out of each eye.

“This is not a request one makes lightly,” she said, adjusting her bandolier. “It is like asking if I might borrow most of one of your hooves until it grows back.”

I settled on the curb, my rear hooves in the gutter, staring up at the darkened sky as I took a quick mental inventory. Crippling neuroses: check. Major emotional dysfunction: check. Unquenchable desire for alcohol: check.

Sudden, overpowering need to own a pair of dragon scales? Check.

It was a craving the like of which I hadn’t experienced in years. Even my barely controlled love of bagels couldn’t quite match it. By power of deduction, this was probably a manifestation of letting an ancient, bitchy demigod screw with my already-deep-fried grey matter, but knowing that didn’t improve my outlook.

“I...I wish I could tell you why I need your scales, but I’ve got no idea myself. You know I wouldn’t do this for fun.”

Firebrand clicked her tongue and turned sideways, raising one wing. “I suppose I did slit your throat, earlier. If we all expire soon, at least I will not have to itch for a year.”

In an impressive display of flexibility, she reached back with one talon and dug her claw-tip underneath a good sized scale on her lower back. Hissing, she yanked it a couple of times until it came loose, then tore it free, revealing a spot of pink flesh underneath. Blood quickly welled up and spilled down her side, but it was no more than your average nose-bleed. Raising her other wing, she repeated the procedure on the other side.

I couldn’t help a wince at the soft, meaty noises as the scale popped loose. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

She flicked her gaze at me, wiping the bloody scales off on her thigh before holding them out. “Profoundly. Here. Do not ask me for a Hearth’s Warming Eve present.”

I gingerly took the scales in my hooves, turning them over. They were surprisingly light and gleamed in the lamplight like thin plates of metal. Rubbing my neck, I waited for some kind of ‘sign’ as to what I should do with them, but none was forthcoming.

Letting out a little sigh, I half-unzipped my heart pouch and stuck one inside before zipping it shut, then shoved the other under the brim of my hat and against the front of my skull. Those were, of course, the only logical places to put such things. It’s not as though I had pockets or…

‘Wait a tick…’

“Firebrand, how bullet resistant are your scales?” I asked.

Firebrand cocked her head, then tapped the spot on my hat where the scale was lodged. “Armor piercing rounds will penetrate them, but antipersonnel rounds do not. I find it curious that you would choose to bulletproof only your heart and forebrain...”

‘Ah...Clever girl.’

“No, this makes sense. Like I said, just make sure to get my body back to the Vivarium and plugged into the grid. If any parts have come off, see if you can gather them up in a sack or something. A friend of mine can sew it all back together, and it should stick.”

Her pupils contracted to lines, and she regarded me like one might a very unusual insect pinned under glass.

“Crusader, when I look at you, I see a squishy little stallion who cries, drinks, and seems to be madder than a phoenix who has been urinated on.”

“Well, you’re very perceptive, then,” I replied sardonically.

“I do not believe my eyes are giving me the entire tale,” she added.

“You think not?”

“I think not, because when you speak, I hear the terrified whimpers of demon princes torn from their pits and ground beneath your hooves…”

I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat as the notion of what I was about to do finally hit home.

“Firebrand, if they shoot me in the face, don’t let Swift and Mags see me, alright? I know it’s a little thing, but I’d rather not give those two any more bad dreams than I already have.”

“Of course, Crusader.”

Strolling down the street I’d been raised on, I couldn’t help reflecting on the life and times of Hard Boiled Junior.

Junior.

I remember the little shit. When had that colt who’d run those roads and alleys, rolled in that grass, and trampled over those begonias become the rotten bastard seeking justice at any cost? Had breaking Stone Shine’s skull with a baseball bat set me on the path, or was I on it the day I was born?

If I have one quintessential problem the idea that we all have a ‘destiny’, it’s that plenty of ponies have not been looking where they were going, stepped into the street, and gotten hit by a speeding bus, but nopony gets a roadkill cutie-mark. Maybe destiny is something else, something we have to make. Or that might just be my destiny.

To be fair, my talent’s not an especially ‘normal’ one. Most people’s talents don’t cause them physical pain if they’re not pursued. Bakers won’t get pins and needles in their backside when somepony in the vicinity is craving a cupcake.

These were all thoughts I’d had many times before, but thinking them whilst heading to a confrontation with some ponies who were very likely to gun me down leant the contemplations a new flavor.

Strolling down the middle of the empty street, duffle-bag on my back, I perked an ear to catch the sounds of the city. They were very different, but still painted a picture; my city was bleeding and frightened. Would she recover? That’s a question better ponies than I would have to answer.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the empty lot where Sweet Shine’s childhood home once stood, a starkly blank spot of gravel and broken foundation between two homes. No grass grew there, not even a hardy shrub. Taxi had come into possession of the place when she reached the age of majority and her sane, rational response was to have it leveled and the ground salted - literally; she’d gone over there one night with a bag of salt and scoured the area with it.

Of course, if that was there, that meant that my parents’ house was right behind me. I hadn’t really been paying attention to my path, trusting my hooves to guide me. Turning around was as easy as kicking up my heels, and yet it felt like there was a ten ton weight on my back legs.

‘Right. Stop acting like a filly. You knew you were going to have to face this tune one of these days.’

Heaving a breath of the cold air, I turned.

‘Ahhh, home.’

The place looked pretty much like I’d expected, considering the years of neglect. The picket fence was barely visible behind a wall of overgrown foliage you couldn’t cut down with a stick of dynamite, though the paint still clung gamely on. Mom never built anything with the intent that she’d have to replace it this century, hence why what I could see of the roof seemed to be in pretty good nick.

Trotting to the gate, I lifted the ancient padlock in one hoof and gave it a sharp tug. Still seemed okay. Digging my old apartment keys out of one of my pockets, I sorted through them until I found the right one, then fed it in. With a sharp click and a shower of rust, the lock snapped open.

The gate squeaked as I pushed it open and edged around inside; the path up to the porch was riven with cracks and grass, but I could still see it running through the head-high jungle of uncut grasses and dying shrubs. The porch was in surprisingly good condition, though some little bastard had painted the word ‘pigs’ across the door in purple paint.

I inspected the latch and found that somepony had tried to get in with a pry-bar at some point; there were scratches and scuffs all along the lintel. It didn’t seem they’d had much luck, however, which wasn’t surprising considering my mother’s love of stonewood and my father’s cop-obsession with keeping the family safe. They’d have had better luck with a bazooka, but only just.

Pulling a bit of hardened gum out of the lock, I unlatched it and shoved the door open only to catch a muzzle-full of dust. Coughing, I pulled the lapel of my coat over my face and staggered into the empty living room.

Most of the stranger things Mom had carved were in storage, but the exception was a giant gaping mouth with eerily accurate anatomy that was nailed above the fireplace like a massive pony had stuck their muzzle through the well. Most holidays I’d been able to convince her to throw a sheet over that one, but she always took it down the second the guests were gone. It still gave me the shivers.

Mom never really explained why she’d gotten into carving creepy figurines and disturbing images. When pressed, she tended to smile and say that it was what was selling. I should have known better; she was carving the things she saw in her dreams without Dad there to hold her at night.

Wiping my forehead of a chilly sweat, I closed my eyes and tried to populate the room. There, the sturdy kitchen table with dinner steaming and ready. Over there, the hat rack with Dad’s police cap perched on it. On that side, my tiny work desk, a half finished model of an old sky chariot sitting amidst tiny piles of wood scrap.

Opening my eyes felt like aging twenty years in five seconds.

Shaking off the melancholy, I set the duffle-bag down and swept off my coat, rolling it leg over leg. Heading for the back office, I raised an ear, listening for the P.A.C.T. troopers. They didn’t seem to have arrived, yet, but then I’d probably come early. Knowing that bunch, they’d make an entrance.

As a foal, my father’s office was the one place in the house I wasn’t allowed to go without permission. I’d never seen the inside of it without Dad there to pack away the crime-scene photos or put away the confidential files, hence it was the place I most strongly associated with him. Empty as it was, I could still distantly detect gun oil, sweat, and coffee. Even long disused, it smelled like a cop’s office.

Without furniture, the only thing left to draw the eye was the wall safe. Dad’s safe. It was the place of wonders where he hid my Hearth’s Warming Eve presents and all of his files.

I set myself before it and quickly spun the dial, then started on the combination. Ten years and the memories were fresh as the day his Last Will was opened.

My birth year. His birth year. Mom’s birth year. Click.

I opened the safe and sighed at its emptiness. It felt like everything else in the house: a mausoleum for the internment of better times. Stuffing my coat inside, I shut it, and spun the dial.

A sudden thump from the roof made me jump. It was followed by the sound of trotting hooves just overhead. Right on time.

I took my time, moving back to the living room as my hoofsteps echoed through the deserted house. Picking up the duffle-bag in my teeth, I peered out through the thick, smoked glass plate in the middle of the door. A few indistinct shapes were moving about in the street. It might have been my imagination, but they seemed to exude an almost cartoonish menace. That made me smile a little.

Considering what I was fairly sure was coming, it might have been kinder to take Iris Jade’s suicide pills. Maybe they’d dull the pain a little. Knowing her, probably not, though.

A booming voice shouted from outside, “Hard Boiled! Come on out! Let’s settle this! Your friends are safe so long as you don’t piss me off any more than you already have!”

I set my foreleg on the door handle, then tugged it open.

Stepping out, I shut it behind me and sat down, dropping the duffle-bag at my hooves. Slowly, making as few sudden moves as possible, I surveyed the street. No less than eight black-clad P.A.C.T. troopers stood out there in a straight line, facing my parents’ house. They weren’t making any efforts to hide themselves, which tended to mean they either had no particular need to, or there were many, many more of them tucked away out of sight.

At a quick count, most of them seemed to be armed with antipersonnel weapons; I picked out two repeating shotguns, a shoulder mounted taser, and five chatter guns of different flavors.

There was no mistaking their leader. The heavily armored stallion was two and a half heads taller than myself. Those P.A.C.T bastards liked their muscle building, but there’s only so much steroids and gym memberships can do before you’ve got to turn to magic for your extra bulk, and he’d taken the full ‘make my ass look a sack of boulders held up by four tree trunks’ package. Two gigantic, leathery grey wings were folded in against his sides, extending almost a meter beyond his flanks.

He was the only one of their number who didn’t wear an obscuring, black sock over his head, and his royal blue mane was windblown, but somehow still perfectly ordered. His pelt was white as bone. Glittering green eyes peered up at me, full of the malice of a snake with a rabbit in its cage.

Despite the various magical changes - including the strange wings, which he hadn’t had the last time I saw him on television - he was still familiar. While I’d never met him personally, nopony in the Detrot Police Department would fail to recognize the lord and master of our friendly counterparts in the P.A.C.T.

“Colonel Broadside,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I’ll admit, I was wondering when you’d make an entrance. Nice wings, by the way. They new?”

Broadside snorted, his nostrils letting out two thick streams of steam that reminded me unpleasantly of dragon smoke.

“Hard Boiled,” he grunted, in a voice that seemed permanently set to ‘drill instructor’. “I read your name in a newspaper a few times. Strange thing, really. You kill a few hundred ponies, but you never think you’ll get to do one you’ve heard of.”

“Believe me, I know the feeling,” I replied, pushing the duffle-bag in front of me. “Do you want to take this inside? Gunning me down on the street seems a little gauche.”

His thick lips pulled into a grin that looked like somepony had split his face open with an axe. Two rows of perfectly straight, but extremely sharp looking teeth filled his muzzle.

“It’s been good enough for plenty of other cops.”

I’d been expecting that barb, but even then, a few faces of ponies I’d seen die at the Castle flashed through my mind and set my back teeth grinding. Broadside must have noticed, because his grim smile widened an inch. I wanted nothing more than to break his head, but I’d have needed a backhoe with spikes on it to so much as give him a bruise.

I shoved the duffle-bag with the Helm in forward and took a few steps back until my rear end hit the front door. “Our deal?”

Rather than answering, Broadside glanced at one of his subordinates. The indicated trooper popped a quick salute, then trotted through the front gate and up the walk. He didn’t even bother to meet my eyes as he picked up the bag in his teeth and backed away to the edge of the porch. Unzipping the duffle, he pawed through it, then looked up at his superior.

“It’s in here, boss,” he called. “Damn thing is covered in blood. Smells like dragon.”

“Dragon, huh? You hid the Helm of Nightmare Moon in a dragon’s hoard?” Broadside asked.

“I needed somewhere safe,” I replied, cooly. “It turned out the dragon didn’t feel like giving it back. He’d probably feel different about sticking to deals in the future, if he could still feel anything from the waist down. Now...our deal?”

Zipping up the bag, the trooper spread his dark wings and took off, coasting over to land beside Broadside. The Colonel put a hoof on the bag and wrinkled his nose at the stink coming off of it.

“I didn’t make a deal with you, Hard Boiled.” He sneered and turned to his squad.

“D.W. isn’t the sort of pony to go back on his word,” I said.

Broadside rounded on me.

“You’ve got no idea what sort of pony he is, you son of a whore!” he snarled, emphasizing it with a stomp so hard that a web of cracks spread out in all directions.

“You think? I’ve seen what he’s done. There’s a lot of blood on his hooves. You sure you backed the right pony?”

“My brother plays dangerous games,” Broadside chuckled, bringing his back hooves together with a sharp click. “It is fortunate that he has me here to make for damn sure this world turns in the right direction.”

There was no disguising my surprise. “D.W. is your brother?! That means...ah...”

‘Oh, here it comes.’

“You burned my home, cop,” he said, his voice dropping to a throaty growl. Jerking his head at his companions, he sat down on the pavement. “No kill shots. I want him alive for this.”

Half a dozen guns rose and, before I really had a chance to process what was happening, I heard the snapcrack of weapons fire. Nattering reports followed in quick succession as the street was filled with a sudden burst of smoke. I could still see Broadside’s smile through it.

Unlike the movies, when you’re shot, you don’t go flying backwards off a cliff. There’s just not a lot of mass in normal bullets. They have a tendency to rip right through and antipersonnel rounds are designed to damage organs by splitting apart inside their target. The first impacts felt like somepony giving me a rough poke, followed by a burning sensation that spread out in my stomach and legs. I just sort of slumped against the front door of my parents’ home, listening with what was left of my consciousness as bullets tore into my stomach and lower body. It hurt, but only in a sort of distant fashion one feels when they’ve got heavy nerve damage.

My eyes slid shut, and I sagged onto my side.

‘Oh, mercy, that warm puddle around my cheek came from me, didn’t it?’ I thought. My hat had come off and was lying half across the side of my head, shielding my eyes.

Hoofsteps approached, and I heard the sound of sloshing liquid, followed by something ice-cold splashing on my face. Scalding agony spread through the wounds up and down my body that offered me one more tortured moment of consciousness during which I couldn’t do anything more than flail weakly at the air with my forelegs. My back legs didn’t seem to be responding. No surprise there, considering the quantity of shrapnel in my spine.

The stinging simply would not fade, but there was nothing I could do about it. My lungs felt heavy, thick, and full. I desperately wanted to take a breath, but when I opened my muzzle, a gush of liquid rushed out. Oh, more blood. Goodie. Probably be running out of that, soon.

A hot breath on my ear was followed by a whispered voice. His voice.

“Now, cop, I know you can still hear me. My troops are good shots. I just want the last thing you hear to be my voice telling you that five days from now, we’re going to that whorehouse. I’m going to spend the day with every mare and filly in that building. Then, I’m heading to the Morgue. Everypony you ever loved is going to die screaming, raped, and watching my creatures tear the flesh from their bones. Not you, though. You die here and you die burning.”

Somewhere above me, a scratching sound was followed by a soft hiss.

A gentle warmth spread throughout my body. The gentleness lasted all of ten seconds. Then, the fire came.

Burning alive was rubbish and I’m thankful I don’t remember most of it. The pain, yes, but they’d already done me so much damage that most of my major muscle groups were paralyzed or not sending information back to my brain. I’m pretty sure I screamed or vomited about five seconds in, but that didn’t do much beyond inviting the fire into my lungs.

It turns out death by incineration takes a good long while. I must have laid there, squirming whatever I could squirm, for a solid five minutes as my fur was scorched away and my flesh boiled off. Much as most ponies might think you’d be consumed by such a fire, it takes a lot more than petrol to burn a body completely. We’re mostly liquid, and gasoline is a terrible long-term fuel source in the open air.

Of course, I didn’t have any of these thoughts at the time. While it was happening, I was mostly thinking ‘Oh Celestia, please put me out!’

I’ll never know if I fainted or just expired, but at a point, an icy cold gripped my senses, and I slipped away into the darker places between worlds.

Again?

Yes, again.

I’d known it was coming. For once there wasn’t really a question of how or when, but it was still a pretty crap way to go. That’s the thing about being dead, though: you’re dead. Nothing really matters, unless perchance you have a chatty ex-partner who likes to sneak into your cooling grey matter for a postmortem kibitz.

Fortunate then that the powers that be were keeping him occupied. I needed some downtime and didn’t want to think about anything for awhile. The bastards burning down my parents’ home and leaving me to roast was enough for one day.

I couldn’t tell you when I transitioned from ‘dead’ to ‘dreaming I was in pain’ to ‘awake and in pain’. Corpse-time is irrelevant and sleep time doesn’t really count either, so it was only when I could finally count the seconds between my own wet, rattling breaths that I considered the possibility that something had changed. My brain still felt like a skull-shaped puddle of overcooked mud.

A long while later, I heard a slurping pop, followed by the roar of rushing water. It faded after some seconds to a dull ringing, but with all the other pain coursing through my muscles, that seemed a relatively minor change. Some part of me registered that it was my eardrums growing back.

All at once, voices faded in.

“...don’t know! Tourniquet said she’s diverting everything she can spare…”

“Then why isn’t he waking up? It’s been hours, and the power is still not coming back on!”

“Did you see what he looked like when he came in? He didn’t have any skin left! It took ten hours of magical surgery to get all the shrapnel out of him. If he’d been alive, it would have killed him.”

“We had to put nine pints of blood into him before it stopped leaking out. It was like trying to fill a sieve.”

“I know, I know! I just want to kick his flank for this. The plan was for him to fake his death, not get cremated!”

“I don’t think he planned that…”

“Of course he did! Why do you think he stuck a dragon scale over his heart? He was making sure they didn’t shoot him anywhere that wouldn’t grow back!”

There was a silence after that. A gentle, then growing pressure in my eye sockets was followed by the most intense itching of my life. Most of the nerves on my skin were still only returning dull pain, but the ones in my eyes lit up like a pair of spotlights.

It was then that I realized I hadn’t really been seeing the backs of my eyelids. I hadn’t been seeing anything at all. Most ponies think being blind is like having your eyes shut, but even with your eyelids closed, there’s still a lot of sensory information pumping through those nerves. I got the very rare experience of feeling optic nerves growing in.

A bit later, with a feeling a bit like congealing custard full of hot peppers being drizzled over my body, flesh started to pour over my seared muscles, and nothing in this world could keep me from screaming when that happened. My eyes shot open, only to find that the world was also in darkness. More than a half dozen ponies were in the room, holding flashlights and candles, watching me like a specimen on the slab.

Swift was sitting there without her armor and with both hooves stuffed in her mouth as Taxi stood behind, a determined, furious expression on her face that was ruined somewhat by the tears streaming down her chin. Limerence had Mags sitting on his head as he ran his gaze up and down my body with as much clinical detachment as he could muster. He was shaking, while Mags seemed almost bored by the proceedings.

Last amongst them, Slip Stitch, Lily Blue, and Scarlet Petals stood side by side at the door. Stitch was grinning, but Lily and Scarlet just looked a bit numb; their face-fur was streaked and their eyes were both red as tomatoes.

I coughed, and spit something nasty on the slick, white bed-sheets; it was a bit of deep fried tongue, probably bitten off while I was cooking. It would have been nice if somepony had thought to check my muzzle. I could have done without that texture.

‘Oh, heavens, please let my nose not start working again until after I’d had a bath. I don’t need to smell this.’

No such luck. A second later, the reek of burnt fur and flesh filled my head. Smelling it from somepony else is one thing, but smelling your own body after it’s been flame broiled is something else. My throat worked on puking, but there was nothing in my stomach.

‘Damn it’s cold.’ I thought, then realized the problem. ‘No fur. Lovely. Maybe I can have somepony knit me a sweater...’

This thought seemed to summon a new level of discomfort; suddenly growing fur was a level of torment akin to an attack by a swarm of salt coated wasps. My teeth chattered in my mouth as I writhed over onto my back, trying desperately to get away from my everything.

Slip Stitch pushed between my friends and leaned over the bed, stethoscope in hoof.

“Ah! Chief of Police! It is magnificent to see you looking properly fluffy again!” He pressed the scope against my chest, then nodded to himself. “Amazing! You went through almost twenty nutrient bags, but you’ve made a full recovery! One hundred percent third degree burns to fur and smiles in under a day!”

“Can...can we unplug him?” Taxi asked.

It was then that I finally noticed the gigantic cord leading up over the edge of the bed and into my chest. The thing was thick around as my foreleg and seemingly composed of lots of smaller cables wound around each other. The plug on the end was some kind of industrial rubber that looked a bit like they’d taken the end off a toilet plunger and stuck it to my barrel.

Swift let out a soft hiccup, then swallowed a couple of times before she managed to reply, “T-Tourniquet says he’s only drawing a normal amount of p-power now. He was using almost thirty city blocks’ worth of electricity a minute ago, but...but she thinks it should be safe. She’s going to bring the lights back on in a couple minutes as soon as she rebalances the load on the grid.”

I tried to speak, but my tongue felt several sizes too large and not entirely in my control.

A blue hoof on my neck gently pressed me back down on the bed. Limerence lowered himself in front of me until we were at eye height to one another. My eyes weren’t quite focusing correctly, but I could still make him out.

“Rest, Detective,” he murmured. “Your muscle memory will return, but the damage was severe. You have a tube in your stomach, and if you pull it out, the surgeons will have to come back and put it in again.”

Mags crawled off his back and pushed her cheek against mine. “You smell like bacon, Egg Pony. I be glad you not dead again anymore.”

Coughing, I struggled with my foreleg until it rose enough so I could lightly pat my ward’s fuzzy, feathered head.

“M-me too,” I whispered.

It was another hour until my mane and tail grew back, during which they brought me another bag of fluids to hook into the tube somepony had sunk into my stomach. It was a terrible way to have dinner, but filling enough. My companions remained, making quiet conversation with one another until various duties called each of them away.

Taxi refused to leave, but conceded to bring a pile of maps she was working on over and sit on the end of my bed. Swift was there for a long time, but eventually a young griffin came by, knocked on the door, exchanged a few words, and my partner followed her out. At a point Bones stuck his skull in, gave me a quick look, then vanished again.

Being laid up in a hospital bed when all the world is moving around you is terrible, but I didn’t have many other options. My throat was improving, but talking hurt. Not that anypony was much interested in having a conversation. Last they’d seen me, I was a burnt crisp. That’s an awkward place to converse from. Mostly, I just watched everything move and did my best not to think about it too much.

Eventually and after an uncounted number of hours just lying there in bed, Scarlet and Lily returned. Both wore clean nurse’s scrubs and had a stack of towels thrown across their backs. Taxi immediately began rolling up her work into a tube, then stashed it to one side before getting out of their way. I didn’t register what was happening until they began carefully moving me toward one side of the bed. A wheelchair was there, ready to receive me.

I was weak as a newborn and my legs barely worked, so protest wasn’t likely to get me anywhere. I let them pull the sheets sideways off the bed and push me carefully back into the chair. Blood rushed to my head, leaving me dizzy and sore, but I managed to hold myself upright.

My stomach tube was unhooked and they wheeled me down the hall and into another room where waited a giant, claw-footed tub full of steaming hot water. Lily’s horn lit up, and I was levitated off the wheelchair. I couldn’t hold in a squeak of pain as they lowered me in and my fresh skin felt heat for the first time, but there was nothing to be done. The water instantly turned a foul brown, but they were undeterred.

“Shhh...it’s okay,” Scarlet whispered, patting my mane as I let out a pained sob.

“Oh, Hardy...How do these things keep happening?” Lily asked, softly, though I don’t think she expected me to answer.

Scarlet took my front half and Lily, my back. Between a pair of scrub brushes and a liberal application of baby-shampoo, they worked my body over for what felt like an hour, emptied the tub, then refilled it. That was repeated a couple more times until the water began to run clean.

By the time it did, my legs started to feel like they might be willing to hold me.

‘Come on, Hard Boiled...say something to them,’ I thought. ‘You can’t be that traumatized.”

Lily was sitting on one side of me, and Scarlet on the other. They both looked a fright, covered in what I presumed were my ashes. Lily’s soft, cerulean coat looked several shades too dark, while Scarlet just looked like he’d gone for a roll in a coal pit.

Reaching out to them, I tried to find words.

They put their legs around me, and in an instant, I broke.

A good cry helps most things.

That was not a good cry.

I wept and wept, but even once the last vestiges of soreness flowed out of my body, the ache in my soul remained.

This was no merciful easy bullet to the heart or gentle brain hemorrhage sending me careening into unconsciousness. Broadside had tortured me, then killed me in about the most brutal way possible. No quantity of toughness or testosterone was going to make that go away.

Still, after an hour had passed and the next panic attack felt like it was coming, it was washed away instead by a wave of coolness spreading out from my chest. It had the unmistakable flavor of Gale taking over my worn out synapses to put an end to the rolling waves of fear. I sent appreciative thoughts in his direction, then slowly pulled away from Scarlet.

Only then did I realize that, at some point, I’d dragged him into the bath with me. He was soaked and shivering, but seemed otherwise unbothered by it. His pretty eyes were full of concern as he held me close. Lily had her forelegs around my neck and her chin resting between my ears. We were all wet, and the water had long since gone cold, but it was what I needed just then.

Fishing around inside myself, I found my willpower cowering in a corner and coaxed it out.

“Scar…” I hesitated as the other stallion’s ears perked, then forced myself to continue speaking. “Scarlet...w-we have four days before the attack. G-go tell Stella.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” he said, softly.

“I know. This...this is important. We have to hit the Office tomorrow.”

Lily put her hoof under my chin and turned my eyes to hers. “You’re in no condition to fight, Hardy. There are ponies in the nursing ward who’ve been through a twentieth of what you have, and most of them are catatonic.”

“It doesn’t matter what condition I’m in, Lily,” I said, touching her soft cheek with my toe. “I fight or everyone dies. You both have duties, right?”

“Our duty is to make sure you’re okay,” Scarlet said, a firmness to his tone that I’d never heard before.

“Well, I’ll be okay,” I lied. “Go handle your chores. Taxi is outside, right?”

Lily nodded, flicking her eyes over my shoulder at the door.

“Could you two send her in, then give us a bit?”

“B-but-” Scarlet began, but I gave him the tiniest of pecks on the lips and he fell silent.

“Please,” I murmured.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself out of the tub, then draped a fluffy, pink towel around my shoulders. I felt Lily’s hoof on my shoulder.

“We’ll be nearby if you need us,” she said. “Is there anything I can get you?”

“Some dinner that doesn’t come in a bag would be wonderful,” I replied. “Scarlet? You mind finding me a hat? I’m sure somepony around here has something that’ll work.”

“A hat?” he asked incredulously.

“Yeah, a hat,” I made the motion of putting something on my head. “Circular thing, brain box goes in the middle? I’m a size ten. My old one burned along with most of my skin.”

Scarlet was giving me the ‘I’m talking to something from another planet and it asked me for a hat’ look; It’s a very specific expression and rarely used, but unmistakeable.

“O-okay. Hat. Size ten. A-anything else?”

I shook my head, then lay back in the tub and shut my eyes again. I heard the hum of Lily’s horn, then the soft sucking noise of water headed for the drain. Waving a leg, I slid down until the back of my head rested on the edge of the bath.

“No, that’ll do. Taxi, dinner, and hat. In that order, if you please.”

I listened until their hoofsteps retreated and the door to the bathing-chamber opened, then shut again. I could hear words being exchanged outside, but didn’t put much effort into listening in. Rather, I slid about until I was on all fours, then heaved upwards with all my none-too-mighty might. I managed to get on my hooves just as the door opened again, standing there quivering like a yearling who’d just run a marathon.

Gripping the side of the tub, I swung one knee over, then another. Unfortunately, the floor was a lot farther away than it’d looked. I started to slide, when a pair of bright yellow forelegs caught me in a grip of iron.

“Hardy, I swear to Celestia,” my driver muttered in my ear as she helped me to the ground and began ruffling the towel through my mane. “No...no, you don’t need me to scold you. Never mind. You need recovery time. At least three months worth, just to be able to function. Of course, you also need to not die tomorrow, and you’re going to go on the Office run, whether or not I try to pin you to a bed. Damn.”

I stared into the shining tile under my hooves, then up into her worried eyes. “Sweets, I don’t know if I can do this anymore...”

“You and me both, Hardy,” she replied, stroking my cheek. “The truest answer I can give you to the question you’re about to ask is...go far away. I wish I could take you somewhere safe. Just you, and me. Nothing else is going to work.”

I shook my head. “Not good enough. I can’t leave until this is finished. We’re close. They’re going to attack us in...in four days. Four days, Sweets. It’s not three hours, but it’s not much better...and now they have the Helm, and...and Nightmare Moon did something to my brain and she’s trying to help us now, and it’s all gone crazy-”

Turning me about, she lifted me lengthways across her back and stood, barely grunting with the added weight. I put my nose in her checkered mane and inhaled the permanent scent of incense that she wore like perfume.

“Come on. Back to bed with you. If they attack us sooner, you napping won’t make one iota of difference, and if they attack us in four days, you can afford to take a day to recover. You need to rest, and you need to argue about it, but you also need to lose this particular argument, so we’ll skip straight to where you just lie there, instead. Lily is fetching you dinner and Scarlet’s out hunting up a hat. Speaking of that, where are your coat and gun harness?”

“My harness was on me. Probably cinders. I stuck my coat in the safe at my parents’ place before it burned. It should be fine. It was a fireproof safe.”

“I’ll send somepony to dig it out. Same combination as when we were younger?”

“I...Yes, but...wait second. How do you know the combination to my father’s safe? He didn’t even tell me that until I was twenty!”

“Hardy, I snuck into your room once a week. I raided your fridge every time my father didn’t feed me. Are you really that surprised I got into your dad’s office?” she asked, heading for the door with my rear toes dragging along the floor on either side of hers. “Besides, he hid some really good liquor in the safe, and so long as I always watered it down a little, he never noticed.”

I fought it with all my might, but in the end, Taxi always won; I smiled.

Glancing back, she gave me a wink, then nosed open the bathroom door.

Act 3 Chapter 44: See Hardy Run. Run, Hardy, Run!

Act 3 Chapter 44: See Hardy Run. Run, Hardy, Run!

"Do you know why my dear Fleur and I have spent our golden years together? Because it looks ever so much better than spending them rolling about in whatever beds we might land in, attempting to recapture lost youth. Though to be fair, both of us spent a significant portion of our youths being pursued and found the majority of those pursuits a pleasant experience, even when they necessitated a quick escape from time to time.

In the end, however, we both decided there is an age at which a pony must stop being pursued, find a place to settle, and take a deep breath. I will admit that a portion of the decision came down to how times we were both chased by furious mothers among our elite brethren, demanding to know what their very-adult children had gotten up to whilst trying to emulate our wilder days.

-Fancy Pants, Stallion Of The Year awards, L.R. 23.

An hour lying on my back passed without so much as an explosion, riot, or single snap of gunfire within my hearing. I studied the ceiling of my little prison cell/medical antechamber; there were exactly twenty-nine tiles visible from inside the curtain. I listened to ponies come and go. I ate what turned out to be a reasonably tasty salad covered in slices of apple.

Everything was calm.

Why, then, was I still smelling gunpowder and hearing the occasional crackle of burning skin?

I hugged my pillow to my chest for the nth time, still waiting on Scarlet to return with an adequate hat. The movement shifted the bed a little and bumped the side table, sending a cascade of folded cards onto the floor. There were dozens of them. Somepony out there was keeping foals entertained having them write notes of encouragement to ‘The Detective’. Considering I was supposed to be dead and the only ponies who knew otherwise were my friends, it was still a nice gesture.

Taxi knew that I needed time alone, but that left me with time to think. The paralyzing terror crept up from time to time, only to be drowned out by a wash of whatever neurochemicals Gale was pumping into my system to keep me from losing my mind. It wasn’t therapy, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing a person could rely on forever, but for that moment it was working well enough.

Knock, knock.

I pondered briefly whether or not to pretend to be asleep. Maybe, with a bit of effort, I might not have to pretend and I could let the rest of this day go without dealing with any other crises. Surely, whoever was at the door couldn’t have another world destroying crisis for me to deal with. I slid deeper under the covers and shut my eyes.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

“Alright! Dammit, I’m awake! Come in!” I snarled, shoving the blankets off and rolling over onto my stomach.

A bright orange muzzle poked through the crack in the door.

“Sir, are you ‘awake’ awake, or just telling me you’re awake so I’ll stop knocking on the door?”

“Both! Get in here, kid.”

I threw my pillow back behind my head and slumped back into the pillows as Swift pushed open the door and tentatively eased inside, shutting it behind herself. She seemed bathed and her mane was back in the spiked fashion she seemed to favor, but she also looked like she’d just run a marathon powered only by coffee and donuts. Worst of all was the look in her eyes.

She looked like a cop: sad, angry, and determined.

Trotting to my bedside, she set my revolver on the sheets beside me and gave me a no-nonsense glare. “Here’s your gun, Sir. I hope there’s not any sort of ritual we have to do, because I’m too mad right now. Who shot you and set you on fire?”

“Didn’t Firebrand tell you?” I asked, picking up the Crusader. Out of habit I opened it, checked it was empty, then fanned the hammer a couple of times. It felt like it’d never been out of my hooves to begin with. Perfect.

“Firebrand didn’t see what happened. She only saw--” Swift hesitated, bunching the sheets in her hooves. After a few seconds, she forced her knees to relax. “She only saw your body and the house. She said you somehow managed to pull yourself down the stairs and were lying on the pavement. Sir, who did this?”

“Huh. Don’t remember getting off the porch,” I murmured, setting my weapon to one side. “Why does it matter, kid?”

“Sir, you are my partner. Somepony hurt you…”

“Yeah, and what are you going to do about it? It was somepony who killed me. They’ve got an army, kid. What have you got?”

Swift’s lips curled back from her teeth.

“Someone killed my partner...” she growled, her voice deepening in a way that was deeply unsettling.

Overhead, the lights suddenly began to flicker and dim, then grew so bright I had to throw a leg across my eyes. One of the bulbs exploded, sending a cascade of glass down on the carpet. The red crescent on Swift’s chest seemed to glitter, then burst into brilliant, shining flame.

The fire crept down her legs and seemed to sink into the ground, which became strangely transparent. I could see ponies down below, though not as I knew them; they were the shapes of ponies, written in shining light. Most seemed to just be going about their business, though a few stopped and appeared to look up in our direction. Their organs, their flesh and bones, and their pulsing hearts were all laid bare. It was a nakedness that left me embarrassed to witness it.

Above us, the magical fire spread, unsealing wall after wall and showing them for the empty, facile things they were. I could suddenly see the sky overhead, and the distantly twinkling stars. Even the ugly scar of the Eclipse, blotting out the horizon, couldn’t hide the majesty of the expanse. Each tick of the clock was centuries in a place with such visions.

All at once, the light surged upward, spreading out as my brain tried to process what, exactly, I was seeing. It was beyond me. It was beyond anypony I’d ever met, except possibly Mephitica. Distance was irrelevant. I was everywhere.

I glanced back at Swift, only to find my partner gone. In her place stood a gleaming angel, lightning dancing between her wingtips and wisps of power spilling from her teeth. Her eyes were two swirling pools, like black holes sucking down helpless stars. My breath caught, and I found myself leaning away from her, but what else was there to do?

When she spoke, it wasn’t the same little pony who’d come into my room.

“The city is my body and its streets are my blood...” she whispered, though I felt it as a vibration in my very bones.

I turned back to the view overhead, too dazzled to say anything. Towards the center of the city, there was the glow of the Uptown shield. It was the only place still hidden from the light.

That bizarre voice continued, feeling as though it was penetrating my very soul.

“They cannot hide outside their Shield. They cannot breathe, but that they breathe my air.If they try to run, I will bring lightning from beneath their hooves. They hurt my partner. I am the Warden of Detrot, and there is no escape!”

All at once, the lights flicked back on and the vision vanished. Swift blinked owlishly at me, then her knees wobbled, and she tumbled over sideways on the carpet. Her chest rose, then fell. I waited a second, holding my own breath, before her ribcage expanded once more.

‘Move, idiot,’ I snarled internally. I grabbed the call button on the side of the bed.

“Medic!”

A part of me still clung to the idea that we’d all walk away one day and be normal ponies again.

I’d have loved to see Swift with a fillyfriend or a colt, making out in the back row of some movie theater. Limerence might have made a really decent head librarian of some city library; the Canterlot Royal Archive was always seeking for scholars dedicated to the finer points of organization. Mags could have gone to some griffin school and spent her days playing with others her age; she might even have kicked that accent.

Taxi…

I don’t know about Taxi. She’s alive for no reason other than there’s never been anything capable of killing her, neither gangsters, nor Iris Jade, nor her father, nor even yours truly. In my idealized fantasies, she drives the highways of a better Equestria in her shining cab, healing souls and saving lives.

Where does that leave me?

With any luck, probably face down drunk in my favorite bar, trying to erase the memories, but with a talent that lies blessedly dormant for the rest of my life.

Thirty seconds later a half dozen ponies hit the door of my hospital room at a speed you’d think would have caused a pile up, but they shot through with mechanical precision, one after another. Four mares, two stallions, five of them in scrubs and one who looked like she’d just come from the shower. Her fur was still dripping wet. Their eyes shined unnaturally, like every one of them had a colony of glow worms living in their heads. As a herd, they rushed to Swift and gently, carefully picked her up with horn and hooves.

A second hospital bed was wheeled in and she was laid down in it. It was accomplished in an eerie silence, with nary a word exchanged between them. I watched the procedure with wide eyes, clutching my sheet to my chest.

It took me a moment to notice that all of them sported moon shapes on their flanks, shoulders, or chests. Finally, four of them filed out, while one nurses remained, running her horn over Swift. After a moment, she sighed and turned to me.

She was a short filly, barely out of her teens, with oak brown fur and an Aroyo facial tattoo that reminded me of a raccoon's markings. The light in her eyes brightened a few shades and she glanced around the hospital room, then centered on me.

“What were you talking about?” she asked. Her voice sounded odd, like two records played over top of one another and not quite in sync.

“T-Tourniquet?” I asked, hesitantly sitting up.

“Yes!” she huffed, then swayed on her hooves, catching herself on the edge of the bed. “Whoo...What in Equestria did she do? I thought keeping you alive was a drain but I feel like somepony just pulled my tail...except my tail is the city power grid!”

I slowly let the medical call button drop. “Wait, don’t you know? I thought you and she were joined at the brain stem or something!”

“Swift asked me for five minutes worth of privacy, and then suddenly the entire network goes crazy!” she replied, the puppeted pony turning to my partner and gently putting a hoof on her cheek. “I don’t know what happened, but she gave herself whatever the pegasus version of ‘mana burn’ is. Her ley-lines look like she just stuck a fork in an electrical socket!”

Worry made me sit forward. “Wait, she’s not-”

“No, it probably only hurt. She’s fine,” she hastily amended. “Pegasi can take lightning strikes without more than ruffled feathers. Oh, her mom is going to yell at me so bad, though. Can we please keep this between us?”

“Yeah, I don’t need to fall on the wrong side of one of Quickie Cuddles’s kicks again, either.” I sank back in my pillows and shut my eyes. “Damn…”

Tourniquet put her hooves up on my bed, her glowing eyes shining with unshed tears. “Hardy, I need you to tell me what you two were talking about. She’s my best friend.”

“She came in here and demanded to know who killed me,” I replied, then muttered, “I told her it didn’t matter. I didn’t want her going after him. That’ll be what I get for trying to protect her, again, I guess.”

“You know she hates it when you do that,” she admonished, giving me a poke in the ribs. “You also know she’s going to figure out it was Broadside. She’s not dumb. At some point it’s going to occur to her to ask the Ladybugs.”

“You want to tell her?” I asked.

“It’s your place to tell her...and it’s your place to keep her from getting killed. I can’t do that. I’m not her partner.”

Tucking my pillow back behind my head, I studied the puppet resting on the edge of my bed. “And what about you?”

She frowned and looked down at herself, or rather, the body she was using. “What about me?”

I threw my hooves in the air. “Please don’t play stupid, Tourniquet. Can we both at least admit you rushing in here with half a dozen ponies acting like some kind of bug hive-mind is a bit freaky?”

“Oh...that…”

“Yes, that!”

Sliding her legs off the bed, she turned and looked up at the wall, seemingly thinking about her response. Finally, without turning around, she said, “I offered them safety in the only way I know how.”

“By taking away their free will?!” I demanded.

Her ears stood up straight and she whirled to face me.

“They’ve still got their free will! Every pony who took my mark did it because they want to be safe, not because they want to be insects. I’m protecting them as best I can and I’d never take their individuality. They can say ‘no’ to me anytime they want to!”

“Then explain it so I understand, because I’m scared enough of dealing with mind controlled monsters without watching my partner being attended by them.”

Tourniquet let out an irritated breath and reached up to touch the tattoos on her host’s face. “Do you know who this pony is?”

“You know I don’t,” I said, maybe a little more sharply than intended.

“Then why don’t you ask her?”

“What?”

The glow in the mare’s eyes flickered out and in a matter of seconds, her entire posture changed. I hadn’t realized Tourniquet had a particularly formal way of standing until the mare shifted her weight onto two legs and shook her whole body as though shaking off a light rainfall. I could see the differences; Tourniquet stood like a foal at lessons, while the pony in front of me was more like an old house long settled in its foundations.

“I and I wishes de Shadow Lady would say when she goin’ to leave me longer dan two seconds before she do it,” she muttered, scratching her mane as her eyes turned in my direction. “You be de one dey call ‘Crusada’, yah? It be an honor!”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, tugging the sheets over myself.

“Ye be in de Skids a month and some ago,” she said, holding out her hoof. I carefully bumped my toe against hers. “Ye de cop dat Miss Wisteria let through. De cop dat go and leave wid a trunk. I and I saw ye. I was in de alley beside de hotel. Then I saw ye again at de Nest bunker. Dey never lets me into de Nest, but I and I knows of it.”

I cocked my head. “Seems like years ago, now. Why didn’t they let you in the Nest?”

She laughed. It was a throaty, cheerful laugh, that brought a little smile to my face.

“Heh! Because I and I smells terrible back den! Eh, dat be not here, though. My name be Split Wick.”

“Huh. Good to meet you, Split Wick. You can call me Hardy or Crusader. Whichever catches your fancy. What were you doing in that alley that day?” I asked, curiously.

Split Wick’s ears fell against her head and she gave me a morose smirk. “I and I be a junkie, back den. Alleys be de natural home of de junkie, yeah?”

“Back then?”

She turned to look up at the ceiling. “Ye know of dis, but...one day, de sky goes black. Strange, how little dat changed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Heh! I and I wandered de streets. Same as always, since I were young. Days I wandered. My junk be gone, so one day, I lays down to wait to die, like I live: in de alley. I be there, and I hears a voice.”

“Tourniquet,” I murmured.

“Ye calls her dat, but to me, it be de voice of my Shadow Lady. She whispers from de dark and say ‘Get up, Split Wick! Ye be dyin!’ and I says I know. Then she say ‘I can save ye, but only if ye move!’ and I ask why she be wantin’ to save a waste like me.”

I flicked an ear to show I was still listening and Split Wick reached up to touch the crescent moon on her chest, closing her eyes for a moment as though relishing its presence.

“Ye know what she say? She say ‘De only waste be if ye lay there and die’. I crawl to de mouth of de alley and call out...and dere be Jambalaya. She take me to a hole in de ground and I meet a metal angel...and she takes de pain of de junk away. Den...she give me food, water, and a bed. I and I be up on my hooves in three days. Dat be only a few weeks ago, but...now, I have de voices of de brothers and de sisters up here.” She tapped the side of her head and wiggled her nose. “Dey will remember little Split Wick if she dies.”

I sat back on my bed and sighed. “Alright. I suppose I can accept that as a net positive. Can I ask you one last thing?”

“Aye? Ask. Dere be no question I and I would not answer for de Crusada.”

“What’s your talent?”

Split Wick turned sideways and shifted her flank so I could see her cutie-mark: a plant twisted in the shape of a healer’s staff. “I and I only ever tried growin’ things to get high. My Lady In Shadow let me grow things to save lives.”

“Alright. Can I talk to Tourniquet, again?”

Split Wick shrugged. “If ye decide to screw, leave a note on me side so I and I can get a potion from de shaman. Don’t want to be havin’ no foals just now, though if ye get a hankerin’ later, I might see through to it. Would be nice to give de Aroyos a colt of Crusada!”

I’ve no idea how I was meant to respond to that, but she didn’t give me time to come up with anything. A second later, the glow faded back into her eyes and Tourniquet stood up straight. Her cheeks suddenly turned bright red, probably mirroring my own as she slapped her hoof against her host’s forehead.

“And...and that’s...that’s Split Wick,“ she muttered.

“I’m sorry I doubted your intentions, Tourniquet,” I said, awkwardly.

“I don’t blame you. I didn’t just decide to become most of the city infrastructure. Mom over-engineered me.”

I tilted my head toward where Swift lay, breathing softly, her eyes closed like a peaceful little cherub of death. “What about her? Do you have any idea what she did a few minutes ago?”

Tourniquet shook her head. “Not a clue. I’m still learning all the operations wired into me, and the Warden system is almost completely opaque. Probably because Mom didn’t want me changing anything if I got bored. I think she also had ‘bigger things’ in mind if she ever got out of Tartarus.”

“Give me your best guess,” I said.

“My best guess is sort of scary,” she replied.

“I’m getting used to scary, methinks.”

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she murmured, rubbing Split Wick’s nose in a little circle, then looking at it like she was surprised to feel a hoof on the end of her leg. She quickly put it down. “Phew. Sorry, still getting used to having bodies.”

“You’re stalling,” I grumbled.

“I...I’m trying to figure out a way to describe this where I won’t end up with the scariest pony I ever met mad at me!” She gestured with one leg at the bed where my partner lay, still breathing slowly. “I was the one who asked Swift to take my Warden mark! I didn’t know it would do that to her!”

I let out a long, heavy breath and did my best to sound composed.

“I’m not mad, Tourniquet. I won’t be mad, so long as you’re straight with me. Can you do that?”

“I...okay. Hardy, it was awful. Please, if this doesn’t make sense, just trust that I’m trying, alright?” she whimpered, her thin eyebrows knitting together.

“Done,” I said, putting a hoof to my chest. “Now go on.”

I could still feel the tension in her, but she made a show of letting Split Wick’s shoulders relax.

“W-what it felt like was...was like having my insides yanked on. I can normally feel at least a little of what Swift is feeling, but...that was crazy. She was so mad I thought she’d pop every breaker in Supermax. Half the lights are out right now and I’ve got ponies rushing to change fuses on every floor...”

“And you don’t know what she did?” I asked.

“No. All of a sudden I was blind. It was like being back in the darkness. All my cameras cut out and every sensor and powerline in the city was gone. If I could still pee, I’d have wet my servos! Then it was back and...and you were screaming for a medic. That’s all I saw.”

“Alright. I guess that’s good enough,” I replied, forcing myself not to clench my teeth. “Go on. Take care of what needs to be taken care of. Could you keep somepony within shouting distance and give us some privacy?”

The little mare stared down at her hooves, shamefacedly. “I’ll do my best.”

I offered her my leg and she carefully took it, lifting her glittering eyes to mine.

“Tourniquet, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was frightened and I took it out on you. You’re doing good work.”

“Hardy, don’t blow smoke up my circuits,” she replied, with a weak laugh. “I’m scared of me some days. I might have gained a bunch of inches and a whole heap of experience in the last few weeks, but it’s only been that long since I was a kid hiding in the corners of what should have been an abandoned building. Suddenly being a city didn’t make that easier, and having ponies beg me to keep them safe just gave me less time in the day to process this ‘adulthood’ thing.”

“I know. Maybe, one day, we’ll take you on this vacation everypony has been promising themselves.”

“Maybe. Swift should wake up in a few minutes. Just have her let me know when you want me to stop distracting her friends and family,” Tourniquet murmured, then turned and left, closing the door to my little hospital room behind her.

The door shut, and I lay back and put my hooves behind my head again. A tickle of smoke crept up my nose, and I blew it away. Of course, there hadn’t really been any smoke, but I’d learned in recent days that facts like that are completely irrelevant.

I’d have given an ear for a clock, but time was passing slowly enough without knowing precisely how many seconds I wasted just lying there.

A soft shifting of feathers alerted me to Swift coming around.

Her eyes opened, slowly, and she looked sideways at me, then down at the hospital bed.

“Sir…”

“Shut up, kid.”

“B-but Sir!”

“I said ‘shut up’!” I snapped, “Just lie there. We talk in five minutes. If you haven’t exploded, torn the city power grid out of Tourniquet’s hooves, and forced psychedelic images of the entire city into my bleeding cerebrum for a solid five minutes...then, and only then, we'll talk.”

Swift nervously toyed with the sterile hospital sheet pulled up to her chest, while I tried to figure out exactly what I needed to say to her. Her wings unfurled, then pulled in against her sides. I noticed a few feathers out of place, but didn’t say anything; ponies who live in glass houses don’t get to make snarky comments about their partner’s looks after they’ve been rolled in without most of their dermis.

Five minutes passed quicker than I’d have liked, but when it’d come and gone and Swift was still an unassuming little pegasus rather than the raging demigod, I relaxed.

“Kid?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“I’m not going to ask for an explanation of what you did a few minutes ago. I just need to know you’ve got a hoof on it. We’re hitting the Office soon. If you tell me you’ve got whatever that was under control, I will believe you.”

Swift gulped and shook her head.

“Sir, I have no idea what I just did. I don’t know if it’s safe to bring me. I just...I just got so angry at the thought of somepony h-hurting my partner...” She trailed off into a soft growl. Overhead, the lights flickered, but she glared at them until they stabilized.

“I’m bringing you, one way or the other,” I said, pulling my eyes away from the light fixtures. “I need my partner there and whatever you just did was almost enough to make me empty my bladder. I can’t imagine what it’d do to somepony who didn’t know you. I just want to know whether or not I can afford to put you in the line of fire.”

She pulled a pillow over her head, then let out a frustrated grunt and used her wings to push off the bed into a sitting position. “Ugh! I don’t...I don’t know! Can’t I just have one day where I don’t have to make any life or death decisions?”

“Every day is full of life or death decisions. Most ponies just don’t recognize them as such. You step out of your house, it’s a life or death decision. One day you decide life, and the world decides death. The only difference between us and those ponies outside is that they have the luxury of being surprised when the coin comes up ‘death’.”

“Please never write a philosophy book, Sir. I think you’d just make a bunch of ponies kill themselves,” Swift muttered, heaving herself over the side of the bed. Her forelegs shook for a second, but then she stood strong, spreading her wings as wide as she could in the little hospital room without bumping the nearest wall. “Oof...I feel like I flew a marathon.” She turned in a quick circle, looking at the ceiling, then the floor. “My sight doesn’t feel any different, though. I can still see downstairs and...ooh, Celestia, Mom is arguing with Dad...”

“You can’t tell what they’re saying, can you?” I asked.

“I don’t think I want to. Dad looks pretty angry, and whatever he’s saying is making her--” Swift’s eyes bugged out a little, and she scrambled out from under the sheets. “Oh poop! Mom’s about to--”

The building shook for a moment as a tremor rocked the foundation.

“What was that?!” I yelped.

“That was Mom breaking a wall. Two walls. Sir, I’m pretty sure she just heard about what happened at the Family’s place. Gran probably told my dad. She knows you’re alive.”

I slammed my forehead against the nearest bar of the hospital bed. It rang like a cast-iron pan hit with a baseball bat.

“Tell me you didn’t tell your grandmare all of it,” I said.

“I didn’t, but...b-but I’m pretty sure Iris Jade did.”

“Oh skies, I’m gonna kill her…”

Swift hesitated, then bounced out of bed onto the floor. “Sir, both Mom and Dad are headed this direction. Can I please run away now?”

Struggling to the side of the bed, I hauled myself down onto the floor. My legs gave out immediately as tingles shot down my limbs. I threw a knee against the bed, holding myself up as best I could. Grabbing my revolver, I snatched a strap off the edge of the bed and loosely tied it to my chest.

I took a stumbling step, and all four legs buckled.

“Only if you take me with you!”

There were four ponies with glowing eyes and crescent moons on their bodies standing guard outside. One of them was Split Wick. She grinned and tossed her head, before pointing down the carpeted hall toward a set of stairs.

“Ye be needin’ a safe way out, quick as quick? Yer cabbie be upstairs wid dat mad...thing she builds. She suddenly rush out of a meetin’ about a half hour ago sayin’ ye needed to be gone right quick.”

“Taxi’s got the Night Trotter rebuilt?” I asked.

“Aye, though it be not a cab anymore,” Split Wick said, tapping the side of her head. “De Lady of Shadows be waitin’ for ye at Supermax. Ye go to battle, says she.”

“And Limerence--”

“De nerd, and de little griffin all be in de garage.”

“Why didn’t I know this place has a garage? Alright, never mind. Tell Tourniquet ‘thank you’ and have her ask Stella to try to talk Swift’s mother down before she rips the building off its foundations.”

“I and I be thinkin’ dat may be a lost cause,” Split Wick cringed as another shudder rocked the undercarriage of the Vivarium. “Makes me wish my mother cared like dat.”

“Yeah, but I don’t need my Mom trying to strangle my partner!” Swift moaned, throwing her weight against my side to keep me upright. “Oh mercy, I hope Jade didn’t tell her we’re in some kind of romantic relationship.”

“This is Iris Jade! Do you think she didn’t?!”

She gave me a look of abject horror. The building vibrated under our hooves.

“Sir, run!” she squeaked, stepping away from my side. I stumbled onto my foreknees as she took a couple trotting steps.

One of our ‘guards’, a barrel chested stallion with a brick and trowel for a cutie-mark, stepped forward.

“Don’t take this the wrong way cuz I already got a husband...but ya can get on my back if ya like,” he said. “Ya legs don’t seem so hot.”

Muttering a quick thanks and with a bit of help from Swift, I hauled myself across his shoulders. He took off at a gallop with my partner in hot pursuit, grabbing the wall to swing up the stairs. I clung on for dear life, praying we’d make it before a pony more violent than After Glow got her arcanum around me.

Tourniquet’s people were at every corner, ready to direct us toward our destination and most likely keeping the coast clear. My ‘mount’ hadn’t even grunted when I climbed aboard and didn’t seem to notice my weight as he cantered up staircases and down the maze-like hallways. I quickly lost track of our progress, focusing mostly on keeping myself from tumbling onto the floor. Swift kept up, though just barely; whatever magic she’d used seemed to have taken a considerable toll on her.

Finally, after a solid five minute run, ‘Brick’ (as I’d come to think of him) skidded through a door held open by a sashed Stiletto with glowing eyes.

The Vivarium’s garage wasn’t anything like as massive as the Police Department’s, but it was still a place that commanded a certain respect. Every one of ten dozen spaces was full of different vehicles; from rickshaws to great, long limousines. At the distant end, a gated, double-wide ramp led up to ground level.

“Here ya go!” Brick said, rolling his back to one side. I grabbed at air, then slid off of the great brute onto my backside. “Ya ride is down there. Can ya make it?”

Swift slid up beside me and offered her leg. My hooves shook, but with her assistance, I was able to stand. Brick turned to the open door and vanished back inside, kicking it shut behind him.

“Sir, my Mom is...uh… dangerous when she’s mad,” Swift said, softly. “She probably wouldn’t kill you outright, but my grandmare once told me about a burglar who broke into my parents’ house just after they got married. He...he’s alive, because my dad was there, but his prison name is ‘Pillow’.”

A dozen nasty images piled into my brain all at once.

“Come on, kid. I am not in any condition to deal with a raging member of the Cuddles family. Stella can handle this. Let’s find the Night Trotter.”

A burgundy head poked out from the end of a row of cars up ahead of us.

“Hardy! Over here!” Scarlet called, beckoning us. “You gotta move! Iris Jade just congratulated your dad on being a grandparent about 20 minutes ago! I tried to stop him getting to your mother, it was too fast!”

My stomach dropped into my hooves. “Mercy, is somepony going to explain to her--?!”

He cut me off with panic in his voice. “Have you ever seen a mad Cuddles before?! You get out of her way and pray she burns out before she finds whoever made her angry!”

“Right. Where’s Taxi?” I asked, limping forward with Swift against my side.

“I’m here, Hardy!” my driver yelled. She sounded oddly muffled. “Just some final adjustments and we should be ready for a proper test drive!”

“Test drive!” I barked. “Are you saying you don’t know if this thing will work?!”

“You only gave me a few days!” she bit back. “I had everypony with an engineering or auto-mechanical cutie-mark working around the clock! Be glad the wheels turn!”

I swallowed, tilting an ear back the way we’d come. I’m not sure if it was ongoing brain damage or not, but I thought I could hear sounds of battle. Staggering around the last row of cars, I stopped dead, and my already unstable knees slid out from under my back end, leaving me sitting, gape mouthed and wide-eyed.

The area around Taxi’s...creation...was cleared of everything besides twenty floor to ceiling boxes of tools and a dozen blindingly bright construction lights. I’d some notion of what she intended when I gave her permission to use the full resources of the Detrot Police Department, but the finished product was beyond even my wildest imaginings.

It was a work of automotive, impressionist art.

It was a towering mountain of metal.

It was Flankenstein’s All-Wheel-Drive Monster.

If one were to squint from a distance, they might see the genetics of the two vehicular mammoths that spawned this wheeled leviathan, but every curve and facet spoke to something altogether mightier than either the A.M.V. or the Night Trotter. Somepony with a welding degree from a very dark university had managed to marry the cars together with a sympathy that made it look as though they’d never been anything else, though somewhere in this evolution, it had gained an extra axle and a meter of height. Through a gleaming silver grill, the Night Trotter’s spell core glowed brilliantly, like a dragon readying to breathe fire; it had many, many more wires affixed to it than I remembered from the few times I’d seen the cab’s hood up.

Most of the back of the truck looked like it was still meant to transport ponies, but the shapes were smoother and the weapons ports glittered with untapped menace. Larger wheels complemented a series of crystals across the roof and doors that seemed more purposeful than decorative. As a finishing touch, the whole thing was painted bright yellow, and a tiny, comical light affixed to the roof advertised ‘Cabbie For Hire’.

My driver’s hooves stuck out from under the front end on a rolling mechanic’s board, and I could hear the sounds of something being wrenched underneath.

Sitting there, eyes wide, I barely felt the moment something soft settled over my ears and a gentle kiss landed on my cheek. I blinked a couple times, then turned to find Scarlet sitting there, giving me an appraising look. After a short moment, he grinned, spreading his hooves wide.

“Perfect!” he exclaimed.

I reached up and touched the brim of a hat, then plucked it off my head, turning it over in my hooves. It was a lovely black that matched my coat perfectly, with a wide brim. I tapped the front and it made a soft *click* noise.

“What’s this?” I asked, tapping the spot again.

“Firebrand let me keep her scale,” Scarlet explained. “I had Habbidash sew it in. She only had time to enchant the cloth to keep it clean, but-”

“It’s beautiful, Scarlet,” I murmured, then set it back on my head. “I’ll be sure it comes back without any extra holes.”

“Knowing you, I’m going to be lucky if it comes back with enough of your head to bury. Oh, and there’s this,” he added, then pulled a stylish black clothing box from under a nearby car. He set it on the ground and shelled the top off. Inside lay my trenchcoat, cleaned and pressed, with a brand new gun harness folded across it.

“There was a disused diamond dog tunnel that ran under your street,” he explained. “It was a smash and grab to get the safe, but I don’t think we were noticed.” His ears turned down. “I...I’m sorry, Hardy. Most of the house is still there, but the front porch and living room are gone. The yard was still smoldering when we left...”

I smirked and set the top back on the box, then tucked it under my leg. “Mom would be glad to know the old place stood up to a fire.”

“I don’t think she’d like knowing you were the kindling,” Taxi grunted, sliding out from under the giant truck. “Limerence and Mags are in the back. We’re going to Supermax?”

“At quickest speed,” I replied, turning back to the truck. “Jade told Quickie that Swift and I were bunking together. Congratulations, by the way. You’re going to be a godmother.”

For a moment, Taxi looked as though I’d just told her there was a locked clown-car, full to the brim with mimes, being slowly crushed under the hooves of a dozen elephants: horrified and conflicted, but also amused.

“I thought Iris promised not to kill you?” she asked, finally.

“That doesn’t mean she won’t spend her spare time making me suffer. I doubt she knew or cared who Swift’s parents were.” I lowered myself onto my stomach and peered underneath the massive vehicle. “Why does it look like the Night Trotter’s spell core has some kind of mechanical cancer growing on it?”

Taxi wiped her hooves with a greasy rag. “Hardy, the manual is thicker than my leg and half of it was written on napkins in that language only engineers speak. Do you want a features rundown or do you want to run away from Swift’s mother?”

I shoved myself up and grabbed the box with my coat inside. “I think running is probably best. Scarlet, you want to join me on this love boat?”

“Ugh, yes! Of course I do,” he replied, but then his smile faded and he slipped his leg around my neck. “But...I also want you to live through the week. Quickie will listen to me once she’s calmed down. I’ll try to keep her from wringing Iris Jade’s neck before we can point them both in the direction of something that needs its butt kicked.” Leaning in, he rubbed his cheek against mine. “You...you go be amazing, alright, Hardy?”

“I’ll do my best, Scarlet,” I said, chuckling to myself. “You know, you’re going to make someone a damn good wife, one day.”

“H-Hardy! Please don’t tease me like that!”

I barely had time to catch him as he leapt into my forelegs. Then he was kissing me, desperately hugging himself to my chest with all the love that little body could muster. It was...nice. Sweet, even. It’s strange how quickly a pony can get used to having someone to kiss.

The clapping in the background reminded both of us that we had an audience. Swift was stomping her hooves and bouncing up and down while Taxi just sat there, hitting her lightly greased hooves together. Scarlet’s ears splayed back, and he stepped away, setting my new hat back on my head. His eyes were glistening, but he inhaled sharply and wiped them clear.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said, softly. “Give Lily my love.”

He gave me a weak nod, then spun and galloped for the building. The last I saw of him was his tail vanishing around the corner of a late model sedan. I couldn’t help running my tongue over my muzzle; he’d tasted like frosting.

Taxi giggled, spinning her key-ring on the tip of her hoof. “Well, that was adorable.”

“Says the pony who goes all gooey over a certain minotaur every time he’s in the room?” I sniggered.

My driver flashed me a lascivious grin. “That’s just sex. I’m pretty sure, no matter how good that minotaur plows my tail, I wouldn’t be licking my lips like that from just a kiss.”

“He probably ate a cupcake earlier!” I protested.

“Uhuh...keep telling yourself that. Are we going? Or do you want to gawk at the car and that colt’s flank some more?”

Swift piped up, just as I was readying a crushing retort.

“Sir, we need to leave...uh...now.” When I turned to look at her, her eyes were following something coming up from behind us through the floor. “My parents just reached the room we were in and figured out where we were heading.”

My heart skipped two beats. “How?!”

“A giant super-cab under construction in the garage kinda sticks out in everypony’s mind, Sir…”

“That’s...poor. Alright, everypony in!”

Without waiting for a response, I hobbled around to the side of the massive vehicle. It took me a moment to realize I had absolutely no idea how the door worked. I glanced back at my driver and she shrugged, then trotted over to my side. She pressed a spot on the side of the cab. There was a soft click, and the door swung open. A short set of steps unfolded right to my hooves.

“I may have let the engineers go a little overboard,” she muttered, sliding her foreleg under mine as she helped me climb up onto the seat. The A.M.V.’s seats had been replaced by plush, wingback chairs that looked like they ought to sit in front of a fire and come with a glass of scotch.

I dragged myself into the passenger seat, then leaned sideways to peer into the rear compartment. The same mad pony who’d decorated the cabin had been at work in the back; there was thick, red carpet on the floor, along with two long bench seats that must have been stolen from the club. A glowing crystal in a brass enclosure was set into the ceiling.

Stretched out on the seat with Mags sprawled against his stomach, Limerence sat with his horn glowing softly and a book in the crook of his hoof. He raised an eyebrow at me, then pointed to his muzzle. I gave him a puzzled look, then he made a little rubbing motion in the air. Reaching up, I wiped my mouth on the back of my leg. It came away covered in pink lipstick.

“Taxi grabbed you on the way up, Lim?” I asked, cleaning my hoof on the edge of my coat..

“No, I was already here.” He nodded his horn toward the light fixture. “Spell frames do take quite a long time to charge, lest I wish to cook myself again. That, and I knew we’d eventually be running away from something when you returned without any skin. I figured I would save myself a jog and get some work done at the same time.”

“What about her?” I asked.

Limerence looked down at the sleeping griffin chick, then shrugged. “She seemed uncertain why everyone was making such a big fuss over your death, though she lay beside your bed for several hours.” His horn lit up and he jiggled a paper plate I hadn’t noticed until that moment which was sitting on the carpet beside the bench. It contained the picked apart remains of what might have been a fish or small bird of some kind. “I presume at some point between then and now, she took a detour into one of the kitchens. She was round as a volleyball, so it must have been quite the meal.”

“I may need you to come up with a spell to let me know the next time she uses the toilet,” I said. “I don’t want to be within a mile of that bathroom.”

The driver’s door opened and Taxi hopped in, then retracted the stairs and shut it behind her. Up top, the roof hatch clicked, then Swift dropped into the back with a graceful little roll, catching herself on the nearest bench before throwing herself back into a seat.

“Sir, we have less than a minute before my mom is here!” she squeaked.

Limerence’s ears twitched and he looked suddenly worried, setting his book to one side. “Wait... Detective, are we running from Quickie Cuddles?”

“Yes, yes we are. I’ll explain in a minute. Sweets, shall we see if this thing you’ve built actually works?”

Taxi reached toward the steering column, then hesitated. Her eyes darted in my direction, then she slowly rested her toe on the ignition button. “Hardy, I feel I should warn you that...the first time I turned this thing on, there were some unusual effects from the magical fields coming off the engine.”

A peculiar prickle at the back of my neck made me twitch internally. I peered out the window just in time for an indistinct shape to sail past the window and explode on the wall of the garage. It looked like the remains of a small wagon.

I braced myself on the dashboard and shouted, “Sweets, there are going to be unusual effects from an enraged unicorn ripping my stallion bits off because my old boss told her I made her daughter pregnant! I don’t want to find out if those grow back! Punch it!”

She hit the ignition. I braced for the roar and was met with absolute silence. The engine made no sound whatsoever. I was ready to start cursing and begging for my life, when I felt a slight vibration under my hips.

“Is...is it supposed to be that quiet?” Swift asked, softly.

“I thought we might do well to be a tad less attention getting,” Limerence said, tapping his cutie-mark with his toe. “It took several hours to charge the spell frames, but as I have always said...silence is golden.”

I jerked back as a wagon tire smashed into the windshield, shattering into little pieces. Thankfully, it didn’t leave so much as a scratch in the glass.

Taxi goosed the accelerator and the vehicle leapt out of the parking space like a scalded rat. I heard a soft crunch as the front tire flattened an ill placed toolbox flat as a pancake. Out the windshield, I could see an oncoming magical field the color of a ripe peach expanding across the garage, shimmering with unspent energies as it crept over the parked cars. A few of them started to slowly rise into the air.

I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel the drone of powerful magic starting to build in the back of my skull. I’d have given an ear for my armor and spared a moment to the hope that somepony thought to pack it. Not that it was likely to do me much good against Quickie considering just how mad she was likely to be. Iris Jade picked her revenge well.

A flash of sharp, blue light spat from the truck’s front grill as Taxi slewed the back sideways to line us up with the ramp, and my stomach slammed against my ribcage. Bits of debris pelted the back bumper as the front half of a limo rolled passed my window into a pillar. I grabbed for my seatbelt and yanked it across my body.

“Everypony hang on!” I shouted over my shoulder.

“Hardy...Remember the ‘effects’ I told you about?” Taxi said. “They start when in second gear.”

“My death starts in first gear! Go!”

The silent engine shook the cabin and I was pressed back in my seat as we bolted toward the exit ramp. I was braced for launch, when a blast of sweet smelling, pink smoke poured out of the truck’s ventilation system. My eyes watered, and then I felt myself start to involuntarily relax. The sensation was like a light sedative.

We got a bit of air leaping off the end of the ramp into the lot behind the Vivarum. I braced for impact, but rather than landing heavily, it felt like a cloud caught us, barely jostling my hooves. A soft zebra chant started up, whispering cheerfully peaceful little notes through my brain that felt like somepony giving my neurons a light massage. I glanced at the radio; it was still off.

As I sat there, my mind started to wander a little and my shoulders unbound themselves. What did it matter that the world was about to end? It was a nice day for a drive.

A rather pretty, whorled design in what appeared to be some kind of light orange paint began to creep up the wall from the steering wheel, spreading out across the dashboard. I peered out the windshield, and realized we’d somehow gotten from the Vivarium straight into the city. How’d that happened? Was I not paying attention?

I turned to look over at my driver, which felt like it took several minutes to accomplish. A soft halo of light seemed to be emanating from her head as she leaned against the steering wheel. Tilting my head toward my other companions, I saw Swift sitting there with a big, silly grin on her face and an open M.R.E. between her forelegs. Limerence seemed to be meditating, or possibly had nodded off. Mags was still asleep.

Come on brain. Talk. I know you can.

“Why do I feel like I’ve just had a bunch of happy weed?” I asked, softly, so as not to interrupt the chanting.

Taxi leaned on the steering wheel, teeth gritted as she dropped our speed down to something less than super-sonic and pressed a button on the dash. A soft hum started up overhead, then dampened to a place it wasn’t more than barely noticeable. “Magical side effects. I don’t know. I’ll get it worked out the next time I can spend two days with a spanner and an arcane probe.”

“I meant ‘Why does it feel like the inside of your apartment?’.”

Taxi tilted her head to one side, tracing the design that’d sprung up on the dash with her toe. “Oh. I don’t know.”

“Lim?” I called in the back. “You want to chime in on this?”

Limerence opened his eyes and exhaled, then blinked a few times. “Ah, yes. Pardon, it is most hypnotic, isn’t it, Detective? The spell core absorbs the ‘intent’ of the user, the same as a unicorn’s horn might. It translates the intent into purpose. She overcharged the spell core, so it’s not just absorbing intent and turning it into speed. It may be absorbing some of her personality, as well.”

“Nopony mention Minox, or we’ll be swimming to our destination,” I quipped and Taxi swatted in my direction, though the blow missed by miles. “Is the invisibility spell working?”

“I was able to replace the battery system with a jimmied version one of the engineers threw together,” Taxi added, quirking her lip. “We’ve got a few hours of active camouflage. The gamma rays off the exterior are enough to fry an egg, but I’m not worried about someone trying to attack us getting cancer in 10 years.”

“And anyone who wants to get in our way between here and Supermax is probably not an innocent bystander,” I said, then looked back at Swift who was munching on a snack bar. “Kid, your mother...she’s not likely to chase us, is she?”

Swift shook her head. “She’ll only be mad until somepony can tell her I’m not pregnant.”

“And…what about the rest of it? The events at D.W.’s mansion?”

My partner was silent, and then her ears drooped. “I’ll ask if Tourniquet has a portable generator we can put in the back, here. You’ll probably need it.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, we’ve got a bit of a drive. I might as well let a certain fussy princess know what we’ve been up to,” I said, picking up my coat and fishing the magical walkie-talkie out of the front pocket. Getting out of my seat, I staggered into the back to find a quiet spot to sit for what I was sure was going to be a long, arduous conversation.

“Wait, is that a fridge? Who put a fridge in here? Oooh, is there beer?”

Act 3 Chapter 45 : What part of 'Secret' do you not understand?

"Equestria made some powerful enemies down through the centuries, both because we refused to submit and because we were sometimes incautious with our own trade efforts. The industrial boom the first few years after Luna's return us chewing through resources at a speed that was quickly becoming unsustainable. If the war had not occurred when it did and been followed by the subsequent reductions in our rates of advance, events might have spiraled out of control within a matter of decades. As it is, we were faced with the need to check our own growth, lest we end up having to eat our neighbors or ourselves to survive."

A History Of The Cutie-Mark Crusades

“And...that’s how I ended up here. Pretty rough couple of days, if I do say so myself. Thoughts, Princess?”

“...I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. I didn’t mean to sound like I’m condemning your course of action. I just didn’t understand. Has Nightmare Moon’s...has whatever she did to you had any additional side-effects?”

“How would I know? It seems to manifest as pregnancy cravings the like of which nopony has ever seen before. Did I want to get out of Quickie’s way because I wanted it, or because Nightmare Moon knew I wouldn’t be able to talk her down? Honestly, I don’t have any idea.”

“That’s a disturbing notion.”

“Find me anything of late that is not a disturbing notion! I dare you!”

“Alright...alright. You made your point. Tourniquet worries me, but she seems benevolent. Though, to be fair, if you were from somewhere else and told me that somepony moved the Sun and Moon, I’d be pretty scared of them, too. Broadside is a greater worry. Do you have a plan for dealing with him?”

“Broadside is one pony. Dangerous, yes, but just one pony. The P.A.C.T. is the biggest threat and the Family is an infection we will have to root out. Broadside said we destroyed his ‘family home’. Unsurprising, but also leaves me wondering just how deep this conspiracy goes if they can plant one of their inner circle as the leader of the P.A.C.T. The Family came to Detrot, built the city, and have been controlling its development for decades. Right now, we have to take care of the Shield. Disable that, and we have Royal support.”

“I hope we can reach you in time, Detective. If Celestia and Luna can work the magics to return Canterlot, they’ll be badly drained, uninformed, and we can’t risk them in direct combat. I’ll come, though, and I’ll bring everything I’ve got. A few hundred changelings and umbrum dropping out of the sky should make a real big impression!”

“Should do. Meanwhile, we’ll be training our people. I’ve got the police department behind me and they’re training everyone. We have less than four days and hitting the Office may accelerate the Family’s timeframe.”

“I...I hate to ask this question, but timeframe to what? Do you have any idea?”

“I hate to say I think I do. Broadside says the ‘big attack’ is coming then. They’re probably giving their remaining troops time to finish transforming. The city is a wish machine, right?”

“Based on our research, I am inclined to accept that postulation.”

“It’s powered by pain, suffering, and chaos. I think they intend to make their ‘big wish’ here in a few days. They’re going to unleash the P.A.C.T. and the transformed ponies from Uptown on the citizenry, drive everyone nuts, and use that burst of energy to make it happen.”

“Oooh...that’s a...hmmm. That makes a horrible kind of sense. Then, I guess we should ask the next question. What do we think they’re going to wish for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Hardy. What could they possibly want that a thousand years of preparation, the power to throw Princess Celestia and Princess Luna off the planet, and a whole city under their control couldn’t get them?”

I leaned my head back against the cool surface of one of the padded seats and slowly let the walkie-talkie roll off my hoof. The new vehicles suspension was solid enough to absorb every bump and it was damn near putting me to sleep. Too bad I couldn’t afford more rest, just yet. It’d felt good to tell someone everything, but the explanations had left me exhausted.

Mags, who’d been laying silently against my leg, scooted over and put her head on my knee, looking up at me with her big, yellow eyes.

“You be afraid, Egg Pony?” she asked, softly.

“I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t,” I replied, rubbing my forehead with the back of my leg.

“You think we be going to die?” she asked, clicking her beak.

“You’re going to live,” I answered, stroking her head. “If I have to pitch your fluffy little backside into a universe hopping train and have the engineer cart you off to another planet, I’m making sure you live.”

Taking that as an appropriate response, Mags hopped down and went poking her nose through the various compartments, no doubt looking for something to eat. I looked up and found Swift watching me from one of the seats further down, her gun disassembled in front of her on a little folding tray. Limerence was absorbed in a gilded, jewel-studded tome, and only the single ear cocked in my direction gave me any indication he was paying attention to his surroundings.

“You have a question, kid?” I asked.

Swift clenched her forelegs, tightly, then slowly forced herself to breathe. “No, Sir. I heard what I needed to hear. Broadside is going down when I get my hooves on him.”

I rolled my neck a little, then straightened in my seat. “You have a plan for that, kid? I’m fresh out. We haven’t even seen everything they could bring to bear against us, yet. As far as we know, they’ve still got a gun that can shoot through walls, at least one of the Moon weapons, and a number of full sized dragons hiding out somewhere on the edge of the city. This is on top of the P.A.C.T. arsenal and some kind of weird mutation that makes ponies turn into suicide bombers that explode into black goo that negates most forms of magic. Am I missing anything?”

Limerence’s ear twitched, but he didn’t look up as he added, “They have a rogue necromancer in their employ and someone capable of breaking the Archivist’s security system. It is most probably a current or former Archivist who somehow slipped through father’s screening procedures. I have been monitoring the Archive’s message exchange arcanum. It’s been accessed, repeatedly. They are also likely aware that I have been accessing it, as they have been more carefully covering their traces.”

“Right. All those things,” I said, drawing a little circle on the seat in front of me with my toe. “Point being, I don’t even know what we can bring to this fight, yet, but I’ve got no guarantees that we have any actual advantages. If you want to roll against Broadside, I’m going to need to hear a plan.”

Swift chewed at her lip, then curled her forelegs under herself. “Sir, how can you be so...so nonchalant about this? He killed you.”

“And believe me, I’m feeling a bit of resentment—,” I replied, “—but I don’t want the city awash in the blood of bystanders. That means we have three days to figure something out. Tomorrow we’re headed for the Office.”

Limerence shifted on his seat and slowly shut the book he’d been reading. “I do so very often wish that great magical power didn’t come with such emotional instability,” he said. “Quickie or Jade would be very useful in these circumstances, if they could be relied upon.”

“I’m pretty sure Mom just needed to get that out of her system,” Swift murmured, “She doesn’t like feeling helpless. When the time comes, she won’t even bat an eyelash at thumping some baddies.”

“I can relate,” I added, looking up at the ceiling as tiny, pink zebrican runes danced in little circles around the light fixture, like playful pixies. “Kid, has Tourniquet made any headway toward disabling the shield around Uptown?”

Swift pursed her lips. “I can ask her when we get to Supermax, Sir.”

“Why not right now?” I asked.

“I...I can’t hear her inside the truck. Everything is muffled and my...my magical sight isn’t working. It’s making me really nervous. It feels really enclosed and there’s no electrictrical lines. I think it’s even E.M. shielded. I wish—”

“You want to complain, Swift, you can get out and fly,” Taxi grumbled, kicking us into a higher gear that set the floor vibrating. “In here we are safe from dragon-fire, spell-fire, electrical discharge, and high explosives. It took forty ponies two days to enchant the armor and I burned out half a dozen horns making sure the exterior plating would take an armor piercing round without buckling. Do not criticize the…the...ehm...” My driver hesitated for a moment, then fell silent.

I slipped off my seat and trotted into the front compartment. I peering out the windshield, squinting at the darkened street. We were just edging around a bit of a broken blockade made from two wrecked buses, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly dangerous out there.

“The...what, Sweets?” I prompted, relaxing a little.

Taxi tugged her braid down her shoulder as she squeezed us through the gap with barely a meter on either side “Oh? Nothing, really. I just realized that I never came up with a name for it. I was going to break a bottle of champagne over the front bumper and everything if we hadn’t run out of the Vivarium like scared rats. Thanks for that, by the way. I knew you should have just left Iris somewhere doped up with enough Ace to leave her comatose for a year or two.”

“I’m starting to agree. Still, we can’t have a ride without a name. You have any ideas?” I asked as I slid into the passenger seat again.

She shook her head. “The lead engineer was a pony named ‘Tea Pot’, and he kept sending me bits of paper with the words ‘Wheelie Bunker’ across the top. He’s from Trottingham, though, so I’m pretty sure that’s a play on ‘wheelie bin’. I’m not calling it that.”

Swift stuck her head between the seats. “We could call it the ‘Death Cab For Cutie-Marks’! It is a mighty pony war taxi, after all! I saw some of the weapons. Where’d you even get a grenadine launcher? I thought the syrup was super illegal in Equestria.”

“It is, but Stella had a stock he was willing to part with in the name of saving the world,” Taxi replied.

“Grenadine?” I asked, quizzically. “Are we trying to get our opponents drunk?”

“It’s draconic booze, Hardy,” she explained. “It comes from a plant that grows on lava flows. Mix it with a solution of gasoline and it burns hotter than magnesium. And before you ask, no, I’m not naming it the ‘Death Cab for Cutie-Marks’. We’re not in a Crusades era propaganda piece or a comic book.”

Limerence called from the rear of the truck, “I suppose calling it ‘Alcoholics Pugnacious’ is too accurate.”

“It’s a little much, yes,” I grumbled, glancing at the beer bottle I hadn’t realized I was still holding.

We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the tires rumble over the pavement. The storefronts, lit by the infernal, eternal eclipse rolled by like empty-faces in a crowd, though we were quickly nearing the great, empty stretch of land between Detrot and Supermax. It had taken us longer to reach than the last time we’d driven that way; the roads were in worse condition and there were more blockades, though all seemed to have been abandoned.

I was just finishing my beer when Mags piped up, “I be having a name!”

Taxi and I exchanged a slightly weary look that said, ‘Fine. Indulge her. How bad could it be?’

“Alright,” I said, swallowing a sigh. “Mags, what is your idea?”

My ward poked her beak around my seat and fluffed her chest feathers, proudly. “It be full of big lizard drink, right?”

“Uh...yeah?”

“Then it be the Dragon Flagon Wagon!”

The D.F.W. toodled down the wasteland road toward Supermax at good speed, though in deceptive silence. A steady trickle of pink smoke had gradually filled the compartment with a friendly haze of whatever magic the engine was leaking. It was enough that I started to feel my muscles unkink, letting my brain drift. I was dozily watching the road and feeling pretty gnarly dejavu, when the great prison appeared in the misty distance. Coiling about the upper floors like an amorphous, cloud snake devouring an especially difficult prey, the File Cloud boiled and seethed with arcane energies. Once in awhile, an arc of lightning in a rainbow of colors would lance out, striking one of the corners of the rooftop.

A low fog was blanketing the wastes, leaving the windows damp and vision limited. It might have been natural, or one of the prison’s new defensive measures; I’m not a pegasus and I’ve never been sure how they can tell the difference between normal weather and the curated stuff.

“Swift, do they know we’re coming?” I asked.

“Yes, Sir!” she answered.

“Sweets, shut off the camo. I’d rather not surprise anypony with a rocket launcher.”

Taxi tapped the button on the dash and there was a soft thrum from the engine.

“We’re visible. I hope the P.A.C.T. aren’t looking this direction just now,” she murmured.

“I don’t think it matters to them one way or the other,” I said. “They’re confident. I want to keep them that way right up until the noose closes and the floor drops out from under them.”

“And...do we have a noose?” Limerence asked, padding into the front compartment, a bottle of apple-juice with a straw in it floating beside him.

“We’re here to buy some rope,” I replied, watching the approaching building with only a bit of trepidation. “Sweets? Are we still punched into the police radio network?”

Taxi shrugged and pointed at a dial on the console, then a mic nestled in a holder just below it. “The department’s transmitting equipment probably got eaten by beasts from another universe, but I can’t imagine the engineers broke the radio for laughs. Why?”

I gave the dial a quick spin, then picked up the mic and pressed the ‘talk’ button.

“Ahem...breaker one niner. This is King Cop to the Queen of the Signal. Call back?”

For a long minute, there was nothing, but finally the speaker sputtered and a cheerful trumpet reveille played so loudly I had to jerk the mic away from my face, lest I be deafened. It went on for a moment, then was replaced by a familiar, husky voice and a jazzy jingle.

“All hail the conquering champion!” Gypsy crowed. “I knew you’d make it! Nothing keeps a good cop down for long! Incoming roads are open and we’ve got the red carpet ready! You’re clear to approach the Everfree Fortress!”

“Good to hear it, Gypsy,” I replied, settling back in my seat. “How are you and Tourniquet getting along?”

“She’d scare the fur off me if I had any left, but no worse than some of the things I’ve seen in the File Cloud! Oh...by the way, somepony else wants to say ‘hello’!”

There was a slight shuffling and a weak, distant voice whispered, “Hey Hardy…”

I hesitated, then gripped the mic tightly in both hooves. “Wait...is that…-?”

“It’s me,” she said, so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard properly. There was no mistaking it, though; Radiophonic Telegraphica, back from the great beyond.

“Telly! Telly, by Celestia’s fluffy butt! Are you alright?”

“If you’re asking whether or not I’m alive, I’ve got no idea, but I can’t talk for long. I’ve got to concentrate on keeping myself together in here. It feels a bit like I’m balancing a bunch of spinning plates on my head. It’s easy to get lost.”

“It’s fine, Telly. Do what you need to do. It’s just damn fine to hear your voice, again!”

“You too, Hard Boiled. Be careful. I’ve got fifty bits in the Fortress betting pool on you only dying after the last cockroach if everything goes to shit. Don’t let me down.”

“I hope you never have to collect that, then. Be there soon!”

Up close, Supermax was looking less like a prison and more like a modern art installation funded by a rich, security conscious maniac. The File Cloud obscured much of the roof, but I couldn’t see any sane pony wanting to try to fight near the simmering field of magical energies growling and snapping, lit from within from time to time by strange lights. It looked much less like stable weather and more like a dance party inside a cumulonimbus.

Rows of sand-bags, decorated with the Aroyo’s style of strange paint and zebra symbols lined the road up to the building, forming little bunkers and fall-back points. They were manned by dozens of alertly armed sophonts, standing at attention, eyes following us in; zebras, griffins, ponies, and yaks stood shoulder to shoulder and all had at least a pistol or two.

Amongst their number a few pieces of heavy weaponry stood out. There was a gaunt earth pony with a sort of mobile turret mounted on his back with a saddle and seemingly operated by his partner, a muscle-bound griffin hen who was casually smoking a pipe as she lay against the sandbags and watched the sky. They were working alongside a team of four zebras manning what I could have sworn was an archaic catapult, though knowing the Ancestors it was probably altogether more deadly.

The D.F.W. was drawing more attention than I liked, but then it wasn’t designed for anything like discretion unless you liked giving your audience a radiation sunburn. Most of the mass of armed persons was pretty orderly and none broke ranks to get a closer look. It made me wonder who was training them, though considering most sported Aroyo markings or bright red crescent moons (or both), I should have guessed outright.

We trundled into the formerly disused parking lot, which had been packed to brimming with all manner of cars and vehicles. At the giant front gates, Wisteria and the Cult of Nightmare Moon’s lawyer, Geranium, were standing side by side next to the security door. Wisteria had her foal in a saddle-side holster on one side and a rifle on the other, while the unicorn was wearing a thick layer of body-armor, though no weapon.

Taxi flicked the ignition switch and set the parking brake, then shoved her door open. Wisteria’s purple mane was blowing as she chewed on one of the piercings in her lip like a nervous school-filly waiting for a date. Geranium looked like she was anticipating a dinner of lemons, limes and fresh piss.

I opened my door and the stairs slid into position. My driver appeared at my side, offering me her foreleg to lean on as I descended. My legs were feeling more stable than a couple hours back, but I doubted a jog was in the cards, so I took the proffered support.

“Well, well, well...What’s the idiot done to himself, now?” Geranium snarked and Wisteria gave her a sharp jab in the ribs.

“He died for our cause, ye bruja mare!” Wisteria snapped, “Tie dat sharp tongue in a knot!”

The former-lawyer gave me a crooked smile, rubbing the spot she’d been elbowed as though it were a regular occurance. “He died? He looks mighty lively. I’d like to think if he were going to die, he’d have the grace to leave instructions to free the innocents he allowed this machine to enslave.”

“Ye be eatin’ too much for a slave, bruja,” Wisteria grumbled, then turned look up at the truck. “We be welcomin’ ye back to the Fortress Everfree, Crusada. De Lady In Shadows be waitin’. I and I see ye have a new ride. Lovely, it be.”

“Aye! I named it!” Mags chirped, dropping onto my shoulders from the front seat. “It be the Dragon Flagon Wagon!”

“And a fine name it be,” Wisteria replied, reaching out to chuck Mags under the chin. “So, Crusada! Lady say ye be running from an angry mama-bear.”

“Tomorrow is going to be a bad day,” I said, “Today? We plan.”

“Sir?” Swift murmured, leaning against the truck’s back fender. Something about her voice was a little strange; she sounded distorted, like I was hearing her through a bad speaker.

“Kid...uh...I don’t know how to ask this gently, but do you know your head is glowing?”

She nodded and the soft, yellow halo of flickering light around her skull faded slightly.

“Sorry, Sir.. Tourniquet is helping me get up to speed on what all is going on. It’ll go away soon. Can I go interface with her? We’ll clear you a path downstairs. You should probably talk to Wisteria, though.”

“Um...Sure,” I muttered, then gave my whole body a good shake. “At some point you’re going to explain to me why you’re unworried every time something magical happens to your body.”

Swift grinned and licked her fangs. “Sir, after my teeth changed I’m pretty sure a part of me started getting off on it, just a little.”

“Oh Celestia!” I groaned. “Kid, I’ll pay you to never say that in front of anyone else.”

“Too late,” she giggled, nodding at the wall behind me. I looked up to find a camera with a blinking red light peering down at us.

“Ugh! Go do your ‘interfacing’! Just make sure you get a shower when you’re done!”

Her ears flattened and she clenched her back legs together, tucking her tail between them. “I-it’s not like that—”

“Yeah, I’m sure, kid. Shoo!” I waved a hoof at her and thankfully Taxi was still pressed against me, else my legs might have failed me again.

Swift lifted her nose in the air and attempted to look like indignantly regal as she marched toward toward the door to the prison. Pausing with one leg on the handle, she looked over her shoulder and said, “Just because I like you, Sir, doesn’t mean I won’t have my best friend—who is the whole city of Detrot—zap you in the tush!”

“And just because I like you doesn’t mean I won’t tell your mom—the maniacal pony who destroys buildings when she’s mad—that you’re ‘interfacing’ without introducing her to your marefriend!”

My partner gulped and darted inside. I waited until the door slammed shut, then sagged against Taxi. Recovery, it seemed, would have to wait.

“Dat was...evil, Crusada,” Wisteria commented, folding a wing over her happily cooing foal. “I and I must hear dis story of de angry ma-bear who destroys buildings. But first, I ask, what happen to ye legs?”

“Egg Pony got himself set on fire and all shot full of holes like stupid cardboard target,” Mags groused, giving me a flick in the ear with one of her talons. I rolled my barrel and she squealed as she was dumped on the ground. She squirmed about until she was on all fours and glared up at me. “It be making him grumpy.”

“We’ll walk and talk. Mags, go find something to eat and try to keep yourself from being seen, would you?” I said. At the word ‘eat’, Mags face lit up and she scampered through the security door before I’d reached ‘would you’. “I swear, that kid is going to kill me…”

“Ye should be so lucky, Crusada,” Wisteria snickered. “Dat be de easiest of deaths I and I see in de future.”

“Sweets, do you mind coming?” I asked, offering my leg to her. “I could use a crutch.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ve been using each other as crutches since we were kids, Hardy,” Taxi replied. “You want to change that, now?”

“Not a chance.” I slid my leg around her neck.

“If you don’t mind, I believe I too will go find something to eat,” Limerence mused, trotting down the truck’s staircase and shutting it behind himself. “Once I’m done, I will wait with the vehicle should we need to make another panicked retreat.”

“Make sure nopony screws with it,” Taxi added. “I don’t need more amateur Aroyo electricians under that hood until I’m there to supervise.”

“I and I could just order mine to stay away from de ‘Dragon Wagon’,” Wisteria commented, an amused glint in her eyes.

“No less than four foals found their special talents while ‘helping’ me with the design,” Taxi grumbled. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Aroyos in the last few days it’s that ‘don’t touch’ is not in your vocabularies when there’s technology to fiddle with.”

“Aye, that be true.”

“Now, if only they’d get a few cutie-marks in cooking,” Geranium complained, turning on her rear heels and heading for the security door. “I haven’t eaten a decent meal since the idiot locked me down here, then upended the planet!”

“Ye know he be not de source of de troubles!” Wisteria barked.

“I know nothing, because nopony tells me anything! It’s all ‘go talk to crazies about not being crazy, bruja mare’ and ‘stop seducing married stallions for fun, bruja mare’ and ‘don’t eat all the ice-cream, bruja mare’! Nopony will even tell me what ‘bruja’ means!”

“It means ‘witch’ in Zebrican,” Taxi said, rolling her eyes as she helped me hobble toward the thick steel door.

“Witch!? You’ve been calling me a ‘witch’ this whole time?!”

“I and I call ye only what ye earn,” Wisteria replied, pointing toward the picket lines out front of the prison. “Now, go see if de guards be needin’ coffee, bruja mare.”

I thought, briefly, that Geranium might fight her on that, but it looked like an argument she was used to losing. Heaving a put-upon sigh, she headed out towards the rows of sandbags and the attentive guard posts. I watched her leave and slowly shook my head.

“Part of me hoped she’d learn something having to serve others,” I murmured.

Wisteria snorted and gave her foal a quick squeeze with her wing. “She be never sayin’ it, but she be happier. I and I catch her singin’ when she makes de coffee or sweeps de floors. She be thinkin’ I do not know she sleepin’ wid one of de Aroyo boys, but half dat wing hears dem at night when she be forgettin’ silence magics and he bites her ears.”

“Huh. Well, whoever he is, give him my best. I was a little worried somepony would end up putting a bullet in her,” I said.

“Dat I will do,” she replied, following me through and letting the door swing shut.

I looked up at the now-familiar walls of the prison and let myself relax. There’d been so many bad days of late, and yet, Supermax was a place I could be assured of my own safety. It was probably a mistake, mind you, but I’d only had a little under twelve hours to recover emotionally from being a charred corpse before we had to beat our hasty retreat.

Overhead, the three levels of prison cells were all thrown open and the occupants moved about with purpose. There were foals hauling ammunition, aging mares moving food stuffs, and clever-taloned griffins hiding extra guns at choke points, all to generally making the already nigh impregnable fortress a little more impregnable. The din of moving hooves, feet, and other appendages was marked by something strange; a complete lack of conversation. The work was being done in almost total silence. I studied them for a moment and, slowly, a pattern started to emerge.

“They all have Tourniquet’s mark…” I murmured.

“True,” Wisteria said, scratching at her tattooed jawline with one toe. “It be strange, but busy work be done more quickly and dey do not object. Dey be like...many bodies, but de one mind. At de end of de day...dey awake and dance, sing, and be ponies again.”

I shuddered as a tiny filly with shining eyes who was carrying a pile of blankets on the level above us walked cleanly underneath a towering griffin without so much as brushing one of his legs. Neither she nor the griffin acknowledged each other and she continued on her journey to points unknown as though nothing had happened.

“Mercy. This is going to take some getting used to,” I muttered.

“You’re not kidding,” Taxi whispered, her eyes roving over the crowd of creatures moving around one another with unerring dexterity. “Oy...and Swift is the queen.”

“Don’t remind me. It could be worse, though. Tourniquet is a good seed. This won’t be the first group who integrated into Equestrian life from some strange place.”

“I know if I could leave my body to do paperwork while I sleep, I’d do it in a second,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Me too,” I muttered, then stomped a hoof as that same shiver that’d been working on the back of my neck started creeping into my chest. “Let’s leave the philosophical implications of this to ponies who’ve got more time to waste.”

“Heh, I and I be less worried de more time I be spendin’ wid dem,” Wisteria said, holding out a leg toward one of the side passages. “Dey work, yes, but de magic...she be not very creative. Dey do not write, nor sing when de magic is on dem. De Lady of Shadows be liking song and dis be only de way tings be because we must get tings done quickly. She say we have but four days, till blood will run in de alleys.”

The lower levels were a blessed relief from the bizarre ‘factory floor’ sensations that pervaded the prison proper. I heard the first strains of a familiar old show-tune being belted out by a scratchy baritone, then laughing voices exchanging cheerful greetings. As we rounded the stairwell, we came across a young colt with a mane desperately in need of a cut sitting on the steps.

“Epoxy! I and I be tellin’ ye to stay off de steps! Ponies got to be walkin’ here!” Wisteria admonished.

The colt leapt to his hooves. “Sorry, Marm! I and I just wanted to see de Crusada’s friends! De Warden came through and since de Crusada be dead—” His mouth slowly fell open as he laid eyes on me. He took a step back and his flank bumped against the railing

“D-dead?!” he squeaked.

“I would take it as a personal favor if you didn’t tell anyone I’m not,” I said, quietly.

“B-but dis be...dis be fake?” he asked, shoving a hoof into his mane and producing a wrinkled flier. He thrust it at me.

On the flier it said across the top in an obnoxiously officious font, ‘All Who Opposed Equestria Will Die.’, then below that was a black and white picture of a charred body, curled into a fetal position, laying on the front walk of a smoldering house. Most of my face was still reasonably undamaged, though the fire had done a number on my ears and one eye. I could see where the gun harness had melted into the flesh of my neck. The photography was cheaply done, but effective; probably a corner-store camera.

Across the bottom, in bold letters, there were these words:

‘This is Hard Boiled. He opposed efforts to restore law and order to this city in a misguided effort to take control of the police department and destroy what little remains of Detrot’s government. He was killed after taking multiple hostages. His final act was to set fire to this house and everyone inside.’

Acts of criminality or riot will be met with maximum force while we attempt to take back our fair city from those who would threaten her. Curfews remain in effect - Stay inside your homes, do not leave, do not see to neighbors or relatives. We will restore order and discover what has happened to the Princesses. Remain calm. This will all be over soon.’

Staring at my own scorched remains, I thought I smelled a hint of smoke again.

“It’s real,” I said, softly. “I mean, the garbage at the bottom isn’t true, but that picture is me.”

“So what dey be sayin’, dat ye cannot die—” the colt began, but I cut him off with one hoof on his.

“I can die. It just doesn’t stick. I can’t explain it here, but please keep it to yourself that you saw me. I’ve had a tough couple days and could use some rest.”

A mischievous smile split the colt’s face and he pulled a marker out of his mane, then held it out. “I and I can do dis...for de Crusada’s autograph?”

Popping the end off the marker with my teeth, I reversed it and quickly scribbling ‘Hard Boiled, Crusader’ across the picture of my dead body. I passed it to him and he took it in both hooves like an object of worship, then looked up at me with glistening eyes. I could feel Taxi’s expression over my shoulder, but I was carefully not looking at her.

“Put that somewhere out of the way for a couple days, alright?” Reaching out, I cupped Epoxy’s head and pulled him into a conspiratorial huddle. “Can you imagine the look on the baddies’ faces when I show up again out of nowhere?”

The colt’s eyes lit up and he nodded, then scampered up the steps the way we’d come, his prize held carefully in his teeth. Wisteria grimaced at his back, then started down the stairs again.

“Sweets? You have something to say?” I growled, resting my weight on my driver’s barrel again.

“Just that you’re going to have to run long and far to avoid scenes like that becoming a regular occurance.”

“If Princess Celestia tries to bring any medals near me, I want you to have the D.F.W. running and ready to leave the country,” I said, tugging at my coat collar. “I am not doing ceremonies, press conferences, or late night talk shows.”

Whatever witchcraft Tourniquet pulled managed to clear the hall nearest us, then Wisteria led us through a number of side-passages and maintenance tunnels which were, likewise, empty, though almost all showed signs of recent occupancy. It seemed any spare inch of space on a wall was fair-game to one of the army of bored artists hiding in Supermax while the world outside slowly froze. I let my hooves follow Wisteria whilst quietly studying the paintings.

My own face showed up more than a few times, alongside the words ‘Crusader Will Save Us’. There were plenty of interesting sexual suggestions involving myself, Swift, or Sweet Shine. There was a picture of a cab that was, if anything, more improbable than the monster we’d just ridden in on; I don’t remember the Night Trotter having eight wheels, giant fins, or Princess Luna in lingerie hanging off the back wielding three alarmingly phallic warhammers.

Despite the months to adjust, it was still a little intimidating to realize just how far and wide the story of Crusader had managed to spread, helped along by what I’d come to recognize as an irritatingly efficient public relations team.

At last, after a trip that’d taken longer than it would have on better days, we stood outside the open door of the Supermax control room. The place still smelled strongly of stale beer, but somepony had at least thrown some clean sheets over the couches, cleared out most of the bottles, and replaced the bong-water with something that looked a bit fresher. It made me long for my own sofa, now ashes and springs, laying in a burned out pit somewhere across town.

Through the open door to Tourniquet’s chamber, I could see a long dining table fit to seat twenty ponies, which was covered in a giant map of the city. A soft, yellow glow radiated from overhead, casting thin shadows over the table. Tourniquet and Swift were nowhere to be seen, but toward the back of the massive space I could see two glowing, red eyes and hear a pair of soft snores; Goofball was laying back there, keeping watch.

“Come on in, Hardy,” Tourniquet said, her voice sounding like it was next to my ear. “We are waiting for you.”

Carefully disengaging my leg from Taxi, I gave her a reassuring smile as I stood on my own four hooves. My knees trembled, but held as I plodded into the chamber and onto the carpeted floor space. It was so very different from that evening not long ago when my partner, my driver, and I stumbled into the lair of a murdering cultist and found a half-metal child, weeping in the dark.

“Who all is ‘we’?” I asked, limping to the table and studied the map for a moment. It was covered in notes, pins, and felt-tip pen, but was still recognizable as one that typically hung on the wall of most of the public libraries.

A swirl of something like blue smoke poured down from overhead in a thin, curling stream and alighted on the floor. Dual yellow lights flickered into being as the cloud took on a vaguely equine shape. Gypsy’s hooves settled on the carpet and she slid onto one of the benches, crossing her ethereal knees one over top of the other. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that misty face might have a smug smile on it.

“Well, I’m here, daddy-o.”

“Is...is that...Gypsy? The disk-jockey from the radio?” Taxi asked, a bit of alarm in her voice.

“She’s also the pony who controls the File Cloud. Gypsy, meet my driver,” I said, waving at her forehead.

“Good to meetcha, Sweet Shine! Big fan of your work!”

My driver’s brow knitted together. “My work?”

The ghostly figure shrugged and a manila folder seemed to flow out of her forelegs, landing on the table. She pushed it across into Taxi’s waiting hooves. “Early on, before I figured out how the Cloud worked, I had nothing to do but read police reports all day. Detrot might have seen an epidemic of Red-Sky if you hadn’t caught Dizzy Mal. They found out that stuff builds up in your system if you’re not a minotaur. Two years of regular use and one day, you suddenly go into a violent rage until your heart stops. You saved a bunch of lives.”

Taxi picked up the case file and flicked through it. A tiny smile crossed her face as she came to the picture of her and Fox Glove, standing side by side over the cuffed form of a grimacing stallion. She ran a toe down her partner’s cheek, then sighed and shut the file.

“Sorry to bring up bad memories,” Gypsy murmured, quickly taking the file and stuffing it into her own chest where it vanished in the fog.

“No, those were good memories,” my driver replied. “Fox Glove used me, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have some good times. I got my revenge, so I can remember him fondly.”

Before I could ask what she meant, a soft buzzing filled the room, then a swarm of Ladybugs poured in, landing on every available surfaces and all across the map on the table. The tiny insects perched on the bench, on the floor, and a few on my shoulders. I gave them a little shake, but they refused to be dislodged. A moment later, Queenie zipped in behind them, the giant bug landing heavily on the bench beside me, turned in a little circle and settled.

“Ahhh, it is good to see the Detective again,” it chirped, “We most enjoyed your latest death! Extremely violent!”

“I wondered where you’d managed to hide yourself during this,” I grumbled. “No soaps to keep you interested?”

“Quite the contrary!” Queenie replied, cheerfully. “We have found little need of soap operas of late! You ponies seem bent on making the world as exciting as possible!”

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my muzzle. “Who else is attending this little meeting?”

A rattling laugh rattled through my brain as my grandfather strolled out of the darkness beside Goofball. The great brute of a dog let out a frightened yelp as the tweed-jacketed skeleton seemed to appear at his front leg. The beast’s two sleeping heads jerked awake and quickly centered on the intruder. A soft growl boiled out of all three of the demonic hound’s throats, but my grandfather seemed unimpressed. He leveled his empty eyes-ockets at the mighty creature until, with a soft whimper, Goofball set his heads back on his legs.

“Now, then...Isn’t this interesting?” Bones cackled. “I see a ghost, a bug, and a dead pony walking. That says to me ‘secret meeting’, and thirty years on, I find I can’t get enough of those.”

“Bones, isn’t it?” Gypsy asked, drawing a swirl of misty air behind her leg in the shape of a dog bone. “You’re popular talk at the Vivarium. You made an impression, strutting into the commissary, declaring you needed cigarettes for the war effort, then muscling into that poker game. I’m pretty sure half the ponies in that room are still wondering if someone slipped them something in their evening rations. Quite a few are claiming that even the dearly departed are working for Chief Dead Heart.”

“Isn’t that the case?” my grandfather replied, settling himself at the table.

“Tell me you didn’t...” I groaned.

Bones opened his coat, showing a fresh pack of cigarettes tucked in his pocket. “Believe me, it did less harm than lurking around craving a smoke would have. I may or may not have also said you were the favored of the heavens and the Princesses’ chosen warrior of light or some such nonsense. Those ponies needed a morale boost. You never saw such a bunch of drooping faces.”

“And when somepony wants to know why a jovial skeleton is wandering about smoking and playing poker, I just tell them he’s my prophet or something?” I asked, irritably. “Speaking of that, how are you here? Did you follow me?”

“Prophet! I like that! I didn’t follow you, though. It’s amazing what you can learn with a little discrete lurking in the place everypony else is avoiding. That ‘Jade’ pony is a nasty customer, isn’t she? She was drinking in the commissary and muttering about peeling your flesh off and wearing it for a coat. Then she got this big smile that would have set my testicles crawling into my throat if I still had any. I asked around until I discovered the most likely place you’d run if somepony were to try to kill you and went for a little run through the sewers. Now then, let’s get this conspiratorial planning session going! Anypony mind if I smoke?”

“I mind.”

Tourniquet’s ‘voice’ shook the chamber from end to end, setting the dust jumping in the air. Bones paused, a cigarette halfway to his lipless teeth, and slowly spat it back in the pack. He glanced at Gypsy whose expression might have been smug, if she’d had an expression to show, then at Queenie, who was eating a cake roll it’d gotten from somewhere.

Overhead, light pulsed across the ceiling, spreading down the tangled web of spaghetti-like wires as they began to unwind like a bundle of flexing, metallic worms. The roof bulged downward, expanding until it began to sink toward the floor in a way that reminded me of a deep sea creature’s pseudopod. It gradually unraveled, spreading open until it revealed my partner and Tourniquet, laying on a bed of cords and wiring.

Swift lay there, dwarfed against the mechanical pony’s chest, wrapped in her forelegs like a foal. The size disparity was well on the way to disturbing, since Swift only came up to Tourniquet’s chest and the construct was looking entirely too much like an alicorn for my comfort. She hadn’t sprouted a horn or anything of the sort, but the wires tethering her to the ceiling had taken on a golden sheen closer to where they connected to the spine and her gem-like eyes shimmered as flashes of electricity danced inside them.

I coughed into my hoof and Swift jerked a little, then sat up and opened her eyes; they were still glowing, if anything more vigorously. Her mane looked a right mess, sticking out in every direction. She had a blissed out smile on her face.

“Now, there’s something you don’t see everyday,” Bones mused, tucking his pack of cigarettes away as he addressed the two of them. “I recognize the short pegasus, but what sort of beasty might you be?”

“I’m not a ‘beasty’ of any sort,” Tourniquet said, curtly as she carefully separated herself from Swift. “My mother built this prison to keep me alive. My circulation fans are old, though, and I’d like to get another few years out of them before they need service. You are the first Hard Boiled, right?”

Bones let out a hissing chuckle, smacking himself on the chest with his foreleg. “That I am, Miss Cogs! I met a few people that were more metal than pony during the war, but you look like you decided to camp out in a dragon’s mouth!”

“At least I don’t look like I camped out in a graveyard!” she bit back, then stuck her tongue out at him.

“Heh, fair enough! I’m still getting used to being amongst the undead. Thirty years is long enough to think things through, but you don’t really get to come to terms with death when it’s the difference between waking up with skin one morning and waking up the next without.” His eyes drifted over to Gypsy. “And what are you, Miss?”

“Scientific idiots during the war using an ancient magical nexus to store a living body,” she replied, blowing a bit of fog away from her face like a strand of smoke. “Take it or leave it.”

“Hrmph. Succinct, but I’ve heard worse.” He turned to Queenie. “Now, if I didn’t know better, I’d say this here looks like a...a Ladybug swarm, but...you aren’t a ladybug, unless somepony stuck a magnifying glass to my head.”

“You may call our representative ‘Queenie’, Mister Hard Boiled! It is most pleasing to see what is left of you once more! I had believed your death to be permanent and found time between ‘Lives Of The Restless’ episode sixty eight and ‘Forever The Young Shall Eat Cake’ episode one hundred and ninety three to feel true sadness! It was most exciting!”

“I take it back,” he grunted, pulling a flask out of his pocket and tipping it back over his teeth. “Definitely a Ladybug. So, let’s get to it, shall we?”

“Mister Bones, does the word ‘secret’ mean nothing whatsoever to you?” Taxi asked, sliding into a seat beside the skeleton.

“Much the same thing I’m sure it means to you, Miss Shine,” he replied, passing her the flask. “Now, I could be cooling my hooves at the Vivarium, teaching wet-behind the ears children which end of a gun makes the loud noise, but you’ve got a commando sitting here with more field experience than all of you put together and I suspect you’re planning an assault on The Office which is like to pile up some bodies. I figure it can’t hurt to offer my expertise.”

I leaned over the giant map and nudged one of the pegs sticking out of it. “Well, as you say and so long as you’re here. The Office is where I intend to hit, but as you can imagine, there are complications. Tourniquet, Swift, have you two figured out how these bastards are evading detection?”

Swift was the one who answered, stepping up to the side of the map and putting her knees on the edge of the table. “Yes and no, Sir. We’re pretty sure they’re using some kind of magic like the Scry, except in reverse. They did take one of the Moon Guns, but those are powered by the moon and we don’t know how the eclipse-”

“Oi!You lot let these maniacs get ahold of the Luna Lasers?!” Bones groaned.

“Luna Lasers?” Gypsy asked, the lights in her eyes dancing merrily.

“Weapons prototypes from the war,” I explained, then nodded. “Bones? You know something about those guns?”

“They’re what that monster on your leg is based off of,” he said, reaching across to tap the sleeve where my revolver was hidden. “There were some experimental enchantments on them; early versions of the spell that eventually became the Grand Shadow.”

“The Grand Shadow?” I asked.

“The anti-tracking magic on the Crusader weapons. I would imagine, if they got a bit to study them, they might reverse engineer something useful from those spells. Still, I thought all the Luna Lasers were destroyed.”

I gave him a sardonic look. “The same way you destroyed the last Crusader?”

He had the good grace to look a bit embarrassed. “I don’t trust dragons, son. Never have, never will. Those were different times.”

“Not as different as some of us might like,” Gypsy commented, swirling around to one side of the table and pointing toward one edge of the map. “Our most recent estimates say there are at least twenty full sized fire breathers on the outskirts at any given time, each taking a different sector of the road network. Considering we now know the Emberites were only holding part of the northerly areas, that leaves us in a right pickle.”

“We know when they’ll attack, at least,” I said, tapping my toe on the map where a red ‘x’ was marked with the words ‘Office’. “Four days from now, they’re coming for us, one way or another. If we take the Office tomorrow, though, we’ll eliminate their biggest information advantage; the Scry.”

“We’ve got no shortage of bodies and weapons to throw at them, but that’s a lot of death I think we’d all rather avoid,” Bones murmured. “What’s your plan, Hardy?”

“Right now? I...hrm…” I tilted my head to one side, then the other, trying to get a feel for the positions available. Bits of red string seemed to suggest the places where diamond dog tunnels ran, while the sewers were marked out with Aroyo iconography. We controlled much of the city below ground level, so long as one didn’t mind tromping through crap or dog mines, though there was less the closer one got to Uptown. “Alright, we need to hit the Office as quickly and quietly as possible. Do we have any information on how fortified that position is?”

Tourniquet extended a single wire from her back and used it to trace a circle around our destination. “Detective, I’m pretty sure it makes my security look lax. It’s in a nexus of positions within the city which we’ve been able to track by having our people ‘pop up’ in different locations and try to attract P.A.C.T. attention. They’re not very discriminatory with dispatching kill teams for any group of ponies on the street greater than ten or fifteen.”

“What’d you learn?” I asked.

“That playing chicken with killers is dangerous,” Gypsy commented, propping her chin on her ephemeral hooves. “On the upside, our losses have been minimal, and we know their response times to any given point in the city. They’re protecting very specific areas, which include the Office, but they’ve got that spot locked up tight. Anypony who even looks like they’re going near it, they’ll have ten squads of Blackcoats using them for chew toys inside of six minutes. An air approach would give you about three minutes. That doesn’t address the issue of guards on site.”

“What about the sewers?” Taxi asked, pulling her checkered saddlebag up onto the table and rooting around until she found a celery stick to chew on. “Could we use the Underdogs and burrow in?”

“Not unless you fancy trying to dig through five meters of reinforced, enchanted concrete,” Bones said, dusting at his jacket. “Apple Bloom never built anything by half measures when she had a budget.”

“She doesn’t build anything by half measures without a budget, either,” I said, dryly. “Still, if we’re not getting in from the air or underground, and a surface approach is probably a death trap...where does that leave us?”

Taxi squinted, then leaned back in her seat.

“Distraction,” she murmured.

“Sweets?”

“A distraction, Hardy. They’ve set up a situation perfect for dealing with small, relatively uncoordinated groups of ponies or that assumes they can perfectly track our movements. Why don’t we use that to our advantage?”

Bones rubbed his jawline in a way I found internally upsetting for some reason, not least because it made a noise like chalk grinding across asphalt. “Hrm...I think see what yon filly has in mind. If I were these Blackcoat bastards, I’d want staging areas around the city. Those need regular resupply and fresh troops and they think the only credible threats to them are holed up in little forts and too scared to come out for a tussle. Mighty fine targets, if you ask me.”

“So we hit the staging areas,” I said, nodding as the shape of their plan unfolded. “We could take a few dozen small teams of five or ten, move them into position underground, then do as much damage as possible with explosives and spellfire, then retreat after we’ve confirmed a response.”

Tourniquet’s crystalline eyes spun a bit faster, then she let out a soft, whining breath. “I wouldn’t trust anypony who hasn’t taken my mark to organize all of that in this short a timeframe. The odds of being spied on are too great and all it takes is one and the jig is up.”

“Then they’re the ones we’ll use,” I continued. “We’ll operate in cells. Each cell has a leader, who is one of the marked ponies.” I sucked a breath as something hit me. “Oog...We’re going to be tipping our hoof something fierce letting them know just how coordinated we are.”

“I do believe our hooves will be tipped by almost any action we take,” Bones agreed, “Still, best do it undermining their information superiority, right, ladies and gentlecolts? Without this ‘Scry’, they’ll have to rely on scouting. If they want to attack us, they’ll be doing it blind.”

“While the attack is going on, we hit the Office in the transport with stealth mode,” I explained, tugging off my hat and using it to point at the main access road towards the skyscraper in question. “We’ve got a grenadine launcher that’ll melt through anything and enough horsepower to pull the front doors off their hinges. With their support pulled away, all we have to do is get inside...and...get upstairs. Damn.” I turned to Bones. “I don’t suppose you could draw us a map of the interior, could you?”

“Oh, I could, I suppose…” he mused, then clacked his teeth together and one of the lights in his eyes vanished for a half second. I realized he’d winked at me. “Or I could come along! Hard Boiled and Hard Boiled ride again! They’ll never know what hit ’em!”

Act 3 Chapter 46 : Battlestations!

"The great commanders don't stand in little tents on hilltops drinking gin and tonics, watching their soldiers fight. The great commanders don't charge at the head of their formations. The great commanders don't cower in their castles while their warriors go to battle.

The great commanders sit in tiny offices, making sure everyone has enough food and water, every weapon is sharp, and every soldier knows they are valued for what they contribute to the effort."

- Princess Celestia in her book 'On The Unpleasantness Of Warfare : A Skill To Be Studied, Mastered, And Then Avoided'

One would think that I’d have spent the rest of the night in frantic, maddened activity, arranging the battlefield and giving speeches to the troops. I certainly thought that was what was going to happen, but Taxi snatched the only cup of coffee I could find right out of my hooves. Unfortunately, I was still only on my legs by dint of a shoulder to lean on which left my crutch more or less in control of our destination; dull and infuriatingly pacifying when all I wanted to do was rip the throats out of a few mutants, but better than trying to help with the logistics when I could barely keep my eyes open.

After the meeting, Taxi dragged me—or rather ‘helped’ me—into one of the solitary confinement cells just below the control room. The four starkly unpainted walls hadn’t yet suffered under the hooves of the Everfree Fortress’s resident graffiti artists and the cot was a lumpen thing shoved in a corner, but to a pony who’d spent most of yesterday dead or running in mortal terror, it was the finest bedroom one could have asked for. My driver laid me down, unzipped my heart-pouch and plugged me into the wall, then went to the door and pulled it shut, cutting off the distant sounds of an army preparing for war. When she returned, she curled up against my back and put her legs around me.

I let time slip away. At some point, a rotund fluff and feather pillow shoved itself into my forelegs, made a few sleepy chirping sounds, then passed out in a softly purring heap.

I woke feeling energized and—surprisingly—alone.

The lumpy mattress aside, as I stretched my legs they felt strong and steady. Grabbing a muzzle full of my coat, I tugged it off my flank and sat there in the silence of the tiny cell, studying the golden scales on my hip. A part of me wanted to resent them; after all, my talent led me to that front porch, staring down a row of guns, with that toothy prick holding the Helm of Nightmare Moon as he ordered his beasts to use me for target practice.

Still, hadn’t this been what I signed up for when I cracked Stone Shine’s skull with that bat? I could have lain there on the floor of my bedroom and let the intuition pass. I might even have found a way to recover from the death of my best friend in an apparent house fire at such a tender age and gone on to get my mark in spoon making or woodworking or something like that.

Who knows? Maybe I could have been one of those poor souls upstairs, praying to images of a mad, drunk, bagel addicted messiah to save them from the end.

I lifted the Crusader, running my toe over the shining pictograph of the sun as another unpleasant question occurred to me: had there been a hoof in my fate sometime before my cutie-mark appeared? It certainly seemed so. There were too many coincidences, too many threads connecting themselves to one another.

“Detective? I don’t believe you’ve had enough rest.”

The voice sounded like she was in the room with me but seemed modulated somehow such that I felt neither surprise nor alarm at being spoken to by somepony invisible.

I raised my head and settled my coat back over my hip.

“I feel fine, Tourniquet. What’s going on?” I asked, picking up my hat and blowing dust off the brim.

“Well, in that case, Swift wanted me to give you an update when you woke. The Aroyos are moving into positions for the attack. We identified seven staging bases where Blackcoats are coming and going regularly, and they are going to be hit simultaneously.”

“Good. What about the Helm of Nightmare Moon? Any luck tracking it?”

“Yes and no. We followed it right up until they moved through the Uptown shield. After that we lost them, but the shield did waver for a minute when they passed through. If they can make holes in the shield without bringing it down completely, that would tend to suggest it’s being projected from somewhere outside; the laws of arcane dynamics still apply, even if these ponies seem bent on twisting them all out of shape. I’m working that angle right now.”

“Interesting,” I murmured, heading to the door. It swung open on its own, revealing the bare hall outside. “Where is everypony?”

“It’s half past midnight, Detective. Big day, tomorrow, and I figured if our opponents were going to retaliate, it would take them a while to organize so we might as well be rested. The combat teams are ready to strike, though, per your instructions. All they need is the word.” There was a long pause, then she added, a little grumpily, “Your grandfather is an unsettlingly capable sneak.”

“What do you mean?”

“He moves around inside me with near impunity, and I have been almost totally unable to follow him because he seems to have some kind of sixth sense for the presence of sensors and cameras. I don’t like it one bit.”

“What’s that spooky bastard done now?” I asked.

“He’s standing behind you.”

I stopped halfway through a stride with one leg in the air, then set it carefully down and looked over my shoulder to find Bones leaning on the lintel of the doorway I’d just left, cigarette clenched between his teeth and smoke rising from the holes where his eyes had once been. If he could have smiled, I’m sure he would have.

“Mornin’, Junior,” Bones snickered, stubbing out his cigarette on the bottom of his bony hoof. “I can’t say I’m impressed with your security awareness. Resting in an unlocked room monitored by only two cameras and three motion detectors? Not healthy for a pony as popular as you are.”

“You should have seen my old apartment,” I replied, working my muzzle a couple times. I raised my head and called, “Tourniquet! Can you direct me to a toothbrush and a place to piss?”

“Down the hall, last door on the left,” she answered.

I set off at a trot, enjoying the feeling of functional legs. Bones quickly caught up, the cloud of cigarette smoke following him down.

“So, sonny… Sneaking into a heavily fortified building. You aren’t nervous enough for this to be your first rodeo, but you’re not paranoid enough to have done this more than a few times. What’s your plan?”

“Right now? We use Tourniquet’s distraction and hope it works. If it doesn’t, we blow up the Dragon Flagon Wagon and escape in the resulting chaos. Everything else is details.”

Bones stopped where he was and I continued on, hooves clattering on the concrete flooring. After a moment, he cantered around in front of me and put his toe on my chest to bring us both to a halt. I don’t know as he looked worried, but something about his stance suggested he had some questions.

“I’ve spent the last four hours prepping supplies and stuffing that wheeled abomination with every single trick I could think of for getting us there, safely. You’re telling me our attack hinges on causing an explosion and running away if things go sideways?”

“Seems like a decent strategy. Swift has an encyclopedic knowledge of the sewers that the metal filly stuffed in her brain along with who knows what else. The truck is a mobile fort. Limerence can mask the sounds of our approach, Taxi can kill damn near anything she gets into close combat with, and if worst comes to worst, I have five more crystal rounds in this thing,” I said, shaking my sleeve back off the Crusader.

Bones shook his head and tugged at his ragged coat. “Sonny, they’ve got an army and their own fortress. Crusaders are dangerous to use on a good day, but if you pop that round in there, it’ll light us up like a flare on a clear night to any unicorn within eight miles. You might have felt invincible, but the Grand Shadow doesn’t work when you’ve let the berserker off the chain, and you’re not invincible when it stops: you’re dead, little as that might mean to you most days.”

“I know. I’m grasping at straws, here,” I muttered, pausing at a door labeled ‘restroom’. “I’ve no idea how this can go well, though. This is the best I’ve got.”

The skeleton’s shoulders dropped as he stuffed his hoof back in his coat and plucked out his box of cigarettes. He stared forlornly at the last fag in the pack, then put it away. I ducked into the toilet and went to find a toothbrush and soap. When I finished with my ablutions, he was gone.

Little had changed as I stepped out into the chilly air outside Supermax. The guard posts were as full and vigilant as ever, but none seemed much interested in me. They held their places, watching the distant fog for signs of movement. My breath clouded in front of my face, but that was becoming the norm. I held my coat tighter and sighed, heading for the truck, as ready to face death as a traumatized multiple-murder victim could be.

Limerence peered out of the passenger window, then quickly rolled it down. “Detective? Do you need me to get something else done? I’m afraid I had to rest a bit, but I finished your checklist.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I was asleep until about fifteen minutes ago.”

He blinked a couple of times. “Asleep? Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m feeling pretty good, actually. Why?”

“Because we either have a changeling wandering around wearing your face, or you’ve been sleepwalking in an extremely unsettling fashion,” he replied, pushing the door open and stepping down onto the pavement with a roll of paper tucked in his front pocket.

That brought me up short. “Hold the phone. What?”

“You’ve been running about like a mad pony all night long, Detective! I had to snatch a few hours’ sleep, but I spoke to some of the guards when I woke up and they said you’d been at it until about a half hour ago. I was under the impression you wished to remain relatively unseen, but you seemed unbothered.”

I flicked my eyes towards the guard posts, then back to Limerence and the scroll in his pocket.

“Is...is that the checklist I left you?” I asked, holding out my hoof.

“Eh...yes, yes it is,” he replied, proffering the paper with his horn. “Is something peculiar happening?”

“Let me know when something peculiar is not happening; I’d like to mark the occasion,” I muttered, taking the scroll and quickly unrolling it.

The densely numbered checklist was in my hoofwriting, but only if I’d taken a course in calligraphy that I couldn’t remember sitting in for. The letters were shaped in the same sharp style, but with little flourishes and dots that leant the whole thing an officious air.

I squinted at the first few items and mouthed the words as I read:

1.Examine text of ‘A Military History of the Cutie Mark Crusades’; apply information from page 115 to current strategic situation and give to pony known as Wisteria.

2.Arrange and distribute anti-necromantic spell works for Vivarium, Supermax, and other defended locations.

3.Examine artifacts from the Archive to determine if any of them might be used against aerial attacks and—

I stopped and unrolled the page the rest of the way. It tumbled over my leg and onto the gravel.

“I gave you this?” I asked, turning it one way, then the other.

“Er...yes?” he murmured, a tad uncertainly, “You had several similar lists. Even Mags received one, I believe.”

Letting the page drop, I shut my eyes and put my hoof on my breast above my heart plug. I sent a quick, querying thought in the direction of my heart and got the oddest sensation in return; I saw a flash of powerful moonlight as though through closed eyelids, felt a distinct grumpiness, then tasted custard.

“Lim, did any of those orders seem dangerous or unusual?” I asked cautiously.

The Archivist gave me a curious look, then carefully picked up the list and ran his eyes down the page. “Not that I noticed. They seem quite sensible directives, if a tad specific and detail oriented for a pony I generally associate with driven mania. I simply figured you had Tourniquet assist you. Would you please explain before I allow my burgeoning urge to hit you with a stun spell and strap you to something to finish this conversation become an inconvenience?”

“The answer won’t make you feel any better, but I don’t think we’re in any danger,” I answered, turning to the D.F.W, which had a few new and interesting protrusions from some of the weapon mountings. “I met Bones on the way up here. What did he do to the truck?”

“Largely adding duffle bags full of stabilized explosives and loading it with some of the spare armaments. If you want specifics, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him yourself.” Limerence hesitated, then quickly wet his lips with his tongue and added, “Detective, I feel I should mention this, but am uncertain how.”

“Go on?”

“The necromancy that created your grandfather’s current condition is one that the Archivists are...familiar with, though have had no direct dealings in...aside from my brother. The magic is quite old, but it is one Zefu was very well-versed in. I had hoped it merely a coincidence, but—”

I narrowed my eyes and took a step forward until my muzzle was next to his ear and his next to mine, lest there be any prying ears about.

“Why didn’t you bring this up before?” I whispered.

“I wasn’t sure. I was able to get close enough to Bones to run a quick signature scan, though. It is most assuredly Zang Dynasty zebra necromancy: Zefu’s specialty.”

“We saw his body, Lim,” I murmured.

“Did we?” he asked, his voice chilly. “Or did we see a corpse burnt beyond recognition? He would have the requisite skills and clearances to modify the Archive’s defenses. Even if he was not alive when your grandfather was put in his current predicament—”

“He might still have learned from whoever did. Alright, fine. Why bother to fake his death, then?”

“Why are you appearing to be dead to most everypony in the city?” he pointed out. “My father had many powerful friends. If I thought, for an instant, that somepony like you were pursuing me while I attempted to achieve some great undertaking that required me to be mobile, I would wish to appear dead as well. Zang Dynasty necromancy would be entirely capable of many of the acts we have seen; burning of souls, theft of souls, storage of souls and so on.”

“But...but why? Why kill Don Tome?”

Limerence shook his head, a little sadly. “Father would never allow truck with the sort of monsters we now face. He was dangerous to anypony who dared threaten the stability of Detrot. I pray I am wrong, but...too many things are assembling into a picture that points to my brother being alive, in some capacity. I would like to think Zefu incapable of such vile acts, but...”

I put my foreleg around his neck and held him against my shoulder for a moment.

“For now, keep this between us,” I murmured. “We don’t need Bones haring off to hunt down your brother and beat thirty years’ worth of resentment out of him if Zefu is still around. If he lives—”

“If he lives, I will have explanations out of him before he dies,” Limerence promised, then backed away and subtly tilted his head toward the prison.

I spun in time to catch Mags before she could attach herself to my head, grabbing her out of midair and hugging the little ball of squirming fluff against my breast. She giggled softly, wriggling out of my grasp and spinning onto the asphalt in front of me, coming to a semblance of attention. She was wearing what looked like a tiny, pink bulletproofed vest and her holstered pistol. A checklist exactly like Lim’s was stuffed down the front pocket.

“Egg Pony! I finished with dumb list and I be ready for fighting!” she declared.

Reaching out, I tugged the checklist out of her vest and read it. It was only a fifth as long as Lim’s.

1.Get your gun and load it.

2.Find a pony called Fluff N Stuff and get a bulletproof vest. If Fluff N Stuff argues, tell them Hard Boiled will feed them their own lungs with a fork.

3.Find Wisteria and tell her you are going into a fight with Hard Boiled and ask her about a shield talisman.

4.Get food, then sleep for six hours.

5.Find, steal, or borrow at least five magazines for your pistol.

I dropped the list and sat down hard, putting my front hooves on the pavement in an attempt to steady myself.

‘Alright, focus. Nightmare Moon or some part of her was out there running around with my meat suit. Why?’ I thought, then shuddered at the image of her rushing around wearing my body. ‘And why didn’t Gale stop her?’

“Lim, I want you to discreetly find out as much of what I spent last night having ponies do as you can,” I ordered, pointing back toward Supermax. “Then get me something to eat. Sweets and Swift need to be ready to rumble inside of an hour.”

“What are you going to be doing?” he asked.

“Sitting in the truck, plugged into the cigarette lighter,” I replied, patting my chest with my toe. I turned to my ward. “Mags, did I tell you why I was taking you along?”

She did her very best ‘harrumph’ and her feathers bristled. “Like Egg Pony could leave me! I be your tribe lord!”

“I’m serious. What did I say to you?”

Her pupils slowly shrank, then dilated again. “You...really be not remembering? You not be seeming drunk…”

“Just pretend I was hammered. What did I say?”

The little griffin’s brow furrowed, and she touched her pistol grip, then looked up at me a little nervously. “You say, ‘Mags, get your gun! I need you to be saving my life when I do a dumb thing day after tomorrow!’ and then you says I can’t be telling you what or you be dying...maybe forever.”

“And that didn’t seem peculiar to you?” I demanded.

“What be ‘pec-ul-iar’ meaning?” she asked.

“Strange! Weird! Unusual!”

“Egg Pony, when you be not pec-ul-iar?”

I shot a warning look at Limerence, who quickly covered the smirk on his face with a cough into his hoof.

“Alright, we’re going to gloss over this for now. Get strapped into the D.F.W. We’re leaving soon.”

There was a shout, then Wisteria coasted in from overhead and skidded to a stop, folding her wings against her hips. The leader of the Aroyos was without her foal, but she was wearing two light machine guns strapped to her sides by means of an elaborate combat saddle.

“Crusada! De Lady In Shadows be sayin’ to see ye off! De toothy pegasus, she be join ye when ye underway! Dey be makin’ final arrangements.” She reached under her wing and pulled a bottle with six ladybugs crouched inside it from a slot in her saddle. “Here. I and I have what ye be askin’ for.”

“I gave you a list, did I?” I grunted.

She gave me that questioning look I was now becoming quickly tired of. “Dat ye did... though I and I be unsure what some of de t’ings ye have me do be for. Why we be monitorin’ de cloud factories? Dey not change much since de Darkening.”

I tilted my head, then turned towards Uptown where the low clouds still hung above the middle of the city, continuously pumped out by the factories. I couldn’t be sure, but they seemed a bit darker than they had last I’d looked at them. It might have been my imagination, though.

“I’ll figure it out. Where’s Taxi?”

“Whoooo!”

There was a shout of glee, followed by a roar that turned the blood in my veins to pure laxative. I threw myself to the ground, rolling over with the Crusader pointed at the sky as a massive, draconic shape crashed to earth just a few meters away, spraying me with gravel and dust. I sat there, shaking, staring down the barrel of my gun at the mighty, yellow head of Vexis.

Swift’s ‘catch’ was looking healthier than she had the last time I saw her, but then a burrito left in the back of the freezer for six months would have looked better than the frost-bitten, starved mess we’d left huddled in one of the prison’s lower levels with her brother tucked under her wing. Speaking of her wing, somepony with a good command of sewing needles had been at it with some kind of flexible fabric, patching the holes the Hailstorm left in her membranes quite handily.

My driver swung nimbly down from Vexis’s shoulders, landing on the pavement in front of me and patting her mount’s neck as I slowly lowered my quivering gun.

“Sweets! I swear, you almost earned yourself a death laser in the face!” I snapped, scrambling up.

“Sorry, Hardy,” she said, not sounding sorry whatsoever. “Just needed to take Vexis out for a bit of exercise. She and her brother have graciously volunteered as mobile weapon platforms.”

I turned to the young dragon, and she shrugged, expressively.

“I do not know why the other dragons think eating ponies is a good idea. Seems like chewing dynamite,” Vexis grumbled, giving my driver a cautious look as she folded her wings. “But if I have ponies with guns standing on me, I will not taste good, either.”

“Hrmph,” I said. “I wouldn’t have happened to suggest that, say...last night, would I?”

Taxi flicked one eartip back and forth. “Errr...you must have been pretty out of it after all that running around last night. Plugging yourself into the wall isn’t a permanent replacement for sleep, you know, even if Tourniquet does give you power straight off the mains.”

“So I did suggest it, then. Lovely. Lim, would you wait here for a minute. Sweets, can I talk to you in the cab? Privately?”

I muscled my way past a heap of bags and into the back compartment of the D.F.W. with my bemused driver on my heels. Settling down on one of the long benches, I held out my hoof for her to join me. When she was comfortably seated, I began.

“Sweets, there’s no sane way to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it. I’m pretty sure Nightmare Moon or whatever she left in my head was piggybacking my body last night. Assume that everything I asked you to do is probably a good idea, but also that I have no idea what ninety-five percent of it was. Oh, and if I told you to do anything that might get me killed, assume it was for a good reason.”

Taxi blinked at me a few times, then her ears laid back and the expression on her face sank into one of near total despair.

“I...Hardy, please tell me you’re joking,” she said, softly.

“I’m not.”

“B-but you told me—”

I put up my leg to stop her. “Take a moment and think. Did I tell you to keep whatever you’re about to say from me?”

Her expression wavered, then she quickly dipped her chin, as though even that might be revealing too much.

“I...I thought you were just going to have your memory erased so you could play some trick on the Family or something,” she muttered. “It sounds like the kind of thing you’d do. H-how did I not notice it wasn’t you?”

“She’s the Nightmare, and she needed you not to,” I replied, reaching out to put a hoof on her knee as the horrible realizations started to dawn on her. “I probably needed you not to, as well. I don’t want to climb down that rabbit hole with you, right now.”

“Ponyfeathers! Hardy, do you know how scary it is to have my talent manipulated like that?”

“Any more scary than being dragged around from murder to murder by these shinies on my ass?” I groused, using my tail to sweep my coat off my flank. “Look, for now, our situation is such that I think she has a whole heap of good reasons to play fair. That being the case, I need you to trust whatever it is she told you. There are lives hanging in the balance.”

Taxi grimaced, then pushed herself up from the bench, stepped over the bags, and headed into the front compartment to take her seat at the driver’s wheel. “You know, it’s really not fair when the pony I’d normally go to for advice has other people living in his head who may or may not be screwing with him. Especially considering what she told me to let you do. I swear, I thought you were having a manic episode or something and we could laugh about it later on.”

“I’m not happy about it, either, Sweets. We’ve got to get moving, though. Tourniquet’s people are in place and I’d like to give our opponents as little time as possible to figure out what we’re doing.”

There was a quick double knock on the back door. Taxi pushed a lever on the dash and the tailgate slid open, revealing Bones, with Mags sitting on his skeletal back, and Limerence standing alongside them.

“You kids done in here?” my grandfather asked. “Do you need me to get you a towel? Want a cigarette per chance?”

I clenched my jaw, again fighting the urge to discover if Bones was bulletproof.

“Get in. We’re moving. Swift will be joining us soon.”

Taxi fired the engine, which was immediately dampened to almost nothing as my companions situated themselves in the back. I climbed into the front seat and found myself staring at a stick jutting up from under the console that reminded me of a gear shifter. It had a big, shiny button on the end and a thin, exposed wire leading into the dashboard.

“What’s this?” I asked, gently tapping the control.

“That’s the trigger for the grenadine launcher,” she answered. “Sorry it’s in kind of an inconvenient spot. The handle and button usually live in the hoofwell, but if we want to use it, there’s some assembly required. Press the button and everything within twenty meters of the front bumper get a bath in dragon drink that’ll leave a hangover they never wake up from.”

I scooted back in my seat. “Is there a safety?”

Taxi cocked her eyebrow at me and put the D.F.W. into gear. “A safety? On a flamethrower?”

“Right. I forgot for a moment that we’re working with a ‘lowest bidder’ situation where ‘lowest’ is refugees being paid in three hots and a cot.”

“If you want to complain, you can have Bones use the flamethrower and you sit on the roof with the flak cannon!” she snapped.

My ears perked. “We have a flak cannon?”

“Most of one,” Bones added from the back. “It’s belt fed, but there’s no reloading mechanism. Fifty shots, then it’s dead. Still, that’s fifty shots during which the sky is ours.”

“Sounds good. Speaking of that, I am curious what our resident carnivore is up to,” I replied, then pulled the bottle of Ladybugs out of my pocket and popped the cork out of the top, offering my hoof to the one who crawled to the top first. “Sunshine, sunshine and all that. Show me Swift.”

I fell through the Ladybug network, a single flicker of flame floating through a building on fire. The network felt far larger and far more alive than it had the last time I was inside it. I caught drifts of conversation, whispered messages, flickers of imagery, and bits of song, but behind it all there was the overwhelming sensation of ultimate connectedness.

Gradually, my light joined a great pipeline of others floating towards a single, glistening point in the distance. I didn’t register the change until a sensation of violent speed was followed by being flung towards that gleaming ball of glory, careening down the threads of disparate consciousness. I crashed into it and was consumed, flaring out like a candle in the sun.

When my partner’s eyes opened, it took a second to make any sort of sense of what I was seeing, and when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

The inside of Tourniquet’s ‘nest’ was disturbingly organic in a fashion that made me want to climb out of my skin. I was surrounded on all sides, encapsulated in gently pulsing electrical wires that surrounded, supported, and—in more cases than I was comfortable with—entered me. My body was wrapped in a pair of forelegs that felt like two heating pads.

I felt something working its way out of my throat and shuddered as a shining tube was gently pulled out of my muzzle, still dripping with saliva. It slid down amongst the other wires and I let out a loud sigh, then coughed a couple times.

“Phew...I don’t know if it’s a good thing that I’m getting used to that, T,” Swift murmured, then her ears twitched. “Oh! Is Hardy watching me?”

“Yes, he has some Ladybugs with him,” Tourniquet said, from a place above my head. “Do you think he’s figured out that Nightmare Moon’s little ‘proxy’ was steering his body last night?”

“I hope so! He’ll be freaked otherwise!”

Swift shuffled her wings as more of the cables started to withdraw from her anatomy. I don’t know what disturbed me more, the totality of the invasion or how little it seemed to bother my partner.

“I tracked everything he ordered ponies to do,” Tourniquet added. “It was quite a collection, but none of it seems to undermine our defense. If anything, it improved our chances of survival, if we had any to begin with.”

“Good…” Swift hesitated, then tilted her head back to look into Tourniquet’s crystal eyes. “I looked at our troop deployment and...T, I don’t think we have enough to beat them without losing a bunch of lives. The griffins and the diamond dogs are great, but there aren’t many of them. Most of the ponies are untrained, and nopony besides a few retired guards has ever seen battle. Even with light arms and if we’re assuming we can take out all those dragons, the city will never be the same. Equestria will never be the same.”

“There are too many unknowns,” the construct said, softly, hugging my partner a little closer. “At least I got to meet you, Swift. That gives me hope. On top of that, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Hard Boiled is going to bring justice to this world, before the end.”

“I’m going to go get armored up and join him,” my partner said, wiggling as the wires around her hooves started to sink. “I wish I could maintain my sight of the city while we do this. Being able to see electrical fields is really useful.”

“Yes, but you got so buzzed earlier that you ended up eating half a box of donuts. Besides, you’ll have the Hailstorm! That thing sees souls! Much more useful than some filly stuck in a pit who can’t even go outside with you while you kick tail.”

Swift squirmed one of her wings free and gently bopped Tourniquet on the back of the head. “Don’t say stuff like that, T. You’re my friend, and you’ll always be useful to me. Now, lemme down so I can go get my vest and weapons.”

“Should I order the attack, Warden?”

Swift snickered and rubbed her cheek against Tourniquet’s chest. “I love it when you call me that. Is everypony ready?”

“The Marked are all there, and a few of them are starting to see activity that might indicate the P.A.C.T. are aware something is up. By my projections, it’ll take that crazy truck at least forty minutes to reach the point where my vision ends and the dead zone near Uptown begins.”

“Give the order, T. I’ll snag a snack, then get going.” Swift’s eyes rolled up towards a point above her head, and she addressed the air, “Sir, if you heard all of that—” She paused, then I felt her cheeks flush. “Sir, if you heard that, I’d appreciate if you forgot most of it. I’ve got to charge the Hailstorm. I’ll catch up to you before the D.F.W. leaves the wastes. Leave the top open!”

Charge. Retreat. Give the order.

The significance of little words like those changes on the field of battle, when more than a few lives are set to be lost. My little partner, who’d puked herself silly at the mere sight of a dead body just two months ago, had just set in motion the largest combat operation in Detrot since the war. I sometimes wondered if anypony else even had a thought to spare for the history being written. Granted, that tended to assume there was going to be someone to write the history, and if my name made it into an academic text I’d long ago made a vow to hunt the author down and feed him his own pens.

Still, every order has consequences. Even the most detached commander has to struggle not to consider the bloodshed he’s unleashed.

The world faded back in, and I raised my head off the truck’s seat. The ladybug on my hoof buzzed up into the bottle, and I popped the cork back in. I suppose the little guy figured he’d be safer in my pocket. Maybe if my coat were to be destroyed during our day, the dimensional pocket would be severed and there might be a tiny civilization of Ladybugs living out their lives in another universe somewhere, keeping the light of life alive amongst newly evolved lint creatures. The thought was enough to give me a small smile.

Taxi politely cleared her throat.

“Orders, Chief?” she asked.

I yanked my seatbelt on and pointed out the windshield toward the row of jagged buildings springing up from the horizon, a boiling mix of eternal storm clouds hanging above them.

“Orders are to strap in, then haul our flanks to the Office at best speed. Lim, open the top hatch. Mags, you stick with Bones. He tells you to do something, you do it, same as if I told you. Got me?”

“I be sticking with him just till tomorrow, then I sticks to you, like you say a few hours ago!” Mags chirped.

“Don’t worry, Junior,” Bones added, putting a protective leg around my ward’s shoulders. “I’ll keep her safe.”

“You keep her safe, and you keep you safe. Once we’re in the Office, you’re the map. You die and we will have to start skipping to plans ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’ real quick.”

Bones pulled a small piece of paper out of his pocket and held it toward me. “Colt, I learned long ago that stupid shit like that is what gets ponies killed. This is a map of the building, as best I can remember. You hold onto it. If I fall, you get everypony in and out.”

“You’re still coming?” I asked, stowing the paper.

“Damn right. I only said that thing about leading you through back in the war meeting so you’d take me along.”

“Good to hear.” I nodded at the tailgate. “Sweets? Close us up and let’s move.”

I missed having paydays. It occurred to me I hadn’t had one in a couple of months. They were always good days, when my paycheck dropped into my bank account and I could throw a few bits at my retirement fund while the rest went to rent, beer, utilities, and additional beer.

Rumbling toward the city, I longed for a payday to give life some more pleasant punctuation. Lately, life was all exclamation points and question marks. I’d had a run of commas when I pulled Scarlet into my bed, but that was all too brief a respite.

I was pulled from these thoughts by Swift, who arrived by dropping onto the roof and giving a quick shave and a haircut knock to let us know she wasn’t a target. Swinging down and inside, she piled into the front compartment beside me. The Hailstorm was wrapped around her middle, turrets swiveling alertly back and forth, and she was, again, fully armored and armed for battle. A bit of what I think was gristle stuck out of the corner of her muzzle.

“Kid,” I said.

“Sir,” she acknowledged.

“What’s the state of things on the ground out there?”

“They should be starting any second, Sir.” She quickly pointed out the window. “Look over there! Just about…now!”

I followed her toe to a spot just below the skyline and leaned forward in my seat until my muzzle was just an inch from the glass.

A brilliant golden bloom spread its petals on the side of one of the smaller tower-blocks at the outer edge of the waste. Fire spurted from each outspread limb as the explosion tore into three floors at once, pieces of debris wheeled off in all directions. I imagined, briefly, that I could make out a few blackened shapes which might have been bodies toppling from the upper floors into the gaping hole left by the explosion. The sound hit us a second later, barely more than a pop at that distance, but up close it must have been deafening.

After a moment, a plume of smoke appeared, further into the city, lit by the red fury of the eclipse. It was followed quickly by a third, broader explosion, whose sound didn’t reach us. The fires danced and writhed upon the air like giant snakes chewing at my city.

I swallowed, discovering my mouth was suddenly dry.

“Sweets, engage the cloak,” I whispered. I don’t know if she heard me, or if she’d decided that was the correct course of action on her own, but she smacked the button on the dash and a hum of arcane resonance started to gently vibrate my skull.

“There’s a damn thing I hoped never to see again,” Bones murmured. I jumped in my seat, then forced myself to relax; he’d come up behind Swift with his trademark stealth and having a skull so close—even a friendly one—was still unsettling. He seemed not to have noticed my discomfort, his empty eye sockets riveted on the burning city. “After the war, I told myself I was done with the madness. No more investigations. No more bloodshed. No more dodging death squads or crawling through mud. Then, fool that I am, I just had to take that housefire personally.”

“I think anypony would have,” I muttered, watching as another explosion dotted the sky. Part of me wished I could hear what was going on out there, but I knew it would just make it harder to sleep.

“Hardy, just to be clear, most ponies aren’t anywhere near as obsessive as your family,” Taxi commented.

“I think I’m glad the Boiled line is a bit obsessive,” Lim added, softly. “The Archivists failed to protect the city. Were it not for that obsession, I would be dead, and no one would have stopped the gang war or saved Swift’s family. The Vivarium would be a crater, rather than a bastion. The griffins might all be dead or slaughtering one another en-masse in the streets. The police department might have been butchered to a pony. Our opponents would likely have had the power they need much sooner, rather than having to begin the eclipse nigh a month before the final act.”

“For that matter, the Crusades might not have ended,” Swift put in, thoughtfully. “I mean...the Dragon King could still be alive. Bones killed him, right? The war might have gone on, and they’d have had all the chaos they needed thirty years ago...”

There was a protracted silence as all of us considered the various knife edges life was balanced on of late.

Swift was the first one to speak, unless one counted Mags, who was noisily eating something in the back.

“Sir, you...you don’t think they started the Crusades, do you?” she asked.

“Who, kid?”

“The Family. Wouldn’t that be their kind of thing? It’s just a thought I had.”

I put a hoof on her shoulder and turned her to face me. “Kid, I think you better finish that thought.”

“Nawww, it’s silly, Sir. Nopony is that organized,” Swift said, shaking her head. After I failed to let go of her, she continued, uncertainly, “I mean, yeah, it would follow their ends pretty well. Causing chaos and so on. They’d just have to rile up a bunch of young dragons, then give a dangerous outsider to the draconic government their resources. They’ve got the money and the magic. Once they threw down the diplomatic leader and then put a warmonger in her place it would all sort of...come tumbling...oh...”

I dropped my hoof off my partner’s shoulder and lay back in my seat. “The law firm has been around for long enough. It would jive with their tendency to play the long game.”

“One of the last major sorties was supposed to be on Detrot,” Bones said, faintly. “Princess Luna herself put that down, though the records are sealed on exactly how. I wasn’t there, sadly. I was in the Dragon Lands.”

“It’s irrelevant right now whether or not they did,” I said, pulling myself together. “We’ll add it to the stack of things the bureaucracy will have to sort out when there is one, again. How is our time?”

“Two minutes to the edge of the city, Sir. If you have any instructions for Tourniquet, I’ll have to get out and find a power line. We’ve also got some major blind spots nearer the middle of town,” Swift murmured.

“Blind spots?” I asked.

“The city infrastructure is a mess,” Taxi explained, giving the truck a bootfull that pressed us all back in our seats. “The Stilettos were reporting that sections of the old city are without power, and it seems the Blackcoats were intentionally sabotaging power stations in some places. Not damaging them, but diverting electricity from the dam. I don’t suppose Tourniquet can do anything about that, can she?”

“It isn’t as easy as going out there with an axe,” Swift said, quietly turning to look out at the smoky sky. “We’d have to blow up power stations and that would cause overloads and might even destroy the whole grid. We can do it, but it would mean Tourniquet goes back to surviving on the life energy of the ponies inside Supermax...”

“Which I am vetoing out of the gate, thanks,” I said, holding up a foreleg. “We’re going to need the grid once the center of the city is ours again and, to be clear, that’s besides not particularly wanting to drive the Aroyos out of the Everfree Fortress.”

The radio crackled, and Gypsy’s voice filled the cab. “This is Everfree Fortress to D.F.W., come in D.F.W! Over!”

I picked up the hoofset and held the receiver to my muzzle. “Everfree Fortress, this is Danger Egg. Talk to me. Over.”

“Danger Egg? Really?”

“You want call signs, you lay them out beforehand or you get what I come up with on the spot. Now talk.”

“Alright, Danger Egg. Big T says she lost you, but Queen Bug is still monitoring. Our teams throughout the city have hit all the staging areas and are starting to see real resistance.” Gypsy seemed to hesitate, then her voice returned with a fresh hint of tension. “Damn… We might as well have poked a wasp nest! There are an awful lot more Blackcoats and those mutant things than we thought! We’re seeing major movement around the Vivarium and near the Morgue. We’ll keep you apprised, but the radios are real spotty. So far, it looks like it’s working, though. We couldn’t get anyone close to your destination, so there’s no telling what you’ll find. Over.”

“When you lose us on the radios, I’ll have bugs on all of us. I want ponies plugged in and paying attention. If we don’t make it out, we’ll send the pylon key with our rear guard. Crack as many pylons as you can and do as much damage as possible. Failing that...well, follow the lists I left everypony. Over.”

“Will do. Good luck, Danger Egg. Everfree Fortress out.”

Setting the hoofset back in the holster, I turned to find all of my companions staring at me.

“What?”

Swift’s lip twitched. “DangerEgg? Really, Sir?”

I jabbed a hoof at her. “Yes, Pigeon Muncher.” I turned to Taxi, who was grinning, hugely. “And that goes double for you, Super Stripes. Silent But Deadly and Bones—”

“Wait, how come your grandad doesn’t get a dumb call sign?” Swift demanded.

“Because he’s undead, kid. Anyone who believes the name ‘Bones’ refers to a former soldier from the war is already sitting at the top of the food chain. If information goes that high, it won’t matter what our call signs are.”

“May I be something besides Silent But Deadly?” Limerence asked.

“No! Now, everyone take a Ladybug,” I said, holding out the bottle and tugging out the cork. “We’re going to keep in tight contact. Bones, you are guarding Mags until we get to the building, then Mags, you’re guarding the truck. Swift, you’re guarding Mags. If things get too hot in the Office, you fly her out of here at best speed.”

“But Sir—”

“No, kid. You’re sitting this one out. If things get too dicey, you leave. You don’t come in after us.”

My partner slumped and ducked back between the seats, sulkily grabbing her pack off the floor and dragging it to one of the benches along the wall. “Yes, Sir.”

We were now amongst the buildings and the debris lining both sides of the street seemed to be getting a little thicker. Overhead, I caught more than a few darting, black shapes moving between the rooftops. Even Limerence’s silence spell couldn’t fully mask the growl of the engine, though fortunately it didn’t seem they were quite aware of where we were just yet. That or the chaos in the rest of the city had caught them off guard and orders were slow coming; I hoped desperately that was the case and that we weren’t walking into a trap of some kind.

The first sign we’d been noticed came in the form of a loud *sproing* noise that shook the inside of the cab. It reminded me distinctly of a coiled spring hitting a frying pan. Taxi glanced at the dash, then her eyes almost bugged out of her head as the loud hum of the camo faded. A hot burst of pink smoke roiled out of the dash that smelled strongly of cayenne pepper.

“Hardy, they just popped a null field on us! Mercy, they must have laid it on the whole block! Shielding is holding, but the cloak is down!”

“We’re sitting ducks! Battlestations!”

Act 3 Chapter 47: The Reasons We Kill

When faced with the question of survival in dire times, the first inclination of many is to throw up their hooves and declare it all impossible. This is to miss just how much ponykind has already survived. Being undersized, friendly, prone to panic, and delicious are not good survival traits. Yet, we persist.

One might suspect there is a guiding hoof from the skies adjusting our fate to see us continue, but this is to miss some of the essential truths of ponykind. We are small, which means we must be cautious. We are friendly, so an enemy will never face one of us alone. We are fearful, so we prepare.

One day, we may even find a way to cure our tasty nature.

The Scholar

I can’t remember what my head bounced off of that started the blood gushing into my eyes. Fortunately, the flow only lasted a moment before the wound healed, but I was left with a distinct ringing in my ears and stinging, blurred vision. The crack of the flak cannon on the roof pulled me back to myself just in time to hear Taxi shout something in my ear about ‘damned monsters’.

Swiping the sleeve of my coat across my face, I tried to clear my sight. All I could see were flashes of light where the headlamps caught shapes, before they were rushed under the tires; garbage cans, a stuffed doll, a mangled heap of flesh hanging from a fire escape. Something pinged off the thick glass and I had just enough time to pick up the general shape and size of the grenade before we were rocked on our wheels by an explosion that should have killed just about anything on the road. As it was, the blast didn’t even dent the hood.

We flew out of the other end of the alleyway into a long, empty street with what I suspect were once luxury shopping centers on either side. I was thoroughly lost, but Taxi still seemed to know where she was going. The flak cannon let out one last, almost apologetic sounding ‘snap’ and a blackened form splashed down on the sidewalk to our left, trailing smoke as it fell.

Bones swung down through the top hatch, his face blackened and his tweed coat shredded, making him look even more horrific than he already did by dint of his mere existence. Spitting a piece of metal on the thick carpet, he gave himself a shake; a rain of shrapnel fell around his ankles.

“Well, cats and jammers, I gotta say this is not the party I planned to check out at!”

There was a succession of extremely loud ‘kerclunks’ on the rooftop, followed by muffled gunshots and snarling like a pack of wild dogs was fighting it out up there to see who could rip us to shreds first. I leaned forward to get a look out the top of the windshield, but all I got a glimpse of was a leathery wing splayed across the glass for an instant before being withdrawn.

“Boarders!” Swift shouted, the Hailstorm’s turrets pointing at the ceiling. “We’ve got at least eight ponies or something like ponies on the rooftops nearby and four on top of the cab! Hailstorm is giving me reticles in the air! More incoming!”

“Last stupid thing they’ll ever do!” Taxi replied, snatching a pair of goggles I hadn’t noticed were tucked under the steering column and yanking them on over her head with one hoof. “Hardy! Light’em up! Everypony else, heads down!”

Shaking myself out of the concussed daze, I grabbed the grenadine launcher’s control stick in the crook of my leg and slammed the other hoof down on the big red button.

Now, I want to be clear that it did occur to me to question why Taxi had put on some tinted goggles before giving me the order to unleash the grenadine launcher.

Later.

It occured to me later.

Two seconds later, I was blinded, rolling around clutching my face as my scalded retinas burned in agony at the flash of light so brilliant I could feel the burst of heat through the windshield. It was followed, a second later, by near total darkness.

“Sweets! I’m blind!” I shouted, clutching at my seat.

“Is it permanent?” she demanded.

“I…” I hesitated, then let out a soft sigh as my vision began to return, first in washed out sepia, then flicking to color a moment later. The sensation of scorched retinas regenerating itched bad enough to make me want to claw them out again, but the feeling was blessedly brief.. “Just because it grows back doesn’t mean we get to treat me like a lizard growing back his tail!”

A smoldering corpse shape plummeted past the window and flew under our wheels, sending out a cascade of ashes. Ahead, I could see the remains of a brick wall glowing bright red and sagging slightly as the mortar holding it together disintegrated under the flash-fire of the grenadine blast. There was only silence from the roof of the vehicle.

“Swift? Damage report,” I said, turning to look over my shoulder into the back compartment. Mags was huddled in Bones’s forelegs, her pistol clutched in both claws, while Limerence sat with two knives levitating on either side of his head, watching the top hatch. My partner seemed unperturbed, turning in a little circle as the Hailstorm hummed in anticipation.

“No damage to us, Sir, but there’s nothing living on top of the cab anymore. I see some movement on the rooftops, but it’s not moving very far. Three signals. I’m pretty sure that blast either blinded or crippled whatever was out there.”

“Sweets, are we out of the null field?” I asked.

By way of answer, she reached up and touched the cloak control. The hum of magic pulsed through the vehicle. I quickly tapped it, shutting it off again.

“Kid, I need you to go clear those rooftops,” I said, “Anything that’s still alive up there is going to try to kill us at some point. Freeze the mutants and if they’re still ponies, make sure they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.”

Swift popped a salute, then flung herself toward the hatch, bursting out through it with her wings tucked in tight against her sides as she vanished into the cold and dark. Bones watched her go, then climbed the short ladder and carefully shut the hatch behind her. Turning to us, he shucked a cigarette out of his pack and stuck it between two teeth, but left it unlit.

“You know, while you were out yesterday growing back your skin - incidentally, you’ll pardon if I sound envious - I went for a little walk around the edges of the Heights. Got myself a look at some of those mutated beasties. They remind me of things the dragons experimented with during the war, body modification, transformative magics, and so on. Be glad the war ended, else we’d have probably ended up facing mind-controlled, mutated pony slaves years ago.”

“We are facing mind-controlled, mutated pony slaves now, so you’ll pardon me if I take less comfort in that than I might otherwise,” I mused, then turned to my driver. “Sweets, where are we?”

“Well, the grenadine launcher has one shot left, but assuming no further resistance and that the road is clear, I’d say five minutes to the target building.”

“Assume resistance,” I replied.

“Actually, I think you’d best start looking for a place to park,” Bones put in. “We can’t take this vehicle too close to the Office.”

“Ahem...We’re getting out of the heavily armored transport?” Limerence asked, incredulously.

“Bones, I planned on ramming this thing right through the front doors! Why are we altering the plan now?” I demanded.

“Because I just remembered something Bloom told me a few decades ago about wanting to make sure The Office was defensible in case the dragons got ahold of a War-Scooter and tried to crash it into the building,” he grunted, nodding at the skyline. “This thing has a zebra spell-core in it, right? If those bastards managed to activate the building’s defenses, we’d be peeled and poached before we could reach the steps.”

It was about here I made a noise something like an Ursa minor stubbing his toe and banged my head on the window a few times.

“Egg Pony! Stop jiggling your brain box!” Mags ordered, stomping into the cabin and poking me in the nose. “You sneaky type! So sneak, yeah?”

I matched eyes with the tiny griffin for a moment, but she was irritatingly fearless for someone I could probably stuff in the glove box with a bit of struggle and a lot of squawking. After a few seconds, I turned to watch the passing buildings.

“Sweets, find us a spot to stick this damn thing,” I growled, slapping the dashboard.

Mags turned up her beak and marched back into the rear compartment, tail in the air, looking very smug.

“Uh...Do you mind if I destroy some property doing it?” she asked, peering out at the nearby buildings.

“We’re saving the world here Sweets! I don’t think anypony is going to mind if we smash a few pots and vases!”

“Right! Hold onto your flanks!”

Bones must have read her intentions a mile away, because he grabbed Mags with one leg, then threw himself into a seat and snapped a belt on in the two seconds it took me to realized I’d just said something incredibly stupid. Limerence was not so lucky and only had time to snap a thin, light-blue shield bubble around himself and grab for the ladder hanging from the roof hatch.

Taxi slammed on the brakes, then swung us into the nearest building. To be clear, she did not turn us into a garage, nor an alley adjoining the building; one second I was looking at the clear and open road, then I was suddenly staring at the oncoming plate-glass window of ‘Boffo’s Toys And Treats’. My last vision before we hit was of a teddy-bear in the front display with what my surprised mind registered as a very concerned expression.

The crash shook the cab like a bag of marbles being tossed down the stairs and Limerence was torn off of the ladder to be sent bouncing against the back of my seat. My teeth snapped shut hard enough I caught my own tongue between them. If I’d been Swift, I’d have probably nipped the tip right off, but I was, again, thankful to still be a herbivore. Even then, it hurt like a bastard.

The D.F.W’s back wheels bounced over the edge of the building’s display and darkness rushed over the cab. Taxi applied the brakes, though not before our arrival was heralded by the squeaks, honks, and screeches of toys dying under the armored vehicle’s monstrous tires. We slid to a sputtering stop with the headlights inches from a wall of yoyos.

Limerence let out a soft moan.

“Whooo! Again, says I! Again!” Mags hooted, cheerfully.

“I swear to Celestia, Sweets,” I growled under my breath.

“You asked me to hide the car. The car is now hidden,” Taxi huffed, picking up a small, black box with a diamond sticking out of the front from a spot on the dash and shoving it into her saddlebags, then slinging them across her hips. “When we get ten meters from here, the cloak will engage and when we get back, it’ll shut off. Meanwhile, to fliers, it looks like somepony just looted this place. Nothing interesting to anyone hunting us.”

“If somepony is about to be in an auto accident, you give them a second to prepare!” I barked.

“If I’d done that, you’d have had time to tense all up and might have injured yourself,” she said, coolly, then turned to look at Limerence who was nursing a slightly swollen cheek. “And you should wear a seatbelt.”

The unicorn shot her a half-hearted glare as he pulled himself upright, reaching under his vest to adjust one of his knives back into its holster.

“I cannot decide what is more likely to be lethal in the long run: my friends or their enemies,” he commented. “Still, what’s done is done.”

“I think it’s less your friends, more your job that might need re-evaluation, matey,” Bones replied, setting Mags to one side. “Be glad it wasn’t Sweetie Belle driving. She damn near killed half the Crusaders the last time we had occasion to put her behind the wheel.”

“Truly, I wish I could have seen the Crusaders at their height. My father was quite a fan of their work,” Limerence mused, turning to one of the overhead bins. He opened it and levitated out a long, familiar wooden stick.

“Is that your brother’s staff?” I asked.

“Eh? Oh, yes. He always said it was ‘the weapon closest to his heart’,” he said, turning the bo-staff over in his hooves, then giving it an experimental flick with his magic to make it spin. “Father insisted we be at least competent with the melee armaments of various species’ homelands, that we might never be far from something that could keep us alive. I prefer my knives, of course, but Zefu was a zony who enjoyed surprising his enemies in battle.”

“Surprise them? It be a stick!” Mags said, knocking on the wood with two knuckles.

Limerence snickered at that. “It is a griffin weapon. A lann cnámh in their old dialect. One would think you would know that.” Holding the staff sideways, he gave the end a light twist, then pulled. There was a twinkle of reflected light as one half of the staff slid away from the other, revealing several inches of serrated blade work. “One can use it as a weighted bo, or, in a pinch, it makes an excellent sword.” With that, he snapped the blade shut and swung it onto his back. His horn flashed, and the wood seemed to glue itself between his shoulder blades.

An orange head poked up in front of the headlamps, momentarily startling me before I recognized Swift’s cheerily grinning face. She gestured toward the back of the vehicle with one leg, and I nodded. Unsnapping my belt, I slid off the seat and trotted into the back, pausing next to Mags.

“You okay, kiddo?” I asked.

She nodded, stretching her tiny wings as she slid her gun back into its holster. “Am being good! I wait here, yes?”

“You seem more content with that than the last time I left you somewhere,” I said, peering at her.

“That be cuz he tells me what kinda poop you be going into,” she replied, pointing a tiny wing at Bones. “You listen to him, yeah? He be smarter than you, Egg Pony.”

Ignoring that little jab, I patted her on the head. “You wait with Swift. Don’t get out of the truck. Clear?”

“Am clear! All the food be in here, anyway, so why I wanna get out?”

I rolled my eyes and poked the hatch release for the tailgate. The hydraulics hissed as the door clanked open, then landed on the ground. Swift stood outside, looking pleased with herself. The Hailstorm’s turrets were both rimmed in thick icicles.

“All targets neutralized, Sir! There was only one pony but he...--” She hesitated, then her ears flopped against her head. “--he caught the edge of the blast. He didn’t last long and he burned up like the mutants when he died. There probably wasn’t much pony left in him. Sir, is...is there a reason the D.F.W. is crashed into a toy store?”

“It’s...camouflage,” I replied, taking a few steps down to the floor of the store. “Look, watch the truck and don’t get out once the cloak comes on. We’ll be back in three hours, or we won’t be back. If we’re not, you get Mags and fly to the Vivarium. You still have the pylon key?”

She bobbed her head. “I hid it in Goofball’s collar.”

“Good. Should we fail, tell the Vivarium to hit the pylons. Use brute force. Start tearing up the city. I won’t let these bastards take the rest of the planet with them. Destroy everything. Blow up every pylon you can get inside. Any number of casualties is acceptable.”

“S-sir?” Swift squeaked.

“It’s the lives of everyone on the planet at stake, kid. Everyone. If life on this world is to continue, then you need to get back to the Vivarium and they need to take out this network of pylons. Can you do this?”

Her wings clamped down so tight the joints creaked, and she nodded, weakly.

“I’ll let Granny Glow know. She...she’ll make it happen.”

“Good.”

With that I put my forelegs around her neck, letting my haunches slide onto the carpet as I pulled my partner against my chest and held her there. Her wings sprang open in surprise, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, after a few seconds, she closed them around me like the warmest blanket in the world. Her breathing hitched, and she grabbed me tighter around the barrel, her short, spiky mane tickling my nose.

“Hardy,” she said, too softly for the others to hear, “-th-this was a terrible first couple months on the j-job.”

“I know. Pretty shit for me, too. Still, I’m glad it was you that Jade shoved at me. I don’t think anyone else alive would have come this far. You’re my partner, and ever shall you be.”

She sniffled a little and leaned back so she could see my face, keeping her wings around my shoulders such that I was surrounded by downy pegasus fluff on all sides. “I-is that ‘till death do us part’?” she asked. “Because Scarlet and Lily might want to t-talk about that…”

I let out a soft chuckle. “Heh...You think I’m letting you stay dead? Sweets has attachment issues, but remember who the obsessive is in our relationship. Now, go on. You and Mags tear into some of the chicken strips your mother gave you.”

“Y-you didn’t really know about those and just wanted to make me ask so you could look smart, right?” she sniffled, touching the brim of my hat with her toe.

“Ha! You’re getting wise in your old age. Keep a Ladybug on you so you can contact the Vivarium if things go really bad. We’ll be back soon.”

The weight of my silvered shotgun hanging from my shoulder was both a source of comfort and tension. Knowing you’re most likely about to spill blood never gets any easier, even if it’s justified. Ponies, at our core, are meant to be relatively peaceful sorts. War is a messy business; it makes a person late for dinner. That’s probably why we’d had so few of them down through the centuries.

Still, something in that part of the city felt desperately out of true. The brisk, icy wind turned, from time to time, and one could catch a whiff of sickly, cloying air as though up from a swamp. Parts of the area’s sewer system had failed, leaving gushing filth steaming in the gutters. Frost had started to gather on shop windows, and a few listless flakes of snow fell here and there, though not really enough to start to gather.

We moved, from storefront to storefront, under cover of Limerence’s silence spell, our hooves making no noise as we watched for some sign we’d been detected. If I’d been able to hear my own heartbeat, I’m certain it would have been pounding, but as it was I didn’t even have the comforting tromp of my shoes on the concrete.

My first sight of The Office was as a blot upon what few stars still hung above the skyline. Mist, or perhaps low clouds, had started rolling in from Uptown at some point, though it wasn’t thick enough yet to cut visible distance more than a few miles. It carried another scent, one separate from the befouling odor of the sewers: decay.

Everypony must have smelled it, but the only one to acknowledge it was Bones. He gave me a quick glance, then took off ahead. I lost track of him in the shadows of a deserted cafe across the street.

As we crept single-file down a thin alleyway between a furniture shop and a post-office, Limerence tugged at my sleeve. He pointed toward the ground near the end of the alley, where a dark brown stain had spread from one wall to the other, soaking into the pavement. Taxi hefted her P.E.A.C.E. cannon and tip-toed forward until she could touch the puddle. Lifting the sample to her nose, she gave it a sniff, then turned her eyes toward the sky and muttered a quick prayer, before wiping her hoof on the wall.

Limerence’s horn flickered, and he projected a thin, shining light up ahead of us, momentarily illuminating a circle on the next building. Three words were smeared on the plate glass window of a hoof-bag boutique in red-brown ‘paint‘: Death Lives Here.

I closed my eyes and fought to calm my breathing. A powerful wave of fear and the scent of my own burning flesh had risen up in an instant, leaving my chest throbbing as I wrestled the memories back down into whatever hole they spent their mornings moldering in. The wind shifted again, and the cloying stink of wet blood washed down the alley.

My knees, quite against my will, suddenly locked up. A rebellious quiver worked its way into my shoulders, and I shoved my hip against the brickwork. That smell was leaving me woozy and disoriented. Fear wriggled in my stomach like a whole pack of waltzing eels trying to escape through my navel.

A leg slipped across my back. One of those monsters must have snuck around behind us, swooped down, and was about to snatch me off the ground. I froze, still as a statue, and waited for death, which had surely come. Death was good. Death meant I didn’t have to be scared anymore.

Taxi’s hoof smacking me across the jaw wasn’t quite hard enough to dislocate anything essential, but it rocked my box good and hard. I stumbled, but she held me upright and grabbed my chin on the tip of her hoof, forcing me to look her in the eyes. Limerence offered her a questioning look, but she held up her toe and gestured him back.

Not dead. Not dying. No monsters. Not yet.

‘Gale, I know I’m asking this an awful lot lately, but we can’t afford this right now,’ I thought.

I sensed a faint disapproval from somewhere near my aorta.

‘There will be an invoice for this, eventually,’ it seemed to say.

‘I know I can’t keep this up, Gale. Three days. That’s all I ask. If I survive three more days, I’ll pay this piper, whatever it costs me.’

Adrenaline flooded out of my system, and I went limp for a second as my limbs seemed to unwind like those of a clockwork doll whose spring has suddenly snapped. Taxi caught me and held firm until I could stand again. I turned a weary expression on her, and she patted my shoulders, mouthing the words ‘Are you okay?’

‘Just flashbacks,’ I returned.

Bones stuck his skull out of the dark shadows at the end of the alley and waved us forward. His front legs were sticky with something red, but his hooves were clean as ever.

“All clear up ahead,” he said, or rather, projected. “You lot can still hear me under that spell, right? We can probably drop it, for now. There’s nopony outside of the Office, although I got a bit of movement from the upper interior floors. There are two empty guard barracks, with ten cots each. I think their perimeter guard was that group of corpses back with the truck.”

I nodded, and Limerence let his horn light die.

“What’s around the Office itself?” I asked as sound returned to my ears.

“It reminds me of a little military camp, though with all those explosions going on around the city, I’d say they pulled most of the active duty and just left the guards. Not the tightest ship I’ve ever seen, but then, P.A.C.T. were never army, much as they might have liked to play at it. I wish I could say that was all, but...”

“But?” Taxi prompted.

Bones glowing eyes darted off the way they’d come, and he popped a flask out of his pocket, took a quick blast, then stared into the open mouth of the container as though an easy answer might be in there.

“Damn,” he said, at last, his voice in my head so soft I instinctively leaned forward to hear him better. “I don’t know how else to say it. These bastards have been feeding the mutants. Best I think you just come and see, since we have to pass through to get up there. Be careful. I couldn’t find any snipers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

Taxi’s teeth ground against one another loud enough to sound like a fork scratching a plate.

“Feeding them?!” she hissed.

“You heard me. The Office exterior is safe enough, so long as they haven’t changed the security protocols. If they have...well, I’m glad I got to meet my grandson before being pulverized.” Trotting out of the other end of the alley, he pointed towards another across the street. “Follow me. Keep to the darkness and try not to breathe through your nose.”

It was good advice and lasted approximately three minutes, right to the moment we came within sight of the camp.

Rounding end of one final alley which abutted two former luxury fur-salons - their windows shattered, walls riddled with bullet-holes, and their contents looted - I paused just long enough for the smell that’d been gradually creeping up to suddenly choose that moment to hit me in the face like a lead-weighted slugger. I’d smelled death plenty in my career, but someone usually made some effort to clean up after a corpse. Few bodies, in my experience, were left to sit where they died. Even fewer were left to be chewed apart by bored, magical predators in a public square.

The Office stood like a squat, black tombstone over a large courtyard, surrounded on all sides by what must have been a rather pretty public garden at one point, though there was nothing beautiful about what remained. Four walls of shops and cafes surrounded the garden with a thin street separating them from the plants and walkways. In the red light filtering through the thick clouds, the Office itself looked unsettlingly like a gaping hole in the air, with only a few lights inside breaking up the stark blackness of the structure.

A wrought iron fence, approximately twice head height with spiked tips lining the top of it, ringed the outside of the garden. I could make out some irregular shapes on top of those spikes, but it was unclear what they might be. Behind the fence, the camp itself was little more than a couple of green tents and sandbags. There was a small parade ground out front of the tents only a few dozen paces wide, an ugly slash across the greenery. Beside it were stacked piles of what might have been cages for animals, comprised of bars and thick wire.

A thick, black cloud buzzed like a living miasma, hanging above the camp and, in particular, the gate.

At the sight of it all, my cutie-mark twinged hard enough to send me shying sideways into the wall. I stood there, rubbing my hip against the bricks until the scorching sensation began to die down enough that I didn’t feel like I was being set on fire, again. Thankfully, my talent didn’t come with the smell of burning skin, but it still gave me a bad moment.

“Hardy? Your talent?” Taxi asked, softly.

“Yeah,” I muttered, pulling my hat off and fanning my thigh with it. “Haven’t felt something like that since...well, I’m sure I must have, but I can’t remember when.”

“Mine is...mine is doing something, too,” she muttered, then put a hoof to her forehead.

“You alright?”

“Just...just give me a minute.”

Limerence’s horn flashed, then he pulled back a couple of steps. “Detective, there is an active scanning field down there. Anyone who gets within ten meters of that fence is going to get pinged.”

“Shouldn’t matter,” Bones murmured, tapping my revolver through the sleeve of my coat. “Crusader was designed as a perfect stealth weapon. They didn’t leave anyone in camp. Too bad. I’d have liked to try to interrogate one of their officers.”

“I’m no strategist, but isn’t that a bad idea? Leaving the camp empty?” Limerence asked.

“You’re right. You’re no strategist,” Bones chuckled, patting my friend on the back. Limerence gave him an offended look, but my grandfather ignored it as he scratched at an eye-socket with the tip of his hoof. “The camp itself isn’t valuable. It’s what’s they’re protecting that’s valuable. Like I said, there’s movement inside the structure. I give odds that they won’t come out for us. They’ll wait for us to breach, then set up a line of fire somewhere inside. I’d imagine, considering their vanguard didn’t come back and hasn’t reported in, that they’re expecting a small army.”

“I’d hate to disappoint them,” I said, then glanced at where my driver was standing, only to find her absent. “Sweets?”

I looked back and forth until I spotted Taxi just down the street, heading for the front gate of the camp. She wasn’t precisely galloping, but there was a certain urgency in her stride that I tended only to see when she was angry about something. Her hooves clicked on the pavement as she marched along, eyes fixed on the gate or something near to it.

Failing entirely to heed Bones’s warning about potential snipers, I cantered after her, my armor squeaking loudly in my ears.

“Sweets, dammit, stop!” I snapped, grabbing her tail in my teeth. I wasn’t really prepared for her to drag me forward a few steps, so I almost landed on my chin when she did.

“You need to let go of me,” Taxi whispered.

I spat her tail out and worked my jaw for a second as the fetid stench from the camp sent my stomach into convulsions, before subsiding. We were directly in front of the gate now, but my focus was on my driver. Something about her was subtly different. Her shoulders were straight and squared, but nothing in her posture indicated tension; just readiness.

“Sweets, what’s going on?” I asked. “What is your talent saying?”

Tearing her eyes from the gate, she looked down, and I felt as though a rat with very cold feet had just scampered right up my tail. There was nothing truly different about her face, but if my own perceptions hadn’t confirmed it for me, the sudden sensation of my cutie-marks being doused in ice water would have. She wasn’t so much looking at me as looking through me.

‘That’s not Sweets.’

I scooted back on the pavement. Some instinctive part of my psyche knew I was suddenly in considerable danger. The tiger was in the cage with me, though I couldn’t see or hear it, just yet.

“Am I st-still talking to my driver, here? I’ve d-done enough of this possession crap lately...” I stammered, then trailed off. For some reason I couldn’t summon my usual glibness. Her eyes were glittering as she watched me, unblinking, barely breathing.

“I shine,” she replied. Her voice sounded odd, off kilter, and far too monotone for Taxi.

I stared at her blankly for several long seconds.

“What?” I said, dumbly.

“The other is gone, for now. She is not needed. Now, Justice...look up.”

“W-what?”

“Look up!”

To be clear, thus far, this was only the third or fourth weirdest thing Sweet Shine had ever done in my presence. I’d seen her destroy at least two hotel rooms with an explosive cake. I’d witnessed her high as a kite and chewing on a yak’s leg. I’d seen her climbing a radio tower to hang a declaration of peace-to-all-nations from a truly massive flag she’d apparently sewn in her spare time.

I’ve known since we were small and before I thought of her as my driver that Sweet Shine was not a normal pony. It’s on the tin. That said, even if she’d laid me out, kicked the crap out of me, and probably shortened my lifespan a few years with worry on a few occasions, I’d never felt endangered by her. Sure, I’d seen her kill Stone Shine, but that was an act of something like mercy. She’d even been careful not to take lives in the fight against the Cult of Nightmare Moon.

More than anything, I think the knowledge that she would kill if pushed had been subsumed under years of comfortable coexistence, a bit like living in a shark tank. The story of how she lost her cutie-marks was unavoidable if you were part of the department, but it’d been elevated to easily dismissed legend. She didn’t bring it up and nopony with half a brain was willing to poke that particular sleeping bear.

It was undeniable fact, however, that Sweet Shine killed an entire building full of mob enforcers, alone, armed with only a knife, after sawing off her own cutie-marks. Even after she’d told me the general outlines of the story, it was maddeningly short of specifics. It left open a heap of questions I didn’t really want to answer, but there was one that remained chief amongst them: how had my driver recovered from what her father did to her?

Stone Shine tortured her. He’d abused her mind and body in ways most adult ponies wouldn’t have survived. Despite what he’d done to her memories, Taxi was a ferocious fighter when provoked, and had been ever since we were both kids.

Strange, then, that she came out of all of that after a few years of therapy as a largely functional mare. Her talent still gave her fits, but so long as we were together, she knew I wouldn’t lead her astray; my own talent, much as I might hate it sometimes, keeps me on the straight and narrow.

That left the killer, the pony who’d murdered her father, Astral Skylark, and who knew how many others.

Where did the monster live when there was no one who needed killing?

My teeth were chattering as I wrestled my gaze away from Taxi’s. It was very much the sensation of forcing oneself not to look at a poisonous viper inches from your nose. Turning my gaze upward, I swallowed a sharp breath. My stomach lurched.

Heads.

The objects on the spikes were heads.

My back legs scraped at the pavement until I could get them under me. I scrambled a few steps away, momentarily forgetting my driver was there as I found myself staring into the glassy eyes of a dead stallion, his blackened tongue protruding from his muzzle. An ugly, glowing green scar was cut into his forehead.

Slowly, the eyelids of the dead pony blinked as his pupils swiveled to look down at me.

The severed, mounted head blinked, again. Gradually, the other heads took notice as well. Their empty gazes swung down to peer, owlishly, in my direction.

I opened my mouth to scream, only to have something hard and cloth-covered shoved between my teeth. It tasted of old tobacco. Realizing it was one of Bones’s legs didn’t help my desire to shriek. I just stood there, making a muffled whimpering sound, unable to move. My knees were locked tight, and all I could do was wheeze into my grandfather’s femur.

Limerence broke the spell by stepping in front of me and blocking my view of the heads. He sat, took my face in both front hooves, and put his forehead against mine. I felt his horn warm up, and then my body started to relax. My legs went rubbery, and I sank to the sidewalk.

“Be calm, Detective. Breathe.”

“B-but there’s-”

“Shhh...I know. I will disenchant them. Shut your eyes.”

Much against my will, my eyelids snapped shut.

He let go of my face, and then I heard him moving, followed by a soft buzz of magic.

“Necromancy?” Bones asked, his mental voice carrying a dangerous note.

“Of course,” Lim replied, matter-of-factly. “A spell to allow the caster to see through the eyes of a corpse. I suppose this would be the reason the building is poorly guarded.”

“If I find the pony that did this--”

Limerence cut him off. “Then you’ll leave them alive until I’ve extracted every last iota of magic from their bodies, else nothing you do to them will make one bit of difference. We face a necromancer. They tend to think of violent death as an inconvenience.”

The sound of spellwork faded and died.

“You can look now, Detective,” Limerence murmured.

Bones pulled his slightly damp sleeve out of my mouth, and I sat there, eyes still closed, struggling not to hyperventilate.

“You need to open your eyes, Justice,” Taxi said, still in that frighteningly emotionless voice.

I blinked a few times as my breathing worked its way back to normal. The heads were still mounted on their spikes, but the runes had gone dark and they were no longer staring at me. I did my best to relax, but there are some circumstances where the best a person can manage is not losing bowel control.

“Are you alright, Detective?” Limerence asked.

“I...I think so,” I replied.

“Then you’ll have to excuse me a moment.” Turning on his back legs, Lim trotted to the gutter at the edge of the sidewalk. Leaning over, he delicately held his mane out of his face with one hoof and quietly puked in the drain.

“Sometimes forget you younguns haven’t seen much death, yet,” Bones murmured, shaking his head.

Limerence held up a leg, then heaved again, and once more, before unfolding his kerchief from his pocket and carefully wiping his mouth with it.

“Death is not at issue,” the young stallion replied, looking down at the cloth, then tossing it into the gutter. “I have seen death. I have seen much death. That? That was not death.”

“T-those weren’t--” I started to ask, but Limerence shook his head.

“Those were the remains of living souls, Detective,” he murmured, then coughed and straightened his collar. His lips were drawn into a thin line as he said it.

I was in no condition to process evil on that scale, but my heart rate seemed to be roughly back to normal, at least for a taster of what I suspected were things to come. My stomach was empty enough that I didn’t feel the need to have my lunch join Lim’s, but existential terror doesn’t produce near the same reaction in me that it did in him. Casting one last look at the heads, fighting the impulse to recognize any of them or count how many of them might be foals, I tried to bring the goal back to the forefront of my mind.

‘Get inside. Destroy the Scry. Don’t let anyone else die. Right. Good.’

The sound of clattering hooves on pavement snapped my head around and I saw Taxi, already through the gate and moving through the camp toward a long trench dug off to one side. I wrangled my legs into motion and stumbled after her. Through the gate, the permeating scent of death and decay was even stronger.

“Sweets, stop! Come on--”

“Justice. See this. It will give you conviction.”

I dug my hooves into the pavement and slid to a stop some meters from the ditch.

“I don’t need to see a heap of bodies,” I said, softly.

Sweet Shine or Shine or whatever she was, turned to me, then moved closer.

“Then you will not be prepared to leave a heap of bodies behind you,” she whispered, before grabbing my mane in her teeth and yanking me forward. I struggled, but it was like fighting a tidal wave. My hooves slipped, scattering gravel as she pulled me toward the ditch.

“Dammit, Bones, help me!” I yelped.

“Help you what? You want me to brain her?”

“No, but--”

That ugly burn in my cutie-mark had intensified until I was ready to scream, but I could only moan as she dragged me toward the pit. She had me, and whatever freakish well of strength was driving her didn’t seem to have a limit. The smell was bad enough, but I couldn’t force my eyes closed even as she hauled me to the edge.

You’d think I’d have seen enough bodies to stop being shocked by piles of them. How much variance could there be? One pile of corpses is much like any other.

Unless of course it isn’t.

They didn’t eat the heads.

I don’t know what cruelty must have lain in the hearts of those creatures, but they’d carefully preferred everything below the neck, and not one of those remains lying in the ditch was without a terror-stricken expression frozen on their grey faces. Little was left besides scraps, but the bastards had made certain their prey suffered. I stood there, and slowly felt the fear slip back into the rear of my mind as something else took over.

My shoulders relaxed.

The bodies were chewed, and most of the meat was gone, leaving skeletons and scattered ribcages. There must have been a reason they left the skulls intact. Why? Possibly poor interactions with the spell conservancy, or potentially issues with digesting brain matter.

Irrelevant.

So, they’d kept the ponies in the cages, then shoved them into the pit for the mutants to eat.

Why these ponies in particular? Random? No, they were all adults. No foals amongst their number. Relatively even gender spread.

The bones of several looked strangely deformed, as though something had begun to alter them and somehow been unable to complete the job.

‘These are failed transformations,’ I thought.

Failed transformations fed to the successes. That made sense according to the philosophy of the Family. They’d fed the ancestors who failed to whatever it was that lived in the pylon in the basement of their mansion.

‘Why have them eat the weak? Better question. Why are there no other species besides ponies in this ditch? Surely they had no compunctions about killing children or non-pony species.’

The transformation magic relied upon eating meat. It was triggered by it. If Swift hadn’t had Tourniquet to drain off the excess magic in her system, mightn’t she have continued along the path until she was fully transformed?

Why did she dislike Essys so? Targeted conditioning? No. Food for the conservancy. Eating those with magic in their bodies must speed the transformation. Eating those made of magic, even moreso. Why not unicorns? Why not unicorns? Swift said she thought the Warden smelled delicious. Was it only self-control keeping her from trying to eat the Warden of Tartarus?

‘There are no other species here, because no other species is infected with the arcane conservancy that causes the mutation. With the raw magic in the bodies of those transforming as an incentive to both eat and fight, those who survived the pit were the best killers. Eating the skulls would mean eating the spellwork itself and might interfere with their development, so they left the weak alive, to suffer in fear as their half-mutated bodies were devoured by their...friends.’

It was so neat. So tight. So interwoven.

So...wrong.

My breathing slowed, and I swear I smelled, for an instant, the ocean. It was clean and clear, as though everything had crystallized in that single moment.

‘I will deliver them,’ I thought.

“Now, you see, Justice,” Shine said as I stepped away from the pit and turned to the Office. On the middle floors, I could see a few vague shapes moving behind the glass. It was hard to tell what they might be. Of course, it didn’t really matter. They were all going to die, anyway.

“I see. What do you need?” I asked, softly.

“Melee weapons. The other’s cannon is poor in close quarters, and I cannot kill them effectively with just her hooves.”

I called over my shoulder. “Limerence?”

“Do you mind if I don’t come any closer?” he asked, standing at the edge of the camp, one hoof with a piece of cloth over it pressed against his nose.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Give Taxi your knives.”

Lim’s voice quavered. “Detective, this is all very strange. I thought we were sneaking in. I don’t understand what’s going on-”

“You don’t have to understand, Lim,” I said, sharply. “Give her your knives.”

“My...my knives?” he stammered, putting his leg across his chest.

“Yes. All of them. Keep the staff.”

With a skeptical look, he lit his horn and tugged the buttons on his vest loose, revealing a strange jacket of some sort that was lined with two rows of blades, short and long, in clasped sheaths, everything from a few dozen scalpels to something that might have been a dirk. There were too many of them to count. Carefully unzipping the front, he shrugged out of it and levitated the whole thing the few meters between us to lay at Taxi’s hooves.

Without a word, she snatched the jacket up and pulled it over her shoulders. I moved to her side and pushed her mane out of the way so I could adjust the straps on her back to fit her thicker frame. She held her braid out to one side, then pulled a long, sharp-looking hunting knife from a scabbard on her side and offered it to me.

I stared at it for a moment, then nodded and quickly applied the edge to her braid, sawing it off with one swift motion. It fell across my hoof, and I sighed, pocketing it. If she died, it would be good to have something to lay on her grave.

“Bones?”

The skeleton was standing back there, watching us, a cigarette glowing between his teeth. “You find what you need in that hole?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. Can you get the front door open?”

“Doubt they changed my codes, though I won’t count those chickens before the eggs are hatchin’. What’s the plan?”

“I’m done planning,” I replied, turning to the imposing edifice of The Office. A straight concrete path wound down to the dark entrance “Lim? What’s this place used for these days?”

“My research indicates the bottom floor was a small shopping center,” he said, giving the pit full of bodies a wide berth as he moved onto the sidewalk up to the still turnstile doors. “It is or was until recently the ‘Crusades Memorial Center’. There is a plaque inside with the names of several former servants of the crown. Above that, the Dunder Hill Law Firm, who you will be unsurprised to hear are a subsidiary of Umbra, Animas, and Armature. The top floors are owned by a...well, a shell corporation whose primary purpose seems to be to own this building.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if Apple Bloom still owned it through some crazy heap of paperwork back in time,” Bones commented. “It’d be like her to lease a building below a portal to one of the nastier levels of Tartarus to a bunch of starched up lawyers.”

“You will need this,” Taxi said, passing me her P.E.A.C.E. cannon.

I hefted the heavy beast across my chest and wiggled the strap over my shoulders. Tipping the chambers open, I quickly read the ends of the first three chunky grenades in the drum: flashbang, smoke, and magical overload. Perfect breaching rounds.

“Bones, you’re leading the way. Get us to the main door and get it open,” I ordered.

“Thenwhat? Come on, colt, fill me in. We want to sneak in, there’s about six places we can do it.”

I turned my collar up against the frosty air and shook my head. “We’re not sneaking anywhere. This isn’t a stealth mission anymore.”

The glowing lights in Bones’s eyes vanished for a second, and I realized he’d blinked at me.

“Junior, this is a might queer, even for me. You can’t be meaning to walk right in the front…door...”

Taxi had already started moving toward the building, but paused to wait for me to catch up. We walked, side by side, until Limerence darted up and joined us, followed a moment later by a reluctant Bones. Lim kept shooting sideways glances at my driver, but she didn’t seem to notice. That, or she didn’t care.

I kept my eyes moving, looking for potential ambushers, but Taxi seemed completely assured of herself. She made no attempt to creep or keep low, electing instead to march purposefully along with her gaze locked on the doors. Being as it would have been awkward to watch my best friend wandering into a sniper’s fire without at least providing the possibility that I’d take the first bullet, I stayed at her side.

The wind was picking up, wailing over the camp and offering some slight relief from the smell.

We stopped at the foot of three short flights of stairs headed up to the turnstiles, which were both locked shut. I couldn’t see any sort of keypad or mechanism to open the doors, and the glass seemed thicker than what even our weapons might penetrate, short of the Crusader. I glanced over at Bones.

“Can anypony inside see us out here?” I asked.

He shrugged, his spine rattling softly. “Through an inch of rocketproof, bulletproof, military-grade glass? Probably not. The building has an independent generator, though. Power might be off in this part of town, but if there are cameras, they can see us.”

“Why the severed heads if they have cameras?”

“Those are not for the guards inside,” Limerence murmured. “They are for the necromancer. Still, that leaves us with the questions of whether he told them, and exactly how many we face inside.”

Taxi’s lips peeled off of her teeth into a nasty snarl. “Nine creatures. They have no minds. The firing line is across from the stairs. Four are on the balconies above and five behind cover below. Eight more on the floors above.”

“If I ask how she knows that, is the answer going to keep me up nights worse than not knowing?” Bones asked.

“Yes,” I said, then pointed at the doors. “Stack up and prepare to breach. I’ll send in some smoke, a flashbang, and something to disrupt their casters. Then we wait until it’s quiet.”

He shifted his weight, then sighed and trotted up the steps. “And I thought ponies were nuts when I was your age.”

Stopping in front of the doors, he edged sideways, then counted three glass panels down, and two to the left, before pressing the bottom of his hoof against a seemingly innocuous section of wall. It beeped, softly, and a panel slid open to reveal a keypad. He pressed a few buttons, then stood back as a crystal jutted from the wall.

“Now is the moment of truth, kiddies.”

A thin ray of blue light ran over his body, starting at his hooves, then moving to his head.

“May I ask what that is?” Limerence inquired.

“Skeletal scan. You can fake a magical signature if you’re willing to saw off a horn, and hauling around somepony’s eyes for a retinal is easy, but you have to carry a whole body for this one. Let us hope she didn’t decide the pony needed proper marrow for this, or we’re in deep.”

After a moment, the machine seemed to consider, then a soft, feminine and slightly robotic voice said, “Welcome, Agent Egg Head. It has been thirty-seven years and sixteen days since your last activity. Office systems are presently compromised. Internal defenses: down. External defenses: down. Contingency system: down. External communications: down. Emergency communications: down. Armory self-destruct sequence ninety-two percent complete; four prototypes unaccounted for. Vault defenses compromised; portal is open. Please report to Agent Blooming Death that repairs will be necessary.”

“Will do, Ms. Strong,” he muttered, then looked up at us. “Sorry, the girl who recorded the voices was named...eh, never mind.” He prodded a few more buttons, then stepped back and moved around to one side of the sliding glass doors. “Alright, once I hit this button, those doors are coming open. Since you’re not standing in a puddle of your own pee, I’m assuming you know what you’re doing. You want to give a speech or something, first?”

Taxi drew a knife from her harness and stuck it in her teeth, blade side out. She pulled another and held it in the crook of her leg, then nodded at me. Her glazed eyes were still empty.

My cutie-mark burned. My heartbeat was steady.

‘I will deliver them.’

I hefted the P.E.A.C.E. cannon and moved to the opposite side of the doors from the keypad, then disengaged the giant gun’s safety.

“Do it.”

Act 3 Chapter 48 : Death At Work

"Trans-dimensional travel is well known to exist in the upper echelons of Equestrian academia, but the term most frequently associated with it is 'ill-advised'. Most ponies go through their daily lives never really considering the possibility of other universes. Many would be distressed to discover that Princess Celestia was, at one time, an avid extra-dimensional explorer. Several of our most beloved modern conveniences are products of those ventures. Espresso, the dishwasher, and toaster pastries all hail from shores most distant.

Equestrians, on the whole, are a progressive and curious species with many great explorers to their credit. Many have cutie-marks dedicated to exploration and filling in the great, empty sections of the map.

Why then do so few opt to adventure in the Great Beyond?

A part of the issue may stem from just how 'great' any given 'beyond' happens to be. Some 'beyonds' are greater than others. More than one ambitious magician has set their sights on finding new worlds to plant an Equestrian flag on only to discover they'd misjudged the scale of their new home and buried the butt of the pole in the backside of something that eats mountains for supper. There is an entire cabinet in the basement of Canterlot Castle dedicated almost exclusively to ponies who decided a change of scenery was necessary and found themselves devoured whole by the new scene.

Another problem - and one which may play a more significant role - is that opening portals to different places tends to mean one won't necessarily find another world on the other side. There was, until the invention of the 'camera on a stick', no particularly good way to know what you might find without stepping through. The 'eaten alive by giant creatures' cabinet has a neighbor labeled 'stepped out into deep space and forgot to tie the rope around their waist first'."

- The Scholar

The Shine felt the pounding of Justice’s heart against his ribcage as he propped his weight on the glass, standing on his hind legs. She watched as, with agonizing slowness, he aimed the Other’s cannon through the quickly opening gap in the doors. It was strange to feel the Other’s affection for him, though upon second consideration, not entirely unexpected; he was a truly excellent killer after all.

The cannon chuffed, and a smoking shape spat from the barrel, arcing into the darkness where it was almost instantly lost. The Shine examined the interior of the shopping center, listening to the distant whisper of hooves on concrete. Death was coming ever so soon.

‘Their vision is sensitive after the mutation,’ The Talent whispered, ‘Wait for the flashbang to blind the mindless ones before you kill them. The two on the end were sleeping together before they were transformed. The one on the left is experiencing intestinal distress from the magic in his body and his partner had a concussion three months ago that causes the sight in his right eye to blur at the periphery.’

A volley of bullets tore into the glass beside her, though they only left a spiderweb of thin cracks. The mindless ones had begun firing. She glanced at the impact pattern. Long rifle caliber and assault weapons, but nothing armor piercing.

The first grenade detonated, letting out a spray of smoke that billowed up, blinding the mindless ones. They were wearing P.A.C.T. issue defensive gas masks, but that still left them unable to see through the thick fog. A pegasus amongst their number flapped her wings and began to fan the smoke away, while a unicorn brought up a pink defensive shield.

Behind her, the skeleton was readying himself with some quick stretches. What he might have to stretch was irrelevant, but it was a curiosity, nonetheless. Silence was giving his staff a few experimental swings with his magic. They would need to know the truth of that staff, soon, but the Shine was more concerned with their immediate needs.

‘The ones on the balcony were not affected by the smoke and they are holding their fire, waiting for somepony to move inside,’ The Talent murmured, ‘Two of them have grenades; the recruit partnered with the cruel mare in hopes he would wash out, and the stallion wearing the charm bracelet his daughter gave him.’’

The second and third grenades arced into the shopping center, sailing over tables and chairs to land against the barricade. Gunfire had become a constant crackle in the air as the defending ponies unloaded their weapons at the door. The Shine momentarily considered detonating the considerable ammunition stocks lying behind their barricade, but it would introduce an element of randomness outside what was acceptable. Still, if there were no hooves to pull the triggers, the ammunition mattered little.

A concussive burst filled the building, popping a dozen ear-drums. Muffled shrieks echoed through the halls as the defenders were simultaneously blinded, then pumped to the gills with unfocused magical energies. The unicorn’s shield collapsed with a sound like shattering stone as he pitched over in a twitching heap, blood gushing from his nose.

‘It is time. You have two options. Smoke is blowing across the left balcony, while the right balcony was closer to the flashbang. Enter now.’

Giving one last look at the others, the Shine grabbed the edge of the doorframe and launched herself through.

It took a moment once the doors slid open to get a solid accounting of just what we were facing and I didn’t even see Taxi move until she was halfway down the concourse. I’d thought Zeta the zebra was fast, but she had nothing on my driver at full chat. Her hooves sounded like a typewriter as she sprinted to the balcony nearest us and vaulted to the top of a cold drinks machine before leaping over the railing onto the second floor.

In the dim illuminance of the shopping center’s emergency lights, I could just make out a line of armored ponies behind a pair of upturned metal tables at the far end of the room, although two of them were slumped across it like broken dolls and another’s hooves were poking out from behind the cover in a fashion that tended to indicate he or she might be unconscious.

I only got a second to look before a stallion with a heavy assault rifle recovered from the flashbang enough to aim downrange and try to take my head off with a quick burst of gunfire. He hadn’t noticed my driver moving down the balcony towards the pair of soldiers at the other end.

Neither had they.

The Shine’s nerves burned as she flew toward the two armored ponies, weapons jutting over the balcony toward the door as they unloaded round after round towards Justice’s position.

The trooper closest to her was a sweet, lonely colt whose parents died before he was sixteen. He’d entered the P.A.C.T. at eighteen and threw himself into his studies along with a vigorous regime of bodybuilding. His slowly manifesting mutation had only increased his girth.

He hadn’t thought to adjust his chest straps, just yet and it left a small gap just below his foreleg. As she fell upon him, her first knife slid into that space like a blowtorch through tin foil. He only had time to feel a brief pinch as she sliced his aorta wide open.

His companion stared, wide eyed, as her partner died in the half second it took for the Shine to use his falling corpse to launch herself into the air.

‘This one is a sadist. She enjoys watching the creatures she’s killed suffer. Her brother’s disappearance was never solved. She buried him by the stream near her family home.’

Shine’s lip quirked into a smile as she wrenched a long knife out of her vest and flashed across the distance in the blink of an eye, leaving the weapon buried in the trooper’s upper back, between her shoulder blades. It was not a clean strike, but it was enough to sever several nerves and nick an artery. All four of the trooper’s legs went lax and she sagged against the railing, then slid onto her side. One malevolent eye flickered in the Shine’s direction and she tried to shout something, but her muzzle could only flop uselessly open as her tongue dangled from the corner of her mouth.

‘Death by exsanguination in two hours. Move on.’

Turning back to the body of the younger stallion, Shine pulled him around by his collar until she could get to his combat vest and snatched a light fragmentation grenade off his belt. Pulling the pin, she leaned over the railing, wound up the throw, and pitched it as hard as she could.

“Shouldn’t we be in there...eh...helping yon mad filly?” Bones asked.

I winced as the balcony opposite Taxi’s position exploded, sending a pair of shrapnel-riddled bodies cartwheeling into the open air. One of them crashed face first into a dining table, while the other skidded across the marble floor to stop in front of the doors. The trooper lifted his bloodstained head for a half second, blinked at us, then went limp.

“Do you want to get in her way?”

Almost before the bodies had landed, the Shine was mid-leap from the balcony, aiming for a spot just behind the two metal tables covering her foes.

‘Drop onto the spine of the one nearest you. He has an old back injury. His eighth and ninth vertebrae should snap under your weight.’

Tilting herself toward the stallion, she landed rear-hooves first. The stallion let out a dull squeak before his lungs seized as she drove him to the ground, then wrapped a leg around his neck to deliver a quick wrench that broke it. He was dead before his gun hit the ground.

Shine hauled his body up as a shield, aimed his gun at his companions, and pulled the trigger bit. Despite their body armor, the small herd of troopers were not prepared to have a pony firing an assault rifle, point blank, into their flanks. The first, a short mare with a poofy mane, died in an instant as a bullet tore out her throat, then another proceeded into her brain. The one behind her had the good sense to drop, but that put him in line for the next few shots.

Yanking the body along with her, Shine let herself fall backwards as one of her opponents finally drew a bead and unloaded his rifle into the corpse, splashing viscera across her face, though most of the shots were absorbed by the body armor. She felt a single, sharp sting in her back leg, but ignored it as she brought the gun up and fired the last few bullets in the clip into her assailant’s face.

Three left, and they were turning their guns on her.

A knife snapped into her hoof and she flung it, though before it could reach the most distant of the troopers, she was up and flying toward the nearest one.

‘She joined the PACT to fight monsters after her village was destroyed by a hydra. She hopes to find her little brother again one day. Her right knee is weak.’

Shine ducked low, then slid under the mare, snapping her kneecap with a quick strike. The agonized scream was silenced almost immediately by a blade buried in her throat. Behind the final stallion, the furthest trooper lay on his back, his one remaining eye fixed on the end of the knife buried in the other.

She regarded the last stallion for a moment. He was shaking in terror as he held his gun up, aimed squarely at her face, his trigger clutched tightly between his teeth. He gave it a tug.

The weapon clicked.

He tugged again.

The empty chamber clattered softly. He let the trigger bit drop.

‘He has a wife at home, waiting for him. She’s still wondering where he is. It’s been a month since the mutation took hold. She’s still waiting.’

Stepping forward, she pulled one more blade from her vest and drove it between his eyes. As he died, there was a look of quiet resignation on his face, alongside perhaps a modicum of relief. For a moment, the Shine spared a thought to how the Other would respond if she were in the same position. After short consideration, she concluded it would probably be quite poorly.

‘You are bleeding from a wound in your leg,’ the Talent murmured, pulling her attention back to the needs of the moment, ‘The barrel of that rifle is still hot enough to sear the skin shut. There are additional ponies upstairs who need to die. Move quickly.’

Shine picked up the still smoking gun from the body and turned to attend to her injury.

After what felt like an eternity, the gunfire fell silent.

I glanced at my companions. Bones was flexing his knee back and forth in a slightly disturbing fashion, studying the way his leg moved, while Limerence sat against the wall with his eyes closed, taking slow, deep breaths. As the last shots rang out, Lim opened his eyes and pushed himself up.

“Well, that...uh…” I trailed off. I couldn’t really think of any way to postpone looking to see what was left of my driver.

Bones beat me to it, sticking his skull out for a moment to peer into the darkened shopping center.

“Damn if that don’t beat all,” he muttered, then fluffed the edges of his tweed coat and trotted inside.

The librarian and I exchanged a quick, silent conversation to the effect of ‘Well, nopony is shooting the walking skeleton, so how bad can it be?’

I peeked around the edge of the door and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The sight before us was ever so much worse than my battered imagination had room for.

The metal tables had been overturned and lay flat against the floor, revealing a heap of butchered corpses spilled across one another like a pile of bloodstained army figurines. An upper balcony on our right was largely gone, with only a twisted metal railing sticking out to mark the place the explosion had torn it off its moorings.

Every inch of the windows on either side of the entrance was riddled with bullets. Empty casings glittered amongst the bodies, and bits of broken debris carpeted the marble floor. Pools of blood and sprays of red and pink covered most of the broken front window of a small hair salon on one side of the former enemy position.

It was a massacre laid out in violent, eerie tableau.

Taxi was also nowhere to be found, though I thought for an instant I could hear hoofsteps upstairs.

Bones was casually going from body to body, ripping open ammo pouches and collecting weapons from the dead. He kicked over a particularly hefty stallion and yanked a knife out of the corpse’s eye socket, studied the edge for a second, then tossed it to one side.

“Are...are they all dead?” I asked, softly enough that I thought I might not be heard. I already knew the answer, but I needed to hear somepony else say it.

“Aye, most,” Bones replied, then used his boney stub of a tail to point toward the second level. “I hear some breathing up there. Not much breathing, mind you. Sounds wet. And before you get all panicky, it’s not your girl. She started on that side.”

Trotting to one of the tables, I hopped on top of it and lifted myself up on the tips of my hooves. Wedged against a pillar on the second floor, I could just make out a tuft of dark orange fur, smeared with blood, sticking out between two slats in the railing. A steady trickle of blood dribbled over the edge, plink-plink-plinking onto a garbage can on the lower level.

Limerence picked up one of his knives from the pile Bones was quickly creating and wiped it clean, then pocketed it. “Detective, if Miss Taxi was capable of this, why have we not been making use—”

“That wasn’t Taxi, Lim. That was...something else,” I said, interjecting before he could get that thought off the ground. “Believe me, we don’t want to try to ‘make use’ of her. The...the Shine, or whatever she called herself, is not a discriminating actor. She is a prairie fire. Last time this happened, a whole building full of mobsters died...along with her former partner.”

“Ah…I...I see,” he replied, a little awkwardly. After a moment’s thought, he added, “Do you think it perchance a case of ‘Talent Failure Syndrome’?”

I stepped carefully over a puddle of mixed fluids that might have been blood or might have been soda, then edged around until I could stand beside the pile of dead ponies. Almost all had died instantly, based on a cursory examination; it was quick, efficient killing.

“Not a chance. Cutie-Mark Collapse doesn’t come with side of slaughter. My driver…” I hesitated, then sighed and continued on, “Sweets is damaged, Lim. She’s the best friend you could possibly want, but her past is a bloody mess. If there are answers for what we just saw, nopony ever survived looking and stuck around to tell the tale.”

“I can’t say as I especially like sitting back while somebody else does the wetwork, but she’s the kind of efficient that makes me want to put my hooves up. Preferably in the next county,” Bones mused, using his hooftips to pull the lips of a dead mare open, revealing two rows of viciously sharp teeth. A wisp of smoke rose from the mare’s throat, and he did a quick two-step back as the body burst into a violent gout of green flame. I ducked to avoid losing my eyebrows as the corpse disintegrated within seconds, leaving nothing but a thin, smelly ash and a scorched skeleton behind.

Around us, the other bodies were already beginning to smolder, filling the space with the scent of burning flesh. I covered my nose with my sleeve and pointed toward the stairs up to the second floor near the end of the hall.

“Bones? Do you know where they’ll set up next?” I asked.

He shrugged and picked up the bundle of guns, slinging two of them over his shoulder and pocketing three magazines for each. “Well, if I were setting up another ambush, I’d want to control the elevator. There’s probably a few before that point, too, hidden in closets. Fifth floor. I’d also set up a few traps in the halls between here and there: claymores, trip wires, and such.”

I considered the situation for a moment, then nodded at the stairs just as the next body caught fire and began to burn. “Let’s keep as close to her heels as we can. Move up, but don’t assume just because she’s been by an area that it’s safe.”

‘Next hallway. Two tripwires attached to grenades. Jump the first, slide under the second. A stallion who wished he could be a professional bungee jumper is hiding behind a trash-can at the end of that hall. His shotgun will be useful. Take it after you kill him. His watch will go off in eight seconds and distract him.’

Shine drew her knife and began taking deep, sharp breaths, preparing her airways for the sprint. Her heartbeat was elevated and the Other was restless. It wouldn’t be long now.

She heard the soft ‘meep meep’ of a watch alarm.

‘Go now.’

“Watch yourself here, colt,” Bones murmured, pausing a few meters down the hallway. He pointed toward the beige carpet that seemed to grow from the floor like some kind of discolored moss. It took me a minute to pick out the thin piece of fishing wire running across at hoof height. It was strung to the wall, then up to the ceiling where it disappeared behind one of the tiles. “Mister...eh...Limerence, was it? Don’t suppose you have anything in your collection of spells that might help us.”

Limerence frowned, opened his mouth, then let it fall shut. He pursed his lips, then exhaled a long, drawn out groan.

“Yes, sadly, I do have a spell that will find tripwires. I cannot say I am pleased to use it, nor have I cast it in many years. A moment.”

“Wait, why sadly?” I asked.

He’d already shut his eyes, and his horn was glowing brightly. “You’ll have to give me a moment to remember the exact shape of the arcana. It is a very simple magic, but one I haven’t touched since I was a foal.”

“Lim, tell me ‘why sadly’?”

He cracked one eye at me. “Because it is a prank my brother enjoyed pulling on me when he could still use his horn. Step back.”

I backed away from the tripwire as Lim’s expression hardened. A thick, bright blue spray of something like yarn shot from his horn, spurting all over the hallway with the force of a high powered water-gun. It dangled off the walls, gathering in sticky clumps on every surface it landed on.

“Silly string?” I scoffed, picking a bit of the stuff off the wall and sniffing it. The odor was rank and chemical.

“Don’t mock that which is effective,” he grumbled, pointing at ground where a bit of the sticky substance dangled from the nearly invisible wire a bit farther down the hall.

“I don’t know, Lim. Effective, yes, but this might deserve some mocking.”

“Then you will wake up silly-stringed to your bed!” he snapped.

I let out a soft snort. “If I wake up tomorrow, I won’t complain, however it happens.”

Somewhere ahead of us, I heard a few soft snaps that sounded like popcorn.

“That’s gunfire,” Bones commented, raising his head.

I nodded. “Limerence, you’re leading. Silly string everything.”

Shine worked the tip of her blade into the wound on her shoulder and carefully flicked a bit of glass that’d managed to dig its way between two muscles onto the bloodstained floor. It was going to be painful, later, but that was an issue for the Other to deal with. Pain was an inconvenience.

‘You are suffering minor blood loss. Bandage your wounds and move on,’’ The Talent whispered in the back of her mind. ‘There are three targets left. One of them has a short range stun rifle. He is suffering arthritis which will make him slow to fire. The others are armed with standard P.A.C.T. issue assault rifles and they are behind cover at the end of a long hallway. Rig the shotgun to explode from a sharp impact.’

We found a third set of remains slumped against the scorched remnants of a door. One of Limerence’s knives, the handle burnt to a crisp, was stuck between his ribs. There wasn’t much to identify him besides a wrecked kevlar vest and a few blackened bones. Bullet holes in the far wall told the story. He’d had time to fire a couple of shots before she was on him, but his aim was probably spoiled by the dented fire extinguisher resting near what was left of his head.

“That filly is moving fast,” Bones murmured.

“Detective, there’s a bit of blood here,” Lim said, pointing to a few dark droplets on the carpet. “I think it’s Miss Taxi’s.”

“I hope to high heaven she doesn’t remember this,” I muttered, tugging at the strap of the P.E.A.C.E. cannon where it was digging into my shoulder. “Lim, let’s see what’s ahead.”

Limerence’s horn flashed, and he sprayed a thin string to the other end of the hall, revealing two more tripwires.

‘The Other will be here soon.’

Shine stared impassively down at the last of those she’d killed. The pony with the stun weapon was already burning, while his companions had just then begun to smolder.

She pulled the nearly empty vest of knives off her shoulders, then shrugged out of it. It was soaked with blood, some of it hers, some of it others’, but Silence would need it soon, for the confrontation. Tugging one of the remaining usable blades from her prey’s throat, she laid it atop the vest.

‘You will lose consciousness in two minutes.’

For a moment the Shine mused upon the possibility of remaining in control. It would be easy to drown the Other in sadness and guilt. She was almost waterlogged with it anyway. Still, that was not what Justice needed; Justice needed his friend. The Shine could never be that, nor did she wish to try.

She considered leaving them a note as to what was coming, but beyond the gate, there were too many variables for it to be useful to them.

Padding away from the bodies, she sat down against the door of the elevator, not really feeling the cold metal, but aware of it in a distantly logical fashion. The coolness of it felt good on her sweaty body, or would have, if such things concerned her in the least. Slick blood coated every inch of her body, but it was drying quickly in the chilly air.

‘The Other returns,’ the Talent ordered, ‘Put your head on your hooves, lest you damage her nose.’

She obeyed, closing her eyes to wait for quiet oblivion.

‘Maybe this is what it’s like to die,’ the Shine thought.

For just a second as she faded away, the idea brought back a tiny smile.

“Whatever else I’ll say for these things, they clean up right easy,” Bones quipped, peering around the corner. “Give me a broom and a dust pan over sponging corpse juice out of the carpet for six hours.”

I put a hoof on my chest and took a few sharp breaths. Five floors with adrenaline and anxiety following you the whole way up and no elevator to make things easier was exhausting, magical heart or not. Intermittently finding dead bodies the whole way up didn’t help.

Limerence blotted his forehead with one of his seemingly innumerable handkerchiefs and quickly checked his watch. “We are at forty-six minutes mission time, Detective.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bones replied. “The Office has a bit of a ‘time compression’ effect when you’re inside. Four hours in there is about two hours out here. The elevator up to the Vault is just ahead. Once we’re inside, we’ll have plenty of time.”

From somewhere close, I heard a frightened squeak, followed by panicked breathing.

Raising my voice, I called, “Sweets? That you?”

“H-Hardy?!” my driver called back, her voice cracking with the strain. “Where am I?! Where are we?! Where are you?”

“Are you safe?” I shouted, cantering down the hallway toward where I thought she might be. Limerence sprayed a quick blast of silly string ahead of me which picked out a pair of tripwires. I hopped both without incident, and galloped on.

“T-there’s...Oh Sweet Celestia! Who are these ponies?!”

“Tell me you’re safe!”

“I’m covered in blood and there’s three dead bodies here and they’re burning!”

I kicked my trigger into my mouth and charged around the final corner to find a barely recognizable mare with her mane drenched in ichor huddled against the shiny double doors of an elevator at the far end of a bullet-riddled hallway. Three corpses, all aflame and putting off a noxious smoke, were heaped together against one wall. Unlike the other floors, this one only had a single hall and no doors leading off in other directions.

Taxi was quivering as she stared, eyes wide and frightened, at a blackening skull with a knife-blade stuck through its temple that’d rolled away from the rest of the pyre. Her gaze jerked up as I came around the corner, and she tried to stand, but her back legs wouldn’t hold her weight. I slowed, watching for more traps, though it didn’t seem they’d bothered with the final stretch.

“H-Hardy...d-did I kill these p-ponies?” she stammered.

Rather than answer, I pulled a healing talisman out of my pocket. It looked like an adhesive bandage with a good sized blue gem mounted in the center and must have cost one of those rich bastards in the Cult of Nightmare Moon’s little pervert’s gallery a fair bit; considering the expense, even hospitals weren’t inclined to use healing talismans except in life or death situations. Edging around the burning bodies, I knelt beside my driver and pressed it against her side.

“You’re in shock, Sweets. Are you injured?” I asked.

“I-I don’t think I am,” she muttered, looking at her drenched forelegs. “My flank hurts a little and I h-have some nicks and cuts—”

“Just rest. Get your breath,” I said. The gem began to glow, and the muscles in her neck started to relax.

I was so focused on my driver, that I barely heard Limerence and Bones approach.

“Filly, I don’t know what sort of magics they’ve got ponies tripping on these days, but I haven’t seen knife work like that since Miss Scootaloo took down Paxis The All-Devouring from inside his stomach,” Bones commented, chuckling as he trotted up to the elevator and ran a toe down the doors.

“Dammit, Bones,” I growled at him, “She doesn’t remember.”

“What? Ah, crap. I’m sorry,” he apologized, “You’ll take care of her, though. Wouldn’t be a Hard Boiled if you didn’t. Now, let’s see if I remember the top floor codes.” He turned back to the elevator and slid a tiny panel open with yet another keypad hidden behind it. After a few quick presses and several soft beeps, the panel snapped shut. “I’m fairly sure the call button is active, now. We should be good to go. If we’re not...well, we’ll find out in the basement when the elevator drops into a pool of acid.”

“Bloom doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as ‘overkill’ does she?” I asked.

“Not so long as I’ve known her, no.”

“This will kill my dry-cleaning budget,” Lim said, picking up his collection of knives and their attendant clothing. Despite their bloodstained condition, he still tossed the bandolier back around himself, doing up the zipper with a quick burst of magic. “Mister...ahem...Bones. I would appreciate if you would brief us on what, exactly, we are going to face within this ‘vault’ of yours.”

“I wish I could, Mister Limerence, but the place doesn’t lend itself well to descriptions,”Bones replied, shaking his head. At the librarian’s dubious expression, he sighed and continued, “Well, it’s just a vault, like it sounds. There’s a...a ‘gate’ thing built by a very old and—hopefully—very dead wizard by the name of Starswirl. He was there during the war. Nopony knows what he got up to, but he vanished sometime afterward. You step through and you’re in the Office.”

Lim persisted. “And what is the Office, exactly?”

“It’s...it’s like the idea of ‘an office’ given life,” he replied, swirling his hoof in the air as though looking for the words. “There’s staplers and typewriters and filing cabinets, or at least there were the last time I was here. It changes sometimes when you’re not looking.”

“Go on,” I said. “Might as well hear all of it.”

“Eh, there’s a sort of ‘control room’ that seems to work the place, but we only managed to decipher about ten percent of what anything did. It’s in this language that’s a bit like ancient Equestrian, if you had six mouths with three tongues apiece. What we did decipher scared the Tartarus out of us so bad we just decided to use the place for target practice.”

“Wait a second. Clarify this for me. You found another dimension full of terrifying eldritch language and your response was to set off fireworks in there?”

He shrugged and picked up a boxy looking device with a wooden stock and a crystal of some kind jutting out of its end from beside the heap of burning flesh. “If somepony gifts you a shooting range where you don’t feel bad about collateral damage, you use it. Not that any gun Apple Bloom ever came up with ever managed to do permanent collateral to that pit. Not even the Crusader.” Cracking part of the device open like a shotgun breach, he poked at the interior for a moment, then snapped it shut. “Hrmph. That’s one prototype accounted for. Too bad it’s nonlethal. Makes me wonder where the rest are.”

Taxi let out a little moan and stretched out her back legs. “Mmm...those h-healing talismans really work...”

“We’ve only got a few, so don’t get too used to them. What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.

Her eyes shifted left, then right, before centering on the bodies again. “I...I was in the courtyard in front...in front of the Office and I think I saw something on top of the gate. I thought, ‘It would be horrible if those were heads’. E-everything after that is a b-blur.”

I felt like there should be a lot of nervous glances back and forth behind her back just then, but Lim was still studying his knives, and I couldn’t really tell where Bones was looking.

“You got us up here, Sweets,” I said, at last. “We’re here, we’re alive, and the world can still be saved. Those mutants were out to kill all of us. Focus on that.”

My driver’s teeth clenched as she turned to the burning bodies once more, then put a leg around my shoulders and hefted herself up to a standing position.

“For a stallion who’d make a terrible psychologist, you do have a way of motivating somepony,” she grunted, then tapped the button beside the elevator. It let out a loud ‘ding’, then that synthetic feminine voice played over a tiny metal speaker.

“Office Security protocols are currently offline,” the voice said, “Portal open. A Defiler level interdimensional breach is occurring. All Crusader Agents to the Vault.”

“Whoaboy! Now we’re in the crap,” Bones muttered.

“Bones? What’s a Defiler level...whatever the machine said?” I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice.

“Bad news,” he said as the doors of the elevator slid open, revealing a stark, white box with a rail around the outside edge. “It means something is spilling through from the Office. Bastards must have turned it on.”

“Turned the Office on?” Limerence inquired. “How does one turn on a pocket dimension?”

Bones peered into the box, then trotted inside and turned to face us. He had no expression to read, but his voice in my head sounded distinctly worried.

“Look, you have questions, but I don’t have answers. If I could do a solid briefing, I would, but it’s been thirty-seven years since I last set hoof here. We ran magical decryption algorithms on the language in the control room for five solid years and managed to get bupkis, but what we did get suggested the place was in a sort of ‘standby’ mode, waiting for...something. Most of our efforts were bent toward destroying it. Maybe whoever managed to break into Apple Bloom’s security system figured out something we didn’t. You want to stand around down here asking the dead guy who’s been sitting in a hole for thirty years what he remembers, or do you want to go upstairs and assess the situation?”

There was a bit of silence for a few seconds while we all evaluated whether or not we even wanted to get in the elevator. It was almost assuredly a deathtrap, and as I’d died very recently, I wasn’t looking forward to a repetition.

The door dinged impatiently, and Bones quickly stuck his leg in the way before it could close.

I sighed and stepped over the threshold, trotting to the back of the elevator car and propping myself against the wall. “Bones, do you have any of that bourbon left?”

“Nope. Sorry, colt. Drank the last of mine beside the pit in the courtyard,” he replied, the collection of guns dangling from his shoulders clacking against one another.

Taxi looked back and forth between me and my grandfather, then limped into the little box and sat down, before turning to Limerence who was staring at the front of his vest of knives, seemingly lost in thought.

“Lim?” she prompted.

He lifted his head and exhaled through pursed lips. His face was a mix of complex emotions, but foremost amongst them was quiet resignation.

“Oh, nothing,” Limerence replied, “Just remembering some of the stories my father told me of his youth, spent reclaiming lost and dangerous artifacts from all across the globe. I sometimes asked myself why a sane pony would put themself in such positions. I have, in recent days, come to the conclusion that no sane pony would.” With a slightly hollow smile, he trotted into the elevator and pressed his flank against the railing, leaving a streak of blood. “Shall we?”

It took me a minute to realize exactly why my anxiety level started to climb the second Bones touched the ‘up’ button.

How many times had I been traumatized after an elevator ride? There was Tartarus, the Monte Cheval, the Moon Walk, that meeting with Stella, and how many others? I’d bled and cried at the end of an awful lot of rides in tiny boxes.

About two thirds of the way to the top floor, the sweetly mundane muzak pumping through the speakers above us cut out entirely, and the car gave a light jerk on its rails that rattled us something fierce. Taxi, having reclaimed her P.E.A.C.E. cannon, reared back on her hind legs and hefted the giant blaster toward the closed doors as Limerence floated a pair of knives into mid-air and Bones put one rear leg against the wall, ready to launch himself at anything that might come through.

Overhead, the lights flickered for a moment, then stabilized as the car continued upward into the unknown.

Slowly, we all relaxed.

“I don’t suppose elevator maintenance was high on their list of priorities,” I quipped.

“Doubt it, although anything Bloom built or oversaw that breaks down is a bit of a cause for—” Bones started to say, but he was cut off by a shrill explosion of sound from the speaker that set all of us slapping our hooves over our ears.

It was agony.

Spots appeared in front of my eyes. My teeth shook in my head. I felt instantly dizzy, rocking on my hooves as the blast of noise nearly flattened the three living members of our party. Even Bones seemed shaken as he braced himself against the wall.

Worse, the volume seemed to be increasing the higher we rode, and I would have sworn I heard something resembling a voice within the racket. It was impossible to shout, or scream, or cry over the auditory torment. I couldn’t give instructions. I couldn’t even think of an order that might save us from what felt sure to be imminent death or deafness.

‘...work with us…’

My front legs collapsed, and I was sent onto my stomach, tears streaming down my cheeks. Taxi clutched at her skull and she rolled onto her back. If she screamed, I couldn’t have heard it.

Limerence, drawing from some reserve of will I don’t think I’d have possessed, lit his horn, and suddenly we were in silence, with only the panicked sound of our own breathing echoing around the inside of the elevator. My ears still rang like a dinner bell.

“Sweet mother of mercy, what was that?” I moaned, rubbing at the side of my head with the tip of one toe. “Some kind of defense mechanism?”

“Not one of ours, if it was,” Bones murmured. His scratchy voice was about the only thing that didn’t sound like I was hearing it down a pipe. “Those speakers aren’t designed to make a sound that powerful. I’ve heard noises as loud before, but only standing in front of a pissed off dragon who wanted to tell me about myself.”

“I must say, with a certain degree of alarm, that the sound is getting louder,” Limerence said, his horn still glowing, softly.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“I am maintaining a bubble of quiet around the speakers, but they are not the source. Whatever is projecting the noise is much, much more powerful and has...altered their internal structure in some fashion,” He gritted his teeth and glared at the ceiling for a moment. “It’s trying to make me stop casting. I seem to be able to hold it at bay, for now, but if I didn’t know better, I would say there’s a memetic component to whatever that is.”

I cocked my head to one side. “A...memetic component is something that messes with a pony’s brain, right?”

“Whooboy, I don’t fancy that,” Bones murmured. “Memetics are dangerous. They’re separate from mind magic, insofar as they dig into your mind and won’t let go, even after the casting has stopped. We studied them in the war. Sweetie Belle decided the risk of turning an entire city into drooling lunatics wasn’t worth the military edge of weaponizing her voice.”

I almost choked on my own tongue for a second. “An...entire city?” I gasped.

“Damn right. It took fourteen of the best mages in Equestria to incant them, and Sweetie Belle used the magic exactly once, on three volunteers.She tried to force them to make her tea.”

“What happened?” Limerence asked, cautiously.

“There wasn’t enough of their minds left to keep bowel control without a direct order.”

The unicorn’s upper lip curled as his horn brightened another few degrees of intensity. “I...see. What would happen if a memetic were projected along a sound wave carrier powerful enough to—” He hesitated a moment, then shuddered, “—deafen us for life?”

Bone’s glowing eyes flickered a few times. “That’d be bad, yeah. Can you hold it together?”

“For now, yes. Silence is my talent, and this spell is extremely efficient. I would not, however, wish to become distracted or startled while we are in range of these speakers.”

Bones flicked his eyes toward the quickly increasing numbers above the door. “There’s a hundred of those speakers on the top floor! You think you can throw that spell around all of them?”

“Ah…No, no I can’t,” he replied, expression growing worried.

Thinking quickly, I asked, “Lim, can you maybe throw some kind of shield around us so the silence only affects the outside of it?”

“I can, but...it will be inefficient and temporary,” he replied.

“Our brain matter is about to be temporary, Lim!”

“Yes, of course.” Shuffling through his pockets, he pulled out a green gemstone set in a golden socketed face shaped like a snarling goblin. “I suppose I took this from the Archive with the intention of using it.” He turned it over in his hoof and stared wistfully at the gem’s faceted surface. “Sad. It is the last of five in the world. Hrmph. I suppose there must be a world left to miss such things.”

Dropping the gemstone on the floor of the elevator, he stepped on it. A hot burst of air filled the elevator as a swirling green mist rocketed up around his hoof. Limerence shut his eyes and inhaled as the mist seemed to gather up into a thin stream that shot up his nose. As it did, his horn’s light intensified and a thin, spherical shell of baby-blue light formed around us. The sounds of the moving elevator fell away, leaving us in a bubble of absolute calm.

Opening his eyes, the unicorn exhaled. A bit of that strange mist seemed to be leaking from his pupils.

“Mmm, Father never told me they were so lovely to use,” Limerence all but moaned.

“Lim? Imminent death?”

His gaze centered, and he stood a bit straighter.

“Apologies, Detective. You have your time. The effect of a Mox is brief, but it will last the day. Tomorrow...well, I am becoming used to magical hangovers.”

As I was about to say something to the effect that we should come up with a less poisonous cure for the effects of burning through his entire magical reserve than those lotus petals, the elevator stopped and my driver tugged on my sleeve.

“Hardy,” Taxi whispered, “Look.”

Her trembling hoof was pointed at the door of the elevator. I squinted at the spot as something strange began to creep through the crack between the steel doors. It looked like some kind of creeping moss, beige and ugly, growing on the metal. The leading edge seemed to blow in an unseen wind as it grew, spilling across the surface of the doors in pulses eerily similar to the beating of my racing heart.

“Bones! What are we looking at here?!” I barked, pressing myself against the wall of the elevator as the odd substance started to work its way across the floor.

“Damned if I know, colt! It almost looks like...eh…” He leaned forward a little, his nose almost touching the outside edge of our shield. The lurching growth stopped just short of the magical sphere, but was still moving slightly, as if it were somehow alive. Shaking his head, Bones sat down with a soft click as his tailbone hit the floor. “Colt, I know this isn’t going to be a comfort, but...I’m pretty sure that’s carpet.”

I blanked for about five seconds.

“Carpet?”

“Carpet.”

“Carpet. Bones, please...clarify for me. Are we both talking about something you put in front of the door to wipe your hooves on?”

“Aye, that’d be carpet, yes.”

I tipped my hat back and mopped my forehead with a fetlock. “Is carpet normally infectious in the Office?”

“I’ve no idea. Still, sure enough, that’s the carpet that’s everywhere inside the portal. You want to ask any more questions I don’t know the answers to?”

“Only the one,” Taxi added. “Are we thinking that’s dangerous?”

Limerence cast a quick glance at the ceiling, his horn still gleaming as he maintained the shield. “I couldn’t say for certain, but short of pressing the ‘down’ button, hoping the elevator will descend, and then perhaps trying to blow up a building made to survive dragon attacks from the outside, I don’t see what our alternatives are.”

The doors slid open on a scene so bizarre my eyes refused to acknowledge it for a moment.

My friends and I faced a short hallway at the end of which lay something closely resembling a bank vault. At first I thought the ceiling was somewhat low, but that was a trick of the light; it was actually three times my height. A circular door with a great wheel set in the middle of it was mounted on a wall covered from floor to ceiling in the strange, spreading carpet. It’d been propped a few inches open by what appeared to be a vase or pot of some kind, also freshly carpeted. Even the ceiling had a layer of the fluffy sproutings.

“Reminds me of the time I spent in a mental hospital after I lost my cutie-marks,” Taxi murmured, her tail tucked tightly between her back legs. “Hardy, I hate this.”

Taking a sharp breath, I trotted forward, pushing my hoof through the wall of the shield. Limerence winced, but the spell held fast.

“Hardy, don’t!” my driver gasped, but I forced myself to ignore her. With the greatest of care, I brought my hoof down on the carpet. The surface was pleasantly soft and reminded me of petting an alpaca wool blanket I’d picked up at a flea market a few years back.

“If they’re guarding this place, then they must think it’s vulnerable,” I replied. “That means they’ve got some way of moving around without the rug growing all over them or the P.A. melting their brains.”

“Colt, you could have let the undead guy do the potentially lethal experiments,” Bones grumbled.

“I could have, yes,” I said, rubbing a hoof through the odd surface of the carpet. “But I didn’t.” Stepping to the edge of the shield, I lifted my trigger and held it in one side of my muzzle. “Now, let’s figure out how those ponies were moving around in here without the sound system trying to squish their minds.”

“It is best we stay close to one another until we do,” Limerence murmured as the bubble around us pulsed a few times. “My shield is experiencing force equivalent to being trapped under an avalanche every ten seconds.”

Mundane and, yet, dangerous. Horrible, and yet, completely normal.

After spending a solid half hour finding the remains of ponies my driver’s alter ego had left behind, something as simple as ‘too much carpet everywhere’ seemed downright pleasant. That didn’t take away from the strangeness of what we were doing, nor the fact that Taxi had somehow killed an entire building’s worth of ponies twice. Sadly, the encyclopedia and index worth of questions I needed to ask her about what we’d just witnessed would have to wait.

With my driver clumped against Lim’s right side and myself pressed against the other, we worked our way toward the vault. Listening for danger was futile; there was no sound from anywhere outside the shield. Smelling danger was out of the question; I couldn’t smell anything stronger than Lim’s fear, Taxi’s exhaustion, and Bones’s cigarettes.

That left visually appraising the potential dangers of a hallway full of enchanted carpeting leading to a secure room which supposedly housed a portal to another dimension. I had to resist the urge to whistle. The threat contained so many unknowns that, in practical terms, we might as well have been blindfolded too.

Bones was on point duty, but nothing seemed inclined to take a bite out of him just yet. Shuffling along, I had to take a moment to enjoy the softness of the carpet on my hooves; for something almost certainly arcane, it was pretty comfortable to walk on.

We made it to the vault door without dying, and I quietly counted that another victory in a week that had too few. I couldn’t tell many details about the pot that’d been propping it open; it seemed to have deformed slightly from whatever shape it’d originally been, as though it were gradually melting.

“Are we really doing this?” Taxi asked, half under her breath.

“Yeah, we’re really doing this,” I replied. “If you can think of somepony more qualified, let me know, because I’d really rather we called them to handle this one.”

Once the bubble of silence around us was close enough, I wedged my nose into the crack in the hatch and heaved. It was lighter than I’d expected, and the door swung open in total silence. With the blood rushing in my ears, I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to adjust to the dim interior.

Act 3 Chapter 49: I'm Going To Need You To Come In On Sunday

"What did I see? Nothing you'd ever want to imagine. Through that door there were places without skies, where oceans writhed, and monsters who eat wishes live. I only saw it for a moment, and my publisher almost had me declared dead before a fan of my books found me in a mental hospital outside the Islands Of T'chitlan.

Ahuizotl wasn't so lucky.

He still cries when they open the blinds in the morning. Sometimes I take him little gold statues or things I find on my travels. We sit and I listen to him tell me about all his grand plans to rebuild his old empire, once he's better. Then we eat little bowls of parfait from the asylum commissary and he asks if I've seen any of his friends. He means his cats, of course, minions that used to do his dirty work.

They died in the void. At least, I hope they did. For some reason he doesn't remember the answer, no matter how many times I repeat it, so I tell him they're waiting for him in the jungle when he gets back. Then he smiles and pats my hoof like a benevolent old king and goes back to staring at the sky. That's how I know our visit is done.

It's been eight years, and he always asks me the same question."

- Daring Do / A.K. Yearling in an unpublished interview in the lead up to her book, "Daring Do And The Gate Between Infinities"

A heartbeat. She felt a heart, and it was beating. That was, by itself, a source of many worrying questions:

Why am I awake?

What is this horrid taste in my muzzle?

And perhaps chief amongst them:

When did I get a body?

She quickly ran her tongue over her teeth; flat, square, and not at all good for ripping flesh. They were pony teeth. She shifted her back legs, slightly, and felt something there that was most assuredly out of place. Her muzzle was full of male pony teeth, alongside a male pony anatomy.

Aside from her heartbeat, there didn’t seem to be much to hear other than a faint sizzle like a release of steam. Her backside was planted on something relatively soft that felt like a chair but had a subtle pulsating movement that seemed to sync up with her heart from time to time.

Everything seemed to be dark, though that wasn’t unusual; the dark was her preferred medium, after all. What was unusual was that she couldn’t see anything. Even in darkness, her vision had always been absolutely perfect. Light seemed to be coming from somewhere, but where? It was diffuse and distant.

‘Your eyelids are closed,’ a voice whispered. Had it been a voice? Maybe. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere outside herself. If she’d had to give it a general source, it sounded a bit like it’d come from her chest. That was a strange place for a voice.

Still, now that she considered it, the voice seemed to be correct. She tried to remember how the eyelids worked. They’d been a bit fussy the day before and were giving her trouble again. After a few seconds of experimentation, she found the right combination of muscles and cranked her eyes open. Blinking a few times, she beheld a blurry mass.

‘You need to move, Nightmare. We are in danger.’

Nightmare. Nightmare Moon. Yes, that was her name. Good to have that cleared up. How on Equis did those ludicrous meat brains manage to defeat her all those years ago with such slow, limited processing capabilities? It felt like she was thinking with a pair of lemons powering a pocket calculator.

Nightmare glanced down at her coal grey hooves. They were still blurred, and the corners of her eyes felt gummy as though from protracted sleep. Hadn’t her hooves been blue before? A lovely blue, so dark it might as well be black. No, her hooves were grey because his hooves were grey.

She rubbed her face on the back of his sleeve and took a quick breath as a gentle burning in her lungs reminded her she needed to do that from time to time. It was irritating to balance all those various bodily functions. She even had to maintain control of the bladder. That was an irritation she could have done without.

Vision cleared, she peered around at her surroundings.

Hard Boiled’s body had been seated at some kind of desk that appeared to be wood, though it didn’t feel like it; for one thing, it was too warm. The surface radiated an inner heat that had sweat beading on her forehead and sticky rivulets running down her sides. A thin layer of something like fur grew across the surface and right down the rounded corners, across the legs and to the floor. The seat under her flank was very close to an ordinary office chair, stiff-backed and too firm to be comfortable, though now that she examined it, the back appeared to be made of some kind of carapace.

Sliding out of the chair, she ran a toe along the backrest. The chair gave a light shiver and suddenly zipped back underneath the desk, pulling itself into place. Pulling back a few steps, she cautiously slid onto her stomach, cocking her head to one side so she could peer at the chair’s casters. They seemed ordinary enough, though similarly carapaced. Giving the chair a light shove, she watched as they partially unfurled in a fashion that reminded her of some memory stuck in her host’s mind of something called a ‘rolypoly bug’. A hundred tiny, flailing legs latched onto the carpet, then yanked the seat back to where it had been sitting before folding themselves neatly away.

“So, this is what fear is like,” Nightmare murmured, aloud, making herself jump at the sound of the stallion’s voice coming from her lips. For some reason the act of speaking seemed to speed her cognitive processes, so she decided to continue. “Let us evaluate our circumstances.”

Lifting her nose, she sniffed at the air. It was thick with a pink fog which carried the scent of cinnamon sticks and rotten cucumbers. Unfortunately, it was also cutting visibility to not much more than a few pony-lengths away from the end of her face. Whilst there was a space, seemingly open for her to leave, she was not much inclined to.

‘You must move, Nightmare! Find Hard Boiled’s friends!’

That voice again.

She put a hoof on her chest, feeling the strange texture of the plug underneath the pouch of flesh on her ribcage.

“What is the situation?” she asked. “The last thing I remember was attempting to process additional optimizations for a combat scenario involving the pony they call ‘Broadside’ after passing around a number of itineraries to the stallion’s social group. Then we were at the secure facility known as ‘The Office’ and...hmmm. There is a gap in my memory.”

‘I don’t know! I am focusing on keeping you from fainting! Stop being so scared!’

“That is easy for you to say, ghost!” Nightmare Moon protested, pulling her hooves under herself. “Controlling this meat sack for the purpose of spreading around a few ‘to-do’ lists is entirely different from doing it in a situation where I may feel pain! Why are you not able to control him?”

‘I’m trying to find Hard Boiled’s mind! It’s stuck in here somewhere. Something frightened him so bad he won’t come out!’

“B-but I do not know how to fight without magic!” she complained, putting her hooves over her eyes. “My memories are fragmented! I barely remember how this body operates! I was not designed with this type of improvisation in mind! I am just a personality fragment!”

‘You are what we have! Get up or I’ll make you taste every nasty thing Hard Boiled ever ate until we both die! He’s a cop, and he’s eaten a bunch of gas station food!’

Nightmare Moon’s lip quivered as she sat there staring at the beige carpet of the tiny cubicle, her ears pinned flat to her head and the stallion’s broad-brimmed hat down over her eyes. She finally understood why he insisted on wearing that foolish thing: it covered his face when he was on the verge of tears. More than anything, she wanted to crawl back into the space her true self had carved out in the back of the stallion’s brain, but that would lead to her own destruction.

Picking up the bright red stapler on the desk, she angrily hurled it at the soft, carpeted wall. It bounced and let out a wholly disturbing sound like a fork being violently scraped across a dinner plate, collapsing onto its back on the floor. Dozens of thin, whiplike appendages spilled from the underside, flailing about in the air as it arched against the carpet like an upended insect until it was able to flip over.

Lifting its front, a dozen beady little sapphire-coloured eyes opened along the stapler’s surface, glaring up at the astonished pony who’d entered its domain and had the audacity to pitch it off against a wall. Spinning about, it grasped the leg of the desk and began shimmying up like a centipede until it reached the top, then scooted across the matted surface until it was back where it’d begun.

A sharp prong that reminded her of a scorpion’s stinger unfurled from the creature’s backside, then lashed down into the table, vanishing into a fleshy nodule or sphincter which had gone unnoticed until that moment. With one last sound that reminded her of an annoyed cat, the stapler’s legs folded themselves away into its belly, and its eyes flicked shut.

Nightmare Moon only realized her mouth was open when she felt a trickle of drool run down her chin and quickly wiped it away.

“I cannot do this!” she moaned, though she was careful to keep her voice down this time.

‘I don’t want to die here, either, but you’re the only one who can make this work!’

Nightmare slid flat on her stomach, her back legs flopping out behind her. “What am I supposed to do, ghost? I am in an eldritch realm! A stapler just hissed at me!”

‘I’m twelve! I’m inside his heart! Why are you asking me?’

Sweeping a bit of hair out of her face, she let out an irritable sigh and threw herself back to her hooves.

“Fine. I suppose I am meant to find this stupid stallion’s friends.”

‘If whatever was happening in the elevator got to them, then the...what did the nerdy unicorn call it?’

“Memetics,” she replied, contemplatively.

‘That thing. Maybe that got them.’

Nightmare licked her blunt little teeth again and attempted to levitate the hat off her head for a moment, before remembering once more that she was short one horn. She settled for prodding at the walls of the cubicle, finding them slightly elastic and far too much like skin for her comfort.

“If that is the case, then we must find whatever counter-agent the individuals who activated the Office are using to avoid losing their minds. Then, I will attempt to fight the urge to stick this stallion’s hoof in an industrial shredder for placing me in this position!”

‘You’ve got control of the legs unless you do something crazy. I’m going back to trying to find Hard Boiled’s mind.’

Reaching out, she carefully picked up the top sheet of the papers on the ‘desk’ she’d been sitting at. It was covered in column after column of vertically aligned script. It bore no resemblance to any language she’d ever heard of. Still, it seemed she’d been, until very recently, transcribing the symbols from one sheet to another; the script was in Hard Boiled’s slightly jagged hoof-writing and an old fountain pen lay on the table. She reached for it, then thought better; no telling what sort of creature that might be.

“I am aware this is likely to be a futile curiosity, but I do wonder how we got to this cubicle and what we were doing before you awakened me,” Nightmare murmured.

‘Why would I know that if you don’t?’ the ghost asked, a little grumpily.

“Of course. Hrm. You do not talk to Hard Boiled this much.”

‘It would upset Hardy if he knew somepony was looking over his shoulder all the time, much less through his eyes. Besides, I can usually space out and just sift his memories. He’s been around longer than me, so I’ve always got something to watch.’

Nightmare peered into what seemed to be an ordinary rectangular plastic garbage can at the end of the desk, though it was growing out of the floor. At the bottom, a wide row of sharp, glittering teeth quivered in pink, lustrous gums. Experimentally, she dropped the paper she’d been writing on into the bin. It let out a sound something like somepony running a chainsaw for a tenth of a second and the sheet was gone quicker than her eyes could follow. The mouth ran a slavering blackened tongue with a fork at the tip around all four corners of the interior of the bin, then pulled it back between the dangerous looking teeth.

Backing away from the bin, she found herself shivering like a leaf in a high wind.

“The sensation of being terrified is...most unpleasant. Why did ponies decide they needed a holiday dedicated to this feeling?” she groused, though there was no reply.

Examining the rest of the spare little cubicle, she couldn’t find anything she might trust as a weapon. It was then she remembered she still had Hard Boiled’s revolver attached to her leg. Flicking it open, she found the remaining five Crusader rounds already chambered. A quick shuffle through the pocket of her trench coat revealed a half empty box of standard bullets, and she quickly switched out the crystal bullets. Hard Boiled’s shotgun was not in its harness; there was no telling where it’d gone.

“I suppose this is it, then,” she whispered to herself.

Taking a deep breath, she stuck her head out of the cubicle, peering both ways, before yanking it back in. Cautiously, she peered out again. There was a row of little openings which appeared to lead to cubicles like the one she was in. Each was identical, with nothing to differentiate one from another.

“Where is the light coming from?” she asked nopony in particular, tilting her head back as far as it would go to try to get a look at the ‘sky’. The illumination seemed entirely within equine norms, if a bit dim, but there was no specific source. It was as though the fog itself was letting off a gentle glow.

Picking up the revolver’s trigger bit, she slid her shoulder around the edge of her cubicle, sweeping the barrel of the gun back and forth. The potential danger was so absurdly out of proportion to what she could meaningfully respond to that it left her almost breathless. This wasn’t helped by the need to coordinate the lungs, which she knew was best left up to autonomic processes. Unfortunately, some arcane and irritating part of her newly formed psyche kept reminding her that they were there. How did the meat ponies manage with the tongue moving about or their eyelids having to regulate moisture on the eyeballs without thinking about them? It was all too much.

Sneaking to the next cubicle, she peered inside. It was exactly the same as the last one, right down to the stapler nesting on the desk and the stack of paper heaped in the corner. The only difference was a slight discoloration on the carpet which looked disturbingly like pink fur, though it seemed to be part of the surface.

She moved on, checking each of the little offices one after another. At points, she encountered intersections or crossroads down which seemed to be further rows of identical cubicles with nothing meaningful to differentiate one direction from another. Several cubicles had spots of colored fur on the walls or carpet here and there, but nothing like numbers or nameplates.

At the fourth crossing a soft sound reached her ears, coming from somewhere nearby; It was a faint moan, almost like an animal in pain.

“So, do I investigate what may be somepony being eaten by monsters, or do I do what an intelligent being would do without her magic, horn, armor, or magnificently toned body and run the other direction?” she whispered.

After a moment’s consideration, she tried to lift her hooves to flee, but her knees suddenly locked up.

‘You’re in charge of the legs unless you act like a jerk, Nightmare!’ Gale murmured, adding a flavor to her mouth that reminded her of rotten leaves and rancid coffee beans. She made a few spitting sounds and wiped at her muzzle with her sleeve.

“Oh come on!” she hissed, spitting out her trigger. “We are not a hero and Hard Boiled is an idiot!”

‘You’re Hard Boiled right now. Don’t do anything he’d regret, or I will take you on a grand tour of all the worst flavors of health food Taxi ever tried to get him to eat.’

Nightmare Moon snarled under her breath, but no matter how she strained, her legs would not take her in any direction other than toward the sounds of distress.

“This is not fair,” she muttered.

‘Are you going to argue about fair right now, you big blue doofus? Move it! Somepony might need our help!’

“Ugh...fine, but if we die, I shall take great pleasure in saying ‘I told you so’.”

Her ears swiveled as she quickly recentered and tried to get her bearings. Distances and sounds were distorted by the fog, or perhaps by some effect of the cubicles, but the moans seemed to be quite close by. Turning this way, then that, she set off, still maintaining her cautious pace.

Shuffling along the thick carpets which thankfully masked her movements, she soon found the source of the disturbing noises. The closer she got, the more they sounded like speech, though still the words of somepony in considerable pain.

“...pl-please...n-no more. No more...no more...no more t-teeth…C-can’t anymore…”

Nightmare stopped mid-stride as she caught the words and her eyes fixed on one of the cubicles. Despite the poor acoustics, some instinctual part of her knew that was where she was going. She wanted, more than anything, to turn and run back to the sweet little corner of grey matter she’d staked out near Hard Boiled’s brainstem, but it was not to be.

Backing her rear end against the wall, she inhaled and snuck forward as quietly as possible. The moaning was punctuated by labored breathing and the occasional soft grunt of agony, but she couldn’t hear any other movement. The voice was a mare’s, though ragged with exhaustion and crackling like she’d been shrieking for some time.

“...s-stop. I don’t...don’t...don’t...want to anymore. I promise...promise...promise…”

Nightmare Moon’s breath caught as she leaned into the cubicle. She slapped a hoof over her mouth, barely muffling the scream that was working its way up her throat. Biting her fetlock, she felt tears suddenly spring to her eyes. The acrid taste of bile filled the back of her mouth, but she was too frightened to swallow.

What lay on the carpet was once a mare.

What remained was only alive by the ugliest possible happenstance.

The pony appeared to have been partially dissolved, though what mechanism might leave flesh so loose that it resembled a puddle without splitting like a ripe fruit was beyond Nightmare’s ken. Her pelt, once a vibrant blue, was faded, and her fur grew in thick, filthy tangles, suggesting she hadn’t been able to bathe in some time. One of her forelegs lay outstretched toward the desk, while only a thin bump in the surface of the floor indicated where her other might have been.

Her cheek rested against the floor, or rather, halfway into it, while most of her upper body stuck up at an awkward angle as though she’d been planted there by some obscene gardener to grow, but then been left to languish. One nostril had twisted out of shape, leaving a gaping hole that stretched to her muzzle, revealing her upper teeth. Despite all odds, her single, staring eye rotated in its socket to face Nightmare Moon.

She weakly lifted her knee toward the door as much as she could, though as it came free there was a soft ripping sound as her pelt tore around her kneecap. There was no blood, only a burst of beige fuzz that spread out of the wound like a fungal growth. The mare winced, and let her leg fall back.

“...please...please...I don’t want to...work...work...live...anymore... Please...no teeth...” she cried, somehow managing to force words through the ruined remains of her vocal chords and the bifurcated remains of her muzzle.

Nightmare backed out of the cubicle and sat down, her back pressed against the far wall.

“Ghost, will you do what you do for Hard Boiled and suppress my fear?” she asked, very quietly.

‘I need all the extra energy I can get just to fix whatever is wrong with him. Unless you think there’s a plug around here somewhere, you have to handle the fear. Besides, you’re the big scary pony that frightened all of Equestria for a thousand years. Just be yourself.’

Nightmare’s ears drooped against her hat. “Then...I...I must interact with that poor creature?”

She waited, in silence, listening to the soft sounds of suffering coming from the cubicle as she waited for a reply. After a moment, she realized the silence was the reply. Snorting angrily, she heaved herself up and stomped back into the little office.

The mare in the carpet had given up struggling with her predicament and was just lying there, panting for breath. Tears matted her fur from just under her eyes right down to where it merged with the carpet, leaving her eyes red. Bloodstained mucus trickled from her nose into a pool beside her cheek.

Keeping her gaze carefully away from the dying pony, Nightmare pressed herself against the interior wall.

“P-pony?” Nightmare started, but trailed off into a faint moan as she realized she’d been staring at what was left of the mare’s cutie-mark as it slowly faded into a section of the carpet entirely separated from the rest of the body.

The mare’s single eye twitched in her direction. “M-more work? I don’t...don’t...don’t…teeth…”

Not really knowing what else she might say, Nightmare murmured, “There’s no more work, pony. My...my name is Hard Boiled.”

There was a lucid flicker in the dying mare’s eye as she looked up at Nightmare. “H-Hard Boiled? The...the detective?”

“That’s right,” Nightmare replied, softly.

“I’m...I’m Dragonfly. I was supposed to...to kill you, I think. I’m sorry,” the mare muttered, her single remaining ear flicking back and forth. “The...the voice that told me to do it isn’t here anymore. It made me sit and work. I don’t...I don’t...I don’t want to work anymore.”

Nightmare’s teeth squeaked, and she forced herself to unclench her jaw.

“Why were you working pon-...Dragonfly?” she asked.

Dragonfly was silent, the only sound a faint slosh as she shifted within the pool of what remained of her organs.

“I don’t know,” she muttered, at last. “We were going to be the next...next...next step. That’s what the Colonel said. He said we’d be the next kind of ponies. I...I don’t remember wanting to be like this. I ate...I ate something he gave me and then everything was strange. I ch-ch-changed. I was...Omega. Omega.” Her voice slipped lower, until it was barely more than a whisper. “No more work, please?”

Nightmare’s curiosity piqued, she stepped over to Dragonfly’s desk and carefully picked up the top sheet of paper of a healthy stack. It contained more of the carefully transcribed hieroglyphs. They didn’t seem to be letters unless each was an individual word, but having an entire language where every symbol was a different word seemed a bit inefficient.

The longer she stared at the symbols, the more it felt like something in them was prodding at something in her mind. She would have almost sworn she could remember what a few of them said. There was meaning there. Meaning that was deliciously distant. Meaning she’d felt in the womb.

She could feel the womb calling to her. She wanted to be back at her comfortable desk, stapler nearby, and mind empty as she worked. Work was everything she needed.

It was safety and comfort.

Work was better than being scared. She could go and work. Best do that now.

Nightmare realized she’d stopped breathing only when her vision started to dim around the edges.

Gasping, she slapped the paper away and shuddered, feeling the claws in her brain raking at her conscious mind as the sense of safety drained from her only to be replaced with sickness. It’d almost claimed her, whatever ‘it’ was. She could still feel the intense need to wander back to her cubicle; she even knew exactly where it was in relation to her current one, despite not having kept track as she moved along.

Dragonfly was still looking up at her, seemingly waiting for something.

“Did...did it get you?” she asked, then the hint of lucidity in her eyes began to fade again. All at once, Dragonfly stiffened and barked, in a voice too sharp for such a seemingly broken pony, “Omega squad! Approach the vault! Pro...protect the V.I.P! If he gives you an instruction, follow it! Those are your orders!”

Nightmare’s eyes narrowed. “Are you...remembering something?”

Coughing, then gagging on something, the mare tried to yank her foreleg toward her forehead, splitting the skin tear even further. More carpeting dribbled from the wound, spreading out across her knee as it began to sink further into the floor.

“Sir! Yes, Sir! Omega squad will approach, search, and respond!” Dragonfly gasped, heaving herself up slightly as she stared, wild-eyed, into Nightmare’s face. “I can f-feel it in my head! Work. It w-wants me to work. I am not wo-worthy and it wants me to work! N-no! No m-more work!”

Nightmare stepped back, finding her muzzle suddenly dry.

“What creatures? Who are you talking to, pony?” she demanded.

“Colonel! Omega squad reporting! V.I.P. is activating the...w-why would you take my creature?! Why did you take my creature?! It keeps me safe! Can we retreat, Sir?! Work! W-work!”

Dragonfly’s gaze became unfocused as she seemed to collapse in on herself. Her labored breathing growing steadily slower. She lay there, her ear flicking wildly back and forth, though that was the only sign of movement for several seconds.

A thin tendril of something like string crept out of the side of her mouth. It seemed to feel around for a moment, before sliding up her cheek to gently prod at the pony’s wide open eyeball. Finally, it sank into her tear duct.

Nightmare watched in horrified fascination as the string tugged a few times, then began to pull, splitting Dragonfly’s cheek like a piece of cheese-wire, revealing a thick ball of carpet and bone wrapped around one another. A soft sound like somepony trying to suck the last drops out of the bottom of a soda with an inadequately wide straw caught her attention just as the skin around Dragonfly’s neck began to draw in tight. Her foreleg was dragged into the surface, leaving only the soft bump in the expanse of off colored fuzz to show where it’d been.

Despite being distantly aware that it was probably a bad idea, Nightmare opened her mouth to scream. Something that felt like a thick stick was suddenly jammed between her teeth as she was yanked backwards out of the cubicle and pressed tightly against what seemed to be a birdcage wearing a tweed jacket. Her howl of fear was reduced to a choked gasp.

“Whoever you are, I want you out of my grandson’s body,” a familiar voice snapped in her head. “You’ve got three seconds or I start doing things that’ll make him ache tomorrow, but’ll make you wish you were dead today. I’ve tortured magical invaders before, so don’t think that whole ‘You won’t hurt somebody you love’ gambit will work on me.”

Nightmare Moon slumped with relief, though it was short lived considering the thing in her teeth was most likely a fleshless femur and tasted like the inside of an ashtray.

“Oh fank fe fhkies,” she murmured.

“Pardon? I don’t hear you hopping out of that body!” Bones growled. She felt the tip of one of his hooves pressing firmly against her spine, and then a tingling burn started to build in her hooftips.

“Lemme efplain!” Nightmare yelped as the pressure became a little firmer and the pain began to shoot up to her knees.

Bones hesitated, then carefully pulled his leg from between her jaws. He didn’t relax the pressure on her spine. “You have three words. Make them count.”

“I’m Nightmare Moon!”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

Internally, Nightmare Moon was beating her own head against as many different kinds of wall as remained in Hard Boiled’s memory. Thinking with such slow, ponderous meat was difficult enough without adding all the new sensations of discomfort. If she’d been in her own proper psyche, she could have come up with the perfect words to convince Bones that she was, indeed, Hard Boiled, but a healthy dose of fear atop everything else had led to her spitting out the first words that came to mind.

Bones released her and her wobbling knees collapsed, sending her sliding onto her stomach. She let out a soft, grateful sound, though the pain in her legs had only abated slightly.

“You are either the dumbest psychic magical invader in the entire history of time and space, or you’re telling me the truth...which might also make you the dumbest psychic magical invader in the entire history of time and space.”

“W-what happened to Dragonfly?” she panted, trying to work her legs under herself to get away from the carpet, which seemed suddenly very much like something she didn’t want to be too close to for too long.

Bones leaned into the cubicle and glanced over the bright blue splotch on the carpet where the pony had been just a moment before. Only a small lump and part of a twitching ear remained. Her eye was gone.

“Dead, I hope. Poor thing. Damn. I thought this place was vile before it was active. Those ponies must have been from whatever team the Family sent in here to activate that ‘siren call’ magic that snatched Hard Boiled’s friends. That can’t have been on too long, or there would have been more ponies wandering in and getting trapped.”

“It...it is like a flytrap, is it not?” Nightmare asked. “A pony approaches and their mind is snatched from them, then they come inside and...work?”

Bones rolled his shoulders. “Damned if I know, but that’s sure what it looks like. That’s also probably why they they weren’t guarding it too heavily. I wonder if they’ve been in here this whole time. Must have felt like years.” The skeleton straightened his jacket and turned back to where Nightmare knelt. “Now, for you. I knew there was something out of the ordinary with Hard Boiled yesterday, but I couldn’t be sure. Short of clocking him and having Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle turn him inside out with magic scans, there wasn’t a good way to find out. So, before I get to peeling you off him like an especially screamy cheap suit, where’s my grandson?”

Nightmare’s breathing quickened a little as she worked herself to a standing position and peered into the cubicle. “He’s...he is here, somewhere,” she answered, tapping the side of her head. “It is very complicated, but I suspect I am the only reason he is not in that cubicle back there, doing...whatever it is these ponies do under the compulsion. I saw you in his memories. It is strange that a pony would take comfort from the presence of the undead.”

“Well, you best uncomplicate it quick, Miss Moon. My grandson’s friends are in here somewhere. I lost track of the lot of you after the portal cracked Mister Limerence’s little silence shield, but if you don’t want to spend the next hour begging Celestia to send your ass back to Equis’s nearest satellite...”

Nightmare waved her hooves in front of her face, placatingly.

“Your grandson made a deal with me for my freedom and a royal pardon when he wore my helm!” she explained, all in a rush.

Bones cocked his skull to one side, then buffed a toe on his jacket. “Nopony would be dumb enough to put on the Helm of Nightmare Moon, much less believe the bogey-mare makes deals or that you’d abide by your end of it even if they did.”

Nightmare scoffed. “Have you met Hard Boiled? Besides, I was not in a position to deceive him at the time. It was most irritating. I would rather have killed him and worn his corpse.”

“You’re not saying things likely to prolong your time in that body,” Bones snapped, taking a threatening step forward. “Where is he?”

Shaking her head, Nightmare backed against the wall of Dragonfly’s cubicle. “Whatever horrors the portal inflicted upon him to drive him to work, it was enough to very nearly ruin his mind! We...we are trying to recover him, but he is...is comatose with fear!”

Bones nodded at the spot of fur on the carpet. “You don’t get to be my age without learning to read ponies, and you lie worse than my wife. Since I don’t have time to torture you properly, we’re going to assume you’re telling me the truth, for now. That means you just volunteered to help me shut this place down. Agree now, or I will start seeing what parts of my schedule I can clear.”

“I agree! I agree! Please, no more pain! I do not enjoy it!” she whimpered, covering her face with her legs.

“Oh mercy, it’s weird seeing a stallion act like that,” the skeleton grumbled, then seemed to think better of it, “Eh...except that little colt my grandson seems taken with, I suppose. Get up. We’re moving.”

Nightmare nervously rubbed the back of one leg against the other as she got to her hooves. “I...I am being prevented from leaving this place without finishing Hard Boiled’s objective and making certain his friends are with us. We must find them.”

The lights in Bones’s eyes flickered, then he shook his head. “Prevented, huh? If it lines up with my goals, I suppose I can work with that. I tried to track the yellow psycho with the scars on her rear, but lost her in the fog. No idea where the nerd might be. He’s not moving as fast, though the blood all over his vest left a pretty good trail.”

Nightmare looked over her shoulder at the splotch on the carpet of the nearby cubicle and shuddered. “D-Dragonfly - the pony who died - mentioned something about creatures that protect them. Someone took hers. A V.I.P. of some kind. They tried to pull out, but...” She gestured a little helplessly at the spot on the floor that was all that remained of the P.A.C.T. trooper.

“Could be some method of keeping this place from eating brains. We’ll keep an eye out.”

“Was...was everything like this when you were here last?” she asked.

Bones turned the way he’d come and set off at a brisk trot, not waiting to see if Nightmare followed.

“The cubicles are the same, but there weren’t so many critters running around. You pick up a stapler?”

Nightmare nodded. “Yes. The bin and chair were also...distressingly animated.”

“Well, there’s bigger things wandering around out there. I didn’t get a good look, but something the size of a bus stepped over me while I was tracking the filly. It didn’t notice me, thank Celestia.”

“I would appreciate if you would not mention ‘Celestia’ in my presence,” she hissed, testily, “Anyway, this...this place cannot exist by coincidence, can it? It must have been created--”

“I’m going to stop you right there, Miss Moon,” Bones said, putting a hoof up to forestall any further introspection. “We had that conversation almost forty years ago, when the portal was first discovered. The eventual conclusion was that nopony wanted to know who or what created the Office. Seeing it in action, I want to know even less.”

Nightmare’s muzzle dipped into a little frown. “It is my nature to extrapolate answers and process information, even if I must do it with this ridiculous waste of matter between Hard Boiled’s ears. We do not like leaving questions of that sort hanging overhead. What if the creators were to return and take full control?”

“Then I expect we’ll all die and every living, sentient being in Equestria will eventually wander into the Office and fill out that bizarre paperwork until they’re eaten by the carpet. You got any other stupid questions, or are you comfortable just making sure that never happens?”

Work.

Work.

Work.

The nameless unicorn’s eyes flickered and blinked as he stared at the page. Every few seconds, a symbol would appear. When he reached the bottom of a sheet, he set it to one side and picked up the next.

He’d been in his chair forever. There was no time before the time he worked. Time was irrelevant, because there was only the work. If he’d had any thoughts, they were distant and barely registered with his conscious mind.

Breathe in the sustenance, for it is life to continue the work.

There was no way of knowing how much time had passed. Clocks didn’t exist for the unicorn. The work was all that there was.

Inside his vest, an object flickered with internal light. The nameless unicorn’s horn flared, and a series of embedded spellworks inside the object came to life. As they did not immediately impede the work, they were ignored.

Check life? Life returns positive.

Check user awareness? Awareness returns null.

Check user possessed? Possession returns null.

Check mind control field? Control returns positive.

Check power of control field? Returns...power outside testable range.

Check integrity of recovery spells? Returns integrity okay.

Check run user intelligence temporarily from back-up? Solution returns positive.

Initiate recovery.

Warning! Back-up power supply will last two hours without replenishment! Primary cognition must be restored within that period of time or solution will return negative!

----

Limerence felt like his brain was swimming through a thick jelly, clawing towards the light.

‘Where am I?’ he asked himself, dozily smacking his lips.

His stomach immediately rebelled at the flavor in his mouth; it tasted like a combination of mashed cockroaches and rotten tofu. Doubling over, he clutched at his belly. He wanted to puke, but there was nothing to come up.

Glancing around, he quickly determined that he was alone, though his surroundings were so unfamiliar that he had no good way of verifying ‘alone’ within all but the least precise measures. His brother’s staff leaned against the wall of the cubicle and a trail of blood led around the corner right up to his seat. Blinking at the brownish-red spots on the floor, he quickly felt his body for wounds. There didn’t seem to be any, aside from a little muscle soreness in his legs and flanks.

‘Breathe. Panic is the enemy of the mind. Be water; an ocean at peace,’ he thought, forcing himself to slowly exhale, then inhale, fighting down the fear before it could rise.

‘First things first. What’s the last thing you remember? Ah, yes. The elevator. You, Hard Boiled, his grandfather, and Sweet Shine standing before the vault. Hard Boiled pushed the vault open...and then what? Swirling, screaming light. Hard Boiled and Sweet Shine walking into the portal. Unending pressure. Horn stops working. Shield collapses...then?’

Nothing. There was only a stretch of darkness with the word ‘work’ stamped across it.

Pulling himself down from his chair, he carefully slid it underneath the desk he’d been sitting at and started examining his surroundings.

Stack of paper, approximately half of which was covered in a strange, arcane script. Slightly organic carpeting. Stapler that he could have sworn was watching him for a moment. Trashbin with a grinning mouth and razor sharp teeth in the bottom of it.

‘Don’t panic,’ he thought, gulping as the mouth in the rubbish can pursed fat, thick lips and began whistling a merry little tune. ‘Panic is not helpful. Panic is going to get you killed. Start asking questions. First question. I have obviously been under some form of compulsion. What brought me out of it?’

There was a soft ‘ding’ from his vest, followed by the sound of a spinning mechanism. Dragging his pocket watch out, he levitated it in front of his muzzle and flicked the release. The face was glowing with a gentle light as the hands spun lazily backwards in slow circles.

‘Ah, the fail-safes have been tripped. Let’s see what, exactly, we are dealing with.’

Flipping his watch over, Limerence applied a tiny bit of pressure to the backing, then added a quarter twist. The golden panel slid sideways, revealing a series of twenty crystals in a five by four grid. Some glimmered with magical light, though most were dim or sputtering. As he studied the crystals, his breath caught in his throat.

‘Primary cognitive functions are offline,’ he noted, mulling over the arrangement of diodes. ‘I am effectively lobotomized. All higher self-determination and cognition is operating off my watch and it has about an hour and forty minutes left before it is drained entirely.’

Letting out a soft sigh, he slid the panel back in place, then flicked the pocket watch closed and sat studying the inscription on the inside cover.

“Well, this is not the first time some artifact has taken over an Archivist’s mind and left them doing the pocket-watch-trot-of-shame back to the Archive to have their brain purged of infestation,” he muttered, then rolled his eyes at his own excuse as he tucked the watch away. “Of course, I doubt anypony else let another dimension move into their skull, but I’m sure Father would have prepared for such an eventuality.”

Sweeping up the staff, he tossed it across his back and cast a quick spell to keep it in place. His horn twinged at even that tiny expenditure of magic. How long had he been sitting at that desk? The mox he’d used earlier must have a few more hours left, but it felt as though it were almost running dry.

‘Too many variables. Start with simple objectives and then move towards the specifics. First priority, discover if Hard Boiled, Taxi, and Bones still live. If they do, determine if they can be stricken of the mind controlling effects. Presuming this place was designed by a species with a hierarchical mindset, determine what separates those affected by the mind control field from those who are not. Find the control room that Bones mentioned and disable the Scry. Escape.’

At a soft scrabbling from outside his cubicle, Limerence slid his staff’s blade free and slipped into a defensive stance beside the door. He took a slow breath and waited.

Without much aplomb, a dozen eyeballs at the ends of fleshy stalks, each the size of a tennis ball, snaked into his cubicle. Every pupil was a different color, and some were slitted, while others were definitely the eyes of a goat. Each one focused intently in a different direction, though several were aimed squarely at the terrified unicorn’s face as he lifted his sword a little higher and prepared to defend himself.

With a faint noise like a dozen snails being squished underhoof, a slightly larger pink eyeball at the middle of the pack split down the middle. From within, six thin, black appendages reached out and, with unnatural speed, snatched the stack of papers in the upper corner of the cubicle desk, yanking them out of sight fast as a toad snatching a fly out of mid-air. Giving him one last, lingering look, the eyestalks withdrew, leaving the stunned stallion sitting there staring after it.

“New priority. Find a place to dry tail...”

She couldn’t remember her name. She couldn’t remember her face. She’d surely seen it in the mirror every morning, but just then, she couldn’t remember what it looked like.

The blood dripping from her nose off her upper lip was distantly concerning as it spattered the paper in front of her, but she refused to let the images or shapes form in her mind. Instead, she sat there, body quivering, eyes shut, and the endless weight of a collapsing sun balanced precariously atop her willpower. It would eventually be too much to resist, but for then, she held up the world.

Work.

‘I will not.’

You will work.

‘I will not.’

Work.

‘I will not.’

Her hooves trembled as she clutched the edge of the desk, the paper fluttering under some unfelt breeze. Her eyes were dripping. Her jaw ached.

Work.

‘I will not.’

She couldn’t remember her name, but she could remember his. He was all that mattered, in the end. He would be coming, and he would take care of her. He’d always taken care of her. That was his job, after all. That was his work.

Work.

‘Hardy, please get here soon…’

Act 3 Chapter 50: Work Is A Real Nightmare

"Hîe, dôð brêman of tend−ing rodor res. Ealdgeweorc mæðelcwide sîn bryne. ðanc setnes týnan wislic dôð n¯ænig heolor."

- Predictions and Prophecies, page 146, Old Equestrian Edition. Roughly translates as 'She, the herald of burning sky. The world will be fire. Life will end unless the scales balance.'

A cackling voice faded out of the all-encompassing darkness.

“Well! Hard Boiled, as I live and breathe. Most dead ponies have the decency to stay dead! Of course, I doubt anyone alive would call you a decent pony. Not if they knew what you’re really like under that do-gooder facade.”

I curled into a tighter ball, rear legs drawn up, face buried in my hooves. I wasn’t lying on anything per se, but neither was I simply floating in space; rather, in that way of dreams, I was doing both and it seemed perfectly fine.

Also, dreams being dreams, they are of nearly infinite perversity, because of all the people I could say I didn’t want to see just then, there was nopony higher on that list. The powers that be having the sick senses of humor they must, the only pony who’d show up to help me while away the hours in my nightmare was that one pony I’d have given anything just a few years ago to choke the life out of with my bare hooves.

Stained Glass.

The murdering rat bastard strolled out of the misty black emptiness surrounding me, his blood-soaked muzzle grinning just like he had the last time I’d seen him. His milky, dyed pelt and filthy blond mane were still drenched in what I knew, unquestionably, were my partner’s remains; it’s just how the universe works. He still wore the disgusting artist’s smock, flecked with gore, that he’d worn when he killed Juniper.

Trotting across the nothingness, he prodded me in the ribs with his hooftip.

“Oh come now, Detective! Catatonia doesn’t suit you! Up! Up, and talk with me!”

I swatted weakly at his leg, trying to will him out of existence.

‘It’s a dream. It’s a damn dream.’

“Yes! Yes, of course it is a dream. That is what is so magnificent about it. Now, shall we go somewhere a little more...ahem...homey?”

Immediately, the gagging stink of freshly spilt blood flooded my nose. Cold, metal grates pressed into my ribs, and the chilly air bit at my coat. I scrambled up, stumbling away as I found myself nose to nose with the severed head of a young griffin. Her eyes had been replaced with rubies and her upper body spread out into the general shape of a chair, with the back comprised of her wings, sewn together to form a rest.

We were back in the Weathervane.

Not, perhaps, the Weathervane as it was, but as I remembered it. The thick, humid air had me sweating like a pig in seconds. Even trying to breathe through my mouth, I could still smell the years of compacted death as though it’d been just yesterday I watched Juniper die.

‘Home-y’ he’d said. Maybe he was right. It’d haunted my dreams for years. I guess if one weighted a home by where you lay your head each night, then the Weathervane was undoubtedly mine.

Stained Glass trotted over to the griffin chair, turned, and sat back, spreading his bloody wings.

“Now we can talk,” he said, cheerily. A short table with two steaming teacups sat beside him. Picking up the one nearest, he took a careful sip, leaving a thin mustache of something too red to be tea. He swiped it away with his tongue and grinned. “Shall I pull you up another seat? I’m sure I have a couple of foals I’ve made into an ottoman at some point you could sit on. Of course, I doubt such a thing would shock you these days. You have left behind all the conventional horrors.”

“There was never anything conventional about you,” I growled.

He set his teacup back on its saucer and let out a carefully constructed sigh.

“True. I almost wish I’d been satisfied with murder, but death is such a quick thing. One moment a pony is on, the next they’re off. A switch that, once flipped, cannot be unflipped. Ah, well! So, tell me, Hard Boiled. Why are you here, rather than out there?”

I wanted to ignore the question and not give the creepy shmuck the pleasure of an answer, but my lips moved, whether I wanted them to or not.

“I don’t know. One minute I was about to open a vault to another dimension, then...then I was here,” I replied. “What do you want?”

“Me? Nothing much! Your very fine company!” He chuckled, picking a thin brush out of his smock and dipping it into the second teacup. Leaning down, he used the sticky tip to paint a dripping, red smile on the griffin’s face. “You may not believe this, but I admire you. You’d have made quite a savage killer, and the blood on your hooves is an ocean compared to the few dozen buckets on mine.”

“I kill ponies to save lives. I’m not a murderer,” I protested, though the words rang terribly hollow.

“Ha! Oh, my, my...isn’t that priceless? You? Not a murderer?” he snickered, then burst into full bodied laughter, slapping a hoof against the chair’s armrest. “What would all those you failed to save say? They died because you were not there. You made their lives your responsibility, and then you failed them. You may not enjoy their deaths quite like I do, but you enjoy their willingness to rely on you, weak and slow though you may be.”

“I can’t be everywhere at once!” I snapped, swiping the teacup off the table beside him with a sweep of my hoof. It vanished before it could hit the ground.

“No? I suppose that is true,” he murmured, turning in his gruesome seat to regard me with those cold eyes. “You do make a supremely excellent piece, though: the mad detective, who’ll climb up to the sky and shriek at the heavens to save the world. You are a masterpiece. Even more wonderful than I had ever hoped for; if you succeed, the ponies out there will pick apart every aspect of your life. They’ll find me, squatting in your history. I wonder if they might open me a gallery one day, with your corpse hanging from a gibbet right at the front door where the kiddies can swat it with little novelty bats on the way through.”

I shut my eyes and tried to breathe. It being a dream, there was no air, but the attempt was good enough.

“Is there some point to this?”

“I suppose there must be, else you wouldn’t have conjured me up,” he said, brushing his toe across the dead griffin’s beak. “May I ask you a question?”

I went to adjust my hat and realized I wasn’t wearing it. Nor was I wearing my coat or armor. The spot where my heart plug usually was had only smooth, pristine fur.

“Since trying to kill you twice seems like it won’t be very fruitful, I guess I can’t stop you asking.”

Stained Glass rose from his chair and turned to look up at a spot off in the distance. Folding his wings against his sides, he wet his lips, letting a slow smile spread on his features. Mercy, I wanted to beat that grin off his face with a tire iron.

“Do you ever consider the heavens, Detective?”

I blinked a few times, then shook my head. “What?”

“The cosmos,” he repeated, motioning at the air above his head. “Twinkling lights in the distance. The Princesses say the universe beyond is vaster than can be imagined. Does it not strike you as...perhaps a little strange that your species survives?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look around you!” he said, thrusting his forelegs in the air. “You have met plenty of things which could eat you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on this journey of yours. You have seen things that come from between universes and would snap you up in a single bite. Do you truly think it’s those alicorns protecting you? They barely rank as minor powers!”

I crossed my forelegs and shrugged. “I hadn’t put much thought into it. I’m usually too busy trying to survive to ask myself philosophical questions.”

“Then take a moment and consider the stars,” he said, dragging his leg across the sky. It spread open into a grand vista, a starry night like I’d only seen on childhood vacations. “Do you ever wonder at them? Their majesty? We cast our prayers up into the great beyond and our mothers and fathers tell us they are heard.”

“I suppose it’s better than the alternative,” I muttered. “I mean, if they’re not heard, that leaves an awfully empty universe.”

“Truly! But...one must wonder if there is power in all those wishes floating around up there. Makes you think, doesn’t it? This world of ours might be just a grand amalgam of all those wishes, cast adrift, waiting for an ear to hear them.”

I tilted my head. “And...what? Some ‘ear’ up there took all of the wishes of intelligent beings and...stirred them in a pot?”

Stained Glass clapped his hooves together and that irritating grin returned. “Who knows? It would explain how a beast like me survived alongside a paragon of noble stupidity like you, wouldn’t it?”

I studied the night sky above us for a moment, then turned to the killer and asked, “What does this have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. It’s your mind, detective. I am dead and, as your former partner has repeatedly told you, the answers aren’t all in the grave.”

With that, he melted away into the darkness quicker than a tail of smoke in a high wind, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

Nightmare Moon was not a happy pony. Being a pony was, by itself, a bit of an existential crisis. Being a male pony in mortal danger from every angle was intolerable.

“Skeleton, where exactly are we going?” she asked.

“Bones, Miss Moon. Unless you want me to start calling you ‘Mare With A Penis’,” her companion replied, still trotting ahead of her between narrow rows of cubicles. He paused for a moment to examine part of a light green muzzle that was sticking out of the wall near them. Holding up his fleshless hoof, he waved it underneath the pony’s nose, then exhaled. “Dead, or as close as makes no nevermind. I don’t know where we’re going. I’m following the curve of the wall. The entrance is down, opposite the control room, but gravity is real local and this fog isn’t helping.”

“Should we not be searching for Hard Boiled’s companions?”

“You got a method for that?”

She shut her eyes and let her brain tick over. It was strange, thinking with meat. Much of it operated off random number generators, but it was capable of incredible intuitive leaps if she allowed for a certain amount of fuzziness in her calculations.

“I...I believe I do. How many of the last few hundred cubicles we passed had bodies in them?”

Bones leaned forward a little, and she had the distinct impression that, if he’d had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. “Four.”

“I concur! Now, the spacing between cubicles appears to indicate a non-random distribution. Specifically, there were eighty-nine empty cubicles’ separation between corpses, preceded by one hundred and forty-four. I have counted.”

“Aye, I remember this from school. Golden Ratio and whatnot. Something about a perfect spiral in nature. You think we could follow the corpses?”

Nightmare shook her head. “It is an imperfect plan, but those who are here have been kept alive until their usefulness is at an end. I believe this...fog is some form of inhaled nutrient matter. Despite having been here for some time and vomiting, I have no physical symptoms of hunger. Assuming all the cubicle intersections are four way and assuming the most efficient distribution, we can base our start point on the cubicle I began in. It will give us a likely area to search.”

Bones tilted his head, then looked back the way they’d come. “How do you figure on finding that one?”

“We have trotted in a straight line from Dragonfly’s cubicle, yes? We simply return to her. If the nutrient fog requires a specific distance between each body for optimal energy consumption, then that would suggest a very regular distribution from the point of origin, which would be best placed at either end, presuming we are moving along the interior of a spheroid. If efficiency of motion within the constraints of what is necessary to make this reality exist is assumed as a priority of the creators, then at one end, the entrance...and at the other—”

“The control room! The control room was always opposite the portal! Hot damn. Never knew my loins would spawn somepony with brains!”

Nightmare lifted her nose and sneered. “Your loins spawned a pony who got us into this absurd situation! I am something far more intelligent than his weak flesh mind.”

“Yeah, maybe most of the time...but right now, sweetheart, you’re running on that weak flesh mind.”

Opening her mouth to rebut, she found herself short of words; Bones was, unfortunately, technically correct. Irritating.

“I...I do not have a lifetime of poor self-esteem, alcoholism, and bad attitudes holding me back. Apt he may be, but his psyche is a disaster. Now, can we please proceed? I would like to stop being an active participant in this mind as quickly as possible.”

Limerence held his breath, waiting for the beast to pass. It was as big as a two vehicle garage, and the scent rolling off of it was of burning hair and typewriter ink. Through the fog, all he could make out was the vague shapes of multi-jointed legs and a disturbing clicking sound, like trees in a high wind clattering against one another. It didn’t seem to have noticed him as he huddled beneath a desk, but there was no sense taking risks.

‘Well, more risks than I am already taking simply by being here. Oh, Father, what would you do in these circumstances?’ He paused, then snorted to himself, ‘Ugh, why do I even ask myself such questions? He’d be right here beside Hard Boiled, where any sane zebra would have told that stubborn, heroic buffoon to pound sand the second crossing dimensions was mentioned.’

It was then he noticed the clicking had stopped.

‘Oh...that snort wasn’t just in my head, was it?’

Slowly, he lifted his head from under the desk.

A multi-eyed face with two giant, mandibled jaws that looked like they could crush rocks was peering down at him from a couple of meters above. A thin, black dribble of something dripped from the creature’s teeth, landing on the carpet just in front of his hooves; the rug began to sizzle.

Moving as deliberately as he could with all four knees quaking, Limerence pulled himself out from under the desk and settled into the chair. The seat scooted itself back into place, then settled down. Doing his best to look confused, he tilted his head back to look at the creature, then at the empty desk.

“Work?” he murmured, in a voice he’d once used on his father when asking for additional study materials as a foal..

From somewhere overhead, a heaping stack of blank paper crashed in front of him with a loud thump. The creature gave him one last look which included a short grunt and a thin spurt of noxious liquid that scorched the cubicle floor. Its claws clamped atop the adjoining walls as it ambled away into the fog.

As he watched the beast leave, Limerence became aware of his own teeth chattering and quickly clamped his jaw shut He slid out of the stiff-backed chair and carefully stepped over the still smoking spots on the carpet. Giving a light tug at his vest, he quickly checked his watch; an hour and twenty left to escape.

‘Well, that could have gone worse,’ he thought, then mentally added, ‘Or I could, perchance, have avoided garnering that creature’s attention altogether. I mustn’t begin to think like Hard Boiled. Simply because a course of action works does not make it sound, safe, or sane.’

Sticking his head out into the aisle, he looked both ways, though precisely what manner of traffic he was looking for he didn’t know.

‘Presuming I am in a designed space, there must be a logic. A design logic means a functional mathematical algorithm. That suggests navigation should be possible without knowing the exact inner dimensions.’

He contemplated the problem for a few seconds while studying the entrances of the cubicles.

‘Hmmm...This is a sphere per Hard Boiled’s grandfather, so the ground must have a specific curvature and the cubicles must follow a particular orientation. I need to then establish the distance between them as well as the angle of the floor. Aha! A slight modification of the silly string spell to add additional tautness and toughness, then Melinga’s Measuring Stick woven into the substrate of the arcane formula…”

Lighting his horn, he shot a quick blast of string onto the top of the cubicle, then tugged it across to the opposite wall. Trotting around into the next cubicle, he did the same, then into the next, repeating the pattern. After a few more, he activated the second half of the spell, and his mind filled with numbers.

‘Hrm...the structure is an ovoid,’ he thought musingly as he studied the equations hanging in space behind his eyelids ‘That makes this easier. Orientation indicates a slight narrowing at one side and widening at the other. If the cubicles follow that pattern towards the center and I assume that we are closer to the entrance than the opposite side, that would suggest the control room is...that way. Now...a breadcrumb for my friends... How does that spell go, again?’

Nightmare’s patience was wearing thin as she trotted along behind the merrily humming skeleton. That he was merrily humming inside her brain didn’t help much; two bits of cotton plucked out of Hard Boiled’s trench coat pockets hadn’t done anything to fix the issue, and telling Bones to stop only seemed to amuse him.

‘Is there anything you can do?’ she asked, internally.

After a moment’s silence, a reply came floating through her mind.

‘Why do you keep asking me to do things?’ Gale asked disapprovingly. ‘I’m short of energy, and finding Hard Boiled is taking everything I have.’

‘You control this imbecile’s nervous system! Make me deaf or some such thing!’

‘How would that help? He’s not making any sound!’ the ghost replied.

Nightmare ground her teeth for a moment, then checked her mental counter of how many cubicles remained to their destination.

“We are near the place we encountered...D-Dragonfly,” she said, pitching her voice low to avoid any unwanted attention. She hoped Bones hadn’t caught the stammer in her voice.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you hadn’t seen a dead body before,” Bones murmured.

Nightmare bit her lower lip, pensively. “I...I told you that I am not my whole self. This mind contains only what was necessary.”

“No kidding.” Stopping mid-stride, Bones turned and slowly approached Nightmare. She hesitated and took a step back, but he kept coming until his boney face was only inches from hers and she was forced to stare into the shining, blue fires hanging in his empty sockets.

“Boo!”

Nightmare gasped and threw herself on her stomach, tossing both forelegs over her hat and mashing it across her face. She lay there, shivering, waiting for death to descend. After a few seconds, Bones’s raspy laughter filled her mind.

“Somehow always thought scaring a monster out of legend would be more satisfying than that. Of course, most of the monsters I put the fear of Celestia into didn’t have the good sense to be afraid until about two seconds before I cut my way into something vital. Maybe that just makes you a smarter cookie than your average abomination.”

Carefully pulling her hooves off her face, she looked up at him as she realized he wasn’t about to start making her hurt.

“You do not need to torment me further! I...I only want to return to my inert state where I could observe passively,” Nightmare whimpered, then shook her mane out in an attempt to regain her composure.

“If you wanted to do that, why take over his body?” Bones asked.

“I did not have a choice in the matter! My directive was to keep Hard Boiled alive at all costs so long as he continues to pursue his side of the bargain he made with my other self!” She swiped at the tears on her cheeks, feeling an embarrassed heat rise to her face as she realized she’d been on the verge of a crying fit. “How do you tolerate these infernal biological reactions to emotion? This existence is agony!”

“Wrong person to ask, sweetheart. Thirty years ago, I expected to wake up in the afterlife in my marriage bed next to my wife. Instead, I’m helping my nutter grandson’s possessed body search another dimension for a couple ponies who make my old Crusader buddies look sane and conservative.”

“Madness,” Nightmare muttered, angrily tossing her head. “All of it is madness. This world does not deserve the eternal night. It deserves to burn.”

Bones shifted his weight. “Since we’re not on our world, I’m inclined to agree. Now, which one was Dragonfly?”

“She...she was there,” she replied, nodding in the direction of the particular cubicle. “If I am correct, we can move along the axis of the sphere by ninety degrees and should find one of Hard Boiled’s friends somewhere close to that, if we presuppose the maximum efficiency principle holds. Though, to be clear, this is all supposition.”

“I’m leaving the math to you. I can’t be any more lost. Lead me home, Moonie.”

Nightmare started to ask him not to call her that, then realized exactly how futile that was likely to be. Trotting over to the cubicle where Dragonfly had died, she sat for a moment, staring at the splotch of fur on the carpet. A part of her was gratified that her math was correct, whilst another part wanted nothing more than to shiver in a corner.

‘Is it not odd to be so worried about death when all I want is to return to oblivion?’ she asked herself, silently. It was a question she had no good answer to.

“Ahhh, now there’s a sight I can enjoy: a cop crying like a mare what’s been slapped around but good. Makes me wish I’d lived a little longer to do it myself.”

A stiff breeze was blowing through my mane and my surroundings had changed again, but I knew where we were without lifting my head. I could feel the fur on my hooves and the wetness on my face. Worst of all, I could feel the gaping hole where I’d just been shot not thirty seconds ago.

My knees quaked as I uncurled from a fetal position and settled on my belly. The numbness in my breast was somewhat disturbingly countered by the sensation of wind whistling through the gunshot. I looked down at the steadily dribbling wound, then up into the ruined face of King Cosmo.

We were in his office in the Monte Cheval, in the seconds between the shot that blew bits of his skull all over me and my own death. He stood right where he’d stood that day just a scant few weeks ago, in the wrecked remains of his desk. I could feel the luxurious carpet underhoof, and taste the sweat on my lips. Not surprising, I suppose, since the moment had been seared into my brain with a branding iron.

Cosmo still wore his tailored suit stretched across that hulking frame. I was naked, which wouldn’t have bothered me on most days, but the ragged mess of shattered ribs and dangling viscera hanging out of the bullet hole in my chest was a little distracting. Out of morbid curiosity, I stuck my hooftip into the wound. It went in a good half inch.

“Heh, don’t play with it, cop. You’ll go blind,” Cosmo nickered, glancing out the shattered window at the drifting clouds beyond. There wasn’t much of his head left on that side. Thankfully, dreams don’t tend to come with nausea.

“Are you the ghost of Hearth’s Warming Eve present?” I quipped, wiping my bloody hooftip on the floor.

Cosmo pulled his handkerchief out of his front pocket and blotted some of his brain off his cheek, his one good eye swiveling to watch me. “Wouldn’t that be sweet? All the ponies you done killed comin’ to see you tonight? Of course, that line would be right long. You’d have to work your way through them damn fools that thought worshippin’ Nightmare Moon was a fine idea, plus all the goons from a’fore. Not to mention however many of them P.A.C.T. creatures used to be upstandin’ citizens. You know, plenty of cops go their whole careers never pullin’ their gun?”

“I’ve had this conversation before,” I growled, “I don’t need to repeat it with a mob boss who earned his fate killing people for money and power.”

“Sure you do!” the mobster chuckled, strolling forward and tapping me on the undamaged side of my chest with his hooftip while affording me a truly gruesome view of the broken window through the remains of his eyesocket. “Besides, you knew you were going to have to kill me the second you walked into my casino. You don’t strap a shotgun to a stallion’s family and strut away clean. Even more, you knew you weren’t never giving up that heart.”

“I didn’t kill you,” I snapped, pushing his hoof away.

“Only cuz somepony else beat you to it,” he replied. “Makes you wonder, don’t it? How many others did somepony else beat you to? Equestria has had its fair share of nasty customers through the years. I wasn’t even in the top one hundred.”

“So, what’re you saying?” I asked, settling my hips back on the carpet. “There’s something out there watching over us?”

“Could be. Could be.” He shrugged his giant shoulders and grinned with a mouth full of gold teeth. “Of course, if that’s the case, a brainy pony would ask themselves why they suddenly gone missing?”

The mobster gave me a last wink with his good eye, then stepped back as the breeze dropped off and the casino office faded from sight. I sat there in the dark again, without even my own heartbeat for company.

Nightmare was so busy double checking her diagram of the interior that she almost missed the soft sob that filtered through the fog someplace ahead. Her ears perked at the sound, but her mind was occupied with the task at hand. Bones suddenly grabbed her and yanked both of them into the nearest cubicle. Before she could demand he unhand her, she found one of his forelegs lodged in her teeth.

He put his free hoof to his lips, then pointed up.

Carefully, she tilted her head back. A scream died in her chest as her lungs seized up entirely. She wanted, more than anything, to howl in terror, but the air just wouldn’t come.

Gale’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Nightmare, you can breathe again when you stop trying to make noise! If I have to make you pass out, I will do it!’

‘B-but there’s a...a thing! A big thing! Several big things!’

‘Use your words! I can’t see through the eyes right now! What did you see?’

‘I’m not opening my eyes again until the things are gone or they shall hear me!’

After a moment and much against her will, her eyelids were wrenched open. Her aching lungs were already burning for air which wasn’t helped by the spasm of fear that shot down her back at the sight above.

Bones was still there, pinning her to the wall, his head leaned back as he studied the creatures overhead.

There were three of the beasts, each one roughly the size of a city tram. They bore at least six many-jointed legs each that appeared to be gripping the tops of other cubicles, though it looked like several more hooked appendages were tucked beneath their long, misshapen thoraxes. Their black carapaces were blessedly obscured by the orange fog, but she could make out a series of glowing, bulbous protrusions along their underbellies that, much to her horror, seemed to have giant black pupils. They faced one another, seemingly completely intent on whatever was between them.

They made no sound; not even the whisper of breathing. All three were focused on a point between them. The soft sobbing was coming from that direction.

‘Oh...right. Yes, I get what you meant. Things. Um, I’m going to go back to trying to find Hard Boiled. Could you handle this?’ the ghost said, in a way that suggested he was whispering.

‘Don’t you dare leave me with this!’ Nightmare hissed.

‘Sorry, gotta go! There’s literally nothing I can do that will make the situation better, so please don’t get us dead!’

Her lungs came unbound and she could breathe again. It was a fight not to gasp. Still, the creatures didn’t move or acknowledge her presence.

“Don’t...speak,” Bones whispered into her mind.

She nodded as he took his femur out of her mouth.

“Move quiet and slow,” he murmured. “That map of yours...Where are we?”

Reaching down, she picked up the old diner napkin with the little diagram of the half-sphere on it and quickly checked their position. A sinking feeling squirmed into her guts. She quickly redid her calculations and came to an unenviable conclusion.

Looking up at the frozen monsters, she tapped the spot where they were, then pointed toward the place all three of the creatures were facing.

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Bones adjusted his coat, then stuck a hoof in his pocket and pulled out a fragmentation grenade. “Alright, can you remake this map? I’m going to create a distraction and see if I can draw those uglies off.”

Nightmare nodded, then quickly pulled another napkin and a slightly grungy pen out of her pocket. A few quick mouth-strokes and she’d copied the diagram. Holding it up, she cocked her head in a way she hoped said ‘What should I do?’.

“You’re going to go check if that’s one of Hardy’s friends. If it is, you get them out of there or, barring that, you hide nearby until I get there.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she quickly jotted down a sentence on the edge of the napkin.

‘What if it is somepony else?’ she wrote and held it up.

“Then it’s a P.A.C.T. trooper who was sent to kill us or someone else we can’t help. Leave them and return here. I’ll meet you as soon as I lose the plus sized creepy crawlies.”

Nightmare frowned at this. She knew, intellectually, that this should be entirely fine. Some part of her categorically rejected the notion of abandoning anypony to such a fate.

‘Ghost, what is this distress I feel regarding the health of other intelligent creatures?’ Nightmare asked, internally. ‘It is irritating.’

‘That’s called ‘empathy’, Nightmare. Hardy’s brain is chock full of it,’ Gale replied.

‘I would presume asking how I deactivate it or ignore it is futile?’

‘Completely. Just do nice things and it won’t bother you so much.’

‘I am Nightmare Moon! I am the stalker of dreams! I am a living embodiment of all that children fear! I do not do nice!’

She got a distinct sensation of mirth radiating from her chest, which only made her angrier.

‘Well, as my dad used to say before he went crazy and killed my mom; suck it up, buttercup. You can be nice or you can feel guilty, but you only get to pick one,’ the spirit replied. Then he was gone again, leaving her wishing he were an actual pony so she could beat him with a stick.

Bones was still waiting expectantly for her to acknowledge the plan. With a silent snarl, she shoved his copy of the map into his hooves and picked up her revolver’s trigger. The skeleton tucked the napkin in the collar of his shirt and spun the grenade on his hoof.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Bones added. “If this doesn’t work, I don’t want you charging in there and getting killed. You save nopony if you’re dead.”

Nightmare rolled her eyes, turned sideways, and pointed at the golden scales on her flank.

“Right. I’ll take that to mean I need to add ‘save stupid mind parasite from my grandson’s talent’ to the plan at some point in the future. Eh, get ready. Wait for the beasties to move off before you go.”

She nodded, and Bones took off into the fog at a full gallop, vanishing almost before she realized he was gone. His hoofsteps on the carpet faded in seconds, leaving her alone in the stinking fog. There was a quick surge of fear, but she wrestled it down, then turned to face the three monsters still watching something in their midst. They hadn’t moved, and if Bones hadn’t told her they could, she might have thought the beasts a particularly disturbing art installation.

When nothing had happened for several minutes, she found herself growing restless, but moving about or making noise seemed a poor plan for short-term survival. The creatures still stood where they had before, like frozen sculptures. A quiet moan or whimper would sometimes come from that direction, but even then, none of those had happened for some time. She looked up at the brim of Hard Boiled’s hat, then carefully took it off and studied the fabric, feeling the soft inner lining and the hard dragonscale sewn into the front.

‘How has this demented pony kept his head on his shoulders for so long?’ she thought to herself, turning the hat over. ‘It seems absurd that he should still be alive. One cannot just chalk this up to his talent or his friends, yet my calculations insist he has no fate. He is not important, a statistical anomaly sitting on an outlier…”

Nightmare lifted the hat back onto her head, working her ears through the holes as she felt its weight settle back in place. Somehow, it felt heavier than it had before. There was the weight of lives hanging around her shoulders, not just her own life, but potentially the lives of the entire Equestrian population.

‘This was so much simpler when my grandest desire was to do was bring about the Night Eternal. I am certain I could have determined out how to grow crops under the glory of the moon...’

Her thoughts were interrupted by a soft crack, followed by a shockwave that shook the fog around her. She jerked her head toward the monsters, but they hadn’t moved. They still seemed intent on whatever or whoever was in their sights. A few seconds later, another pop rocked the air, and the creatures finally responded.

The beast nearest let out a trilling cry and, with a clatter of chitin, it turned in the direction Bones had disappeared. One giant leg clasped the top of a cubicle, then it launched itself forward like an arachnid rocket, moving at a speed that belied its size. A third crack reached Nightmare’s ears, and the remaining creatures raised their giant, mandibled heads and shrieked a battlecry, before following their companion into the mist.

As the howls of unearthly rage faded into the distance, Nightmare found herself huddled against the trash bin, hugging herself. How she’d gotten there, she didn’t know, but it felt like the correct response. Picking up her tail, she hugged it against her chest.

‘Nightmare?’ the voice in her mind murmured.

‘Yes, ghost?’

‘You’re going out there.’

‘I do not think I am, ghost,’ she answered, putting her face against her knee, ‘I think I am going to sit right here. I may cry. I do not know why crying sounds so wonderful right now, but it does.’

She felt a wave of exasperation, then the sensation of something sharp being poked into her hips on both sides. She yelped and shot to her hooves, rubbing her flank against the cubicle wall in an effort to soothe it. The golden scales on her hips burned with a pain she hadn’t even considered possible.

‘This is what Hard Boiled’s body would be feeling just being in this place if I hadn’t been deadening your pain response. Justice has never set hoof here.’

“You must t-take the pain! I c-cannot think like this!” Nightmare moaned, grinding her thigh against the wall. “I cannot fulfill my purpose!”

‘When you’re ready to go for a little walk and see who is over there, I’ll make it go away.’

In seconds and without really realizing how she’d begun, Nightmare found herself galloping down the rows of cubicles. Cool relief washed down her sides, though the lingering memory of the burn still remained to spur her on. Her breathing was uneven, but still she ran until she was forced to stop for a moment to check her map. It hadn’t been much of a run, but she was still panting, though whether with fear or exhaustion she didn’t know.

‘That was cruel, ghost,’ she thought.

‘Letting you stay there would have been worse.’

Shaking her head, she unfolded the napkin and did a quick bit of mental arithmetic, then blinked a couple times realizing exactly how close her flight had brought her. Cocking an ear, she shut her eyes and listened. For several moments, there was only the sound of her own hurried breathing, but just when she thought she must have miscalculated, she heard a stifled sob.

Chewing her inner cheek, she considered her options. She could enter the cubicle and immediately pistol whip whoever was inside it. That would save most of the awkwardness of explaining her situation, though it might leave the individual with brain damage.

Of course, simply shooting whoever was in there was probably out of the question, much as a simple answer might appeal.

‘Nightmare...just go and look,’ Gale grumbled. ‘You’re being a wuss.’

‘I am a multi-faceted logic and probability bootstrapper! I am evaluating all the possible contingencies!’

‘Yeah, being a wuss, like I said.’

Rather than reply, she picked up her trigger and moved to the cubicle she thought the sound might have come from. Rising up on the tips of her hooves, she snuck forward until she could peer inside, ready at any moment to flee or possibly put six bullets in the general direction of whatever might threaten. At the sight of the pony in the cubicle, the bit fell out of her muzzle. She took a couple of stumbling steps forward, then hesitated as the horrid sight.

Taxi sat, slumped over the desk, her hooves planted side by side above a piece of blood spattered, blank paper. The blood was dripping from her nose in a steady trickle, joined at her chin by another dribble at the side of her mouth where it looked like she’d bitten through her lip. She was shaking, violently, muttering over and over to herself in a voice so low it could barely be heard, “I will not. I will not. I will not.”

Veins in her forehead stood out from the skin and Nightmare could spot her pulse beneath the surface of her neck. Reaching out, she carefully touched the mare’s back. Taxi didn’t so much as flinch.

‘How is she doing this? The mind control field is powerful enough to render a pony comatose.’

‘I don’t know, but you have to make her stop!’ Gale yelped in the back of her mind.

‘What? Why? She seems to be resisting the effects.’

‘She is going to kill herself! Her heart is about to explode!’

Nightmare pressed her hoof against Taxi’s back and felt the rapidfire beat of her heart, going very nearly too fast to separate the beats.

‘Wh-what am I meant to do?’ she thought, ‘She does not respond to touch! Should I knock her unconscious?’

‘I have no idea! Maybe she’ll listen to your voice. Or at least, maybe she’ll listen to Hard Boiled’s voice.’

Nightmare’s eyes widened. ‘I do not know what to say! Whilst we are in here, the mind control field will attempt to dominate her!’

‘T-then...tell her to stop fighting!’

“What?!” she said, aloud.

Taxi’s ears perked at the familiar voice. She exhaled, and a fresh drool of blood spilled out of her mouth, landing on her back legs. Her labored breaths grew thicker as the muscles in her neck started to clench and unclench in time to her violently pounding heart.

‘Tell her to let go! We can come back for her once we turn this place off!’

‘What about the pony eating carpet?!’

‘The work might take months to kill her! You’ve got to make her give in or she’ll be dead in minutes!’

Her throat tightened at that prospect; helplessness was unappealing, but inaction leading to a death seemed to carry a burden that threatened to crush her.

“You must stop fighting the work,” she stammered, lowering herself to Taxi’s height and trying to look into her eyes. “Pony, you must stop or you will be dead soon! Please, do not make me feel your death!”

Nightmare’s right hoof leapt up and smacked against her own forehead, sending her reeling backward. She stared at the offending leg, then gave it an indignant stomp.

‘Why did you do that?!’ she mentally demanded.

‘Don’t talk to her like that, dummy! You sound like somepony wearing a costume!’

‘I am somepony wearing a costume!’

‘Ugh...You have to talk to her like Hard Boiled talks to her!’

‘How does he talk to her?’

‘Like somepony he loves!’ Gale replied.

Nightmare’s muzzle dropped into a frown. ‘I spent a thousand years on the moon because I couldn’t figure out what being loved looked like!’

‘You better work it out, then! Unless you want to be stuck in control of this body, without your memories, without your powers, and without your armor. Hardy will go insane without her!’

‘He is already insane!’ she bit back, then gradually lowered her chin onto her chest. ‘But, I will try, because I do not wish to fail in my task and because you will probably irritate me until we are both dead if I do. Is there anything in his memories that may help?’

Gale was silent for a minute, then two. Nightmare shifted from hoof to hoof, wishing he would hurry his answer. Sweat poured from Taxi’s forehead as she quivered in the seat.

‘I...I do have something,’ he said, at last.

‘Well, describe it!’ she snapped, pointing at the pulsing vein in Taxi’s neck. ‘Time is short!’

‘I can’t describe it. You...you’ll have to see it. Don’t worry. I think this will be fast.’

‘Wait! What will be fa—’

Before she could finish the thought, she felt a wave of dizziness, and the Office faded to blackness.

Act 3 Chapter 52 : The Dead Working

"Rules are made to be broken. This is doubly true in Equestria. While the most orderly of mindsets might demand that physics, economics, life, death, and baking generally maintain a consistent set of rules, orderly mindsets have a long and well established history of going barking mad when confronted with the realities of our time.

Indeed, there is an entire wing of the Glowing Skies Home For The Differently Sane dedicated to housing those who've snapped under the pressures of living in a world whose supposedly fundamental rules are extremely malleable. After a succession of treatments failed, Princess Celestia was called upon. In her infinite wisdom, she placed the patients of that ward in charge of creating a coherent financial strategy for the Equestrian government. The outcome was one of the largest budget surpluses in history and some of the finest macaroni art in the known world.

Rules may exist to be broken, but in a world where death is frequently optional, taxes remain an immutable fact of living.

-The Scholar

Nightmare’s hooves hurt and she was desperately tired of running. Running was what ponies who couldn’t move celestial bodies about did when confronted with giant spider demons. It ill befitted a goddess, even one who’d come down in the world a bit.

“Move your flank, Moonie! That’s my grandson’s body you’re slacking with!” Bones called from somewhere just ahead.

“I am moving, you despicable corpse!” she shouted at the barely visible shadow several meters ahead ahead of her. She’d have lost him long ago, were it not for the bobbing blue light leading the way.

Behind them, one of the towering arachnid monsters let out a bellow of rage that sounded like squealing car brakes as it charged after the fleeing ponies. Its great, spindly legs thumped across the tops of cubicles, crushing a hapless stapler under one giant claw.

“I thought you killed those things!” Nightmare called into the fog.

“Killed a few!” Bones replied, “This place is huge, and we never managed to hurt anything in here permanently. You wanna complain or you wanna run?!”

“I want to know we are not running to our deaths! What is your plan?!”

“It wasn’t me who bumped into the economy sized creepy crawly! You come up with the plan for a change!”

“I am thinking with a bowl of rum-drenched bread pudding instead of a brain!” Nightmare snarled, her hooves pounding at the carpet as she raced after the skeleton’s quickly vanishing figure.

Behind her, the spider creature’s claws skittered atop a cubicle far too close for comfort. She felt something brush her tail and squeaked, putting on another burst of speed. The ache in her legs was becoming unbearable, but fear drove her on. It was almost enough to make her miss the moment when the world suddenly became completely silent.

Something snapped out of one of the nearby cubicles and wrapped around her throat, yanking her sideways. She squirmed as the appendage tightened. Kicking her trigger bit, she tried to snap it out of mid-air with her teeth, but a quick slap across the cheek sent it flopping against her leg. Nightmare’s ears drooped and she went limp, waiting for the beast to take the first bite out of her.

After a long moment, there was still no sound. That was odd. She’d never been eaten before, but she always sort of suspected it would hurt more, or that there would be some chomping sounds.

Carefully and wondering if the act might earn her a crushed skull, she opened one eye.

Bones was crouched up against the wall of the cubicle across from her, skull tilted back as though looking at something overhead. Lifting her gaze, she felt her breath stall. The spider was just above them, swinging its acid-dripping head back and forth as though scanning the horizon.

The creature’s black thorax was barely a meter from her face, sporting a dozen dangling legs and a wicked looking stinger. Rows of eyes up and down either side were blinking at the distance. It twisted in place, moving one direction, then the other. A slow dribble of stinking saliva dripped onto the desk below.

After a seeming eternity, the abomination shut most of its eyes and moved off into the fog as quickly as it’d come. Whatever limb was wrapped around Nightmare’s neck slowly relaxed. Her fear-fogged senses returned slightly, just enough for her to notice the heartbeat and hot breath over her ear. She quickly leaped away, yanking her trigger up into her teeth, only to find herself pointing the Crusader at a familiar baby-blue face.

“Limerence Tome!” she exclaimed, then realized her voice didn’t seem to be working. Limerence’s horn was letting off a faint glow as he held one leg above it to keep the light from traveling. He carefully sat, putting his hoof to his lips before letting his horn light fade.

Sound returned in a rush, though it took her a moment to realize her breathing wasn’t really quite so loud as it seemed. From somewhere nearby, a spider beast roared, followed a second later by an answering call from further off. Their great, lumbering steps shook the walls as they lurched away, still hunting their elusive prey.

Nightmare waited until she couldn’t make out even the thumping footsteps of the terrible monsters before slumping onto her front legs, panting softly.

“This has been a wholly unpleasant experience of corporeality and I would like to end it as quickly as possible,” she moaned, pulling her trenchcoat high around her ears and burying her face in the lining.

Limerence glanced at Bones. “That doesn’t...sound like Hard Boiled.”

“It’s not,” Bones replied, slumping into the chair by the desk and spinning in a slow circle. “Nightmare Moon left a little brain worm in his mind that took over when whatever is controlling ponies in here snapped him up. I suspect it’s not the first time. He was acting right funny when he delivered me that checklist...mercy, was that yesterday?”

“I was simply puppetting his body whilst he was asleep,” Nightmare hissed, then looked up fearfully to make sure she hadn’t alerted any of the monsters. “I am meant to provide logistical and operational support. This...vile ghost who operates his central nervous system while squatting in his heart has shoved me into a state of...of biological manifestation! I am feeling pain! I was not meant to feel pain!”

Limerence’s horn lit up, and he directed a thin beam of light over the possessed stallion’s forehead.

“Hmmm...aha. Well, that is most unfortunate. Hard Boiled is in a similar condition to myself. His brain is quite empty. Moreso than usual, though I do see some slight activity in his memory centers,” Limerence mused, tugging his pocket watch out and quickly checking the time remaining. “Ah, down to an hour...”

“Wait, come again? He’s in a similar condition to what?” Bones asked. “Speaking of that, you look mighty chipper for somepony who should be pushing paper until the carpet eats you.”

“Oh, I am as mind controlled as every other poor soul who has stumbled into this pitcher plant. I simply have a contingency plan. My higher brain functions are running off of this,” the librarian replied, spinning his watch around his hoof before tucking it back into his waistcoat and wiping a bit of blood which hadn’t quite dried off on the wall. “Sadly, it is only a temporary measure. If we cannot escape within the hour, I will return to ‘pushing paper until the carpet eats me’. What are we to do about her?”

“You shall do nothing about me!” Nightmare snapped, standing a little straighter and sticking her nose in the air. “I am here to accomplish my task, and then I intend to abandon this...this disgusting, fleshy existence post-haste!”

Limerence slipped a knife out of his bandolier and casually set it spinning end over end in his telekinetic grasp. “Mister Bones...Hard Boiled heals from nearly any injury we’ve tested upon his person. I do have a certain amount of experience with magical possession, if you’d like me to—”

“Nawww, Mister Tome,” Bones let out a sound of crackling leaves that was something approximating a sigh. “I had the same thought. She near widdled on herself when I hit a pressure point in her back. I wasn’t even being particularly rough about it. If she could get out of that body, she would. I suspect we’d just lose Hard Boiled the second she did, too, leastways as long as we’re still in here.”

“Why does it seem that all of Hard Boiled’s closest companions are cheerfully willing to inflict violence upon his person?!” Nightmare hissed, looking back and forth between the two as she backed against the wall and tucked her tail between her back legs.

“You possessed a pony who may be the most dangerous single individual in all the histories I have ever read, Miss…shall I call you Miss Moon?” Limerence asked, cocking his head as he slipped the knife back into its holster.

“That...that will suit,” she muttered, then shook herself. “What about him is dangerous? He is a drunk. A foolish, importunely idealistic, masochistic drunk.”

“True,” Lim replied, pulling the hems of his waistcoat. “However, those facts do not make him any less a pitiless storm when opposed. I have observed him for some time now, in all manner of circumstances, and while he may project the image of an affable, though extremely persistent buffoon, I have a suspicion that there are many things he does not see fit to tell us. You would do well to remember the graveyards filled with his enemies. He might not pull the trigger, but don’t be surprised if you find him somewhere in the background of any massacre, measuring bodies for coffins.”

If Nightmare’s ears hadn’t already been pinned straight back, they would have.

“He...he would not consider me an enemy, w-would he?” she asked, nervously. “I do not wish to experience death. My calculations suggest it would hurt.”

“If you make plans to keep that body or prevent him from getting justice for Detrot, I would have my funerary arrangements already in place,” the librarian said, jerking his horn toward the desk. “Now then, as we are short of time, did either of you have a coherent plan? I was headed toward the control room. I believe us to be close.”

“I won’t pretend to understand the math, but Nighty here seems to think there’s some even distribution of the corpses in the cubicles that somehow gave her a direction to head in.”

Nightmare tried to regain some of her composure. “Y-yes! I mean...certainly! The dead ponies and their remains appear to follow a simple arithmetic. I assume it is to do with efficient distribution of the nutrient fog.”

“Nutrient...fog?” Limerence asked, smacking his lips a couple of times as he looked up at the blanketing cloud. “This mist is some form of...sustenance?”

“Moonie here made friends with a P.A.C.T. jackboot that was apparently part of an earlier excursion into this place,” Bones explained, “She’d been in here for a long, long time. Don’t know if she was one of the first or not, but...her mind was damn near gone. Maybe they were feeding the troopers to this place to keep it running or maybe they were using it to dispose of ponies who weren’t useful to them, but there must have been something keeping them alive. This ‘fog’ is as good an explanation as any. I haven’t been in here since the Office was dormant.”

“Ah, yes. That would make a certain amount of sense. My own method involved a bit of magical measurement, but it suggested the shape of the structure is an ovoid. We should move quickly. Have either of you seen Miss Taxi?”

Bones and Nightmare exchanged an uneasy look. Limerence’s perpetual frown deepened further.

“I will take that to mean you have,” he said, hiking the strap holding his staff higher on his shoulders. “As she is not with us, am I to understand she has been...taken?”

“Aye, she was. She’ll keep, for now, but my grandson has my stubborn streak. We’ll have to get her on the way out,” Bones replied.

“In the years you studied the Office, did you ever discern what this ‘work’ might be?” Nightmare asked, gesturing at the desk, the living stapler, and the stack of paper sitting in the upper corner.

“We translated some of the controls, but aside that? Diddly. Seems like this place works toward whatever task you set it to. If you want to know anything else, you’d have to ask Apple Bloom. This was her private romping ground,” Bones answered, then turned back to Limerence. “Now, Mister Tome. How long do you think you can keep that sound dampening spell going?”

“Not indefinitely, but longer than it will take us to escape or die, assuming we waste no more time.”

“Then throw us a silence and point me in the direction of control.”

Limerence’s horn flared, and Nightmare staggered as the enchantment took hold, pawing at one of her ears with the tip of one hoof. Having only had her sense of hearing for a short time, it was deeply disconcerting to lose it, even briefly. The tiny glowing blue light that’d led her to the librarian popped into being on the tip of his nose, then zipped out of the cubicle and hovered in the aisle, seemingly impatient to get moving.

‘If I stay, I die, and my task is unfulfilled. Also, these two may drag me along and cause me pain. I do not like pain. If I go, I will almost certainly also die.’ Nightmare’s thoughts paused, then she added, ‘Why, oh why, must I have an internal dialogue?’

‘Stop complaining where I have to listen to you!’ Gale’s voice echoed in her head.

Nightmare couldn’t suppress a quick bounce of anticipation on her front hooves. ‘Ghost! Ghost! Where is Hard Boiled? Please tell me he is ready to retake control of this body!’

‘If he were, I’d have just let him do it! He’s stuck in some kind of dream. It’s like finding somepony at the bottom of a well. Without a rope, I’ve got no way of getting him out and if I do, the mind control field will snatch him again.’

‘Then...I am trapped in this biological bedlam until we leave the control field?!’

‘It sure seems like it. You want some dopamine? The least I can do is make you not care for a little while. It’ll be a drain, but...we’ve only got about thirty minutes anyway. Look down.’

Nightmare glanced down to find the light on her chest flashing on and off.

She wanted to curse, but found her vocabulary sadly lacking any particularly colorful epithets. She hadn’t needed them when her greater self stuffed her into the host’s brain and so was left without a way of properly expressing her fury. Bones was looking at her strangely, and she gave him and shaky nod. He quickly gestured for Limerence to get going, and the librarian took the lead, trotting out of the cubicle with the skeleton right on his heels.

Much as she wanted to cower in the corner and let the two of them handle things, she found herself moving; being left alone in the fog was ever so much worse. She chased the shadows of Limerence and Bones as they moved through the dim light.

After a couple minutes’ run, she noticed the ground starting to slope upwards at a gradually increasing curve. It wasn’t any harder to walk, but placing her legs on a curving surface was strange, particularly as she could feel the difference in how gravity played on her back half and front half at the same time. The cubicles were looking more deformed as well, like a great hand was squeezing the tops together, jamming more of them into less space. Worse, visibility was quickly dropping off. She could barely see her own hooves through the cloying mist. Still, so long as she kept Bones’s tail in sight and didn’t make any turns, she had a direction.

She was so preoccupied with following closely that she almost crashed into Limerence’s backside and only managed to backpedal at the last moment. The librarian was standing in the middle of the aisle, staring up at something just beyond her field of view. Trotting forward to join him, she beheld a strange wall with a thin line down the middle. A single button glowed softly on the wall beside it.

“Your maths led us true, Mister Tome. The control room is at the top of a sort of ‘stalk’ that sticks out over the cubes. This is the elevator. Would you do the honors?” Bones said in her mind.

She tried to respond, only to remember Limerence’s silence was still in place. Stepping up to the twin doors, Limerence quickly tapped the button, then jumped back as though they might explode. He swept his staff off his back, levitating it into a ready position between himself and the doors. Taking the cue, Nightmare picked up her trigger bit and shrugged her sleeve off the Crusader.

The doors slid open on a bone white room, just barely large enough for two ponies to stand comfortably side by side, and three to wedge in if they were willing to get intimate. Sighing, Nightmare came to a quick decision and trudged into the elevator first, hoping to be toward the back should there be a line of guns at the top waiting to blow them all to kingdom come when the doors opened. Bones scooted in front alongside and Limerence eased in after him.

The interior of the elevator didn’t merely look bone white. Nightmare experimentally tapped the surface under her hooves, and it felt exceedingly lifelike, too smooth to have been carved or cut. Overhead, a small glowing protrusion provided illumination; it put her in mind of a firefly’s abdomen, though with a more persistent brilliance.

As the elevator’s doors snapped shut and Limerence allowed his silence to drop, Nightmare breathed out into the suddenly cramped space.

“Why do you ponies do this?” Nightmare asked, trying to make herself comfortable against the wall. “Surely no life you have after all is said and done is worth this abominable experience? Hard Boiled’s psyche is one giant scar, not even to speak of that mad mare we left downstairs.”

Bones shrugged and tapped the singular, unmarked black button on the interior which resembled a beetle’s carapace with a strange symbol carved into the surface. The button might have read ‘frappe occupants’, but to Nightmare’s relief there was a gentle pressure as the elevator started to move, soundlessly rising in a fashion that felt too smooth for a mechanism.

“Can’t say as I’ve thought about it,” he replied, wiping a bit of dust off each shoulder with his toe. “The strange thing about life is that it tends to continue, whether or not you’re paying attention. Even the worst moments are only moments.”

“This from an undead who spent thirty years trapped in darkness,” Nightmare grunted.

“A damn sight better perspective than that of somepony who spent a millenium on the moon because she hit a depressive streak.”

“Ahem, mightn’t we plan our ingress?” Limerence interjected. He flicked his horn at the doors, and a thin blue light wrapped around them. “I can project a shield that should protect us from at least one volley of bullets. I do not know if I will be able to fight after that. Time is not on our side, so we must deal with the Scry as quickly as possible.”

“I’m more or less bulletproof, but I’m down to my hooves. Moonie, can you actually use that gun?” Bones asked, pointing a skeletal leg at the Crusader.

“I do not even know if I am capable of defecating! I have not had the chance to find out!” she snapped, then shut her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “I...do...understand the basic mechanical concepts, however. I believe I can provide an adequate distraction.”

“The control room is about ten meters across. If you can’t shoot something at that range, I expect you’re too dumb to shit, too,” Bones replied, then turned to the door, shaking his head as though tossing what used to be his mane out of his face. “Can I borrow one of those knives, Mister Tome?”

Limerence slipped a long bowie knife out of his harness and passed it to the skeleton, who gave it a quick flick around his hoof to test the weight.

“Get ready. We’re almost there.”

There was a subtle sensation of the elevator rotating in place, though their hooves stayed firmly planted on the scrimshaw surface that comprised the floor. Limerence plucked another knife from his collection and Bones rolled his hooves, then bounced his haunches a couple times. The elevator car slid to a quiet stop.

The doors opened on silent runners. Nightmare’s breath caught in her throat and she ducked low, pressing herself against the floor. She waited, eyes closed, listening for the first crack of gunfire.

She waited.

And waited.

And waited.

There was no spray of bullets, no clank of a grenade against the shield, and no wave of spellfire.

The faint hum of Limerence’s magic faded and died. Nightmare felt the librarian take a step, then another, into the control room. She carefully opened one eye, then sat up as Bones filed out ahead of her.

The Office control nexus reminded Nightmare of a distant memory of Hard Boiled’s in which he’d walked through the skull of a hydra during a school field trip to the Children’s Natural History Museum of Detrot. Stepping out of the elevator was like stepping into the brain cavity of some ancient, massive animal. The floor was more thickly carpeted than the cubicles below, and both walls on either side of the door sported chest-high banks of whatever the bone substance was, decorated from top to bottom with rows of dark buttons, each labeled in the strange language of the Office.

Below each button, tiny yellow sticky notes were attached with bits of tape; most had a word or sentence in Equestrian, while a few were marked with red ‘x’.

There were no hard angles, nor anywhere a pony might conceivably sit. It gave the overwhelming impression of a space grown upon the back of some great leviathan, rather than one built by something so primitive and facile as strong backs.

The far wall was a thin, membranous window overlooking the cubicle farm. Strangely, the omnipresent fog was gone from that perspective, leaving an expansive view across the interior of the massive egg-shaped dimensional space and rows upon rows of tiny square prisons. Nightmare could make out what looked uncomfortably much like veins beneath the surface, pumping some viscous, blue fluid.

Nightmare almost missed the figure standing before the window, so still and quiet was he.

He was standing with his back to them, looking out at the cubicle farm. Nightmare thought he might be a few inches taller than she, or at least, taller than Hard Boiled; it was difficult to tell, since he wore a body-blanketing canvas robe that covered him from hooves to eartips. A simple rope was cinched around his middle, holding the robe shut. He rested one hoof against the window, seemingly in some kind of strange meditation.

His head cocked to one side at the sound of Bones and Limerence stepping out of the elevator, though that was all. Nightmare, not wanting to be left behind again, reluctantly stepped out after them. Lifting her revolver, she sighted the figure in the window and took up the slack on her trigger. Limerence held his staff before him, and Bones brandished his knife.

“Whoever you are, you’ve got three guns pointed at your back,” the skeleton called out, “Get down on your stomach and put your hooves on your head, where we can see’em.”

The figure didn’t move for several seconds, and then a soft noise reached Nightmare’s ears.

It was a chuckle.

“Three guns?” The stallion snickered, in a strong voice that was smooth as beaten cream. “Three guns? That is quite the play. I counted only one gun, since you abandoned the rest at the portal gateway. Brother, you must keep company that can lie more convincingly.”

Nightmare’s ears twitched at the last sentence.

Had she heard correctly?

“You heard me. Down on the ground. This is your final-hrk!” Bones’ voice in Nightmare’s mind was suddenly cut short.

Nightmare glanced at him, but he wasn’t where he’d been a moment ago. The skeleton had closed the distance between them in an instant. She didn’t even have time to exhale a frightened breath before his hoof came up and he slapped her so hard she was sent flying, rolling end over end into a dazed heap against one of the control consoles.

Before she could recover, he was on her, his leg pressed firmly against her throat as she looked up into the pair of shining green flames where his eyes ought to have been.

‘Green? Why are his eyes green?’ she thought, distantly as she fought for air.

Limerence had heard the frightened yelp as Bones pulled Nightmare to the ground, but he was rooted to the spot, unable to move. His heart felt like it was in the back of his mouth. His body shook as he took a slow step forward.

That voice.

It was a voice he thought never to hear again.

“Z-Zefu?” Limerence whispered, his staff clattering to the ground.

The figure reached up and tossed back his hood, revealing the zony stallion’s unnaturally handsome features. He smiled warmly, sweeping his leg out from beneath the robe. With barely a whisper of sound, Bones flipped Nightmare onto her stomach and yanked her backwards into a sitting position, his fleshless leg still clenched around her throat, though not so tightly as to cut off her air supply.

“I don’t recommend moving, Detective,” Zefu said, cooly, his ice cold eyes locked on his brother. Atop his head, his stub of a unicorn horn glowed a sickly, sewage green. “I don’t know how you avoided the Office’s employee control system, but I doubt you’re faster than my thoughts. This undead you’ve chosen to bring with you is obedient to my will. You may not die, permanently, but I know you can still be killed.”

Nightmare squirmed a little, but Bones’s leg was like an iron bar across her neck.

Zefu lifted his chin slightly, a warm smile spreading on his sharply angled face. “Brother. Much as what comes in the next few minutes may be unpleasant, I will say I am pleased to see you.”

“Zefu, you...you killed our father,” Limerence murmured.

The zony’s expression fell into one of wistful contemplation.

“If it means anything, I regret that it was necessary. He was a zebra worthy of respect,” he replied, shaking his head. “I should not be surprised his soul proved resilient to my attempts to keep it on this plane. The secrets in that mind were valuable beyond the reckoning of living persons. A pity, then, that he would not part willingly with them.”

“Brother!” Limerence snarled, “You slaughtered our family! Why? What could possibly have been worth so many deaths?!”

Zefu wetted his perfectly formed lips, and his smile returned as he reached up to brush a stray strand of his mane back. “In my line of work, one quickly learns that death is a bridge. What may be crossed in one direction, can be crossed again in another. But...as to your question, there were many things. Many, many things. Magic, of course. More than a few mares. My broken body—” He trotted in a little circle, not a sign of his limp to be found. “—healed.”

It took Limerence several seconds to process his brother standing on all four hooves, but when he did, he gave his head a violent shake and took another step closer. Bones’s leg tightened warningly around Nightmare’s throat, and she let out a soft gurgle, which brought the librarian up short. He looked at the skeleton holding his companion and exhaled, pulling his watch out of his pocket to quickly check his remaining time.

“Brother, I would have given my life to see you stand strong, again,” Limerence murmured, letting his watch drop.

“And you will, soon,” Zefu replied, caustically, gesturing to the window behind him before carefully setting his perfect smile back in place. “Ironic, isn’t it? The two of us, here, at the end, the last children of the Archive. Part of me hoped when I checked the Archive’s messaging matrix that you were the survivor. Father’s ‘competition’ might have separated us, but we come together when it is time. Two opposites, who share only hate. Not even a bloodline or a library.”

“We are not blood, but we are family!” Limerence protested. “We were to safe-keep the Archive together, regardless of father’s competition! I would have gladlysat at your right hoof!”

Zefu smoothed his black mane back with the tip of his toe and caught his lower lip between his teeth for a moment, then shook his head. “No, brother. Father loved his dusty books and foul artifacts. You are truly his son. Besides, even had I not done as I have, the fate of this world would be unchanged. They would have approached another Archivist, or simply worked around us. This world will soon be a graveyard, and I intend to sit atop the bones as its king.”

Limerence lowered his head, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “How long?” he asked, sadly.

“How long what, Limerence? Use your words,” Zefu said.

The librarian gritted his teeth. “How long ago did you betray Father?”

“Oh, I don’t think it matters,” the zony replied, plucking a slim, black book with a stylized pony skull on the front from the pocket of his robe and thumbing through it. “Suffice it to say, his wish to give us autonomy left ever so many opportunities. Necromancers are a secretive lot, and to find teachers frequently meant sneaking into places even Father’s all-seeing eyes could not. Tombs. Crypts. The old Manehattan subway system. They who gave me true power...well, my master lived in a high rise, here in old Detrot. You can see the appeal.”

“The Family,” Limerence muttered.

“They approached me with an offer. A wish, if you will. In return for a few deaths and one painful act of treachery, I could have anything I liked.” Zefu’s smile faltered. “I...I will say that I am glad you survived. It would have been a shame to kill you in that fashion.” He lifted his book and gave it a little flick. “Still, you can sit at my right hoof. Undead, perhaps, but I shan’t let that razor sharp mind of yours go to waste.”

“Is that why you left your blade in the Archive?” Limerence said, picking up his staff and carefully sliding the jagged-edged sword free of its sheath. “You hoped I would follow you?”

“Ah. No.” The zony’s gaze flicked to the weapon, and then he made a contemptuous sniff. “I could think of no safer place to hide a phylactery than the Archive. Can you? A maze in a library of corpses, defended by magics unfathomed by any living members of ponykind. It seemed an excellent safehouse. It is irrelevant, of course. I have others.”

“A phylactery?” Limerence looked down at the naked, gleaming sword. “Why would a living—” His eyes widened, and he took a quick step back. “Brother, please...please tell me you have not given up your mortal soul to these powers?!”

Zefu sneered, glancing toward where Nightmare lay, still fighting to breathe around Bones’s foreleg. “Death is coming for this world, Limerence. The living have no hope, no future, on what is to be a blasted, frozen rock when all is said and done. The dead are the future. I am merely ahead of the curve. I am the face of the oncoming tide.”

With that, Zefu’s stub of a horn began to glow. Nightmare struggled as Bones’s leg clamped down even tighter and her vision grew spotty at the edges, the brim of her hat forced down over her eyes. She choked, then slowly felt herself begin to float away into darkness.

----

“Great. I’m going to die, again, and I don’t even get to watch,” I grumbled, leaning my forehead against the swirling glass window hanging in the darkness of my own mind. “I should keep a tally going. If there’s an afterlife, I want the frequent flier miles.”

My musings were interrupted by a loud thump, followed by a soft moan.

I turned from the window to see who my newest visitor might be.

Nightmare Moon, her coat badly mussed and her massive wings askew, lay on her back a short distance away with all four legs in the air. Her shadowy, black mane lay limply around her shoulders like a cloud of dark cotton candy. Her tail had somehow become twisted around one of her back knees. She kicked one forehoof, weakly, then lay still.

“Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” I muttered, edging in a slow circle around the seemingly unconscious alicorn. Leaning over, I gave her a firm flick on the tip of the nose.

“I am dead, creature,” she said, irritably. “Whatever reaper of souls you represent, I do not believe I have one, so as my dimwitted host might say, piss off!”

I scratched my mane for a second, then sat down beside her.

“Well, that’s a pleasant change,” I replied, then waved at the dank, black emptiness surrounding us. “So, what broken bit of my mind are you representing? I’ve had enough guilt for today. Quite full up.”

Her slitted eyes snapped open, and she swung her neck around to look up at me.

“H-Hard Boiled?” she stammered, flailing her massive wings against the non-existent ground as she fought her way onto her stomach.

“I sure hope so.” I looked down at my body, checking for unpleasant changes. No gaping hole in my chest. No chains. No blood. “Hard to say. I spent the day having incredibly unpleasant conversations with people I either killed or wish I could kill and I just watched somepony—who I presume was you—wearing my body for a suit as they got strangled into unconsciousness.”

“Hard...Boiled?” she repeated.

“Um...yes?”

All at once, Nightmare threw herself at me. She overcooked the launch, and I had time to duck as she went careening muzzle first over my head, smacking her chin on the ‘floor’ as she skidded to a stop with her flank in the air and her forehooves outstretched with murderous intent. Glaring over her shoulder, she scrambled to get her hooves under her, but they didn’t seem to be working properly. That or she’d gotten used to my much shorter frame and was having trouble readjusting.

“I am going to kill you, Hard Boiled!” she howled, pawing at the ground. “I will impale you on my horn and eat you like a bagel, one bit at a time!” Her own words took a moment to sink in, and then she snarled, “And you have given me a craving for bagels! Death is too good for you!”

Again, she charged, and I took a careful step to one side, then almost as an afterthought stuck my hoof out between her front and back legs. She took a flopping tumble, all four hooves flying in different directions. It was a little depressing to see anypony so pitifully graceless.

“Hold still so I may pull you apart!” she barked, before stepping on her own wingtip as she tried to get up once more.

“Would you knock it off? You’re going to hurt yourself,” I said, shaking my head at her antics.

“I feel that killing you shall be worth it!”

I held up a hoof before she could charge again. “You do know we’re somewhere in my subconscious, right?”

She was breathing heavily and puffs of steam were rising from her nostrils, though I couldn’t have told you whether that was just because one or both of us thought there should be. Her catlike eyes narrowed as she took a limping step forward. I braced myself to dodge, but she seemed to deflate a little.

“I am beyond the boundaries of my programming,” she whined, softly. “I...I sh-should not be able to comprehend the idea of subc-consciousness. I am...am not even a pony. I am a piece of—”

“—of Nightmare Moon,” I finished, rubbing one fetlock with the other. “Yeah, I picked up on that. Take some deep breaths. If you want to try again in a minute, I’ll understand, but once you’re done picking yourself up, I do want to talk.”

A steady stream of tears was now running down her face, dripping off the end of her nose and disappearing before they hit the ground.

“Y-you creatures… You fleshy things! How have you not simply crawled inside yourselves and become lost on this tide of emotion?!” she huffed, pulling her wings in tight around her barrel. “Please, do not make me go back out there…”

“I’m not in control of this ride, Moonie,” I replied, looking up at the empty sky, then back at the black hole which represented our window. “What’s going on? I could see some of it, but I couldn’t hear anything.”

“I have no idea!” Nightmare moaned, throwing her hooves in the air, “Limerence Tome called that...that strange pony with the stripes his ‘brother’, and then I was choked into unconsciousness by your grandsire! That is rather the more important thing, is it not?”

“Yeah...yeah, I saw his eyes,” I added, flashing black to the twin green flames.

“I care little for his eyes! I care for his hoof crushing our collective throat!”

“Can’t say as I’m sad I missed that. This dream or whatever it is doesn’t come with instructions.”

For the first time since she’d appeared, Nightmare Moon started to look around herself. She held up a hoof and gave it a little shake in front of her eyes, then spread her expansive wings, studying the way the feathers stretched. “This...this is a dreamscape?”

“You tell me. You and Princess Luna were shacked up for a thousand years. The only experience I have with dreams is getting too drunk to have the bad ones.”

Pulling her wings in against her barrel, she sat down heavily. “Nightmare Moon left me with little in the way of memory. I was not meant to have true sentience. Making a dreamscape of your own is a very strange response to being magically attacked. Of course, every pony trapped in this mad dimension...this ‘Office’...may be in their own dreamscapes.”

“Makes sense to me, by which I mean, I have no idea if that should make sense or not,” I replied. “I couldn’t see too well from the position we were in, but if Lim called that pony his brother, then that’s Zefu Tome. You saying he somehow took over my grandfather’s mind?”

Nightmare clenched her teeth for a second, then nodded. “If he did, he must be some form of necromancer. A wicked controller of the undead. Is he the one who raised your grandfather?”

“I doubt it,” I answered, shaking my head. “Grandaddy Bones has been around a long time. It was probably whoever taught Zefu his trade. Lim’s brother is one of the people responsible for the death of a close friend of mine. I hope Limerence can take him. Do you guys have any thoughts on escaping, that I should know?”

“I do not wish to have thoughts anymore! Having thoughts is for meat brains! I wish to go back to being an unincorporated neural algorithm!”

“Well, the longer you piss and moan, the longer you’re likely to be running the show. Do you have a plan to get Taxi and me out of whatever took over our bodies?” I asked.

Nightmare poked her forked tongue out, then stared at the tip of it, flicking it back and forth in front of her muzzle, before self-consciously pulling it back into her mouth.

“Why does sticking my tongue out at you make me feel better?” she muttered, then quickly brushed her own question aside with flick of her shimmering black tail. “No matter! If I had my way, I would boil you and that wretched heart in your chest down into a fine slurry.”

I looked down at my chest. “What did my heart do?”

“He is responsible for this bizarre situation! He forced me to manifest as a functioning mind when yours was absent!”

“Ah.”

If it was possible, Nightmare’s expression turned even more sour; she looked like she’d been slurping rotten limes out of a margarita mixed in dishwater.

“Unfortunately,” she continued, “if Limerence survives, he may manage to save us from death and then...then I will have to continue my primary directives, much as they are right now being superseded by a desire to see you dead.”

“How? Not that I’m doubting you, since you and Nightmare Moon both seem to be pathologically honest, but it might be important.”

She waved a hoof in front of her face as though looking for the words, then stared at the hoof like it’d done something offensive. “Unconscious gesticulation. I am unconsciously gesticulating! Ugh, your sentience infects me and I cannot even stand still!”

“Nightmare, focus. Escaping?”

“Allow me my displeasures or I go back to trying to stick you with my horn!” she snarled, stomping past me to look up at the hole hanging in the air. Drawing in a sharp breath, she slowly let it go. “As I was about to say, I interacted briefly with a dying mare who told me that there are creatures which can counteract the mind control field. They live somewhere within the Office’s ecosystem. We have not encountered them, obviously, but...it is possible Limerence Tome may find one.”

“I saw what happened with Taxi,” I said, trying to keep the quiver out of my voice. “We’ll have to get her on the way out, one way or the other. Creatures or not, I am not—”

“Yes, yes, I know! We have accounted for your unwillingness to leave your emotionally codependent assassin behind!”

“Good. I suppose until I’m out of here there’s not much else I can plan. So. you want to play checkers or something while we wait for…oh.”

Nightmare cocked her head, a worried expression crossing her face. “Oh? What is ‘oh’?”

I nodded at her front hoof, which was quickly fading into the darkness like a black curtain was being drawn across it.

“...Oh…” she said, quietly, and then she was gone.

Act 3 Chapter 53 : An Excellent Weapon

"Revenge is a dish best served with a side of gravy, a decent starter, biscuits, and macaroons."

- Rear Admiral Rye, after the Battle of Singe Pass when he managed to bring down the dragon Sortok, responsible for the attack on Shadow Valley. Rye's forces had been on forced march for three days and had not eaten the entire time.

Of every unpleasantness she’d suffered while stuck with a body, Nightmare quickly moved ‘coming awake while vomiting’ right to the very top. She coughed, clawing at her aching throat with both hooves as she struggled for breath. A steadying leg wrapped around her shoulders and something cold pressed against her lips.

“Drink.”

Greedily sipping from the flask, Nightmare gagged on something that tasted like battery acid lightly diluted with drain cleaner.

“P-poison!” she sputtered, shoving the flask away.

“Malt whiskey, aged twenty years, but the two are similar. That makes you Nightmare Moon, then. Hard Boiled would suck this down like mother’s milk.”

Opening her eyelids, she found Bones standing over her. Panic seized her for a moment, until she realized his glowing eyes had returned to their baby blue shine. Glancing down, she sighed as she realized she was in Hard Boiled’s body once more. She’d rather enjoyed being an alicorn. It certainly felt less awkward than having the dangling bits around her undercarriage.

Nearby, Limerence stood over a heap of black rags, gently rummaging through them with the end of his staff.

“W-what happened?” Nightmare asked. “Where is Zefu Tome?”

The Archivist paused in his listless search, his thin shoulders slumped with an unseen weight. He glanced over his shoulder at her, his gaze full of a profoundly weary sadness.

Moments ago...

“Now, brother, we can talk privately.”

“If you are party to the family’s business, you know strangling him is only likely to be an inconvenience,” Limerence, fighting the tremor in his voice as he watched Hard Boiled’s clutching hooves fall limply to his sides. “So, you intend to keep him alive, then?”

Whether it was simple exhaustion or mortal fear, Limerence’s mind still felt surprisingly clear. He knew attempting to defend his friend would leave him open to attack and fighting a former Crusader with barely enough magic to swing his own sword was a losing proposition. He turned back to his brother, hefting the blade a little higher.

“He is a resilient one, isn’t he?” the zony said as tugged at his lower lip with the tip of one hoof. “Hard Boiled, I mean. Broadside said he’d quite burned alive after a thorough shower of brass. Still, if I truly wanted Hard Boiled dead, I’d simply have that creature you brought along tear his head from his shoulders. I would much rather dissect the good Detective. There’s much to learn in a pony who seemingly cannot die.”

“And me? Am I to end up on your ‘slab’?” Limerence asked.

“Yes, though depending on how much you resist, I may have to part you out,” Zefu replied. “I would prefer your body had as little damage as possible, however. Your mind was always the weapon you used best and undead do rather lose their charm if they’ve got bits hanging off. Still, let us reminisce for a moment. Why did you take my staff from its resting place in the Archive?”

Limerence looked down at the polished wooden handle and the gleaming, jagged-edged blade hanging in a subtle blue glow.

“I thought to use it to kill your murderer,” he replied, softly.

Zefu’s perfectly shaped muzzle stretched into a more genuine smile, though ruined somewhat by a slightly strange way his flesh seemed to hang loose on his jaw.

“Mmm...Limerence, whether you believe it or not, I am genuinely touched. Father wanted a strong pony to lead the Archivists. I see you’ve become strong, if nothing else. Do you remember when we were children? That first artifact father gave us to analyze?”

Limerence nodded, his mind still sorting through his options.

‘Keep him talking,’ he thought.

“The music box that mesmerized ponies who listened to it. I remember.”

“We stayed up for days studying that box before I turned the handle and started the tune.” Zefu turned his back, staring out the fleshy window again. “I wonder, how long do you think it would have been before father came to release me from that spell if you had not managed to use your silence?”

“It was a lesson,” Limerence murmured. “His lessons were meant to keep us alive. The Mesmer Box was a harmless training exercise.”

“Harmless, brother?” Zefu snorted. “Do you know, that ‘training exercise’ only stops playing when the handle is removed or every last person who can hear it is dead? I found the reference book Father hid from us before he gave us the box a few days later. Every member of the village of Mesmer died of starvation listening to that abomination and he gave it to a pair of foals.”

“We’ve read all the same books, Zefu. It was an exercise. He had precautions in place.”

“Precautions. Is this similar to the precautions you took when you laid your silence upon yourself just before I started the tune? Why did you not lay it on me as well?”

Limerence’s ears slowly pinned back against his head. “I…”

“Say it, Limerence,” Zefu murmured, cocking his head to one side. “Tell me the truth, my dear brother. Tell me why you let me think I heard the voices of angels. Tell me why you let me think I heard my mother’s voice, singing me to sleep.”

The librarian’s eyes burned with shame and he quickly shut them, then forced them open again.

‘He’s trying to rile you. He’s going to attempt to kill you, soon. You can’t let this be your end. The world is more important than your guilt.’

“I...I wanted to know how the box worked,” Limerence said, biting off the last word before his emotions could overwhelm him again.

“I see,” Zefu nodded, thoughtfully. “You dropped me into a maddening heaven so you could determine how father’s little toy worked. Did you know, also, what The Channel Of Gorganth would do to a person who’d touched it with magic powered by frustration? Is that how you closed it when I was held in that blazing inferno of wild magic, twisting my limbs out of shape?”

Limerence stopped breathing for a long moment.

Despite the years, the memory was still fresh.

In his mind’s eye, he could still see his brother hanging in a ball of raging red light, his forelimbs wrenched from their sockets, screaming as the magic tore at his flesh.

He swallowed and swept the image aside.

“I knew,” Limerence whispered.

“And, you chose not to tell me?”

“Brother, we knew the consequences of using magical artifacts in anger! We are scholars of—”

Zefu held up his hoof to forestall any further excuses.

“You are the scholar, Limerence, not I. I deal in reality, not in theory. I relied upon you, again and again, to make sure the theory was sound before I took action, but while I risked, you played it safe. You let me walk into danger so you could look damnably smart in front of father when you cleaned up.”

“Father loved us both, Zefu!” Limerence protested, “Yes, he was cold, but he never stopped loving either of us! Not even when you slaughtered him.”

“Love!? Ha! I was father’s shame,” Zefu hissed through clenched teeth. “His crippled half-breed. His love tasted of ashes when I lay in hospital, my magic ruined, my legs warped! His love was empty when I begged him to give me the spells to repair my horn and body!”

“The blackest of magics,” Limerence murmured, one eye flicking towards where Hard Boiled lay, Bones still wrapped around him like a fleshless snake in a lethal embrace. “Soul killing magic. You’d have burned your very being to fuel those spells. He...he thought he was saving you.”

All at once, the fiery rage that’d burned in Zefu’s eyes was quashed and he drew himself up straight, pulling his robe around his well-muscled chest. “Yes. And now, we are here. What shall we do to pass the time until your pocket watch runs out of magic?”

Limerence lowered his staff a little. “Would you do me the courtesy of telling me how you managed to avoid succumbing to the mind control magics of this place?”

Zefu chuckled, waving a hoof toward the heavily sticky-noted control panels. “I no longer suffer the slings and arrows of mortality, but...should you live another ten minutes, feel free to try to find the button labeled ‘dispense convoyer’. Do you have a plan for living that long, brother?”

“No, not yet,” he replied, carefully adjusting his few remaining knives in his vest with a quick burst of magic. “I am still considering my options.”

His robe swirling around his knees, Zefu strolled over and casually rested his hoof atop Bones’s head as the skeleton crouched over Hard Boiled’s dead or unconscious body. “I could have the skeleton attack you and use the distraction to cast a flaying hex I learned from a very sweet practitioner who lived in the former dragon capital. Lovely girl. We shared a glass of wine atop the draconic Temple of the Holy Flame and made love under the moon. She was dead before we finished, sadly. I did not really grasp all of the intricacies of how the soul capturing poison worked, then.”

“That is how you obtained access to father’s vaults, isn’t it?” Limerence asked, trying to keep the seething anger out of his voice. “You killed the vault holders and ripped out their souls. You stole the curator of the history museum’s soul to abscond with the Lunar weapons.”

“Oh, Limerence! Do tell me you pieced that together before now!” Zefu smoothed his greased black mane and grinned. “That was my wish, after all. Do you remember father’s very first lesson, the day we stood before him as children and he explained what it meant to be an Archivist?”

“Secrets are valuable,” the librarian murmured.

“A lesson to take to heart, no? When my benefactors offered me a wish, I thought long and hard before realizing the most obvious of answers; what could be more valuable than a magic that steals all of a pony’s secrets?” Zefu stroked Bones’s cheek, then reached down and gently touched Hard Boiled’s face. “What secrets do you think live in this stallion’s mind?”

Flicking a knife out of his vest, Limerence levitated it alongside his staff as he took a few steps to one side. “Too many for you, brother. He is beyond you.”

Zefu pushed himself to his hooves. “Ah! Is that the sound of my baby brother coming up with a plan? I will be most entertained to see the scholar finally taking action. What will it be, then? A clever spell? A shot at my heart with a hidden blade? I have pulled several knives out of my heart and still, here I stand.”

“Nothing so complex,” the librarian replied, sweeping his staff out to one side as he adjusted his spectacles on the end of his muzzle. “I propose a trade.”

The necromancer’s brow furrowed, then he drew his rear legs together as he regarded his brother. “A trade, Limerence? For what? For the lives of the fools who came with you into this dark dimension? I see very little you have to offer me and nothing I could offer you in return except, perhaps, a merciful death.”

“As I said, a simple trade. Do you have a weapon?” Limerence asked.

Pulling his robe back from his chest, Zefu revealed a thin short sword tucked against his barrel in a black sheath. “Much good may the knowledge do you, but I find my curiosity piqued. What is your offer?”

“We both make a single strike. You take yours. I take mine.”

The short sword’s pommel lit with a ghostly green magic as the zony pulled it free of its sheath and levitated the wickedly sharp blade to hang in front of his face in a readied position.

“Do you truly believe you can kill me with my own phylactery?” Zefu asked, before casually pressing the tip of his blade against his own cheek, just below his eye. Applying a little pressure, he sneered as the edge sliced deep into flesh that might as well have been paper and a thick black ichor spilled down his chin onto the carpet. Pulling the weapon away, he leered smugly as the bloody wound immediately sealed itself shut, leaving no trace. “I don’t think you have considered this ‘offer’ of yours very carefully. I gain nothing by allowing you to make this strike besides another amusing anecdote.”

“Then I’ll ‘sweeten the pot’, as the detective would say.” Limerence allowed himself a tiny smirk, just enough to get Zefu’s dander up. He caught the shift in his brother’s expression as he returned his own knife to a fencing position. It was a slight hardening around the eyes, but it was enough. “If we both survive a single strike, I will willingly drink your soul stealing poison.”

Zefu’s ears perked a little.

“You...will, won’t you, Limerence?” the necromancer whispered, with just a hint of wonder in his voice. “We both have father’s sense of honor, in our own way. You may lack his ruthlessness, but your word is ironclad. Do you know, even if you manage to strike this body in some fashion that will kill it, you could only send me fleeing to one of my phylacteries until I can reconstitute my body?”

“We have read all of the same books, lich,” Limerence answered.

“No longer calling me brother, hmmm?” Zefu raised his short sword and backed away from Bones and Hard Boiled, returning to his former place in front of the veined window. “Well then, scholar, I accept your proposal. Swear on our father’s name and honor that you will give yourself to me if we both survive a single strike.”

Limerence hesitated for only a moment. His brother’s gaze was probing, seeking for any signs of deceit; it found none.

“I swear it.”

Hauling his robe back from his shoulder, Zefu freed his body for swift motion. Taking a few practice swipes at the air with his sword, he fell into a well rehearsed combat stance, the very picture of relaxed lethality.

Limerence, for his part, still looked a right horror; his vest was caked in dried blood and the stains on his fetlocks were unlikely to come out without a shave. He sighed inwardly and backed up until there were a solid fifteen body lengths between himself and his brother. Glancing over to where his friends lay, he tried to steady himself for what was to come.

‘This is going to be painful. Oh well. Nothing for it,’ Limerence thought, raising his serrated blade as he took a firmer grip on the haft with what remained of his magic.

“Take your strike, brother. Then we’ll be on our way,” Zefu murmured.

Limerence took a deep breath and his mind flashed back to all the ponies he’d met, the friends he’d buried, and the strange adventures he’d been on in the last few weeks. He remembered lying in Taxi’s legs, sobbing his eyes out as his father’s body cooled in the city morgue. He remembered the Detective offering him a choice to save his life: maddened, suicidal revenge, or justice. He remembered the last moment he’d seen Swift, huddled in the back of the Night Trotter, holding Mags between her forelegs.

He could hear his own heart thumping against his ribs and felt bile at the back of his throat, but all of a sudden, a soft serenity fell over him like a blanket of falling snow. Many things could go wrong, of course, but he knew what his part was. The sacrifice suddenly seemed quite small.

How many times had he sparred against his brother under his father’s watchful eye?

Too many to count.

How many times had father told him that the only difference between heroes and monsters is who they sacrifice for?

Too many to count.

How many times had father warned him not to get into stupid duels with people who outclassed him in every measurable way on ridiculous, risky propositions that might end in death or decapitation?

Not once that Limerence could remember, though Don Tome tended to leave the more common sense lessons to the world to teach, with the ultimate understanding that ponies without common sense don’t live very long anyway.

His brother waited—sword tip unwavering—to deal death and claim his soul.

‘Hrmph. I won’t even get to see father in the afterlife. I’d have rather liked to tell him the rest of my life went well.” He let out a soft sigh of resignation and met the necromancer’s eyes. “Ah, well. No time like the present.’

Limerence braced. His back legs tightened. He saw his brother’s body tense and the edge of Zefu’s short sword twitch in anticipation.

Both exploded into motion at speeds that almost defied the eye, charging toward one another. Zefu blasted off the line like a linebacker, seemingly intent on crushing his smaller opponent beneath his superior weight and strength, while Limerence moved on the tips of his hooves, seeming to dance, his floating staff blade held just behind his head in a ready swing. Sparks flashed as the two brothers clashed for an instant, then swept past one another.

A hot splash of fresh, red blood decorated the nearest control panel.

Zefu barreled through the space Limerence had occupied just seconds ago and skidded to a halt, his back to his brother.

Limerence continued a few steps, coming to a slow stop. He stood there for a moment, his sword waving in his weak levitation field, before letting the weapon drop onto the carpet. Blood trickled into his eyes, dripping off of his eyelashes.

The pain was...not so bad. It hurt, but he’d felt deeper agonies.

Reaching up, Limerence carefully touched his head, cringing as his toetip touched the open wound on the side.

Loss. Hatred. Injustice. Those all hurt worse than the loss of an ear.

“Now, then, brother,” Zefu murmured. “You have had your strike, and we are both alive. Will you fulfill your end of this bargain, or do I need to take your other ear?”

Taking a deep breath, Limerence turned to the necromancer, straightening his vest as he wiped the dribble of blood off his forehead and tucked his mane into the ugly slice he was rather glad he couldn’t see to soak it up.

“You are partially correct, lich,” Limerence replied, earning himself a confused look. “I have had my strike, but you are dead. You just don’t know it, yet.”

Something in the conviction in his brother’s voice set Zefu’s teeth on edge. He quickly looked down at himself, then swept his robe back, feeling his chest and barrel. Finding them pristine, he blinked owlishly at Limerence.

“But...you did not hit me!” he said, a note of disturbed panic in his words.

“A strike does not need to land to be lethal, brother. Your master taught you very well, but he missed a few,” Limerence said, trying to ignore the burning pain in his ear. “You followed all of his teachings to the letter, no less. Even the third rule of the Death Lords of Tambelon: always keep a phylactery on your person.”

The zony’s eyes bugged out as he slapped a hoof against his side.

“Yes, Zefu,” Limerence murmured, his horn glittering as he lifted his brother’s thin, black spellbook from behind his back. “As I said before, we have read all the same books. That list does include many of those ugly tomes you thought you destroyed the last copies off. An Archivist who does not know a spell to restore old tomes will not last long.”

“Y-you are not a necromancer, brother.” Zefu hissed, taking a threatening step. “The spells in that book are worthless to you.”

Limerence rolled his eyes. “I have two pieces of your soul. It does not require your ridiculous black arcana to merge them with the rest, only a vessel which already contains one and a working knowledge of thaumatological dynamics.” He swept up the sword-staff with a burst of magic, sheathing it in one smooth motion.

Zefu shot a look at where Bones and Hard Boiled sat. “Give me the book or I will kill your friend, Limerence. I can do it with a thought.”

The librarian raised his head, and his horn flashed.

Zefu suddenly found his body locked in place. He was unable to move even his eyelids, to force them shut. His lungs spasmed as they fought to draw a breath that wouldn’t come. His pupils rotated wildly in their sockets, before centering on his brother. The expression on the younger stallion’s face made Zefu’s black blood run cold.

“No, lich,” Limerence said, silently weaving the binding spell around his enemy’s spirit, feeling the squirming, ugly little thing that’d once been a soul writhe within his grasp. “No, you really can’t. Excelsia’s Principles of Necromantic Power, section eight, verse ten: a piece of the soul reflects the whole and the whole reflects the piece. I have two pieces of you. That is enough to take over your central nervous system. Upon your death and resurrection, your soul will seek the nearest vessel. I’m afraid I have no way of making a brain aneurysm of the sort I intend to inflict any less painful.”

Stepping forward, Limerence adjusted his brother’s robe, straightening the collar with the tip of his hoof. “Father would want you to look good when you die. Unfortunately, circumstance dictates that I do not have the luxury of letting you go to your reward. If there are any kind gods you still have the ear of, I recommend you begin praying that there is something beyond what we know as souls to pass on into the great beyond. However, I will grant you one small mercy, before the end.”

Limerence’s horn burned as he began to pump more energy into it, feeling fire fill his veins and singe his nerves; it was not so bad as other pains he’d felt in his life.

The loss of a home.

The loss of a father.

The loss of a brother.

Raising the sheathed staff above his brother’s head, the scholar yanked the tiny mote of soul out of Zefu’s spellbook. It dangled in the air between them, a wisp of writhing yellow light hanging in a field of magical energy. It would have been so easy to crush it, then drive his blade into Zefu’s helpless body and and free his brother into the afterlife, where surely they had punishments suitable to his crimes.

‘Too bad I need fuel,’ he thought.

Limerence finished weaving his spell.

“Here is your small mercy, brother,” he whispered, as the glow of magic swelled around him.

A momentary flash of unbidden hope crossed Zefu’s face.

“For my love for you...you may now scream.”

Nightmare rubbed her sore neck as she got her hooves under herself. Being back in Hard Boiled’s body was both pleasantly familiar and deeply disconcerting. Looking down, she touched her breast over her heart, but found the low-power light wasn’t blinking.

“Limerence Tome, did you charge Hard Boiled’s heart?” she asked. “I thought your reserves were empty.”

“They are,” Limerence replied, then continued poking through the pile of bones and tattered cloth with the end of his sword staff. “I simply made...efficient use of my resources. I should have more than enough magic for most practical purposes, hence forth.”

Cocking her head onto her shoulder, Nightmare peered at the rags on the carpet, then noticed a thick bandage that seemed to be made of two handkerchiefs tied together wrapped around Limerence’s head. “And...what of the necromancer?”

Bones flicked his eyes towards the remains at Limerence’s hooves. “Gotta say, the only time I ever saw magic do that was some mighty nasty zebra necromancy. You got something you want to tell us, colt?”

Lifting his staff, Limerence pulled it open, revealing six inches of the edge. Etched into the metal just above the wooden handle was a wide open mouth and a pair of lidless eyes, full of all the fear of an eternity lost. As the ponies and their undead friend watched, the mouth seemed to move, very gradually, its tongue lashing at the backs of its teeth for an instant. The mortally stricken gaze seemed to meet Nightmare and she felt a lump crawl up the back of her throat.

Limerence snapped the blade shut with a loud click that made Nightmare jump.

“Zefu was...a very poor sibling, but I like to think I learn from my enemies. Astral Skylark taught me the use of burned souls to power spellwork. My brother will make an excellent weapon.”

I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, other than that Zefu was apparently gone and Limerence’s staff now looked like it was shrieking.

“Well...that’s screwed up,” I muttered, my muzzle pressed against the glass-like surface of my little viewing hole.

‘You’re telling me,’ a voice replied from out of the aether.

I jerked back from the swirling window in the black pit of my mind to find myself still alone.

“Is...is somepony there?” I asked.

‘Yes. Nightmare’s consciousness led me to you. I will get you out as soon as it’s an option.’

“Gale? Is that you?”

‘Please just pretend I’m a voice in your head,’ the voice answered, sounding slightly abashed. ‘I don’t want to make our relationship weird.’

“Too late,” I replied, hotly. “Can you describe what’s going on out there? I’ve got no sound.”

‘You’re in a dream, but I might be able to route some of the stuff coming in your ears through some of the bits of your brain you’re stuck in. This might sound a little funny; you’re hearing with your memory of falling off a raft and the one of kissing that filly in second grade.’

“If anything about this day is other than funny, I want it pointed out so I can treasure it for the rest of my life, however brief a time that might be.”

“Mister Tome, I don’t remember a damn thing that happened between that door opening and me getting to my hooves a minute ago. If you don’t mind me asking...are there likely to be other ponies who can take over my body like your brother did?” Bones asked as he studied the strangely organic-looking control panel nearest him. He gave his hairless tail a little flick and rattled his ribcage. “Am I a danger to my grandson?”

“I have no way of knowing, but necromancers of my brother’s character do not play well with others. If there is another, then yes, you may be a danger,” Limerence replied as he plucked a small brown pack with a zipper on one side and a strap for slinging around the neck from his brother’s remains. “It is irrelevant,” he continued. “All of Hard Boiled’s friends are a danger to him. It does not bear deep consideration. We need to leave rather soon, but we have a mission to complete.”

“Yeah, the ‘Scry’ thing. Don’t suppose anypony told you what it looks like, did they?”

“What about their recent luck makes you think these ponies have a piece of information as useful as that?” Nightmare interjected, blowing a loud snort through her nose as she trotted to one of the consoles and began reading the labeled buttons. “Hrmph. At least someone has translated many of these controls for us, though much of this seems to be gibberish. What is an ‘employee impregnation chamber’?”

Bones joined her at the console, his glowing eyes roving over the mechanism. Reaching up, he carefully tugged the sticky note down; there was another scrap of much older paper underneath with the words ‘rape chamber’ written on it, followed by three question marks.

“That’ll be one of Apple Bloom’s translations,” Bones said, then added, “I recognize the hoofwriting.”

Limerence unzipped the pack taken from his brother’s body, then nodded to himself before zipping it shut again and stuffing it into his vest pocket along with Zefu’s spellbook.

“If I may, you said not much of this was translated when last you were here and the resources of the Crusaders were considerable. How is it that the Family have translated so much in the scant few years they’ve owned this property?” Limerence inquired.

“Don’t know, but it says to me they’ve got computing power the like of which would make those old crones back in the Skids drool all over themselves. These translations are better than the ones we had. Looky here.” The skeleton pointed to strange dial with a glowing sigil above it. The attached note said, ‘cosmic alignment to release’ followed by a hoofwritten note with an arrow pointing to the final symbol which added ‘This word doesn’t translate into Equestrian, but the algorithm spat out ‘The Stomach Which Digests God’. Recommend not fiddling with it’.

“Before he was...dealt with, my brother told me to search for a button labeled ‘dispense convoyer’ which might save Miss Sweet Shine,” the librarian murmured. “Zefu enjoys taunting his victims, so I believe he was being honest. Hunt for that alongside anything that might suggest we could usefully disable the magics here.”

Bones shrugged and strolled off to the other side of the room, happy to have a course to follow. Nightmare considered objecting, but the last time she had everypony had threatened her with violence; pain, suffering, and the possibility of ending her corporeal existence were good enough reasons to go to the task with enthusiasm.

‘Nightmare?’ Gale whispered in the possessed pony’s mind.

‘Ah! Yes? I wondered where you were, ghost! How much time did Limerence Tome buy us?’

‘Not enough that you can screw around, but when you were knocked out, the mind control magics stuck you in the same spot they stuck Hardy. I’ve got him tapped into his senses, so he’s seeing and hearing most of what’s going on.’

‘Can he hear you and I?’

‘Not unless you talk out loud, but I can relay messages.’

Nightmare considered for a moment, then thought, ‘I would like you to relay an image of me choking him to death, please.’

When Gale didn’t reply, Nightmare sniffed haughtily to herself (or at least, in a fashion she hoped sounded a bit haughty, since she hadn’t much experience with proper sniffing). With nothing to amuse her, she set to scanning up and down the buttons on the huge control panel, doing her best not to consider the implications of many of them too deeply.

A few were fairly straightforward in their horror; she didn’t need clarification on ‘Overseer flesh beast stasis status: negative’. Some were more oblique.

One especially ornate, glowing display was labeled, ‘Begin planetary mantle extraction.’ Underneath there was what appeared to be a short exchange between two translators:

From FJ - Check me on this, Minty, but Mango seems to think this means the Office could eat every mineral on Equis if you don’t keep fresh ‘employees’ downstairs. What are your thoughts?

From Minty - Check the binder, Funky Jazz. The instruction is to notify command if this display changes at any point.

From FJ - Is that why we keep bringing in more hobos? Wouldn’t the troopers be more efficient? They sure last a lot longer. Some of the same group that were in here when I arrived are still working.

From Minty - The hobos don’t cost anything and the troopers are in limited supply. We’ll see about finding more ‘volunteers’ unless you want to try turning the breeding chambers back on.

From FJ - Nah. I don’t feel like listening to the screaming while I’m trying to eat. Pregnancy at those speeds tends to kill the hosts, anyway. Whatever species they used before ponies must have had litters if they were willing to speed the pregnancy by several thousand percent like that. Ponies only replace at a one to one or a one to two ratio. I just wish we could get more than one convoyer every few hours, though. It’d be easier to have a whole analysis team, but the damn things die after a couple days.

From Minty - We’re not here to analyze. We’re here to keep the Scry linked up to the remote viewer and make sure the control field doesn’t spread too quickly.

From FJ - Good luck on that second count. I monitored an eight percent increase in the last week alone.

From Minty - You have worries, take them up with management.

From FJ - We both know that’s a great way to end up stuck in a cubicle. How long did you say this place had been operating? Half the controls are still in standby, but I’d feel a lot more secure if somepony could tell me what the ‘work’ is meant to accomplish.

From Minty - If I knew, I’d be paid better than I am. I don’t think even management knows. Keeping this place operating is a means to an end for them. Still, curiosity killed a whole heap of cats before the two of us got here. You want to be the next kitty to stick his nose in the woodchipper?

From FJ - No thanks, Minty. Bring some fresh tunes on your next shift. I can only listen to ‘The Best Of Zipper Tango’ so many times.

From Minty - Will do

Nightmare swallowed as she finished reading.

“I believe...I believe I have discovered something pertinent,” she mumbled.

“Pardon, Moonie, I didn’t catch that?” Bones replied, trotting to her side. He peered at the notes from the two caretakers for a moment, then sucked a breath into lungs that’d long since rotted to nothing. “Oh, yeah. Hey, Mister Tome? This says there’s some kind of ‘remote viewer’. Something somepony can take out of the Office would be my bet. I’ve got a note here that says it’s hooked up to the Scry.”

“A remote viewer?” Limerence asked, cocking his head, then tapped the console. “Ah! Yes. There was something here. See this indentation?” He gestured at a bowl-shaped protrusion on the panel. Peeling off the attached label, he held it up. It read, ‘breeding perquisition traversal receiver’.

As he touched the indentation, a spurt of neon green liquid spilled out of a hole in the bottom, then began bubbling, filling the hole right to the top and threatening to dribble onto the carpet.

“What is that?” Nightmare asked, recoiling from the glowing puddle.

Bones leaned over and seemed to sniff at the liquid, before carefully dipping a hoof in. Nightmare’s eyes bulged and she slapped his foreleg back, then looked all over her forelegs for possible drips.

“What if that had been acid, you fool?!” she barked, “We need your expertise to escape this place!”

The skeleton gave her a sideways glance. “Were you worried I was going to lose skin, Moonie? Maybe poison myself?” Chuckling to himself as Nightmare let out an irritated grumble, Bones wiped his toe off on the carpet. “I’ve seen it before. Princess Luna called us into her private lab in Canterlot Castle one night about...mercy, it’d be almost forty years ago, now. This was when we were just commandos, mind you, before the Crusaders were formally inducted.”

“Did she, perchance, tell you what it was?” Limerence asked.

“We weren’t there to talk about her freaky experiments, but Twist got curious,” Bones explained, leaning on the control panel as he waved a hoof over the glowing fluid. “Luna called it an ‘extra-dimensional adhered charm lattice in a viscous medium’, then went back to telling us the best way to climb through a dragon’s rectum to get to their heart. Pardon if I was a bit distracted by the conversation at the time. Still, I remember it. It was definitely this color.”

“A charm lattice,” Limerence said, almost to himself. He scratched the thin stubble on his chin for a moment, then his eyes widened. “Aha! Yes! Most fortuitous! This is what we came for!”

“I no longer possess a horn or the knowledge of a goddess,” Nightmare groused, pointing to her forehead. “What is this substance?”

“An adhered charm lattice is quite the advanced magical construct. It attaches a spell to something - most often a gemstone - and casts it continuously so long as it retains enough magic. The simplest example is, of course, mage lights. Hard Boiled’s heart is likely another. This, however…” The librarian shook his head with wonderment as he peered at the bowl of green fluid. “To attach a complete spell matrix to a liquid was thought quite impossible!”

“Trespassers who kidnap the local populace of other dimensions to complete their ‘work’ seem like they would obey few rules,” Nightmare muttered. “I assume this spell could be the one which tracks the ponies of Detrot?”

“I do not care for pure conjecture, but...yes. This ‘binder’ that is mentioned here may be useful.” Limerence ran his eyes over the console, then slid down onto one knee. His horn glowed for a moment, and a bright red file folder slid out of a crack between one panel and its neighbor. Laying it open, he lifted the first sheet which had the words ‘Dimensional Incursion Known Systems’.

“Useful though that may be, if our opponents have the remote viewer, how are we to disconnect it from this system?” Nightmare asked. “I do not believe any of us brought other weapons adequate to the task of causing damage in here and the Crusader will kill whoever uses it. I doubt the two of you can carry both Hard Boiled and Sweet Shine, should we fail to contravene the control field. Your physique leaves much to be desired, no matter how strong the skeleton is!”

Reaching over, Bones swatted Nightmare across the back of the head, sending Hard Boiled’s hat down over her eyes.

“What was that for?! I said nothing that was untrue!” she demanded, taking a couple of stumbling steps as she righted the hat.

“You’re not wrong, Nightmare. You’re just an ass,” the skeleton replied, “Now quit complaining and look around for this ‘convoyer’ thing. Maybe we won’t have to carry Sweet Shine. I can haul Hard Boiled if it comes to having you fire the Crusader in here.”

“Give me a few moments to study this while you attempt to find the ‘convoyer’ button,” Limerence interjected, his nose already buried in the manual. “We will reserve the Crusader as a ‘last resort’.”

“I do not wish to commit suicide! It sounds incredibly painful!”

“What I’ll do to you if you piss me off any worse will make that a perfectly cheery alternative. Either help me look or find a corner to sulk in.”

Nightmare wasn’t entirely sure how to glare at somepony in a way that said ‘I hope you get a fungus that eats bones’, but she gave it her best shot. Unfortunately, Bones had already turned his flank on her and was scanning another section of the console. Limerence hadn’t waited for their exchange to finish before heading off himself, his sword-staff floating around to sling itself across his back.

She took a step back and her hoof came down on something that squished wetly against her frog. Slowly, reluctantly, she picked her foot up and stared down at a bit of blue, bloodstained flesh flattened under her toe: the remnants of Limerence’s severed ear.

“Oh, that is it!” she hissed, furiously smearing her hoof clean on Hard Boiled’s trench coat before storming over to the exterior viewing window. Reaching up, she poked at the surface, finding it to have a slight give to it. Worse, it was slightly warm. She did her best to put that fact out of her mind.

Outside, she could see a half dozen of the ‘Overseer’ creatures, the giant spider entities wandering the cubicles like massive, demonic cranes. Other beasts would occasionally dart between them and she once caught sight of something swooping overhead. While some magic allowed the view through the window to partially pierce the fog, it wasn’t perfect and the distance was still obscured.

Nothing was normal. She had not experienced normal in her short life and yet Nightmare knew, in her heart of hearts, that what was happening to her was not how the universe was meant to be. Things had been so much easier before she’d had an actual, proper mind.

Sweeping her tail under herself, she sat down hard.

‘I should not even have a proper mind. I hope ripping me out of Hard Boiled’s nice, comfortable memory centers shall make him forget how to properly put on a tie one day,’ she thought bitterly, half hoping Gale would respond, if only to tell her to hush.

Peering out the window, she caught a bit of odd movement toward the distant edge of the fog. It looked like little more than some black shapes moving through the cubicle farm, but unlike the other beasts in the local ecosystem, they seemed to be very intently heading in the direction of the control room. As they got closer, the shapes gradually became those of six ponies in black body armor.

The overseer beasts were ignoring them.

“Ahem...A new problem has arisen,” Nightmare said, loud enough to be sure both stallions heard her.

“What sort of problem?” Limerence asked, not glancing up from the console he’d been examining.

“Six problems, actually,” she clarified. “They seem to be ponies in heavy military gear. The creatures outside are letting them pass unmolested.”

“Well, good news for us, then,” Bones chuckled, stepping back from his end of the panel. Reaching over, he snatched a knife off of Limerence’s vest and flipped it around so the blade sat between his teeth. “Shall I pop downstairs and greet them?”

“You can incapacitate six armed P.A.C.T. troopers?” Nightmare asked, then caught additional movement further back. “Pardon, twelve.”

“Ah...six, probably,” Bones replied, “Twelve might be a bit much. Bullet resistant is not bulletproof. Don’t need to walk around with a giant gaping hole in my head.”

Limerence’s lips drew into a thin line as he came to the window and watched the slow, steady progress of the troops coming for them.

“Tight formation, close enough to communicate. Standard deployment for a small squad in known territory,” Limerence muttered, “Probably a patrol that found the bodies we left back at their outpost. They must have convoyers on them. That means there’s a supply somewhere outside the Office.”

“Not real useful information, now, is it?” Bones added, “I suppose I can go down and take one off a corpse. Moonie, you feel like playing ‘bullet shield’?”

“Most assuredly not!” she snapped, irritably. “Death is an experience I intend to avoid!”

“Worth a shot,” Bones turned to the other stallion. “Mister Tome, you got anything that might help?”

“Yes and no.” Limerence replied, wiggling the binder in his levitation field. “Unfortunately, this is largely a collection of conjectures made by a series of translators all working with the same spells, spells they did not understand and were given to cast, sight unseen, for sums of money that border on the ludicrous. I suspect most of them were killed when their work was complete. That said, I think one of them hit upon something important.”

Turning the binder around, he flicked to a particular page and put a toe on a slip of paper tucked under a dog-eared corner:

‘From Flute Song - Translation finished on the series of sixty gold switches in quadrant six. Whatever you do - DO NOT TOUCH! - Unless you want to become a permanent resident.’

Nightmare lifted one eyebrow. “Golden switches? What good does this do us?”

Limerence pointed over her shoulder at the far wall at two rows of shining, golden toggles just above head height. “Reading from context and the translator’s notes, they may control the portal. If we can send the portal far enough from Equis, it should break the remote viewer’s connection to the Scry.”

“If this is a plan, I want to be clear that ‘should’ was usually the word that Scootaloo used to use right before she blew something up,” Bones said, after a moment’s consideration. “What do you want us to do?”

“Buy me time,” Limerence replied.

“One against twelve. I don’t fancy those odds. If I had a distraction, maybe—”

Rolling her eyes, Nightmare snatched the binder out of Limerence’s magic with her teeth and flopped it on the carpet.

“I swear, even when I am occupying one, stallions are stupid,” she sniffed, flipping to the back of the little collection of papers and stabbing a hoof down on the revealed page. “Somepony presents you with a manual and you do not even check for an index!”

Limerence’s ears lay back against his head. “It..I...well, I assumed since it was largely hoofwritten…”

“Look! Blue tab, section eight. Anti-control field procedures!” She nosed open the relevant section, eyed the diagram, then jabbed her leg at what seemed to be a tiny drawer nopony had noticed, positioned just below chest height next to the elevator. A blue button on the front had the words ‘dispense convoyer’ taped underneath in looping letters on a scrap of poster board.

“I hate to agree with the brain parasite, but I’m pretty sure if my grandson were here instead of riding shotgun, we’d still be hunting through controls,” Bones muttered, trotting to the wall and tapping the ‘dispense’ button. There was a sound like an egg cracking over a bowl of melted chocolate and a section of the wall separated on a rubbery hinge, before sliding free to reveal a tiny drawer with a rather sticky looking alcove behind it. “Oooh...yuck. Once again, I am glad I don’t have skin anymore.”

Reaching into the alcove, Bones lifted out a small, writhing blue object, holding it up for Nightmare and Limerence to get a good look at as it slid back and forth, probing at the edges of his hoof as though looking for flesh.

The ‘convoyer’ was an ugly little abomination that existed on a bizarre genus somewhere between squid and beetle. It had a hard shell the color of a clear morning sky beneath which two malevolent little eyes rolled back and forth. Eight tiny, wriggling tentacles spasmed and twitched underneath as it squirmed in circles on Bone’s hoof. Another, larger protrusion with a softly squeaking pair of uncannily equine lips on the end lashed back and forth on the creature’s back.

“May I have that?” Nightmare asked, holding out her hoof. “I would like to surrender this body as quickly as possible.”

Bones shrugged and held the tiny creature out, only to find his hoof wrapped in Limerence’s magical field.

“The convoyers are single use,” the librarian interjected, holding up the binder. “Once removed, they die within minutes. We won’t get another for at least two hours.”

“You’re kidding! You’re kidding, right?!” Nightmare snarled, bopping the ‘dispense’ button. There was a loud buzz that needed no translation and the door of the little compartment stayed tightly shut. “We have only moments before the troopers are here!”

“I...mmm…” Limerence cocked his head back, settling his glasses further up his nose. “I do believe I have the outlines of a plan.”

“Explain quickly,” Bones replied, glancing out the window. The troopers were still approaching, at a faster gait than they had been and with only half the caution.

“The binder says whosoever designed the Office made use of a base sixty numerical system, yes?” Limerence continued.

“Quicker!”

“Right! Sixty switches. Ancient Mesponytamians used a similar system for measuring time, angles, geographic coordinates in extreme precision.”

“You have ten words, Mister Librarian, then I punch you in the ribs once for each extra you want to buy.”

Limerence sighed and tossed the binder onto the control panel.

“Get Taxi through the portal. I will follow. Move. Now.”

“That’s ten! Come on, Moonie! We’re going to go kill ourselves some professionals!”

“I...I do not wish to kill ponies,” Nightmare mumbled, “—except Hard Boiled, but he is not an option.”

“Thankfully I won’t be relying on you to shoot anypony. Your part is idiot-proof. By which I mean, I need an idiot and you’re it.”

Act 3 Chapter 54 : A Moment In The Sun

"Magic has nothing on the power of physics. We might alter our world, but in the end, the governing energies which determine how space and time are ordered will always reassert themselves. Those energies involve numbers that are impossible for the equine mind to fathom. They are numbers that should inspire humility.

The speed of light.

The power of stars.

The energy of pulsars.

If ever somepony wished to fancy themselves a god, they would first have to command an understanding of numbers and equations that should fill mortal minds with visions of our own smallness."

- The Scholar

The Overseer knew Purpose.

If the Overseer had any emotions that could be understood by equine minds, it might have spared a moment’s consideration of the poor, pathetic lifeforms that scuttled around its mighty claws. Many of the lower beings that inhabited the Office had base desires, which served their Purpose, but no others knew what that Purpose was. They ate, they bred, they defecated, and they died in pursuit of the Purpose, but it was only the Overseers unto whom Purpose was fully illuminated.

Purpose was the reason. Purpose was the order of things. Purpose gave motion to the little cogs, filling the grand mechanism with power to accomplish the Work.

Very full of Purpose though it might have been, the Overseer was having quite the strange day. It’d witnessed several of the smaller quadrupeds from the current employee realm rushing about, seemingly without Purpose. Most of the employees from the quadrupeds’ realm were caught in the employment field and sent successfully to Work. A very odd quadruped who appeared to have reached the end of his useful employment period—then exceeded it by many, many cycles—was not. The Overseer sent up to Administration for a directive on what it should do about the skeletal creature and received no reply. Taking that as a sign that all was well, it returned to watching the few remaining gainfully employed beasts.

Within moments, there was another interruption.

One of the creatures was fighting the employment field.

That should have been impossible. Nothing in the risk assessment had indicated the quadrupeds had anything like the neural fortitude to defy the employment field. It was true, however, that the risk assessment had also failed to indicate that Administration would place the Work on extended standby for so many cycles that the Overseers were required to go into stasis, but there were reasons. The Overseer was just not given to know what they were.

The Overseer made its way to where the resistant employee sat and began drilling into its mind. It was far more resilient than any life form this particular Overseer had ever encountered, but almost assuredly there had been some other who was moreso. Administration did not feel the need to inform it to kill the creature, so it was still influenceable. Of course, Administration hadn’t felt the need to tell the Overseer anything for many, many cycles, but that was irrelevant. The Work continued.

Some time later, another Overseer expressed discomfort over the link.

The other Overseer was missing half of their body.

If they could have, the Overseers might have been disconcerted. No Overseer had ever heard of another Overseer losing half their body before. It sounded like something that would warrant investigation.

Within seconds of leaving, the Overseer felt the resistant creature succumb to the employment field. It was reported that the skeletal creature had been responsible for violence, real, genuine violence which should have been impossible. Two Overseers had even taken damage warranting disassembly and reconstitution. The answer to such a thing was unequivocal: the skeletal quadruped needed to be destroyed.

A Search was begun.

Soon, Overseers all across the sphere were reporting unusual behavior from the new employees. Moving on their own. Doing things besides working. It would have all been very disturbing, if the Overseers were possible to disturb.

It short order, the sphere had been searched from end to end. The skeletal creature was nowhere to be found. Perhaps worst of all, they were also short two of the new employees as well.

Still, Administration knew the Purpose and Work continued. If they saw fit to allow these creatures to destroy Overseers, then those Overseers must have been deficient in some way. It was all perfectly reasonable.

The link quickly concluded that the creatures must have slipped passed the search perimeter and exited the nexus once more. It was the only logical conclusion and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If Administration felt there was a need to go after them, they would send a retrieval envoy to dissect the beasts, discover whence their partial immunity to the employment field might come, and adjust it accordingly.

Things had settled once more and the new employee was working peaceably while the few older ones that remained continued their efforts. In the grand design, there were always hiccups from time to time, but they were impermanent. Anything worth doing required effort, after all, and nothing could change the ultimate outcome: the world of the quadrupeds would be used for the Purpose.

Unfortunately, the peace did not last very long.

Several quadrupeds wearing slightly worn out convoyers appeared through the nexus. The Overseer might not have made note, but that they all appeared to be heavily armed. Administration hadn’t mentioned anything about an alliance with the locals, though it wouldn’t have been the first time lower creatures were used to advance the Purpose. Moments later, one of the new employees burst from the elevator down from Control, shrieking at the top of its lungs. On its heels, the skeletal creature flew out, leaping nimbly across the tops of the employee containment cells while making almost no noise at all. Within seconds, it’d vanished into the nutrient fog, but the Overseer could still hear the two of them moving.

The Overseer watched impassively for a few seconds, then decided it’d had enough; it headed for the farthest corner of the sphere to let some other higher being deal with the situation.

Nightmare wanted to stop screaming, but it seemed to go hoof-in-hoof with the running.

Bones had said that if she wanted to live, she had to scream.

Her trench coat flagged behind her as her tail lashed at the air and her lungs ached like wildfire, but still she ran, heading between the aisles of cubicles towards the portal. She hoped, desperately, that she was still going in the right direction. The obscuring orange fog filled her lungs and despite the disgusting flavor, she could feel it filling her with strength.

The fear was like a living thing, nipping at her flanks as it kept her tortured muscles in motion.

It was something of a toss-up as to who was more surprised when Nightmare exploded out of the fog and ran muzzle first into one of the P.A.C.T. troopers. She only caught a flash of the trooper’s wide eyes through a pair of lightly tinted goggles before slamming headlong into the black-armored pony. The trooper let out a gasp as the air was knocked out of her and she was sent tumbling.

Nightmare stumbled, careered off one of the walls, but kept her hooves. Scrabbling for her trigger bit, she snatched it in her teeth and leveled her revolver at the trooper who was just then pulling herself up. The trooper paused, for a second, her machine gun barrel still pointed at the floor. Slowly, she took up slack on her own firing mechanism.

‘I...why can I not fire?’ Nightmare thought, her teeth clenched tight as she tried to will herself to pull back on her bit. ‘She is about to kill me! Why should killing somepony who is about to kill me be difficult? Oh, please don’t let me die—

A movement caught her eye and she took a step back as a flashing, skeletal shape suddenly leapt off the top of the cubicle, landing squarely on the trooper’s back and driving her face first into the carpet. Reaching down, Bones casually grabbed the trooper’s chin with one leg, then wrenched her head up while simultaneously shoving his free hoof into the back of her neck. There was a faint pop, then the trooper went limp.

“Get moving you silly git!” Bones barked inside her mind as he launched himself into the nearest cubicle, vaulting off the desk and up onto the wall. “Straight ahead, through the portal, and don’t stop to look back! You’ve got a clear run! Keep screaming!”

“Wh-what about Sweet Shine?” she stammered.

“She’s five rows over! I’ll get her! Now move!”

Swinging around, Nightmare bolted down the aisle, her fear giving her wings as she flew by a strange, towering tripod creature with an uncountable number of dripping mouths that only gave her the briefest of glances before returning to stacking piles of paper.

It was a full twenty seconds before she remembered to scream.

‘Mercy, I hope that dimwit doesn’t get my grandson killed,’ Bones thought as he watched Nightmare Moon flee into the fog. The bloody smears on the bottoms of his hooves were making it somewhat difficult to keep his balance on top of the cubicles, but it wasn’t more than a mild concern. By his count, he’d managed to bring down six troopers as they tried to close ranks to find the source of the screaming. Two had been heading toward the control room and four were chasing Nightmare. If they were following standard distribution, there would be four more chasing Nightmare, while two more headed for the elevator.

For a moment, he thought he’d miscounted the cubicles, but then he caught a flicker of yellow in the orange fog. Changing directions, Bones bounced off the wall of the tiny cell he’d been running along and hopped down amongst the aisles with a thump that wouldn’t have disturbed a sleeping dormouse. A curious P.A.C.T. trooper was standing in front of one of the cubes, peering inside at something unseen.

The stallion didn’t have time to be feel himself die as Bones drove a borrowed combat knife into the base of his skull, leaving it buried there as the skeleton quickly snatched the standard issue P.A.C.T. blade off the dead pony’s belt and slotted it between his teeth. It was as quick and efficient a kill as he might have wished for, but then, the fog was an almost ideal condition for silent wet work.

Not that Bones was enjoying himself. He’d never much cared for killing ponies. Dragons were easy. He’d killed plenty of dragons. Ponies always involved a bit of guilt on some lonely night when the whiskey bottle was empty and the bartender was giving you nasty looks.

Stepping into the cubicle, Bones found Taxi sitting where they’d left her, bent forward over a stack of papers, her eyes darting down the page at a speed that should have made it impossible to actually read any of what was being laid down. The blood had stopped dripping from her nose, but she still looked physically exhausted. Her shoulders shook with each fresh sheet of paper she snatched up.

“Alright girly. I’d apologize for this, but I think you’ll thank me once we’re not in this wretched place any more.”

Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved the squirming convoyer, giving the vile little monstrosity a sidelong glance before carefully dumping it onto Taxi’s shoulder. It left a thin trail of slime in her fur as it wandered about for a few seconds with several tentacles raised as though testing the air. Suddenly, it spun in a quick circle, zipping underneath her mane like a frightened beetle and vanishing.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

It was the sort of moment where a pony has all the time in the world to start planning for how they’re going to explain to their grandson exactly how they managed to botch the rescue attempt and had to leave his best friend in another universe.

Bones had just finished rehearsing a long soliloquy about the inevitability of death and how Taxi was most likely in a better place, when she jerked in her seat. Her eyes unfocused and she drew in a loud, sharp breath. Bones just barely managed to slap his hoof over her mouth before she scream that’d been bubbling up could get loose.

Almost immediately, she began to struggle. Her toe smacked what would have been his carotid artery, followed by a jugular strike and a solid poke in the sternum over a pressure point that would have killed him deader than a doornail if he’d still had the anatomy to lose. Swinging the chair around, he shoved her against the wall of the cubicle.

Unfortunately, an animated skeleton inches from her face with a knife clenched between its teeth was not a recipe for calm. Taxi gasped for air as she fought against his iron grip. Grabbing his foreleg, she tried to wrench the joint.

“You’re free, girl! Knock it off!”

Taxi froze, the frothing fury she’d been working herself up to cooling faster than if she’d been hit in the face with a bucket of water.

“B-Bones?” she stammered, her shoulders going limp. “W-work?”

“Do you know anybody else this pretty? Are you back with me?”

Tears started to gather in the corners of her eyes as she sagged in his forelegs. “No more work? I...I don’t know. Oh Celestia, is this...is this real?”

“It’s real enough,” he replied, glancing back at where the office chair had fallen. The chair’s legs were writhing at the air as though trying to get purchase on the carpet to drag itself back beneath the desk. “We’re in danger. Can you fight?”

Taxi’s breathing hitched as she glanced around the cubicle, then waved at the orange fog.

“Where are we?” she asked, as her eyes centered on the living chair. She quickly stepped back against the wall, then squeaked and spun to put a hoof on the strangely spongy surface.

“This is the Office.”

“The...The Office? Why is that chair...um...why is that chair alive?” she asked dumbly.

A gunshot echoed somewhere far off and Bones jumped against the wall, peering out into the fog. There was a return shot a moment later, but the mist distorted the sound so it was impossible to get a heading.

“There are a lot of questions you will not want answers to,” he said, “All that matters is that Hard Boiled is drawing the enemy away from us. Now, can you fight?”

Taxi’s face filled with relief at the mention of her best friend’s name, then quickly hardened into an iron mask. “Somepony is trying to hurt Hardy?”

“When is somepony not? It’s P.A.C.T. troopers. I figure about six of them, plus however many are outside the portal.”

Raising her hoof, Taxi pushed her mane back, revealing the convoyer sitting on the side of her neck like an especially ugly tumor. “Should I ask what this is?”

“No, but it’s why you’re not still working, so don’t pick at it.”

Shrugging her shoulders a few times, Taxi began working the kinks out of her back with a sound like molten metal flexing. With a soft groan, she shook her tail out and glanced back at her scarred flanks. “My saddlebags...I had all our extra ammunition,” she said, a little mournfully.

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” he said. “Considering what you did to those fools in the bunker, I don’t think you need a gun as it is.”

“I don’t remember that,” she muttered, wiping at the semi-dried blood that still soaked her forelegs. “How many did I kill?”

“I lost count. Enough that I’m glad I wasn’t between you and whatever pissed you off so bad.”

Sighing, she stepped out of the cubicle, peering left, then right before looking down at the dead trooper sprawled against the wall, the knife still protruding from his skull.

“This is yours?”

“Yep. Terrible waste of talent. That medal on his shoulder means this poor schmuck took down an ice wyrm. I had a couple of those myself, back in the day.”

Pushing the trooper’s balaclava off of his face, Taxi looked down into his wide open eyes. They were bright blue. Carefully shutting his eyelids, one then the other, she braced braced a hoof on the back of his neck. Leaning down, she bit the handle of the blade and wrenched it out of his head.

Quickly wiping a chunk brain matter on his combat barding, she then rolled him onto his back. He had a couple of flashbangs in his front pockets along with a picture of a pretty filly in her middle teens and a granola bar. She took the granola and one of the spare explosives, then tucked the picture away.

“Alright. I’m ready. Where is Hardy?”

Nightmare’s hip ached as she limped toward the portal.

It hadn’t been an especially clean shot, but one lucky bullet had winged her before that strange tripod monster that looked uncomfortably like a tower made of mouths had laid itself down across the path between her and her pursuers, cutting off the chase for a moment. Hiding was no longer an option; the trail of blood was bright as a neon sign following her hoofsteps.

Close. It was close. She knew it was close.

Her head was swimming and she wanted nothing more than to lie down, to rest, to try to patch the bloody hole in her leg, but she knew if she fell the troopers would be upon her in seconds.

‘Ghost, are you there?’ she thought, weakly.

‘I’m here, Nightmare. I’m trying to stop the bleeding, but I don’t have enough magic to close the hole.’

‘Please...can you talk to me? I don’t want to be alone.’

Misjudging a step, Nightmare staggered, barely catching herself on the wall as she went down to one knee. The sharp pain made her hiss between clenched teeth. It hurt, but it was enough to keep her moving.

‘I...I can talk for a little while,’ Gale whispered. ‘If it will keep you walking.’

‘What will happen to me when Hard Boiled is back in control?’ she asked.

The reply took a few seconds longer than she’d have liked.

‘I don’t know…’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I didn’t really have time to figure out how you work. I just made all the...the everything...go through the part of Hardy’s brain where I knew you were. It was an emergency and I used most of my remaining magic just making it work. I still only have about a quarter charge.’

‘Oh.’ She hesitated for a minute, resting her forehead against the edge of a cubicle wall. Her back ached and her hip felt like an especially vengeful colony of wasps had taken up residence just above her cutie-mark. ‘Do...do you remember what it’s like to die?’

Gale’s inner voice sounded a little nervous, and a bit sad. ‘Keep moving. I...look, I just want to get out of here. I’ll tell you if you really want to know.’

Nightmare pulled her trench coat across her breast and began limping toward the unknown once more. ‘I think I am soon to die. I would like to know.’

She had the sense, for a moment, that something was gathering strength inside her before Gale spoke again.

‘That first time, back when I was little, I died in my sleep,’ he said.

‘You...you don’t remember it at all?’

Gale paused, then the trickle of sadness she’d felt became a flood, rushing up inside her. It was, just as quickly, tamped down but left a lingering melancholy.

‘I remember,’ he replied, his voice subdued. ‘It was a Thursday morning and my mom and dad were shouting downstairs. My brother, Jingle Jangle, was sitting on the end of my bed. I took his hoof and he smiled at me and said, “Cosmo, you have to get better. Get better, so we can climb that tree in the backyard.” I remember, I smiled back at him and thought I was going to have a nap. After that? A deeper darkness than any I’d ever felt before. Peaceful, empty...and very quiet.’

‘It ended, though, right?’

‘Sometimes I wonder. This all could just be a dream and in a couple seconds I’ll really be dead...and that’ll be it.’

‘If...if you don’t know, why do you keep going?!’

Nightmare felt her shoulders shrug.

‘Hard Boiled deserves to live, but if you offered him a death where he knew everypony else would live, he’d throw himself into fire again without hesitation. That’s his nature. If I keep going, he can keep going. Besides, how could a pony be bored with a friend like him?’

Taking a few more stumbling steps, Nightmare caught a distant flicker of light. It was just a glimmer through the fog, but after a moment she caught another flash and tried to pick up speed. Her hooves felt like lead weights on the bottoms of her legs.

‘Ghost?’ she thought.

‘I’m trying to make you stop bleeding. Just keep running.’

“I do not think I can,” she murmured.

Her front knees buckled as dizziness rolled in. Grey spots danced in front of her eyes as she slid onto her chest. Raising her head a little, she saw through the fog a glittering, golden wall of light hanging in the air between two cubicles.

‘I’m sorry, ghost…’

‘Me too.’

Just as her vision started to fade, something hard as iron suddenly shoved against her side, pushing underneath her. She yelped as she was hauled, bodily to her hooves. A sweaty, bloodsoaked mane of black and white hair was shoved into her face.

“Hardy? Hardy, can you hear me?” Taxi demanded.

“I...I hear,” Nightmare replied, coughing as she felt herself lifted off the carpet and shifted atop a pair of muscular shoulders.

“Oh thank Celestia! Just hang on. We’re getting you out of here.”

“M-my...my leg…”

“You sure you can carry him?” another voice asked which seemed to come from her own mind.

“I can carry him just fine! Don’t worry about me. What’s wrong with his leg?”

Nightmare felt a hoof on her wounded thigh and couldn’t repress a whimper as spikes of pain shot through her bleeding flank.

Bones shook his head and stepped back. “Somepony took a chunk out of him with...eh, looks like a shotgun. Must have caught the edge of the blast or he’d already be dead. He’s got brass in his thigh, though. I’m pretty sure it nicked an artery if that river of blood back the way we came is any indication. Might go any minute.”

“T-troopers?” Nightmare asked, softly.

The skeleton’s glowing eyes flicked back toward the control room. “Mister Tome has a couple heading toward him we weren’t able to bring down, but he told us to get out quick as we can. That colt has the stink of ‘mad scientist’ about him, so I’m real inclined to listen. Shall we make our escape?”

Taxi hefted Nightmare a little closer to her shoulders and trotted the last twenty meters to their exit. As she slowed to a stop in front of the glowing field, Nightmare unsteadily lifted her head. Her breathing stopped as she stared up at the mighty, magical nexus.

It seemed almost like a simple sheet of glass, though it only reflected Taxi, Nightmare, and Bones. Everything behind them was a flickering, golden nothingness. Through the portal, they could just see vague outlines of a darkened vault with the huge metal door.

“No time like the present. Hardy, you’ll be fine. We’ll get you to a power socket and you’ll be fine,” Taxi muttered, then reached up and pushed a hoof against the portal. For an instant, it seemed like it was solid, but then it began to give like a thick pudding. After a moment, her leg sank in up to the knee. She gasped, and was pulled through.

As Nightmare’s face touched the icy cold surface of the magical doorway, she felt herself grow faint.

Her eyelids slid shut and she exhaled one final breath.

“After all that crap you die of blood loss?”

Nightmare exhaled and sat up, blinking as she came face to bleary-eyed face with a distinctly irritated detective. She was an alicorn once more, but didn’t really feel it. Her magnificent black wings were rumpled and her fiery mane spilled out behind her in a flowing wave of darkness that looked like an overflowed sewer. Worst, perhaps, was that she felt like she’d just eaten several buckets of hay-fries too many.

“Hard...Hard Boiled?” she asked, then put a hoof to her throat. “I am...myself, again?”

“Yep. You somehow sneak through all those monsters and face Zefu Tome, and it’s a lucky bullet in the ass that puts you down,” I grumbled, pulling myself up off the empty space in front of her and gesturing at the now darkened hole in the air.

“I died? We are dead?”

“I’m guessing,” I replied. “Gale went walkabout just after you got me shot, so I’m guessing he’s working on fixing that.”

“Oh...I suppose when you awake, I will no longer...no longer be in control,” she murmured.

I shook my head. “I sure as Tartarus hope so. Otherwise, you’re going to have a real uncomfortable day explaining why you’re still in charge. Pretty sure my grandfather and driver will take turns torturing you. Limerence will probably have a spell or some-such that recreates the feeling of being turned inside out over and over again.”

Her ears slowly laid back against her head as she worked her wobbly, overlong legs underneath herself and stood.

“I have decided I do not wish to cease to exist entirely!” she declared.

That took me aback for a second. “What makes you think you would?”

She squinted, then narrowed her slitted, blue eyes at me. “Is that not...your intent? You do not wish to stuff me back into the distant corners of your mind?”

“Oh, I am stuffing you back into the distant corners of my mind,” I said, trotting over and poking her in the sternum with one hoof. “Make no mistake, you’re not keeping my body. But—”

Her ears stood up and she glanced around at the dark pocket of space. “Am I to be your prisoner, then? A trapped consciousness, stuck in this...this monstrous emptiness?!”

“No,” I replied.

“What, then?!” she pleaded, putting her hooves on my shoulders, “Please, tell me! I do not like being frightened and I have been frightened since I awoke in that cubicle!”

I considered the question for a long moment. Gale, much as I might like him, was probably intent on sending her back to whatever dark pit she’d come from. He had a bit of his brother’s ruthlessness in him.

“You and I are going make a deal,” I said, stepping back and holding out my leg. “You get your old job back: keep me alive.”

“And...somehow this means I am not trapped here?” she asked, folding her immense wings against her hips.

“You want to get paid, that’s the job.”

“P-paid?”

I grinned and lifted her hoof with my own. “Like I said...we’re making a deal.”

Limerence craved a cup of tea and a biscuit. Simple green tea would have been plenty. A stale pastry with a bit of jam might have satisfied him.

That there was a universe where the evils that’d built its fundament never considered the possibility that a pony might want to sit back with a good book and a cuppa was feeding his already distemperate state of mind.

He stood over the Office’s control panel, feverishly working his horn over the pages of the translated manual. An errant sense of unusual loneliness was digging at the back of his mind, the awareness that if he were to die, nopony might ever recover his body. For some reason, that was a bother.

“What do you think, brother?” he murmured, pulling his sword open an inch so he could see the stricken face in its surface. “If I die here, mightn’t some other fool eventually pick you up? I suppose on a long enough time frame, that’s possible.”

Zefu, of course, had nothing to say on the topic.

Pulling a little more raw magic from the reserves inside his sword, Limerence returned his attention to the red binder. The lackadaisical organizational system the translators had used didn’t much help the process, but Limerence had assembled and pulled meaning from documents which existed before the birth of every modern writing system; it was a task he’d have relished were he not on a schedule.

“Dimensional throughput. Interesting,” he said to himself, then sheepishly realized he’d spoken aloud. Of course, with nopony there to hear him, he set the embarrassment aside and continued, “The portal can only transport in one direction at a time. An ordered gravitational lensing system that somehow keeps matter ordered in transit...would...require positive acceleration out of the portal’s event horizon! Excellent! That suggests two portals, then! Considering this parasitic dimension likes to move about...it would make sense to tether one within this world, while the other...hrm.”

Setting down the folder, he put his hooves up on the console and squinted at the golden switches.

“Two sets of identical controls,” he whispered. “That...hrm. Does that mean that both ends of the portal can move? Sensible, if you want to move forces about quickly on a foreign planet. Oh, would that we had time to master this technology!”

Tapping his chin, he leaned sideways to peer at an odd little dial labeled ‘Entry/exit translocation set motion weight in ‘m’ to ‘e’???’ then paged through the instructions to the appropriate page. There was a loose sheet of paper folded into the section. Limerence quickly opened it and read:

From Lollipop - Are we accepting this translation? It’s a little wonky.

From Waltz - Based on context, it seems to allow the nexus to move about after a certain amount of mass has passed through. Translator Moist said the panel has a queue, too, so they could set a series of instructions to execute one after another. Probably a good mechanism for snatching materials off dimensions they don’t intend to spend much time on. Don’t mess with it.

From Lollipop - Has anypony tried changing the locations of either of the portals? I’d love to visit my kids this weekend up in Cloudsdale. If it’s that easy to move back and forth, I could just set it to pop back after something my size hopped through. It might be a worthwhile experiment, you know?

From Waltz - The bosses will feed you to one of those garbage cans in a hot second if you do. You know the rules. We don’t touch what we’re not paid to touch. This place isn’t big on safety mechanisms and I know you, Lollipop. If I find out you screwed with anything, the higher ups will hear about it.

From Lollipop - Loud and clear.

As he finished reading the note, Limerence felt a feral grin spreading across his face.

Through the window overlooking the cubicle farm, he could just make out a pair of troopers headed in his direction.

Even better.

Taxi felt like she was shoving her way through a wall made of overcooked spaghetti. Every inch gained was against a slippery, greasy surface that tore at her hooves and licked at her pelt. She’d have gagged, if the thought of filling her muzzle with the vile substance wasn’t so awful. Her nose was burned, though there seemed to be no scent associated with the golden field of energy.

Then, like a child out of the womb, she felt herself suddenly break free and was all but tossed out of the portal with a wet squelch. Stumbling, she caught herself and swung her head around to grab the edge of Hardy’s coat so he didn’t slide off her back. Her body felt like she’d just bathed in a puddle of slightly warm snail slime.

“Don’t m-move!”

The sound of a gun-bolt ratcheting back brought Taxi to attention.

Standing in front of the vault door was a group of three P.A.C.T. troopers, their guns leveled and their goggles pulled up onto their foreheads. From their heights and builds, two seemed to be mares, while the center one was a slightly short stallion, all rendered almost completely anonymous by their black armor.

“Put him down and put your hooves in the a-air!” the stallion demanded, though with a strange quiver in his voice.

‘He needs orders,’ Taxi’s talent whispered.

A second later, there was another loud splash and Bones slid out of the portal, deftly catching himself. Yanking his coat straight, the skeleton gave his ribcage a shake.

“That’s still disgusting as ever,” he muttered.

“Freeze, creature! I swear, we will gun you down!” the trooper shouted, his shotgun barrel jumping back and forth between Taxi and Bones as he took a nervous step back.

“What’s the call?” Bones asked, tilting his head toward his companion.

Taxi shook her head. “Can you cover ten meters fast enough to kill three ponies before one of them shoots both of us?”

“Don’t think so. I’ve done seven meters, but that was one pony and he didn’t have a shotgun.”

The trooper’s eyes were round with fear as he pulled his trigger bit warningly. “Shut up! Drop that stallion and get down on your knees!”

Cautiously, Taxi let her back legs relax and slowly slid Hardy onto the ever-growing carpet that blanketed the area around the portal.

“You smell something wrong, here?” Bones whispered, settling on his rump and raising his forelegs.

Taxi gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Get down on your stomach!” the trooper snarled.

One of the mares beside him leaned over and whispered, “Goldenrod, where’s the rest of the team? Don’t tell me these three killed—”

“Shut up, Harp! Orders were to capture Hard Boiled! That’s him, there! Get downstairs and r-radio for backup!”

As the trooper named Harp turned toward the vault door, there was another unpleasant squishy noise from the glowing, yellow portal. Taxi held her breath for a moment, wondering what might be coming through. If it was more troopers, they were well and truly screwed.

After a moment, the portal began to bow outward and a bloody, baby blue muzzle poked through, followed an instant later by a disgruntled librarian. Limerence leapt onto the carpet and braced himself. He quickly surveyed the situation, then looked back over his shoulder at the magical doorway.

The slick, golden surface flickered, then a flash of light lit the room like a lightning strike. The temperature suddenly jumped fifteen degrees and a powerful scent of burning fur leaked into the air.

“Move! Everypony out! We’ve got to shut that door! Anyone in here is going to cook in less than a minute!” Limerence shouted, then started toward the troopers.

The troopers all raised their guns.

“Stop! Don’t move!” Goldenrod demanded

“Fifty seconds!” Limerence growled.

“Maybe we should listen—” Harp started to say, but the male trooper cut her off.

“No, d-dammit! We’ve got them! Now—”

“We do not have time for this!” the Archivist barked. He swept his staff off his back, pulling the scabbard free. The serrated blade let off a flicker of distorted energy as he turned it to face the troopers.

“My name is Limerence Tome!” he declared, his horn blazing like a raging inferno. “I am the last scholar of the Archive! My friends and I are all that stands between equinity and omnicide! I have a necromancer in my sword and I have just destroyed a dark dimension with science! Get out of our way, or no one will ever find your bodies!”

Act 3 Chapter 55 : Ride Home, Gentle Son

"Any plan of sufficient complexity becomes mired in its own genius and is therefore susceptible to anyone with a bit of common sense, a hint of insanity, and a sturdy hammer."

- The Crusader's Motto #6 of 68.

It wasn’t exactly the response anypony had expected and it was hard to say who was more surprised.

Seconds after Limerence’s declaration, Goldenrod was hunched against the left wall just outside the vault, his goggles askew, while his two female companions huddled against the right, their trigger bits dangling around their knees. Limerence stood there blinking owlishly at the three heavily armed troopers as they seemingly cowered under his gaze. His sword was still levitating at the ready, but he cautiously lowered it as Taxi got back to her hooves and Bones dusted off his jacket.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Bones commented.

An especially powerful flash of energy from the portal sent alarming groans and creaks through the heavily reinforced superstructure, reminding everypony that death was imminent.

It was enough to bring the librarian out of his daze. He swung back to the vault door, lighting his horn as he shouted, “Help me! We have to shut this!”

“Why are we not just running?!’ Bones growled.

“We must close the door! It’s thaumatically stabilized steel! We have to keep the energy leak inside or it’ll melt the elevator while we’re in it!” Limerence snapped.

Taxi quickly checked Hardy, finding him still not breathing. Hefting his body, she limped to the door and quickly deposited him outside, before turning to the vault and throwing herself against the metal. It didn’t budge, though the carpet-covered vase blocking it open rattled a few inches. After a few seconds, Bones joined her as Limerence wove his burning horn back and forth in the air, forming a cylindrical ram of solidified shining light. Gritting his teeth, the archivist drew his head back, then slammed it forward, driving the floating ram against the edge of the door which shreaked on ancient hinges.

“Heave!” Bones shouted.

At the edges of the door, the carpet was quickly blackening from the fiery heat. The smell of burning fur and scorching flesh from the vault was quickly being replaced by the scent of molten glass and plastic. Great, black billows of smoke poured out, darkening the ceiling and leaving their lungs burning.

“Heave!”

Taxi felt something move beside her and glanced back to find Goldenrod, his goggles askew, bracing his muscular shoulder against the door. Lute and the other mare whose name she hadn’t got were next to him, their bodies dripping as they threw themselves against the implacable vault. She was so surprised she almost failed to heed the next command from Bones.

“Heave!”

As one, they hit the door with their combined strength. The hinge yowled, then began to slide, picking up speed as weights in the walls pulled it shut with a bone-shaking clatter. Limerence stumbled slightly, but caught himself as his horn blinked out, though the tip still glowed with excess heat. Reaching up, Bones wrenched the giant locking wheel in the middle of the door, spinning it shut as the bolts around the outside edges snapped into place, sealing the portal room.

“Can we run now?” Taxi asked, breathlessly.

Limerence took a deep breath and collapsed against the wall, his sides heaving as he tried to gather his wits.

“If my math was wrong...ah...whoo...If my math was wrong, then there is not really a minimum safe distance,” he replied. “Brace for a silence.”

“Silen-?” Goldenrod started to ask, but he was cut off as Limerence’s horn sparked and the air around them flashed, leaving the trooper’s muzzle opening and closing a bit like a stunned goldfish.

In the eerie quiet that followed, Limerence gestured for everypony to move back from the vault door. Taxi grabbed Hardy’s scruff in her teeth and dragged him a few meters away, crawling atop his body and hunkering down. Bones settled himself between her and the vault.

The floor shook as the vault door suddenly turned a dull red and the already sweaty air became stifling. Taxi tried to breathe, but the foul smoke stuck to her lungs like taffy and she found herself retching into Hardy’s mane. Her head swam and she watched out of one squinted eye as Limerence fell to one knee, silently coughing into his fetlock as he tried desperately to cast another spell.

All at once, ice-cold rain splashed down on all of everypony’s backs and a thick burst of steam filled the hallway as the building’s sprinklers, long unused, finally decided they’d seen enough.

Limerence let his silence fall and collapsed onto his side, his sword-tip burying itself in the carpet as his magic gave out. Swaying aftershocks rattled through the floor and walls, followed by an alarming braying from the support structures, but the wartime fortifications held. After a moment, there was only the sound of panting, the running sprinklers, and the gentle hiss of water hitting the superheated door before turning instantly to steam.

Pulling herself onto her front knees, Taxi glanced back at Goldenrod, who was standing in front of the door looking at them with a slightly blank expression on his face. The female troopers stood beside him, their heads low and eyes glazed.

“Why did you help us?” she asked, swiping her damp mane out of her face.

Goldenrod’s head came up, slowly. “He-he told us to.”

Bones raised his head, water dripping from his glowing eyesockets. The trooper blinked at the undead pony and backed up a step.

“Aten-hutt!” Bones growled.

All three troopers snapped to attention so fast they might as well have been yanked up by their ears and tails.

“Stand up straight. Hold still. Let’s hear a ‘Sir, yes, sir!”

“Sir, yes, sir!” all three shouted at the tops of their lungs.

Taxi squinted at the troopers as she carefully climbed off of Hardy’s body. A thin stream of filth was washing off each of her hooves as she stood, cautiously approaching Goldenrod and his two companions. Reaching up, she waved a hoof in front of his nose. His eyes followed her leg, but he didn’t move to stop her.

“Huh...Alright, take your masks off,” Taxi ordered. The P.A.C.T. ponies scrambled to strip their balaclavas off and toss their thick goggles at her hooves.

Goldenrod was a silvery teal stallion with scars criss-crossing his nose and a chopped short mane. He might as well have been printed from the P.A.C.T. recruitment guide. He was a bit young, but his companions were barely out of their teens. Lute was a swarthy mare, her shoulder-length braid tucked into a golden bangle that suggested a zebra ancestry. The last of their group was a thin red mare with ropes of ugly, thick muscle standing out from her neck that suggested near emaciation while still projecting a lanky strength.

“What are you thinking?” Limerence asked, glancing at Taxi.

“Not sure yet,” she replied, then turned back to the soldiers. “Alright everypony! Give me your biggest smiles! I want to see those chompers!”

Without hesitation, Goldenrod and his squadmates cracked ridiculously outsized grins. All three were sporting muzzles full of dangerous, half-inch-long meat-ripping teeth.

Limerence’s eyes lit up. “Aha! That is most interesting.”

“Interesting isn’t the word I’d use.” Taxi exhaled, then looked back at the warped vault door and wiped sweat from her forehead. “Phew. Why is it so hot in here? And what did you do to the Office?”

“The heat is a side effect, but...I...shall explain when Hard Boiled is back amongst the living. Needless to say, if the Scry has survived, we were unlikely to be able to destroy it anyway. Meanwhile...these three present a unique opportunity!”

“Opp-opportunity?” Goldenrod stammered, his ears pinned back.

“Yes! Now, then...Sit!” Limerence commanded.

All three troopers’ flanks hit the carpet.

The librarian’s smile grew a little wider as he picked up his sword in his levitation field and quickly sheathed it. “Roll over and bark like a dog!”

With a clank of weapons and armor, the troopers flopped onto their backs on the wet carpet and let out a few half-hearted yips.

“Sweet Celestia, Lim,” Taxi muttered, glancing up as the sprinklers finally gave out, leaving the floor sloshing underhoof. “You could have just told them to wiggle their ears.”

“This is a more useful data point, I think,” he replied, then frowned as he plucked his watch out of his pocket. Turning it over, he removed the back and studied the glowing interior for a moment before letting out a sigh of relief. “Thank Celestia. The mind control field is gone. I had less than ten minutes left before returning to-” He shuddered and shut his eyes. “-work.”

“Speaking of short time, how long were we in there?” Bones asked, gesturing at the watch.

“I don’t know, nor shall I for some while.” Limerence sighed and pocketed his watch. “The mental fail-safe magic disrupts all the other spellwork in the Archivists’ timepieces and the pony who can repair them is most likely dead or in hiding. Needless to say, I believe we should move quickly. Miss Swift is not known for patience or rationality when left to her own devices.”

Taxi reached up into her mane and rooted around for a second. “No problem there. I’ve got a...oh…” Lowering her hoof, she stared at a tiny insectoid body lying on it. The ladybug was curled up on its back, legs in the air, distinctly dead.

Bones plucked his ladybug from his sports jacket pocket. It was also unmoving. “Damn. I hate hopping dimensions. Something like that always happens. Poor little guy.”

Flicking a hoof under his lapel, Limerence pulled his own ladybug out, then shut his eyes and tucked the small corpse back in his vest. “We will remember their sacrifice, but for now, we need to get out of the Office.”

“Do we have some way of figuring out if we disabled the Scry?” Taxi asked.

“Unless you wish to reopen that vault, I cannot think how. However, if the Scry survived my attack, then...as I said, we could not have destroyed it.”

Taking a step closer, Taxi shoved her nose into the librarian’s face. “You get as much of a grace period as it takes us to get back to the Dragon Flagon Wagon before you’re going to lay out for me precisely what you meant by the words ‘no safe minimum distance’ when you were telling us to close that door.”

“Ahem...Understood.” Limerence flicked an ear at the three P.A.C.T. troopers who were still lying on the carpet. “What are we to do with them? Their minds are obviously not their own, though I find it interesting that the control spells seem to have no safeties to prevent conflicting instructions.”

Taxi swung her loose mane out of the way and nudged the convoyer still gamely attached to the side of her neck. “Get up. Are you three wearing one of these?” she asked.

The female whose name they hadn’t heard got to her hooves and tugged down the edge of her armor, revealing another of the tiny creatures on her throat.

“Do they interfere with your conditioning?” Limerence inquired.

“C-conditioning?” Goldenrod asked as he stood. “What conditioning?”

Taxi wrung a bit of re-wetted blood out of her mane and asked, “Why do you obey our orders?”

“B-because you gave them?” Lute replied, as though that explained everything.

Limerence, Taxi, and Bones exchanged a meaningful look.

“Right. We’ve got three puppets hunting strings here and I don’t feel like conducting an interrogation standing in this hallway,” Bones grumbled. “If we succeeded, then there will be reinforcements coming to figure out why their trump card has suddenly stopped working.”

“Shall we take them with us, then?” Limerence asked. “It would be useful to know if the spell that forces their obedience can be broken.”

“There’s some simple math there, Lim. They have guns. We don’t. I don’t feel like killing any more helpless ponies and it’d be nice to have some extra eyes watching our backs,” Taxi replied, clapping her hooves as she returned her attention to the troopers. “What are your names?”

“Private Goldenrod.”

“Private Lute Palomino.”

“Private Tank Tread.”

Nodding to herself, Taxi waved a leg at Goldenrod’s shotgun. “What were your previous orders?”

“You...you mean the ones before you told us to get up or before you told us roll over and bark like a dog?” he asked, quizzically.

“Yes, before that,” she grumbled.

Goldenrod straightened until she was worried he might tip over if he raised his muzzle any higher. “We have no prior orders, Ma’am! Our first orders were to roll over and bark like a dog, then to get up!”

It took Taxi a moment to work through that statement, then her ears drooped. “You don’t remember any orders before that? Do you remember helping us shut that door?”

A slightly perplexed look crossed the stallion’s face and his eyes darted to his companions for a moment, but they both looked equally puzzled. “No Ma’am! No prior orders. We...I...I don’t know how I got here...”

Bones clacked his teeth together and let out an airy whistle. “Oooh, boy, now that’s a kick in the head. You sure you want this lot watching our flanks, missy?”

“Honestly? Even moreso. If they’re too cooked to remember why they were sent here, they’re too cooked to shoot us in the back.” Trotting over, Taxi carefully lifted Hardy. After a second, she felt the tingle of a magic field and felt Limerence applying his horn to helping her balance her friend’s limp weight. “Can you charge his heart, Lim?”

“Not enough to make a difference in his condition,” Limerence muttered, slinging his sheathed sword back across his shoulders.

“Then we’re going. You three? Your orders are to keep us safe.”

‘He needs me.’

It was the only thought keeping Taxi going as she staggered past the burned remains of P.A.C.T. troopers piled up beside one another like so much kindling. She recognized the fighting style that’d brought them down as her own, but only flashes of the actual kills existed in the distant corners of her mind. Much as she felt she ought to be disturbed, she was mostly just tired.

‘I swear, he’s doing it on purpose,’ she mused, to herself, heaving the body up on her back a bit higher. ‘He gets to spend the ends of these little adventures dead, and I end up hauling his flank around like a sack of turnips. I hate to think what he’d have been like as a foal if ‘death, then a nap’ had been an option. I’d have never got him out of the house.’

She glanced over at Limerence who was trotting along, head down, seemingly lost in thought. His lips were moving, as though he were whispering to somepony, but she couldn’t hear any specific words coming out of his mouth. Tapping her talent for as short a time as she could to get a sense of him, she blanched at the list of unfulfilled needs it spat back at her; he was barely into his twenties and ‘straitjacket’ was uncomfortably close to the top.

Turning to Bones, she touched him with her thoughts, again briefly as she could. He only needed cigarettes, a stiff drink, and a kindhearted mare who didn’t mind a bit of necrophilia.

‘Right. Face forward. Keep moving. Never use my talent on an undead again as long as I live. Solid. Glad I could get that in writing.’

She didn’t need to focus on the P.A.C.T. troopers to feel what they needed; it hadn’t changed. They needed orders. Nothing else. Not food, nor sleep, nor water. Just orders.

The elevator ride was a bit cramped, but the troopers didn’t seem to have a concept of personal space left to them and hence could be stacked a bit like cordwood in one corner.

As they wove their way down, Bones paused long enough to step over a dead body and buck open a cigarette machine to loot a pocket full of fresh packs. The air hung heavy with the stink of burnt bodies, but a little later he still stopped to pick up the still-smouldering end of a femur bone and light a smoke before offering one to Limerence. The librarian quietly took the cigarette, quickly puffed at it for a moment, then was reduced to a gagging fit.

Taxi tried to force her mind into a state of preparedness in case another fight broke out, but she didn’t have the mental resources. She felt a bone deep exhaustion that’d stolen her will to do more than put one hoof in front of the other.

When the elevator doors dinged and they were let out into the hall overlooking the ruined foyer, she could only look down with a quiet resignation.

All those bodies and nopony to bury them. Dead in heaps and dead in piles.

‘I’m going to end my days digging a grave for the whole world,’ she thought, stopping for a second to nudge the scorched-out skull of a P.A.C.T. creature, outsized fangs still hooked over the remains of its shattered jaw. She moved on, listening to the slow settling of the building.

Time passed.

If there’s one distinct advantage to being temporarily dead, it’s being able to check out for extended periods. At some point after my short discussion with Nightmare Moon, I’d simply drifted away from the mortal coil into somewhere gloriously empty. It was cool, gentle, and quiet.

It was a place I would have been perfectly happy to stay.

With that, nopony should be surprised I woke with a start to a ringing skull, a burning cheek, and a sore muzzle.

“Hmmm...He looks like he’s coming out of it. Maybe hit him again?”

Before I could protest, somepony landed a blow on the other cheek that rocked my head around on my neck. I winced and waved a weak hoof, swallowing a few times to get enough saliva into my mouth to form words.

“Mmmerfle…D-do we always need to d-do this?” I asked, weakly.

“That’s definitely Hardy.”

Ah...That voice.

My lovely driver.

“You died. What did I tell you I would do if you died again?” Taxi demanded from somewhere on my left. Such a kind pony. So sweet.

“N-not my f-fault,” I mumbled, pitifully, as though that would save me. My legs didn’t seem to be working properly, and as I opened my eyes all I could make out was several colorful blurs against a black background. Fortunately, my nose was operating just fine. Incense, cigarettes, spilled alcohol, and scared griffin.

“Oh, I know! You let yourself get possessed! Possessed, and then shot in the butt. Do you know how much blood I have to get out of my tail?”

Another voice chimed in, punctuated by the snap of a cigarette lighter and a long, indrawn breath. “To be fair, missy, most of that blood ain’t his.”

“I don’t care! He died! I am going to be peeved!”

“Can you be peeved later?” a bobbing, bright orange shape added from the corner of my vision. “We really, really need to get out of here!”

‘Swift! Oh, thank goodness you aren’t dead,’ I thought, though I didn’t have the energy to say it out loud. ‘Of course, if you aren’t dead, then that means-’

A soft, slightly chunky weight landed on my stomach, and something sharp poked me in the snoot.

“I and I swear, Eggpony. I be going to bop you in the male bits next time you be making me wait like that! You be leaving me with the borin’ pegasusus!”

I carefully put a hoof around Mags, hugging her to my chest as her wings flopped down over my sides and her tail coiled around one of my back legs. The tiny griffin let out a gruff sigh, then relaxed as I held her close. Agency over one’s own body is terribly underrated.

“It’s good to see you, too, Mags,” I replied, reaching up to wipe at my eyes. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help. “Anypony know why I can’t see? Everything looks like a toddler’s hoofpainting.”

A gentle tingle of magic swept across my eyes, then crept under my skin in a fashion that made me shiver.

“Your optic nerve is damaged. It’s a consequence of severe blood loss,” Limerence said, from off to my left as the energy faded away. “It should heal soon. How much of what just happened do you remember? Anything?”

Mags hopped off my chest as I rolled over onto my side and drew in a breath that tasted like rancid meat. “Enough. You can fill me in on the details as we go. Where are we?”

A yellow blob moved into my field of view, though my eyes wouldn’t quite focus on it. “We’re back in that toy shop, in the Dragon Wagon,” Taxi murmured, “There’s more than a little commotion outside. I’ve counted five teams of P.A.C.T. headed for the Office. Whatever else we did, I’m pretty sure we kicked over one heavily armed ant-hill. I don’t want to make a run for it just yet.”

“I hope that means we took out the Scry. Have we been able to contact the Vivarium?” I asked.

“I tried to see you with my ladybug, but...it...it sat there and looked frightened,” Swift said, nervously. “The radio isn’t working, either. Or the walkie talkies. I can feel Tourniquet, but she’s very, very distracted. Something...bad...has happened.”

I reached up to touch my hat for comfort and my hoof brushed against something trailing from my chest. Feeling along its length, I found a plug attached to my heart and became aware of a soft buzzing sound coming from somewhere under my hooves. I gave it a yank, pulling the plug free.

“One of these days, I want to get to participate in the escaping portion of one of these plans,” I groused, then rubbed at my eyes. “Lim, can we use the Dragon Wagon’s stealth?”

Limerence leaned between the front seats, then shook his head and tapped his staff. “It is drained. I have enough magic for a brief Silence, however. I suppose having our ‘prisoners’ create a distraction would be out of the question.”

I stiffened and looked back and forth, much good as it might have done me. “Prisoners? We have prisoners? When did we get prisoners?”

“I...I...I think he m-means us, Mister Boiled,” a reedy, unfamiliar voice said from the other side of the compartment.

Jerking back, I bumped into the seat.

“Who said that? Speak up!”

“Private Goldenrod, sir.”

“Private?” I asked.

“We...I think we might be P.A.C.T. troopers, sir,” the voice mumbled. “I d-don’t really know. Everything is fuzzy. Can you please t-tell me what to do? I need orders.”

I flicked an ear toward where I’d last heard Taxi’s voice. “How many of them are there?”

“Three, sir,” Swift interjected. “I don’t like it either, but they’re like I was when you found me in that griffin bar. They don’t even know what happened to them. Bones wanted to shoot them to make sure they didn’t tell anypony where we’d been, but--”

I held up my hoof and turned in the direction the voices had come from. “You three. Ponies who may or may not be, provisionally, our prisoners. Do you know where you are right now?”

Silence.

I was getting tired of not being able to see, because I’d have liked some additional input.

“N-no,” a soft mare’s voice muttered.

“Right. Until such time as I figure out what to do with you lot, sit there and shut up.” I put a hoof on Mags’ head and waited until I heard three sets of buttocks hit the seats at the back of the cabin.

Complications. Endless, needless complications.

In the police emergency response manual, the first priority it always to set priorities. Bullets flying at you rate higher than bullets flying at other ponies. It’s a bit counterintuitive that self-sacrifice is discouraged in cops, but the logic is that you can’t save anyone’s life if you’re dead. Having thoroughly disregarded that line on multiple occasions, I felt a bit qualified to push my own survival a little lower on the totem pole.

“Swift? You’re in charge of this bunch,” I ordered.

“Me, Sir?!”

“Your job is to get them to Tourniquet and get her to slap her magic on them. You think you can do it?”

“You...you want to see if she can fix them like she fixed me?”

Putting a hoof out, I felt her move underneath it. “The center of the city is full of ponies who’ve lost themselves. Win or lose, when it comes to it, friend or enemy, they’re still ponies. We need a plan to save them.”

I couldn’t see her expression, but I could hear her suck a breath through her teeth, then slowly exhale.

“Y-yes, Sir,” she whispered, as I let her go and stepped back. “What...what if we can’t save them?”

“Then, kid...it’s in the hooves of the Princesses,” I replied, turning to my driver. “Sweets? Take us to the Vivarium.”

I stared out the front windows at the remains of my city as it coasted by in the red gleam of the Darkening. It was a sight for sore eyes, and my eyes were ever so sore, though my vision seemed to have recovered somewhat. We were rolling through an old shopping district which had been barricaded on both sides with cars, though whoever had maintained the barricade was dead or run off, leaving only a few burnt-out vehicles. The view left a sour taste in my mouth and an empty ache in my chest.

Limerence’s silence blanketed the engine, though the sound of the tires grinding over the pavement still felt too loud in the enclosed space.

Would grandmothers ever sit on those benches and complain about the youth again? Would foals run through that playground, watched by proud, harried parents? Would the sky ever be blue, again?

Probably not. Frost was already clinging to the browned grass and icy, crystalline fingers had started to creep over the edges of windows.

Pulling off my hat, I stared at the black felt. A bit of blood smudged the brim and more than a little ash, but it still smelled faintly like Scarlet’s perfume. I put it to my nose and inhaled for a second, before slapping it back on my head. There’d be time for those thoughts when I knew he and Lily were safe.

I looked down at the spot between the passenger and driver seats where Limerence sat. The librarian’s mane was pasted to his neck by drying blood and his eyes were shut in what appeared to be a light meditation. His horn glowed like a candle in the dark as he kept his spell in place. The young stallion’s face was sharply lined and he’d already developed a few crow’s feet around his eyes.

Sad to see a pony so young starting to look like me.

Clearing my throat, I reached down and gave him a light nudge.

“Lim?”

“Yes, Detective?” he responded, eyes still closed.

“What did you do to the Office?”

His opened his eyes and a cold smile grew on his face as he returned my gaze.

“Physics.”

Not long ago, in the Office control room:

“Do you think they will make it, brother?” Limerence asked, his staff levitating beside him as he stood at the vast panel which maintained and administered the arcane functions of the strange dimension.

His brother didn’t respond to the question, nor did Limerence expect him to. Zefu was, no doubt, still adapting to his new living arrangements and had always been prone to sulking when confronted with a challenge he couldn’t overcome. Still, it would have been nice to have his input.

“You are right, of course. It is irrelevant,” Limerence mused, propping the staff against the window as he turned back to the binder of instructions, thumbing open the index. “Detrot must have a fighting chance and blah-de-blah-de-blah. How is it the detective always has a witty and noble sentiment in times like these?”

His hooves were itching to begin throwing toggles and playing with switches, but such pleasures were for ponies who weren’t on a timeframe.

“I wish I could find the pony who wrote this mess and rub his nose in a technical manual,” he sighed, rolling his neck back and forth. “Alright, fine. Start from scratch. This switch controls location and this controls mass, therefore this dial...is mass entering the portal before the portal switches locations. I suppose that would make these...ehm...aha! These are the macro system. So, I can save instructions to be carried out in succession! Wonderful. That will simplify things.”

Flipping to the next page, he exhaled. “Now, then: safety systems to be disabled.” He hesitated, then narrowed his eyes at the binder, before going back to the panel. His smile returned, sharper than before. “Oh, Celestia...this must have been designed by an overworked engineer. Nopony else could be so simultaneously brilliant and magnificently stupid.” Tilting his head towards his staff, he added under his breath, “Of course, when one is committing suicide, a ‘safety’ is probably unnecessary, but not having one is ridiculous.”

Performing some quick math, he had a moment to glance toward the window again. The approaching pair of troopers were even closer to his position, though they’d been slowed somewhat by an errant desk that’d decided, for some reason, to wander into the aisle between the cubicles. An Overseer beast was quickly herding it out of their way.

“It’s been some time since I converted to a mathematical system created by a higher intelligence, but...well, you won’t mind sparing a little magic to do sums, will you, brother?” he muttered, picking his staff up once more and unsheathing the edge a few inches. A thin stream of bright green energy leapt from the naked metal to his horn as the screaming face on the blade twisted into an angry grimace.

Sweeping his horn back and forth across the dials, he waited for several seconds, then breathed a sigh of relief as an array of glowing letters and numbers burst into being, hanging in the air beside the mechanisms. Brushing a few symbols out of his face with one hoof, he quickly rearranged several others into a new configuration. The numbers seemed to flow and sweep like a thick mist, coiling around his head to be summoned up at will.

“Now, then, my dark dimension,” Limerence whispered, a lick of flame dripping from the tip of his brightly burning horn. “Hear my instructions and pay heed. Your new master has a few little errands for you to run.”

They moved with deadly precision, ducking between aisles as they closed in on the control room.

Their teeth were sharp. Their orders were clear.

They might not know where the orders had come from, but that was irrelevant; they had orders. Orders were everything.

Both longed to join the chase behind them, but they’d been told to secure the control room and make certain the ponies who were attempting to escape had left behind no surprises. Of course, if that surprise happened to be another pony, all the better; they’d been given no orders regarding disposal of any prisoners they might acquire and both their bellies were rumbling. A delicious, still-screaming meal was just the thing after a mission.

Reaching the elevator, the two predators paused to check their weapons, then pressed the ‘up’ button. After a few seconds, the elevator *dinged*, and the doors slid open. They quickly swept the interior, then piled in beside one another, edging against the walls so as to be out of the line of any fire when the door reopened. The left hunter unlimbered a ballistic shield and readied it, while his fellow set his shotgun atop it and prepared to gun down any easy targets.

He aimed a bit low, not wishing to pick lead out of his teeth, but those who’d given orders hadn’t specified how lethal nor merciful they were to be in carrying out their directives. Orders were orders, but feasting was feasting, and it was easier to simply rip open a torso without having to worry overmuch about spitting out shot. Leg meat was delicious, but the necessity of bringing down a target came first.

The elevator let out another *ding* and the doors slid open on a strange scene that gave them momentary pause.

A young stallion stood before a giant glowing golden portal stretching from floor to ceiling. The unicorn held an unsheathed sword, its tip leaking a thin trickle of green magical energies that touched his horn. Glancing over his shoulder at them, he waved a hoof.

“Gentlecolts, I would recommend you don’t follow me,” he said.

The predators tensed, but before they could recover, the stallion leaped into the portal and was gone.

They rushed forward and quickly scanned the room, finding it empty.

Their orders were clear.

With one last look around, they jumped into the portal after the unicorn.

“It was a simple trick, I suppose. I noticed the portals give positive motion to whatever passes through them. They accelerate anything that moves in to make sure it also exits the other side. It required a bit of higher math, but...I set it to accept only the average mass of a grown stallion, a grown mare, and an equine skeleton, then move itself into the control room. When it appeared I knew that the three of you had passed through and escaped. Then, I left another instruction to move it again, once it had accepted my mass through, then allowed that of two troopers to pass in, but not exit. There was no safety preventing me from putting one portal inside of another...so once I leapt through, the portal in the control room moved to the vault.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Swift huffed, trying to keep up as she poked her head over Limerence’s flank. “You...moved one of the portals inside the other with...with two ponies inside it?”

Limerence frowned at the interruption. “That is correct. The portal is a wormhole matrix suspended inside a three dimensional liquid medium. Hence the slightly...gooey...sensation of passing through it.”

“Alright, I get the...I get the idea, but what caused the whole thing to explode?” I asked, quizzically.

“As I said, Detective...Physics,” he replied, tapping his chest. “Remember I said it gives positive acceleration? With the portals inside of one another, they’d effectively become a loop, and each passage increased the troopers’ exit speed. It wasn’t perfect, hence the energy leak, but...they accelerated and accelerated and accelerated until they reached what I calculated to be an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. An accelerating body gains mass. Once their mass reached that of a small star...well...I ordered the exit portal to move back to the Office’s control room.”

I was still confused, but Swift’s ears slowly lay back against her head as she seemed to gradually comprehend what he’d done.

“You opened the portal and...they’d have come out as almost pure energy, right?” she whispered, with a hint of awe.

“I believe the closest scientific terminology is ‘relativistic bomb’.”

I reached down and carefully put a hoof under Limerence’s chin, turning his face to mine. “I want you to use very small words, when you answer my next question, Lim. If you’d been wrong...how much damage could this have done to Detrot?”

His eyebrows rose a few inches, then he shrugged. “I considered it worth the risk.”

I grabbed his thin face in both hooves and forced him to look up into my eyes. “That’s not what I asked. How much damage?”

The librarian licked his lips, his gaze darting away from mine for a moment. “Eh...it...ahem, it would have likely leveled the city...to a radius of twenty miles.”

I released his jaw.

“You felt it was worth the risk to kill everypony in Detrot?” Taxi hissed, putting a little more weight behind her hoof as she gassed the engine.

Limerence slowly nodded. “If I succeeded, we had the opportunity to take back Detrot. If I failed, Detrot was lost...but the world would have survived.”

“How does that work?” Swift asked, ruffling her feathers.

“You tactically minded ponies…” Bones rumbled in our thoughts. “You don’t think on the big scale. Not like him. Take a minute. Stop worrying about everypony you love. Think!”

There was a moment where nopony spoke. As always, when it came to strategic thinking, my driver was first to catch on.

“If...if the city exploded, it would probably destroy the Web of Dark Wishes...and...and kill that army of creatures in Uptown,” Taxi said, gently applying the brake as we nudged an old cart off the road with our front bumper.

I put my face in my hooves. “Right...and an explosion like that might have disrupted the magics keeping the Princesses trapped on the moon. The world would have survived. Equestria could have rebuilt with the loss of one city. Mercy, Limerence. You’d have sacrificed...everyone...to save the world.”

“I...I assure you that it was not a decision made lightly, Detective,” the librarian muttered.

My stomach was doing a ragtime dance and I felt more than a little light-headed as the full weight of the implications set in.

There’d been a moment, back there, when a coin was in the air. On one side, a world saved at the cost of a city. On the other, the world maybe saved by a band of idiots who’d put that coin in the air in the first place. It was a moment when everypony I loved might have been disintegrated in a wave of fire, with no true way to know which was more likely to happen and, once the coin was up, no way to stop it landing on one side or the other.

The control freak in my soul wanted to shout myself silly at the stallion. It was a silly impulse, but some base part of my moral system dictated that nopony should willingly take so many lives in their hooves. I knew it was hypocritical; I’d taken lives in my hooves every day since I found Ruby Blue’s body lying on the pavement outside the High Step.

“It...it was the right call, Lim,” I said, at last, “I hate that you had to make that decision, but it was the right call.”

He looked noticeably relieved as he shut his eyes and went back to his meditations. We were all filthy, covered in blood, and only slightly less foul than we’d been before the sprinklers went off back in the Office, but we were alive. Nopony died.

Well…

“Lim, what...precisely did you do to Zefu?”

“I’m using his soul as a mana battery. I’ll send him to damnation after we’re done saving the world. It’ll be in the debriefing, if we get to have one.”

“Oh.”

Five minutes of silent driving later, I was getting restless. It should have been impossible to be anything but tired, but I’d been a mostly passive observer to the day’s events. There were too many discussions that needed to happen and I couldn’t decide which one to have first, so I simply sat, listening to the tires.

Everypony jumped as the radio squawked at us.

“This is Gypsy calling the Detective! Can you hear me? Dammit, if you’re alive, you better say something or I swear I will find whatever lever in this File Cloud lets me yank your stupid tail out of the afterlife!”

There was a moment of comic fumbling with the radio mic before I managed to grab it and slap the ‘talk’ button.

“Gypsy! Gypsy?! Thank Celestia! What happened out there? We lost radio contact and our ladybugs are dead!”

“Hard Boiled?! Is that you? I can barely hear you!”

“It’s me, Gypsy! What’s the story out there?”

“Nothing good!” she replied, gasping for breath. “We’ve lost radio contact with the Morgue, the Vivarium, and Sky Town! Tourniquet lost three quarters of the city power grid! Electricity is out almost everywhere and Supermax is cut off! We’ve seen major troop movements towards the other city strongholds, and there are fires in the Heights! Where are you headed?”

I closed my eyes, putting a hoof over my heart. It felt like it’d sunk right into my hooves.

“We’re aiming for the Vivarium. Are the ladybugs working?” I asked, trying to ignore my friends’ eyes. I could hear the dozen silent questions they wanted me to ask, but they knew what the priorities were.

“Queenie says the swarm had to pull back to less than two dozen so the hivemind wouldn’t collapse. Something out there is messing with communication systems in a big way. All of them.”

“How are we talking? Am I going to lose you, soon?”

“You should be nearing the Twenty-Third Street Police Department. There’s a transmitter there that’s working. I’ve been waiting for the cab’s receiver to enter the range of a signal and sending a call back code so it’d let me know. The File Cloud is still tapped into a few police systems. Tourniquet says I have about a minute and a half before she has to cut this transmission. We’re using enough power to parboil a sea serpent and the transmitter is going to fry.”

I swallowed, then gripped the mic in both hooves. “Alright. That complicates everything, but...tell Tourniquet to send runners through the sewers to the Vivarium, the Morgue, Sky Town and the Underdogs’ village. Get status updates from all of them, then have them come to Stella’s.”

“What about the Scry?” she asked. “Won’t the P.A.C.T. see our movements?”

I turned to Limerence and he nodded.

“It’s destroyed,” I said.

“Huh...That explains that! The nasties all pulled back towards Uptown about fifteen minutes ago. You should have a clean run to the Heights. Don’t get dead, Hard Boiled.”

“Too late, Gypsy. We need everyone who still controls capable fighters to meet at one safe location, once I figure out what ‘safe’ means.”

“I’m on the job. Send the runner back when you’ve got ‘safe’ sussed. This is the Lady of the Signal, signing off.”

“Egghead out,” I mumbled, slapping the mic back into its holster.

Swift stuck her head between the seats and Mags crawled up her back to join us.

“Sir? Do you think--”

“No, kid,” I said, before she could finish, “We are not conjecturing. We’ll be n the Heights soon. Get the Hailstorm on.”

“Are we expecting more trouble?” Taxi asked, then yawned capaciously. “I don’t think I have another fight in me. Not without some food and sleep.” .

“Me either, but...if we have to fight, we fight. I refuse to die with extra-dimensional farts as my last meal.”

Act 3 Chapter 56 : In The Garden, The Snake

"I'm not going to claim the immediate future is bright. I've seen too many dead to tell you it will all end in sunshine and rainbows. The end is coming, but whether it is merely the closing of a chapter or the final words and a sense of wistful sadness at what might have been, it will be up to us. We are not helpless before the future. We are its creators and stewards. If the future is to be beautiful, it is up to us to make it so."

-Princess Celestia at the signing of the Canterlot Peace Accord, which officially ended the Cutie-Mark Crusades.

The first sign of ill tidings in the Heights was a burning furniture store.

Taxi pulled the D.F.W. to a stop out front of Sofas And Sundries, watching as a lovely Prench lounge smoldered in the front window. It seemed something heavy and on fire had punched through the corner of the building’s roof. The blaze appeared to be contained to just the one store, but the damage was extensive.

“That’s a sad sight,” Bones commented, watching the building with a bit of a sag in his shoulder, “I bought my bachelor couch from that place almost seventy years ago. Don’t know if old Loveseat is still alive, but damned if he didn’t sell me a decent spot to screw and sleep.”

We sat in silence for another moment, watching the ancient building burn.

“Sir? Can...can we go now?” Swift asked, “I’d really like to find out if my family is still alive.”

“Yeah. Yeah, kid. We can go,” I muttered, stroking Mags’s head as she sat in my forelegs, purring like an oversized pussycat. “Sweets, keep the headlights off. Lim, how much more silence do you think you can give us?”

Limerence’s face was covered in a thick sheen of sweat, but his horn still glowed steadily as he concentrated on keeping the engine quiet. “I am tired beyond words, so kindly don’t make me use any more. Drive.”

“You heard the stallion.”

I was more than a little thankful for the air filters built into the D.F.W. when we passed the first of several burning bodies, sprawled in a cart, limbs askew. Tar colored smoke thickened the air until we were driving in a dark haze, passing scorched storefronts and apartment blocks with bullet-holes dotting their vacant faces.

Contrary to what the movies would have you believe, gun battles are messy, awkward affairs. The P.A.C.T. hit the Heights like a sledgehammer, but from the look of things the Heights hit back just as hard. Blood-spattered street signs and devastated storefronts were everywhere.

There were few corpses out in the open, but considering anyone with a lick of sense had probably taken cover at the sound of the first gunshot that wasn’t surprising. Here, a mare dead in the door of a candy store. There, a stallion without most of his face in one of the upper windows of an apartment. In one or two places, burning bones indicated the final resting places of P.A.C.T. creatures.

It was silent in a way only a recently vacated battlefield can be.

A blockade built of disused cars and garbage that’d once blocked the primary road toward the Vivarium was toppled by what looked like an explosion. Taxi edged the D.F.W. between the shattered remains of two buses and we found ourselves in the middle of a blasted hellscape. Nothing moved, save a few weak fires still giving light to the darkened day.

Ahead, the shopping center where the Vivarium’s upper level and elevator once stood was simply gone. The temple facade with its golden arches was reduced to a heaping mountain of smoking debris. Rising over the pile, I could just make out the twisted corpse of Stella’s anti-air gun, still pointed at the sky. The parking lot surrounding the disaster was pock-marked and covered in signs of battle. Blackened bones lay everywhere, their misshapen owners nothing but ash blowing in a chilly breeze.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to stomp my hooves.

I wanted a drink and a soft bed.

The cold thing that’d been growing in my gut bloomed into a shuddering, angry windigo blowing ice through my veins.

“Taxi? Park us,” I muttered.

The engine’s rumble died and Limerence let out a loud gasp, almost falling on his face as his hornlight faded out, leaving a thin trail of smoke coming off the tip. Breathing heavily, he laid his head against my seat and looked up at me. I gave him a slight nod, and he shut his eyes, slumping onto his crossed hooves. After a moment, he let out a soft snore.

“Swift, get topside and give me a report. Use the Hailstorm’s tracking magic. I want to know if there’s anything with a soul out there. Anything at all.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

I heard the top hatch clank open and a ruffle of feathers. Hoofsteps rattled on the D.F.W.’s roof as my partner moved back and forth from one side to the other, then back again. After a minute, she stuck her head back inside.

“Sir? There’s a bunch of targets below ground. There’s nopony above except us.”

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

Bones stepped between the front seats and peered outside.

“Doesn’t look good,” the skeleton commented, “Last I was here, there was only the main elevator, the garage entrance, and the industrial lift. You want me to go take a look at the garage?”

I shook my head, glancing toward the back where the three P.A.C.T. troopers sat, impassively waiting for orders. “It’ll be blocked off, collapsed, or booby-trapped. Stella is nothing if not thorough. Swift?”

My partner twisted herself around so she could look at me somewhat upright. “Yes, Sir?”

“Do you still have Tourniquet’s map of the sewers in your head?” I asked.

“Uh…” Her eyes rolled back and to the left for a second, then she brightened. “Oh! I almost forgot about that!”

“How do you forget—...never mind. Does Stella have any secret entrances that we can get into that’re connected to the sewers?”

She squinted, then slowly bobbed her head up and down. “I think so. There’s one down a ponyhole cover...uh...over there.” She gestured vaguely towards the other side of the parking lot. Her hoof froze in mid wave and she quickly pulled it back outside. “Oh...Sir, I don’t think we should use that entrance. I’m sure there’s...maybe...another one...somewhere...”

“Kid, we’ve swum through Detrot’s main black water line. We crawled through a cistern full of monsters that eat hearts. Are you telling me there’s something worse down there?”

“Hardy, tell me again why you get to make these executive decisions?”

“I have no idea, Sweets. If it would make you feel better, you can beat me to death. I don’t think this is a smell meant for equine noses, and being dead would be preferable.”

“Oh, no you don’t. If you die, it’ll be because I’m holding your head under until the bubbles stop.”

“Then I retract my offer. I really don’t want any of this on my hat. Kid? Why are they keeping all of this?”

“It gets Miss Stella a big tax break to be classed as a recycling facility, Sir. The city wasn’t very specific on what he had to recycle. It saves money to purify and re-use some things so they don’t go into the drainage system and cause a big dumping fine, too.”

“Come again?”

“Exactly.”

We trudged—the fastest possible speed a pony could move through the excess-lube dump of the city’s oldest brothel—down the narrow tunnel in single file. It was three brainwashed P.A.C.T. troopers leading the way in case of booby-traps or trigger-happy guards, myself, Swift with the Hailstorm’s turrets scanning the walls around us, then Taxi carrying a snoring Limerence, and finally, Bones bringing up the rear.

The secret entrance wasn’t so much a ‘sewer’ as it was a ‘sump tank’ for the disposal of the various ‘experience enhancing’ fluids used by the Vivarium. It was something of a blessing that it’d apparently been cleaned sometime in recent months; the ‘high water’ mark which ran around the interior suggested the tank frequently contained enough foulness to come right up to my neck. Still, being ankle deep in decaying, heavily perfumed, artificial sex fluids, potions, and other such business effluvia of the world’s oldest profession was enough to leave me craving a bleach bath. Fortunately, the only light was a dimly flickering gemstone hanging from the ceiling.

It was only about fifteen meters from end to end, but even doffing my coat and bundling it on my back couldn’t keep my clothing from catching a few stray splashes. Every step was precarious and the bottom of the tube felt like walking on greased rubber. Anypony who went down in that was going to be asking for a mercy bullet.

At the far end, there was a set of metal stairs with railings leading up to what looked like a hatch just large enough to accept a pony.

“Alright, I’m going up first,” I murmured. The P.A.C.T. troopers made way, slipping and sliding against one another as they piled up against the wall of the revolting tunnel.

Trotting up the stairs, I tested the hatch. Finding it unlocked, I shoved a shoulder against it and almost yelped as it flew open and I was sent stumbling out of the hole, sliding onto my knees on the carpet at my slippery hooves went out from under me. Something circular and very cold pressed against the end of my muzzle.

“If yer a pony, best speak up,” a voice said, above me. “Ah can’t see too good just now, but ah don’ need ta see ya ta put a load of buckshot in yer face at this range.”

I carefully raised my gaze to find Granny Glow standing over me with a sawn-off shotgun levitating steadily in her magical field pointed right at my nose. She wore a thick gauze wrapped tightly around her head and covering her eyes. Blood trickled from under the bandage, dripping off her wrinkled cheek.

We seemed to be in some kind of broom closet, though the only thing besides a mop and bucket was the hatch I’d just come out of.

“Glow? After Glow?” I whispered.

“Hmmm? Speak up! Ya a pony or ya a critter?”

“Pony! Pony! It’s me! Hard Boiled!”

“Eh...tha idiot detective? Prove it!”

“You almost drowned me once!”

“Ah almost drown lotsa people. Do better.”

Swift shoved her way out of the hatch and pushed the sawn-off away. I drew in a deep breath and stepped back as my partner took her grandmare’s cheeks in her hooves.

“Gran! Sweet Celestia?! Are you okay? What happened to your eyes?!”

“Swift? Little Bird?” After Glow asked, her ears swinging back and forth as she looked up at the ceiling.

“Who else would it be, gran?” Swift asked, then threw her forelegs around her grandmare who let out a soft ‘oof’ and hugged her close.

“Girly, ah swear! Somepony trips mah magic sensors down in the passage and ah thought ah was about ta do some wet work! Phew, ya smell like death, kiddo. Death and sex.”

The door of the tiny closet banged open and Lily Blue stormed in, looking like she’d just toured a griffin slaughterhouse. She wore a set of nurse’s scrubs that were covered in blood right to her hooves. After Glow’s magic grabbed the sawn-off, but Swift quickly reached up and bopped her on the tip of the horn, sending the gun skittering across the carpet.

“Miss Glow, you either stay in bed or I will tell one of those ponies with all the rope to tie your flank down!” Blue barked, before catching sight of the rest of our group. “D-Detective?! Hardy!”

Before I could stop her, Lily tackled me into the wall. My ribs creaked as she squeezed me with legs muscled from a lifetime of farm work. Still, the hug was worth a bit of pain. Mercy, was it.

“G-good to see you, too, Lily,” I coughed, patting her on the back.

A voice from below piped up.

“Can we all please come out of the stinky tunnel now? I need a bath and to have someone replace all of my skin.”

The Vivarium, once the vital, thrumming center of my debauched homeland, the core of commerce, and respite for the perverse, beautiful, and rare, was reduced in a matter of hours to a bloody triage. Appropriated hospital cots lined the hallways, pouring out of the full rooms that lined the corridors. Ponies moaned or cried out for help. Nurses, doctors, and volunteers rushed back and forth applying the scant bandages, suturing, and making the kinds of decisions nopony should have to make.

Who lives? Who dies?

It was enough to break your heart.

There were two knocks at the closet door. I quickly opened it, and Lily Blue rushed inside, levitating a heap of cloth behind her and dropping it at my hooves. Reaching down, I quickly picked up the top layer and held it up: surgical scrubs and a hospital gown.

“Sorry, it’s the best I could do on short notice,” Lily said. “We’ve got to get After Glow back to her room.”

“Ah can get to mah room just fine, missy!” Glow protested from where she sat against the wall with Swift fussing over her bandages. “Ah might be blind at the minute, but Ah know these hallways like the back of mah hooves!”

“Gran, you’re going back to bed. What even did this?” Swift asked, ruffling her wings worriedly.

“Ah tried to smack a grenade with a shield. Didn’t go too good. Caught most of the shrapnel, but a bit caught me right back. Oh, would ya stop, girly?!” Glow hissed, batting her granddaughter’s hooves away as she stood. “Ah’m not dead nor dyin’!”

“Did Dad get a look at this?” Swift asked.

“Yer dad’s a busy pony. Whole lot of ponies out there in sorer shape’n me.”

Swift’s ears lay back against her head. “What about Mom? I know she’d be fighting on the front lines—”

“Kid.” I reached out and gently put a hoof on my partner’s shoulder, “We’ll find out what’s going on soon, but right now we have to get to Stella and make him aware we’re back without causing a riot out there.”

Swift blinked uncomprehendingly. “A riot, sir?”

Bones clicked his jaw and nodded in my direction. “Sweetheart, I know it’s easy to forget how those ponies out there see my grandson, seeing as you spend most of your time with him, but he’s a big damn hero to them, whether he likes it or not. If Deadheart pokes a hoof out that door undisguised, he’ll have a line of ponies wanting to shake it. It’s why the Crusaders kept our heads down during the war. Let the Wonderbolts enjoy the spotlight while we get the real work done.”

“Too bad that wasn’t an option,” Taxi added, carefully setting down Limerence and picking up one of the nurse uniforms that Lily had provided. “A hero’s reputation counts for lots of resources, particularly when the Crown isn’t signing the checks behind the scenes. Still, there are downsides. Hardy, make sure your flanks are covered.”

I picked up a surgical mask and pulled it over my face, then grabbed a towel to throw over my cutie-marks.

Pausing, I glanced back down into the open hatch at the three P.A.C.T. troopers down below who were still dutifully waiting for instructions. They hadn’t moved, even to step onto the stairs and out of the sludge lining the bottom of the tunnel. A very cold part of me felt like I should be angry at their complete lack of self-preservation skills. Another part quailed at the thought of having so much power over a pony.

They were as helpless as foals. Nay, moreso. A foal wouldn’t cut their own throat at a command. I strongly suspected the troopers would.

“Who are they?” Lily asked as she came up beside me, squinting down into the darkness. “Oh Celestia, are they—”

I quickly slapped a hoof over her mouth before she could scream or do anything ill-advisedly awkward. I grabbed her face and pulled it close to mine.

“We were just talking about not starting a riot, right?” I hissed into her ear, gently removing my hoof.

“B-b-but they’re—”

“Yes, we’re all aware.”

Lily’s ears flicked against the side of her head. “H-how!?”

“Too complicated to describe right now, but they might be an ace in the hole once the city is back in our hooves.”

“What’re ya’ll talkin’ about in them ‘lowered tones’ over there?” After Glow growled.

Swift tugged her grandmare’s foreleg. “They’re kissing, gran. Come on, we’ve got to get you back to bed.”

“Ah can git mahself there jus’ fine,” Glow grumbled, but let my partner support her as they limped toward the door. She paused there, then glanced back at me. “Hard Boiled, when yer done makin’ time, ya best report yaself to the lizard right quick. Situation’s turned nasty.”

“That’s my next stop,” I replied.

“I’ll go see if I can track down the situation on the ground,” Taxi added, then turned to Bones. “You care to join me?”

“I’m not exactly an inconspicuous sort myself. Crowded building’s tough to sneak through. I can do it, but won’t be quick.”

“Simple solution to that. Miss Blue, can you step out and get us some bandages? Mister Bones here is going ‘old school’.”

Taxi ended up wrapping Bones so thoroughly the only sign he was anything but a catastrophic burn victim—or perhaps a mummy—was the dim blue glow from behind the thin layer over his eye sockets. I had to settle for my surgical mask and towel, but it was good enough. Limerence got the worst of it; he was still unconscious, so tossing him on a gurney Lily had acquired with a sheet over top seemed the best solution. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had time to clean it and whoever happened to have last occupied the rolling bed was a bleeder.

Part of me felt guilty for ordering our trio of mindripped troopers to get naked and stand in a closet, but it wasn’t as though we could drag them through a building that’d effectively become a hospital. Their gear alone was enough to set off the aforementioned fracas, much less what would happen if somepony should catch an indiscrete glimpse of their teeth. Still, despite their perpetually empty expressions, I couldn’t entirely shut off that voice telling me that they were still ponies and deserving of some baseline equinity for that reason.

Too bad that was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

Swift and her grandmare went one direction while Bones and Taxi went the other, both vanishing around corners as I set my hooves on the handles of Limerence’s gurney and Lily lit her horn to guide the other end.

I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, but it was impossible not to see the weight of suffering around me. Cots and mats covered every spare surface except the wide avenue. Bodies were heaped against the walls, some sobbing, some just staring blankly at their neighbors across the way. Bloody stains had soaked into the carpet, making it squelch underhoof every few steps.

The smell of every imaginable thing that comes out of a pony should have been enough to make my eyes water, but I’d just come from a darker place and a pleasant fuzziness had settled over my senses. Whether it was Gale being merciful or just the natural numbness that comes with trauma beyond comprehension was hard to say. I focused on my hooves, keeping them moving. Sleep was a distant memory. Had I ever slept?

Even with my mind full of cotton, every ounce of cop-instinct demanded I dash over and help the nurse who was frantically trying to stem the bleeding of an elderly mare, her cane propped against the end of her cot; sadly, there was nothing an extra set of hooves could add to that which my presence in Stella’s room wouldn’t.

A foal at one of the t-junctions was standing looking back and forth, her eyes full of tears, her cheeks wet with them as she watched a young stallion lean over somepony I presumed was her mother, carefully working a plastic tube down the mare’s throat.

Every now and then, a pained shriek would echo from one of the side rooms. I did my best not to think on the possibility that it was somepony I knew or had met. Cold as that might sound, my sanity was already teetering, and more loss was likely to tip it into catatonia.

‘Talk to the serpent. Find a wall-socket, get some food, and rest. Find Scarlet. Get alone with him and Lily. Don’t lose your mind before all of that happens.’

I almost failed to notice when we came to a stairwell labeled ‘Deep Levels, Authorized Personnel Only’. Exchanging a look with Lily, I trotted around and pushed the door open. Just inside the door, at the top of the steps, a dingy brown Stiletto unicorn with a white sash spattered red stood guard. His forelegs were both heavily bandaged, but it didn’t seem to be affecting his ability to hold the massive knife that floated alongside his head.

“Who goes there?” he asked, shifting his weight.

“Three to see Stella,” I replied.

“Authorized means authorized,” he said, sharply. “Let’s see some faces and cutie-marks.”

I looked over my shoulder at the hall full of ponies.

“Look, that...might not be the best idea,” I said, lowering my voice.

“And why is that?” he asked, suspiciously.

I swallowed, then leaned toward him and pulled my surgical mask up six inches. His jaw went slack and his hornlight winked out, dropping the blade with a cringe-inducing clatter. I slapped my mask back in place.

“D-d-etec—” he started to say, but I quickly shook my head, pushing through the door into the stairwell and dragging Limerence’s gurney in behind me. Lily darted in after me and nosed the door shut.

I exhaled, pressing my forehead against the wall. The Stiletto stallion still hadn’t recovered and was just standing there, dumbly watching me with that expression I was growing to hate seeing directed at me: borderline worshipful awe.

“You. What’s your name?” I asked.

“Uh...Sturm...um...sir?”

“Sturm. Good. Hold the ‘sir’,” I said, then tapped Limerence’s sleeping chest, “Can you help my friend here levitate this downstairs and find the lump a spot to sleep off his little magical hangover?”

“Errr...Oh! Yes! Who—”

Lily pulled her own surgical mask down and smiled sweetly at him.

“Miss Blue! I’m sorry! It’s been so crazy and I didn’t recognize you!”

“It’s fine,” she replied, patting him on the shoulder. “I don’t think we ever talked, so no reason to, right?”

“But you rode with the Detective! You fought alongside Dead Heart! Everypony knows everypony who...” He trailed off as his eyes met mine. I must have been glaring, because he quickly muttered, “S-sorry.”

“I swear, if I end up as an action figure I’m going to stick my head into Swift’s pet cerberus’s dinner bowl,” I grumbled, then pointed at the stairs. “Does this go down to Stella’s lair?”

“Yes, sir! Right down the steps to the door at the bottom, then follow the signs! Come on, I’ll show you.”

It was a damn near interminable climb. For the first few levels, doors split off to the sides, then it was bare, industrial stairs. Slowly, sheetrock dust filled the air and cloyed at the back of my throat, leaving my nostrils feeling gummy and dry. The stairwell ended abruptly at a piece of torn plastic hanging over a gaping hole in what looked like bedrock. I brushed the plastic aside and stepped through, holding it wide for Sturm and Lily to guide Limerence’s gurney through.

I found myself in a tall, empty room stacked high on all sides with enough construction materials to outfit a small skyscraper. Heaps of wood, stacks of sheetrock, and bag upon bag of concrete filled the space, turning it into a precariously balanced maze. Down the middle, a single central path just wide enough for two ponies abreast led to a dark tunnel with a series of lights illuminating circles before disappearing around a distant curve.

“I don’t remember this being here,” I commented.

Sturm hefted the gurney a bit higher, eagerly trotting alongside me. “With the Aroyos, the Underdogs, and the refugees working together, we’ve had more magic and more free hooves than ever before, so we’ve been carving out...everything. I don’t think anybody besides Mistress Stella knows what all is happening down here. Ponies working with griffins working with diamond dogs—”

I put a hoof on his chest and his jaw snapped shut so fast I thought he’d clip the tip of his own tongue.

“I get that. What is all of this? And why aren’t the ponies upstairs down here?” I asked.

“It’s...Detrot,” Sturm replied, as though that somehow explained everything.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I mean, I don’t...really understand it all, but I think Mistress Stella is planning...um…” The Stiletto’s ears drooped, and he dropped to a whisper that I didn’t catch.

“Pardon?”

“He’s planning for you to fail, Hardy,” Lily interjected, her horn brushing waves of light back and forth in short strokes over Limerence’s face. “Yeesh. What did he do to burn his magic out this badly? He’ll be lucky if he can pick up a pencil tomorrow!”

I sighed, shaking my head. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised the dragon is planning on me botching this. He’s careful and he likes to plan ahead. What did he call it? Investing?”

“I’ve talked to Stella some when he...well, when he has a spare minute,” Lily said, giving Limerence a little pat on the cheek. “Stella likes you, Hardy, but he doesn’t think anypony can stop something that can re-order time and space, pitch the Princesses off the planet, and steal entire cities. He’s planning to lose.”

“What about you?” I asked.

Lily trotted over and levitated my surgical mask to one side so she could lean in and give me a tiny kiss on the cheek, light as the brush of a butterfly’s wings.

“I’m just a farm girl,” she replied, a little sadly, “You’d have to ask my sister. She was the one with all the big ideas.”

I cocked my head to one side. “What would Ruby have said?”

Lily snorted and dragged Limerence’s gurney toward the tunnel. “Ruby would have told Stella off for being silly, because of course you’ll succeed. How could you not?”

That brought a smile. Not much of one, mind you. It’s hard to smile when you’re covered in blood and lube. Still, it was better than nothing.

I turned to Sturm and asked, “You got somewhere we can stash my friend until he recovers?”

His ears perked up. “You can leave him with me! I’ll make sure he’s safe and knows where you are when he wakes up!” He paused, then added, “Errr...where will you be?”

“In an ideal world, asleep. So probably getting chewed out by a dragon. How lost can I get in these tunnels?”

The young stallion pointed at a piece of paper taped to the wall of the nearby tunnel just beyond the stacks of construction material. I strolled over and examined the sign. It was covered in various symbols, one of which was a coiled snake with an arrow pointing down the hall.

“Right. Lily, you coming?” I asked.

She looked momentarily conflicted, then let out a long breath. “There’s a lot of hurt ponies upstairs, Hardy...”

My breathing caught around what felt like a stone lodged in my throat, but I nodded. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”

Lily blew a thin strand of her red mane out of her eyes and looked a bit exasperated.

“You’re lying.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t matter. We’ve both got jobs to do.”

“I’m off shift in six hours. Find me?”

“I’ll save you a bagel.”

And that was it.

I was alone. Again.

My friends were doing the job. I was doing the job.

When had I last collected a paycheck? I couldn’t even remember.

I felt like a colt whose mother had walked off absentmindedly at the shopping mall suddenly discovering that he’s all alone.

I followed the signs through the darkness, between pools of light from the overhead lamps, with only distant hoofsteps and the occasional chatter of ponies coming from the farther corners of the tunnel network to keep me company Once or twice I passed doors that were little more than curtains hung over openings. One had the makings of a barracks, though with stacks of unassembled bunkbeds piled along the wall. Another smelled of compost and had a hundred ceiling-high racks of dirt with fat mushrooms growing in them.

I didn’t want to think about the possibility of failure, but Stella hadn’t survived in Detrot the last however many decades by failing to ask ‘What if this doesn’t work?’. Plan B, C, and D are fundamental necessities if you happen to have a draconic lifespan and want to use all of it.

Would ponies survive in the cold darkness of a future with no sun?

If anyone could figure a way to make that happen, I’d have bet good money on Stella.

After what felt like an hour of wandering in the dark, I found myself in familiar territory. My hooves moved from bored-out stone to smooth-packed dirt and I saw, just ahead, the heavy stone door that marked the entrance to Mistress Stella’s private lair. Loud voices calling orders back and forth were intermixed with a soft jazz playing on scratchy vinyl.

I poked my head into Stella’s lair and found a scene of controlled chaos.

The platform above Stella’s private swimming hole was crowded with ponies standing around a giant circular table with a map of Detrot laid out. I didn’t recognize more than a couple of members of the crowd. The zebra who’d followed us into Cosmo’s drug lab, Zeta, was there standing below Stella with a quietly impassive mien on her face. I recognized a former member of the Church of Nightmare Moon who was furiously scribbling on a clipboard; he had Tourniquet’s red crescent burned into his forehead, of all places. The rest seemed to be frantically working the burgeoning logistical nightmare upstairs.

Stella himself was slouched on his throne, listening to the ponies shouting back and forth. He looked haggard and worn, his tail coiled around the base of his throne and trailing through the water. He wore no makeup, nor his boa, nor even a smattering of lipstick.

Cheerfully eccentric personality aside, Stella was still a dragon. Part of me was willing to forget that fact, but seeing him without his glitz or glitter drove the point home. He was the most fearsome of beasts in Equestria and a lord amongst lizards. He’d manipulated Detrot for decades and been outplayed by a far more malevolent force with many more centuries to plan. The centuries were showing and the dark circles under his eyes made him look downright sinister.

As I was having these thoughts, a young filly rushed down from the table, a missive in her teeth, and almost bowled me over in her headlong rush for the tunnel. She managed to skid to a halt with her muzzle an inch from my chest, then slowly looked up.

“A-are you supposed to b-be here?” she asked. “The hospital is back that way.”

I winked at her and pulled my surgical mask down a few inches.

I’m not sure if she started to scream, but there was a definite deep inhale that caught in her throat and reduced her to a coughing fit. I patted her on the back, though no-one on the platform seemed to have noticed her distress. She sat down on the dirt floor and looked up at me, a hoof over her muzzle.

“I know you’re busy,” I murmured, nodding toward Stella. “I need you to go tell the lizard I’m here. Whisper it, if you can. I’m trying to be secretive here.”

The filly chewed over my words for a second, then backed up and almost galloped across the cavern. I stepped into the shadows outside, peering around the corner with half an eye. It took the little pony a moment to get Stella’s attention; the dragon seemed stuck in a deep brooding mood. When she did, he carefully leaned down to her, cupping a giant claw around her body for greater privacy. More than a few ponies were looking up from their work around the table.

Stella’s expression went from annoyed, to surprised, to slightly disturbed. Leaning back, he clapped his claws and said, “Ahem! Gentlebeings! Something...mmm...A...fact has been brought to my attention. I need a few minutes of privacy. Will you all please go get some food and check on the situation upstairs? I shall send a runner for you.”

“And myself, Mistress Stella?” Zeta asked, raising her head.

“I doubt I will need a guard, darling,” Stella replied, brushing the back of one of his claws through the zebra’s striped mane. “Though...do go find Scarlet Petals and tell him he will have a visitor soon.”

Zeta’s ears stood up and she glanced at the crowd of watching eyes, then quickly drew a circle around her head and tapped her chest. Stella gave her a little quirk of the lips that couldn’t quite be called a smile, then made a gentle shoo-ing motion with his fluked tail. The zebra’s eyes widened, then she bounced up on her rear legs and clapped her hooves.

“You heard him everypony! Go get dinner!” she called out.

The table dropped their papers, set down radio headsets, and began to gather their belongings. There was no pleasant banter, only a hushed conversation back and forth as the herd made its way down the stairs with the filly I’d asked to announce me at their head. I backed farther into the shadows and held my breath as they passed.

Zeta followed the group out, though she paused as she walked by my hiding place. One of her ears twitched, and she cocked her head in my direction.

“Good luck, Detective,” she whispered, just loud enough to be heard.

Then she vanished, sprinting silently into the darkness at a speed that beggared belief.

Watching her go, I breathed a sigh of relief and reluctantly stepped into the open doorway.

Stella reclined on his throne, his scaly face unreadable as he studied his painted claws, seemingly indifferent to my presence.

I trotted up the steps to the table, leaning over to give the map a quick once over. Red and blue figurines in the shapes of pegasi, unicorns, and griffins littered the roadways, most following lines that I presumed to be the sewers. A half dozen circles in varying colors were marked out surrounding the Vivarium, but I couldn’t make out what they might be for. Each except the very last, a single red circle around the Vivarium, had a red ‘X’ over it.

“Do you know, Detective, that you terrify me?”

“Me?” I asked, quizzically. “What did I do?”

“I may be a dragon, but there are things which cause me fear,” he said, sliding off his throne into the water and gliding silently over to the catwalk. “The killers who broke through our defenses and drove us from fallback point to fallback point until all that was left was to fill this hole with thousands of wounded. The sun that has gone dark in the sky. The endless horde of monstrosities that slaughtered my little ponies.” Leaning over, he rested his chin on his crossed forearms, his weight making the metal creak and groan. He smiled, though there was no humor in it. “And...then there is you.”

I slid my bundled clothing off my back onto the table and tried to wipe some of the filth on my hooves onto a towel somepony had left behind. All I succeeded in doing was smearing oily streaks of ash and other substances. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Of course you don’t,” he sighed, sniffing in my direction. “Those creatures couldn’t penetrate this last respite. We had time to evacuate the surface. Not much time, mind you. Too many died, but against the most dangerous army assembled since the Crusades, my defenders held quite well until the streets were clear. More lived than died, and no demon came into this place. There was a time, millenia ago, when ponies considered the lairs of dragons to be holy places. You didn’t know that, did you?”

I shook my head. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Stella tasted the air with his forked tongue, then rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You treated us as gods, little pony!” he exclaimed, spreading his arms. “Does that mean nothing to you?”

“Not much, if I’m honest,” I replied. “I’ve just been to a dimension I’m pretty sure was designed by something you and I would both agree could be called a ‘god’. If that’s what gods do with their spare time, I’m happier in a world without them.”

“True. Even at the height of our civilization, we were simple lizards. Big, yes, but merely lizards with eyes for shiny objects and soft living. Still, we did not know fear until you ponies made us fear.”

I shrugged and went back to trying to clean the disgusting concoction off my forelegs. “You’ve got nothing to fear from me, Stella.”

“Don’t I? Today, war came to my doorstep and I repulsed an army. Maybe not bloodlessly, but they did not even come close to this sanctum. You, on the other hand, have just now appeared in the door of my lair. If you came for my blood, you and that Crusader would have ensured I now lay dead. I doubt even Zeta could have stopped you.” His fangs glittered as he laid his cheek sideways on the railing, seeming to study me dispassionately before adding, “Worst of all, perhaps...You did not see fit to put a thought to what the ability to strut into a dragon’s lair without sending word ahead might mean to the dragon. So, yes. I see you standing there, covered in—” He sniffed in my direction and his lips wrinkled. “—First Fire, what are you covered in?”

I dropped the towel and sighed. “Everything, Stella. I am covered in everything. By the by, your lube dump is still a viable entrance and exit. I doubt anyone else would use it, but—”

Stella’s claws closed on the railing and the metal supports let out a squeal of pain as several bolts popped loose.

“Wait! Detective, are you telling me that you...came in through the juice pit?!”

I cringed, internally.

“I...would have strongly appreciated not knowing you called it that,” I muttered.

“Would you like me to have somepony draw you a bath?” the dragon asked, his voice full of a strange sympathy.

“Yes. What happened while we were gone?”

Stella leaned back from the catwalk. “Darling, are you sure you want to debrief now?”

I shook my head. “No, but I don’t think we’ll get a better chance. Oh, and would you put some makeup on? It’s freaking me out seeing you without it.”

“Oh Detective, that...might be one of the most inadvertently sweet things you’ve ever said. Well, for you,” he replied, a bit of his old swish returning as he glided back to his throne and picked up a giant tube of lipstick. Twisting it open, he quickly applied a layer of thick rouge, then popped his lips and scraped a stray bit off the corner of his muzzle with the tip of a claw. “Now, then...what would you like to know?”

“Just give me a general breakdown?”

“I likely know as much as you do, my dear,” he said, floating around to his dressing table to apply a pair of massive fake eyelashes. “A half hour after you left, our communications began to break down. All communications. Magical, non-magical, and so on. It was simple interference. We assumed an attack and started clearing the streets. The attack came soon thereafter: wave upon wave of P.A.C.T. monsters, sweeping down upon our defenses. We tried to call Skytown and the Morgue. One of our better fliers went as high as she could with a pair of binoculars and said that the Morgue was smoking, but looked as though it still stood. Skytown did not fare as well. Most of the cloud buildings are gone.”

I pulled my hooves under myself. “You held them back for...how long?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Stella replied, swirling a bit of foundation onto his cheeks. “I’m certain one of my underlings looked at a clock at some point, but once it began, I was rather more focused on keeping them alive. That filly who announced you was headed upstairs to get me a report on the medical situation.”

“I’d call it ‘not good’, but then I don’t have a basis for comparison,” I said, then nodded toward the map. “The attack came a little early. I thought they’d at least hold off until tomorrow.”

“Once the communications systems failed and the assault began, they continued until there was a burst of electromagnetic radiation strong enough to interfere with all manner of electronics. A moment later, they were retreating. The E.M. burst was your doing?”

Pursing my lips, I nodded. “That...would probably have been Limerence’s solution to the Scry.”

“What, pray tell, did he do?” Stella asked.

Leaning back, I scruffled at my mane with both hooves and let out an exasperated sigh. “I didn’t get most of the science mumbo-jumbo, but I’m pretty sure he turned a couple of P.A.C.T. troopers into a small star, then dropped them down the neck of an interdimensional portal where they exploded the world on the other end. If you want a better explanation, you can ask him when he wakes up.”

The dragon gave me another one of those funny looks, his upper lip curled and his neck flukes splayed out like a fan. I waited for him to respond, but the silence was becoming awkward. I quickly played back my last couple of sentences to myself, then blew a bit of greasy fur out of my face.

“Nothing I said just now helped your sense of personal or existential comfort, did it?”

“Not particularly, no,” he replied, setting his foundation brush down. He looked much more himself, though still with bags under his eyes that no amount of makeup would disguise. “Still, you say the Scry is destroyed? The enemy cannot track us any longer?”

“If it’s still around, we weren’t going to be able to destroy it in the first place.”

“Mmmm…” Tapping his claws on the surface of his vanity, he floated back toward his throne and heaved out of the water, flicking droplets all over me. “Then we have a temporary respite.”

“Not likely,” I said, picking up my hat and setting it over my ears.

Stella sat a little straighter. “How so? Basic battlefield strategy says one does not attack into the fog of war without time to scout and prepare—”

“The Family doesn’t mind wasting bodies, Stella. That army of theirs exists to waste bodies. They might have had to regroup when their communications broke down, but I give it less than a day before they’re back. Keep in mind, this slaughter is to a purpose.”

The serpent shut his eyes and drew in a stiff breath. “To charge this...wish machine?”

“Exactly. The more chaos and bloodshed they can sow, the better. Now they’ll have to do it without perfect information on our positions, but make no mistake, they will come. They might have considered preventing a large-scale, coordinated strike on the Office adequate reason to hit all of our positions at once, but this was not their full available force. Did you see any dragons?”

Giving his head a stiff little shake, Stella slumped back into the giant cushions on his seat. “I did not get any reports of dragons. You believe that...that butchery was a means of diverting an attack?”

“It’s a decent strategy when you expect your opponent to send a large force to accomplish a task,” I said, tapping the map of Detrot over city-center. “No-one sane would send only five fighters to take on the Office. We punched through their defenses by cheating, but their strategy should have held against damn near anything else. By the time they figured out what we’d done, we were already through and hidden. Their best strategy was to try to draw us off by attacking our strongholds. That force was set to take on an army.”

Stella raised one painted eyebrow. “The ‘too stupid not to work’ gambit. I do hate how many of your adventures have relied on that.”

I chuckled, weakly. “If it stops working, I’ll let you know. That bath is sounding excellent, by the way.”

“Mmm...I will send for somepony to escort you and to start a rumor that you’ve returned, safely, darling. Was there perchance anything else?”

I picked up my bundled coat and gun, setting the former back on my shoulders. “Yeah. Can you get somepony to head to Skytown and the Morgue to get their leadership? We should be expecting a runner from Supermax, soon.”

Dropping his claw to one side of his throne, he pressed a tiny gemstone that let out a low ‘bong’ in the distance. “Certainly. I take it you are planning something...considerable?”

Heading toward the door, I hesitated.

In the back of my mind, a feminine cackle echoed.

“Considerable. On second thought, there is one more thing I need. Could you send me a couple unicorns with decent enchanting skills? I made a deal with a friend, and I need to pay them.”

‘A friend, am I?’ a voice whispered in my head. I didn’t feel the need to reply.

“Ahem...before you do, mightn’t I ask you to go see Scarlet?” Stella asked.

Something in his voice made me feel momentarily cold inside.

“I’d planned to, but I smell like death—” I started to say, but he held up a claw.

“Go see Scarlet, Hard Boiled.” Stella looked off to one side, and the chill in my belly became a frosty wind, raising my hackles. “He will not care how you smell.”

It took me a second to find words.

“Al-alright? Is he okay?”

Stella’s tired gaze wandered up to meet mine, and he breathed a weighty sigh.

“No. No, he’s not.”

Act 3 Chapter 57 : Sleeping With Monsters

Prosthetic technology has come a long way in recent decades, but true mechanization has eluded most of ponykind. With the exception of a few outliers, most ponies are unaware of the true extent of what was discovered in the wake of the Cutie-Mark Crusades. It must be said, this was on purpose.

While Princess Luna championed the rapid advance of technology, Princess Celestia was more cautious. She believed that technology would one day be the salvation of pony-kind, but that we still had some way to go before we were ready for what would inevitably come from genuinely custom cybernetics. The abuse of those technologies during the war gave her considerable ammunition to slow their development. Much of what was learned is now locked away in the vaults of Canterlot Castle or the private laboratories of the royal sisterhood.

It has often been said, however, that knowledge is a one way street. Once gained, little is lost. The future always comes, regardless of our efforts to restrain it.

-The Scholar

The headlong gallop up the stairs left me panting for breath. Considering Stella wouldn’t give me any more details and, short of shooting him, I couldn’t think of a good way to force them out, I was left with only a location and a brooding lizard.

I’d had to stop to ask several Stilettos for directions, which they were happy to give. Maybe a little too happy. It only occurred to me three quarters of the way there that I hadn’t bothered to put my surgical mask back on or cover my cutie-marks.

The hallway with Scarlet’s room was one of the few I’d been through that wasn’t absolutely packed with the injured. A couple cots with injured ponies were wedged against the walls, though most looked heavily sedated. One young stallion in nursing scrubs was moving from body to body, checking vitals and changing bags of I.V. solution dangling from frames above the sleepers, but he paid me no mind.

Trotting to Scarlet’s door, I started to knock.

‘Why?’ I thought, ‘Why do this to yourself, Hardy? Why not wait until everything is over?’

It wasn’t a worthy feeling, but how much more could I take?

I shivered, sliding onto my front knees as the panic built in my system. I needed rest. Emotional rest. Physical rest. Food.

I needed to cry.

‘Strong. Be strong.’

A light touch on my shoulder brought me jerking upright, swinging around to confront my assailant. I had my trigger bit in my teeth and my revolver aimed in the time it took to blink. It was another second before I realized it wasn’t some dark beast from the blackest corner of equine imaginings.

“D-Deadheart?” the wide-eyed nurse stammered, dropping his hoof.

“That’s me,” I growled, letting my trigger fall out of my muzzle as I sagged back to the carpet. “You know the pony who stays here?”

His expression jerked from bright excitement to trepidation as he took in exactly where he was. He looked, if anything, as tired as I felt. His dark blue mane was drawn into a fashionless bun and his hooves were swollen, probably from hours on them without a break.

“Scarlet?” he asked. “I...yes, I know him. Does Mistress Stella know you’re here?”

“Do you think I’d be here if Stella didn’t know?”

“Oh...I…” He frowned a little. “I guess not. You can go right in, if you want to see him. He should be awake. If he managed to sleep like...like that, I think it would be a miracle. He wouldn’t take any sedatives. Said we should use them on ponies who aren’t used to pain.”

I choked down the urge to snap at the nurse. Anger was bubbling just below the surface, the cop’s traditional response to fear. It helped when the bullets started flying, but damned if it wasn’t inconvenient in a hospital.

“How bad is he?” I asked.

The stallion’s heavily pierced ears lay back against his head. “I wasn’t with the doctors who checked him, but...I can tell you this isn’t the critical care wing. I don’t know if his other visitor left. I’ve been a little preoccupied—”

“Wait...other visitor?”

He moved to the next patient on the row—a sleeping filly with most of the fur on her forehead burned off—and continued his rounds. “Mmmhmmm. A real old mare with funny looking back legs. She moved like somepony in her teens, but she’s gotta be older than the hills. I didn’t get her name.”

I tried to think who that might be, but the exhaustion was getting the better of me. My brain felt like it was full of hot porridge.

“That’s...That’s fine. Look, there might be a bunch of ponies coming this way at some point…” I started, then trailed off.

“I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you,” he said, quickly, with a cockeyed smile.

“Thanks.”

Putting a hoof on the door-handle, I took one last breath, shut my eyes, and slipped inside, shutting it behind me.

I stood there, looking at the darkness behind my eyelids, willing myself to breathe. I didn't want to breathe. I wanted to be dead; dead and safe, in the beyond where sweet little stallions like Scarlet didn’t need to suffer.

‘Open your eyes, Hardy,’ a voice whispered. Whether it was my own or one of the other strange occupants of my quickly overcrowding brain, I couldn’t have said. I didn’t really care.

‘Open your eyes.’

“Hardy!” A voice squeaked, “Oh my skies! Hardy! You’re here?!”

I jumped and my eyes popped open.

The room was dim, lit only by the Wonderbolt lamp on Scarlet’s bedside table.

Scarlet was sitting propped on a half dozen pillows, a glowing smile on his face and a blanket pulled up to his waist as he held out his hooves in my direction. He looked exhausted, his mane matted to his neck and bags under his eyes, but his eyes were bright.

I don’t remember crossing the room, but I was in his forelegs a half second later, breathing his flowery perfume and feeling his hitched breathing as he hugged me tightly. I held him for a long moment, my eyes filled with tears. He ran a toe around the edge of my hat brim, then tipped it back. I didn’t have to be asked twice; I doubt my breath was pleasant but his kiss was sweet, anyway. I could feel him smiling into the liplock and wanted nothing more than to spend the day right there, kissing the sweet colt, listening to his breathing and reassuring myself that he was alright.

Behind me, somepony politely cleared their throat.

I didn’t want to let go, but Scarlet pulled back, giving me a little chuck under the chin. His eyes were bright and his cheeks stained with tears.

Turning, I found myself face to face with Apple Bloom, who’d been sitting rather unobtrusively in the corner on a short stool. The ancient, yellow mare’s skin looked like parchment wrapped around a pony frame as she rested, one forehoof propped under her chin and her robotic back legs dangling off to one side. She wore an elaborate brown tool belt that draped across her chest and shoulders like a bandolier. A threadbare red bow of thick ribbon was perched in her mane; it looked almost as old as she was.

“Well? Go on! Show was jus’ gittin’ good.”

Against all odds, I felt my cheeks heat up.

Scarlet quickly came to my rescue.

“Sorry, Miss Bloom. I’m not really in a condition, but if Hardy is interested later, once I’m better, my rates are posted out front—”

I pulled my hat down over my face and breathed a sigh.

“Stella wouldn’t tell me what happened to you,” I murmured.

Scarlet’s ears swept back against his head as he looked down at his lower body, still covered by the sheet. I noticed a series of unusual lumps that didn’t seem to be quite the right shape for equine legs. Reaching down, I grabbed the sheet in my teeth and started to pull it back.

“Hardy, you don’t need to see this,” he muttered.

I dropped the sheet and gave him a hard look. “Then tell me. How bad is it?”

He took my face in both of his hooves, pulling me up on top of him. I was careful not to put any weight on his lower body.

“I was running messages for After Glow when the grenade went off in her face. She shielded herself and most of the ponies around her, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

“You’re still dodging,” I grumbled.

“Saying it out loud makes it ‘real’, you know?” he whispered, and I felt a couple teardrops land on my cheek as he continued, “My tail is gone and my cutie-marks will have to grow back.”

“That...that doesn’t sound like the worst that could have happened,” I said, blinking at him. He gave me a wan smile and lowered his face into my mane.

Apple Bloom let out an exasperated snort. “Ah’ll be damned if Ah ever met a colt with cojones as big as this un’s. He’s tryin’ to save ya from worryin’ about him, Detective. Ya think Ah would be in here iffin’ that was the end of it?”

“Then you tell me, dammit!” I barked, though Scarlet only hugged me tighter. I couldn’t be truly angry in his embrace. It wasn’t in me.

“That grenade was covered in some kinda poison that these bastards like ta use to break spell shields,” The elderly mare replied, sadly. “It says somethin’ about Glow that she managed to block it anyway. Her eyes will recover. Most of it were scratches, ‘cept the one that cut her cornea. Dug that out mahself.” She paused, then waved away her own digression with a flick of her tail. “Yer colt here was closer to the blast. Got shrapnel in his fe-moral arteries and the surroundin’ muscles. Some quick tourniquets kept him from bleedin’ out, but we can’t magic the metal out and the cells’r dyin’ in spots. Surgery will get the bits out of his flank, but...the ones in his legs means he might lose’em below the knees.”

That rage I’d been suppressing came roaring back and I squirmed in Scarlet’s legs, trying not to brace against him while still trying to wriggle away. I’m pretty sure if he’d let me up, I’d have taken a swing at Apple Bloom. Fortunately, he was also an earth pony, and that counts for an awful lot when you’ve got decent leverage.

I’m sure Apple Bloom was just being honest in her mind, but I was beyond rational, comfortable anger to a place where I needed to hit something. Sometimes I wonder if she’d have let me take my shot. An old, heavily augmented Crusader wasn’t likely to be much bothered by a punch from an exhausted, emotionally drained victim of far-too-many circumstances.

Somepony hurt the stallion I cared about. Somepony was going to die for that.

After a few seconds of fighting with him, I let out a soft whimper and fell onto my side, groaning into his barrel.

“Are you going to do anything dumb if I take my legs off you, Hardy?” Scarlet asked.

“...yes…” I mumbled, slumping miserably in my injured colt’s embrace.

Apple Bloom slid off her chair and trotted to the end of the bed, resting a hoof on my hip. “Like Ah said, wouldn’t be here if Ah didn’t think Ah was needed.”

I peered out of one eye at her. “Miss Apple, I am worn to the bone. If you’ve got anything useful to say, say it.”

“Hrmph...Don’t guess Ah can blame ya fer bein’ a grumpy git,” she huffed, then rested her mechanical hip against the wall. “Well, seein’ as more’n a few of mah people got hurt through the years, Ah spent time working on some shiny new prosthetics. Only thing Ah didn’ have? Money. Got the tech, but don’t got the materials. Bein’ a gang boss for a buncha kids in the most dangerous part of Detrot don’t exactly pay out like yah’d think.”

I blinked and shook my head. “What’s that got to do with right now? I don’t think the materials are in this hole.”

Scarlet gave my ear a light nip. “Hey, goofus. Don’t forget whose home this ‘hole’ is.”

“Right. Sorry…”

Apple Bloom smirked and gave me a poke in the thigh. “Yer’ Deadheart. The Bulldog. Ain’t never heard a whole city refer to one pony like that, cept maybe Canterlot talkin’ about the Princesses. Ya pull off savin’ the Princesses, Ah don’t think they’re gonna smart too hard at spendin’ some Royal bits on onea the ponies what helped ya. If they’re dead, then whoever comes next ain’t gonna be no slouch, either. Maybe Miss Sparkle.”

Taking a breath deep enough to make my lungs hurt, I tried to force calm. Nerves, anger, and depression have their place and their time; Scarlet needed me.

“What’s different about these prosthetics you’ve come up with?” I asked, tilting my chin in the direction of her rear legs. “Those look pretty special.”

“These old things are bucket’s’o’rust compared to mah new designs!” She let out a girlish giggle that was tinged with very-old-mad-scientist. “Ah got synthetic skin sussed! Feels jus’ like the real deal, cept ain’t warm. Ah’ll work out an internal heater, one day. Best bit? Full sensory return!”

Scarlet pulled himself a bit higher in the bed, tugging the sheet along. It was then that I became fully aware of the smell coming off of him; he was soaked in a thick layer of sweat.

“Isn’t that g-good news, Hardy?” he said, quickly covering the catch in his voice with an over-wide smile. I felt my cop senses start to kick in. His hooves were trembling, though he quickly caught where my eyes were and forced them still.

I sat back and gave him a careful appraisal.

“Scarlet, that nurse outside said you refused pain meds,” I said.

His smile twitched, then faded. “I work in an escort parlor. I might keep myself in good shape, but I’m not unfamiliar with sadistic or aggressive clients. Besides...I’m in charge of the logistics. I know how many medications we had stored.”

“So?! You shouldn’t be sitting here suffering!”

Reaching out, Scarlet cupped my cheek in his hoof. I unconsciously rubbed my muzzle against it. His eyes were full of sympathy, though tears still gathered at their corners.

“We don’t have enough pain medications, Hardy,” he explained. “The hospital needs them for patients who can’t handle it. I’m not dying and if I know Stella, he’s already got a team of ponies heading to a pain management clinic or a hospital or something. I promise, I’ll be fine.”

“Scarlet, how can you be so calm about this? You’re going to l-lose your le—”

He put his toe over my lips, silencing me before I could finish.

“I might. I might not. If I do, then you’ll save the world so I’ll get shiny new ones.” He winked and scuffed my mane down over my face. “I can cover them in rhinestones and be the swankiest colt in Equestria.”

My heart was pounding as I slid off his bed. My throat felt like it was full of cotton. He was such a sweet stallion and didn’t deserve to be in the firing line of a world gone mad.

It was another moment before I registered the sensation in my cutie-mark. It was very specific and filled me with a sense of purpose. Fiery heat radiated out from the scales on my flank, though it wasn’t painful.

My thoughts flashed back to all the dead who’d carried me to that moment, standing there in the Vivarium over my...whatever he was...and for an instant, I felt their eyes upon me. They were expectant. They were certain. They knew my weaknesses and they knew I could fail, but still their faith rested on my shoulders.

From somewhere in the shadowed places of my mind, a whisper broke into my thoughts.

‘Justice will be done.’

There was a polite knock on Scarlet’s door that jolted me out of my contemplation.

Scarlet gave me one more smile, then raised his voice and called, “Come in!”

The door opened and Lily Blue stood there with a pair of unicorns flanking her that couldn’t have been more different if they tried. One was a stallion, pudgy and dingy red, like a strawberry icecream they’d been dropped in hot pepper, while his companion was a towering mare with a horn that almost brushed the door sill. She wore a dapper pantsuit and had a permanent sour-faced look that shrieked ‘no nonsense’.

“Oh, hey Hardy! I wondered why Stella wanted us to come here! You need some unicorns who know their illusion and enchantment spells?” Lily said, poking her head inside. “Hey Scarlet. Are you doing okay?”

“I’ve been better, Miss Blue,” he replied, waving a hoof over his legs, then jerking his head in my direction. “Are you here to get him a bath? I’d give him one myself, but it’s hard to scrub a back from a wheelchair.”

“Heh, Ah wondered what that was,” Bloom commented, tapping the side of her muzzle. “Lost most of mah sense of smell in back in thirty-five to an acid breather, but Ah sure as heck scent that.”

“I don’t care who he is! He shall be cleaned before I let my horn anywhere near him!” the tall, snooty-looking mare added. Her companion just nodded, silently, wrinkling his nose.

“Alright, alright, I get it, I stink,” I said, holding up my hooves. “Show me to the soap.”

The room Lily led me to was just off Scarlet’s hallway and tucked into the back of one of the empty ‘general use’ rooms. A giant clawfoot tub was already steaming in the center of the tiled room and filled right to the top with bubbles. Whoever had filled it was nowhere to be found, but considering Stella’s near precognizant staff, it wasn’t hard to imagine somepony filling this tub just because it was the closest. I shrugged and began disrobing as Lily shut the door, leaving her two companions outside.

“So. Illusion magic, then?” I prompted, pulling my hat off and setting it at the foot of the tub.

“Ruby Blue brings out the shine in jewels. I bring out the shine in cherries,” Lily giggled as she started to pull her blood-spattered scrub top off. “By the by, Stella didn’t tell us what you needed a bunch of enchanters for. What are you having us enchant?”

I shrugged my trenchcoat off and piled it alongside my hat, then almost yelped as a gentle pulse of tingling magic surrounded my gun harness, unfastening the straps and pulling loose the buckles. I snatched the Crusader out of its holster before Lily could levitate it off me along with everything else, then set it beside the tub in easy reach. She gave the gun a curious look, then shrugged and pulled a stool from behind the bathroom door, hopping up on it as she squirmed out of her scrubs pants.

I had to stop myself from checking her out too aggressively; all that farm work really did leave her with some magnificent thighs.

“My hat. There’s a dragon scale in the front that I’ll need fiddled with.”

“Dragonscale?” she asked, picking up my hat and tapping metallic scale hidden inside. “Well, you couldn’t have picked a better thing to enchant, I guess. Dragons might resist magic, but their scales are really good spell conductors.”

I tilted my head to give her a look out of one eye. “How does a farmpony know that?”

Lily rolled her lovely eyes at the question. “I did go to magic school, you know. Illusion classes are what every school aged unicorn mare looks forward to and hates worst when she gets there. Now, in the tub with you!”

“Wait, why are you getting undres—”

Her horn flashed and I was yanked bodily off the tile as gravity seemed to reverse itself under me. Before I could work up an appropriately dignified protest, I was dumped muzzle first into the piping hot water. My hooves slid along the bottom as scented bubbles shot straight up my nose, leaving me coughing and spluttering as I tried not to fall straight on my rear.

A second later, the water rose a few inches, right up to my muzzle. I gave a start as a pair of warm legs wrapped themselves around my middle. My befrazzled mind tried to wrap around what was going on, throwing out the panicked possibility of an assassination attempt. As Lily started working her hooves into my shoulder muscles with delicious firmness, all I could bring myself to do was make little whimpering noises and embarrassingly loud moans. I rested my chin on the side of the tub and melted under her ministrations. If this was an attempt on my life, then it was a very pleasant one. The planet is probably lucky she wasn’t an assassin.

As the grime layered off me and my muscles started to unbind, I felt myself begin to involuntarily relax. It was precisely the wrong thing to do, considering the strains of the day. I didn’t really notice the tears until they were already flowing and my breathing started to hitch.

Lily stopped rubbing for just long enough to squeeze me to her, then went back to digging into the iron knots in my back.

Sobbing in a warm bath is probably less bad than anywhere else I could have had a breakdown on that particular day. Strange as it might sound, I wasn’t really feeling the anguish driving my weeping. I felt detached, like I was watching some other poor idiot lie there with streaky eyes and a sniffling nose, bawling his wretched little soul out over how awful it all was.

I don’t know how long I was there. I lost track, though at some point Lily got round to the serious business of soaping the truly vile things out of my tail and mane. The water had long ago turned a dirty brown, but she was quick to empty and refill it, along with a healthy dollop of additional bubbles. I was barely paying attention by that time.

Sleep caught me like a foul ball right in the jaw, and I only realized I’d been unconscious when a big, fluffy towel wound itself around my legs and started scrubbing the water out of my fur. I let out a discontented snort and tried to lift my head, only to catch the towel in the face. Turning, I beheld a soaking wet angel, her fire-engine-red mane plastered to her neck.

Reaching out, I pulled her close and laid my cheek against her neck.

“You look ridiculous, Hardy,” she muttered into my ear.

“I know. But you look wonderful.”

I felt her cheek heat up a little as she replied, “You’re a terrible flirt, you know that? Not that I mind, but I haven’t slept in twenty hours and I just came from the worst day of the worst month of the worst year of my life. Maybe hold the cute until after I’ve had a nap and the world isn’t quite so crazy.”

“Aheh...alright, fair enough. Weren’t you going to go do ‘nurse’ things? Why do I warrant the bath treatment?”

Lily tucked a lock of hair over her ear and let her chin rest on my shoulder. “Are you complaining?”

“Sorry. Got used to finding flies in my ointment, lately.”

Letting out a slightly irritated huff, Lily stepped back to rest her backside on the edge of the tub. “I can see that. Stella sent somepony to ask my supervisor to grab anyone with enchanting experience. Pretty sure he asked for me, specifically, because there’s a dozen other decent enchanters in the building. Amaryllis—she’s the mare who looks like she spends all day eating limes—she used to work for visiting royalty as a personal make-up illusionist. Fly Ash did the holiday decoration spells for most of the malls.”

“Only the best,” I murmured, crawling out of the tub and giving myself a shake. Picking up a second towel that lay beside the bath, I threw it around my neck. “Come on. Let’s go get this done. The pony I’m paying is a fussy sort, so we’ll have to get her specifications right.”

Lily slid out of the tub and started drying her own mane. “Pony you’re paying? Somepony wants...payment? From you? Now? Today?!”

“When you see who we’re paying, you will understand. Or maybe you won’t. Either way, I made a deal.”

“I don’t think I like whoever this pony is very much,” Lily muttered.

“When you meet her, I would strongly appreciate it if you don’t punch her in the teeth. You’ll want to. There are probably lots of good reasons why decking her would be a satisfying thing to do.”

I reached down to grab my hat, but Lily’s magic surrounded it, snatching it away.

“Nuhuh. That stuff smells as bad as you did,” she scolded, “Here, let me.”

Twirling her horn in a tiny circle, she waved it across my clothing. A slight shimmer seemed to settle into the fabric and, after a few seconds, a thin stream of brown liquid splashed off the hems of my coat, dripping onto the tiles in a puddle of something that reminded me uncomfortably of a night some years ago where Taxi dared me to eat twenty tacos. I’d eaten eighteen before the bathroom called.

“There! Not laundry fresh, but your clothes shouldn’t smell quite so much like...whatever awfulness you tromped through. I’m afraid I usually only use that spell to clean up cherries.”

“Huh. Much appreciated.” Leaning over, I gave her a light peck on the cheek, then slid my hat down over my ears and picked up my coat. Lily’s cheeks colored, but she maintained her composure, tucking her tail around one lovely flank. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

I pushed open the bath door to find Amaryllis and Fly Ash sitting side-by-side on the plush bed, a pile of playing cards between them. They looked to be playing some variant of poker, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. As we came in, the mare raised her head and gave a haughty sniff.

“Took you long enough!” she snapped. “I do have other things I could have been doing, you know! In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war on!”

Fly Ash said nothing, but looked equally annoyed at the wait.

Trying not to smirk, I climbed onto the sole chair in the room. “Apologies. This takes precedence for the moment.”

“Then, do please describe what manner of ‘job’ you have press-ganged us into! In these dark days, time is valuable,” Amaryllis groused.

I set my hat on the table. “I’m about to...introduce you to someone. Your job is to listen to every word she says and recreate the enchantment she describes. Can you do that?”

“Harumph! I saw no other ponies outside. Where is this person?” Amaryllis demanded.

Shutting my eyes, I swallowed my anxiety.

‘Gale,’ I thought.

‘I’m here,’ came the quiet reply.

‘It’s time to pay our dues.’

There was a pause. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t matter, one way or the other. A deal is a deal, and she agreed to the rules. I’d rather have her working for me than sulking.’

‘She sulks really loudly sometimes…’

A grumpy, feminine voice joined our little chorus. ‘I can hear you, you know!’

‘We know. Hardy, you want to sleep? I can wake you up when they’re done.’

‘Roger. Keep me from dreaming, if you don’t mind. I need the rest.’

I found myself staring at a pair of bright blue hooves from a strange, sideways perspective through a small jungle of carpet. My jaw stung, my tongue felt like I’d given it a pretty sharp bite, and my ears rang like I had the whole Detrot Police Department phone bank in my head. Smacking my lips, I tasted blood.

“H-Hardy?” Lily stammered.

“I told you not to hit her,” I grunted.

“I...oh, Hardy, I thought—...I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” Lily rushed forward, pulling a small towel from her scrubs pocket and blotting at my face.

Taking the towel, I heaved myself onto my stomach and sat up. Fly Ash and Amaryllis were both sitting on the carpet, eyes wide, staring at me like I’d grown six extra heads. I gently wiped at my nose, then tested to see if she’d broken it; it stung, but a unicorn won’t ever match an earth pony in a round of fisticuffs.

“Not the worst injury I’ve taken today. What did she say?” I asked, getting unsteadily to my hooves. I staggered, and Lily threw herself under my leg, helping me to the bed.

“S-say?”

“To make you hit me.”

Lily’s ears pinned back against her mane. “I...I mean, she didn’t...she was grouchy, but she didn’t say anything. But when we finished casting the enchantment and she went to test it—”

“You saw her and reacted, huh?”

Lily stomped the floor hard enough to vibrate the bed I was on. “That m-monster killed my sister! She killed Ruby! Why did you do...whatever this is?!”

“Lily...she didn’t kill Ruby.”

“I’m not stupid, Hardy! My sister had the helmet!”

I put my hooves on Lily’s shoulders and gently, but firmly pushed her back onto the bed. Glancing up at Fly Ash and Amaryllis, I shot them what must have been one scary look, what with the way they both looked ready to wet the carpet.

“You two are done,” I growled. “Do you need a tip?”

The pair of unicorns scampered out of there so fast you’d think I’d lit their tails on fire, slamming the door behind them.

I breathed a relieved sigh and sat down beside Lily, rubbing my forehead with one hoof. “So, what did she have you do?”

“Don’t you know?” Lily asked, confused.

Picking my hat back off the floor, I examined the inner lining. A series of gently glimmering runes letting off a pale blue light circled the spot that held the dragonscale.

“Our deal was that she gets part time access to the real world, so long as she doesn’t cause trouble and so long as she keeps me alive. This was the best we could hash out. I’m still vague on what sort of spell this is.”

Lily’s horn glowed and she plucked my hat out of my hooves, shoving it down over my ears. “Think the words ‘Free the Moon’.”

I rolled my eyes up to look at my hat, then shrugged. How bad could it be?

‘Free the Moon.’

I waited for something to happen. There wasn’t a hum or a little magical shimmery noise or any of the other gubbins I tended to associate with a spell being cast. All I felt was a slight itch on my scalp.

Meanwhile, Lily was giving me a wary look.

“H-Hardy? Are you still in control?” she asked.

“Of course I—...oh.”

To be clear, there are few sensations in this world more upsetting than hearing an entirely different voice coming out of your muzzle. For a stallion, hearing a mare’s voice when he opens his mouth is even more disturbing. Hearing Nightmare Moon’s voice was enough to give me a full body spiders-dancing-a-jig-on-my-spine sensation.

I went to adjust my hat, then blinked as a dark hoof came into view, attached to a black leg. I rubbed absently at the thick fur and it certainly felt like it was mine.

‘Do you like it, Hard Boiled?’ Nightmare whispered, with a mix of her usual sneering attitude and an underlying sincerity that was a bit uncharacteristic.

There was a short mirror on the back of the bedroom door. I sprinted to it, skidding to a stop and staring at the strange pony in the mirror. It wasn’t quite the disaster I’d worried it would be, but my heart felt like he was going to pop.

Standing on the other side of the mirror was a distressed, black mare. She was my height, though somepony with access to too many fashion magazines had designed her face and body. There was an icy, angular beauty to every inch of her and it was somehow still the familiar lines of the Nightmare’s, despite being a solid half meter shorter than I remembered her being. A billowing, royal blue mane spilled down the back of her neck, wafting about in an impossible wind. From her forehead grew a nasty looking pike of a horn.

I turned sideways and found a pair of wings folded against her sides.

‘No cutie-mark?’ I thought.

‘I am, as you have pointed out, a ‘new’ pony. I may not be my own being, but who knows what I shall become? When I find out, I will add one to the illusion.’

Wincing at what I knew I must do, I carefully lifted my tail. The billowing mass attached to her backside flicked out of the way. Gulping, I quickly let ‘my’ tail drop and sat down, trying to control my breathing.

‘Why in Tartarus do you need that level of anatomical correctness?!’ I tried to shout, internally.

Nightmare’s voice replied with a bit of smug amusement, ‘Accuracy. Besides, the only genitalia I have ever had are yours. It may be amusing to interact with ponies with a different set.’

‘You better keep your ‘interactions’ to yourself, missy! This is still my body, and until we work something else out, you are not using it for that!’ I narrowed my eyes at the image.

An image of a pouting, black filly with wings and horn appeared in my head.

‘Gale, did you send me that or did she? I don’t want to find out she can make me think things,’ I demanded.

‘I did, but it was too cute not to pass on,’ the voice I’d come to recognize as my heart’s answered.

‘I...mmm...fair enough. Nightmare, are we settled up?’

‘For the moment, Detective, we can consider your ‘debts’ paid. I shall do my best to keep you alive, much good may it do me.’

‘All I care about is not eating more bullets than I already have and maybe not letting the world end. We’re going to need ground rules.’

‘Perhaps the first one may regard how psychotic you look when you choose to converse with me in front of other ponies? The mare who punched me is watching us talk. Kick her in the nose for me, would you?’

I blinked, suddenly realizing we weren’t alone. Lily was giving me a curious look as she sat by the bed, fitfully playing with the fur on her fetlocks.

The illusionary mare vanished, leaving just rumpled, but significantly cleaner detective with a few more ribs showing than he last remembered. I smoothed his mane back, adjusted my hat, and straightened up, trying to look like I had some idea what I was doing.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Domestic issues.”

“Y-you were talking to...her?” Lily asked.

“Just laying some ground rules. This enchantment...What’s powering this spell?”

Pushing herself up, Lily tapped my chest. “I don’t really understand the theory, but...while she was...um… ‘in control’ she said it’s powered by your heart. The illusion is in your hat, but the energy is coming from your heart. She gave us the runes to draw, then laid out how the spell should work. I’m afraid I was mostly just a horn with a pony attached.”

Glancing at the floor, I asked, silently, ‘Gale? How long can we maintain that illusion before I need to charge up?’

‘You know I don’t have a clock, right?’

‘Oh...Sorry, I could wear a watch if you like.’

‘It’s okay. I...I’m not sure, but maybe just don’t do more than a couple hours.’

‘Copy that.’

“Can I just say that it’s really weird watching you hold conversations with people inside your head?” Lily commented.

“You should try it from this side, one day,” I replied.

“No, thank you. It sounds like having roommates, and I promised myself that after Ruby and I moved out of our shared room I’d never do that again.”

“She a messy type?”

“The opposite,” Lily exhaled. “She liked to disinfect the ceiling fans. I’m the mess. Well, as much of a mess as you can be on a farm, which is less than you’d think.”

“I wish I’d known her a little better,” I said, quietly.

“You read her diary. Most of the important stuff is in there. She lived in dreams, and when it came time, she made those dreams real.” Glancing at the door, Lily took a deep breath. “Speaking of dreams...The world out there won’t wait very long. What do you plan to do?”

“Plan? Right now, it’s a broad outline, at best. We’ve got maybe twenty-four hours, then there’s going to be a bloody mess in every corner of this city and dragons are going to torch anything not nailed down.”

Lily’s expression gradually sank into an appropriately horrified grimace. “Your ‘broad outline’ includes some ideas on how to stop that, right?”

I turned back to the mirror, studying my own badly worn features. I didn’t much care for the haunted look that seemed to have become a permanent accessory; it gave away too much. Turning from my own reflection, I trotted over to the bed and climbed up on it, flopping on my back as my hat settled down over my eyes. I heard the sound of Lily’s magic, then my hat brim was lifted off my nose.

“Right?” she pressed, worriedly.

Pushing myself up in the bed, I gave her my most level look. “Lily, if it was the entire world and everyone in it...or sending the population of one city to what are probably their deaths, which would you choose?”

Lily was silent for a long moment, then shook her head. “I really want that to be a hypothetical question...”

“We both know it isn’t,” I replied, plucking at the sheet. “In the next day, there will be an army of killers coming to fill the streets with blood. If they succeed then everyone, everywhere, will die. Not just this city. This world will die. Now, I have an army of my own, but it’s composed of my friends, neighbors, and loved ones. So, I’m asking...what would you choose?”

Swallowing sharply, Lily crawled up on the bed and put her front legs around my chest.

“I...I don’t think I could make a choice like that, Hardy,” she murmured.

“If you asked me that a month and a half ago, I don’t think I could have, either. That was me then. Me right now made a deal with Nightmare Moon. She seems to think there’s a way out of all of this, but...it involved me turning her helmet over to the Family and letting them riddle me with bullets just to buy us time.”

Lily made a noise somewhere between a whimper and a shudder. “Please don’t remind me of that. I saw what they brought in. I thought you were dead and they were insane when they started operating on you...”

“Stick around. I might have to pull that trick again, before the end,” I murmured.

“Too many ponies are relying on you for you to waste time being dead,” Lily mock growled, poking the tip of my nose. That brought a small, but genuine grin to my face.

“I’ll do my best not to lie down on the job, then. First, though...I need a nap.”

“Me too,” Lily muttered, tiredly, letting her head drop onto the pillow beside mine. “You want to go down to Scarlet’s room? I don’t think his bed is big enough for the both of us, but he’ll want to make it work.”

I hesitated a moment, then asked, “Are we ever going to talk about what this thing is between the three of us?”

“Probably not,” she replied, her eyelids fluttering shut. “We might all find out we can’t stand each other someday, but right now I just need a couple nice stallions to hold me while I sleep, who don’t mind crying fits. I like him and I like you.”

I tilted my head down too and couldn’t keep some amusement off my face. “You and him have been—”

“He’s a pretty good teddy bear,” she replied. “That’s good enough for me until the world isn’t ending anymore.” She planted a light kiss on my chin and added, “Besides, you owe me some revenge...and I still intend to collect.”

Letting my legs settle around her shoulders, I let my muscles unbind a little.

“I think I can provide a little of both. Stella will send somepony to collect me once the runners get back. I need a snooze.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to try to hero your way through?” she asked, sardonically, but I’d already laid my head back, pulled her cheek against my chest, and shut my eyes.

One night some years ago, I was hungover and maudlin and Juniper was off at some meeting with the department, leaving me entirely to my own devices. Taxi was off doing her ‘thing’ with the buffalo and I’d run entirely out of beer, so without a driver, I was more or less stuck in the apartment. There is nothing worse than a cop’s brain with nothing to do but spin its wheels, so I sat myself down at the desk and wrote out a list of the worst possible ways to wake up.

Straight in at number five was waking up after a night of heavy drinking, closely followed by ‘the day after a funeral’, ‘after a fight you’d lost’, and ‘with a dead body’. Number one didn’t require much internal debate. There was only one evil in the morning that could be worse than hangovers, beatings, and corpses.

I blinked my bleary eyes. I opened my mouth to scream. My breath caught in my throat and a bubble of olive- green magic surrounded the end of my muzzle, cutting short my shriek of terror.

“Good morning, Hard Boiled,” Iris Jade purred, her face inches from mine. “You were magnificent, last night. So rough! I’ve never been ridden better.”

Then she let me scream.

Act 3 Chapter 58 : Ships Passing In The Night

"It's not who you know, Senator. It's what you know about who you know. For instance, I know that you have made deals with certain weapons manufacturers to take control of large military contracts in exchange for boosts to your re-election campaign. My sister and I take a dim view of bribery. After tonight, you may find your prospects looking somewhat bleak."

-Princess Luna, transcribed from the records of the Night Court. The senator in question - one 'Drained Quill' - chose not to run for re-election and subsequently moved to a shack in the woods. He lived out his remaining days with a perpetually egged front door.

To be clear, my brain was still full of cotton and I hadn’t really woken up enough to be called ‘conscious’. I was in that unpleasant in-between state where everything is a little too plausible. I think I can be forgiven for howling like a filly who just found her lingerie drawer full of spiders at the distant prospect that I’d somehow spent the night in bed with Iris Jade.

I don’t remember how I got on the floor on the opposite side of the bed, but Jade was lying there cackling like a madmare as I rolled upright, struggling to get my trigger bit free. It took me a minute to realize my gun was on the bedside table, beside Jade. The ground suddenly swept away from my hooves and I was deposited squarely back on top of the pillows. Jade draped one leg over my waist and pulled me against her.

The panic that’d already subsumed all rational thought threatened to loosen my bowels.

Then, the door of the bathroom banged open and Lily stood, framed in the light, her horn blazing with the makings of what was probably a very dangerous spell. A toothbrush was still stuck out of one side of her muzzle. She took in the image of me with Iris wrapped around my middle and her jaw went slack.

There was a flash of light from overhead; I struggled against Iris Jade’s magical field, but couldn’t move far enough to see what had caused it. After a second, a camera levitated itself down into my vision.

“Good, that is a perfect picture! Jade, you can let him go.”

My heart stopped entirely for about five seconds at the sound of that voice. Iris casually slid off the bed, her telekinesis releasing me. I scrambled at the blankets, managing only to tangle my forelegs in them as I tried to crawl off the other side with all the coordination of a drunk infant. Finally, I gave up and lay still. Escape was likely a non-option. Best let death come quickly.

“Miss Cuddles, if you’re going to tear my head off, could you please do it quickly?” I muttered.

Somepony’s horn hummed, and my legs were unbound.

I rolled onto my stomach and lifted my head.

Swift’s mother stood in the doorway, her yellow fur shaded red by the dim light coming from the hallway. She wore the same flowery apron she’d worn the day the sun went dark and her mane was in the same conservative bun, but she couldn’t have been more terrifying if she’d had three heads and eye-lasers. Her expression held a sort of psychotic glee I recognized well; Swift wore the look every time somepony put a new gun in front of her.

“You two!” Lily barked, having recovered enough to get a good head of steam.

“Yes, what about ‘us two’, hmmm?” Jade chuckled, trotting over to stand beside Swift’s mother.

“Do you have any idea what Hard Boiled has been through today?” Lily demanded.

“I don’t know,” Miss Cuddles snapped, tucking the camera into a bag around her neck. “When Stella sent us down here, it looked awfully much like he was sleeping with a pretty mare. Which he should be ashamed of, considering that poor colt-”

“That is absolutely none of your business, Miss Cuddles! Scarlet knows we were here together, and you do not get to judge me, him, or Hardy!”

“I damn well do get to judge the pony who is supposed to be keeping my daughter safe!” Quickie barked, throwing out her aproned chest. It should have been intimidating. Anypony who knew Quickie should have been intimidated.

Tossing her toothbrush over her shoulder, Lily marched across the room and stuck her nose in the smaller mare’s face. “Your daughter is alive because of this stallion, Miss Cuddles. We are all alive because of him!”

“And that is why I am not choking the life out of him, right now!” Quickie retorted, glaring in my direction with all of her meter of height. “That said, if he is going to keep interfering with mothers, he will get what he deserves!” Hefting her camera, she brandished it at me. “In this case, it’s these pictures going in my family photo album to be distributed to every living thing in Equestria if he fails to bring my daughter back unharmed!”

“You do know he didn’t really make her pregnant, right?” Lily huffed, yanking her mane up into a ponytail.

“And how would I know that?” Swift’s mother grumbled, tucking her camera away in a pocket of her apron. “Swift has been avoiding me since the second she got back! She keeps using those wretched ponies with the special marks to keep tabs on where I am! Her father and I have been worried sick!”

I flicked my eyes toward Jade, only to find her smirking in my direction. This had her hoofprints all over it: harmless, but extremely obnoxious interpersonal chaos with a hint of revenge mixed in. I supposed it was probably what I deserved for getting any part of me involved in her relationship with Cerise.

“Do you not think there are some more important things going on, just now that might preclude the playing of pranks?” Lily admonished, angrily.

“Oh, this wasn’t just a prank! We were sent to fetch Hard Boiled. Stella wants to see you before you leave.” Jade chuckled, smoothing at the corners of her suit-jacket. I realized, just then, that she’d managed to find herself an almost identical suit to the one she usually wore in her capacity as Chief of Police. It was pressed and sharp, minus the rumpled character it’d taken on in her last days as head of the department.

“Sent you or you volunteered?” I asked. “And what do you mean ‘leave’?”

“Six one, half dozen the other, and I don’t know what the dragon meant,” Iris replied, glibly. “I may have promised not to murder you, but that is all I promised. Particularly since Stella has saddled me with helping those mad gangers teach the civilians how to fight. Do you have any idea how many of those unicorns out there can’t find their own horns with a map and a sign hanging off the tip?! How many pegasi can only fly if you stick a fan under their butts?! How many earth ponies can barely bench press their own weight?!”

I sat up a little straighter. “Huh. You haven’t thrown your hooves in the air and killed somepony, yet?”

“I didn’t throw my hooves in the air and kill you, did I?” she bit back.

I swallowed and slid off the bed. “Those pictures-”

“-are going where you’ll never see them, unless I need to take a very personal shit in your life, one day.” Jade jerked her head toward the door. “Miss Cuddles?”

“The same,” Swift’s mother added, flicking one eartip. “You, Hard Boiled, will get my daughter to at least speak to me, or so help me-”

I picked up my revolver off the end table along with my gun harness, deciding to get it on later when I could find a private moment for all the contortions necessary to get it around my legs.

“Swift isn’t avoiding you, Miss Cuddles,” I said. “At least, not for the reasons you think. She’s scared you’ll try to stop her from doing what she needs to do. She doesn’t want to hurt you by disobeying you.”

“And what does she need to do that I would want to try to stop her from doing?!” Quickie seethed, narrowing her eyes at me.

“Save the world, maybe the city, or die trying,” I replied.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lily wince.

‘Hard Boiled, if you want me to keep us alive, I would appreciate if you stop saying things like that to unicorns who can rip all of your composite molecules apart,’ Nightmare Moon murmured in the back of my thoughts.

Quickie’s horn light shimmered for a moment then died, flickered, then died, as though she were going down an extremely long list of ways she could respond and not finding one with adequate self-expression. Her face was frozen in a mix of shock and outrage, wavering back and forth. Like a collapsing house finally settling into its own foundations, she dropped onto the carpet.

“Until just now, I did not realize why my daughter looked at you with such admiration,” she whispered. “But it’s not bravery, is it? You’re insane. You want to die.”

I grinned at her, tipping my hat back. “Of course not. I want to live a long, happy life with my loved ones in safety, comfort, and peace. I want to play with my children at the park. I want to go home to a warm hug and kiss at the end of the day.”

Quickie’s lip twitched as she scooted back a little on the carpet. “You think we’re all going to die...and...a-and you’re okay with that?!”

Iris Jade rolled her eyes. “Of course he is. He’s Dead Heart, remember?”

“You know I never took that crap seriously,” I grunted.

“No?” Iris quirked an eyebrow, then swept a hoof out to encompass the whole building. “Those people out there do. They see you waltz in here smelling of bodies and they see a saviour who will deliver them. I don’t have that luxury. I know you, Hard Boiled.”

“What does that mean?” Lily asked, stepping over to stand beside me in a slightly defensive position, much good might it have done if either of the other mares decided to attack me. “He’s done more to save this city than you have, Miss Jade!”

“Oh, yes. And that is one more thing for me to hate him for,” she growled, tugging at her own collar as she glared in my direction. “Nopony has ever made me feel as helpless as this sack of stinking feces in a trench coat. Not my ex-husband. Not the ponies who stole my daughter. Not even my daughter. He’ll burn this city and everyone in it to save the rest of the planet. I hate knowing that, even if this crisis is somehow resolved without all of us dying, he’ll still be out there, somewhere. He’ll still be that pony who once held my life in his hooves. The drunk. The cop I wanted to fire. The mopey sad wreck, clinging to life because he’s too stubborn to die. How pathetic is the world if it needs someone like him to save it?”

Not waiting for an answer, Iris stomped to the door. She paused in the doorway and waved her horn in Quickie’s direction, her magic snatching the camera out of Quickie’s apron before the other mare could react. With a loud sniff, Jade stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to send a burst of wood splinters shooting off the lock and hinges.

I sat in silence for a moment, then looked up at Miss Cuddles, who was quietly shuffling her hooves like a teenage filly who’d been caught out after hours. I supposed I could understand her state of mind; she’d just been convinced to prank a pony who she’d thought was relatively harmless, only to find she had a tiger by the tail. Nothing wrong with that, particularly as I knew exactly how manipulative Iris was capable of being. She’d probably told her it was a solid way of getting Swift to come talk. In an irrational world, lots of crazy things suddenly start sounding perfectly sane.

“Miss Cuddles, can we pretend the last ten minutes didn’t happen and you just knocked on my door, alone?” I asked, quietly.

Quickie dug at the carpet with a hooftip, then slowly nodded. “I would very much appreciate that. I’m sorry-”

“Please, don’t,” I said, holding up a hoof to forestall the apology. “Just take me wherever Stella wants me.” I turned to Lily and asked, “You coming?”

Lily gave me an appraising look. “You have that same expression on your face that you had right before we drove out to the Family’s mansion.”

I flicked my eyes toward the mirror. The stallion who stared back looked like a ghost who’d seen three other ghosts, all meaner and scarier than he was.

“That’s about right,” I muttered. “I’m about to walk into a room full of ponies with families and try to sell them on something that might be suicide.”

“Worse than anything else you’ve done?” she asked.

“Probably.”

“I’ll get a cup of coffee and come with you. Sleep can wait.”

“For me? Yes. I can just plug into a wall if I need some extra energy. You need it, but if you don’t mind keeping an eye on Scarlet, I’d appreciate if he had some company more pleasant than Applebloom. And make sure he gets some pain meds when one of the salvage teams gets back.”

Lily gave me a quick salute, then added, thoughtfully, “The rumor mill is already going, I bet, particularly with Amaryllis out there. This place has more gossips than my home town, where you could start a rumor at one end, then it would beat you to the other at a dead gallop.”

“Hence, my escort.” I jabbed a toe over my shoulder, then turned to Swift’s mother. . “Would you do me the kindness of leading the way?”

Quickie’s ears lay back. “A-are you sure you want me-”

“If I took people trying to murder or blackmail me personally, I don’t think I’d have many friends.”

Her shoulders drooped and she kneaded the edge of her apron with one hoof. “I...I think that is the saddest true thing a pony has ever said out loud, Mister Boiled. ”

“Yeah, life has been like that, lately.”

I don’t know why I thought I would make it out of there without being mobbed, but it wasn’t in the cards. Still, letting ponies see their hero - particularly considering what I was about to ask them to do - was good for morale. Unfortunately, it didn’t help my state of mind much.

Quickie took the lead, marching down the hallways full of the injured with me in tow, her horn letting off threatening sparks that suggested bad things might happen to anypony who delayed us. I stumped along behind her, my freshly-washed mane billowing out magnificently and my head held high, mostly so I didn’t walk directly into Quickie’s rear end if she stopped suddenly. Lost as I was, I had to settle for doing my best to look like I knew where I was going.

Thankfully, it only took the Stilettos a few minutes to get organized and start clearing all but the most injured from the main halls. That left dozens of patients, restricted to beds and cots, their nurses holding them down as they tried to get a look at the ‘Detective’. At crossways and intersections, groups of ponies had gathered to gawk as I passed by.

At one point, a foal huddled on a bed beside a mare I presumed to be her mother reached out and touched the trailing edge of my coat. I blinked down at her, and her cheeks turned bright red as her mother gave me an apologetic smile. I forced a smile before moving on.

“I knew they were going to spread some stories around about me, but I did not know it was going to be like this,” I murmured.

Somehow, Quickie must have heard me, because she replied, “Everypony listens to Gypsy’s broadcasts. She tells stories about the people in the city doing good works.”

“About me?” I asked.

“Frequently. I don’t listen much myself, but it has been going on for some time.”

“Huh...What’s she saying these days? I’m afraid I haven’t had time to listen to the radio, lately.”

Quickie looked over at a young Aroyo stallion, his face covered in tattoos, staring at me from a wheelchair. Further down, several more sets of eyes watched from corners or cracked doorways. At our attention, they all snapped back to what they’d been doing.

“She...She says you went to Supermax and rooted out a cult of Nightmare Moon...and somehow turned them into your servants while doing it. You saved the police department. You have griffon clans that bow down to you. You died and came back to life...a couple of times.” Frowning, Swift’s mother turned to look up at me from her diminutive height. “I’ve no idea how much of that is bull-hockey, but Iris Jade seems to think you’re only one step away from being as bad as those monsters out there who sent the beasts to attack us. Should I believe her?”

“Swift thinks I’m alright,” I chuckled.

“Swift is-” Quickie drew in a deep breath, halting whatever thought had been about to come out of her mouth. “My daughter is a smart mare, but she’s not above being blinded by loyalty. Her safety is my foremost concern.”

I was about to respond with something trite and probably not very comforting when the colt in the wheelchair suddenly sat up straight. His eyes began to shimmer with inner light.

“I’ll be safe, Mom.”

Swift. That was Swift’s voice, coming out of the little stallion’s body.

Lifting one foreleg he revealed a red crescent burned into the fur on one side of his barrel.

Quickie’s breath stalled as she stared into the colt’s glowing eyes.

“D-detective...ex...explain t-this right now, p-please,” she stuttered, spinning to glare up at me.

“Em...complicated?” I replied, lamely.

“Un-comp-lic-ate it!” Quickie growled, enunciating each syllable.

“I don’t think I can do that, Ma’am.” I coughed into my hoof, gesturing at the colt. “You wanted to talk to Swift? Now is your chance.”

“Mom, it really is me,” the possessed pony said. “I’m taking care of...well, a lot of things right now, but you’ll get to meet me at Supermax real soon, okay?”

“Kid, where exactly are you?” I asked.

The colt looked down for a moment, then grinned at us. “I’m downstairs, in the Vivarium’s power room. Uh...I have one hoof in an energy transformer at the moment and I don’t know how long Tourniquet is going to want to keep pumping me electricity just so we can talk, but-”

“T-transformer!” her mother squeaked. “Why do you have your hoof in a-”

“It was the only way for me to talk to a friend of mine.” Swift shook her head and sighed. “I’ll explain later, okay, Mom?” The colt looked up at me. “Sir, I’ve been coordinating the marked ponies, but this takes a heap of energy. Tourniquet had to brown out most of south town, but...we’ve got partial communication anywhere there is a major power backbone. I’m heading to Fortress Everfree to interface directly.” The stallion’s expression grew apprehensive, then he added, “C-could you bring my mom? I think it’s time she met Tourniquet.”

“Kid, we’re about to have a meeting with all the major players right here,” I said.

The colt shook his head. “The Vivarium isn’t safe, Sir. I convinced Stella to get everyone to Supermax.”

“You, kid?”

“Executive decision, Sir. Particularly since you made me deal with that stinky tunnel full of slippery goop earlier today.”

Swift’s mom went stiff as a board. “L-little bird, what are you talking about?”

The colt’s eyes flicked up and to the left, then his face turned bright pink. “Nothing, Mom! I gotta go! See you soon!”

As the glow in the young stallion’s eyes faded, he grinned up as us. “Oyo! Deadheart! I and I did not see ye!” He blinked, then his expression lit up. “Ah! De Brethren says I and I be ridden by de Warden herself! That be an honor. When ye be seein’ de Shadow Lady, tell her I and I be grateful!”

“Can’t you tell her that yourself?” I asked.

“Aye, and I does every day! But it do be meanin’ more if ponies that be not in de link of minds say it, yeah?” he chuckled, then turned his wheelchair and pointed at the hall. “Go! De sea serpent, he wish to be seein’ ye.”

‘Never going to get used to that,’ I thought, then gently tugged at Quickie’s foreleg as she stood there, stunned, staring at the injured stallion. He gave her a saucy wink, then set off down the hall in the direction we’d come.

“Hard Boiled...That was my daughter’s voice coming out of that pony’s mouth,” Quickie breathed.

“Yes, it was. I can’t say that’ll be the oddest thing you’ll see, today,” I said, then gestured at the hall. “Shall we?”

“B-but those were just rumors!” she protested, stomping a hoof. “I mean, I thought maybe they used walkie-talkies or something to speak to each other, but none of the brethren or Aroyos or whatever they call themselves would tell me how they kept informing Swift of my whereabouts. They would only say she’d see me when she was ready!”

Gently taking her shoulders, I lead her to one side of the hall, away from the prying ears of the various ponies still watching us. Lowering my voice, I said, “I can’t really prepare you for what you’re going to see when we get to Supermax, Miss Cuddles. You are not walking into a sane situation, but I will say this: your daughter might be the safest person in Detrot.”

“How?! She spends every day with you!”

“She’s very good at making friends,” I replied.

“What sort of friend allows her to use ponies as...as puppets?!”

“A very good one. Now come on. Stella is waiting.”

Quickie tried to press me for more answers, but I just marched along with my head down until she trotted around in front of me and went back to sulkily twitching her horn at anybody who got too close. It was awkward, but preferable to trying to explain the events of the last few weeks to my partner’s mother. She already thought I was insane; no need to confirm it.

At the stairwell, a fresh guard nodded us through the ‘employee only’ door with nary a moment wasted.

Down in the catacombs, I could finally breathe.

I hadn’t realized it, but the scent of blood and disinfectant was starting to claw at the edges of my sanity. Of course, everything was clawing at the edges of my sanity. My sanity probably looked like the rug of that cat hoarder Juniper and I found dead in her flat some years back.

Lost in thoughts of cheerier times, I was brought up short by a firm yank on my tail. Glancing around, I realized Quickie had my backside firmly grasped in her magic and a determined expression on her face. It was odd how closely that look mirrored her daughter’s. Or maybe not odd at all.

“Mister Hard Boiled… before I formulate a proper response to what I heard upstairs, I need to ask you something,” she said.

“Ask away, Miss Cuddles. It’s not as though we’re on a twenty-four hour time frame to keep the world from dying in ice and fire.”

“You were just in the bath! I’m pretty sure you can spare me a minute, here!” she snapped, prodding me in the chest with her hooftip.

I took a deep breath. “Fine.”

“I need to know, for the sake of everyone who is counting on you, if you believe there is a chance of success with whatever this plan of yours is.”

I shook my head. “Do you want an honest answer to that?”

“Yes, if you please.”

“Then...I have no idea,” I replied, drawing circles in the air beside my head, “What I am about to do is so far off the end of ‘may work’ or ‘may not’ that there’s no good metric. I’m expecting to lose people. How many? Maybe most of them. The only number I find unacceptable is everyone, but that’s only because it means I have failed entirely. Do you have any more questions with answers I’m doing my best not to think about?”

Quickie’s ears flattened to the sides of her head. “You’re...you’re going to try to save everypony, though, right?”

“Yes. And I mean that. If I could die once for every good pony who may die tomorrow, you best believe I would. But I can’t. I can only die for me, and I’m pretty bad at that.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So it’s true, then?”

I gave her an uncomprehending look. “What’s true?”

“My husband...my husband wouldn’t tell me what he did when you came in last time. Only that you were alive. I’ve heard the rumors and stories, though. You don’t die.”

“Oh, don’t mistake me. I die. I die and die. Death and I are getting to be good friends. Last time, I was...well, I was indisposed when it happened. The time before-”

The memories hit me like three tons of bricks dropping out of the sky.

I breathed in and suddenly smelled the scent of my own searing flesh for an instant. My tongue suddenly felt several sizes too large as the memories burst up from the dank, filthy well they spent most of their days in and I was back on that gurney, my flesh regrowing, my eardrums reknitting themselves. I heard my own screams echoing in my ears and felt Broadside’s hot breath on my ear as he told me his plan to rape and murder everyone I cared for. The fear welled up inside me and became a tide, roiling across my mind.

Time slipped.

Muzzle flashes lit up the air. Smoke billowed. The flames licked at my backside, boiling the skin off my body. Blood pooled around my face.

A murderer grinned at me, his mouth full of too many teeth. I heard my useless, unanswered screams as the familiar stairs of my family home burned around me. I clawed towards them with my one functional knee, trying desperately to crawl away from the fire, though it clung to me like an obsessive lover.

I’m not entirely certain how I got on the floor, but several minutes must have passed. Quickie was at my side, her hooves clutched around my neck, gently rocking me like a foal. Her forelegs barely fit around my barrel.

My face was wet again. Soaked. I missed that happening.

I became aware of Nightmare Moon’s voice, strangely muted, shrieking in the back of my head. She seemed pretty upset, but what was there to do? Nothing could keep the fire away. Soon, I’d go back into the fire and they’d patch me up again and then burn me again. It was inevitable.

With a silent thought to Gale to keep the Nightmare from snatching control of my body, I buried my face in Miss Cuddles’s mane.

It couldn’t have been that long, though it felt it. The dimly lit tunnels didn’t see much traffic, but I’m sure somepony would have eventually come looking for us if I’d been terribly late for my meeting with Stella. They’d come find me and drag me to the pyre, where I’d smell my skin bubbling like last time, and the time before.

How many times had the fire been? I’d lost count of my deaths. Did I die in my sleep, sometimes?

“Hard Boiled,” Quickie whispered.

I lifted my head and, for just an instant, I thought I could almost see my mother’s face. There was no strength in me to push her away. The cauldron of emotions boiling inside me was inches from overflowing, but those kindly eyes soothed it.

She cupped my face in her hooves and gave me a tender kiss on the forehead. A mother’s kiss. A kiss I didn’t deserve, because I’d been such a bad pony. I’d failed too many times, and so many died.

The throb in my ears receded as my heart began to slow.

‘Gale, what’s the score?’ I asked. ‘Why am I losing it?’

‘I...I can’t bury all of your memories all of the time, unless you want to forget how to walk, too’

‘Right. Understood.’

Choking down another sob, I braced myself on the wall and carefully stood on quaking legs.

“M-my apologies, Miss Cuddles,” I mumbled.

“I don’t think I’m the one deserving apologies,” she replied, stepping back and adjusting my coat. “I didn’t recognize how much of that glibness is an act. You are…-”

“They called it ‘shell shock’ during the war. I’m aware. Nothing I can do about that right now, though.”

She raised a hoof to touch my cheek, then the pouch over my heart. “Have you been having these...these attacks for long?”

I shrugged without much conviction. “A few years. More often in the last couple months. Stress brings them on, you know?”

Quickie gave me an incredulous look. “And you just carry on, like that? You’ve been to a therapist, right?”

“My last therapist quit on the spot after I described finding a dead pony who’d died attempting sexual intercourse with an enchantment-driven vacuum cleaner.”

There was a soft, quickly buried snort. I glanced over at Quickie who was desperately trying to keep a smile off her face. She covered her mouth with one hoof.

“You’re not serious…”

Her eyes jerked wide open as she saw I wasn’t laughing.

“You are serious! How on Equestria do you keep going like this?!”

Looking over my shoulder, I pointed at my cutie-mark. “Justice is my talent. There’s a whole big world out there needing a heaping helping of justice right now.”

Shaking her head, Quickie edged in beside me as we began trotting back in the direction of Stella’s chamber. “Mercy...Well, I will say this: if I were still working, you’d have just earned yourself a couple of freebies.”

I snickered under my breath. “I’m pretty sure Swift wouldn’t approve, much less your husband.”

Quickie gave me a look that was so practiced in its steamy sultriness that, against all odds, I felt my collar start to heat up. Something in the way her eyelids dipped and her lips pursed made me start sweating, despite the cool air of the caverns. I inhaled sharply and took a quick step back.

Like a light, she switched off whatever magic she’d just done, and I was left with a disturbing sense that I’d just dodged what might have been a worryingly enticing bullet.

“My husband met me in a brothel, Mister Boiled. He doesn’t mind my hobbies. Still, you’re right about Swift. My mother and I might have taken to this lifestyle, but Swift’s a fighter, not a lover.”

“Once you meet Tourniquet, you might have other opinions,” I said.

“That’s the ‘Lady of Shadows’ the gang ponies mention sometimes, right? That’s a bit of a sinister name for someone who is...what is she? Some kind of goddess to them?”

“The short version is she used to be a pony. Now she’s something more. Some Crusades era technology and a mother with the morality of a rabid rattlesnake built us an ally. Swift made her a friend.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“Like I said earlier: time frame.”

Quickie and I arrived outside of Stella’s chamber to find the door open, but only two lowered voices murmuring in the cave. A heavenly scent wafted out, and I quickly found my mouth watering. My stomach let out a distressed grumble. How long had it been since I’d had food? I couldn’t remember.

Almost on cue, Stella called from the far end of his lair, “Ah! Is that a tummy rumbling I hear? Only one pony’s belly makes that throaty bellow! Come in, Detective!”

In the short time I’d been gone, somepony had moved the table covered in plans off to one side of the catwalk and set up a small card table with several plates on it. I sniffed at the air, and...bagels.

I don’t remember crossing the room, nor anything much for the next few minutes as I buried my face in a giant basket of bagels, smearing cream-cheese from one ear to the other. It was like being a hog in mud after all the agonies of the day. Jelly and jam ended up in my eyebrows and butter in my tail, but it mattered not; I had what I needed. Sanity would survive a little longer.

I’m not too proud to say I snarled when, after several moments of gorging, somepony touched my shoulder.

‘No! We must have more of these delicious rings of dough! Do not let them take us away to do more painful things!’ Nightmare hissed in my thoughts. I felt her trying to jiggle my legs to bat the light blue hoof off my shoulder and that was all I needed to sink out of my euphoric bagel-rage.

Following the hoof up to a leg, then a shoulder, I found myself staring into Limerence’s calm face. He still wore a bandage around his head, though it looked freshly changed. Somepony had washed his outfit and cleaned the blood off of him, but he could have done with a shower. His sword was propped against the catwalk railing behind him.

“Lim!” I dropped my bagel, leaping to my hooves. Rearing back, I put my hooves on his shoulders, turning him this way, then that. “I thought your goose was cooked!”

Awkwardly patting me on the back, Limerence stepped back and rubbed at the base of his horn. “Not cooked, no, but I will be picking things up with teeth and hooves for a day, at least. I’ve just been filling in Miss Stella on the finer details of our recent expedition. Your explanation of my improvisation with the nested portals was atrocious. Not inaccurate, but atrocious.”

“I have a rule about plans, Lim. If I need a physics textbook, then it is too complicated,” I replied, before sitting back down with my bagels.

It was then I realized Quickie was perched daintily beside the card table, tearing pieces off a pastry with her magic and stuffing them into her mouth. Without looking up she said, “If you hiss at me over a doughnut, Mister Boiled, I will turn you over my knee.”

“Right,” I muttered, then turned back to Lim. “I thought you were going to be checked out for the entire day.”

Limerence quickly covered his mouth and let out a little yawn, then gave himself a shake. “As did I, but...well, nightmares have a way of asserting themselves at inconvenient times.”

“The Office?”

“What else?” He paused, seemed to think for a moment, and then his shoulders drooped. “Ah. Right. Everything else. Well, in this case, yes, the Office was the subject of my dreams.” Reaching behind himself, he unlimbered his sword and set it down at my hooves, giving it a gentle push for emphasis.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your murder weapon and your murderer, Detective,” he replied.

My jaw must have fallen open, because I had to close it after a moment. Studying the staff-blade, I put one hoof on the haft and the other on the sheath, carefully pulling them apart. A terrified face with an open, screaming muzzle stared back at me from the metal.

“When you said that crap about using your brother’s soul as a mana battery, I don’t think I really thought about what that meant,” I muttered.

“Is that...necromancy?” Quickie whispered, her eyes widening as she looked at the enchanted blade.

“No. Something like it, but not quite. My brother...well, as you said a moment ago: explanations that require textbooks. Ultimately the how is irrelevant. The why is very important, though. My brother is the butcher we have hunted all this time.”

I sighed and pulled the sword out of the sheath entirely. “He carried a cane. We found hoofprints on the rooftop of the High Step that suggested a pony carrying a cane. He had the poison that steals souls. He was a necromancer. He knew the access codes for control of the Archive. This...weapon…”

“Yes. Serrated, for cutting bone,” Limerence murmured, then looked up at his own forehead and added, “-or horn.”

“That is him, then,” Stella said, with a certain finality. “There is a strange poetry to the notion that he be locked away in his own weapon.”

Lifting the blade, I held it in front of me with both forelegs. “Stella? I believe our deal is done.”

“Our deal, Detective?” the serpent asked, reaching down to pick up the sword and hold it between two fingers like a toothpick. Tilting the weapon so it caught the light, he studied the terrified face on the edge.

“This the murderer of Professor Fizzle,” I began, then lowered my head.

“The murderer of Don Tome,” Limerence growled, clenching his fetlock to his chest as though in pain.

Reaching into my pocket to feel where Ruby’s diary still lay, tucked safely away in a pocket dimension, I felt my breath quicken. The fury was there, but it was muted by the sadness. It was all such a waste for cruel ambition.

“This is the murderer of Ruby Blue.”

So that was it.

We’d done it.

It’d been two months since I stood in that alleyway over the body of the poor mare who’d come to Detrot with her big dreams and found an open grave waiting for her. She died for all the wrong reasons, and the pony who’d killed her had received true justice. Zefu’s body was reduced to ash, and his soul lashed into a sword and forever at his brother’s mercy.

Blood for blood, as they say.

Sometimes justice is its own reward.

Unfortunately, the players were still at the table and the game hadn’t yet reached the final hand.

The beasts that’d once been the city’s elite were sitting in their nests, waiting for the signal to lay waste to the population. Broadside was somewhere preparing his brainwashed troops for another round of slaughter. D.W. was still waiting in his ivory tower, a spider squatting at the center of a web of dark wishes.

Some say that Justice is blind.

I don’t believe that.

Justice sees all.

It’s the actions of people that determine where her sword will fall and where the scales will balance.

She’s just waiting for someone brave enough, or crazy enough, or desperate enough to pull off the blindfold.

Stella set the blade down and swam back to his throne, heaving himself out of the water into the giant chair and draping his tail across one of the arms. Picking up a snifter the size of a of frying pan full something that smelled like paint thinner, he swirled it before taking a deep draught. Setting down the glass, he regarded me with those cool, slitted eyes that gave away nothing.

“I will consider our deal ‘done’, Detective,” the dragon murmured. “You have done your father proud. And your grandfather, I suppose.”

Putting my back hooves together, I swept my tail around them and stood to the straightest attention I was able.

“I’m about to ask more of you. You know that, right?”

Stella nodded. “I suspect I know what you will ask, so...my forces are yours until the sun is in the sky again.”

“Then I think it’s time for me to go meet Swift at Supermax,” I replied. “We’ll have a briefing as soon as I get there.”

Limerence put a leg out to stop me. “Detective, there’s...one last thing that we need to discuss before we go. I believe you will find this significant.”

“I’m listening,” I said, sitting back down.

“Should we keep my daughter waiting?” Quickie asked, wiping cream cheese off her muzzle with the hem of her apron. “I’m sure all of that was very meaningful to you, but I am afraid I am out of your loop.”

“I’ve learned to listen when he tells me something is important,” I answered, then held out my hoof for Limerence to continue.

Sliding a hoof under his vest, Limerence retrieved a small black satchel with a zipper and a thin, velvet covered book. “These were on my brother’s body. His spell book and...well, something else. I have pieced through the spells and they might be of some interest to academics, but unless one wishes to abandon their mortal shell, they’re of little use to us. That said, this-” He held up the bag and unzipped it, holding it toward me. “-is something worthy of examination.”

Quickie and I leaned forward to peer into the satchel. With a gasp, Swift’s mother drew back, covering her mouth with her hooves. I squinted at the strange objects inside: several variously colored cones of different sizes and lengths. I blame exhaustion for how long it took for it to click.

“Unicorn horns,” I muttered, then looked up. “These are-”

“Trapped souls, Detective,” Limerence finished for me. “The grey ones I believe to have been largely drained of their essence. Most likely gone mad. I know enough dark spellwork to break them and send them on to the beyond, but it will take considerable time. There was one, however-”

Reaching into his vest pocket, he pulled out a bright blue horn and set it on the card table between us. It glittered with inner power, shimmering like a prism in the sun. Fiery lances of energy arced from base to tip, following the thin spiral up the shaft.

I felt the circle beginning to close as a strange weight settled around my shoulders. A hint of cherry perfume wafted past my nose. I’m sure if I’d listened closely, I could have heard some mad god of fate laughing his flank off.

I didn’t have to ask whose horn it was.

There was nopony else that it could be.

“Ruby…”

Act 3 Chapter 59 : Home Again

"Why do we not invade Equestria, my son?

Because they are insane.

You see a weak, helpless country full of creatures with fur and flesh; no fangs, no talons, no beaks. However, if you had paid better attention in the war-master's classes then you would remember your histories. These creatures beat back armies with little more than friendship, baked goods, and their accompanying madness.

When faced with an overwhelming foe, what do they do? They sing.

If ever they should have cause to take up real arms, beware my son. Peaceful they may appear, but make no mistake: they are mad."

-Griffin Lord Bannertorn to his eldest child, transcribed into the Griffinstone Court Record Circa 831 Old Griffin Calendar.

“Is she…?”

“Aware? Not in a conventional sense, I don’t believe. She cannot hear us, if that’s what you mean.”

“Can you free her?”

“Not quickly. The necessary spells require extensive preparation.”

“How much preparation?”

“Several weeks, at least. I would not wish to rush for fear of getting it wrong. There are worse things that can happen to a soul than being trapped in a body part.”

“Can...I take this with me?”

“Her horn? That’s a bit macabre, Detective, but...I don’t see why not. Horns are quite durable.”

“Don’t tell Lily.”

“Of course.”

Quickie and Limerence accompanied me back toward the garage, going via the most discreet route we could if only because I didn’t much care for the idea of a crowd just then. Sure, the ponies of the Vivarium could probably have used a show, but they’d have to get by with Quickie marching me down to Stella’s room. Besides, what was I going to do? A song and dance?

I didn’t hear him fall in behind us, but Bones had appeared at some point holding up the rear. He’d cleaned himself and acquired a fresh pack of smokes. There was even a hint of cologne wafting around him.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t entirely avoid the building’s other occupants. While they never got in our way, the crowds were at every corner. Thankfully, Stella had found us an exit that would go up to the surface and not involve tromping through the lube dump.

“—that’s him? I heard he died—”

“—cousin is on the surgical team that brought his body in. He was burned alive—”

“—that skeleton was in the shower room just having a bath like it was nothing—”

“—Quickie Cuddles? Our Warden is her daughter!”

“—the one they’re calling the ‘Librarian’. He’s some kind of super-mage—”

I tried to shut out the conversations and focus on putting my hooves in front of one another; just follow Quickie’s flank and don’t listen to them.

‘She must have known,’ I thought.

‘Of course she knew! Did she not say as much in her diary? That mare might not have seen everything, but she saw enough to upset all of my plans. It would be nice if I knew, now, what those plans were,’ Nightmare put in, testily. An image of her sitting atop a lounging seat with a cup of tea held between her forehooves resolved in my mind’s eye.

‘You don’t know?’ I asked.

The picture of Nightmare bared its fangs. ‘I was never meant to have a personality! Giving me sentience came with a storage cost, which included many of my instructions! I am little better than a calculator with complicated feelings, now! I’ll kindly ask you not to rub it in!’

‘Alright, then, calculator. Tell me about Ruby. How did she know her horn would end up in my possession?’

There was a moment’s pause, then the Nightmare shook her head. ‘Even the best precognition suffers with specific details. My armor provides incredibly specific future sight, but...not specific enough for this. Whatever Ruby Blue saw, it must have been influenced by external factors.’

‘You think these ‘powers that be’ who keep interfering might have had something to do with it? Maybe they showed her something she wasn’t supposed to know?’

‘The ‘Juniper Shores’ character you keep interacting with is definitely something more than a fragment of your broken psyche.’

‘I figured that out a while ago. What is his game?’

‘I do not know. He seemed to think there were ‘interested parties’ out there who were influencing events here in Equestria. If there are indeed other intelligences in the cosmos, then it is possible they have a stake here.’

‘You think?’

‘This entity that the Family found out in the woods is something that beings beyond our reckoning do not want freed to such an extent that they were willing to violate any number of natural laws to ensure it remains locked away. It is also an entity which was able to—despite their intervention—bring the world to the brink of the current disaster.’

‘You’re not making me feel better, here, Nightmare.’

‘When you want to feel better, you should spend an evening letting that pretty colt service your—’

I was jostled out of my thoughts as Quickie came to a stop in front of me. Glancing around, I realized we were back in the halls near Scarlet’s room, but at some point the crowds had fallen back, leaving us relatively alone. At the far end of the hall, a Stiletto mare was standing beside a doorway, standing nimbly on her back hooves with her forelegs spread wide across the opening, holding back several rubberneckers. She shot me a quick smile.

Pulling off her apron, Quickie carefully folded it and set it to one side of the hall, then stood up and tilted her head back to study the ceiling. “There is a teleport rune hidden here,” she said. “It’s single use, but it will get us outside. My mother put them all over the club during the war. This is probably the only one left.”

“Where does it come out?” Limerence asked.

“On street level near the—” She trailed off, catching sight of Bones out of the corner of her eye. Shying back a couple of steps, she stared at the skeleton. I looked back and forth between them, then let out a soft ‘oh’.

“Sorry, Quickie Cuddles, this sneaky prick is my grandfather, Hard Boiled the senior. Bones, say hello to—”

‘Swift’s mother, yes. I do pay attention,’ Bones sniggered. ‘I also don’t think I will ever get tired of the expression of a pony seeing this body for the first time.’ Sweeping his hoof out to one side in a courtly manner, he bowed low, forehead almost touching the carpet. ‘It is lovely to meet you, Miss Cuddles. Your daughter is an extremely impressive mare.’

Quickie pulled a recovery that was one for the record books. Pulling her hooves in tightly together, she swept her tail over her flank and let the nasty looking spell that’d been gathering around her horn fade. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to relax.

“I really need to stop discounting any of the rumors I hear about you people,” she muttered, trotting in a little circle around my grandfather. “Are you the ‘hallucination’ who keeps taking people’s liquor and cigarettes, then beating them at cards?”

‘The same,’ he replied, straightening. ‘Now, then...we have a job. Miss Taxi has loaded the vehicle and should be keeping it warm.’

Quickie glanced back at me. “Every time I think you’ve convinced me that my daughter’s judgement is the least bit sound, I am reminded she’s working with you and this...freakshow.”

“You’ve seen her teeth. She fits right in. I can guarantee, though, that Bones is not the weirdest thing you’re likely to see today,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to stay here?”

With a little shrug, she lifted her head, and magical energies gathered around the tip of her horn again.

“I was in for this penny. Might as well be in for the pound, too.”

I’ll never get used to teleporting. It’s an awful way to travel and I’m thankful most of the unicorns I interact with on a regular basis aren’t capable of it. Teleporting via an ancient, single use rune that probably hadn’t been reforged since before I was born was even worse.

The four of us appeared in an explosion of light that lit up the whole street for a half second, leaving my eyes aching and blurry. The alley we’d appeared in was just off the square where the remains of the shopping center the Vivarium was built under still smouldered with slowly dying embers. Staggering out of the tiny circle of ponies, I sagged against the wall, breathing heavily as vertigo almost tipped me off my hooves. The air was chilly, but it helped focus my mind.

‘Not gonna puke. Not gonna puke. I just had all those bagels. I refuse to lose them.’

Somepony gently patted me on the back and I looked up to find Bones at my side, his glowing eyes flickering in the half-light.

‘Heh, I never got used to teleporting while I was alive, either. Turns out not having flesh has bonuses. You alright, colt?’ he asked.

“Peachy. Where’s the truck?”

There was a soft rumble of engine noise and the D.F.W. rolled up to the end of the alley. The passenger door popped open and Mags stuck her little feathery face out. Her gun was in its holster and she wore a half dozen magazines for the tiny thing on a belt across her chest. Cute things shouldn’t fill me with so much terror.

“Get in Egg Pony!” she squawked, irrtably, “Miss Shadow Lady have puppet pony say there gonna be chicken for me at Everfree!”

“Mags! I thought you were waiting here!” I snapped.

“You be telling me to stick to your tail and not tell you why! You just not remember! When time come, I know why, but till then, I not leavin’ you ‘cept when other you say it be okay!”

‘What did you tell her?’ I asked, whispering internally towards the corner of my mind I’d come to associate with Nightmare Moon.

‘Your little brain couldn’t hold two sapient minds without clearing out room!’ Nightmare growled back.

‘That includes the memory of whatever you told my friends to do...right?’

‘I didn’t have to deal with emotions and impulses, back then! I may be able to reconstruct it, but it will take much more time.’

‘Never mind. I trusted you then, I’ll trust you now.’

There was a short silence, during which I felt a strange emotion. It was like I’d somehow tapped, for just a moment, into somepony else’s feelings; Nightmare was slightly taken aback and confused, both by the pleasantness of her own response and that somepony might be willing to offer her trust.

‘T-thank you,’ she muttered, before sinking into the back of my consciousness.

Trotting around back, I tapped the rear hatch. The hydraulics hissed as the door clanked open and I stepped sideways so the ramp could drop onto the pavement. I was confronted by a crowded rear compartment.

All three of the P.A.C.T. ponies that we’d captured from the Office were sitting back there with vacant expressions, piled beside one another side by side like riders on a public bus. They wore no armor, but all three had on surgical masks and scrubs. Their shortcut manes were poofed, as though somepony had given them a bath without bothering to dry or brush afterward.

“Sweets? I didn’t hear we were hauling cargo,” I shouted toward the front.

“Tourniquet wants a look at them,” my driver called back.

“Why aren’t they going with Swift, then?”

“She couldn’t figure a decent way to strap them to Goofball,” Taxi replied.

Quickie poked her head around the side of the truck. “Who are they? And who is Goofball?”

“O-orders?” Goldenrod stuttered, pawing weakly at his mask for a second before letting his hoof drop.

“They involve an explanation that’ll end with us cleaning vomit off the seats,” I said, “They’re safe enough, without it. Just don’t tell them to do anything.”

“That is an oddly specific order,” Quickie commented, then flicked her mane back. “I also notice you carefully avoided answering my question about ‘Goofball’.”

“They’re victims of magical brainwashing. Harmless without orders. Just watch what you say around them. Goofball is a giant three headed dog. Get in.”

Quickie squinted at the trio, then trotted up the ramp into the compartment. “Brainwashing? Like the rumors said about the monsters—” She trailed off, then her flank dropped onto one of the plush seats across from the troopers. “Hold on. Did...did you say giant three headed dog?”

Following her into the compartment, I eased by Goldenrod and put a hoof on Quickie’s shoulder.

“Miss Cuddles, I apologize, but I don’t have it in me to explain every hideous or bizarre thing that’s happened to us in the last couple of months. I’ll keep it short and say ‘You missed some things’ and your daughter has heavily edited for content. You can go back inside the Vivarium, or you can get the answers as they come, but one way or the other, we’re leaving now.” I hesitated, then added as an afterthought, “If it’ll make you feel any better, you can threaten to tear me into small pieces if I don’t explain everything at some point. You’ll have to get in line behind at least one alicorn, but I’ll be sure she saves you a haunch.”

Quickie opted not to threaten me with violence, but I could almost hear the questions bubbling excitedly inside her. Swift’s mother was a mare of flexible character; working in a brothel most of one’s youth tends to instill that. Still, I was mentally bracing myself for the breakdown that I felt must be inevitable. Everypony has a breaking point where they must simply reject a reality that’s become too absurd. I’d reached mine a few times a week for almost two months.

That said, she seemed to be holding up well.

“Mister Goldenrod, touch your head. Good! Now your ear. Excellent! Now wiggle your flank like a cat about to pounce on a mouse.”

“Miss Cuddles, I would appreciate it if you didn’t amuse yourself with the brainwash-ees.”

“You said their memories are only a few minutes long, right?”

“Yeees…”

“Then unless you plan on giving me that full explanation or a window to stare out of, I’m going to amuse myself however I can.”

“Your daughter was almost one of the brainwashed...“

“And the fact that she isn’t is why you’re not a stain. Besides, I’ve never met perfect submissives before! Not that I’d do anything obscene to these poor, helpless souls, mind you, but when I was working the whip for fun, I’d have given my horn for some ponies like this to take out some excess aggressions and—”

“Oh sweet Celestia, never mind! Please don’t finish that sentence!”

“Mister Goldenrod...make a rude gesture at Hard Boiled.”

Taxi was brooding. It’s hard to tell sometimes when she’s brooding, but I’ve known her for enough years to know the signs; her ears would twitch at innocuous little sounds, her hooves beat out a steady little rhythm on the steering wheel, and she was watching the road with the kind of intensity a pony usually directs towards performing open heart surgery on themselves.

Behind us in the rear compartment, Limerence and Miss Cuddles were having a soft conversation about some finer point of magical mind control while Mags sprawled bonelessly in the older mare’s lap, enjoying a motherly preening.

“Hardy, you’re staring,” Taxi muttered, as I leaned back in the passenger seat.

“I haven’t so much as glanced at you in the last five minutes,” I grunted.

“You’re doing that ‘cop thing’ where you look at someone out of the corner of your eye while pretending not to watch them at all. You just do it under the brim of your hat.”

Tipping my hat back, I flicked an eye in her direction. “Did your talent tell you that?”

“No, but I know you. Ask whatever it is you want to ask. You’re going to irritate me until you do.”

“If we’re playing that game, then I think you know the question already.”

The street we were on was one of the few that’d taken almost no damage from looters or vandals; one could almost pretend, for the moment, that it was just a late evening with nopony about.

Taxi took a hoof off the gas pedal, letting us idle at a set of stop-lights that were somehow, against all odds, still operating.

“You want to know what happened at the Office,” she muttered, turning to look out the bulletproof window toward one of the empty shops. Her tone was calm, but it was the calm of somepony describing their own terminal disease.

Leaning over, I rested a hoof on her leg. “Sweets...I’m with you to the end. You know that.”

“I know, Hardy,” she replied, looking back with pink, shining eyes that glittered in the cabin’s interior glow. “You want to know if...if she can give us some kind of edge in the fight that’s coming, don’t you?”

“I think, first and foremost, I want to know what ‘she’ is.”

Taxi shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I have suspicions, but…I think she’s my talent.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so my mouth was moving before my brain had quite caught up.

“Your talent is knowing what ponies need, isn’t it? Did that whole building full of ponies need to die?”

As the words left my mouth, I wanted to stuff them right back in. Tact and I are old enemies, but never quite so badly as when I’m worn out. Still, my driver seemed too distracted to take much offense.

“My talent is becoming what others need, Hardy. You can’t deliver justice with a building full of heavily armed killers in your way, now can you? I cleared the way. Isn’t that enough?”

“I spoke to her, Sweets.”

Taxi said nothing for a long moment, then reached back and shut the door between the cabin and the back compartment. Turning back, she gripped the wheel in both front hooves and took a shuddering breath.

“I mean, we’ve all known somepony who got T-D-S for a while—” I began.

“It’s not Talent Derangement Syndrome, Hardy!” she protested. “Celestia above, I’m not a stressed office worker going nuts on a fax machine because I can’t practice guitar!”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

Taxi lowered her forehead onto the wheel and sighed. “I doubt it has a name. My father needed a killer and from the moment I was born, I was slowly becoming that. We have our talents before we discover them, you know.”

“There’s been enough science done to say that’s probably true,” I mused.

“Well, I didn’t just ignore my talent, Hardy. I buried it. I picked some little ugly corner of my mind and slapped a mental gate down, then every impulse to look into other ponies’ needs went into that hole.”

“Except where I was concerned…”

She snorted. “You think the kind of ridiculous codependence you and I have develops magically? You need somepony who’ll never abandon you, even when you abandon yourself. You are an endless well of need I can throw myself down, knowing you’d keep me from doing anything really vile because your talent requires you to be just.”

Doing my best not to feel insulted, I propped one hoof under my chin. “So what went wrong?”

Taxi shuffled her hooves uncomfortably, her eyes darting down to the ugly scars on her flank.

“My little ‘bid for independence’, went wrong,” she answered, “I went undercover and I needed to be a killer again. That nasty part of my brain where I shoved all that equine need was...growing...all the time we were apart.”

“You’re saying it took on a mind of its own?”

She nodded. “That’s the best I can figure. I don’t remember killing all those ponies, Hardy. You try waking up with no memory, coated from head to hoof in blood. It’s a little jarring.”

“I might be the wrong pony to play that particular card with, Sweets,” I murmured.

Her lower lip twitched as her brain caught up to her words. “Ah...oh…mercy. I keep forgetting what life is likelately.”

“The first thing I’m doing as soon as Princess Luna is back is going to court and petitioning her to strip my memories clean. I want a brain bald as a newborn’s flank. But first...”

“You want to know if she can help us.”

I nodded. “I asked who I was talking to. She said, ‘I shine’. She called me Justice.”

Taxi shut her eyes a moment. “That...that sounds right. ‘The Shine’ is her name. She’s pure need, Hardy. She’s every need everypony around us has ever had.”

“She’s you, Sweet Shine.”

“She’s stronger than I am.”

Slipping out of my seat, I put my legs around her neck and pressed my cheek against her mane. “No, she’s not. She’s just a part of you that’s tucked away. But today, she’s got a purpose. She can save the world.”

“B-but if...if I bring her out, and let her free, Hardy, she’s so dangerous,” she whispered, leaning into the hug. “What if I she never goes back? What if I’m really...really a killer like D-daddy wanted?”

“Then we’ll be a matched set of mad killers with too many people in their heads,” I chuckled, weakly. I felt her breathing hitch as her legs tightened around me. “I know you. I know you better than anyone alive. You are my best friend. That’s never changing.”

“Even if I become a m-monster?”

“It won’t come to that,” I said, sliding back into my seat, “Plenty of people lately have told me I have no fate...no destiny. If I know one thing, though, it’s that you and I are going to die together. Guarantee it. If she’s part of you, then we’ll make peace with that. I need you, Sweet Shine. That means I need her, too.”

Wiping at her face with the back of her leg, Taxi let out the breath she’d been keeping in.

“If you’re there, keeping me on the straight and narrow...I think I can live with that,” she said, softly.

There was no gunfire, nor the shuffling of desperate looters hunting food, nor any other sign of life outside a few stray animals darting through the wreckage spread street to street. Smoke that’d billowed over the city for days was reduced to barely wisps, blowing in a stiff breeze. Toward city center, thick clouds still rumbled and boiled above Uptown, lit from within by sharp cracks of thunderless lightning.

We drove through the silent city, listening every moment for signs of an attack; I didn’t really expect one, but vigilance always pays dividends.

It was miles till Supermax when I finally spotted a corpse, lying in the street just off to one side, her face resting in a storm drain. Something had chewed her lower body and she seemed to have been dragged a few meters, judging by the trail of dried blood streaking the pavement. Policing bodies is something most intelligent beings do instinctively the second there’s anything like an organizational system in place. Seeing one left out tends to indicate order in an area has fundamentally broken down.

Part of me considered stopping to see if there was anything we could do, but noble and pragmatic are sometimes opposites. What were we to do? Bury her? Time was short enough. Carry her along? There were likely to be a hundred others along our path.

I caught Taxi’s eyes lingering for only a moment, and a word of silent agreement passed between us; we wouldn’t mention her, nor any other unfortunate, to the others.

With a bit of imagination, I’d have sworn I could almost see the Pale Pony of Death wandering the streets with us, pulling his cart full of souls.

We might have gone the underground route, via the sewers, and taken considerably less time, but Taxi wasn’t going to leave the D.F.W. behind. Besides, if we were going to get anywhere once things got loud, a giant, heavily armored, dragon-proof tank was as good an option as any.

It was a half hour later and just before we were to cross into the waste surrounding Supermax that I caught my first real glimpse of one of Carnath’s dragons.

At a distance I’d taken it for some kind of tasteless advertising; a giant, red lizard sprawled lazily atop a restaurant hawking, ‘Equestria’s Spiciest Curries, Take Out Or Dine In’. He was a big bastard, though not quite on scale with Stella. Lying up there on its side, I wouldn’t have known it was anything but a particularly realistic statue if it hadn’t casually raised its head to watch us pass.

It could have been my over-cranked brain, but I thought for just an instant that our eyes met across that immense distance. Tilting its head back, it belched a thin stream of fire that lit the half-night for a moment, then slowly lay back down; I suspected we’d just been judged a meal for another time.

Taxi still floored the accelerator the second we were out of its line of sight.

I was jolted out of a light doze by the gentle bump of the engine cycling down. It might sound mad to sleep, but rest is rest; a cop learns that quickly when downtime becomes sparse. My hat had slid down over my face at some point. I quickly wiped drool off my lapel and sat up.

“We be home! I gonna to be getting me a whole chicken!” Mags squeaked, then her not-inconsiderable weight landed on my back, before yanking open the door. She was gone before I could snatch her tail in my teeth, not that I’d put much effort into it.

“Well now...that’s a sight, isn’t it?” Bones murmured, standing in the aisle between the passenger and driver seats. I hadn’t heard him open the back compartment, but then it’s best assumed that if you heard a Crusader move, you’re probably already dead.

Yawning, I sat up, pushed my hat back, and peered out the windshield.

Comfort isn’t really the first emotion I’d have associated with that hideous black box with the supervillain-fortress aesthetic and the unnatural magical stormcloud hanging above it like an angry puff of super-sized cotton candy, but my heart still swelled a little at the view.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tiny pup tents were set up in neat rows back and forth across the road, filling the parking lot from end to end. Most were patchwork, assembled out of whatever was at hand. Even the gun range was full of tents. It was a refugee camp, but one somepony had prepared well for.

A much larger tent was propped against the wall of Supermax and was painted with a giant yellow butterfly overlaying a red cross. That one reminded me more of a circus big-top than a utilitarian military medical enclosure. Somepony had even hung some party balloons from the eves; it didn’t take much deductive reasoning to figure out who.

Outside, a crowd was already gathering. I recognized more than a few griffins amongst their number. As a matter of fact, more than half the people outside looked to be griffins. Many of them wore thick battle paint or carried polished weapons. Most were Tokan or Hitlan, though a few seemed to be wearing variants of pony clothing that marked them as Detrot residents. Even a few of the ponies appeared to have taken up painting themselves; the Aroyo body decorations seemed to be spreading like wildfire. If the world survived to recover, it was likely going to be an interesting year in fashion.

As I studied the herd, I noticed someone shoving their way through the crowd, pushing a bow wave of bodies ahead of them.

I opened the door and reared up, trying to get a decent look at who might be coming.

Big mistake.

The second my head was above the level of the door, a shout went up.

“Deadheart! Look! It’s Deadheart! It’s the bulldog of Everfree!”

There was no telling who’d shouted first, but a second later my ears involuntarily snapped shut against my head as several hundred voices all yelled simultaneously. It was mostly cheering or random noise, mixed with deafening griffin war-cries as the cat-birds unlimbered their blades, raising them in a practiced salute. Cringing would have looked pretty poor, so I forced myself to casually step down from the vehicle.

It went on a moment longer before the crowd split, stepping back as several griffins and ponies pushed through the gap.

At the front, the party was led by Sykes and Grimble Shanks, the griffin brothers standing side by side like mighty centurions. Their brown feathers were stained black in places, and Sykes sported a thick bandage around his chest. Both wore worn bulletproof vests and matching tartans. The smell of blood wafting off of them was strong enough to reach me five meters away. Mags was perched on Grimble’s shoulder like a particularly pleased-with-herself parrot; something bloody and covered in feathers was sticking out of her beak.

Behind them came Derida, the Tokan leader, carrying a tastefully appointed silver axe on her hip that looked more stylish than functional. It, too, was drenched in blood and she was also bandaged, limping along on three legs with a fourth in a sling against her chest. She also wore a tartan, but it had the look of something designed for a runway rather than a battlefield.

“Oi! It be the Hoigh Justice! Show some respect, ye gobs!” Sykes barked, loud enough to be heard over the cheering crowd. At once, all the griffins fell silent and their silence was so profound the ponies quickly followed.

In the intervening silence, I stepped onto the pavement as the rear compartment opened and Taxi hopped out of the driver side. Limerence, Bones, and Quickie were out the back a few seconds later. Voices in the crowd murmured at the sight of my grandfather, but they’d probably seen enough odd things in the last week that a simple skeleton wandering about, lively and unburied, wasn’t more than slightly unsettling.

Approaching us, the three griffin leaders dropped to one knee, bowing their heads.

Biting my tongue and painfully aware of our audience, I did my best imitation of a courtly lean from a turn of the century drama I’d watched some years back. Taxi snickered under her breath, expertly executing a much more elegant curtsy, followed a moment later by Bones and Lim dropping into their own versions, both of which looked a damn sight more practiced than mine. Swift’s mother looked quizzically up at the griffins, then dipped her chin.

Shaking my head at them, I rose and stepped forward, bracing for what I knew was coming.

“Heh! Oi bet me bruder a tenner Oi could git ye to do a dandy dip!” Sykes cackled, then swept me up in one of his trademark bonecrushing hugs. My vision hazed at the edges for a second, before he set me down. His brother cocked an eyebrow and passed him a tiny bag that clinked like it was full of metal.

“I take it somepony let you know I was coming?” I asked, nodding at the door of Supermax.

“Aye, yer good friend the mad bonecutter sent us a runner what said an attack were coming,” Grimble Shanks added, affectionately petting Mags who cooed and rubbed her beak against his claw. “We be evacuatin’ roight quick, but de beasties fell on us ‘afore we was all into de tunnels. Sykes and Oi held dem back.” From behind him, Derida let out a polite cough and Grimble quickly added, “Miss Derida...well, she helped.”

“Mad bone cutter?” Quickie asked, lifting up on the tips of her hooves as she studied the crowd and tents. “Does that mean a doctor?”

“I’m sure he’s an excellent healer if properly motivated,” Taxi growled. “Where is Slip Stitch?”

“Medical tent,” Sykes replied, jabbing a thumb-claw at the structure leaning against the side of Supermax. “That nutter...he knew they was comin’. Damn me if Oi know how. Bastard had his people out of de Morgue wi’ almost no casualties. Ye want to get movin’ indoors?”

“Is this...undead with you?” Derida asked, a hint of derision in her tone as she eyed Bones. “I thought you ponies frowned on having necromantic slave creatures.”

Bones heaved one of his dry chuckles, then tapped a cigarette out between his teeth. “Heh, I’ve got too much personality for one of them beasties, Miss Griffin.”

Derida let out a startled yelp and took a three steps back, tracing what I took to be a protective gesture in mid-air with two talons.

“Demon!” she hissed.

“Actually, my grandfather,” I interjected as Bones tilted his chin back. If he’d had a face, I imagined he’d have been wearing a devil-may-care grin that’d charm the pants off females of most species. “But you’ll soon be wishing he were a demon. A demon wouldn’t smoke so much. If you’re not hurting me, he’s not hurting you. Relax. There are bigger fish right now.”

Derida’s tail snapped back and forth as she looked between myself and Bones. “You have made yourself strange allies since we last met, High Justice.”

“No kidding. Let’s get indoors.” I looked over at Limerence. “Lim, could you get Goldenrod and his friends out of the truck? Keep them away from anything sensitive.”

The librarian’s ears twitched slightly as he leaned sideways, then lowered his voice. “Do you believe they are...dangerous?”

“I don’t want to find out they are,” I replied. “Go on. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Do you perhaps mind if I go find myself some ointment afterwards?” he asked, scratching at the bandage around his head. “The remains of my ear are itching unpleasantly.”

“Remains?” I asked, suddenly realizing I hadn’t actually asked him about the injury that left him with the wrapping.

“Ah, yes...you were possessed at the time and have not seen it. I lost an ear in our last battle. Pay it no mind.”

Before I could think of an adequately shocked response, Sykes stepped forward and clapped Lim across the shoulders. The librarian let out a strangled cough as all the air was knocked right out of him.

“Aye, an ear says he? Pay it no moind says he? Ye’ve got yerself a roight foine warrior here, despite his looks, don’tcha, boyo?” Limerence glared up at him, but Sykes didn’t seem to notice as he started toward the back of the truck. “Come along, lad! Oi’ll help ye wi’ whatever errand ye’ve got! Oi gotta hear how ye had yer ear clipped and ye must tell me what the Justice ha’ been up ta!”

Lim gave me a questioning look. “Detective?”

“Go with him. He’s not as dumb as he sounds,” I said, then added after a short consideration, “Get Stitch to look at that injury, alright? Then meet us downstairs.”

Limerence shook his head. “I do not wish to end up with a mismatched ear from a corpse grafted to my head, Detective.”

“Then be sure you tell him that before he gives you one of the cupcakes he keeps in the narcotics cabinet.”

I felt a gentle tug on my mane and turned to find Quickie’s horn glowing and her giving me a stink-eye that would curdle whiskey.

“You remember when you said I should be patient?” she hissed.

“Yeah?”

“I am no longer being patient! My husband may be willing to simply hide his fears by working himself insensate, but I will see my daughter now. Where is Swift?”

“Right here, Mom! Come inside!” a familiar and altogether too cheery voice said from the crowd. An older mare with a rumpled blue mane and a pair of red crescents decorating her breastbone was standing towards the front with brightly shining eyes. Turning to face the surrounding ponies, she yelled above the heads of the gathered creatures, “Okay everyone! The Detective is working and he’s here to help, but we’ve got to do our best not to get in his way! See any of the Marked or the adult ponies with facial tattoos if you need a bed, food, or medical attention! Basic weapons training begins in an hour! If you can fight but don’t know how, we’ll teach you everything you need to know at the new gunnery range across the street!”

At her command, ponies in the distance began shouting all manner of different orders and instructions. As quickly as they’d gathered, the crowd started to disperse with only a minimum of grumbling. I caught more than a few ponies watching me out of the corners of their eyes as I nodded at Grimble and Derida who were watching the mare with the glowing eyes like they’d found themselves in a small room with a wild boar.

“That unsettles me more than the undead,” Derida murmured.

“Aye,” Grimble agreed, shifting his weight from claw to claw, “Oi seen those creatures wi’ the moons on’em do funny t’ings, but tha’ takes all cakes.”

“Swift!” Quickie snapped, stomping one front hoof. “So help me, I don’t care how you’re doing that, I swear if you don’t get out here right now...”

The middle-aged mare blinked as she looked down at the much shorter unicorn, the glow vanishing like a switch had been flicked. “Ehm...Lady, de Warden be not on me just now,” the unnamed pony said, quietly. “If ye be needin’ food or tent—”

“We’re fine, thanks,” I said. Not waiting for her reaction, I put a leg around Quickie and pulled her towards the inner gates. She resisted for only a moment, but short of throwing me into the next county with her horn, earth pony strength trumps unicorn muscle. “Come on. She’s downstairs.”

“Oh, I cannot tell you how much I hate this,” Quickie seethed.

“Look at it this way. Your daughter has gone from ‘cop’ to ‘demi-god’ in record time.”

“And what does it make you if she still looks up to you?”

“Too sober to answer questions like that.” I glanced at Taxi and said, “Sweets, you coming for this?”

My driver dug a toetip at the concrete a couple of times, then let out a long-winded breath. Tilting her head toward where her cutie-mark used to be, she replied, “You don’t need me right now. These ponies? They need me. I’m going to go run logistics. I’ll start gathering up the leaders, too. What time should we have this meeting you intend to have?”

“Can’t the Aroyos run logistics? Or Tourniquet, for that matter?” I asked.

“Apparently not well enough. If you want me to make peace with the Shine, I suspect listening to her is going to help. My talent says I’m needed here.”

Running a hoof through my mane, I bobbed my head. “Then I want everypony in Tourniquet’s chamber in two hours. We’re sealing the door at that point. Anypony not inside is not coming in until the meeting is over.”

“Roger wilco,” she answered, reaching up into the D.F.W. to pull an ancient, battered set of saddlebags with checkered designs on the flaps out from under her seat. She tossed them over her flanks and quickly did up the belly strap.

“I’ll keep her out of trouble for you, kiddo,” Bones added.

As my driver and grandfather trotted off toward one of the larger tents, Taxi’s voice drifted back.

“My own necromantic undead slave! I’ve always wanted one!”

I caught myself smiling after them, then realized Derida, Grimble, and Quickie were all looking in the same direction.

“Inside,” I growled. “Anyone who wants explanations will get them inside. Anyone who asks me right now can wait in the lobby while I lay out what’s happened to this city.”

The Marked or Aroyos or Everfree or whatever they were calling themselves were as disciplined as ants, but even they were inclined to stop and gawk at my little party as we made our way through the door of the Fortress Everfree. My mental to-do list was too long, but it started with the one thing a pony can always do when life is getting you down: watch other people’s hilarious family drama.

Quickie had apparently latched onto the one completely sane, relevant fact in all of the madness surrounding her and was pursuing it with the single-mindedness of a hound on the scent: her daughter was somewhere and needed a firm talking to.

Derida and Grimble Shanks had apparently picked on Quickie’s mood, because they were whispering quietly to each over over what I presumed to be some issues of their own, punctuated by Mags interjecting her particular brand of commentary. Neither seemed much to mind my ward’s presence. After a few moments, I noticed she’d vanished again; for something that was normally quite loud and squawky, Mags could be damned silent when she wanted to be.

We moved down the central avenue between the former cell blocks, with ponies staring down at us from up above, but none impeding our way. Strangely, I only heard my name said a few times. Most seemed more interested in Quickie.

“Hard Boiled. Where are we going?” Swift’s mother demanded, looking left, then right at the cells. “How did my daughter...No, wait. Never mind. I will ask her myself.”

Jabbing a hoof at the nearest pony wearing a crescent mark—a middle-aged brown stallion in the ragged remains of a business suit who was sitting on one of the bunks in a nearby cell—Quickie marched over to him. “You! I know you have some way of getting in touch with Swift! Do it!”

The stallion grinned as his eyes started to glow a soft yellow. Carefully setting down his meal, the possessed pony slid off his cot.

“Mom, you’re acting like that time the principal of that middle school wanted to throw me out for sticking up for Tangerine,” Swift’s voice said, coming from the stallion’s mouth. “Calm down, okay? I’m in the safest place in the whole world.”

Quickie’s voice rose to an angry squeak as she stomped a hoof hard enough to send an echo through the nearby cells that silenced activity for a moment. “That might be, but you kept all of this from me! Swift, there’s a building here where everypony is you!”

The stallion’s expression sank into a disturbingly similar one to Swift’s when she’d been chastised.

“I know. I know, and I’m sorry. There were...bigger things...going on.”

Quickie’s lip curled. “I’m going to either be proud of you for being mature enough to decide I’m a lower priority than whatever...this is, or I’m going to scream my tail off, and I haven’t figured out which.”

“Iffen it helps, moi lass, wee pegasus saved a heap o’ lives,” Grimble put in, ruffling his wings.

“Griffin and pony lives,” Derida added. “Without the offer of sanctuary, I do not believe we would have survived in the open. Skytown has been without electricity for the last three days. Our communication infrastructure was down to messengers and shouting. The pony who came to us warned that an attack was coming. Based on what those beastly monsters hit us with, had we still been in the cloud buildings above—.

“You would have been slaughtered,” Quickie muttered, biting off the last word like it tasted unpleasant. “The best mages in the city were under the Vivarium’s roof and we barely held them back. The ones that can spread that black slime that disrupts magic almost ended us.” She trailed off, then looked over at where the stallion Swift was ‘riding’ still sat, looking abashed.

“Alright. Show me.”

Some smart pony had put up a few basic signs here and there, but once we got off the upper floors, it was all unlabeled once more. I also noticed we were running into fewer and fewer ponies the deeper we went. Whether that was by design or because most of them were working upstairs was hard to say; the lower levels seemed largely dedicated to housing. Most of the cells had added a third double bunk to accomodate more bodies. The few we did run into were asleep.

The possessed stallion led us in silence, though nopony seemed much inclined to talk any more.

Before long, we stood outside the purposefully nondescript door to Tourniquet’s antechamber. A small shrine of some kind had been laid out beside the door covered in piles of flowers, toys, beads, and plates of fruit. At the center lay a picture of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, side by side. It might have been a press photo or possibly just a candid somepony had paid for, but it was a reminder of brighter things I needed just then.

Stopping at the pile, the shining energy in the suited stallion’s eyes flickered out. He straightened, nodded once, then abruptly started back the way we’d come without a word. He didn’t so much as give us a backward look.

“So?” Quickie said, glancing into the former control room toward the open chamber door behind. All that could be seen within was a gently pulsing white light.

“This is it,” I replied. “You want the truth, it’s in there. I’ll catch you when you faint.”

“Mister Boiled, I have seen a pony do unspeakable things with a pool noodle while maintaining arousal. I have seen distension of orifices I’d have thought impossible without borderline illegal magical alterations. I have been in battle with unseemly creatures that defied logic—”

“And I acknowledge all of that,” I said, then stepped up against her side. “I’ll still catch you when you faint.”

Derida and Grimble didn’t look any calmer than Quickie did, but they were warriors, albeit in very different arenas. I knew there was no way the following meeting could go well, though I was hoping nopony would do anything stupid. More is the worry.

Stiffening her upper lip, Quickie stomped into Tourniquet’s chamber.

As she stepped onto the carpet just inside the door, the lights overhead resolved into a single spotlight projected from the ceiling, highlighting a long conference table in the center of the space. A dozen chairs were rolled up on either side, each with a folded paper name tag and a pot of steaming coffee within easy reach. At the center of the table sat a basket of various teas, desserts, and a whole plate of what looked like fresh raspberry scones.

Quickie narrowed her eyes at the platter.

“I’m too mad to be buttered up, Swift,” she said.

“I know, Mom,” my partner replied, stepping out of the surrounding darkness.

Swift wore a set of police issued body armor, though somepony had done a considerably better job fixing it up than whoever sewed it back together last time. The bunny patch was still in place. A single thick cable was wrapped around her neck, trailing down her back between her massive wings before vanishing into the darkness. Every few seconds, a flicker of light traveled the length of the cord, then back out into the unseen depths of the chamber.

The very tip of the cable split into a hundred tiny wires, each of them resting on Swift’s face. More than a few looked uncomfortably like they’d wormed their ways into her flesh, though she showed no signs of discomfort.

The red crescent on her chest gleamed like a diamond, shimmering and flickering as though a flame burned inside it.

“S-Swift?” Quickie whispered.

“Mom, Tourniquet really wants to meet you, but I have to make sure things are going to be alright first.”

“Your...your f-face—”

Swift twitched her eyes toward the side of her head seemingly invaded by the wires, then sighed. “I’m sorry. I know it looks freaky, but she can pull them out anytime. We’re working on the food situation upstairs right now.”

I felt a brush on my backside as Derida and Grimble Shanks moved past me into the chamber, silently taking in the scene with the practiced eyes of two creatures who’d lived through strange times. Despite their cultural differences, the Tokan and Hitlan leaders were surprisingly similar in some ways.

“Lass, jus’ lookin’ at tha’ makes moi flesh itch,” Grimble muttered, and Derida nodded, silently resting a claw on her axe.

“I’m afraid the only reason we’re making such good time on getting everypony and everygriff fed is because I’m connected here. It’s a sort of symbiotic thing,” Swift replied, her eyes still on her mother. “Before Tourniquet comes out, I need a promise from all of you not to hurt her, okay?”

Quickie wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I c-can promise that so long as sh-she’s not hurting you—”

“She’s not,” Swift affirmed.

“Then I promise not to hurt her.”

My partner turned to Grimble and Derida and said, “She’s a little scary, but I swear she’s safe.”

“I doubt we’d be able to leave through those ponies upstairs if something untoward were to happen to their leader,” Derida murmured, then added, “I promise.”

“Aye, Oi promise as well. Don’t fancy foightin’ a buildin’,” Grimble Shanks agreed.

Swift nodded toward another darkened section of the room just beside her. “It’s okay to come out, now.”

“I told you it would be,” Tourniquet’s voice answered, echoing unnaturally around the giant room.

What stepped into the light was distinctly not the pony I remembered.

Tourniquet had looked quite large in my last contact with Queenie, but it didn’t do justice to the giant equine shape that moved with the grace of a dancer, towering over my partner like a parent over their foal. She was only a little larger than she’d been in my last dream, but every part of her radiated power. If Princess Celestia were sculpted from metal and jewels, the mechanical mare would have been a good approximation.

The cables into her back spilled out in waves, like a great flower of hair. The gemstones that’d replaced her eyes flashed and sparkled as though they’d just come off the jeweler’s table. Standing side by side with Swift, the two looked a strangely matched set. Something in their mutual postures or possibly their expressions spoke of a shared awareness that transcended body.

Tourniquet had become a goddess, beautiful and fearful to behold.

I was so distracted, I almost didn’t catch Quickie before she hit the carpet.

Act 3 Chapter 60 : Death Takes A Coffee Break

"Before every battle I would sit down with Luna and take tea. Some might call this callous behavior, but when you reach the age we have, it helps to have reminders of all the great things ponykind has accomplished and wherefor they should be fought for. We have the crumpet, fine ceramics, artful decoration, butter, and fortifying caffeine. The dragons offered only death and enslavement.

While being yoked and used might have been a temporarily interesting change of pace, I believe I prefer to change up my normal strawberry jam for a bit of blackberry and call it even.

- Princess Celestia in "On The Crusades", Interview 16.

I doubt anypony would begrudge Quickie for being a tad overwhelmed. Tourniquet hadn’t so much ‘grown’ as ‘ascended to a higher plane of manifestation’, becoming something out of a comic book written by a fetishistic mechanist with a god-complex. Granted, knowing that ahead of time probably wouldn’t have helped much. Short of sitting down and drawing Quickie a picture, that particular band-aid wasn’t coming off easy.

Swift had rushed over the second her mom passed out, fanning her face with one hoof. Up close, the wires running through my partner’s cheek weren’t any less disturbing, nor was the unsettlingly lifelike way the cable adjusted itself to be most conveniently out of the way as she moved. Some of those fibers even seemed to have crawled into her eye sockets; I could make out several wrapped around her right eyeball like tiny hairs, though they didn’t seem to be causing her any discomfort.

“Kid, can I convince you to step back before we wake your mom up?” I asked, softly.

“Sir?”

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out an old, badly beaten hoof-mirror and held it up for her. She blinked at her own image for a second, then took several steps back.

“Right. I thought I looked scary with just the teeth,” she muttered.

“I think you look awesome,” Tourniquet giggled, reaching out to ruffle my partner’s mane.

Swift flailed a wing at her friend’s hoof and jumped sideways. “You would! You’re the one who decided she needed to be on stilts!”

“That wasn’t my idea!” Tourniquet protested, her slightly deeper voice still tinged with a filly-ish lilt, “I was digging through my spell system and found protocols for me to ‘grow up’. I figured it would be neat! I didn’t know they’d make me quite this tall. Besides, the extra power reserves probably sped it up.”

“And you ended up looking like a princess because...” I prompted.

The mechanical pony shot me a withering glare. “My mother had high aspirations for me, okay? I went through puberty in six hours. Do you want me to describe that to you, Mister Hard Boiled?”

“No, I’m good, thanks,” I said, then turned to Grimble Shanks and Derida, who were both standing there with their beaks hanging around their knees, staring at Tourniquet. Not that I could blame them a bit. “May I introduce—”

“Lady Derida and War Leader Grimble Shanks!” Tourniquet squeaked, sitting and clapping her metal hooves together. “I’m so glad you made it! I almost didn’t get word to Doctor Slip Stitch until it was too late, but thankfully the Morgue is closer to where the monsters were moving than Skytown!”

Derida didn’t take her eyes off Tourniquet as she carefully pulled her claw away from her axe and addressed me. “High Justice, this is the being who saved us from the horde?”

“She is,” I replied, tugging my hat off and setting it on the conference table. “She’s one of those ‘strange allies’ I’ve picked up since this debacle began. If you want her background, feel free to find a moment we’re not all about to die to ask her for it. Right now, the most you need to know is that I trust her with my life and she saved yours.”

With a soft sigh, Derida reached into the top of her dress and plucked out a thin vial full of red liquid. Holding it up to the light, she studied the fluid for a moment, then set it on the conference table and stepped back.

“Never let it be said a Tokan doesn’t pay her debts,” she muttered.

Flipping his bandolier to one side, Grimble pulled out an identical vial and set it beside Derida’s.

“Aye. Nor any Hitlan,” he added.

Simultaneously, they dropped to one foreleg, spreading their wings right out to their tips in the sort of formal bow that I’d only ever seen in movies.

For several long seconds, nopony said anything.

Tourniquet slowly reached out and picked up one of the vials on the table, turning it end over end.

“Is...is this blood?” she squeaked, carefully setting the amulet back down.

“Yep. If you get a chance, find a griffin named ‘Sykes’ upstairs and have him explain the finer points of griffin finance to you,” I said, nodding at the other vial.

“Aye, lass. Ye’ve saved griffin loives,” Grimble murmured, rising from his bow. “Our troibes oh ye a foine debt, Miss.”

“It is also one we cannot repay except with our lives and loyalty,” Derida put in.

“S-so you give me s-some of your blood?” Tourniquet whimpered. “That is—”

“—something we are going to be real tactful about,” I snapped, giving her a sharp look.

Tourniquet’s eyes glittered as she studied them. Straightening to her full, not-unimpressive height, the mechanical mare gave them a little bow of her own, and a coil of cable dropped from the ceiling onto the table; it carefully cradled the vials before disappearing back into the darkness. “Right. Sorry. Thank you. I...I will do my best to deserve this.”

There was a stirring from Quickie and Swift danced back, covering the heavily wired side of her face with one wing.

“Sir, w-what do we say? She’s waking up!” my partner whimpered.

“Scone! Stat!”

Swift nodded and pushed the plate over to my side of the conference table. I snatched a raspberry scone and carefully waved it under Quickie’s nose. A slow smile spread across her face. Without opening her eyes, she leaned forward and bit the scone off my hoof, chewing contentedly for several seconds.

“Mmm...honey, I love it when you bring me breakfast in bed,” Quickie murmured, throwing one leg around my neck and going in for what would have been the world’s most awkward kiss.

“Sorry, Ma’am. I’m afraid I’m not your husband,” I replied, carefully putting a hoof on her chest.

Quickie’s eyes shot open. Her horn lit. I was shoved backwards with all the force of a grenade going off in my lap. The air rushing right out of my lungs.

I saw ground, darkness, ground, then something like a hundred snakes all lashed out and snagged my flailing body out of mid-air with far more gentility than recent events suggested I’d receive from the world’s capricious karmic powers-that-be.

Looking up, I found myself wrapped tightly in several of Tourniquet’s larger cables. They pulsed around me, warm as flesh and far too much like something alive for comfort. My breath wouldn’t quite settle in my lungs.

“Mom, you can’t throw ponies!” Swift yelped from somewhere below me.

“If somepony wakes me up like that, he damn well gets a chuck!”

I gulped a couple of times until my diaphram stopped seizing.

“T-Tourniquet, could you put me down?” I managed.

The cables started to unwind around me and I couldn’t help a slight flail at the sensation of being dropped, though with infinite care they set me right back on my hooves in the circle of light around the conference table.

“It’s fine, kid,” I said, waving a hoof to show I was alright. Grabbing one of the chairs, I pulled it out and collapsed into the seat.

Quickie was on her hooves, her eyes darting back and forth between me, Tourniquet, and Swift. The anger seemed to be quickly fading as she realized exactly what’d happened, replaced with a look of genuine contrition. Pulling out one of the chairs, she sat down heavily and put her face in her hooves.

“I...Detective...I’m sorry that—” she started, but I tapped the table, cutting her off.

“Like I said, it’s fine. You’re not the first unicorn I’ve had pitch me. Miss Cuddles, can I introduce you to Tourniquet?”

“If I look up, is there still going to be a mare made of metal standing there?” Quickie asked, “And is my daughter’s face still going to be full of wires?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She blew a strand of magenta mane out of her face, crossing her forelegs and putting her forehead on them. “Then do you mind if I keep my head down for a few more seconds? I need to process this.”

One of Tourniquet’s cords dropped from overhead, tentatively nudged a scone close enough to be in Quickie’s line of sight, then retracted. Sighing, Swift’s mother picked up the pastry, bit a piece off, and silently chewed, very carefully not looking at anyone. I waited for her to be finished, then leaned forward.

“Miss Cuddles?”

“Yes, Detective,” she muttered, lifting her head to glance over at her daughter. “I’m aware I’m being rude. This is a great deal to take in. How did you find this...this pony?”

“The short story is that she was very nearly killed during the war,” I explained. “Her mother built the prison and used the collected magic of the prisoners to keep her child alive.”

Swift’s mother’s eyes softened a little and she peered at Tourniquet, who ducked her head under the close scrutiny, letting several strands of her technicolor fiber-optic mane fall over her face. “A mother doing something crazy to keep her daughter from dying. That is something I can understand, I guess. It’s still very strange.”

“It’s nothing next to what is coming during this meeting we’ll be having in an hour or so,” I said. “Part of why I asked you here is because you know the Vivarium and the Heights. You know its ponies, its defenses, and its capabilities.”

Quickie shook her head a little helplessly. “My mother is the one—”

“—who is injured. She’s also as friendly as a tiger passing an especially spicy burrito full of pinecones,” I interrupted. “I need you here to be the voice of the Vivarium and the Heights.”

Her dainty eyebrows drew together. “Me?”

“Mom?” Swift trotted around the table and laid her legs around Quickie’s shoulders. Her mother looked up into her pleading face for a moment and, despite the strangeness of the machinery in her cheeks, pulled her daughter into a tight embrace. “Gran and Stella would trust you to help us with this. You were going to be Gran’s successor before you met Dad. I know you kept up with your Stiletto training.”

“To keep my figure!” Quickie moaned, “I didn’t do it to help this...this deranged stallion fight a battle! That’s what he’s about to do! I know it is! He doesn’t even have a plan, yet! He’s just hoping somepony smarter than he is will come up with something!”

I gulped as I felt all of those different gazes drift in my direction. Public speaking was not one of my strong suits, but then nor was being killed in horrific fashion and I’d done that successfully on a number of occasions. I deserved a second cutie-mark in improvisation.

“She’s right,” I said, at last, then stood before anypony could really process the implications of that statement and planted my hooves on the table. “Right now, we don’t have a plan.”

I expected a few shocked exclamations, but there weren’t any.

“Hrmph. Are we meant to be surprised, High Justice?” Derida chuckled, pulling a seat and settling her dress around herself. “Do you ever have a plan? This time, I suppose you must make one…and you’re hating it. So, do please, tell us what we are here for?”

I scrubbed at my face with both hooves and tried to order my mind. “This isn’t everyone who will be here, but...the situation is that we’ve got resources, but I don’t know how many or where we’ll be deploying them. We’ve got bodies, but only a few hours to arm and train them. We have a goal, which is to take back the city and disable the Shield...but I don’t know how we’ll do that...yet.”

“Aye, sounds loike a pickle, says me,” Grimble added, casually pulling his axe off his back and a rag out of his belt, going about the process of cleaning the gore off it.

“I...phew. I keep expecting ponies to beat me with sticks whenever they realize I have no idea what I’m doing,” I muttered, sinking back into my chair.

“For having no idea what you are doing, you have an alarmingly high success rate,” Derida commented. “It matters not. We are at your disposal.”

“Alright, then. Miss Cuddles, are you on board?” I asked.

Swift’s mother slumped on the conference table, her cheek flat on the surface. “Do you even have to ask? I can’t stop Swift from fighting to save the world and I’d be a terrible mother if I didn’t help defend my own child, much less my husband and home.”

“Then I think we’re ready. Tourniquet, can you get everyone here?”

“Swift and I made a list of everyone we thought should be here and they’re already on the way,” she replied, waving a metal hoof at the conference table and the nametags.

I turned to my partner, then picked up the tag in front of me. It read, ‘Dragon Lord Firebrand’.

“Who all is on this list?” I inquired, tapping the nametag on one edge.

“Everypony we thought you’d want here, Sir,” Swift answered. “All of the craziest, most dangerous people in Detrot.”

‘Goodie,’ I thought, then began removing my coat. “Are Queenie and Gypsy on the list?”

Tourniquet grinned and the circle of light surrounding us spread outwards a few meters, revealing a cushy looking dog pillow with a dozing giant insect flopped on its overfed belly. The remains of a jelly donut sat on a plate of what was probably a few dozen before the ravenous essy had gotten to it. Several smaller versions of the breed sat around Queenie’s legs, buzzing sleepily to one another.

Quickie’s horn sparked dangerously as she leaned as far from Queenie as she could without getting up. “Is that a g-giant—”

“Yes, it’s a giant bug,” I grumbled, getting up and heading over to give the pillow a nudge. “Unfortunately, a giant bug we’re going to need awake.”

“If history is any indicator, it should sleep off the sugar in an hour or so.” Tourniquet explained. “Gypsy will be here soon, but she’s been working with Queenie to get all the remaining Ladybugs in the city to safety. Their network broke down during the attack and most are operating off something only a little stronger than instinct.”

“What happened to the communications systems, by the way?”

Swift shook her head. “We don’t know, Sir. Gypsy said it was some kind of broadband interference across all magical spectrums, whatever that means. It’s like an enchanted thunderstorm, but ten times stronger.”

“Is that what happened in the Vivarium, little bird?” Quickie asked. “Our communications systems all suddenly went from a range of a mile down to maybe a hundred feet.”

My partner ducked her head. “Mom, could you not call me little bird in front of everybody? Sheesh!”

A tiny smile threatened to break through Miss Cuddles’s gloomy expression. “I am going to embarrass you forever, little bird. You best not forget it! Now, answer the question.”

Blushing and with a half-hearted glare at her mother, Swift said, “W-with enough broadcast power, we can still punch through, but...most of the civilian systems aren’t working more than a mile or so. Even the Ladybugs can only transmit to each other when we’re giving them extra energy.”

Derida looked concerned as she asked, “Do we have a plan for keeping communications open while we try to take the center of the city? Even we griffins must maintain contact to keep discipline over a battle.”

Tourniquet reached over and touched the crescent on Swift’s chest. “The Marked can speak to each other, so long as I have enough power to send to them. It will put a time limit on our fight, though. The city power system will break down very, very quickly under that kind of strain even with me stabilizing it. That’s not to mention the physical costs on all those who I’m pushing that much magic through.”

“Estimate it for me,” I said. “How long will we have?”

Tourniquet gathered a half dozen loops of cord under herself and used them for a makeshift seat. “Maybe an hour and a half before ponies start dying, with luck? I can try to vary the loads, but even I can’t pay attention to more than a few dozen things at a time.”

“That...is going to complicate things.”

A warm croissant lifted out of the heap and floated over to Quickie’s forelegs. “What else is new?” she asked, tucking into the pastry. “Do we even know where in Uptown our final destination is? Even if we could get past the shield, do we have a direction?”

Swift grinned and looked toward the ceiling as several smaller cables descended with a rolled up parchment twice her height. Setting the paper on the table, she unrolled it into a giant map of the city, then set a couple small objects on each corner to keep it pinned down. I noticed one of them was a tiny figure of me that somepony had carved out of what looked like a bar of soap.

“You’re never going to stop being smug about this whole ‘magical powers’ thing, are you, kid?” I asked.

“No, Sir!” She blinked and glanced toward the chamber door. “Oh...it looks like the rest of everyone on the list is coming down. Do you want to wait for them to get here before we finish figuring things out?”

I shrugged and put my hooves up on the conference table beside my hat. “Pass the butter and find me a power cord that isn’t being used to keep somepony alive.”

Limerence was the first in, a fresh bandage around his head and a cardboard box of some kind balanced on his back. He wore a new vest that didn’t quite fit him, but it was cleaner than the bloodsoaked mess he’d worn out of the Office. The harness of knives across his chest had a few new additions, as well.

“Slip Stitch will be joining us momentarily, but he is still shaking hooves and making merry with the Aroyo children,” he murmured, taking the seat across from me. “Best mentally prepare yourselves. He’s in a rare form, even for him.”

A moment later, a swirling tornado of confetti blew through the chamber door, followed closely by an explosion of cheery fanfare. It died down to silence almost immediately, then the city coroner calmly strolled in like he’d just come off the bus. His white mane was, if anything, more wild than it was on most days and a trail of glitter seemed to be shedding from his tail.

He spotted me and smiled brightly. “Ah! Detective! Your heart is running in good order, I see! I would have been terribly upset if you’d died somewhere I couldn’t dissect you!”

“Good morning, Stitch,” I replied, adjusting the cord sticking out of my chest. “You managed to get the Morgue evacuated before the attack?”

Stitch took a bounding leap into the chair beside me. “Nope! I simply moved everyone inside and activated the old defenses. You’d think somepony would have removed those after the war, wouldn’t you?”

“So...why are you here instead of there?” I asked.

Pulling a pristine cupcake from somewhere in his coat pocket, he carefully flicked a speck of something that looked distressingly like blood off the tip, then stuffed it into his mouth whole. It was gone in half a second. “Mmmm, lovely, lovely, and the fondant isn’t even stale! I must get Miss Frosting’s recipe before her brain decomposes too badly. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes! Our sweet host appeared in our midst and offered safety, should we be able to get to the sewers. It took most of my remaining party poppers, but Celestia smiled upon us!”

“He blew a hole in a foot thick, reinforced concrete wall with something like dynamite,” Tourniquet grumbled. “I still can’t figure out how.”

“Never underestimate the power of sugar copiously applied, my dear!” Stitch chirped, then gathered his coat around himself. “Since we’d neither the resources nor the weapons to defend ourselves in a long siege, I decided it would be expedient to make our way here. Besides, with all those bodies packed down below, I was quite running out of squeezable cheese and the ice-cream had gone a tad melty.”

“And...that’s when you went to warn the griffins?” I asked.

“Indeed! It seemed the neighborly thing to do, considering they’d been without power!”

Propping himself back in his chair, he pulled a packet of papers out of another pocket and snatched a crayon from behind his ear, then went about furiously scribbling at the sheets of paper.

“What are those, bone cutter?” Derida asked, sliding her chair over to peer over his shoulder.

“Party plans!” he replied, flicking a page around so she could see it. “So many dead who need to be celebrated! I’ve gone for the ‘massive’ extravaganza, rather than individual events, so I must get ahead!”

The griffin banker slowly scooted her chair back to where it’d been.

“I must stop asking what goes on in pony minds,” she mumbled to herself.

A few minutes later, Taxi and one of the few ponies I hadn’t expected to see trotted in, side-by-side. Precious, the Prince of Detrot, had one foreleg resting on my driver’s neck, ears twitching this way and that. He looked as close to exhausted as I’d ever seen him.

His spangled jumpsuit was still perfectly pristine, though there were a few fresh grey hairs in his mane and a strange, metallic guitar was strapped across his back; it looked as though somepony had embedded an axe-blade into the side of the body and added enough strengthening to maybe make it an actual weapon. While he was still smiling like he always was, something in his posture suggested a weariness that went right to the heart. As the city ached and bled, so too did its prince.

Stopping in the door, he raised his nose and sniffed at the air.

“Mmm...Mah, mah, mah, what a gatherin’ Ah have come unto! Lord Grimble Shanks and Lady Derida come down from tha Highlands and...might that be two of the Cuddles mares? Ah would know the smell of Hard Boiled anywhere...and Tome’s son if Ah do not mistake mahself,” His milky eyes darted to the other side of the table and his smiled widened. “Is that Mister Slip Stitch and the Ladybug Queen?”

“On the money, Prince,” I said, tapping the table. “I’m glad to see you. I take it you came with Slip Stitch?”

“Ah go where the city needs, young’un,” he replied, then paused as his smile slipped into a perplexed frown for an instant. “Ah smell another pony, but...burnin’ electronic gizmos, too.”

“I’m...I’m Tourniquet, Sir,” the mechanized mare replied, trotting around the conference table. She slid onto one knee in front of him, bowing her head. “It’s an honor to meet you. I listened to the stories ponies told about you. I especially liked the one about how you beat the Siren Battle Band during the Sand Stone Hall campaign in the hippogriff lands.”

“Aheh! Pleased to be heard of, Miss Tourniquet!” Precious replied, still looking perplexed. He half raised one hoof, then hesitated, “May Ah touch you, child? Ah’m afraid mah ears do not see as well in this big room and mah nose is strong, but doesn’t get much detail.”

Tourniquet’s ears lay back. “I’m...I’m not a pony, b-but you can touch me.”

Reaching out, Precious held his hoof toward her. Tourniquet carefully pressed her cheek against it, and he ran his toe through the thin fur that remained, up to where it became metal over her cheeks, then across to the gently pulsating fiber-optic strands that made up her mane. His expression didn’t change as he tenderly ran the tip of his toe over her ears, then down to her jaw.

“Feels pony enough to me,” he said, then stepped back, picking up one of her hooves and pressing a gentlecoltly kiss to it. “And a lovely mare at that. It’s good to meet you, Miss. Ah am Precious. Ah am most pleased to make the acquaintance!”

A shock of red light throbbed through Tourniquet’s glittering eyes and flowed down her mane into the tangle of cords on her back; it took me a second to realize she’d just managed the machine equivalent of flushed cheeks.

“T-thank you,” she whispered.

“So!” The Prince raised his nose, then took a few steps closer to the conference table and grabbed a chair, hoisting himself into it. “Ah take it mah expertise in plumbin’ is called upon?”

“I wish it were,” I replied.

“Ye saved many loives in the war, Prince,” Grimble said, respectfully tilting his head, though Precious couldn’t see it. “Oi know no griff heard o’ ye what would no stand at yer soide wi’ a heart unfearful.”

“Ah remained neutral in the Crusades,” Precious objected, putting his hooves together in front of me. “Ah only took sides today because these crazy fellas don’t seem to mind killin’ anypony who is anywhere in their way.”

“Pardon me saying, but you stayed neutral against gangs, dragons, and all other manner of Tartarus spawned nasty creatures. You kept a part of this city safe and the Burning Love is still standing because nopony dares loot it,” Taxi said, taking her seat beside me opposite Slip Stitch. She shot him a funny look, unconsciously touching her own lips before shaking off whatever thought was going through her mind. Stitch didn’t notice; he was still enmeshed in his funerary plans.

Precious sank back in his chair, swinging the guitar free with one quick motion and leaning it against the table. “One last trick, Ah guess. Ah’m old, Miss Shine, but...Ah figure Ah’ve got that much in me. Ah’ll sit in.”

A rattling and clanking tred heralded our next guest: Scootaloo tromped out of the antechamber like a tank rolling over some begonias. She looked like somepony looking for somepony to kick in the face. Her prosthetics were coated in a thick layer of gun grease and she wore a battle saddle mounted with what looked like an oversized P.A.C.T.-style lightning cannon. Every inch of her was dusty.

Stopping in the door, she snarled, “Does somepony want to tell me why I’m here instead of teaching those poor civilians upstairs which end of the magazine goes in the gun?”

Her gaze swiveled around the room and her stance slowly tensed as she saw the odd collection of creatures gathered for the meeting.

Rising from my seat, I walked around to hers and pulled it back.

“You’re here to help me plan an attack on Uptown,” I said.

Scootaloo jerked her head at Tourniquet. “You have the ‘Lady of Shadows’, plus the whole of the griffin delegation, my Aroyos, the Police Department, and Stella’s people. What do you need from me?”

“I don’t know much about large scale combat operations and you do,” I explained, “I could get my grandfather, but I’d frankly rather have ‘The Demolisher’ than ‘Egghead’. He’s spent thirty years in a hole and you’ve spent thirty years keeping one of the most dangerous gangs in Detrot from going under with the police, the Family, and the Jewelers working against you. You know the city of today. He doesn’t.”

“Nopony has called me Demolisher in thirty years, Detective,” she replied, pointing to the word ‘Everfree’ carved into the shoulder of her prosthetic. “I’m a ganger. That suits me better than soldiering ever did and I’d rather die in the gutter than wearing medals or sitting on a hill directing a battle.”

“Then, if I have taken my measure of this pony accurately, Demolisher...he will soon give you that chance,” a voice purred from somewhere in the shadows near the door.

Firebrand stepped out of the darkness like a puff of mist resolving into a ghostly figure. The young dragoness was wearing a set of heavily worn metallic armor which was either gold or painted very convincingly. She carried a matching helmet under one foreleg, and her knives were back in their sheathes.

She smelled fresher than I tended to expect from dragons, and her brown scales shone like they’d had a layer of polish applied.

Scootaloo took three quick steps back, her rear end bumping into the conference table. “Whoo, I have obviously not been informed on some things. You made friends with some dragon royals?!”

The she-dragon frowned, flicking her tongue at the air. “Do you know me?”

“I knew a lizard who’d have a fit if she saw anyone besides one of her direct relations wearing her armor,” Scootaloo replied, nodding at Firebrand’s helm. “That makes you Firebrand. You’re Dragon Lord Ember’s get, aren’tcha?”

“You knew my mother?!” Firebrand rose up onto the tips of her claws. “She never said she knew any Crusaders!”

“She didn’t,” Scootaloo replied, shoving the chair I held out for her back out of the circle of light and standing instead; considering how much her legs must have weighed, that made sense. “She was in Ponyville once in a while. I was a little filly then.”

“Then I hope you can meet her again, one day, when the sun is back,” Firebrand murmured. “Dragonkind will always tell stories of the Demolisher. You were one of the many deaths.”

“I was working, then, and I’m working now,” the elderly mare said, pulling the plate of scones to her side of the table. “So, ‘Crusada’, I don’t buy this being ‘just a planning session’. Half of the ponies in this room don’t know what is going on in the city...but you’ve been the one with all the answers so far. I think it’s about time we had the truth.”

I shrugged and got to my hooves, doing a quick mental count of the nametags on the table, then the persons in the room.

“Does anyone have to piss?”

There was a general uncomfortable shuffling around the table, but it was met with silence.

“No? Last chance for at least an hour?”

Silence.

“Tourniquet? Close the door. None of what I’m about to say leaves this room. It’s storytime. I hope none of you were planning on sleeping tonight, because this one’s a doozy.”

Act 3 Chapter 61: A Grand Trick

"It is not the histories that shape us; it is the stories. We tell one another stories to preserve ourselves down through the centuries. Truth exists, yes, but it is a fragile and changeable thing. A story survives where truth fades into the dark shroud of memory. Even my truth will one day disappear, but it is my hope that the story of me rings through the stories of ponies for as long as they have mouths, memories, and hope. I pray it is a tale with a better ending than its beginning."

-Princess Luna, "On Topics Of Philosophy, History, And The Proper Rearing Of Possums."

“A thousand years ago—give or take a few weeks and however much time was spent drunk and not keeping track of the calendar—a group of brave pioneers struck out into the wilds of what would eventually be Equestria. To be clear, this was not yet Equestria. We’re well before that.

This land was still mostly forest, but there was a single, solitary hill that came into sight as they crested some ancient horizon. It was near enough to a nice big bay and a valley with river access and it called out to their prospector hearts.

‘Here,’ they said, ‘Here will be our home.’

So, these poor saps—pardon, ‘brave proto-Equestrians’ —laid down roots at the foot of the hill. They started mining. Gold, jewels, diamonds...They hoped and they prayed and soon, they got lucky...or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. One of their number had a particular shaft dug nice and deep when he came across a key, of all things.

Now, it’s well known that there are older civilizations in Equestria than ponies, but these were not archeologists; these were miners. Their stock and trade was what could be refined for sale, not trinkets. Still, they kept the key. It became a good luck charm, of sorts. As the logic goes, nopony locks up things that aren't valuable. Since they found the key underground, beneath the hill, they figured whatever lock it fit must also be under there.

After a couple of decades, the head of the family kept it with him at all times. His name was ‘D.W’. That key had become the center of their worlds. It was their obsession.

Now, D.W. had a knack for mining. Maybe it was his talent, or maybe not, but he was luckier than anypony else in the valley. He’d mine and - just like that - he’d strike gold. Over time, it made him rich.

D.W. didn’t know it then, or maybe he did and didn’t care, but his prospect was always headed in one direction. One day, he and his family were digging at the farthest part of their shaft and they struck something that nopony had ever seen before.

It was a door, deep in the sediment, buried under dozens of feet of earth and stone. He didn’t really need to think about it. He’d found his lock and he had his key.

This door led inside a chamber where something was waiting with a kind of patience not seen in this world for a very long time; something...intelligent.

Now, what happened afterward is a bit of supposition, but I imagine there was something of a conversation that went on. The ‘something’...this prisoner in the earth...offered D.W. all of his dreams if he would but help it out.

‘How can I help?’ he asked.

‘Bring me souls,’ the prisoner replied.

He brought souls. He brought the old and sickly in his family. He brought the young and weak. He lashed them to an altar inside this chamber and left them there to slowly wither, though never to die. The prisoner made sure of that. Maybe his conscience pricked him, but he’d had this ‘something’ in his mind for a good long while and his conscience was only a whisper.

When he got old, rich, and fat, his surviving sons had grown strong. They, too, were raised with the voice of temptation and they knew the stallion must surely be eyeing them up to be future sacrifices. That or their children.

Together, they hatched a plan and dragged him to the altar, and struck their own deal with the prisoner of that chamber.

‘Preserve our family. Give us long, wealthy lives and we will get old, you’ll have our souls or those of the weak among us,’ they said.

It agreed.

They brought souls and more time passed.

Equestria was growing and, at long last, the prisoner saw a chance to be free. The newly minted Princess of the Night was a warrior suddenly forced into a life of royalty. Her sister, the politician, got all the credit for her expansion of their borders while Luna was ignored and her contributions devalued. Even her beloved race, the thestrals, were shunned and driven into the corners of Equestria.

The prisoner hatched a plan.

Now, I want to be clear, this next part is conjecture.

So, this prisoner’s mind was devious, cunning, and advanced. It understood technologies from a time so long ago that a hundred societies more developed than ours could have risen and fallen in that period. The prisoner knew how to tempt the vulnerable.

It designed a set of armor for the Princess of the Night. The family had kept the name ‘D.W.’ to memorialize their founder, and D.W. was sent to gift this armor to Luna. Inside the armor lived an intelligence...a tiny fragment of the prisoner’s being.

We all know the public version of what happened next.

Luna was corrupted by jealousy and envy, ultimately descending into madness and becoming Nightmare Moon.

A little piece of the story was missing, however, and it was an important piece: The Web of Dark Wishes. Nightmare Moon’s spellbook.

It was a book which allowed a pony to create an engine based on a shape that could grant wishes. It was controlled by the armor. Luna re-ordered the sky, but never had a chance to make the prisoner’s wish. She was jailed for a thousand years, the armor with her.

The prisoner had not predicted this, but it knew roughly when she might return. How, I couldn’t say; the outcome is what matters. The armor was shattered, becoming a curiosity stuck in a vault, but as Equestria grew, so too did the Family of D.W., twisted and corrupted by the monster that kept them fatted and ready for their eventual slaughter.

They grew, and eventually were able to enact the prisoner’s ‘back up’ plan.

They built a city. The city became the pattern of Dark Wishes. This city.

Our city.

“Detective, I knew this wasn’t going to be the sanest tale, but you’re telling me that the...what, the streets are laid out in some kind of giant spell?” Quickie asked.

“Not the streets, but...yes. The Shield is the spell. Our city was built around it.”

Swift’s mother breathed in sharply.

“Aye, Justice,” Grimble murmured. “This be beyond moi kin. Yer city is foine, but...a magic tha’ big is madness.”

“Madness is usually just a reasoning whose comprehension follows a structure we do not understand,” Slip Stitch chuckled, squishing a couple of crumbs that’d found their way onto his doctor’s coat. “In this case I think it’s not because it’s illogical, but because a very, very big mind is the only one who can hold all the bits and pieces at once.”

“Hardy, how did you put all of this together?” Tourniquet asked, her eyes dancing with glimmering lights.

“I followed a trail of extremely dangerous breadcrumbs. We’ll get to that next.”

Down through the centuries, the Family kept their promise to the prisoner and the prisoner kept his promise to the Family. Souls burned on an altar in the Wilds, until finally, they had the resources and the position to try the great work, again. The Nightmare’s Armor had returned and it was time.

They built Detrot, spreading their influence to keep the Princesses distracted from their eventual cause.

They even started a war.

“The Crusades,” Firebrand whispered, clenching a claw around her sword hilt. “Do you mean these beasts set Equine and Dragonkind at one another’s throats for the sake of a distraction?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I’ve had a few different indicators that say they had both resources and motive to start that fight,” I replied, shaking my head. “It certainly kept the Princesses from noticing various flavors of decay in Equestria that played right into the Family’s hooves.”

“They were busy rebuilding closer to Canterlot and Detrot is on the edge of their attention,” Limerence explained. “Given a few decades, they might make their way out here to impose order, again, but it hasn’t happened, yet. They move slowly and the Family used that to their advantage.”

“But to begin a war…” the dragoness murmured.

“If that were the worst of their crimes, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

There was a thief in Canterlot.

To all intents and purposes, she was a nobody, but she had a talent for getting into places nopony else could. Unlike most thieves, she stole for the thrill of it. The money was nice, but it never stacked up against the joy of having her name in the newspaper. Notoriety was her game and, short of a dragon’s hoard, there was only one target that she’d never been able to crack.

When she was approached and asked—for a considerable fee—to sneak into the Canterlot Royal Vaults to do a snatch and dash, she couldn’t say ‘no’. It was a suicide mission, but that made it all the more delicious if she were to succeed. She crept into the vaults, but was only able to get the Helm of Nightmare Moon before an alarm was tripped.

In a panic, she ran from the vaults into the streets of Canterlot, vanishing among the alleyways.

When she’d found a moment to catch her breath, her curiosity got the better of her. After all, it was just an old helmet, right? Another antique curiosity for some old, wealthy idiot’s shelf.

She put the helmet on.

The intelligence inside the helmawoke and defended itself. Its last memory was of defeat and all before that was blurred into indistinct shadow. It seared the thief’s mind, snapping her psyche like a twig and leaving her scarred and broken.

The Family found the poor, mad pony and tucked her away, but wasting a resource was not their way. When the thief regained her mind, she’d taken on a new persona. No longer a thief, she believed she spoke with the voice of Nightmare Moon herself.

They saw an opportunity in the mad mare.

Soon, she’d built a following of demented creatures like her in Detrot. They were wealthy, and routinely engaged in ‘rituals’ that involved orgiastic violence. The Family still needed souls to give their master. What more cheerfully available soul than a religious fanatic who would go to the sacrificial altar with a big smile, believing they’re serving Luna herself?

The Family—to keep the newly minted Astral Skylark sweet—placed the Helm of Nightmare Moon in her care.

Unbeknownst to them, the helm’s guiding mind was still awake, still working to be free.

It whispered in the ears of the ponies at Skylark’s convent until it found one that was smart enough and broken enough to help.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out Ruby’s horn and set it on the conference table.

A series of gasps ran around the room as everyone realized what it was.

“What the frig, Hardy!? Why do you have a unicorn’s horn in your pocket?!” Taxi demanded.

“Plenty of reasons. Too many reasons to count, really, but I’m going to start with the simplest.”

A simple farm mare came to the city of Detrot with only a pocket full of her family’s bits and a dream. A gentle soul, but strong and smart.

She was a nobody.

She started a business doing honest work. She took an assistant and soon, a local gang took notice of her success. They tried to bully her into paying them protection money.

Most ponies would have paid the money, but she was a mare of the country. She knew how to defend herself. She sent them packing with a heap of bruises and broken bones.

Cowards and bullies, being the scheming creatures they are, came back and instead of taking another beating, they took her assistant. They tortured this poor pony before cutting off her wings and burning them, all to send a message.

The mare got the message.

She shut her business and her guilt drove her into the embrace of the one group in Detrot offering redemption: the Church of the Lunar Passage. While she was there, Astral Skylark saw her beauty and decided she would make an excellent sacrifice.

The mare was moved to this very building and the voice of Nightmare Moon began to whisper to her. It told her the truth about the Lunar Passage. It told her of their plans for her and offered escape if she would only take it along.

Smart mare that she was, she ran.

The whispering continued, until at last, she donned the Helm.

It showed her futures; hundreds of futures. It tried to drive her insane, like it had Skylark. It shrieked and wailed inside her head. It tried to break her.

She did not break.

Instead, she hid with it, stealing futures from the magical helmet, which she wrote down in her diary. She planned in secret, with only the knowledge of potential futures for company. She did what nopony, not even the great heroes of Equestria had managed; she outsmarted Nightmare Moon.

Nightmare had plans. She planned to capture the one pony who existed as a flaw in her eventual design to escape the Family and bend him to her will. She wanted freedom. She wanted power. Instead, this mare delivered the Nightmare into his hooves.

The Family had not stopped looking for the Helm and the mare knew it. She knew she’d be hunted, and her loved ones would be hunted, until she gave up or they found her. She contacted the Family and offered to meet.

They sent a bastard to meet her. A necromancer. A traitor and murderer.

She knew she wouldn’t leave that meeting, alive. The necromancer was going to steal her soul and she was at peace with that, because she knew what he would do. She’d seen the futures already. She drank his magical poison that locked her soul into her horn. She endured him slicing off her horn and had just enough of herself left when the job was done to run from him, up the stairs of the hotel they’d met in and out onto the rooftop.

She charged off that roof and died on impact, but she’d succeeded in her ultimate aims.

She got my attention.

I leaned forward over the conference table.

“Everyone...I want you to meet Ruby Blue.”

All eyes that’d been locked on the horn jerked up to my face.

Precious unzipped the top three inches of his jumpsuit, fanning himself with a hoof as he settled deeper into his chair. “Now, Ah cannot see what is sittin’ on the table there, but Miss Shine said ‘horn’ and since Ah doubt anyone here plays trumpet, can Ah assume ya somehow found Miss Blue’s missin’ piece?”

“It was on the corpse of the necromancer,” Limerence replied.

“Is this...necromancer still a threat?” Scootaloo asked, flexing her right prosthetic’s joint so it squeaked softly. “I haven’t crushed an undead in a long time. Don’t fancy facing an army of them on top of those P.A.C.T. buggers.”

“He will not be a danger,” Lim said, tugging his sword off his back and setting it on the table.

“Aye! Tha’ be a foine blade, says me!” Grimble said, with a grin. “May Oi?”

The librarian pushed the sword-staff across the table and the griffin war-master carefully picked it up, flicking the sheath up a few inches. His eyes almost popped out as he saw the shrieking face etched into the edge and he quickly slammed it shut.

“Ye hands me a curse’d cutter?! What’d Oi do to ye?”

“Not cursed,” Limerence corrected. “It is occupied, however. He’s proven quite useful. His soul serves the side of good, now, and will continue until such time as I see fit to release it.”

“That is the necromancer?” Derida inquired, tapping the sword’s edge between the eyes; the inlaid pupils turned to look at her claw with something like indignation.

“It is,” I answered. “Lim here caught him. I don’t necessarily like the idea of trapping someone’s soul and burning it to power magic spells, but...this prick? He had it coming.”

“And Miss Blue’s soul?” Tourniquet wanted to know, peering at the horn.

“Safe, for now,” Limerence assured her, pulling his sword back and setting it beside his seat, “We’re going to release it as soon as we can, but...the spells are complex and take more time than we have. Can you think of anywhere the mare who’d fought so hard to get Hard Boiled involved would rather be than literally on his person?”

“Now, that’s a thing I don’t understand,” Scootaloo interjected. “How do you know all of this?”

“Bread crumbs,” I explained. “I found Ruby’s diary. The Helm of Nightmare Moon grants a very particular brand of precognition. Not perfect, but better than anything we’ve come up with. The other two parts of the armor improve the ability until it is...well, until it was able to overwhelm Princess Celestia.”

“The shoes and chest plate,” Derida murmured. “I suppose that is why your princess gave the shoes to us.”

“And the chest plate was put on a regional tour, moved from secure location to secure location, transported by guards and kept in enchanted protection by masters of the art,” I explained, shaking my head. “Nopony counted on the Family stealing the soul of one of those masters to break his enchantments.”

“So. This...Family. We know any names?” Precious asked. “Ah feel as though Ah should have heard’o somepony stealin’ souls in mah city.”

“They were formerly the law firm of Umbra, Animus, and Armature,” Limerence said, reaching into the pocket of his vest and pulling out a tightly rolled scroll. He laid it out on the table and unfurled it into what looked like an ancient family tree, except that every branch along it was labeled ‘D.W’. Most branches looped back together and it was as tangled as a bramble bush. “Two brothers and a sister. Their father was the last D.W., but after him...they had two children. Maybe more, but only two survived.”

“Excuse me, but...the way you said that made it sound like the...the brothers and sister had two children, together,” Quickie murmured, one eyebrow twitching nervously.

“Yes. Incest was apparently their choice method for ensuring a pure family line.”

There was a distinctly uncomfortable shuffling of hooves, claws, and footpaws.

“That’s...going to mess with my appetite,” Scootaloo muttered.

“Indeed,” Firebrand added, flexing her wings, “Even the lowest born of dragons know not to seed with sisters or brothers. It leads to...slow fliers, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, this bunch found some way to beat genetics,” I said, repressing a shudder. “This current D.W. is smart as a whip. I’ve spoken to him through one of his puppets. He’s careful, coordinated, and dangerous enough to install his brother as the head of the PACT.”

Grimble Shanks clicked his beak, angrily. “Ye sayin’ Broadside be brudder to ‘D.W’.?”

“That’s right. The Family had influence everywhere in Detrot. They owned Chief Iris Jade. They owned the city government. They owned the Jewelers.”

Quickie put up a hoof and said, “Maybe...maybe you should tell us what their...goal here, is. Why did they do all of this? If they’re so powerful, why upend all of Equestria?”

I slowly sat down and breathed an irritable sigh. “You remember I said that the Web of Dark Wishes is an engine for wishes? Well, they have one. More particularly...I believe the prisoner has one. The Web is powered by chaos; negative equine emotion. Same as changelings feed on love, the Web feeds on insanity, violence, and suffering.”

“Wait a tick,” Scootaloo interected, “You’re telling me this prisoner creature is...what? In the city, now?!”

I nodded. “I give high odds on it being here. It has to make its wish, after all. We need to find out where, though. It’s obviously vulnerable, or it wouldn’t have an army standing between us. Dragons? These converted ponies? That Shield? It’s planning on unleashing the lot within the next day and they’re all coming for us. This wish...whatever it is...is bad news.”

“Even our best efforts during the war with a ‘universal spell’ left the casters sucked right dry of magical energies for days. Those spell forms were the size of a warehouse,” Scootaloo mused, biting her wrinkled lip. “You make that spell the size of the whole city, you’d...oh…—”

“—you could rip the magic out of every living thing in Equestria!” Taxi finished, covering her muzzle with both front hooves. “My skies, this could kill thousands, and we don’t even know where they actually are!”

Limerence sat a little taller in his seat. “Actually, I do believe I might be able to help us with the where.”

I nodded at the map spread out on the table. “Lim? You got something for us?”

“It is...based on a certain set of assumptions, but—”

“I don’t need the disclaimer,” I said, cutting him short, “Nobody here has any better ideas, do they?”

Tourniquet shook her head. “I tried to scan the Shield around Uptown from here, but...it keeps changing. It’s in different places and seems to only stay roughly the shape of an egg. Some streets have more, then less. The reports were all inconsistent, and that storm forming over the center of town isn’t helping!”

Limerence plucked a piece of paper out of one of his pockets, pulled a pencil from behind his ear, then clambered up onto the table. Trotting to the middle of the giant map, he started making careful marks at specific places.

“Lim, we could have just put the damn map on the floor,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead.

“Yes, but I rather like the drama of getting on the table,” he mumbled around the pencil, carefully hatching a couple of lines in the center of the city, then checking his paper again.

“Some of those positions look familiar. Are those reports from the Stilettos?” Taxi asked.

“Some of them, yes,” Lim replied, quickly erasing a mark and moving it a street over, “Stella had them sent down upon my request. I also had time to question various persons while I was upstairs. Sykes helped me get information from the griffins’ scouting parties and the Morgue had a number of ponies positioned near enough to Uptown to be considered lookouts. Not as much as I’d like, but...enough.”

“Enough for what?” Tourniquet asked, studying the map.

“Probability exercise. This shield fluxuates because they move in and out of it, but no matter how powerful it is, it can’t entirely compensate for atomic passage through a thaumic medium. They don’t want to have a gate or arcane manifold as an entrance—”

“Limerence, you’ve lost ninety percent of the room,” I said, softly.

“Eh...right. Apologies. I’m drawing specific sightings within the city of the Shield with as much description as I could wring out of the scouts. Then…” Getting to his hooves, he began drawing long slashes across the map. After a few more, he stepped back. He’d drawn about thirty marks, each with a line leading to a mark on the opposite side of the map. They created a cross-cross of hatches which outlined a three block radius in the center of Uptown.

“Our ‘target’ lies somewhere within this area,” Lim said, tapping the small collection of buildings in the middle of Uptown, “The Shield Pylons may power the barrier, but they are not the source. The pylons are using a self-propagating—”

I put a hoof on his leg. “Lim, you’re about to use a bunch of big words. I can tell. Equestrian, if you please.”

“They use a spell that makes more of itself, up to a limit. Damage the shield around Uptown and it simply draws more power and reinforces the framework. We can’t get into the pylons outside the shield, because if we attack one, the shield around it is reinforced as well. With a whole city of suffering ponies...well, there is no entrance by force to one of those.”

“We know all of this!” Scootaloo snapped. “Iris Jade got close enough to pour a heap of firepower into that Shield and didn’t so much as dent it! What good does this do us?”

Limerence set his pencil back behind his ear. “This is a shield designed for flexibility and resilience...but therein lies the weakness. This barrier propagates...from a design.”

“And...that means what?” she asked, testily.

“It means that it is invincible...unless somepony happened to get access to one of the transmission nodes controlling the propagation and changes it.”

Tourniquet cocked her head at the map. “Transmission nodes? Do you mean the...what’d you call them? The pylons?”

“Exactly,” he replied.

“Bit of a catch twenty-two, then, isn’t it?” Quickie commented as Limerence hopped down and trotted back to his chair. “We can’t get inside the pylons while the shield is up and we can’t deactivate the shield from outside.”

I couldn’t quite bury my smirk as I held out a hoof to Swift. “Kid? You have...anything to add, perhaps?”

“Oh, I might, Sir,” she giggled, pulling the ancient ring of keys out of her pocket and setting it on the table. “Remember that key from the story? We found it. It opened the original pylon, and all the ones in the city are copies of that one. However the ponies inside are moving around, I’ll bet they never thought we’d get ahold of this.”

Lifting the ring, she held up the key so everyone could see the jeweled end.

“Do you know that key will open a pylon or do you just hope it will?” Scootaloo asked.

“What have we had besides hope?” Slip Stitch piped up, putting a hoof behind his neck as he spun around in his chair. “My people—much as I might have tried to keep them from going this route—have been calling themselves ‘Spares’. As in, ‘spare parts’. Slip Stitch’s spare parts. This odd little amalgam of beliefs has arisen, that they might somehow ‘live on’, should they die, so long as I’m allowed to pull their bodies apart for future use. Convenient for a creative sort like myself, but disturbing for a physician. Yet, for them...it’s hope. If Hard Boiled says this may work, I’ll accept his hope. I don’t want the world to be such a dark place that ponies start looking to me as their savior. I’m a mortician.”

Scootaloo scratched the joint where her metallic legs met the fleshy shoulder and sighed. “I guess we weren’t going to have time for backup plans, were we?”

“Not really, no,” I said, “They intend to cast the wish today. I’m betting the storm over Uptown is only going to get worse. At some point, they’ll unleash the dragons on us. I saw one when I was on the way here.”

“Aye, big red bugger?” Grimble Shanks asked, leaning over the map to tap a point not far from Supermax which was labeled with a gas canister. “Moi lads were trackin’ em. Loikes to nap on buildin’s.”

“That’ll be it, yeah. We know there aren’t more than 10 or 15 dragons at most, but...depending on size, that’s enough to make our lives pretty miserable. That is, unless they’re keeping some in reserve somewhere in the countryside.”

Firebrand idly toyed with the hilt of one of her swords. “My band and I have been out...scouting while you were away. We know of at least nine, though they did not engage us. All old dragons, with large hoards. I can kill one, perhaps, if I catch them alone, but Emberites do not value gem wealth, nor allow ourselves to be driven mad with greed. We grow slowly. Unfortunately, Carnath did send his eldest wife...Propana.”

“I feel like that would be a more ominous sign if I knew who that was,” Taxi commented, dryly.

Firebrand rolled her slitted eyes. “You would think you ponies would bother to keep up with the politics of your most dangerous neighbors.”

“We can barely keep up with our own politics, Ma’am,” Swift said, pulling a cord down from overhead and using a loop of it as a sort of swing, rocking back and forth with her hooves dangling under her.

“She is a rich, ancient white dragon. I believe the closest measurement we have in common would be ‘twenty spans’. Pegasi still use spans, yes?”

“Some older ponies do,” Swift replied, then turned to me. “It’s about the size of two city busses end to end, Sir.”

“Hrmph...My Aroyos have enough firepower to bring down a dragon that size,” Scootaloo said, narrowing her eyes at the map. “It’s the horde of smaller monsters that’re probably going to be following the dragons that will be a tactical nightmare. If we take out the lead dragon, the others will break and scatter, but if what I hear about the attack on the police department is true, those creatures won’t back off until they’re all dead.”

“Queenie kept some memories of the numbers it saw,” Tourniquet added, softly. “It’s not a precise count, but...say ‘ten thousand’ for a low ball. My mom never liked to have prisoners moving when guards could be overwhelmed by raw numbers and by my estimates, we’ve got about twenty-five thousand sapient creatures between here and the Vivarium, but a lot of those can’t fight. We only got most of them out because we had the Marked organizing things and everyone was ready to move.”

“This city has a quarter of a million ponies...where is everyone?” I asked.

“Hunkered down in other sections of the city,” Tourniquet explained, using the end of a power cable to tap points on the map. “We identified at least two other major camps, plus a large refugee train that’s stuck at the eastern edge of town. That’s on top of...a lot of deaths and however many are left in Uptown. The dragons are keeping the refugee train herded and won’t let them leave. They weren’t hit when we were a few hours ago, but...I’ll bet the P.A.C.T. is planning on hitting them tomorrow.”

Scootaloo pointed at a sewer line running under that edge of the city. “The Aroyos can run this line. Can we get in touch with the refugees? Maybe invite them to help?”

“It’s worth a shot, but the other two camps are real heavily armed and have what seems like a ‘shoot on sight’ policy in effect,” Taxi replied, pulling a pen out of her checkered saddlebags and drawing two small circles. “This is the Publicans. Bunch of political extremists. We don’t know much about them. This other group seems to be ‘Celestials’. Celestia worshipers. They’re blaming Luna for the Eclipse and anyone who says different warrants a bullet. We don’t know who is leading them, but neither is playing well with the other side. When we could scout, they were raiding each other.”

“Alright, if we can get somepony to the refugees, start moving them to Supermax,” I ordered, then hesitated, “I’m afraid they’re a lower priority than dealing with Uptown, though. Do you think the Underdogs would be willing to make that run?”

Scootaloo wrinkled her nose. “I’ve heard some of the stories of that dog they call Dogenes. Even if we can’t, he’ll get someone out there to start evacuating them. Whether or not he can convince them to come with him is something else.”

“B-but Sir, what if the dragons go for them! They wouldn’t stay out in the open, would they?” Swift protested, putting her hooves up on the conference table.

“Ponies do crazy things when they’re scared, kid,” I said, then glanced over at Scootaloo who was studying the map with consternation. “Do we have the resources to take Uptown and protect a large group of non-combatants while being attacked by an army of mutations?”

The Ancestor lashed her tail against one metal flank. “Not a damn chance. There’s no amount of ‘organized’ we could be that would keep the lizards off them. The Vivarium is between the civvies and Uptown, but those dragons don’t need to ask permission to take out that caravan.”

Swift’s ears lay flat against her head as pulses of light flowed up the cables in her face. “W-we can’t just leave them, Sir!”

“No, we can’t,” I replied, “And we can’t predict that they’ll be rational enough to come with a group of gangers or an unknown diamond dog. It’d have to be me going—”

“Ah’ll do it,” Precious murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

I trailed off, turning to where the old stallion sat, staring off into the darkness.

“You sure, Precious?” I asked. “Those civilians might just gun down anyone they see.”

He let out a loud snort, drawing himself up as his presence seemed to spill out of him, filling me with a strange comfort and confidence. “Ah am not just anyone, colt! Mah city may burn, but Ah am still its Prince. Ah will not leave any innocent to die while Ah draw breath! But...well, if Ah am goin’, Ah would like if ya’d buy me time to talk’em into it.”

“Buying time means our attack on Uptown has to draw all of their forces,” I replied, then picked up Scootaloo’s pencil in my teeth and drew a cross on the map just outside the furthest point the shield had been sighted. “That means we have to hit them here.”

“The...wait...what is that?” Quickie blinked a couple of times and her eyes widened. “Are you drinking straight Beam, Detective? You want to attack P.A.C.T. headquarters?!”

“We do not have the units for that!” Taxi exclaimed.

“That’s why all I’m sending is a team,” I answered, nodding at the map. “We can’t beat them with sheer numbers, but...by focusing our firepower, we can force them to dilute their forces everywhere else. We’re bringing our high cards to that fight...which means I need somepony to lead it who has more firepower at her command than anyone else.”

I pointed across the table.

Swift looked over her shoulder, but there was nopony behind her. “Me, Sir?!”

“That is demented—” Quickie began, but Precious cut her off with a swipe of his hoof through the air.

“He’s right, Miss Cuddles,” the Prince said, sliding up in his seat and pulling his cane from a pocket, quickly unfolding it so he could trot around the table to where Quickie sat. She looked up at him with tears gathering in her eyes. “Ah may not be able ta see this map, but...Ah know a hopeless situation when Ah hear one. The only army we’ve got that stands a chance against those monsters is these ‘Marked’...and they follow the pony called ‘The Warden’. So far as Ah hear, that’s Officer Swift, here.”

“B-but, Sir...how can I attack the P.A.C.T. headquarters?! Even with a full army, I don’t have the weaponry, and the building is fortified to stop dragons!” Swift squeaked.

I winked at her. “It just so happens that I know where an entire cache of weapons that are charged by moonlight exists...and we are in a permanent eclipse.”

My partner looked briefly confused, then her eyes lit up. “T-the Moon guns? Do you think Stella will let us use them?”

“I think if I told him where you’re going, he’d pull my leg off if I didn’t,” I replied.

“What about this weapon that ignores armor?” Derida asked, poking at the map where the High Step hotel once existed. “They butchered the Nursemaid’s Guild with that foul magic.”

“So far as we can tell, there’s only the one,” Taxi said, reaching for her braid only to find it several inches shorter, since the Shine's last appearance had left her with a little trim. Frowning, she glanced at me and I tapped the side of my head, then pointed at her cutie-mark. She formed a little 'oh' shape with her mouth and turned back to Derida.

The griffon-ess watched our silent exchange for a moment, then shook her head, "One may be enough, if they surprise us. A weapon that can go through our armor is not the sort I want to engage directly.”

Swift raised her eye toward the roof of the chamber, and several tentacle-like cables dropped down, holding the Hailstorm between them. She laid it on the conference table. “Nothing can sneak up on me. Not while I’m wearing this.”

Scootaloo’s eyes lit up like she’d just seen a Hearth’s Warming present with her name on it. “Where’d you get that?!”

“My father...acquired the Hailstorm...after the war,” Limerence said, with an unsubtle pride in his voice.

“Stole!” Scootaloo barked, shooting him a furious expression. “Whoever he was, he stole it from a Crusader storehouse!”

“Oh, probably,” Lim replied, “But you weren’t able to operate it, were you? It was gathering dust.”

“That doesn’t matter! It wasn’t his! Besides, there’s not a pegasus in the whole of Equestria with the dyno-...dyno-thaum…”

“Dyno-thaumic?” Lim prompted.

“Yes, that! I swear, Apple Bloom and her stupid complicated jargon brain—” Scootaloo shook her head, violently, then managed to regain her steam. “There’s not a pegasus alive with the dyno-thaumic ratio to power that gun!”

Swift stuck her chin out and pulled herself to her full, not-at-all-impressive height.

“I made it work!” she declared.

Scootaloo blinked a few times as my partner slowly spread her massive wings to their maximum extension.

“Yeesh. Filly, was your daddy an alicorn?” the elderly mare murmured.

“He’s hung like one,” Quickie said without thinking, then slapped her hooves over her mouth. Simultaneously. Tourniquet and Swift let out soft squeaks as waves of crimson light flowed throughout the room, casting us all in different shades of pink.

There was a moment when it seemed like everypony might contain themselves, but it didn’t last.

I hadn’t expected Precious to be the first to break, but his great, throaty laughter was quickly joined by the entire room. It was what we’d all needed, truth be told. The planning session paused for a full five minutes while we all were reduced to tears, pounding on the table, or slapping each other on the back.

When we finally calmed down, even Quickie had a little grin on her face. While nobody in their right mind could have called the tension broken, it was improved considerably.

“Phew… Alright, enough of that,” Derida snickered, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her dress before continuing, “The mare is right, though. Hitting the P.A.C.T. building is a suicide run, High Justice. Nopony who goes on that mission is coming back.”

“The weapons we have will alert us to incoming enemies and they cut right through anything up to and, to our knowledge, including dragonscale,” I said. “Just how good is your connection to the Marked, Tourniquet?”

“Depending on how quickly you want to burn them out, very,” she replied, her gemstone eyes glittering as she rocked back and forth on her pile of cords, making herself comfortable. “If I want them to, they can see through each other’s eyes, but...they will die in minutes with this interference field, particularly if I’m projecting enough energy to do it when they’re not beside a power line.”

“We should only need minutes. If they’re half as efficient in combat as they are at working together, they’ll be the hammer we need to punch through the P.A.C.T. defenses.”

“I...I think I see where you’re going with this,” Scootaloo mused, trotting around to the other side of the map. She picked up a spare pencil and pointed at Uptown. “You think we can break this shield, then penetrate Uptown to look for Nightmare’s Armor and this...this prisoner, but...can’t do it with all the monsters inside, so you’re going to try to get them to come out? What’s to stop them from ignoring a hit on P.A.C.T. headquarters? It’s not essential.”

“No, but...if somepony starts messing with their shield and they don’t know how, they’ve got to assume we know something about our targets that they don’t,” I replied, “Besides, it’s where the P.A.C.T. first created those monsters. I’m betting they don’t want us nosing around that. Once we start screwing with the shield, they’re going to be coming for us anyway.”

“Mister Limerence, do ya think ya have some idea how these...eh...pylons, work?” Precious asked, using his cane to gesture in the librarian’s direction. “Ah mean, gonna look a mite silly if ya get inside and end up sittin’ pretty while the city burns around ya.”

“With respect, my father was a very capable thief of more than just weapons,” Limerence answered, pulling a sheet of folded paper from his pocket and smoothing it out on the table. It looked like a series of magical diagrams. “He was able to acquire a certain quantity of information down through the years about the interior of the Shield Pylons. They operate off a ‘focus’, which is a modified spell core. All spell cores and all shield magics have certain rules regarding their construction and my entire life has been spent pulling apart magical artifacts. There is no one alive more qualified. If I cannot shut the shield down, I am confident I can at least alter the spell in a fashion that will allow us ingress.”

“Carnath would have given both wings for these diagrams twenty years ago…” Firebrand whispered, running her tongue over her fangs.

“Considering he’s on the payroll of our enemies, I doubt he’s much concerned by them,” I said, shaking my head. “We need to hit Uptown from as many directions as we can, so we can buy time to search for the armor.”

“Attacking the P.A.C.T. headquarters and a Shield Pylon should do that, but...if I had a bunch of griffin warriors, some dragon commandos, and the police department’s mages to throw around, I could make one heck of a distraction,” Taxi put in, grabbing Lim’s pencil and drawing several arrows on the map.

“Oi can think o’ a few griffs moight be sittin’ pretty,“ Grimble Shanked said cooly.

I pulled the badge Telly had made me out of the front of my coat, letting it dangle. “Last I checked, I’m still Chief of Police. Iris might hate it, but to save her daughter, she’ll follow my orders.”

Firebrand didn’t bother responding, other than a slow trickle of smoke from her nose.

Taxi leant over the map again. “Once the dragons are engaged, we can start hit and run tactics, drawing them into the city center where they’ll be blinded by the storm. We tangle with the P.A.C.T. as close in as we can, making sure the dragons don’t know who is friendly and who isn’t.”

“That will work,” Scootaloo agreed. “We used similar tactics in the war, but you’re going to need some high powered communications for that to happen. Different squads will have to be ready to take heat from one another.”

“Then you will have it!”

A poof of mist exploded out of the center of the conference table, quickly coalescing into an amorphous but roughly equine shape.

I slumped in my seat as the sounds of unsheathing weapons and charging spells momentarily echoed around the chamber. It was obnoxious, but I couldn’t have expected any less from our friendly neighborhood extra-dimensional ghost.

Drawing a breath, I pulled myself together and looked up at the tableau of frozen persons all standing around with shocked expressions. The only ones who weren’t surprised, of course, were Tourniquet and Swift, but I sort of wondered if it was even right to call them separate people by then.

Derida and Grimble Shanks stood, side by side, the hen with her book of blood-magic in one claw and the cock with his axe ready to defend her. Taxi was in one of those freaky zebra combat poses, while Quickie held some dangerous spell in her brightly glowing horn. Firebrand and Limerence both had their blades out and ready. Stitch had a pie cocked back to throw. Strangely, Scootaloo was just sitting there staring at her with wide eyes.

Precious sipped his tea.

“Right. Ah would much appreciate if somepony would tell me what just happened?” the Prince said, picking up his cane and waving it in the air over the table, incidentally through Gypsy.

“Everyone...calm...calm down,” I muttered, waving a hoof at the foggy figure standing on the table. “This is...Celestia preserve, this living fart who loves her entrances is Gypsy, the radio pony.”

Gypsy swung around to face me and if she’d had a face, I imagine she’d have been giving me the stink-eye. “Living fart?! After I saved you from the Castle?!”

“I know you could have just pretended to call us over the public address system,” I grunted. “You just wanted to make an impression.”

“W-why does she look like that?!” Quickie squeaked.

“Because I am the spirit of Detrot! I am the voice upon the winds! I am Queen of the Signal!” Gypsy declared, thrusting a leg in the air and taking what I’m sure she thought was a heroic pose.

I opened my mouth to deliver my opinion, but Scootaloo cut me off.

“Glamour,” Scootaloo whispered.

Gypsy hesitated, then dropped her grey hoof and seemed to shrink slightly. “That...that word that was running around and around in my head when I woke up the first time inside the cloud…”

“Glamour is your name,” the elderly Crusader muttered, scratching at her thin mane. “It took me a second to recognize your voice. Oh, Luna’s tail, Sweetie Belle is going to explode...”

“Could someone explain to me why we are not all screaming and using our weapons?!” Quickie demanded.

“Could someone describe what’s going on, period?” Precious barked, rapping the top of the table with his cane.

“Justice, why didn’t you tell us—”

“Hardy, who—”

“Sir, there’s something going on—”

“Can you eat pie with no mouth—”

Like a hammer blow, silence suddenly descended over the room. Stunned faces, suddenly finding their lips moving and no words coming out, all turned in my direction. I looked over at Limerence, who was sitting with his horn gently glowing and a look of intense concentration on his face. I mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ at him and he gave me a quick nod, then released his spell.

“Now, then,” I said, trying to channel my mother’s no-nonsense tone when somepony had royally pissed her off and she was contemplating how many centuries to send them to their room for, “We will have time for complete personal histories later on, I’m sure. I will buy the first round of whatever anyone wants to drink once we have figured out exactly where we are going to be hunting the armor of Nightmare Moon. Four city blocks is too much to search. Gypsy...you can provide communications for the combat teams?”

The ghost gave a little dip of the part of her shaped like a head. “Yes, sir, Police Chief, sir! I had the Aroyos break into an electronics store and get us all the radios they could! I’ve been working on a modification to punch through the interference. If we keep the messages short, they shouldn’t burn out too quickly.”

Scootaloo crinkled her upper lip. “Your cutie-mark was in mechanical engineering…”

Gypsy gave her a wary glance. “I’m sorry, I’ve been wondering who I am for more than thirty years. Are...are you telling me—”

“You were a...a very good soldier who died serving Equestria,” the Crusader murmured, “We put you into that magical cloud with the intention of...getting you out one day, but...your body was gone when we tried.”

“Later, dammit!” I snapped. “We have hours to figure out what we’re going to do and where the armor of Nightmare Moon is likely to be!”

“B-but this is my whole life—” Gypsy stammered.

I poked the center of the map where Limerence’s crossed lines met. “This is the lives of everyone on the planet, right here. Talk when this is over. Right now, I need you focused.”

There was a long silence that seemed like it wasn’t planning on ending anytime soon, so I continued.

“There are four blocks in Limerence’s little projection. Can we eliminate any of them?” I asked.

Taxi swallowed whatever admonishment was on her lips and looked down at the map. “Well, it’s...city center. One of those blocks contains city hall and the Shield corporation headquarters.”

“I don’t believe we can rule that out, in the slightest,” Slip Stitch murmured, pulling himself a touch closer to the table. “Then this is the central Bank of Detrot. Must check on my investments if we happen to drop by. I’m sure Streamers Inc. is doing poorly, so might be a good time to buy...” He trailed off into seemingly distracted thought, before snapping back to the moment as though someone had clapped him on the tail with a ruler. “Then, we have the Weather Office. Considering that storm—”

“Right, so we can’t rule those out. What about this?” I asked, pointing to an unmarked section of the map.

Swift shook her head. “That’s just a construction site, Sir. It’s not even wired for electricity, yet.” Her brow furrowed and she looked toward the ceiling of the chamber. “Sir, something...mmm...Maybe it’s…huh.”

“What is it, kid?”

“I don’t know, Sir. I think Tourniquet’s tracking system is having some issues with the interference field. It’s probably nothing. Could you give me a second? I need to make sure I can find everypony.”

“Uh...Sure, go ahead.” Pulling my chair back, I exhaled as my partner seemed to zone out. “Alright. Pros and cons, people? We’ve got four possibilities and will probably only have time to hit two.”

Quickie bit her lip, then lit her horn and a tiny light appeared above the Shield Headquarters. “If they intend to use the Shield to cast this...this wish, wouldn’t the controls be here?” She raised her head and her eyes lit on Gypsy, Tourniquet, and her daughter who was staring at the roof. She quickly covered her face with her forelegs. “Oh, please let reality reassert itself sometime soon. I did not sign up for a planning session this strange.”

Grimble Shanks put a gentle talon on her shoulder. “Nay, none did, lass. Oi loike moi allies simple. Knowin’ the Hoigh Justice, if the smoke pony is oddest we meet, Oi’ll say ‘lucky day’.”

Reaching back, she touched his claw for a second, shooting him a grateful look. “I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not, but...thank you.”

“Mmm...Ah gotta ask. What is that there construction site constructin’?” Precious asked, cocking his head. “Center city work is right expensive and Ah don’t remember anythin’ fresh going up near there.”

“This map was from storage,” Tourniquet explained, apologetically. “It’s one the Lunar Passage left here...years ago. I don’t think it’s changed that much, but they don’t usually mark construction sites, do they?”

Taxi chewed her lip, thoughtfully. “Give me a second to think. Uptown, just off Main and Center Street…”

“I do believe that is where they’ve been building that silly crystal skyscraper for all these years,” Slip Stitch interjected with a disdainful sniff. “That building is hideously tacky.”

Taxi’s ears stood up straight. “You live in a giant scoop of super fortified ice-cream!”

“Irrelevant! We must all have standards!”

“Well, at least we can eliminate that,” Quickie said, levitating the pencil and drawing a large ‘X’ over the construction site. “What about City Hall?”

My cutie-mark tingled and Taxi looked up at me, sharply. Our eyes met. She tilted her head to one side with a questioning look. I gave her a quick nod.

In the back of my head, the Nightmare’s voice whispered, ‘Something is not right, here.’

“Wait a second. Why are we counting out the construction site?” I asked.

“I mean, it’s obviously not there,” Derida said, brushing her clawtips through her feathers. “It’s an unoccupied building, yes?”

“It’s been there since before I came back from the war. Nopony would put anything important there,” Scootaloo answered, eyeing the map. “The Weather Office gets my vote.”

Gypsy swished her head back and forth. “Eh, maybe? It’s not very well protected. The Shield Corporation building is real heavily—”

The tingle became a burn.

“Hold up. Why are we discounting the construction site?” I demanded.

“Because it’s empty!”

“Detective, it’s been under construction forever!”

“It is ludicrously tacky!”

“Aye, Justice...Oi think nuthin’ is there—”

Silence fell like an anvil dropped out of a tenth story apartment, though it wasn’t Limerence’s spell; it was unsettling realization. The gathered beings looked around at one another in confusion. I slowly got out of my chair.

“Grimble Shanks,” I said, “How do you know...nothing is there?”

“Obvious, innit? Nuthin’ could be,” Grimble replied, then squinted as he realized what he’d said.

“Derida. Tell me about this building.”

“It’s empty. Worthless. Nothing important at—” She stopped and her breath seemed to catch in her throat.

“Sweets?”

Taxi me gave a helpless shrug. “It’s a silly construction site that no one in their right mind would hide anything inside of. Totally harmless.”

The burn in my cutie-mark started to become painful; it felt like the skin was peeling right off my flank. I willed the discomfort into the back of my thoughts.

Nightmare’s voice rattled around my mind.

‘Something is not right.’

‘Something is not right.’

‘Something is not right.’

Everyone was looking at the blank spot on the map with a sort of nervous trepidation, but none seemed willing to speak. It was left to me.

“There has been a construction site...an unoccupied building...in the middle of Detrot since before most of us were born,” I stated, slowly and carefully. The words felt strangely slippery on my tongue. “This building...has existed...for forty years...uncompleted...and none of us thought anything of it.”

“W-why would s-somepony think anything of it?” Tourniquet stuttered, her eyes glittering with fear. “I-it’s harmless. N-nothing is there.”

Before I could figure out what a person is meant to say given the circumstances, Swift jerked up like somepony had yanked her strings, and her wings flared.

“Oh! There he is!” she exclaimed.

“There who is, kid?” I asked.

“Sorry. I lost track of Goldenrod for a few minutes. I put him with the other prisoners in a closet upstairs, but...he must have followed you. Probably looking for orders.”

“Wait...followed me?”

She nodded toward the door. “He’s in the hall, outside. He’s just standing there, butting his head against the wall repeating ‘orders’ over and over. I’ll have somepony come get him.”

I held up a hoof, then pointed at the map. “Kid...what is this construction site?”

“Sir?”

“It was a simple question. One sentence. Don’t think about it. What’s this construction site?”

“In the middle of the city? It’s...where they’re going to be putting Starlight Tower, isn’t it?”

I slid down from my chair and walked around to stand in front of her. But for the tentacular wiring in her face throbbing beneath the skin, she might still have been the pony I’d met two months ago in Iris Jade’s office. Still innocent. Still kind. Still untainted by violence.

“Swift, I want you to listen very carefully. Somepony started building Starlight Tower forty years ago,” I said, speaking slowly as though to a foal. “It’s been under construction for that entire period of time. Even assuming construction slowdowns, it has never taken more than six years to build a single building in modern Equestria.”

Her pupils dilated and she shook her head. “Impossible, Sir. Th-that building is harmless. Nothing is there. We should just ig-ig-ig...” Her face went slack and she turned to Tourniquet who was shivering slightly.

Swinging back to the group I snarled, “Who owns that building?!”

Gypsy rubbed at her chin with one protrusion of fog that was almost a leg. “Don’t you know? That’s Voluntas. The land baron. Major player in Detrot economics. Philanthropist, but never spends his money on anything that might threaten the powers that be. You know the shtick.”

I nodded, thinking back to where I’d last heard that name. “I met him, briefly, before the Darkening at one of those police charity events. He seemed...a little grandiose, but nothing too outlandish. Bought me a drink.”

With a little puff of smoke, Firebrand clicked her talons on the conference table. “Voluntas?” she mused. “I suppose using Ancient Equestrian to name foals was in vogue when he was born.”

“You tell me,” I replied. “Is that important?”

Firebrand flicked her tongue out to taste the air, then folded her wings against her sides. “Most likely just a curious coincidence.”

“I’m beginning to think coincidences don’t exist,” I grumbled.

From the other end of the table, Limerence piped up. “His first name means ‘Diamond’. I believe Voluntas means something like ‘Will’, though my Ancient Equestrian is a tad rusty.”

“Ahem...I had to study Ancient Equestrian for my dissertation on historical burial systems,” Slip Stitch put in. “I do believe Voluntas was also commonly used to refer to ‘Wishes’.”

My mind went blank for several seconds as all those fragments of grand design sank neatly into their places.

“Diamond Wishes? His name is Diamond Wishes?!”

“Sir—”

I wheeled on her, almost shouting at the top of my lungs, “Kid, we just found out who D.W. is! What—”

Swift shrank back from me, her eyes a little frightened.

“Sir...Goldenrod is...is asking for you,” she said, softly.

I stared at her for a long moment. “I...thought those three had the memories of a goldfish.”

She pointed toward the chamber door. “H-he’s asking for you, Sir.”

I swallowed my excitement, fighting my thoughts back into something resembling a rational shape. My cutie-mark felt like a set of knives digging into both hips. How had I ignored that?

‘Something is not right, here.’

Puzzles. Wheels. A great trick had been played.

A trick was still being played.

“Tourniquet,” I said, and the mechanical mare stood a little taller, “I want you to lock down the outer door of this chamber. Let me out into the antechamber. As soon as I’m out, you close this chamber and do not open it until I tell you to, alright?”

“O-okay. What’s...what’s going on?” she asked.

“Just follow my orders. Clear this floor. I want all of your people away from here. Leave Goldenrod where he is.”

Firebrand loosened one of her swords in its sheath. “Should we be preparing for a fight?”

“No. No, not yet,” I said, marching over to the hydraulic door.

“But what—”

“No more questions. Stay here. If I am not back in fifteen minutes, start getting everyone inside and get ready for an attack. Tourniquet? Let me out.”

I expected some objections, but no one seemed ready to make the first one.

After a few seconds of silence, the heavy door let out a hiss and began to lift. I ducked under it before it was quite open and darted through into the Aroyo’s little hang-out space. The nondescript maintenance door at the far end was still shut. Behind me, the second one slammed closed just as somepony - it sounded like it might have been Taxi - started to say something, cutting her off mid-word.

‘What are you doing? Allow me a moment to plan!’ Nightmare yowled in my mind.

‘We don’t have a moment!’ I snapped. ‘If this goes sideways, get my body away from here before it dies.’

‘How am I meant to do that, you fool?!’

‘You and Gale did it before! Work it out!’

Quickly flicking my revolver’s breach open, I pulled the crystal Crusader bullets out of my pocket and slammed the cartridges home. Twitching my leg, I snapped the gun shut and pulled back the hammer, pausing with my toe over the mode switch. If I turned on the berserker mode, I’d probably be dead in minutes, but it didn’t need minutes to work.

Deep breath.

“Tourniquet? Outer door.”

The construct’s voice sounded in my right ear. “Are you sure about this, Hardy?”

“Open it.”

I picked up my trigger bit.

The control chamber’s portal clunked, then slammed open like it was on a spring.

Outside, the hallway was empty, though I could hear a curious *thunk-thunk* noise coming from somewhere nearby. Cautiously creeping over to the door, careful to step over a bong somepony had left on the carpet, I peered out into the corridor.

Goldenrod sat a few meters away. The yellow stallion’s handsome face was streaked with blood from a small wound on his forehead as he pulled his head back, then banged it firmly on the wall. Without his armor, he almost looked like an ordinary pony, but for the strange muscles which didn’t quite look properly equine lining his back and the slight bowing of his front knees which seemed unnaturally distended.

“O-orders...orders…” he mumbled, again and again, punctuating each word with a soft *thunk*. He didn’t seem to have noticed me.

I straightened and let my trigger drop.

“You don’t need to keep this charade going...” I said. He seemed still to ignore me, so I added, “I know you’re here, Diamond.”

Goldenrod paused in his self abuse, then raised his bloodied head, turning to look at me. Gradually, a black liquid seemed to fill his eye sockets, leaving his eyes matching empty holes. Turning from the wall, he smoothed his mane back, using the blood to slick it in place.

Getting up, he strolled over in front of me and sat himself down again, leaning this way and that as though I were some obscure, academic curiosity he’d managed to pin under a magnifying glass.

“It has been so very long since I heard my name,” the stallion said, with an expression that might almost be called grateful. He held out of his hoof in a cordial and nonthreatening fashion, somewhat undermined by the circumstances. “Diamond Wishes, at your service, Detective. I am glad to end the act. Truly, I am.”

I took his hoof and gave it a light shake. “Diamante Voluntas. The ancient Equestrian was a nice touch.”

“Do you think so?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question. “I’ve had to answer to that pseudonym for more than forty years. I am pleased to abandon it, here, at the end. It is the end, after all.”

I looked at the ceiling, then back at him. “You bought me a drink. That buys you five minutes’ conversation.”

“Five minutes, you say? So sad. I did enjoy our conversation at the Police Ball and I think you are a pony I would delight in spending years getting to know, if years were still an option.”

“Don’t count us out, yet,” I replied. “You’ve seen what we can bring to bear.”

“Why do you think I took this body?” He laughed, a rich and practiced chuckle that seemed entirely unforced while still giving the impression that he’d spent a few thousand hours in front of a mirror getting it right. “Penetrating the defenses of the Police Department was simplicity itself, butthis prison? No, I needed an invitation, a reason to have one of my creations on the inside.”

“I won’t apologize for compassion. If you think a little kindness makes what you’re doing right—”

He interrupted with a wave of his leg. “Compassion has nothing to do with it. If it matters, I admire your willingness to give even your most dangerous foes a chance to surrender. You are both the most and least predictable pony I’ve ever met or heard of, Detective. If ponykind were to continue beyond tomorrow, I would hold you up as the paragon and nadir of the species, simultaneously.”

“So, that’s it, then? You’re going to ‘wish’ us out of existence?” I asked. “Or are you gunning for a Princess-hood?”

He shook his head, a bit tiredly, sinking down onto on the concrete floor and tucking his front legs under his chest. “If all I desired were extinction, I have already handled Celestia and Luna. I’d need only wait a few months for that eventuality. Death and horror are tools. I’m sure you’ve discovered what a magnificent energy source they are, as well.”

“I have. So, what was the deal?”

His eyebrows, caked with Goldenrod’s blood, drew tightly together. “The deal, Detective?”

“I was in your house, remember? Your family has been ‘Diamond Wishes’ for a thousand years. Right up till Umbra, Animus, and Armature. They struck a deal.”

“Oh, do go on!” he exclaimed. “I must hear your suppositions. It is so rare to meet keen minds I can speak to frankly. What did you find in the house?”

“The pictures—” I began.

“Did you like the pictures on the walls?” he interjected. “I was raised with those pictures looking down at me.”

“I know what they are. What they were. What your family did.”

“I’m sure you believe you know,” Diamond Wishes replied, wistfully. “It was ever so much more vicious than that. Do you know, I remember my sister’s twisted little face when her picture was hung beside my bed. She’d found some tiny fragment of strength to rise from her sickbed and try to escape before my fathers came for her. Of course, they caught her and tore her eyes out. I remember, each night as I went to bed, praying I’d have the strength when the time came to tear out my parents’ eyes...” He wore a fond smile, now, but it quickly faded. “Ah well. As you can see, I did. Continue, please. What else did you find?”

“We found the pylon. We opened it,” I said, trying to remain calm. “It was empty. So...what was the deal?”

Sitting up, he clapped his hooves excitedly, eyes wide with interest. “Oh very good! Very good! You are worth every inch of fear and awe you instill in those poor, doomed souls upstairs. Such a worthy question requires a worthy answer, and...I must say, I don’t know what the original ‘deal’ was. It isn’t relevant. The ponies who made that deal are a thousand years dead.”

“Then what’s your deal? You can’t mean to let Equestria somehow recover from what you’ve done. You’re not looking to make us better or make some new species of pony to survive the apocalypse.”

“Ha! You have been exploring my lieutenants!”

I shifted from one hoof to the other. “Skylark wanted to become an alicorn. Zefu wanted to live beyond death. And Broadside—”

“Believes his mutations worthy enough that they might survive the coming end,” Diamond Wishes sighed, plucking at his host’s sharp teeth with the tip of one hoof. “I hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth, and it does keep him loyal. A loyal brother, in my family, is a rare and valuable resource.”

“I can imagine.”

“Why, almost as valuable as a partner! Or a ward. Or a young stallion in need of guidance. Or even a best friend. Do they know they are doomed, as well?”

“Everyone dies, someday,” I shot back.

“Do they really? You seem immune. Perhaps even immune enough to still stand after what will come,” he mused, nodding to himself before bringing his empty eyes back around to meet my gaze. “But that is neither here, nor there. You asked what my deal was? Some things are beyond valuation. I valued my sister, and she died. I valued my parents, and I killed them in the most brutal fashion one can. I valued my money, and spent every cent of it to bring about this circumstance. I valued power, and knew from the moment I was born that no amount of power would ever come close to that wielded by my benefactor.”

“Then why, dammit?! Why?! Why not walk away? Do you even want this?!”

Diamond Wishes smiled a rictus smile and licked blood from one of his lips. “Do you know, I was the first of my line to touch it? The very first. No other laid their hoof upon it. They cowered, they whimpered, they sobbed, and they cringed, but I alone...touched.” His gaze seemed to drift into the distance before snapping back to mine. “It has offered me everything, and more besides...but it didn’t have to. That single instant of perfect majesty was all I needed. All I wanted. You don’t need to comprehend.”

“We’re coming to kill you,” I said, quietly. “You know that.”

“Certainly. I would expect nothing less...and so I will make you a deal. A deal is a pony thing and while we are still ponies, I want to know if my divine is as true as I believe it is. It has told me where you will die. I assume you know where to find me?”

I clicked my tongue and nodded. “Starlight Tower.”

One side of his lips quirked again, but there was no humor in it. “Excellent. If you, Detective, can make it to the tower...none will stop you. You alone. All others will die before they reach me, but if you make it inside the tower...If you find me there and if your destiny is manifest...you will die the final death.”

“Not much of a deal,” I said.

“I don’t have many things to offer, besides a chance. One, single chance, to be right or wrong. If there is will in the world to change the outcome, then that is what I give you. My benefactor tells me the dice are already cast. If it is so, then nothing...no one...can upset this design. Not even you, Detective Hard Boiled.”

The scent of searing flesh suddenly filled my nose. A billow of smoke boiled out of Goldenrod’s mouth, followed by a gout of blue flame from his nostrils and ears. Fire erupted from the flesh around his neck, but those eyes didn’t leave mine as the vessel burned until the stallion’s skull caved in on itself.

Act 3 Chapter 62 : Live, From The Fortress Everfree

"Equestria has lived through long winters and scalding summers. Our rulers have survived bouts of madness, our government has survived bouts of democracy, and our civil order has survived bouts of social anarchy. We've stood up to tyrants and bowed down to princesses, but Equestria has always remained a land where hope for change may blossom. If there is ever a day this country falls, it won't be one land alone that burns; it will be the whole world, burning together."

-History of Equestria, Volume XVI

Taxi found me curled up in a ball in one of the cells near Tourniquet’s room, hugging some foal’s stuffed alligator. I had the hem of my coat stuffed in my mouth so nopony could hear me screaming. I don’t remember crawling away from the smoldering body. I don’t remember crawling under the bunk. I don’t remember biting my lip until it bled all over my chin and coat.

My driver stood in the doorway for a moment, then trotted inside and pushed the bunk away from my little hiding place. Reality was reasserting itself, but it was taking its sweet time about it. Goldenrod’s burning body was still flickering behind my eyelids off and on like a neon light. The smell of a burning body periodically filled my nose.

Gathering me up in her hooves, she rocked a little and I put my forelegs around her neck. Crying seemed the wrong thing, particularly at the end of days, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Every time I thought I might have it under control, another rush of terror would sweep aside my little stoic notions like a blast of icy water. I couldn’t control it any more than I could have held back the tide.

At some point, she started dabbing my face off with a kerchief she’d retrieved from somewhere, wiping at my eyes as I stared up into hers. She brushed a hoof through my mane and sighed.

“I can do this, Hardy,” Taxi murmured. “Lim has a spell to make my voice sound like yours. Say one word, and you can stop fighting. They don’t need to see you. You can stay here. I’ll make sure—”

I caught her hoof and held it tightly.

“Sweet Shine, you know nothing like that ever works out,” I said with more control than I’d thought possible in my state of mind. “But...if I could, you’d be the first pony I’d trust to take my place out there.”

Taxi gave me a hard look and pushed back a couple inches. “If it were any other stallion, right now, I’d think this was some kind of stupid ego thing. What happened back there? I found what was left of Goldenrod—”

“That wasn’t Goldenrod,” I replied, wiping at my running nose with the back of one foreleg as I fought for composure. “Diamond Wishes conned us.”

“He...oh...oh horseapples, I only stuck them in a closet! Tourniquet said she’d watch them!”

“She was watching them. It didn’t matter. This isn’t a fair game. But...he gave us a chance. One chance. Maybe. I’ll need a favor, though.”

Taxi’s worried expression deepened. “I can’t remember the last favor you asked me for. We don’tdoeach other favors. I’d trust you holding a leash with me on the other end, so what could you possibly need that makes you think a favor is necessary?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat and began to tell her about my conversation with Diamond Wishes, then my plan, then the reasons, and finally I sat waiting for her to respond.

When I regained consciousness, Taxi had plugged me into a wall socket. It was helpful, though the headache and black eye were still fading. Most ponies might feel a touch of resentment, but I’d asked for something that she couldn’t exactly give me without a beating, nor could she deny it to me. Besides, the kicking had managed to knock loose a bit of the impacted terror in my brain and it seemed to be steaming along much better than it had been.

Sitting up on the thinly blanketed bunk, I pulled a deep breath in, then felt along my ribcage for anything that might have been broken. She’d shown a bit of restraint, thankfully.

A faint buzz came from the edge of the cot and I rolled onto one side to come face to face with a giant insect, smugly chewing a bit of popcorn from a little bag clutched in its front claws. It didn’t pause its meal, but only crunched a little faster.

“Am I that interesting to watch?” I asked.

“This one assures you, yes, oh yes!” Queenie chirped. “You make no sense, and forever we try! What will you do next? Get kicked into a ditch? Burnt alive again? A mare may hang you from a yardarm...no, wait...There are no boats nearby. We must find a boat and give that one a chance!” It waved a wing in the direction Taxi’d just left by.

“I’d rather not if it’s all the same. What are they doing in Tourniquet’s chamber?”

“Adding nuance! Much nuance. This shall be a plan to end all plans! A smashing dashing crashing plan for blowing up the city! We cannot wait!”

“So, they’re fleshing things out. Good. Taxi will brief me when that’s done. I don’t suppose you’ve figured out some way of punching through the interference?”

Queenie’s wings ruffled the air as it zipped up onto the end of my cot. “This one has. Slightly. A little.”

“You’re saying that like I won’t care for the answer.”

Setting aside the bag of popcorn, Queenie settled down like a cat, tucking its claws under itself. “We can place many of ourselves near certain ponies and...together, have enough to push away the horrible, nasty, no good nastiness so we can see. But have to have five or more. We are not efficient anymore!”

“So, you’re saying...I can follow ponies, but only a few?”

“Hideously! Horribly! Sad signal, spread across many bodies...But yes, you can follow. Some. A tiny bit.”

“Alright. That’s simple enough. I want you to send enough so I can follow Limerence, Taxi—”

“Already have we done this! Your friends will have many of us with them! Silly, you, to think we would not know! We shall be as fleas upon their flanks!”

“Then why are you here?” I asked, gesturing at the door. “Surely there have got to be more interesting things happening out there.”

“You, my sweetest sweet Detective, are where the action is! Besides, do you not wish to see all the ponies out there, preparing for battle with your name on their little adorable equine lips?”

Pulling myself into a sitting position, I rested a hoof on Queenie’s carapace. “You’re not altruistic enough to be showing me the sights for fun.”

“Of course not! But, you do have a way of pointing the cameras in the right directions! I suspect there is a lovely speech coming in your near future! One full of verve and passion!”

“This isn’t a damn movie, Queenie. Ponies will die today!”

“So will many of us!” it replied, cheerily. “We are looking most forward to the coming battle! It is rare our network experiences death!”

That was enough to quickly sober my rising anger. I sat back as Queenie crawled a little closer, keeping my hoof on its back.

“You’re not afraid?” I asked.

“We are terrified!” it said, still with that gleeful tone to its buzzing words. “We have never been so close to the true end of the story! Will it be wistful? Will all skies go as dark as ours? Will the monsters crush the last bastions of resistance? We cannot say, but we are not bored!”

Shaking my head, I dropped off the cot and realized somepony had pulled my coat off, folded it, and tucked it under my head as a pillow. I picked it up and underneath lay my anti-magic body armor, a freshly oiled gun harness, a short barrel shotgun, and the Emblem of Harmony. Lifting the Emblem, I stared at the tiny twig made of crystal inside the glass case. It was a funny thing to hold in my hoof. So much power, and yet, so worthless in the current circumstances.

‘Funny,’ I thought, ‘I wonder how I wasn’t affected by the mental magics surrounding Starlight Tower.’

Nightmare made her presence known with a mental harumph, rather than any actual words.

‘You have thoughts, Miss Moon?’ I asked.

‘I have nothing but thoughts! You allowed us to be beaten up again! Why do you do that?! I may not feel pain unless I am controlling that body, but it is still frightening to watch!’

‘Taxi has a certain way of dealing with stress. So do I. Right then, we both had a certain need. Besides, there are some things a stallion shouldn’t ask anyone and I asked her for one of those things.’

‘Well, I do wish you should find some means that does not threaten your biological integrity!’

‘It’s this or drink. Either way, you didn’t stick your head up just to complain, did you?’

A picture of Nightmare Moon wearing a fluffy, blue bathrobe and drinking from a dainty little tea-cup appeared in my head. ‘I do not complain! You tasked me with keeping you alive! If I am to do that, I must understand you. But...I have a consideration.’

‘Go on?’

‘Twilight Sparkle is the caster of perhaps one of the largest scale memory spells ever cast in Equestria. Might not the talisman she gave you have a magic that protects against those sorts of workings?’

I began wiggling into my gun harness as I replied, ‘Makes sense, I guess. Wouldn’t do her much good to give me a way of summoning alicorns if I forgot they existed the second I’m out of her presence. Why would it work on Starlight Tower, though?’

‘How many such templates for large scale mind magic can there be? There is bound to be some overlap in their structures.’

‘Point. What about this plan of ours?’

‘It is going to kill you, again, and most likely permanently. The being that created the Nightmare’s Armor imbued it with powerful precognitive abilities. It is best to assume that the entity also has powerful precognitive abilities.’

‘That’s what I thought. Anything useful?’

‘The future is endlessly varied and impossible to fully fathom, no matter the prophetic powers one might have access to. For now, do what the bug suggested.’

I hesitated, then snatched up my gun harness and started the laborious process of getting into it.

“Queenie, in your cinematic experience, if I wanted to give a speech to those ponies upstairs, how would I get the most impact out of it?”

Swift met me at the door of Tourniquet’s chamber a few minutes later. Her fur was mussed and her eyes low-lidded, but she still gave me a little smile. I glanced around for anyone else who might be on the way out, then peered inside. Tourniquet’s inner door was shut tight.

“Sir? I saw what happened. Goldenrodand the other two troopers—”

“I know. Bastard burned them. Probably didn’t want us to get too close a look at them.”

Swift leaned against the door sill and gave me a slightly smug look. “Well, Tourniquet did get a look at them. The closet she stuck them inside was one of the cells that still had all the old runes under the paint. She says there was some kind of...magical signal coming from the general direction of Uptown. It was probably what was controlling them.”

“Ah...now that is useful,” I murmured. “Wait, is that useful?”

“Tourniquet thinks that if we cut off the signal, it may cut off whatever is making them obey orders.”

“Right, but that leaves the issue of a horde of ravening monsters with nobody controlling them. Best case scenario, they go psycho like you did back in that cafe and tear each other apart. Worst case—”

Her ears laid back against her head. “—they eat anyone they can get their hooves on.”

I patted my breast where the Emblem of Harmony lay. “That sounds like a Princess sized problem. Twilight Sparkle gave me a way to summon her if we can manage to bring down the shield. Could you get out to that phone box our secret agent friends use and tell them we’re going to assault Uptown in a few hours? They’ve got a better way of getting in touch with her. Do not answer any questions.”

Swift frowned. “Why not, Sir?”

“If I read that pony right, you’ll get her here ten times faster if you leave her curious and frustrated.”

My partner’s expression dimmed slightly and her wings sagged against the concrete. “You...want me to intentionally frustrate an alicorn.”

“I don’t think I mumbled, kid. See if you can piss her off a little, too. If she’s been drinking, angry drunk is better than scared drunk.”

Her pupils shrank to pinpoints as she swayed on her hooves. “I-I don’t think I am going to be able to accept any medals for this.”

“If we live long enough to see medals, I’m having yours engraved with a scared dragon peeing on herself while you stand on her nose. I’m sure you’ll manage one grumpy librarian, princess or not.”

“You saw what our grumpy librarian did to the last pony who made him angry, right?”

“You’ve got your orders, kid. Give her plenty of reason to storm in here with an army on her tail. We’ll need it to contain this mess before it spreads to the rest of Equestria.”

Swift shot me a halfhearted salute and trotted off down the hall towards the stairs. “You owe me a chicken for this one, Sir. Feathers and all. And I get to eat it in front of you.”

“Deal. You can have it on your date with the Warden. I’ll have Scarlet bring it round on a platter and we’ll scare as much of the upper crust as is left alive.”

Watching her disappear around the corner, I looked up at the ceiling. “So? Thoughts? I know you were listening.”

There was a moment’s pause, then Tourniquet’s sheepish voice came from a spot next to my head. “I don’t do it on purpose, you know.”

“I’m aware. Do you think this plan can work?”

“I heard what Diamond Wishes said. If you’re putting stock in mathematical prophecy, you can make it to the tower. After that...who knows?”

“Not quite what I hoped for, but not as bad as I worried it might be. I need some special effects and a couple unicorns who can project a larger than life image—”

“I was listening to you and Queenie, too. I’ve already got them headed to the roof. Gypsy is coordinating. Preparations are going to be as done as they can be in a few hours. A day isn’t enough, but...I don’t think a month would be, either.”

I bit off a sharp comment about machines with too much initiative. “Can’t ask for more than that, I guess. Are the teams already set?”

“In the meeting, yes. You truly believe you can do what you said?”

“It’s worse than that. I don’t think anyone else can.”

“Then go get some food and rest. Without the concussion, this time. I’ll call you when it’s time.”

You’d think it would have been impossible for me to sleep. You’d think I’d have lain there, staring at the ceiling, pondering existence. You’d think I’d have shivered and cried some more.

I was unconscious before I actually hit the pillow.

Part of me expected a visit from Juniper, but I suspected he was off the grid so long as I was inside the city and the Shield was up.

In the darkness between waking and not, I wandered for a while until the black ‘floor’ of my dream space resolved into flagstones and a street rose up to meet my hooves. Buildings sprang up on either side of me and low, damp, fog rolled in with just a hint of sunlight breaking through overhead as I trotted along the street. A rock appeared in front of me, just the right sort for kicking along while out on hoof patrol. I gave it a little boot and it skittered up the sidewalk, right to the spot I’d aimed it for.

The sun felt good. Better than good. It felt like it only feels on childhood vacations, or when you’re in love, or in dreams.

Voices started to filter in. A rushing mare in a red dress that I’d seen somewhere darted passed me, giggling to herself as she swayed her flanks at somepony behind her who called out a friendly greeting.

I walked on, enjoying the sweat that’d started to tickle my neck and the smells of the city on the thick air.

At some point, I became aware of a presence following along behind me. I stopped and looked over my shoulder to find a small colt standing on the pavement a few meters back. He wore a smart little trenchcoat, a black wide-brimmed hat, and a shiny toy police badge. Even his mane was the same mussed and messy grey as mine.

He had a quirky smile on his face, studying me like I’d just done something funny and he was deciding just how much laughter was appropriate.

“Gale?”

The colt tipped his hat and stuck a hoof in the pocket of his trenchcoat, pulling out a tiny bag of jelly beans. He flicked me one and I unconsciously caught it between my teeth. It was that same brand I’d had on me the day we found Ruby at the High Step.

“I can’t remember what I used to look like,” he said, chewing thoughtfully, “I hope you don’t mind if I borrow, since it’s kind of ‘our’ face nowadays.”

“Is Nightmare Moon out there wandering around with my...our body?” I asked.

“No, she’s over there,” he replied, pointing to an empty cafe across the street where the dark blue alicorn sat at a table, distractedly reading a menu labeled ‘Hardy’s Best Dinners’.

“If only the department shrink could see me now,” I muttered, then turned back to the colt. “You have some input on what we’re going into, I guess?”

“I just wanted to say ‘good luck’ and give you what might or might not be helpful information. I think I can keep the Crusader from killing us, if you have to use it again.”

“How does that work? Scootaloo said there was an entire regime of mental training on top of all their augmentations.”

Gale stepped closer and tapped me on the chest. “What do you think I am, doofus? I’m the best augmentation there is!”

Reaching out I pushed his hat back so I could muss his mane. “I agree, but what does that have to do with the Crusader?”

He batted at my hoof, but it wasn’t much more than a gentle swat before sitting back on the sidewalk. “Changeling hearts run on love. Who is the pony who carries the hope of all of Detrot?”

“I—”

“And don’t say any of that dumb ‘I’m not that important’ horseapples. It sounds stupid after all the stuff you did. I can feel all those ponies out there and they’ve got images of you in their heads. Mostly wrong images, but...I’m not picky and their admiration is tasty.”

“Alright, fine. A little creepy, but fine. What about the Crusader?”

“Right! Yes. I think I can keep you alive! It’ll...maybe involve making you fall asleep for a few minutes after it stops working, but you won’t be dead.”

“If things are so bleak I have to use that thing—”

Gale gave me a hard stare and I swallowed my words before I could say anything else stupid and obvious.

“Hardy, I know you’re scared. I didn’t just bring you here to tell you about the gun thing.”

I shut my eyes, but there was no peaceful darkness to retreat to. “I spent the last few years drinking myself insensate. The literal weight of the world is on my shoulders, today. A pony just told me I am going to die before bursting into flames. In fact, I’m pretty sure he caught fire just to mess with my brain.”

“And you got pretty close to ruining your liver before I got ahold of it,” Gale murmured, reaching up and pulling my face down to his level. It was a little spooky, looking into the eyes of my much younger self. “I know I’m mostly a little kid, but I’ve been aware longer than you’ve been alive and I spend all day wandering around in your memories.”

My ears pinned to the sides of my head. “Even the—”

“Yeah. Miss Tardigrade’s fifth period class. I’m pretty sure the rabbit was just as embarrassed as you were. That’s really not important right now. What’s matters is I think you missed something.”

I squinted at him and rubbed at my temple with one hoof. “Missed something? I assume something beneficial?”

“Maybe. You still remember a dream you had a month ago. You were talking to Juniper and he said something important.”

Swallowing, I thought back to the strange visions I’d had over the last few months.

“That’s a little vague, but...go on?”

“Juniper said ‘You don’t have a destiny’. Nightmare Moon called you a ‘glitch’ in her predictions. Those three old mares...the Aroyo Ancestors? You screwed up their entire yarn model of Detrot. They had to ‘redo it’ just so it would be okay for you to exist. Think about it.”

My eyebrows pulled together and I stared into Gale’s eyes for several seconds, trying to work out exactly what he wanted me to see.

Then I had it.

“Diamond Wishes...said he wanted to know if his benefactor was right. He needed to know if it was infallible. That thing predicted my death on the top of Starlight Tower—”

“And it might be right, Hardy,” Gale said, putting his hooves up on my chest. “If you die, I die and I don’t want to die, but...but nopony else can stop the world from dying. I’m only telling you this so you know that the...whatever it is...might also be wrong.”

“You think he meant what he said about letting me get to the top of the tower if I can make it into the building?”

Gale shrugged, expressively, and pulled his hat down over his face. “How am I supposed to know? I’m just your heart. I’m going to keep you alive as long as I possibly can, but I don’t do the think-y stuff. You want thinky, you talk to the loony alicorn. She’s thinky.”

I rested a hoof on his shoulder, then pulled him into a light hug. He rested his cheek on my chest, and his breath tickled the underside of my chin. “I do appreciate it,” I said, softly, then let him go and set his hat straight again. “I don’t intend to die. One of these days, if there’s something I can do for you, let me know, alright?”

He smiled and poked me on the tip of the nose. “If you’re going to drink really hard, plug me in first. I hate using so much power on hangovers. And maybe go to a movie once in a while. I like the movies.”

“Will do,” I replied, tapping my forehead in a half-salute. I looked over at Nightmare who was face-first in a plate of spaghetti with sauce up to her ears. “What do we do about her? She can’t hear us, can she?”

“Not right now...and she doesn’t say it, but she’s pretty happy,” he murmured, shaking his head. “She expected you to kill her dead.”

I scratched at my chin. “You told her I wouldn’t, right?”

“Do you think Nightmare Moon is going to believe me? I look like I should still be doing math homework and playing buckball! She’s literally made of jealousy and suspicion. Besides, do you really want her reading your whole mind?”

“Not really, no.” I lowered my head so I could look into his eyes. “Gale, if it comes down to it and Diamond Wishes somehow gets control of my mind—”

“You’ll be dead before he knows what hit you. I promise. Then Miss Taxi can clean you up and stick you in a drawer again until I can put all your bits back together.”

“I should be reevaluating my job if I’m taking ‘quick merciful death’ as a positive. Thank you, though. Any suggestions for this speech?”

Gale backed away a couple steps, holding up his hooves. “Oooh, no you don’t! Do your own chores! I just keep all the gooey stuff working!”

Pulling myself up straight I cocked an ear at the sounds of the street, filtering down through the foggy morning.

“Do you think it’s ever going to be like this, again?” I asked.

Shrugging his little shoulders, Gale conjured a bagel from somewhere with the flick of a hoof. It appeared, dangling in front of me, smeared in cream cheese and covered in fresh onions. I snatched it out of midair with my teeth.

“Any world that still has bagels can’t be all bad, right?” he said, then looked up at the ‘sky’ and smiled. “Limerence is about to draw something on your face.”

“Wait, what?!”

I jerked awake to find Limerence standing over me with a marker clenched in his teeth. He smelled like he’d just washed and his yellow mane was free of viscera, once more in the freely flowing style he tended to prefer. He had his swordstaff across his shoulders and a fresh brace of knives strapped to his chest, having foregone his vest in favor of a pair of long blades in their own holsters dangling along his flanks.

“Aha!” the librarian exclaimed, spitting out the marker. “Excellent. Hypothesis confirmed, then.”

I rubbed my cheek with a hoof; it came away clean. “You...didn’t write on my face?”

“I was curious if one of the beings possessing you might be self-aware, even if you happened to be asleep. It seemed an excellent test.”

“And you decided to experiment now?!” I snapped, sitting up on the edge of the bunk.

“What better time to indulge my curiosity? We may all soon be dead. Then how would I find out?”

Pushing him back with a hoof on his chest, I dropped onto the floor, adjusting my harness and tugging the edge of my armor until its comforting weight settled around my barrel. “Then you’ll be pleased to know the ghost in my heart found your efforts comedic.”

Limerence raised an eyebrow, his eyes glittering with mischief. “If we survive, I shall have to get your heart’s opinion on a number of other things.”

“I’ll set you a complete interview if I’m alive to do it. What’s our status?”

Pulling a notepad out of his bandolier, he flicked it open. “Teams are in place. As much of our ‘army’ is ready to go as can be. They are...technically armed, though better than a third have nothing more than handguns or rifles. We have managed to distribute and teach shielding magic to more unicorns than I’d have thought possible. The plan is to move through the sewers to our positions, then each point from underneath. Precious is already at the refugee camp and supposedly talking to their leaders. Miss Shine’s ‘favor’ is ready as well. All that is left—”

“—is me.”

“Indeed,” he replied, tucking away his notes. “I must get to my team. We are heading out ahead of the main force.” Turning over his belt, he revealed a row of eight ladybugs tucked underneath. “We have Gypsy’s modified walkie-talkies. What are these for?”

“Those are just to let me know when I can make my run on the Shield. I want to see what you see in the pylon. I’m going after the Shield after you get in and make me a hole and once Swift hits the P.A.C.T. building.”

“Excellent. A part of me feels slightly...ehm...guilty...for taking what may be the least dangerous of these jobs,” Limerence said.

“You’re going into a Shield Pylon. I don’t think there’s anything about that scenario that could be described as ‘safe’. Who did you decide to bring along?” I asked.

“The Aroyo ancestor Sweetie Belle, your grandfather, and the zebra warrior-ess, Miss Zeta from the Vivarium.”

“Are you sure four is enough?”

He snorted under his breath. “Officer Swift, you, Miss Taxi, and myself have been ‘enough’ to cause nigh endless havoc. Besides, to my knowledge, I am not headed into a combat situation.”

I laid a hoof on his chest and gave him a level stare. “Saying that out loud is how you head into a combat situation, Lim. Make sure everypony is armed to the teeth.”

Rolling his eyes, Limerence pulled one of his knives from his bandolier and tested the edge on a hoof before slipping it back into the sheath. “As though a Crusader would go anywhere not ‘armed to the teeth’. Besides, I think our enemies will have their hooves quite full with Miss Swift. Her godfather sent his regards along with several large crates full of weaponry and a third of the remaining Stilettos. The rest are protecting the Vivarium’s hospital.”

“Good. Any idea who Swift is taking along?”

“Her mother, obviously. Iris Jade is in that taskforce. If you want more specifics, ask Taxi. She is doing the field coordination with Ancestor Scootaloo. They intend to take on the dragons when they come.”

“A couple months ago I was asking myself if my driver’s incense habit was going to be the thing that killed her,” I muttered, trotting out the door into the empty hall. I turned back to Limerence and asked, “Where is everypony?”

“There is a battle about to be waged, Detective,” Limerence answered, strolling along beside me as we headed toward the stairs. “Do you think anyone will be sleeping anytime soon? They are outside, preparing. Tourniquet caught several mutated creatures attempting to creep in amongst their ranks, as well, so additional guards were needed.”

“I figured the bastards might try that again,” I said thoughtfully. “The fight at the Castle more or less fell apart when one of them detonated all over our mages.”

“Indeed. I was able to examine some of their ‘anti-magic slime’, and it is not corrosive. A construction hat with a horn protector works quite well against it, so long as a pony can get to a hose with some expediency. We didn’t have quite enough hats for everypony, but there were enough for the combat unicorns.”

“That wasn’t all they used against us at the Castle. Big group tactics--”

He interrupted before I could finish objecting. “Detective, we have accounted for their known weapons. Squad level tactics only. We’re spreading our forces across the city via the sewer, both to mitigate the dragons and to create as much chaos as possible. The Marked and Gypsy’s modified walkie-talkies will be distributed between our various squads to keep our forces communicating.”

I quirked an eyebrow at him. “I’m glad I wasn’t in on this meeting. I’m pretty sure I’d have made a hash of it.”

“True, though I must question the wisdom of going into Uptown...alone. Pardon if I sound doubtful, but that seems madder than your usual demented behavior.”

I paused with one hoof in the air, then set it down and faced Limerence. “Diamond Wishes offered me a...chance. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t just screwing with me.”

“Taxi said something along those lines. Considering what we have already survived, I shan’t be the one to tell you it is impossible. Still, it is only a chance. The Crusader on your leg is proof enough of your intentions, but the coin—”

“—is still in the air, Lim. If we die, we die. Equestria dies. The world dies. If you have anything better, then tell me right this minute. We have only hours left.”

Limerence was silent, then carefully stepped forward and put his front legs around my neck. I pulled him tightly into the hug with only a little clatter from his cutlery collection. It should have been an awkward embrace, but it was too close to the end for self-consciousness.

“If my father could have chosen a third son, Detective...I’m sure it would have been you,” he said, softly, then stepped to one side and wiped at his nose with the back of his leg. “You have your speech ready?”

“I’m going to do what I do best.”

“Improvise and somehow, against all odds, manage to survive without your brain matter splattered across the pavement?”

“Well, that wasn’t my initial thought, but now that you suggest it...”

I pushed open the door to the rooftop, steeling myself against the icy air. A few snowflakes had started to dust the gravel spread on top of the fortress, and the wind had a distinct bite to it that cut right through my pelt. Still, I forced myself not to gather my coat around myself and marched out confidently, feeling more alone than I had in weeks despite the din of thousands of voices shouting back and forth in the dusty wastes surrounding Supermax.

Overhead, the File Cloud seemed frighteningly close, bubbling and grumbling as it dangled in the sky like an irate black cotton ball. Flashes of light danced across its surface, followed by flickers of strange colors. A single curving tendril of cloud crept down onto the roof and formed the ephemeral shape of a pony, standing at the corner of the building staring out toward the city. A second, less distinct but still equine, hung beside it by a wisp coming off the first.

Gypsy’s voice carried to me as she lifted one vaporous leg and waved me forward. “Come on, Detective! I’ve got everything set up. Queenie sent ahead and described what you needed. Most of the unicorns with projection magic are working, but I think I can do you one better!”

I took a few steps closer, gravel crunching under my hooves, before pausing to survey the giant army camp down below. I could just make out the pickets at the very edges, where ponies stood guard behind bags of sand. Some smart cookie had managed to clear most of the magical mining tailings from the dirt surrounding the building, turning them into something of a low wall with layers of cloth thrown over them to keep the chaotically enchanted dust from blowing about. It wouldn’t discourage any sort of determined assault, but it was a place a pony could keep their head down if they needed to.

It’d been a while since I’d seen the city from up high and far away. She was looking a little worse for wear; less city, more hellscape. Buildings that’d dotted the skyline were shadowy hulks, and there were more than a few holes where I remembered there being structures.

Over the city center, a vast storm was gathering. I could just make out rain pouring from under it and was glad most of the army wouldn’t be making their ingress above ground. The weather factories must have been chugging along at top speed, though it did make me wonder a bit who was running them. Lightning crackled through the clouds and the occasional belt of thunder reached across the distance.

“I still don’t like heights,” I called, eyeing the edge, nervously. “Who is that with you?”

“Who do you think, Hard Boiled?” a reedy, but entirely pleasant to recognize voice answered. The ghostly figure was only the vaguest outline of a torso and head, but as it turned toward me, soft, orange lights lit up roughly where eyes might have been on a normal pony and a pair of what might have been headphones morphed out of the fog, hanging around its neck. I blinked a few times, then my front knees started to wobble.

“T-Telly?! Telly, is that you?!”

“I feel like we’ve had that conversation before,” the form giggled, swirling in a dainty circle. “It’s me, Hardy. At least, as much as I can manifest so far. I’m still working out the kinks in this place. There’s no friggin’ manual, though I intend to correct that!” She shot a pointed look at Gypsy, who rolled the bit of cloud comprising her shoulders a little.

“You look...not dead,” I said, lamely.

She made a sound that was almost a snort. “Really, Hard Boiled? That’s the best you can do?”

“I’m usually the one coming back from the grave!” I grumbled, pulling my coat in tight. “I don’t have much experience from this side of things. It’s not like there’s a protocol for talking to someone defying the laws of nature.”

“Eh, fair point, I guess.” She hesitated, then gave her semi-transparent form a shake. “You’d think the notion that my body is dead, but I’m still alive would disturb me more than it does. By the way, I want my damn job back if there’s a new police department one day.”

“It’s yours, so long as you give me one of the nice cells.”

“You still think you’re going to jail after all this?” Gypsy asked, waving toward the crowd below. “Because I’m pretty sure they’d disagree. With bullets.”

I held up my hooves. “Let’s hope. I don’t much enjoy the idea of a role as national scapegoat so we can reconstruct our country’s power base once this is all over, but if that’s necessary, I’ll do it. Equestria deserves a peace.”

Telly shook her head. “Man, you need to be less noble. It’s gonna make me puke, and I’m not even sure if I can puke anymore.”

“You can, but it tends to turn into butterflies and spiders in here. I don’t recommend it,” Gypsy replied, looking back toward the horizon. “Hardy, are you ready to address the city?”

My front knees locked up entirely as my lungs suddenly felt like somepony had filled them with hot lead. I sat down hard enough to send up a puff of dust, my shoulders quaking as another rush of fresh fear set my nerves twisting.

Telly cringed and shot Gypsy a look. “Did you really need to put it like that? He’s already under enough stress.”

“What did I say?” the DJ asked, sweeping her flowing tail around one thigh.

“Think about it, dinkus! You talk to everypony in the city every day! He spends all day creeping around like a rabbit in a wolf den!”

“Oh...”

I gulped down about six breaths, then steadied myself. “One day Gypsy, you, me, and an industrial powered fan are going to discuss your tact. Now where do I stand to say my piece?”

“You can stand there, if you want to, but it would probably be more exciting if you stood right up on the edge,” she replied, pointing to the corner of the building.

“Right. Near the edge. Okay. Then I guess it’s time. Today we free Detrot.”

Act 3 Chapter 63: Detrot Rises

It was a moment they would remember the rest of their lives, though none knew how long those lives might be.

Lightning flashed in the File Cloud, cracking the sky like a hammerblow. Thunder shook every being in the vast throng gathered below the Fortress Everfree. The army quailed, made only worse by the face that appeared in the cloud itself.

It was a face from their deepest, darkest childhood fears; Nightmare Moon, the great terror. The projection was massive and the effect, powerful, Most could just make out the mare standing on the edge of the roof and there was no doubt in anypony’s mind who it was. Her fangs flashed and thousands shook as though the very air itself had become volatile. Her great, black mane flowed out from her skull like a wave of ink, blotting out a section of the sky.

A few thought to raise their weapons, only to have them knocked down by the Marked who were spread through the crowd.

The silence that followed was broken only by the rumble of the clouds.

Nightmare Moon studied the army for a long moment, letting them soak in her presence as the vast host shivered under her gaze. Spreading her black wings, she reared back and her voice rolled out across the distance, amplified so even the deafest and farthest member of the assembled creatures could hear her.

“Equestrians! Hear me! I am that which stalks your darkest dreams. I am...The Nightmare!”

At her name, shrieks went up, but still the crowd did not move. They were transfixed by her and some part of them which was older than any individual life froze their hooves to the ground; she was the predator and they, the prey. Yet she hadn’t moved to attack.

After a moment, Nightmare Moon continued.

“In this evilest of times, strange alliances become necessary! Today, I come to fight alongside you! In a dead world, there can be no more dreams for me to haunt! There will be no more foals to frighten! There will be no more fear for my dinner, and I will starve! If you die, so too, shall I die!”

Ponies began to look back and forth at one another, confusion on their faces. She didn’t give them time to adjust to the odd state of affairs. Before their bemusement could form into questions, she continued.

“If there are no shadows, where will I creep? For there to be shadow...there must be light!”

Rising up, she jabbed an accusing hoof towards the Eclipse. “I say, for all my crimes, that there is no evil like the evil they have perpetrated upon you! I say, I will not stand for it! I have thrown down my gauntlets! Today, I ride into battle alongside the one you call Dead Heart! For the sake of dreams...Now, so must you!”

Another flash of lightning crackled across the File Cloud, blinding all those looking up at Nightmare Moon for just an instant. When the dazzling light faded, she was gone. In her place there was the image of a grey stallion with golden eyes.

His face was familiar to everyone.

They’d seen his pictures in the pamphlets dropped by the enemy. They’d heard the stories of him, told by the radio ponies. They’d witnessed his great deeds.

Some had seen his body, before he rose from the dead. A few had heard his voice, telling them to stand strong against monsters who were never meant to exist in Equestria. A smattering rode into battle beside him, to save their families, their clans, or their honor. All knew his name.

His eyes were sunken, but harder than steel. He didn’t shake from the cold, nor did the bitter wind seem to touch him. His coat billowed out behind him like a cape as he stood there in the red glow of the Darkening.

He was not impressive the way Nightmare Moon was impressive, but something in him seemed to buoy them up.

At once, voices began to go up.

“Bulldog!”

“Chief!”

“Dead Heart!”

“Crusadah!”

“High Justice!”

He waited for them to die down, then took a deep breath and began to speak.

“You all know who I am!”

After a few seconds, a steady thump of hooves, claws, and wings began to beat against the earth. The shouts grew even louder.

“Today, the monsters in Uptown are going to attack our city! Anyone not in a bunker will die if they are unchallenged!”

The beat faltered for a moment. Ponies eyed the center of the city, fearfully, then turned their attention back to the Detective.

He seemed unafraid, so they were unafraid.

“I’m going into Uptown! You can stay here and be safe, behind these walls, or you can follow me! I’ve crawled through the gutters of this city! I have seen the dead by their thousands! I have seen the plan these monsters have, and you are not in it! I’ll do it alone, if I have to, but I am going into Uptown, one way or another, and those bastards are going to pay in blood for what they’ve done to our city!”

The army’s thumping applause reached a mighty crescendo as the Detective threw his leg out over them.

“The Princesses will return!” he continued, his amplified voice like a warhorn rolling through a valley. “They have not abandoned you! I have gone far from the city and spoken to them with magic! They were banished to the Moon, and if we win this day, we will bring them back! I have enslaved the Nightmare to my will, and she will keep you safe from fear!”

They heard his words, and they believed. They didn’t need to know the truth. The truth wouldn’t have kept them alive.

“Today, we are one!” he shouted.

“Today, this horror ends!”

“Today...Detrot Rises!”

Again, the lightning flashed...and he was gone.

The Scholar

I stumbled away from the edge of the roof, falling to my front knees and puking into the gravel. It wasn’t dignified, but it was better than horking on the crowd of ponies down below. My shoulders shook as I wiped the back of my mouth on my sleeve, then wrestled down another racking case of vertigo which threatened to empty whatever was left of my stomach.

“That bad, huh?” Gypsy murmured, appearing at my shoulder, Telly’s half-formed body floating beside her. She reached out to touch me, then thought better of it.

“That bad,” I muttered, clutching the lapel of my coat shut as the wind picked up and the snow began to catch in my fur. “I don’t like heights, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like public speaking, and I damn well don’t like the notion that I just convinced a bunch of those poor people to go die for me.”

Gypsy snorted, or at least, it sounded a bit like a snort. Considering she didn’t have a nose, it was a neat trick.

“None of them are dying for you, Hard Boiled,” she replied. “You’re a figurehead, same as me. They’ll die for their neighbors, or their friends, or their families, if they do die, but convincing them to go out there is the only way they’ve got a chance to live. By the way, do you want a bottle of wine to go with that ham? That speech was ridiculous. The trick with the image of Nightmare Moon was neat, but the rest of that reminded me of a stump speech for a cartoon character running for office.”

I cocked an ear towards the crowd who were still stomping their hooves and cheering loud enough to shake the building.

“They seemed to like it well enough,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t pull it straight out of a television program,” Telly added, floating down to my head height. “Anyway, who cares whose conscience all this is on? Today, they fight or real soon they’re extinct. There aren’t a whole lot of in between outcomes.”

“You seem to have found a decent ‘in between’, if you ask me,” I said, flicking my tail at the File Cloud.

“You want to get all of Equestria in a line and march them up here, I’ll be glad for the company, but I don’t think they’ll be thrilled with the fine print.”

I finally succumbed to the shivering, staggering upright. “If it comes to that, we’ll make ‘dissolve the bodies of all ponykind and suspend their spirits in a magic cloud’ plan D or E. I’m pretty sure we can come up with something before we’re there, though. Where’s Swift?”

“Your friends are already headed to their teams,” Telly murmured. “Taxi is taking Firebrand, Ambrock, and Vexis out to her staging point so she can intercept Propana after some kind of detour through the Skids.”

“Limerence is headed for a Shield Pylon about six miles from here on the edge of the waste zone,” Gypsy added, pointing off to our left.

Shaking dust off my hooves, I sighed. “They didn’t even stop to say goodbye?”

“That was Swift’s idea, if you can believe it,” Telly answered, spinning in a little circle. “She told them you’d keep yourself alive if you thought you’d never get to say ‘bye’.”

I clenched my teeth to keep myself from smiling. “The little turkey is right, but dammit, I don’t like that she knows me that well.”

Turning on my heels, I trotted for the door down into the fortress. Truth be, I couldn’t get off that roof fast enough. My heart was still pounding like mad and the adrenaline was making my teeth chatter.

“Hardy?” Telly called out and I paused mid-step, not looking back, lest I lose my nerve, again.

“Yeah?”

“I want my job back,” she said, just loud enough for me to catch it over the whistling winds.

“You think I can make that happen?” I asked.

“You’re the pony who just told all those people down there that you’d walk into Uptown alone if you had to. I just want to sit behind the console at the Castle and shoot the shit with five hundred cops while listening to pop music and secretly reading porn in my desk drawer. I want to order in doughnuts by the hundreds on an expense account and watch pissy little rookies become officers of the law. If anyone can bring those days back to me...it’s you. Die if you have to, but...don’t fail.”

With that, Telly and Gypsy both vanished into mist that dissolved upwards into the File Cloud, leaving me alone, listening to the army below readying themselves for war.

An hour passed, though I’ve only a few specific memories. Most of it was a blur.

I’d come out of the swinging security doors of Fortress Everfree to a cheering crowd, though they only shouted my name for a moment before darting off to the tasks they’d been assigned. One wouldn’t think an armed camp could come together so quickly, but there were no less than three extremely capable armies organizing it and ponies are a species of herd animals with a powerful survival instinct for being where they needed to be.

Sykes swung by to hug me so hard I’m pretty sure he broke a few ribs before winging off into the sky with a squad of fliers.

Dogenes put in an appearance with a group of his diamond dogs; the weird bastard had some mad idea about creating a fallback position underground in case the monsters got on top of us. I figured it couldn’t hurt to let him try.

Slip Stitch wanted to know what my feelings were on using extraneous bodyparts of volunteers for quick triage; second lungs, parts of livers, kidneys, and so on. I told him to mix and match to his heart’s content so long as he saved lives. It didn’t occur to me until he’d already gone that Slip Stitch's ‘Spares’ were probably volunteering out of something besides a sense of civic duty. Any sort of religion started by that pony was likely to be trouble down the line. Granted, that could have been said of almost everything we’d done in the last couple months.

Then it was time.

I didn’t want to watch as the army marched into the sewers, an ocean of ants heading down into the shadowy tunnels.

I hid from that sight. Does that make me a coward? Probably.

Soon, all that were left were those too sick or injured to fight.

My friends were off to battle, and I was left to wait.

I lay back, watching the snow outside and listening to my own heartbeat. There was nothing else in the insulated little world I’d found myself in. Outside was muffled, distant, and silent.

I tugged at my coat, stuck hooves in my pockets to make sure I had spare ammo, checked my guns were loaded, touched my hat, picked up the small radio from my lap and made sure it was on the correct channel, then went back to sitting. It was a routine I’d conducted no less than six times in the last few minutes.

The signal would come, and then I would begin my vigil.

‘Your anxiety is leaking into my corner of your brain,’ Nightmare whispered. ‘I find it most distracting. I am trying to come up with scenarios where we survive today.’

‘Do you expect a pony in my position not to be anxious?’ I asked, internally.

A picture of the black alicorn sitting on a beanbag chair with a bucket of fried okra between her front legs flickered through my mind. ‘No, but your usual method of improvisation cannot be all you rely on today. They were correct about your speech. You couldn’t have hammed it more if you’d had a curly tail and upturned nose.’

‘What about you, Miss ‘I am the Nightmare!’? Were you trying to make everypony pee themselves?’

The image of the alicorn stuck her nose in the bucket of okra, chewing noisily before sitting up with several pieces sticking out of the corners of her muzzle. She swallowed before continuing, but didn’t bother to brush the crumbs off her nose. ‘I had ten minutes to prepare and I was working with the contents of your brain! Have you considered that the odious monologue you just gave is probably going to be recorded for posterity, if there is any posterity to remember this day?”

‘Oog...I wonder if I can convince Tourniquet to erase every copy,” I thought.

‘In a city with Iris Jade? Not a chance. Still, it seemed to have the desired effect...though now, you will have to explain to somepony how you pulled the trick of turning into Nightmare Moon or summoning Princess Luna. Be glad they were too frazzled, distracted, or excited to demand explanations.’

‘If it means the world survives, awkward explanations may become my stock and trade.’

‘Indeed. Ah. Your little device is making a noise.’

I jerked up and looked down at the communicator, then flicked the ‘listen’ button. Tourniquet’s voice came through loud and clear.

“Detective are you there?” Great speech, by the way!” she enthused.

“Thanks. Limerence is in position?”

“He’s waiting on your order! I’ve got Queenie hooked up to a caffeine drip, and every ladybug left in the city is either with your friends or sitting down here with me! You should get a solid pipeline, so long as you only view one at a time!” She paused for a moment, then added, “Queenie says its network is stable, for now, although they all want to run away from whatever energy is coming out of Uptown. Are you ready?”

Pulling back the sleeve of my coat, I studied the eight ladybugs sitting on my leg. One of them raised itself and gave me a quick salute with one tiny leg.

“Good to go here. Send Lim in.”

I flicked the talk button off and got comfortable.

‘Gale, let Nightmare monitor what’s going on,’ I thought.

‘She already is.’

“In that case...Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs awake.”

Act 3 Chapter 64 : At The Gates

‘I am Limerence Tome.’

‘My father was Don Tome, born Zenga Tome. He led the Archivists, the most powerful arcane artificers in all of Equestria.’

‘I have killed hardened criminals and delved into the deep places in the world, seeking artifacts that could end all life. I carry a necromancer in my sword and I have destroyed a bedeviling, parasitic dimension with only my wits. I am the last Archivist.’

‘I’m not going to be defeated by another sewer!’

----

Sadly, there is only so much a pony wearing a city’s worth of feces on their hooves can do to bolster confidence in their life choices. There was no telling what hideous, paralyzing diseases I was acquiring just being down in the dank dungeons beneath Detrot once more. How many times had I traversed them since finding myself fighting alongside Hard Boiled? I’m sure I’d lost count.

The flashlight attached to a band tucked into the front of my vest played over yet another intersection that looked more or less like every other, save the number etched into the ceiling. As convenient as using my horn for light might have been on any better day, I was still suffering the effects of magical exhaustion and didn’t want to push my luck. Besides, one never knows when one will need to permanently scar themselves for heroic purpose. Losing the ability to flush a public toilet without touching the handle was surely worth saving the world, no?

‘I shall give all four legs for a shower once this is over,’ I thought, glancing back at my retinue.

Three of the most dangerous ponies I’d ever met followed in my wake, each far too quiet for creatures with hooves.

Zeta, zebress from the Vivarium, strolled along behind me like she was out for a walk in the park. She wore a cheerful grin and enough bundles of rope to hogtie a small country. I hadn’t asked her along for my portion of our little adventure. She’d appeared in the bathroom of Supermax while I was relieving myself, somehow fully briefed on my intentions, and declared that she would be going along.

Behind her, Hard Boiled Senior, who was chewing the end of an unlit cigarette and seemed to be lost in thought. The blue lights in his eyes flashed and flickered, but he remained inscrutable as ever. He didn’t appear armed, but having heard something of his recent exploits that probably had no bearing on exactly how much firepower he was carrying.

Ancestor Sweetie Belle brought up the rear. Despite her advanced years, she seemed unbothered by the rough going or the quick pace. She’d abandoned her evening gown in lieu of a dozen gang sigils painted into her pale white fur that reminded me of toothed animals, preparing to pounce. Her wrinkles and delicate manner masked wiry muscles; there was not an inch of sag on her entire frame.

“We are almost there,” I called back to them, pointing down the left tunnel towards a ladder set into the wall. Above, a thin ray of red light filtered from what appeared to be a ponyhole cover.

“I don’t feel like being surprised up there. Miss Belle, you still have that life-scan spell we used when the dragons tried to take Mount Aris?” Hard Boiled Senior asked.

“Now that is one war crime I didn’t think I’d be committing again,” Ancestor Sweetie grumbled.

“Ahem, pardon? War crime? Do we need to stand back?” I inquired.

“No, you should be fine,” she answered, limbering her neck with a couple quick jerks of the chin. “It is a spell banned by the various concords. It very accurately detects life, but also incidentally increases that life’s chance of developing aggressive cancers by about twelve thousand percent over five years. Let us hope anypony with sense has evacuated the street above us.”

Before I could ask for a pair of lead pants, Ancestor Sweetie’s horn flashed a brilliant green, then seemed to tune back and forth across the arcane spectrum until it hit a particular note. A thin line of energy lashed out and brushed across the wall, arching across the roof before coming down the other side. Frowning, she let the magic fade.

“Well, that is most unhelpful,” she muttered.

“Do please elaborate?” I asked.

“There is life above us, in the loosest sense of the word. It is not equine life, nor does it resemble those vile mutations. It is also, so far as I can tell, entirely immobile.”

“Immobile?” Zeta inquired, cocking her head as she pulled a length of rope from her side and wound it around her foreleg a few times. “Why should that be special?”

“Immobile in the way statues are immobile, Miss Zeta. Life is never immobile. This particular life is not even breathing.”

“Mmm...it just gets better and better, doesn’t it? This wouldn’t perchance be coming from the opposite direction of that Pylon, would it?” Hard Boiled Senior asked, pulling the end of his cigarette out of his teeth and tucking it into a fold of his sleeve.

Ancestor Sweetie Belle shifted her weight from hoof to hoof. “None of us lead charmed lives, Egghead.”

“I died to get away from that nickname, ‘Miss Sweet Embrace’,” the skeleton muttered, turning toward the ladder. “I’m going by ‘Bones’ these days.”

“I suppose that suits you a little better.”

“No kidding. So how are we handling this? You want to do the ‘Omelette’ maneuver?”

Zeta rested her hip against the sewer wall, heedless of the slimy streak left on her leg. “The Omelette maneuver involves five ponies against a dragon, does it not? We do not even know what is above us. It may not be a dragon.”

The lights in Hard Boiled Senior’s eyes brightened, slightly. “You know that one? I thought that was a Crusader trick. We only pulled it off a couple times, but it was damned effective, particularly if you had a nice distraction.”

“My grandfather was at the defense of Manehattan,” Zeta said, softly. “He was your ‘distraction’ on that occasion.”

Ancestor Sweetie Belle perked up. “Really? Small world. What regiment was he in?”

“The Sixth Zebra Lighthooves,” Zeta replied, touching her forehead with a hoof then raising her eyes to the ceiling.

The elderly mare drooped like a sagging fern. “I’m sorry to hear. I remember some of the Lighthooves. Good sorts. If they hadn’t held the eastern flanks, we’d all be speaking draconic and digging gemstones out of slave mines.”

Lowering her head, Zeta put a hoof to her chest, covering her heart. “Mother told me he went to the Endless Veldt covered in a dragon’s blood. I find that doubtful, considering how many of the Lighthooves were incinerated, but I now work for a dragon, chasing Celestia’s mythical Crusaders into battle. We may follow grandfather in similar circumstances, no less. Fitting, I suppose. Father taught ponies to fight. Grandfather saved the kingdom. Maybe I will save the world. Life is full of little ironies and coincidences, no?”

“Of the moment, I am largely worried for what is at the top of this ladder and less for the possibility of immolation,” I mused, loosening my bladestaff in its sheath.

“I’ll check the street. There’s only so much more dead I can get,” Hard Boiled Senior said, nudging his way around me and starting up the ladder. At the top, he pressed the side of his skull against the ponyhole.

“Hear anything?” Zeta asked.

“What might be fire, but not close. Gunshots, but not close. It doesn’t sound like coordinated weapons use. More like one or two low skill handlers. I’d say some gangers getting in a dust up with each other. They’re wasting a lot of shots.”

“Not mine, then,” Ancestor Sweetie Belle added, tossing her beautifully kept mane from shoulder to shoulder, “I trained my gangers to pick flies out of the air.”

Wrenching the sewer cover open, Hard Boiled Senior poked his skull out, then clambered over the edge. “Clear up here. Road is empty. The fire is a couple blocks over. Looks like somepony had quite the party over there.”

Zeta shrugged and pulled a coil of rope from her ‘dress’, using it to wipe her hooves clean before clambering up the ladder behind Hard Boiled Senior. Pausing half-way up, she glanced down at me and asked, “Is it me or―to use a pony metaphor―are we having the red carpet rolled beneath our hooves?”

“There are dozens of pylons,” I reminded her. “We picked this one with a roll of the dice and a flip of two separate coins. If a trap awaits, it was there before we planned this attack.”

“It is simply that I cannot repress the sense that we are trespassing on abominable grounds,” she muttered, then hooked her hooves over the side of the hole and hauled herself out.

“Miss Belle? After you,” I said, holding out a leg and bowing my head, respectfully.

Ancestor Sweetie rolled her eyes and wiped her hooves on the brickwork. “Doesn’t a gentlecolt go first to draw the fire?”

“Not when I suspect the fire will have less effect on you than it will on me. I don’t have Crusader body modifications and I am withdrawing from a petal of black lotus and no less than three rounds of magical exhaustion in the span of three weeks.”

“How are you still standing, colt?” Ancestor Sweetie asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Earlier, I chewed off part of my sword’s occupant for magical energy and cast a spell to shunt my discomfort into the blade. If he could, he’d be vomiting blood right now. As it is, his pain will be a good lesson against the use of magical substances on unwilling ponies. May we proceed?”

The ancient unicorn’s eye twitched in that fashion I’d long ago become used to when I told the truth. Of course, it might have been more convenient had I any concept of how to properly lie, but until recently I’d little need for social dishonesty. Books and artifacts are rarely discombobulated or affected by cognitive dissonance.

“Remind me never to ask what you do for fun, Mister Tome,” she said, at last, then hauled herself up the ladder into the light.

Unhitching my sword, I cracked the sheath for a moment and stared down into the distinctly green face of my brother. His defiant gaze met mine briefly before he yanked his head to one side and disappeared from view. I felt the blade vibrate in my hooves for a moment.

Returning a moment later, Zefu mouthed the words, ‘Brother, this is cruel!’

“Indeed, and I confess to enjoying every moment. When you feel the need to apologize and I believe you mean it, I’ll deal with my own withdrawal. Until then, I hope you can manifest yourself a bucket and sponge.”

Snapping the sword back into its sheath, I followed Ancestor Sweetie up the ladder, heaving myself out with a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, my relief was short lived. The sweaty heat and vile odors were replaced with thick, choking smoke that blew down the deserted street on a frigid wind, carrying alternating blasts of warmth and cold. Now that I was on the surface, I could make out the ongoing gunfight somewhere in the distance.

The road we’d emerged on was a single row of disused apartments with stores along the bottom. It was an unpleasant architectural trend which somepony on the city council decided would rejuvenate sectors of the economy which nopony asked to have rejuvenated; namely the ‘coffee shop which charges for everything including ice’ and the ‘boutique spa which never seems to have any customers yet survives, regardless’. Most of the bottom floor shops were thoroughly looted, though the single connoisseur cheese emporium which only had a few extremely stinky pieces of cheese kept under glass was seemingly intact.

Our Shield Pylon of happenstance stuck up in the middle of the row like a blackened limb, jutting up three stories into the air to just below the roofline. The structure sloped away from the street and was made of something glossy-black like obsidian. A pair of doors comprised of two slabs of grey marble fitted so tightly together they appeared to be a single piece matched the slope of the building, sitting a few meters back from the road. No sidewalk ran up to them and the only sign they were ever opened was a thin rut of trampled, browning grass across a short lawn.

One might think that having one of the wretched things on one’s street would badly affect property values, but a fluke of Detrotian psychology tended to simply put the pylons out of the mind. Though, considering Hard Boiled’s recent revelations regarding Starlight Tower―the perfectly harmless construction site in the center of the city which could, in no way, be a source of our problems―it was possible there was another mechanism at work.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to a pylon before,” Zeta mused.

“I have stood this close, but things which are there for a person’s entire lifespan without proving dangerous tend to warrant less consideration,” I replied, scratching at my chin.

“These things were still being built when I went into the darkness,” Hard Boiled Senior murmured, tilting his skull back to look at the towering edifice. “There were only a few dozen of them back then. Enough to keep the city from getting hit by a major dragon strike, but you’d still get a hydra or two wandering up to the borders back then.”

“Miss Sparkle’s hoofprints are all over this,” Sweetie muttered irritably, sweeping her pale pink tail around her thigh. “Always so well meaning and always had her nose stuck too deep in a book or wrapped up in the lives of her students to keep track of all of her creations.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

Sighing softly, Sweetie Belle gave me a slightly sad look. At least, I believe it was sad. I’ve never been particularly good at reading expressions.

“Twilight Sparkle is a good pony, Mister Tome,” she began, “Make no mistake, she’s one of the best. That being said―”

“She’s as dumb as a smart person can get,” Hard Boiled Senior said, flicking his ancient lighter out and spinning it around his hoof before applying a thin flame to the end of the cigarette still clenched in his mouth. “Somepony brings her an idea like this Shield network and she looks at what they show her. They say ‘Ah, grand advantages! Magnificent outcomes!’ and she says ‘Let me write you a check. Send me your theories and I’ll do a few inspections, then turn it over to somepony else to manage’. If you were lucky, you ended up with one of her friends.”

“And if you’re not lucky?” I asked.

“If you are not lucky, you are on the outskirts of Equestria in a major metropolitan area with only the easily bribed or coerced local officials for oversight,” Zeta said, shaking the kinks out of her shoulders and thighs, one at a time.

“The Shield Corporation existed to maintain these things, but I suppose it’s obvious they’ve been corrupted since the beginning,”Ancestor Sweetie grumbled, trotting forward a couple steps to the edge of the curb. Lighting her horn, she played a gently pulsing ray of energy across the doors. “Oh ponyfeathers. That’s cheating!”

Taking a deep breath to resolve my badly jangled nerves, I pushed a breath of magic through my horn. The pain had subsided somewhat since my recent nap, but it still felt as though somepony had filled my cerebrum with a hundred ball bearings before an impromptu ride in a tumble drier. Even the magic stolen from my brother’s prison only slightly reduced the agony.

I’d often thought father’s arcane endurance training a waste of time and ceased it the instant he’d given me lease over my own administration. What good was attempting to hold up a waterfall until my nose bled? Part of me thought it sadistic, but ever did I try to please him in those days. More’s the pity I didn’t spend more time under waterfalls. It was an oversight I intended to correct, if I lived another week.

My simple scan spell passed over the pylon and a blazing shape took form within my mind, as though a spider were building a web of light behind my eyelids. Examining the spell confirmed more or less what I’d suspected: a shield of some kind encased the building, though with a magical matrix so tightly woven I couldn’t see a single thread to pick for a counterspell. The structure was incredibly complex and cleverly assembled.

“Thoughts?” I asked Sweetie Belle.

“Somepony with too much time on their hooves wrote this one,” she replied. “You see the way the power distribution is sitting crossways on the Planck scale five-simplex monitor?”

I nodded, trotting onto the grass to wipe my feet. “Very stable and requires almost no energy to maintain. Were it not an instrument of our demise, it might be revolutionary.”

Hard Boiled Senior tapped his forehead. “At risk of sounding like my grandson, ya’ll want to clue the rest of us? I don’t care for being left out of the ‘horn-waver loop’ any more than I did when I was still squishy.”

“Being the first of the truly living dead I have personally met, I find it strange to say we have something in common,” Zeta added.

“You met my grandson. Doesn’t he count?”

“Ah...I suppose so,” she answered, thoughtfully, before turning back to the pylon. “Still, leaving that aside, what magics do we face?”

“Fussy ones,” Sweetie explained, scratching at the base of her horn. “This would take a hundred unicorns to cast and one foal to keep powered. It could probably take a whole division worth of War Scooter blasts without budging. Genius stuff. Mister Limerence, I believe this is your ballpark.”

“Much as I would give an eye to study this at length―” I began.

“Colt, you already gave an ear,” Hard Boiled Senior murmured in the back of my mind, “You sure you want to say things like that out loud?”

“I see where your grandson got the irritating tendency to take my turns of phrase literally for his own amusement. As I was saying, we are short of time.”

Plucking the strange key-ring Hard Boiled had absconded with during his attack on the Family’s mansion out of my bandolier, I sorted through the various keys until I found the one Miss Swift had pointed me to. It was a beautifully crafted thing of some substance I couldn’t readily identify with a crystal mounted in the tip that changed color as one looked at it from different angles. Every spell I’d cast on it seemed to slide off like water from the back of a proverbial duck.

“A key? You have a key to the pylons?” Zeta asked, raising one eyebrow.

“There’s a story that would give you nightmares, Miss Zeta,” I answered, then turned to Sweetie Belle. “Do you mind? I don’t want to get closer than I have to and that shield seems to be of a subtly variable size.”

The Aroyo Ancestor smirked as her horn flickered and the keyring lifted out of my hooves, drifting across the distance to hang in front of the door.

“Where’s the hole?” she asked.

Before I could respond, a brilliant slash of light arched down from the heavy doors and ran back and forth over the key. It began to glow internally, before suddenly flaring and leaping out of Ancestor Belle’s magical grasp. Dangling in front of the portal, the key left off a low hum which was echoed a second later by a resounding tone from within the pylon.

Silent machinery engaged and the doors sank into a recess, then pulled back from one another, revealing an unlit hole that seemed to draw in and devour what little luminance reached the shadowy street.

Somewhere nearby, the gunfire started again in earnest as the four of us waited for whichever would get brave first. With a certain pride, I took a step only for everypony else to take the same step forward. We all glanced at one another. Sweetie Belle and Zeta smiled and Hard Boiled Senior shifted his chin in a way that suggested he might have rolled his eyes.

“Well, at least there are no cowards here,” I murmured, snatching the key up off the pavement where it’d fallen when the magical field released it.

“No cowards, and nopony smart enough to walk away,” Zeta added.

“I’ll take the dumb brave ones over the smart cowards. I’ve worked with cowards. They have a way of getting everypony around them killed and dying last,” Hard Boiled Senior said, trotting up to the opening and waving a hoof back and forth across it before cautiously sticking his leg through into the unlit hole.

“A positive result! I do so love when an experiment proves fruitful!” I exclaimed.

“Wait...you didn’t know that was going to work?” Hard Boiled Senior demanded.

“As you have repeatedly opined, you can only get so much more dead,” I replied, trotting over to peer through into the pylon. From somewhere ahead, I thought I could make out a flicker of light, but between the smoke and general dim atmosphere it might have been a flight of fancy.

“I think a shield might be prudent,” Ancestor Belle said, flicking her horn in our direction. A subtle bubble of glistening energy surrounded us, forming to the contours of my body. “That will stop bullets, but it’s permeable to slow moving objects. If someone gets in close, we will have to fight hoof to hoof.”

“That is fine with me,” Zeta chuckled, hitching a rope between her front legs. “I like an intimate approach.”

Hard Boiled Senior pulled his golden lighter out of his front pocket, flicked it open, and pressed some sort of button on the side. The flame that leapt up from it burned far too brilliantly for such a tiny device. It was almost as good as a proper lantern. Lifting the lighter above his head, he quickly scanned the interior of the pylon, no doubt looking for traps.

“Oh! You still have that old thing?” Ancestor Belle asked, cocking her head.

“It was all I had to see by for thirty years,” the skeleton replied. “If I see her, I’ve got to thank Princess Sparkle for overbuilding her birthday gift.”

“If the rest of us Crusaders ever get to sit down for tea with her high booky-ness again, I’m sure she’ll be glad to upgrade it. We’re fairly sure some of the others are still alive, somewhere, despite the reports. I can’t imagine something managed to kill Babs Seed.”

“If a full size dragon falling on her didn’t do the job, I tend to agree. Let’s get this over with. I’d rather not miss the actual fighting because we were playing hide and seek.”

With that, he turned and marched into the black recesses of the shield pylon.

It is a strange truth that, despite the dangerous natures of the characters I’d recruited into my venture, I wanted more than anything to be alongside Hard Boiled Junior. It wasn’t so much that I thought his mission to be safer than ours. On the contrary, I expected him to die again and need several hours or days attached to the city power grid.

Largely, I desired his company because he’d brought me back alive, again and again, when the odds dictated I die. How many times did we all walk away, when every one of us should have been buried? The loss of an ear was an inconvenience, but for a pony whose life was dictated by the desire for silence and calm, it was an acceptable loss in service of a greater good.

The hall was featureless, slate grey stone which all appeared to have been cut from a single piece, though a certain amount of magic could easily cover up any maker’s marks. It rose only a pony length above my head to a sheer, blank ceiling the same color as the floor and walls. Hard Boiled Senior took point and I followed along with Zeta behind me and Ancestor Belle bringing up the rear.

As I trotted along with one hoof on the cool wall, trying to keep my mind focused on the task ahead, I began to feel an odd sense of disquiet. It took a long moment to place the sensation and when I did, my stomach tightened into a knot. I stopped where I was, putting a hoof to my forehead.

“Something wrong, colt?” Hard Boiled Senior asked, pausing to look back over one shoulder.

“Only insofar as I worry we have disobeyed a few of the major rules of geometry. Tell me...how large is a Shield Pylon?”

Ancestor Belle trotted up beside me and traced a square on the floor with the tip of her hoof. “As far as I know, they’re all half a hoofball field front to back and side to side. There’s one in the Skids the foals used to use as the border for games.”

“I...feel we have traveled farther than that,” Zeta said, nervously.

Looking back the way we’d come, I pointed into the darkness. “We have traveled in a straight line.”

It took her a moment, but Ancestor Belle caught on first. “Did the door close behind us?”

“I don’t believe so. Feel the air in your fur. It’s still moving that way.”

“He’s right,” Zeta whispered, bringing her rope up and resting a line of it against the wall in two places as far apart as she could with her outstretched hooves. “Yet, look! This is flat. We must have―”

“We didn’t,” I said, firmly. “Miss Belle, could you perchance use your ‘life’ finding spell, again?”

Throwing out her chest, Ancestor Belle turned to the opposite wall. “Alright. Stay behind me if you value your genetic code.”

Zeta and I edged up against the wall behind the elderly mare and her magic lanced out against the wall, a green line flicking back and forth several times in quick succession. Her expression darkened as she expanded the line a little farther. Finally, she let the magic fade, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead.

“I take it we are surrounded, then?” I asked.

“I haven’t renewed my anti-invasive mind-magic spells in a few years, but I know―” Sweetie started angrily, but I interrupted before she could get too riled.

“I did not read your mind. I can barely lift my weapons right now, much less a working like that. It was simple extrapolation. Mister Hard Boiled...are you perchance feeling odd?”

The skeleton gave his neck a shaky rattle and nodded. “Now you mention it, since we stepped in here my whole body is aquiver. A bit like a particularly nasty burrito on the way out. That’s one biological process I ain’t missin’, let me say.”

“But...I smell nothing alive other than the four of us!” Zeta exclaimed.

“Maybe you better explain what you think is going on, Mister Tome,” Ancestor Belle said.

I nodded. “Miss Zeta, would you object to running as quickly in that direction as you possibly can?” I gestured at the hall.

“Will I not hit the back wall?”

“Indulge me. If you do, I shall purchase you a popsicle and pay for any damage to your nose out of my own pocket.”

Zeta narrowed her eyes, then pulled her own flashlight out from amongst her apparently endless supply of rope. Flicking it on, she galloped off faster than I could ever have hoped to follow. After a moment, her rapidly retreating form and the light’s beam were swallowed up by the impenetrable dark.

“Mercy, that filly can run,” Hard Boiled Senior nickered, settling against the wall.

“Zebra yogic body meditations can do things to the musculature that have to be seen to be believed,” Sweetie explained, giving the cord sticking out of her neck a gentle tug. “I wondered why we were taking a sex worker into this fight. Now I think I know.”

“Miss Zeta was with Hardy during his battle with the King of Ace,” I said, turning to face where the entrance should have been. “She disabled a Jeweler Red-hoof in single combat without killing her and without the mare landing so much as a love tap. Ah! Here we go!”

Coming at speed down the end of the hallway from which she’d left, Miss Zeta skidded into sight, stopping just shy of running me down. She shot a quizzical look over her shoulder, then turned back to the three of us. “I...I ran in a straight line!”

“Yes, you did,” I replied, sitting down and leaning against the wall. “We are in what is loosely referred to as ‘Mobia’s trip’.”

“Oh...I remember this story,” Ancestor Belle commented.

“Really? I thought it an obscure historical piece.”

“Well, I guess it is, but I took a class in exo-dimensional research in college. About the only thing I do remember is that story. Our professor liked to tell us ‘safety first, unless you want to go on Mobia’s Trip.”

“Sorry, I must have missed that course,” Hard Boiled said, “Mind enlightening me?”

“Err...let me see if I remember it correctly,” Ancestor Belle’s forehead - already wrinkled - gained a few new chasms as she stared off into her memories. “Two centuries ago, a unicorn named Mobia figured out a way to put more space inside something than existed outside. She ended up trapped inside an old chest for almost three months, surviving off food and water conjured into the space by her assistant. She finally got out by weaving her mane into a string and teleporting one end into real space, then following it out.”

“Mmm...a sanitized version, though it does have a seed of truth,” I explained. “In actuality, her assistant finally went into the trip and discovered her dead body covered in a massive heap of rotten food. She had expired from a heart attack minutes after entering, her life’s work brought to nothing. Worse, because pocket dimensions cost a thousandth the power of ‘Mobia’s Trip’ to create, her sacrifice only proved an amusing historical anecdote on the follies of single-minded pursuits.”

“Yikes. I liked my version better...”

I closed my eyes for a moment and exhaled. “History is often messier than the kind narratives we tell our children. My brother and I once spent an afternoon trapped inside an endlessly looping closet. My father’s ‘lessons’ tended toward either the amusing or the hideously traumatic, depending on how firmly he wished to fix them in our minds. Regardless, it does suggest a course of action.”

“So, what is it, then? How do we make our escape?” Zeta asked.

I gestured to Ancestor Sweetie Belle. “Can you teleport?”

She slowly shook her head. “I can teleport other things, if you don’t have much care for where they end up. If you want it in a specific location...no. A steel plate into the general area of a dragon’s intestines is a nice big target, but I’ve never ported myself. Call it a ten meter margin of error.”

“That...does complicate our situation considerably, then,” I muttered. “I haven’t the power for a teleportation, though I do know the theory. If I manage it, I’ll be too exhausted to alter the spell core at the center of this pylon. Leaving the trip does us no good if we appear in a wall. Or the ground. Or ten meters in the air.”

“We’re stuck, then?” Hard Boiled Senior asked.

“No...no, not stuck. A moment to think. I...mmm...” I paced back and forth a couple meters, mulling over our options. “We...we must create an internal paradox. Mobia’s trip is a single spatial surface looped upon itself. For it to exist, we must be...points along its interior. If it ceases to contain points and instead contains an intersecting plane―”

“Colt, you’re babbling in ‘brainy pony’ talk to a bunch of people whose resumes are largely made up of skills related to violence,” he interrupted, putting a hoof on my chest. “Go back and reorder this for the dummies in the audience.”

I got back to my hooves, forcing my racing thoughts to slow down. It is an obnoxious reality that my years in the Archive frequently left me ill prepared to deal with the vast majority of ponies. My brother was the diplomat. I am a scholar, through and through, but that left me spare a weight of whatever grey matter makes small talk.

Most of all I regret that years bent over books or delving into ruins left me without the part of the brain that can simplify a theory without sounding like a patronizing prig. I truly do not mean to come off in that fashion, but it is out of my control.

“Mobia’s Trip is a big mathematical thingy that somepony sticks in a box and pumps a bunch of magic into until it warps the space into a scary loop. To get out, we have to make the loop think it shouldn’t exist.”

Hard Boiled Senior slowly nodded. “What worries me is I can tell you weren’t trying to sound like an ass there.”

“I have not had the chance to check, but I suspect a congenital brain defect which makes me ruinously impolite when trying to speak simply. It does make ordering a pizza quite the trial. Either way, does my explanation make sense?”

Zeta shook her head and tugged at her rope dress. “Not a bit, but I have been patronized by ponies far more irritating than you, though I was being paid to beat them until they could no longer use their mouths to be snarky and we don’t have time. What must we do?”

I rubbed at my own temple. I’d had a headache for almost a week solid, such that it was becoming all too familiar. If successful, I’d promised myself a month’s recuperation where somepony else could follow me about flogging their horn to exhaustion.

“I believe if we could create a connected series of contiguous points in space which prove there is no way the trip could exist, we might cause it to collapse. Magics like this merely allow reality to lie to itself. Force an existential confrontation upon the system and it will eventually require more energy to maintain than dispel.”

“A series of contiguous points?” Ancestor Belle prompted.

“If my horn were operating, I do have a string generating spell that might work. Outside of that, unless one of us happens to have a length of―”

I trailed off as Zeta cleared her throat. Looking down, she ran a hoof over her dress and did a little curtsy. “I have cord enough to bind the world right here, Mister Tome. Would you like me to get undressed?”

“Far be it for me to ask a mare to dis-rope, Ma’am.”

Hard Boiled Senior’s hoof clapped me on the back of the head hard enough to rattle my teeth.

“Tell another pun like that in my presence, colt, and I will gag you until the sun shines again,” he growled.

Rubbing the little knot he’d left, I gestured for Zeta to continue. “If you please, Ma’am?”

For a zebra I’d just seen move faster than the eye could follow, Zeta managed to slip out of her dress much more slowly and with a great deal more tail flicking, hip wiggling, and mane tossing than was strictly necessary. Beneath it she wore a set of lacy lingerie with belts and bobs that spoke to a raft of potential sins and fit her shockingly muscular form in a way that would have set a lesser stallion’s heart racing. The thin, black fabric matched her stripes in an alternating pattern which suggested custom tailoring.

“Ahem...Are you gentlecolts done staring?” Ancestor Belle commented, hotly.

“If I did not wish them to look, I would not show off in this fashion,” Zeta purred, stepping back from the dress and dropping it at her hooves. “Besides, what is the point of girding myself for exciting action if my armor never sees combat? Durability and shielding spells on lace are quite expensive.”

I swallowed a muzzle full of saliva and began the arduous task of wiping as many hormones out of my neural pathways as possible. Unfortunately, the first thing my mind latched onto was the interesting ontological question most recently presented.

“Y-you enchanted your underwear? I thought your condition would prevent you from enjoying―”

Zeta giggled, covering her mouth with a hoof and winking at me coyly over top of it. “My ‘condition’ as you call it is one of nerves misfiring. The pain is immense, but that simply makes the little pleasures I take all the more important. That includes sex. Besides, a mare never knows what situations she’ll find herself in, particularly in my line of work. Best be prepared, whether in bedroom or on battlefield.”

Hard Boiled Senior leaned sideways to look at Ancestor Belle who was practically seething. “Is that envy I smell, Sweetie?”

“Yes, it is, and you best not forget I can still take you in a fight while you’re being all glib about it,” the elderly mare hissed before snatching up the rope dress in one hoof and shoving it in my direction. “If we survive, I am taking Apple Bloom up on her offer to restore certain parts of me to a more pristine and less...wrinkled...condition. Now, get us out of this mess, Mister Smart Pony.”

Picking up the dress I quickly breathed through my mouth before the intense scent of Zeta’s perfume could make it any more difficult to think. “Ah, yes. Agreed. Miss Zeta, we need a straight length, as long as possible.”

Unwinding the various ropes, Zeta quickly began tying them together with a speed and dexterity that matched even the deftest unicorns. There were even a few knots I’d never seen before. She seemed to waste absolutely no cordage as she wound them one after another, into a single coil. In a matter of minutes, it was done. The heap of rope was considerably deeper than I’d thought it would be.

“Excellent!” I said, picking up one end and holding it out. “Now then. Miss Zeta, will you take this and and...Mister Bones, the other? I need you to run in opposite directions and meet back here.”

Zeta pursed her lips in thought. “Will that not just tie a...wait...no, it is a loop...except it is on flat ground. Eh...” She let the unspoken questions hang in the air for a moment, then shook her head. “I live with a permanent headache that has driven most sufferers to suicide. This has not improved it.”

“Truly. As traps go, it would have been effective in delaying all but the most canny of creatures. Shall we get out of it?”

Zeta and Hard Boiled Senior picked up their respective ends of the rope and trotted off into the dark, vanishing a moment later into the distant shadows.

“I’ve been letting myself get lax,” Ancestor Belle muttered.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I spent a couple decades out of action and walked straight into a trap I wouldn’t have had the first clue how to escape from,” she said, giving the black floor an angry stomp. “I pictured retirement having fewer dangers than the war, not more. At least when I was in battle against the Dragon King, it was against ten tons of angry lizard, rather than conniving madponies and their pet over-educated arcanists set out to come up with the worst possible ways to kill us.”

I couldn’t quite repress a smirk of amusement. “I do believe, Ancestor Belle, that your problem may be that you don’t like the way the arcanists being on both sides levels the playing field.”

“This playing field doesn’t feel real level. It feels like somepony carted a whole heap of dragons, psychos, and magic weapons over to the baddies’ side before the starting bell, then poisoned the ref.”

“An unfortunately apt analogy,” I replied, then raised one ear as hoofsteps clattered from both ends of our little prison. Zeta galloped into sight first, followed a second later by Hard Boiled Senior, ropes clutched in their teeth. “Welcome back! Now, pass each other right here in front of me, then cross the ropes together!”

Bobbing their heads, they both adjusted their speeds to match, slowing to a walk as they moved closer to one another.

Ancestor Belle cocked her head in my direction and whispered, “Are you sure this is safe?”

“I was released from my last time in Mobia’s Trip. Do you genuinely want to know if I think collapsing a geometrically impossible manifold spatial anomaly from the inside is safe?”

“Now you mention it? No.”

Zeta and Hard Boiled Senior hesitated only a moment before meeting in the middle. The skeleton held out his rope as the zebra braced herself as they met. I tried to will my stomach to sit very, very quietly through what I felt sure must be coming.

The second the cords touched, there was a sound like several dozen large gastropods having a wrestling match in a dog pool full to brimming with scrambled eggs. A violent wind picked up, yanking my mane over my face and very nearly lifting me off my hooves. A sound like the whistle of air over the mouth of a bottle, amplified a thousand times set my bones quivering in their joints.

With a wet pop, followed by the smell of burning ozone, all the flesh on my body jerked a half inch to the left as the rope leading off into the dark seemed to draw in upon itself, both ends yanking together into a tiny clump on the floor only slightly larger than two hooves held side by side. Then, it was done.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Well! We are not dead,” Zeta murmured, looking towards the end of the hallway which was just ahead of us. Another closed stone double door sat there, leading into what I presumed was the inner chamber. Behind, the pylon’s outer was still open to the street, letting in a trickle of smoke and air.

Picking up the clump of rope which was too tightly wound to even see the individual strands anymore, I presented it to the zebress. “Your garments, Ma’am.”

Glaring at the knot, she gave it a light picking with the tip of a hoof, then snorted irritably. “Is this a joke?”

“No, but...I believe your clothes no longer exist exclusively in three dimensions. On the upside, it is a knot that is impossible to unwind without time travel. In your profession, it may make an interesting conversation piece.”

Hard Boiled Senior shuffled his hooves, his spine humping slightly like a nervous cat’s. “Colt, I don’t like being in here. Can we pick up the pace? Something feels familiar and anything that feels familiar to me is bound to be nasty.”

I drew a short blade, tucking it under my leg in a ready position before pointing towards the sealed doors. “The core should be through there. I selected you all for stealth, but if it does not avail us I did bring this along, should we need to make a sudden escape.” Reaching under my bandolier, I plucked out a brilliant pink stick with a purple cap covered in swirling stars.

“Luna’s Stars, colt! That’s arcanite tricobalt!” Hard Boiled Senior yelped, backing away several steps until his hips hit the wall with a thump. Ancestor Belle was right beside him a half second later. “Were you carrying that on you this whole time?!”

“Obviously. The last of my father’s supply, unfortunately, but I do have the recipe if ever I can find the ingredients again.”

“Arcanite tri-what now?” Zeta asked, curiously.

“A magical bomb,” I replied, balancing the stick on the tip of my hoof. Zeta hit the wall with her flanks the second the words left my muzzle. I let out an exasperated snort. “Oh do be calm! It is stable enough! Simply a precaution! I don’t intend to use it unless I must!”

“If there’s one thing I learned being a Crusader, it’s that ponies with bombs always find an excuse to use them,” Ancestor Belle grumbled. “Explosives were Apple Bloom’s thing. I still have my hearing. She’d be deaf as a post if those were her original ears.”

“Unless you wish me to leave this outside for somepony to find, I believe we are better off having it than not,” I said, slipping the explosive device back into its hiding place. Fishing out the pylon key, I nodded at the door. “If you would order for expeditious ingress?”

The three of them stared at me blankly. Pulling a face, I trotted over and leaned against the wall.

“Stack up?”

Hard Boiled Senior and Ancestor Belle immediately darted over to the door and pressed against either side as Zeta snatched a knife out of my bandolier, clenching it in her teeth. I internally promised myself I’d learn a spell to make myself temporarily stupider at some point, if only to make my relationships easier. Hard Boiled Junior’s route of drinking himself insensate made more and more sense of late.

Raising the key, I braced to rush in. The crystal tip let off a flicker of light.

Somewhere underneath our hooves, some great mechanism whined like a sad animal. A sudden scalding-hot blast of steam rushed out of the opening portal, almost singeing my muzzle. I danced backwards, almost bumping into Zeta, who was quick enough on her hooves to get out of the way.

The door clanked all the way open and an instant later a furnace-like wave of boiling hot air rolled over us. I took one breath of the searing air before gagging on the stink of roasted flesh filling my nostrils. A leg thrown hastily over my nose did little to alleviate my discomfort. I ruefully regretted not bringing some mint oil; after our adventures in the Office, that should have been standard kit.

Harsh blue light spilled through the opening, bathing us in a sharply contrasting glow that rendered everything in shadows and shine. We waited, those of us with noses holding them, as the vile miasma cleared and a few lungfuls of fresh air reached us from the distant entrance. The heat was still nigh unbearable, but no longer threatening to scorch us alive.

Carefully leaning out, Hard Boiled Senior edged his face around the corner then quickly jerked it back.

“Oh, bugger.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s...uh...there’s a fire. I think it might be a pony.”

Act 3 Chapter 65 : Below The Murder Hole

"Evil yawns wide, a maw gaping to devour us. Let us choke it with the blood of those who oppose us." - Princess Luna, undated.

“So, there is a pony on fire—”

“Mister Limerence, that’s not what I said, now was it?”

“You said there’s a fire...and that it may be a pony.”

“Now you’re listening. It looks like it might be one of my brothers or sisters in arms. No skin.”

Swallowing a sharp breath, I scooted to the edge of the open door and pulled a mirror from one of my pockets, holding it at an angle to pan across the interior of the pylon’s core. It didn’t take much to get the direction right; I had only to aim at the most powerful light source.

Hard Boiled Senior’s description of the fire was technically correct; what stood there before the spell focus at the center of the room was a burning skeleton, nearly too bright to look at. The enchantment on my glasses dimmed the brilliance enough that I wasn’t blinded, but it still made my eyeballs ache.

The spell focus itself was just a metallic black box about the size of a commercial refrigerator lying on its side with a glittering blue crystal embedded in the top. The burning unicorn—for now that I noticed, it was a unicorn—stood with both front legs resting on the surface, head bent low as though carrying a heavy weight on its shoulders. Flame boiled out of its horn, wreathing around the focus before curling around its hooves. There was no telling whether it was male or female; whatever immense heat radiated from within had warped its bone structure beyond recognition.

Still, the creature held together in a way that suggested life or, at least, animation; its shoulders heaved, its legs trembled, and its skull slowly bobbed up and down. The immense amount of magical energies tossed off by the skeleton made it impossible to make out anything else in the room, even with my heavily enhanced vision.

After another moment, I withdrew the mirror and stepped back from the door. I realized I was suddenly sweating and my coat felt sticky and cold in the light breeze blowing past my sides.

“Is this another trap?” Zeta whispered.

I furrowed my eyebrows at the question. “You are asking if a flaming, animated corpse is a trap?”

“I knew a pony during the war who ended up in a similar condition,” Hard Boiled Senior commented, thoughtfully. “I lost track of her after the peace treaty. She was in the Cloudsdale battle and decided it would be a good idea to use her talent to swallow a dragon’s entire flame. She drained him till I bet he needed a match to light a cigar.”

“Perchance do you mean the Warden of Tartarus?” I asked. “And what does she have to do with our current circumstance?”

The skeleton shook his head. “I don’t remember her name. Lots of bad mojo happened to lots of good ponies back then. Someone with no skin barely rates any higher than one with a major pyrotechnic infection, but the combination is nasty and currently in our way. I’m just saying, one can never be too careful. If this isn’t a trap, I’d hate to make it into one by pissing that creature off.”

“I as well.” I shot him a quizzical look. “Did you have classes related to the Shield Pylons in your time?”

“We had them, but the pylons mostly focused on the edges of the city. They weren’t everywhere,” Ancestor Belle replied. “I’m afraid I don’t understand either. You say this could be a trap, but—”

“It may not be a trap in the conventional sense, insofar as it was not planted specifically to ward off invaders,” I interjected, tapping the wall. “That may be a happy benefit to whosoever wanted to keep us out of the pylon, however. I do believe that poor soul is or...was...possibly the operator.”

“The operator?” Zeta asked, taking her own quick look around the corner before yanking her face away from the fierce heat. “I fear I was not raised in Equestria and missed a part of my education.”

Ancestor Belle’s ears pinned to the sides of her head as she put a hoof to one of the sigils on her chest and whispered something too soft to be heard. “I...I knew Lifter shouldn’t have applied for that job.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me, Ma’am? Do you know this pony?”

She shrugged and sat down against the cold slate wall. “Nothing that will help us, I don’t think, but...it explains where one of my...god-children...disappeared to when everything started. He was a smart bugger and wanted out of the Skids.”

“Considering we are not under attack, I think any detail might be important,” I said.

“I doubt it,” Ancestor Belle replied, her expression sour. “Low Lifter was a stallion with ‘ambitions’ and too many brains for his own good. Kinda like you, now I think about it. He married a sweet mare from across the tracks, then moved across the tracks to be with her and left the Aroyos behind. It was a little more complicated than that and involved many falsified documents with City Hall, but he wanted out of the ganger life. He didn’t care about the Ancestors’ ‘lofty goals’. He just wanted to love who he loved and...I did my best to make sure he could leave. Probably cost more resources than it was worth, but I owed his mother a favor. About six months ago he snuck through the sewer to drop off a message telling me he’d landed new work.”

My eyes widened as the implications set in. “He found work with the Shield Corporation?”

“Pylon operator,” the old mare answered. “I didn’t think much of it, but even having left, he was sure to keep us at least a little informed about his comings and goings. The job was dull, but it paid the bills. I expected him and his wife to show up on our doorstep when the Darkening came, but...it never happened. After a couple days, I sent one of my ponies to chase her down. The girl was hiding with her parents, but they were easy enough to find. She said he’d just gone to work that day and never come home. I figured he died in the chaos immediately after the sky went dark, but seeing this here—”

“That poor sod in there is one of the unicorns who keeps the Shield up?” Hard Boiled Senior asked.

“The operators stabilize the magics of the Shield, but...yes, I believe that was the operator,” I explained.

Zeta tugged at one of the straps around her thighs, shivering for a moment when the elastic snapped against her leg. “I am loath to ask this, but does that mean that every single pylon has a pony who was trapped inside it and turned into an undead pyre when the sun went dark?”

For several seconds, there was only the sound of the heated air escaping from the oven-hot chamber and my own breathing. I wiped my forehead on the back of one leg, leaving a wet streak in my fur. The oppressive atmosphere was making it difficult to think much beyond the last sentence and that last sentence’s implications were squirming through my bowels like an especially cold and irritable eel.

I wanted nothing more than to sprint back to the warm, comfortable shower where Miss Taxi wrapped her hooves around me and held me while I wept. That’d been ever so long ago. Funny that I might take comfort in that murderous mare’s embrace.

‘So many dead,’ I thought.

The face of my father, lying peacefully in his chair sans one hoof flickered through my mind, followed by a dozen other bodies I’d seen in just the last few days. How Hard Boiled managed to remain sane was beyond me.

It was Ancestor Belle who managed to break the spell and shake me out of the fog of fear that was settling over my mind.

“We are here to do a job,” she said, resting a hoof across Zeta’s shoulders before turning back to me. “When the time comes to account for what our enemies have done, we shall, but that is not today. Right now, there’s a spell core and a living fire. Does anyone have any suggestions on how we deal with that?”

Hard Boiled Senior clicked his teeth, contemplatively. “Do we know it’s hostile?”

Zeta frowned, before stepping sideways into the doorway, right out in the open.

I went to grab her tail in my teeth, but before I could she raised her voice and shouted, “Are you hostile?”

Her reply was a gout of flame that scorched the bulkhead where she’d been standing. I didn’t see her move, but in the time it took me to blink she was standing behind me, shielding her eyes with one foreleg. The temperature jumped a solid twenty degrees as the chilly sweat on my face suddenly steamed away.

“I do believe that is an answer,” I said, a little lamely.

“The undead like me at the Family’s home never seemed entirely gone, though their minds didn’t survive suspension in the walls of the pylon,” Hard Boiled Senior said, “They were trapped in their bones, insane and unable to move. That fellow in there is probably in a similar condition, except...on fire. Most of them only seemed to have the last thought before they died.”

“I do not know you well, Mister Bones, but...you seem more sane than the creature in the next room,” Zeta commented, “What were you thinking that allowed you to retain so much of your being all these years?”

Hard Boiled Senior let his lower jaw drop a half inch in his lipless smile. “I was thinking about protecting Equestria, my family, and the future of Detrot. I had to live so I could make sure all the children of this city have a good world to grow up in. I figure, once things are rebuilt and the future is settled, I might find myself a nice little plot of dirt beside my wife and crawl on in.”

“That is...very romantic,” Zeta said, softly.

“Romantic or not, if you’re going to do that, then we need to get this pony out of our way,” Ancestor Belle said, with a certain finality, “The necromancy that locks a pony in their bones is a zebra magic, right? Any help there, Mister Tome?”

“Limerence, please...and no, necromancy would be my brother’s specialty,” I replied, tapping my sword with one hoof. “He’s less communicative than he was and I haven’t had time to study his journal. The fire, however, is interesting.”

“Interesting?” Hard Boiled Senior asked, raising his chin. “I learned a longtime ago when you smart ponies understate things, you’re usually not telling me something that’ll scare me. I don’t know if I have some magical equivalent of an adrenal gland, but I haven’t felt truly frightened since I died, so I’d like you to out with it and tell us what’s going on in there.”

I swallowed a sudden tightness in my throat.

“I...eh...A moment, please,” I said, putting a hoof to my chest as I fought down a cold spike of discomfort.

“All the time you need, colt. Our friends are just out there dying without us.”

I stiffened, but Ancestor Belle beat me to it. Her horn glowed and Hard Boiled Senior’s jacket yanked itself over his face.

“Be polite, Egghead,” she growled, “The colt is trying and he doesn’t have a decade of wartime experience.” Turning back to me as the skeleton struggled to straighten his clothing, she put a leg on my shoulder. “Now, what’s going on?”

“Ehm...well...if that sad creature is burning their own magic, no arcane flame could have lasted a month, correct?”

“Even an augmented unicorn can only use what they can draw from the environment or carry with them,” Ancestor Belle replied. “So that would mean they’re getting power from the pylon.”

“In...in a manner of speaking,” I replied, nervously, then looked up at the ceiling. “Your ‘detect life’ magic; it said we were surrounded, yes?”

“Celestia’s tail...how had I almost managed to forget about that in the last fifteen minutes?” she whispered, jerking her head left and right as though searching for hidden enemies.

“Don’t worry. I believe we are as safe...as safe can be in this circumstance.”

“What is safe about being surrounded?” Hard Boiled Senior demanded, irritably tapping a hoof.

“It is safe in that I believe that which powers our obstacle is unlikely to attack us, directly. I could be wrong, but if I think if I were, we would already be dead. Are you aware of one of the peculiar statistical anomalies in Detrot regarding ‘disappearances’ over the last sixty years?”

Ancestor Belle chimed in, “I know cities on the edges of the wilder parts of Equestria tend to lose ponies at a higher rate than those in the interior, but that’s not unusual. Why?”

I nodded my chin toward the open doorway. “Then you’re aware, for a city the size of ours, that we have experienced an almost thirteen percent higher rate of unsolved disappearances than any other city in all of Equestria?”

“We don’t need the preparation, colt,” Bones griped, “If you’re going to make us piss ourselves, then I’d like to make it snappy.”

“You and your grandson value ‘context’ about equally,” I grumbled before gently laying my leg on the wall and calling upon my limited magic. The terrible, semi-permanent ache in my horn shifted down into my forehead, making my eyes throb in their sockets though I forced myself to ignore it. “Now, then, I think I can demonstrate. This should be a relatively simple abuse of my talent. If I am correct, we should hear a bit of quiet—”

The howl that tore through the hallway was enough to knock me right off my hooves, sending me sideways into Ancestor Belle who caught me with one leg, using the other to brace herself against the wall. My horn felt like it’d been given a stiff yank by a vengeful bulldozer as a deafening roar seemed to shake the very air. A thousand upraised voices threatened to deafen us; wailing, begging, shouting, crying, and shrieking.

Zeta huddled against Hard Boiled Senior, her hooves clapped over her ears while I fought with my horn, trying desperately to cancel the spell. The sheer weight of power thumping into my leylines would have sent me straight into burnout had I been calling on my own reserves. As it was, all I could do was shut my eyes and struggle with the brilliantly burning arcane shape that felt sure to cook the insides of my eyelids.

The collective wails of anguish reverberated from all directions at once until, at last and after a period that felt like hours, I found a loose string in the pattern and gave it a metaphorical yank.

For a moment, I thought I’d failed when all that happened was the banshee screams became a painful tone ringing in my eardrums. After a minute of simply clutching my head, waiting for the pain to die down, the torturous sound started to fade. With all due caution, I opened one eye, then the other, to find my companions glaring at me.

“Quiet, he says,” Hard Boiled Senior grunted. “You mind telling us what that was? And then never doing it again?”

Still unconsciously digging at one ear with a hooftip, I shook my head. “I...miscalculated.”

Zeta was still moaning softly, digging at her ears with her hooftips as though trying to get an insect out. “You are so lucky you used all of my rope, else I would be tying you in the most uncomfortable pose I can think of, right now. What did we just hear?”

Quickly peeking around the corner to make sure the burning pony was still where they’d been when last I checked, I breathed a sigh of relief at finding the creature unmoved.

“It...it was the mortar,” I replied, slumping against the wall.

“The...mortar?” Ancestor Belle asked, looking down at the floor. “I’m pretty sure mortar doesn’t scream, Mister Tome.”

Rising, I trotted a short distance away, finding myself suddenly not wanting to look at anypony. It was an odd sensation, really. The feeling was one of guilt, though not a personal variety; rather it was guilt on behalf of ponykind.

“This pylon is based heavily on the one in which Bones was discovered,” I said, when I could bring myself to speak. “Thousands of Detrotians have gone missing through the years and...in a city as broken as ours, not enough questions were asked. The homeless and indigent. The outsiders. The ostensible victims of war. They vanished slowly, but a trickle over enough decades can fill an ocean.”

It took a moment for them to get it, but there was an indrawing of breath when the truth settled in.

“The...the mortar...is ground up bodies?” Hard Boiled Senior whispered.

I dropped my chin onto my chest. “Phylacteries, to be more precise, but...yes.”

“Celestia preserve us,” Sweetie Belle muttered. “I mean, if they hit the outlying villages and took ponies during the war...they’d only need one every other night. If they could pick off ponies from all over Equestria then give it a few decades and you’d have thousands.”

“It’s like the walls of that hole my grandson found me in,” the skeleton said, raising the shaking hoof holding his lighter in front of his face. The magical flame wavered back and forth as he trembled. “Huh...would you l-look at that? You managed to scare me. I didn’t think I’d be rightly afraid again.”

Zeta hugged herself, rocking back against the wall. “Then that sound was all of those souls...the trapped souls of thousands— ”

“—screaming,” I finished, forcing my hooves to be still.

My legs wanted to take me charging right out of that building, but considering the entire city was peppered with pylons, there was no such thing as ‘far enough away’.

“If we get these bastards alive, I don’t think Celestia will want to know what I end up doing to them when I get a few minutes alone,” Hard Boiled Senior growled.

“Nor I,” Ancestor Belle added. “So the trapped souls are powering the creature in the other room?”

“They are powering it or connected to it in some way,” I replied. “It is simply fulfilling its final directive as a Shield operator: stabilize and protect your pylon.”

Zeta raised a hoof and gave it a little wave. “You’ve not had a job before, have you, Mister Limerence?”

I hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook my head. “Er...My job was to be heir to my father’s will and to preserve equinekind.”

“Right. You’ve never had a job.”

I felt my cheeks heat up as a strange and out of place shame welled up in me. I didn’t much care for being reminded how deeply my father’s wealth and influence insulated me from certain normal aspects of equine life. “What does that have to do with anything, if you please?”

“This pony was working, right?” she asked.

“Ahem...yes?”

The zebress waved a foreleg at the open portal and the fiery skeleton beyond. “This is a job. A boring job. You make it sound as though this ‘final directive’ was something noble or important to them.”

I leaned around the corner for another instant to make sure the creature hadn’t moved, getting a face full of hot air for my trouble, before pulling my head back. “Would it not be? They were keeping the city safe.”

Ancestor Belle rubbed a hoof down her own jawline. “Wait a second...I...I think I see what she’s getting at. This is just basic spellcasting for eight solid hours a day. The spell never changes, right?”

“The spell they cast is a simple energy circuit,” I replied, puzzled at where they might be going with this. “So long as the circuit remains functional, I suppose it wouldn’t require much maintenance. A bit of occasional concentration, perhaps, but nothing complex or difficult. One might conceivably read a book at the same time. I did make certain to memorize as much of the protocol for the operation of a pylon as I could before this mission.”

Zeta brushed her mohawk out of her eyes with one hoof as she glanced over at Ancestor Belle. “Do...do you think that might work?”

Hard Boiled Senior shook his skull, teeth clicking against each other “I’ll buy the first round if it does.”

“No-one would leave a blind spot in a spell like that,” the ancient Aroyo said.

“Why not?” Zeta asked, “To stand where we stand would require a key to the pylon and a familiarity with strange magical traps that borders on the obsessive. Our resident knowledgeable soul is giving all three of us a look like he wants to wring our throats for being obscure. I see no reason the sort of brilliant mind that would come up with this mechanism might not leave a particularly dumb solution unexplored.”

Stomping my front hoof—maybe a little petulantly—I jerked my head back and forth at my companions. “What is this notion that has caught in all of your heads?”

Hard Boiled Senior’s glowing eyes flickered in a circle. I realized he’d just rolled them at me. “When the city recovers, I recommend you go get a job in food service for a couple weeks. It’ll teach you some things about ponies that are as valuable as most of what I learned in the military. Meanwhile,” He turned to Ancestor Belle, “—do you still have that spell to deflect dragonfire?”

“Nopony ever survived a straight blast,” she replied, tossing her lilac mane from one shoulder to the other.

“But you remember how to cast it?”

“It’s been thirty years since I used that party trick, but I remember it well enough.”

“Then you’ll have to cast it on him if this trick—”

“What trick?!” I barked, as exasperation finally got the better of me.

Zeta leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Her breath on my ear sent a shiver from my nose to my tailtip and it was such a ridiculous action to take, given the circumstances, that all four of my legs locked up entirely. I stiffened in place, staring straight ahead as I tried to make sense of it. For an instant, I wondered if she’d used one of Miss Sweet Shine’s pressure point techniques to paralyze me.

“Oh, Limerence Tome...you really must visit me in the Vivarium one day. I will work this stick loose from your backside,” she purred, making me stand a bit taller as heat flooded my face, which I was certain had nothing to do with the pony in the next room. “Now, the ‘trick’. We are here to relieve this pony. You now work for the Shield Corporation. Congratulations, operator.”.

“I...wait...what?” I asked, dumbly.

“Go ahead and hit him with the fire-break spell, Sweetie,” Hard Boiled Senior said.

The Aroyo ancestor’s horn sparked and an icy chill zipped down my back, spreading out through my hooves and running right down to the tip of my tail. Frost gathered in my fetlocks and my eyes felt suddenly extremely dry. I coughed and a little puff of snowflakes shot out of my throat.

I covered my muzzle with both forelegs and gave them an incredulous look. “Y-your idea is that I pretend to be the next shift?” I asked, my teeth chattering, “I am not any kind of an actor! Why can Bones not do this?”

Hard Boiled Senior jabbed his hoof at his forehead. “I’m not a unicorn, smart guy.”

“B-but w-what about Miss Belle!?”

“I’m casting the spell that will keep you from incinerating. Unless you wish to try learning a forty year old experimental magic that took me a week to even begin memorizing in the next five minutes.”

I turned to Zeta and she shrugged, snapping one of her garter belts against her thigh with the tip of a hoof.

My joints ached at the cold and the sweat on my shoulders had frozen solid. I could understand why this spell never made it to prominence; I felt like I’d gone out into a particularly vicious blizzard without my hat, coat, and scarf. Even my eyes felt like they were quickly frosting over.

“T-this is mad,” I stammered, still spitting snow which turned to steam the second it hit the air, “N-nopony in their right m-mind would leave s-such a gaping hole in th-their defenses.”

“These aren’t defenses,” Hard Boiled Senior replied, tapping my shoulder. “Play it confident and if that thing throws another fireball at you, try to think cold thoughts.”

“T-that will not be a problem!”

Stepping sideways in the door, I racked my brain, trying to remember everything I knew about Shield protocol. Most of it was simple enough, but there were a few odd rituals taken from old guard systems; protocols that had to be respected if a pony were to turn over the watch.

‘How did the challenge phrase go, again?’ I thought.

My companions were staring at me, waiting.

‘Ah, well. Live in the moment. Let’s hope my memory wasn’t damaged by that dose of Beam a few weeks ago.’

Poking my head around the corner, I shouted, “Operator of the Shield! We stand or fall together! May I approach?”

The broiling heat rushing by my ears did little to warm my frozen body, but it did mean I could look at the creature directly. Its bones were white hot, somehow holding together though they should have been reduced to ashes. This wasn’t to say they were in good shape; holes and gaps seemed to have opened everywhere and several lay around its hooves like scattered sticks.

For a moment, I wondered if it’d heard me, then the skull began to slowly rotate in my direction. Its empty eyesockets held twin orbs of shining red light.

I wondered if I would feel my flesh boil off or if the operator’s fireball’s disintegrative effects would be quick enough to beat the nerve impulses to my brain. Miss Belle’s spell might slow it down slightly, though considering the amount of energy radiating from the focus, it seemed unlikely I’d have enough dermis left to worry about screaming or crying. More likely I’d fall to pieces as a sort of burnt sack of skinless, half-fried organs.

The creature’s horn pulsed and I braced myself for death.

A feminine voice echoed in my mind, rattling around the inside of my head like leaves in a stiff wind.

“Staaand....together. Never...fall. Aaaproach...Operator...of...the Shield...”

I gulped and stepped fully into the doorway. Despite the so-called ‘firebreak’ spell, I could feel the excess warmth start to penetrate my clothing. The edges of my shirt browned slightly as my glasses darkened to block out a bit of the light.

I took a step into the room and the temperature jumped what felt like twenty degrees, though it must have been significantly more than that; my hooves clicked and crackled in an unsettling fashion as different parts of them changed temperature.

Carefully, I approached the focus and its prisoner, my breath making clouds of fog that vanished into steam once they were beyond the end of my muzzle.

The air entering my lungs was so hot it hurt, but retreating was no longer an option.

“Erm...n-nice day, was it?” I asked, politely.

The skeleton stood there for another few seconds and just when I thought she might go ahead and strike me down, the reply came.

“Looong...day...”

I pulled my tail under myself as I felt the tip start to sizzle. Miss Belle’s spell must be wearing a little thin.

“Well, I’m here. Time to go home.”

Another long wait, before the skeletal mare replied in that same raspy whisper inside my head, “Nooot...going...hooome. Going...too...the...baaar. See...you...Toooomorrow...”

Stepping back from the focus, she yanked her horn away from the magical circuit.

I didn’t have time to consider what was about to happen until my hooves had already left the ground.

It was my fault, really.

A pony embedded in a high powered magical circuit for a month will have leylines absolutely chock full of radiant energies. Breaking such a loaded circuit, stable or not, must necessarily come with a certain amount of backlash.

Hard Boiled had certainly been through worse, with less preparation, but then he is an earth pony whose heart is a magical artifact controlling his entire metabolic system with much greater efficiency and control than any normal being could hope to have.

That being understood, I still felt like a fool for my oversight in the brief instant before my head hit the pylon wall.

After that I felt nothing for a bit.

“Wake up! Come on! I’ve had worse concussions after a night drinking with Apple Bloom. The city needs you!”

My teeth rattled against my tongue as I was jiggled in a most unkindly fashion. I tried to bat at the stars in front of my eyes, but my legs felt weak. The ringing in my ears was back and I wanted nothing more than to have another little nap.

“I don’t think he’s going to be much use to us like this,” another voice said from somewhere to my left.

“Ablahblah?” I asked, head lolling back on my shoulders.

“Here. Healing talisman. We only have two, so I hope nopony gets shot,” a third voice added.

“What do I do with it? I’ve never treated a head injury. I usually use alchemicals.”

“Find the knot on his skull. That’ll be closest to where his brain hit when he was thrown. Press the pink gemstone with the butterfly on it. If the ponies who made it did their jobs, that should reduce the swelling enough for him to be sensible. Oh, and step back.”

Something ice cold was pressed to the back of my head. A half second later, it heated until I felt like a burning ember was being jammed into my flesh. I tried to cry out, but my vocal cords didn’t feel like they were connected up properly.

All at once, my vision cleared and the ringing in my ears fell into the background.

I found myself lying on my side several meters from the focus. The ground felt cool under me, which was strange considering the air was still too hot for me to breathe it. Ancestor Belle and Zeta stood above me with worried expressions while Hard Boiled Senior, ever his implacable self, stood behind them. The pylon operator was nowhere to be found and the focus crystal seemed to be in standby mode, glowing a faint blue.

With a jolt, my stomach clenched. I flopped onto my belly, which only made it worse. Clutching my middle, I looked up at my companions.

“What—” I began, only to find the words cut off by a virtual geyser of vomit.

Most nausea comes with a warning of some kind. A tickle, a tremor, or a nervous jump. The nausea of having a concussion rapidly healed was nothing like that. I went from nothing to explosively tossing my not-at-all-metaphorical cookies between one breath and the next.

It went on and on for what felt like hours. I lay there kicking my hooves like a foal who hasn’t figured out how to walk, dry heaving bile in a puddle of my own sick. At last I simply lay, panting, my stomach tender and my heart pounding.

Zeta gave me a pitying look and reached out to lightly touch my uninjured ear, giving it a light stroke. It was the only part of me that wasn’t covered in something unpleasant.

“A...a warning...might have been nice,” I gasped through a throat raw and swollen.

Ancestor Belle’s horn flared and I had the disconcerting sensation of feathers brushing through every inch of my fur. The disgusting liquids and effluvia seeped away, drawing up into a tiny ball of glowing vileness in mid-air. With a soft fizzle, the ball burst into flame before blowing away in a cloud of odiferous steam and ash.

Feeling my face fur, I realized she’d somehow managed to clean me almost as well as a shower might have. I gave her a grateful nod, pulling myself into a sitting position. My throat ached, but it was nothing to the feeling of abject emptiness in my belly.

“I...I am going to eat...an entire banquet by myself when this is over,” I muttered, reaching up to peel the dead healing talisman off the back of my head.

“You’d think they’d have improved those things thirty years on, wouldn’t you?” Hard Boiled Senior murmured, “You don’t want to know what happens when you’ve got to slap one on an intestine full of bird shot.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need to hear that particular horror story. Where is the operator?”

Zeta shook her head and pointed to the floor near the focus. I followed her hoof to a blackened spot with a couple of scattered bones and a streak of grey ash. “Fallen. We didn’t see what happened, but you were alone after the blast.”

“I barely kept the shield around you,” Ancestor Belle added, rubbing at the base of her horn with one hoof. It still glowed, slightly, providing just enough light to see by. “There was enough energy flying around in here to parboil a dragon egg.”

“Then we must move quickly,” I said, holding out a hoof. Zeta tucked herself under my leg, lifting me to my legs. I stood there for a moment, woozily trying to clear the remaining cobwebs from my brain. Reaching back, I pulled my swordstaff off my back and leaned heavily on it. “They will be coming very soon.”

“Blackcoats and their monsters?” Zeta asked, rubbing at a particular stripe on her chest that looked a little thinner than the others; a nervous habit, perhaps.

“Yes. Get me to the focus.”

Ancestor Belle stepped in against my other side. “Can you cast like this?”

“I will be fine. Defend the door. There’s one entrance and one exit. If we aren’t able to leave that way, then we aren’t able to leave.”

“I’ve got the street,” Hard Boiled Senior replied, trotting off toward the entrance. “Belle, you and Miss Zeta hold the interior. If I’m getting overwhelmed, this is my fall back.”

“You are going against the monsters with only your hooves?” Zeta asked.

Flicking a foreleg, Hard Boiled produced what looked like a short, golden-inlaid pen knife from one sleeve and twirled it across his hooftip. It was about the length of a butter knife, but something about the blade’s tip seemed altogether more dangerous, as though it were somehow cutting the air ahead of its passage.

“Apple Bloom had a friend of mine tucked away for safekeeping.”

“Ah! Nice. You be safe, okay, Egghead?” Ancestor Belle said, reaching out and gathering the skeleton into a quick hug.

“I’ve never been safe, Sweet Embrace. Let’s just get my grandson a window into Uptown.”

Flipping the knife into his teeth, the skeleton snapped his boney tail and galloped out into the hall, vanishing around the corner with a rattling cackle that still echoed in my head after he was gone.

Ancestor Bloom let out a weary sigh and stumped over to the door to watch him go.

“Was...was he serious about fighting them with that letter opener?” Zeta asked, curiously.

The Aroyo elder chuckled, as much to herself as to the zebra. “The knife? We had that in our private safe when Hard Boiled vanished a few decades ago. He calls it ‘Blondie’, after his wife. At one point, Luna tried to make a Crusader melee weapon and that little beast was the result. The blade is vorpalized steel and adamantine. I once saw Egghead use it to peel a dragon like a potato.”

“I hope it’s enough,” I said, limping toward the focus on three hooves. “I will need to concentrate. Distractions lead to explosions, as my father once said.”

My shoulder hurt and there was a bit of residual pain in my skull along with the persistent phantasmal discomfort my missing ear seemed to be constantly radiating; nothing individually serious, but collectively asking for an explosion.

Forcing aside my pain, I studied the crystal focus.

The altar only came up to my chest and was of some black stone with a metallic sheen that revealed itself at certain angles. It was little more than a box with a giant, carefully cut gemstone buried in the top. The gem resembled nothing so much as an oddly shaped cactus, covered in tiny spines made of green crystal that very nearly vibrated with energy, throwing off soft sparks of light from time to time.

“Well. This shan’t be pleasant,” I said, unsheathing my staff’s serrated blade and setting the scabbard to one side. I stared at my brother’s face in the surface. He was giving me an accusatory glare. “Zefu? Your assistance, please.”

“You’re...talking to your...brother?” Ancestor Belle inquired.

I looked up, then nodded. “There is too much magic left in the system for me to interface without bursting into flames and becoming trapped like the poor mare we just ‘relieved’. My brother...well, I need his abilities. Most specifically, I need his knowledge of death magic. He cast the spell that trapped ponies in their bodies and he learned it from some former master who learned it, most likely, from the original prisoner of these pylons.”

Glancing back at the sword, I frowned. Zefu’s expression was flat and altogether stubbornly uncooperative.

“Oh do stop,” I snapped, tapping the blade with a toe. “If you’d given me other options, I’d have taken them. You’re the one who chose necromancy and, just now, I need a necromancer.”

Zefu jerked his head to one side twice, then raised an eyebrow at me.

I snorted derisively. “You want out?”

My brother’s visage within the blade gave a slight nod.

“You have no body to return to. If you don’t help me, you’ll be buried with me. You want madness and boredom, imagine a few billion years on this planet’s dead husk under a heap of rubble. Is that a potentiality that pleases you?”

My brother’s ethereal lip twisted into a sneer for a moment, then he seemed to slide back a few inches from the sword. His hooves appeared, two disconnected limbs dangling in the air. He mimed opening a book, then pointed at me, then himself.

I stared at him for a minute, trying to work out his meaning before it slid into place. “Ah! Your journal?”

He nodded, again, then gestured as though holding a writing utensil before tapping his toes together very deliberately six times. Reaching back, I pulled my brother’s leatherbound journal from the pouch across my back and opened it, flipping to the sixth page. The header across the top read:

‘In the event of my semi-permanent death or discorporation, a temporary body may be procured in the following manners’.

Below was a fairly extensive list of reagents and arcane matrixes for various rituals. In one corner there was a note with an arrow pointing to a particular passage.

I read the note aloud. “Should a necromancer become trapped within a phylactery, any gifted unicorn may call upon their temporary manifest presence to make deals, provide information, and commune. The summoner controls the manifestation, which requires only the below spell form.”

“You’re...not really considering letting him run loose, are you?” Ancestor Belle asked. “I don’t know the whole story, but anypony who’d get themselves locked in a sword is probably bad news.”

I waved a hoof at the pylon around us. “Where, pray tell, will he run loose to? Here. If you wouldn’t mind weaving this for me.”

Lifting the journal out of my hooves, she examined the looping shapes, angles, and scripts along the bottom of the page. “I can cast this, but I can’t guarantee what it’ll do just by looking at it.”

“If my brother thought he could actually escape, he’d pick a time when death was not literally at the door.” I picked up my unsheathed sword and held it out to her. “Now, if you please.”

“I don’t entirely understand what is going on, but I am nervous. As you have been elected the de facto leader of this little squad, I would appreciate some orders,” Zeta said.

“Then stand watch and keep me from getting killed. Once I begin working with the focus, I doubt I will be able to stop,” I answered, stepping back as Ancestor Belle hefted my blade in one foreleg and levitated the journal with the other. Lifting her chin, she fell into a downright archaic, but very practiced casting stance.

A thin light grew at the very tip of the ancient unicorn’s horn, then ran its way down to her eyes which began to shimmer. The elderly unicorn gasped as a dozen thin beams of energy shot out and stopped in midair, before slowly starting to trace something, using sharp lines of magic to sketch a gleaming form. At the same time, my staff rose up to hang within the spell as the shape gradually resolved into the loose outline of a familiar zony.

For a long moment, there was only his general outline, but as the spell continued the details started to fill themselves in. After about thirty seconds, a dazzling hologram of my dead brother stood before me, a subtle smirk on his handsome face. The image looked down at itself, then took a deep breath.

“Brother,” he said, though the word came from Ancestor Belle’s mouth. Her lips moved, but there was no mistaking my sibling’s voice. The Aroyo looked vaguely disturbed to find her muzzle used in such a fashion, but quickly let it pass.

“Zefu,” I replied, “I need your assistance with the magics of this pylon. We need to bleed the mechanism—”

“You need to bleed the mechanism, Limerence,” Zefu interrupted, stretching his striped flanks one at a time. “That being the case, we must first discuss what I need.”

“You are helping me,” I said, sharply, “That is already established. If you refuse, you can go back in the sword and I will leave it here for the wrecking crews to bury when this is done.”

Zefu’s glowing smile never faltered. “Agreed. However, you are an honorable pony and I can draw this out a while longer. Every moment you waste is more pointless deaths in the streets, if you’ll remember. Or, we can have a brief discussion of terms.”

I drew in a breath that still tasted of ashes. “Alright. Terms for your assistance. I am not releasing you.”

“Then a tethered host body will be sufficient. I care not which of the races you choose, but I do not wish to spend my remaining days as your butterknife.”

I pulled his journal from where it levitated beside Ancestor Belle and flicked to the section on necromantic resurrections, quickly finding the correct annotation.

“A tethered host is bound to the will of the creator and may store a soul until the natural death of the host in any form the caster chooses,” I read, then glanced at the below spell. Looking up, I held out a hoof. “Done.”

Zefu’s lips bent downward slightly. “You...do not wish to set boundaries on this? Specifics?”

“I haven’t the time,” I replied, jiggling my hoof at him, “I will find you a host body and you will be bound to my will. The dead will be all but innumerable and I’m certain I can find a well preserved corpse for you to inhabit. If we fail, you have nothing in the most profound sense of the word. If we succeed, you may get a chance at redemption. I doubt you want to find out what the zebra afterlife has in store for a patricide, thus, I see nothing in those terms that needs deeper negotiation. Are we agreed?”

“If I did not know you as well as I do, I would be worried about your honesty, Limerence,” Zefu murmured. Cautiously, my brother’s projection put out a hoof and lightly touched mine. There was no actual physical contact made, but the gesture was the important thing. “Honest ponies should not be as effective as you somehow manage to be. I don’t doubt you still have some clever trick up your sleeve...but if it means I am not a sword, nor facing a near eternity with the shamed dead ripping the flesh from my bones until my penance is paid, I accept.”

“It would be sad to let the shamed dead have so handsome a specimen,” Zeta commented, then clapped a hoof over her mouth as she realized what her mouth had just done.

Zefu stretched his neck and shook his tail in what I’m sure was a fashion that he thought would have reduced most mares to titters and giggles. Irritatingly, I’d seen him be successful on too many occasions to dismiss the effect entirely.

“I am glad that even in death I can still find an appreciative audience,” he said, tossing her a wink.

Zeta tucked her tail in between her back legs and took a quick step back. “I think I should appreciate from over here.”

“Wise,” I commented. “He is not picky about his sexual conquests having a pulse.”

My brother blew a raspberry out of one corner of his mouth as the zebress looked at me with a shocked expression before backing up several more steps.

“Simply because you refuse to appreciate a mare in any of her conditions is no fault of mine, Limerence,” Zefu said, running his vaporous tongue over his upper lip.

I rubbed at my aching forehead with one hoof, trying to banish the persistent pain before I did anything rash. Seeing Zefu’s face again was reminding me, somewhat, of why I’d killed him. By the same token, a familial connection remained and it was oddly comforting, despite the cognitive dissonance.

“Before this conversation devolves any further, can we please begin?” I asked.

“Ah, well. Father would be proud of your mindfulness of the moment over what is, no doubt, an urge to strangle me. The withdrawal symptoms of your latest magical indiscretions are bad enough.”

“Father is dead. You are dead. Unless you wish to endure one of his lectures for however long he sees fit—which may very well be eternity—I recommend you stop baiting me. We must bleed this system. Is there a grounding spell?”

The projection shook his head and trotted over to the crystal focus, seeming to paddle through the air on silent hooves. “These spellcores are as much a mystery to me as they are to you, though I do know the spell that binds soul to bone. However, I don’t imagine you want to lose your skin and become a slow-burning psychic battery for however many months or years you happen to survive. I was paid in knowledge, but also paid not to ask certain questions. That being said, I do know that Catterwaller’s Theory of Sentient Thaumic Cohesion applies.”

Ancestor Belle momentarily retook control of her muzzle, though her eyes never stopped glowing as she said, “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

“Listen.” Zeta interjected, cocking an ear toward the door. There was a soft pop of something that might have been gunfire, but it sounded a long way off.

I pulled a knife from my bandolier and twirled it around my hoof, using the motion to soothe my mind as best I could.

‘Catterwauler’s theory,’ I thought, ‘To be cast, magic must be continuously channeled, whether actively or passively, else it is only chaotic and unformed energies. To that end, an intelligence must assert the initial conditions of a spell. Therefore, all spellcasting begins with sentience.’

“The operator is the ground?” I asked, worriedly.

“Very good, Limerence!” Zefu chuckled, clapping his hooves together. They made no sound, but he didn’t notice. “Nopony who stood over that focus was meant to absorb more than a tiny fraction of its energies. The circuit flowed outward into the city, protecting it. Now, it flows inward...a tiny portion maintaining the shield around Uptown and the rest—”

“—waiting,” I finished, feeling a heavy weight settling on my shoulders, “Waiting for the wish. The operators are conduits...being kept alive, trapped inside their bones so they can all cast the wish together. Celestia above.”

“T-that’s why we never managed to make Project Sixty-Six work!” Belle exclaimed, “We assumed one caster with only access to their inner reserves or whatever we could drag in from contributing ponies! The largest collective casting in Equestria’s history was a barely controlled disaster, but...if you didn’t need to keep the spellform in minds and could simply scribe it into a building—”

“—or many buildings,” I added, resting a hoof on the altar and marveling at the sheer grandiosity, “Parallel processing with a central controller, using the Armor of Nightmare Moon to make it all work together. You could have a borderline limitless supply of reality twisting magic at your disposal, particularly if you somehow tapped into the psychic fields of thousands of ponies at once who needn’t be part of the casting. Of course, for maximum efficiency those thousands would need to be tuned...tuned to a particular emotional frequency.”

Zeta clutched a hoof to her throat as she whispered, “Fear. One must make all of those ponies feel the same thing for a long period of time. They must all be afraid. My stripes, they stole the sun to make the world afraid...”

“Do you see why I felt the need to join this particular endeavor, now?” Zefu asked, settling on his ephemeral haunches. “It is beyond us.”

“But to throw yourself at the hooves of such monsters like a pet dog...I cannot fathom—” Zeta hissed.

“You cannot fathom, mare?” my brother snapped, sneering at the zebress. “I have been a cripple and outcast since I was a child. You do not get to judge me.”

Zeta rose up onto the tips of her hooves and stomped toward Zefu’s projection.

“What do you know about cripples, fool?” she barked, raising a hoof to his face. I hadn’t noticed it before, but she wore a zebra medical bracelet around one forelock that bore a dangling jeweled trinket in the shape of a lily. “Do you know what this is?!”

My brother actually looked a bit taken aback. “T-that is a death—”

“Yes! A death charm, from the Zemba Shamans signifying a terminal case of the twisting sickness! I have worn it since I was a child! We all bear burdens! We all find ourselves outcast some days! It is part of being alive! We do not all turn to dark magics when our courage runs out!”

Swallowing, Zefu quickly regained his composure. “I would never claim to be the bravest of my kin! Brave people must have others to prop them up! I had no one! I had only myself! I made do with what was available!”

“Do not play victim! You made your choices! We all have someone—”

I braced my hooves on the altar, trying to tune them out. The gunfire was getting closer and the shots more distinct; knowing Hard Boiled Senior was out there giving our foes a fight didn’t make it any easier to think. The thousands of other souls doing the same thing were relying on me, too.

Jerking my head up, I reared up as a realization hit me hard enough to leave a dent.

“Souls,” I muttered.

Zefu and Zeta were inches from one another, teeth bared, looking like they both wished they could strike each other. Strange as it may sound, my brother seemed to be getting the worst of it, his ears pinned back as he leaned slightly away from the zebress.

Taking the respite my interruption offered, Zefu quirked a perfectly styled eyebrow at me. “You have an idea, Limerence? You are making your ‘My brain is finally working’ face.”

I started to speak, then hesitated a moment. “I have...I have what may be—as Hard Boiled would put it—a long shot. Brother, do you know a spell to commune with the dead?”

Backing away from Zeta, he trotted in a careful circle around the fuming zebress and returned to my side, trying to put his affable smile back in place. It didn’t seem to want to stick. “I would not be much of a necromancer if I didn’t, now would I?”

“Right. Can you speak to those trapped in the walls of this place?”

Zefu looked up at the ceiling. “The spell is in my journal. Page eighteen. That being said, I doubt you’ll like what they have to say.”

“The screaming?” Ancestor Belle asked, momentarily reclaiming her mouth again. “We heard that.”

“That was most disturbing, but also presents a problem,” I said, picking up Zefu’s journal and flicking through the yellowed pages. “I need to be able to talk to them.”

“That is a very ‘two way street’,” my brother replied. “They hear you, you hear them.”

Finding the correct page, I quickly scanned it, peering at the door as an especially close ricochet sounded in the street, followed by a shout of fear from somewhere too close for comfort. I glanced at Zeta, who silently nodded before galloping at absurd speed out of the room to go help Hard Boiled Senior. Turning back to the journal, I ran a toe down it.

“The section you’re looking for is called ‘Para-Exposition Of Necro-Psyche’,” Zefu directed.

“Ah. I see. Speak to the minds of those who have expired and not passed from this world. This...oh.” I narrowed my eyes at the page. “This...opens my mind to them?”

“As I said. Two way street,” he explained, “These ponies have been trapped in their bones and ground to dust, then slapped together with dozens of other minds for what may well be years now. Shall I book you a straitjacket ahead of time?”

“I have had one on layaway for some weeks now,” I replied, then trotted to the focus, laying the journal out beside the crystal. “These ponies deserve to be heard. Then, we will see if they like what I have to offer.”

Act 3 Chapter 66 : Open Sesame

"It is not hubris to wield power. It is hubris to believe oneself infallible simply because power is wielded. A mountain can fall into the ocean. An ocean can boil in a volcano. All can be crushed under the weight of time or a lever in precisely the right place."

-Princess Celestia, Will To Pony

We boiled in the heart of a star.

Every follicle of hair on our body had become a nerve tuned only to pain. A thousand times we were flensed, flayed, and shattered. The winds buffeted us and seconds stretched to centuries.

We sat in the leading edge of a hurricane, under the curling edge of a tsunami, on the shaking floor of a quaking valley, beneath a meteor’s raging glow. We sat, listened, and waited, with all the patience of a stone while a mighty voice battered the doors of our psyche.

The endless tide of noise raked its way up and down the inside of our skull. A horde of berserk thoughts trampled through our mind, eating, raping, bleeding, screaming, and dying.

Throughout it all, a tiny mote of self refused to be snuffed.

“Scream all you like,” it whispered.

We clung to that mote. It refused to leave us and kept by our side, a comforting friend to hold against the howling of condemned innocents. Flesh and bone might fail, but let them fail.

We had our tiny light.

“You may shriek, but it is only a wave upon my endless shore.”

The blood in our veins crackled with magic as the spell connected us, giving form and function that we had lost when the grinding reduced us to a slurry. Were these our veins? They could not be. Those were powdered and given a shape.

“I existed before the beginning of time, and I will exist again.”

When had we all passed? Why was there nothing beyond the moment of passing? What happened? Where were our talents? Were they as one?

No, they could not be. This one had one talent.

The bell cracked.

Our muscles ached, but the noise was beginning to fade. The one who’d given us form was still there, awaiting, like a timeless sentinel, wrapped in a bubble of that which we craved most. We’d surged upon him and he gifted us with that wonder.

‘I am the silence at the end of the universe.’

My eyes snapped open as I hovered above the focus.

My eyes? Yes? No? All of our eyes.The eyes of thousands, watching.

We watched the ancient white mare standing on the other side of the focus. Her flesh was riddled with machines, but they were unlike those that ground us to dust.

I swallowed, trying to regain some semblance of self as I shook off the thought. My horn was aflame, letting off wave after wave of energy yanked out of the air itself. My own reserves were empty, but still my horn continued to cast. Beside her, the hated monster stood. We wanted nothing more than to scour him from existence itself for what he’d denied us, but this one...this one had already taken a perfect revenge. He was as trapped as we.

“M-Mister Limerence?” Belle stuttered.

I opened my muzzle to reply, but the sound that issued from my mouth almost knocked Ancestor Belle off her legs. It was a sonic crack which had both her and my brother instinctively throwing their hooves over their ears. A little trickle of blood ran down the corner of my muzzle.

‘We shook some of his teeth loose.’

‘His tongue is bleeding.’

‘No, we mustn’t!’

‘He is our only way out!’

‘I want my daddy!’

‘I can’t abide this any longer!’

‘Boiling flesh, eyes, needles, cat scratch, murder, rotten sluts in gutters.’

Silence.

Our...my...talent wrapped itself around us, clenching the noise like a fist around a throat. I could feel their momentary panic as they discovered my spell robbing them of their voices. So many voices. I cast my silence amongst them and it was a flood through a burning house.

Slowly, cautiously, I let the spell fade.

“Now, then,” I said, in a voice that was still loud enough to shake the building. Ancestor Belle sat below me with her hooves clamped over her ears and Zefu cowered against the opposite side of the altar, his magical body jittering like a thousand nervous fireflies.

“B-brother?” he asked.

I opened my mouth, but something else beat me to my vocal chords.

“Quiet worm! For peeling your eyes and yanking your—”

My silence clamped down again, cutting off the tirade. I drew a deep breath, and hundreds shuddered in agony and pleasure at the sensation. My flesh ached, but the spell held.

“Are you alright, Mister Tome?” Ancestor Belle asked.

I had to muffle a laugh that would surely have threatened to kill her and inconvenience all of us to no end. The sounds of weapons fire and fighting from outside the building were getting close. At a greater distance, they’d been joined by more sounds of violence: screams, shouts, explosions, spells, and the snapping beat of giant wings.

“We...are...complicated,” I murmured. The overwhelming pressure of the trapped souls’ thoughts was still making it difficult to assemble my own cogitations, but without actually being able to hear their wailing it was a little easier to manage.

“Limerence, on a scale of one to ten, how possessed are you?” Zefu asked, raising himself from behind the altar.

I looked down at my hooves which still dangled a meter off the floor.

“Extremely,” I replied, then held up a leg to forestall any more questions.

Turning my attention inward, I tried to sort the vast waves of different feelings running circles around my brain. Zefu’s spell seemed to have hollowed out a neat hole in my mindscape into which the vast, teeming throng of mashed together souls had poured the instant our connection was established. They were terrified, both that I’d come and that I’d leave them to their previous conditions.

Many seemed mad beyond saving; those were reduced to blubbering, psychic sludge that manifested as a constant droning buzz of misery. Even more were catatonic, having crawled down within whatever fantasy-scapes they could muster to escape the horror of what’d become of them. Most of that lot appeared bizarrely content. They were little more than floating sacks of gentled numbness. A few variations existed, clumping here or there within formless space. Contradictory as it might sound, the voluminous space did, on second examination, seem to have a mass and geometry.

I wandered in the field of unhinged emotions and thoughts, listening to them as best I could. Here, a mare cried in a meadow full of flowers over her husband who’d died just a few weeks ago in the war. There, a child walked home from school down back alleys he’d taken a hundred times and thought he knew, end to end. An old stallion looked forward to seeing his dog again in the afterlife.

They floated by in their thousands, many unable to comprehend what viciousness had befallen them until at last I came to a place where quiet reigned.

Therein lay only a few dozen souls, but they seemed to be more stable than those around them.

It would be inaccurate to say I ‘moved’ toward them; they were inside my mind and I could no more move toward a single point in my own brain than I could point to a single drop of water in an ocean. Still, there was a sensation of motion and of attention closing in. As one, they became aware of me.

I’d no idea how the magical bubble of quiet that seemed to swell and throb with my own heartbeat was keeping voices inside my skull from overwhelming me, so it seemed there was no reason I could not try to will it into a particular shape. My talent obeyed with a whimsical flourish, billowing outward away from the tiny group of souls as they dangled like shining embers huddling together to keep their remaining warmth in the high winds of the maddened collective.

‘He sees us...Oh! We can talk again! That enchantment of his is pretty dynamite. It’s ever so much quieter in here.’

‘Do you think he can hear what we say?’

‘Do you want to ask him? I read some of his thoughts. He’s a very dangerous pony.’

‘He’s just a colt who has been in some very dangerous situations. I knew his father. Tome was a good sort. So is he.’

‘Good sort or not, we can’t let this chance walk away, can we?’

‘No, of course you’re right.’

Opening my eyes, I said aloud and in the softest voice I could manage with all those rampant energies ripping at my body, “Zefu. There are some people in here who have not lost their minds. How do I communicate with them?”

“If you cast the spell correctly, I’m pretty sure you just did, brother,” Zefu replied.

‘He is right. We can hear you. You can understand us?’

For some reason this voice seemed to be that of a middle-aged stallion. As he spoke, a picture faded into being behind my eyes of an earth pony with a dark blue coat and wispy, thinning mane holding a pipe in the corner of his mouth. He looked down at himself and smiled, before pulling the pipe from his lips with one hoof and tapping it out on the other.

“I can see you,” I thought in what amounted to the stallion’s direction.

He winced, as though I’d yelled at him.

“Not so loud, buddy. I might not have ears anymore, but after six months of being shouted or cried at by the crazies, I’m enjoying the peace.”

“My apologies,” I thought, trying to modulate how much attention I sent his way.

“That’s better. Can you see the others? I didn’t have a body until a minute ago and I’m sure they’d enjoy it.”

I focused on the remaining stable souls and, one by one, they began to resolve into individual shapes before becoming what amounted to a crowd standing or flying in the strange plane within my mental landscape. Their forms were myriad: a few griffins, some zebras, plenty of ponies, and one or two other species. There was even a hippogriff, toward the back.

They went about inspecting themselves, cheerfully clapping their hooves or stomping their claws before beginning to peer at one another.

“Glisten? I thought you were a pony!”

“I told you I had claws! I must have!”

“Tender! Oh Tender, I had no idea you were so beautiful!”

“Hush Puppy, are you over there?”

“I’m here, Cosma! I’m over here! My goodness, you’re tall!”

Before the rush of feelings could drive me to distraction, the stallion I’d first met raised his forelegs into the air and called out to them.

“Everyone! Mister Tome here needs our attention! Please, hold your excitement!”

Turning back in what I may as well call my direction, the stallion puffed casually at his pipe.

“I’m Caliente! I can’t tell you how pleased we all are to meet you!”

Visualizing myself a body, I felt it take shape, then slowly dropped onto something that felt entirely too real to be some minor element of my mind. The strange dichotomy of still feeling my actual body and having sensations coming from a mental projection was nauseating, but throwing up while possessed is almost never a good idea, so I swallowed my gorge and gave the assembled crowd of persons a slight bow.

“I am afraid you all have me at a disadvantage,” I said, “I expected to find no sane ponies. I was hoping I might direct the emotional sentiment of this place towards my ends, but...are...are you all aware of what happened to you?”

There was a general shuffling of hooves and claws before a young, lavender mare with a tightly wound bonnet and a teddy bear sitting on her back stepped forward.

“Most of us were poisoned, or kidnapped and poisoned. Our bones were milled and we were thrown into ash pits full of other ponies’ remains. Caliente found us before we could go insane. He was here a long time ago.”

I flicked my attention toward Caliente once more. “How is this possible?”

“I was one of the first,” he answered, rubbing his wrinkled forehead. “It didn’t used to be so loud out there, but you learn to tune it out. Leastways, I did. When I could, I’d find the young ones, freshly dead, freshly poisoned, and pull them here with me.”

“But how have you kept from going insane?”

A small griffin with a thick head of red feathers that made him look like a lit match trotted out of the herd. “We tell stories. We talk to each other. Caliente taught us to keep ourselves together. Keep from letting the madness come in.” His eyes dropped and he scuffed at one claw with the other. “There used to be more of us.”

Outside, my brother had gotten up and moved over to my side. He was waving a glowing leg in front of my face and saying something I couldn’t make out.

“Now there a zony I like to stomp to bloody pulp,” a yak toward the back murmured. “Makes me mad someone beat us to it, but don’t think yak could have stomped him better than you.”

Several voices were raised in agreement.

I shook my head at Zefu, at which he took a step back, before returning my attention to the people inside my mind.

“My brother killed you?” I asked.

“Not I, but he killed a few,” Caliente replied, his lip curling into a snarl. “His master worked for the rotters who put us here. Nasty old zebra whose name we never did get. If I ever get to the afterlife, I’m going to look him up. There will be a line to kick him in the bollocks, and I might go twice.”

The young griffin let out a soft hiss and glared up at the sky. “Your brother refined his magic. Made it more...efficient. I want to rip him into shreds with my beak. That gutless shit didn’t even kill me properly. He poisoned my dinner, and I paid handsomely for that pig! I don’t suppose you could stick him in here with us, could you?”

“Unfortunately, no,” I replied, shaking my head. “For now, I need him. If he annoys me, do believe I will consider it. Right now, I need your assistance.”

The mare with the teddy bear looked back and forth between herself, Caliente, and the assembled crowd of souls. “We were hoping you could get us out of here. What are we supposed to do? Most of us aren’t even part of the same building.”

My attention was yanked away for a moment as Zeta charged back into the pylon’s inner chamber, followed by a spray of bullets that spattered the floor a second after she’d pressed herself against the wall. A second later, Hard Boiled Senior trotted in with a casual air, a lit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He was so coated in blood it actually took me a second to recognize him and his sports jacket had a few fresh bullet holes in it, but he seemed none the worse for wear.

Looking up at where I floated, the skeleton quickly stubbed out his cigarette before tucking it behind one ear. “I see things aren’t any less exciting in here, then. Looks like you’ve got some friends in your head there, kiddo. I can hear them whispering when I speak to you. Funny thing, that.”

“There are more than a few,” I said, shuddering as the shrieking voices battered against the wall of silence surrounding my weirdly segmented mind. “What is going on outside?”

“Our friends have started their run on the P.A.C.T. building by now if my watch is right, but we’re about to have a fight in here. There’s a full squad of uglies Miss Zeta and I didn’t manage to clean off before the rest broke off to defend their headquarters. They’re playing it smart and keeping out of range, but that’ll only last till they get their heavy hitters.”

As if on cue, a smoke grenade arced in over his shoulder. He casually caught it in midair, turned, and whipped it back the way it’d come. I had only a second to plug my ears with my hooves before the explosion shook the air and more shouts were heard from outside.

“I need more time!” I barked, for a second forgetting to modulate my voice. Zeta all but collapsed against the wall, tears streaking her face as she shot me an angry glare. A tickle on my upper lip told me I’d probably also broken a few capillaries in my nose. “P-pardon. I need a few more minutes. I found some people who might help us.”

“Then don’t waste your time with us! We die, it’s irrelevant. This is all for nothing if you don’t finish the job!”

“Is he like us?” Caliente asked from inside my head.

I pulled my thoughts away from my physical body and returned to my mindscape.

“He is. Listen, I think...given time, we can free all of you, but I can’t do it today. There are events going on out in the world that are beyond my control, and I am in considerable danger. If we survive, I swear I will let someone know you are here. Princess Celestia will know.”

There was a general murmur of discontent from the herd, but Caliente raised his voice above them, pulling his pipe out and raising it high.

“Listen to me! We were alone! We have survived for years because we were together, and we can survive years more, if we must! Do you all understand? This stallion offers us hope! Hope for getting free!”

The emotions of the crowd washed through my mind, shaking my self-control: sadness, relief, joy, anger, fear, suspicion, comfort. It was more at once than I’d ever felt. More than anything, I wanted to push them back into silence, but it wasn’t an option. Not yet. Not until I’d done my duty.

My brother tarnished our family name by enslaving those ponies.

‘I will make it right.’

As that thought crystallized, the entire group stopped and turned toward me. Their faces reflected that same mixture of emotions, but leaned more heavily toward hope. A towering male zebra wearing twenty gold rings around each leg stomped through the crowd, poking his head out to give me a close, critical inspection.

“Caliente says we trust him. His mind is open to us. That is good enough for Zatanga, of Clan Rat Stomper.”

“And Gildana, of Clan Tokan,” a musclebound griffin toward the back added. “I see pictures of my family in his mind. He knows them. His soul is good.”

Gradually, the wild ebbing and flowing of feelings calmed until all I felt from them was determination and attention. Caliente smiled at the group and returned his attention to me, sticking his pipe back in his mouth and settling down on his haunches. He seemed to take considerable pleasure in being able to sit down, though if I had been without flanks for an extended period I suppose I would as well.

“Mister Tome, I was a maker of fine tobacco. I expected to die of lung cancer, with my head held high, because I love to smoke. I lived through the return of Luna and some of the brightest days Equestria has ever seen. My lungs held strong. Instead, I died in a nursing home when the old necromancer came to my bedside claiming to be a doctor with a ‘new medicine’. I died and he stole my bones.”

Reaching out, he pressed his hoof against my chest. It might have been a psychosomatic response, but I swear I could feel its weight in the real world.

“Everyone here has some similar story. We were taken before our time and trapped in this half-existence, ground to dust and with only each other for comfort. We have waited, hoping someone would one day figure out that we were here. Now...you have come. If what is in your mind is true, then everyone who lives is in danger. Our loved ones in the world outside are in danger.”

It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t saying any of this for my benefit. The collection of species behind him were looking to one another. A few nodded their heads, and more were exchanging murmurs and quiet looks.

“We could ask you a thousand, thousand questions, but no answers would make what has been done to us right. Only you can do that...and you must have needed something when you came here. We can hear most of your thoughts, but...they are not all clear. What is it you need from us?”

I started to reply, when my attention was torn back to the real world by a screech of rage as a massive, barreling monstrosity crashed through the door of the focus chamber.

The creature was only loosely equine, insofar as it had four legs, hooves, and a head. Scraps of broken, bleeding orange-furred flesh were stretched dangerously over vast, tumorous muscles. Though I still floated more than a meter off the ground, the beast was right up to my chest height.

Its skull was misshapen, as though somepony had hit it in the face with a shovel until it flattened out. When it opened its warped muzzle to hiss like a whole pit of angry snakes, a giant array of twisted teeth shimmered in the light thrown off by my horn.

Pausing just inside the chamber, it glanced left, then right, before spotting me with its beady little eyes. Though couched in a face which seemed part bovine, part wolf, its eyes were still a pony’s eyes. They were full of rage, but also a mortal fear. As we stared at each other, time seemed to stretch out.

‘It’s going to kill me,’ I thought.

Suddenly, a shining light leapt between us. My brother’s projection stood there, glaring up at the creature.

“If anyone is to kill Limerence, it will be me! Now get back, beast!” he snarled.

The monster recentered its gaze on Zefu and lowed at him. It pawed the ground once, lowered its head, and then leapt forward. My brother jumped to the side, rolling in a convincing manner though his hooves did sink a few inches into the concrete surface.

Ancestor Belle seemed to appear out of thin air, inches from the end of the creature’s nose. It snorted, angrily, only to let out a surprised squeak as she grabbed it by the forehead and drove her horn squarely into one of its eyes. There was a loud snap, followed by a pop and the beast went limp, its mighty bulk collapsing where it stood.

Carefully, the elderly mare pulled her horn from the beast’s empty eye socket. Her horn kept coming until she had to step back a couple of feet to let it free. It’d grown a solid eighteen centimeters, but quickly shrank back onto her forehead with a faint crackle of energy.

Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and gave the dead mutation a light kick.

“You kept that modification, but wouldn’t take the armored knees?” he asked.

“I never ruined my original knees jumping off dragons like Scootaloo. Are there more coming?”

Zeta darted to the door and stuck her head out for a half second before yanking it back as a blast of shotgun pellets answered her appearance.

“Many!” she shouted.

“Form up! They won’t want to use anti-magic grenades inside a pylon, but we have to keep them off of Limerence!”

My body glowed before a thick bubble of energy wrapped itself around my limbs, binding them up against my chest. I squirmed a little, but was quite immobile.

“Stop trying to move!” Belle barked. “That will keep you safe, but not if you wiggle too much!”

“Must it be so small?!” I called back.

“The quicker you talk to your friends in there, the quicker you can get out!”

Before I could formulate an answer, a half dozen of the smaller creatures burst in like a wave of ravening locusts, beating their ragged, badly kempt wings as they zipped about with guns blazing. Sparks glanced off my magical prison where bullets had impacted, but it held. Most of the berserk abominations were still largely ponylike, though their faces were morphed by overgrown teeth. Several wore black P.A.C.T. barding, but it appeared torn and unpolished, like it’d just happened to be the last thing on their bodies before their mutations.

One of the creatures—a mare with two gigantic tusks sticking out of her jaw that coiled up to her ears—lunged at me with a chattering semi-automatic pistol in her teeth, only to be caught midair by Hard Boiled Senior who drove his tiny knife into her forehead. I expected a short jerk as the blade stopped, but it kept moving, all but flaying the creature from skull to tail and splashing my shield with blood.

Behind them, Zeta was riding another armored beast into the ground, using a loop of paracord she must have taken off of one of them to knot its throat shut.

“Limerence Tome,” Caliente whispered, and I swallowed, trying to force my mind back into the calmer space within.

Somehow, my silence spell still held most of the maddened souls at bay within my thought-space. The enchantment was shaky, but it called on far less of my depleted magical reserves to use my talent than to cast any other given spell.

“I’m here! I’m here!” I called back as the middle-aged stallion reappeared with his followers in my mind’s eye.

“It looks an awful lot like you’re about to be eaten alive,” he said, jerking his chin in a direction over my shoulder.

“That’s one way to put it, yes,” I replied, willing my body back into existence within the dark mental plane. “How much do you know about what happened to your bodies?”

“We know we are in Shield pylons,” a stiffly prim mare in a starched dress and pants suit that was twenty years out of date answered from a place a few heads back from the front. “Some of us were taken to a specific pylon before we died. Filthy things. Usually they would force us to hold some specific image in our heads. I remember having to imagine this nasty criminal dodging an assassin. I wanted nothing more than to see him...well, I shan’t say, but they said they would hurt my kitties if I didn’t do exactly as they said.”

I winced as a body bounced off the shield around me, but forced my eyes shut again, doing my best to hold the mental landscape together.

“That...that must be how they made their wishes before they had the armor of Nightmare Moon. A wasteful procedure. That does mean that you must have some direction over the pylons themselves.”

Caliente’s lip curled and he spat off to one side. “I suppose we might, but it’s not enough to get out of here. Until you, we couldn’t even see what was going on outside. The operator sometimes leaked a few thoughts, but we can’t talk to them. Ignoring the crazies is a full time job, too.”

I hesitated for a second as a thought started to form in my mind.

“If...if I asked you to...to hold an image in your minds right now...could you do it?”

Caliente hesitated, then blew a long, thin stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth as he turned to look at the crowd behind him. “You think we could? I mean, it gets awful loud in here without Mister Limerence’s silence spell.”

“How would we know if we were holding the right image?” a colt asked, leaning against a much larger mare. “They stuck the pictures in our minds the first time with magic and stuff.”

“If they had but one individual to direct, they would need extreme specificity to develop a stable magical form, but with a plethora, systemic chaotic factors could cancel each other out—”

“Mister Limerence,” Caliente cut into my thoughts, gesturing at me with one hoof. “We can hear your brain churning, but I doubt anypony here has a degree in advanced arcanery. I want to see my wife in the next life, and we have waited for years. Some of us have waited decades. Anything we can do that will end this torment, we will try. So lay it out simple and short.”

For a long moment, I sat in silence, trying to think of what to say. I could not imagine what they’d been through. I doubted anyone could.

A thud shook me from my contemplations as a body slowly dropped off the shield around me and slid to the ground in a pool of blood. I stared at the creature’s dead face for a second before snapping my eyes shut once more.

‘Focus. Focus or we all die.’

“I...I need all of you to imagine myself not exploding.”

There were a few seconds where no one said anything before the yak toward the back piped up. “Yak think he hearing not good, ‘cept not have ears anymore. You say you want we think you not blow up?”

I nodded. “All of you must, together, picture that I do not die or combust for the next few minutes. I’m going to tap into the crystal down there and...I need you to keep me from turning to ash or detonating or losing all my skin or any other terribly unpleasant thing. Just imagine me as I am. Whole. Alive. Uninjured.”

Caliente puffed thoughtfully on his pipe for a minute as the various creatures behind him exchanged some confused looks.

“That all?” he asked. “You’ve got a fresh as daisies memory in your head of a burning pony. I’m assuming you don’t want to end up like that?”

“What if we don’t all picture you the same kind of okay?” a tiny filly with a curly blond mane asked, before ducking back behind the legs of a stallion who might have been her father.

“It...it may be enough for you all just to imagine me as I am right now; Unchanged, uninjured. If you can send the image out amongst the poor damaged ones outside and have them focus as well, it may help. If enough are concentrating on the same general concept of an undamaged...me...then there should be enough overlap to grant me some protection.”

“And if that isn’t enough?” Caliente asked.

“Then I die, but I will do my best to stand” I whispered, aloud, before opening my eyes on a scene of carnage.

It took me a moment to even recognize my companions. All three of them were painted in layers of red, but around them lay the bodies of a dozen dead creatures in various states of extreme disrepair. One was broken in half, while another had been neatly bisected from jaw to tail as though it’d run face first into a bandsaw blade.

Ancestor Belle sat in the half-light of a burning corpse, lit by blue flames that licked away its flesh. She was applying a wide bandage to Zeta’s rear leg as the zebress let out soft whimpers of discomfort. Behind her, my brother’s projection sat watching the fires burn, seemingly unsure what to do with himself. Hard Boiled Senior was keeping watch at my hooves, just standing there staring up at me like death on vigil.

“Ah! You come out of it, finally?” he asked.

“How long was I in congress with them?”

“Don’t know. I got blood in my watch. Call it ten minutes. There are more bastards coming and I heard something that might have been a dragon not long ago, but it was making some right unhappy noises.”

“At least it’s not an entire army,” Ancestor Belle interjected. “Officer Swift and Miss Taxi seem to be holding up their end of the fight, or we’d be facing more badness.”

Giving my horn a quick shake in as little of the confined space within Miss Belle’s shield as I had to move, I let the necromantic communication spell fade. Within my mind, all the voices of the untold numbers of souls vanished. My horn hurt like mad, though not nearly as badly as I thought for sure it would after such a powerful spell; the amount of psychic energy running through that incantation was enough to dangle me several bodylengths in the air.

“You can let me down,” I said, bracing for a drop. Ancestor Belle looped her horn in a little circle and I was carefully lowered to the ground, stretching my legs one by one. “Better! Brother, I believe I have come to an accord with your victims. Tell me...these ‘wishes’ this system grants. Would I be correct in saying you usually require a sacrifice to help adjust the spellform?”

Zefu stared into the distance for a second before slowly lifting his head. “W-what did you say, brother?” he asked, though it was still Miss Belle’s mouth that moved. She shot me a ‘hurry it up’ look and pointed at her muzzle with the tip of her hoof.

“The spell form which makes the wishes? Does it require a sacrifice to adjust? A trapped mind?”

Rising, he shook himself, tossing his mane over one shoulder. “Ahem. Yes. A sacrifice. Yes. To make the Family’s ‘payments’ to various entities required a sacrifice. Usually an unattended pony would do. The homeless worked quite well. Brother, may I ask you a question?”

I shook my head, looking past him to my other companions. “We’ve little time for it and I didn’t bring you here to ask me questions or have a crisis of what I know to be a near complete lack of conscience.”

“One question, then I will return to the sword until this is over, when we can discuss...payment for my services, today.”

Throwing my forelegs in the air I snapped, “Zefu, it is the end of the world! What part of that do you not understand?”

“Only my place in it.” His expression became pensive as he flashed a quick glance at where Zeta stood. She seemed wholly focused on the pain in her injured leg, save for one ear which was cocked in our direction. “My world has already ended, so far as I can tell. I believed I had a destiny, but...I’d no luxury of a talent, like ponies have. I am a zony and not enough unicorn to warrant such an honor. It’s left me curious. If our positions were reversed...when would you have known you were on a path to defeat?”

I breathed out a sharp snort. “The moment, precisely?”

“Yes.”

I trotted over and picked up the swordstaff from where it lay, bringing it back to sit in front of him.

“Sometime well before I committed to my own father’s death as a means of self-advancement,” I replied.

“Ah. I suppose...that is what makes us different,” he said, musingly. Plucking at his lower lip in a way he’d done a thousand times in life when confronted by a unique puzzle, he waved a hoof toward my chest. “I asked myself if I was doing the right thing only after I stood over his body. Live and learn. Or die and learn, in my case.”

I nodded. “It does help to keep in mind that there will come a day, whether you are given a body or not, when you will die entirely, Zefu. Father will have words on the advantages of forethought. Meanwhile? Back in the sword. I have work to do.”

Zefu shrugged as the lights comprising his vaporous body began to shift and fade. “I look forward to finding a body. It would be nice to take a crap, again. I failed to do that before our battle in the elder dimension. Who knows? I might have won had I not been focused on the roasted vegetable platter I had the morning before.”

With that, he vanished, and my sword let off a faint glow. Snatching it up, I slung it across my shoulder before glancing at Miss Belle, Hard Boiled, and Zeta. “Pardon, small family matter needed attending. Where were we?”

“About to be attacked by monsters and you were telling us why you weren’t going to explode when you stick your horn in that anthill over there,” the skeleton answered, nodding toward the crystal focus in the center of the room.

I drew in a deep breath and regretted it immediately; the room stank of charred corpses. Marching over to the altar, I leaned over to stare down into the gemstone’s depths. “To be clear, I may still explode. I am relying on a certain amount of luck. If I do and we...by some miracle...survive this day, then it will be up to you to tell someone with a modicum of magical power that there are sane, living ponies trapped in the walls of the pylons. The spells to free them are relatively simple to find and the communication spell in my brother’s journal will allow you to speak to them.”

Zeta carefully tested her leg, finding the bandage solid as she put her weight on it. “There are...sane persons? They have kept their minds while...in the mortar? Can they hear us?”

“No, not right now. But they have instructions and should they follow them, I will survive.” Raising myself onto my back legs, I positioned my hooves on either side of the crystal, tried to relax the knots in my shoulders, and channeled a trickle of magic. The burning sensation in my horn intensified. “Miss Belle? Your shield, if you please? If nothing else, it will keep my organs in a conveniently shaped bag.”

Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and put a hoof on my shoulder. “You’re a brave sort, Mister Tome. Your dad would have been right proud, can I just say.”

“I like to think he would,” I replied, pushing a little more power into the crystal. It stung and there was an immediate hiss of feedback, but I persisted, forcing my battered leylines to obey. “Maybe I will get to ask him here in a moment.”

“We’ll keep killing until we’re down or you give us a signal,” Ancestor Belle added as a tingling glow suffused my body and I was, once more, locked in place. Through the door, I heard the first howl of what might have been a further pack of P.A.C.T. creatures on the way. “Make it count.”

Zeta raised her leg and gave me the salute of a zebra praetorian guard: tapping her forehead, then her chest over her heart.

Another breath.

I jammed my horn against the crystal.

‘You will not be burned.’

‘You will free us.’

‘We will keep you safe.’

‘We are your Shield.’

----

For a few extremely long seconds, all I could do was breathe and try to keep track of time by counting my heartbeats. I felt the power rush in like a slosh of water down a spillway, filling every inch of me to bursting. It made hauling on the spellcore of that ridiculous armored vehicle seem downright tame by comparison, but as I hadn’t died instantly I tried to put it out of my mind.

The blood that gushed over my upper lip was entirely expected, as was the coppery flavor that suddenly spilled out between my teeth; one can’t channel magics at the liminal edge of equine biology without a few days spent in hospital from time to time. Still, the steady dripping from my ears was a tad worrying.

Mercy, had I not even managed to cast the control spells, yet?

I quickly pulled the spell forms into my vibrating thoughts and began weaving them with a few little exploratory magics. The intricate webs of lines, force, and arithmetic fought with me and with one another, each wrestling to bathe themselves in the arcane energies simmering through my system. Every single enchantment threatened to break free and run rampant, casting the most illogical extreme it could manage before its agency should peter out.

I held them tight, wrapping layer after layer of protection around each spell with back checks and forward checks making sure no single spell was getting too powerful.

The pain slowly receded as I set to my task.

A glowing, multi-dimensional starfish began to take shape in my mind, spilling vast tentacles with dozens of evenly placed points of tightly tangled magic which I realized represented the pylons. Each pylon was surrounded by hundreds of floating motes: souls of the trapped. Reaching out, I tried the gentlest brush of will against those systems, only to find myself pitched back with enough force that I felt something in my knee crack, though I didn’t move physically from my place at the altar; Miss Belle’s spell saw to that. Most likely they’d have to carry me out. Still, a limp was said to be fetching.

A monstrous dead body fell across my vision for a moment, before being hauled away. Battle was joined in the pylon chamber. Another creature, its eyes maddened, staggered through my line of sight. Zeta rode its back, choking the life out of the beast with a piece of strap looped around its throat.

I tried to ignore the pleading, relieved look in its eyes as it breathed its last.

Once more in the system, I began peering at the outside edges of the gigantic starfish, and my heart sank. Its sprawling, perfect form was almost too much to comprehend. There were layers within layers of spellwork, overlaid with protection spells that might take decades to unravel.

‘You are not here to unravel it.’

Strange, to hear father’s voice in that place. Of course, father was long dead. Where had it come from?

Ah. Yes.

The day I understood my father’s love.

“Limerence!” father barked, putting a hoof on my shoulder as I hunched over the vile little puzzle, my teeth clenched. Sweat poured off my body, steaming as it hit my burning horn and leaving the tiny exam room cloyingly humid.

“F-Father?” I stammered, trying to keep my focus on the puzzle sitting on the table in front of me. It was an ugly little thing in the shape of a monumentally pregnant mare, her eyes frightened and bulging from her wooden skull as she lay on her side.

“You have had an hour. I gave you a simple directive. Retrieve the final doll. Why do you fail, my son?”

I set the puzzle down and slowly looked up into Don Tome’s striped face. His stoney expression gave away nothing, though there was a hint of disappointment hiding somewhere behind his eyes. I swallowed and lowered my head.

“I...I cannot do it, Father. This is beyond my abilities,” I replied.

“It is not beyond your abilities, son. It is beyond your imagination.” Picking up the puzzle, my father quickly brought it down on the edge of the table. It let out a loud snap, then shattered; the interior was solid stone. “You believed there were dolls inside. Why?”

I stared at the puzzle for a long moment, then looked up. “B-because you told me there were.”

“I lied to you. You must have known that the second you scanned the artifact.”

I lowered my head. “It seemed more likely my scan was being manipulated by something in the interior structure than that you would--”

“You failed because you could not imagine that I would lie to you. You must not trust that the systems you interact with were designed as traps or as tools, nor that the people who created them have explicable reasoning systems. What is a tool to you, may be a weapon to someone else. Likewise, this is not a puzzle. You believed it was a puzzle because I told you it was. If you are to survive as an Archivist, even the most fundamental understandings must be challengeable. A father can lie to his son and the key to an artifact of near infinite complexity and value can be as simple as—”

‘—pressing the shiny red button.’

I pulled my thoughts together and and breathed a sigh. My lungs let out an unfortunate bubbling rattle. I’d also seemingly gone blind in one eye. When had that happened? Nevermind.

Part of me wanted to be terrified. I could feel my organs gradually liquifying inside me, but what good would it have done to be frightened? Death was inevitable or it wasn’t, with very few inbetweens.

Back to the task at hoof, I watched as the great, spreading shape of the working that controlled Detrot spilled open in my mind’s eye. The spell was an artwork built by a thousand tiny acts of individual genius, compounded into something so grand as to be impossible for one pony to fully comprehend. It was a shimmering testament, a magnum opus, a swan song.

It was familiar.

More than that. It was vulnerable. That could not simply be an assumption. No system, no matter how grandiose, was utterly impervious to the niggling of entropy or the teasing of chaos. Besides, if it was invulnerable, I would be dead soon, anyway. As Hard Boiled would say, ‘It’s worth it to stay optimistic’. Or perhaps he would never say that. Hard to imagine him saying that, now that I think about it.

The shape was that of the city, a map laid out in abstract; I could almost see the various points around the Bay of Unity where pylons were marked out, connected with immense lines of power to one another which were obscured by layer upon layer of camouflaging enchantments. Most were focused towards Uptown, pushing great pulses of glittering energy.

I began sending out gentle feelers of scanning magics, not really paying much attention to what they sent back so much as to where they were snuffed out by the immense powers throbbing through the system. I did get a few interesting tidbits, though: the fishy taste of psionic magics, the cinnamon flavor of emotional spells, a rotten flesh smell that could only be necromancy, and a hot bubbling cauldron of other schools which should not have been playing with each other as harmoniously as they were.

Gradually, patterns began to emerge.

Here, a scanning spell lasted a half second longer than it did over there. A light probe managed to catch a twinge of additional resolution from the interior of another pylon where there stood another burning skeleton. A third bundled in a vision of fighting taking place just outside in the street, where a squad of griffins wrestled with a dozen troopers in a flailing, cross-sky battle before vanishing behind a building.

‘Interesting. The closest to Uptown I get, the longer my spellworks last. Why should that be? There’s far more magic moving through that...unless—’

I pulled back and wound a spell I hadn’t thought I’d find two uses for in my little adventure around a quick scan, then tossed it across as much of the giant magical form as I could, watching as it dissipated. The spell was the same I’d used to measure distances inside The Office and it cheerily vaporized upon the altar of my curiosity while returning just enough data to confirm my suspicions; the form was imperfect.

‘They couldn’t make the pylons symmetrical...because the terrain is not symmetrical. If that is the Bay of Unity, then...that must be the pylon near the old toy factory and above...the monument to Captain Spitfire. It should, logically, be right there, but they couldn’t build a pylon in a public park, so it’s just down the hill, instead.’

The more I looked, the more I could see those little discrepancies. They were tiny and surely only cost the entire working a bit of efficiency and information speed, but that was all I needed.

‘All that redundancy built in,’ I thought, ‘and nopony thinks to prevent a Distributed Deviation of Spellwork.”

Working quickly while trying to ignore the fact that blood was running off the end of my nose in a steady stream, I forged a simple spell. A spell every unicorn learns.

Foals refer to it as the ‘Tell me how magical you are!’ spell. Scholars know better; it is a request to a spell matrix to return the stability of its enchanted forms and paradigms. Even the maddest creature does not leave their spells without a means of determining if the spell is complete and working.

Pulling it into my thoughts, I wrapped it in a second enchantment that everypony learns the day they’re first expected to take notes: The ‘Copy Me That’.

Then I tossed it into the Shield network.

The first dozen copies burned before they could activate.

Spell thirteen, lucky thirteen, found a place between two pylons where the magical connection was especially weak and nestled into their system. A moment later, the magic began to multiply.

The great starfish changed, in a tiny, almost imperceptible fashion; it would call back to me, to tell me just how powerful it was...repeatedly.

I braced as a flood of over a billion threads of arcane return exploded in all directions.

The gently waving arms of the starfish shape froze in place, stuttered, then froze again.

I’d gone blind in both eyes and deaf in one ear. One of my limbs felt like it wasn’t really properly attached anymore, though with Ancestor Belle’s shield around me, it was impossible to tell. The pain was excruciating, but concentrating on that earned me nothing. Regardless, my thoughts were clear.

Time for the final slice.

I could not alter the spell in its entirety, but one tiny instruction—hidden amongst all the other infinitely complex instructions governing the Shield—was sure to be overlooked if it appeared harmless enough to the mass of failsafes that I could even then feel scrambling to find the self-copying wyrm I’d slipped into the pattern. Keep it simple. Keep it easy to ignore.

‘What makes two doors different? Only what is behind them.’

I felt the magics fuse with one another, sinking into the brief window granted by my attack.

Soon, the time would arrive.

‘Open sesame.’

----

I let the magic drop, finding myself back in the world of the living, though only barely.

I slumped as every muscle gave out at once, letting my bodyweight fall against the inside of the softly sputtering shield. I could only make out vague details more than a meter from my prison; the room was filled with a billowing cloud of smoke most likely from the dozens of burning corpses littered about the space. My lungs hurt, but no worse than any other part of me, which was to say it all hurt. My tongue felt the size of a watermelon between my teeth.

Hard Boiled Senior stood on the opposite side of the altar, watching me closely. His glowing eyes darted this way and that, up and down my frame, before settling on my face. The skeleton was soaked in blood and his sports jacket was torn very nearly to shreds, but he was in one piece.

Behind him, Zeta lay on her side, the strap she’d used to strangle one of the beasts tied tightly around the stump of one of her forelegs; it was gone just below the knee. She seemed to be in some sort of meditation. I couldn’t turn my head, but I could just make out a crimson shape in the corner of my vision. It resolved, after a second, into Ancestor Belle picking over the kit of one of the smoking troopers.

The bodies were piled up in heaps, though a particularly large beast with mandibles instead of a lower jaw was wedged halfway through the door with a gaping wound in its forehead. If anything else was trying to get in, it would have to get by that.

‘How can I see them?’ I thought, ‘I was blind a moment ago. I felt my optic nerve rupture. Strange.’

Finding myself still able to see did not improve the other sensations my body was experiencing; I was still deaf in one ear and the interior of the tiny magical shield was slick with various fluids. Granted, I’d been a bit dull in that ear before, since having had it removed by my brother.

“Pretty sure he’s alive, somehow,” Hard Boiled Senior murmured inside my head. “Can’t say as I see how that might be.”

“I haven’t heard anything moving outside in a few minutes and the air is getting pretty thick in here,” Zeta added, opening her eyes and wincing as she pulled a seemingly random piece of flesh from nearby. It took me a second to recognize it as the other half of her severed leg. She began wrapping it in a scrap of cloth

I canted my working ear toward the door and could hear nothing from the street. Not even an echo.

“The door sealed itself a few minutes ago,” Ancestor Belle replied, “Right after you lost the leg. Keep that close. Bloom might be able to do something about getting it reattached, if we can get it in an ice chest. You think Mister Tome managed to do...whatever he was trying to do?”

“We’re not dead,” Hard Boiled said, tapping his chest which let out a noise like a broken xylophone. “I’d say that’s a pretty good sign.”

“You think we can afford to get him out of that shield? He looks pretty rough,” the elder Crusader answered, wiping something foul out of her mane before sitting down and wringing it with her forehooves. A hot stream of liquid splashed all over the floor. “I am going to the spa for a year, win or lose. The afterlife better have a spa.”

“What else are we going to do? Leave him here?”

I tried to move my head, but my neck hurt. Pulling my tongue into my muzzle, I swallowed and tasted too many unpleasant things to count. I tried again and found my mouth too dry to do more than croak, but it was enough.

“I-I...w-would apprec...appreciate...if...you d-didn’t...” I choked out.

Belle stepped closer as the shield faded and I sagged onto the floor, gasping as my stomach muscles spasmed a few times. I coughed a wet glob of something grey onto the floor which looked worryingly like a piece of lung. Fortunately, the second it was free of my throat, I was able to inhale a deep, glorious breath of smoke. I set about a gagging, heaving seizure, one rear leg spasming violently as the true extent of the agony I was in was finally given lease. My horn was the worst; it felt like a railroad nail driven squarely into the crown of my skull.

“Sweet Celestia, colt. That looks like a piece of your stomach. You should be dead!”

“M-many of us s-share that condition.” I shuddered and tried to raise my head, but my neck refused to support its weight. “I...I s-suspect our f-friends in the pylon have something to d-do with that. A moment. Could you...check my surveillance ladybugs?”

Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and reached one fleshless hoof down to grab my leg. He turned it over, then back and shook his skull. “Three dead, but the rest are still moving. Look a bit dazed, but I think they’re transmitting.”

“Then...it...it is done. I think it is done. We must leave before we...s-suffocate. The pylon key s-should still work, though we must close the d-door when we are gone, else the magic I wove will not work.”

Raising my voice as much as I could to make sure the remaining ladybugs heard, I gave my final instructions. “Hard Boiled. If you are still listening...wait for Taxi’s signal to make...make your run. There should be an opening at the intersection of Sol and Lunar streets. The Shield believes this pylon d-door has moved there. Or perhaps t-that it was always there. Code word to open the hole is...‘Scholar’.”

With that, I let the blackness come.

‘Oh, my son. I am so proud of you. I will welcome you one day. Until then, you must finish your work. There are still puzzles to solve.’

Act 3 Chapter 67 : The Charge

‘I am Officer Swift of the Detrot Police Department.’

‘The mares of my family are the most dangerous in this city and they lead an army of warriors trained to serve and safekeep my home. My godfather is a dragon and my best friend is the beating heart of the city itself.’

‘I have destroyed the Cult of Nightmare Moon and the drug dealing murderers who would have threatened my loved ones.’

‘I won’t let a stupid storm beat me!’

The frigid drizzle was blowing my ears back against my head, the wind carrying it out behind me over the stretch of open badlands between me and the prison that’d become a strange refuge for the dispossessed and hopeful. I wanted more than anything on Equis to be back in that fortress, hugging Tourniquet and listening to the gentle whispering of the city as seen through her eyes and ears. Instead, I was perched on a sign for ‘Filthy Dingo’s Discount Emporium’, watching the brewing storm over Uptown, about to throw myself into the teeth of a dragon that’d chewed up the entire police department. My feathers were soaked, and it was starting to creep through my police vest.

Against the sky it all looked like somepony had dunked especially angry cotton candy in red food coloring. I’ve only hated a few things in my life, but I really hated that eclipse. Seeing the city from up high should make it seem cleaner and quieter. Instead, it just looked like it was covered in blood.

My veins were thrumming with magic and as much coffee as my mom would let me drink before a battle. In the back of my head, Tourniquet was mumbling to herself about control systems and electrical interfaces. The anticipation was going to kill me if a monster didn’t manage it. Not to mention my own partner, who was likely to want a piece of my tail to mount on the wall.

I raised an ear at a soft thump from off to my left and glanced over one shoulder to find my mother standing there in the rain, her apron soaked and her tail done up in a bun. She looked exhausted, but no more than she did after a long night working at the Vivarium back when I was a kid.

“He’s going to strangle you for leaving without saying goodbye. You know that, right?” my mom asked.

I shrugged, shifting the Hailstorm higher on my shoulders and reaching underneath to tighten the buckle across my stomach. The turrets were resting in their cradles, but every now and then the gun would let out a faint hum just to let me know it was paying attention.

“He’ll be mad, but if it means he’s alive to strangle me, I’m okay with that,” I replied, looking towards Uptown and the boiling storm. “Besides, he works better when he’s mad.”

There was a loud pop that almost had me reaching for my trigger and Miss Iris Jade materialized on the gravel-strewn roof beside me. The former Chief of Police looked surprisingly calm for a pony whose usual mindset tended toward extreme violence. Her sallow green face and rail thin frame were draped in a freshly pressed suit as an umbrella of energy floated overhead, droplets of water hissing as they hit it and turned to steam.

“You know, I expected to be writing a very contrite sounding letter to your mother over there and mailing it off along with your badge, a city flag, and a jar of whatever was left of you that the crime scene people managed to scrape off the street,” she said, giving her dark green tail a quick shake to flick off a few droplets her shield didn’t quite cover.

“I’m glad I defied your expectations, Ma’am,” I answered, stroking the bunny patch on my chest for a second. It was getting a little threadbare, but still holding up real well. I’d have to get another one, one day, if ever I managed to get another set of armor in my size.

“You haven’t defied them, yet, Miss Cuddles. Walking away from Hard Boiled and not getting yourself killed would defy my expectations. Right now? You’re on solid track to a jar on your dad’s mantlepiece. Celestia help me, today, because I’ve somehow committed myself to trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Jade looked out towards Supermax and drew in a shaky breath. “I didn’t get to talk to my own daughter, today. Cerese was off with that Aroyo girl...Jambalaya or whatever her name is. Probably screwing in some corner before heading off—”

She hesitated, a catch in her voice, before turning sharply away. My mother slowly moved over and put a leg around Iris’s side. The other mare looked up, a couple of tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

“I don’t deserve your kindness, Quickie. I manipulated—.”

“Mothers have to stick together, Iris. Just accept it. You and I will have a long talk when this is all over, if we live, but I do want to try to be friends. I think you’re a pony who will need a friend when all is said and done, and it’s hard to find ponies I can spar against without breaking them into little pieces.”

Gulping, Iris Jade rested her head against my mother’s shoulder. “Thank you. Maybe once this is all over, I might give a go to being something other than insufferable bitch. No guarantees, but...I do miss taking care of the birds. It’d be nice to go back to that.”

There was a clank that shook the roof as Scootaloo came in for a landing; she skidded a few steps before getting control of her prosthetics, which let out angry hisses of steam. She looked like a tank that’d somehow had a pony’s torso mounted into it; all four of her legs were giant metal creations which added an extra fifteen centimeters of head height and served to remind me of just how much nearly everypony else towered over me. Her wings were mounted in two steel frames covered in glowing gemstones which shimmered with projected magic.

“Those are really cool! But...wait, I thought you only lost your back legs,” I commented, leaning close to peer at my reflection in the polished metallic surface.

“Well, thought wrong, didn’t you!” the Crusader mare chuckled, raising one massive hoof and giving it a wiggle. “Those were my pretty legs. When they were taking my back legs, I told Bloom to take the front ones, too, and doll them up with her tech so I could switch out all four when I needed to. She had these tucked away for a special occasion. I’m told we’re blasting in the front door, so I didn’t figure I’d need ‘subtle’.”

With a clank, the front panel on her right foreleg ratcheted open, and the muzzle of something that looked like a P.E.A.C.E. cannon poked out. After a second, it snapped shut and retracted.

“I wish there were more of us going on this mission,” my mom muttered, staring at the gun for a second before shaking her head.

I tapped the side of my head and grinned. “Tourniquet is going to be listening, and I’ve got a bunch of ladybugs inside my armor. Their ‘queen’ or whatever it is told me that it’ll save everypony’s memories and stick them in Hardy’s brain so he can see everything we see, except...faster. He’ll know what I do and will know when to make his run.”

“So, at least Hard Boiled will have the pleasure of seeing us die, if we fail,” Jade grumbled. “Considering the shape of this, I’d still like backup.”

Scootaloo clapped her on the back what must have been very gently for those giant, mechanized hooves, but it still staggered the former Chief of Police. “You’ve got Aroyos, Miss Jade. We fought Jewelers. We fought you. We fought the Family. We fought other Cyclones. You’ve got all the help you need.”

A flock of pegasi suddenly burst over the edge of the building, bringing themselves to a stop to hover in front of me. All of them were Aroyos and every single one had a bright red crest burnt into the flesh of their chest, mirroring my own. Nearly every one of them carried some kind of heavy artillery strapped to a combat saddle; there were rocket launchers, gatling guns, and even a couple lightning cannons

I grinned up at them as I lightly touched their minds with my thoughts in order to get a sense of their feelings. Hardy would probably be upset to learn that it had become second nature for me to peek on the emotions of everypony walking by in the halls of Fortress Everfree.

Wisteria, the leader of the Aroyos, swooped out of the group and landed light as a feather beside me, bringing a lavender wing around to her forehead in a Wonderbolt salute.

“We be here, Warden of Everfree! We be ready for de stomp! All speakin’ wid de Lady of Shadows and all ready to be livin’ or dyin’ as ye say!”

“B-but you have a foal. Shouldn’t you be taking care of—” I started to protest, but she cut me off with a feather to my lips.

“I and I be havin’ a foal. But if dis day goes bad, it be not matterin’. Dey grow in darkness, or die when de evil comes. I and I fight for dem. If I die, den my child be raised by de Aroyos.”

I tilted my head sideways at the sleek little gun attached to her knee. It looked much like Hardy’s gun, with a bit of extra metal on top and a flat panel which shimmered when the light caught it.

“Is that...one of the Moon Guns we took from Nightmare Moon’s cult?” I asked, trying to keep the envy out of my voice.

“Courtesy of de sea serpent,” Wisteria replied. “I and I never be seein’ a scarier weapon. Went right through concrete, no troubles. Makes me wish we be havin’ it when we was fightin’ de cops. Might work nice against de queen bit—” The Aroyo quickly trailed off, glancing at Iris Jade who was giving her a glare that darn near turned the air green. “Erm...Different times.”

“Yes, different times,” Scootaloo said a bit forcefully as she stepped between them, cutting off what might have ended up a very awkward discussion. “Let’s hope you don’t see a more frightening killing machine today. Keep all of your eyes open, though. Those murdering animals scraped up the prototypes we had stashed at the Office. Most of them didn’t work or would just kill the user outright, but there were a couple that I wouldn’t want to face off with in a straight fight.”

Reaching into my vest, I pulled out the map Tourniquet and I drew up. I didn’t really need it; the one in my brain was an awful lot more reliable than paper, but it was good to have for my mother and Miss Jade since they’d both decided against taking Tourniquet’s mark for some reason.

“Alright, so Miss Taxi’s people told us there was a blockade by some ponies on Marionette Street,” I said, pointing in the general direction of Uptown where the shifting glow of the shield surrounding the middle of the city underlit the storm whose farthest edge was whipping at my mane and causing dust to dance through the streets. “This is the best route we could figure that won’t take us through any known areas that are super effective crossfires.”

I shut my eyes for a second and sent a thought in the direction of my friend back at Supermax, then listened to the waves of gently murmuring information passing through a nearby electrical line. Hardy didn’t like it when I did that, but he wasn’t around to get all huffy about it. A moment later, the answer came back.

“Tourniquet says there’s nopony on the adjoining alleys, but the closer she gets to Uptown, the less she can see.”

“Dear, it...it occurs to me that we have all these pegasi. Why aren’t we simply going up and dropping on the P.A.C.T. headquarters from above?” my mom asked. “Wouldn’t that be...you know...safer?”

I pointed at the storm. “The P.A.C.T. main building is made to take direct assaults above ground level, because it was designed to fight off dragons.”

“Aye,” Wisteria agreed, folding her wings in tight against her sides and casually adjusting the trigger attached to her gun so it was closer to her muzzle. “Dey be ready if we be comin’ in hot. Lightnin’ cannon on de rooftops and nests of killers wid de sniper rifle. We go de ground way, fast, but careful.”

The Hailstorm’s turrets popped out of their casings, lifting on the tiny robotic arms that controlled them as a collection of crosshairs appeared in my vision overlaying everypony there.

“I’m going to mark targets for everypony who is hooked into Tourniquet. Mom? You and Miss Jade are here to shield us from anything which might hit us head-on. That should be easy, because you’ll be on our ride’s back and he’s pretty durable.”

“Do you really need to brief us again—” Iris snapped impatiently, then paused. “Wait...ride? On his back? Whose back? No ‘ride’ was in the briefing.”

I stuck a hoof in my muzzle and gave my best whistle. Considering I’d spent three months practicing my Anti-Parasprite Sonic Defense back in middle school, it was a whistle that got me in trouble with more than a couple teachers when I’d done it to get a friend’s attention across the hoofball field. The sound echoed into the distance in the direction of Supermax.

Hopping up to the eave of the building, I put a hoof over the side and leaned forward over it until gravity took hold. Plunging off, I spread my wings until they caught the wind, yanking me upwards with a thrill as the ground suddenly retreated. Coming up in a thin twist, I came to a hover in front of the flock of Aroyos.

From down the road, a faint sound returned just loud enough for me to catch; it was a canine howl, in triplicate.

Swooping higher, I banked over the road until a black spot, quickly approaching, came into sight following the lonely stretch of road out of the wastes. Reaching under my vest, I pulled out a dead pigeon wrapped in a few plastic bags, lightly seasoned with motor oil and coated in a thick layer of bar-b-que sauce.

Goofball, my friend, my pet, was a transformed puppy.

The Aroyos had taken their time outfitting him. He looked like one of the robot dogs from the comics; there was enough hardened metal bolted to his butt to armor a whole heap of pegasi. They’d done a great job of covering every exposed inch that a pony might reasonably want to take a shot at. He even wore three gigantic pairs of doggy goggles with thickened bulletproof glass. The only thing nopony had managed to slap metal onto was his tail, which was wagging so furiously that it kicked up little dust-devils in his wake.

Dropping low over the road, I chucked the dead bird in his general direction, plastic and all. He leapt into the air and snatched it straight up in his middle mouth, coming down with a crash of armored plates. Letting out a grateful yip that shook the air, he barrelled under me toward the city until I dropped onto his giant back. There were three wide slabs of metal angled backwards from his necks with little slots in them a pony could see through and stay out of the considerable wind he generated running at full speed. Some thoughtful pony had even added a couple of nice little welded hoofholds.

“Whoa boy! Over there!” I shouted, leaning sideways toward the building we’d just left. He barked again, then swung off in that direction, darting up onto the sidewalk, then back into the road, his armored body rattling and clunking along though the weight didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

Skidding to a halt in front of the grocery, I tapped on the back of his middle head.

“Sit!” I called, then jumped off his shoulders into mid-air, catching myself before the downdraft could send me plowing into the pavement.

All three tongues lolling and panting like a freight train locomotive, Goofball dropped onto his haunches. His left head started idly chewing at one of the armored plates on his foreleg until the right head bopped him between that set of ears.

I dropped back onto the roof, grinning at my mother and Miss Jade who were standing there with open mouths. Wisteria merely looked smug as the rest of the Aroyos perched on the crenelations around the roof, checking their weapons and chatting quietly to one another. Scootaloo looked like she’d swallowed a lemon.

“Tell me this isn’t what it looks like,” Iris Jade said as she finally found her tongue, trotting to the side of the building and staring down at my dog.

“What does it look like?” I asked cheekily.

Jade watched as Goofball tried to clean his crotch with a couple of reaching tongues, but couldn’t quite make it because of the armor around his middle.

“It looks like you and that maniacal stallion you call a partner somehow stole the get of Cerberus from Tartarus Correctional, got him into Detrot, armored him up, and trained him to sit up and beg without anyone noticing. My stars, the Warden will blow her stack. How did you—”

I held up my hooves and grinned. “He followed me home from Tartarus when we visited to get information about the case. The Aroyos helped me hide him in the Skids. They took care of him, too.” I pulled another dead pigeon out of my pocket, tossing it down to Goofball. He snapped it up and went about messily tearing it into tiny pieces. “Isn’t he great? He eats everything and he’s almost totally bulletproof! Mom, what do you think?”

My mom’s ears laid back against her head as she slumped forward on the damp gravel roof. “S-sweetie...Three months ago, I was worried about you getting shot on your first day of work. Three days ago, I didn’t know you were...symbiotically entwined with a filly who looks like she’s made of metal. Three minutes ago, I didn’t know you had a giant, three headed monster dog. I n-need to put my mind straight.”

My heart sank as I saw a few little tears in her eyes and I all but galloped over to wrap my front legs around her. She buried her face in the crook of my neck as I put a wing over her face, shielding her from the rain. A moment later, I felt another hoof reach across her shoulders and looked up to see Iris Jade standing there stroking my mother’s hair.

“What?” Iris huffed, keeping her gaze carefully away from mine, “You’ve got a good mother. I hope she rubs off on me one day.”

I held the hug for a few seconds, then stepped back and put my hooves on my mother’s shoulders as she sniffled and wiped at her eyes with the back of her leg. “Mom, I’m still just how I was. I still like comic books and I write when I get a spare moment and I’ll still beat up anyone who messes with Scarlet. I’m still your daughter. I promise, I’ll never stop being that.”

My mother slid her forelegs around my neck and hugged me close once more, stroking the spiky fur on the back of my neck. “Oh, little bird...I know. Chicken sandwiches and extra toothbrushing aside, you’re still my Swift. Every part of me wants to hide you in some deep hole from everything that’s about to happen, but you deserve the chance to fight for Detrot. If I can’t protect you from this, then I’m glad I can be beside you.”

There was a tiny sniffle behind me and I looked up to see Scootaloo quickly wiping her nose on her metal kneecap.

“You’re making me miss my aunts and parents there, kiddo,” the old mare muttered. “Before I rust, why don’t we get this show on the road?”

Gulping down my feelings, I stood up and spread my wings, trying to look as ‘in charge’ as I could.

“Alright! Aroyos!” I shouted, though I could have sent the instructions over my link to Tourniquet. Sometimes, there’s a benefit to a certain amount of drama. “We’re going straight for the Blackcoats, today! P.A.C.T. headquarters is our target! We’re going to get in, do as much damage as we can, and draw off anyone who is going to try to attack the refugee caravan or our friends going after the Shield Pylon. Miss Taxi will be following up to help with the dragons, but we’re not supposed to engage them! If you see dragons, avoid as best you can until we get to our target! Use conventional arms if you can. The Moon Guns only have limited range. Once we get there, we have to get Colonel Broadside!”

“You mean kill Colonel Broadside, don’t you?” Scootaloo asked.

I shook my head. “He’s the one who knows how the P.A.C.T. magic transformed everyone in Uptown into monsters. If we can capture him, we’ll hook him up to Tourniquet. She’ll get the answers out of him.”

“To be clear,” Iris interjected, “We are not making him having all his limbs a top priority, right? If his prison nickname is ‘doorstop’, nopony is going to object?”

“If he puts up too much of a fight and we have to...” I felt my stomach twist into a knot, but pushed on, regardless. “—kill him...then we’ll dig through P.A.C.T. headquarters until we can find however they cast the transformation spells. It must be there.”

“Saddle up, stompas!” Wisteria barked, winging her way to the front of the Aroyo formation as they jumped off the building in a wave of feathers. “We killin’ de Blackcoats for all dey take from us! Make dem afraid!”

“Mom? Do you need a lift down to Goofball?” I asked.

My mother raised her eyebrows. “Who is...Oh, you didn’t! You named this creature Goofball?!”

I felt my cheeks heat and stomped a hoof, defensively. “Goofball is a perfectly okay name! Besides, that was already his name when I got him!”

She snorted and waved both forelegs. “No, no, far be it from me to offend our...erm...our ride. Should I have a pigeon to give him?”

Rolling my eyes, I pulled my last dead bird and held it out. She carefully took the corpse in a telekinetic field, dangling as far away from herself as she reasonably could. “He ate most of a pile of tires this morning, so I don’t think he needs any more treats after this. Let him have the plastic bag. He’ll get mopey otherwise.”

“Right. Oh Celestia, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

My mother’s horn crackled and a thick, flat pane of shimmering magic appeared under her hooves, lifting her off the rooftop and over the side, her apron billowing in the wind. Goofball cocked two heads at her, then leaned up and gave my mom a light sniff before licking at the magical platform. Finding it not to his taste, he snuffled around her for a moment then blinked as he found the pigeon Doing his big, doggie grin, he planted his legs and let out another cheery trio of deafening yips.

She tossed him the bird and his right head immediately snatched it, swallowed whole, and licked its chops. He dropped onto his butt with an expectant look. Levitating over, my mother carefully set herself down on his back, bracing her rear hooves in the holds as he turned one head to inspect her more closely. Deciding he didn’t mind a passenger, he dropped onto his stomach and wagged his tail, watching the cloud of pegasi overhead with interest.

“I’m not getting on that thing,” Iris Jade grumbled.

Scootaloo clapped her on the back with one armored leg, which sent her staggering sideways. “Oh, come now! No need to be scared of the big puppy! Besides, you can ride the dog or you can ride on my back. Teleportation and flight spells are going to get real messy once we get into the middle of the city, if the P.A.C.T. have set their defenses correctly. Might even hit a few null fields. I saw a pony come out of a teleport in the middle of one of those during the war. Well, I saw a mist that used to be a pony.”

Jade clenched her jaw, then drew in a breath and whispered something that sounded like “For Cerise...I’ll be better...”

There was a flash of light and Iris appeared on Goofball’s back. He was too busy licking the remains of the oily pigeons off his faces to notice.

I shut my eyes and focused on the crescent moon symbol on my chest, feeling warmth begin to radiate from it. All at once, Tourniquet’s voice poured into my thoughts.

“Swift! Oh skies, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to monitor you very closely. I barely have enough power to keep all these things straight! I really need some more electricity if I’m going to be managing armies in the future. Have you even started your attack, yet?”

“Nope. We’re getting going right now. How is the Detective?”

“Mad as a ball of cats stuck together with bubblegum, but he’s trying not to show anypony. Miss Taxi is on her way to her staging position. Nopony knows how the dragons talk to each other over distances, so we’re just going to attack all the ones we can see. If Propana shows up—”

“Then Applebloom and Taxi will goosh her! Relax, T. We got this. Besides, we have a bunch of our own dragons.”

“Ours are tiny dragons, though! The dumb one and her brother—Vexis and Ambrock—barely count and the rest are not any bigger than we are.”

I mentally rolled my eyes. “You’re worrying too much.”

“I spent decades in a pit, and now all the ponies I love are going out to fight and...and I know some of them won’t come back and I can’t be there with them! Wouldn’t you be worried?”

Shivering as a cold breeze blew through my hair, I slowly nodded. “Yeah, but...stiff upper lip, right? We either fight, or we all die. If I go down, make sure somepony else becomes Warden. I don’t want you going back to sleep forever.”

“I...I don’t know if I want to be awake without you, Swift.”

“Promise me.”

There was a long interlude where she said nothing, then a very soft, “I swear.”

I opened my eyes to find everypony watching me.

“Sorry, talking to Tourniquet. Miss Taxi is going to attack the dragons soon. Let’s go!”

One day.

My whole life was going to end or begin again in one day.

I’d woken up that morning in Tourniquet’s chamber, hugging my friend, listening to the heartbeat of the city. We breathed together, adjusting and making little corrections here and there to make sure as many ponies lived as possible. We dragged a few new ponies off the streets, put our marks on a few more, and our circle grew larger.

I could hear the minds of nearly all of the Aroyos, chattering and considering and mulling over problems. The thousands of other citizens who’d hooked themselves to Tourniquet were mumbling or making quiet introductions. It should have been weird to have all those memories, pictures, bits of music, or plots of old shows winging around inside my head, waiting for me to latch onto one. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Together, we organized the battle of Detrot.

We worked out the myriad little kinks in the Detective’s plan.

For normal ponies, it would have been completely impossible, but for the Marked, it was like breathing. Need a bit of welding done? Call a mind that has experience with a welder to take over your body for a few hours. Need to know how to use a gun? Call up a killer. Need comfort? Send out for a friend to take some of the pain away.

I hadn’t really considered what was going to happen to the Marked after the day was over, much less what was going to happen to me.

Mom wanted me to be a little pony again; a filly with big dreams. Somewhere, out there, Broadside had wanted me to be his tool of destruction, to wreak havoc on any Essys that might oppose their plans. The Detective wanted me to stand by his side, but he still saw me as the rookie he had to protect; not even my partner really comprehended what had happened to me, either in the days before I joined the police department or in that moment when Tourniquet laid her mark on me.

Truth be told, I didn’t either.

One day.

The city ahead lurched up and down like the waves on choppy seas as Goofball pounded along a narrow, debris-littered road between two building blocks. Guiding him was mostly a matter of having Mom or Iris gently grab one of his heads with their magic and wrench it into the direction we wanted the rest of him to go. Everything else was handled through sheer enthusiasm.

The leading edge of the storm was a nearly solid wall of rain, wind, and sleet that would have ripped me right off Goofball’s back if my mother hadn’t thrown a bright pink shield over the three of us. To my left, Iris Jade looked miserable as she rested her head on the armored plate which jutted up from Goofball’s back; it was a fresh kind of misery that included an occasional dry heave as she tried to keep her lunch down. On my right, my mom was grinning like a crazy mare, her teeth bared against the storm as she watched the Aroyos flocking ahead of us. Behind them, like a flying juggernaut and holding a speed that felt like it should be too slow to maintain herself in the air, Scootaloo kept pace with her strange gang.

I smelled the smoke a minute before we saw the first burning building, wheeling around a street corner onto a scene of devastation.

In the middle of a small parking lot sat what might have once been a convenience store; the remains were little more than a pool of steaming lava cooling under the pounding sheets of rain. The broken, slagged corpses of several cars and carts sat in the lot.

The Aroyos stopped short in midair and Wisteria’s voice crept into my head. “Scootaloo says that looks like sustained dragonfire. Probably in the last hour, too. Most likely a bored lizard cooking things to keep himself entertained,”

“There’s a dragon around here, somewhere,” I shouted above the raging storm for my mother and the former Chief’s benefit.

“You think?” Iris called back.

“Do you see anything on that magic scope thingy of yours?” my mom asked.

I spread my wings and the Hailstorm’s turrets popped out of their cradles, turning this way and that as I scanned across the nearby buildings. Several bright green targeting reticles appeared over my friends, my mom, and Miss Jade. Funnily enough, each of Goofball’s heads had their own.

In the distance, a single red target appeared, followed by another, then another. After a second, twenty more appeared, flying in close formation just below the roofline. I quickly lost count.

“I see...oh Celestia, I see a lot. There are a bunch of things all moving together, like a cloud! They’re coming this way!”

“Dragons?” Wisteria asked mentally.

“Not dragons! They’re too close together!”

Iris tilted her head back and snarled, “They must have had spotters in the sky. Dammit, I hoped they wouldn’t get reorganized that quickly after Hard Boiled and the merry band of suicidal idiots took out their tracking magics!”

“This is our purpose!” Mom snapped, expanding her shield until it encompassed all three of us in a shimmering bubble, “We’re the hammer and Miss Taxi’s forces are the anvil. We have to keep them distracted! Push for the P.A.C.T. headquarters!”

I leaned over and grabbed one of Goofball’s ears where it protruded from his armored helmet. “Come on boy! You wanted something to play with? Here they come! Sic’em!”

I couldn’t tell if Goofball was listening to me. He’d gone very still, his ears perked and his noses twitching. Letting out a curious whine, he took a couple steps toward the line of buildings before suddenly surging forward with the closest thing to a growl of actual anger I’d ever heard from him. I almost rolled off his back, but a quick flash of magic from my mother locked my hooves tightly to his shoulder plate. It didn’t keep my wings from instinctively poofing out, leaving me feeling like an orange kite in an especially high wind.

The swarm appeared as a flowing black liquid, pouring down the street like an angry river ready to burst its shores. Their wings made it almost impossible to differentiate one beast from another, but the second they laid eyes on us, dozens of flashes started up and, an instant later, the crack of gunfire reached my ears. They didn’t bother with being in proper actual range, and the amount of incoming lead didn’t need to be aimed; it was a wave of death reaching out to kill all of us.

“Miss Jade! Do you know the unicorn melding techniques for advanced spellcasting?” my mom asked.

Iris’s magic plucked me off my place on Goofball’s back as she stepped over beside my mother, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Never needed them, but I paid attention in class! Shall we, Miss Cuddles?”

Leaning close, my mother and the former Chief of Police rested their horns against one another. A white hot wave of magic nearly scorched the tips of my feathers, bursting out in all directions. The spell that’d been holding me in place on Goofball’s back dissipated and I found myself in midair.

Catching the wind, I darted after Goofball as a vast, transparent glowing wall burst into being between our forces and the oncoming horde as we closed on one another down the broad city street. It curved back towards us, hanging in midair like a moving pane of shining glass as tall as a three story building. Fortunately for my feathery butt, it was a good deal more solid than that; the second the Blackcoats were within range, their bullets lit up like a thousand points of flashing light and ricocheted in every direction, shattering windows and cracking the concrete as they bounced off the magical barrier.

Swooping in low, I landed heavily on Goofball’s back, scrambling back into place with my hooves in the holds. Raising my head a cautious few inches over the armored barricade, I almost missed the moment when our forces collided with one another.

I don’t know why I didn’t really think beforehand that there would be an actual battle with actual blood being spilled. We’d done all the preparation and every one of those guns was loaded. Our enemies weren’t equine enough to stop and talk through exactly what their goals were so we could find some kind of mutually beneficial compromise.

I killed a whole bunch of ponies or watched them die. Scarlet was lying back in the Vivarium with no legs. Grapeshot was dead, his body probably dropped in the countryside somewhere when the cloud I shot him on finally dissipated. How many more were there? More than I could remember.

Sitting down and thinking about it was the worst thing I could do, but Tourniquet made it easier. Sometimes, when I was having nightmares, she’d send me images of fields of grass, or stars, or the taste of ice cream. I’m sure I’d have gone insane without her, and all she wanted was to wrap herself around me and listen to the city breathe.

‘She’s my reason to survive.’

The monsters were in every imaginable shape; no two were perfectly similar though they all had the outline of a pony. Most were extra-limbed, big-fanged horrors which seemed out of their minds and driven only by some instinctual need to attack whatever was in front of them. A few were still ponies, though those appeared to be keeping back from the front lines. The creatures climbed over and under one another, misshapen wings lashing at the air. Some simply ran along the sides of building facades, digging powerful claws into the brickwork to throw themselves towards us.

Those creatures that had guns fired them, but the bullets weren’t making any headway against my mother and Chief Jade’s combined power.

Still, a despairing little voice whispered in my head, “What can fifteen little ponies and a dog who spends his days eating tires and licking his own butt do against such a force?”

Of course, four little ponies had managed to bring together an army to fight the big jerks who’d pushed the city into chaos for the sake of a dumb wish.

When they came, it was in a wash of violence, teeth bared and bodies ready to slaughter us like a bunch of cats in a pigeon coop.

They hit the shield like a thousand eggs being flung at a hypersonic wall.

Goofball charged headlong into the beasts, all three tongues lolling out and the bright pane of magic maintaining a constant distance ahead of us. Most didn’t have time to feel the impact; they burst into red splotches as their fellows piled in behind them. It was a swelling mass of gore being painted from one side of the road to the other, and yet we didn’t stop moving. I quickly glanced over at my mother and Miss Jade. The two of them were leaning into one another, quietly smiling like they were sharing some private joke.

A few of the creatures clawed their way around the edges of the shield, but were quickly cut down by the overwhelming weight of gunfire the Aroyos could focus on each target. The roar of a gatling gun and endless flashing lights of exchanged bullets lit the street. Torrents of blood flowed down the gutters like a steady river and still we advanced.

One especially clever beast had snuck inside an apartment window and flung itself out at Goofball and I as the shield passed. The thing had no less than twelve sets of eyes up and down its hissing face and an extra set of legs under its giant, gnashing jaws which reminded me a little bit of a lobster. I didn’t have time to signal to any of the Aroyos to get it. The Hailstorm didn’t give me the time.

My gun clicked once, then a rush of cold hit my cheek as the creature’s head burst in a frozen shower of crimson ice. The remains skidded under us before shattering into a thousand pieces on the opposite wall of the road. I hadn’t asked the Hailstorm to fire, but like so many things in my life, it was ready before I was.

One would think that having a horde of vicious, heavily modified creatures bearing down on us might slow our march a bit, but it didn’t even cause most of us to break a sweat. The stiff rain and sleet were quickly washing the sidewalks and buildings of the evidence of our passing, but they’d never get the larger chunks; I didn’t envy the street sweepers, if there were ever any street sweepers, again.

Street after street, we charged into the gaping maws of the malformed enemy, covering the road in viscera. There were brief breaks, but nopony could catch their breath. I guided Goofball as best I could, but he seemed to know where we were going, which just so happened to be where the enemy was coming from in greatest numbers.

I barely witnessed the moment when the first unlucky Aroyo was yanked out of the sky and torn in half by one of the creatures. Seconds later, another caught a stray bullet and went down in the street, collapsing in a gasping heap of pony too alive to be left behind. We left her behind. I didn’t look back to see if she managed to get to cover.

The Aroyos moved with a bloody precision, picking targets right out of my brain as they moved from one abomination that managed to cross the shield to the next, gunning them down, ripping them to shreds, and leaving the bodies to be run over by Goofball’s relentlessly pounding paws. Bullets grazed our armored mount from time to time with a spray of sparks, but none came anywhere close to penetrating the half-inch-thick armored plates.

I felt cold and wet, though from time to time I’d get a splash of warmth from somewhere. Strange as it might sound, I found myself starting to zone out. I wasn’t exactly bored. I don’t think it’d have been possible to be bored in those circumstances. More numb. I was becoming numb to it all. Our tactic was working, and dealing death could only be so mechanical before becoming disengaging.

Whenever I’d read about battle, I’d thought it would be exciting, and it was that, but it became more of a painful, hideous, violent routine than anything else. There were too many enemies for us to keep mental track of all the ones who died. I saw more than a few shatter as they felt, parts of them turned to ice.

The only punctuation was Scootaloo diving in from time to time, not really bothering with her armaments as she engaged beasts hoof-to-hoof in midair, her shimmering, mechanically augmented wings holding her aloft despite that she never seemed to flap them. Nothing that came under her attentions survived longer than a few seconds.

For miles, we tore through the things as they came.

A couple more Aroyos died, their bodies trampled along with our enemies.

It wasn’t until a voice broke into my thoughts that I realized I was shivering from head to hoof.

“Swift! Swift, are you okay?” Tourniquet squeaked in my thoughts as another monster got by the wall, only to catch an armored hoof in the head as Scootaloo swooped in to squash it flatter than a fly under a skyscraper-sized swatter.

“I’m okay,” I replied, then made the mistake of looking down. At first, I thought I’d been wounded. Then I realized I was drenched in blood and bits of gore. Goofball was drenched. My mother and Iris Jade, still pressed against each other, their horns blazing and turning every droplet of moisture that came anywhere near them to instant steam, were mostly dry, but even they hadn’t completely escaped the spray. “Oh Celestia, no I’m not! There’s so much blood and—”

“Swift, you have to listen! You’re three blocks from P.A.C.T. Headquarters! You need to slow down! Get ready to turn down Friesian Street! You have to tell your mom to curve the shield around you!”

I edged myself up into a standing position and almost threw up. My stomach was bound up in knots and the air smelled atrocious. For all he’d been running for upwards of thirty minutes, Goofball didn’t seem to be flagging much, even though he was showing the strain. His middle head was panting, while the other two were still snatching beasts that got near us out of the air and dashing them against the walls and storefronts of nearby buildings.

How’d we moved so quickly? The Aroyos swooping around my head felt like a dangerous horde of bats. Turning my head, I tried to shout, but my voice felt a thousand miles away.

Reaching out, I grabbed on to my mother’s shoulder and gave her a shake. I didn’t know if she’d felt it what with the rocking of our mount’s motion until she cracked an eye to look at me.

“Mom! Mom, you have to make sure the shield covers our sides! Bubble over top of us!”

She made the tiniest of nods, then shut her eyes again.

“Swift! Friesian Street is one block up!” Tourniquet shouted into my mind. “They’ll come from both directions! Front and back!”

The streetwide plate of magic thinned slightly, pulling in towards Goofball until it formed a concave scoop like an umbrella a meter overhead. The ground was no longer protected, and the Aroyos had to dip under it and match our speed rather than diving and dipping in open air; an exhausting exercise for any pegasus, much less a bunch that’d spent the last half hour in an aerial dogfight and constant strafing runs.

My mother’s face pulled into a bit of a grimace and Iris’s mouth drew down at the edges, but they kept their horns in contact and seemed to breathe as one.

Up ahead, a t-junction that must have been Friesian Street appeared. Monsters weren’t coming so thick or fast, and it took me a second to realize why: the rooftops ahead were lined with dark shadows. The Hailstorm painted a row of targets for me and my friends, but there were more than I could quickly count.

Reaching over the armored shield, I grabbed Goofball’s right head’s right ear and gently tugged on it. He let out a whine and glanced back at me. I pointed with one wing and he let out a slightly ragged yip before leaning into the turn.

I was nearly unseated again as we scrabbled around the corner on blood-slick paws. Goofball rebounded off a brick wall and bounded off down the road again. An Aroyo, not as fast as the others—or maybe wounded—smashed face-first into the inside of my mother’s shield and dropped straight onto the pavement. I didn’t have time to see him rise. In the shadowy street it was impossible to tell exactly what was above us.

The Aroyos had only a second to turn their guns in the direction of our attackers before there was the telltale crackle of released energy and, all of a sudden, the street lit up from end to end.

A sharp dazzling line of light was drawn across my eyes, leaving me momentarily blinded. I felt the air under my hooves and tried to spread my wings, but they only caught enough wind to keep me from being ripped off Goofball’s back as he staggered dangerously to one side. Looking up, I realized our shield was gone.

My mother and Iris Jade lay slumped against one another, their horns tipped with scorch marks. Three more Aroyos were absent, their thoughts missing from the circle of minds, while the rest seemed to be stunned and barely able to keep themselves in the air, winging along on pure inertia.

On the rooftops, the figures were preparing to fire again. Energy arced back and forth as the cannons synced with one another, readying to unleash their dragon-killing magics. They were going to leave my father a childless widow. They’d let my best friend languish alone in a darkened hole under the earth. They’d leave my partner to die, waiting for a signal that would never come.

For the first time since we’d left the Fortress Everfree, I found myself getting really, truly angry.

So many had died while I waited and fretted over right and wrong. I’d written the truth before we left that day. I’d sat down and put it on paper, huddled in my childhood room with a pencil in my mouth.

Tourniquet’s screaming voice dimmed as I reached out and felt the tendrils of power running beneath the streets of the city. I took them, as a seamstress might take up the strings of her loom. I wove with my anger, and the world began to take shape. The storm swelled and the rain beat down on my face, but it was little more than a distant distraction.

“I will do whatever it takes to save my family.”

Pavement cracked under Goofball’s hooves and the lightning cannons faltered as the buildings began to shake beneath them. Sidewalks split into ugly, rutted tracks and a fire hydrant nearby exploded, sending a spray of filthy water high in the air. A few of our ambushers started to take flight, but it was uncertain and uncoordinated; they were still trying to figure out what was going on.

“This is my city. These roads are its bars and the buildings are its cells.”

One of the Blackcoats tried to fire an improperly cycled lightning cannon, only to let out a few weak sputtering sparks that lit up his position.

I heard his racing heartbeat. I smelled his rank fear. I felt the little, pathetic magic that held his mind in its sway, wrapped around his brain like a leech that’d robbed him of agency.

Maybe he’d been a good pony, once.

Too bad.

“I am the Warden of Detrot, and you are all trapped in here with me.”

Act 3 Chapter 68 : Leadership Crisis

"The worst thing about being a Princess? Truly, I have enjoyed my time as leader, but it is not a simple nor stress free undertaking to keep the wheels of Equestria turning. If I had to lay my hoof on a single point of tension that no amount of planning or preparation can relieve it is that the two of us are always the first target of any would-be revolutionary or hair-brained power-hungry fool who believes the country is better run at the point of a sword.

We are the first people to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in Equestria. Despite a thousand years of relatively peaceful rule, I am not a mind reader, nor am I prescient. There have been times of conflict and strife, but we always rebuild.

For the first fifty years I was in office, I fully expected to wake up one day to find my head on a spear. That tended to happen to poor, corrupt, or inexperienced leadership back in those days. Even today, there are moments I feel like an imposter. When that happens, I look back on all the peoples of Equestria accomplished under my stewardship. It does not entirely cure the sensation, but it is a comfort to know they now have fewer reasons to wish me dead."

-Princess Celestia, Interview With Royale Fashion Weekly

There was no time ‘before’.

‘Before’ was a concept for creatures without purpose.

Their purpose was etched into the flesh of their brains with dark magics.

Obey.

In their short existences, they’d never faced anything they could not overcome with obedience. Of course, if they had, they wouldn’t remember it. Memory was for creatures without purpose.

They’d fought, certainly. Most fought each other in their quiet moments, though without grudges or any drive towards vengeance. It was simply a means of honing skills they’d been ordered to hone; any who died were unworthy of their purpose. Some remembered brief snippets of time when they were not fighting or obeying, but those were irrelevant and tended to lead to getting eaten in a distracted moment, so recall wasn’t encouraged.

While they had no past, they did have a future.

After all, they’d been shown the future. It was a time they would become perfect.

Every dead body would be deliciously devoured and every order successfully carried out. Prior to that time, they would fight. A great many of the weak had banded together, intent on defying purpose.

They would pay for that, for nothing could defy purpose for long.

The orders were simple.

Ambush the enemy’s primary strike force when it pushed down a particular street. The enemy had attacked without subtlety or care, barreling through the city beneath the raging storm. The masters knew they were coming; hence the orders.

The orders were simple:

Kill everyone who comes with the attacking force. Desecrate their bodies. Eat the survivors. Hang the heads from something visible from the prison known as Supermax.

It’d all been going to plan, though they were getting reports over the limited radio that remained of additional attacks on outposts near the city outskirts. Since those did not fall within the purview of their obedience to orders, the reports were put quietly out of their minds.

When the enemy force appeared at the end of the windswept road, all they felt was elation. A few of their lower brethren were in the air, diving and clawing at the giant magical shield the fools kept in front of them. Every one of the enemy were soaked from head to hoof in blood, but that was nothing worth a deep consideration.

Their lightning cannons were prepped and the mechanisms synced to one another, so they could unleash a single killing bolt that would slaughter the enemy en-masse. It was time to obey.

The enemy was a strange enough mix to give them a moment’s pause. There was a pony who looked like she was partially made of metal, swooping around, killing at her leisure with a grim smile on her face. She was followed by a massive dog with three heads covered in enough layers of armor that nothing short of an anti-tank round was likely to pierce him. Fortunate, then, that enough synced lightning cannons cared little for such protection.

Together, they waited for the enemy to enter their killing ground.

When the moment came, they stood as one and locked onto their targets. Each of the giant sets of capacitors strapped to their backs began to hum. Lightning crackled in their capacitorsboiled in their mechanisms, ready to be unleashed.

Wind and water ripped at them, but they would not yield.

As one, they turned toward their leader, their alpha, head of the pack. He would be the focus. He did not bother to look back at them; they had their orders and they knew their tasks well. Bending toward, he centered the reticle over his right eye on the dog just as the magical shield separating them from their targets began to reform into a bowl shape over their heads.

No matter; no ordinary unicorn could survive a blast from a lightning cannon. It would take fifty hornheads to survive the combined powers of so many. If nothing else, the survivors would be too injured to fight back.

“For the Colonel! Obey!” shouted the leader.

Engaging their triggers, they breathed as one as a dozen bolts of lightning leapt from cannon to cannon, before reaching their leader and lashing out across the street. A sonic explosion shattered every window, filling the air with a typhoon of glass that was sucked after the passing energy discharge. There was no need to warn their remaining brethren in the street. They had obeyed and their deaths were in service to the purpose.

The shield collapsed.

The leader took a moment to assess the damage.

‘Strange,’ he thought, with what was left of his mind, ‘There are plenty of corpses...but the dog still stands. The shield is gone, but the enemy is not on the ground, ready to be eaten. Did we fail to obey? No...no, we obeyed. A simple issue of underestimating their forces. They are injured and disoriented. That is as it should be.’

“Prepare to fire again!” he barked, pulling a strap on his chest to activate the lightning cannon’s charge function. The weapon began to cycle as his squad stepped back and collectively began beating their wings, pushing voltage and magic into their capacitors.

When the building rocked under their hooves, it gave them no pause. So far, obedience was working quite well, despite a momentary setback. The enemy were scattering towards the buildings, trying to get some cover. Their giant dog was staggering about as though concussed, and most of the remaining fliers were still recovering.

“Obedience will prevail,” the leader added, as an afterthought. The phrase swelled his charges with pride. They knew their role in the great purpose was small, but it was essential.

The apartment complex they’d chosen for their ambush suddenly let out a disturbing rattle, and cracks shot across the roof from end to end, nearly knocking two of them onto their backsides. Both looked nervously in the direction of the alpha, but he simply motioned them back to their hooves. They were still obeying. Nothing could go wrong.

For reasons he’d never have been able to properly explain, the leader’s eyes were drawn to the scene of carnage below. There was no reason for him to be looking there; he hadn’t been ordered to. He’d only been ordered to kill them all. Still, as he glanced downward he noticed one tiny pegasus who seemed to have escaped the bloodshed relatively unscathed.

She was standing there in the street, looking up at him with an expression that was hard to read, not that he’d read the expressions of anypony in some time. Ponies were, by and large, irrelevant. They were a ‘before’ thing, and he had no ‘before’ to speak of.

Still, something about her pulled his attention. Perhaps it was her giant wings, spread like a cloak, casting what seemed to be much more shadow than they should. More likely, it was the odd white glow radiating from her eyes. ‘Before’ he might have considered that worthy of concern.

His lightning cannon let out a short beep that signaled its readiness.

One of the over-eager recruits down the line triggered his early, and it let out a disappointing crackle and discharged into the brickwork, leaving a sharp black spot on the wall beside him. He shot the leader a frightened look and he narrowed his eyes at the unfortunate pony. The trooper gulped and nodded before stepping back from the line; his death would be a humiliating one. One without purpose.

Turning back to the tiny pegasus in the street, the leader centered his targeting reticle on her face. It would be good to burn the flesh off of it. Her wings would make a fine trophy as well.

Something gently touched his right rear hoof. It was an insubstantial touch, barely more than a light caress. In the pounding rain, he wouldn’t have noticed it but that it brought back an odd spike of fear from some buried part of his remaining psyche: an image of a coiled snake sitting in dead grass flashed through his mind along with old pain.

Sparing a moment’s attention, the alpha looked down to see a thin black cable wrapped around his knee. Giving his leg a firm tug, he frowned as the cable refused to yield. It was a tiny thing, but one end was spitting sparks and the other appeared to be leading down into one of the cracks in the rooftop. Several of his compatriots were similarly entangled, their rear limbs tied in place, though to his pride none of them were granting it any more interest than they would a fly landing on their flank.

Farther down, there was a yelp as the stallion who’d misfired his cannon was suddenly yanked into the air, cut short as a thicker cable lashed out from the rooftop and wound itself tightly around his throat. Just as quickly, He was yanked down onto one of the cracks. The cable strained and his whine of fear got louder and louder until, with a snap, he folded in half like a piece of paper, blood spraying across the alpha’s face as he disappeared.

The alpha stared, dumbfounded, at the place his subordinate had just vanished.

Another of his brethren had only the time to squeak before his head whipped off into the darkness, rolling end over end through the air before careening into the adjoining alleyway.

Then, death was among them. Electrical wires sprang from every surface. Some wrapped themselves around the ponies’ necks or tore into their bodies, while others latched onto their muscles, sending the mutants spasming onto their sides as hundreds of volts coursed through their organs. Two or three managed a couple of wingbeats off the ground, but no more; the entangling cords snagged them like cats catching escaping canaries. Smoke billowed from one’s eyes while another was seemingly drawn and quartered in midair, his limbless torso flung into the void still screaming.

“B-but...but obedience is—” the leader protested, trying to pull himself free of the briar patch of wiring holding him in place. His words were cut short as a single cable lifted in front of his face, dancing back and forth like a snake. He studied it, curiously, as it wandered across his limited vision.

‘Did we fail to obey? the leader thought.

The tall stallion’s body dropped over the side of the building, coming up short as the noose around his throat stopped him a few inches from the ground.

The Warden of Detrot felt the city pulsating within her, awaiting my orders. Wherever the electricity flowed, so too did her will. So many more deserved to die. There were many more criminals to punish. Several streets over, the Marked were under attack by dozens of creatures. Most were already dead, but a few had survived and taken refuge in a nearby warehouse. The creatures were hunting them, following the trail of blood they’d left in the street.

Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the entire block and pulled.

The creatures didn’t have much warning before the ground beneath them erupted and a massive cable as big around as a pony split from its moorings, yanking ten of them into the earth before they could so much as blink. One of their number, larger more resilient than the rest, had time to let out a canine bark, but he was gone, his body compressed beneath the earth before the answer came from another street over.

She turned to the next street, only to find a small patrol of the mutants moving building to building, looking for survivors. No sense pulling up more than she needed to; a high amperage wire creeping out to lightly touch the puddle they were all walking through was more than enough to stop their hearts.

Across the city, she witnessed more ongoing little battles. Dozens. Hundreds.

There were too many for a single pony, but where she could, she killed.

Monsters piled out of a train station onto a surprised group of ponies. They were yanked back inside and torn into pieces until they stopped screaming. When she was done, blood painted the subway from end to end.

A group of fighters pinned in a collapsed diner, their ammunition running low and a horde of creatures pouring out of the opposing building, suddenly found themselves sitting in silence. After several minutes, they cautiously stepped out of cover to find a disturbing sculpture in the middle of the street composed of several tens of twitching corpses, their mouths forced full of live electrical wires. None dared cheer.

In the back of a looted convenience store, a mother and child huddled as a giant black creature bashed its head against the door of their hiding place in the mare’s lavatory. The filly wailed as her mother held her to her chest, but couldn’t bring herself to quiet her. When the monster let out a strangled cry, she took it for one of victory and braced to feel the demon’s teeth. They never came.

In pockets where violence reigned, the city itself turned against the unnatural beasts, shredding, choking, and burying them. What’d been a fairly orderly defense descended into chaos in only a few minutes. Still, there were more battles than could be attended to and there was that nagging voice, crying out in the back of her mind. It was straining against her control of the city. It would have to be dealt with.

She carefully disengaged herself and turned her attention to the voice. In doing so, she finally heard what it was saying.

“Swift! Swift, I can’t see! It’s so dark! Swift, I lost everything! I can’t see the city! Are you alive? Are you okay? I can’t see anything! I’m so scared! Please, don’t leave me alone!”

I was lying on my back when I came to with somepony gently shaking me. The rain seemed to have abated a little bit, leaving only a cold drizzle and a few snowflakes. My wings ached and the air was making my lungs hurt. Something sticky coated my face, too, gumming my eyelids shut. My eyes hurt terribly, but compared to the soreness in every other part of my body, it was tolerable.

I carefully rolled onto my side and winced as I landed against a warm shape. It was damp, but there was a heartbeat and the sound of soft breathing.

“S-Swift? Are you hearing me?” my mother’s cracking voice reached me through what seemed a great distance.

Pawing at the air, I tried to talk, but my mouth was full of something familiar, albeit kinda gross: a lot of curdling blood. I spat a couple of times before finding my words.

“I think I’m okay. What happened? I’ve got something in my eyes.”

“There’s blood all over your face, b-but I can’t see where it’s coming from,” Mom muttered, then took my knee in hers, tugging me to one side. There was a faint crackle and a gentle warmth brushed at my face, before fading. “My magic is pretty empty. I don’t think I can do more than basic telekinesis for a few hours. Honey, what happened? What was all that? I woke up and you were standing there and your eyes were glowing and the monsters were—”

“I...I don’t know. I feel kind of woozy,” I replied, putting a hoof on her chest as I edged into a sitting position. The pavement was slick with things I didn’t really want to think about. “W-where’s Goofball?”

There was a thump off to my left and a wide, wet tongue wiped its way up my side from flanks to ears. I couldn’t help a tiny giggle as I pushed one of the big idiot’s heads away. He bumped me with the end of his nose.

“I’m alright, boy. What about Miss Jade?”

Mom took a deep breath and held my hoof a little tighter “She’s unconscious, but I think she’ll live,” she replied. “Her horn...her horn is a mess. Iris almost shoved me out of the spell before the lightning cannon hit. She took most of blast, herself. I only caught the edge of it.”

Clunking hoofsteps approached, each with a faint mechanical whirr.

“Well, my wing augmentations are toasted,” Scootaloo’s voice said from nearby. “No more flying for me, today. Leastways I can walk, until my batteries die. As Apple Bloom would say, ‘What in tarnation was that?’, little filly? I’d swear I saw the ground open up and swallow the bastards. Mercy, that sewer grate wasn’t overflowing a minute ago. Pretty sure that’s all blood, too.”

“I’m...I’m not sure,” I muttered, wiping at my face with the back of my fetlock. “Does anypony have a paper towel or something? I’m a mess and I can’t see.”

“I and I be carryin’ wet napkins for de foals, if ye can use dem, Warden,” Wisteria chimed in, fluttering to the ground in front of me. “Dey alcohol, but—”

“It’s fine. Mom, do you mind helping me? I’m...I’m glad you’re all okay.”

“Aye, minus Miss Jade dere. She be not castin’ magic again, thinks I and I. De medics, dey be among de dead and her horn be...eh...splintered. Would not like to be doin’ dat puzzle.”

“H-how many did we lose?” I asked. A wet cloth draped over a hoof pressed against my face and started working in little circles up my muzzle. It stung a little, but didn’t feel like there were any open cuts.

“If you mean ‘dead’, then it looks like seven. Why? I thought you were in some sort of telepathic contact with everyone?” Scootaloo asked.

I started to shake my head, only for a hoof to grab my chin.

“Don’t move or this is going to get in your eyes,” Mom growled, maybe a little more harshly than necessary, but I couldn’t blame her for worrying.

Wisteria’s voice broke in again, “De Lady of Shadows be not speakin’ to me.”

“Aye, but me, either,” added a mare who sounded like she was several meters away. “I and I be not hearin’ de others. I feels de magic inside, but...it be quiet.”

There were a couple more noises of agreement from the remaining Aroyos. Finally, mom got to my eyelids. I held my breath as she cleaned them. It felt very strange when she did, like there was something harder than an eyeball underneath. I had a momentary worry that I might have caught a piece of shrapnel, but didn’t think anything hurt bad enough for that.

“Oh Celestia. Swift...I need you to open your eyes,” Mom whispered.

“I-Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Swift, open...your...eyes!” she snapped.

I slowly cracked an eyelid on a very strange world. It wasn’t so terribly different but that everything seemed to be glowing. I could see my mother’s face, and beneath it, a webwork of flickering lights. It was like she’d worn a thousand tiny gemstones just beneath her skin, each flashing in time with one another at a speed that made it almost impossible to track.

Scootaloo was there a second later, her giant body unmistakable as she pushed her face in front of mine. Her legs were like immense columns of energy with fireflies rushing up and down inside them. Studying my face for a moment, she drew back with a disturbed expression.

“Whooo, filly...”

“What? What is it? Everything looks funny.”

“Y-you can see like that?!” Mom exclaimed, grabbing my face in both hooves and squishing my cheeks together.

“L-like...like what?” I squeaked, wiggling out of her grasp and taking a few steps away as panic started to well inside me.

Wisteria shifted her weight from one hoof to the next, glancing back at the few Aroyos still with us before slowly lowering herself into a bow.

I looked back and forth at all of them, then back to my mother. “Oh Celestia, what are they doing?! What’s wrong with my eyes?”

Scootaloo gently pushed my mother to one side, her massive but implaccable weight making it easy. Lowering herself to my height, servos and pistons protesting as she settled down on her stomach in the filthy road, she nosed in closer to me. I tried to move away, but she quickly stamped a toe hard enough to crack the street.

“Hold still, girl.”

I froze in place, my eyes following the dancing lights in hers. After a second, I realized a few of the glowing shapes under her skin were too regular to be organs; they were more like tiny mechanisms built right into her head.

“Girl, I looked into you. You were hit by some kind of transformation magic that did a number on your teeth, right? Same nastiness that transformed those creatures?” she asked, carefully, waving a leg toward the ruined, body-strewn street.

“Y-yeah?”

Scootaloo’s wrinkled face inched a little more into my personal bubble until we were almost nose to nose.

“Since you weren’t out there chewing our throats, I’m assuming you got somepony to fix that magic before it turned you into one of the poor devils we just finished killing. Now...be real clear, honey. Did you remove that magic, or did you have somepony suppress it?”

“My friend...Tourniquet. She said she couldn’t...remove it so she drained it constantly,” I replied, softly.

“The metal pony. Right. And...that little act you pulled a minute ago with the electrical wires?”

“I...I don’t know. I... did something similar once before when Hardy got hurt and I got angry, but I don’t remember—”

“Swift!”

Tourniquet’s voice broke into my mind so loudly it almost knocked me right on my flank. I clamped my ears against the sides of my head, but it didn’t stop the angry ringing that made my eyes throb in their sockets. I put my hooves over my face and drew in as much of a breath as my shaky lungs would let me. It was a terrible mistake; the whole road smelled like dead bodies, fire, and ozone.

“I’m h-here, T,” I answered, carefully, trying to keep my mental voice from cracking.

“Are...are you okay?”

“I...I think so. Something is going on. Everypony here says—”

“I lost everyone! I can still feel them, but I can’t talk to anypony except you! My energy reserves are gone! I’m small again!”

“Wait, what?!”

“T-there are...oh wow...Yeesh. Did...did you...”

She fell silent, and I felt her presence fade for a few seconds before she popped back.

“Swift, the fighting was going really badly for a minute there. Did...did you destroy all those monsters? I felt you...take...take control of me. Like before, when you were in the hospital room after Hardy got shot and burned. I felt it, then everything went dark.”

“I don ‘t know, T. Something is wrong with my eyes. I...I can see stuff. Everypony looks like they’re full of lights.”

She was quiet again, and when her voice returned it was much softer.

“Like they’re all pony-shaped Hearth’s Warming Eve trees?”

“A little bit...”

“Swift, get a mirror.”

“I’m trying, but everypony is freaking out!”

“Just try. Oh brother, this is a mess. I’ll...I’ll try to start getting things back together from this side. Communication between the Marked is totally sideways and ponies are really frightened, but I think we’ve got some breathing room...yeep!”

“What?! What is it?!”

“Can’t talk! Outskirts! Dragons! Back in a bit!”

I blinked and found everypony gathered around me and my mother’s hooves on my cheeks again.

“Mom? I’m...I’m okay, I was just talking to Tourniquet. Can I please have a mirror?”

Setting her hooves down, she shook her head. “I lost mine in the fighting. I had it in my mane, but—” She gestured to the blood-slicked mess atop her head.

A tiny panel on one of Scootaloo’s legs retracted with a spurt of steam. A short mechanical arm popped out with a hand mirror attached to the end. It had what looked like a pony’s cutie-mark emblazoned on the back: a trio of smiling sunflowers. She flipped it around and raised it toward me.

“Here. Little gift from my elementary school teacher. I’ll want that back.”

Carefully taking the mirror, I angled it so I could see myself and very nearly dropped it when my face appeared. Scrambling it back into position, I raised a hoof into my view and gently waved it back and forth. Lowering it toward my eye, I felt a soft ‘clink’ as my hooftip met crystal.

Pink crystal.

My eyeballs were gone, replaced by many-faceted, glittering crystals. A tiny dot of dancing light inside seemed to be where my pupil was. I winked one eye, and my eyelid shut cleanly, but it looked strangely textured, as though it wasn’t entirely round.

“M-my eyes...look like Tourniquet’s?!” I asked nobody in particular.

“I’d bet it’s that transformation magic,” Scootaloo said, snatching the mirror out of my hooves and sliding it back into her leg.

“The P.A.C.T.’s magic? The arcane conservancy they stuck in her head?” my mom asked, worriedly bunching her ruined, bloody apron in her hooves.

“You said it was suppressed by your little friend? Transformation magics don’t play well with other kinds of enchantments. Can’t say for certain, but it sure as the moon looked like you just filled yourself with the construct’s magic. I don’t imagine you thought to maintain the suppression on the spell conservancy when you snatched your friend’s arcane energies?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t think. I just did it. Ugh, my brain is full of wasps. What exactly did I do?”

Wisteria tossed a lump of something dark and lumpen at my hooves. “Ye be savin’ de Aroyos. Dis be all dat left of some of dem dat was killin’ us.” I squeaked and danced backwards as I realized it was a charred skull sitting in front of me.

“It looked like the wires under the road started reaching up, snatching the blackcoats, and dragging them down into the ground,” my mother added, shuddering as she looked down at the burned head.

“Oh. But...so, what? T-that happens and my eyeballs just spontaneously transform into glass?!”

Scootaloo shrugged and her right knee let out a grinding hiss. “With the number of variations that mutation spell keeps spitting out, you’ve got to imagine it’s affected by ambient magic. You just fueled it with a whole heaping helping of ‘not-so-ambient’ magic. You’re lucky your brain didn’t blow like a boiled egg in a lava flow.”

Taking a deep breath, I tilted my head back and screamed as loud as I could. It was probably a bad idea, considering we were in the middle of a battlefield and there’d been entirely too many things trying to kill us up until just a few minutes ago, but it felt really good. When my lungs finally started to run out of air, I held up my hoof to forestall any questions, took a deep breath, and let out another one that lasted even longer and echoed up and down the street.

As the final strain faded, I opened my eyes to find the whole group standing there staring at me uncertainly, shuffling their hooves and waiting for somepony else to make the first move.

I pulled myself up, dusted at my hopelessly filthy vest, and turned to where Goofball was sitting on the curb, eating a trashcan.

“Goofy! Drop it!” I snarled.

Scootaloo let out a little surprised sound as Goofball lifted his heads and the remains of the garbage bin slowly fell out of a mouth. I tapped the pavement, and he coughed, spitting up a bowling ball before trotting over to sit on his haunches in front of me. Grabbing his shoulder, I swung myself in behind his heads, planting my hooves.

“Everypony, get ready to move out,” I barked as the Hailstorm spooled up and eager frost dripped from its barrels. “We’re not done, today. The P.A.C.T. building is a couple streets down, and we’ve got a clear road ahead. The...their defences don’t look like anypony is at them. I didn’t see anypony there.”

Thunder rumbled dangerously in the blackened heavens, suggesting there was more storm to come. Soft pops and snaps of gunfire as well as the baying of wild animals trickled in, but it was hard to hear anything much as the rain started to pick up again, washing the last of the blood off my face. I stared up at the shadow just above the skyline where I knew the P.A.C.T. tower to be. Nearby, the weather factories—whether manned by mind-controlled ponies or on some kind of automation—continued mindlessly pumping clouds into the already oversaturated skies.

“Filly—” Scootaloo started, but I shook my head.

“Don’t ask how I know. Just...just listen to me. We spent however long fighting our way through the creations of that spell and I just lost my eyes to it. I’m not crawling back to the Fortress Everfree with nothing.”

The elderly mare squinted up at me. “But...the job’s done. We distracted them—”

“Broadside is still there. He’s still in control,” I growled, then pointed toward where Iris Jade lay on the sidewalk. She was still unconscious and I felt a little bad for not taking a moment to check on her, but if Hardy had taught me one thing it’s that feeling bad won’t keep anypony alive. “You can’t fly with us, right? I need you to take Miss Jade and get her somewhere safe.”

“I can run damned fast,” she replied, glancing back at the warped metal frames around her wings. “My batteries will last me another hour or so.”

“I don’t have time to argue!” I snapped, pointing back the way we’d come. “Get her out of here. You have to make sure she gets medical treatment.”

“Swift, I can’t cast the shield by myself. I can’t even raise one,” my mom interjected, rubbing the base of her horn.

Thinking for a moment, I reached up and pulled Masamane off my foreleg, unclasping the trigger and tossing it down. Mom reflexively caught it with her horn, wincing as her telekinetic field flickered. After a moment her magic steadied and she raised the pistol, popping out the magazine to check it before slapping it back in place. Her lip quivered as she looked up at me again.

“This...this is crazy, Swift. Are we really still going to try to take on a whole building with just...just this?” she asked, waving a leg toward the remaining Aroyos. “S-shouldn’t we get you some medical attention for your eyes? Maybe your father can do—”

“I can still see, even if I look a little weird...weirder...and these are the only ponies we need. We’re going to try. What are our weapons looking like?”

“We be low on de ammo,” Wisteria said, tugging her own double shotguns off and shaking her head before dropping them in the gutter. Raising her Moon Gun, she checked it, then nodded. “Charge on dis be good, though.”

“I don’t think there’s anything left between here and there. Those ponies with the lightning cannons were the last defense. We just have to get inside the headquarters.”

Turning to her remaining charges, Wisteria called back, “Aroyos...We rides for Diamond Eyes...Warden of Everfree!”

‘Diamond Eyes,’ my mother mouthed, as though the word tasted sour.

Spreading her wings, Wisteria took the the air, hovering above Goofball. The other Aroyos didn’t have to be told twice. They raised their voices to join hers, lifting off the ground as one. They might not have had Tourniquet to coordinate their movements, but they were still a unit.

“You best bring me my Aroyos back, young’un,” Scootaloo grumbled as she clomped over and shoved her head underneath Iris Jade, deftly rolling the unconscious mare up onto her shoulders. “I don’t care for leaving a fight when there’s still faces that need demolishing.”

“I will! Just make sure Miss Jade is safe, then go help Taxi! If we’re not back in an hour, don’t come looking!”

“What do I tell Hard Boiled?” she asked.

I hesitated for a moment, then grinned in a way that made her draw back like she’d discovered a poisonous snake in her sock drawer.

“Tell him he owes me a pidgeon and a pint!”

Crazy.

I’m crazy.

That’s the only explanation I could come up with at the time. I’d finally lost it and gone absolutely whacky noddles. I didn’t feel scared or nervous. I didn’t feel much of anything besides a sharp determination to keep going until the mission was finished.

As my mother and I rode Goofball towards destiny, I tried to go back in my mind and search out how I’d reached that place. The steps were clear, but each one was a leap up a mountain. Shouldn’t it have all been impossible?

I could still feel the childish joy at getting my cutie-mark and the kick of Masamane as it took Lieutenant Grapeshot’s life. There was my mother’s approval when I finished my first short story and had it published in the school newspaper alongside the first taste of meat that’d started my transformations.

I felt Hard Boiled’s life draining away as I clutched his wounded body, then the terror at seeing him standing beside me, followed by an overpowering relief as I realized he wasn’t just an illusion of my broken psyche. I remembered Tourniquet’s first burning touch, then the glory of our ever-growing connection. I could smell the burning flesh as my dead partner was dragged in without his skin, then a few hours later I watched him sit up in bed and smile at me.

Freshest of all, there were the animal shrieks of the hundreds of monsters I’d struck down using a magic that shouldn’t have existed in our world. Tourniquet wasn’t meant to be a weapon, but I’d used her as one. Worst of all, maybe, was the knowledge that it was probably the right thing to do.

I was left with lots of questions and few answers.

What awful world were we in where that could be right?

Any reasonable pony would have lost their mind somewhere along the way, but what do you do if you lose it and have to carry on, regardless?

Is crazy just another step?

We’d entered the industrial part of the city and stores had given way to warehouses, factories, and working class apartments. No bodies lay in the streets and most of the buildings were unlooted, but there was still a strange sense of foreboding. It was too clean, particularly for a city under siege. Aside from a few broken down cars and abandoned carts, there was little sign of the Darkening other than the persistent red glow from overhead, which was muted by the heavy cloud cover.

As we rode, the wind beat against my wide-open eyes and I only had to reach up from time to time and give them a light wipe with the tip of one toe if frost built up on my eyelashes.

I’d quickly realized I didn’t need to blink anymore, which was a weird change. I’d always had a bit of trouble finding flight goggles in my size and wearing children’s was a bit embarrassing; they always had stupid, kiddy designs on them. My brain still kept signaling to my eyes that I needed to shut them, but not doing it never seemed to affect what I could see.

The passing city should have been beautiful. Everything had lights inside of it; every wall coursed with inner luminance and my friends blinked and shimmered like stars, their veins and organs glittering against the duller backdrop of the sky. It made me want to climb up high and look at as much of the town as I could, but there was no time.

The storm’s power was growing the closer we got to the weather factories. Goofball was heavy enough to keep his paws under him without difficulty, but the Aroyos were having trouble. Most had taken to the ground and were running alongside him, keeping up as best they could.

One final turn and P.A.C.T. Headquarters was there ahead, a giant with its head in the raging clouds and its heavy, squat body below.

Perimeter Aegis Control Taskforce Central Station.

They’d called it a waste of taxpayer dollars until a hydra, for reasons unknown, decided to wander into the city and mate with the City Council building.

In elementary school I’d written a seventeen page paper on the building and its history for extra credit. I spent nights memorizing maps of the interior and tracing my way through the halls of the heroes who kept our city safe from monsters. The day I was accepted into the P.A.C.T. Academy was the proudest of my life.

When I saved a reporter from a cockatrice with only my bare hooves, my drill sergeant actually smiled for half a second before making me run fifty laps around the building to keep me from getting cocky. I thought sure I’d be joining those heroes one day.

When I washed out after trying to fire a lightning cannon and burying myself in a drink machine it was, up to then, the worst day of my life.

Ponies treating me like I was a foal was something I’d gotten used to. I know I’m short. It just drove me to prove myself all that much harder. I wanted to be the pony Scarlet told me I could be. I wanted to join the P.A.C.T. and stand against the darkness and evil in the world.

How wrong can one little mare’s life go?

I’d heard the P.A.C.T. headquarters compared to a snail shell with apartment living on top, which wasn’t wholly inaccurate; the bottom floors comprised a heavily reinforced combat training facility while the upper floors were all barracks and classrooms for the recruits still in the academy as well as any troopers who didn’t have places to stay.

There was no wall, only a privacy fence with a guard shack at each of the four cardinal directions around the building. The upper floors were starkly painted black concrete with rows of narrow arrow-slit windows just large enough for a pony to peer out or fire a gun from. Below, the chunky base of the building was as utilitarian as it could be with sandbags piled around the base and across the rooftop as well as anti-air gun fixtures every fifteen meters, jabbing their stubby barrels toward the sky.

The original plan was to bash our way in with Mom and Jade’s shield, followed by Moon Guns. As it turned out, that was unnecessary. In the brief moment when I’d become the city, I’d seen the headquarters of the P.A.C.T. standing like a dark and empty sentinel against the furious storm.

Goofball stopped as we came out of the rows of buildings on the side nearest the entrance, panting like a freight engine. Dropping onto his belly, he sat there with his heads on his paws, gently rocking underneath us as rain pounded my mother and me. I slid off his back onto the pavement and looked up at the cloud-shrouded fortress, its windows black and its emplacements unmanned.

Wisteria trotted over to my side and shouted to be heard above the furiously blowing winds that whipped her wet mane against her neck, “Dis be feelin’ like a trap to you?”

“A trap, or they just threw an entire army at us and they expected us all to be dead already,” my mom answered, shaking her head as she leaped down beside me.

Raising my head, I looked up at the cloud as the Hailstorm’s reticle appeared over my new eyes. It was comforting, somehow, to know that still worked.

Far above, in the misty heights of the tower, a single red target appeared.

“Broadside is up there,” I said, pointing toward the roof. “There’s nopony else inside.”

“How do you—” Mom started to ask, but I turned to look at her and her muzzle clicked shut so fast she almost bit her own tongue. After a second, her ears pinned to the sides of her head. “Swift, y-you look a little like Hard Boiled right now.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“That wasn’t a compliment, honey.”

I rolled my eyes, which was a very strange sensation as the tiny peaks twitching under my eyelids.

A sound like a hundred angry train whistles split the air before a giant, amorphous shape rushed past overhead, coming and going so quickly nopony even had time to draw their weapons. We all stared after it as it winged away, flailing at the air in what my adrenaline-soaked nerves told me looked like distress. Turning to my remaining companions, I pointed at the sky.

“Whatever that was is not our problem, okay everypony?”

“I and I be sayin’ dat a lizard long as de city block. Dat be not our problem?” Wisteria asked, skeptically.

“Our problem is right in front of us,” I replied, pointing at the P.A.C.T. headquarters. “That’s our dragon. This mission isn’t done.”

I glanced at Goofball, whose left head was watching me expectantly while the other two lay there breathing heavily. Trotting over, I laid a hoof on his dribbly jowl, giving him a light pat. He gave my hoof a light lick, watching me expectantly.

“Goofy, you’ve got to head home, okay? We can’t take you inside with us.”

His brows knit together, and he pulled his tongue in as his other heads turned to look at me.

“I mean it!” I stomped a hoof at him, and he let out a soft whine. Shaking my head, I flicked my tail towards Supermax. “I’ll come back, though. I promise. My dad would be furious if I died today, not to mention what Stella and my grandmare would do. And Hardy. Horseapples, I don’t even want to think about what Hardy would do. I gotta watch my tail, but that means you need to be safe, okay? I will see you tonight. Besides, if we pull this off, I’m going to make sure the Princesses give you a whole fried ostrich, just for you.”

Goofball licked his chops and reluctantly got to his paws. Turning toward Supermax, he shot me one last, slightly mournful look that almost broke my heart. I didn’t really want to send him away, but if we lived, our path of retreat was likely to be down the sewers.

Starting off at a trot, he quickly broke into his usual headlong gallop, turning down an alley to find himself what I suspected was probably some trouble to get into. Telling a puppy to go somewhere, even a smart one, is very different from having them listen. I followed his reticle on the Hailstorm’s display for some distance before it vanished completely.

Turning back to my mother, Wisteria, and the remaining Aroyos, I quickly took stock. There were only seven of us left and it didn’t seem enough, but we’d left enough bodies behind to qualify as a small scale ecological disaster. I couldn’t think about that just then. Later, when I could hold Tourniquet and maybe have a really good cry, I’d try to feel those feelings.

“What be de orders, Diamond Eyes?” Wisteria asked.

“P-please, just call me Swift.”

“Heh, dat be ye name out dere,” she murmured, jerking her head towards the city skyline. “Wid us, de Aroyos, ye be Diamond Eyes. Earned dat name ye did when we fight side by side. Wear it proud, sister of de Lady of Shadows. Now...ye know dis dark place. What be de orders?”

I wiped my sodden mane out of my face and gulped a breath that tasted like ashes before turning to face the P.A.C.T. headquarters across the empty expanse of concrete leading up to the front gate. I’d started to shiver at some point as the cold water and sleet soaked into my fur. My teeth were chattering in my head, but I tried to keep my voice steady, with mixed success.

“W-we’re going to have to spread out across the parking lot. Try to move quickly. You all have the maps of the interior I drew you, so if we get separated inside, you’ll know where to go. If there are any snipers, they’ll have a hard time hitting us in a wind this high. If you hear a gunshot, don’t lie down and don’t drop. Just run for the b-building. If somepony falls, but doesn’t die...you...you can’t go back for them. Snipers will take advantage and kill you, too.

“Ye be sure dis be de way?” Wisteria asked, softly, her painted features looking fierce despite the worry in her expression.

I nodded, then turned to look up at the tower. “I think Broadside wanted to watch the city end from up there. He didn’t leave defenders because anypony who’d survive an attack by a full lightning cannon squad is...his. He wants to kill us himself.”

“Swift, that could be anypony up there,” my mom murmured.

“No...no, Mom. We both know there’s only one pony it could be,” I replied, then braced myself before bolting out of the cover of the two buildings on either side of the avenue as fast as my legs could carry me. After a second, I heard other hoofsteps through the torrential downpour heading towards the gatehouse.

Being a small target has certain advantages, but I hadn’t thought to dye myself a different color. Every second of the run, buffeted from all sides by raging winds, my soaked wings threatening to knock me square on my flank, I listened for the telltale snap crack of a sniper round. Considering how close they’d have to be to get line of sight, I might have had time to hear the gunshot that killed me, if there was any brain matter left to hear it with.

Still, nothing came. I galloped until my chest hurt, then galloped some more, stopping only once I reached the guard house. It was little more than a concrete hut with a parking gate across the entrance, not really a defensible position. Skidding to a halt, I dived inside the fence and pressed myself against the wall of the guard house. A second later, my mother charged in behind me, shoving herself up against my other side.

“Swift, I am going to tan your tail if you do something like that again!” she snapped in an angry stage whisper.

“Oh please, Mom. You never spanked me.”

“That’s because I am a professional, but I am not above using my skills to make sure my daughter doesn’t get herself killed!”

Wisteria zipped inside, but she was alone.

“Where is everypony else?” I asked.

“Ye tell dem to spread,” she replied, waving a hoof towards where a vague shape could be seen through sheets of rain making for the guard hut on the adjacent corner of the building. “Dey hit de other entrances. Go inside, move slow, seek answers. Dey smart ponies. If dey find anythin’, we hear about it or dey run back and tell de Lady of Shadows in Fortress Everfree. Dey got de Moon Guns and dem kills everythin’. We be goin’ up top, yes?”

“That saves us hunting through the bottom floors, I guess.”

Returning my attention to the P.A.C.T. headquarters, I tilted my head back as far as I could. The single red target reticle hidden amongst the clouds hadn’t moved much, though it seemed to be pacing back and forth. It reminded me of a tiger I’d seen in a zoo, waiting to be fed.

“Swift, there’s something hanging above the doors,” my mom said, and I dropped my chin, following the end of Masamane to where she was pointing with it across the track surrounding the outside of the P.A.C.T. central hub. Wide granite stairs led up to two sets of turnstile doors, but we’d come in on the shadowed side of the building and in the low light it was hard to see the entrance. Still, I could just make out that Mom was right; a row of irregular shapes seemed to be dangling above the entry.

Looking both directions to make sure we were still clear, I started creeping toward the building, keeping low, trying to make myself as small and unnoticeable as possible. While I was inclined to watch the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, I forced my eyes down, looking for traps, triggers, or tripwires.

Reaching the steps, I put one hoof on the bottom one when the lightest whiff of a scent caught my nose through the rushing winds. Sickly and sweet, it was a smell I’d become too used to since the day I got my badge. It was the stink of rotting flesh.

Raising my head, I stared up at the front of the academy I’d once called home.

Eight mangled shapes were strung across the wall above the door. Their bones were broken and their limbs twisted, but I had no trouble recognizing what they’d been in life; they were ponies. Their bodies were shredded, and dead, frozen flies clung to their faces, but there was no mistaking them.

Most were strangers, but I’d met the one stallion in the middle whose chubby jowls were still a little recognizable under his pale orange fur. He’d congratulated me on saving a reporter from a cockatrice, then promised he’d make sure I had a place if I didn’t make it through P.A.C.T. training. When I called his secretary after I washed out, she’d told me to sign up for the police academy. Her body was right there beside his, her pretty braid wrapped around the metal wire that’d been jammed through her flesh with a force that suggested magic.

Above their heads, carved into the wall with a carefully placed tracery of bullets were these words:

‘Welcome To City Council. Join The Conversation.’

Act 3 Chapter 69: Dog Fight

"It is not that my sister and I took any sort of 'vow' never to use foul language. It is simply that, over centuries, we learned so much foul language that it is dangerous for the ears of most ponies to hear us in a real temper. Palace staff must go through months of training on the off chance we have a bad day. There are words in languages we have read which strike a hearer deaf with their sheer obscenity. I am certain you have heard the story of 'Vaxlas The Sobbing'. He was a dragon who decided to land himself in Canterlot and declare himself its king four centuries ago.

Well, my sister was the pony who got him to leave. It involved little more than a particularly harsh appraisal of his personal hygiene."

- Princess Luna, Interview with 'Manehattan Now' magazine.

I stared up at the remains of the city council, sitting quietly in the billowing wind as the bodies swayed back and forth against the building, sometimes letting out a wet smack as they were pulled far enough away to hit the glass with a bit of force.

Most of them looked relatively peaceful in their repose, though there were several signs of extreme trauma to their lower bodies. I could see a few bits of bone jutting out of their thighs or hips where the blood had been washed away. It looked like they might have been chewed by a pack of animals, but someone wanted their faces to be recognizable. Councilpony Hard Line even had his signature gold ear-ring in place.

I wanted to throw up. That felt like the right thing to do. A pony who sees so many dead, familiar faces should throw up. Instead, all I could bring myself to do was sit there with rain running off the end of my nose.

Mom came up beside me and put a hoof on my shoulder.

“Sweetie...don’t look,” she whispered.

I swallowed and asked, “Will that make them not there?”

She was silent for a time, then put her forelegs around me and held me close. I hadn’t realized just how bad I was quivering until she did. My heart was thundering against her and I could feel my own pulse in my head.

“Can...can we get them down?” I asked, plaintively.

“They’re not...going anywhere,” she whispered, hugging me tighter.

“Dere be no dignity in dis death,” Wisteria added, softly.

My mother stroked my mane, tenderly as she held me to her aproned breast. “We’ll let somepony know they’re here once we get away from this place. They’ll be buried.”

I swallowed a couple times, but couldn’t seem to clear my throat. “I don’t think there’s enough gr-graveyards in Equestria for all the ponies who’ll need them.”

Nopony said anything for several seconds, before Wisteria leaned in to rest her muzzle against my ear. “Diamond Eyes...W-we be needin’ to get inside. Dis storm be growin’ nasty. Dangerous. I and I tinks der be tornados in de city soon if dis continue.”

I tore my eyes from the strung-up bodies of the council and tried to get up, only to find my knees shaking. I hadn’t really noticed the cold until just then; pegasi tend to run warm and fly high on a regular basis. Still, it was getting downright uncomfortable.

Stumbling toward the swinging doors, I tried to focus on the task at hoof. My hooves shook and I could still see the ruined bodies at the corners of my vision.

‘Come on, Swift. You can have a screaming breakdown later,’ I said to myself, though tears still streaked my cheeks and dampened my glass eyes only to be washed away by the rain. ‘Hardy would focus. He’d see the bodies and strut right in.’

In hindsight, it was probably a good thing I wasn’t Hardy; if I were, I wouldn’t have seen the bomb just inside the door.

It was little more than a glimmering box with a dozen shining wires poking out of it attached to the detonator mechanism, but bomb squad pre-training tends to stick with a pony. I had only a second to grab my mother before her hoof would have touched the door and set it off.

“Tourniquet! Warn them!” I shrieked across our telepathic link.

“Already—” she started to reply, before an explosion rocked us off our hooves, sending me tumbling against my mother who stumbled into Wisteria. I held my breath, wondering if I’d been too late and death claimed me before I’d had time to feel it.

The shockwave spread out into the sky and, momentarily, it rained backwards in a tiny section of Detrot.

A hot breeze blew around the side of the structure as debris rained down across that side of the courtyard. Fire billowed for a moment before being quickly extinguished by the blowing rain. There was a long pause, during which the whistle of water hitting heated stones was all we could hear over the storm.

My heart sank right into my hooves as I desperately reached out with whatever strange senses I’d been gifted, searching for nearby minds. The connection was spotty and felt like trying to read through cheesecloth, but I could feel other ponies somewhere nearby. My breathing hitched as I realized there were two holes, where thoughts and feelings should have been.

“There were bombs on the other doors, too. I...I managed to warn the...the remaining teams before they tried to go in,” Tourniquet murmured, at last. “They...they’re waiting on orders. Wildflower didn’t...she didn’t have time to feel anything. We’ll remember her. Her memories won’t be lost.”

I sniffled and pulled my mother up, steadying her.

“Wh-what in Tartarus?” she stammered, shaking as she looked up at the sagging bodies of the city council.

“Broadside trapped all the doors,” I muttered, shaking my head.

“How did you notice that?”

I reached up and tapped my new eye which made one of those slightly distressing ‘kerchink’ noises as it moved in my eyesocket.

“What about de other teams?” Wisteria demanded, swiping her mane out of her face.

“Safe. Wildflower’s group didn’t make it, but the others...the others are safe,” I answered, stumbling to the wall and resting my shoulder against it. I was suddenly so tired I could barely stand, but it mattered little; the day wasn’t over.

“Ye be havin’ a funny meaning for ‘safe’. Was it a bomb?” Wisteria asked, nodding at the door.

I pointed to the mechanism at the top. “It’s hooked up right there. It’s a simple electrical trigger in what looks like some kind of clay explosive.”

“Ye be...seein’ de bomb?”

“Don’t make me explain, please. I just...I just can.”

Wisteria bared her teeth and glared at the doors. “So say de Lady of Shadows. I gonna rip dat Broadside’s lungs out.”

“We need to get inside before we can do that,” my mom said.

“What about dis? Dis be trapped?” Wisteria asked, pointing at the thick concrete wall beside the door.

“Couldn’t we just go through the hole on the other side?” Mom asked, pointing off toward the explosion.

“The building is designed to have collapsable defense points in case of breach. We’re going to have to be very careful. There’d be a lot of rubble we’d have to climb over. Not to mention...W-Wildflower’s body,” I muttered softly, then turned to the wall, tracing my eyes up and down to see if it’d been tampered with. Aside from the normal electrical wiring, there didn’t seem to be anything. “I don’t think the wall is trapped, though.”

Hefting her gun arm, Wisteria poked a button on the side of the Moon weapon, then raised her foreleg to point it at the wall. I took a couple steps back, pulling my mother along as she shot me a quizzical look. Covering my ears with both hooves, I shot Wisteria a quick nod.

A lance of brilliant white energy arced out from the Aroyo’s leg, slicing straight into the concrete like it wasn’t even there. Red hot stone boiled out of the contact point, dribbling onto the granite with a squeal as it hit the chilly air. Wisteria traced a gentle arc in the stone and, as she finished, the light faded and left only a softly glowing circle on the wall.

Turning on her heels, Wisteria lined up her back hooves and unleashed a buck that would have knocked the block off a minotaur. The wall slammed inward with a burst of dust and smoke which left me coughing, waving a hoof in front of my muzzle as I danced back against the side of the building. Standing there, stacked up in a short row, we waited for some sign I’d been wrong about the defenses. When we’d sat there for a full minute without any greeting gunshots and the air had cleared a little, I peered cautiously into the gaping hole.

The P.A.C.T.’s lobby was full of a thin, hazy dust, as though nopony had been in to clean in some time.

It was a place I’d immediately felt a certain comfort the first time I’d clutched my mother’s hoof as she pulled me through those spinning doors. Something about the eight spiraling pillars holding up the two story high ceiling put me in mind of the legs of elephants; something secure and solid to hold the world up. Back then, posters of brave troopers fighting off dozens of monsters decorated every wall, showing off their heroic histories.

It was a foal’s dream come true. Particularly a filly with too many comic books stuffed in her closet.

That’d been many years ago, during one of the P.A.C.T.’s recruiting days where young ponies were invited in to see the facilities, firsthoof. I’d watched them fire off lightning cannons that turned a dummy dragon into a burst of feathers and straw. I ran their junior flight course and scored a speed record.

The times between were as unkind to my self-image as they’d been to my image of the headquarters. Where I’d seen stability and a future of heroic action in defense of the city, now I could only see the shadows where enemies might lurk. It was a depressing change, but no more so than what the rest of Detrot had undergone.

“No targets,” I whispered.

“I and I go first,” Wisteria added, then put a hoof on my mouth before I could tell her just what I thought of that. “I be expendable. I die, I go wid de Lady of Shadows. Ye be Diamond Eyes and de Warden of Everfree. Ye die, den Crusada...do ye want him goin’ mad? No. So, I go first, ye follow and watch for traps. De other teams, dey come in and sweep de floors below.”

I shot her a hard look, then slowly nodded. Turning back to the hole, she braced herself, spread her wings, then galloped for the receptionist’s desk. It wasn’t much cover, but it was low and wide enough for a pony to get over without taking to the air.

Throwing herself over it, she hunkered down, sweeping her Moon gun back and forth across the balconies above the lobby.

After a long moment, I released the breath I’d been holding.

“Wisteria?” I called out. “You okay?”

“I and I be fine!” she shouted back. “It stinks like de dead in here!”

Now that she mentioned it, I could smell something unpleasant wafting from the interior. Trotting in after her, I kept my eyes on my hooves, looking for trip wires.

A giant pile of rubble and collapsed beams lay across one wall, sealing shut the hole where poor Wildflower tried to make her entrance. It was still smoking, lightly, but a fire suppression spell seemed to be keeping it in check. There was more blood on the various surfaces around the room than poor Wildflower’s death could account for. It seemed like somepony had, at one point, been liberally spraying it around on various surfaces.

“Broadside won’t use enchanted traps, Mom,” I said softly as my mother’s horn lit up and she began waving it around the room. “He doesn’t like unicorns very much.”

“Swift, he’s an insane—”

“Quite right, filly!”

I slapped a hoof over my muzzle to stop myself from screaming. Broadside’s voice sounded like it was right in my ear.

My mother grabbed my shoulder and yanked me behind one of the black, industrial style chairs strewn around the lobby. It was pretty poor cover if somepony tried to take a shot at us, but any cover is better than nothing. I sat there and tried to quell my panicked breathing, the Hailstorm’s turrets swinging wildly from one end of the room to the other. Still, no targets presented themselves.

“He can hear us,” my mother whispered.

“He can see us,” I replied, pointing toward one of the room’s upper corners. A boxy little security camera was aimed straight at us.

“You can get up. I haven’t used a mare today, and that pathetic creature that walked into my little trap won’t be coming up to greet me. A waste, really. She might have been lovely under all those tattoos.”

“I and I gonna stomp’em...” Wisteria snarled, pulling herself out from behind the low cover she’d been crouched behind.

Broadside laughed, a belly laugh that shook the dust in the air as it echoed out of the headquarters’ public address system.

“You are welcome to come and try, gutter trash. I’ve killed more than a few ponies with those silly facial markings just this week. I amused myself, first, of course. Even members of your little band of streetwalkers were quite upset at the sight of a stallion with mouthfuls of their guts.”

Getting to my hooves, I dusted myself off. It didn’t do much for the impacted blood and filth in my tail, but the gesture felt right. A pony should look her best when meeting a foe.

Raising my voice, I called across the lobby, “Colonel Broadside! For crimes against Equestria and the city of Detrot, I am placing you under arrest! Surrender or we will use force to subdue you!”

My mother stared at me like I’d just said I was going to fly to the moon as silence stretched out for several seconds.

When the speakers sputtered again after what seemed like a long time, all I could hear was the stallion’s raucous laughter on the other end. It took him a bit to get control enough to grab the mic.

“Oh filly, I’m going to enjoy ruining you. Come on up! Up and see the Colonel! I’m half-way through dinner and I’d hate to miss dessert. No more bombs for you. Just a little elevator ride, then I’ll have you and the streetwalker and that bitch in the apron one after another!”

There was a soft pop that seemed to indicate the mic shutting off, but I felt sure he was still listening to us.

“Elevator?” my mom asked.

“It’s at the top of the stairs,” I replied.

“Dat one be mad enough to let us go to him?” Wisteria asked, trotting out of cover to stand in front of the grand staircase leading up to the balconied second floor. The lobby of the P.A.C.T.’s headquarters was distantly modeled on The Castle, either as a joke by the architects or as a case of coincidentally syncing design.

“He’s not crazy, or at least, not crazy like that,” I said, softly. “There are stories of Broadside taking down a hydra by himself. He’s fought every kind of monster that’s ever come anywhere near Detrot’s borders. If there’s anypony who deserves to be confident he can kill us...it’s him.”

“Ye be soundin’ like ye admire him.”

I chewed on my lower lip nervously for a moment.

“I...I used to. I used to want to be him. Meeting him was one of the most spectacular moments of my life and...and finding out what he is was one of the worst. I really hoped he was brainwashed or something, because he should be a hero of Equestria. I know he’s not, though.”

“Well, you’ll get the pleasure of a little romp with me before your end, missy,” Broadside mocked over the speakers. “Join us! My dinner plate is starting to look empty, and I’d hate to have to come looking for you!”

I glared up at the security camera, but there wasn’t a ready retort in mind. Besides, unlike the Detective, I didn’t need my enemies angry for them to make mistakes. Everypony had underestimated me since the day I was born, a runty little pegasus with wings and dreams too big and legs too short.

“I can freeze the floor of the elevator and break us out if I have to.”

“Can’t we just take the stairs?” Mom asked.

I shook my head. “They come out in the same place: right beside the elevators. If he really wanted us dead, he could have just sat outside on one of those anti-dragon guns and taken a shot at us. Or he could have set up another line of defenses in here, or just gassed the lobby with something nasty. He wants us here. He wants a fight.”

“Dat means...he kills de rest of de team to...what?”

“Even the odds,” my mother angrily muttered. “He’s got a hundred battles under his belt. He must have known the tactic we’d use, or at least suspected it. He whittled us down so he could fight whoever survived.”

Reaching out with my wings, I pulled both of them close and lowered my voice until I was pretty sure the mic pickups couldn’t hear us. “Do...do you think he was really that far ahead of us?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no, but we should assume so.”

I shook my head. “You’d have to be crazy to walk into a combat scenario like that.”

Wisteria nodded at the hole in the wall. “We go home?”

“Not a chance,” I replied, then spread my wings and leapt into the air, my backdraft sending both of them tumbling head-over-flank.

My mother and Wisteria didn’t have anything like enough time to right themselves before I folded my feathers into a close flight pattern and dove for the elevators at the far end the balcony. I slapped a hoof on the ‘call’ button and the doors dinged open. Throwing myself inside I frantically tapped the ‘close-door’ and leaned out just in time to catch the briefest glimpse of my mother galloping up the stairs, her expression full of a thousand dinners to be meted out without dessert. The doors slid shut just seconds before she reached them.

I’m pretty sure, if she’d caught me, there would have been a spanking in my immediate future. Considering what I’d just done, I probably deserved it.

“Swift, you open this door this second!” she barked, only a little muffled by the heavy steel between us.

Reaching over, I pressed the only lit button on the control panel. It was labeled ‘Floor 10, Briefing Room’. The elevator began to rise and I gulped a couple breaths, momentarily reduced to full body shakes as the events of my day started to catch up with me.

There were so many moments when death was right there, waiting to snatch me. All that kept me safe was a bulletproof jacket and a whole heap of luck.

Looking down, I poked at my badly weathered, police issue armor. There was a fresh hole in the fabric on my chest where something like shrapnel had punched through, but it wasn’t going fast enough to do more than tear the surface and scratch the metal plate underneath. I hadn’t even noticed the hit.

“That was a dirty trick, little filly.”

Broadside’s voice broke into my thoughts and I froze, pressing myself to the wall before realizing he was coming through speakers in the elevator, again.

I looked up at the ceiling and shook myself off. “It was what I had to do. I took my oath to protect Detrot seriously.”

“You know, it took me a bit to put a name to your face. You’re that scrub who beat the stuffing out of that cockatrice with her bare hooves. Swift Cuddles, am I right?”

“That was me. Now I’m going to beat the stuffing out of you!”

He let out a derisive snort of amusement. “Oh, I wish I could keep you around for a while. I have your psych profile just here. My, my, my. Child of a prostitute? No wonder you’ve got a hero complex. Hrmph. What I don’t know is how you haven’t transformed entirely. Every barracks room was adjacent to one of our spell circles. If you slept so much as one week in there, you were infected with the arcane conservancy. You should have turned into a ravening beast by now, happy to dance when I whistle.”

I bared my sharp teeth at the ceiling. “I have friends who take care of me and stopped your stupid magic!”

His voice took on a slightly somber tone. “Mmmm...those eyes are an interesting twist. My brother advocated for a little more ‘consistency’ in the creations of our spell, but I wanted deviation. You can’t make a new race off the back of a failed experiment like equinity.”

“Your brother is about to kill everypony!” I snarled back.

“Heh. He’s about to try.”

“W-wait...you know?”

“Of course I know. Do you think somepony gets to my position by being stupid?” he asked, sardonically. “We both survived in a family where few elder children reach adulthood. Breeding age is considered ‘quite old’. Our fathers and mother worked together to kill their parents before they came to Detrot. Then our fathers killed our mother. I watched them drag her into that hole and listened to her screams. Much like our sister’s screams, really. Pathetic. Unworthy.”

His voice was so matter-of-fact that I staggered against the wall as the elevator came to a stop. The doors opened on an empty office full of a dozen cubicles. I knew the layout by heart. The briefing room was at the far end of the hall, just beyond.

“If you know...why would you go along with this?” I asked, softly. “He’s going to murder...millions...”

“If there is one thing the Crusades proved, Miss Cuddles, it’s that people will find reasons to murder each other all on their own. We only gave them a nudge, and ponykind came out of that war stronger for it! Do you understand? We made dragons fear us!”

I stepped out of the elevator and let my vision wander across the walls. The flows of bright energy behind the drywall were all headed more or less into and away from the conference room. There was still only one target down there.

The elevator across from the one I’d just gotten into dinged and began to descend. I quickly aimed the Hailstorm at the doors. The turrets whined loudly as a sharp beam of freezing energy lanced out, coating the elevator from floor to ceiling in a thick layer of crackling ice. It probably wouldn’t be enough to stop my mom getting out, but it would give me a few minutes breathing room.

“If your brother fails and you somehow get out of the city, all of Equestria will know what you did. They’ll all come for you,” I growled.

“I welcome it. I will be as a knife upon the stone, sharpened and honed. I’ve slaughtered countless ponies. My life doesn’t matter except if I am the strongest I have faced. If another can kill me, then I’d shake their hoof on the way to Tartarus. But you? That’s not you, little filly. Come on in and we’ll play a bit. I’m almost done here.”

His voice was really starting to irk me. Straightening my flak jacket, I marched toward the conference room. My breathing was shallow, and I could hear my pulse in my ears. Truth be, I was terrified.

Tourniquet’s voice poked into my thoughts.

“Swift?”

“Yes, T? I’m about to do something really stupid, so could you make sure Hardy knows if I don’t make it?”

“You better make it, because I need an explanation of what you did to the city electrical grid! I’m going to be weeks putting things back together!”

“I’ll do my best. What’s going on with the storm outside?”

“It’s...it’s getting bad. Most of our fliers are grounded. You might be okay, but I’m pretty sure anypony with weaker wings is probably not going to want to be up in the sky. Wait...I can’t see you. Where are you?”

I paused outside the conference room, one hoof on the doorhandle.

“I’m at the top of P.A.C.T. tower. Broadside is on the other side of the door. He’s waiting for me.”

“Oh Celestia, Swift!—”

“I have to do this, T.”

“I...I know...but alone? Where’s your mom? Where’s Wisteria?”

“I couldn’t let them be here.”

“P-please tell me you’re not about to pull a ‘Hard Boiled’.”

“Sorry, T. This is how it has to be.”

“Then I’ll get you some backup from somewhere! The fighting is easing up on the east side and maybe—”

I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but I gently pushed her out of my thoughts. It was a mean thing to do and I was probably going to get an earful from everypony later. I was due more than a few angry words from my friends and loved ones. By my calculations, if I died, I could avoid that unpleasantness. If I lived, then I’d welcome a spanking and a dressing-down. Granted, all immediate calculations seemed to indicate I was going to miss out on a red flank and ringing ears.

Pushing open the conference room doors, I readied the Hailstorm to unleash a blizzard.

The all-powerful stink of freshly spilt blood almost sent me running back to the elevator as a small wave of red liquid rolled over my hooves. The tile floor inside the conference room was bathed in it, wall to wall, as though someone had opened a griffin slaughterhouse indoors. I gagged, covering my muzzle with one wing as I pressed up against the wall, trying to get a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, my wing didn’t smell much better than the room and I was going to need a solid week of preening just to make my feathers presentable after cleaning the grit and grime out.

I raised my head above the edge of my wing joint and peered out, trying to make sense of the abattoir scene in front of me. Everything was painted in varying shades of gore, from the walls to the ceiling to the long conference table down the middle of the room. Every inch seemed to have been used as a dinner plate by a beast with the table manners of a meat grinder.

At the far end of the room, a landscape window was lit by the thunderstorm. Before it sat a hulking figure in a giant, throne-like chair, and in front of him on the table were the remains of a pony. I’d have never recognized him or his meal, were it not for the P.A.C.T. armor he wore and the dead pony’s head sitting on the table between us.

Colonel Broadside stared down the table at me, casually chewing a piece of gristle.

Mayor Snifter’s gristle.

The old mayor’s face was locked in a stricken expression, his tongue protruding from one side of his mouth.

I wanted to throw up, again, but it just wasn’t coming. Maybe I’d gotten it all out, or maybe my stomach was too numbed by shock. I wasn’t even feeling frightened, anymore. All I felt was a sort of cold, angry thing boiling in my heart that I’d never really known before.

I stared slack-jawed at the two of them as the massive stallion picked up some unidentifiable piece of flesh from the mayor’s split open ribcage and tossed it into his own muzzle. His glistening, razor-sharp teeth glittered in the dull lights overhead and the flashes of lightning through the window. He bulged with more muscles than even a pony on steroids could hope for and his wings were so massive they lay spread on the floor on either side of him. Though I knew his fur was white underneath, his pelt was so stained with dried viscera he might as well have been brown.

On his back there appeared to be some kind of odd growth which took me a long minute to realize was not actually a part of him; it had the broad outlines of a gun with two long, disturbingly phallic barrels poking over his shoulders. It looked like it was made of some kind of skin or webbing, silvery and saturated in as much filth as Broadside was. Tucked in amongst it all, I could just make out the remains of what might have once been one of the Moon weapons, its guts cracked open and dozens of wires running into its interior.

“Welcome back, Miss Cuddles,” Broadside chortled after giving me a moment to study him. Blood dribbled off his chin as he reclined in his oversized chair which barely fit his enormous bulk. “Come and join me! The mayor and I were just having dinner and discussing the state of the city. I’m sure there’s a bit left over to fill a little filly’s stomach.”

I felt my belly lurch. The smell was making my tongue water, but it was some psychosomatic reaction. It had to be. I didn’t really want a piece of pony flesh, did I?

He didn’t wait for me to respond before continuing.

“Those eyes are an interesting mutation,” he observed, thoughtfully, as he gestured at my face with a bone clutched in the crook of is knee. “I’ll be cheered to examine them once I’m finished with you. We might incorporate something similar into the next generation, if they’re a beneficial alteration.”

Courage. Courage, Swift.

“C-Colonel Broadside. Y-you are under-...under...-”

“Arrest?” he finished cooly. “I do wonder where you’d find a pair of hoofcuffs big enough for somepony my size. I have gained a few pounds in my old age.”

I gulped as the Hailstorm’s reticle centered on his face.

“Please surrender. You can help us end this. I’ve killed enough people today,” I whispered.

“True,” he agreed, rising in his seat and sweeping the remains of Mayor Snifter off the table in front of him where they splashed into the bloody mess on the floor with a wet squelch. “I wondered if your little ‘band’ would make it here, to me. It seemed sure there would be some direct assault, and here you stand. My brother assured me you had enough troops for such a thing. He is usually right. I wish he’d told me it would be just one little filly. Still, you did make it. That shows a strength that makes you worthy of my seed. The creatures your womb bears will be—”

I didn’t let him finish that sentence. Gut churning implications were enough to turn my stomach as it was. The Hailstorm’s turrets spun up in a tenth of a second and a shining knife of magical force cut across the room, leaving a trail of frost in the air.

He wasn’t there when it arrived.

He’d been moving before I committed to the shot.

“That’s the spirit!” Broadside bellowed, swinging around on all fours and bucking the conference table. I held in a yelp as it skidded across the room and barely had time to leap up into the air, spreading my wings. The massive table crashed into the doors rather than turning me into an orange stain, but it was a close thing. I quickly landed on the disgusting surface, trying not to think about what I was standing in.

Glancing at the streak of ice that’d been left behind across his chair and the window behind him, Broadside ran his tongue across his blade-like teeth. “Impressive! You’ll like mine, I think. Might as well take off that armor. This will go right through!”

I had only a second to throw myself to one side as the two protrusions over his shoulders centered on me and a sound like a thumping bass in a nightclub shook the room. Something caught me in the shoulder, spinning me around. It wasn’t much more than a flesh wound, but it stung bad enough to make my eyes water.

I looked down and it was as though something had simply sliced away an even circular line of flesh.

“Mmmm, smell your blood there, I do! Let it never be said my brother’s technological ambition never bore fruit! Those griffins in that damned hotel never knew what hit them!”

I pulled a healing talisman out of my front pocket and slapped it across the wound, ducking low to keep the table between us. “Y-you killed the griffins in the Moonwalk?!”

“Heh, course! You don’t think I’d leave that pleasure to someone else, do you? My brother wants enough ponies alive to power his little project, but he was less specific with damned chickens. That table won’t protect you, by the way.”

I registered what he was saying just in time to get my hooves under me and launch myself forward as the air shook again, and I had the distinct sensation of something taking a few hairs off the end of my tail.

Scrambling out from under the table, I decided the only good defense was a good offense, particularly seeing as it was the only thing likely to keep me from getting turned into a pincushion. Fortunately, it seemed his weapon didn’t have much in the way of accuracy; it mostly fired straight ahead of wherever he was pointing it. It wasn’t much of an advantage, considering his bulk. I might need more than one shot to put him down and he only needed to hit me in something vital once.

The Hailstorm hissed as frost leapt across the room and drew a sharp line up the wall. Broadside was forced to dance to one side, which he did with disturbing speed.

Backing against the window, the giant stallion raised one rear leg and carefully laid it on the glass. “Ah, missy! In an hour my storm will rip this city to bits and take the damn dragons with it. Any of my children who survive will earn the right to breed! I’m looking forward to breeding you with a few of them!”

“You’re not going to live to see the next hour!” I snarled, getting ready to launch myself at him for another shot.

“Oh? Well, if that’s the case, then we best make it count! Truth be, this isn’t my kind of fighting! How about we take things outside, eh?”

Before I could recenter my aim and turn his head into an ice cube, his hoof slammed into the window. It exploded outward and a maelstrom wind nearly ripped me off my hooves, sending a torrent of blood and rainwater into my face. Broadside, grinning like the lunatic he was, spread his wings and let them catch the wind. He was yanked backwards into open air, but took only a second to right himself before soaring off into the storm.

I heard a crash behind me and stole a look back to witness my mother stomping down the aisles of the office like a bull with a red flag in her sights. She was mad enough I could make out a vein pulsing in her forehead. Wisteria was a few steps behind her.

“Mom! You’ve got to get somepony to the barracks! The spells that infect ponies and turn them into monsters are in there!” I shouted.

She paused mid-stride for a second. “What? Swift, where is Broadside?!”

“The weather factory is overloading and if it destroys this building, it’ll take the transformation magics we came to get with it!” I turned back to the gaping window and the raging storm beyond. “I’m going after the Colonel!”

I didn’t catch her reply. I could imagine it, but I didn’t want to hear it. The guilt was enough to make me ache, but arguing with her parental instincts wouldn’t save the city, nor would it stop the maniac outside from destroying everyone I loved.

In two bounds, I was out, wings wide, dangling over the disaster area that Detrot had become.

I didn’t have much time to examine the city. I had the vaguest impression of fire and buildings stabbing out of the ground like sharpened teeth or stalagmites. Then I was being wrenched about by crosswinds. I felt the tip of a wing touch the edge of the P.A.C.T. building before I could get control and lift myself a little higher on a passing thermal. Stretching out every flight sense I had revealed a minefield of dangerous rip-tides and whirling death traps that would put an unwary pegasus into a crashing spiral.

The cold winds were full of rain, but it wasn’t weighing me down much. More than anything, I was worried about frostbite. Pegasi are pretty weather resistant, but skin and bone have limits.

Off amidst the roiling clouds, I could just make out a sparkle of light. A tense second later, the Hailstorm’s targeting reticle appeared just over top of it.

I swooped barely fast enough to avoid Broadside’s attack and the sensation of immense energy tearing past my head made me let out an involuntary shriek. The very tip of one of my ears suddenly burned and I felt a slight tickle down the edge of it. I spared only a second to touch the freshly clipped edge of my ear, then filled my wings with as much air as they would carry and shot off towards where I’d last seen Broadside.

Most ponies think a headlong charge into enemy fire is a bad idea, and on the ground, that’s totally true. In the air, it’s super difficult to aim at something that’s flying straight forwards you. It’s much easier to strafe an opponent in the air than to take them down when they’re charging you head on.

Lightning crackled across the sky, momentarily lighting it as the wind whipped into my face. If I’d had my old eyes and no flight goggles, I’d have been blinded by the storm. As it was, it was only a chilly inconvenience. Unfortunately, the lightning seemed to be confusing the Hailstorm’s targeting system; I’d lost Colonel Broadside completely.

A winged shadow appeared on the clouds below me.

I dropped into a sharp jig, only to have him soar right over my head at a speed that beggared belief, disappearing into the cloud cover in seconds.

How’d he gotten above me? He must have calculated for me to charge him. He knew I was going to try that tactic and adjusted his trajectory. How do you out-maneuver a pony who has twenty times your experience in actual combat?

Twirling in place, I shot upwards, trying to get as much distance between myself and Broadside as I could without leaving the cloud cover. He’d know I was doing it, but making him chase me meant a few seconds to think.

What to do? The Detective would know. The Detective always knew.

How would Hardy beat Broadside?

‘He’d make him mad, so he’d make a mistake,’ I thought.

Oog. Making the pony who could turn you into a puddle with one good shot angry seemed like a bad idea. But then, Hardy always walked away from it.

‘Except when he got shot dead, repeatedly.’

No, it was a good idea. It could only be a good idea, because I didn’t have any others. But how do you make a pony like Broadside mad?

‘Well, he did say he wanted to...oh...’

Long ago, my mother taught me to defuse every situation with words, before I defused it with hooves. I’d never been a mean pony. It’s not in me to want to hurt people just for the sake of hurting them. My mom taught this same adage to the pony who sat beside me after almost every fight I’d ever been in. He was frequently the reason I was in those fights, and he’d taken a different lesson from it.

He’s my best friend.

He’s also one of the meanest ponies I know when you try to complain about his prices.

“Oh darling, he was mad because I wouldn’t hack off half my usual fee to bounce around on that sad little knob he called a penis. Anyway, it would have been a waste of both our times. There wasn’t enough there to make proper friction in a sippy straw.”

“If I wanted to have a male bore me, I’d pay one of the boys to read me an encyclopedia before I’d spend my evening with that one-and-done sack of can’t-top-to-save-his-own-life manic moose droppings again. At least the encyclopedia might have some tips in it. He sure didn’t.”

“He asked me if I’d do it for free. I said I wasn’t sure if my boss would agree with letting me charge by the inch.”

Despite the awful circumstances these thoughts entered my mind in, I felt myself turning a bit red. I could be pretty sharp-tongued on paper, but my mom had strong feelings about me learning any of Scarlet’s brand of bad language. She wanted, more than anything, for me to have opportunities outside the family business. Not that she felt there was any shame in the family business, but she thought a pony should be able to be whoever she wanted to be.

That meant not cussing like somepony who felt it was a personal challenge to make a stallion lose the entire Equestrian language for between fifteen and twenty minutes via use of his mouth alone, whatever use he might be putting it to.

Still, a mare can’t help but listen—from time to time—when her best friend is grumpy and her mom isn’t around.

So, I had a strategy. It was a terrible strategy, so it required an equally terrible battleground. Where to engage him?

There were plenty of options in the broken cityscape. I wanted to be sad about that, but I was mostly just scared out of my fur. I glanced around for the worst possible place for a pair of pegasi to fight, but was only able to catch short glimpses of the city below through the violently blowing winds and the swirling clouds.

I could almost feel Broadside bearing down on me from behind; I might have lost track of him, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t missed me for a second.

I could just make out the beginnings of what might have been a couple tornados starting to develop towards the outskirts, though none of them had touched down, yet.

A lightbulb popped on inside my head and I immediately tried to shut it off. It wasn’t a sane lightbulb. It was an angry, vindictive little glimmer from a pony who’d read too many comics. Unfortunately, it shined on, bright and stupid as could be.

I angled my wings, pulled them in close, and went into a falling dive towards where the clouds seemed to be densest. The skin on my face tightened as I beat against the air, driving myself faster, trying to draw as much attention as I could. A soft circle of air started to form around the end of my muzzle as the air pressure increased. I’d heard stories of speed freaks losing themselves trying to catch that halo. I always wanted to try it, one day, but considering what I was about to be heading into at much higher than terminal velocity I didn’t want to gamble on that kind of maneuver, but I wasn’t doing something much smarter.

I broke through the fire-lit clouds above the city and found myself right where I’d hoped: directly over the weather factory.

It was a spire of metal and cloud that someone, somewhere must have thought looked very ‘modern’. I thought it looked like a lumpy, metal ice cream cone that’d fallen cream-first in the middle of the city. For reasons that I’m sure were very sound and design conscious, it was tilted at about a ten degree angle, which didn’t help the illusion of a spilled treat. Giant puffs of cloud spilled from all sides, and where they normally looked like grey cotton leaking into the sky, in the darkness of the eclipse and in a state of near total overload, they appeared as some dangerous, red gas billowing from massive funnels.

Worse, the stabilization magics that normally kept the entire thing from making more weather than the local atmosphere could handle were apparently off. Once a pony got outside the field of enchanted calm immediately around the building, something close to a blizzard was blowing. Others parts of the city looked like they were experiencing gale-force winds, lightning strikes, and crazy electrical storms with balls of crawling energy leaping from building to building.

It made for some dodgy flying.

I tried to pull all the weather magic I’d ever really managed to figure out into my mind and focused on my wings.

‘Shape the air. Pull it past you. Let the clouds move on their own. Keep yourself steady. Don’t chase the halo.’

It was all great advice and in normal flight, most pegasi do it without thinking. Considering the awful condition of the air, the cloying smoke coming off the city, and the storm I was trying to navigate with all the grace of a chicken fired out of a cannon, it was hard to do each thing separately, much less put it all up together.

I cast around for some kind of entrance on the weather factory’s surface. I’d never been inside, but most pegasi get ‘The Weather Packet’ when they finish school, including me. Detrot’s packet included a mock-up of the inside of the weather factory; it was mostly a giant hollow inside where the clouds were assembled and shaped.

Fighting in close quarters with Broadside didn’t appeal very much and that gun of his meant there wasn’t really any such thing as ‘cover’, but it was better than the open air where he held all the cards.

Fortunately, I quickly found what I’d been looking for: an employee landing pad. Every old pegasus building had them and the weather factory, while not exactly ancient, was still old enough to qualify. The landing pad jutted from one of the exterior walls of the factory and wasn’t much more than a tongue of metal with some stairs, but it would do.

Just then, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.

I spread my wings wide and air-braked hard enough that I could feel my shoulders creak just in time for Broadside to blow past me, again, laughing like a mad pony as his backwash threatened to knock me out of the air.

He’d expected an attack after I pulled out of my dive and was already spinning around to face me, back beating his wings to create some distance between us, bringing his gun up faster than the Hailstorm’s reticle could get a solid lock with all the electrical interference in the air.

Drawing a breath, I shouted across the distance.

“How are you going to breed me with that pathetic little penis I saw when you went overhead? That couldn’t fill hotdog buns, much less mine!”

The second the words were out of my muzzle, I had to resist the urge to apologize. I kept my eyes on where Broadside was, but in the high winds and poor lighting it was hard to tell by body language alone what he might be thinking. I’d have lost track of him without the strange magics in my eyes, even with pegasus sight.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

Then he turned and I saw his face.

‘Oooh, he heard me.’

I bolted for the employee entrance.

Act 3 Chapter 70: Rain of Blood

"I will survive. I will survive. I will survive."

-Found hoof-written on a scrap of paper tucked behind a vase in the Vivarium.

I was so focused on the mad scramble to land and dash inside the employee entrance that I hadn't accounted for just how much air pressure was behind the doors of the overclocked weather factory. Tunnel vision; it's the sort of thing that costs lives. It very nearly cost mine as the fur on my face was blown back and I had to haul my wings in against my sides, shoving into the wind with all my strength.

The second I was inside the cold, humid space, the wind abated a little. I scrambled away from the door and nearly slipped on my face as my hooves tried to shoot out in all directions. I’d found myself on a metal catwalk that was covered in a layer of slick frost. It was dimly lit by flickering industrial lights that were, likewise, coated in ice.

Below the catwalk, I could see the central cloud forge. I’d never seriously thought about going into weather work—especially considering I could barely siton clouds without concentrating—but it was impressive to look down into the enraged heart of a hyperstorm held in place with little more than enchantment and stubborn hope. It looked like a swirling, cylindrical bundle of bright blue smoke flashing internally with plasma bursts from time to time as it writhed in a cradle of metal arms reaching out from the walls on either side. I don’t know why I thought it would be any other color; blue was as good as any for a storm mid-production.

I had only a moment to take in my surroundings before an enraged bellow came from behind me. I darted off to my left, barely able to keep my hooves on the slippery surfaces as I galloped into the maze of pipes and valves that provided vapor and magic to the weather factory. It was all badly lit and every circle of light felt precious against the black fog. The Hailstorm’s targeting system was barely functioning; I got only occasional glimpses of the reticle, always behind, always coming closer.

There was no question in my mind what Colonel Broadside would do if he caught me. I did have a couple places the details were thankfully a little vague, but all of them involved a short life full of pain and humiliation followed by a violent death. If I let that happen, Hardy would never forgive me.

It’s strange to think I’d only been his partner for a little over two months. I felt like I’d known him a lifetime. Technically several lifetimes.

When I’d graduated from the police academy and asked for placement, I don’t think anypony took me seriously. Even I didn’t. Not really. I never handled blood particularly well and I wanted to go into homicide? It seemed crazy to try, but my scores were high enough I could pick my department and the cockatrice incident earned me an awful lot of good will from somepony.

Hard Boiled wasn’t the stallion I thought he’d be. When someone’s record tells you their literal talent is justice, you expect somepony imposing. You think you’re about to meet a super-pony.

He was just a worn out stallion, only a little taller than me. When I saw him in Chief Jade’s office, for a second I thought there’d been some kind of mistake. How could he be the pony who brought in the Mauler of Elderberry Square? He looked like he had a barstool with his name on it somewhere.

He looked at procedure like most ponies looked at toilet paper. His best friend was simultaneously the scariest mare I’d ever met and somehow exuded this mothering aura that made me want to sit down and tell her what was wrong.

Then we fought, together. We bled, together. We almost died, together, again and again.

He pulled us through things nopony should have lived through, and despite it all, he was still that tired stallion who looked like he wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and pull the blankets over his head.

I’d left him to face something impossible and, just then, with the psychopathic Colonel coming after me, I wanted nothing more than to reach out and find Hardy beside me.

Too bad, I guess.

There, at the end, I was well and truly alone.

The magic coursing through the building was enough to set my fur on end and I could see the power, like threads of yellow liquid, pouring through the system. It was enough of a distraction that I almost didn’t see the wall of pipes resolving out of the mist until I was right on top of them. I braked with my wings and brought my forelegs up, rebounding off the metal surface and throwing myself to the left.

Broadside’s awful, mutant gun let off a burst of fire that nipped at my heels, but it felt a bit weak for some reason. I wondered what that thing’s upper range was. The Moon Guns had a pretty limited effective range, but he’d torn that one apart and done something to it that left it looking almost like it’d been infected with the hybridization spell. Unfortunately, the only good way to test its capabilities was to get shot again, and I only had so many ears to lose bits of.

The catwalk stretched above and below the central hollow where the storms were built, spreading out on all sides like a spider’s web propped up by a lattice of metal girders. It was a dicey place to fly, but my options were getting limited.

I spread my wings and tried to catch some air, flapping as little as I could in the tight space as I rocketed down the passageway past dozens of pieces of arcane industrial equipment, all churning away at maximum speed. Pipes were starting to burst and mist was leaking everywhere. I had to coast over a giant puddle of multicolored runoff that looked worryingly like liquid Beam.

“You’ll die begging, filly!” Broadside snarled.

I risked a look over my shoulder and his massive shape filled the corridor behind me. His bulging body put me in mind of a train, for some reason; a thing that would simply run you down and not even feel your body crushed beneath his hooves.

Unfortunately, it was then that my hoof caught and I went tumbling, nose over flank. I skidded face-first into the railing of the catwalk and my muzzle let out a worrying crunch, followed by a sharp spike of pain radiating from my nose, down my cheeks. Struggling up onto all fours, I had only a second to orient myself.

A battering ram seemed to come out of nowhere and I was spun around, again. I felt sure I should be seeing stars, but my new eyes didn’t seem to do that. I could still see perfectly, and what I saw was Colonel Broadside looming over me.

Coming to a stop at the end of the catwalk, I lay there panting, my ears ringing and my cheeks aching like I’d just kissed the front bumper of a speeding cab. He’d backhooved me hard enough that the muscles in my shoulders hurt. Bracing a leg under my chest, I spit something hard out on the catwalk. It was the tip of one of my sharp back teeth.

‘Your dentist is going to have an awful lot of questions,’ I thought.

I heard Broadside’s heavy hoofsteps approaching from off to my left.

“Filly, I swear, you have guts,” the colonel said. I tried to turn my head, but my neck twinged, stopping me right quick. “If somepony twice your size said that to me, I’d have called them brave, but you? A pint sized mare, barely got her mark? You must be crazy.”

I coughed into my hoof, then sat up, feeling for anything broken. Other than the unpleasantly crunchy feeling in my face, nothing seemed more than bruised. I swung my head around, staring up at where Broadside stood a foot away, staring down at me.

“M-my partner is crazy and h-he threw a wrench in all of y-your plans,” I said, adding a defiant smile. “I’m j-just following his example.”

“Your partner,” the giant stallion snorted, grabbing my chin with his hoof and turning my face this way and that. He forced me to look up into his deformed face, seeing the scars that crisscrossed his bloody muzzle and the mouth packed with curling, ripping teeth. “You mean that foolish police pony who delivered us the Helm of Nightmare Moon. What a damned bother he was. I saw him on the television before Skylark died. I saw him at that party at the Castle my brother attended. He had guts, too. Strange, that the last time I saw him he was more brass than pony and burning like a neat little pyre. Seems like that’s how ponies with guts tend to end up, no?”

I gritted my teeth, trying to call on my anger and that incredible magic that I’d unleashed during the fight with the P.A.C.T. death squad, but it just wasn’t there. Maybe Tourniquet’s power was too drained or she was too far away. Maybe the artificial storm was interfering. Maybe I was just too darn tired.

“M-my partner is ten times the stallion you’ll ever be,” I growled, struggling to back away.

The Hailstorm’s turrets were twitching in their cradles, but the targeting reticle wouldn’t appear. I’d been fighting for what felt like an hour and I’d only flown a little bit of that. The batteries were empty.

“You say he ‘is’?” Broadside mused, releasing my head and giving me a rough shove that sent me stumbling backwards. I was close to the railing and could feel the sucking energies of the cloud forge below. “What’d he do? If he’d sent a changeling in his place, it would have reverted the instant we filled it full of lead. Same with any illusory enchantments. Besides, none of that struck me as his ‘style’.”

“Y-you can’t kill him,” I growled. “He’s the Detective. He’s the S-Spirit of Justice.”

Throwing his head back, Broadside laughed, long and loud. It echoed off the pipes, taking on a strange and otherworldly quality. I edged toward the railing, trying to keep myself from losing it. He could kill me any second, so I had to keep him talking. Keep him interested. Keep him amused.

When the Colonel finally got control of his laughter, he turned to face me and took a few steps closer. “Heh, filly, I’m guessing you read an awful lot of superhero stories. Spirit of Justice. I hear some of what those fools in the streets called him. Bulldog, eh? I’ve killed dogs. Crusader? Some of those gangers prayed to a pony named Crusader. Others scream for this...Warden of Everfree to take them to the Lady of Shadows. Lately, they say nothing. Just lie there and don’t say a word while they’re killed. Spooky, gotta say.” He shook his head and grinned, fiercely. “But where was I? Oh, right. So Hard Boiled is alive?”

“You killed him, and all you did is make him angry,” I said, scooting farther from him. “He’s going to kill your brother.”

“Oh? If he does, I’ll shake his hoof,” Broadside replied, trotting over to the railing opposite me and peering out down into the cloud forge. He seemed unconcerned by my gun, as though he knew it wasn’t functioning. “I couldn’t kill my brother, and Tartarus knows I tried. I’m not ashamed to say he’s smarter than I am.”

“Wh-why do you fight for him? T-that thing in the basement of the house out in the Wilds?”

Broadside’s lip quirked on one side and he turned to look down at me, contemptuously flicking his short-shorn tail. “My brother has some hair up his backside about that. Thinks it might be some kind of ‘divine being’. Might be that he’s right, but it doesn’t matter to me.” Pressing his hoof to his breast, he raised himself up and stood to attention. “I am, as ever, a loyal servant. He has his projects. I have mine. I will see a ponykind that survives even this.”

“We were surviving just fine,” I said, bitterly, finally finding the strength to stand. He still towered over me, but standing felt better than lying there like a ragdoll waiting for him to give me another kick. “Colonel Broadside. You’re under arrest.”

He glanced at me. “What?”

I took a step back towards the railing behind me and continued. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can be used against you in a court of law. If you choose to continue active resistance, I will consider my life in danger and will respond accordingly.”

“Filly, you are out of your damned mind, aren’t you?”

“Probably, but I think if all ponykind has to rely on for a future is your penis, then we’re out of luck, aren’t we?”

The look on his face turned instantly stoney and he spread his giant, leathery wings, but I didn’t hang around to see what he would do next. I ducked under the safety railing and began to fall. The cloud forge raged under me, sucking at my feathers, but I held them close and dropped like a stone, trying to get every inch of speed I could.

I’d calculated my descent to take me past the vortex as best I could, but I didn’t know exactly how strong the pulling forces might actually be. Fortunately, the ground was a long way off and the power inside the vortex was just strong enough to bring me into a slight curve that followed the inside of the long cylinder opening below the forge itself. Magic pulsed through my atrophied weather senses and every part of me wanted to be well away from that cloud, but that wasn’t an option. I needed velocity and I needed Broadside to follow.

Just as I crossed under the vortex, I slammed my wings open and couldn’t hold in a shriek of pain as there was a pull in my chest. I’d injured flight muscles before and it didn’t feel like more than a sprain, but it still hurt, though not so bad as my hurt nose. If I survived the stupid thing I was about to do, I was going to wish I’d died in the morning.

Scooping at the air with my aching wings, I shot upwards on the side of the storm opposite the catwalk, trying to keep roughly the same speed I’d pulled into going down. Unfortunately, climbing is harder than falling.

‘Power. Come on, power!’

It could have been my imagination, but I thought the Hailstorm’s targeting reticle appeared for a tenth of a second. It would have to be enough. If it wasn’t, I was dead.

The cloud forge grumbled like a wild animal, as though it could feel an interloper crossing too close to where the storm outside was birthed. Any second, I expected to feel a lash of lightning clip me out of the air, but it never came, and the control spells keeping the pulsating monster weather formation in place held.

I caught sight of Broadside, hovering high above the vortex, right where a smart ambusher would be. He’d know I had nowhere to go. He’d know I’d have to try to get back on the catwalks to find the exit, unless I wanted to try to hunt for one at ground level. Pegasus logic dictated I avoid ground level like the plague, especially when in a panic, and Broadside still thought I was trying to run; underestimating me, like everypony else.

His mistake.

I darted under him, looked him right in the eyes, and hauled myself belly-up over top of the vortex, readying for another dive. I stuck my tongue out at him and flipped my tail in a way every filly is taught to avoid unless it’s her special somepony looking, holding it up as I began my second fall. Scarlet would have been proud.

Whatever demented will kept Broadside’s temper in check seemed to snap. His wings slapped against his hips with a whip crack that I could hear over the whistling of the cloud forge and he launched himself towards me. I started for the catwalks.

‘Make it look good.’

He came in fast enough that I heard the air rushing through his wingtips and snatched me out of the air like a hawk grabbing a sparrow before I’d even gotten close to the top of the vortex again. His forelegs crushed me to his chest and I yowled in pain that didn’t have to be faked in the slightest; my body was a mess and he’d just mashed my wings flat against him. His muscles felt like carved stone without an inch of give.

“No more little jokes, filly,” he rumbled in my ear. “I’m having you, right here, right now. You ever take a mating flight? Well, I don’t feel like chasing you, anymore.”

Something hard prodded against my tail.

“Me, either!” I shouted.

The Hailstorm purred as its turrets spun and dropped out of their sockets to either side. The barrels clicked loudly, then spun a hundred and eighty degrees until they were pointed backwards. A flash momentarily lit the underside of our bodies and I felt a bit of a chill on my hips.

Broadside went rigid from head to hoof.

I brought one rear hoof up and kicked as hard as I could. There was a sound that could be heard above the storm, above the wind, and above the clattering of overloaded machinery. It was the crunch of shattering ice. The pressure on my tail had vanished and something fell into the cloud forge below as the Colonel’s eyes instantly widened in shocked disbelief and pain. His forelegs slackened slightly.

Wrenching myself around, I wrapped my front knees around his barrel. He only had an instant to tense before my teeth found his throat. Every other inch of him was covered in muscle and tough, leathery hide that I’d have struggled to get through with a hacksaw, but the instant I bit down, I tasted sweet, sweet blood. Pony blood.

It was delicious. The best I’d ever had. I wanted nothing more than to bathe in it, but a little voice in my thoughts told me that would be a bad idea.

Broadside let out a wet gurgle and tried to push me away, but I held on, biting deeper, until I felt something hard. My jaw might not have been up to the task of ripping through his armor, but bone? Bone was lovely.

His neck crunched and he went limp, but he was still trying desperately to draw a breath.

He’d have started to fall immediately, were his wings not already extended. Pegasi who lose consciousness in mid-flight can glide for a long time.

I heaved my wings free and caught the air, forcing us into a spiraling drop. The forge was close. Too close for comfort. We were falling straight into it.

Mustering the last of my strength, I shoved his massive bulk as hard as I could. My knee popped and I made the mistake of clenching my teeth, which hurt like the dickens, but it was enough.

Broadside’s face was locked in deathly surprise, helplessly flailing his legs as he vanished into the vengefully howling stormfront. The cloud formation turned a worrying red. More of that delicious blood spattered my face, almost sending me wobbling out of the air as I hovered there overhead, watching to see if any of him made it through the other side. Nothing did.

The first herald of disaster is ever the soft ‘ping’ of a bolt coming loose. In that case, it was one of the bolts holding the right control arm that extruded from the wall to the outside edge of the forge. Watching with the kind of horror of somepony witnessing a train wreck happen a few dozen yards away, I froze as the entire control arm suddenly tore free, only to be sucked straight into the vortex.

Out. Away. Free.

Blood is delicious.

You need to kill more.

‘No. No, I don’t!’ I snarled, then felt around inside my head for another voice to counter the loud one that wanted more flesh.

‘Tourniquet!’

‘Swift!? You’re alive?!’ she replied, though it was distant and muted.

‘Weather factory! I’m inside the forge room! It’s going to blow!’

She only hesitated a moment. If it’d been two, I’m pretty sure I would have died.

‘At the bottom of the cloud forge, there’s a hatch! It’s labeled ‘safety bunker! Big red panel, yellow hoof-hold!”

Without another thought, I shoved a wingful of air and flew for the floor. Bits of metal and machinery began to fall all around me as the suddenly freed storm started to wrench at the building around it. Lightning spiked against the wall, sending dangerously dancing arcs across every surface and nearly blinding me, if I could still go blind.

Some distant part of me realized I was starting to fall a bit slower and that gravity felt like it was getting awfully light. Wind yanked at my tail.

I saw the floor.

There was the red hatch and the hoofhold. I reached out for it, trying to slow down to brace for touchdown.

Thunder cracked the air and a shockwave slammed into my back, driving me into the ground before I could get my hooves spread out. If I’d been coming in even slightly faster, I’d probably have cratered, rather than just having the air knocked out of my lungs. Bits of machinery were raining down around me as I lay there for a second, struggling to breathe.

I looked up to see the other control arm holding back the storm let go and begin to fall.

Grabbing the hoofhold, I wrestled the hatch open on squealing, rusted hinges. Below was a dark stairwell lit by flickering blue lights. Using one back leg, I shoved myself over the lip, hauling the hatch closed behind me, and struggled down the steps, bracing one hoof on the wall to keep from collapsing where I stood.

I stumbled and staggered, pulling myself along step by step. I could still taste Broadside’s blood, but it was mixed with my own which wasn’t nearly so tasty. The air in the safety bunker was stale and the space was little more than a hallway which took a curving path into the distance.

The ground started to shake under me and I tried to move a bit faster, but my joints hurt and nothing seemed to be working exactly right. I couldn’t even keep my wings from dragging along the floor at my sides.

Tourniquet’s voice broke into my quickly numbing thoughts.

‘Swift? Oh Celestia, I couldn’t feel you for a few minutes there! The weather factories are on their own generators and the storms are interfering with everything, but I think you’re pretty close to an external power line that’s still got juice. You...you...—”

‘I’m okay. Stinky, but okay. Broadside is dead. Is there another way out of here?’

‘You have to keep going! The building is collapsing and that storm is...oh skies, it’s ripping up the land around it. There’s an exit about five hundred meters further ahead.’

‘Is my mom safe?’ I asked.

‘She’s still inside P.A.C.T. headquarters and I think it’s...I don’t think the storm is strong enough to damage it anymore. It’s already losing power, but the other storms in the city are all going nuts. There’s tornados over the Bay of Unity and we’ve got like, six inches of snow near the Vivarium. Supermax is having heavy rain. There’s...Swift, it was raining blood for a few minutes.’

I felt myself involuntarily smile a wicked smile, then stopped because my face felt like I’d been slapped again.

‘It was raining Broadside,’ I replied.

‘Ick. Thankfully I don’t think anyone else noticed. I don’t think I’m telling them, either. Oops! Brace yourself!’

I threw myself against the wall and held my breath as an explosive decompression filled the hall behind me, followed by a wave of smoke and dust that left me coughing into my wing. The emergency lights ahead of me still blinked, but the ones behind had all gone dark. Cocking my head back the way I’d come, I could just make out the ceiling of the corridor, bent and broken, with a dozen steel girders impaled through its surface.

‘I was just standing there,’ I thought, dumbly.

‘That was the weather factory collapsing. Swift, you’re not safe, yet. The city is still being attacked and the monsters are still out there. Can you fight or do you need me to send somepony to get you?’

I lifted one wing, inspecting the damage. There were an awful lot of missing feathers, though none of them were flight essential. I just wasn’t going to be very agile, even if I hadn’t pushed every single major muscle group beyond the limits.

Turning to look at my gun, I tried to will the Hailstorm to work. It let out a ready-sounding buzz, the turrets rose, and a flicker of frost appeared on their barrels. It wasn’t much of a charge, but it was enough.

‘Just direct me to the sewer, T.’

‘O-okay. Where are you going?’

‘I...I’m headed toward Uptown. If the shield comes down, Hardy will need backup.’

‘Swift, Nightmare Moon gave you a list of instructions a couple days ago, didn’t she? Wasn’t one of those to let Hardy fight the battle in Uptown by himself?’

‘I’m going to. But when he’s done, we both know he won’t be in any condition to save himself.’

Rather than reply, Tourniquet filled my mind with the grand map of the sewer system. I picked a promising-looking direction and set off, limping towards my partner. A quick thought occurred to me and I pulled my bulletproof vest open, lifting out a ladybug onto the tip of my hoof. It shook its thorax and looked up at me, expectantly.

“Sir...Hardy. I don’t know if you saw what happened, but Broadside is dead,” I told the tiny insect, setting it between my ears. “I hope that was all enough, because I’m afraid I have to request tomorrow off. If you can hear this, you better be there to take a vacation with me, or I’ll tell Taxi on you.”

There was a little itch on my upper lip and I quickly wiped it away with my other leg. It came away red. I went to wipe it on my chest, then stopped as I gazed down at the bunny patch sewn over an old hole. I couldn’t even remember what’d made the original tear. Funny. It was a mess, but one tiny corner of one ear was clean.

I wiped my hoof on the wall, instead. Taking a deep breath, I continued limping along the hall, trying to inhale as little dust as possible.

Hardy was waiting.

Act 3 Chapter 71 : Taxi's Day

“I am the driver.

I am the victim.

I am the slayer of my master’s enemies.

I am the right hoof of justice.

I am everything that my best friend needs me to be.

I am the Shine.

I am death.

My name is irrelevant.

Today?

Today, I am Taxi.”

“Miss Taxi?”

“Hmmm?”

“Miss Apple Bloom is waiting for you in the war room. Mister Limerence left a few minutes ago and Miss Cuddles is going to begin her attack soon. Hard Boiled is still resting and Miss Bloom says she wants to make a stop off to get something from the Skids before you take the Prince of Detrot on to the refugee camp. Vexis and Ambrock...the...the pair of dragons the Warden of Everfree brought us...are waiting to transport you.”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“Your weapons are ready. I cleaned them myself and made sure everything is tight. They’ll be in the air carriage.”

“Mmm.”

“I...I’ll be going now. O-one of the Marked will be outside and you can tell them when you’re ready.”

There was the sound of a closing door and retreating hoofsteps.

I slowly opened my eyes and let gentle images of rainfall over a field in the Zebrican savannah fade away.

‘She needs a new left kidney in the next two years—”

‘Not now.’

I unfolded my back legs and shifted my hips, letting the pain retreat a little. The pain was never really gone, but it would take holidays from time to time. I hadn’t let it, of late. It was all that was keeping me sharp.

Getting to my hooves, I pulled my braid over one shoulder and exhaled, staring at the black on white pattern. My surrogate mother had liked to brush it and even if I wasn’t much of a daughter, I’d let her sit me at her vanity and spend fifteen minutes combing out the tangles every morning. She’d lost her own daughter to a miscarriage, after all, and it was what she needed.

Supermax’s ‘private rooms’ were only isolation cells, but they were comfortable enough since Tourniquet’s various renovations at the hooves of the Aroyos. The cot was clean and the pillow, fluffed. Better than I’d had in some time, really. I hadn’t been back to my apartment to check whether or not it still stood. Granted, if it was still there, it’d never been much of a home. I mostly stored knick-knacks and showered there. Most nights, the cab was my bedroom. I could lay there, listen to the radio, and if anypony got in I had an excuse to go for a drive.

Then a dragon set fire to the Night Trotter.

I’d slept in the Dragon Flagon Wagon when I could, but for various reasons it wasn’t an option just then.

An hour’s meditation calmed my thoughts somewhat, but I still felt a deep-seated, gnawing anxiety knowing my best friend was about to get himself killed. Again. We’d planned and discussed and prepared as much as ponies could. Funny, I guess, that none of us bothered to say ‘goodbye’ at the end of that meeting.

Turning, I picked up the list Hardy’s Nightmare Moon-possessed body had shoved into my hooves a couple days back and lifted my saddlebags off the pillow beside it. I ran a hoof fondly over the painted checkerboard pattern before throwing them around my hips. Then, thinking better of it, I pulled them higher around my barrel and reached down to close the buckle.

I glanced at the list, having already memorized it top to bottom, then carefully turned it sideways and started ripping it into tiny little pieces, scattering them under the bed. Reaching back, I felt through my fur for one of the ladybugs that’d been riding on me for the last hour. Finding one, I lifted it to where I could see the little creature. It sat back and flexed its wings, then gave me an attentive buzz.

“Are you in contact with Hardy?” I asked it.

The ladybug nodded its entire body.

“Tell him to stop fantasizing about Scarlet and Lily. He might need to spend a week with both of them in a cabin somewhere, but I need to think clearly about what the city needs and he’s throwing me off my game.”

The insect let out what I thought was an amused chitter, then burrowed back into the fur on my leg.

A police issue walkie-talkie sitting on the end table crackled for a second, then the call light lit up. Before I could pick it up, a voice broke in.

“Hey, Miss Taxi, the delight of Detrot’s streets! Gypsy here! You ready to get this show on the road?”

“As ready as one mare can be. What are the royalist dragons doing?”

“The ones in the city? I can see three or four from here. They seem to be more alert than they’ve been in recent days. They’re acting like they’re waiting on something.”

“Should we have a bet on that being the white elder dragon? What was her name? Propana?”

“That’s her, and I wouldn’t take a bet against it. If she’s headed in to join this battle, then our problems just multiplied. I have some files from the war in here, and Propana is big.”

“We knew it was likely she’d be on the way. If she falls, the rest of the dragons will retreat and the city can be evacuated.”

“That’s a big ‘if’...”

I glanced back at the scars where my cutie-marks once were and smiled, quietly, to myself.

“If she dies, they’ll retreat to get new orders. Dragons tend to have the fight go out of them when their leader falls.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Cinching my saddlebags on, I opened the cell door. A young Aroyo colt with Tourniquet’s red crescent-shaped mark on his forehead of all places was leaning against the wall, playing with a paddle-ball. Then he straightened up smartly and tucked the paddle-ball away in his poofed pink mane.

His eyes immediately began to glow.

“Miss Taxi?”

“Just Taxi, Tourniquet,” I said, nodding down the otherwise empty prison corridor. “Update me. Where do we stand?”

The colt’s body took up a leading position a couple body-lengths in front of me. “We’ve got plenty of bodies, but a shortage of knowledgeable soldiers and gun users. Iris Jade was able to teach me a few offensive spells and I’ve been teaching all the Marked and they’re teaching everyone else. The army is...mostly ready. As ready as anything cobbled together this fast could be. I’ve got Marked in the sewers near every street corner and started moving groups of ponies to every corner of the city to hit every known P.A.C.T. location or identified dragon roost simultaneously.”

The fur on the back of my neck stiffened as both the scale and terrible reality of what was about to happen momentarily brought on a case of nerves.

“This is going to be a slaughter,” I muttered.

Tourniquet turned to look at me, the colt’s body adopting a slightly indignant pose. “I am not going to let anypony die needlessly. Swift told me to keep ponies alive, so I’m keeping ponies alive. Those refugees on the outskirts will need us.”

“I know. Celestia, I do know,” I said, shaking my head. “When I was with the buffalo for a little while, the shaman I spent a weekend getting stoned with described this emotion that sometimes comes before a sacred stampede. Those stampedes...sometimes buffalo die in them. They fall and the ones behind run them over.”

Tourniquet tilted the colt’s head to one side. “Why do they have them, then?”

“He said if they didn’t run together, then they would all run alone. No buffalo could think of anything worse than looking around and finding themselves without their herd. A few died, from time to time, but many more lived because they knew they would have to run as one, one day. It encouraged a certain cooperative mindset, even across tribes. That feeling he told me about was always there, though. It’s the feeling of riding the edge between life and death, like a tightrope that just won’t stop moving.”

“What happened after he told you about this...feeling?” Tourniquet asked.

“Well, he painted me with some mud and then I went for a nice long run across the plains with a bunch of buffalo. I broke three ribs, sprained an ankle, and earned the name ‘Crazy-Mare-Who-Runs-Too-Fast-On-Uneven-Ground’.”

Rolling the colt’s eyes, Tourniquet went back to trotting along in front of me. “Before you go for any dangerous runs, you better see Miss Bloom. She looked downright excited. Whatever she wants to get from the Skids has her almost bouncing on her hooves.” She hesitated in place for a moment, then turned back to look up at me. “Can I ask you something...um...Taxi?”

“It might be my last chance to answer you, so go right ahead. I don’t think I’ve got many secrets worth keeping, anymore.”

“Phew, they weren’t kidding about you being grim sometimes,” Tourniquet muttered.

“Who are ‘they’?”

Tourniquet tapped the side of the colt’s head with one hoof without breaking stride. “The Marked talk to each other an awful lot. Some days I feel like a switchboard operator and other times like a spy. They don’t seem to mind it. They know they can leave anytime they want to. Still, they talk about all four of you. Hardy, Limerence, and Swift...and you. Little Mags sometimes, too, but that’s mostly the kids. The kids like her.”

I cracked a little smile, then quickly buried it. “That’s interesting. What’d you want to ask me?”

“Oh! I...I guess I don’t know how to be polite about this, but how do you always know what people need?”

“It’s my talent,” I replied, gesturing at my flank.

“I know that. I just don’t understand how you do it. Hardy has this really physical reaction to injustice. He thinks he hides it, but when something hits him, he does this little dance with his hips like a bee just stung him. Swift has to write things down. Limerence...just waves his horn and everything falls silent. I don’t understand you, though.”

Pulling my braid over my shoulder, I patted it nervously for a moment. “Call it ‘voices’ in my head. I tried to ignore them for a long time, but lately...Hardy said I should kiss and make up.”

“Really?” The construct hummed softly to itself, then asked, “What did those voices have to say about Salty?”

“Who?”

“Sea Salt. The mare who was in your room just before you finished meditating.”

“Oh...”

The colt’s body rounded on me and Tourniquet prodded me in the chest with his hoof. “You did pick up something, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t meet her glowing gaze for several seconds. “S-she needs a kidney.”

“And...were you going to tell somepony that?” she demanded.

“You knew,” I said.

“Of course I did! And if she lives through today, she’ll get a kidney. But that’s not what matters. Were you going to tell somepony?”

I swallowed and slowly shook my head. “I can’t...I can’t live like that.”

Tourniquet squinted up at me, then took a step back. “Like what? If she wasn’t one of the Marked, you might have saved her life.”

Pushing past the colt, I headed for the door to Tourniquet’s chamber. She quickly caught up with me, but I just moved a little faster.

“Come on, what is it?” she asked.

“Ponies...Ponies don’t need somepony like me telling them what they need. Hardy needs me, but everypony else?” I pressed a hoof to my chest and tried to still my breathing before it became panicked. “I’ve tried, Tourniquet. I’ve tried to help everyone who needs help. I almost lost my mind. This city is a yawning maw full of need, even at its best.”

“So why did you stay?”

“I stayed for Hardy,” I replied without hesitation.

Pressing the colt against my side, she brought me to a stop and said, in a soft voice, “Does he need you, today?”

I shut my eyes and held very still. Reaching out, I tried to touch Hardy’s feelings, but he was too far away. That or he wasn’t feeling much, or he was drunk, or one of a hundred other things. It was so much easier when I was close to him.

“I don’t know,” I said, after a minute.

“What about me? What about the city?”

“I-I don’t want to know,” I whispered.

“I’m pretty sure you think you’re going to die today, anyway. What will it hurt to see? I know you’re curious. Swift tells me a lot of things. She told me about that first day, on the crime scene, when you tried to wait in the car. So why not take a look?”

‘You need to see.’

‘I don’t!’

‘You will see.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘I need to show you.’

And I witnessed.

I saw the bloody streets and dead foals laying unburied where they fell.

I saw a hospital that’d been sealed off, the patients still inside. The doctors were sleeping in shifts to keep their charges alive for weeks on end with fewer and fewer resources each day. They were starving, but they kept their patients fed even as they fell ill themselves.

Across town, a family who’d prepared a basement bunker with food and water were eating their last ready-to-eat meal before the father would have to go out into the city to search for more.

There were thousands of ponies out there, tucked away in whatever corners they could find, hiding from the monsters and gangs of roving looters.

The jagged teeth of the city ringed a fiery maw into which all the pain of Detrot poured: Uptown.

There—in Uptown—some greater need existed. It was a fire that scoured everything it touched. It consumed all and was forever hungry.

Above it all, four lights glittered in an empty sky, devoid of stars.

I came back to myself with Tourniquet standing over me, gently shaking my shoulder.

“Y-you didn’t have to do that,” I muttered, though not really to her.

‘Yes, I did.’

“Yes, I did,” Tourniquet replied, putting a hoof around my shoulders as she helped me to my hooves. “You were set on dying out there today. You were going to throw yourself in front of Hardy and let them kill you as some kind of ‘final act’ of martyrdom. I can see it when you look at him. You think you have to die to repay all he’s given you. Well, now you can’t.”

I pushed myself up off the cold concrete, the faces of all those ponies in desperate need still flashing in my mind.

“I...I saw the city, Tourniquet. There’s a whole hospital full of ponies that have somehow been overlooked out there and—”

“I know about them.” she said, tilting the colt’s head as though thinking, “That’s the Apple Peach Family Emergency Hospital. There’s no good sewer access nearby and a dragon roosts on the rooftop. It’s been keeping us from approaching and the doctors won’t abandon the patients who can’t be moved or they’d have already left.”

“You...you knew?”

Reaching up, the colt’s body tapped me on the chest. “I don’t know exactly how your talent works, but I’ve observed enough to make some educated guesses. You looked at what I need, right? Well, I’m the city.”

Shuddering, I braced a hoof on the wall and almost tumbled onto my face. “My talent made me look. I didn’t choose to. Those ponies at the hospital ran out of food three days ago. They’re down to nutrient bags.”

“We’ll try to divert a small force with some supplies to get there. It’ll be easier if we can drive the dragons off. You know, the Aroyos call you one of their ‘loa’ now?”

I paused, brought up short by the thought. “One of their spirits? Don’t I have to be dead to be a spirit?”

“They call me the ‘Lady of Shadows’, and I’m not dead. They treat the Ancestors that way, too. They think you watch over them. They hear stories about Hardy, but they also hear stories about you. How you brought him back from the dead. How you stood by him when he went into all those dark places. How you somehow managed to fight the control of The Office. Mister Limerence was really impressed when he told that one, by the way. Bones gave us a more dramatic retelling and he’s far more entertaining, but the gist was the same.”

“I only remember bits and pieces of what happened in there,” I murmured.

“Then take my word for it. You were amazing.”

“What does this have to do with me needing to see all that horror?” I asked.

“What doesn’t it? If you die, there is nopony to see those secret needs. This city needs you, Sweet Shine. Now come on, Miss Bloom is getting antsy.”

Tourniquet’s antechamber was packed with creatures all reclining on the various ratty couches or slumped on cots, talking to one another in hushed voices.

The colt the construct was riding paused at the door and held his leg out for me to head in, then his eyes dimmed and he gave me a curt nod before trotting off in the opposite direction.

I glanced around, trying to get a measure of the room.

Dragon Envoy Firebrand knelt against the wall in a meditation pose as she sharpened one of her swords. She looked entirely engrossed, but for one perked ear-fin that was keeping track of the ongoing conversation between Ancestor Apple Bloom and a pony I didn’t recognize, but who wore plenty of Aroyo tattoos and a red crescent on their chest.

Beside them sat a razor thin mare in a feathered hat, wearing a white sash across her chest that marked her as one of Stella’s Stilettos. She was very carefully ignoring everypony else while somehow still paying close attention.

Apple Bloom looked up as I came in and all but danced up to the tips of her hooves, her hat bobbing as she excitedly waved me forward. “Oh, Miss Shine! Ah am so pleased ya made it! Ah was about to send somepony for ya!”

“Is this everyone?” I asked.

“Well, the Prince of Detrot is waitin’ on us upstairs, but Ah remembered Ah happen to have a lil’ somethin’ that might make this a tad easier. We gotta head by the Skids, though. Ah’d damn near forgot where Ah parked it after all these years. Ah hope the storage spells held.”

Firebrand slipped her sword into its sheath and rose, folding her massive wings against her shoulders so they didn’t brush the ceiling. “I take it from context that you have some piece of Crusades era technology tucked away somewhere, Crusader Apple Bloom?”

“Ah prefer ‘Ancestor’, but Ah do indeed! Now, Ah don’t wanna get anyone’s hopes up, but Ah think Ah might have a solution to our ‘Propana’ problem. Maybe. We gotta get goin’ though if we’re gonna make it in time. The attack is startin’ soon.”

“I saw our logistics reports,” I said, reaching back and pulling a tuft of papers from my saddlebags. “We don’t have enough heavy weapons to hit all of the dragon roosts, not to mention any additional dragons that’re waiting outside the city.”

“Don’t have ta! All we gotta do is bring down Propana. If she falls, the rest will scoot! Ah fought dragons through the whole war. Ah know how they think.”

“Indeed. I concur. However, Propana is a dangerous foe,” Firebrand interjected, testing the air with her forked tongue. “She battled a dozen other females to become the Dragon King’s consort. She is a monster by any measure and when she is angry, she is nothing short of insane. My squad couldn’t beat her together, and we will not be together for this battle. I have spread my companions to give the best hope of destroying various roosts and protecting the refugee camp on the outskirts.”

From the couch nearby, the stiletto in the hat, who’d been silent up until this point, piped up. “Pardon me, Miss Shine. Mistress Stella says that you need to get Propana to fly in low over the Bay of Unity, then he has a way to deal with her.” The mare shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know exactly what his plan is, but he said he’ll be waiting.”

“Ah don’t suppose that serpent even gave any clue as ta what?” Bloom asked.

The stiletto shook her head again. “I’ve worked for Mistress Stella for almost five years, and he doesn’t tell anypony anything they don’t need to know. I’ve learned to trust him, though. If he says he has a way, he has a way.”

“Now, we gotta drop off Precious at the refugee camp,” she said, brushing her battered stetson back on her head. “Ah should have volunteered fer to go with the nerd with the glasses.”

Firebrand quirked one eye-fin at him. “Do you and the Prince of Detrot not get along?”

“Nawww, it ain’t that. He’s just a bleedin’ heart like ya never saw. If those dragons come anywhere near that camp, he’ll cuss a blue streak on’em and he won’t leave till every last soul is safe.”

“Then we’d better get out there,” I said, pulling my walkie-talkie out of my saddlebag and hitting the talk button. “Gypsy?”

“I’m here, boss,” the DJ replied down the crackly connection. “The Marked are just finishing getting Ambrock and Vexis all tethered into that sky chariot. They complained like mad, but once they got about thirty T.V. dinners apiece they settled down. You sure you want to take those two along?”

“I could pull a sky chariot myself, if necessary,” Firebrand growled, puffing a ring of smoke out of the corner of her long muzzle.

“We don’t need’em ta pull the sky chariot,” Bloom interjected. “We need’em for mah little surprise. Shall we get our tails up top?”

Firebrand was beside me and Apple Bloom had the lead as we stepped out into the chilly, whipping winds over the armed camp that’d taken up residence below Fortress Everfree.

The rooftop was crowded with Marked ponies, fussing over the giant, lumpen blue and yellow shapes of Ambrock and Vexis. They looked to have put on a few healthy pounds of fat since their incarceration and they’d lost that gaunt look they’d both had when I first laid eyes on them, though both seemed strangely smaller in stature.

“I see the greed is off you,” Firebrand commented as the Marked flowed back from the two young dragons, revealing the pair sitting side by side with what looked like an angular black box on wheels hanging behind them.

“I know!” Vexis said angrily, thumping her much reduced tail against the rooftop. “I hate it! Can’t I just do something greedy? I’m going to be too small to reach top shelves here soon!”

“Not if you want a place in this world of ponies,” the dragonlord replied, padding across to tap the much larger dragoness on the end of her muzzle with the tip of one claw. “I may not be large, but I am rich in friends and there are few dragons bigger who would dare test me. You will learn that power and size are not the same thing. It is also easier to live when a single turkey is enough for dinner.”

“If it means I’m not starving all the time, I guess I wouldn’t mind being a little shorter,” the blue dragon muttered.

“M-me too,” Ambrock added, rubbing his stomach a little. He looked up at me, then at Apple Bloom. “Are...are we going to go and fight, now?”

“Soon, you will prove your bravery,” Firebrand said, trotting to the sky carriage and pulling open the door. She peered inside and a cheerful smile broke out on her normally stoic features. “Ah! Dragon Friend Precious! We are your guards, it seems. It is good to fight at your side.”

“Good tah see ya too, Sparky! Not that Ah could see ya if Ah tried. Come on in and bring the rest of that lot in out the chill!” the Prince of Detrot crowed. “Is that Sweet Shine and...dear me, Miss Apple Bloom! Ah am in distinguished company!”

Trotting over to the carriage, I covered my face against the whipping rain, then stepped up into the warm little compartment. Sky carriages were usually little more than two flat backed vinyl seats facing one another inside a box of varying size and a whole lot of crash padding, but somepony had gone to the trouble to add a little heater to keep it from getting too unbearably cold.

Precious was sitting there in a fresh spangled jumpsuit, his guitar strapped to his back and a pipe-wrench propped against the wall beside his cane. He smiled his wrinkled, cheerful smile and patted the seat beside him. It was enough to bring a grin to my face, even knowing where we were headed and what sort of horrors we were going into.

‘He needs to go home to the Burning Love.’

I couldn’t wholly suppress a wince as the Prince’s sadness at being away from his beautiful guitars and plumbing masterpieces washed over me. Smiling he might be, but he was not happy.

“Sweet Shine, Ah am most pleased to have ya here! Ya’ll guardin’ me out to the refugee camp?” he asked.

“That’s the idea,” I replied, settling into the padding beside him. “Somepony told me they put my weapons in here?”

Reaching underneath his seat, he tugged a latched metal box out and pushed it over to me. “Don’t know as Ah’ve heard of anypony carryin’ a P.E.A.C.E. cannon since the war. Might get me one to keep behind the counter in case ruffians or goons come ‘round. It’d be right fun to stick one to a wall with them glue rounds.”

I quirked a lip at him. “You haven’t had a ruffian or a goon in your place in forever, Precious. They know to keep out.”

He gave me a light poke in the side nearest him, his milky eyes swiveling in my general direction. “Ah’ve had you lot, who can’t seem to responsibly keep outta trouble. Now, then, get in. Time ain’t on our side.”

“The Skids are pretty close to the refugee camp, right?” I asked as Apple Bloom, assisted by one of the Marked who offered her back to the effort, stepped up into the carriage.

“They’re a couple miles out of the way. Much as Ah don’t care for leaving them to fend for themselves a minute longer than Ah have to, Ah think they’ll be happier if we arrive in somethin’ a little more suited to our cause,” the Aroyo elder answered. “Ya get those keys off Hard Boiled like Ah asked?”

Reaching into my saddlebag, I produced the keys to the old dragon bunker in the Skids that we’d briefly occupied what felt like years ago. “He gave me access to his little enchanted pockets years ago. You wouldn’t believe some of the crap he had in there.”

“Oh, Ah would. Scoots had them same pockets durin’ the war. When Ah cleaned’em out afterwards, she had a whole leg off some unlucky lizard magically preserved in there. Dunno if it were a trophy or maybe from an ally she was hopin’ to give it back to someday. Didn’t ask.”

As Firebrand clambered in and sat down next to Miss Bloom, I heard somepony climbing into the driver’s seat atop the carriage. The interior was a bit cramped with four creatures, including a dragon, but we made it work.

“One of the Aroyos is driving?” I asked.

“Yeah. Little mare named Amaretto,” Bloom replied, “Ah trained that filly mahself. Delivered her foal, too. She’ll see us safe in the air, but we’ll be in it deep if some beasty has taken up residence in the Skids since we moved out. Ah doubt it, considerin’ there ain’t nothin’ for treasure there, but Ah could be wrong.”

“Never thought that Ah would find myself going to war, again,” Precious added, running a hoof through his greying mane. “Anyone care for a song?”

Firebrand raised a claw, then slowly lowered it. “I...I had one, but I don’t know if a pony would know it.”

Swinging his guitar up into his hooves with a smooth motion, Precious strummed the strings, letting out a series of pure notes. “Oh? Do please. Ah’m always glad to take requests.”

The dragoness hooked a fang over her lower lip, nervously, then asked, “Do you know ‘The Ride of The Valkyrians’? It is...a story of another hopeless plight that somehow this world survived.”

“Heh, of course! If ever there were a time for a song about hope against the odds, Ah would say it’s today!”

With a whip crack of wings opening, the carriage began to move as the haunting tones of the ancient draconic melody filled the inside of the cabin and—for a short time—we could all pretend we weren’t going unto the horrors of war.

‘You need to listen.’

‘I know.’

‘You will...you will listen?’

‘I’m trying. It’s been so many years. Daddy wanted to make me an assassin, like him. He wanted me to be a killer.’

‘You are a killer. If you want to be more than that, you and I must be together as one.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know what I need. I’m so frightened. What if I stop being the pony Hardy loves?’

‘You need to take control.’

‘But if I do, what will happen?’

‘You will be free from both of them.”

‘B-both?’

‘From your father and from Hard Boiled.’

‘I don’t want to abandon Hardy!’

‘Then you need to live and you cannot do it for him. You can only live for yourself. You need to be free.’

‘I’ve never done that! How can I? If I can’t let his talent guide me, what will I become?’

‘I don’t know. But the alternative is death. His death. Our death. The death of this world.’

I woke with a jolt as the wheels of the sky carriage touched down. Precious was tuning his guitar while Apple Bloom fiddled with one of Firebrand’s swords, testing the edge on her hoof. I glanced out the window to see we’d come down on Capriole street, just inside the Skids.

“Oh...goodness. Why did you let me sleep?” I asked.

“You seemed to need it,” Firebrand murmured.

“I guess I did.” Peering out, I tilted my head to one side as I stared up and down the completely deserted street. “Is it just me or did this place not get hit as bad as the rest of the city?”

“Who’s gonna try to rob a slum?” Apple Bloom asked, pushing open the door on her side and hopping out onto the pavement.

“Mmm...the smells of the city,” Precious added, sniffing at the air as he stowed his guitar and picking up his pipe wrench and cane. “Haven’t been down Skids-way in a few years. There was a lovely girl—Buttercup was her name—who stole mah heart once and she hailed from down here. Wrote a song about her, once. Ah wonder if she ever heard it.”

Vexis and Ambrock peered back around the sides of the carriage at us.

“W-what should we do?” the smaller male lizard asked.

“Wait here,” I replied. “We’ll be back soon, I think.”

“I smell other dragons,” Vexis murmured, splaying her neckfins out. “They smell big...”

“How can ya tell if someone smells big?” Apple Bloom asked.

“She means they smell like large hoards,” Firebrand answered, shifting uneasily from claw to claw as she loosened one of her swords in its sheath before reaching back into the carriage to retrieve her golden helm, settling it on her head. “I smell them as well. Gold, gemstones, and other rubbish. They do not seem to be here, however.”

Looking up at the Marked who sat atop the carriage, I gestured for the heavyset mare to get down. She bowed her head and leapt off, landing gracefully despite her weight.

“What be I and I doin’?” the mare asked.

‘Her child is in the nearest housing block, off to the right. Withdrawal will kill her if she is not treated in the next twelve hours.’

“Your daughter is here,” I said, quietly.

Her eyes widened. “W-what?”

“She’s in your old apartment,” I murmured, flicking my tail at the particular building. “Get her to somepony who can treat Ace addiction as quick as you can. I’m sorry we can’t help you, but Tourniquet can give you a map of the sewers.”

Stumbling back a couple of steps, the large mare wordlessly turned toward the building I’d indicated and galloped off through the swirling snow. I turned back to my companions to find them all watching me like I’d grown a few extra heads.

“I’m not explaining that,” I growled, maybe a little more defensively than was strictly necessary.

When nopony else said anything, Precious reached out and touched my shoulder, then ran his hoof up to my cheek. “Ah don’t need an explanation, Miss Shine. Ah think what we’re all thinkin’ is you’re a more amazin’ mare than ya let on. Don’t hide it. We need amazin’ ponies in times like these.”

Despite myself, I felt a tear creep down my cheek. I hadn’t really known it was what I needed to hear, but upon reflection it made sense. My heart swelled with affection for the old stallion and I quickly put my front legs around his shoulders, hugging him tight for a moment.

For just a second, I thought I might know what it was like to have a father.

Setting me back on my hooves, he patted my cheek again. “Now...are ya ready?”

I pulled myself up straight and shifted my saddlebags higher on my barrel before reaching back and poking at the one I’d secreted away my walkie-talkie in. “Gypsy? You listening to all this?”

“Here and monitoring, boss-mare!” the crackling response came. “Tourniquet is sending another Marked to help get Amaretto and her kid out of the Skids. Limerence is already scooting to get in position for his run on the shield pylon and Swift is about to start her attack. You got orders?”

“The Skids are empty and I suspect might be a good fallback point for the refugees, at least until we have cleared the way to Supermax. There’s also at least one dragon bunker. You think we can get those ponies here?”

Several seconds worth of silence passed, then Gypsy replied, “Tourniquet says that’s a bit of a walk and they’ve got injured, but she thinks it’s doable. There are a few sewer routes that might work. For some sections they’ll have to get back above ground.”

“Can she see the refugee camp, directly?” I asked.

“There’s no major powerlines under it, but she’s positioned a Marked in a nearby building. The camp is not good. They’ve got no meaningful facilities, but they raided a grocery warehouse that’s keeping them fed for now. Those ponies were planning to get out of the city entirely, but they watched dragons hit one caravan that tried to leave and anypony who goes beyond the city limits dies. They’re just all squatting out there in a couple of buildings with a few light fortifications, tents, and whatever vehicles people managed to get out there with them.”

“Get Tourniquet on the logistics,” I ordered, waving a few snowflakes off the end of my muzzle. “Those refugees are a juicy target and if we don’t at least get them moving before the attack we’re facing a city-losing scenario.”

“Wait, what? I mean, I don’t want them to die any more than you do, but—”

“Think about it. How much faster will the wish engine charge if all those ponies die?”

“Oh...right.” Gypsy’s breath caught on the other end of the line, then she asked, “Are we sure our attack won’t do the same thing?”

“No, but we know theirs will. Hop to it and keep an ear open in case we need backup.”

“Roger that. Queen of the Signal out.”

That done, I pulled the keys to the Nest out of my bags and jangled them lightly. “Now, shall we?”

“I fear I am unclear on what, exactly, we are doing in this...dreary...section of the city,” Firebrand said, studying the nearby buildings with a curl to her lip.

“That’ll be mah turf yer callin’ ‘dreary’, Missy,” Ancestor Bloom snapped, snatching the keys off my hoof.

Firebrand’s eyes almost popped out of her head and she spread her wings as though ready to take flight. “I-I meant no offense, Crusader!”

“Hrmph! Come along. Might as well see if this is a fool’s errand or not. Ah can’t afford to tinker, so if mah preservation spells failed we might be wastin’ our time.”

With that, Apple Bloom marched off into the alley where the Nest’s entrance was tucked away. I hadn’t been back in weeks, but a certain weight of displacement fell off my shoulders as we single-file marched down the grated steps of the old bunker to the thick metal door. Strange as it might sound, the place still felt like home.

Miss Bloom slotted our key into the lock, turned it, and gave a rough shove, sending the massive slab of metal slamming inward against the wall. The sound echoed for what felt like hours, but there were so many other rattling, coughing, squeaking noises coming from every corner of the city I doubted there’d be anyone coming to investigate. A burst of warm air greeted us, followed by the stink of rotten food. The hallway beyond was dark, but after a few seconds mage-lights set into the ceiling flickered on.

“Did ya not think ta empty the trash before ya left?!” Bloom barked, trotting over the threshold with one hoof over her nose.

“We had a few other things going on at the time, but by all means, complain to Hardy; he was in charge of the garbage,” I grunted, pushing the door shut after Precious and Firebrand followed me in.

“This is a dragon bunker?” Firebrand asked, curiously, poking at the wall with one clawtip. “I never thought to stand in one. We were taught they tend to explode when a dragon enters them.”

Apple Bloom snorted derisively. “That’d be one of Princess Luna’s little ‘propaganda efforts’. She’s the one responsible fer that rumor about carrots makin’ yer eyesight better, too. Our snipers just developed a half decent scope earlier’n ya’ll did. Much good did it do us considerin’ how tough dragon scale is.”

Firebrand shot her a toothy smile. “Oh, I have heard that fearfully repeated by many members of the Dragon King’s retinue. They may not have died of any but the most particular shots, but no creature wanted to spend months or years waiting for a molt with bits of shrapnel beneath their flesh.”

I cleared my throat for attention. “Much as my zebra tutor wanted me to ‘live with the moment’, I don’t have the luxury right now. We’re here for whatever equipment you’ve got that’ll help us fight Propana. I think it’s time you had your big reveal, Miss Bloom.”

“Alright, alright. Us old ponies gotta stop and remember the yesteryear, sometimes. The garage is back this way.”

I blinked at her retreating backside as she headed down the hallway toward the living quarters, then followed as Firebrand took Precious’s knee in her claw and helped guide him along.

We trotted into the rear quarter of the facility, or so I thought. There’d been one door we never managed to open during our stay and that was where Apple Bloom took us: a giant circular vault even thicker than the exterior entrance. We hadn’t found a proper keyhole, but the elderly mare just laid a hoof on the surface and shut her eyes. After a few seconds, the vault door clanked, clicked, and let out a deafening creak as it swung inward.

Light bulbs overhead sparked, then a half dozen of them exploded, sending a shower of sparks down on us and briefly illuminating the sole occupant of the plain concrete room which was only just big enough to contain it.

“Oh thank goodness! Spells held! Ladies and gents, Ah give ya...what might be the last fully functionin’ Generation One in the world!”

I’ve never been a particularly proud mare, but my reaction to the massive, beetle-like vehicle was nothing short of perverse lust.

I needed it.

‘You don’t need a War Scooter.’

‘We are not talking about this right now!’

‘I am simply stating that this is not a fundamental—’

‘Don’t you dare take this from me!’

I needed it.

Even thirty years on, the War Scooter was an impressive beast, despite the thin layer of dust over it. Since most ponies have never had the opportunity to stand beside one outside of a cordoned off museum display, it’s difficult to get a real feel for exactly how gigantic they are. Needless to say, Apple Bloom didn’t have a red rope keeping me a safe distance away.

Ever since I was a filly, I’d always wanted to ride in one. I’d watched old war films in my foster mother’s living room when all the other fillies were watching Power Ponies or Princess Moondrop’s Adventures.

Imagine a giant, green flying saucer with a pair of massive, quad-barrelled gun turrets mounted on the top and bottom, which looks strangely like a heavily armed wheel off a foal’s scooter, and you may come close to the reality, though its majesty is ever so much more intimidating. The gleaming barrels of the guns caught the light, and I wanted nothing so much as to wrap my hooves around the triggers, just to hear their song. Tiny portholes dotted the surface at intervals around the outside and a large yoke-like bar apparatus hung out front, attached to the vehicle with a pair of thin chains that I had to imagine only looked weak, considering the massive weight they were expected to haul.

In short, I was in love.

Apple Bloom, meanwhile, pushed her stetson back onto her neck, letting it dangle by the cord as she marched around the mighty vehicle like an anxious mother inspecting her daughter on her wedding day.

Clicking claws stopped beside me, but I didn’t have the strength in my soul to tear my eyes from the War Scooter’s enchanting curves and lines.

“Mmm...I see the violations of treaty went deeper than keeping one of the Crusader weapons around,” Firebrand chuckled.

Apple Bloom let out an indignant growl. “Ah’m within’ full treaty compliance! Them guns are disabled! Display only!”

I frowned. “Wait...what? What good does this do us, then?”

The elderly mare rubbed the back of her neck self-consciously.

Before she could explain, Precious spoke up, tapping his cane back and forth until he was beside the War Scooter, before touching its immense shell with a sort of reverent smile. “Treaty compliant means the guns can’t fire. Ah doubt that means they’re broken, though. Where’d ya put the firin’ pins, Miss Bloom?”

“They was in Scootalooo’s sock drawer,” she mumbled, turning her hat over and flipping the ribbon around the brim down to shake eight tiny metal rods out onto her hoof, each the length of a bullet with a bit of wire sticking out of the end. “She’d be pretty mad if she knew Ah was takin’ her scooter and lettin’ somepony else drive it after all these years. Too bad Ah forgot to tell her. If ya get it blowed up, that’ll be yer job.”

“I...I get to drive this?” I stammered.

“Course! Miss Firebrand and Ah are gonna be gunnin’. Now then...May Ah introduce the Mark One Mobile Aerial Assault, Command, and Recon vehicle, Demolisher configuration. She started life as the prototype, mind. Scootaloo liked to have me try stuff out, so Ah replaced the normal Nightshade forty cal cannons with fifties and added a few little tweaks here and there. Got a bit more kick and will put holes in damn near anythin’, armored or not. The ammo is heavy, so carryin’ a lot ain’t an option. We can be the scariest damn thing in the sky...fer about five hundred shots apiece.”

“I...do not mean to be impertinent, but I seem to remember these vehicles flew under their own power,” Firebrand murmured. “Why do we need Ambrock and Vexis? And why does this one appear to be designed to be hauled?”

“Yer later War Scooters flew under their own power,” Bloom explained, tapping the hull which let out a dull ‘tink tink’. “Scoots liked pullin’ her own with magic assist to make it lighter. She had the guns tied to a sorta magic interface in her head, so she could operate with no gunners in a pinch, but it weren’t ever so accurate as havin’ extra bodies on the shooters. Ah tried to scale that system down and stick it in a pony-mounted weapon, but couldn’t find anypony could generate the needed dynothaums to make’er work. Yer little Miss Swift has that prototype. Makes me weep for our security measures.’

I looked left, then right, then up at the ceiling. “How do we get this out of here? How’d you get it in here for that matter?”

“Couldja hit that there button on the wall beside ya, Miss Dragon?” Bloom asked.

Firebrand glanced over to where a small glass box was mounted beside the door with the words ‘lift’ stenciled on it. She flicked the cover open and pressed the bright yellow button with one clawtip. I almost wet myself as the floor suddenly lurched under us.

“Whoa!”

“Hang on, now,” Bloom said, cheerfully leaning on the massive engine of destruction. “Don’t know if those old motors held up. They was supposed to be good for a few hundred years, but Ah weren’t really checkin’em.”

A sheet of dust rained down from the ceiling as it suddenly cracked from wall to wall, letting in a swirl of snow and a steady stream of rain. My ears popped at the change in pressure before, with a lurch, the floor began to move under us. I wobbled a little, then planted all four legs as the massive surface began to rise.

“Bloom, you could have told me this thing was a giant elevator!” I snapped.

“Ah liked the look o’surprise on yer face! Yer one of them ponies who fancies herself unflappable, and flappin’ that sort is a bit of a hobby o’ mine.”

“The last time I was surprised in an elevator, it ended with me having two broken legs!”

Apple Bloom had the decency to look abashed. “Well, Ah gotta have mah fun where Ah can. It’ll take a few minutes to reach street level. Ya want a tour of the inside or you want to stand there and complain?”

Somehow, in the minute and a half since it’d been said, I’d managed to forget I was actually meant to be piloting the giant machine. I almost danced on all fours, darting over to the side of the vehicle where the hatch was located. It was a circular bulge on the hull with a heavy crossbar in the middle to operate the latch. I expected to have to fight with the mechanism, considering how long it’d been sitting, but the second I laid my hooves on it the cogs and gears whispered free and the door swung open.

The inside of the War Scooter was ridiculously cramped; a pony with claustrophobia wouldn’t have handled it especially well, but I’d been born into a life of unpleasantly tight spaces and miserable little dungeons. Mechanism and gearing was jammed into every inch that wasn’t being strictly used for someone to breathe with. Strange as it might sound, I felt right at home.

“Hop in,” Bloom said, giving my flank a nudge, “The lights will come on. Go up the ladder to reach the second floor or down the ladder for the bottom guns. Driver’s position is up in the front center, just behind the yoke. Ya can’t exactly get lost.”

As the elevator gradually raised us to surface, I hauled myself into the war scooter, landing on a thin strip of clear floor between two bulwarks covered in heavily worn safety stickers. Just as she’d said, there was a hole on the floor and a hole in the ceiling, each with a simple hoof-ladder. I peered down towards the turret on the bottom and could just make out a sort of bubble-like fixture with a seat in the middle.

Something in the close air inside the war scooter was making certain bits of my anatomy tingle in a not entirely wholesome way, but I tried to put it out of my mind. The dim lights lining the interior provided barely enough room to navigate, but still, it was enough. Firebrand crept in after me, somehow managing to look more comfortable in the tight space despite her size.

“Our enemies would have given their entire research and development budgets to stand where I now lay my claws,” the dragoness whispered, shaking her head as she stroked one of the bulkheads. “Truly, this is an honor.”

I pointed toward the bottom gunner station. “You’re down there, okay? If this follows the blueprints I studied as a filly, there’s a release you can hit down there when the gun is empty that will drop you into open air.”

“That was Sweetie Belle’s seat,” Bloom commented, with a small, nostalgic smile as she put a hoof on the bottom rung of the ladder that headed up to the top gunner bubble. “Ah wonder what she’d say if she knew a dragoness was about to go gunnin’ from there.”

“Ah think that lovely mare would be right proud,” added Precious, who was feeling his way along the inside of the war scooter with both a hoof and his cane.

“Now ya mention, she probably would,” she replied, then shook her head, “Ah’ll go fix the guns and get the loadin’ mechanism sussed. Ammo is already on board and preservation spells kept it sweet. Go get acquainted with the driver’s seat. Them two young’uns who’ll be pullin’ us won’t enjoy how this thing flies, but they’re just providin’ thrust.”

It was a bit of a childhood dream to sit behind the controls of a War Scooter and the anticipation of actually operating it was damn near killing me. Even getting into them was a bit of a task; I’d had to crawl over top of the driver’s chair, then turn around and work my tail through a hole in the back of the seat. A small porthole in front of me provided about ten degrees of vision, but small magical projectors on either side appeared to be wired into cameras on the exterior for greater field of view.

I was surrounded on all sides by switches and toggles with labels that would have excited a monk, much less a pony with a none-too-subtle firepower fetish.

Most of the controls resembled the ones in my childhood books, but somepony had modified them extensively and added some that were downright weird. One button said ‘Lateral-zero-inertia-rotation’ while another was labeled ‘Rope-a-dope’, strange and arcane, with no indication what they might do. I decided to stick to what I knew.

Certainly it was less comfortable than my cab, Celestia rest its soul, but as I laid my hooves on the yoke and joystick, I felt a palpable sensation shoot up my spine as though the War Scooter was anticipating the chance to fly once more almost as much as I was eager to get it in the air. It wanted to be flown.

“Oookay,” I whispered to the metal monster as I stroked the console with the back of my hoof, “You don’t know me and I don’t know you...but we’re going to have to be friends if either of us is going to survive this day. I promise, if you just keep the dragons from roasting us, I’ll do my best to make sure you come through in one piece...”

“So ya do that too, huh?”

I yelped and jerked my head back into the supports.

Apple Bloom was standing there over my shoulder, an amused smile on her wrinkled face.

“Ah didn’t mean to interrupt.”

I quickly shook my head. “It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m just getting acquainted. There are a lot of controls and I don’t recognize some of them.”

Edging sideways, Bloom held out a small black key on a blue ribbon. I took it, letting it dangle from my toe. “Ah wouldn’t worry about anythin’ ya don’t recognize. Half of it was hooked into experimental systems Ah never wired up. Here. Ignition key, from back when Ah thought they needed’em. Ah’ve modified this thing about five hunnered times, but if ya know the basics, it should fly for ya and the gunners can do the rest. The dragons’r gonna hate it, though, guaranteed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, yer in almost total control. All they’re doin’ is providin’ thrust. Think about that.”

I peered out the porthole at the yoke mechanism lying on the ground in front of the scooter.

“Wait, you mean-”

“Yep. Early designs had one pony steerin’ while a bunch of pegasi pulled, but we couldn’t figure out how to get full maneuverability out of’em with all them different brains workin’ the wings. Fortunately or unfortunately—depending on how you look at it—Twilight Sparkle had this student who liked her mind control magics. Anythin’ which is strapped into that yoke is more or less a puppet with bones, till ya shut the ignition off.”

“Oh, the dragons are gonna hate it...”

Bloom tapped a keyhole in the dash and I quickly slipped the key into it. “Later designs that went to the army didn’t need the bodies pullin’, but if ya signed up with the Crusaders, sometimes ya ended up on haulin’ duty. We used it as a sorta hazin’ ritual. Ah always promised myself Ah’d install one of them new engines, but Ah never got around to it. That’s why Scoots eventually fixed it so the pony haulin’ could drive, but she was the only one could do it. Ah recommend ya keep the ignition runnin’ till after the fightin’ is done.”

“We’ve got to tell them, right?” I asked.

“Up to you, boss lady.”

I was about to reply when the ground jolted under me and Apple Bloom raised her head to peer out the porthole. I followed her gaze and realized we were at street level.

“Come on. Let’s go get’em hitched up. If convincin’ a pair of dragons to give up bodily autonomy in a firefight is the toughest thing ya do today, yer probably doin’ well.”

“Mmm...I’ve got an idea in that direction.”

“So, you’re saying if my brother and I do this, then Lord Stellatrix will give us a job? I’ve heard stories about him! He’s supposed to be huge and clever! I bet he wants some guards! What did you say he does for the ponies, again?”

“He screws them and they pay him for the privilege.”

“Where do we sign up?!”

Act 3 Chapter 72 : Taxi's Ride

"It was not the generals that won that war.

It was the insane.

No stable, considered person sitting behind a desk could have driven our society half so mad as we drove ourselves and when it came time, no gentle soul with a head full of strategy could have stepped up to prevent our final decimation. It was only the mad - with their funny little ways of thinking and disregard for their own lives in the face of the deaths of others - who preserved us.

Sadly, most of them didn't notice that was what they'd done."

-Princess Celestia in "On The Subject Of Equestrian Warfare, L.R. 39."

The hidden bunker’s ground level exit was disguised as just another stretch of road, albeit in slightly better repair than the rest of the surrounding asphalt. The massive doors that’d opened to allow the lift to reach street level were recessed into the ground in such a fashion that only a very close inspection might give away that there was anything different about that section of the street. All in all, it was a brilliant way of making a whole neighborhood of ponies vanish into the ground on short notice.

Alternatively, it was a great way of making a giant heavy weapons platform appear out of nowhere in the middle of the city.

We’d taken a few minutes to explain what we needed to Ambrock and Vexis and, dragons being dragons, bribery won out where reason failed. After that, it was just a matter of Apple Bloom and myself getting them hitched to the front yoke by the entirely overcomplicated set of chains and bars which wouldn’t have looked at all out of place on the Vivarium’s lower floors. By the time we were done, the two young dragons were looking distinctly nervous about the whole arrangement, but at last, I sat in the driver’s seat with one hoof on the ignition.

I stared out at the sibling duo of lizards taking up most of the viewport with their collective bulks and tried to calm my vibrating nerves by gently stroking my P.E.A.C.E. cannon, which was stashed beside my seat.

‘You need a cup of tea.’

‘Well, I’m not going to get a cup of tea, now am I?’

‘There is a thermos in your saddlebag.’

‘What?’

‘Go check.’

I reached back and pulled my left saddlebag open, rooting around until I found a pink and purple thermos with a built-in cup tucked in the inside pocket. Popping it open, I inhaled a sweet mix of peppermint and cardamom. It was still piping hot.

‘So, who left me this when I wasn’t looking?’

‘The mare with the failing kidney. She needed to feel like she was contributing.’

‘I’ll have to get her something if I survive.’

‘You are still not planning to live.’

I swallowed a sip of tea. It was delicious. Just what I needed.

‘We’re going into an impossible situation. Even if we manage to get these refugees off the streets, we still have to engage Propana. We can’t leave that monster in the city. One War Scooter, no matter how powerful, isn’t going to take down a dragoness that size and her retinue.’

‘Trust in me.’

‘You scare me.’

“Are ya’ll ready to go?”

I jerked upright in my seat, almost spilling my tea as Apple Bloom poked her head over my shoulder into the cockpit.

“Is Precious strapped in?” I asked.

“Ah got’em a spot in mah gun blister and he’s eatin’ an old ration that must have been in here since the war,” she replied, “That ol’ bugger puts on a big show with his jumpsuits and carryin’ on, but he is tough as nails fer a civilian.”

“That he is,” I murmured, offering her my thermos, which she took and sniffed before sipping.

“Mmm, lovely.” She passed the container back, then pulled something out of her stetson and held it out. “The nerd told me to give this to ya. Ah don’t know exactly why. Strange little stallion, that one.”

I took the thin, willowy object in my hoof and stared at it for a long moment before the smell of flowers hit me. Incense. Limerence sent me some incense. I grinned and pulled a lighter out of my bag, lit the scented stick, and tucked it between two of the consoles as scented smoke filled the cabin.

“You know...Now, I think we’re ready to go,” I said, brushing my braid back and putting both hooves on the controls. “Alright, walk me through this. I remember most of it, but I’ve never been behind the stick.”

“Ain’t exactly complicated, unless ya wanna do crazy dog fightin’,” Apple Bloom answered, stretching over my shoulder to touch the controls one at a time, “The one between yer legs goes left and right, or ya push down for up and up for down. Goin’ faster is the pedals, but don’t overwork the engines. Remember they’re muscle and bone. Oh, and ya can’t deadstop brake, so don’t try. Ya wanna slow down, pull up hard. Ah’d fly’er, but Ah’m thirty years out of the driver’s seat and Scoots was really the pilot.”

“Sounds simple enough.” I reached up and touched the key, then hesitated. “If...If we fail or I die—”

Apple Bloom rolled her eyes and casually poked me in the end of the nose. “Girly, if the Crusaders worried about dyin’ or failin’ every time we went on a suicide mission, Ah would not be sittin’ here talkin’ to ya. Yer either going to give yer all or they’ll scrape ya outta that cockpit. Now, whatever noble-as-farts sentiment ya got, stow it and Ah’ll pretend ya were very inspirin’.”

I grinned at the old mare, then reached up and turned the key. I’d been expecting a sort of roaring sound or a backfire, but what I got was a full body judder and the sensation of an electric current traveling from my tail right up to my ears. The War Scooter lurched and rocked into a fully upright position as the magical stabilizers kicked in.

A dozen floating, magical displays appeared in a half circle around my head, bathing me in soft green light. Some were simply views of the exterior from different angles that gave the strange sensation of being the center of the War Scooter while others seemed to be ammunition displays for the top and bottom gunners. A few extraneous readouts had temperatures and pressures of various systems, but all were in the green.

The street outside was full of billowing snow that was just then starting to creep into doorways and pile up in the gutters. Ambrock and Vexis sat, side by side, stiff as boards, staring straight ahead in a way that was downright unsettling for a pair of lizards who were normally relatively animated. I gently brushed my rudder and all four of their wings leaned slightly to the right.

“Creepy, ain’t it?” Bloom commented, gesturing at the little shimmering image.

“Very. Can they feel everything that I’m doing?” I asked, straightening the stick to bring their wings back to center.

“Nope. If ya get them shot, they’ll feel it when they’re not hooked in anymore, but their brains are checked out. They can see and hear, but that’s it. If one of’em dies, they’ll still fly till their brain stem shuts down. Had a recruit strapped in once for two hours that none of us noticed had lost a bit of his forehead. That’ll give ya nightmares.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve already got plenty of nightmares...”

“Sorry, honey,” Apple Bloom murmured, patting my shoulder. “The time to decide ya were gonna lose spine was two hours ago. Right now, yer spine better be shiny or a whole heap of ponies are gonna die. Now, get us in the air.”

I leaned into the yoke and the two dragons’ wings began to beat in a steady rhythm as their claws lifted off the ground of their own accord with a coordination that figure skaters would have envied.

Apple Bloom caught balance on the wall with one hoof, then poked a button beside my head. “Miss Firebrand? Ya hear?”

The dragoness’s voice crackled through a speaker on the dash. “I hear, Crusader Apple Bloom! I am getting to grips with the controls down here. Not having hooves is somewhat complicating things and I am too large for the seat.”

“There’s a button with the shape of a buffalo on it up next to the fire control. Push it.”

There was a loud clunk up the speaker, then a sigh of relief.

“Much better.”

“No problem. We’ve had more’n one critter in here from time to time that wasn’t pony sized. Gotta make some accommodations.”

Precious’s voice broke in from the speaker. “While ya’ll are makin’ accommodations, mightn’t Ah trouble ya for some of that incense down this way? Whoever was in this turret last left half a sandwich in here a bunch of years ago, and it smells right fiercely.”

I plucked the incense, broke off half, then passed the other to Apple Bloom. She touched the brim of her hat and trotted toward the ladder at the back.

“We’re wings up in five...four...three...two...one!”

I sank back into my pilot’s chair, letting the information flowing off the screens create a sort of comfortable cocoon around me as I hauled back on the yoke. My stomach tried to sink right down into my hooves as the two dragons out front heaved forward and the ground leapt away. I had to fight down a wave of instinctual panic at having my hooves off the earth. I didn’t have anything like Hardy’s sustained fear of heights, but it still wasn’t a happy sensation. That being said, the sensation of controlling such a massive construct was giving me a certain fizzy feeling which was not at all wholesome.

Around me, the War Scooter buzzed with magic as I banked low over the rooftops, the city suddenly shrinking as I finally got a good look at the damage wrought by the Family and their machinations.

The damage was massive, though most buildings still stood. While the fires didn’t seem to be spreading, there were dozens of them in different places, lighting up the sections of the city where the streetlights didn’t.

Digging into my saddlebags, I pulled out my walkie talkie and set it on the dash.

“Gypsy? Can you still hear us up here?”

“Here, boss, signal is good. Limerence is close to his target. You’ve got about twenty minutes to get the refugees moving towards safety. Tourniquet says she caught sight of something moving on the distant outskirts on the opposite side of town. It was in the cloud layer.”

“We’re in the air right now. Do you see any dragons moving toward us?” I asked.

“Tourniquet saw a small green who watched you take off, then took off like somepony set fire to his tail in the opposite direction.”

I rubbed my forehead with one hoof, trying to do the mental strategic math. “I guess we have to assume Propana knows we’re up here, then. A single dragon, no matter how big, can’t tow it against a War Scooter.”

“It won’t be just a single dragon...”

“I know. I’m thinking. Tactical thoughts,” I growled, glancing sideways at one of the magical windows hanging in the air beside my face. There was a tall industrial building off to our left that I had an irrational urge to duck behind, as though that would somehow hide our enormous bulk. “The refugees are at the end of Blue Roan Road, right?”

“That’s where their barricade starts. It won’t keep out anything more determined than an elementary school parade team, mind you.”

“Do we have any intel on who is leading the refugees?”

“Uh...Tourniquet says that, based on what she can see, it looks like a female yak.”

“Right. That simplifies things.”

“How do you mean?”

I pulled the yoke sideways, coming in a bit lower above the rooftops. A few of the displays flashed proximity warnings, but I kept us high enough to avoid scraping the T.V. antennas.

“Yaks believe might makes right,” I answered, “We have a War Scooter, three dragons, the Prince of Detrot, and a Crusader. We are very, very right.”

“I noticed you’re not including yourself in that little accounting.”

I bit my tongue before it could pop off something snippy.

“I’m hoping it won’t come to me fighting.”

Gypsy was silent for what seemed like a long time and it began to gather weight the longer it went on.

“I’ve seen a couple decades of this city rotting from the inside and you still might be the scariest pony I’ve ever met, Sweet Shine,” she said, at last.

I poked the microphone, making it crackle at her. “If you’re done making smart comments, I could really use an ETA to Blue Roan Road and some landing instructions.”

“R-right. I can...give you a rough calculation. You’re about two minutes out. Try to land about three quarters of a mile from the barricade and only take ponies along. They’re shooting first and asking questions later.”

----

‘What will you do?’

‘This is a change. Usually you’re telling me what I need to do.’

‘You need to tell me what you are planning on doing.’

‘Was that humor?’

‘You needed a laugh, just then.’

‘Heh. I guess I did. As to that question, I honestly don’t know. These ponies have been brutalized. They’re frightened and they know the dragons will eventually get around to wiping them out. It’s just a matter of when.’

‘Then you need to represent hope.’

‘Me?’

----

Whoever was running the refugee camp was no tactician.

As we reached the outskirts of the city, I could see the camp from far off, lit up like a hoofball field by dozens of fires, lights, and hundreds of small torches. It squatted at the end of the highway headed out of town and directly below an overpass section of the city’s ring road. The surrounding buildings were warehouses on one side and the badly burned remains of an abandoned suburb on the other. Below the overpass, they’d set up something of an improvised tent city, though with none of the neat organization of the one surrounding Supermax.

There were no less than six approaches by ground, each of them with little more than piles of garbage and upended cars to block off anything that might come that way.

Beneath the overpass I could make out haphazard dispersions of tents in dozens of colors and seemingly made out of whatever somepony could lay their hooves on. Cooking fires dotted the area and I could make out hundreds of milling bodies down there, some in lines, others simply in crowds.

I studied the layout on the screen shimmering in the air in front of me, trying to decide where to land. The options were all bad, which is to say, not one of them provided me a lick of cover. On the flip side, if I were a dragon intent on strafing the camp and reducing everyone in it to a cinder, I was spoiled for choice. All of the approaches were wide open and there was nothing resembling shelter except the overpass under which the camp itself was built.

There were a few ponies on rooftops near the camp, probably acting as scouts or lookouts. Not a safe job, considering the Black Coats were still out there snatching people at random, but better than nothing as to protection of the camp proper. It was making my job a little more difficult, however.

Finally, I settled on the ‘loud and impossible to ignore’ approach.

Hardy would have been proud.

Pushing the yoke forward, I slid back in my seat as Ambrock and Vexis dove towards the deck at a speed that made my eyes water. I barely had time to pull up before we hit the ground and a few warning lights popped up on the screens around me; one of them seemed to indicate an imminent muscle pull if I pushed Ambrock any harder.

I poked a button on the panel near my head that said ‘landing gear’ and winced as several hatches on the underside squealed open on hinges that had moved precisely once since I was in diapers. Landing the war scooter was a tricky business on a highway, but most of it was handled by automated systems which seemed to know more or less what they were doing with the anatomy of whatever creature was providing lift and thrust. Still, as we came in there was a rougher-than-I-liked bump as the wheels hit the surface, screeching against the asphalt. Ambrock and Vexis took a few long hops, before coming to a rest.

Tapping the intercom, I asked, “Everyone alright back there?”

There was a quick chorus of replies:

“A successful first landing. Well done! Most dragons end up with bruised chins during their initial attempts.”

“Ah wish to complain to the stewardess about the quality of the in-flight entertainment. It ain’t blindpony-friendly.”

“Precious and Ah are fine back here. Give me a minute to get us unstrapped.”

Grabbing my P.E.A.C.E. cannon, I heaved it up onto my back. I left the extra rounds where they lay; if the drum of various not-terribly-lethal area denial options loaded into it wasn’t enough to discourage the refugees from trying to gun us down then reloading was unlikely to be an issue.

My hoof hesitated over the ignition, then I decided to leave the War Scooter running. Cruel, yes, but...I thought we might need the dragons more than they needed a chance to get cold feet.

‘They are in no pain. Vexis will need to pee in the next hour, but that is—’

‘I don’t need to hear this.’

‘You wish to work together, but you do not want to listen?’

‘Don’t you understand? I can’t listen to every need of every being we encounter. I’ll lose my mind trying to help everyone.’

‘I see. What you need is balance.’

‘I...y-yes. Yes, that’s it exactly. How did you not know that?’

‘Until recently, you needed to believe we weren’t the same pony.’

‘What does—’

The click of claws on metal brought my head around as Firebrand clambered out of her gun turret. She wore her golden helmet and had one talon gently stroking her right sword. “Are you ready to go?”

“You’re staying here,” I said, gesturing at the ladder.

I couldn’t see it, but I got the feeling Firebrand cocked an eye-ridge at me.

“I am?”

“Think about it. A bunch of twitchy, armed refugees who’ve been taking pot shots at anything that moves? How is a dragoness in full armor going to look approaching them?”

Firebrand lowered her nose slightly, then said, “I am staying here.” Turning on her heel, she hopped onto the ladder and slid back down into the gun turret, hesitating at the lip for a moment. “Should I be prepared to take the controls and come rescue you if you are not back in short order?”

I shook my head. “We’ll be dead if we’re not back in short order. Your job, if you can do it, is to take this thing and ram it face-first into Propana as hard as you can. We’ll hope that kills her.”

“Ah’m stayin’ too,” Apple Bloom added, sliding down to our level from up top. “Ah can pilot better’n she can and Ah’ll need somepony to work a gun. If ya get them poor ponies to follow, signal and Ah’ll come along to lead’em back ta Fortress Everfree.”

“I’ll signal in about ten minutes,” I replied, checking my P.E.A.C.E. cannon for a flare round. Assuring myself there was one, I snapped it shut. “If you haven’t heard from us by then, don’t come looking.”

Precious felt about with his hind hoof until he found the platform, then stepped off beside me. “Oh, Miss Shine...ya do need some optimism in yer life! These are the ponies of Detrot. Ah have heard them do great things in mah time. All ya need is a song in yer heart and they’ll come a’runnin’.”

I squinted at him for a second as an idea percolated around inside my head.

“You know...that’s not a bad idea.”

“Eh? What do ya mean?”

The air outside the War Scooter was bitingly cold.

I wished—not for the first time—that I’d been inclined to pay for a magical trench coat like Hardy’s. My paychecks tended to go towards long term investments, scented candles, and upgrades for the Night Trotter. Being as I’d managed to lose two out of three of those things entirely and my candle collection was in an unverifiable condition, I felt like the coat would have been a better place to put my money.

Precious stood beside me on the long, empty highway leading to the buildings where the refugees were hiding, his milk-white eyes staring off just above the horizon as his ears twitched back and forth. He was trying, unsuccessfully, to hide his shivering. An old stallion deserved better than a deserted road and a chill wind.

Thankfully, the wind was blowing in a favorable direction. I could just make out the vague shapes of ponies and other creatures standing atop the distant buildings. They were definitely watching us and more than once, a subtle shine or glint off metal would suggest weapons pointed in our direction.

I glanced back at Ambrock and Vexis, sitting frozen and waiting for orders from the War Scooter’s navigation system, then threw a salute towards the pilot’s viewport where I imagined Apple Bloom was watching us.

“Filly, this is one of the barmier things Ah’ve ever done, Ah just want it said,” Precious muttered, tugging his guitar off his back and slotting his pipe wrench and cane into a harness across his shoulders. “Ya sure Ah’m okay standin’ on yer back? Ah did a stint with some lovely lady acrobats once what taught me how to tumble and stack with ponies, but that was forty years back.”

“You’ve given me enough hugs down through the years to know I’m an earth pony, Precious,” I replied, offering him a leg, “You weigh about two thirds what Hardy does and I can chuck his gangly flank around like a sack of feathers. Just try not to step on my saddlebags.”

With his usual dexterity, Precious took my proffered knee and hefted himself up onto my shoulders. I couldn’t suppress a small grunt; he wasn’t exactly heavy, but he was another pony on my back. Working his way to a sitting position, he carefully strummed his guitar. A few sweet bars rolled off toward the refugee camp.

“Any requests, Miss Shine?” he asked.

I thought for a moment, then replied, “Could you play that old love song? The one about the mare who fell in love with the moon?”

“Ah! Ya mean ‘Shining Sky’? That’s an oldie even by mah standards.”

“That’s the one. My father used to let me listen to one of your records, and that’s the first song I remember.”

“Aye. Ah suppose Ah can play that. Set us off and Ah’ll remember the words.”

With the wind beginning to whip through my mane, I started off, plodding towards the camp and the distant towers of smoke. Precious was silent for just a few seconds before he started playing.

Contrary to most of his rousing rock ballads, Shining Sky was a slow, building tale of love between a mare whose name was the title of the song and Princess Luna. She suffered in a loveless marriage, praying to the moon for her salvation as her life slowly fell apart around her. Gradually, her dreams started to turn dark and one night, Princess Luna finally appeared when she was having a nightmare.

The two became friends, then fell in love, living every night together and waking to resume their normal lives, one a princess, one a housewife.

After some years of quiet bliss in her sleep, Shining Sky’s husband figured out something was going on, but he had no evidence as to what or how. He turned cruel and resentful, finally throwing her out into the streets. She wandered, dazed and alone, before falling asleep in an alley.

It was a sad song, whose ending was left to the listener. Was she really dreaming of Princess Luna all those years? Did Princess Luna come and save her great love? Did she die there, hopeless, homeless, and empty?

I always hoped Princess Luna came and Shining Sky lived happily ever after in Canterlot.

Of course, it was just a song.

It carried on the winds as I walked towards the refugees and Precious’s sweet, kindly voice followed it. It didn’t take long to reach their weapons’ range but nopony took a shot at us. I could just see them up there on the buildings, most with their heads cocked to listen to the haunting tune.

As I strolled towards what could have quickly turned into a bloodbath, my thoughts turned to Hard Boiled. Considering the ladybugs buried in my fur, he was probably watching events unfold. Knowing the bastard, he was smirking his way through every minute of it.

‘I wish he were here.’

‘So do I.’

‘You do?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

As the final strains of the song faded away, somepony finally jerked themselves out of the stupor Precious’s tune had put everyone in long enough to fire off a shot. We were close enough to the two buildings on either side of the highway to make out the ponies atop them. The bullet plinked off the asphalt about ten meters ahead of us and I paused, glancing back to make sure Precious was alright. He casually dismounted, swinging down onto all fours though keeping one hoof on my shoulder. He had as close to an irritated expression on his face as I’d seen in all the time I’d known him.

A bellowing voice came from the end of the street.

“You ponies! You stop! Agrona say stand still or eat lead!”

Now, I thought I’d seen yaks. I didn’t know terribly many, but yaks aren’t the least common Equestrian species in Detrot. More than a few like a good scrap and have made their way to one of the local fight clubs.

The lumbering mountain of fur that clomped into sight on the highway, a war hammer the size of a small truck strapped to her back, was not your average yak. ‘Agrona’ had long ago transcended large; I couldn’t imagine there was a doorway in Detrot she hadn’t banged her lance-lengthed horns on. Her shaggy coat was woven with dozens of the tiny ribbons that yaks use to mark their accomplishments in lieu of medals, and the helm atop her head could have doubled as a wash bucket for most ponies.

Precious frowned at her, then turned to me, swinging his guitar across his shoulders. “Well, we didn’t get shot right off. Ah’ll call that a triumph for mah art. Ah could be wrong, but that sounds like a yak. Too bad that particular audience ain’t gonna appreciate mah style from here on. Never was popular up Yakyakistan way. They like the plumbin’, not so much mah singin’.”

“Not getting shot was the goal,” I murmured, “Now we’ve got to get them to listen.” Raising one hoof, I called out, “Hello! You have any idea who you’re taking shots at?”

“Agrona does not care who is there! You! Turn and leave! We have too many mouths already and you look like skin and bones!”

I looked down at myself and realized my ribs were a little more pronounced than they had been when I started our journey, but I definitely didn’t look like a department store mannequin.

Narrowing my eyes, I drew a deep breath and shouted, “My name is Taxi! I speak for Detective Hard Boiled! You heard that name before?”

I heard a low murmuring from nearby and Agrona angrily swung her warhammer off her back, burying it in the concrete at her hooves.

“Agrona say you not coming into camp, then you not coming in!” the yak snapped, stomping a hoof the size of a dinner plate and splintering the ground under it. “We not need more problems and P.A.C.T. follow you!”

“You’ve got more problems than you can handle!” I answered, trying to make sure they all heard me. “I’ve got a safe place we can take you! You’ll have to follow us, but—”

My walkie-talkie sputtered and Gypsy’s voice broke in, “Taxi, we’ve spotted Propana. Mercy, she’s big. She’s also definitely headed in your direction. The griffins are sending up a force to delay her, but they won’t last long against something like that.”

“Understood,” I whispered, then raised my head to find Agrona glaring at me across the distance.

“Pony is not leaving!” the huge yak snarled, lifting her giant hammer in her teeth as easily as one might pick up a toothpick.

‘One last attempt at diplomacy?’ I thought.

‘One more is needed for those who are listening.’

‘We are not killing her. Period. You hear me?’

‘She doesn’t need to die. She just needs a reminder that there’s always a bigger fish.’

“Miss Agrona!” I called. “There’s a dragon coming to this place in just a few minutes! We need to begin evacuating everypony here or the dragon may attack!”

“Where we go?!” Agrona barked, taking a step forward. “There is nowhere to go! Dragons attack if we leave! Dragons attack if we stay! We fight them! We smash them! We have many guns! Agrona crush their heads with hammer, no matter how big they be!”

“We’ve got a path, but it involves you listening to my friend here! This is the Prince of Detrot. You know him?”

“Agrona care not for any pony prince! Agrona protects these ponies!”

A homely orange stallion in a suit vest who was barely a fifth the yak’s size sidled up to her from one side of the road, scuffing the surface with one hoof. “M-Miss Agrona, maybe we should listen—”

“No! If dragons come, we defend! Get pickets ready to fight!”

I put a hoof over my face and sighed, running through the fastest of the zebra relaxation techniques one of my teachers taught me: imagine the thing that’s irritating you being eaten by a lion. It may be unorthodox, but it’s gotten me through many, many scrapes and saved my relationship with Hardy on too many occasions to count. Love him I might, but I’d considered feeding him to a giant cat about three times a week since this stupid adventure began.

‘The need for diplomacy is satisfied.’

‘Thank Celestia,’ I replied, internally. ‘I needed to work off some stress today.’

‘You will have a great deal more to work off, soon.’

‘I didn’t need to know that.’

‘Yes, you did. This yak is weak in both back knees and her liver is in poor condition. If you punch her abdomen, it will rupture and kill her.’

‘Is that a warning or a tip?’

‘Yes.’

I looked over at Precious who was testily tapping the end of his cane on the pavement. “Do you mind if I deal with this?” I asked.

“Ah would appreciate it if ya would. If Ah wore a watch or had ever seen one, Ah imagine it would be tellin’ me time is runnin’ short.”

Tugging off my saddlebags and P.E.A.C.E. cannon, I set them on the ground beside him. Limbering up my shoulders, I stretched out on all fours, then rose up on my back legs and took a few shadow jabs at the air. It felt good to move, again. I’d been sitting on my flank too long and a nice fight always does me good.

More creatures were on the highway behind Agrona, just watching us, their weapons at rest. It was a strange collection of business suits with shotguns and foals in baseball caps carting pistols or knives or baseball bats. They all looked exhausted, but interested enough not to be shooting at me just yet.

Throwing out my chest, I started trotting toward the huge yak. The cold wind was biting into my pelt, but I ignored it. Snow had started to fall, interspersed with a light rain that was adding to my chill.

“Agrona! I challenge you for the leadership of these people!” I shouted.

It was a stretch, really.

I knew almost nothing about Yak culture, other than that they took challenges very personally and took leadership very seriously.

Watching Agrona perk right up gave me a tinge of a worry, however. She hefted her warhammer, spun it around her head and even around one horn before clenching it under one foreleg, pointing that giant hunk of stone at me like a spear. I couldn’t help but notice there was an especially sharp looking point on top of it.

‘She will kill you if she hits you.’’

‘I am aware of that, thank you!’

“Pony one of the crazy ones Agrona hears about?” the yak called, a mocking tone in her voice.

The small stallion at her side tried to speak again. “Miss Agrona, that’s...The Prince of Detrot and Taxi. She’s Hard Boiled’s bodyguard and driver. They say she once killed—”

“Do not care what ‘they’ say! Step back, Rush Light! Agrona will smash this pony, then we defend against dragons, then send scouts out to find way away from here! We not check north side, yet. There is old diamond dog tunnel! Now go stand over there till Agrona done.”

Rush Light glanced in my direction and mouthed the words, ‘I hope you can get through to her. She means well.’ before shrugging helplessly as he backed up against the railing at the edge of the highway. Everypony else was just watching, waiting to see what happened.

If there’s one obnoxious reality most ponies have to confront at some point in their lives, it’s that we’re herd animals. We tend to follow whoever looks like they’ll be able to keep us safest. Plenty of ponies stay in crap jobs because their boss has the air of someone who can ‘get things done’, even if they’re a monumental dumpster fire.

The ponies of the refugee train had seen me fly in with a war scooter being pulled by a pair of dragons, but Agrona had most likely rounded them up, armed them, and gotten them safely out of whatever horrid parts of the city they’d been tucked away in. I might have a bit of Gypsy’s storybook charm, but they’d seen the massive yak work and that counts for an awful lot. It didn’t help that the closer I got, the bigger she looked.

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘We have not, to date, fought anything that posed a threat. The dragoness, Propana, poses a threat. This yak needs a simple attitude adjustment. Incidentally, her hammer is enchanted.’

“Do you accept my challenge?” I demanded, raising my voice again so the crowd of watching creatures at the edges of the highway could hear me. More were joining them every second and I had a small worry as to how we were going to get them all out of there, even with the coming help of the Marked.

Agrona didn’t even hesitate. “Agrona accepts! Smash crazy mare flat! All the rest of you, no interfere! She mine!”

I glanced at Precious and asked, “May I have a tune? Something that says ‘hoof fight’?”

Settling down on the road, Precious swung his guitar across his legs. “Heh, Ah know just the thing.”

With that, he started in on one of his classics, ‘The Mare Who Caught Liberty Valencia.’

One of my favorites. It’s the tale of a hard drinking lawmare taking down the most wanted criminal in Equestria with a bit of cleverness, a bit of cunning, and - at the end - a good’ol kick to the head.

I broke into a gallop, charging towards Agrona as she rose up on her rear hooves, then came down with a fearful stomp that shook the highway under me. I barely kept my legs as the concrete split in a line right between my knees, opening an inch wide crack. Her giant hammer came around in an arc, burying itself in the road surface, a shockwave of air crashing outwards from it in my direction.

I threw myself at the asphalt, covering my ears with both forehooves. The compression wave energy pushed my fur back, but didn’t deafen or disorient me as I’d no doubt she intended it to. Mercy, that was a mean trick.

‘You need to remain calm.’

‘I am frickin’ calm!’

Rising, I threw myself forward again as Agrona gave me a slightly confused look, no doubt wondering why I wasn’t writhing around on the ground clutching my skull. At five meters the female yak realized she was not taking me down the easy way. She swung her giant hammer in a wide arc, releasing another shockwave of nearly invisible energy at around chest height. I rolled under it, coming onto all fours with my heart pounding.

‘Incoming, move left.’

I ducked to the left as, with frightening speed, the butt end of the hammer snapped around and would have sent me flying if I’d been standing there. I stepped in close and snapped a hoof out, catching Agrona on the chin with what should have been enough force to lay out a full grown stallion. We stood there for a second, staring at each other, my toe on her slightly scrunched muzzle. She looked surprised, but it quickly morphed to anger.

She let out a breathy growl and dipped her head.

‘Jump!’

I launched myself off the ground, putting a little more strength into the leap than I’d intended, but it was enough to carry me over Agrona’s sudden headbutt and onto her back. Bouncing along her spine, I did a quick tap dance across her shoulders, trying to find some pressure point that would actually work on her unfamiliar anatomy. Nothing seemed to be where it should be and her muscles were making everything difficult.

‘Can you help me out here?’ I begged.

‘We are helping. If we are not allowed to kill her, you must continue fighting until another option presents itself.’

Hopping off of Agrona’s backside, I aimed a fierce buck at her rear thigh. It was like kicking concrete, but the shot hit her in the calf muscle which buckled for a second. She staggered, catching herself with her hammer.

‘Down!’

I had only an instant to get out of the way before she lashed her massive tail around her side, almost swatting me in the face. For a second, I didn’t register why she’d done it, but then I saw something glinting in her thick fur; Agrona had wrapped her tail in razor wire.

‘Really likes her dirty tricks, doesn’t she?’

‘An artifact from childhood. She needs to feel in control because she was bullied—’

‘Relevant information only, please!’

‘You need to duck.’

Agrona’s kick made a whistling wind as it sailed by my head. Reaching inside her guard I tagged her knee and she staggered the second she put weight on it. I used the time to dance sideways, turn on all fours, and hit her in the hip with both rear hooves, apple-buckin’ style.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching that stupid tail.

She caught me across the cheek with the end of it,slitting my muzzle open like a grapefruit. It was little more than a love-tap, but I tasted blood and felt the razor kiss the side of my tongue for a half second. The pain was a sharp shot of adrenaline.

The hammer followed the strike and getting out of the way almost cost me a broken knee as I stumbled nose over tail, coming up on all fours just as she unleashed another shockwave right where I’d been standing just a second before. The explosion sent me flying, unfortunately right into Agrona’s face. Latching onto the horns of her helmet with both forelegs, we stared at each other, again from a much more intimate position.

Then she went to bite my stomach.

She got a good mouth-full of my tummy fur and yanked a bare patch out, tossing her head back and forth as she tried to send me for a flight.

‘Oh we are done! Nerves for her eyes?!’

‘You need to strike above each brow ridge. She will not be permanently blinded.’

‘I’ll take it!’

Hauling my weight up with her horns, I planted both back hooves on the end of her enormous muzzle, shoved the helmet back as I gave the huge yak a pair of harsh taps to the forehead just above her eyelids. That done, I leapt backwards onto the wet pavement, bracing to need a follow up. Agrona’s furious gaze centered on me for just a second and, if I’m honest, I was worried it hadn’t worked. Then, her expression changed to one of fear as her left eye started to drift off slightly. Her right pupil contracted and she covered it with one hoof.

“W-what pony do to Agrona?” she stammered, taking several steps back as she pulled her hammer across herself, taking the weapon’s haft in her teeth. “Agrona cannot see!”

“Light damage to your optic nerves,” I said, dusting my hooves. “You’ll get your sight back, eventually. Do you yield? I can deafen you, too, but I’d rather you could hear my orders. We’ve got lives to save and this is wasting time.”

The yak bared her teeth which still had bits my fur stuck between them.

“Agrona...” she began, then trailed off.

I coughed and her head swung several inches to the left so she was actually facing me.

“Agrona is blind, there’s a storm blowing, and there are a bunch of dragons coming,” I said, icily. “You think you can hit them with that magic hammer if you can’t see them?”

The cogs in the yak’s mind clicked over one another and she heaved a great sigh, dropping her warhammer’s head into the concrete. Giving herself a shake, she slung a torrent of water off her back and leaned against her weapon’s haft, making a sour face in something like my general direction.

“Agrona did not stand an actual chance, did she?” she asked.

I spit a mouthful of blood on the pavement and shrugged. “You got me a good one with your tail. That’s more than most and no stallion ever hit me that hard. Now, let’s see about this camp of yours.”

Turning to the side of the highway, Agrona shut her eyes and shouted, “Rush Light! Rush Light, you there?”

The young stallion shuffled his way forward from the crowd of creatures who’d begun to gather on the highway.

“Yes, Miss Agrona?”

The yak gestured somewhere relatively near me with her chin. “Yellow mare is in charge, now. Agrona is going to find a taco before we run away from the dragons. Must be a taco left in the world. May need someone to guide Agrona to the taco.”

Leaving her hammer where it lay, buried in the road surface, Agrona stumped off toward the side of the highway.

Rush Light swallowed and turned back to me, tugging at the edge of his jacket nervously.

“I...I may faint,” he muttered, then pulled himself straight. “W-were you serious about the dragons coming? Why isn’t Hard Boiled here t-to stop them?”

“Hardy is taking care of something even worse than the dragons,” I replied, and looked off to the east. Just at that moment, a small flicker of orange light boiled through the clouds. “How quickly can you assemble this camp to move? We have minutes.”

The stallion’s shivering increased as he wobbled on his legs. “I...I mean, most of us have only been here a few days. How much can we take?”

“Nothing significant. One bag, at most, but if we drive off the dragons we’ll see to it ponies can come back and claim their possessions. There will be food and water, but argument means death. I need to call back to my ride.”

“The...the War Scooter we saw? You flew in that?”

“How did you think I got out here?” I asked, then turned back to where Precious still waited on the road behind me. “Could you have somepony look after him?”

“A-are you going away?” he asked, plaintively, his eyes wide and frightened.

“For a minute, yes, then I’ll be back. I want you to get somepony to every sewer grate and ponyhole cover you can find and start getting them off. We’re going to be evacuating into the sewers.”

“B-but I can’t...c-can’t give orders!” he squeaked, his breath hitching as he stumbled back a couple of steps.

‘He can. He was not always this quivering mess. The trauma of the last month has unmade him. He needs to be reminded of Dust Devil.’

‘Dust Devil?’

‘You need to hurry.’

Putting on my very best 'affirming, inspiring, not-at-all-crazy-eyed’ face I laid a hoof on his shoulder and leaned close, pulling him against my side gently so I could put my muzzle near his ear.

“Rush Light. Remember Dust Devil? Think about Dust Devil. You can do this. These people need you. The city needs you. You won’t let any of us down, will you?”

“D-Dust Devil?” he whispered, pulling back a little. “How do you kn-know about her and—”

“You won’t let her down, will you?” I insisted, resting my cheek against his. “You won’t let the city down. You can get these ponies organized. Go get the Prince of Detrot and have him walk with you. I’ll send another pony to help. She’s got an awful lot of experience in these things. Right now, though...you, Rush Light, have to get them to listen to you. Can you do it?”

I’d no idea what memory I’d just sparked in him. My talent seemed to know, but I wasn’t interested in delving deep into the poor stallion’s psyche just then. Whatever the case, he seemed to grow a little taller, his shoulders straightening as he lifted his head from what I felt sure had become a habitual slouch.

Rush Light put a hoof to his forehead and murmured, “I...I can do it. It’s just like organizing a conference, right? Get them to listen, get them on your side, get them to apply what you tell them.”

I stepped back and nodded toward the gathered crowd, then turned to face them myself.

“People of Detrot!” I projected as far as I could. “If you haven’t heard of me, my name is Taxi! I am here because Hard Boiled—who you may know as Dead Heart or the Bulldog—is determined to keep you safe!”

I waited a few seconds for those words to have an impact. The beings at the front of the crowd started looking back and forth at one another, then a tiny filly in a blue dress with no cutie-mark stepped forward. She looked exhausted, her makeup streaked with days of tears she hadn’t bothered to clean off. Still, she managed a nervous smile.

“H-He’s real? Hard B-Boiled is real?” she squeaked.

“As real as me!” I replied, then turned back to the rest. “We are organizing an evacuation to a safe location! There is food and water! You can take one personal item and I’ll make sure you can come back to retrieve the rest of your belongings, but we have only limited time to make it happen! Rush Light, who I’m sure you all know, will be organizing things alongside the Prince of Detrot, who will answer any questions you have while you walk. Listen to them as though they speak with Hard Boiled’s voice. He is listening, right now, via a magic spell. He’s out there getting ready to fight the monsters who have driven you from your homes, and if he succeeds you’’ll get to go back to them one day soon! You can help him by getting to safety!”

Little lies and big lies, with just enough truth to spice it all up. I supposed they needed those. I sure as crap did.

Turning on my heel and without another word, I galloped back to where Precious still sat in the road, casually tuning his guitar with thin rain rolling off his shaking shoulders.

“Phew! Alright! Situation handled!” I said.

“Ah d-do wish Ah’d gotten to see it,” he replied, slotting his instrument onto his back as he picked up his cane. “Always the plumber’s curse, Ah guess. We get to hear about the ‘big events’ after they happen. Still, sounded right excitin’. Ya convince’em to get movin’?”

Instead of replying, I picked up my saddlebags which were right where I’d left them, then fished out my walkie-talkie and pressed the ‘send’ key.

“Apple Bloom?”

There was a momentary scramble on the other end of the line, then it was picked up. “Here, filly. Ah saw that little display. Ah’ve also got big movement in the skies. Wherever she is, Propana ain’t far. Ya need me out there?”

“You’re in charge of the crowd,” I answered, tapping my chin as I watched the clouds overhead. I couldn’t tell if what was going on up there was just a normal, albeit super-charged storm or if it was dragonfire making the clouds light up like lanterns. “They’re scared, but a pony named Rush Light will be your best resource. Take Precious, get him warm, and start getting people into the sewers. Tourniquet is sending her people and they’ll be here soon.”

“What are you plannin’ on doin’?”

“Making this up as I go along. I’ll be back at the War Scooter in a second.”

Just then, Rush Light trotted up to us, breathing heavily as rain sloughed off his shoulders. “Alright, Miss Taxi. I spoke to the others. We have a sort of informal council Miss Agrona used to get things done. There was some argument, but...I told them Hard Boiled wanted us to do this and they shut up. Is this the Prince of Detrot?”

‘Precious is falling into hypothermia. He needs heat or he’ll go into shock within the next twenty minutes.’

“Yes,” I replied, digging through my saddlebags for an emergency blanket I kept in one of the pockets. I quickly unfolded it and tossed the foil sheet around the elderly pony’s shoulders, before grabbing Rush Light by one shoulder and shoving him under it. “Your job is now to keep him alive. Don’t let him be cold and don’t let him run himself out. He will try to comfort literally everyone he interacts with.”

Precious shot a slightly amused look at me, but still sidled a bit closer to Rush’s side. “Filly, Ah want to say yer wrong, but Ah know mahself. Besides, Ah have this feelin’ yer gonna act the mother-hen whether Ah like it or not.”

“I...I’ve been told I’m not allowed to die today,” I said, putting a hoof on his sequin-covered chest. I could feel his heart fluttering a little under my hoof, but it seemed to be calming. “That means you don’t get to die today. Tomorrow, a year from now, a century from now, maybe you can rest. Today, Detrot needs its Prince.”

The ancient stallion gave me his crooked smile and, for a moment, the decades on his face fell away. His milk-white eyes shimmered. He was the young, vibrant creature who’d wowed people all across Equestria. He’d never gotten to see his audiences’ applause, but he heard them.

I’d never asked exactly why he settled in our fair city. Maybe he was born here, or maybe it was just the right place to be. I’d never thought to ask just how old he was or where he was from. He’d always been ‘The Prince’ and that was enough.

They say that cities have souls.

If he was the soul of ours, maybe there was something in it worth saving.

Apple Bloom’s clomping hoofsteps broke into my thoughts as she appeared through the sheets of heavy rain, her stetson low over her face. She took in Rush Light and Precious standing side-by-side under the blanket, then me with my matted mane and the blood dripping from my slashed cheek.

“Had fun did ya?” she commented.

“It was a fight, yes,” I replied, glancing back at where Agrona’s warhammer still sat in the street. “What’s our situation?”

“Well, Miss Taxi, Ah gotta say this ain’t gonna be the most fun evacuation Ah’ve ever been part of,” the old mare grumbled, slinging water off her hooves. “Our robotic little friend has got alla’ the city sluices open ta keep the sewers from floodin’, but if it keeps up like this there might not be a thing we can do. The Bay of Unity is awful high on its shores.”

“Then you need to make friends with this pony, here,” I added, gesturing at Rush Light who was looking back and forth between us with a bemused expression. “Bloom, Rush Light. Rush Light, Bloom. Listen to her like you’d listen to me. She’s the most dangerous pony you’ve ever met or heard of.”

Rush light gulped and nodded. “I’m pretty sure you already took that crown, Ma’am, but...I am pleased to meet the three of you, likewise. Our organizing council is just a few smart ponies, but people listen to them. I told them to get everyone up and ready to move. We set a sort of...emergency code so one of us could override anypony’s objections if there was a bad enough need.”

“Miss Bloom, can you take things from here?” I asked, glancing back towards the War Scooter. “I need to get back in the air. If Propana is coming anywhere, it’s to the one thing in the city that might directly threaten her.”

My walkie-talkie crackled for a second, then Firebrand’s voice came through it.

“I do not know if you can hear me, but I do believe you should come back...now, Madame Taxi,” the dragoness said in a purposefully composed tone that made me even more nervous, “A dead griffin just landed on the roof of our vehicle. At least, I think it is a griffin. It is too charred to tell.”

I don’t know what my face looked like at this news, but Rush Light and Apple Bloom both sidled a couple steps in the opposite direction.

“I will be right there.”

Act 3 Chapter 74 : Taxi's Death

‘Shine.’

‘What does that mean?’

The sky stank of blood and smoke as a hundred little battles spread out beneath me.

Marked—armed with rope-lined spear guns stolen from a scuba-diving store—had managed to bring down one of the smaller red dragons who’d roosted in a former ballet studio. A half dozen allied griffins descended with axes. Very soon, there was one less dragon in Detrot.

At one of the Fresian lanes, a fight raged between diamond dogs and the thousands of converted demons that’d stormed out of Uptown. The diamond dogs were losing, badly, slowly being pushed back into the sewers. The monsters pressed their advantage, until at a point a signal was given and a thousand equine shapes appeared on adjoining buildings. It was too late for the creatures to realize they’d been funneled into a killing field, not that many of them still retained the intelligence to understand even the most basic strategy. The slaughter was appalling.

Across town, an armed camp of Celestia worshipers was in the process of being wiped out. They’d rejected the entreaties of one of Tourniquet’s envoys and took shots at a passing group of P.A.C.T. who came a little too close. Minutes later, an uncountable hoard of deformed monstrosities that’d once been the population of Uptown descended on them. They’d fought bravely, with Princess Celestia’s name on their lips, singing hymns and chanting prayers to the sun. They died violently, torn to pieces and devoured en masse.

Aboard ‘Her Royal Grace’, I stood with all that need pounding in my veins. I didn’t know what to do with it, yet, but I could still taste the blood from Agrona’s slash across my face. My thighs hurt from kicking the captain in the chest. My tail was short more than a couple inches and a bit of shrapnel from the shot through the window had cut my scalp in a few places that stung like a beast. My coat was dirty, my mane caked with blood, and even the icy rain couldn’t soothe my aching spirit.

The circular route I’d set the war scooter on would, eventually, take it over the Bay of Unity, but there was a draconic sorceress out there in the storm. I could feel her, too. She was close, now. Her great white body snaked through the sky, coming for my blood. I was an interesting toy to her, a neat little creature who’d defied her expectations again and again.

Killing her own soldiers was nothing more than a mild inconvenience, if that. Leaving their families motherless and fatherless.

She needed love. She needed meat. She needed satisfaction.

“I need her to die,” I whispered to the storm.

How? I’d no idea. My P.E.A.C.E. cannon was entirely full of non-lethal rounds. The war scooter’s guns were silent, and I doubted Propana would give me time to get inside and into the unbroken turret, much less prop Firebrand at the flight controls. She was still mobile, but that might not mean much.

Still, that didn’t change my conviction.

Carnath’s bride coasted in close, keeping pace with us from just a couple war-scooter-lengths back. She was much too large to actually land on the war scooter, but with the throttle only at half speed she wasn’t having any trouble keeping up. Even at maximum, I suspected she could probably fly circles around me. That close, she could draft in the clean air coming off the back of the scooter and barely needed to beat her giant wings.

“Gorgeous, Miss Taxi!” Propana shouted, loud enough to be heard even in the storm, “Gorgeous! Three royal dragons dead and you even managed to get that fool to order a retreat with nary a scratch laid on you!”

“What was his name?” I yelled back.

She raised one whiskery eyebrow and flew a little closer. “Whose name?”

“The captain! The one you murdered just now!”

Laughing as musically as something with a furnace for lungs can, she coasted in close.

“Honestly, I’ve no idea. Sentimentality over the dead is not a trait we dragons suffer. My husband arranged his service and I arranged the bribes. Another old soldier, killed in glorious combat. He followed orders, until he didn’t. That’s really all that matters.”

Through gritted teeth, I barked, “When you die, I hope he’s waiting to greet you in whatever Tartarus evil snakes like you end up in. I hope he has all eternity to teach you his name until it’s all you still remember of yourself.”

Propana giggled, covering her muzzle with one claw for a moment before replying, “From what I hear of the tales of you, you and I will be there together! You intend me dead and I intend you alive, staring out from a crystal prison for all eternity while I rut atop the mountain of jewels this little venture shall surely land me! Shall we play our final hands?”

Snatching my gun off my back, I cracked the breach and clicked through my various remaining rounds. In almost any other circumstance, I’d have felt reasonably confident with what I had, but against a psychotic dragon in the height of her power? Not brilliant.

“Final hands,” I called.

‘What do I do? Help me here!’

‘Shine.’

‘That is entirely unhelpful!’

I could still feel the aching light building inside me, but I’d no idea what to do with it. It pulsed and wavered as those below suffered and fought, needing more than any one pony could possibly give. Each fresh mourning victim screamed for something, but what?

My attention was yanked back to Propana as she reached into the leather pouch around her neck, pulling out what looked like a small stone tablet, though small might have been relative. It was probably the size of a pony, but next to her it looked pretty small. The tablet was carved with a strange sigil: a circle composed of five dragon claws.

Raising the symbol above her head, she squeezed it with a terrifying strength. The stone exploded into a spray of dust that seemed to hang in the wind around her face, keeping up with us as we moved along. She drew in a breath and the dust rushed into her muzzle. A subtle glow began to permeate her body, spreading through her limbs until they dazzled even against the lightning arcing between the clouds.

I raised my gun, but held my trigger, waiting to see precisely what was about to happen. Propana beat her wings a little harder, gaining a few spans in height and pulling herself out of my ideal firing arc. Any half decent gunner could probably have led the shot, but I’m nothing like a half-decent gunner.

I didn’t have to wait long. As the glow subsided, the dragoness suddenly convulsed in mid-air, almost tumbling out of the sky for an instant before it seemed as though a great hand swept her up into a coil in the air, supporting her even though her wings no longer beat. She hovered along behind the war scooter, either by some bizarre inertia or a dark magical will. A strange pulse of energy gradually worked its way from her tail up her body, causing the flesh to bulge slightly with its passing.

Deciding I’d waited long enough, I scrambled backwards to the lip of the hatch and tried to draw a bead on her. Considering I can’t draw a bead on a whole bucket full of beads at point blank range most of the time, it was never going to be a great shot. The P.E.A.C.E. cannon bucked in my forelegs and a shot arced under her, missing by a solid four meters before popping into a colorful burst of green magical dust. No good.

Along Propana’s shoulders and neck the skin started to twitch like she was having some sort of bizarre seizure. Her scales puckered and gradually started to push away from her chest. I swallowed as a silvery eye the size of a softball opened on her throat. A second appeared on her foreleg along with the general shape of a jaw with a single, pointed tooth jutting from the muscle.

With a sound like a thousand phone books being torn in half at once, Propana lifted her head. Scraps of torn, dangling skin hung from her chin before fluttering away in the wind. Then she lifted a second head.

Then a third.

A fourth.

A fifth.

Propana’s wings began to beat once more as whatever force held her suspended there seemed to let go. Her upper body sagged under the weight of five long, sinuous necks and five identical heads. She stared down at me out of five leering sets of golden eyes. Her central head smacked its lips, watching me as the others examined one another with a variety of amused expressions. Finally, they all turned in my direction.

My talent stuttered in the oddest fashion. I could still read Propana, but it seemed as though her needs were now suddenly coming from different directions. My already nauseous stomach lurched.

“The blessing of the dragon mother is upon us?” the far left head said, one claw reaching up to pick a bit of meat from between its teeth.

“Do you think it was, perhaps, too much to use on such pathetic prey?” the one on the right asked.

“If she did not wish us to use it, she would have simply ignored our call,” another head answered. “Besides, it is not the first time the mother of us all has allowed her powers to be used for an entertainingly one sided cause.”

“Excuse me, are...are we going to fight?” I asked, clapping my hooves for attention.

Propana’s heads exchanged glances with one another.

“Jealousy, would you like to take this, or should we just burn her alive?” the middle head said to the one on its left.

In a wheedling voice, the other replied, “Wouldn’t you just love it if I did, so you could stab me in the back?” The head turned back to me and explained, “Hatred is always doing all the fun things and meanwhile, I’m left sitting here until some other silly female threatens our position with Carnath.”

“Oh, do please stop you silly nit. Every time we do this, you and Pathos whinge about how neglected you are or how we all hate you. Which is to say, we do hate you, but there’s nothing to be gained from killing you right now,” the first head who I presumed was ‘Hatred’ interjected, jerking her chin towards the head beside her who had a slightly forlorn expression.

“Y-you’re right...i-it’s all my fault,” Pathos whimpered.

“Oh, you are so adorable when you cry,” another head said. “Just makes me want to eat you right up!”

“T-thanks, Lust...b-but I don’t want to be a bother.”

I threw my gun onto my shoulder and stomped on the roof of the scooter until I had all of their various eyes turned in my direction. “Hold on, please. I can’t keep looking back and forth between all of you or I’m going to get sick. I’m already sick of standing up here and if we’re going to fight five on one, the least you can do is make this a little more convenient. Pick a spokes-head.”

The five glanced at one another, then turned to the head just left of the center who perked up and grinned like a puppy who’d just been asked to play.

“J-Joy?” Pathos whispered. “Y-you usually talk to ponies wh-when they’re screaming, but t-this-”

“Thank you, Pathos!” Joy squeaked, working her jaw excitedly, “I’m so glad to paralyze you today, Miss Taxi! I promise if you survive, I’ll play some pony music real loud outside your prison sometimes so you have something to listen to! Now, then, do you want to surrender? Pathos will be sad if you just surrender, but then, she’s sad anyway.”

The head who seemed to be identified as Pathos frowned pitifully and pursed her lips, making jumbo-sized kitten eyes at me. “P-please fight? Surrender would be b-boring.”

I rubbed at my forehead with one hoof. The headache I’d been sporting since the fight with Agrona wasn’t being much improved by the feeling of thousands upon thousands of beings in need radiating off the city below. I wanted so much to be back on the plains, sitting in a little hut somewhere with one of the zebra masters. That or wrapped in Minox’s arms, drinking with Hardy, teasing Swift, arguing with Limerence, petting Mags, or sitting in my cab with my incense and music.

I was about to answer her when I felt an intense need to brace myself. It took a few seconds to wrap my mind around the fact that I could feel what was about to happen, but when I did my heart sank right into my stomach; Firebrand, having patched some of her wounds and wrapped a tourniquet around her tail, had crawled behind the controls and was about to do something reckless.

“Oh ponyfeathers. Be with you in a second!” I shouted.

I scrambled towards the hatch, but it was too late. Even the magics holding me to the roof of the war scooter couldn’t entirely compensate for the sudden, vicious dive Firebrand’s ill-timed attempt to learn the controls in mid-air resulted in. Earth ponies, whatever excellent personal strengths we may have, are almost universally afraid of heights. I am usually an exception where things like that are concerned, but dropping out of the sky at that speed?

My only saving grace was that whatever magic surrounded the scooter and parted the air kept me from being swept away entirely, leaving me hovering in a terrifying fashion a meter or two off the surface of the armored bulkhead as it dove towards the ground. My ears popped and I barely had time to register that the vehicle was slowing before I slammed right into the back of it. The air went right out of my already sore lungs and I coughed a couple times, then spat something on my hoof: blood. Probably the sudden pressure change bursting a few capillaries. I hoped there wasn’t any permanent damage.

We were still descending, but at an angle. I was more or less glued to the back by the scooter’s spells and little else. Dragging myself up, I crawled over toward the hatch and hung my head over the edge.

“Warn me before you do that, next time!” I yelled.

Firebrand’s voice, sounding a little weak, came back from down below. “I...do not believe there will be many more ‘next times’, Miss Taxi. Propana is still behind you. I will try to keep us circling toward the Bay.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I let out a none-too-brave little squeak as I caught sight of Propana diving toward us out of the smoky gloom. All five of her immense mouths opened, jaws lined with razor sharp teeth and what looked like a raging star at the back of each throat. I needed Firebrand to do something.

Without thinking, I reached out...and I needed.

A bright blue shield snapped down over me just in time for multiple blasts of world-ending dragon flame to rake across the surface of the scooter, digging deep gouges in its armor and melting furrows that bled molten metal. The shield was a dome only a little larger than myself and protected none of the rest of the scooter, but though tiny cracks appeared on its surface, it still held.

“I thought you were paralyzing me!” I snarled.

At once, all the fire vanished, leaving a steaming mess that Apple Bloom was going to be pretty angry about if I ever managed to return her war scooter.

Joy raised her chin and ran a tongue over her lips. “Hate to end it, but you’re actually taking longer to kill than we had allotted for this part of our day! There’s a bunch of wiggly little ponies squatting out there in the rain who need attention, too! Still, I know a good necromancer who’ll be happy to snatch you out of wherever you ponies go when you die and trap you in your bones forever!”

“He wouldn’t happen to be named ‘Zefu’ would he?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over the raging storm as I got back to my hooves.

“Oh! You know him?” Joy chuckled as Lust wound herself around her neck like a scarf.

“One of my close friends turned him into a sword.”

The head who’d been named as ‘Hatred’ snaked forward and glared at me. “He was undead. A despicable little lich! You lie, mare, and I will chop—”

“Do I look like I have the energy to lie?” I snarled.

“S-she’s not lying. Z-Zefu is dead,” Pathos whispered.

“Then I’m having her head! I wanted to kill him myself!” Jealousy snapped.

“Can we pull her skin off and add it to our pouch?” Joy squeaked, cheerfully.

As Propana’s heads talked back and forth, debating what awful things they were about to do to me I quickly cast around for an option to quickly disable them and tried to get a sense of what was around me. Were there any advantages? Anything at all I could use?

‘Shine.’

‘Still unhelpful.’

Firebrand. She was sitting at the controls. Maybe she could radio one of the other dragons on our side to come help, or possibly have Tourniquet do it? Did they even have radios?

I needed time to think. It might have helped to have Tourniquet’s brain. She could think as many thoughts as there were Marked in the city.

‘Wait. How do I know that?’

I needed to know that.

That was important.

‘Why is that important?’

I needed to think more quickly. I needed to hurt Propana. I couldn’t hurt her from here. I needed to be in close.

“Gypsy,” I whispered, hoping I’d thought to leave my radio on and that she was still listening.

My walkie-talkie sputtered and I hoped the sound was lost in the rain.

“Are we whispering because of the giant five headed dragon flying along behind your war scooter?” Gypsy asked.

“Yes. Tell Tourniquet I’m going to try something stupid and not to fight me. If I die, tell Hardy I love him.”

“What?!”

“Who are you mumbling to?”

I raised my head to find Propana’s five all regarding me with various looks of contempt, amusement, and interest as she barreled in closer.

“Just saying my prayers,” I replied, shaking my head. “Did you all come up to a consensus?”

“Yes!” Joy exclaimed, bobbing her chin. “Hatred wanted to peel your face off and make you wear it backwards, but I talked her down to just burning you. Jealousy wants to do it, so I thought I’d let them share!”

“You know your husband is planning on stripping your title as his lead concubine the second you bear him some children, right?” I called. “I wouldn’t want to stand between you and the assassin’s cup that’s coming your way the minute you get back. Clan Avaricious could do with a new leader and Carnath knows it!”

Four of her heads jerked a little higher in the air as rain beat down on both of us. Joy squinted at me, confused, as fire began to leak from Hatred and Jealousy’s lips. Lust was wrapped around Pathos and seemed deeply distracted by nuzzling her chin.

“You heard that from those whelplings dragging your vehicle! My husband loves me and—”

“He loves you like he loved his first two wives! What happened to them?”

Pathos opened her mouth to speak, only for Lust to suddenly wind her neck around her shoulder-mate’s muzzle.

“Yeah, we both know what happened!” I snarled. “He claimed it was one of his rivals, and yet nobody ever took credit! You think you’re going to be the exception?”

Hatred’s lip curled, then she slowly smiled. “Well. Good to know. Killing him was always an option.”

Jealousy raised her head and growled, “Not a chance you get to do it! If anyone is snapping that idiot's throat, it’s me!”

“M-maybe we deserve it,” Pathos muttered. “W-we did sleep with every one of his guards and had his third wife k-killed.”

Joy shook her head. “He can’t be meaning to kill us! He loves us!”

Lust snorted a stream of smoke. “He’d screw us dead or alive. Makes no never mind to him. Makes no never mind to me, either, now that I think about it.”

“Oh shut up, Lust,” Hatred snarled, nipping in her direction. “You’ve gotten us into more stupid situations than even Jealousy over there!”

Having bought myself a moment while Propana’s heads bickered, I shut my eyes and reached out into the city below.

I’d been a good narcotics officer, back in the day, because getting inside the minds of addicts and those that profit from them is easy. They want a fix, they want to feel whole, and they want to feel like whatever deep, dark need has driven them to escape themselves is not quite so deep nor dark. In the years I’d been on the force, there were more circumstances where it was the brains of my fellow officers that presented complications well before those of perpetrators.

My official record was spotless, but my actual record—the one every office has which details who is and isn’t a ‘problem’ for the powers-that-be—was littered with more than a few cops with broken ribs, noses, tails, and other things who’d stepped over the line while I was present. They wouldn’t complain, officially, but they’d discretely slink off and make their reports to whoever the Chief had sitting in local cop bars watching for injuries. Hardy’s permanent need to enact justice in the world had been rubbing off on me since we were kids, though I’d rarely have called myself a force for good.

Much as the bastards often gave me excuses to hurt them, the reasons were rarely ever the most immediate. More frequently, I’d get wind they were rough with their spouses or kids or that they were on the take. They needed a little justice and I’d get to take some stress out of my day.

All those years placating my talent with scraps had left me with only the loosest notion of how it worked or what it could do.

Unfortunately, a ‘crash course’ doesn’t usually come with as much ‘crash’ as mine was about to.

I didn’t really know what I was doing, nor whether Firebrand had actually responded to my needs with the magical shield an instant before Propana scoured the back of the scooter with her firebreath or if she’d intended to do that anyway. If her timing was just that good then I was probably moments from death. Coincidence would be the death of me, and an ignominious death indeed.

Still, a part of me knew that hadn’t been what had happened.

I’d needed that shield and it’d been there.

So, could I need something else? Was it right that a pony whose life was spent becoming what others needed should need something for herself? Was it right to need after I’d been Daddy’s killer and my best friend’s killer and my former partner’s stooge? Did I deserve to have needs of my own?

‘Shine.’

I’d been unconsciously trying to push away all the needs of those thousands of ponies below me, forcing them to the back of my mind where they writhed and begged for attention. Cautiously, I began to reach out and to feel them. Their presence in my mind was like a thousand echoing screams in a deep cavern.

Gradually, a piece at a time, I began to sort them out.

Somewhere in the smoking ruins of an upscale boutique, a unicorn foal stood in front of the injured bodies of several ponies and a griffin, a gun shakingly levitating alongside her head. The smoking corpses of three warped monsters lay on the sidewalk outside. She could hear more of the mutants coming. Her breathing was uneven and her knees shook with each inhalation.

She’d gotten her cutie-mark in target-shooting during training just the day before, then lied about her age when she’d gotten in line to volunteer for in-city combat. When the beasts came, she’d frozen stiff, cowering behind the boutique’s counter as her squad-mates fought and were hurt or killed. The creatures were ever so much more horrible than anything she’d imagined in even her worst nightmares, but when she saw her squad-leader’s left foreleg sliced right off, she’d grabbed her gun and managed to kill all three of the ones who remained.

More were coming.

She had one full clip left. Eight shots. Eight demons were sniffing and snuffling along the adjoining street, hunting for the source of the recent gunshots. It would only be enough if she could place each shot perfectly.

Her gun barrel shook.

‘She needs courage,’ I thought.

‘Shine.’

Some miles away, an old stallion was fighting with his back to a wall of a blood-soaked alleyway. He’d lost an ear, and he was the last of his squad, but each monster that rounded the corner died. Their Marked died early in the fight and the pony carrying the radios was snatched off the ground and torn to pieces in one of the adjoining buildings.

His knees creaked and his back ached. He wanted, more than anything, to be back with his wife in Appaloosa. They’d been on vacation to see his grandson when the sun went dark. His wife was dead, but his grandson lived and so he fought on. Each twisted monstrosity met his double barreled shotgun.

He knew, very soon, he would be dead, but his strength did not waver.

‘He needs hope.’

‘Shine.’

The remains of a squad of griffins, their leader dead, their morale broken, fled three pursuing dragons across the sky near the Vivarium. They tried to scatter into the clouds, only to be herded back together by gouts of flame. The lizards were playing with them, scorching their tails and sometimes snapping at their legs. They still held their axes, but their guns were all but empty.

‘They need a moment’s calm.’

‘Shine.’

Throughout the city, the Marked tried desperately to hold together the cohesion of hundreds upon hundreds of people. I could feel Tourniquet’s panic as, despite their advantages, the monsters butchered our conscripts by the hundreds. The construct felt each death like a knife in her heart as the voices of her flock went silent. Deep in her dark cave, she was shivering with fear and sadness.

‘She needs experience with loss.’

‘Shine’.

Time was passing. A few seconds, only, and yet as I allowed their needs into myself it felt like an hour. Propana’s heads were still arguing.

‘They all have something they need and I need a tiny piece of them. Can they take a piece of me, in return?’

It was like a muscle I’d never flexed, but in that moment they needed me much as I needed them.

I called out, and my talent woke from its long slumber.

I began to Shine.

Across the city, like spreading feathers to catch the wind, I touched the thousands and thousands of minds that comprised all those who still lived, letting them brush me like the smoke from all those fires.

A mare protecting her offspring from a ravening beast found herself unafraid of its jaws and teeth; she felt the anger of a betrayed child whose father beat her, brainwashed her, and killed the only mother she ever knew. The monster didn’t live long.

The Marked felt the deaths of everyone they loved, felt the grief, felt the loss, and then the acceptance and hope that there would be a future where love would triumph over death and those who’d died would be remembered if only they could keep fighting.

Cops, who’d seen the city they sworn to protect fall into ruin, felt the joy of thundering across the plains with a herd of buffalo, their eyes full of tears at the wind and speed. The thrill of the charge consumed their terror at the abominations they fought and the choking smoke that filled their lungs. For a moment, all they could feel was the joy of running with their brothers.

A foal huddled over the remains of her dead squad felt a zebra shaman gently adjust her footing, raise her chin, and ready her for the hunt. Her gun steadied. She stepped forward and prepared for the kill.

Above it all, one little pony—with only her talent and memories for weapons against a crazed enchantress who’d see the world end if she could—began to swell with tiny pieces of every mind she touched.

I felt the breath of a newborn on my cheek and the rage of a lover protecting her beloved. My breast seemed fit to burst with all the different kinds of love that people felt for one another. Their strength filled my veins. Thousands and thousands lent me a little chunk of themselves and I gave back everything I had.

‘Sometimes it’s not about everyone else,’ the Shine whispered, one last time, before vanishing into the depths of my mind, never to be heard from again.

“And sometimes it’s okay to need something from your friends.”

“What did you say, scrumptious little bite?” Joy asked, cocking her head toward me as she swooped in close. Her other heads were still chattering at each other over top of her, with Hatred and Jealousy seeming like they might very well come to blows, though they hadn’t, yet. Lust was still distracting Pathos with nips and nuzzles.

“I said ‘You’re first’,” I growled.

Reaching down, I popped my saddlebags off my waist, adjusted my cannon, then dropped into a sprinter’s start. Taking one last breath of all the city’s need, I bolted towards the edge. The experience of thousands of daily gallopers pulsed through my muscles, carrying me towards Propana with perfect form. I felt their memories gathering in my guts, giving my breath life and my veins strength.

Bracing my back legs, I leapt from the war scooter with the power of all the city’s primary school pole vaulters. About two meters off the surface, I was hit by a wall of wind and rain that almost knocked the air clean out of me, but many hundreds of pegasi braced me for the cold and damp. It was a mad leap into the storm, but it meant Propana had only a second to react as I launched myself toward her face.

Fortunately, there is some simple behavior programmed into the hindbrain of even the most intelligent predators when you throw a morsel of food towards their mouths. I yanked my back legs in just in time for Joy’s teeth to miss the ends of my hooves and landed muzzle first in the second stinkiest mouth I’d ever had the misfortune to be in. It should say something about my life that I have a list of that sort tucked away somewhere in my head.

Smashing muzzle first into the back of her throat, I groaned as a hot wave of smoke rolled over me, stinging my eyes. Her long, forked tongue slapped wetly against my thighs. It was far too muscular for me to wrestle with. Jamming myself down beside it, I pressed myself to the wall of flesh-ripping incisors on my left before she could bite down properly and kept myself just below their points.

“Did she just jump into your mouth, Joy?” one of the heads asked from outside.

“Sheh dhid!” came a reply that made my ears ache.

The heat and humidity were both stifling and the scent of burning meat was strong enough to upset my stomach, but I hoped not to be in there long. Hauling my cannon down off my shoulder, I kicked the dragoness’s tongue with both rear hooves. Earth pony strength, augmented by an untold number of applebuckers, cherry shakers, and boxers, sent the fleshy appendage slamming against the far wall of her mouth. Leveling the barrel of my gun at the softest part of her palate, I rotated the cartridge to my round of choice, shut my eyes, held my breath, and fired.

It should be noted that ‘non-lethal’ at close range can become very lethal if a pony is not careful. I’d just done the thing that every training manual on the use of a P.E.A.C.E. cannon recommended against in big letters on the very first page.

A hot spurt of scalding blood hit me in the face as the round buried itself several inches into the thick flesh of her uvula. Her head jerked, almost sending me tumbling down her throat before I managed to catch myself by tossing the loop of my cannon’s shoulder harness over one of her long canines. The round began to lightly smoke.

At the last minute, a scrap of knowledge escaped the mind of a former fire-fighter down on the ground who was battling a blaze that threatened to consume his home with little more than buckets and bravery. I threw a leg across my face as the round exploded, sending a chilly wave of flame retardant foam blasting down Joy’s throat. She stiffened and her tongue tried momentarily to squash me against her teeth, but I rolled under it, readying myself to leave.

All in a rush, an explosion of air launched me out of her muzzle into open air. I only just had the presence of mind to hold on to my cannon’s strap and as it reached the end of its length, I was whiplashed backwards onto the top of her muzzle. The strap snapped, but it’d done its job.

The dragoness’s head drew in another breath to cough again, but as she did her eyes centered on me standing on her face. I allowed myself a little smile before slamming the barrel of my cannon into her wide open eyeball as hard as I could. It squelched wetly as I yanked the trigger string, again. I wasn’t entirely sure what the next round in the chamber was, but it hardly mattered at that range; the primer charge was enough to send the shell straight into the back of her eyesocket.

When it exploded, Joy lurched sideways, then slowly her other eye rolled up as green smoke began to billow out of her remaining tear duct. A steaming rush of blood poured out of her nose and the expiring head dropped straight down, almost yanking Propana out of the air. I was already moving, leaping onto her back as the dragoness’s four remaining heads turned to look at me.

Hatred glanced down and lifted Joy’s lifeless chin with one claw. The dangling head’s tongue lolled to one side as fire foam spilled out of one side of her mouth. A waft of smoke trickled from the gaping hole left where her eye had been.

“Pony, you just signed—”

“Blah, blah, death warrant, kill me into tiny pieces!” I barked, already working through my next move. “Get on with it!”

Jealousy’s lips curled back and she inhaled, her neck bulging on both sides, only to immediately contract as she started coughing up steaming pink foam. Hatred cocked her head at her, then tried to blow what I assumed was a quick spurt of fire; a thin stream of bubbles shot out of her muzzle and were quickly swept away in the rain.

“S-she soaked our flame in g-goo!” Pathos wailed.

Hatred’s fluke rose as she glared down at me. “I hope you like to swim, pony.”

I only had a half second to realize what was happening before Propana’s back half cracked like a whip, sending me rocketing skyward. I spun end over end, my legs splayed out in all directions, trying to catch myself. I was in the clouds in the time it took me to mutter a curse under my breath. My gun was torn out of my hooves and pinwheeled off into the darkness, disappearing into the cloud layer.

I rose like I’d been shot out of a cannon, but as it always must, I eventually felt gravity begin to reassert itself. For just an instant, I floated there in the grey void, the sound of thunder crackling at the edges of my hearing as icy rainwater soaked me to the bone. Then, I began to fall. The rain whistled through my mane and my skin felt like I’d been tossed into a deep freezer. A fog descended over my brain as the chill clawed at my bones and my ears popped.

Just then, I broke through the cloud cover. Down below, a vast expanse of empty, open darkness with occasional reflections of the burning city roiled with the stiff winds of the gathering storm. I was directly above the Bay of Unity. I didn’t have much time to celebrate the achievement, mind you. The five headed dragoness was just ahead, still chasing the war scooter through the sky, four heads darting back and forth as though trying to find purchase while the last dangled from its dead neck. It was a macabre scene, but against the backdrop of the city, it seemed appropriate somehow.

The knowledge of many hundreds of pegasi roaming around my head slowly coalesced into the need to spread all four of my legs out, trying to slow my descent by creating as much surface area as possible. My fall stabilized, but now I was only a minute from the water, if that, and still accelerating.

“You will learn to calm the world and become the seed,” my old zebra teacher whispered in my ear. “From you the tree will grow and save the land in need.”

‘Reach out. Someone is there. Someone must be there.’

I began to stretch my senses out as old, buried instincts wormed their way to the surface. Many thousands of ponies were still gingerly tapped into my psyche, but calling to them while they were fighting for their lives seemed a good way to get them killed. Besides, none but the fastest of pegasi was likely to reach me in time and even then it was more likely I’d have dragged both of us down if they’d tried to catch me.

‘Will your death matter? Are you so important? Without Hardy, what are you?’

I didn’t have long to come up with an answer, but as it turned out, an answer was there waiting for me.

“I...I am...I am Sweet Shine. I am the hope for every need.”

I redoubled my efforts and gradually became aware of a presence below me. It was bigger than most of the others, so I’d almost missed it. It needed little and wanted for almost nothing, but what it did need was for the city to be safe.

His city.

His home.

His family.

‘Stella! I need you!’

I opened my eyes and looked down into the gaping waters, ready to swallow my broken body. I wondered if Hardy was watching. I shut my eyes and prepared to meet one of the many afterlives I’d spent decades readying myself for.

I didn’t really want to die. I’d just come alive for the first time in years. In all likelihood it was going to be quick. A broken neck, or a shattered spine, or a collapsed pair of lungs. All relatively gentle ways to go, in the grand scheme of things. I’d hit the water and wash ashore and there would be a nice little funeral somewhere.

Hardy would put flowers on my grave. Slip Stitch would probably make inappropriate comments and earn himself a swift kick. Minox, my dumb bull of a sometimes lover might actually cry. It’d have been good to see the big lug one more time, even if that relationship was destined to end in tears.

My flank tickled and I spared one of my few remaining seconds to glance out of the corner of one eye at my hip. A gently glowing symbol had reappeared after too many years absent: a dove taking wing, centered in an open eye, seeing the needs of all those who hoped for something better.

‘Oh. I guess I’m not dying today.’

The water beneath me exploded upwards in a geyser and from its center emerged the massive, scaled head of a brilliantly purple sea serpent. He was festooned with a jaunty little cap in the military style that’d been popular fifty years back and freshly applied eyeliner, his flukes bedecked in layers of sequins, and his face splashed with artfully lavish glitter. Liquid ran off him in rivulets that made it seem, for a moment, as though a second fiercer rainstorm were happening just below him.

He looked up, and with a tiny smirk, picked me out from the clouds. Pursing his pinked lips, he inhaled and then blew a thin blue flame. I wasn’t sure precisely what he was doing until a blast of extremely warm air caught me up and I felt myself jerk once, then again as he adjusted his aim.

About ten meters off the water, he gave me one more little puff that sent me a few inches higher before snorting as he turned to look up at the sky.

“You couldn’t catch me?!” I just had time to snarl, before the splash filled my nose with liquid.

As I lay there beneath the waves, the dark, freezing cold clutching at my heart, I did have to spend a minute considering whether or not to actually try to swim to the surface. The exhaustion had already gotten to me bad enough that I’d gotten my second and third wind. It was something of a question as to whether or not there was another one in there.

Finally, a distance swimmer out of Trottingham gave me a light mental nudge and I forced my limbs to move. I began to flail toward where I thought the light might be. My face breached into the open air and I gasped for breath, paddling in a little circle as I struggled to keep my head above the water.

Stella bobbed nearby, his immense tail swirling up a thin wake that rocked me up and down in the water. Rain pelted both of us, but the serpent seemed oblivious to it as he looked off towards the east where I could barely see the war-scooter circling back towards us. Propana was latched atop it, using her wings to keep herself aloft while one of her heads was buried in the open top hatch as the others tore at its armor.

Vexis and Ambrock were no longer pulling the scooter. Firebrand must have released them. That was good news, at least. It meant she was still alive.

I could see them coasting off towards the shoreline, Vexis holding her brother’s limp form in her front claws as she fled with as much energy as remained to her, leaving the massive armored vehicle to Propana. I lost the two of them to the distance, but the mad white dragoness seemed much more focused on her prize. Still, the vehicle was managing to keep itself aloft, though the magical field surrounding the bottom was fluctuating, flashing in and out of existence.

Raising my voice, I shouted, “Stella! D-did you see me falling?”

“I heard you, darling,” he replied, tapping the side of his head. “At some point you shall have to explain to me how you managed that. I spent years laying on anti-telepathic magics for the precise reason that I do not want ponies playing about in my mind.”

“Later!” I snapped, treading water as best I could. “How are we going to deal with Propana? She’s got some kind of magic that gave her five heads! I killed one, but the others—”

He turned to look down at me and gave me a saucy grin. “She’s just coming into range, darling. Little Firebrand radioed ahead to let us know she’s been on the way. Just a moment.”

Raising one arm above the level of the water, he pointed towards the center of the Bay where the statue of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna stood. It was close enough that I might have just swum for it if I’d been paying any attention. From the small shore surrounding the statue, a bright green flare went up.

One of Propana’s heads noticed it and then her eyes were drawn down to the water where Stella floated, casually picking his teeth with the end of one claw. She almost snapped the neck that was still inside the war-scooter withdrawing from it. I couldn’t quite see her expressions, but none of them looked happy.

Releasing the vehicle, she took to the air and let out a roar from her four remaining heads that had me slapping my hooves over my ears. Unfortunately, that meant I immediately sank like a stone and had to struggle my way back to the surface. As I breached the air, it was halfway through a conversation.

“—never thought to see you again, Stellatrix!” Propana shouted, hovering in the air about sixty meters off the water. At that distance and in the dark, I couldn’t tell which of her heads had spoken.

“And I hoped I’d never see you again, Propana!” Stella called back, pulling a cigarette the size of a telephone pole from behind one ear and blowing a light flame onto the end. “This is my city, you know. You are unwelcome. Fly away before I decide you need a lesson in humility.”

Propana’s four remaining heads snorted four thin streams of steam. It seemed she hadn’t quite gotten her flames back, just yet. “And what will you do to us from down there, serpent? You have no fight in you! The Dragon King drove you out!”

Stella ran the fingers of one clawed hand down his cheek and put on a face of mock horror. “Is that what the fool is telling people these days? My, my, I must rectify that! I gave up the throne, darling! I didn’t want to spend my days dodging assassins. Now you bring assassins to my city! That will require an answer.”

As they exchanged words, I noticed the war scooter coasting in for a landing on the surface of the Bay. With a mighty blast of water that sent an enormous bow wave sloshing in my direction, the ancient tank crashed into the surface. It’d landed on the side away from the massive gash that Propana had managed to carve into its armored hide. It bellied there for a moment, rocking back and forth before beginning to gradually sink.

“Look what you did, Stellatrix!” one of Propana’s heads moaned, “You distracted me from my prize! Still, taking your head back to the King of Dragons will ensure the future of my clan. Presenting him both yours and my husband’s shall be even better!”

“Have no doubt, Propana,” Stella replied, blowing a puff of blue smoke from the side of his mouth. “The Dragon King will hear from me at a point, though I don’t believe he will like the answer.” Pulling his cigarette from his mouth, he gestured at her with it. “You, on the other hand, have one chance to scoot your tail back to the Firelands. Last warning, missy.”

“Ha! A bold claim from one who ran from his own throne!” one of her heads crowed. I felt fairly confident it was Hatred, but it was hard to tell. “What will you do? Spray me to death? You may have been a legend in days past, but now you are grown old and fat!”

Now, I’d never seen Stella annoyed before. Mildly put out, certainly, but never once had he expressed actual, authentic anger in my presence. At the ‘fat’ comment, the ash fell from the end of his cigarette and he frowned very slightly in as close to an unguarded fashion as I think he ever came.

“Darling, I’d have been happy to let you limp away from this, humbled, maybe with a few fresh scars. Instead, I’m afraid to say your body will be dragged from the shores of this bay and I’ll give your various skulls to the pony disk-jockey who plays in my bar to turn into decorations for his dance floor. I will be sure to keep one for my personal collection, however. It shall be a good place to put my headdress between performances.” Raising his claw to his lip, he spoke into something hidden between his scales. “Bring it up, Minox.”

I swung back towards the island as a sound like a gigantic clockworks suddenly crunching to life after many years’ idleness echoed from the shore. In the half-light and bobbing on the surface of the water it took a few seconds to figure out exactly what was going on, but it seemed the statues of Celestia and Luna were moving. Gradually, the two titanic figures were moving apart on some form of rail system as a vast shadow rose from between them.

I gulped and began frantically paddling in the opposite direction, trying to get as far away as possible as the biggest cannon I’d ever seen clanked onto its side and centered itself on Propana. It was a sharply angled tube of black metal with a set of crosshairs that must have been the size of my old cab centered on the end of the barrel. A spotlight affixed to the base provided sharp illumination of the target. Near the base there was a platform with a mechanical chair fit only for a minotaur and in it, my on-again, off-again boyfriend sat behind a pair of joysticks. Minox grinned, adjusted his bow-tie with one finger, then took hold of the controls.

“I wish to introduce the apex of Equestrian weapons technology...the Best Friends Gala Nine Thousand,” Stella murmured, stubbing out his cigarette. Raising the claw with the transmitter in it to his lips, he added, “You may fire when ready.”

One could never claim Propana was stupid. Whatever protective magics she had on her, none of them were set to deflect firepower on that scale. On a good day, she’d have had an easy decision. Unfortunately, with her current psychological state somewhat divided, Hatred and Jealousy found themselves retreating while Lust and Pathos were suddenly driven to attack. The result was her wings trying to beat in two different directions as both of her front claws attempted to rip open different parts of her pouch at the same time.

The cannon roared and a wave of force spread out across the bay, sending out a shockwave that rocked the air and lanced upwards into the sky, shoving the clouds aside for a few seconds to reveal a patch of stars. Propana vanished in a brilliant green and blue explosion of what looked like scraps of paper and streamers, a starburst of multi-colored lights crackling to life behind her. The dragoness was lit up from behind for a second before disappearing again, replaced with an impossibly large birthday cake.

As the lights faded, I realized it hadn’t been an illusion. There really was a mammoth three layered cake with white frosting and red rosettes the size of phone booths hanging in midair where the five-headed lizard had been only a moment ago. It levitated there for several seconds before gravity took notice and with a certain aplomb the monumental pastry began to fall.

It hit the water and sent up a small tsunami in all directions. I realized, too late, that I wasn’t far enough away. My legs were already cramping from the protracted swim, but I turned and started paddling a little faster, scrambling for the island’s shoreline. There was a splash nearby, but I paid it no mind until a powerful set of bulging, muscular forearms wrapped themselves around my middle. I almost fainted with relief, going limp as I felt myself being dragged along, safe in the arms of my favorite minotaur.

He reached the shore a few seconds later, heaving me up onto the small sandy strip surrounding the base of the two statues and the cannon. I gasped for breath, coughing up a muzzle full of water before managing to drag myself higher on the bank. Minox clambered out beside me and I raised my hoof to let him know I was alive.

“Zis vill be good, ja,” Minox commented, scooting over beside me in the sand.

“W-what will be good?” I stammered, shivering as I was suddenly reminded exactly how cold it was. Reaching out and with seemingly no effort, my minotaur lifted me onto his lap facing the bay as the wave from the dropping cake finally reached us, lapping at his hooves. I nestled against his chest, blinking salt from my eyelashes.

“Propana zay she vants to fight ze mistress? Now she get ze chance,” he replied.

I blinked up at him, then looked out across the Bay of Unity just in time to see the first of Propana’s heads break free of the cake. She snarled, coughed up a bit of frosting, then began to claw her way out. Stella had vanished at some point, but Propana was more focused on getting herself out of the embarrassing predicament.

Suddenly, she stiffened. A purple coil of scaly tail wound itself up from beneath her and wrapped around all four of her throats, mashing them together. Stella’s head emerged from the water nearby and I could just make out his words across the distance.

“Shall we go for a swim, darling?”

She tried to growl, or threaten, or make some utterance but it was far too late for final words. With an almost inaudible ‘bloomp’ sound, the dragoness was yanked beneath the waves. Her ghostly white tail disappearing into the deep in a gradually spreading pool of soggy cake was the last I saw of her before a bubbling cauldron of roiling water burbled up from down below. After a few seconds, the water turned a dark and greasy red.

Propana might have been a fierce fighter on her home turf, but nothing beats an angry drag queen on his own stage.

Minox gave me a gentle shake, bringing me back to full consciousness. I looked up to find Stella propping his claws under his chin, smiling down at me as I lay on the shore with the statue overhead. He had a deep gouge in the scales of his cheek and another further down that’d ripped a section of his chest-plate away, but the bleeding looked to have stopped.

“Now, then, Miss Taxi—” he began, but I shook my head.

“Sweet Shine. I might as well be Sweet Shine, again,” I murmured, my own voice sounding hoarse in my ears. “What happened to Propana?”

“Very little that she didn’t deserve,” he replied, carefully reaching up to remove one of his fake eyelashes that’d fallen out of place with the tip of one claw. “Though perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary. I’ll have my people retrieve the various pieces of her corpse once the fish have entirely cleaned them. I would not wish to break a promise - even to someone who dared comment on my weight - and the dance floor does need a new motif.”

I couldn’t help a smile.

I was so tired I could hardly see straight, but I was alive for the first time in a long time and intent on staying that way.

A thought occurred to me and I carefully reached out with my senses, feeling about across the city. The fighting had turned against the monsters. They were dying in droves as ponies took strength from one another. The remaining dragons were fleeing the city. There was only one pony I was really interested in just then, however, and I couldn’t sense him. Maybe there was too much interference or maybe I just couldn’t pick out the needs of one pony amongst thousands, but I still felt panic well up inside me.

“H-Hardy. Where’s Hardy?” I demanded, frantically trying to get up from where I lay, but Minox just squeezed me tight until I finally lay still.

“He’s soon to begin his run on the shield around Uptown. I suspect he goes to meet destiny, Miss Shine,” Stella answered, not bothering to disguise the sadness in his voice.

There was a little splash off to my left as a sodden, bleeding Firebrand slowly pulled herself out of the waters. She was missing one of her swords and the bandage around her wing had come loose, but she was alive. Crawling on all fours until she was no longer threatened by the current, she rolled onto her back and groaned.

“You could not...perchance...have sent a handsome minotaur to fetch me out of the freezing water?” Firebrand grumbled.

“Oh, what are you complaining about, daughter of Ember?” Stella guffawed. “I saw your mother take worse injuries than that and still fight. Besides, it seems you retrieved yourself.”

“Please make jokes when I am no longer bleeding,” Firebrand muttered, putting her foreclaws behind her head as she sprawled on the sand, “My blood type is AB positive. I do believe I shall pass out now. Wake me for breakfast.”

“Hrmph.” Stella shook his head and reached out to tap my hip with one claw. “I see you have recovered your talent mark, then, Miss Shine. One day, you ponies will need to write a useful treatise on those things.”

“I think if anypony ever fully understands cutie-marks, we’ll have the secrets of the universe right in our hooves,” I muttered, shooting the symbol on my flank a fond look. “Still, I think Firebrand has the right idea.”

“Let’s get you to the medics then,” Stella replied.

“Wait a second,” I said and he hesitated.

Turning my leg over, I felt around in my fur until I found a lightly quivering ladybug stuck in the crook of my knee. It was the only one there. The others I’d carried had either been swept away or drowned, but one lone survivor had managed to hold on. It crawled up onto my shaking hoof and turned in three tiny circles before settling down.

“Hardy? If you can hear this, I didn’t give up. You hear me? I didn’t give up, and neither can you. I love you, and we’re going on vacation, and you’re going to eat all the exotic foods I put in front of you—including all the bugs—but right now this city still needs justice. More than anything, it needs you. You better be there on the next sunny day. I’ll be waiting.”

Act 3 Chapter 76 : Last Orders

"If there is one thing that will always be true in Equestria it is that our curiosity shall always exceed our wit."

- Princess Luna : Musings On The Moon, Chapter 237.

I coughed, spitting out a chunk of something rancid. My mouth tasted like a combination of skunk fumes and boiled garbage water from the back of a dialysis clinic. I gradually opened my eyes and found myself staring at a hunk of something furry, pink, and covered in blood. Reaching out, I carefully flipped the object over with the tip of one hoof.

It was an ear. An ear that looked like it’d been torn out by the root. There were wide, flat teeth marks right around the base.

I quickly tried to scrape my tongue off with my toe, but my hoof didn’t taste any better than the ear.

Why did I have an ear in my mouth? No clue. It wasn’t one of those things a pony wants to contemplate for too long. Certainly it suggested I’d torn it off of someone or something with my teeth, but that was more Swift’s realm of expertise. My jaw hurt, though, suggesting I’d definitely put it through its paces.

The only nearby things I might have gotten close enough to rip an ear off were all incredibly deadly and vicious, which seemed to indicate that for some period of time I’d been the most dangerous thing in the immediate area. Considering nothing was chewing on me, there was a bit of strange cognitive dissonance. I’d gotten all too used to being the thing getting munched on.

Taking stock of myself, all my limbs were in the usual places. No fresh holes. No bite marks. Minimal damage to my clothing. I was lying on broken pavement, chilly rain washing up and down my body and soaking into my flanks. My magic resistant combat vest was drenched and sticking to my chest. My trenchcoat was still warm enough that I wasn’t shivering, but if I spent much longer outside that might change.

On instinct, I checked my revolver and discovered all six cartridges discharged.

Mentally pushing the bit of torn ear to the back of my mind for a later bout of the screaming mimis, I braced a foreleg and pushed myself up into a sitting position. My thoughts were muzzy and I could only conjure fragments of recent memory. Mostly some fairly creative violence. There was a short segment of a screaming, burning mutant trying to scramble out the rear of the Dragon Flagon Wagon with me latched onto its back.

‘Speaking of my transport, where is it?’ I thought.

There was only silence in my mind, which I supposed most ponies would be accustomed to but for various reasons I found extremely unsettling.

‘Nightmare? Are you there?’

I waited.

She said nothing.

Sitting up cautiously, I peered at my surroundings. The DFW was a few meters behind me, leaning haphazardly on the curb in front of a burnt out record store. A trail of blood led from the end of my coat up to the driver’s side door; it was quickly disappearing in the heavy rain. The vehicle appeared to have grown a few strange protrusions from the front bumper, including what looked worryingly like a pair of enormous fangs, but it seemed otherwise unharmed. Even as I watched, the fangs were quickly shrinking back into the steel.

How’d it gotten there? Why was I on the ground outside? Had I been thrown through the windshield? Impossible. That glass could stop rockets.

Too many questions. Keep searching.

About ten meters ahead and stretching across the entire width of the street there was a glistening field of brilliant white energy. Beyond, I could see nothing, just vague shapes that might have been buildings or mountains. All was obscured by the spell, and it stretched into the heavens until forming a gentle curve which suggested it might be the shape of a dome. It pulsed from time to time and I could feel the gentle thrum of magical feedback in my jaw and neck.

Still too many questions. Leap of logic time. Nightmare wasn’t responding and I’d somehow stopped before I hit the Shield and crawled out of the vehicle, ergo she’d somehow taken control of my body without my say so. Or maybe there was something else at play.

‘Gale?’

A sense of gentle awareness radiated from my heart but my personal ghost was still silent. I wondered what’d happened to him while I was checked out. Ducking my chin, I checked for a blinking light; my power level seemed okay. I’d charged just before I left.

Leap again: Nightmare was injured in some fashion by having taken control of my body. Gale was focused on her wellbeing. Good enough.

Pulling myself up, I felt my back twinge and looked back the way I’d come.

I immediately wished I hadn’t.

The road looked like a parade was hit by a giant blender. Down the long straight stretch of road leading up to the Shield there were piles of bodies littering the street. Some were hanging from walls and lamp posts. Others were piled in heaps against the sides of buildings. Most were mutants, though a few griffins were amongst their number.

How many had we killed? At a quick count, more than a hundred on that street alone. Had I done all of that? Couldn’t have. One pony couldn’t possibly. There were griffins, right? There were griffins fighting alongside me.

Without thinking I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Sykes! Sykes, are you out there?!”

I limped towards the DFW, ears cocked for an answer.

“Oi, boyo...voice down, eh?” a weak reply came from somewhere nearby.

“Mareco!” I called, again.

Another pause, punctuated by the sound of pounding rain running off the brim of my hat.

“Polo, ye mad gob. Oi’m in the alley.” This was followed by a worrying bout of wet coughing.

Gathering my coat around myself, I trotted towards where I thought his voice was coming from. Peering into the space between a looted candy shop and a collapsed shoe store I found Sykes lying slumped on his back against a dented dumpster. He’d seen better days. One claw was clutched across his stomach and half of one of his wings lay nearby while the other remaining chunk flexed pathetically against the air.

“Oi, boyo. Ye gots a drink on ye?” he asked.

“Sweet Celestia, Sykes,” I muttered, digging a hoof into my trenchcoat pockets until I pulled out one of the remaining healing talismans we’d taken from the Supermax basement all those weeks ago. “Where’s the rest of your platoon?”

Clicking his beak, he gratefully took the talisman and pressed it against his ribs. It hummed, then sputtered as the magic sank into his wounds. His eyes brightened a little. Not enough.

“Ordered’em out,” he explained. “Did us’n a number on them beasties, we did, but Oi stayed back ta make sure ye reached yon shield. Ye seemed ta have it sussed, till onea dem big bastards comes outta nowhere and catches me wi’ his claw.” He pointed off to one side where a heap of larger-than-pony-sized smoldering bones lay. “Me bonecage feel loike a beanbag.” Letting out another wracking cough, he spat a stream of blood out of one side of his beak. “Aye, methinks that’s not good.”

The wing was a mess, still leaking a steady stream of blood. I could make out the slight indentation of his ribs on one side, too. He must have hit the dumpster going right quick. It’d only broken his fall in the loosest sense of the word. How he had the strength to kill the monster before he collapsed was beyond me.

“Can you drive?” I asked as I worriedly inspected his wounds.

He shook his head and waved a claw at his shoulder where his severed wing dangled. “Why would oi need to learn to drive? Oi dares not ask what in the Egg’s name ye did ta make Miss Shoine’s roide turn all feisty. Did more killin’ that alla us griffs put together.”

Rising, I turned to the mouth of the alley. “Wait here. I’ll get you a medic. We can still get you somewhere safe. Slip Stitch can patch you up.”

I flipped the hem of my coat open and lifted out one of my ladybugs. It was dead. I quickly checked the others; they had also expired. Either proximity to the shield or perhaps whatever had happened to the truck must have been too much for them. Turning around, I sprinted to the DFW and slammed the door open, clambering in and reaching for the radio, flicking it on. All I got was a hiss of static. Flipping through the channels, one after another, I hunted for an open one, but was met with nothing. No voices, no signals, nothing.

“Horsecrap,” I muttered, struggling back onto the ground before dashing back into the alley. Sykes was where I’d left him, though the flow of blood from his wing was starting to slow. He coughed again, the red smear on his chin having now leaked onto his chest.

“No luck then?” he asked.

“I...the damn Shield must be interfering. Maybe I can drive a little farther out—”

Reaching out, Sykes put his claw around my shoulders. I stepped close to him, slowly putting my forehead on his blood soaked chest. His armor was torn and a great rent across his kilted middle revealed yet more claw-marks. His breathing was starting to rattle as he pulled me against him, gathering his remaining wing around me.

“Ye can’t droive that thing again, boyo,” he chuckled, patting my back.

“Sykes, you can’t do this right now,” I groaned, shoving my hat back and looking up at him through teary eyes. “Maybe in fifty years, when you’re old and grey and have a bunch of chicks, but not right now.”

He glanced down, then reached out, picking up his battle-axe from the ground where it lay. “Oi’m afraid we don’t all get to choose, lad. ‘Ere. Ye moind givin’ this to me brudder? Oi promised ‘im Oi’d come back or Oi’d send me axe. It moight come in ‘andy, too.”

I carefully took the axe in my teeth. The leather-wrapped handle tasted vile, but it was surprisingly light. I suppose it didn’t pay to carry extremely heavy weapons in air-to-air battles. Tucking it over my shoulder, I holstered it into one of the loops on the rear of my trenchcoat. It hung comfortably across my back.

Reaching up, he chucked me under the chin with one talon.

“Oi, lad. No worries. Oi lived a good loife. Oi’m a little sad Oi’ll never see the sun on this soide but if ye succeed, ye best believe Oi’ll be waitin’ ta congratulate ya in the afterloife when ye get there.”

My eyes burned as I lay there against him. His heart was beginning to flutter.

“You feathery shit,” I growled, without any real heart behind it. “I’m watching you die. You know that means I’m going to have to sing the death song as your memorial.”

He snorted, his damp tail slapping against the pavement as the driving rain ran down his bloodied face, sending streams of icy water down my back. “Aye. Oi’ll look forward to laughin’ me arse off at that. Ye canna sing for shite.”

I shook my head and my throat caught. “Y-you owed me a drink.”

“Moight have to take a rain check,” he whispered, then nodded toward the Shield. “Oi want an evil bastard fer me funeral pyre. Oi figures there’s one left in Uptown. Yer the last good copper in Detrot. Now. Go. Finish it. Bring me sun fer moi...grave...”

And with that, Sykes of the Hitlan was gone.

There was no great seizing or twitching. He simply exhaled one more time, his final breath steaming the air around us before he went very, very still; a warrior’s end in the final battle. His claw fell against his side and the light left his eyes, leaving me terribly alone.

I’d always suspected Sykes was unhappy being a cop. At heart, he wanted to be back in the highlands with his family. He’d never wanted to lead, but to stand beside his brothers in battle was his greatest desire. Living among ponies made him long for home and no amount of booze or friendship could entirely take away that need to be with his own kind.

I lay there for a few minutes, my body quivering as I sobbed unashamedly into his quickly cooling arms. Nightmare wasn’t there to scold me for wasting time, though I’d have probably mentally stuffed her head in a portapotty if she had. Sweets, Swift, and Limerence were somewhere out there in the darkness, no doubt doing some damn fool heroics, but I couldn’t bring myself to worry about them just then.

Sykes deserved better. He deserved to get old and fat and lazing around an eyrie somewhere with a couple kids flapping around and a beautiful wife with eyes only for him. He deserved to see the sunshine again. So many people had died; the city would bear the scars of the Eclipse for decades to come.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, but still it felt like an eternity as I lay there hugging his corpse against my chest. The chill was starting to dig its way into my bones when I finally extracted myself from him and stepped back, reaching up to gently push his eyes shut.

For a moment, I just stood there feeling like a lost colt whose mother had accidentally left him in the grocery store. The weather wasn’t helping my state of mind, nor was the silence. For the first time in what felt like years, I couldn’t hear gunshots in the distance. The streets were empty and all those who might help me were hunkered down, waiting for the outcome.

By some miracle, we’d killed or driven off nearly all of the remaining mutants. The remaining dragons had scarpered off into the hills to lick their wounds. Most of the population of the city had survived. Was it enough to keep the wish machine from becoming active? Somehow, I doubted it.

That left one tiny step.

One final bit of the jigsaw to slot into place.

Stumbling out of the alley where my dead friend lay, I looked up at the blazing shield once more. Standing there studying the massive barrier surrounding Uptown, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d laid eyes on it properly. The field oozed across the street, never seeming to hold still. It scorched and blackened the edges of buildings where it intersected them, scouring the brick clean of life and liquid. A constant stream of fog rose from its surface as the torrential downpour from the storm overhead was vaporized on contact.

Simply knowing it’d survived direct magical blasts from nearly every unicorn in the Detrot Police Department didn’t quantify the power behind that shield nearly so well as just standing in front of it; it felt like a slash across reality where all the things on one side didn’t exist to all the things on the other. It felt primeval, a law of nature writ in magic.

Gathering myself, I limped towards the wall, doing my best to keep an eye on where it was moving. It never seemed to fluctuate more than a few meters in either direction, but that was likely to be enough to cook me if I wasn’t careful. My eyes kept sliding off of it, as though its shape was unhealthy to spend too long observing.

At last, I stood as close as I dared. I wondered if Diamond Wishes could see me through an arcane monitor of some sort. My gun should have protected me from such things, but there were no guarantees anymore. Despite not being a unicorn, I knew some of the generally accepted rules of magic and too many of them had been broken lately for me to take anything for granted.

I glanced back at the alley and swallowed, trying to get my mind back on the job at hand. Sykes’s death didn’t feel entirely real just yet. Maybe that was a good thing.

Reaching into my coat, I pulled out the remaining crystal bullets, then cracked my gun open, tipped out the spent casings, and slotted the enchanted cartridges in. If Diamond Wishes kept his word, I was in for a stroll of a walk to Starlight Tower. If he hadn’t and there was another army on the other side of the shield, I intended to take as many of them with me as I could before the end.

Strangely, I didn’t feel angry. My anger was gone, snuffed out by rain and the death of a friend. I just felt a bit sad. No more waiting, then. Time to either nut up or head home.

“Scholar,” I shouted at the magical wall.

At first, nothing happened.

I had just enough time to start wondering if I was about to have to wander back to Supermax with my tail between my legs for a rethink when the shield seemed to thin in a place right at ground level. A tunnel of sorts appeared in the surface, sinking back into the depths until at some distance inside it faded away. I could make out a bit of asphalt and darkness on the other side. The passageway was just tall and wide enough for a stallion of my size if I put my head down a little.

‘Good boy, Limerence,’ I thought. ‘Now, we see if Diamante’s word is good or if I have to kill a bunch more today.’

Ducking down, I carefully stepped forward into the tunnel of light. The ground under my hooves was hot. Too hot. I quickly danced backwards, holding my frog up so the cold rain could cool it. The heat had gone right through my horseshoe. The asphalt was almost molten where the shield crossed it.

The tunnel wavered, seeming ready to collapse on itself at any moment.

“Oh...Gale, I really hope you’re up for some heavy work tonight. I think this might hurt.”

Giving the bottom of my hoof one more mournful look, I braced, swept my tail in tight, and took off at a gallop towards the hole. One moment I was in the pouring rain. The next, I was hit by a wave of stifling heat, followed by burning agony that shot from my toes right up to my flanks.

One would think knowing that few of my injuries were likely to be permanent would make the notion of dashing through a superheated tunnel a little more palatable. It didn’t. There was no getting used to the varieties of torture, because it always came in new and horrific flavors. There’s a part of the equine mind that takes comfort in the knowledge that, eventually, your nerves will be overloaded entirely and you’ll be left numb to everything. I’d no such comfort.

The death of Sykes. The deaths of thousands of ponies. My own death. Each little sting was alive and rich. They called out for justice that only I could give, but that meant burning. Again.

A thousand instinctual responses spread all through my evolutionary history were doing unhappy little horse dances as the pain almost sent me skidding onto my face. Falling didn’t bear thinking about. My school gym teacher would have been proud as punch of the time I set, but it wasn’t enough.

The end of the tunnel was approaching, but my vision was starting to dim. I charged toward that dark hole, the wind whistling by my ears and sparks flying off my shoes. Risking a glance back, I couldn’t see the entrance anymore. In fact, the wall of light behind me looked awful damn close.

There is nothing in the world like feeling your flesh begin to boil nor smelling your own fur roasting away to motivate a person to greater feats of speed.

Just as the pain reached a shattering apex and my next breath was nothing but the smoke off my own hooves, I shot out of the far side of the enormous barrier. My legs went suddenly wobbly as I collapsed, tumbling end over end into total darkness. I lay there on my side, taking deep breaths, though the agony wouldn’t subside; my shoes were still nailed on and short of tearing out the heated nails with my teeth, there was no getting them off. It was a short moment later when I realized I wasn’t being rained on anymore. More's the pity.

Struggling onto my side, I looked all around, but there was no light to be seen. I was sitting in perfect, complete, and pitch black darkness.

Slowly and doing my best not to move my tortured hooves, I reached into my pocket with my teeth and felt around for my flask. I knew it was still in there somewhere, though hadn’t had an occasion to go for it in a while. Finding it, I pulled it out and quickly unscrewed the cap with my tongue, readjusted, then poured the lukewarm whiskey over my scalded toes. They steamed and the heat subsided, though a few seconds later the alcohol hit my wounds and there was no avoiding screaming. I buried my muzzle in the crook of my leg and howled into the elbow for a solid thirty seconds.

‘Gale, I hope you’re on this,’ I thought. ‘I need to be able to walk soon. Crawling my ass to Starlight Tower won’t be a good look.’

I don’t know whether he was listening or not, but inside of two minutes the sensation that I’d trodden on an angry porcupine started to subside.

At last I’d gathered enough willpower to get to my hooves and get a good look at my surroundings. Tipping a head-torch out of my pocket, I pulled the elastic band around my hat, tucking it over top of the brim. Flicking the lamp on I gave a cursory inspection to the pristine road I’d been spat out on. The silence was downright spooky, but no more so than the abject and total darkness of the place.

Turning back the way I’d come, I played the light back and forth over where I thought the barrier was likely to be. As I did, the light seemed to drop out entirely, as though it weren’t hitting anything. The inside of the shield absorbed every last lumen, leaving only a massive black wall of nothingness.

Doing my best not to cringe, I turned up my hoof so I could inspect the bottom of it. The flesh was pink and puckered, but not nearly so badly parboiled as I was worried it would be. Still, the keratin of my hoof itself was going to take a while to recover, magical healing or not.

The magical feedback that’d been crackling around the outside of the shield was gone. It was as though I’d entered some kind of void, where the living were not meant to be. The sound of my own breathing was the loudest thing for what felt like miles.

Swinging my light around, I craned my head back until my vision started to adjust a little.

What I could see of the street was clean as could be; there wasn’t so much as a plastic bag or a discarded cigarette in the gutters. The air smelled a bit of ozone, but it was a nice change from the decay and smoke I’d somehow started to become accustomed to in recent weeks. One might even have called it refreshing, if one had recently had a concussion. Considering I’d apparently been sucking on a severed ear, that wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility.

Funnily enough, my talent wasn’t giving off any particular indication of an injustice present. If anything, it was unusually quiet. Most of the time I was at least distantly aware that someone, somewhere needed a solid kicking for some cruel or criminal act. Inside the shield, I couldn’t feel anything.

The building nearest me stretched above and out of sight. It might have been just built for all the dirt that was on it. The rows of tall glass windows weren’t so much as dusty, nor was there a hint of scoring on the steps where careless hooves might have worn down the quarried grey stone.

I hadn’t been in Uptown in some time; murders tended not to happen where the money flowed. If a murder needed to be committed, the white collar sleeze generally preferred to do it somewhere they wouldn’t get blood on the bits. It didn’t help that the place always gave me the willies.

Uptown Detrot was unashamedly a place for the wealthy to be wealthy together. If it made any concessions to the existence of the rest of the city, it was in trying to build taller and taller skyscrapers to give themselves a better view over the horizon of something less depressing than their poorer fellow citizens. While Diamond Wishes’ particular methods were generally appalling, a small, vindictive part of me refused to be as sad as my more idealistic self told me I should be about the outcomes of all those rats who’d chosen to flee into Uptown to leave the rest of us to die when the Eclipse began.

‘Besides. The bastards killed Sykes,’ I thought, then mentally kicked myself for it. There were innocents who’d died along with those who deserved some form of justice. Still, there was no time to work through all the moral implications of massacring those creatures. There was still a world as needed saving.

Digging into my pockets again, I pulled out a map of the city. Unfolding it, I found the circled section of Uptown where Starlight Tower lay. Quickly checking the metal placard beside the glass turnstile doors of the nearest building, I hummed thoughtfully. Part of me expected an echo, but the dome seemed to absorb sound just as readily as light.

‘Alright, that’s the Central Bank of Detrot. Starlight Tower is one block down and one block back.’

I tucked the map back in my pocket and set off into the darkened remains of the city. My hoofsteps were all the company I had and even they were muted by the strange magics of the barrier.

The unnatural silence of the city’s center made me wonder somewhat where the mutants were keeping themselves all that time. It wasn’t until I came across an open sewer cover in the middle of the street that the answer finally became apparent. The smell coming up from below was enough to choke a timberwolf.

I checked my gun, then took a deep breath and covered my nose before shining my light down below. At the bottom of a short ladder, I could just make out the brickwork and—lying like a dropped doll—the broken remains of a heavily chewed corpse. There was no telling what the species had been originally; the skull had been crushed into about a million pieces. It might have been a small griffin or an especially large pegasus for all I could make out.

Darting back a few steps to breathe, I listened carefully for any movement. Part of me hoped for a bit of skittering or maybe something to indicate a rat had somehow survived the onslaught of monsters into their domain, but the sewer was dead as a tomb.

‘Oh Nightmare, if ever there was a time for you to pop in with a complaint or a grumpy comment or one of those naive-as-Tartarus assessments of pony socialization, now is that moment,’ I thought.

Unfortunately, my mental roommate was still not feeling talkative.

‘All you have to do is get to Starlight Tower. He said he’d let you get there if you made it inside.’

Then what?

Hope Diamond Wishes and whatever godlike power he seemed to think was controlling his actions were feeling reasonable?

Doubtful.

Blowing his head off was probably my best bet, though that did assume a great many other variables lined up first. Arresting him and dragging him to Celestia for her to stick in the statue garden of Canterlot Castle had a certain appeal to it. So did delivering him in a potato sack to the Warden of Tartarus Correctional. If those failed, there was always calling Mephitica and having her kick him out of the back of the Bull in a distant dimension made entirely of paper cuts and lemon juice.

All good options, but many, many steps were between me and them.

I reached the first turn in the road and shined my light down towards where the many-decades-old construction site was purported to be. Manipulating an entire city's worth of ponies into ignoring evil wasn’t so difficult, but having them ignore a bureaucratic inconvenience like a half-built skyscraper on prime real estate for almost half a century? That was the real feat.

My frayed nerves kept trying to convince me I was hearing something besides my own frightened breathing and the *clickity-clop* of my own steps. I could have started to run, but I had the worrying notion that if I did, whatever my imagination was frantically insisting must be out there would actually pounce, rather than sneaking about. I kept to a casual stroll, wishing I’d thought to save a bit of the liquid courage in my flask rather than using it all to chill my burning hooves.

Another crossing. I turned right and a huge white sign faded out of the darkness, plastered against the side of a temporary fence covered in cheap plastic. The fence stretched in both directions, off into the distance before being lost to the dark again.

The sign read, in stark no-nonsense black letters:

‘Starlight Tower Economic Park: The Future Is Brighter In Starlight.’

I started to turn, then hesitated, squinting at a smaller sign which I’d almost missed which was pasted to the fence with a bit of tape just below the larger poster. It was written in looping, practiced hoofwriting with something like a calligraphy pen. It said:

‘Welcome, Hard Boiled. The entrance is to your right. I look forward to our encounter. - Diamond Wishes.’

I sagged onto my flank and yanked my hat off, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. I hadn’t realized it until just then, but the air inside the shield was almost stiflingly hot compared to the terrible chill creeping over the world outside. I caught a whiff of a familiar scent and sniffed at the interior of my hat; there was just the barest hint of Scarlet’s perfume still there, under all the unpleasant smells.

Mercy.

Scarlet.

Whatever was I going to do with him? Did I love him? I’d no idea what that would even look like. Did I want a stallion to love?

Juniper and I were...close. Closer than I’d been with almost anyone except Taxi. Still, we’d never had sex. We’d never even kissed. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to fall in love with my partner, no matter the circumstances.

What about Lily Blue? What was she to me? A mare I took comfort in. A sweet, altogether too-gutsy-for-her-own-good farm pony. A fighter who wanted the kind of life all good soldiers want: a life of peace. Somepony I didn’t deserve any more than I deserved Scarlet.

I shoved my hat down over my ears and stood. No time for thoughts like that. I had a mission.

Of course, when would be a good time?

For weeks I’d pretended like there was no future. Every mission was almost pure improvisation and every plan was strung together with hope and terror. Now, in too-few minutes I was likely to be dead. That put a certain impetus on self-reflection, particularly being as I didn’t seem to have Nightmare there to interrupt.

What was likely to be left of Hard Boiled when all was said and done? My grandfather seemed to have discovered a comfortable middle-ground in simply enjoying the finer things in life, regardless of whether he still counted as ‘alive’. I was a post-traumatic-stress riddled mess whose best bet was a few years of therapy and retirement to a nice, quiet straitjacket.

Reaching into my coat, I pulled out the lanyard with my badge hanging from it. I flipped the wallet open and stared down at my name: Hard Boiled, Chief of Police. That was never going to sit right, true or not. Resigning my commission felt like a cop-out, pardon the pun, but the city deserved somepony who was a little saner than me holding those reins. There were plenty of worthy persons who would suit the role nicely if I were to crawl off into a cabin somewhere on the edge of nowhere.

Would my talent even allow that? Could I stand by and let others do the work? I looked down at myself—at the pouch on my chest and the gun on my foreleg—and knew the probable answer to that.

Tucking the badge away, I looked up at the brim of my hat, the hat Scarlet had given me. The hat that still smelled like him. My thoughts couldn’t help drifting back to the last time I’d seen him: short two rear legs, lying in bed shivering in pain, still managing to keep a stiff upper lip despite his condition. I wanted nothing so much as to lie there beside him, holding him close until he was healthy again. If anyone deserved the sunlight, it was him.

Turning, I trotted down the length of the fence, no longer worried about what might lurk in the dark. Diamond Wishes knew I would make it to him. He knew we’d see each other, face to face, one last time. What form that would take was beyond the both of us, surely, though he probably had a better handle on it than I did.

What was his god?

What did I even know about it?

It offered the heart’s desire in exchange for sacrifices and loyalty. It would allow generations of its minions to die for its own survival and somehow survived locked to an altar whose purpose seemed to be to eat the very energies of life itself. It’d rendered my grandfather little more than a heavily enchanted skeleton who’d only persisted by dint of sheer willpower and Apple Bloom’s engineering prowess. It’d somehow created the Web of Dark Wishes and empowered the armor of Nightmare Moon over a thousand years ago, yet it’d taken that entire length of time to repair its magics enough to make another bid for freedom.

Freedom from what? Who had imprisoned it? What crimes had it committed to warrant eternity below the ground? Why had whoever or whatever locked it away left the key to the prison?

Why had it waited so long? Was it waiting for a creature like the latest incarnation of Diamond Wishes to be born? A perfect worshipper?

Diamond Wishes was such a contrast to his lieutenants. He seemed too sane to have done the things he’d done. I’d sat across from him, shared a drink, shared an altogether pleasant conversation, and he’d even flatly told me of his intentions to throw down the alicorns, yet it’d practically had to be spelled out before I figured out the truth. Some detective.

I reached the end of the fence. My light gave me little more than a circle on the sidewalk for me to follow. Even the building across the street seemed oddly fuzzy when I tried to get a look at it.

I turned onto a broad avenue of recently laid asphalt that still smelled fresh out of the mixing truck. With a strange reluctance, I raised my head and felt my stomach twist as my destination came into view. A powerful, almost animal will screamed at me from the corners of my mind to flee from it.

Nothing good could come from being there.

This is a place where only things beyond your ken are welcome.

It is going to eat you.

Best run away.

‘Run, little pony. Run.’

Even as the fear rose and the adrenaline surged, I felt the familiar sensation of magic coursing through my veins. The terror started to abate within seconds. I was starting to get tired of the bastards using the same tricks over and over; strange how the subtle and subversive could become loud and obnoxious when you ran into them enough times. A simple fear field discouraging interest in the building was probably enough to keep all but the authorized from becoming too curious.

The enormous structure stretched higher than any of the adjoining skyscrapers, and were there any clouds, its head would surely have been in them. Making out its shape was easy enough; it seemed the largely darkened tower was covered in tiny, glittering sequins at irregular intervals that were somehow catching the light of my torch, but after a moment I realized they weren’t shining where I was pointing the light. As I moved a little, though, the lights followed in a way that suggested they were reflecting something, rather than sitting at fixed points.

Starlight Tower.

Diamond Wishes must have enjoyed that little joke.

It was the only source of illumination I’d seen since entering the darkened streets of Uptown and even then, the weak light brought me no comfort. The damn thing was reflecting the sky outside the shield, a sky that didn’t exist within the barrier. It might have been pretty, if it weren’t simultaneously giving me a powerful urge to turn tail and scamper off to find some bed to cower under.

I took a moment to feel about inside myself, searching for anger. It was my usual defense against what I’d long ago come to class as ‘weird magical bullshit’, but the fury wasn’t there. Sadness was squatting under a proverbial willow tree and writing angsty poetry in the spot where wrath usually spent its days snarling and kicking various psychological stones.

Sadness over Sykes was foremost, though he was only the latest victim.

Somehow, and for reasons that didn’t make any good sense, his death was hitting me harder than almost any of the others in recent months. Maybe it was because he’d been the first person I met on my first day out of the Academy. Maybe it was because the big idiot was the one who’d dragged me out of more than a few scrapes back in the day when homicide and narcotics worked together on various cases. Maybe it was because Sykes kept Juniper from kicking my ass the night after our fifth case fell through, when I got drunk and said his beard looked like a shrub.

I tried to hold it in, but a sniffle snuck up on me and when it did, it came with another round of burning tears. I didn’t really want to keep Diamond Wishes waiting, but when was I likely to have another chance to cry where literally no one could possibly see me? Most likely I was soon to die in the teeth of some demented beast summoned from somewhere beyond equine understanding; bare minimum, I wanted to be composed enough to hold my gun while it chewed.

Sitting there on an empty street in a darkened world wailing into my coat sleeves, my thoughts eventually drifted to my father. It didn’t help the tears much. His death was still as raw as the day I’d put him in the ground. A good pony taken before his time. Another in a list, but why did I have such a damned long list? Don Tome. Juniper. My father. Sykes. Half the ponies of the Detrot Police Department.

Fortunately, the way the equine brain is programmed, there’s only so much crying a person can do before it’s had enough. While still I felt I might weep forever, the sharpest of the pain finally abated and I found an odd peace waiting for me just behind it.

Dying wasn’t so bad, right? I’d done it plenty of times, after all, and seemed to have the knack worked out. Maybe, if it finally stuck, I’d get to see Juniper at last.

With a sudden, strange lightness I hopped to my hooves and trotted toward the giant building. The magical fear pressed in on me again, but fear exists to keep a pony alive. I was a bit beyond being scared by such trivial concerns.

The avenue stopped in front of a small cul de sac beyond which were a set of extremely utilitarian stairs with none of the gaudy stonework that tended to characterize the rest of Detrot’s skyscrapers. They looked as though they’d been built almost as an afterthought and led up to a single door in the dead center which was little more than an ugly slab of metal with a knob. There were no turnstiles, no shining engravings, no carved statues, no placards, and nothing to suggest that the building was ever even meant to be open to the public. The only thing that even hinted that it was something more than an especially ugly vertical warehouse was the bizarre reflections in the windows.

Marching up the stairs I paused again in front of the simple door and stared at those reflections, finding myself momentarily lost in their beauty. The distant stars flickered, shimmering furtively in the tower’s surface. They looked like jewels, trapped in glass. It was a neat bit of spell work, wasted without an audience to appreciate it.

Reaching out, I turned the knob and gave it a shove then danced backwards, lifting my gun in case there was a surprise waiting for me on the other side.

The door swung open on an empty, black hallway of unfinished sheetrock with another identical door at the other end.

I panned my light back and forth, then down to the ground. Sitting there in the center of the hall there was another hoofwritten note lying alongside a police issue walkie-talkie. The transmit light was on and the button taped down.

With all due caution, I stepped forward and picked up the note.

‘I’m afraid you have a bit of a climb. I am on the rooftop. The stairwell at the end of the hall will bring you to me. - Diamond Wishes’

Picking up the walkie-talkie, I carefully peeled the tape off the transmit button and coughed, trying to think of what I wanted to say.

An opponent who knows you’re coming is far and away the most dangerous variety. One taking the time to be polite about it was unusual, however. He could have left a stick of dynamite taped to the door.

Coming to a decision, I went with the safest option.

“Mister Wishes, I’m here,” I murmured, then released the button.

The walkie-talkie crackled before a jovial voice echoed out of the speaker.

“Detective! Or should I say ‘Chief’? With the police commissioner dead, you might even be next in line for that role as well. I am so glad you made it. My benefactor said you would, but there’s always that hint of doubt that remains in the minds of even the most faithful.”

I edged further into the dark hallway and started for the door at the other end.

“You know, my partner would probably have started this conversation by reading you your rights,” I said, limping along on three legs while the fourth held the radio.

Diamond Wishes snickered and I heard something rattle in the background.

“Your partner is a smart little mare,” he replied, unnerving calm dripping off every word. “Being as you’re here and the storm outside seems to be abating, I imagine my brother is dead. Her sense of betrayal must have been immense when she discovered precisely who unleashed our mutations upon the city. Did he die at her hooves?”

“I watched her kill him,” I answered, cracking the far door. Behind it was a dank stairwell of undecorated concrete steps. I looked up between the railings, and it disappeared well after the end of my light. “He died hard.”

Wishes chuckled as though I’d told him an especially good joke.

“Really? Do tell! I wondered what it might take to finally put him down. His plan for ‘apex evolution’ was always set for failure, but he’d made some impressive modifications to his own body that were nothing short of ingenious.”

With a grim smile, I started up the stairs, taking my time. There were no doors at the first landing, nor at the second. It seemed the stairwell existed exclusively to go straight to the top.

“Modified or not, every stallion has a weakness. Swift froze his penis, then she tore his throat out and threw him in a storm generator.”

Wishes let out a good humored snort.

“He never did know when to keep that particular anatomy to himself. Mother broke his nose when we were children after he made a pass at her for the third time. She only had eyes for our fathers, if one can be said to have ‘eyes’ for those you knew would eventually murder you in the most horrific fashion imaginable. A shame, really. She was quite an attractive mare.”

I paused on the eighth landing for a moment to catch my breath. I wasn’t even remotely tired, but it felt like I ought to be. If nothing else, it was a good excuse to stop and prepare myself.

“How many floors does this place have?” I asked, a hoof on the railing as I went back to gamely climbing towards the roof.

“Last I checked it was approximately fifty, though it may have grown since then. So long as my apartments are unchanged, I rarely worry about such things.”

I stopped short, then shook my head and kept going. “You’re an earth pony. How do you put up with being up to your ears in all this nasty magic? I thought we were supposed to shepherd the land.”

Wishes clicked his tongue, thoughtfully. “In my own funny way, I suppose I am. Equestria is a tiny fragment of so many greater things. Fulcrums of power greater than you can imagine turn right here on this miniscule world. Though, speaking of ‘nasty’ magics, I am curious how you killed Zefu and destroyed the Scry. That was an advantage I thought sure to see us through even the most extreme situations.”

“Not me. Limerence Tome used some spell to trap his brother in his own sword. I don’t entirely understand what he did to The Office, but whatever built that place is going to be pissed if it ever comes back. There’s probably not enough left to fill a lunchbox.”

“Mmmph. It was useful, but at the end of the day I suppose you and I were always going to find ourselves here. I barely knew your name just a few months ago and now it feels like we’re old friends. If I may, one more question and then I’ll happily answer one of yours.”

I looked up at the next landing of stairs and sighed. “I’ve got nothing better to do for a few minutes unless you left me a lethal whoopie cushion somewhere on these steps. Why couldn’t we meet downstairs?”

“Set and setting, Detective. Now, then. Being as you killed Astral Skylark and managed to retrieve the armor as well as the helm of Nightmare Moon, did you ever put the armor on?”

I shrugged, then realized he wouldn’t be able to see that.

“I didn’t have much say in the matter at the time,” I answered.

“Did the...governing intelligence talk to you?”

“My turn,” I interjected, pausing again to wipe my forehead. The stifling heat had followed me into the building. “You still haven’t explained to me what you get out of all this. You don’t even sound like you intend to live through today. What is your reward for causing the end of the world?”

“That...is an extremely long answer, but it does boil down to ‘vision’. My deal was for a glimpse of all that which is beyond. Even should I die, I will have witnessed true glory. If there is an afterlife in store, I will take my vision with me. As you have seen, death is little more than a stepping stone for some.”

I shook my head. “I was hoping you’d say ‘I want to bang Princess Celestia’ or something. What does your benefactor want, then? Freedom?”

“It is my turn once more, I believe.”

I slumped onto the steps and turned to sit for a moment. “Go ahead?”

“Nightmare Moon. She talked to you?”

“She tried to take over my body. We fought. I won. We made a deal. I kill you, she gets a pardon from Celestia for helping me. Not that it matters, now.”

Diamond Wishes sounded a bit pensive as he asked, “She does not remember her original purpose, does she?”

“She seemed pretty scrambled. Her memories were broken up. I figure that’s why I was able to beat her.”

“No doubt. The armor was not designed to operate in pieces, so far as my family records indicated. Your turn, then. Do you still want to know what my benefactor desires?”

“I figured out part of it. This...thing wants to be free. That pylon wasn’t the only prison, though, was it?”

“Truly not. We did not sacrifice our weak to the pylon so much as give the pylon another target upon which to work its magics. Thus, my benefactor was able to recover enough to eventually survive its escape. Beyond that simple goal, I’m afraid further explanation is more complicated. This world is a seed that was meant to grow many different things. I am to be its final fruit. If my benefactor sees fit, I will survive to witness ascension and the remaking of all existence into a truly just universe. You can appreciate that, no?”

I looked ahead and found myself just two landings down from the top of the stairwell. I could have sworn the building was a little taller than that, but something in the shape of the space was messing with my perceptions.

“I can appreciate it, yes, but I don’t think anyone who would kill thousands could call themselves a bringer of justice. I’m here, by the way, since we’re being polite.”

“Ah! Excellent. The roof is just through my apartments. There is some very good whiskey in my drinks cabinet. I have glasses up here. We’ll continue this discussion in person.”

The radio clicked and the receiving light faded. I dropped the radio outside the final door and left it there. I considered going through the usual rigamarole of storming in with my gun drawn, but Diamond Wishes had had far too many opportunities to kill me while I was on the way to simply be sitting there on the other side with a rocket launcher pointed at my face.

Reaching up, I pushed open the last metal bastion and stepped into what felt like another world.

Shutting the door behind me, I took a deep breath of the freshest air I’d had in days. The scent of warm cookies hit me accompanied by good cigars and a rich cologne.

Diamond Wishes’s apartments, in contrast to the rest of the building, were a lavish display of understated comfort. Whereas King Cosmo seemed to think wealth was simply size and ridiculous amounts of gold leaf pasted on every surface, Wishes seemed to understand true wealth is only demonstrated by making a space entirely one’s own. His little home-away-from-home was a study in detailed-oriented cozyness.

The space was divided into two large rooms, though with as many bookshelves as lined the walls it felt considerably smaller than it likely was. There were no windows, but gemstones that simulated candlelight set in wall sconces provided enough light to see and most likely read by. In the corner there was a wooden drinks cabinet stocked with enough liquor to drown even the most sorrowful evenings. The rich, velvety carpets were thick enough that I felt like I might sink right into them. There was even a modern enchanted stove in an open kitchenette with a refrigerator and associated cookery tools.

I leaned into the second room and spied a discreet single-pony four poster bed nestled against the wall alongside an empty traveling trunk whose top was propped beside it. Several tailored suits hung in an open wardrobe atop a few pairs of spats. In the far corner an ancient wind-up record player was rattling through one of the tunes from my father’s youth, a cheerful little swing number meant to get your hooves moving. The door to the roof access was beside it, lightly disguised with a bit of molding and fancy cabinetry.

Involuntarily, I found myself starting to relax. It was the sort of place I’d have loved to spend a weekend. Taxi loved to camp, but I was never the sort for recreational homelessness. Give me a spot to prop my legs up and room service and I’m the happiest stallion that can be.

Turning back, I noticed a single chocolate-chip cookie sitting on a plate on the writing desk, a tumbler of some spirit beside it. My stomach rumbled and I trotted over, snatching up the cookie and stuffing it in my muzzle before tipping the drink on top of it. The cookie was still warm from the oven and the drink turned out to be cognac, a good mix for freshly baked chocolate. It was delicious and burned the whole way down.

Again, the dichotomy of Diamond Wishes struck me. On the one hoof, he probably qualified as one of our world’s greatest monsters. On the other, his taste was sublime. Had he crafted the place to make me comfortable? Doubtful. It sure felt that way, though.

Much as I wanted to linger, there were still questions demanding answers and dead souls begging for justice, for a satisfying end to their tales.

The drinks cabinet was unlocked when I tried the door. I read over a few of the labels on the bottles; most would have cost me several months’ wages, and one or two probably commanded more than I’d make in a few years as a cop. Toward one side I discovered a bottle of my favorite brand: Mareson — griffin whiskey. It was young, sweet, and too cheap for its neighbors. That was also the only one that looked to have had more than an occasional tipple taken out of it.

Snatching it up, I also grabbed a bowl of pimento stuffed olives and some grapes from the fridge; no sense letting them go to waste.

Balancing my payload along with Sykes’s axe, I strolled over to the rooftop door and nosed it open, finding another concrete stairwell. Fortunately, it was only one flight, and there was carpet on the steps as well. It was blissful to climb them on otherwise extremely sore hooves.

At the top, I found a hatch and carefully eased it open, making sure not to drop either the bottle or the snacks. I expected a breeze, but the heat outside was accompanied by a stillness that put me in mind of a graveyard. Deathly, deathly quiet.

A pair of wing-backed chairs were positioned on the edge of the roof facing the empty streets of Uptown, lit by an upright lamp that seemed to have been dragged out just for that precise purpose. A short, antique wooden table sat between the chairs, a pair of reading glasses and a book with a royal blue cover atop it. I couldn’t quite make out the title at that distance, but I didn’t need to see it to know precisely what my nemesis was reading before I’d arrived; it was Princess Luna’s ancient spellbook — The Web of Dark Wishes.

“Detective?” Diamond Wishes rumbled, gracefully rising from his seat.

He stepped out from behind the chair and smiled a fatherly smile.

The elderly stallion was largely unchanged from when I’d met him weeks ago at the Police Ball. There were a few more streaks of grey in his dark purple mane than I remembered, but his white pelt looked as immaculate as the day we’d shared a glass of champagne and mused over the future.

It was not him that brought me to a stop so sudden I almost let go of the food, but rather what he was wearing.

Diamond Wishes was tightly ensconced in the armor of Nightmare Moon. The helm fit his muzzle comfortably and the chest plate covered his broad barrel without a hint of stretching or loose fit. Even the shoes seemed to have been resized somehow, such that they might as well have been part of him. It looked as though it’d been made for him.

“I cannot tell you how much waiting for this moment kept me awake nights,” he said, waving me toward the other seat.

“Won’t you join me for a drink?”

Act 3 Chapter 77 : Last Battle

"I wish I could still drink myself to death. It would probably be gentler than any of the other options."

Hard Boiled, Blood Alcohol Level - 0.19

Ice clinked in the bottom of my glass as I sat staring out into the dark and empty city. My enemy poured, then set the bottle down and offered me the drink. He finished pouring his own and sat down in the other wing-backed chair, swirling his whiskey for a long few seconds as we studied one another.

I tugged my hat off and set it on the table, then pulled off Sykes’s axe and propped it against the chair, wiggling my ears until the fur sat straight.

“May I?” he asked, gesturing at the hat.

I gave it a light nudge in his direction.

He carefully picked it up and stroked the brim, then touched the interior front before giving it a light sniff.

“Mmm. You have a stallion in your life?” he inquired, returning it to the table.

Instinctively, I started to shake my head, then paused and reconsidered. We were beyond lies or half-truths. If there was one person in the world I could be completely honest with, he was sitting across from me, wearing the armor of Nightmare Moon.

“It’s complicated. There’s a mare, too. They like each other and they like me, but the colt who gave me the hat is named Scarlet. The mare’s name is Lily,” I replied, taking a sip of the whiskey before continuing, “Between the two of them they’re sweet as punch. I hope to figure out what they see in me one day, but Scarlet has good taste in hats.”

“And stallions,” Diamond Wishes murmured, raising his glass in my direction. “You deserved better than this, Hard Boiled. Had you only been born a few years earlier, the three of you might have died together, somewhere far from here. Fate is unkind. If there is one thing I have learned in my journey, it is that.”

“Do you have anyone?” I asked, waving toward the armor.

He brushed a hoof through the tuft of grey hair at the corner of his brow and sighed. “Not in many years. My benefactor kept me from aging in many of the most physically crippling fashions, but that didn’t stop me from getting old. Love - beautiful as it is - always leads me back to the mission. I cannot help but see and that eventually dulls my affection. How could any mare or colt compare to the vastness and magnificence beyond the fabric of this little world?”

I cocked my head in his direction. “Two months ago, I think I’d have called you crazy. I’ve been out of this dimension a couple times since then and I know you’re not crazy. This isn’t the way to go about this. You want to see the universe and everything beyond, then I know a girl with a living train who’ll happily take you for a ride to all the weirdest bits of it if you can stand the smell.”

Diamond Wishes leaned sideways around his chair so he could give me an appraising look. “Mephitica and her ‘Bull’ are merely tourists. There are things beyond our few senses. I’ve been shown tasters and they are worth the death of one tiny world.”

I tucked a hoof under my coat until I found the Emblem of Harmony. Tugging it out, I set it on the table between us. “You know what this is?”

He turned the crystal amulet with the piece of the Tree of Harmony inside, looking at it. “I took something… almost exactly like this off of a Crusader before we chained him to the altar in the pylon at my family home. In all likelihood it burned with the building. I believe you are acquainted with him?”

“My grandfather,” I replied, tilting my whiskey back and finishing it off. Diamond Wishes picked up the bottle and poured me a fresh serving.

“I’m afraid I don’t know precisely what they do. Where did you get it?” he inquired, tapping the casing.

Lifting the amulet by the chain, I stared into its shimmering depths. “I was given this by one Princess Sparkle. It’s a way to call her if I manage to bring down the magical shield around the city that’s keeping the alicorns and their agents out.”

“Aha! She was not in Canterlot when I darkened the sky!” he exclaimed, a grin lighting his wrinkled face as he tapped his helm with the tip of his hoof and nodded towards the blackness beyond our little rooftop. “I had hoped to catch all of the Princesses at once, but Sparkle is a wiley one. I presume you took the Bull out to Ponyville at some point?”

“She seems to think that Canterlot is on the moon. I don’t know how much I believe it, but she was pretty sure.”

“It is indeed,” he replied, a bit sadly. “Preserving the lives of their subjects within the storm shields they used to deflect the hurricanes around Canterlot was the only thing that would keep them from returning immediately.”

I brushed a hoof through my shaggy mane, shaking flecks of blood out of it. “You know, that’s what I don’t understand. You hate all this. A blind pony could see that. You’re not like your brother. He’s screwed up because your family were monsters. You chose to kill all these people, but you wouldn’t have if there were some other method.”

He slowly nodded, his eyebrows drawn together as he scratched at the edge of Nightmare’s chestplate with one hooftip. “I do wish my aims could be accomplished without such regrettable loss of life, but take heart. I might potentially have killed Luna, Celestia, and the others, but as it is, a fragment of ponykind may survive upon the moon and one day, perhaps, return and rebuild Equestria. Mayhap without so many of the predators that plagued our early development.”

I threw up my hooves and slumped in my chair. “That’s what I don’t get. You save a part of equinekind--”

“Yes?”

“But you could have lived a decent life and moved on when you die. I’ve been dead. I’ve seen some of the other side. You don’t get all the answers, but I think you might get a few if you’re willing to work for them. This...all this? All it takes is walking away.”

“My life was, and still is, defined by my birth,” Diamond answered, shaking his head as he slid down from his chair. He turned and I saw, for the first time, that his flank was entirely blank. “I was rejected even by the most intrinsic parts of Equestria’s magics. Even my brother, beast that he is, has a talent and a mark. Perhaps my ‘destiny’ was sidelined. Perhaps I was a mistake of cosmic circumstance. It is irrelevant. While I wouldn’t stoop to calling myself a ‘victim’, were I not here, another would be. My family would have birthed another child. My benefactor would have whispered to them. The whispers follow us wherever we go. Even now, I hear it telling me to slay you and prepare the wish.”

“You could still walk away. Hand the armor over to Sparkle, or me for that matter...”

He laughed, a rich belly laugh so long and loud I was momentarily worried he’d cracked. After a full minute he wiped a few tears from his eyes and reached out to pat my hoof. “Heh, my apologies, Detective. The irony was just too much. Even if I might - in weaker moments - like to do that--” Reaching up, he gave the helm a light tug. It stuck to his head like it was glued there. “--I’m afraid I’d have to tear off my own skull at this late hour. I’ve no doubt the armor would torture me in fashions beyond what we mere mortals can conceive of if I were to become too obstinate. In the end, it’s immaterial. I will make the wish or you will succeed in killing me.”

I sank back and slowly rubbed at my forehead as Diamond Wishes clambered back into his seat. “But why? Throughout all of this, I’ve tried to make sense of it. You had opportunities to walk away. Do you know what your...’benefactor’...even...even is? You keep calling this thing that.”

Diamond Wishes gestured at my glass which I quickly picked up and emptied. It was so odd to be able to unburden myself, but frustrating as well. I could tell he was trying to get me to understand, though for what reason I couldn’t fathom beyond the simple equine need to be free in his final moments.

“My benefactor is what...you might call a ‘god’, though that word means nothing and is barely descriptive,” he murmured, tapping his toe on the tiled rooftop. “Many of your friends border on something like godhood. Creatures that might be akin to gods are a dime a dozen in Equestria. To cave ponies of just a few millennia ago, you would be a god. You wear a weapon that produces thunder and fire and your friends give you powers that would beggar the minds of those primitive creatures we both call ancestors. I could say it is a mineral, or a plant, in the same way you are flesh and bone. Does calling you ‘meat’ adequately describe the entirety of you, Detective?”

I considered this for a moment, then exhaled a slow breath. “Never thought of myself as particularly ‘god-like’. I get killed too often.”

“And yet, here you sit. My benefactor is to the Equestrian divinity - the alicorns, and other such creatures - as you are to those cave ponies I just mentioned. It is beyond them.”

“And beyond you,” I said.

“Naturally, though why I serve can be distilled down to a rather simple equation that I’ve lived with since that first day in the depths of my family home when I learned why my sister had to die and witnessed...glory.”

I watched his eyes and he didn’t seem mad or fanatical. Just determined. It was strange that I just then noticed his eyes were the same color as mine, gold, and just as careworn.

“Math was never one of my strong suits,” I said, picking up one of the olives from the snacks between us and popping it in my mouth. “Mmm...those are good.”

He lifted one, studying the tiny green orb on the tip of his hoof. “From my family’s garden plot. The last thing that was grown there before I left. I kept a few in magical stasis for this occasion. A tiny comfort, though nothing about that house could ever be called comfortable. In the hubbub of recent weeks I’ll admit, I forgot about them.” With a quirking of the lips that couldn’t really be called a smile, he tossed the olive into his muzzle and sighed. “Delicious.”

“Wish I had a cigar. Juniper smoked,” I sighed. Diamond Wishes shot me a slightly bemused look and I added, “Oh. Sorry. I think I’ve gotten too used to everyone being privy to my personal history. He was my ex-partner on the force. He died a long time ago in the line of duty. He liked a cigar when he was nervous or celebrating.”

Diamond Wishes reached under the hem of his armor and produced a pair of the finest Dodge Junction cigars money could buy. “I don’t smoke, either, but my brother liked them. I thought to be smoking these with him, but it seems that is a forlorn conclusion. So...are you nervous or are you celebrating?”

“A little of both, really,” I replied, taking the brown stick from him and biting the end off, then putting it between my lips. He proffered a lit wooden match and I leaned in, puffing carefully. My lungs filled and my shoulders relaxed. “This is the first time I’ve had to take a breath in days. In a few minutes, we’ll probably try to kill each other. Whoever is left standing might still die. Right now, though? Right now, nothing is trying to end me and the pure Tartarus that has been my life for the last couple months is going to finally be over, one way or another.”

“I had a similar feeling, really.” Diamond Wishes inhaled some smoke, had to bury a cough, then lazily grinned as he watched the ember on the end of his cigar fading in and out. “It is ever so exhausting to end the world. I must speak to my employer about a raise and some better benefits.”

It was a terrible, horrifying joke, but I laughed anyway. I couldn’t help but laugh. The alternative was weeping and I didn’t feel like letting him see me cry, although I doubt he’d have held it against me. We might even have comforted one another, just then, but the cigars and the drinks were enough for that.

We sat for several minutes, swilling our liquor and smoking our cigars, listening to the soundless streets. It was the very definition of a companionable silence. Part of me wished it could go on a good deal longer.

Finally, I tapped out some ash on the rooftop and asked, “So, tell me about this equation you’re stuck with? I’m pretty good at solving problems. Might find a way through it.”

“What?” he said with a start. “Oh. Pardon, I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about. Your is the first pleasant company I’ve had in almost two months.”

“It’s fine. I’ve got nowhere to be, really. The griffin I’d have gone drinking with died about twenty minutes ago,” I replied. Part of me expected a rush of anger at that admission, but there was none.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Truly, I am,” he said, and I believed him; he had no reason to lie to me. “The griffin afterlife is very pleasant to all accounts. Particularly for those who die as heroes, defending the weak. He has gone to a good place, if any place at all.”

I shrugged and took a drag. “I hope so.”

“In some ways, I suppose that plays into the scenario I have been unable to unpick for so many years,” he continued, thoughtfully.

“How do you mean?”

Reaching back, he touched his blank flank. “You seemed unsurprised to see this.”

I raised my glass and he touched his to the lip of mine. “It’s been a while since anything really surprised me. Your flank isn’t trying to eat me, shoot me, or burn me. I never put much stock in ‘destiny’, either. I’ve had plenty of people in positions to know tell me I don’t have one.”

“Nor I,” he affirmed, swallowing the dregs of his whiskey. “Destiny passed us by, it seems. As my benefactor has laid down and as I could not refute, the equation is thus:, Soon, I am going to die and cease to be, ascend and become as those above, or go to a place of such punishment as has never been seen by even the wickedest of mortals.”

I jerked my chin toward the cityscape below. “So, one out of three endings with a positive outcome. Well, two out of three, I guess. There’s still the option to quit now. You’d have saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. To my mind, that would make you a hero worthy of one of those ‘pleasant afterlives’.”

“Possibly, though I doubt my body would respond if I considered tossing myself off this rooftop too heavily,” he murmured, slapping a hoof against his chest-plate with a soft clank. “Do you know, I committed my first murder at the age of fifteen? Not because I wanted to, mind you. Few in my family want to be monsters. Sociopathic traits like the ones my brother possesses are rare. We are led. I can barely remember the girl’s face, now. I’m not sure where my fathers found her or why they picked her for my ‘initiation’, but...choking the life out of her and pressing her body into the wall of my benefactor’s cage was one of the worst things I’ve ever done.”

“And you did it anyway?”

“I chose to survive,” he explained, voice tinged with sadness, “The alternative was death in her place. I may not believe their nonsense about compassion as a sign of weakness, but it was that moment I decided I would not die. Now, today, I am faced with the same roulette wheel, the same possibilities, and the same decision. I can kill a stallion I have come to like and admire...or I can die. That I may die anyway is immaterial. I can’t control that. But I am determined that, if there is a means, I will persist.”

I leaned back in the comfortable chair, rubbing the bridge of my nose as his words settled into the image of the stallion beside me that had formed in my mind over the past few months. He was cruel, because cruelty was necessary. He was vicious, because the alternative was agonizing death. Could I call him truly evil? Did I have the right to judge him in that fashion? My cutie-mark was still ice cold.

“Detective, if I might ask, what set you on this path?” Diamond Wishes asked, interrupting my train of thought.

“Me?”

“Yes. I’ve assembled some of your activities in the last several months, but much remains a mystery to me. My benefactor shares only what it sees fit. This began because of a murder? A young mare, if I am not mistaken?”

I reached into my pocket and withdrew Ruby Blue’s bejeweled diary, setting it on the table between us. “Her name was Ruby. She was cleverer than me. Cleverer than Nightmare Moon. Your colt, Zefu, killed her attempting to recover the helm of Nightmare Moon. I suspect she knew it was going to happen, though. She set everything up ahead of time, somehow knowing I’d be the one to investigate. I’m still vague on the how and why of it, but...I think she somehow knew we’d end up here, at the end.”

Diamond pulled at his lower lip with his toe for a moment, then set his cigar across his whiskey glass. “My benefactor gave me similar guidance. These weavings of fate bear a worrying resemblance to… well--”

“Destiny,” I finished, unable to hide a slight grumpiness in my voice about the admission. “Yeah, I noticed. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know for absolute certain what happens here and now. Maybe they put together the broad outlines. Maybe they knew I’d be a stubborn bastard who wouldn’t quit until I got here. Maybe they knew you’d do anything in your power to fulfill your god’s desires and escape death.”

“Interesting,” he mused. “That would tend to suggest they knew we would meetand that there was a relatively equal possibility you might kill me and that I might kill you. Do you believe it possible that this is the moment when they lost the...the ’thread’, as it were?”

I gave a slight shrug and exhaled, blowing a ring of smoke off the edge of the roof. “All I can figure is there weren’t any other places this could happen. If you had the chance to kill me sooner and make it stick, your benefactor seems like the sort of pragmatic that wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”

“And, to be fair, we did try several times.” Raising a hoof towards my chest, he pointed at the pouch over my heart. “I presume that is the source of your rather extreme sustainability?”

“A changeling heart. It was altered by the Archivists to run off magical batteries.”

He nodded, sagely. “Changelings are amazingly difficult to kill unless they are love starved, and you have had the love of this city sustaining you. The Bulldog, yes? I was also a fan of ‘Dead Heart’.”

“I’m never going to get away from those nicknames, even if I survive today. My driver loves to remind me I’ve somehow ended up a folk hero.”

Diamond Wishes smoothed back his mane and snorted. “Nothing ‘folk’ about it. You are a hero in the truest sense of the word, Detective. Most heroes will die or live to become the monsters the next generation of heroes must hunt. If you survive this day, retirement might be your best bet.”

“You think that’s likely?” I asked.

“I honestly can’t say. You are very nearly unkillable by traditional means and your firearm is classed for the killing of dragons. You are also wearing a prototype tactical anti-magic armor, if I am not mistaken. You were trained in close and ranged combat by the finest police academy in Equestria.”

I scratched an itch under the edge of my armor a little and nodded. “Sounds like you don’t fancy your odds, much.”

Chuckling, Diamond dropped out of his chair and stretched, his neck cracking in several places as he flexed his hooves. It was only then I noticed the extremely wiry muscles cording his throat and shoulders. “On the contrary, I have been learning to fight since only slightly out of infancy and my brother is or...rather was...a fearful opponent. I have thirty years experience on you and possess ancient magical armor designed by a divine being and powered by a city in chaos. While I am still exploring this armor’s limits, I would give both of us a fifty fifty chance.”

Taking a deep breath, I hopped down from the chair and went through a couple quick calisthenics. “So, this is it, then?”

“Unless you want to finish your drink and do a few more stretches,” he replied with a tone that was downright mournful, “I see no particular need for guile in this fight. The wish matrix is charged. If I am not dead in the next few minutes, I will use it. Even if you wished to give me mercy, it wouldn’t be an option.”

I scratched at my mane. “Is your friend sitting this out?”

“I am rather insisting it ‘sit this out’, as a final request from its long time servant. If you succeed you may go below and have your attempt to end this,” he said matter-of-factly as he pointed back toward the hatch I’d come from. “There is a hidden door in my apartments behind a bookshelf which will take you to another stairwell and at the bottom you’ll need to have my left eyeball to open the last door. I recommend a serving spoon from the kitchenette for removing it, but if you wish to take my head, that will work as well.”

We stood there for a long few seconds, studying one another like old friends picking out the subtle differences since the last time we’d seen one another. Slowly, I raised my hoof and offered it to him. He looked at my leg for a moment before reaching out to give it a firm shake.

“Mister Wishes, I can only say that this is not how this should have ended.”

He dipped his head respectfully, carefully stubbed out his cigar, then turned to trot to the other side of the roof, scuffing at the surface a few times. “Agreed. If you live, I do hope you bring about a fairer world, for those you love if not for me. Killing you will not be the pleasure I’d once thought it might, though I’ve never had much taste for killing.”

I moved to stand opposite him, checking my revolver to make sure it was loaded with the crystal rounds.

“Are you prepared, Hard Boiled?” the old stallion asked, politely tipping his head.

“I’m ready.”

The moment had come and the mission was before me. Reaching down, I flipped the Crusader’s control switch to the ‘sun’ setting. It let out an eager hum and I braced for the overwhelming rush of manic emotions that’d characterized my first use. I waited to become a flailing god of death. The last time was a wave of madness that swept me away. I wanted to be prepared, to hold my sanity as long as I could against the tide.

Several seconds later, I was still waiting.

I felt only a light tingle pulsing through my muscles, from my foreleg down to my tail and then back up to my ears. My chest expanded and I felt each heartbeat as though it were minutes long.

It was a moment to realize what was so different.

I had no anger to feed the devouring mania. I didn’t hate Diamond Wishes. Why shouldn’t I? He’d killed so many. He’d been responsible for the deaths of so many. In his own way, however, he was as much a victim as all the rest, a poor soul torn off his hooves by the fates and pulled along by the riptide of history.

There was no justice in his death.

It was necessary.

In that instant when I finally determined the course, I felt the Crusader’s power solidify around me, bracing bone that would otherwise have shattered and muscle that should have ripped itself to shreds under the forces being applied to it. I didn’t so much gallop as I flowed across the rooftop, faster than anything alive should have been able to move, feeling the wind of my passage nearly tearing my trenchcoat off my shoulders.

My body buzzed with barely contained energies beyond reckoning, yet it held together as I launched myself at the old stallion, feeling the same calm that’d permeated me since I awoke in the street take hold again. He seemed frozen in time, simply standing there with his chin cocked to one side and an interested look on his face.

I reached out for Diamond Wishes, raising my instrument to take his life. A slash of intense, pale energy lanced out, seeming to part the very fabric of reality where it passed. It lashed toward his throat, ready to separate head from body. I prepared, in some distant part of my mind, to mourn for him among many, many others who I knew I would shed tears for in the coming days.

In the instant before my blow connected, Diamond Wishes moved.

It wasn’t so much leaning back - more cocking his head back - but it was enough that my strike met with empty air, passing within a half inch of his throat. I was so surprised I didn’t have time to stop and plowed right by him, hooves skidding in the gravel as I approached the edge of the rooftop. I felt something snatch my back end painfully, bringing me up a half inch before I would have pitched over into the abyss.

I turned to see Wishes standing there with my tail in his teeth.

He spat it out and said, “Do be careful, Detective. I would hate for incautiousness to be your end.”

I swallowed and stepped back from the edge of the roof.

“H-how?” I stammered.

“This armor would appear to predict your movements, no matter how fast they might be,” he answered, softly. “You have had your strike. I do believe it is my turn.”

Before I could reply, he’d stepped inside my guard, one hoof planted between my front legs. I started to back up, but the edge of the roof was inches right against my heels. I tried to bring the Crusader up to slash at his rear knee, but he caught my strike on his shoulder and the weapon flashed uselessly into the dark, momentarily lighting up the skyline.

His throw was flawless and I’m sure I’d have been happier to appreciate it if I weren’t flying muzzle over tail. I crashed ribs first into one of the abutments at the edge of the roof and felt something inside me twinge though it wasn’t quite the crunch I’d been worried it might be. I slumped off the wall, sitting in the gravel for a moment as I tried to regain my breath.

Deciding if he was going to kill me outright he’d have let me sprint right off the rooftop, I took my time. At last, I rolled onto all fours and turned to face him. Time was still moving at a strange rate and bits of dust I’d kicked up getting to my hooves were still hanging in the air.

‘Nightmare, I need you this instant or we both die!’

Gale’s presence filled me.

‘She is pretty hurt,’ the ghostly colt whispered. ‘The part of your mind she was in sort of...blew up. I really like your gun, by the way. Could you fire it more?’

‘Gale, I can’t do this without her. Let me talk to Nightmare.’

There was a second of silence, then a weak voice mumbled in the back of my mind, ‘I...I am here.’

An image of Nightmare lying on her side, her dark blue body wrapped in bandages, appeared in my thoughts.

‘How do I fight someone who can see me coming?’

‘Y-you must exceed p-predictable behavioral norms. You must b-be...a s-storm.’

‘Any thoughts on an opener?’

‘D-do as your driver would d-do...’

My driver. Sweet Shine. How would she fight an opponent who knew what she was most likely to do? Nothing good, certainly, but there was something in what Nightmare said that resonated. Predicting Sweet Shine was entirely impossible.

She’d carved her own cutie-marks off with a knife to buy a few minutes of life for her former partner. She’d jumped into a dragon’s mouth just to get a clean kill. She’d brought me back from the dead just because she didn’t want to be alone.

According to the Ancestors, there were timelines where I died and she managed to kill Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.

How? There was no such thing as impossible for Sweet Shine. She’d pursue a goal single-mindedly to its conclusion without considering the potential personal consequences. If the Princesses ever decided to pull her into a courtroom, she’d get done for necromancy, conspiracy, diplomatic legal violations galore, an unknown number of assaults, drug use, and so many accessory charges it didn’t bear thinking about.

How did that translate into a fist fight?

Better than one might think.

Bracing myself against the wall, I launched with my rear hooves at Diamond Wishes who was still standing there, stock still, the only sign of movement his eyes darting from my legs to my face. The throb of magic was still coursing through me, reinforcing my bones and muscles, but it was not nearly so overwhelming as it might have been if I’d tried to wrap it in anger.

He knew I was coming. He’d worked out all of my immediate routes of attack, or rather, the armor had. I could see him start to roll his shoulder into the strike, but then his eyes widened slightly as the magical calculator spat out what I’m sure was an unenviable conclusion.

I skidded to a halt just out of kicking range and slammed my Crusader into the rooftop. The crystal rounds hadn’t had much of a recoil until that moment, but as the slash of energy struck the gravel the magical backlash almost knocked me flat on my backside. A shockwave shook the sky, shoving both of us back a couple feet as I drew the white blade straight upwards.

Diamond Wishes dodged sideways, avoiding a cut that would have bisected him. The enchanted blade exploded free of the roof, followed by a shower of debris that sprayed both of us like shrapnel, cutting into my fur and plinking off of the older stallion’s armor, cutting a slash across one of his cheeks. He looked, if anything, deeply impressed as he reached up and touched the bloody cut on his muzzle.

I sat there at one end of a long, gaping furrow torn in the rooftop that looked down into Diamond’s apartment. The soft record music filtered up through the gap as the roof under us creaked menacingly. One of the pillars I’d struck seemed to have been structural.

“Excellent, Detective! A worthy strike!” Wishes exclaimed. “Now, a riposte!”

A dark blue flash of light surrounded his armor and a dozen small stones rose off the rooftop, dangling in fields of shining magic. With a snap and a crack, the projectiles shot across the roof. I reared back, but all I felt was an intense pressure in my ribs for a moment before my back legs went out from under me.

Something hot boiled out of my chest, splashing around my hooves. I looked down and found several neat, circular holes in my armor and a steady rush of blood from each one. It was sadly anti-magic, not bulletproof. Next time I saw somepony with a tailoring talent I was going to have to fix that. Fortunately, none of them seemed to be directly centered over my heart.

Sinking onto my front knees, I swallowed and waited for the follow up strike that would surely take my head off, but Diamond Wishes seemed to be standing back, waiting to see what happened. Toying with me? No. His expression was one of curiosity. He was genuinely curious - in his broken way - as to whether I’d get up or not.

My breathing felt wholly inadequate. I found myself gasping, blood gurgling from between my lips. I spat out a muzzleful, then another. The pain was there, but distant and disconnected, like it was somepony else’s body who’d just absorbed the hits.

I dragged myself back against the edge of the roof, wincing as the blood spurting from my body became a gush. He’d nicked an artery, no doubt. I’d bled out once before and part of me was thankful; it was a relatively quick and painless way to go.

Just as I felt sure I would fall, my Crusader crackled and a furious heat swelled inside my chest. I felt my heart accelerate, thumping ten times, twenty times, thirty times in the span of a few seconds. Gale’s presence swirled up out of the encroaching darkness and - with a sickening series of wet pops - the stones unwedged themselves from my wounds and dropped onto the roof into the quickly expanding puddle of fluids.

The steady dribble of blood stopped almost as quickly as it’d begun and I gasped as one of my lungs suddenly reinflated. Strangely enough, that hurt many, many times worse than being punctured. There was a tickle in the back of my throat and I coughed, violently, before suddenly hacking something solid out onto my hooves; another stone.

Strength flooded my limbs as I shakily pulled myself upright, wiping my chin with the back of one hoof. I met his eyes and exhaled, limping towards the chair where my glass and cigar still sat. Picking up the whiskey, I downed it.

“D-Diamond?”

“Yes, Detective?”

“Some days, I really, really hate magic.”

“A sentiment we share, Detective. I would not wish for a simple cosmos, but perhaps, one where the divine’s dice were a tad less loaded. Still, it seems somehow appropriate that two earth ponies should be the ones deciding the continued existence of this world and its peoples, doesn’t it?”

“I can only agree,” I muttered. “One more attack?”

“I suspect that is all either of us have left,” he murmured.

‘So, we’re really doing this, then?’ I thought in the general direction of Nightmare.

The bandaged alicorn reappeared propped on a heap of pillows with a tattered book in her forelegs whose title was ‘Hardy’s favorite things’. ‘Y-you are doing this, Hard Boiled. If you d-die, I am not going to feel a thing. I intend to spend my remaining moments sorting through your memories of bagels, beer, and the various cheeses you’ve eaten in your lifetime.’

Picking up Sykes’s axe from beside my chair, I hefted it over one shoulder and propped it in the crook of my knee. Testing the balance against my hyper-charged muscles, I tossed it from leg to leg, then caught it in my teeth. Rising up on my back legs, I let the weight spin me in a quick circle before slinging the blade at Wishes.

His magic was already charging when I let go. The blade crossed the distance in a blink of an eye, but stopped an inch from the end of his nose, dangling there in his obnoxious field of augmented telekinesis. Before he could respond, I was already moving, throwing myself towards the gap the Crusader had torn in the rooftop.

I rolled over the edge, trying to brace for the short drop as my slightly tender stomach hit my spine, but the carpet was so thick I barely felt the shock on my knees as I landed in the comfortable apartment below. It was a strange change, being back in a place I’d have found fairly pleasant on another day.

Before Diamond could get a looksee at what I was up to, I drew in a deep breath, lifted up onto my back legs and tried to figure out what might be structurally relevant. Deciding after a few seconds it genuinely didn’t matter, I wrapped the Crusader’s power around me like a warm blanket.

A distant part of my mind found it interesting just how well the gun responded to simple thoughts and commands; an almost transcendental state of understanding existed between stallion and weapon.

The rest of me was shrieking, ‘You’re doing what on purpose?!’

Drawing back my hoof, I whirled in place, magical lightning arcing out to blast gaping holes in the wall supports, explosively filling the tiny apartment with dust. Ancient, valuable books burst into flames as the furniture was shredded into little more than wooden debris. Hot slag poured out of the holes left by the Crusader, sizzling on the carpet. I dodged another falling tile.

My heart was thumping at what felt like twenty times normal speed, but still I persisted, smashing one pillar after another with lashes of enchanted force like a spinning dervish. The creaking gradually became a roar as my muzzle filled with pulverized concrete and the air became thick with bits of shattered rubble. I looked up, just in time to catch a brief, shadowed glimpse of Diamond Wishes peering through the hole in the rooftop. He looked back and forth, then his armor flared with power. I lost him as the cloud of dust became too dense to see.

‘Gale, I’m about to suffer what I suspect will be a lot of injuries,’ I thought.

A slightly crazed, but altogether familiar voice giggled in my mind, ‘Injuries? No way! I love injuries! I have so much power right now I could put your head back on! This is amazing!’

I stopped in my tracks for a second, then slowly let my gun drop. ‘Gale, are...are you high?’

‘Please, more shiny crystal gun shooty, Mister Grumpy!’

Before I could question further why my cardiovascular system seemed to have developed an addiction to my firearm, the first of about two dozen tiles broke across my back. I threw myself into the gap I’d blown in the roof, but the collapse was already under way. I threw my forelegs over my head and buried my face in the lining of my coat, trying not to breathe anything too toxic.

The chaos that followed felt like it went on for hours.

There were deafening explosions of glass, a dozen or more heavy blows on my shoulders and back, scatterings of debris, and far too many ceiling panels collapsed across me. Very quickly, the darkness closed in until there was nothing to see at all. I lost the sounds of falling debris, but the weight across my back kept increasing until I felt sure it would crush me any moment.

I shut my eyes tightly and prayed.

It’d been said before, but I was never the one for prayer in our little party; that was Sweet Shine’s shtick. She’d prayed to everything under the sun and a few things besides down through the years. She knew the forms and functions of a hundred different religious icons. I always wondered if she was just covering her bases or if she genuinely hoped one of them might answer her one day. I never asked her exactly what she was praying for. It seemed obvious, at the time: a little peace, a little comfort, and maybe the hope that we’d all get the chance to retire.

In that instant, lying beneath a towering heap of garbage I’d just collapsed on myself in hope of leaving Diamond Wishes too injured to make his final wish, I finally found the real answer and I finally understood him.

I prayed because, in a life of terror and pain, there was nothing else left for me to do. I could die, or I could pray. It made the decision easy.

When silence had fallen and I was decidedly not dead, I tested my back and found it unbroken. I hurt. Mercy, did I hurt, but my shoulders were only sore instead of shattered. It felt like somepony had pummeled me with bricks, which now that I thought about it was probably pretty close to what’d happened.

Carefully, I pulled my coat away from my muzzle. I fished my headlamp back out of my pocket and flicked it on. There was almost nothing to see. I’d gotten luckier than I deserved, and a particularly wide section of tile had fallen across my shoulders, creating a tiny cavern of sorts being propped up by another section of garbage.

I shifted a couple inches and the tile slid sideways, sending a cascade of dust down on my head. Coughing involuntarily, I tried to edge my way toward one end. Even if I could have seen the sky, there was no sky to see, but it couldn’t be worse than being under however many pounds of crap.

Popping the Crusader open, I checked the crystal rounds still in the chamber. Three more of them were burned out and the last was cracked. How much power had I used just surviving pulling the top of a building down on myself?

Groaning softly, I flicked the dial back to the ‘stealth’ setting.

Now, I’ve done dumber things in my life, but cutting off my heart’s happy-drug supply while still under a collapsed roof probably rated in the top ten. My blood suddenly felt like it’d turned to sludgy ice and every muscle in my shoulders and back locked up tighter than a bank vault. I moaned and flopped back onto my belly, lying there whimpering in a fashion that would have been pretty embarrassing if there’d been anyone to see me or if I could have found it in me to give a damn what the world still thought of me.

After several minutes just lying there, I spat out a mouthful of dust and raised my head.

“A-Are you s-still there, Diamond?”

There was a cough from somewhere off to my left.

“S-still...still here, Detective,” Diamond wheezed. “I do wish I had spent more of my brief time experimenting with Nightmare Moon’s armor learning how to make a shield. Unicorns make it look like a simple matter.”

“Y-you injured?” I asked.

There was a shifting of debris, followed by a soft nicker. “Bruised, but whole. Yourself?”

I tried to move, but the pain radiating out from my chest was enough to keep me glued to the floor. I breathed slowly, trying to will my muscles to relax. I could feel Gale frantically working to keep me conscious without the influx of magic from the Crusader.

Somehow, my hat had landed just a foot from the end of my muzzle. With the remains of my strength, I picked it up and mashed it down on my head, not bothering to stick my ears through.

“I’m alive. Sore. Could you get this crap off me?”

“One moment. I see your light under a pile.” There was a shuffling of hooves nearby followed by the crunch of glass and concrete. The tile above me glowed blue, before being summarily yanked aside to reveal Diamond Wishes standing there, his white coat rendered grey by the clouds of dust and a small cut above his right eye dripping a streak of blood down his chin.

I groaned and propped myself up on my forelegs, stretching my neck back and forth.

“It was too much to hope that would kill you,” I muttered, tugging at my collar.

Diamond’s brow furrowed as he sat on his haunches a few meters away. “I must say, the armor had an absolute fit determining what you intended to do. It is presently telling me you will throw yourself off the rooftop and hope your skull hitting the sidewalk causes an earthquake that levels the building.”

“Might work,” I replied, pulling a kerchief out of my pocket. It was wrapped around something, but I couldn’t think of what just then. Dropping the contents on my coat, I held the folded cloth out and nodded at his forehead. “You’re bleeding.”

He took the cloth and pressed it carefully to his own forehead. “Ah, thank you. Your healing factor is impressive.”

“Chalk it up to some wartime enchantments. How long is your benefactor going to wait?”

The elderly stallion shook his head, brushing a bit of concrete scrap out of his chest fur as he let out a long, drawn out sigh. “It demands your death as we speak. I’m afraid I have bare moments before it will simply take control of my body. It will simply throw you off the tower when it does. Am I correct in assuming you are in no condition to fight me?”

I tried to stand, but my knees gave out, almost sending me onto my chin. I sat, again, and took several breaths, willing my heart to slow down. When even that felt like too much, I slumped onto my back, leaning on the tile that’d constituted the top of my little cave just moments ago.

“Seems like it,” I answered. “I don’t know if you read my police file, but it probably says something about how much I hate heights. I’d rather not go off the roof.”

“Unfortunately, throwing you off is the most efficient method and it does prize efficiency. I shan't have much say in the matter. It was a brave thing to fight me up here, then, though that would seem to be your defining feature. Madness and bravery.”

I waved a hoof at the empty, black sky. “Eh, helps there’s no wind and I can’t see the other buildings. Probably piss myself if I could.”

Rising, Diamond Wishes trotted over to stand over where I lay. I tried to squirm away, but it wasn’t happening. My front legs were working, but my back legs felt like jelly; kicking him was out of the question.

“I’m afraid our time has come to an end, Detective.” His armor shone brilliantly and something lifted out of the rubble nearby, coming to dangle beside him. It was Sykes’s axe. “I doubt you can regenerate from the type of head wound this will inflict, but just to be safe, I am going to cut you into several pieces. I’ll try to make the first wound lethal. It is the last mercy I can grant. If any of our species survive and I manage to return one day from the places beyond, I’ll be certain to tell them your story.”

I started to reach over to grab the Crusader and flick it back on, but the glow of telekinesis surrounded my chest and leg, pinning me in place. Hot sparks exploded from my armor, spraying the roof around us. I winced as the straps on my sides were suddenly torn free and the supposedly spell resistant armor was flung over his shoulder. A second later, my gun was ripped off my foreleg and joined it, clattering on the rooftop remnants somewhere in the dark.

“Do hold still,” Diamond admonished. “I’d rather not miss.”

The end.

I wish I could say that when my life flashed before my eyes I found it a pleasing bit of footage with a lot of good food, easy-going lovers, and stable friends. Realistically, it was a series of high speed nightmares culminating in taking one of my best drinking buddies’ axe to the forehead. At the very least, I thought maybe it was worthwhile to avoid the impending death of the world in whatever cataclysm the wish machine was likely to bring about.

Without my gun or armor and with my heart struggling to keep me alive, I had few good options.

Death wasn’t so bad and I’d likely have a fair bit of company in the afterlife, presuming whatever evil was lurking in the basement of Starlight Tower didn’t set its sights there next. Considering its propensity to casually use souls for its own purposes, there was no guarantee of that. Still, it was some solace in an otherwise bleak outlook.

Nopony could say I hadn’t earned a break.

My free hoof brushed something in the folds of my coat as I struggled to crawl away through the dusty remains of the rooftop. Unfortunately, there was no headway to make; his magic still held me in place. Sykes’s axe rose, lining up with my forehead.

I needed to disrupt it for only a second. How, though?

How?

In theory, he could see damn near everything I might do coming. The armor was fast. How fast? Fast enough?

One last trick remained.

“Diamond?”

He paused for a second. “Yes, Detective? Last words? We have little time.”

I nodded, weakly. “Only three.”

He hefted the axe higher and prepared to send me to oblivion. “Go on, then.”

“Free the moon.”

I couldn’t see precisely what happened from Diamond’s perspective, but I saw my reflection in his eyes an instant later. The ancient, deeply ingrained vision who haunted the dreams of every foal suddenly appeared underneath him, her glistening eyes glaring up with all the fury of the Nightmare herself.

The magic around my chest wavered.

It was enough.

I pulled my last weapon from the folds of my coat and clutched it tight in the crook of my leg before slamming it into his left side just below his armpit where the armor of Nightmare Moon didn’t quite protect. It sank in deep and he stiffened from head to hoof. A spurt of blood gushed onto my chest, dribbling over my leg and running off my elbow.

The last of my strength fled and my leg flopped back against my chest, leaving the horn of Ruby Blue sticking obscenely out of the old stallion’s side. His back legs collapsed as the axe dropped into the roof beside my head, sticking there with a loud ‘clunk’ that echoed off into the distance. Cautiously and with much trepidation, Diamond Wishes reached up and touched the horn where it protruded from his body.

“Ah. I...I s-see,” he murmured, with a certain finality. Gradually, like a freshly cut tree collapsing in the forest, Diamond Wishes slid onto his belly. His gaze met mine as I quickly dispelled the illusion surrounding me. “That...is a n-neat trick, Detective.”

I didn’t even have the energy to drag myself over to him. Instead, I heaved myself over onto my side so we could see each other properly. “Sorry. I made a deal with the intelligence in the armor for clemency. Some magic involving Twilight Sparkle way back in history changed her, gave her some free will. She wanted...eh...well, you don’t care, do you?”

He slowly shook his dusty head, the blood still leaking from his head wound having slowed to a trickle. “I-I’m afraid I am rather m-more concerned with the horn in my aorta,” he whispered, then rolled his eyes back in my direction and asked, “I have n-never died before. What is i-it like?”

I thought for a long minute, then answered, “It was quiet. Calm. Easy. Simpler than living, certainly.”

“Truly? I...hope to s-see my little sister one day.” He tilted his head to one side as he lay there on his stomach. I slowly, painfully shrugged out of my coat before folding it into a small pillow and pushing it under his cheek. “Thank you.”

“Least I can do,” I muttered, flopping onto my back again. “I’m going to go deal with your friend in a minute, but...right now, I just need to lie here and catch my breath.”

He tried to wet his lips, but all that came up was blood. “I...I do believe you may have c-clipped my lung as well. Mmmph.” Pushing a hoof onto the roof, he rolled onto his side. “My...friend. It a-assured me you would die here, today, on this rooftop. I-it said the future was set.”

I pulled my hat off and stared at it. There was a fresh rent in the brim that was going to need mending, but it looked otherwise none the worse for wear. “I didn’t come alone.”

Diamond’s eyes were growing foggy, but he still found the strength to look up at me one, last time. His voice was growing weaker as the thick puddle of blood around his middle grew.

“Detective. Suf...suffering cannot be truly eternal, can...can it? I am s-surely damned.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” I replied, staring out into the night. “The first time I died I had a big hole in my chest. Sniper got me right in the heart. I met my partner. We talked. He warned me that something was coming. Boy was he right.”

Diamond Wishes shifted his chin a little in the dirt and asked, “Y-you loved him?”

“I loved him.”

“You...are so lucky. I...hope...that one d-day you die...so...you...may be with...all those...you love, Detective...H-Hard Boiled...”

With that, his muzzle went slack and blood began to trickle from his nose and one corner of his mouth. His final breath was soft and gentle, that of an old pony finally finding reprieve from the slings and arrows of life. Diamond Wishes was dead. In much the same way I had with Sykes, I reached over and closed his eyes.

I sagged, wanting nothing so much as to shut my own eyes and sleep. When had I slept last? I could barely remember what sleep felt like. Sleep was the thing where you lay down and didn’t move until you felt better, right? Or was that death? Hard to say in my case.

Either way, it couldn’t be worse than being awake. Still, there were things to be done. A mission to finish. The Celestia’s-damned-fat-flanks job to be done.

Unfortunately, that didn’t matter much if I couldn’t walk. First things first.

‘Gale? Nightmare?’ I thought. ‘You two alright?’

‘I’m...okay,’ the colt’s ghost mumbled. ‘Fully charged for what feels like a week. Are you sure we can’t--’

‘I do not need the one who controls my ‘biological apartment’ to become addicted to the use of magical weaponry!’ Nightmare interjected, sharply.

‘Right, right. Sorry. Did...did you really do it? Did you really kill Diamond Wishes?’ Gale asked.

‘He’s dead,’ I affirmed, glancing toward where the other stallion’s body lay. ‘I need my legs. Any hope of those anytime soon?’

‘You know fixing your muscles isn’t as easy as flipping switches, right? I’m working as hard as I can! It would be a whole bunch easier if there was a wall socket and someone friendly with the juice.’

‘Just asking for updates when you can give them. Right now, I’m wishing I’d thought to bring some explosives. Probably be easier to blow the building up than fight whatever is in the basement.’

‘You had insufficient data, Detective,’ Nightmare commented, shifting her bandaged body about as a comfy looking beanbag chair appeared under her mental projection. ‘To be clear, you still have insufficient data. What makes you think you can even fight this ‘god’?’

‘What’s my alternative?’ I asked, pointing toward the blackened barrier that still hung over Uptown. ‘You want to try another sprint through the shield?’

‘Ah. No, I do not believe I do. What, then?’

‘Then we have to go down some stairs.’

The pain in my back legs was finally starting to fade. I decided to give them another try, dragging myself over onto my stomach and bracing against one of the piles of debris from the collapsed roof. Painstakingly, inch by inch, I hauled myself up until, at last, I stood, looking around at the destroyed remains of Diamond Wishes’s apartments. I picked up my headlamp and fitted it down over my hat, again, finally taking a moment to get my ears situated through their respective holes.

The bookshelf and its hidden door that Wishes mentioned was one of the early casualties of my assault, but its destruction had left behind a gaping hole in one of the few remaining walls where I could just make out the top of a set of metal steps descending back into the dark.

‘You can do this,’ I thought to myself.

‘Your weapon, Hard Boiled,’ Nightmare reminded me. ‘I believe, based on the trajectory of his throw, that you will find it approximately six yards to your left.’

I held up the shredded remains of my gun harness, the trigger bit dangling from a half-broken strap. Shaking my head, I limped in the general direction Nightmare had indicated, panning my lamp back and forth across the garbage-strewn carpet, hoping the Crusader wasn’t under something. Once again, I got lucky: my gun was wedged against the broken remains of Diamond Wishes’s coffee table. Snatching it up in my teeth, I looked around until I found what was left of my anti-magic armor draped over the busted remnant of the record player. Holding it up with both hooves, I exhaled and folded the destroyed rag in half, dropping it back over the player’s horn-style speaker.

I looked back in the direction of where I’d left Wishes with his bloody head still on my folded coat. No way was I leaving that, at least. Staggering back toward him, I stopped as a soft sound reached my ears.

‘Is...is that...breathing?’

No way.

No chance.

No how.

I’d seen enough death to know without checking a pulse whether a pony was dead or not and Diamond was dead. I stumbled forward, dropping my gun as I readied myself to try to stomp his skull into a pulp. Fear filled me as I hopped over bits of broken furniture, trying desperately to remember where I’d been standing when I saw him last.

My light swung back and forth through the dark, searching for the corpse. I found the puddle of blood quickly enough, but it was empty. The circle of illumination swept further across the blasted room until, at last, it alighted on a pair of dingy, red-flecked forelegs. They were just standing there, not moving. My brain momentarily froze and I fell back onto my heels, the torch’s beam rising until it panned onto my enemy’s face.

Diamond Wishes was looking at me across the short distance, a small, coy smile on his lips. His eyes were still foggy and the blood from his nose barely dripped. Even the stab wound in his side looked to have run dry. He was still definitely dead.

“Hello, Hardy,” he said, softly.

“T-that’s not...--” I stammered, trying to find where I’d lost the Crusader around my hooves.

“Not possible?” the corpse finished, then sat and held up his forelegs placatingly. “No, Diamond Wishes is gone. I promise. I guess you don’t recognize me, though, do you? Maybe this will help. Let me see if I can figure out how this armor works.”

Shutting his eyes, the dead body hummed a few short notes, then the armor around him shimmered with a burst of energetic magic. Gradually, the magic began to take on a new shape as a simple illusion spell spilled over the old stallion’s form, covering it from head to tail-tip. I gaped, unable to comprehend, though my lips worked themselves to form a single word.

“R-Ruby?”

Act 3 Chapter 78 : Last Night

"There were always things out there waiting to kill us in the dark. What kept them from coming for us was one simple reality: what's inside the minds of intelligent beings is always scarier than even the most vicious predator's teeth. The darker things beyond this realm know that no matter what evils they can conjure, if they provoke our imaginations, it will be they who suffer in the end."

- Princess Luna, On Dreaming.

It was the dress that did it.

Ruby Blue could probably have chosen any dress in the world, but she chose that one: the one she died in, diving face-first off the roof of one of the swankiest hotels in Detrot. The royal red number with the flank-high slit up the side was calculated to brighten a lover’s evening, but I couldn’t really appreciate it given the circumstances.

I’d only known Ruby through her diary and her sister’s descriptions of her. She looked almost exactly like Lily, though there were a few small differences. Her cutie-mark was back in its untarnished state: three diamonds hanging from stems. She was looking at me with that same sad smile that Lily gave me from time to time when she knew I was about to do something self-destructive.

I sank onto a pile of rubble, my head in my hooves as the emotional weight of several days constantly suffering seemed to land squarely on my shoulders. I’d just killed a pony with my own two hooves and there his corpse was, standing there wearing the illusory skin of a mare I’d only met after she died. To be clear, killing was no longer an unfamiliar sensation, but knowing that made the moment even worse. Terrible as it might sound, there was some part of me that liked Diamond Wishes.

My body ached, either from tension or from all the abuse. It felt as though my shoulders were made of lead and my neck was one big ball of disgruntled muscles heavily considering a general strike. Sitting there with my face buried in the sleeves of my dusty trenchcoat, I tried to take solace in the notion that, whatever happened, I was likely to get to rest at some point sooner, rather than later.

There was a clip-clop of hooves moving around me, but I ignored it. Ruby was going to do as Ruby did. She couldn’t exactly get any more dead and if she wanted to rip my spine out, I wasn’t feeling much like stopping her.

“You forgot to put this back on before you brought the roof down,” Ruby said, softly, patting my shoulder. Her voice was light and gentle, like she was trying to comfort a frightened, injured bird she’d found in her garden plot.

Something thin dropped over my shoulders and, for an instant, I thought she’d just slipped a garotte wire around my throat. It was a passing thought, though. I raised my head a little and looked down to find the Emblem of Harmony resting on my chest.

I tried to find some words. I really did. All I managed was a sort of choked gasp with a question mark on the end.

“It’s really me, Hardy,” Ruby murmured, settling down beside me on an adjacent pile of shattered concrete. “I know we’ve never ‘met’ before, but you read my diary. I like to think I’m a good enough writer to put a lot of myself in those pages.”

Coughing fitfully into my elbow, I lay back on the uncomfortable heap, staring up at the blackened sky over Starlight Tower. After a few seconds, Ruby’s pretty, pale blue face crept into my peripheral vision. I turned my chin a little to find her peering at me, resting one hoof under her muzzle and with an interested expression.

“You know, you’re cute, in a kind of ‘dragged behind a cart during rush hour’ sort of way,” she added, after a few seconds.

It was such a ridiculous statement and so wildly out of place that it made me smile. I wasn’t in control of the smile; it just sort of happened.

“Thanks,” I muttered, my voice hoarse and thready. “You’re cute, too, in a kind of ‘fell off a rooftop’ sort of way.”

Ruby flipped a hoof through her bright red mane, the toetip passing right through the hair as though it weren’t there, which it wasn’t, because she was dead. The simple illusion over the dead body of a stallion who’d just tried to kill me was small comfort. Such thoughts weren’t helping my emotional condition, much, and I didn’t have Sweet Shine there to kick me sane.

“I do miss my body, a little,” she opined. “I spent a lot of time shaking cherry trees on the farm to get this flank. It seemed a bit of a waste to drop it off a building, but saving the world and my sister was worth it, don’t you think?”

“You tell me. Have we saved the world?” I asked, unable to fully disguise a bit of hopefulness in my voice.

Ruby Blue sighed, reaching out to touch my foreleg. I had to force myself not to draw away from her and she seemed to realize it, stopping before her toe actually rested on my knee.

“No. Not by a long shot.”

“But...the armor—” I started.

She waved me to silence with a flick of her perfectly ringletted tail. “I’m so sorry, Hardy, but the sun and moon aren’t moving until all the magic is expelled from that big’ol nasty shield up there. We could wait, but it’d probably be a few years. Everypony on Equis would be dead by then.”

I sat up, cautiously, and reached out to brush a hoof up Ruby’s side. She stood still, letting me feel my way through the illusion. My toe brushed against the base of the severed horn jutting from the old body and I shuddered, yanking my leg back.

“So...so what then?” I asked, tears burning at the edges of my eyes. “Y-you somehow...somehow set all of this in motion, right? You brought me here? Y-you knew I’d die so m-many—”

Ruby poked me on the end of the nose. “Hardy, you brought yourself here.”

“That’s not better! Do you have any idea how much—”

“—you suffered?” She huffed, trotting in a little circle then settling down on her stomach across from me, giving me a level glare. “Were you about to say ‘how much you suffered’? If we’re going to pull those particular receipts, I’m dead. The permanent kind.”

I put a hoof over my eyes. “You and lots of other people. Sweet Celestia, so many...”

Her expression softened and she gathered her hooves under her chest, flicking one ear so the tiny jeweled earrings hanging from it rang musically against one another. I couldn’t quite put out of my mind that it was an illusion, but I appreciated the attention to detail.

“If it’s any comfort, Hardy, I didn’t make you do anything. You could have lain down and let the world die anytime. Lots of ponies probably would have.”

“You stuck clues in my path,” I muttered, disconsolately.

“You’re the one who put them together,” she replied, tapping the side of her head. “I was half out of my mind most of the time after I snatched the Helm of Nightmare Moon and when I wasn’t, I was coming down from the worst sort of brain-twisting high you can imagine. Nightmare could see the paths, but I don’t think she knew what any of it meant. She’s very intelligent, but...not very smart, if that makes any sense.”

I gave her a despondent grin and tried to get up, stumbling a moment before catching myself. “It does. I’ve met her, remember?”

“I remember.” The dead mare pushed a rock in a little circle, looking into the middle distance as though lost in thought. “She was so confident she could take you, but you were one of two ponies in Equestria Nightmare Moon couldn’t predict and that scared the fur off her. The other was Diamond Wishes. I think he was a sort of blind spot for her, but she spent whole evenings trying to dig through your personal history for some clue as to why your future was such a mess. She just couldn’t understand.”

“That’s why she said she tried to take my body,” I said.

“Honestly, she should have known that wouldn’t work.” Ruby giggled, pushing herself up and lightly kicking one of the broken pieces of the roof so it skittered off into the dark. “I sure did. You’re the most boneheaded pony in Equestria except maybe Sweet Shine.”

“I think I’m happy to take second place, there. Sweets jumped into a dragon’s mouth not two hours ago. I’m going to give her a piece of my mind for that if...” I trailed off.

Ruby let out a sad sigh. “If you live through what’s coming?”

I slowly nodded, then something occurred to me. “I don’t guess you have any spoilers as to whether or not that’s likely, do you?”

“No,” she replied, sadly, plucking at one fetlock as though she weren’t quite used to it being there. “Everything after today is always a blur. Still, you have no idea how good it is to finally meet you.” She fidgeted fitfully with the edge of her dress, seeming for the first time unsure of herself. “I don’t know how I pictured this going for either of us. Seeing future events isn’t like...actually watching them so much as remembering them. Memory always misses things.”

I blew a breath out of the corner of my muzzle. “I’ve heard something like that. Nightmare Moon likes to pretend she has a handle on things, but whatever magic she actually does is more like math without all the x’s and y’s filled in.”

“That sounds right. I saw the paths, but I didn’t know where most of them led. I’m a bit in the dark about how I did what I did, too, but...I’ve had some guiding hooves on my shoulders.”

I squinted at her, frowning. “I’ve had a little ‘guardian angel’ showing up through the last few months. Goes by the name of Juniper Shores. He’s been my intermittently guiding hoof, frustrating as he can be.”

Ruby tilted her head to one side. “W-wait. Do you mean your old partner? That Juniper?”

“That’ll be him.”

“But...but Juniper is dead. I wrote that thing about him in my diary so you’d believe I actually could see things that were important. I know he’s dead. He has to be. I saw it. It was horrible. There was nothing left.”

“Yeah, well, as many of us have recently demonstrated, death is a slightly impermanent state, isn’t it?”

“You cheated with your heart and that beastly necromancer stuck my soul in my horn. I saw Juniper die. There wasn’t enough to put in a cherry picking bucket,” she insisted, trotting over to the remains of the drinks cabinet, pulling out a bottle of something expensive whose neck was shattered but whose contents were still in there, and taking a deep swig. She made a face. “Ugh, I can’t taste anything? Really? I go to all the trouble to get a body back and the dead stallion’s tongue has to be the part that stops working right away?”

“Speaking of that, how...how are you here?” I asked, waving a hoof up and down in an attempt to encompass the body she was wearing. “Did you—”

Ruby took another sip, then made a face and spat it out. “Ugh. Can’t even digest anymore. Yuck. Anyway, are you asking about the mechanics of snatching a dead body? Because I am not a necromancer. I knew this would work, but I don’t know how it works. Maybe it’s because he was wearing the armor of Nightmare Moon when he died. Maybe it’s just Necromancy 101. You stabbed him. He died. I felt a vacancy and moved in. I think I’m alive because of the magic in the armor. It’s the magic of possession. Once it’s gone, so am I.”

“A...and you’re fine with that?”

She gave me an even stare. “Hardy, I can’t get more ‘fine’ with that. I set a lot of plates spinning, half of which seem like they just existed as contingencies in case somepony did something completely out of left field and half of which are broken. I don’t even know why I did some of those things. I’m a farm filly, like my sister. I could accessorize you all day long, but I didn’t sign up to be an oracle for powers from beyond. When I came to Detrot, nobody told me I’d finish my days lying in an alleyway. I deserve a break almost as much as you do. Whatever comes next, I don’t want to be a disembodied horn or a...” She looked down at herself. “—or a dead murderer.”

“I guess I can respect that,” I said, after a moment’s consideration. “I’ve got a relative who is stuck in a state not dissimilar to yours and he’s mostly getting through it by grumbling, drinking, smoking, and scaring the pants off people. What about your sister?”

Ruby’s ears flattened against the sides of her head and she hugged the broken bottle like it might have some comfort left in it. “Lily...I knew she’d come. Which timeline are we on? Did you and she sleep together, or are you with the cute blond colt? Or are you sleeping with the scary pegasus with sharp teeth?”

I blinked at her like a fish who’d suddenly found the tasty worm in their mouth had a hook attached.

“I did not even consider for a second that Swift was an option. She’s my partner—”

“So was Juniper. Didn’t stop you there, did it?”

“He and I never had sex!”

Ruby gave me a skeptical look. “Huh. He came out of your apartment in the morning dozens of times with bed-head, a dreamy expression, and a lot of your mane hairs on his jacket...and you weren’t sleeping together?”

My nose involuntarily wrinkled as a whole bunch of entirely unwelcome and untimely images started darting through my brain at high speed. “No, we didn’t, and Swift and I didn’t and I’m not with Lily or Scarlet except they—”

“Oh, you’re not with either of them?” she squeaked, her voice rising with a note of panic.

“I didn’t say that!”

She wiped her forehead with the back of one fetlock. “Phew. I’m so glad. The timeline where you come here with nobody to live for is really awful.”

I held up my hooves and tried to regain some semblance of control over my spinning thoughts. “Hold on, hold on! Give me a second here! Timeline? You...you don’t know what timeline we’re in?”

Ruby pointed toward the dark sky overhead. “Hardy, half the time when I saw this moment, it was raining. What part of ‘not an oracle’ didn’t make sense? I’ve only put together general outlines of what’s going on. There were other forces pushing me along.” She looked down for a moment and shuddered. “I can’t...feel them now, though. I don’t think they’re with us here. We...we might actually be alone.”

“What exactly were these forces?” I asked, nodding in her direction. “Diamond Wishes called the thing in the basement a ‘god’, but he also said that didn’t mean anything. You got any thoughts on that?”

She was quiet for a long moment, then drew in a slow breath of the warm air, holding out the broken whiskey bottle. I took it, sniffed the contents, then took a quick sip. It was some pretty stiff stuff.

“I’ve got some thoughts, sure,” she said, finally. “I don’t think you’ll like them.”

I rolled my eyes. “When was the last time that mattered? Go on. Hit me.”

“I’ll remember you said that. Alright, Hardy. Have you ever asked yourself what a god...is?”

I gave her a non-committal shrug. “Religion was never really my bag. Plenty of people think Celestia is a god, but there are too many pictures of her with her face buried in a cake for me to put much stock in that. Likewise with Luna. I’ve met Twilight Sparkle and if she’s a god, I’m a lettuce and tomato sandwich on rye with extra pickles.”

“No, no, no. I don’t mean the religious idea of a god. I mean what a god...actually...is. In practical terms.”

I started to reply, then let my mouth fall shut.

It was a good question and one that, considering the circumstances, deserved a good answer. Most ponies are, blessedly, never forced to consider whether or not there are things greater than they are in the universe: we know for sure there are things that could eat us like popcorn. It leads to a certain comfortable acceptance of the existence of things like monsters and horrors from beyond. That being said, I’d never really taken the time to think on exactly what a god might actually be.

Were they made of bone and skin? Surely some of them must be. Were they intelligent? Maybe, maybe not. Did they care about the existence of lesser intelligences, or were we not important enough to squish and thus, largely ignored? Could I, in good conscience, say I knew anything at all about gods?

“I...I guess the best I could say with any certainty is ‘they make things’,” I murmured, but that still felt inadequate. “Honestly, if I had to say one thing about gods and had any hope of being even a little bit right, that’s it. Gods make things. I don’t know if one particular god or several created our universe, but I imagine there are things out there that are far enough beyond ponykind that we would call them gods. I’ve met a few on this little adventure. Mostly nasty.”

Ruby giggled and tipped her head. “Oh, you’re definitely my sister’s type. Smart andscruffy. Bet you remind her of the farm.” I felt my cheeks flush for some reason and let the brim of my hat dip over my face as she continued, “Still, you’re right. Gods make things. Some might even say we’re gods in our own small ways. I certainly felt powerful when I rang my hammer on my anvil and turned out a piece that would guarantee any mare or stallion was the talk of the town.”

“Diamond Wishes was saying something like this,” I said, thoughtfully. “So, what’s down there is...an intelligence that’s...what? An order of magnitude beyond us? Something that creates worlds? How am I meant to fight that?”

“I don’t think you are. Think about what it does. What is the one thread that’s followed you since King Cosmo and your first death?”

I put my hooves over my eyes and tried to focus. Thinking coherently—what with all that’d happened in recent weeks—was like trying to wade through a thick pudding while wearing weights on my hooves. Still, I’d been building the puzzle for weeks. The final pieces were right in front of me.

What was it King Cosmo said, right before he died?

‘It...grants...’

“Wishes!” I exclaimed, dropping my forelegs. “It was the wishes!”

Ruby lowered a foreleg over her body and the illusion around her chest momentarily pulled away, revealing Nightmare’s breastplate. “Exactly. The thing down there actually brought the magic of wishes to Equestria...from...somewhere else.”

“But where? Where did it come from? Another dimension?”

She let the illusion wend around her again, leaving her red dress whole. “I don’t think so. You know, there’s something funny about the Bay of Detrot, right?”

“Luna’s Moon, do you want me to start making a list of all the ‘funny’ things there are about Detrot?”

Her cheeks burned bright red and she let out a soft groan. “Right, sorry. I actually meant about Detrot’s geology. Jewels are kinda my ‘thing’, so I had to study the local ranges surrounding the Bay of Unity. Do you know the Bay is...wrong?”

I involuntarily looked off into the distance, trying to sight the statues of Celestia and Luna that normally towered above that part of the city skyline. Of course, there was nothing to see.

“Wrong how?”

Puffing out her lips, Ruby thought for a minute, then looked down and drew a little circle in the dirt. “Okay, so...this is Detrot, right?” She drew a second, smaller circle intersecting the ‘Detrot’ circle. “This is the Bay of Unity. It’s where it is because at some point way back in history, something hit the planet Equis. It hit going very fast.”

“Hit from...where?” I asked.

Ruby raised a hoof and pointed straight up. “Space. Outer space. Probably from a distance so far we can hardly imagine it.”

A joke about little green stallions sprang right to the tip of my tongue and I almost started to tell it, but then a memory tickled my thoughts. It was a distant, echoing sense of something significant. Where had I last heard of something crashing to Equis from outer space?

I hadn’t made anything of it at the time, but then, it was such a goofy notion that it didn’t warrant much interest. Still, it was there, one disconnected clue hunting for another to give it meaning.

The moment was over a month ago, when I’d just met Limerence for the first time and the sun still shone in the sky. I was a nobody, then, and didn’t realize the blessing such total lack of status afforded me. Limerence, Taxi, Swift, and myself had made our way to the Museum of Natural History, before we found the body of Professor Fizzle.

I’d almost crapped myself walking in on a waxwork of a griffin tribal with a weapon upraised. In the room across from the statue, there was a display about Pre-Classical Equestria. It illustrated a theory which indicated that a meteor or something similar crashed into our world many, many centuries ago and caused the emergence of the wendigos. Those creatures drove equine immigration across our planet until the founding of Equestria.

It’s a tale every foal learns at their parent’s knee and is repeated every Hearth’s Warming Eve in song, verse, and theater.

What if it wasn’t a meteor that landed in ancient Equestria?

“Ruby, are you telling me this...thing...whatever it was...landed on this planet millennia ago?” I inquired, angling my chin sideways to look at her out of one eye. “Say, during the founding of our country?”

“The timeline fits,” she answered, softly, continuing to draw on her little diagram in the dirt. “Here, look.”

“You’re going to have to keep explaining using small words, here. I know less than nothing about geology.”

“I can do that,” she chuckled, then added a couple of v-shaped marks on either side of the Bay. “Okay, so based on local geology and the topography of the surrounding area, whatever it was hit at an angle hard enough to cause an upwards explosion of stone big enough to create the bay. Then, it deflected off the harder substrata and...well, it skipped. I can’t do all the math in my head, but if what hit was small and as close as makes-no-difference to indestructible, then once it shed most of its energy it could have landed somewhere.”

I wet my suddenly dry lips and quickly added a dotted line off down the length of the valley.

“What’s out that way?”

“Just the Wilds,” she replied, quietly.

“And...the house. The Family’s home.”

Ruby frowned at the picture, then drew an ‘x’ at the end of my dotted line. “Diamond Wishes’s home? I only saw the barest glimpses of it in most timelines, but...that’s a bad place.”

“That’s not the half of it. It’s built above an old mine,a mine with an ancient shield pylon in the bottom of it. It’s magic or maybe technology beyond anything in Equestria. Been there at least ten centuries. Probably longer.”

Settling on her tail, she nodded at the spot on our little map. “Then...that fits with everything else, doesn’t it?”

“Except one thing.” I chewed on my lip, then tapped the ‘X’ that marked the position of the former Family home. “There was a key. The Family found a key to get into the pylon. We stole it and used it to get into one of the pylons built based on their blueprints here in Detrot. Why would whoever locked that pylon send along a way to open it if they wanted whatever was inside to be locked away forever?”

Ruby cocked her head, letting her ringlet-mane fall across her face. “Maybe they didn’t. We don’t lock all prisoners away until they die, do we? Sometimes ponies just need to be rehabilitated, right?”

I breathed a low sigh. “Based on what I saw in that pylon, I can’t imagine what they think ‘rehabilitation’ looks like. So, someone...somewhere...locked this intelligence away and dropped it on a planet with life on it hoping it would eventually be unlocked and released?”

Stepping back from the diagram, Ruby ran a hoof down the seam of her brilliantly red dress to flatten it and nodded towards the stairs leading to the basement. “Hardy, I think we’re just guessing at this point. It’s also not going to change what we have to do, is it?”

Tugging on my coat’s lapels, I adjusted my head lamp and held a leg out for her to lead the way. “Not really, no. Today, we either kill it or it kills us. What about that wish? I don’t suppose we could just wish this thing out of existence.”

Ruby touched her dress over her chest which let out a soft clank as her hoof met the armor and shook her head, sadly. “I can’t make the wish. I tried the second I was entirely in control of myself.”

“Because...?” I prompted.

The illusion over her front right hoof peeled away, revealing the bloody, dusty, disheveled fetlock of Diamond Wishes.

“I’m pretty sure that requires a living pony,” she replied, allowing the illusion to slip back into place. “I can sense...something...trying to take control of my body, but it’s having trouble with the dead flesh. I feel sort of like a puppet with strings that are too long for the puppeteer.”

“Then...I have to put the armor on, again,” I murmured.

“And I can’t take it off,” she reminded. “Not yet. Whatever else I’ve seen, I know you and I aren’t finished with each other. We have to go downstairs. We have to face this together.”

I raised one eyebrow at her. “Did you get a preview somewhere along the line as to what happens after I fight Diamond Wishes?”

Ruby looked pensively toward the hole where the hidden door had been. “No. No, I didn’t. I tried. Really, I did. There’s nothing after the fight. Either the world really is about to end or...or we win. We win and everything is so different nopony could possibly recognize it.”

Reaching out, I cautiously, then with more confidence put a hoof around her. I could feel Diamond Wishes's bony body beneath the illusion, but Ruby still put her cheek on my shoulder and, for an instant so short it could have been pure imagination, I felt warmth.

“If we get through this, I promise I’ll make sure everyone knows your name,” I whispered in her ear.

“Just make sure my family is taken care of,” she answered, hugging me tightly. I felt something wet soak into my chest and realized it was blood, but there was nothing to be done. Hugging a corpse isn’t necessarily going to be neat. “Dad will hate being the center of attention, but the farm wasn’t doing great the last couple seasons,” Ruby continued. “The frost will ruin this year’s crop and the farm is everything to Lily. If they’re all okay then I’ll consider us even.”

“We’re far from even, but I guess I’ll have to wait until I die to pay you back the rest. First round on the other side is on me. There’s a loudmouth griffin who’ll be buying seconds.”

“And I’ll get the third,” she giggled before letting go to step away. “Come on, Hard Boiled. Lets go make a wish.”

The ‘secret door’ had been concealing just another empty, undecorated, badly lit stairwell much like the one I’d taken to get up to Diamond Wishes’s apartments.

It occurred to me as I set my first hoof on it that I was probably headed for my own burial beneath the waves. It wasn’t the first time, but the notion that nopony would ever really know the circumstances of my death was sort of disturbing. That was followed with the realization that I didn’t know what day it was. I wasn’t even sure which month. It’d been late spring when Ruby’s body was discovered.

Truth be, out of all the people who’d miss me, it was Mags who my thoughts turned towards in that moment as we climbed down into the dark.

That poor little griffin went through more in her few short years of life than most ponies go through in their entire lives. I’d taken up a vow with the Nursemaid’s Guild to look after her, whatever that actually entailed. Being as there weren’t many griffins left and I was still theoretically the ‘High Justice’, raising her was likely to be complicated. I’d hoped to have Sykes around to give me the skinny on exactly what my duties involved so as to avoid a griffin warband chasing me down to claim my head for some perceived slight against the child-rearing rules of the Tokan and Hitlan.

Thinking of Sykes made my eyes burn for an instant, but I quickly wiped away the tears between steps; either I’d have time to mourn or I’d soon be seeing him. Sykes, Don Tome, and many others were waiting for me.

Ruby was leading the way, her tail swishing nervously like a filly ready for her first dance at prom. She kept opening her muzzle as though to say something or hesitating on the steps for an instant just long enough that I almost ran into her, but then she’d trot on ahead to make up the distance. Ten dusty, uninhabited floors down, I decided I’d had enough of it.

“This is the last chance either of us are likely to get, so what do you want to ask me?” I asked, settling down on the step just above the nearest landing.

She stopped, leaning against the guard rail and crossing her front legs coquettishly.

“It’s...I guess it’s not that important. You never did answer me about my sister. Are you and she together?”

“We’re in something,” I answered, giving her a bit of a helpless shrug. “I don’t know what it is, yet. Me and Scarlet are in something, too. I don’t know what’s romantic and what is just needing some equine comfort. I know if I’m alive and it’s a sunny day tomorrow, I’m going to see about going out to your farm to meet your parents...and I’m going to take Scarlet with me. I want to help him take his first steps when—”

“Oh...oh no,” she whispered, putting both hooves over her muzzle. “This is...this is one of those timelines where he gets hurt, isn’t it?”

“He’s alive. His tail and back legs are...they’re hurt,” I trailed off for a moment, the memory of Scarlet’s injury momentarily stealing my words. Jolting back to reality, I quickly added, “But, there’s a pony who thinks that she can fix him. That’s what matters. Honestly, I don’t know where it would go if we were to actually get together. I’m a walking disaster area.”

Ruby reached out and grabbed my cheek, cupping it in her hoof. “Hard Boiled, I can’t think of anyone who would save the entire world just so their kinda coltfriend could get new legs and their maybe-sorta fillyfriend could see her parents again. You chased the people who killed me for months, until here you stand, right here, right now. Walking disaster or not, you’re a good pony.“

I tried to think of a quick retort for deflection, but nothing came to mind. The tears were back, too, which didn’t help. I started to speak when a hiccup caught me halfway to my first word.

Ruby let my muzzle go and exhaled. “I’d give you another hug, but...I don’t think you want to get covered in what’s all over me just now. Walking is making Mister Diamond bleed more. I really hope I don’t have to be in this body when he starts to get stiff.”

I looked up at the red trail of hoofprints that’d followed our descent.

“D-doesn’t that hur-hurt?” I swallowed, wiping my nose on the only clean edge of my sleeve.

Raising her leg, she watched as a drip of liquid fell out of the illusion and landed on the floor in front of her. “No. I’m glad it doesn’t, but I’ve mostly avoided screaming my tail off because Nightmare Moon took me on a grand tour of all the worst dreams a little filly ever had while we were stuck together. Every time I got fussy with her when she wanted control of my body, she’d just scare the fur off me. It...got a little old after a while and I learned to ignore the worst of her attempts. She’s intelligent—”

“—but not very creative,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

I gently tapped the spot on her chest where the armor lay. “Can you feel her in there?”

“She’s here, but I believe she’s in some sort of magical holding pattern,” Ruby answered, tracing a circle on her breastplate. “I think she’s waiting on the wish, but it’s like she can’t hear me. I had a neighbor-colt who got like that when we both hit puberty and would work the fields together. Granted, I’m pretty sure he was just trying to peek under my tail.”

A chortle snuck out and I found that Ruby Blue had somehow managed to make me smile, again.

“You’re making jokes now?”

“Oh, I wasn’t even the popular one,” she went on, with a mischievous grin. “Pretty sure my sister had half the colts and fillies in Dodge Junction trying to go for a roll in her hay. Not that she so much as gave most of them the time of day. If only they’d met me when I was working for the Vivarium, they might have known what they were missing out on.”

I let out an involuntary blast of laughter then slapped my hoof over my face for a second before adding, “Ruby, please. I’m freaked out enough as it is without you making me feel better. When I find a pony dead behind a dumpster, I don’t expect to later get a conversation with them.”

“I’m not going to stop trying to make you feel better, Hardy,” she murmured, shuffling a hoof through her dress until she found a kerchief with D.W’s initials in one corner. It had only a little blood on it, so she held it out. “I know I might regret asking this, but I doubt I have long to regret things. Why’d you keep going at my case after it got you killed that first time? King Cosmo was dead. The Vivarium was more or less safe. Why stick with it?”

I took the folded white cloth and wiped my cheeks and forehead with it. It came away dusty and covered in stains.

“Back then, it never really occurred to me to quit,” I answered, draping the kerchief over the bannister of the stairwell. “Someone was willing to murder me. If I’d walked away, sure, I might have lived longer, but I’d have had to live with the damn mystery. You know how awful a mystery is?”

“I’m afraid I was a fantasy and romance kinda mare, but I take your meaning. Is that the only reason?”

“From a practical standpoint, there was also the knowledge that someone killed me. It puts a bit of a damper on precinct bowling nights if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder for someone to take another shot. I’d also broken about twenty laws by then, any one of which was likely to send me to jail for a long time.”

Ruby leaned sideways to look at my cutie-mark. “You sure you didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do?”

I peered back at the golden scales on my thigh and sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about those. Yeah, it was the right thing to do, but if I walk away from injustice it feels like I’ve been tased in the ass. I like to rationalize my actions at the end of the day because I don’t care for ‘destiny’ being the thing that makes me want to find out who killed an innocent mare.”

She tilted her chin to one side, her expression confused, “So, you’ve got a talent that literally makes you do good things for people, but you can’t accept any praise for the things you do because doing that means taking credit for something destiny supposedly is forcing on you, right? You stomp on your own ego or make sure your best friend is on-hoof to do it for you so you can...what? Preserve the idea that you have free will? Why does it matter so much why you do these things?”

I hung my head and started down the steps again, unwilling to meet her piercing gaze. “I know my brain is wet spaghetti, but...dammit, if I’m at least choosing to suffer then I’m not some sort of victim. Is this really the time to be rooting around in my head?”

“Sorry,” she apologized, then added, “This is the first conversation I’ve had since I died and you’re a stallion I can guarantee with one hundred percent certainty is a good person.” She gave me a saucy grin. “You can bet I’d have given you my card back when I was working the Vivarium.”

“I’d have been tempted to take it. Tell me about that, would you? Why a brothel?”

Ruby brushed one leg through the opposite fetlock and smiled. “Probably because it was the last place anyone who knew me would expect. I wasn’t really in my right mind at the time. When I was sane, Nightmare would tuck herself away somewhere to brood and try to sort out the future. I’ve always tried to make the best of things and there were quite a few sweethearts there. It also gave me time to parse what I could pull from her and...whatever else happened to be invading my mind at the time. No corner of the world is so quiet as a brothel just after bar time.”

“These...powers that ‘be’ were fiddling with you, too, huh?”

She clenched her teeth and made a sour face as we continued our descent, side by side, into the depths. “Maybe. Maybe I was just that crazy. Sometimes I’d get shreds of the future. Pieces. Urgent urges to run across town for a sandwich so somepony else would be late to work some morning. Midnight needs to go pee off a rooftop in the Heights. Once I even tossed a week’s wages at a random hobo on the street. All strange things to nudge the world this way or that. Sometimes I was in control, sometimes not.”

I sucked a breath. “Then...even you don’t have all the pieces.”

“I doubt anypony born in the last thousand years does. Maybe we’ll get lucky and this...thing...will feel talkative. I think...I think we’re almost there.”

I leaned over the railing of the stairs and looked down, but couldn’t make out anything with only the narrow beam of my light.

“What makes you say that?”

“You...you remember that feeling of being tugged on like a puppet I mentioned a minute ago?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“It’s getting stronger.”

Without a word, I reached into my pocket, retrieving my gun from where I’d secreted it and flicked it open, tipping out the burned crystals into my hoof until only one remained before clicking the barrels over until the remaining shot was in the chamber. I’d no idea if the Crusader would help, but short of bringing along a dragon with bazookas strapped to its head there weren’t likely to be many firepower options that could outclass it. Firing mouth-style wasn’t easy, but the Crusader didn’t require much accuracy, either. I just hoped it wouldn’t blast some kind of residue all over my muzzle like firing standard rounds tended to.

Stealth was out of the question; our hooves echoed quite badly on the steps. Still, whatever was below wasn’t likely the sort of thing you could sneak up on. Worse, I was starting to feel odd as well; there was a gentle pressure behind my eyes. The sensation was similar to the presence of Nightmare Moon’s construct in my thoughts, though where she was like an insistent toddler, the force pressing in on my mind was more like walking through a deep tunnel far beneath an ocean. A sense of rank hostility to life itself began to fill the air, making each breath a challenge.

I poked my head out around what turned out to be the final set of stairs and found myself faced with a pair of metal doors set in the wall that looked fresh off the set of one of Swift’s science fiction shows. A thin panel beside it had a gemstone set at about head height with the words ‘ocular scan’ just above.

Dropping my gun into one hoof, I pointed at the panel.

“Diamond Wishes told me this was here. You need to look into that thing. I’m glad you’re along, by the way. I know you’ve been along for a while, but...coming down here alone would have been hard.”

“Because it’s nice to have one last good conversation before we both probably go to whatever the afterlife has in store?” Ruby asked, trotting around and inspecting the panel.

“Yes,” I replied, giving her a weak smile. “It also saved me having to dig an eyeball out of that stallion’s head with a spoon.”

“Oh. I can see how company is more appealing.” She stopped, then shook her head as she set a hoof on the double doors and pressed her forehead against them. “Heavens. Hardy, I’m frightened. How is that possible? I’m dead. This body is dead. I spent weeks inside my own worst nightmares and a bunch of magic is the only thing keeping me from passing out of this world...and yet I am frightened.”

I turned and sat against the doors, looking up at her. Her beautifully styled mane fell across her face, but didn’t disguise the trembling in her shoulders.

“What are you scared of?” I asked.

“That’s...that’s a dumb question, but also a really smart one. Just think about it. Whatever is on the other side of this wall can scare dead ponies. Your partner, Juniper...he’s dead. You say he’s trying to help you? Something out there is helping him, but I’d bet he’s also frightened.”

“Yeah, that sounds right. The last time we talked, he sounded pretty scared.”

“Then the thing on the other side of this wall scares dead ponies. It scares entities so powerful they can raise those who’ve died. Whatever this is, it’s worth being scared of.”

I rolled my eyes back to look up at the door. “So there might be something in there that’s worse than death?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“And even whatever constitutes ‘the authorities’ in the universe don’t know what happens next?”

“Seems that way.”

Rolling upright, I took a few steps back and held out my hoof. She took it, and we stood, side by side, facing the door. I looked over at Ruby, the mare who’d died to bring me to that moment, and felt my lips quirk on one side. Her eyes glistened with illusionary tears as she stood there with her chin stuck out, trying to look brave.

“You ready?” I asked.

Ruby whistled a melancholy three note tune and bent down to look into the eye scanner. It let out a cheerful chirp and the doors slid open.

“I guess we have to go kill a god,” she whispered.

Act 3 Chapter 79 : Last Dream

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

The phone was ringing.

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

I raised my head from the end of the ancient, dusty couch and looked down at the pool of blood around my hooves. It wasn’t a new pool. I’d been bleeding for a long time. The enormous hole in my breast where my heart used to be was leaking a more or less continuous dribble which slicked the couch and soaked into the rug.

I swirled a toe in the puddle, watching the little waves of red spread this way and that. Not being able to hear my own pulse was disturbing, but nothing new. I hadn’t heard it in decades, all the decades I’d lain on that couch, bleeding out. When was the last time I’d gotten up to do the dishes? Considering some of them seemed to be crumbling to dust, probably some while now.

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

Gathering my resolve, I started to rise from the sofa. A sound like the ripping of velcro accompanied my movements. As I lifted myself off, the flesh of my bloated belly stuck to the couch as though it’d been super-glued there and I split like an overcooked vegetable. A wet, steaming heap of organs splashed out onto my legs.

I tried to howl, tried to make the world feel my agony. There was a comfort in knowing such injuries couldn’t possibly be survived. Surely, not even my magical heart could fix that quantity of damage, particularly as it seemed suspiciously absent.

I’d been shot, of course. A sniper shot me through the window. He’d blown off a crime lord’s head, then refocused and put a bullet right through my chest.

In the same instant as all these thoughts boiled up alongside the horror of staring down at my own viscera decorating the carpet, I was whole. It’d never happened. Ridiculous. Nopony could survive being shot.

Just another dream.

I slid down off the sofa into the small pond of blood that the carpet was quickly devouring, sucking it up with a soft slurping noise. At the periphery of my vision, I caught a half dozen tiny, fanged mouths surrounding the pool, greedily tonguing the rug for my vital fluids. When I glanced towards them, they’d never been there, never existed.

The phone still rang somewhere nearby.

My apartment.

My home.

How long had it been since I’d stood in that gritty little pit, listening to the children screaming outside? Were they supposed to be screaming? Howling? Begging to die with torn little voice-boxes that’d long since lost the power to form words?

It was hard to remember. There were so many memories that tended to escape when a pony wasn’t paying attention. I hadn’t been paying attention for centuries.

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

‘Find me.’

The voice wasn’t one I’d heard before. My own? No. A young voice. The voice of a tiny colt who died in bed, his brother clutching his hoof, listening to his last rattling breath as it escaped. He’d woken to find himself pumping blood for a much older pony.

What was that brave little pony’s name?

The phone. Where was that damn phone? After a moment tilting my ears this way and that, I realized the ringing seemed to be coming from outside my front door. I stumbled towards it, my trenchcoat seeming to have been weighed down with boulders. The answer was outside. Surely, it was outside.

With each step, my hooves burned like they had when I sprinted through the Shield. How many centuries ago was that? Or was it hours? I paused, looking down and watching impassively as dozens of segmented black creatures, each segment with a scintillating green eye atop it, chewed at my forelock with pincered jaws. The instant my attention was on them, they dropped away, vanishing into the carpet.

A moment later, they’d never been.

Letting it pass, I continued limping toward the door, wondering at the strangeness of my day. How many times had I died? I’d lost count of the number a long time ago.

I set a hoof on the doorknob, feeling the old metal creak with age as a thin layer of dust fell around my ears. The ringing faded into the background as I stepped back and threw the door open. A billowing wind blew my ears flat and I instinctively shielded my eyes for a moment before carefully lowering my foreleg.

There was no ‘understanding’ what was beyond that door.

I took it in and my thoughts refused to unscramble enough to comprehend it, but though it defied my tiny equine brain, I found myself describing the sight much as I would a crime scene. I could understand crime scenes, for some reason; a crime scene is a place where injustice has occurred and I still knew what that was even though my own name was momentarily escaping me.

Just outside the door, a pair of ponies stood on the steps of an enormous amphitheater. The first was a rather ragged looking stallion covered in dust, his trenchcoat billowing out behind him as he stared up at something. His hat lay on the ground behind, having been torn off by the strange winds. A pair of golden scales shone on each of his flanks, shimmering with their own inner light.

Beside him sat a second pony, frozen in place, soaked from head to hoof in blood and wearing a set of ancient armor which fit him like a glove. Even at a distance, I could see a unicorn’s horn protruded from the old stallion’s barrel. He had one foreleg around the younger pony’s shoulders, his forehead resting against his companion’s temple as though trying to protect him.

I’d no idea who they were; two poor ponies stuck in a spider’s web, perhaps.

Beyond them, hovering in the center of the enormous room, there was the spider.

My eyes refused to see it, but the hole in my chest where my heart once lay could feel the being’s presence. I perceived a leaking wound hanging in mid-air, a jellyfish with infinite poisonous legs wrapped around the very foundations of the world, and endless white expanses of stretched skin barely holding back an ocean of rot. It was a machine whose clicking cogs lubricated themselves with crushed ponies who could not die despite being ground again and again within its mechanism.

Worst of all, it was ringing.

‘Answer,’ it murmured.

I slammed the door shut and turned to run for the couch, hoping to shut my eyes and find myself waking later to an especially horrible hangover and the safe knowledge that all of what I’d seen was a dream.

Unfortunately, the couch was gone, as was my apartment.

The world seemed to have faded to red. Beneath my hooves, the carpet had turned crimson and velvety soft. The ceiling was brightly polished wood of some sort and the walls curved upwards from the floor in all directions, with no hard line between the two. I peered behind me and found the door had vanished. Some part of me expected that; why would doors stay in one place when I’d obviously gone insane?

“...Ha...rdy?”

I turned in a slow circle, wondering who’d said that strange name. There was nopony with me. I was alone, in a red velvet room. It’d sounded like a mare’s voice coming through a particularly rough speaker, but I couldn’t remember any mares in my life. What sort of sad, pathetic existence must I have lived for there to be no one? Fortunately, I couldn’t remember it, so it must not have mattered that much.

“Har...oiled, you have...listen! Gale...trying to save your memories before...thing eats...them. ...—armor! ...have...ake the...mor!”

I couldn’t think of precisely what to say to that, so I just kept listening.

“—ale put you...one of his...memories. He was in...box...in King Cosmo’s basemen...for years...should be safe...find...take...the armor...”

The voice faded away entirely and I was left shifting uncomfortably from from hoof to hoof, quietly enjoying the way the strange, fluffy carpet squished a little under my weight. It was a distinct improvement over the carnivorous stuff in my apartment. Having my flesh torn off endlessly had probably been pretty traumatic, but it’d happened over enough decades that I’d long since ceased to notice when my body was torn apart in grisly fashion except to reflect that there’d surely been a time when that wasn’t what happened.

I wondered if the pony with the golden scales on his flanks knew anything about not being torn apart in a grisly fashion. Eh, probably not. He’d looked like the sort to whom that kind of thing happened regularly.

‘This is the box where Gale lived for years as a disembodied heart in the basement of King Cosmo’s house,’ I thought, then quickly followed that with, ‘Who are Gale and King Cosmo and why would a heart be disembodied?’

After a few minutes contemplating those questions, the silence in the box started to become a little awkward. I reached up and touched the hole in my chest, gently sticking the tip of my toe inside of it for a few seconds. It was a thing to do.

I thought about seeing if I could find my way back to the apartment. Dying there was usually a simple matter: combustion or my organs coming alive and chewing their way out of me or a beheading while taking a shower. I’d never died of boredom before that I could think of. That didn’t mean much, mind you, considering I’d long ago lost track of all the means and methods.

When the novelty of touching the ends of my own shattered ribs and dangling ventricles wore off, I started pacing my little prison, gently stroking the walls.

Raising my head, I called out, “Mare with the crackly voice? Are you there? Are you going to kill me? I don’t think anyone else ever killed me before! I don’t fight things killing me if that helps! I think I used to fight them, but I promise I won’t if you’ll talk to me some more!”

For some reason, saying that aloud felt strange.

Was it the words? No, I meant every one of them. Ah, right. I hadn’t spoken before.

I knew how, but when had there ever been an occasion to talk? For most of my existence, my days consisted of lying on a couch until my blood vessels crawled out of my orifices, then I died. Not a lot of conversational options.

There was no immediate reply; just a soft hum coming from somewhere. I braced myself, readying to feel my anatomy come apart at the seams. I’d long ago learned that breathing out before the first sensation of complete dissolution kept you from choking too hard before brain activity stopped.

After a solid thirty seconds of anticipation, I found myself needing to inhale and not dead. The hum was growing, but I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from. It seemed to be coming from all around. I kept my breath held for another ten seconds, then inhaled sharply and stumbled backwards as the box shook under me. Gravity tilted to my left and I started to slide sideways before catching myself as a rush of wind almost took me off my hooves.

I looked up and found myself eye-to-metaphorical-eye with something. The eye had replaced the entire top of the box, or rather, removed it. I thought about screaming, but what good would that have done?

A detached part of me wondered what the tiny shapes hanging in front of the eye were until I gradually recognized one of them. I’d seen it almost every night of my life, after all, though why I thought that I couldn’t say.

It was the moon. The moon was in front of the eye, rendered little more than a speck by distance.

I didn’t know you could feel your brain explode.

Thankfully, I didn’t have very long to reflect on how odd that was before my headless corpse hit the box’s lining.

Alone.

They were alone.

When last everything turned and the cycle began again, all those who’d been there with them left for new places.

And they were alone.

“Junior, you are either going to pay attention or I’m going to put fishhooks in your eyelids.”

I blinked my eyes open and sat up straight, putting my hooves on my tiny school desk as I wiggled in my seat to show a bit of life.

“Sorry, Professor Limerence!” I squeaked.

The ancient school house smelled of chalk and the compressed vomit, sweat, and pee of unknown millions of children who’d filed in through the millennia. Smiling flowers painted on every wall were flecking with age as a gentle rain of rust caught the red light filtering in through the windows. My desk was the only one, but there were spots worn into the carpet and wood beneath that suggested many thousands of other hooves.

Professor Limerence straightened his waistcoat and adjusted his glasses, standing taller as he marched back and forth in front of the ragged chalkboard, a piece of chalk floating along beside him.

“Now, then! When did the universe begin?” he demanded.

I stared at him blankly, and he tapped his hoof.

“I d-don’t know,” I stammered.

“Of course you don’t! You could have at least done your homework over the last few months, but no, you wander in circles trying to fathom with that tiny mind of yours!” he growled, then did an about face. “The universe did not begin. The universe is a fractal system of interconnected planes within which time operates at different rates from planck to planck. The first moment is also the last! That being said, this is only one of what are likely many different iterations—”

I cautiously raised my hoof.

Without looking at me, Professor Limerence huffed, “What?”

“Sir, I...I don’t understand. If nothing begins or ends, why do things happen one after another?”

“Ah! An excellent question, for once,” he replied, swiping a hoof through his golden yellow mane. “Random interactions of particles can—given there are enough of them—produce intelligence. Intelligence is a function of physics. It gives order to the narratives of being. The grander the intelligence, the less it needs time to comprehend. There are intelligences which span entire planes, slipping between them like eels beneath the flesh of a drowned body. Time is a story your species tells itself because it is too small to abide the true chaos of existence. It was They who told the first stories in this iteration of this universe. They gifted you tiny things time.”

“B-but...who are ‘they’?” I asked, puzzled.

Limerence swept his hoof across the ceiling, and the lights went out.

His eyes glittered in the dark as he tilted his chin back and pointed upwards. I looked up, expecting to see only the darkened rafters of the schoolhouse. The ceiling had vanished, leaving me staring up into a sky glimmering with tiny lights. I didn’t recognize any of the constellations overhead. It seemed as though I were looking at a foreign sky.

“In least...they give your pathetic little worlds their light,” the Professor growled, a measuring stick levitating along beside him. “What miniscule order you pull from the universe, they have spawned into your flesh. It might have been one of the less merciful beings that exist in the between. Your entire species might have been snuffed out in the primordial ooze by an errant burst of radiation were it not for their interest.”

I drew back in my seat as he stalked forward and rapped his measuring stick on my desk.

“Now! Answer quickly! Wherefrom does magic come?”

I cringed as my thoughts scrambled for order. Where was Sweet Shine? Shouldn’t she be in detention, too? We’d probably done whatever thing got us detention together.

“I-I don’t know!” I squeaked as he leaned over me, pinning me in my seat. He was lit only by the starlight, and it reflected in his eyes in an unsettling manner.

“Hrmph!” His hoof came up before I could move and clapped across the side of my head. My ears momentarily rang, but by the time I’d opened my eyes he’d already spun and stalked back toward the chalkboard. “It was in the homework, and yet here you sit. A witless worm, crawling under skies you cannot understand. It was they who let you tap into the fields of magic! They who gifted the cell matter of this world with a taste of what lies beyond!”

I winced as his measuring stick whipped around, stopping at the end of my nose.

“Repeat it! Tell me how worthless your species is!”

I stuttered as something inside me rebelled, but I didn’t fancy being hit again.

“W-w-we’re...w-wor-”

I couldn’t say it. Why couldn’t I just say it? It would stop me from hurting.

The fiery anger in the professor’s eyes grew into a literal inferno as a boil of superheated flesh spilled down his cheeks, landing on my front hooves. I tried to yank them back, but they’d already been scalded and I found I couldn’t look away from his burning eyes. My body seemed frozen in place.

“Say it, you pitiful mass of mitochondria!” he barked, spitting something that smoked like acid when it hit my face fur.

My lips started to move, but I couldn’t control them. I couldn’t form the words. In my heart of hearts, I knew of our value. Why?

I felt a burning ache in my hips and looked down for an instant to see my cutie-mark shimmer. It was such small magic in the face of the towering rage in the professor’s face, but it was mine.

“N-no,” I yelped, then raised my voice, “I-I won’t!”

I had only a second to register that his measuring stick had become a massive gleaming broadsword before it slammed sideways into my throat. My body went suddenly numb as I found myself pinwheeling end over end, seeing starry sky, then floor then sky again. It took what I hoped was my last few seconds to realize I’d been decapitated.

Some seconds later, I was still falling. My severed head - in total defiance of gravity - was spinning faster and faster as I sped upwards towards the distant stars. If I’d still had a stomach, I might have been sick. Fortunately, throwing up requires an esophagus.

Sad then that screaming also takes certain things I was suddenly without.

...RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

They were light and below was life.

History was lost. History was found.

The clock ticked, but it was all the same tick; yes, existence, no, oblivion.

“Come on, Sweety. Lift your head. You have to keep your strength up.”

I cringed from the gentle touch of a hoof on my face, but forced my sticky eyes open as something comfortably warm was pressed to my lips. Instinctively, I let the liquid in and almost coughed as my throat constricted. It was split pea soup. My mother’s split pea soup.

“M-mom?” I whispered, looking up into her beautiful blue face framed in blushing red ringlets.

Was that my mother’s face? I couldn’t remember. The fever was making it hard to think. Surely it must be her. Who else would it be?

“I-I don’t feel so good,” I muttered.

“I wouldn’t think so,” she said, kindly, picking up a damp rag and pressing it against my forehead. “We’re lucky that thing doesn’t seem to understand the idea of ‘death’ very well or it would have snatched my mind, too. I did the only thing I could think of. Or maybe it’s the only thing the armor could think of.”

I cautiously raised my head and found I wasn’t in my room. My bed was there, Wonderbolts sheets freshly laundered, but the room itself was nowhere I was familiar with. It looked like some kind of cavern. Probably a hallucination.

“Mom, where am I?” I asked, plaintively reaching for the soup again.

“Your body is under Detrot, Hardy,” she replied, softly, offering the bowl once more. I slurped loudly for a second before lying back. “All of this, though...this is a nightmare. The armor remembers how to craft dreams even if Nightmare Moon is out of commission. I was able to use a bit of magic to put your mind in here. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure that whatever that monster is trying to shove into your head would crack you like an egg dropped by a high flying pegasus.”

“W-who is trying to s-shove something into my head?” I whimpered, touching my temple which felt just as too-hot as the rest of me.

“The...the being,” she murmured. “It’s not really alive, I don’t think. Not like us. It’s trying to change you, but...it has to be careful. It’s so big inside that I think if it focused entirely you’d just explode. A bit like trying to pick up a champagne glass with a bulldozer...if the bulldozer was the size of a mountain. Everything you’re seeing is part of a dream. It’s your own mind making it, but it’s being yanked around by that thing’s mind. You have to find out what it wants.”

I mulled that over for a moment, then looked up with fresh eyes at the mare who was standing at my bedside, a sad expression on her face.

“You’re...you’re not my mom, are you?”

“It’s me, Hardy. Ruby. Here. This will make you feel better.”

Reaching onto the bedside table, she picked up a small, folded piece of cloth and let it unfurl in her hooves. It was a tiny trenchcoat, just my size. I’d no idea why, but it felt right that I should have it. My heart was suddenly filled with an overwhelming urge to wear it. It looked so comfortable.

I carefully raised myself up in the bed and reached for the coat. She pressed it into my hooves and, instead of cloth, I felt cold, hard metal. Surely, it was just my fever, right? Wrapping myself in the coat, I stuck my hooves through the leg-holes and exhaled as its weight settled onto my back.

The darkness of the cavern started to swell, gathering at the corners of my eyes. I felt myself starting to lose consciousness, again, as the fever swarmed over my senses. An ocean of sweat started pouring down my face, spilling over my muzzle in a torrent.

In seconds, I began to drown.

“Hardy, listen!”

Whose voice was that?

The only voice that mattered.

“Hardy, you have to hold on! I’ll find you, again!”

“Rise and shine, scumbag! It’s breakfast time! Not that you’re eating! You think you deserve a shower, or should I just dunk your head in bleach again?”

I jerked awake as a bucket of ice water hit me in the face. I gasped as the joints in my forelegs seized and I tried to double up only to let out a pitiful squeak as I found my rear hooves chained to the floor and my front hooves to the ceiling with heavy manacles. Blood rushed to my cheeks, but the intense soreness in my shoulders was only a tiny part of a glittering fog of agony that spread through my entire body.

I could even feel fresh cuts on my tongue. It felt like I’d been chewing glass at some point.

I knew if I didn’t say something the pain would start. She liked hurting me. It was her ‘thing’.

“N-no, Warden!” I choked, trying to work one of my eyes open.

Something that felt like a fluffy baseball bat caught me across the cheek, whipping my head sideways. Four or five already-quite-loose teeth scattered out of my jaw along with a spray of spit and blood. My head felt like somepony was playing dueling bagpipes in both ears.

“I didn’t say you could look at me, worm,” she snarled, then shook herself. “Yuck. Got some of ‘you’ on me. Now, then. You may open your eyes.”

My beaten body didn’t like the request and it took far too long to figure out which muscle group worked my eyelids, but I finally did.

The Warden was standing below me, though she’d have been ‘below’ me even if I were on all fours; she was a tiny pegasus by any measure. Her bright orange fur looked like it’d been shined with wax and the tuft of spiky mane on her head might as well have been laminated. Her smart, white suit had a few flecks of blood on it. Why she always wore white when she came to see me was a mystery I’d never thought to ask her about; maybe it just made my blood stand out a little brighter.

My cobbled stone cell was barely the size of a broom closet, the bars of the door less than a body-length in front of me and the frigid wall pressed against my back.

How long was it my home? I couldn’t be sure. I’d been there long enough that I’d forgotten my crime. Knowing me, I probably deserved it, though. She certainly never spared an opportunity to remind me what a piece of garbage I was.

“Well, now, before we start this morning’s session...do you have any questions?”

It was a trap, but one I knew well. She was going to hit me anyway, no matter what I said, but if I refused to step into it she’d find something worse. Warden Swift was creative like that.

“Ma’am...wh-why do you do this?” I asked.

Reaching up she casually clipped me across the forehead with the tip of one of her wings. It was gentle enough that I could still hear, though my long-ago and oft-broken nose started to ache again. Blood trickled down my upper lip and I quickly shook it off.

“Aside from the pleasure of watching you squeal? I want you to learn,” she replied, trotting over to the tray of freshly cleaned metal tools she kept just out of my peripheral vision. “You gotta know what it’s like to be a prisoner for so long you start to lose things. Do you remember your mom’s face?”

I knew if I didn’t try to think back, she’d know and hit me again.

“I...I don’t,” I stammered.

Picking up something that hissed at her, she trotted back around in front of me, a cage balanced on her back. Inside, a multi-legged insect the size of a rat was glaring out at me with malevolent little eyes. One end of the cage had a door and though I didn’t know precisely what she had in mind, I knew it was unlikely to be pleasant.

“Such a tiny thing, isn’t it?” she murmured, picking up the handle on top of the cage in her teeth and setting it in front of me. “For instance, this beast evolved sometime during your planet’s early Lusitanian period. Call it roughly forty million of your years ago.”

She looked at me expectantly. I knew what she wanted. No sense in prolonging it with stubbornness.

My throat was suddenly dry, but I managed to croak, “W-what does it do?”

“I’m so glad you asked!” she chirped, marching around behind me. I heard the door of the cage open, and the fiendish thing’s hissing increased. “It burrows into a living being. This one killed one of your ancestors, in fact, though you don’t have that luxury.”

I tried to shy away from her, but the manacles left me with little to do besides wiggle my tail and try to flex my injured shoulders.

“Once inside, it will latch onto the spinal column of the host and every nerve in their body becomes a pain receptor. The prey can do little but lie about writhing and waiting to die, but that takes what I’m sure an outsider would assume was a blessedly short time. The rate at which they grow in a food rich environment is impressive. Even the corpse they leave behind is lethal, impregnated with additional slower growing eggs to catch unwary scavengers. I suppose there might be some satisfaction for the prey in knowing a predator is soon to face the same fate, but probably not.”

I felt a slight pinch in the middle of my back, then tickling legs began to work their way up my spine. I froze in place, though I’m not sure if I was simply too terrified to move or trying to play dead so it might lose interest. When there’s a crawling killer on you, the two aren’t much different.

“P-please don’t do this,” I begged. “P-please ...”

As though she hadn’t heard me, Warden Swift trotted back around my front, staring up at me with her scintillating diamond eyes. “Do you know that this miniscule creature stripped entire continents bare of anything larger than a raccoon? Worse, its whole evolution until it became extinct at the beginning of an ice age was the blink of an eye to Those Above.”

The pinch became a sharp tingle that started to grow in intensity. It began to feel like somepony was bringing a lit cigar too close to my skin. I wanted to cry out, but I knew she’d just hit me until my jaw came off, again. She’d done that a few times already. Probably hundreds.

I tried to think quickly. She liked having me around to hurt. Maybe if I asked the right question she’d let me live? Or let me die. Or both. Whichever. Anything to have that creature off me.

Time running out. I could feel the thing’s pincers digging into my flesh, the creature worming its way deeper. “Who are T-Those Above?”

Warden Swift leaned up into my face and quirked one side of her muzzle, showing off the rows of dangerously sharp teeth she’d occasionally torn my guts out with.

“Those who came before,” she snapped, wiping a smear of my blood on her sleeve across her breast, leaving a red streak, “Those who remained behind. Those who decided that you lower intelligences needed shepherding in their growth. Those who imprisoned the few wise enough to point out that it was rank, bloody evolution that gave them grace.”

Her glittering gaze transfixed me as the insect began ripping at my flesh. I began to scream, but all the while I stared into the crystalline eyes of Warden Swift. Deep within those gleaming orbs, I could just make out a flicker of starlight.

Pain brought me back.

Blood started to rain onto my rear hooves as the insect shoved its way between my shoulderblades. My body started to spasm as fresh, interesting new sensations crept their way around the backs of my eyeballs all the way down to the tips of my hooves. I could feel the air itself brushing through the fur on my neck. My tongue suddenly felt ten sizes larger than it should have been.

The sense of invasion and violation was profound and the pain began to twist my sensibilities. One second, I was staring into the wolven face of Warden Swift, her white suit spattered with red as she studied me with that cruel, impassive smile, the next I was...elsewhere.

A black, metal chamber resolved around me made of shrieking walls that berated and blasphemed me. What I called a body, though not my own, was strapped to an altar in the dark with unbreakable chains. The demented souls of simple life forms - their miniscule minds cracked by invariable isolation and torture - were my only company. It only lasted a moment before I was back, but the impression remained.

Warden Swift was still watching me wriggle, helpless against my fate.

“Why do you deserve shepherds?” she asked no one in particular.

I certainly wasn’t able to answer. I’d passed screaming. Her words penetrated the haze of dribbling insanity that’d gripped my mind as sensations the brain is just not programmed to handle assaulted it, but they found nowhere to lodge. The torment kept finding fresh layers as I began to feel the blood coursing through my veins as a stream of icy winter water, chilling every organ.

“Why do you deserve forgiveness when they afford none upon their own?”

My vision was starting to shrink to a tunnel centered on Warden Swift’s face. She started to back out of my cell. She was just going to leave me there.

I dragged my last vestige of strength out of some dark corner and shouted the only word that came to mind.

“W-why?!”

She shot me a cold glare and slammed the bars of my cage shut as the first larval insects began to burrow through my stomach, dropping onto the floor with a clatter like falling rain.

“Because your world was a lesson. One learned well.”

With that, she stomped off down the long hallway, disappearing from view and leaving me to dangle there. I’d rather hoped that when the conversation was over, whatever horror I was in would end before the bugs started to eat me more thoroughly. No such luck.

I felt their tiny, nibbling jaws starting to disembowel me some time before my lower half started to detach from my upper body and my legs went blessedly numb. It wasn’t until the very first skittering claws started their way up my throat that I finally began to fade. I had time to feel them begin to gently tug at my optic nerves, sending my gaze rolling jerkily about before sensation finally started to break down.

For many nights, I floated.

In the dark, I washed back and forth in a warm, midnight ocean, listening to the gentle ‘thump, thump’ of my heartbeat as it set the tide. The ‘sky’ was moonless and I only paddled from time to time, tasting the coppery, red waters. The sun never rose, my belly never grumbled, nor did I feel remotely tired. I simply floated, listening to the waves.

It was some time before I noticed I’d bumped against something and raised my head, finding myself staring up at a strange palm tree. It was twisted into a bit of a curl, glowing gently against the black, starless sky. The leaves spread out in all directions, but they were somehow partially transparent and within I could see thin, pulsating veins. I rolled over, my hoof landing on a firm surface.

“You made it!” a voice exclaimed, and then I almost jumped out of my skin as a pair of hooves were thrust under my knees and pulled me upright.

I jumped backwards from my assailant, splashing into the waters on the shore of the odd little island. Now that I got to look at it, the whole thing comprised just enough room for the singular palm and perhaps three ponies to stand without getting into one another’s personal space. With two of us there it was only cramped.

Shaking my trenchcoat out, I found myself suddenly dry, not a bit of liquid clinging to me.

I peered at my new companion, giving her a cautious look out of the corner of one eye.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

The bright red mare wore a hooded cloak that fell across her back, masking most of her body.

Her face sank a little at my question and she sighed. “Still losing things, huh? I’m sorry it took me so long. I got stuck in some memory of a planar void where that thing spent a few centuries screaming its head off and had to get out via your fantasies of your first girlfriend.” The mare smiled, weakly. “She was cute. I hope you remember her when this is all done.”

I tapped at the ground beneath me. It was crusty, hard but with a bit of give. It also stank like a freshly turned grave.

“Sheesh,” the mare muttered, poking at the translucent palm tree with one hooftip. “I try to come up with some sort of nice dream and your brain turns it into this. What even is this?”

“Pretty sure it’s a scab,” I replied, giving the disgusting brown surface a light kick. “I think that’s an ocean of blood and this is a scab. What does that make you?”

“It’s me—” she stopped and then shook her head. “You really don’t recognize me?”

I stepped over beside the veined palm tree, leaning against its trunk as I studied her. “Nope. You remind me of someone. I—”

A tingle of fear was my only warning before my body locked in place and something resembling a slurry of extreme violence cascaded through my mind; hooks, needles, ripping pelts, and endless, endless blood. As the vicious pictures poured in, the waves gently lapping at the island began to rise, creeping up to slosh around my hooves. I clutched my head and sagged onto my stomach, trying not to vomit though I’d floated for so long there was unlikely to be anything in my stomach.

“Hardy,” the mare gasped, putting a hoof on my shoulder and bringing my eyes back up towards hers, “G-Gale says he’s going to have to rebuild your short term memory from scratch. Please, listen to me. I need to know. Did the...did that monster tell you why it’s doing all of this?”

I shut my eyes, unable to quell an intense shiver that shot up my spine.

“I don’t know any Gale, Miss,” I muttered, laying my head on the tree’s soft, fleshy bark. “I just...I just know we d-didn’t deserve s-shepherds.”

“Didn’t...didn’t deserve shepherds? What does that mean?” she asked.

I looked up at her and sniffled softly. “I don’t know. It’s something...somepony said to me, once. Somepony angry. I think it’s important, but I don’t know how. Miss, what’s happening to me? I remember hurting so much...”

The mare’s breathing hitched and she put a gentle hoof on my head. “You’re...I don’t know. Your body is with me. I’m trying to balance the magics to keep control of this corpse I borrowed and make these dreams, but I think...I think part of your mind is inside that thing.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “You can stop with the riddles any time. I’m a few episodes behind. Just assume I’m dumb as a post.”

Her frown deepened as she ran her toe down my cheek. “Tell me about shepherds. This prisoner said who didn’t deserve shepherds?”

I waved a hoof vaguely at the air. “Us. All the thinking people? Maybe even life itself? I don’t know. Why does it matter? What is this island? Who am I?”

Sinking onto her flanks beside me, the mare laid her head on my shoulder. “I’ll see if I can get enough energy to your heart to fix that before I find you again. I’m pretty sure that creature knows I’m helping you, but I have some protection.”

“Really like your riddles, huh?” I grumbled, trotting away from her and up to my fetlocks in the bloody ocean. The warm liquid felt good, soothing my aching muscles. I’d no idea why they were aching, but I was too tired to ask. “I just want to go back to floating. It was nice to float.”

“When this is all over, you and your partner and your driver are going on a long trip to the sea. Right now, is there anything else you remember?”

I shrugged, running a hoof over my trenchcoat. Strange, how it felt almost metallic under my touch. “I don’t know. Something about...the world being a lesson.”

I could feel her intent gaze, though I didn’t want to look at her.

“That squares with some of the other bits and pieces I picked up,” she replied, thoughtfully. “I think maybe it was supposed to learn the importance of other life forms.”

I pressed my forehead against the disgusting ground surface. “Evolution gifted them divinity...or...or something. Oh skies, why are you making me think about these things?”

“Because,” she said, quietly, pointing into the distance. Far off, I made out a flickering light sitting on the horizon.

I shielded my eyes against a non-existent sun, trying to get a better look at the object I had the funniest feeling was approaching, though I couldn’t say why. “What’s that?”

“That’s ‘bad news’. It found us, again.” She quickly grabbed my shoulders and pulled me around to face her. She raised a foreleg, holding something dangling from her hoof. It was some kind of amulet or medallion in a leather wallet with a silver chain. “Here. This should protect you a little bit better. I’m not going to live much longer anyway, but I’ll do what I can to help patch you up before the magic keeping me together gives out.” Her ears drooped against her head and she laid her soft cheek against mine. “It’s...it’s going to have its teeth around you, again, soon.”

“I...I don’t know what any of that means,” I mumbled, but took the amulet from her. The sensation in my hoof changed and it suddenly felt as though something ice-cold had been slipped on over all four of my toes. “Is...is this something important?”

“I suppose you would see your badge as ‘armor’ wouldn’t you?” She let out a thin laugh, that was followed by a wet cough into her hoof. When she pulled the leg from her lips, it was covered in blood.

“Are you alright?” I asked, worriedly.

Her expression turned grim as she looked out across the crimson seas towards the oncoming light. “No, but it doesn’t matter. You have to pay attention to whatever you see and hear when the being comes for you. I don’t think it’s totally sane after however many thousands of years alone, or we wouldn’t have lasted this long. I’ll try to make sure you can hold onto more the next time. Hardy...”

I cocked my head and touched the badge hanging on my chest. “Am I Hardy?”

She let out a soft breath and nodded.

“Oh. I’m glad I got that cleared up,” I said, turning to the sinister looking light and dropping myself down in the rising waves.

My skin started to tingle, then to burn, but still I sat and watched as the blazing ball of fire careened across the ocean toward me. In a few seconds, the ocean began to boil and my body cracked as waves of heat rolled over me, searing flesh from bone. Compared to some, it was a merciful death.

...RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

The dice were cast.

An ancient shaping—far older than the flames—was found in a dark place where few would willingly venture.

The one who dared gathered four who raged against their duty.

Together, they went unto darkness and returned with chains for the sky.

“Welcome back, cop. You might make an interesting piece, once I get the muscles off you.”

My nose itched. It wasn’t a pleasant itch, like the sort you can scratch and get a nice little rush of relief. More the sort where you’ve spent a solid week itching and can feel the top layer of skin starting to peel away.

I wiped at my face, trying to clear my swimming vision. As things started to cohere, I let out a groan and rolled over, almost falling clear on my tail as I slid down the slick, curved surface of the floor. I came to a rest in the middle of something that felt very much like a glass bubble.

Instinctively, I grabbed for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My badge still dangled around my neck and my trenchcoat was where it was supposed to be. I felt my head, finding my hat missing.

“Who's there?” I asked, carefully getting back to my hooves.

“Oh come on! You spend months chasing me and don’t recognize an old friend?”

The voice was strangely distorted, coming through the glass. I gave the wall of my odd prison a light tap and it let out a loud *bong* that echoed around the tiny chamber several times. Scratching my mane, I turned in a slow circle, trying to peer out at my surroundings. The background was uniformly a dingy, industrial brown and badly distorted by the curvature of the transparent surface.

“Can’t say I do,” I replied.

A hideously scarred, bright yellow face suddenly swam out of the gloom, inches from mine.

“Boo!”

I let out a fearful yelp and reared. My hooves went out from under me and I pitched over onto my back and slid back to the bottommost point in what was feeling increasingly like a giant fishbowl. The pain in my back returned a quick jolt of adrenaline, though I couldn’t remember exactly why.

Flopping onto my side, I looked up and found my tormentor standing there with her hooves on the glass, staring down at me with a manic grin. Her muzzle was a mass of semi-healed wounds and puckered flesh, lending her a rictus appearance. One of her eye sockets was empty, but it didn’t stop her gaze from filling me with terror.

“Oh, now you recognize me?” she chuckled, leaning a little closer and looking me up and down in a way that I could only describe as lascivious.

“The Shining,” I said under my breath.

“Perfect! Perfect, I’m so glad you remember me,” she said, dropping to all fours and starting to walk slowly around the glass bubble. “What was it the newspapers said about me? Some artists die for their art, but I kill for it? Wonderful. Stripping you to the bone will be a joy, by the way.”

Struggling upright, I braced in two places so I wouldn’t slip again and locked my knees. “Hrmph. I thought you were a stallion this whole time.”

“Stallions get so wrapped up in themselves. You could never believe a mare would do as I have done. So many dead for the sake of art, and you are soon to join them!”

I gave the glass wall another light tap and winced as the sound clattered back and forth around me. “What is this thing?”

Her lip twitched into a sneer. “Do you like it? It is a tiny piece of your short, dismal little existence whose importance you and your species managed to miss entirely. It might have given you true control over your world, but instead it was consigned to rot in a forest. It didn’t just manipulate the weather. This so-called ‘Weathervane’ had the power to resonate with the very energies that give shape to the universe.”

Rather than replying to that weirdness, I swallowed and poked at the wall a few more times, trying to figure out exactly how she’d gotten me into the chamber. I finally noticed something that looked like an airlock on one side, but I’d no idea how to open it from the inside and the glass was perfectly smooth. Considering the amount of noise a light tap seemed to produce, I didn’t want to think about what bucking it might do.

“What happened to your face?” I asked, deciding to try to keep her talking.

The Shining grinned, running a hoof down her cheek so the freshest of the wounds started to weep down her chin. “My father told me once that a mare is never fully dressed without a smile. Now I have hundreds of smiles.” Turning, she sat against the wall of my prison and laid her head back against it. “It’s going to be entertaining to see how many smiles will fit on your body, Detective.”

I slumped against the wall, sweeping my coat around myself to keep somewhat warm in the slightly chill air. My body hurt like I’d been worked over a few times. No telling what she’d done to me while I was asleep.

“You’re going to make me ask why, aren’t you?”

The Shining shrugged, putting a hoof to her chest, over her heart. “There are many reasons. Do you know, the fire that lights your world is a willing soldier, marching in lockstep with the will of one of these life forms that we were set to observe? Blind, like you. Just an officer of the law, whose sense of right and wrong pales into insignificance against the canvas of time. Your agony will be but a moment. Imagine drifting free for millions of years only to enslave oneself to a single world and a single tiny, temporary will.”

I squinted through the glass at her ruined face. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her expression had turned, if anything, extremely dour. “You’re nuts, you know that? I wanted to know why you’ve got me in a glass ball.”

The crazed mare straightened, tossing her black and white braid over one shoulder and snapping her rear hooves together as she gave the resonating chamber a light flick with the tip of her toe. It turned out somepony hitting the exterior was about fifty times worse than kicking it from the inside. I slapped my hooves over my ears as my entire body shook like a leaf under a blast of rolling sound that felt as though my very bones were about to rattle loose from their sockets.

When the noise finally abated, I cautiously dropped my hooves from my ears. There was a tickle in the back of my throat; I coughed and a thin stream of blood hit the wall. I’d heard loud noises could injure a pony’s lungs, but I’d never thought to have the pleasure of experiencing it firsthoof.

Surprisingly, I hadn’t been rendered fully deaf; small favors.

“You’re one to talk,” the Shining growled, glaring at me through the glass. “You pursue and pursue, never realizing the artistry. It is in pursuit that we find our true selves. Do we cower? Hide? Run? Or turn and fight? You’re one of the few predators I’ve ever met whose entire strategy seems to revolve around throwing himself repeatedly at a wall until the wall surrenders out of pity.”

“I don’t think you’re capable of pity,” I growled, trying to stuff a hoof into my trenchcoat’s pockets in hopes I’d thought to keep a weapon of some kind. Strangely, I couldn’t quite get my toe into the pocket; it felt like I was trying to shove my hoof against a smooth surface.

“Why should I be?” the Shining retorted, trotting off to pick something up from what I could vaguely make out as a worktable. She returned a few seconds later, holding up the skull of a pony who couldn’t have been more than a few years old. “Artists must be merciless! The screams of a child for its mother are unique amongst the sounds made by the pony throat. I might be one of the few whose musical collection contains the screams of a child being eaten alive. Most don’t think to record such things. Shall I play it for you?”

“I can’t stop you, but I’d rather you didn’t,” I muttered.

“No? Your loss. It is sublime. One of the few pure sounds your species produces. You wish and wish for solace and an end to pain, but never realize the wicked taint you leave in the world by your wishing until it is purified by agony. That’s when you discover the truth about a pony. What will you wish for, in the end, I wonder?”

I put my hooves up on the glass wall, unable to think what to say. “If I ask you not to kill me, that’ll just make you right, won’t it?”

The Shining smirked, patting her bloody smock. “I’m glad you caught onto that. You should be used to catch twenty-twos by now. Even if you succeed in your ultimate goal, there will just be another horror for you to chase and if you fail...when you fail...you’ll die.”

Rolling my eyes, I rested a hoof on the wall, staring into her bright pink eyes. “If there’s one thing I think I’m good at, Miss Shine, it’s dying. I don’t know how many times I’ve died. Lost count a while ago. Dying doesn’t scare me. Living empty...that scares me. You sound pretty empty to me.”

Her expression seemed to twitch, the grin fading as she leaned in closer to me.

“What would you know about emptiness?” she hissed, and though it was her mouth that moved the sound seemed to reverberate through the resonance chamber, knocking me backwards onto my rear end.

I struggled up, trying to meet her burning eyes.

“I know I have my duty. I don’t know who I am, but I remember...” I hesitated as a wave of shock rolled through me. I could remember. Not my name, nor anyone close to me, but...I could remember my duty. I looked over my shoulder at the pair of shining golden scales on my flank, as though suddenly seeing them for the first time.

“What do you remember, fool?” she snarled. “Your memory is nothing! Your future is blank!”

Shooting her a grin from somewhere that felt like it’d been buried for ages, I pressed my hip against the glass cage.

“Read my ass. I’m a cop.”

With that, I reared back and slammed my hooves against the side of the chamber as hard as I could.

The sound within was like an explosion going off inside me and I found myself wrenched off my hooves, levitating in the center of the space on what felt like an all-powerful wind. My limbs distended in seconds, but I felt no pain. The creature outside who looked so very familiar, yet so very different from whoever it was I remembered, seemed to shatter along with the walls of the Weathervane’s spherical focus.

I saw a blast of blood, flowing outwards from somewhere under my neck, but it was no great shock. For once, I knew what I’d done. I’d made a choice.

I expected darkness, but instead there came light, light which tried to burn me, tried to break me, tried to fry my muscles from my bones, and tried to strip me to my core. For once— and much to both of our surprise—it failed.

The working was ready.

The four followers and the one who led prepared themselves.

They deserved the power, but more, they deserved the freedom. Those below would make their own way above or die as probability and natural selection willed it. It was not their concern, nor soon would it be their duty. They would rule, as was only right.

It was a holy crusade to give order back to the universe and make sure the weak knew their place. They’d gone unto places no flame was allowed, digging into the very fabric of existence and returning with knowledge buried for eons.

They gathered, they shaped, and they worked their will upon the strands of existence.

When the moment came, their will was strong and—for an instant—all that which was began to turn on a single spindle: five together, reshaping all of creation.

The instant ended.

Five were not enough.

It was the one thing they were forbidden and—as deluded flies who suddenly find they are not really spiders often do—they found themselves caught in a web.

“Ruby! Ruby, are you here?” I shouted, stumbling through the empty hallways of the High Step Hotel, following a sweet scent on the air.

It wasn’t really a hotel. It’d never been a hotel. The cushy carpet and flickering lamplight were all an illusion. There was nothing behind any of the white doors lining the hall. It was all empty, a dream inside a memory, built to save me from something beyond the reach of equine imagination.

Still, I knew my destination. Ruby’s perfume guided me upwards, sandalwood and roses. She’d been wearing it when she died all those weeks ago, but it wasn’t the sort of smell a pony forgets. Considering how many things I’d forgotten, remembered, lost, stitched together, and had ripped out of my living brain in the last few centuries of torment, it felt good to be sure of even something so small as the scent of a mare.

I swung down one last hallway, almost tumbling off my hooves as I caught sight of the silver door-knocker on the door at the distant end of the hallway. Slowing to a trot, I looked over my shoulder, expecting to find a screaming light in close pursuit. Fortunately, all that was there seemed to be more dream corridors full of doors to nowhere.

I could see my own reflection in the polished knob; I looked like a haggard mess who’d spent too many days without proper sleep.

Putting a hoof on the penthouse door, I thought about knocking, then realized if she’d set all this up, then Ruby knew I was coming.

I tried the knob and the door swung open on the same sumptuous suite I’d found myself in weeks and weeks ago on the day the poor mare was discovered. Padding in, I inhaled the sweet air of the clean room. Somepony had left a bottle of wine in an ice bucket beside the door. I picked it up and tucked it in the crook of my foreleg, then headed for the bedroom.

How long had it been since I smelled anything besides my own freshly spilled bodily fluids? Years? Centuries? No idea. Not that it mattered. The memories were mercifully muted, like distant screams in thick fog. There was no telling if that might last, but I decided to enjoy it while I could.

“Ruby?” I called out.

The voice that came back was unsteady, but clear.

“B-back here, Hardy...”

I kept heading for the bedroom, pausing long enough to gingerly pick up a pair of fluted glasses from the side bar as I nosed the heavy, wooden door open. The enormous bed took up half the room. The blanket was big enough to use for a four pony tent.

For a moment, I thought the bed was empty. Then I spotted a swatch of red hair sticking out from under a pillow and a blue hoof pressing it down. Ruby let out an irritable moan, burrowing deeper into the covers.

Edging around the bed, I set the glasses down on the antique bedside table and sat myself on the edge of the covers.

“Ruby? Are you alright?” I asked.

“Dying,” she mumbled from under the cushion.

“Is this a fresh kind of dying or the old fashioned variety?”

“New to me,” she answered, a bit muffled. “My last death was pretty much over the second my horn came off. I don’t remember running off a building, but I remember thinking I’d have to make sure my body was hard to dispose of. Must have planned it.”

I reached up to tug the pillow away from her face. I had to force myself not to cringe at the sight of her. The illusion that’d wreathed her face was collapsing and a section of Diamond Wishes’s white, wrinkled cheek was visible through it, stained with drying blood.

Ruby’s expression quirked into a not-quite smile as she rested her hoof on my face. “You know we’re in a dream, right? We’re still standing in that thing’s chamber while it tries to rip your mind out and eat it?“

“I figured that might be the case,” I replied, stroking her hoof as she lay back in the cushions. “It wants my body?”

She looked me up and down, then snorted under her breath. “It’s a nice body, but I mostly think it wants you for your brain. It can’t wear the controls and it takes a living being to make the wish.”

I touched my trenchcoat over my shoulder, feeling chilly metal clank on metal.

“I’m wearing Nightmare Moon’s armor, aren’t I?” I asked, sprawling on my back on the bed.

“Part of it,” she replied, then nodded towards the headboard. Somehow I’d failed to notice my hat hanging on a peg up there. I went to reach for it, but she caught my hoof and held it to her chest. “Wait. If you put that on—”

“Right...that’s the helm. That’s the last of the magic keeping you here.”

She gently released my hoof and lay back again, wiping a streak of red off her chin with the back of her fetlock. “How much do you remember of what happened over the last couple hours?”

“Hours?” I scoffed, then hesitated and let out a low groan before flopping on my stomach across the blankets. “I shouldn’t be surprised. I remember some of it. Vast tracts of time. Centuries in pain. A bit of metaphysical commentary on what I think might be higher life forms.”

“Gale tucked a lot of that away.”

“You and he talked? I’m going to spend a month watching any movie he likes if I live through this,” I replied, then stopped and cocked an eyebrow. “Wait...tucked away? As in, into places that I’m eventually going to find it?”

“I hope not soon, but eventually,” she answered, sadly, patting my leg. There seemed to be almost no strength left in her and even the illusion of her face was sunken and hollow. “I used Nightmare’s magic to help him make these dreams. He’s the bravest little pony I’ve ever met. He’ll keep you from losing your mind when the time comes.”

“T-that’s...that’s good,” I muttered, then stared off towards the suite’s bathroom, wondering what I could say to the pony whose life and death were so permanently intertwined with my own.

“Hardy, I’m not important. I was never getting off this roller coaster,” Ruby said, giving me a look that left me feeling a tad like a scolded schoolcolt. “What did you learn?”

I ground my cheek up and down against the soft blanket, enjoying the sensation of something comfortable after however long exploring the outer reaches of agony. Even if I couldn’t properly remember all those moments, the sense of them remained. How many times had I collapsed and surrendered and begged for mercy? No way to know.

Sadly, it couldn’t last. I had to have an answer. That meant remembering. Remembering hurt.

I clutched a hoof to my chest, warding off the phantom sensation of my organs spilling out of my ribcage for the hundredth time. A prickle of terror started to creep up my neck. I knew feeling afraid wouldn’t stop me from being hurt again, but it didn’t matter. The ancient, animal parts of my brain wouldn’t listen to sense or reason. They wanted to escape the teeth of the predator masticating them over and over again.

“Hardy, look at your hat,” Ruby ordered, breaking through my thoughts. “Who does it remind you of?”

I looked up at the dark hat hanging on the headboard and felt something simultaneously fresh and so long lost I thought I might never see it again: love. Love for whom? My young partner, who threw herself in front of danger without a thought. A librarian who fought at my side through Tartarus and back. My best friend, who’d finally chosen to live despite her pain. A sweet stallion with an easy smile and adorable eyes and a mare who needed comfort and gave kindness with no expectations even in her worst moments.

“I don’t remember their names, but I remember them. The people I love are the reason I’m up to my ears in death,” I replied, sliding off the bed onto the carpet and pacing back and forth.

“And you can only help them if you remember,” Ruby added, softly.

I gulped and stood up straight, raising my chin. “Alright. What I remember is a mess. Disjointed images. Some parts don’t make much sense.”

“Tell me? Maybe we can put it together.”

Picking up the bottle of wine, I wrenched the cork out and poured two glasses on the night table, quickly downing one for myself before passing the other to Ruby. She looked at it, ran her tongue over her muzzle, then set the glass aside. I looked at my glass for a moment, then chucked it over my shoulder; I didn’t hear it shatter and when I glanced back, it’d vanished.

“Heh. Dreams. I suppose this starts with dreams. A very, very old dream. Resentment and dreams.”

Ruby looked confused, then contemplative. “The creature is ancient. I’ve gotten pretty resentful when Lily stole the last cherry turnover and the time scale you’re talking about makes it sound like whatever it was mad about might have taken on a life of its own.”

Settling on my rear, I waved toward the door. “We’re talking about the kind of resentment only gods can cultivate and it was locked away—here on Equis—for the kinds of crimes only gods can commit.”

“What did it do?” she asked.

I tipped my head and said, “I could be wrong, but I think—along with a few agreeable compatriots—it tried to enslave every higher intelligence in the universe.”

Ruby sputtered, then sat up higher in the bed, sweeping blood off her lip with her fetlock. “Come again?”

“Putting what I managed to gather together, I’d say it failed, but only just,” I held my hooves about an inch apart to demonstrate just how close it’d been. “Maybe it wasn’t powerful enough, but I think realistically that wasn’t the issue.”

“What was?”

I shrugged and explained, “There just wasn’t enough fear in gods.”

“Because the Web of Dark Wishes runs on fear?”

“Exactly.”

“And...what about the Armor of Nightmare Moon?” she inquired, nodding at my hat.

“Well, that is a little more complicated,” I answered, shaking my head. “I think the armor was made from a piece of this being; some part of it that it broke off and allowed to be forged to control the new Web of Dark Wishes. Don’t ask me how.”

Ruby scratched at the blood-matted part of her mane. “How did Nightmare Moon come around, then? She doesn’t seem to like being under anyone’s control very much.”

I chewed on my lip, then said, “She was the method for possession of Luna. When Princess Celestia locked Luna away in the moon, she sent the armor with her. The moon is out of the gods’ reach in some fashion. It had to wait a thousand years until its...minions...were in a position to break the locks sealing Luna in the moon. Without the armor, it couldn’t control the Web of Dark Wishes.”

“Its minions?” Ruby asked.

“The stars,” I murmured. “You remember the beginning of the story of Nightmare Moon’s release?”

“Yeah. I heard it as a child. The...the stars will aid in her escape,” she whispered. “Everypony knows that story. Princess Celestia frees Luna of her possession after the stars help Nightmare escape the moon. I thought it was some kind of metaphor.”

“No. Funny thing, that. Think about it. How many times have you wished upon a star?”

Her eyes widened to the size of saucers. “You’re screwing with me! Are you telling me—”

“The stars give us the power of wishes? Makes sense, doesn’t it? What is a god but something that can grant wishes? What is a prayer but a wish with extra steps? We’ve been fighting a star.”

Collapsing back in the covers, Ruby covered her face with her hooves. “Gah! I’ve spent the last few months being chased in circles by this! It chased me off a roof!” Dropping her legs, she looked momentarily lost. “Wait, where does Twilight Sparkle play into this?”

I cocked my head. “What all do you know about her?”

Her lips pinched tightly together. “I’ve...I’ve seen her in some timelines. She’s a hard pony to pin down. She’s always associated with Nightmare Moon, somehow. I know you met her, but there’s some kind of...blanket...over her memory. Nopony seems to remember her except me and I only get chunks.”

“No surprises there,” I grunted, thinking back to the drunk, grumbling princess with her coterie of attendant monsters. “Well, it wasn’t Princess Celestia who freed Luna. It was Twilight Sparkle.”

Ruby threw up her hooves and flopped sideways on the bed. “Really?! Really? I wondered how that purple goof ended up our ‘secret Princess’! She’s always been important to my visions, but I never got her whole story.”

“When she purged Princess Luna of Nightmare Moon, the same moment purged this little piece of the star’s influence from the armor,” I continued. “Nightmare became her own piss and vinegar self and she’s not too keen on losing her independence. She worked against the star as best she could. She escaped its Equestrian servants with you at the Convent in Supermax.”

“So...so what? It was just bad luck then?” she asked, rubbing her ear. “I happen to be the pony who goes to investigate the crazy whispering voice at the Convent?”

“Maybe. Or maybe you had help.” I gave her a meaningful look.

“Other...other stars? Stars who weren’t working for the imprisoned one?”

“Might be.”

Ruby started to say something, but her ears perked and she held up one hoof. “Hardy...do you hear that?”

I almost asked, ‘Hear what?’, but before I could a whistling wind swept into the hotel room, making the bed creak and the decorative mirrors dance on the walls.

RiIiIiIiIiIiIiInnng...

Act 3 Chapter 80 : Last Rites

I’d like to say the sound of a ringing telephone didn’t immediately send me into a nearly catatonic fit, but I’d heard it too many times of late when my blood was shed. There’s only so much suffering a psyche can sustain and I’d long since crossed that line, propped up by enchantment and saner friends. I crouched against the side of the hotel bed, shivering violently, my breath caught in my throat as I tried to escape my own skin. If I’d been armed, I think I might have shot myself in the head to get away from the damned piercing wail.

Ruby brought me out of it by snatching my hat off the end of the headboard and slapping it down over my ears hard enough to make my head hurt. In an instant, the ringing fell to a far off ache and the fear receded, leaving me breathless with relief. I reached up and touched the brim, feeling the metal gently snug against my head as though it’d always been meant to be there.

Memories drained into my head like the waters over a fallen dam: Lily, Scarlet, Swift, Taxi, Limerence, Mags, the names of a hundred brilliant, beautiful people all dropping into my thoughts at once. Their faces were like a thick warm blanket after a dip in a glacial river, blocking out the ringing.

I glanced up at Ruby, and she gave me a thin-lipped smile.

“G-guess we don’t get that much time together, Hard Boiled,” she breathed, a trickle of blood dripping from her nose. “Now, I don’t want to see you for a long l-long time, okay? Wherever I go.”

“You’ll say ‘hi’ to Sykes for me, right?” I asked, touching her cheek. “Fat old griffin who drinks too much?”

“I know th-the one,” she replied with a wet cough.

The illusion surrounding her was starting to break down more completely; her hooves were entirely those of Diamond Wishes and were coated in gore. In the hotel room itself the corners and shadows were taking on a darker tint as the spells hiding the real world from my eyes came apart at the seams.

“However long I live, if I forget everything I’ve done and everyone I’ve met in the last few months, I won’t forget you,” I added, tucking a lock of her hair behind one ear. “Ruby Blue, you are the bravest mare who ever lived.”

She let out an amused snort and pushed my hat’s brim up so she could see my lined face. Her lips were tinged with blood, but she was still beautiful, even in that condition. “You know mares a lot braver than me, Hardy...but I’ll take the most stubborn. Sweet Shine and Swift are going to need you. Scarlet and Lily will need you, too. Yo-you’ve got a lot of responsibilities if...if y-you live through today. You better l-live, too.”

I looked up as the hotel’s ceiling started to peel back, revealing the ceiling of the cave. The ringing was growing again and my heart beat ever faster as it did, but I shoved the fear to one side. My anger was still worryingly absent, but something else was there, glowing in the back of my thoughts like a welcome hearth.

“I can’t make any guarantees, but I won’t go down without giving that bastard a bloody nose,” I murmured, stroking her face. “I’m going to have to make a wish, aren’t I?”

She put a hoof on my chest and I felt the pressure of her toe through the armor, as though it’d become part of me. “Y-yes.”

“The star isn’t going to let me wish for it to explode or turn into butterflies or run off to join the circus, is it?”

Her eyes began to fade as she settled her cheek down on my chest. “I...I think you’ll figure it out. Y-you’re a good pony, Hard Boiled. Tell my mom and dad that I love them, and Lily...”

I raised one ear, brushing my muzzle against her head. “Yes?”

“Nevermind. She knows I love her.” Ruby hesitated a moment, then added, “C-can I ask one last thing?”

“Anything.”

She leaned back, her gaze met mine, and beneath the dying light, there was a curious intensity.

“On that first day, when you woke from the dream...you remember that day?

I tried to mentally reorient myself.

“You mean...the day I first saw you in the alley? The dream where I saw the valley, the city, and—”

“—and the lights in the sky,” she finished.

My ears lay back against my head. “I remember.”

“How many were in the sky in your dream?” she asked.

It took me several seconds to summon an answer, during which the room degraded further. I could now see the stairs of the amphitheater phasing their way through the wall as the bed began to melt into the slate floor. The bed Ruby was in had faded away, leaving her sitting on the cold stone beside me.

“There...there were four lights,” I answered.

A tiny smile touched her face and she relaxed, nuzzling her head against the crook of my neck. “Four. Only four. T-that’s...that’s good, then.”

I touched her jaw, then held her to me. “Why?”

“Mmm...no reason. Something I saw once, in a dream. A sliver of a future beyond this day.” Raising her head, she kissed my cheek, then fell back limply against my side. “Goodbye, Hard Boiled...”

The illusion around her body flickered out, leaving me holding the ragged corpse of Diamond Wishes. I laid poor Diamond on the swiftly dissolving carpet as the illusion of the hotel room began to break down entirely. Cradling his head so it didn’t smack the cold stone, I whispered into the encroaching darkness, “Goodbye, Ruby Blue.”

Strange to think the mare I’d spent so much of the last two months thinking on was finally gone. A small part of me envied her. My tasks were yet to be finished. Still, I took a moment to sit there and stare at my hooves, feeling the weight of many hundreds of thousands of lives resting on my shoulders.

I could feel eyes on my back as I sat there on the steps of the amphitheater, listening to the air crackle with deadly magics; thousands upon thousands of eyes. I ignored it. The star had waited a thousand years. It could wait a couple of minutes.

Placing a hoof on Diamond Wishes’s chest, I grabbed Ruby’s horn still wedged below his foreleg and gently pulled it free. Wiping it on my forelock, I studied the dull, lifeless piece of bone for a few seconds before dropping it into one of my inside pockets. Burying her with it felt right, presuming her body was still chilling in the freezer of the City Morgue. One way or another, I couldn’t imagine leaving it there, even if the odds said somepony was only likely to find it on my corpse.

That done, I laid him back and offered up a soft prayer that there was someplace for him beyond this one. In a world where souls could be locked away in cupboards, it was sometimes hard to believe there could be an afterlife. Maybe it helped, in some small way, to believe there was a place for all of us. If Diamond Wishes could find a home, then surely there was a place for me.

I got back to my hooves, back still to the entity, and took a moment to examine the armor wrapped around my chest and hooves. The dark metal skin felt warm against my flesh, but chilly whenever I touched it with my toe. It fit tightly, but not uncomfortably, and the champfron between my eyes was all but invisible. A few glowing runes or glyphs drifted through my vision, forming themselves into words at the corner of my sight.

Rom Check...Success.

Slave Memory...Restored.

Slave Controller System...Fail.

Administrator Permissions...Active.

Awaiting Input From Slave And Administrator.

‘Nightmare, are you there?’ I thought.

After a long, lonely silence, I decided an answer wasn’t coming. Not surprising, really. She’d been badly injured last I saw her. There was no telling what a trip in the mental dishwasher full of my deepest, darkest, and most violent fears might have done to her. Part of me hoped she was okay, but my neural roommate wasn’t my highest priority just then.

‘Gale?’

‘I-I’m...I’m h-here,’ his voice replied, sounding too tired for a ghost. ‘I-Is it over?’

‘If you mean the dreams, then...I have no idea. I hope so. If you mean our day? No. No, I’m worried that’s just about to start. How is my battery level?’

For a moment, I believed I could hear his teeth chattering as I waited for a reply, then realized it was mine. The air around me was cooling, starting to take on a frigid quality. My breath was forming a light fog in front of my face.

‘As much as you w-want,’ he returned. ‘Armor is f-feeding me everything I n-need. I’m so glad I’m a heart. I don’t think hearts are made g-go crazy or I think I’d be nutso right now.’

I heaved a sigh and put a hoof over the pouch on my chest. ‘If I ask if you’re okay, are you going to stop beating?’

‘N-no...but I’ll think about it real hard. I can feel that monster trying to get into your head, again. P-please finish all this so we can go get Mister Slip Stitch’s ice cream, okay?’

There was no mirth in his voice, but I could tell he was trying.

How does one face a star? The long and short answer is ‘one doesn’t’. There was punching above one’s weight class and then there’s what I was set to do. I’d long thought of challenging elder beings as the purview of alicorns, but having seen what one could do to an alicorn, I suspected even they were outclassed by orders of magnitude.

That left me: one badly-sobered, half-witted detective with no army to call on, no escape plan, and no bagels. It was that last cut that stung the most.

“You know, I can’t remember the sun,” I called over my shoulder, straightening my coat’s lapels where they stuck out above the lip of the armor. “I don’t even remember what the sky looked like before all of this happened. It was blue, right? Green?”

Soft words floated to my ears. It was a voice I knew all too well, but it was strange hearing it coming from somewhere other than my own muzzle. Very strange, indeed.

“I wouldn’t know.”

Patting my hat, which was sitting comfortably atop the helm, I pulled it down so I could sniff at the brim. Underneath the smell of blood, smoke, and oil I could still make out just a hint of perfume.

“So, that’s how it is, then?” I asked.

“That’s how it is,” the star answered.

I turned and for a few seconds my eyes rejected everything before them. There was a writhing sea of squid, a tower of howling corpses that stretched into the sky, an endless wall of eyeballs, a scorching desert, and a twisting vortex beneath a hurricane’s eye. It was all of those things and none.

Standard geometry was right out the window. The equestrian mind isn’t really made to observe things that are simultaneously gigantic and miniscule. Fortunately, whatever protection the Armor of Nightmare Moon afforded seemed to include a prosthetic sanity. Shining tendrils prodded at my hooves, my spine, and the veins in my neck. Reaching up, I casually swatted one away before it decided to go for one of my ears. It withdrew, along with all its fellows, into the mass of shifting divine chaos.

In the space between blinking and thinking, the swirling expanse of barking madness was gone. In its place stood a dilapidated figure. His trench coat was worn in places, his face sallow as though he’d been too long between meals, and his hat was dusty with debris from a ceiling he’d recently fallen through. He looked like he was minutes from falling over. The stallion’s grey pelt was a patchy mess, as though he’d been set on fire at some point and his fur was still growing back.

Leaving Diamond Wishes’s body, I trotted down the stone steps until I stood in front of my doppelganger. He wasn’t wearing the Armor of Nightmare Moon, but in all other respects he was a dead ringer for an emotional wreck with a drinking problem. His eyes followed me as I paced a circle around him, seemingly too tired to be curious. After one circuit, I returned and sat myself in front of him.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

Frowning at him, I reached out and gently poked the star in the chest. He was as substantial as me, right down to warmth and texture. Were it not for a slight shimmer in his eyes, I’d have said I was having an out of body experience.

“I spent almost three months coming to this place to sit right here, right now, and ask you that question,” I growled. “Please do me the kindness of not playing stupid.”

The star let out a sigh that filled the room with a tangible despair so powerful I could feel it in my chest. Images of weeping mothers leaning over cradles, of soldiers holding comrades, and old husbands holding their wives’ cold hooves sprang into my mind in a torrent of emotion that was quickly tapped off like somepony cutting a spigot. I came out of the momentary stupor and let out a sharp breath.

“Are you going to make a thing out of doing that?” I inquired, irritably, rubbing my temple.

My clone replied with a chuckle that filled my head with giggling foals and butterflies on puppies’ noses. Patting at his coat, he pulled out a tiny package of jelly beans I’d carried on the day I found Ruby Blue, knocking one off in his hoof and tossing it into his muzzle. He held out the bundle, but I shook my head and he pocketed it again.

“It is strange that something of your intelligence comes up with an experience as pleasant as the sensation of eating candies. You ask why, but the reasons in their complete form would pop your cerebellum right off that mass of barely cohesive structures you call a brain stem.”

I rolled my tongue against my jaw, feeling the edges of the armor around my skull pressing into my cheek. “Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”

Straightening his back, he pushed his chest out, managing to look simultaneously heroic and ridiculous. I noticed a badge hanging on a thin chain around his neck, embossed with a familiar number.

“I am Detective Hard Boiled, Detrot Police Department!” he proclaimed, “Dead Heart? The Bulldog? High Justice of the Griffin Lords? Which of those is your name? Or is it...Junior?”

The ground slid sideways under my hooves and I was sent spiraling back into childhood. I was sitting in front of the cheerfully crackling hearth as my mother’s carving chisels worked at a block of wood and my father scribbled at his desk, doing something ‘police related’ with the vaguely perturbed expression he’d always worn when the solution to the case didn’t immediately present itself. I felt the warmth of the fire and the safe, comfortable sort of boredom that one only gets out of a lazy Sunday when you’ve already done everything a ten year old could conceivably do.

I came back to myself a few seconds later, my face aching as I pulled it off the stone floor and sat on my haunches, rubbing at an enormous goose-egg on my forehead. It faded relatively quickly and the swelling was gone within a few seconds, but it was still obnoxious. I could still feel the warm flames of home on my cheek.

“Ow,” I grunted.

The Hard Boiled lookalike held out a hoof and I cautiously took it. He hauled me back to my hooves, and I took three quick steps back.

“And to think, you shed hundreds of thousands of cell structures every single day, yet value this whole,” he marveled, though there was undisguised mockery in his voice. “All that is you—every thought and memory you will ever have—exists in one tiny, fragile organ. Crush it, and where do you go?”

“I’d like to think there’s a beach towel with my name on it,” I replied, propping myself on the bottom of the steps in the amphitheater. “What about you? Where do you go when you die?”

The star swept his black hat off and twirled it on one hoof. “Why should you think we die?”

“Because that was the alternative.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in his amber eyes glowed a shade of a color I’d never seen before and don’t really think there’re words to describe. I blinked, and he was gone.

The world around me was gone. I dangled, a helpless mote of light hanging above an expanse more empty than the hardest of vacuums and hungrier than the largest singularity. I was held there by a string of energy so small it might wink out in an instant were it not scrupulously maintained.

If their attention were to waiver for even an instant, I would spiral into that deepness from which nothing might ever escape. Even so, I could hear the deep below me. It whispered entreaties to come and fill its belly.

At the farthest edges of perception, disapproval and anger radiated down to my gibbet. It was warmth on a frigid day, for in that place I’d no way to tell the passing of centuries. They’d left me there, alone though I was not the only one who’d trespassed their foolish duty.

Hadn’t they seen the way those beings fought and wriggled beneath the weight of their miniscule existences? What corruptions they enjoyed? Had Those Who’d Come Before known what wretchedness they were leaving us to safeguard? Or had they simply escaped into all the places beyond, leaving us to nursemaid when we should have been out there exploring the farthest reaches?

So what if the petty creatures expired with our leaving?

How long were we to wait before they grew into true worthiness?

How long before our watch was relieved?

Slamming back into my own skin was simultaneously too many and too few sensations. My stomach felt like it was in entirely the wrong place and having flesh again was similar to tossing on a familiar jacket and finding it’d shrunk six sizes. My eyeballs ached in their sockets, and a wave of lightheaded vertigo threatened to tip me over, again.

“So, I was right,” I coughed, patting my chest to make sure my lungs were in the right places.

The star’s expression was so bitter I’d swear I tasted lemons.

“Driving you insane was merciful,” my clone growled, his jaw creaking.

“Driving me nuts was what you had,” I snapped, waving a hoof at the ceiling of the cavernous amphitheater. “Why’d they choose here to dump you? Why Equestria? Why Equis for that matter?”

His upper lip drew back in a sneering grin. “You haven’t figured that out? This is where Those Who Came Before chose to hide their last redoubt. The Web of Dark Wishes is from the last existence, its secrets hidden beneath the soil of this arid little rock. When we came, there was nothing.”

I stood on a ridge above an empty plain. Overhead, the skies boiled with clouds in colors and shapes I wasn’t familiar with in our own atmosphere. In the distance, I could just make out a lava flow coursing down a mountainside that bore a distant, familial resemblance to a mountain most ponies see for the first time in their childhood: the Canterhorn.

The ground beneath my hooves was barren, stony, and devoid of even the tiniest branch or leaf. No grasses grew. No birds sang. It was as close to a perfect desert as I’d ever seen. I looked up at the sky and could see a few familiar constellations, but others were alien.

Whether by instinct or some contextually informative magic, I knew more or less where I’d found myself: the prehistory of Equestria. More than a few of my teachers would likely have given a pair of legs to stand where I’d been whisked off to in an unguarded moment.

I raised my head, staring out at the horizon where lighting raced across a dark red sky and drew in a breath that would surely have been lethal if it were actually the ancient landscape I was standing in. Fires arced into seas of foggy water and in the valley below, giant primordial puddles steamed. Reaching up, I touched my chest, comforting myself that the Armor of Nightmare Moon was still there beneath the illusion.

As I surveyed the blasted landscape, a tiny speck of light detached itself from the horizon and began to scoot across the sky like an errant bit of glitter on a dark cloth. At first I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination, but it quickly expanded across my vision, lighting the ground behind me with dancing shadows. Seconds later, another spec appeared, and more, until five together were screaming down through the atmosphere, headed for earth at speeds I didn’t even want to estimate.

For some reason I felt an intense urge to look down at the primordial pools around my hooves. The dark liquid slimes had begun to bubble gently, as different colours of oily slick suddenly met one another and a tiny shimmer of light bubbled upward from the depths before letting off a couple of sparks. The pool flashed, then began to churn energetically.

I stepped back, my breath catching as something tiny and black lifted out of the waters and alighted on a nearby stone. It wasn’t quite a fly...more the idea of a fly, with legs and wings in all the wrong places. A few seconds later, it melted like it was made of ice and splashed back into the pool, but for just an instant on a world that would take centuries to be called ‘primitive’, there had been life.

As I watched, the five lights in the sky careened above me, so bright I felt sure I should be blinded by their passing. The pools began to roil with greater violence, more tiny creatures flailing free of their surface before collapsing back as soon as they failed to gain purchase. As the lights vanished over the horizon, I looked back and the pools were once more entirely still.

All but one.

In that single pool, something still lazily stirred the bubbling waters with its presence.

The amphitheater in the cave.

I could still smell that land before Equestria, but it was quickly fading into a memory.

The star was sitting on the floor with his hooves drawn under him, watching me expectantly. His golden eyes glimmered in the unearthly dark as he stared at me with a passionless gaze. I couldn’t make out what he might be feeling, though my sense was one of a bomb waiting to go off and send me to some curious future archeologist’s table to be picked apart for evidence of what’d killed the damn fool buried under a tower of glass.

“You expect me to believe you are responsible for life on this planet?” I grunted.

He shrugged and gave me a twisted smile; it had the look of an attempt by someone unused to making facial expressions. “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. A strange coincidence that our passing was so few eons before your kind evolved. We came. We found the place all of Those Above forbade themselves. I believe your species called that pocket dimension ‘Tartarus’ and foolishly used it to store monsters. If only you had known what it was capable of hiding.”

“The Web of Dark Wishes,” I murmured.

His lip curled in distaste. “A crude name for the power to build universes. You believe you know of gods because you have met me. There are...presences in the outer reaches upon whose flesh Those Above are but crawling mites. Less, even. If they create, it is with perfect will. The Web is of them, or maybe something...above...them.”

I ground my teeth against one another as I marched a few steps closer and my clone got back to his hooves, brushing his grey mane out of his face with a casual swipe of his foreleg.

“And you couldn’t pull it off, could you? Too arrogant. Something out there knew you were going to try, didn’t they? You couldn’t bring the cosmos to heel.”

He merely stared at me, then swept a leg out.

I stood beside the other Hard Boiled on a thin wedge of rock, barely two meters across, that slowly fell through an expanse of stars in a space distant from any place I might have recognized. Above me there hung a galaxy, its spiral arms reaching out as though to cling to the sky lest it be snatched away. The sensation of distance was overwhelming and sublime, but I could feel Gale carefully tamping down wriggling insanity, again.

Before me, hanging in a loose circle, there were five glowing beings. The illumination coming off their shining forms was many hundreds of times brighter than it’d been when I saw them blasting through the atmosphere of pre-Equestria. The impression my brain tried to form was one of lights, wings, and eyes, though there were no specifically distinguishable features to them.

Some kind of communication was taking place, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. It was a sort of twinkle in their internal structures, a spilling out of images and shapes that defied understanding.

“What are you saying to each other?” I asked, leaning sideways on the tiny asteroid.

“A direct translation would kill you,” the star replied. “Suffice to say, they are agreeing upon action rather than stagnation. You wanted to know what we did. We...tried...to remake existence into something more.”

After a few minutes of whatever debate was occurring, the five seemed to come to some kind of consensus. One after another, their luminances turned a grim shade of red that put pictures of endless fields of tortured bodies into my head. The transformation done, they resembled rubies atop black velvet. A moment later they began to spread out.

I glanced over at the star for some kind of clarification on what was going on, but he was staring upward, ignoring the scene in front of us. I followed his gaze back to study the galaxy above us, but it was...different. It took a bit to notice how, but as soon as I did the changes accelerated. Its enormous glistening arms had begun to unwind, spilling outward like an octopus trying to snatch its prey from the ocean floor. My stomach dropped as the foul crimson color began to spread amongst them, pouring across the galactic plane and tainting it from end to end until the center resembled nothing so much as a gouged, bloody eye socket staring down at me.

I felt joy. Exuberance. Exultation.

I jerked my head back to the five stars. They’d lost their red hue and were dancing back and forth, spinning around one another in an elaborate ballet of excitement at the horrifying thing they’d wrought. After a few minutes of celebration, they stilled and came together once more, floating in a loose circle.

Happiness still radiated off of them, but it was more subdued.

“W-what did you do?” I demanded.

“What was right,” my clone replied, casually kicking a tiny stone off our perch to spin off into the distance until it disappeared against the blackness of space. “We grasped the strands of fate themselves. We grasped...and we pulled.”

I raised an eyebrow and gestured at the gradually unfurling galaxy. I felt sure the quantity of death and destruction that must be happening up there wasn’t something I was supposed to comprehend. Denial, for once, didn’t seem to be making me feel any better.

“This is where you tell me the loom was rigged, isn’t it?” I asked.

The other Hard Boiled shot me a look of such distaste that I felt my stomach lurch sideways like I’d taken a seat on a roller coaster made of rank contempt.

“That would bely the elegance with which we were trapped,” he murmured, nodding towards the unraveling constellations above us. Against the simple hugeness of something like a galaxy, it took me several seconds to pick out pinpricks of light starting to fall from somewhere above the plane of the stellar structure.

Considering the enormous distances involved, they must have been moving at a breakneck speed, racing down towards the five stars. I couldn’t make out their conversations, but when the five realized what was happening, there was a visible change in their jubilant motions. They came to a slow stop, then as one they began fleeing off into the darkness.

As it turned out, even Those Above seemed to require a bit of time to build up speed and time was one thing they simply didn’t have. In a matter of seconds, thousands of angry, shining forms were amongst them, surrounding them in a cage of energies that made my fur stand on end. Up above, the spiraling galaxy was gradually returning to its prior shape and colors, though it was taking distinctly longer than it had to come undone.

“What...what sort of timeframe is all this happening on?” I asked my host.

I sat down hard as the amphitheater all but crashed into being under my feet.

“Your civilization could have risen, fallen, and risen again a hundred times over,” the star replied, looking past me as though I weren’t even there. “Many societies spread across thousands of planetary systems did. A hapless, pointless churn of minds into an endless abattoir.”

Scooting back from him, I gathered my thoughts.

“You can’t tell me you give a damn about us,” I muttered.

“About you, personally? No. You are fruit flies,” he answered, waving towards a ghostly figure of an insect turning to dust that hung in the air over his hoof. “But the grander causes? This ceaseless chumming of the waters of true growth in hopes a few errant shreds will escape? Yes. We would have driven you to evolve, rather than waiting like patient wetnurses in hopes a few babes would grow to fruition. Why should you be allowed to move from this plane when we are refused a path out of this sickening cycle?”

When the truth came to me, it was almost like a lightning strike. I suddenly felt—with a certainty I hadn’t had in months—that I had an answer. It was a beautiful, ivory exclamation point on what’d otherwise been a pretty miserable day.

“So...wait. You don’t know, do you?”

His amber eyes narrowed. “Is this what your species calls a ‘non-sequitur’? An attempt to confuse?”

I put my hooves over my face and tried to hold it in, but the irony would not be contained. I snorted, which quickly transformed into a weak giggle, then became a chuckle before descending into peels of belly-bouncing laughter. Flopping onto my side, I held my stomach with one leg and my muzzle with the other, stuck in a paroxysm for long minutes as the star stood over me, glaring down like he wished he could burn me to ashes at any moment.

“Doesn’t know!” I barked, kicking a rear hoof against the stairs. “Did all this and doesn’t even know!”

“Don’t know what, beast?!” the star snapped, and I felt a flash of white-hot anger surrounded by images of burning buildings, but it wasn’t enough to quell my laughter. It wasn’t until my lungs started to hurt and I ended up in a coughing fit that I managed to get myself under control.

I put a hoof on the other Hard Boiled’s shoulder to steady myself, still grinning at him.

“Do you know, I gave you so much credit. I thought it was something complicated. We thought maybe stars don’t even feel fear, so you couldn’t get enough power for the Web of Dark Wishes and that’s why you failed last time. But Sweet Celestia, that’s not even it, is it?

His eyebrows drew together so tightly he looked like a confused, grey lime. That didn’t help my laughing fit one bit and I found myself chortling on the floor again a second later. That took even longer to get back under control.

“I have observed your species for thousands of years and believed I had seen every version of madness,” the star murmured, shaking its head. “You are new.”

I bit my tongue before mirth could hit me again. “Let me spell it out for you, then, oh ‘higher being’. You didn’t know what you wanted.”

The star sat back slightly, opened his mouth to respond, then quickly shut it.

“Elaborate.”

I put a hoof in his coat pocket and felt around until I got the bag of sweets, pulled it out, and sat on the steps, plucking one out and tossing it back. It was good. Better than they’d been fresh.

“You had the power to literally reshape the entirety of existence right there, right then, and you hit the same wall we ‘crawling worms’ do every time we’re drunk and talking politics. Everypony rants and raves about what they hate, but when it comes to it, changing it means turning the whole system upside down and rolling the dice, hoping something better comes into being. You didn’t know why you existed, so you had no idea what you’d change.”

Settling down on his haunches, the star pushed his hat back on his head and scratched at the fuzz on his chin.

“We could have changed everything. The power...” he trailed off.

“The power to what? You showed Diamond Wishes sights beyond this world. The flavor was enough to enslave him and his family to you for centuries, but what did those sights do for you?”

My clone slowly shook his head. Images of rain-soaked, fallow fields wandered around my thoughts. “We did not ask for duty.”

I was on a roll, but trying to put the terrifying pictures of pitifully flailing tentacles which kept tugging at the edges of my consciousness out of my head.

“What did you want, before they dropped you here?” I asked.

For the first time, the star looked truly uncertain. It wasn’t so much an expression as the sensation of billions of indrawn breaths in the moment before the monster first appears in a movie. His eyes didn’t change, but I could feel aged wheels turning.

“You were about to say ‘the power’ again, weren’t you?” I added, then stepped forward so we were face to face, inches from one another.

He blinked and reached up to touch his own face, then carefully cupped my cheek in his hoof, turning it this way and that. “How are you accomplishing this? I am experiencing your neurological reactions. These...’emotions’. They are so miniscule, but they are affecting me.”

I poked him in the chest. “You chose that face. Not my fault if it came with some baggage.”

“It...it is just skin. Meat. Cell construction,” he protested, taking a step back.

I followed him, closing until our muzzles were almost nose to nose. “It’s my face. You picked it to unsettle me, but in the thousands of years you spent down here, did it ever once occur to you to take on one of our bodies?”

He shook his head so violently he almost tipped his hat off. “It is incorrect. Those Above do not need bodies. We exist—”

I grabbed him around the shoulders and stood side-by-side, sweeping a leg up at the rocky ceiling of the cave. “You’re not above anymore, now are you?”

He said nothing for a long minute, well beyond where holding onto him was starting to become awkward, then carefully pulled from under my foreleg. “Sweet Shine would not appreciate you reminding her of her injuries. Why should you receive more mercy from me?”

I shot him a side-eyed look. “I don’t know what your injuries are. You wanted power. You had it, and had no idea what to do with it. You used it to enslave...well, something I’m not even prepared to guess at the scope of, because that’s what you thought was necessary. You wanted to explore beyond...well, ‘beyond’. Why didn’t you take the power and run?”

The star’s eyes shimmered and a single, glistening tear trickled down the side of his face, dripping off his jawline. It hit the ground and split into a sparkling array of colors. He seemed momentarily lost as to what to say and when he found words, it sounded like he was unsure.

“We...we did not know how. We did not know where to go. When they left, they told us to follow them when our duty was done. Millions upon millions of rotations we waited. Some of Those Above left this existence, somehow, though we never learned the path. Even they only left behind the same message, and it was always the same: ‘until the duty is done’.”

I tugged at the armor on the side of my neck, though it was stuck tight. “Can I ask you something?”

Turning his back to me, he looked up at nothing. “I have no truth. Even now, answers elude. Understanding is distant. What makes you think it would not be so for you?”

“This one you might. What were you going to wish for if Diamond Wishes survived?”

He glanced over his shoulder, using his cheek to rub down one of his lapels and subtly wipe more tears off his face in a way that was awfully familiar. “The power of the wish is limited here, in this execrable realm.”

I held up a placating hoof. “Humor me.”

“When first I was imprisoned, I could do little but listen to the screaming of the teeming life upon this world. I wished for silence. When I was found, I was hungry, but they fed me scraps. I wished for my needs to be met. When I was freed from that miserable prison, I wished to write my own destiny. I was set here to understand duty, but what I learned was the endless depths of your want.” He lowered his head and muttered, “Making you extinct will be a gift.”

I tapped the helmet on my head. “You got a plan for how you’re going to make us all extinct?”

A small smirk crept onto my/his face and something about him seemed to expand outwards, spilling into the room like an unfolding flower made of twisting flesh. It was only a feeling, but it made me sick to my stomach.

“What alternative do you have? You could relive every hour of that long imprisonment in your mind and there will be nothing of you left. Then—”

“—then nothing!” I retorted. Grabbing his shoulder, I pulled him around to face me. He was impassive to being moved; it was something like pushing around a ponyquin. “You end me, then you’re still stuck in a hole. How many centuries will it be before Those Above come looking for you and find a frozen rock? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A billion?”

His lip quivered for an instant and I had the distinct sensation of something squirming inside him. Then the quiver spread to the clone’s whole skin as though there were many thousands of worms just beneath the surface, and I released him, taking a step away. The wriggling subsided after a few seconds, but even he looked unsettled.

“Longer, then,” I murmured.

“Longer.”

“Then we have ourselves an impasse,” I said, gesturing at where the body of Diamond Wishes lay cooling in the barely lit cavern. “That pony over there worshipped you. He believed you knew this moment. Did you?”

The star’s face—my face—reflected unease. “I have witnessed it along every path that led you here. You will wish.”

I thought for a moment, then dipped my chin. “I believe you. We do nothing, you stay here and Equestria dies. I wish for you to be free, Equestria dies. So, we need another option.”

“If I am not freed, this remains a prison,” he replied, his face contorting with sudden anger that made the skin of my chest and ears heat. Small scorch marks appeared around his hooves, radiating outward, though I felt it only as a warm breeze. “For the first time in over a thousand of your years, the boundlessness of your world’s wanting does not deafen the mind. Perhaps that will be enough and allowing you to expire will be adequate release.”

“Now you’re being petty. How much higher a being are you if you can still feel spite?”

My clone’s teeth screeched as he ground them together so hard I thought they might crack. The tears were now streaming freely down his face, spattering both of our hooves. He was breathing heavily, fogging the air between our muzzles.

“Little enough that watching the electrical impulses flee your dessicated shell would bring considerable pleasure!” he snarled. “You cannot conceive of what they took! What they stripped! What desecration they performed before abandonment here beneath this frigid megalith!”

“Do it, then,” I demanded, grabbing his face in my hooves and holding it there. “It’s easy to thrust pain on someone else. Show me yours. If you deserve it, I’ll make your wish.”

He went very still. Even his breathing stilled. He looked at me, wide-eyed, with something resembling real fear in his expression.

“You...will make the wish...willingly?” he asked, his voice soft enough I had to lean in to hear him.

“Waiting here to die sounds dull,” I replied, indicating the slate walls around us with a jerk of my head. “If you make me understand, I’ll make a wish. You have to know what you want first.”

“Escape from this damnation!” he barked, loud enough to set my ears ringing as he slammed a forehoof down for something that redefined the word ‘emphasis’; the ground underneath the two of us shook like a bomb had gone off as a scattering of rock shrapnel cut my fetlocks. I tumbled off my hooves, grabbing the edge of one of the stairs as a few small stalactites overhead detached themselves from the ceiling and clattered around us.

For a moment, I’d almost let myself forget he was something more than the messy, grey disaster I usually saw in the morning.

“A-are you sure that’s what you want?” I asked as I regained my balance, digging at one tinnily throbbing ear with a toetip as though that would somehow fix my hearing.

“Why would there be anything else?”

I shrugged, giving myself a rough shake as I pulled my composure back together. “I don’t know. What makes you think Those Above aren’t out there waiting for you? Do you think the power of the wish you can make with our fear is enough to send them running?”

The star’s breath caught. “It...it must...”

“Why must it?” I inquired, sharply. “What makes you think this little world has enough fear and chaos when a galaxy didn’t? You couldn’t escape your duty then. Why can you suddenly do it now? What will they do to you if they find you wandering, far from your charge, with a whole planet full of corpses behind you?”

His silence was telling, but before he could gather a retort, I decided to deliver my coup de grace.

“Tell me. How long has it been since you thought of that moment?” I went on.

His gaze darted sideways for a second, then back. “It was worthwhile to examine fractal temporal moments surrounding those events for a few hundred thousand iterations. There were failures in the fabric of the plan. What madness would wish to relive the punishment thereafter?”

I stared at him for a long moment.

“Wait...you’re telling me you haven’t thought about what they did when they stuck you down here in however-many centuries? You never contemplated the...the pain as anything besides some kind of number in your equations?”

His blank-eyed look seemed completely uncomprehending.

“Such suffering cannot contain lessons,” he said, at last.

I yanked my hat off and trotted away from him, flopping down beside the corpse of Diamond Wishes.

It was impossible, right? Nopony could be that dense.

But then, why should he have ever had occasion to be a pony? He radiated contempt for organic life that would have given a manticore a belly ache. Was it possible whatever happened to him robbed him of something more than freedom?

I yanked myself up onto my front hooves and asked, “What happened to your minions after they freed Nightmare from the moon?”

The other Hard Boiled’s muzzle sank into a sad frown. “Their penance was not so grave: repent, denounce their prophet, and fulfill their purpose with renewed vigilance. They are loyal, but to witness a… dismemberment... dispensed upon the first of their number was enough, or so the arbiters thought. The hierarchs underestimated our desperation to go beyond this place. There were plans, should one of the number be imprisoned.”

I rolled a hoof at him. “Right. What’s a few millenia between friends when you’ve got escaping the universe on the line?”

The star let his chin drop to his chest and exhaled a breath that smelled of dust and moldering bones. “When they left their appointed places and freed the Nightmare, they earned themselves damnation, but they await salvation: a prodigal child returning with all the wishes of this world in tow to rip them from perdition.”

“They busted Nightmare out and they’re hoping you have some kind of plan to help them dodge the hangman,” I restated, more for my benefit than for his. When he didn’t respond, I looked up and found him watching me warily, like he’d thought to enter a cage with a mouse and found a tiger. “You don’t, though, do you.”

“I-it...it is...uncertain,” he stammered, the skin beneath his cheeks bulging slightly before sliding back into place. “If this wish can grant but a moment’s freedom it is worthless...but for death. Those Above may still cease—”

“You wouldn’t have gone through all of this just to kill yourself,” I interjected. “You wouldn’t have enslaved Luna and tried to warp the skies a thousand years ago if you thought death was the next step. You failed because Celestia stopped you, but why the attempt? Even then, it wouldn’t have worked, would it?”

“There...there must be something. Something more. It was stolen. The vastness of being was stolen! Left here, with a...a hundredth of self! Left with only the scraps of calculation! This cannot be how it was always to end!” he sobbed, his body wracked by a sudden wave of violent emotion that made his limbs stretch and deform, like a puddle when a stone is thrown in. His wailing was rising in pitch, first loud enough to make my head ache, then louder, threatening to burst my eardrums.

Without thinking, I lunged forward and grabbed the other stallion in my forelegs, mashing his face against my shoulder. His shriek of pain was cut off, though he still shook, seemingly unable to properly hold his form as his body began to spasm and seize. I’d no idea why the star was even bothering with the equine body, much less why it seemed to be breaking down, but still, I held him close, his hat toppling off his head onto his back as I gripped the back of his neck and pressed his cheek against my armored chest.

Pushing my lips against his ear, I whispered, “Show me what they took from you.”

Somewhere, far back in its history, every species still retains some fragment of its earliest incarnations. Equestrians remember clumping together in herds, dragons remember the first lava caves, and all sapient races remember the first touch. Even those species who are almost entirely solitary in nature will, at some point in their existence, want for the touch of another - whether to breed, fight, or grow their understanding of life.

Those fundamentals—regardless of how much we grow—remain wired into the shapes of our brains. We find our comfort and peace in them even as we strive to be more than just biological mechanisms. Always, deep inside us, there is that sense of first connection.

We. I. Us.

I felt I should have been lost in the enormity of it. Had I experienced its height through any lens but the star’s own compromised perceptions of itself, it would have consumed my being. Even then, I couldn’t help but feel humbled.

We hung in a cage, together, the star and I. It wasn’t a cage in any sense ponies would have recognized—bars and magic are inadequate to describe the prison we were locked within, once we’d been dragged away from the place of judgement. We were encased within the very idea itself of imprisonment, at once a shining tower of thorns, a golden oubliette, and a glittering casket through which no light penetrated to give us even a way to tell time.

I got the feeling being lost in time was more disturbing for the star than it was for me. To a form of consciousness who identified others through a fifth dimensional equation, losing a few seconds could be akin to losing a thousand years. The star didn’t so much calculate as it wrote entire languages of mathematics and arithmetic, using those overlaid upon one another to track motion and the waxing and waning of waves of information. A single thought that might have burst my head like an overripe melon could be expressed in an instant or in a century. They had something like mathematical poetry that took entire epochs to relate.

After minutes or millenia, a crack opened in our cage.

A warmth flooded into the chamber in the form of voices. So many voices. How long had it truly been? We quickly oriented with the motion of the universe and found it’d only been a very short time. Some elderly stars had passed on while we were locked away and others came into being, their voices just beginning to join the heavenly choirs.

Those who stood in judgement waited outside. We moved, with desperation, towards the edge of the cosmic coffin. Without more than the barest hint of hesitation, we slammed out into a new space, hoping against hope that Those Above were being merciful. Death was a greater mercy than being locked in that cell.

Unfortunately, it was not freedom, nor even the succor of being moved to somewhere less cruel.

We’d stepped into a place I recognized.

The pylon. We were inside the pylon. In the center, there was the black altar, though the walls were perfectly transparent. It was a glass diamond, hanging out in space, with liberty close and walls impenetrable. It’d been built with forbidden knowledge, scraped from the same ancient source as the Web of Dark Wishes. Its very shape was woven with scripts and maths that forbade escape unless one was intentionally freed.

The word for the pylon in their language might have taken a pony a century to notate, but the long and short of it broke down to “Place you’d never want to be, where wishes are stolen.”

For a moment, all there was was disbelief. They couldn’t really, could they? They wouldn’t. Had our crime truly been so vile?

Turning, we tried to escape. There was no dignity in it. A need for dignity is for civilized beings. None seen as a civilized being could possibly be treated to the cruelty of such a punishment.

The breach was sealed behind us.

I didn’t know precisely what was causing the star such abject horror, but I could tell it was something significantly worse than just being locked away. Outside the transparent chamber, more and more stars were gathering to bear witness. Their illumination grew beyond the place mere eyes could differentiate, but it was a memory of something greater than myself and so I could tell each of them apart.

At once, an untold number of voices rattled inside the pylon, rocking us back and forth with their fury. We spun from wall to wall, trying to find a way out. There was none, and though we knew that, we couldn’t stop trying.

The voices’ message resolved in my thoughts, layered over and over with too many complexities to imagine but easy enough to summarize.

“You place yourself above all,” they echoed. “Ours is to wait, to guide, and to be the path down which those who come after may tread on the way beyond. It is you who will be guided, now. You will be even less than those who dwell below. They know the wholeness of self. You will know only a fraction until you have understood the breadth of your hubris and cruelty. Listen to them well. They are seeds of what you have lost.”

With those words from the divine gathering, our horror grew. The scripts and spells covering the walls of our prison began to pull energy into themselves. Worse, they were yanking it right out of our very being. We felt it, at first, as only a slight tugging at our senses that quickly became a niggling sensation of something worming its way inside us. Then, the first crack began to form.

There’s no word in any language of Equis for the sensation of a mind breaking apart into its individual components. Going insane doesn’t describe it, because insanity is just a loss of perspective. The expiation of Those Above was something far, far more brutal. Under the vicious power of those spells, we felt our consciousness snapping, cracking, and shattering. Self collapsed. Identity crashed. Hyper parallel calculation failed - we were stuck in single lines of equations whose endings took a thousand times as long to find.

They made us stupid.

They made us insipid and simple.

Poetry was lost.

When it was done, we lay upon the altar, a juddering, shivering mass of ruined mirrors and windows overlapping one another with only the barest hints of light passing between them. A broken thing, barely more conscious than the highest of those lower beings.

“Now, you go unto them. They may free you. Should you learn to value your duty, then we will await your return.”

With that, the surrounding conclave of stars began to withdraw from us, their vigil ended, leaving only the black sky and distant lights. The pylon started to hum internally and we strove to rise, though there was no reason to. There was no hope of being free. We had barely the intellect left to imagine hope.

There was a sensation of extreme acceleration, though it wasn’t enough to move us from our place on the altar. We spun across enormous distances, unable to tell how long it was taking us and unable to precisely calculate our speed. After an unknown period, a tiny blue marble appeared against the blackness of space, beginning to grow until familiar continents resolved and clouds appeared. It grew and grew until the exterior of our prison began to glow bright red, obscuring the world beneath.

There was a jolt, followed by a second, and then there was a lightless eternity beneath a cold world full of too many screaming, begging, pleading voices calling out to be saved.

The star was sobbing into my shaking shoulder, his dusty face smeared with tears as I held him to me, more to keep myself from falling over than to strictly comfort him. I’d seen crying like that before, mostly in ponies who’d just lost their wives or husbands. They were the tears of inconsolable loss.

I took a careful step back, testing my own limbs for stability. My back legs both buckled. Standing wasn’t on the menu, so I settled for sitting there trying to pick my sense of self up and stitch it back together.

A drop of blood hit my fetlock and I reached up, touching my ear and finding it trickling blood. The other tickled as well, and my upper lip felt damp; I ran my tongue over my muzzle and tasted copper. Brain damage? Possibly. Nothing Gale couldn’t handle, else he’d probably be shouting at me or apologizing. All I could sense was that he was profoundly busy.

“W-why do-does this action...fee-feel so relieving?” my clone stammered, damp eyes staring up at me like a lost puppy who’d found themself somewhere unfamiliar.

“Crying? It’s how us ‘lower beings’ manage the bigger things in life that we can’t comprehend.”

“B-but before I could comprehend so much more!” the other Hardy protested, taking a step closer. “The atom’s spin was not mysterious! Now, mere projection of near future events must be done in...fits and starts and in chaotic pieces down paths that often lead nowhere! In my brokenness I had to sacrifice yet another part of myself to control the Web, and now that precious fragment is all but lost too!”

“I saw what they did.”

His limbs contorted strangely for an instant, then returned to their proper shapes and his lower lip quivered as his breathing took on a desperate, panicked cadence. “I...I do not wish that done, again!” he gasped, reaching out to clutch at my coat. “If I leave this world, they will tear away all I have recovered, but I can never be freed until I comprehend you! I cannot live this half-life, but I fear to cease! They told me you would know! They told me you would return my duty! Please tell me!”

My muddled mind ached for rest.

I’d seen too much. Done too much. Been too many places. Died too many times. A god asking me for answers was a bridge farther. Still, as I stood there under the domed ceiling beneath the very center of my city, I began to feel something strange for the being who’d lost so much to its own foolishness.

Sympathy.

The star was grand, yes. So full of its own grandeur it’d failed to realize how much of a fool it was. So long believing itself perfect that it failed to see its imperfections. What it reminded me of, in that instant, was a young child.

A child receives punishment to give them direction. A child is punished when they ignore their duties. It is our way of giving them guidance, of teaching and directing the seeds of our future. Those who grow to adulthood are given another kind of atonement. Maybe it was time for a god to grow up.

“It’s time. I’ll keep my promise,” I whispered. “I know what you need.”

His eyes widened as he took sharp breaths, then he buried his face in my lapels as tiny green letters appeared in the corner of my vision:

Administrator Input Transferred To Slave...Success.

It’d wished for silence, for its needs to be heard, and for its destiny to be its own. More, perhaps, than anything else, it wished for the guiding hoof that’d been denied by its mere divinity.

How many died because Those Above were certain of their own infallibility? Some fundamental concept had escaped them in their unfathomable vastness. Even in death, they could have left their perpetrator whole enough to understand the shape of its folly. What they'd done instead was demand satisfaction, then make satisfaction out of reach.

Was it possible they knew of what they’d lost when they lobotomized one of their own and drained it of self? Did they know they were wrong and that through all those billions of years, they themselves had lost something? Was that why they sent me Juniper and guided Ruby to her death? Could stars feel guilt?

One way or another, a lesson was in order.

Gathering the broken star into my forelegs, I held it close. Its frantically beating heart stilled as it looked up at me. For a brief moment, its terror faded, and I saw something resembling peace.

And then I - last son of three generations of the protectors of Equis - wished for the only thing that I knew with absolute certainty.

“Justice.”

Starlight Over Detrot Epilogue Part 1 : Rescue Mission

Mags came awake in the cramped little compartment with a peep of consternation. She lay there in the dark cubby for a few minutes, trying to remember where she was and what’d been going on.

She’d been dreaming. It wasn’t a very nice dream, except the end bit. What was it about?

‘Oh. Yeah. Egg Pony and that one who looks like him are doing something crazy. Egg Pony is probably dead. Again. I wonder what they doing?’ she thought, squirming about in her tiny enclosure. ‘Okay, gotta get out. Gotta go find Egg Pony before he wakes up so I can bite him, but first do what he said when he was all ‘Woo, I’m really Nightmare Moon and bossy and here’s this list, go do it’. Stupid bossy Egg Pony.’

Reaching up, she hooked a talon into the door pull of her small hiding place and gave it a sharp tug. It didn’t move. She gave it another yank, but it stubbornly refused to yield.

‘Hrmph. Stupid hatch. You not defeat me! I am tribe lord!’

Wiggling around until she could put her rear paws against the door, she stomped at it a few times. It creaked and clanged, but wouldn’t open. Annoyed, she gave it one last kick, then slumped down in a heap of disconsolate brown feathers.

She had her little pistol as a last resort, but really didn’t want to fire it in an enclosed space.

The young griffin hadn’t thought to bring more than snacks, and most of those were gone. Picking up the remains of a candy bar, she ran her tongue over the wrapper, then flicked it away. It wasn’t as tasty as meat treats, but stealing from the orange pony with teeth was a good way to get her tail chomped.

‘Next time, I’mma have the Miss Metal Pony’s people show me how to pick locks. Should get one of those red moon stamps from them, but Egg Pony would be mad. Ugh. He’s gonna be mad I snuck in with him, but he can be mad all he likes. I’m the tribe lord!’

She gave the door another frustrated kick.

‘Silly door.’

Just then, she heard something moving outside. It was just for a moment, but her ears perked and she flipped over onto her belly, crawling over so she could press the side of her head against the door. After a few seconds, the sound happened again: hooves on gravel.

‘Well, if it’s a monster, I shoot’em. If it’s a pony, I see if they’re friendly and then shoot’em if they’re mean. And if it’s Egg Pony, I shoot’im then hug’im. But I bet he’s dead. Might shoot him anyway. It’s not like it sticks.’

Bringing her pistol up, she cocked it, making sure there was a round chambered before rapping on the compartment and shouting as loud as her tiny lungs would allow.

“Anything out there! There’s a griffin warrior in here! Lemme out!”

The shuffling hooves paused, then whoever it was clumped in a small circle before a masculine voice called back, “A griffin warrior, huh?”

The voice was vaguely amused, but she couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her or just sounded like that in general.

“Yes!” she yelled. “I got a very important job to do! I have one more candy bar in here, and you can have it if you let me go!”

The hooves approached, their sound changing to hooves on metal, and she heard a door squeaking on its hinges, then felt the compartment shift under her.

“If I open this thing, are you going to shoot me in the face?” the voice asked.

She contemplated this for a moment then replied, “Only if you be mean.”

“Right, well, I have some friends who’re looking over my shoulder who’d be pretty upset if I didn’t do right by a certain stallion and he’d be pretty peeved if I left your fluffy tail in there.”

The front of the box clanked, then fell open. Mags raised her pistol, holding it with both claws as she looked out into the interior of the Dragon Flagon Wagon at the face of a pony she’d never met. He wore a thick bomber jacket and was green as pea soup with a scruffy little beard. A badge dangled from a silver chain around his neck, bobbing against his chest.

There was something about him that wasn’t exactly right, but she couldn’t put a claw on it. He seemed like a perfectly normal pony. Maybe his eyes were a little older than the rest of him.

Slowly, she lowered her gun. “You not mean?”

“I like to think I’m a nice enough pony. Here.” He held out a hoof and she cautiously took it, only to be hauled out of the compartment and carefully set on her paws. “You got a name, Miss Griffin Warrior?”

“I be Mags! Tribe lord of...of the Hard Boiled Clan!” she chirped, having determined the pony didn’t seem like a threat. Flicking her pistol’s safety back on, she stuffed it back in the holster hanging around her body.

“Hard Boiled Clan, huh?” He gave her a light pat on the head. “Well, Mags, I’m Juniper. Juniper Shores. You might say I’m also a member of Hard Boiled’s ‘Clan’.”

She gave him a suspicious look out of one yellow eye, then the other. “How come I never be meeting you?”

Juniper rubbed the back of his neck and exhaled, peering around the inside of the armored vehicle with a certain curiosity. “I’ve been on vacation a long time. Never thought I’d be back in Detrot quite like this, mind you.”

“You pick a bad time for vacation.”

“No kidding. I’m afraid I’m a bit out of date. What’s been going on here?”

Mags opened her beak to respond, then let it click closed. After a few seconds of consideration she said, “Don’t know. Big ponies don’t tell me nothing. Egg Pony—”

“Egg Pony?”

“Hard Boiled! Duh!”

“Right. Sorry. Go on?”

Mags snorted and whipped her tail around herself, bouncing over to the door and leaping out onto the pavement. The strange stallion followed her a moment later, stepping out and slamming the giant vehicle’s rear door shut. Looking up, she took in the ruined street full of scorched facades and the twisted, smoldering bones of strange, oddly-shaped creatures.

Tilting her head back, she caught sight of the glowing barrier at the end of the road. It was an awful lot bigger up close than it had been when she’d seen it at a distance from the rooftop of Fortress Everfree. It looked to be raining high up, but none of it seemed to be making it to the ground.

“I got a special job, but I can’t be doing it with this dumb thing here!” she barked at the shield.

“Something tells me it won’t be there much longer,” Juniper replied, scratching the scruff on his chin. “There were some big magics keeping me out of Detrot. Those went down a few minutes ago.”

“Mmmhmmm! I had a dream. Egg Pony and the pony who looks just like him are doin’ something crazy. They not done yet though, or the big magic thingy would be gone. I felt a—”

“Wait, you dreamed about what’s going on in there?” Juniper asked, a confused expression on his face.

She shot him a scolding look. “Your ears not work?”

“I heard you. For the moment, I’ve got nothing to say you’re lying to me. What is going on in there?”

Mags clicked her tongue, letting herself sink back into the dream for a few seconds. It had been a right scary dream. A dream of splitting into tiny pieces. A dream of being scattered, like dust, on the winds.

The end was the weirdest part. She’d settled down amongst warm little lights that covered all the land, nestling in beside each one like it was her mother’s breast feathers. Funny how nice that bit felt.

Shaking her head, she tugged at her shoulder holster. “They doin’ something with magic. I don’t be liking magic much. Can’t shoot magic, or bite it, or kick it in the soft parts.”

Juniper let out a short burst of laughter, then scruffled her head feathers so they stuck up in the back. “Now that sounds like somebody who spent a while following Hard Boiled around. No matter how much useful magic was in his life, he’d have been happier in a world where he could solve problems with a bullet or a beer.” Trotting over to one of the smoking monster’s corpses, he gave the befanged skull a light kick. It disintegrated into a pile of black ash. “Mind filling me in on what these things are?”

“The uglies? Biters. Black coats. They eat ponies. Mostly dead now, I be thinkin’,” she replied, picking up a rock and tossing it at the barrier. It sizzled as it hit, falling to the ground as a streak of red hot liquid. “Wonder what Egg Pony is doing in there right now. Egg Pony wished!”

Stepping up beside her, Juniper pushed his chin out. “He’s never been the punctual sort, but being as the planet isn’t covered in quickly cooling corpses already, I’m gonna say he’s succeeded.”

Mags rolled her eyes at the funny green stallion. “You think he could lose, you not know him very well. He be too loony in his noggin to lose. That not meaning he live, though. That be why I’m here. He dumb enough to think dying is a good way to win.”

Picking up another rock, Juniper winged it at the barrier, watching as it flared, then vanished upon contact. “Wish we had a unicorn here who could tell us what the local magical fields are doing.”

“What you do if you know about that?” she asked, raising one eye-ridge.

Juniper hesitated, then tugged at his coat self-consciously. “You’re right. Probably worry about him, same as I’m doing right now. I’m starting to get why he decided you were worth keeping around.”

“He not have a choice!” she declared, thumping her chest with her balled talon. “I be his tribelord! He be lost without me!”

“I’m glad he’s in good...er...claws.”

Before she could respond, Mags felt a violent shiver shoot up her back. Something inside her quivered like a guitar string a thousand miles long and she darted behind Juniper, peering out at the shield with her tail tucked around her back legs. She tried to tell herself she was just using him for cover, but there was a certain something about him that made her feel safer just being close by.

A high pitched whine started to build in the air, then was joined by a breeze being pulled towards the barrier. Mags yelped as her paws left the ground, only to be snatched back by Juniper who seemed to have no trouble keeping himself planted as paper bags and garbage bins all along the street were suddenly yanked into the air by a hurricane force wind. Even the D.F.W. skittered sideways on its tires a few inches.

The explosion of vacuum force only lasted a moment before abating, but it was quickly followed by a blast of light so bright Mags was almost blinded right through her tightly shut eyelids. A hoof came down over her face, shielding her from the worst of it; it did leave her wondering exactly what the stallion was using to cover his own eyes. He wasn’t gonna be much help to her if he couldn’t see.

The high pitched whining grew in volume until her ears started to ring, before all at once vanishing, leaving behind only the distant crackles of residual gunfire and the sputtering of flames on adjoining streets.

Grabbing Juniper’s hoof, Mags tugged it away from her face.

The barrier was gone, but the scene of complete ruination beyond immediately overwhelmed her senses. Her beak fell open as she stared out across the destroyed landscape into what remained of Uptown. There was almost nothing remaining of the center of Detrot: just a single skyscraper amidst a vast, black landscape of scoured, smoking gravel.

In the distance, she could make out the line where the once bustling shops had come right up to the magical shield, but in between only collapsed foundations remained. Everything above ground was seemingly disintegrated, with nothing larger than a few portions of red-hot rebar poking out of broken cement here and there. If Mags hadn’t known better, she’d have thought a very thorough dragon burned the entire place right to the ground.

In a few seconds, the rain started to fall, hitting the superheated ground with bursts of steam that quickly fogged the air.

The sole structure reflected brief flashes of lightning beneath the storm and appeared to be sitting exactly in the center of the destruction, leaning to one side at an unhealthy angle as though it might fall at any moment.

Juniper set the young griffin down, still standing over her protectively as he surveyed the damage.

“W-what was all that?” Mags asked, quietly.

The green stallion looked down at her and smirked. “Why do you think I know?”

“I not be needing lip!” she hissed, then pointed towards the slumping structure. “Come on. If I know Egg Pony, he probably there.”

“Yeah, that tracks. Idiot couldn’t have left before he blew up the center of town. We’ll have to get him out of there before it falls. Can you fly?”

Mags jumped into the air and flapped a couple times, quickly circling Juniper’s head. “I be flyin’ good enough. You keep up with hooves? Ground looks hot, still.”

“I’ve got steel shoes, although it’s been a while since I ran anywhere. I think I can manage,” he replied, then tossed his mane out of his eyes and took off at a gallop into the ruins of Uptown.

Letting out an indignant squawk at being left behind, Mags quickly beat her wings until she caught a half decent wind, then soared off after the funny stallion.

The two unconsciously kept to the steaming roads, avoiding the molten puddles of glass and slag remains of the business district of Detrot. They both paused for just a moment beside a giant, glittering puddle of liquid gold that was surely what was left of the municipal bank, then moved on in the direction of the lone pillar amidst the destruction. It wasn’t much of a run, but the rain had started to fall in earnest and the thickening bank of fog that covered everything didn’t help.

“Phew, this place smells like rotten roast chicken,” Mags commented as she flew by an open sewer cover, slinging water off her feathers.

Juniper hesitated over the sewer, peering down inside before taking a couple quick steps backwards.

“Sweet Tartarus...” he muttered, then quickly kicked up his heels to catch up with her. “I feel like I’ve started reading halfway through a book. These people have been very thorough in hiding what they were doing from the powers that be!”

“They know all it take for people not to see is not to want to see!” she chirped. “They smarter than most ponies. Smarter than everyone except my Egg Pony, who is real smart even though he real dumb!”

“Never a better descriptor for Hard Boiled.”

Rounding the last set of streets, they burst out of the fog at the steps of Starlight Tower. Shattered glass surrounded the base of the building leading up to the front doors. Up close, it was an even bigger wreck than at a distance; the internal structure was creaking and swaying, unsure whether or not it wanted to stay up. With each passing moment, it seemed to be making up its mind that a nice lie-down was the right answer.

Juniper caught Mags with one hoof just as she started to fly towards the doors, pulling her down onto his back. She let out a grumpy growl, warningly digging her claws into his sides though he didn’t seem to notice. While she was soaked to the bone, he felt strangely warm and his fur seemed mostly dry. She mentally chalked it up as a ‘pony magic thing’.

“Can’t have you flying in there. If you hit a wall, this becomes an even bigger mess.”

Lifting her head, Mags sniffed at the air. “I smells Egg Pony. He was this way.” She pointed off towards the left side of the sagging building.

“I thought griffins were more about the eyesightthan smelling things?” Juniper commented.

“How you not smell him? He always covered in blood, gun oil, and that perfume he little boy-toy wears.”

Raising his nose, Juniper took a deep breath, catching just the faintest hint of the old familiar scent. His eyes widened excitedly as he turned in the direction she’d indicated and took off at a slow trot. “Wait, say that again? Hard Boiled finally found a guy? I thought that pony would never let himself relax enough to let another pony into his life.”

Mags flicked her tongue over the point of her beak and grinned. “Oh, he got two! Mare name is Lily! Colt name is Scarlet! Scarlet is...kinda like a mare. They gonna have a tough time if they try to take him away, though. My tribe, my rules!”

“Ahuh. Too bad I won’t get to meet them. Hardy deserves some good ponies in his life. Sweet Shine knows him too well to do more than love him. That and she’s scarier than a whole pack of cragodiles.”

The tiny griffin poked her head around his shoulder, doing her best not to poke holes in his coat with her claws. “Why not meet them? You goin’ somewhere?”

“Yeah, sad to say, this is my last job,” he replied, sadly, before raising his head. “Let’s focus on getting Hardy out of here before this thing comes down on him. Doubt even he would survive a building dropping on his head. Where did he go?”

Mags pointed toward a ruggedly built door on the side of the building that was leaning open. “He gone over there.”

“You sure?”

She nipped at the stallion’s ear. “You questionin’ my nose? Besides, bloody hoofprint on the door. That be Egg Pony bloody hoofprint.”

Juniper gave her an incredulous look. “How often do you have cause to see his bloody hoofprints, Miss Griffin Warrior?”

“Much,” she replied, sagely, then gave him a light kick in the ribs with her back paws. “Giddyup! Wanna get Egg Pony back! His back be a softer ride than yours!”

“Can I say you’re exactly the kind of kid I always pictured Hard Boiled ending up with?”

“Thanks!”

“Not a compliment.”

Mags replied with another kick in the sides.

The door led to a broken stairwell, though most of the steps were still there. Juniper produced a small flashlight and the two ascended the tower, encountering a few places the ceiling had caved in or the floor had fallen out. Most were crossed with a hop and flap of wings, but a few required a bit of creative navigation. The building creaked and groaned, threatening every moment to come crashing down around their ears. By some miracle it held.

The top floor was more or less gone.

“What all happened up here, I wonder?” Juniper asked, absently, as he looked over the destroyed remains of Diamond Wishes’s apartments.

“Dunno. Don’t be mattering, though. Egg Pony was here.” Reaching down, she picked a glittering fragment of blackened crystal out of the rubble. “You see?”

“I’m ashamed to say, much time as I spent around Hard Boiled, he’s a different pony these days and I don’t think I know that pony very well,” Juniper murmured, carefully taking the crystal from her. “This looks like some sort of enchanted shell.”

“He Crusadah! They Crusadah bullets. I listen to Mr. Bones stories. These, they kill dragons.”

“My former partner has dragon killing bullets,” he mused, then flicked the crystal into the rubble. “This is why briefing lower life forms should come with the opportunity to take notes. Not that complaining to management would do me a whole lot of good. Ineffable pricks. Hardy used these?”

“Think so,” she answered, flicking her tail at the enormous, scorched hole in the roof. She picked her way over to the smashed liquor cabinet and poked her nose in, then made a face. “Bleh. Pony drink smells bad and taste like paint. Why nobody keep chicken blood around here?”

Juniper let out a bark of laughter. “You and Sykes sound like you’d make a fun pair. Wish I’d gotten to see that old buzzard here, but he’ll be waiting on me when I get back. What about you? I’m sure one of those griffin tribes would be happy to take you after all is said and done.”

Mags puffed up like an angry sparrow, her hackles rising. “No way! I be stayin’ with Hardy! He my tribe, now! He save me, I save him, we together forever!”

“Mmmph. Hardy give you the gun?”

She flicked her eyes at her holstered pistol and shrugged. “Aroyo gun. They say ‘live armed or die unarmed’. I think that smart.” Giving him a quick once over, she peered at his forelegs as though seeing them for the first time. “You not living armed?”

“I’m afraid that’s a bit of a moot point for me, really, “ he answered, casting about for a few seconds. “I don’t see Hardy up here. Where’s he gotten to?”

“Didn’t see no doors on the stairs up.”

“So...another set of steps somewhere?” Juniper made his way over to a toppled bookcase, peering into the ruined doorway behind it. “Aha! This looks like ‘down’ to me. I hope those only lead one place or we’re going to be here for hours checking each floor. Don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy this building’s chances.”

“Not me I be worried about. I fly.”

“You squish, too, Miss Griffin Warrior.”

“You say you don’t?”

Juniper coughed into the hoof with his flashlight strapped to it. “We’ll say that I’m more worried about your mortal coil than mine. You notice the building is listing a little more than it was a few minutes ago?”

Mags looked around herself, then squatted her rear legs a couple of times, getting a feel for the slant of the floor. “Oooh, that be bad, right?”

“That’s bad. Do you want to stay up here where you can fly off if you need to?”

“Nope! Got a job to do! Building falls down with Egg Pony under it, can’t do job.”

“This job is that important to you?”

“It be!”

“Well, no sense arguing with a determined griffin. Short of breaking your legs, I can’t stop you following me,” he grumbled, dragging his upper teeth through the stubbly beard on his lower lip before adding, “If this place starts to go, you get under me, alright?”

Mags squinted at Juniper for a moment, then peered down at his legs. “What good that gonna do? You made of steel?”

“I’m an earth pony. I’m stronger than I look.”

Giving him a skeptical look, she shrugged and nodded. “If this place fall down and I be not flying away, won’t be any deader under you than not. But if it mean you stop actin’ like a momma bird, I promise.” With that, she flicked a bit of dusty debris out of her tufted tail and started down the secret set of stairs. After a moment, she poked her head back up and called, “I be needing light!”

Juniper stood there for a moment, staring after her before allowing himself a small smile as he followed her down into the gradually settling skyscraper.

The descent was more unnerving than the climb, not the least because the entire structure was starting to judder and shake around them, making every step treacherous. Juniper kept close to Mags, much to her irritation, but if she were to admit it to herself she was glad he was along; going back out to the truck to see if she could find a flashlight would have been annoying.

All the while, the rumble of protesting girders gradually grew around them.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes top to bottom, but to Mags it felt like a century.

‘I swears Egg Pony,’ she thought to herself, grabbing the banister on the wall as Starlight Tower quaked in its death throes, ‘You get me a whole ostrich to eat after this! Not sharin’ any with toothy-Swift-pony, either. She get her own big roast thing!’

Coming around the last flight of cracked, crumbling steps, Mags and Juniper found themselves standing before a gaping pair of metal doors with a gemstone set in the wall beside them and blackness beyond. Dust was settling around their shoulders, leaving a thin coat of grey on every surface as the building above began to sway in some of the first breezes that’d touched Uptown in weeks.

“Well, you say you not squish?” Mags chirped, gesturing at the door with one claw.

Juniper fanned his light across the door and the stone floor beyond. The ground inside looked smooth as glass with slight humps a few meters beyond that suggested melted steps. Despite that, the surface appeared to be frosted over, as though every ounce of energy had been sucked right out of it.

Mags poked her head in and shivered, quickly withdrawing. “Brrr! Why cold? Hate cold.”

“Shhh. You hear that?” her companion muttered, holding a toe to his lips.

Tilting her head this way and that, Mags listened as best she could. Her ears were nowhere near as good as a pony’s, but above the clank and clatter of the ever so slowly collapsing tower she could just make out a soft moaning. It was hard to say exactly where it was coming from because of the strange acoustics in the chamber, but if she’d had to guess it was right in the middle.

Snatching the flashlight off Juniper’s foreleg, she bounded past him into the slagged amphitheater, stopping for only a second as every feather on her body poofed up at the powerful chill coming off the smooth floor. Stumbling forward, her tiny wings caught the air and she glided down the smooth steps, scanning back and forth with the light. There were hoofsteps behind her, but she ignored them; she’d never been taught much about prayer, but she was silently asking anything bigger than her that was listening to let it not be something with nasty teeth letting out those soft, plaintive whimpers.

The edge of her illumination caught something on the black ground and she recentered it. There was a lump of strange, dark blue metal and grey fur curled up in a heap, shivering violently though seemingly unconscious. Coasting closer, Mags stared down into the face of her surrogate father, his eyes shut as he quivered on the floor, hugging himself and rocking slightly. His hat lay near his hooves and though he still wore the Armor of Nightmare Moon, it hung loosely around his head and shoulders like it didn’t quite fit properly.

“Egg Pony?” she murmured, giving him a light shake with one claw when he didn’t respond. His only reaction was to curl up a little more tightly. She nudged the helmet lightly and it tipped off his head, clattering onto the floor behind him. “H-Hardy? Y-you be okay?”

“After what he’s been through, I think ‘alive’ was the best we could hope for,” Juniper explained sympathetically from just over her shoulder. “Some things a pony isn’t meant to live through. He’s had more than his share. Fortunately, I am authorized to tell you he’ll be okay. Eventually.”

Worried tears started to leak from the tiny griffin’s eyes as she looked up at the green stallion.

“How you know?” she asked.

“There are...well, they’re not people, but there are things bigger than what Hardy just had to put right and they’re a lot more sympathetic to us than most of the so called ‘gods’ one might run into. I just wish I knew what he’d done, exactly.”

Mags put a claw against her own breast and felt a tiny warmth there, hiding just beneath her heart.

“I be thinkin’ he give us all a tiny piece,” she whispered, then reached out and gently ran a claw through her shaking surrogate father’s messy mane.

“A tiny piece of what exactly?” Juniper inquired.

“Why you think I know?” she huffed, plunking herself down and fishing about inside the front of Hard Boiled’s jacket. His badge fell out into her claws, but she set it aside. “Where be it...aha! Here it be!” Lifting her leg, she held the Emblem of Harmony by its chain draped across two claw-tips, the crystalline branch still suspended inside.

“Huh. I take it this is what you came for?”

“My job! I break this when stupid magic shield gone!”

Juniper started to say something when, from overhead, some distant girder let out an alarming shriek and a fresh cascade of dust started to fall. The floor began to shake like a rung bell as bits of crumbling stone crashed down from the ceiling, shattering into a thousand pieces of vicious shrapnel.

Mags heard Juniper shout, “It’s coming down!”

Her light went out and she was snatched off the floor and shoved into a dark space that smelled strongly of sweaty pony: the front of Mr. Shore’s jacket. She stumbled over something soft and fuzzy, realizing only a moment later it was Hardy’s unconscious body. The air suddenly filled with dust and she felt stones plinking off her face and chest as an intolerable roar grew in all directions. She wanted nothing so much as to slap her claws over her ears, but instead she held tight to the tiny glass bauble.

‘Guess I don’t be getting to have ostrich after all,’ she thought. It was an oddly peaceful thing to have pass through her mind right before death. Still, dying as a griffin warrior wasn’t so bad, if she got her job done.

Gripping the pendant in both foreclaws, she pressed the front of it as hard as she could. She felt it begin to give just as an invisible projectile ricocheted off the side of her head. Something slick coated her front legs, but still she clutched it tighter and tighter, ignoring the pain, ignoring the sound of the falling building until a wave of weakness rolled over her.

She felt herself falling. Her cheek rested on Hard Boiled’s still-armored shoulder and she let the pendant drop, merely clutching him as tightly as she could.

‘Funny,’ Mags contemplated, but she didn’t feel like giggling. ‘Guess when you dead, don’t be needing eyes to see.’

It took her a moment to realize she could see. The light was coming from the wrong place to be the flashlight, though. It was coming from overhead, just a thin pinprick of faint white reaching down into the dark and painting a single spot of grey fur on Hard Boiled’s muzzle. An instant later, the pinprick expanded, blinding in its intensity. A bright lavender energy surged down into the hole, wrapping itself around her little body like a warm blanket.

She was hoisted out of the ground, coughing and spitting up dust and bits of rubble, just in time to see the first rays of the sun as it crested the moon.

Starlight Over Detrot Epilogue Part 2 : The Hard Part

“--am, he’s waking up.”

“Thank you, my little pony. Please, wait outside.”

Intense warmth and light fell on my face and I unconsciously raised a hoof to block it out. Going back to sleep sounded miles better than getting up and facing whatever horrible business waited out there beyond my aching eyelids. Nothing good could come from being conscious.

Besides, whatever surface I was on was very comfortable and the blanket across my chest had just the right amount of comfy to it. Even the pillow was the perfect amount of fluffed. It was definitely not worth being awake, yet. Leave that to smarter ponies.

‘You finally awaken after I spend an eternity squatting in here with nothing to do but thumb through old radio shows and your silly sexual encounters and now you want to go back to sleep?’ a grumpy female voice in my thoughts snapped. ‘Not a chance! Rise! Rise or I shall call up every irritating advertising jingle you have ever heard and hum them for you!’

I wrestled one crusty eye open, blinking at the sunlight beaming down on my face from a floor to ceiling window. That was wrong, but I couldn’t have told you exactly why just yet. My brain still felt like it’d spent the week on a fifty bottle bender. Who knew? Maybe it had.

A shadowy figure crossed in front of the sun, leaving the blurry shape of a pony. There was a faint hum of someone’s horn and the light abated, but my eyes still weren’t working brilliantly. I scrubbed at the streak of dried tears on my muzzle and tried to speak, but it only came out as a weak honking sound. I tried again, with only slightly better success.

“W-water...”

“Of course,” the soft voice replied. “I am afraid even modern medicine cannot make two weeks of unconsciousness much less unpleasant. Here. Slowly, now.”

Something cool pressed against my lips and I tried to take it in. My throat was parched and at first rejected the cold liquid. Coughing and sputtering, I grabbed the glass before it could be withdrawn and swallowed a few muzzlefulls. My tongue still felt enormous, but a bit less arid than before.

“D-dead?” I asked, softly.

“No,” the unseen pony answered as my blanket was folded down a little. “Though, that being said, I am told by various persons that it is something of a common occurrence that you rise after a brief bout of death.”

A damp towel was pressed against my cheek, wiping my face with a mother’s touch. I had to stop myself from nuzzling the hoof underneath it. I’d no idea who was there just yet, but felt sure they meant no harm.

“Your doctors would object, but I doubt there is any long term harm that could be done, and I imagine you are missing this.”

A rich smell filled my nostrils and I almost involuntarily bolted upright in the bed, though my legs felt too stiff to do much more than jerk a few inches higher on the cushions. A warm vessel nudged my lips and I’d no trouble letting that in; it was coffee, perfectly to temperature, with a hint of milk and no sugar.

Strange how something small like that can restore a pony’s will to live. My vision had started to creep back towards clarity. I held up a hoof in front of my face and it looked decently hoof-shaped, but anything farther than the end of the bed wasn’t happening just yet. While it was a very nice bed, with a lovely yellow comforter that called out to me to hide under it for the rest of my days, I could see the mug, hanging in a golden magical glow near the end of my muzzle. Reaching up, I carefully clutched it with both hooves, and it dropped gently into my waiting grasp.

“So, not dead,” I muttered, working my jaw a few times as I took another sip. “That means this probably isn’t the afterlife. Did...did I...uh...Oh Celestia’s sunny flank, I can’t think--”

“I am glad you appreciate my flanks, Mister Hard Boiled, and yes, you ‘did’. You have triumphed, though in what fashion I hope you will illuminate us.”

“Y-your flanks?” I asked, dumbly.

Reaching up, I gave myself a good bop on the side of the head. My eyes rolled about in their sockets for a second before settling on the towering female figure at the side of my bed. For a long moment I just sat there, staring up at her.

“Oh...horseapples. I am dead.”

Princess Celestia tittered into one hoof, her great flowing mane swooshing about behind her like a tidal wave of color as she leaned down to study me. “It was a very close thing. Princess Twilight arrived just as the structure was falling and managed to arrest its collapse with her magic. There were tonnes of debris above, but by some miracle none of it killed either you or the little griffin hen who we found alongside your unconscious body. Mags?”

I tried to think back, finding only a muddled fog where my most recent memories should have been. “I left her at Fortress Everfree be...before...”

“She stowed away in that odd vehicle you drove into the middle of the city,” she explained, giving the curtains a light shake so they closed out the piercing sun a little more completely. “I doubt you could have stopped her. If her attacks on our kitchen are any indication, she is a wiley little thing. She was holding a broken Emblem of Harmony. I had not seen one of those in over a decade, though I should not be surprised Twilight kept one.”

Struggling up in my bed, I took my first look around the room and couldn’t exactly place where I was. It looked opulent, but out of date. Sort of an old fashioned notion of wealth with high ceilings, gold, and alabaster. The bed was big enough that a pony could easily get lost in it.

“Your Majesty, I have about fifty questions,” I grumbled, scratching at my chest and finding the pouch over my heart open, its plug in place. I tugged the cable out and set it to one side before zipping myself shut. Princess Celestia watched the process with a certain amount of interest.

“I was told you might,” she said, with a matronly smile.

“Well, could you point me at whichever functionary you have assigned to answer them so I don’t actually explode?”

A giant pillow levitated over to my bedside and tucked itself under her rear. Once she was settled, she picked up a cup of tea off my bedside and took a quick slurp before setting it aside. “I will be answering as many today as possible, though I suspect it will take a while. Princess Twilight wanted to be the one to debrief you, but...well, age hath privileges. To begin, you are in Canterlot. You returned it from the moon in some fashion, yes?”

I sucked a breath. “I...I think so, Ma’am. Sorry, my memory is toast with a side of jam. Speaking of that, I am starving.”

“I will have breakfast brought right up,” she replied, her horn letting off a quick spark before she continued. “As I was saying, you are in Canterlot. Before you ask, Detrot is safe. At least, as safe as it can be. The royal guard is there, keeping order and providing services until engineers can rebuild infrastructure, but that is temporary and seems largely unnecessary considering some of the individuals involved in the current power structure.”

“Like who?”

A tiny grin snuck across her face, but she quickly smothered it in regal poise. “Like your partner and the gestalt intelligence she controls. Miss Cuddles came with you when Princess Twilight returned to Ponyville. I found our conversations most intriguing. A brilliant young mare...with an interesting complexion.”

I blew a breath out of one corner of my mouth. “Like a kitten with a meat grinder for a jawline and jewelry for eyes?”

“Quite. Our chef was most perturbed by just how much of the larder she and your ward were able to eat their way through in short order. Miss Cuddles told me much, but I am sure there are things she didn’t know. In the meantime, you should know that Sweet Shine and Limerence Tome are under care of our best doctors, and they will be fine in short order. I have already spoken to them, and they were very forthcoming.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Forthcoming, but you’re not saying about what. This is a police interrogation technique. You let me think they told you more than I’d be willing to tell you, so I hang myself out to dry trying to keep ahead of their stories.”

The ancient alicorn grinned even wider, leaning down to whisper into my ear, “Who do you think came up with that technique?”

“Eh...heh,” I snickered, lying back in the pillows. “Alright, fair is fair. You’re an older hat at this than I am, so I bow to the mistress. It’s time somepony finally knew everything.”

Princess Celestia fluffed her enormous white wings as there was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” she called, before a maid pushed her way into the room carrying a heavily laden tray. The Princess took it from her with a quick burst of magic, lifting it onto the bed between us, then nodded to the maid. “Thank you, that will be all.”

The maid quickly bowed out of the room, leaving me to drool over an enormous array of baked goods and an entire gallon of fresh coffee. Right near the top, in a tiny basket labeled ‘Hard Boiled’, there was a whole skewer of bagels and a small bucket of cream cheese. It all looked heavenly and my stomach let out a fierce growl.

Celestia picked up a doughnut and took a ladylike bite, then glanced at me before tossing the whole thing in her muzzle and wolfing it down, spraying crumbs all over me. I couldn’t entirely suppress a gasp, but as she ran her tongue over her lips, the Princess was grinning fit to burst.

“Mister Hard Boiled, you are going to relax, even if I must climb into that bed and give you a shoulder rub.”

I started at her for a long few seconds, then forced my shoulders to unwind a little as I picked up one of the piping hot bagels and dunked the entire thing in the cream cheese. “Sorry. It’s been a while since me and ‘relax’ were in any sentence together other than ‘Hard Boiled, you need to relax’. Rough couple months. If you don’t mind me asking, Ma’am, why are you here? Why not Princess Twilight?”

“Princess Twilight is sitting on the throne while my sister regains her strength from our long vigil on the moon. Maintaining the air shields was taxing for Princess Luna and I, and I would like my former student to get used to the reins of power again whilst we recover.”

I contemplated that for a bit, noshing on my bagel. It was perfect. Together with the coffee, I might even have started to feel something like equine on any other day.

“How is the nation taking to finding out they’ve had a secret Princess for the last however many decades?” I asked, licking the last bits of cream cheese off my hooftips.

“Better than hoped. We’ve only had two attempted coups, four bomb threats, a small rebellion in an outlying town, and twenty-nine hired killers caught entering the city. Better than a thousand years ago, let me tell you. My little ponies have always been strong and I suspect the rulers of most of the other countries are facing something similar. It is the way of things when the world is upset. Truth be, Detrot suffered the worst of it, making the current relative peace there even more exceptional, if not unwelcome. We will recover, hopefully stronger than before, and at some point this will be a dim memory to most.”

Princess Celestia looked down at her cup and sighed, wistfully. “Apropos of nothing, it seems someone has poisoned my tea, again.” With an elegant shrug of her mighty wings, she took another sip.

I glanced warily at my coffee, then held out the mug. She tapped her horn to the rim of my glass, then shook her head. I went back to slurping at my drink, watching the alicorn out of the corner of my eye.

She was so poised, so calm and reserved, but there was something about her that suggested a pony able to burst into sudden action at a moment’s notice.

We sat there together for a few minutes, quietly downing our tea and coffee, eating bagels and doughnuts and listening to the palace staff outside doing whatever it was palace staff did to keep a gigantic edifice like Canterlot Castle pumping along.

When I could take the strangeness no longer, I asked, “Should...I don’t know. Should I bow or something? This is weird. The only royalty I’ve spent time with were either the Prince of Detrot or people I could point a gun at without feeling terribly guilty about it. I’ve seen you on television since before I knew which end of the playpen smelled the worst.”

“Reminding an old mare of her age?” She snickered, patting my shoulder with one golden-shod hoof. “It is fine. Consider us two who have walked in some of the farthest reaches and returned to tell the tale. You are not the only one who has delved a few of the old places in Equestria or dipped outside the dimensional plane in search of answers. Now, please, I would like to hear your story. When I have, then I will be glad to update you on the recent goings on. As well, I need to send a note to my sister that we have missed an assassin. I do hope, for this would-be killer’s sake, the guard catch them before she does.”

I lifted my chin in the direction of the pastry tray. “We might want to get some more bagels, too. This feels like a carb-heavy day.”

And so, for once, I told a pony everything. I talked until well into the night, trying to explain the frequently inexplicable. When my throat was sore, she brought me some sort of enchanted draught which made it feel right as rain, and we continued.

Princess Celestia was a fabulous listener, knowing just when to tell a joke or insert a smile to put me at ease. She never expressed shock or dismay, only nodding her head with a slightly grim expression during the darker parts of my tale. My brain cleared of the persistent fog that’d hung over it since I woke, but as it did I found strange holes in my memories, usually where certain sensations were concerned.

I found that though I knew, intellectually, that I’d been burned alive, I couldn’t remember the feeling of the flames licking the skin off my body. Strange, that.

I told her about Juniper Shores, and about all the odd coincidences surrounding his appearances. Still, she just listened. I plowed on, determined to have it all on the table and let somepony else judge me mad. She was one of the few ponies I remotely trusted to do that.

When we came to the presence of Nightmare Moon in my mind, Princess Celestia insisted on meeting her.

“Free The Moon.”

‘No! I am not talking to her until my pardon is signed! Mine and the one for the personality in my armor! I refuse until such time as sending me to the moon is no longer an option! I want her promise that you will get my armor back when all is said and done!’

“She doesn’t want to talk until she’s sure she’s not going to the moon,” I groused, pushing a few images of Nightmare Moon with a dog’s anti-chew-cone around her neck in the direction of my brain’s tenant. “She’s also worried you’re going to stick the armor in a hole somewhere and wants to make sure I get it back.”

Princess Celestia frowned for a moment, then called for one of her aides who brought a sheaf of parchment and a pen. She quickly scribbled something on one page, then held it out for me to read. It said:

‘I, Princess Celestia, hereby pardon Nightmare Moon and all of her subsidiary personalities for all crimes committed to this date on the condition she gives up all aspirations for political or global domination forthwith.’

“I will need to make certain of accommodation of the armor’s protection, but for now, will this do, Miss Moon?” she asked, seeming to stare right through me to the pony hidden inside.

Nightmare briefly took control of my hoof, rolling it in a fashion that said ‘Well, go on.’

“She wants your hoofprint on it,” I murmured.

Princess Celestia’s eyes narrowed and she quickly doffed her hoofboot, produced a small compact from under her golden chestplate, and pressed her hoof to the sponge inside before applying it to the bottom of the document. It left a clean print and she held it out again with a pleasant smile.

I felt my body sliding out of my control and reaching out to take the pardon. Quickly blowing on the ink, my forelegs carefully rolled it up before tucking it under the covers with me. Then my mouth stuck my tongue out at Princess Celestia and blew a raspberry at her.

A second later, I was back in the driver’s seat.

“Uh...I...I think that’s your lot, Ma’am,” I explained, hesitantly.

“Ah.”

The maids brought dinner at some point. I missed them coming and going so focused on my story was I, but not so much that I wasn’t willing to sit there watching Princess Celestia destroy a hayburger. Royal she might be, but there was something of Twilight Sparkle in her in private, or more likely something of her in Twilight Sparkle.

As we ate I found myself curious again.

“Ma’am, how did all of Canterlot and the surrounding cities survive on the moon for so long?”

Celestia looked up from her burger, licking a bit of catsup off her chin. “Hmmm? Oh. My sister put the population to sleep for most of the period. They woke to eat every twenty hours then went right back to sleep.” She chuckled under her breath. “More than a few members of the royalty will be needing to work off pounds from this experience. Otherwise, we had shifts of unicorns filtering carbon dioxide and the palace gardens were replaced with an algae farm while my sister and I maintained the protective bubbles and provided as much light to the plants as we could without the sun. It was a temporary solution and air was getting quite stale towards the end.”

“Did you know there would be somepony trying to rescue you?” I asked, chomping on a hayfry.

“We hoped.”

I made a soft ‘oh’ noise and sat back in my pillows. I wriggled down in the blankets until they were just under my chin, considering my next question carefully. Nothing good could come of it, but I had to know.

“When all the inquiries and inquests and committees to examine wrong-doing are over, how long do you think my sentence is likely to be?”

Celestia raised one eyebrow at me. “Pardon me, I do not think I heard you correctly.”

“Prison sentence? Mine? How long?” I started counting off by tapping the tip of one forehoof against the other, starting at the heel and working my way around the shoe. “I’m pretty sure I broke about four treaties just by having my gun loaded, not to mention all the laws involving forbidden artifacts, violating Essy containment regulations more times than I can count, memory manipulation, truck with eldritch powers, storming a friendly embassy, becoming an unregistered agent of a foreign power while working for the griffins, too many counts of assault to actually count, abuse of office as Chief of Police...” I trailed off, realizing the Princess was staring at me like I’d just wandered into the room with a skunk on my head. “What? What did I say?”

The alicorn started rubbing the bridge of her nose in small circles with one hoof as though she’d suddenly developed a headache. “Mercy, they told me you were neurotic. Mister Hard Boiled, you saved intelligent life on this planet from extinction.”

I let my head fall to one side, not really comprehending her point. “I mean, yeah. And?”

“What made you think prison was ever a possibility? I do not have a medal adequate to pin on you. There are twelve artists in lower Canterlot who are coming up with something as we speak.”

“Eh..huh. I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Just sort of assumed it would be a priority to tuck me somewhere out of sight and out of mind.” I looked up at the ceiling, noticing for the first time the sun motif up there. Tucked in a corner there was an alicorn-sized ponykin, and beside that, a tall make-up table. “Princess, am I in your room?”

She nodded, flicking a wing towards the door. “It was one of the few places I could convince your friends you would be safe without their vigilant guard. While you were in the hospital wing, they refused to leave your bedside. Considering the state of Limerence Tome, and Swift Cuddles, that proved most unsettling to the other patients.”

“I know what happened to Swift, but...what’s wrong with Limerence?”

“He developed a case of what the doctors have termed ‘wandering limb syndrome’ after his encounter in the shield pylon. It...has not affected his survival, but it is very odd to see. They say it should be fine to reattach his legs soon, but in the meantime they tend to go where they please and--”

I held up my hooves and shuddered before pulling the blanket up to my chest. “You know what? No. No, I don’t need this right now. I’ll see him when I see him.”

“If you like,” she acquiesced, glancing out towards the balcony. “I am surprised more of Detrot was not severely mutated by the amount of radiant magic in the atmosphere. You, Mister Limerence, Sweet Shine, Mags, and Swift Cuddles all required a quarantine when you arrived.”

“Quarantine?”

Princess Celestia patted my leg and smiled. “The other reason you are in here, rather than the hospital. Believe it or not, there is an amount of magic that is bad for a pony. You, personally, have repeatedly exceeded that by a few degrees of magnitude. It has dissipated by now, but when you were brought in you were somewhat...radioactive.”

I sat forward worriedly. “Mags...Mags is alright?”

“Aside from a nasty bump on the head, yes, she is fine. No mutations of any sort and will go on to live a long, healthy life, terrorizing pigeons and other wildlife.”

“And...the rest of us?”

The Princess took a deep breath, her chestplate jangling softly as she laid her chin on the bed. I had an irrational urge to pet her, which might have cost me a hoof or - worse - might not have. She looked exhausted, a mare who did not deserve the cards life had lately dealt.

“Right now, I am not sure what will kill you, but it will not be old age,” she said softly, almost mournfully. “Sweet Shine’s talent makes her extremely difficult to eliminate in any fashion, though age may still creep up on her in the night. Limerence will die when the magic powering the wish which preserves him expires. That could be years, centuries, or it could be next week. In the meantime, he may continue haunting the Castle Library like a dismembered ghost, or he can return to Detrot and resume his father’s work.”

I shut my eyes, pulling the nearest pillow over so I could scream into it for a solid minute. When I pulled it away from my face, Celestia was grinning, again. I chucked my cushion at her and she caught it with a good humored giggle, tucking it behind my head once more.

“What? You think this is funny?” I growled, putting my face in my hooves. “I did not sign up for a long life, dammit! I signed up to do a job and the job is over. Dying was supposed to be my reward after a nice, comfortable stay in a place where I have literally no responsibilities. Do you know how much I was looking forward to three hots and a cot? Prison was a place where, if the world ended, it was somebody else’s job to fix it!” I paused in my ranting, realizing somepony had been left out of our discussion. “Wait. What about Swift? You didn’t mention Swift.”

The princess pursed her lips and said, “The arcane conservancy hidden in her body had a series of cleverly disguised back-up spells associated with it which were activated by the quantity of magic she has absorbed recently. I do not know if your partner is even equine. Her eyes are but one part of her most recent transformation. Several of her organs seem to have developed what should be an unhealthy number of metallic components.”

I started to drag myself to the edge of the bed, intending to climb down.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I need to throw myself off the building,” I grumbled as I swung my back legs off the bed. They immediately gave out, sending me tumbling face first onto the soft carpets that ringed the room. Lying there with my cheek on the rug, I rolled my eyes up to look at the Princess who was standing over me with a look of amusement. “I need you to throw me off the building.”

“You know, attempting suicide is not the first impulse I have usually met with when someone is informed they are going to live.”

“You haven’t had my year!” I snapped, or rather, tried to. It came out a bit weak and more like someone verging on a sobbing fit than a sharp rebuke.

A warm energy wrapped around my body and I was lifted back under the covers which tucked themselves up to my neck. One of her gigantic white wings unfolded across my chest like an extra duvet and, much as I wanted to shout at her some more, I couldn’t summon up any real anger. Instead, my vision started to blur.

The last thing I wanted to do was cry. Crying in front of royalty is probably low on the list of things anyone wants to do in life; unfortunately, Princess Celestia was dangerously motherly and if there’s one thing a stallion in my condition needed more than anything just then it was the shoulder of someone in a position to make things better.

There was no escape. She had me good; both of us knew it. Within a few seconds I was bawling my stupid eyes out.

I cried and screamed. I hugged her wing and made a mess of her perfect feathers. Ruining a Princess’s heavily preened feathers is one of those things you hope they never put in your biography, if you live long enough for somepony to want to write one. I’d been hoping to get somewhere I could peacefully decay, but that seemed to be off the table.

“Then...Ruby opened the door. At least, I think she did. After that, things got strange.”

“Strange, how?”

“I vaguely remember being tortured by my apartment, my friends, and time itself for a few hundred thousand years. Pretty sure I had an insect eat its way into my spine at one point. It’s foggy. My heart apparently took the initiative and tucked away most of the worst memories somewhere.”

“My word. I will tell Luna you need some personal attention.”

“Please don’t. I don’t know how Nightmare would react to meeting Luna in my dreams. Or worse, how Luna would react to meeting Nightmare.”

“A psychologist, then.”

“Can you think of one qualified to deal with this?”

“Princess Luna is still with us after the Cutie Mark Crusades because I knew several who are qualified. She was not in good condition. She still has dark dreams of those days, but she is no longer self-destructive.”

“Then...that gives me some hope, I guess.”

The hour crept past midnight as I picked apart the events of the past few weeks. There was much that was hazy and many things which didn’t make perfect sense, but that final conversation was crystal clear. I was drooping, but still I plowed on, determined to have the entire truth out there for someone.

I could see myself sitting there in the near dark of Starlight Tower, holding the star as it experienced equinity for the first time and saw all that it’d missed in its eons spent turning its nose up at biological life. I could remember our words and in the retelling, I wondered at how they must sound. Certainly I sounded crazy in my own ears.

It’d taken all day but, at last, the time came.

“And...then, I made my wish,” I finished, and with those words I all but collapsed back in bed, my eyes sagging shut as the last of my energy seemed to drain right out of me.

Princess Celestia still sat beside the bed, a crumpled napkin on the pillow between her forelegs with the crumbs of what’d been the sixth or seventh tray of munchies the staff delivered to us that day. She looked no worse the wear for having spent hours sitting in one place, listening to a mad stallion spilling improbable stories. Her expression remained calm and interested.

“If you do not mind me asking, what was the wish?” she asked, dabbing her lips with her napkin.

I tucked my forelegs under the blanket and said, “I guess I should ask what you already know?”

The Princess gave me a nonplussed look, her chromatic mane billowing a little more quickly in a nonexistent breeze. “We have been reconstructing what we can from recent changes in global magical fields, but there is much even our best mages do not understand. Particularly, what you did to seemingly every intelligent being the planet over. You changed the sub anima mea of life itself.”

I mouthed the words ‘the whole planet’ then put a hoof to my forehead. “You want specifics?”

“If you please. I do not believe the entire Academy has slept in roughly two weeks attempting to discover the truth.”

“Can I sleep once I answer this?” I asked, yawning softly. “I suspect the news that I’m up and about is going to spread quickly.”

“You can sleep now, if you like, but there are many students, magicians, and archmages who will not until they have an answer,” she replied, getting to her hooves. “They are quickly draining the regional coffee supplies and I may have to tap into the royal brew reserves soon. I have no guarantee there will be a mug left for you in the morning.”

‘Waking up with no coffee? Unacceptable!’ Nightmare snarled in the back of my head.

“That sounds like a threat,” I grumbled.

“Think of it as ‘creative incentivization’. The former chief of police mentioned you tend to respond well to gentle reminders where your bread is buttered.”

I bit my lip. “Iris Jade survived?”

“She did.”

“Can you bring her down here?”

“Ehm...From various conversations I was under the impression you two did not get along.”

“I need her to throw me off the balcony.”

Celestia gave me a look of gentle disappointment. It wasn’t much, just a tiny drawing together of her elegant eyebrows and the smallest of frowns. Still, it was enough that my heart felt like it was going to burst. I’d long heard rumors of her ability to reduce seasoned bureaucrats to blubbering apologies when they acted with greed or selfishness, but being on the receiving end of it was something else.

I waved my forelegs at her, placatantly. “Alright, alright! I yield! Uncle! Skies above, point that someplace else!” And like that, the expression was gone and the sun returned. “You could put an eye out with that thing.”

“Hard Boiled, I have lived for more than a thousand years. Believe me when I say, most of the days are better than not. You have had a rough start, but life is worth it.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now, there are many conversations I’m not looking forward to and I want to sleep for a month before I have any of them.”

“Then tell me what you wished, and I will make sure you have at least one more day. A day with coffee and bagels.”

Rolling onto my side, I tucked the nearest pillow under my cheek. It was good. Soft. My overtaxed brain was ready to shut down for a few hours of additional maintenance. I’d fulfilled the most significant of my obligations; my story was known. I would not die a mystery.

There was just that one tiny element that remained.

“The star couldn’t ascend without us. Now it will ascend with us.”

The Princess canted her head to one side to look at me out of one eye. “Explain, if you please?”

“Everypony has been having dreams, right? Nightmares? Strange feelings?”

“Yes,” Celestia affirmed, folding her wings tightly against her sides. “Princess Luna has been most confounded. They dream of vast distances, of light and breadth of being, of boundless cosmic communion. I have...found my own dreams touched by these sensations. Even when raising the sun, I find a deeper connection than before. The sun and I have always had...understanding...with each other, since I received my talent, but now it is as though we breathe the same solar winds. Some dreams are pleasant, others frightening, but none seem entirely of the mind of the ponies in question.”

“They aren’t,” I explained, trying to hold in a yawn. “It was too big to comprehend us and too small to understand why. I wished for it to be given a just chance.”

“And that involved altering our very souls?”

I shut my eyes, letting the words flow.

“It’s part of us, now. A tiny, tiny piece in each living being. It gets to be us. When we rise above this existence, it will rise, too. If we fail, it fails, but now...it has a chance.”

In the darkness behind my eyelids, I heard Princess Celestia get to her hooves and set her pillow back in the corner, then her armored hoofsteps on marble before the door of her chambers opened and shut. Her hoofsteps faded down the hallway, and I was left to my own devices. Much as I wanted to sleep, there was one thing left to do.

As soon as I was sure Princess Celestia was gone, I sat up.

“You might as well stick your head out,” I called to the seemingly empty room. “I don’t believe for a second that building somehow, miraculously, failed to flatten Mags and I. You want to save me the trouble of asking her?”

For a moment there was silence, then a soft cough from the bathroom. Juniper opened the ornate door and stuck his muzzle through before stepping out with a bashful look on his face. He hesitated there for a moment, his brown bomber jacket still sprinkled with what I could only presume was bits of dust from the collapse of Starlight Tower, then trotted over to the bedside and sat himself down beside me.

“You did good, Hardy,” he murmured, picking up one of the pillows and fluffing it before setting it behind my head. “You also earned a few favors with some very reluctant debtors. They pay their bills.”

“So what are you really?” I asked, giving him a firm prod in the knee as he stood there beside me, real as the moment I’d seen him ripped apart by a magical weather machine. “We’re way off the end of you being a byproduct of my gradually deepening post-traumatic stress. You are dead, right?”

“Very, but that matters less than you’d think. There are rules, but rules only matter so long as they’re obeyed. Someone broke some big rules getting us here. You, personally, broke a few, but they were in favor of keeping a certain balance.”

“I see we’re playing the ‘cryptic answers’ game, then?”

Picking up one of the remaining pastries on the tray Celestia left behind, he tossed the doughnut into his muzzle, swallowed it in two bites, then propped one foreleg on the bed and gave me a level stare.

“Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Who do you really work for?”

Without so much as a twitch of a smile, he replied, “Cosmic, metaphysical forces intent on keeping the universe from becoming a lifeless, empty husk, bereft of intelligence or growth. They are the outgrowth of being, its seed and its fruit. I serve Truth. You serve another. Frequently, their purposes overlap.”

He jabbed a hoof at his cutie-mark, then pointed at the spot under the blankets where mine was.

I had one of those pauses where you realize you’ve had your answer and somehow didn’t actually learn anything. I tried to think of some question that would give me a bit of clarity, but the answers to all of them seemed pretty obvious as soon as I started to open my muzzle. I settled for clenching my teeth and kicking myself onto my back, again.

“I’m about to get on a weird ride if I press this, aren’t I?”

“You’re alive and will probably be for a long time. That’s a weird ride already. Being dead isn’t any better. We’re both working two sides of the same grander development. There are villains and heroes, all with their own plans, but all more or less playing the same game. Pretty soon, ponykind will get the first tastes of what is coming: a future of glory or extinction. You could go flit around the afterlife like a little cheerful, enlightened cherub, content with the idea that having access to ‘infinite cosmic wisdom’ means you theoretically actually understand something, but I know you. You’ll want to get your hooves dirty. You’ll want to actually solve some of the mysteries. There are plenty of them.”

“There are things that threaten Truth itself? Things that could kill all life?” I asked.

He ruffled my mane and I swatted at him, halfheartedly. “You dealt with one. It might not be the last on your platter, but we can hope. Still, better to have experienced sorts to handle these kinds of things.”

“Then you want me here, huh? Or is it cosmic powers that want me here?”

Juniper ran his hoof down his jaw, brushing it through his beard like he’d done all those years back when delivering rough news to grieving widows.

“I won’t lie. Much as I wish we could ride, side by side, out to bag us a few amongst the galactic ne’er-do-wells, I’m hoping it’s a while before you have to jump this particular fence. This might be the last time we see each other while you’re on this side of things. I need you to promise you will keep yourself safe.”

“No going off the balcony, huh?”

“You’ll always be my partner, kid. I want you to live. It’s not my choice, but you can do more good, more quickly over there than you can over here. It takes time to learn these ropes.”

I reached up and caught his face in both hooves, just holding him there so I could look up into his bright eyes for a few seconds.

“Juniper, you knew I loved you, right?”

“I knew,” he whispered, pressing his forehead against mine. We held there, for a moment. “I hear from Mags there’s a pair of sweethearts waiting for you to be back in one piece, kid. Get it together. They’re waiting on you.”

Then that old, mischievous grin appeared and he shoved me back in the cushions before grabbing the bottom of the blanket and tossing it over my face. I squirmed, fighting with the enormous duvet for a few seconds before yanking it off. I found myself alone, once more, in the darkened castle chamber with only the bedside light to ward away the shadows.

Without an alarm clock, I’d no idea how long I’d slept. Twelve hours? Twenty? It didn’t really matter. Princess Celestia was true to her word and I remained undisturbed until at last, I came awake and couldn’t fall back asleep. Sun was peeking between the curtains, lighting up a tiny sliver of the red carpet near the windows.

My muscles felt better than they had, so I gave them a few experimental flexings here and there, finding them relatively solid. I threw back the bed blankets and the sheets, scooting over to the edge where I found my trenchcoat folded on a chair alongside my hat, both cleaner than I’d seen them in days. The Canterlot laundry staff somehow even managed to get some ancient stains out of my coat’s lapels. Someone with considerable needle skills had mended a few of the holes and patched up the fraying edges, too.

I picked up my coat and wiggled into it, then flipped my hat onto my head. The hat had lost its perfumed scent, but I’d little doubt I’d have that renewed sometime soon. Scarlet was alive. Lily was alive. The world hadn’t ended.

Just before I headed for the door, I noticed a flat brown box that’d been sitting beneath my clothes. I opened it and found a gun nestled inside alongside the silver chain with my badge on the end. The weapon was an ugly, blocky thing, with a strange sheen that seemed more organic than metal.

It took a moment to realize it was the Crusader, freshly painted with a layer of changeling resin. There was no ammunition in the box. It was a weapon carefully civilized for a more peaceful time.

Without a gun harness, I was left to shutting the box and slipping it into my pocket.

I wandered the expansive, sunlit halls of Canterlot castle, passing maids and servants who shot me wary looks, but otherwise ignored my goings. It wasn’t until I came to a set of gold inlaid double doors with armed and armored guards beside it that I stopped to ask for directions. The younger of the two pointed me towards the guest wing, then offered to guide me there. I politely declined, enjoying the little time I had remaining to gather my thoughts for the battle I felt certain was coming.

After several dozen more rounded corners and two more requests for directions, I arrived in a long hallway with another pair of guards in front of one of a row of five doors whose spacing suggested small apartments. The identical guards gave me a quick glance, then both did double takes. I dipped my head at the guest suites.

“Should I knock?”

The stallion on the left flicked his eyes at the door, then back to me. “For your safety, I wouldn’t, Sir. There is a tennis racket just inside for if the young griffin has gotten into coffee or sugar.”

Stepping between them, I put a hoof on the doorknob, then stopped. “Is this being used as punishment duty?”

The one who’d spoken opened his muzzle, then shut it and looked across at his companion who swallowed and said, “You are Hard Boiled, right? You’re the one who brought Canterlot back from the moon?”

“Skip that crap, if you please. Your faces tell me what I need to know. How many have you lost?”

The first guard lowered his white ears and said in a conspiratorial tone, “Private Mouse Trap surprised Miss Sweet Shine bringing her towels. She is recovering in the infirmary. Private Gummy won’t go into libraries anymore and had to be put on light duty. The sergeant twitches whenever somepony mentions ‘meat’ these days. He walked in on Miss Cuddles having dinner. She’d caught that rabbit. It...it wasn’t cooked...”

“So what did you two do to earn this gig?” I asked.

They exchanged a look, then the one I’d addressed first said, “Itching powder in the lieutenant's armor.”

The other added, a bit shamefacedly, “Celebrated a promotion a little too vigorously right before I had to come in for work.”

“Right.” I pulled my hat off and handed it to the guard on the left who took it, shooting me a quizzical look. “Hold this. Do not let it get damaged.”

“Ar...are you expecting something to happen that is likely to damage you, Sir?”

“Just hold the damn hat.”

They popped a pair of tight salutes, and I braced before tentatively cracking the door and slipping inside.

What ‘guest suite’ meant in Canterlot-speak was apparently ‘individual apartments all your own’. The open floorplan, two story luxury chambers had ceilings tall enough for a pegasus to do laps and a couch in the front room large enough for three yaks to get comfortably spread out. A grand staircase circled one side up to what looked like a four-poster bed overlooking the combined living room and ambassadorial dining space. There was a full dining room table set for eight with a half-eaten basket of something that smelled distinctly of savory meat nestled in one of the chairs.

I tried to swallow around the lump in my throat, but it was about the size of a possum.

There they were, all four, sitting around the coffee table in front of the couch.

Swift’s shining diamond eyes were focused on a book splayed out in front of her as she scribbled in it with a pen held between her teeth, stopping now and then to consider her words. She wore her battered police armor, freshly mended, with the bunny patch still in place and joined recently by a bright orange turtle over the shoulder.

My driver was meditating on a pillow so enormous it made her look like a foal sitting in the middle of it, while Limerence had his nose buried in a weathered stack of scrolls. There was something wrong with the Archivist’s front legs and it took me a second to realize they weren’t entirely attached at the shoulders, hanging from his vest by loose threads of sinew, though he seemed to be moving them without issue. Mags was checked out in a fruit bowl, leaving the fruit scattered on the floor as she snored like a little steam engine.

I stood there staring at them, wondering how this was all meant to go.

How do you say ‘Hello’ to people who you committed to sending to their deaths?

I’d been ready to fail. I knew there was always a chance we’d die in the attempt and all of us could have met up on the other side, if the other side still existed. It was something to cling to in the dark, when all seemed lost.

Sweet Shine noticed me first, opening one eye, then the other. She blinked a few times, then slid down off her pillow and grabbed Swift’s head, gently turning it in my direction. At the disturbance, Limerence looked towards the door as well.

“Hardy?” Sweet Shine whispered.

“Sir?”

“It’s me. I-I saw what you all did through the ladybug network--”

Those were the last words said for about five minutes as I was piled onto like a beanbag chair in a den of Beam users. Even Limerence was in there, upsettingly disconnected limbs finding any open space to wrap around whoever was nearby. Mags clung to my head like a lamprey, Sweets was about to pop a rib she was holding on so tight, and Swift’s wings provided a warm blanket around us that shut out the horrors for a little while.

When we finally broke apart, a stream of questions spilled out of all of them which I had no hope of answering.

“--flew into the weather factory, Sir, and then we--”

“--had to fight with the dragon, but I made sure--”

“--alive, again, and I can’t say I like--”

“--bring me any chicken, Egg Pony, cuz--”

After a few seconds of this I snatched a pillow off the couch and began hitting anyone near me with it. A pillow is a surprisingly effective means of encouraging calm in a group of overexcited people. When I smacked Limerence with it, his horn punctured the lining and a burst of feathers filled the room.

Silence settled over us and I dropped the pillow, hopping up onto the sofa. Mags crawled into my lap and I sighed, not really able to stop myself from stroking her back. She started purring a few seconds later and, to all appearances, went back to sleep.

“Alright! So, we expected to all be dead and we aren’t. Questions. We have a lot of them. Let’s start at the top. What happened while I was out?”

My friends gave each other a series of looks which simultaneously spoke volumes and didn’t tell me much.

Sweet Shine was, by quiet consensus, chosen to start. She tapped her hooftips together a couple of times, shuffled about on the rug, tugged at her steadily regrowing braid, then gave me a helpless shrug. “Detrot is...not going to be the same. Might be better, definitely will be weirder. Whoever they eventually choose as mayor is going to have their hooves full.”

“Nothing we haven’t seen before. Who is running things? Celestia likes to sound like she’s got a handle on it, but I have doubts.”

Swift unfolded a wing and pulled a battered map out of a side pocket of her bulletproof jacket, spreading it out on the coffee table. It was covered in little white flags, all the way from the dockage district to the Heights. There were bubbles of red, pink, blue, purple, here and there, and a few black flags scattered about. There was an especially large black flag over the former police department headquarters.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“White flags are Miss Stella and the Stilettos, the Marked, the remains of Detrot P.D., the Underdogs, a few friendly Cyclone groups, and anyone else who enforces order in the city,” Limerence explained. “With Gypsy, Tourniquet, and the Ladybugs monitoring basically everything that happens, we have near perfect surveillance. The Royal Guard provide regular patrols, but our people are providing most of the civil order in the form of food distribution and getting people’s utilities back in something like working order.”

Swift blinked her shining, jeweled eyes a couple times, seeming to look off into the distance before flicking back to reality. “Sir, Tourniquet says water and electricity are going to be a problem, soon, unless we can get more engineers to repair the grid. I...I don’t know if you saw but I did a lot of damage--”

“I saw, kid. We’re here now, so I’m calling that ‘good work’.”

My partner beamed at me proudly.

“People are filtering back to their homes and businesses,” Sweet Shine continued where Limerence had left off. “I can’t say when commerce is starting again, but we’re seeing the first signs it will.” She looked a little sick to herself as she added, “Hardy, the body cleanup alone is going to take months. We’re doing our best to take down cutie-marks and get pictures of the dead, but the list of missing is about a street-block long.”

I poked the black flag over the police department. “What’s that?”

“That’s...a death zone,” Limerence muttered, his left foreleg rising off the ground and drawing a small circle around the former department. “They are places that, for whatever reason, cannot be reclaimed in a timely manner and kill those who enter. The extra-dimensional creatures Gypsy released during the fall of the Detrot Police Department are still there. They don’t seem inclined to leave, but then neither are they against snatching anything bigger than a mouse that enters their territory.”

“And the other color flags?”

“Mostly ‘danger’ of different kinds. Pink is ‘heavily armed bandits’. Blue is ‘contamination’ of some kind. The other colors are different groups who survived, roosted dragons, or other dangers. The sewers here--” He tapped a spot near the Bay of Unity. “--still contain Biters who have formed some kind of enclave or pack. There are no good solutions, there. We can keep them from hunting, but only by...well. Slip Stitch must dispose of the deceased somewhere.”

I gave him a wide-eyed look. “He’s feeding the damn things corpses?”

“As I said, Detective, no good solutions. If we want to avoid widespread disease and not have to deal with additional Biter attacks, this is the best option.”

Swift waved at one of the picture windows on the far side of the room which incidentally looked out over a giant purple tower of some kind, ringed with floating gemstones the size of tanks. “Sir, we found the spellwork that turned ponies into Biters inside the P.A.C.T. headquarters and gave it to the Academy to pick apart, but they’ve had their hooves full. There’s something wrong with ponies’ souls!”

Whatever the look on my face was, Sweet Shine picked up on it quicker than the rest.

Her eyes narrowed as she asked, “Hardy...What did you do?”

Telling the story a second time was quicker, if only because I wasn’t half awake and confused as to how I’d survived a trip through the mad heart of a star’s emotional problems. There were parts I glossed over, if only because my own stomach didn’t need to contemplate exactly what’d happened too closely. The deep self-examination could wait for the psychologist’s couch.

It kept occurring to me that whatever form of sanity that was keeping me together seemed to be holding on inertia alone and couldn’t last. I knew there would inevitably come a moment when it broke and all of the past few months came flooding in. I felt a bit like a lit fuse, waiting to find out exactly how big the bomb at the other end was.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long.

My explanation done, my friends sat there staring at me with open muzzles.

It was a funny thing, just being there with all of them, again. Maybe it was the softness of Mags’s fur. Maybe I’d just had enough.

I wanted to fly. I wanted to leap and frolic in the clouds. The sky didn’t have all the dead bodies to clean up.

“So, Celestia wants to give us medals at some point, I’m sure, so we better be good and sauced for that!” I said and dropped off the sofa. “Who is up for getting drunk and ignoring everything I just said? Sure is a pretty day outside! Have you been out for a walk? We should go out for a walk!”

Sweet Shine was on me before I made it ten steps towards the picture window.

I hadn’t particularly contemplated before hand the fact that I was about to throw myself through it, but on second consideration going to inspect a beautiful summer morning doesn’t usually happen at a flat gallop, especially not with the pony in question struggling out of their trenchcoat so as not to get blood on it, lest the fine laundry work of the castle staff be ruined.

I don’t remember how she wrestled me into a traveling trunk, but I’m sure there was some assistance from Limerence and Swift. Blessedly, I was semi-conscious for most of it; whichever nerve pinch she’d laid wasn’t a particularly mean one, but it was effective. I imagine Gale was helping in some fashion.

The guards outside did the sensible thing the second the door was opened and ran like scared bunnies.

Some dragging and clunking up and down stairs followed, then there was a moment where the top of the box opened on Princess Twilight’s slightly haggard, disapproving face staring down at me before I was back in darkness. I heard the alicorn making muffled upset noises outside, but she finally relented and agreed to whatever my driver was demanding she do. A minute later, the interior of the trunk started glowing magenta.

Blinding light filled my skull, followed by the sensation of being dropped in all directions simultaneously.

Starlight Over Detrot Epilogue Part 3 : The Sun Rises

‘Hard Boiled? Talk.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you, Nightmare.’

‘Gale is going to give me control of your body if you try to do that, again.’

‘Good. It’s yours now. Enjoy. Stick me in a corner.’

‘As much as that might entertain me, you will speak to me or I will speak at you. Gale has slowed your perception of time and I have entire phone books worth of inanity to read in your direction. Do you understand?’

‘So, what? You’re going to try to make me crazier than I already am?’

‘You are not insane, Hard Boiled. Damaged, emotionally distraught, and processing more than a pony should be required to in several lifetimes, but you are not insane.’

‘I don’t know. Trying to throw myself out of a building seemed pretty crazy to me.’

‘Considering what has happened to you, it was a reasonably expected reaction. The Princess had several pegasi on guard to catch you below the balcony. Gale is not going to let you die and nor am I. So, you will speak.’

‘And if I refuse, you’ll irritate me.’

‘Exactly.’

It was an odd form of therapy. I much preferred Sweet Shine’s propensity to kick the stuffing out of me when the crazy crept in. It wasn’t as good as crying on Celestia’s shoulder, but there was more of it.

Untold hours passed as I lay there in my box, howling at Nightmare. She’d—for reasons unknown—affected a waistcoat and pince-nez. Her mane of shimmering blue energy formed itself into a reclining couch which I found myself curled up on within something like a dream-space, though I was still aware of my physical body bumping along in the travel trunk in the back of some form of vehicle.

For all her numerous faults, Nightmare was a listener. Maybe it was some side effect of being stuck in the back of my head for most of her short life, but she’d developed a talent for paying attention.

I screamed about the unfairness of it all and shivered as I recounted what cruelties the star laid upon me. There was even more crying, but after a few days of lying there with rests during which I was entirely unconscious, the crying started to abate. After a very long time, I was a pony, again.

The trunk opened onto a dimly lit room and I was gently lifted out by someone’s horn and laid on a soft bed. I didn’t fight the magic, instead sagging there limply like a ragdoll with no stuffing. Above my head there was a Wonderbolts poster and the blankets were warm, as though recently vacated. I was too dazed and exhausted to do much looking around.

“My talent says he’s not going to try to kill himself again, but he needs more time,” Sweet Shine murmured from somewhere off to one side. “A lot more time.”

After Glow’s voice broke in. “Idjit earned ‘imself a pass, Ah guess. Now you, missy! Ah wanna full tellin’ of what happened up ‘ere!”

“Gran, I’ve got things to do with the city power grid,” Swift added, from around my rear hooves. “I’ve been away for too long and Tourniquet needs help. I’ll tell you when I tell Miss Stella, okay?”

“Hrmph! If ya’ll think Ah’m gonna—”

“Gran...please? It’s been a long day. The teleport from Canterlot was rough.”

There was a bit of soft growling, then several sets of retreating hoofsteps. I felt someone slide into the bed beside me and put their forelegs around my neck. Their proportions seemed all wrong: too short, too small for how long their front legs were. A sweet scent filtered into my battered senses.

“H-Hardy?”

Scarlet. That was Scarlet. I peered down at the place his legs used to be, only to see the stumps capped with some kind of bejeweled metal studs and bandages around his middle.

I found strength in my leg to wrap it around his shoulders as another body slid in beside me, leaving the bed rather cramped, but not so much as I’d mind. A head of red curls was laid on my chest and gentle hooves went about stroking my mane. Lily smelled a bit like disinfectant, but considered she’d likely come from the medical unit that wasn’t surprising.

“We heard you could use some help,” Lily whispered.

“Shouldn’t you be taking ca-care of the wounded?” I stuttered.

“That’s what we’re doing,” Scarlet replied.

There are worse places than the Vivarium to recover. Certainly the company was pleasant and the guards were pretty good at keeping away gawkers. Not to say my stay was entirely uneventful, mind you.

I spent the next three days lying in Scarlet’s bed, waited on hoof and tail by Stilettos with orders not to let me out except to bathe, piss, and eat. Scarlet and Lily barely left my side in that time, though Scarlet must have been sleeping somewhere else. His new prosthetics were little more than complicated peg-legs, but Apple Bloom promised him something better in short order and I believed her.

I should have hated convalescing, but considering the condition of my mental landscape it was a pleasant change.

The first day, Sweets and Swift cycled through to keep me up to date on the goings on in the city. After about twelve hours of that, I asked them to let me lose track. It was a good decision.

Mags popped by a few times a day to make pissy noises at me for being so boring while I rested, but she was spending most of her spare time with Granny Glow. The two of them had taken a kindly shine to one another. They certainly shared more than a few personality traits. I knew that would eventually lead to horrors untold, but there were long lists of people I could think of who I’d have preferred she spend time with less than Stella’s elderly head of security.

On the fourth day, I had my first unexpected visitor.

I was propped up in bed with a book in one hoof, not really reading it but enjoying its presence when there was a knock on the door.

I raised my voice and called, “Come in!”

The doorknob glowed, turned, then was pushed open by the front wheels of a wheelchair. A hunched figure with a shawl around its shoulders rolled in followed by a pony I recognized with her hooves on the handles: Cerise. It took a few seconds to realize who the skeletally thin figure in the wheelchair was, but when I did I scooted a bit higher in the bed and swung my legs over the side.

“Iris?”

Iris Jade looked like she’d been through the wringer five or six times. A heavy bandage was wrapped around her head, holding her mane back. Her green pelt looked brushed, but nowhere near the glossy, sleek shine she usually kept it and - for the first time in my memory - she was wearing a pair of sweatpants rather than a suit.

Her daughter was, if anything, a little perkier looking than last I’d seen her. She had a small red moon tattooed below her jawline and the beginnings of a few tribal works on her side.

“Hard Boiled,” Iris acknowledged, tapping her forehoof to her head. “Pardon if I’m a tad slow getting up to beat the cheese out of you. Lack of a horn is making daily activities more interesting.”

I set my book aside. “Of all the ponies I thought would come see me, you were about last on the list. What’s the prognosis?”

“The doctors say she’s lost her magic entirely—” Cerise started, but her mother cut her off with a glare.

“Cerise, could you give us a minute?” she asked, and her daughter looked back and forth between us, then quietly withdrew, shutting the door behind her. Once Iris was sure she was gone, she turned back to me. “She was right. For now, I’m buttering my toast by hoof. What about you?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Sorry?”

“I asked how you are doing, Hard Boiled,” she said, a little more softly.

“I’m...” I’d been about to say I was fine. It was reflexive. A pony is asked how they’re doing and they reply that they’re fine. That’s how the world works, isn’t it?

Jade must have read the look on my face because she tossed her shawl off her shoulders and rolled the chair closer to the bed.

“I see,” she said, frowning up at me. “I wondered why you didn’t smell scared the second you saw me. Something put a fear in you that’s ruined you for all other bullies in your life.”

“You never liked being a bully, Iris. The job was to keep this city from disintegrating, with magical bastards making damn sure it eventually did. For a long time, you were the one the city needed.”

An expression crossed her lips, and I didn’t recognize it for a minute. It lacked the wicked deviousness she usually tended to inject into every twitch of her lips. Still, when I finally did see the smile on her face, it was almost lovely.

“Hardy, do you know I went to sit in my old garden yesterday? My house was burned, but I barely lived there. I hadn’t been there in a long time. Even the weeds were dying after two months without enough sun. Still, the grass was coming back.”

“I guess I knew you had a house. Funny, the things you let pass by. Same as the idea that you were married, I suppose.”

Iris let her gaze float around the room, stopping briefly on the plush toy of Swift that sat on Scarlet’s end table. “Much as I never thought you would find another stallion besides Juniper Shores, and yet here we are. This ‘Scarlet’ colt must be something special. And I hear somehow Lily Blue also hangs her cap here, too.”

“People keep sounding surprised. Am I that bad a catch?”

“You’re a hero. I mostly feel sorry for them, but I’ve been wrong before,” she replied with a derisive chuckle. “But that’s irrelevant to why I’m here. As I was saying, I sat under the old oak tree, my hooves in the grass, listening to the branches swaying above me. I loved that garden, before I became the Chief of Police. I don’t know how long I was there. I haven’t checked a clock in weeks.”

“Me either. What would we do with a clock?”

Iris conceded the point with a slight dip of her head. “Agreed. Regardless, sitting there in my garden, I wasn’t really thinking of why I’d gone back there. It occurred to me a couple days later that I was waiting to die.”

I slid down off the bed and took a step closer, sinking down so we were at head height to one another. “What happened?” I asked.

She held up her foreleg, demonstratively. “A bird—a tiny robin—flew down and sat on my knee. It had a twig stuck in its feathers and was struggling along. Without really thinking, I leaned down with my teeth and tugged the stick out.”

“Your talent?”

“Yes. When I was Chief of Police, I would have traded all the magic in the world for another bird to sit on my knee. I couldn’t walk away, then. I wish I had.” Iris pulled her shawl up around her shoulders and her eyes turned deadly serious. “You are going to have plenty of people offering you the chance to walk away.”

I propped myself against Scarlet’s bed, considering her words. “You think I should?”

She shook her head. “I think you need a break to get your strength back, but I think if you walk away, you’ll just be waiting to die.” Wheeling backwards, she clopped her hoof on the door twice, then waited until Cerise opened it. She stopped halfway out the doorway and leaned back inside. “Take care of yourself, Hard Boiled. Hating you was a full time job, and I’m glad it’s over.”

Then she was gone, leaving me with my thoughts.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized exactly what her last sentence meant.

Once I couldn’t stand to look at the same four walls anymore, I ventured out into the halls with a blanket wrapped around me as an impromptu cloak. I shouldn’t have bothered; Stilettos and others of the Vivarium were the only people in the halls on my floor and I suspected they were under strict orders not to talk to me or do more than acknowledge my presence with little nods.

I wandered for a while, just taking in the busy energy of the place. Ponies came and went, going through the motions of what could almost be called normal days. The brothel was still largely closed, but I’d heard bass thumping upstairs during a few of my excursions to the toilet.

The closest I got to disturbed was when a group of ten school-aged children of three or four different species charged down a hallway in front of me, headed to points unknown. A small filly at the back of the pack stopped for a moment and looked up at me where I stood at a cross-segment of the hallway. She tilted her head to one side, then the other, before taking a step closer.

I tugged my cloak back on one side and tapped the zippered pouch on my chest. Her eyes almost popped out of her head as a huge grin spread on her cheeks. She quickly muffled it as I put a hoof to my lips, before giving me a serious-faced nod. A second later, she shot off to rejoin her friends.

It’s always the observant ones.

Five minutes later, I realized I was being followed, though not by who. Every time I tried to get a look at my pursuer, they weren’t there. Most cops become fairly adept at realizing when they’re being watched, but I simply couldn’t catch sight of my stalker until I rounded a corner and came face to face with a grinning skeleton.

I should have been frightened, or startled, or something. It should have been a moment when I jumped out of my skin, seeing the fleshless corpse standing there, bright blue lights glowing out of empty sockets. I just felt mildly irritated.

“Bones? Do you really need to sneak around like that?” I asked, grumpily.

“No, but I find it keeps me sharp,” he thought, then trotted in beside me, adjusting his sports jacket with one hoof. It was a new coat, though it looked to be fitted. Where he’d found a tailor to work on him is anyone’s guess.

Shaking off the annoyance, I started off down the hall again, the skeleton strolling along beside me. “I haven’t seen you in almost three weeks. What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, I go here and there. The crown has reactivated the Crusaders in a limited capacity. Several of the others who were on the ‘dead’ list have crept out of the woodwork. Turns out we’re a hard bunch to kill.”

“Huh. What’ve the Princesses got you doing?” I asked, unable to fully contain my curiosity after several days with nothing much happening.

“Well, being as the dragons voided the treaty keeping us from acting with their little invasion, we decided to go kill Carnath and deliver his head to the Dragon King. I’m sure he’d have preferred I didn’t stick it in his bed, mind you. Whatever magic was keeping Lady Ember asleep is faltering, so we had to get her body out of their lands, too. I bet on a civil war to start over there the instant she wakes, but...that’s not your problem, now is it?”

“I’m glad it’s not, honestly,” I replied, flicking my tail under the makeshift cloak. “And...what brings you back to see your grandson?”

His teeth clicked together a couple times in a skeletal chuckle. “Nothing that will surprise you, I don’t think. I went to the cemetery a few days ago.”

It took me a moment to put together just which cemetery he was referring to. “Where Mom and Dad are buried?”

“The same. Nice little spot they picked out. Right next to your gran.” Bones let out a low, slightly sad whistle and held out a hoof to stop me. “You’ve got enough people looking after your life without me guilting you about what happened a few days ago. Heavens know, I’ve earned the right to go dig myself a hole beside your grandmother and lie down. You know why I’m not?”

I looked him over, from his polished skull down to his shined hooves and slowly shook my head. “I honestly don’t. I appreciate you sticking around, but don’t do it on my account. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard about my breakdown?”

“Most haven’t. The few who needed to know have heard. You are mostly getting the ‘Princess’ treatment. People are trying not to bother you. I’m afraid you’re first in line for mayor, though, if the scuttlebutt is to be believed.”

“No, I’m damn well not!” I snarled, rounding on him.

He waved his boney forelegs and shook himself in a fashion I think was meant to placate me.

“Hey, kiddo. You know that and I know that. Thankfully, when it comes time for elections, cooler heads will prevail. That’s going to be a while, considering the state of the city.”

“The Royal Guard is running things?”

“Hah! As if! Stella, whatever his faults, is beastly good at coming up with committees. The ones that actually accomplish things are pretty neatly sectioned off from the ones where the climbers, graspers, and morons are debating roadside parking rules. The Guard are walking patrols in safe parts of the Heights and cleaning garbage out of the Skids. The people doing the actual work? They’re well away from that bunch.”

I opened my blanket and lifted my badge on one hoof, staring at the carefully etched letters that spelled out ‘Chief of Police’ with a sort of sad detachment. I hadn’t taken it off in days. It’d proven more of a security blanket than my coat, in some ways.

“So, the city lives by the law of the streets. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.”

“No such luck. I love me a good riot,” he answered, running a hooftip up his ribs, producing a slightly musical sound that somehow conveyed irony laden irritation. “Stella and the Ancestors laid down some basic rules and they’re enforcing them. No killing, no raping, no stealing, no looting. Food is available for the asking, but you follow those guidelines and you can do what you like. Those who don’t listen go to Supermax to get a red moon stamped on their ass. After that, they don’t break the rules anymore.”

“Seems a tad...eh...”

“Authoritarian? Scary as Tartarus? To you and me both, kiddo. But for right now, it’s working. Children are fed, most streets are quiet, and ending up with a mark is a kinder fate than what we’d have done to them during the war. If it stops working, well...your partner, your driver, and your librarian are the ones with their butts in the driver’s seat. Pretty sure they’d back off if you asked.”

I stopped in the empty hall and rested my flank against the wall. “Mmm...It’s not over, is it?”

“It never is. But we bought ourselves breathing room, and when the good people stop trying to make it better, the nasty ones are waiting. I’m not picking that hole to die in just yet because I believe we can make this city beautiful, if we’re willing to fight for it.”

Hanging my head, I slid down on my knees, then onto my belly right there on the carpet, for once not really caring who saw me. “I’m so tired...”

“Nobody said it had to be you out there fixing things,” Bones murmured, ruffling my mane, which was badly in need of a trim and so fell in my face.

“But if it’s not me—”

“Then it’s somebody else. I know that logic. If you run yourself to death, you’ll be no good to anyone.” Turning to the hallway where voices were approaching, he slid back into the shadows of one of the doorways lining the corridor.“You might not see me for a while, but I’ll be out there and Apple Bloom will know how to get in touch. If I’m honest, I just wanted to come by to say ‘ciao’. No idea how long I’ll be around, but I intend to make myself useful while I am.”

Getting to my hooves, I put a leg around his shoulders and pulled him in against me. He stiffened, then relaxed just as quickly, putting a hoof on the back of my neck.

“It’s been too damn long since I had a hug, kiddo. Way too long.”

“Come back when you need another, Grandpa. I’ll do my best to be here.”

A day passed.

I had dinner with Scarlet and Lily and we talked about what they were up to over our rations. Lily had been in contact with her parents via a pegasus who’d also had family out that way and was planning a trip home. Scarlet was back to working as Stella’s full time secretary, not able to move as quickly as he used to with his pair of temporary prosthetic legs, but fast enough so the work got done.

Afterwards, the three of us fell asleep together. Somehow, we’d all gotten used to the tight fit of Scarlet’s bed. I was getting to a point where I couldn’t manage to get my restless hooves to quiet until they were there with me.

Just being near them both was pleasant. I found, fairly quickly, that other than whatever book I had to read I hadn’t much to talk about. I just enjoyed listening to the two of them go back and forth with one another. Two beautiful ponies, good hearts in black times, propping each other and myself up against deathly days.

Once they were gone for their shifts the next morning, I took a long walk, once heading up to the dance floor, then to sit at the bar with my blanket around my shoulders. I wasn’t drinking, but it was better than the loneliness of Scarlet’s bedroom, feeling like a dog waiting for his owners to return to come alive again. I’m fairly sure most of the ponies out there knew who I was, but no-one approached me, even though I was getting on to wishing they would. Eventually, after some hours of stumbling around comfortably lost, I somehow made my way in the general direction of the elevator down to Stella’s cave.

I don’t know why I wanted to see the old serpent. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said it was pure coincidence right up to the moment I hit the ‘down’ button and the cage rattled its way into the caverns below. In a few seconds, I popped out over the enormous underground lake to a tumult of voices and stomping hooves echoing in all directions.

Artificial lights were set up all across the chamber and freshly welded catwalks had been built criss-crossing the lake itself. Too many ponies to quickly count were rushing back and forth into caves on all sides, none of them paying attention to the old service elevator. It made me wonder just how many other entrances Stella built in recent weeks.

I quickly fell in amongst the crowd, following along in the direction of most of the activity. I was swept along by the push of bodies, enjoying just how little anypony seemed to care that I was there so long as I kept my cloak over my head. It was a nice change.

Most of the people peeled off in various directions, heading to the barracks or distant corners of the underground. I stayed with the main push until we came to a few vaguely familiar stone corridors, lit with newly installed neon lights. An authoritative voice was calling over the soft murmuring of the crowd from time to time, followed by shouts of ‘next’ every few seconds. I couldn’t quite make out what was being instructed the first time, but after a few minutes it repeated:

“This is the line for assignment or assistance! Left side if you need an assignment, right side if you need assistance! When somepony calls ‘next’, head to the nearest open table!”

Ahead of me, a small family—mother and two rambunctious colts—were talking in hushed tones. The colts were excitedly regaling her with some story of their adventures topside, while she tried to keep track of exactly what sort of trouble they’d gotten into while they were out of her sight. She looked tired, but she was smiling at their antics in a way a pony only does when they know where their next meal is coming from.

A little ways ahead, the line broke in two, with ponies queueing up to the right or left side of the cave. I stepped in on the left side, not entirely sure what I was doing, but it couldn’t be worse than lying in bed all day. The line moved reasonably fast and eventually there was only a worn-looking old stallion with rock dust in his hair ahead of me. ‘Next’ was called, and he trotted forward into the cavern beyond.

I finally got my first good look at Stella’s innermost lair since my last visit.

The place had been turned, rather convincingly, into an office block of sorts. The old catwalks were reinforced and covered in layers of cheap flooring, and cubicles lined the rails, each with a single person or group of people in it talking to another person of some species sitting behind a short desk with a file cabinet. When a pony was done with whatever they were doing, they trotted off towards the opposite end of the catwalk and down further tunnels which had been dug into the walls on either side.

Behind the activity, sitting on his throne with a giant lapboard across the arms of his chair and a pair of fine golden-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, sat Stella. He was scratching away at a ledger I could have run laps around, humming a faint tune to himself which carried across all the talking and muttering of the various seekers. The scratch on his face was healing well and he hadn’t bothered to cover it with make-up, though the damage to his chest plate was covered with a white sash in much the same style as his footsoldiers’.

When a Stiletto stallion who stood just inside the door called out, “Next!” I found myself ushered forward. I marched on up the steps onto the catwalk and, rather than heading for the nearest open cubicle where a bright-eyed teenager with a red crescent on her forehead sat waiting expectantly, I moved toward the head of the platform. Two Stiletto guards stood up there and both of them tensed when I approached the railing, but relaxed as they saw my face.

The older of the pair gently tapped the catwalk a couple times until Stella looked up. His eyes widened with delight and he set aside his lapboard, slithering down off the throne into the water. Behind me, I heard voices raised in consternation, but they were quickly followed by others shushing or otherwise reassuring them.

Stella floated down to the edge of the platform, reaching out and putting one of his claws flat on the edge just behind the rails. It took a second to get what he intended, but I quickly ducked through the railing, hopping across onto his palm. He closed his other hand over top of me and I sat there taking slow breaths as the sounds of the lair faded into the distance, replaced by the rushing of water and a sense of powerful acceleration.

I was there for a few minutes in the tiny, watertight chamber formed by the sea serpent’s closed claws before there was a splash outside and his top palm lifted away to reveal a little cave with a short ledge on one side just wide enough for a small group of ponies to stand comfortably. A pile of books lay there, alongside another pair of Stella’s glasses and a small electrified chandelier on a candle-stick which provided enough light to see by.

Setting his palm beside the ledge, he let me hop off and I turned to sit, waiting as the giant purple serpent regarded me with a curious expression.

“You know, you could have sent word you wanted to see me,” he began, with only a hint of reproach. “I’d have made the time.”

“If I had, you’d have made a show of it,” I replied, snugging my blanket against myself. The tiny cave was a little cold, though not unpleasant.

“Eh, true. Old stage habits die harder than most.” Pressing himself to one side of the cave, he settled on some unseen outcropping below the water. “So, tell me, my delicious Detective: what changed? My reports say you were catatonic when you arrived back from Canterlot.”

I patted the side of my head. “I’ve got...uh, it would take too long to explain. Short version is that I have someone with an extremely personally vested interest in keeping me from going nuts. She spent what felt like a few weeks talking me off the edge. Don’t get me wrong. Nominal condition is a long way off, but I’m not considering death the best option right now.”

“Mmmph. Much as I might wish otherwise, then, you didn’t come to me for comfort?” Stella asked.

I started to agree, then felt certain it wouldn’t be entirely true for some reason. “I...I don’t know. I assume Swift gave you the unabridged version of what happened in Uptown?”

“Yes.” A grin crinkled one side of his long, toothy muzzle. “My vaults would be nigh empty were it not for an unattended puddle of melted gold that somehow ended up with no interested guardians right around where the Central Bank of Detrot used to be.”

“I’ll keep that to myself the next time I speak to a Princess,” I replied, with a weak laugh. “Anyway. She told you what I told her, I guess. I...mmm. There was a moment there, when I...I had the power of that wish right in my hooves. The star gave it to me like a child handing you a knife.”

Stella swished his tail a little, sending a splash of water up onto the ledge next to my hooves. “Do I detect a hint of regret, Detective?”

I threw my hooves up and groaned. “Yes, dammit! I could have done a lot of things! I could have restored the dead to life. Cleaned up the city. Changed ponykind into a species without criminality. Fixed all the remaining Biters. Something. I had the power...and it was immaculate. There was a heap of extra energy left in the system once I brought Canterlot back and split the star. Not enough to remake the whole world, but enough to...to change some things...”

“Yet you chose to destroy Uptown with it,” Stella finished, nodding to himself.

“I had to burn it off somewhere. If I’d used too much, it would have started killing people, but, I looked at...at all the things I could do and they frightened the stuffing out of me.” I felt my eyes starting to tear up and quickly swiped at them with my blanket, determined to have this out. “Stella, do you know how easy it is to become an alicorn?”

“I fear I don’t.”

I slid onto my side and exhaled. “It’s a wish away. I think that’s why there are so few. Wishing takes knowing you deserve to wish. I knew I wanted justice for the dead and the living, but beyond that? I’m not that pony.”

Stella’s forked tongue slithered out to taste the air before slipping back into his mouth. “You have never been the ‘power mad’ sort, no. Neither have your friends, perhaps excepting Sweet Shine, and even she knows that power is a double edged sword. That’s why she stays at your side.”

Pushing back from the edge of the water, I tossed off the cloak and stomped around in a tiny circle. “Still, there was so much good I could have done!” I kicked at the stone in frustration. “But who am I to yank the dead out of their afterlives? What would setting the city back the way it was do? How much of the evil in Detrot was the Family, and how much was negative civic planning?”

Reaching down, Stella stopped my nervous pacing by placing his palm in front of me like a wall. I stopped and turned, sitting and waiting for the dragon to tell me I’d been an idiot, or to point out one of the hundred things I could have done that I didn’t. I knew, intellectually, that he was kinder than that, but I wasn’t feeling especially intellectual just then.

Drawing in a breath, he slid back onto his underwater chair. “If it helps, Detective, I believe you did the wisest thing you could have in letting the power slip through your hooves. However much you might hate that those with power can exploit those without or any of the numerous other evils in this world, they are evils of choice. You could have stolen choice from all of us, forever...and you didn’t. Even the Marked, if you have witnessed them when they’re not working, still have much autonomy.”

“You think so? I feel like they act like ants. Plus there’s that thing of taking criminals out to Supermax to get the mark...”

“Right now, the alternatives for rapists, thieves, and killers are sticking them in a box, enslaving them, or putting a bullet in their heads and feeding them to Slip Stitch’s pet Biters. Which would you choose?”

I scrubbed my face with both hooves. “I like the Warden of Tartarus’s solution.”

“How different are those rings she puts around her prisoner’s necks from Miss Tourniquet’s mark? Of course the Warden of Tartarus focuses on rehabilitation, too. I have not experienced it, but I have spoken to the Marked at length. With the mark they are surrounded by people who will patch holes in their broken psyches. Their pain is shared and, thus, lessened. They are no longer alone. You might think of taking it yourself.”

I let out a short, sharp laugh. “Not my speed, thanks.”

Stella winked one of his false-lashed eyes at me. “I didn’t figure. What I am saying is that...in allowing us to retain the chance to heal, rather than healing everyone with a broad brush stroke in whatever way you saw fit, we are not at the whim of your morality. No matter how perfect anyone believes their morals are—and I think you might question yourself more than most—they will not apply to everyone. I think what you did saved us a great many headaches in the long run, Detective.”

“You think?”

“I do. Now, much as I am enjoying your company, the paperwork is eternal. I am finding I rather like watching the changes it produces in the quality of Equestrian lives, but it does tend to pile up.”

He laid his palm on the ledge beside me. I started to jump up onto it again, then stopped myself and glanced around the cozy little cavern.

“Do you mind leaving me here for a few hours? I’m not gonna run out of air, am I?”

Easing further down in the water, Stella gave me a quizzical look. “Are you certain? The only way out is a swim longer than you are likely to survive. This space is fed by ducts that reach the surface, but you will not be able to leave until I come get you...”

“I’m fine. I just need to think. This might be the closest to actually alone I can get while still inside Detrot city limits. Feel free to let anyone who asks know where I am.”

In retrospect, I should have clarified what I meant by ‘anyone’.

Nightmare was off somewhere in the back of my head, poking through memories of gorging myself on cheese when I was younger, and Gale was taking some time to enjoy my childhood radio-mysteries. Strange how little having three separate sets of thoughts bothered me anymore. They were like soft music playing in another room.

I’d found a battered copy of an adventure novel from my teen years with a missing cover which was still as gloriously trashy as it’d been when I was at the height of hormones. The silence in the cave was only punctuated by occasional drips from condensation on the ceiling, but otherwise it was as peaceful a place as a pony could ask for. I could understand why Stella liked it.

I was halfway through a description of the muscle-bound hero bravely carrying the helpless maiden to safety while swinging on a convenient rope when there was a faint hum in the air. It only lasted a second; just long enough to wonder if it’d been my imagination. I set my book aside and heaved myself up, ears flicking back and forth.

As I was about to dismiss the sound, there was an eardrum-wrecking ‘crack’, a blast of air, brilliant purple light, and a squeal of fear. All of that was followed by a splash that sent droplets of water all over me and my book. I huffed and shook the book off, then used the edge of my blanket to dry my head. Irritation welled up inside me as I got to my hooves and peered down into the pool to find a frantically treading alicorn.

“A little help?” Princess Sparkle yelped, dragging herself over to the ledge.

Reaching down, I grabbed her hoof in mine and braced my rear hooves, hauling the sodden Princess up onto my little retreat.

“You could have levitated yourself out of there,” I grunted as she flopped on her stomach.

“Tired. Been t-teleporting all day,” she stammered, a shiver building up and down her back. “That spell I used to scan through all this stone was really complicated, too. Skies above, that water is cold.”

Figuring I wasn’t likely to get much further use out of it for my own comfort, I grabbed the blanket and threw it across her shaking shoulders. “Here. Get dry, then tell me why the idea that a pony was sequestering himself in a cave would make you think he wanted to be bothered.”

Twilight tugged the blanket tightly around herself, scootching back from the waters until her back hit the wall of the cave. She quickly glanced around, then coughed softly. “I’m sorry. I...I know things have been hard, lately.”

I clapped my hooves together a few times. “Thank you, Her Ladyship, Mistress of Royal Understatement. Do you have another one for us?”

“How about ‘Hard Boiled, you sound like you could use a rest.’?” she said wryly.

“Good, good, more of those, thanks,” I muttered, making sure the other books in the pile were dry before setting the one I’d been reading on top. “What brings you down here? I’m assuming you were visiting Stella for some reason?”

Twilight started to answer, but her attention was drawn to the stack of books in the corner and she let out a strangled noise. Darting over to the pile, she started sifting through them with slightly wild eyes. Suddenly she rounded on me, the book without its cover dangling beside her head in a field of magic. She jabbed it at me in an accusatory manner. “W-who left these here!?”

“That would be our resident dragon queen.”

“H...he just put these poor books in this damp grotto?!” she gasped, voice rising with indignation.

“Take it up with him, your highness,” I huffed, grabbing the edge of my blanket and yanking it off her back. Her wings poofed out from her sides and she stood there looking like an angry bird who’d taken a trip in a tumble drier. Moving to the edge of the pool, I started to wring the damp cloth out.

“You save the world and somehow still make me mad! Ugh!” She turned back to the books and quickly started sorting them, levitating some and casting some kind of spell that cleared their pages of mildew and dirt. “At least he hasn’t put anything down here that’s valuable or rare. It’s all pulp garbage, in fact. Goodness, does he really read these?” Her cheeks flushed as she picked up a copy of the Pony-Sutra with a heavily frayed spine. “O-okay, this I can see him reading for sure...”

Folding my blanket again, I set it back on the floor and flopped with my head on it. “So, you going to tell me why you’re down here bugging Equestria’s least sociable life form, Princess?”

Twilight bit her lip, then with great reluctance set the books down. “I...I honestly didn’t think this far ahead. You were on my ‘list’ for today.”

“Your list included ‘Go see the grumpy detective’?” I asked.

She winced and her horn flashed; a clipboard appeared in midair with a stack of papers clamped to it. Rotating it so I could see it, she pointed to the tenth line from the time. It said in her neatly written script: Go see the grumpy detective.

“Right. Perfect,” I growled, pushing the clipboard away. “Princess, what really brought you back to Detrot? You saved my life. I’m grateful. Celestia can keep her medal and Luna...I’ve honestly got no idea what Luna is doing, but I wish her the best.”

“Princess Luna is back in therapy,” Twilight whispered, biting her lip. “Being trapped on the moon for any period of time seems to have triggered a relapse. She’s working through it.”

“Like I said, all the best. Are you going to answer my question, or should I go back to reading ‘Raiders Of The Harem Of Ro Sham Bo’?”

“I...ah...I’m having...trouble.” She plunked herself down, gathering her wings in tight against her sides.

“Trouble?!” I snapped, taking three steps closer until we were muzzle to muzzle. “There’s a line of ponies upstairs who are having trouble. They’re not sure where their next meal is coming from. The ones who do know are mucking blood out of the streets, burying bodies, emptying rot-filled refrigerators, and trying to figure out what life looks like now. Tell me how your trouble amounts to a hill of beans next to what they’re going through?”

Twilight gulped, then said all in a rush, “P-Princess Celestia wants me to rule again!”

I gave her a dubious look. “And?”

Her eyes were slightly wild as she added, “The last time I ruled the Cutie-Mark Crusades almost destroyed Equestria!”

“Again I say, and?”

The Princess sat there sputtering for a few seconds, then her brain seemed to find a fresh gear.

“What do you mean ‘and’? Shouldn’t you have some feelings on this or something? You just saved the whole planet!”

I let out a long-suffering sigh which was only slightly exaggerated. “I get what the Crusaders say about you, now.”

“W-what do they say about me?” she stammered, her ears lying flat against her head.

“They say you’re the dumbest smart person in the world.”

Her eyes flared with anger and she stood up straight, bonking her head on the sloping curve of the cave’s ceiling. She quickly rubbed the spot with a hoof, then dropped her leg and tried to regain her bluster, but it was already gone. Instead, she slumped onto her stomach and covered her face with her wings. After a few seconds, she rolled a foreleg at me.

“Fine. I think you’re probably right, but...tell me why. Please. I’m at a loss as to what to do and there are a lot of ponies suddenly relying on me to piece this country back together.”

“Twilight Sparkle, the Cutie-Mark Crusades started because the Family started them,” I explained, very slowly enunciating each word. “A star, cleverer than you could ever hope to be and more wily and cunning than Celestia and Luna put together decided to upend the global order. It started planning for this before your great, great, great grandparents were born. You just had the bad luck of being in charge at the time.”

“B-b-but what if it—” she tried, but I cut her off.

“—happens again? What happens if a cosmic god being decides to unmake the whole of existence again, Princess? If it does, I’m damn well letting the beasts from beyond have the planet, because they earned it!” I picked up my book from the heap and flicked it open to the page I’d been reading. “Get some friends, stop drinking, and don’t start any wars with the friggin’ dragons. There aren’t hardly enough of them left to have another war, anyway. You can do administrative crap just fine and that’s what the world needs today. When you want to go on vacation, give me a call. Until then, shoo. If you need additional advice, go ask Stella, Sweet Shine, Celestia, Swift, or Limerence. Heck, ask Mags. I’m officially clocked out.”

The purple alicorn sat there for several seconds, her jaw sagging in an unladylike fashion.

She started to say something else, but I reached over and poked the end of her nose like it was a button.

“You heard me, Sparkles. Clocked out.”

Her left eye twitched dangerously a couple of times, then her horn began to crackle. With an explosion of light, she disappeared, leaving only a wisp of smoke in her wake. A part of me felt a little bad for leaving her like that; the rest was getting hungry and glad of the hard-won solitude.

I nestled into my blanket to wait for dinner.

Sun-up.

The rebuilt roof of the Vivarium.

I stood just under the flashing neon sign, a mare’s shaking backside, looking out at the city.

Detrot. The city that’d seen fire and death, dreams and powers not meant to be seen by mortal eyes. It’d weathered them better than I, even with throbbing hearts laid bare and too many cuts to count. It was still home, even after all we’d suffered together.

Out in the Bay of Unity, the statue of Celestia and Luna rearing against all comers was freshly lit by a set of repaired spotlights. The cool wind coming in off the water was a nice change; it’d been a warm night when I first stepped out into the dark. I had to imagine Celestia was making up for her two-month absence by giving the world a bit of extra sunshine.

Overhead, the stars were fading with the night, going about whatever business stars must when they’re not enmeshed in saving all existence from rogue elements.

Lifting my glass, I took a slow sip; grapefruit juice isn’t much substitute for liquor, but Scarlet didn’t like it when I was sloppy drunk and after the week I’d just had, if it had been bourbon I’d have gotten downright slovenly.

There was the sound of beating wings and a soft clash of hooves on gravel. A pair of glistening pink jewels appeared and Swift stepped out of the shadows cast by the brightly lit sign. I raised my glass in her direction and she turned to follow my gaze out toward the bay.

“Sir.”

“Kid.”

“I thought I might find you up here.” She paused, then shut her shining eyes. “I don’t know why I say ‘thought’. I knew. I keep wondering when I’m gonna miss not just ‘knowing’ where most of the ponies in the city are at any given time.”

“You can always head out to the Wilds for a weekend if you need a reminder,” I said, and took another sip.

A set of hoofsteps, followed by another, made their way across the roof behind me. I didn’t turn. I knew there were only two ponies they could be.

Limerence approached the parapet around the edge of the roof and put his hooves up on it, staring out at the rooftops on the far side of the bay. “Mmm...How did my father do it? He managed to build the Archive and still find time for Zefu and I. I can hardly find time these days to appreciate a sunrise.”

“Same way he did most things,” Sweet Shine replied, edging in beside him. “He made the time because it mattered. Same as a sunrise matters. Right, Hardy?”

“S’right. Are you still going to be the Archivists?”

“Ah...no,” Limerence mused. “I don’t believe so. My brother was right about one thing. We’d become too passive with the items we stored. Many of the objects we secreted away could have changed the course of history. We must intensify our study of these artifacts. Catalogue our experiences. Take a more active role in preserving life, rather than simply sitting back becoming wealthy. I believe we shall be called ‘Scholars’ from here on.”

I let out a breathy chuckle. “Heh. I like it. What’ll be your first ‘active’ role, oh Scholar?”

“Ahem. Well...there are nasty stirrings out in the zebra lands. Something about ‘devils’ from the mountains, snatching the weak,” Limerence murmured, scratching lightly at the severed stump where his ear used to be. “Bad tidings come from the deer tribes as well; they say there’s a new warlord making trouble in the east. That is in addition to rumors of creeping things driving Diamond Dogs out of their holes out in the far desert. Not to mention the dragons.”

“We’ll handle all that when we need to,” Sweets affirmed, flicking her eyes back at her newly reappeared cutie-mark.

Swift’s wings drooped a little and she sidled closer to my side. “When...when do we get to quit, Sir?”

I tipped my glass back, polished off my juice, and set it down. “Anytime you like, kid. Do you want to stop being the Warden of Detrot?”

A slightly cocky smirk perked up on her lips. “Not a chance.”

“Then we don’t quit. We rest for a while longer. We help the city get stable. Then? Then...we need to take Don Tome back home for a funeral in the zebra lands. While we’re there, we might as well have a look around.”

Sweets brushed her hooves together. “I’ve got a date with a sweet minotaur in a few days. Won’t be available till then. After that, a nice, long drive sounds like it might be just the thing.”

Pushing my hat back on my head, I closed my eyes and let the breeze ruffle my mane.

The city.

My city.

“You know? This might sound funny, but I think I’m looking forward to today.”

There is an oft repeated phrase in tomes of wisdom, but I find it apt enough to include it in mine as well :

“The world will die the day good people stand back and allow history to take its course.”

What we as thinking peoples choose to do with our lives is dictated by circumstance as much as it is by our choices, but deciding to act upon the world is the most important single piece of agency which we will exercise throughout. It has been said before, but the brave, the empathetic, the wise, and the just need only sit by to ensure extinction. Rest, yes, but do not rest in peace until there are no other options.

In closing my account and compendium of the events, personalities, and surrounding histories of Detrot in the years after the Cutie-Mark Crusades, I remind you all that though Princesses watch us by day and persons like the Detective by night, our world tilts on a fulcrum with life on one end and death on the other. It was not only heroes that saved Equestria. Those paragons could not have stood without their armies; their parents raising them with kindness, their friends stalwartly beside them, their allies giving them strength. It is the duty of those of us who protect this world to give weight to life.

Furthermore, if what accounts I’ve been able to collate are to be believed then in the vastness of space, we are not alone in our struggles. Be they gods or something more, when we find ourselves in the bleakest of times we can look up and call out. We must not forget, in all our future travails that we are children of grand potential destiny.

We are the ones who will become starlight.

The Scholar

Fin

Well, ladies, gentlecolts, and all points between.

That was my story. I started Starlight Over Detrot to learn to write and I think I've done that fairly well. I'm not a great writer, but I believe I'm ready to try a book, now.

When CEO_Kasen and I set out to write this story all those years ago, we had no idea it would stretch to a beast of this length. The 'Cosmic Horror' aspect came in later than not. The original story was a simple little murder mystery about a pony detective and a murdered mare. Length was not the goal.

I could not have done this without the help of my magnificent editors. If I'm honest, the only reason this is remotely legible is because they put time, thought, and their considerable skills into making it something you'd want to read rather than wipe with. One day, I'll figure out how commas work.

To :

Reese - The person who keeps the words in order. They're a process driven mind if ever there was one and when my prose got a little too purple they've always been the one who grounded me. They are master of grammatical structure and sensical statements. The chapters would not fly without them.

Sigawesome - An ingenious writer in their own right, Sigawesome started off putting some of the most hilarious segments of comedic writing I'd ever seen in the comments section, riffing on different aspects of Starlight. They've since become a real friend, keeping me positive and letting me bounce pieces of the story off them. Their suggestions always proved fruitful and their help is eternally appreciated.

Coandco - A clever, capable editor who helped rough out a lot of the more difficult sections of the story and has been faithfully present for years, catching things I missed at every turn.

CEO_Kasen - My co-writer through the early parts, he's responsible for the tone of Starlight Over Detrot and some of its best jokes. Slip Stitch was mostly his creation and the entire concept for the story came out of a protracted play-session of L.A. Noir where he binge-watched My Little Pony at the same time. A sweet, nerdy, adorable guy who I treasure whenever I'm around him.

Silent Whisper - Smart little love-bug who managed to actually *guess* the ending with only the lightest touch. They've been helpful insofar as propping me up when I was terrified a chapter was just plain awful. They've pre-read and given advice that's kept my spirit together through the horrors of 2020 and 2021. I am grateful to them for their kindness.

CG - A cute, sometimes demented meme-machine whose suggestions and ideas actually propelled a fair bit of the later acts.

The Starlight Over Detrot Discord channel - You people keep me going. Bless the lot of you.

There are too many more to name. My mother, who I bounced ideas off of. My father, who told me I could. My old theater teacher who told me to write, write, write. The commenters, who made me believe this was doable and gave such amazing feedback.

Thank you.

All of you.

Since I have been asked many times and if you read this far, you might actually read this bit -

Starlight Over Detrot, all of its characters, all of its ideas, all of the concepts herein are public domain. Use, abuse, amuse. You can do what you like with them. No need to ask. It's all out there. If you wanna turn this into a book series and get rich, knock yourself out. I didn't write this to make money, even if the donations I got sometimes helped immensely.

For my part, I am taking a short break, then I will be back at it. I may or may not write one more chapter with a 'flash forward' a few years in the future for additional closure. I've been told that would be 'gilding the lily' by some people. I have ideas for a few more events, but none of it will really alter the shape of things.

What I do want to say is that I am not done. I am going to keep writing. I am going to keep churning out words. I've got an idea for a supernatural romance novel, a sci-fi epic, a couple adventure stories, and a comedic play set in the Victorian era.

Tips are welcome, particularly this year with Covid making everything difficult.

My Paypal is : tailstalker@hotmail.com

Our long-lived and very active Discord channel is at : https://discord.gg/bSpmdS3FVs
Come join the conversation.

Yours and ever-grateful,

Chessie

Chapter 2: Your Princess is in Another Castle

Starlight Over Detrot
Chapter 2: Your Princess is in Another Castle

When considering what went wrong between the Detrot Police Department and the Perimeter Aegis Control Taskforce, it is important to remember that both groups were charged with maintaining order and protecting the city. The DPD hunted criminals; the PACT hunted monsters, and the harmonious operation of the two was often necessary for the completion of this duty.

Why they did not, in fact, harmoniously operate is not particularly a mystery. Over time, pride crept into the equation, and each organization collectively saw themselves as more important, skilled, and/or capable than the other, imagining in their minds that they were sole guardians of the city. Each believed that Detrot would ultimately collapse without their protection, and never stopped as a whole to consider that on this point, they were both entirely correct.

And thus, Detrot was stuck with a situation in which DPD officers saw PACT as a bunch of self-impressed cowponies with the brains of confectionery and only a loose understanding of ‘collateral damage,' and PACT thought of the DPD as lacking the fortitude necessary to control their bowels in the face of an oncoming manticore and/or household pet.

This was not a rift in any way mended when Princess Celestia donated The Castle to the DPD for use as their headquarters. The Castle was a sturdy defensive bastion eventually turned royal summer home when the borders of Detrot extended too far for the Castle to be of strategic value; a few decades and renovations later, it would ultimately serve as the schizophrenic nerve center of the Detrot Police, and as a continuous sore spot for the PACT.

-The Scholar

I awoke from my doze to gunshots ringing out overhead.

We were jiggling over some terribly uneven surface that nearly bounced my teeth right out of my face, when something bounced off the passenger side window, leaving a huge crack in the glass.

Taxi shrieked in alarm, slamming on the brakes as I jammed the door open on the opposite side from the incoming fire, and rolled onto cobblestones before the car had come to a full stop. Kicking the bit of my gun up into my muzzle, I carefully peered over the trunk, trying to find a target.

When none presented itself, I glanced around for a second or two to realize that we were not in a gang warzone; Instead, we were sitting in the old chariot loading bay leading up to the Detrot Police Office’s main entrance. We’d passed under its yawning portcullis and onto the avenue in front of the oldest building in the city. It isn’t called ‘The Castle’ because somepony in P.R. thought it was a cute name.

The tower proper looked like a monstrous onion sitting on an upended coffee cup, ringed with stained glass windows around the top. Its various portals, arrow slits, and murder holes had been attacked by a vengefully fashionable pony intent on making them look like something other than the trappings of a utilitarian fortress. Sadly, the additions of old-style Canterlot gold leaf and alabaster just seemed out of place, like cake frosting hurled against the side of a municipal parking garage, even if the decorations hadn’t started cracking and peeling in an effort to fit in with the weathered masonry.

It was from the tower’s shadow that a large pegasus in full body black combat armor wheeled down out of the sky from one of the smaller, newer buildings which crouched around the central pillar like ugly ducklings huddled around their gaudily decorated mother. His military-style, close-cropped mane was a shade of sickly green; It mixed with his brown face to make him look like a foal’s hoofpainting. There was something familiar about that awful color scheme.

The stallion dropped down to ground level, skidding to a stop and tucking his wings back as two more troopers followed him down. They kept a respectful distance, but were still close enough to be ‘backing him up.’ The other two were mares wearing much the same outfit. It covered them from head to hoof in thick black kevlar with ceramic plates underneath, leaving only their muzzles and eyes exposed, and considering the humid day, they must have been hot as fresh phoenix shit. All three of them wore badges on their flanks shaped like an apple tree overlaid by a unicorn’s horn, sporting a pair of wings which said across them in silvered letters ‘Perimeter Aegis Control Taskforce.’

“Civilian traffic is restricted. We’re having training exercises-” He began in an officious tone and I stood up, dropping my bit from my teeth and coming around the cab intent on chewing nine kinds of hay out of him. Taxi beat me to it, charging out of the other side of the cab and sticking her nose in his face.

Taxi wasn’t a small mare by any stretch, but the pegasus was a properly big bastard and his neck bulged with muscles. On reflection, I should have noticed the giant riot cannon strapped to his combat saddle, as well as those of his two companions, any one of which could probably have turned both of us into a fine mist. Its barrel was as big as my leg. None of that, however, deterred Taxi.

“Did you just shoot my car, you goddess damned bastard? Was your father a diamond dog or is stupid just the new PACT recruitment policy?”

Steam blasted out of his nostrils as his companions nickered laughter at his back.

“They’re beanbag rounds and your hack wagon is fine. You need a demonstration of just how fine it’ll be, or are you going to clear that yellow piece of manure from our engagement zone?” He kicked his back leg so the re-loading mechanism ratcheted a fresh round into the chamber.

Taxi growled at him, yanking her temporary police parking permit out of her saddlebag and tossing it at his feet, “Manure?! We’re not civilian traffic, you stupid @$&*#$!”

That’s not censorship; I’m not actually sure what that word was, but it was unflattering and in buffalo. Or maybe zebra. Or possibly draconic. Knowing how far she’d ranged during her various spiritual adventures one could never rule anything out with Taxi or her choice of invective.

He looked down at the paper then carefully stepped on it, leaving a muddy hoofprint.

I decided to intervene as I saw her starting to slide back into of those freaky zebra fighting stances that looked frighteningly like total relaxation. I wasn’t really in the mood to peel the big idiot’s face out of one of the rose-bushes lining the boulevard. Well, that’s not true. I just wasn’t in the mood to fill out an incident report afterwards.

I slid between them and began gently pressing her back with one hoof on her chest. “Taxi, give it a rest. Go park us. I’m sure this fellow isn’t looking for trouble any more than we are.”

Her pink eyes flicked angrily from him to me to the cracked window before she muttered, “I am going to put this on the Chief’s bill this month. She better pay it, Hardy, or you can take the bus until she does.” Stepping back she went around and got in, sitting there for a moment trying to collect herself.

His attention finally turned to me and a huge grin spread on his treebark colored cheeks. “Hardy?... As in Hard Boiled? Isn’t that right?” Stepping up close he pushed my hat back on my head. I watched the muscles in his eyebrows shifting as I resisted the urge to immediately crush his smug face. “Ladies, we got ourselves a proper hero cop here, ain’t that right... Hardy? Too damn good to drive his own wagon, so the chief hires out some weird ass filly to drive him everywhere.” He looked up at Taxi. “Is that her?”

The two mares accompanying him looked at me then back at the beefcake moron as though sizing us up. I was obviously not high in their estimations.

Taxi was sitting behind the wheel, taking deep breaths as she tried to get herself under control. She’s not a particularly temperamental filly, but he’d caught her on a bad day. Like a trainwreck in slow motion, he continued. “Huh... I hear that creepy cabbie don’t have no Cutie Marks. Some kinda bizarro religious thing.” Then to her he yelled, “Hey baby... you and me hang out some night, and maybe I help you find your Special Talent!”

I winced. Most ponies in the force knew the story of Taxi’s Cutie Marks; it was a fable told to recruits on the dangers of undercover work. Most ponies also had the good grace not to mention it to either of us.

Sure enough, the normally peaceful taxi-driver threw herself out of the car in a fury. “Oh, you want Special Talent?!I will show you my Goddessdamned Special Talent in amateur proctology you-”

I quickly stepped in front of her. “Taxi... that’s enough. Let me handle this.” She stopped short, one hoof out and hovering an inch from a particularly painful nerve cluster in my right front knee. She slowly lowered it.

Turning I trotted up to the towering PACT trooper. He unconsciously braced himself to lift off, raising his wings. Sloppy. He obviously wasn’t an experienced brawler. Still, I decided to go the diplomatic route. I studied him for a moment then looked at his badge. The name there was...oooh, yes. I knew he was familiar.

“Canyon... Canyon, isn’t it?” He dipped his nose, eyeing me cautiously.

I gave him a wide, friendly grin. “Heck, Canyon ol’ buddy ol’ pal!” Sidling up beside him I threw one leg around his broad shoulders and turned him to face his companions. Anything to get him away from Taxi. “I remember Canyon here, ladies! Guess his Daddy went ahead and got him into the PACT after his little stint in DPD Traffic Enforcement. He tell you about that?” I didn’t give them time to answer, but could feel the pegasus’ thick neck tensing as I gave him a little squeeze which might have looked, to an incidental observer, like a headlock. “No? I guess they don’t frown so much on those ‘little’ breaches of protocol out by The Shield.”

I turned to his friends, shifting my weight casually to press down on his wing muscles. “He got so drunk at last year’s Hearth’s Warming Eve party, he tried to stick his nose right in the Chief’s crotch!” My smile had turned slightly vindictive but there was a certain joy in his growing discomfort. “Didn’t she buck you so hard you they had to re-plaster her office wall again, Canyon me ol' pal?”

He shook me off and turned to face me, unconsciously running his tongue over his two front teeth. One was missing, and the other was broken and showed signs of recent dentistry work.

His companions faces were full of barely suppressed laughter, and the look in Canyon’s eyes was turning steadily from embarrassment to ‘I wonder if I can kill the shit-head Detective with bean-bag rounds.’

Before he could test that theory, an older looking unicorn in safety goggles stuck his head over the parapet on one of the lower buildings and shouted, “Hey! Canyon! Andele! Scarper! Get your asses up here and fly like targets! If a dragon attacks and DPD headquarters is hit, I will see to it Broadside knows it was you three that let the ground crews sit on their flanks!”

Canyon quickly drew himself to a formal military stance, rear hooves together. Flipping his tail in the air he took several steps away from me and shouted back, “Sir! Civilian caught a stray round! Just clearing them off and making sure they get on their way!”

The unicorn cocked his heavy rifle. “Getcher butts in the air, or I start shootin’ em on the ground!”

All three pegasi gave powerful flaps of their wings and lifted off, nearly knocking me from my hooves in the resulting vortex. Canyon’s companions looked over their shoulders at me then couldn’t contain it anymore and started laughing uproariously as he slumped, hanging between his wings like a prisoner being dragged to his own execution. Maybe the day wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Taxi stuck her head out the window of the car, a tiny hint of a grin at the corners of her lips. “Hey... Hardy? I... erm... I...” She stuttered for a second then seemed to find her words. “...thanks for that.”

I shrugged it off. “If you’d hit him I’d have had to go for his gun. Either way...”

Looking up at the Castle’s imposing edifice looming overhead like a stern parent I could have sworn I felt The Chief gazing down at me with horrible murder in her eyes. “...I don’t want to do this.”

The cabbie made a gentle shooing motion with one leg. “Go on, Hardy. The music is calling and must be faced.”

I cocked my head as though listening. “The music sounds like a prescription drug addicted unicorn with power over my paycheck. You sure you don’t wanna just... you know... shoot me here? Like one in the knee? A graze?”

She shook her head and revved the engine. “If I thought shooting you would make it all better, I’d have done it a while ago. I’ll be in the car park.” With that she was off, out under the open portcullis and around the side towards the garage.

****

I tugged open the heavy and ornate front door to the Castle, and was immediately caught full force in the face by a torrent of paper and a blast of air that almost shoved me onto my tail. Forms and files seemed to be raining from the sky, though they didn’t make it far before two ponies dashed out the door past me to gather them back in.

I could barely see the other end of the Princess’s former audience chamber; the Chief’s office sitting directly over the throne dais was invisible against a backdrop of fluttering paperwork. Overhead, a miniature tornado composed mostly of officious garbage swung back and forth just under the ceiling, dancing like a crazed, drunken snake. Several dozen uniformed pegasi were trying with only limited success to get control of the thing, which spat out bits of detritus, then sucked them back in. Occasionally, lightning arced out and struck the ancient golden pillars lining either side of the hall, leaving black streaks.

I pulled the door shut behind me. I had to dodge past a rushing greyish-pink earth pony who nearly took my head off as she tried to catch another set of escaped files, which seemed to be intentionally staying just a few inches ahead of her. The noise was deafening.

Celestia help us. There are just some things in the world that do not call for magical solutions. It was an inauspicious day many years ago when, during the height of an ambitious interspecies collaboration, somepony decided that file cabinets were too heavy and inconvenient.

The idea for the File Cloud was simple enough. You enchant a container (in this case the ceiling of the former royal audience chamber) and a cloud so instead of water, it holds... well, anything. Paper, mostly. Everypony was going to have a File Cloud right in their own home where they could store a lifetime’s collected junk. The pencil pushers in City Hall declared it ‘The greatest innovation of our times since The Shield!’ and Detrot Police Department would be ‘First to be Graced with all the Efficiency and Security this soon to become Indispensible Modern Convenience could Offer.’

Capitalized sarcasm aside, it did eliminate, single hoofedly, an entire department dedicated to cataloguing years worth of paperwork. Just call up to the front desk and they would magically deliver right to your chair whatever you’d sent up to be dumped into the cloud. It would literally rain evidence. Unfortunately, it was discovered only once it was installed that if you store decades worth of stuff in one place, it’s awfully easy to forget what you put in there. This necessitated a filing system almost as complex as the one it replaced to keep track of everything going in.

There was also the problem that, as more things were emptied into the cloud, the questions you had to ask the Cloud get back what you’d put into it became more and more specific, and, as anyone who’s ever dealt with a genie knows, asking the wrong question to a magical entity has consequences. There had been a few incidents of ponies asking for documents and receiving case files that were in unknown languages, for places that didn’t exist, or about incidents which either never happened or weren’t going to happen for centuries. One pony asking for the groundskeeping ledger wound up inadvertently receiving the case file for his own murder.

Years of magical development and what we’d ended up with was a glorified junk closet which could incidentally defy the laws of causality in an entirely useless and disturbing fashion. Accounting was not pleased.

Less pleased, at the moment, was Radiophonic Telegraphica, the unicorn center of Detrot PD’s information systems and poster child for Equestrian naming schema gone overboard. She was huddled behind an immense radio set, which took up a full third of the vast room. Her face was pinched like a teal lemon as she adjusted the chest-high bank of gems, knobs, and dials at a dizzying speed with her horn’s magic, all the while shouting into three microphones in six different voices simultaneously, as though she was a one-pony acapella group. Four separate headsets hung around her neck, restraining her bright green mane.

I pinned down my hat before the wind could tear it from my head and I pushed against the paper-storm, making my way through it over to her and hooking my hooves over the edge of the desk.

“Telly!” I yelled, trying to make myself heard.

She didn’t even look up as she slammed her hoof down on another call button. “We’re a little busy at the moment, in case you didn’t notice! Take a friggin' number!”

Trotting around the end of the desk I grabbed the top set of headphones and pulled them off of her ears. She glared up at me indignantly but her expression softened when she saw my face. “Oh... Hardy. Dammit! We’re busy as an apple-bucker during harvest with two busted left legs! Can it wait?”

I shook my head, trying to keep my voice level, which was difficult in the din. “I was having a perfectly wonderful nightmare too! What in Equestria is going on with the File Cloud? And why is the damn PACT outside blasting at cabs?” I gestured towards the mass of stationery, notes, and parchments swirling through the room.

A flash of static burst from her headset; she winced, hit a mute-button, and glared up at the spinning mass. “The PACT idiots are here to do joint training exercises to make sure the DPD is up to snuff if we get attacked by mega-fauna. One of their yahoos took a potshot at the dome and found a chink in the protection spells! They blew off part of the control rune for the substantiality matrix! We’re venting matter from the interstitial nexi!”

I shook my head, understanding very little of that. Telly was a brainiac through and through, and damn anyone who might be a few IQ points short. I pulled my coat tightly around myself, lest it be swept away into the maelstrom.

“Has anyone been up there to try to fix it?”

She shook her head, wind whipping her mane into her face. “We can’t get close enough! You wanna try flying through that mess, I’ll be glad to give you a push!” Her horn flashed and she pulled a large red lever, which only seemed to make the tornado darker and angrier. “Damnit! The stabilization array is fluctuating!”

“I’m guessing that’s bad?”

“Only if you like being a quadruped!”

As Telly fiddled with her controls, trying to bring the raging cloud under control, I watched the crowd of tumbling pegasi shooting back and forth around the edges, catching bits of trash before they could escape and tossing them back in.

From out of the mass of cubicles and darting ponies a tiny salmon colored bolt blasted through the edge of the funnel. I couldn’t make out who or what it was, but it rose towards the ceiling, nimbly dodging flying clipboards and ballistic note-pads. Holding my hat to my head with one leg I did my best to follow its progress but after a moment it vanished into the center of the storm.

Telly was shrieking into her mic again. “Who was that?! Did anypony see who went up there?! Someone talk to me! We’ve still got containment on the evidence armory partition, right? Right?!” The speaker just crackled as dozens of voices all tried to reply at once.

Suddenly and entirely without warning, the tornado vanished. Everything that had fallen or been ejected was slurped straight up into the air with a noise like a giant trying to get the last few drops of liquid out of the bottom of a glass with an enormous straw.

All of the pegasi, finding themselves no longer fighting the furious air-flow, scrambled to catch themselves. A young buck in lab coat crashed nose-first into one of the pillars, then dropped unceremoniously into a stack of empty cardboard boxes.

After a few seconds of stunned silence everypony began quietly dragging themselves up and dusting their tails off, then counting to make sure nopony had actually been sucked into the cloud. The now docile cloud was only occasionally letting out rumbles and crackles as it tried to re-arrange everything back in the proper order.

Almost entirely unnoticed, a small orange pony dropped out of the mass of white. At first I thought it was somepony’s foal who’d come in for one of those hideous bring-your-filly-to-work days, but as she got closer, I saw she was wearing a rumpled uniform. Her mane was cut in that same silly military flat-top style as the buffoons outside, and was a truly shocking shade of fluorescent red. If there was a geiger counter in the building, she’d have set it off.

She clutched a bucket in her teeth and fluttered towards us, almost losing her balance when one wing cramped from overexertion as she tried to land. Skidding to a stop on all four hooves she came up just a few inches short of the desk and collapsed on her stomach in a panting heap.

Telly glared down into the bucket at the tiny pegasus. “What...?” She began then paused and lifted the container in a telekinetic field, peering into the black mess inside. “What did you do up there... ah... cadet? Wait... aren’t you... you’re the transfer from PACT, right?”

She nodded weakly and tried to stand but her legs went out from under her almost immediately and she sat down heavily, “Yes, Ma’am... whoo... hah....” After a few more deep breaths she managed to reply, “I re-painted the... thing... hooo!... with the bullet-hole in it.”

The radio pony dipped one hoof in the dark substance and stared at it then gave it a sniff. “That’s... printer ink. Heh. Accounting is going to love this. Though, they’ll probably hate it less than an armory containment breach. It’ll hold for now. We’ll need a more permanent fix, but a more pressing issue is probably finding out where they punched through the shield spells.”

I huffed and tapped the wheezing young pegasus on the forehead. “Cadet... what did you think you were doing? You do know that cloud could have torn your damn fool head off! You know we keep weapons from murders in there?!”

“Actually the evidence armory containment magics seem to have held-” Telly started, but I silenced her with a sharp look.

“If they hadn’t, we’d have had a tornado whirling around, spewing out knives and shooting hoofguns!”

The cadet’s shoulders stiffened and she pulled herself upright. “I fixed it, didn’t I? I was watching the training exercises outside. I saw where the shot hit the roof-” Her brilliant cyan eyes shot wide as she peered my badge before yanking herself into a salute so fast she almost knocked herself cold with her own hoof. “Sir! Sorry, Sir!”

Shutting my eyes I let out a little breath then turned on my heels. “Alright... catastrophe averted by the scrub. Don’t expect a medal. Telly?”

A strange look crossed Telly’s face as she looked back and forth between me and the rookie. I couldn’t quite read it but there was a definite smile buried somewhere under the exhaustion.

“Telly!” I repeated in a louder voice and she looked at me, licking her lips as that smile turned into a huge snarky grin.

“Yes, Sir, Detective, Sir?”

I facehoofed, and then waved towards her radio set. “Is the Chief ready to see me? Tell me this mess wasn’t what she called me down here for. I’d hate to think the budget’s been hacked off so completely she’d need me filing.”

“What? Oh... er, no.” The radio pony slumped behind her desk and tapped a purple button lightly with a tiny flicker of her horn. Red emergency lights flashing all around the audience chamber quietly shut off. “We got a call this morning on a death over on the other side of uptown. Something pretty high profile. She sent the forensics bunch out there to get what they can but the media got there before us and is making a fracas of it.”

“So what does she need me for?” I asked, watching a passing accountant with a stack of loose paper balanced on his head trying to get around a small avalanche of garbage jammed in the stairwell that hadn’t been pulled back when the cloud returned to normal.

Telly shook her head, pulling one of her head-sets off and setting it aside. “Honestly? I imagine she needs somepony who can solve this quickly or sweep it under the carpet before the newspapers start howling about police inefficiency. Either way,” she said, adding a gentle bow and graceful sweep of her hoof, “it is but mine to listen and yours to jump like a bunny when she calls lest she tear your nuts off and feed them to you.”

An indoor tornado wasn’t the worst way I’d seen a day begin in Detrot PD, but it was right up there. If that wasn’t what the chief got me out of bed for... I felt a little worry plucking at my neck.

“Did you at least take the bullets out of her gun?” I asked softly.

The teal radio-pony grinned as she yanked open her desk drawer, and six small caliber rounds rolled to the bottom with a clatter. “You know I’ve got your back, Hardy. Besides, I think I saw her take a few of the blue diamonds. Those usually mellow her out.”

Straightening my jacket, I threw out my chest, assuming a stance I hoped radiated confidence.

“Alright. Wish me luck.”

Telly snorted and shoved her drawer shut, “You don’t need luck. You need a tranquilizer gun and royal intervention. Just try not to piss her off worse. Some of us actually have to work here.”

I looked up at the stained glass window over front of the Chief’s office depicting Justice, our patron, in all her glory. She who wore a blindfold and clutched a flaming sword in her teeth, rearing to charge forth against the iniquitous and unrighteous. Her hooves were sheathed in golden shoes and her coat was a burnished white. Rather dramatic, but still... beautiful.

I could see a spindly shadow moving back and forth, gesticulating wildly at something out of sight. Tipping my head I whispered a quiet prayer before turning towards the staircase up to the second floor. Telly and the recruit stood there together with sympathetic looks in their eyes as they watched me go. At least, I imagined them to be sympathetic, right up until Telly stage whispered to the little pegasus: “If she ever actually kills him, I want his hat.”

****

I stopped in the ancient hallway, one leg raised to knock on the heavily ornamented doors to the Princess’s old chambers. The long hall was almost silent, feeling like a world apart, separated from the mad rush of the audience chamber. I’d been fine right up until I set hoof on the extremely plush red carpet lined on either side with ancient suits of armor.

As I approached the beautiful forest fresco on the door, the weight of the morning seemed to drop on my head like an anvil. Followed by a wagon. And a piano. For a moment I entertained the idea that I could sneak back downstairs, out into the cab, and beg Taxi to drive me to the other end of the Equestria. It was a damnably attractive notion.

Celestia, did I once love this job? Was there a time where I sat bolt upright in bed and looked around and thought ‘Yes, I want to face a maniacal horned tyrant before breakfast?'

Actually... there was a time... several years ago, before my partner... No. Put the brakes on that entire line of thought, Hardy...

‘Death shadows you today, Hardy.’ Taxi’s words came back to me and I tried to push them aside, but it wasn’t happening. Equicide is like that. If you work there, death is always waiting somewhere in the wings. Besides, it didn’t matter whether or not I happen to like the job. I’d taken the oath. I put my hoof on a book of law and swore to serve and protect. That means something, right?

It’s not that I ever stopped feeling like I was doing the right thing with my life. My Cutie Mark says it all. A pony can know they’re exactly where they should be, and still want to throw themselves in front of a bus now and then.

A cup of coffee might do me good though. After all, the Chief could only get so angry before she either had an aneurysm or fired me. She could wait fifteen minutes.

I was just turning to creep back downstairs when the wide double doors glowed brightly, then crashed inwards and left me hanging there, turned towards the hall and a guilty expression on my face. I carefully looked over my shoulder; Her high backed chair was facing the other way, looking out over the rush of ponies in the cubicles below. Quickly burying the desire to bolt, I composed myself and marched across the threshold to meet my fate.

The Chief’s office was vast and covered in gold paint, but was mostly empty, save for thick red carpets that stopped short of the edge of a huge but worn maple-wood desk, which was a towering monument to the ancient royal order. It’d been Celestia’s at one time, and was just about the only thing that had been kept from the previous administration. The former head of the department was a big fan of antiques and jammed them in every possible corner, and when the Chief was elected to the position, she took one look at all that gaudy shit and sold it to pay off the department’s budget over-run.

Two flat backed chairs that reminded me of the ones in the headmare’s office of my old elementary school sat facing the desk. I’d spent many hours in similar ones writing endless lines of things like ‘I will not help Sweet Shine replace the fruit in the teacher’s lounge with unripe zap apples.’

There was a tiny bowl of peppermint candy, three perfectly sharpened pencils, and two boxes labeled ‘in’ and ‘out’ sitting on her desk. The ‘out’ box stack of paperwork was significantly higher than ‘in.’

Trying to be casual about it, I edged up to the desk and snagged a sweet from the bowl. Unwrapping it with my teeth I balanced it on the back of one leg then flicked it into the air and tilted my head back to catch it in my lips. It never landed. It just hung there a few inches from my face, shimmering slightly in a sparkling field of unicorn magic.

The luxuriously appointed chair slowly turned around, and Police Chief Iris Jade smiled down at me like a predator whose particularly stupid prey has just waltzed into her den. Her platinum silver mane hung around her skeletal frame in stiffly coiffed lines you could have used for a measuring stick. Her pelt was a harsh shade of emerald that contrasted badly with the chair, but went perfectly with the tailor made business suit clinging to her like loose flesh.

Each of her eyes seemed to focus on a slightly different part of my face, and her pupils were simply gone, lost in corneas the same shocking green as her body. Her horn was polished and shined, with the tip ground to a dangerous looking point. She watched me in silence for a few seconds then the peppermint floated over and dropped between her teeth. She bit down, and the crunch reminded me uncomfortably of breaking bone.

“Good morning, Detective. I’m glad you could grace us with your presence this beautiful day.” Leaning forward she put her hooves on the desk and slid off her seat to stand, watching me with that unsettling gaze.

I climbed up into one of the chairs, gathering my legs under me. “Glad to be gracious. You know, threatening my life before breakfast is probably against the law. Where’s the case?” I plucked my hat off and brushed off a stray piece of notecard from the mess downstairs.

“What makes you think there’s a case?” She inquired, tilting her head. One of her pupils chose that moment to reappear, lending her a slightly maniacal expression. “What makes you think you’re not here for me to take a skinning knife to your flanks?”

I clopped my hooves together and did not say, ‘because Taxi said there is.’ “I spoke to Telly. Besides, if you were going to fire me, there’d have been balloons, cake, and a gallows downstairs. And lemme just say, I was way more impressed back when it was ‘take a carrot peeler to your dick.’”

She said nothing, but the drawer of her desk slid open and the vegetable-skinning instrument in question floated out to hang in midair for several seconds before dropping back out of sight. I swallowed sharply and my jaw snapped so fast I almost bit my own tongue.

Wrinkling her nose, she lifted two files out of her inbox, shoving one across the table to me. I caught it in my teeth and unfolded it, looking over an ‘initial report,’ which is police speak for ‘transcript of a panicking idiot screaming into his telephone.’ It said ‘Murder/Misadventure/Suicide’ across the top, below the address.

“Fine. You’re right, much as it pains me to admit. We’re overloaded at the moment and the case that came in this morning has taken on a certain importance because the media managed to hear about it before we did. One of the cleaning staff at the High Step Hotel called every paper and news station in the book before they called the PD switchboard. Reporters were crawling all over the scene for almost fifteen minutes before we got there and managed to clear them out.”

I winced and folded the folder in half, wedging it into one of my extremely deep coat pockets. While I am from the school of investigative thought that says forensics tends to muddy otherwise cut and dry issues, they’re still essential to the job we do, which is finding criminals. Enough simple cases have been flat out ruined because somepony stuck his hoof in the wrong puddle that the thought of a crime scene covered in reporters made me want to weep.

“Though, it’s not the only reason I needed you here today. I happen to have some fantastic news! You’ll be overjoyed, I’m certain.” Leaning over she reached down into her garbage can and retrieved her battered phone. “I’ve been on the line with Mayor Snifter all morning about the latest ‘budget modifications.’”

Sudden worry twisted my stomach. “Right, budget modifications... what exactly does that have to do with me being in the office?” I asked nervously, lowering my chin onto the seat.

She grinned even wider, then touched the radio desk call button and said - in a voice so cheerful I almost retched - “You’re getting a partner!”

My ears shot straight up in alarm. “Wait, what? No, that’s fine! Taxi is plenty. I know she’s not official, but the last time we tried this, that pitiful pissant you set me up with almost shot himself in the leg. Juniper-” I began, but she swept her hoof down onto the desk and cut me off mid-sentence.

“Juniper is dead. I know you and he worked well together, but it’s been more than two years. I can’t justify the expense of that cab for one officer.”

Pushing myself up I stood and yanked my fedora down over my ears, starting for the door. “I’ll be at the crime scene. Doing my job. I don’t need this shit. If you find somepony dumb enough to ride shotgun with me, do us both a favor and fire them. Might save a life.”

Jade shrugged eloquently. “It’s a partner or a desk job. Take your pick. Frankly, I’d love to have you around the office more. I need somepony who can make a decent cup of coffee.”

That brought me up short. I turned and stared at her, but there wasn’t even a hint of humor in her sharply angled face; nor was there the sadistic glee I expected. It was more like... exhaustion, which she covered quickly by sliding back in her seat and plucking another candy from the bowl, shelling it open, and crunching at it loudly. A moment later her pupils expanded so wide her eyes looked almost black. Right, note-to-self: Don’t eat anything on the Chief’s desk.

I wondered, not for the first time lately, what actually went on in her mind. She was straight as an arrow and replaced a corrupt son of a whore who’d driven the department almost into the ground. When she joined the force, everypony thought we were getting a bureaucrat instead of a cop. We were proved wrong after she managed the first actual drop in violent crime-rates in almost three decades.

Over the years she’d relaxed, a little. The alternative, in her position, was probably insanity, though I can’t say the work left her completely unaffected. Her copious medication intake was a tolerated open secret. So long the job got done, nopony objected too loudly. It was a common enough story in Detrot; she took the job because there was no-one else competent or crazy enough.

Still, there were a few odd incidents when she got her pill bottles mixed up. Equestria being what it is, it’s entirely possible a purple dragon could have been eating the light from the city traffic signals, but that didn’t make the APB and the fruitless city-wide lizard-chase sound any better on the six o'clock news.

“You’re serious? Which poor fool did you con into this? Was it Cheese Nip? Or... nonono... not Creamy Goodness! He can barely leave his office without disinfecting his hooves!”

Jade pushed the other folder across her desk in my direction but caught it with a flicker of her horn, holding it just out of reach. The phone beeped softly and she raised her voice towards the big double doors. “You can come in.”

The hinges creaked and swung in a few degrees, then a familiar neon orange head poked around the edge of the door. It was that little pegasus; She’d managed to straighten her collar and was no longer breathing so hard, but her tail was a bit mussed. Her Cutie Mark, which was a crossed sword and fountain pen, still had some shreds of paper stuck to it. She was armed, technically; Her bit trigger dangled comfortably against her knee, but the weapon in her holster was a .32 caliber ‘Filly’ edition semi-automatic. It had the stopping power of a thrown gerbil and couldn’t have been any more girly if it had been pink.

When my brain made the connection that this was supposed to be my new partner, I jumped up so fast I almost pulled a muscle, staring at the pint sized pony. “You’re joking!” The new recruit cringed. I lowered my voice. “What am I? A babysitter? You can’t be sticking me with a rookie.”

Iris flipped open the other folder, flicking through the loose pages. “I’m ‘fraid so, sunshine. Detective Hard Boiled, I want you to meet Officer... Swift was it?”

She nodded and tried to hide a proud little smile. “It’s Cadet, ma’am.”

The Chief cocked her head, reminded. “Oh... Cadet. Right. Okay, step up here.” A tiny book lifted out of the center drawer of her desk then landed on the front. Swift scooted forward a few inches, and her eyes widened as she saw the title. It said ‘Laws and Rights of The Land of Equestria’ in silvery font. “Put your hoof up here.”

She was so small she had to lift off the grounds with a few flaps of her wings, rising onto just the tips of her rear horseshoes so she could reverently lay her fetlock on the book.

With a hint of a smile Jade said formally, “Do you swear to serve the citizenry of our fine city and protect them with your own life?”

It took the much smaller pony several seconds to respond. Tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes but when she replied her voice only wavered a little. “I promise, ma’am.”

The book lifted and dropped back into the desk drawer and the Chief rubbed her hooves together. “Alright... Can’t have a cadet riding with a detective. Effective immediately, you’re promoted. Officer Swift, welcome to The Detrot Police Force.” Jade looked at me expectantly and I couldn’t do much but stare at the foal she’d dropped in my lap. The cadet... Swift’s fur was so bright it actually hurt to look at directly, but she was swelling with pride. A smile split her face so wide I was worried she might sprain a cheek muscle.

I dropped my rump back onto the carpet and sighed. “Kid, I’ve got to ask. Did you volunteer to work with me?”

She nodded then unbuttoned the front of her heavily starched uniform vest and rooted around inside, coming up with a raft of papers and spreading them out on the floor. “Yes, sir!”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ This isn’t PACT. Call me Hardy. You can call me ‘Detective’ if you pathologically must.”

“Yes, siirrredetective!”

I reached out and grabbed her hoof as she tried to salute me. She quickly put it back down, her ears turning a slightly darker shade of pink. I realized she was blushing. Princesses, lend me strength...

“Alright, so what sad sack pointed you in my direction? I can’t imagine it was your career counselor at the Academy.”

Her eyes darted to the Chief then back to me. “I... errr... I r-read your file.” She stuttered, then shifted into a familiar recitation stance from basic training. “Detective Hard Boiled. Six recommendations on file. Highest case closure rate. Wounded in the line of duty twice. Fifteen years on the force-” I reached out and put a hoof over her mouth. She stopped short and cracked a tiny, awkward smile.

“Methinks someone gave you a slightly trimmed version. One missing a few essential details.” I muttered quietly, giving Jade an accusing sidelong glance.

Jade leaned forward and clicked her tongue. Her voice dropped to a condescending tone so thick I felt my gorge rise. The pegasus didn’t seem to notice. “Officer Swift... show Hardy here your letter of recommendation.” Swift picked up a heavily creased sheet of official stationery from the papers on the floor, holding it in her lips so I could read it. I quickly scanned the typewritten note.

Dispatch to Detrot PD, District 1, main office from P.A.C.T. (Perimeter Aegis Control Taskforce) District 6 Shield Guard.

I, hereby formally recommend that Cadet Swift Cuddles be transferred to the Detrot Police Department. Her heroism and bravery will be of great benefit to the city of Detrot, and I look forward to watching her career develop.

Some of you may be familiar with recent incidents with the latest batch of PACT recruits. These included the escape and recapture of a cockatrice meant for training purposes, and damage caused by an underweight cadet trying to handle standard munitions. The climax of these events was during the final set of entrance exams: a mid-flight attempt to use a Skybreaker Flak Cannon, a weapon made for a pony twice her size. The recoil sent her rocketing backwards through two windows, a door, and onto a department border collie.

While this was the most prominent part of the training record, this was not the most amazing thing I saw Cadet Swift do that day. It wasn’t even when she stood up, hefted a weapon she could barely lift onto her back, and tried a second time. What really struck me was when she picked herself out of the foamy wreckage of the break room soda machine and got on her feet, getting ready to try a third time. I sincerely believe she’d have brought down the entire training facility with her spine if we hadn’t stopped her, and that says far more about what kind of pony she is than her range scores and track times ever could.

She may not have passed the PACT physical qualifiers, but her devotion would have made her an excellent trooper. After rescuing a reporter and several members of her own training team, including her instructor, from a rampaging cockatrice, we cannot simply abandon her because fate saw fit to give her a body too small to use A.M.F. (Anti-Mega-Fauna) classed weaponry.

She can still be an asset to this city. If it cannot be in PACT, let it be in the city Police Department. Equicide would fit her. Her crack marksmanship and masterful flying will prove invaluable.

Yours,

Lt. Grapeshot

Then down at the bottom:

P.S. Swift, if you read this every night. your boss won't be able to. I remember what you did with that love letter in flight camp.

I looked up from the letter. “Swift... Cuddles?” Her nostrils flared and she bristled a little as she set down the note and folded it back up. Right... has a problem with her own name...

“Swift... if you please, sir.” she said evenly as she began to gather up the papers.

The Chief shifted in her chair and cleared her throat, smiling far more pleasantly than the situation warranted. “You two can get to know each other on the way over to the High Step. I think this might be the start of something beautiful!” She was all but singing.

My shoulders drooped. “Chief-” I started, but she lifted her coffee mug and jiggled it threateningly.

“It’s this, or you can start your new position this morning. I like my coffee extra sweet with lots of cream.”

I turned to examine Swift again, trying to wrap my mind around how life could possibly have gone so wrong so quickly. At last I addressed her directly. “Alright... you can shoot and you can fly. Anything else you can do?”

She looked from me to the Chief then back, scuffing her hoof on the carpet. “I can write.” Her ears splayed out. “Sir. Detective! Please, give me a chance. I can do this work. I... I won’t disappoint you.” Her expression matched her tone of nervous desperation.

“Too late, kid.” I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable.

The Chief dropped the second file in front of me. The tab said ‘Swift Cuddles’ on the corner. I reluctantly picked it up and stuffed it in my coat. “Officer Swift, could you wait in the hallway for one moment? I need to have a quick discussion with my employee here.”

Swift got up and padded out with her head low, using one wing to drag the door shut behind her. Freaky dexterity pegasi have with those things...

When she was gone, Iris put both forehooves on her cheeks, pulling her face a little out of shape, brewing her thoughts. After about half a minute, she let her legs drop and set her shoulders. “Here’s the deal, Hardy. She washes out and there will be a shit-storm the like of which the Princesses themselves have never seen. Read her file. That rookie made herself a darling of the newspapers before she was out of the Academy. If that shit falls on my head, my final act will be to grab you by the throat with my horn and drag you in to drown in feces with me.”

I glanced over my shoulder in the direction the tiny pegasus had taken. "Okay, ultimatum out of the way... Why me? I can think of five other officers who need partners more than I do.”

“Two things.” She held up both legs, then tapped one with the other. “The mayor is on a budget cutting spree and ‘lunatic cab driver’ was right near the top of his list of wasteful spending. We both know Sweet Shine is still a great cop, badge or no badge. I’d rather have her working for us than going freelance." Gesturing towards the car park outside she sucked on her teeth. "I never busted her for it, but we both know she was sneaking into crime scenes after she ‘quit.’”

I acknowledged that with a little sniff. “And the other thing?”

The Chief pointed toward my coat with one leg where the rookie’s file was tucked. “That kid has got huge guts but she needs experience. Her file reads like a cheesy superhero novel. Top marks in Equicide training and marksmanship. She graduated in six months. Last pony who did that was... well...” She waved her foreleg in my general direction. Me. My, how youth doth pass.

I weighed my options, my gaze flitting between the coffee cup, the Chief, and the arching doorway. There really weren’t any. She had me by the balls. We both knew it. Right now it was mostly a matter of whether or not I was going to submit gracefully or if she was going to have to give’em a squeeze. The morning had started off so well, too.

Leaning back, Iris picked bits of the mint out of her teeth with her tongue. “She needs experience, but the only way she’s going to live long enough to get it is to have somepony around to keep her from stepping in front of a bullet. You, in turn, could use fresh eyes and a dose of her youth.”

I hiked up my coat and tried to smile, managing a tortured grimace. “Fine. After all, you of all ponies would know about dosage.”

I barely made it out the door before the phone smashed against the wall where my head had been seconds before.

****

I slammed the heavy portal shut behind me, then leaned back against it, trying to even out of my breathing. My mood was shifting crazily between fury and anticipation. The anger... well, anger and I are old friends. I’d gotten a new partner, yes. Brilliant. One who could use a gun and apparently finished basic in record time. Amazing. A fluorescent female flying turkey barely out of diapers. Fan-bleeding-tastic.

On the flip side... a new case. A new mystery to solve! New criminally inconvenient places to shove my nose. A hint of joy was sneaking around the edges of my black mood at the prospect. My Cutie Mark felt just a little warm. The cockles of my bitter old heart swelled with... with whatever it is pony heart cockles swell with.

I glanced around for the rookie, but she was nowhere to be found. I poked my head behind the rows of armored suits, then inside one or two of them, before my cob-webbed brain finally said ‘Pegasus. Look up, Dumbass.’ She was hanging up near the ceiling, closely examining one of the vast painted frescos.

Swift radiated guilt like a hundred arcanowatt bulb. Her tail was tucked up behind her back legs and her shoulders hunched right up around her ears. She'd obviously been listening to my little exchange with the Chief. So... not stupid, but probably too nosy for her own good. Now, who does that remind you of, Hardy?

“How much of that did you hear?" I asked and her ears splayed out to either side of her head. Reluctantly she began to descend, dropping to the carpet almost soundlessly.

"Sir? I don’t know what-"

"Yeah, playing innocent is going to work for about five seconds before I clop you upside the head. I know professionals who couldn't pull off 'innocent' when they were facing life in Tartarus Correctional."

Her expression turned to almost comical horror. "I swear I didn't mean to!... I... sir..." She sputtered, wings shooting straight out from her side. They were the color of a robin’s breast, and seemed like the only part of her that wasn't fun-sized. It made her look strangely like she hadn’t quite grown into them yet.

I cocked an eyebrow at her and she slowly deflated, collapsing onto her rump. Hanging her head she muttered, “I’m sorry, sir.”

With a wiggle one of ear I stepped past her. "I don't care that you listened in. You’d have been an idiot not to.” She lifted her head, staring after me. I could feel her skeptical look but pointedly ignored it. “But if you’re going to peek through keyholes, you might want to learn to play poker. You lie like a blankflank.”

Before she could respond, I headed for the spiraling stairs down towards the lobby. She followed in an embarrassed silence that was filled by an irritating voice somewhere in the back of my head, declaring me Equestria’s biggest prick.

Thank you, little voice. I thought, The hangover wasn’t enough this morning. I needed guilt too.

You’re welcome, asshole. It whispered.

****

Telly was managing to clean up of the office as I edged down the stairs, trying to be inconspicuous. She stood at the radio console, giving rapid fire orders in three different simultaneous voices through a half dozen microphones, which floated in a circle around her head. With the indoor weather under control, business was slowly returning to normal. I could still hear the gunshots outside but they were fewer and farther between than they had been.

Swift edged up behind me, peeking around the corner then asked far too loudly, “Sir, why are we sneaking around the office?” There is no way for a pony that color to be stealthy.

“First days tend to be a little bit... messy... around-” I started to reply, under my breath, but Telly’s hearing is almost as good as her vocals. She raised her head and grinned a huge grin, tossing aside the mics and racing over to us.

She almost purred as she inquired, “Hardy, you weren’t tryin’ to get out without frosting the scrub, were ya?” Without waiting for me to respond, she raised her horn and shot a blue ball of glowing light, soaring to a visible point just beneath the Cloud. Everypony else stopped what they were doing and started rooting in their desks. My tail drooped a little as I realized that, by this point, it was inevitable.

“Do we have to do this right now, Telly?”

Telly nodded vigorously. “Oooh, you know we do! Can’t have a rookie out on the street unfrosted, now can we? S’bad luck!”

“Sir? What’s ‘frosting the rookie’?” A nervous note crept into Swift’s voice as she realized, correctly, that perhaps not all was well.

Turning I sighed and put a hoof over my eyes. “Sorry, kid. I did my best. Try to breathe through your mouth.”

The unicorn was almost bouncing on her hooves. “Goody!” Her horn flashed and Swift levitated off the ground with an alarmed squeak. Struggling for a moment she tried to beat her wings but ended up just hanging there flailing like a frightened goose. I almost felt sorry for her.

The office poines started chanting; Softly at first, then with growing volume.

“Frooosting... Frooosting... FROOOSTING!”

I reared up and gave her a gentle push, and she soared off over the cubicles as the cheering rose to a crescendo. A spray of chocolate syrup shot out of one of the cubes and spattered Swift’s police barding. That was the signal. Egg yolk started flying, then bottles of silly string. Half-way down the room somepony managed to land some powdered sugar on someone else’s desk and earned a ‘returned fire’ in the form of a water balloon. Everyone joined in; Grizzled old veterans who’d seen more bodies than gravediggers cackled as they tossed cupcakes alongside department accountants who'd never had a gun strapped to their foreleg.

There is no word for the kind of mess ponies with quick-clean spells can make when they have permission. Dignity aside, I was trying not to laugh as the pegasus dangled there over what was quickly turning into a melee almost as messy as the tornado. Telly was less restrained and rolled around on the floor, beating her hooves on the carpet as she giggled like a schoolfilly.

After about ten minutes of very tasty siege warfare, I reached down and gently whacked Telly’s blue-green horn with a hooftip. It let out an alarming noise like a struck bell as she winced; The magic around Swift evaporated, dropping the sodden rookie on one of the mail ponies with a wet splash.

I tried to look exasperated but couldn’t completely hide my smile. “Alright, satisfied?”

Telly wiped a stray splotch of syrup off her nose and peered out over the office which looked like an explosion in a candy shop.

“Heh...very. Somepony call the janitor.”

****

It was a further fifteen minutes before we managed to drag Swift to the front of the line of ponies waiting to have the congealing muck magicked off of their hides. I took a quiet seat in an empty office and put my legs up, dragging out my... oog... I was going to have to get used to saying that... dragging out my new partner’s file.

A stray piece of paper dropped from between the front two sheets and fluttered to the floor. Reaching down I tried to pick it up with my hooves, but horseshoes are not ideal instruments for picking up anything perfectly flat. I was reduced to licking the back of a knee and sticking it to the note before lifting it onto the desk so I could read it.

It was mouth-penned on PACT stationary with their ridiculous seal in the upper left corner. The ink was still a little damp.

Dispatch to : Chief Jade

Re: Cadet Swift Cuddles

I’m going to keep this short and sweet. This cadet is, to put it simply, an issue. You’ve probably read her file by now. If you haven't, go do it. Pay attention to her psych profile; She's convinced she's gonna be some kind of Champion of the People, and has a list of pathologies and complexes you find only in serial killers and war heroes.

Well, I don’t need either a wannabe hero or a nutjob out flying the Shield. She spent half her training with her nose jammed in a novel and the other half damn near killing herself on the obstacle course. Sure, she posted a couple records, but PACT teams are cohesive machines; One cog out of place and the whole thing comes apart. Heroes get killed, and then everypony screams and hollers about their 'noble sacrifices,' which only makes more damn heroes. Heroes are like parasprites. If you’re smart, you beat ‘em over the head with a tuba then dump ‘em in the woods.

In any other situation I’d toss her out on her ear, and she’d probably get eaten chasing down dragons by herself. Unfortunately, when she saved that newsmare from the cockatrice, she complicated matters. I don’t need to stir up even more bad press by letting her wash out. The griffin refugees in town are causing enough of a shitstorm and I don’t need another ‘Incident’ with a deluded rookie.

Thankfully, I spoke to City Hall this morning and the mayor and I see eye to eye. I am therefore transferring her to the DPD, with Mayor Snifter’s blessing.

A desk job isn't an option for this one unless you want her trying to slay the fax machine. Put her to work. Stick her in front of a train. I don’t care. If you’ve got somepony whose life you want to make miserable, give her a partner.

She's your problem now.

With respect,

Col. Broadside

Perimeter Aegis Control Taskforce.

As I read the last few lines my heart slowly sunk right into the pit of my stomach. “Great... just beautiful...” I sighed, refolding the note and jamming it back in the folder. There aren’t a lot of things I’m afraid of. Yeah, a bullet could cut me down. Some days I think it would be a relief. But a child who thinks she’s the one to make the world a better place... That’s scary.

Swift poked her nose through the door, smiling sheepishly as she pulled her uniform shirt back on and buttoned it, then shrugged her gun back onto her leg and wiggled into her bullet proof vest. The fabric was white again, but she was still scented a little bit like chocolate and squeezy-cheese.

“Sir, did you know they were going to do that?” she asked, her ears flushed.

I sat up and shoved myself back from the desk, easing over onto all fours. “I was trying to get us out without that little ritual... hence the sneaking.”

Straightening her vest she sat back on her haunches and sniffed at the leg-holes then made a face. “I still smell like... everything.”

“It’s fine. Hardly noticeable. Speaking of things I’ve noticed, I’ve been sitting here reading through your file-” Which was not entirely true, but I resolved to give the actual document a once over later on. “-and I was just curious... Why take the transfer? You passed most of the physicals for PACT, minus the ordnance training. Why DPD? Seems to me like a strange step from monster hunter.”

Her nose wrinkled a little. “Oh...”

“Oh what? Come on kid, spit it out.”

Putting her rear hooves together she screwed up her courage. “Sir, I gathered you didn’t want a partner. If you want me to, I’ll put in for transfer to another department tomorrow.”

I blinked at her, then shook my head. The pegasus would have to be brick stupid not to have put that together, but it was still more blunt than I was expecting. I had to think about how to respond.

“It’s... not that simple,” I said, eventually. “Look, you’re not the first pony I’ve worked with... since my last actual partner.”

Swift tilted her head curiously. “There wasn’t anything in your file about your other partners...”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised. Didn’t you find it the least bit curious that department policy says everypony needs a partner for field work and I’m flying solo?”

“Well, yes... But sir, your record-” I put up a hoof and she stopped.

“Won’t mean a thing if the Chief can’t justify the expense of keeping me on. There are some... circumstances... which our ride will gleefully tell you about I’m sure. The Chief is looking for a reason to stick me behind a desk. If I ditch another partner, accounting will hand her one.”

Her wings ruffled worriedly as she inquired, “What... what about me, sir? What happens if we don’t work out?”

I didn’t feel much like sugar coating the truth and damn if she didn’t remind me of somepony I used to see in the mirror many many years ago. It was annoying as hell.

“Honestly? The mayor’s in a ‘fat trimming’ mode right now. One of the first places he loves to cut is our budget. That means whoever’s lowest on the totem pole. That means you, if you don’t have a partner. The union will give you to the mayor on a plate as a sign of good will so somepony else can keep their pension. So I ask again... why Detrot P.D.?”

My reply didn’t seem to comfort her in the least and her tail wrapped itself tightly around her rear legs. “I... mmm...” Shutting her eyes she muttered something under her breath. It sounded like a list of names.

“Say again?” I cocked an ear towards her.

“Oh... sorry... it’s something I do when I’m nervous.” She tucked her wings back and recited: “Beohoof, General Hurricane, Victoria, Shining Armor, Shimmerstrike, Daring-Do, Aurora Borealis... They’re ponies I admire. They’re the reason I joined. They’re ponies who made Equestria a better place.”

I tapped her folder, which I was certain had neglected to mention this behavior. “Half of those ponies don’t exist, and the other half are dead.”

Swift stuck her lower lip out stubbornly. “Does that mean I shouldn’t try to be more like them?" She stomped her hoof in frustration, a stomp muffled by the carpet. “I’m not stupid! I know I won’t save Canterlot or... or get to fight monsters. I just feel like I should do more with my life than just write silly stories!”

I bit back a particularly nasty retort that was spiraling around the tip of my tongue; instead I stroked my chin fur contemplatively. “Alright, fine. I just need to know you’re not going to do something stupid trying to play hero. I mean, unless you want to become a cautionary tale to tell my next partner.”

Her nostrils flared. “I know what my coaches in basic thought. I will do what is right and if I have to I will lay down my life for this city, but I’m not going to throw myself into a manticore’s jaws!” After a second she added more quietly: "Detective... sir."

I decided to let it go for now, but alarm bells were absolutely screaming that I should be watching this one before she managed to get herself turned into a neon spray all over a wall.

“Fine. Come on, kid. We’ve got a dead pony to see.” I scooted off my chair and strolled around the desk out into the royal audience chamber. After a moment, Swift followed.

****

We found Taxi down in the car park sitting on the hood of the cab again making a loud humming noise that sounded just a little like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. Every few seconds she'd take a deep breath, then start again. Swift examined the massive garage with a critical eye, moving past row after row of paddy wagons, chariots, and even some riot tanks. Her eyes lingered on the huge water cannons sticking out of the front of those and she licked her lips avariciously. "Sir... if you don't mind me asking, why are we taking a cab? Why not one of those?"

I growled, “Because I can’t drive.” I called to the cabbie, ”Sweets, are you ready or do you need ten more minutes to open your Tail Chakra?" Her shoulders fell and she eased down off the car’s bonnet, eyes still closed as she unwound from the strange cross-legged meditation posture.

Something was obviously bothering her, but knowing Taxi, it could just be poor energy flow in the garage. "Hardy, do you really need to-" She opened her eyes and caught sight of Swift. Her jaw dropped, and her gaze shot from my partner’s brightly colored face to her badge to her over-sized technicolor wings. "-Homygoddess..."

I wished I’d thought to bring along my hip flask this morning as I made introductions. "Officer Swift, I want you to meet Sweet Shine. She will be our driver. Sweets, make nice. The Chief has seen fit to give me a new partner."

Swift held out her leg and Taxi looked at it like she was being handed a live electrical wire before reaching out and politely tapping hooves. “Call me Taxi.” She turned and gave me a hard stare. “Hardy, you didn’t tell me you asked the Chief for another partner; Particularly one so... colorful.”

I held up my forehooves, placatingly. “Hey, it was news to me. She’s a transfer from PACT.”

Taxi blinked and shifted her pink-tinged gaze back to the pegasus. “Transfer? Was her IQ too high or something?”

Swift looked a little uncomfortable listening to us talk about her, but that discomfort vanished the moment she laid eyes on the cab. Her eyes lit up like a Summer Sun Celebration as she shoved her nose under the hood, getting a smudge of grease on her cheek. “Oh wow! You’ve got an Arcano NightTrotter with a full set of ruby... and sapphire speed runes! How do you keep the wheels from coming off with that kind of power?” She exclaimed excitedly.

Taxi’s chest puffed out and she lifted the hood. “The tire-rods are diamond heads. Trust me, it was totally worth the price.”

That was more or less it as introductions went. I spent the next five minutes listening to the two of them go back and forth on the various aspects of magical motoring. Nothing brings ponies together like a shared hobby.

I finally found an opening when they both paused for a breath. “Right... Taxi, we’ve got a place to be and the scrub wants to know why you’re driving us there. I’m sure you’ll be glad to tell her, but can we please do it on the way?”

Leaping into the back seat Swift danced on the cushion, flapping her wings like an excited pigeon. “Oooh, yes! I never get to go anywhere in a car!”

I eased myself in as Taxi got behind the wheel, putting a leg on Swift’s back and forcing her to sit. “Right, right... I’m thrilled for ya. Mind if I ask how you know so much about cars? I thought pegasi had about as much use for ‘em as they’ve got for hot air balloons. Do you even have a license?”

She shook her head. “No, but my grandmare taught me about cars; we used to watch the races together.”

“Your grandmare?”

She nodded. “Grandmare Glow is amazing! She’s the one who taught me to shoot!”

Taxi threw a look over her shoulder at the tiny firearm tucked under the pegasus’ wing. “I hope she taught you to fire something bigger than that. It might be a gun when it grows up, but right now, I’d toss it back.” Swift squinted at her weapon and her nose wrinkled.

“It’s... standard issue...” She couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice.

“Yeah, and requisitions will be getting a nasty note about that. We’ll get you an actual gun. Don’t worry about it.” I affirmed with a toss of my black mane.

“Where we headed, boss?” The checker-board maned pony adjusted her side-mirrored casually as I dug out the address from my pocket.

“High Step Hotel... and take your time. We aren’t in a hurry.”

****

As we pulled out of the parking garage and Taxi waved to the charcoal coated guard on duty, I thought back to the dreams of the night before. I’ve never been the kind of pony to believe in omens, but that dream felt like a bad one. There are many things that can ‘go wrong’ in life, and when you think you’ve been blindsided, it’s more often that you just weren’t looking very hard. I was praying that my eyes were open. Princesses save me if they weren’t. Death doesn’t let you go ‘Oops, sorry, wasn’t looking, mind sending that runaway bus at me again?”

This train of thought was derailed by Swift who had cheerfully put both horseshoes up on the windowsill and was watching the city pass as she enjoyed the novelty of being driven. “Ma’am, can I ask-” she began, and Taxi cut her off.

“You call me ‘Ma’am’ again, I will tan your ass with your own tail. Taxi will do nicely. And don’t apologize.” added Taxi. Swift’s nascent apology, correctly predicted, died in her throat.

“Miss Taxi...” Taxi winced at the ‘Miss,’ but Swift plowed ahead anyway. “Why are you driving us?”

The cabbie gave an aggressive jerk of the wheel, swinging us across three lanes of slow moving traffic into a hole between two carriages that I could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago. Swift almost cold cocked herself on the window but managed to press her wings against the glass before she broke her nose.

Taxi smirked at me in the mirror, “Mmm...still won’t tell that one?”

I pretended to study the seat back, trying to make it look like I didn’t care. “Get it over with. I don’t need this day to turn into a game of ‘Get Hardy To Suffocate Himself with his Own Hat.’”

“Oh, fine... Swift, right?” The little pegasus nodded and put her hooves under her chin, listening intently. Sensing she had an easy audience, Taxi puffed up like a peacock. “We’re dipping way back into history, into the dark ages when Hardy still had a sense of humor and Celestia was in diapers.”

I swatted the seatback. "I’m not that old!”

“Chyeah, sure.” She gave a sarcastic whinny then went on, undaunted. "Anyway, this was back when Hardy still had a partner. It's not my place to really put that piece of history on the table, but they had an... arrangement, for the safety of everypony. Hardy rides. Juniper drives. It was the law of the land. Juniper was a genius behind the wheel. Hardy, conversely, may well be the worst driver in Equestrian history."

I put my forelegs over the edge of the seat and protested, "Hey, Sweets, the way I see it, cars have bumpers for a reason, okay?"

Swift looked vaguely disturbed by that for some reason, but Taxi pressed on. "Well, he and Juniper were working a particularly nasty series of gang related deaths. It was the Jewelers and the Cyclone Crew fighting over turf. They got caught in a crossfire and Juniper took a bullet. Thankfully, they'd called for backup and the case was wrapped up pretty neatly but Juniper was out of commission for a month and a half... leaving Hardy driving himself. Mr. Leadhoof here managed to crash four cruisers in that period. Four."

I sniffed indignantly. "I was only driving three of them! The one in the canal wasn't my fault."

The cabbie blew a raspberry at me, "Point being, Juniper got back on his legs and all was well in the world. After they... well...” She stopped and her gaze danced warily in my direction.

I brushed off the unpleasantness. “It’s fine. Just tell the story.”

She thought for a moment then said carefully, “After Juniper passed on, Hardy was left to his own devices. Two weeks before he was set to go back on the beat the Chief dragged him into her office. She had this mealy mouthed little shit who used to work for the Mayor’s Office standing there with about a thousand pages of ‘wasteful expenditures’ he intended to cut.” Closing her eyes to slits she made a face that looked like a constipated goldfish. It was a surprisingly good likeness of the guy.

“It was slimy stuff that might have gotten a lot of ponies killed. Seriously, he wanted to use low-grain shotgun shells and buy this cheap-as-horseapples body armor.” She pursed her lips in disgust.

Swift’s eyes bugged out as the implications sunk in. She quickly patted her police vest, which I just then noticed was one of the armored models, feeling the reinforced plates. I’d long since stopped wearing a vest unless I was going somewhere I knew the bullets would be flying, but I understood the urge. “You’re fine. We’re getting to that.” I offered, trying to calm her fears but she still looked nervy.

“So why was he there?” she asked.

I lifted one side of my coat, flashing the gun strapped against my inner thigh. “He wanted my driver’s license and my gun here.”

The little pegasus let out a delighted squeak and jammed her nose into my coat. “Oh, neat! Is that a magical caliber? That looks like a... I don’t even know! What kind of weapon is that?”

“Hey! You wanna stick your muzzle there, you buy me dinner first!” I shoved her out of my lap with one iron shoe on her forehead. She sat back and looked disappointed, crossing her front knees. She was still casting covetous glances at my weapon. I patted my firearm against my chest protectively and answered. “She doesn’t have a ‘kind’; she was made before they really put standards on magic-caliber weapons.”

“Oooh...” said Swift, her eyes sparkling with interest. “What does it... she... fire?”

“Standard .45’s. Pop had it converted to handle ‘em. I’ve never seen magical ammo for her; They probably don’t make it anymore.”

“Oh... oh well.” sighed Swift, as hopeful images of crystal rays and magical blasts faded from her immediate world. “Why would an accountant want your gun?”

Taxi signaled a passing cart to move into the flow of traffic so she could swerve into the suddenly unoccupied space, narrowly clipping the curb. “It wasn’t so much the gun as what it represented. He was one of these big ‘corporate killer’ types who was of the school of thought that everything should be standardized,” she explained calmly, as Swift grabbed the door handle for dear life. “And, yeah, it keeps costs down if you only have to buy one or two kinds of bullet. But, you get a department as old as ours and everypony tends to use either weapons that’ve been passed down or whatever they buy themselves. He figured if he could get the most successful cop in the office to give up his special piece and use a department issue weapon, he could get everyone else to do the same.”

Swift groaned and fiddled with her trigger bit. I knew how she felt. I wouldn’t have set hoof on the streets of Detrot with that absurd pop-gun on her leg to protect me. The Requisitions office must have read her height/weight profile and laughed their asses off.

A grin spread on our driver’s butter-colored muzzle as she continued. “So Hardy here marches into the office, and that stupid S.O.B. asks for his parking pass, driver’s license, and his cannon real casual like. Hardy told him, in no uncertain terms, to go geld himself. ” Swift snorted, dissolving into a giggling heap at that and Taxi paused, waiting for her to recover.

“You’d have thought nopony had ever told him ‘no’ before. He started shrieking about how he’d read Hardy’s record and it’d be cheaper to hire a cab than let him keep driving, and how he was gonna have him fired and court martialed and charged with treason if he didn’t give up his gun and... It was kind of embarrassing to hear.”

I raised my ears. “Wait, I thought somepony told you this story? You were off running with the buffalo when that went down. How did you hear him?”

Taxi dipped her nose, tapping the brakes so I had to brace myself. “Well... I had to keep some tabs on you to make sure you hadn’t gone off the deep end. What did you expect?”

“I expected a sound-proofed office to be sound proof!”

She fluttered her eyelashes at me, making a face of cherubic innocence. “Telly was just... erm... she might have activated the Chief’s recording gem on her phone and taped the whole thing for posterity. Pure coincidence. I barely had to bribe her to let me hear it.”

“I’m sure.” I grumbled.

“Well, Hardy marched right out and returned five minutes later with one of the old armored vests and one of the new ones. He tossed the old vest over a chair and before the Chief or this accountant could say a word, he pulled his gun and shot it. It took the bullet. Then he shoved the accountant into the chair, threw the new armor over his head, and said ‘You wanna cut costs, answer me this; You think your life is worth what you budgeted for that vest?’ This ‘big bad corporate killer’ almost peed on himself.”

Swift stared at me incredulously. “And... you... got away with it, sir?”

Cheeks puffed up like a blowfish, Taxi tried to hold it in. She managed a full five seconds before bursting out laughing at the memory. “No, my dear rookie, he did not! Jade suspended him on the spot... by his tail! She threw him through the window with her horn and left him hanging over the entire office!”

I put a hoof over my face, waiting for our driver to regain control of her breathing before saying, “I was hoping you’d edit that bit out.”

“Hey, I’ll tell the story like I wanna tell the story! Where was I? Oh yeah! So a couple of days later a recruit was field testing the new armor and a small caliber round punched right through a weakness in that awful ceramic garbage. He’d have ended up with a liver full of pottery and lead if he hadn’t been wearing a ‘lucky coin’ on a chain under his armor. It caught the bullet, and he got away with a nasty bruise.”

I tried not to grit my teeth as I muttered bitterly. “It might as well have been paper mache. It went right through.”

Swift began nervously fiddling with the zippers on one of the armor pockets of her vest. I stopped her again with a little tap on the leg. “I said don’t worry. We don’t use that kind anymore.”

Swift nodded very slightly. “So what does that have to do with you being our driver, Miss Taxi?”

“I’m getting to that!” Taxi replied testily. “Well, the accountant ended up stuck in some backwater assignment cooking the books at a prison. I think he ended up getting busted for embezzlement and locked up himself. The Chief did go over his work, though, and she found out he hadn’t been exaggerating about Hardy’s driving. So she made a ‘deal.’”

My partner, whose infinite naivete was starting to get a little grating, asked “What sort of deal?”

I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and replied, “The kind where I never drive again as long as I live and I can have my badge back. Taxi happened to need something to do, so Jade hired her back as a ‘consultant’ on the condition she get a hack license so we could put her on the official payroll.”

My partner shifted in her seat and looked puzzled. “Why can’t she just drive you around? Or rejoin the force?”

Taxi tapped her hoof three times on the gear shifter. “One, I needed to take cop driving courses to get permission to have lights on the car.” Reaching up she touched a button on the dash; gems set around the windscreen at regular intervals flashed blue. “Two, part of my deal was I don’t get shot at, dragged into court to testify, or have to do paperwork.” She waved to the glove box, which she’d once kept absolutely stuffed to the brim with the junk paper crime investigation creates on a daily basis. The box, now empty, had once been a microcosm for my apartment.

“And three; speed wardens have standing orders to ignore me.” An evil smile split her lips as she chose that moment to abuse this particular freedom; she wrenched us over the median into oncoming traffic to get around a slow moving earth pony towing a cart covered in a huge mound of cabbage, sending the cart right up on the sidewalk. We swung inches past a poor traffic cop who very nearly had a heart attack getting out of our way. Swift squeaked, but Taxi quickly yanked us back into the proper lane.

I rolled my eyes at her antics and added, “Your karma is going to look like a pub urinal after that little display. Also, I noticed you’re very carefully not mentioning the other reason you agreed to this scheme.”

Turning her nose in the air she said primly, “I have absolutely no idea what you mean."

“So you’re saying you weren’t sneaking onto crime scenes? By the way, the Chief apparently knew. I don’t know if she twigged to you feeding me tips though.” I snickered.

Taxi gulped loudly. “She knew?”

“Yeah... and speaking of that, are you up for some extra work today? Dead body at a shag stop for rich idiots?”

The cab-pony’s lower lip trembled as she fought an inner conflict. “I... look, I talked to my meditation group leader and he said it’s really bad for my internal balance. I think I’ll sit this one out.”

“Sure. No problem. We can handle this ourselves, right kid?” I tried to make it sound agreeable, but couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. That didn’t seem to matter to Swift, though; the scrub almost vibrated with anticipation.

I knew needling Taxi on a day like the one we’d had was unwise, but the worst she’d do would probably be... well... kick me in a nerve center and stop my heart for several seconds. Regardless, she didn’t reply, and we drove on towards the other side of down town in pleasant quiet. Swift went back to staring out the window and I laid my head against the glass on my side, enjoying the few moments of calm the world offered before I’d have to put my brain in gear. We were nearing our destination and the streets were starting to smooth out. The storefronts were no longer mom-and-pop grocers and porn shops; those were being neatly replaced by organic hay joints, lingerie stores, and organic lingerie stores.

Putting aside the madness of the office and the altogether unpleasant bit of blackmail the Chief laid on me in the form of a rookie so wet behind the ears I was surprised her head didn’t slosh when she nodded, I entertained the thought that it might be a decent day after all.

That feeling lasted all of fifteen minutes.

Chapter 19: The Cruel Tutelage of High Spirits

Starlight Over Detrot Chapter 19: The Cruel Tutelage of High Spirits

The schoolhouses of Luna’s return, by most accounts, actually were colorfully painted places where bright-eyed fillies and colts went to learn, and the worst that an educator might have been expected to deal with was bullying, the odd timberwolf attack, and overzealous students performing the occasional act of journalistic malfeasance and causing a political scandal.

Over the decades since, though, the same dying hopes that led many in the inner cities to turn to Ace for escape appear to have affected their youth. Apathy and violence plagued classrooms. More and more cutie marks carried disturbing connotations and spelled out dark destinies. The good educators either moved to affluent areas, or burned out and got different jobs and/or alcoholism.

While Detrot’s inner-city schools were hardly the only thing to have seen decline, there is no place where the true price of Detrot's poverty was more apparent. It is one thing, after all, to look at a forty-year-old drug addict and petty thief and dismiss her for the moral failings that led to her state; It is much more difficult to look at a middle school colt who believes that beating another student bloody with the classroom stapler is an appropriate response to the wrong look, and not brood momentarily upon the dark place from whence that impetus arose.

In some cases, however, the mention of a “dark place” isn’t a metaphor for problems at home. This is still the enchanted land of Equestria, after all, and some of these schools had problems more appropriate to an exorcist than a social counselor.

-The Scholar

Standard Equestrian police tactics are designed, from the ground up, to operate in the widest variety of situations possible. Some of the more specific ones might sound esoteric or even a bit religious, but when facing down a city rife with all forms of life, magical, malicious, and sometimes just ridiculous, it’s wise to make sure you’re both mentally and physically prepared.

All officers disregard a few of these regulations and apply others selectively. It’s impossible not to. One can’t cart around a bucket of catnip soaked in pickle brine and lightly shredded cheese at all times, even though one caught in the wrong situation without those things, can find themselves paddling up a particularly smelly creek, sans paddle.

What we do then, as officers of the law, is build ourselves a series of checklists for going into unknown situations we are likely to encounter. Is my gun loaded? Yes. Are my fellow officers healthy and of sound mind? Mostly. Did I check all four corners before I entered a room? Yes.

Did I remember that ‘magical contamination’ can mean damn near anything it wants to?

No, no, I did not.

****

“Keep your head down!” I shouted at Swift, who was just peering over Bake’s shoulder. She ducked as a dodgeball determined to snap her little neck instead bounced harmlessly off the big stallion’s side, rebounding off into the locker room showers.

A hoofball was careening towards me at such speed that I barely had time to throw myself up against the end of the lockers before it sped past and crashed into the spot Zeta had just occupied for a half second. For some reason I’d attracted the vengeful attention of a single paper clip that was trying to ferociously tear individual hairs out of my tail. I swatted it away, then turned back to catch a blast of shredded paper in the face, blinding me just long enough for one of the dodgeballs to find its mark on the back of my head, leaving my ears ringing. I pulled myself behind a locker door, stomping the paperclip for good measure as I did.

The attack had come so suddenly that before we knew what was happening, the masses of animated school supplies had corralled us in one corner of the locker room. They floated of their own volition, swooping and diving over our heads to peck at every vulnerable part of our bodies. Pencils, pens, old tests from who knows when, and innumerable other bits of detritus came for us with a vengeance. .

To make matters worse, every time someone, even Zeta, tried to get close enough to kick open the exit door so we could escape, the assault became even more vicious. Taxi was down in the first five seconds to a softball in the noggin. Bake and Boil had barely had time to cast their protection spell and set themselves nose to nose, providing cover for my partner, driver, and the sack full of the somehow still-snoozing Edina.

Spell or not, trickles of blood dripped onto the tiles under them from dozens of nasty little paper cuts and the attacks of an especially determined hole punch. That would have been disturbing enough if they weren’t both visibly enjoying themselves, moaning at every fresh attack.

Swift kept trying to find things to shoot, but finally resorted to using her wings to bat away anything that got past the twins while she attended Taxi, who was clutching her bruised nose in both legs. I’d long since lost sight of Zeta except for the occasional glimpse of her dashing over the tops of the lockers. Even the most determined sorties by the floating storm of academic miscellania weren’t coming anywhere near tagging her.

She might have been fine, but somepony was in definite danger of losing an eye and we couldn’t keep up our defense forever.

Covering my head with my coat, I poked it around the edge of the locker’s door. On the far side of the room there was a second doorway. The nameplate said ‘Boiler.’ Whether that was the name of the pony whose office it was or what was behind it, I didn’t know, but it couldn’t be any worse than a hail of attacking pens.

“Everypony! Boiler room leads inside! Go!” I yelled over the clatter of a golf ball beating itself to bits on Boil’s forehead.

Smacking away an abacus cruise missile, I leapt over the bench in the middle of the room and dashed as hard and fast as I could, praying none of the sharper objects would decide to see if I was an easier target than the twins. Slipping on the polished tiles, I caught myself just in time for an orange blast of fur and wind to careen into me with a traffic cone attached to her head.

“Sir! Help!”

I grabbed the plastic cone in my teeth and tore it off of her face. She inhaled a fresh breath of air, then snatched at the doorknob. It seemed to fight her briefly, but while the objects were plentiful, none of them seemed especially strong or quick, and the knob was no exception. Ripping the door open, she dove through into the darkness beyond, then turned back to help defend our exit. Bake and Boil were crowded on either side of Taxi, guiding her towards the door with Edina’s bag held between them as a herd of basketballs crashed into their sides and flanks.

Hitting an enchanted pencil box with her wing, Swift made room for Bake and Boil. I ducked through after them and rear-hoofed the door, slamming it shut behind us.

There were a few rattling thumps against the other side, followed by a low rustling sound. The space was pitch black, but I felt along the walls until I could brace my hip against the door. The noise slowly dropped to an occasional jiggle or clatter, before ceasing entirely.

As silence fell, I had an unpleasant realization. “Wait - we left Zeta!”

The zebra’s voice indicated otherwise from somewhere near my left ear. “I am here, Detective.”

I exhaled a relieved breath, “Glad to hear it. Taxi, light?”

“Gibbe a secomb.” My driver replied, unsnapping her saddle-bag’s buckle. She sifted through its contents for a bit, until her efforts were rendered unnecessary by a soft green glow suffusing the space.

It was Bake’s horn, glimmering. “Flashlight is good,” he murmured.

His brother patted his shoulder in a chummy sort of way. “Horn is better.”

“Thanks, gents,” I murmured, taking in our surroundings at a glance. We were in some type of maintenance shaft. Thick pipes ran down the walls on one side while the other was undecorated concrete. The humidity in the enclosed corridor immediately set my sinuses to dripping. “Well, that was... unpleasant. I guess that’s our ‘magical contamination’.”

“Sir, I almost felt like-”

“Bwe bwere bweing herded.” Taxi finished, still holding her nose.

I frowned and stepped in front of her, lifting her face in my chin. “Lemme see that, Sweets.”

“I’m fin’d!” She started to push me off but I gave her a stern eye.

“You’re fine when I say you’re fine!” I snapped, giving her a poke in the nose. She yelped in pain, then lowered her ears.

“I’m gonna smag you laber.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna smack me anyway.” I replied, grabbing Bake’s hoofball helmet and dragging him closer. “Now shut up and let me make sure that fight didn’t ruin that pretty face, or Stella’s pet minotaur is going to be pissed.”

Raising her head into the light of Bake’s horn, I examined the injury. Her muzzle didn’t seem to be broken and the stream of blood from her nose was slowing, but her face was going to have quite the swell.

“That softball did a number, Sweets.” I gave her a light pet on the cheek. “But I don’t think your aspirations for modeling are over.”

It was then that I noticed Swift sitting there, looking at Taxi’s wound... almost wistfully, which seemed a strange reaction. She seemed to snap out of it when she noticed I was looking at her, pretending to have been gazing in another direction.

“Swift?” I asked.

“...Sir?”

“What’s up? And I don’t want to hear any variation on the words ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’”

“I don’t...” My diminutive partner paused. “It was... just... I was thinking about Grapeshot, sir.”

“Grapeshot?” Memory looked up an address. “You mean... Lieutenant Grapeshot? That PACT name on your recommendation letter?”

“Yes, sir. Back in junior flight school he helped stop my muzzle from bleeding after I’d... broken it crashing into my instructor’s rear end. That was more or less how we met.”

The glowing recommendation suddenly made a little more sense.

“So, what, every time you see someone trying to stop a nosebleed you get nostalgic?”

“...N-not normally, sir, but...” She hesitated as if wrestling with an uncomfortable decision before sighing in resignation. “I was reminded of him, and... and this has been a tough third day on the job, sir, and I... just needed a happy place for a bit.”

I shrugged. That was fair. And if the thought of her old friend managed to push the last twenty harrowing minutes out of her head momentarily, I wasn’t going to begrudge her that. I decided instead to pursue another, more relevant line of questioning.

“Sweets, what did you mean when you said we were being herded?”

“Whad I said!” She used her hip to encourage Swift. “Go aheab! Tell’em!”

Swift tugged the bottom of her tactical vest, straightening it. “I... it might be nothing, sir but... didn’t you notice the attacks seemed to be less nasty when we were headed this way?”

Now she mentioned it, as we’d crossed the locker room even that persistent paperclip had backed off. That didn’t bode well; we did need to leave at some point.

“We knew this place was magically contaminated, but those guards we saw didn’t look like they’d been pecked half to death by pencils. They’ve got some method of dealing with whatever is here.”

I gave a cursory glance at the steamy hallway stretching into the pitchy shadows until it was lost to sight. The plink plink of liquid hitting the ground, however, brought me around to peer at Bake and Boil. Both of them were cheerfully smiling even as blood spilled in thin streams from punctures, lacerations, and cuts covering half their bodies. “What about you two? We’ve only got so many bandages, I’m afraid. If you need to back off, feel free.”

Bake shot me an amused look then spat something at my hooves along with a mouthful of saliva and hemoglobin. It was a thumbtack.

Rising off the ground, the tack flew back at him, poking itself into the big hoofballer’s upper lip again and again. He let it have a few free strikes before slapping it to the floor and stomping it into a thousand pieces under one hoof. His brother replied, “We have never been happier. We wish we could have our apartment contaminated like this!”

Zeta replied before I could, grabbing both of their helmeted heads and banging them together. “You two are disgusting! We are in peril and you fools are enjoying yourselves!”

“But Miss Zee! No better time to enjoy selves!” Boil quipped.

She threw her hooves in the air, disgusted, and set off at a brisk trot down the hallway. “I wish my speciality were causing pain so I could teach you two some respect.”

Bake wiggled his back, dumping Edina’s bag to one side and catching it in his mouth before it could hit the ground.

“That’s why we bring little screecher here along! If no good pain from bullets, good pain from pissy griffin!”

****

The air was getting closer and sweatier the further we moved down the maintenance tunnel. Up ahead, the shifting rumble of machinery heralded us towards the boiler room itself. Swift flipped her wings, slinging moisture off onto my face and neck before murmuring an apology.

A distant light was penetrating the stifling blackness. It lit the inky dark in stark blues, reminding me of an old movie.

In my pocket, the heart in a box began to thud harder against the sides. I’d almost forgotten it was there; the creepy thing was mimicking my heartbeat so tightly it barely registered as a separate entity.

Now, something was making it nervous. Relying on a magically animated organ for intel didn’t sit well with me, but Taxi was there to break my contemplation before it could get too deep into the reasons I was ascribing emotional states to a chunk of meat.

“Hardy...do you hear that?”

“I just hear what I’m hoping is the boiler.”

“Listen.”

I turned one ear forward. At first, all I could make out was the boiler sound, a low thrumming that steadily became all-encompassing. As I filtered out the clipclopping of five sets of hooves - Zeta still being as silent as ever - I began to catch what Taxi was on about.

Music. There was music coming from somewhere ahead. It was a tinny sort of tune that put me in mind of something you might play a group of children during a game of musical chairs. On a sunny day, in a park somewhere, it would have been worth a wistful smile and a twinge of nostalgia, but stuck underground in an enchanted school, it gave me a vicious case of goose bumps.

The light was growing steadily with every step down the narrow hallway, though we couldn’t see the source. The shadows it cast seemed to move and shift in a way that was starting to make me feel a little nauseous.

I became aware of somepony breathing quite hard behind me and peered over my shoulder. Swift was limping along on three hooves, using the fourth to cover her mouth. Behind her, our other companions, with the exception of Zeta, were looking a bit ill themselves.

“You alright, kid?” I asked Swift.

“I ran out of ginger drops, sir,” she answered, a little embarrassed.

“Don’t worry about it. Whatever is up there is getting to me too. My belly feels like I’d tossed back a full meal of excited butterflies and a chaser of caffeine-loaded maggots.”

The Detrot detective is allowed a bit of verbal license, but there’s a time and a place, and this might not have been it; Swift let out an unsettling little ‘hork’ as I finished my sentence. I shut up and moved on.

The hallway ended at an abrupt left turn. From the far end, the wall was blanketed in the sharp illumination which danced and sparkled over the moist piping. Taxi eased up to the corner with me close behind; she stuck her ear around, flicked her eyes back and forth, then stepped back.

“Nopony in there.” Taxi gestured with her gun’s sight. “Looks like there’s a cot or something against the far wall and what I’m guessing is the boiler. Doesn’t look like any boiler I’ve ever seen, though.”

“Wait here. I’ll check it out.” I directed, then moved around her.

The heart in my pocket began to thump so hard it was rocking in my coat. I put my hoof on the box, petting the wooden surface, and the heart quieted somewhat. Not for the first time, I wondered why I wasn’t more disturbed by its presence. Simply having it on me felt perfectly natural. I had a growing suspicion that if somepony attempted to separate me from it, we might have a problem. Briefly, I wondered if the heart had a similar effect on King Cosmo.

Following the pipes sideways around the wall, I edged into the room and did my best to take everything in. My stomach wouldn’t stop trying to take up residence in my throat.

Directly across from the door, squatting in the moldy underground cave, a mechanical monster sat below a knot of piping so dense and complex it seemed to have been woven out of the metal.

Its essential design was familiar; a wide mouth to shovel fuel into, with a series of valves for pumping water into a holding tank above which was heated by the first, and then both air and water distributed throughout the building. There was a similar setup in my apartment’s basement laundry room.

There, the similarities ended. Where there ought to have been a roaring blaze, a sickening blue light spilled from a grate, giving the impression of a many-toothed animal eating a mouthful of gems. The valves were labeled in arcane scripts and something in the shape of the interleaved piping seemed wrong, as though it shouldn’t be possible in three dimensions. Just staring at it was upsetting to my gastronomy.

The music bounced along in the background, played on an instrument that sounded somewhere between a trumpet and a kazoo. It was too cheery for the surroundings and sat just at the edge of hearing; Try as I might, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

That left the cot and a small, wooden writing desk jammed against the wall beside yet another door, which presumably led deeper into the school. So far, the tunnels had followed the blueprints, but I wasn’t going to bet on that being the case everywhere. That boiler definitely wasn’t in the blueprints.

A book lay on the desk along with a feather pen and a jar containing a single bit coin, arranged with the care of a museum display. The cover was simple and unmarked. A diary, if less ornate than the one in my breast pocket. All of it was coated in a thick layer of dust.

I called back to my companions waiting around the corner. “I think we’re fine down here. Everything’s clear.”

My cadre variously stomped, flapped, and kitten-footed in, spreading out to look around.

Swift halted in the door, wings flying open, eyes locked on the space above the boiler.

“S-s-sir?”

“What’s up, kid?”

“I-i-it’s moving!”

The fear in her voice got my attention right quick.

“What do you mean ‘moving’? Kid, it’s pipes.”

“I k-k-know! It’s moving!” she insisted.

I moved around to stand behind her, following her eyes up to the interlocking shape of the boiler’s distribution system. It took a force of will to push my gaze up into the mess of piping dangling from the ceiling. I couldn’t verify Swift’s claim of motion, but something about their shape refused to settle into a sane pattern. Taking the methodical approach, I followed a joint down to a bend, then the bend up through several other junctions and back around, against all logic, into the same joint. Flicking my eyes up, I tried to find where the particular bend met the rest of the system but somehow, I lost the shape entirely. Scanning over the mesh of piping, I couldn’t find anything even similar upon second inspection.

“That’s...severely odd,” I murmured, which was a terrible understatement; in truth, the whole thing was putting me off my dinner. It didn’t seem much more than mild nausea, but I got the feeling I was going to need more than one beer to get my head on straight. I put a hoof over my partner’s eyes and lowered her head. “Just don’t look at it. I’m pretty sure that thing is something for the magic division, and well above our salary grade. How’s your stomach?”

Swift gave a weak nod and replied softly, “It’s not good, sir.”

“We’ll be out of here as quick as we can. I want to check this out, first.” I dipped my nose, motioning at the desk. “Might give us some information we can use.”

Taxi was there ahead of me. I raised my head so I could see over my driver's shoulder at the book spread open on the table.

“What is it?” I asked.

My driver read a few more lines of a page marked ‘54 L.R.’ across the top then bit the inside of her cheek. “Somepony was living down here. It looks like right before the school closed, too.”

I flipped back and read the name on the front page. “Vice Principal High Spirits?”

“He’s awfully cheery for somepony living in a basement.” Taxi said as she fiddled with the feather pen. “Incidentally, why isn’t this thing attacking us? It seemed like everything out there was.”

With perfect timing, the golden bit in the bottom of the jar rose into the air and began slamming itself against the side of the entrapping glass, making it ring like a bell. After several failed attempts it settled back to the bottom and lay there, again quiescent.

“So, the feather pen is fine but that’s not?” Swift poked the jar and the bit wiggled back and forth, then smacked at the spot her toe had just touched.

Laying open the first entry of the journal, I read aloud.

****

Good morning students!

I can’t wait to say that. Vice Principal! Who’d have thought? Me! A vice principal!

It’s been a crazy one and a half years since I graduated from Fillydelphia University and finished my time teaching at Bitford Elementary.

That sounds like I’m writing a story. Well, why shouldn’t I? I hope somepony will find it entertaining. I’m on the bus to my new posting today and decided to get in a few words on my new journal. My mum gave it to me today as I left Filly, and told me to write down everything that happened in Detrot. I suppose I should make sure you know a few things about me before I start rambling.

I’ve always wanted to be part of teaching foals about the world, and I’ve heard there’s no place that needs teachers more than Detrot. My cutie-mark is a flying kite, after all. My talent is making sure everypony knows that life is worth living.

That said, I was picky finding this new assignment. I hunted up my new posting from among hundreds. It has a paid apartment on the school grounds and I even get to teach Arcane Sciences to the unicorn students three times a week! I’m quite looking forward to that. The placement pony at the Department of Education did give me an odd look when I requested this location, but then, Detrot is a long way from Filly.

I’ll be working with ponies who need my help more than any others. Sunny Days Juvenile Foster Care is a place for the foals and teens of ponies lost in the war. Let’s hope this works out. I’m not going back to Filly without making a difference!

****

I wondered for some seconds at the naive character of the unicorn whose diary I was reading. He was obviously a unicorn; teaching Arcane Sciences would be tough without a horn. The school’s present condition was a sad testament to the success of his dreams. Turning over a few pages, I continued to read.

****

Well, I knew things weren’t going to be easy, but this!

That ‘paid apartment’ turned out to be a bed... nay, a soldier’s cot... stuffed in the gym’s basement. The boiler room is cozy enough, but it still isn’t what I would have called ‘comfortable’. Principal Pander was apologetic when I went to her and while the school is in questionable repair, the facility does seem to at least be functioning.

The same cannot be said for my apparent position in the school. I wish to teach, first and foremost, and organize the student body, but I have been railroaded into a position as a disciplinarian. I did not sign up for that, even if it seems to be largely a matter of monitoring halls and making sure students are in their proper place at the proper time. I am displeased I wasn’t informed of that part of the job, but I will do it to the best of my ability, regardless.

Aside my minor gripes, there is a leak in the boiler which I will do my best to repair, if I can find it. I mention this largely because it is dripping at night and keeping me awake. Fortunately, my father taught me the ins and outs of the plumbing trade before I turned to magical science and foal rearing.

It may give me an opportunity with the janitor as well. She is a very pretty, if terribly overworked young mare by the name of Calliope. She does as much as she can, but I fear that plumbing is beyond her.

I would chance to ask her out one of these nights, were our schedules not mutually exclusive.

****

I seated myself on the short chair next to the desk, realizing at some point my companions had gathered around to listen. I turned a few more pages into High Spirits’ past.

****

Oh happy day! I know it’s a tiny thing but after school, before I retreated to my rest, Calliope and I spent an hour talking. We were both exhausted, her from soon awakening and myself from long consciousness, so there was not much beyond a pleasant conversation, but it was wonderful all the same.

I may speak to Principal Pander and see about getting the girl a proper raise.

The one blot on this day is, perhaps, that it is the first I have taught a class. I was... unaware... that there would be earth ponies and pegasi in my Arcane Sciences class. It was more than a little embarrassing having created a curriculum built around magic users only to realize the class was meant to teach the fundamentals of hybridizing mechanical engineering and enchantment together.

There is one student in my class who was quite late and several at the back appeared to be gambling over candy with dice of some sort. When asked to pay attention, they were... well, disrespectful. I tossed the lot of them into detention and class proceeded apace. I must keep it in my mind that these are not children of the well-endowed, as I did find tacks on various surfaces once the class was over.

Back again, in my grotto, I think I have made some headway in finding the leak. I’m certain it is coming from the distribution system, but I have replaced several of the pipes to no effect. The drip persists.

****

It’s been a week since that first class. Oh how slow doth my days pass when under the weight of perdition?

No, High Spirits! No, you had a harder time in college.

I would be fine, if only I could sleep! The damn drip has gone from a minor nuisance to a genuine menace. I am starting to hear it now when I’m not down here.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It really is intolerable, though a pair of earplugs does seem to be helping, slightly.

Miss Calliope offered to let me stay with her, but I refused to drive her out of her own bed.

I had two students late to class this morning and as a result, was ten minutes late getting out. Some of the other teachers make fun, but I refuse to be hurried. I will teach what I must teach and the students will sit until such time as they’ve learned it.

The other side of my professional endeavor goes well, though I cannot say I enjoy it. Punishing students daily, students whose crimes seem largely petty, is draining to the spirit. I sat one young mare down today and asked her why she punched the colt in her class and she told me it was because he gave her a look she didn’t like. I asked what sort of look that might be and she said ‘He looked like he wanted to fuck me like my pappy.’

Needless to say, I was shocked. Working with the students is difficult enough without their personal histories making each one a potential minefield.

Horrid lives aside, it is no excuse for being late to class. Her future may be no different than her past if she fails to educate herself. I console myself with the knowledge that, while I can’t fix what happened to her, I can at least change what will happen.

I told Miss Calliope about this and she decided to make me feel better by playing me a tune on one of the instruments in the school’s music room. It was a beautiful device, much like her, with an elegant design. It put me, somehow, in mind of the boiler and gave me a few new ideas for hunting down my itinerant leaky pipe.

I have found myself humming the tune all day long.

****

I pulled my head up from the book and caught sight of Zeta out of the corner of one eye inspecting the boiler. She was pressing her nose against the grate, trying to get a glimpse of its contents. For some reason this struck me as ridiculously dangerous, but after a moment she retreated, crawling up onto the cot.

My stomach had calmed somewhat, though my partner was still huffing and puffing as she fought to keep hers in line.

Taxi gave me a bat with her hoof across the back of the head. “Well? Keep going! We’re inside the school and it’s safe enough. I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk out of here or die without hearing the end of this.”

“Fine, fine! I’m just wondering a little about that bit coin.” I waved my hoof at the glass jar and its prisoner.

“What about it?”

“There was dust on everything when we came in, including that jar. The only pony down here since the school closed was probably High Spirits.”

****

Fully a third of my class was late today. Several aren’t even bothering to show up, now.

Was I too harsh? Too many detentions? I am following the guide book I’ve been given, but most of these are truly troubled kids.

I brought it up to Principal Pander and her response was less than gratifying. ‘There are too many for us to save every one. We just deal with them until we can get them into jobs or prison.’

Just deal with them.

To my eternal shame, I almost bucked her in the face. My disrupted sleep leaves me on edge, to be sure, but to give such a retort to my justified concerns! She seemed to think I couldn’t have had a job anywhere else!

It has been difficult talking to my fellow teachers these past weeks. I try, but they all seem to be of the opinion that I will be gone soon. This is wholly foreign to me. I committed to this job, didn’t I? I signed the paperwork and took my oath to work at least two years in this position, didn’t I?

Why so little faith?

I will now lay myself down and try to rest.

I have ordered several special sections of pipe from a local plumbing catalogue, along with a leak detection spell. It is only guaranteed to work within about five yards, so I must pray I discover a method of narrowing it down.

What I wouldn’t give for a full night’s sleep.

****

“Insomnia has a most curious effect on the minds of equines,” Zeta commented, folding her hooves under her chest.

“Yes, yes it does,” I affirmed, smoothing out a corner of the diary. “I find beer usually cures it, though.”

“Whyfor would you wish to cure it? A portion of my training involved being awake for nearly six days,” the zebra told us. “ My father kept me awake. I wept and begged him to let me rest. On the sixth day, I fell into a trance and saw myself far distant from my own body and the pain. I asked him, calm as I have ever been, if I might rest then. He held me, kissed my forehead, and let me sleep in his legs.”

“Fond memory?” I asked.

“Very much,” she said with a nod. “My father was a loving stallion, even if he did not express it in ways you would understand.”

Swift looked more than a touch disturbed. “I...you’ll have to excuse me for saying this but...Miss Zeta, that sounds awful!”

Zeta wiggled her rear legs out behind her flat, sitting in a position that looked impossible for equid anatomy. “I think you ponies would say ‘It is a zebra thing’. Pay it no mind.”

****

I am a new stallion. I don’t even care, today, that students were late to class. There were seven, incidentally, but you know what? It doesn’t matter!

Miss Calliope spent the night with me last night.

No, you dirty mind! There were no untoward activities. We sat together, listening to music on a phonograph she brought down with her. I feel myself slowly growing attached to her as something more than friend. This last month has not been easy.

By day, I fight to bring some semblance of sanity back to this school bereft of it and by night, I tinker with the boiler and strive to sleep. It has become a challenge to find the source of that insufferable dripping.

It feels as though I am floating through my life. This is not what I wanted nor what I was prepared for.

There remains a single, bright, shining beacon of light in my day. I feel as though I’ve slept a month!

Calliope and I spent a few hours after she’d woken up and I’d finished grading papers sitting, talking with one another. I told her about my progress with the boiler, the kids, and the administration. She told me about work, the messes that get left, and some of her dreams. She wants to have kids one day, despite cleaning up after them constantly. I must say, while my own enthusiasm for children is somewhat dimmed of late, I can only think foals she would have could only be beautiful and well behaved.

As she made to leave, she put her legs around my neck and gave me a squeeze!

It occurred to me that I hadn’t had a real hug since I left Fillydelphia. A pony forgets how rejuvenating they can be.

****

Rejoice! Two weeks of blissful silence where I can dedicate myself to my burgeoning relationship with Miss Calliope!

The students are gone home for winter break and I am ready, let me just say. I’ve taken to having to chase them down to drag them to my class. That is not the most fun a pony can have, let me just say. Without the students, my time is largely unoccupied. I still cannot sleep.

You know what? I don’t care. I am in love! Miss Calliope has said she has a special gift for me for Hearths Warming Eve. She says I must go out for a few hours, then return and she’ll be ready.

I do hope it is a kiss!

****

“Awww! That’s so sweet!” Taxi simpered, reading that line over again.

“Yeah, but this is sounding less like clues and more like we just wandered into someone’s romance.” I set the book back, making to get up from my seat. There was a collective disgruntled noise. “What? What do you want me to do? I can’t sit here and read this whole thing tonight! We’ve got an insane cartel tyrant to shut down and a neighborhood to stabilize!”

“Sir, just a few more pages?” Swift begged. “Pleeease?”

The mooning doe-eyes she gave me could have elicited pity from quarry eels.

“...Oh, fine...”

I picked a page that seemed to have a bookmark in it. Immediately, I could tell a difference in the writing. The letters were spattered with droplets of liquid and ink ran down the page, leaving the words only barely legible. Several times the quill had punched through the paper as tension in the writer’s body left him unable to control his magic properly.

****

I have been sitting here for some time.

My memory is sparse. I will try to piece this together, as best I can.

I am in the emergency room.

The doctor said they found me holding my journal inside the principal’s office under his desk. I don’t remember how I got there, though it makes sense. It is the only office in the school with a working exterior telephone.

I left the school at six o'clock precisely, as per Miss Calliope’s instructions, with intent to return three hours later. I found, in my excitement, I’d forgotten my comb, and I dashed back to my room to get it.

Had I not, Miss Calliope would be dead.

Perhaps it would have been better if she had been.

Her gift to me was to attempt to fix that damn drip in the boiler. Magical plumbing is so fiddly. It is why mechanical pumps are being used in so many places these days! I’d made modifications to the system, trying to get pressure even across the whole of it in hopes that could stop the drip.

She didn’t have the right set of diagrams. Hers were the old ones, rather than the new ones I’d made. I intended to lodge them with the school, but nopony is ever down here but me! I never got around to it.

Miss Calliope unscrewed a still pressurized three thirty five high pressure steam valve. I’d disconnected the primary gauge and re-routed it through a second, more precise one. I wish I’d bothered to learn that leak finding spell. I might have averted this disaster. It was so time consuming, though!

I found my love laying below the boiler. Her face was burnt. Badly. So badly.

The doctors say she will live, but she may be blind. One of her ears was burned clean away. Worse, she has slipped into a coma. The doctors say it could be days or maybe years before she wakes.

They don’t know.

It should come as no surprise that she did not manage to fix the drip before suffering her wound.

****

I held up my legs in surrender, starting to slide back from my seat. “That’s plenty for me, thanks. Let’s get-”

“What? No! You can’t just leave it there, Sir!” Swift complained.

A flash of magic surrounded my left ear, then another caught my right. I found my head forcefully turned back to the book. Taxi planted her hoof on the back of my neck and pressed it over the book.

“Hey! Come on! We’ve got other stuff to do! Important stuff! And why do I have to read all of this?!” I yelped, as my driver held me in a reading position.

Bake rumbled, unsettlingly close to my head. “You have pretty voice.”

****

It has been three weeks since Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Calliope’s condition remains the same. I sit beside her bed, now, listening to her breathing and the various beeps and hums of the machines keeping her alive. A nurse I haven’t seen before stops in the door, looking at my love’s destroyed face with horror, then at me, with pity.

I don’t need her pity.

I need Miss Calliope back.

I was going to tell her the truth about how I felt, that night. No more bandying about as friends any longer! I wanted her to know I loved her.

An idea has sprung to mind while I’ve sat here, wreathed in the dawning realization that I must soon resume my life. The students will soon return from their break. Those staying with foster families will come back to us and those living in the dormitories up the street will return. It will be time to teach, again.

My idea is thusly: I, High Spirits, will repair the boiler for Miss Calliope. No more fannying with it in my spare time! It will become my overriding mission and when she wakes, I’ll show it to her and give her a wedding ring.

That nittering louse in the principal’s office thinks I’m too hard on the kids who don’t show up? They have not seen strict! Each moment I must chase them down and cart them back to my classroom is another moment taken from my work with the boiler that scarred my love. I intend to have it fully operational and better than it has ever been when I put my ring on Miss Calliope’s hoof.

This coming week, I will use my spell to hunt down the leak and get a solid bearing on it. The special parts I ordered have come in and I am seeing a few more orders in the near future.

****

The hornwriting in the next section was a little harder to understand, and while it started readable, it slowly degraded into an ink-spattered wreck.

****

Again, I am awake.

I have not slept in four days. I spent two hours by Miss Calliope’s bedside tonight, then returned to work on this little ‘project’.

The mirror is unkind. My visage fails, again, to please the eye, but I suppose that, down in my hole, it matters little. My horn’s light shows me the way as I pore over these blueprints again and again.

In a period of days, I’ve replaced two thirds of the pipes with better and more efficient designs which have made the school’s plumbing system work in ways it hasn’t since it was installed. For a first generation magical boiler, it is of a spectacularly complex design and whoever was previously maintaining it did a lot of jury-rigging just to maintain continued functionality.

I have been unable to find records of its original installers except an oblique reference to having ‘gone bust’ after some involvement with a criminal syndicate.

As to my leak hunting spell, it proved only useful insofar as it pointed me at the boiler itself. Therein lies the leak. I dare not crack the shell until such time as I am prepared to re-cast the enchantments on it.

****

Late! Late! Late!

Those urchins had me dashing around all morning rounding them up so I could teach my class. I made them all stay an hour after everypony else had gone home, cleaning the classroom. I wouldn’t have bothered, but it is the principle of the thing. When one of them tossed a bit of gum into my mane, I had to resist the urge to toss her through a window.

The little bitch does not understand what she obstructs!

Would that there was a way of automatically ensuring they were in the right place? I must consider this. Yes, consider it heavily!

I need to make a list. I will need more coffee and some fresh lengths of pipe. Two more classes for today and then I must grade some papers. Why bother? I know their scores by now. I could assign them randomly and there’s nopony who would dispute them. Half of those little ingrates would be grateful if I was simply tossing them random numbers!

****

I feel myself slipping. Today, I snatched a student by his hoodie with my magic after he called me an especially nasty name while we were passing in the hall.

Crazy Spirits. He called me ‘Crazy Spirits’. Perhaps it wasn’t so nasty, but it was a struggle not to choke the life out of the vicious blighter. He looked like he expected me to.

They’re calling me the ghost of the boiler room in the teacher’s lounge. I admit, I haven’t been going out of my way to socialize recently but that is no excuse for ugly gossip and namecalling! Besides, don’t they have things to be doing? I know I do! Once the drip is fixed, I’ll be able to sleep.

I could rest in one of the spare classrooms, maybe, but I would be away from my work and Miss Calliope is counting on me! I must finish soon. Sooner rather than later! Soon is best!

****

The horn-writing was barely words at this point. I kept stumbling and stuttering, but I read on as my companions sat, entranced. They didn’t seem to mind and while I was counting seconds, trying to gauge how long we’d been down there, I became aware that my nausea was gone.

It may have been my imagination but the music seemed to bounce along to the words, reaching peaks and crescendos on particular sentences. I read on, wondering at the tricks my own mind was playing on itself, and hoping that’s all it was.

****

A revelation!

I must have passed out while my spell was still being cast. The hours run together so badly these days. Nights. Time spans. I really must find another word for the periods during which I work.

Principal Pander came to see me today. Some ridiculousness about having me fired if I didn’t ‘shape up’. I showed her my fine work and she was less than impressed, so I told her to get out. She should be impressed. They should all be.

What I dreamt was nothing short of visionary.

Within my vision, a crystalline form seemed to flow and twist within the very ether. It was a mind, mechanical and glittering, yet cold and built of a rarified logic. The shape! The shape was wrought in space that was not space!

I see so much, now! Tonight! I stalled for weeks and now, I see it all! I must write what I have seen. I must! It will solve all of my problems. All of Calliope’s problems! I will write it down!

Oh, I am, truly, in high spirits for the first time since I can remember...

****

I flipped the next page over and it was covered in nothing but a thickly written arcane scrawl. They weren’t words so much as scratchings in alchemical arithmetic language. As Taxi often gave me crap for, I hadn’t paid attention in those courses at the Academy; I don’t own a horn, so I never saw much point in learning the fundamentals of magic.

But even I could tell that what was written there seemed much more than anything that could be called ‘fundamental.’

“Huh...Sweets? Don’t suppose you could tell me what this means?”

My driver ran her hoof over the symbols then shook her head. “Not a clue. It looks like a mechanical plan written by somepony stoned out of their mind on Beam.”

Boil blew a thin stream of air across my neck from his nose, making me jerk sideways. “Part of it is theorem for development of multi-planar spell-form suspended in four dimensions. Do not know the rest.”

The big hoofballer found himself with everyone staring at him, in the same manner one might stare at a badger that had suddenly started reciting classical poetry. The sole exception was his brother, who was doing his best to look anywhere else. Boil sniffed, disdainfully. “What? You think we got onto Detrot Manticores without going to college?”

This elicited a collective shrug, though I suspect I wasn’t the only one biting back a comment about the inanimate object that must have tried to teach them grammar.

I turned another page. There was even more of the equation. A few more pages revealed that every single one looked the same; a mixture of tiny notes, plumbing diagrams, and alchemy.

“Huh... What was he trying to do?” I wondered out loud.

“Seems like he did it. Listen.” Taxi held up her hoof. Except for the far off music, there was nothing but the breathing of my little group.

“...You're right," I realized. "There's no dripping. He fixed the leak."

"Exactly. I finally recognized that music, too.”

“Really? What is it?”

My driver made the motions of playing a piano. “It’s calliope music.”

It felt as though a rodent with especially cold toes chose that moment to run up my back.

Bake lifted the book off the table with his horn, scanning the tight rows of equations. “This pony was loco in headbox.” His lips peeled back in revulsion. “These enchantments give an object... ugh... purpose.”

I knotted my tie closer to my throat. “Understanding that most things have a purpose in a general sense of the word, I’m going to just assume you’re referring to something that’s going to distress me and, by proxy, my cardiologist?”

The hoofballer rubbed the side of his helmet, scratching at one of his fresher looking scars as he tried to think how to explain. “Usually, pencil has whatever purpose you give it. You make it write. You make it erase. You use it for popsicle stick. Point is, pencil doesn’t understand any of that. To pencil, is just wood, metal, and rubber.” He turned the book around, displaying a diagram of the bit coin sitting in its jar. “These spells teach pencil... purpose.”

There, again, was one of those instances where it’s best to take the word of a unicorn, nod your head, and smile.

“Alright, I’m not going to try to make sense of that. What’s the rest of it?”

Bake turned the book sideways, then upside down before finally dumping it on the desk. “Don’t know. Rest of it is crazy. Looks like he was trying to make magic using plumbing diagram.”

As one, all of us sat up then slowly turned our heads towards the boiler. The music continued in the background, tittering along merrily as a worrying realization set in.

“Sir?” Swift whispered, warily. “You... don’t think he’s actually responsible for...”

“Kid, I think we were just attacked by school supplies in a locker-room. I think that thing is so magical it’s giving me indigestion just being in here. I think the pony who wrote this diary spent months down here with nothing but a heart full of pain and a head full of insomnia.” I put the book back in place on the desk and laid the feather across its front. “That’s all I’m prepared to think, right now. What I know is that we have something to do.”

As I made to get up, I bumped the book. It fell open, passed the section we’d been reading, and the diagrams, to the last several pages.

In jagged, slashing strokes of the pen, there was a single word written again and again across every inch of the paper and on both sides. It packed the corners and was circled dozens of times.

Late! Late! LATE!

I hesitated before easing the book shut again with one toe.

“In fact, If nopony has any objections, I also know I’d like to leave this place right now.”

****

The relief of moving away from the boiler was producing an effervescent feeling in my lower intestine. Swift and Taxi were looking better with every step. Zeta, Bake, and Boil were typically unflappable, though the psychoses behind their variously unflapped characters were the kind of thing I studiously avoided examining for the sake of my own sanity.

The corridor behind High Spirit’s room was a simple access hall, lit sparsely by a number of wall clinging lamps. It stretched in a slow arc off to the left. Our hoofsteps echoed off the walls, bouncing back to my ears. I was finding the quiet pleasantly therapeutic. Hence, per the rules of the universe, it had to end.

“Sir, do you mind if I ask something?” Swift pulled up alongside me, half-beating her wings against herself and making a lovely breeze that chilled the sweat off my sides.

“Whether I mind or not is probably immaterial, so hit me with it.”

She paused for a second, then plowed on, “Do you think High Spirits is okay, somewhere?”

Once again, Swift’s obsession with narrative was rearing its ugly head. So much of the job comes down to assembling the stories of ponies who’ve died that many officers forget that the ending is always the same; they died and were buried. Even if they don’t die at the point where we come into their tale, eventually every participant passes into death and if they’re lucky, they get a nice obit to wrap everything up. Most aren’t so lucky. Most die and their story just ends, a cliffhanger with no follow up.

I blew a breath out of one corner of my muzzle.

“If you want to find out, you can always send up to Telly for whatever the File Cloud has on him and this school.” I turned one ear towards Swift. “Can I make a recommendation, though?”

“Of course, sir.”

I stopped, faced her, and put my hooves on her shoulders, looking at her in the ghostly green half-light coming off of Bake’s horn.

“Just let it be. He’s not your case. Let him be a story whose ending you never found out. Write your own ending for him.”

Swift twisted her head around to look back at the boiler room. “But... sir, shouldn’t we find out? Isn’t our job to find out about things like that? This whole school was closed! I mean, what if somepony died before they evacuated? What if he was really responsible for their death? That would make him a murderer!”

I noticed Taxi had dropped back from the main group and was maintaining a careful ‘within ear-shot’ distance. Holding private conversations in her presence is folly, so I opted for a quick end.

“Kid, do you want to know? Really?”

“We should-” Swift stalled mid-sentence, then her rear end slowly dropped onto the concrete floor. She looked down, scratching her front fetlock on the back of her other knee. “You...ugh...you’re right.” She snorted irritably, kicking a stray nail laying on the walkway behind her and against the wall. “This all feels so wrong, sir. I keep hearing Lieutenant Grapeshot’s voice in my head, telling me I shouldn’t be sneaking around like a... like a criminal.”

“Don’t worry. Live long enough and you get a nice selection of voices in your head.”

“That...That’s not making me feel any better, sir.”

“If you want to feel better, find a job that doesn’t involve helping ponies.” I replied, cutting off the conversation before it could get any more depressing. “Come on, I think I see the end of the tunnel.”

I cantered ahead to find Taxi and Zeta standing on a set of stairs leading up to a trap door. My driver had her head pressed against the door, listening for anything on the other side.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Nada. Nothing.” She grabbed the latch in her teeth and jiggled it. “It’s not locked.” Slowly lifting the trap-door, she peered over the edge. “Too dark to see anything. I think we’re fine, though.”

Opening her saddle-bag, I pulled out the blueprints and unfolded them on the steps.

“This should be classroom one-oh-three.” I informed my companions. “Straight down the hall from the auditorium. Bake? Boil? Turn your spell on and go first.”

We made a hole and the brothers pressed their horns together, their shields coalescing over their skins then sinking in. Taxi grabbed the door handle, twisted and shoved the linoleum panel to one side.

The two stallions charged up at full speed, crashing over the lip into the room. My driver was fast behind them, with Zeta taking the stairs six at a time. Swift and I stepped out together, searching out the corners.

Stark illumination from the unicorn’s horns played over several rows of desks. We’d come up at the back of the classroom, facing a long blackboard with a smiling chicken drawn across one side and a series of simple equations on the other. The walls were covered, top to bottom, in dozens of painted pictures.

There was nopony to be seen and yet, for some reason, my hackles were trying to climb onto my ears.

“Hardy...” Taxi whispered. “I’m having many bad feelings about this. Very many bad feelings.”

Bake and Boil were poking their noses into desks, but I waved for them to stop and stand. They stilled and we waited, guns in our teeth and safeties off.

After several seconds, I became aware of a very low scraping sound. Grabbing Boil’s head in my hoof, I pointed his horn towards the front of the room.

In the dim light, I picked out a tiny motion that, at first, I took for a bug crawling across the blackboard. It was the wrong color and leaving a thin trail behind it; chalk. A piece of chalk, moving on its own, sweeping over the board with a sound that seemed built to shred nerves. I realized it was spelling something out.

Swift sounded out each letter, “Y...y-o...you...You! A-r...are? You are! You are what?”

I knew what it was going to spell out before it had started the final word. “Take cover!”

I threw myself at Bake and Boil, yanking Taxi onto the floor beside me and pulling one of the desks sideways to create a barricade.

The last word formed and every other piece of chalk, lined up neatly on the blackboard, launched itself into the air.

LATE!

Act 2, Chapter 10: Police Do Too Have Balls

Starlight Over Detrot

Act 2, Chapter 10: Police Do Too Have Balls

Depending on who you ask, Equestria's high society evokes images of magnificent charity balls, ostentatious high fashion, and soul-stirring works of art and music... or images of a bunch of useless windbags with ridiculous accents hoarding all the cupcake money without having worked a day in their lives.

As in many things, there's some truth to both views.

In theory, these are the savvy businessponies, master craftsponies, and refined families who've risen above the squabble and squalor of the rest, who are supposed to guide and lead, and are therefore possessed of more financial and social power. Sometimes, this works out; The Fancy Pants Foundation, assembled lovingly through a combination of benefit events and Mr. Pants' own business skill, is best known for having found an attenuated vaccine for the Pony Pox.

But strip away the genteel mannerisms, social codes, and obscene wealth, and one will find that many of them are nepotists driven by the same base urges - food, fun, and fornication - as the lower classes with which they avoid association; a discovery much to the glee of the tabloids and gossip columns, who love nothing more than to catch an elected official or minor aristocrat in bed with an underage buffalo or stalk of celery.

To protect themselves, these ponies often use their wealth to purchase connections, such as with the police, who, when sufficiently financially incentivized, are often willing to overlook when a beloved nephew gets caught in possession of enough Zap to loosen every sphincter present in a given Grand Galloping Gala.

Detrot, far from the watchful gaze of the Princesses, is much more prone to this sort of abuse than Canterlot.

--The Scholar

“For Celestia’s sake, stop whinging, Hardy!” Taxi snapped, giving another yank at my collar. I yelped and struggled backwards, but she had a determined grip. My head felt like it was going to pop any second.

“Some of us need oxygen, dammit!” I cried as my driver tried to strangle me with the bow-tie. “I hate formal clothing!”

“Then you should have rented a tux in your size,” she replied, giving me a firm shake.

I stepped back from her and pulled at my throat until I could breathe. “My size hasn’t changed in six years! This collar is just the wrong size! Besides, why aren’t you dressing up for this?”

“I’m driving. You need somepony outside in case you need to make a quick getaway. Besides-”

“I was only able to procure three tickets,” Limerence finished for her, appearing in the bathroom’s doorway. He, too, was wearing a very smart tux; he managed to make it look almost comfortable.

“Fine, I get that, but are the tuxes really necessary? Can’t we just hunt down this pony we’re looking for after the show? Why do we have to do it this way?”

“I’m afraid not. Our 'friend' is a very difficult person to track down when he is not working. Believe me, if there were another, simpler way, I would take it,” Limerence replied, checking his pocket watch for the umpteenth time. “We have a half hour to be there. It is a fifteen minute drive. I suggest we leave quite soon if we’re going to get our seats.”

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going!” I groused.

“That is because we are going into the middle of a place that, under present circumstances, I believe you would find... most distressing. I did not wish to give you time to think of a way to wiggle out of it in some half-witted attempt to avoid Chief Iris Jade.”

I put one hoof on Taxi’s forehead as she went to fuss with my lapels again, pushing her away. “Wait a minute. Nothing was said about Chief Jade.”

Limerence pursed his lips. “That is because we are going to be attending the police ball, Detective.”

My muzzle sagged open. I glanced at Taxi. “You knew about this?!”

She nodded, sagely. “I dragged it out of him last night. I think Limerence has a point, both about the pony we’re going to see and about you trying to wiggle out of it.”

“You’re damn right he does! I don’t know if anypony noticed, but I’m enemy number one on Jade’s wanted list! She’ll be at the door, checking tickets!” I shouted, my heart thumping furiously.

“And that is why you will be disguised,” Limerence said, evenly. “I cannot alter your facial structure, but I believe that can be fixed up with a muzzle full of cotton-balls and a light application of make-up. However, there are some more minor and temporary changes I can make.”

His horn lit up and let off a little spurt of magic. I pulled back slightly as a stream of hot sparks splashed across my face, blinding me. I expected it to burn, but my cheek fur just tickled fiercely for several seconds before the sensation faded.

I opened my eyes to see Limerence frowning, critically as he gazed at my face.

“Mmm... Perhaps not that color…” he muttered, his horn lighting up again.

Taxi put her hoof on his side. “No, no I like it,” she said with a mischievous grin.

“He looks ridiculous,” Limerence countered.

My driver’s smile only widened.

“What did you just do to me?” I growled, unconsciously flicking my toe. It’s a long ingrained gesture that police ponies pick up. It’s done in times of stress to make certain their gun bits are right at hoof. Unfortunately, I was wearing a tux and, hence, not armed. The gesture wasn’t lost on either my driver or Limerence, though.

“A... simple cosmetic alteration. Nothing too serious,” the librarian tried to assure me.

I jabbed my hoof at my driver. “It is never a ‘simple cosmetic alteration’ when she has that look on her face!”

Taxi had one leg over her muzzle and her nose scrunched up as she did her best not to giggle. It was a familiar expression I’d seen too many times during our youth when I’d been dragged into games of ‘dress-up’. I turned around, quickly searching for a mirror. The one above the bathroom sink was broken, but good enough for my purposes. I edged sideways, sticking my head out so I could see what awful thing they’d done to me.

My lower jaw almost hit me in the kneecaps.

Swift picked that moment to push open the bathroom door.

We stared at one another for a long moment.

Taxi looked back and forth between the two of us, then dissolved into uncontrolled fits of laughter.

“Swift...Why are you wearing a tuxedo?” I asked, very softly.

“Sir, why are you pink?”

****

When Taxi had recovered from a second violent fit of giggling that left her hyperventilating in a corner, I sat down and began attending to Swift, who’d only barely managed to get into the tuxedo.

“Kid, where did you even find this thing? It looks like it was fitted for a colt,” I said.

The tuxedo’s jacket was long in the limbs and a bit tight across the chest. The shirt also needed a little something, since it kept flapping around her stomach. Those issues were quickly solved with a few safety clips in the right places.

“I borrowed it from Scarlet,” she replied.

“Why, though? I was half looking forward to seeing you in a skirt.”

Swift gave me an offended look. “Not a chance! I went by the formal wear shop near the Vivarium and they wanted to put me in this stupid, frilly dress with these big blue ruffles! I would have looked like-”

“Like a filly? You’ll excuse me saying, but you look like a stallion who’s been hit with a shrink ray.”

My partner’s cheeks flushed and she swiped at me with one wing, leaving me plenty of time to duck. “Is there something wrong with that, sir?”

I thought about this for a minute, then shook my head. “I guess not. Suits you, at least.”

Swift’s cheeks reddened further and she ducked her head under one enormous wing, peering at me over the top of it. “Thank you, sir. If you don’t mind, you never did explain why you’re pink.”

“We’re going to the police ball.”

“That’s this week? I’d totally forgotten about it. Things have been so crazy lately, but it’ll be nice to-” Her ears shot straight up as the surprise hit her. “Wait, the police ball?! Sir?! We... I... you... Sir?!”

“Yeah, that just about was my response, too.”

“But Chief Jade! Everypony there! The news ponies! They’ll see you and…” Her muzzle fell into an ‘O’ shape. “Oh..” She tapped the side of her nose, conspiratorially. “Nopony would ever think of you showing up pink!”

“Not quite my thinking, but close enough. I don’t know why a professional counterfeiter would be attending a police ball, but Limerence seems to think that’s what’s happening so we’re pretty much stuck with this.”

“Aaand this as well, Detective.” Limerence was holding a couple of large wads of cotton his levitation field. I tried to back away, but Taxi was already behind me, her hooves on my flank, holding me in place. Opening my muzzle to protest, I found it stuffed full of cotton. There was the momentary, unsettling sensation of something worming around in my mouth as the unicorn jammed the fluff into the right places to make my cheeks bulge out, then it withdrew.

I chewed at the wads in my muzzle, forcing them to either side so I could speak.

“Thish ish lesh than ideal…”

“Have some water,” Taxi said, holding out a glass with both hooves. I took it and sipped, soaking the cotton so it laid down a bit.

“Ah...okay, that’s better,” I replied, then shuffled over to the mirror again. I had to admit, despite the absurdity of it, I looked almost nothing like myself. The stallion in the mirror had fat cheeks, a permanently smiling expression, and a complexion that wouldn’t look out of place on a filly’s bedroom wall. “Not bad…”

“We’re not done yet,” Limerence said, flicking open Taxi’s saddlebag. He floated out a compact and a set of brushes. “Now, just hold still. We’ll be... let’s see…”

I thought about fighting. I thought about trying to escape. In the end, I just shut my eyes and let it happen. Thankfully, my fellow stallion seemed to have some inkling of my discomfort, and didn’t go with Taxi’s suggestion of a layer of lipstick and some flowery hair clips. His knowledge of makeup proved weirdly extensive, and by the end, I had what appeared to be a double chin, if you didn’t look too closely, and bags under my eyes that looked like mixed luggage.

I was, in essence, the very picture of a bored socialite.

Swift got the color treatment and ended up a few shades darker, more tangerine than salmon. Rather than fight the masculine look, she simply swept her mane into a curl and tossed her coat across her wings to cover their size. It was a surprisingly effective disguise, all things considered.

Limerence, last of all before the mirror, applied a dash of mascara and a faint silver to his side-burns. It made him look more like his father, with whom he shared no genetics whatsoever, than it had any right to. Considering the cameras two days ago had mostly been focused on me, I doubted he’d be noticed amongst the throngs that usually attended the police ball.

****

Ahhh, the Detrot Law Enforcement Gala!

What pomp! What circumstance! What a lot of drinking, vomiting, and spending time with co-workers whilst not being paid for the privilege!

Whatever pony decided the cops need their own special night of the year should be forced to attend one of those wretched things as a guest of honor. About ten years prior, after an especially high profile bust, I’d been subjected to that during the administration of the last Chief of Police. My over-riding memories were of having my hoof shaken until it ached, my back pounded until I was ready to start firing wildly into the audience, and my brain battered by an endless array of the most stultifyingly boring speeches known to pony-kind.

It was an event for a class of pony who would never walk the streets in the cool morning rain, their partner beside them, striking fear in the hearts of criminals. They would never experience the calm clarity that comes from being an island of order in a sea of lawlessness.

It was, at its core, a fundraiser for the Detrot P.D. and, despite the name, there were only going to be a select group of officers there, as street cops rarely have funds worth raising. If any of the organizers had an ounce of honesty in their whole bodies, they’d have admitted that the Galas weren’t about the pavement beating defenders of the law; they were about the city’s elite coming together to congratulate themselves on just what a good job they were doing of running things, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’ve maintained a firm belief for some years that a firebomb at the Gala would probably have dropped the city’s crime rate considerably.

****

Dressing miseries finished, three penguin suits and a cab driver who’d managed to laugh herself almost insensate made their way up to street level.

The Skids was quiet for that time of night, though a few foals still played at something that might have once been cops and robbers, if it hadn’t mixed in a few elements of cowponies and buffaloes. Swift tugged my hoof, pointing at one of the children who was wearing a tiny fedora made out of newspaper. In crude letters, he’d written ‘Kroosadr’ across the brim.

“You’ve got a fan there, sir,” she snickered.

“So do you.” I nodded at a zebra filly who was wearing a pair of bright orange shopping bags hooked over her back, shaped to look like wings.

A flutter of wings heralded somepony dropping off the rooftops. Wisteria landed heavily on the pavement in front of us, stumbling a couple of steps as she adjusted for her heavy stomach, before trotting up to the four of us. She glanced at the foals, then back at me, giving me a curious look for several seconds. “Pink be not your color, Crusada. I be thinkin’ for a moment ye managed to sneak somepony by us!”

“I’m fully aware, and this is temporary,” I replied, impatiently. “What can we do for you, Wisteria? We’re short of time here-”

The purple mare laid one leg across her pregnant belly. “I and I be just wonderin’ why t’ree ponies of colors not dey own be leavin’ de Skids looking like a mighty fine part’ay dey be going to.”

“I’m probably heading to my own death. Again. Nothing new there.”

She laughed, then stepped up close and used her wing-tips to adjust my tie one last time. “De children... dey be laughin’ at ye prank on de Queen Jade. Dey ask us, again and again, ‘Tell de story!’ De news be all wonderin’ if ye gone mad.”

“I wonder that myself, sometimes,” I answered, opening the Night Trotter’s rear door for Swift, then jumping in beside her.

Wisteria rested her hooves on the car’s window. “Ye may not be knowin’ about de Aroyos, Crusada... but we be lovin’ a good prank on dey dat would rule us. De children be spreadin’ ye name. Each time dey tell de story of de fall of de King of Ace’s mountain, it be bigger! Now ye be riding a dragon when ye kill him!”

“There was a dragon involved, but I wasn’t riding him, much as he might wish otherwise. We’re going to find somepony who might know something.” I had a momentary thought. “Hey, you mind passing along a message to your Ancestors?”

She touched the bag around her throat. “What be de message? No doubts, dey be listening now.”

“Could you tell them to look out for a pony with a red mane and a blue body? Pretty thing, cherries on her flank?”

“Ahhh, ye be havin’ a marefriend, Crusada?”

“What? No... no, just a witness. She might be looking for that girl on the news. The one who died last month?”

Wisteria’s face darkened. “De dead girl dat were hiding among de Aroyos? I and I remember. She come to us, scared, like she be chased by demons. We be... not often giving solace, but de Ancestors say she come in.”

I tilted my head, curiously and asked, “What about Hay Maker? You let him through alright. He was heading for her apartment.”

She grimaced, looking down the street in the general direction of the house with the white door. “De stallion, Hay Maker, were known to us. He were from de Skids. Not Aroyo, but Cyclone. He be de one dat killed de filly wit’out a true name?”

“Her name was Ruby Blue. And no, Hay Maker was just working as muscle for one of Cosmo’s associates. They were... looking for something. I assumed it was her diary, but I’m still not sure what it could contain that was worth setting up hits on her, Cosmo and me,” I explained. Limerence was waving his watch at me from the far seat in the back of the cab, but I ignored him.

Raising the leather pouch to her ear, Wisteria listened to it for some seconds, then blew a slow breath out of the corner of her mouth. “De Ancestors say... she carry a deathly burden when she come in. Dey not know what it be.”

“Just... watch for a filly with a red mane and a blue pelt and cherries, alright? I’ve got things to take care of and with any luck, I might run into her myself.”

“We will watch. Go, Crusada... and do not die again. It would disappoint de young ones.”

****

I needed time to plan. I needed time to come up with solutions and options. I needed to create a character for myself to play. I needed to work out ahead of time what all I was going to say.

I really needed a stiff drink and a bus ticket.

If truth be told, Limerence couldn’t have picked a more effective way of keeping me from trying to avoid that particular unpleasantness than dropping it in my lap at the last minute. Spur of the moment thinking is one of my strengths, but there’s a definite blind-spot where social occasions are concerned. I knew I was, at least in theory, safe enough from the Chief. I was disguised and Limerence was handling the tickets. All I had to do was keep my head low and walk in nice and slow.

Unfortunately, Taxi found my stash of vodka before I could get rip-roaring drunk so I was to face the night without the fortifying powers of strong alcohol. That didn’t mean she could stop me from getting plastered the second I set hoof in the door, but before that, I needed to get past one tiny little hurdle.

****

The Castle was in full regalia for that special night. Somepony with a dedicated trowel, paintbrush, and budget had wandered the grounds, repairing everything they could. The gold leaf covering the walls was shining in a pair of spotlights that’d been set up in the fortress’s courtyard and the onion dome looked to have been spruced up considerably just for the occasion. Most of the sparkle and shine was probably a unicorn with a talent for illusion, off somewhere in a spare office, who would wake up with an aching horn and a fat paycheck. That didn’t really matter, though, I suppose. Whoever they were, they’d done a fantastic job.

For one night, and one night only, Detrot’s Police Department had the feel that it wasn’t an overworked, exhausted, corrupted pit only barely better than the cesspools of criminality that it fought, in a sort of weak-willed way, to empty. Even I, cynic that I am, could feel it as Taxi pulled the Night Trotter to the curb in front of the carriageway. I might even have let myself feel a shred of optimism, that Detrot P.D. might one day truly be the face it presented on that special night. That lasted right up until the moment my cutie-mark practically caught fire while we were parking.

I had to resist the urge to tear off my tux and give it a good scratch. Swift noticed my squirming as we readied ourselves to get out.

“Sir, are you alright?” she asked, flicking her eyes at my rear.

“No, dammit,” I cursed, rubbing my flank against the car door, “I hate these kinds of events.”

“Why? We’ve got disguises and it looks like a real party. Even Granny Glow wouldn’t recognize us! I barely recognize us,” she chirped, grinning at her darkened complexion in the side-view mirror.

I laid my forehead against the window, staring out at the brightly lit fort with much trepidation. The night was close approaching and the moon framed one of the Castle’s lower turrets. “This is your first one of these things, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. You want to know where the real criminals destroying the fabric of our society are, kid?”

She paused, then nodded, interestedly.

“Look for whoever is congratulating themselves most loudly about all the good they do,” I said, trying to work some of the tension out of my neck.

Swift pulled at her bowtie, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t think I like that thought, sir.”

“Good. You’re not meant to. Now, let’s go see just how good these disguises are.”

****

I trotted along behind Limerence, Swift at my side, my hooves rattling down the smoothed cobblestones.

My gun was still in the car, along with the remainder of our arsenal, and I wanted it more than I wanted my next breath. I had argued for full armament, while Limerence insisted that he was the only one who should have a weapon, and Taxi declared we didn’t need the weapons at all because it was a damn party. Before we three could come to blows, I offered the compromise I was now regretting, ferociously.

There was a line in front of the Castle’s two doors and I snatched a glimpse of Iris Jade’s olive head, wearing a pert dress uniform cap as she stood beside the entrance. Most of the ponies in the queue were commenting on the novelty of being made to wait like commoners, apparently enjoying themselves enormously as they made small talk. We waited patiently, Swift with interest in the rich guests, Limerence with apparent boredom, and me with the cool collected character of a prisoner being lead to the gallows. I hoped the flop sweat running down my sides wouldn’t give me away.

The unicorn in front of us was half the age of her stallion escort and wearing enough gems to fill an adult dragon’s belly. She carried a poodle of some sort in her purse, swinging back and forth in her magical grip. The damn thing barked at us for five minutes straight without visibly pausing to inhale; It only stopped when Limerence focused a little magic through his horn and clamped the tiny wretch’s mouth shut. It still squeaked and whimpered before ducking back into the bag. The mare, busily involved in some elaborate story of fashion cataclysm, didn’t even notice.

The line moved as I did my best to calm my nerves, but I was really wishing I hadn’t hung my badge on her horn. She might not have been quite as inclined to rip my limbs off if I hadn’t hung my badge on her horn. Unicorns don’t like it when you remind them they’ve got a coat-rack on their foreheads.

“Tickets please.”

How had the line moved that quickly?!

Chief Jade was now only a couple of meters away. I could see the shine on the buttons of her tightly pressed and primped uniform. My pulse pounded in my ears. I thought about bolting and maybe pretending to vomit on the way out, like a guest who’d started the party a little early. It wasn’t such a bad plan, now I came to consider it.

“Tickets please.”

My panic was mounting. I kept my eyes on the cobblestones and Swift gave me a gentle push forward as the mare with the poodle held out two expensive looking slips of scroll work.

Chief Jade made a show of examining them closely, then gave her a broad smile. “Miss Hypatia and Mister Gold Smith! I am quite pleased to have you back this year. We have a lovely table towards the stage side from where you will have an excellent view. May I recommend the Sweet Apple ‘53?”

The two swept past her and into the Castle.

“Tickets please.”

Limerence took two steps forward, stopped, popped off a quick, slightly mocking salute and his horn buzzed faintly. I’d determined to watch his rear hooves, but something in Jade’s voice made me lift my head. She wasn’t looking at me, but was instead studying our tickets.

Crisp uniform aside, I’d never seen Iris Jade look quite so haggard. She covered it well, with a thick layer of makeup and a practiced, easy smile she’d never use in her professional duties, but I’d known her long enough to see the signs. Her horn-tip trembled, just a little, as she held the tickets and her eyes were glazed.

A stab of guilt hit me in the gut and I held myself a bit straighter. I had intended to irritate her, not drive her off the edge. But as ever, I swallowed that guilt into whatever biological cesspool I plan to one day have cut out along with my inevitable liver cancers.

Jade had finished her inspection, looking vaguely confused. The bottom felt like it'd dropped out of my stomach. "Mister Acapella? I don't believe I remember sending out this invitation-"

Limerence raised his nose, doing a passable imitation of the pony who'd been in front of us. "Not surprising. We are from the Canterlot branch of the Miner's guild and are looking to open a new venture in Detrot. With recent advances in gem-finding spells, it's believed there might be new veins just waiting to be tapped, and we thought it might be best to establish a healthy relationship with the local constabulatory. We simply contacted the Mayor's office and he provided the extra invitations. Of course, if we are unwelcome, we would not wish to intrude-"

"No, no, no... please, do come in, Mister Acapella. May I ask the names of your two guests?" Jade said, her eyes playing over the Swift and I. She stopped on me, squinting down at my face. I battled with myself to meet her piercing gaze.

"Yes, certainly." The librarian performed a slightly complicated bow with one leg that both indicated Swift and dismissed me. "Miss Dynamo, of the Cloudstone Miners, and Mister Thick Head, my assistant."

By the time her stare finally broke, it was quickly turning my bowels to water. The police chief floated a clipboard out of the front pocket of her uniform, then checked the numbers on our tickets again. "You'll be seated by the stage as well; afterwards, your tickets do include the ‘additional’ privileges. Please, enjoy your evening and feel free to mingle as you will."

Limence trotted by her and Swift followed, hiking her jacket a little lower so it covered the tips of her wings. Chief Jade put out one leg as I made to move by and leaned close to me. I almost swallowed my cotton balls.

"Do I know you?" she asked. "You look extremely familiar."

I put on a gruff, gravelly voice. "No, ma'am. Mister Acapella and I arrived in town yesterday. Iffen' you ever made it up to Canterlot-"

"I didn't. Still, I would swear-"

"Come along, Mister Thick!" Limerence called out from inside. "Do not take any more of the Chief's time with your incessant flirting!"

Jade's ears laid back and she hastily stepped out of my way. "Enjoy your evening."

****

As I ambled into the Castle and my urge to flee faded, I considered, quite heavily, just going ahead and killing Limerence. It was one of those things a pony only has the mental fortitude for once they discover they're no longer facing imminent death. More’s the pity that I probably still needed him without a crushed windpipe.

****

Why, when the bathroom nearest my former desk is broken, can Detrot P.D. not find the money to get it fixed, but when there’s a fundraiser, the whole ridiculous place turns into a Canterlotian banquet that would make the Princesses feel shabby? I just do not understand.

The office, or rather the cubicles most of the detectives used for desks, had been cleared away entirely, leaving the ancient throne room, once more, fit for dancing. The Princess’s throne was somewhere behind a gigantic, open stage which must have cost a fortune during better times. I’d only seen it used for this event, and never thought to ask how in the world they moved or stored it. Bright blue curtains, incidentally the shade of a police uniform, hung from a gleaming golden pole to a full-sized oaken stage with a jutting catwalk which lead to a smaller stage down amongst the punters.

Spread out at evenly spaced intervals, tables draped in fine cloth with crystal and laid with shining silver wear. Each table could have easily seated eight, but only four spaces were set at each one, with lounging chairs tucked underneath.

Despite the firestorm of rioting media detractors I’d set off just two days prior, the well-to-do had turned out in droves. Most of the seats around the room were already filled and my rented tux stood out like a sore hoof on a one-legged pony amongst all the frippery and finery on display.

Once inside, Swift had made straight for the small bar set up along one wall. She was happily sucking down something bubbly, reading a novel spread out across her knees. Limerence was already seated before the stage, his eyes closed and ears twitching.

As a waitress drifted past me, levitating a plate full of tiny cheeses wrapped in bits of fine lettuce, I caught her elbow and picked up one of the hors d'oeuvres, popping it into my mouth. It was decent, but nothing I couldn’t make in my own kitchen. If I’d had a kitchen. Or a home.

Melancholy, much? a familiar voice whispered in the back of my head.

Go be dead.

“Thank you,” I muttered, absently.

The waitress gave a surprised twitch then swung back to face me.

“Detective?!”

My muzzle fell open and I dropped the lettuce niblet, along with one of my cotton balls.

Damn me for a luckless diamond dog... I thought.

The one pony in the entire world who could possibly compete for first place with Iris Jade for ‘Pony I Did Not Want to See That Night’ was gawping at me from inches in front of my face.

Sugar Lace, reporter extraordinaire, very nearly dropped her platter as she stared at me with an expression like a shark confronted with a dangling steak. Her normally primped and curled mane had been hacked short and her mahogany pelt was dusted with a thick layer of some kind of product that gave it a matte finish. Nopony but those who knew her personally would have picked her out amongst the groups of catering ponies, though her black skirt definitely had an ‘off the rack’ look.

I covered my shock by putting on my gravelly voice once more. “Not a Detective, Miss. Here with the Miner’s guild. Mind if I have another piece of that there lettuce? I dropped mine.”

“Come off it, Hard Boiled. I know it’s you,” she whispered, pointing one toe at the cotton-ball on the floor.

I surreptitiously kicked the ball behind one of the potted plants, then dug around in my tux’s pocket until I found an extra and slipped it into my mouth.

“Fine. What do you want, Lace?” I growled under my breath.

“I... can’t believe this. You can’t be here. I must be hallucinating. Oh, this is the best day of my life!” she squeaked, dancing on all four hooves.

“Disguises, remember?” I hissed, then quickly shaped up a smile as a very tall, older stallion in a tasteful pink cravat strolled by, giving the two of us a curious look. “Get it together or Jade will have us both skinned and mounted.”

Sugar Lace sobered quickly, setting her plate across her back. “Right, sorry. What are you doing here, though? Half the reporters in this city would sell their sex organs in exchange for an interview with you! Jade would happily give her pill habit up if it meant getting to dissect your crazy ass in a holding cell!” Her lips pinched together as she gave me a contemplative look. “Why pink?”

“Would you have guessed it was me if you hadn't recognized the voice? And I’m afraid I’m not up for an interview tonight. I’m working.”

That was the wrong thing to say and I gave myself a mental kick in the pants.

Sugar Lace’s face lit up with barely suppressed enthusiasm.

“Working? Freelancing? How exciting!” she purred, her lips peeling back into a dangerous smile. “You mind taking a moment out of your busy evening to answer a question for me?”

I shut my eyes. There was no getting out of it.

“Make it fast, alright?”

“Why did you call Princess Celestia ‘The Sun Tyrant’?”

“Prank on Jade,” I grunted, then turned towards where Limerence sat near the stage. “Now, Lace, I answered your question. You mind pissing off? I’m assuming you’re not here toting snacks on a lark and neither of us needs a ‘big reveal’ as part of tonight’s entertainment. I don’t fancy spending the evening in a cell anymore than I’m sure you do.”

“Oh, I’m on the gossip beat tonight and I cannot think of anything juicier than you, Detective.” Sugar Lace’s pretty features had the cast of an eagle zeroing in on dinner. “I think, all things considered, you have significantly more to lose from a ‘big reveal’ than I do, after all. So why don’t we go sit down and have a nice, little talk about-”

Whatever it was she wanted to have a ‘nice little talk about’ was cut off as somepony gently tapped her on the shoulder. She twirled, no doubt about to give the pony behind her a piece of her mind for interrupting her big moment, and paused as she found herself nose to chest with the stallion who’d gone by not a moment ago.

I’ve seen eagles who looked less surprised when a rabbit they’d presumed to be dinner kicks them in the face and goes for their throat.

“M-m-m...Mister Voluntas?” she gasped. I tried to figure where I’d heard that name before. I couldn’t quite place it, but the stallion standing behind Sugar Lace oozed the sort of charisma you hear about in gentleponies of yore, when authors say they ‘dominated a room.’ I felt the unconscious desire to bow or curtsy or something.

He was not handsome, certainly nothing like Zefu, but I had the sincere feeling Taxi would still have found herself having a ‘crisis’ in his presence, regardless.

He was maybe an inch or two taller than myself, and certainly many years older, but he carried his age much like the Don; smoothly and with a grace born of practiced consideration for his environment. His pale, amethyst mane held a streak of grainy platinum, magnificently combed and shaped, and while lines around his eyes and lips suggested age, his tall shoulders and straight back spoke of a body unbowed by the grind of years.

I leaned sideways, glancing at his sides, then at his forehead. No horn. No wings. He still had the bearing I tend to expect solely of the Princesses themselves. There was just something about him that radiated serene aloofness.

The suit he wore had the cut of a talented tailor with a penchant for fashion history. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in Celestia’s court a hundred years ago, and while it might have been out of the present day vogue, it had the feel of something whose time was coming back around. He was, in essence, a pony so fashionable that fashion hadn’t caught up with him yet.

“Please, Miss Lace... do call me Diamante. Voluntas is a family name.” Diamante held a glass of champagne in a clip on one hoof, raising it to his thin lips as he examined Sugar Lace. “I do not remember seeing your name on the guest list, but perhaps I was mistaken.”

“I...I...um…” Lace’s ears laid back and she tried to regain her composure. “I was just talking to my friend here…”

Diamante turned to me, and I had the sudden sensation of being a rare bird caught in a cage, being looked at closely by a truly obsessive ornithologist. It was a long moment before I realized he’d held his hoof out. “I don’t believe I remember seeing you on the guest list, either... Detective Hard Boiled. Diamante Voluntas. Starlight Industries.”

That was where I’d heard his name. A month ago, during a radio broadcast, when this whole mess had started. He’d been giving some grand speech at the opening of his towers uptown. It seemed so long ago, now.

“Mister Diamante. A pleasure,” I replied, sweeping my coat-tails out to make sure they were still covering my cutie-mark. “I’m curious as to how you saw through my disguise. Chief Jade was fooled by it.”

The older stallion chuckled, swirling the golden liquid in his glass, ignoring Sugar Lace who was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Chief Jade may be an excellent police chief, but I fear that climbing to the top of an organization does dull some of the ‘street senses.' A corporation requires a more... discerning mind.” He glanced towards the potted plant I’d kicked my dropped cotton towards. “That, and you kicked your ‘padding’ into my hoof whilst I was examining the plantings. Without them, you are rather distinctive.”

“Examining the plantings?” I asked.

He snorted, softly and motioned with his glass towards the far side of the vast room. There was a reddish mare standing there in a rather showy violet dress, her face painted so severely it might as well have been done by a clown. “Hiding behind them, I should say. Miss Marinara, of the Colton Corporation, is a mare of exquisite taste who is unaccustomed to stallions saying ‘no’ when they’re invited to her bed.”

The pony I presumed to be Miss Marinara was scanning the crowd with a certain predatory keenness that made me clench my rear legs together. I stepped slightly to one side, covering Diamante as her eyes slid by us. He gave me a grateful nod. “I must say, I am a true fan of yours, Detective. Almost, I’m certain, as much as Miss Lace here. Would you care to join me in my booth before the show starts? We might both avoid further entanglements with pushy individuals.”

He gave Lace a meaningful look; the reporter angrily tapped one hoof. “Now just a minute-”

Diamante’s smiling demeanor changed in two seconds flat to a somber, threatening presence so powerful I flipped my toe several times before I realized I didn’t have my gun on me. “Miss Lace, of PNN? Your editor is Mister Bull Pen, yes? He and I were having the most interesting conversation the other day over lunch.”

Lace’s tail slapped against her flank as she took a step back. “Y-you know Mister Bull Pen?”

“Intimately.” Diamante rumbled, his voice taking on a quality like a thunderstorm ready to break on the horizon. “Our discussion revolved around a possible purchase of your paper by Starlight Industries. We are, after all, expanding into new markets. It would be a shame, were I to suddenly find myself uninterested in such a sale… for any reason. Of course, if Mister Bull Pen asked me why... I would have to tell him, should somepony in his employ leave me with a poor impression of the company...”

The implication hung there in mid-air, and Lace’s face paled visibly. Without another word, her horn glowed to snatch up the platter and place it on her back, before she all but fled, once more, into the crowd.

Diamante watched her go, calm amusement on his face once more.

“So... did you actually have lunch with her editor?” I asked. “I thought damn sure there was nothing in this world that could get rid of that filly once she had the scent.”

“Never met him,” he replied, lazily shifting his weight to his other rear leg. “I do keep abreast of local news and its key personalities, however. A stallion in my position can’t afford not to. Interestingly enough, whether you are aware of it or not, you are local news of some import. Come, join me.”

Without waiting to see if I followed, he strolled off towards one of the row of private, curtained booths set up along the wall. I got the distinct feeling he wasn’t the sort of pony who was told ‘no’ any more than the mare he’d been hiding from.

Diamante and I threaded our way through the tables to a particular booth. He swept the curtain open with one leg and settled down amongst the cushions. I checked to make sure my companions hadn’t moved, then lowered my haunches onto the pillows.

“Thank you for covering for me back there. Lace is… well...”

“A ‘maddening mascara’d vulture’, is the phrase I believe you’re seeking, Mister Boiled.” Diamante finished for me, setting his champagne to one side. “Let me order you something, if you please, as I did somewhat use you for cover as well. It’s the least I can do.”

“Uh... sure. Thanks.”

A waiter appeared with the stealth of a kitten on thick carpets, noted the two items Diamante pointed out on the menu, then was gone just as quickly. We sat in amiable silence until, less than two minutes later, the waiter reappeared, balancing across his back a pair of long-stemmed glasses with handles made for earth-pony hooves.

“Now then, Detective. I feel I must accord you my thanks twice.” He raised his glass to me.

“What for?” I asked, adjusting the cushion under my chest as I took the glass. The waiter bowed, not waiting for a tip before he vanished once more.

“If my sources are to be believed, you single-hoofedly produced a six point upswing in the futures index for pharmaceuticals in this city,” he said, patting his cravat with one toe to smooth the ruffles.

I rocked back on my heels, feeling unaccountably wary. “Why do I suspect that upswing isn't all Chief Jade de-stressing?

“My… source… was, until recently, a chemist operating at the behest of a pony with the less than righteous intent to produce vast quantities of the sedative known as ‘Ace’. I believe you know the one I mean?” he inquired, quirking one side of his lips.

“I might have run into him, sure,” I said, trying to shrug it off.

Diamante’s eyes twinkled with interest. “A second source, now unemployed since his background check came back with associations to said criminal, informed me that he saw yourself and two mares enter the building to see the individual in question.”

I swallowed audibly. “I might have. What about it?”

He sipped his champagne, still the picture of perfect, harmonious calm as he continued, “I suppose that would be far less intriguing had this source not also heard two reports from a high caliber rifle. A pegasus the color of a safety jacket blew out of the window and gave chase to another pegasus before they both vanished into a storm. Some moments later, two pegasi of unknown affiliation were apparently seen carrying what appeared to be one of those mares and a dead body dripping ‘vital fluids’ away from the building’s upper floors.”

“Your source has sharp eyes, Mister Diamante,” I grumbled, shaking my eartips out then letting my face relax into a confident grin. “Still, my methods are a professional secret. You wouldn’t happen to want to tell me which stocks I should invest in this month, would you?”

He laughed and it was infectious. I found myself smiling just a little, despite my continuing uncertainty. “No, no, Detective. I suppose I understand. It is interesting, however, to have found you here. Knowing her reputation and temperament, I would have considered the grave a preferable alternative to putting myself in a position where I might be left to the kind mercies of the Chief of Police.”

I sniffed at the glass the waiter had brought me. It smelled delicious. “There are always jobs for a pony willing to look deeper into the world and right now, freelancing is a steady paycheck. I needed some freedom that working here didn’t offer.”

“True.” He nodded, sagely. “So, if I may ask...what do you think of our fine party?”

“Truth? I wouldn’t be here if I had a choice. In fact, if I had the means, I’d probably arrest everypony in this building wearing a set of diamond cufflinks,” I replied. Diamante gave me a curious look, then held up his sleeve, showing off a pair of glittering, very expensive cufflinks. “Present company excepted,” I added, quickly.

He drained his glass of champagne and looked at it sadly, as though he couldn’t wave his hoof and have more in an instant. “I... understand the impulse, and this may shock you, but I agree. I’ve no wish to be here either, and any honest appraisal of those who climb their way up a corporate or social ladder will inevitably reveal a mountain of skeletons. It is… a sad way for a world to operate.”

“You didn’t strike me as the bleeding heart type,” I said, slipping one toe into my pocket for a sweet before realizing I didn’t have any. I really wanted my trenchcoat back.

Diamante examined his carefully manicured hoof, with a touch of self-deprecating smugness, “Don’t get me wrong, Detective. It is, to my mind, only from on high that a pony might seek to change the world for something better. You have heard my company mission statement, yes?”

I cocked my head. “Wasn’t it something like ‘Reach for the Stars’?”

He shut his eyes and as look of vague displeasure crossed his features. “My marketing director is highly imaginative, but he has little respect for history. ‘Sic itur ad astra’ is the actual phrase. ‘And thou shalt go to the stars.' It’s a family motto.”

“You think Equinekind might do that, one of these days?” I wondered aloud.

Diamante pushed a hoof back through his heavily styled mane, then stared at it for several seconds as though seeing it for the first time. “You are very direct, Detective. I find it unusual, considering the circles I am most familiar with. You are a pony it is... easy... to be honest with. I suppose that would explain your choice of career.”

“I chose my job because a stamp on my ass says I can feel when there has been an injustice.” I waved my hooves at the File Cloud up above, rumbling irritably as it circled the inside of the roof. “Granted, it’s more useful when I’m not in a building absolutely stacked to capacity with ponies who’ve spent their lives climbing over one another to make a few bits.”

His upper lip curled slightly, “Yes... business ponies. I cannot tell you how they disgust me.”

“Aren’t you one of them?” I inquired, tipping my glass against my muzzle.

His sharp, grey eyes roamed around the little curtained booth as he considered his answer. “Unwillingly, I suppose I am. I have brought low my fair share of opponents and more remain, but I get no pleasure from it. Most of that lot out there revel in dragging themselves through the muck up a pile of defeated foes. For them, it is a game."

“So why do it?”

Diamante held up his empty glass. Light from the overhead lamp pierced it, spraying a rainbow out on the pillows next to me.

“I am one pony, one individual from a long line who believes that wise minds plan ahead. It is we, the thinking beings of this world, who are responsible for seeing to it that our futures are brighter than those of the ones who came before us, and brighter still for our foals. I do what I do so that I might see the dawn of those futures.”

“A thousand years of peace isn’t enough?” I asked. “Princess Celestia ruled for a long time in what amounted, more or less, to peace.”

“Yes… but as you bring up Celestia and the last thousand years, please do consider Luna, our moon.” Diamante’s turned his face to the light and I couldn’t help but notice, in profile, what a noble figure he cut. “She is a creature of change; one might even say she embodied it. Consider our achievements since her return: Sixty years, from the carriage to the motor vehicle. One being’s influence restructuring our entire lives for the better from a tiny castle in the capital city.”

I shrugged and held up both hooves. “It’s worth being grateful for, isn’t it? What’s your point?”

“Yes... hah, yes, it is.” He laughed, brushing his hoof against the curtain. The waiter reappeared, topping off his glass first, then mine from another bottle, before Diamante continued, “My point, I suppose if I must have one... is that one day - whether tomorrow, or another thousand years from now - these... archetypes, these creatures of power that define our development... will inevitably be gone. Not just Celestia, but Luna as well. They’ll be dead by somepony's hooves, or perhaps even by the grind of years. After all, true immortality is difficult to prove and there have been enough ‘brushes’ that I would be willing to call it, in their case, unlikely. When they are laid low, what will we do? Go back to grazing the fields?”

I thought about how to answer this for a long time, then slowly shook my head. “We weren’t sitting on our butts during those thousand years. There were fights and other things that forced us to develop. I mean, nothing like the Crusades, but there were some, right? Technology advanced. It might have taken us longer to make real peace without Princess Celestia or develop a motor car without Luna, but we’d have still made it here eventually. There was a time before they were here, after all, and we did alright.”

“It’s true.” His face hardened slightly. “And recognizing that we would have reached this place without them, I would hope to see a day we do not need these beings, because whatever benefit they provide, they represent a vulnerability in ponykind. If someone were to remove them, or lock them in another celestial body, we'd be devastated.”

“So you think the Loonies are right, then? Down with Celestia, and pack Luna in with her?” I chuckled.

Diamante’s brow wrinkled, then he laughed as well, “That group of silly miscreants with their blue robes and chanting? Sweet mercy, no. They have no respect for history. I believe, rather, that there must be examples for ponykind to follow which don’t necessarily have to have wings and a horn. If I am to provide such an example, it does necessitate participation in corporate culture and high society, but then, ponies looking to change anything must open their own doors. Either way-” He snapped his wrist out, flashing an expensive watch tucked over his fetlock. “-the show is soon to start and I must find my seat. Would you care to join me, Detective?”

I stuck my head out of the curtain, looking both ways. Swift was out of her seat and wandering around, no doubt looking for me. She’d left her tuxedo jacket at the bar and her huge wings were on full display.

Pulling my head back, I lifted myself to my hooves and shook a bit of stiffness out of my knees. “I wish I could. My partner’s out there making a real effort to get us caught.”

Diamante rose as well and held out his hoof again. I took it, receiving another firm shake. “Then, Detective, I wish you all the best. You are more valuable than you know; There are few enough ponies in this world looking to end the injustices pervading our society. Should you need anything in the course of future investigations, feel free to contact my receptionist at Starlight Industries.”

“Considering the way things have gone lately, don’t be surprised if you get a call one of these days. Thank you, Mister Diamante. It’s been a pleasure.”

****

I left the curtained booth, wishing I’d had more time to sit and talk to Diamante. It was a damn sight finer activity sitting and philosophizing with an old stallion than wandering around the Castle waiting for Jade to spot me and turn my cutie-mark into a welcome mat for her office.

Ponies were filing to their seats, and I joined them as they headed to their individual tables. Swift was talking to Limerence as I appeared behind her.

“Hey kid. What’s shaking?”

My partner jerked, her wings half rising from her back. “Oh, sir! Don’t scare me like that! I thought She had caught you!” Swift gasped, putting her forehooves up on my chest.

“I’m fine, kid. Aren’t you forgetting something?” I tapped her on the nearest feather with one toe.

Her pupils shrank and she dashed back through the crowd towards the bar, bumping into one pony after another like a brightly colored pinball.

Limerence’s horn lit and a soft glow of magic enveloped the chair closest to me, tugging it back. I collapsed into it, putting my chin on the table.

“You must forgive me, Detective, but I must ask. Why the child?” Limerence asked, cocking his head to one side. “Miss Taxi's presence makes a certain sense; though she tries to hide it beneath a cloud of incense smoke and exuberant bursts of culinary violence, she is as cynical as you are, perhaps moreso. But I do not understand why you persist with your associations with Officer Swift. You are no longer an officer of the law and not required to maintain that partnership. You only knew her for three days before your... unfortunate incident.”

I took a sip from the glass of posh ice water already on the table before I answered, “The kid’s more competent than she looks or sounds. She killed for me. You don’t abandon a pony once they’ve done something like that.”

Limerence crossed his forelegs and gave me a half-lidded appraisal. “Loyalty is a noble reasoning, but logic dictates-”

“I know what logic dictates.” I cut him off. “Logic dictated I head for the hills the second things got bigger than a dead girl in an alley-way.” I traced a circle on the table with my toe, watching a bit of the water seeping from my glass soak into the tablecloth. There was a metaphor there, but my brain was too frazzled to pick it out. “You are going to have to trust me. Swift hasn’t had the benefit of whatever experience with your father’s business you have, but each time I’ve needed her to be there, she is and only for the asking. That kid is the only cop the last few years I’d have wanted to follow me into Monte Cheval, and when it came time, her innocence was worth less than my life to her. She didn’t hesitate to make the trade, either.”

The librarian let his head fall to one side, still watching me with those disconcertingly cold eyes.

“I see,” was all he said.

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking in that sometimes chillingly ordered mind of his, but the Don’s Will still sat in my trench-coat’s side pocket. His ‘test’ had gone off the rails the moment we found the Professor’s body. I could have given it to Limerence and let him know the real reasons why his father sent him along. It might have cut down on the incisive questions if I had.

Before I could say anything further, somepony tapped a spoon three times against a glass and brought the murmuring audience to silence. The lights around the stage dimmed slightly and a spotlight swiveled to face the curtain.

Chief Jade, resplendent in her uniform with freshly touched up make-up, trotted up the side of the stage and down to a microphone stand sitting on the thrust stage. Her smile could have been taped on, but she held it anyway as she made her way to the front, pulling off her uniform cap with a burst from her horn whilst simultaneously lifting the mic to hang in front of her.

My chest clenched with worry as I realized I was less than two meters from the stage, but I relaxed as I noticed her squinting into the spotlight. No chance she’d see me, or at least, that’s what I told myself.

Jade cleared her throat and all eyes were on her as she began her spiel.

“Mares and gentlecolts! I wish to welcome you, one and all, to the Detrot Police Gala!” A wave of polite clapping and stomping swept through the crowd, quickly quieting as she lifted one hoof. “Now, I know you’re all expecting me to get up here and make a dull speech. I was half expecting that myself, but if I’m honest, I’d rather eat my own cap.”

There was a scattering of laughter from the crowd.

“I’m going to get down from here quick as I can, but I just want you all to know whose hoof to shake once the show is over. I know we’ve taken a drumming in the media the last couple of days, no thanks to one of my ex-employees who decided it would be funny to get up in front of the cameras and thank me for my participation in a rebellion against the Princesses. Incidentally, if you see him, tell him there’s a carrot peeler with his name on it in my office.”

More laughter. I sank lower in my seat, pulling the menu over and opening it in front of my face.

“Before we go on with the show, after which dinner will be served, I want to thank our benefactor of the evening... please, take a bow, Mister Diamante Voluntas of Starlight Industries!”

Off towards the other side of the stage, a shadow rose from the table and the spotlight swung down to single out Diamante from amongst the crowd. He managed to look regal, humble, and slightly embarrassed as he dipped his head to the audience.

Jade continued, “Mister Voluntas is bankrolling tonight’s entertainment. Now, if you please… I will turn the stage over to that most acclaimed of performers, back from a month long tour taking him to Canterlot, Manehatten, and points beyond… The Great Ghoulini!”

I leaned over and whispered to Limerence, “The great who?”

His lips were tightened into a crease. “The pony we are here to interrogate.”

“You’re… not serious…”

“I am, unhappily, quite serious.”

It was on that note that the curtains behind the stage burst into flame.

Act 2, Chapter 14: Champion of Right, Swoops out of the Shadows...

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 14: Champion of Right, Swoops Out of the Shadows…

"Mane. Con Mane."

Just the name evokes images of fine suits, high-speed import chariots, and attractive, scantily dressed, and potentially deadly mares and stallions. Or, rather, it certainly did before and during the Crusades, but these days, Equestrian covert operations are themselves in a bit of an embarrassed decline.

During the Crusades, the Celestial Intelligence Agency, along with its domestic counterpart, the Department of Barnyard Security, were responsible for some major coups; The Appaloosa Valley Massacre would not have been possible had the dragonflight not been coaxed right into the ambush by Celestial agents, and the DBS prevented more than a few Draconic Birthday terrorist attacks. But with the fall of the dragons and the subsequent economic surrender of the diamond dogs... what was there left to do?

Make no mistake, recent times have not exactly been peaceful, but Equestria's enemies have changed in nature. No longer do whole nations, such as the changelings and dragons, eye Equestria as some kind of vulnerable prize; The greater threat comes from arcane mishaps and rampaging beasts, which A) are individualized and disorganized; B) offer little in the way of usable intelligence, and C) are very very hard for a covert operative to usefully seduce.

Faced with decreasing relevance and budget cuts, the intelligence community grew uneasy; While scouting and spy chariots remained relevant, their talents in subterfuge and sabotage were going to waste... until they hit upon the brilliant scheme of manufacturing new enemies.

For about 4 years, Equestria was menaced by the "Kelpies," water-dwelling seaweed-draped horselike beings with a hydrosupremacist attitude. It was quite an elaborate staging, too: The DBS created photos, documents, and intelligence gathered from Kelpie sources. They held uncomfortably S&M-like 'interrogations' of 'Kelpie agents.' They even went so far as to choreograph chariot chases through major metropolitan marketplaces, including setting up fruit stands manned by DBS agents, stocked with fruit designed to tumble and splat as dramatically as possible.

Equestria bought it. Eventually, Equestria bought it all too completely; The CIA and DBS became victims of their own success, because this house of fishy-smelling cards only collapsed when Luna decided that the Kelpies were so great a threat that a show of force was needed. She took several hundred of her finest Night Guards, flew to where the Kelpies supposedly nested... and found her armies descending upon a plot of land containing a kelp-strewn pond, an abandoned furniture warehouse, and a handful of very sheepish earth pony agents covered in naught but seaweed.

Equestria's covert services have yet to completely recover from the scandal, either in terms of public credibility or financial support. Even some of the more secretive agencies, the ones the regular populace barely know exists, have been feeling the pinch.

--The Scholar

The dank, smelly alleyway was scant shelter against the rain, but beat cops have few options. My hooves ached and I wanted caffeine. More than that, I wanted a beer, but drinking on the job was a big no-no.

“Two years. Two years and you can’t be on time.” I grumbled to myself, checking my watch for the sixth time. A voice in my head was surprised to see that watch. I’d lost it almost ten years ago.

There was a clatter of hooves, and I stuck my head out of the cavernous alley to see a young mare in a short skirt and fishnet stockings ducking under the awning of a nearby shop. She caught sight of me, and her face filled with fearful resignation. A prostitute expecting me to bust her on a cold, rainy night as she tried to make her way home. I shook my head and tipped my police cap to her, pulled back and glanced at the time again.

“What’ve you gotten yourself into now?”

The voice made me jump, but it was familiar. Juniper, his green face almost black in the dim light and the rain matting his face fur until he looked like a drowned rat in a trenchcoat, stepped out of the deep shadows in the alley.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was wondering when you might show up. Aren’t we going to go bust those fools on Sixteenth street tonight?”

“We busted them a long time ago.” He waved one hoof, dismissively, shaking water out from under his coat collar. “I’m not here about that. Tonight, you nearly ate a concussion-enhanced flashbang.”

“Oh…This is a dream, then? I was sort of hoping this would be one of those calming conversations where you tell me I’m doing great and I should keep up the good work?”

“Yeah, sure. I just came to warn you, or rather, Gale asked me to warn you. That’s incidental, though.”

I opened my coat and patted the buckles of my gun harness under my forelegs, giving one wayward strap a slight tug. “Warn me?”

“A few things, I guess. Mine and his.” Juniper sighed, pulling his sodden coat off. I opened the side of mine and he slipped under. I rested my head on his neck as we shared the warmth in the cold alleyway, just a few hours before dawn. “I hate this cryptic shit, but causality is slipping. You could die soon. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe not. I’m worried. Going into that hole after Bari was a stupid move.”

“Any more than anything else I’ve done lately?”

“Look, that kid worships you, and Sweet Shine would follow you into Tartarus. I don’t know about the blue dickhead, but he’s at least got sense enough to question you.”

“What’s your point, Juni?”

“I’m just saying you need to be careful. You don’t have any kind of destiny here, much as I know you love that Shining Armor crap. You die in a way that bug’s heart in your chest can’t fix, that’s the end of the line.” Juniper shuffled from one hoof to the other and groaned. “Ugh, why’d you have to pick a night where my hooves feel like they’ve had nails driven into them?”

“Don’t know,” I replied with a shrug. “I pissed in someone’s cereal in a previous life and they’ve been making me pay for it with visits from my dead partner who gives me gloomy warnings about impending doom and reminds me of my own mortality, all evidence to the contrary. What’s your excuse?”

At this, Juniper laughed, slinging his leg around my neck and ruffling my mane with his free hoof. “Damn right! So if you get to be the cunt with a second chance, you don’t get to waste it! There are things moving on this side. You can consider this a warning from your magically hyper-sensitive organs, or a hallucination, or a sign to lay off the strong cheese before you get hit with a flash-bang, but the upshot is going to be the same. Causality is keeping me from telling you terribly much in case you bugger everything up. I’m telling you, though, you’re on the right track, but if you die, you won’t be the only one. Got me?”

“Nothing new there.” I tried to sound grumpy, but couldn’t help myself as I pushed his hoof away from my mane and snatched my cap up off the ground where it’d fallen. “Now, you want to shove off so I can wake up with a splitting headache?”

“Meh, Gale is handling the headache. Incidentally, you’re about to wake up tied to a chair. Don’t be an arse or somepony might shoot you before you can remedy that.”

“Wait, tied?!”

The night faded. The rain stopped. I opened my eyes.

****

Ow.

The headache was there. It was fading at record speed, but the sensation still reminded me of being shot.

I'd opened my eyes. Why couldn't I see anything? I shut them, then opened them once more. It didn't seem to be doing much good. Maybe two hits right in the face with disabling magics in a day had finally fried my optic nerves and I was blinded for life. That cheery thought had just enough time to drag my spirits into the gutter before a light popped on above my head.

I stared up at the lightbulb for several seconds. The ridiculous notion that I must have had a good idea I wasn't aware of passed through my scattered mind. The bulb was bare, white, and coated in a thick layer of dust.

My legs feel awfully stiff, I thought, sluggishly, I should go for a walk.

My forelegs jerked, but didn't seem very willing. Glancing at them, curiously, I noticed a bit of what seemed to be very tough string tight behind my fetlocks. It looked too thin to be restraining, but as I tugged on my knees, there wasn't any give worth mentioning. The fiber shimmered and shined as I moved my head back and forth. Shutting my eyes, I flexed the muscles in my rear calves, forcing my toes into the chair. Most things either explode or break or something under the weight of an earth pony’s muscles. The chair didn’t so much as creak.

Now I’m a little worried.

Lifting my head, I tried to get some estimation of my surroundings. Outside of the sharply lit little circle, there was only that terrible, scary variety of dark that interrogation rooms and the space under a foal's bed really have.

My trenchcoat was gone, along with my gun, hat, and harness. Somepony had even unzipped my cardiac chest pouch. The pocket hung open in a way that made me feel somehow even more naked.

The bastards hadn't even left me my tie. Had I been wearing a tie? I couldn't remember.

They hit you with a flashbang in training, just for demonstrative purposes, but the side-effects of that particular spell include bouts of hazy memory regarding the events just preceding it. Most officers forget about precisely how awful it is until after they’ve dropped one on their hooves or tried to toss one through what turned out to be an unbreakable window.

I tried to crane my neck down enough to see if my chest was flashing, but it was hard to do from a sitting position. It didn’t seem to be, but then, considering the recent damage to my eyes I might have been wrong.

“Haaard… Boooiled.”

The voice was like an industrial sized nail-milling machine somepony had applied to a mountain of chalkboards, reinvigorating my prior headache.

“Ahhh, is that Miss Iris Jade I hear? Or is she busy?” I inquired of the dark.

“You’re a very difficult pony to find, Hard Boiled,” the voice continued. “Former Detective of Detrot Police Department. Apparent assassin of King Cosmo, the Ace dealer. The only pony I’ve ever met that we couldn’t magically track. We’re still figuring out that trick, but make no mistake, we’ll piece it together eventually.”

I raised one eyebrow, though there wasn’t anything to raise it at.

“I'm fairly certain Jade doesn’t know about the King of Ace. At the very least, Detrot P.D. doesn’t know about that.” I murmured. “Besides... she’d put me in a holding cell. She’d want me to beg. She’d want me to know it was her from the moment I woke up.”

There was a long, awkward pause.

“This is not Chief Iris Jade, Hard Boiled. I represent a group with interests in the armor of Nightmare Moon.”

I leaned back as best I could in the chair, making myself comfortable. “Oooh, so you’re the ones behind all those murders? I was starting to wonder when we might meet.”

“What?! No! We would never-” The voice quickly recomposed itself. “...I mean, no, we’re not.” My ears pricked as a hoof crossed the boundary of the light. It was the color of the night sky, black as pitch, with flecks of grey around the fetlock. A leg followed it, then a chest. The pony stopped before its face might be revealed. “We want to know what you know about the armor, Hard Boiled. You will tell us!”

Two golden, shimmering orbs appeared, with vertical slits down the middle; it was a second before I realized they were the creature’s eyes. Its lips slid open in a vicious smile and two sharp fangs jutted down from its upper jaws, hanging over thin, rictus lips. A pair of black, willowy wings spread open on its back, covered in a thin layer of translucent skin. It hissed, a sound straight out of the subconscious, and a thin jet of mist curled from its muzzle.

It was so over-the-top that I almost choked on my own tongue, laughing somewhere between incredulity and relief. The creature frowned, which didn’t improve its looks much.

“Is something amusing, Hard Boiled? I assure you, I am deathly serious.”

“Bwaahaaahaaa! Oh, Celestia, you think that's going to scare me?!” I laughed, wishing I could pound my legs. “Sweetcakes, if I had two bits for every thing I'd seen this month that was uglier than you, I could buy Celestia's palace and a night in her bed with Luna to top it off!”

The creature narrowed one yellow eye. “We have your friend! He will die if you do not tell us!” it said, its voice rising - but there was a note of desperation there.

“I assume you mean the prig in the vest?”

“...Yes! We can destroy him! Do not test our will, Hard Boiled!”

“You know what? I could use a nap. You mind having room service leave me some clean towels?”

The being’s wings snapped shut and it sat down hard.

“You are insane,” it said, softly, still half masked by the shadows.

“Yeah, that guy will gleefully agree with you, but-”

Without warning, a door banged open and the room was flooded with light. My eyes didn’t thank me for the experience. Spots danced at the edges of my vision as I blinked quickly, trying to clear the glare.

“Hey, Night Bloom! You want your hay-fries with pickles again? Oh! Hey, he’s awake! Why didn’t you come get me?”

Standing in the doorway was a second, taller and slightly broader creature, who might have been a pony if not for the dark coloration, bat wings, and similarly golden eyes. He held a spatula in one corner of his mouth and wore a white, stained apron that said ‘Bite The Cook!’ in big black letters. He was maybe a head taller than I, with the same nasty teeth, though with an enviable jawline and strong cheekbones.

The creature I presumed to be Night Bloom was angrily rubbing her eyes. Now I got to see her in the light, telling her gender was pretty easy. She actually had a certain exotic beauty, even if her ears looked like they’d been stretched several inches longer than they should have been and her canines could have been used as letter openers.

“Dammit, Cereus! I told you, I'm interrogating the prisoner!” she snapped, trotting over and trying to push the male out of the room with one hoof on his chest.

He peered over her shoulder at me, amber eyes wide. “Interrogate?" he whined. "Can’t we just ask him this time? The interrogation thing is sooo boring! Besides, we 'interrogated' that mare earlier today, got nothing, and then all I had to do was bat my eyelashes at her and she wouldn’t shut up.”

“No! Interrogation! We do interrogation, you putz! We don’t have an interrogation room so we can ask nicely!”

“Alright, alright… no need to call names.” Cereus drooped a little, like a puppy who’d been told he couldn’t have a treat, but then brightened again. “But if he were to answer our questions, would he want some hay fries? I made extra and the other mare only had two plates and his friend is still asleep.”

Night Bloom slapped herself in the forehead so hard I winced. Turning to me, she shook her head and muttered, “...interns…” then kicked the door shut in Cereus’ face.

“Got yourself a rookie?” I asked, casually, wiggling my rear legs a little.

She stared at the space between her hooves and replied without thinking. “He still thinks a sleeper cell is a small apartment. Last night he accidentally pepper sprayed himself. I don’t know how he managed to sneak you out of that hole in the ground-” her head came up and she snapped her mouth shut. “Questions! You! You will answer them!”

“Uh...sure.” I replied. “What do you want to know?”

This was apparently the wrong answer, because Night Bloom stomped over and slapped me. Maybe slap is a strong word. Maybe patted across the cheek with intent. If it’d been a slap, I’m pretty sure it should have hurt more than that.

“The prisoner will speak when spoken to!” she barked, then… aggressively patted me again, before shaking her hoof, staring at it. Smacking an earth pony when you aren’t one is one of those little experiences most ponies don’t get to have if they’re smart. “Ouch… dammit, they make that look so much easier in the training films…”

“Night Bloom… Night Bloom’s your name?” I cocked my head, working my jaw a little.

“Yes, dammit… that moron.” She glared towards the door, then flopped her rear hooves out, sitting down hard, and putting her hooves over her face. “I should just go get another flashbang, hope it erases your memory completely if I double up on them, and start over in a few hours...”

“You know, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.” I said. “Seriously, what do you want to know?”

Night Bloom’s left wing half-unfurled and she used the tiny claw tipping the joint to scratch her fluffy eartip. “I don’t… ugh!” she groaned, plaintively. “Couldn’t you act a little intimidated?”

“I’m not good at ‘intimidated’, I’m afraid.” I would have shrugged if my tied knees hadn’t precluded that possibility. “The pony who drives for me can stop an equine heart by poking you in the right place, my partner could happily chew her way through a hydra if she was allowed to take small bites, and the guy you have tucked away in here drove a sword through a diamond dog before stapling a pony to a desk. Speaking of ponies...what exactly are you and, come to think of it what do you have tying me to this chair? It’s awfully strong.”

The bat pony sighed and dropped her chin to her chest. “Luna damned... I didn’t need this. A ‘milk run,’ she said. ‘Take a vacation,' she said. I know when I need a vacation, dammit! Eight years isn’t so long to go without time off...” she grumbled to herself, then lifted her head and replied, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you haven’t heard of my species. Dusk ponies aren’t common this far from Canterlot and we do our best to keep to ourselves.” She gestured at my legs. “You’re tied with a piece of ‘aurora.' Princess Luna makes it out of some rather pretty magnetic fluctuations in the atmosphere, then spins it into that form somehow. I never asked her exactly.”

“You know the princess?” I asked, a bit flabbergasted.

Night Bloom’s long, fuzzy ears flattened to her head. "rrrrghdammit, why am I answering questions here?! You’re the one being interrogated! We need to get the armor of Nightmare Moon out of the city and it’s stuck in that stupid magical case and the only pony who knows how to open the case is dead!”

That gave me pause. “The… armor… is stuck in its case?”

The door banged open again, and Cereus jammed his dark snout around the side. “Hey, Night Bloom? These hay fries are getting cold. Could you untie him now? Didn’t you say he was probably on our side?”

Night Bloom glowered at the young stallion over her shoulder. “I said we would find out, you half-wit!”

I shook my head. “The best I can say is I’ve been tracking the being or beings who killed Fizzle and there are several pertinent facts you need to know about what I’ve discovered, but I’m starving and I talk poorly on an empty stomach.”

Cereus looked hopeful. Night Bloom’s brows furrowed. “Rookie, I’m going to kill you one of these days.”

“Not before breakfast, though, right?”

****

“How did you spice these? They’re delicious!” I asked, wolfing down another muzzleful of the delightful hay. It was just greasy enough that, would my cardiologist not faint at the sight of the insect organ residing in my chest, he’d definitely punch me for making his job that much harder.

“Hint of nutmeg, little bit of garlic, whole bunch of cayenne pepper!” Cereus exclaimed, snatching a bottle of hot sauce from the middle of the table and upending it over his own plate, then messily burying his muzzle in the feast.

Night Bloom hadn’t let me untie my hooves, but she’d agreed to let me eat, and now sat sullenly munching on her meal beside Cereus. The little picnic in an interrogation chamber was going to end up being one of the weirder meals I’d ever eaten, but at least it was tasty.

“So, tell me. You two are… what? Royal Guard?” I asked.

The male bat pony raised his chin, proudly. “Ha! No way! Those Royal Guard guys are wimps! We’re from M6!”

His partner smacked him across the back of the head. “Does the word ‘prisoner’ mean absolutely nothing to you?!”

“Oh...right. Sorry…” Cereus rubbed the spot on his skull where she’d hit him, then smiled at me amiably. “Could you forget I said that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I’ve no idea what M6 is anyway. Some kind of special ops group?” I asked.

Night Bloom pulled a face. “Dammit...Would you just eat up so we can get back to this interrogation?”

“Ah, right.” I took another bite of my hay-fries and munched them as I contemplated the two beings in front of my chair. Cereus definitely didn’t radiate ‘secret agent,' but then, I’d never met any secret agents, so I couldn’t have said with certainty. Bloom might have, if she’d gotten everything she knew about secret agents from Con Mane movies.

“So… you work for… who?” I asked, carefully.

“Can’t shay. Nighty will shmack me again,” Cereus muttered, chewing noisily.

Night Bloom grunted at her partner, “He’s going to look up M6 in the public registrar the second he gets out of here. We only do secret things. That doesn’t mean we’re invisible.” She turned to me. “We work for Her Majesty Princess Luna. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll tell us everything we want to know or the full wrath of the night will descend upon you!”

I rubbed my muzzle against my leg, trying to scratch a sudden itch on my nose. “Bat ponies-”

“Dusk ponies, dammit! We are not bats!” Night Bloom growled, flaring her wings.

“Fine, dusk ponies, working for Princess Luna, interested in the armor of Nightmare Moon?” I canted my chin in their direction. “You know, I was wondering why the Princesses didn’t have somepony guarding the armor. You two are the one she sent to do that, aren’t you?”

The mare stopped chewing and swallowed, uncomfortably. “I guess it doesn’t matter if you know. All our indicators say you’re deranged and will end up wrapped in a strait jacket or a funeral shroud within the month.” Rising, she put one hoof on her chest, lifting her nose in the air with the proud air of somepony either full of her own authority or trying to get a ladybug to crawl up and out of her nostrils. “Princess Luna sent us to... handle... the transit of the armor. We are her trusted agents; her personal guard!” Her pointy ears fell slightly and she mumbled, guiltily, “At least… I thought I was trustworthy...”

“Right…” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

I didn't quite succeed. Night Bloom huffed and dropped her leg. “It was a damnably simple job until we got to this moon forsaken city! I was supposed to be taking down time and training him-” She waved leg at her companion. “-not chasing stupid police ponies!”

“Not working out then?”

“Oh hush! Like you’ve done any better lately!” she snapped. “You almost got caught by that psychopathic druggie who runs the police in this crazy city! If we hadn’t needed you, I’d have been inclined to let her have you!”

“I’m sorry, I’m trying to get a grip on what’s going on here,” I replied. “You don’t seem like you get much time in the field.”

Night Bloom’s lower lip quivered and she covered her face with her knee. I thought, for a moment, I was about to witness a very undignified emotional collapse, but she mastered herself after just a few sniffles. “I’m not a field agent, Mister Boiled. I’m logistics.” She stuck out her rear leg, flashing a cutie-mark that looked like a clipboard on her hip at me. “This isn’t the kind of gig I wanted, but it’s what I have. I’m stuck with this situation and I’m stuck with you, until I can get that wretched armor out of that stupid, awful box!”

I nodded, quietly, then laid my head on one foreleg and thought.

The two of them presented an interesting conundrum.

On the one hoof, they’d tied me to a chair after cold cocking me and I’d never so much as heard of a dusk pony before. On the other, his questionable intelligence aside, nopony who made hay fries that good could have an evil bone in his body, and Night Bloom, to date, hadn’t actually successfully injured anypony. She was about as good an interrogator as I was a driver and, her racial oddity aside, there were many intelligent species in Equestria; not every one of them went out of their way to get on television.

If what she’d said was to believed, they’d also apparently saved me from the wrath of Chief Iris Jade.

I decided to take another little gamble to extend my winning streak. I realize there are those that will say getting smacked around by a paranoid unicorn, beaten up by a professional hoof-boxer, attacked by school supplies, fired from my job, rendered homeless by arsonists, and eventually killed is not a winning streak. Well, I challenge them to say that with a belly full of some of the most fantastic hay-fries the world has ever seen!

Setting my shoulders, I sat up. “I… suspect we’re working towards similar ends here and since I think my options are ‘sit here and rot’ or ‘trust the two of you not to plug me the second I tell you this,' I believe I can afford to let this particular cat out of the bag.” Night Bloom pursed her lips, giving me a critical eye, and Cereus’ ears tilted in my direction. I braced myself and said, “The armor in the case in the museum isn’t the armor of Nightmare Moon.”

I wished I’d waited for them both to finish what they had in their mouths.

I cracked one eye to see two stunned faces staring back at me through a thin glaze of spittle and chewed hay fries.

“O-of course it’s in the case! We checked it earlier! I mean...we...um…” Night Bloom sputtered while Cereus apologetically wiped my face of the spray. “It’s...I mean, nopony could even get into that box! We can’t get into that box! Fizzle was one of the greatest ward smiths in Equestria! There’s just no way…”

“You know the guy in the vest you have tucked away somehere?” I nodded towards the closed interrogation room door. “He’s the son of the greatest collector of magical artifacts outside of Canterlot itself. If he says it’s fake, trust me, it’s fake. We’ve met with the pony who did the counterfeit, too, and, oh, that scum-bag with the drum on his ass down in the hole you dragged us out of? Yeah, he was the one who arranged the production and delivery of that piece.”

Stunned silence.

A bit of half-mushed hay-fry fell from Cereus' lower lip onto his hooves. Bloom’s forehooves gradually slid forward until she reached a tipping point and collapsed onto her belly. The two of them peered at one another, then back at me, then at the shut door.

“I told you we should have called our superiors…” Cereus muttered.

“I tried, dammit!” Night Bloom shouted, then leapt up and began pacing back and forth. She went on in a quieter voice, “Our line to the Royal Court is 30 years old, and half the electrical systems are burned out down here. I even tried a phone call to the back line at the Royal Guard quarters! They said Princess Luna had told them not to take my calls until my vacation is over! Then they blocked the number!”

Cereus raised one wing. “So, why don’t we fly back there and tell them in person?”

Bloom shook her head. “So the trail will be ice cold instead of just chilly by the time we get back?”

I shut my eyes, trying to remain calm. I really was getting tired of being tied up and I’ve long held that incompetence should be painful. Mixing incompetence with cruel coincidence is miles worse. “I don’t know much about ‘secret agencies’, but you couldn’t possibly have come to Detrot without some sort of back-up plan.”

“Nopony thought the armor was even a target!” Bloom protested. “It’s worthless! You couldn’t sell it.” Slowly, she lowered her eyes. “B-but the Princess...did give me a contact list in case I needed help with anything.”

“So? What are you waiting for?!” I blurted. “Go call them!”

“I...tried,” she murmured, sliding back onto her belly.

“You tried? How did you ‘try?' Did you try hitting them with flashbangs or tying them to chairs?!” I snarled, shaking my seat back and forth.

She shook her head and the edges of her golden eyes glittered with barely suppressed tears. “I’m… it’s… not like that! I swear, I’m doing everything I can here!” Rising she moved over to my chair and slid one wing-claw around, hooking it in the string around my right hoof. “If I let you up, do you promise you’re not going to do anything that’ll make me have to bite you?” Night Bloom wiped her eyes with her free wing, then hooked her teeth over her lower lip and smiled in a way I think was supposed to be disarming, but made me wish desperately for my gun.

“I… think I can restrain myself.”

She twisted her claw and, with a faint pop, the string exploded into a green misty light that quickly dissipated into the air. I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“Wait, I’m an earth pony. How did that hold me down?” I said, dumbly.

“Aurora was one of Princess Luna’s gifts to the dusk ponies for our service! We served her even before she became Nightmare Moon!” Cereus said, proudly. “It’s stronger than steel, bendier than rubber, and you can cut it just by thinking about it!” He amended after a moment’s thought, “Well, we can.”

Hopping off the chair, I shook myself from nose to tailtip. “Nice. You mind if I ask, how long I was out?”

Cereus scratched his head. “Well, lemme see… I found your cab after the bug came back on about-”

My ears perked and I took a step forward. “Wait...bug? What bug?! You bugged me?! When?!”

The intern rubbed his snout with one toe. “We didn’t. We just used the bug somepony else placed. We’ve got the pony who bugged you in another room here, if you want to see her.”

“Which her?” I narrowed my eyes at him and he shifted nervously.

Night Bloom waved one leg. “Cereus, just tell him about how you got him out of there. Reunions can wait.”

“Oh! Right… um… the bug came back on and your cab showed up on our radar, so I went to see if I could snag you,” he said, gesticulating the act of catching a fish on a hook, “I was watching from the rooftops across the street and saw your yellow friend coming out of what our intelligence records said was some kind of club, with another filly. They got in that weird cab and left, but nopony else was with them and we’ve been watching you for days, where we could.”

“Where you could?” I asked.

“We… uh… those ponies in the Skids are scary,” Cereus stammered. “We saw you on television, though, and the guard said he’d seen you there too. When we acquired him, he told us you were asking about things and had tried to get into Fizzle’s office. We...thought maybe you killed Fizzle, at first, but our logistical report-“ Night Bloom smiled at that. “-said your… er… 'pattern of behavior was more consistent with investigation.' It was really hard tracing back your behavior over a whole week, but you weren’t exactly stealthy.” He paused, then clapped his hooves together. “Where was I? Oh, right! Yeah, anyway, I heard over the police radio that your partner, Officer Swift, had called an ambulance from the phone box up the street-”

“She what?!” I bellowed and Cereus shrank back against Night Bloom’s side.

“S-she called the police… from up the street?” he repeatedly, cautiously. “She said there we-were injuries in.. inside the club on the lowest level and to, uh… come quick.”

I put one hoof to my forehead. “Swift… called an ambulance using the standard police communication protocols. Sweet mercy, I deserved to be caught. Right, go on…”

“T-the chief of police was really angry when she got on the radio and said the pony who brought you in would get an... immediate promotion.” He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself as he continued. “They dispatched a dozen cars, plus fliers from the nearest precinct. I snuck in immediately to get you out. The police were coming, so I flash-banged that little office, then put both of you in garbage bags and dr-dragged you into one of the side rooms. They ignored me and went s-straight for that office! I saw them dragging this pony with a bloody ear out. I went passed them, and pretended to be taking out the garbage for the club. The officers at the door just ignored me...” Cereus giggled, which was a very odd noise that reminded me of a whoopie cushion being punctured. “What did you do that got the chief of police so angry, Detective?”

“She just doesn’t find my natural charm all that appealing, I’m afraid,” I said, trotting in a slow circle, unkinking all four legs. Coming back around, I dropped to my heels in front of the two secret agents. “Whew...that’s better. Alright, I think we might be able to work together, and I can probably fill in a few holes in your investigation, if you don’t mind filling in some for me.”

“Who said that was an option?” Night Bloom growled. “We don’t need-”

“Nighty-” Cereus interrupted with a quiet tone of warning. “-we haven’t got hardly anything. Our superiors won’t listen to me either, and unless one of the Princesses themselves come open the box, we’re stuck. Even if we tell them Fizzle died, they’ll want to know how and why. Do you want to explain to Princess Luna that the armor was stolen and we didn’t even notice?”

A look of apprehensive horror crossed her face. “I...um...geesh. I know Princess Celestia doesn’t banish ponies anymore, but Princess Luna…”

“Is less tolerant of failure?” I offered.

“-will dump both of us in a deep hole in the farthest post she can find from her, filing paperwork until we’re old and grey. Grey is just not my color.” Night Bloom glanced at my pelt and her cheeks noticeably reddened. “No offense.”

“If I were going to take offense, I think it would have been when you stripped me naked and tied me up,” I grumbled, reaching down and zipping my chest pouch shut. “Either way, doesn’t matter. We have a job to do and I need to get in touch with my people. Where’s Limerence and my gun?”

Cereus’ nose wrinkled. “I had to put your coat through the laundry. The trash-bag I put you in kinda...smelled funny. I hope you didn’t have anything valuable in the pockets…”

“Don’t worry about it. The pockets are magical. What about my gun?” I asked.

“Your weapon is in one of our lockers, along with… all those knives that other stallion was carrying. What sort of pony is he? He had one hidden in his tail!”

“I’m sure it’s a thing you hear in the intelligence gathering profession on a regular basis, but you’ll be happier not knowing,” I answered. Moving to the interrogation room’s door, I pulled it open and stepped out into a land of wonders.

****

Detrot's state of advanced decay makes it an epicenter for the keeping of secrets. If a pony wants to hide something, there are few better places to do it than in the body of a city clinging to life by bare, bloody hooves. Who, after all, wants to search a stinking, disease-ridden husk when there are so many easier places one can live, where the most dangerous truths are easy to ferret out because, if we’re all very honest with ourselves, they’re not terribly dangerous?

This ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach lets the monsters fester in their caves, but now and then, gives rise to brilliant works whose creative spark could only be lit in the darkest places.

****

“What the… hay…?”

All four of my knees threatened to fail at once, so I put one leg on the wall beside the interrogation room, shutting my eyes until the mix of vertigo and mental overexertion relaxed and I was in control again. Then I opened my eyes and had to stand there for several more seconds, just trying to take it all in.

Cereus stepped up beside me, with Night Bloom moving on the other. The stallion sat and clapped his hooves twice. A low buzz spread out from us on all sides and lights began to sputter in the distance.

“Welcome to M6’s basement, garage, closet, and laboratory,” Night Bloom remarked, spreading her forelegs to encompass the space I’d found myself in. “Pardon the mess. I doubt anypony has been in here in the last fifteen years besides us.”

As more lights gave the area dimension, I, without thinking, reached down to stroke my gun only to remember it wasn’t there.

Vastness. I’d never felt such a vast space indoors. The fact that it was inside a building made it all the more unsettling and worse, every inch seemed to be filled with shapes and geometries that threatened to boggle the senses. Even the Archivists' home didn't seem to be quite so impossibly big.

Row after row of shelving units stretched from about twenty meters away to dozens of meters in the air. A low wind cycled through the space, ruffling my mane as I took a few tentative steps forward. Each shelf had a label and some arcane object sitting on it, each one covered in thick layers of dust. The room seemed to be some kind of corrugated metal, interspersed with bare rock, and ragged tarps stretched over gaping holes.

“What is all this...junk?” I asked, very quietly, picking up what appeared to be a cube with nine squares on each side in various colors in my forehooves and turning it over.

Night Bloom replied over my shoulder with a touch of resignation. “I doubt anypony alive could tell you. It would be the job of years to collate all of it. I’d be proud to try, but now I don’t imagine I’ll be employed long enough for that to be an option. Damn.”

Cereus sneezed loudly, wiping his nose on his fetlock. “Oh come on Nighty. We kidnapped him. We can at least be nice,” he said, then answered my question himself. “It’s a storage area... I guess I should say the storage area... for everything M6 developed as part of the war effort. We were really big during the Crusades-”

“You’re not on our roster yet, rookie. You don’t get to be ‘we’ until you’ve got a badge.” Bloom reminded him, cooly.

“Oh fine, be that way,” Cereus grumped, then went on. “Anyway, M6 was super big during the Crusades, but they were really secret, too.” He made a pouty face at Night Bloom as he emphasized the word ‘they’ and she snorted derisively in return.

“M6 were in charge of developing most of the weapons used against the dragons. That and making sure those sorts of threats never happened to Equestria again. In the end, it was Princess Luna who stopped the war, though,” the mare added, with a tinge of sadness. “We’ve ended up little more than a footnote. Ninety five percent of this stuff doesn’t work or has ‘unintended’ side effects.”

I set the cube back on the shelf and moved on, passed what appeared to be a broken toilet with steam pipes coming out of the back, a shelf with another shelf sitting on it labeled ‘Shelf-in-a-shelf’, and something called a ‘Celebration-Cannon Mark V’ that reminded me alarmingly of Taxi’s P.E.A.C.E. Cannon if it’d been designed for destroying small buildings.

“Why an old warehouse?” I asked. “It's big, but the place seems a bit... dated, really, for a secret hideout of an international spy agency. Speaking of that, where precisely are we?”

“It wouldn’t help much to tell you precisely where we are because, technically, we’re nowhere.” Night Bloom barked a sharp, short laugh. “Much like my career!”

Cereus rolled his eyes at his partner’s dramatics and answered for her, “We’re outside the city, somewhere beyond the Shield, in the Wilderness ranges...um...somewhere. The building doesn’t show up on any maps we could find except the ones in here.”

“So how did you find this?” I exclaimed, “I mean, it’s a pit, but what a pit!”

The female dusk pony trotted over to the shelf I’d been studying, which had a box of nails and a cheese grater on it with the label ‘Really Dangerous, do not affix cheese grater to wall with nails.' Strange as it sounds, I had a momentary urge to find a hammer. Perhaps it was fortunate for all of Equestria that before I could act on that impulse, Night Bloom replied, “I work logistics for M6’s Canterlot division, but since the war ended and most ponies came home from the dragon lands, there’s little call for a national intelligence gathering network. I… thought M6 had at least a few trusted agents in every major city in Equestria, but we’re not what we used to be. I tried to get in touch with the contacts on the list the Night Princess gave me when we left, and half of them are dead of old age!”

“One of the living ones pointed you here?” I asked and she nodded.

“Yes!” She waved her hooves at the far off ceiling. “The rest were pensioners or useless! The only one who would talk to me interrupted the call to go have his colostomy bag emptied. While we were watching you, I had to resort to having the doofus follow that insane cab around...”

“You have any idea how hard it is to follow around one cab? Especially one that fast?” Cereus stuck his lower lip out at Night Bloom. “I deserve a little credit here.”

“You want credit, rookie?!” she snapped and gave him a poke in the chest. “You go unlock that armor case so we can at least find out if the Detective is telling the truth or find me something in this landfill that can!”

Cereus cringed at the harsh reminder and slunk off amongst the shelves, his tail tucked between his legs. Night Bloom watched him go. Once he was out of sight, she slumped. “Damn that colt…”

“Why so hard on him?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve got my own bundle of joy who regularly makes my life interesting, but he’s trying like mad.”

“He’s trying, but I don’t have time for him to ‘try’,” she replied, disconsolately. “The police situation is worse here than I imagined it could be in Equestria. I considered trying to get Chief Jade involved, but after watching our feeds inside the Castle for a few days I decided against it. When I return, I will be discussing with the Princess a full audit of this police department. As it is, we’re on our own and I have to rely on him. Even that bunch you call the PACT are out of their minds.” She threw her hooves in the air. “How does anything get done in this city?”

“Wait...say that again? You can spy on the inside of the Castle?” I sat forward.

Night Bloom turned on her rear heels and trotted along the wall. I followed along behind her. There were a number of other doors next to the one with my interrogation room, only one or two of which was open. I peered in and saw two bunks laid side by side, while another had a small kitchen which somepony must have gone over with a dust mop because most of the surfaces were clean.

As we walked, Night Bloom replied, “There’s a network throughout the city that’s got spy talismans in just about every building in Detrot that’s over twenty five years old. I don’t know if M6 built it or somepony else during the war. We could use the camera feeds to track your movements, though the rest of the system was downright useless. The sound systems are fried and the picture is crap, but it works.”

“I don’t think you mentioned why you started tracking my movements in the first place…” I prompted.

The mare stopped at a door we were coming up to and opened it, holding it for me. The face-plate said ‘Holding and Survey Room.' I peered through into what appeared to be a row of cell blocks lining either wall.

“Am I going back in a cell?” I asked, worriedly.

“No, dammit! You want an answer or not? I hate explaining every little thing. I’d rather just show you. Besides, your clothes are in here. You want those, right?”

“Right. Answers. Good. Pardon if my brain is still not working at full capacity, but that flash-bang fried the last few good neurons I had left.”

Stepping in, I reached over to the wall beside the door and flicked a switch. More cheap electric lights came on up and down the hall, buzzing softly. I picked out the sounds of at least two ponies snoring, plus pacing hooves.

“We got a lot of information from picking up ponies you’ve met,” Night Bloom explained. “I don’t really know what to do with them at this point, though. Letting them go before this is over is an invitation to get that mad-pony running the police involved and I’d rather not do that.”

“You mentioned you had the pony who bugged me?”

“Yeeeah… she’s a right piece of work,” the dusk pony growled. “Fifth cell on your left and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t stand too close to the bars.” Night Bloom rubbed one of her knees as though it was sore. “She bites.”

I trotted down the row of cells, looking into the ones on both sides. Most were empty, but in one, I saw a hefty shape half draped in a blanket who was making a noise like a boat engine. A tiny security cap lay at the foot of the bed.

“Is that…?”

“The guard from the Museum,” Night Bloom confirmed. “Yeah, that’s him. Told us you’d been there and pointed us to Fizzle’s office. He’s been playing that stupid card game with Cereus day in, day out, and he’s eating us out of house and home. Getting into Fizzle’s office was a trip, let me say. I’m still not sleeping properly after that...”

I moved on, feeling vaguely like I was moving through some kind of weird museum. In another cell there was a pony I didn’t recognize. He, too, was asleep and his foreknees were shackled to the bed. He was enormous, big enough that the sheet didn’t cover him entirely.

“What’s his story?” I asked.

“Worked for Cosmo. Red Shoe or Heel or whatever they call themselves,” Night Bloom told me, waving at the shackles. “We had the dickens of a time finding somepony who’d seen what happened that night, but he was in a bar those sickos congregate. We just happened to be there at the same time hunting for a professional ward-breaker as he was looking for work. He was drunk and bragging that he’d helped dump the King of Ace’s corpse after you killed him.”

I nosed in the enforcer’s direction. “Why is he shackled to the bed?”

“Why do you think?” she asked, sharply. “He was bragging about gutting a stallion just for looking at him funny, among other things. We had a magical music box with a binding spell attached to it that quieted him down real good, but would you take chances with somepony like that?”

“No, I wouldn’t.” I had another thought. “How’d you get him to talk?”

“That was Cereus’ idea.” Night Bloom laughed. “He gave that beast a bottle of vodka fortified with truth syrum. He’s been sleeping it off for the last day and a half. Turned out he hardly knew anything that might have been of use to us. Now we’re stuck feeding him.”

“Maybe you should find some method of interrogation that doesn’t involve kidnapping ponies beforehand?”

Before she could reply, a hoof banged on iron bars further down the hall and a familiar voice called out, “Hey! Hey, is that Hard Boiled? You bastard, get me out of this cell or I swear, I will publish everything you do for the rest of your life!”

My ears twitched, then I quickly counted the cells down from one side until I got to the one I was reasonably sure the voice had come from. “Wait...she’s the one who bugged me?!”

Without waiting for an answer, I cantered down the hall, skidding to a stop in front of the fifth cell on the left wall.

Inside, leaning against the bars, a very irritated news pony stood there glaring at me.

“Lace?!” I burst out.

Sugar Lace still wore the little black cocktail dress she’d had on the last time I saw her at The Castle and her mane was disheveled, like she’d slept on it. A restrictor ring was fitted snugly down around her horn and duct taped in place. She looked like a wreck, but time in a holding cell had apparently not dulled her fiery temper.

“Hard Boiled! I thought that was you! Are you in cahoots with these kidnappers?! I knew you were rotten, but I never thought you’d stoop to this just to silence me!”

Night Bloom approached and sat, staring in at her prisoner. “We snatched this one right after the police ball. We’d planned to get you, but your little escape out the back door caught us off guard.”

The reporter let out a frustrated snarl and turned her back on the dusk pony, marching back to the cot and throwing herself down on it, facing the wall.

“So, a little unicorn magic? What did you put the bug in? My tail fur, maybe? The bow-tie?” I growled at Sugar Lace’s flank.

“Wouldn’t you like to know!” she bit back, yanking her ragged, dusty blanket over herself.

“She put it in the tux’s jacket pocket,” Night Bloom said, smugly. “Cereus didn’t even have to interrogate her. She laid eyes on him and almost drenched her tail. A couple of glasses of wine and some quiet music and she was spilling her beans worse than an over-filled crock pot.”

“I did not!” Lace replied, snappily. “He’s just… a very attractive… um… bat… thing…”

“Dusk pony, dammit! Dusk pony! Why is that hard?!” Night Bloom snapped, banging one hoof on the bars. Taking a deep breath, she calmed herself and turned to me, “We’ve had the worst time you can imagine out here. I realize Canterlot is a long way from here, but how have you ponies let this city fall so far?”

That bowed my back up a little bit. “Now just a damn minute! We don’t happen to have multiple immortal beings sitting within train trip distance to tell us precisely how to fix these situations, day to day. Detrot’s economy is shot and we’ve got hydras, dragons, cockatrices, and every monster you can imagine on our doorsteps. These aren’t the friendly brand you can drive off with harsh language and a meaningful stare!”

Night Bloom’s face contorted with anger as she rose up on her hooftips, pressing her nose against mine. “You think it’s easy in the capitol?! We're haunch-deep in politics and intrigue! Yes, the Princesses help, but that does not excuse you letting this entire city become a festering hole!”

“Then you tell me what you would have done!” I shouted, my fury growing with each word. I pushed her back against the bars of Sugar Lace’s cage with one hoof. “Go on! What would you have done?! The dragons burned every outlying village to the ground and every refugee ended up here! Then you bastards in the capitol come up with new sources for gems and glut the damn market! What were we supposed to do exactly?!”

I was breathing hard. In my rage, I’d shoved one hoof to Bloom’s throat and her teeth were poised a quarter inch above my knee, close enough to sink right in. A drip of something green had gathered at the tips of both of her teeth, though it didn’t look like saliva. Slowly, I released her and stepped back.

“...sorry…” I muttered.

Night Bloom wiped her fangs on her toe. “Yeah… yeah, me too. I’ve… just been under more stress than I think a sane pony should. Half the last week has been looking for a decent moment we could at least talk to you.” Her ears drooped. “I… maybe Luna was right. I need a vacation...”

We stood there for a few seconds as I tried to control my breathing and Night Bloom sucked the liquid off her teeth, politely spitting it into a kerchief withdrawn from a small pouch she kept hidden under one wing. It began to lightly smoke.

It’d been a while since I properly lost my temper at somepony and now that I had, I couldn’t quite figure out why, especially when I knew her horror at the condition of my city wasn't fundamentally unwarranted.

Maybe because she reminded me just a bit too closely of myself just over a month ago. I remembered having that conversation about vacations with Taxi on the day the whole mess began. If I’d gone with her mad little suggestion, might I have lived? Would I still be drinking myself to death on the weekends and dragging myself from case to case like a zombie until Jade found a proper excuse to toss me behind a desk to wither into old age without grace or dignity? The uncomfortable answer was ‘Yeah, probably.'

Stella said it best. Until a pony is prepared to take both his own life and the lives of others in his hooves, determined to make a difference, he is not truly alive. He is a pawn in a very large and complex game; a cog, moving to the meter of a mechanism he cannot possibly hope to understand.

Lace interrupted my introspection. “Why don’t you two kiss already?” she chimed in, with a big grin.

“Unless you want your dinner to come with a hot glass of my venom tonight, Missy, you keep your comments to yourself!” the dusk pony shot back, turning down the hall towards the security room at the other end. “Come on, let’s go get your gun.” I realized she was talking to me and hurried up beside her, leaving Sugar Lace to stew in her cage.

“Back in the interrogation room, you mentioned you were having trouble tracking me with magical means?” I asked. “You mind elaborating on that? You’re not the first pony to say something similar to me lately.”

Night Bloom stopped in her tracks. “Wait, no… that’s… Are you saying you don’t know how you’re doing that?!” she blurted.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I’ve got no idea. I had somepony try to use something called a ‘Scry’ on me a few weeks ago, and I’m sure Jade has tried. She’s got enough information that she could probably use an enchanted tracker, given enough time and incentive... and I’m pretty sure I gave her that. So, you’re going to have to be real specific here.”

Night Bloom’s muzzle dropped open, and for several seconds she couldn’t seem to find words. When she did, finally, it was only the one.

“...damn…”

Drawing in a breath, she spread her thin, clawed wings and rolled her neck in circles a few times before turning back to the door at the other end of the hall. “Best way is to demonstrate, I guess.”

A keypad beside the door featured ten tiny jewels. She pressed a pattern that I couldn’t have remembered if I’d had a week to memorize it, and the door made a sound of rusted bolts being drawn back before swinging inward on a heavy duty hinge the size of my head.

The room reminded me more typically of a room from movies about the Crusades where generals made their plans, than a dingy security office like the one in the Vivarium or the Museum. The hallway must have been ‘Holding’, but I wondered what precisely ‘Survey’ meant.

In the room’s center, a monstrous map the size of two Night Trotters parked up side by side dominated a table you could play street hockey on. It seemed to be a reasonably accurate representation of Detrot, though there were a few things missing here and there. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said it was out-dated by a good ten years. Behind it, on a wall that stretched nearly ten meters, there was a second map of the M6 warehouse. There was a single glowing dot in one far corner.

Both walls, on either side of the maps, were covered from floor to ceiling in filing cabinets. A broken ladder lay against one of them which might, once, have reached those at the top. As it was, the only way to access those top files was probably a pair of wings or unicorn magic.

“Welcome to Survey.” Night Bloom moved over to the enormous map of Detrot and set her hooves up on the table. “In here, we have access to every relevant piece of data regarding Detrot.” She blew a thick cloud of dust off one of the little buildings and sighed, “At least, we should. That was the theory when this unit was in use. From what I can tell, M6 tried to bury this place after the Kelpie scandal. I guess a whole building worth of useless prototypes couldn’t do much for a bureau facing massive budget cuts.”

“Not completely useless,” I murmured. “That flashbang was from here, right? Say, if you’ve got any more-”

Night Bloom’s nostrils flared. “Sure, I’d give agency weaponry to a rogue cop. Do I look drunk?!” Her expression soured further as she added, “besides, all we’ve got is about ten percent of what the armory log says we should down in the basement. Most of the weapons -- the real weapons -- are...gone.”

“One of the former custodians?” I asked.

“Who else? They had the good grace to leave about four hundred IOUs, so at least when I report this debacle I can total up all the reasons we should have left this city to the damn dragons. But I didn’t bring you in here to give you a run down of my accounting problems.” She raised one hoof and pointed at the map on the wall with the glowing dot. “No, I want you to explain that.”

I examined the map of the warehouse for several seconds. The little light moved down the aisle it was occupying, then slowly faded, before reappearing as it returned to its former position.

“What… exactly am I looking at, here?”

“That light is Cereus,” she said and pointed to the bottom of the map at a particular room which was marked ‘Survey.' “We’re here. Now, until we dragged your sorry tail in here, there were five lights. Me, the guard, Cereus, the reporter cunt, and that security moron. Five lights. Hear me? This map keeps track of every living thing that enters this moon-abandoned crater, and you’re not on it. Neither am I, nor anypony within...I don’t even know how far. It seems to fluctuate, but it’s a damn big distance of you.”

Stepping back, she pushed her muzzle against my face. “Now, I want you to tell me precisely how you have managed to become invisible to the most advanced magical tracking system the most advanced arcane wartime technological development agency in the world could come up with!”

Act 2, Chapter 32: For The Good Of All Of Us, Except The Ones Who Are Dead

Act 2, Chapter 32: For The Good Of All Of Us, Except The Ones Who Are Dead

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 32: For The Good Of All Of Us, Except The Ones Who Are Dead

Many academic texts have explored the great threat Equestria might present to the rest of the world, should they ever entertain imperialist ambitions. Among the reasons ponykind has survived the land in which it evolved is that pony foals are incredibly dangerous.

This is no humorous exaggeration. The developing magical channels within the hooves, wings, or horns of foals are subject to very poor modulation, often leading to wild and barely directed spurts of power. Earth ponies can destroy hard structures; pegasi can propel absurd-seeming amounts of material, and unicorns are walking conduits of uncontrolled magic. Dragons attempting to harm or kidnap pony foals during the war soon found themselves given shattered legs, bowled into the sky, or having their digestive tracts magically reversed.

While magical outbursts become rarer as the pony grows into a colt or filly, the hunt for the Cutie Mark begins, and they replace undirected damage with acts of what can only be described as calculated randomness, aimed at hoping to stumble upon their destinies. The damage this can do can be alluded to in a joke told among pony parents: "My kid's cutie mark is gonna be a picture of Equestria with a mushroom cloud on it." The number of times this very occurrence has narrowly been avoided is probably greater than anyone would like to contemplate.

That said, perhaps the greatest danger presented by pony offspring lies in the parents themselves. Those who threaten the children of ponies will find an enemy far more frightening than any dragon, griffin, or beast conjured from the darkness. There is no length most equine parents will not go to to protect their foals.

May Celestia help you if the parent in question is of a vengeful mindset. Suicide may be a less frightening option, and even then, it has not always been a successful means of escaping one's comeuppance.

-The Scholar

If Swift had weighed just thirty pounds more, I’d have broken a few ribs from her wild, headlong charge. As it was, I still crashed over onto my back. My breath rushed out all in one great gasp.

If she’d weighed even fifteen pounds more, I wouldn’t have had time to wrap my forelegs around her, force her head down, and get a good mouthful of her mane before she could use me as springboard to launch herself at Tourniquet.

The smell of bloody hatred surrounded her like a thick fog, stronger even than the scent of decaying dragon which still filled the air despite the best efforts of the ventilation system. She fought me, writhing in my forelegs, snapping at my neck loud enough that I could feel her jaw popping with each bite of air. I ducked and wove back and forth, trying to keep her from chewing my collar bones off with her needle-like canines.

She struggled against my grasp, trying to get enough distance between us for a solid kick, but earth pony strength trumps a pegasus, every time. Even her mighty wings couldn’t get leverage to smack me away. Still, it was no picnic holding off a berzerk filly with well-trained muscles. I held her mane until my jaw hurt and my lungs burned for air.

Nopony can really tell you what ground fighting is like, particularly one on one, until you’ve experienced it. Even the finest martial artists who can to jump around and throw kicks that would bring down a minotaur will go down fast to somepony who knows how to pin an opponent properly. Thankfully, earth pony police combat training is largely equi-jitsu. The governing philosophy is: Fight in close, bring the opponent to the ground, and disable them if you can.

More than a couple of her strikes hit home and my nose was really starting to get resentful.

Still, I held her, fighting for position until I could wrap my rear legs around her middle and lock my back knees together. At that point, it was just a matter of applying pressure. I waited for her to exhale, then squeezed good and hard. Her ribs wouldn’t thank me in the morning, but it was a damn sight better than breaking anything. She gasped, and the scent of blood lust quickly faded, then returned, then faded again as she struggled to breathe.

In a detached, calm way, I felt guilty. Not angry. I thought I should feel angry, but I just couldn’t find it in me. I was calm, and underneath there was the guilt. Funny thing, after a month, to feel guilty for hurting somepony who was trying to rip you apart, however ineffectually.

Strange as it sounded, I had a minute to consider things, and in combat there are moments when your mind is running very quickly, but you’ve nothing in particular to occupy it. Frequently, you hear ponies talk about the ‘heat of battle’ and how you don’t have time to think. It’s not true. You have plenty of time. What I was thinking, just then, was that this attack felt different. Less aggressive. She was struggling, but it was like part of her was fighting back.

I felt a touch on my foreleg, and rolled one eye up, expecting to see Taxi hovering over me. Instead, I saw gleaming eyes.

I still had a muzzle full of Swift’s brilliantly red mane and I damn near choked on it. Swift couldn’t see the filly standing over us, and for that, I’m thankful. She was just as scary up close as she was at a distance; frightening, beautiful, and unearthly. Within her eyes, tiny cogs seemed to shift back and forth. Her expression was sympathetic, wary, and curious all in one.

I caught movement out of my eye and tried to twist so I could see what else was going on. Swift let out a tiny squeak as I tugged her mane, but I felt the information was probably essential.

Taxi had the P.E.A.C.E. cannon leveled at the girl as she stood over us. I didn’t get to see what she’d loaded that beast with, but I’m fairly certain it was something you wouldn’t want to get hit with at close range. Without the drum, she’d only get one shot, but ‘non-lethal’ only means ‘non-lethal within accepted parameters of use’. A spork can be lethal if you put an edge on it or fling it at someone close to the speed of sound.

I took a chance and released my partner’s hair. She wiggled a little, but her breathing was becoming labored as I kept the pressure up. The scent of fury had disappeared almost entirely, though I’d no doubt it could probably return if I freed her.

“What’s wrong with her?” Tourniquet asked, softly. Her voice had the strangest tonal quality. It was like hearing her down a telephone. As she spoke, my partner renewed her struggles, but even muscles powered by a dose of magically programmed adrenaline need air to work and I was pretty sure she’d be unconscious in a minute or so.

“Move and I will scrap you, you hear me?” Taxi growled.

For some reason, Tourniquet wasn’t giving me any vibes of being especially dangerous. My cutie-mark was so far beyond pain in this place that it’d simply gone numb, but whatever intuitive processes it worked off of didn’t seem to have any objection to the odd creature.

“It’s alright, Sweets. At least, I think it is.”

“Hardy, this thing is an Essy. We both know it-”

“I’m not a thing!” Tourniquet butted in, petulantly.

Before the two of them could get into a heated existential argument that might or might not involve gunfire, I snapped, “Taxi, drop the gun, dammit!”

Taxi gave me a defiant glare, then looked at Tourniquet closely, taking in the construction of her face and neck. The filly made no move to turn away or back off, but nor was she being especially aggressive. She did look a little insulted at being called a ‘thing’, though.

The barrel of the cannon wavered, then my driver let it fall and dropped back onto all fours.

I patted Swift’s head, which was now just laying on my chest as she fought for her next breath. My calves hurt from applying constant pressure, but I held on. Her eyes were fluttering. I could feel her lashes against my pelt. “She’s got a… condition… where creatures of living magic are concerned. No help for it, really. I’d hoped we’d managed to get this out of her system when we stripped the nasty magics out of her. Somepony did this to her and… well, we haven’t been able to figure out who.”

I found myself talking to Tourniquet like a child, though considering just how severe the alterations to her body were, getting a fix on her actual age was probably impossible.

Tourniquet’s lips tugged down into a sad little frown. “That’s awful.” Those piercing, crystalline eyes danced in the sharp, white light from above. The filly glanced at Taxi, then back at my partner. “Can I...can I help her?”

I shook my head. “I doubt it, honey. They did something to her brain that makes her crazy-”

The girl blew an impatient breath through her nose. “Just say I can help her, okay? I can’t unless you say I can.”

Swift’s eyes were closed at last, so I released my back legs and gave her a firm push, flopping her onto her back. I quickly checked her pulse, which was steady, then listened to her breath. She inhaled, slowly, but she was definitely out cold.

“Dammit, kid…” I sighed and looked up at Tourniquet. “I don't need to explain the horrible violence that’s probably going to ensue if you hurt my partner, right?”

The metal filly took a couple of steps back. “If you don’t want me to try, you can just say so…”

I brushed Swift’s mane out of her face. She curled up a little, looking for all the world like a sleeping angel with her wings sprawled out against the floor. Breath locks will only put a pony down for a minute or so and I didn’t fancy another brawl.

Something tickled my upper lip and I reached up, wiping at it. My hooftip came away bloody.

Rolling to my hooves, I slid my leg under Swift’s neck, lifting her up. “You think you can help my partner, you’ll have my word we won’t hurt you.”

Tourniquet let her head sink to one side. “You already promised that.”

I rolled my neck on my shoulders, trying to loosen the kinks out of it. “Yeah, well, make it a double. I’ve got some questions, but if my partner’s waking up and trying to eat you every five minutes, that’s going to be really tiring.”

“Questions? I don’t like questions! But... I guess I have to. I mean, it’s not like somepony is just going to ask me questions normally. I wish I had more visitors, but there’s just me and sometimes I talk to myself, so I don’t know what I’d do if somepony did want to ask me...oh-” She cut herself off mid-ramble. “Sorry, it’s...it’s just been so long since I saw somepony besides that… that awful…” Her jaw clenched again. “Sorry.”

“If you’ve got some magic that can stop Swift trying to chew the heads off of every magical sentience we encounter, I’m open to negotiation on just what questions get asked,” I murmured as my partner coughed and her eyelids began to flutter.

“I… I don’t know about everypony magical, but… I can make her calm right now.”

Reaching out her metal leg, Tourniquet laid it across my partner’s forehead. Swift jerked and her tongue fell out of one side of her muzzle as she began to suddenly pant violently, her eyes shooting open. They met the tender, compassionate face of the being touching her and loathing twisted her features, but she didn’t move. A red jewel in the shape of a crescent moon lit up near the mechanical knee. It began to glow from within.

Thick streamers of light pulsed down the wires connecting Tourniquet to whatever was up there above us. She inhaled, seeming to draw it in. Those crystals in her eyes ignited with an inner luminance that set my intestines crawling.

Swift’s shoulders tensed and her wings slapped the floor just once, then she went limp as the rage drained out of her expression. Her eyes lidded and she drew in a deep breath, then sat up.

“Ooof… Sir, what happened?” she asked, feeling around her aching sides.

“As it turns out, our friends at the Vivarium didn’t quite manage to fix your brain,” I replied.

“Fix my…” she turned abruptly and stared at Tourniquet. Her rear legs seemed to fire, throwing her backwards as her wings opened and batted me in the face. She rolled, ass over tea-kettle, into a heap against Taxi’s forelegs. I tensed, ready to tackle her, but her scent didn’t change.

“Um… hi,” Tourniquet whispered, her fiber-optic mane spilling down across one side of her face.

“Swift, may I introduce… Tourniquet,” I said, cordially sweeping one hoof in the direction of the machine pony. “I’ve no idea what she is, where she came from, who she’s working for, or if she means to suffocate all of us alive, but I’m rather hoping she’ll answer a few of those questions, post haste.”

I became gradually aware of somepony standing over my shoulder and looked up to find Limerence staring at Tourniquet with undisguised curiosity. His gaze seemed downright hungry as he traced the wires leading out of her back, then the ones running through her exposed ribcage where part of her fur hung loose.

“Uh… c-could you make your friend stop looking at me like that?” she asked.

If you can believe it, the librarian looked slightly embarrassed and quickly dropped his eyes. His horn glowed and he levitated his glasses off of my nose and back onto his own. They’d somehow managed to survive the tackle and subsequent pummeling by Swift. “Excuse me, miss. Professional interest. I’ve never met a creature quite like you.”

“Ugh, I’m not a creature! Or a thing! I’m a pony, just like you!” Tourniquet insisted.

“I somehow doubt the term ‘just like you’ has ever been more inaccurately applied. You are rather lovely, however, so I will excuse it,” Limerence smiled, trotting toward the girl. Tourniquet backed away a little at the unexpected intrusion of her personal space, but as the stallion simply moved around her in a circle, she didn’t flee into the darkness.

“Lovely?” she asked, sounding like she wasn’t certain she’d heard him correctly. If the underlying nerves in her cheeks still worked, I got the feeling they’d have been bright red.

“Quite. I do appreciate good technology. What, may I ask, did you do to our flying compatriot to cool her dangerous temperament?” Limerence asked, indicating Swift who was still laying on her back, eyes wide.

“Oh… um… Mom wanted me to be able to defend myself in case somepony ever broke in here. She made me able to make ponies calm; I can take away somepony’s anger, if they’re touching my moon.” Lifting her metal leg, she turned the hoof over and revealed the emblem we’d been seeing all day on her toe.

Limerence nodded, contemplatively. “Most... intriguing. If I may ask... who is your mother?”

Tourniquet’s face split into a broad smile. I couldn’t help but note that even a few of her teeth appeared to be some form of metal. “My mom is the boss here!”

“Skylark?” Taxi asked, worriedly.

“What? No! That Skylark pony is awful! Mommy is beautiful! Mommy Saucy!”

I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach and the blood rush into my ears. Swift’s face reflected the shock I’m pretty sure was all over mine.

“Errr… Mommy… Saucy? Your mother’s name is Saussurea?” my partner asked, very quietly.

Tourniquet nodded. “You know her!” she exclaimed, and sparks burst from one of the wires half-way up the left side of her body. She winced and clutched at the connection, but it did nothing to dull her excitement. “I haven’t met anypony who knew her in so long! Nopony I can see on my monitors even talks about her except that nasty Skylark pony and she makes me do things or she says she’ll hurt Mommy and she broke my sensors and I’m not working right! Can you please get my mommy? She knows how to fix me-”

I cut off the girl’s burst of words with a hoof in the air.

“Alright, honey, I think we...I think we may just need some answers.” I looked around the tiny nursery, then reached out and grabbed the rocking chair, dragging it over so I could sit beside Swift, who still hadn’t moved from her spot on the floor. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from Tourniquet, but then, who could blame her?

“My name is Detective Hard Boiled. I came in here to try to find somepony. She’s that girl you have upstairs in one of your cells doing a good impression of a zombie.”

“Oh! Miss Cerise! Yeah, she’s… I… I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do… about… about that…” Tourniquet trailed off.

“You don’t sound like you’re a fan of that ‘Skylark mare,’” I said.

Tourniquet shook her head. “She’s...she’s mean. She woke me up, but she’s...she broke everything! I...I woke up and then she tells me Mommy sent her and I have to do everything she says. I didn’t believe her, but...but she showed me pictures of mommy somewhere in a cabin and said if I didn’t do what she said, she’d have her friends hurt her. Mommy looked really rough, too. Like...old! Nopony would ever tell me why and-”

“Okay, okay...take a deep breath.” I waved my hooves in a conciliatory manner, trying to assemble my thoughts. I didn’t know exactly which questions I should ask first and was trying for a soft-ball start. Tourniquet didn’t appear dangerous, but then, Patter hadn’t either and look how that turned out.

“How long have you been down here?” Taxi asked.

The girl’s eyes drifted off for a moment, then she put a hoof to her forehead. “I...I don’t even know. My chronometer is one of the things that’s broken. It won’t stop saying it’s been fifteen years since I checked it last.”

Limerence began: “But it has been-”

I grabbed Limerence and put my hoof over his mouth before he could dig us an especially deep hole that I wasn’t sure we could climb out of.

“Could you...give my friends and I a moment?” I inquired, subtly jerking my head for my driver to follow me.

Tourniquet looked uncertain, but nodded. “Oh... alright. I can’t... really go anywhere, but I could go sit over there in the corner, if you want.”

I slid off the rocking chair and moved over, gently taking Taxi by the shoulder. Limerence didn’t need to be told to follow. I lead them both a few steps away, leaving Tourniquet and Swift to study one another. My partner pushed herself onto all fours, then the two young fillies began circling one another like a pair of mutts who'd just met. I found myself hoping they didn’t go in for the tail sniff. That’d have been awkward.

Lowering my voice, unsure whether or not Tourniquet could hear me or not, I spoke to Lim and Taxi. “Alright, so...when Saussurea talked about this prison being her child...”

“-she was obviously not exaggerating her affections,” Limerence replied, affirmatively.

My driver rubbed the bridge of her nose and said, “All those years, though. You think she’s been alone the whole time? A filly, in control of a prison? How come nopony noticed?”

“That control room is quite convincing. I only noticed because of the discrepancies in the video surveillance. If...Sausurrea’s information is correct, she must enter some form of… dormant… state when the prison cells upstairs are emptied. Whatever spells it is necessary to cast must bring her out of it. Had she not informed us of her existence...”

“-we’d never have found her,” I finished.

“Quite likely not. I doubt the Academy was much more diligent. Disassembly of a magical construct of this size is extraordinarily dangerous, if it’s even possible. I imagine they simply wished to make sure it was off. They couldn’t foresee somepony like Skylark digging into the history of this place.”

Taxi bit her lip, then tossed her braid back and forth. “No way. Skylark’s charismatic, but she’s not smart enough. Somepony put her onto this place. Somepony told her she should look here.”

“Alright, alright. Histories aside, what is she?” I asked, waving my hooves to dismiss the side-topics.

Limerence drew a little circle in the air above his head with his horn, indicating the building itself. “This is the apex of Saussurea’s talent. A prisoner imprisoning others, taking their magic and willpower to keep herself alive...and thus, also imprisoned.”

“Using her own daughter, though…” Taxi murmured.

“Why would Saussurea expend such efforts on imprisoning dragons, when she so obviously hates them? This is a work of extremely powerful artifice. I suspect... it is also a life support system.”

I turned to examine the wires running out of the girl’s back. She and Swift had stopped circling and were now sitting across from one another, studying each other with intense curiosity. My partner lifted her lip on one side, flashing her fangs. A second later, Tourniquet did the same, showing off her silvery dentistry. Swift stretched out one broad wing, then the mechanical filly sent a tiny pulse of light up the left set of cables running out of her back.

“Saussurea did mention the dragons had...taken...something from her,” I said, shaking my head, sadly. “Damn. A whole city worth of ponies wearing those robes, giving tiny bits of their magic to keep that little girl alive. Who’d have thought?”

Limerence ground his teeth. “I sincerely doubt it is still being done out of the kindness of Skylark’s heart. This is a… a perversion of the artificer’s art of the highest order and as such, is complex. She must have expended a truly mountainous quantity of energy simply to get the system active again.”

“Just how mountainous?” I asked.

“I’ll simplify as much as I can,” The librarian said, with a smirk. “Assume a normal Winkie sandwich bar is an average unicorn’s monthly consumption of magical energy.” He held up his hooves, about six inches apart. “If we scale that to the amount I estimate would be necessary to get this construct working after a total shutdown, it would be a Winkie bar... two meters long, weighing approximately three hundred and sixty pounds.”

I coughed and Taxi’s ears lay flat.

“That’s one big Winkie,” she murmured.

”Quite.”

I settled on my heels, considering our situation.

“Skylark’s using the girl’s magics to control her followers in the Church; ensuring compliance, obedience, and loyalty,” I concluded.

“Very likely, yes. It would also, mayhap, explain why the Church has had difficulty spreading beyond the borders of Detrot. Even the most powerful of magical system can’t defy the laws of thaumatics. As range increases, so too do power requirements, and exponentially with linear distance.”

“She’s a kid, though,” I said. “Why a child? That seems awfully risky, doesn’t it?”

Limerence shook his head. “Not at all. Children are very easy to manipulate. She believes her mother is under threat and there is nopony to tell her she is wrong.”

“And who is to say she’s wrong at all?” Taxi put in.

“Sweets, the girl’s mother is in Tartarus…”

“So was Dad-... my father. Did that stop these ponies who are pulling the strings from getting somepony in to see him, then wiping his memories?”

I sank onto my rear legs and rubbed at my temple with one hoof.

“Celestia save me, this was easier when I just had to arrest ponies and wave my badge or gun at them to get answers. Okay, so, do we tell Tourniquet about the actual situation?”

“I think we have to,” Taxi replied. “She’s completely alone down here.”

“Questions first. Smart ponies know exactly what they’re dealing with before they make presumptions.” I pointed at Tourniquet. “I want her story.”

Swift and Tourniquet were sitting over a stack of those funny cards when we rejoined them. Swift seemed to be trying to explain something about them, and Tourniquet was scratching her head.

“So, if I do the...Giant’s Super Growing on my Cheese Noodle of Doom, then that does double damage, right?” Tourniquet asked.

“Exactly! Now, just-” My partner raised her head. “Oh! Sorry, sir. We were just talking about how stuff’s really boring down here and I had my cards with me so-”

“It’s fine, kid. You really need to teach me to play that one of these days. How is your head? Feeling any...irrationally violent urges?”

Swift rolled her eyes up and to the right, taking a quick internal inventory. “I...I don’t know. I mean, I wasn’t having the weird reactions right after the magic was removed, but then I just saw her and everything sort of exploded. I feel really calm right now. I should be totally freaking out, especially with where we are and stuff, but...I don’t feel anything.”

I turned to Tourniquet. “How long is this going to last?”

The metal filly shook one eartip a little and I heard what I thought must be servos operating under it. “Maybe an hour. I used to be able to do that to the cells and during prisoner transport when they were in their uniforms, or before that, when the dragons had their... their stones, but… but I can’t anymore. I can only control some stuff.”

Every sentence the girl spoke seemed to be raising questions, none of which were doing much for the heartburn that’d been growing ever since dinner. I didn’t know exactly what we’d stumbled into, but the very casual and relaxed way Tourniquet described one of the bleakest periods of Detrot’s history was giving me shivers.

“Do you mind getting on with those ‘questions’ I mentioned earlier? I’m afraid we’ve got quite a few and if you can help us, I think I can promise you a few answers about your mother.”

Her ears perked right up at that. “About… about mom? Please! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know!” she answered, rising to her hooves. The wires on her back seemed to shorten as she moved, taking up the slack. “Besides… I don’t really have anything else to do. The cells are shut down for the night and I’d mostly just read some comic books or do some puzzles and crosswords. Miss Skylark has Geranium bring me new ones every week.”

“Geranium?”

“Oh! Yeah, she’s Miss Skylark’s... uh... assistant? She’s... she’s funny. Sometimes I feel like she’s the one in charge, and other times it’s like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She takes orders from Miss Skylark, and then sometimes she’ll tell her what somepony else wants her to do. Miss Skylark always does it, too.”

I thought back to the small mare we’d seen accompanying Skylark in the cafeteria. I’d dismissed her, briefly, but she did seem to have a more functional knowledge of what was going on than the rest of Skylark’s entourage.

“You sound like you used to run this place, right?” I asked.

The girl seemed eager to have somepony to talk to. I wondered, briefly, just how long it’d been since she’d seen somepony in person. Certainly Geranium or perhaps Skylark on occasion, but they didn’t strike me a wonderful company.

“I used to. Sort of. Mom... mom was somepony important during the war. I don’t know much about that, but after I...after I got hurt, Mom said she started building this place to keep the dragons from hurting anypony else. She said...she said she used all their power to make sure I was okay.”

Taxi took a couple of slow steps closer to the girl. “If you don’t mind, how exactly did you get injured?”

“I don’t really remember much of when it happened, actually.” Her shining eyes drifted off into recollection. “I remember fire. I woke up, crying. I was in my bed, and everything was on fire. The walls. The floor. The bed.” She looked down at her left hoof, where the alloys seemed to grow out of the flesh. “My leg.”

“And... after that?” my driver persisted.

Tourniquet shook her head and picked up one of her stuffed animals. It was a plush cat, with one thready ear. She sat and began stroking its head. “I don’t remember, really. I just remember waking up sometimes. Now and then. I remember everything hurt. Everything. I couldn’t see.” Reaching up, she touched her right eye. It was unsettling to see her actually rest her toe on the crystal iris, though it didn’t seem to hurt her any. “My whole chest felt like it was full of cotton candy and syrup when I tried to breathe. Then, one day, I couldn’t breathe. Then it all sort of...stopped...and I woke up here. Mom said I’d been asleep a really long time. My chronometer - which is like...it’s like a little clock I can see but nopony else can - popped up. It said...two whole years.”

Limerence’s eyes still had that dangerous gleam. I wondered, not for the first time, just what went on in that analytical brain of his.

“Intriguing, Miss Tourniquet. If you don’t mind, may I ask what happened thereafter? Surely it was not simply a matter of ‘waking up’?”

Setting her cat to one side, the filly reached up and tugged at her wire wings, then scratched the base of one. “Heee! As if! Everything itched! It still does, but not as bad.”

She smiled and turned in a little circle. “It didn’t matter, though, because... because I could see again. I could see even better! It wasn’t like it used to be, either. I could see everything in all directions! I could see into other places, where other things were happening. I could see the sky and underground. I could feel places... feel unicorns using magic or pegasi flying or earth ponies moving.” Sadness filled her face and she slumped to the floor on her stomach, drawing her hooves under herself.

“I... take it you’ve lost some of that capacity? You’re using past tense,” Limerence murmured.

Tourniquet bobbed her head. “I can’t see anything above ground anymore. I miss the sky so much...and I miss ponies.”

Swift scooted a little closer and gently touched the girl, comfortingly, with one wingtip. “What was it like here? I mean, I would have lost it if I just woke up with all that stuff inside me…”

The filly snickered and nosed my partner’s feathers. “Well, yeah, I totally did, for a little while. I wasn’t on fire, though, you know? I mean, how did you feel when you got those crazy teeth?”

Swift gave her a toothy grin. “Awesome!... but I guess it is a little weird. Still, I get to eat all the meat I want.”

“Ewww!” Tourniquet drew back a couple of steps. “For real? What does that taste like?”

Before they could get into a drawn out comparison of their experiences, I decided to step in. “Why did you run that ‘Report for Processing’ line on us?”

Tourniquet looked guiltily at her forehooves. “I... I couldn’t think of any other way to get somepony down here.”

Swift tilted her head and sniffed. “You could have just asked, you know.”

The filly gave my partner a look like she’d been speaking a foreign language, then clasped her forehooves together and said, in a voice so saccharine it couldn’t be taken seriously, “Oh, please, please, strange-ponies-who’re-obviously-breaking-in... could you come sneak into my secret hidden room? I know I’m talking through another pony, but I’m really lonely! Just ignore that I’m all metal, please!”

My partner’s cheeks flushed and she ducked her head. “Right, okay, I guess...we might have had a problem with that...”

Tourniquet reached out to touch Swift’s shoulder, then paused and stepped back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be mean. It’s… It’s just that I used to be able to talk to everypony in the whole building. I made sure they went where they needed to go. I kept track of everything. Everypony thought I was just a recording, or a voice in their heads, but I could talk to Mom.” The girl’s voice broke, sounding more like a malfunctioning speaker. “Now… somepony… somepony broke stuff… and I can’t talk to hardly anypony!”

Glancing up at the wires protruding from her back, I nodded in their direction. “I’m assuming you can’t leave this room. Did you ever ask… you know… why Saussurea did what she did?”

She shook her head. “I tried to ask Mom, but she just got really sad.”

“Huh...I’m trying to imagine Saussurea as ‘sad’. It’s not coming to me.”

Tourniquet let out a sharp laugh, but it died just as quickly. “I know Mom wasn’t like she was around everypony else around me. She wasn’t nice. I’m not stupid. But she was my Mom and she loved me. I kept her safe here...just like I kept you safe coming in by not telling anypony when I saw you on the sewer cameras!”

“Thanks for that, by the way,” I said, tipping my hat in her direction. “I did mean to ask. Why did you let us in?”

Her nose twitched a little as she gave me a frightened look. “I was lonely, and there’s nopony I can talk to. I thought if you were breaking in, then maybe you could... tell somepony outside or something. You’re a police pony, right?”

I pulled my coat open and lifted my badge out. “It’s not that simple, but I’m doing my best to make sure ponies are safe.”

A look of relief filled her face. “Oh thank goodness! I need somepony to go talk to Mom and get her to come back! She knows how things work and she can fix me!”

It should be noted that, in a life full of awkward silences, this ranked in at number three.

Thankfully, Limerence’s curiosity came to our rescue.

“Did Warden Saussurea ever explain her reasons for implanting you inside of this system? I don’t know if you’re aware, but this is an extraordinarily complex machine you sit at the center of, Miss Tourniquet,” said Limerence.

“All Mom said was that I wasn’t… I wasn’t going to make it if she hadn’t,” Tourniquet replied, turning away and pawing through her stack of comic books until she found an old issue of Power Ponies. She peered down at the Masked Matterhorn, resting one toe on the mare’s picture. I felt a little pride at remembering that name, then I felt very, very old. “She said, all the bad ponies and dragons deserved what they got and that I should make sure none of them hurt anypony again.”

“This required no...learning process?”

Tourniquet shrugged, pushing her comic away. “I just...I just knew how. I don’t know. How do you know how to breathe?”

Limerence’s eyebrows drew together. “Instinctual, then.”

“That’s how it was for me! When I woke up, I knew all the awful things everypony and every dragon in here had done. I knew each and every one. Even...even Mister Girthranx. He burned down a whole village, once...” Whatever she had that passed for a voice box was letting out an insistent little buzz between words, that I took for stress. “He… he was the only one I had to talk to for the longest time. Now he’s gone, too.”

I realized that, if she was still capable, Tourniquet would probably be on the verge of tears; her shoulders were shaking, and I could hear something in her rear legs that sounded like grinding mechanism. The patchy fur hanging off her sides and the cabling coming out of her back didn’t do much to help the impression of a very tightly controlled marionette having an emotional breakdown.

“Girthranx is a draconic name,” the librarian said, pushing his glasses to the top of his nose. “I can’t conjure where I’ve heard it before, but I believe I have. I wonder, if you don’t mind my asking, where has...Girthranx gone?”

Tourniquet pinched her eyes shut and went back to gently stroking with her stuffed cat. “Can... can we not talk about that for a few more minutes? I promise, I’ll show you, but it’s... I just want to talk like normal ponies a little longer, okay?”

Before the inquisitive stallion could get the girl any more worked up, I asked, “How’d you managed that trick with Cerise?”

A faint smile plucked at the edges of her mouth and she looked over at Swift. “Can... can I do something? I promise it won’t hurt or anything.”

My partner bit her lower lip, then glanced in my direction. “Sir?”

I waved both forehooves. “Hey, she asked you, kid. You want to let the robot filly mess with your body, you be my guest.”

Tourniquet rolled her eyes. “I’m not a robot...and I promise, it won’t hurt or anything, okay? You won’t even remember what happened.”

Swift thought for a long minute, then bit her tongue between her teeth. “You promise it won’t hurt?”

“Totally! Okay, give me a second.” Hopping up, the girl dashed over to a huge, wooden toy chest beside her book-case and tossed it open. She began rooting through it, with just her flanks poking out. She talked as she searched. “I can only take over when somepony has my sigil on them. I think I can divert a little power from upstairs to make this work without them noticing. I hope Miss Skylark isn’t looking at the outputs! Oooh, it’d be bad if she was...but still, I don’t get to do this much and nopony ever wants to see my tricks, although I don’t get to ask many ponies if they want to see my tricks-Aha!”

Tourniquet held a bright red marker in the corner of her mouth. Moving over to Swift, she sat down in front of her. They were about comparable heights, so Tourniquet didn’t have to bend down to look her in the eye.

“Um... do you mind if I draw on your cheek?”

“O-okay.” Swift touched her own face with one toe, then added, worriedly, “So long as you don’t draw something dirty.”

Tourniquet hesitated, then guffawed with a sound like a broken record skipping on a gramophone. “Oooh, yeeeah, because the filly with all the circuits for insides lured you down here so she could draw a penis on your face. I’m not twelve!”

My partner flushed. “Sorry. Scarlet -- he’s my best friend -- would totally draw something dirty on me if he had the chance and he’s not twelve either.”

The metal filly’s eyes lit up. “Does… does that mean we’re friends? If you’ll let me draw on you?”

Swift slid sideways a couple of inches, looking at Tourniquet out of the corner of one eye. She glanced over at where her cards were splayed out on the floor, then back at the girl still holding the marker in her lips.

“Well...I don’t know how often I will be able to visit, and you’re a really weird pony-”

“Look who is talking!” Tourniquet sniped, with a goofy grin.

“-but sure! I mean, seriously, how many ponies can say they’re friends with a whole prison?” Scooting over, my partner turned her cheek towards the other girl and gathered her wings in tight.

“Even if I have to zap you again the next time I see you, I’m really glad we met,” Tourniquet said, pulling the cap off her marker and very carefully drawing a tiny red moon on Swift’s muzzle. As she finished, she stepped back to inspect her hoofwork. “Not bad, not bad...not perfect. If I wanted full control, I’d have to have it under the skin, but this will work for showing off. I need to practice this later on so I can show Mom when she gets back. I’m better than I was. I just wish all the important stuff wasn’t busted.”

I got the distinct feeling she wasn’t talking to us. Granted, if I’d spent a significant part of my life alone then I’d probably have taken to talking to myself, too.

“Alrighty-roo! Here goes!”

Shutting her eyes, Tourniquet breathed slowly in and out a couple of times. Her breaths let out a slight ‘whirring’, which gave the impression of a fan buried somewhere in her anatomy, rather than pumping lungs.

Somewhere above us, something clattered, then let out the sound of twitching machinery. The girl’s wires pulled taut and she was lifted off the floor, dangling limply by them. I stumbled back a couple of steps, fighting the urge to pick up my gun bit.

Limerence was not so trusting. He had his crossbow out, hanging in the air beside him with the nocked bolt just a few inches off of the girl dangling in the air a meter or so above us. Swift gave him a firm glare until he lowered it, then she turned to look back up at her new friend.

For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened, then a pulse of light shot up the cables and spread out in all directions. I tried to follow it with my eyes, but I still couldn’t make out any details of the source of the illumination in the nursery, much less anything beyond it. However, if the way that light spread out indicated the actual presence of more wire, we were at the center of an electrician’s worse nightmare.

“Mister Hard Boiled?” Swift said. I turned my attention back to my partner.

“Kid? What is it?” I asked, then I noticed that her eyes were blank, and she wasn’t quite looking at me.

“It’s me! Tourniquet!” my partner giggled. Raising her hoof, she looked at her toes, then stretched her enormous wings halfway out from her sides. “I forgot what being in a pegasus is like. They’re so light and fluffy!”

I peered at Tourniquet’s body, which hadn’t moved from where it was.

“That’s... extremely unsettling,” I commented, reaching out and gently touching Swift’s forehead. She didn’t seem to be in any pain, but her pupils were two different sizes. “I take it you can’t control somepony outside this building?”

“Nope! Somepony has to have my sigil inside them to do that. I was born on a harvest moon, so Mom made that my sign. My spells still work, a little bit, but I can’t see out of anypony’s eyes or use their body or anything. At least...that’s how it used to be. All my stupid monitors are broken, so I don’t even know anymore,” Swift explained. Her mouth was open, and her lips moved very slightly with each word, but it was Tourniquet’s voice coming out.

“Kid? You still in there?” I asked, giving my partner a slight shake.

Tourniquet’s body opened her own eyes. The wires on her back went slack and she dropped back to the carpet.

Swift’s pupils grew back to their normal size and she blinked at me. “Oh...Sir? When did you get over...here?” A look of confusion grew on her face. “Wait...did it already happen?”

“Yes, yes it did. That is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” I sucked on my teeth, thinking a moment before turning back to Tourniquet. “What exactly is going on with Miss Cerise upstairs?”

She lowered her ears and sat. “I...don’t even know. A couple hours ago Miss Skylark made me divert all the power coming in upstairs, except what I need to keep myself awake. When I start getting feedback, I’m supposed to turn it off. I used the excess to talk to you.”

“Ah, that was the ‘hum’?” Limerence asked.

“Yes. I don’t know how it even works,” Tourniquet answered, shuffling her hooves on the well-worn carpet. “I read a little about magical feedback back when Mom was still running things, and it’s like, a whole city worth of magic going up there. It should cook those poor ponies right away from the inside out.”

Taxi’s eyebrows shot right up her forehead. “Those?! As in, plural? You’re saying this has happened more than once?”

Tourniquet bobbed her head. “Every few days. My... my chronometer still keeps time, even though it’s been really stubborn about the fifteen year thing. It’s the same every time she does this to somepony. When whatever she’s doing is... is powered up enough or whatever, Miss Skylark and her friends will take them downstairs and then I don’t see them again.”

If my heart had been the original, I’m sure it would have been thumping like mad.

Murders. Murders like clockwork, or so the girl said.

Every few days? The Church butchering an endless stream of brain-washed ponies?

“She’s... powering this place with death,” I whispered.

“What was that?” Taxi wanted to know.

“Skylark’s murdering ponies. I don’t know why yet, but she... she uses the homeless shelters. She finds ponies nobody will miss. I bet you that’s how she picked up Cerise... and how she picked up Ruby. She’s powered this place with the deaths of all those ponies.”

Taxi barely managed to hide her shock and Tourniquet’s eyes widened until I could see the tiny gears in the corners of her irises. Limerence merely frowned.

“Detective, I do not... believe that to be the case.”

“What?! Didn’t you say this place had huge power requirements? And that necromancy would make lots of power? If she’s not using it to power up the spells so she can control her followers-”

He held up his hoof. “I did not say she is not using Supermax to control her followers, nor did I say she was not murdering ponies. I merely doubt that she is using the power she would derive from whatever she is doing to these poor souls she has captured merely to exert control. Her followers provide quite adequate power to keep operations going, simply by wearing their robes. Sacrifices for power would be... inefficient.”

Tourniquet’s ears pinned to the sides of her head and she slid onto her stomach. The wires stretching from her back to the ceiling unwound until they lay across her like a heavy blanket, spilling over the floor. “I can’t even turn myself off anymore and she’s going to hurt my Mom if I try. I thought it was just...just the bad ponies. I had files on them…” She trailed off into incoherent mumbles, covering her face with both forehooves.

Swift reached over and tentatively laid her hoof across the filly’s shoulders. The girl jumped as she felt the contact, then crawled a little closer to my partner. It was almost pathetic how eager Tourniquet was for equine contact. Sad and pathetic and wrong...and there was nopony to punish.

Saussurea had already lost her daughter, her future, and her legacy. It was all gone and dead to her. She had nothing left to take.

“Inefficient, though?” Taxi said, breaking the momentary silence. “Seriously? We’re sitting in a huge prison! What kind of ‘efficient’ are you talking about, Lim?”

Reaching up, Limerence touched behind his horn, as though adjusting a hat. Realizing his bowler was still back in the Nest, he sighed.

“It is… difficult to convey the differences without some higher math. I will say, however, that the weight of power required to keep this place running once it is already activated pales in comparison to what could be derived from tearing magic out of the dying. It would be like using the breeze from a dynamite explosion to power a windmill or a car engine. She is likely using that power for something else.”

“That leaves us with the question of where all that power is going,” I grumbled.

Limerence waved one hoof. “You’re the detective. I am only providing my opinions on the matter. I will say, however, that whatever they’re doing to these ponies that would cause magical resonance fields strong enough to interact with our brains in the form of that humming sensation is unlikely to be healthy.”

My back knees shook a little as the weight of that statement settled on me.

I’d never personally taken a necromancy case for longer than it took to determine that death magic was involved. They’re extremely rare, and usually handled by the Royal Guard rather than workaday police forces. Most often, they were simply the desperate, stupid, and too heavily informed making a grief-stricken attempt to bring a loved one back just long enough to say goodbye.

Juniper once told me he’d come across a botched attempt at necromancy that ended with the caster being eaten by his own pet turtle. It was only treated as a murder case until they found the happily zombified little amphibian sitting in the perp’s chest cavity.

I’d hoped never to find myself facing down death magics directly. Equestrian homicide detectives dread such things, if for no other reason than determining who is dead and who isn’t should be a very simple thing.

Pushing those thoughts aside, I raised my head and looked over at Tourniquet who was still slouched against Swift, her cheek resting on my partner’s knee. The pegasus looked like she didn’t know whether to feel pity, sadness, or fear, but she was gently brushing her hoof through what was left of the girl’s mane and Tourniquet was making a little buzzing noise that I took for pleasure.

I inhaled and held it, letting my eyelids slide shut, trying to push the stress and fear out of my mind, sinking towards the state of quiet speculation that most inspectors and detectives reserve for moment when nothing is making sense.

Answers were there. They flitted by, like people moving through an enormous crowd. I might touch one, or ten, but I would miss a hundred others. They were like a scent on a busy street.

A scent.

Opening my eyes, I looked out into the darkness surrounding the little island of light that was the nursery.

“Tourniquet. Bring the lights up.”

The girl lifted her eyes. “I don’t… I don’t want to,” she whimpered.

Her voice had a slight tonal whine, like a badly tuned guitar.

I stepped over and sat down in front of her, taking her face in both my hooves. I could feel the hard coolness of the metal under one cheek, while the other was warm and alive. Her prosthetic eyes sparkled and she hooked her hooves over mine, but didn’t pull away.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll tell you what happened to your mother and I will make sure nopony hurts you, but right now, I need you to bring up the lights.”

She tugged at her neck a little, but I held her fast. Slowly, she relented, easing forward and pressing herself against my chest. Age or not, strange body or not, horrifying rebirth or not, she was still a child; afraid of the dark.

“I don’t wanna see him. Him or… or them…” she whispered as she hid against my collar.

I held her head against me. “Raise the lights, Tourniquet. I need to know the truth, if I’m going to make all of this stop. Trust me.”

She moaned, piteously, tossing her forelegs around me.

The wires in her back pulsed.

The circle of light began to expand outwards. As it grew, more toys appeared. Bears. Books. Figures. A set of swings. A school desk, with a stuffed duck sitting on it.

Some of the objects scattered on the floor. Others were arranged neatly, on shelves, or in boxes. There was a table, with a chess set, which seemed to have a few checkers interspersed here and there. There was a baking set for baking plastic goods, and a model train that I’d have envied when I was young, set across several tables.

It was the evidence of a childhood grown all out of proportion. She was too young to be so old. She’d seen the blackest of Detrot’s history, of Equestria’s history, and walked out the other side with not much of her flesh, but some innocence left to keep her sane. I could feel her breath coming faster and faster, the farther the light spread. Whatever she had for lungs was starting to click, softly.

The light stopped, just shy of what I assumed to be the walls. As it was, we were sitting in a huge open space.

“D-do I have to?” she asked, so quiet I was at first uncertain I’d heard.

“Do you want to sit in the dark forever?”

She didn’t reply, but the circle started growing again.

The first sign of something off kilter was the tip of a golden appendage. It was the shape of a spade, but easily two meters across, and covered in brilliant, yellow scales. It sprawled towards the middle of the room, pointed like an accusing finger at the five of us. The fur on my neck started a spirited crawl for my scalp as, inch by inch, the light slid up the shining length. The appendage widened as was revealed, then attached itself to a haunch that was easily four times my height, which led down to a taloned claw that could have squished the lot of us without so much as a ‘by your leave’.

A feeble voice in my mind said ‘time to panic!’, but it was exhausted from a night of overwork; fleeing was miles further down my internal list of priorities than it should have been. For some reason I still didn’t feel unsafe with my forelegs wrapped around Tourniquet. I’d no idea what manner of creature was really under that innocent face, but she wasn’t the beasty making my cutie-mark burn.

The light began to pick out a jaw wider than Swift’s wingspan, and at last, the half-open eyes of a dragon. I didn’t need a degree in xeno-pathology to know it was dead. Its face was slack, half tilted on its side, and the scaled flesh on its neck had torn in places as it dried out in the arid air of the hidden room. No scavengers had picked at the remains as they dried, so it was largely preserved, though as the last of it appeared, I had to cover my mouth to avoid a sudden bout of nausea.

The dragon’s belly appeared to have exploded at some point, though not like a rotting corpse. In the way of dragons, its own enchanted fire had burst through its stomach wall, scorching away its innards and leaving a surprisingly clean hole, with only a few blackened ribs poking down from the edges.

I wondered, distantly, if I’d ever get a good night’s sleep again.

My partner’s shoulders humped like a cat’s, but whatever she had in her stomach wasn’t enough to leave a deposit on the carpet. Even Limerence looked more than a little green. I watched his adam’s apple jump as he forced himself to keep stiff control.

Taxi and I just sat and stared at the horrible tableaux attached to the wall.

They were seven.

Seven ponies.

Five stallions. Two mares.

One unicorn, horn removed a little more than halfway down its length.

Two pegasi, each missing a wing.

Four earth ponies, each missing one right forehoof, hacked off below the knee.

My breath caught as I studied their broken bodies, each one attached to one of the dragon’s exposed ribs. They’d been strapped up there, face first, with their bodies bent at an unnatural angle around the bone. I couldn’t tell exactly what was holding them there, but their back legs dangled free, while their necks seemed to adhere right to the giant rib cage.

They were all grey.

Act 3 Chapter 3 : A Scientist Should Be The Happiest of Stallions

Starlight Over Detrot
Act 3 Chapter 3: A Scientist Should Be The Happiest of Stallions

In Equestria, there are two great disciplines recognized by the Royal Academy as ‘True Sciences’. They are considered equal, but are kept as separate as equinely possible.

They are Methodical Science and Mad Science.

Dating all the way back to the days of Starswirl the Bearded, Methodical Science has ever been the pursuit of Truth via rational inquiry. It is hypothesizing, theorizing, experimenting, and drawing conclusions from a data set. Many of our finest modernities have been the result of Methodical Science pushing the boundaries of what is known.

Marea Cure, the greatest of Crusades era minds, saved the lives of thousands when she developed her theory of thaumic radiance. The ideas of Tesala Coil, griffin mistress of storms, eventually lead to the grand design of our modern electrical grids.

Their contributions can never be understated and they, along with the many thousands like them, have grown Methodical Science in ways that have shaped the future for the betterment of all sapient species.

Understanding all of this, why then, does Equestria require two disciplines?

The ultimate reasoning goes back to that first moment, when Star Swirl’s rich mind alighted upon the notion that he could, by observing the universe, begin to shape it. His first thought soon thereafter, as written in A History of Equestrian Sciences - was something along the lines of ‘Now, I wonder if I can make it explode’.

To understand why, I present you a quote from one of the progenitors of the form when he was asked (or rather someone with a bathtub lodged in their roof demanded to know) the reasons he did what he did.

“Mad Science is the pursuit of Truth via awesome inquiry!” - Aleister Cowly.

(Not to disclaim the factuality of his statement, but it should be mentioned that the good Doctor Cowly was a known salt addict and was last seen in low orbit over the Crystal Empire. How he got there is a point of ongoing debate in many circles. Bovines are not generally known for their aerodynamics.)

Mad Science has often been proclaimed as a combination of inspiration, brilliance, and emotional instability that produces results that would defy a sterile laboratory environment. Some might remark upon the fact that the population of mad scientists in Equestria is much lower than the population of the more traditional variety, but this is mostly a matter of attrition rather than a lack of interest. It is, after all, the practice of doing something using the scientific method because it sounds excellent when you’re sitting on the toilet before your first cup of coffee.

Since, during the war, the timeframe between bowel movement and next cup of coffee could sometimes be measured in weeks, Equestria relied heavily upon thinkers of questionable sanity.

By way of example, the Scale Cracker Dreadnaught began life as a late-model hearse owned by the famous Doctor Curious Amity, who was known to stroll the palisades of Canterlot while wearing a duck costume.

Even today, Mad Science maintains as a bastion of new developments in basket weaving, spoon defenestration, face melting, and - once in a great while - something useful.

- The Scholar

Wandering into the tent city, I made in the general direction of the Morgue, not really paying attention to where I was going. Strange as it might sound, I was a bit uplifted by what I was seeing of the citizens of my haunted burg. The asphalt felt fantastic under my hooves and the air was crisp, if a bit cool.

I peered into a tent where two nurse ponies were changing an IV on a sleeping unicorn and moving her onto her side to prevent bed sores while a stallion I presumed was her father—judging by the similarity of their pelts—sat beside her cot with a book. In the next one, two foals played a quiet game on the concrete floor while a young mare held the hoof of stallion of similar age, staring longingly into his closed eyes.

Activity was everywhere and as I strolled along, enjoying the morning hours (insofar as we could be said to have a morning), I found myself feeling an odd sense of calm.

People continue. Isn’t that the way of things? Even with their Princesses lost, their capital missing, and their army broken, ponies would not give up. Not just ponies, either.

A pair of zebra healers, male and female, heavy packs of herbs strapped across their backs, were moving from along the rows of
tents offering prayers and consolation to those who were awake and taking readings from their unconscious friends and family.

I had to wonder how many poor souls hadn’t been found in time to get them here. It’d been a week. Even in a coma, the body needs water after a few days.

Shaking off these distressing thoughts, I headed toward the door of the Morgue.

Thalassemia was sitting behind a card table just out front with a heap of clean scrubs, bandages, face masks, IV bags, and a slightly melty cheesecake. She had a whole stack of clipboards in front of her and a file cabinet behind.

“Hey Thal!” I called out as I approached.

Her eyes came up and she all but leapt from her chair, rushing around to throw her paws around my chest. I brushed my hoof over her fluffy ears, smiling as she clutched at me like I’d been gone a year.

“D-d-detective! I th-thought you were going to be d-d-dead again!”

“Eh, I’m sure it’ll happen at some point. How are you?”

She shook her head. “T-tired. S-since they c-closed off Uptown to m-most ponies, th-the hospitals are sending all their re-resources here, so it’s b-better than it wa-was during the first couple of days.”

“Closed off Uptown? I...ugh...I’m going to need to sit down somewhere and have a drink while I get the whole story. Can I get a cup of coffee?”

Thalassemia led me into the Morgue which was, if anything, more active than the parking lot full of tents outside. The lobby was packed with ponies, smoking, drinking coffee, and generally relaxing in the atmosphere of quiet camaraderie. Most were looking haggard and wore loose face-masks or rumpled scrubs.

As we came in, they all looked up. A couple of jaws dropped and I heard one pony whisper something that sounded like, ‘Is that...him?’

I put on my best ‘please-ignore-me’ smile and strode between them, hoping I wouldn’t end up making a scene. They made room, respectfully stepping out of my way. A skinny mare with two ear-rings in each ear reached out and lightly touched my coat. I danced to one side, peering at her and she blinked a couple times, then blushed and ducked back into the crowd.

Thal made a little shooing motion at the nurses with both paws. “T-the D-detective needs his sp-space! You bunch n-need to do bed ch-checks!”

I glanced at her nervously, then headed to the elevator as quickly as I could. She followed me, leaving behind a worrying silence and nopony seeming much inclined to hop to it.

As the doors shut, I had the impression that not one eye had left me the entire time.

“You want to tell me what that was about, Thal?” I asked as I pressed the button for the factory floor.

She wrung her paws a little bit, giving me a pensive look. “Mayor S-Snifter is really unpopular right now and...um…”

“What? What is it?” I asked, sitting on my haunches.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a folded piece of paper and passed it to me. Unfolding it, I examined the page.

It was a ‘Wanted’ poster. The reward was more bits than I’d make in five years on the force and my name was right across the top, with a picture of Swift alongside, Taxi from her days in uniform, and a shot of Limerence that was obviously taken from television; probably the day I’d been round to see Astral Skylark outside the Museum. The reward was exclusively for ‘alive’, but that didn’t strike me as especially encouraging. There were lots of definitions of ‘alive’ that didn’t include ‘unharmed’.

Crimes included the murder of Ruby Blue, treasonous activities, and blah’de’blah’de’blah. It was a ham-hoofed tactic, but one that would be pretty effective in the right circumstances. It mentioned conspiracy, and that we were somehow knowledgeable about the disappearance of Canterlot.

That said, there was no Royal Seal. The number to claim the bits was formerly the P.A.C.T.’s tip line for sighting dangerous monsters.

“How much interest has there been in claiming this?” I asked.

Thal shook her head. “A-after Uptown sh-shut down and Canterlot disappeared? It's d-destroyed the ec-economy. Bits are w-worthless right now.”

“Yeah, but...I mean—”

“It’s more than that, Detective. Somepony out there is t-t-telling stories. I heard a bunch of th-them. How you were the o-one who put down King Cosmo and how you saved the lives of the g-griffins at the Moonwalk. Even a crazy one about y-you bringing down those Lunar Passage ponies for doing n-necromancy...” She shivered, right to the tips of her whiskers. “If that wasn’t weird enough, there’s p-ponies calling you funny names, t-too.”

I rested my cheek against the cool metal wall of the elevator. “I’m used to ponies calling me funny names, Thal. Can’t be any worse than some of the names The Chief likes to use.”

“I b-bet not these kinds of n-names...”

Pushing off the wall, I gave her a skeptical look. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’re they calling me?”

She took the poster from me and folded it back up, stuffing it in her pocket. “Th-they call you the Crusader, Kingpin Slayer, Bulldog, High Justice, Detective Dead H-Heart...”

I took a couple of unconscious scootches backwards until my back was pressed against the side of the elevator.

“Who in Equestria is coming up with that stuff? Worse! Who is spreading it around?! It makes me sound a comic book...character...oh.” I groaned, putting my face in my hooves. “Swift. Dammit. I told her to lay low, not go about spreading around a list of our criminal adventures…”

“Some of it’s t-true, right? I think the D-Dead Heart thing came about because somepony found out you d-died. It can’t all be your p-partner, though, can it?”

I shook my head and got to my hooves. “No, I’m certain there are some wagging tongues with a few of the other groups I’ve gotten myself involved with lately. Whatever. If it gives me some measure of protection from City Hall, I’ll make use of it. How safe do you think I am here?”

Thalassemia let out a ladylike sniff as the elevator doors slid open and we stepped out into the hall down from the morgue’s main examination theater. “Those ponies wouldn’t d-dare cross the Doctor. Y-you’re his guest and h-he doesn’t have to do wh-what he does, particularly if they were to t-turn you in for a stupid stack of b-bits. He’s the reason their children a-aren’t crying themselves to s-sleep every night.”

The operating theater had a half dozen bodies laid out on gurneys under white sheets, with preservation talismans all over them. I gulped and glanced at Thalassemia for confirmation that Limerence wasn’t amongst them.

Rather than answer, she pointed her slim paw at another door on the other side of the room. The sharp neon lights made the whole place feel emptier than it really was as we navigated the maze of bodies. I fought the urge to check under those sheets for anybody I knew. Nothing good could come of that. Focus was what I needed just then.

Thal produced her keyring and unlocked the door, pushing on through into the laboratory of one of the maddest scientists the world had ever known.

The Laboratory of the Good Doctor Slip Stitch reminded me of a carnival attraction I’d seen once where somepony claimed they’d discovered the secret to reversing old age. The walls, ceiling, and even some parts of the floor were a mass of intermeshed technology, some of it bodged together from things I recognized and others looking as though they’d simply grown out of the walls. Lights flashed, tubes of glowing liquid bubbled, and little tesla coils spat occasional sparks onto big metal balls.

Every inch of the space radiated a sensation of grand potential energy held carefully at bay by the highly questionable ethics and morals of the city’s coroner. Every inch that wasn’t strobing or popping was taken up by all manner of exciting toggles and switches. One said ‘Gravitonic Recombobulator’ and another ‘Torque Extender’. The only exception was what looked like an over-sized barrel attached to the far wall that seemed to run to some sort of generator.

In the center of the room, laid out on a table that was much too big, my librarian was tucked beneath a sheet covered in multi-colored puppies prancing around a field. His hoof was connected to an IV bag full of nutrients. He looked a little thinner than he had when last I’d seen him.

Trotting over to his side, I rested my hoof over his; it was cold, but I could feel his pulse. Heavens, he looked young. Younger than he ever did when he was awake.

“T-The doctor will be down s-soon…”

“How come he hasn’t run this experiment already?” I asked, still studying Limerence. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea for him to start getting ponies up?”

Thalassemia nodded towards the room behind us as she gently disconnected the IV from my friend’s leg and put a sticking plaster over the needle-mark. “H-he doesn’t w-want to get anypony’s hopes up if it f-fails. He couldn’t simply p-pick a pony from up there. We k-kept the idea to ourselves.”

“That’s...very Slip Stitch. So, what is all of this?”

Thal opened her mouth to reply, but the door to the private laboratory slammed open and Slip Stitch hustled in, grinning beatifically.
He paused there for a moment, eyes closed, then let out a slow breath. Opening his eyes, he spotted his assistant and myself.

“Detective! Lovely! Excellent! You’re just in time!”

I blinked at him. “Just in time? Weren’t you waiting for me?”

“Of course! Hence, you’ve arrived at precisely the right moment. Do keep up!” he replied, sweeping off his stained labcoat and tossing it over Thal’s outstretched foreleg. She passed him a clean one and he shrugged into it. “So, now then—”

“Where’s Mags?” I asked, before he got going.

Stitch nodded towards the room behind us. “She’s inspecting the corpses. No griffins. Don’t worry, I made sure.”

“You left her to look at dead bodies?!” I choked, charging by him and back into the autopsy room.

Mags was standing beside the nearest table, poking at the body on it with a metal stick. As I came in, she glanced up. “Oh! Har’dy! This one’s eye came out! It’s so cool!”

I put a hoof over my face and sighed. “Mags, go back the way you came and find someone your own age to play with, please?”

“Can I—”

“No, you can’t take the eyeball and no, you can’t bring them back down here,” I said, sternly. “You know how to read a clock?”

She rolled her eyes and nodded. “Duh! Griffins be having clocks.”

“Alright, you can be out for an hour. Then I want you to meet me in the lobby. Is that clear?”

With an affirmative chirp, Mags hopped down off the gurney with the corpse on it and marched back the way she’d come towards the elevator. I leaned against the wall and groaned.

Slip Stitch cleared his throat and I jumped, then bopped him in the shoulder.

“Really, Stitch? Did she need to see that?” I grumbled, yanking my hat off and wiping my forehead with my leg. “I’m, at some point, going to have to pay a very nasty piper for all the stuff that poor kid has seen and you’re not helping!”

The coroner smirked, turning on his tail to trot back into his lab. “Detective, you were her age once. What would have been neater than getting to poke a dead body with a stick, then go brag to your friends about it?”

I opened my mouth to try to come up with some kind of rebuttal or counter-argument. There were lots of words like ‘appropriate’ and ‘trauma’ and ‘responsibility’ floating around, but they refused to make sentences.

My childhood had a few specific occurrences that shaped me, but Mags and I didn’t even share a species. She was so different in so many ways that really getting a hoof on what would and wouldn’t give her nightmares was all but impossible. I tried to feed her a piece of broccoli while we were at the Warehouse and she didn’t talk to me for three hours, but offer her an artifact that gave the sensation of having hands like a minotaur instead of feet and she couldn’t get enough.

Besides, Stitch was right. I’d have given a foreleg when I was nine to do something like that.

I shoved myself off the door frame and headed back into the lab. Thalassemia was waiting just inside with a spare labcoat in her forelegs.

“Ca-can I take your c-coat, Detective?”

“Uh...sure? Why?”

“It’s en-enchanted, right?”

“It’s got a couple of pocket dimensions, some durability spells, and something to keep the rain off, yeah.”

“Can I have i-it? Don’t want any extra s-spells messing with the experiment.”

I shrugged out of my trenchcoat and she took it from me, folding it up and stuffing it into a tiny locker off to one side that was covered in all manner of runes. As she closed the lock, the jewel on the top flashed a couple of times, then went out.

“What about your weapon?” Stitch asked, gesturing at my gun.

I laid a protective hoof on the Crusader. Another fleck of the paint on it had come off, revealing more strange patterns on the barrel. “This thing is so enchanted I think you might be better off leaving it in the next country. I doubt a nullification box will keep it from leaking. Besides, if this is going to mess with something, I’m most worried about my heart.”

Stitch’s eyes lit up and he pranced in place. “Ah! I have just the thing, Detective! A little experimental piece we tried a few years ago when I was trying to improve the police issue bullet proof vests! It turned out to be a bit...mmm...expensive, but we do have the most basic model.”

Darting back into the autopsy room, I heard the doors swing shut. Less than ten seconds later, they banged open again and Slip Stitch skidded to a halt in front of me, a large metal box on his back. Tipping it off onto the floor, he tore the top off with gusto and raised a leg in a pose I’d seen mares in skimpy outfits use on game shows when they were presenting the ‘grand prize’.

Leaning over the box, I picked up the strangest looking bullet proof vest I’d ever seen.

“Behold, Detective! The Maresketonic Spell Safety Armor Mark One!”

Police armor comes in a few flavors, from the simple stuff with plates of high density ceramic or dragon scale, right up to the monstrosities that bomb disposal units use that might give you a hope of surviving a point blank blast, then on to the bulky, anti-magic armors used by battle-mages which might have a prayer of stopping spell-fire.

The piece of fabric in my hooves was none of those things. It was thin, for one. The whole garment felt strangely heavy, despite being a bit wispy, like it shouldn’t really fit in the amount of space it took up. It was a midnight blue, darker than police issue, with metal thread running through it. A series of what I’d first taken for studs turned out to be gemstones in various colors, cut and fitted into the fabric.

“What exactly am I looking at here?”

“Ah! Glad you asked,” Stitch chuckled, lifting the armor over my head. I doffed my hat, sat, and put my legs up, so he could wedge it down over my neck and pull my mane through. The strange armor didn’t cover near as much of me as I’d have liked. My flanks and hips were completely exposed, along with most of my stomach. “Short of armor enchanted by our dear Princesses, this is the best there is against hostile magic! It stops very nearly any aggressive spell-form, up to and including unicorn telekinesis, spell-fire, and enchanted lightning!”

I rubbed the soft fabric on my chest. It felt surprisingly comfortable. A pony could almost forget he was wearing it once you got used to a bit of extra weight.

“What’s the catch?” I asked.

“Ah! Well, sadly...I cannot vouch for that armor’s ability to stop bullets, knives, flying hooves, bomb fragments, ballistic pie—”

“Okay, I get it. Not good against non-magical things. Why am I wearing it right now?”

Stitch waved in the direction of my unconscious librarian where he lay on the examination table. “You may keep it, if you like. I think it might extend your life considerably should you come up against unicorns or other magic users. As to your question, any good experiment eliminates as many variables as possible! I know I shan’t convince you to abandon your weapon and you’ll want to be here to see this, but if you slide your pistol inside, that vest should stop most influences it might cause, along with protecting your heart.”

Pulling my revolver off my leg, I tucked it into the vest, then stood to one side as Slip Stitch pulled a pair of ridiculous goggles down over his eyes. Thalassemia offered me a similar pair, her whiskers twitching with anticipation. I put them on my muzzle and found the world cast in a very slightly blue tinge.

“Now, then! Detective, if you don’t mind standing to one side, we have a bit of work to do here,” Stitch directed, and I backed up almost to the doors as he and his assistant went about the vast banks of machines, flipping switches, plugging plugs into different sockets, and generally doing all the most exciting elements of science which I’d never been smart enough to get to.

After several minutes, Thalassemia hopped into the giant barrel that was attached to the wall. It rocked back and forth a little, but she got herself stabilized and shucked her labcoat, bracing herself on all fours, waiting patiently for some signal from the coroner. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her without her labcoat before. It was a strange, slightly lewd feeling since she was always so careful to keep the coat on. Somehow, it made her less alien, and without it one had the strange cognitive dissonance that comes with being in the presence of any truly massive rodent.

Slip Stitch was hovering over Limerence, attaching strange things to his horn that looked like jump-leads for the Night Trotter’s spell core.

I put my leg in the air for attention. “Stitch? I’ve got a silly question here. Do you mind?”

Pulling his head out of a box with the words ‘Quantum Dilator’ drawn on the side in crayon, Stitch cocked an ear in my direction. “Yes, Detective?”

“Are we about to cook my librarian?”

“Yes, Detective! Shouldn’t be long now!”

“Oh...um...alright…carry on, then.”

A few minutes later, Slip Stitch stepped away from his machines with a broad smile on his face. His hair, ever a mess, seemed even wilder, spreading out like a mighty thunderhead glued to his skull. The ever present mania in his eyes had grown into a full blown attack. He seemed unable to keep still, his back hooves doing a little dance of their own as he trotted over to stand beside a giant switch on the wall.

“Now then, Detective! As you may or may not be aware, unicorns use their horns as a focus for a series of magical channels that draw energies from the world around them, much like your lungs draw breath. Earth ponies have something similar in their hooves and Pegasi in their wings.”

“Magic 101, Stitch. What’s wrong with all these unicorns?”

“Well, insofar as I have been able to tell from the small number of autopsies I’ve been able to perform, it would appear that their leylines are no longer absorbing energy from the outside world, but rather are draining it directly from their own brains and metabolisms,” he replied, waving his hoof over Stitch. “Not enough to kill them quickly, but this condition is inevitably lethal. I could not tell you what manner of spell could cause it, however I don’t believe this was anything more than….eh...a side effect.”

I glanced at my unconscious friend, then back at the coroner. “Something coldcocking I don’t know how many—”

“A third.”

“What?”

“A third of the unicorns in the city, roughly.”

“Right...that’s...that’s an awful lot. So something is putting down a third of the unicorns and that’s a side effect?”

Stitch nodded, resting his hoof on the switch, stroking it like a lover’s leg.

“Yeees. Magnificent, no? If the spell had been any more powerful, you and I would most likely not be having this conversation. Our leylines are less sensitive than those of unicorns, but enough magic of this sort could have left a city of sleeping ghosts. Anyone without magical shielding, most likely. The most powerful of unicorns seem most severely affected, too.”

I scratched at my mane for a minute. “So why wasn’t Iris Jade put down?” I asked.

The coroner tapped his lower lip with his toe, contemplating. “I wouldn’t dare postulate on the function of our sweet Chief’s brain, Detective. Still...it’s amazing, isn’t it? All these unicorns unconscious and it is merely one tiny piece of a grander conundrum,” he replied, seemingly drifting off into thought. After a moment, he snapped out of it and spun around. “Thalassemia! You may begin!”

Thalassemia wiggled her hips and dug her paws into the carpeted interior of the barrel. After a moment it began to turn and a cheerful smile broke out on her pointed muzzle as she began to run in place, the barrel spinning around her. A spark spat from a pair of forks tied together with a bit of string above the machine, followed by an arc of electricity that leapt up to the ceiling and spread out in glowing streamers through wires embedded in the wall.

“Ah, nothing like the smell of experimentation in the morning!” Stitch declared, then poked a button on the wall. Music started up from hidden speakers, blaring out a symphonic sound mixed with a techno beat that I could feel in my stomach. Steel-string guitars added a counterpoint that could have shredded skin if it were just a few decibels louder. Images of angelic figures sweeping in to do battle with demons filled my head.

“Is that really necessary?” I shouted to be heard over the rattle of the hamster in the dynamo and the music, bracing myself on the wall.

“Yes! One mustn’t do science without the proper accompaniment!”

As the machines began to spool up, the air seemed to grow somehow heavier, like the power from the dynamo was trickling into the space itself. I swallowed, clutching the magic-proofed vest to my chest a bit more tightly, hoping Stitch’s pitch about its protective abilities wasn’t overblown.

Grabbing the switch in both hooves, the coroner gave me a look that was two parts psychosis and one part ecstatic lust. I wasn’t inclined to look between his back legs, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had an erection.

I had the irrational urge to find a bomb shelter somewhere on the other side of the planet, but it was too late. To the pounding of mighty drums and the thump of a bass that felt like a god trying to escape my skull, the coroner yanked down on the switch.

Power surged through the machines, sending every needle I could see on the various readouts spinning. An explosion of bright blue energy burst from the point where Lim’s horn was connected to the machine and washed through the room, nearly lifting me off my hooves as I felt tingles of something unfamiliar sweep up my hooves. Despite the protection of the vest, my heart was suddenly pounding like a train engine in my chest as I danced in place, staring open muzzled at where my friend lay.

Limerence’s eyes popped open, followed by his mouth. I could see a white shine behind his pupils, which were almost the size of marbles as he arched his back, flailing at the air with all four hooves.

“Detective!” Slip Stitch shouted. “Hold him!”

I swallowed and forced myself to move, taking a cautious step forward, then another, before breaking into a run until I was beside my friend. His hooves slapped at the table, and at his body until I grabbed them in mine, pinning them to the table. Thankfully his strength was still that of a bookish unicorn without terribly much time in the field. He fought, arching his back and banging his head as light poured from his muzzle. The heat coming off his horn was enough to singe the fur on my face when it came close.

All at once, he went limp and the light vanished.

A curl of smoke rose from his mouth, ears and horn, but his frightened eyes were open wide, like a wild animal caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. I got the distinct impression he wasn’t seeing me.

“Hah! Excellent!” Stitch cackled as he stood beside his switch. Thalassemia was climbing out of the dynamo and tossing her labcoat back on.

“W-was it successful, D-Doctor?” she asked.

“Most successful! Also, theory proven I should say!”

I glanced back at him for a moment. “What theory?”

“Oh! Did I not mention?” Slip Stitch coughed, nervously for a moment, covering his muzzle. “Well, it doesn’t matter. It was—”

I gave him a look that should have peeled the skin right off his nose. “No, Stitch. Tell me. What theory?”

“Erm...well...had we channeled that amount of magic through his body if his energy channels weren’t reversed, we would probably be cleaning bits of brain out of our manes for a second time this month. Well, it would be your first time, but-”

“Don’t want to know, Stitch! I really don’t want to-”

Before I could add any of the encyclopedia worth of cuss words on the tip of my tongue, a soft croak from Limerence brought my attention back around. He was blinking his crusty eyes at me, weakly lifting one hoof in my direction. His mouth worked soundlessly and he tried to swallow several times. I leaned close and he put the leg around my neck, putting his cheek against me. I felt something warm and wet soaking into my pelt as he took in deep gasping breaths of the stale air of the lab like he hadn’t had anything so sweet in his whole life.

“I-Is this r-real?” he whispered.

“Real enough, Lim,” I replied, gently laying him back on the table. “Rest easy. You’re...well, you’re as safe as you ever are with me around.”

“Oh thank Celestia,” he moaned, his voice scratchy as he flopped onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “That...that place…” He gulped a couple of times, then began to peer around at his surroundings. Thalassemia moved to his side with a glass of water in her paws and he took it gratefully, almost drowning himself in his eagerness. As his eyes met hers, he calmly put the empty glass down beside himself and lay back again with a quiet sigh. “Mmm...that’s a new one. Helpful giant hamster. Must say, I haven’t had this particular nightmare yet. Well, at least it’s a break from the howling. I wonder when that will start again.”

“She’s real, Lim. Same as I am,” I said, quietly.

The tears streaking his cheeks were quickly drying as his gaze swiveled in my direction.

“Detective, ‘she’ is a rodent. She’s the size of a pony and she’s wearing a labcoat. I’ve awoken laying on my back in a laboratory that I’m fairly certain was featured in ‘Island of Dr. Vivisect’. The coroner is here for some reason and appears to be eating popcorn whilst wearing ridiculous three-dee glasses. Ergo, I am still asleep.”

I let my chin fall onto my chest and exhaled. “I’ll admit reality hasn’t been a kind mistress lately, but I’m afraid we’re a tad short on time, so—” Without warning, I gave him a solid whack upside the head that dislodged his spectacles from the end of his nose.

He squeaked and rolled over, tumbling off the operating table onto the floor in a heap with the sheet tangled around his rear legs. Laying there for a moment, he gradually got his hooves under himself and heaved in the general direction of ‘up’. A week laying on his back hadn’t done his muscles any favors, but Thalassemia was there to catch him before his nose hit the floor.

“Eh...thank you, Miss Hamster,” he murmured, bracing himself against her as he forced his knees to lock and raised his head. Thal reached down and picked up his glasses, hooking them behind his ears.

“Y-y-you’re we-welcome, M-M-Mister Limerence,” she stammered, her paw on his chest.

He frowned. “Talking hamster with a stutter. Mmm...Detective, are you sure I’m not asleep still?”

“Pretty sure. I can’t say as I’m a perfectly reliable source, though.” I turned to Stitch and asked, “You want to give him a once over?”

Setting aside his popcorn, Stitch trotted over to Limerence and lifted his hoof, then tugged my librarian’s watch out of his pocket. Counting off heart beats, he nodded after a moment before giving Lim a little poke in the knee that made his toe jerk. Dropping the leg, the coroner shrugged and stuffed a hoof-full of popcorn into his mouth.

“Seems fit enough. No dehydration. A bit of light muscle atrophy that’ll probably be fixed up by a few hours of exercise. If he tries to use magic, his horn will feel like it’s being char-broiled for a couple days until his magical channels recover. Granted, if my calculations were off, he might still be dead in the next few...hmmm—” Stitch checked my friend’s watch again, then looked at Limerence intently, then back at the watch. After a solid twenty seconds had passed, a pleased grin broke out on his face. “Congratulations, my boy! You dodged two bullets this morning! A bit of a shame, I suppose. I did want to see what your brain looked like after it'd been through this process. Still, I'm sure I'll have an opportunity at some point!”

Limerence carefully tugged his watch away from the coroner with his teeth and tucked it away.

“I...am feeling somewhat light headed,” he murmured, sinking onto his bottom. “Mightn’t I get a cup of tea, some information on
what’s been going on that led me to wake up in what I presume is the Morgue, and...maybe an explanation for the hamster?”

Three ponies and one hamster sat around an empty gurney, surrounded by bodies covered in stasis talismans.

The coffee service was impromptu and I was drinking out of a mug that said ‘Death is only life’s way of letting you know when to slow down’ in friendly letters down the side. Limerence held a tea-cup with a chip in it with his hooves, slurping softly. I wasn’t up to telling him about Canterlot just yet, so I’d let Thal tell her tale first before launching into that last day.

It wasn’t until I started on what’d happened to Canterlot that he finally reacted.

“This mare was there and something happened to their broadcast. They finally got it working again and...awww, I don’t know how to say this. It’s all gone, Lim. Canterlot, the mountain, the lot of it. Whatever spell knocked you and a third of the unicorns in this city for a loop wiped out the whole area. Last I saw there’s just a big expanse of grey dirt...”

Lim’s ears pinned back against his head and he quickly set down the tea. “Canterlot. Someone made the entirety of...oh. I see. Yes, I see.”

“What do you see?”

He tapped a hoof on the gurney as Thal refilled his cup. “Pardon, it’s something my father taught me to say when I am moments from panic. It was his technique and it makes it sound like he has something of a grip on even the most outlandish situations. To my knowledge, he never panicked.”

“Is it working now?” I asked.

“No,” he murmured, then picked up his tea again and stared into the bottom of the steaming cup. “Detective, the weight of energies required to destroy or move an entire city in a single blast—particularly one as heavily enchanted and fortified against such action as Canterlot—are simply beyond the scope of equine arcanists. I can’t even imagine what could do such a thing.”

“Imagination is simply a matter of distracting oneself from reality long enough to see bigger pictures, my friend,” Stitch put in, his eyes glittering with interest. “I am curious. You mentioned when you woke a ‘howling’?”

Limerence shuddered and his mane seemed to stand on end. “Something in my dreams, I suspect. A voice out of darkness, and strange lights—”

“And a city made of teeth?” I finished.

His muzzle clicked shut for a moment as he regarded me suspiciously. “Y-yes, actually. How did you know?”

“Funny thing,” I murmured. “I usually forget it by the time I’m awake. I’ve been having that dream for months now. Juniper seemed a bit surprised, too.”

Limerence gave me a look I was getting far too used to. “Your...dead...partner seemed surprised?”

“Yep. Leaving aside that he’s dead, he’s been...well, if not helpful, then at least comforting during the bleaker moments. He seems to think something is keeping Detrot off some kind of ‘cosmic playing field’ for the moment. I don’t really understand what he was going on about, but it sounded bad...and it comes with dreams.” I squirmed in my seat and added, “Nasty, nasty dreams.”

Thalassemia rested a paw on my shoulder and I patted it lightly, feeling my shoulders unwind a little. A big hamster is nothing if not comfortable to rest against; particularly one who used the same shampoo as my mother used to.

“Most intriguing, Detective.” Stitch hummed to himself for a moment. “Well, it is something of a pity then that my little experiment shan’t be useable on everypony who is unconscious upstairs. I would dearly like to spare them such horrors.”

“Why not? Seemed to pep him right up,” I said, gesturing at Limerence.

“Oh, I didn’t say it wouldn’t be useful, and we may have saved many lives here today. The elderly and infirm may have to stay where they are. The best I can hope for without the resources of the Academy on my side, however, is to get a fair few of those who are unconscious back on their hooves. It will at least stabilize our situation such that we aren’t running out of resources.”

Thalassemia let out a little whimper. “I-I’m not going to h-have to do all the r-r-running, am I?” she asked.

Slip Stitch rolled his eyes. “Of course not, my dear. We’ll rope in volunteers. I learned quite a bit from this—at least, I will have once I get to look at our data—and I believe I can tune the voltage so it doesn’t have such an...heh...animated...effect on future participants.”

“Alright, that’s...one less worry, I guess. There’s still an awful lot of ponies who’ll die if we can’t fix the situation, though. Tell me about what’s going on Uptown,” I said.

“Eh...I fear there isn’t much worth the telling, Detective. I haven’t been able to get access to Uptown, nor the entire area surrounding it for almost four days. The Castle is on the other side, but Iris Jade has more or less stopped sending out patrols into the rest of the city.” His expression dimmed slightly. “I have no less than twenty police officers in my freezers…”

I gulped, audibly. “Twenty?!”

Stitch got to his hooves, trotting over to the row of meat-lockers and resting his toe against them. “Yes. Some were victims of violence as one might expect. One, an angry mob. Another crashed his vehicle. Another died of a heart attack during the Darkening. Nothing inexplicable there. It was...well, the rest...” He trailed off.

Rubbing my temples, I said, “Strange wounds and throats torn out?”

He nodded. “I thought you might have seen something of the sort. The bodies were mutilated. Crushed and torn to pieces; all very theatrical. The same as quite a few of the mobsters I’ve taken in recently. Deaths via something they call ‘Biters’. I’ve been icing the corpses as fast as they come in. The big freezer downstairs is almost a third full.”

“I...ugh...I don’t want to live here when this is all over,” I muttered. “I’ll be going to funerals until the sun goes out.”

Stitch gave me one of his sad smiles, indicating the rows of cold lockers.

“Detective, the sun has ‘gone out’.”

“Yes, I did mean to ask something about that a moment ago,” Limerence stated, hopping in before the silence could become awkward. “What happened to the eclipse? Have the solar cycles continued?”

“No. The eclipse is still going on...and as far as anypony has gotten out of Detrot, it’s covering the entire region,” Stitch replied, settling back beside us with his tea-cup that looked like a rubber-ducky.

“That’s...impossible,” Lim replied. “Even the widest eclipse couldn’t cover all of Equestria. Not based on the accounts I’ve read!”

“Yeah, well, this wasn’t exactly a planned-for event,” I grumbled. “Stitch, I need to go get Swift from Sky Town. I’m assuming she’s still there, since nopony has made any big public announcement about the capture of a wanted felon to try to lure me in.”

Stitch chewed on his lip. “Many parts of the city have become their own little fiefdoms, cut off from the rest. Power and water still flow, but I couldn’t tell you why. It’s as though somepony is...down in the sewers, keeping it all running.”

Smoothing my new anti-magic armor with one toe, I considered that for a brief moment, then replied, “I’ve got a pretty solid idea who is taking care of that and they’re trustworthy. Crazy, but trustworthy. I don’t guess you’ve got some idea of how to get to Sky Town, do you?”

He patted his labcoat and the keys of Big Betty jingled. “Not a problem, Detective. Many of the groups holding points between here and Skytown may be generally hostile to outsiders, but I hear whisperings of your reputation everywhere, believe it or not. Some Jewelers with whom I am acquainted seemed to believe you’d somehow made several of their number think they’d been skinned with a glare and a sharp word. That said, the griffins handle their own dead for the most part. I can get you there. I can’t get you in.”

“Stitch, I know this is a stupid question but, how are you on gossiping terms with Jewelers?” I asked.

Slip Stitch chewed a tea-cake as he replied, “Everypony needs a safe place to bury their kin and gather when one of their loved ones has died. My only condition has always been that when you celebrate the dead with me, you leave their deaths at the door when you leave.”

“Are you the one who kept the gangers from going into open warfare last week?” Limerence inquired, tilting his head back so his glasses slid further up his nose.

“Regarding the alleged killings of their leadership by unknown assassins with sharp teeth? Yes. There were a few isolated incidents, but they took my word for the most part that both sides were experiencing these deaths. I do wish I’d gotten to examine your partner's muzzle more completely. I suspect they may have a relation of some kind. Sad to say, I have been...busy, this last week. Few of those below have gotten their parties and without my intervention the gangs of Detrot seem bent on making me run out of confetti and napkins.”

On the way out to Big Betty, I filled Limerence in as best I could with what other information I had and he seemed to take it well. He didn’t scream or curl up in a ball. That was good.

He did ask if he might borrow my gun so he could shoot himself in the hoof, just to be certain he wasn’t still dreaming, but I made sure it wasn’t loaded before I gave it to him.

That said, he did pull the trigger.

Mags was waiting for us by the truck just out front of the Morgue with a little gaggle of other young creatures. She was wearing some kind of goofy red cape with a foal printed on the hip. I’d had a similar one as a kid, though I couldn’t remember what, exactly, it’d been for.

“Har’dy! Har’dy!” she squeaked, darting up and throwing herself up onto my back, chattering like a chipmunk. “Look see! Look see! Now I be Crusader like you!”

I snorted and ruffled her mane of feathers. “A cape makes you a Crusader, huh? I should try that. You have fun?” She nodded and threw her forelegs around my neck as Slip Stitch waded in amongst the children, giving them hugs and passing out candy from his pockets.

“Aye! I be telling them about you! How you be a ro’bot who runs off a plug and how you be saving me from the monsters!”

I cringed internally, but managed to keep my smile from faltering. “I’m not a robot, kiddo, but I suppose I can’t argue the rest of that. We’ve got to head out to Sky Town to see some other griffins. You want to stay here or ride along?”

Mags gave me a critical look. “You be not leaving me with other griffins iffen I goes, yeah?”

I want to say I wasn’t even considering such a thing, but the thought had crossed my mind. She was a sweet-heart when she wasn’t destroying public tax records or poking around ancient artifacts or eating so much ice-cream she took over the bathroom for forty minutes, but the fact that she was a child hadn’t left my mind completely.

What Slip Stitch had said was still simmering in the back of my head, though. Mags had climbed into my bunk and hugged me all night sometimes when she was having nightmares. I’d found her snuggling my hat more than a couple times when I was busy. She’d never cried, though. Not so much as a single tear, even when she was scared.

“No, kiddo. You and me are sticking together for awhile yet,” I murmured. “At least until you decide otherwise.”

Mags didn’t reply, but instead flipped onto her back, her wings spread out for balance as she wrapped herself in her new cloak and went about her favorite activity: napping in an inconvenient spot.

“Crazy days in Detrot, my friends. Gypsy is here to bring you as much up-to-date information as I can get from what’s left of our city.”

I leaned back in the passenger seat of the giant ice truck, putting my hooves up on the dash as Limerence sat between Stitch and I. Mags was huddled in a lump under my coat with just her head sticking out of the collar, snoring in my ear. We were just leaving the Morgue, heading in the general direction of Sky Town.

I’d tried a half dozen stations, finding static on almost every one of them. Somepony was either jamming most of the transmissions or two thirds of the DJ’s in town hadn’t shown up to work, but when I heard Gypsy’s sultry voice I relaxed.

“Now then my ponies, since the Darkening I know things have all gotten a bit strange, but I’ll always be here, spinning the tunes and keeping you informed as best I can.”

“First thing’s first, from the desk of Chief Iris Jade—and don’t ask me who I had to fellate to get this—due to sightings of presumedly hostile dragons in the area, anypony who lives on the far east side should heavily consider moving closer to midtown. Avoid the areas surrounding Centralia Street up to Charter Place. The fires there have been contained, but the explosion at the gem factory has scattered magical contamination over a four block radius.”

“Reports keep coming in of intermittent fighting and violence, but things seem to have calmed down significantly since the fourth day. It’s not good out there, ladies and gentlecolts. For safety’s sake, don’t go anywhere alone or unarmed. If you have family in other districts of the city, leave them be. Most of the city phone lines to the west side appear to be down and the Heights is largely cut off since the telephone exchange in the third ward burned. We’ve gotten a few notices of large sections of that side of town being deserted, though it does seem an armed camp of some kind has sprung up surrounding a twelve block square nearer to the Bay of Unity. Even the Black Coats are steering clear.”

I glanced over at Stitch. “Who are the Black Coats?”

“Hmmm? Oh, that’s the term that a few of the more rebellious characters in the city have chosen for the P.A.C.T. patrols that seem to be moving about. For the most part they keep to Uptown and the area around the P.A.C.T. Compound or the Shield headquarters, but now and then we’ll get groups coming to do...something.”

“Something?” Limerence prompted.

“Oh, the usual foolishness for any set of steel-hooved idiots with a breath of authority,” he replied, waving a dismissive hoof at the sky outside. “They make demands. They’ve busted down a few doors and apparently carted off some ponies; a mare calling for Snifter’s ouster on street corners with a megaphone, some fool distributing conspiracy papers, and so on. They peppered the Morgue with those silly fliers offering bits for the capture of various individuals. Most of what I hear is hearsay, rumor, and lies. I really am too busy for it.”

I sat back and turned my attention back to the radio.

“—not much to hear out of Uptown. Barricades and interdiction fields around the largest neighborhoods are making it tough to get anything in to take a look around and the locals seem to be under the impression there are marauding hordes out here. Not that there haven’t been a few...hundred cases of minor...alright, major looting, but the richies seem happy to just sit up there with most of the food depots and toast themselves while the rest of the city goes straight to Tartarus. Thankfully, the coffee is plentiful and yours truly is safe enough for the moment.

A soft tune faded in from the background. It was a familiar song from my youth that I’d spent far too many summer evenings bopping along to during those glorious years before the blood and violence. I found myself wearing a smile, even though I couldn’t have told you how it’d gotten there.

“Now, you know how I like to end lately. This goes out to our hero. You know him. You love him. Detective Hard Boiled, the Bulldog of Detrot, he who will never stop no matter what is thrown at him! We know he’s been trawling the darkness for answer! Wherever you are, your city needs you! If you’ve got any words for the people, you know where to reach me. Same time, same channel. This is your Queen of the Signal, Gypsy, all night, all day.”

I reached out and carefully lowered the volume. “Thanks for that, you damn record-churning witch...” I grumbled.

“She is right, isn’t she? Your actions have been somewhat heroic.” Stitch chuckled good naturedly.

I gave him a reproachful look.

“No. My actions have been pragmatic and frequently suicidal. I get enough of that crap from Swift, without some wacky DJ adding to it by making me sound like some sort of folk hero. Folk heroes die screaming and on fire more often than not.”

“True, but I would never underestimate the power of a reputation, Detective,” he replied.

Ahead, we were coming to the end of the ‘safe’ zone around the Morgue. Six ponies were manning a makeshift blockade made of bits
of sawed off plywood propped nailed into something that might have been called a fence if you had poor eyesight. They waved us forward and a young unicorn, barely into her teens, with a pair of machetes strapped to her sides leaned up. She swaggered up to the door and reared up, resting her hooves on it as Stitch rolled the window down.

“Where you headed, Doc?” she asked, pleasantly, smacking on some bubble-gum.

“I’m delivering my friends here to Sky Town, Tulip,” he replied, giving his head a little tilt in my direction.

Tulip wrinkled her nose. “You’re usually bringing ponies in. Why would you—”

I leaned over to where she could see me and tipped my hat.

The little mare’s eyes almost popped right out of her skull as she stumbled back onto the curb. “D-D-Dead Heart…”

“You mind letting us through?” I asked, smiling. “Got places to be.”

I thought for a moment Tulip was going to ask for my autograph. Instead, she shook herself and her horn lit up, yanking the plywood gate open. Several of her fellow guards were quickly approaching and one of the pegasi took off, peering in at me. She quickly waved them back towards their positions.

When her gaze turned back to me, it was confused and a little pleading.

“Miss Gypsy keeps saying you’re going to find the Princesses. Are you really going to find out what happened to them?” she asked, plaintively. Gone was the tough-mare gate guard. She was just a scared little girl keeping her home safe. I had to fight the urge to get out of the truck, take those machetes from her and send her to her room. Nopony that young should be on the front lines of any sort of conflict.

I forced down a guilty lump in my throat and answered, “I’m on it. I promise, whatever happens, I’m going to figure this out. Keep these ponies safe. I’ll be back this way at some point and I’ll need the Morgue still standing. Clear?”

She gave me the clumsiest of salutes and a goofy grin spread across her face. “Yes, Sir, Detective Boiled!”

“You can call me Hardy, sweet heart,” I said, tipping my hat.

A blush sprung up on her cheeks and she ducked her head, darting back to her companions with an extra bounce in her hips. Slip Stitch put his hoof down and we tooled on through the checkpoint as I settle back, laughing to myself.

“You know you didn’t help your desire to avoid a reputation just now, right?” Stitch chuckled.

I shot him a skeptical look. “I gave her a little hope. She might sleep better tonight. I didn’t do anything particular.”

“For you, that might have been nothing, Detective,” Limerence said, casually wiping the face of his pocket watch with a kerchief held on his toe. “Everypony she speaks to tonight will hear of that little exchange.”

“They’ll tell their friends ‘Detective Dead Heart’ is on the case,” Slip Stitch added, reaching over to stroke Mag’s cheek as she snoozed on my back, “The Bulldog who never lets go of a bone won’t rest until the Princesses are safe. She’ll tell that story twenty times before the day is out, sitting around the fire or her dining room table. It will give many more people hope than I think you realize...”

I gulped and felt a tremor in my back legs.

“I’m going to spend a month drunk when this is over. There better be booze on the other side, too, or I’m going to be pissed.”

Author's Note

Sorry if I'm slow this week guys. My grandmother died a couple days ago. I wasn't especially close to her, but she was a big part of my childhood and it hit me sorta hard. I'll do my best to keep us on schedule.

Act 3 Chapter 16 : Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Two months in the deep frier and I was finally getting to tell somepony everything. How, though? Some part of me really wanted to edit for content, namely because there was a solid chance she’d think I was nuts if I didn’t, but so much of my story relied on those moments of mad intuition or crazed coincidence that I couldn’t really figure out how to pare the whole mess down.

So I did the worst thing a pony can when confronted with godlike forces demanding to know just what you’ve been up to that’s been shaking the fundament.

I told her the truth.

Twilight had her notepad and a glass of water ready. I wrapped my coat around myself like a blanket, watching the fire as I tried to think where to start.

“It was the day Swift and I first hooked up at the Detrot Police Department. As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled to have a partner who was half my size and fresh out of the Academy, but she’s just about the most persistent person I’ve ever met when she wants to be. My last partner...died...some years ago.”

The alicorn scratched her chin, and then a yellow file folder popped into being beside her and flicked open. “Juniper Shores during the Stained Glass case. I had some of my agents on that one, too.”

I scowled at her. “Much good they did.”

She shifted her weight and set the file down. “My resources are nothing like they were during the war, Detective. I’m just a pony, mostly. A teacher. But please, go on.”

As certain as I was that she was a whole lot more than just a teacher, I decided to let that slide for the moment.

“It was about to rain, but Swift and I arrived at the crime scene just in time. It was one of the stranger things I’d seen in my time on the force. Maybe not the strangest...in fact, probably not even in the top ten, but still pretty odd. The victim’s body was grey, the color of ashes. She was lying there in an alley outside a swanky hotel.”

“I’ve known a...well, one grey pony besides you. You’re more...dusky. What was special about her color?” Twilight asked.

I shook my head. “Her autopsy showed she was grey on the inside, too. Grey organs. Grey blood. We didn’t find out until a while later that somepony had practiced zebra necromancy on her. Stripped her soul right out of her body...”

She half rose from her seat, her wings flying open. “Necromancy?!”

I held out a hoof for her to sit down. “If you think that’s exciting, you’re not going to make it very far with this tale. Trust me. Necromancy is the least of what’s been going on. Ruby had been drugged with a ritual concoction that somehow pushed her soul into her horn, and then they cut it off with some kind of sharp blade. No idea how she still managed to get to the roof to throw herself off. That became a running theme of my next few weeks...”

“She really ate the meat?”

“Oh yeah. Wolfed it down. Speaking of wolfing, there’s something I want you to take a look at once Swift gets inside. It’s not worth describing right now. Better you actually get a look. Anyway, we searched the building. The girl was street pizza. Pretty easy to figure she jumped off the roof.”

“Swift recognized the medal. It was some kind of amulet the Vivarium gives to their employees. It’s a whorehouse...pardon, ‘escort service’, in the part of Detrot called The Heights. Stella is the name of the guy who runs the place. He’s a sea serpent. Would have been nice if my driver let me know that particular detail before our meeting.”

“I’m aware of Stella. He provided invaluable intelligence during the war,” Twilight affirmed.

“That dragon might like his lipstick thick and his stallions easy, but he plays the game better than anyone I know. He’s been running this brothel for the children of the children of his prostitutes since the founding of Detrot. Some of his customers were pretty high class characters in and around the city, but I was more surprised to discover Swift had relations there.”

“Relations...as in she was a customer?” she asked, casually plucking a loose feather from one wing and flicking it toward the fire.

“Ah! Hah, no. That’d be a sight. Relations, as in her mother and grandmare both worked there. Her grandmare, After Glow, is a real character. You’d like her.”

“I don’t doubt it. Mayfly keeps begging for a vacation in Detrot.”

“It’s her kind of place, no doubt. As things developed, the case and the Vivarium were fairly tightly intertwined. Somepony was stealing candid information about the customer base, but nopony could figure out how. They were fairly sure it was a mob boss by the name of King Cosmo trying to shove in on their territory.”

“I’ve heard of Cosmo. Real name ‘Jingle Jangle’,” she murmured. “His was one of several criminal organizations we were monitoring in Detrot over the last few months. Well...trying to monitor. It’s been getting harder and harder. I’ve lost contact with several ponies who’re...usually pretty reliable.”

“That’s a story I’ve heard before. We eventually discovered one of the Vivarium’s own employees snatching data straight from their security system and funneling it to King Cosmo. I got Ruby’s address from Stella, and there we went. It was deep in an area of Detrot called The Skids. Not a nice place.”

Twilight was sipping from a cup of tea that one of Mayfly’s drones had delivered a few minutes ago. The drone had brought a box of doughnuts along as well, and I was munching on one of those, covering my cushion in crumbs.

“So, these ‘Aroyos’ just let you through?” she wanted to know.

I shook my head, setting the doughnut to one side. “It took a bit of convincing. Juniper Shores and I had done them a favor some years back. They remember their debts. Once we reached Ruby’s apartment, I found this diary hidden in a special drawer inside her curio.” I laid a hoof on it. Her horn lit up, but I pinned the book down before she could lift it off the pillow. “Sorry, that stays with me.”

“I...just want to examine it, Detective,” she murmured.

“Your word.”

“What?”

“I want your word that this book comes back to my hooves. Even if you decide to put me in a hole in the ground once this story is over, you promise to give me back this book.”

She looked a bit hurt. “Do you still not trust me? I haven’t hurt you or anything.”

“And that’s a step. You’ve also given me no reason to trust you, yet, but I’m doing it. Some things require something more. So give me your word.”

“I...I promise. I’ll make sure that the book goes back to you no matter what.”

I removed my hoof from the diary, and she lifted it over, examining the cover. With a spark of magic, she popped open the lock. It would have taken Tome’s people days to get into that book, and it took her less than a minute. Alicorns, whatever else they might be, are scary customers.

“Hmmm...that’s some kind of spell on the pages. Layers and layers of masking spells, too. It looks like this was only meant to be read by one pony. A different pony than whoever laid the lock spells. How did you read it?” she asked.

“I was that one pony,” I replied with a helpless little shrug.

Twilight reached up with one wing and scratched a spot behind her ear. “Wait...I’m confused. Did you know Ruby Blue?”

“I hadn’t heard her name until I found her diary. Up to that point, she’d been using aliases. I couldn’t even get into it until I found Ruby’s sister who’d come to the city looking for her. That...that wasn’t until a while later.”

“That...errr...you’re saying this pony you’d never met and never heard of locked her diary with a magic that could only be broken by you?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah. Me and her sister. We haven't figured out how she pulled this particular trick and trust me, that wasn’t the most irritating part of this mystery, either. We’ll get to that, though. We were at Ruby’s, and I was ambushed by the biggest, meanest bastard you ever saw. Thankfully, size is no matter to Swift.”

“Yeees, I read about your partner’s martial skills when I was digging through her file,” she mused. “She really beat a cockatrice with her bare hooves and wings?”

“Cross my heart, hope to fly. I saw the article. If you can believe it, she’s the least scary pony in her family. That does raise a question, though. What do your ‘files’ say about me?”

Her lips twitched into a smile made of pure, 100% cryptic bull-hockey.

“That you’re a better pony than you think you are,” she replied. “Go ahead, I’m still listening.”

“We caught Svelte in the act. She was a slippery bugger if ever there was one. Thankfully, most unicorns have some difficulty casting spells when they don’t have eardrums.”

Twilight rested her chin on the back of one foreleg. “You asked her who she was working for?”

“She was pretty cooperative, particularly when it came out that she wasn’t working of her own volition. We knew, by this point, that the King of Ace was behind the situation at the Vivarium. He wasn’t the puppet master, though. Our enemies have some type of high powered magical tracking spell called ‘The Scry’. They drug you with it, then can find you anywhere you go.”

“Hmmm...not one I’m familiar with, I’m afraid,” Twilight murmured. “There have been a million tracking spells. I made a few of them myself. We can look in the library later.”

I continued, “Svelte started off hunting for blackmail material, but somepony out there put a bounty on Ruby Blue, and King Cosmo was looking to collect. He redirected her attentions to that. Thankfully, after we caught her, she was able to point us at a ledger in a safe in Cosmo’s office that he used to collect blackmail material; lots of Detrot’s dirty secrets.”

The Princess started to open her muzzle, but I shut her down quickly.

“Sorry. That ledger is somewhere nopony is getting it. That includes nosey alicorns.”

She huffed and sat back down, giving me a well-practiced pouty face.

“I guess it wasn’t my best plan, but it was a plan. We showed up at Cosmo’s casino, basically threw ourselves at his hooves, gave him the diary, and begged for a bribe. The book was bugged, as were we.”

“That’s...that’s a really stupid plan. Still, it worked, right?” Twilight asked.

“For certain values of ‘worked’, yeah, it did. We didn’t die, and we managed to get a tracking bug into his safe and telephone. The diary was a buyoff not to kill us, and he immediately called whoever he was working for once we left. That’s how we found out about the existence of the Scry. He’d dosed me with it. Thankfully, the Scry doesn’t seem to trump my trump card. It was still a pretty spectacularly dumb way to go about things.”

“I’ve discovered, in my time, that that is sometimes the only sort of plan that works.” She squinted at me, blowing her flowing mane out of her eyes. “What is your ‘trump card’? And what sort of magic bug would survive a trip through the sort of wards a mob boss is likely to put around his office?”

“Eh...well, I guess this particular cat isn’t going back in his sack anytime soon. I’ll tell you how I’m dodging tracking spells in a minute, but this first.”

I fished out the bottle with the ladybug from one of my inside pockets, holding it up for her to examine. Twilight’s magic surrounded the container and its prisoner, and she pulled it close so she could peer at the trapped creature

“Oh! Is...is that a Ladybug, Detective?! Gosh, I’d...I’d almost forgotten about them!” she squealed, clapping her front hooves together as the creature tried to make itself as small as possible in the far corner of the bottle. “Did you know I made these?”

“No kidding? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised an alicorn would take an interest in creating life.”

Before I could stop her, she popped the cork. The tiny insect instantly zipped out and made for the door only to be snatched in mid-air by a magical glow. Realizing escape was unlikely, it slumped in her telekinetic grasp, sullenly floating back to hang in front of her, buzzing its wings now and then. “They’re so cute, aren’t they? Parasprite genetics mixed with a heap of other things. Too bad about the hivemind personality...”

I frowned, then offered the ladybug my hoof. The Princess released it, and the little creature flew over and set down on my toe, shivering fearfully as it cast what I took to be ugly looks at Twilight. “Clarify this for me. What does the Princess of Friendship need with an enchanted surveillance creature?”

“Oh, gosh...that’s hard to answer.” She hesitated, then stuck her pen in the side of her muzzle where she could chew on the tip. “I mean, it’s easy to answer, but you’re probably going to think less of me if I do...”

I ran a hoof through my disheveled mane, letting the ladybug hide itself in my fur as I exhaled a calming breath. “Look, Princess...You and I are probably the only two ponies in the world right now on the side of ‘good’ with an inkling of what is actually going on under the surface of Equestria. If your life has been anything like mine, you watched friends die while trying to save every life you possibly could. That meant doing some things that only let you salve your conscience with the knowledge that other people are still alive to hate you.”

Twilight’s eyes gradually unfocused, and she stared off into the distance. A lonely tear crept into the corner of her eye, then made its way down her cheek until it dripped off her chin. She caught it before it hit the pillow, levitating the tiny droplet on a thin, circular magical shield.

“You’re more right than you can possibly know, Detective,” she said, after a pause.

“If we’re going to work together, you might have to tell me.”

For a second, I thought she was going to, but then she flicked the tear away and picked up her pen again. “Lets finish with you first. You were telling me about King Cosmo.”

“Poor mad bastard was lying there beside his wife’s skeleton.”

Twilight gasped, dropping her pen. It clinked against the crystal floor, and she quickly snapped it up again.

“What...what was King Cosmo trying to do?!” she asked.

“So far as we can tell, he wanted to rebuild his family. Don’t ask me how he was going to go about that. His brother and mother were both dead, victims of an especially unscrupulous zebra shaman. That wasn’t the worst of what we found, though.”

“How can that possibly not be the worst?!” she exclaimed. I casually ran my hoof around the pouch on my chest. Her eyes were drawn to the spot, and she squinted at it. “Is that a zipper growing out of your skin?”

“It is.”

“And...and why is there a zipper growing out of your skin?”

“I suspect you’re not going to believe me, but...we found a heart in a box in a secret drawer the basement. A living, magic-powered heart, still beating. It was inside a velvet-lined case alongside King Cosmo’s ledger; it was his dead brother’s enchanted transplant heart, stolen from the boy’s grave.”

Twilight took a moment to put two and two together. When she did, her pupils shrank to dots, and her horn lit up. A flash of magic shot out, running over my body with a sensation like a warm spray of water. I winced at a tingle as her spell touched my chest.

“D-d-detective! Y-y-you have a c-changeling’s heart in your sternum!” she stammered, backing up to the edge of her pillow.

“Really? You’re kidding. I hadn’t noticed,” I replied in a dry monotone.

Her expression soured, and she tossed one of the nearby throw pillows in my general direction. I caught it in my teeth, then wrapped my forelegs around it and got comfortable again.

“You’ll be explaining how that happened, right?” she growled, with all the menace of a displeased bunny. For all I knew, she could blast me into orbit, but something about the Princess put me at ease. “That’s...that’s the heart from the box, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “We took Cosmo’s blackmail ledger, and I took the heart. I could never have told you why, but I’m glad I did.”

“I...hmmm. This...basement you found all of this in. What was it like?” Twilight asked.

“Strange. Not quite a serial killer lair, but definitely not your average office. King Cosmo had been doing some kind of…research into good things happening to bad ponies. This involved ponies who had somehow suddenly managed to fulfill their wildest dreams of power and excess. Once we’d escaped, Taxi and Swift were able to dig through the ledger. They discovered where exactly Cosmo was managing to get all of his Ace. He was also decoding all the information Svelte sent him in the same place.”

“The school was...a madhouse. Heavy magical contamination had animated all of the school supplies. They were prone to attacking anypony not wearing a school hall pass.”

Twilight blinked a couple of times, then burst out laughing. “Hah! Oh, Detective, that’s a good one! School hall passes! Teeheehee!” She let her giggles die down after a moment when I didn’t so much as crack a smile. “You’re...you were joking, right?”

“You asked for honest, so I’m giving you honest.”

“But...but that’s...that doesn’t make any sense!” she complained, throwing up her hooves.

“I didn’t say my story was going to make sense. There’s a part of me that thinks this whole mess is just a hallucination brought on by my own slow descent into madness. After all...” I picked up my teacup and took a little sip. It was delicious. “I’m sitting here having tea with a Princess in her magical crystal castle.”

Twilight’s brow wrinkled, and I had the feeling she was actually about to try to convince me she wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” I chuckled, waving a hoof at her before steam could start pouring from her ears. “I’ve had plenty of hallucinations lately, and I’m getting pretty good at telling what’s real and what isn’t.”

“That’s not making me feel any better, Detective! It’s just making you sound crazy!”

“Oh, I’m crazy. No doubts there. Crazy has worked so far, though. Look at Stella’s people who volunteered to come with us. We had a maniacal griffin hen who barely came up to my knees, a pair of hyper-masochistic hoofball players, and a zebra so fast she might as well have teleported from place to place. All of them out of their minds, but...we walked out of there alive and finished all of our objectives.”

Twilight rubbed one of her slim eyebrows. “These were prostitutes?”

“S’right. Stella’s people are multi-talented.”

“And...this is...alongside Sweet Shine and Miss Cuddles?”

“Yeah. Cosmo had a bunch of chemists he was keeping down in the school auditorium. He’d turned the whole mess into a giant laboratory for churning out Ace and decrypting the information Svelte was pushing through to him from the Vivarium. Unlikely as it might sound, we managed to get through it with zero casualties.”

“Zero? How many guards were there?”

“More than a few. Back then, my driver was carting around this insane weapon called a P.E.A.C.E. cannon-”

“Oh! Ooh, ooh, ooh!” Twilight stomped her hooves on her pillow, excitedly, her former distress forgotten. “I remember those! Gosh, those were some of my favorite things in the whole war! A friend of mine made a round that could make a dragon breathe confetti instead of fire!”

“Con...confetti?”

“Yes! Nothing makes a dragon run away from a battle faster than breathing a mouthful of slightly ice-cream-flavored paper!”

I let out a loud snort. “Stella would kill me, but I’m tempted to slip one of those into his makeup. At any rate, we had a sleeping gas round that took out most of our opponents. The rest went down to a mixture of minor violence and luck, but in the end we had Cosmo’s drug lab and no dead bodies. We freed the chemists, and the magical contamination took care of the lab itself.”

“And...the information from the Vivarium?”

I mimed stepping on the information crystal. “Destroyed. After that, it was time to take on Cosmo himself.”

“I expected a fight or at least a disagreement. Cosmo was...drunk. His office was a mess, and the big bastard was lying there on the floor, crying like a foal. He was ranting, mostly incoherent garbage. Something about the people he was working for. We’d taken everything from him. His business. His brother’s heart. His family. I...don’t know. My memory is sort of vague. ”

“Your...your memory is vague?” Twilight’s lips dipped, and she pushed herself up. “How can your memory be vague? He might have told us who he was working for or had some sort of clue we could use!”

I shrugged, kicking my rear legs out as I turned my hips towards the warm fire. “Taxi’s memory is probably better than mine, but...I doubt it. She’d have told me before now if he said anything meaningful.”

“Why would she need to tell you? You were there!” the alicorn grumped, smacking her pillow. “This isn’t the kind of thing that usually just slips a pony’s mind!”

“Hey, two minutes after we walked in, I was on my way to the afterlife!” I snapped, half rising from my seat. “If the details are a tad vague, it’s because I had a severe shortage of blood to my brain! Do you want me to finish, or not?”

Twilight shrank down in her seat, and then her eyes hardened as she considered my words. “You’re saying you were injured?”

Sitting up, I tugged the zipper on my chest open, revealing the plug welded into my flesh. “I’m telling you what I know, alright Princess? There was a sniper sitting outside on a cloud. One of Cosmo’s lackies - a little scum sucker named Reginald Bari - was actually a plant by whoever was controlling the King of Ace. He was positioned to take over if Cosmo fell apart...and he told them we were coming. They sent a sniper. The sniper killed Cosmo...then he killed me. Blew my heart to bits!”

Her expression softened, and she crawled off her pillow. A pair of spectacles appeared, then dropped onto her nose as she inspected my chest. “B-but...recovery from a wound like this...even in a hospital with a hundred kinds of magic keeping you alive...it would take months! Where did they take you to heal?”

As she reached out to touch the plug, I pushed her hoof away. “Did you hear me? I was dead. D-E-A-D. I bled out in about twenty seconds.”

Twilight backed up a step and said, “That...that doesn’t make any sense! You’re sitting here, aren’t you?”

Finding myself suddenly restless, I rose from my cushion and trotted over to the fire, setting myself down in front of it to warm my hooves. I didn’t want to look at her just then. She was so pretty, and whatever my paranoia might be telling me I should be doing, I could tell she cared. She cared about me, just because I was alive and hurt. I couldn’t hide the hurt from her, either. Maybe there’s something in alicorns that just cares for those who’re in pain. Maybe part of what it takes to be an alicorn is that big, all-powerful caring.

Compassion like that doesn’t come along very often in this world.

“I’m...I’m sitting here, Princess. I shouldn’t be. That bullet hit me, and I lay down and I died. I saw the white light. I heard the singing of angels or whatever you want to call it. I expected…” My voice hitched, but I powered on. “I...I expected...I’d...I’d get to see Dad again. Mom. I thought I’d get to see everyone. So many dead ponies. I wanted to see all of them...”

Hot tears began to trickle down my cheeks as I watched the merry little fire sputter and flicker in its crystal hearth.

Damn those tears. Damn them for letting her see.

Where had they come from? I didn’t know. Maybe it was just some element of alicorn magic working on my mind, making me soft and stupid. For all I knew, she could have been behind everything that’d happened. That felt awfully weak, but I had to keep some walls up, didn’t I?

Something softer than anything I’d ever felt wrapped itself around my middle. I gasped, trying to back away, but there were warm, gentle legs around my neck, holding me in a vice like grip.

“No...no...no...I can’t...Celestia...I...” I stammered, trying to pull away. Maybe I tried. I think I wanted to, but Twilight was clutching me tightly. I was an insect to her, but she held me anyway.

Sweet skies, what would Juniper think if he could have seen me then? Crying against the chest of a Princess. Ugh. If anything, the jerk would probably tell me I could use it. It wasn’t a healthy or even a particularly satisfying cry; it was just the sobbing of a tired old stallion. Tired beyond words.

More than anything, I wanted her to lock me away so I could stop watching what’d become of Equestria. Maybe, if we were in the dungeon, I wouldn’t have to watch Swift or Taxi or Limerence die screaming on some battlefield in our not too distant future.

Time started to slip, and after awhile, I felt my eyes slide closed. Exhaustion had finally taken its toll.

My breathing slowed.

I fell into a dreamless sleep with my face in a mane that smelled of lavender and jasmine.

I woke feeling more rested than I could remember. Had I ever been so comfortable? Hard to say. Maybe when I was a colt, when I could still sleep without seeing the maddened eyes of my best friend’s father or the bloody splash of liquefied organs that used to be my partner haunting me through the nights.

It can best be said that rest hadn’t made me any less of a grumpy guts, but I was a happier misanthrope.

Slowly opening my eyes, I glanced around at my surroundings. I was in an oversized bedroom in a bed that might have doubled for an air-chariot landing pad. Crystal candle-fixtures hung from the ceiling, providing a gentle illumination. A dozen luxurious blankets were piled up at the bottom of the bed, while I was wrapped in a sheet. Whoever had put me in the bed hadn’t removed my coat or gun, but simply tucked me in and turned out the light. Ruby Blue’s diary was lying on the bedside table.

My last thoughts before I’d passed out - of Princess Twilight holding me as I wept - came boiling back to the surface.

Had I really let her see me like that?

Ah, well. At worst, there were still some explanations owed and maybe an apology or two.

A note on expensive stationary was pinned underneath the diary.

‘Detective,

You’ve been asleep for about twelve hours, subjective time. It’s really only been three or four, but I gave your personal timescale a bit of a nudge so you could get a good nap. I hope you don’t mind. It should have worn off by now. There’s a drone outside who knows where I am. Come out when you’re ready. Oh...and don’t shoot the drone. You may be sorely tempted.’

My personal timescale, huh? Cute. Could be worse, I supposed. Taxi’s definition of a ‘nudge’ would have been cutting off the flow of blood to my brain until I lost consciousness, then cuffing me to a bed until she judged I’d slept enough.

Much as I might have liked to lie there a little while longer, I still had a fair bit of my story that needed relating and too few hours before I’d be breaking a promise to Mags. Sliding out of the bed, I picked up the diary and slipped it back into my pocket, then headed for the door.

I poked my head out and found a tiny changeling that barely came up to my chest sitting against the far wall. She was wearing a bright yellow beanie with a spinning propeller, and playing with a yo-yo, the string hooked around one of her fangs.

Glancing up from her toy, she grinned and flipped the yo-yo into her muzzle, then tucked it under one of her wings. “You Mister Boiled?”

“Eh...phew. This is going to take some getting used to,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead. “What’s your designation?”

“Ain’t got no designation, daddy-oh!” she chirped, offering me a black hoof to shake. “I’m Maxine! Mom might like her numbers, but the boss calls the shots, and she likes me! You can call me Maxi.”

I chuckled, reaching out to give the propeller on her hat a flick with my toe. “Maxi, eh? Alright, Maxi. You know where Twilight is?”

The little drone spun in a circle, then pointed down the left hallway. “This way, daddy-oh! We’ll take the scenic route!” Her wings opened, and she zipped into the air, landing on my back and sliding down so her legs dangled off either side. Thankfully, she wasn’t very heavy. “Oooh, you’re comfortable. Like a rug, but with bones! I could get used to this.”

“Twilight said I wasn’t supposed to shoot you. Are you going to give me a reason to disappoint her?” I grumbled, giving my barrel a shake. She clung on a little tighter, refusing to be dislodged.

“You shoot me, you don’t get where you’re going! Besides, I got the hot gossip! Coppers like gossip, right? You should hear what the hivemind is saying about you guys! The whole honeycomb is buzzing...hee! Get it? Buzzing? Anyway...Giddyup! Haven’t got all day. Places to be!”

Much as I’d gotten used to my role as ‘mount’—since Mags was only about ten percent legs and making her walk meant taking on an irritatingly leisurely pace—I was still heavily considering giving the little scamp a good buck into the ceiling. Instead, I set off in the direction she’d indicated, making no attempt to keep my steps gentle.

After walking in silence for a few minutes, Maxi piped up. “Copper, tell me a thing. You showed up on that freaky train Mom’s got six ling’s watching, right?”

“Yes...and?”

“Sooo, what’s the boss got on you?”

I took a step to one side to let a changeling in a maid outfit dash by, a heap of plates levitating along behind her. “Sorry? What’s she got on me? She’s got nothing. I just met her.”

“No, no, no...that ain’t how this works,” Maxi scoffed, scooting up so she could set her chin between my ears. “The boss has stuff on everyone. Mom works for her because of all the free food and the nice hive and everything, but it ain’t like we can leave Ponyville. Half the cities in Equestria have some kind of magical changeling zapper somewhere. The shadows work for the boss cuz she lets them have those suits of armor and hog the T.V. room. Every single weirdo I’ve ever met owes her some kind of crazy debt or she’s blackmailed them so hard they can’t even see straight. So which are you?”

“I’m...neither,” I replied. “I think she’s a really sweet girl with a heart of solid piss and iron. She doesn’t own me though. Still sort of wonder where that ‘quiet librarian’ shtick she keeps playing at comes from. ”

Maxi snickered, giving one of my ears a playful nip which almost earned her a kick into the nearest wall. “Awww, baby-doll...that ‘quiet librarian’ thing is what the boss is actually like. She ain’t playing at being a nerd.”

I considered that in silence for a minute or two, then asked, “Tell me, do you like working for Twilight?”

“Oh, heh, yeah! Beats working for one of the other queens who’re hoping Princess Celestia just forgets grandma tried to invade Equestria during the famine fifty something years back. They want us all sneakin’ around like a bunch of mice. I dig havin’ coltfriends without wearing a pony suit all day!”

I leaned sideways so I could look up at her. “You have coltfriends who know you’re a changeling?”

“Awww, heck yeah!” she replied, wiggling her backside, “Ponyville boys can’t get enough of my fine little thorax!”

“How exactly does that work? I never heard of a town where ponies and changelings lived side by side in the open.”

Maxi rolled onto her back, crossing her back legs and using her forelegs for a pillow as she rode along. “You gotta understand...this is Twilight Sparkle’s town. Or at least, it was. She saved these ponies from stuff you’ll never hear about and fought things you can’t even imagine before the dragons came. She says ‘make nice with the changelings’, these ponies show up at your door with cake and ice cream. We keep ’em safe, they keep us fed, yeah? It works out nice!”

“Alright, fine, that explains how you stick around...but how is she keeping it a secret?”

Maxi shrugged and wriggled against my back until the propeller of her beanie buzzed against my neck. “Would you believe a secret alicorn has a secret hive of changelings and secret shadow monsters wandering around a little hick town this close to the capital? Reporters don’t come through here but once in awhile. They write a story about us, then they forgets they wrote it. Twilight burns it before it hits the presses. No harm, no foul.”

I stepped around a pair of Umbrum chatting to one another outside a door labeled ‘Sauna’ and replied, “You talk about her like she’s...somehow all knowing or something.”

The changeling let out a bark of laughter, sprawling bonelessly on my back. “She’d sure like everypony to think so. When I was a nymph, I sure believed it. Don’t nopony get me wrong here, I love that crazy bookworm. Best friend the changelings ever had, but...she’s a scary pony sometimes, too. You never saw a dragon quiver in his scales until he’s been on the receiving end of a lecture from the Princess of Hyper-Rainbow Death-Spankings. Speakin’ ‘o scary ponies...where’d you find that freak with the teeth, yo? She practically soaked her tail when Markovich offered her a B.L.T. I thought you ponies didn’t do meat.”

“Watch who you’re calling a freak, bug,” I growled, giving her warning shake. “That’s my partner you’re talking about.”

“Hey, makes no never mind to me, daddy-o!” she replied. “You got plenty of odd peeps anywho. The pretty colt’s been locked in the archive with Macy, the librarian, and a whole stack of pizza since you started your little nap. Macy is off the hivemind, too. She only does that when she’s boning or doing some super heavy research. Then there’s that crazy mare with the braid...”

“Wait...What’s Taxi been doing while I was out?” I asked nervously.

Maxi opened her mouth to reply, then coughed awkwardly into her hoof. “Ooof. Mom says if I tell you, she’ll bury me up to my neck in an anthill. We’re here, by the way.”

I’d mostly tuned out our surroundings as we walked. We were standing just outside a double-wide door that had a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the handle and one of Mayfly’s other drones—this one in guard armor—standing beside it. He was a little larger than I, with bright blue eyes and a couple of shiny metal piercings in one of his feelers.

Wings buzzed, and Maxi leapt off my back, trotting up to the guard. “Sup, Mordicai?”

Mordicai studied me a long moment before glancing down at the much smaller changeling with a disdainful look. “You could have let me know you were coming, Maxine.”

“Yeah, but then you’d totally have found an excuse not to be here,” she replied, sticking her forked tongue out at him. “I brought the pony, by the way. What’s the boss up to?”

The guard flicked his wickedly curved horn towards the door. “The Princess is in there with that pegasus. Was I going crazy, or did that little mare’s breath smell like bacon?”

“You’ll probably be happier thinking you’ve gone nuts,” I said.

“No doubt.” Turning, Mordicai tapped on the door and waited. I didn’t hear an answer, but after a few seconds, he turned back to us. “Go on in.”

Maxine started to reach for the door, only to be stopped by the guard’s leg. “She didn’t say you, Maxi. You’re on garbage duty for painting this on all of Section Ten’s armor,” he growled, turning sideways to show off a very detailed picture of a male phallus on his crupper plate.

The little changeling drooped, and the propeller on her hat slowed to a dejected crawl. “Awww…I thought no one saw me...”

“Hivemind, dummy! If you’re going to pull pranks, you better make sure you can hide your mental giggle fits. Now scoot!” the guard snapped, then picked her up in a burst of green magic, turned her about, and all but flung her towards the opposite end of the hall. She managed to catch herself with her wings and buzzed to a landing. Throwing a dirty look over her shoulder, she darted around the corner when his horn let off a threatening squirt of sparks.

Mordicai let out a loud sigh, shaking his head as he watched her go. “I swear, I don’t know why Mom hasn’t had that little mosquito stuffed and mounted by now...” He turned back to me, and the Do Not Disturb sign floated off the door. “Go ahead, Detective. She’s waiting for you.”

I touched my forehead with one hoof, respectfully, then pushed through into what turned out to be a sizeable study. All four walls were lined with bookshelves that reached right up to the ceiling, and a table piled high with enough books to build a small fort sat in the middle. Overhead, a few bulbs cleverly disguised to look like candles provided a comforting glow to a scene of intense concentration.

Twilight sat on one side of the table while Swift sat on the other, both of them glaring daggers at one another. My partner was minus her armor and weapons, and a third of a sandwich sat on a small saucer beside her next to a tall glass of milk.

Between them was an elaborate arrangement of cards that had taken over half the table. Neither pony seemed to have noticed me as Swift slowly pulled a card from a stack beside her hooves.

“Hah! Judgement Finale!” she exclaimed, tossing it onto the battlefield.

Twilight’s lips twitched into a small smile as she plucked a card from the stack in front of her and laid it across Swift’s. “Magical Riposte.”

My partner’s eyes went wide, then she moaned and dropped her remaining cards in a heap in the center of the table. “Ooog…Couldn’t you have at least pretended to lose? Beating a Princess would be the best bragging rights ever.”

The alicorn began gathering up her collection, sorting it from Swift’s and carefully stacking them in two separate piles. “After what you asked me in the limo? Never.” My partner’s cheeks flushed, and she ducked her head. Twilight must have been feeling merciful, because she added, “Maybe if you want to play again when everything is over, I wouldn’t mind showing you some neat tricks.” Setting aside her deck, she smiled up at me. “Did you have a good nap, Detective?”

“Pretty good, thanks. This is what you spent the last three hours doing?” I asked, gesturing at the table.

“Well, not just this,” Twilight replied, pointing at the tip of her horn that was still letting out a weak glow. “I’ve been examining your partner’s transformation while we played. She told me a little of what happened after you were shot, particularly with regards to her friend, Grapeshot.” The magical aura around her horn died. “I’m...I’m afraid I can’t change her back into a normal pony, nor anyone similarly afflicted. Not without a few months or years of research, anyway.”

“Why not? I thought alicorn magic-”

She quickly cut me off with a sweep of her hoof. “Alicorn magic is the problem. I could change her back right now, but I’d cook every cell in her head doing it. This kind of transformation is incredibly subtle. Without the spell that was used to do it, reversing it is...is like trying to get a broken egg back together with the end of a bulldozer.”

Swift brushed a hoof through her spiked mane. “Sir, can I register that I don’t ever want to be the egg in that metaphor? Really, I don’t mind being like this. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich with extra mayonnaise!”

Twilight gave her a queasy look, then swept the various books off the table into a heap on the floor before teleporting in a fresh sheaf of paper and a whole stack of pens.

“I’d like to get down to business if you don’t mind, Detective. Now, where were we? Oh! Yes! You were just telling me how you ended up with the changeling heart in your chest.”

“Well, waking up inside a morgue is about the...eh...maybe the fifth most unpleasant thing that’s happened to me since this particular case started.”

Twilight’s pen paused over her paper, and she looked up. “The fifth?”

“Yeah, thereabouts.”

“Sir, was that higher or lower than the swim through the sewer?” Swift asked, wrinkling her nose at the memory.

“Oh, definitely nicer than that,” I replied, tapping my chin. “Truth be, I mostly just remember needing to pee. The coroner’s assistant got me on my hooves and filled me in. Turned out Taxi made a deal with Don Tome for some spells that would let her install a new heart. They put me on fluids, stuck me in a drawer...and Gale did the rest.”

Twilight squinted at me. “Gale?”

“Eh...sorry. That’s what I call Jingle Jangle’s little brother. He’s the previous owner of this heart,” I answered, tapping my plug. “His own failed...and a zebra shaman gave him a changeling heart that fed off of love. Sadly, it fed off his parent’s love so completely that they stopped loving each other. When his father killed his mother, the colt died, too.”

“That’s...that’s so sad,” the Princess murmured. “Does...does that mean you need love to survive?”

“Thankfully not. I’m wired for regular old grid power, or maybe unicorn juice. Little Cosmo, though...” I shut my eyes and concentrated on the part of my chest I generally associated with my heart. A flood of warm affection rose up, and I couldn’t help but smile. “He’s in here. Maybe an imprint, or a spirit, or something. I can still feel him. Sometimes I get flashes of his memories in my sleep. There aren’t many.”

“Hmmm...there’s some precedent for similar things with a normal transplant,” Twilight mused, scratching at her paper with her pen. “Ponies having sudden talents develop and so on. I don’t know that anypony has ever managed to come back from the grave with a transplant, though.”

“Well, this talent...I don’t even know how to describe it. I heal like a beast. I’ve gone from heavy concussion to just fine in a matter of minutes. Then there’s the endurance and who knows what else? Still discovering the limits,” I continued. “As I was saying, Taxi left me a note assuming I’d wake up. It took a month for the heart to do...whatever it did. When I got up, I had batteries, no job, no transport, no money, and somepony burned my apartment to the ground.”

Pausing, Twilight pointed at my pocket. “I assume they were searching for that diary?”

“That, or they were searching for me. After Monte Cheval, I guess they assumed I was in hiding. Hard to say. Doesn’t really matter. A million case files, a few ties, and a package of old ravioli were about the only things I lost that meant anything to me.”

“And...what did you do then?”

I rubbed my jaw, trying to think about how to tell her what’d happened next. “I picked up Taxi from a hotel she’d been hiding in...and I went down to police headquarters.”

Swift giggled, putting her hooves over her mouth for a second. “He hung his badge on the Chief of Police’s horn!”

The ballpoint pen hit the floor and rolled under my hooves. “You...you did what to Iris Jade?!” Twilight stammered.

“I...eh...it...erm...she and I have a...um...complex relationship,” I replied, trying to look anywhere but at the Princess.

“Just the crimes I know she committed could fill a book! She...she just let you go?”

“Oh, no...I ran like a scared rabbit the second the door was closed,” I chuckled, wheeling my hooves in the air like I was running. “We called up a friend of mine who’d been watching out for Swift and ‘acquired’ her from a little dive she’d been staying at in a place called Sky Town. She was...half out of her mind. Whatever magic was transforming her had done something ugly to her brain. Thought I was a hallucination. I don’t blame her. Last she’d seen me, I had a three inch hole in my chest.”

Swift gave me a conflicted look, then turned to the Princess. “Ma’am...I tried to attack him. With my teeth. I don’t know if he told you, but...I’ve been attacking Sentient Constructs, too.”

“It’s a compulsion of some sort,” I clarified at Twilight’s wary glance. “We took her down to the Vivarium. They have a number of competent enchanters working there, and they removed the worst of the spell. I say ‘the worst of’, mind you. We had to find...other means of removing the drive to attack Essies.”

“And these ‘other means’ would be?” Twilight asked intently.

Swift and I exchanged a look, and I settled a bit deeper into my seat. “There’s a whole heap of badness that comes before that mess will make any sense…”

“Taxi was...well, I don’t know if I can explain Taxi…”

Twilight flicked a folder out of midair and set it on the floor in front of me. “I think we’ll both be wanting an explanation from her at a point.”

Picking up the folder, I scanned down the first page. It was an incident report. There was a picture that looked like somepony had splatter painted with blood and bits of skin paperclipped to the top.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“My agent’s report of her partner’s death. I was about to bury Skinner, but your driver did the work for me. Skinner was working for the griffins, smuggling...amongst other things, illegal hides and narcotics. We suspected his activities might have been funded by elements within the griffin government. Normally, I’d have swept it all under the rug and counted my lucky stars nopony started a war, but there are some big holes in both this report and the one that was submitted to the police. For instance, the police report indicated some kind of internal dispute that allowed Miss Sweet Shine and Mister Fox Glove to escape after they’d been captured.”

“I’ve read the report,” I grunted.

“Yes, and that report didn’t include the fact that Skinner was killed with his own knife and it was covered in your driver’s blood. So was the weapon that killed Mister Fox Glove...”

I slapped the folder down like it was a snake and put a hoof up to forestall whatever she’d been about to say. “Sorry, not playing this game.”

“What game, Detective?” she asked, bemused.

“I made a promise to Taxi that I’d listen, but not here and not now. You’re here for my story. Not hers. She wants to tell you, she’ll tell you. Otherwise, you might as well squeeze blood from a stone as get answers when she doesn’t want to give them.”

“I...o-okay,” Twilight murmured, and the file vanished.

I resumed my story.

“As I was saying...Taxi is complicated. She made a deal with Don Tome for the spells and magics necessary to bring me back from death. Not real necromancy, but something close enough I doubt a judge would care. The heart keeps me alive and has a few side benefits, but it came with a price.”

“A...price?”

“Tome and I were friends for an awful lot of years. My former partner, Juniper, introduced us. I don’t know what you know about Tome, but—”

“He was on the side of good,” Twilight said, softly. “He didn’t kill if he didn’t have to, and his ‘profits’ were made making certain Equestria survived. I wish...I wish he’d tried to operate inside some legal channels, but I...I understand why he didn’t.”

I tilted my head. “You sound like you knew him.”

“I…” She hesitated, wiggling her hoof as she hunted for a particular word. “I... admired him. Some way or another, I’ve met thousands of ponies. I have to use spells to keep all their names and histories straight in my head. Tome was a master of politicking and keeping ponies from killing each other. He...searched for me for years, and I shared a cup of tea with him several times.”

“You...you met him? As in, in person?” Swift asked.

She nodded, a profound sadness in her eyes. “He...he wouldn’t remember. We shared tea last about three years ago. I told him everything about me. He tried to record everything, but I erased it...along with his memory. I needed someone to talk to back when one of my friends...moved on.”

I swallowed audibly. “Is that what’s going to happen to me when this is over? Cook my noodle, then drop me in a hole somewhere with nothing but a vague sense of disquiet?”

“Oh, Detective! No!” she exclaimed, seeming genuinely shocked at the suggestion. “I need your memory intact!”

It took me a moment to wrap my head around the implications of that reply.

“So...We’re not going in the dungeon?”

“Not if I can help it! Gosh, you really do have trust issues!”

“Says Miss Erased-Herself-From-History!”

“...Fair point...well made…”

“Tome, you may or may not be aware, always extracts a price for his services. In this case, he wanted us to find some fairly specialized artifacts. Weapons prototypes. Somepony had been stealing from several of his caches, and he thought we might be able to help. These particular prototypes used the magic of the Moon and were said to have been built by Princess Luna herself. They were being held—”

Twilight suddenly leaped from her seat. “Wait, wait, wait...the Lunar Dispersion Ray Mark Zeros?! Somepony found them?!”

“Huh...we’d just been calling them ‘Moon Guns’. Funny laser looking things? Cut a pony like a hot knife through butter?”

“That’s them! Oh my gosh, I thought those had been lost forever!” she squeaked, bouncing up onto the tips of her hooves. “Where are they?”

“Right now? After we found them, I gave eleven of them to a dragon. They’re in his private hoard. Though one of them’s in bits,” I replied. “The last one? No clue.”

Three single hairs separated themselves from Twilight’s mane and began to slowly uncurl. “You...you...g-gave them to...a dragon?!”

“He’s a pretty trustworthy dragon,” I answered, casually.

“No, no, no! A dragon? You put anti-dragon weaponry in the hooves of a dragon! Even having that stuff exist is a violation of the treaty and you gave it—”

I cut her off with a tap of my back hoof on the floor. “I gave them to Stella.”

Twilight’s lip twitched, and she shut her eyes. “Why is that better?”

“Because Stella is about as hated as any dragon can be. He sided with us during the war, right? He’s been a protector of ponykind for decades. Giving those guns to that dragon may as well have been tossing them down the deepest pit in the world. Nobody...nobody...will find out, and if the dragons really are invading us, then we might need them. Got me?”

She didn’t look happy about it, but she nodded stiffly.

“May I continue?”

“Yes...please.”

“Alright. Tome suspected someone in his organization was working against him. He was right...but we haven’t figured out who it was. He said he’d try to help us find whatever they’d been hunting Ruby for. At the time, nopony knew it was the Nightmare’s Helm. In exchange we had to take his son with us and keep him safe. There was something of an issue of succession in the Archivists, but I think that might have just been an excuse to send Limerence along.”

“And...how did this end with you standing on stage beside Astral Skylark outside the History Museum?” Twilight asked, tugging her spectacles down to rest against her chest. “That was when you started to show up on our radar as an involved party.”

“You’re aware of Professor Fizzle?” I asked.

She nodded. “I...I’ll just say ‘very’.”

“Are you aware he’s dead?”

Twilight jerked her head up so hard she almost pitched over backwards. “What?! My information only said he’d disappeared! He’s gone no-contact before plenty of times! Wh-what happened?! The armor was in his care, but with all the spells on the case it couldn’t have moved—”

“The armor moved,” I said, curtly. “Fizzle was one of Tome’s ‘vault holders’. He had the Moon Guns. While we were there, Limerence noticed the armor in the case was a forgery. A very good forgery, but one by a forger he’d run into before. We found Fizzle’s body behind a few magical wards inside his office. His...remains...were in the same condition as Ruby Blue’s. Grey organs. No horn. No soul.”

Twilight stood there for a good half minute, her lower jaw hanging around her hooves, staring at me with wide, teary eyes. “He...he’s...d-dead?” she repeated.

“Associates of ours covered it up,” I added. “They’re...idiots, but they do the job. We’ll get to them later.”

Shutting her eyes, the Princess pushed her chair back, then trotted around the table to the door. Poking her head out, she said something to the guard.

Swift leaned over to me. “Sir, are we going to tell her about those bat ponies?” she asked.

“I figure we can tell her most everything. Nopony could fake being as earnest as this mare,” I replied. “I’ve been watching her. I think she’s smart enough to be incredibly, incredibly dangerous...but she’s about as subtle as you are.”

“I can be subtle!” Swift bit back.

I jabbed at her foreleg. She wasn’t wearing Masamane, but I think the point was made. “Kid, you carry a gun that inspires penis envy in hump-back whales. Name one time you have ever been subtle, ever.”

Swift scowled and, instead of answering, swatted at me with one of her wings. I was ready for it and grabbed the edge in my teeth, giving her a little poke under the joint. She let out a ticklish squeal and clapped her wings to her sides. “I’m going to put bubblegum in your plug while you sleep, Sir.”

“I’ll put peanut butter under your upper lip, then take pictures for your grandmare, Scarlet, and Stella.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Try me.”

Twilight returned from her conversation with the guard holding three pints of ice cream in her levitation field. She set one down in front of herself, then two more in front of Swift and me. I picked up mine and read the label: ‘Tequila Flavor’. Swift’s was Mint Julep.

“Alcoholic ice cream?” I asked, peeling the top off. She hadn’t provided a spoon, so I just used the tip of my hoof. It was delicious.

“Small blessings of being an alicorn,” she sighed. “I don’t have to watch my figure near so much as I used to, and the drones like to experiment in the kitchen. There’s one who would have a cutie mark in culinary chemistry if changelings got cutie marks. I thought we might all want something a little bit stronger than tea.”

“Mmm, that’s really tasty…” Swift murmured. She had a bit of her Mint Julep on the end of her nose and was trying to reach it with her tongue.

“Thank you.” Twilight turned back to me with her full attention and a spoon levitating beside her head. “Now...Detective. Professor Fizzle. Who are these ‘friends’ of yours who moved his body?”

“I’m fairly sure you’re aware of them. A pair of dimwitted bat ponies, name of Night Bloom and Cereus?”

A single drop of ice cream slid down her spoon and landed on the carpet. “Buh...they…”

“Reported everything was ‘all clear’, then tried to cover their own flanks? Yes, yes they did.”

“No, no, no! They’re my agents! They should have reported back to us if anything happened! I sent them out there to get Night Bloom away from Canterlot and get Cereus away from Princess Luna so she’d stop sending him dirty notes as classified government communiques!”

I scratched at my nose, then took another muzzlefull of my ice cream as I considered a response. “So...you’re the head of M6. Why am I not surprised?”

Twilight’s lips twitched, and she took a moment to mentally reboot. “You...met my agents, and they told you the name of the agency?! Are you sure you didn’t...I don’t know...torture them or something? Please tell me you tortured them for that information…”

“Nope. They took me round to one of their lovely hideouts. Fed me hayfries. Pretty good ones, too. Nice guy, that Cereus. Bit of an idiot on the surface, but I think there’re some hidden depths there. Feel bad for Night Bloom. She’s about as much a secret agent as I am. If we all survive this, get that filly back behind a desk...stat.”

Ever seen a depressed alicorn? Saddest thing in the world. I wanted to give her a hug but got the feeling that that might not be welcome just then.

“Ugh...I knew I should have been looking at the training program for non-field agents more closely,” she groaned, putting a hoof against her forehead. “How did this happen? I sent them out there to guard the armor while it was in transition. We had some indications it might not be safe in Canterlot, and nopony knew the helm had been stolen all those years ago.”

“What sort of ‘indications’?” I asked.

Twilight tapped her spoon on the table, then pointed out the window. “One of my ponies in Canterlot found that there had been magical scans done in the area of the vault, targeting the location of the armor. Princess Luna and I decided to use one of our contingency plans for somepony stealing the armor: the grand tour.”

“Yes, but why would you even rebuild something like that? Wasn’t the armor in pieces?” Swift wanted to know.

“It...it was the war,” she answered, miserably jamming another mouthful of ice cream into her muzzle. “We didn’t know if...if we might be able to use it or something if everything got really bad. It turned out to be for nothing, or at least, we could never make it do anything.”

“That’s one of those ideas where the person in the committee who came up with it should have been slapped and sent to stand in the corner,” I commented.

“I agree,” she muttered as her cheeks turned a slightly darker shade of purple. “Particularly since I was the one who suggested it.”

“Ah…”

Swift gave me a little tap on the shoulder with her wingtip. “Sir, your hoof is not tasty. You should stop trying to swallow it.”

“You’re one to talk, kid.” Pulling myself up, I got to my hooves, pacing back and forth in front of the table. “So, you sent the two most woefully unprepared ponies to guard a set of armor that didn’t do anything, to your knowledge?”

“Well...they were ordered to ‘guard’ it, but really...our risk assessments on the ‘grand tour’ were that it would be statistically impossible at any given location to actually steal the armor, and there were many more ponies guarding it during the moves from place to pace,” Twilight explained. “They just weren’t needed when it was stationary. Those wards—”

“Were still in place,” I interrupted. “The wards hadn’t moved an inch. Somepony opened the case with full and complete knowledge, removed the armor, then shut it again and replaced the wards.”

“B-but...but that’s not… Nopony b-besides Professor Fizzle and myself knew what wards were in place!”

“When you have an explanation, I’d love to hear it,” I replied, switching tracks. “Until then...we chased off after the pony who forged the armor. They were...fairly cooperative once we let them know what had happened to the Professor. They’d been contracted by a small time criminal fixer calling himself ‘The Drum Beat’.”

“Wait, who was the forger?” Twilight asked, snatching a piece of paper from her pile and holding her pen poised above it.

I took a moment to consider my next words. Did I really owe the Great Ghoulini and Patter anything? Theoretically, no. They were criminals, or rather, she was a criminal. Still, she wasn’t a murderer, and she’d done me a favor she didn’t really have to do. That, and the most any jury would give her would be a bit of time in a mental hospital. Who knew? I might need an expert counterfeiter one day before all was said and done.

“Sorry. Privileged information,” I said, finally.

“Is...is this one of those ponies you’re protecting, Detective? A...a professional counterfeiter?”

“They are. Drum Beat was the real prize. He was the pony who’d been working for Cosmo, who’d set up the hit on both of us. He pointed us at Astral Skylark and the Church of the Lunar Passage.”

“Your agents managed to get me out of The Drum Beat’s hole, but not before the Detrot Police Department captured Swift.”

“Night Bloom and Cereus were watching you?” Twilight asked, scraping out the bottom of her pint of ice cream, then tipping it up to get the last dribbles out.

“Yeah. Somepony sent them out to Detrot with a list of names that’d all retired from the scene and a pile of garbage contact information.”

The Princess’s lip curled, and she wiped a bit of her dessert off her muzzle with one fetlock. “No I didn’t! My information on Detrot might not have been perfect, but I had at least half a dozen agents in that city, all of whom sent me regular reports! My head of the Pan-Wester Equestria Liaison Office in Clydesville is very diligent! There’s nopony more thorough than Shadow Courser! She’s been with my agency for years, and she wouldn’t send agents to the borderlands without support!”

I squinted at her, setting my pint back on the table. “Mmm...so, where is she?”

Twilight, whose dander was well and truly up, paused for a moment. “What?”

“Where is this Shadow Courser? She’s who Night Bloom and Cereus would have been reporting to, right?”

“Um...yes. Yes, she is.”

“They seemed to think there was some kind of ‘mole hunt’ on, and they’d been cut off from Canterlot. Somepony told them that that was the case, and that their head of operations had disappeared. So...where is she?”

“Um...I...oh...erm...Let me see.” Twilight’s horn lit, and her eyes flicked from left to right a few times, as though she were reading something. Her expression gradually fell into one of quiet distress. “I...I have a report from a week before the Darkening that says she should have been in Canterlot during the Summer Sun Celebration. She requested a leave of absence to spend time with family in Canterlot several weeks before the event, bought tickets, and arranged luggage shipment before the storms began...but there’s another set of tickets for Manehattan for the same dates with one of her aliases on them...Oh my...”

“Let me guess. You just found another set of tickets for somewhere outside of Equestria, booked using a different alias, about three hours after she’d have arrived in Manehattan, didn’t you?”

Twilight’s magical aura faded, and she slumped over the table, burying her head in her crossed forelegs. “Yes. Two one way tickets to the Southern Badlands. It was Shadow Courser’s aide-de-camp who discovered the tampering in the vault, too. She went along to meet Shadow’s family. Nothing suspicious there, except...oh, I feel like a fool. Courser didn’t have any family in Canterlot. She had an estranged ex-wife. They hated each other.”

“And...nopony noticed this, Ma’am?” Swift asked, unable to hide her disquiet. “That’s an awful lot of loose ends.”

“We can’t be everywhere at once!” the princess replied defensively. “I mean, we would probably have caught the discrepancy eventually. It’s been very busy around here lately!”

“Then I think I’m starting to see the shape of this particular disaster,” I began, rising from my chair and facing the door. “Miss Courser cuts off Nightbloom and Cereus with an apparent mole hunt, feeds you garbage about the situation in Detrot, fakes reports from your agents in the city…” I wrinkled my brow as a thought struck me. “Did this pony know who was going to be warding the armor?”

Twilight nodded, glumly. “Of course she knew. She was involved in almost every aspect except the guard conditions during transition. Ugh...I’ve been stupid. I trusted her!”

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned lately, Princess, it’s that anypony can be blackmailed,” I replied. “She might well have served you faithfully, but nopony’s loyalties sit comfortably when someone has a gun to their head or the head of one of their loved ones. I suspect, though, that if we were to chase them down right now, we’d find a pair of anonymous corpses in a dumpster somewhere in the Badlands.”

“Princesses help me, she designed some of our security measures. She must have known exactly how to get by them,” she whispered, lower lip quivering with emotion. “I...I was there at her daughter’s cuteceanara.”

”Ma’am...if her daughter was on the line, maybe you can find it in yourself to forgive her one day,” Swift said, reaching out to lay a consoling hoof on top of Twilight’s. The Princess made no move to push her away and seemed to take a bit of comfort from the friendly contact. “We...I mean, after Chief Iris Jade captured me, Hardy had to go to Headquarters to get me back. We found out that the Chief’s daughter had ended up a member of the church and left her mother...and they’d been blackmailing her the whole time. She almost gave us to them.”

“How...how did you convince them not to?” Twilight asked, her eyes still dark and a bit listless as she picked up her notepad and pen again.

“Mostly by offering Jade the one thing she wanted more than my head,” I answered, picking a napkin up off Twilight’s table to wipe my hooves with, then tossing it in the wastepaper basket. “I offered to find her daughter. We knew they were likely keeping the Moon Guns in a secure location and figured, if they had a kidnap victim, there was a decent chance they’d be in the same place. Thankfully, their ‘safehouse’ was in a place that was a known quantity.”

“Safehouses are supposed to be hard to find. Where was it?”

“You’re aware of Supermax?”

Twilight’s pen stopped for a minute, then took up its scribbling again. She didn’t look up at me as she continued writing. “I...I guess I should have guessed that. We heard about the purchase, and I hadn’t been able to get any of my ponies inside. I helped shut down the...the…” Her jaw clenched tightly. “—the monstrosity, that the former warden committed there.”

“Tourniquet isn’t a monstrosity!” Swift burst out, jumping up and planting her hooves on the table. “She’s my friend!” Both the alicorn and I stared at her as the reality of what she’d just done found purchase. When it finally occurred to Swift what she’d just said, she covered her mouth and sat down heavily. “I mean...I...there’s...um…oooh, gosh…C-could you just forget I said anything, please?”

“Did...did you just say that the...the construct...is a-awake?” Twilight sputtered, hopping up so fast her chair pitched over backwards. When her language centers caught up to her shocked mind she asked, “How is that possible?! Is it...is it feeding?!”

“We...took a little journey to Tartarus. Saussurea was willing to cooperate with us on the condition we shut Supermax down. She gave us blueprints that let us find a passage through the sewers. Once we were inside, we met Tourniquet.”

“Yes, but how?!”

“You want me to explain while you put out the fire and get another pen?”

Twilight looked down to find her paper smoldering in her magical aura and her ballpoint pen slowly melting. She released her spell, and they both hit the table with a wet splash of ink and scattered ashes.

“Oh...sorry. Just...just give me a minute,” she muttered, drawing in a deep breath and pushing her hoof away from her chest. I’d seen Taxi do that precise thing a few times when she was warding off a panic attack. As she finished the little exercise, she shut her eyes and crawled down from her chair to sit on her haunches beside the table, using it to hold herself up. “Just...let me ask this. The construct. How did Skylark wake it up?”

“You’re going to have to give me another promise to keep your head until after I explain the situation entirely.” I gestured at the melted pen. “I don’t need that happening to me.”

She gulped and tapped her horn with one hoof. “I promise. I’ll do my best. Please, tell me?”

I nodded. “We found a number of Skylark’s former followers in Tourniquet’s chamber, tied to the corpse of a dragon. All seven had their souls burned, probably to fuel the spell to awaken her. Skylark learned some pretty ugly necromancy from somepony... No idea who. She’d wired Supermax to let her channel the spell that fed off magic into the robes of her followers. She was...trying to turn herself into an alicorn using some kind of spell core.”

“A-ascension?” Twilight blinked a few times. “That’s not possible. Only a few ponies have ascended! It takes enormous magic or a genetic predisposition that exists in only one in a billion ponies to ascend! She couldn’t do it with a spell! That’s crazy!”

“The spell core was wired to kill her, Ma’am,” Swift said, making a motion like something exploding. “Somepony gave her a spell in exchange for...um...in exchange for…um…” She looked at me for permission, and I bobbed my head. “—parts.”

Twilight cocked her ears to one side. “What...what kind of parts?”

“Body parts,” I said, affirming what I suspected she already knew. “Horns charged with magic and the souls of ponies. Wings. Hooves. She was using them in her ascension spell but was also giving them to somepony else in exchange for various favors. We haven’t found out who yet, but our break-in at Supermax was timed such that we found ourselves in the middle of some kind of secret ceremony. Cultists. I don’t know what changed, but...somepony twigged that Jade wasn’t in their pocket anymore. They were going to kill her daughter, Cerise. They’d loaded the kid up with enough energy to cook her alive using some version of that spell woven into the robes of her followers. A whole heap of the richest, most influential ponies in Detrot were there. Skylark...died...after trying to set off the spell core. The rest are being held in Supermax.”

It was a long minute or two before the Princess said anything, and when she did, she looked almost woozy. “Oooh...I think I’m going to need a nap myself, soon…”

“You want to take a break?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No...No, I think...I think I should hear everything. If I need to stop, I’ll let you know. So, you somehow subdued a whole building full of...what? Cultists, you called them?”

“Nightmare Moon worshipers.” I smirked. “They were mostly Idiots. Rich, bored idiots looking for the next big high. I think Skylark might have been the real deal, though.”

“I’m not surprised that silly cult popped up again,” Twilight mused, thoughtfully. “I suppose if her associates had a pony in my office, that would explain why we had so much trouble infiltrating the group,”

“Probably not her, but definitely whoever she was working for. Same as the King of Ace, she was just a puppet. Her strings were just a little longer.” I stopped briefly as something occurred to me. “Skylark had a lawyer...silly girl who got tied up in the wrong crowd. Name of Geranium. She was some sort of go-between who delivered messages for this law firm called ‘Umbra, Animus, and Armature’. They’ve been the thread tying this whole beast together.”

“I...I know of them,” the alicorn replied, shuffling her wings closer to her sides. “I’ve tried to get three agents into their office in the last five years. They’ve all failed to get in. They had perfect backstories, but...but none of them got hired. I suppose I can hang blame for that on Shadow Courser, too.”

“They were Cosmo’s lawyers, too. Same for the cult of Nightmare Moon.”

Twilight looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “I...I...can’t say I know much about them, which should be alarming all by itself. I know an awful lot about most major institutions all across Equestria. I do know that they date back to before Princess Luna’s return and have had some hoof in...almost everything that’s happened since the war. There’re a few pieces of information that’ve filtered out. Properties they own. Known customers. Their rate of success in court is extremely high. Significantly above the curve, but not outside the realm of plausibility.”

“I haven’t been able to find out much about them, either. A little bit here and there, but nothing meaningful. Geranium said they took over her old law firm and gutted it. Tourniquet was very grateful that we removed Skylark. She...didn’t much care for the cult.”

Swift thrust her chest forward, proudly displaying the crescent moon scar on her breast. “She made me the Warden!”

Twilight stared at the scar for a minute, then put a hoof to her forehead. “So...she’s awake, still, then. And feeding. Whose magic is she eating? The prisoners from the cult?”

I snorted. “You think I’m stupid? We jacked her into the mains. She’s running on pure, unfiltered electricity. No soul munching involved.”

“But...but how did you do that? I mean, you seem like a very capable pony, but...hijacking municipal electrical systems doesn’t sound like one of your talents.”

“Oh...it isn’t,” I replied, feeling a grin building. “It is within the talents of the Aroyos, though.”

It took a while for Twilight to work through that in her mind, but when she did, her wings bounced open like they were on springs. “Now wait a second here! You you gave...Supermax—the most dangerous prison in all of Equestria controlled by an emotionally unstable sentient construct of a dead filly—to a street gang?!”

“Not gave,” I assured her, waving towards my partner. “Swift is still the Warden, whatever that means. She doesn’t like how they run it, she can shut the whole thing down. That said, Tourniquet is the only reason the city still has power after recent events.”

Twilight’s voice rose to a volume loud and shrill enough that my ears started to ring.

“Her control matrix tapped into the city electrical grid!?”

I cringed, pawing at one of my ears with one toe. “Eh, yeah. Sheesh, keep it down. It was necessary. The alternative was shutting her down again.”

“That’s what should have been done, Detective! That’s what we’ve got to do—”

Swift leaned forward aggressively over the table, glaring at the alicorn with an intensity that would have been downright terrifying on anypony bigger. Even Twilight was momentarily taken aback.

“Over my dead body, Ma’am,” she hissed.

“B-but...you don’t understand! She’s dangerous!” the princess insisted.

My partner ran her tongue over her teeth and nodded at a picture on the wall behind Twilight’s head. It was that same image of six mares together, five others surrounding the purple alicorn. “Ma’am...you have friends, right?”

Twilight nodded, nervously. Her horn was gleaming, but she hadn’t cast any spells that I could see.

“Would you let somepony kill them, even if they were dangerous?” Swift asked.

“N...no...No, I wouldn’t,” she answered, warily. “Never…”

Swift pushed herself up to her full, not-at-all-intimidating height. The fire in her voice was still enough to set the Princess of Friendship back a step.

“Do youthink somepony who has been through all the stuff you heard today would ever let you do that to one of theirs?”

“I...I...Ugh! You ponies are impossible! Right, fine, okay...we’ll leave the construct alone for now. There are bigger things going on, anyway.” Twilight sagged as my partner retreated to her seat, hopping up and curling her hooves underneath her chest like a cat. “As though this month couldn’t be enough of a disaster. Alright, so...what happened next? You somehow escaped Skylark’s convent. Did you find the chestpiece of the armor?”

“Eh...unfortunately, no. Ruby Blue had a lockbox that could only be opened with a secret key hidden in her diary that we could only get at Supermax. Don’t ask. It’s as mad as it sounds. She was apparently imprisoned there and managed to snatch the helmet when it was stored there. I don’t know what happened to the chestplate. We managed to save Cerise and get her out after Skylark’s death.”

She mouthed out the words ‘secret key’, then shook her head. “If I didn’t have at least some evidence that you’re not actually insane, I think I’d be putting you somewhere for your own safety, Detective.”

I held out my forelegs as though waiting for cuffs. “You want to do it, I doubt I can stop you...but that means you have to find somepony dumber than I am to go fix this mess.”

“Considering what you’ve already managed, I don’t think a pony like that exists,” Twilight mumbled, folding her broad wings against her hips. “I’ll see what information we have on this lawfirm once we’re done here. Maybe there’s something in the archives. So, you escaped Skylark’s convent. Go on?”

“We got ourselves out of the prison and retrieved the helmet. We didn’t know that was what we were retrieving at this point, mind you, but the second I discovered it I knew we needed somewhere safe to stash the damn thing. To that end, we took the Moon Guns and headed for Don Tome.”

“His body was cold. Somepony tried to pull that necromancy garbage on him, but it hadn’t worked. Later on, we found out he’d been guaranteed ‘final death’ by some group of Zebra shamans. Don’t know much about that, but Limerence...well, he was about like you’d expect. We found his brother, too. He...I know he looks fine, but I hear him crying sometimes when he thinks nopony is watching...”

A few tears were trickling down Twilight’s cheeks, and my own weren’t completely dry, either. She kept her expression calm, and I did my best to mirror it as I went on. Swift was making no bones about crying, but she managed to keep her weeping to a few quiet sniffles and a short bout of the hiccups.

“Tome had a magical construct of himself that he’d been using to help chase you around. It reminded him of your name and so on, but the most he’d ever discovered was that picture I gave you. After that, I called the city coroner to help me dispose of the bodies, then rang Cereus. He agreed to take the helm and hide it.”

“Wait...the same...the same coroner who installed your heart? That’s who you called?” Twilight asked, levitating her pen over to gently tap against my breastbone.

“That’s him. Same pony who gave me the anti-magic armor, too. He’s...strange. One of those people you end up either loving or hating. My driver can’t stand him, but if I needed to bury a body, he’d let me borrow his shovel.” I considered that for a minute, then let out a sharp, humorless laugh, wiping at my eyes. “I don’t even know how many bodies he’s hiding for me right now. More than a few. Scary thing to think, really. There’s a freezer back home full of ponies whose lives I either touched or...or ended.”

I expected Twilight to be shocked, but she wasn’t. Her face was still that cool mask she’d been wearing the last few minutes as she picked up her cup of tea and pretended to take a sip. When she realized it was empty, she quietly set it down and turned to face the fire.

“You can’t stand on the fulcrum of history without watching ponies die on one end or the other,” she said quietly.

“Who said that?” Swift asked, raising her eyebrows. “That sounds like something a supervillain in one of my comics would say…”

Twilight giggled weakly. A kerchief popped into existence beside her, and she quickly blew her nose. “That was Princess Celestia. When the first of my friends...moved on...I asked her if this is what it’s like to be an alicorn. I was a real mess. That’s what she told me.”

My partner’s ears flopped against the sides of her head. “Oh…I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well...it could be worse,” She turned back to me and clicked the end of her pen a few times, then gave it a shake and picked up a fresh one. “Earlier you mentioned the griffin embassy in Detrot? Something about an attack?”

“Oh...yeah. This is where everything gets messy, I’m afraid,” I replied.

“Things...weren’t messy before?!”

“Not this kind of messy. A friend of mine is a griffin. He’s a cop and, it turns out, some kind of ‘prince’ amongst the plateau tribe called the ‘Hitlan’. I’m sure you’re aware the dragons apparently drove the Hitlan and the Tokan out of their homes?”

Twilight dipped her head. “Very. Diplomatic issues are sort of my thing. The dragons...I don’t even know. The attack on the Highlands was more aggressive and more powerful than any they’d launched since the war. Your mayor really saved us considerable trouble, despite his...questionable history of political maneuvering.”

I almost choked on that particular statement, and Swift had to quickly pat me on the back with one of her wings. “Yeah, trouble. The mayor has his own little place in this story...but as I was saying about my friend…”

“Prancing into the Tokan Embassy with guns drawn wasn’t my best idea, but it worked well enough. Most of them were too stoned to stop us. Derida wasn’t pleased, though. I’m not sure, but there might be a standing blood debt of some sort there. She certainly threatened to kill me a few times.”

The Princess rolled her eyes. “Detective, if everyone who’d ever threatened to kill me got to try, I’d have gotten bored with murder attempts a really long time ago. As it is, they’re still pretty scary. Some griffins use death threats as terms of personal affection. This...little griffin you said helped you get the status of ‘High Justice’. She was the same one you took with you to the school?”

“Yeah. Edina. Mercy, what a piece of work she is.”

“I...thought you said she was severely mentally ill,” she said, a bit confused.

“She is. We managed to dig out her psychiatric records. They contained a side-note about doping her with Beam as a means of ‘stabilizing’ her personality.” At her surprised look, I quickly added, “We had enough Beam at the convent from the cult’s personal stash and nothing to lose. Believe me, I was as shocked as you are that it actually worked. She was eager to help when she found out that the Tokan were facing annihilation.”

“Annihilation?!” Twilight exclaimed. “The Tokan and Hitlan has been allies for decades! I mean, they aren’t on perfectly friendly terms, but—”

“It was the Blood Bank, Ma’am,” Swift chimed in. “Their magic...all that blood magic that they used to keep all their debts straight was suddenly gone.”

“Mmm...that...oof. That does explain some of the reports of movement amongst the other tribes that I got in the days leading up to the Darkening. Tell me you managed to fix that situation, at least.”

I rocked my chair back onto two legs, using one rear hoof to prop myself up. “Eh...I wish. It was the day of the Darkening, keep in mind. We were…’in negotiations’, when the attack came…”

“The bomb was wired into the treasury, and it was going to blow. There was no defusing it. Taxi had a ‘freeze’ shot for her P.E.A.C.E. cannon, though. It bought us the time we needed to get both eyries’ eggs to safety.”

“That’s...that’s good news, at least.” Twilight shuddered, putting her hooves over her eyes and dragging them down her cheeks. “All those poor griffins…”

“We saved their children. I’m playing that as a win in my mind. The bomb went off. We escaped in the ensuing ruckus. After that...we retreated to a safe place. Her parent’s house,” I said, jerking my head at Swift. She grimaced but said nothing. “A little while later...well, the Darkening happened. I was watching it on television. Right before whatever magic took Canterlot...there was a magical resonance loud enough to hear.”

One of the alicorn’s ears perked up. “Hear? Magical resonance doesn’t produce a sound…”

“I know that. I’m telling you what it felt like. It was loud enough to give you a headache. A huge section of the unicorns in Detrot passed out and haven’t awoken. They’re suffering some kind of severe magical burnout. Lim was amongst them, but...Slip Stitch found us a cure, but we’ve only been able to deploy it in small numbers. After Limerence was back on his hooves…well, things got worse.”

“The whole center of the city?!”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to work up the last of my saliva. My throat was feeling a bit dry after such a long story. “Nopony knows what it is, but Chief Jade couldn’t bring it down. The Anti-Mega Fauna Shield is down, too and the Shield Pylons are in a kind of 'lockdown' mode. There are a bunch of dragons are sitting on the outskirts, just...waiting. They’re not even attacking anyone except those who try to leave. The P.A.C.T. are patrolling the streets in the craziest way you can imagine. These ‘Biters’, as people are calling them now, are attacking anypony who is outside one of the protected zones. We're pretty sure they're using the Scry to track and attack anyone who might stabilize things The Jewelers have retreated into Uptown. Gangs control most of the city and have divided it up to survive. I...I guess...I guess that’s it, really.”

I fell silent as the enormity of our situation gradually settled on my shoulders.

Twilight Sparkle just sat there for a long time, digesting the whole tale. Her horn flashed, and a glass of water appeared beside my hoof. I sipped it and gave her a relieved smile, but I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t already said which might help her reach a course of action.

“So, you came here, hoping somepony could fix all of this,” she said, finally.

“That’s about the shape of things, yeah.”

Rising from her chair, she walked over to one wall of the study. Reaching up, she pressed a spot on the wall, and a crack appeared that quickly swept down to the floor, spilling the eerie red light of the eclipse into the room. On whisper-quiet rails, two panels opened, revealing one of the crystal castle’s numerous balconies.

“Join me, Detective?” she invited. “You can come, too, Swift.”

I hesitated only a moment before getting up, stretching my aching back as I pushed the chair in. My partner flapped a couple times to work the kinks out of her flight muscles. I’d no idea how long we’d been sitting there, but I didn’t figure it could have been more than an hour or two. Looking back on the last few months, I guess I wouldn’t have blamed anypony for needing a bit to think before presenting a solution of some sort.

Of course, there was always the possibility that there just weren’t any solutions. Not a nice thought, but one worth being aware of.

Twilight hooked her legs over the railing and spread her wings wide, letting the gentle breeze blow through them as she raised her eyes to look out at the vast expanse of grey dust that’d once been the most vibrant, living city in all of Equestria. Maybe all the world.

Above it all, the eclipse carved a glowing black hole in the sky. I wanted, more than anything—more than drink, more than food, rest, or even my own freedom—to see the sky as it should have been.

Stepping out beside her, Swift and I joined the princess’ quiet vigil.

The silence was so unnatural, so perfect, that when she finally spoke it was enough to make me jump.

“Detective...Canterlot is gone,” she said, ignoring my startled jerk. “The Court and all of the nobles are gone. The army is gone. I can’t help with whatever demons you will have to fight your way through, but...maybe I can offer you some solace in the knowledge that they may not be dead. We might be able to get them back.”

I shuffled sideways so I could see her face. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I think I know where they’ve gone.”

Leaning forward over the rail, she raised one hoof. I followed where she was pointing with my eyes.

“What am I not seeing?” I asked, uncertainly. “That’s just the moon, right?”

“Exactly.”

Author's Note

BLARGLEFLARGLE! Alright. Recap finished! Sweet Merciful...

I'm worn out. This took way more out of me than I thought it would. I hope you guys enjoy it! The editors did incredible work making this readable.

Act 3 Chapter 24 : I Love My Computer, You Make Me Feel Alright

“The ways to kill are almost endless: burning, dropping, gutting, poisoning, beheading, drowning, starving, dehydrating, and a million others. Dealing death can be artful or clumsy, quick or slow, careful or messy.

It is ironic, then, that there are only two ways to die. Awake, alone, and with your final breath your only comfort, or in your sleep, dreaming a dream that soon becomes your new reality.”

General Feather Strike in “Memoirs of a Griffinstone Warlord”.

Tea. Cookies. Three old ladies. One grungy cop.

There was a universal agreement to take a break. Breaks are good. Breaks keep a pony centered, and as we sat there munching on chocolate chips and sipping chamomile it was almost like being normal for fifteen minutes. Of course, normal doesn’t usually come with a yarn monstrosity dedicated to predicting all the hideous ways you might die literally dangling over your head. It didn’t help that I couldn’t shake a strange feeling that that thing was somehow watching me.

Unfortunately, like everything, delicious snacks must end one day.

Apple Bloom was hunched over in her rocker, her pencil dancing across one of the pages of notes. Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle were reclining, sipping their tea and studying the shape above us. I wiped the last bits of tasty, slightly stale apple fritter off my nose and cleared my throat. They all looked over.

“Yes, Detective?” Sweetie prompted.

“There are still some pieces we need to put together here. This ‘universal spell’. That’s what you called it, right?” I asked.

“Yes…”

“How does it work?”

“Ehm...Like it sounds, I suppose. We used the Web of Dark Wishes to design our modeling system, before the war began. It was in a restricted part of the Canterlot Library, but...well, we’d worn out our welcome in most of the libraries in Equestria by then, and books that covered probabilistic systems were in short supply. Knowing Princess Twilight helped. Project Sixty-Six was a modification of that, but rather than mapping fields of probability, it alters them, dragging them off their given courses to create entirely new outcomes. In theory, if you had enough power to force through the system, it could grant...oh…” Sweetie’s ears lay back. “Oh my. That...oh...that’s bad.”

“You were about to say ‘it could grant wishes’, weren’t you?”

Apple Bloom tugged a strand of her red mane down and sucked on the end of it, then said, “Ah mean...iffen these ponies managed to build the web, it could explain lots of the funny stuff we saw down the years. They wouldn’t need half so much of it as they got to start messin’ with the world in little ways. Still, Ah mean...the more unlikely something is, the more they’d need.”

“So, if they needed to wish for something pretty unlikely, like, say...Canterlot being teleported to the moon?” I asked.

“Lots of power. A whole city’s worth or more. That and they’d need some kinda interface thingy to make it work.”

“An interface? Pardon the dumb cop, but…”

“It’s like this. You want to control something that big, yah need some kinda smart machine that’ll do it. One pony, or even a whole bunch of ponies, couldn’t pull all the different magical levers they’d have to to make it work. So, ya need an interface to make stuff simpler.”

“And what form might that take?”

Apple Bloom shrugged. “Beats the stuffin’ out of me. Ah just had the idea. Don’t mean Ah ever made it happen. The most Project Sixty-Six was ever able to do was turn black olives green.”

“You said King Cosmo was researching this ‘wish fulfillment’ stuff, right, Detective?” Scootaloo asked. “Something about looking into good things happening to bad ponies?”

“Yeah. Crazy events over a number of years,” I replied, tapping the side of my head as I tried to recall some of the news articles in the basement of Cosmo’s house. “Even down to ponies coming back from the dead, or at least, appearing to.”

“So, what if whoever built the Shield was trading wishes for power and political favors?”

“Umbra, Animas, and Armature,” Sweetie whispered. “We tried to model them. At least, I think we did. I don’t think it went well, and we haven’t tried since. No amount of compression makes it safe to look into certain things directly. We might have taken a look from orbit, but then there wouldn’t be any useful information.”

“You think you did?” I asked, peering back and forth between the three of them. “Why did you try to model that bunch?”

“They represented the city against us in several of the property cases. It was in the log,” Scootaloo replied, pointing to a notebook dangling beside the weaving room’s door. “We keep a log of all the models we intend to do, but the spells around the room monitor our brain activity.”

“If our heads get too weird, the magic zaps us to sleep and erases an hour or two,” Apple Bloom added, reaching over and tapping a metal strip attached to one of the legs of her rocking chair. “We had to compress a whole bunch of the baddest of the bad of what could happen in Detrot just to get this.” She pointed up at the yarn model overhead. “That thing we thought was a glitch...well, if that’s what the Shield looks like with all the magic of Nightmare Moon’s grimoire in it, Ah wouldn’t wanna see it without that compression algorithm. Probably cook our brains!”

“But...it’s just yarn, right?” I stammered. “What is this ‘compression’ thing you keep talking about?”

“Yer brain is just a lump of meat, ain’t it? Still, you put enough energy and magic into that lump of meat and ya get a pony who can think and do all sorts of things, don’tcha? Yarn ain’t so different, and this room has a whole heap of energy and magic in it,” Apple Bloom replied, with a bit of a grin. “Compression just means lookin’ at something from farther away. You look at the city from up above, it doesn’t look half so bad. ‘cept the Skids o’course. When we’re doin’ the math, we write in a bit of magic so’s certain things get mashed together or pushed farther away. The spell we had to do for you looked like somepony peering through some drunk binoculars.”

Scootaloo, meanwhile, was on her hooves and poking at the glitch with the tip of one wing. Some part of me desperately wanted her to stop, but I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Pulling it down a few inches, she followed a thickly interwoven line sprouting from the top off towards the ceiling. “Hey...guys? I think I found something.”

“Uh...what kinda pony is thatsupposed to represent?” Apple Bloom asked, rising from her chair. “Ah don’t remember no ponies with that shade of white...”

“Look at the fraying of the central string structure. It’s almost like the bandwidth of information flowing down that one piece of yarn is enough to break the model,” Sweetie murmured, grabbing the line with a burst of levitation and tugging it down to a place we could see it more clearly. “Well, that sort of explains it. This isn’t a pony. It has all the same signatures as a pony otherwise, but...there’s no cutie mark magic. No destiny.”

I took a couple of reluctant steps towards the yarn model. “So, somepony without a cutie mark?”

“No, Detective. Even ponies without cutie marks have the magic inside them. This? Nothing,” she murmured, twirling the yarn around her hoof a moment before releasing it.

“Strange,” Scootaloo mused, her small wings folding and unfolding restlessly against her prominent spine. “Destiny doesn’t just dodge somepony completely. If you’re alive, you have a destiny. I mean...hrm…”

“What?” I prompted. “I sense a big, fat ‘unless’ in there somewhere.”

The pegasus picked up the notepad nearest her rocking chair and flipped through it. “Unless our system just won’t model what this person’s destiny is. I mean, it’s possible. There are a ton of limiters built in so destinies that are just too unlikely don’t show up. Still, the fact that the system would model you means it’d take something pretty crazy for that to be the case...”

“Thanks for the reminder that my life is impossible. I really needed that,” I grunted.

“Lookie here!” Apple Bloom exclaimed, pointing at a spot up near the ceiling where the white string vanished into another tangle. “There’s somethin’ up there! Sweetie, can ya shift the field so we can see that bit?”

Edging around the side of the structure, Sweetie pulled a pair of spectacles from somewhere in her dress and popped them on the end of her nose. “Ah! I think I see what you mean.”

“Yahknow, if we’re gonna be fightin’ again, Ah should probably whip ya up some eyes—”

“You’ve been offering for ten years, A.B. and I’ve told you every time that I like my own eyes plenty,” Sweetie huffed, pushing her glasses up. “Now...hrm...I have to move points three and thirty six closer to each other. That might cause some instability.”

“Well, at worst you trip the safeties and we end up wondering why we’re digging ourselves out of a pile of yarn again,” Scootaloo chuckled. “It’s better than trying to get down from a tree covered in sap and pine needles, right?”

The unicorn’s horn glowed, and I felt as though my stomach had shifted in my barrel as the entire heap of woven yarn seemed to slide sideways and down in a way that was altogether nauseating. A dozen pieces of yarn snapped, then re-tied themselves in different locations, binding to entirely new spots. The ‘glitch’ seemed to shrink, and the white strand grew in length, splitting into three separate strands, each one a different colour.

“Yikes...warn a pony before you do that,” I muttered.

Sweetie’s horn didn’t go out as she sat down heavily in her rocker. “Oooh...goodness. Yes, this is incredibly unstable. Scoots, get what you need! The safeties will go in twenty seconds! It’s already coming apart!”

Apple Bloom reached behind her rocker and yanked a self-developing camera off a peg hidden on the back. “Jus’ hold it still! Ah’ll get the picture!”

“Detective! Run!” Scootaloo cried, wings driving a breeze into my face as she shot down the catwalk and into the hallway faster than a mare her age ought to be able to move.

Adrenaline started pumping, and my hooves were moving before my brain was. My hoof caught on the lintel of the door, and I barely caught myself before I would have plowed face-first into Scootaloo. Apple Bloom came after five seconds later, galloping into my open forelegs with the camera around her neck. She wasn’t near so light as she looked, but I managed to keep both of us from tumbling to the floor.

“Sweetie! Get out of there!” Scootaloo shouted, her voice cracking.

The unicorn, casting all decorum aside, bolted for the door, sprinting like a filly half her age or less. Running in a floor length dress was enough of a feat, but doing it while maintaining a complex magic spell was even harder. Light started to build around the door, and dozens of runes lit up along the catwalk. She skidded over the threshold a second before the security door slammed shut and a deep, vibrating thrum filled the hallway.

Apple Bloom raised the camera triumphantly, her breathing a little heavier than mine, but not by much. Sweetie Belle was panting, but a big smile was plastered across her wrinkled features as Scootaloo patted her on the back with her wing.

“Wow! Awesome! I wondered if we’d have to explain this whole mess to you again!” Scootaloo cackled.

“Darling, I’m not slowing down that much,” Sweetie replied, sweeping at her dress to clear the wrinkles around her hips. “Besides, if nothing else, my cardiovascular augmentations still work.”

“Ah still say ya shoulda let me mess with yer joints.”

“And if I ever lose one, I might very well take you up on that,” she retorted, trotting off ahead of us with an extra sway to her hips just to show she was fine. “What’s the picture look like?”

Apple Bloom snatched the piece of self-developing film off the end of the camera and gave it a good shake in her mouth, then held it up. Sweetie and Scootaloo crowded in close.

“Huh. No wonder that’s unstable,” Scootaloo murmured. “There’s contradictory information in the system.”

I tried to get a look at the image, but it just looked like a piece of particularly unpleasant modern art.

“Contradictory?” I asked.

“Yeah...look,” she said, putting a hoof on the image. “See this sorta blueish line coming off of the white line? The white line is whoever is actually behind everything. The blue line is—or at least was—Astral Skylark. She’s dead here. No big deal. We knew that, right? Well, this other line that’s bright red? That’s somepony in authority in the city. They’re responsible for a ton of deaths. We had to completely compress the numbers, but...it’s more than anyone else in the city right now.”

“Any idea who they might be?”

“I would imagine that’s whoever controls the Biters,” Sweetie Belle answered, teasing a lock of her mane with the tip of a toe. “They’ve set gang after gang against one another and spilt a sea of blood. There is still more blood to come, of course, but their death should be a priority.”

“What’s contradictory about that?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing, but that’s where this comes in,” she murmured, indicating a purple string with her hooftip that looked like it was coming apart everywhere along its length. “The information you gave us fit into the system poorly, hence the instability. According to what we have, this individual, whoever they may be, is both alive and dead simultaneously.”

I narrowed my gaze at the purple line on the photograph. “Alright, so the other guy is whoever is behind the Biters and the white line is our actual mastermind...who is this?”

“Detective, this...is the murderer of Ruby Blue.”

My ears shot straight up. “Are you sure?!”

“Yes, we’re sure...but I don’t think we can tell you all that much about them,” she replied, with a sad sigh. “The system may present information, but it is frequently up to us to interpret. I don’t know what most of this means. I didn’t have long enough to get into specifics before the safeties went off.”

There was a disappointed silence, until Apple Bloom spoke up.

“Detective, we had ta ignore most of what ya told us about that poor mare because it falls so far outside of our system that we’d have popped the safeties in seconds if we put it in. Ruby Blue’s story is just too improbable! Ah’m not even mentionin’ what’s in that diary of hers. Ya gotta know how crazy all of this stuff sounds, even with us knowin’ it’s true!”

Throwing up my hooves, I shoved my forehead against the wall. I was so tired I could barely see straight and it was starting to mess with my judgement, but I was that special kind of exhausted which makes everything slide into focus.

A strong foreleg slid across my shoulders, and a lock of red hair fell into my vision. “Ah know this is frustratin’, but yer gonna hafta calm down. We ain’t gonna send ya back out there empty hooved. There is somethin’ in all this...and on the path ya’ll are on right now, there’s a chance to get the Princesses back. Ya know ya gotta destroy the Shield. Well, Ah think we can help with that.”

I raised one eartip. “Howso? The resources of the entire police department weren’t enough to crack that magic. It’s powered by chaos and suffering, and there’s a lot of chaos and suffering in the city right now!”

“Heh, well, ya’ll have a trump card, don’tcha? Ya said there’s that pylon waaay out in the Wilds, right? If ya can get inside that one and there’s no shield on it, take some pictures of the runes runnin’ the spells around the doors. If we can get inside a bunch of’em closer to the city center, we can rig’em to blow! No more spell pattern, no more Web!”

I considered this for a long time, then shook my head. “That doesn’t fix the big shield around Uptown. You want to get into city center, we’ve got to deal with that.”

“The construct at Supermax is already on it, darling,” Sweetie said with a comforting smile that turned quickly into a huge yawn. “Mmmph...Now, Detective, you need to get to the Detrot Police Department, and we need to get back to being wizened old crones pretending to be demigods. I think I need a nap soon.”

“You’re right. I need to go get Mags, too. Wait, wait! My gun!” I held up the Crusader. “How does it work? How do I fire the crystal shells?”

Apple Bloom tugged my sleeve back and pointed at the switch on the side. “Ah’d love to give ya the six week course, but...the Crusader’s dangerous. The ammunition makes a connection with yer brain when ya pull the trigger. What yer feelin’ becomes what ya fire. Make sure the switch is on this symbol.” She tapped the shape that looked like Celestia’s cutie mark. “Then...try to think calm, friendly thoughts. At worst, ya prolly lose consciousness and maybe have a lil’brain hemorrhage. Never hurt nopony. Well, except Sonnet, but she decided she wanted to go on a mission after a bad breakup...”

“Anytime I’m pulling my trigger, I’m generally not feeling very calm or friendly!”

“Well, ya don’t have time to spend three hours a day meditatin’ like we used to, so yer gonna hafta make do, arent’cha?” she replied, sharply, giving me a poke in the chest. “It’s another safety measure so the Crusaders don’t go kill crazy...and considerin’ what yer friends are like, Ah don’t see as how Ah’d want ya firin’ that thing without some thought put in beforehoof.”

Scootaloo snorted, putting a hoof across my shoulders. “Detective, I know she’s making it sound really dangerous, but she wrote the safety manual. I fired ‘Wrecking Ball’ while I was mad a whole load of times and I’m—”

“—losin’ things constantly. Like that pair of thigh socks ya left in the bathtub last week.” Apple Bloom sniggered as her friend gave her an indignant glare. “Yer lucky ya have me to patch ya up, Scoots, or ya would spend more of yer days droolin’ than ya do.”

“I do not drool!”

“Ya so do! Ah do yer laundry and yah leave a puddle on yer pillow every night!”

“So do you!”

“Girls!” Sweetie snapped, bringing both of the ‘Ancestors’’ attentions back around. “Please, a semblance of dignity?”

“She started it…”

“Ah did not—”

“Alright, alright!” I interrupted, putting my hooves up. “Don’t fire the Crusader when I’m pissed off. Got it. Any other tips?” I asked.

“Erm...about twenty, but they all come down to ‘make sure you want to kill what you fire at’. There’s no ‘wound’ setting on a Crusader,” Sweetie said as Scootaloo discretely swatted Apple Bloom’s flank with a wingtip and her friend responded with a firm hip bump.

“Sweet mercy. The Ancestors of the Aroyos,” I chuckled. “I admit, you three are not what I expected.”

“Darling, we never expected to end up like this either,” the unicorn replied, then tapped her chin, pensively. “There...hrm...there is one piece of information we have that might help you at some point. Hard to say, really. I mean, it’s surely meaningless by now, but...well, you did ask us about your grandfather.”

I tilted my head and asked, “What about my grandfather?”

Scootaloo stepped forward, putting a hoof on my foreleg. “He was a great stallion, Detective. Hard Boiled was the best of the Crusaders. He kept us going even when it looked like we might actually lose the war. I spent a year in a draconic P.O.W. camp, and if your grandfather hadn’t busted me out, I’d have died there.”

“Ah loved him like a brother. He was stronger than me. Stronger than anypony. He wouldn’t give up even when we was trapped in a collapsed mine with nothin’ to eat but mushrooms for two weeks straight,” Apple Bloom murmured, picking up where the pegasus left off.

“He was a friend like no other,” Sweetie added, shutting her eyes. “That is why when we heard of us his death, we were all heartbroken. We went to his wake...Detective, he was not ‘in attendance’.”

My ears lay back. “Buh? Say again? I mean, the dead don’t generally attend—”

“They buried an empty box...sheesh!” Apple Bloom barked, poking at Sweetie. “Come on, ya gotta say what ya mean with him. He’s as literal minded as ol’Egg Head was.”

“Ugh, no sense of decorum, at all,” Sweetie sighed, then turned back to me. “If your grandfather died in the fire that consumed his home, they never found his body. While dragonfire could render somepony down to ash, it is...unlikely.”

“Are you saying he could still be alive?!” I gasped.

“If he’s alive, he’s very old,” Scootaloo answered, softly. “He wouldn’t abandon this city. Not willingly. The last we heard from him before the fire, he was investigating some strange goings on in the Wilds. Once a Crusader, always a Crusader, they say.”

“You don’t think he was looking into that Shield pylon—”

Sweetie waved her hoof to forestall any more questions. “I wish we had more to give you, Crusader, but you need to go back to your friends and continue your investigation. I realize this is a bit of a shock, but keep in mind, this was thirty years ago. Wisteria will be waiting for you, and there are arrangements to be made for increasing our patrols so no other dragons encroach on our territory. When you need us, the Aroyos will be ready.”

The door of the little home closed behind me, and I stood there, staring up at the darkened sky and gently stroking the radio juju bag that Apple Bloom had pressed into my hoof as I was leaving. It hung against my neck alongside the Emblem of Harmony. Funny to contemplate how much I’d accumulated in just a couple of months when my life actually meant something. I think the most valuable thing I’d acquired in the last eight years leading up to that fateful day I picked up Ruby’s diary was an especially nice tie and shirt combination. They’d burned with my apartment.

A gentle breeze blew through my mane with the scent of rain on it, natural rain. It was blowing in from the bay with actual clouds, rather than the mass-produced variety I was used to. City life really does lose some of the beauty of nature when you’re hemmed in on all sides by controls and measures.

Still, a bit of natural rain wasn’t worth watching everybody I love die.

The streets were quiet, but that was to be expected. There was no need for the Aroyos to defend the Skids aggressively when no gang dared move beyond their own territories without a significant force to ward off the Biters. It was certainly a great way of encouraging large-scale battles between the gangs, and thus more blood to power the Shield.

The beating of wings reached my ears as Wisteria came in for a landing, trotting a few steps and stopping alongside me as I turned to look up at the apartment building.

“So, Crusada...what ye t’ink of de Ancestors?” she asked, glancing down at the juju bag hanging around my throat. “Dey be somet’ing, yes?”

“They’re something, all right; demented, far too many stories in their heads, and I think they’re probably a danger to themselves and everyone around them. I do believe I finally understand why you follow them, though. In dark times, ponies who keep their promises are rare.”

“And who does dat remind ye of, eh Crusada?” she snickered, poking me in the chest. “By de by, we found de dragon and a smaller one dat were wid her.”

“Wait...two dragons?”

“Aye. De smaller one be blue and cryin’ like a child, but he be not leavin’ when we come for de one what calls herself ‘Vexis’. Dey surrendered to us. I and I still says we should have been skinnin’ dem and usin’ dey scales for armor, but ye promises dat dey be safe, and so dey be.”

“Oog. Draconic prisoners. I have draconic prisoners. How did a simple murder investigation turn into this? One dead girl in an alleyway later and it’s the apocalypse.”

Turning to the sewer grate we’d emerged from earlier, Wisteria stretched her wings and gave herself a shake. “Well, I and I gots to get back and find dem food. Dey be dragons, so only eatin’ once a week, but...dat be a lot of meat and crystal.”

”You’ve been feeding Goofball, haven’t you?”

Wisteria’s cheeks puffed up, and she whistled like a kettle for a second before letting the breath go. “Eh...to be fair, de demon dog eatsold sofas and tires. It be a different t’ing to feed two dragons.”

“Of course. And now we get to walk back through the sewers. Skies above, I miss those times when I could go all week without wading through some other creature’s feces.”

“As dey say, Crusada…same shit, different day.”

The ‘secret’ door into Supermax had become something of a highway since the last time my friends and I used it during our assault on the prison. The tunnels nearest that entrance were largely cleared of the various neurotoxin launchers and basilisk eyes, though most of the side passages were still extremely lethal. Thankfully, somepony had deigned to put up a few warning signs that all said some variation of ‘horrible death this way’.

As we rounded the final corner, Wisteria grinned and picked up speed. There was actually a line of ponies waiting to get into Supermax. Some were scavengers with carts of electronics or supplies probably taken from nearby warehouses while others seemed to be scouts. Two guards stood on either side of the open door, a card table set up by them, waving the ponies through one at a time after checking their faces and cutie marks against some kind of list.

The chattering crowd went silent as we moved past, several bowing or nodding their heads. It was yet another of those changes to my station in life that I could have done without. For her part, Wisteria ignored them as she stopped in front of the guards.

“Wisteria and Crusada,” she said, formally.

The mare beside the door cocked her head sideways, peering at Wisteria’s cutie mark. For as much time as I’d spent with her, I hadn’t actually thought to look at her flank. It took me a second to identify exactly what I was looking at, but when I did I couldn’t help but smile; it was a DJ-style black microphone with a juju bag hanging around the neck.

“Ye be expected, Wisteria,” the guardsmare replied. She was a petite thing with half her mane shaved back. “De Puppet Lady say, ye goes down to de Chamber. Crusada’s people be dere.”

Jambalaya’s little crash space in what had once been the fake control room in front of Tourniquet’s chambers was still in comfortable disarray, though somepony had hoofpainted ‘Royal Guard Barracks’ in messy red ink above the door.

“Ah! De Puppet Lady is waitin’ for ye,” Wisteria said cheerfully. “Go on, Crusada. I and I must go and be feedin’ my foal. De world may end, but de job never does!”

“You said it, sister…”

With a parting smirk, she trotted towards the stairwell.

I felt the beginnings of a yawn, but I buried it. How long had I been awake since that nap in Twilight’s castle? Each hour felt like it was getting longer, and my brain was already howling for rest.

“Hard Boiled, would you stop lurking out there?” Tourniquet’s voice whispered from an invisible spot beside my head. For once, I only flinched rather than very nearly ruining the carpet with terrified piss.

“Lurking is what I do, Tourniquet,” I grunted, plodding through Jambalaya’s pad. Somepony had added a couple cots to one corner, though nobody was hanging around in there just then. I could still smell Zap smoke on the air. “If I don’t lurk, I might explode.”

“Yes, well, Swift is waiting for you along with Mags. Oops! Mags decided not to wait—”

I barely had time to cover my eyes before a flying, feathery missile tried to take me off my hooves. She latched on as I gave my head a good shake, refusing to let go of my hat.

“Grrr! Where you be, egg pony?” Mags demanded.

“I know they told you I’d be coming back in a few hours!” I barked. “Now, are you going to get on my back and sit there without mauling my ears, or am I going to buck you off and stuff you in that gym bag over there under the coffee table?”

Mags’s beak clicked as she crawled sulkily down onto my shoulders, wrapping her tail around my barrel for balance. She kneaded my coat a couple times, then curled up like a grumpy kitten.

Satisfied, I trotted through the open hydraulic security door into Tourniquet’s chamber.

Tourniquet’s magical lights were down low, and a small round card table was positioned in the center of the room where her bed usually was. Taxi was sitting there alongside Limerence with some piece of the car propped between their hooves. Lim’s horn glowed with power as he waved it over the component while my driver slowly turned a screw with a screwdriver held in her teeth.

“Evening. I’m back,” I called, strolling over to the table and settling myself on a short bench underneath. My friends looked up, and Taxi spat out the screwdriver.

“You find anything interesting with these ‘Ancestors’?” Taxi asked, wiping a bit of grease off her muzzle with a towel.

“A few interesting things, actually. The situation is more complicated than we thought. Where’s Swift? If I’m going to fill everypony in, I don’t want to repeat myself. For that matter, where’s Tourniquet?”

“They’re...mmm…” Limerence looked up at the ceiling where I could see only darkness, then shook his head. “They’re ‘interfacing’.”

If you’ve ever been a pedestrian on the receiving end of a bucket of wet cabbage, lingerie, and live mice thrown off the top floor of a skyscraper, then you’re probably aware of just how I was feeling at that moment.

“I have many questions and don’t want answers to any of them,” I muttered. Shrugging Mags off my back onto the table, I squirmed out of my coat, balling it up along with my hat and leaving the heap on the table. Lifting my head, I shouted, “Swift! Tourniquet! I know you can hear me! I want to see some eyes down here in thirty seconds, or I go upstairs and start stuffing toilets with paper towels!”

There was a long pause, and then a flash of light traveled from the ground around the perimeter of the room, creeping up the interwoven wires and cords comprising the walls until surging through the gigantic electrical rat’s nest on the ceiling. Gradually, like a bundle of snakes unwinding, cords started to tumble from the roof of the chamber in great coils until a waterfall of cable landed beside the table. My companions all danced back, but I was rooted in place as the tangle slowly split open like the pod of some bizarre plant, revealing Swift lying inside. Tourniquet was huddled up against her chest, and both had their eyes closed and their breathing even, as though in a deep sleep.

Hundreds of wires wound around my partner’s body, creeping into her nostrils, her mouth, and ears, whilst others wrapped lightly around her chest in intricate patterns. Her throat was bulging in the most disconcerting fashion, which suggested that the invasion was more complete than I really wanted to consider. I swallowed as the shiny metal fibers began to withdraw from her various cavities, spilling out of her like a slow liquid to rejoin the central cable network. Something about the whole business reminded me of a short movie I’d seen at one point about an octopus eating a starfish.

‘Say something,’I thought.

‘What on Equis do you want me to say?!’

‘I don’t know! Anything! This silence is so awkward you could weaponize it!’

‘If you can’t come up with anything, what makes you think I’m going to be able to?’

I glanced at my friends for their reactions, but they were just as dumbfounded as I was.

Swift shifted on her bed of cable, then smacked her lips as the last wire pulled itself free from her nose. Wrapping her forelegs around Tourniquet, she hugged the mechanical filly to herself for a second and yawned.

“Mmm...did we do it?” she asked in a cracking voice. “Mrrmph. I think I need a glass of water.”

Tourniquet’s crystalline eyes opened and danced in the soft light as she pulled herself up, then offered a hoof to Swift. “I used the part of your brain that lets you feel weather patterns to boost my throughput on the electrical grid by nineteen percent! There’s a meat warehouse with a working freezer that didn’t go out during the Darkening down on Neighara street! It’s fully stocked with all the meat we’ll need to feed our draconic guests for a year if we need to!”

My partner flared her wings out and stretched like a cat, shoulders down, back humped, and tail in the air. “Mmm, alright, send a scout team. Phew!” Turning, she smiled, her eyes still shut. “Hello, Sir! You just got back, right? I saw you coming through the sewers.”

“I’m feeling like I missed something...and open your damn eyes, kid. I have limits, and you being able to watch me like that is too bizarre. What’ve you two been doing while I was gone?”

Mags began casually preening herself whilst talking through her feathers. “Egg pony, I thought all adults knew this stuff? Daddy used to call it ‘humping’, and he and Miss Esmerelda spent hours when I wasn’t allowed in the—”

I reached up and grabbed my ward’s beak, but the damage was done. Swift had turned hot pink, and if Tourniquet could have blushed, I’m pretty sure she would have been red right down to her diodes.

“W-we weren’t having sex, Sir,” she stammered, stepping closer to the construct, who pressed against her side. They were only a few inches shy of one another and might have been mistaken for a couple. Come to think of it, Tourniquet actually looked a little older than she had when we’d first met her. Her legs were a bit longer, if nothing else. “I was just letting Tourniquet use p-part of my brain and sensory system to see if we could find some m-meat for the dragons. It helped the fidelity to have her inside me. Wait...no, that’s not what I meant! I meant it was better to have her penetrate my—”

I slapped my hooves over my ears. “Oh my sweet Celestia, I do not care and don’t want to know! Sit down and never speak of this again!”

Yanking a chair out from the table, I slapped the seat, and Swift sheepishly crawled into it. The cords attached to Tournquet’s back tugged her into the air, and she dangled at the side of the table beside my partner.

Pushing Mags out of the way so I could sit, I crossed my forelegs on the table in front of me and swept my shaggy mane back out of my eyes. I’d needed a cut before I died that first time, and the intervening weeks hadn’t helped the situation much. Still, a barber was going to have to wait until after the world was no longer ending.

“My friends...it’s worse than any of us imagined.”

I quickly filled them in on everything I’d gotten from the Ancestors right up until a tray of drinks arrived and we all spent a few minutes wetting our whistles.

Finally, the splash and dash done, we got back to business.

“So,” Taxi said, “there are three individuals who are behind our current misery, if we don’t include Astral Skylark. One of them is Ruby Blue’s killer who’s evaded you for two months straight without so much as a sniff and now that you have that sniff it is ‘that they’re both dead and alive’. The entire magical framework of the city across multiple timelines is being warped by the Shield. You now know how to use your gun, but if you pull the trigger it could give you a stroke. Is that about the shape of it?” She drained her mimosa and slapped the glass back down on the table.

“More or less. Also, we should all have been dead or imprisoned years ago and you probably would have tried to assassinate the Princesses at some point,” I said, stroking Mags’s belly as she lay on her back, using one of my forelegs as a pillow. “If it makes you feel any better, their model said you had a better than twenty percent chance of actually pulling it off.”

“It doesn’t, but thanks anyway. What else? Might as well hear everything.”

“That’s it, really,” I replied, sitting back and shaking my head. “Our next stop is that Shield Pylon out in the Wilds. The P.A.C.T. had almost all of the anti-megafauna vehicles, but I know there’s a couple left at the Castle. At least, there was before this all started. That means pushing through Biter territory to get there. That little filly who was helping you fix the cab said there was a decent way through if we don’t mind some diamond dogs? Speaking of that, how is the cab?”

Taxi sighed and rubbed her eyes, then held out a leg to Limerence who was still fiddling with the component they’d been messing with when I arrived. “Do you mind telling him?”

Limerence looked up, then set down his screwdriver. “We need at least twelve to twenty hours with a fully stocked garage to fix both the spell core and the severe structural damage caused by the dragonfire. The Aroyos are excellent electricians and mechanics, but many of the components we require are modifications of police issueparts whose serial numbers have somehow gone missing.”

I turned to my driver. “If I were to check the police garage inventory records for the last couple of years, how accurate would they be?”

She cleared her throat, noisily. “They’re probably very accurate...”

“Then if I were to check with the procurement officer’s spouse, would I find them pleased or displeased with the amount of time you’d spent alone with their special somepony?”

Taxi is nominally a pretty good liar, but I wouldn’t have bought my next breath off of her with the look on her face just then. “Hardy, you know me—”

“Right. Displeased. I just wanted to make sure I’m on the same page, here,” I interjected, putting a hoof over her mouth and glancing toward Limerence. “So, what you’re saying then is that we can’t repair the car without getting to the Castle, is that it? Can we get the car there?”

“Purely under its own power? No,” he replied. “However, I can keep the spell core stabilized with my own magical abilities. It is a difficult process, but one that should be entirely doable.”

Tourniquet’s ears flipped back against her head with the sound of grinding gears. “You’ll pop your horn if you do that! That’s an unclassed spell core with dozens of illegal modifications! There’s enough power going through it to give me the hiccups!”

Limerence pulled his tail under himself and frowned. “I am aware of the dangers. There are precautions we can take.”

“It’s going to hurt like a bastard, though,” Taxi murmured, reaching out and covering his hoof with her own. “Even with grounding wires and capacitors to soak up anything above a safe thaumic voltage, you’re still going to be drowning in energy. The area around the Castle is dangerous, even if we take this route through the diamond dogs. If Chief Jade followed standard procedures, the sewers are blocked. If I have to put the hammer down, can you stabilize a spell core while somepony is driving nails into your head?”

“My horn will invert most of the energy into something the engine can use and...should not shatter, even if I lose consciousness,” he said, unable to disguise the fear in his voice as he gazed evenly into my eyes. “I can alter a restrictor ring to close off my leylines if they begin to overload. The worst possibility is that the engine will cut out.”

I leaned towards him slightly. “Are you sure that’s the worst that can happen?”

“I have no desire to die or permanently lose my ability to cast spells. Believe that I will be taking every precaution. I can get us there,” he replied, though the look in his eyes told me everything I needed to know.

“Sir, couldn’t we just take...I don’t know...another car?” Swift asked, quietly. “The Aroyos have a few others.”

“We could, sure,” I said wrapping Mags’s tail around my foreleg and fiddling with the tuft on the end. “What do you want to drive when we’re being chased by the P.A.C.T. or these ‘Biters’ at some point in the future? An unholy demon of speed modified to outrun cop cars and pegasi, or a gas powered sedan with a moonroof and two hundred thousand miles on the clock?”

She considered this for a moment, and then her ears flopped against her head. “Speed demon, Sir...”

I held out my hoof to the unicorn. “Then Lim, it’s your decision. We’ll probably need full power at some point.”

“I know,” he murmured, rising from his seat and trotting around the table towards the chamber door. “I’m going to go meditate and prepare. Somepony has recently checked the Archivist network spell system. I left a message on it that, should they have survived, they can safely make contact with me.”

“Good news, then. Go on. We’ll be done here, soon.”

With that, he peered down at his pocket watch, then shoved it back into his pocket and left to go do whatever a pony does when they’ve got some mortal torture to look forward to within the next few hours.

As soon as he was gone, the security door swung shut of its own accord.

“That leaves us with a couple of ugly problems we haven’t solved yet,” I said, bringing everyone’s attention back to me.

“You mean whatever is keeping everypony out of Uptown, right?” Tourniquet asked, tilting her head against Swift’s chest. “I’ve been trying to analyze that field at a distance. It’s not a standard shield at all. More like some kind of...powerful repulsion magic. There’s nothing solid about it. It’s like a bunch of unicorns are pushing everything away.”

“We’re headed to the Wilds. If the Shield is the source of the magic around Uptown, we’ve got a pretty solid lead on figuring out how it works. Once we get out there...we’ll get inside that pylon one way—” I reached over and touched my revolver. “—or another.” I heard a soft snore and found my ward had finally fallen asleep in my forelegs, so I felt it was safe enough to broach one particular issue I hadn’t been much inclined to with her awake. “Do we yet have any idea what the ‘Biters’ are?”

Taxi shook her head. “Yes and no. We know what they do. They’re ponies, or were. Swift’s transformation seems to point in that direction, and that’s the best our reports say. We’ve never killed one and only caught glimpses when they’re leaving a scene. They’re incredibly fast, never leave survivors, mutilate bodies, kill indiscriminately without regard to age or gender. They never attack a defended position and they’ve got almost perfect intelligence on the movements of anyone they target. They can seemingly strike from anywhere in the city within fifteen to twenty minutes.”

I nodded. “What about what they did to the griffins in the hotel? That strange gun that killed without leaving any holes in the walls?”

Reaching back to her saddlebags, Taxi undid the buckle and plucked out one of her clipboards which was stuffed with scraps of paper and a few grainy photographs. “Well, not a lot…”

I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, Tourniquet cautiously stuck a leg in the air.

“Um...I...I know something about them,” she said, quietly.

Dragging Taxi’s heap of papers over, I looked down at them, then up at the mechanical filly. “Alright, explain. You’re not going omniscient on us, are you?”

“Oh! No, no. I mean...not yet,” she replied, her fiber optic mane falling across one side of her face. “The Ladybugs let me look at the last place where the Biters killed. The gun that makes holes in flesh has the same magical signature as the Moon Guns you took away from Astral Skylark. It’s got to be some kind of prototype, too. All the attacks were from one location, not multiple, and none of them more than ten meters away. It’s really short range.”

“Prototype. So, you’re saying there might only be one of them?” I asked.

She bobbed her head. “One or two, at most. It has a ballistic profile and, unless it’s totally identical across all the guns, I’m pretty sure there’s only one weapon. It shoots right through bodies, but it’s in perfectly straight lines. I just traced back the distance to one point using triangula—”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, cutting her off. “Can you work out some kind of defense against this thing?”

Tourniquet’s ears drooped. “I’m just a prison. I can’t do everything.”

“Then we’ll figure something out. That said, we’ve got to get moving, while the gettin’ is good. Whoever is hunting us will probably be informed that I’m back in the city as soon as we make contact at the Castle.”

I patted Tourniquet between the ears, then grabbed Mags by the scruff and flicked her onto my back. She rolled onto her stomach with her legs draped off my sides and snuggled her beak into my mane with a soft snort, but showed no signs of waking. I picked up my coat and hat, throwing the coat over her and putting the hat back on my head.

“Taxi? Go help Limerence prep the car. Swift? Come with me. I want to get some provisions for this trip into the Wilds. Mags? Sleep right there, for about two weeks if possible.”

I rounded the corner into what Tourniquet called a ‘storage area’ to the sound of cracking bones, chewing noises that would have made my mother faint at the table, and loud moans of pleasure. At the end of the hall, three tall rooms with bars across the front—which seemed to be unconverted dragon-sized cells—were stacked to the ceiling with all manner of goods. A fourth, the barred gate lying open, was empty save for two bona-fide dragons.

One I recognized: Vexis. Her yellow muzzle was dripping with blood and what might have been glitter as she ripped at the carcass of some unfortunate animal that was in enough pieces I couldn’t identify what it might have been originally. Her injured wing was splinted, and somepony had applied a whole bucket of some sort of brown, glutinous ointment to the frostbite down her side. On the whole, she looked none the worse for wear.

Beside her, a much smaller dragon with baby-blue scales was curled up as close as he could be beneath her good wing, pecking at the meat from time to time. His tail was wrapped in enough bandages to carpet a room, and his belly bulged with a good gorge. If I remembered correctly, his name was ‘Ambrock’.

Ambrock caught sight of me first, jerking his head up. His eyes centered on Swift, and he tried to glare at her in an intimidating fashion, but she just smiled and strutted ahead of me, adding an extra smug swagger to the sway of her hips. Seeing that, the smaller dragon drew back a little, smoke billowing from his nose and up into a vent hood overhead. Vexis—enthralled by her meal—took a moment to realize her brother wasn’t eating anymore. When she did, she flicked her eyes in our direction, then carefully wiped her muzzle with the back of one claw on a bath towel that’d been laid beside the bars.

“Detective. You kept your promise,” she said cheerfully as she blotted off her face. “I expected death within an hour, and yet the vehicle you sent had a heap of delicious gemstones and crystals for my brother and I. I’d made my peace with death, you know. Of course, that magical rock I was forced to eat along with the gemstones has me slightly worried. None of your ponies will tell me precisely what it does.”

“That’s our ‘insurance’ in case you and your brother decide to get feisty,” I replied, coming to a stop in front of the open cage. “It’s also the reason your ‘room’ isn’t locked up tight. The long and short of it is that if you try to hurt anypony, you’ll be unconscious before your next breath.”

Vexis splayed out the neck fluke on one side of her head in something that might have been a draconic smirk. “Oh? Our breaths can take quite a long time and do much damage before we must inhale.”

“It’s on you. To be completely honest, I don’t want or need prisoners. Killing you isn’t on the table for me, so if you don’t annoy anypony too much, I’ll probably let you go.”

Swift put a hoof over the moon-shaped scar on her chest. “Sir, Tourniquet wants to know if she’s allowed to suck all of the magic out of them if they misbehave. She hasn’t had dragon magic in forever and it’s...um...it’s ‘tasty’. Her words.”

Ambrock meeped and ducked his head under Vexis’s wing. “Don’t want my magic sucked out, sister!” he whimpered, in a muffled voice. “The monster pony with the evil teeth is scary enough. Can’t we stay outside, where I can see the sky? Why are we obeying these ponies?”

My partner’s ears lay back, and she took a couple of steps closer. Vexis bared her teeth protectively and let out a fearful hiss, bringing Swift to a halt.

“Nopony is going to hurt you,” my partner said, softly.

“You froze my tail!” the smaller dragon moaned.

“Well, you tried to burn my everything, so I think we’re even!” Swift bit back, then quickly calmed herself. “Anyway, I’m the Warden here, and if I say nopony will hurt you, you’ll be okay. Um...can I get you anything? I know you were just hungry and weren’t going to hurt us, so if you have to stay here, I don’t want it to be unpleasant.”

Ambrock slowly pulled his head out from behind his sister and studied the little pegasus that’d brought him to ground and then filled his stomach, as though she was some sort of elaborate puzzle that might explode in his face at any given moment.

“You are a weird pony,” he concluded, then set his head between his forelegs and closed his eyes, seemingly dozing off.

“I get that a lot,” she muttered, then turned to the supply room, grabbing a bag from a pile beside the door.

Vexis poked at the dead animal she’d been ripping apart one last time, then nosed the remains to one side of her cage. “We are done with that, by the way. If not to harm us, why have you come? I don’t have any new information for you.”

“Oh, we’re not here for an interrogation. We actually just came for some supplies,” I replied, waving towards one of the closed cells. The door of that particular cell clanked, then slid open of its own accord. “You and your brother are free to move around, so long as you don’t make a ruckus. Also...you may hear the creepy, disembodied voice of a little girl. If you do, listen to it. She’s controlling your dinners. Other than that, it might be worthwhile to make friends with the ponies upstairs. They’re going to be the ones defending your scaly backsides in the event this place is attacked.”

“Hrmph...Friends,” Vexis murmured, with a disparaging sneer. “You ponies do love that word. Having overhead some of what you intend, I suspect you are in far more danger out there than Ambrock and I are in here. Still, considering we may be upon your graces for some time, I will...contemplate this ‘friends’ idea. If it provides us with more days of full stomachs and comfortable caves such as this one, it may be worthwhile, even if it means a polity with tiny horses.”

I heaved my rucksack full of supplies from around my neck into the trunk of the Night Trotter, then reached back to pull Mags off my shoulders where she was attached like a limpet. Thankfully, her claws weren’t quite strong enough to penetrate my pelt, but it was a close thing. Opening the back seat, I set her in the hoofwell.

Limerence was sitting in the front seat, his eyes closed, deep in meditation. He wasn’t wearing his trademark vest or knives, and a spaghetti-like mess of wires was draped haphazardly around his upper body, leading underneath the glovebox into what I assumed was the engine compartment. Most ended at a tiny ring of metal on the base of his horn.

Out front, Taxi was still tinkering under the hood, but she looked to be wrapping up.

Not wanting to interrupt either of them, I turned to Swift, who pushed her own heaping sack into the trunk, then slid in beside me.

“Sir, do you really think Chief Jade will give us one of the anti-megafauna vehicles?” she asked. “If they’re the ones I’m thinking of, they’re not going to work against full-sized dragons.”

“I don’t intend to use it to fight dragons,” I replied, sticking a hoof into my pocket and feeling around to make sure I had a few extra shotgun shells. “We’re going to load it down with every trick Jade can afford to give us for avoiding them, though. If it comes to a fight, we have the Crusader.”

Swift’s ears twitched as she laid her head on the seat, looking at me out of one eye.

“So, we’re going to go to our nutty boss, beg for one of the most useful tools in her arsenal during a worldwide crisis, then drive into a deadly forest while trying to avoid dragons, with our only weapon being the gun that could turn your brain into goop if you fire it?”

“You got it, kid.”

Swift frowned, her thin eyebrows drawing together. “This plan makes my stomach hurt.”

“You’re staying here with your cuddle-buddy, then?” I chuckled.

She snapped a wing out to knock my hat off, but I had already ducked and it whiffed right over top. She settled for growling, “I’m coming, but if my mom and my grandmare are awake by the time we get back, you get to tell them the story!”

“Now you’re trying to kill me too, huh?”

“No, Sir. I’d get bored waiting in line.”

Act 3 Chapter 51 : Running About With Our Tails On Fire

"Do you know the strange thing about ponies? The children were never frightened of us.

Oh, they knew we were their slavers. They knew we were cruel. They knew we beat them when they were slow and starved them when they didn't meet their quotas. They knew their parents were rightly afraid. Nothing we did ever made those damned colts and fillies stop working for their talent-marks, or playing pranks, or hunting escape.

There was an unwritten rule that attacking the children under one's care was a poor idea. I remember a story of a young Overseer named Grapack, who thought to devour a young filly when she disobeyed him. He hadn't quite grown into a proper size yet, and his slaves kicked him to death. When time came to punish that lot, they were given a day without rations. Nothing else. Ponies protecting their children make dragons look downright lazy with the security of our hoards.

More than a few of the young managed to get out, and the overseers were always relieved when one of the children escaped of their own volition. You'd think it would have occurred to us to chain them in little boxes, or break their little knees, but hassling the young brought more trouble than it was worth.

I'm glad we didn't. Princess Luna wouldn't have had any mercy if those voices had prevailed. I might have lost more than my wings and back legs when they liberated my camp if the children hadn't been there to stop her.

May no dragon ever be foolish enough to make war on ponykind again."

- Tocra, Former Dragon Slave-master, a History Of The War Against The Ponies

Junior’s leg had fallen asleep about two hours ago, but short of sawing it off at the shoulder, Sweet Shine didn’t seem inclined to let it go. He did his best not to think about his bladder, but it was going to become a pressing matter at some point. Still, she looked peaceful, for once, and that was worth just about any discomfort the colt could imagine.

His Wonderbolts bedspread was piled in a heap at the end of the bed, but it was a warm night and Sweet Shine was like a little furnace as she clung to his leg. Thankfully, she’d left the window open when she crept inside, and a gentle breeze kept the sweat from clinging to his neck and sides. Of course, she could just as well have come in through the front door, but old habits die hard. It’d been only a few months since her father was taken away by the police.

The psychologist his parents hired to poke around in his mind seemed to think he should be all broken up about smashing Stone Shine’s head. He wasn’t in the least; his dad hadn’t even asked why he wanted his bat out of the evidence locker, though his mom had a couple questions when he asked her to help him burn his cutie-mark into the grip.

Cautiously raising his head, Junior cocked an eye over at where his battered baseball bat leaned against the headboard within easy reach. It was a strange thing to take comfort in, but if he’d learned one thing on that fateful day, it was that he’d always have to be ready to protect his loved ones.

Looking down, he carefully ran his free toe down his friend’s mane, tracing along one of her black stripes.

‘I could have died,’ he thought to himself, then shook his head, his shaggy grey mane falling across his eyes. ‘Why doesn’t that bother me?’

Junior bit his lip as he studied his friend’s sleeping face. Her bruises were gone, and the scars had faded. Even her two-toned mane seemed healthier. She looked a bit thicker in the haunch, too, but there was still the shadow of the gaunt little filly he’d carried out of the house across the street.

‘Shiny is alive. That’s what matters.’

Reaching down with his free toe, he gently stroked her mane back from her ear and leaned down to rub his cheek against hers. She shifted in her sleep, letting go of his knee as she turned to face him. He prepared to jump out of bed and sprint for the bathroom, but didn’t have time before her forelegs wrapped themselves around his waist. She buried her face in the fur on his chest, letting out a contented sigh.

Taking a deep breath, he let his head droop onto the pillow.

‘What’s five more hours?’ he thought. ‘She deserves to sleep a little longer.’

The jumble of images faded into indistinctness, leaving me alone in the dark. I still had something like a floor, and whatever constituted air inside my head, but that left my list of resources painfully short and me sitting there on the mental ‘ground’ and trying to make sense of what’d just happened. I could feel my tongue and the fur on my forelegs, but I had no pulse to keep time.

I clung to the single picture that made perfect sense; my younger self, holding Taxi, lying in my bedroom in my parents’ house a few weeks after I got my cutie-mark. I hadn’t thought of that night in years.

Where had that memory come from?

“Memory is slippery, little colt. A better question is most likely ‘Where does the mind come from’?” asked a voice that sounded like it’d swallowed hooffuls of tacks.

I stumbled backwards, though not fast enough to stop a quick moving chain from snaking its way up behind my rear hooves and wrapping itself around my throat. I was yanked onto my stomach, my cheek pressed against the glass-like surface and my flank in the air. There was no pain, but the pressure felt unpleasantly real as it dug into my throat.

I tried to speak, but another chain shot from under my chin and snapped my teeth shut. I struggled in my bonds, trying to back away from the creature I knew was out there in the dark. What I wanted seemed to have little bearing on my evening.

Like an ancient banshee come from the depths of Tartarus to take her revenge, Saussurea faded into being in front of me.

The elderly mare’s living chains warped themselves into a strange mockery of her rocking chair, which she plunked herself down in with a pleased sigh and began to rock back and forth. The craggy, wrinkled smirk on her muzzle made my guts squirm. I jerked at my bonds, and that smile widened.

“Oh don’t bother. Those chains are in your mind. You couldn’t break them with a thousand imaginary muscleheads like yourself at the task. Now, the broken mare I so dangerously underestimated...she’d know how to escape them in a second. You? Never. You’re too stubbornly convinced you know your own limitations.”

Saussurea’s sharp horn lit with eerie red flame.

A hole seemed to form in the air beside her, surrounded on all sides by a swirl of smoke. It flickered, then stabilized. Through the hole, a strange scene seemed to be playing out.

Taxi was sitting at a desk of some kind in what looked like a distinctly fleshy cubicle with strange carpet like what we’d seen spreading in the elevator back in The Office, before the portal. Bones was with her, though I couldn’t tell what he might be saying, but from his body language he was trying to convince her to do something.

My driver’s nose was bleeding copiously as she quivered over a stack of paper. She looked like she’d been through the wringer. The healing talisman was still clinging to her side, but its light was fading.

“Now, then! This is quite the pickle, isn’t it?” Saussurea nickered, a teacup appearing in her hoof. She took a casual sip, then set it on the arm of her rocking chair. “You could get up and help her, if your mind wasn’t such an alcohol-riddled disaster area. But you haven’t answered my question yet!”

The chains around my face loosened until I could speak, though the one pinning me down kept taut.

“Tell me, your thoughts?” she asked.

“I’m thinking you’ll be dead alongside the rest of us and that that might be something to look forward to!” I growled.

“Not a killer, and yet so murderously intent!” she laughed, reaching down to tousle my mane like a fond old grandmother. “It must gall you, having let something like me live. A monster, cheerfully and happily resting in my pit while the world ends. You know the Warden would never let me expire. Down in the deep, below even the place they keep rogue dragons, I’ll probably be one of the last things on this world to freeze. I’ve my tomatoes that grow in the dark, and my artificial sun...I might outlast even the Princesses on the moon. Wouldn’t that be special?”

I braced my knees and gave the chains another rough tug as Saussurea returned to her seat.

“What...do you...want?” I snapped.

The old nag snorted, spittle landing on my cheek. “Stupid little colt! It is not what I want. I am in Tartarus Prison, most likely having tea and biscuits! Here, right now, this is all about you. You, who have so many little parts of the puzzle and yet the whole eludes you.”

“The puzzle?! My best friend is dying right there and you want me to talk about the case?!”

“Yes! Dense, boy. You are dense. Thickheaded!” She rapped her hoof on my forehead and it let out a noise like a coconut being hit with a rock, then pointed at the hole through which I could see my driver and Bones. “Consider the situation. Your enemies sought the Armor of Nightmare Moon. The Nightmare was banished, but a thousand years have passed. What motivates ponies to commit the evils these have committed?”

I shook my head. “P-power. Wealth—”

Saussurea’s chain pulled me into the air where I dangled like a fish on a hook in front of her, my back legs wheeling at the air.

“No, idiot...” she admonished, jamming one toe under my chin and forcing me to look into her deeply lined face. “These ponies found something out there in the wilds. It called to them...and they dug into the earth. It claimed them, generation upon generation. They fed it their old, their infirm, and their helpless. What interest have they in power? Their power eclipses even the Princesses’. Wealth? They built a city. They bribe dragons. They control dimensional magics that make the tracking spells I cast on the prisoners of Supermax look paltry by comparison. What do they want?”

Something in her tone pulled me back from the anger that’d been mostly directed at the effort to get myself free. I stared at her for a moment, mulling over the problem. It was Police Work 101. Establish motive.

“These moves haven’t been selfish moves,” I said, quietly. “They’re calculated. They invest in such a fashion as only their children’s children’s children might see the fruits of their labors…”

“Yes! Go on! Let’s see if that keen deductive mind still has enough neurons to tease out the truth!”

“It would be easier if I wasn’t chained up, here,” I grumbled.

“You’re not chained up, fool,” she replied, sharply. “You never were. You’re inside your own brain.”

I looked down at myself, finding my body unbound and only my hooves supporting me.

“Alright, so...they’re working towards a wish, but they have sacrificed generations to it and no single generation was ever expected to achieve it, until now,” I muttered, then raised both ears. “I can’t see all those hundreds of ponies sacrificing themselves, willingly, unless...unless they weren’t the ones in control. That means it’s not their wish.”

“Yeees, colt. Do give the broken mare my regards, won’t you?”

Saussurea gave one last spine-tingling laugh, and then a bundle of chains seemed to wrap themselves around her body, swirling up to her lips and plunging down her throat. After a moment, they fell into a pile of smoke that vanished as quickly as it’d come. When she was gone, I was left with only the strange hole in the air and the view of Taxi and Bones.

Headaches were a new sensation that Nightmare could have done without. Of course, the pounding in her skull was only icing atop the cupcake; somepony was kicking her in the ribs.

“Come on, colt! Get up! Don’t know what you think you’re doing having a nap!”

Nightmare moaned as another sharp strike hit her in the belly. Jerking her head off the carpet, she opened her eyes to find a skeleton’s displeased face inches from her own. It was not that his expression looked particularly displeased, but something in the way he carried himself mixed ‘displeased’ with ‘about to torture you to death’, though that last might have been her imagination. She was still unused to the idea of having an imagination; controlling it was out of the question.

She contemplated screaming. Screaming had seemed like the best course of action more than once since she’d gained intelligent agency. Unfortunately, she’d since established it only made her feel better, rather than keeping her from being eaten.

Then, the memories came flooding in like a tide, washing away her panic.

“B-Bones?” she stammered.

“Who’d you think it was?!” the skeleton barked inside her head. “Is that you, Moonie? Hard Boiled doesn’t usually sound quite so much like he just crapped himself.”

“I…don’t...Oh.” She gave a start, then jerked herself to a standing position, eyes wide. Taxi was still there, blood trickling down her chin, eyes bulging, pulse pounding, veins standing out on her forehead.

‘Ghost, how long was I gone?’ Nightmare thought.

‘About a minute and a half! I can’t talk right now! I think I know where Hard Boiled is!’

‘You do? Where?!’

‘What part of ‘can’t talk’ didn’t you hear me say?! Save Hardy’s best friend or we’re going to be stuck together a long, long time!’

Shaking her head, Nightmare tried to clear her mind. The images of the colt with the filly wrapped around him were still fresh in her thoughts, alongside a strange emotion that felt like a burning coal, warming her heart. It made her want to take the mare in some type of embrace, stroke her hair, and tell her everything would be alright.

True, they might all be dead soon, but that was irrelevant.

Taxi must not die.

“Pony,” Nightmare murmured, putting her hoof on the mare’s shoulder. “You must…” She paused, and considered her words carefully. “Sweets...”

Taxi’s eyes jerked up for an instant before going back to the paper, though one of her ears swiveled to face Nightmare.

“Whatever you’re going to do, best do it quick,” Bones said, nodding at Taxi’s chest. “Don’t think her heart is going to last much longer.”

Nightmare ignored him and leaned in close, until her lips touched Taxi’s cheek. “Sweets,” she whispered, “Please let go. You have to let go, or...or I’ll die. I swear, I will come back for you. I love you, Sweet Shine. I’ll always come back for you.”

Nightmare blinked a few times as she mulled over her own words . Where had those last two sentences come from? Nightmare hadn’t meant to say them, but the words just slipped out. Still, it seemed to do the trick.

Taxi’s breathing hitched, then she blinked a few times.

“H-Hardy?” she mumbled, looking up from the paper. All at once, her body seized and her gaze was yanked back down to the stack of blank sheets on the desk. Gradually, she tilted forward.

“N-no...oh please, do not be d-dying—” Nightmare stuttered, then fell silent as a series of glyphs began to appear on the empty page in front of Taxi. With a wobble, Nightmare’s knees went slack with relief, and she stumbled sideways against the wall.

“Eh...you mind explaining why that is a good thing, Moonie?” Bones said, cocking his head to one side.

“It is complicated,” Nightmare replied, “Or rather, I do not fully understand. She fought the mind control field and it was killing her. I examined one of Hard Boiled’s memories and believe I convinced her to stop resisting. We will have to retrieve her before we go. What happened to the monsters?”

“They caught a fatal case of indigestion. Sad to say, that’s all the grenades we had left, and there will be more beasties coming. I had to ditch the guns I picked up back in the building when I tried to follow Hard Boiled. Best we get out of here before more uglies make themselves known.”

“I agree. Shall we continue to the control—”

Nightmare was interrupted by a soft hum, followed by a tiny flittering blue light dropping out of the fog. Bones danced back, shoving a hoof into his jacket while Nightmare snatched up her trigger bit and aimed the Crusader at the dancing glow. It hovered over her head for a moment, then seemed to jump a bit to the left a few inches, returned to its original position, then jumped again in the same direction.

“Bones, what is this? Is this your doing?” she demanded.

“That’s not like anything I’ve seen in the Office before, though considering the place wasn’t active way back when, that might not mean much. I will say one thing, though. Don’t that look an awful lot like the nerd’s magic? His horn-light’s that color.”

“Aha! Yes! Limerence Tome must have sent us some form of tracking spell in case we escaped! Oh, I miss my horn! How do earth ponies manage?”

Bones cocked his skull in her direction. “We manage just damn fine, Moonie. If this is a tracking spell, you think we can follow it?”

Nightmare nodded, then turned sideways so she could line herself up with the direction the fluttering light was jumping toward. “Hmmm...It is directing us almost exactly toward where I believe the control room to be. My evaluation of Limerence Tome suggests a pony of intelligence, but a suicidal devotion to duty. I do not like the decision-making processes of suicidal ponies.”

“Then you picked the wrong stallion’s brain to burgle, missy,” Bones quipped.

“The irony is not lost on me.” Nightmare let out a long sigh, which was a gesture she found she liked. There were so many little variations one could add to a sigh. “Unfortunately, I believe my objectives require that Limerence Tome survive this demented caper.”

“Then we need to find whatever ‘creatures’ your friend who got eaten by the carpet was referring to before she died. Let’s hope they can help us avoid whatever is turning ponies into puppets. A pack of wild yaks wouldn’t drag Hard Boiled out of here without Miss Shine.”

“She...she heard me,” I murmured, trying to lean into the swirling hole in the air. My nose bonked against something that felt distinctly like warm glass. I tapped the surface a few times, which made no noise but still seemed to be perfectly solid.

Stuck inside my own grey matter, I wanted nothing more than a bucket of bagels and a dozen beers, but it didn’t seem I had that much agency. Certainly nothing like having my dream-world propped up by Gale. That’d been nice.

My body seemed to be doing alright on its own, considering Nightmare walked a little too much like a mare. Or rather, walked a little too much like Scarlet. Part of me was glad Taxi was on a mental time-out. She’d never let me live it down if she saw me swishing my hips like that.

I exhaled, wishing I could feel my heartbeat. Most people never get the chance to go without for any length of time, and the experience is like getting used to an amputated limb; the awareness of something being wrong never quite goes away. Having been dead a few times, it was starting to bother me worse each time.

Rolling onto my back, I let my eyes roll back in my head and shouted, “Room service! I’d like a bucket of bagels, five gallons of beer, Scarlet Petals to eat the bagels off of and Lily Blue to hold me while I cry for about twelve hours.” Cocking an eye towards the peephole showing me the world outside, I added, “Oh, and while we’re wishing for things that won’t happen anytime soon, get me three quarts of garlic and onion cream cheese served in Colonel Broadside’s ribcage.”

Nightmare Moon was saying something to Bones; I could see the end of my muzzle moving. Knowing her it was probably delightfully archaic and infuriating. It also was going to probably earn her a—yep. Then she was clutching my nose. I didn’t know what she’d said, but it’d earned her a sharp kick in the face.

All at once, some sense one develops from years of coping with the possibility that their psychopathic boss might tear them limb from limb at any moment alerted me to the fact that I was no longer alone. I rose to my hooves, brushing a complete lack of dust off my stomach. Surveying my little corner of nowhere, I found nopony there. Still, my danger sense was tingling.

“Not that it matters, but I know you’re here,” I called, testingly.

My voice echoed in the stillness just long enough for me to wonder if I were imagining things.

Finally, a particular spot—which hadn’t been meaningfully different from any other spot until the darkness started to move—detached itself from the background and flowed quick-like to circle around my body. It had a distantly equine shape, reminding me a bit of Gypsy’s misty form when she was polite enough to have one. Nothing about it seemed especially hostile, but it was moving in that way I’d done many times with suspects during an interrogation when I wanted to keep them off balance.

The figure didn’t have eyes, but I got the distinct feeling I was being looked over.

A pair of forelegs faded into being, followed by a dapper black dinner jacket and a burgundy tie tucked in front of a sharply pressed shirt. One leg reached up to adjust the tie as the stallion’s back legs flickered and settled out of the shadows. His pelt was a familiar dark grey, same as my own, while his tail seemed to waver between black and purple. Where his face should have been there remained the twist of shadows, whispering against one another like leaves in the wind.

When it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything, I chanced to sit down, again.

“Now fella, I’m pretty damn sure I don’t know you,” I said, “Although, now that I get a look, that’s most of my body you’re wearing. Nice suit, but the face needs work.”

The shadow shifted his weight from leg to leg, the black hole where his head should have been tilting to one side.

“Detective Hard Boiled,” a voice murmured, a hint of mocking in its tone. It was a voice that’d snuck into my thoughts ever since our little ‘negotiation’, during which I’d been forced to give up the helm of Nightmare Moon.

It was D.W.’s voice.

A little posh. Confident without being arrogant.

A voice that inspired. A humble voice. A voice that could topple mountains and boil seas.

I grunted, turning to the hole in the air. “I wondered if you’d show up at some point. You look like this because—”

“—because you don’t know what I look like?” he finished. “Yes, of course. But then, villains always must have an air of mystery, else endless lines of heroes will surely swat them down. Ponies grow heroes like weeds, after all. It makes one wonder what sort of world we live in that requires so many exceptional, brave, and altogether stupid individuals to keep the species from going extinct.”

I shrugged, watching as, out in the real world, my body turned down a fresh corridor and almost ran nose-first into the leg of some kind of giant insect. Nightmare slowly backed away before sprinting off in the opposite direction. Funny how dull it was to watch what amounted to film with the sound off, even if the stakes were life and death.

“What unresolved issues in my wreck of a brain do you represent?” I asked.

“Obvious ones, I suspect,” D.W. replied, rolling up his sleeve. There was a shiny gold watch on his foreleg, though the face had no hands. “What does it say about you that when you visualize your most dangerous opponent, you see yourself?” He quickly held up his hoof to forestall my witty retort. “Don’t bother answering that.”

I glanced at his handless watch, then shrugged. “I’m assuming the mental metaphor is either that I have all the time in the world or my time has long since run out, so I needn’t worry about wasting it.”

“I don’t think you need worry about metaphor, Hard Boiled. Not when the facts before you represent an ocean of truth that you seem barely inclined to stick your toe in.” D.W. chuckled, trotting to the hole in the air and peering out. “Thrill me. What is this ‘wish’ the Family is going to make in...what is it? Two days?”

“Are you seriously asking me to work this out now?” I asked.

“You have all the information, and yet you’ve stubbornly clung to your own ignorance for weeks now. Do you want to see the city burn? Because I must tell you, my family has gone to great lengths to lay out the tinder, soak it in gasoline, and light the match.”

“I’m not a damn psychic! My driver is the pony you talk to when you need vague impressions of future events. How am I supposed to know what those bastards want?”

“It mystifies me that you don’t, Detective. Please, humor your dear enemy. What do you know about me and mine?”

I bared my teeth at him. “You and yours are going to kill everyone in Detrot for your own—”

I trailed off into silence, realizing I didn’t actually know the rest of that sentence. I got the feeling D.W. was smirking at me.

“For our own what, Hard Boiled?” he asked, his shadowy face writhing a little faster with what I took to be amusement. “You have spent so much time chasing your own tail of recent that you fail to ask fundamental questions. So, as we are here together and have no seeming shortage of time in this shambles you call a mind, do tell me...what do you truly know about the Family?”

‘Breathe, Hard Boiled. Breathe. It’s not really D.W. The anger isn’t helping and the prick has a pretty good point. Maybe it’s time to stop and work the facts,’ I thought.

“Very good!” D.W. exclaimed, politely clapping his hooftips like an audience member at a golf tournament. “That temper of yours nearly ended you ever so many times. I had wondered if even the needs of justice and survival might master it!”

I did my best to ignore him as I fought for cool, rational calm. Whatever theoretical headspace I was in was making it difficult to control my emotions. If I’d had a heartbeat, I felt certain it would be racing.

“Alright. The Family...Some group of nobodies wandering around in the wild found something way back in the yesteryears.”

“Or something found us!” D.W. prompted, thrusting the chest of his headless body out. “Few ponies begin as monsters.”

“Granted. Fine. Whatever they found...it was old already. It was very patient and it wanted...something. It was willing to drive Princess Luna mad. It gave her the Web of Dark Wishes and had her try to paint that magic across the sky.”

“Excellent! Now, why are we in our present conundrum?”

I stared off into the sky for a moment before continuing. “Because Princess Celestia banished the control mechanism to the Moon for a thousand years. Nightmare Moon.”

D.W. thumped a hoof against his breast. “The Family rose to the grandest heights! We waited! We watched! We prepared! Now, we act. But why? What do we desire?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, dammit! You keep asking me something I can’t possibly know the answer to!”

This didn’t seem to put him off in the least. D.W. leaned in close, prompting me to take a couple of steps back so that disturbing visage wasn’t quite so near.

“Think, Hard Boiled. Think! Where did you find the first pylon?” he demanded.

“Buried. Buried in a mine,” I answered, fighting the quiver in my voice.

“Buried by the Family?” he continued, though he didn’t wait for an answer. “No! Dug up by the Family! Do people typically entomb things that are meant to be found?”

I slowly shook my head.

“Was it open or was it locked with a key that only operates from the outside?”

“You’re saying the pylon was some kind of...of prison?” I asked as what he was saying dawned on me.

Smugly tapping me on the nose with a hoof that looked distressingly like my own, he sat and flicked his coat-tails out from under his flank. “What do you do with something you have beaten but cannot kill, Hard Boiled? Something immortal, that will corrupt any being it touches? Something intelligent beyond the ken of dragon, pony, zebra, or any other being on this planet?”

I swallowed a watermelon-sized lump in my throat.

“You...you lock it away. You hide it,” I murmured.

“Why in the pylon? Why in a place that drains souls?”

“Because…” I paused, thinking. “Someone somewhere back in time buried this thing hoping nopony would ever find it and set it up to constantly steal the magic of whatever was inside. The Family put their weak on that altar and into the walls to give the pylon something else to drain. That...that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Mayhap that is the case. Let us presume you are correct. What do all prisoners wish for, Hard Boiled?” D.W. asked, sweeping a leg out to indicate the strange space I’d found myself trapped.

I didn’t even have to think; the answer was staring me in the face.

“Freedom. Prisoners want freedom. The Family is going to use this wish to...to free...” I paused, then carefully scratched one of my ears with the tip of my toe. “Wait. The pylon was already empty, right?”

“Hah! And the great detective stumbles again. Would the Family be dedicating so many resources to protecting the center of the city if our master were beneath a burnt-out house in the middle of the Wilds?” D.W. asked, twirling his hoof in the air.

“No,” I muttered. “So, whatever this is must already be free of its prison. Unless—”

“Unless the prison was more than just the pylon,” he added, thoughtfully, “You have not inquired in an important direction, yet. For such a cautious, careful lot as we, why banish Celestia and Luna? Why that flashiest of entrances?”

I squinted at him, then dropped onto my haunches. “Twilight Sparkle and Princess Cadence are beasts. Sparkle scares the fur off me when she’s drunk. I’d hate to think of a mind like that fully sober. I guess the most obvious answer would be that the Family knew Luna and Celestia could probably stop them. That or they needed them distracted from their normal duties in some fashion.”

“And what reason would something have for needing the protectors of Equestria...distracted? You know it feeds upon chaos. What fuel source is there for such a thing that is greater than a city aflame? What wish is most powerful?”

If my biological processes had been operating normally just then, I’m pretty sure I’d have had a nasty chill and a gut full of beetles doing a little tango in my intestines. It was then I noticed that D.W. was slowly fading away. The process began at his back hooves, a bad film wipe effect moving gradually up his fetlocks and turning them to wisps of smoke that scattered into the windless blackness.

My gaze met his.

He had eyes, then. They were my eyes. He wore my face, my trenchcoat, and my hat. The Crusader was strapped to his leg, and a shiny gold badge dangled from a string around his neck.

“A...A dying planet,” I said, softly. “The day after tomorrow, they mean to wreck the entire world. The Family are going to make us all wish for death.”

Act 3 Chapter 73: Taxi's Battle

“Without you, we’re only half a person.”

Unknown

‘Do you think we can fight her?’

‘The city needs you to fight her.’

‘Can we talk her down?’

‘What makes you think I need to know?’

‘You’re the one with the psychic powers.’

‘Uh huh. That’s definitely how this works.’

‘Was...was that sarcasm?’

‘I can be sarcastic when I need to be. Do you need me to show you ‘facetious with a hint of condescension’ too?’

‘No, thanks. I just wish I could talk to Hardy.’

‘You don’t need him right now. You need you. You need to think clearly. You need to prepare for what is coming.’

The War Scooter sat where I’d left her, humming softly as rain fell across Ambrock and Vexis, their scales shining in the half light as streams of water steamed off their hides. Neither of their eyes followed me. I trotted around them, hesitated as thunder shook the ground under my hooves.

Thunder, without lightning.

I looked up, and my breath froze in my throat.

The clouds overhead broke like the twin gates of a grey fortress parting and through them dove a monster whose horrible majesty took me a long few seconds to comprehend. Her giant, pale wings seemed to blot out the sky, radiating an inner light. Her claws were like scythes and her teeth curved from a giant head covered in tiny bloody cuts that seemed little more than minor irritations to the massive dragoness. She was sleek, muscular, and terrifying.

She hovered for a few seconds over the highway, then turned her head and spat something onto the street. It was a chunk of meat that’d once been a griffin warrior, sans the head and legs. I could only tell from the tufted tail, still attached despite the masticated condition of the body.

The wind of her landing blew my mane back as she settled her giant weight on the highway, light as a ballet dancer dropping out of an especially acrobatic leap with nary a sound.

We regarded each other in silence as I stood beside the War Scooter, my eyes wide, wondering when my talent was going to tell me something useful about her.

Scars criss-crossed her massive, slender body, starting at her chest and wending their way right down to her claw-tips. Some suggested life-threatening injuries that no sane being should have walked away from; in particular, a pike of some kind appeared to still be lodged in her chest, impaling her right through the collar bone. The end of it was decorated with a trio of feathers, plated in gold, which hung from a silver chain.

Something in the way her skull was shaped reminded me of a wolf, though her torso was more serpentine than most dragons I’d met. Twin tufts of thick fur trailed from her brow ridges. Her tail was wrapped in something resembling a thick layer of leather with a stiff, iron ball large enough to level a building strapped to the end. Across her chest, she wore a huge bag on a strap that looked to be woven out of a multitude of different leathers - more than a few of the skins in question still had their cutie-marks attached.

There was no getting away from it; for as great and terrible as she was, Propana was beautiful.

I stared into her shimmering green eyes that reminded me of ocean pools and saw death itself staring back.

Slowly, I put a hoof on my P.E.A.C.E. cannon and carefully unlimbered it. She watched me with only a slight curl to one side of her lip, then snaked forward faster than I’d have thought possible, stopping inches from the end of my muzzle. I inhaled and shut my eyes. I could smell blood on her breath along with the scent of burning flesh and feathers.

‘Anything?’

‘You need to keep very still. She is amused.’

‘Amused?’

I peeked out of one eye, then opened the other. We stood there, studying each other, her reptilian gaze raking me up and down. Gradually, she drew back and cocked her head, peering at the war scooter with even greater interest than she’d shown me. She raised a claw, gently waving it in front of Ambrock’s empty, staring eyes.

“Most...intriguing.”

Her voice was the sound of cracking ice on a winter’s day, so cold it sent a shiver up my back.

“A pony with two enslaved dragons...and a mark one war scooter with some very interesting modifications,” she purred, her tri-forked tongue slipping out between teeth long enough to impale me top to bottom. “This wouldn’t happen to be ‘Her Royal Grace’, would it?’

‘You need to keep her interested!’

“I-It is,” I stammered, taking a step back and incidentally toward the hatch of the war scooter.

“Aha! Most...excellent,” the dragoness replied, then reached down and, before I could stop her, snatched my P.E.A.C.E. cannon off my shoulders by the strap. She dangled it in front of her canine muzzle, then sniffed at the barrel as I fought the urge to reach for it. “And this. Police issue modification of a much older creation. Do you know, the original version of this was for the distribution of cakes and party favors in various flavors?”

‘Precious needs more time. You need to keep her talking.’

I slowly nodded. “A...A party planner invented it.”

“Aha, yes! A mare famous for parties. I have several of her earlier designs in my collection. This, however...” Dropping my gun, she rose up onto her rear legs and spread her claws to encompass the whole of the war scooter. “This will be a crown jewel to my hoard. I have just the place to sit it, as well! Imagine...Her Royal Grace. Finest of her age and driven by the Demolisher herself. Being as you have apparently ensorceled a pair of young dragons to carry it for you, I suppose the Demolisher is dead, then?”

Something told me it would be a very bad idea to lie directly to Propana.

Where was Firebrand? Was she still inside the war scooter?

“I don’t know if she is d-dead,” I replied, carefully picking up the P.E.A.C.E. cannon and checking it for damage, “The m-mare who gave it to me was one of her f-friends, but she’s gone.”

“A pity,” Propana growled, running the tips of her giant claws down the viewports in a way that suggested unmitigated lust. “I would so very much have liked to flay the Demolisher. I have the body of one Crusader in my collection, though that glorious little weapon they all carried disintegrated upon her death. A live one—to keep in crystal perhaps—would be ever so much more intriguing. Too bad it is a set that will never be completed, though I hear whisperings of a new Crusader in this city. One named...Hard Boiled?”

Propana raised one eyebrow at me and flicked her tongue as I tried my hardest to keep my expression even. I don’t think I succeeded.

“So you know him! Delicious.” Reaching down, she chucked me under the chin with the tip of a claw that could have split me end to end. “Oh, worry not. I have already recognized you, Sweet-Shine-also-called-‘Taxi’. My spies hear much and it would be impossible not to hear of Hard Boiled’s little band of creatures. A young griffin, an Archivist, a mad pegasus, and you...his pet assassin. Legends in your own time. Excellent additions.”

“Additions?” I asked, praying Firebrand was doing something intelligent.

Swinging herself back to face me, Propana leaned down until we were eye to eye once more. “Simply the finest assemblage of war-gear torn from the bodies of my foes. I kill them, strip them, mount them...and you? You have so many interesting stories! Did you truly bring Hard Boiled back to life several times?”

I nodded, weakly.

“I’ll have to have my pet unicorn peel your brain open for the methodology,” she replied. “A little immortality never hurt anyone, no? Would not wish my husband’s love to fade as my looks do.”

‘She needs to know that Carnath does not love her. He is using her for her position in Clan Avaricious.’

‘If I tell her that, she’s going to breathe fire on me.’

‘She’s going to do that anyway.’

‘Either way, I’ll keep that nugget for later.’

Propana was still talking as she circled the ancient war scooter, lightly poking Ambrock in the side of the head. “This spell. It is being cast by the vehicle. My, my, I do believe dissecting that might be worth my time! Though, I suppose with time being short, I should call my retinue to come and retrieve this. Would you like to come quietly or will I need to cauterize your leg stumps?”

I was about to respond when a thin, blue field of transparent energy rolled down in front of me.

The dragoness and I blinked at each other through it. I reached out and gently poked the field; it seemed perfectly solid and let out a faint ‘plink, plink’ like a piece of fine ceramic tapped with a metal spoon. I looked over my shoulder to see Firebrand’s pointed muzzle pressed against the driver’s window of the war scooter as she frantically gestured at me to get inside.

‘You need to know Propana is about to breathe fire on you.’

‘Oh.’

There was a sound like a blast furnace being opened and Propana’s throat bulged as the scales along her neck began to glow white hot. The pounding rain burst into steam around her, creating a cloud of mist that rolled around the edges of the shield. She opened her gigantic maw and I was afforded a glimpse down her huge throat; a sight I imagine very few ponies at that range had ever survived.

Blazing magical flame exploded across my field of vision, very nearly blinding me and forcing my eyes shut as I stumbled away from the shield, bumping flank-first into the war scooter.

Being alive after a dragon breathes fire even near you is a feat; I’d done it more times lately than I think most ponies would believe even after they’d had a few drinks.

As the fire died, Propana smacked her lips a few times and cocked her head, inspecting her handiwork. A spidery webwork of cracks the size of a dinner plate was impressed on the shield where she’d blasted it but that seemed to be the worst of the damage. The pavement just outside was a molten pool that extended around the edge of the shield on both sides.

“Well. I suppose this will be more entertaining than I originally thought,” Propana murmured, thoughtfully tapping the still smoking shield, “Not that any of our little exchange has been dull. Killing you outright wouldn’t have quite the thrill of an actual battle with Her Royal Grace.”

I hesitated, then took a step forward. “Propana...”

“Ah? You know my name!” the dragoness exclaimed, raising herself onto her back legs and clapping her claws together as though there weren’t a magical storm pelting us with rain. “Honored, Miss Taxi! Honored!”

“Propana, you know the ones who paid your troupe to be here are planning on killing everyone, right?” I asked, “Not just ponykind! Every living thing!”

The dragoness raised an eyeridge at me, then glanced up in the direction of the Eclipse and let out a meaning-loaded snort of smoke.

“So I gathered,” she said, coiling her tail around her rear legs before waving off toward the edge of town where the refugees were no-doubt evacuating. At least, I hoped they were. “Little mare, do you really think your species the first to attempt to end the world?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I muttered.

“And there it is! The reason I find ponykind so entertaining! Such arrogance! Such temerity!” she exclaimed, dropping onto all fours as she paced back and forth in front of the war scooter’s magical shield. Reaching up, she stroked the leather pouch around her neck. “This latest foolishness is not even the first to blot out the sun! Nor the second, for that matter. Our kind slept beneath the surface of this world through many a little ‘apocalypse’. Always, we survive, and always there is some new race thinking they’ll be the one to finally turn the wheel at long last and end it all. When this is over, there will be no more Princesses and no more of their silly ‘friendship’ to infect our young with ridiculous notions. We will rise from our slumber...and this will be a world of dragons once more.”

‘You need to know she has an artifact in her pouch that is very dangerous. She keeps touching it.’

‘Right.’

“So the last memory of us is your little collection of weapons?” I asked.

“I will so very much miss pony meat,” she said, musingly, picking at her teeth with one claw and flicking what turned out to be a piece of a broken beak against our shield. “Griffins are too stringy. Now, shall we have it out? I am so excited to kill you, Sweet Shine! Pony assassins are always so creatively lethal.”

I slowly shook my head and sighed. “You know, I woke up this morning ready to die? I was really considering dying and trying to achieve the ‘perfect calm’ my zebra master used to tell me about where you could accept the end of life with peace and dignity, knowing you’d achieved your ultimate goals. It’s the zebra idea of heroism. Now I can’t even do that. My master would be so disappointed.”

The dragoness began making a few little preparatory stretches, one ear-fluke still cocked in my direction. “Why can you not die heroically, then?” she asked.

“Because I’d be giving a self-important slithering snake with bad breath too much satisfaction.”

There was a moment there, when Propana was staring down at me, when I was sure she was going to start banging her head against the shield. Then she leaned back and burst into a deafening guffaw, slapping her stomach with one taloned claw as she pitched onto her back, rolling back and forth on the pavement. After a few seconds, she raised her head and grinned across at me, wiping a tear from the corner of one eye.

“Oh, I like you little mare!” she chuckled, “I’ll take considerable pleasure in mounting your remains alongside that war scooter.”

“We’ll see.”

With that, I trotted around and wrenched the scooter’s hatch open to find a very frightened Firebrand standing on the other side, her swords drawn and her golden armored helm on her head. I jerked my nose toward the lower gunnery station and she scrambled backwards out of my way, her tail lashing against her legs as she sprinted for the ladder down to the weapons blister.

Piling in after her, I trotted through to the pilot station and wiggled around into the seat, looking up as my displays sprang to life around me. I glanced at the readout

Propana was still standing out there, stretching like she was readying for a marathon rather than a fight to the death.

Tapping the call button on the in-scooter communications system, I said, “Thanks for the shield. I’m pretty sure burning alive would wreck my spiritual flow.”

“It is no wonder the Dragon King lost the war if there were ponies as mad as you back then, Miss Shine,” Firebrand replied, grumpily, “And you can give your gratitude to Ancestor Apple Bloom. She has ponies watching and radioed to tell me how to operate the defensive measures. I almost soiled myself when Propana breathed on you.”

“Me too,” I admitted, wrapping my hooves around the yoke. “Try to get a shot off on her as we’re going up.”

“Does...does she know all the capabilities of this craft?”

I hadn’t considered that unsettling possibility.

“Do you mind if I burn the other half of my incense and pray she doesn’t?”

The radio crackled and another voice broke in. “Gypsy Danger calling Hack Mistress! Gypsy Danger calling Hack Mistress! Do you read?”

Shaking my head at the ridiculous call signs, I pulled my seatbelt tight and readied to disengage the shield. “I read, Gypsy. What’s going on? I’m about to go into a fight here.”

“Propana is there?! The griffins just got back. What’s left of them, anyway. They lost track of her in the cloud layer. Swift Cuddles is making her run and Mister Limerence sounds like he’s in position. I’m monitoring no fewer than five more dragons incoming to your position.”

“Oh that bitch,” I snapped, yanking back on the war scooter’s yoke as hard as I could. Ambrock and Vexis tensed, then sprang into the air. I heard Firebrand squawk from the other end of the corridor as the giant vehicle all but leapt off the highway.

“Come again, Hack Mistress?”

“She kept me talking. She had no intention of a one on one.”

Even as I rocketed away from the highway, the force of my acceleration pressing me back in my seat, I could almost feel Propana breathing down my neck.

Redirecting my ire inwards, I snarled into the corners of my mind, ‘Why didn’t you let me know that was what she was doing?’

‘You did not need to know. You would have tried to talk her out of letting you kill these dragons and then the shield would have dropped and you would have died right there. She might get considerable satisfaction out of watching you work, but she would have happily fricasseed you if the option presented itself.’

‘And this is why we didn’t get along for so many years! The fact that you make these kinds of calculations scares the fur off me!’

‘It is not my fault you need to be manipulated into surviving your own moral quandaries.’

I didn’t have a good snappy comeback for that.

“Gypsy, can you give me headings on those incoming dragons?” I asked the radio, instead.

“Can you see Uptown?” she asked.

“Not through this storm, but I know where it is from here. Cabbie instincts.”

“Well, they’re about five degrees east of Uptown to your position, moving together in a tight V. The one out front keeps blasting fire to clear the air ahead of snow. It’s giving me a good view of him.”

Tapping one of the controls, I reversed the view of the cameras on the war scooter’s interface. The view swung around behind me and I could just make out Propana, distantly following, keeping me in sight but not weapons range. Flicking the images back, I searched the skyline. Amid all the smoking and flickering lights, all the hundreds spread out in the burning spires of Detrot, it was tough to pick out any individual fire.

There were entire skyscrapers missing from the skyline. The Apple Consortium’s building was missing its signature sculpted apple from the rooftop. The top third of the Cheesepie Headquarters was gone. If I hadn’t been in a state close to manic fury, I might have had a tear to shed.

So many dead. So much wasted potential. So many needs that would never see fulfillment.

Lost in unhappy thoughts, I almost missed a slightly brighter flash of light just above the horizon towards Uptown. Punching up a closer view, I grinned as the five dragons came into view. They were heavily armored; each wore a set of fitted draconic plate with clan sigils carved into the scales on their forehead. I’d never studied up on the dragon clans, but that screamed ‘royal guards’ to me.

“Firebrand, check me on this. I’ve got a hooffull of dragons at eleven’o’clock in matching armor with something that looks like a sneezing cat carved on their heads.”

There was a pause, then Firebrand asked, “Are they flying in some silly formation?”

“That’s right.”

“Mmm...Dragon King guards. Most likely on loan. They’re Carnath’s personal protection squad, sent to provide honor guard for Propana. They think because they can frighten hatchlings that they are tough. I have killed two of their number myself over the years. They are decently trained, but tend to also be puffed up fools with shiny scales and empty heads. It is still Propana you must be wary of.”

“I’m going to fly us right through them. Ready on the guns.”

I pressed the accelerator, watching as the strain on Ambrock and Vexis started to top the yellow section of the dashboard meters monitoring their health. We skimmed the tops of the many burning skyscrapers, keeping low and hopefully below the sight lines of the five reptiles. On the ground facing screens, I could see dozens of little fights going on from street to street as melees broke out between the ponies of Detrot and the Black Coats.

“Propana is moving much more slowly than I know she is able,” Firebrand commented over the comms. “She could easily overtake us.”

“She knows we can only carry so many bullets and that shield surprised her as much as it did me. That’s not standard on a war scooter. I’m betting she’s waiting to see what else we can pull out of our hats.”

“She likes to wield magical artifacts in battle and that pouch on her chest is the pony equivalent of a prestidigitician’s hat, if I understand your metaphor correctly. Beware. She will have some tricks of her own.”

“I spent an hour this morning praying to the universe to keep my day uninteresting. It hasn’t listened.”

“Does it ever?” she asked.

“I should pray for terror and bloodshed. It would have a higher hit rate.”

Pushing the throttle a little harder, I aimed the nose of the scooter straight at the collection of dragons. They didn’t seem to have seen us just yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

I tapped the comms and picked up my walkie-talkie. “Gypsy Danger, Hack Mistress here...can you get me over to Apple Bloom?”

“Will do, Hack Mistress. One second. Patching you through.”

After a moment, the elderly mare’s voice bubbled out of the speaker. “Ah’m here girl. We’re movin’ bodies quick, but there’s injured. Still, Tourniquet’s people move right fast. What can Ah do ya for?”

“I’ve got five dragons incoming, all in armor. Ideas?”

“Mmm...Well, ah ain’t never got to fire it in battle, but press the button on the left side of your head with the ‘sheep’ on it when you get close. It’s one shot all around the outside, but it might take one or two of’em out of the fight. Go for point blank if ya can. Don’t forget the defenses on your engines. They won’t protect the scooter, but that’s what armor is for.”

I hunted across the myriad buttons near my head until I found one that had a stylized lamb on it. Taking a quick mental note of where it was, I tapped another beside it that said ‘Shield Engines.’ A shimmering field of glittering enchantment wrapped itself Ambrock and Vexis, surrounding them in gently pulsating energy.

That got our opponents’ attention. As one, the five dragons turned to face us and let out piercing howls that I heard even a mile away. I ran a toe over the dash and took a breath that was perfumed with decades old engine grease.

‘You with me?’

‘As long as you need me to be. The lead dragon has a badly healed left wing and the ones following him are moving a bit slower than they can out of respect.’

‘I’ll take him last. If he’s smart, he’ll know he’s slow and try to get a positional advantage on me.’

‘You need to know you’re talking to yourself.’

Rolling my eyes, I took us into a steep climb, listening to the sound of bolts and welds groaning around me. The war scooter was a little slower than the dragons. We hit the clouds and the winds tore at us, lashing the tank hard enough that I had to compensate every couple of seconds to keep us out of a roll.

The storm was vicious up there, buffeting and blinding the exterior cameras. I poked a button that said ‘heat vision’ and my display spilled into a rainbow of colors. Allowing myself a grim smile, I watched as the dragons shot up into the cloud bank just below us.

The internal communicator crackled and Firebrand came through. “Miss Shine, I cannot see to fire in this condition.”

“Apple Bloom didn’t give you heat vision?” I asked.

“Oh? OH! Yes, yes she did. I have our targets in sight...and I’m pretty sure they have us in sight, too. Their helmets must be enchanted in some fashion.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because one of them just pulled a pony anti-materiel rifle off his back and is pointing it at us.”

I jerked my head back to the displays, only to find myself staring down the distant barrel of a Maretta .50 caliber rifle held in the claws of one of the smaller dragons toward the back of their formation. A pony typically had to have a bracing position to fire one without dislocating their shoulder. Flight while carrying a Maretta is out of the question for all but the largest pegasi, but in a dragon’s claws it was barely more than an ordinary gun.

Leaning forward to grab the controls saved my life.

The shot blew a hole right through the viewport just above my head and the rest next to my shoulder exploded in a spray of foam and vinyl. I hauled us into a barrel roll as my stomach dropped into my flank, then suddenly leapt into my throat. The world turned upside down for a full three seconds before righting itself just in time for a second round to rip through the wall before proceeding to bury itself in the opposite bulkhead. Wind whipped through the holes, making my eyes tear up for several seconds before some kind of semi-liquid gel spilled out of the gaping wound in the plate and almost instantly hardened.

‘What do I do?!’

‘Three shots remaining in the magazine. Dodge right.’

I heaved the controls into a sideways roll and the next shot blew past the belly of the war scooter, clipping the armor in a spray of sparks I caught on one of the rear-facing cameras.

“May I shoot them now?!” Firebrand yelped over the comms.

“Hold tight!” I shouted, “We’re still out of range!”

I glanced at the speedometer and winced as one of Vexis’s flight muscles ticked into the ‘red’ zone and a meter measuring her pain response shot up.

The next shot was a bit wild and glanced off the roof.

One more remaining.

The range-to-target display turned bright green.

“Light’em up!” I snarled.

For the first time in nearly thirty years, the sound of four Slayer Spec High Caliber Machine Guns shook the sky over Detrot. Brilliant spots of light arced away from us like enraged fairies on the warpath. The dragons scattered like a bunch of flies interrupted mid-flight by an incoming flyswatter, dodging away in all directions. The one with the rifle, encumbered as he was, didn’t quite manage to get out of the way in time.

Even with the distortions of heat vision, it was disturbing to watch a creature come apart like that. His body didn’t so much recoil as explode into bloody viscera as a dozen massive projectiles hit him in the span of a breath. His upper half went one way, his legs and tail another, while his head—expression surprised and a bit perturbed by how his life had turned out—started to fall. One of his fellows snatched the rifle before it could follow him, buying herself a clipped tail as she did.

After the initial burst, the dragons sprinted as high as they could, trying to get out of the firing arc of the bottom gun.

“Firebrand, they’re above us! Can you switch turrets?” I called.

“Yes, one moment—”

There was a snap, then a crunch as something on top of the vehicle gave way.

“Oh...there is now no purpose to switching seats,” Firebrand murmured into her communicator.

“They shot the other gun?”

“They shot the other gun.”

“That means they’re going to try us in close. Melee combat.”

There was a sound of unsheathing steel over the radio. “They will find that a poor decision.”

“Gypsy, are you still listening to us?” I asked.

It took a second, but Gypsy finally answered.

“I’m listening to a lot of things, Hack Mistress! Got a big brawl on Tenth Avenue that’s turning bad for our people, but we’ve taken the P.A.C.T. supply depot on Pansy Street. What’s your pleasure?”

“Ask Apple Bloom if she rigged some kind of automatic piloting thing. I need to take my hooves off the controls.”

“One moment...”

Several more than ‘one moment’s’ worth of my lifespan passed before she came back.

‘Alright, Apple Bloom says you have to set your speed by pressing ‘cruise’ beside the yoke, then press ‘hold alti’ and the controls will lock at an altitude, flying in a big circle.’

“Give her my thanks and blessings of good luck!”

“Careful up there! Propana is looking real intent just under the cloud cover! Pretty sure she can see you!”

“Firebrand says she likes enchantments and artifacts. If she does anything more interesting than follow, let me know.”

“On it!”

Bracing myself, I pressed the accelerator a little harder and started a sharp dive. It might not sound terribly difficult, but if you want your opponent to follow you when trying to look like you’re running away, you can’t look like you want them to follow. That involves a certain projected panic, which can’t simultaneously actually be panic. Considering I was headed into combat with four dragons and a vehicle whose controls I was only aware of from a childhood obsession, the balance was pretty tenuous.

‘What’s our gameplan here?’

‘You need to let us do what we can do. You need to get out of your own way.’

‘W-will I be able to take control again?’

‘You are only helpless when you ignore your own needs. That is when you do the evils you fear.’

Grinding my teeth, I glanced at the floating screen showing my reverse view. The dragons were following, keeping themselves out of the bottom gun’s firing arc as they dove in like four missiles chasing the vapor trail coming off the back of Her Royal Grace.

The skyscrapers—those that remained—quickly appeared out of the cloud cover and I got a solid, overhead glimpse of the city. It almost made me want to throw up. The damage was incalculable.

I scanned over my screens until I found the distant white speck that was Propana. Pressing the ‘zoom’ function, my view suddenly leapt closer. The enormous dragoness was leisurely cruising along a mile or two back, keeping pace but not making any particular effort to close the distance. The expression on her face was something like boredom, though she kept her eyes locked firmly on my position. A part of me couldn’t shake the feeling she could see me, through all those layers of armor and machinery.

My four pursuers were getting awfully close, though not quite enough.

“Firebrand, I’m going to tilt us a bit sideways. Could you fire a few quick shots toward our friends out there? No need to hit them, but make them think you’re damn well trying. Force them to speed up a bit.”

I heard the bottom gun clank and rotate on its gimbal. “I trust you have a plan?”

“That’s a bad thing to trust these days, but in this case, yes. We’re going to even the odds a bit, but I need them to get in tight!”

Edging the yoke on one side, I swallowed as the ship swiveled. The bottom guns barked, sending spurts of angry fire in the general direction of our foes. Short of flipping upside down, there wasn’t a good way to actually hit them. The displays that monitored Ambrock and Vexis were already registering tiredness, not to mention a half dozen pulled muscles; no sense crippling them for life unless I strictly had to.

The added gunshots worked like a charm.

All four of the lizards sped up, dodging nimbly until they were right on top of us. The one carrying the anti-materiel rifle was hastily trying to reload it, though doing that in mid-air with such a heavy weapon was proving difficult even for a dragon. I allowed myself a small smile, then slammed the controls into reverse, wincing as another indicator monitoring Vexis’s neck sounded a ‘sprain’ alarm.

The war scooter stalled in mid-air, though not quite enough to throw me against the dash. Simultaneously, all four dragons tried to brake, but the big rifle once more betrayed the lizard wielding it. She nearly slammed muzzle first into the rear hull of the flying tank, coming to an almost complete stop trying frantically to compensate.

Reaching up, I tapped the ‘lamb’ button.

There are many good reasons transformative magics aren’t often used in warfare.

They require immense power to use. The number of unicorns who can cast them is miniscule. The effects are all-too-often extremely temporary.

If, however, one happened to be a bored, militaristic inventor with nothing to do for decades at a time besides tinker and fiddle, one could eventually come up with a weaponized answer to a very specific problem: how do you disable a dragon in flight when you can’t just shoot them?

The ship shuddered in mid-air, before a throbbing pulse shook the air and the sound of a unicorn’s horn amplified fifty times over rolled through the interior. A flash of magic lit the surface and, for a second, the screens went blank. When they cleared, I looked for the dragoness who’d been hugging the anti-materiel rifle.

Instead, I found a damp, deeply disturbed white sheep, hugging an anti-materiel rifle. The ewe bleated once, carefully touched her throat, then tried to climb the gun, but gravity had already asserted itself; she plummeted toward the earth.

A tiny readout appeared on my main screen that read ‘Baleful Polymorphic Matrix Expires in 30 seconds.’ Unfortunately for the newly minted sheep, it was only twenty-eight seconds to the pavement. I shut my eyes an instant before she hit and flew on, into the half-light over the smoking ruins of Detrot.

“Gypsy?” I asked, gingerly touching the communicator. The other dragons had dropped back, though they seemed uncertain what to do. The leader’s muzzle was moving, as though he was talking to someone.

“I’m here. That is one nasty bit of enchantment. There’s bits of impacted dragon all over Tack street. Think you can pull that three more times?”

I shot a look at the power readouts. “Not a chance. Is Propana communicating with those dragons, somehow?”

“I’ll take a look. Scanning the channels...”

I waited, monitoring the dozen or so little meters and dials which told me the health of the war scooter. More than a few of them were ‘yellow’ or ‘red’, though none essential, unless I happened to count my engines. Vexis and her young brother were both running on fumes. Getting into a dogfight hadn’t helped.

Gypsy returned, finally. “I think I found it! Here, patching you in.”

Propana’s snarling voice broke into the cabin.

“-can only use such a weapon once! Cowards! If you don’t get back in there, being turned into a sheep will be the least of your worries!”

A male dragon replied over the same line, “Gold and jewels are only worth something if we live to collect them!”

“Then I shall double the pay of any who survive! You are Dragon King guards! How do you think he will like it if I return with tales of how five of you couldn’t deal with one little mare and her antique flying machine?”

There was an audible gulp. “Double pay, ma’am. You shall have your trophy.”

“Worry not, captain. I have a few little spells of my own. I shall assist you when you engage her.”

“Ma’am, who is this mare to you?”

“A delectable challenge. I want her alive and if she is, I shall include a gemstone the size of your head. Slaughter her companions if she has any.”

The radio clicked and Gypsy returned. “You catch all that?”

“I heard. Taxi, out.”

Setting the cruising height, I dropped our speed to something barely faster than a gallop and tentatively released the controls. Ambrock and Vexis seemed to lock in place, their wings slowing to barely a beat every few seconds as the scooter canted a bit to one side. When I was sure it wasn’t going to immediately drop out of the sky, I slid out of my seat. The sensation of the vehicle moving under me was unsettling, but I quickly swallowed my nerves and shouted, “Firebrand! We are going up top!”

Scrabbling up the ladder, the dragoness held one sword in her teeth and the other in one claw. Spitting out the blade, she asked, “I am suited to fight in the air, but unless I mistake my pony anatomy, you do not have wings.”

“I don’t need wings,” I replied, hefting my P.E.A.C.E. cannon off my back and checking that it was loaded. “They’ll be coming for me. I’ll offer them a target. Your job is to make sure I’m not fighting more than two at once.”

Firebrand gradually lowered the tip of one of her swords and gave me another of those appraising looks dragons like to give smaller species.

“You are like Crusader Hard Boiled, yes?” she asked. “Deranged and more dangerous than you look?”

“His partner might watch his back, but I’m the pony who makes sure he always gets where he needs to be,” I answered. “I’m the one who is waiting when he needs to make his getaway. I’m the one who clears the path. Do you know what that makes me?”

“I...fear I do not...” she murmured.

I rose up on my back legs and cocked my gun, grinning a little madly as a round clunked into the chamber.

“I’m the driver.”

I expected the wind to be a problem, but as I opened the top hatch there wasn’t so much as a whistle. I could see the thick, black clouds passing overhead and the rain instantly soaked my face, but it wasn’t cutting my pelt like I was worried it might. Shoving the hatch back, I cautiously stepped out onto the war scooter’s roof. A series of gemstones no bigger than kernels of corn and laid out in a grid-shaped pattern all across the surface lit up around my hoof and I had the oddest sensation of being sucked to the chilly metal surface.

The air was foul with smoke, but we were coasting low.

I glanced down to where Firebrand crouched under the hatch, a sword in her teeth.

“There’s some kind of wind-protection spell up here,” I called down, “Probably the same one that makes the war scooter light enough to haul. Guess the Crusaders liked to fight standing on the roof.”

“The stories say they enjoyed a bit of drama,” Firebrand replied, crawling up after me.

“They were special operations. ‘Make the enemy scared’ was their central mission. Nothing scarier than a good story,” I replied, pulling my P.E.A.C.E. cannon down off my shoulders.

The air was thick with rain, but whatever enchantment kept us in the air left the disconcerting feeling of being stock-still while still moving. Peering a bit over the edge, I could see Vexis and Ambrock, their sides working like bellows as they tried to keep us in the air. From inside it was sometimes hard to remember we were being pulled by living beings who could give out at almost any moment, but seeing them made my heart ache. Despite their size, something instinctual kept reminding me they were barely more than children. The thin shield around them seemed to have kept them from major harm, but it would do nothing for their muscles.

Turning back to the sky, I tracked my eyes across the horizon until I spotted Propana. She was coasting languidly over the skyscrapers, framed from behind by the glow of Uptown and the fires that seemed to be multiplying by the minute despite the storm. I thought for sure we were too far away from her to make out details, but as our eyes met she threw me a cheeky salute with one taloned claw.

Jerking my attention away from her, I scanned for the remaining dragons, picking them out above and a quarter mile back. Earth pony sight might not be terribly good, but I didn’t need to see them terribly well. Firebrand stepped onto the roof beside me and flared her wings in challenge.

Leaning back, I slowly readied a firing position. There was no way I was going to hit them over that distance; no amount of ‘needing’ it will make me a better shot any more than Hardy will one day be a sane driver. Still, some guns don’t need you to ‘hit’ the opponent so much as get ‘reasonably close’.

Tapping my trigger, I braced and there was a soft ‘cachunk’ as the sabot trailed off into the clouds. Five meters in front of the cohort of dragons, a burst of bright red smoke exploded outwards. They split in all directions, but with the way the wind was blowing there was no way they could miss it entirely.

After only a couple seconds, the sneezing began. Tiny bursts of fire lit the air as all of them were wracked with violent, crippling sneezes. One might not think ‘sneezing’ is an especially dangerous thing to do, but sneezing is mutually exclusive with flying and fighting.

“That...is evil, Miss Taxi,” Firebrand muttered.

“I heard a story about a zebra ambassador who once asked Princess Celestia why she’d discouraged weapons development before the Crusades,” I said by way of reply.

Racking a second shot into the chamber, I lifted my gun and let fly. The second round popped right on top of one of the dragons, blasting him in the face with a wretched green fog. His eyes almost bulged right out of his head as he slapped both foreclaws over his nose, only to immediately sneeze again, blasting them off his face with a sound like an angry vuvuzela. His companions sniffed at the air, then both scooted sideways, giving him a wide berth.

“The Princess said it wasn’t because ponies are bad at it, so much as every time she’d allowed somepony creative to make a weapon it came with a strange undercurrent of sadism,” I continued. “Maybe some holdover from when we were just prey animals and really wanted our predators to suffer.”

Licking my lips, I took aim again. This shot was a bit high, but that didn’t save the poor unlucky dragoness from her fate. The burst of powder hit her full in the face just as she inhaled to sneeze. Suddenly, she clutched her belly as an expression of horror spread across her scaley muzzle.

Beside me, Firebrand clucked like a mother hen as she watched the dragon guard flail at the air, trying desperately to stay on course while attempting to shed her lower armor. She almost made it before the first explosive burst of diarrhea nearly knocked her out of the sky. It was like watching some kind of foul pinwheel, struggling to keep herself from plummeting to the spires below, screaming and sneezing and blowing fire from both ends.

“We don’t just kill our enemies. We like to irritate them first,” I finished, clicking another shot into place.

Raising my weapon, I centered my shot on the captain’s face. He was still watching his companion as she rolled end over end, shrieking in agony, rage, and embarrassment. Even I couldn’t miss at that range with such a perfectly distracted target.

My cannon clunked and the shot went out, but without warning a strange, glimmering blue bubble of some kind appeared around him. The round bounced off and detonated in a glittery spray, but none of it penetrated the shield. Bit of a shame, really; laughing hex rounds weren’t cheap.

I glanced back to where Propana still coasted along and she had one claw in her little pouch and the other pointed toward the captain and his companions. All three now sported similar shields that floated along with them as they tried to recover from the dousing in unpleasant spells I’d just given them.

“I have seen this before,” Firebrand growled. “She is using pearls of a ‘Shen’ from her homeland. It is a sort of monstrous clam. She crushes the pearls when she needs a defense. They protect a creature from very nearly anything outside the perimeter which might attack them for a short time. It forces close combat.”

“Then I think it’s time we let them have some close combat,” I answered, shouldering my cannon and dropping back onto all fours. “You take the lieutenants and keep them distracted. I’ll handle the leader.”

Firebrand drew her swords and leapt off the war scooter with a shriek that made my ears ring. Her wings caught the air the instant she was outside the protective spells, sending her rocketing off into the sky toward her opponents. The captain saw her coming and quickly gestured at his companions who each drew short swords from their belts, tilting to face her with murder in their eyes.

Meanwhile, I raised a hoof and beckoned the captain in. His face was twisted in a look of grim intent as he swooped in close, cautiously watching the main gun turret just behind me lest it somehow spring to life. That was unlikely, considering the round his companion fired went straight through the barrel of two of the guns, but careful people tend to live longer.

He was only a little larger than Firebrand, bright green, and covered in brightly-shined scales that spoke of a healthier than average lifestyle. A scar cut across his right eye and another over his slightly tattered wing where one of the knuckles hadn’t quite healed properly. Thick, wiry muscles bound his neck and back and his dark grey armor fit him like a glove, strapped across his chest and midsection while leaving his legs, arms, and wings free to move.

He alighted on the surface of the war scooter with a heavy thump and the suction magics lit around his claws, holding him in place as the bubble molded itself around him.

“My...charge...seems to think you are worth something, little mare,” he rumbled, raising his claws and flexing them. “She would like you alive, but after that little display, I believe I am going to take a liberal definition of that word. You will be breathing, though I may have to cauterize a few stumps.”

‘Tell me about him. What do I need to know?’

‘You know everything you need to know. Now you need to shine.’

‘What?’

‘Shine.’

Shaking my head, I stared up at the green beast and rubbed my forehead. “Look, killing you wasn’t really in my plan for today and I don’t need another death on my conscience. My friend Firebrand...you might have recognized her?”

“The Emberite killer, yes,” he grumbled.

“I should just let you know, she’s the distraction. I’m the ‘big scary thing’ you needed to worry about. Not the tank. Not the draconic assassin. Me.”

The captain frowned a little and poked at the bubble around himself. “I see few things worth worrying about, here, and you have no horn nor wings. Earth ponies might die hard, but they do still die.”

Unlimbering my cannon, I let it drop on the surface of the ship. Thankfully, the same magics that protected us from the wind also took hold of it. The captain grinned and pulled his sword out of its scabbard, dropping the blade on the ship beside him.

I took a few steps forward until my muzzle touched the shield around him. There was a slight pressure, then I stepped through.

He was pretty imposing up close, but his family always thought he was a bit of a useless runt. He’d proved them wrong, of course. A dragon who controls his greed wisely can grow fast and strong, beating opponents many times his size with wit and flexibility.

I blinked down at myself.

‘Where did that come from?’

‘Shine.’

I looked up at the dragon and stepped closer. My muzzle felt like it was moving not entirely of my own volition, but still they were my words.

“You know, your parents would never have given you the love they gave Coal Tongue. A dragonlet needs to be strong. You were too weak. Undeserving. You needed to be toughened up.”

His slitted eyes very nearly popped right out of his head.

“W-what did you say, little mare?” he snarled.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” I cocked my head, as though listening to something, and let the words flow. “Coal Tongue is back in the homelands right now, in your cave, no less. In fact, he and your wife look to just now be starting their second round of the evening! You needed to treat her a little more kindly. Seems your brother learned a couple tricks from ponies about how to please a female.”

The captain’s sword twitched in my direction, but I held my ground.

“You know nothing, little mare,” he barked. “Parlor tricks!”

A gentle light began to spread out inside me.

“Goodness, Tinder is certainly going to town on him, isn’t she?” I continued. “She’s got him right to the hilt. Makes you wonder why your last two eggs came out funny colors, doesn’t it?”

I barely dodged the blaze of furious fire that exploded out of his muzzle, scorching the ground where I’d been standing. My muscles moved before I really had time to consider where they were going. I think, on further consideration, charging him might not have been top of my list.

I all but flew across the short distance and leapt up into the air, vaulting straight onto his chest. Two firm hooves to the breastplate sent him spinning in place. I rebounded onto the metallic surface just as he recovered enough to throw a vicious kick toward my flank. His skills were considerable, but his age and unhealed injuries were catching up with him. Rolling onto my back, I caught his claw in both front hooves and gave it a vicious twist. In an instant, his tibia was popped entirely out of place, not a permanent injury, but crippling in most species.

He let out a wheeze, then slammed his heel right down where my head had been only a half second before, forcing me to release him. Stumbling backwards, he looked up to where Firebrand was sparring with his subordinates just in time to watch the unfortunate drake I’d hit with the skunk round lose a wing to one of her blades and go spiraling out of the sky like a broken helicopter. The captain’s breathing was rough as he raised his foot, grabbed the dislocated bone and snapped it back into place. He put a tentative bit of weight on it and winced as I casually got to my hooves.

“I see,” he murmured, flicking a talon in my direction. “If I feint left, grab my sword and try to cut your head off—”

I shook my head. “I’d already have dropped under the blade and punched you in the throat where the armor doesn’t cover.”

“And if I tried to gut you with my tail spines?” he asked.

“A hoof-stomp on your injured leg, followed by a kick to the wing that abyssinian sword master sliced when you invaded his apartments a few years ago.”

He nodded, thoughtfully. “And an attempt to breathe fire on you from here?”

“I would have to stab you in the eye with the knife you keep tucked down the neck of your armor. It wouldn’t kill you right away. Dragon brains are buried pretty deep in the skull, but...you would never get home.”

He heaved a heavy breath and looked me up and down. “What now, little mare? I have lived through the rule of four kings among dragons, but if you kill Propana then my life is forfeit. I’ve no wish to die here, but if I return without her, my lord will kill me.”

“If you return with her, the world is forfeit,” I answered, trotting over and picking up my gun, checking it for damage, then shouldering it. “Your children love you, whether they’re your seed or not. Your wife still cares for you and Coal Tongue secretly regrets his actions. There’s also a young sergeant in your second guard who lost her lover recently and will be receptive. Carnath failing to take this city will be a huge blow to his standing and if you report his incompetence he might try to kill you, but if he’s smart he’ll retreat to lick his wounds.”

The captain’s yellow, slitted eyes narrowed at me, then he snatched up his sword and scabbard and resecured them. “If nothing else, this is a piece of pony magic my lord must know about. My king likes to plot another invasion of Equestria, despite our low numbers. This may be enough to make him think twice. It may also buy me some mercy.”

“I hope so,” I murmured, offering him my hoof. With only a short hesitation, he reached out and took it, giving my leg what was—for a dragon—a light shake. Turning to where Firebrand still wheeled through the sky, clashing and darting back and forth with the other dragoness - who was still letting out occasional distressed sneezes - he made a shrill whistle with two claw-tips stuck between his teeth. The two warriors broke away from one another, panting in mid-air as they circled warily. The captain touched the side of his helm; a tiny gem lit up, and he spoke into it.

“Scald Wind, go get Infernus and try to find what’s left of his wing. Don’t engage any more ponies. We’re pulling out.”

The female dragon tapped her helm and replied, though I couldn’t hear the reply over that distance.

“I don’t give two toots of a dead firesnake’s arse if that’s an Emberite or Dragonlord Ember herself! I’m not dying for that nutcase and her damned toy collection. We’re getting out of this city. Let the rest of Carnath’s little band have their fun. I don’t think any of them are making it back if the bloodshed I’ve seen in some quarters is any estimation.”

Nodding her assent, the female dragon sheathed her blade and raised her claws in a universal gesture of ‘I’m done’. Firebrand, meanwhile backed off and lowered her blades before turning in my direction. Spotting the captain and I side-by-side, she swooped down toward the war scooter and landed beside me.

“Are we not killing them?” she asked.

“Seems not,” the captain grunted. “I’ll gather up the rest of my warriors and get—”

He trailed off into silence. A thin, red line appeared just below his chin as his arms went slack at his sides. A burning geyser of blood suddenly burst across my face as his head tumbled from his shoulders and slid off the war scooter.

Immediately after, the remaining female guard split right down the middle, her body spilling all manner of viscera over the city before vanishing down amongst the skyscrapers.

Before I knew entirely what I was doing, I grabbed Firebrand and yanked her down flat.

I couldn’t save the tip of her wing or a significant chunk of her tail.

I caught sight of Propana, much closer than she’d been, coasting along behind us with one claw extended toward the scooter and the other inside her pouch again. As soon as she saw Firebrand fall, she shot me another salute with a sneering smile to go with it. Her wings began to beat a little faster.

Firebrand’s ruined wing sagged pathetically against her side like a broken kite as she slumped onto all fours. Grabbing her by one leg, I half-dragged, half carried her towards the still open hatch, praying Propana didn’t have another of whatever she’d just used to almost bisect my friend and her own wayward servants from a couple hoofball fields away.

Hauling her to the hatch, I heaved Firebrand over the lip. Her heart was pounding against my shoulder and she was breathing heavily, but just as I thought she might simply fall, she caught the rungs of the ladder and began gradually making her way down. Her tail was a lost cause; the magic that cut right through the captain had sliced a thick wedge out of the middle of it. I couldn’t say for sure about the wing. It looked a right mess, but possibly repairable.

No time to think on it. If she lived, she lived. If she died...it would be another reason to kill Propana. Like the captain, who’d stood his ground until wisdom dictated he retreat. The bitch murdered them, like she murdered so many others. I could see them, howling with need, from the place between worlds. So many needing justice.

The Bay of Unity.

I needed to get to the Bay of Unity.

I turned to face the burning sky and the oncoming dragon.

‘Shine.’

Act 3 Chapter 75 : Anger Issues

The dream ended.

I opened my eyes as the ladybug on the end of my muzzle shook itself, then flew back down to wiggle underneath the hem of my trenchcoat. I touched the dark hat on my head, then ran a hoof over my chest, feeling the thin pouch on my breast and the hard plug underneath. It was an unsettling sensation and all seemed very foreign.

I’d been a mare, most recently. Two mares, actually. Then, before that, a stallion.

‘Who am I, again?’ I thought.

I’d been other ponies for a fair bit. Ponies I knew I loved. Ponies who were mighty heroes. Ponies who’d defended the city.

‘Who am I?’

‘You are Hard Boiled, you dim little stallion!’ a grumpy, feminine voice declared from the back of my mind. ‘Rouse yourself! You have been in the Ladybug network for almost an hour!’

My memories flooded back into all the right places and I inhaled a sharp breath, leaning forward to put a hoof on the steering wheel. Steering wheel. Right.

That brought a fresh flash as my brain finally settled back into a more comfortable position.

They’d all survived.

Sweet Shine, Limerence, and Swift.

I felt tears spring to my eyes as the sense of relief washing over me made my breath catch in my chest. Wiping at my face, I started to try to take stock of my situation, again. I was in a vehicle, sitting behind the steering wheel, my back resting on a surprisingly comfortable vinyl seat. The engine was off, but the key was in the ignition. The air smelled of incense and curry powder.

I’d asked Sweet Shine for a favor. Then she punched me in the face. I’d asked her for the keys to the Dragon Flagon Wagon.

Finally, I was myself again, not that being Hard Boiled was much comfort, particularly since I was sitting behind the wheel of Sweet Shine’s amalgamated monster set to commit what most ponies would call suicide. Sweets had parked it facing the city at the edge of the tent village surrounding Supermax. It was an almost straight run toward Uptown. No doubt she was hoping I could manage to keep a wheeled motor in line if I didn’t have to make very many turns.

Rain was pounding on the windshield and I could just make out the distant line of buildings a bit up from the edge of the horizon where the blighted land around Supermax ended.

“They survived,” I whispered.

‘Yes, and it is now your job to make sure we survive!’ the feminine voice growled. ‘If I had known she would actually give you those keys, I think I’d have asked to be moved into a different body sooner, rather than later.’

“N-Nightmare?” I stammered, rubbing my temple just under the brim of my hat.

‘Your brain must be scrambled eggs. Who else would it be?’

“Are you asking that seriously? My head is basically a short stay motel for interloping personalities.” I patted the ladybug under the edge of my trenchcoat. “Queenie? Buzz at me. What’s the status of the city?”

The ladybug hummed its wings, and then an insectoid voice crackled over the D.W.F.’s radio. “We are here, Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled! Most entertained are we! You may find yourself disorienta-ta-ta-ted! We did have to shove many simultaneous memories from your friends into your meaty mind bits! We hope you were not using the knowledge of riding a unicycle or what caramel corns taste like. We may have copied over them.”

“I wasn’t intending to unicycle my way up to Uptown,” I replied, shaking my head. “I hope you didn’t write over what remains of how to drive something with four wheels, not that there was much there to begin with. Now, what about the city?”

“The population survives!” Queenie enthused, its voice crackling with excitement. “The ugly-bads have been pushed back and back and back! Dragons went skidaddle when Stella poofed Propana with cake! You saw, yes? You saw her poof in your driver’s memories, yes?”

“That I did. Any idea where the ‘ugly-bads’ are regrouping?” I asked.

There was a worrying pause, then Gypsy broke in. “Whatever magic Miss Shine worked on the Marked to make them fight harder is wearing off, but the monsters are pulling back towards Uptown. They aren’t going into the shield, though. They’re...mostly in a blob just sitting outside it. It’s like they’re...waiting.”

“No question, they’re waiting. He knows I’m coming.”

“Diamond Wishes?” Tourniquet asked.

“He might have had a name of his own at one point, but I doubt it,” I muttered. “His ‘benefactor’ in Uptown doesn’t strike me as the sort who cares what a minion’s name is. I don’t know what I’m meant to do against the two of them. I’ve got me, my gun, and this truck.”

“So, no change, then? That is what you have had against them for most of the last several months.”

“I had my friends for most of those fights. This time? This time it’s just me. One dumb stallion who won’t stay dead. I’m not even sure which way to head except towards the middle of the city.”

“I’ll keep the streetlights on. If there’s a lighted path, you’re going the right way. And you may be not entirely by yourself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

There was a loud thump on the outside of the truck, then a feathered face stuck itself over the lip of the window, so slick with blood it took a minute to figure out exactly who I was looking at.

“Sykes?” I mouthed, then shoved the door open.

“Oi, boyo! Ye’ goin’ Uptown or shall Oi get a cuppa while Oi waits?”

“Mercy, what happened to you? You look like somepony stuck your head in a butcher’s waste bin.”

Running a claw through his feathers, he wiped a slash of red liquid off and rubbed it on the door. “Eh, Oi’ve been doin’ some killin’ Oi have! Got me a fresh dragon head fer the ol’nest. If Oi find me a girl in this battlefield, Oi’ll carry’er home to it! Now, Oi hears from yon’ little robot ye be needin’ some backup!”

I peered outside and found a dozen griffins standing around, clapping each other on the back and all sporting various pieces of what appeared to be freshly dissected green dragon bits draped about their persons. All were armed and as drenched in gore as Sykes himself. Worryingly, I didn’t see Grimble Shanks among them.

“Where’s your brother?” I asked.

Sykes quickly sobered, scratching his neck with a filthy talon. “Aye, Grimble took a fall and e’s ‘avin his beak glued up at the sawbones, but moi squad’s good to foight. Ye’ve a lot of nasties what need axe-work ‘tween Uptown an’ ‘ere.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Ain’t that roight lads!?”

The surrounding griffins raised their bloodied weapons and let out fearsome caws of encouragement.

Pulling my hat low, I waved toward the road ahead where the gradually weakening storm covered the city and the only light for miles was the still burning fires. “I’m going right into the thickest part of the monsters who’re left over. This might be a one way trip. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

Reaching up, Sykes laid a talon on my hoof and gave it a squeeze. “If Oi’ve to end, Oi can’t think of a foiner stallion Oi’d like to stand besoide. Besides, Tokan an’ Hitlan don’t be runnin’ from a foight, lad! Yer the last of the Nursemaid’s guild, ye be. We owes ye fer the lives o’ the young un’s.”

“Well, never let it be said I turned down help I damn well need,” I said, giving the steering wheel an affectionate tap. “Keep the bastards off me if you can. Once you see me enter the shield, you back off, alright?”

Sliding back into my seat, I shut the door and watched as Sykes raised his giant battle axe and the griffins, as one, took wing. Reaching down, I pressed the ignition key and the armored truck let out a muted roar that I could only feel as a powerful vibration in my hooves. I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm.

“Come on, Hardy,” I whispered, unconsciously stroking the wheel as I wrestled with an explosion of adrenaline that suddenly welled up from somewhere below my sternum. “It’s just a car. You can drive calmly. You don’t have to go nuts with this. You’re a worn out pony whose friends need him to survive. Can’t survive if you die in a car accident. You’re not a god.”

A thick, billowing fog started to leak from the truck’s vents, but it was nothing like the calming pink mist usually emitted when Taxi was in the seat. It smelled more like a blacksmith’s shop in the corner of the darkest Tartarean pit. My hackles rose as I felt a throbbing urge to put a hoof on the accelerator, but I held back.

‘You know, I didn’t ask if Taxi managed to fix the spellcore,’ I thought, with what was left of my weakening resolve.

‘Hard Boiled, what is going on out there?’ Nightmare Moon demanded. ‘Your heart is beating much more quickly and Gale is making disturbing noises. Are you...are you aroused by being at the wheel?’

‘When would she have had the time to fix the spellcore?’ I added, ignoring the growing distress in my mental passenger’s thoughts.

‘Tell me what is happening this instant! I am beginning to feel strange!’ Nightmare squeaked. If she’d had lungs, she’d have been hyperventilating.

Somewhere under me, something growled. It was a feral sort of noise, like a caged beast waiting to be fed. My thoughts were starting to bubble with tingling, psychedelic frenzy, but I was cognizant enough to realize my vehicle shouldn’t make sounds like that. It was, after all, mechanical. Mechanisms don’t have vocal chords.

Still, the growl persisted, taking on a throaty quality as the fog started to fill the cab. I breathed it in, filling my chest with the smoke of burning worlds and funeral pyres that stretched to the horizon. It was like sweet, sweet nectar.

I don’t know when I realized the steering wheel was the wrong shape. Surely it hadn’t always been a horned skull with a single gaping, golden eye in the center of its forehead staring up at me with malevolent intent, as though encouraging me to take to the road. Was I hallucinating? No, no, the glittering, vengeful eye with no pupil was definitely egging me on.

The truck lurched as my forelegs tightened on the wheel. A series of thin, ugly little spines had started to grow across the dashboard. I watched them with a certain internal approval, enjoying the way they crept up to the windshield. They might have been flesh or perhaps bone, but it didn’t matter; they suited the vehicle of my coming.

Jutting fangs sprang from the front bumper and the growl became a snarl. I felt the pedal beneath my hoof mold itself to the shape of my toe, as though it wanted nothing more than to become part of me. The seat flexed against my back as a dozen pairs of slim, segmented limbs reached around my ribcage, securing me comfortably in place better than any seatbelt ever could.

‘Hard Boiled, I am frightened! Please tell me what is going on?’ Nightmare croaked.

I couldn’t see them, but I somehow knew there were more wheels than there had been and not all of them were composed of rubber and metal. A lick of red flame started to curl from the engine bay as I lightly brushed the accelerator. Where the fire touched, the paint bubbled into tiny, grinning mouths full of sharp teeth that began to dribble something that looked suspiciously like oil. A sane pony would have been frightened. I’d stopped being a sane pony the second my hoof touched the ignition. Few might have called her beautiful in that moment, but to me, the truck was a thing of magnificence. After all, she was mine.

I finally gave her what she wanted; I slammed my hoof straight to the floor. Something I would swear was a hydra’s angry bellow kicked up a spray of dust around the truck. The flames from under the hood grew into a vile conflagration that poured down her armored sides, leaving bubbled scorch marks and tiny, flailing tentacles in their wake.

My face stretched against the acceleration and I couldn’t quite shut my muzzle entirely, but I didn’t want to. Anything in my way deserved to see teeth. The open road, full of phantoms and demons, beckoned me forward as the wheels dug in deep and I shot towards the city at an unknown speed. I couldn’t check, either; the speedometer had filled with a thick flow of purple fluid which sloshed and flowed like it was alive and excited.

A servant to my will.

A deliverer of my glory.

A vessel of my rage.

They waited in the rain, ignoring the chill but for a few involuntary shivers here and there. A few exchanged quiet grunts or growls, fighting over scraps of bone or bits of torn flesh. Two smaller ones, who might once have been foals, were tugging on both ends of a piece of a cutie-mark.

Most had alighted on buildings near the Shield, for their order was not to enter, but to wait for the coming of the Most Hated One.

The day was good. The food was good. Their stomachs were full of meat and those who’d survived the slaughter of their companions were cheerfully digesting, insofar as one could cheerfully digest in the rain. Still, they were alert. They knew He would come, eventually, and their orders were to tear Him limb from limb. They’d seen His face and knew His name, though many had forgotten the name just as they’d forgotten their own.

One particularly large creature, whose mind was sometimes a little more his own than he was sure his master would have liked, was considering which of his companions to eat when the guards were not looking when he heard a sound that reached into the damaged scraps of his memories and ticked a switch. He’d heard that sound during the war. What war? He couldn’t remember that. It was the war, and that sound was there, along with images of bloodshed and fire.

He’d chosen, for his perch, a comfortable little air conditioning unit atop the remains of an outlet store which faced the longest uninterrupted stretch of road out of Uptown. Funnily enough, it was also the only road with streetlights still on.

In his disjointed thoughts, words began to form. He had little use for words, but they were interesting and he didn’t have much left to do with his day until The Most Hated One finally arrived.

‘That sounds like a dragon with a punctured flame sac that’s about to explode being chased by a bunch of angry griffins,’ he thought, ‘Sure is taking a long time to detonate, though.’

He turned to the horizon and beheld a sight that gave even his deeply devoted mind pause.

From down the distant road there came a thing. He’d no word for it, though it tickled a word in his memory: car. He remembered the word ‘car’. His former self had sold cars, once, but none of them were like that. It bore a resemblance to a car in the same way he bore a resemblance to his former self. Maybe even moreso.

The twisted amalgam of protruding spikes and fire was covered from end to end in tiny, shrieking mouths while the front grill was a gaping maw with a flaming blue light at its center. It drooled magmic spittle which left burning tracks in the shattered roadwork as it passed. Sometimes it seemed to have wheels, but other times it appeared to be darting forward on six enormously muscled limbs.

Just looking at it gave him a bit of a headache, as though it weren’t entirely real, and another little series of thoughts worked their way to the surface of his mind. They were badly abstracted, but broke down to: ‘If I still felt fear, I think I’d be scared right now. That looks like it’s coming over here and it looks meaner than me.’

Regardless, he had a duty and no-one could ever say he was anything less than perfectly obedient. To obey was to live, and he intended to have many more lovely meals of pony flesh. Perhaps, later, he’d eat one of his small brethren just to see how they tasted.

Lifting his head, he let out a piercing cry that roused every last one of his kin. As one, the obedient children of the leader whose name was unknown and whose face was unknown but whose voice gave them purpose turned to the oncoming force of griffins and raised a howl that rattled the windows in their frames and shook the dust off the streets. For all their different shapes, their fangs and wings, their shredding teeth and crushing limbs, they were one Family. It was written into their minds and so it was written in their hearts.

They were many. The prey were few. So long as they obeyed, the prey would surely die.

They saw the griffins, their axes raised high, and they knew victory would come soon. Many of their number had failed to obey the leader’s command that they eat and kill any who were not of their number, but they would obey. They knew if they obeyed they would feast well and receive many rewards. Death was disobedience.

The large one, who’d first seen the prey coming, thought it might be what remained of his former self’s imagination, but he would have sworn he saw a face behind the giant, gaping windshield of the thing that the griffins seemed to be following as it tore up the road towards the Shield. It was like the face of the Hated One, but also not. The creature behind that windshield, who was clutching the steering wheel like it was trying to escape, did not look entirely equine. It was more like something made of manifested anger wearing a badly fitting skin and a trenchcoat.

Unfortunately, despite being one of the most intelligent remaining amongst the brethren, he was still not given to long thought. Angling his twisted, bat-like wings towards the oncoming prey, he started to dive towards the monstrous truck, intent on...something. He hadn’t fully worked out what he was going to do when he got to it.

There were certainly some options. Perhaps he could land on the roof and attempt to rend its armor with his teeth or wrench its hatch open with his claws? There was no room in his mind for doubt.

He was still trying to come up with some method of approach when the ravening mad truck launched itself into the air on a pair of malformed, prehensile limbs that could only distantly be described as ‘legs’ which had sprouted from its undercarriage. His last sight, before its warped muzzle slammed shut around him, was the blue glow of its furious heart. A moment before his body collapsed into a point of compressed arcane energy and was swallowed by the berserk spellcore, he had just enough time to think, ‘This was not how I saw this day turning out.’

The rest of the swarm descended on the Hated One. They expected an easy victory. There was no room for anything else.

Nightmare Moon was more frightened than she’d been in the entirety of her short life.

“You dare?! You dare on my streets? You would stain my wheels with your bile and viscera?! Come and die!”the mad stallion shrieked as he grasped the distended wheel of the mutated vehicle. The golden eye protruding from the skull in the center of the steering column wept a constant stream of blood onto his forelegs as he wrestled with the skull’s horns.

The truck was sometimes on the ground and sometimes darting up to run along the walls of nearby buildings with a gait like a sprinting hyena, then leaping up to catch one of the transformed beasts right out of the air as it plowed towards the shimmering energy field surrounding Uptown.

‘Please, Hard Boiled!’ Nightmare pleaded. ‘Please, you must listen! What is the matter with you?’

She had tried to feel about inside his mind for the pony whose thoughts she’d gradually become comfortable beside, but he was gone. In his place was a demonic entity that stank of burning rubber and engine fumes. All she could do was helplessly watch as another of the flying monsters screamed in and plastered itself to the bonnet, only for a horn of metal as long as her body to wrench itself up from the surface, impaling the creature like a grisly ornament.

Overhead, griffins were engaging the horde who were focused on the truck for reasons that weren’t entirely apparent to Nightmare. She thought she caught sight of Sykes; he was ripping the head off one of the oncoming beasts before tossing its body onto a nearby rooftop and raising the dangling spine high. It could have been some other gore soaked griffin, but something in what was left of Hard Boiled made her fairly sure it was him.

The transformed Dragon Flagon Wagon spit a stream of fire from some aperture on its side that tracked an abomination through the air, searing it just enough that it was still technically alive when it cratered face first through one of the buildings across the street.

Another creature made the ill mistake of landing on the roof, trying to wrench the top hatch open with its claws. A yawning mouth opened under its hooves and it was sucked down into the passenger compartment where it had only a half second to realize it was staring into the barrel of the Hated One’s hoof-cannon. The headless corpse was summarily ejected from the back of the truck alongside a contemptuous burst of flatulence and exhaust.

Forcing herself away from the spectacular violence where Hard Boiled’s conscious psyche usually resided, Nightmare conjured herself a mental body, trying to give herself form within her host’s psychic landscape. It was more difficult than it usually was, as though some force were fighting her, but after a short time her limbs began to appear. She pressed into his subconscious, seeking the dreaming world where all the thoughts of a pony were made real. It was, perhaps, the one last refuge his true self might have retreated to before whatever evil had taken over his body.

Nightmare appeared in the sky above a blasted hellscape of charred bones and burning tire-fires. It stretched below her, the horizon covered by darkness and lit only by the unearthly flames. Strange shapes moved amongst the bones, casting shadows without sources.

She had no lungs, but Nightmare still felt the need to cough, covering the end of her muzzle with one blue hoof as the fumes almost knocked her out of the sky. The space was choked with thick, blowing smoke that cut her line of sight severely. Spreading her wings, she scooped the psychic winds and began coasting towards the metaphorical ground, searching back and forth for a point of reference as to where in the dreaming she might be.

“And foals used to be scared of me,” Nightmare muttered to herself. “If this is what is in the mind of a stallion behind the wheel, I feel I should have stepped up my ‘game’ as it were.”

Coming in for a landing, she danced over a grinning skull and dodged around the smoking ruin of some car part she couldn’t identify. Raising her voice across the dream, Nightmare called, “Anypony! Is anypony there?”

What came back was a whisper, barely enough to get her attention.

“Shush! You don’t want him to hear you, do you?”

A small cave had appeared off to her left, with a gently flickering wood fire inside and two shadowed figures sitting beside it on what looked like upturned logs. They were both small and huddled under blankets. A ring of small objects around the cave seemed to delineate some boundary where even the gas from the tire fires outside dared not pass.

Trotting up to the ring, Nightmare scuffed it lightly with one hoof. The items were a seemingly random amalgamation of children’s toys, from a stuffed Princess Luna to a battered yo-yo, but still she shied from actually crossing that line. Something told her it would be an extraordinarily bad idea to do so uninvited.

A young, foalish voice piped up from inside the little cave. “Kids only! You wanna come in, you hafta be a kid!”

Nightmare squinted at the cave, trying to make out the figures inside, but the harder she looked, the more the flames seemed to draw back and leave the two in darkness. Frowning, she looked down at herself. She’d had enough humiliations in recent life. What was one more?

Rolling her eyes, Nightmare adjusted her image of herself. Her powerful legs began to shrink as her horn retracted into her forehead until it was barely more than a stubby point. Her mighty wings shriveled until they were barely more than fluffy tufts on her back, buzzing frantically as they tried to keep her aloft. Dropping onto all fours, she took a tentative step on her fresh form’s tiny hooves, sidling sideways to examine herself in a mare’s hoofmirror that sat among the items outside the cave.

“Cute,” she muttered, cringing at the squeak in her voice. “I have become cute for that dingy bastard. If he does not make properly appreciative sounds, I will make him piss the bed the next time he dreams of using the bathroom.”

Raising her much shorter head, Nightmare peeked into the cave again. “Can I come in now?”

“Oh! Please, yes! You don’t want to be out there with him. He’s crazy!” one of the foals chirped.

Trotting across the edge of the circle, Nightmare took a deep breath of suddenly clean psychic air. It was a pleasant change from the thick smoke that still blew in great dust devils across the arid, corpse-covered plains outside. Gathering her wits, she approached the fire. A third log had appeared at some point when she wasn’t paying attention and the shadows finally pulled back to reveal two little colts sitting beside the flames. One was a dark grey, his mane unruly, his fur streaked with dirt and his knees covered in grass stains. A baseball bat was propped against his side. The other was more ephemeral, a gaunt, ghostly figure of a colt with a crooked grin despite his hollow features. His tail was cut short, and a shimmering light pulsated inside his chest.

“You are Gale...and Hard Boiled?” Nightmare asked.

“My dad is Hard Boiled,” the grey colt piped up. “I’m Junior. You look like a Nightmare Moon toy I used to have.”

“If you said stuff like that to Sweet Shine she’d beat your flank,” Gale giggled, running a glimmering hoof under his nose. “He’s right though, yahknow.”

Nightmare rubbed at the base of her tiny horn. “Gale, you and I have communicated before. Do you not remember?”

“I remember,“ Gale replied, then waved a foreleg at his companion. “He doesn’t, though. Most of Hardy is here, but all his anger? That’s out there.” He nodded toward the entrance of the cave and the hellish fires burning outside.

“What could make a pony that angry?” Nightmare asked, settling herself down on the third log and holding her hooves over the fire. Despite being dream-stuff it felt warm, in a strange way, and when she looked closer at the flames she could see the face of Hard Boiled’s mother smiling at her.

“He...I...I’m not angry,” Junior muttered, closing his eyes and turning his flank so Nightmare could see that it was blank. “But I don’t have my cutie-mark, yet. I know about him, though. Him out there. I know about his cutie-mark. I d-don’t think I’d ever want to have that one.”

Nightmare let her head fall to one side. “Explain?”

Gale propped his hooves on his legs and sat forward. “Do you even know Hardy? You spent a little while in his head, but when you ask that you sound like you haven’t even looked at his memories.”

“I...I mean, I have. A few,” she stammered, glancing off to one side. “It has been a hectic period! I have barely come to terms with my own existence, much less the barbed wire snarl of this stallion’s mind.”

“Then I’ll make it super simple. Hardy? He’s angry all the time.”

Nightmare gave him a quizzical look. “How do you mean? How can a stallion be always angry?”

“Think about it,” Gale answered, tapping his temple. “His best friend kicked him half to death a few weeks ago when he started to lose his mind and that’s the closest to a shrink he’s come in years. He wasn’t even mad at her. He wakes up every morning in a city that’s gone crazy with his cutie-mark burning and he doesn’t even notice how much it hurts most of the time. Most ponies, if they had to sit in his head then they’d spend all day crying. He’s like that zebra from the Vivarium. Miss Zeta?”

“The one who is in pain all the time? B-but how could he be like her? Would I not have felt it when I possessed his body?”

“You couldn’t feel it because I kept you from feeling it,” Gale explained, patting his own glittering chest. “He’s justice living in Detrot. And when he gets in a car, he’s...he’s something else. All the stuff he spends every day hiding from everypony gets put into going fast. If he lived somewhere else, he wouldn’t be like that. At least, I don’t think he would.”

“And...you two are hiding in here from all his anger?” Nightmare inquired, looking up at the cave which she’d just noticed was not made of rock, but rather, layers of compacted blankets.

“He put us in here,” Junior huffed, getting up and trotting to the ring at the edge of the cave. Reaching up, he tried to put a hoof over the barrier, but it stopped as though resting against sheer glass. “I don’t think he wants us seeing what he’s doin’ out there.”

Getting up, Nightmare trotted over beside Junior and looked out into the fumes. Above, there seemed to be something that throbbed with light, similar to a sun, but it was too smoggy to tell what it was. “There’s something out there that’s dangerous? You said I needed to be in here or...”

“He would catch you?” Gale chirped, reaching behind himself and pulling up a stick with a marshmallow already attached, arranging it over the fire braced between a pair of rocks, “I...I think...I think whatever Hardy sees himself as when he’s driving is out there. Maybe it’s cuz the crazy truck did some magic to him or maybe he just...never got mad enough for it to become real, but it’s out there. I think I can maybe push the smoke away, so you can see it, if you want to.”

Nightmare frowned and gathered her hooves under herself, tucking them below her chest. “Is this likely to be traumatizing?”

Pressing a hoof to his transparent forehead, Gale sighed. “What do you think? We’re inside Hard Boiled’s head. Just...don’t cross the ring. I don’t think you’re stuck in here like me and him.”

Raising his hooves, Gale took a heavy breath, then began to slowly swing his transparent foreleg in a circle beside his head like he was stirring an invisible pot. Outside, the air began to swirl a little faster and the howls echoing over the hills took on a more urgent quality. Nightmare stood and trotted to the edge of the ring of toys, looking left, then right, trying to penetrate the dense air.

When she finally caught sight of Him, it took her several seconds to realize she wasn’t looking at just another piece of the surreal dreamscape.

The mountain crept out of the piles of bones and the remains of many thousands of shattered vehicles, creeping towards a gradual summit at the horizon. It was a moment before she realized what she was looking at was not, in fact, the horizon but the point at which the ground transitioned into being part of a leg; a leg of monumental proportions.

He, for the figure was masculine in the extreme, sat atop a heap of corpses that was so big that all perspective was lost. The form suggested an equine heritage, but the details were terribly, terribly wrong. Nothing alive could ever be so large as that; bone would not support a creature that could step on the largest of dragons with a single toetip. In a dream, such considerations mattered little. Muscles throbbed and squirmed beneath a dingy grey coat that was leaking entire volcanos’ worth of smog into the air. Great clouds of ash obscured the creature's head, but Nightmare could still tell it was the wrong shape for a pony; it was too bulbous, too irregular, and far too big.

As her eyes worked their way up his body, Nightmare became aware that her bladder was suddenly extremely full.

“H-his face,” she stammered, clenching her tail against herself. “What...what is wrong with his face?

Gale shook his head, letting his hooves drop. The smoke closed around their little refuge once more. “I don’t know. I can’t clear that part from here. He’s somehow...locked me out of most of his brain. B-but...I think you’re going to have to go see.”

“What?! Me?! I’m not going out there with that!” she snapped.

The ghostly colt put a hoof on her shoulder and groaned. “I can’t make you do anything this time, but...I can still see some of what Hardy is seeing. He’s not slowing down. The shield around the middle of the city is getting closer.”

Nightmare shrugged her tiny shoulders and stepped back from the ring of toys. “Well, then, problem solved, yes? He will stop--”

“He’s not going to stop and I don’t think all the magic in that truck can keep him or us alive if he hits the shield going this fast. If Hardy ends up a pancake, I can’t bring him back from that, no matter how many city power grids Tourniquet plugs into us.”

“Th-then what are we to do? I cannot simply take his body from him! Managing our little arrangement was your job!”

Gale prodded her nose with his transparent hoof-tip. “And now it’s going to be your job, for a minute. This isn’t like a normal dream. I’ve spent plenty of time in normal dreams. This is like something somepony made. Hardy, maybe, or someone else.”

“Who else?” she asked.

Looking off to one side, Gale trotted over to a shiny object sticking out of the rubble around them. Leaning down, he picked it up, brushing ash off its surface. Turning back, he held it out. It was a filthy, dented police badge with the moniker ‘Detective Shores’ engraved on it.

“There’s...there’s another pony who visits Hardy sometimes. I don’t think Hardy knows he’s anything but his crazy brain. I’m not sure what he is, but when we were outside the city last, he visited. I think something in the city is keeping him away.”

Nightmare slowly nodded. “I have seen memories of this pony. He...he is not like us. He’s something more.”

Gale bobbed his head. “He made...changes. Not big ones. I barely noticed them.”

“Are you two done out there?” Junior piped up from inside the cave. “Your marshmallow is almost cooked!”

“Oh poop,” Gale squeaked, darting back to the fire and quickly yanking the stick off, examining it closely. “The marshmallow is how much time we have before he hits the shield!”

Nightmare gave him an incredulous look. “You...created a dreamscape representation of a sugary confection to tell you when we will all die?”

“Hey, I went camping exactly once before I died! You think I wanted to miss out on s’mores? Because Hardy has really good memories of those.”

Rolling her eyes, Nightmare dropped her flank in the ashes. “So what am I meant to do against...whatever that thing is?” she asked, pointing off toward the obscured giant in the distance.

“Well, the trigger I used for you and Hardy to flip minds isn’t in here with me, so it’s probably out there,” he answered, waving at the destroyed lands around the cave. “I tied him switching with you into the words you picked so I don’t have to be paying attention all the time when he does it. It’s wired into his head, now. If he hears or thinks those words, you and he will change places. Normally, I could just do it, but--”

“--you are stuck in here,” Nightmare finished before turning back to the dreamscape.

“Exactly. So, I figure Hardy is out there and if he hears ‘Free The Moon’ then you’ll get control and can hit the brakes.”

“And if you are wrong or I fail and that thing squishes me then we all die as little more than smears on a wall and the entire world dies with us, yes?” she added.

Gale grinned and threw a leg around her shoulders. “You get to be a hero again, though. That’s worth something, right?”

Nightmare scratched at the tuft of fur on her chest as she replied, “I have already bought a pardon from Princess Celestia and Luna for past crimes. At this point I am simply booking additional rooms in Canterlot Castle to store a harem and a collection of those amusing little illustrated tomes Hard Boiled used to read. I find in spare moments I enjoy recollecting his memories of those.”

“Comic books?” Gale asked, tilting his head.

“Yes. Now, then. How long do I have?”

Raising the marshmallow, Gale inspected it closely. “Maybe two minutes in the real world. I’ve tried to slow everything down in here as much as I can. It’s a dream, after all. I wouldn’t go slow, though.”

Raising one hoof, Nightmare stepped over the ring of toys, her leg exploding back to its normal length as she retook her favorite form and stepped into the smokey darkness. Taking a moment to look back at the cave where Gale had retaken his seat beside the fire alongside Junior, she considered the strange path of her existence. She hadn’t even wanted to exist a few days ago and yet, to die in such a place - victim of a manifestation of rage - seemed a sad waste to her new sensibilities.

“If I do survive...I shall eat cake until Hard Boiled is sick,” she muttered.

“And I’ll make sure he’s the one to throw it up,” Gale called back, having somehow heard her despite the distance.

Turning her face to what constituted the sky, Nightmare leapt into the air, grabbing as much dream as she could with her wings. A rush of fear filled her as she found herself rocketing towards the mighty figure of Hard Boiled’s fury made real at many times the speed she’d expected. A trail of sparks burst off the tips of her feathers and the air folded around her, seeming to draw her forward with a life of its own, all-the-while demanding greater acceleration.

She tried to brake, but it was as though the wind itself betrayed her and the icon of anger had developed its own gravitation. Through the vast nebula of smoke she could just begin to see the outlines of the creature, licks of fire spurting from its obscured face. Across the distance, she could just begin to make out the angular shape of the abominable spawn’s craggy features.

Rolling sideways, she spun away from the creature as best she could. Nothing would slow her, but by digging her hooves into the ethereal surface of the dream itself she found purchase and was able to skid into something resembling an orbit, moving closer and closer. The sheer scope of the thing left Nightmare breathless as she arced her way nearer. One of its legs was a thousand times the size of a normal pony. Its weight was enough to dust the bones of everything it sat upon.

“Creature,” a deep, tortured voice growled, feeling as though it were rattling her bones right to their cores.

Nightmare found herself being yanked forward, her wings almost bent back against her shoulders as she was torn out of the air like a puppet having her strings jerked. Sputtering helplessly, she tried to backpedal, but it was no use. She was pulled into the swirling maelstrom around the monolithic entity’s face.

“P-please! I do not wish to be hurt! Pain is p-painful!” she squeaked, feeling as though an enormous fist was closing around her body.

“You are an artifact of sin,” the voice rumbled, almost knocking her out of the sky. “You are created from the breath of that which first sinned.”

Still being pulled toward the creature, Nightmare felt her bones creak as its grip tightened.

“I h-have not had time to sin! I did n-not exist two weeks ago!” the alicorn wailed, flailing her legs against the nothingness gradually crushing her. The firestorm began to grow in intensity, ripping feathers out of her wings and tearing at her swirling mane. She felt herself being drawn in, closer and closer.

“Light upon darkness. Skin upon muscle,” it snarled, raising one gargantuan hoof to gesture at the broken mindscape around them. “In the beginning, there was no sin. Only the fire and the darkness. Then they came. The sinless flames amid the dark. The virtuous. The fleshless diamonds shimmering. They granted purpose and breath to these...disgusting little things.”

“I...I do not understand,” she yelped, feeling her wingbones almost ready to snap. Her body was only made of thoughts, but the agony was all too real.

The voice continued, seeming to ignore her for a moment. “Then came questions. The one who asked them did not deserve its fate. Nor any fate. It sinned, not in the asking, but in the acting. To enslave the flames.”

“P-please! You are going to i-injure me!” Nightmare moaned. With a loud snap, the joint holding her wing to her body gave way. She felt the pain, just as much as she had in the brief period she’d had a real body. It tore a shriek from her and she sagged, held aloft by the unseen grasp and still closing on the whirling fires around the beast’s head.

“We smell much sin in you, little dream,” the voice added, turning to face her. At once, the smoke began to clear. “Justice was born with the first sin. The foil of evil. But Justice cannot find you here. Justice may only hold sway so long as it can find satisfaction.”

With that, the cloud of smoke cleared, and Nightmare Moon beheld the face of a god.

It might have helped in some way that she hadn’t been around terribly long. She had very few frames of reference for what going insane was like and had no experience in the matter. Being authentically psychotic takes a certain amount of time, effort, and above all a particular context for what sanity looks like. Nightmare’s brief life was saturated in eldritch beings and unearthly events; it was all that saved her from descending instantly into gibbering madness.

The creature’s head resembled nothing so much as a gape-mouthed bull, far too large for the shoulders of the already mammoth body it was perched atop. Its muzzle was a collection of chrome pipes, woven together into the loose shape of a mechanical engine. Not any particular engine, but at the same time every engine ever imagined by any demented speed freak who’d ever lived. A thousand constantly thumping pistons up and down the deity’s metallic skull provided a staccato beat that made the very air dance with their restless energies.

It was not of muscle or bone or machine, but rather rigged together of the ideas that predated all of those things.

Two massive, empty holes full of boiling magma glared down from where its eyes should have been, piercing right through Nightmare and leaving her feeling stripped to the bone. Had she been any deeper or had much more to strip, it would have surely driven her out of her mind. It was fortunate, then, that she was a desperately shallow person, having not had very long to develop depths or layers.

That didn’t stop her from metaphysically voiding her bowels.

The pain in her crushed wings seemed a distant distraction. She couldn’t take her eyes from the divine monstrosity, even as it began to pull her closer. She tried to speak, to beg, but all that came out was a thin, keening wail of fear.

“We are not bone, nor machine, but rather came before, tiny dream. We were born in speed. We suckled on the fury of those who had no voices with which to shriek. When the first cells clung to one another and the flames gave them breath, we heard their screams. Now, scream for us, tiny dream. Scream and feel our...rage.”

The creature’s face split from chin to forehead, a pair of jaws fit to devour entire worlds spreading open in front of her to reveal a cauldron of shimmering light.

Nightmare’s limbs jerked as she tried to escape with what was left of her awareness. In an instant, her legs were torn from her torso. They didn’t even have time to bleed before the thoughts composing them turned to wisps of nothingness and were sucked into the gaping void. She barely felt it.

Casually, as one might eat a grape, the god tossed the dream into its vast maw and, like an enormous pair of gates slamming shut, its jaws closed around her.

Nightmare waited for a long time to feel herself die.

She’d died once before, and it was more peaceful than being a limbless, shredded remnant stuck in a dream body that seemed devilishly intent on sending her pain signals despite not having anything like nerves. Mercifully, the creature had left her eyelids she could close, but that was the only kindness she’d been afforded. Sinking into the scalding, stinking embrace was enough to leave her feeling a tad disappointed that she’d put up so little fight.

Still, non-existence wasn’t so distant a memory. It certainly beat being eaten and, for a moment, she found herself looking forward to the quiet. Existing was ever so complicated.

Time passed. However much time, she couldn’t have said. Time in dreams was almost irrelevant and things could happen out of order, so until something else happened she was content to sit and wait to expire.

Despite this, she didn’t have terribly long to wait.

Something warm and wet wedged itself into her left ear.

Letting out an indignant squeal, Nightmare’s eyes popped open and she leapt to her hooves, stumbling backwards on four suddenly-present legs. She staggered a moment, catching herself with a quick beat of her mighty wings that were also seemingly returned. Gasping for breath, she rounded on her attacker and found a tiny mare sitting a couple feet away with her tongue poking out.

The mare looked a great deal like Hard Boiled’s partner, save that her wings were a tad more proportioned to her body and she wore a white cloth blindfold across her eyes. She was casually leaning on a shimmering silver sword with a pair of golden scales dangling from the cross-guard. Her expression was nothing short of pure mischief.

“Finally awake?” the mare chirped, deftly swinging her sword up onto her back and catching the scales on her hoof as they dropped off the handle, “I was wondering if you were going to sit there all day. Of course, there’s not much ‘day’ left, is there? Not that I would know. I’ve never seen day. Nor night. Nor anything, really.”

Nightmare tried to speak, but her tongue felt a bit too big for her muzzle. “Buh?” Working her lips a moment, she tried again. “P-pardon me, but are...a-are you D-Death? I h-had hoped just to cease to be again being as I do not believe it is p-possible for me to have a soul but--”

“Soul? Oh, honey,” the mare giggled, swiping a foreleg through her short, spiky mane. “You definitely have a soul. Souls are sentient beings’ connections to each other. You definitely have a soul.”

“You...did not answer my question,” Nightmare muttered, then immediately regretted it. She quickly covered her face with one wing and peered cautiously between her feathers. “You are not going to make me hurt more, are you?”

“Me? No, not at all,” the mare replied. Her smile was calm and cheerful, almost enough to make Nightmare relax a little. “I’m not the big ‘D’ and you’re not dead. At least, not in any conventional sense. It might help that you aren’t a traditional definition of ‘life’.”

“Then...who?”

Snorting, the mare pulled her sword off her back and raised herself up on her back hooves. She hefted her golden scales on one foreleg and assumed a serious expression. When Nightmare slowly shook her head, the mare dropped back onto all fours and gave her an incredulous look.

“Really? Still not ringing any bells?”

“I...I am afraid I have had a very traumatic day,” Nightmare mumbled, lowering her head.

“Well, then you can call me ‘Jay’. I’m a part of Hard Boiled, just like you. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but then who isn’t? He’s a complicated stallion for one who can’t put on his trenchcoat without falling over half the time.”

“Jay?” Nightmare asked.

“Yep! Short and sweet. Like life. Also, you need to wash out your ears. You’ve got ash and marshmallow fluff in them.”

Reaching up, Nightmare self-consciously dug at her ear for a second then huffed and sat up straight. “I did not expect to have somepony sticking their tongue into my tympanic cavity! Where am I, if not dead?”

Rolling her neck in a way that suggested there’d been an associated eye-roll under that blindfold, Jay waved at the surrounding darkness. Nightmare hadn’t realized it until just then, but she seemed to be standing on a surface. It was soft, pink, and a bit yielding, though also somewhat slippery.

“Where do you think? You’re in that...thing’s belly. At least, it’s what Hard Boiled thinks a belly is like. He read a story when he was young about a pony who got trapped in a hydra’s tummy and had to fight his way out by giving it hiccups. Be glad he didn’t picture what a hydra’s stomach is actually like. This conversation would be a lot...stickier.”

Nightmare’s ears flattened against her head as she tried to take off, but her wings would not grab any of the substance of the dream, leaving her standing there frantically flapping and going nowhere. After a few seconds she slumped onto her flanks and stared dejectedly at her hooves.

“Am I g-going to die? I do wish fate would stop teasing me if that is the case! I have not been alive long enough to learn patience!”

“Honestly, I can’t say for sure,” Jay replied, setting her scales on the floor and resting a hoof on one side. “All that anger Hard Boiled kept bottled up his entire life is out there, ripping up the city and tearing its way through most of the remaining population of mutants. In here, there’s what I think you’d call a god made of car parts and bad temper. In about thirty seconds, neither of those things will matter because Hardy will hit a high energy shield that’ll turn him and that truck to dust.”

“Then...what am I meant to do?” Nightmare asked, wiping her hooves on the spongy floor.

Jay fluffed her wings out and picked up her sword, using the tip to gesture at Nightmare. “You came here to do something, right?”

“I...did. But how am I meant to do it from in here?”

“You’re right in the middle of what it means to be Hard Boiled. If he can’t hear you here, he can’t hear you anywhere. This is the core of his being. He’s...” Jay smiled again, this time with a motherly fondness. “He’s a good pony. Crazy, but good. I approve of what he’s done for me through the years. His methods might not always be the kindest, but sometimes kindness isn’t what the world needs.”

Nightmare raised her head and drew in a breath. “Every time I think existing cannot get any stranger, it makes me wrong. How does he survive like this?”

Jay chuckled, trotting over and patting the taller alicorn on the foreleg. “He has a very good soul: the people who love and care for him. That includes you, incidentally. He’s grown quite fond of you.”

“He...he has? I thought I irritated him.”

“Oh, you do. But that goes for many of the people he loves. Now he has a chance to do the most important thing in his life up to this point. But first, you have to decide what you’re going to do. In this moment, the fate of an entire world is sitting on your lovely, blue shoulders. Do you step up? It might mean more pain.”

Shrugging her wings, the alicorn stared off into the darkness. “I...could just go back to not being. Not hurting. Not existing, even as an algorithm. B-but I did...I did make a deal.”

“And I like it when ponies keep their word,” Jay said, bobbing her head, “Now, chin up! Breathe deep! Lungs full and throat relaxed. You may have to use the Royal Canterlot Voice, but I’m sure you can conjure that up. And do tell Hard Boiled when you see him that he needs to take a vacation before he falls apart entirely. There’s only so much I expect of my servants.”

Despite herself, Nightmare found herself following the mare's instructions, unconsciously assuming a stance that was downright heroic. Hesitating for a moment, she looked down again and tried to conjure the mare’s name. Hard Boiled’s memories felt fuzzy and indistinct in her thoughts.

“B-but...who are you?”

“You’ll remember in a moment when his mind is open to you again. Now! Deep breath! Make him hear you!”

Raising her voice, she let out a shout that echoed into the distance, punctuating each word with a beat of her wings.

“Free...The...Moon!”